Category: Featured Post
Book Release
I am very pleased to announce that my first book, The Bunkhouse Chronicles: Field Notes from the Figure 8 Ranch is now available for pre-orders. The reviews have been kind, and I am now hard at work on the next one. The book can be ordered directly from Smoke Creek Press, your local bookseller, and ...
Meditations in White
I’m writing this on Sunday morning, during the first real snowstorm we’ve enjoyed this year — though I almost didn’t believe it was going to happen. I stopped believing the weather woman about 2 months ago. This was a deliberate act of rebellion because riding the prediction roller coaster was damaging my nerves and upsetting ...
Mirror, Mirror
Last week provided a sobering look in the American mirror. Much of that ugly reflection was concentrated in the State of Virginia, where governor Ralph Northam first admitted, then denied, that he was one of the two utter dimwits who appeared in a photo from his medical school yearbook. One of the idiots was wearing blackface, ...
The Negative Space News
There is a concept in the art world known as Negative Space. The basic idea is that instead of trying to draw the branches in a tree, one draws the space between the branches, and therefore, ultimately, the whole tree emerges. So, with that in mind, last Thursday night I put on my old high ...
A Very Close Shave
Now that the APA (American Psychological Association) have decided that the political opinions of psychologists are a legitimate factor in mental health care decisions, we’ve reached another checkpoint on the battlefields of American culture. Under the guise of concern for “the impact of power, privilege, and sexism on the development of boys and men and ...
The Great American Freak-Out
Americans are not only terrified of everything — it turns out they are also subject to sudden and inexplicable tolerance breaks. Last week’s viral incident at the Jet Blue counter in Miami serves up more evidence of an epidemic of adult conniption fits, even as nobody seems to know why the Adult Freak Out singularity ...
South Philly Barbacoa
One idea that surfaced from the recent VAT meetings was to foster a vision of Sisters Country as the artisanal capital of Oregon. That idea may be one of the better ones to have emerged from the project, if only because it is an organic outcome of broad-based community support. It is also something that ...
Good Citizenship in the Age of Lying Liars
My detective brain tells me that President Donald Trump is lying, though it’s unclear to me exactly what he’s lying about. It also seems clear that fired FBI Director James Comey, too smug by a country mile, is lying also – either actively or by omission, and who knows which. But that’s not unusual in ...
You Can’t Get There From Here
I’ve been wondering what there is to say about the saga of Judge Kavanaugh, and the allegations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. There really is no upside to joining the discussion in the present environment, largely because we seem to have regressed to the tactics of denunciation and character assassination in place of evidence ...
Bee Lives Matter
Historians and archeologists tell us that human beings began collecting wild honey about 10,000 years ago. Evidence shows up in ancient North African pottery, Egyptian art, and honey in jars has been recovered from the tombs of the Pharaohs. By 600 BCE the Picts of ancient Scotland – naturally it was the Scots – were brewing ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 