Reflections and Revelations

End of the Year

For the changes in my attitude that I have started to make, I call it a good year

The Fires

What can we learn from the ashes?

Job in San Bernardino

While we gaped at these horrors, a man in a yellow shirt and a golf hat came up to us. He was in tears. He introduced himself to us as "Ruben" and he pointed, saying, "That's my house".

The Issue of Trust

Arnold's candidacy is thus undermining my faith in other people.

The Gutless Agnostic Pacifist Speaks Up

Every Christian blog needs it's token agnostic!

The Heart Again

Could it be that sometimes the heart is in control of the pen and deceives us so that it can proceed in its rank and broken way uninterrupted?

Frida and Me

It can be hard to take photos that reflect your feelings.

A Voice in the Darkness

I've learned to beware of rouged over faces in women and cunningly coifed hair in men. I don't trust the person who always knows me before they know anything about me.

Between Dawn and Dusk

The time between dusk and dawn. My time. When I sit at the keyboard and open my mind like a vein and watch the blood dribble all over the place. Apologies to Sherwood Anderson for stealing his image.

Permanence

How can we look at anything now and affirm its permanence?

Of Blogging and Sticks: A Ramble

I'm having one of those days when contempt for the blogging world is at its high.

Eagle Scout

Every time Troop 38 consecrated an Eagle Scout, I'd tick off the scout virtues and compare them to the candidate.

Thirty Five Percent

35% of those who were abused as children end up in prison for violent crimes.

Vanilla Flavoring is Not Diversity

....diversity seems to mean that you don't express differences, that you don't declare where you have personally closed your mind.

Shadows

I've been thinking a lot about shadows lately.

On Solitude

fred titles his blog bit "Are you alone(r)?" I would answer "No. I'm just a human being with a rare perspective."

Morning Person
I'm a morning person. Until about 9 or 10 am. Then I need to let the night catch up with...

Road Maps

Road maps give me a way of stretching my arms beyond the front door, a set of wheels that travel faster than the eye.

No Subject at All(?)

It's no subject at all. It is silence. It's the distraction and the illusion of content.

Things in the Head

Many things start in the head. Books, plays, films, paintings, sculptures are all things which everyone will agree proceeds from the mind of the artist through the hand and into the world. But we don't like to think about other things that start in the head: wars, the decision to pull a trigger, to point the barrel of a tank cannon at a civilian hotel, etc.

A Lead Balloon at A Pity Party

Tonight, part of me is thinking "if such people didn't come around when I was alive to say those things, fuck them. I don't want them at my funeral."

Open Letter to Jeanne d'Arc

I felt very much alone in the world, an odd duck bleeding from thousands of shotgun pellets and waiting for still more to come from all quarters.

Zwischenraum

Out of the mud, the ice, and the blood, came me, one of those inexplicable happenings. There's no reason for it. Though I suffer from an axis of three evil diseases -- diabetes, asthma, and depression, -- and though shit happens, I am glad to be alive.

Twenty-One Gifts of the Magi for the New Year

Sila ersinarsinivdluge.

Resolved to not Unresolve

Some year's ago, I decided that there was only one New Year's Resolution I could possibly keep and I've remade it every year since then.

Writer's Search

I would number these years as the most severe of my depression, when the world encased me within a blank cube and seemed to offer no alternative. I could call this time by many names: the Silence, the Paranoia, or The Pain.

Blog Meet Santa Monica - 1

Witness to the Effects of a Spiritual Fragmentation Grenade

I've grown sick because the human rights issues that I have championed over the years are being selectively employed to justify the ultimate human rights abuse, which is murder.

Jeremiah Considers What He Has Wanted
If being a prophet means that you are a person who gets in trouble for telling people what you think...

Jeanne Jugan

I think her story demonstrates very nicely the danger inherent in any established religious authority, particularly those based on accidents of biology such as sex.

So Many Philomels, so rudely forc'd

Becca, Red Water Lily and I fight to be ourselves in a world that thinks it knows our minds and can make better prescriptions for our happiness than the ones we know to soothe.

Correction
My friend snaily^ runs peersupport.org. I erroneously listed it as peersupport.com. The text has been changed appropriately, but I...

Lynn's Closet Catholicism

If the Pope ever underwent a true Christian conversion and ordained women priests, you can rest assured that my Quaker wife would be up front and center at the baptismal fount, signing up.

Susceptible

My friends assured me that astrology always spoke the truth -- as did numerology, palmistry, bibliomancy, UFO paranoia, the visions of self-proclaimed psychics, and whatever guru or gura happened to be popular at the moment.

Crazy Tracy vs. the Vatican

I can't for the life of me see why the Vatican doesn't think that women are fit to preach the Gospel.

The Humbling of Arrogance

People who aren't monks tend to see them as extremely unselfish and humble. A monk doesn't share their opinion of him. He suspects that he is both selfish and arrogant.

Unrecovered Memories

I hate it when some people go rolling out their "past" like a heavily retouched wallet photo. "Recovered memories" seem gruesomely unreal because they are unreal.

To Sleep, Mischance to Dream

Dreams are a crazy salad of all kinds of things.

Semi-Hallucination

This is how burnout feels.

Do I dare eat a peach?

In terms of age, I may be in the top 5% of all bloggers.

Crazy Tracy Again

Drugs aren't the answer to the depression. They are the floor that you put down so that you won't be getting sucked up in the mud while you address the life issues that are getting you down.

White Buckwheat

I look outside at the sharp sandstone ridges and half domes and I feel like them -- half-clothed with "soft chaparral" like buckwheat that cracks when you pick a piece and explodes when you set a spark to it.

Beneath Mount Santiago

I'm a middle aged Jeremiah, pointing to the Jehoiakim in the White House, and watching as no one reads the scrolls he puts out.

Is Chat my only strength?

To be quite frank, I get rather tired of seeing my friends in views falling for the same bait every time.

Flight from Heat and Unsaid Advice to the Young

Before the sun can turn my condo into a broiler, I get in my truck and glide down the hill to Tully's, to spend my afternoon writing to old Sixties and Seventies tunes.

Advice from Self to Self

When you leave a place or situation, take count of your friends.