Rick Bailey's Blog: Stuff happens, then you write about it

I am scum. The chief executive of the United States recently said so.  Yes, I lean left. I believe that DEI addresses injurious discrimination and injustice ignored for decades, that “inclusion” is not such a bad thing, that it’s wrong (and unnecessary) for children to go to bed and to wake up hungry, that healthcare…More

In the compelling introduction to her new collection of poems, Secular Audacity, Joy Gaines-Friedler observes, “These poems speak from a secular mysticism in conversation with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s pious views.” Heschel, Polish Jew, a theologian and professor of ethics, narrowly escaped the Holocaust, as did some (perhaps not many) of Gaines-Friedler’s relatives. In one…More

When needed, you come to your kids’ rescue. This morning Tizi and I are driving over to our daughter’s house. Before leaving home I put a pair of heavy black rubber gloves in the back of the car, gloves I wear when I spray our hastas with smelly deer repellent, the kind of gloves my…More

A couple crisis moments so far. A fly. And a rattlesnake. Across western Minnesota I’m doing 77 mph in light traffic on a very sunny Friday morning. It will be a nine-hour drive to Rapid City, SD. No one understands how we can possibly like this trip. Even when we tell them about LaCrosse, WI,…More

Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction got me thinking about frogs—the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, in particular, when frogs rain from the sky. First one goes splat against a car windshield, then a few more—thunk, thunk thunk—falling from the night sky onto the roof and hood of the car. Then more of them bounce…More

These days you can’t cross the space between Kroger and your car without seeing one. It’s part of a driver’s mobile toilet (let’s be delicate and say twah-LET). You shave in your car, you apply make-up and eye liner and do your hair in your car, you pluck nose hairs and squeeze blackheads in your…More

A week or so ago I couldn’t get the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party (so I’ll go)” out of my head. The song is about a jilted lover. At any time, at any place, it would start playing in my mind’s ear. “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear .…More

This would have been 1968. I was in tenth grade. I wore an orange Nehru shirt. And I was not embarrassed.  As far as I knew, no one in school had a Nehru shirt. I would not have worn it to school. I couldn’t see myself sitting in Mrs. Davison’s civics class wearing an orange…More

I swing into the parking spot that’s farthest from the hospital entrance. It’s 7:25 a.m. I’ve come for an MRI. From the far corner of the lot I’ll take the long walk, a small down payment on good health, to the hospital’s main entrance. After I shut the engine off, I toss my keys into…More

I read an article about dementia in the New York Times this morning. The title was something like “the ten things you should do to minimize memory loss.” The author was a famous neurologist or brain doctor. His advice: get enough sleep, eat good food, get a lot of exercise, be sociable, watch your cholesterol.…More