Sunday warrior
The Doppler radar looked like a corner man’s towel in the ninth round. Three slashes of red cut across Georgia and western South Carolina, each one more pronounced as they stepped south toward the...
Author: Brad Willis
St. Francis Hospital: The real cost of having a baby
About the author: I am an award-winning investigative journalist who worked at Greenville, SC’s WYFF News 4 from 1999 to 2005. Everything you read below is objectively true. Summary: Below is a long and...
Contrails and flour
Busy on several projects today. Here’s a photo I found when cleaning off my hard drive from 2009.
Cocaine cabbies
It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I am in rough shape. I left the club some time after 3am, somewhere around the time I remembered I was 36 years old and most of...
M&Ms
Nassau, Bahamas–The little girl behind me wants an M&M. I know this because she repeated what she wanted for five consecutive minutes, only taking breaks to take giant breaths that would propel her through...
Bahamas bits
I’ve now been in the Bahamas for ten days and there is no common thread that can tie the whole experience together. It’s a mess of random nightmares mixed with zombie walks through a...
Five years of wandering
I got the sense they were talking about me. I was younger then–just 31, in fact–but I was no dummy. I’d already seen some of the most impressive and disturbing things most people ever...
2010: Time to go
Well, the way I see it, it’s time for us to get moving. Near as I can tell, I have been waiting around long enough. I’ll get as old as the road as long...
Rapid Eye Reality’s 2009 superlatives
In 2009, my wife gave me another son. She gave me room to be me. She gave me encouragement like no one else could. In 2009, my oldest son looked at me in a...
Being us on Christmas
The other day as we sat beneath stockings and in the glow of a perfectly-lit North Carolina pine, my son asked, “Dad, can we celebrate Hanukkah sometime?” This is where my son’s experience is...
Slower down the mountain
Several years ago, I was somewhere in Colorado (more than likely Copper or Breckenridge) and standing at the bottom of a run with several friends. We stood in the mountain air and worked on...
Otis Resolved 2010
Last year at this time, I posted a sort of peremptory list of resolutions for the coming year. The way I see it, the top of the year is full of people resolving to...
People who died
I did something odd last night. I was doing it before I even knew why. I’m still not sure I have a decent grasp on my motivation. A guy who went to my high...
Charity Worley: One year gone
One year ago, Linda Casey walked out of her house on a cold morning and found her daughter dead. She made a phone call that was eventually broadcast to the tri-state area by a...