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A friend thought I had included a poem by Mary Oliver in my blog and so she gave me one of her collections. But no, instead my friend introduced me to Mary Oliver. This is the first poem I read in the book and I read it at breakfast and we all welled up. Halleluiah Everyone should be born into this world happy and loving everything. But in truth it rarely works that way. For…
In 1995, we moved to New Orleans for eleven months and I met a guy in a writer’s workshop at Tulane. Then he moved to San Francisco where his sister lived. Then I moved back to San Francisco. I joined a writer’s workshop there and the woman who ran it was such a nutball. In one of the sessions we had to review submissions from other writers wanting to join the group. And a manuscript…
Today I went to see Flower’s baby – do you know how long I’ve been telling Flower to have a baby, before it’s too late, before her biological clock betrays her? And now, she has one, a full fledge Flower eel baby who is so beautiful since she came via C-section that we have dubbed her the Miss America Eel. To see your friend become a mother is such a transition that it bring tears…
Amidst the muscular architecture and loud wail of the El, I wonder sometimes how people live in Chicago when it is the second city. It’s big, but not huge. It has so many things, but not everything. It lives it’s life in the shadow of New York and yet Chicago is its own beast in the jungle. Today we had Italian at the Italian Village, a three story homage to low and high Italy and…
Kierkegaard said “We create ourselves by our choices.” And how that works with the rest of what you know is this: everyday if you are a sentient, thoughtful, functioning human being, you are asking yourself if what you are doing in life as the master plan is meaningful, then you are toiling over your decisions to do this or that, your friendships and relationships to family, your productivity at work, your end game – you’re…
My 50th birthday celebration got kicked off in earnest this weekend and the first stop was Commander’s Palace for lunch where they still pour 25 cent martinis and cosmos despite the fact that the dining room looks like it came out of the Royal Palace. My birthday cake was in the bread pudding souffle while the man flamed bananas foster.
Here is the Stella calling contest we went to on Sunday, when the primal Stanley wails for his demon lover:
I’ve spent nearly a half century becoming self-actualized and amazingly thought I was there when I hit a road bump the last week. A friend, who is a social worker, told me about this personality test, the Enneagram, which has a high degree of accuracy in defining how you deal with life and its challenges. I scored a Number 2 – which is referred to as The Helper with almost as equal high scores in…
In Chicago, can’t sleep – want to be home face to face to see my gf and heal my heart. I was reading an article in the WSJ about how important face to face business meetings are and I know for sure they are uber important in personal relationships. Through email and text and voicemail messages the human slips away and what gets said is washed of emotion and empathy. Here is my horoscope today…
I flew Southwest to Chicago and man, I missed Jet Blue. SW changed from the ABC lines to the 1-5, 6-10, 11-15 towers to stand by while in line. It’s still cattle being herded onto a plane. Why can’t they assign seats? And worse I picked to sit between two large men on the front row but unlike Jet Blue where the flight attendants save space for the front rows to put their luggage overhead,…