The Long Trail of Posts

As COVID-19 began hitting urban centers in March and governors began issuing lockdown orders, sheriffs began quelling rumors of checkpoints and mass arrests. “This is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia where you are asked for your papers!” wrote Sheriff Scott Nichols …
Read More

On a beautiful November day John Maloney delivered a sweet, brilliant eulogy for his friend Frenchy, voicing the admiration we all felt. Marines shed uncontrollable tears, duty bound to serve in Iraq and resolved to stay tight and honor this …
Read More

Please consider a contribution.  I know money is tight and times are rough all over, but we keep trying to make important work in the meantime.  My budget will be short and I will lose money, but I’d like to …
Read More

We have a legal showdown underway in Oregon that has implications across this battered republic. On Monday, a judge in Baker County, Oregon, acting on a case brought by faith groups, invalidated the restrictions on businesses and social gatherings imposed …
Read More

Remember back in January, before we sent SWAT Teams into restaurants after diners and before we jailed hairdressers or governors outlawed vegetable seeds?  If those things don’t disturb every fiber in your body…well, they just should that’s all …
Read More

Governments don’t live together, people live together. With governments you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well I’ve come here to give you either one, or get either one from you. — Josey Wales to Chief …
Read More

RIR reader and contributor Rob L. Thornton has a poem published in the current issue of Dark Mountain. A signal accomplishment, and we tip our hat(s) to him. I stumbled across the Dark Mountain Project in February of 2016. I …
Read More

I’ve been riding every day — weather permitting — this spring which has been great for my mental health and even better for my youngest horse, Remington.  He’s a long four year-old this spring and coming out of our mild …
Read More

One benefit of this Covid Spring is that we all get the chance to reexamine our priorities, which can become wildly skewed in lengthy periods of prosperity.  We’ve been prosperous for a very long time, most of us entirely unscathed …
Read More

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” — Joseph Conrad * “The systems of explanation, historical and psychological, that we employ to explain ordinary human behavior, however extreme, cannot explain Hitler, who represents, …
Read More

In February, 1944, Lt. Ed Charles was a Navigator in the 336th Squadron, 95th Bomb Group out of Horham, England.  One night he was sleeping in the barracks when the door flew open and the C.Q. (Charge of Quarters) went …
Read More

As did you all, I read with great enjoyment Craig’s “Tickling The Wire” post, which set me to ruminating upon his observation that our bad-tooth, grisly-and-bubbling-infections-and-finally-death past is a mere camera-flash away from us. This, of course, set me to …
Read More

I let the dogs out late the other night and looked up in the sky to see a train of satellites — forty, fifty, sixty of them — racing through the stars.  It is a testament to effective quarantine — …
Read More

In response to wildly irresponsible remarks made by the artist David Hockney, who told the NY Post that smokers are immune to the coronavirus, the Figure 8 Ranch assembled our emergency response team for a counter-briefing.  Here is an unclassified …
Read More

“NO BLOOD FOR OIL, man!” That’s what the guitar player said as we listened to the news on the radio, trundling down the 405 Freeway in a panel truck. It was 1990, the U.S. was fixing to boot Saddam Hussein …
Read More

The seasons have finally turned here in the Cascades, which mostly means a ton of work.  Spring in the mountains is a cranky bitch, like the old flatbed Studebaker I drove when chasing cows on the Fish Creek Ranch out …
Read More

Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… — William Butler Yeats A month ago, COVID-19 was a dark cloud on the horizon, a low muttering of thunder, …
Read More

I am now 72 hours into a self-imposed news blackout and the results have been marvelous. The decision to quarantine my mind, and spare it the slings and arrows of fear-based journalism and morale-sucking stupidity, was actually compelled by a …
Read More