ArcaMax

If you want to know why people in America shoot so much heroin, re-watch Pres. Donald J. Trump's State of the Union address.

Oh, sure, we had a drug problem long before Trump became president, but Trump is the only president whose public mutterings make me think about catching a heroin habit just to turn down the sound a little. Bear in mind, I...Read more

If you ever smoked cigarettes, chances are you didn't pay for the first one you ever smoked.

You stole one from your mother's pack. Some uncle said, when you were 9 years old, "You wanna puff on my cigarette?" He thought it was cute. You bummed one off an older worker. A friend. Some guy you were dating.

Which generally meant you started to ...Read more

I've always lived among my own kind, which is humans, cats, dogs and the birds I feed in my yard. You can see someone who is a member of all those species if you look out the window of the apartment I live in, a second-floor apartment in the three-floor apartment building I own.

If you look out the window at other times of the day, you can see ...Read more

Back when we were fat, when we ruled the world, Americans knew how to tell if a country was "Third World."

The country was invariably led by a bellicose dictator who said things like "enemies of the state" and who constantly claimed greatness for himself.

The country manufactured either nothing, or next to nothing. If there were factories in...Read more

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