The Two That Got Away

The week after Thanksgiving. . .

"So, you hear the one about the hunters?"

"No, tell me."

Two hunters walked into a bar. . ."

Teddy Roosevelt and the 1907 New York Herald

The first president to understand the importance of working class Americans was TR. No wonder he was adored by so many.

Here are two original cartoons from the 1907 New York Herald Newspaper.

This is the lighter side of politics. Yes, that's what I said and isn't it about time we all lightened up?

Good, now read and enjoy.








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Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina Rationing Health Care

Two months ago, my wife and I began health care coverage with Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina. The monthly payment was $499.00 for $5000.00 deductible on a 60/40 plan, which means after the deductible amount is met, they pay 60 we pay 40%.

Today, I received the pictured letter in the mail, notifying me our monthly payment amount would increase to $528.00, or about a 6% increase.

We have not used our Blue Cross Blue Shield health care, period. Not once for any reason.

Along with the increased monthly payment amount, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina will now be rationing MRI, MRA, CT, and PET procedures. Read the letter I've posted to learn more.

We need the public option to stop this. But do not count on South Carolina's U.S. Senators, or Republican Congressmen, they receive serious campaign contributions from the heath care industry.

Note this too:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina overcharged Medicare 6 million dollars to pay for executive pensions. This in one of the states with the highest number of uninsured, one of the worst overall health care systems in the country. However, BCBS CEO is one of the best-paid and financially compensated HMO executives in America.

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Fear is not Freedom

Fear is the mind killer, Frank Herbert wrote. However, fear is but half the equation of domination. The second half is hopelessness.

We saw, clearly demonstrated in the early years of this century, the ease with which fear and hopelessness saturates freedom.

The insane activities of a single man ignited another's drive for revenge, which bled into the thoughts of the people. Led by his fanatic need for retribution millions clamored around his cause, feeding on the fear he stoked to maintain the frenzy of the innocent.

The fervor rose in pitch until it permeated society through the multiple channels of media driven by online faces and spaces, bloggers, and cable network news. Discussions removed from civility, evolved into catastrophic verbal brawls and occasional physical confrontation.

The death of innocents, once a rare horror viewed with complete disbelief, became commonplace as parents killed not only each other, but also their entire families without cause it seemed, or any form of justification beyond that of fear and hopelessness.

As if this was not sufficient to satisfy, leaders twisted by the quest for apocalypse targeted the welfare of the less fortunate in contradiction to their religious teacher's words. Then, they flooded other lands with the quagmire of their venomous hatred of common decency.

Spiraling in the frenzy of fear's hatred, their followers attacked any person or idea they now believed with the conviction of the insane, affronted the concepts they allegedly upheld.

The welfare and health of all citizens no longer stood as a moral foundation of freedom, but instead, according to the few leaders now on platforms of greed and personal desire for fame, undermined the principles that so many combat heroes sacrificed lives and futures to create more than two centuries earlier and since.

Solutions no longer seem to exist, excluding the most radical, which dissect the diseased remains of a nation once held in the highest esteem by all others. When finished, discard, or allow secession to root out those leaders who will call their followers to lemming-like retreats on the rock-strewn shores of religious persecution.

Those leaders, thinking themselves elite aristocrats, noblemen, and princes, will gather armies to corral and control their followers once those drones declare their error and plead with outsiders for humane retreat.

Of course, there are alternatives, but none with fear and hopelessness interwoven through the fabric of order.

Acceptance and hope, like that which created democracy from the ashes of monarchy, and the voices of men and women who understand and uphold equality and morality are what is needed now.

Yet, I now wonder if this society can be rescued from the damage severing the arteries of peaceful dialogue. A few men with wealth and power created a tidal wave, and like any tsunami, the waters of misunderstanding mindlessly roil and churn, swallowing the good and evil together.

