The Presumption of Aging I have never been one to have a fear of getting older. In fact, whenever I am asked my age, I always state a number one year beyond my present age. Right now I am 68 and when asked, I say I am 69. This might be due to the fact that I always had a bit of a baby face and liked to think of myself as older, and it…
The Sanctity of Pain There is and has been for some time, a debate about the value of pain. I think we all understand that physiologically, pain serves as a useful mechanism for the body in that it signals damage to varying degrees and acts as a warning flag that something serious needs to be attended to. Pain as a bodily wake-up call is something we all appreciate. That is not where the debate generally…
Losing My Grip I am increasingly feeling like an observer of the world as it rushes past rather than an active participant. Some of that feeling is inevitable as I get further and further out of the mainstream. I am still actively trying to remain relevant and I do that by keeping up on the news and engaging friends in lively debate when the topics are not too controversial or the people involved are not…
Pizza, Pizza It’s taken us three years of living out here on this hillside, all the while under the cloud of a Global Pandemic that restricted services, restricted business operations, mandated masks, gave us CDC guidelines to live by and generally made us all wary of interfacing with anyone we absolutely did not have to interact with. Starting this summer, we seem to have finally broken through to forming some local friendships in our neighborhood.…
Dopesick Kim and I have become addicted to the Hulu series about OxyContin and the Sackler family’s creation of the opioid epidemic in the world over the past twenty-five years. That series is called Dopesick and that term represents the feeling an addict of OxyContin (and any other strong prescription opioid) gets when they are strung out and in desperate need of their next fix. This story fits nicely with our having just listened to…
Swimming Upstream One of my prized possessions from my mother is an odd poem in a silly little gilded frame that goes: Most any poor old fish can float And drift along and dream: But it takes a regular LIVE ONE To swim against the stream It is attributed to a Maurine Hathaway, a woman nicknamed The Poetess of the Pines. She was one of the contributors of these little ditties to a guy by…
Saying Hello I’ve probably said this in so many ways that I’ve become quite predictable. I have a relatively easy time saying goodbye to places. That comes from my lifetime of moving, first as a trailing child and eventually as an adult with a roving eye and more than a modicum of wanderlust. But saying goodbye to places is always much easier than saying goodbye to people for sure. I’ve been pretty fortunate in my…
Thursdays Suck I suspect that many people, probably the same ones who invented Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF), have felt that Mondays are the day of the week that sucks the most. Needless to say, this likely has mostly to do with the need to go back to work or school come Monday, and the fact that that represents an obligation rather than a desire. There are plenty of songs and accolades to Saturday and…
Aye, There’s the Rub Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub…”. It is part of the great “to be or not to be” soliloquy and I have a new take on the whole affair. Hamlet was very troubled, to say the least, and was contemplating death by suicide. I love life and am way too much of a chicken to ever come within a mile of that contemplation, but…
In the Den I am home after five weeks away. We arrived home yesterday afternoon with enough time to unpack our car and generally shake off the physical issues of our 8,000 mile cross-country extravaganza. I drove every one of those miles and remind Kim of that every time I want her to do something for me. I think after 24 hours, I have run that line of reasoning into the ground and will have…