Essays
The ones we let in
I’m not a pet person. It’s not that I don’t like animals. Like people, it just takes me time to warm up to them,...
A long ugly story
Sometime in the fall of 1979 I got a phone call from a friend of my older brother. He wanted to know if I...
‘Cold or not, God is present’
I think about the shoes.
I think about the shoes; 60 of them, lined along the east bank of the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary....
Naked Belief
My favorite professors were the ones who’d set me up a space heater before I arrived. Even in the early fall months, just as...
Truth follows
A woman wept at the corner of Table Mesa and Harvard Lane, and all I could do was put my hand on her shoulder.
I...
Stones of remembrance
The side table drawer in my grandparent’s Arizona living room was always full of playing cards. There was the deck with Van Gogh’s self-portrait,...
A masochist’s love letter
I love telling the story of my wisdom teeth. Anytime someone mentions a tooth extraction or dentistry mishap, I weasel my experience into the ring...
Just a Dawdream
Bar 40 is assaulting my will to live.
I’ve spent two hours clawing away at this brief descending figure in fifths, trying to harmonize and...
A portrait of the small town as a young man
I turned off my phone and put it in my desk. I quit Facebook, and closed my email accounts. I deleted my LinkedIn profile,...
The bikini
I remember the first time I felt fat. I was 7 years old, and so excited to spend the day at the pool. I...
7th annual essay issue
Every year around this time, Boulder Weekly publishes a collection of essays written by the people — editors, publishers, contributors — who put out...
2021 in the rear-view
The space-time continuum seemed to warp this past year, contracting and elongating: While the post-election, pre-insurrection days when election truthers seemed crazy but not...
