"That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff!"
- George Carlin

My weightiest worry about the move to Gastonia was allayed Friday. I found an affordable place to live that's fewer than five miles from the newspaper office where I'll be working.

Since I scouted the area in April, I knew the rental prices ( Read more... )

Though I grew up 700-some miles south of New Bern, I always have felt a pride of place and sense of belonging here in North Carolina's colonial capital. Next month, however, I'll be leaving my adopted hometown.

I've accepted a job at the Gaston Gazette, a 30,000-circulation daily paper in the Charlotte suburb of Gastonia. My first day of work is ( Read more... )

Pain and pride. Embarrassment and elation. Reluctance and resolve. A night of contrasts bled into morning as I staggered off the quarter-mile track.
The blister forming on my left heel landed with a sore thud, my calves ached, my legs chafed. I had just walked 26.2 miles in the Craven County Relay for Life, an overnight team walk that raised nearly ( Read more... )

As a terse warning to an amnesiac world, “history repeats itself” is clever. Applied to an individual lifetime, the old axiom is as false as it would be fantastic.

We live without the benefit of cosmic second chances, do-overs, fresh starts. Each decision we make is frighteningly final; without the ability to rewind time’s relentless spool, we must ( Read more... )

Today's quote from the Freedom Forum calendar:

"Newspaper people love impossible dreams. I suppose we're reckless sentimentalists. If we didn't love impossible dreams, we wouldn't be working in an industry whose basic technology was developed in the 16th and 17th centuries."

R.W. "Johnny" Apple,
journalist, editor, 1993

No wonder. 'Nuff said.

A small wedge is missing from the grille. It gives my new car the giddy grin of a champion boxer whose front teeth were bashed out.

The faded silver paint is speckled with worn-in gunk that no car wash could remove. The right side sports two chrome hubcaps, but the left-side tires have no ornamentation.

I’m proud of the cracked leather seats and ( Read more... )

 
I’m preparing for a marathon, but you won’t see me gasping down the street in sweatpants, arms pumping and eyes fixed on an endless horizon.

There will be no calisthenics, no whistle-happy coaches, no energy drinks and no PowerBars. I carry neither stopwatch nor pedometer, and I won’t be seen in a gym or on a quarter-mile track.

My training ( Read more... )

 1. If I had a dime for every...
time I've procrastinated, I'd bankrupt the U.S.treasury

2. If I could catch a star I'd...
be immolated by its searing heat and crushed by its massive weight. Read a science textbook!

3. If you saw me cry you'd...
think I'm weak, but that's not necessarily the case

4. If you could read my eyes they'd tell you...
that I'm ( Read more... )

Many retail stores will station an employee near the front entrance/exit to check customers' sales receipts as they leave. It's a well-intentioned but wrongheaded way to combat shoplifting, insulting the integrity of honest customers caught in a colossal dragnet with a few would-be thieves.

Some of us shrug our shoulders, flash the paper and wait ( Read more... )

 
Never pray for patience, my former pastor would quip. God has a peculiar way of answering that prayer - making you wait.

As the walls around me whimper and the newspaper office roof above me sags and creaks under a February cloudburst, I’m thinking about next week, next month, next year and next decade. Time is a thick fog.

I’ve watched as a ( Read more... )