“And even then I had a huge complex because guys on one team yelled “Onion head” at me to try to rattle me when I was pitching.”

Somebody this morning on Substack asked if

if any of my old Quibbles and Bits columns for the Carteret County News-Times in Morehead City (NC) are available online.

I answered “No, I was way too lazy to save more than three or four of them then, and I’m even lazier now; I only use one finger to type because the others won’t lift a finger.”

But I found the energy to ask Google AI.

The answer was NO.

But the sucker knew a lot. At once pleasant and frightening.

Hell, it knows more about me than I do.

And I think it likes me more than I’ve ever liked myself. Except when I played baseball in my teens.

And even then I had a huge complex because guys on one team yelled “Onion head” at me to try to rattle me when I was pitching.

It didn’t affect my pitching, but it scarred me for life; I vowed forevermore that my ears would never see the light of day.

At least AI didn’t know how much being short affected my self-esteem, not to mention how difficult it made it to hear people at big parties.

You know that old adage, “That’s over my head?”

Being short at a big party is like being a submarine that’s in the middle of a bunch of enemy ships and is incapable of surfacing and is running out of room in the bilge tank.

But back to the search for columns.

AI: “Because Quibbles & Bits" was primarily written as a print column for local North Carolina newspapers like the Carteret County News-Times during the 1990s and early 2000s, full text archives of those specific vintage columns are not widely digitized on the public web.”

Vintage? Damn, I like that better than “older than dirt.”

Why?

People collect vintage stuff. Maybe some rich couple will collect me and Gwen and feed us; grocery prices are higher than Willie Nelson in the era of President Dump.

AI goes on: “…Brad Rich frequently references his old "Quibbles & Bits" days, resurrecting its themes, running jokes, and style in his modern work. “

Yeah. One-trick pony, for sure.

“One of the most famous storylines in the original Quibbles & Bits column was Brad tracking his family's life, including nicknaming his then-unborn daughter ‘The Quiblett’ back in 1995.

FAMOUS?

Satchmo the BlunderLab got all the fan mail, stuff like, “Dear Satch, you should sue your asshole owner for libel.”

Then, AI got something right:

“Today, he still writes about her—and how she is all grown up—on his social channels, such as his active public … column,  ‘Views From the Porch.’”

It continued, “The true spiritual successor to Quibbles & Bits is his current free newsletter.

“He writes with the exact same observational humor, transitioning from stories about raising a young family to navigating life as a grandparent.”

Observational humor. That one is on target. Observing is my favorite (only?) passtime at age 69, primarily because I can do it a lot better than, say, well, ANYTHING.

Anyway, I appreciate all of you who have read my ramblings and continue to do so.

I’ll keep slogging away until my finger gets as lazy as the rest of me.

Have an irie weekend.

Note: AI failed to mention my friend and CCNT co-worker, Chuck Waters, who had the original idea for the column and its name, and co-wrote it at first.

“…she blared and hummed opera and spun inside tales of political intrigue and talked about babysitting ‘Little Al’ (Gore) while the latter was a little  kid in Tennessee.”

By Brad Rich

A town I lived in and loved for more than 20 years appears to be planning to move forward by looking back.

The town of Atlantic Beach (NC) announced last week it plans to build a circular concrete oceanfront events stage to host its own annual beach music festival and other attractions.

It will also include colorful shade sails, with picnic tables and additional seating planned to create a welcoming space for residents and visitors to gather, relax and enjoy community events.

The town’s central oceanfront area, complete with a boardwalk and known to most as simply The Circle, has been many things in its more than 100-year history.

It’s been an oceanfront Mecca for middle-class workers and anglers and farmers, mostly east of the state capital, Raleigh.

It’s been an amusement “park” with a Ferris Wheel, bumper cars, game arcades and bathhouses.

It’s been a funky southern Asbury Park, with open air or partly open air night clubs that brought in music as smooth and slick as The Chairmen of the Board, as world famous as Gregg Allman and as raw as heavy metal, although worried town leaders cancelled metal icon GWAR.

Sometimes the town has  been all that at once.

Most recently, since developer Fred Bunn purchased most of the property in 2005, it’s increasingly become a haven for condominiums owned by wealthy folks.

It’s home to the town’s largest public beach access parking lot, where everyone barks at parking rates.

It’s pretty, of course, but it’s got very little funk,

no rollicking music clubs, no publicly owned events space and no amusement rides.

Some might call it progress; some call it boring, at least compared to its past.

The new events area is a great idea, a pretty bold attempt to bring back a bit of the past.

While I applaud that idea and hope and believe it will be great, I’m not here to tell you about that. I’m here to tell you about what Atlantic Beach was when I lived there, especially in the ‘80s. Before out-of-state millionaires and real estate investors completely changed the whole game plan.

It was one word: Heaven.

At least it was to me, my wife Gwen and our daughter, Summer.

It was one of the glorious (to us) times when “AB” was “all of the above.”

Stately but not ostentatious multi-story “cottages.”

Resort hotels and small, cheap mom & pop motels.

Houses that ran the gamut, from those huge “cottages” to tiny cinder block boxes.

We lived in one of those at first.

There were two truly funky - but well-kept - fishing piers. A gorgeous beach to lay on, to run on and stroll on with a wife, a kid and a dog.  A beach where, if you walked early enough on a warm, sunny summer morn, you might spy a passed-out Marine, from a nearby base, in the dunes, maybe with a sleeping girl, and you’d not worry about it or them.

And The Circle, while fading a bit, still had rides and funky bars and paragliding over the ocean and and fast food places and tiny open air bistros where you could get all kinds of food, like fabulous Vietnamese dishes cooked and served by Sam, an American who served there in the war.

