She lies at the water's edge,
clouds of rain gathering.
She indicates that the water's deep,
errant strands of hair breezing.

She recounts her love of swimming
and speaks on about her paddleboard.
She laments a love self-terminated
and adjusts her sweetheart bustline.

She regales us with there and back again
and of identity masquerades.
She fantasizes about ogres
and fiery breath she couldn't quench.

Last I noticed her,
she was right there
lying at the water's edge.

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I’ve always enjoyed it. But lately… it’s something more.

My palate isn’t sophisticated enough for all of the nuances of wine flavors and notes. Sometimes they taste jammy. Sometimes they taste like butterscotch, if the woman working the bar preempts my sip with, “Try this and tell me what you think of the butterscotch flavor.” But sometimes all I’ve got for a descriptor is campfire or dusty gravel or astringent or what I imagine cold armpit sweat would taste like.

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I can’t distinguish between currants and plums. I might get fruity versus floral. But never vanilla versus nutmeg. Not in wine.

I think this is why mezcal shines. Once you agree it’s smoky and move on, there is a lot to discover. Earthy, green grass, or citrus are much more distinct callouts for me to understand. Smoke and dirt and grass make sense to me. I know what those things smell like.

Emma Janzen wrote in Mezcal: The History, Craft & Cocktails of the World’s Ultimate Artisanal Spirit, “…historically, mezcal is consumed neat. No ice. No water. No bullshit.”

While I agree that it’s great all by itself, I’m not above putting it in a cocktail to see what else I can get from it.

I’ve also been on a bitters kick lately and tend to add them to nearly every drink I come up with—and wonder whether some of the ones I didn’t could benefit from them.

That’s how this drink was born.

I was wondering how I might convert a Buffalo Sweat or a Prairie Fire into a full drink instead of just a shot.

Neither shot is complicated: one part hot sauce and four parts bourbon (for the Buffalo Sweat) or tequila (Prairie Fire). I’d call either drink more of a dare than anything. “Bet you won’t!” But I like their bones. What would happen if I slowed things down and invited the agave and chile to dance intimately? I wanted to create something you savor. Something to taste instead of chase.

I chose this name because two of the key ingredients are Cholula Hot Sauce and Montelobos Espadín Mezcal. The former is from Jalisco and gives this drink its rich orange color, and the latter is from Oaxaca.

Two distinct states in Mexico. So naming it something like Prairie Smoke felt wrong geographically and too close to its ancestor.

But usually there’s fire where there’s smoke.

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I shorten it to simply Entre Fuego.

Entre Fuego y Humo

• 2 oz. Montelobos Mezcal (you can choose another brand if you like, but the Espadín is the agave you want for this drink)

• ¾ oz. fresh lime juice

• ½ oz. agave syrup

• ¼ oz. Cholula (yes, really)

• 2 dashes orange bitters

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

• Tiny pinch of kosher salt

Add everything to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake for 20-30 seconds. Double strain into a rocks glass with one large cube.

You remembered to rim the glass with some ghost chili salt first, right? (I used Jacobsen Salt Co.)

Express an orange peel over the drink and use as a garnish if you like.

As I sipped my drink with Stephanie, I told her how it reminded me of the carne asada tacos I wasn’t eating.

I wanted some juicy meat thrown into a street taco with diced white onions, cilantro, and nearly unbearably spicy hot sauce on top. Something vinegary to cut through the fat, yet substantial. I wanted the kind of food that leaves your fingers slick and makes you reach for your drink, even if it’s gonna burn too.

So much for those sophisticated tasting notes.

Stephanie sipped her drink and told me that she regarded it as a Death Row Drink. I know she doesn’t always mean the last drink when she says this. There are contenders. But Entre Fuego made the list.

I don’t think a stronger endorsement exists.

It’s a phrase that sticks with me: a Death Row Drink.

There’s something existential about deciding what you want for the last time. We do it with last meals, parting words, death poems, and our favorite song once more. Ordinary pleasures made sacred simply by putting an ending after them.

If someone told you there was only one glass left, what would you want in it?

Maybe the answer shouldn’t be whatever you’re supposed to appreciate. Maybe it doesn’t have to carry notes of apricot or leathery finishes. Does it matter if someone finds stone fruit and all you can do is taste something vaguely sweet? I’d even say it doesn’t matter if it comes with no ice, water, or bullshit.

But it should probably taste like something you recognize.

