Mountains and Islands

The creature stared at me, wide-eyed through the florescent glare, Saran Wrap stretched tight across its broad back. Alone in the seafood cooler, he was the only one of his kind, there among the farmed, color-added Atlantic salmon and mud-flavored tilapia, perched on a blue foam tray, legs tucked 'round him like a comfy kitten. He didn't blink. He was dead, red, cooked and chilled, ready to eat. Such a find is rare in the City Market fish department in Gunnison, Colorado. What if nobody takes him home? I thought. This beautiful animal will have died needlessly, ripped from his home, family and friends (Dory, Nemo, Crush and Gill?) only to be tossed in the trash when his expiration date came and went. I lifted him for closer inspection, checked that date, felt the heft of him, scanned his surface for cracks and blemishes. The creature was perfect. I lowered him back into the cooler, nodded farewell, turned to walk away, took one step, and stopped. Shoppers strolled past, stud...

                                                                                I have not traveled recently to Mexico. Nonetheless, I'm stuck home today, mere steps from the water closet for a mild case of food poisoning. Montezuma's Revenge. Like Kings Kamehameha and Luis, there were several Montezuma's, but it's Monty II who is the namesake of this expression, so soundly trounced by Spanish Conquistador Herman Cortéz in 1519. Herman, it would seem, was not a nice man. It's like the Indigo Girls' re-incarnation song, "Galileo." Montezuma got the shit kicked out of him, and today, I am literally living that legacy. Hard to believe the guy who looks like a pansy, beatnik poet (not that there's anything wrong with that) prevailed over the loin-clothed stud. This is the lesson o...

It's been some time since I've written. My mom died in February, and I haven't had the gumption to write much, other than a couple of feature stories for the paper and the occasional pithy email to a friend. Tonight, sitting in my favorite burger joint with a pile of fries in front of me, I dunk them into a deep pool of ketchup mixed with a hot sauce. That's how Mom liked 'em. My burger? The Spicy Hawaiian, a nod to my 808 connections. It's a brilliant combination of peppers and pineapple, a favorite on the Power Stop menu. I'm sure she'd have loved it, too. There's a bubbly beer with a lime in it. That's not a homage to anything. I just like beer. These past months, I've done little but work, search and apply for jobs. Two rejection letters have landed in my email this week. Search-and-apply has become a futile obsession. It's time for a break, at least until I hear back from all those applications still floating around out there. I am...

Life is rigged. And boring. Seriously, I mean, you know the drill.  Yes, living without running water has been inconvenient, and you'd think people would sympathize, but all they do is stare at my jugs.  Everyone should go without water for a few days. She says, as though that were a real hardship. I imagine my Alaska friends splitting a gut over that. "A few days? Hah! Try it for a few months," they'd say. "Or years. Decades!" Yeah, well you last frontier people are mad. I'm talking about the rest of us; sane, normal people, the complacent, wasteful kind who take natural resources like fresh, clean water for granted and piss them away every day without a thought. It takes two gallons to flush a toilet. Two. Gallons. (I'll pause for effect here.) That's a container in one hand poured into the tank -- glug, glug, glug -- and then from the other hand -- glug, glug, glug. It's a lot of water. And when one has to schlep those gallons...

I'd done what I could to get there, to be there with her that Sunday evening, February 24th. I didn't make it. But I DID see her. She'd gone into the hospital the Friday before with debilitating abdominal cramps. Doctors were confident they knew the cause of her discomfort, and assured my mom and Jim that a simple, routine procedure would have her home Saturday morning, "feeling like a new woman." What they found instead was a dead colon, killed for lack of blood supply by a tumor that had grown exponentially over the course of three weeks since its initial diagnosis, choking off the main vessel. The surgeon reported, "the cancer was everywhere." I jumped online to book a flight, but a dastardly Rocky Mountain blizzard had other plans, for the Denver airport, for all Western Slope airports, and for me. All Saturday afternoon and evening flights from here were canceled. No sleep, I left early the next morning, drove through the drifting white over four ...

This is my beautiful mom. She died last Sunday. For those who knew her, my heart breaks with you. For those who did not, here's an introduction to the best confidante, role model and mother a girl could hope for in life. This is the obituary I'd planned to submit to the local paper, but have opted instead to publish here. Obituary: Beverly Todd Bev -- my mom -- was a longtime caregiver, advocate, and dear friend to countless elderly in South Salem. Hers was a kind and generous spirit. She devoted much of her life to the welfare of others, giving wholly of herself and doing so always with great affection and humor. She was born Beverly Marie Steinberger in Silverton, July 23, 1938, the first child and only daughter of Art and Marie Steinberger. Her brothers called her Bevvy Buns, a nickname she grew fond of and wore proudly within the family circle as an adult. Bev attended St. Paul’s Elementary School in Silverton, Silverton High School and Marylhurst Co...

Here's a beef. In the United States of America, we have miles of soybeans, rows and rows of those podded, phytoestrogen-laced legumes across hundreds of thousands of acres. Why then, can I not find a bag of frozen edamame that does not say, in tiny print on the back of the package, "Product of China?" Anybody? I even tried the local health food store. They had 'em, compact plastic, post-consumer-waste pouches with "Organic" emblazoned across the front, a blast of eye-catching, eco-graphics. But on the back, way down in the lower left corner, written in letters so small you have to squint to read:"Product of China." Speaking of beef, in Hawaii, a place where I occasionally spend time, many of the larger, local cattle ranches ship their animals to the mainland for processing. Meanwhile, island supermarkets are filled with beef from the mainland. "There are two things in this world you should never pay for," advises a wise (ass) friend o...