September 2004
Fitting In
Three beloved cats, one sand-painting ceremony, four pairs of blue-shag sandals
September 2004
When I visited New York City a year after the September 11 terrorist attack, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Ground Zero — not after learning that it had become the city’s number-one tourist attraction.
Sunbeams
Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.
Twenty-Eight Words That Could Change The World
Robert Hinkley’s Plan To Tame Corporate Power
We can’t solve the problem of corporate irresponsibility by imposing volumes of laws and regulations that try to restrain the system, because the system is designed not to be restrained. I believe the solution lies in redesigning the corporation itself to build in some self-restraint.
On The Bus
Stephen Elliott Trails The Candidates On The Road To The Nomination
Lieberman stayed out of the race until Gore had announced that he wouldn’t run. Now the man Lieberman considered his friend has gone on record as backing Howard Dean. Lieberman must feel like a plane overhead just cracked in half and dumped fifty tons of shit on his campaign bus. How does a person recover from that?
Three Short Essays
Driving across America the August before I stopped drinking, I found myself in Tennessee, taking note of that big look that trees get in the East at the end of summer: a line of them at the far end of a field, like blooms of dark green ink dropped into water.
Realism
For about ten months I worked at a radio-antenna factory in the tiny town of Hays, Kansas. The factory workforce was comprised mainly of the inexperienced, the handicapped, the socially discarded, the desperate, the just-out-of-jail, and the fallen-to-the-bottom-of-the-ladder, with a handful of cheerful, non-English-speaking Mexicans thrown in.
Dancing On Jim Morrison’s Grave
Before leaving, I had vowed I would not go looking for Jim Morrison’s grave. The idea of making such a pilgrimage at my age struck me as vaguely ridiculous. Yet there I was, on my last morning in Paris, wandering mapless in the sprawling necropolis, looking for the tombstone of a singer I had barely thought of in almost thirty years.
The Rat
“Rat check,” my father would say when he came home from work. And we would run to the various traps to see if we’d caught the rat. We slept lightly, each hoping and fearing that we would hear the slam of the trap in the night and be the one to go running with the news that the rat at last was dead. But we found nothing, heard nothing.
