In the morning it looked like it had rained over night, and the mountains were socked in with clouds. I took a last walk to the river but there wasn’t much to see, and the dog wasn’t out. The dog… Read More ›
travel
Teaching machines to learn cause and effect
The twitch in my eye is the result of an outdated prescription, or from reading too much online at work, I’ve decided. The reading has been on artificial intelligence, training machine models to learn unsupervised through clusters of computers tied… Read More ›
The god of only children
For some reason when I’m in Portland I feel like I can be more myself, maybe because no one knows me here. I wake and walk down César Chávez to the Starbucks in the cool, marine air. And remember the… Read More ›
Testing and failing, most every day
By the time we get to Friday we’re all so tired, we’ve just started going out for dinner. Last night I took the high road and just had a salad but when we got home, a couple slices of pizza… Read More ›
Dover to Dunkirk, Jan. 31, 2016
And just like that, January was over. It meant we could reenter the Schengen by way of France, spend a night, and the next day return to my mom’s house in Germany. The radiator crapped out on the Opel and… Read More ›
Discreet Music | January 16, 2018
I made marrow soup for the first time (or released the marrow I guess, into a soup). And I took a hot bath and imagined myself settling into it the same as the chicken carcass, reduced. I flickered in and… Read More ›
No Christmas in Germany (26 Dezember)
Eberhard put school pictures of the girls in a pack of cigarettes and we said goodbye, gave him the last of the turkey in a Ziploc bag. When he leaves, mom always goes to the kitchen sink window where they… Read More ›
No Christmas in Germany (24 Dezember)
24 Dezember, 17 Besigheim, Baden-Württemberg Early morning, happy snoring sounds in bed with Dawn—then mom and I by the banquette watching the birds gather outside by her window. We stayed up late playing Dan Fogelberg songs on mom’s tablet, Dawn… Read More ›
No Christmas in Germany (23 Dezember)
My pants don’t fit, and we can’t get the lyrics right to any of the Steely Dan songs. Cooked onion hangs like phlegm from the lips of Eberhard, the seafood gumbo I made: we were so full from lunch, mom… Read More ›
No Christmas in Germany (21 Dezember)
This month I’ve been featuring journal-style stories from our time visiting my mom in a small German village in Baden-Württemberg. The series is named after a post from 2014, before we moved here for nine months. We had to leave… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 