Twenty-seven years ago to the day, to cheering crowds the Berlin Wall came down and a ticking stop watch began the countdown to the end of the Soviet Empire. It's ironic isn't it?  Today, in the Russian parliament when it was announced that Donald Trump, who promised to build another wall, had won the U.S. election they broke into applause and

My birthday cake sits uncut on the kitchen counter.  This has been the crappiest birthday that I can remember.

This last winter we had no winter here. Inclimate weather we had aplenty: massively destructive hailstorms, monsoonlike torrential downpours of rain, floods and a large deadly tornado that cut a swarth of destruction through the city but no cold weather and no sustained freezing temperatures. As a consequence, we are cursed with clouds of ( Read more... )

My neighbors have hung out their flags.  I have a flag too.  It rests folded in a triangle in a glass faced display case in my living room, a daily reminder.  Among my earliest memories is the sound of  bugle calls blaring through  loud speakers with Taps, the last call of the day, echoing into the darkness.  I was raised by a soldier and grew up ( Read more... )

This year has been the year that the music died, with each week seeming to add to a growing list of dead rock stars, pop idols and country icons. Recently, though, Eric Burdon who used to be a bouncing gnome and once was an Animal and Bob Dylan, once an angry young man now turned mumbling crooner with a pencil thin pimp's mustache, both celebrated ( Read more... )

The events of the past weekend have starkly borne home on a personal level the fragility of existance.  I was reminded of Warren Zevon's comment while dying of lung cancer.  He was asked if the approaching end of his life gave him some special insight and he replied, "Enjoy every sandwich."

Odi et amo.  quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Catullus         

During a thunder storm when I was about six years old, my soldier father sought to reassure me by teaching me flash to bang time theory. It works like this he explained, sound travels at 1128 feet per second so you can tell how far away a nuclear or other explosion is by the length of time it takes from the initial flash of the detonation to when ( Read more... )

Sometimes life seems to move at a glacial crawl - every day merging in meaningless sameness with the days proceeding them and one day you realize that nothing much happened that week, that month, that decade but at other times life roars past like a bullet train. I've ridden that bullet train at a hundred and eighty miles an hour as life flashed by ( Read more... )

I want to relate a strange dream that I had early this morning. The setting was a bedroom with two beds: one larger bed and the other a smaller daybed. On the daybed there was a five feet long alligator engulfed in flames. The alligator was on fire from tail to snout, though, the daybed itself was not burning. I didn't know if the alligator was ( Read more... )