One day You’re in the classroom, in the fifth grade maybe, and you spend too long staring out the window. You notice the flickering light of an approaching storm, the faces of angels or gargoyles rising and falling in a cauldron of clouds. You turn your attention back to the inside of the classroom (the… Read more »
I am driving my father to the airport on a rainy Monday morning. He’s flying out to attend the funeral of an old childhood friend. There is this girl on the shoulder of the highway, maybe 15 years old with a green mohawk and a leather bomber jacket, hitchhiking, holding a cardboard sign that says… Read more »
Regular Voice readers will recognize Bill’s inimitable style: a lyrical, and often surreal, take on this topsy-turvy world. In this slightly more prosaic outing, he examines the ambiguity between friend and foe. This column originally appeared October 5, 2007, in issue 1537. It’s a night in late summer. we’re gathered around the barbecue in the… Read more »
It’s a night in late summer. we’re gathered around the barbecue in the back yard of my friend’s cabin on the Sunshine Coast. There are maybe a half dozen of us, drinking beer and eating grilled oysters. There’s this American guy from Idaho–checked shirt, baseball cap, one of those foghorn voices you can hear from… Read more »
Okay, all right. So You’re walking along this path, and you can’t quite remember how you got there, or what you are heading for. The path leads through a darkened wood. You seem to think that you’ve been walking along this path for a very, very long time, yet it seems completely unfamiliar. There is… Read more »
?It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.? – Confucius Better to walk a mile along an empty beach on a moonless night, with the banshee wind howling in your ears, taking away your breath. Better to hold a laughing infant, with all the love and care in your soul,… Read more »
Tonight, the wind is howling around my house, and cats are screeching in the night. There is a tall, crooked man with a broad black hat standing at the bottom of my garden, leaning on the fence. There are eyes staring at me from the branches of the tree, its leaves scraping across my window…. Read more »
Love is a pop song. It’s sentimental and radio friendly. It’s smooth and slick and bright and shiny. That’s what some people believe. In truth, though, It’s a graveyard song, a drunken chant, a rising wail. It’s a Transylvanian dirge played on out-of-tune cellos. It’s a country and western song about train wrecks and widows?… Read more »
As a child, his parents take him to visit a circle of enormous pagan stones standing in a silent field. Inspired by this, he practices transforming himself into rock. Stone, he reasons, is impervious to pain. A rock is not afraid of darkness or weather or time or death. One molecule at a time, he… Read more »
Our Mother, who art in Haida Gwaii and Venice and Montreal, who art walking alone on a midnight coastline, who art in Stonehenge and that greasy-spoon breakfast spot on Commercial Drive Hallowed be thy name, and hallowed be the hip upon which thou swingest thy babbling infant, and the beautiful creases around thine eyes, and… Read more »