Avoidance! Diversions! Escapism! As a service to our occasional customers, we’ve brought back this possibly unpopular feature. If we cared more about you, you’d have real content once in a while, sure. So go pay somebody already – even lousy CNN now has a paywall for some of its content. But not us, not here, …
Frankman
Ex newspaper editor/writer fella. Cultural crank. Spiritual dilettante. Music snob/music junkie. Family dude. Pet crazy. Craft-beer jerk. Coast craver. Short sometimes of fuse. Short always of fuel. Very tall on paper.
So, nothing to see here. I am badly broken up about it, sure. So many other people are as well. The sky feels weighted with sadness, with the horizon foretelling a storm of despotism and blunt stupidity, which is all just as wretched as hell, but … Look, squirrel! Avoidance. Diversions. Escapism. What say we …
Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, in The Sopranos: “You know, Quasimodo predicted all this.”Tony Soprano: “Who did what?”Bobby: “All these problems, the Middle East, the end of the world.”Tony: “Nostradamus. Quasimodo’s the hunchback of Notre Dame.”Bobby: “Oh, right. Nostradamus.”Tony: “Nostradamus, and Notre Dame. It’s two different things completely.” Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Two different things completely.Yet …
I feel I must share with you the appalling circumstance of this morning. Fairly early into it, that feet-to-floor, brushing of teeth, handful of pills, navigating of pre-dawn dogs near empty food bowls, the scratching of things in need of scratching, I came to the hard realization that there was, simply, no cake. And wouldn’t …
So there I was, stranded along a quiet country road littered with smashed cut-flowers, beneath a darkening sky, beside a field full of foraging cows. Later that same day, a twitchy kid would stick a loaded semiautomatic rifle in my face. I’ve determined just now, via a quick consult with Google, which was not yet …
My name is Frank, and I’m a registered Democrat. And I need support; we all do, if we you are part of the increasingly diminishing collective that’s still in this awful boat with me. Because lately, identifying in any way as a Democrat is as much to my shame as anything. I have voted almost …
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 …
The great, the late … When I was just newly a teenager, my older sister Michele’s next-door neighbor friend Lori kindly loaned me a bunch of albums, stuff she thought maybe I’d be into. Much of it I didn’t go for, and still don’t, like REO Speedwagon, which was way too treacly sweet for my …
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 …