spring The evening grosbeaks have been peeping and cheeping pretty much every morning in April, snacking on elm buds and drinking from the creek that’s been running alongside the tracks since the deep freeze of winter left us. The grosbeaks aren’t unusual, as they show up every spring, but the creek is. Old Town Spring often leaks and trickles a bit...
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The first day of spring—March 20, in this year—wasn’t very springlike here in Flagstaff, with rain and snow showers coming on a gusty day of clouds and near-freezing temperatures. More of the same, in other words. It’s been a harsh winter in northern Arizona. As storm after storm has pummeled the high country, the snow days have piled up as high as the...
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By the time I got to The Drive, I’d gotten damn used to small-d driving: all those errands through suburban mall-land, returning home late through the mercury-vapor streets after nights out with friends in some Chicago neighborhood or other, the longer expeditions that took varied combinations of friends, often overnight, to visit someone at a college in...
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Every six weeks, when my time in the lineup comes up, the same question arises, or set of questions: What to write about, and how to write about it? So I went to the hot new tool of the moment: ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence writing software that has set academia abuzz, mainly in an alarmed way, because of its great potential to create...
Read MoreWhen I was a kid normal was both a state of being and a place. The place was easier to define. It was a town, for one thing, and it could be found on one of those folded (paper!) highway maps that could be acquired at gas stations: there it was, smack-dab in the middle of the great flatness of Illinois. Corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn; there wasn’t...
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