Sometimes, you just feel the need to say something profound, whether it’s because some weighty and/or touching occasion seems to demand it, or because you’ve just been so prattlingly infantile lately that you’re clearly overdue to let loose with a pearl or two of exalted thought. So you think hard on it, really press your …
To view this personal family obituary as a downloadable PDF, click here. FRANK RABEY Jan. 10, 1932-Sept. 26, 2017 GREENVILLE, N.C. — He was both jokester and Depression-era pragmatist. A cut-up, a card. A contrarian of the very first order. He was a lover, above all, of family, including his pets, and of travel, classical music, the …
When I die, and everything I have seen thus far in life suggests this will happen, despite my best efforts to pretend that black-gowned bony fella with the scythe who keeps inching closer in my rear-view mirror is just a very persistent and poorly dressed itinerant wheat farmer with a moonlighting Amway gig, and everything …
So after so much of this, for so long, I find myself forced to ask: Is there something about me that simply invites a certain kind of chaos? I went out early tonight to a concert, 18th-century European chamber music on period instruments, at a local gem called The Music House, on 5th Street just …
In the end, this may be my favorite picture ever of my father, dancing here with my mom, my angel, my mother. It says everything you need to know. Everything all of us who knew him should remember. At 9:46 p.m. yesterday, Frank “no middle initial” Rabey, the final child of Slavic immigrants rubbed out …
So the Affordable Care Act is back in the crosshairs, this time reportedly at the end of a very loaded gun – and all because a small vocal contingent of the Republican base keeps vomiting into gerrymandered Congressional ears in total willful ignorance of the dire consequences of ACA repeal. Meanwhile every left-leaning organization that’s …
Another outrageous act of terror, this time on foreign soil, in a lovely city of lovely people, a place I have always been so happy to have visited, in what now seems another lifetime ago. So in my trying to make sense of this new stupid waste of human life, I do not mean to …
WWJT. What would Jesus tip? Based upon my heretic’s reading of the Beatitudes, I’d figure, what, 20-25% easy? I guess it goes without saying that I don’t know Jesus … Sometimes some of us pause to wonder how we got Donald Trump as president. The answer is this cowardly human colostomy bag, this sanctimonious puddle …
So now it’s Venezuela, is it? Are you fucking kidding me? I’m reminded of a line from that 1979 redneck anthem “Family Tradition,” by the would-be-outlaw son of the iconic “So Lonesome” American troubadour who once set the standrd for country music as the people’s music, on which Sr.’s newly all-is-forgiven electric-geetar racist sire and …
So I was driving into work this morning, a little late, as a houseful of pets can make you, when I glimpsed something my brain pleaded with me not to see. It was Monday, stranded there beside the road, the sky ahead ominous with dark clouds, a big rain a-comin’. I rode on past, even …