Pop Quiz. Answer the following question: “BREAKING NEWS is to CNN what a shiny new red Corvette is to . . .” (fill in the blank).
Back to that later.
All in Non-Fiction
A clipboard staked my claim on the counter nearest the nursing station. I poured myself a cup of coffee, whitened it with a packet of powder, and scanned the to-do list on the top page. Not so bad, I thought. My co-residents hadn’t signed out too much. As the intern on call, the forecast for my night now depended on who got admitted to the hospital, but I expected it to be quiet. Around Lake Erie an advisory of sleet mixed with snow got the streets salted and kept most folks inside and out of the ER. I drew little boxes next to the things that had to get done, intending to fill them in as I went along.
In the fall of 1976, we sixth graders were thrilled our Georgia Governor Carter had been elected President of the United States and that we’d celebrated the bicentennial of our country. Our community had come together for a parade with the high school marching band, the mayor in a convertible waiving, and our church youth singing the good news on a float pulled by our song director’s Ford F-150. The next day, Sunday morning, our twelve-year-old group of boys marched into the sanctuary of the Baptist church, sitting near the back, so we could pass notes, send spitball through straws to girls a few rows down, fart and laugh at ourselves.
In nature, good and evil do not exist. All actions and events in the organic world follow elemental law, which is to survive despite chaos. Good and evil are constructs of the human experience and relative to situations within that experience. They are value judgments regarding how we perceive situations to be; we make them either of benefit or detriment to our individual interests, ethical and moral frames. The natural universe is morally neutral.
In 1955, Emmett Till was murdered. He looked wrong. He’d looked at someone who looked wrong. However you’d like to put it. He did nothing.
Then we caught the killers. Wasn’t hard, because there was nothing surreptitious about their murdering. Their motives were loudly proclaimed. We didn’t have a cellphone recording of Till’s final moments, but we had most everything but.
The killers were found not guilty. Free to walk.
“…..I’m a believer in Christ, and I am a recovering sex addict.”
Those were the jarring initial words I heard after I walked into my first Christ-centered twelve-step meeting several months ago, before I had admitted to myself that I couldn’t control whatever had gotten me to this point. Ok, I just have to dwell on those initial words for a moment. A “believer in Christ AND a recovering sex addict?” How is that even possible? What does that mean and how does that apply to me?
The old dance hall above Radio Shack is crowded, and it sounds like the ocean when I close my eyes. In yoga class, we breathe only through our noses, and I pray the person next to me isn’t smelly as the teacher shuts all the windows and we stretch our arms above our heads.
I had seen a counselor before nine months ago. He really only had what I told him to go on, and I only went to humor my wife to keep our marriage together. I was able to manipulate him easily, and eventually I just quit going. I didn’t think this would be any different.
Buenos Aires, 1992:
It’s a sultry February here below the equator, where Nazis are harbored, where machismo reigns. Where Argentina’s middleweight boxing champion, Carlos Monzón, flung his wife out the window to her death. “My dinner was late for the second night in a row,” Monzón explained.
Me? I’m sharpening my housewifery skills.
The default turf where I encounter Artificial Intelligence is on the chess board – the virtual board. That is where I meet and play Chess Titans, muted, stoic, and non-living according to scientific taxonomy but conscious, even self-conscious. Which should tilt the single criterion for classifying living and non-living more towards ABBA’s in Move On:
What really makes the difference
between all dead
and living things -
the will to stay alive.
“Call me right now! I can’t believe you lied to me AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!”
It was Friday at 3:42 pm. I was in a meeting when I felt my phone vibrate. Sheer panic is a very appropriate descriptor of my emotions at that exact time. Mix in a healthy dose of shame, disgust, self-loathing and add a bit of self-preservation. She knew. I had contacted the woman I cheated with after promising I would never do so again. And now she found out. How could I mitigate this? And could I lie to cover it up? Only to protect her, of course.
Earlier this year, Frankie Metro contacted me about doing a reading in Denver in August. It would get me back to the Mercury Cafe. I had always wanted to go back. I just didn’t know when I would get the chance.
Suddenly, given the chance to go back, I felt the weight of failing two years ago. It was an instant match for the anxiety I almost always, immediately feel, whenever someone asks me to read or perform.
And we’re gonna fly, as well? The first time I’ve done so in eighteen years? Lovely.
The holiday we think of as Presidents Day is really a bit of a misnomer. Celebrated on the third Monday in February, what we today know as Presidents’ Day was first established by Congress in 1879 in recognition of President George Washington, and is still called “Washington’s Birthday” by the federal government. The holiday became Presidents’ Day in 1971 after Congress and the Nixon Administration moved to change it to the third Monday in February as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, an attempt to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers.
Cultural history as it begins to be written in the years after 9-11 reveals that the fault-line along the American psyche has become seismically active again. The right-wing is sounding its irrational depths, and suddenly this great National Buddha stirs from its hibernation—out of the blubber of historical lullaby and the sugar plums of paranoia. The collapse of the Twin Towers was a terrible suction event, in which any remaining intelligibility was evacuated from national discourse, like oxygen in a conflagration.
OK, look, about this new administration in Washington D.C…I know it’s frustrating. A lot of you are mad. A lot of you are disgusted, weary, disheartened, bewildered; you want to turn away in despair, turn off the television, stop watching the news, get off social media, retreat from the turn reality and our society appear to be taking.
PLEASE DON’T.
POLITICSAnd Now For Something Completely DifferentM.G. Poe
With inauguration day just a few weeks away, I have been thinking a lot about our President- Elect. Having not voted for him, completely perplexed as to why anyone would, I wanted to know the reasons why 61 million Americans voted for him this past November 8. What I encountered was a series of reasons that I found both enlightening and alarming. Though a large majority of Trump voters did not think he was a particularly good candidate, they considered the alternatives, including a vote for Hillary Clinton, far worse.