Y’know those commercials for prescription drugs for this or that chronic ailment, ads inevitably ending with an “ask your doctor about,” and then promptly launching into a whole litany of horrors (in some patients, shedding of vital organs may occur, etc.)? Those wretched causative unwanteds, plus my own propensity for reacting negatively to, well, just about …
Increasingly, when you step outside, everything at first seems kinda still, and then … and then this warm little wind whips up, licking around your heels, tripping you up, before next encircling you with brutish power, a cyclone of swirling heat dropped hard atop you, your skin and eyes searing, your vision blurred, your way …
Never have given half a rip for country music, as country music is today, all truck-lovin’ light-beer bros in over-styled cowboy hats gulping on the last note or two to get it to twang. But Merle Haggard. Now, Merle Haggard. Deeply grateful I once got to interview this raucous gem of a man, by phone, …
The roller-coaster ride of old pets, another dip, another rise. Took my dear old Bug boy in today to our outstanding vet office, East Carolina Veterinary Service, sure in that awful down-in-the-bones way it was over, or the start of over, and even the vet was bracing me for the worst of news. Old boy has …
So it’s well after midnight, and my dear wife has awoken more than once to alert me to this, as Total Dingbat Kitty with the big paws snuffles and snorts his way through sleep in the plush pillow valley between us, and the chipped wine glass sits cold and empty in the air-conditioned computer light …
So I’m in my kitchen doing kitcheny stuff, and my son, Luke, from the other room, starts banging out the drum part on the Jimi Hendrix gem “Crosstown Traffic,” on whatever version of Rock Band he’s wrapped up in today. And suddenly, there I am in my last angry years of high school, slumped down …
So I was not even aware that Mike “Obviously the Voters Are Sick of Me” Huckabee had bailed two days ago on his second abysmal slog at ensnaring the American electorate in his angry-white-man web of proselytizing pablum. And now, alas, Rick Santorum, God and Google’s own smudge of wet fecal ick, has himself left …
RIP, great Meadowlark. You inhabit one of my favorite childhood memories. This, from a story I wrote for Mountain Xpress in Asheville, when I was working there back in 2001: An 8-year-old kid gapes from the stands as the great George “Meadowlark” Lemon stomps over courtside to hurl a bucket of water on the ref — …
So there was this time that me and Monday were in a life raft together, the ship we’d been on sinking fast against the horizon, it matters not why. Soon after, Monday tried to take all the fresh water for himself, so I snatched a fat seagull right out of the sky and beat Monday …
So Thursday shows up, once again, at what he’s told will be a great party, invited, though kind of as an afterthought, along with his friend, who won’t be arriving till later. The place, of course, is dead, as dull as last week’s news. People are milling around aimlessly, as if waiting for some reason, some excuse, to let …