Fallow Ground

Writing is paralegal research. Each scratch of the pencil across the page is a scratching away at the layers of falsity applied to my personality. Each click of the keyboard is chipping away at the calcified lies concealing my heart. Writing is trial. Each fiction crafted is truth teased out by hypothetical character and action.…

Back in April, Paul Simon released a new album called So Beautiful, So What. The opening song on the album is “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” a 4 minute and 6 second long meditation on the many things that weigh us down and make us long for the liberation of Christ’s coming. Interspersed throughout the song…

We’ve slipped into week seven of the ten week quarter like a political candidate into a sex scandal, and just like one of those candidate’s chances for election, my mental space for reflection has slipped away. I’m even writing this brief post in class. (It’s an audit, so it’s ok.) The end of the quarter…

“Men and women, who through almost superhuman hard work and without the slightest help from the legal state (in fact in the face of its declared hostility), have learned how to create more jobs and more wealth in the zones in which they have been able to function than the all-powerful state.  They have often…

There is a party happening upstairs in an apartment whose balcony faces mine. It is called “Dessert Night,” and I am invited to attend. People are laughing, talking. I can hear them. I think someone just started strumming a guitar. I am not there. Someone on the balcony is saying my and my roommate’s names.…

There is a place of waiting. It is just beyond where the waves break and just in front of where they begin to rise. In this place there is peace, but there is also expectation. Surf boards are buoyant, of course they are, but this is a truth lost to those on the shore. Tie…

“I go into the outdoors to recharge. Climbing and being in the mountains is what I do, maybe one of the most important things I do. But it’s not everything. Most of my life is periods of intense work punctuated by one day in the mountains on the weekend, and maybe a half-day somewhere during…

The cars constantly rush beneath my second story apartment window down Los Robles Avenue, one of the busier Pasadena streets, and over the 210 freeway a hundred yards north of my building. The freeway flows with a never ending stream of vehicles heading towards either ocean, though likely settling somewhere on land before they reach…