I was skimming through the newspaper when I inadvertently glimpsed the fundamental nature of the universe—a glimpse of which physicists (and artists and poets) have been searching, and mostly missing, for millennia. I guess I was just in the right place at the right time. “To my mind,” wrote the noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, […]

The new releases at Rasputin’s Records were directly to the left of the checkout line. That’s where I first saw Art Pepper staring out from the cover of a Blue Note twofer.  With those haunted eyes and sunken cheeks, he had the refried look of the nasty habit. Friends of ours back home had that […]

He says the speed of light is an absolute, a universal physical constant: 299,792,458 meters per second, no more, no less, but then I say that’s nothing to how quickly my mind races when he’s away the way he is now, away in the night when I know-damn-well-know that he’s not still at work, that […]

It’s hard to sort out after all these years when I really started to care about MUSIC as a THING. It played such a huge role in my life, since before I was even conceived, that it’s almost no wonder I haven’t thought about it much. Except to know the music I wanted to listen […]

I approach the monastery of green corrugated steel in a forest of cedar and hemlock. Film badges and radiation dosimeters line the rack by the gate. I clip mine to my belt and enter. It’s a typical Pacific Northwest night. The cool, misty air caresses my face with the clean smell of evergreens. I cross […]