It’s been a strange year in which we’ve lived in four different places, made a cross-country trip, and attempted to start a family, sometimes with hilarious developments in that process. So here are the moments that made me laugh the hardest.
Enjoy, and Happy New Year! Read More…
On my 40th birthday in June this year, my mother called me, and I was at the sheer edge of phone reception, having decided to trek to Yellowstone National Park—where everything around me would be older than me, and by a lot. She was really cheery, Mom was, and she said, with a busload of glee, that the next 40 years go by a lot faster than the first 40. She’s a dear.
To round out the context for this post, I’ll turn to my work-in-progress, a novel in which a lot of the action takes place in the 1920s and early 1980s. Thinking back, to my teenage years, we lived in a whole different world, and in many ways, technology is at the center of what’s changed since the start of this century. Read More…
I hoped my memory of how to find his house wasn’t fuzzy, but if I was right, we had quite a ways to go before we’d show up at the white row home. As the sun prepared to set, I sniffed around an abandoned strip of train cargo cars. Judging from the height of the weeds and the rusty state of the tracks here, no trains had passed through here for a long while.
I slept in fits, as Pie was tied to a crumbling handle on the open cargo door. The wood was rotted in places and my nose stuffed up from the smell of mold and old urine, but I’d become so exhausted I couldn’t keep myself awake, and I hoped the horse would alert me if I were in any danger. Read More…
Many moons ago, back in Washington, DC, Susanne and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party. Without verbalizing it, we’d grown too old to find a night of uninterrupted dancing to a set of booming woofers interesting, much less achievable. I recognize that for some—I’m looking at you, 20somethings—it’s a painful realization. But my point isn’t about watching ourselves lose our Youth Cards, it’s about what happened after this party. At the time we lived a dozen blocks from Union Station, so I offered to give a couple of our guests a ride to the Metro, where they could travel the rest of the way to their homes. And we were nearly hijacked by a marauding band of zombies. No wait, they were merely drunk. Read More…
We’ve explored a respectable swath of the eateries in Seattle these past six months, everything from food truck vendors to lunch counters, bakers, a chocolate factory, and German tavern fare. We’ve also pursued ethnic food from local Indian buffets to authentic Chinese food and Ethiopian shared plates (injera, mmm). So we jumped at the chance to have dinner at an upscale classic French restaurant, Le Gourmand in Ballard. Susanne made our reservation, since attempting to dine there as a walk-in is a long shot at best, and we drove over on a typically cold, rainy early winter Seattle evening. Read More…
When I was a child, I had a wonderful book called The Nonsense Book by Edward Lear, of riddles and jump rope rhymes, knock knock jokes, and logic puzzles. There were great illustrations here and there, but by far, the riddles section was my favorite. No contest. I learned every version of “What’s white and black and red all over,” and I could fire them off like any of the Catholic prayers drilled into me by the nuns of my primary school. Except the riddles were met with groans, and as far as I know, God didn’t groan at me, even when I was going through a whole rosary as penance for telling Danny McGuinness he had a fat head. Read More…
Okay, this is really a list of the top writing posts I’ve written, by popularity of post and my personal preferences. It’s my blog, I get to pick! There are also a few other “best of” here that involve other people, so worries that this is all about me are premature. Enjoy. Read More…
In 1636, a ship of intrepid English women and men arrived to the new colony in America and the first thought that coursed through their brains was wow, it smells a lot better out here. Those were some of my ancestors, and thinking about it now, I can see why my lot are stubborn and make foolish decisions. At least from that side of the family.
Two years after setting foot on a new continent, as autumn sounded its last gasps and the days shortened to a quick, the moon went away. Who knows how this was explained among them? Gallileo sat back in Europe, under arrest. Yes, that Gallileo. A modern millennium eventually rolled around, and the eclipse/solstice collision was reenacted for another generation, one raised on fearmongering in the news and among their political appointees. Read More…
For those of you following along, here’s the latest piece I’m sharing of my work in progress.
Closing my eyes made the experience feel more familiar, even if I knew I was sitting back on Jeannine’s friend’s couch and not in a lab. I appreciated Dr. Stanger’s voice, strangely comforting even after everything I’d put him through. Without seizures anymore, we weren’t sure if this would work. I should have been more nervous about the hand-built EEG machine than my own capacity for out of control neuron activity, but I didn’t think the doctor would have subjected me to anything that could hurt me. Even if he’d gone through a terrible ordeal on my account.
“Just relax, Jack,” he said, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know why he cared to do all of this for us. Was he interested in inventing a time machine? Wanted to prove himself correct? Was he actually insane?
I considered ripping the wires off of my head, held to my scalp with some kind of hair product instead of the medical putty I was used to. This was reckless, dangerous. What was I thinking? I should jump up and get out of here, explain to my parents that I’ve been stupid and desperate. They’ll have to get over it at some point. Read More…
It’s been a good year, even if I did have a lot of hopes for 2010. If 2008 was chock full of life events—getting married, moving to the other side of a large continent—and 2009 was about adjustment to those new environments, I figured the next year, this year, would show up with big rewards for my good behavior. And it did, kind of. It’s been hard work on top of more hard work, and a lot of it has been frustrating (I’m looking at you, rejection letter). All told though, I can look back and see several important lessons. Which leads me to: Read More…
Trans/plant/portation 