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David Todd McCarty

David Todd McCarty is a writer, director, photographer and cinematographer. He writes fiction and nonfiction essays as well as journalism. You can see his commercial work at http://www.hoppingfrogstudios.com
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Looking For bears

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 22, 2020
8 Min read
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“We’re going to the dump,” Jane announced. I was lying on the sofa of a cabin in the Adirondacks.  We were on vacation and I had purposely traveled thousands of miles away from home just so I wouldn’t have to do anything remotely like work.  This sounded like work. I looked up at her and asked, “Why are we going to the dump?” “To see the bears,” she said. They called it “the Camp.”  After seeing it for the first time, I had visions of Merryl Streep and Robert Redford in East Africa...

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I’m Not From Here

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 22, 2020
7 Min read
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Originally published in New Jersey Monthly Along the shores of Tuscany grow wild, salty shrubs that sailors, long ago, claimed to be able to smell long before they could actually see land.  It was this distant scent that alerted them that home was near. Although I have never spent time at sea, I can appreciate the sailors’ reaction.  I too live on the shores of the ocean and associate home with its scent. I live along the tidal marshes of southern New Jersey in the village of Goshen...

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Lost and Found

By David Todd McCarty
In Uncategorized
March 22, 2020
3 Min read
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I was visiting my parents recently and happened to pick up the local newspaper, which was sitting on the kitchen table. There on the front page, was the big news of the day, “Lost Items Collected In Lost And Found.” I’m not making this up. I actually had to read it several times and show it to various suspicious family members to make sure. They assumed I was making it up, or at least exaggerating. But there it was, “Lost Items Collected In Lost And Found.” I guess, “Lost Items Found In Lost...

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Chickens In the brothel

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 22, 2020
26 Min read
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Jane wanted chickens.  Live ones. “Four of them,” she told me matter-of-factly.  She thought about it some more then said, “No six.  Yes, six.  And red.” “Six red chickens,” I repeated, not looking up.  We were having lunch outside, as it was an unseasonably warm day.  I was trying to decide what I wanted to eat knowing full well that I would order the same thing I always did.  I like to think that I want something new; that...

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Wild Parties

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 22, 2020
5 Min read
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They found him there the next morning, passed out cold. It was clear what had happened, as the evidence lay strewn all about him on the front lawn of the Baker Lake Resort. So when Lisa Broxson, bookkeeper for the Baker Lake, Washington resort arrived in the morning for work, she did what you’d expect any normal person to do, she called Sgt. Bill Heinck, the local Fish and Wildlife Agent. It seems the culprit, a brown bear, had gotten into a camper’s cooler and had used its teeth and claws to...

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A Brief History of Violence

By David Todd McCarty
In Fiction
December 6, 2017
5 Min read
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I’m the guy no one sees. An invisible man in a city of millions. Oh, it’s not hard to be invisible in the city—not like back home in Calumet, Oklahoma where we had a whopping 553 people in the whole town—well, until I left, and then I guess it was 552. Haven’t been back in years, so who knows how many people live there now. Not enough I can tell you that. Or maybe far too many. It’s hard to know sometimes. Often times I don’t even meet the owners. The maid lets me in, shows me where the piano...

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Santa Accused of Assaulting Third Elf

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
November 30, 2017
4 Min read
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In a stunning new development, in what has been a month of developments, a third elf has come forward to accuse Santa Claus of sexual harassment and retaliatory behavior. The yet unidentified elf has come forward with claims that Mr. Claus made unwanted sexual advances while they were flying over the Horn of Africa sometime on Christmas Eve in 2011. It was not clear whether the elf involved was male or female, or really whether or not there is such a thing. The elf went public this week, after...

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Dalton Trumbo

By David Todd McCarty
In Quote
November 3, 2017
2 Min read
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I think of this piece often when thinking about how it can be easy to be seen as combative when defending your concept of liberty. How easy it is to be dismissed as “Angry Dave” a moniker I did not invent, but did adopt. How often are the fights in our lives, really just part of one big fight? “I’ve always thought of my life as a sequence of conflicts, each a separate battle, segregated in my mind under the heading, ‘My fight with these guys’ or ‘My fight...

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