A Diary From Planet Earth

Coming soon...

Greetings and salutations from a tiny oasis in a desert of urban decay. I'm sitting in a secret greenspace buried deep within a vast expanse of concrete. More specifically, the old local mall. (Malls are large buildings from the 1990s.) My mother is having cataracts surgery down the street, and I find myself with several hours to kill. When I was young, the mall would open up early to let the elderly have a safe, warm place to exercise. The stores weren't open, but the Food Court was, and you could sit and have a cup of coffee after a doing a few laps. But this morning the mall is dark and locked up tight. Yet another simple pleasure deemed "not cost effective" in our growingly greedy world. The enormous gray building looks like the corpse of an ancient, lifeless leviathan that has stranded itself upon a flat gray beach of asphalt. A few world-weary employees have started to trickle into the side door, giving me strange looks. I'm a little too well-dressed to be u...

Hello, old friend. I'm still here. Writing brings out the softer side of me, and for a while I didn't feel like going there. In a world such as this – in a time such as this – I needed to focus on my strengths. But this time of year always makes me feel wistful (perhaps the cool weather cools my temper as well) and I feel safe enough to reveal my soft belly here again. It is a soft day here on the farm. At dawn, the sun pinkened the sky, blurring the edges of the horizon and blending it into the vast indigo field of stars. A brisk-yet-refreshing mist has settled into the hills, tucked down in the valleys and peeking over the horizons. During a few morning chores, I was engulfed in it, barely able to see the ancient black barn hiding in the lower field. The twin maple trees are wearing their autumn gold, while others such as the black walnuts are already stark silhouettes ready for the dark time of the year. A new plague is wiping out the local White-tailed Deer population, prod...