It is unique, the blast of smoky air that hits you when you walk into a Waffle House. It is as unique as the people that are sitting there, black and white. They are big, for the most part, and they favor sweat clothes and t-shirts. It is regional America, the vast red part […]

  I’m in the South. You would think that Virginia would qualify, but it doesn’t.   I love south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but Northern Virginia is as much the North as parts of Florida, and of course as alien as parts of Somalia and the Hindu Kush and Guatamala or any of the other […]

  Time flies when you are having fun. It just doesn’t seem like ten years ago today that Pop star Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley were married in the Dominican Republic. That should have alerted us to something, even then.   They would prefer those days were back. The rains are continuing on the […]

  It’s enough to make you feel a little creaky today. Bob Dylan is 63. Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong, is 66. Patti LaBelle just turned sixty.   Time for the Baby Boomers to move on.  I saw Rebel Bob is now advertising underwear for Victoria’s Secret. Perhaps there comes a softening of the […]

  President Bush reassured the American people on the plan for stabilizing Iraq, though I did not know about it in real-time.   I was more concerned about the small Japanese car that crept along the left-hand lane somewhere south of the tunnel at Baltimore. The car drifted across the center line, headed somewhere unknown, […]

  We may or may not be done with our latest Hundred Years war in Europe, and we may have launched off into something just as profound and enduring elsewhere.   The news continues bad enough this morning, and they are trying to pin the prisoner abuse on Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US […]

  The storms blew through last night but we were lucky. None of them hit Big Pink head on. Instead they smashed into Gaithersburg to the north. But the air mass changed and water came and this morning the locusts are muted, their humming subdued in the background. The air is as moist as a […]

  I woke to the great rhythmic humming of the cicadas. It was a like the background music to a science fiction movie. I had left the windows open and the rich humid air flowed through them with the wave of sound.   Their song will continue while they live and mate and burrow to ground […]

  The thunderstorms cleared out the humidity last night. I roused briefly at three, glanced at the clock and drifted off again, strangely content, considering the news of the last two weeks, and the prospects of what is still to come.   The alarm clock did its raucous thing at 0445 and I got up […]

There are strategies and strategies. I had a turgid discussion about tactical withdrawals last night, how my partner and I could remove ourselves from our current positions and re-deploy our limited forces on a more secure front.   I did not intend to be combative, but if that was your perception, I have to accept […]