My neighbor introduced himself to me a few weeks ago.

He told me that he frequents McAlister’s Deli at North Hills, and that he likes to read crime novels. His favorite author is Patricia Cornwell.

(I also know from living in the apartment below him that he watches a lot of Law & Order. The “bong-bong” carries through the floor.)

He has amblyopia, and there’s a slight hesitation before he speaks. He volunteered a lot of this information without my asking.

At one point, he had a job working with computers, but he no longer works. He said he stopped after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Continue reading “Neighbors, Numbers” →

The election party I went to felt wrong from the moment I walked in.

There was a band playing music that sounded like nothing, and there was popcorn with the character of styrofoam. The beer was good at least, but the TV screens felt small for the crowd.

Some friends and I walked up shortly after the polls closed in NC (except for Durham county), and there was already a hint of bad news. It didn’t look good for Deborah Ross in the US Senate race.

The biggest cheer came when they called the Wake county transit referendum in favor of the For vote. Others were false alarms as we saw the percents and compared them to the number of ballots counted.

Continue reading “Muddle” →

Buckethead would have you believe he was raised by chickens and grew up in a chicken coop.

That he’s the proprietor of a fictional “abusement” park named after himself.

That he has a nightmare nemesis, a direct negative wearing a black chrome mask, who chases him through dreams.

Those are hearsay and rumors.

Reality is subjective when dealing with Buckethead, but it’s more than likely he’s a robot, an android of some kind. Made to look like one of us, but perhaps by someone who doesn’t know what human beings look like or how they act. He’s simulacrum from a time or place where we may be gone or where we never existed.

Whatever his origin, there is music there, of a sort.

Continue reading “Slunk.exe” →

We follow the script.

When you wake up the morning after a mass shooting, you find out when you check Facebook, or Twitter, or a news channel. There’s an email in your inbox urging action. An investigation is ongoing into who the shooter is, how he was armed, what his motivation was. There are thoughts/prayers.

The next day, or maybe late that afternoon if the shooting happened over night, someone will say “Don’t talk about the shooter, talk about the victims.” They’re not wrong.

You don’t need to wait for that article, though. I can tell you about who was shot in Orlando.

Continue reading “Orlando” →

If you live in North Carolina, you’ve probably noticed a lot of people driving slower this week. Frustrating, no doubt. Suddenly you’re showing up to work five minutes late because you got stuck in traffic that wasn’t a thing yesterday.

But it’s not really traffic. There aren’t more cars on the road. It’s the same people, just driving slower.

Turns out Pat McCrory has decided our state needs to crack down on speeding. Under the direction of the Governor’s Highway Safety Program, law enforcement and highway patrols will be pulling people over for speeding as much as 1 mile-per-hour over the posted speed limit.

You’ve heard plenty of cutesy safety campaigns over the years. “Click It or Ticket.” “Booze It and Lose it.” Well the new thing is “Obey the Sign or Pay the Fine.”

This new initiative officially goes into effect today, Thursday March 24. My coworker said on his two-mile commute this morning he passed five people who had been pulled over. And there were more speed traps in that space that hadn’t been sprung.

According to the poll in that WRAL article, 81% of respondents drive somewhere between 1 and 9 mph over the speed limit, so I guess we all need to be careful now. Ol’ Pat’s got our priorities set, and they’re serious about it.

Continue reading “Obey the Sign” →