Those of you who’ve been to the dance with me likely know of my baby brother, Woody. I’m his legal Guardian and Conservator. The day before Thanksgiving, he wasn’t feeling well. One of the staff members from his group home took him to the emergency room (ER). His blood pressure was 66/45. He was kept […]
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 […]
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 […]
I don’t think I fully understood or appreciated the effect political correctness has had on language until I took my car to the repair shop one morning last week. Ernie, the service manager who wrote up my service order, told me he’d call to let me know what his team found, to get my permission […]
Some years ago, I wrote the first piece in what’s now, with the publishing of this piece, turned out to be a series. Who knew? A common expression says there are no guarantees in life. Since, as Grandpa O’Brien loved to say (among a million other things), “It’s the exception that proves the rule,” there […]
In the October 2nd episode of my program, The Anxious Voyage, I welcomed a guest named John Tejada. After being imprisoned on a sexual-assault charge, John wrote the manuscript for a book called, Searching for Redemption. During our conversation, I told John I’m conflicted, torn between two points of view: On one hand, I believe […]
Late last month, NPR ran a good news/bad news story online. The good news, according to the headline, was this: “An annular solar eclipse is coming to parts of the U.S. in October”. The story went on to specify: The moon will pass between Earth and the sun, treating viewers here on our planet to […]
Because I love true crime shows, it should come as no surprise that I love the Oxygen True Crime channel. My favorite show on the channel is New York Homicide. I love New York cops just because I love the way New York cops talk. And even if the show were a waste of 59 […]
Once a bureaucracy grows beyond a certain size, it exists only to sustain itself and to grow. No bureaucracy ever recognizes its inefficient dysfunction, nor do the people who serve it ever examine it, seek to improve it, apply logic and reason to it, or say no to it. If the people who suffer its […]
