What the Spray Allowed

On the night of the fourteenth of September, 1997, in the first squall band of a blow that never got a name, a man went over the rail of a shrimp boat working the inside grounds off Cameron, Louisiana. The boat was the Coralee B, sixty-two feet of wood and rust out of Cameron, named for the captain’s mother. Junius Hebert was the man: twenty-nine, out of Hackberry, the lead deckhand, with a wife and two little girls and a laugh that carried over the engine. The sea that took him did not splash. He was working the winch on the starboard side, and the first green sea stood on the deck amidships, and the second one came over the rail where he was standing, and when the deck cleared the winch was running empty and Junius was gone.

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Taking the Mechanism Out of Man

In 1931, George Orwell wrote a magnificent essay simply entitled, “A Hanging.” That piece is a hauntingly simple story of a prison execution.  There is no fantasy in the dying and we are made real and substantial witnesses.

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Your First Corpse

Have you ever seen a dead body? 

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Unwanted Witness to an Instant Death

The other day Janna and I were walking around Journal Square. I was looking one way and Janna another when she saw what I missed: A young woman stepping into the street in the middle of traffic.

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Farting, Burping and the Dangling Booger

If you fart in public, do you:

A). Make a joke out of it.

B). Quote a medical study saying everyone farts 14 times a day.

C). Pretend you didn’t deal it. 

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