I am afraid that the future holds only division, since the two sides now represented in town hall meetings do not care to find common ground. Each seeks the higher level, the path most walked on rather than the trail trod by those who listen to the beat of a distant, and it seems forgotten drummer. As they do, the least among us die and starve, which is the ultimate demise of democracy and freedom.
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A Soldier's Bond

When I walked into his room, I knew he was dying. His face looked gaunt, as if the muscles that once pulled a frown, and parted a smile chased by laughter had dried up. Yet, he managed a weak smile when he saw me in uniform.

As I approached the side of his bed, I smelled his death as if it clung to the air around him like an apparition, patiently awaiting its final embrace. The scent of it was different from combat death. In war, death is liquid red, raw flesh, shattered bone. It smelled as if life lingered, the passing soul shocked by the awareness that twenty was the totality of its years.

He spoke softly, greeted me, and sounded as if he truly felt happy I survived something I was not sure I cared to have survived.

Survival is not living, I wanted to tell him, but he would not have understood. On the other hand, if he had, he might have misconstrued my intent.

I took his frail hand, grasped it expecting the strength it once revealed, and found him unable to grip my fingers. When I was a boy, he would act as if he planned to crush my hand, squeezing enough to water my eyes. As a master carpenter, he wielded a hammer, and I watched in awe as he drove sixteen-penny nails into two by fours with three blows.

We spoke, innocuous subjects avoiding the past. While we did, my mind wandered. Two weeks earlier, I slept in a combat zone, discussed killing the enemy with the appreciation only a soldier might comprehend. Them or us, we knew. They used the cover of night, falling rain, and boldness to assault our sandbag lined shelters.

Gunfire, artillery rounds roared at 3a.m. like locomotives racing fifty feet overhead. The heated rounds ignited air molecules as they forced their bulk along a path destined to terminate fifteen or more lives.

Since I ordered the attack, I listed with headphones to the sound of incoming, heard the heated rounds whistling to the earth as if it was a movie. They exploded over the electronic sensors planted on an enemy infiltration trail through the jungle blasting the voices I had heard minutes earlier while they talked and laughed, the voices that alerted me that the enemy moved in our direction.

I listened to them die, died with them, roughly removed the headphones and realized I could no longer see the world I knew that afternoon. Nature's darkness quivered around me, the room's light, too, seemed to fade. With a shock-steadied hand, I lit a cigarette, stared into the flame, wondered why it did not extinguish when I blew on it.

His weak fingers found strength enough to close on mine as if even though he was dying, he understood the place I had just visited. I looked into his northern German blue eyes; saw him studying me with a wisdom I once wished I might share with a man from his generation.

Now, his words did not form, but then I no longer needed them. What flowed silently between us felt stronger, like a bond given from an older man to a younger man as had been done for a thousand generations. Warriors walked the same path, through the same history, and when we glanced over our shoulders, saw those who strode before us. The trail was a long narrow corridor of time strewn with the fallen.

He did not know, that I at twenty-one knew I was older than he was, at seventy-five.

Facing death in combat left me indifferent to death outside of the battlefield. I struggled to move into a civilian life, and never again spent time with him that passed more than a casual greeting.

He died three weeks to the day after I returned home, six or more months beyond the time his doctor told him he had left to live.

And, I mourn him still.
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Spider and Snake

None shall know
of the zephyr’s passage
or the secret story
its passing foretells,
it drifts through ancient rafters
rustling webs among the eaves
awakening a lazy brown spider
at the center of her tattered web,
legs flexing
fluid spinning
she dances in preparation
for the coming generation.

This homespun globe spirals
into the sun
with a lamb upon a spit
once tender flesh crackles
above glowing embers,
while the hungry sit and watch
their tired tongues flickering
in the desert sun
their stretched bodies slither and writhe
sliding over crystalline sand
as they flee the unforgiving.

Yet that glowing global ember
grows even larger
until it slowly settles in the sea
orange light spilling
drifting through the rafters
through cracks in the walls,
and the brown spider
hunger now abated
curling her legs beneath her
patiently awaits the next zephyr.

