Stories from a static year 2020 was my first full year of writing on Medium And although I told myself with almost every story I published that I was done with the platform, I kept coming back. Until the calendar flipped over and I realized I had a body of work on my hands. Some of these stories are among…

There are no big moments; there’s only this one — I’ll be poor forever That’s what a friend of mine says, over and over again, repeating it like a mantra, like something he wants to believe. He’s not poor now. At least, not by the grim metrics of global human existence. If we put all the money in a great big pile and split…

Bulk buying in Basque Country — How far would you go for a Costco run? During the darkest and most isolating days of the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife shopped for a living. She wasn’t a reseller, one of those parasites who cornered the market on the suddenly thin supply of toilet paper to extort government dollars from panicking neighbors. She sold unnecessary things at healthy…

A philosophy of life and travel, courtesy of the Holiday Inn — It wasn’t a great start “Yeah, sorry, we canceled your booking.” The hotel receptionist could not have made his indifference more clear. You expect this. As a general rule, the bigger the city, the worse the people in it. And New York prides itself on a kind of circumspect aggression. Besides, it’s 2023. Nobody gives…

A review of ‘The Things We Take For Granted’ by Mike Alexander — Every blessing carries a curse Like those tiny toys inside the chocolate egg, banned in America to stop them choking children. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable. We may have started out as tall African apes, but now we live on every continent on the planet. The only other animals that can claim that kind of…

The old life dies so the new life can grow — There are no accidents. That’s what some people say. That our existence has some grand purpose, everything in its right place like the intricate tiles of an unimaginable mosaic, the net of Indra with its dangling pearls. They say it especially when things go wrong. Everything happens for a reason…

Taking the poet’s trail through Manhattan — “I went to the White Horse Tavern looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead.” — Leonard Cohen Some places you know without ever seeing Our collective dreams are haunted by yellow taxis, blaring horns, steaming sewer grates, rattling trains. A stray bolt of sun catching in the edge of some glittering tower where billionaires hide…

A review of Fishing for Leviathan by Rodney DeCroo — Anyone familiar with the work of Vancouver’s Rodney DeCroo will know how trauma informs his art. The son of a violent and PTSD-ridden Vietnam War veteran, DeCroo spent his childhood moving from Pennsylvania to the gloomy rough-and-tumble towns of British Columbia and back again, accruing the damage, both physical and…

Do you even want to? — It’s Wednesday. The humped back of the middle of another work week. But I’m not working today. Today, I’ll enjoy myself. This summer, I’ve been travelling a lot. Next week, I’ll be going on my longest trip of the year. But it’s not a true vacation, free of work. …