TULSA, OK-

Let’s talk about relativity.

For every observer, things seem slightly different. From a physics point of view, you do not occupy the same location in space as anyone else, and you might be moving at different velocities, and so on.

This is why using astrology for anything other than entertainment seems silly to me. Constellations don’t physically exist. A group of stars that from the Earth seem to form the shape of a bull could in reality be millions of light years apart and share no relationship with each other whatsoever. They only form the shape of a bull from where we’re looking.

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SANTA FE, NM-

One summer I collected Monarch butterflies and pinned them to an old walnut board in the family barn. I was eleven and chubby with a Dorothy Hamill haircut. My younger sisters and I built endless Mexican
blanket forts in our battered living room and dressed our long-suffering dog in my dad’s blue boxer shorts. My mom decided she couldn’t take one more minute of our endless muggy summer, and
she signed us up for the one-week August hell known as Arts and Crafts camp at the Town Hall.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

The Wood = Inglewood

Bump ‘Em Up = Scare someone a little

Break Leather = Pull your gun from your holster

Roll a Code 3 = Turn on the sirens & respond to a call

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SARANAC LAKE, NY-

Cherry blossoms rage in D.C.

Weather.com tries to give me a gardening report, which incites mild disgust, as we are bouncing between 6-in. snowfalls, 50-degree days, thunderstorms, and 10-degree nights.

It also spurs daydreams of hyacinths emerging from the snow bank, bare toes, dry ground, and naked nights.

It makes me change my Myspace profile to an image of myself and my dog sitting on a remote beach on Middle Saranac Lake.

As though a photo can propel me away from a mud season that leaves me feeling like a lost soul, again.

It reminds me of those dark months between my last college summer job, my Dirty-Dancing summer fling, and the real world - the blankness of that time.

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SACRAMENTO, CA-

“Marathon running is not a sport of vanity.  We chafe, blister and puke—then sign up for the next race.” - Deena Kastor, 2004 Olympic Medalist Marathoner

My first try as a runner was at a 5K back in October.

I was passed by an 89-year-old speed-walker and an eight-year-old girl. (more…)

MADRID-

Like most expats and/or struggling writers, you take pretty much whatever work comes your way.

I’ve done a lot of trickle down jobs that range from networking computers, translation, travel guide writing and DJing to the obligatory English teaching.

I sometimes call the last one “slingin’ ‘glish” (but never to my students).

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

I once took a class with Kurt Vonnegut, who told me I’d never make a living as a writer.  He told me I’d always be poor, all writers are poor.

He also told me that a character in one of my stories needed to fall in love with her doctor.  He compared the doctor/patient relationship to the relationships among soldiers in foxholes on the frontlines of battle.  He said he fell in love with his fellow soldiers. (more…)

By R Kent

PARIS-

Sarko v. Ségo.

That’s what we all thought it’d be.

When last I reported in on the upcoming April French presidential election, I said that while there may be a plethora of official candidates out there seeking their place at L’Elysée, the French equivalent of our White House, the choice seemed to be between right-wing candidate and Bush buddy Nicolas Sarkozy and bumbling Socialist candidate Ségolene Royal.

Neither candidate is particularly enticing.

The problem with Ségo is that she doesn’t have much of a record to back up her aspirations, and the Socialist Party seems disorganized and not ready to govern.

No one really likes Sarko, either.

But he leads the polls because he’s been in politics since he was about six years old, so people think that while he’s definitely the devil incarnate, he at least might get things done.

But hold on. (more…)

BIRMINGHAM, AL-

Emphasis on IS.

As in, I’m surprised that I find it so funny.

And, yes, I do hate myself for it.

Which is clearly why I can’t get it out of my head, hating myself being a sort of comfort zone, for those times when I’m sick of loving myself.

My head - not so clear, by the way.

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ANYWHERE, USA-

The night is still and the purple scent of wisteria fills my nostrils.

I feel heady, dizzy, drunk on smell.

I’m also drunk on sake and celebratory champagne, but it’s the drooping clusters of flowers that make me nauseous.

I feel sick.

Regurgitated sushi rises in my throat like chunks of phlegm.

Downstairs I hear Alexa, my producer, my partner, my co-director, my co-pilot, my friend, banging around in a seemingly epileptic panic. In the third bedroom our cameraman slumbers, surrounded by just-opened boxes of microphones, booms, batteries, tapes, THE CAMERA, his iPod firmly jammed into each ear to drown out our girlish squeals of excitement and clumsy accidents, providing a loud musical respite from our incessant, schizophrenic, nervous/panicked/emotional/bickering/giggling chatter.

