One of the many challenging things about living with me, for the few who’ve made the attempt, is that I am something of a packrat. Hoarder is the term of art these days, although in its true sense, this term…
Category: The Long Tunnel
Watching (Mariners) Baseball is Bad for My (Mental) Health
I write here a lot about competitiveness. So much so, apparently, that I wrote two posts entitled “Winning and Losing” on this blog, both mostly about RUDU, both in 2010, two posts separated by That Summer. You can read them,…
Signs
I am looking around the room and there is a little mug half-full of orange juice and don’t even get me started on where the mug came from because it’s another memento that should have died in the fire, the…
From Here to There
She gets in the car and laughs. I confirm that it’s for Jimmy and she says yes and shakes her head in ongoing amusement. I ask her what and she says “He got it exactly right. Jimmy described you exactly.”…
Prevention and Cure
We live in a cure society. Not just because we have races for the cure and build awareness for cures and believe that eventually every malady we face will someday be cured. Also for those reasons, but not even primarily…
The Quest for Understanding
For most of my life, the prevailing presumption underlying my existence is that I was on a mission to be understood. More even than to be loved (though I of course see them as related), certainly more than to be…
Independence Day
“There was an exodus of birds in the trees because they didn’t know we were only pretending. And the people all looked up and looked pleased and the birds flew around like the whole world was ending. And I, I…
The Promise of Spring
(or: Today, It’s Next Year)
It’s fitting that baseball begins in spring. I’m not much of a spring person myself, having a penchant for difficult times in April and May. I was always with TS Eliot on the whole April question and I probably offer…
My Life with Yoga
“When I talk to people about sadness and depression, as I often do, one of my suggested strategies is really internalizing and absorbing good days and ‘banking’ them as antidotes against future storms of sadness. Not because they will make…
Senior Retreat and the Infinite Sadness
My image of God isn’t really an image at all. I think we’re all to an extent overly influenced by religious, Biblical, and societal depictions of the divine as a white-haired bearded father sitting on a cloud and looking vaguely…