The favorite books of one's youth can be dangerous stuff. One of the highest-risk authors for me turned out to be Ernest Hemingway. His writing almost killed me in at least in three ways. That…
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
The first time I heard Rush Limbaugh was on my father’s car radio decades ago. Rush was lecturing away on some topic, I think illegal immigration and the horrors thereof, and went on and on.…
Winter in California, decades ago. I’d come back from traveling the world for almost two years after graduate school, with the primary aim of reuniting with my long lost true love. We’d rekindled it all…
There’s an old actors’ trick that advises if you can’t bring on fake tears, just think of when your favorite dog died. It can work for even the toughest macho men. And I’ve even seen…
“Just pick any political meeting you wish, go to it, and write a short report,” ordered our high school “social studies” teacher, way back in the 1970s. This was in Orange County, California, named “America's…
Game tied, bottom of the ninth. Two runners on base, and any one of us scoring now means we win the whole enchilada. The pennant hangs in the balance. But I can’t afford to even…
I Do This So You Don't Have To... But it was Quite a Week: Trump recommends an oleander concoction promoted by Ben Carson and the MyPillow guy/Trump donor to fight Covid; so many actual doctors…
Donald Trump is in the White House because of abortion. Not solely that issue, of course, but it was his craven, calculated, and hypocritical embrace of the “pro-life” label just when he decided to run…
A tiny bacteria or even tinier virus gets into a flea, who jumps onto a rat, who sneaks onto a boat and then off into a new city, and changes the course of human history…