Writer | Journalist | Storyteller
In the movie A Beautiful Mind, John Nash gives his Noble Prize speech and explains that despite all his mathematical searching, and throughout his struggle mental illness, it was love that made life worth living. Love was the answer to the question. “I’ve always believed in numbers,” he says, “and the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, ‘What truly is logic? Who decides reason?’ My quest has taken me through the physical, the...
The problem I have with the elf on your shelf is that it is a blatant attempt to teach children to be good, when I think the central message of Christianity, and therefore presumably the message of Christmas, is to be kind. Be kind. That’s the message of love that Christianity proclaims it instills, and not the idea of being beholden to the Law. The Old Testament and the Judaic tradition of living under the law, was supposedly altered permanently with the birth and death of Jesus Christ, the...
I have never been all that enthusiastic on traditional New Year’s resolutions, by which I mean I have never once in my life resolved to do anything particularly new or different just because the calendar flipped from one year to the next. I do not like being told what to do, and am especially resistant to being told when to do it, so coming up with a list of things I will or will not do in the coming year, on the eve of said year, seems fundamentally absurd and pointless and entirely against my...
As America remains hopelessly polarized in its endless culture war, it has become abundantly clear that there is little personal advantage in taking sides, as there is nothing to win here. There was a time when mankind believed wars could be won. Two armies would meet on a battlefield, and proceed to kill each other in an organized fashion until one side or the other determined that they’d suffered more than they had initially hoped and withdrew from the fight. Whoever was left standing was the...
There is a downside to allowing your world to grow small, but it’s not what you think it is. You can maintain a limited existence even while searching far and wide. You can explore the world while living inside a prison cell that measures eight inches across from ear to ear. You can find yourself alone, surrounded by people, or overwhelmed by stimuli, sitting still in the dark. I myself am a romantic. But not a hopeless one, and it is hope that has turned out to be the problem for me...
When we are young, we look forward to holidays with unbridled excitement because they are so full of possibility. But as we age, we turn our attention to the past, to memories of a life already spent. We wax poetic about ancient meals, and conversations with people no longer living. We remember the good times. But memory, like time itself, is a relative thing. Memory is a peculiar aspect of human existence. We constantly remember things that didn’t happen, forget the things that really...
When you buy a ticket to the circus, you expect to see some crazy shit, but what you don’t expect is for the circus to burst into your living room and start getting it on right in front of you. There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock of watching a clown go down on your mother-in-law, or for the lion tamer to stick his head in your uncle’s mouth while your cousin reads passages from Atlas Shrugged out loud. As a wise woman once said on the six o’clock news, “Ain’t nobody got time for...
I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to a point where I think I look better unclothed than I do clothed. For all intents and purposes that ship has sailed and probably didn’t set off anytime recently either. It was probably somewhere around my mid-twenties and even then I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it myself although I do seem to remember a coterie of willing companions who must have been. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.Joseph Roux But it’s not just about being physically or...
Autumn is a smell: woodsmoke, decaying leaves and cinnamon. It’s a color palette too: oranges, reds and browns. The color of the earth on fire. The air has an entirely different quality with a crisp snap in your nose and the way the low light glows now rather than shimmers, the sun never getting so very high. The tastes are no longer the green bite of spring shoots, or the sugary sweetness of summer corn, but the savory, earthy, more subtle flavors of mushrooms, root vegetables and gourds...
It’s a story that’s been told and told again in our family. I think we tell it because it so accurately reflects who we are as a people in a way that trying to describe our little clan could never do. It’s a symbol of our love, arrogance, ego and empathy, all rolled into one. My Aunt Opal was at the Department store with her daughter. There were in the shoe department, buying new shoes, which is always a big occasion, but which I imagine was an even bigger deal back then. This would have been...
Writer | Journalist | Storyteller
