Checking Out
2020 – “I Think I Prefer They Die” I have hurried to the mirror. For a consultation. How much beast, I wonder at the glass, Do I allow its freedom? And will drugs help again? Not so much influence, politic, go joining, Swizzle weary threats – Under the influence I cannot Remember where I hid…
Gloria’s in the Attic (30:30)
Ah – the magic typewriter. The magic of the typewriter, the magic falling and spilling and exuding from her keys, and I say her because I am sure she is a girl and I have (long ago) given a name to my typewriter which sits quietly on a small table in the attic room with…
When Listening is Enough (a 30:30 report)
And now, live from the outskirts of Oklahoma City, here comes the Benny Bragg Comedy Hour. Or some such thing, the kind of time-waster most people in the States would be happily satisfied with. Most. Becky Franzine, thank goodness, doesn’t even want to live here cause she’s always dreamed that Portugal or Greece would be…
Please Allow me
Please bear with me as I, like Walt Whitman, sing my body electric. I’m 71, I turned the dial to begin my 72nd year on this planetary journey while visiting my son Cameron and his wife and kids in Florida. I traveled and adventured with my wife, a dazzling respite from the wet Portland cold,…
Fourth Morning, San Diego
This is how I want to live – exactly like this. Is that the best way to say it? Perhaps, this is what feels like the perfect life, as it is experienced in the moment – moment after moment. These last two days, pieces, parts, and times of the days. It’s all only one man’s…
Second Morning, San Diego
I keep jumping up from the curvy cushioned chair in which I am sitting and reading and drinking coffee in hope of seeing the flocks of loudly chattering wild parrots which fly and roost and chatter in this up-the-hill neighborhood of Ocean Beach in San Diego, California. But I never do – see them –…
A Week of Stories
I spent the last week with my wife Susan in San Diego – specifically two days with her parents out in the County, and five glorious days in San Diego’s Ocean Beach. Our first morning, at Ann and Bill’s, awake before all others, I performed my usual morning routines and rituals which end with writing…
Inspired to Keep On
From The Morning Pages: Late to the party this morning, got hung up reading a bunch of my old Blog posts. I, for the most part, dig them, there is a voice – my voice – and there is both a gentleness and a fairly clear sense of loathing and doom. Again, the idea…
We Give, We Get
For many years I made an annual donation to The Jimmy Fund – the Massachusetts Children’s Cancer research and treatment fund. The Boston Red Sox have been affiliated with The Jimmy Fund for about forever, and one year my donation was large enough that I was afforded a lunch in the Fenway Park press room…
My Last Post
I truly thought my last post – ‘Taking Help Part Three’ – would inspire and generate lots and lots of comments. It feels important, like I got to channel some big stuff. Have you read it? Do you have thoughts about its ideas?
Taking Help – Part Two
Cash Only In his book “On Writing Fiction” author John Gardner reminds us that reading fiction involves “a suspension of disbelief.” Not a usual collection of words but easy to understand – if you truly want to enjoy this story about a young wizard and his friends you need to believe, at least here and…
Taking Help – Part One
Will It Go Round In Circles I wonder when my story began? In a delivery room in St. Luke’s Hospital in New Bedford, Massachusetts sometime early the morning of January 19, 1949? A Wednesday. That’s the easiest answer. Or was it the winter-turning-into-fall of 1969 when my outlook on life – perhaps stance is a…
Your Stories
As promised, these are comments in the form of dislodged memories and other thoughts and thinking from subscribers in reaction to the “Flying down Durant with Doug” post. And as always, I bow to your commitment. And heart. “Jim Morrison was always my muse, light my fire playing on my families’s car radio at…
Addendum of Sorts
9/16/18 Verbatim ‘Morning Pages’ I have a distinct sense, which feels to be clearing with time, that the “Couch” Blog is in fact something special – special for me as an opportunity to move closer to focus and devotion and intention, loyalty even, than what I have usually wrung from myself in the past.…
Kind of How it Goes
A couple of weeks ago a friend named Eric stopped by the house. He lives up near Seattle and was down in Portland for the weekend. Talking on the phone a week or so earlier he was describing a room he’d rented in a house under construction – the floors were torn up, he was…
Surfing Around the Rail Trail
There’s another story that proceeds this one, but I’ll begin here. The third or fourth week of May 2007 my son Cameron and I completed a cross-country father-son journey and adventure from Oakland, California to Cape Cod, that peninsula-like-thing that sticks out from the Massachusetts coastline. Technically homeless (me), Cameron and I had spent a…