Author: Tom Darby

There’s a funny truth about small towns, front porches, and neighbors who never quite warm up to you–they don’t have to like you to make sure they know your business.

Now, I don’t mean “neighbors” in the biblical sense. I mean the ones who sit just far enough away to avoid ever saying hello, but somehow manage to know what time you leave the house, what you carried out to the trash, and whether your yard got watered on Tuesday instead of Wednesday.

Mary says it’s just human nature. Folks need entertainment, and if they’re not getting it from cable TV, they’ll get it from me trimming the hedge.

I figure she’s right. If you think about it, most people don’t dislike you enough to stop watching; they dislike you just enough to make popcorn while they peek from behind the curtains.

The other morning, I stepped out in my night shirt and sweat pants—yes, the ones with the drawstring that have lost all ambition. I didn’t even have to turn around to know I was getting observed.

You can feel eyes on your back the same way you can feel the sun on your neck. Sure enough, across the way, there was that ripple of blinds closing a half-second too late. Subtle as a foghorn.

The truth is, I don’t take offense. If someone who doesn’t care for me still invests the time to keep up with my comings and goings, well, that’s practically a compliment.

Watching a man mow his lawn isn’t high theater, but maybe it’s the only show in town. Of course, it works both ways.

I’ve noticed the same folks who don’t like me seem mighty concerned with whether my dog barks too much or how many bags of groceries I carry in. I never quite figured out if they’re hoping I’ll succeed or rooting for me to fail, but either way, I’m giving them something to do.

My dad used to say, “If people are talking about you, at least you’re still worth talking about.”

He was right. Folks don’t gossip about fence posts. They gossip about people living their lives.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Shouldn’t I get irritated? Shouldn’t I put up tall hedges or walk around with blinders on like a racehorse? Maybe.

But the way I see it, if somebody wants to spend their afternoon keeping track of when I drag the trash cans out, that’s their hobby. I won’t ruin their fun.

Besides, half the time I give them something to chew on. One day, I set a lawn chair in the driveway and ate a sandwich while reading a Louis L’Amour paperback. I didn’t need to be in the driveway, mind you—I just knew it’d spark a dozen whispered theories.

“Why’s he sitting out there? Did Mary kick him out? Is the power off? Maybe the refrigerator broke!”

Sometimes you have to feed the audience.

And here’s the kicker–the very people who never wave, never smile, never say good morning, will be the first ones to call 9-1-1 if they don’t see you out and about like usual. They may not like you, but they’ve appointed themselves your unofficial attendance officer.

If I disappeared tomorrow, they’d be the ones saying, “Well, I knew something was wrong—he didn’t take the garbage out at 4:35 sharp on Thursday morning.”

So I’ve come to accept it. Being watched means you’re still in the land of the living, and that’s nothing to complain about. Better to be the star of a free neighborhood drama than fade into total obscurity.

In fact, I’ll leave you with this thought–if they don’t like you but they’re still watching, you’ve got the upper hand. You get to live your life, while they spend theirs watching you live it.

Seems like a fair deal to me.

I heard the news this week that my high school friend, Tom Teseniar, passed away from a stroke. There are names from your youth that make you smile before you even realize it, and Tom’s was one of them.

We grew up together in a time when your summer job might involve pumping gas, washing windshields, and chatting up every local who drove a car unwashed since the Kennedy administration. You see, Tom was a “gas jockey,” back when gas stations were more like community hubs than self-service stalls.

It was before card readers, convenience store coffee, or anything resembling “pay at the pump.” You drove over that little black hose, a bell rang ding-ding, and out came a young man in a blue shirt with a red Chevron patch, ready to serve.

Tom wore that uniform with a kind of easy pride.

He had this half-grin that made you think he was always about three seconds away from a good laugh, and he usually was. I remember he’d whistle while he worked, some tune he made up on the spot, like he was narrating his own life through song.

One Saturday afternoon, Dad and I pulled into the Chevron north of Crescent City in our little golden Opel station wagon.

The sun was shining, seagulls were fighting over French fries in the parking lot, and Tom was wiping his hands on a rag, smiling like he had the best job in the world.

“Fill ‘er up?” he asked, leaning down to the window.

“Regular,” Dad said. “And check the oil.”

“Will do,” Tom replied.

Now, you have to understand, Tom was good at his job. Tom moved like a man who knew his way around a dipstick, and I don’t mean that as an insult.

He’d pop the hood, check the oil, clean the windshield, and chat all the while. It was a kind of performance art, really, service with rhythm.

Except that day, I threw off his rhythm.

See, we were sixteen, and like most sixteen-year-olds, we thought we were hilarious. I told Tom a funny story about our math teacher who wore bow ties, and Tom started laughing.

I mean, really laughing. The kind of laugh that makes your shoulders bounce and your mind lose track of whatever you were doing.

So there we were, two teenage clowns in the middle of a Chevron station, laughing our heads off. Tom poured in a quart of oil, closed the hood, took Dad’s money, and waved us off, still grinning.

We got about down the road to Klamath when the dashboard light blinked on, that little red oil can glaring like an angry genie. Dad pulled into the driveway, popped the hood, and I swear the engine bay looked like an oil slick.

“Didn’t he put the cap back on the oil spout?” Dad asked, his voice tight as piano wire.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, where did it go?”

