Brianland

The  Maltese  Fall . It’s Friday, May 15th, 1998, our final port of call, Valletta, Malta, the ancient capital, site of The Great Siege, home of the thousand-year-old Knights of St. John, the nomadic Christian healers who were granted refuge on the island by the Emperor of Spain in 1530 for the rent of two […]

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The Grateful Dead Played My 30th  Or Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned At A Grateful Dead Concert             The weekend of my 30th birthday, four old friends drove from Winnipeg to New York to help celebrate it, and the Grateful Dead flew in from San Francisco to play. It’s a curious story […]

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Every Day Is A Gift   by Brian Hassett Every day you’re alive is a gawd-damned gift.  And that’s the whole shot, as Gregory Corso would say. Try adding up all the times your Indomitable Spirit was challenged but did not topple in a deathly firestorm of adversity.  There’s probably been a hundred of them, […]

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  . May your lights be bright and your resilience strong, May your thoughts be poetry and your voice be song. May your dreams be vivid and your days be bold, May your riches be measured in human gold.     Happy Shopping Daze — 
But the best gift you can give is the gift […]

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It was a grey newspaper day during “papers” week at Camp Cleanup — digging through layers of mounds of newsprint and letters and notes like an archeological dig, uncovering the strata of history in this ancient city of my life. Overnight, the cat tipped over an old Safeways bag full of newspapers from a closet […]

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The Ballad of the Profiteers   . You’re suckin’ on / your money’s teat, When nothin’s left / for folks to eat, You’re livin’ high / down on Wall Street, Crushin’ dreams / beneath your feet. How come it is / and why it’s not, The biggest thieves / are never caught, When all you […]

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. Condolences, memories, and tributes to Enid have been coming in from — Indonesia, Vietnam, Nepal, Oman, Switzerland, Austria, England, Mexico . . . Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Portland, Eugene, Seattle, the Olympic Peninsula, Missoula Montana, Colorado Springs, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Rochester Minnesota, Rochester New York, Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, Louisville, Detroit, Key […]

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A full day and night party . . . featuring Enid movies, music, paintings, photographs, artifacts, internet performances, books with stories, and people with stories. It’ll actually be sorta fun. We’ll have oliver favorite food n drinks. This is just an invitation, not an obligation. But it’ll certainly be a memorable Memorial. Date:  on The […]

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Her father was an engineer on the CPR, so the whole family got to travel all over North America, when virtually no one in their town ever went more than a few miles from home. They had 5 sons, followed by 4 daughters, Enid being the first. They owned the first (and for a long time […]

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Obama’s election night in New York City may have been my favorite single night / moment in 25+ years of living in Manhattan. (You can read about it here: https://brianhassett.com//2008/11/election-night-2008/ ) That feeling was extended to a week-long celebration in my second favorite city, Washington, D.C. — a home-game in the History League — And lo, […]

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