Written by I really don’t mean to just update once a year around these parts. It’s just that Life gets in the way. So let’s catch up. READ MORE »
Posts in category Family and Friends
Valleys and Farms
Written by These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Someday you’ll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you’ll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms
Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I’ve witnessed your suffering
As the battle raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms
There’s so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones
Now the sun’s gone to hell and
The moon’s riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it’s written in the starlight
And every line in your palm
We are fools to make war
On our brothers in arms
The Abyss Looks Back
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”
I’ve been a presidential politics junkie since before I could vote. Part of that, I think, comes from growing up in Battleground Florida, where even the most placid and uneventful national election is cause for riot and shooting war. I remember watching Dukakis speak at my high school in the fall of 1988. I briefly shook hands with both Clintons when I volunteered on his campaign in 1992. Worked in the Hillsborough Elections Office supporting early voting efforts in 2004. They were all bloodbaths. (And the less said about 2000, the better.)
Living in California since 2007, I still have a hard time not covering for the mortar rounds every four years. California isn’t a battleground. Everyone knows that, every four years, the state outcome will have a 30-point margin in favor of Pacific blue. There are no rallies. No ad carpetbombs. No crisscrossing bus tours. No fights in the streets. There’s just the general sense that, no matter what happens in the nation at large, here it’ll still be California.
This year, that’s the only damned thing holding my sanity together.
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Economies
Hemingway came back to my mind recently with this great David Brooks editorial in the New York Times. Even if you’re not into Hemingway or even literature, I still recommend reading it.
I didn’t really understand Hemingway until I started crossing into my forties. By then I’d been writing professionally for many years, which helped, but I also needed a perspective that for me only came in the opening salvos of middle age.
Like many of us, I grew up not having a whole hell of a lot, and so in my younger days I thought that the key to happiness was having it all. When that didn’t pan out, I suspected that the key to happiness was not having anything: freedom in low overhead, divest of attachment, the power of having nothing to lose. Strangely enough, both routes gave me pretty much the same mix of bad days and good days. It was almost as if what I had – or didn’t have – didn’t greatly matter to the universe at large.
Strange that.
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