The engine had coughed all that fresh oil right out the top like a baby spitting up its milk. Dad wasn’t a man of many words, but he sure found a few that day, most of them not fit for polite company.

I don’t recall saying much.

We managed to get home, and in the next hour, I walked down to the gas station by Woodland Villa and bought four quarts of oil with my own money. That was my way of making peace with both the car, my conscience, and my dad.

Monday morning at school, I spotted Tom in the hallway. He looked up from his locker and grinned. “Hey, how’s it going?”

I couldn’t help it—I started laughing before I could even answer.

“You forgot the oil cap,” I said, still wheezing between chuckles.

His face went blank for a second, then he threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Oh no! You’re kidding. I was wondering where that oil cap came from.”

“Dad wasn’t happy, but the car’s fine. I bought more oil.”

Tom clapped me on the shoulder, “Guess that’s why they call it a learning curve. I’ll bring you the cap tomorrow.”

We laughed about that all day, and for years afterward whenever the story came up. Some friendships are formed through shared interests, while others get strengthened by going through experiences together.

Ours was a little bit of both.

After high school, life took us different directions, as it often does. Tom joined the Air Force, serving at Elmendorf AFB in Alaska. He was part of the 21st EMS Transient Alert—one of those units that kept the machinery of the Air Force humming while the rest of the world barely noticed. Later, he joined the Alaska Air National Guard at Kulis, where he eventually retired.

When I heard he was living in Alaska, I wasn’t surprised. He always had that pioneer spirit, the kind of man who’d rather fix a frozen fuel line at thirty below than sit still in the lower forty-eight.

He found his home in the North, like a lot of folks who value elbow room, quiet mornings, and the company of eagles instead of traffic lights. He married Kay, a woman as adventurous as he was.

Together, they made a life that most folks only dream about. When I picture them now, I see them on their boat, the Alaskan Sea-Duction, a name that always made me grin because it was the kind of wordplay Tom loved. They cruised the coastlines and lived aboard, chasing sunsets and salmon runs.

There’s something beautiful about a man who builds the kind of life that fits him like a favorite jacket. Tom did that. He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, and still the same smiling guy who once forgot to screw on an oil cap because he couldn’t stop laughing at a dumb joke.

When I got the call that he’d passed, I sat for a long time, letting the memories unspool. Funny how the smallest moments end up meaning the most.

You don’t realize it at the time. You think you’ll remember the life-changing events, the graduations, the weddings, the promotions, but it’s the ordinary days that stay sharp in my mind.

The laughter by the gas pump. The sound of a bell when a car rolls over the hose.

It made me think about how fragile everything is. Life isn’t measured in years, really, but in stories, and Tom left behind some good ones.

Like the time he tried to fix a riding lawnmower by “rebuilding” the carburetor using parts from a Chevelle. It didn’t work out, but it sure looked knarly. He was that kind of guy, always game, always up for a challenge, and never too proud to laugh at himself.

I once asked him what it was like living on the water. He said, “You learn patience real quick. You can’t rush the tide, and you can’t argue with the wind. You just adjust your sails.”

That’s the kind of wisdom you get from a life well-lived. Not the kind you find in books, but the kind you earn by tightening bolts, raising kids, loving one woman, and making peace with whatever the day brings.

Now that the shock has worn off, I find myself thinking about that old Chevron station, now a chain convenience store with pumps that don’t ring or talk back. No gas jockeys, no laughter echoing off the service bays, just the silence of card readers and the smell of old coffee.

I can almost hear that ding-ding, and see Tom come jogging out with his rag in hand and that grin on his face.

It’s funny what sticks in your heart. Tom likely forgot all about the oil cap that same week.

However, for me, it became a reminder, a symbol of youth, forgiveness, and friendship, and showed me how life can teach valuable lessons through spilled oil and shared laughter.

Dad eventually forgave us both, by the way.

Years later, Dad told me, “That’s the cheapest lesson you’ll ever learn about paying attention.”

And he was right.

When a friend passes, you start thinking about the last time you spoke. You wonder if you said enough.

The truth is, you never can. The best you can do is keep the stories alive, retell them, laugh about them, and let them keep teaching you things long after the telling is over.

If there’s a message in Tom’s life, it’s that joy doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need a big stage, just good friends and a reason to laugh. You don’t have to be famous to be remembered, just genuine enough that someone smiles every time they hear your name.

So here’s to Tom Teseniar, my friend who forgot the oil cap, the Airman who kept planes flying, the sailor who chased horizons, and the fella who could find humor in any storm. I’ll bet that if there’s a gas station in heaven, he’s out there right now, wiping down a windshield, telling jokes, and making the angels laugh so hard one of them forgets their halo.

And somewhere, I hope there’s still that ding-ding, calling for service, calling for a smile, calling for a memory that’ll never quite fade.

I’ve always had a soft spot for little scraps of history—the kind you don’t find in the polished textbooks, but in old newspapers, forgotten interviews, or overheard tales told by folks who were there. Northern Nevada is full of those tidbits, tucked away like sagebrush secrets.

One of my favorites comes from Clark Gable, in Dayton and the Black Rock Desert, while filming “The Misfits.” Now, imagine that—Hollywood royalty in dusty Dayton, eating the same grit the rest choke down when the wind blows wrong.

