Often I have something in mind to write about. I read. Thoughts conveyed by others often imperfectly understood, capture my imagination. I feel a compulsion to write something, because instinct says an insight important for the future is worthy of exploration. We are “in this thing called life,” together are we not? It is…
Friday, another “end” of the work-week. But this Friday is incomparable to any other that has ever been… The Starbucks room here at 3rd and State contains a configuration of individuals, various, by socio-economic status, or by the arc of a standard lifetime, a group of high school students, and I, a retiree… Never…
Broken Brix is a winery & cidery in St. Charles. The two of us stopped in for a few minutes of conversation, to relax in the comfortable atmosphere, the bar displaying hints of the infinite possibilities of taste inherent in the art of brewing. Almost always Steve, the owner warmly greets us from behind…
…the world is immense, truly, and the way we’re doing things in this world is only one of the many ways we might be doing them. Once you know this, then you know that we’re not just alive, we’re the bearers of life. Anything can change. -excerpt Shadow Dancing in the USA, by Michael…
I had a few minutes at the end of my evening, I decided out of curiosity to watch a few minutes of an episode of The Walking Dead. I have not followed the show. I didn’t care which segment was available on the TV. A friend recommended the series as an exploration of human…
I remember writing about this tune in the past. The musical score and lyric of certain songs strike me as iconic, as emblematic of a time, a quest for what it means to be human in a certain “world.” The lyric lines, the blend of the voices convey the friction and effort of discovering…
It is the moment that first imposes a chronological sequence and order upon the stimulations operating on an organism, and, in turn, through the sub-noticable joining together of successive units of this smallest time-span, time originates. In the moment, the world stands still. A series of moments in which, respectively, time stands still, leads…
Fall sunrise over the Fox River is glorious. I think it worth rising for the brief spectacle just before 7AM. This is the view through my windshield traveling on Fabyan Parkway east toward Starbucks in Geneva. The sunlight is a gift to every living thing, trees, shrubs, grasses and the squirrels that inhabit the…
The crisis of ’29, which was a real catastrophe, cannot happen again today. It has been supplanted by a perpetual simulation of crisis. Unlike a society’s heroic or intrinsic values, the simulated, synthetic values (see Reagan) that have taken their place no longer threaten to collapse. Their own weight no long threatens to result…
Orwell had it easy when fixing 1984 as the crucial point. What we are condemned to may be, after time itself has unfolded, the disappearance of time in the instantaneousness of action. That is the price of change. In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up-to-dateness, societies lose the thread of their development….
