I was going to excerpt portions of President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union remarks and annotate them with snide comments. But four things happened: I realized snark is indistinguishable from truth at this point, and snark doesn’t sit well in some circles. Neither does truth. And here we are. I wouldn’t have enough time […]
On The Scale of Self-Deceit and Frivolity Unto Extinction, there are points well beyond first-world problems. They indicate the extent to which life in the United States is luxurious enough that we can afford to make shit up to worry about. They also confirm the point made by Bill Maher that Americans are a silly […]
Author’s Note: This story was prompted by my wife, Anne, with whom I shared the story I’m about to share with you. When I told her the story, she said, “Six strings. You should write about that.” And people wonder why I love her as I do. The woman is like the tide she comes […]
Last week I wrote about the lethal peril to which we find ourselves subject as the result of anthropogenic climate change and two of its perniciously wayward children, bomb cyclones and weather whiplash. Well, just when you thought it was safe … Last week, the Washington Post ran a story — “This weather phenomenon on […]
In the northeastern United States, where I happen to live, there’s an annual climate-change event. It’s called winter. During this event, the temperatures fall, as do little white flakes the natives call snow. We’ve already had seven or eight inches of the stuff fall this month. And there’s more to come: After a mostly calm […]
Ya know what I was thinking about today? Nothing. I put in a full day of work, but I gave my mind the day off. That’s right. I was on something like cerebral autopilot. I had things to do, but they were routine enough and I knew them well enough that they didn’t require creative […]
I wake up most mornings with questions on my mind. Generally, they’re relatively innocuous or inconsequential things like: Why do I have the theme from Mannix stuck in my head? Do bald men think toupees are fooling anybody? Why do so many people believe in gravity? Why do some Kindle books cost more than the […]
During my time as a student at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut — from which I earned a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Philosophy — I had a teacher, Professor Langston, who’d earned his Ph.D. in Intellectual History. He was, therefore, justifiably enamored of the work of existentialist deconstrutionists and post-modernists such […]
Some people know what they want in life, others figure it out along the way. Rocky Michaels, multi-award-winning independent singer-songwriter and recording artist was encouraged to learn the piano at a young age and the rest fell into place. We learn by watching others and it can stir something within that takes us down a […]
Author’s Note: It’s entirely possible I watch too much C-SPAN. I don’t know. But I do know it gets increasingly difficult for me to understand what’s going on in the formerly United States, how we got here, and why we put up with it. Part of it, of course, results from the polarization to which […]
