An oligarch walks into a bar…
…and the patrons immediately realize the danger and leave. I hope whoever says, “May you live in interesting times” is given the job of White House Tweet Control. Or perhaps Consigliere to the Attorney General. I’ll take boring times over these adrenalin-draining times any time. The stench horn of national news that once stunned us now barely registers as we long for quaint bygone comforts, [...]
2020 vision?
In her poem Blackbirds, the poet Julie Cadwallader Staub wrote, "...and when I turned my face upward / I saw a flock of blackbirds / rounding a curve I didn't know was there / and the sound was simply all those wings, all those feathers against air, against gravity..." She asked, how do they do that? And then: "If we lived only in human society / what [...]
A Conspicuous Vanity
I have avoided writing about overtly political topics in this blog, mostly because it’s divisive and I need space for other aspects of my writing life. Satire is a reliable outlet for frustration, angst, and general world-weariness, but as I try to digest the events of yet another exhausting week of political crisis in the first days of 2020, satire serves neither this topic nor [...]
How to become an ink-stained wretch.
I subscribe to a daily email roundup and summary of local environmental news called the Salish Sea News and Weather. Yesterday’s installment contained a story from Seattle’s KOMO News called “Got squid? Why officials say you should catch and eat it out of Puget Sound.” It went on to say, “Forget fishing for salmon. Puget Sound crab pots are so passé. Squid is in.” The [...]
Why are pigeons gray? And other vitally important questions.
I'm following up on a previous post on the meaning of home and how laughter helps define it, and on another post on the science behind the benefits of laughing. Here’s an example, one of many, of how the weekly round table of six friends who meet at our local pub, drove, in less than a minute, a perfectly good conversational topic right over the cliffs [...]
Happy Dystopia Week!
Yes folks, it's that time of year again, where thoughts turn to zombies and we are reminded by the Center For Disease Control and FEMA that the federal government has preparedness pages for the apocalypse. I kid you not, see for yourself. And here. This year the only difference is that in Congress and at the White House, shit just got real. The whole country is [...]