“I am not alive. I am dead. I speak from the grave.” — Mark Twain In his 70th year, Mark Twain would perform a show in his brownstone on Fifth Avenue in New York. He would tell stories, crack jokes, and cut the high and mighty of his time down to size. “To-morrow I mean…

As a child, I dreamed of growing up and dazzling the world. But time and disappointment chipped away at me until only the real stuff was left, and it was not all that dazzling. Tired stories, a sack of regrets, and a reverence for the pieces of me that survived. All this ruination has stranded…

We all have our little superstitions, though many do not like to admit it. I have my own, including never wishing a friend a happy birthday on their Facebook page because it seems that every time I do, that person passes away. While it isn’t true, it has happened enough times and registered so plainly…

“Write drunk, edit sober” is a maxim attributed to Ernest Hemingway. It may work well in fiction writing, but not for historical news articles. Even though I took cold medicine before bedtime, I still could not sleep. What it did do was leave me feeling intoxicated and desirous for something to do. I decided to…

My Cousin Elmo says, “I ate two popsicles yesterday and ended up with forty dollars in lumber.”

So ill was I that I thought I was going to die, but it did not prevent me from dreaming or, at the very least, hallucinating. The two I recall most emphatically involved God or a being I believe is God. I have flown in my dreams for years, sometimes high, sometimes low to the…

Hired to take photographs of a Venezuelan military review earlier this century and fresh out of adventures, I took the assignment. As the parade moved down the open court, passing the cheering crowds, I had a surreal moment of being pulled back through time. It was like watching an old Movie Tone newsreel, and I…

My Cousin Elmo says, “Gas prices are going up faster than a Biden vote at 2 a.m.”

The same media that controlled the narrative of a pandemic is also using the same tactics to frighten us when it comes to Ukraine and Russia. Vladimir Putin is trying to halt a neo-Nazi movement ensconced in the Ukraine government while protecting the citizenry of two self-declared independent regions. One sentence. In 2008, Russia recognized…

It is not every day that the swing-shift announcer gets asked to be the Grand Marshal for Independence Day. So I jumped at the offer. It was early Friday evening, and I went to find my contact. That person turned out to be a rather wonderful-looking and wonderfully built rancher woman. She showed me where…