If the Past Held the Future

If I strolled along the crest of hill overlooking the sand dunes hiding the beach from view, you would not see my passing. Yet, if I walked where you saw me as you had long in the past, you would not know me. Memories are cellophane wrappers carefully applied to preserve what we experienced.

They rattle when we touch them, as if in warning, telling us that if we peel away their protection, what we discover once exposed to the light of present day might not reveal the knowledge we anticipated so anxiously.

Alternatively, if knowledge was not our desire, but a comparison between then and now, we might learn that what we left behind was a tenuous crystal egg of time. Within it lies trapped the fragile innocence of youth we then believed filled with the wisdom reserved for those who lived long enough to understand the true definition of tolerance, upon, which wisdom roots itself most securely.

Moreover, if we sought fondness along with those echoing whispered promises of joy and forever, we might discover that promises were a moment's gift, and forever ended a moment later.

Haunted by the why of yesterday, we might learn that the why of today is but the precursor. Perhaps every why goes unanswered when definition is proven unnecessary. Asking may be a delay, but not a query.

The sand across the top of the dunes swirled under a stiff breeze's persuasion, rattling across my feet as I moved forward. I will not walk where you might see me. I do not want to see you. Let the rustling cellophane of memory fade as a hawk's feathers shivering the air do, when he drops to strike his prey.
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Returning from War

Landing at New York's JFK airport felt normal enough. I had flown several times over the span of the previous two years. Before then, I never stepped foot aboard an airplane.

Required to wear my dress uniform, despite my formal discharge from active duty, was not bothersome. Although I'd heard of returning soldiers being spit on, cursed as baby killers, threatened too, I felt no shame for my actions. Because of that, I'd spent enough time at the PX buying every ribbon, braid, and medal I'd earned and wore them proudly as if they might shield me from something unanticipated.

I suppose, I wanted to make my WWII father proud of his only son, maybe even a little envious since the award I felt most proud of was awarded only to infantrymen who saw actual combat. Dodging bullets, or squirming in the mud while rounds hissed the air overhead. Our enemy used red tracers. Every third one lit up like Satan's saliva. Lift your head two, three inches and die.

Of course, we were not always face down in the mud. Often we gave better than we got. My greatest accomplishment, I knew as I walked along the concourse returning to life as a civilian, was that I lived to do it. The heroes did not walk, were carried under the drapery of the Stars and Stripes.

Clearly, I recall standing at the top of that last flight of steps and seeing my entire family below watching for me. At first, they did not see me. Then, my mother did and all of them did.

I also recall how I felt. Emotionless. I expected to feel joyous, wanted to feel exuberant. Even the smile that moved my mouth, failed my eyes. I looked down a flight of steps and saw strangers and I did not understand why.

There was something very wrong. Not a thing I could see really. Everyone appeared to be the same as they had looked a year earlier.

As if standing outside myself, I watched our interaction, felt myself doing the expected, heard myself speaking the proper words, but that cold calculation of the survivor witnessed this return to life without touching its warmth. Something had died within me and until that moment, I had not missed it and by then, I knew it was too late to regain it.

Perhaps my family and later my friends had anticipated actions or reactions from me that were not forthcoming. Or what they saw of me was obviously not who I'd been before joining the Army.

I did not know, but knew some impenetrable barrier erected itself between us. That's not to say they treated me differently, but yet pulled inward as if wondering who returned in my shoes.

A worm had hatched deep inside me in dark recesses where once streamers of happiness took root to radiate out in uncontrolled laughter. Childhood memories and the black footprints of their passing into oblivion absorbed more than light. I resided in a place where two of me lived.

Days into weeks, and I discarded old friends, my old employer, old girlfriend, found new people who never knew me before an M16 became my closest friend, a belt of ammunition suspended my ego.

Waking me unexpectedly proved threatening as combat wariness drove me to reach for my weapon, fight without if needed.

