It seems I got to be a geezer awful fast.
Like Teddy Daniels, a former candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant, who is prominently featured in a series of doomsday, deep-fake ads on Facebook and Youtube.
I could call up any large chain store in a city and talk to someone without being told to call corporate ownership on the other side of the country.
As the poet Theodore Roethke once wrote: “In a dark time the eye begins to see…”
I have not written much in this space about my mother.
“Learn a new language and get a new soul.”
I have said and done many things of which I am not proud. That is, I am no golden bird cheeping about human frailties from some high branch of superhuman understanding.
That’s what happens whenever I hear the opening notes of Bruce Springsteen’s wonderful “My Hometown.”
Of course there’s irony here in that LinkedIn is asking writers — who, after all, make their living by writing — to help “educate” a technology that would automate their jobs.
I have always considered it a strength, not a weakness, to consult with people with whom we vehemently disagree.
I can’t shake the conviction that a sense of perpetual aggrievement is one of the key components of the engine driving our national estrangement.
I was curious. I had to know what was true. So I set out to educate myself.
Perhaps my brain injected a bit of humor to cover the shock. But I felt the gut punch.
Cartoon by Frank Shiers
Here are other songs I’ve heard over the years that have had this effect on me.
State lawmakers return Jan. 8 to Olympia.
I have been thinking about phrases that we use without considering what they actually imply down deep, or whether they are necessary at all.
Like many of you, I have a wish list for the coming year.
Cartoon by Frank Shiers.
I have always been fascinated by the titles we Americans have bestowed on our towns and cities over time.
