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, ...
This article originally appeared as one in a three part series in the Nugget Newspaper, August 16, 2016 Hohenfels, Germany. There is a grim certainty of purpose among the 30-odd professional military officers gathered in the room. We are at the orders briefing, in a non-descript hut among a village of huts, berms and concrete ...
If I have any readers left, I would like to assure you that I will soon be returning to this page in force. Although I am, in theory, retired from gainful employment, my life seems to have become busier than I would have expected. Here on the Figure 8 we have many, many, irons in ...
In my last post, I promised that Jim Cornelius and I were up to something. Here’s a sample. It’s a mindset, it’s a way of life, it’s a business card. This is just a teaser of what is to come. More important things on the general theme will follow soon…just you wait.
This one comes by request from a very good friend, but it will stand some explanation. Recently, I wrote a column piece for the paper discussing our garden. The point, more or less, was that we aren’t raising a garden for amusement. We are trying to raise food, and a lot of it, as much ...
Been a few days, friends, but I could explain if I felt compelled too. I don’t, but will anyway, because if you are here, we are probably to some degree simpatico. You already understand. Life, in the modern world, is busy, and we have things to do and people to meet and deadlines to appease. ...
“The Road March is the crucible in which the soul is refined. Pulling a trigger is easy. Humping the load over the distance is where you find out who will be on the ambush site to pull the trigger with you. The Road March defines you. Never quit. Come in ugly if you have to, ...
Four Bears, Mato-Tope′, is known to history as one of the most respected chiefs of the later Mandan Nation. Perhaps, by the time white contact with the Mandan-Hidatsa was essentially routine, even the most respected. I’ve written about him here before, and have just finished a fine book “Encounters at the Heart of the World,” by ...
*This column originally appeared in The Nugget News, 20 April, 2016 Two weeks ago my mother called and dropped a bomb on our house. She asked if I was sitting down. I wasn’t, but I did, quickly, because that’s what sons do when their mothers start a conversation that way. And if you are a ...
Last night, apparently, the town council in our fair burg passed a “resolution recognizing the 9 rules of civility.” This was evidently the result of a “toxic environment for discourse,” which is one of the more interesting and simultaneously sickening memes I keep hearing repeated about the state of debate and disagreement in America. Now ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 