Dreams drove tomorrow into the trenches of yesterday's deaths. The sound of helicopters raised goose bumps as fear and readiness drilled hot pulses of adrenaline through me. I can recall falling to the floor at mealtime when someone dropped a plate and the noise explosively filled my mind with fight or flight.

The worm in my head demanded more than I had to give, and soon the only solution was attempting to drown the bastard. At first, it was beer, then whiskey, then drugs, and back to alcohol. Sleep rode waves of liquid oblivion. On the flipside, rode shimmering flames of rage.

I feared owning a gun and drove my car fast enough to rattle every loose bolt. My music was loud, insulting, ripping apart the layers of society that dared approach me.

Yet, most people who knew me never saw what I experienced, never knew of my extreme anger, the need to run, to crawl into those dark recesses, and dig archaeologically for a past that could never again exist.

Ten years. I spent ten years living as a ghost. I learned to co-exist and formed true friendships, but always the hand on my back drove me relentlessly off the path and deeper into a forest without sunlight.

Finally, I awoke in a city nearly on the opposite side on the continent. Physical pain crippled me. Crawling to the bathroom, I wept for the first time. I wept for what I'd done in war. I wept for release, wept for forgiveness, wept for the everlasting embrace of death, or the opportunity to finally, live a true life.

Begging a God I felt sure turned His back on me the first time I raised a weapon, aimed, and pulled the trigger with the intention of killing an unknown man or woman, something changed.

A spark lit the dark recesses, where childhood dreams hid under a low small bed with sailboats on the blanket, and small toy car waiting where I might reach them when moonlight woke me in the middle of the night to witness the wonders that lay entwined by billions of stars.

Hope peeled away a first onionskin layer of pain. I prayed then, feeling God's gentle and encouraging touch maybe for the first time in my life. I promised to give up using chemicals that numbed, drown, and muffled my emotions. Promised to walk whatever path He laid before me without reaching for false assistance; walk it without questioning its destination and attempting to fulfill the deeds passed to me along the way.

The pain that crippled me lifted, and I fled to the nearest emergency room. When I returned to my dreadful underground apartment, which had matched the place I lived in my mind, I did the unthinkable. I poured out six bottles of beer, and never touched one for any reason since. Promise kept.

Yet, I cannot say that the dark recesses glow only with embers of past joy, and hope for the future. The memories of war weigh like cast iron chains, and require serious effort to lift and move them at 2 a.m. An effort that those I love ease with their love, and the path lies open, fogged in by occasional doubt, but clear enough for the next step.
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Who is afraid of L Ron Hubbard?

What is it about Scientology that frightens people? Especially, it seems certain Frenchmen, the Catholic Church and assorted Christian denominations.

Do they honestly believe that Scientologists want to destroy the Christian faith or the world?

After centuries of rumors and historical fact left in the wake of the Vatican and its henchmen, one might think Catholics, especially in France -- think 14th century French Inquisition -- would want to avoid closer scrutiny.

Perhaps this all sounds simplistic, but I am making a simple point. If Christians desire to eliminate every philosophy that might contradict their own religious teachings, they should start with the mirror.

Show me documentation exposing anything Scientologists have done that casts a sliver of shadow across the torrent of violence Christians committed during the fourth crusade and many times before and since then.

My experiences have brought me directly into contact with hundreds of Christians from various denominations.

In addition, I have spent time with Scientologists.

Radical Christians threaten those who disagree with them using words, and occasionally vile deeds. I have experienced this personally.

Cult Christianity demonstrated its violence in Kansas yesterday.

Never, have I read or heard about Scientologists harming another human being for any reason in any way.

* * *

Now about L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, the man who started it all. The man some people fear.

It turns out that L. Ron Hubbard was a writer first, a good one. While he wrote successfully as a young man, he discovered something he found quite disturbing. Publishers did not want to take a chance on new writers. They only wanted to publish writers they considered tried and true. Risk free sales.

