September 19th, 2022
Mark O'Brien
In 1999, I was working at a small public-relations firm in Avon, Connecticut. My dentist was in the next town east, which, oddly enough, is West Hartford. (Everything is relative.) Exiting I-84 on Prospect Street, I drove north on Prospect, intending to turn left onto Farmington Avenue, the street on which my dentist’s office was […]
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September 12th, 2022
Mark O'Brien
Author’s Note: This story is an elaboration on a comment I posted in a thread initiated by my friend, Tammy Eldredge. It’s also a faithful recounting of an actual event and a very valuable lesson. In 1974, I was playing in a band with some guys who rented a house on West Street in Rocky […]
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September 6th, 2022
Mark O'Brien
As readers of my ravings likely know by now, my father was a U.S. Marine. To him — and, so, to us — time was an adversarial construct. There was no later. There was no gradually. There was no patience. There were just two things: (1) Now. (2) Now, God damn it! Growing up in […]
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September 1st, 2022
Mark O'Brien
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” (George Eliot) As it pertains to the outcome of the midterm elections on November 8th, we’ve been hearing terms like shellacking, landslide, bloodbath, tsunami, wipeout, cataclysm, apocalypse, and fuggedaboudit. One can only hope […]
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