Mornings were best for napping in the picture window on the lip of the sofa if you were a cat with nothing to do. Treated like royalty, we brought him his food, kept his water bowl full, his cat box… Read More ›
Memoir
Those purple hills
You can smell Tacoma coming from miles away. Rounding the bend on the freeway, how the sky opens up like it did that day driving to the beach after college, to live there the whole summer. The size of the… Read More ›
Knees post
Like other kids growing up in the 70s my dad had a lead discus, a discus like the kind they throw in the Olympics, a discus that looked like a 1950s photograph of a UFO, perfectly saucer shaped and black,… Read More ›
Cheese post
Cheese when it’s starting to go off smells the way I remember the boys locker room smelled. Like feet and bodily gases, something chemical-like or blooming, something alive that shouldn’t be. I consumed things well past their shelf life as… Read More ›
Placement services
As a reward for getting overtime work I ordered seven yards of landscaping bark since now we can justify a cosmetic expense. And the bark smells good, makes all the beds look clean, keeps the weeds down, feels like summer…. Read More ›
Deep Charon blues
No one else would eat my cheesecake so I ate it every day, all week. I loved that it was just cream cheese, sugar, flour, eggs and cream. And that it bloated in the oven and turned a deep brown…. Read More ›
Rainbows
As a treat to myself for finishing David Wallace’s difficult book I bought another difficult book, JR by William Gaddis, 760 pages of pure dialogue, a book that influenced Wallace. I’d tried reading Gaddis’s first book but gave up and… Read More ›
Unfinished
Dawn and I sat in the car in the Dairy Queen parking lot eating our sundaes with the windows down watching the other cars come and go through the drive thru, all the people in the suburbs walking their dogs…. Read More ›
Hot desking
Springtime as a young consultant though not really young, almost 48. An office of about 200 with capacity for 150 and me in the oldest 10%. Young consultants dressed to look older, older consultants headed the other way. Office chit… Read More ›
Cart boy
No one called me cart boy to my face but they probably did behind my back. That was the crux of my job, pushing reports on a Rubbermaid cart, dropping them off for each CSR. The reports were DOS-matrix style,… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 