He decided to change the status quo, and assisted writers he knew so they too might be published. He succeeded and perhaps because of his efforts, much of subsequent science fiction became available to the reading public. Likewise, if he had not cared, science fiction and fantasy probably would not have thrived as both have.

The success of his efforts back then, drove him later in life to again endeavor to help unknown writers become known and to have a chance at success. He created the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest.

Entry was and is free, and the winners, twelve per year, received both publication in a special volume of short stories, and a cash prize. How could he do it? He personally financed the endeavor. Then, he asked published science fiction authors to act as judges. They did.

A few years after the contest began, L. Ron Hubbard decided to add artists, and again he was a man leagues ahead of his time.

The contest became extremely successful and since its inception in 1984 has developed into the most important contest of its kind in the world.

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was a brilliant man with a huge heart. He cared deeply about others. He did not ask for anything in return. His generosity has helped many struggling writers and artists, and outside of the Sundance Film Festival, there is nothing that compares to his efforts.

Yet, so many fear him it makes me question their values not L. Ron Hubbard's values. His actions have shouted across the years since his demise. The philosophy he created, Scientology is also part of his legacy. It too has helped hundreds live a better life guided from within not without.

I am not a scientologist.

However, my personal experience with Scientologists came when the contest administration team flew me to Los Angeles to receive my award for being one of twelve writers to win the Writers of the Future contest in 2004.

I went without preconceived expectations. I am not driven particularly by religion, politics, and or structured prejudices. I do not mean that as an indictment, but as a statement of my beliefs.

I have my own philosophy for life, part of which is to attempt to keep an open mind, learn, and do what I am here to accomplish even if I do not understand what that might be. Narrow thoughts lead to a narrow unfulfilled life.

Within two days of my arrival in LA, I had the distinct feeling that I associated with some of the finest people I might ever know. It was not just, because of how they treated my wife, and me, which was exceptional. It was the way they conducted themselves, worked together as if meshed by something more than employment that radiated from them and led me to believe that they knew something about themselves and living, which I did not know about me.

Later, I wondered how I might have reacted if a church taught me to fear Scientologists. Then, I knew the answer. No one who could fear people as kind and generous as those that I met in LA -- people very much like L. Ron Hubbard -- would consider writing science fiction or fantasy.

Thank you, L. Ron Hubbard! I knew there was an answer.
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Psalm for a Lost Seeker

I wanted to call across time while the music played a lonely haunting cry through the mouths of long wooden pipes. Their hollow whistling notes seemed to beckon to love lost, like forlorn hearts.

Their chiming echoes calling, "Seeker, can't you hear me?"

The musician was not visible. The tune heard across a gulf I could not bridge another way. Reaching out to touch someone through time reminded me how nearly impossible I found it to remember their appearance, the resonance of their laughter while their eyes glowed with joy's remembrance.

A subterranean reverberation of drums vibrated Earth's atmosphere as if to summon those absent souls. Ice tumbled down the face of mountains, falling to collect in a pool where the sun could melt it, and like the blood of those wounded in war's battles, the liquid would leach into the single entity of its beginning.
That was what we were given and that was what we lost.

I helplessly watched as you bled. Your life flowed and collected around the seat of your spirit while you shriveled as if wanting to die. However, life is too strong and your power too much interlocked with mine for either of us to flee this Earth before our tasks are completed.

"Seeker, can’t you hear me?"

Crickets stirred sound that brushed dew-laden grasses. It is too soon to mow, too late to harvest. Their song evoked confusion, but within their message laid the answer, we sought. Listen to them dance with nature’s cymbals entwining their limbs, chiming each step, each heartbeat. The crickets spoke softly to us to stop hiding and continue the quest.

They sang stories written but forgotten in archives tucked between stones along the stream that feeds the Pool of Life. Stories once recited by the Giver of Knowledge as the tree bore fruit offered to the Creator in thanks for the opportunity to live and prosper under the grace of enveloping sustenance.

