On Account

When a pirate of yore went “on the account,” it meant he was hopping on a ship to sail off and plunder other people’s property. Sometimes it was hard to feel sorry for these other people, many of them Europeans extracting the fruits of non-European places off the backs off free non-European laborers. Nonetheless, when […]

Age of Time

How can time simultaneously scream by while crawling endlessly? Stephen Hawking could perhaps explain it to me, but he’s not here right now, and even though I know where to find his book on my newly-organized bookshelves, reading it sounds like work. Way back an entire decade ago when I turned 50, almost to the […]

Chaos Order

Last Thursday I made one of my semi-annual trips to the parking lot of the grocery in Crested Butte, where my dentist’s office is located. This parking lot may be the most haphazard in the entire universe, with people parking higgedly-piggedly. But now – now there are lines painted on the asphalt, and arrows, directing […]

Nothing Much; What’s Up With You?

Yes, this space has gone dark once again, despite my intentions. Time — that’s the most precious commodity in my life, and like money for others, I don’t have enough of it. I am always coming up short. I feel I can blame some of this on my back, which really isn’t my back so […]

All Booked Up

Well, Lynn has abandoned us once again, although by the time you read this she could have returned — just hopefully not too soon. This was the big week of Lynn’s camping trip that wasn’t, and while she remains a bit chagrined that she backed off her plans to sleep on the ground in a […]

Hirpling

Azimuth Orange light leads to symme- try again when silver brooks begin to burble yellow then can mimi- cry as graying filters pink through growing herbal Pricking of a green thumb black now has been pilfered and away brown hirples so blue and red become purple I wrote this poem, which is in some form […]

The Dark Side of Football

I started this entry 11 months ago, at the end of the middle school football season. I ran to 1,300 words and was still plunking along when I set it aside, and now that we’re at another football season, here it is, relevant again. I don’t know most of the kids at Gunnison Middle School. […]

Plugging Along

While Lynn has been lumping boxes — she and one co-worker sorted 1,400 packages Saturday morning — I have been hard at work myself, watching videos. Now, this is not the standard video-watching that takes place at Pat’s, where some large percentage of the workforce just assumes that part of their job description includes propping […]

Going Postal

When we talk about waiting, no discussion would be complete without mention of the United States Postal Service, which at least around here seems single-handedly determined to teach people patience whether they want to learn it or not. The Postal Service is a giant amorphous agency that seems to be perpetually a point of controversy. […]

Where the Real Fraud Grows

To go back to the subject of waiting, as if I were anywhere near done with the topic yesterday, one of the things I’m waiting on — futilely, I’m afraid — is for sanity to be restored among 30-ish percent of the American voting public. Or at least among the politicians these folks vote for. […]