Walking back to my office behind Seattle Central I passed a woman in a green Urban League t-shirt and a string of red beads I played the eye-contact dance with. Smiled hello; when we crossed wakes I caught the head-splittingly strong smell of sandalwood, maybe her soap, and it occurred to me that I like my vanity (I was coming back from the ( Read more... )

In a 4th-story concert hall last week, I got nailed up by some kind of aesthetic delight which hadn't found its proper outlet-- or I was bored-- under this long somber evening light through the hall's stained-glass windows. The light felt preservative and tacky, like it was trapping even the littlest, downiest impressions that my recording mind was ( Read more... )

Our office's third-floor kitchen has one of those suction-cup racks stuck in its sink, with soap-pump sponge, a little Joy bottle and a scrubber for my coworkers to do their dishes, but the damn thing won't stay sucked on. It keeps tipping into the sink and spilling the sponge into the suds it itself made, with tomato skins, microwave-blackened ( Read more... )

So Cait's friend Matt from New Orleans told her to tell me that my pushup form was wrong, all wrong. I imagined often, face to the living room floor and indie radio piping these last six months, that I was making some terrible mistake, a mistake of facility and form that led to being able to do 80 a day. Matt says (Matt was in the army and has been ( Read more... )

Shirtsleeve weather, weather that's nice enough I don't remember my dreams. The yards of the fine old houses on my street are all exploding, purple and white lilac and bluebells and jasmine and anonymous other vines, cigarette butts flicked into their woodchips. Smile lines a fixture.

Saw this show last night

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

( Washington Ensemble Theatre Presents: ( Read more... )

Livejournal, I love you! I spent a weekend with an elegant French friend-of-friend getting sunburned, then allergic, then stupid. It's been very French around the blue apartment: crusty bread for breakfast, bottle of wine at lunch. Personality, as expressed through the mortar mannerisms of language (the way I say yeah yeah yeah to encourage someone ( Read more... )

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Why do we do what we do? After a few years lodging writing online, clocking time as a critic, and putting out a little magazine, my heart was lightened to hear a conversation with someone else who shot through the same air a decade ago-- the poet (and hedge fund manager!!!) Katy Lederer edited the out-of-sight magazine Explosive back in the day, ( Read more... )

Hi dudes, a new season means a new issue of the stunning literary journal I co-edit, Thermos. One feature we keep up on the regular is the appreciation-- an editor writing about a poem from the issue they liked. I'm always curious reading a journal: why this poem? What's the journey one reader took? So. Here's a little bit I wrote about a funny, ( Read more... )

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