We lived about four blocks from The Circle, with all its funky but fading glory. And, it’s hard to believe, but public beach parking was FREE.

We could hear music of all kinds and joyful screaming and car horns blaring and fireworks booming and lifeguards’ whistles blowing … if the wind direction was right, or wrong, depending on your mood and desire for sleep.

But most of all, the town had

character- and characters - like nowhere I’ve ever lived.

Our first home there was a rented 800-square-foot cinder block combination freezer/oven.

On one side of us, in a two-story rental, a young construction worker lived above an older woman who was a former high-ranking muckety-muck of some sort in the Carter Administration.

If my wife was working at  night, always nearby, sometimes I’d go over and sit with her.

While we both sipped her top-notch bourbon,

she blared and hummed opera and spun inside tales of political intrigue and talked about babysitting “Little Al” (Gore) while the latter was a little  kid in Tennessee.

On the other side of our house lived maybe the oddest and kindest pair of people I’ve ever seen.

The sister talked loud and sometimes told bawdy stories.

She did all the hard work; gardening and mowing and car repairs and such.

The brother was soft-spoken, gossipy and friendly as a lap dog.

They complemented each other perfectly, loved us and our dog and gave us vegetables.

We loved them back.

Across the street lived an elderly woman who was sweet and kind and neat-ish but occupied a house that, inside, made the county dump look like a fine art museum.

Maybe that’s why when she needed her house painted outside, she hired a mustachioed guy who spoke with a foreign accent and would paint for five minutes and take 30-minute breaks, during which he’d pace, brush in hand, pausing repeatedly to stroke his ‘stache and gaze quizzically at the wall, like Picasso pondering his next stroke.

He’s probably still there.

Not far away lived a tall, skinny guy who cooked for a living and regularly walked a long-necked goose around the neighborhood. They looked like brothers.

Hmm… Maybe there were a succession of geese being walked?

My best friend and co-worker at the county newspaper lived on the top  floor of a nearby two-story

octagonal house. You could spit on the liquor store and send your order over on a paper airplane. We shot fireworks off the deck and people clapped instead of calling the cops.

My friend refused to get a phone. AB is on an island, the newspaper on the mainland. That was a problem.

If I still worked there, I and all other reporters would still be getting a monthly $30 phone allowance check.

That’s what it took to get my buddy to get a phone; back then 30 bucks paid for a good amount of Captain Morgan’s rum at the store.

In the neighborhood, we all helped each other without being asked.

We  eventually moved around the corner to a larger but still very modest house we bought behind a popular tavern.

A short distance from the tavern there was a pizza place that sold nose candy with a slice if you ordered the right toppings.

Adjacent was a barber shop.

Its main clientele was bald or hat-wearing old men who wore ill-fitting suits, spoke with a foreign accent and drove sparkling Caddies.

We couldn’t afford movers, so we walked nearly everything around the corner to the new house, staggering under the weight like old-time European gypsies whose horses and wagons had been impounded by the  authorities.

We kept our old friends and made close new ones: a beautiful and generous young Marine couple: a university basketball coach; an elderly couple who became surrogate grandparents after our daughter was born;  a millionaire town councilman who invited us to use his oceanfront pool and whose wife helped get government aid to disaster victims: a fellow who “promoted” imaginary wrestling matches between town officials and prominent citizens; and the town mayor, a colorful pol who lived across the street and helped old ladies move garbage carts but was stripped of his powers by the town council, to which he replied, “This ain’t no Panama.”

He also called his successor a “piss ant.”

I covered town meetings for the paper. Me and the mayor would often arrive home at the same time after meetings in a smoke-filled room above the fire department and he’d yell at me and call me horrible things and then we’d shake hands and smile at each other and ask about each others’ wives.

That parting for the night, in the middle of the street with ocean sounds for a soundtrack, was a microscopic view of a neighborhood that was as neighborhoods should be: neighborly, despite huge differences on many issues.

In many similar situations today, that would be nighimpossible.

And that neighborhood was a microscopic view of how a town, a state, a nation, should be: All mixed up, and happy because of it.

It probably doesn’t exist in nearly as many places as it once did, what with all the neurotic lies and hate spewed by so many leaders and followers.

But it’s etched in ether in my mind.

There’s a song I love by a rock band named Pavement. One fantastic line goes,  “A shady lane, everybody wants one … a shady lane, everybody needs one.”

I’m pretty sure that fleeting, etched-in-ether time and place in AB was and is my shady lane.

But where does fun come from when hurry-scurry turns into a lot of free time but also occasional days that seem like an endless slurry of worry?

By Brad Rich

One Sunday a couple weekends ago, the wife and I didn’t do anything that looked like fun, but we had a lot of fun.

For most of our lives - my wife, Gwen, is 70 and I’ll catch her and hang on for dear life in late November - we generally had to DO something to have fun.

It was pretty easy to find fun aplenty.

We lived walking distance from the ocean, and we didn’t mind driving relatively long distances to see concerts by our favorite bands.

There were many weekend trips to Winston-Salem to watch our daughter and play soccer at Salem College, and we came to love the beautiful, historic and quaint Augustus T. Zeverly  Inn, a bed-and-breakfast across the street from the college.

But we moved inland, health concerns increased with age, and after I had to take medical retirement from my newspaper job, financial constraints increased.

We have mostly stayed home for the past year, alone together with Arlo the Dog.

I admit I was concerned about how well we’d do.

For 40 years we’d both worked jobs that commanded much of our attention, mostly away from the house.

Hurry-scurry, halter-skelter. 

