Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, September 13, 2018, 1:55 p.m. Florence is coming to town. In fact, it looks like it’s going through Florence (the city) on the way. Not Florence Nightingale. Not Aunt Florence. They are both no longer with us. Hurricane Florence is very much alive, but I hope it’s on its deathbed by …
Author: wastedpilgrim
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Bumping Along in a Crazy World
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, September 6, 2018, 1:15 p.m. Not much of me has been literary in recent days. Oh, there has been beauty in my world. The Red Sox’ seven-run eighth-inning rally and Brandon Phillips’ ninth-inning home run against the Braves was, as Dennis Eckersley is fond of saying on TV, “a beautiful thing.” …
Words and Lyrics and Titles and Tunes
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, August 26, 2018, 2:42 p.m. I listened to a Johnny Cash song that had slipped my mind. “See Ruby Fall.” I feel I know exactly how Cash wrote it. He was in his tour bus, heading through the country, probably in the mountains of the Appalachian chain, and he saw an …
Don’t Even Try to Put All This Together
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, August 23, 2018, 10:11 a.m. Two days ago, I ate at KFC for the first time since the horrible commercials started. I bought a three-piece, Original Recipe, Big Box Meal. It was all dark meat. I like white meat. I deserved that. Why do I hold silly commercials against restaurants where …
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, August 17, 2018, 10:54 a.m. This morning I learned about the wet-bulb thermometer. So enriched was I that I moved on to wet-bulb temperature. Am I a man of boundless curiosity? I’d like to think so, but the short-term answer was that I was trying to figure out why Clinton High …
Up on the Hill
Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, August 8, 2018, 11:38 a.m. It seems there’s always a hill. It might be a plateau above a practice field, with a town’s young men busily preparing to represent their school and town in battles for football supremacy, scattered a week apart throughout the fall. It might be a manmade hill, …
Folks Are So Mad They Could Just Spit
Clinton, South Carolina, Sunday, August 5, 2018, 10:22 a.m. People seem habitually, chronically and incurably mad at one another. They are divided into warring camps. My theory is that everything is slowly becoming a sport. My team is made up of incredibly gifted student-athletes who will follow up a national championship by huddling up to …
What I Like About Him Is He Does What He Says
Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 1:56 p.m. I’m going to pay for my own campaign. I’m going to build a wall. Mexico will pay for it. There was no meeting. Okay, as it turns out, there was a meeting, but I knew nothing about it. The meeting had nothing to do with the …
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Even as the summer swelters
Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, July 26, 2018, 2:25 p.m. I was out working on a feature for the GoLaurens.com website until almost 8 on Wednesday night. When I got back home and turned on the TV, I discovered I had missed two innings, five runs and three homers in the Red Sox game in Baltimore. …
The Dutton Deal: My July Newsletter
This Week Only! Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell for free! I think this new novel, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, is my best. Some won’t like the politics. In one way, it’s about a group of people who get themselves in a serious bind. In another, it’s about America, right now, and it hasn’t gotten a bit …
Nightrider's Lament 