Today, my faithful and faithless followers, the Good (and Not So Good) Words asks you to look at the margins. To not focus on the spectacle at the center of the three ring circus of national politics. Trump is a bad clown act, but he is not the Ring Master. Trumpery = Showy but worthless. […]
Today, my faithful and faithless followers, I spend a bit of time writing about the bad news blues. I should be working on a job application, so I can pay for the upkeep of this here Mission to Save the Whole Wide World and Little Old You, but that can keep. Most mornings I check […]
Can I get an Amen? Can I get an Awoman? Can I get a some days it feels like we’re going to hell in a hand-basket, a hand-basket that is simultaneously on fire and flooding? Life is hard. Life is complicated. In these almost-but-not-quite End Times, we are facing catastrophe, calamity, chaos. The world is […]
I felt sorry for myself today. Trapped in the house, stiff and sore, and lonely, on a bit of a bluesy trip from the pain meds. Things felt unreal. But the world continues to spin out atrocities, which also feel unreal. Tonight, I cannot write about the surgery. I think about History, & War, & […]
[This is the first of a series of loosely connected, perhaps sometimes contradictory, essays sparked by various books and conversations around ideas of neatness, messiness, and the good life]. In my library district many people have waited long months to read Marie Kondo’s book The life-changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering […]
In the liturgical Christian tradition today is the last day before Lent. Lent is a period of somber reflection, letting go of harmful to self and other habits and taking on good for self and other spiritual practices. In New Orleans, it is Fat Tuesday, a day of excess and pageantry. For Anglicans and Episcopalians […]
Lately on FB, seems like every other post is related to the recent DiseaseLand measles outbreak. In between clickbait and status updates, there will be yet another post that validates all of us who believe that imperfect but rigorous science has improved public health more than fear-driven campaigns led by pop stars. One of my […]
Today, I read Marilyn Nelson‘s “how i discovered poetry” a “sequence of fifty unrhymed sonnets” that use personal and political events from the time she was four in 1950 to the time she was fourteen in 1960 to build a picture of the life for a girl in a military family. The author never denies […]
I write this with a cup of coffee on the left side of my laptop, one cat on the end of the table busy cleaning herself and another cat on my right in the window sniffing around to better understand the world around him. The small, sharp barks of my father’s puppy come through said […]