Scarlet Letters

Home, slightly sunburned and exhausted from an awesome ArsonFest! This was our fourth (?) ArsonFest, joining my dear friend Mitzi and her friends and family to celebrate Independence Day with shootin', barbecue and watching things go boom in the sky, just like the founders intended. It is always a great honor for me to be included in this annual tradition, and I honestly can't imagine what the Fourth would be like without it. Shooting was great, and as always we were happy that those who actually own guns let us Illinoisans shoot as well. Ian turned out to be quite good with the 9mm pistol and a .22 rifle. I brought a batch of chocolate chip cookies as our barter for admission to the range. A brief panic ensued when a sizable squall hit in the late afternoon, and we scrambled to tack down the rainfly on our rental tent. We had put up the tent at 1 a.m. without any familiarity with the tent's design, so I think it was a testament to our (read: Mitzi's) brilliance t...

Sitting on a rooftop in a cool breeze that tastes of early summer. Watching a glorious sunset begin to settle behind the city skyline. Deep breaths of fresh air between photo bursts of the sunset, all shades of deep orange and rust-red and softly glowing rays breaking through cottony scattered clouds. But no words. Notebook and laptop silent before me. If I cannot write here, where can I? The words won't come. Ideas, images... But no words.  So I force them, and of course they are awful. Cliches that fall on the ear with the thud of anvils like "glorious sunset." How did I do this in my previous life? I can't remember. The words just came. Sometimes they hid, sometimes they were rough. But never this rough, and never for so long. I was going to write about the beast in the storm. The creature that rode into a small town on the screaming energy of a tornado, and the things it did in the night between the thunderclaps. He's a nasty beast, and he wants to be written....