Author: Vic Socotra

Election Day

VOTE! If you haven’t, think about going out to the polling station and do the Deed. Vote. They don’t call it a “civic duty” for nothing. We live, at the moment, in Winston, Virginia. The Chairman’s Farm is a small component of two former great plantations in Virginia’s rolling verdant Piedmont country. The junction of […]

Arrias: It’s Not A Democracy

Among those elites who would shape our view of things there is a meme that they like to intone, in an often condescending voice: democracy dies in darkness. It has even made it into several movies. The problem, of course, is that we don’t live in a democracy; we live in a republic. And the […]

The Day Before

Arrias chimed in this morning with some basic civics. We feel is extremely useful, since the talk about “democracy” being threatened in America is really only appropriate if you don’t know how it works. The Founders of our nation- the majority of them- fought a king to ensure matters of public interest were discussed before […]

The Fires of Heck

02 October 2002 (This would have been an image of the “shape” of a weapon of mass destruction. It was a US Air Force picture, declassified in 1960, but unable to load due to local connectivity issues at The Farm). You can see from the date above the title that this outing (Morning? Afternoon?) is […]

Hamiltons

Strange times, aren’t they? We were worried about atomic war in Europe at the beginning of last week. Thursday, the Saudis claimed the Iranians were going to strike targets in the Kingdom, and the North Koreans continued to fire rockets to ocean areas around their cousins to the South. Naturally that sort of news may […]

Weather Report: On the Brink

Interesting start to a new month that ends the summer of campaigning. There is all that stuff flying around in the Wide World and the chaos of the American general election cycle. There was a technical challenge in just attempting to compile it all down on The Farm. We transferred the old “last backup” from […]

Going to Press

(This was the big deal yesterday- the cover to the manuscript of “Last Cruise.” It includes the teaser description for the back cover, a semi-dramatic symbolic image of a mighty warship steaming in the vicinity of an imaginary symbol of an implacable foe for the front. We think we got it complete, after the initial […]

Thoughts on being stuck in doctors’ office waiting rooms with TV’s blaring This piece’s topic during the late run up to this election year day of days is like being consigned erroneously to Hell. By now we all can lip synch the political commercials. It does not matter knowing which party they are for or […]

Things That Surface

It is a little disoriented here at Refuge Farm. Some boxes were opened down in the office attached to the garage spaces. There were images that had been unseen in twenty or thirty years. Some we had never seen. Is there one that includes Jane, a wife of some twenty years? As a matter of […]

Life & Island Times: Feelin’ Alright

Editor’s Note: At Refuge Farm we had the weekly visit from the wound care lady. She looked at the covering over the ankle injury, inserted a glove-clad finger on the edge and popped it off. “Healed,” she said. There was mild applause that the one-year medical adventure was complete. – Vic Author’s Note: We had […]