Strongsville I awake this morning in middle America, where the highway arcs south and east from Lake Erie to link to the mountains of Pennsylvania. This is terra incognita to me, though I have crossed it fifty times or more on the concrete, hurtling from Virginia to Michigan. The Turnpike is a sealed system, complete […]

The Mask of Pharaoh The eyes glitter black, the obsidian taking all the light, and the lapis is bluer than blue. The gold is what takes you, on the headdress, and the whole idea that this is eternity looking back at you, when it was supposed to only look the other way. It is a […]

The Last Best Freedom I am in Michigan, the flat part of it, on personal business. I left Washington in a bit of a rush, since I did not have the time to go stand at the airport and wait for my bottled water, jug of Popov vodka and tube of lipstick to be confiscated […]

Tritium Sorry to be dancing on the edge of the apocalypse this week. I don’t mean to be doing it; events of the wider world have intruded into what should be a boring series of postcards about the gracefully declining plant facility of Big Pink, and the quiet disintegration of the residents. We now appear […]

End of the World I was comforted to be able to do some planning for the end of the world. We have had a few occasions to do so, what with the thugs and their bombs, and the odd hurricane. It was useful to know the end was coming in advance, since it gave me […]

The moisture has come inside this morning, warm as a blanket. It had been dry and cool almost all through July and into August. I knew that was not going to last, not after the fire trucks left yesterday. I was surprised by the magnitude of the response. I drive up on the service drive […]

Summer Reading August is calling out to us all. It is the tantalizing glimmer of slim fingers at the end of a nut-brown hand, tanned to perfection by hours under the July sun. The index finger beckons to a last delight before the State Fair of summer is about to have its last hurrah, and […]

A Shield Against Heaven There really aren’t any new abominations in the world. They are just endlessly recycled. War is as old as the species, though we have put some spectacular wrinkles on the technical side of it. Still, as Mr. Zarakawi demonstrated prior to his timely demise, there are some acts of personal brutality […]

I like dogs. I don’t happen to own one at the moment, which is a function of pure laziness on my part. I excuse myself by saying that I have been traveling too much, and that my life is too chaotic right at the moment to take on a responsibility of caring for another being. […]

Technician #0523266 It would be easy enough to slip into the breathless accounts of the latest war, or wars, depending on what you see and read. The Lebanon mess has trumped the news from Iraq, with thousands of ISF troops scouring the countryside for Hezballah rockets before the enforcement of a cease-fire. They say that […]