ArcaMax

I went to get my COVID-19 booster the day before Thanksgiving. I had an appointment at a chain drugstore in a strip mall located in the dope-shooting heart of the fairly bad neighborhood where I was born.

I checked in and sat down on a plastic chair, waiting with several others of my kind.

I'd been panhandled on my way into the drugstore, and ...Read more

Donald Trump has not been reinstated as president; dark forces continue to conceal Hillary's emails; it seems all those school shootings really happened; and no dead member of the Kennedy family has returned to life.

There's your political column right there, pal.

Now for a holiday story about pie.

It was two days before Thanksgiving. Having ...Read more

In a suburb near my mid-sized city, there is a commercial building on a corner. Across the street is a grocery store, a discount store and a Burger King. Next door is a car dealer. There's a liquor store on the other side and a convenience store right across the street. In short, it's a neighborhood that can sustain life all by itself, and it'...Read more

Will gas prices topple President Joe Biden?

The French demanded bread. The queen is supposed to have told them to eat cake. The king's head thudded into the basket below the guillotine. Tea chests splashed into Boston Harbor. In 2007, Mexicans rioted over the price of corn used to make tortillas.

The president of the United States of America ...Read more

Some habits are hard to break. Smoking. Drinking. Drugs.

Some habits, once broken, are hard to pick up again. Voting. Going to church on Sunday. Reading a daily newspaper.

The drunks living in precarious sobriety say of their habit, "you pick it up where you put it down," meaning that, no matter how many years sober, one shot of Wild Turkey ...Read more

A month or so ago, I went to five different stores before I found the kind of cat food our cats like. My wife searches the grocery store for the canned soup I enjoy. A fellow I know who likes ball games and hot wings complains bitterly about the shortage of chicken wings in our local markets.

The supply chain, she is broken, says the television...Read more

You could say he fell in the middle of the store because the store is so small that nearly every part of it is in the middle.

But the store is not in the middle of the block. It's on a corner. Where else would you open what has always and forever been called a "corner store"?

And the windows are covered with paper ads for off-brand ...Read more

Not everything means what it seems to mean.

In the post-industrial New England town where I live, the library is a big granite structure built to impress in the 19th century.

Over the front door are chiseled the words, "THE PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY."

Local politicians and civic pride hobbyists assure us it means a man or woman can use the books ...Read more

Ever since Geoff Diehl slouched north from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Massachusetts, he's been the failed politician's favorite candidate.

He was born in Bethlehem, no doubt under the light of a single star, but he trekked up to Massachusetts, where he found there was plenty of room at the inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, a town of dazzling ...Read more

Aw, what a picture.

There was this cowboy, all hat and spurs and chaps (woah there, Village People!)

Well sir, that cowboy was a-leanin' out of his saddle like a cottonwood tree leans when there's a Blue Norther a-blowing across the dad-gum plains.

And he was a-swingin' his rope at a couple of muley Haitians who had broken away from the herd ...Read more

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Cinderella-ed her way into the Met Gala in a form-fitting white dress with "Tax the Rich" splayed out across what polite people would call "the back," it was a 1960s moment, maybe even a 1930s moment, when stars embraced activism and activists became stars.

Mother Courage, but with a foot that needs a glass ...Read more

Because I was working in a newsroom on the day and because I'm a newspaper columnist, it's expected that I can (and will) produce a Sept. 11 column.

And why not? I'm 64. I was no kid on that day.

And why not? I won an Associated Press award for writing about Sept. 11. I know what happened, right?

I wish I'd never won the damn award. It's on...Read more