I am not a believer in ghosts. Not. Just not. And this has created some unexpected problems for me, since my life is haunted pretty much up one side and right down the other. I should explain that the phantoms that plague me are most often entirely my own, holdovers of myself from different flashpoints, …
So much of my life has become defined for me by what I shouldn’t have been doing when I should have been sleeping. Sometimes, the emphasis is on the activity itself, but more often than not, it’s about the fallout. The repercussions. The aftermath. Which could be major, surely, especially when I was a good …
So this Siddhartha Gautama fella, propped there beneath the midnight bodhi tree, feet fitted together like pretzel arms, the light bulb of his consciousness glowing with the pure unbroken filament of now. And in no religious statues or silly garden art, or any other caricatured renditions of the Buddha for that matter, is dude ever wearing …
Of all the difficult relationships I’ve maintained in my life, the one I poorly keep with sleep has been the most maddening, because I never seem to learn from it. Sleep and I have real enough affection for one another, to be sure, yet we consistently fail to spend nearly enough quality time together. And …
Taken in our entireties, we’re each of us a bit lacking in places. A tad weak here, maybe a touch too much there. But in excerpt? We can all add up to something to recommend us in excerpt. Witness: this opening segment from a 2004 Mountain Xpress story about a karaoke world championship south of …
So I was walking today back toward home just before twilight, after venturing onto an old farm path beside a fallow field a ways outside of town, seeking whatever, as you do. And that’s when I saw him, bald as some monstrous baby, jiggling and grinning in his way, the dust motes licking at his chubby …