Is there anything so magical as the woods? They’re the settings for adventure, where trees are metamorphized from friend to foe, fantastical creatures they become, their long, spindly, skeletal fingers clutching at the unwary traveler, spookily, eerily suggestive that that tug on the back of the jacket was not just happenstance.
Tillicum
Poem: Home! Sweet Home! revised
With apologies to American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne (1823), and Englishman Sir Henry Bishop (melody composition):
Letter: Behold the heavy hand of government – MJ and RIP
City fence-sitting on marijuana (MJ) won’t be allowed if the State gets its way, and a warrant to inspect rental housing won’t be needed now that the City has its way. If House Bill 1099 passes this current legislative session, Lakewood will lose over a half-million dollars annually from the city’s estimated share of alcohol […]
Letter: Living as a square peg in a round hole world
Martin Luther King Jr., whose life and accomplishments are recognized officially with a day set aside in his honor, was “an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his […]
Letter: Another day (month), another unmet rental inspection deadline
As of this writing, January 6 was yesterday, “but” in the hit single lyrics of Chad and Jeremy (1963) “that was yesterday and yesterday’s gone.” And with the passing of another day, another deadline promised by the City of Lakewood’s legal department has gone unmet as well.
Letter: Three questions to ask a prospective landlord (in Lakewood and elsewhere) before signing an apartment lease
“Most people tend to rush signing a lease,” warned Nancy Simmons Starrs in the December 28, 2016 “Washington Post.” Indeed, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” likewise warned Alexander Pope in a poem about tenant/landlord relationships gone bad (or maybe 1711 was pre-rental inspection days).
Letter: New Year’s resolution – never ‘whatever’
Whatever is the most annoying word of the year just ending? Yes. It’s both a question and a statement to which ‘whatever’ is the answer.
Letter: Three predictions for 2017
Marijuana sales will sprout – like the weed that it is – in Lakewood, the city joining La La Land – not the movie but its neighbors – in transitioning from holdout (bans) to handout (bucks). “Principles,” after all, opined the Tacoma News Tribune Editorial Board, “don’t keep the lights on.” And sprigs, that is […]
Letter: Rental Inspection Paradox
When I won the Great Cross Sound Race in 1990, a competitor’s double rowing shell was named ‘Paradocs’, appropriately enough given the pair were both doctors. Lakewood’s Rental Housing Safety Program (RHSP), paradoxically, plans to achieve after the fact – entailing a great deal of complexity in the process – what it could have done […]