Jeff Howe
- Location
- Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
- Company
- Howe Original Productions
- Bio
- Jeff Howe is a bonsai enthusiast and harmonica player who has very good reason to believe that the Universe tastes like a cheap buck-fifty melon. He is a product of Walled Lake and a former Poetry Slam Champion of Milwaukee. He once shook hands with Rocky Colavito, opened for Leon Redbone and took a piss next to Mose Allison (no hands were shaken). All things considered, his best single day was July 4th, 1987 when he marched in the Marmarth, North Dakota parade in the morning, discovered a rare dinosaur skull in the afternoon, and then sat in playing harmonica with a drunken cowboy band until way past tomorrow. It's been downhill ever since. Jeff is a misemployed geologist who specializes in interpreting rock outcrops at 70 miles per hour. It's a gift. His daughter loves cows.
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “Brad via Cat: Thanks!
I've told this story before
but I'll
tell it again: I
ope…”
February 01, 2010 04:18PM - “I can only offer you
this. I do a lot of substitute
teaching
in the schools
and…”
January 31, 2010 09:18PM - “Good shot.”
January 31, 2010 04:31PM - “(from a 60's
comix)
Seeker: "Hey Mr.
Natural! What's it all
about?"
Mr.…”
January 31, 2010 11:41AM - “Great story. I can see
the layout vividly. And I can
see your
frustration. I
h…”
January 31, 2010 10:51AM
Jeff Howe's Links
- Best Of...
- A Single Steel Paper Clip
- I Witnessed A Murder
- A Mountain Cabin...
- A Young Man's Encounter...
- When The Baby Exploded
- The Next Moment...
- Church of the Holy Moly
- The Universe Tastes Like...
- Idiot, But Well-Meaning, Dog
- When The Last Girl Leaves...
- Incident At A Drive-In
- Where Do Mountains...
- Sweet Old Burt: SOB
- A Guy With A Pen
- Stories
- Pennock Hall Pizza Drop
- Old Baxter: A Dog Story
- When Mom Ran Over The Cat
- Let Me Be Rich
- Grandma To The E.R...
- Dead Lady Rockin'
- Pie-Wielding Polocks...
- Essays
- Old And In The Way...
- Hitting A Tennis Ball
- Canada: The Air Is Moving
- On SPAM
- Two Items (for GNS)
- On Ice Cream
- Amish Of Lancaster County
- Why Live In Oakland?
- Reunion: Going Back...
- The President Has Been Shot
- Snow Along The Conestoga
- Best There Ever Was
- Clueless Wanna-Be Hippie
- The Wind Isn't Blowing...
- Humor/Irony
- Dead SOBs Part II
- A Thanksgiving Incident
- ...Like A Buck-Fifty Melon
- The Physics of Little Old Men
- Playing Squirrel Chicken
- San Francisco Street Corner
- Review/Opinion/Commentary
- The Tiara!
- Buddy Guy - Old Blues Guy?
- Harmonica Players
- Science
- The Invention Of Sex
- The Physics Of Little Old Men
- Einstein's Hammock #1
- The Tick-Tock Continuum
- Geology
- The Haiti Earthquake
- Where Do Mountains...?
- The Desert From The Air
- Teaching
- About Global Warming
- Lazy, Disinterested Students
- History
- Refighting the Civil War...
- Searching For The Old Road
- The First Vermonters
- Horticulture
- The Bonsai Paradox
- Dawn Redwoods As Bonsai (II)
- Dawn Redwoods As Bonsai (I)
- Workin' For A Livin'
- Don't Touch Me!
- If Pirates Picked Grapes
- Punching Out
- Other Sites by Jeff Howe
- Little Big Trees - Bonsai
- Whistle Up A Rope - Stories
- Howe Original Productions
Good News: Daughter Discovers Flaw In The Apocalypse of 2012
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 »
Down Along The River With The Dog (A Photo Essay)

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 Is So Over Between Mechanical Pencils And Me.
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 »
Two Items (For Good News Sunday)
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 »
In Praise Of Hitting A Tennis Ball

“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

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 »
The Bonsai Paradox: How Do You Keep A Big Tree Small?
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 »
Of Dead SOBs And Lost Shiny Buttons

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 4th Avenue E. and Tullis St. in Olympia, Washington, when something lying on the sidewalk caught his eye.
He picked it up.… Read full post »
The Pennock Hall Pizza Drop
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 Tiara: The Acceptance Speech

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 »
Old And In The Way: You Too?
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 »
The Wind Isn't Blowing, The Air Is Moving (Damn you, Canada)
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 »
On SPAM (GNS)
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 »
My Weirdest New Year's Eve
(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 »
When The Last Girl Leaves The Nudie Pond

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 »
The Bread Man Of Christmas Eve

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 »
Winter Snow Along The Conestoga River

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
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
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 »
On A Street Corner In San Francisco, 1982
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 »
Where Do Mountains Come From?
Don't Touch Me!
“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 »
When Mom Ran Over The Cat
(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 »
A Geologist Views The Desert From The Air
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 »
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