Fat Man’s replica, the big death’s first egg, is polished and buffed like a Jemez pot, and white. Ceiling white, though, not the white of a Jemez pot, not the white made from a special place in the surrounding earth. Little Boy is well named, inflated younger brother, olive as only the Army could interpret […]
Toward the end of the eighties, My closest, oldest friend Richard Bohle was informed he had lung cancer. I don’t know if the docs told him it was terminal, but he figured it was, and set about getting rid of as much stuff as he could and preparing to make his departure as easy for
“‘It suddenly struck me the other day,’ continued Bernard, ‘that it might be possible to be an adult all the time.’” (Aldous Huxley, 94) In 1963 when I was an undergraduate at a midwestern university, a famous poet (at that time such a thing still existed) was spending a year on campus as Poet in
Oh Brave New World That Has Such Cornholes in It Read More »
“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” (Hemingway 153) Hemingway’s Jake Barnes was quite
Shawn Green: the Zen Pragmatist at the Plate Read More »
When things go sideways, as they always do – When life’s like a steak that’s too tough to chew, When you lack the legs to make the jump And, try as you might, can’t get over the hump, And everyone calls you to show True Grit – Do what intelligent dogs do: quit. If you’re
Quit by Zigmund A. Guest Read More »
Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction. Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. – Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions When Vonnegut offered that diagnosis in
II Now It Can Be Told Read More »