Monthly Archives: May 2015

Happy hour and anarchy: good for the soul

I SPENT much of my day feeling depressed and frustrated over a letter from the IRS that was waiting for me when I got home yesterday following my South Texas trip. Not a big deal: not an audit or anything … Continue reading

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50 years and counting: Looking back at an unremarkable high school experience

FIFTY YEARS AGO tonight I walked across a makeshift stage in the center of the dilapidated gym of my high school to receive my diploma. When I walked out of that gymnasium, I never looked back. I never went back … Continue reading

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‘They’ll be waiting for me; I’ll be there tonight’ — A final conversation with a man who was about to die

FIVE YEARS AGO today, at 6:19 p.m., the State of Texas took the life of my friend, Rogelio Reyes Cannady. Ten more days and he would have been 38 years old. He had been behind bars more than half of … Continue reading

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Cut back on energy use? Great idea and I’d do it — but I’m not perfect

MY LAUGH OF the day comes from a New York Times piece on “environmentalists” in the Seattle area practicing for a massive kayak flotilla event next Saturday to protest the plans by Shell Oil to lease a terminal at the … Continue reading

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This is what she did. This is what my mother did.

THIS IS WHAT she did: She ate the brown bananas and other over-ripe fruits so that we didn’t have to. She removed the nata — that film that forms on the surface of milk when you heat it, as when you … Continue reading

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A brief — very brief — visit to a pleasant past

THERE SEEMS TO be a lot of home repair work being done in my neighborhood this week, and I’ve become accustomed to the sounds of construction. Hammers banging against wood. Electric saws grinding through planks. Drills boring through two-by-fours. The … Continue reading

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