Uncertainty is and always has been, for everyone, one of life’s non-negotiable facts. These days, what with politics and pandemics, uncertainty is also the whole country’s mood, a fog bank of unhappiness and anxiety that’s settled in everywhere and isn’t leaving any time soon. Everybody’s irritable and pissed-off and scared, and they’re taking it out […]
This was first published December 8, 2016 and since then I have stopped doing yoga — not stopped needing to, just stopped doing it, the result of the pandemic and massive personal character flaws. The need for bullshit detection, however, will never stop, never. I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those […]
Update: the Nobel Prize for physics for 2020 went to the scientist for whose profile I created the Finkbeiner Test; and the prize for chemistry went to the two scientists who helped create CRISPR; and to the amazement of headline writers everywhere, all three were women. I had to get all over Twitter, grading these […]
Here’s one of the odd things about this pandemic but it’ll take me a minute to explain it. The older you get, the more people you know who have died. You know what “died” means: their physical bodies have stopped, we’re left with whatever of their presences we can hold on to. Whatever else the […]
I wrote this October 1, 2018. I was thinking about getting older and how that meant getting stronger or more concentrated or something; and of course life imitating art as it does, this particular coffee shop morning conversation happened at the same time. I was also thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings and the extraordinary anger […]
This first ran May 17, 2017, and Chris still finding stuff. He’s also gone on to serious work at the local historical society. His retirement looks to be going splendidly. So do his pandemic plans, as all he needs is a stockpile of postcards, the internet, and the ability to merge the lost past into […]
I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day. And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re […]
Last winter I was staying with friends who have a dark sky. (I don’t have a dark sky and even on clear nights I can hardly see Orion, which makes me sad but I’m used to it.) It was New Year’s Eve and as usual I bugged out early, went up to the guestroom, adjusted […]
