In early 2011, my marriage of 37 years ended. A few months later I moved back to Missouri…and I was traveling lightly. I never expected to live in the Show-Me state again. After we left MO over 40 years ago, when we had to pick our first password (probably for an ATM in Corvallis), we…
I’m not sure when I started doing it. I think it was after Shelly and I moved in together in 2013, but it might have been before then. I read (or more accurately “skim”) the local paper most mornings in the lobby. I will sometimes send Shelly a text of her horoscope, and sometimes I…
I’ve told several people recently about “a chain of events…things that happened” so I might as well write it down…. The story I’ve been telling is very linear. 1. In late August of 2011, a woman I was exchanging messages with on a dating site told me about house concerts being held at a place…
Fifteen years ago today, on September 9, 2001, Joseph and I were flying back to Tampa from El Paso, connecting thru O’Hare. (You take what you can get using frequent flyer miles, even back then.) We had flown to El Paso so that we could see the Oregon State-New Mexico State football game. OSU won…
For many years I’ve been telling anyone who would listen: “I wanta die like Leroy Nichols.” And then I have to explain who he was, and how he died. Leroy died the way that almost everyone wants to go…before they become just a memory. Or worse, a drooling doofus. People wanta die quickly, and with…
I was drafted into the Army 2 days after I turned 22. I was discharged 1 year, 6 months and 6 days later. Thanks to Tricky Dick’s Vietnamization military draw down, “early outs” were the norm…and the lifers definitely wanted people like me gone. The copy of Robert Sherrill’s “Military justice is to justice as…
When I posted my Facebook status yesterday, January 6, 2016, I was pretty sure that a good friend’s reply was right on. I wrote: “OK…alright…i know that the odds of winning are 1 in 292,201,338. But you can’t win if you don’t play. It was either a couple of bottles of two-buck-chuck, or this: Charles…
I’ve loved listening to music as long as I can remember, but growing up in a conservative baptist home I had to sneak around to listen to my music of choice: rock and roll. Surprisingly I don’t remember any “first time tunes” from the late 50’s when I was clandestinely listening to Top 40 countdowns…
Over the years I have made numerous attempts at keeping a journal. It was always short-lived. Only a couple of times did it even last for double-digit days. All that changed as of October 26, 2012. My first entry in my current journal was written the day after Shelly and I made our first road…
Apparently Hemingway neither said the above phrase that has been attributed to him, nor did he live it…in spite of his heavy drinking. While I probably had an adult beverage or three before I fired off the following as an e-mail at 11:55 pm on 6/7/15, I wasn’t drunk when I wrote it. And in…