An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in…
What we have at present in our country is a ‘dialog of the deaf’. A group of eight to ten friends recently considered the failure of communication between Americans. I mean between those who believe a bygone way-of-life, paternalist, authority based, moral principles as reasonable, the only option for creating a future – and…
It is snowing outside. It is the first snow of the season to significantly cover everything, and the snowplows are out. Snow covered asphalt reacquaints us with the laws of physics. With a warming climate, winter snow, as it happens, comes later, and less of it. I can remember the blinding snowstorms of many…
Gray and raining outside. Starbucks is momentarily, unnaturally quiet, only the two of us minding our screens and our thoughts. Why so silent? Is this the edge? I mean the edge (never with a safety rail) of the abyss? Perhaps it’s extraordinary to know when one is proximate to the edge, a “hazard zone”…
Today, the 21st of December is Winter Solstice. Darkness will be at maximum duration. In the Northern Hemisphere the earth’s pole is tilted at greatest distance from the sun. But that is not all… Spring is coming! I wish that I knew a metaphor of greater exuberance, of unalloyed childlike anticipation to celebrate the…
“What have I done? What possessed me, again I am here, trembling. One way or another I am going to live to tell about this!” – This is exactly what I’ll feel when I am seated and the harness is tightened, into the C8 Corvette Z06. I signed up with Xtreme Xperience for four…
Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means… Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a…
This graphic was featured in a Sunday edition of the New York Times. “Luck” – If you are lucky… Of course the entire point is the unknown of the future, your future and mine. Would you delight to have a long life, winning against the odds, what we mean by luck? I would. My…
The rules that programmed an entire century: form follows function. We planned cities, tone-deaf buildings, urban social engineering, so soul-crushing it finally had to be leveled. Monster homes plopped on the seashore, boxes upon boxes, right to the property line, curve of the shore against the straight-lime imagination of the developers. Post-modern architecture was…
Soon it will be mid-December. Its raining outside, Saturday. Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down A Dream played on the radio, I drove on the rain slicked road before light this morning. An extended email exchange with an old friend occupied my thoughts. He is a die-hard conservative. I, on the other hand, am on the…
