O.W. Root

Michigan

Contributor at Enjoyer

Columnist at Blaze Media

Host at Pleasant Peninsula with O.W. Root

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Articles

Fatherhood has ruined peace and quiet for me

1 week ago | theblaze.com | O.W. Root

I’ve been in Italy for the past 10 days, and I’m bored. Yes, I’m bored, but not in the way you may think, and not for the reasons you may suspect. I haven’t been bored my entire time here. My tolerance for input has increased since becoming a father, and now anything less than chaos is kind of a boring breeze. The first week was packed to the gills.
The End of Each Night Is Tragic and Beautiful

1 week ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Alpena — Looking at a photo of a low sun hovering over blue water, it’s not possible to tell the time. Was the sun rising or setting? The photo can’t tell the story. Frozen in time with the snap of the lens, sunrise and sunset are identical. Light grows in the morning just as it fades in the evening, played backward. And though they are mirror images, the difference between them is the difference between a swelling wave and a calming sea. Ascent and descent. Birth and death. We don’t watch the sunrise.
Watches, clothes, and cars are no substitute for character

2 weeks ago | theblaze.com | O.W. Root

If you spend any amount of time on X (formally known as Twitter), it’s hard not to notice the incredible amount of daily anxiety people experience. It’s all over. There’s political anxiety, height anxiety, weight anxiety, relationship anxiety manifesting in an accelerating gender war, and, of course, class anxiety. And my God, the class anxiety is so painful, so fraught, and so vapid. Really, it’s so absurd you have to laugh.
Michigan's Best Airport Has Only Two Gates

2 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Pellston — Flying isn’t really very pleasant these days. Well, it’s not exactly the flying that’s so bad; it’s the airport. The lines, the security, the parking, the pointless frenzy and chaos, the sense that you aren’t really a living and breathing human with a name and face, but rather a random number being shuffled through the body-scan machine. Our terrible flying situation isn’t inherent or predestined. You can start your journey in peace and luxury, instead of misery and insanity.
An Inn Like No Other at the Highway's End

3 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Cross Village — If you drive to the end of M-119 and stop, you’ll find yourself in Cross Village, population 79. Past Harbor Springs, through the tunnel of trees, beyond Good Hart, this little collection of houses, streets, and stop signs is the last ember of human civilization until you reach Mackinaw City. Past the old Holy Cross Catholic Church on the north side of town is wilderness. Sturgeon Bay Beach, Wilderness State Park, O’Neal Lake, and not much of anything else.
Not without my fur baby! Our bizarre new dog-worshipping religion

3 weeks ago | theblaze.com | O.W. Root

Dogs. They're everywhere. Stores, cars, restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, airports, and airplanes. Our world has been taken over by the K9s. Banning dogs from certain places is now seen as 'exclusionary.' According pets human status — behavior once limited to the eccentric rich — is now everybody's prerogative. Places previously reserved only for those who walk on two feet and upright are now open to all species. No beast is barred from the dairy aisle, no hound is left out in the cold.
When did America's public libraries become homeless encampments?

4 weeks ago | theblaze.com | O.W. Root

What happened to libraries? No, I’m not talking about school libraries being turned into propaganda factories, shelving what amounts to textual pornography for middle school students, all justified under the guise of “inclusivity.” That’s a discussion for another time. One December, as my wife left the library, a homeless man spit across the stairs onto the back of her dress. She turned around to find him quite satisfied with himself.
Want Outdoor Kids? Don't Let Them Inside

4 weeks ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Petoskey — Kids are in trouble. They are wasting their days inside on iPads, frying their attention spans and crushing their imaginations. Screens make good children into worse children. On a robust diet of iPad consumed in a climate-controlled living room, children grow up dull, weak in spirit and body, unsettled, distracted, and poorly behaved. The more TV, iPad, and YouTube kids consume, the worse their manners become. They take cues from the stupidity on the screen. They become what they watch.
Why Yoopers Have Their Own Chocolate Bars and We Don't

1 month ago | enjoyer.com | O.W. Root

Escanaba — The U.P. isn’t so far away. On one side of the water there are the trolls, and on the other are the Yoopers, those hardy (read as “insane”) individuals who live way up there. On one side are Hershey’s bars, those generic chocolate bars that all good Americans seem to eat around the campfire while swatting mosquitoes every summer. On the other side are Yooper Bars, the candy bar you’ve never heard of. What is a Yooper Bar? It’s the chocolate bar of the U.P. It’s the opposite of generic.
We're all 'too busy' to eat dinner as a family — but we should do it anyway | Blaze Media

1 month ago | theblaze.com | O.W. Root

What does it mean to eat dinner together as a family? Why do we do it? Or rather, why did we do it? It seems the number of families who eat dinner together every night is shrinking. I remember that if the phone rang during that time, my parents would look at one another shocked. 'Who would be calling during dinner?'It feels like every year it becomes more rare.