When medical marijuana was legalized in Michigan, there suddenly emerged an epidemic of chronic back pain. From the Porcupine Mountains all the way down to Monroe, doctors’ offices were teeming with goateed sufferers in their tie-dyed…
There goes Jackie, scamperin’ by in his pamper. All he got on is that pamper. He’s a pamper scamper, I say, and he smell to pee yew, too, and that pamper is fresh new. “Slow down, Jackie,” I…
I keep encountering old people. As part of my job as a social worker, they come hobbling in, creaky and wrinkled, and settle in to share their tales of woe. Sometimes they carry smells, are grey and bifocaled, and fill their application…
The second time I was absorbed into a mass of humanity, I was living in Ankara, Turkey, circa 1973. A friend had invited me to a concert where some obscure Dutch rock band was performing. When…
Read Part Two (G-O) of the election alphabet here. P is for protest. In the spring of 1972, when I was a long-haired, anti-war student at Michigan State, I grabbed a bullhorn on the steps of…
Read Part One (A-F) of the election alphabet here. G is for getting a buzz. When I was in high school, a bunch of us wrote an “underground newspaper” which we dubbed, RIPT. The name was a…
A is for ambush. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex is a fairly large animal. Its trillion-ton head is Manhattan, its girth the million-square-miles of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; its claws extend through the Bering Strait.…
In the beginning, at the starter’s gunshot of all beginnings, there appeared a bearded and cherry-cheeked giant who wore bright red suspenders. His was the first breath, his the first ray of sun, his the first…
My next door neighbor has a dog, a big, bouncy golden retriever named Runner. One day, Runner, having to go, must have been in a quandary. He sat on the property line between his owner’s yard…