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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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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What is sacred to you? The radio is playing chants. I curl beneath my electric blanket on the floor and listen, thinking about the day, my friends, my body and soul, my past and future, illusions and reality, and this very perfect moment. “He who yields to fear or pain or anger is a fugitive…
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Please note: this entry contains descriptions of violence and death that some readers might find upsetting. I read this at Open Mic Night Monday, October 7, 2024… There’s something about seeing freshly-dead, burned-up bodies that puts an air of frivolity around the day’s business. The lives of four people, on a business trip, were rather…
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There is a clever saying that goes, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.” That’s how I feel and act all the time. When I bought new tires for my Nissan Juke this week, it inspired me to hand-wash the car,…
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Today Ada Sunrise Rotary presented the 2023-24 President appreciation plaque to me, which was an honor to receive. And while I did serve as Sunrise Rotary’s President for a year, it was fun and productive, and, for anyone familiar with civic clubs, another chapter of, as the Rotary International motto says, “Service Above Self.” I…
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I visited a friend on the local college campus recently. When we stepped out into the cool late-morning air, I was struck by the memories it summoned. Many college memories center around the start of college, the start of semesters, the start of the school year. Those are often associated with the excitement of the…
Continue reading →Engines: most science fiction depicts spacecraft with their engines running the entire time they are shown on-screen; Prometheus, The Martian, Star Wars, Star Trek, and on and on. This is probably because the graphic designers were in love with the deep blue glow they created in the engine exhaust. Why this is a problem: aside…
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Unsafe by Richard R. Barron What do you keep from me to spare me? The countless ways to say goodbye? The action that is filled with light and darkness? My selfish little tragedies? The moment of darkness between us? Remorse? Chaos? Vulgarity? Clarity? Rage? A beautiful moment of tenderness that I ruined by merely witnessing…
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Pamela Michelle Young Hudspeth has died. She was 58. I was unmarried and lonely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In May 1992, I started dating Pam, and, quite honestly, she was incredibly beautiful. She was so beautiful, in fact, that it blinded me to more realistic considerations, such as the fact that she…
Continue reading →Here my vision for my service as 2023-24 Ada Sunrise Rotary President. This year’s Rotary International theme is “Create Hope in the World.” My keyword: fun. My first goal for Rotary is to make it more popular and appealing to those who might not have considered joining. Rotary is a lot of fun, and many…
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Many of my readers will recall that I have been writing in a journal for most of my life, since September 1978. As I thought about this, I began to think about breaking it up into various periods, a kind of lifelong chronology of my writing. 1978 really was a different time. No internet. No…
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I recognize that I have never experienced grieving the death of a spouse before. My wife Abby died 18 months ago, and I am finding my second year of grieving her death to be harder than the first. I miss her more than ever. Losing her wasn’t as hard as watching her lose the fight….
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I was digging through a journal recently, and if I am completely honest, it was to find out when I had sex with someone that year. I didn’t find that, but I came across some extraordinary notes. May 11, 1998… “I’m tied of ice chest boyfriends.” ~Lisa, who was hitting on me at the time….
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I’ve been cooking on this item for six months, hoping to get “60 life lessons I learned by the age of 60,” but I guess I haven’t learned that much, because I topped out at fewer than 50. Every day is the right day. Looking bad in the eyes of strangers doesn’t matter, and I…
Continue reading →As of today, I am your 2023-2024 Ada Sunrise Rotary President. It honors and amazes me that I was elected to do this, since in some ways, I don’t really see myself as an adult, and never have. I know I do an adult job, was a good adult husband, and I behave as an…
Continue reading →I recently rewatched a couple of my favorite home entertainment items: A Man for All Seasons, and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror. A Man for All Seasons tells the tale of Sir Thomas More, named by King Henry the VIII as Lord Chancellor of England, but, when More declines to endorse Henry’s…
Continue reading →I recently came across a YouTube video about the demise of Borders Books, and it sent me down memory lane about my bookstore days in the 1990s. My friends in Norman, Oklahoma, and I would often meet for lunch on Sunday, then pick something to do in the afternoon. Much of the time, we would…
Continue reading →It’s been a month since anyone heard a peep from this blog, and while there are some legitimate reasons, there are as many lame ones. The biggest blame falls to work, which, while it is the absolute dopest the bomb there is, the middle of April through the middle of May take it all. So…
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Updated December 2022 to include a note about the movie Die Hard. Often when watching movies, I will simultaneously look up the background of them on Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB), or, if the film has guns, the Internet Movie Firearms Data Base (IMFDB). I did so recently when I was rewatching the 1995’s excellent…
Continue reading →I have a friend who is very afraid of heights. He gets nervous, then panicked, then actually shuts down in the face of any kind of perceived open exposure to unprotected high places. I don’t share his fear at all. I am known as the photojournalist who will climb on, or fly in, anything without…
Continue reading →I sometimes wish I were less transparent. I sometimes wish I were more of a mystery. It seems like my feelings are so obvious, and that the vulnerability from it could be dangerous. I was at a store recently. My former photography student Devon was behind the counter. “You look sad,” she said. “I am…
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An issue came up at one of my civic clubs (the name of which I am withholding) recently. At a meeting in June, the Board voted to change the weekly meeting to include a moment of silence instead of a prayer, which historically was always a Christian prayer that included Jesus. Some of the members…
Continue reading →In a public setting recently, someone said they were, “a Christian first, a family man second, a countryman third, and a member of this group fourth.” His assertion was intended to express his life’s priorities, and I understood his point, but I don’t agree that you have to put them in an inflexible order. If…
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