We are in Michael’s boyfriend’s apartment getting into Michael’s boyfriend’s bag. Michael is gay before anyone else in Pittsburgh. He wears scarves and earrings and looks beautiful but doesn’t act like a priss. People talk behind his back but he doesn’t care because he’s not insecure, it’s just who he is.
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.
There is a space between us and the ones we love and I want to understand why we allow that distance. Or talk about what gets in our way of crossing it.
I muscled my way through writing as I did with mountaineering, relying more on brute force than actual technique. In mountaineering it nearly got my killed and as a writer it kept me at the junior varsity level of blogger…. Read More ›
I walked eight miles and didn’t see another soul. Another hundred and I’d cross the Oregon border. I got to the lake, cleared a ledge of snow off by a small stand of trees and pulled out my tent, moving fast to stake it out.
Pink on the mountains as the sun falls behind the ridge and casts a shadow with a line inching upwards in gray as it sets. I climbed that peak and could picture myself on the top in a picture I… Read More ›
Dappled yellow leaves on the ground and rainwater gathered on trash can lids pooling in the creases. Back to wearing socks and donning my old sweater, funny things in pockets from forgotten times. Robins tugging worms from the scruffy rise… Read More ›
I conditioned the air because it was clammy inside and we couldn’t open the windows. The ducks were still at the lake and in the morning everything looked ghostly with that mixture of fog and smoke. I slapped my chest… Read More ›
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 ›
Labor Day came and went, hot easterly winds. The tell-tale crunch of leaves. In mid September we drove to that strange town in the French mountains, Saint-Pierre des Champs. We rented a Eurovan and I was the only one who… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 