It’s gotten so that I can’t leave the windows open at night or it will get too cold. This morning it was 60 in the house and Dawn was in her sweater, cranky, like it was my fault. She’s at… Read More ›
creative non-fiction
Birdsong reports before dawn
We set the coffeemaker to go off at 3 and it did. I got back from the airport before 5 and walked to the lake in the rain without an umbrella to see if anything happened and my friend Tim… Read More ›
Night falls on Teanaway
Ginger licks the sleep out of my eye, licks the insides of the rain fly for condensation, doesn’t understand tent etiquette or the idea of personal space, steals my sleeping bag each time I get up, looks like Kermit the… Read More ›
Reed College walk, Portland
Spooling around southeast Portland with my childhood friend Loren, the guys with beards pouring growlers and pints at the neighborhood bottle shop flipping records, preparing dishes with fresh oysters, grated horseradish, a bed of sea salt. Past the antique shops where… Read More ›
Chameleon, don’t paint yourself the color of perfection
It was very late August that summer we stopped in Portland on the way to the Redwoods and Loren made me some CD with early Pink Floyd I hadn’t heard, and I waited to play it until we left a… Read More ›
Canyon Road bookends
I unrolled the gravity-fed water filter bladder that still smelled like campfire from a year ago, collected a few liters of stream water and hung it from a tree by our camp while Brad finished a cigarette and started a… Read More ›
Deceiver Trail to Far Country Lookout
I took the Deceiver Trail, the S3, past the Licorice Fern cul-de-sac to a crumpled-up viewpoint where there wasn’t much to see but it sounded nice with the water collecting in a dark pool by a leaning sign, Far Country… Read More ›
Sunday’s solemn features
We got back to our vitamins, raw almonds, coconut milk — shopping for the best price on gas, how the clouds cling to the hills on a Sunday morning, the treetops tucked in, gone back to sleep. Even though it’s… Read More ›
Fortune presents gifts not according to the book
That last Tuesday in Germany I had two Xanax I’d saved from the flight last summer and took one when I got back from the artist Matthias’s house, found our place a shit-storm of packing and bad energy and realized Dawn… Read More ›
Fantastic Erratic: on muses, flow, and writing in spurts
When I started blogging, I posted for the first three years without a single visitor, not even my mom. It didn’t matter because, a.) I didn’t really understand (and wasn’t interested in) social media, b.) I didn’t think my writing… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 