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 ›
Memoir
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 ›
The speed of coffee and music, marketing serene
My last project at Starbucks was to address the move toward slow coffee, or as it’s called, the Third Wave. A strategy guy shared a deck with us he pitched to the board demonstrating why Starbucks had to act, the… Read More ›
The weird old man down by the lake
First snow on the mountains, and they all look like postage stamps with the clouds, matted in lavender-blue. There’s a purple piece of foam I found on the trail someone dropped, for sitting on, and I take it with me… Read More ›
Black and white portrait of geese flying against the clouds
It’s a cold, wet snow that’s started on the mountain passes and though we’re much lower elevation in the foothills, it’s the same chill in the air that defies logic, that seems so much colder than the temperature—like that San… Read More ›
The moon so close, again the rain
Went down to the den, turned out the lights, waited for the moon. The cat got on me and I cupped her head in my palms, Egyptian, an upside-down pyramid from the tip of the nose, fans out to the… Read More ›