The girl sits on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, hands twisting in her lap and chin jutting out slightly. Her braids are tight and smooth, hanging just past her shoulders and secured with matching red bands. A little comic strip kid, neatly drawn, eyes big and sparkling. “I can’t believe […]
Month: December 2016
I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen. It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the […]
December 5-9. 2016 At a writing residency in Oregon, Emma finds a bird foot in coyote scat, and then sees death all around her in the forest. When I stopped for lunch, I took out my notebook and wrote, “Thinking mostly about nothing much except how the forest is death, death, life out of death, death accumulated so it […]
Friends of mine know that I’m full of weird, mostly bad business ideas. There was the science tattoo consultant service, to help fact check your tattoo before you put the wrong DNA sequence on your body. There was the Brooklyn dog running company, that would go for runs with your dog. There was the proposal […]
I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure. But my hip joints hurt and so did my […]
One of the best free diversions in London is the Wellcome Collection, the medical museum operated by the Wellcome Trust and supported by the posthumous generosity of Sir Henry Wellcome, the American frontier kid who became a British pharmaceutical tycoon. “Medicine Man,” one of the permanent exhibitions, is drawn from Sir Henry’s own extraordinary collection of memorabilia related to […]
Sylvain Martel of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal has spent the last 15 years discovering that just as you figure out what you need to design, it often comes about that it’s already been designed. At least, something else already exists with those exact specifications – it’s just being used for a different purpose. He’s […]
I find a stick and use it to break up the dry twists of coyote scat I have found on the trail. Shit is nature’s obituary page. In each pile are the traces of lives recently lost. In this particular excreta I find a sprinkling of little white brittle bones—bird bones. And then I pull […]
