There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound. How are you doing? We say we’re becoming numb and […]
Part of a series of ‘penspective’ posts using a pen for scale The earth is a producer of oddities. Crystals curl around each other like fiber optics and groundwater stains rock like Van Gogh. Geologic byproducts come out faster than Linnaeus could name off species, lava bombs, pseudomorphs, barites that look like roses, and copper […]
My mother is an artist, and when she was a kid in New Mexico she’d draw horses in a Southwestern style, jaunty spring in their step and delicately curved, a bit like the art of Navajo, Acoma, or Zuni, all of which could have influenced her. The other day, I came across a couple of […]
Given the choice, I wouldn’t be a bear, though it’s tempting to skip this dark season and live off my fat. Far below the metabolic plane of sleep, my body would be as cold as death to the touch. Parts of the brain that dart about in REM sleep are turned off, brain functions reduced […]
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith? Monoöbelisk. Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife […]
On some days, one thing looks like another. It’s easy to be fooled. That’s where a pen helps. Over the last couple years I’ve been taking pictures of objects that require scale to grasp. What I’ve used as reference is my pen, so I’m starting an ongoing LWON series of photographed objects using one for […]
This post originally ran winter of 2014 and circumstances have not changed. Careful out there! There’s been a lot of road kill on my drive to work and back in Western Colorado, mostly prairie dogs and rabbits, and young magpies trying to learn how fast they have to fly to get out of the way. […]
I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which […]