Overheard in my back yard over the course of several hours on New Year’s Day:
“Why do you think that Cripple Creek song is stuck in my head?”
“You mean ‘Up on Cripple Creek she sends me’?”
“No, I mean like Neil singing ‘Hey hey, Cripple Creek ferry.’”
“What is Cripple Creek anyway?”
“Want me to Google it?”
“Nah. [...]
Author Archive
Lazin’ on a sunny afternoon
Thursday favorites: What it’s like
It’s hard to find powerful figurative language. A good metaphor or simile needs to surprise you, either by describing the same old thing in a brand new way, or else striking a chord of recognition, putting it in some way that you immediately know is just what you meant but you never knew exactly [...]
Thursday favorites: Shameful products
You buy shade grown coffee. You try not to eat meat. You never buy products that aren’t cruelty free. You scorn SUVs. You only use cage free eggs and milk with no growth hormones. You shun Nikes and the sweatshops that churn them out. You make sure the [...]
Thursday favorites: Summertime cocktails
Thursday Favorites is a group-written list—like a mix tape of things where everyone adds an entry. Okay, I’ll start. When you’re sitting on the patio pretending you don’t have to work the next day and the night is warm and long and your music is loud and the junebugs are buzzin’ and your [...]
Thursday playlist: Palm Springs Record Camp
Thanks to Bryan “Johnny Recordseed” Waterman, who led the West Coasters down the Record Club path two summers ago and taught us the importance of strict rules, the LA Record Club is still going strong. As Jen noted yesterday, the club met in Palm Springs this past weekend, supposedly for some hard-core listening. [...]
Would you rather …
I wasn’t presenting a particularly inviting picture today. Dirty and sweating in my shorts and steel-toes, I was hauling heavy bags of sand from the front yard to the back to make a nice little suburban patio in my nice little suburban yard. That’s why I was so surprised when a car pulled up across [...]
Talk yurty to me
So here’s another thing I love about California: in almost any area with perhaps the exception of Orange County, you can still find small hippie enclaves just outside the borders of “regular” society. Ever been to a yurt? (Know what one is?) A yurt is an East Asian round latticed tent [...]
Little ditty
In the sentimental ‘70s, the appetite for tragic drama in pop culture was a lot more voracious than ever before or since; the genre of the after-school special and such movies as “Love Story,” “The Other Side of the Mountain,” “Ice Castles,” ”Brian’s Song,” “Something for Joey,” and of course, “The Boy in the Plastic [...]
Identity in a state of conflict
How much of your identity is rooted in geography? I’m from California, a place with a mythology so strong that reality can’t struggle its way into mattering, and it has a profound connection my own identity, whether I will it to or not. Stella’s recent posts about the United States, and Tim’s subsequent [...]
Those men inside my brain
I’ve always had a philosophy about exes: if you liked each other enough to stay together and get to know each other so well, there’s something positive there that should translate into a friendship even after the hot love crumbles away. Needless to say, many of my friends and some of my own exes [...]
