I’ve been a meat eater all my life and never really given it much thought. I grew up eating it, continued to eat it as a young adult and still eat it now at whatever stage of life this is.

As the teens come to an end and we enter the roaring ’20s, a question is dividing families and ending friendships. Is this year the beginning of a new decade or the last year of an old one?

I’ve never been much on New Year’s resolutions. One day turning into the next at this time of year isn’t different than any other time of the year, aside from the fact we carry on like loons about it.

It’s Christmas day when you read this, maybe. Or maybe you set it aside and got to it later. Actually, if anybody reads this on Christmas day, I’ll be mildly stunned. I mean, I’m sure you have other things going on.

Sometimes you can come across something on the internet that’s meant to show how much better things were back then. One of those things shows an old picture of a kid with a Tonka toy dump truck and the caption, “When I was a kid, you could kill a moose with the toys.” Or something like that.

I’ve never really been sure what surprises people the most when I admit to certain things. It could be when I say I never had any kids and never really wanted any. Maybe it’s when I say I have no interest in alcohol. And then there’s the mind blowing revelation that I can’t drive a straight shift.

In another head rattling blow to the publishing industry, Sports Illustrated announced recently that they would go to a monthly publishing schedule. Including preview issues for the big sports, there will be a total of 17 issues in 2020.

It’s not surprising to look up in the modern world and see all heads around you tilted down toward some kind of screen, the things around people going totally unnoticed. You probably shake your head a little at this before you look back down at your own screen.

I live in a small town in a neighborhood that has had, to my knowledge, one crime reported in the past 23 ½ years. Nothing has ever gone missing from our yard. There’s never even been a hint of anybody trying to get in the house while we’re not there.

I have no idea how it works today and, honestly, my memory of how it was during my school years probably isn’t that reliable.

The second half of the daylight saving time for this year has come and gone, there was a lot of complaining and now, three days later, I doubt anyone has mentioned it again.

When I was a kid, from under 10 to, well, 18, we lived in a duplex apartment. It was basically a normal sized house cut into two small houses so the landlord could get twice the rent for the same space.

The two fears that seem to cross all boundaries, regardless of race, gender, beliefs and anything else you can come up with is getting fat and growing old.

The twin American idols of free speech and commerce had a violent collision last week when the general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets sent out a tweet in favor of Hong Kong’s protests against their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government.

Once upon a time, having a job at a newspaper meant working in one of the most imposing buildings in town, inhaling the acrid aroma of fresh ink and the dusty breath of cheap newsprint and feeling mini-earthquakes under our feet every time the presses started to roll. For those of us old eno…

As someone who is now in the job market, I’m a little astounded at what people consider good pay and what some jobs actually offer.

It might have been a few years for some of you, but just about everybody has memories of driving down the road, bouncing around as a good song played on the radio.

It wasn’t supposed to last too long, this job. I’m not saying I had some grand plan at 23 years of age, but when you’ve messed everything up monumentally and you just want a job that gives you some money, you don’t think you’re taking a job that will turn into a career and take up most of yo…

A friend of mine with two small school-aged kids informed me the other day that one of her special munchkins had brought ... something home and infected her with it. It got so bad my friend ended up at the doctor, where she was informed she had pneumonia and was given a bunch of medicine and…

Do you have a money disorder? Of course I do, you say. My disorder is that money comes in a lot slower than it goes out.

When it comes to temperature, I’ve found there are two kinds of people. One says, “Yeah, 92 is hot, but I’d rather it was 92 than 29!” The other one says, “Yeah, 29 is cold, but I’d rather it was 29 than 92!”

Just when you thought Monroe County had both its general fund budget and the school budget under control, social media (Facebook) rears its head and gets everybody upset.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but just about every day that I’ve had to get up before I was ready has made me feel sad and depressed as the sun came up. From the age of 6, when I first started school, to, well, this morning, my first thought has always been, “I could sleep another hour. Ma…

When I was growing up, my mother and I didn’t share meals. She would eat at the kitchen table while I would either hit the floor in front of the TV, my carefully-arranged food (it could NOT touch) on tray in front of me, or in later years, when sitting on the floor was for babies, in a chair…

You would have though the world was coming to an end. The County Commission, looking at a budget for the upcoming fiscal year that was nowhere near being funded, had for several months flirted with the ideas of a wheel tax and a property tax increase.

