There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Mark Twain & others It’s interesting to me how we as human beings can feel better about numbers depending on how they’re framed or presented. How we like to believe that we can somehow cheat math and get the better of a situation by …
Month: August 2020
Early this morning, I was sitting on my porch sipping tea and writing in my journal. Normally, I’d make some sort of crack about moving into a nursing home next week, but I’ll try to be somewhat serious for a moment. What I found myself doing was writing down what it felt like in that …
I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. That title from a 2017 HuffPost article goes through my mind an awful lot these days. Whether it’s trying to prevent more people dying from a virus or trying to prevent more people being shot by the police. If I’m …
The Friday Five is a list of things that I’m thankful for, inspired by, or have found interesting over the last week. #1 – Ibrahim Maalouf – S3NS … This listening recommendation came by way of a Tim Ferriss newsletter. Maalouf is a French-Lebanese trumpeter and composer that combines a variety of musical styles and …
It’s been over six months since starting my new social media policy and it seems like a decent time to examine how things have been going. In true 2020 form, I decided to make a major shift in some of my habits and was immediately smacked in the head by the flying turd that is …
There’s a school of thought that says a poem is never finished, it’s just resting. For most of my writing life, I haven’t had a traditional view of that since I seemed so allergic to editing that I should have an epi-pen at the ready. So most poems were finished immediately after they were typed …
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” Steve Jobs In spite of what it might look like here on this here interwebs …
There are times when I’ll have music on while writing. It can be a pleasant way to add a little life into the room, drown out whatever might be happening outside – a bit of functional white noise. Sometimes, the rhythm works its way into the poem itself and I find myself typing as fast …
In last week’s edition of Free Range Idiocy, Tim and I talked a bit about Kevin Smith’s retort to Martin Scorcese’s opinion comic book movies are “not cinema”. What I find most interesting is how Smith’s approach is something we could all learn from. Certainly there’s time to make a distinction between right and wrong, …
This year has given me a good grasp of what “aging in dog years” actually looks like. Last month feels like last year, March seems like it was a decade ago, and last year feels like it was the turn of the century. Back when this whole thing started, folks were having their Zoom Cocktail …