“So as this deployment draws to a close, I have to ask myself a few questions. The type you take some time to reflect on after it all comes to a close and hope that when you find answers to them, you will become a better person in the future, whatever ‘better’ may be. So… [Read more…]
October 3, 2009
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People collect things. This happens all over the world for different reasons. Children collect bottlecaps, rocks, erasers, stickers and baseball cards just for the hell of it. A woman at UCLA used to crisscross the school grounds collecting plastic bottles and soda cans. In many places people collect scrap metal, combing through trash heaps and… [Read more…]
October 3, 2009
0
ALAMO, Nev. — How to describe the darkness? If Las Vegas is a city of light, rural Nevada is a creature of the opposite nature. When night falls, a blackness, thick as velvet, engulfs the world. When the last light goes, drivers turn their cars’ headlights to the brightest setting, rolling cautiously down the highways… [Read more…]
October 3, 2009
0
Taipei was many things — an open-air market where vendors slaughtered chickens live; a rollicking parade of glowing placards advertising shops and eateries in the night; packs of cabs and scooters lined up at every stoplight, poised to fly forward in a salvo of exhaust. We arrived in the mid-1990s. Like most families we knew,… [Read more…]
October 3, 2009
0
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Las Vegas is a place of natural beauty, a place that speaks of mankind’s limitations. Raucous as it is, this city is an outpost of civilization, set in a lonely valley against elegant mountains of bleached, red rock. Drive fifty miles in any direction and you will find yourself in the… [Read more…]
October 2, 2009
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“You live in the middle of nowhere,” my friend Andrew said when he visited me in the Inland Empire. Yes. Sort of. When I brought Zak to visit our office in San Bernardino, there was a straw-colored tumbleweed in the parking lot, perfectly round, about two feet tall. My knowledge of Riverside and San Bernardino… [Read more…]
October 2, 2009
0
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — At 4 a.m., the dogs begin to bark. Like them, I can’t sleep. In Los Angeles, 10 miles from the beach, the Santa Anas whistled in the evening. On days when they were strong, they howled, hanging over the neon lights of Sunset Boulevard, dancing across the glossed black surface of… [Read more…]
October 2, 2009
0
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — The first time I drove up Interstate 215 was on a dark night, the shadows of palm trees rising beside the freeway, a vacuum-packed mattress in the back seat, the rest of my life in the trunk. I turned left off the exit, rolled past some railroad tracks and wondered where… [Read more…]
October 2, 2009
0
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — I knock repeatedly. I knock again. The man behind the door opens it a crack, tired, eyes weary. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m a reporter with the local paper, and I was wondering if you might speak to me.” He looks to be about 20 years old, like me. “I was wondering… [Read more…]
January 22, 2010
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