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 floor and woke up the dogs. And then the morning sky, still dark but ripening, opened up with hailstones.
Nous Sommes Tous McEnroe
Some of you might remember Jean-Marie Colombani’s heartfelt headline and editorial in Le Monde, on September 12, 2001: Nous Somme Tous Américains (We Are All Americans). Later, in an interview with NPR, Colombani was asked how conscious he was of the American reaction to that headline. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of nothing. I was just conscious that we were entering a new period of our history so we had to be strong in the way of expressing it.” And it is with that same spirit, of strength, conviction, and awareness that we have clearly crossed into a new period of history, that I am proclaiming, one day before my 51st birthday: We Are All McEnroe.
White Hats, Black Hats
While out delivering The Nugget recently, I listened to an episode of the American Spy Museum’s Spycast podcast, featuring Ric Prado. Enrique Prado was a covert CIA operative in Central America in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sought to build an insurgency to overthrow the Communist Sandinista regime, which had come to power in a revolution against […]
The Royal Nonesuch
When the poet John Berryman leapt off a bridge in Minneapolis he was sober. He’d been largely drunk up until that morning but he was scarred forever by his own father’s suicide and probably every tall building looked something like a hell-hole.
La Plaza
I won’t bore you with details of 18 hours in delayed flights, an unexpected stay in Denver, or any of the weird third-world adventures accompanying domestic travel that are now routine in modern, robust, and according to President Joe Biden, the excellent economy and upward trajectory of the United States. This is the same man that tries to shake hands with thin air, but I can tell you that if you want to be treated like a human being, or expect appropriate customer service, do not fly United Airlines. If you decide to fly United Airlines then what happens to you next can only be your own fault.
Shaved By A Drunken Barber’s Hand
I don’t need to read the papers To know the heart of man This world’s been shaved By a drunken barber’s hand — Slaid Cleaves/Rod Picott, Drunken Barber’s Hand Last weekend, Slaid Cleaves returned to Sisters to play The Belfry. The Austin, Texas based singer-songwriter works in a tradition of folk songwriting and storytelling that celebrates the courage and resilience of ordinary folk […]
Instructor Pelayo
It is axiomatic that all tactical training that is any good must involve rubber boats and cold water. If your training does not include rubber boats and cold water you cannot possibly be training for anything more rigorous than seizing a bicycle from a child. My own training involved far more cold water and rubber boats than I care to remember, but there is something in that combination that very quickly separates the wheat from the chaff, and over time builds incredible teams.
Maximum Zuckage
“I know it’s preposterous — but is it preposterous?” — CNN host Don Lemon I pretty much gave up on CNN back in 2014, when I read an interview with then-new honcho Jeff Zucker, in which he explained that CNN’s news/business model, built to compete with ratings juggernaut FOX News, was going to be picking a single story […]
The Philosopher’s Stone
One thing I’m trying to avoid is the indignity of being wheeled into the day-room for group exercises at “Autumnal Leaves”, which is a raisin farm in Ricky Gervais’ excellent series After Life where his father—suffering from dementia—mostly doesn’t recognize him and makes increasingly inappropriate sexual commentary to the nurses.
My Kingdom for a Durable Tarp
They are apparently incensed that Joe Rogan has bucked the system, hunts his own meat, has eaten Ivermectin and beaten Covid, has a wildly popular podcast, and discussed all of these things out loud. And also because he smoked weed with Elon Musk on the air. Or something. It’s hard to know, except that the battle against irrelevance is on-going, and as a figure in The Madness of King George once pointed out: Character is required to endure the rigors of indolence.
Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World
Oh, this country sure looks good to me But these fences are comin’ apart at every nail. — Neil Young I love me some Neil Young. Saw him live a bunch of times in some truly epic concerts— rocking with Crazy Horse, solo acoustic; the whole wild, erratic, eccentric range from the deep Americana of Harvest Moon to a bone-crunching Sedan Delivery. […]
Primo Somno
Doesn’t it just seem, some days, that we are being outplayed and outmaneuvered at every turn? One wonders if the underwater cables have been tapped, the cyphers compromised, if there is a mole in every briefing room, or if we are just as inept and delusional as appearance suggests.
