• General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    A Winter Morning’s Hike With My Friends Henry and Kevin

    January 21, 2015 - By 

    I managed to invite two friends to tag along with me yesterday morning on a hike in my beloved Annadel State Park. The  unusual thing is they came along in shifts. My longtime running-biking-hiking-drinking-yakking-deconstructing-the-world buddy Kevin accompanied me on the first and most arduous phase, keeping a pretty serious pace as we hoofed it up Rough Go Trail and around Lake Ilsanjo on a crisp winter morning when fog lay heavily across the distant valleys. When I got home, my friend Henry was waiting for me in the easy chair in the corner of my bedroom, paying me a surprise…

  • General Nonfiction

    Rereading “Walden,” Forty Years
    Later, on My Kindle

    March 9, 2013 - By 

    “Simplify,” Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden. I am reading this advice in the airport, awaiting a jet plane excursion, just moments after downloading a 464-page collection of his works onto my Kindle, delivered courtesy of the airport wi-fi via Amazon’s “Whispernet” technology in a matter of seconds. Currently, I have Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Arnold’s Culture and Belief, Homer’s The Odyssey, Aristotle’s Poetics, and the entire New Oxford American Dictionary packed onto my Kindle, too. And this mini-library has barely begun to crack the device’s capacity. I’m lugging these hundreds of thousands of digitized words onto a plane in…