Several days ago, I determined it long past time to go through the stray bins of my old newspaper and magazine clips and throw out the stuff I never liked, and eliminate all the many duplicates, and then shove the remaining assortment into a single box, back again into the back of a closet, to …
I used to be one profoundly angry guy, eternally pissed-off, hair-trigger to explosion, and like that, a trait that, increasingly through the years, has, well, outraged me, even if … Because let me very quickly qualify, I am not violent, nor have I ever really been, toward others, and not otherwise abusive either, certainly never …
Y’know how the most mundane of things can drop you smack-dab in the middle of the most poignant of memories? No? Well, get to be my own sparkling young age, and trust me, you will. For now, let us begin: With a text received just the other day, from an insurance company. Not some business …
Wounded-crow handoff to wildlife rehabber. I didn’t expect this to get to me like it did. Too often, I find myself uttering those very words. Yet, live and learn, that’s what they say we’re supposed to do. At least that’s what I’m led to understand it says in the manual on being human, if anyone …
I’ve never shared a link to one of my own pages of past newspaper writing here as its own blog post however, the response in just the couple of days since I originally added this almost-30-year-old story to this site, and then mentioned it on social media, has been kind of amazing. It really seemed …
So, OK, 2021. It’s gone just now, and good riddance, I say, to fantastically bad rubbish. But why all this contrariness, you ask, so new into 2022? I mean it’s not like 2021 was 2020, or anything, y’know? Like hell it wasn’t. Right out of the gate, my mother, my blessed angel of a mother, …
My angel mother died three nights ago. She was at last peaceful, drifting out of several days of semi-consciousness following a steady decline from what was by then a rapidly spiraling dementia, compounded in her final days by a COVID-19 infection that may well have produced a stroke. Jeanne Patricia Eaton Rabey, gone now, permanently …
Trying to put my hands on these photos all day yesterday; now, as a new today is upon us, I find them, not at all where I remembered them to be. I’m not sure there’s not something awfully appropriate in that. So above is my old man as a young man, career Army, visiting family …
Tributes have been piling up for Anthony Bourdain since news of his death last Friday morning in a luxury hotel in Strasbourg, France. As tributes will when death intersects celebrity, particularly when suicide is the culprit. Tributes in this case are requisite, however. This was Anthony Bourdain, for chrissakes. Anthony Fucking Bordain! Former chef and …
Even as a raging heathen, I do love me some Christmas. My favorite holiday, hands down (and that’s even taking into account the Hadaka Matsuri guys-in-sumo-loincloths-competing-for-trinkets festival every February in Japan). I dig Christmas not just for the purty lights, that phenomenal Pogues/Kirsty McColl song and the excuse to put liquor in sweetened egg froth and …