Fun fits in between work OK when you’re young, full of boundless energy.

But where does fun come from when hurry-scurry turns into a lot of free time but also occasional days that seem like an endless slurry of worry?

As someone else on Substack keenly noted recently, you’ve got to take advantage of the slower pace of life and NOTICE.

That’s when you start to look more carefully at what you’re doing, and more importantly, at what’s happening when you’re mostly not doing, just being.

I like to think of it like the late Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter put it in “Scarlet Begonias” back in 1974: “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

We’ve done that. My wife has probably practiced “noticing” consistently all her life; that’s how she rolls. But I’d only done it sporadically until retirement forced me to slow down. 

These days I actually write down funny and cool things I notice in our day-to-day life together.

There’s a tiny notebook and pens on the table beside the sofa I’m sitting on as I write this, and those items are also on the night stand beside the bed.

Turns out

mundane days are  pleasure-packed; those notebooks’ pages fill up fast with Hunter’s lights in the strangest of places: at home, right under your nose.

On that Sunday I mentioned earlier, after breakfast we started on a plan to get rid of a crappy old rug underneath my desk, a bookshelf and some drawers.

We’d put it off for years because it entailed moving those things and the things on top of them: my computer and accessories, a router, a modem and a finicky printer. Plus junk. Lots of junk.

After three hours, we got the rug out to the garage and put the furniture and other stuff back where they’d been.

There were plugs all over the place and we got confused and had to use AI to get things up and running.

In the end, we had a great feeling of accomplishment. It was one of those bolts of light, duly noticed and scribbled in the notebook.

Next we watched a baseball game. The umpire called a balk on Atlanta Braves pitcher Chris Sale. Gwen has watched a lot of baseball but she’d never heard of a balk.

I explained that Sale twitched his back leg almost imperceptibly while his other foot was on the rubber, but didn’t throw a pitch. A balk.

Gwen didn’t understand and for the life of me I couldn’t explain it any better in half an hour of trying.

Hilarity ensued; lots of smiles and laughter.

Laughter, even a little chuckle, is one of those lights to notice.

Do it enough and you’ve had a good day.

We also spent 20 minutes discussing what kind of crab our late dachshund used to dig up and throw in the air while we were on the beach.

Had to look it up. They were ghost crabs.

But the mere thought of Fritzie throwing crabs in the air (they lived!)  spurred memories of when we and she moved to the beach more than 43 years ago. 

She was old then but used to follow our then-baby daughter, Summer, around our house.

Taking Fritzie on her final car ride - to the vet, bathed in sunlight beside me in the front seat - was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. 

But all the other memories of her are warm and fuzzy ones Gwen and I shared; good memories are lights looked at right.

That aforementioned Sunday night, Gwen burned her thumb while cooking supper.

I asked if she was OK to finish cooking.

“Well, I can’t stand here with my thumb in a glass of milk all night.”

Best laughs of the day, duly noted.

Later that night I was on the sofa watching a concert video on the tube. Gwen looked out the sliding glass door and saw Jerry Garcia in the back yard.

That brought back beautiful memories of going to Atlanta to see the Grateful Dead with two of our best friends while Gwen was pregnant with Summer. 

Garcia in the yard.

Light is light, sometimes equally strong when reflected.

Our whole seemingly mundane Sunday had been reflections, of and upon, the best lights of our great  life together. I’m glad we noticed.

You can’t ask more from a day, right?

By Brad Rich

Warning: This is very long, so you might want to read it upside down in a large, quiet room with a dog.

We have three carpet runners in the hall in our house, held together by carpet tape.

They’re driving me crazy; despite the improved appearance of this shaggy indoor Straits of Hormuz, which is still open with no transit fees or flying missiles, by the way.

The craziness is an offshoot of my obsession with the runners’

inclination to end up crooked. You could say they imperceptibly trot laterally.

My peevish mood about this movement is not surprising. In fact, I’m equally obsessed by a need for everything in the house to be properly aligned: furniture, even silverware.

The crooked carpet runners piss me off more than the innumerable other objects that go askew in the night, because I traverse the hall so often each day and I still look down a lot in the wake of last year’s depilating illness.

I knew all this before we got the carpet runners. I knew that every time I walked down the hall I’d have to stop at least once to nudge one or more of the fuzzy things a fourth or eighth of an inch to the left or right.

I also knew that all this niggling nudging would cause the sons-of-bitches to bunch up and I’d spend even more time smoothing them out than straightening them.

Yet I was even more obsessed with covering up the dog pee stains and worn spots in the underlying carpet we’ve trod upon in 11 years in the house.

So who’s the culprit in the crooked carpet caper?

I won’t blame myself, because I walk the hall like I’m treading on exposed carpet nails.

I can’t blame my wife, because she shares my obsession and swears she’s careful.

No. I’ve got to blame

I3-pound

Arlo the Dog, who regularly barrels up and down the hall like pre-NASCAR-fame stock car legend Junior Johnson being chased by the revenuers while delivering illegal hooch to customers like Otis Campbell and Rafe Hollister and Briscoe Darling and his boys, and probably Ernest T. Bass, way back in the remote hollers in the foothills of western North Carolina in the 1940s.

But I can’t get mad at Arlo, even though I’m convinced she knows exactly what she’s doing to me.

She’s just too damned cute to elicit ire, with her tiny cute legs pumping like stock car pistons on speed and her tiny cute pointy ears pinned back to her tiny cute head as she careens from end to end of the hall.

When she skids to a stop like Roadrunner, she flashes a fleeting proud grin like Sheriff Andy when he secretly helps Aint Bea beat haughty Clara Edwards in the annual pickle-making contest in Mayberry.

