ArcaMax

As Pres. Donald J. Trump prepared to deliver an address to the nation this last week, I thought about snacks.

I'm an American. If there's an event, and that event is televised, you have to have snacks.

Kentucky Derby? Mint juleps. Super Bowl? Everything is for the Super Bowl, but don't try to do it without chicken wings. Your guests will get...Read more

The American economy has never been stronger. We have the biggest, best economy we've ever had in history.

I'm not pulling that statement out of my Trump, either. I've been a functional member of the American economy since I was 14 years old, when I got a job as a dishwasher. I know when things are good. I'm just sad that I'm a white man. If I ...Read more

In the state where I live, Massachusetts, there is now legal weed for all. My town, Fall River, is right on the edge of getting its weed store. This is because we're a poverty pocket. All the drugs get here first.

By, the way, I keep calling it "weed" because I'm unsure of what to call marijuana these days, having lived through "Mary Jane," "...Read more

For the newspaper columnist, the Christmas effort is fraught with peril. Is he/she writing about Christmas because there are warm feelings to be conveyed, because the babe was warmed by the breath of oxen, because Jesus may come back before global warming finishes off the last of those cute-as-hell penguins?

Or...

Is the writer just looking ...Read more

As the toothed trap closes on Donald Trump, he contemplates going coyote, and chewing through his own leg, leaving it behind and limping off into the underbrush to either heal or grow a new one.

In other words, he dithers and jitters on the edge of a revolution, beginning, and not timidly, to call for said revolution, a rising up of "We the ...Read more

As a columnist who writes some pretty un-pretty things about President Donald Trump, I'm about to briefly leave the pack of wolves howling for his death.

They buried former President George H.W. Bush the other day. Trump was there, and cameras got him looking bored, or un-presidential, or not reciting the Apostles' Creed.

This is the ...Read more

Tonight, a month or so after the shootings at a synagogue in Pennsylvania (remember those? I didn't think so.), I went to an "interfaith memorial service" at a synagogue about five minutes from my house in a midsized Massachusetts city.

I lived four blocks from that synagogue for 16 years, and you could see the back of it from the small corner ...Read more

Two nights before Thanksgiving, my wife threw out a whole bag of lettuce.

The morning news said some kind of greedy killing bacteria was loose in the nation's lettuce supply, that no taco was safe, no salad healthful, if it contained the killer leaf.

Bang! In the trash, accompanied by a burst of filthy language from my wife, who does not ...Read more

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