Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Part and parcel of being raised in a monoculture is the gradually built hubris wherein the world is divided into two distinct antithetical halves. They are 'our way' and the 'wrong way.' It sets the stage for the curse of binary thinking, an almost complete inability to see shades of grey, including the inability to appreciate the vivid spectrum between white and black that gives t...

It is amazing that words uttered when years could still be written with two digits are a laser light exposing reality 2,000 years after the fact. It is a perfect example of Santayana's maxim that the past is repeated by those who can't remember (or read) it. None of us were in existence during the life of Seneca and most Americans are too incestuously nationalistic to put credence in the b...

In some cases, familiarity brings a measure of acceptance. In others, familiarity brings about contempt. Ubiquity becomes first invisible before transforming into a constant grating on the nerves at its everpresent presence. All the while, that which we can't have, acts as a siren pulling us powerfully in its direction. If I eat the same food too often, I get sick of it. If I hear the same mus...

Everything you are about to read is bullshit, complete and utter nonsense better attributed to a person locked in a padded cell and restrained by a four-point harness than an educated scientist steeped in the mythology thought can and should be rational. Every concept, every sentence, every phrase, each word, letter, even the spaces between the letters are lies. This piece contains not an ounce of...

For decades, I have coveted a poet's soul to balance the strictness of my Engineer's mind to help me break free of constricting squares whose corners harbor demons allowing me to immerse in the freedom of circles without beginning or end. It is a struggle. Half of me wants to elucidate exquisite reality while the other half prefers to marinate in surreality where the physical laws of the universe...

Humans are attuned to patterns. It was a necessary evolutionary nuance for the hairless ape to survive the descent from the trees to the plains in Africa where differentiating between food source and foe was crucial to seeing the sunrise on future days. I imagine ancient man adopted clothing and ornamentation associating them with their clan creating easily discernable patterns helping them recogn...

I find it challenging to write with enough clarity that a piece accurately and adequately expresses my ideas so there are minimal holes in understanding my thoughts with my poet's soul desiring to say the most possible in the fewest words building upon captivating imagery. The former requires copious words in precision order that frequently loses the reader in utter boredom while the latter can ea...

Imagine, if you will, a football (real football) match between the Premier and World Champion Manchester United (I know, a current fantasy) and a team of U9 players with the match played on a regulation pitch bounded by 45-minute halves. Besides being a joke to both the professional and amateur athletes participating in the fiasco, it would be an insult...

I fondly remember from days of yore when differences of opinion would result in deep, logic-based, fact-centered debate, sometimes heated by passion's flame resulting either in agreement with one or both parties shifting their understanding, or termination in agreement to disagree respectfully with the debaters toddling off together for cold beverages or a hot meal without any animosity tainting t...

In the halcyon days of my youth, a female acquaintance informed me that kissing is considered so intimate that ladies of the night refrain from lip-to-lip action with their clients while having no qualms about letting a man otherwise ravage their bodies. As far as I know, this woman never worked in the world's oldest profession so I have no idea how she knew this tidbit. She couldn't search online...

I grew up in the era of flower power, make love not war, the smiley face, and the peace sign which oddly became the symbol of a criminal president. It was heralded as a new Dawn of Aquarius, a time of change, hope, innovation, and a shift in consciousness from "me" to "we" ushering in a break from staid traditions allowing for new ideas to germinate, bloom, and perfume the world. I was young, naiv...

I rarely disagree with the pearls of wisdom extolled by the prophet extraordinaire, Edward Abbey. Much of my thought lines were indeed born of his writing but, unlike religious zealots, I am as comfortable rejecting his pearls that don't glisten in my heart as I am in accepting others into my soul and informing my future. I am not saying he was delusional with the opening quote only that its appli...

Since my early 20s, I have fantasized about escaping the large, midwestern city to which I was unfortunately born for someplace more rural with a landscape that would feed my imagination with surreal apparations that I could work into interesting reading. Countless situations have arranged themselves such that my vision has never been made manifest. I currently live in the heart of the city that I...

The first riddle encountered with the Raven tribe is they are not black. To human eyes, they appear black but that's because we hairless apes are locked into the "visible" spectrum and lack the eye cone that would allow us to also detect waves in the UV spectrum. To their own kind, they are tinged with bluish, dark red, or greenish undertones complementing the black base...

his opening quote ostensibly falling from the prepubescent mouth of John Lennon appears to identify a fractious mind when compared to another Lennonism in the form of lyrics claiming " Happiness is a Warm Gun. " There is no written record of John ever telling this story still it has been attributed to this man who, along with three compadres, revolutionized Rock 'n Roll music helping it soar to va...

My hands have not flowed over canvas in months. Not a color imagined. Not a brush of liquid pigment leaving a snail trail on the white, waveless ocean. Not an inkling of beauty finding its way out of my head where, once visions had to fight for a line place and imminent exposure to the light of day. No queue remains for the beauty, any beauty has become ash and was blown away into oblivion by the...

I am watching a live stream that bubbled up on one of my social media feeds. The stream is of a procession led by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th and incumbent Dalai Lama, each a reincarnation of his predecessor and a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the original Bodhisattva of Compassion. The Dalai Lamas are revered as high spiritual leaders in Tibetan Buddhism. They are not viewed as reincarnations of...

If you would ask my mother...could ask my mother...would have asked my mother before cancer ate away her body and soul, she would have told you with a roll of knowing eyes that I emerged from the womb with fiery red hair and an ingrained, hardwired rebellious streak. Was it the red hair? Perhaps those recessive genes came encoded with rebel tendencies because those of my ilk had to fight to surviv...

I often wonder what prehistorical event or sequences of events drove early humans to morph from adapting to the myriad vagaries of dynamic nature into humans doing everything in their power to force nature to adapt to human proclivities, proclivities that are frequently detrimental to our survival. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle required a degree of social nimbleness and activity as they followed s...

Aside from declaring the US is not the greatest country in the world, the two most blasphemous utterances one can make in the USA are, in no particular order, that humanity is an evolutionary mistake and that God was made in man's image. A close third for half the population would be any assertion that Dumb Donald is not the second coming of Christ despite his being identifiable in multiple script...

When I think of the SNAFU that has become the US government and the SNAFU society embraces thinking the US is a freedom paradise, which is a matrixed simulation, it is a wonder each and every one of us has not run afoul of some government agency and has been elevated to an enemy of the state status.

I've been tempted more times than I can count to pull an Everett Ruess and disappear into the backcountry somewhere bounded by the Colorado Plateau. To date, the nearest I have come to following the leader was a two-week camping excursion ranging from Bear's Lodge in Northeast Wyoming down to Chaco Canyon in Northwest New Mexico via Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks. It was while...

What has the shift from community to commodity, from partner to slave wrought on us? Separation, loss, anxiety, ignorance. Isolation from the Mother that bore and provides for us. Loss of intimacy with plants and animals transitioning companionship to segregation. Anxiety as to how we will survive disconnected from the source of all known life. Ignorance of the Garden of Eden...

In the context of the late 1800s and early 1900s when Muir was alive, an era when Christianity had venomous claws deeply impaled in human consciousness, this was a radical, if not blasphemous, utterance. It was probably the most sacrilegious, with respect to Christianity, utterance until Edward Abbey burst onto the literary scene with the highly influential books, "Desert Solitaire" and...

I will harken back to the beginning, to the purest, holiest, healthiest time in a human's life, a timeframe that starts with the onset of curiosity and ends when we become judgmental, defined as quickly forming critical or harsh opinions in lieu of understanding the individual. It is one of the most impoverished forms of humanity, one that eschews curiosity. It is particularly vile when manife...