Vampire

How Gothic can it get? I thought, as I parked in front of the fading paint and castle-style battlements of this three story house at the end of a dirt lane. I looked around as I walked to the door and could see no sign of life. No traffic noise came from the paved road [...]

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The Best Words

The best words hang around. You notice that cool just won’t go away. Some of the best words are words I distinctly remember learning. I was on a camping trip in the mountains of Colorado, just a ratty-haired brat of a girl, when I learned the word “osmosis.” I remember learning the word “ubiquitous” driving [...]

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Bee

The cat stalked a bee. Foolish cat. She was stung for her efforts. It remains to be seen whether she learned anything from the experience. She cannot seem to learn to stay off the kitchen counters no matter how many times she’s punished for jumping up there. But she easily remembers what the sound of [...]

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Berlin Wall

Bush agreed to build a new Berlin Wall, oops, a new fence between us and Mexico today. Reminds me of a stupid story I wrote years ago when I couldn’t rid my yard of tumbleweeds no matter how many I pulled up. The story proposed fencing in the whole state with a 20′ high chain [...]

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Cowboys

The movies were nothing but cowboys when I was a kid. All the stars were cowboys: Roy Rogers, Rex Allen, Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Randolph Scott. Even their sidekicks and horses were famous. I had enough cowboys as a kid to last a lifetime.
Propaganda pieces about WWII were also popular then. I got [...]

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Wyoming

I’m pounding down Wyoming Blvd at my aerobic heart rate, ten minutes to go at this pace. Something red in the arroyo to my left catches my eye. Keep running, I tell myself. But I look again anyway.
And I stop.
It’s a girl in a red sweat shirt. There’s blood in the sandy ground beneath [...]

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Dance

A superbly-toned, dark-haired fellow in earphones was doing chin ups on a machine in the corner. I didn’t pay much attention to him until he finished his set of chin ups. He leapt off the machine and began to dance around the gym, gyrating past the rowing machine, wildly wriggling his hips around a stack [...]

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Top five great movies

Back when I was reading Women Who Run with the Wolves for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I thought The Secret of Roan Inish was the best movie ever made. That transformed slowly into thinking director John Sayles was the best director ever. I still put John Sayles up at the top of my list, but [...]

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Optimism

“Just give it some time, everything will work out,” Sally said, patting my hand in an irritating way that she meant to be reassuring.
“Don’t give me your optimistic line of crap, Sally. This is an unsolvable disaster and you know it.” Her never ending belief that things always worked out for the best drove me [...]

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Entrenched

Jeremy was entrenched in his own power. Deeply. He would do anything to protect it without ever questioning whether the course he’d set with his command of power was the right one. The goal was to protect the power, not to examine the actions it engendered.
So choices like destroying others, or simply hurting others [...]

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