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What the Hell Happened to Nebraska?

I grew up in Nebraska. Then I escaped to New York. When I lived in Nebraska, it was a pretty good place. North Loup. Scotia. Lincoln. The University. Bob Kerrey. We had stamina, hard work, and a future, and we were kind to each other because we believed in the Good Life. Then, over the last 30 years since I’ve been away, something broke, and a red-hard Republican named Pete Ricketts, decided to ruin the state in an ego-driven run for the governorship just so he could ultimately become a thug in the Trump Covid-19 Death Cult along with Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. Thankfully, there are still some sane people in Huskerland who can use their power to do goodness — as in getting the Nebraska Covid-19 Dashboard reinstated:

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The Scotia Register Wormhole

It isn’t often you can take a trip through a wormhole, and survive, tumbling back in time, from whence you began, and then arrive back in the future from which there is no escape; and so I have described my recent journey tripping through the online archives of — The Scotia Register — a village newspaper that was published weekly, on Thursdays, in Scotia, Nebraska (population 291) from 1895 to 2003. Paging back through The Scotia Register archives was like being watched and recorded, from afar, years ago, with the perspective, and perception, of the now.

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1983: Year of the Big Glasses

Yes, 1983 was the — “Year of the Big Glasses” — as you can see preeminently evidenced below in the 1983 promotional newspaper advertisement for “KFOR, Radio 1240, The One You Turn to For News.” I am in the lower right corner, aged 18, and in my Senior year at Lincoln Northeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was not alone in my Big Glasses accoutrement. Three others were with me, but none of my coworker cohorts also had the keen, brown, tint-a-wheel of The Big Glasses Transitions lenses of 1983!

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On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet

If you spend any time doing business on the internet — “Branding Yourself” — is an important part of the process even if it seems shameful and unseemly and selfish: Enjoy it! It’s what you’ve become by being here!

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The Nebraska Abolitionist: When Slave Owners Won the Day

When I was in sixth grade in Nebraska — around the time Alex Haley’s ovaric “Roots” novel was making its debut in the world conversation about America’s shameful treatment of slaves — our teacher, who was Lily-white born and bred and a staunch conservative from Oklahoma, decided to hold a “historical” debate with a bunch of 11-year-olds on the topic of abolition.

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Predators, Children and Sexual Prevarication

Children are some of the most vulnerable in society. They are trusting by default and unaware by necessity of nature. Popular culture and the Arts are filled with the sexual exploitation of, and the aggrieved results of, unattended children in peril with no one to protect their best interests except, oftentimes, their grooming predators.

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A Stone’s Throw: “That Abortion Play” 30 Years Later

Thirty years ago, as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, I wrote a play: A Stone’s Throw. The full-length drama was about the dilution of the human spirit forged against the willful hard-edge of moral exhumation — but my production quickly became known on campus as “That Abortion Play.” You may download an early draft of “A Stone’s Throw” on this Boles.com Prairie Voice Archive Scripts page; and here some of the reviews of the production.

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