Workin’ At The Carwash Blues In 1974, while I was working at the Cornell Plantations for the summer, doing 12-hour shifts (7am – 7pm) before running off to a little league practice for the team of seven-year-olds I was coaching, and before picking up my summer-fling girlfriend, Margaret, from her job at the nursing home at 11pm and getting to bed or not, whenever, I would listen to Jim Croce sing his latest hit. While…
Looking Forward I am feeling pensive this morning as I wait for a business call with my expert witness partners in an hour from now. I spend way too much time thinking about life these days and am always trying to take away lessons to live by in the process. I am certain that this is about being in and adjusting to retirement. When I was working full-time I used to take time to write,…
Caution: Boric Acid I have written many times in passing about the country of Chile. For such a small country, far from the United States, farther from Europe, and with a turbulent course of history during the span of our lifetime, it holds a disproportionately important role in my consciousness. I have thought long and hard about why Chile enjoys such a place in my sense of history and I have a number of thoughts…
Into the Death Zone I get my inspiration in many places, but none more than the here and now of what is right in front of my eyes. It’s late Saturday afternoon and I have spent an active day of gardening. I bought three trees and used my new power cart to place them on the back hillside where I want them to be planted. They were each heavy and the power cart was essential…
The End of Family Gardening American roots run deep in the family farm. The development of the nation from its original thirteen colonies after their war of independence through the ensuing nineteenth century of westward discovery, settlement and expansion, pretty much took the same path with one territory after another becoming a product of the family farm. The term “family farm” is most often applied to an intergenerational wealth transfer protocol that allows for the…
The Total Agony of Love The other night we watched a movie that was a Christmas movie made in 2021 called Love Hard. It was about a cool L.A. blogger who gets “catfished” by an Asian kid from Lake Placid. They spend the next few days pretending to be a couple and they fundamentally disagree about the best Christmas movie. It seems this subject, which I covered extensively a few days ago, is getting to…
Falling Down and Being True I tend not to be drawn to keeping up with celebrity lifestyles. Who is married or getting divorced to whom? What’s hot and what’s not? Who’s got a killer series on Netflix and is Netflix really the happening place for the real glitterati that are making their move to the A List? I find it all mildly interesting, but its very easy to get to feeling like a groupie with…
The Sovereign State of AT&T When I was in college and studying Latin American political history, we were reviewing the recent political changes in Chile. While a small country, Chile was symbolic because it was very much an isolated country on the far side of the world. In the days before the Panama Canal, anything on the Pacific side of the Andes was a long way from home and if you went th Chile, unlike…
Pershing Square I am writing this story for my pal Larry, who will be worried as hell for the next 1,300 or so words that I am going to say something in writing and that it will be put onto the internet, which is immutable as an NFT, and that it will be something that will stick to his foot like a random piece of dirty chewing gum. It gets me chuckling inside just to…
Mistletoe We are gearing up for the holidays around here this week because we are scheduled to head out to NYC to see the kids for a few days. The last time we saw them was September when we were supposed to be heading to Spain and Portugal, but cancelled the motorcycle trip since some in our group were not so comfortable with the feinting surge in the Delta variant. So, we spent a week…