To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,who neither listen nor speak;Who do not drink their tea, though they always saidTea was such a comfort.From Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent MillayLoneliness isn’t actually a disease. I checked the DSM-V. But it’s got …
Continue reading Only the lonely (need to read this post, and maybe not even them?)
Relativism is not a helpful mode for grieving. By nature it has no fixed position, which is problematic when someone’s already adrift because one of the central fixed points of their life – a loved one -- is gone. Bare relativism isn’t that helpful generally: how many idiotic conversations have been started in college classrooms …
Continue reading Relatively speaking about grief (and other mistakes I’ve made).
"the possible settingsof a web are infinite:how doesthe spider keepidentitywhile creating the webin a particular place?how and to what extentand by what modes of chemistryand control?it iswonderfulhow things work: I will tell youabout itbecauseit is interestingand because whatever ismoves in weedsand stars and spider websand knownis loved:in that love,each of us knowing it,I love you,for …
When Nina died, one of the things she left me was the ownership of two vehicles. The first, my primary car when she was alive, was a Mazda 3, a small sedan with a six speed manual transmission. It's both fuel efficient and fun to drive. The second was a Mazda CX-9, a crossover with …
Continue reading My midlife crisis seats seven and has a power rear lift-gate.
Montaigne wrote that every life is complete when it ends. He wanted death to find him planting his cabbages, concerned neither with mortality or even less his unfinished garden (but apparently overmuch with digestive health—why no radishes, arugula, or Japanese mustard greens, eh Michel?). We are always in the mode of becoming who we are, …
This was the only picture of female judges I could find on the Internet. OK, not quite, but pretty close, and most of the others were Judge Judy or RBG. (That's Sotomayor, Ginsburg, O'Connor, and Kagan, created by an enterprising woman who wanted to fill a void). I went to Richmond this week for an argument …
Continue reading Mansplaining to Judges is a thing and we are all in very deep trouble.
Grouper - RuinsYears ago I had to be on steroids for an extended time. I didn’t sleep much and one of my coping mechanisms was reading about music. I found Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide and, impelled by the prednisone, read his massive, alphabetical catalog of reviews in order. (It was slightly crazy, even given the …
This is how I see myself when I run. This is how people under 20 see me. Aging is weird. I had 20/20 vision every year until I hit 41, now I have an astigmatism. I weigh considerably more than I did five, ten, and twenty years ago. I mend less quickly when I’m sick. I fall asleep …
Continue reading Gravity’s aging, slightly embarrassing rainbow.
*Quick Post-Hurricane Post-Postmortem Update: We had heavy rains for a couple days and nothing more. I know our friends and family down east got clobbered, so it's not an indication of what Florence did on the front lines, but Greensboro was largely spared.The other day I went to the ophthalmologist’s office for my annual diabetic …
Continue reading I can see clearly now (but also progressively less well).
It’s entirely possible I’ve been spending too much time indoors. We are dealing with the fringes of Hurricane Florence and, though the storm hasn’t had nearly the impact we feared, it’s been raining steady for over a day now and schools have been closed since Thursday. Despite my best efforts to orchestrate activities for the …
Afterword 