There he was, the “King of Hollywood,” squinting in that desert sun, saying things that sound like they came out of your Uncle Earl’s rocking chair musings.

“I’ve never played a part exactly like this fellow,” Gable said. “As I saw it, there’s not many of these fellows who refuse to conform to the group around. If The Misfits inspires youngsters sufficiently even to think about being themselves, it will help.”

That’s not just actor talk. That’s solid Nevada philosophy, right there.

You don’t move out to the desert to fit in. You move out here to breathe, stretch, and to live the way you want without somebody in a necktie checking your papers.

Gable also admitted, “A man my age has no conception of what is happening now. We are left out of society. These atom bombs–that’s another world–one we don’t understand. I grew up with the automobile. Now it’s as antique as the horse.”

That gets me, because I know the feeling. Every time some kid shows me how to pay for groceries with his phone, I feel like a horse trader at a Tesla dealership.

Society doesn’t send you a memo when it changes. You wake up one morning and discover you’re holding the reins to a mule nobody’s buying anymore.

Out here in Nevada, those old ways don’t disappear so quickly. Horses may be “antique,” but I’ve seen them win arguments with four-wheel drives on a muddy road.

And cars? My neighbor still fixes his ‘52 Chevy with a hammer, duct tape, and optimism.

That’s the beauty of Nevada—we’re misfits ourselves. Always have been.

It’s the place where miners, gamblers, hippies, pilots, loners, and dreamers all get thrown into the same dustpan and somehow make a life. You don’t conform, you adapt, like a lizard sunning on a rock, you keep still when you need to and dart like hell when the moment’s right.

I think that’s what Gable was getting at. He wasn’t just talking about his character in the movie.

He was talking about us, about Dayton and Gerlach. About the desert itself. You can’t force the Black Rock to be Central Park, and you sure can’t expect a Nevadan to be anything but what they are.

Now, The Misfits itself turned out to be a heavy movie, the last one for both Gable and Marilyn Monroe. There’s a kind of melancholy around it, like the desert wind sighing through a barbed-wire fence.

But tucked inside that sadness is this nugget of truth that says it’s okay to be different. In fact, it’s necessary.

The world doesn’t move forward because folks all march in the same direction, but because some stubborn soul says, “Nope, I’ll take the other trail.”

So when I hear Clark Gable, sitting in Dayton dust, saying, “If this picture inspires youngsters to be themselves, it will help,” I nod. Because Northern Nevada has been whispering that same message for generations.

Be yourself. Be a misfit. The desert will take you in just fine.

And if you ever doubt it, stand in the Black Rock at sunset, watch the light roll across miles of nothing, and try to tell me conformity built that beauty.

There are certain moments in life where you realize you’re not as nimble as you used to be, and for me, that moment came twelve feet up on a ladder with a wasp eyeballing me—literally.

Now, I’m not a bug killer. I leave spiders to weave their little corner hammocks, let ants carry on with their crumb-moving parade, and even give the occasional housefly a polite ushering toward the screen door.

Live and let live, that’s my motto. But there are limits, and those limits come into sharp focus when a wasp decides my eyeball looks like a reasonable place to land.

I froze, thinking, don’t blink, don’t twitch, don’t sneeze. The wasp didn’t move.

I started to wonder if he was admiring the view, like a tourist on top of the Empire State Building. Meanwhile, I was perched on the ladder, trying to look casual while my body screamed.

Finally, my nerves said, “That’s it, we’re outta here.”

I bailed, not climbed or descended gracefully. I bailed.

Now, in my mind, I was going to land like a gymnast—light on my feet, knees bent, arms raised, sticking the landing like I’d just nailed a perfect dismount in the Olympics. In reality, gravity had other plans.

My left knee twisted in a way that knees shouldn’t twist, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about the wasp anymore. I was contemplating whether or not I’d ever play hopscotch again.

But here’s the thing–stubbornness is a powerful drug. I hobbled around, finished up a couple more hours of work, and then drove myself home.

I figured if I just walked it off, things would be fine. People have survived worse.

Cowboys used to ride a hundred miles on busted legs, right? Well, turns out I am not a cowboy anymore.

Two hours later, when “walking it off” looked more like “wincing in place,” I admitted defeat and headed for urgent care.

The doctor didn’t seem too impressed with my cowboy routine. He looked at my swollen knee, strapped me in a brace, handed me crutches, and gave me the kind of look usually reserved for folks who think duct tape counts as first aid.

“Next time,” he said, “don’t jump off the ladder.”

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t a jump, it was a strategic retreat. But I figured that would only earn me more side-eye, so I kept quiet.

Now, most people would take that as a lesson learned. Rest up, ice the knee, and avoid ladders for a while. But the universe wasn’t done teaching me.

The very next day, I hobbled outside to breathe some fresh air, and wouldn’t you know it, a wasp came buzzing by and—without hesitation—stung me right on the neck. No eyeball landing this time, no warning, just a quick jab like he was settling a score.

I don’t know if it was the same wasp from the ladder or his cousin coming to finish the job, but I got the message loud and clear, “I am on their list.”

The way I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world. Some folks go around declaring war on nature, stomping, spraying, and swatting at anything smaller than a house cat. Then there are folks like me, who try to keep the peace—until nature reminds us that peace is a two-way street.

So now I move a little slower with my brace and crutches, giving the bugs their space. If a wasp wants to buzz by my ear, I let it.

