Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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3:30 a.m., July 21, 2024, Gile Blueberry Farm, Thurston County: “Shhh,” said our youngest son, Ryan, using his chin to motion over his shoulder. “There’s one right there.” Ahh. The thing we came to see. An animal emerged from tall brush to our right, maybe 30 yards from where the two of us were sitting in the northwest corner of Ken Gile’s 18-acre blueberry farm. The animal was under the light of a full moon on a cloudless night, and I tested a cliche. I shined the flashlight on the thing,...
I spent three hours the other day scouring the internet for some jokes and quotes. My only criteria for judging the jokes’ worth, aside from being suitable for the newspaper, was whether they made me laugh loud enough to make the cat raise his head from his indentation on the couch. I couldn’t find any attribution for the following jokes, which shows the value we put on masterpiece jokes. I mean, Vincent Van Gogh gets credit for his paintings … ■■■ “An 8-year-old boy who had never spoken a word...
Our five-day heat siege made me worry about Ron, a friend who’s in his mid-60s and lives without several 21st-century conveniences, like electricity. He has a residence, but barely. Maybe you, too, had someone you worried about during our sweat dome. It was that kind of hot. Ron lives alone in the sticks in Thurston County, and he makes money by manual labor, and by selling the art he makes and the treasures he finds. He fishes most of his food from dumpsters and his winter heat comes from w...
I was in the grocery store last weekend when I stepped and slipped on a strawberry on the floor next to the checkout counter. I went down in an instant, landing on my right knee. As I took a moment to gather myself before rising, I came eye to eye with a youngster, maybe 2 years old, standing a couple of feet in front of me. Her shirt, face and hands were smeared with strawberry goo, and she had a full strawberry in her hand. I looked into her eyes, she into mine, and I suspected the following...
I've been filling this space in the Shelton-Mason County Journal for almost seven years, and one of the difficult parts of this enterprise is convincing people to talk to me, especially for column ideas that could be considered odd. A good approach has been to enlist someone close to me, someone who knows the person I want to interview, and have that person make the pitch for me. It's worked several times, including for a column about an anonymous kidney donor and one about a Swedish fellow who...
Note: I’m taking three weeks off of paid labor, so this space will be filled with reruns of some favorite columns. The following ran in the Jan. 14, 2021, edition. Fresh, unfocused-group content returns June 27. “It’s coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst.” — “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen OLYMPIA — In the midafternoon of Jan. 6, a day that will live in infamy — and reverence — across our schizoid nation, I was in the parking lot on the south side of the state Capitol h...
“Ya know, Nietzsche says, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’ ” — Howard Johnson “Oh, blow it out your alpaca, Howard.” —Olson Johnson Note: I’m taking three weeks off of paid labor, so this space will be filled with reruns of some favorite columns. The following ran in the March 23, 2023, edition. Fresh, unfocused-group content returns June 27. This is a newspaper. It should remain free of profanity inside and outside of quotation marks, so we’ll substitute words when talking about the movie “Blazing...
Note: I’m taking three weeks off of paid labor, so this space will be filled with reruns of some favorite columns. The following ran in the Dec. 23, 2021, edition. Fresh, unfocused-group content returns June 27. This is a story about a gift my father gave me when I was 5 years old. This memory is as true as any memory can be that’s summoned from a long-gone Christmas. I’m child No. 4 in a four-child family, and when we were wee our family was the type that put Christmas presents under a Chris...
Carrie Brownstein, a singer and the guitarist for the punk group Sleater-Kinney, and the co-creator and co-star of the off-kilter TV series “Portlandia,” lived four homes down from us for a few years in Olympia. You know how hard it can be to find a movie or show that anyone of any age in your house will watch on TV? Mrs. Ericson and I discovered, when our youngest son was about 14, that we all liked “Portlandia.” For a couple of years on New Year’s Eve, we watched “Portlandia” episodes all...
Kathryn Hamilton Wang remembers the dinner parties in their Shelton home on Grant Avenue. The plates were of fine china, bracketed by sterling silver, and their guests’ lips cusped the elegant rims of Waterford Crystal. “Appetizers and drinks were served ahead of time,” Kathryn, now an Olympia resident, wrote me in an email. “We girls [Kathryn is the oldest of four sisters] helped pass the hors d’oeuvres which might include stuffed mushrooms or ham and egg balls. We’d fill trays with these...
I received a text Thursday morning from our youngest son, Ryan, a 19-year-old almost junior at the University of Washington in Seattle. His text included a photograph of the Quad, a pastoral rectangle of stone and flora on the campus that’s hemmed in by Gothic academic buildings. The rectangle is filled with cherry trees, finely tended grass, and it’s segmented by several brick walkways, all precisely considered and precisely placed. You feel smarter just walking through it. But the pho...
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.” — Clive James, author When I was a youngster growing up among the sticks and hicks of Eastern Washington, an adult volunteered some of his precious time to tell me I didn’t have any common sense. I can’t remember what behavior prompted the comment, but I do remember wondering what “common sense” could mean. I wondered for so long that I finally decided that...
