One unpleasant side-effect of being a cruise destination is the cankerous rash of tourist strips that inevitably blister the dockward side of your town. These places were my first impression of both Kitchican and Juneau, and they have an unfortunate homegenizing effect on a place: the weary sameness of ugly, repeated ad infinitum. Or so [...]
Juneau is an odd city, and possibly the most uncapitalish looking capital I’ve ever seen. The main government center, behind tourist row, makes a sort of half-hearted attempt at gravitas: a city hall with the requisite set of doric columns, a modernish courthouse with dull brick walls and a glassed-in entrance protuberance on the ground [...]
Although Ketchikan has a population of only 7368, it is the fifth largest city in Alaska1. This is partly due to the vast tracts of wilderness and icy waste that dominate the Alaskan landmass, but mostly due to the Alaskan state slogan: The State with a Billion Billion Cities. Late Alaskan governor Mad Sparky McJuddnick [...]
The TSA man stands on the other side of the magic portal. I smile, uncertainly, but he glares at me with some unstable concoction of impatience, distaste and contempt, and gestures. I interpret this as a summoning, and step through. But the magic portal is angry. It emits a series of high-pitched beeps. Beep beep, [...]
Epicurus: Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.
I just found out from my friend Z that his company’s content filters have started banning this blog. I wonder what I did to piss off the cyberprudes — to much cursing? Whining? Bush bashing? Goose slandering? Whatever it is, it needs to stop. Pariahood is bad for my complexion. So, from now on, I’m [...]
I went my dentist the other day with swollen gums and walked out with a murdered tooth. He called it a root canal, but that’s just what passes for euphemism in the dental community. This was an execution. How could this happen? Well. Apparently, some portion of the inside of one of my molars got [...]
One of the reasons I find the Adam and Eve myth so odious is the role to which it implicitly consigns women: second-fiddle organisms made out of the master sex’s cast-off rib parts. That’s one interpretation, anyway — but, given the way that women are treated in the rest of the Bible, it’s almost certainly [...]
I spent a ridiculous portion of last week trying to write a capsule bio of myself, for a story that’s going to be coming out next year. I say ridiculous because it really shouldn’t take very long to write a hundred words about yourself, should it? And yet I labored over this thing for five [...]
The last thing I wrote in the waning days of Clarion came out in a sort of fever dream, and it shows: it’s a tumbling wordy over-the-top story about an amorphous living city’s relationship with its children. That’s what I thought it was about, anyway. But a couple of really perceptive people in my writing [...]
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