Body Count
Body Count is a heavy metal band fronted by Ice-T. Twenty-one years after their founding they received a Grammy Award for the song “Bum Rush” which features lyrics such as “It’s all twisted, the game is bent / Still no clean water in Flint.” Between 1986-98 there were four Hollywood movies named Body Count. The highest audience score on Rotten… Read more →
An Unnecessary Woman
A girlfriend introduced me to Rabih Alameddine we share our reading experiences but rarely recommend being comfortable in the knowledge that our journeys are different she’s a bit of a swot this girlfriend highly intelligent productive tactile and poised she’s all too aware of her own shortcomings and screw ups and has a characteristic wry smile at the ready when… Read more →
Bluffs
I didn’t want to fight her. But here we stood, facing off in the bluffs behind our houses, the dirt pocked with tracks where after dark older teens spun brodies and rolled their cars trying to climb the sheer canyon wall. Back here, behind neat rows of split-level homes and manicured lawns, where the gentle slopes of the streets gave… Read more →
Unfiltered Camels
I was thirty when my father, Jerry, died in McKinleyville, California. The last time I saw him, I held his shrunken body upright from behind while he urinated, my arms wrapped around his chest. It was like hugging a bag of wheezing, cancer-ridden feathers. It was the first time Jerry didn’t smell like cigarettes. He pissed in… Read more →
Convergence
“We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley I know the Montana sky. A cyanic canopy stretching beyond beyond. Open country. I’ve been lost and found beneath that sky. I’ve slept under it, made love under it, rode horseback under it, cooked campfire steak under it, but I’m always overwhelmed by it. That sky… Read more →
Doppler Effect
That summer, my younger brother and I biked a mile from our house to the railroad tracks every day, where we’d built a hidden fort between the boulders and slabs of rock, making a roof out of leafy branches. Only two boys in the neighborhood knew about our secret refuge, and the four of us squeezed into our cramped quarters,… Read more →
Anchor
I recognized the speaker at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a man wearing a motorcycle jacket and a bandana. The memory has mostly faded, but I can still see him standing in that jacket, his hands pressing his sides from inside those pockets. My friend Michelle and I sat on folding chairs behind other people in that shadowy room. Motorcycle Jacket… Read more →
Contemplating Distances
I learn the blueberries I am eating this morning were flown in from Chile. They have a dusting of white on them and are firm, some with little nubs of green where they’ve been picked by someone I will never meet. Their origin is found on the container, but also in the article I have read about other fruits from… Read more →
Captivity
When my mother was a girl during the Depression, the circus rolled into her prairie town on slow trains, then set up on the fairgrounds at the edge of town. She loved the big tent, the smell of sawdust. My circus? At the cement civic center downtown. I was not captivated by the clown cars, the balloons, the woman riding… Read more →