My Wannabe Socialist Friends? Twenty-seven years ago I started a motorcycle club with a few pals. I had gone on a solo motorcycle walkabout through the canyons of Southern Utah in 1994 when I turned 40 and had been inspired to make that an annual ritual. The first year I could only get one guy to go with me. He was a lawyer and a bit of a henpecked husband (his wife didn’t like him…
The Last Straw Not so long ago I wrote about my travails with AT&T and Verizon and the extremely annoying process of trying to cancel services I do not use and have not used for a while. I termed it a death throw for these telecom behemoths when they must resort to unscrupulous tactics to try to drain the last few drops out of the cow they have been milking dry. I thought that was…
Rounders If you haven’t seen the movie, Rounders, and you enjoy an occasional game of poker with friends, you really must find a way to see the movie. It was made in 1998, so it has more or less modern production value and yet its got the patina of age that makes it a classic. There are other great poker movies like Molly’s Game, The Cincinnati Kid, and Maverick, but almost everyone agrees that Rounders…
Rock On Tomorrow I finally get to test out my new rock climbing wall, which I have dubbed, MoonstruckPurna in honor of all those vast Himalayan peaks that I will never get close enough to see, much less to climb. I have the means to include Nepal in my travel itinerary, but, quite frankly, the altitude scares me off and I prefer to get my mountain climbing kicks vicariously and from a distance. I love…
The Clutter of Life It’s 5:30am again and here I am trying to make sense of my insomnia. I actually feel like I got a decent span of sleep with almost six hours uninterrupted last night, but once awakened after that amount of sleep, I am a lost soul lying in bed listening to my CPAP machine in ways that I cannot hear when I am more tired and more ready for sleep. I think…
The Power Elite What a strange world we live in. I feel it is even stranger for me than it is for most. I am a white male born of privilege, but raised with a liberal ideology. My paternal grandfather was a fascist, one of Mussolini’s men from the region of northern Italy near Bassano del Grappa in the Tyrol. He was either a bully like young Benito or more likely just a sycophant trying…
Hunting for Hunter This title will probably do more to raise the readership of my blog among my red friends than anything other than one denouncing Hillary for something obscure and yet serious, like the mishandling of top secret government document. But while the story has nothing to do with Hunter Biden and why right wing deflectors need a bane of their existence to distract them from all the very real, growing and harsh criticism…
Papyrus Denial There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring…
Journaling Every once in a while I will look back over my blog stories for one reason or another. I have now been doing this under the Old Lone Ranger monicker since early 2019 when my son Thomas told me I should do it. That is three years and seven months or about 1,300 days. My blogging software feeds me all sorts of statistics that I generally ignore since I am not doing this commercially…
Contrite Is as Contrite Does The concept of contrition is often thought to be associated with Catholicism. We think of sitting in a confessional and leaving with the seemingly trivial penance of saying so many Hail Mary’s or Novenas to absolve ourselves of our sins. But contrition is a far more general and important concept for modern life than these old, somewhat antiquated memories or images. We all need to start from a common basis…