Called to Terror
I picked up Amanda Coe’s debut novel, What They Do In The Dark, not because I had heard of it (which I hadn’t) or because it was propped up on the bookseller’s “staff picks” shelf (which it was),…
Produce A Decent Cartwheel
Good news, bad news. First the good: another sunny day and hardly any traffic on I-94. You’d think that the Apocalypse might have slowed down global warming since there are so few of us left alive…
Triangle
Hey Jake It looks like it’s time to take matters into my own hands. Yes, I understand that you have priorities to balance. And yes, I understand that you can’t introduce me to Sarah at the…
Migrate!
Since moving to LA last fall and becoming one with the highways, on their shoulders I have seen a dead skunk, at least a couple dead possums and something I think was, at one time, a dog. But…
I Do Some Embarrassing Things for Love
I realized I do some embarrassing things for love while standing outside the women’s restroom at the Arclight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. The Artist had just ended a few minutes earlier. I’d already taken care of…
Use Up Some Fuel
Tomorrow I’m going to use up some fuel and drive into the old neighborhood to look for Levi and Dingo again. I’ll also check on how Dad is doing with the store. Your sister-in-law Eve used…
An Open Letter to the Editors of Star Magazine
Dear Sir or Madam: Recently, my quality of life took a rather abrupt downswing when I was unexpectedly required to accompany my mother on one of her weekly visits to the chiropractor. Some undoubtedly banal meeting…
The General
The past few months here in Milledgeville, Georgia, have been unseasonably warm, even for this part of the world. I’ve noticed two immediate results. One is a bumper crop of enormous flying German cockroaches (“palmetto bugs”)…
Perhaps He’s Been Reincarnated
Here’s what I know about our people: Your dad is dead and has been since well before the Apocalypse. It’s a shame you won’t remember him. Sometimes I like to entertain myself with the idea that…
Microclimates
My dad just served me a weather post, in the most improbable way. We’d just woken up and were sitting at my kitchen table, in my fifth-floor walk-up, looking out my window over the flats of central…
Spanish Stroll
A week ago, Ben Lerner won the Believer Book Award for his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, beating out fellow Trop-approved author Jesse Ball. Ostensibly, Leaving the Atocha Station is a curious choice. It spurns…
State of Trop
Dear Readers, Today ends Trop’s first week of existence, so I thought it’d be a good time to explain a few things. Let’s start with logistics. We’re going to offer five full-length posts per week—one per…
And Females Are Expected
And females are expected to be nice.
Welcome
Welcome to our home, Acorn Hill. Acorn Hill was built for a Great Man nearly two hundred years ago. Most people see the house as a monument to him; its columns uphold his legacy, the tall…
I Was Strong Enough
Back in the days when I was strong enough to read depressing literature, I read The Drowned and the Saved. The author claimed that in the concentration camps the nice people with him died, so if…
The Challenge
Yesterday, Evan wrote that he sympathized with the challenge facing me in this task of writing creatively about the weather from a place with a climate as famously uneventful as Los Angeles’s: here, we barely have…
Stevens Square Park
The two and a half acres of Stevens Square Park are home to a few dozen oaks well over a century old, a pergola, a playground, a basketball hoop, a pump-handled well—also almost a century old—and,…