Phoenix of Love

When you hear the phrase “crayon art,” chances are that the image that pops into the gray matter is one of those squiggly compositions that your parents displayed on the refrigerator door when your age was solidly in the single digits. Galleries and museums probably don’t enter into the picture.
A fellow by the name of [...]

I don’t believe in umbrellas. This means that I occasionally get drenched when for one reason or another I have to walk a longish distance outside in a torrential downpour.
The reason I decline umbrella protection, though, is that being drenched by rain is really not a traumatic experience at all.
For the record, I do NOT [...]

I found the entrance to the sky where I
could never hope to be, where I could see
empires of fog (upstaging my existence)
caught in trysts with stone insanity.
I found it slashed in walls so high
that all my thoughts collapsed beneath the ground
to thrash in luscious silence and rebound
against their obfuscating sophistry.
I found the entrance to the [...]

One of the most striking aspects of the Icefields Parkway, and one that I had not even considered before I was actually standing there on the side of the road, was the silence.
The only other place in which I’ve experienced such total, unbroken silence is in Death Valley. There was no background noise whatsoever. When [...]

This is Diversey.
The slightly agonized swoosh of opening doors.
The verbose drunk man sitting behind me keeps talking, with hardly a pause, about the Super Bowl; how he keeps getting caught drinking on the job; how people should be allowed to do what they like on the weekend, because they deserve it, after all, don’t they? [...]

My overcoat has a small hole in the lining of its right pocket. For the most part I’ve gotten used to not putting small objects in there, ever since I discovered a few pens, my car keys, and assorted receipts burrowed into the bottom of my coat, but occasionally I forget. Yesterday evening, after buying [...]

I might be taking a trip to the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies around the end of February.
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For anyone who happens to be planning a leisure trip in the next few months, I have a piece of advice. As soon as you arrive in Boston or Bosnia or Bermuda or your location of choice, find a large hill (preferably with a view of the ocean), pack a bottle of water, and walk [...]

It occurred to me today that it could be tremendously beautiful just to drive straight in one direction from the center of the city into the country, going from the extremes of urban order and chaos into the calm autumn void of the most remote countryside. There is such a vast contrast between those two, [...]