So Arlo’s off the hook.

Her namesake, of course, is

a hero of mine.

After listening to him for years, I met and interviewed Mr. Guthrie sometime, somewhere in the mid-70s while I was allegedly co-editor of the UNC-Charlotte student newspaper, which we published every week or two or whenever we remembered to do it.

One of those times was an issue that contained an article that included my interview of Mr Guthrie and a review of his concert somewhere in Charlotte.

(AI says the concert wasn’t where I thought I was that night. I’m not sure I believe that; AI would not tell me where my car was when I couldn’t find it one night in those hazy halcyon days after a party on or near campus.

I don’t remember how or where I found the car, but I know it was in a field.)

Anyhoo, I carefully wrote the story and the review, quite possibly while either half-drunk or high, states of mind that were all-but required, at least occasionally, of editors of college newspapers in the 70s.

I sent the story and the headline I wrote to the typesetter, who almost surely was following the required state-of-mind dictum, and who might have been named Michael and might have been my roomie in a dorm on or near the campus.

But maybe not. There were a lot of people all over the place in those years.

Fred - let’s call him that just in case it’s right - set all the type for the whole issue.

I’m sure it was full of righteous diatribes against whoever and whatever we writers noticed or made up.

Then we worked for hours in near darkness in the Cone Center basement to paste the sticky waxed copy (typeset stories) on cardboard pretend newspaper pages we sent to the printer. They were called paste-up sheets and the copy on them was supposed to be perfectly straight, somewhat of an alien concept. (Take that, carpet runners; I smiled contentedly when I typed ‘perfectly straight.’)

We didn’t use small sheets of paper to map out where the stories and ads were supposed to go; they were called dummies, and there were already enough of those around.

The printed issue of the paper eventually wandered back to campus and was delivered to the basement of the administration building, where Dean Wormer burned all the papers except his and mine and sent a letter to the other deans telling them to get mad at the paper for something we may have published.

He sent another

letter to the student government council, demanding that the newspaper’s largest budget line item - “ink and other stuff” - be immediately eliminated.

The joke was on the dean because we had accidentally spent all the money, legally, on “other stuff.”

It was the ‘70s. The deans gave us more money and sternly said, “Be careful, mane.”

(They had recently got hip to the whole “man” thing but were confused and pronounced it like they heard it in hip blues songs by hip folks with cool names like B.V.D. King and Mudflap Rivers and Blue Slim Fencemouth.

Anyway, I opened my copy of the paper and found my story and saw the headline, which had most of the right words except Anlo was somehow there in place of Arlo.

I decided to promptly write Mr. Guthrie a letter of apology and did so two months later, thanks to an address provided by someone who said something to me like she met Mr. Guthrie after he came into a Los Angeles airport where she worked in the suitcase-key-making shop.

The address worked, of course, and I think I got back a nice letter,

in which Mr. Guthrie, or someone answering his mail, essentially said it was OK and he wasn’t mad at me.

I figured it was partly because in those days

he talked a lot about all that “peace and love” stuff, which we could sure use about now, when there’s still quite a few million aging Grateful Dead fans like me who, after a spliff, would gladly sign a vague petition to enact a Constitutional amendment to make peace and love the law of the land, like the Trump-era law that requires everyone to get electricity from lumps of coal or from mini-barrels of oil from wells in pristine national parks.

As for the migrating hall carpet runners, I’m anticipating Trump will take care of that by banning migrants along with immigrants.

If he dilly-dallies too long, well, I’ll just make peace but not love with the carpet runners.

Our daughter, Summer, delivered us a second grandson, Mason, today in Morehead City, N.C.

We live about 30 miles away, near Swansboro.

Summer and Brian, her fiancé - or whatever you call longterm couples these days if they don’t have a piece of paper in the register of deeds office - are elated and exhausted, of course.

My wife, Gwen, is also elated and exhausted - she’s helping. I’m elated … but not exhausted. Since my stage four liver disease hit like a hammer last May, I’ve worked hard and escaped the “you could die in three months” prognosis for now, but I still have a way to go in the stamina department. So I can’t be as helpful as I’d like.

But I’m not gonna let myself feel guilty; I’ve learned I can’t afford that luxury.

I am what I do these days, and what I do, mostly, is work every day to get stronger, physically and mentally.

No, I ain’t what I was and might never get back to that person, but that, in some ways is a good thing, for my health and my family.

And I’m very optimistic that the me I am now will be better as the world spins on to whatever its fate may be.

Photos attached are of Summer and Mason, wife Gwen and Mason, me and Gwen and Mason, Meyer and Mason. And just me. And just Arlo the Dog.

Gwen will be hanging with Summer much of the rest of the week to help Brian with Meyer and Archie, Arlo the dog’s brother.

Me and Arlo the Dog

will survive until bedtime. Don’t know how that will go without Gwen.

Arlo loves me, but is a mama’s dog.

In other news, I drove a 60-mile round trip to Morehead City and back for the first time since I started getting sick about 15 months ago.

No problem except that my left hand - I had surgery in March - still doesn’t like manual car windows very much now. It’ll get there.

I continue to believe ordinary day-to-day life is, more often than not, extraordinary, with lessons we can learn from each other when shared.

And ordinary life is also - if you stop long enough to think - just plain weird. And funny as hell.

Don’t forget “funny.” It’s harder to hate people and things when you’re laughing.

By Brad Rich

It’s pretty hard for me to believe, but my wife and I are about to become grandparents for the second time.

Why is it hard to believe? Because even though our daughter, Summer, and her fellow, Brian, gave us one beautiful and perfect grandson about seven years ago, in my 70-year-old so-called brain, I’m still 30.