When I looked down at the last sip of my drink, I saw what was left: ice shimmering orange, ghost chili salt grains clinging here and there. The smoke lingered after the final swallow, and the Cholula came creeping back.

Fire where there was smoke.

I watched my love drinking something I created. Something she’d apparently consider having at the end of everything.

Then I tipped my glass to the flames.

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After I left the Army, my encounters with Fat Tire grew fewer and farther between. I wouldn’t say I forgot about it. But as craft brews grew more popular, so did my adventurous side. There was always something new to try. IPAs, browns, stouts, porters—some better than others. Inferior stouts have an odd tendency to taste like ashtrays—am I the only one?—and some porters might as well be syrup. But I kept trying them anyway. Fat Tire became one of those beers I knew I liked but rarely thought to order. Been there.

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Anyway, it was the summer of 2026. We were gathered in another one of those chain restaurants, but this one had the unrivaled branding of a modern-day pirate, even if that pirate was almost three years deceased at the time. My uncle ordered a Fat Tire ale, and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

Fat Tire?! I thought to myself. Well, there’s a throwback. So, I ordered the same thing. They came to the table in unopened bottles and cold glasses on the side. We fumbled them open and poured. It tasted like my time in the Army, when all my friends at that table in Fayetteville were still full of salt and promise.

Stephanie only had a sip and said it was good, but she stuck to her water for the meal.

It was a couple of days later that she came home from the grocery store with a sixer of cans. She giggled and said, “I wasn’t expecting it to be that good!” I had to restrain myself from chugging the can I opened. Wow! This is so drinkable.

As I looked at the cans, I couldn’t help but feel like the aesthetic had gone milder. The unconsumed ones are sitting in my garage fridge next to the Voodoo Ranger lineup. But they certainly look as if they’d be more at home sandwiched between some Miller Lite and PBR tall boys…

Maybe it’s earned its place in the Dad Beer lineup.

Two creatures negotiated the maple trunk from opposite sides…

The juvenile five-lined skink was skittering among the dusty green California poppies, currently denuded of their other colors, before it lept to the black ant-infested trunk of the Freeman’s maple. The tree’s mottled bark and patchy lichen aided its camouflage. But its tail gave it away—as if that were unconsciously deliberate. An electric-blue survival holdover from somewhere in the Miocene.

I wanted a glimpse of this skink even though I’ve seen countless cousins throughout my lifetime. One more wouldn’t hurt. I crept to the east, and it moved west. I backtracked; it did the same.

A six-foot human striving for a better look, and a six-inch lizard defeating me by simply sidling to the other side of a tree.

Eventually, it must’ve decided that remaining motionless was its best option. I watched as it blended into the bark, still and patient, its eyes betraying a quiet vigilance.

I wondered what it had been hunting. Which arthropods is my garden supporting lately? What insects had become part of this ecosystem? Did they, in turn, support this little reptile? Did it know the earth snake I had found about three shrubs south of this very spot?

The thought reminded me of the Carissa hollies that came with this property a decade ago. Tight, compact, and evergreen, they serve their purpose—one that nearly convinces us we are looking at a mature landscape. The same could be said for the Chinese boxwoods. Tidy little pieces of furniture that take up space but offer little in return, much like the Bermuda carpet between both clusters.

The landscape is orderly, but not especially alive.

Perhaps that’s why an ordinary skink can interrupt my reverie on the way to the mailbox. In a garden of boring homogeneity, a flash of blue becomes an event.

Then I wondered what this little lizard must think of me.

Large.

Upright.

Approaching.

Unfamiliar.

Threatening its ant lunch.

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My youngest son has a habit of blindsiding me with questions that send me into deep research loops. About a year and a half ago, he asked what would happen if no one voted for president—not low turnout, but zero turnout. And he meant it. He climbed out of the car at school, handed me an assignment, asked, “Will you look it up and tell me this afternoon? I know it’s unlikely… but what if?”

I did, of course, because when he asks things like that, it’s never small talk.

A more recent question involved ketchup. But it wasn’t enough for him to know who invented it—he wanted to know why. “Who invented ketchup? And why?” closes the car door behind him

Sigh. I knew I was in for another term paper.

It’s not the question itself that gets me. It’s the why. Somewhere between his curiosity and my need to give him a real answer, I start thinking about how many things we accept without interrogation. Ketchup is just there. In the fridge door. In packets stuffed into kitchen drawers. A red cultural constant sitting beside mustard as if it were delivered unto mankind on stone tablets. Most of us never stop to ask where it came from because we don’t need to. It exists. It tastes good on fries. The end.

