Excuses are superfluous when invited to drive the pinched length of the Columbia River Gorge. Verdant green drips from every vertical surface. Slender fissures in rock yield to tumbling waterfalls. The roadway cantilevers over a rabid, fizzing cauldron of river, droplets racing themselves to a union with the Pacific. Vertigo evaporates with eye contact, drinking images resplendent with wet, with ooze, with confounding drama where it joins the desert and is sucked dry.Continue Reading

After talking with my mother about self defense on the Natchez Trace, I decided to go in a different, unorthodox direction. Because I’m me. And because my mother’s my mother.

(Carlos Ovalle, you have NO IDEA how apt your t-shirt suggestion is: FORGET MY GUN. BEWARE OF MY MOTHER. Seriously, people. When she arrives in Mississippi, nobody better mess with me.)Continue Reading