Joshua Heston

A clearing sky. A blackberry winter, again. The moon is a timeless thing cradled in the midnight above. The hubris of the day slowly passes into night, into forgetfulness. The day is done but the night is alive with the dead. Too often the dead of past regrets, of half-remembered thoughts, of memories sweet and bitter all. Ghosts are troublesome things. They don’t exist, of course. Just the result of an overactive imagination. A bit of neuroses with that fragment of potato that Ebenezer...

Every day this past week, it seems, I’ve been bombarded by some opinion of “artificial intelligence.”

The old short bed Chevy blocks the way to the weedy gravel in front of the old repair shop. Tires are stacked against the old metal building, rims swimming with mosquito babies. A beat-up side door is blocked open and from inside comes the sound of metal on metal and occasional swearing. The big elms sway in a breeze somewhere between spring and summer. The sound of a Sawyer Brown song lilts from a cassette deck covered in cobwebs. Across America, a thousand-upon-a-thousand shade tree...