National Geographic magazines once came with great maps. One of them detailing the Midwest states I hung over my bed in a tiny room I shared with three guys on a floating cannery offshore Togiak, Alaska. In far-flung, gray and barren Togiak, I needed reassurance I was still somehow attached to civilization, or at least to Wisconsin. I picked up…
She was a pale-skinned girl working at a coffee shop like all the other pale-skinned girls working at coffee shops, her light brown hair parted in the middle and tied back into a short ponytail. She wore small hoop earrings and a gray hoodie and jeans and she moved in an efficient way, making lattes and Americanos for customers at…
The Fourth of July is something to make you think. To think about the nation, how it got here and how it’s going and where it’s going and whether it’s going to last, or to last in any semblance of the great words written on the day of its birth. Great words were the legacy of that first Fourth: Life,…
Let the record show: Our republic was saved by stout-hearted black and brown women in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Phoenix who convinced their neighbors to stand in line for hours in November weather to cast a single ballot. By all rights, this was our most unlikely group of saviors. Of all the people in the country, this is a…
I have some friends who have guns they keep in the event the government comes to take away their rights. My friends are misguided because that’s not the way tyranny works. Rights aren’t something you can lock up in a vault in your basement. The government can take away your rights without firing a shot, or you getting a shot…
Back in January, I suffered headaches for a month. I’m used to headaches. I had migraines as a kid. Headaches come to me regularly enough I seldom even bother with aspirin. They last a day and are gone. But January’s headaches were different, located at the very top of my head with a sharp pain like someone using a chisel,…
Warmer weather kicks off free junk season, when people put their discards out on the curb with a “free” sign, enticing passers-by to believe they’re getting a bargain instead of hauling off someone else’s trash and saving them a trip to the dump. Free junk is a recent twist, something that didn’t happen so much 30 years ago, when people…
Oahu, Hawaii – Public officials on this island paradise fret coqui frogs and the pretty girls who primp along the road at the public botanical garden at Kaneohe. Photography is prohibited on the garden road and right in front of us a blonde plops down in the middle of it, spreading her colorful skirt out across the asphalt while a girlfriend…
It’s a sad day for anyone west of the Mississippi. Larry McMurtry, the great voice of western Americana, is dead of Parkinson’s disease at age 84. A career novelist, screenwriter, critic, bookseller and book scout, McMurtry created Gus McRae, Duane Moore and Hud Hannon, outsized characters who leapt from his books to movie screens in the late 20th century. His…
I bumped into Sarah Palin yesterday while streaming Randy Rainbow videos on YouTube. There she was, our former governor, on an Internet infomercial advertising the services of some investment counselor. Using her Alaska credit card, Sarah was comparing investing in the stock market to hiking in the wilderness, pleading with viewers that they might get mauled on Wall Street without…