Does anybody else out there feel like a fraud? I suppose I was okay up until the second grade or thereabouts. They taught me to read and I read. Miss Gamon thought that maybe I should be double promoted from the first grade.
These days I don't do much of anything and I'm pretty good at it.
In between I've been asked over and over, "What do you do?"
I've passed myself off as a writer, a musician, an adult, a realtor, a hippie, a geographer, a promoter. I always look down and my palms start to sweat no matter my answer.
All I can tell you is that if I were a dog, I would be a mutt. My only aspiration would be to be called a good boy.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Maybe it's survivor's guilt. As I watch, along with you, the world unravelling, led sensationally by the USA, on the internet, I worry about the victims. The poor. The sick and the uninsured. The immigrants and the unemployed. The under-employed. I feel like I left just as the bottom of decency and compassion was dropping out.
For a man who was born in Alabama during the Segregation Forever era and came of age during the Viet Nam war times, nothing about this heartache is new. Of course more of the bullies have nuclear weapons now and we laugh at the quaint memories of "duck and cover."
We had rock'n'roll then.
What's gonna get us through these times? We could use some heroes.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
The mind, mine at least, creates melodrama when left unsupervised for too long. Probably some evolutionary device to keep us from lounging in the middle of the road, thinking good, dirty thoughts.
Now, somehow, I've found paradise on a windy rock sticking up in the middle of the English Channel. One of the best parts of this adventure is the discovery that my neighbours, here in Portland, are aware that we're in the best place. I'm a geographer, for heaven's sake. I don't take this for granted.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Turns out the universe is as simple or as intricate as you think it is. It's all just stuff. Trees are falling in the forest with no-one around all the time. The secret, if you can call it a secret, is to enjoy it.
If the rules are made by bad guys, do you disregard them? Sorta' makes you an outlaw, doesn't it?
We all know that we shouldn't judge. We all judge.
If you can make someone happy while enjoying life, yourself, you're successful, in my book.
Spread some joy, give some love. Give some more. Don't worry much about what they think. They don't know any more about it than you do.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Do you have to taste bitter to appreciate sweet? The further along the road I get, the more obvious it seems that there is no divine plan. Some of us only touch the hot stove once. There has to be a beginning, of course, and there's always that darn end. Neither money nor luck can change that.
If there's a purpose, it surely must be pleasure. Yours and everybody else's, too.
Adopt a dog. Fall in love. Sing with the birds.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
You have to be something of an optimist, I suppose, to be much of an anarchist. Now, I'm one who believes that there are a lot more good folks on the planet than rascals. The truly rotten ones, however, aren't often satisfied with taking more than their share. They tend to devote effort and energy towards depriving the riffraff, that's us, of the basic necessities to sustain dignity, sometimes life, itself.
If Mr. Bezos would pay his employees a living wage, he might save a few bucks on bodyguards. Where's the fun in that, though.
Seems to me that a part of the problem, if we can agree that it's a problem, is that those scumbags are only interested in impressing those other scumbags. Now that intelligence, education and honesty are ridiculed, we're working on putting the word "empathy" in that part of the dictionary where we've managed to put "liberal" and "socialist" and "woke." Words merely mean what those guys say they mean, never mind what you learned in school. Turns out alternative definitions are like alternative facts.
If the good guys have a bomb and the bad guys have a bomb, how do you suppose that's ever gonna work out?
Oh, I'm still betting on the decent folks, just not in the short run.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
