Memoir

Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Spare

This morning I’m thinking about a riff on Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” One of literature’s great ironies is that even while surrounded by ocean, one can die of thirst. The irony of the name…and my name…is not lost on me. The quote is rich with symbolism and paradox. The poem itself captures Coleridge’s symbolism of the albatross, which stands for sin and…

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Business Advice

Golden Ticket

Gold may be the single most consequential material in human history. Gold was almost certainly the first metal humans ever worked, simply because it occurs in pure form in nature with no smelting required. The oldest known gold artifacts date to around 4,600 BC, found in the Varna Necropolis in modern Bulgaria. Those were grave goods that already suggest gold’s association with status, divinity, and the afterlife. Egypt became the ancient world’s great gold power.…

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Memoir Retirement

Communicating Over Time

I wrote last August about a visit I had from my old Roman motorcycling friend, Mike Cobbold, who now lives in Sacramento. I mentioned in my Roman Memories story that Mike has struggled with some physical limitations due to a combination of many years of Type 1 Diabetes, the connected autoimmune condition of Rheumatoid Arthritis, and some strokes… all possibly genetic or perhaps signs of a life lived hard and well in the wilderness. On…

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Business Advice Politics

The New World Order

When big geopolitical summits take place it is sometimes hard to tell who has the power stroke and who is coming off as the groveler. Sometimes there’s a strong meeting of the minds and a palpable sense that great things were accomplished. Other times it appears that the two sides are talking at cross purposes and things only get more rather than less at odds at the end. And then there is a third type…

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Memoir Politics

The Midterms and Me

Ever since 2016 and especially since 2024, I, like many like-minded, liberally-inclined Americans that have worried about the political drift of out nation and its impact on the world have tried to find ways to do our part to move towards a solution to our concerns and our state of play. I start by declaring quite frankly that for most of my adult life I have lived in a benign neglect for the political machinations.…

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Memoir Politics

The Next China Syndrome

The “China Syndrome” refers to a hypothetical nuclear reactor meltdown scenario where the reactor core melts through the containment vessel and, theoretically, continues melting downward through the Earth. The darkly humorous idea being that it would melt all the way to China (from the US perspective). I wonder if that was intended to be a reaction to the “Butterfly Effect”? The actual physics involve in the former is a reactor core losing cooling, causing fuel…

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Love Memoir

Michael Row the Boat Ashore

On Sunday, Kim and I went to go see the new Michael Jackson biopic called, with no surprises, Michael. The film was released April 24, 2026, so we were now opening-nighters. I had heard from my son Roger that it was a good movie that very much resonated with him since Jackson’s dominance of the music scene in the 1980s coincided with Roger’s youth and it left a big impression on him. I was less…

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Memoir

The Heart of the Matter

Back in 1981 when I was 27 years old and living in the quaint suburban Metro NYC town of Rockville Centre on Long Island, I came home from work from yet another long day in the NY banking world and thought I was having a heart attack. My wife wasn’t home so I drove myself the mile to Mercy Hospital to the ER, where they put me on a EKG machine. Within the hour, a…

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Memoir

Strength Training

I just returned from a five-day 1,500 mile motorcycle ride surrounded by mountains, canyons and desert, all at speeds averaging 85-90 mph. I started doing these rides, especially like this one to Southern Utah, 32 years ago. It was then that I came up with the five-day format that I have tended to follow ever since. Of course, I was 40 years old then where I’m 72 now…minor difference, right? I have been quite anxious…

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