Running Iron Report

I won’t be voting this time around. And spare me the lecture. You may allow yourself to get cornered into a bad vote between Donald Duck and Porky Pig. I won’t. The same way I won’t sign a loyalty oath to a nation that is equally make-believe and doesn’t even exist. I’ll take my chances with the small, and shrinking, … Read More

One problem with all of this high altitude lying is that us common folk now have a difficult time discerning the truth, in those rare moments when someone is trying tell it. It is somewhere in that miasma—where the truth being offered is a lie, and the lie being offered turns out to be the truth—that conspiracies are born and … Read More

A couple of years ago, before the plague struck planet earth and accelerated the already impressive pace of batshit crazy behavior here on our little blue ball, I had a fellow who helped me out around the ranch. I’ve written about Mando before, sharing the story of him arriving one day on our porch with a rake and a tarp, … Read More

It isn’t much, this fort, and I strain for verisimilitude. It might be the very sad museum, where the most interesting item on display is a woven Clatsop hat. The rest is fraud. Intellectual and physical. Reconstructions of reconstructions. The people inside shuffle and wheeze in unison behind their masks, a phlegmatic choir requiring oxygen and historical handrails. It feels … Read More

I like to think of Vin as a kind of ancient bard telling the story of Ulysses around a campfire. He was a master scene-builder, and could seduce a listener into the story of a young pitcher, just called up from the minors, making his debut. He would make that story something like your own, epic and inspiring and familiar, … Read More

I don’t raise bees anymore but I’m still working on my Theory of Everything. In physics, the big TOE is meant to unify general relativity (all the big stuff) with quantum theory (all the little stuff) to create a grand unifying theory of the whole enchilada. Mine probably isn’t as ambitious, and I realize I’m running out of time to … Read More

Every once in a while, I’m in the mood for some over-the-top mad-science/military-horror mayhem. When the mood is upon me, I turn to Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series. They’re a hoot. Here’s the very first caper — Patient Zero: When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there’s either something wrong with your world or something … Read More

On June 17, 1859, an otherworldly blast of hot wind blew into Santa Barbara, California, from the northwest. Within minutes the temperature rose to 133°. Cattle fell over, birds dropped from the sky, and old men toppled over in their adobe doorways, dead right there. Or so the legend goes. It’s an interesting story, this sudden simoom, even if the … Read More

And so it was that shortly after breakfast, on an otherwise bluebird morning, that Rosa had started up an accusatory harangue at Wayne, Jake, and Francisco. Francisco had once raised chickens in Mexico until an avian flu wiped out his birds to the last rooster and, post bankruptcy, his wife ran off with a tour guide who specialized in Aztec … Read More

Yesterday I woke up in the dark to a sound like jet airplanes directly above the house. It wasn’t airplanes. It was a sudden, heavy, and sustained gust of wind through the dark ponderosas. Then came flashes of lightning that lit up the room, like some scene from a horror movie, and then basso-profundo rolls of thunder that vibrated the … Read More