Our Time

Our Lives

Ross: Hatikvah means "the hope"

Jack: I know, but how could one have the strength to hope for anything after Bergen-Belsen? I don't think I could have maintained a frame of mind to care about life. There were those who threw themselves on the wire.

Ross: and those that survived to fight again.

Jack: I remember the line attributed to Admiral Halsey at Midway as his pilots were taking off to fight superior Japanese forces, "Where do they find such men?"

Maybe even ordinary pishers like us are capable of great things when confronted with immensities. As Boomers, we have never really been called on to protect anything more serious than our standard of living.

It is strange to have lived a life devoid of both hardship and heroism.

The Stock Market

My Seven Figure Income
I did pretty well in the market last year. I had an income in seven figures. Of course four of them were the cents, the dollar sign, and the decimal point.

And sure enough...

Eighteen years later
It has become a long time ago and it is not the least bit romantic that it has.

At Edible Complex

Here is a note I found in a notebook dated June 29, 1988, a year after Patty left
How did I get here? My life is like a singularity compressed out of time and space by my own collapse, utterly cut off from the universe by an impenetrable horizon of my own thoughtless making. I am so invisible that you could stare right at me, talk to me for an hour, and never see me. Still I am here. I glow so faintly that I can only be seen with one's eyes and reason turned aside.

I am a cliche of alienation. Literally a government clerk, a cinder of a failed marriage - burnt to a fine ash of solitude and indifference, an orphan, a former life, hoping for nothing, expecting nothing. So much has been lost and forgotten that even anger fails me. I may metamorphose at any moment.

My evenings have become so empty that I haunt coffee shops meant for student lesbians and lesbian students - the Rockridge in the summer of 1988. Just to write it so, in hopes of it sounding romantic and a long time ago, chills me with the near prospect of when it will be a long time ago.

Flash Fiction

The Divorce
I sat on my unmade bed, longing for something but not knowing quite what. I began to cry. In the evenings there was a dull ache where she used to be. I have to get out of here, I said to myself, I have to go home. Then I remembered that I was home.

Sincere Translation?

The Starry Banner
Is there a reason the Spanish version of the national anthem is called "Nuestro Himno" rather than "La Bandera Estrellada"?

In Pendency

Still Here
As so often in my life I am on hold, waiting to resolve minor matters before I can get about the serious business of my life. For me that is bicycling. I mean to ride far and wide.

But first I have to go to the pharmacy and the post office and to REI and the optometrist and the bank. I have to put asphalt on the sidewalk so passing litigants don't fall over a tripping hazard my redwood tree, Gus, has created. And on and on. But my day will come.