Lately I’ve the privilege to witness the email exchange between two friends on the topic of The Second Amendment and gun ownership. The exchange has been passionate, and to my sense, contentious at times. Yet, the topic represents a nexus of the present state of our society since firearms are a prominent aspect of…
Friday is typically conceived as the end of the work week. The truth is, one’s work never ends. To be alive is to work. We make these conventional assumptions, arbitrary lines. They are illusory and evaporate under the pressure of reality. What we think is reality gets in the way of reality. So here…
While living in the suburbs I seldom go into Chicago. Every place in northern Illinois is within the orbit of the city, one of the most populous in the country with 9.5 million people. The scale of the city causes discomfort. I have a sensation of 360 degrees of thinly veiled chaos when I…
Life is a matter of values. The thrust of one’s life is a matter of one’s aims. Purposes which one has chosen together, constitute the meaning of an individual’s life. Each has the opportunity to choose, to endorse the path that he or she takes. A few of the options offered by our post-industrial,…
Saturday was dedicated to putting in the garden. The patch of ground was broken a few times with the assist of a power tiller. I was grateful for the powered help. A neighbor who owns a horse farm was kind to allow me to obtain a sufficient quantity of barn manure for fertilizer. The…
Saturday is the beginning of the long weekend, culminating in Memorial Day on Monday. Memorial Day is set aside to remember our war dead. The last war to defend the country from attack was World War II. The others since have been “botique wars” conducted by politicians to assert our interests; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,…
Awakened this morning from a nightmare. The dream had to do with life as we know it today, of encounter with the myriad bureaucratic obstructions imposed upon the individual by “the system.” There is no escape. Costs pile up. Red light cameras, late penalties of all kinds, and if you live in Cook County,…
A few days ago my daughter asked me to write about the connection between the white headed robin and the muscle cars which were featured in the post on BEAUTY I am satisfied that there are many ties of relationship between the rare bird and the hand built single purpose hot rods. It is…
One of many useful gifts that I received from grad school is the habit of taking notes in a pocket-sized moleskin notebook. I record memorable statements, questions, and especially outrageous exclamations that I happen upon in my reading. As a result of much reading I have filled seven or eight of these notebooks with…
So how is it going? You know, that pursuit of happiness? Was it genius or was it a touch of madness for Jefferson to have inserted “that” (happiness) into the Declaration of Independence? Is there anything more unstable than happiness? Happiness is not up to me for a starter. Today I plan some actions…
