Running Iron Report

It’s four am on Super Bowl Sunday and I’m wide awake. I don’t know why. The forest outside the windows is impenetrable in the dark. I woke up about an hour ago to the hooting of my old friend the owl. Our relationship is made more interesting by the fact that I’ve never seen him. I only ever hear him … Read More

Here’s hoping you enjoyed the sudden appearance of the Steampunk Party Balloon over the United States as much as I did. There’s something delightfully throwback, something Jules Verney, or perhaps League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, about this mysterious apparatus that has so beguiled and bewitched the public imagination. Nothing triggers a Sean Hannity meltdown, or constricts the reptilian pupils of foreign … Read More

Even as a child I could take a punch or, if required, a stinging slap, but I hold no grudges. Call it an act of immersive journalism. Or maybe it was just the beginning of an artful effort to understand the power of chain reactions. Who were these strange people that had created my even stranger parents? They were clearly … Read More

SBF, of course, was well on his way to becoming a cardinal in the Church of Our Holy Climate after dropping forty million in the collection plates of mostly left-wing politicians–and somehow convincing Major League Baseball’s umpires to stitch the FTX logo on their uniforms. The former earns a big meh, because that’s how America really works. But the latter … Read More

Yesterday I travelled down into Bend with my bride to buy some new cell phones. This seemingly innocent task turned into an excellent lesson in modern commerce, and maybe some other things, though hard lessons are difficult to draw from the early part of the second millennium which is a kind of historical bouillabaisse. … Read More

“Such is time: everything passes, it alone remains; everything remains, it alone passes. And how swiftly and noiselessly it passes. Only yesterday you were sure of yourself, strong and cheerful, a son of the time. But now another time has come—and you don’t even know it.” … Read More

Who is this guy? I see him everywhere. He might be in his mid-thirties. He’s wearing baggy sweatpants, destroyed shoes, and a hoody over a baseball cap. He’s pushing a bicycle up the sidewalk and smoking the last raw nub of a cigarette. Sometimes there is a plastic bag with dubious cargo hanging on the handlebars. He’s in no particular … Read More

I had coffee with Jim this morning and can report that he too is alive and well. We are nearing the end of an election cycle and you can probably imagine that in his role as the Editor in Chief of our newspaper he is like the Gypsy Moth battling a storm in the Roaring 40s. The politically devout—a growing … Read More

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