Happiness is merely a momentary suspension of dread. -------------------------------- Here’s an extreme manifestation of liberalism in America in 2024: Pet owners get angry at you for using the wrong pronoun for their pets. -------------------------------- The key to a long marriage is making sure your spouse marries the right person. -------------------------------- You don’t need to lift weights to build muscle mass. The weight of gravity is available to all of us, everywhere, pretty much all...
From “Gloria and the Riddle,” an episode that aired on CBS in October 1972: Gloria: There’s this father and his son and they’re driving along in the car. The car crashes and the father is killed. Edith (Gloria’s mother): Oh, that’s so sad. Archie (Gloria’s father): Oh, geez. It’s only a story Edith. Gloria: Anyway, the father is killed, and the little boy is badly injured so they rush him to a hospital and take him into the operating room. The surgeon walks in and says, ‘I can’t operate on this...
“In 1858, three days after the first Atlantic [telegraph] Cable connected New York and London, The New York Times asked if the news would become ‘too fast for the truth.’ ” — From the book “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington” “Too fast for the truth.” That phrase should be stamped on every cellphone, tablet and laptop sold in this country. It could read like this: “Warning: This product is too fast for the truth. Wait before forming an opinion on information presented.” Before...
“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” — Abraham Lincoln The grand unified theory in physics is the belief that there is a single explanation that can predict all the behaviors of all the forces in the universe. Theoretical physicists are searching for that elegant explanation of why forces behave the way they do, from the subatomic to the outer bands of the universe. Could there be a grand unified theory for the world’s religions? Could there be a thread t...
If you met your spouse at an orgy, you’d probably tell your kids you met at a big party and leave it at that. “Lisp” is a cruel word. That word describes a condition that seems designed to invite mockery of lispers when they try to pronounce their affliction. Many Americans have no desire to be rich. It seems sacrilegious, even heretical, to live in the United States and not want to be rich. Overheard at the gym I go to, involving two high-volume men in the locker room: One was compl...
If you could have been present at an event that occurred sometime, somewhere in your life, what event would you choose? What would I choose? Thanks for asking. ■ I would have liked to be in the South Pacific on April 12, 1970, when the Apollo 13 astronauts put their feet on the flight deck of the USS Iwo Jima. Much of the world had been riveted by the struggle to return the crippled ship to Earth after a malfunction aborted its mission to the moon. Imagine witnessing those men who had spent the...
Our spring, our vernal equinox, arrived Tuesday at 8:06 p.m. “Vernal” means “of or relating to spring.” “Equinox” means “the time when the sun crosses the plane of earth’s equator, making night and day of approximately equal length all over the earth.” So says Merriam-Webster. “Oh, the storm and its fury broke today Crushing hopes that we cherish so dear Clouds and storms will in time pass away The sun again will shine bright and clear.” So sings the Carter Family. The precise time, in thes...
I didn’t vote in the March 12 presidential primary. It’s the first time in years I’ve intentionally not voted. I’ve voted in 56 elections since the general election of 1992, according to my voting record at votewa.gov. The site doesn’t show you how you voted, just that you voted. For comparison, Mrs. Ericson has voted 68 times since 1992. In matters of citizenship, and civility, she is better than I am. The way Washington’s presidential primary ballot is arranged, if you voted for a Republican...
Two months ago, a plastic freezer bag appeared on our front porch. Inside was a 100% Merino wool, long-sleeve black undershirt, with the tags still attached. All that was written on the freezer bag was "KIRK" (with the last "K" turned backward), with no hint who it was from. It had to be from someone who knows me well, well enough to know I have an affection for Merino wool, long-sleeve shirts, possessions that come free, the color black, and that I wear a size large. And perhaps the person was...
The world is not going to hell. It’s not going to heaven, either. It’s going to where it’s always been going and where it’s always been: Planet Earth. This world of ours is a mix, a kind of impure puree. Sometimes, the heaven part coagulates at the top, and sometimes, the hell part’s at the top. That’s the ebb and recharge of the universe’s experiment with Homo sapiens. Many of us humans have worked hard to learn how to exist amid other Homo sapiens, and many of us have worked hard to destr...
I've lately been asking people how many people in the United States have died of COVID. Their answers are generally way low - before I checked the stat, my answer was way low, too. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,176,639 people died of COVID in the United States from January 2020 to February 2024. More than 1 million Americans dead. Imagine. That's almost double the deaths from the Civil War. "So, again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days i...
“But if Christ hadn’t delivered his Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.” — Kurt Vonnegut, “A Man Without a Country” Imagine, if you will … It’s circa 30 A.D. and Jesus Christ is in his late 20s and starting to make a name for himself. He’s on a hilltop near the Sea of Galilee and a crowd has gathered to hear the carpenter deliver a major speech. Among the assembled is an old man named Strange. He’s t...
It’s easy to be entranced by the innocent looks of toddlers. They appear to have no idea what’s coming at them. The wonderful thing about quitting cigarettes is you have the opportunity to start them all over again. When both our boys were living at home and would go out for the evening, returning after I went to bed, one of my first destinations the next morning was to check the shoe rack to ensure their shoes were there. Seeing those shoes always gave me a serene feeling. All was well wit...
