Author: Tom Darby

you ask advice.
sure.
you light a cigarette with the wrong end of a match and expect the smoke to spell salvation.

you come to me, of all people—
elbows scraped raw from the gutters of last week,
with two dollars in your sock and
a poem in your head you’re too afraid to write.

“what should I do with my life?”
you say it like it’s a bar tab you forgot to pay.
like I’ve got answers folded in my coat pocket
next to lint, a broken pen, and a ticket to nowhere.

let me tell you something:
any man who tells you what to do with your life
is either trying to fuck you, rob you,
or sell you Jesus in a can.

I once took advice from a man who wore corduroy in July.
he told me to get a job at the post office.
I lasted two months.
sorting mail for dead people and love letters that came back unopened.
that was enough advice for ten lifetimes.

what you want is a map,
but I’ve only got burnt toast and a hangover.
you want meaning,
but all I’ve got is this aching tooth and
a neighbor who screams the same name every night
into the wallpaper.

you think there’s a RIGHT direction?
you think there’s some glowing exit sign in the sky
saying “this way to purpose”?

listen.
you’re gonna take your soft little dreams
and set them down on a barstool
next to a guy with one eye and a story about his fourth wife.
you’ll think:
“maybe this is it.”
and it won’t be.
but it’ll be something.

you’ll try to be a good man.
you’ll fail.
you’ll try to be a bad man.
you’ll fail at that too.
eventually you’ll learn to just be a man.
or something like one.

so don’t ask me what to do with your life.
dig a hole.
write a song.
scream into a coffee can and bury it.
fall in love with someone who laughs like they mean it.
or don’t.

but whatever you do,
don’t look to guys like me
to point the way.

my compass is busted.
my maps are drawn in crayon.
and the only direction I trust
is down.

but you’ll go your own way anyhow.
you will.
that’s the beautiful, stupid, dangerous thing about being alive.

you’re gonna find your own goddamn disaster.
and if you’re lucky—
it’ll be worth the mess.

Having climbed so high, civilization is again a’flounder in the mud. On the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-fifth of April, at 4:48 p.m., an uproar befell the Taco Bell situated on East Prater Way in the proud township of Sparks.

According to the city’s constabulary — a noble body of men who labor daily to keep the peace and who sometimes almost succeed — a female citizen did engage in violent discourse and then unseemly fisticuffs with a humble cashier, all on account of a disagreement over some small coin. Change, that ancient enemy of reason, was the tinder for this blaze.

The Sparks Police Department, steady in their purpose, said that the woman did commit battery — a term which, in these times, is more legal than literal — and then made her getaway in a silver chariot believed to be a 2017 Kia Sportage, proving that even the most villainous may still ride in some comfort.

Though the constables have identified and cited the lady for misdemeanor battery, in their infinite wisdom or perhaps just a heavy nod to the mysteries of the law–are keeping her name from print. The cashier, a brave soul, suffered a slight injury but, it is said, lives to ring the register another day.

Now, in a twist of civic spirit, Secret Witness did offer a bounty — five hundred dollars in gold–or what passes for it nowadays—for any scrap of information leading to the apprehension and judicial satisfaction of the suspect. Though the Taco Bell mayhem is retired, those who wish to assist justice may contact the Sparks Police Department at (775) 353-2225.

If a person prefers the honor of remaining cloaked in secrecy — which is often the wisest course when women, change, and combat are involved — they may submit the intelligence to Secret Witness by telephone at (775) 322-4900, by the internet at secretwitness.com, or by conjuring it through the modern wizardry of the mobile application known as P3Tips.

Thus concludes the latest chapter in the never-ending struggle to manage change, temper, and dignity all at once.

The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, having poked, prodded, and puzzled over every splinter and skid mark, has seen fit to declare Highland Ranch Parkway fit for travel once more.

“Thank you all for your patience and cooperation,” they said in a social media post, sounding much like a preacher thanking the congregation for not bolting during a long sermon. “Stay safe, Washoe,” they added as if that were easy in these lively parts.

Early Saturday morning, just as the sun was yawning over Sun Valley, trouble struck on Highland Ranch Parkway. In a stretch between Midnight Drive and Pyramid Highway — a place with names that could spook a man without trying — two vehicles collided with all the finality of a pair of runaway trains.

Deputy Cade Goodman, who doubtless has seen more than his share of calamities, reported that one driver was pronounced dead at the scene by the medical folk, who arrived but not swift enough to beat fate. The other driver, luckier by a hair, sustained only minor injuries and was carted off to the hospital to be patched up.

