The Unsettling Role of Zeitgeist
I have two daughters, the Big One and the Little One. This is a story about the Little One. It's a story about the stories we tell each other and how they matter more than the facts or the truth....
View ArticleLet Me Introduce You to the Enemy
The enemy is named Cathy, and John and Adam. The enemy is James and Kay and Alfreda. The enemy are the disaffected, the distainful and the disenfrancised. They are the reductionist, the good...
View ArticleThree Plays Ahead... Hoping Axelrod is Hella Smart
Me, I don't know much about politics. I worked on a Mayoral campaign or two. I stumbled into a PR job at an agency handling four campaigns one fall a long time ago and sat in on at least one war...
View ArticleTheatre of the Absurd
Edward Albee came to town one day, on the dime of a local university. A friend of mine was his general dogsbody for the duration. We did Albee in high school in competitions. We loved it. He...
View ArticleWhat the Bankers Think
They have rocket scientists working on Wall Street slicing and dicing derivatives. I am not a rocket scientist. I have words, not numbers at my beck and call. I have metaphors and imperfect...
View ArticleAbout Guys and Ground Game
I'd like to talk to you about guys. You know, the guys that come in little plastic buckets, molded green plastic. The guys of Toy Story and Toy Story II. That's just about all there were for boys in...
View ArticleI have three facts
On any given day, I'm not sure of anything. I read the blogs to see who can put the day's news in context, who can pull the narrative thread through it elegantly, but without going all...
View ArticleA Mild Cardio Infarction
Way in the back when I worked in a Retirement Center. It was the ambulatory wing of a nursing home where there was still carpet in the common room and people had their furniture and personal...
View ArticleThis is the thing about Rand Paul
I adore Rachel Maddow. Her quirky sense of humor and love of wonkery is at turns awe inspiring and bug cute. However, I think she did a lot of folks a disservice in the Rand Paul interview. She...
View ArticleOn the Sanity Train
I was interviewed by a CNN crew at the Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday. He wanted to find a theme. Why did I come? What were people trying to say with their attendance? What did it mean? Was it...
View ArticleAbout that Pat Down
I actually hate the liquids foolishness more than I hate backscatter x rays. I need product in my hair in order not to resemble Einstein. Every time I try to squirt the leave in conditioner into a...
View ArticleGrace under Pressure
We think we know ourselves. All of us. We tell ourselves and our friends how we would react if this or that happened. "I would have punched him," we say. "I would never have lost my temper," we say....
View ArticleOn my high horse
My mother was apparently very concerned about my riding skills when I was a child. "Get off your high horse," she would say. I assume she was seeing in me what I heard in my own children from time to...
View Article"Bodies Don't Have Handles on Them"
There's this guy, a cop guy, who looked at the video of the UC Davis Pepper spray incident. This guy, whose name is Charles J. Kelly, and is apparently a former Baltimore Police Lieutenant. didn't get...
View ArticleDeath and Secrets
I lost a sister to lung cancer in September. She would have been 59 or 60. I found out yesterday from my daughter. A cousin on Facebook told her.I found myself befuddled, confused, sad, anxious,...
View ArticleHe didn't know you had Cancer
I didn’t want to know.She didn’t want to talk about it. But it was there with us. My friend of 20 odd years was tiny and wizened, her hands trembling slightly, and I noticed how the skin on them had...
View ArticleThe Republican Distopia: An SF Perspective
In the world of Science Fiction there are two main traditions of storytelling: "What if?", and "If this goes on..."The new TV Show "Revolution," asks what if the lights go out? And in the oft alluded...
View ArticleThank you, Fred Phelps
I don't know that I believe many things. But I do believe in what is called Visionary or Outsider Art. My personal temple is AVAM, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. They keep the work...
View ArticleThe Suicide's Daughter
So, I had been away at college about two, maybe three hours. There was this girl in the room next door. I was trying on myself, inventing myself anew the same way I tried at the start of every new...
View ArticleThe World's First Atheist Orphanage
Okay, so there is this orphanage in Uganda that has captured my imagination. And in my imagination I hope it will capture yours. Billed as the world's first atheist orphanage, BiZoHa has as its...
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