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Praying
A hundred-dollar bill, lemon cookies and a Wink soda, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
April 2007
New Weather
There is no more horse, / smack, H, tar, heroin, / china. No more oxy, percs, / Percocet, Vicodin, vikings, / v for victory. There is / no more coke, blow, / white, cane.
January 2007Howard
We never did cocaine on weekdays, only on weekends, and Dave always made us stop by eight o’clock on Sunday, right after Sixty Minutes, because otherwise he was a mess at work the next day.
November 1998Goodbye, Johnnie Walker
Until recently, I hadn’t gone to bed sober in twenty-five years. I was a drunk when I first met my wife of twenty-three years, and I have been one ever since. I have been a pretty good drunk, as drunks go, without the usual DWIs, abusive behavior, or too dear a price paid for being too honest after my seventh or tenth drink.
July 1998Huckleberry Summer
All day long we would pick, seeing places we would never have seen had our mission not drawn us out of our daily routines. We filled cottage-cheese containers and old ice-cream buckets and coffee cans, and we poured them into the bigger containers in the back of the red 1965 Volkswagen that we’d all crammed into for the trip. We drank water straight from cold streams. We ate berries by the handful. We studied squirrels and chipmunks. We ran across deer.
January 1997The Moral Equivalent Of Wildness
I drifted in my kayak, listening for small sloshes and hushed voices behind me: the sounds of my college students launching their boats in the dark. The night was intensely quiet and dark, like a campsite after the fire goes cold, but the moon was preparing to rise over the mountains in the east, and the lake showed a slick of silver.
July 2005
Every Reason To Stay
Eva Saulitis’s Life With Whales
I have to say, what kept me there was not the science but the place. I wanted to be there in a way that had purpose. I didn’t want to visit or go on long kayak trips. I wanted to spend my life in Prince William Sound. For five years I lived at a field camp for three or four months at a time. The work gave me a purpose for being there: a part to play in protecting the ecosystem.
January 2017
Letter From A Cabin
On A Fifty-Mile-Long Dirt Road In Montana’s Centennial Valley, Written To My Sister In Vermont, August 2016, Never Sent
I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
January 2021
Rise Like Lions: The Role Of Artists In A Time Of War
An Interview With Howard Zinn
We’re fooling ourselves if we think that, because we don’t have a totalitarian system or a military dictatorship, we have a real democracy with free elections. How hypocritical it is of the United States to demand that other countries have free elections, when we ourselves have elections that are not free.
July 2004
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