Bieler's Broth
A diet of mostly alkaline foods, especially green ones, can make you feel heroic: clear, calm, solid, steady, focused.
Cindy Crawford emerges sylphlike from a treatment room.
Being immoderate, I stayed on the thin green gruel longer than I was supposed to.
There’s a chapter of my life during my late 20s and early 30s that I refer to as “the Hollywood years.” I was living with my ex, an exacting man who badgered me constantly, in an unfurnished bungalow tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, high above the teeming, seedy parts of the city. He’d written a bestselling book and went off on the lecture circuit for a year; meanwhile, my own writing career had begun to take flight, and I had magazine assignments that stretched as far into the future as I could see. I spent many nights alone in that spooky house, which the actor Rudolph Valentino had supposedly bought for his mistress, listening to it sigh and creak and groan.
I frequently stayed up all night to meet my deadlines, haunting around our near-empty house, fueled by mug after mug of strong black tea. My diet involved a lot of toaster waffles and frozen chicken sausages. As my relationship disintegrated and …
Beyond Dead Pool
A trip down the Colorado
A hideous accounting trick is destroying America’s rivers
Lake Powell is the American Pompei, preserved under oozing tonnages of mud
Cash-register dams prop up a forsaken nineteenth-century fantasy
When we got to the North Wash boat ramp, we pulled up, four of us in a truck towing an inflatable rib boat on a trailer, but there was no ramp. Instead, we were confronted by a steep dirt bank, almost a cliff, crumbling into the fast current ten feet below. It was May, 2005, and the water of Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, was at its lowest level since May, 1969. We’d come to put a boat on the water in order to find out what we didn’t know, and what no one seemed to know: What was happening now that the Colorado River, after being smothered for 42 years, had begun pushing back?
This ramp of sorts is not where North Wash empties into the Colorado River — that is a mile and a half downstream — but is nevertheless called the North Wash boat ramp. I mention this because it is a pattern in this story, that things are officially called one thing in spite of in reality being quite …
Blame the Butcher
The syringes and the diabetes testing strips are just two sides of the same bad penny.
We are not the giants we were meant to be
What have they ever got done?
Poverty, like butchery, is the commodification of the parts to the desecration of the whole. America is a people in squalor, trafficked by godless, market-based renderings. Our bodies are monetized, while our souls are demonetized. It’s unholy, the grifts we bear. From birth house to death house, we are hustled for parts. Our parts.
South Phoenix is 50 percent Latino, 25 percent black, 25 percent white, and 100 percent piss-poor. Myself, I’m three quarters bastard, one quarter Irish. We’re always working, so we’re always in the Poor House. When my girl Cricket and I moved here in 2009, peak Great Recession, we came for proximity to the cancer-discharging fuel terminals and concrete plants where the trucking jobs are always available. We were both hazmat tanker truckers at the time. I still am. I drive a bomb that has yet to go off.
The air here is acrid from auto parts recyclers, plating factories, …
