Sporks For Sticks – an essay about presence, by Corby Anderson

You know how a particularly out of place noise in a certain situation can just grate on you? Well, times that by two. Sure, I could get up and leave, but I was the customer here. I had purchased food and had a right to sit and read my paper in relative quietude, right? And here was this oblivious child, no parent in sight, ruining my long-anticipated Baconator moment! Were I an urbanite, you can just about guarantee that my outraged gourd would resemble a bobble head and my outstretched finger a windshield wiper.

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Eulogy of Martha Rogers Tullis

Whether it was just on a run to the store, out to church, or on a cross-country trip, Martha was rarely seen without a classy ensemble, usually consisting of a perfectly tailored, brightly-colored jacket and matching blouse, smart skirt or pants, and accompanying shoes. And lord, she could accessorize – she had a myriad of interesting broaches and pins, jewelry and purses, scarves and shawls. That beautiful silver head of hair of hers was always precisely done, and had the unique ability to maintain it’s base form in the strongest gale or the wettest snow.

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Grin and Bear It, by Corby Anderson (National Steinbeck Center “Travel’s With Charley” 2010 essay contest winner)

Thoroughly isolated, there was nothing for us to do but play. And so we did, with gusto. We chased lizards, mapped stars, made up ridiculous songs about fleas and sticks, and barked profound declarations into the night.

When the urge struck, I wrote languorously in my journal while Bear napped in the scrape in the dirt. Or I napped and Bear sat alertly, defending our nest from wrongheaded buzzards and flies and long-tailed mice. Once a day I sat in the dirt and drew pen sketches of the monocline, and each time, as if keeping a schedule, Bear, as he is wont to do, wrestled with mud-stuck rocks in the now-trickling creek.

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Change is Good, Change is Good…Repeat Until Change is Good – Commencement Address to the 2010 Graduating Class of the Pacific Valley School

I am a long ranging observer of interesting conditions, a freelance archivist of sorts, a commentator of the mundane and the spectacular alike, an exaggerationalist, a dramatacist, and a story teller with heavy leanings towards what I call “sentimental absurdism,” which is a way of saying that I like to write about things that I have experienced and hold dear, while reserving the right to frequently go way off the reservation and twist a relatively true story into something…better.

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Radio Reunion: Geeks, Stoners, and a Few Cheesy Zombies Come Together to Celebrate a Rock and Roll Rebelution an essay by Corby Anderson

Out in the Quad – the place where used wads of gum flock to pool to die, and where brunch carts circle daily against the marauding hordes of hungry students, we come upon the Senior Tree – an old majestic Oak Tree that has for years been the epicenter of student spirit and localized patriotism.

Now it sits moated off by a deep well of dirt and an outer wall of cinder, it’s formerly paint caked trunk stripped to the bark and ringed with chicken wire. The sight is astonishing. If there is one thing that I thought would never change, it was the regular painterly molestation of the Clayton Valley Senior Tree.

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SOAKED! In the Muck at the 13th Annual Legendary Boonville Beer Festival

Out on the edge of the field, near the bratwurst vendor, a crowd had gathered in a circle, which looked all the world to be a fight in progress. Closing ground through the muddy grass, I see that it is actually an impromptu female mud-wrestling match. There, in the middle of the circle, several well-endowed ladies were grappling in the rain and goopy mud, which they gleefully smashed each other into. They were very dirty girls, completely covered in the grey-brown sludge, and seemed quite thrilled by the attention until they were upstaged by what turned into a full-on mosh pit of fellows who took no quarter of one another, punching and thrashing each other with brotherly aggression.

