Category: The Grab Bag

…this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 14, 2017 Yesterday, encouraged by the bluest skies, I bravely opened the door to our shop. Our shop, where I like to futz and putter and try to make things, or fix things, or think about things, had become a desultory crypt of neglect. That’s my ...

It’s never like old times, of course.  We get older, the world keeps spinning, things fall apart, and tucking in behind a crew-served gun, although something like riding a bicycle, feels a little different on this end of the years.  It’s slower maybe, the rust of time and a lot of miles revealed in stiffer ...

Brass and links piled up beneath the M2.  Big Sandy, Arizona I have just returned from a weeklong gig covering the Bushmaster Users Conference for a magazine.  I was invited down to this eye-popping event by my former platoon sergeant from the US Marine Corps, Eric Rogers, who went on to become a warrant officer ...

Many of us watched with interest the recent, and remarkably anti-climactic, extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to face drug trafficking charges in the United States. He has, naturally, pleaded not guilty. As this news broke, I received no fewer than a dozen messages and emails from my former partners in narcotics enforcement celebrating, to ...

Last evening, in something of a pique, I decided to downgrade my presence on the Book of Face.  My existence there was experimental–I opened the account for selfish reasons to begin with–an attempt to broaden the audience for my writing–and am stepping far back for equally selfish reasons:  the preservation of my mind. Once, I ...

This piece originally appeared in The Nugget News, January 11, 2017. The great battery of recent storms has made things interesting. Cars are off the road, pipes are freezing, heat pumps are failing, and I’ve got three snowy mounds down in the corrals I think contain horses. By the time you read this, we may ...

Bummer news this morning from an old friend and fellow denizen of the Nevada desert–they have finally demolished the ruins at American Flats.  To those of us who once tromped around in this amazing and ghostly wonderland, tucked into the hills outside of Virginia City, it comes like a gut punch. Officially known as the ...

This post originally appeared in The Nugget News, January 3, 2017 I decided to write the first column of the New Year down here in the barn, with the horses and the hay and the barncats. My wife and I have managed to do a few things right, and this barn is one of them. Aside ...

This piece originally appeared in the Nugget News, November 1, 2016 Last week I went elk-hunting with some friends, out past Hampton, in the big and mostly empty desert and juniper country. We were an odd collection of hunters, precisely the kind of guys that columnist Victor Davis Hanson calls “alienated Americans.” Which is to ...

This post originally appeared in The Nugget News, September 13, 2016.  This piece concluded my series from Hohenfels, however I will be adding some fresh afterthoughts here in the BC in the coming days. JMRC Hohenfels, Germany.  When Russian troops poured through the Roki tunnel in 2008, after months of international legerdemain and carefully stage-managed ...