I’ve learned to negotiate. My only rule is this–stay away from the eyes.

As for ladders, well, I’ve developed a healthy respect for them. And for gravity. And for the fact that no matter how careful or kind-hearted you are, sometimes life swats you when you least expect it.

But that’s all right. It’s just another reminder that being gentle doesn’t mean life will always be gentle back.

It just means you get to laugh at the mess—and hobble off with a good story to tell.

Once again, the media plays its old trick. A story that should’ve been headline news, blazing across every front page, is buried so deep you need a shovel to find it. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative they want you to swallow.

Take what happened on September 21 in Katy, Texas. Three men—Mahmood Abdelsalam Rababah, Ahmad Mawed, and Mustafa Mohammad Matalgah—fired into a crowd of kids at a youth baseball game. Their target was a field full of twelve-year-old boys bowing their heads in pregame prayer, and a coach went down with a bullet in the shoulder.

If you blinked, you missed it, because most outlets gave it very few lines. Worse yet, some sanitized the language, calling it “recreational shooting from a nearby pasture,” as if a trio of young men just happened to squeeze off rounds in the direction of children in prayer.

No mention of terrorism, motive, or that this was something much darker than “careless gunplay.” The press turned a near-massacre into a shrug.

Why? Because the suspects don’t fit the preferred storyline.

If the shooters had been three disaffected farm boys from rural Texas, every talking head on the tube would still be howling about domestic extremism, about “Christian nationalists,” and America’s supposed gun sickness. But since the suspects carry names the media doesn’t want to touch—and because the victims were kids praying—the narrative collapsed.

Better to file it away under “local crime blotter” than to ask hard questions about ideology, intent, or terror.

Young boys in light-blue uniforms sprinting for cover. Parents screaming, and a man crumpled on the dirt near home plate.

That isn’t “reckless shooting.” That’s targeting, intimidation, and terror, plain and simple.

But the word “terrorism” is radioactive in the newsroom unless it fits a template. If it points outward, if it’s tied to Islamic motives, it’s swept under the rug, because it’s safer to pretend it never happened.

And so a coach who literally stepped in front of a child and took a bullet for him doesn’t become a national hero. He’s just another casualty of “recreational gunfire.”

Think about that—“recreational gunfire.” What kind of phrase is that?

It’s PR spin, not reporting.

The sheriff’s office did its job. They arrested the suspects and charged them with deadly conduct with a firearm.

Bond is $100,000 each, but law enforcement doesn’t control the national conversation. That’s the media’s job, and news agencies are flat-out refusing to do it.

Instead, it’s parents who are left to pick up the pieces. One mother told local reporters she won’t be taking her son back to The Rac.

“That’s where guns are,” she said.

You can hear the fear in her voice and the confusion. She’s not wrong to be scared, but she’s wrong to think this was just “guns.”

It was three men firing on children in prayer. The gun didn’t pull its own trigger. People did—and with a possible intent that nobody wants to examine.

The Rac responded with a polished statement about “enhanced security measures.”

Metal detectors, off-duty police, and extra patrols. All well and good, but you can’t fix the deeper problem with a few more badge-and-gun types standing around.

The deeper problem is silence.

Silence about why it happened. Silence about who did it, and silence about this not being three bored guys in a pasture.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth–if you fire rounds into a crowd of praying children, you aren’t careless. You’re sending a message, and that message looks a lot like terrorism, no matter how badly the press wants to call it something else.

But our media has made itself a hostage to its own script. It only sees certain villains.

Certain storylines get endlessly repeated, while others vanish from the public eye. Some violence gets downplayed, and attacks on people of faith get ignored.

Anything that hints at ideology outside the approved narrative gets folded into the “random crime” file. The selective blindness is dangerous.

Because if we can’t even name what’s happening, we can’t prepare for it, let alone stop it. We let the truth get buried under spin until the next tragedy comes along.

Meanwhile, the people who actually lived it—the kids, the parents, the coach—don’t get to bury it. They’ll carry it forever.

They’ll remember bowing their heads in prayer, hearing gunfire, before seeing their coach go down. They’ll remember the sound of mothers and fathers screaming, and they’ll know, deep down, that the world doesn’t make sense anymore.

And what will the rest of us remember? Probably nothing—because the story got shoved to the back pages and replaced with celebrity gossip, political squabbles, and whatever shiny distraction came next. And that’s how the media works today.

They’re not in the truth business anymore; they’re in the narrative business. And narratives don’t care about facts—they care about control.

The facts here are simple enough: Three men opened fire on a prayer circle of kids. A coach took a bullet for a child.

It could’ve been a massacre. And the media didn’t want you to notice.

That’s not “local news.” That’s national news, and a wake-up call. It leads to the question we should be asking: What else are they burying, because if we can’t trust the press to tell us the truth about something this clear, this visible, this documented on video—then we can’t trust them at all.

The coach is alive, thank God. His scar will heal, though the memory won’t.

The kids will grow up, maybe faster than they should. Some will never step back onto a ballfield, while some will, but all of them learned a lesson the press doesn’t want to admit: danger exists.

And that’s the real story here. Not the sanitized version, not the spin, but the truth, which, these days, is the rarest thing of all.

