Dropping bombs on civilians, including children, is unmannerly. Firing rockets at your neighbors isn’t nice. Hiding rocket launchers in residential neighborhoods or near hospitals is naughty. Stealing your neighbors’ land is unkind. Announcing that you intend to annihilate the folks next door generates hard feelings. Confining your neighbors behind massive walls and restricting their freedoms, […]
Martin Levowitz
Life Among the Humans: And Let’s Not Even Mention Mom
After an art opening in Tucson, a bunch of us went out to eat. Sitting right across from me was someone I didn’t know, a pleasant-seeming woman, in her forties, I’d surmise, whose salient trait, for the moment at least, was a rather extraordinary display of cleavage. Her bosom was fairly erupting out of a […]
Life Among the Humans: The Foreseeable Perils of Taking a Dump
In biology class they made a big fuss over the body’s organ systems: respiratory, circulatory, digestive, etc., usually leaving the excretory system for last, both because it resides at the end of the line, and because, to those who’ve been potty trained, excretion will always seem a bit funny or embarrassing. Evolution, too, discourages comfort […]
Life Among the Humans: Beyond Beyond
One sunny autumn day, 12 years ago, our next-to-last dog, Punk, was cashing in his chips. We took him up Mt. Lemmon to a meadow in the woods, his favorite place. He had barely enough strength to walk. We helped him get down from the car. He had to yield to gravity, and wobbled down […]
Life Among the Humans: A Little Like a Locket Worn Within
Photo by Martin Levowitz On New Year’s Day, Kathryn and I were rushing home, abruptly, from Taos, New Mexico. A friend had called to say Mookie, our sweet, even-tempered pit bull, was dying. We’d had him for almost 12 years. Both our family and friends really loved the old guy. And so, we hoped to […]
Embarrassment Plucked From the Jaws of Defeat
It’s said the mythic gates of hell are guarded by a dog with 50 heads. Our hometown, too, has 50 cops at either end of town, or so it seems. Those year-round, festive, flashing lights are mighty pretty, too: red, white, and blue. This sleepy hamlet makes a lot of money off the fools who […]
Your Friendly Hometown Pharmacy (A Letter to Walgreens)
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: (And I damn well think it should concern someone.) Crawling around on my hands and knees outdoors at night in dangerous neighborhoods is not part of my normal routine, but that’s how the paramedics found me in your parking lot at 12th and Valencia in Tucson on the night of […]
Life Among the Humans: Victoria’s Secret
Big Steve, a contractor friend from Oracle, left Arizona in the 1970s and moved to Galveston, Texas, which, in the mid-1800s, had been a sort of Gulf Coast Bisbee: a thriving, deep-watershipping boomtown. Alas, the city’s boom went bust when Houston had its harbor dredged. Poor Galveston just disappeared from view, except for a bad […]
Life Among the Humans: The Minefield
Here’s an old Sufi teaching story: Walking home late at night through the quiet streets of his village, a man is startled by a loud noise. Turning the corner, he sees a dog and a donkey, fighting. “Friends, friends” he implores, rushing between them, “Surely there’s some better way to settle your differences.” Whereupon the […]
Life Among the Humans: The Whole Universe Sucks
Here comes the summer heat again. We open all the windows every night, then close them when we get up. This works quite well. I haven’t yet been on the roof to flush the cooler or replace its pads. Even more delinquently, I haven’t yet installed our window screens, so while the house is cooling […]
