Sloops, Sleeps

Sleepless nights are the devil’s own, I tell ye, and I’ve been having them lots and lots lately. I had one just the other night. I couldn’t locate sleep on a map, a detailed map with topographical details and vivid red arrows that pointed to ”Sleep: two nautical miles” and “Sleep: this-a-way” and “Sleep: look here, cowpoke, a whole Great [...]

“And you were? Where were you this hour o’ need?”

One night early last week, I walked past my kitchen window. “Huh! What was that searing flash of white light in the sky?” I thought, and turned around to go back and look. Lo and behold–or “Aye and begorrah”–it was THE MOON. ["Good one, you cretin," murmured my cerebral cortex]. Subsequently in the mood to look at lunar [...]

Sans Sturm und Drang

It has been very quiet on the western front of late. The summer is passing away; the sun is shining; the tigerlilies in the backyard persist in all their strange and orangey glory; blueberries the size of mutant gumballs are consumed [you should have seen these blueberries I just had. How did they grow these blueberries? I accidentally nicked my [...]

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.

The best fireworks display I ever done seen was from the window of an airplane in 2005. I was flying into Chicago late in the evening on the 4th of July, and as I looked outside, I saw that the entire city was ablaze with the fireworks people were setting off in their backyards, in the streets, [...]