It’s spring again, so I bought a book called Global Catastrophic Risks. It’s not the right book for the season but I’m compelled to read it because it cost so much. It’s thick and scientific with a Bruegel painting on… Read More ›
humor
Sisyphus in the underworld of our kitchen
It’s true, the microwave is sticky. Sticky on the insides, sticky when the door opens. And there’s hair on the kitchen cupboards, hair adhered to grease. Animal hair, but it doesn’t belong there. And mold on the insides of the… Read More ›
What it takes to look like a poet
There is nothing ordinary or light about you. You don’t look into the camera, you look down or sideways. You do that because the weight is too much for anyone to bear, the weight of your gaze. You know that,… Read More ›
The art of make-believe and singing in the shower
The acts of being and pretending are one and the same through an artful delusion of self. That form of delusion is how people with big dreams make them a reality: by not letting reality get in the way.
The White Duck
Image taken without permission from writer Ross Murray I’d never seen one like it before and my instinct was to feel sorry for it because the other ducks either shunned the white duck or lashed out at it with their… Read More ›
Saved by old times
Like a Greek myth that punishes its subject to suffer the daily pattern of futility as recompense for some trespass with the gods, so it was: not the recurring monotony of the pandemic but instead just getting our kids to… Read More ›
Postcards from a distance, “wish you weren’t here”
There is a pervasive sense of loss in all this, a strange peace that could be a kind of acceptance or another form of dismay. The frame of our worlds collapsing down, retracting.
Mondays don’t matter
It is the best day ever! A Monday, full-on sun, and I’m not working yet. I smoked a five-pound pork shoulder on the bone and weeded, planted flowers, just poured a beer and it’s only 3.
The self-care hair problem
This week we all went nuts.
Filling holes
The firepit, my bloody toe. We slept with all the windows open and it felt like camping. Four years later and we finally moved that mound of soil to the vegetable garden. It takes a global pandemic for us to… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 