Blog

  • Late Introduction

    It is weird to think of writing in 2024… books and blogs are becoming obsolete in the age of social media blurbs and TikTok shorts. However, I believe that the written word could (and should) have power still, and writing is one of my passions in life. I guess I am a Renaissance woman of…

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  • Morocco: Lessons from Tahar

    My friend Tahar has the brightest face I have ever seen. He seemed to be friends with everybody—when he wasn’t talking to me, I would pass him at his shop conversing with locals and Western shoppers alike with that same luminous smile. When I was in a hurry, he was respectful. One of the few…

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  • Saturday Evening Register of Actions

    One (1) dive bar with one (1) cute bartender telling me he tried my regular drink at a separate bar, separate night. I must be four (4) drinks deep. The bar has been slow, frigid, and I sabotage myself with stolen glances and sips of drink. I’m one of the real ones, a true regular,…

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  • Tuesday Evening Register of Actions

    In the absence of a couch and in the presence of a hamster—one (1) witness to such—Gustavo, Russian Dwarf, aged “old enough to do this goddamn thing”—I enter into the record of this new apartment a few words—perhaps an idealistic pessimism I feel when faced with the idea of home. I tie myself to this…

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  • On Loneliness

    “Because there’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone” – Kris Kristofferson, Sunday Morning Coming Down, 1970 Home can be lonely. In the middle of a reunion, a birthday party, or Christmas—doesn’t matter—home can make you want a drink and to crawl into a dark hole. Once a black sheep, always the…

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  • We’ll Always Have Barranco: A Love Affair with Peru

                It was the first time I had ever seen the Pacific Ocean. It was 10 p.m. in Lima, the city just now coming alive, and we drove here and there through the barrios surrounding the airport to the highway that ran by the sea. It pushed. It pulled. It gushed. It called to me.…

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  • If All My Exes Live in Texas, Then Why Am I Still Here?

    The hands of change touch everything in my life these days—pushing, pulling, prodding, stopping. What can sometimes be sensuous is now a bully—what egged me on now forces me into submission. I’m learning choke holds in Jiu-Jitsu right now. Is that why I feel like life has me by the throat? If life is a…

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  • “Dallas is Just a Transition Ground for the Midwest”: A Conversation with Belle Pardue

    I sit down with my dear friend Belle Pardue on a Friday night at the Kona Grill in Dallas. They have a reverse happy hour for the mall employees, “The Northpark Centre” employees, as she corrects me. “They’re very adamant about it; the ‘re’. This place is closely tied with the Nashers—I know wealthy people…

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  • Marfa: Reflections One Year Later

    Under the stars and onto the flatness of Mother Nature’s tongue sits a tiny town of about 2,000 people—nine hours west of Dallas and three hours east of El Paso—in one of the largest and least populous counties in Texas—truly, the middle of nowhere. Before Peru was even a possibility in my mind, there was…

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  • Strike Rich

    There is a golden age that one acquires when one strikes it rich– it has nothing to do with age, though it takes considerable time to get there. He wonders when his time will come– when the well– the fountain of youth and abundance the ancients searched for will spring forth– some searched for a…

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  • Strike Three

    An orange moon rises above the desert in the early dawn and the oil man curses the ground he has worked so hard to develop. It is the fate of the first man, or so he used to believe. At times he wakes up and he loves the desert– he drank too much the night…

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  • Love Sick

    I was born a Valentine’s baby, only the day before, and I have always felt as if narrowly missing the day has had some effect on my romantic endeavors. Is the way the stars aligned why I feel so detached in my relationships, why I avoid them entirely, or why I love in great spurts…

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  • Grief

                There aren’t words for grief; I will try.             Sometimes it is looking in a mirror and realizing we were more similar than I thought. That makes me sad.             Sometimes it is knowing she would not have been able to stand my drinking or the fact that I’m probably an atheist. That makes…

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  • Passion

    I have tasted the beauty of the world now as an adult, and I am transfixed by it. I always wanted to be an attorney, and two dropouts later, I found myself a working paralegal– still chasing a middle school dream. It is an accomplishment, and I am proud of it, that I stayed the…

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  • Time

    I stopped looking at life as how it could be, but as it was. I stopped to wonder why I had started to write my diary in past tense. Time seemed to me less of an upwards lateral and more of a circle. I sometimes thought I could tell the future. Or maybe that was…

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  • Marfa

    Past the mountains and onto the flatness of Mother Nature’s tongue lies quiet in the desert a town called Marfa, Texas. I called my trip a pilgrimage because that is how it felt– like I was called by some otherworldly force whispering into my ear. She is nine hours west of Dallas and three hours…

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