ArcaMax

We, the people, dammit. We are sometimes hard to look at, but we are the many-headed god to whom the big gods bow.

In the most recent elections, the pundits say, Democrats "took back" the house. But if you want to know the truth of it, it was just good old tax-paying, tattooed, truck-driving us bringing a little balance back to things.

Because...Read more

The columnist, pouring flop sweat like Brett Grabanaugh at a #MeToo meeting, seizes the microphone stand like a drowning man clutching at another drowning man.

"But seriously, folks," he says. "How about that airline food? It tastes really bad.

"C'mon," the columnist snarls at the audience. "I laughed when you came in. Is this an audience or ...Read more

My wife owns 48 pairs of shoes, although, as she huffily pointed out to me, that includes sneakers. Apparently, sneakers are not to be included in any official shoe count.

Before you think I'm the kind of husband who prowls through his wife's belongings looking for forbidden luxury, the only reason I counted her shoes was because we were moving...Read more

In Fall River, Massachusetts, the red brick and gray granite perpetually poor city of 90,000 where I live, the mayor is under indictment on 13 separate federal counts of wire fraud and filing misleading tax returns. The mayor's name is Jasiel Correia II, a 26 year-old chipmunk-faced fellow with a very nice wardrobe and an apartment over a bar. ...Read more

Being 61 years old, and damn near, kind of, semi-retired, I told my wife I was going to walk every day.

"Join a gym," she said. "You can join a gym for $10 a month, and you could go during the day when there are not too many people there."

"The only gyms I ever liked were boxing gyms," I said. "They're dirty and comfortable, and they don't ...Read more

In light of recent news of a national war between the sexes, I'm going to tell you a little story I think explains everything.

I tended bar for a while. That's no surprise. Young working-class men who need money and don't want to join the military often end up behind the bar.

The place where I worked was small, dark inside, and not very ...Read more

I have a good education. I got it at a state university, at a suburban high school, and, most importantly, from the Sisters of the Holy Union of the Sacred Heart, at a red brick, square grade school with two-family houses across the street. So, I read, because one of the ways you can tell you have a good education is that you continue to read ...Read more

Back in the days before video games in which a man can play as a female character, we (and by "we" I mean street-corner bums like me) had a simple rule that helped us determine if a guy was gay.

If you ever did anything sexual with another man at any time, for any reason, you were gay forever.

That was the rule. For a lot of men, it still is. ...Read more

Not far from where I live, there's a Renaissance fair. In the advertisements for the event, "fair" is spelled "faire," so you know you're getting the real thing. Many of the vendors at the faire refer to their business as a "shoppe," rather than a "shop," so you can be really sure what you're getting.

Anyway, should you decide to goe to the ...Read more

I live in Fall River, Massachusetts, a city of 88,000 people invariably described in newspaper stories as either "a gritty former mill town" or "a town at the epicenter of the opioid crisis." In a needle-sharp bit of irony, a company is trying build a new opioid treatment center on the site of an abandoned mill that burned down a couple of years...Read more

There's a warehouse close to my house, and they're hiring.

They're always hiring up there. The jobs pay minimum wage, half of them are part time, and they monitor you electronically to make sure you're working. A guy who got a management job in that warehouse told me that an hour of his two-hour "orientation session" was devoted to a crudely ...Read more

I like animal crackers, and every now and then I'll buy a box. They're vaguely comforting because they taste like my childhood, which is to say sweet and with just a touch of vanilla. I buy them in the food aisle of my local drug store in what I call the "Grandma Candy Aisle." That aisle is where they keep the little bags of sour balls and ...Read more