Welcome to Everything

The other morning I ran into Local Writer. No, not our famous local writer, though one does see her around town. You likely haven't heard of this other one, unless you're local and connected to the literary scene. Her one novel appears to have stayed clear of the major selling platforms-- though I acknowledge that lucrative writing and quality writing often book separate rooms. Frequently, they're not even staying in the same hotel. In any case, she sometimes organizes salons…

A traphouse refers to any house where drug dealers sell product (typically hard drugs such as crack, meth, or heroin) and/or host clients while they're getting high, often allowing clients to trade sex for drugs in empty rooms. They run the spectrum from clean, relatively well-maintained accommodations run by grandmothers to burned-out shacks with newspaper over the windows and no running water. Gang connections are common but not a prerequisite.

Social workers and public defenders, the…

Earth is a haunted house. It always has been. 

There is no heaven or hell. No Hades or Fiddler's Green or Valhalla. There's no escape to a better -- or worse -- world after death. There's just Earth. And yes, the soul exists, and it's eternal. Anything that ever lived -- every person, every animal, every fish and bird and spider and even the plants -- eventually becomes a ghost. Forever. Forever and ever. 

Some of the ghosts get to be interesting. They get to be Headless Horsemen or…

Bandito is a familiar English word used to refer to a bandit, especially one in Mexico or the American southwest. While it is familiar to most English speakers, especially Americans, it is not a word in common rotation in most people's vocabulary. It came into popular culture by way of the Italian-made spaghetti western and related media, and stuck around specifically in the context of westerns.

Bandito comes from Italian, being the past participle of bandire,…