‘State of Control’ Draft; Copyright WBJR Living Trust DAY TWO Pennsylvania, 4:30–5 pm EDT Dillon Rice was not pleased to find James Keyes in Thornton’s office. “I can come back tomorrow, Chief.” “No, no.” Thornton motioned him in. “The Chairman wants Jim to work with us. Anything new?” Rice settled…

Not to sound banal, but I truly feel your pain. My mother wrote in the family dictionary the year before I was born: "then you will know how much you can care, when you've given your heart to a dog to tear" and the 1942 date her childhood dog died…

Born a Georgian, forever a Georgian. No matter how far you roam or how long you stay away. My formative years were in Georgia before my grandfather retired and relocated us to a Florida beach-house. There were plenty of trips home before and after I graduated high school. …

STATE OF CONTROL. Draft, copyright WRBJr. Living Trust. DAY TWO. PENNSYLVANIA, 2 PM EDT Dillon Rice was not tall enough to see above fourth-floor beige privacy-partitions dividing cubicles of Central PA liquor inspectors. Scarcity of ringing phones or hallway palaver told him most were already in the field. Rationale: licensees…

I had yet to catch a steelhead, whether drift-fishing legally on the Puyallup River or spearing in the Gorge with Aaron’s kid, who got a kick out of my inability to develop the proper wrist flick. …

(“Orphan” notes, some of which made it into publication.) Sept. 9, 2006 — it is 9:30 p.m. in the brightly lighted parking lot of Foothills Ranch Casino. One of those little hip-pocket hangouts for locals with which Vegas away from the Strip is so abundantly endowed. This one is on…

Apology to my handful of readers. A friend wrote alerting me the recent Joe Consonants chapter had some editing glitches. I’d tried to shorten the chapters some, to leave out extraneous novel asides. Must have been half-asleep. So I deleted the abortive edit and hereby replace it with the full…

Note: this one is out of order, and should follow the Joe Consonants chapters. I really should get more sleep before attempting a post… The skooks didn’t come back around our house again that summer as far as I know. I watched my son like a hawk, and he took no more unexpected jaunts toward the foothills. After Joe Consonants shrugged off the incident as not worth worrying about, because the skooks had marked my son out for a special relationship dating back…

Stanley Donen’s 1958 romantic comedy Indiscreet reteamed Cary Grant with Ingrid Bergman a dozen years after the two shared the screen in Hitchcock’s spy thriller Notorious (1946.) …