Author: Vic Socotra

Strategic Ambiguity

(This fair-use non-commercial low-resolution screen-capture is from The Atlantic Magazine e-edition on an article regarding evangelical dissolution by Mr. Tim Alberta). Goodness, what a morning! Faithful correspondent Arrias weighed with with some considerations on the balance of nuclear terror on this vast but finite spinning world. It would be tempting to casually reach back into […]

Arrias and his Muse: Shipmates

Two shipmates sit and talk, Sipping sweet Iced Tea, Crab soup, Po’ Boys, Sandwiches, Tales of their lives at sea. Ships and ports, crises and wars, Far too many to name, Forty years since they first met, Much changes, everything’s the same. Several years since they last met But it feels just like yesterday, Serve […]

Life & Island Times: Closing on the Horizon

Author’s Note: Nice work on yesterday’s fire ring doings. W and I will vote in our state primaries this coming Tuesday. Georgia has already surpassed 2020’s record general election early voting totals. In the off-year primaries, no less. The national parties’ carpet baggers are down here in force with their money, BS TV commercials and […]

Stop Fake

(Nina Jankowitz official picture) It’s a new world, all right. Our panel of Fire Ring experts and hacks was naturally energized by a bunch of stuff. We are at swirl in the latest lunacy, some of it bringing up old mysteries in the swirl of a more recent one reaching its expiration date, and others […]

Housekeeping

Summer is still three weeks away, but Virginia’s Piedmont has the moist rag of heat waving across us for the first taste of the season of warmth and perspiration to come. It was a bit of languor on the deck above the Fire Ring, a coolness of night still emanating from the siding, intermingling with […]

Life & Island Times: In a New York Minute

Editor’s Note: This is powerful stuff from shipmate Marlow. I was in attendance for the ceremony and reading this still moves me. Hard. -Vic Author’s Note: I didn’t begin to write about these events until May of last year — their 30thanniversary. Here is the current quasi-organized version of these thoughts. -Marlow In a New […]

Gaylord Gets Slammed

MapDescription automatically generated Locating: Otsego Ski Club was just east of town. West ten miles was the cabin on a little lake in the woods near tiny Elmira. Two miles to M-131 and north past Boyne Mountain, big-time Michigan skiing, and eventual to Petoskey, where Dad was Mayor pro tem and I thought I was […]

Why Things Are the Way They Are

Some of the crowd around the Fire Ring at Refuge Farm were wearing shorts. The Lady in Red on the flatscreen in the bunk house had done an ominous turn in her weather reporting, saying that the relatively cool Spring was going to transition into a weekend with temperatures in the 90s. Splash was wearing […]

Arrias and His Muse: Soldiers of Azov

They stood against a rain of bombs, Russian siege guns pounded away, Tanks and fire thrown at them, Day after day after day. Their President said they could surrender, He said they’d done enough, But they would not bow to the foeman, To Russian dreams they were MacDuff. Some say they are a disreputable sort, […]