Stories of battles won and lost, lives forfeit for the sake of the quest without the knowledge that the quest was preservation of life. Stories of warriors those Seekers struggling against foes uninvited, and therefore unintended.

However, cold rain persisted, the crickets fled, their songs muffled and forgotten. The pipers resumed their hollow whispering calls into the wilderness of lost time and love.

One unknown man crawled across the wet, slippery surface of the life summit, having climbed to become what a man must be in his lifetime, and found that a man would not have to prove himself a man if he were to become one.

The rain carried him down the mountain as if now discarding the remnants of the unnecessary and dropped him in the Pool of Life.

There the man found his purpose.

Rain pelted all living things, killing some with the fruits of salvation while others received nurturing from the same bounty. Bodies drifted along unnatural streams gouged into the Earth to flush the ruined dreams of Seekers who had given up their quest before reaching their goals; given up when a lifetime's completion remained only a heartbeat's distance. A single step a small caress a smile or hand held out in kindness.

It is easy to quit, but difficult to succeed.

Small child-sized bodies lie in the sun
I watched to make certain I wasn't one
the soldier standing, holding a gun
was the person who might have won.

Footsteps rustled leaves even though wet
and life moved forward without regret.
We're taught stories, a fragmented vignette
of hollow tales and another's need to forget.

Standing, I knew I must move away
the soldier had lowered his gun to pray
the bullet he fired tumbled the day
turning light into words he dared not say.

I can watch and see his sorrow and tears
his shoulders shudder under so many years
and while his features blur with the cheers
the crowd walked away, and like me disappears.

Time danced with our lives and taunted us to challenge it with deeds. However, those tasks set by others were never to be completed. It is within our grasp to control the flow of time by calculating emanation of our thoughts. Chaos ruled only within the context of undisciplined attitudes, flowing into mountainous drifts, crossing the paths we selected as our own. A stiff current of unexpected events, life's promised fulfillment, churned a heartbeat into arrhythmic palpitation that drew breath from a floundering body. But a spirit at peace is a calming influence on all it embraced, on all it touched, and on all who ask, "Is this the way we should walk this path?"

"Seeker, can you hear me?”
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We get winter too

Here in coastal South Carolina, we get winter too. This is the inlet marsh in February layered with ice, which hung around until the sun rose to 10am high.

Okay, it's not much winter, but shoot, it is enuf for me.









See, it's not all fire and brimstone in the deep south, there's a few progressives too, which I guess might explain the ice. See, hell did freeze over! Whoops, weren't supposed to announce that one. My bad!

How to keep from screaming during these difficult time - get a real hobby

A good hands on hobby will help during difficult times, and just for relaxation. This is one I especially enjoy.
http://tinyurl.com/c9aw26


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Red rose of spring

Southern Rain

Late last summer after a long dry spell . . . relief!

Singing Mockingbird

The pic part of this video is not cool, but it's the song that counts.

Snowy Egret in flight

Yeah, I know, who cares. What does it matter if there is anything but humans alive on this planet. Like one Republican congressman said last year about trees: "Who needs them? They don't do anything."

Animals can't text, don't rely on cell phones, twitter and the rest. So who needs them right? They don't do anything.

Well, not to worry. Global climate change will eliminate the problem for you in your lifetime.

Endangered Woodstorks feeding

This was shot behind our house in a semi-protected inlet creek along the South Carolina coastline.