It’s 1984, and I’m fit as a brand new Stradivarius.

(I know, a Strad is to a fiddle as a

Martin D-30 is to a dime store guitar, and I also know there are no dime stores anymore and they didn’t sell guitars even when they existed.

But I like the fit- as-a-Strad metaphor anyway, and I’m not going to go back and change it. Sue me for bad metaphoring if you want.)

But it’s still 1984, in my head, despite the length of the previous parenthetical paragraph.

Our daughter is still 11 years

from being born.

Here in ‘84land, I despise soccer because I sucked at it in high school and wouldn’t know the World Cup from a spittoon.

I drive a six-year-old, two-seat, black, no-air-conditioning Honda CRX that doubles as a microwave and hugs curves like a mother hugs a 4-year-old daughter with a boo-boo from falling off a jungle gym.

I love the car,

but my wife isn’t so fond of going 90, with a dachshund in her lap, on the curvy backroads to and from our former homes in Monroe and Charlotte.

I’ve got longish hair, bleached blonde by numerous 30-minute breaks from my newspaper job, lounging on the strand at The Circle in Atlantic Beach.

See, I lived in AB, but worked on the mainland, and also had stories to report from the beach towns, so there were lots of trips back and forth across the drawbridge in the Honda Oven, and the cool ocean beckoned, and I kept a towel and suntan lotion in the car.

We didn’t need no stinkin’

sunscreen in the ‘80s, dark (skin?) ages.

I wore a bathing suit under my naturally bleached jeans at all times

The top hit in the U.S. was "That's What Friends Are For" by Dionne & Friends (Elton John, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder). I never heard it; I had a tape deck in the tiny rolling oven, and REM and The Boss and Prince constantly

scorched my ears.

Our daughter - I mentioned her, right? - is still 11 years from being born here in ‘84.

I despise soccer because I sucked at in high school gym class and I wouldn’t know the World Cup from a spittoon.

Now I’m gonna force my brain to skip ahead 11 years to 1995. Summer is born, after Gwen lugged her to, among other things, a Grateful Dead concert with me in Atlanta, along with our friends, Jackie and Tim.

Summer, then called Emmie, for embryo and later known to many as The Quiblett when I wrote a column called Quibbles & Bits for the newspaper - survived the concert and can somewhat plausibly say she heard but didn’t see Jerry Garcia.

Her chances of being born were not damaged at the concert, by the way, because Gwen stayed low, unlike me and almost all others in the Omni, who were

elevated to the point where Big A gendarmes, unlike today’s ICEholes, cared about humans, and herded us like bad cattle from the Omni to our motel. I suppose they also might have been worried we’d litter or something.

So from 1995 I’ll bludgeon the brain into 2001, when we decide Summer needs a sport, instead of just ballet dancing, so I sign her up for soccer, of all things.

I get drafted to co-coach the team, and despite no knowledge of the game, do so, for years, in increasingly less important roles.

Summer’s team wins a state championship, thanks to excellent coaches who

are not fictional and go to this day by Steve and Chris.

She also

plays four years in high school and at college at Salem, near the N.C. mountains, which she likes.

So ace student Summer goes to grad school at App State in Boone. Brian, who Summer knew in high school, moves in with Summer after her grad school days and they eventually move home to the coast.

Then, the wife and I apparently enter a time warp, because grandson Meyer is suddenly born, followed instantly by Summer becoming pregnant with Myles, who’s due to boogie out next week.

I don’t know how Summer felt after Meyer was delivered.

I do know that Gwen and I basically

looked at each other and said, “What the xxxx

do we do now?” after we pried infant

Summer out of the barely secure car seat at home after the trip back

from the hospital.

I also know how Gwen and I felt when we first saw Meyer.

I, and I presume, Gwen, thought correctly he was the second most beautiful infant we’d ever seen. Summer is still first, even though I unknowingly and ignorantly got scared when she popped out of the womb with no discernible forehead.

We treasure

every highlight in smart-as-a-whip Meyer’s life, and worry like new parents if he hiccups or gets the sniffles in our presence. Or in our absence.

We can’t wait to see brand-spanking-new Myles at the hospital next week.

We love him already, and love Summer and Brian as always and think they’re great parents.

But we also love them for giving Meyer a brother in a crazy Trumpian world that needs love and family more than ever, and more than anything.

Except, maybe, puppies and vanilla ice cream.

https://youtu.be/OkOB57UcYk8?is=9m4NXWDASXCUU3wQ

Contact Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com.

By Brad Rich
I’m not going to let the babbling baby president’s lies kill my positive outlook anymore.

It’s silly and unhealthy to allow  it.

He can stand in front of cameras and insist he’s done more for us than our parents.

He can stand in front of cameras and say the governor of Minnesota and its agencies attacked and attempted to disable water systems in the state.

He can stand in front of cameras and say he won the 2020 election.

He can tell the world he built the greatest economy ever and enacted

the largest tax cuts in U.S history.

He can tell the world our historically closest allies have bilked us for decades.

He can tell us vandals ruined the reflecting pool.

He can tell us Joe Biden ran a multinational crime syndicate.

He can tell us his personal, private lawyer can be a fair attorney general.

He can tell us Canada, Venezuela and Greenland residents would like their homes to be U.S. states 51, 52 and 53.

He can tell us Barack Obama committed treason by soliciting Russian interference in elections.

He can tell us whatever he wants, and he does.

What he can’t tell us is the truth.

(OK, he did tell us the truth, once, when he said the ceasefire in his idiotic and absurdly damaging war with Iraq was “over.”)