But this kid doesn’t let things end there. So I started digging.

As it turns out, ketchup didn’t begin with tomatoes. Or America. Or even anything remotely recognizable as the sugary red condiment we drown burgers in today. The ancestor of ketchup was probably a Chinese fermented fish sauce called kê-tsiap or ke-tsiap (as if that distinction helps the pronunciation at all), popular in Southern China centuries ago. Salty. Funky. Fishy. I get the idea it was more something a medieval dockworker stored in a barrel than a cookout condiment. It was likely invented to preserve and flavor food. Basically, an early umami seasoning.

Makes sense. History rarely begins glamorously.

Traders carried versions of it across shipping routes into Southeast Asia, where European merchants encountered it and did what Europeans tend to do with foreign food ideas: carried them home, altered them beyond recognition, and pretended they discovered them. The British especially became fascinated with the sauce during the 17th and 18th centuries. They often couldn’t replicate the original ingredients, so they improvised.

And by “improvised,” I mean they just started making ketchup out of whatever happened to be nearby. Mushrooms. Walnuts. Anchovies. Oysters. Probably despair.

Tomato ketchup didn’t really take hold in America until the early 1800s, and even then, people were suspicious of tomatoes. [See my Side Note #004 piece below for more on people believing tomatoes were poisonous.]

This means that at some point in history, there was likely a man staring nervously at a tomato, the same way people now stare at gas-station sushi.

Eventually, though, tomatoes won. Sugar got involved. Vinegar balanced everything out. Then in 1876, Henry Heinz standardized the now-famous version that conquered backyard cookouts and fast-food trays forever.

All because somewhere along the line, humanity collectively decided: “You know what this fish sauce needs? Tomatoes and a frightening amount of sugar.”

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between plants and posts
spiderwebs beyond counting
arachnid wizards



buckled retaining wall
lichen spreading over rot—
roses leafing out



ceremonial
butterfly burial ground—
marigold grove



edged bermuda lawns
rolled pine straw planting beds—
white dandelion



midseason heatwave
and sanitized porcelain
wriggling housefly



potted hellebore
leaves catching early morning sun—
musk turtle corpse



transplanted roses
hand-sewn poppy seedlings—
volunteer vetch

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And at first, it doesn’t feel like a mistake. You feel like you’re seeing things for the first time. As if you’ve finally found what matters more than anything else. It’s the only thing worth holding onto when the rest of the world starts to slip. That’s the first lie it tells you: that devotion, in and of itself, is a virtue. It convinces you that loving something deeply enough justifies anything else it could ask of you in return.

It isn’t. But you know that already.

Some things don’t reject your love. They don’t have to. They accept it, quietly and completely, until there’s nothing left of you that isn’t oriented around them. It’s not romance. It’s gravity.

If you want to see what that kind of love looks like when it’s left unchecked, you don’t need a case study from psychology or a cautionary tale from modern dating culture.

You need Sméagol. Or Gollum, as most people know him.

W. H. Auden once wrote that if equal affection could not be, he hoped to be “the more loving one.” It’s a beautiful sentiment on paper. Noble, aching, and deeply human. The kind of line people underline in college literature classes before they’ve lived long enough to understand how dangerous it can become in the wrong context.

Obviously—but somehow a reminder still seems necessary—there’s a difference between loving more and loving blindly. Auden was writing about imbalance. About the quiet pain of asymmetric love; about caring more deeply than someone else does and choosing tenderness anyway. Most of us know that feeling. We’ve all stood on one side of a conversation, a relationship, or a memory, wondering why ours is the voice that echoes loudest in its sincerity.

But Sméagol is something different entirely. He doesn’t love a person who can’t love him back. He loves an object incapable of mercy. Something ancient, possessive, and cold. The tragedy of it all is that Sméagol’s devotion is sincere.

That sincerity matters. People often reduce him to weakness, as though he lacked discipline or courage. But weakness doesn’t explain nearly 500 years in the dark, clutching something that has all but scooped out the last bit of your identity. It doesn’t explain the tenderness in the way he calls the One Ring “My Precious.” And it doesn’t explain how losing it felt less like theft and more like the world stopping entirely.

What people call Sméagol’s weakness was actually his faithfulness. He was catastrophically faithful. That’s what makes his story so important. Sometimes evil destruction arrives as comfort. As a bright spot in an ordinary, dull life. But by the time you realize your devotion has become dependency, the roots have already penetrated the foundation.

