One of my totally awesome MWC alums insisted on picking me up from the oral surgeon Thursday — even after I told him I could get an Uber.
And he didn’t even laugh too hard when I was so doped up afterward that I didn’t recognize him! (“Who is this strange, albeit polite, man greeting me in the waiting room?”)
Good friends are hard to come by, but I’ve got a few.
Or … maybe it WAS a stranger who drove me home. Seriously. This really is a hospitable Southern city and I was high AF.
Before you call Roanoke a small town, remember — it’s got its own ICBM.
I’m kidding. It’s not a nuclear missile. I think it’s a … rocket of some kind? I’m too lazy to google it. It’s outside the Virginia Transportation Museum.
Why do I so badly want it to be a stolen Russian rocket, reminiscent of 1982’s “Firefox” with Clint Eastwood?
Update: I have just been informed by a few people that this actually was a nuclear missile at one point. Apparently what we’re looking at is a Jupiter-class rocket that once held a nuclear warhead? And here I was only joking above …
I’m so glad today to see The Piker Press publish another poem of mine — “When I Meet the Devil.” You can find it right here.
Thanks, as always, to Managing Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice at The Piker Press!
I am so happy today to see The Roanoke Times publish my latest letter to the editor:
Letter: Beware those who would criticize knowledge
As always, I am grateful to the editorial staff of this superb regional newspaper. The Roanoke Times is the primary newspaper for Southwest Virginia, and its Sunday readership throughout 19 counties is estimated at 230,000 people.
I’m also pleasantly surprised that this particular letter seems to have struck a chord with people the way that it did. After it was carried by a number of newspapers in Virginia and by Newsday in New York, it was shared with a combined 733,000 readers. That would make it the most broadly circulated single item of all of my writing.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 