Chalida, a student from Thailand dressed in pink everything, insisted: “I CAN’T WRITE!” I asked: “Why do you like pink? Tell your friend in Thai, then translate it into English.” The result: three beautiful paragraphs!
Near my apartment in downtown Oakland, here’s what I have seen: At 4 o’clock in the morning, I go out for an early coffee at all-night convenience store a block away. No one is around. There is a great stillness, the peace between the night and the first grey light of dawn. And yet, there’s the skunk, a thick slightly sickening burning smell coming from the empty parking lot across the street. A security guard is doing his rounds and trailing behind him are these ghost-like clouds illuminated by the security lights.
Holy Trinity Church was a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, PA, outside Pittsburgh, where my cousins grew up in the 1960s. Then the town’s steel mill closed.
It's early morning in the heart of Oakland's Skid Row, and Steve F. is coming toward us, me and Artie G., from across the street, bouncing from leg to leg, waving at us with one hand and balancing a styrofoam plate with a few pancakes in the other hand, grinning his maniac drug grin.
When I hear about freewriting, it feels like … freedom…! Like a bird in the sky, a leaf in the wind, la ripple on the lake at dawn, the first sign of life, the first heartbeat of a baby in a mother’s womb …
On an ordinary sunny winter day, I was a Korean solider stationed near thedemilitarized zone between North and South Korea and received this message…so began the scariest night of my life.
Two weeks below 0 F, wind bites deep into the fingers, bones are like icicles, and nature shows a malevolent face. Machines keep us alive.
Nothing has been more thrilling than to see IU football win a perfect 16-0 season… until a hit left its star quarterback lying face down on the grass…
On a lark, I watched this movie, “Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman”, thinking it might be weird and campy – but it turned out painfully stupid and boring. You’ll get most of it by fast forwarding to the 58:00 minute mark and catching the “50 Ft. Woman” in the last five minutes of the film.
John Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera may seem like a warm-up to the author’s later “post-modernist meta-fictions,” On re-reading, I see a model of what a novel can be – a new vision of everyday life, imbued with love and delight at all the world’s absurdities and pleasures.
Well-written, deliberately nuanced perspective on male sexual exploitation of vulnerable women in high-pressure corporations. Identifies with the victims – at last! – but how about the the poor and powerless around the world, victims of American policies left out of the “news”?
The amusing detective work of a whimsical but charming nihilist. Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) works as a “consultant” for the FBI, but is perfectly candid that his real mission is to seek revenge against the serial killer who murdered his family, legal procedures be damned.
The national deb of the U.S. soared by 40% during and after the Covid pandemic in 2020, and now the headlines are full of warnings about the looming debt crisis. Here is an alternative view that argues the U.S. can default on its debt.
Blessed Pino Puglisi fought the Mafia by creating community, breaking the social isolation that feeds the mob’s power. He knew his end was near.
This Buddhist monk, a best-selling author on happiness, was asked in an interview to describe the way to attain happiness. He said…
On Teaching
“I Don’t Know How to Write!”
Chalida, a student from Thailand dressed in pink everything, insisted: “I CAN’T WRITE!” I asked: “Why do you like pink? Tell your friend in Thai, then translate it into English.” The result: three beautiful paragraphs!
The joy of freewriting, purely from the inner self
When I hear about freewriting, it feels like … freedom…! Like a bird in the sky, a leaf in the wind, la ripple on the lake at dawn, the first sign of life, the first heartbeat of a baby in a mother’s womb …