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When I lived in Phoenix in the late ‘70s, there was this local second-rate amusement park called “Legend City.” The tired-looking park was totally themed on the clichéd Old West where cowboys, saloons, mines, and Miss Kitty were the artifacts of the genre, and our anchors to a specific history of the American West. On… — read more

As I drive home, my hand shields my eyes from the brilliance of the moribund Fall sun that paints the rain-pregnant cloud underbellies salmon. And just like that and without warning and despite the wash of the intervening decades, a daydream supervenes, and I’m back-timed to nineteen eighty-one when I was a young boisterous man.… — read more

The smell of burning citronella candles mixes with those aromas of young love and pours over the backyard, not yours but hers, and you take a bite of the red plump candied apple that is too sweet like she is, and it’s night and her father looks at you and he’s not happy his 17-year… — read more

It rained most of the gray morning. It was a clean rain cast down from the Heavens like a stream, pure and good, of sugary glaze onto the fragrant round orbs of baked yeast-cum-dough that await consumption by hungry mouths to satisfy a desire innate, yet nebulous. Overhead, the clouds are an indistinct blanket (perhaps… — read more

We light the fires in the early afternoon in hopes the People of the Forest will see the smoke and heed our warning. The day is cloudy. The rain falls on and off. Sometimes the rain falls a lot, sometimes not so much. When is does fall a lot, I hear the hiss of the… — read more

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