Coyote Crossing

New Office

Cheap cameraphone image of Coyote Crossing World HQ.

This is just a short post to note that after yet another move in the back of the Jeep — bringing the total such mileage involved to 880 since June 2008 — the Coyote Crossing Computer Machine

The last few days

On our way back from signing the lease on our new digs yesterday, we pulled off the freeway to get something to eat and ended up on a couple miles of twisty, dark road east of San Bernardino. About three minutes after I suggested that maybe I’d

New home

This may or may not be a photo of the kitchen in the apartment for which we’re signing a lease on Monday. The photo is from a real estate agent’s website — the building’s been on the market for a while — and there are a few apartments in the

Topanga

We woke too late on Saturday to head for the desert, so we went the other way: out to the Pacific Coast Highway and up Topanga Canyon. Two years I’ve lived here and it’s less than twenty miles, and still I never made it there until this weekend. It

Los Angeles

My old friend Andy Golebiowski, with whom I fought against wars and intolerance and stuff 30 years ago in Buffalo, posted a video on The Facebook last month. It’s a profile of Buffalo’s architectural heritage, gorgeously shot, and not even a little

Leap

Two weeks ago, lying on my back at 7,400 feet watching the stars peer down at me through a canopy of piñon and juniper, it struck me — once again — that I have been fortunate.

I was in the White Mountains, trying to fall asleep after a day of

Beauty, standards of, changes therein

That’s a California striped racer, Masticophus lateralis lateralis. I saw one an hour or so ago hiking in Runyon Canyon, which is just up the hill from the apartment. The one I saw was gorgeous, charcoal with pale yellow racing stripe, in great

Regarding the African Iris

I taught myself to read pretty early in life, age three or thereabouts. My memories of the time before that are unreliable, mainly remanufactured from stories I’d heard told about those days, with a layer of remembered visual image plastered atop

Stripped clean

Yesterday a blue-eyed storm blew through Los Angeles. The wind had been out of the desert for some days, calm and a bit warm, and then Tuesday morning we were buffeted. It got cold, for Los Angeles, and the wind reached 30 miles an hour at

Sonnet uncompleted

Tonight I ran, and cursed this aging frame
each mile run cursing harder than the last
each breath more labored, every pace the same
and sorry degradation, milestones passed
chained to my ankles. Streetlit sky a sieve,
the sodden city noise damping

Desire Lines

Longing defines the storied heart. Contentment is pleasant enough, but it kills story. “And they lived happily ever after.” Fukuyama arrived at this realization, though his dystopia — unlike those of Orwell or Huxley — was unintended. But he knew

Significant absence of rabbit mortality noted

I seem to have left a few people hanging as to Thistle’s fate.

He’s recovered about 98 percent from the head tilt thing, and about 99 percent from Interstate Five through the Central Valley. All that’s left of either of those traumas is a slightly

Rain

Los Angeles is getting the edge of a major storm, the first rain of the season. People at the bases of the burned mountains look nervously upslope, waiting for debris flows. Elsewhere it is calm, and the earth swells, drinking.

Tomorrow the Los

Dodging the random beautiful

I have been thinking about love these days.

This is of course nothing new.

Relationships end and they begin, relationships maintain themselves and they wither. These days I am both buoyed by love and burdened by it. The last vestiges of my

Fire

The largest fire in Los Angeles County history was apparently set on purpose.

Outside the fire zone itself, the result downwind is still dramatic and deadly. Even as far away as Northern Arizona, the results of the fire are what you might call

Mountains, ardent

It was somewhere around Mendota that I saw the hawks, a dozen of them, in a mixed flight of ravens around a stand of eucalyptus. The hills to the west were glowing, their sculpted structure plain in the slanted light. The Raven asked why the hills

Harper Lake

It came to me on the scent of creosote, cloying and resinous, and wet dust driven before a summer desert storm. A sudden gust out of the glowering east sent the little car skittering across the lane, and as I tightened my hands on the wheel the

Seen

… (continues)

Slow down.

A shriek from outside, a sickening noise almost inaudible, and then another I couldn’t identify. Tires on a curb? And then angry shouts, a deep, bellowing male voice, a woman crying hysterically.

I’d been dressing for a run. I went outside.

An

Metaunderfoot

Erica caught the above photo of me taking this photo of a snake. If the snake has a photo of Erica taking this shot, then, um, it’ll bite its tail or… … (continues)