die once

Master Planned Obsolesence

choose one: crisis or opporunity.

Blind alleys and dead ends.
I drove number one to school today. On the ride over, I mentioned to him that I had started working on a new story. I asked him if he would read it and give me some feedback. He is always my harshest critic; I value his opinion as he is frank and his observations are generally both helpful and insightful. He asked me what it was about so I started to outline the plot. It is an experimental piece that may be categorized as “post-modern” fiction, where the varied writing styles are as much a part of the work as the plot. I did not tell him this, I just described the basic plot. He asked me a few a questions and then told me that it did not sound like a literary work. I r

I have a problem with God.
I have a problem with God. Or more precisely, I have a problem with the word God. I believe it is a product of convenience: a word created by humans to describe the indescribable. An artificial semantic construct that subtly shifts the inconceivable into the realm of the near tangible. It is a word that allows us to apply convention to something that is not just far beyond our physical capability for understanding but something that is seemingly beyond our abilities of abstraction and imagination. By assigning a linguistic, etymological or symbolic value to that which can not be described, we simultaneously limit its scope and define it in our own terms, dragging it into

Fail 7 out 10 times and you are truly extraordinary.
I am not a big baseball fan primarily because it requires a large time commitment to really follow any given team. A regular season schedule is 162 games played from April through October. That is 5-7 games per week over a 7 month period. If you are a starting player, you are going to bat on average about 3.5 times per game which corresponds to 500+ “at bats” over the course of a season. A batting average or relationship of hits to at bats is one of the defining benchmarks in the sport.  The absolute best lifetime batting average belongs to Ty Cobb at .367 while

getting punched and getting insight.
Due to illness, this was my first full week of sparring in the last 3. Early in the week, I was out of sync: my body was shaking off the ring rust and my mind was less focused, less in the moment than is required to both punch and avoid being punched. So as my mind was wandering and body was being beaten, I had a few of insights that I believe have a wider application than exclusively to boxing. The first is the distinction between chasing and pursuing. When I found myself chasing, I inevitably lost my balance,  relaxed my stance and loosened my guard. And before I could reposition myself, my opponent would see the opening, hit me and knock me further o

Oil drilling and seismic activity -just a coincidence?
First and foremost, my thoughts along with millions of others are with the people of Samoa, American Samoa and Indonesia who have been affected by the 2 earthquakes which occurred in the last 12 hours. Hopefully a fast response by international relief agencies will minimize the effects of these tragedies along with the devastation from the recent typhoon in the Philippines. Current scientific consensus holds that in our solar system, only the Earth is geologically unstable. As far as I know, it is also the only planet where oil is actively being pumped out of the ground in ever increasing quantities from ever increasing depths. Earthquakes occur when opposing plates that make up t