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Venus in full sun
traps blackening with protein—
buzzing midges



asiatic lilies
infested with aphids—
fat spiders and ants



southbound toad
stopped dead in its tracks—
yellow jackets feed



sun standing still
in motionless muggy air—
no birds, no rain



unhatched wren egg
single nestling at feeding—
cowbird fledgling gone



lichen-covered stones
below the tree line's shade—
echoing footsteps



dead noble savage
haunts the pseudo lagoon's bluffs—
children and dogs play

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Mine.

A few pages later, in the first Delight, another name appeared: Stephanie.

Hers.

Now, rationally, this means nothing. Patrick isn’t exactly an obscure name. Neither is Stephanie. Ross Gay didn’t secretly encode a message into a book a couple of years before I cracked it open. The universe wasn’t winking at me from a paperback.

But for a brief moment, the world felt strangely illuminated. Not supernatural or prophetic. Just… charged. Like when sunlight breaks through storm clouds at exactly the right moment, and an ordinary parking lot suddenly looks cinematic enough to stop you in your tracks.

Maybe that feeling says more about me than the coincidence itself. I’ve been accused of being a romantic before. Guilty. I’ve also been accused—even if only implicitly—of assigning too much meaning to small things. I think I’m guilty there, too. Sort of…

Lately, I’ve started wondering if the greater problem is not that some of us find too much meaning in the world, but that many people no longer allow themselves to find any at all.

Maybe I’m simply tired of living in a world allergic to wonder.

Not wonder in the supernatural sense. I’m not talking about angel numbers, crystal energy, or pretending every coincidence is fate. I mean ordinary human awe. The willingness to pause in the middle of your life and let something small matter to you.

A double rainbow. A line in a book. The smell of rain on hot pavement. The way someone says your name when they’re starting to love you.

We live in a culture that increasingly treats earnestness like a developmental flaw. Everything must be filtered through irony, detachment, sarcasm, or clinical framing before it’s safe to reveal publicly. To care too openly is embarrassing. Being visibly moved by something sincere is to risk becoming a punchline.

And maybe nowhere is that more obvious than with men. I’m tired of boisterous men whose only socially acceptable enthusiasm revolves around chasing tail or screaming at box scores. Men permitted to howl over fantasy football while remaining emotionally inarticulate about nearly everything else. Men who will memorize batting averages but not the emotional topography of their own inner lives.

And to be clear, this isn’t an indictment of sports or sex. I like both just fine. The problem is narrowness. The starvation of emotional vocabulary. The quiet pressure placed on men to flatten themselves into creatures of appetite and performance while treating tenderness, wonder, or reverence as at least vaguely suspicious.

That starvation leaks into everything. Relationships. Art. How we speak to one another. How quickly we explain away moments before they even have a chance to breathe. So much of our modern identity feels defensively constructed. We rush to classify ourselves before someone else misunderstands us. Every quirk becomes a diagnosis. Every preference is a taxonomy. And every emotional intensity is a disclaimer waiting to happen.

Look, I understand why people do this. Some labels genuinely help people understand themselves. Some people spend years suffering before finally finding language that makes their lives intelligible. I would never mock that.

But somewhere along the way, explanation started replacing experience. We became so fluent in analysis that many of us forgot how to just notice ourselves. To sit with mystery without immediately reducing it into terminology. We don’t need to append a footnote to everything we share that moved us or made us feel strange or overcome with joy.

I’m not standing outside any of this with clean hands. I became cynical, too.

I wasn’t always that way.

When I was a boy, the world still felt enchanted—not in a cartoonish, storybook sense, but in the way childhood naturally enlarges everything. Summer evenings stretched forever. Lightning bugs weren’t insects yet; they were living lanterns blinking secret messages across the yard. Creek water felt ancient. Thunderstorms felt cataclysmic.

I could stare at a rusted railroad track disappearing into the trees and feel something enormous without needing to explain it.

Wonder came easily then.

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Children don’t require permission to be moved by things. In fact, we raise our eyebrows at the ones who don’t show unbridled joy. Most kids haven’t yet learned embarrassment or been taught to suppress their enthusiasm under irony or self-awareness. A boy can become completely absorbed in the shape of a cloud or the strange blue glow of a TV at midnight and never once stop to wonder whether he looks foolish from the outside. Somewhere along the way, many of us lose that.

