Blog
Asking questions can lead you to new places. Writing helps bring you to answers. And more questions.
Here, I’ve collected writings on a number of topics. Sometimes they’ve been published elsewhere, and other times they’re just for this blog.
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The authorized biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. needs your help. The film, which has been thirty-some years in the making, launched a KickStarter campaign Tuesday to crowd-fund $250,000 to finish Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. Filmmaker extraordinaire Robert Weide was only twenty-two when he met Kurt, then sixty, in 1982. Yet the two struck up…
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When I wrote my profile of Holy Cross, I had to cut down to the essentials to capture the neighborhood as a whole. So, while I want folks to read my article (Click here: Holy Cross Neighborhood in Downtown Indy Resurges with New Homes, Businesses) I’d also like to share these stories. Society of Salvage +…
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From the pinnacle of Highland Park you can see a lot. It’s the second highest point in Indianapolis, so Chase Tower and the downtown skyline are highly visible. But so are the 136-foot Holy Cross bell tower, a fence with three Rottweiler statues, a development of brand new $300,000 to $500,000 homes, a one-acre urban…
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Why mass-produced National Homes are interesting (to me)
Update for 2022: In 2014, I wrote an article for Angie’s List Magazine about prefabricated homes. In putting together this blog, I wanted to pass on some history that didn’t make the final cut. However, at this time, eight years after doing the research, I don’t really consider myself an expert on this topic, and…
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Santiago Atitlàn, Guatemala, 2005
Fifteen hundred people buried alive, & I stood over their bodies through five feet of displaced earth, judging— no, measuring—by how high soil crept up still standing buildings, hiding doorknobs on el hospitalito. I can’t say the things they needed to live were what killed them, only their method of acquiring; I heard about the…
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DEUS EX MACHINA
It all started at the very, very, absolute end of everything. There was no crimson red sky announcing the apocalypse. It was quite sunny, although slightly smoky. Birds chirped, choked on the smog, repeated. Then came the thunder, trumpets, and angels descending. Almost the whole world was in awe. In a far off desert, anti-modern…
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Pemaquid Point, Maine, 2013
Peering from the lighthouse deck, the ocean stretches like a sheet for a bed with edges _____________that no toes _____________can overhang— green grass & crags trap thin layers of sand between the sharp sloping shore and sea; millennia of subduction pinstriped the metamorphic rock fashionable, igneous collisions, _____________& layered granite _____________slabs—unsliced kitchen counters— with the…
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How we got engaged
One week ago, I asked Stephanie Snay to marry me. We went to the IMA to see the Neo-Impressionist Portrait exhibit, and when we left, I said we should go for a walk in the 100 Acres. The weather was changing from the previous week’s pleasant October-in-July back into the muggy, blinding Indiana summers that…
James Figy 