Yeah. He can lie all he wants.

Why can’t he tell us the truth?

Because the constant barrage of lies is his only hope if he wants to keep his already abysmal approval rate from hitting single digits.

See, he’s got to keep blathering lies because his brainwashed base is all he’s got left, and if he suddenly starts telling the truth, THEY will think he’s lying. Then he’d catch hell from all directions.

And of course his lies have all been aimed at the true believers of his utter nonsense anyway.

That’s why, even though he knows he’s lying about most things, and we know he’s lying, and he knows we know he knows, it doesn’t matter to him one iota.

As long as his core cadre of billionaires, criminal Congress-stormers racists, misogynists and thieves stand by him and give him enough love to keep his gargantuan ego satisfied, his world is hunky-dory.

I’ll now watch the news and his lies and laugh instead of scream, as I should have been doing all along.

Contact Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com.

By Brad Rich

I thought a lot about artificial intelligence.

I love AI. It’s extremely useful and very fast and, somehow, concurrently time-consuming beyond measure.

One day at about noon, I asked Google’s AI - Gemini, formerly known as Bard - where to place the brackets on a bird house we got from a neighbor who builds them.

Gemini told me. But it also asked whether I was going to mount it in a tree or on a pole. Fine.

I answered “tree” and it asked me if I wanted to know which direction the manor on the tree should face. OK, I suppose.

I said “Yes” and it told me, but it also wanted to know what species of bird I wanted as a tenant, the direction of the prevailing wind in winter and summer, the girth of the trunk or branch it would be attached to, whether I wanted to use a bungie cord or a plastic-coated wire, the name of my favorite dead cousin and the airspeed of an unladen European swallow.

I looked it all up, then looked at the clock, and It was time for bed and I wanted to throw the birdhouse in the garbage.

Another day, when I forgot Gemini was listening, it heard me say something it thought was a question and typed “…a breast pump.”

Gemmie, I don’t know what I said to spur that answer, nor do I want you tell me, if you’re eavesdropping.

Oddly, I was suddenly curious about whether a dog’s tail-wagging is involuntary or a considered decision.

I looked it up and found an article.

Apparently it can be either, or both. But I read more, unfortunately.

Seems the direction of the wag matters.

A predominately rightward wag signals positive emotions, while a wag biased to the left signals negative emotions.

Since then, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking at Arlo’s ass.

I thought about rice. I love all kinds, but they’re all annoying as hell. I spend way too much time trying to get the last two or three kernels on my fork. (For the sake of your sanity, do not ask Gemini anything about “rice” or “kernel.”)

I thought about where we live. It’s 7 miles east of

Camp Lejeune, one of the largest Marine Corps bases in the world. The Marine Corps also has two air bases nearby.

The Jarheads are constantly blowing things up, shooting machine guns at something or launching mortars, sometimes all three at once, presumably training for Trump’s plan to invade the tiny island country of Nauru, which is mostly uninhabitable because decades ago it devoured itself by digging up anything of value.

So why invade Nauru?

Because it’s easier to topple than Iran and Trumpy’ll get to talk bigly-wiggly about it, instead of talking about the price of gas and photos of his Epstein Smiles.

Anyway, the Marines rattle walls and windows,

especially when clouds are low.

It’s called “The Sound of Freedom” by some, “The Sound of Falling Pictures” by others.

This past week we were also attacked by thunderstorms a couple days.

One day, thunder was coming from the east and mortar fire from the west.

I don’t know who won, but I was grateful the Leathernecks didn’t extend the rattling by waiting to start start their rattling after the thunder rattling. It was concurrent!

I yelled “Thank you.”

Gemini heard me and said I could be arrested and jailed, by whoever the hell the babbling baby president’s latest attorney general is, for yelling the F word followed by the letter “U” at a military base.

Contact Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com

BREAKING: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce just rescued a childhood reading program after Republicans defunded it

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce quietly donated $26 million to more than 20 charities across the country this week, and one gift stands out above the rest.

The couple gave $2 million to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, the beloved program that mails a free book every month to children under five. The donation comes just weeks after Republican lawmakers in Missouri slashed the program's funding from $6 million to $2 million, forcing it to freeze enrollment and shut out new kids starting July 1. More than 170,000 Missouri children were signed up when politicians pulled the plug.

Dolly Parton herself responded in a video message, telling the couple she was "blown away and overjoyed" by their generosity.

The rest of the donations tell the same story. Nine food banks received gifts, including $1 million to City Harvest in New York, which said the support comes at a critical time as soup kitchen visits near record highs "in response to federal funding cuts." Three children's hospitals, seven educational programs, and the ASPCA also received donations, according to reporting from Variety.

While politicians in Washington and state capitols keep cutting programs that feed hungry families and put books in kids' hands, two of the most famous people in America stepped up and filled the gap days before their own wedding.

That is what using your platform for good looks like.

Hey, did all you alleged commie heathens listen to President Trump’s July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore?

It was, well, not exactly a call for unity in troubled times, like some other presidential addresses on Independence Day.

No. Not this guy.  Not ever. Everything with him is a call to chaos and an opportunity  to belittle everyone except his obedient followers.

He used this opportunity to warn of

a resurgent Communist “menace,” and called his political opponents “godless” and “evil.” Yeah, pols probably call opponents worse than that. But on TV?

As for commies, never mind that nobody running for anything significant is espousing government control of the means of production. They’re just Americans who support regulations that might manage to keep totally unfettered American capitalism from running so far amok that the shrinking middle class totally evaporates.

Then we become a nation in which there’s no midpoint

between the have-it-alls and those who have little or nothing at all.

