water under bridges

anthony bourdain, and the dark in light places

Tributes have been piling up for Anthony Bourdain since news of his death last Friday morning in a luxury hotel in Strasbourg, France. As tributes will when death intersects celebrity, particularly when suicide is the culprit. Tributes in this case are requisite, however. This was Anthony Bourdain, for chrissakes. Anthony Fucking Bordain! Former chef and …

Gimme the purty lights, those purty holiday lights

Even as a raging heathen, I do love me some Christmas. My favorite holiday, hands down (and that’s even taking into account the Hadaka Matsuri guys-in-sumo-loincloths-competing-for-trinkets festival every February in Japan). I dig Christmas not just for the purty lights, that phenomenal Pogues/Kirsty McColl song and the excuse to put liquor in sweetened egg froth and …

vigil

There is nothing, just nothing they can giveyou, not for this. You’ve set the timethey will arrive with needles, somethingliquid clear and final, andsome sorries, surelyso the suffering will go out But for now, you markthe labored rise of ribs, furfloated into every cornerof your life, there will beso much less to clean, feelyour own breaths, halting there is …

heart like a fire alarm + a pulse of tiny, angry wings

Y’know those commercials for prescription drugs for this or that chronic ailment, ads inevitably ending with an “ask your doctor about,” and then promptly launching into a whole litany of horrors (in some patients, shedding of vital organs may occur, etc.)? Those wretched causative unwanteds, plus my own propensity for reacting negatively to, well, just about …