I had never met or seen the people who lived in the houses I delivered to, but here was this girl I’d had a crush on and now I knew where she lived.
Creative Nonfiction
Where everyone would love to drown
I was barely 15 and didn’t have luxuriant tastes. I bought James Bond paperbacks and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. I wasn’t into drinking or drugs and didn’t have a girlfriend so I bought IZOD shirts and corduroy shorts and then all my money was gone.
Beach sequence
There is just time. And they say it doesn’t even exist but we don’t have another word for it so we just call it time. How much we have while we sit here and wait. On a beach this morning,… Read More ›
Get rid of unwanted back hair
We forget how good we have it, we read books about the apocalypse for entertainment. We get a taste of that and the first thing we do is run for the toilet paper. We’re like domesticated dogs, we wouldn’t last long in the wild.
Desert island selection
It was nearly impossible to love our house as much as it needed to be loved. I’d sit in the backyard and pretend I was at a resort the way the tall trees looked, the angle of the moon coming… Read More ›
Palace of the brine
I was wet from the ocean spray when I woke, with eagles up above. The tide looked low and the beach opened up. Fallen trees off the bluffs made it feel like we were at the edge of the world.
Field notes from the Pacific Coast
A few years ago I did a 30-day challenge to write 50K words, inspired by an outing to the Washington coast and in part, the singer Chris Cornell’s tragic death. Cornell sang for the band Soundgarden, one of the primary… Read More ›
Postcard from the Mediterranean
I go back to the curves of that sea along the beach, shapely as a woman’s hips. To the dark, side street bars and waving aloe stalks, the persistence of salt in the maritime air.
Cloud Atlas for Dummies
A dramatic spring sky where the clouds take on exotic shapes, this one taking me back to grade school when I first learned about plate tectonics, the idea our earth was once supercontinents that broke apart, that you could fit… Read More ›
Testosterone in pink
This shirt is salmon pink, a new, tight-fitting shirt for a man. A man bold enough for pink, for a stiff collar and a tight weave. Who conceals the limp from his plantar fasciitis on his way across the grocery… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 