Vic, I have been remiss in providing as requested my long-standing recipe for Old Fashioneds. I will admit I first sampled this elixir during my teens from the leftovers in glasses to the kitchen as evenings wore on during my parent’s monthly mixed and female bridge parties. In the beginning I favored my father’s Cuba […]

Author’s Note: Vic, Your recent turn of phrase “What’s next?” regarding American events these past five months spurred me to write this short piece. I am unsure my characterization of the ending list of phrases, words and concepts answers your query, since I have direct evidence from colleagues that well more than half of them […]

23 June 2020 America’s Current Street Mob Madness Editor’s Note: Marlow is taking the thoughts of Arrias to a more pragmatic and personal level. I am wrestling with the same issues, trying to plumb the depths of what comes next. There is the election in November, which scares the hell out of me, and there […]

Can we live without hope? Can we live without faith, tradition, family, ritual? We are now learning during these plague days of street rage and jihad that we can live without all of these things, but only in a condition of a radical now — a barbarism that is enslaved to immediate sense impressions (hot […]

Bourbon Old Fashioned There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make excellent bourbon Old Fashioneds, and the other is to put together excellent nuclear attack mission folders for Naval aviators. Doing so taught me to never trust Russians and those who do not like Old […]

Such a lovely, living it up place, this Hotel America. When I was a young father, I read everything I could on being a good father. All the greats including Spock, Freud, Skinner . . . but the ones that struck the deepest chord were the makers of Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker cartoons. Under […]

Antique German clockwork tin toy This plague has resurfaced age old, hard questions regarding public behaviors like wearing masks: “Should we via our governments impose these behaviors? If so, are we denying them moral choice and free will? Thus denied free will, does he cease being a man? Isn’t life sustained by the grinding opposition […]

Author’s Note: Vic, I decided to write and share this with you, given your missing Wednesday incident. You are not alone. Our day after same day to the next day existence during the plague’s worst phases sometimes caused days not just to blend into one another but for time and memory of them to go […]

Ben Affleck socially distanced dining-in at Savannah’s B&D Burgers last Wednesday Bless their hearts One month into reopening thus far, it’s not so bad in the Empire. Guess we barefooted, way too early, jumping the gun, southern hicks got lucky. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Last weekend’s national news reports mentioned a sotto voce how we […]

Veiled Lady”, Raffaelo Monti c.1860, Minneapolis Institute of Arts … A tear in our plague shroud? Wanting to see how this new reality unfolded, I narrowed my focus briefly to local observations with little to no following of the broader national, regional, or state plague reporting. Upon this closer view, I noticed that people looked […]