Tuesday, the cost of purchasing legal marijuana in Kansas City rose six percent, as Jackson County joined every municipality in the metro in passing a three-percent tax on weed. A $240 ounce now costs about $14 more than it did a week ago. Half of those new tax dollars will go to the city in which you purchased, and the other half to the county.  Few local governments need the shot in the arm as badly as Raytown, I reckon. The city’s head is bloodied from years of banging against the citizenry’s impenetrable anti-tax wall.  Raytown needs so much – law enforcement, investment in infr ..read more

Kansas City is objectively the best in the world at one thing – football. Regardless of how Sunday goes, this is about as hard a fact as there is in today’s day and age. Kansas City is as synonymous with football excellence as the Champagne province of France is with sparkling white wine, Switzerland with watchmaking and Hogwarts with Wizard rearing.  I know, we’ve got barbecue, and boy do I love it. Arthur’s, Gate’s, Big T’s, Danny Edwards, LC’s, Hayward's, Q39, Char Bar, Snead’s, Slaps, Jack Stack, Zarda, Joe’s, Rosedale, Woodyard. You name it, I love it. Hell, I even liked KC Masterpi ..read more

Gnarly Hussle is our throwback thrift store located in the heart of downtown Raytown. Right up the road from Crane Brewing, a literal stone’s throw from Fox’s Drugs, and a hungover urine stream from the pocket park that sits in the rubble of the old Mug’s Up.  We spend the bulk of our time curating top-shelf second hand clothing, books, movies and music. And we spend a chunk of time making ridiculous TikTok videos in an effort to get people to come visit us in Raytown to buy said goods.  We’re so desperate to get people to visit this little-thought-of, landlocked suburb and our sto ..read more

When you walk into FunkyTown, between the sterile, business-like greeting you get from the door guy and the acid trip of a night that awaits on the inside is the “Time Warp”, a tiny little hallway through which you’re transported from this dodgy-looking parking lot on the border of East Kansas City and Raytown to KC’s best (only?) bustling, jiving juke joint.  If you’re reading this and you’ve been to FunkyTown, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re in the other lot, those who haven’t been, that’s a mistake that needs correcting post haste.  When you take a newbie to ..read more

Strawberry Hill. West Bottoms. Downtown Parkville, Lee’s Summit or Independence. When you lower your lids and conjure downtown Raytown’s future, what do you see in your mind’s eye? Oh, you don’t do that? If you grew up in Raytown in the '90s like I did, or anytime before, I’d wager your narrative for the landlocked suburb follows similarly that of Hilldale, Marty McFly’s neighborhood in Back to the Future Part II – farmland turned idyllic suburb turned dilapidated, crime-ridden slumburb. Just being honest. If HGTV made one of those shows where impossibly perky people showed you a bunch of ..read more

Whenever we needed pants, we'd get in the car, drive to the store, try them on in a tiny public closet some teenage couple probably just made out in, put them on lay away, come back a few weeks later, buy them, and then finally drive them home. Now, you click your smart phone twice, Jeff Bezos sacrifices two puppies, and POOF! your jeans are on your doorstep in 15 minutes. Used to be, if you wanted to get goosebumps watching the Chiefs, you had to get up at 4 a.m., load the station wagon, drink your way to a frothy buzz by sun up, assemble a 9-course meal out of the trunk, stagger a mile in o ..read more

I remember mom loading my brother and I in the station wagon, swinging across Raytown to pick up our “cousins”, mom’s best friend’s kids, and then nearly sweating to death on the blacktop, “playing” at Norfleet Elementary. Whatever it took to kill a summer day with a quartet of rambunctious children, I guess. Heat stroke be damned.  On at least one such afternoon, soaked head-to-toe in our own waste, forced out our pores onto the surface of our skin to cool our fragile little bodies in the unrelenting sun, we pulled into the Mugs Up at 6235 Raytown Road to indulge in some root beer float ..read more

You ever feel like a piece of media is made specifically FOR YOU? I imagine my brother, an older millennial soccer nerd from Kansas City who’s dedicated his career to positive coaching, might feel that way about Ted Lasso, a show by and starring a Kansas Citian who coaches soccer with a relentless positivity, the writers ceaselessly blowing chef’s kisses to both Kansas City and older millennials via subliminal wardrobe choices and pop culture references. As a mostly-sober, celibate, sports-obsessed freak in high school, I dove head first into the narratives of Hoosiers, Above the Rim, He Got ..read more

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 kind of snuck up on us, didn’t it? Until the chilling images from Afghanistan landed like, as Toby Keith would phrase it, a mighty sucker punch from somewhere in the back, it wasn’t on my radar. Not because I’d forgotten. I suppose, when the world ending seems like a near-daily worry, as it does anymore, it’s not that the disaster of 9/11 has been muted, but the alarm bells from everyday life have turned up, making it harder to discern between generational tragedy and an average Tuesday.     My, how the world has changed since that fateful day. The ..read more