Tulip City Dispatch

Charlie's Dump, the Georgetown Soccer Bowl, and Rosewood Park all describe the same common area in Jenison, Michigan, at the northeast corner of 20th Ave. and Rosewood St.  It's, simply put, a giant pit surrounded by residential subdivisions (and lately, a nice playground).  It was our local sledding hill.  It was where we'd go in the winters.  Every year, it seemed, one kid would come to school with a broken arm.  There were low-key "gangs" that would push and shove you if you went down the wrong side of the 4-sided structure.  And, late at nights, the bad kids (you know, the ones who would smoke cigarettes underneath the Rush Creek bridge on 12th Ave. or ride BMX bikes behind the Pizza Hut on Baldwin) would tip over the port-a-potties and push them down the hill. Starting at the rim and going down the hill, there's a bump about halfway down that served as a launch ramp for kids on sleds.  The really cool kids could manipulate their sleds mid-air, doi...

  It's been a full year n ow that a state of emergency was declared by former president Trump for the Novel Coronavirus CoVid19. Friday the 13th, 2020, was the last day that I ventured out maskless.  I remember heading into Sam's Club that afternoon and seeing the place nearly vacant.  I grabbed the last flat of canned beans, and prepared for locking down for 2 weeks - a pattern that would repeat throughout 2020.  As an aside, I made sure to keep 2 weeks of supplies through the 2020 election through President Biden's inauguration, and after the Trumpist insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 , I'm very glad I did so. The uncertainty was palpable back then - hence, my articles perusing the old headlines and papers from 1918, trying to parse out any useful, pertinent information.  The facts are that the world hasn't seen a pandemic like this in over a century.  Nobody alive will have any sort of useable advice. I look at the fucking Trumpist militias gat...