Copyright property of L F Schliessmann

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Cancilleri's Law excerpt

Cancilleri's Law



Waxman swore she lived, but you would be hard pressed to prove it to me. I saw no sign of breathing, not a twitch of muscle. Not once during the long hours I sat and watched from across the primitive wood-slab table, did she blink. A rough, hand woven scarf shrouded her lower face and hair -- part of her period costume, Waxman had told me. The material's color matched her crystalline blue eyes.
Unless I touch her, I thought, despite my knowledge of her situation, how can I be certain she's real?
She stood poised in a half-squat of indecision as if trapped before her thoughts had time enough to sift evidence. Her room was constructed from pale gray sound-deadening plastics. Light strips around the baseboards subdued the space into the dusk of her original departure.
The furniture, one table and chairs padded and upholstered in dark ruby velvet, sat on a floor carpeted with a thick pile, blood red synthetic both soft and resilient -- except where her feet touched bare earth grown over with knee high wheat or barley.
I stood and went around the table. She did not move. By then, I wanted to believe I witnessed a mirage, a holographic prank. I could still hear my mates at the Advanced Chrono Sciences Lab laughing at my naiveté when I had announced I would be the one, the person to bring her the rest of the way through.
However, the woman was a frozen mannequin, incredibly life-like and frighteningly human. The briefing data provided by the Loyal Order of the Keepers had not exaggerated.
I rounded the table's corner to close the distance between us. I could smell her, but could not identify the sweet sickly aroma.
Her unblinking eyes remained fixed on the place where I had been sitting. I studied my hand as I reached to touch her, and stopped. Will she suddenly come to life and attack me? Will she scream? Or will nothing happen?
I lowered my hand, and decided to stare directly in her eyes before I touched her. I could only see shadows below her scarf; the highlights across her cheekbone, the swirls of her right ear, and of course her eyes.
The briefing data said her life span had reached thirty years when the accident occurred over two hundred years ago; she had not and would not age.
I moved closer and saw strands of blue-black hair poking from beneath the scarf. The woman was stunningly beautiful. I felt there was something hauntingly familiar about her, which increased her mysteriousness. I wondered, maybe she's ... Then thought, No. It's not possible.

As Helpless as Beached Dolphins

I’ve often beaten the bushes trying to understand concepts and ideas that once were logical but now seem less so. The internet, for all its promise, has become a cyber world of scammers for whom logic is a means to an end only. Their ends, using us for its means.

The old time snake oil salesman lives on. Anything and everything you might find interesting, is now laid out like an autopsy. Why bother investigating, researching, and truly learning a subject when with a click or two all of what you would’ve learned through meticulous and careful observation, is there before you. Forget about the journey of learning or the disciplined thought acquired through old fashioned education.

Oh, that’s a good thing? Is it really? Can one actually learn and retain details using this method? (Right, bookmarks, I forgot) Do you still get the thrill of success you would’ve received doing research the old way? (Oh, yeah, bookmarks) Is instant satisfaction really satisfying? Or is it merely instant gratification? The type one might need from the first drink after a day of cubicle living.

The exponential expansion of online life, devours time, and erases days while never quite filling the needs we might’ve once felt were there to answer some basic questions such as what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What are we supposed to accomplish while we are?

I know, sex, eating, talking, texting, chatting, tweeting, and oh, yeah sleeping. Did I say eating? As in pigging out? Oh, and working too, I forgot. Full days ahead. Whoopee!

Internet living deletes those questions with its quasi-reality of just out of reach promises, and the more massive this new “world” becomes, the more likely we are to be absorbed, ignored, cast out, and forgotten. Kind of like yesterday’s news only the modern version of yesterday lasts 15 microseconds.

In the same way that religion replaced addiction for some of us, so does the internet for others, cell phone communications for many. How much time do you truly spend alone in your own mind without any type of outside interference or interruption?

I imagine the answer is very little. Who among us can afford to live that way? We are so linked in to technology that we know we cannot live without it. In another decade, will any of us care?

That will be the time that the plug gets pulled leaving the majority of us as helpless as beached dolphins.

For more and better information about this, go here: http://tinyurl.com/cwt2th

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A Progressive Democrat living in the Deep Sourh

A Progressive Democrat living in the Deep South

Typing that felt weirdly satisfying. Since moving to Coastal South Carolina in 2000, I’ve slowly found myself withdrawing from public activities. No joke. It’s downright, well, otherworldly to hear people discussing Jesus at lunch while they gorge themselves with enough food to feed a starving family of four for two days. Of course they bow their heads and recite prayer first. Then, they leave their server with a miniscule tip of less than five percent.

