Year: 2015

Caffeine in the Morning

Curmudgeon

You know how you always remember where you were when a life-changing event happens? I vividly remember the circumstances of my first taste of coffee. It was awful. I was about ten. It was a cold Saturday morning in March and my parents and I were waiting in line outside the junior high to sign me up for swimming lessons the next summer. They must have been less worried about stunting my growth than my freezing to death when they handed me a steaming cup freshly poured out of the Thermos. The bitter taste on my blistered tongue made me wonder if “a mother’s love” was an oxymoron.

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The Them vs Us Dilemma

Curmudgeon

I’ve wanted to write on the recent events in Paris and about terrorism in general. I wrote several articles I knew were only knee-jerk reactions which I didn’t publish. The first version I wrote was akin to rounding up anyone who had ever walked into a mosque and chasing them down with torches and pitchforks. However colorful the imagery of that article it did go a little over the top. In another I preached universal brotherhood along the lines of why can’t we all just get along. But I’ve done that already so I didn’t want to repeat myself. Then I decided that I needed to look at the patterns causing this latest blight on the human condition. It’s all boiling down to one of  the most basic of ‘them vs us’ reasons, religion. […]

Pulling Back The Curtain

Curmudgeon

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Those were the words shouted by the wizard when Toto pulled back the curtain near the end of The Wizard of Oz. The wizard did not want anyone to know that all the smoke and noise was only a trick. Now I’m gonna pull back the curtain and show you a few tricks that if you’d been paying attention you would have noticed anyway. […]