When I was 15, my 10th grade English teacher, Gil Hernandez, lent me his copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I read it, but its influence didn’t really start to sink in until college, when, as so many of us do at age 19, I began to cobble together a…
Continue reading →Prior to studio executives taking over the film and mandating sweeping changes, the 1981 film “On Golden Pond” was originally called, “Cattails of Death,” and was written by John Milius. Studio staff objected to many aspects of the original plot, including a B-52 strike on the bucolic cabin at the end of the film and…
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My friend of 15 years, Ann Kelley, has died after a three-and-a-half year battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 41. Ann and I felt close to each other from the day we met. We talked about everything, but more often than not we talked about our romantic lives, even after we were both married…
Continue reading →“I want my machinery to disappear.” -Andy Warhol With death and his friends hunting in packs this fall (coworker Bob Forrest in October, brother-in-law Ralph and close friend Ann in November, and yesterday fellow Oklahoma photojournalist Jerry Laizure), I’ve given a few minutes to thinking about how I want my machinery to disappear. I think…
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My friend of 15 years, Ann Kelley, has died after a three-and-a-half year battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was 41. Ann and I felt close to each other from the day we met. We talked about everything, but more often than not we talked about our romantic lives, even after we were both married…
Continue reading →In addition to the scores of blog entries here over the years, I’ve written dozens of notebooks full of journal entries, as well as the hilarious green and red notebooks full of stuff my friends and I thought was funny or ridiculous. I also kept a few “other” notebooks. Some of them were full of…
Continue reading →Most people are aware that the Chevrolet Nova was not a big seller in Mexico, for the obvious reason that “no va” translates to “not going” or “it does not go” in Spanish. There are, however, some lesser-known examples of car names that were not entirely successful. Nissan SNOT: Originally an acronym for Synergistic Naturalistic…
Continue reading →This was previously a page, but here it is now as a post. M7 has decided to write “a series of blog posts with each of the Band Names, Titles, and Poo References as the title of an individual blog post.” As he does so, I will link each title to his entry. –Von Luger’s…
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As my readers know, all my life I have been motivated by the idea of being creative. Non-creative people baffle me. Why do they even exist? How can they find meaning in life, I wonder, since creativity gives so much meaning to my life? In the fall of 1979, when we were juniors in high…
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My sister wanted me to write about a few things from our childhood, some of which she only vaguely recalls because she was so young when they occurred. This entry gets its title from the fact that until 1971, I was known as “Rusty.” That year we moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, and there was another…
Continue reading →Again I am going to talk about the long ago past and my mistakes. Live with it. I do. This is another story about hanging out with douchebags in high school. In the spring of 1981, my friends and I went to Oklahoma University for the day to tour the college and pre-enroll. In my…
Continue reading →After Abby dozed off this evening, I walked around outside for a while. The sky was alight with the last of the sunset, and combined with a thunderstorm to our east, a rainbow formed. I walked down to the pond, which has been dry since the beginning of the month. I had my shovel with…
Continue reading →My sister Nicole and her new husband Tracey came from New Orleans for a long weekend, along with Abby’s daughter Chele, husband Tom, and their baby, our grandson Paul, who flew from Baltimore. Some highlights include a big lunch with guests and other family from around the area, shooting some of our firearms, which Tracey…
Continue reading →Like most high school seniors, I got some senioritis. We didn’t drink or get high, but we stayed up late and stayed out late. We “cruised” a lot, meaning we drove in circles in the vicinity of Wayne’s Drive-Inn, trying to infuriate the “goat ropers” (our term for urban cowboys), who we regarded as inferior…
Continue reading →Actual sign: jungle ice enter What I read: uncle ice eater Misheard: Two men were arrested after having their vaginas pierced. Misheard: AT&T’s global douche farm. Not technically misheard, but heard with a double take: Somebody turned over the ‘tater cart. Not technically misheard, but still: Bethesda Naval Hospital. (Surprised they have hospitals just for…
