Vindication Don’t you just love it when some long-held belief ends up getting some validation and makes you feel that you are not so very stupid after all? I’m not so sure that I am as opinionated as some people, but I have more than my share of long-held views that inform my lifestyle and make me the way I am. I think we can call it the Popeye effect where we all huff and…
I Express Therefore I Am I checked my files and I have twice written stories that used the expression Cogito Ergo Sum, I think Therefore I am, penned in 1637 by French philosopher Rene Descartes. Some expressions, and I guess especially the existential ones, always pop up when you get introspective. Well, I’m at it again on this foggy Mothers Day morning and it has little or nothing to do with my mother. Now there’s…
Mobilizing I find myself thinking a lot these days about the notion that motion is the best lotion. When I left New York City three years ago, it coincided with my long-time NYU general practitioner deciding he too was moving his act to California (somewhere up by Palo Alto, I think). He was an Irishman with a noticeable Irish accent and a tendency towards osteopathy, which is to say a more holistic view of healthcare.…
Reliving the War When I was in high school in Rome, between 1968 and 1971, I think its fair to say that the Vietnam War was at its peak. There were 550,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive by the North had begun its inexorable push to bring the war to a conclusion…or perhaps create the impression that if it didn’t end with a U.S. withdrawal that it would go on… forever. In…
Eating Out and Ordering In I spent forty-five years (minus two years for bad behavior when I got sent to Gulag Toronto) living in New York City. Just to get everyone on the same page, the two-year stint in Toronto was literally a three-year sentence (starting in 1990) by my employer, Bankers Trust Company, to run our Canadian Bank. I had been running a vast empire of the Global Derivatives business and the Global Commodities…
From Here to Eternity There is something very familiar about this unfamiliar place. I am in the Jury Lounge of the North County Regional Court Center in Vista, California. I have been called to service by the Superior Court for the County of San Diego. I already pushed this off once a few months ago due to my business schedule and unlike the last time I was called a few years ago during COVID, my…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
Curb Appeal Every day I wake up with some new idea that I cannot believe I haven’t had before. Now that Ive taken care of all the currently necessary fixes and maintenance of my property, I’m free to innovate and improve as I see fit. I started out thinking that I needed to take three approaches to the property. There was the front that had been heavily planted with a vast variety of cacti and…
The Guardians of the Galaxy We tend to throw around astronomical terms without necessarily knowing of them in detail. I’m not sure I have ever spent the time to understand the full scope of the firmament. The classic human conundrum that more or less defines the limits of our simple minds is to ask how far space extends and, for that matter, what is beyond that. The void is the default mechanism now as it…
Ringing the Bell When we moved here more than three years ago, we had to make lots of arrangements to accommodate being here full time rather than only once in a while. We had owned the house for eight years while we thought about when the right time to retire might be. On Wall Street, for various reasons including the stress of the work and the hard head banging that goes on in the business,…