Midlife Meditation

Dear Red America, This is really hard to write. How about we start with the good things? Yes, that's it; remembering the good times makes everything feel better. Remember how thrilling it was when we first got together? We had something huge in common: big dreams of independence, founding a new republic, and we knew neither of us could do it solo. We needed each other. So we came together, hammered out some vows, and announced to the world that we were now in a relationship. We knew from the beginning that we were not the same, that we had to make allowance for differences, find ways to balance the power in the relationship. Some of the compromises seemed minor at the time: we of the Blue states had more people, and in a simple democracy, should've had more power; but you made it clear from the beginning that you were not willing to give up some of your more peculiar practices, and if we wanted this relationship to work, we had to concede power to you. T...

A first for this family. Somehow it came. To Scrooge, to the Grinch, and even to curmudgeonly me: Christmas came, and not a moment too soon. It's been a season, a year, a decade of growing ugliness, of good will becoming as endangered as summer ice in the Arctic. I could write of the ironic rightness of the way Americans have come to celebrate the birth of a poor child in a small Middle Eastern village, occupied by a global superpower, by spending billions of dollars on gewgaws and tchotchkes, screaming at each other over parking places at shopping malls, fighting tooth, nail, and bullet over perceived bargains and limited-availability toys, and how this so-very-American holiday has hegemonized so much of the rest of the world, drowning out far more appropriate traditions of generosity and piety--but I've done that. In fact, I've been doing that for most of my adult life. And I don't want to, because in some inexplicable, mysterious way, Christmas has gotten ...

Cover art depicting the Mule from a paperback edition of Foundation and Empire. “The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”  ―  Isaac Asimov ,  Foundation and Empire In 1973, Isaac Asimov changed my life. I was that most pitiful of adolescent types, a lonely nerd in search of a passion. I was mercilessly bullied by my seventh grade peers, had no close friends, and had only recently lost my interest in playing with action figures, but had yet to find anything to take the place of them. I had a knack for writing and some modest musical talent, but neither of these pursuits had become a passion for me yet. My hatred for sports (it was always pre-empting my favorite Saturday morning cartoons) meant I had little in common with other boys my age. As a whole, then, my life was...

A stunt, not a joke: Donald Trump serves up some verbal abuse prior to shaving the head of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, 2007. "When they go low, we go high." --Michelle Obama, July 26, 2016 Unfortunately, in a cage match, going high means exposing your soft underbelly. We've all heard and read it so many times in the last six weeks it's getting tiresome: we're grief stricken, horrified, furious, depressed, terrified at what the next four years will do to our nation and our world. How did this happen? Are the American people really that stupid? Is there any way to reverse it? Whose fault is it? Why, why, why, why, why? There are plenty of answers to that question. We can roll out tired tropes about voter suppression, the rural bias of the electoral college, FBI collusion, Russian influence, inadequate outreach to the working class and evangelicals, the cyclical longing of the American people for change, and on and on and on. But there's another, more si...

It's a divide as old as civilization. A town mouse paid a visit to her country cousin, who served her a traditional country dinner. The city mouse turned up her nose at the humble cuisine, telling her cousin, "You should come visit me in town. You'd be blown away by how rich the food is." The country mouse took her up on the offer, and found that the food was every bit as delicious as her cousin had promised. Of course, this being a town, there were dogs roaming the streets, one of which chased the mice into a hole. "The hell with this!" said the country mouse. "No fancy city food is worth becoming  a meal for one of those monsters!" And with that, she headed for home. Aesop told the story 2600 years ago, but he drew on traditions already ancient in his time. Humans first began to practice agriculture 12,000 years ago. It took another 6000 years for villages to evolve into the first cities. At every stage in the process, there must have been...

Too soon! As in so many other things, Donald Trump has defined the impending era for us via Twitter. Trump was commenting on an incident involving an American drone submarine being impounded by the Chinese navy. He called it "unpresidented." The tweet was later corrected to read "unprecedented," and there's at least a chance Trump knew that was the correct word, and just slipped up and used a nonexistent homophone instead, something I've done myself in the heat of passioante writing (both with a keyboard and a pen). Merriam Webster spun it into a "not" joke with its own tweet, saying "unpresidented" was NOT the word of the day, as that honor was reserved for the word "huh." Social media seized on the neologism, and it's been everywhere, as the nation tries to come to grips with what's going to happen on January 20. The scrambling to correct the Freudian slip--and the ironic glee with which it's been welcom...

One hour into my commute, I learned it had barely begun. Strangely enough, I foresaw this in a dream. In the dream, I was on I-5, headed south from downtown. For the first minute, it looked like I had the highway to myself. Then I saw the brake lights: traffic was completely stopped. I consulted my phone, looking for an alternate route, and saw something a lot like this: Every road, whether highway, byway, or surface road was dark red. There was no way for me to get home: the entire city was gridlocked. Oddly, there was no snow in the dream, which then morphed to me having dinner with the Trump family. Their servants were squirting beverages into their mouths from squeeze bottles, because apparently they'd never had to learn to use drinking glasses. There were two trays of food on the table, and both were beef, so I was going hungry. It didn't bother them at all that they were snubbing their dinner guest: after all, they'd won the election without the help...

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.--Albert Camus It's still there. I turned on the patio light to check, and at 6:30 a.m., December 11, 2016, after a snow storm with 50 mile an hour winds, followed by freezing rain, a thaw, and now more heavy rain, the single blossom is still there, vibrantly orange, a small defiant splash of color in a time of deep greyness. It can't last forever. Eventually, wind, rain, and chill will cause the rose to wilt, its color to fade, its petals to drop. Like all the other roses in the planter, it will be tucked in for the winter, done with this stubborn display of resistance to the darkest time of the year. Eight weeks from now, I'll cut the roses back, preparing them for their spring growth spurt, and starting in May, they...

Unfortunately, it's actually "Yep." I thought I'd said all I needed to about how we're stuck with Donald Trump in the same way a public school teacher has no choice but to teach every student who comes through the classroom door: they're all my students, for as long as I'm at this school and they're attending it. I really thought that was a frame of reference I could apply to the unpleasantness of having this awful man become the leader of my country. Then I read that  Dylann Roof's mother had a heart attack at his trial. The name "Dylann Roof" may not immediately ring a bell, so here's a quick review: on June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Bible study. At the end of the gathering, as the participants stood to pray, he took out a gun and killed nine of them. He did so for one simple, powerful reason: to incite a race war. All the victims were Black, an...

This never happened. Did I get your attention? Are you furious? Concerned about the state of my immortal soul? Listening for the crack of thunder as God smites me with a lightning bolt? Or are you feeling suddenly insecure, worried I may be about to cast doubt on some of the truths that keep you sane? Or are there things you've been seeing and hearing about all your life, but never explored, and you'd like some help figuring them out? If you answered yes to any of those questions: good. That's exactly where I want you to be. Because the story I'm about to tell you is one of the most significant in the history of Western civilization, and how you interpret it will absolutely determine how you live through the Trump Era. Let's start with the truth: roughly two millennia ago, a baby was born to a Jewish couple somewhere in the Middle East. They named him Yeshua, a fairly common name, and raised him in their home town of Nazareth. As an adult, he became a...