Trump in his speech sounded a bit like Les Nessman, the news guy on the old WKRP in Cincinnati television show.

Lester once called tornados “godless” because the station had only one disaster warning tape, for a communist invasion.

I half expected  Trump to hold up one of Les’s five Buckeye Newshawk awards.

Trump emphasized the U.S. will "forever be the land of the free.”

That sounds nice. But the way he and his supporters talk, that might mean true freedom only for pale-skinned Protestant heterosexual men and - maybe women - who have donated to far-right Republican election campaigns.

Everyone else could be part of the “communist menace” that supports national health care and higher taxes on billionaires.

My favorite line in a modern presidential speech is John F.  Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Trump always seems more interested in what “we the people” must do for him.

The venue for the speech, Mount Rushmore, is a bit

endangered, as Trump and his supporters are angling to get his mug carved into the rock alongside those of presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

Trump and his acquiescent sheep have been

informed there’s no room for his face on the mountain, but I’m sure he doesn’t see that as much of an obstacle; just draw up and issue a nice, big no-bid contract to a crony who can remove TR - the patron saint of non-commercial national parks - and replace it with the face of Donnie, who has slashed parks budgets and wants to turn half of them into oil fields and coal mines.

Heck, he might rename Mount Rushmore, like he did the Gulf of Mexico.

How ‘bout Mount Rush Limbaugh, to honor the late radio talk show host and rabid early Trump backer?

I also have an inkling that changes might be in store for the D.C. reflecting pool Trump tried to “fix” with a no-bid cleanup and painting contract awarded to a crony and Florida neighbor. Call it the blue paint special.

We all know what happened. Godless commies, paid by  the Joe Biden crime syndicate and armed with invisible pocket knives,  86ed the repair job and tossed  in a keg of algae for good measure.

Donnie got mad. Hell, dude, where’s that famous Don the Con entrepreneurial magic?

Move on.  Scoop out all that pesky algae and turn the pool into a for-profit skateboard park.

There could be a McDonald’s in the former pool, with  a new menu item: The Big Don, with thick slices of fried baloney and a layer of bull bacon.

In addition, the big new Mickey D’s could offer the babbling baby president’s reported favorite megameal: two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches with extra tartar sauce and a large chocolate milkshake.

That one no doubt helps the prez maintain his svelte figure. Make it available to all, pronto!

But remember, you’ll have pay with Trump bitcoins.

Mickey D’s music might be an endless loop of some of Trumpies’ favorite songs, such as Kid Rock’s “Born Free,” which could be the new national anthem.

https://youtu.be/bu3rsha1ZtI?is=N18sf9yK-WuGKcBt

After all,  who  wants to go to the ball park and hear all those silly words about ramparts and the red (Commie?) glare?

Contact  Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com

By Brad Rich

We went to see my primary doctor this past Tuesday and got good news, exactly one year after a doctor in Jacksonville  very bluntly told me I had end-stage liver Cirrhosis.

He seemed angry at me; that anger shocked me more than the diagnosis. I didn’t need that; I was already mad enough at myself for ignoring health problems for so long.

I had arrived in the Onslow Memorial Hospital emergency room early in the morning after falling as I got out of bed. I’d previously fallen on the porch and had to crawl and roll into the house and wait several hours for wife Gwen to come home from work

and call a neighbor to help me get off the floor.

After the second fall, we called 911 because I again couldn’t get up, and the crew got me standing.

Although I was in a lot of pain and my abdomen looked like I was pregnant and my legs and feet were similarly swollen, I said standing was enough; no trip to the hospital for me.

But my wife, Gwen, and a female EMT were having none of that.

“You’ve got edema,” the EMT from the nearby Bear Creek Department said. “If you get scratched, you could get cellulitis and you could die.”That convinced me.

At the hospital, they eased the pain with morphine and later drained eight liters of fluid from my abdomen. That’s equivalent to four two-liter soft drink bottles.

They then transported me to Novant Hospital in Wilmington because there was nothing more they could do in Onslow.

For more than two weeks the nurses in Wilmington continued to drain my abdomen periodically. Finally, a surgeon installed a Plurex catheter in my abdomen. You just hook up to it and suck stuff out into a bottle.

Still, a doctor at Novant said I might have as little as three months to live. I weighed 89 pounds, down from 130.

I was malnourished. My blood pressure was consistently abysmal, sometimes as low as 60. I couldn’t get out of bed.

But a beautiful, kind nurse, during her time off, searched literature

and found a drug that might work. It did. BP generally increased.

Still, my wife and most others thought I’d never come home. I signed a Do Not Resuscitate form, because a Novant doc told me that if I needed to be revived, there wasn’t much to “save.” I agreed; saving me for exactly what? I’ve lived almost 70 great years, have no real regrets and don’t fear moving off this plane.

But after a few weeks in physical rehab at Croatan Ridge in Newport, I was better physically and able to come home on Aug. 7.

The head nurse at Croatan taught Gwen how to drain me, every other day, ad infinitum, we thought.

She was scared but in the end, nurses said she was better at it than they were.

Gwen did all this while still working, walking the dog, cooking and taking me to doctor appointments.

I don’t see how.

Still, although I felt better physically, and was walking better, mentally I was a basket case.

I honestly didn’t care that much if I lived: what exactly was the point?

I was mostly bed-ridden and I didn’t like how the future looked without my job as a reporter. I was useless around the house. And I was utterly bored.

But a funny thing happened: For once in my life,  I followed directions.

