Cooking With Gas

We now live in a house whose stove is fueled by gas. There’s nothing unusual about this–it’s just different, that’s all, and requires a bit of getting used to. Things heat up more urgently, somehow, altering my cooking routines and confirming one saying while debunking another. I can now appreciate that when you’re “cooking with […]

Fear and Loathing in Tulare

No fear pertained, but a loathing still is palpable–like the proverbial bad taste left in one’s mouth. More than a week after having attended, feeling the need to be…I don’t know, scraped off, say, remains. This is the take-away from April 27th’s Tulare Local Health Care District (TLHCD) board of directors meeting. TLHCD’s has been […]

Welcome To Modern America

Rich Text Editor, editor1, Press ALT 0 for help The warden now gives me 14 months. That is to say, at roughly this time next year our fifth–and last–child will be readying herself for graduation from high school. Which means that–having been in harness since 1987, accumulating 127 father-years to my 54 years of age–the […]

The First Thing We Do

I’m fairly certain you know how this famous Shakespearean line ends; if not, Google it. I am–with no small irony–misappropriating it for my own purposes. I’d like to apologize for the fact that the delivery of our 17 March edition–Erin go bragh–was, for a few hours, postponed. It was my doing. I had been receiving […]

Read On, Macduff

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird— 1961’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction–died on February 19 in the same town in which she was born in 1926, Monroeville, Alabama. I have never read her novel. More properly, I was never assigned to–although I attended a truly great high school. If you Google “the […]

Dear Max

Dear Max– I hope this letter finds you well, but given the state of the postal service these days my hope is simply that it finds you at all. Maybe this is why nobody writes letters anymore. So–if this has indeed found you–know that I’m also sending my love to Anne and the Mongol Horde. […]