“Dear Abby”

I had lunch in Ardmore yesterday with Abby’s daughter Chele and her husband Tom, who were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to look for a house, as they are moving there from Baltimore in July. It was great seeing them, and we all hope their move puts them on the north side of the metro…

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The Potential

Yes, I am still going through stuff, stuff and more stuff as I clean out the house. There certainly is a lot of scrap paper, everything from canceled checks from when my late wife Abby and her first husband ran Stuckey’s Restaurants in the 1970s, to spiral notebooks intended for a class or a project…

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The Arches Connundrum

I read just today that Arches National Park  will implement a temporary, pilot timed entry system “to help manage traffic and improve visitor experiences, from April 3 to October 3, 2022.” I wrote about this issue once before (link), but today I want to be a little more thoughtful. The National Park system is under…

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The Utopian

40 years ago, I was a freshman college student at the University of Oklahoma. I had yet to buy my first Nikon camera. I lived in Adams Center, the older of the “tower” dorms at OU. My roommate was Jeff, who had switched rooms, without being invited or even asking, with the kid I was…

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Why, Internet, Why?

Lately the internet has been hocking wet loogies on my cupcake and telling me it’s frosting. Most recently is the idea that every page … every page … had some kind of delayed pop-up, mostly intended to get me to sign up for updates. Usually there is no “No Thanks” button, just a tiny, hard-to-see…

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Review: The Journals of Kurt Cobain

“I don’t think you’re going to come away from this ‘decoding’ knowing anything more about him than what is already commonly known. You may learn something about him you, personally, didn’t know before, but as for ‘decoding’ him? Not gonna happen. Not from photos of his journal pages alone.” And so another dismissive, journalist wannabe…

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The Social Dilemma

I just watched the Netflix Original Documentary The Social Dilemma, and I have some thoughts on this rather chilling assessment of the current and future netscape. I have often been disappointed by my social media posts seeming to gather so much more attention than my blog posts here on this site, and I always have…

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Two Decades Since 9/11

In some ways, the era before 9/11 was an age of innocence. I have written many times over the years about where I was when 9/11 happened. Since Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an entire generation of people, some my friends and relatives, have little to no memories of that day….

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Another Reason to Vaccinate

A friend confessed to me just today that he was “afraid of shots,” but was seriously considering getting his COVID-19 vaccination. He said he’d seen that I got vaccinated Monday Aug. 23. What he didn’t realize is that I got my third, or “booster”, dose of the Moderna-made vaccine. Update, August 25: a day after…

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“Oink!”

By the time I was a senior is high school, I was hanging out with some people who might not have been the best influences on me. One thing we did all summer long after graduation was to “cruise.” Younger readers might not exactly understand this activity, since it seems so lame, but essentially, we…

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A High School Graduate

A portion of this was my column this weekend. I added some less-palatable bits to this entry. As I cover graduations this year, as I do every year, I think of when I walked the same walk. I graduated from Lawton’s Eisenhower High School on May 31, 1981. If you subtract, yes, that is 40…

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Nature Fighting Back

I got my second coronavirus vaccination this week. My arm is very sore and I have some muscle aches, but that tells me it’s working. I posted on social media this week that my peach trees had gone straight to leaves this year, and did not appear to be making blossoms, which, according to my…

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A Legacy of Dignity

What if, after your political career, you could depart the landscape of history with dignity? What if you could be known as someone who learned from the First World War and brokered a brilliant solution at the end of the Second World War? What if you left with a spotless record of dignified speeches, a…

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The Times We Have Made

The most difficult year since 9/11 is over, but the world seems to continue to deliver a steady stream of gut punches. The most recent of these is the unfathomably violent, vulgar and seditious actions by pro-Trump supporters in our nation’s capital. There is good news, however… Abby received her first dose of the Moderna…

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Hate It to Death

I saw a meme on social media recently that read, “Make racists afraid again.” You are so in love with hating racists that you don’t realize that they are already afraid. They would have to be to be racists. Maybe I’m asking too much to say, “Make racists realize that we are all human beings,”…

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Your Hatred of Science

“Why is NASA spending $1.1 million* to send a probe to Jupiter when all they have to do is open up their Bible to see how all that was created.” ~Citizen at town hall meeting, Ada, Oklahoma, August 2011 A frightening aspect of the recent political landscape is the idea that science and the educated…

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