Rocket Man

A few days ago, a man named “Mad” Mike Hughes died in California. I didn’t know him, although I knew of him: his goal in life was to prove that Earth is flat. He kept building rockets to take him high enough that he could gain photographic proof, and said he didn’t care if he […]

Cat Squall

Wasn’t it the poet Carl Sandburg who had something creeping in on little cat feet? Well, that’s what the snow is doing here this morning, despite the shrieking alarm I just got on my phone. While watching the news from my bed, surrounded by cats and dog, I saw one little flake wisp out of […]

A Guy Walks Into a Bar and Says Ouch

I am no good with jokes. I like hearing them, although not at the expense of ethnicity or hair color, and sometimes they really make me laugh — but I can never remember them. There’s a bookkeeper who works in the building that surrounds Pat’s Screen Printing, and she knows a million jokes. She stops […]

Exercising My Demons

I don’t know that you can call it an epiphany when it’s been months in the making, and the realization spread over hours, but I had at least a long moment yesterday when the obvious finally smacked me in the face: I need to make some changes. As I have done every day for several […]

Keeping It Under His Hat

While many of my late friend Bob’s other friends were angling for his guns, there was only one memento I was hoping to procure from his “estate”: his red sombrero. But somewhere along the way it vanished, and I figured the best I was going to get was our friend Pete’s photo of Bob wearing […]

Calendar Daze

Thirty days hath September,/April, June and November/All the rest have 31,/Except February, all alone. You know how brilliant insights occur in the early hours of the day? Well, of course they don’t, but I was sure I had one anyway this morning. It was a solution in search of a problem, which certainly seems like […]

Wrong-Way Germophobes

Once upon a time, an aviator named Douglas Corrigan set out to fly from New York back to Long Beach, California — and somehow instead landed in Ireland, earning the sobriquet “Wrong Way Corrigan.” Well, these days he seems to have plenty of company. Sunday morning at breakfast my friend Pete, a biologist, said that […]

Celebrity Cons

This morning I am considering celebrities and how so many of us seem to lose our sensibility around them — and sadly, I have to include myself in this consideration. Nowadays, if some celebrity by chance were to wander into Pat’s Screen Printing — [It could happen: once upon a very long time ago, actor […]

Welcome to My World

Yesterday, in a day that was focused and busy and didn’t offer a lot of room for blogging, I ran across my friend Paul, whose birthday happened last week without acknowledgement from me. Until yesterday — better late than never, I hope. It took a minute to recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing glasses, which […]

Movie Romance

It’s Valentine’s Day, which I wasn’t really giving any thought to, it not being one of the Major Holidays on my personal calendar, but now CBS has got me thinking. As part of their feature on Valentine’s Day (the kick-off: don’t send money to someone you’ve only met on-line, followed by notice of an auction […]