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501 Minutes To Christ
Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago (I stuck his head into a snowbank until he promised to leave me alone) and a middle-aged fellow who drives around town shouting obscenities from a riding mower, there is not much happening here in Middlebury, Vermont.
August 2005
August 2005
After 9/11, I promised to stop demonizing our leaders. That’s what al-Qaeda does, and it’s just a matter of degree.
August 2005Captive Audience
Confessions Of A Book Junkie
Here in this high-desert penal colony, boredom is king, and although prison is not nearly as harrowing as it is made out to be in the media, simple pleasures are in short supply. Under these diminished circumstances, passing the time with a good book takes on new meaning. Books are cherished, hoarded, reread, traded, borrowed, begged for, and accumulated in any way possible.
August 2005
Driven By Desire
The first sharp pang of desire hit me in the parking lot of my daughter’s preschool. It was a cold winter day in North Carolina, and as I buckled my seat belt, another mother maneuvered her gleaming new Volvo station wagon into the space beside my 1992 Honda Civic. She smiled and gestured for me to roll down my window so we could talk.
June 2005
Crimes Against Democracy
Thom Hartmann On Voting Fraud And The Right-Wing Attack On The Middle Class
The unfortunate reality is that about 80 percent of the vote was either taken on or counted by computers that are programmed by private corporations, and these corporations say we have no business asking how they program their computers. These voting machines leave no paper trail. There’s no way to audit them. There’s no proof that if you push button A, the machine records A rather than B.
June 2005
March 2005
The reality of impermanence is hard to bear. Sometimes I try to shut it out; like everyone, I have my ways. But, paradoxically, I feel more alive, more grounded, when I acknowledge that I can’t know anything about the future. Anything. Tomorrow is a secret the world knows how to keep.
March 2005On 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?
September 2004
A Friend Of The Sun
From half a lifetime away, I saw an idealistic young man, hair down to his shoulders, standing on the street with a stack of magazines under his arm. He, too, was struggling to overcome his shyness as he tried to describe his new magazine to passersby. The afternoon light was fading, but he wasn’t ready to quit just yet. I imagined reaching across the years to shake his hand, to thank him for not letting shyness get the best of him, to encourage him to keep on.
June 2004The Wind Isn’t Depressed
Robert Bly Talks With Michael Ventura About Art, Madness, And The Joy Of Loss
Isn’t there a word for something like “the joy of disappearing”? Some people say that’s what a water drop feels when it disappears into the ocean or evaporates on the sidewalk in the sun. I’ve always been interested in joy, but the joy of disappearing . . . [His voice trails off.] There’s a joy in winning the race, and there’s a great joy in losing the race.
May 2004
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