It has been widely proposed that the world is hell-bent for some great time-ending cataclysm in the year 2012.  I don’t keep up with all of the details but apparently Nostradamus, the Mayans, a coven of witches, some Korean mathematicians, Billy Baldwin, Al Gore, the RNC and the Devil hims… Read full post »

It had been raining hard for 24 hours straight and the dog and I were depressed.  Not necessarily from the rain, mind you, just depressed. We actually enjoy big storms and great atmospheric commotions…  But life outside the window had slowed to grey, cold and wet, and i/… Read full post »

It occurred to me today, as I was starting to write with a mechanical pencil and the lead tip broke off, that I don’t like mechanical pencils. For some reason I have spent an entire lifetime trying to learn to like them because they are, admittedly, very cool. 

They are… Read full post »

My thirteen year-old daughter has a misdirected curvature in her spine, Scoliosis, serious enough to warrant major surgery in two weeks.  It is a condition that was diagnosed over a year ago but has continued to get worse and worse.  On a Tuesday morning in early February they will slice he… Read full post »

“Mwwock!”

In an adrenaline surge, you gage the tiny ball coming towards you over the net.  It skims the tape, nose-dives with topspin, skims the court surface and heads on a low straight line to your right.  You have estimated where you can meet it waist high and/… Read full post »

A single steel paper clip was all that separated life from death.  It’s probably steel, she thought, or aluminum, or tin… or some combination of the three.  Maybe some copper.  The woman wasn’t sure why she was pondering what a paper clip was made of, o/… Read full post »

The surface, or “crust”, of the Earth is like the shell of a large blue egg that has been accidentally dropped on the floor.  It is criss-crossed by jagged fractures that separate the surface into irregular pieces, often referred to as plates.  These plates float o/… Read full post »

Bonsai: The artistic cultivation of miniature trees in containers.

The most frequent question that people unfamiliar with bonsai ask (after “how do you keep them alive?”) is: “how do you keep them so small?”  The general public seems convinced that our wee/… Read full post »

One day about a month ago, a young man was walking down a street. More to the point, he was walking past a mailbox at the corner of 4^th Avenue E. and Tullis St. in Olympia, Washington, when something lying on the sidewalk caught his eye.

He picked it up.… Read full post »

At the far end of the campus of Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, sits a five-story building called Pennock Hall.  It now houses the School of Optometry, and is full of offices and labs, but back in the Fall of 1969, it was a newly opened dormitory.  Because it… Read full post »

The following text is an excerpt from Jeff Howe’s acceptance speech at the WSFTC Tiara Awards in London Thursday evening: 

“In the entire world of writing, there is no award so coveted, so career-altering, and so fulfilling as The Tiara.  This is becaus/… Read full post »

Somehow, I have become old, over-educated, under-skilled, irrelevant, and virtually unemployable.  The world is – as I speak – passing me by like a thundering, through commuter train on a really fast track.  Me?  I’m sitting here stupidly on a sidetrack with the oth/… Read full post »

First, configure the inside of your mouth to say the word “who”.  

Now drop the back of your tongue (the part that goes down your throat) down into your lower jaw so that you produce a large, resonant cavity in your mouth.   Exhale forcefully but slowly from deep in/… Read full post »

Wake up!  Get out of bed.  It’s Good News Sunday - a perfect day for eating specially processed army meat products (SPAM).  Why?  I dunno, sometimes you just know these things.  

And besides, I’m fresh out of Ho-Ho’s, the milk has go… Read full post »

(January 1, 1976, 5:30 a.m.)

Like running water.

Yes, that’s it.

It was distinctly the sound of water running through my head.  It gurgled and bubbled and flushed through my sinuses, danced around my inner ear bones and sloshed back in forth inside my brain.  It was not… Read full post »

Along the West Marin coast north of San Francisco, isolated patches of coastal redwoods still invade the steep canyons that cut sharply into the rolling hills from the ocean.  Acting as flumes for the fog, these canyons cut upwards where they emerge into Bolinas Ridge, a broad ridg/… Read full post »

Every year on Christmas Eve, my mother would drag my brother and my sisters and I off to midnight mass at St. William’s Catholic Church in Walled Lake, Michigan.  Only Dad had the good sense to stay home and wait for Santa.

Despite all the pomp, circumstance and pageantry,… Read full post »

 The entire Atlantic seaboard and areas for hundreds of miles inland sleep quietly this evening, huddled beneath a giant howling snowstorm that continues to blanket the region with record-breaking snow.  Here in south central Pennsylvania, on the Saturday before Christmas, eve/… Read full post »

A well-thrown stone is a joy

and I've been throwing stones

since I was the smallest boy

and pebbles...

and marbles...

and baseballs...

and rocks

snowballs and

seashells and

wadded up socks

              … Read full post »

Global warming, like abortion, evolution and gun control, is one of those issues that automatically raises the hackles of people at its very mention.  I predict that your hackles are already raised, one way or the other, just by choosing to read this. You’re curious as to which flavor… Read full post »

While walking to work one morning, I ran into a group of foreign tourists at the corner of Clay and Hyde.  They were holding a map and arguing loudly, each pointing in a different direction. 

"Hallo… pleez?”   They stopped me, waving their arms wildly for emphasis.… Read full post »

First there is a mountain,

then there is no mountain,

then there is.

                                    … Read full post »

“DON’T TOUCH ME!”  The boy screams menacingly, his eyes wide and frightened like a caged animal.

It is 7:28 on a Friday morning.  I have just checked in.

Three staff members surround the boy down the hall.  Anger and insolence pour off of him like beads of sweat. Wit… Read full post »

(PITA Alert: One cat was mashed in the telling of this story.)

Now, I will admit, before we even begin, that I never much liked that cat.  I don’t even recall its name – “Socks” or “Whiskers” or “Frisky” or some such thing.   It was mean/… Read full post »

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water everywhere,

Nor any a drop to drink.

- Samuel Coleridge, “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”

A desert is a land devoid of water, a baked and desiccated condition forced upon/… Read full post »