I’ve done some very stupid things in my life. One night in Norway I got drunk, climbed up a tower crane, and walked all the way out to the end of the boom. No idea how many hundred feet off the ground I was. When I got to the end of the boom, the wind kicked…
War with China? Not a chance.
January 2, 2014
For whatever reason journalists, historians, pundits, and academics are permanently convinced that the US is right around the corner from catastrophic defeat at the hands of an invincible enemy. I’ve now lived through four major conflicts that involved American forces, and I’ve studied them all. My guess is that the gore crows who tell us…
The worst year of my life
December 31, 2013
This was the worst year of my life. For over a decade, Tim and I would say to each other, “This was the worst year yet,” but 2013 was the absolute bottom. I say than knowing full well that I’m daring the fates to make 2014 even worse, but it can’t be. The depths have…
I AM sorry but go away
December 28, 2013
August 20, 2012, was not a good day. I learned that someone was not at all who I thought. It was genuinely horrifying because I discovered that I’d been dealing with an insane person. She’d hid her insanity relatively well, but as always, I denied the little signs that things were awry. In August of…
Broken arms and exploding piglets
December 28, 2013
I broke my right arm in 1971. Mom and my siblings were watching an oil well being drilled at night in the vacant lot two houses down in Campo Verde, Tia Juana, Venezuela. The Club is in the foreground; right above the words “photo courtesy,” you can see the giant swimming pool where a nineteen-year-old…
Thirty-three years and counting
December 27, 2013
My friend Joe Cady dropped in for a visit today. In Ghosts and Ballyhoo, he’s The Punk Who Set Me on My Course (pages 17 to 20). Unfortunately, I’d set my camera to take time exposures or something, so all the images of Joe in Tim’s house came out blurry and yellow. Here’s the best…
The first Christmas without Mom and Dad
December 24, 2013
This is the first Christmas without Mom and Dad. What I feel mostly is strangeness. When you get to be old yourself—I’m fifty-one—it’s incredibly bizarre to no longer have access to people who were there your whole life. Dad’s dying process was so sudden, unnecessary, and ghastly that when he finally passed away, it was…
Improvement is not always conscious
December 23, 2013
Those of you who’ve read Ghosts and Ballyhoo may have noticed that I make only one mention of Tony Levin, on pages 42-43. This was not deliberate. My friend Steiv Dixon and Carmen were Levinites, as they called themselves. They introduced me to Tony Levin’s best work. As a result he became one of my…
