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TAKING PART IN FAMILY LIFE

Family life takes time. Ask the Baldwins with their seven kids.
Keep that in mind, you youngsters, when you decide it’s time to join in.
Join the club, the family club, sooner than later.
Why?
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THE TRUTH, GETTING A HANDLE

Getting a handle on the truth shouldn’t be a big hurdle to clear.
All it takes is a little self-awareness.
The truth is your friend if you’re not too sketchy.
Will it set you free? Well . . .
It depends on the sort of shackles your used to.
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‘DOING RESEARCH’ AND OTHER EXCUSES

What counts as doing research?
For writers it’s an easy answer: Everything is research.
And because everything is research, the trick is finding what matters more.
Is it writing about where you are, how you feel, the people you’re with?
The correct answer? All of the above.
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TWO STORIES + ONE MAN = GREAT LITERATURE? OK LEO

Where does great literature come from?
From more than two stories, but first about ‘that man.’
The great literature man.
Where does he come from?
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GRACE AND DIGNITY FOR AGING MILLENNIALS

I became my ‘brother’s keeper’ through misjudgment, and it wasn’t my brother but my father in-law.
Same idea, though. I think it’s the same idea.
And it was misjudgment, not a mistake.
What happened?
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toughen up

GUN WORLD SURROUNDS YOU? What’s It Mean When You Don’t Notice

  A gun world is all around us in America. Start a casual conversation and you might learn the mild mannered person you’re talking to owns thirty guns.   Since it’s so long ago, I like reflecting on my days as an Army medic. It comes in handy helping me pretend not be as grossed […]

THE VIEW THROUGH PORTLAND EYES

Life Changes Year By Year With Portland Eyes. They arrive in pairs, young and old, men and women, all showing the gift. Everyone knew the drill inside the macular degeneration clinic in the middle of the Portland. Of each pair of people, one was getting eye treatment. How does it work? “I’ll move from room […]

INFLAMMATION, CHRONIC PAIN, ADDICTION

We all have a horse in the chronic pain race. The best advice after surgery is taking pain pills on a schedule. If you let the pain get ahead of the pain killer, it’s hard to back down. Skip a pill and you might take an extra dose, then double up in half the scheduled […]

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boomer years

BOOMER FAMILY AND PAT CONROY

If The Great Santini Couldn’t Break His Family, What Broke Your Boomer Family? The author Pat Conroy, one year older than the first baby boomer, had a traumatic childhood by most accounts. He’s a good boomer spokesman for the voiceless masses who wonder why things go wrong. Call him a senior boomer. He mined his […]

MESSAGE TO AGING MILLENNIALS: STAND TOGETHER

Eventually you figure out where you stand. How does that work? Look around. You’re not standing alone. Even when if feels like no one notices, they do. What they notice is context, where you are, and the nearest identifier. The biggest thing is if they decide to join you. You might call it selfish to […]

LAST BEER CALL? MAKE IT THE BEST LAST BEER

      (Part I of two.) The Last Beer Call Champion: Breakside Brewery IPA. After traveling coast to coast, Breakside blew the competition away. Drinking every beer in Portland since Grant’s and Red Hook were the only new beers on the rack shows how good Breakside is. Call it scientific research. You want to […]

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buckle up

THE OREGON BEER TRAIL TO PORTLAND

Oregon Brewers Festival Fans’ Points Of Origin. Courts of law rely on evidence. They need proof. Nothing helps close a case like proof. How do you prove Portland is a big draw, that the recent Brewers Festival draws huge numbers to Portland, who then go home and tell others? Put a map up with push […]

INSULTING ENVIRONMENT CLOSES ROADS, MINDS

  Keep an open mind to insulting environment. Global warming, from either man-made pollution, or natural cycle of atmospheric anomalies and melting ice-caps, is still about the environment. You can’t hide from that old environment. It’s all over the place; we all share that one. And we’ll share the insulting environment after it changes. Whether […]

WOODEN BOATS, EARTH DAY, DEPOE BAY, OREGON CRAB. AND BEER

What do you call fooling around with wooden boats? Fun. That’s what Ratty says: “There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or […]

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