The Great British Baking Show Versus the Election

It’s still Thursday, as I write this, and they’re still counting. Meanwhile, everything about the show I’m watching makes me feel better, even when someone chooses to make a steamed treacle pudding. Because of this show I can now tell a fiddly from a stodgy sponge. I know – by sight, at least — proper […]

Science Plus/Versus Religion

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 […]

Penspective: what bird is this?

On some days, one thing looks like another. It’s easy to be fooled. That’s where a pen helps. Over the last couple years I’ve been taking pictures of objects that require scale to grasp. What I’ve used as reference is my pen, so I’m starting an ongoing LWON series of photographed objects using one for […]

Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol

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 […]

The poetry of the morning walk. Murmuration.

This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the sun […]

How are you?

Lately, I’ve had some form of this conversation several times a week: Hello! Hello! How are you? Good! How are you? Pretty good. Or, you know, good considering…everything. [chuckle] Oh yes, me too — fine considering it all. Usually, this is the preamble to whatever the meat of our conversation will be. But a few […]

Mounting evidence to the contrary

If you asked me in the abstract, and I wasn’t thinking about it too hard, I might tell you that most people are a bit stupid. A bit provincial, a bit ignorant, a bit wrapped up in consumer culture. I might think, if not say, that your average Joe is a bit of a philistine, […]

Guest post: Waiting for the End

I have never watched anyone die before, so I didn’t realize how much of it would be time spent watching Ativan dissolve in Morphine. The mixture is cloudy sea glass blue, ocean colored when it comes together. Florida is swamp hot in September, so hard to breathe, and I’m here swirling the two together in a […]