Recharging My Battery

A good motorcycle ride will do that every time. Here’s a four-minute GoPro video I put together yesterday after a ride to Arivaca, one of the oldest settlements in southern Arizona. The town is located just 11 miles north of the Mexican border, dead center in one of the Southwest’s busiest drug smuggling and migrant […]

Dog Days

It’s National Dog Day. Everybody gets a belly rub! While we’re at it, let me plug a favorite Twitter account, @DogSolutions. So peace. Such soothe. Deg best antidote to times of hate. My cell phone rings all the time now. Spam, scams, once in a while someone calling the Tucson Police Department’s seized property division (transpose two digits and you get […]

Paulgram, Instagram, Abstigram

Did you know I write email newsletters from time to time? They’re called PaulGrams, and I just sent one out this morning. You have to subscribe to get them; the signup box is on the left sidebar under PaulGram (duh). Just enter your email address and click “Subscribe” (duh again). Don’t worry, I won’t flood your inbox […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Memoir, Essays, Fiction

“Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air. Mountain ranges, no longer seen in profile, dwarf to anthills; seas lose their horizons; lakes have no longer depth but look like bright pennies on the earth’s surface; forests become a thin impermanent film, a moss on […]

Blasphemy Is Hard Work

This is the time of year in southern Arizona where evening thunderstorms form right about the time you want to cook on the patio. Last night’s storm was a teaser. It looked like it was going to stay parked over the mountains, so I tempted fate by lighting the grill. The first gust hit as I […]

In One End, Out the Other

We got a safety recall notice on our GMC pickup. Actually, two of them: one about a potentially bad trailer hitch, the other about a defective part in the seatbelt mechanism. I took it in this morning. The service rep said they’d fix the seatbelts and inspect the hitch, and if the hitch was bad […]

Saturday Bag o’ You-Know-What

This election. Someone observed it’s like unexpected guests drop by after work and you’re discussing dinner options. Some want to call for pizza, some want to kill and eat the others. Even if pizza wins, there’s a problem.

Hello Roadblock, My Old Friend

Donna asked today how The Book’s coming along. She prods me every couple of weeks, usually when I’m in the middle of a blog post. She thinks blogging is at worst a waste of time, at best a way to put off serious writing. I admit that when I started blogging I hoped my talent would […]