“I’m a little nervous,” I said in the parking lot. The ice and hard snow under foot felt foreign beneath stiff ski boots that hadn’t seen these ten toes for a decade. Slippery, and cold, I fumbled with my gear as a novice. I know myself. I know that I will push my ability until […]
Continue reading →Up close to the fire ring I moved the last of the rocks into place. After four or five beers I felt like royalty and the work went easy. Shaped from boulders I found around the campsite, what I’d made looked like a stone age La-Z-Boy, armrests and all, straight out of the Flintstones. By […]
Continue reading →In my head, I did the math and reckoned there are between sixty-three and seventy-two pounds of toe and fingernails spread throughout the Buttermilk and Chalk Bluff Boulders in and around Bishop, CA. Decades of clipped keratin strewn about the high desert. With all the degradational speed of an empty two-liter plastic bottle, it’s all […]
Continue reading →It Went Down Like This The rabbit said, “You should eat more vegetables like I do.” “But I like the taste of meat”, replied the raven. “Did you know the amount of water that it takes to grow a pound of meat compared to a pound of wheat is like a hundred and fifty to […]
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The little chipmunk sat upon a rock and watched the man eat a handful of almonds. She loved nuts of all kinds and had luck in the past gnawing through the thin nylon of an unattended rucksack to get at some of these treats. Most that camp here these days are hardened outdoors people who leave no […]
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An optimist sees the glass as half full. A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An engineer sees the glass as being twice as big as it needs to be. I was five years old when my father pointed out the twin granite pillars that cling to Wheeler Crest. “It’s a rabbit,” I said and […]
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To me it was loud but these park-pond Mallards were accustomed to the racket, still milling around the benches and the water’s edge like it wasn’t even there. I wished they’d fear it. I wanted the lawn mower to scare some lost wild back into their webbed feet and remind them that begging for bread […]
Continue reading →My sense of Purpose meets my Nihilism in the hot, dry heat of Bishop, California. Purpose, his typical oblivious self, secure within his bubble, lost in his own world, and up today, down tomorrow, world-less Nihilism is feeling rather choleric. “Hello Purpose.” “Oh, hello Nihilism. Jeez, sorry, I almost ran right into you…haven’t seen you […]
Continue reading →And then there is the transportation gang, often heard before they’re seen with squeaky chains propelling haggard old bikes, for whom there is no choice…or perhaps the choice is to ride or hoof it, as the bicycle is their sole means of speedy A to B. Maybe they ride to work, maybe they’re unemployed. Maybe they’re homeless, lost their […]
Continue reading →To another group within the group “cycling”, the club riders and racers, the bike is a recreational activity; like hunting, fishing, or…er…umm…Irish road bowling. The problem here is, seeing the bike as a pastime and the paved road a playing field has with it inherent contradictions to the motor-dominated status quo, no? As a recreational […]
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