Gwen made healthy meals, often iron-rich, for me, and I ate them three times a day. I took all my prescribed meds. I started exercising more. I paid attention to the visiting nurses. And several other things happened

First, I rediscovered my love for reggae music. I went back from Bob Marley to  the founders of the genre, then forward to the new wave of reggae, mostly bands, like SOJA and Rebelution, from

from California, Hawaii and Florida.

Immersion in the vibrant and meaningful music and positive vibes slowly changed my attitude.

I also absolutely have to listen every morning to “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, the most spiritual major rock band ever.

Second, fluid finally stopped flowing into my abdomen, so we got the catheter removed and I felt much better. The pain and severe itching slowly disappeared.

I also found something to do other than reading and listening to music: Transforming our porch from a pretty space with a few chairs and a coffee table to an oasis that reflected our life philosophy and tastes: Wind chimes, wind gongs and a big gong I bang to start each day.

Photos, sun catchers and flowers galore, all reflecting our peaceful and natural/pro-environmental aesthetic, found homes.

I did the planning and ordering, mostly, and Gwen did the assembly work.

For me, it was similar to being a reporter: lots of thinking and research to find the right stuff. Detailed and time-consuming.

By the end, I was no longer bored and depressed.

The future didn’t seem so bleak.

I started writing again, longer stuff than the usual Facebook posts. It was a start.

The doctor visit Tuesday culminated  the odyssey temporarily. I weighed 117 pounds and all the health markers were great. (OK, cholesterol’s a bit high because I’ve been eating copious amounts of ice cream to gain weight.

But the doctor said my liver is functioning well enough  to extend my life indefinitely, as long as I keep doing the right things to keep it functioning. I hadn’t, as the doctor in Jacksonville said, killed it.

I plan to continue to do all the things I’m supposed to do.

I hope to outlive Donald Trump and see a new government that cares more about heath care than it does about bit coins and raping the environment.

This was my first real experience with the country’s health “care” industry; I’d been remarkably healthy all my life.

It was maddening.

The bureaucratic maze makes it difficult, often impossible, to speak face-to-face on a timely basis, to, well, anyone. Phone systems urge you to text, so it’s often difficult to discuss anything by phone.

It often takes a day or more to get an answer to a simple question.

Understanding how various insurers - public and private - mesh requires more attention than patients can give.

The upside is nurses. The ones who helped me were mostly phenomenal.

But if you talk to them privately, as I did, many will tell you they hate the “system” as much or more than patients do. They are horribly overworked.

We feel lucky and indebted to them to have come out of the journey with sanity intact.

Thanks and love to all who helped us and sent cards and emails and made phone calls during this strange continuing trip. Peace be with you.

Contact Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com

By Brad Rich

Frogs and Dogs and Storms, Oh My

Saturday night, Gwen and I settled

In for our usual weekend entertainment, rewatching a great comedy movie.

The choice this time was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which

I believe is the funniest flick - and one of the most brilliant - ever made.

But Ma Nature intervened, sending us a bad thunderstorm right after King Arthur cut off the last leg of the Black Night.

Partly because the thunder was making it hard to hear the movie, but mostly because of a long ago decree by mom that the TV had to be turned off and unplugged

If a storm was nearby, we decided to take a break.

Funny. As I type this, I can’t remember if I took my Vitamin B this morning, but that TV directive from mom lingers powerfully in memory, as does mom’s “Don’t stand there with the refrigerator open.”

Anyway, we sat in the living room talking until the storm passed and then tried to go back to the movie but it was gone.

I searched for it on HBO Max, making my usual interminable typos in the infernal search box. That went on so long I gave up and we watched an episode of MASH, the best show ever on network TV.

(Don’t “argue with me” about MASH, as mom always said to me when I tried to get her to come out of the closet she hid in during storms.)

Anyway, as the credits rolled at the end of the show, I realized we’d watched the start of Monty on some other streaming channel, but I couldn’t remember which one.

The bizarre selective memory baffled me.

So we went out on our porch, where I quickly remembered and felt oddly compelled to tell Gwen that one time, when Mom was in the closet, Dad was out on our tiny backyard screen porch, drinking a beer and smoking and reveling in the lightning, like Ben Franklin flying a kite during a storm in 1752.

Ben changed the world. Dad got wet and changed his shirt.

He wouldn’t come in, so I served as an envoy, informing him mom wouldn’t come out of the closet and telling mom that dad wouldn’t come in, so they should meet and talk inside the tiny laundry room on the porch.

Then I went to my room and turned on my little black and white TV to watch The Tonight Show until I went to sleep.

The next morning, I reveled in my small, unnoticed rebellion against the very TV-lightning decree that made me turn off Monty.

But back to our porch.

The rain was dripping off the trees in quiet rhythm, our wind chimes were tinkling, our wind gongs were gonging. The porch ceiling was bathed in shifting shades of blue and purple from a light I bought and keep out there.

Our lanterns glowed warmly and a barely visible vehicle swished by on the wet street, its headlights adding a glow.

Arlo the Dog snoozed briefly in her outside bed before taking leave of us and going inside, likely to sniff the floor for crumbs from supper.

There was a loud frog sing-a-long somewhere south of us, probably dozens of tiny frogs. The lead singer was obviously a big bullfrog, croaking like Tom Waits singing “Jersey Girl.”

It was all beautiful, almost magical.

“This was better than any movie” I said as we walked into the living room, and Gwen agreed.

P.S. Remind me to tell you the story I remembered Saturday night about the long ago time me and my best friend, Kris, after playing ball in his family’s carport, entertained ourselves by catching bugs and feeding them to a frog until he or she couldn’t move.

No, wait. Don’t remind me. I still feel guilty.

Contact Brad Rich at noriches@icloud.com