Field notes from the Figure 8 Ranch
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The field of candidates for the 2020 Presidential Challenge Blowout is taking shape just in time for pitchers and catchers — they report for spring training in early February – and what makes this timing so marvelous, so utterly serendipitous, ...
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 ...
This post originally appeared in The Nugget News, December 27, 2016 If you are a parent – particularly a father – and you have a daughter, or if you like great movie scenery, or even if you are merely a curmudgeon with gender axes to grind, here’s a fun holiday season idea: Go see “The ...
This piece originally appeared in the Nugget News, November 8, 2016 I have a photograph somewhere, taken from the rear seat of a British Norman Islander, of my father and uncle. My uncle, the captain on this flight between Pago Pago and the Samoan island of Ofu, is hoisting a beer and flashing a decidedly ...
This piece originally appeared in The Nugget News, August 30, 2016. Hohenfels, Germany: One of my companions for the evening was U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Robert Gallup. Gallup, 32, was wounded in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, scene of the bloodiest fighting in the Iraq War, where 82 Americans were killed, and some ...
This article originally appeared in The Nugget Newspaper, August 23, 2016. Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels, Germany: On the outskirts of this training village, known to the real world as Raversdorf but today serving as the notional Afghan village of Spinchai, someone has propped a large stuffed panda on a fence. The panda stares out over ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 