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SANDY, UT-

One summer in the early 90s, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

I attended at the suggestion of one of my professors, who was also attending that year, as a senior faculty member.

He invited several of us from the University of Utah graduate writing program, where he taught, to apply, and a couple of us were accepted.

We went on waiter scholarships.

If Bread Loaf were an Indian caste system—and it is—then faculty are the Brahmin and waiters are the Untouchables.

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PHILADELPHIA, PA-

It’s a typical night in Doylestown, an artsy, affluent suburb of Philadelphia. Antique shops, coffee houses and art galleries speckle main street, as soccer moms in oversized Hummers make their way towards this evening’s PTA meeting. A group of suburban skate punks meander in the bank parking lot, halfheartedly attempting kick-flips and ollies.

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LONDON-

One of the strangest things about life is the way that it rewrites itself. One moment, there you are, with the facts of your existence spread out in front of you, tidy and accessible, like a picnic on a blanket.

Perhaps you look away. And when you look back, everything is different. Rearranged by a glittering train of ants.

It’s a little Alice-In-Wonderland. It’s a little unnerving. It seems to happen all the time. Here’s an example.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

First things first

Perhaps some of you might’ve read this title and thought:

“What? Sex paraphernalia? Cat? I hope this guy isn’t into weird kinky shit with his pet!”

Well trust me
It’s not the case at all

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

As river systems flow, the Kern River is one of the mightiest in California. A star of films in the early 1900s, John Wayne stepped into its waters to shoot Injuns and fist-fight villains. The river lapped at his feet, sparkled, smiled, shone its teeth, and wore its own watery cloak like a glittery dress. If it could have walked the red carpet in hundreds of premieres starring itself, it surely would have. Fatty Arbuckle, Gene Autry, William Fairbanks, Rin-Tin-Tin, Gabby Hayes, Rex the Wonder Horse—they were all in the Bakersfield area, Hollywood’s backyard, just 150 miles northwest of a big fat Chinese theatre, and digging their claws and hooves into the succulent waters of the Kern. That’s just before it flows into the lands of the Great Central Valley. (more…)

BEIJING-

(All photographs by Jeff Cheap, used with grateful thanks.)

Not long ago I was in Nanjing for neither the first nor last time and was invited to participate in the 2007 Nanjing International Plum Blossom Festival. The exact nature of my participatory role was somewhat unclear to me, as such things most often are, but I walked happily up to the festival nonetheless, mainly because I had never seen the plum trees of Plum Blossom Hill in bloom, and had always wanted to. (more…)

SAN ANTONIO, TX-

It’s daunting to write about New York.

I’m daunted.

Everything has been written or said.

Nothing new to say.

It’s Old York.

Old.

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Par R Kent

PARIS-

For me, speaking French is like writing with my left hand. (more…)

CHICAGO, IL -

Igor, your newest email address doesn’t work now.

Sounds about right.

Par for this course you’ve had me playing on for the last six months.

I’m getting the failure notices again.

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THE DEEP SOUTH-

The greatest time you can ever be in a rock band is when you are sixteen years old, the best musical experience you can ever have in your life is to be sixteen years old in a rock and roll party band, playing in an arcade, not on a stage but over in the corner by the snack bar, not by the pool tables
where older boys who look vaguely like Matt Dillon swagger under Budweiser
lamps, pointing cue sticks at you, making snide remarks, not some neon fancy
arcade next to the movie theater in the mall but a mom and pop arcade named something
like the “Play Palace” run by the cool guy in a Hawaiian shirt who once
substitute taught your Social Studies class, not some big city place, just some podunk
southern town, tucked back in a strip mall between Baskin Robbins and the
Christian bookstore, a small town where there’s not much competition or
expectation and parents complain that there’s nothing for the kids to do,
where hot young things with their mother’s bee-stung lips but no saddlebags yet
cake on mascara in the one-stall bathroom, throw up their hands and whoop at
every power chord accompanied by a wagging tongue and pelvic thrust, where
bagboys, lanky and pale from the Piggly Wiggly, still in their thin white dress
shirts and loose neckties will slap your back and cheer for anything remotely
resembling rock radio.

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