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 …
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.
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 …
<Illustration by Tel Aviv artist Yuval Robichek> I don’t usually post two days in a row. Yesterday’s somber deconstruction of conflicting raw emotions demanded from today, however, some little upswell of positivity, at the very least. As did I, as well. This aims itself in that direction. I hope it comes close to hitting its …
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 …
You think it can’t happen to you. We all think that, out of hopeful denial, perhaps, that we ourselves will be spared the impossible horror of it. Then one day, you, like so many other poor souls before you, glance outside one disarmingly sunny afternoon, maybe while fixing yourself a cup of burnt coffee or …
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 …
A couple of days I ago I made a run to one of our county-dump transfer stations to drop off our recycling,. My trek out there was near the end of a series of errands, and I’d put off breakfast, so I grabbed it on the way. This particular dump site is kind of hidden; …
So, fireworks. Eye sky-candy, and like that. I have absolutely no delusions about the things being anything but environmental toxins, but yet, there is that child-heart part of me that can’t help but still kinda love them. When we lived on Fort Sam Houston Army Base in San Antonio when I was kid, I remember …
Earlier today, with no forewarning, I was blindsided by a 1978 TV clip of Donnie and Marie. As in Osmond. As in Devil, get behind me!/Jayzus take me now! They were performing, as a corn-fed TV-variety-show number, “Reelin’ in the Years,” the disarming 1973 hit by Steely Dan. The great Steely Dan. That now defunct, …
Been fiddling with this poem for a while. I still consider it far from done, and looking over it again just now, again made further changes. The proverbial work in progress, start, stop, start, stop, repeat. I like very much where it’s headed, though I wonder with it if I’ll ever feel quite like I …