(Ed: I entered the Boulder Weekly “101 Word Fiction” contest last year and earned an honorable mention. They’re doing it again and I just submitted this one.) I almost missed him in that full-length camouflage coat, Vietnam era boonie, Ho Chi Minh beard and braided pigtails. He was nearly invisible against the backdrop of alders … [read more]
A Really Big Lunch
Jim Harrison has been one of my lighthouses of artistic honesty for years. He exposes himself and those around him in bare naked prose and poetry. It’s a guilty pleasure to read someone else’s guilty pleasures. Jim’s primary stock in trade has been poems, short stories, novellas and novels, though, as a food writer he … [read more]
Opening Day, 2017
Happy Opening Day! Ahh, baseball. Maddening to the uninitiated, like watching Bergman’s Seventh Seal. To the cognoscenti, a beautifully out-of-square cipher, as Carlin told us, with an arrhythmic cadence, arcane rules, ancient grudges and secret histories. I don’t care what a linebacker’s glove smells like, but a catcher’s mitt? Yes. Which toxic tube snack is … [read more]
Flipping The Bird: A Primer and a Prescription
Ahh. The venerable bird, that ancient gesture of abandonment of civility and any pretension of effort to understand the other. “Fighting words”, as it were, in one finger. Let me preface these brief remarks by saying that by no means do I recommend any of us traipse about our lives flipping one another off. Doing … [read more]
Two very short stories…
Two very short stories… I saw Buckminster Fuller speak in 1972 and was thoroughly impressed with his approach to design thinking. Here was a man who had designed, among many other things, the geodesic dome, telling us about the inspiration he got from working on submarines. To several thousand hippies, Bucky referencing war machines was … [read more]
Breakfast In 1959
I. It’s cold outside. It’s cold between Mom and Dad. It’s 1959 and everything in the world is black and white. The Lone Ranger show is on the radio on top of the old refrigerator. Jackson Pollack spattered linoleum sits beneath a Jackson Pollack spattered dinette. Mom pours the batter into the waffle iron for … [read more]
