When last I typed that title, I told how I’d decided to let Helen do whatever she wanted…
The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with [...]

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.
How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to [...]

I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.
This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly [...]

I’ve just discovered this new video, which I am told is “going viral.” I hope so, because it’s affected me quite strongly this morning. I hope you like it and pass it on:

In a very real sense, absolutely!
Today is my “actual” birthday (from AstroDienst), with the sun lining up precisely with where it was when I was born in 1945 (!) at 9:25 p.m. tonight, rather than tomorrow, my calendar birthday. This has to do with the imprecision of the numbers, things slipping, the impossibility of our [...]

My 86-year-old mother is in the hospital with pneumonia in Tucson and not making sense. It’s impressive, what that does to you. I might as well call this post “John Watch.”
My brother is worried that I’m not there and hopes I’m coming soon. That’s not how we do it, though. Just the sight of [...]

Here, try this:

Well, that was a night, all right. That’s “John-John” by the original Zoo Pilots at our one and only paid gig — funded by a Kent County, MD Arts Council grant, if you can believe that — at Washington College in, uh… [ponder] 1984? ‘85?? It says right here at my audio page [...]

Things like this never happen when I have my camera with me.
Yesterday my wife and I took our exercise walk up the mesa. On the way back we saw two baby horned toads! These were two separate incidents, amazingly. And when I say “baby,” I mean tiny, about the size of my thumbnail. I took [...]

It rained all Friday evening, which was novel.
I forget what happened the next morning, but we took off in the afternoon to drive down to a restaurant north of Santa Fe to meet my wife’s cousins. Very smart people. (One of them asks the most amazing questions.) On the way home we saw flooding in [...]

Retreat, a strike, or practice?
For the last few days I’ve felt I wouldn’t mind if the Internet completely disappeared, if I never sent or received another email, never visited another Web site. I have no idea where this comes from, but it’s been very satisfying to let it flow to the ends of my extremities [...]