WORDS
This is where you will find short stories, personal essays, and guest posts. Family and friends and the ordinary business of life are the inspiration for this section.
Calm Down and Shut Up: The Politics of Lao Tzu
[click on blue links for further information] NOTE: All translations of Lao Tzu are from Ursula Le Guin or Witter Bynner unless otherwise noted. You might say that I’ve been a mess of emotions since the November election. The candidate that I least...
El Chapo
Today's News: Drug lord 'El Chapo' extradited to the U.S. I wrote this one year ago while in Puerto Vallarta. Gotta Do It “Listen Guzman, we gotta do it. We gotta build a wall. Those Americans are flocking down here, drunks, fat people, cheapskates and...
Trompudo, A Literary Phenomena
[Please click on blue links for further information] “Donald Trump – a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s lived it up a bit in the real world and at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair … It always...
Two State Parks and a Red Tailed Hawk
“I do not think it is an overstatement that it appears just as important for California to have Mendocino preserved and guarded against encroachments as it was for Virginia to have Williamsburg restored and protected.” Civil History Chair of the Smithsonian...
Channeling Charles Péguy
There was a man, a Frenchman, you wouldn’t know about him, my child. . .He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation. . .This man decided that if any soul was going to...
My Week With Pierre Trudeau
NOTE: Click on the highlighted links for sources and further information. Pierre and Justin Trudeau, the father and son Prime Minister team, were blessed with good luck as well as good looks. When Trudeau the elder ran for PM of Canada, Nixon and Humphrey were...
JP’s Books
UPDATE: And now, there is this fascinating fact: New Study Links Reading More Books To Longer Lifespan I have a friend. Let’s just call him JP. He’s a little older than I am and much smarter. He’s cleaning house, disposing of the books he’s kept for years,...
I Am a Computer Simulation
I woke up this morning in a fright, woke up from a long dream in which I imagined I was a computer simulation. And now, and now I’m not sure if I’m dreaming this that I’m writing and if the dream was reality or the other way around. I’m not crazy. Please do not...
Daniel Bolelli, Thomas Paine, and St. John of the Cross
As our Independence Day fades into the unsavory miasma of what proves to be an entertaining but disappointing Presidential election season, I find myself unable to let go of one of my all-time heroes, Tom Paine. Googling about in a fit of nostalgia for the “good ole...
Poem by Think in the Morning: Basket Case
Their lives did not turn out Like they planned. L was successful But unhappy. By most measures S had excelled But her success made her afraid. Nearly everyone thought G was a colossal failure Except for G. According to Conventional wisdom...
What A Teacher Can Do
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour William Blake, Auguries of Innocence Pierce High School in Arbuckle, California is not the kind of place you would expect a young boy to...
Short Fiction: Dora
An old woman walks, stooped so far forward that she can hardly see through her thick eyeglasses. She wears a cotton dress with a floral pattern of red, pink, blue and white flowers under a purple wool coat. A little wobbly on her feet, she puts her arms out for...