I was chatting with my friend Kelly last night, and we both confessed that we’re entirely baffled by some people’s behavior surrounding the pandemic. Kelly is one of the toughest people I know. Anytime I fancy myself a bit of a badass, with my live warheads and sightings of test pilots, I remind myself that […]
This afternoon, I suddenly felt quite happy. I’ve noticed that both happiness and misery spring from trivial causes, but that it’s wiser to notice the former, and to treat the latter with lordly indifference. Here, then, are my reasons for happiness: I actually enjoy going to El Rio to pick up prescriptions. Today I went […]
It’s Independence Day. All of the firework shows in Tucson were cancelled because there are fires raging out of control in the Santa Catalina mountains, and we are in the middle of a global pandemic. Naturally, this means that all of my neighbors started shooting off fireworks around 10 a.m., and the various amateur shows […]
Sometimes I wonder why I read The Guardian. I already subscribe to the Washington Post and New York Times. It’s obscurely comforting to see that Great Britain’s Prime Minister is a dishonest buffoon, true, and to watch old-school British politicians spank him during the Prime Minister’s Questions. But is that really necessary to my happiness? […]
Today I looked at Arizona’s numbers — I’m experimenting with using the Johns Hopkins website, which is updated more frequently than covidtracking.com, but sends my iPhone into a frenzy of error messages and page reloading — and I panicked. Here’s how we look on coronavirus.jhu.edu: Arizona, US Confirmed: 79,215 Deaths: 1,641 Recovered: 0 Active: 77,574 […]
If you haven’t lost a loved one or died yourself, then the pandemic brings both consolations and miseries. In my case, after about six months of soul-searching, I’d just accepted that I’d always thought of myself as a man. Since we have the technology, I thought, Fuck it — I’ve lived 51 years as woman. […]
I don’t have words for a lot of what’s happening. The symptoms in my own neighborhood hit me the hardest. So today I’ll share some of the signs and murals and street art that I see on my morning walks. Tucson is the most magical place I know. Inglorion in the Elysian Fields is a […]
I’m back working from home after a long stint in the lab. Remember what I said about seeing what really happens in the neighborhood during daylight hours? In the middle of a long afternoon of skimming over shock and vibe data, I looked up from my monitors and through a window, and saw a pillar […]
I posted this photo on my Contact page yesterday. I used the photographic print in the lower-right corner as a visual reference when I was writing “His Lordship Used to Model, But He Was Young and Needed the Money.” I had a little mini-epiphany about the image as I was driving to work. I thought, […]
Let me briefly draw the reader’s attention to this excellent discussion of police brutality by John Oliver. It’s one of the strongest arguments I’ve seen in favor of defunding the police. Overall, I’m pretty damn skeptical of the idea. Or, at least, I was until Oliver played a clip of Tucker Carlson braying that people […]
