Once upon a time, when I was in about second grade, my almost-best-friend borrowed a record from her older brother’s room and I heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the first time. In the song, Major Tom, an astronaut, leaves his space capsule, which then takes off for Earth without him, stranding him in space. […]
Pass the Skull Cookies, Please
Here’s a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon – Death Café. Officially described as a place where “people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death,” Death Cafés are discussion groups, not support groups or counseling sessions. The Death Café I attend does sometimes meet in a café, but we’ve also […]
Just Be
It’s busy inside my head. At any given time, I’m thinking about at least three different things: deadlines to meet, snippets of stories that I’ve read or am trying to write, work projects, grocery lists, communication that has or needs to happen, all of it often overlaid with a soundtrack of mashed-up sections of songs […]
Four Seasons in One Weekend
It must have been 11 at night. The last episode of season four of Breaking Bad had just finished. We were watching it on DVD because cable is impossible and satellite sketchy at our farm in the boonies. We looked at each other as the credits rolled. And then we (Tim, my life partner) and […]
Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It
I’ve wanted tattoos since I fell in love with a biker on the Tilt-A-Whirl when I was about eight years old. My first was a disaster. Meant to be a moon lady inside the sun, it looked like a hairy eyeball. When I got around to covering it up, the artist, Joseph Dunmire, talked me […]
Hold the Press! And other Adventures in News Reporting
My very first semester in college, I was offered an internship at a daily newspaper. I turned it down, rather piously as I recall. I was majoring in English, not journalism. I was going to be a fiction writer. Why would I want to write daily news? Ironically, ten or so years after turning down […]
