A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Sorted by date Results 26 - 44 of 44
The ever-shortening sprint from Halloween to Christmas is on and, with it, the annual retrospection is underway, the tradition of reviewing the year inching ever earlier like the retail Christmas decorations going up before Halloween and the Halloween decorations going up before Labor Day and the back-to-school stuff showing up on Father’s Day. And so on. As the Hurry Up to get to the Next Thing intensifies toward ridiculous, elbowing out the notion of Carpe Diem in deference to FOMO, the m...
If things were normal, the acrid aftertaste of pumpkin spice lattes and commentary about busting out the flannel and lamenting the coming of snow would suffice for things to scan (as opposed to read) while listening to the clock ticking away the seconds of your life, and maybe a sigh or two about the Once Again Lame Vikings and their Glee-Club Quarterback demonstrating about as much competitive angst as Snow White - but, what the hell can one expect for $86 million - if things were normal, all t...
When everyone’s drunk or getting there on a Saturday night and you’re not, there’s an island you inhabit where the intense loneliness of being surrounded by other humans stings less than during the sober, awkward daylight hours. This is because the innate ability of humans to sense another human’s loneliness is compromised, meaning they don’t treat you like a lonely person like they do when they see you in the grocery store, avoiding eye contact (thank God) or at the grad party or at church or...
There’s a spot on the walking path along the north side of the river, west of the trestle, directly across from where my brother works on the trains that bump back and forth between there and Sappi, chugging away like determined old ladies, where, on clear days, the late afternoon sun pours through the 93 million miles and dapples coolly through the twinkling leaves, raining down dappled jangles of white light, glinting. Autumn hints. If you pause there, you’ll smell what must be the lea...
The world cares. Sorta. The earth doesn’t give a darn. Planet Earth was so much healthier without us on it. Planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, as a lava- and gaseous-laden living thing for most of its life, slowly solidifying, evolving life, as its own “thing.” Then, about 200,000 years ago, we came around as arguable/inarguable humanoids and tried to make sense of the rock on which we lived, miraculously. Where’s the water? Where’s the meat? The oxygen unmentionably available...
When I was 7, my Gramps let me hold a 1903 Colt .45 six-shooter revolver and shoot it at a line of Olympia beer cans he’d arranged on the branch of an oak tree somewhere out in the Ditchbanks. I hit five out of six. Gramps was ecstatic. The noise and the kick didn’t scare me at all. Missing the cans on the branch did. My dad was there. It was 1972. A bunch of years later, on my 16th birthday, Gramps gave me that revolver, saying: “Don’t ever use it unless you’re gonna use it, except on cans....
When you’re away, the things you thought you’d do but didn’t before you left seem monumentally failed because, in truth, you could’a Got-R-Done, and you didn’t because you didn’t and you make a thousand excuses for not performing and you erase 999 of them and admit that your only excuse is You and the lack of You and that feeds the diminution of your self-esteem and you recognize the bumper sticker on a passing ‘81 gray-striped, black Mustang, saying: “I hate days when I have to do stuff and se...
These are the nights. Hot like Vietnam, and muggy, the heat heavy and wet like a blanket drenched in lilac mead. The smell of butterflies. The box fan screaming I’m Trying! plowing hot air, me next to you, salty as the ocean, spooned. Saltwater sweat rolling downward, behind the knees, down the neck, and in the hairline, dripping onto the mattress, like crying. Saltlick for mosquitoes and, every now and then, a cottony moth that ends up in the corner of the ceiling, shadow like the ghost of a d...
Awake. Verb, intransitive verb. (A person can “awake,” as in Wake Up [verb], or a person can be awake, as in: “I’m awake [intransitive], so turn off the alarm.” These states are mutually exclusive, albeit infinitesimally.) I spent last week in California. Again. Oakland isn’t San Francisco the way earth isn’t topsoil. One needs both, of course, to plant a vineyard or attract tourists or foundationalize the Raiders (When the levee breaks …). Or the A’s. Or the Giants or 49ers, Warriors, etc. ...