It’s a gradual loss, like sediment gathering slowly in a river.

Adulthood teaches caution.

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crimson-edged leaf
lying on the spring lawn—
bug-riddled maple



giant resin bee
crawling over the porch beams—
untold watermarks



arborvitae and
climbing wisteria—
still, erosion



heavy thunderstorm
drenching the wilted jenny—
silty runoff



longhorn beetle
resting in the hydrangeas—
Carolina wren



bedroom makeover
painted walls and potted plants—
alocasia tears



bright and blistered
orange toreados—
savory maggi

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I noticed them because they felt out of place. Or perhaps because they didn’t.

The cemetery itself leaves me cold. Most of the markers lie flat against the ground, bronze plaques swallowed by grass and sunlight. Efficient and maintenance-friendly. Designed so that the riding mowers can pass right over the dead without interruption. I understand the practicality. Upright stones crack, tilt, and require more care and labor that somebody must pay for.

Practicality is not reverence.

Some cemeteries feel like archives of human presence. Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah comes to mind—a famous Southern necropolis draped in Spanish moss where angels weather slowly beneath live oaks. Where entire generations seem to linger in marble conversation. A walk through a place that feels less like navigation than time travel. You don’t simply locate bodies there. You encounter memory. Personality. Texture. The dead continue taking up space in the world.

The flatter cemetery feels different. It feels administrative. It’s a place where grief has been organized into rows and sections and mowing schedules. A place where visitors stand on hills quietly wondering: Is this the one he’s buried on?

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hummingbird feeder
rocking gently in the breeze...
consistently full



birdsong in still air
then CLONK before the silence...
feather drifts away



Mexican purples
thriving around the mailbox
glory days again



firefly in my hand
limping around my knuckles
dwindling lights



chewing paper wasp
red and yellow jacketed—
nesting near Buddha



strutting in the yard
community bobtail cat—
wounded squirrel



overnight flush
after several days' rain—
inedible

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When I was a kid, I learned how to snake a drain, reignite a pilot light, and adjust my brakes without fouling the backing plate. I learned that if you huff carburetor cleaner, you don’t overdo it. Same with the apple brandy in the freezer—steal a sip, top it off with unsweet tea, and no one notices.

I’m not ashamed of any of that. I learned the pride of doing things yourself, of doing them right. It built something in me that no degree ever touched. But it never taught me how to live in my own skin without checking who was watching.

Everyone around me said I should go to college. Of everyone they knew, I was the one. I didn’t want to. I went anyway.

Somewhere along the way, the same people who pushed me toward it started mocking what it made of me.

Common knowledge said that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest word in the dictionary. My freshman professor made us carry one. I checked. It wasn’t.

I told someone—not to prove anything. Just to share it. Something I’d learned.

“Well, before you weenies had to have your own dictionary…” he laughed.

That was the tone.

It unlocked an earlier memory: that time I explained why over-kneading dough makes bread tough—something I picked up watching Graham Kerr—and got nicknamed “Mr. Wizard.” I carried it like a compliment. Now I wonder if it was more leash than honorific.

I learned something else, too. I learned how to answer questions so the room stayed comfortable—not true, just easy. A nod here. A softened edge there. Enough agreement to keep the air from tightening. I didn’t always lie outright. Not at first.

The first time someone broke up with me for not being a Christian, I was in the eighth grade.

The strange part is—I didn’t even know I wasn’t.

We never talked about it. Maybe that was the tell.

In what feels like another lifetime, I worked at a community bank. Twelve dollars an hour. A finance degree. Four years in military intelligence.

Right place, wrong time.

Maybe just the wrong place.

I applied for a position at another branch and got it. A vault teller there had also applied. She didn’t take it well.

“A degree is just a piece of paper,” she said.

I didn’t argue. What was there to say?

The bank laid me off.

I got my MBA and started commuting to Midtown Atlanta. Then took a job at a company closer to home.

Closer to home meant closer to the same conversations. Same assumptions. The same quiet expectation that you’d nod along, keep things smooth, and not complicate the room.

I didn’t belong there either.

Then I met Lara.

She was the first person I didn’t have to translate myself for—no edits, no softening, no version of me built for survival.

Just… honesty.

She had seen more of the world than I had—Europe. South America. Guam. More miles behind her than most people I’d grown up around would ever consider.

Georgia impressed her, despite the dull brown winters. But what struck her wasn’t the place—it was the lens.

