I sat at the end of the bar with the bartender Robbie watching It’s A Wonderful Life, his favorite movie. It was snowing outside and the bar was basically closed. He wasn’t supposed to, but Robbie only charged me for… Read More ›
Memoir
A low-melting alloy used for joining less fusible metals
When Ginger gets up in the morning and first stands she looks like a newborn fawn touching down, the legs wobbly, on stilts. But I don’t stretch, it’s the discomforts of my past I remember in my joints, stumbling down… Read More ›
The shoulder seasons
Friday, 9 Dec 16: mom looked out the front door and winced. Two hour snow delay but it all turned to rain, and now the lawn looks patchy and white like a grisly, old dog. Stayed up late watching it,… Read More ›
First night with the lights
The hail fell, a proxy for the snow, but the cold made the windows fogged around the edges like it was matted, and it took me back to that house in Bethlehem where we lived, that night it kept snowing… Read More ›
Don’t blame Belfast, ’16
It was in Belfast this time of year we learned Charlotte can sleepwalk. It’s not like a special power sleepwalking, more a defect. The house was really small with steep stairs and I had the coal stove going all night… Read More ›
Whatever happens between now and December, keep it between us
This time of year 2012 I kind of snapped. Dawn asked what’s wrong and I started crying, said I needed to write. We went to Germany for Christmas and I had this transcendental sense reopening thing when I heard a… Read More ›
Spellbound colander of treetops amid bruised cloud aperture
It’s funny, when I think about James Joyce now I wonder how much of his art is judged by what he said vs. how he said it, the fact he freed others to rethink writing: or that his book went… Read More ›
November spawned a monster
Rainy Thursday morning, Thanksgiving at the lake, all to myself. The level’s come up to the rocks, nowhere to sit. Ginger has a private crap somewhere in the trees. The rain makes a pattern across the surface, little black dots rippling,… Read More ›
This time of year the mountains
When the girl at the Whole Foods asked how my day was going I paused and had to laugh, how much I wanted her to know, she should read my blog. Leaving the office at 2 PM and stopping for… Read More ›
The ancient art of eating glass
I got in the slot on the offramp at the exit I used to take for work, turned left on 1st past the strip club, the pot shops, the Alaskan outfitter Filson—parked at my old office, climbed the steps to… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 