My fascination with boxing began as a boy. Never the fighting type, I liked the drama. But as youth passed I no longer cared. Many years later, I missed the rise of the cable-TV phenomenon Ultimate Fighting. Then in 2003, a Willamette Week ad touted a night of brawling. I attended to fulfill a graduate […]
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Parents like to display schoolwork the kids bring home. At our house we put it in on the dining table and eat it. To be precise, Daniel isn’t our kid. He’s my nephew and twenty-three. But he’s living with my wife and me for now. With increasing frequency he’s bringing home what he prepares at […]
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Every spring I start filling up the front porch with potted plants. The porch extends the width of our 1920s Craftsman house, so there are long wide ledges begging for greenery. The back deck next to the small goldfish pond gets a few plants too. I gravitate toward the tropical and cold-sensitive, mostly begonias because […]
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I was a human dynamo today. Literally. Working out on a specially outfitted exercise bike, I generated electricity while burning calories. Sweat dripped from my nose at the Green Microgym whenever I glanced down at the flashing numbers showing how many watts I was producing. It’s too soon to call me Megawatt Man, but I […]
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Selective memory erasure, coming to a doctor’s office near you! Such a treatment option appears inevitable based on accelerating medical research into how to manipulate what we remember. Imagine the possibilities: even in my fifties, as age slowly blunts the pain of life’s low-lights, I could enjoy not remembering anything about events I choose. Who […]
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In our yard, autumn turns elegant Japanese laceleaf maples into flashy look-at-me strippers. For several days each year, the tree hovering over the pond dons the color of the goldfish swimming beneath its branches. An exception is their recent offspring, little gray clouds that won’t brighten until spring. Cold has already induced torpor among the […]
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Sometimes I look at things too simply. Take, for example, U.S.-style elections. Because we live in a democracy, the people decide who gets elected to make the big decisions that affect our lives. Therefore conducting free and fair elections should be the most efficient and effective thing we do as a nation. Oh silly me. […]
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