(This piece was written in early 2006. One amusing fact that never made it into the piece was that, in the course of my research, I was actually escorted out of one of the Power Plant dance clubs by a bouncer after a manager saw my notebook. The bouncer let me finish my beer and, [...]
I spent the day after Thanksgiving helping to drag a dead animal out of the woods. I guess that probably sounds unremarkable to long-time Montana residents, but back in Baltimore the only animal carcasses you ever see are road-killed rats, so this was a new one for me. Out east we don’t know a lot [...]
There was this lie a friend of mine would tell. I’m a D.C. native, she would say, when people asked where she was from. But her family hadn’t moved there until she was three. Well, no one’s actually from D.C., she said, when I brought this up.
Am I?
I was born there, at George Washington University [...]
I felt like chattel often enough during my four years in the U.S. Coast Guard that I preferred not to think about the implications of the fact that the official term for “letting us off the ship” was “granting liberty.” If they were granting it, I would take it, of course, but first there was [...]
In high school, unwilling to lay claim to original thoughts and deeply held sentiments ourselves, we quoted movies, TV shows, even parents and teachers. This allowed us to try on different personalities and outlooks without risk to our precious reputations. Also, it made conversation easier: it’s a lot simpler, when you want to get a [...]
A woman misses her flight, becomes upset, starts screaming. This is not a scenario one would expect to end with the woman dead in a police cell within the hour, but that is indeed how Carol Gotbaum’s story turned out on September 28 at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport. On the one hand, Gotbaum was an [...]
What $58 per night gets you at the Gunther Motel in Choteau, Montana, out on the plains just east of the Rockies: two double beds, a television, a phone, an alarm clock, a full-sized refrigerator, a dish of butter in the refrigerator, a yellow formica table, a couple of mismatched plates, a microwave oven, an [...]
This one snuck up on us. I was on my way out to the library yesterday when A. looked out the window and said “is that snow?” It was, but it was so small I could barely see it and it certainly wasn’t accumulating. In other words, it looked like the kind of “snow” we’d [...]
The first mile along the gravel road that might or not be the right road is always the most difficult. There’s the fear that the nine-year-old Toyota Corolla will not prove up to the rough surface. What if we break down? Will we have to capture the llama standing guard over a flock of sheep [...]
In which I mention spiders and announce my plans to post a new essay every Sunday.
Back when I toyed for about five minutes with the idea of becoming a professor, I remember reading about a woman who was driving a school bus in order to be able to afford to keep working as an adjunct [...]