• A Dead Star Looks at 27

    I’m bad at being ceremonious around milestones. There are a lot of reasons for it that I’m aware of, and probably more that I’m not. Of the reasons I do know, I think my biggest handicap to developing a healthy relationship to milestones is a lack of anticipation. Despite being a seasoned time traveler to the future thanks to my anxiety disorder, one of my superpowers is preemptively convincing myself I’m…

  • Notes from a Butte Bender

    Far from normal, everything about Butte looms larger than life, magnified, exaggerated, like some gross caricature of itself. Butte’s villains are more villainous, its heroes more heroic, its wealth more extravagant, its poverty more grinding. Butte’s triumphs are the stuff of legends. Butte’s tragedies are almost too painful to bear. And yet, in this caricature we see somehow more clearly — the essence standing out in stark relief. Michael Punke, Fire…

  • Notes from a Gretel Ehrlich Bender

    The bardo state occurs not only at the moment of death or the moment before death, but all during our lives; the bardo is the uncertainty and groundlessness we often feel. Match to the Heart There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration. The Solace of Open Spaces Yet in all this indeterminacy, life keeps opting for life. Islands, the Universe, Home…

  • Notes from a small press bender

    It’s a good day if I don’t get asked either of these questions by people I know: How are you? Have you read any good books lately? These questions always overwhelm me. They’re too broad. I think I’d have an easier time with them if I could willfully go into macro-perspective mode, but I’m usually on the life-one-day-at-a-time program, and it’s difficult to pan out a bit. I think the accepted…