It wasn’t the questions people asked her. It was what those questions revealed: how small a world can feel when it thinks it’s the whole thing.

After five years, the closer-to-home company laid me off.

Lara died two weeks later.

I had just gotten close to something like unguarded happiness, and then it was gone.

Both of them.

Job and wife.

Even though I saw both endings coming.

The last thing I wanted was to start again.

That was almost four years ago. Now I work from home. Corporate finance for a global company.

I do my banking online. I’ve opened accounts, taken out loans, signed mortgages—and never stepped foot inside a building my bank owns.

I rebuilt something resembling life.

And then she walked into it.

She’s an easy woman to love.

That’s not hyperbole. It’s an observation.

Men come into her work—and her DMs—older men, married men, men who should know better—and mistake her warmth for something meant specifically for them.

“I know you have a boyfriend, but I’d love to show you around sometime.”

They come back after the weekend to thank her for something she did on Friday. Something that could have been acknowledged in the moment.

They linger. Project themselves into something that was never offered. They take kindness and turn it into invitation because they don’t have a category for it otherwise.

She doesn’t play along.

When someone asks if she’s found a church, she doesn’t hedge.

“I have no interest in church anymore. I’m figuring out my own beliefs.”

She told me it felt good to say it. To not second-guess herself.

I admire that. I didn’t have that when I stood in similar places. I had strategy. I knew how to keep the room comfortable; she knows how to keep herself honest.

There are places here where belief isn’t just assumed. It’s broadcast. Devotionals over the speakers. Conversations that don’t end—they circle back like they’re trying to wear you down. Customers handing out pamphlets like receipts. Places where “no, thank you” doesn’t feel neutral—where a simple answer has a cost attached to it.

I know that calculus. I learned it early. But there’s a difference between choosing to manage a room and needing to.

I live in a place that taught me how to do things. How to fix, build, work, and endure.

It also taught me how to shrink. How to sand myself down just enough to pass inspection. A version of me that didn’t complicate conversations or force anyone to consider that their way might not be the only way.

I left that place in every way I could.

Except physically.

She followed me here. The Vail Valley Songbird flew east.

“Georgia is beautiful,” she told me. “But also very… different.”

She’s not wrong.

I’m not better than the people here. I understand them too well for that. I know the pride. The limitations. The habits of thought that form when your world doesn’t ask you to look beyond it—and sometimes punishes you when you do.

I know the cost of pushing against it.

I also know the cost of not.

You can outgrow a place long before you’re able to leave it. If you’re not careful, you build a life sturdy enough to keep you there—a house, a job, a schedule, responsibilities that root you deeper than you ever intended.

I learned how to answer questions in a way that kept the room comfortable—how to sound like a broken record you’re sick of hearing.

Watching her answer them in a way that keeps her honest feels like pride. And something I don’t have a better word for than regret.

I know exactly what she’s walking through. I know how heavy that costume gets—especially once you realize it was never meant to come off, not with these people watching.

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skittish brown viper
small underground introvert—
garden sentinel



box turtle hatchling
exploring the big wide world—
red heart in its mouth



cardinals flirting
in the new hydrangea blooms—
snakes and pipesmoke



feathery pink tufts
lone invasive mimosa—
ten years in my yard



three miles through the woods
rebirth through contant decay—
ghosts still find their breath



(sir) Darwin's spider
camped in my fruitless orchard...
waiting for dinner



nested troglodytes
in a Boston fern planter—
cowbird egg

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When I was young, I was told—not taught—not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

No one explained it or defined it. Just: don’t say certain words. Don’t cuss. Especially don’t say “goddamn.”

That was the whole lesson. Neat. Contained. Easy to enforce.

And completely hollow.

I didn’t go to seminary. I’m not a theologian. I’ve read the Bible—cover to cover, and in pieces, and sometimes out of order, as most people do—but I wouldn’t call myself an authority on it.

But I know this much: “vain” doesn’t mean profanity. It means empty. False. Something sacred used for your own ends. And if that’s the case, then most of what I was warned about as a kid wasn’t the problem.

The problem is a man who invokes God to win an argument he can’t win on his own. The one who tells you, “God put this in my heart,” when what he really means is, “I want this, and I’d like it to sound unquestionable.” The kind of man who uses faith like a credential. Like a backstage pass to your trust.

I’ve seen it dressed up a hundred different ways. Each one convinced it’s novel. Unique. In politics, God becomes a talking point. In relationships, He becomes a line. In quiet corners of conversation, He becomes leverage.

