Craig Tyson Adams

  You don’t know what you’re missing vs. dodged that bullet Ah, children. The future of civilization. We place our hopes and dreams on them even though they don’t deserve it. We make plans for them and when they find out about our plans, they plan on doing something completely different. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be proud to have them. We are! Our hearts burst with pride when we see how much they look like us. You can spot features and actions that remind us of beloved family members. Your kid may have a gait like a treasured uncle. They may have a smile like a favorite aunt. A twinkle in the eye, like the mailman. All things familiar to us by the sharing of genetics. It gives us a bond that can never be broken until the day they pilfer the car keys and do donuts in the neighbor’s yard and take out the mailbox, or figure out your password and order a trombone and an entire collection of James Bond movies from Amazon. There are pluses and minuses Having one or two children...

  My mother mentioned Elvis so much, I thought he was a relative While growing up in our house,  Elvis Presley  was very much present. We didn’t have the black velvet Elvis paintings and Elvis music wasn’t played that much in the house. The times Mom sent me to the store to get the  Los Angeles Sunday Times  was when her Elvis fixation reared its head. My parents went to Las Vegas a lot.  Three or four times a year, they’d pack up and leave for a few days, leaving me with my grandparents. After a time, I knew when they were going to leave when I heard the name Elvis. She’d be on the phone with one of her friends or family when she’d say  ‘We’re going to Vegas to see Elvis’. I thought Elvis Presley was a family member To my 8-year-old self, this was very befuddling. They were leaving me to see someone that was like a mythical being. Elvis Presley was like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Why hadn’t I met Elvis? How come this Elvis guy was some kind of m...

  I write whatever seems to pop in my head whether I like it or not. My humble beginnings began with my parents.  My father was an unidentified astronaut and my mother was Jacqueline Onassis. After the scandal, I was put up for adoption. I found my way to a small town in Southern California called Mira Loma. There I was raised with four other children. Since I was nine years younger than the one before me, they were the ones that told me I was adopted.  The story has it that I was discovered on the front porch in a picnic basket. The nice lady that denied the story and claimed that indeed she was my mother did the best she could. The man that she said was indeed  my father didn’t say much besides that he was hungry.  He also had a prodigious ability to rent beer. I write every day, sometimes twice. I started this thing called writing when sitting on a bench looking out over Santa Monica bay one evening. Pondering my next move, a lobster with the face of  Ja...

  A cubicle cautionary tale It happened in a flash. My hand struck the bottom of the desk and the stapler dislodged and fell into my lap. Before I felt it, I heard a click. As the pain washed over me, I looked down. There it was. The staple. The pain stopped and was replaced by a shivering cold as the shock set in. As I caught my breath, I stood up and adjusted myself. In a panic, I hurried to the men’s room. There was another guy in there. Without looking up, we exchanged greetings, and I went into the stall. There wasn’t any blood, but it was stuck. I couldn’t dislodge it. What the hell? I left there and headed to my boss’s office. I had to find some sort of authoritative guidance. As I opened her door and walked in, she looked up at me, startled. “What’s wrong?” “Uh, there’s been an accident.” I said, closing the door. I couldn’t let my coworkers hear. They’d find out soon enough. I didn’t want to be there when they heard. “An accident? Where? What happened?” “The stapler. Uh, I...

  A guy’s got to do what a guy’s got to do. Mostly everybody knows that Orson Welles is famous for arguably the greatest movie ever made. Citizen Kane  has topped the annual list of monumental movies for decades. It’s well known that Welles drunkenly endorsed Paul Masson wines in the later part of his career. But, most people don’t know what happened in between when Welles had trouble finding financing for his movie projects. He alienated studio bosses and television executives. Here are a few facts about what Welles did during that time to facilitate fundraising for his projects. Welles supplemented his income by being the training jockey of Secretariat. It’s been said that is the reason the horse was fast enough to win the triple crown with a regular jockey. Orson was a stand-in at Sea World if some attractions became ill. He was a popular seat filler at televised award shows because he could fill two seats instead of only one, cutting down on the cost of paying multiple peo...

  George Brett had a helluva stroke and then almost had one Gather around, young ones. I’m about to tell you about how  Major League Baseball  Hall-of-Famer Billy Martin turned fellow Hall-of-Famer George Brett into a human volcano. Which is quite the turnaround because Billy Martin was famous for his eruptions. Brett’s team, the Kansas City Royals were playing the Martin-managed New York Yankees that day. The backstory is that both teams hated each other, in a sporting sense. It wasn’t hatred like the Hatfields and the McCoys or the Montagues and the Capulets. That’s a whole other story. The teams in the late ’70s and ’80s were perennial playoff opponents. They often met in the American League Championship Series for the right to advance to the fall classic. The World Series. The Yankees, of course, dominated the Royals. They’d brush past them like the Royals were the weak peasant pretenders to the throne. The Royals were a folly standing in the way of the Yankees’ right...