Mercifully, no passengers were aboard either contraption, sparing the undertaker from more work. The cause of this miserable event — whether demon liquor, sleepy eyes, or some other mischief — remains a mystery, wrapped up tight for now.

It appears that the wise heads down at Storey County Emergency Management, along with the fire-eaters at the Fire Protection District and the badge-wearers at the Sheriff’s Office, have come together in rare harmony to put on a wildfire evacuation drill up yonder in the Virginia City Highlands. This grand spectacle’s goin’ to take place Saturday, June 14th — provided the wind don’t blow the whole county into next week beforehand.

Before the stampede begins, they’re holding an Informational Town Hall meeting on Tuesday, May 6th, from six o’clock sharp to six forty-five — not a minute more, mind you — at the Virginia City Highlands Community Center, at 2610 Cartwright Road. That’s where they’ll lay out the evacuation routes, the emergency squawk-box alerts, and what a body needs to do besides wringing their hands and hollerin’ at the dog when trouble comes knocking.

“This drill is an important part of keeping our community safe,” quoth Adam Wilson, the Emergency Management Director, with all the solemnity of a man warning folks off thin ice.

He reckons wildfire season’s stretching out longer than a preacher’s Sunday sermon these days and that practice might save a heap of misery later on. He says he wants every soul in the Highlands to feel “confident and informed” before the hills light up like a Fourth of July sky.

Good folks are heartily encouraged to drag themselves down to the Town Hall, show up bright and early for the June 14th drill, and make sure their kinfolk, critters, and valuables are ready for whatever Nature throws at them. Not that the regular Virginia City weekly will tell you a blessed thing about it.

Joins Merry Band of AGs to Protect DOE Handouts

Out here in the wild and woolly territory of Nevada — where a man is supposed to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and not by the trembling of his pen — our very own Attorney General, Mr. Ford, has once again hitched his wagon to the fancy parade of spendthrifts known as the Coalition of 19 Attorneys General. Their latest spectacle? Filing suit against the Department of Education (DOE), like a posse of fortune hunters suing the sun for setting too soon.

Now, the Department of Education — never known for its towering wisdom — sent word down the line that states must bow and scrape before the administration’s new reading of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or else watch their federal coffers dry up faster than a waterhole in Death Valley. In plain speech, if the states don’t snip away at any notion of equal access to education the way Washington dictates, they can kiss their dollars goodbye.

Nevada, poor soul, stands to lose almost a billion dollars a year — most of it thrown into the noble causes of special education, low-income aid, non-native speaker programs, and heaven knows what else. One could feed every horse, cow, and politician from here to Reno on that much coin and still have silver left for the gambling tables.

And who stands on the front lines of this noble fight to keep the gravy train running? Why, none other than Mr. Ford — the man who has wasted more Nevada taxpayer dollars chasing lawsuits, ghost causes, and political pipe dreams than any politician who ever daydreamed about being Governor.

Ford proudly joins hands with his fellow letter writers from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin — a regular map of states where taxes grow faster than tumbleweeds in a storm. Mr. Ford, if given a choice between righting wrongs and riding the gravy train, would not only buy a first-class ticket but demand a private car and a brass band to announce his arrival.

Whether the lawsuit saves the day or sinks like a stone, one thing is as sure as sunrise–Ford will have spent more of Nevada’s hard-earned money making noise than he ever will saving it.

In the capital of the Silver State, where one might hope civilization had taken root a bit deeper than the sagebrush, deputies found themselves busier than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs this past week.

First, there’s a fellow named Perry Adams, age forty-six. He figured a quarrel with his girlfriend about his flirtations on Instagram would best be resolved not with words–but with a stick.

Deputies were called to a modest home on Dori Way after reports of a disturbance. They found the victim—shaky, whispering, and nodding her head in a fashion that suggested she wasn’t so much answering questions as warning them without words.

Invited into the house, a rare courtesy in these parts when tempers are up, they found Adams, who looked as innocent as a schoolboy caught with a slingshot. The woman told deputies that Adams had gotten hisself worked up over accusations of conversing with a minor online, then suffering righteous indignation, deleted the app, no doubt to spare himself the aggravation and the possibility of the burden of evidence.

Despite claiming no harm had come of it, the woman bore the badge of battle—a red, raised welt upon her arm—and further confessed, once her fear loosened her tongue, that Adams had struck her across the face with his hand and then walloped her with a stick held in both hands like a man splitting kindling. There was choking involved as Adams had pressed his forearm against her throat in the manner of a man attempting to hush an unpleasant truth.

