I was a little scared to go back.
Someone with that much anger could go ballistic. I’ve experienced a person at the negative tipping point who’s tipped himself right into a psych ward. Society, formatively early bad experiences, the culture–too much can overwhelm one’s coping mechanisms. But not everybody snaps. I took solace in that.
Michael was nice, after our Good [...]
Grownups always seemed so weird to me. Fluffy or thin hair, paunches, cigarette-and-coffee breath. They had all the power. They intrigued and perplexed me all too early. I questioned and observed them, when I was still supposed to respect them unquestioningly .
If they weren’t so flawed, I wouldn’t have noted their existence, at such an early age. I would [...]
I read about a man who suffered a stroke in his visual cortex, rendering him “cortically blind.” His eyes functioned perfectly well–he wasn’t retinally blind. But the signals going from eyeballs to the visual processing center in the back of the brain hit the stroke wall, like so many misfired paintballs.
However, and this is the cool thing, [...]
Mondays are hard enough. But it helps to start out a new day walking to school with Megan. We tried to walk last year, but Tropico is a narrow, curving, hilly, blind-spotted road, and to get to school we thought we had to suck in exhaust from the zillions of SUVs flying past, as parents race to drop [...]
You can’t have eggs without salt. I’m too far from my predatory roots to enjoy the quick snap and slurp of a stolen shell. I need to scramble my eggs on a propane-fueled cook stove, scramble them just like the heat- and pressure-scrambled rocks around us. Back in La Mesa, we moved the salt and pepper from the picnic basket [...]
(Puppet Insurgency of San Diego sends envoy to protest.)
Here’s one role I never expected to play in life: organic intellectual. It’s when someone stays and works from within a community, instead of bailing when things get uncomfortable and difficult or trying to effect change from some safe haven.
It’s a term I picked up in some college [...]
Red ripe garden tomatoes. Yes, we know they’re fruit. In fact, they’re ovaries. Yes, fruit are the ovaries in the plant world, sorry to break it to you.
Plucking each tomato’s genetic lineage right off the vine, yesterday, hoping to end it in a lasagna, I filled my basket. (Sure, I could harvest the pesky little [...]
Flatiron Building, NYC.
Spiderman’s day job at the Daily Bugle
I used to wonder why I was only one of five protesters during the first Gulf War.
There was so little national dialogue. Father George did gather an international consensus, and everyone agreed Saddam was creepy, his state stability built on crushed knees and chemicals, so, OK, fine.
He [...]
I turned you on.
Before we got started, there was just the blank screen, the inner sanctum. Everyone else sees only the outside shell, a flashing Toshiba logo stamped in fine metal. The flip side—after I unlatch and unfold you at the joints—is what only I will see, for hours on end.
I will dive in, deep [...]
I’ve finally turned the corner, after two weeks of either viral meningitis (can’t test for that, tho the spinal tap showed inflammation) or a bad reaction to not resting after oral surgery.
Just a simple tooth extraction and bone graft. My inner world can be so chaotic that I ground myself by grinding my teeth in [...]