The Year of Dying
Only 2% of Americans are officially designated as farmers. The reality is worse.
A kite or hawk swooped down and sunk its claws deep into Fudge Pie’s skull, breaking her neck.
It takes concentration and effort to leave this world.
This past year seemed to have taken up dying as its prevailing theme, at least here at our house. The business I launched eight years ago and grew to employ six writers at our peak is slowly dying. A company is not a person. But a small, family business, as ours was, has a life of its own, and when the people who made it what it is are let go, the death is palpable. We wrote dialogue for video-game characters for a living. Our voice actors gave each character speech. The laughter we shared on table reads, the spirit we breathed into tiny screen images — those had an energy, and that energy has now gone cold and dark. Dormant, like the earth in winter.
The business of dying, too, is serious. My cousin Joel was dying of cancer. He and his wife kept birds, and in the final weeks of his life he requested the birds be homed elsewhere so that he could die in quiet. It takes concentration and effort to …
The Silence of the Lambs in Phoenix
Charlie Kirk’s flock is circled by wolves.
Kick-ass Christian babes inherit the mic, while sullen gamma males lurk at the bar, unsure whether ‘Heil Hitler’ is a joke.
A young man ain’t nothing in the world these days.
While Charlie Kirk was arguably the most influential political activist since the 1960s, the manner in which he has been memorialized is largely without precedent. There are, evidently, five books penned by Kirk. Having read most of them, I can confirm that there is no “Letter from Scottsdale Jail” nor an Autobiography of Charlie K. There’s no Turning Point of the American Mind, no Turning Point Review, no Collected Speeches of CJK. Kirk does not fit neatly among his antecedents, as there’s no singular opus from which his legacy can be understood. His is not a gravestone that will be found using the Dewey Decimal System. The digital world he came from is not one that is inclined to stand ceremony on the altar of the printed word.
Instead, what’s most prominently come to memorialize Charlie Kirk’s life are thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of video …
Shark Attack!!!
Toothy leviathan explores its world, is maligned as a monster.
We project the foul darkness within us onto innocent ocean-dwellers.
The poodle and the dachshund are more prolific oral aggressors than these gentle, fast-healing giants.
The Great White shark is on the prowl. In the chilly northern California waters above its massive, streamlined head, near the surface of the Pacific by North Salmon Creek in Sonoma County, the toothy leviathan spots a gliding form. It seems to be that of a sea lion or seal, the Great White’s favored prey along this stretch of rocky coast. But the shark is uncertain about what it’s glimpsed. Great Whites are color blind, it’s thought, and the waters in which they choose to hunt are often murky, all the better to conceal their lurking presence. The shark’s only way to determine the identity of the tantalizing silhouette is to use its most trustworthy sense organ, its mouth.
And so, like a blind person tapping with a cane, the shark closes in on the moving mystery object and gently — in Great White shark terms — nips its side. The result is confusing. This doesn’t taste like seal flesh. It doesn’t …
