Last night a friend of mine was stabbed several times in the face. He was also stabbed in the bicep while stripped naked. Another friend had his shirt taken from him and people–girls as young as sixteen–stapled his body with a wood stapler. And then there were the fireballs. Raging, manic clouds of flame that…
Fifth graders, I have decided, from a marginal sample size in an unscientific setting, have trouble with understanding cause and effect. Take this conversation: “Did you hit him?” “No.” “I saw you hit him.” “Because he hit me first.” “Why did you hit him first?” “Because it was a redo and he said it wasn’t.” No,…
Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson to any length is a lot like spending an afternoon in a pottery museum. Imminent disinterest is moments away in every pottery museum on earth. Half the time they are not even pots, just shards of dirty glass under clean glass. But let’s put away the dirty dishes from the museum, I’m here to give Emerson…
Some came here looking for it, asking for it, basking in it and bleeding it. They packed their bags and hopped a plane or train wearing their I’m-going-to-go-off-the-deep-end trunks. Some came here for other reasons—jobs probably—and heard its whisper rise to a cry and threw their brief cases out the office window and flipped off…
Within the package holiday market there’s a quite spectacular array of holidays travelling to destinations all over the world. Near or far, soaked in sunshine or sparkling with freshly fallen snow, land-based or at sea, the prospect of a package holiday is an exciting one that’s also incredibly diverse. If you love your holidays…
Students in the Bronx after-school program I work with informed me that mother’s day was coming up. I would have had no idea. I’m sure Facebook will tell me the day of, but it should tell me with enough time to hook mi madre up with a box of eccentric awesomeness that seeks and delivers a holy marmot manure! surprised face.…
If this weekend were an animal, it would be an eight legged dragon bear wearing a sombrero, gyrating to the rhythm of a rain dance, imploring the gods to shower the earth with the laughing tears of El Señor Cuervo. If this weekend were a school bus, it would be the Magic School bus and…
The following is a bit of prose I wrote in March on an overnight bus ride from Kenya to Uganda. Sometimes it’s the means of transportation that connects, as my thoughts jumped to three years earlier, when I was on an overnight bus on the other side of the continent, Morocco and them meandered from this to…
CNN’s headline report on the collapsed building in Bangladesh, stated that such incidences are not an “isolated problem.” Shoddy construction standards in the third world claim lives like any natural disaster, unfortunately. I witnessed a situation like this earlier this year when January, 16th a four story building under construction in the Kenya’s third largest…
Originally published in Range Magazine. Photo Credits: Matt Stabile. Though I grew up in North Dakota, a place with a Western history or rough riders, it was abroad, galloping on the back of Flaca that I discovered one spirit of the West I’d never found at home. The other horses had a healthy robustness that said, “Bring it…
