Retired Navy after 23 years. I retired at the age of 40 years old. I've been out longer than I was in. All of the ships I served on have been made into razor blades. I had fun and I lived my life the best I could. Most of my shipmates are gone and I try to stay in touch with the remainder. It continues. Substance abuse counselor, builder of wooden boats, furniture maker, prison non-violence workshop facilitator, life observer, activist, reader, writer, geriatric subject of interest, generous tipper. I stay involved.
THE PAST IS ALWAYS WITH US Just like a seed or a tick our past events are stuck to us. A function of time, happenings go through a process of transformation from not yet to uh oh. We supply the adhesive with our individual response. The adhesive is the level of emotional investment that gets … More Memories
JUST ANOTHER JOB More or less Early in my Navy career as a crew member of one of the Navy’s new nuclear submarines we’d been at sea for a few weeks testing the ship’s control systems. We were off the east coast. The submarine had surfaced in preparation for entering port. I came up from … More Just Another Job
A GOOD MAN? I’m listening to a jazz septet. One of the musicians toyed with the memory of a fine jazz musician. He recalled that “He was a good man, most of the time.” It was a play on words and sentence structure and it brought a chuckle from those around. I thought how clever. … More What is a Man?
THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER 2015 Winter is coming, no doubt. November has been a gentle and polite host so far. I feel honored and well cared for. However, yesterday the wind nearly blew the hair off my head during a pleasant half hour of walking the breakwater in Rockland, Maine. The air was bracing and … More Middle of November
THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL Writing is a useful tool to explain our surroundings to ourselves. Thinking is alright but writing is where we have to really think hard and put into words what it is we are experiencing, sensing, absorbing unwillingly, and regurgitating in front of other people. Putting things on paper is a good … More There’s a Small Hotel
This old vagabond has lived a couple of lifetimes worth of travel starting as a child and then as a sailor and now as an old man with sand in his shoes. I’ve spent so much time on the road and at sea that the only way for me to feel comfortable with my restless … More Patty Griffin Sings My Music
I learned to tell time at an early age. The first time I told was twenty minutes after eight in the morning. My sister Jean helped me to learn this skill. I was a really bright kid so it was an easy task to teach me things. Time gets problematic when these two events arrive; … More Timex and John Cameron Swayze
Of course what I’m getting at is which eye we are using and what it is we are seeing. Just the same it all begins with the stimulus passing through the lens to the brain, the receptors at the back of the eye. This post is a result of a photo by Robert Mitchell of … More More Than Meets the Eye
I’m happy to announce that I’ve been reading a lot lately. Reading authors whose work I admire and which I have found to mimic my own writing. I like ambiguity, metaphor, and a bit of fantasy or magical realism. My preferences also tend toward the short story or essay format. I am finding more and more … More I’m Inspired by Etgar Keret, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Borges
This morning I decided to write a short piece involving an incident that happened a few years ago in Northern California. I’d met a couple of young men and given them bogus directions by mistake. While I was writing the draft I noticed time was fleeting, that my son Sam was soon to be arriving … More Nutribullet Transporter and Bad Directions
Playing Fair and Being Kind 