Daily Prompt | The Gad About Town

No Bullies. No Drama. Only Comedies on TV

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

The comments territory under any YouTube video is an unlighted playground with shards of glass for sliding boards and a ball-pit full of barbed wire. There is no “thumbs-down” or dislike button available on Facebook, for obvious reasons. Comments are certainly allowed, and often the prevailing rhetorical mode is insult and injury.

Twitter may as well be one big dislike button sometimes. Not in my experience so far, except for two or three times. Each one of these is etched in my co-dependent memory, however.

When I started publishing on WordPress a year an a half ago, I wondered: What will it be like to have my work exposed to a comments section?
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Flipping and Flopping, Wishing and Washing

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

If you are interested in the horse-race nature of American politics, the drop-everything-every-four-years-so-we-can-fill-all-the-jobs-in-Washington-DC portion of our public life, you could do no worse than live in either New Hampshire or Iowa for the entire year before Election Day. This means that right now is a good time to move to Nashua, New Hampshire, or Des Moines, Iowa, if you are a politics addict.

The reasons for this are obscure and boring, unless you live in either state. In that case you might be passionate about your community’s role in selecting our next President. It might be the one thing you care about, and you might care about it more than the name of the person who will get your vote.
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Beyond the Sea

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

The Atlantic Ocean. Those tiny dots are people with lives, voices, loved ones, losses. Sunburns.

We are standing in front of the “Beach Hut” at Smith Point County Park on the South Shore of Long Island. It is 2014, one of the more recent years in history. For much of my adult life, I have sat here internally convinced that I do not like “the beach.” I do not remember when I convinced myself of this. I do not remember an unpleasant beach incident that convinced me of this piece of self-knowledge.
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