As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion. “The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he has written. “It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to ( Read more... )

It seems that sometimes all life is just waiting for something to happen.  In this case, the weather.   Excitement grows for the first snow storm, coupled with the realization that the weathermen are usually off on these things.  Can't help hoping for some cross-country skiing.  It's been too long for me ( Read more... )

Partisan happiness is so much better than public immolation. Still it is so easy to worry that my party will be "quietly backing out of the room, while their brother gets yelled at for burning down the garage" as Jon Stewart allegorized the situation.  The garage, in this case, is a whole mid-eastern country, which anyone who was paying attention ( Read more... )

Taurus Horoscope for week of October 26, 2006

"Jaws" is the most common name for pet goldfish. Take your cue from this fun fact, Taurus. Identify the mildest, tamest, most passive part of you, then push it in the direction of becoming more daring, assertive, and courageous. If it helps to give that part of you a nickname like "Jaws," by all means do ( Read more... )

October 7, 2006 (10:27AM) Sat ( Read more... )

The alarm and the thunderstorm conspired me awake. Can't listen to NPR, with the tragedies of Amish schoolgirls, and hypocrisy of the Republicans, so I'll concentrate on the raindrops splashing on the crab apple leaves, the brakes whining gears grinding of the school bus. Praying, like an apologetic supplicant: I know you're busy right now, but ( Read more... )

Penance would be a more popular kind of sacrament. More solitary than communion. More active too. Working, doing, thinking, planning, all those -ings that stop when life stops. Or not, if one is to believe the common earthly extension of Heaven. In that Heaven it is all just easier, unencumbered by the weight of the body. But one thing is ( Read more... )

The best things in life are said to be free, but I never really subscribed to that theory when it came to vacation. Camping is one of my worst skills. Roughing it lost its charms for me some smelly cottage many years ago, wait that might have been Larry's old cottage on Half Moon Lake... Anyway I just spent the most I have ever spent on a ( Read more... )

Instructions from Rob Bresney ( Read more... )

My mother has a favorite saying: No problem looks as bad by the light of a new day. This blog reminds me how devastated I was last week. Now resolved, abandoned worry is the best kind. Funnily there is always something else, though I would be hard put to find something as horrific as an incurable disease in any of my piddly worries. I can ( Read more... )