Tag: Life

  • Earworm Wednesday: It’s That Song From That Cartoon!

    I will admit that “Me and My Arrow” by Harry Nilsson re-entered my life this week due to a Spotify generated playlist, not from my own music knowledge. And if you don’t know, this song is part of a cartoon that Nilsson created and wrote in 1970 called The Point! I remember seeing it on cable, sometime in the 80’s, and what stuck with me about the show was the wise man, or dude, who tells the hero that, “not having a point, is a point.” That little piece of philosophical logic has stuck with me my whole life.

    As to the song, “Me and My Arrow,” when I heard it this week, it struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I had to look it up, and I think where I truly remember it from is an episode of The Simpsons that used it. But when I read it was from the cartoon The Point!, then it all came back to me. Just a little gem of my childhood. And I had no idea that the great Harry Nilsson was responsible for it all.

    Oh, and what just stuck in my head is the whole thing. I’ve been humming it all week.

  • Where Did That Come From? Aliens?

    I got a little tiny cut on the knuckle of my left ring finger, right above my wedding ring. It is a tiny little cut, barely there, but there enough to let me know that there is a tiny little cut on that finger. The perplexing part of this injury is that I have no idea how I received it. I just know that when I was walking home from parking the car this morning, I felt it on my hand.

    I didn’t come in contact with anything sharp as I completed the task of moving the car. Yet I know that I didn’t have it when I left the apartment, or at least I know that I wasn’t being annoyed by a tiny cut when I left home.

    This isn’t the first time of late that I have discovered some sort of injury on my body that I have no idea where it came from. Most of the time, I chock it up to playing around with the kid. I had a small bruise on my arm once that was a total mystery. A little scrap on my knee I discovered over the winter – when I had been wearing pants every day.

    Am I getting to the age when I forget things, or becoming so numb that I just don’t notice when something hits me?

    Even though this situation is nothing like the example I am about to give, but what this reminds me of is people being abducted by aliens, and the weird cut and bumps they discover after their encounters. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me?

    Or, what if I am being abducted by aliens, and I’m losing time in all, but what if the aliens are really clumsy with people? Like they have trouble keeping humans walking in a straight line, and the people walk into doors or walls? Or the aliens drop instruments on people. Not all the time, but accidents are known to happen, right?

    And then, what if these aliens got written warnings and bad performance reviews, and they lost their jobs abducting and probing people because of their sloppy work ethic?

    Then there is some alien sitting in a bar back on his home planet, getting drunk and bitching to his friend how his boss was a total dick, and he was set up to fail because his boss never offered any help or guidance, even when he asked for it. Then that alien goes on to tell his friend that his boss is totally screwed now because he was the one that kept the whole abducting and probing operation working, and it’s going to take them months to get everything back on track because that alien was the one who knew how everything worked.

    But then the alien’s friend tells him that the abducting/probing job wasn’t that great of a job anyway. They order another round, and talk about starting their own abducting/probing company if only they could get the money together.

    Or maybe I cut my finger on a sharp key on my key chain when I reached into my pocket.

    Maybe.

  • Spring Break Broke Me (Unedited)

    I take full responsibility for my actions. Let’s start with that.

    The kid has been on her Spring Break for the past week, and on the whole, I have enjoyed the time we have spent together. The older she gets, the more fun she is to talk to. She very smart and a very opinionated kid, which makes conversations with her enjoyable because she is very passionate in what she believes in. She’s at a fun age when the world is brand new and just waiting for her to explore it. I didn’t try to over schedule her, but we did some fun stuff like spend an afternoon at the Whitney Museum, and we shot some arrows over at Gotham Archery in Brooklyn.

    But I did make a mistake with this Spring Break; I fell out of my routine. This was the kid’s Spring Break, not mine. For some reason, I got it in my head that I was also going to enjoy some “time off.” Unfortunately, this was a miscalculation, as you see, when you are a stay at home parent, you never really get a day off. Your job is to keep the family on track and moving forward. This I lost sight of.

    What I ended up creating in myself was a feeling of anxiety, and the sense that I was letting “everything” fall behind. Everything was taking longer to do, and thus created situations where I wasn’t able to complete the tasks that were important to me; mainly writing and catching up on my reading. But if I took time for myself, then I started feeling guilty, and then those feelings rolled up into a ball angst, as I wasn’t doing enough for my family.

    I chalk this up on bad planning, and too high of aspirations, on my part.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Time for Some Trust Busting, Vacation, and a Cigar

    ODDS and ENDS: Time for Some Trust Busting, Vacation, and a Cigar

    (Something Clever Goes Here…)

    Looks like Paramount is about the buy Warner Bros./Discovery, which means there will be five companies that control 51% of the media. If what the Ellison’s did to CBS is any indication of what they’ll do to WB/Discovery, then we are about to enter into a dark age. Prices will go up, coverage will be pro-conservative, service will decrease, and market share will continue to be concentrated. The good news is that this has happened before in America, and we have the tools to break all these trusts up. And I mean all the trusts; media, social media, airlines, online shopping, web services, and banking. The only thing stopping it is the will of the people. The laws are on the books, but they’ll only be enforced if we elect the right people to do it. I’m telling you, we gotta get involved before its too late, and we are getting very close to it being too late.

    I think I might vacation in West Virginia this year. Somewhere up in the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe along a river or a creek. Nothing crazy, but a cabin away from everyone and it should also be a place where it gets cool at night, like low 60’s or high 50’s. This is Summer after all. Just a thought I have been having of late.

    I haven’t smoked a cigar since college; it was after a cast party and I was feeling on top of the world. I don’t particularly like cigars or the smell, but the idea of sitting on a porch as the sun sets, smoking a cigar with a glass of bourbon in my hand sounds wonderful at this point. This might be tied in with the West Virginia vacation thing from above… but it’s on my mind.

  • Short Story Review: “Predictions and Presentiments” by Valeria Luiselli

    (The short story “Predictions and Presentiments” by Valeria Luiselli appeared in the February 16th & 23rd, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Jesús Cisneros

    “Predictions and Presentiments” by Valeria Luiselli is a short story that gave me a reassuring hug. The reassuring didn’t come in the form of any answers to the questions which the story brought up, but it reassured me that life is about growth and discovery.

    Overly Simplistic Synopsis: After a divorce, a mother and her daughter spend time in Sicily, not too far from where the mother’s grandmother is originally from. And they try to cook a swordfish head, too.

    In the story, the main character has a small mosaic fragment of the god Proteus which her grandmother obtained/stole from an archaeological dig she was working at. The mosaic fragment is a clever dramatic device in the story. But I had this thought in my head that “Predictions and Presentiments” was a bit like Proteus; it kept shifting and changing. Was this a story about just the narrator, a mother, and her daughter? Was it about her grandmother as well? Legacy trauma? Family origin story? Connection to the past, or the ancient past? What truths do we share with our families, or do we make fictions out of those truths? Can we change who we are, or we destined to our nature? Is our future but a guess, or is there a way to logically know what’s coming?

    This is a story that walks a very nice tightrope of keeping it all together. I couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment the mother and daughter could spin off into ruin. I can’t say where in the story I got that from; perhaps it was the refrain of starting over in a new place, the perils that come with beginning again, and discovering something new? Maybe it was the climax of the story, or the fishmonger who sold the fish head? Or it could have been how not everything that happened in this piece got wrapped up neatly, or fully explained? This created a feeling of fragmentation, that Proteus mosaic again, but Luiselli held it all together. See, it reassured me that life is messy, not neat, but wonderful to experience.