I am overeating bulk bin item #6431 from Sprouts.

4:52 p.m. and my monitor has already gone into night mode.

When the leaves turn red, what is there to say? I can only stand in the sun and admire them.

I am nothing if not future soil.

You say dry skin, I say Thanksgiving for dust mites.

A deer whistle screaming through the suburbs.

Travis Syndrome: Overestimating the significance of the present.

Bizarreness effect: Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

Naive realism: The belief that we see reality as it really is—objectively and without bias.

Bikeshedding: The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Subjective validation: Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true.

Rhyme-as-reason effect: Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful.

Pareidolia: A vague, random stimulus is perceived as significant.

Overconfidence effect: Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions.

Illusory correlation: Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.

Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

You have a wildly imaginative mind. Cherish that. But don’t take it for something it isn’t. The universe does not hang from your antlers.

Glitter, glitter. Love, love love. Poof. You’re the universe.

Language that makes you feel unbound can still be its own form of restraint.

Even Rumi, poor guy. Some of his supposins are absolutely ridiculous.

All I see is cognitive bias. In poetry, art, philosophy, spirituality. Some of it is beautiful, but only because of my own cognitive biases.

Outward, cognitive biases. Inward, cognitive biases.

This beautiful, tender darkness.

What can I know that can’t be unknown?

Meditation music coming from another room.

This dark tunnel, this little death.

Four apples tossed into the courtyard.

There is beauty here, too. Look up.

Inside the tunnel, I wasn’t the tunnel, but I wasn’t not the tunnel.

I return to Kansas to find it’s still Kansas.

Across the street, a man wearing a salmon-colored shirt walks among salmon-colored leaves.

Home: Autumn leaves mingle above bright-yellow caution tape.

Flight: No bird is more in the air than any other.

Square bales of hay have given way to round bales of hay.

From afar, a white grain elevator looks like an old milk bottle.

In Kansas, a scarecrow wears khakis.

In Oklahoma, cows walk northeast through a shorn cornfield.

Like a petroglyph, a handprint stamps the dusty Ford Explorer’s rear window.

The better the land is, the more people want to live with it or exploit it.

It seems my mind is as the environment is: cluttered in the city, open on the field.

The trumpet player on a nearby bench who is fully committed to the wrong notes.

Even storm systems are moving to Canada.

The moon competes with electric signs for attention.

Ornamentation: Four doves in a bare cottonwood.

Just met a young man who is traveling around the country in a 1989 Acura named Steve.

Going to the Petrified Forest today. Totally appropriate.

How is your persona feeling about itself today?

I stand in the room of the pueblo that once held household waste.

The Wupatki Pueblo, silent except for a fly buzzing near my left ear.

In the valley below old volcanoes, cinder rolls out a celadon carpet.

The supermoon rises above a Chevron in Flagstaff.

In Marble Canyon, a homemade NoDAPL sign by the highway.

Inside a canyon, you don’t go back in time. You go down in time.

I walked beneath a waterfall with Dhammapada in my pocket.

Water drips rhythmically from the cliffs and makes its way to the river.

Above a waterfall, teenagers howl like coyotes.

Alone together, we pass one another on narrow trails slick with sand.

Perched on the cliffs, hikers fill the canyon with chatter.

The tunnel inside the mountain where we get to know ourselves.

Who am I to speak for this rock?

The faces of these rocks trace the wind.

A fence made of dead tree limbs.

A deer crosses the highway at the deer-crossing sign.

In the pasture: dozens of buffalo and a single cow.

Sheep huddle inside a dilapidated barn.

And you get a pipeline. And you get a pipeline. And you get a pipeline.

Divided we stand.

I’m afraid the November 14 supermoon will have Trump’s face in it.

Thought I heard a bird in the wilderness. It was just someone’s ringtone.

Dear Kansas, Things aren’t going to work out between us. Yes, it’s you.

Meanwhile, Cascadia is figuring out how to become its own country.

Float me out to international waters.

Today, I will step inside a canyon and go back in time.

Mo(u)rning.

Current mood: Shelter in place.

Sunset at Dead Horse Point: One dozen tourists arrive with their tripods.

Two hundred seventy-five million years of rock can’t be wrong.

I can only hide in these canyons for so long.

A raven’s shadow on the far side of the canyon.

At least my job isn’t driving pigs to slaughter.

I feel like I am moving through model train scenery.

Growing up, I was never far from a snakebite kit.

All the land I love is full of snakes.

A chimney acts as a headstone for the farmhouse that once stood here.

Bare aspen white out the mountainside.

My life needs a runaway truck lane.

Six bighorn sheep appear as suddenly as memories.

Pines offer their dead needles to the earth.

A choir of windows sings the sky back to itself.

Balconies perched beside the highway.

A shawl of clouds around the mountain’s white shoulders.

Stumps stacked like bodies beside the shallow river.

Mountains inside clouds the color of mountains.

Two wild turkeys following the train tracks.

Fences dash the hopes of tumbleweeds.

Evergreens march deep into the field.

Half-buried cars next to the highway.

The earth’s ragged edge cuts the sky.

Grain elevators are the skyscrapers of rural America.

The dead deer is the color of harvested wheat.

What punctuation does the sky know?

Bales of hay stand shoulder to shoulder like commuters waiting for the subway train.

The sudden green of an irrigated field.

Each memory is a black cow lying in a flaxen meadow.

Marriage is a commitment to a lifetime of shared cognitive bias.

The telephone poles are crosses divining the pasture.

I live between wind farms.

From the mouth of the false teacher: “I am always ahead of everyone else.”

I just want to lie down on my therapist’s couch and hope I don’t get bedbugs.

Synthetic thyroid is to natural thyroid as Splenda is to sugar. My brain is a bitter confection.

My words keep getting twisted up like snakes in a hibernaculum.

I’m caught between worlds: world of plain speech and world of rhyme and meter.

In the end, we’re all two-headed ducks who must decide which head to trust: the one that got the brain or the one that’s anencephalic.

Do not throw this world away for the promise of a magical discotheque in the sky.

I don’t even know what to say. I’m watching a train wreck, and I’m not very far from the tracks.

Outside, birds shrill at the threat of a chainsaw, eighth notes shaken from their lines.