January, 2017

The homeless are all waving now. They walk in between the lines of cars at stoplights and smile and wave and smile and wave and smile and wave.

I once read an article that explained how all the members of England’s royal family waved and what their waves meant. It was in a Canadian newspaper. Prince Henry was honest and open. Some ex-wife was conspiring to hide some secrets with her bent fingers and wry smile. The queen was perfect and her wave, honed over the years, was just as blue as her blood. Other royals waved too and their waves meant something, but I forget what.

It’s hard to see how the homeless wave because their coats are ill-fitting and bulky and they wear mittens and gloves that hide their fingers.

Now, in Chicago, you can say “isn’t it fun” when you show off the glass pipe you bought your husband to smoke pot out of.

Everyone loves mezcal now—which is...

December 2015

The city looks like someone put a ‘filter’ on it. The colors are impossible— every shade of red and orange punctuated by an impossible blue. Inside the city gates the sun is always setting and so the hours are magical and last forever. Everything is equally ancient and new. A massive fort sits above the town that makes the idea of attack seem ridiculous. The roads are carefully planned and inviting and the gates haves spikes to keep out mongrel hordes and elephants. Death before dishonor and waxed handprints—the wives of a dead king gracefully and quietly walk into town and burn in the funeral pyre.

The streets here make no sense. Every one of them is different but somehow the same. Everything is on display. Everything is for sale. Everyone says hello. I meet a man who invites me into his home and tells me, over a cup of tea, that he is the 7th generation of his family...

Summer, 2015

It takes twelve hours to travel the 400 kilometers from Fianar to Antananarivo on the RN7. The road is a single-laned affair that supports traffic running in both directions as well ox carts, bicycles and foot traffic.

The road slowly saunters and winds its way up from the coast to Antananarivo with poorly done makeup and dangerous shoulders like a drunk stumbling into a small town bar on a Saturday night.
 
Traveling by bush taxi is both unnecessarily painful and surprisingly beautiful. The seats are too small and the vehicles are compulsorily stuffed to the gills with people, sacks of rice, dried fish and luggage.
Towns, faces, landscapes and animals drift past like a silent film projected on a white sheet in the summer twilight. Light pours out of the sky, bounces off the red dirt, and reflects the emotions of strangers as they move about their lives. The brilliant...

November 2015

The light here is never still. It dances on the walls and ripples across the corrugated ceilings. This land was not meant to be land and one gets the feeling that the ocean would like to take it all back. The water laps at the edges of the coral foundations and slowly eats away the wooden poles that stilt the houses. The sidewalks are a maze of weather worn boards and old bits of houses and boats. Each house is connected to the boardwalk by long bamboo poles or small ramps made from abandoned boat hulls or any piece of material long enough to cross a gap.

The cats are never quiet here but the dogs only howl at night. Rats scurry down the boardwalks and into the piles of coral that the nicest houses are built on.

The boats here are called ka-ting-tings because that is the sound that they make. These boats are wooden pirogues whose hulls were once attached to the fins of...

July 2015

The road from Mangily to Tulear awkwardly sways next to the coastline for 25 kilometers. Once or twice it reaches out and brushes its hand across the soft beauty of the Mozambique Channel.

The red dusty road terminates in a tangle of brilliant colors, smoke and chattering diesel engines. Old Indian buses painted and vibrant mix with even older Mercedes that are retrofitted to carry both cargo and people.

Trucks make a pell-mell border that fence in a jumbled mess of smaller mini-buses, rickshaws, porters, sellers and a considerable number of people who just don’t seem to have anywhere else to be. Each bus is slowly filled by a line of workers, spun out like tentacles, groping after loosely held luggage, livestock or anyone who looks easily moved.

Sellers sit calmly on the ground. They paint their faces with a beautiful yellow paste made with dabs of water and the ground...

February, 2015

Cuba is an Easter egg, pastel and promising. It has a rhythm and a beat and cold beers. Cuba is endless sunshine and the chatter of cheap diesel engines. There is money for locals and different money for the Canadians that come to sleep with the locals.

The old white men that drag themselves down the streets in the afternoon are thirsty and hungry and so they get drunk and when it is dark enough, they sway angrily on the open air dance floors and the heavy salt air dampens their sour breaths. They shuffle from one thick foam heel to the other and think about their arch-support.

Beautiful black men glide just above the floor and leave sandy contrails in their wake like the heavy metal discs on shuffleboard tables in Midwestern bars. Drums and strings and staccato voices punctuate their Caucasian failures.

The bright orange flare of a match blurs the peckish stars...

December 2016

I slipped out from the cold and watched the northern Indiana snow quickly melt and slop into the ditches. A few hours south, the hills were still toasted and brown. Hints of red and yellow rolling into the fallow.

I was home for two weeks and I couldn’t figure out what to do. Magnetically, I was pulled toward the bars and brick facades of every 20th century downtown in America. I ordered beer and drank fast. I wondered how many people in that bar were in every bar? How many characters are there? How many miles between two people, slurring the same words?

I was somewhere in Florida today when I passed a billboard that said “Burger King, next 4 Exits.”

Last night I had drinks with the first openly gay and elected politician in Tennessee. His name was Chris and he was 36. He was kissing a half-Asian boy at the bar of a fancier restaurant. He met the half-Asian boy on...

November, 2016

The chickens are learning how to fly. There is no land. There is nothing for them to peck. I saw one fly from the twisted boardwalk to the peak of a bamboo hut with a thatched roof. When I woke up this morning I could see it strutting. It was a boy chicken, I think. It was crowing.

The scavenged boards that make the railing of the porch I sleep on framed it and it looked like a picture of a chicken hanging on the wall of a mid-western kitchen. The chicken walked back and forth like a night watchman. After a while it sort of fell from the roof.

The house behind this house has a broken satellite dish that is growing out of a tree. It is a flower made of cheap metal and rust. The frame, which is most of what is left, looks remarkably similar to the octagonal clotheslines that people had when I was a kid in Indiana. You could spin those clotheslines around like alfresco...

October, 2016

Strung off the east end of the island of Flores there are small islands where men still hunt whales. I’ve heard that they go to sea in small boats and that men take turns standing on the bow as it rises and falls with the waves and when they are close enough they leap into the abyss. I’ve also heard that these islands are covered in the bones of whales and dolphins and turtles and other sorts of things that come from the ocean and can be eaten. I’ve never been there.

I have been to other parts of the island. I have been to the crumpled up parts that sit near its corseted waist. I’ve heard that this part of the island looks like a discarded ball of tinfoil, land that didn’t suit the creator and was cast off—a do over. To me, though, this part of the island looks like it rose from an ancient ocean like a submarine, crushing through the arctic ice—forced ridges and...