It’s gotten increasingly harder to take all-cold showers as the season’s worn on. But it never disappoints, that first moment of sensory shock. Scenes of women giving birth in the Baltic from some grainy film we watched when Dawn was… Read More ›
Memoir
It’s more than a feeling
Growing up in the 70s it’s hard to reconcile the kid I was then with the person I am now. A shoebox full of Polaroids and old prints, in the days before smartphones when everyone looks surprised by the camera,… Read More ›
Source code and origin stories
Maybe it’s just the light but in that first picture of me I don’t look born as much as I do unearthed, the way dad’s holding me out like some product of an archaeological dig. Dad’s so young his beard… Read More ›
Songs in the attic
This morning the fog was so thick on the plateau it blurred all the trees but when I got up the road you could see the very edge of it, like where the fog officially began or ended in the… Read More ›
First night with LSD and the police
How can you just leave me standing alone in a world that’s so cold The night ended like all nights, with the dawn. But this was like no other, that first night in Erie, Pennsylvania. The rugby player Grundy drove… Read More ›
Reconstruction of the fables
I thought I couldn’t slow down any more than I had, but I was wrong. Now taking late morning naps. Not a good look when my wife is working her ass off, too busy to hang her clothes. The house… Read More ›
This is a long drive with nothing to think about
The land driving east across Washington to the desert steppe looks stretched and spotted like the hide of an old reptile. Just flecks of sage brush, land that looks scarred and weathered, like it’s already been burned or is about… Read More ›
Bookending
This is a series of posts written from my mom’s house in Germany that begins here, and ends with this post. I came and went on a Thursday. Took the old walk my last day, the one mom calls her… Read More ›
Leaving the country
At Eberhard’s we sit outside his mom’s place on a rickety bench with our backs against a stone hut, by the walnut tree. He uses a tree stump for a small table with a crude table top balanced on top… Read More ›
The pearly everlasting
We meet mom’s friend Helga for dinner at the Croatian guy Tony’s new restaurant and sit inside at the best table (“without shadows,” Tony says). It’s called Adriatic cuisine, which I take to mean Mediterranean, though my geography and culinary… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 