Having Finished The Last of Us Part 2

Being grown never stopped me from being a gamer. And it’s not like there was ever anything to be embarrassed about. Games have become as valid an outlet for storytelling as any other media. I’d go further and say games can be better, because they’re interactive. You’re in the thick of it, live, with characters […]

Vivid Dreams IX

November 30, 2016 I find myself in the most casual of clothes. Jeans, t-shirt. Worn, comfortable shoes. Socks with holes at the big toes. They’re clean, though you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking. Old stains have set, impervious to laundering. At fifty paces, you might think I was homeless. I’ve given up, you […]

That something…

We’ve all got that something. It’s the reason we hesitate to introduce ourselves, the first thing we think about when we undress with someone new, that idiosyncrasy, that flaw we’ve been taught to believe is the whole reason we’re so shy and ill at ease around others. It’s been hammered into us that we’re physical or […]

A Familiar Beauty

You’ve never met before, and it takes you a while to realize it. Uncommon. Remarkable. Familiar. Warmth and a genuine smile. Simple grace that’d be wasted on film or TV—subtlety no camera could capture. Polite questions at first then she digs a little deeper. Deep enough to tell you she’s interested. Not in your job, your […]

Why are we fighting so hard?

Everything seems like a fight these days; cooperation is lost in divisive issues of our time. Most conflicts have to do with scarcity, but that isn’t always the case. And when it comes to energy, is scarcity really the issue? Economists are fond of saying we will never run out of oil. You can point […]

Vivid Dreams VIII

Ok, so spoiler alert: it had Mark Zuckerberg, Johnny Depp, and me in it. Two out of three were robots. The Johnny Depp part was brief. He breezed through the same tourist shop I was in, babbling like Jack Sparrow, wearing a lot of loose clothing and eye makeup. And he said to no one I […]

Vivid Dreams VII

I find myself in the back seat of a limousine, looking through the side window. The streets outside are humming with big American cars, all steel and chrome from the seventies. They gleam like new. Cyclopean stone buildings squat along the boulevard like engineered mountain ranges. Fortresses of turrets and parapets. Buttressed cathedrals. A crucifix and haloed dove on every vertical […]

Who the Pills Want Me to Be

“You’re getting better,” the doctor says, scratching pen across his pad. “Am I? I can’t tell.” The doctor looks up from the pad, peering over the top of his reading glasses. “You’re not still hearing the voices, are you?” “They weren’t voices. Just thoughts. Bad thoughts.” “Well, you’re not hearing them anymore is the important part.” He […]

Vivid Dreams V

A place deep in the woods. Drawn to it without any understanding or reason why. We started on foot, hiking wide city streets from the valley up into twisting mountain roads. The farther we went, the fewer cars whizzed by. Pavement was pale gray with age beneath us, and grasses forced their way into cracks, […]

All Things Conform to the Shape Flesh Imposes

There’s a lot of fuss about the hardest naturally occurring mineral in the universe. Beyond the industrial uses, I get that diamonds are shiny and pretty. People seem to like them enough they’ll pay ludicrous sums to have them. Whatever. When I think of the Lapidary at a desk, cutting diamonds…it seems ironic that soft hands shape and […]