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 […]
On Reading Challenges
On her Facebook page, author Ania Ahlborn confessed feeling baffled by people who read more than a dozen books a month. (Did you notice the name drop? Yeah, I don’t know her IRL, though.) Her “confusion” stems only partly from the mere fact of time and how does anyone have that much. Mostly, she wonders […]
Does This Book Spark Joy?
At about 2 a.m., my life partner, Tim, smelled smoke. Our main source of heat is a wood stove. He went outside and looked at the chimney, smoking lightly as it should be. He checked the exterior walls near the chimney for signs of heat. Nothing. There was a faint curl of smoke where the […]
The End of the World as We Know It
I spend entirely too much time thinking about the end of the world. I should clarify. I don’t think very much about the ways the world could actually end: climate change-related, nuclear disaster, asteroid. I spend more time thinking about zombies. Vampires. Dragons. Maybe aliens. But mostly zombies, the Walking Dead kind more than the […]
