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  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Mar 28, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Mar 21, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Mar 14, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Feb 29, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Feb 22, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Feb 15, 2024

    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...

  • These Times

    Kirk Ericson|Feb 8, 2024

    “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...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Feb 1, 2024

    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...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Jan 25, 2024

    This is a story about how to improve your body’s existence. All you need is a floor and a rug. And a wall. I received an email last week from Nils Marcks von Wurtemberg, a friend a few years older than me. He lives in Sweden. His email reported his latest adventure … and its aftermath: “We have minus 13.5 degrees Celsius today in Stockholm. Tomorrow it will be colder. … Last Sunday I skated 40 km on the Baltic Sea with my long ice skates on quite soft ice, which was awful. I have never been so...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Jan 18, 2024

    We in Western Washington are in our hardest stretch of weather. It’s mostly freezing rain, showers, rain, more rain, drizzles, mizzles and downpours, and we’ve got another few months of it staring at us. Our cold and rain loom like an extended sentence in the hole. In 1989, I lived just outside of Washington, D.C., where I worked for Gannett News Service and was around people from around the nation. I’d often ask those people what they thought when they thought of our state, and a common answe...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Jan 11, 2024

    The light bulb in our kitchen started flickering last week and I realized I hadn’t replaced a light bulb in maybe a year. It used to be light bulbs going out was a constant irritant of modern life, but with incandescent bulbs being replaced by longer-lived fluorescent bulbs and LED lights, we can go months now without thinking about light bulbs. I brought this matter up with Mrs. Ericson. Remember when, I asked her, we used to put light bulbs on the list of things to get? Do you remember when w...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Jan 4, 2024

    The world is getting worse and better, and it’s all happening at the same time. Don’t generalize. Generalizing is always bad. The odor of a banana makes honeybees want to sting you, according to an interview with a North Mason beekeeper that ran in the Dec. 14 edition of the Journal. So … that’s one more thing you must keep in mind as you go about this hard and complicated life: Never attack a beehive with a banana. When dogs and cats suddenly find themselves in the middle of a sunbeam while l...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Dec 28, 2023

    The flagpole outside the PUD 3 building on Cota Street in Shelton is catty-corner (or is it kitty-corner?) to the Journal’s office, and our view from the newsroom gives us a wide view of that skinny pole. Several months ago, the flag went away. But that’s not what this is about. When the flag was at half-staff, we’d often wonder why that was so, and sometimes I’d go to the Governor’s Office website to dispel our wonder. If you type in “Washington Governor’s Office flag display,” then scroll to ...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Dec 21, 2023

    The scene: Several luminaries are gathered for Jesus’ 2023 birthday at the Prophet Muhammad’s house. Attendees include Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Abraham, Siddhartha Gautama, brothers James and Simon, Adi Shankara, Desmond Tutu, the Brahma, Zarathushtra, Mary Baker Eddy, Mother Mary, father Joseph, Father God, Mary Magdalene, Confucius, Zhaung Zhou, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir and Rosalynn Carter. It’s a surprise party. Jesus opens the front door …) All: Surprise! Happy birthday, Jesus! Jesus: Oh, yeah. A...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Dec 14, 2023

    Here are some jokes for you. Some are ones friends have told me, some have been riding in my head for years and others I found by doing thorough joke research. Why can’t you believe anything an atom says? Because it makes up everything. A couple is lying in bed. It’s the middle of the night and there’s a knock on the door at 3 in the morning. The guy gets out of bed and opens the door. He comes back to bed and his wife says, “Who was that?” The guy replies, “Some stranger who wanted a push. I t...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Dec 7, 2023

    It’s amazing how technology evolves. I recently learned you can get an at-home prostate test. How could that possible work? Do they just mail you a polyurethane model of your doctor’s finger? The phrase “missing person” is inaccurate. The “missing person” isn’t really missing. He’s just not where everyone has already looked. To really appreciate poetry, being in emotional distress helps. At this moment, you likely have some Tupperware item in your possession that needs to be returned to its righ...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Nov 30, 2023

