Memoir Politics

It Always Ends Badly

The world is filled with dictators, despots and strong men. The world has pretty much always been filled with dictators, despots and strong men. I hate to say it, but I can find no reason not to expect that it will always be so. My entire life has intersected with these strong men, beginning with my earliest years growing up in Venezuela. My mother was a development officer at the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela from…

Continue reading

Business Advice Memoir

The Burden of Command

I have been a CEO of eight companies (I actually had business cards that said CEO) during my career and I have run fourteen distinct businesses for which I was the primary decider of strategy and tactics. The term Chief Executive Officer seems like its a week defined role, but saying you are a CEO can range from being the head of a small start-up company with two people and a dog, to being the…

Continue reading

Fiction/Humor Memoir

Cruising the Coast

Given that we live in the county that occupies the bottom of California, just above the Mexican border at Tijuana, we find ourselves regularly heading north and debating the best way to do that. For reasons I can guess at, but cannot really explain, we do not head south into Mexico…ever. We used to go down to Cabo San Lucas with some regularity and I used to visit the west coast of Mexico mainland with…

Continue reading

Fiction/Humor Memoir

Unmasking Santa

About seven years ago, Kim and I were headed to a motorcycle ride that was to take us all across the mainland of Greece. In searching for the cheapest business class seat to that distant locale, I found that Turkish Airways had a great flight direct from JFK to Istanbul. From there it was a small hop to Athens. Since Kim had always wanted to go to Istanbul and I hadn’t been there for a…

Continue reading

Fiction/Humor Love Memoir

Why Do We Decorate?

For several weeks now, Kim and I have had time to leisurely decorate the house for the holidays. I have gone through many different stages with regard to holiday decorations. In the mid-Nineties I can recall paying as much as $5,000 to a local decorator to decorate our ski house in Utah for the holidays season so that we could enjoy all the festive atmosphere of the holidays without having to detract from our one…

Continue reading

Memoir

Heal Thyself

Every morning now, I am watching Kim’s face as it goes through the process of healing itself from the traumatic faceplant that she inflicted on it on Thanksgiving day. The real cause for thanks that day was certainly not the fall or its cause (digestive distress due to her bariatric surgery…now over three years ago) or even the concussion and broken nose that she suffered, but that her ER doctor told her there was nothing…

Continue reading

Love Memoir

Driving Miss Kim

The 1989 Academy Award choice for Best Picture was a story of aging, friendship, racism and antisemitism in the socially turbulent era of WWII through the 1970’s. The Deus Ex Machina of the story is Daisy’s (Jessica Tandy) inability to drive safely after she drives her Chrysler into the neighbor’s yard, giving rise to her son Boolie (Dan Ackroyd) hiring Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman) to drive her wherever she needs to go. I have not…

Continue reading