Prefacing Note: The following extraordinary story, absolutely as true as my memory serves me, which is quite well, has never been documented before, and through the years only brief details of this strange encounter have been discussed among family and intimate friends – including my immediate family members, all of whom were there (as well as the family dog, who was terrified) . The story should have been told publicly long ago, but there is always the reticence – for fear of ridicule or worse – that inhibits the ego and keeps one silent about such things. – lap/alw (At right is the old dirt road as it looks today at the crossroads where the encounter occurred. The alien craft approached from the upper right of the photo while we were driving in the direction of the view. I first stopped the car near the point where I took this picture.) The incident took place shortly past midnight on a summer night in the early 1970's. We were on our way home from a drive-in movie in Riverto...

As the years wear on I find myself, more and more frequently, looking back over my long life with conflicting and alternating mixtures of quiet comfort and satisfaction, unsettling regret and remorse, and nostalgic memories of all that has gone before. Though I seldom dwell on the past for long, I often pull incidents, places, people, and things through the cobwebs of my mind for use in my writing. For a writer, drawing from personal experiences is the most valuable reference library there is. From time to time I consider the influences of the roles that others have played in the shaping of my life – the significance of my father, mother, and siblings, for instance. It took me decades to realize that my mother had more influence on the character of my mind and my personality than my father did. My father was a here and now kind of person, and he was a friend and companion more than a father, for we spent years fishing, hunting, and exploring together when I was a kid – all the while i...

Long ago, when I was a parent of three grade-school aged children, IBM introduced an elementary level science textbook and workbook to our school district that included a section on the Big Bang Theory , and the outrage began from angry Christian parents who wanted the books removed from the science curriculum and banned from the library shelves because they flew in the face of the biblical version of creation by arguing that time, and not eternity, was the cosmological reality. The Roman Catholics had a theory of their own, developed, in part by a Roman Catholic priest, called the steady state theory . Our little gym was packed for a final hearing with the PTA and school board, I remember, and it seemed to me that the majority of those who were there were dead-set against the science course. Tempers flared and voices were raised. I spoke for those parents in favor of retaining the program, arguing that the theory was developed from Albert Einstein's basic Theory of Relativity, and...

In this house-of-cards world that seems to be collapsing inward upon us from every conceivable angle, everyday-people seem to lie supinely in apathy watching it all come down around them. We are an indolent, intellectually lazy, bunch who collectively respond to any form of oppression or trouble with an attitude of there ain't nothin' I can do about it . I can't tell you how many times I've heard those who I love and care about the most in all the world say those words. The situation is close to dire enough to bring me storming to the battle-front from my reclusive world. Why are we allowing this to happen? Our very existence as we've known it is being systematically swept right out from beneath our supine bodies as slick as a cloth from a table, leaving us exposed, unprotected and naked, to the nefarious winds of oppressive change. For 30 years and more, some of us have seen this coming and yet, knowing it in our hearts, feeling it intuitively in our guts, we'...

It's Christmas – a time when some of us do a lot of soul-searching and reflecting in a nostalgic sort of way. And it's not that I feel old; I really don't. I'm in excellent health, comfortable with my life except for obsessing over my Zahir, and I like to think I'm pretty much up to date as a techno-user in this new world of technology and gadgets. Yeah, I've got my computers, my BlackBerry, and I do quite a lot of semi-technical work. But the thing is I don't really enjoy all this hi-tech crap any more, and so much of it seems to me to be entirely unnecessary, or even counter-productive. I think it causes stress in humans, but maybe not in rats. Yesterday my BlackBerry mysteriously lost its Internet service, and between the time it went down and the time my service was restored, I was tense, irritated, sweaty under the arms, and upset with RIM – an outfit that prides itself in its technological expertise. When I finally got to talk to a real person about th...

My uncle, Albert Pendergraft, committed suicide in 1944, apparently from a longtime overdose of alcohol and depression. He blew his head off with an S&W .38 Special revolver. Born just three years before his death, I have no recall of the event, but Albert, no doubt unintentionally, left a life-long gift for me – or for anyone else who cared to partake of it for what it was. So far as I know I am the only one who did, though my older brother may have. The gift was what I believe was his suicide note – a poem of love for the land he roamed that depicted a key part of the philosophy of his lonesome life. For several years late in his life he was a ditch rider. For sure, he was a recluse: he had great love for Gaia, but little love for his fellow man or their gods. Albert was born on a remote ranch in Johnson County, Wyoming, in 1894, just four years after Wyoming became a part of the United States. The son of a Texas Trail cowboy, he spoke so seldom that he became known as Silent Al ...

"Every organized [patriarchy] works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny." - Robin Morgan Considering the huge flap over the Halloween-influenced hanging of Sarah Palin in effigy, I wonder what today's social circles would think of the real thing -- the actual hanging of an innocent female -- except that in this case the murderers were the politically and socially elite ones, and the female victim the scapegoat for those men and women who had come before her and an inhibiting omen for those who would come after her. It happened on a July afternoon in 1889. The following is excerpted from the Preface to my historical novel manuscript, presently in an edit iteration, The Sweetwater Conspiracy: the Legend of Cattle Kate. In the summer of 1889, during the settling–up of the American west, a sensational news story drifted off Wyoming's high plains, making international headlines, and shaking the resolve of the westward pioneering spirit. The story told of th...