Continue reading →Saturday Update: From the Mega Millions web site Saturday, March 31: Three tickets matched all six numbers in the Friday, March 30, Mega Millions drawing. Those tickets will split the jackpot, estimated at a record-shattering $640 million. Those tickets were bought in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland. When I was seventeen, my friends and I talked…
Continue reading →In the truest sense of egomania, I believe that the mere act of my discovering something on the internet means it is about me and I must respond to it. Everything is a challenge, not especially of the validity of my opinions (though it usually is), but more of my ability to be more clever…
Continue reading →As an outdoors person, one might expect me to have been pretty cold and miserable on any number of occasions, but the truth is that while I love to hike and camp in the colder months, the one time I was colder and wetter than any other in my life wasn’t in the wilderness at…
Continue reading →I was young once, and as a youth I possessed a certain recklessness that is common to the young. I think we are all prone to this behavior, and I sometimes think it’s amazing we survive those years. In the summer of 1981, I hung out with some guys who drove fast, expensive cars. Friends…
Continue reading →It was in Centrahoma, Oklahoma, August 1992. It was my second time to visit the double-wide trailer in this tiny town, so tiny that its only road was unpaved. The first time was two years earlier, when a reporter named Judy and I came to investigate claims there was a poltergeist in the house, who…
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I was a freshman at The University of Oklahoma. At the beginning of the spring semester, my roommate Jeff dropped out, so I had a dorm room to myself. I brought my enlarger from home, and managed to make my room dark enough that I could make prints at night. And it was all about…
Continue reading →There are those of us who spend their whole lives waxing rhapsodic about autumn. I once had a college professor at OU, a man named Clay Lewis, who told us about one time he was watching the marching band practice on an autumn day in October, causing him to burst into tears. This afternoon, while…
Continue reading →In the summer of 1978, our parents decided to get an above-ground pool for our back yard. The first step in the installation process was to dig a 12-inch deep hole in the yard the size and shape of the pool. Dad hired Michael and me to dig it. It was June, which in Oklahoma…
Continue reading →Yesterday was another day in a long stretch of very hot days in our corner of the world. On top of that, it was an incredibly busy one for me, and one in which I worked outdoors quite a bit. Even after a long, hot day, I still needed to shoot, but my final item…
Continue reading →Like a lot of writers, I tend to gravitate toward a word that I find interesting, and then use it ad nauseum. Lately I have been labeling anything I find to be slow moving or boring “ponderous,” particularly if it is attempting to express an intellectual construct, even unsuccessfully. This paragraph, for example, is ponderous….
Continue reading →I’ve been posting much more frequently on my teaching blog, primarily since this summer is the first time I have taught two different classes at the same time. One result of this posting is that I feel a little unbalanced in my digital life. Both classes are going great. If there is a down side,…
Continue reading →Abby and I spent some of this weekend cleaning and organizing. The house has been in disarray for some time, since last month Abby’s friend gave her an antique bedroom suite, and we have not, as yet, found a home for the furniture it displaced. We have made some progress, including one of my longstanding…
Continue reading →I know that everyone on Facebook is posting those lame “Best Dad in the World” status updates today and tomorrow, so I was a little reluctant to post this, but on the other hand, it’s nice to have this stuff on file for posterity. My father, Joseph Lloyd Barron, was born April 15, 1935. He…
Continue reading →My story will start like this: “David and Shannon met each other… no, those are stupid names. You’d think I wrote this in college.” Barking up the wrong fish. Modern-day Rufus. I named my first girlfriend’s breasts Frank and Ernest. Wifemosis. I was the kind of guy who missed winter. Even when it was still…
Continue reading →I was in my second and third years of college in 1983. One of the most significant things that stands out from 1983, which is often forgotten or misunderstood, particularly by younger people, is the prevalence of the notion that nuclear war between the east and the west was not only a threat, but likely,…
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