It’s always something, isn’t it?
Sometimes what makes it hard to lose someone is that you lose them slowly over time. Their health and their memory are taken long before they are. Lyn Shrader was a man with such a strong and vibrant soul that even as his mind faded in his last years, the memory of the man he was persists loudly today.

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“No one wants to be married to the guy who thinks he’s going to save the world.”

I bought a book on my Kindle after hearing an interview with the author on NPR, and it may have been the first time I’ve done that. I know nothing about the world of startups, but being one of billions of people hooked up to them, I catch a whiff of that culture all the time. It seeps into anything and everything. Just one passage intrigued me enough to read it through. That book is The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam. Continue reading →

Happy Monday, readers!

This week two of my poems are appearing in Modern Poetry Quarterly Review:

“Amazzacaffè”

and

“Cobbler Gnomes”

You can read them, and other poetry, by clicking here.

It’s not hard to believe that twenty years ago I walked into my high school German class to hear a classmate tell me that a guy flew a plane into the twin towers. I’m not hard on myself for laughing at first, because I instantly thought he meant some idiot who couldn’t fly steered his tiny plane into the building—it’s sad, but the kind of story we might chuckle at. Then they told me the rest of the story. This was no accident, and there were many deaths, and more to come in the following hours. To be honest, I didn’t feel furious or scared or heartbroken. Just shocked. What? This? Why? Continue reading →

Well folks, it looks like, depending on where you live, your mask may be coming off for good here pretty soon.

To celebrate the wearing of our masks and the removing of the masks, I want to hear from you.

We’re taking a poll. At the end of the day, when you leave your place of work or wherever else you go, how do you remove your mask?

Here’s your choices:

How do you remove your mask?
a) Like a doctor who just got out of a failed surgery on Grey’s Anatomy
b) Like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible
c) Like Kylo Ren, hissy fit and all
d) Like an astronaut after the capsule re-pressurized
e) Hannibal Lecter style

I’m not doing. If there is one. If there is going to be an outright civil war, I’m not participating it. I’ve got better things to do.

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If you’ve read anything this year, it might have been some fine fiction that helped you escape from everything going on around you. Or maybe help you deal with current anxieties by getting you thinking about other anxieties. But eventually you will look back on everything you went through and see it through the eyes of a character. Continue reading →

“If you follow me, Christianity will have power.”
“Wait a minute, that sounds a bit too much like the temptation of Christ in the wi—”
“I hate abortion, trust me.”
“All hail Caesar! He will deliver us!”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have recruited a famous comedian to portray our opponent’s opponent in a series of skits every Saturday night.”
“So the comedian is very woke, right.”
“Indeed. He shares our views on everything.”
“Even vaccines?”
“No, he’s fully against them. Even more than our opponent.”
“Oh…”

“President Trump separated hundreds of children from their families at the border!”
“That’s horrible! So did Obama.”
“Yeah but Trump isn’t creepy on women.”
“[holds up several photos of Biden].”

“This is the most important election of our time!”
“Why?”
“Are you kidding me? Biden is a socialist! We’re four years away from the slide to communism!”
“If Biden is a socialist, why does he love corporations so much? You realize the DNC is so bought by corporations that it chose him over Bernie?”
“I saw a thing on Facebook that I liked and shared that said that he said we want an end to capitalism!”
“I thought you said Facebook is silencing your free speech. Clearly it let you like and share that meme.”
“And they took it down.”
“Did they?”
[Checks] “Well, no. But they might.”
“Well first of all, we don’t have capitalism. We have a mixed economy. Like we did under Obama, Bush, Clinton, even Reagan. But that meme you shared was a lie. What Biden said was he wants an end to ‘shareholder capitalism.’ He clarified it by saying he wants to end the idea that the only responsibility a corporation has is to its shareholders.”
“Sounds like socialism to me.”
“Does it? Socialism tolerates corporations and shareholders? If he were a Marxist, he would want to end corporations, period. No shareholders. You do realize that even a kid can recognize a bad guy in a movie when all he cares about is impressing his shareholders. Biden’s not exactly an exemplum against that but at least the idea is good.”
“Don’t get all fancy with me. Biden is a socialist who wants us all to get relief checks so we don’t work.”
“Like the one Trump made out to you last spring?”

“This is the most important election of our time! It feels like Handmaid’s Tale in here! Trump’s about to appoint a Supreme Court Justice who supports the patriarchy!”
“So we’re about to become a dystopia where women are only for breeding and no reading, because he wants a woman on the supreme court?”
“She wants to overturn Roe V. Wade.”
“Well, half of unborn humans are women, and they have rights. This is why people need to study and debate the Constitution, professionally.”

“Let’s defund the police!”
“Yeah!”
“We found our guy!”
“Tell us about him.”
“He…doesn’t want to end the police.”
“Well what about his VP pick?”
“She is the police.”
“Well, was.”
“And was really tough police.”

“Our opponent wants to end the police!”
“I knew it!”
“And I bet he picked a VP who hates the police too.”
“Not really. She made a lot of liberals upset by how tough she was an ally of the police.”
“Oh. Well, ignore that! She wants to end law and order!”

“The president just brokered a peace deal between Sudan and Israel! Of course the mainstream media won’t tell you that.”
“Are the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, BBC, and The Guardian not mainstream media?”
“Oh, do they have stories about it? Because I haven’t seen it.”
“Do you get your news from them?”
“…No.”
“I’ve never been to Wisconsin. So I don’t know if there are Applebees restaurants in Wisconsin.”
“Oh, I get it. So that means I can’t say for sure that there are no Applebees in Wisconsin, just that I haven’t seen them where I haven’t looked.”
“Yes, and in both cases, you can Google it easily to find out.”
“But the peace deal is amazing, right?”
“That remains to be seen. It’s not completely unprecedented that they’ve agreed to try and normalize relations. Many Palestinians feel betrayed, as well as many Sudanese political parties. Israel is occupying Palestine, and normalizing political relations with Israel is seen by many as supporting colonization and legitimizing it. Trump is removing Sudan from a list of countries that the US recognizes as supporting terrorism. It doesn’t mean that it is no longer happening. The deal is complicated and has been done with great timing to look like a political victory. Why else would he brag about it and claim that Biden could not have done it?”
“Ok sure. But back in the 70’s Carter was negotiating between Israel and Egypt and it was all over the news.”
“And he was a Democrat. The peace between the countries he worked with largely remains to this day, but at the cost of not supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The consequences of the U.S. both aiding the Mujahideen in fighting the Soviets, while at the same time not giving voice to occupied Palestinians, has had many consequences we are still dealing with today. We are learning these lessons, and Trump hasn’t. He lied when he said that Russia invaded Afghanistan to stop terrorists decades ago. Russia invaded to prop up a puppet regime. We aided rebels who would later become terrorists (actions taken under Carter, and then even stronger under Reagan). In their eyes, we’re the new Soviets. Let’s not let our political loyalties to parties lead us to assume what can and can’t succeed. Republicans and Democrats will both lie to us about the wars they support overseas and then justify it by blaming it on one another. Enough.”

In lieu of a blog post this week, I decided to take time to address the abyss. I hope you take time to do the same. The hole you have inside of you, that we all have. Don’t peer into it too deeply, and don’t run from it either. Address it head on for what it is, seeking to have it repaired. If it feels too large, ask yourself, “what is larger than my abyss?” You know what’s not, anything you toss inside. Think bigger.