The beating, for good measure, was delivered while a child slept elsewhere in the house, blissfully unaware of the foolishness of grown folk. Deputies, not being entirely born yesterday, arrested Adams on the charge of felony domestic battery with a deadly weapon and confiscated both the sticks and the phone, which Adams pretended he could no longer access.

No sooner had the dust settled from that escapade than the deputies got summoned to Como Street, where a 22-year-old woman decided that if love couldn’t find restoration by persuasion, it might get revived through violence.

The young lady, suspecting her former sweetheart of infidelity with a man—a curious complaint for an ex-girlfriend to make—barged into the woman’s bedroom and delivered a punch to the face hard enough to leave a cut and the early bloom of a black eye. She was thoughtful enough to keep her sister on speakerphone during the assault, a detail which proved about as helpful to her case as a screen door on a submarine.

In her defense—stitched together with the kind of care usually reserved for secondhand quilts—the ex-girlfriend claimed she got smacked first, though she could not recall which hand had done the deed. Deputies, using the effective method of common sense, determined that the victim, not the aggressor, had summoned the law and that the injuries spoke louder than the accused. Thus, the ex-girlfriend got herself arrested for domestic battery.

In Carson City as elsewhere, while love may lift some to the stars, it just as often drops us flat on our faces.

Now, friends, it has come to pass that one of our more silver-headed truth-hunters, Jacques Vallée by name, has raised a cautionary finger against the reckless unmasking of the world’s best-kept secret—that the night sky is full of neighbors and some of’em don’t come bearing apple pie.

Mister Vallée, a veteran of sixty years’ worth of stargazing and spitball fights with the learned men of science, has said plainly that telling the whole truth about these flying whatchamacallits—and worse yet, the grim record of the people they’ve maimed—is a job fit for more than just a loudmouth with a megaphone. He says it needs a plan. A grand strategy. A structure not yet invented by man or beast.

Now, you might wonder, how did we get ourselves into such a box of rattlesnakes?

Why, through the oldest American traditions—secrecy, lying, and the self-righteous belief that if we bury a bad thing deep enough, it’ll sprout into a rosebush. That trick ain’t never worked, not once, but the government, like an old hound with no sense, keeps sniffing down the same rabbit hole.

Vallée himself has waded through the muck. He helped with a Pentagon-backed effort called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program—AAWSAP for short, though it ought to be called “Another Attempt At Sweeping Away Problems.” Hidden in the bowels of a Las Vegas aerospace outfit, these good gentlemen and ladies documented a grim thing–hundreds of poor souls, in Brazil and elsewhere, left scorched and battered after getting a little too friendly with the strange lights in the sky.

Some of those injuries weren’t accidents, Vallée says. Some were deliberate—as in, shot-on-purpose. Death was no stranger to their investigations.

In truth, these sky critters, whoever or whatever they are, haven’t just been scaring cattle and old ladies—they’ve been cracking human skulls. And while such deadly encounters are said to be rare, they’re not rare enough for comfort.

In his latest scribblings, Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles, Vallée talks about secret chats with billionaires and desert-dwelling scientists who have made it their business to poke around crashed machines not of this Earth—or at least not of any neighborhood Earth knows about. The government’s been trying to cobble together a copy of this alien tinkering for decades, while rival nations have been doing the same–which explains why nobody wants to come clean–national pride and national survival.

Vallée ain’t against telling the people. Lord, no!

He believes that if we sprung the truth on the world like a drunk might by bursting into a church social, we’re bound to set off chaos so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. He says the truth needs some framework—a “structure,” one sturdy enough to carry the weight of a hundred uncomfortable follow-up questions, religious reckonings included.

And if you think that’s easy, remember: these are the same folks who couldn’t even roll out a postal service without causing a war.

In the end, it ain’t just about UFOs. It’s about the rot that’s been eating away at the country for a hundred years—the belief that lying protects liberty, that secrets save souls. If we’re in a fix now, it’s because we trusted the wrong hands to hold the candle, and now we’re fumbling around in the dark, trying to find the door.

The lively spirit of youth, ever so it can outrun misfortune, met a rude and final reckoning on the winding road of Geiger Grade. In their solemn way, authorities named the poor soul–a Reno man of but 25 tender years–Kyle Rodgers.

At about half-past six o’clock, with the sun hanging low over the Sierra and shadows stretching long across the land, troopers of the Nevada State Police were summoned to a scene of calamity near Rim Rock Road. Mr. Rodgers, mounted atop his iron steed, was tearing southward along Geiger Grade — a road not built for such galloping haste. ‘Tis a road that snakes and curves like an old river and demands a man mind his speed and prayers.

