Just down the road from my house, there lived a bull. He had a massive, muscular neck and a glossy black coat that rippled as he strode around the pear orchard that served as his pasture. In fall, when the pears ripened, the bull rubbed against the old trees, shaking their trunks until the fruit […]
Miscellaneous
* Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, […]
When I look in the mirror, though everything is mildly blurry, I can’t not see the signs of aging I used to think might miraculously skip me—back when I was being carded in bars (at 43!!). But there they all are, the sags and swollen bits, the divots and wrinkles, the spots and stiff (and […]
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith? Monoöbelisk. Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife […]
I have a personal policy: never read the comments. And when my book was published last year, I quickly learned that I probably didn’t want to take note of the reader reviews at Amazon either. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing from readers. Nothing makes me happier than receiving a personal note from […]
I am alone as I write this, as I have been most days the last eight months. There are many things I know I miss: french fries fresh out of a restaurant kitchen, killing time in a bookstore. Other deficits have been more subtle, things I know aren’t available to me right now but that […]
This is a conversation the People of LWON had late last March when, along with the rest of civilization, we were going bug-nuts with covid stress. We had decided we couldn’t keep up a five-day-a-week posting schedule, we’d have to cut back to three days a week. We didn’t like this, but we talked through […]
