This is a series of posts I started in late May and plan to continue for 40 days, with a goal of hitting 50,000 words by July 5. It’s inspired by a three-day solo trek on the Washington coast, with… Read More ›

isolation
‘Where the shadows run from themselves’
I got back in the slot, the cafeteria salad bar at work, tonged some shredded carrots, spinach, diced beets…made a modest bird’s nest out of it, weighed it, scanned my card, picked a two-top by the windows and started in…. Read More ›
A thumbnail of a person
The playground is empty though it’s the middle of the day, the middle of the summer, with laminated signs on stakes warning the slides are very hot from the sun. It’s like the heat made everyone disappear, until two teenaged… Read More ›
You’ve got to earn the right to be wrong
The woman in the pizza shop carries her kid on her hip like it’s some growth, a Mini-Me, an evil puppet you can’t control that just talks like that and won’t stop. Because I’m not employed and my wife is over-worked and we’re… Read More ›
No present like the time
Ginger is on top of a stuffed rabbit with a squeaker, looks like she’s sodomizing it. The rabbit has a cartoon eye, looks nonplussed. Ginger thrashes it to break the neck, sniffs its underside, walks off distracted, comes back. I… Read More ›
In between the nether-lands of dreams
I enter the shop and trip a chime and it’s the same tone on my phone that wakes me: new message. I wrote this in my sleep. I’m walking down the row of cubes, at work, naked. There’s people in my… Read More ›
Dream about a boy who turned to stone: online loneliness
We go to our corners, the family. There’s the TV and the kitchen for the genders to split, devices for the teenagers to keep them docile, interested, present. Life spins in a prism of thoughts and distractions, frames. Most you… Read More ›
Far From Home (Positively 5th Street)
The last time I went, they tore it down so it made me wonder if it was ever even there: that brick building by the art museum where I paid my first rent, on 5th and Hamilton street, Allentown, PA…. Read More ›
Goodbye to the guy in the van
For the past couple years, I’ve been tracking a homeless guy who lived out of a van on the alley by my work, the Starbucks corporate office. I got to know his name, made small talk, met his son, shared… Read More ›
“Trapped in the amber of this moment”
I finished the Harry Potter series on Saturday, and felt the loss at the end of the story, no more. I got cranky and unmotivated, hard to be around. I started getting obsessed with death themes. I had a dream… Read More ›