Maybe you’ve been up in the remote Rockies where the air straight overhead is a deep ocean blue, and the thin extremity veins of the roads peter out at rock formations that point roundly at the mountains as if toRead more…
One of the Cities of Gold is in Asia
A river winds through it, wide, slow waters churned by constant traffic. > The water is downhill and someone shook the city so that all the gilt glass blocks of the buildings tumbled to its edge. And originally I wasRead more…
How many boroughs in London
Staying in central London sounds like a fab idea. One short walk to the venue where we are offering the training. All the fab delights of modern london. A couple miles to old London (look, kids, Big Ben, Houses ofRead more…
Schism
In Aristotle’s Nichomachean ethics, he says virtues don’t exist as opposites to vices, but among them, in the strain between them. Bravery, for example, is not in the absence of fear, but inside the tension between fear and rage. TemperanceRead more…
A Race
The rumpled folds of the middle of Italy. An undisclosed hour in the night. The thick shutters are locked back against the villa. The big-paned windows, slightly wavy with their slow, liquid sink through time, invite the racing wind intoRead more…
A treatise on tight pants and headrests
Rick Steve is a real person, apparently, and he writes guidebooks. He rocks. He doesn’t send you to dives, like LP does sometimes. He urges you to be a reasonable traveler, and not to be quite as American as youRead more…
Breaking international law… by accident, officer?
I appreciate the way all trips abroad are Pilgrimage. We rise long before dawn. We pack what is precious. We go via unpredictable means to strange places where even the smells are familiar but strange. Nihil sub sole novum. There’sRead more…
Alcatraz
The lesson is as simple as this: the carving knife needs to dull itself on the flashing armor of the fish belly. If the garden were its own order, if the weedy fields were what was wanted, we would stillRead more…
The sun rose this morning
The sun rose this morning at 3:14 Everyone was quite surprised. The lavender was caught near the wisteria with its pants down. The lemon was so astonished, given how slavish he is to schedules, that he burst immediately and allRead more…
On Fire
I wonder if they pack the wicker ribs of the burning man with Persephone’s gems, sweet, sweating, burning, bursting as the fire comes. Like even the black tarmack does when Pele’s blood creeps, unstoppable intensity, to the sea. Everything isRead more…