On Saturday morning there was a man on the Balboa Island promenade painting a copy of The Raft of the Medusa. He stood on the sand on the other side of the sea-wall. Aaron and I stopped our walk to watch him. Aaron told him it was a cool painting and that he had just...
Photo: “The Green Line in Nicosia (Cyprus)” by Marco Fieber is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 I would like to tell you about the kafenion, about the cat that lived there, and the cheese rinds I fed it. About the coffee-shop owner who was hit by a car, and the...
We catch our breath near the beheaded buddha at the temple’s summit. Beyond us, the crater of Mt. Merapi breaks through a ring of clouds, while among the bell-shaped stupas, the gap-toothed man snaps photos of a young couple. Sunlight rises over the central stupa’s...
1. In the boat’s wake:a range of mountains,arching spine of peaks and valleys molded into the pliant sea. The path forward: littered with driftwood. 2. The earth’s anxiety in the liminal spaces: maelstrom of birds, the wind’s long howl, arrhythmic ocean swelling and...
The same guy who gave Ron Swanson a snifter at Lagavulin was the same guy who taught me how to pull whiskey from a barrel, a skill I’ve never used since. In 2016, he was smaller than on TV, only to my shoulder, and I wondered how we shrank over time and in real life,...
