by Jessica Berta
New York is in a sassy mood tonight. Umbrellas are flipping. Dinner plans are being cancelled. Delivery men are 
cursing. The rain drowns abandoned newspapers in the streets. Forgotten, they turn to mush. A crack of lightening bursts. The room flickers, and I crawl under a blanket.
This weather forces us to retreat indoors like sardines returning to a stinky tin can. There isn’t enough room to play… but the sour mood is temporary. Storms like these don’t drown New York of her energy. They simply give her a chance to relax. To recoup. To make hot chocolate and watch a Hitchcock movie.
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by C.A.B. Fredericks
photos stolen from the Associated Press
…Something looked weird over the ocean. A thick cloud of some kind. Smoke from a wildfire. When the moon finally appeared, it was blood red and angry and half-hidden by the massive plume. Everything was becoming terrible.
—Ken Layne, “Santa Barbara Burning,” LAist.com, 11/14/2008.
2008—Tea Plus Two Hours
Montecito, California, is burning; the press dubs it the Tea Fire. Montecito is a wealthy enclave of a wealthy enclave of a wealthy state in a wealthy country; of course when the town burns, it burns like tea. Though it’s also the boarding school fire, the three-day eventing fire, the cabin in Tahoe fire. It will be blamed by the pundits and the crazies on every sort of sin, every sort of intolerance, every environmental crime, but secretly, we the pony-less will blame it on the ponies.
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by Ian F. King
Solitary walks always seemed like they should be a sure-fire way to find inspiration, and until not too long ago, I would, on occasion, take walks on the misguided premise that I could experience poignant moments on purpose. It seemed as 
though perhaps the monotonous physical exertion of shuffling down a sidewalk might alleviate all the extraneous thoughts that distract you from distilling the essence of the moment, and the body’s movement pushes all of the most dynamic blood cells up towards the brain, leading to revelations amplified by a raised pulse.
A couple of times on such a walk, it felt like I came close, like the time when I turned a corner and marched straight into a Saint Patrick’s Day parade I didn’t know was happening, and watched people of all ages and sizes dutifully playing music and dancing and marching together on a cold and grey afternoon. Then there was another time when I walked into the West Indian Day parade, which I also didn’t know was happening.
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by S.K. Evans
I don’t need booze to send stupid emails.
So maybe I’m not the target for Google’s new Email Goggles, which, at certain times of certain days, force you to take a math test before you can send that incriminating email—perhaps protecting Joe Sixpack from that 3am Sarah Palin rant. This ingenious utility will undoubtedly aid in the prevention of 
drunk emailing, which, to put all things in context, is the new drunk dialing, the old drunk texting, and the decrepit drunk Facebooking.
Yet emails can be much more harmful. They’re longer, meatier, and the recipients are generally less forgiving about misplaced modifiers, run-on sentences, and misspelled words than they are in txt msgs.
And much like some people say, “I don’t need drugs, I’m plenty crazy without them,” I don’t need booze, I’m plenty capable of sending stupid emails sober. In fact, most of the painful, awkward emails that I’ve sent in my life have been composed while staring at spreadsheets—eyes glazed over—at work or on particularly lonely Sunday mornings.
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