    After a lifetime of not doing so, I started making our bed two months ago. The spur was mostly a desire to improve order in the courtroom, which it has, but we’ve also discovered the satisfaction of slipping into a smooth invitation at the end of the day. Your mind drifts while making the bed, and mine drifted the other day to a question: How many people make their bed? In 2011, an organization asked America just that. It’s 70% of us, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Last week, I sen...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Nov 23, 2023

    Annoying words and phrases infect our speech with frequency and tenacity, and I can’t stop it. I try, but I’m only one bro, one bruh, one dude, one dawg, one homeboy. But if I was king, I could send out a minion with a stiff back to proclaim, “Listen up, peasants. The following words and phrases are banned. Any of the king’s subjects heard uttering the following phrases shall be playfully chastised upon first and second offense, and on the third offense, the subject shall be drawn and quartered,...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Nov 16, 2023

    “To the earth you are scattered You’re going home, so what does it matter? To an atomic mind Scattered here while you travel time.” — The Kinks, “Scattered” My 64th orbit of the sun will be complete in a couple of weeks, and one thing that amazes me about this accretion of years is how slow it’s gone. I would have thought I’d be 100 by now. In the interest of taking stock from this vast vista, and sparing my survivors the burden of busy work, here’s my sanctioned obit: Kirk Ericson Kirk Eric...

  • Seeking change on our cities' streets

    Kirk Ericson|Nov 9, 2023

    I’ve made a promise to myself. If I ever see a homeless person sporting a sign that reads “Need $ for cellphone bill,” I’ll surrender $20 right there. There was a short period when I carried single-wrapped slices of Velveeta cheese in my back pocket to give out when someone asked for change. The cheese was left over from a Halloween when I gave cheese to trick-or-treaters who came to our house. One visitor asked for two slices, maybe because he wanted two cheese sandwiches. But mostly, I don’t...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Nov 2, 2023

    Compassion is its own reward. Dave Pierik, the office administrator and the longest-serving employee at the Shelton-Mason County Journal, has been joining us lately in the newsroom, making corrections on pages on Wednesdays, our get-the-paper-out-the-door day. We’ve learned he’s got a quick wit: ■ We were working on a front-page headline about the Shelton homicide suspects who were being sought by police during the first week of October. The A1 headline was “Homicide suspects at large....

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Oct 26, 2023

    Oliver Svenningson is 8 years old. He’s the son of friends of ours, friends who used to be neighbor-friends, but they lost neighbor status when mother, father and Oliver moved to Germany in summer 2021 for a job. I told the father, Brad, a couple of years ago that he should be saving Oliver’s observations because Oliver makes comments worth remembering. Here are some Brad has sent me: October 2020: Oliver saw a woman and man working on their roof, and dad explained what was going on. Oli...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Oct 12, 2023

    We eventually become what we’ve left behind. I was at a bookstore in downtown Olympia two weeks ago to buy a book for Mrs. Ericson, and I found a paperback copy from one of her favorite authors, “Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett. While standing in the fiction aisle at that bookstore — Last Word Books — I flipped through “Bel Canto” and found a lavender-colored note containing a name and a phone number. I walked the note up to the fellow behind the counter and suggested he keep the note, in the remote...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Oct 5, 2023

    Becoming aware of the love around you is the only price you must pay to feel joy. A recent headline on the cover of a health magazine: "One woman's 8-year journey with nasal polyps." I didn't read the story, but I did imagine some of the wonderful places in the world she could take those polyps of hers. I was at Safeway the other day to get fish, and while I was talking to the fishmonger about something or other, he said, "You can't believe anything reported in the news. They're all bad." I...

  • THESE TIMES

    Kirk Ericson|Sep 28, 2023

    We had a trampoline in the backyard for our kids when those two kids were kids, and for 10 years I had to put up with safety Nellies telling me how dangerous trampolines are, especially ones not surrounded by netting. I heard stories about broken backs and quadriplegia and fractures and dislocated shoulders and broken teeth. I heard people cite statistics about trampolines being a leading cause of emergency rooom visits. Sometimes, those people shared their own involvement in trampoline-related...

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