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Last Year’s Poverty Was Not Enough

The day hadn’t begun well, but it was just another day in a long line of mean, anxious hours. Time mashed in on her like a couple of hands folded hard in prayer.

Straight From The Mouth

I didn’t think I’d hear again from my grandmother’s second husband, Uncle Benny, and then he called one Wednesday afternoon, three years after my grandmother had left him. I was stacking money on my bed at the time — ones on the pillow, fives at the foot, and tens in the middle where I could see them easiest.

Poor And Poorer

Growing Up In The Projects

The endless rows of cramped units were designed to house the maximum number of people in the smallest, most underdeveloped side of town. Most families were black. There were only two categories — the poor but not yet without hope, and the poor without any hope.

The Seduction Of Consciousness

We don’t have a “drug” problem. We have never had a “drug” problem. We will not have a “virtual reality” problem. Past, present, and future, we have a consciousness problem — today compounded by the fact that it happens to be occurring in a Neanderthal political landscape.

The Myth Of Therapy

An Interview With James Hillman

What one feels is very important, but how do we connect therapy’s concerns about feeling with the disorder of the world, especially the political world? As this preoccupation with feeling has grown, our sense of political engagement has dropped off. How does therapy make the connection between the exploration and refinement of feeling, which is its job, and the political world — which it doesn’t think is its job?

Trying To Quit

Show me someone more ridiculous than a jogger smoking. I can do five miles on the track, but only with cigarettes. Show me someone more dexterous and adroit than a swimmer on her back, floating, sucking on a cigarette like a submarine. If I am conscious, I am smoking.

Addictions

Tetris, freebase, house plants

Renee

This was it — the cool, very weird thing I had been hoping for. I was about to go to a strip joint with a Pentecostal Christian mentally ill recovering alcoholic young lady. These are the moments I live for.

Sunbeams

Heaven and Hell are in the present moment, and we are either in Heaven or Hell as we live out our lives each day.

Charles Scot Giles

Sharing History, With Rufus

The first time I saw Rufus was in 1967 when she was just a puppy. She was actually just a dark waggle on the end of a leash in the hands of my friend Jerry. He and his new girlfriend, Dolores, were walking Rufus, their new pal, around the quad at Wake Forest. I don’t remember how they acquired Rufus but it had something to do with getting stoned.