From the Left
/Politics
The Things I Used To Do, Lord, I Won't Do No More
My father spent the last 13 years of his work life at a sporting goods company, where he was an assistant department head.
When he retired, 34 years ago, he had full and complete rights to a pension of $241.86 a month. He died five years later, and my mother received $241.86 a month for the next 34 years.
And that was my father's life, that ...Read more
Blackfellas
Movie scene: A car pulls to the curb on a downtown street. Four men wait inside the vehicle. They're white. All of them have slicked-back hair, pinkie rings, shiny suits and shirts with long collars that almost cover the knots in their ties.
A man walks down the street, not seeing the guys in the car.
(Because the director of the movie is ...Read more
Toora Loora Loora
Sure, and it's a little St. Paddy's Day story from my grandmother.
She was Irish American herself, and in her childhood, there were a great many people in her life who had come from Ireland.
"If you said Ireland was a bad country, they'd fight you in the street," she said of the Irish immigrants. "But if you got a bunch of them together, no ...Read more
On the Road
It's Newt Night. Frog Fest. Salamanderpalooza.
The temperature is brushing up against 50 where I live, and it's been drizzling for a couple of days.
And so, the amphibians, the goggle-eyed, slightly slimy dwellers in marsh, swamp, creek, pond, slough, and sluggish, shaded stream, are making their way to the spring pools where they lay their ...Read more
We're Getting the Band Back Together
I don't live in the kind of city that gets Lady Gaga live for one night, or Taylor Swift.
I live in the kind of city that gets a Journey tribute band that sounds just like Journey if you're drunk. Sometimes, at some limping, underfunded civic event, we get a band that still has one of the original band members from the days of their greatest ...Read more
I Was Country Before Beyonce Was Country
The old man's idea of paradise is inertia.
Right now, there's an old woman looking sadly out the window of her apartment, seeing the vacant store where the "good" bakery was, or the kosher deli, or the bar with the neon shamrock in the window. The Dominicans and Haitians who moved into the neighborhood didn't have much use for those places. ...Read more
Crying Over Spilt Beer
There's probably still a bar that uses the old beer schooners. Maybe in Chicago or Topeka or Bemidji, one of those towns with a flair for the traditional, for ethnic sausages and casseroles and good barbecue.
The schooner, if you remember, is a beer glass with a wide base, then a thick glass stem that suddenly blossoms out into a heavy glass ...Read more
Sexual Notes From the Debate Team
Like high school itself, high school sports are the unimportant masquerading as the hugely significant.
Every time an adult told high school me that "these are the best years of your life," I used to pray the guy was wrong.
He was.
And I liked high school. My parents got along. We lived indoors. I usually had a girlfriend.
But, bedazzled ...Read more
Manhood as a Game
So, let me get this straight. You DO want to see muscular men in tight pants play football. You do NOT want to look at Taylor Swift.
This, you tell me, is manliness. You tell me that right before you begin sobbing into your hanky.
There's a lot of beauty in manhood, and a lot of ugliness. The beauty is the guy working two jobs because he's ...Read more
Ooh That Smell
My wife, who worked at a desk 13 feet away from me in the newsroom, noticed it first.
"The parking lot of the Walmart reeks of weed," she said. "I mean all the time. In the afternoon, in the morning, at night."
"Sometimes, even inside." she said.
A few months later, she reported back from a local grocery store.
"Not in front of the Stop & ...Read more
Throwing Me at Donald Trump
I'm a reasonable man. I do not raise my voice to my wife. If you cut me off on the highway, I do not make rude hand gestures. I do not roll my eyes and sigh if there are other people in line at the grocery store.
So, of course, I don't support former President Donald Trump. He is not a reasonable man, he believes and says unreasonable things,...Read more
Lights at the End of Day
Understand. I live in an urban area full of old multifamily homes and Hyundai sedans with duct tape on the upholstery.
This means that my small, northeastern city looks best at dusk. In the full black of night, it seems dangerous. In bright sunlight, it's too harshly lit, and the sunlight picks out every flattened cigarette butt in the gutter...Read more
Trump Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Former President Donald Trump is innocent of directing, fomenting, encouraging or concocting an insurrection.
He is innocent of these things until he is found guilty. This is because, in America, you are innocent until proven guilty, one of the facts I retain from a civics class taught by an assistant basketball coach.
That's a weird thing for...Read more