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 ›

Morrissey
Deep impression by a shallow pool
Gray smear of a Saturday too wet for yard work, it still seems everyone’s gone since the Fourth. You can hear a car engine coming a way’s away, they cut arcs around the bend and go in and out like… Read More ›
‘Is evil something you are, or something you do?’
We’ve hung a roadside atlas of Scotland over the door in our flat, draped there like something we shot and dragged in for drying — it looks so big on paper, but you can see much of it we’ve covered… Read More ›
Meet me at the cemetry gates
We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›
“Helpless”
I don’t think my parents liked me having the bedroom door closed when Marie was over, but it wasn’t tightly enforced. We closed the door and smiled at each other: there wasn’t anywhere else to sit in my room, just… Read More ›
The Golden Hour of Knowing, The Witchcraft of Writing
I repositioned a photo of my dad in a mirror over the fireplace in our den. It’s odd because I look at the mirror and see myself, and also see him in the corner, and I look at both of… Read More ›
Quality, Popularity
These two don’t always go together. Businesses that grow from a quality product struggle to maintain it once they get big; they pay consultants to help them remember what it was like to be small. Morrissey said, “Fame, fame, fatal… Read More ›
In a river the color of lead
We were flying above the Atlantic when the Newtown shootings occurred, headed to Germany. Eberhard asked if I heard about it and I hadn’t, so he broke the news to us. Various Europeans we met over the next couple weeks… Read More ›