The relentless question, even after the arguing and debating and philosophizing is all played out, lingers: Would you rather live your life willfully and happily discounting the anvils constantly dropping from the sky, or spend your days nervously looking for cover in the hopes of sidestepping a few of them as they inevitably fall? I… Read More Optimism is Hard
We’re in the final hour, if I’ve timed this right, of the most memorable, awful, scary, weird, frustrating, infuriating year of our lives. Midnight absolutely can’t get here soon enough. Springsteen warns about that kind of thinking, about rooting on tomorrow to come while missing out on today: My soul checked out missing as I… Read More Looking To Twenty-One
Lyrical is a series on music in our lives A sane person, to stay sane, has to have, as a general rule, a place to escape once in a while. A little corner for a self-imposed timeout from time to time. A spot to crawl into and pull the figurative — or real, if that’s… Read More Lyrical: O.P., Again
Of all the numbers bombarding us in 2020 — and 2020 has been nothing if not one ceaseless bombardment of sad statistics — we should remember, more than any of them, 72+ million. In years ahead, when we finally have a chance to breathe freely, to eat out with no fear, to hug and shake… Read More What to Think
At some time around 3 o’clock in the morning on November 9, 2016, I sat stone-stunned awake at home, like many of us, thinking that I might never sleep again. I was thinking of my wife and my son, and of Hillary Clinton, and of the tens of millions of people who had just voted… Read More Give Us A Break
Road trips, once long ago in my flat, dusty Delaware boyhood, held a special, almost spiritual promise. Getting away — to the beach, to the mountains, on vacation, to Arizona as a young man, just anywhere, really — was everything to me. It was the stuff of Springsteen (Together we can break this trap/We’ll run… Read More A Trip
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