The Front Porch
There is no shortage of opinions going around these days. What they mostly have in common is that the people who offer them don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about, and at the same time imagine that they themselves will bear zero responsibility for the consequences of their passionate opinionating, which removes any normal incentive to tell the truth. If someone begins a sentence with some version of the words “I believe,” it is therefore a sure-fire signal that what follows will be some form of a lie, which will in turn diminish our ever-shrinking common reservoir of trust.
Lying is in general a nasty business that should always make you feel a bit low. It’s bad for your character, and it almost always means treating someone else unfairly, by denying them access to an accurate picture of reality, which is why even well-intentioned lies can be so cruel. Lying interferes with the human …
Fox Insurrection
Wily foe battles Postal quartet in Battle of Rochester NH
“An attack on one is an attack on all”
Medical privacy concerns vetted as dire portents suggest that not all is well with our Union
The US Postal Service is an unsung bastion of our democracy. In all sorts of weather, day after day, to people of every background and description — even during pandemics — it delivers! But lately this most essential institution has come under attack.
In Rochester, New Hampshire in October, a brave quartet of local postal workers was set upon by a subversive foe: a vicious, stubborn, curiously resourceful, and possibly rabid fox. The assailant did not attack just once but four times, a siege whose details remain necessarily vague, in part due to medical privacy concerns and in part because such details might reveal vulnerabilities in a system crucial to our well-being as a nation.
The first stage of the onslaught occurred outdoors and came, it seems fair to conclude, as a surprise. The threat posed by unruly domestic dogs is well known to postal employees (a modern unionized workforce firmly …
A Hitchhiker's Guide to a Wounded Mind
Desert highways won’t take you to Huck Finn’s America
Leaving Las Vegas on a motorized trike after 58 dead, 867 wounded
A schizoid nation of nurses, meth-heads and bums mourns losses it can barely name
There are days when whole cities are harried and unshaven; sleepless nights when the sunrise brings no cleansing promise to man or woman alike. Apocalyptic neon columns cut the dawn, leering over the desert, where hundreds of thousands of souls linger in disillusionment and fear as the sirens endlessly scream. It was the morning of October 2nd in Las Vegas, 2017. Sleep-deprived nurses from area hospitals dragged themselves through drive-thrus for coffee, listlessly muttering their orders, shocked by the carnage they’d witnessed only the night before.
In line at the Goodwill in Henderson, just south of the city, one of the nurses seemed liable to combust. His eyes hung down, morose and lamblike, somehow ancient in their grief. He moved up in line clutching a t-shirt bearing the word “HOGWARTS” — a gift for his girlfriend, he said. It was only his first week as a clinical nursing student. As the cashier’s …