California … knows howda pardy. If you’ve never been, you should and if you have you should again and if you live there you should consider your unfathomable good fortune and shrug off that whole San Andreas Fault thing the same way we Minnesotans shrug off the heightened threat of seasonal depression, alcoholism, suicide and mosquitoes. Not to mention army worms … Or the fact that the Vikes just can’t figure it out. Ever. … Eventually, we’ll all end up in the sea. Or the dirt. Even the army wo...
The thing about dirt is that it is. Dirt. When you’re planting raspberries, you want some, and with geraniums too, and maybe lilacs. Petunias. You get the point. The other thing about dirt is that it’s dirty and everywhere. Under your fingernails. Little clumps stuck in your armpit hair — tiny meatballs of dust, lint, deodorant and sweat. Dirt just lives. In yer belly button. Netherplaces. Between yer toes. Your BarcaLounger. An early-years HSN cleaning product proudly claimed: “Cleans Everyth...
Once your daughter makes it in the world, you’ve made it. You’re done. Your sons are someone else’s problem. When your daughter makes it, turns out happy and satisfied and loved and actualized, maybe even a bit avenged, there’s a ringing of a bell, an aria in the space above your head, pianissimo and bright, like a bluebird in the morning, just after dawn, the billion-year-old sun baking your sleeping bag, the vapor of dew rising from your body like smoke or an offering. She smiles your way, wi...
Raise your hand if your mom’s dead. Raise your other if your dad is, too. Raise whatever other appendage you can if you’ve got dead parents with whom you wish you could have a few more words, a few more moments. Raise your ire if your dead parents raise your ire. One morning, when I was 17 and full of zits and quasi-confidence and a lacking reality thereof, when my posse lingered in my kitchen, awaiting the trek to the high school, my pinnacle almost met, my younger brother’s yet to rise, the v...
Unfake News: The colon is quickly falling out of favor and some linguists believe it will be all but extinct by 2050 or so. To geeks like me, this is very unfortunate, given the rich, bloody, confusing history of the mark. The “modern” use and construction of the colon, as we know it, was used most notably by the writer and philosopher, Aristophanes in about 300 BC. He (then everyone else) used it mostly to mark the end of a complete thought, which is to be followed by another, related one. Thi...
Upon exiting the driver's side door of a standard automobile, the left leg is kinesiologically compelled to load kinetic energy at hip - something like a ski jumper crouching on descent in order to engage, generate and hold until needed, the energy necessary to contradict gravity. Before that, as the driver lifts the left leg from the floorboard while simultaneously flinging open the door, a pronounced twisting of both the upper and lower torso occurs, the upper greater, the lower, less - this...
There’s no freedom like stolen freedom. Just ask Henri Charriere (“Papillon”). Or the dude from “Shawshank Redemption.” Talk to anyone who’s spent time in county jail. At the risk of tripping over the obvious: The world on the outside is different than the world from within. Of course, the world itself doesn’t give a damn one way or the other who’s In and who’s Out, who’s Free or Imprisoned and doesn’t alter itself in service of either. The distinction is among the imprisoned and the free. The d...
The old man squints through the cold air and down to rooftops and updrifting chimney smoke, silver-snow farm fields, the golden glow of street lamps, dark holes of wilderness. The night surrounds him as he sails in air, his eight trained beasts heaving vapor from the effort. Their legs kick rhythmically, their breath deep and chugging as they drag on their reins, pulling. The old man sighs and feels his tired bones. “I am old,” he murmurs. He tugs off heavy mittens and kneads, with gnarled fin...
It’s been two weeks already but thank God that’s over. With Thanksgiving behind us we can get back to all the self-serving, egomaniacal, narcissistic, consumer-oriented hellness that the holidays are all about. In other, less enlightened cultures around the world, including the one we White, Western Europeans all but decimated on this continent in the name of Manifest Destiny, the concept of thankfulness is so integrally baked into the general gestalt that to devote a single day out of the yea...
19. My dad catching me by the ankle as I desperately scramble up the stairs in a vain attempt to escape the well-deserved spanking I was about to endure, him fresh home from a double shift in the stock room at Northwest Paper Company, having learned in the car ride home from the mill, from my mother, about how I’d lied about spilling a gallon of paint on the living room floor while using it as a step stool to get at the piggy bank my sister had hidden behind the ceramic elf on the mantle. ...