But young Rodgers, it seems, put too much trust in speed and too little in good sense. Being no more forgiving than fate, the motorcycle bucked him off when it could no longer hold to the crooked path. Man and machine skidded helplessly across the travel lanes before striking the guardrail meant to save others from such a fate.

When the dust settled, the echoes of the crash faded into the hills–Kyle Rodgers lay still. The troopers pronounced him dead at the scene, a verdict as grim as any handed down from judge or jury.

Thus, another chapter closes–a bright young life dashed to pieces on the hard stones of Geiger Grade, a reminder to all that while youth may ride fast, death rides harder.

But Don’t Break Out the Fireworks Yet

By all accounts, and against the usual run of folly, the grim reaper’s stranglehold on Nevada’s highways loosened its bony grip a mite this year. After 400 good souls were lost to the wild perils of our roadways in 2024–a year that drove up the toll faster than a Comstock miner chasing a silver lode–the early reckonings of 2025 bring a whisper of better news.

From the bristling streets of Las Vegas to the lonely dust tracks of Battle Mountain, the state’s March fatal report shows a curious dip in death. Naturally suspicious and somber, experts advise caution before raising a celebratory glass. With all its heat and hubris, Summer is yet to come–and in Nevada, summer on the road is about as safe as tickling a rattlesnake.

Ask anyone who’s braved the Nevada roads, and you’ll find the opinions as fierce as a July sun.

Erin Shannon, a city-dweller of Las Vegas extraction, spoke plain enough, “There’re certain hours of the day I won’t even stick a tire out,” she said, with the wary tone of a soldier describing no-man’s-land.

Kim Kessler, hailing from the peaceful plains of Wyoming, could hardly hide her horror. “It’s actually a little scary for me,” she said. “People are in a hurry, and if you’re not, they’ll let you know with all the manners of a hornet.”

It is why many jaws dropped like bad poker hands when word got around that traffic deaths are–for now–down.

By the end of March, 98 travelers had met their end on Nevada’s highways, a three percent decline from the same stretch last year. Clark County–where the desert shimmers with heat and hazard alike–the fall is even sharper–68 deaths against 2024s 85, marking a 20 percent drop, though 68 is still 68 too many for anyone with sense.

What caused this unlikely downturn?

Our long-time friend, Erin Breen of the Road Equity Alliance Project, a woman accustomed to surveying wreckage and heartache, was blunt, “Last year was so God-awful bad, anything would look better by comparison.” She further warned against unbridled optimism, “I’m not counting my chickens,” she said, no doubt with an eye on the still-looming thunderheads of summer.

Among the brighter notes in the otherwise dirge-like symphony, Clark County saw nearly 30 percent fewer pedestrians claimed by passing iron beasts. Tweaks to traffic signal timings–giving the two-legged a fighting chance against the four-wheeled–get some of the credit.

But Breen leaves drivers with a solemn bit of counsel, more enduring than any statistic, “Whether it’s your fault or not, taking a life will ruin yours for a good long while.”

And in Nevada–a land where fortune changes quicker than a desert storm–a bit of slowness and attention on the road might save lives and a little dignity. But if there’s one thing Nevada knows, it’s that luck, like a loaded dice game, has a way of running out when you least expect it.

South of Reno, along that stretch of road they call Interstate 580–a place not fit for man nor beast in the wee hours–a most lamentable business took place Saturday morning.

‘Twas about 2:15 by the clock when one solitary soul, beset by moonshine, saw fit to wreck his vehicle smack in the middle of the southbound lanes just south of Mt. Rose Highway. No sooner had his wreckage come to rest than a Good Samaritan, a woman of stout heart and tender conscience, took it upon herself to stop and offer aid–a thing so rare these days it ought to be preserved in a museum.

But Fate, which has no more manners than a goat at a garden party, had other ideas. Before she could assist–another motorist–barreling along the southbound way with a head full of booze–crashed into the wreckage and struck the Good Samaritan dead where she stood.

The Nevada Highway Patrol, speaking later in that sober, solemn way that law officers adopt after a particularly grim duty, noted that both the first and second drivers seemed to have taken to drink, or something worse, before climbing behind the wheel. Both were arrested and carted off to the Washoe County jail, there to reflect upon their sins.

The authorities, keen to keep the rabble from gawping at the scene, shut down the southbound side of I-580 at Mt. Rose Highway around six o’clock and kept it closed for several hours. No names are getting released right now, and the conditions of the offending parties were left to speculation–though one might wager they were in no condition to make introductions.

The road is open again, though the stain upon the morning and human nature remains.