Category: essays
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Speaking Freely
Provocateur Alex Jones’ ongoing rampage across social media recently encountered at least a speed bump and perhaps a cliff as Spotify, Apple, Google, Facebook and – when he tried to use it as a last-ditch refuge, Vimeo – purged the bulk of his content from their sites (in addition, as I was writing this, Twitter…
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Last Days
My mother’s end begins, as most bad things have these past six years, with a phone call. A series of them, actually. On Friday, May 25th, her private caregiver S. calls to tell me that she is mostly incoherent and largely unresponsive. On Saturday Anna, my mother’s favorite nurse at the skilled nursing facility, calls…
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what you made me feel
the fortune teller On high school graduation day a teacher asked me to stay after class. He sat me down, and took my hand, and said, “I want to tell you your fortune.” I looked at him expectantly. “So high school is over, and you didn’t go to prom, and you weren’t a popular girl.…
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Back in Big Sur
On Friday the 13th, Big Sur rejoined the world. After a winter that saw the region drenched with over 100 inches of rain, massive slides along the always precarious Highway 1 blocked the road to the south just past Ragged Point and so severely destabilized the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north that it had…
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Unbelieving
I was about six the first time it dawned on me to ask my fifteen-year-old brother who the man on a stick he wore so conspicuously around his neck was. This was before the phrase “personal savior” had entered the public lexicon, so he explained to me the long way around that Jesus was a…
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A Day for Eating the Poisonous Mushrooms
Today is a day for eating the poisonous mushrooms. A day for climbing the pole and finding out how high the voltage is. For flying above the storm and stepping out onto the clouds, For standing at Zion’s edge and answering vertigo’s call. This is the world? Two years strapped in a padded cell. Glimpses…
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Doing the Math
Once upon a time I was a software developer. Somewhere along the way I gave it up to pursue a passion for writing and a quieter life. But if you ask me now what I do, and if I were to answer honestly, I’d have to say, “I am the administrator of my mother’s death. And…
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What I Hate
This is a thing that has been making the rounds on Facebook among some people that I know: The Democrat [sic] Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of the New Year
– I am snug in an ocean side room near Cambria. The rain that had been slanting sideways has dwindled to little more than a drizzle, and though the sea and the sky meet in a soft, unbroken expanse the seagulls are emerging from their huddles onshore and drifting past to remind me that I…
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How Phyllis Schlafly Made Me a Feminist
During my very brief stint just out of high school as an evangelical Christian, I tried with the committed desperation of the newly converted to coax my parents to church so they too could receive the Good News Of Jesus Christ. My father was immovable. My mother, who for years had attended seven a.m. Mass…
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