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The Great Affair of Moving: A Fantasy Train-Travel Itinerary, inspired by...
British author Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote: “I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Agreed. Movement is major, no matter how you accomplish it. And, lately, I’ve felt strangely...
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Spotted around Manhattan: Cheeky Vanity License Plates of Banking Industry Execs
Disgraceful behavior warrants a bit of satire. Herewith, a send-up of bankers behaving badly, in 23 hypothetical vanity plates.
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Overheard in Portland: “Is there anyone else in this line named ‘Apple?’”
Overheard in Safeway, McLoughlin Boulevard November, 2014 Around 6 p.m. In light of the late blasts of Gwyneth Paltrow vitriol blowing around the Internet, I was intrigued to recently overhear this...
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I was nominated for a Liebster Award!
What is a Liebster, you ask? Sort of like a Pulitzer or a Nobel? Well, yes, it is quite similar to both of those awards … Wait … Actually, it’s not at all like either of those. Not even the teeniest...
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How to Eat a Buffalo: A Declaration of Loss
How do you swallow a buffalo? There’s a trick to it, which I was taught some dozen years ago, deep in the jungle, at Christmas dinner, by a man who’d stolen everything from me. And now, I’ll teach it...
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What We Carry: Some Thoughts on Miscarriage
I have composed iterations of this little essay in my head at least a hundred times over the past month, but somehow, I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and write it out loud. To make it...
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You’ll Get Bad Things and Like Them: Hate Songs, Little Mouth Cuts and Great...
Have you ever had a little cut in your mouth that you couldn’t stop chewing on? Poking at, worrying over, jabbing and stabbing against with your tongue, endlessly, compulsively? Even though it hurt,...
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The PATSIE Principle: You’re not as Special as You Think, and That’s Just Fine
“I dropped out of college because I knew more than my professors did.” “I often have to explain things to others because I just grasp stuff more quickly than most people do.” “I live in accordance with...
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My Afternoon with the Foot Fetishists of Twitter
The trouble started the way so many kinds of trouble do these days – with an Internet meme. I logged on to my Twitter feed a few months back, bored, and noticed that something called “heelconcept” was...
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Christian college, correctional facility, or both? A short quiz
What’s in a name? Really, maybe, not very much at all. Sometimes, it seems, the incongruities are downright stark. Over the years, I’ve curated a personal collection of hilarious and unlikely...
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Packing for the Apocalypse: Advice for Overloaded Travelers
I have seen a good bit of the world, which for some reason has cultivated in others the mistaken impression that I might be a good source of counsel when it comes time to pack for a trip. Let me assure...
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Travel Tips: Can Americans Use Debit or Credit Cards While Visiting Cuba?
I often fantasize about the jobs I’d hold in alternate realities. Singer. Hair stylist. Travel Agent. I can’t sing a song that anybody would ever really say was worth listening to, and my bangs are...
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Scattered Tribes: What Do We Owe The Syrian Refugees?
I wrote this letter in response to a question from a friend on Facebook about my views on Syrian refugees. R: You wrote me, somewhat out of the blue, to ask how I will feel when extremists make their...
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Resolutions and Recorrelations: On Becoming an Ex-Suicide
“The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him...
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Drumpf’ed – An Open Letter to Trump’s Supporters
Will the real Trumpites please stand up?
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Hey, Trumpettes! I’ve Got a Message to Relay.
“If you want to destroy my sweater/ pull this thread as I walk away / Watch me unravel / I’ll soon be naked …” -Weezer I. Have you ever wished, at some point over these past three weeks (yes, it’s only...
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Atheish: An Atlas of Spiritual Skepticism
1. “Here be dragons.” It’s the enigmatic message of warning scrawled across the Southeast Asian coastline on one of the oldest globes in know existence. Look closely at this one-dimensional...
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Health care’s luck mandate: why the not-sick-and-nearly-dead should worry, too.
Last week, I visited the dentist. It was a rather mundane undertaking: a pleasant hygienist with a difficult-to-place accent cleaned my teeth, and as he did so, he entertained me by musing on a variety...
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On Not Moving to Cambodia, or: How to Stay Present through Trying Times
Last Saturday, while out with Gabi on our afternoon neighborhood constitutional, I happened upon a garage sale. The sale was of outdoor stuff, mostly, spread out over the grassy front lawn of a...
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White Fragility: What it Means and Why it Matters in Portland Now
It’s been a tense few weeks here in Portland: the owners of a nascent burrito food cart were shamed and shunned into shuttering their business after the um, enterprising, women bragged about nabbing...
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