Forgiveness can begin by simply refraining from killing the bastards. A man steals $10,000 from the loose change basket on his father’s dresser. He spends most of it on blackjack, vodka shooters and fast women. The rest he squanders. Too ashamed to go home, he becomes a drifter. After sinking to the depths of degradation, […]
An atheist friend says the existence of a spiritual realm is horse pucky. And he may be right, in a be careful what you wish for kind of way. My friend is both an atheist and a scientist, the poor bastard, and when he insists there is no God, he may be creating his own […]
A “civilized” Indian was one who found a way to tolerate and work with the foreigners who came from Europe. I have a rather involved fantasy which I dip into now and then. I’m on a television quiz show where the top prize is a million dollars. I get past the half-million level and the […]
A farmer of red dirt. This poem is set somewhere in time, between the last polio poster child and the end of home milk delivery, when they stopped making farmers (except for the exceptions). There was this old farmer I hung with three miles north of Fairland, Oklahoma, walking that funny way you do over […]
Can we sequence the DNA of goodness? Does the goodness gnome even exist? The falling “Newton’s apple” that triggered this for me, was the onset of autumn. Standing on the doorstep of winter’s sleep is strangely invigorating. Autumn is the season when everything does a lingering waltz toward dormancy and death. But even while prepping […]
The first homemade chili of autumn is a national holiday in my house. We’ve recently had crisp rainy days in Maryland, harbingers of an icy winter of three-dog nights to come. When that snap is in the air, it’s time to make the first chili of the new season. Chili nouveau. This is SanViejo’s Life […]
Humor hurts. Why do you think they call it a “punch line”? True story. High winds contributed to a huge multi-vehicle pile-up on a major thoroughfare near our house during a big outdoor event with parades and pageantry. It was like this: An 18-wheeler jackknifed in gale-force winds, strewing its cargo of bananas, cream pies […]
The seeker puts a wish “out there” and the universe scurries to help. It works too. Except for the exceptions. I did my master’s thesis on cross-cultural communication while hitchhiking through Mexico, Central and South America. It was an audacious undertaking that began with a Broadway quality song-and-dance sales pitch to my grad school department […]
After you pass on, you have no control over the kinds of monuments people make to remember you by. I hope I fare better than Shelley’s statue. On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing off the northwest coast of Italy […]
The relationship I have with hunting is, “it’s complicated,” as they say in the social media. I have Bambi issues. Best shot in the family with iron sights, was Mom. She stilled her breathing and heartbeat to mimic a cave dweller frozen in a glacier. When we were younger our whole family went out shooting. […]
