What is credible about it to me is the lack of vehemence.  The police mentioned his name, claimed he had been spotted nearby that night, and that was that.  Astonishingly today, having his name or something close to it, the web reveals a surprising amount.  The man is dead, and that is a matter of relief to me.  For I fear him, that is the simple truth.  He is forever coming after me in this, my waking dream life, the terror-inspired present.  But there it is, on the Read more [...]

With everything out of sorts, out of true and out of balance, it should be no surprise that I am running out of patience.  Particularly with the staff of Trader Joe's, normally stalwarts, but on this particular evening most disappointing.  For I have many notes to go before I sleep, all of them in the bass section, aimed with various degrees of accuracy at John Rutter, tonight's favorite composer at the weekly rehearsal of the Menlo Park Chorus.  But for now, with minutes to go before Read more [...]

This story begins with the toppling of a small container of french fries, although not that small, or if one is mercilessly honest about the dietary facts of middle-age, not small enough....  And naturally we are in a church parking lot.  What is natural about this is that I keep finding myself in them, more particularly Jane's Episcopal carpark, up the hill in Menlo Park, and they are all very much of a piece, paved and striped.  And in this one, Bill has parked his Toyota, and the Read more [...]

Hard to know what to do when one wakes up in a fighting mood, and there's no one to fight with and not even a clear, distant opponent.  The only answer is to roll out to the garden, park under the tomatoes and contemplate growth.  They are downright arboreal, these vines.  The tomatoes are appearing higher and higher up their branches.  Doubtless this imitates certain trees, although why I believe this...well, that is uncertain.  Nor is it clear why I retreat to the tomato Read more [...]

My disregard for and distrust of technical language seems so deeply rooted in my past that the matter seems incurable.  Still, even the middle-aged mind has to open occasionally.  So damned if it didn't come to me, tilted back in my wheelchair in the midst of a morning muse upon my current state of anxiety.  That is to say, things came into focus.  The light bouncing off my retina finally wound its way through the right cells of my brain, producing a sort of harmony between, if Read more [...]

With life reduced to few options, all of them pleasant, why not hit the deck?  At Inverness, our rented house is all deck, yet the deck is not all sun.  This is why God invented fog, not to mention trees, their combined impact making the deck experience somewhat elusive, at the very least, fleeting.  One can sit in the sun to read, but the sun itself will not sit still.  Ever moving, it is, ducking behind trees, sailing over the rooftop, the resulting pattern never fully grasped Read more [...]