It’s as if the version of the New Testament I read while a child and their version are totally different.

In 2004, I won an International writer’s award and did book signings. When I sat to sign books at a local Books-A-Million, I confronted a few radical right Evangelicals who not only expressed what was wrong with Science Fiction, but that the founder of the contest, L. Ron Hubbard, was the Devil’s agent.

Yikes! What the heck do you do with statements like that? Shoot (as they say down here versus what we’d say in NY which starts and ends the same letters but with only 4 total) I don’t even believe in the Devil and Hell. I think people like the ones who made the “informed” statements, are an example of hell on earth, but that‘s another matter entirely.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m walking through an Evangelical version of Disney World. The Appian Way lined with crucified Progressives. The Believers’ golden road to their version of heaven. Yes, they do think there are angels playing harps for God’s entertainment. Wonder what happens if they miss a note?

So, I decided I needed to blog this since so much of my time and mental energy has been entrapped by a religious philosophy I cannot entertain as applicable to my life; one that is twisted off the parchment and tangled into tall tales of loathing. Evangelicals seem to despise, or worse, every person who does not conform to their standards. Yet they all walk around babbling into cell phones and forget about their driving skills. It’s do or die!

I really am uninterested in spending time wading through other people’s spiritual dilemmas. Hence my posts on spiritual belief.

Naturally, any Evangelical who reads this post will advise me that if I don’t like it, I should move back to New York. A tongue in cheek method of proving my point and the true reason that Christianity is a failing religion. Intolerance, exclusion, and even violent behavior towards those who disagree with them.

My response to them? Well, bless your heart!

Corning Ware, one of life’s simple pleasures.

I enjoy cooking, which is good since my wife informed me that the skill was one of several requirements for marriage (strong sarcastic sense of humor was another). Seems a man in the kitchen is worth two behind lawn mowers or six watching football.

Of course, the plan might’ve run aground since on our first Thanksgiving (the one before we wed), I managed to punch a hole in the roasting pan filled with hot turkey drippings while it was in the hot gas oven. A smoking puddle formed across the bottom of the oven. Yes, oh my, or perhaps OMG!

With less luck, I might’ve burned down the apartment complex, but as it worked out, I reacted fast enough to smother it, the turkey was delicious and Ruth forgiving. Okay, at first, I groveled some, but she still allows me to cook turkey, demanding however, that I not use an aluminum throwaway roasting pan.

All of this brings me to the point of this discourse. Recently, I discovered a Corning Ware Electomatic skillet on EBay. This was a necessity in our home when I was a boy. My mother used hers until it exploded, or something, which required fifteen years of continuous daily use, probably.

When I sent the link to Ruth, the skillet became a must have. We did, got it, and I discovered a couple of things.

First, why my mother loved hers. It’s terrific, easy to use and turns out a well-prepared meal, meaning not under- or overcooked.

Second, what is wrong with corporate America (no that‘s not the new name of our nation, yet. Give the CEOs enough time and leverage, billion dollar bonuses, and. . .).

What I believe corporations have done is to put low costs and high profits ahead of customers and their ultimate satisfaction. Corporate marketers led us down the crimson path of promises--or would that be a yellow brick road--with advertising designed to brainwash us into buying whatever stupid, cheap crap they designed and manufactured.

Like disposable aluminum roasting pans.

Sometime back about 10 to 15 years ago, Corning Ware veered off the path of stable success (less profitable perhaps) and joined the fad parade. Instead of sticking with the tried and true, they abandoned it for high profits and low cost.

Don’t think it’s true? How is Corning Ware doing today?

I say bring back items such as the Corning Ware Electromatics line of kitchenware. Make it so it will last for a decade or more and see what happens.

The throwaway mentality that brought us to the brink of financial destruction should die a thousand painful deaths and be forgotten.