She calmly propped the now-empty shotgun against the door frame and walked out to her waiting horse. Once in the saddle, she rode south-west, towards Gold Hill, Nevada, name-unknown and directly out of the historical archives of the state. Rattlesnake Dick’s big claim to fame was that he was a two-bit hustler and a thief.…

People watching isn’t limited to the mall. While at the Department of Motor Vehicle, I got to watching a boy of about seven and his younger brother. The pair were playing at the feet of their father. When dad was called to the counter, the older boy leaned into his younger sibling and stated as…

Sam Smith. That’s the name he’d been going by for the last 150-plus years and it suited him fine, like the 21st Century and it’s clothing styles, which he thought of as he adjusted his tie, making certain that the double-Windsor knot was as small and tight as possible. He enjoyed looking impeccable for the…

Poor Thomas’ Almanac for January 30: In 1835, Andrew Jackson survived the first attempt against the life of a U.S. president. Time’s are  changing as the media is openly calling for the assassination of President Donald Trump.

There’s a Cherokee tale called ‘White Wolf and Black Wolf’ and I’m about to purposely screw it up. Last night, I allowed Black Wolf to control me. In my darkness, Black Wolf bit down on my head like a vice-grip, shook me violently and kicked away at my innards. Fortunately, I made it to the…

My friend passed away. I thought her death unfair. She’d beaten cancer only the week before. Grief consists of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Sometimes these five stages come one at a time or all at once.  In my case, they came at once, hitting me hard. After a night of drunkenness and petition…

Misplaced feelings (happy, sad, glad, mad) are common as I learned following the death of a good friend. All the night of her passing I whined about how sad I was that she’d beat cancer, only to be taken because of an infection. To this end, I got blitzed, hoping to numb the pain brought…

“But I thought she was getting better?” I asked. Kay responded, “Yeah, the doctor said her cancer has gone into remission.” “That was three days ago, so why is she back in the hospital now?” “Some sort of infection.” That’s pretty much how the conversation went before this morning, when my friend Cheryl Darnell passed…

A simple fling; a one night stand, that’s all it was to be, but it turned into much more than that. He wasn’t very happy with himself for screwing around on his wife, but it was too late to worry about that now. She was dangerous, crazy dangerous, and he knew it, but still he…

Next to a house of worship, the local library is a sanctuary that is also under-utilized. In the pre-Internet days, a trip to the library was necessary if you needed to do research. The row-upon-row of dust-cover clad books offered a silent refuge during many stormy points in my life. Along each wall were thousands…