Category: Life Lessons
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Lesson Re-Learned
If you have read any of my books or short stories on travel, you know that Rita and I normally eschew the guided tours, preferring instead to discover and explore on our own and at our own pace. In fact, one of my recent posts was about the joy of finding someplace unexpected. It is not…
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Hoping to Travel Again
I have what’s called a Smart Folder setup in iPhoto that sorts photos by month from the previous thirteen years. The photos for whatever month we are currently in then displays as the screen saver on our living room TV. I know that makes me kind of geeky, but really it’s a nice trip down…
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Hate and Anger on Facebook
Phone the neighbors, wake the kids, it’s time for another Facebook Rant! Actually, this time it is more of a screed about Facebook users, and the larger issue of the increase in hate, anger, and general incivility over the past four or five years. I’ve always said, if you have nothing nice to say, say…
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Do the Write Thing
“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”― Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde was truly a man ahead of his time. Never in history has it been easier to get a book published, and never has it been…
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I Shall Believe
It has only been four days since I said no political posts for a while, and although this touches tangentially on politics, it is not really a political post. What’s on my mind today is something I think is at the root of most of the rancor and division in America. Too many Americans have…
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Labels and Boxes
Last week I had a typical yet interesting Facebook exchange with an Ecuadorian. I believe he spent some time in the US, and may have family there, but mostly he is a musician giving one-man shows around Ecuador. On Inauguration Day, he posted a simple “Welcome to Socialism”. Comments were mixed, mine was rather tame…
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Don’t Lose Your Franchise
It all began with the election of 1952, when a UNIVAC computer correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election. Now if you look at the election results from that year, it seems like it would have been a no-brainer to predict. After all, Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson by over 6 million votes, and…
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Divided We Fall
I was idly scrolling through FaceBook the other day when I saw a post with what struck me as an uniquely American brag. A young woman proudly stated that she had just spent about two hours in a Target store brazenly unmasked, and had not been asked to leave. She saw this as some kind…
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With our Music, Life Would Be a Mistake
I don’t always title a blog post with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I make an exception in this case. I want to take a break from the Galápagos Islands book I’m working on to write about a show that we attended at the Tennessee Theater on Thursday, March 12, 2020. I bring it…
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Better Living Through Chemistry
I would like to start by thanking all of those readers who responded about my previous post ‘Tis the Season. As you may imagine it was not an easy decision to make public such a personal post on depression. But after hearing from so many people who have similar problems and concerns but have been afraid…