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Dream Journal

The portraits are abstractions until my friend pulls a secret lever and the paintings open, like books. I gasp as the women’s faces, their thoughts, their histories come alive. They are unaware of us and may be studied on any level we choose.

Iowa Diary

I often feel, in this mixture of silence, isolation, ignorance and pettiness, that if I were struck by a virus, I wouldn’t fight it; I’d give up and implode and disappear. Dangerous signals, those. Not that I will put any effort into taking my life — I feel in large measure that it’s already taken. So I have to leave this place, and fight to get it back.

Sunbeams

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

Pablo Picasso

Sunbeams

He who mounts a wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes.

Randolph Bourne

It Doesn’t Take Much

A Summer’s Tale

(Part Two)

Some mornings you have a feeling everything’s going to go right. I got mine when this blond girl in an old Studebaker, wearing light blue shorts, a cotton blouse, and sunglasses perched on top of her head, stopped to pick me up. She said she had the whole day off with nothing to do.

Childhood Fears

Large vegetables, losing one or both parents, the death of an animal

One Hundred Years Of Solitude — An Appreciation

We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self.

A Summer’s Tale

(Part One)

I was actually going away. I must have waited a whole year for it but, right then, I was really depressed. If you could have seen it around my place last night you’d know what I mean. Everybody thought I’d never come back. Nobody came right out and said it, but my oldest sister, Jeannie, kept telling me how sad my hat looked.

Doing What I Do

Nursing — My Wounds And Theirs

I started out to help but I’ve hurt. I wanted to defend, but I became a judge. I was to be warm and generous but I grew cold. In doing for others I forgot myself. I’m supposed to be feminine and defer but I’m a male and chafe.