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Just a Quick Drink

Money is drinking miniature bottles of Bud, and as a way of attempting to fit in, I chide him for his tiny beer. “Ikn get two a deez fer lessn ona dem,” he says. The photographer who I am following around is named Crystal. She is a sprite thirty-eight, but looks ten years younger, and carries herself as a model. Her hair is chopped in strange bolts – like a young Pat Benetar. Some people, at least two of whom sit within ten feet of me, think that she looks like a dancer. Money slurs out an order to buy us each a drink on his tab, and thumbs a soiled wad of bills. At first I demure, not wanting to take Money’s money. He looks like he might need it more than I need a drink. “Let him buy it,” whispers the photographer. “Always accept a drink,” she adds, smiling. We order a full-sized Bud and a Fat Tire.

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Comedy Work is Serious Business – short essay submitted for the Hotel Jerome’s 120th Anniversary Celebration essay contest

With my head to the sky, eyes transfixed on one particular, postcardesque snowflake descending through the tangerine glow of the klieg lights, I never saw the ten-foot section of lighting truss coming. The steel beam clipped me right in the neck, sending me reeling backwards down the ramp, sliding the last five feet upside down like a human curling stone.

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(Link) A Crack in Hell, by Corby Anderson – published today in the Canyon Country Zephyr magazine

The Border Wall, in theory, is intended
to keep Mexican laborers from crossing il-
legally into America. It is made of various
shapes and configurations across its span,
but for the most part consists of rusted
piping and landing craft materials that
were reclaimed after the first Gulf War. It
reaches eighteen feet high in most places,
although in some long reaches the wall is
but tangle of steel beams welded together
into a low slung vehicle barrier. The Bor-
der Patrol recons the new wall to hold up the average illegal immigrant from crossing by
an average of only four minutes. At one section south of Tucson, just a mile or less down
the road from where the construction crews were building more wall, we found a simple
rope ladder attached to the wall the instant that we started traversing it. When motiva-
tion is strong and options few, desperation hastens improvisation.
Still, good people die every day in the American desert, opting to avoid the new at-
tention and to go around the wall, further out into the heart of the furnace. They walk
for dozens of miles into the desert in disparate groups led by coyotes, their guides who
require thousands of dollars to lead these incursions, a profitable venture than now finds
most of them in league with the narcos.
They die of exposure, of thirst, of assault.
Women are raped and abandoned to
wander towards their helpless end. Men
are murdered in their sleep. Coyotes turn
on one another out in the tragic canyons,
the black market loads that burden them
and their flocks worth more than a life’s
worth of guilt or conscious.cable that serves as a conduit to profession-
al production sound as well as a potential
noose, snagging easily if allowed to drape
low in the rocks and brush, and that is how
expensive cameras get destroyed and hard
planned shots lost. The devil is in the de-
tails in this line of work, and the details
are unending. Running through the des-
ert in advance of a quick moving band of
college kids, I was to stop my cameraman
from sure disaster, but to let him move if
the obstacle that he was about to encounter was deemed to be passable in the least. My
gear was innately catchy, and I felt like a giant piece of double-sided female Velcro run-
ning sideways through a narrow hall of hooks. When the flat land running up into the
hills gave way to the veins, and then arteries of the canyon system, we followed leader of
No More Deaths, an athletic, tall and bearded man in his mid-twenties to lead us to the
proper canyon, where he had warned us a squalid scene awaited. Carrying water jugs
and empty backpacks, the activists trailed along behind their leader, who had recently
been given a ticket for littering when caught leaving full water bottles out in the desert
in a high traffic area, the Border Patrol ticket coming just days after he had discovered a
dead teenaged immigrant girl’s body in
similar terrain.
We alternately followed behind at a
brisk pace, or ran ahead to get shots of
them marching past, our network inter-
preter and guide grumbling at every step
about being asked to carry the tripod. As
a self-promotional desert rat, I expected

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Reason # 923 why Craigslist is a cest pool of degenerate punks; and my letter to Vikram the irregular freak

Get a hold of yourself man. People are out here looking for work who are desperate to get a legitimate interview. I am one of them. You send me an invitation to interview tomorrow, addressed to the wrong person, without a phone number and then don’t respond to my email when it is all of 2 hours before the business day is over leading to the day of this “meeting”, and bet your rude ass I am going to look you up and try to hammer out a time.

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