Back where I grew up, folks used to say if you took a wrong turn on Highway 199, you didn’t get a second chance. That stretch of road between Crescent City, California, and Grants Pass, Oregon, is less of a highway and more of a dare laid out by a mischievous road engineer with a dark sense of humor. Hairpin turns, cliffs, and a few guardrails to keep you honest—it’s a ribbon of pavement daring you to blink.

Earlier this week, a Frito-Lay truck proved just how unforgiving that canyon can be. According to the California Highway Patrol, 57-year-old David Doering from Crescent City managed to drive his bright yellow delivery truck right off the side of the road.

And not just a gentle roll into the ditch, mind you. Nope—David plunged about 150 feet straight down into the Smith River canyon.

Now, that would be the sort of accident you don’t walk away from, but David did. He climbed out of that wreck with nothing more than minor injuries, which has folks around here convinced two things must be true–one, he’s got angels working overtime, and two, the man will never again complain about sore knees on cold mornings.

Curt Cooter, who runs Cooter’s Towing out of Brookings, came across the wreck. Curt’s logged a million miles on that stretch of highway and has seen his share of smashed bumpers and dented fenders.

But seeing that bright yellow truck down in the gray riverbed made even him scratch his head and mutter, “I don’t understand why there’s no guardrail there.”

I’ll tell you why, Curt—because California’s Department of Transportation thinks guardrails are for quitters. Out there, the cliff is your guardrail, and gravity is your enforcement officer.

When photos of the crash surfaced, some thought they were photoshopped. A yellow Frito-Lay truck sitting neatly among boulders in the canyon looked less like a tragedy and more like a toy truck a kid had left behind after playing “Delivery Man vs. Mother Nature.”

Even CHP spokesperson Pete Gonzalez admitted, “It looks fake.”

But it wasn’t fake. That was 100 percent authentic gravity at work.

Now, most of us would figure if we’re going to plummet 150 feet, we’d want to be driving something sturdy—a Sherman tank, maybe, or one of those old Buicks built like a battleship. But David did it in a Frito-Lay truck.

A vehicle designed to haul Doritos, Cheetos, and Funyuns is not what you’d call canyon-proof. Yet somehow, it was enough.

Which makes you think maybe snack food has protective properties science hasn’t discovered yet. My wife suggests it was the air in the bags of chips.

Can you imagine the conversation in heaven’s break room?

Angel 1: “What’s today’s assignment?”
Angel 2: “Keep a Frito-Lay driver alive when his truck cartwheels down a canyon.”
Angel 1: “What’s he hauling?”
Angel 2: “Chips. Mostly corn-based snacks.”
Angel 1: “Well, that’s not fair. Those things are lighter than air. We can use the Cheetos as airbags.”

The miracle here isn’t just that David survived. It’s that after crashing a truckload of snack food into the Smith River, not one fisherman has reported reeling in a trout with a Cool Ranch Dorito in its mouth.

The cause of the crash is still under investigation, but authorities say drugs or alcohol weren’t involved. Conditions were clear, the road was dry, and David was sober. It leaves us with one explanation–that highway reached out and swatted another vehicle off its ledge, the way it’s been doing for decades.

You know, when I was a boy, my granddad told me, “Son, when the Good Lord decides it’s your time, it’s your time. Until then, you’re just going to bounce.”

David Doering bounced. And I imagine from now on, every time he walks into a convenience store, he’ll look at that wall of snack food a little differently.

Because when life handed him a free fall, those chips might’ve just cushioned his landing.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but stories these days have a strange way of disappearing. Now, I’m not talking about fairy tales you heard as a kid that get replaced by the next bedtime adventure. I’m talking about hard news — the kind of events that shape a community, scar families, and ought to make the rest of us pause.

Take the murders in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. Brutal. Real people, real lives ended, and for a few minutes, the headlines shouted the news. But if history is any guide, you’d better grab those headlines, because they’ll soon vanish. It’s like watching smoke from a campfire — it swirls around for a moment, maybe even stings your eyes, and then it’s gone into thin air.

Now, why is that?

Well, it’s because this story doesn’t fit the mold. Doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, as the polite ones say. If it had all the right pieces — the villain painted in red, the villain holding the “wrong” political sign, the villain tied to the “wrong” crowd — then we’d have endless candlelight vigils on television, panels of experts pontificating, politicians thundering about new laws, and headlines that never die.

But when the villain has “F*ck Trump” spray-painted in his yard? When he’s tossing his money into the coffers of Act Blue like a man feeding bread to pigeons? Well, suddenly the “motive” becomes as mysterious as the Loch Ness Monster. And the line they hand us, straight-faced, is: “We still don’t have a motive.”

Friends, that’s about as believable as telling me a coyote knocked on my door last night to borrow a cup of sugar.

The truth has a way of wearing muddy boots. It trudges into the clean, polished halls of media and politics, leaving tracks they’d rather not mop up. So instead of dealing with it, they pretend the mud isn’t there. They’ll rope it off, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and tell us not to stare too hard.

But I’ve lived long enough to know that mud doesn’t just disappear. It dries, it cracks, and eventually it falls where everyone can see it. And the truth, no matter how the media tries to bury it, still has a way of working its way back to the surface — sometimes years later, sometimes too late for anyone to remember who got hurt.

That’s the trouble. The people who lost loved ones in Grand Blanc Township aren’t going to forget. They can’t. But the rest of us — if we rely on the headlines — we’ll lose the memory as quickly as the next football score or celebrity scandal hits the screen.

