I’m connected to you. Intimately. I don’t just stick my viral tongue down your throat and dive into the gooey mucus of your lungs. I don’t just rabble rouse such a riot among your antibodies that they rise up and blindly attack their host, your body. Your own rogue antibodies kill you. Go figure.  I… Read More

A picture is worth a thousand words... unless it isn't. Read More

I don’t know if I’ve cheated at cards. I never progressed much beyond ‘go fish’ and blackjack with the deck of fifty-two. I can’t remember if I ever kept excessive change dealt out by a storekeeper. I found $400 dollars in tightly rolled bills in a baking soda can, stashed in the demolished darkroom of… Read More

All time is fluid in human experience. At times, the minutes, hours, years fly by. At other times, they drag down the road like zombies. In our search for logic and meaning we measure time — from the billions of years it takes for light to travel from a distant galaxy to the time it… Read More

I’m handy. I began early, learned how to use hand tools from my father, a hands-on electrical engineer who designed and built prototype instruments to measure outcomes of physics and biology research projects. I’ve constructed everything from mercury barometers to mine shafts to cherry wood cabinets, from stage sets and circus rings to birch plywood… Read More

Music plays a grand role in my life. My first memory involves me discordantly playing harmonica to a blues player on a 78-rpm record. I must have been three. My mother often played the piano while I drifted into sleep. I could hear her playing the same Chopin Preludes, haltingly, but with enjoyment, on the… Read More

I come from a long line of galoots. They began American life in 1849 as farmers in Pennsylvania. They fought on the Union side during our first Civil War and then headed west to Placerville, California, where my great-great grandfather, John established a frontier business as a harness maker and soon opened a boot shop.… Read More

Photos of families, couples, and mobs, shuttered or pixilated images preserve decades of life, love, and memory, chaos captured, order performed. Random or planned, group photos reflect group purpose. We gathered to chronicle the choking, smoke-filled days and siren-screaming nights of ’92, to project a cinematic family photo, to replicate violence against a lone black… Read More

Excerpted from Rocked in Time, a work in progress. Read More

Early in this new year, I resolve to take a walk on a quiet byway down to a river. On my way, I’ll find a stick dry enough to snap from its source and large enough to see at a distance. When I reach a bridge, I’ll walk halfway across and lean over the downstream… Read More