Articles written by parnell thill
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Notes from the small pond: Designated Maniac
When everyone’s drunk or getting there on a Saturday night and you’re not, there’s an island you inhabit where the intense loneliness of being surrounded by other humans stings less than during the s...
Notes From a Small Pond: Masks
There’s a spot on the walking path along the north side of the river, west of the trestle, directly across from where my brother works on the trains that bump back and forth between there and S...
Notes from the Small Pond: Manifest Destiny
The world cares. Sorta. The earth doesn’t give a darn. Planet Earth was so much healthier without us on it. Planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, as a lava- and gaseous-laden living thing f...
Notes from a small pond: Robbed
When I was 7, my Gramps let me hold a 1903 Colt .45 six-shooter revolver and shoot it at a line of Olympia beer cans he’d arranged on the branch of an oak tree somewhere out in the Ditchbanks. I h...
Notes from the small pond: Away
When you’re away, the things you thought you’d do but didn’t before you left seem monumentally failed because, in truth, you could’a Got-R-Done, and you didn’t because you didn’t and you make a thou...
Notes from a small pond: Blood
These are the nights. Hot like Vietnam, and muggy, the heat heavy and wet like a blanket drenched in lilac mead. The smell of butterflies. The box fan screaming I’m Trying! plowing hot air, me next t...
Notes from the small pond: Pondering the genesis of evil can leave one 'awake'
Awake. Verb, intransitive verb. (A person can “awake,” as in Wake Up [verb], or a person can be awake, as in: “I’m awake [intransitive], so turn off the alarm.” These states are mutually exclusive...
California has got its own vibe going on
California … knows howda pardy. If you’ve never been, you should and if you have you should again and if you live there you should consider your unfathomable good fortune and shrug off that whole San...
Dirt
The thing about dirt is that it is. Dirt. When you’re planting raspberries, you want some, and with geraniums too, and maybe lilacs. Petunias. You get the point. The other thing about dirt is that i...
Aubrey
Once your daughter makes it in the world, you’ve made it. You’re done. Your sons are someone else’s problem. When your daughter makes it, turns out happy and satisfied and loved and actualized, maybe...
Raise your hand
Raise your hand if your mom’s dead. Raise your other if your dad is, too. Raise whatever other appendage you can if you’ve got dead parents with whom you wish you could have a few more words, a few...
Colonoscopy:
Unfake News: The colon is quickly falling out of favor and some linguists believe it will be all but extinct by 2050 or so. To geeks like me, this is very unfortunate, given the rich, bloody,...
Driver's side
Upon exiting the driver's side door of a standard automobile, the left leg is kinesiologically compelled to load kinetic energy at hip - something like a ski jumper crouching on descent in order to...
Train Squatting
There’s no freedom like stolen freedom. Just ask Henri Charriere (“Papillon”). Or the dude from “Shawshank Redemption.” Talk to anyone who’s spent time in county jail. At the risk of tripping over the...
Nikolaos
The old man squints through the cold air and down to rooftops and updrifting chimney smoke, silver-snow farm fields, the golden glow of street lamps, dark holes of wilderness. The night surrounds him...
Be Thankful
It’s been two weeks already but thank God that’s over. With Thanksgiving behind us we can get back to all the self-serving, egomaniacal, narcissistic, consumer-oriented hellness that the holidays are...
Liar's blues
19. My dad catching me by the ankle as I desperately scramble up the stairs in a vain attempt to escape the well-deserved spanking I was about to endure, him fresh home from a double shift in the...
