First Monday Open Mic Night has found a new home, the Ada Public Library. The two pieces I read were Ashes to Dust, and Praying to the Thanksgiving Duck, both published on this blog Monday afternoon. The lenses I used for this event were the AF-D 85mm f/1.4 and the Altura Photo 8mm f/3.0 Fisheye.
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My friend Courtney has told me in the last few years that her favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, and recently, it has become mine as well. But it wasn’t always this way. Traditionally, Thanksgiving is a feast holiday, featuring the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I have no problem with a nice meal, but it seldom works out…
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A popular joke on the Interwebs right now goes like this: “One of my favorite hobbies as a child was making sand castles with my grandfather, until my mom took the urn away.” The reason I thought about this recently is that a friend of mine asked me if she could spread the ashes from…
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Poetry on Lost Street is an open mic event at Lost Street Brewing Company in Durant, Oklahoma. The event includes a featured poet. September’s featured poet was Molly Sizer.
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Our open mic band of poets is searching for a new home. On Monday, October 6, we met as we had the previous month, in Ada’s Wintersmith Park. The Night Always Seems to Win by Richard R. Barron Memories of being a sick child, laying on a couch made up with sheets and blankets, the…
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A last-minute issue moved us to Ada’s Wintersmith Park, but it was a beautiful evening, and it felt like we all read well. Chapter 11: Moral Bankruptcy by Richard R. Barron Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. I need to be more chaotic, so I think, “You can dance on my…
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Poetry on Lost Street is an open mic gathering at Lost Street Brewery in Durant, Oklahoma on the third Sunday afternoon of each month. This was the first time I attended, but it has interested me for a while. I am very glad I went. First Monday Spoken Word Open Mic Night organizer Cody Baggerly…
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First Monday Open Mic Night at Kind Origin Dispensary remains popular and successful. Summoning the End by Richard R. Barron What exactly am I trying to accomplish, sitting pretentiously on my front deck, sipping my pretentious coffee, writing in my pretentious notebooks with my pretentious pen? Everything around me is more genuine that I am…
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A Rotary International custom for the history of the organization is the “classification speech.” Most of the time, new members are asked to deliver the speech in their first year of Rotary membership, but I was recruited during the pandemic, so we never got around to scheduling my speech. The purpose of this activity is…
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First Monday Open Mic Night at Kind Origin Dispensary remains popular and successful. Working titles for this poem include Song, America, Light as a Leaf, and Song for America. The last one is the title of a Kansas song I really like. by Richard R. Barron Do you have a favorite song? A Farewell to…
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This week, I had to have my Irish wolfhound, Hawken Rifle Trail, euthanized. He was a great dog and a great friend. Very large breeds don’t live as long as smaller dogs, and he was very old, almost nine.
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Over the past several months, I’ve made a point to ghost (meaning to erase the internet and communications footprint) certain people from my life. Some of these people get ghosted because they live in an us-vs-them paradigm, especially politically. Other people I’ve ghosted were rude to me and my work. Still others are gone because…
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My sister Nicole and her husband Tracey timed their June vacation road trip to start with an appearance at First Monday Spoken Word Open Mic Night. My good friend and fellow photographer Danielle O’Daniel made the photos of Nicole and me.
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Critical Thinking and Our Duty to the Truth by Richard R. Barron (Rewritten from a 2019 blog entry) Did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning us? I thought about these and questions like these as I reread and reshared a 2016…
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If you know me at all, you know that I love paper maps. For me, they have a soul of their own. I love paper road maps, paper trail maps, and, of course, paper sectional aeronautical charts. When I am feeling the itch to travel, hike, fly, or just explore the world, I dig out…
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Sticky note in my journal, January 5, 1995: “Lead with this at OMN!” … “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief the develops the powers of the mind.” ~Marcel Proust The night before this open mic event, I dreamed that there were both male and female hot dogs. “Buddhism is the one…
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This is the story we published about my experience speaking to Byng, Oklahoma School students about the day I covered the bombing in Oklahoma City. Journey of Hope visits Byng School The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum’s “Journey of Hope,” an effort to share the experience of the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Building Federal…
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In some ways, nothing is more important than the weather. The weather dictates how we live, where we live, what we buy, what we use, what will probably be plentiful, and what might become scarce. In Ada, we got a refresher course on this important truism when, in the predawn hours Tuesday, March 4, 2025,…
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Waiting for the Miracle by Richard R. Barron I find myself on the front deck again, taking aim at the blue sky. If I shoot it down, it will fall all around me, and I can wrap myself up in its’ blueness. The sun would look on in black-and-white contempt, though only for a moment….
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Why does the truth even matter? (I originally wrote this as my column in December 2019, but it seems to be more important every time I look at it, so here it is again.) Did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning…
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At a big box retailer recently, I saw a display that held hundreds of boxes of earloop face masks. The price had been marked way down, so I assume they have a lot of this product and not many people are buying them. This is an interesting example of our society’s ability to forget a…
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My notes for the group, from my eclectic mountain of notebooks – ideas you can steal and run with! Create an image with words instead of an image with suffering. My blindness was wasted on you. I can’t make sense of my dreams, which already make perfect sense. Even after she left me, she said…
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___________________________ My Ten Commandments by Richard R. Barron This above all: to thine own self be true. Better to remain silents and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. Light and love, while you still have the chance It’s only 1/8000000000th about you. Stop thinking you have all the answers….
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My readers know me well enough to know that I am a very well-organized person, particularly when it comes to photography. Part of that is my devotion to keeping things neat (not, as some charmingly unwelcome critics have suggested, “OCD”), and part of it is my fairly sharp memory. I thought of this as I…
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I am parking this here so I can refer back to it.
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I have often said and written that putting pen to paper is one of the best ways to learn, one of the best ways to express yourself, and one of the best ways to keep track of our very complicated lives. You can see some clinical analysis at Psychiatrist.com. and Pens.com. I’ve been writing in…
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“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou An important truth I have grudgingly learned over the years: most people are very happy to be very unhappy. I thought about this for a long time after someone I once liked decided to set me straight about what a terrible…
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Two of my long-time photographer friends and fellow Alan Parsons Project fans attended an AP² concert recently, so it got me thinking about what songs I loved and hated from this long-lived band. Most of the instrumentals are robotic and pointless: Hawkeye, Cloudbreak, Breakaway, Urbania, Pipeline, Nucleus, etc. On the other hand, instrumentals like Voyager…
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A couple of searches and shared memories resulted in finding these old photos of my late wife Abby. It started when my sister asked how her husband could take better pictures of her, and I reminded her of a time in 2007 when I posed, lit, and directed Abby for a portrait in my mom’s…
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“Richard, stop being infatuated with me!” ~Pam, October 1990 Today is the first anniversary of the death of Pam Hudspeth, a long-time friend, one-time girlfriend, and fellow journalist. She was just 58 when she died. A couple of nights ago, I had vivid dreams about her all night. Lucid dreamers know how much that can…
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