Now that the snapshots have cooked inside my various albums for a while, they've acquired a certain historical sheen, although I'm talking history with a very small h. I've even tripped across several photos I didn't know I had. This one of my maternal grandmother is a complete surprise.

In this… Read full post »

What a fucking shame. And things had been going so well, too.

 Actually, "well" isn't the word I want and maybe a single word won't do it. Just that the Universe had recently burped out two tiny events nicely showcasing my neighborhood's fine weirdness. But in true duelistic Buddhist fashion,… Read full post »

For a lot of reasons: lousy personality, odd obsessions, a reading addiction, and peculiar parents, I was an alone child, but not usually a lonely child.  Alone was my preferred state most of the time, and then, suddenly, my world would seem small as an ice cube and I'd start wishing… Read full post »

The black dog is running loose, toenails clicking on the pavement, jagged white teeth showing, hunting in this lightless thickening night...

I have an addict friend who calls his invariable bouts of crashing depression the black dog, as did Winston Churchill. My friend is sober now  and has been… Read full post »

"How do you know your soul is in your body? Like how do you feel it? An' how do you know it's soul and not spirit?" Ramone, my intense tree trimmer was asking me this as we roared down Gus Thomasson. We were speeding towards Home Depot so he could rent… Read full post »

During the summer and into the warm days of late fall, we went through a jumpy period here in my Eas' Dallas neighborhood. On a Saturday night, always around ten PM, there'd be the fast pap-pap-pap of an automatic handgun. A drive-by. One gang, maybe the eternal East Dallas Locos, had… Read full post »

Driving back from the supermarket towards my mongrel neighborhood, I have occasion to drive through some hipstery areas, and it was in one such that I saw this sign in a yard: Live Locally...Support East Dallas. I wondered to myself how you could do anything else besides live locally, but that's… Read full post »

Tomorrow, I'll go to pick up the ashes of my cat, Antone Boudreau. The doctor offered to scatter his ashes in a memorial garden she has. "Thanks," I told her, "but he needs to be buried here." Here in our back yard, near the big wide red live oak that's wrapped… Read full post »

My great-grandmother Lucy made quilts; they were pieced together out of tiny, tiny bits of fabric. She chose her pieces with an eye to texture and pattern and seemed to like small intricate designs. I have her wedding-ring quilt up in my attic now. It's over ninety years old; the top… Read full post »