Thinking and Knowing
Art and poetry get banished from our lives, and we are impoverished. We put our hands in our empty pockets and wonder why nothing fills them. We turn to roadmaps and instruction manuals but are still unable to decipher how…
Can We Trust Our Eyes?
Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing about the nature of reality, because—I guess—I’ve been trying to find it. If we are somehow not in touch with reality, though, what, exactly, is it that surrounds us? Good question, no? Is it…
Be Merciful to Me, a Sinner
I have written often about labels and categorizing, and my attention is warranted. Labeling is essential to our existence, but, as with nearly everything, it can be both benefit and bane. We lessen the impact of unmapped territory, defusing its…
Letting Myself Look
I guess I have not written about Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill and that surprises me. It, or maybe the just the Joe Rogan chat with Tom O’Neill, turned out…
Big Pictures
Through the details unique to each story, literature shows us the big pictures in life. When I take in the stacks and stacks of shirts in Jay Gatsby’s closets, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and the…
Person or Commodity?
When I look back at my writing, I notice common themes, and while in the past, it bothered me, because it seemed like I was unable to move forward or entertain an original thought, I no longer feel that way.…
The Cave
Our lives are filled with assumptions that most of take as true. We see these things with our eyes, hear them with our ears; sometimes, we touch, taste, or smell them. I am holding this big, heavy, dull grey rock…
Which Character are You?
Once in a while, I remind myself that I used to get frustrated with people who wouldn’t hand out answers like candy. I liked the sound of this: “Literature leaves you with questions; lesser works give you all the answers,”…
The Compartmentalization of Attention
Thanks to the attention-span-killing Internet, it becomes harder to pay anything the attention it deserves. This works well for those who exploit it. What was earthshattering news last week can barely be recalled today. We more easily forget and, to…
The Tales We Tell
It turns out that I have a tendency to make the most of a bad situation, and I write it that way because this was not readily apparent to me for the longest time. If I had been asked, while…
Meaning and Reality
Questions about reality have come up over and over and over in the last year. When answers have been found, they’ve not always been satisfactory, although they have consistently led me to further questions. Oh, but now, that last sentence…
The Old and the Novel
The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well.…
