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THE INTIMATE PERSONAL, BUT WHY?

The intimate personal is the #1 Rule of memoirists, novelists, poets, playwrites, noodlers, doodlers, and bloggers. Their readers want to know things, not necessarily first hand. Something on a page, or screen, is more than enough. But, someone’s still got to get it there. Some of my favorites:

VIETNAM VETERANS ON BOOMERPDX

My Vietnam Veterans show up on BoomerPdx not as veterans but as guys I’ve met along the way. Extraordinary guys I’ve been lucky to meet. What’s my plan to meet anyone? Get out of the house and walk around and you can’t go wrong.

CHECKING OUT THEN BEFORE CHECKING BACK IN NOW

Checking out, dropping out, call it what you will, but leave the back door open. Why the back door? Because you may want to check back in and avoid the scrutiny out front. The nice picture above was not taken at an Amish farm last week, or a pioneer homestead in the 1860’s. Nope, none […]

MEMORIAL DAY 2021, WASHINGTON PARK, PORTLAND OREGON

Memorial Day is for the kids, the enlisted guys, the drafted guys, the FNG who followed orders. It’s for the professional soldiers who learned the job and did the work. Sergeant Tennyson said it with, “Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.” Take that hill, cross that river, crawl […]

BOOMER BUBBLE: LIVING IN A PORCUPINE SUIT

Once you make it to the ‘home’ things change; you’re out of the boomer bubble and into the back stretch of life. Everyone can justify being nice since you’re on the clock. Or when you move to the ‘over 55’ community? Same deal, things change, but you’re still not out of the boomer bubble. No […]

GLOCK 17 DOUBLE STACK PROBLEM

  Why does the Glock 17 have so many bullets? Because it might take the first sixteen shots to hit a target.   Some people are bad shots. Maybe you’re a bad shot. I know I am. I nearly failed Army bootcamp because of my shot pattern with an M16. I wanted to blame the […]

MOTORCYCLE HOODLUM GRANDPA, EARLY WWII ANGEL

  One enchanted evening the man on the hog met a woman at a USO dance. He saw her across a crowded room. They married just before he shipped out to the Pacific Theater of Operations, PTO.   Score for a motorcycle hoodlum, but he was the least motorcycle hoodlum on the road.   He […]

TO KNOW A PLACE, MEET THE FIRST PEOPLE

    Like the City on the Sound, the 30th Annual Seafair Indian Days Pow Wow stayed in continual motion. At a west coast gathering of First People, dancing and celebration filled the air. They strengthened bonds between each other and Seattle.

To: COMMANDER, NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS, VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS

Baby boomers know how to move on. We’ve seen hippies turn into businessmen, radicals to politicians, yippies into stock brokers. We’ve seen our soldiers come back from Vietnam and work to regain missing years. The following two letters come from an American veteran. He served on the Korean DMZ. Thomas Lucken, like thousands of other […]