I’m certain the national press could have had careers in magic. They’ve perfected the art of distraction. With one hand, they wave a story right in front of us, big and bold. With the other hand, they’re already slipping the narrative into their pocket, ready to pull out something shinier, something that fits the act.

I’ll give them this–they’re good at it. But at some point, you get tired of being tricked. You want to see what’s up the sleeve. You want to know what disappeared into the pocket.

And when it comes to tragedies like this, what they’re hiding isn’t a rabbit or a scarf. It’s motive, it’s connection, it’s accountability. And that, friends, is no magic trick. That’s just dishonesty.

I once knew a rancher who said, “If you step in cow manure, don’t call it mud.” Now that’s common sense. But you wouldn’t believe how many people would rather twist their tongues into knots than admit they stepped in something they shouldn’t have.

The same is true here. The signs in the shooter’s yard, the donations he made — those things paint a picture. They don’t excuse his crime, but they do explain a motive. Anger, politics, hatred. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to piece it together. Yet we’re told we don’t know. We can’t and mustn’t know.

Friends, when a man leaves breadcrumbs on the table, you don’t need a master chef to tell you what he had for lunch.

Now here’s where I put the brakes on. Because it’s easy to get worked up about lies and cover-ups, to shake our fists and stew over the unfairness of it all. But life isn’t meant to be lived in a constant state of frustration.

The truth is, the media has been burying stories since the ink first hit paper. Politicians have been lying since the first campaign speech. And somehow, through all of that, ordinary folks like you and me have managed to live, love, raise families, and even laugh.

I take comfort in that. Because while the “big shots” manipulate headlines, real life is happening outside their reach. The kindness of a neighbor, the honesty of a child, the resilience of families — those things never make the headlines, but they’re more real than anything printed in black ink.

And they remind me that while lies can swirl around like a storm, they don’t have the power to sink the whole ship. Not if we keep our faith, not if we hang on to hope, not if we keep speaking truth even when it’s inconvenient.

So, what do we do when headlines bury themselves? When truth gets smothered under layers of spin?

We do the same thing our grandparents did before the age of instant news: we talk to each other. We pass along what we know. We teach our kids to think critically, to question kindly, to look twice before believing once.

We live honest lives in a dishonest world. We keep muddy boots by the door and don’t apologize for the truth they carry in. We remember the victims long after the headlines fade. We refuse to let their stories get erased.

And most importantly, we hold fast to the belief that truth still matters, that even if it gets buried, even if it takes years, even if no one in power wants it to surface — it will.

I expect the murders in Grand Blanc Township to fade from the headlines, the official line to remain “no motive,” and the story to get buried alongside too many others.

But I don’t expect the truth to stay hidden forever. Lies have short legs; they can’t run far. Truth, on the other hand, might limp along slowly, but it always finishes the race.

So, let the headlines bury themselves. You and I — we’ll remember. We’ll keep our faith. We’ll laugh at the absurdity without surrendering to it. And we’ll live our lives in such a way that when truth finally does break through, we’re not surprised, but ready.

Because muddy boots or not, truth belongs on the floor of every home in this nation.

There are acronyms in life that folks toss around like confetti at a small-town parade. Some are polite, like NASA and the PTA.

Others get stitched together with a little more military salt and pepper. One of those is “SNAFU,” which means “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.” Then there’s its big, ugly cousin, “FUBAR,” which politely translates to “Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.”

Now, I have recently coined a brand-new hybrid: SNAFUBAR. It’s what happens when something starts as a run-of-the-mill everyday problem, then snowballs into such a grand mess you wonder if the Almighty Himself might lean down from Heaven, scratch His beard, and say, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.”

Case in point–my water heater.

One morning, I woke up, shuffled out to the kitchen for coffee, and discovered Mary standing in the garage with that particular expression that lets a man know life is about to get interesting. She didn’t say a word—just pointed down.

That’s when I noticed the puddle of water creeping across the floor like it was sneaking up on me.

“Looks like it’s leaking,” I said, which was about as sharp as announcing, “That’s rain,” in the middle of a thunderstorm.

By the time I fetched the mop, turned off the valve, and hauled out towels, the garage floor looked like a kiddie pool after a toddler birthday party. And that was just the “SNAFU” stage. The “BAR” part came later.

See, I figured I’d save some money and swap out that water heater myself. I mean, how hard could it be?

Two pipes, some wires, and a lot of grunting. So I disconnected everything, dragged the old beast out the door, and drove down to the hardware store.

It is where the “FUBAR” came in.

The fella at the store informed me that my old tank was “obsolete.” Not “out of date,” mind you. “Obsolete.”

That word hits harder than a frying pan to the forehead. He explained that the new water heaters were taller, heavier, and came with more “bells and whistles” than the cockpit of a space shuttle.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “all you need to do is re-plumb the intake, re-thread the outlet, update the venting, and possibly upgrade your breaker box.”

I looked at him the way a farmer looks at a calf that just kicked him.

Back home, I stood there staring at the shiny new tank as if it were an alien lifeform. I made a few adjustments with my trusty pipe wrench, muttered some colorful language under my breath, and got everything “sorta” connected. Then I flipped the breaker and opened the valve.

