More than the absence of heat

The coffee shop is bundled up close and crowded against the gray of the sky. Cutting through my wool sweater drafts sneak past weather-stripped window panes, rather amused at our illusions of shelter. Drowned in burnt brown swill, caffeine invades my blood, welcome as a gleeful daemon summoned in the rash of youth and occult [...]

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Cheap wine and long sleeves

Winter has returned with razor sharp teeth. As the sun sets all the warmth bleeds out with the reds and oranges sinking westward. The full Moon seems over due, though she’ll arrive on time as always. The little dead oak tree out front is a black jagged sketch over blue shadows. A pot of orange [...]

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Excerpt: Cookbook of Heresies – Vegan Shepherd’s Pie

Get a glass of cheap box wine from the fridge. Find the chili in the fridge just before it’s due to go bad. Freak out. Have an epiphany and go buy a bag of potatoes.

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The Right to Divorce

Saturday afternoons are a terrible time to march from Texas Tech campus to the court house. Our stops on University were the only times there was enough traffic to bother with chants or silliness. The walk along Broadway to Lubbock’s dead downtown area was uneventful, except when we all thought the leashed beagle keeping step to the march was hyperventilating.

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Kitty woes

My efforts to get to the library before noon today were thwarted by a screaming kitten stuck in the house foundation. Teeny tiny little Falafel, Pope Gooseberry III, managed to find the one vent opening to this cob-webbed mess, the screen of which happened to have an tear just large enough for his holiness to [...]

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Betty F*cking Crocker at the Rockstar Hotel

There is yet another cabal of musicians sprawled unconscious across my living room floor, and we may have to rename the house the Rockstar Motel, as the trend shows no sign of letting up. The little oak tree out front has shed about half his leaves; they are strange and burn-blackened, which leaves me at [...]

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To Grok the Whirling Dervish

Drinking too much coffee makes me want to spin in circles with my arms thrown out until I fall down.  Interestingly, this was one of my favorite things to do as a child. It occurs to me that Shmoo and I have been trying to start various joke religions since we were teenagers; what an [...]

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“Weak and frivolous by nature…”

A flat tire at half past midnight only a block from crossing Indiana Ave., and another ten minutes from home. Stumbling down the road nearly a mile back to lock up at the coffee shop and sit on the curb in the orange of the sodium street lights until my father arrived. Listening to a [...]

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Invoking the Sacred Clown

This week’s Sunday ride was a flaming success. Whilst wandering idly downtown, the boys and I came upon a box sitting out on the empty brick road that claimed to possess crab cakes in need of freezing. However, upon examination, the box proved to possess some two dozen glass votive candles (expensive looking tea lights). [...]

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So It Goes

I wish the rain would come back. Or at least the cloud cover. Biking between noon and 7:30 or so in the evening takes on an aspect of danger in the flatlands. What I would give to splash around in a proper creek or pond, to have access to water flowing over the earth unbound [...]

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