drmstream[writing]

The film­maker Erroll Mor­ris asked the ques­tion on Twit­ter, “I am inter­ested in assem­bling a col­lec­tion of sto­ries of peo­ple destroyed by read­ing (Any sug­ges­tions?)” and I wanted to make a smart con­tri­bu­tion but couldn’t shake a faint mem­ory of some­one wrapped in a blan­ket wan­der­ing Easton’s Beach with a tat­tered copy of Far From […]

I lived in a stu­dio on the Upper East Side, a cou­ple of blocks off the river. I put my pay from my part-time sec­re­tary job into envelopes for the rent, food, util­i­ties, stu­dent loans, dog food. Any­thing left over I used to buy beer and cig­a­rettes. I played my sax­o­phone on the streets to […]

An old tree came down at the edge of the prop­erty in a wind­storm. It sat below the cot­tage at the edge of the farm road. The base was mas­sive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, mak­ing it appear fore­short­ened against the sky. The trunks and branches […]

I love the order­li­ness of this page of man­u­script from Jorge Luis Borges. And I love this line from Con­jec­tural Poem. In the mir­ror of this night I find The unex­pected mien of my eter­nity. Both the man­u­script and the line are sur­prises. They are filled with con­trol, cer­tain about their pur­pose and uncon­strained by convention.

When my great-great-great grand­fa­ther William Can­dlish was born in Vir­ginia in 1804, there were 1 bil­lion peo­ple in the world. It had taken thou­sands of years for the world to reach that mile­stone of human sat­u­ra­tion. When my father was born in the 1930’s, the num­ber of peo­ple in the world had just passed the 2 […]

Some­times you type the begin­ning of a query into Google search and as the sug­gested terms appear under the box you get pulled into the zeit­geist like Alice fell into the look­ing glass. I was look­ing for a global demo­graphic info bit and typed “per­cent­age of” into Google. The fol­low­ing list appeared as sug­ges­tions: Per­cent­age of […]