Richard Adams died on Christmas Eve last year. That will always be a fact of my life, that I got engaged to Alex on the night of the day that Richard Adams, author of my favorite book of all-time, Watership…
Category: But the Past Isn’t Done with Us
Haunted City
It’s Twelfth Night. Happy Twelfth Night, everybody! Here is my favorite song about Twelfth Night: It occurs to me that posting links to things isn’t really good enough for the long-term posterity of the web. Sometimes I review old posts…
A Life Lived Out Loud: Remembering Jonathan Bernbaum (1982-2016)
On Saturday morning, I woke up late, as I usually do these days. I’d been out driving till about 3:00 AM, wrapping up Friday night much earlier than normal. I was feeling a little sick. That night, I had nightmares,…
Signs
I am looking around the room and there is a little mug half-full of orange juice and don’t even get me started on where the mug came from because it’s another memento that should have died in the fire, the…
The Kid in the Hall
Any Mariners fan knows that 1995 was the most magical year of baseball in our history. The Mariners overcame a 13.5-game deficit (11.5 games on August 24th, with just over a month to go in the season) to catch the…
Bernie Sanders and the Future of American Democracy
When I was growing up in Oregon, I was an avid 4-Her. (That’s pronounced four-ae-cher, not four-her, if you’re not familiar with 4-H.) We had ducks, geese, rabbits, and chickens, and I would show them at the county fair every…
Duckland
When I lived in Oregon, I was in a lot of plays. I started (and ended) my professional acting career, serving in the ensemble for the Lewis and Clark Pageant, an annual summer play on the riverbank in Seaside designed…
Prevention and Cure
We live in a cure society. Not just because we have races for the cure and build awareness for cures and believe that eventually every malady we face will someday be cured. Also for those reasons, but not even primarily…
The Quest for Understanding
For most of my life, the prevailing presumption underlying my existence is that I was on a mission to be understood. More even than to be loved (though I of course see them as related), certainly more than to be…
The Closeness of Baseball and the 2015 Seattle Mariners
The Mariners did something this afternoon they haven’t been doing much lately. They won a game. Even more surprisingly, they won the game by more than a single run. The final score was 4-1 in their favor. Less surprisingly, it…