"E" Is For Elephant Beetle

Huge versions of small things are pretty neat.

"D" Is For Dugong

Thousands of years ago, dugongs may have helped inspire the myth of mermaids.

Cats Of Old San Juan

There are stretches of the bulwark dotted with crumpled kites. Simple kites and fancy kites and kites with crazy colors, all snagged on the wall separating the field above from the footpath below.

And cats. What seemed like hundreds of them. Lazing on the rocks and flickering across the walkway. Looking at you like you're the one out of place, standing there with your camera, tourist that you are.

Lou Barlow

Maybe it's not surprising that the high-water mark of my musical career was left in a Chinese restaurant. (I'm a fan.) Either way, there it is. In a strip mall an hour or so outside Los Angeles. Overlooking a round, family-sized table that once sat Dennis, Catherine, Rael, Dan, Lou Barlow and me.

It was profoundly odd, fumbling with chopsticks in such prestigious company. But in came the lunch specials and away went the empty plates. And slowly as we all ate and talked, maybe a little of that oddness lifted, replaced by the unique sense of peace only a full belly can produce. And maybe I felt like there was no telling where being in a band could take me.

I kept that fortune for years.

"C" Is For Coelacanth

Maybe for every mutation that alters the course of progress there's a thing that stays utterly the same. Just sitting there, too stubborn or aloof to adapt, content with or indifferent to its obsolescence.



And maybe, as sad as it might be for a thing to be stunted so, there's something comforting about its survival. Some part of you that just says, "Phew."