This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]
Miscellaneous
This first ran in August, 2016, and then it ran again a year or so later, because the recipe for mint lemonade had an important update. It’s had no updates since because Helen and I have not gotten together because, you know. And I’m re-upping it now because it’s hot out and I don’t know […]
In the early mornings now, instead of scrolling the news or mulling over a Wordle, I check the wind speed and direction. If it’s from the East, I multiply by two. I run along the Rideau Canal, watched by the same worryingly-tame heron every day, and by the time I get to the lockmaster’s house […]
Every morning, I wake up, make myself a cup of coffee, and open the Spelling Bee. For the uninitiated, Spelling Bee is a word game published daily by the New York Times, and the concept is delightfully simple: you are given seven letters arranged in the shape of a honeycomb, and you try to find […]
It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found […]
My mom used to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. She rode the bus downtown every workday from where she lived in the mountains outside of Denver. A golden-hearted woman, she believes in the EPA’s mission, which is protection. She saw her agency’s job as preventing the water we drink and the air we breathe […]
Two days after the summer solstice, more than an hour after sunset, the sky a rich dark blue that is at last starting to deepen to black. Five of us are arrayed about a grassy swale near the top of the southeastern face of Protection Island. We have all our layers on and hunker down […]
Last month I wrote about delight—specifically, my inability to access it, at least the way I once did. How impossible it felt to notice the little blessings of an ordinary day. Then a funny thing happened. Mere minutes after writing that post, I started seeing those little blessings. So I opened a fresh list of […]
