Each year on St. Patrick’s Day my wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. 18 years ago on St. Patrick’s day we eloped and were married at the Chapel of the Bells on 4thStreet in Reno. Ten minutes earlier there had been a funeral in the same chapel, and I was so broke I couldn’t even afford the VHS tape of the nuptials. Two decades later I wouldn’t change a thing.
Cool Water
Out here in the mountain west water is always precious, particularly when living on the east side of any of the hundreds of mountain ranges between the Sierra-Cascades and the Rockies. Out here, the east side of anything is always the drier side, the rain-shadow side, and so eastsiders live within a perpetual loop of drought and diminishing returns. The diminishing returns are a result of aggressive settlement beyond the 100thMeridian, which is desert, and has been a desert since before the end of the last Ice Age.
Give A Drunk A Drink
My weekly Thursday RIR post was delayed due to the Great Snow of ’19. As you read in Craig’s post “Meditations In White,” Sisters was walloped by a mighty winter storm at the beginning of the week. I got up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday to this charming sight: That’s my truck under there. One of […]
Meditations in White
I stopped believing the weather woman about 2 months ago. This was a deliberate act of rebellion because riding the prediction roller coaster was damaging my nerves and upsetting the dogs. Calls for snow this winter have too often dissembled into blue skies, warm chinooks, and mud in the paddocks, and although I have sympathy for anyone who signs up to predict the weather in Central Oregon my stores of good humor were used up three fake storms ago.
An Ace in the Hole
Over the years I have paid particular attention to my family history. Not because my family is in any way unique from anyone else’s, only that from a very young age I have been imbued with an abiding appreciation for the experiences of my ancestors. I’ve wanted to know them, or at least about them, and so maybe learn something about myself as I’ve traveled through this life. And it is the Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri branches of my family — Norwegians, Germans, and Dutch — who all wound up farther west at one point or another, that I have learned the most about
Fear
There are people among us who think they have all the answers. They don’t. Blowhards and know-it-alls, particularly those of the political stripe, are really just people overcome by fright who have morphed into frenzied tent-revivalists, and who would love to baptize you in the church of their own nightmares.
Apostate Blues
Readers of this site generally accept the proposition that our American experiment in self-government is taking on water. I would argue that, all things considered, the ship is actually beginning to list heavily under the combined weight of a wholly unaccountable administrative state, a surreal burden of debt we will leave to our grandchildren as a kind of cynical stocking stuffer, third-world education standards, tribal strife stoked by retail journalism, a new and prevailing cultural adulation of the victim mentality, meme-think politics, and a Congress that is more or less directed by the parasitic whims of a guild economy.
Sunset 2030?
Cardi B and Nicki Minaj are feuding. Stormy Daniels has described Donald Trump’s penis for us. A big storm in North Carolina demanded 24/7 coverage, even if reporters had to fake it. Meanwhile, in other news: The Shanghai International Port Group is expected to take management of a new private seaport at Haifa, Israel in 2021, bringing a Chinese […]
Repair As Rebellion
“…When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, repair becomes a political act.” — Stuart Ward, repair café volunteer My grandfather made his own electric lawn mower out of a pair of scrap metal blades and a washing machine motor that he pulled out of one of the machines at an apartment complex he owned, and repaired. […]
Come and Take It
A bill disarming citizens is precisely the kind of nonsense one would expect to be issued from a group of people whose own solutions have been ineffectual since their inception, whose entire history is steeped in fraudulent claims of divinity, by unconscionable wars, slavery, and assassinations, and whose only real purpose from the outset has been to control the minds, bodies, and coffers of others by the precise application of fear backed by the threat of annihilation or eternal damnation.
From the Universal to the Particular
Living in one place for any length of time supplies a kind of general knowledge, but that tepid way of knowing is often vague to the point of uselessness. I may be able to see and identify, for instance, the particular song of a western meadowlark, and I may thrill at the extraordinary memories it calls forth from my youth on the Great Basin desert, but other than the sound it makes and the emotionally pleasing memories stirred up in my brain, what do I really know about western meadowlarks?
Dispatches From The Wasteland — No. 1
The social and economic fabric of the 21st Century world is a highly complex, interconnected web. And all complex systems are fragile. Best to keep in mind that we’re ALL no more than a few days or weeks of disruption from the world of Max Rockatansky. Those charged with holding the lid on the cauldron can testify […]