It’s always the same move: take what was meant to be sacred and make it useful.

The funny part is how the same people who performatively flinch at a swear word will use their god as both a fulcrum and a lever to get their needs met. They won’t say “goddamn,” but they’ll wrap their own desires in God’s name and present them as truth. They won’t curse aloud, but they’ll claim divine authority over things that were never theirs to speak for.

Serpents, every one of them.

If the commandment means anything, it isn’t about vocabulary. It’s about representation. It’s about the weight of attaching something supposedly infinite to something personal and pretending it’s the same thing.

I threw away the Bible I was given years ago. My name was embossed on the cover in silver lettering—like it was meant to last forever. Keeping it felt dishonest. Not because I rejected everything in it, but because I couldn’t reconcile some of the things it said with how I kept seeing it used.

I was told not to say His name in anger. No one warned me about saying it for advantage.

If that isn’t taking a name in vain, nothing is.

If you’re curious, passages like Exodus 20:7, Jeremiah 23, and Matthew 23 have more to say about this than most Sunday lessons ever did.

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soft rain on my face
thunder without lightning—
hydrangeas blooming



ranch rail cardinal
hopping fencepost to fencepost
singing songs of lust



unused and empty
lichen-covered bird feeder—
spider builds its web



unfinished Malbec
in hazy twilight—black fly
drowning in red wine



cedar composter
consuming skulls and junk mail—
from trash to black gold



transplanted roses
that may or may not make it...
cardinal-approved



pudgy doves mourning
cooing and whistling too—
desecrated eggs

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“She didn’t know Jesus,” she said.

This isn’t new.

Years earlier, when my second marriage was coming apart, she was already taking inventory. The day my then-wife packed a U-Haul and finally drove away, I came home prepared to grieve. Instead, I found the woman down the street and her husband lingering near my mailbox.

I pulled into the garage without intending to speak to them. She followed anyway—walked up to the open door as if invitation were a formality she didn’t require.

She wanted to know if we were moving. That’s when the questions began. Not concern. Not empathy. Just inquiry. She wanted details. Reasons. She wanted something she could carry down to the other end of the street.

I answered what I was willing to answer and let the rest fall where it landed. Their quiet critiques found no purchase. Yes, I cooked most of the dinners. Yes, when I came home, I went inside. I kept my life where it belonged.

He offered me his number—nodding with his phone as if we were already in agreement. I declined.

Time passed. I saw them in passing—at the pool, when the kids were there. Once, running barefoot through the neighborhood, I went by their house without slowing.

They had questions when I circled back.

“Lost your shoes?”

“They filled with sweat. I finished without them.”

Cordial is as far as it went. Not warm. Not unkind. Just enough to keep the peace with the woman down the street.

Then Lara got sick.

She drove home with her stepfather after a round of chemo, and that woman down the street and her husband were lingering near our mailbox. The inquiry resumed quickly.

“We didn’t even know!!”

“Why would you?” Lara smiled. “We didn’t advertise it to the neighborhood.”

She asked for her number. Lara gave it to her.

Her texts were incessant. We started ignoring them.

Another time, I ran past their house. The woman down the street stepped out from her garage before it finished opening. She stood across the sidewalk, placed there as if by habit.

“How’s Lara? I’ve been texting her.”

“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s trying to rest.”

It didn’t take. The messages kept coming for another three months.

I took Lara to her family’s ranch in Northern California. She entered hospice there, away from the noise. She died on December 14th.

I flew home and met my sister for lunch. She’s chronically late. I was sitting alone in a restaurant across the county, waiting to order a drink, when a finger tapped my shoulder.

I turned. The woman down the street stood there. Her husband watched from their table.

She tried to start again.

“How’s Lara? I sent her—”

“She’s dead,” I said.

She paused.

“She’s dead?”

“Yes. Wednesday.”

She left. I didn’t watch her go.

Some people live close enough to mistake it for knowing. The woman down the street and her husband never knew my wife. They don’t know me either. It hasn’t stopped them from watching or from deciding what they’ve seen.

Those who live on gossip are never full.

For some, belief is just another form of inventory. It isn’t a knowing that’s been earned. It’s something simpler than that. It’s something declared and left alone.

Lara didn’t advertise her beliefs. She saw no point in asking to be seen. She carried it quietly, even at the end.

Did she know Jesus? The answer doesn’t matter. That’s not what the woman down the street meant. She meant something smaller than that.

