End of Summer Update

Aug24
2016 Rob Written by Rob

[ Mom: Sorry to hear about Oscar. We haven’t been checking R&K much this year, and I only saw your comment about his passing this morning. I know it’s now months later, but thoughts and prayers. We know it’s hard. ]

So I’m sitting here at my desk this morning waiting for the first of the day’s vendors to arrive. Sometime this morning our new pest control service is going to arrive and hopefully nuke the everloving bejezzus out of our growing ant population. Because seriously, we’ve had enough. Enough of the marching armies. Enough of the ants floating in our drinking glasses. Enough of the great and almighty swarms every time one of the cats happens to leave a piece of kibble on the floor. ENOUGH.

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Posted in Everyday Life, The Animals, Work

The 27%: A Public Service Announcement

Jun17
2016 Rob Written by Rob

As we progress in this season of political inanity, crazy ass news, and just general WTF-iveness, we’re all going to see a lot of opinion polls, and we’re all often going to express shock or dismay over how many people have signed onto whatever notion that we ourselves think is insane, provably factually incorrect, or just generally brain-dead stupid.

Yay, election years.

In those moments, we’ll express – privately or publicly – our pessimism about the general direction of the country, perhaps of Western civilization. We’ll mock, we’ll shout, we’ll shake our heads over the idea that some of these people actually vote or are otherwise taken seriously.

(Note: this R&K is not about any one set of political or personal views. It is also not about any mass of citizenry other than that of the United States. If you read partisanship here, that’s a flaw in your own wiring, and I hope you deal with it.)

You can rest easy however, my fellow Americans. Because the 27% are on the case.
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Posted in Current Events

Orlando

Jun13
2016 Rob Written by Rob

The worst mass shooting in U.S. history happened in my hometown this weekend.

Everyone is now playing their assigned roles. The gun nuts are doing their usual thing: ignoring, averting, “praying”, reminding us all that they have a God-given right to legally purchase, own, and presumably use machines that have absolutely no intended purpose beyond the murder of human beings. The partisans are trying to score points in this election season for pretending that this was a 9/11-style terrorist attack. Amidst the calls for calm reflection and intelligent action, there’s a thunder of “I told you so’s” – some making valid points, most not, but everybody fighting to climb to the top of Message Mountain.
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Posted in Current Events

Economies

May13
2016 Rob Written by Rob

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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Posted in Everyday Life, Faith, Family and Friends, Making Good Art
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