It was very late August that summer we stopped in Portland on the way to the Redwoods and Loren made me some CD with early Pink Floyd I hadn’t heard, and I waited to play it until we left a… Read More ›
Seattle
Lost in the Funhouse with Barth: on meta, Brecht, and what’s behind The Fourth Wall
With social media and technology what they are, metafiction has become more a part of our lives than ever: we’re constantly stepping outside the frame to capture ourselves in it, and our story of documenting our life story is as much a story as the story itself. But as we step outside the frame, we’re straddling two worlds and cease to exist fully in either — like tourists on an Alaskan whale-watching cruise with our cameras out trying to catch the breaching whales as proof we were there, we miss the reality just beyond our lens and I wonder, did we really see anything at all?
The trees could be characters if we only gave them names
A row of arborvitae intended to screen an unseemly RV strip at the edge of our property died; it was really the only thing we lost in the yard but it bothered Dawn to look at: there were seven, in… Read More ›
Deceiver Trail to Far Country Lookout
I took the Deceiver Trail, the S3, past the Licorice Fern cul-de-sac to a crumpled-up viewpoint where there wasn’t much to see but it sounded nice with the water collecting in a dark pool by a leaning sign, Far Country… Read More ›
Advanced state of Frühling
SAMMAMISH, WA 29th IV 2016 Climbed the dead end road Beth lives on a half an hour before sunrise to walk and write. Our last night in Germany, mom, Eberhard and I laid out the drugs on the table for… Read More ›
‘Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund’
Some of the girls in the beer tent wear their hair braided Princess Leia style and some of them look like nymphs on a Led Zeppelin album cover crawling on rocks, or a Maxfield Parrish print lazing by the pool… Read More ›
Four months 18 summers ago in France
In the fall of ’97 I announced I would be leaving my job at Starbucks that December, moving home to Pennsylvania for a few months and then on to southern France, to live in a condo on the beach a… Read More ›
Rattle my bones all over the stones
Saturday, all of us on damp streets swaddled against the wind coming off Dublin Bay, wandering northeast from our flat past large churches, intersections where the asphalt’s painted LOOK RIGHT, LOOK LEFT, and the people have complexions that remind me… Read More ›
Day 15 in Scotland, coming into Oban
The Latvian-Scottish hairstylist in the salon across the street from our flat holds my hair up in the mirror, both of us looking at it, and says it’s a disconnected style, which I ask her to define but she can’t… Read More ›
‘Tell only happy hours’
Drink anything with enough alcohol in it and you’ll start tasting almonds, oranges, coconuts, pine needles, Christmas cake. But there’s no pretence in the tour at the Scotch distillery: our guide, who wears a badge saying Team Leader, points to… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 