Street Talk: For a long moment, it felt as though the world had taken a brief timeout so that its complex human inhabitants could take a moment to reflect upon their existence.
Street talk
Mark LaFlamme: Forever in search of the perfect sleep concoction
Street Talk: When you have trouble accessing sleep on the reg, you end up searching endlessly for the perfect panacea that you remain convinced is out there.
Mark LaFlamme: A death-faking beetle and other oddities borne of pure desperation
Street Talk: Why spend precious minutes writing a column when I can have unsuspecting fools on Facebook write one for me?
Mark LaFlamme: Alleged reporter misses his notebook
Ubiquitous, convenient and unavoidable technology turned my floppy, faithful notebook into an archaic relic good for little more than starting fires or swatting flies.
Mark LaFlamme: In the old days, the Lewiston Walk of Shame was a weekly occurrence
Street Talk: The Walk of Shame was a giddy affair for me. For making a small-time hack like myself feel like a genuine, big league reporter, no single event could compare to the Lewiston Walk of Shame
Mark LaFlamme: Weird scenes inside the B Section
Street talk: When I went to work for the B Section, my editors at last had their chance to punish me for all the misbehaving I’d done from my relatively safe perch on the police beat.
When it comes to animal stories, you can’t always get what you want
Covering the plight of Ghost reminded me a lot of a different dog named Abby who, in 2016, was abandoned in the cold along Strawberry Avenue in Lewiston.
Mark LaFlamme: Expensive McMuffins, the evils of Florida and other secrets revealed in mystery mail
Street Talk: Once you start reading one of this mystery man’s letters, it all starts to make sense, like one of those crazy photos with mystery image hidden behind the pixels.
Mark LaFlamme: The Christmas Eve beggar
On the unsteady march to the car, weaving around abandoned shopping carts and stomping through dirty slush, I pondered the great question of the day. Honest-to-God woman in need? Or just another scam artist looking to make mucho dope bucks off the naivete and generosity of good-hearted souls at Christmastime?
Mark LaFlamme: The mass shooting leaves a sense of unreality in our wounded city
Street Talk: There are times when I can convince myself, if only for fleeting seconds, that the grim affair was nothing more than a horrid nightmare; something merely imagined in a half-waking fever dream.