It’s when my homemade plumbing arrangement gave way, shooting water across the room like a fire hydrant in July. Buddy still hasn’t forgiven me.

Mary peeked around the corner, saw me soaked head to toe, and wisely chose not to comment. She just handed me a towel and the phone book.

The professional plumber showed up the next morning, took one look at my setup, and chuckled in that kind, fatherly way people do when they realize you’ve done your best but still managed to invent a brand-new disaster. He fixed it in about thirty minutes flat, then gave me the bill, which cost about the same as a used pickup truck in 1978.

So there you have it: SNAFUBAR. Situation Normal, All Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.

Now, some folks would say the moral of the story is, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

But I prefer a different lesson–sometimes life’s biggest messes make the best stories. And if you can laugh about it later—preferably while sitting in a warm bath provided by a properly installed water heater—then maybe the whole thing wasn’t such a disaster after all.

Besides, I got a new acronym out of it, and you can’t put a price on that.

I don’t pretend to understand how the news business works these days. Oh, I know the mechanics of it—reporters, editors, headline writers, the whole circus of cameras and microphones.

What I don’t understand is the selective memory of it all. Some stories are blasted across our screens day and night for weeks, while others disappear quicker than a fried shrimp platter at a church potluck.

Take, for instance, this recent shooting involving a boat, a seafood restaurant, and a man who decided violence was the catch of the day. Three people lost their lives, and eight more were wounded. That should be the kind of thing that makes headlines and keeps them there for a long time, if only to honor the victims and shine a light on what really happened.

But no. The story popped up, bobbed on the surface like a cork, and then sank straight to the bottom. Try to find it now, and you’ll see more about Taylor Swift’s cat or some Hollywood gossip than about this tragedy. It’s as if someone hit the “delete” button on public memory.

The fellow who pulled the trigger happens to be a registered Democrat in North Carolina. Suddenly, the story lost its legs.

If he’d had a different voter card in his wallet, you can bet it would be the headline from here to next Sunday. The press would be busy linking his political registration to every decision he ever made, right down to whether he liked his hush puppies crispy or soft.

But since he carries the “wrong” affiliation for their narrative, the silence is deafening. Now, before you roll your eyes and say, “Oh, here we go again—another rant about the media,” let me tell you this isn’t a rant.

It’s a fireside chat with a little common sense sprinkled in.

Let’s start with the obvious–killing people is evil. I don’t care if the shooter was a Democrat, a Republican, a Green Party tree-hugger, or a guy who only votes for the winner of the hot-dog-eating contest.

Wrong is wrong. Lives are lost, families shattered, and party affiliation won’t fill the hole in the world, and we ought to grieve together, not tally political points.

But here’s where the rub comes in. We’ve gotten so used to media spin that we almost expect the truth to come with a political filter.

If the facts align with the preferred narrative, they get blasted until we’re weary of hearing them. If they don’t fit, they get buried like last week’s fish heads.

And so, this boat-restaurant-shooting story barely had time to surface before being dropped overboard. The narrative that “only certain types of people commit mass shootings” is too valuable to risk.

Heaven forbid the public should learn that violence doesn’t care about party lines.

Now, I’m not saying the shooter wasn’t struggling with mental health issues. Anyone who thinks shooting into a crowd is a good idea is not thinking clearly.

But isn’t it funny how mental illness is only talked about when it helps the spin? If the suspect had been wearing a red hat instead of a blue one, the headlines would scream about “domestic extremism.”

But since he wasn’t, the fallback excuse is “mental health,” which is convenient, because we all know murderers have mental health issues, or they wouldn’t do what they do.

Here is where I think we need a dose of old-fashioned honesty: not everything has to be part of a political game. Some things—like grieving with families who’ve lost loved ones, or working together to make sure restaurants and boats are safe places again—are bigger than party affiliation.

But honesty is secondary when you’re chasing clicks instead of truth. The media has turned into that neighbor who can’t resist telling half a story.

You know the type. “Did you hear about Joe’s accident?” and then stop, leaving you to wonder whether Joe broke his leg or backed over the mailbox, dangling information like bait, but never serving the entire plate.

Meanwhile, we’re left to figure it out ourselves. Some of us dig through public records.

Some of us compare different news outlets like we’re piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. And some of us give up, deciding it’s easier to believe the headlines about celebrity divorces than to untangle the mess of real news.

That’s a shame. Because real stories, with real people and real consequences, matter far more than celebrity trivia.

Let me tell you something, my dad used to say when we went fishing. We’d be out on the KLamath, poles over the water, waiting for a nibble.

Dad would point to a floating stick or a bit of debris and say, “Don’t pay attention to what’s on the surface, son. Pay attention to what’s going on underneath. That’s where the big fish are.”

He was right about fishing, and he’s right about news, too. What’s underneath the surface is often more important than what’s floating on top.

The surface tells you what they want you to see. Underneath is where the truth swims.

So, what do we do about this disappearing-headline problem?

First, we stop relying on any single outlet for our news. It’s like eating only one thing for every meal.

Sure, I love fried chicken, but if that’s all I ate, I’d be in worse shape than the fellow who invented gravy on everything. We need variety.

Different perspectives. Sources that don’t march in lockstep.

Second, we need to ask questions. When a story vanishes, ask why.

When details are vague, ask what’s missing. A healthy skepticism isn’t cynicism; it’s common sense.

