The Hellish Handbasket

For the past week, elk have been bugling in the forest near my camp. That means it's rutting season. I don't hear it in my car at ni...

Mike (not his real name) is a flabby grizzled aging man with no front teeth and a cute roly-poly dog named Roxie. I met Mike and Roxie this ...

This should be interesting. I didn't bring my keyboard into the mall with me today, so I'm typing on the virtual keyboard that comes...

Monsoon in Arizona is late this year, but maybe it's finally starting. According to the weather app, it's supposed to rain every aft...

Two days of hard rain in Flagstaff sent me running out of the forest back into town. No way am I getting stuck in this thick red mud. I driv...

I remember when my family used to visit my grandfather's cattle ranch in the high desert east of Prineville, Oregon. For a city kid, the...

After weeks of hiding out in Portland, living in parking lots of public parks during the day and trolling Portland streets for safe places t...

Sometimes when I'm walking around the reservoir at Mt. Tabor Park (my old neighborhood), I see an athlete. You wouldn't know she was...

When I'm at the coast, I take long walks on the beach. I aim for the middle ground between soft dry and soggy wet. I walk in the early m...

You know how after you have a run-in with a stupid person who accuses you of something, you get all defensive and start trying to deny their...

Most of the time I forget that I'm an outcast. Every now and then people remind me that I don't belong. It's always people, only...

First off, nobody died. Just want to make that clear up front. Nobody got hurt except my bank account and the environment. I guess if the wo...

You know you aren't in Southern Arizona anymore when an older woman living her car feels the need to pull out her stun gun and press it ...

The theme of the week is persist and resist. Persist at the personal my life sucks and then I die level, resist at the existential cosmic no...

Spring in Portland is an on-again off-again phenomenon. Now you see it, now you don't. Now it's sunny, oops, now it's raining. A...

I find myself driving aimlessly around the city, looking for something that isn't here. Home, I guess, although I'd settle for somep...

When did the Department of Motor Vehicles turn into such a bureaucratic pithole? I've been to several DMV locations in the greater Portl...

I'm boohooing the blues back in my hometown, Portland, Oregon. Cool but not freezing, raining but not all the time, and relentlessly gra...