Lessons From The Garden

I am continually amazed that a culture who values inspirational quotes so highly could have created something so vile and intolerant as a twitter mob. That social bubble seems to force us all to retreat into bubbles having been forced out of one, or sucked into another. These bubbles are like the Garden of Eden. Inside […]

Half and Half

My parents met at a race riot. On opposite sides. My mom, the Hispanic beauty queen, was on the side trying to get the LaRaza flag raised on her campus in East LA. My dad, the Vietnam vet (recently returned), was on the side of the MP’s, trying to keep order. He asked her to […]

Experience makes you sweeter

The sweetest juice doesn’t come from the youngest or the freshest fruit, it doesn’t come from fruit that refuses to fall off the tree; it comes from the fruit that has fallen to the ground, been tumbled about and looks like it’s about to explode with age. Remember that. — swampfaye (@swampfaye) May 16, 2018 […]

A Bard’s Privilege

A man can lie, cheat and steal, He can do everything wrong. He can wound every friend he has, As long as he does it with a song. A woman can sin and fall, For all the worst things can long, She can be as lustful as a man, As long as she does it […]

Cinderella’s post wedding dilemma

Dear Diary, Sometimes t’s really hard being married to Prince Charming. I think it was easier to live in the attic with the mice, the three blind ones… Is this what it’s like being rich? You’d think they’d enjoy it more, but they are so uptight about it that they don’t want ME to enjoy […]

Surviving Abuse

Please ignore this post if you want to avoid political issues: Once upon a time, not so long ago as it now seems, I was in an abusive relationship. What I saw then, I see now in Washington. Before I had committed to this relationship, I thought, quite naively that with nothing but hard work […]

Losing the Language

Why are we so apathetic? We hear the media constantly shouting out doom !Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! that we turn off the moment anyone says anything that should be preceded or followed with an exclamation mark. When a political debate about who should pay for birth control is ‘a war on women,’ but stoning […]

The Pride Cycle

A long time ago, I recognized a pattern. Maybe I recognized it because I was taught it in Sunday School, but it should be pretty evident for those who have studied history. In Sunday School, they called it “The Pride Cycle.” Historians would call it they cycle of civilization, or some such (like such as). […]

American Values — Good Works (viendo el bien que ustedes hacen)

I asked my kids what they thought the most important American Value was, trying to get a feel for what kids thought about these sort of things, and they both gave me the same answer: Good Works, BUT… They both meant something different by it. So I will address both in this post: When my […]

Name Recognition

One of the most annoying familiar traits of certain genre music is the incessant need habit of speaking their name at the beginning of a song. Listen to an intro of a modern hip-hop song and when you are just getting into the riff and beat, someone will inevitably drop the names of the artists […]