August 11th, 2025

The bass stack still murmurs to me.

On the seawall bench smoking a cigarette, taking crisp nautical breaths and dashes of bitter smoke. A doe tiptoes its way across the street and takes glances back at me. The citrine buzz of dock lights draped over the rigging and railings of resting fishing ships. The last few drops of twilight reach up over the horizon, mixing into the star-speckled sky like creamer into the blackest coffee.

Every drag off the cigarette pulls a blanket from my feet to my chin. Water laps at the rocks.

The earth dances gently to no music.

July 28th, 2025

Pixie mullet hippie girl dwells in a slant of shadow next to the smoker's pit. The glow of her pocket computer washes her face in light, revealing her braided strands and sheepish smile. She's showing me photos of a fish sculpture she made out of animal bones, and I delight in its morbid beauty.

I pass her the stone I'm idly kneading in my palm - it's a smoothed out riverbed stone with a gentle divot which entices the holder to massage their thumb around it. With the cadence of dough rising out of a pan, a grin spreads across her face as she nestles her thumbprint into the divot. Tracing around the edge of the crater and then slipping back into its depth, her head lolls back in ecstasy.

We're enthusiastic about each other but whatever cocktail of drugs she's on is halting the flow of her speech. Which is a shame, because who knows when I'll see her again? It's one of those people you just have to let pass by with the hope that lady luck grants you a second encounter.

April 15th, 2024

The wind howls paling daggers into my hands. Stomach dropping, I fasten my footing into the snow, the gusts threatening to kite me up and over the surrounding precipices.

Behind me screams metal abrasing metal, as dangling and swinging cabins are corralled into formation around the bullwheel, the gear churning clockwise, releasing them back into the sky on the opposing diameter, but not before their bellies open, allowing their inhabitants to gingerly step back into the Earth's domain.

The valley sprawls beneath me, and I wonder if it is as big as the hearts of men who constructed such an insult to the mountain's sovereignty.

April 21st, 2024

The downpour and its implications are welcome here. More and more often our summers are replaced by wildfire season. Instead of plumes of mist and comforting blankets of fog we are buried by layers of smoke.

Smoke that dries you no matter how much you drink, the smoke that stings no matter how much you blink. The inescapable smell of campfire; proof that there can be too much of a good thing.

The smoke that robs you of breath and blue sky.

The smoke that brings the bugs out - every insect in the land emerges en masse. In daytime as well as night moths and gnats swarm the light of a gas station like a horde of confused locusts. Mosquitoes do the same but are only after the source of your breath. Every little thing with wings emerges to feast on the Earth's carcass. Driving through the haze will leave the front end of your car looking like a paintball field, minus the neon.

Every year this happens and feels more apocalyptic - every year the anxiety grows that our children will catch as many summertime tans as youth in Shanghai, or when they finally climb a mountain that called to them as children their reward will be a red disk in a deluge, instead of the depth and blue of the sky colliding with the sea interspersed by flickers of light catching more waves than a hairy van-lifer in the 60s.

We would like to believe things were always like this. But we are young, not necessarily stupid - deep down we know the score, but feel powerless to change it. It is an unspoken truth. The best option is to savour while it lasts.

May 9th, 2024

The intertidal zone makes my skin crawl with its beauty. The wind howls across the open flat, shadows of outstretched wings rake the ground and call attention to the two pairs of bald eagles circling above, in each pair the raptors trace opposing arcs in complement to the other. But unless stationary, it's not advisable to watch the dance for too long. The ground has hazards. Middens of expired clam and cone snail shells poke out of the sand, and the discarded limbs and shells of Dungeness crabs who have since molted litter the area. In the spaces between the sandbars are canals of shallow water warmed by the sun, within growing gardens of eel grass whose tendrils caress and tickle your ankles.

The sandbars in the intertidal zone have waves and miniature dunes on their surface. Every step down the sandbar you crush the peaks of the dunes and the sand clumps and nestles itself between your toes, compressing into mud cakes on the heels and balls of your feet. The foot, paw, and talonprints of creatures trace their paths throughout the intertidal zone, but do not remain for long - it is inevitable that the moon will make another quarter circuit around the Earth, pulling with it the dormant sea back into the spotlight, swallowing the foreshore and erasing again the evidence of foreign creatures who, in their opportunism, trespass while the sea is out to lunch.

As children we would occupy ourselves with building fortresses made of sand, the walls tall and concentric, in jest that our engineering could hold back the ocean itself. Not illusioned though - we knew the futility of this practice, and that's why we found joy in the preparation, not the inevitable wipe of the slate. Still, blind to the wider application of this philosophy, that life is apart of a cycle that must come to a close before it can begin anew. The joys must be found in preparation for release, being opportunistic and getting our kicks in wherever we can, and ticking our boxes in readiness for our slate to be wiped clean.