Musings of a Middle Aged Man

An aspect of bird life I greatly admire, besides the ability to take wing and view Earth from on high, is that they are free to explore wherever their hearts desire, bounded only by the food they prefer to ingest. If a bird chooses to expand their palette, they can dwell virtually unbounded. Some, like the Arctic Tern, use their freedom to round-trip close to 60 thousand miles every year, while th...

It may be obvious, but I will say it anyway. Though writing is a solitary activity, it can not be done in isolation. All experiences, knowledge, genetics, and imagination contribute to the creation. Even the environment in which I write has an influence. It is as if the environment breathes ideas into my head, ideas seemingly lifted from the environment, from the thought energy emanating from anim...

It wasn't until years later that I learned Vulcans did have emotions. The intensity of their emotions resulted in irrational action, so the society, guided by elders, opted to subjugate their emotions to pure logic. Just knowing a being like Mr. Spock could exist gave me hope that a rational existence could be the hallmark of a superior humanity and a kinder, gentler society. Can you say, retu...

Like the inward turning Buddhists, I was raised in a large metropolis. Unlike the Buddhists who grew up in what was pretty much a monoculture, the area I was raised was populated with people of all colors, shapes, and sizes. I am currently living in a densely packed city with multi-story homes built so close together, it is pert near possible to run from roof to roof...if the roofs were not pitche...

As much as I appreciate the laws of physics and relish in precise mathematical concepts and believe society should adhere to generalized guidelines, I am a huge fan of breaking rules, especially when they are capricious, arbitrary, and not uniformly applied. I am saying this as a former soccer referee assigned the authority to judge and mete out punishment, up to and including execution, upon brea...

One of the greatest evils foisted upon growing children is the Christian fixation on the mythical Satan used to terrorize the tender-aged with the teaching that they will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire for not kowtowing to the tenets laid out in the Bible. Childhood, in the modern day, is supposed to be a carefree time of growth through exploration, not a season to suffer night terrors because...

Imagine, if you can, a world where bits of colored cloth did not rile people up to commit acts of war or prop up genocidal campaigns aimed at eradicating the undesirables. A world where allegiance was not given to nation states, but instead to Earth herself. No borders. No countries. Devotion instead to the apodictic rock beneath our feet and the entirety of beings calling our big rock home. Rathe...

It does not help that the wanna be king turd and his horrid band of jesters are doing everything in their collective power to establish policies normalizing hate against anyone who does not conform to the narrowly construed definition of a true American patriot - white, protestant, male and begrudgingly female if they keep to their place in the hierarchy, with at least three generation of parents...

Our self-aggrandizing tendency to view ourselves with respect to our best days and others according to their worst moments is self-serving bias taken to an extreme. It is frequently employed because their cognitive dissonance needs prevent them from thinking rationally. Cognitive Dissonance also comes into play when we judge ourselves by our intentions, irrespective of our actions, and others by t...

There are many animal traits I admire to the point of envy. The acute vision to see a tiny rodent from so high in the blue, the falcon appears a mere speck. The agility to change direction so quickly it sends a pursuing predator tumbling ass over tea kettle. The twitch muscles enabling a hunting feline to strike five times in the blink of a human eye. Hearing that can detect the sound of a pine ne...

There is a singular Navajo word, Hózhǫ́, that encompasses engulfment in beauty that also includes immersion in balance, harmony, wellness, adaptability, and gratitude. The nuances are complex and varied with subtle connotations all pointing toward personal peace and harmonious societal coexistence. There is no single English word with a one-to-one correlation in meaning thus the listed words are n...

Complete transparency. I was a nightmare growing up. A stubborn, mean, self-centered person approaching the world with a confrontational attitude toward anyone who would get in my way. I was regularly a punch first and ask questions later philosopher. The word sorry was not in my lexicon and was only uttered under threat of punishment. Despite my arrogance, my verbal violence, my overall negative...

Any doubts the Bible is not misogynistic are dispelled by the third chapter in the first book when Eve ate from the tree and "suffered" her eyes being opened to reality. The story implies open eyes are a bad thing, an inescapable curse. Vision is only a bad thing if the chattel is owned rather than a partner in equal standing and can help the enslaved understand and long for freedom.

Given the opportunity or, if I had written it myself, a level of intelligent creativity that often eludes me, I would replace the word holy in the opening quote with the word sacred. True, the two words are often used interchangeably and frequently used as synonyms, however, there are subtleties altering each quote's personality.

The insidious aspects of groups come when the individual is seen as a cog in the system often filling roles that do not make use of their unique interests, skills, and abilities. Even worse, they frequently succumb to groupthink, a dehumanizing state where individual opinions are shunned placing the non-compliant thinker in danger of being ostracized.

There are a couple of religious leaders I begrudgingly admire despite their association with the cults of organized religion. Or, as Christopher Hitchens calls them and others of their ilk, the enemy. My admiration comes from a single utterance unique to each of them but are closely related in essence. The first of the leaders, Pope Francis, currently struggling to stave off his end of life, when...

I find it fascinating that words not only can be used to describe objects and fill in the gaps needed to understand action and non-action on a subject but also color entire society's attitudes toward the subject. Take, for example, the compound word wilderness. It is derived from the individual words wild, meaning savage coupled with doer, meaning beast. Together, they describe a savage place...

By general standards, at 4,434 unique posts, and counting, I am a prolific blogger. Of course, quantity does not necessarily equate with quality. At a mere average of 24 views per post, my offerings are barely a wart on the ass of influencership. Not that my goal is to achieve notoriety as an influencer. They tend to be entitled bottom feeders expecting the world to bow to their presence and showe...

rowing up, I recall watching a made-for-TV movie about two Irish boys, one Protestant and the other Catholic, plucked from the 'Troubles' plaguing Northern Ireland. They were sent to the US and housed, temporarily, with a US family. The twist? The sponsoring parents, a mother and father, were a Catholic and a Protestant living in harmony, well, as harmonious as any marriage can be. I was b...

The three most impactful events I've ever seen on television are the moon landing in 1969 magnificent for human ingenuity overcoming complex problems using nascent computer technology to set foot on the mysterious celestial body that has intrigued humanity (and animals and plants) since time's dawn. Next comes in 2001 when two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, including their subsequent...

The scary thing about cult members, zealots if you will, is they are able to twist any information, even if it is directly opposite their position, to prove their case by utilizing mental gyrations that defy all logic, including pretzel logic. Most of the time they appeal to the source of their information to prove their source, an alarming usage of circular logic a type of logical fallacy where t...

It feels as if my parents did a disservice to me and my five siblings when they filled us with buckets of no strings attached love. They loved us as unique individuals through thick and thin, come hell or high water, for better or worse, in good times and bad, and against all odds.

The challenge of empathy is, that if you don't have empathy for others, you lack the necessary empathic ability to realize you lack empathy. This enables you to commit unspeakable acts because you don't know or even care how the recipient of the acts feels. The terms to describe a person with an empathy deficit include sociopath, psychopath, and narcissist.

Diversity is necessary for any endeavor...another triggering Boomer topic who see DEI programs as giving jobs to lesser skilled minorities when it was instituted to overcome lesser qualified white male candidates being hired over better qualified minorities.

Personally, I can't fathom the mind that would shun languages or people simply because they are different. This closed mindset is anathema to learning and growth. And if we are not growing then we might as well be dead. There is little difference between the two.