ArcaMax

"She's the kind of girl you take home to meet your parents when your parents ain't home." -- My father, Eugene Dion, who probably heard somebody say it in a bar.

Oh, Lauren Boebert, R-Back Row, The Prairie Rose, blushing first flower of spring in the Colorado mountains, a flower drooping under the weight of a holstered pistol.

Lauren, who ...Read more

Massachusetts, a state sweltering in the heat of self-congratulation, is up against it right now. Massachusetts has several "sanctuary cities," which means anyone from anywhere in the world can go there with no ID, no skills and the DEA on their tail, and we'll plop their kids into an underperforming urban school faster than you can say "Che ...Read more

Taxation is theft, no?

Government causes more problems than it solves, right?

You pay taxes, and you don't get anything for your money.

And those are three good reasons to storm the Capitol and then spend 22 years taking showers with a Proud Boy?

Not really.

A little story, then.

I worked for newspapers most of my life. A few decades ago...Read more

As sure as E. Jean Carroll was just another old lady out buying underwear, some days I feel pretty safe -- just an old man out buying some oat milk or a couple frozen burritos.

And then ...

Oh, sure, I haven't, and probably never will be, trapped in a dressing room by former President Donald Trump, but things happen.

As an example, my car ...Read more

Despite a master's degree in English Literature, and a job that does not require getting my hands dirty, I love country music.

Hank. Johnny. Jones. Haggard. Loretta. Tammy. Sturgill. Little Jimmy Dickens. Willie. Waylon.

It started when I was growing up in Missouri, and it stuck. Country, and its cousin, folk music, are what's on my Spotify,...Read more

My wife, Deborah, born and bred in a New England city of 100,000, rolls her eyes a little when I talk about those nights.

I worked the 4-to-midnight shift for the Associated Press in Kansas City in the 1980s, when the night shift was young, good with words and disrespectful of everything. There was no internet, no email and no texting, so we ...Read more

One of the most valuable things about drag queens is the "drag names" they make up for themselves.

You know what I mean. Names like Ivanna Mann or Tess Tosterone. It's an undermined source of American humor reaching all the way back to boxing nicknames like "The Manassa Mauler" and old-school stripper nicknames like "Busty" Russell.

Such ...Read more

If many Americans cannot keep a job for very long, or love the same person for a lifetime, or live in the same house with our biological children, we can, by God, love and cherish and nurture and adore and follow the same sports team for a lifetime, until death do us part.

I've seen men laid out in a coffin wearing a Red Sox jacket, and no one ...Read more

I did part of my growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.

The parents of most of my high school friends were immigrants who had come to Kansas City from Bluejacket, Oklahoma; Coffey, Missouri; Calico Rock, Arkansas, and a hundred other angle-parking-on-Main-Street towns in the middle of the country.

Their parents had "country" ...Read more

It starts the way a million stories start. "I know a guy..."

And I do. Friend of mine. I've known him for at least 30 years, and our friendship lived at the long wood bar of a corporate steakhouse with 16 televisions and pictures of baseball players on the walls. Neither one of us likes sports, though I'll watch a boxing match every few months....Read more

The White House was, as required, horrified by the presence of cocaine within the sacred precincts of democracy. So were numerous commenters who apparently do not live in America where the public is gobbling drugs like they are hot wings.

My father used to look at a group of poor people and say, "If you turned 'em upside down and shook 'em, ...Read more

You don't know anything about poor, working and middle-class America until you try to rent an apartment.

I'm not talking about renting an apartment for yourself. I'm talking about renting an apartment to someone else.

My wife, Deborah, and I own a three-decker Victorian-era house of the kind some people call a "tenement." We live in one ...Read more

"Why aren't you out arresting the real criminals?"

Because America is presently full of dumba--es with a dull ax to grind. We hear a lot of, "But Joe Biden had top-secret documents, too, and nothin's happened to him."

I can explain the difference between Biden's possession of top-secret documents and Trump's possession of top-secret documents ...Read more