Sinle is a small village that is built low in a valley in the Shan hills. It is nestled quietly on the lower slopes where the terraces begin to flatten out and step lazily toward the small rivers that crisscross their way toward the delta. At night you can see the stars unpolluted by excess and light. They come and go as the clouds whisk low from one horizon to the other.

Here is a deep quiet, one that slides down the hills and settles into this valley in eastern Myanmar. It is not an awkward or strange quiet, it is the type of quiet that you can sink into and feel comfortable with. It is the type of quiet that allows you to hear the singe and crackle of tobacco being smoked in the next room and the flutter of a bird’s wings as it settles onto a porch railing.

It’s in this quiet that I sat on the porch and watched the butterflies on their afternoon visits to the cauliflower. The...

Mobile Bay, Alabama

There is unincorporated land in Florida and if you have a gun you can go there and shoot at things. I went out to a large piece of nothing that was carpeted in shotgun shells and bullet casings and shot a gun that was first used to shoot at Korean people during the Korean War. The gun belongs to my brother in law, he competes with it against other people with old guns that were also first shot at strangers. I shot his gun at a cinder block and some broken pieces of a Hyundai. Nothing happened when I shot the car but when I shot the cinder block it jumped up into the air. 

Heading west from Pensacola the land becomes thin and wispy and low. Sand climbs up from the water and spreads itself across the flat roads and then back down again. I drove until the land ended west of Gulf Shores, Alabama and waited for the ferry to take me across Mobile Bay. The ferry docks in...

February, 2015
Cuba

There is a small bridge just outside of Hemingway marina. The bridge is crumbling and painted blue. It spans a rotten canal of driftwood and trash and reeks of the dead dogs that were killed on the highway and thrown into the water. From the bridge you can see the local marina full of small fishing boats in varying degrees of repair. The most useable of them are not more than ten feet in length with a tiny cabin on the bow that a person can squat down and avoid the waves that crash over the bow when the boat is out trolling the steep drop off that runs along the northern coast of Cuba.

I watch the little boats climb the waves in the morning and dip down and disappear into the lulls between the crests. The water around Havana are incredibly deep and the waves are forced up by walls of coral and spit angrily before smashing into the manmade break walls. There is very...

Temanto Samba, Senegal
November, 2017

The first thing that you notice are the birds. There are just so many of them. They were everywhere and I had no idea what kinds they were. Outside of a few reasonably educated guesses at order and family, I was completely lost—just throwing darts into family trees. By the time I arrived in Temanto Samba, a small village in southern Senegal near the Guinean border, I was getting used to the idea of being lost in Africa. I have, at best, a beginners understanding of French and nothing when it comes to Pular or Wolof. Every conversation I am capable of starts at ends with hello. Years of living in Madagascar has accustomed me to the bad roads, cramped cars and the idea that all foreigners speak French. I came to west Africa prepared for the heat and the dust, the choking exhaust, the ‘close proximity to animals and livestock’ and the small buckets of...

Denver, Colorado
January 2016

Uber picked me up at 4 am. My driver was born in Tehran. He was a teacher. Mathematics. He taught for twenty-six years in Dallas, Texas. He was Persian. He told me that Texas felt like living under Ayatollah Khomeini and while I don’t exactly know what that means, it sounded like an important thing to be able to say.

He told me about the kids in gangs and the kids who were doing sex under the tables and the kids whose parents grew up in dirt villages and walked dirt roads to get to America and how they get pregnant at 13 and run to the bathroom and run to recess and run to lunch and run to anywhere but it takes them two hours to walk to class.

He told me about the ‘motherfucker’ who sued him and the ‘motherfucker’ who deliberately failed his class so he would be punished and the ‘motherfucker’s’ parents who said it was his fault. He told me about a lot of...

Thank you for making a million rice paddies in a million different shapes and not a single one of them a square.
Thank you for the bicycle bells and the cobble-stone roads.
Thanks for fixing everything a hundred times over.
Thanks for sewing my flip-flops back together and for saving the left over parts of sparklers.
Thanks for the terraces and the the tiny patios and the way you hang corn to dry.
Thanks for painting the tiny attic windows the color of a crisp and clear morning sky.
Thanks for not killing all of the birds.
Thanks for making your own toys and for what I imagine to be transistor radios hanging off of the handlebars of your bikes.
Thanks for making mofo everything.
Thanks for the rhythmic clacking of old coins on metal trays of peanuts in the early morning markets.
Thanks for everyone selling rice for the same price.
Thanks for the tiny displays of carrot salad and...

Damnation Creek, California
April, 2017

My brother took me deep sea fishing once. We were twenty miles offshore when we saw a frigate bird calmly circling in the bright sky. Two hundred yards behind us we saw several Dorados flickering in the sun.

Frigates are thieves that can live aloft for months at a time. They cross the oceans nestled in amongst the clouds and then dive like avian Messerschmitts toward their unsuspecting prey. They eat the small fish that the larger, predatory, fish school up to the surface. They have the largest wingspan to body size ratio of any bird but their feathers are not waterproof. It is a cruel tradeoff. Frigates, like fighter planes, are not meant to land in water.

I once saw an old frigate bird in the water though, it was gently floating on the rolling waves. It must have dipped too low while trying to catch a fish. Every meal for a frigate is a...

Key West, Florida
January, 2017

I left Key West on the overseas highway which follows the railroad that Henry Flagler built with his oil money and slave labor in the early 1900’s. I was headed to Bellingham, Washington to play board games and watch the rain

I left a thin cloud of exhaust and traces of rubber behind me as I drove north. Mr. Flagler left a trail of dead black men that he rented from corrupt cops as he chased the sunset to Mallory Square. His wife was sick. She had a cough—maybe consumption?—and he hated lazy, unused land so he kept building and buying and building and buying and building. He had a lot of money. There is a university named after him on the east coast of Florida, north of the swamps, that was once a very nice hotel he built near where Ponce De Leon landed when he was looking for the fountain of youth. The Fountain of Youth is a special fountain that if you...

Kandy, Sri Lanka
December, 2015

There are fish living in the planters and in the puddles along the rails at the train station in Kandy. Christy dips her fingers into the water and the tiny fish come to eat, gleaning the energy that she shakes from her sleeves. I stand along the edge of the platform and watch the water ripple and jump as the train arrives. My dad once told me that Indians would press their ears to the rails and listen as destiny manifested. I wonder if the fish feel the same vibrations as the train grinds to a slow and bumps into the thick rubber at the end of the line.

We board the train and can’t find seats. We don’t know how to read the tiny tickets that feel too thick and are written in Sinhalese. I find a place next to an open door and sit on the floor. The train starts to move and I swing my feet out. The air grows cooler and my ears pop as we climb up to the top...