Category: The Other Day

No, we shouldn’t really make junior high kids smoke

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The other day I went to visit my parents’ home to say hello and pick up some mail that fails to migrate with me to new residences.

As I parked and walked up to the door, I went across their lawn and first thought they’d started laying down straw before I realized it was grass, or used to be.

“Wow,” I said when I got inside. “You’re sure taking this water-restriction thing serious, aren’t you?”

My dad said, “What water restrictions?”

(He didn’t really.)

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The Main Drag

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There’s nothing about Jimmy to suggest he’s a showman.

At 34, the short, somewhat chunky Hispanic looks polite but entirely modest to the point of boring. Hiding his smiles under his baseball cap and his shrugs under his hoodie, he stands in a dimmer part of Club Passions and sips quietly from a longneck.

Jimmy isn’t the last person you’d expect to go perform on stage, but he is toward the bottom of the list. And that’s before you notice he’s got a bad hip and a limp.

But that was a workday. The next time I see him, it’s a Saturday, and the weekend changes things. Jimmy has put on his dancing shoes, girded his loins — and torso — and put on a dress, wig and makeup.

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This is a democracy; we get the government we deserve

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In my younger, more mentally virile days I could have written a very, or at least somewhat, sophisticated allegory using President Obama to represent all the various recent abuses of local-government transparency as opposed to open records laws written and intended.

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It’s also quite a lovely song from ‘Dark Side of the Moon’

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The other day I was walking through a parking lot and spotted a suburban with a Nimitz football sticker on the windshield. My first impulse was to find a rock and smash the window in.

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Anything you’re used to is reality

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There once was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up wondering how he could know he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming he was man.

The 4th century B.C. Chinese philosopher credited with that, Zhuangzi, isn’t asking a real question, just something about the nature of knowledge. But, it’s something we’re all familiar with, waking to an intense feeling that evaporates under the rays of the sun.

Last week I spent more hours unconscious than conscious, I think literally.

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Fred Astaire is dead; what hope have we got?

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All good things must come to an end, which is a shame made palatable only because all bad things end as well.

The other day a friend called me in the early morning hours, knowing, I’m sure, that I’d likely be awake still and not at all mind if she’d been drinking a bit.

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And the King James Bible turns 400 this year

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The other day, someone posted a comment on the online version of my column regarding a passing sort of mention to Pentecost.

“I was really digging this until the Biblical reference. Fantastic way to isolate everyone but your Christian readers.”

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It’s a good thing the future can’t dump its trash on us

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The other day I went to the top of a hill and found a piece of glass and large wooden peg in the ground by itself.

(In journalism, every story needs a peg; that is mine.)

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I couldn’t decide what to do a column about this week

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I sort of thought about doing something about the Super Bowl, but it’s now four days past, so the relevancy of the moment has escaped. Unfortunately, I don’t have aphorisms or anecdotes to illustrate that point. Erm, seize the day and make flee the sun. Or something. (I’m sorry.)

In any case, I’m entirely too happy about the outcome of the game: that the Pittsburgh Steelers lost and Green Bay Packers won, in that order.

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The uniformity of franchises makes the individual shine through

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The other day I found myself needing the sort of assortment of stuff that once sent folk scrambling all over town all weekend, but now can be had in about an hour at any Walmart.

I shop in the living-alone bachelor way indistinguishable from a man preparing for the apocalypse. I buy enough canned food to last six months, enough soap, toothpaste and toilet paper to last a year. Shampoo, two years.

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