The Lone Prairie Blog

It starts by assuming the land’s gender.

Ranch-flavored cheese curds, peak Midwest. I did not know you could return food.

My small hometown post office. As it turns out, sending a Christmas present to Germany is more difficult than crossing the Maginot Line.

I’m not new to inappropriate Thanksgiving tales , but a decade ago, after significant professional degradation during this time of giving thanks, I discovered that chocolate was king and some people just deserve the side-eye.

While watching my overweight cat swat his partially empty food bowl around and while looking at me accusingly, I was reminded that there are several ways a civilization can fall, some more dramatic and worthy of historians’ attention than others. I considered how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that unfortunate trajectory we are all on, in which entropy (disorder and randomness) always increases as time goes on. I also considered people who don’t put away their shopping car

In February 2006, I ordered a copy of the book A Reader’s Manifesto : An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose . Originally an essay, the author, B. R. Myers, expanded it into a tidy little book that took a swing at the growing pretentiousness in literary fiction. Mixed metaphors, odd imagery, weird word choices.