Reading books is a wonderful thing, and something no one seems to do as much as they want, myself included.
Imagine if we read things the way we eat.
The future is bright, unfortunately
Tag: odessa
If you haven’t heard, Osama bin Laden is dead
It’s a week now since we got the announcement from President Obama.
In 20 years, they’ll ask, “Where were you when you heard the news?”
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For Easter, children and the spring that hopes eternal
I’ve said before that I hate spring, and I do.
This is not the climate or location for it, even in the best years.
For the longest time, I thought the smoke from all of the wildfires was just the usual dust blowing in the air, the brown particle overcast of West Texas common to the season. It’s too dry to keep down the dirt, and that’s true, yet it’s now too dry for there to be much left unburnt except for dust, it sometimes seems lately.
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The South will rise again, then Sherman will reincarnate
It’s the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, all this year and for the next four, and it started, really, really, with April 12 and Fort Sumter. Now we’re getting into the sort of thing mustachioed Southern men can actually re-enact, and be interviewed about while dressed up on the History Channel.
(Or rather, be interviewed about on the History Channel as it existed 15 years ago.)
This is the good part of the Civil War, the one everyone likes with its gallantry and troop movements, and “Oh, brother-against-brother; they had such courage on both sides, and who really knows who was in the right?”
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No, we shouldn’t really make junior high kids smoke
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
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.
This is a democracy; we get the government we deserve
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’
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
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.
Fred Astaire is dead; what hope have we got?
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.
Continue reading “Fred Astaire is dead; what hope have we got?”
ADJ 