Michael Campbell
Story Time.
A Step Up for Your Swim Ladder
Add comfortable treads to protect your feet I sail an older Macgregor 26 Classic. I love it in every way. Every way but one: it came with a swim ladder made of 1" chrome tubing that just kills my feet. Adding insult to injury, the ladder doesn't reach deep enough into...
The Liberty of Responsibility
Do you want fewer laws and more liberty? Start by doing the right thing.
Flushed
The internet is helpful, mostly. The telephone: now there’s a handy device. But every single day I pause to give thanks to my favorite invention of all: my toilet. Every vulnerable, humbling, shameful experience gets washed away discreetly, at the press of a silver...
Where Civility Ends
Did Facebook and Twitter break the world? We used to be nice to each other (at least face to face) and we managed to disagree without throwing punches (mostly). Have we lost civility forever?
Feeling Punchy
On St. Patrick’s Day in my elementary school you were supposed to wear something green. If you didn’t, everyone had the right to pinch you. So far as I can remember, this was the only opportunity to pinch another boy and not get slugged in return.
How Life Really Begins
August in Nebraska: the wet 95 degree air squats like a heavyweight wrestler on your lungs. It was my day off, but I was called back to my bar. The air conditioner had gone out again. I knew what was wrong, the same thing every time. Humidity wrung from the air drips...
Sixties Eve
Tomorrow is my birthday. Today is the last day of my fifties. Happy Sixties Eve to me. I sure didn't skate through my fifties. I fell in love, got married, published a book, released an album, and recorded a soundtrack. I learned to ride a unicycle, juggle wooden...
Cereal Killers
As a kid I was always up at dawn. Every day was an adventure and I was eager to get started. I’d teeter downstairs and join my dad, who was inevitably sitting in his boxers, leaning on his elbows, updating his to-do lists in his back-slant lefty handwriting....
Hot Stuff
Mary Avery grew up on a prehistoric dome of salt in the middle of the Louisiana marsh. It was a huge hill: six miles around, with caves 50,000 feet deep. It belonged to her parents, so naturally she wasted no time escaping it. In the early 1800s Mary was happily swept...
Slow Cook
Millions rushed out to buy an Instant Pot, this year’s hot kitchen gadget. Many were disappointed to discover the Instant Pot didn’t deliver that kind of pot. It didn’t even deliver instant. But it is a pot. You can bake a potato in 10 minutes! That is, if you don’t...