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CLEAN LIVING FOR A QUIET LIFE

Clean living is an art form, and like all art it takes practice. Yes, we’re talking about practice. It takes practice to talk without a particular tone, without too much edge. Do that and you may have a productive conversation. Go ahead and save the tone and edge for people you don’t know, who don’t […]

END PRODUCT IS WHAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT, NOT PRACTICE

‘End Product’ is another way of saying, “What have you done lately?” We pay to go to concerts, games, and races. We don’t pay to go to practice rooms, weight rooms, or interval track training, the stuff done before the end product. Buy a ticket for an event and you expect a competent performance? Sounds […]

RETIREMENT WARNINGS FOR BOOMERS IN THE FAST LANE

You’re in the fast lane and know it when you pull up on a Waymo car.   Waymo has named the Rose City as one of the next locations welcoming its own fleet of self-driving vehicles. As part of the announcement, the company revealed it will start manually operating the cars on Tuesday to “help […]

STARTING OVER ONE MORE TIME

Calling it a day and starting over after forty five years? Not me, my wife’s business. After five moves beginning in NW Portland and ending in Lake Oswego, delivering hundreds of babies, treating thousands of patients, the timing couldn’t be better. We met at the start, teamed up for her business, and now it will […]

WRITING TOOLS: THE SHORT LIST

Writing tools were easy in the beginning. Either write something worth reading. Or, do something worth writing about. Is there more? There’s always more.

MY BEATLES MARATHON

First off, it didn’t start as a planned Beatles marathon. I hadn’t even thought of it when my wife came home and said, “This is the same music I heard when I left this morning.” Me: Hey Siri, play The Beatles for two days. No, I didn’t say that. Nobody says that, but here we […]

BASHING CIVIL DISCOURSE TO NEW HEIGHTS

How often do you catch yourself in civil discourse and regret what you’ve said? It usually goes something like, ‘this would have been better if I had just stayed on topic.’ That’s the polite self-talk. The other? Not so polite.

MAY 1986, THE LAST WEDDING

It was a cloudy, wet, day, in May 1986 for the last wedding. Like so many raised on the Oregon coast, a cloudy, wet, day, is good luck no matter where you are. Everything was done, everything set in Sandy, from rented morning coats to a rented preacher. The preacher was a second choice.

LET THEM, LET YOU, OR LET ME?

The Let Them Theory book has a lot of lets in the letters. My favorites are the parts that address my problems, which come with a writing habit from what I can tell. Will I discover why I’m not a better writer? Learn what I should have done by now, or find a lingering message […]

NORTH BEND HEROES START HERE

 Calling North Bend a small town is a disservice to real small towns everywhere. Driving south on 101 and crossing the North Bend Bridge takes you under this sign. If you’re not paying close attention and keep going the same direction, the entire area of the largest metro complex on the Oregon coast feels like […]