If you’ve been out and about lately, you might be surprised to hear that Tennessee is only the 16th most obese state in the nation. If just asked out of the blue, you might’ve said, “I’d guess we’re third. Surely, Alabama and Mississippi are fatter than us.”

If you pay attention to the news, and I’m painfully aware not everybody does, you might have seen the stories about videos of people taking a lick off of ice cream in a store and then putting it back on the freezer shelf or taking a swig of mouthwash, spitting it back into the bottle and put…

Like most people, I always considered myself the young person in the room. No matter how many years I piled up, it always seemed like other people were older.

You might have heard that Monroe County recently increased its wheel tax, doubling it from $25 a year to $50 a year. Including the $29 the county and state charge you for the privilege of driving on the roads, that brings the amount you pay to keep your car on the road to $79 a year.

Sometimes you just get enough of budgets and taxes and politicians and uninformed people that all you want to do is kick back and listen to some music. So you crank up the music, however you listen to it nowadays, and let the music wash over you.

If you text a lot, if the phone portion of your handheld computer is gathering dust, you probably know somebody like me.

One of the oldest jokes known to man is, as someone gets older, that person saying, “Retirement? What’s that? I’ll be working until the day I die and probably beyond!” If you want, you can add, “They’ll come dig me up and say oh no you don’t! You still got bills to pay!” for extra emphasis.

It’s summertime, at least temperature wise (the real thing doesn’t start until June 21), and a lot of people are making plans to take at least a few days and get away from work and the old hometown.

If it was possible, would you want to live forever? Depending on your situation in life, the answer could be an obvious yes or an obvious no.

Are you wasting your money? Do you spend it on things you don’t need while things that really need your monetary attention are ignored or forgotten?

It was news that was met with a shrug. ESPN The Magazine is closing its doors, printing its last issue this coming September. I’d guess a lot of people scratched their heads and said, “ESPN has a magazine?”

You may have heard, or read, that your favorite weekly paper is becoming the very definition of a weekly paper.

It seemed to come around quick this time, but once again, Parade magazine has released its annual look at what people earn.

I get a LOT of emails at the address you see somewhere in this paper, most of it nonsense political stuff that boils down to “we have to stop the liberals! Please send $10, $50, $100, or whatever you can spare before it’s too late!”

It can seem like beating a (fat) dead horse to constantly report on surveys that detail how fat we all are. But every time one of these surveys come out, and they come out with alarming regularity, Tennessee is right there in the top 10.

I’ve never been what you would call super healthy. I’ve, so far, managed to avoid the big things, but with day-to-day living, I’ve never felt that great.

I’ve come across a couple of articles recently about how the declining newspaper industry will eventually leave small town communities without anybody to act as a watchdog on local government.

It’s no secret that most of us Americans aren’t exactly what you’d call healthy. Hollywood makes us think 98 percent of us are drop dead gorgeous with great bodies, but if you go out in the world, you find out pretty quickly that’s not true.

With the Tennessee men’s basketball team having fallen out of the top five, and all the other teams forgetting what winning is, something needed to come along and put us back near the top.

I’m not sure what the numbers say, but I’m pretty sure I’m part of a dying breed in the simple fact that I’ve been doing the same job, at the same place (minus two years) for nearly 30 years. With factories closing left and right and so many jobs just disappearing with time, I have no doubt …

I saw a story the other day that said Americans are shocked to find their tax returns are not as large as they’ve been in past years. The story said returns were down an average of 8.4 percent, dropping from $2,035 to $1,865 on the standard tax return.

Before we get to our yearly look at the Super Bowl commercials, let’s harken back to last week when we discussed all the weird bets you could make on the game. I’m sure you all read it.