Most reporters will tell you that when the really big stuff is about to go down, they can feel it. When the S is about to H the eff, sensitive reporter nerves start jumping like bacon in a pan. It’s an extra sense, they insist. You either have it or you don’t. Most reporters are […]
Street talk
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk does not mean I’m talking to you
Hi there. How are you? I like your hair today. Do you like mine? Don’t answer those questions. I wasn’t talking to you. Sometimes I think I might be losing my mind. This will come as a shock to most of you. I know you’ve always considered me the very height of emotional and spiritual […]
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Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: How to give up smoking even if you’re stupid
Contained within the Sun Journal photo archives are roughly 6,000 photos of yours truly taken over the course of the past 20 years. Here’s me brooding at a crime scene. Here I am getting my face painted (I was a kitten) at the Balloon Festival. Here’s me leaning against a post, sitting at my desk […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: Inconsiderate E.T.s never show up on time
One recent evening, on the woody outskirts of Lewiston, I drove past a group of people who had their eyes upturned to the darkened skies. I recognized the scene at once. The fingers pointed at the heavens; the low-hanging jaws, the wide eyes … What we had here was a UFO sighting in progress. I […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Warning: Childhood can be hazardous to your health
When I was a boy, each day was a date with death. By today’s standards, anyway. We used to climb trees like monkeys, and sometimes we’d fall out of them. Falling out of trees was half the fun of climbing them. It was also how we verified, once and for all, that gravity was real. […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Street Talk: What you do in the morning says a lot about me
I’m not one to brag. But this morning I had a cup of coffee in my hand, ready to drink, in less than a minute after I rolled out of bed. Fifty-two seconds, to be precise, shattering the old record of one minute flat. I truly don’t like to brag, but … In your face! […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: 13 years of bad hallucinations
Lord, I’m old. I made this discovery, not through some complex mathematical computation, but through a giant heap of old Street Talk columns recently unearthed from the deepest snow caves of Tibet. Or from somebody’s basement — it’s all very hazy. The fact is that I found these old columns — most of which I […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: I just want to buy Vienna sausages and live my life
Good morning, ladies and gentlepersons. Today I’m writing from the checkout line at a popular local grocery store — or possibly a pet store or hardware joint — for the very first time. I’m writing from this cramped and crowded space because my column is due and no matter how I beg or plead, I […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: Has anybody seen my car?
All I had to do was meet the dude in a crowded parking lot for a perfectly-legal-as-far-as-you-know exchange of cash for goods. Easy as falling off a park bench. You’re in, you’re out. Everyone’s happy. “I’ll be driving a brownish Nissan Rogue,” I told this fellow I knew only as Craig S. List. I pulled […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme
Street Talk: The winter of jungle cats and wet feet (or something)
In an Evernote notebook dated Jan. 14 lies a truncated mutant of a column which rants on about the feeble nature of winter to that point. “Hardly any snow!” the archaic column raves. “Why, it’s practically spring already!” The column was never finished and I think you know why. Winter came, winter saw — and […]