Category: Yo Ivanhoe

I spent much of my early life looking for fables, and can remember the days when the spring woods would be full of them. If you climbed back up into the bluffs above the Bitterroot creek and nosed around under rocks and in the shady areas beneath the stands of big oaks, you’d find fables…

Death had become bored with humans and their ridiculous rituals, their lip service to life and its preciousness. How could he take them seriously after all the centuries they’d been mucking up his once mostly orderly routine? Once upon a time he’d had a pretty cut-and-dried job description. It wasn’t pleasant work –it wasn’t meant…

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering. –Denise Levertov, from “Every Day” Bring me all your dreams, You dreamer, Bring me all your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world. —Langston Hughes, “The Dream Keeper”

I know these things about my barber: He refers to his wife as “the battle-ax.” Or, alternately, as “the fucking battle-ax.” Though uncommonly foul-mouthed, even by my debased standards, his favored exclamation remains the sturdy and old-fashioned, “Oh, my stars!” The project of his old age is reading all thirteen volumes of the Lewis and…

He wasn’t even sure anymore if he could jump, could get his fat ass off the ground. One more pathetic little milestone on his way down the drain. Still, he could always find consolations. There were people out there who couldn’t get out of bed, people for whom showering was an adventure worthy of Indiana…

So this fucking midget walks into a bar with a chimpanzee on his shoulders, right? It’s cold as shit, and both the midget and the monkey are covered with snow and frost; the chimp, in fact, looks almost like it could be dead. There’s not another soul in the bar but the blind bartender and…