Ode

I find my perfect solitude where the city meets the desert

How I got over myself and spent thirty dollars to enter a magic portal to instant endless summer vacation

My mash note to a painting that indicts Las Vegas' heedless growth

Some time, when we look back from a future, shark-jumped Believer Festival, these will have been the days

The smog check hut dude is difficult to classify. He’s not an auto mechanic, obviously, but not merely a smog-themed 7-Eleven clerk, either ...

O! Big Agnes, how you have changed my camping life! Before buying your Air Core featherweight inflatable mattress, I was adrift on a sea of hip-bruising,…

An affectionate look back at a book stuck in the past

It was New Year’s Day 2014 — I believe I was trying to outflank an inchoate hangover migraine with flat lukewarm last-night champagne — when my girlfriend proposed Dry January. Dry wha? You know, a month without drinking alcohol.

At the baccarat table

It’s not just the Shakespeare Festival — although that was the central reason why five friends and I planned a three-day excursion there weekend-before-last — it’s all the other coolness that surrounds the festival like a comfy cultural blanket. On Saturday morning, we rode bikes from our rental house north through town and out highway 130 to the Parowan Gap, where we drank our Gatorades beside huge panels of petroglyphs, most likely etched into the stone by Fremont Indians more than 1,000 years ago.