If Lara is anywhere, she isn’t theirs to account for.

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manicured borders
tidy flowering beds—
a fairy ring



alone in tulips
beetle mounting his lady—
suburban scandal



a north wind
through ferns and hydrangeas—
disheveled cobwebs



Japanese holly
wandering Jew, Boston ferns—
Nicaraguan smoke



invading
parasol colony—
ornamental shade



hatchlings at sunset
nesting underneath the deck—
shit on mailboxes



heuchera's new growth
pale against the woody mulch—
rain clouds brim over

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The path to poverty is paved
in bedrook... force majeure.
Ambulate, hands and knees.
Faith without piety.
No questions.

Pigeon-toe the line
for a banker—favored odds,
dual-wheeled and humming.
Navigate with sense and youth,
balance and dual-wield
skill and zeal.

Toll-free rescue
in a black sedan, GPS and A/C.
Roadside creatures promise
comfort after fixed flats,
neon sanctuaries buzzing
like porch lights full of June moths.
Anywhere but here.

Scrambled egg, to go,
a too-cool pan—
spoiling faster than it cooks.
Make it a combo deal
for only your last dime.
Paper sack sweating grease
onto the passenger seat.

The foundation held.
That was never the problem.
The road knew exactly
how much flesh it could take
without slowing traffic.

And the snakes along the way—
soft-speaking things
curled warm beneath porch steps
and billboard scripture—
never struck to kill.

Only enough venom
to keep you thirsty,
clocked in,
and dreaming of black sedans
gliding westbound
through rain-slick midnight
toward some promised place

where the gas pumps still work,
the waitress still smiles,
and nobody dies waiting
under fluorescent lights
with their wallet open
like a begging mouth.

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My friend reminds me every few months (usually after I mention a piece I’m submitting or chewing over) that he “should start writing,” because people tell him he’s got a good story idea. But he’s busy. He says it the way a neighbor who hasn’t run since high school says he should sign up for a 10K. As if the body just remembers. As if intention is enough to carry you across the finish line.

I wish he would. He’s told me for years about these others and their praise. Likely a small cast of recurring actors rather than an all-star ensemble. No new writing to share. Just a repeated line from a hazy movie, half-remembered. I’d love to see him finish something that moves him. Something he’s certain will move everyone else. I want to bear witness when he publishes it.

Then I want to share a drink with him when he hears the crickets’ applause. Maybe he’ll ask why no one reacts to words that made him blubber. I want to welcome him into the fold.

“Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt.”
—Stephen King

Having an idea isn’t the same thing as writing. Having a social media account doesn’t make us writers. It just gives us a place to be seen trying. Most of what we say there dissolves before it ever lands: skimmed, or half-read at best. Passed over for the next political outrage or underdressed distraction. Each engineered for reaction, not reflection.

It creates the illusion that we’ve spoken into the world when we’ve really just brushed up against it. A mere flash of contact with no weight behind it. Little consequence—unfollows notwithstanding.

Writing asks more of you. It asks for time. Repetition. The willingness to let a sentence stew—or fester—long enough to realize it isn’t saying what you thought it was. It asks you to stick around after the initial rush burns off, and all that’s left is the work.

Few of us ever get that far. We stop at the idea. We stop when the possibilities are endless. Untested. Unwounded.

The first time you send something out into the world, you expect it to echo. If you’re too humble to admit that, you at least hope it resonates with someone. Anyone.

More often than not, it’s met with thunderous silence. Maybe it touched someone; maybe it didn’t. In either case, most people move along quietly.

You refresh your stats. Check your inbox for an approval letter. You mistrust your lover’s praise—not because it’s a lie, but because love and intimacy color everything.

Why do writers keep going? I don’t know.

I keep going because it’s a pressure-relief valve. If I don’t let the compulsion off-gas, it consumes, and I have redundant conversations with myself about all the brilliant ideas I have. Like a barfly already three beers beyond tomorrow’s hangover, I can’t shut the voices down, and I order another round. A round no one will remember—a round no one needs.

Sometimes I think I’m pretty good at it. Sometimes the words I’ve shared make me cringe. But it’s the only way I find a little quiet. I need that silence in a world that won’t shut the fuck up.

So I hit submit.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

At some point, you stop writing for the response.

You realize no one is coming to meet you there. So, you meet yourself.

That’s the discipline. Denuded of the romance. That’s when you learn that talent and good ideas aren’t what carry you through the silence. They never did.

“Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.”
—Stephen King

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