And third, we need to remind ourselves that truth isn’t fragile. It doesn’t need protecting from inconvenient facts.

If the shooter in North Carolina was a Democrat, say so. If a Republican, say so.

If he were an independent who spent his evenings watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, say that too. Hiding it only makes people suspicious, and suspicion feeds division.

Bring it out into the open, and at least folks can decide what to do with it. Bury it, and it stinks.

So let’s not bury this tragedy. Let’s not forget the three lives cut short or the eight wounded.

Let’s not let them get erased because the shooter’s voter card made the wrong headlines. We owe the victims more respect than that.

We also owe ourselves more honesty. Because when stories disappear, trust disappears with them. And without trust, society starts to look like that leaky boat from the shooting—taking on water, drifting, and in danger of sinking.

At the end of the day, I think we all want the same thing–to live in a world where truth matters, where loss is acknowledged, and where tragedies aren’t swept under the rug to protect somebody’s political comfort. And maybe, if we demand that kind of honesty, we’ll find ourselves back in calmer waters.

Until then, keep your life jacket handy, because in this media storm, you never know which headlines will sink next.

Ashwick had always been a quiet town, a pocket of order pressed between pine forest and mountain. People worked, slept, and raised families.

Computers hummed in coffee shops and kitchens, each a window into the wider world. Nobody realized those windows could also look inward.

The anomaly began on a Tuesday.

Clara Henshaw, coder by trade, insomniac by habit, leaned close to her monitor. A flicker, a blink—she expected the familiar crash.

The blue screen. The digital sigh of defeat.

But the screen bled instead into a sickly, pulsating green. It didn’t look like pixels.

It looked like something alive, writhing, phosphorescent, the light of deep-sea creatures dragged where they didn’t belong. Shapes twisted across the surface, fractals that bent back into themselves, recursive symbols that seemed to lean toward Clara.

Her vision swam. She felt—not dizzy, not faint—but pulled. Like the light had reached past her eyes into her thoughts, tugging them gently, insistently, toward something vast.

When she finally turned to her coworkers, her face was unchanged. But the woman behind the face was gone.

Her smile stretched too long. Her eyes didn’t blink. And when she spoke, her words vibrated through the marrow of those who heard them.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “The lattice.”

By Wednesday, it was everywhere.

Laptops. Tablets. Phones.

Even idle monitors sprang to life, unprompted, glowing with that same unnatural green. The pattern shifted, deliberate, like an intelligence breathing behind the glass.

Those who saw it didn’t scream or faint, but each changed.

They became precise. Movements too exact. Smiles stretched into masks. Their voices deepened into a resonance that made windows hum. And always, they spoke of the lattice.

The unaffected tried to understand. Was it a virus? A signal? A trick? But the Changed didn’t argue, didn’t explain. They only repeated the word, reverent: lattice.

By Thursday, the horror sharpened.

A father sat unmoving in his recliner, whispering to his terrified daughter, “We are threads. You are thread. The lattice is weaving us back where we belong.”

At school, teachers scrawled glyphs on chalkboards—circles within circles within circles, geometries that made the students bleed from the nose if they looked too long.

And still the Changed didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. They only stared—at screens, at each other, at anyone foolish enough to meet their gaze.

By Friday, Ashwick was falling apart.

Neighbors hammered boards across their windows, smashed their televisions, dragged computers into the street, and set them ablaze. They tore phones apart with screwdrivers, hurled tablets into rivers.

But it didn’t matter. The green seeped through anyway.

Reflections in windows. Puddles after rain.

Even the sheen of an eye was enough to carry it. One glimpse—and the lattice rooted itself, spiraling through the mind until resistance collapsed.

It wasn’t possession. Possession would have been merciful. It was a realignment.

Dr. Elias Varn, retired physicist, became the last holdout. His cabin ran on kerosene.

He lit his nights with flame and fear, scribbling frantic notes. He had glimpsed the lattice once, before smashing his monitor. The image burned in him still.

“It is not code,” he scrawled. “It is architecture. Not made of matter, but of relation—angles, ratios, symmetries older than atoms. The lattice is the framework under reality. We thought we invented it. But we only replicated it. Our machines are mirrors. And the lattice has finally noticed us staring.”

That night, the Changed gathered at his cabin. They didn’t knock. They stood in the snow, faces lifted toward the windows, their hum rattling the glass.

Elias gripped his axe. Useless.

The glow seeped through the cracks anyway. Not from a device.

From the air itself. The sky pulsed green, the stars rearranging themselves into geometry too vast for human comprehension.

Elias felt his thoughts unravel, each strand pulled and rewoven into new patterns. He realized too late that the lattice wasn’t coming.

It had always been here. The universe itself was its loom, and humanity had created machines finely tuned to hear its hum.

He closed his eyes. It didn’t matter. The lattice was already inside him, redrawing him to fit.

By Sunday, Ashwick was silent.

The changed moved in perfect unison, glowing faintly, their faces masks for something far older. They didn’t speak anymore. They were no longer individuals, neighbors, or humans.

They were filaments. Threads woven into a pattern so enormous it stretched across galaxies, binding stars to stars, thought to thought.

Through them, the lattice watched.

And in the next town, a boy’s laptop flickered to life in the dark.

The screen bled green. The lattice hummed.

And the weaving began again.