I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

No, that's not another line from a Who song. That is the quintessential core of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a devotee of whose is now hoping to be a breath away from the presidency. It's a philosophy that once held great appeal for me. When I was 16 or so. It stands at the core of what Rand called "the virtue of selfishness." Read more about Teenage Wasteland

There's a Jerome Kern song that runs through my head every once in a while and, when no one is at home, I sing it around the house. The Way You Look Tonight brings back a time that, likely, never was. I think of myself in my young college years and a man I said I would marry. Lovely ... never, ever change. This song is about somebody I wanted to be, but I changed. Read more about The Beautiful People

I'm spending Mondays cheating like hell - if I think of a whole new topic to write about, I'll spend the next two hours doing it, and there goes the day. And I'm giving a mega-party in less than two weeks. So these are pieces from a little blog I had on Blogspot once upon a time and which may have been read by two, maybe three people. As this one may be as well. I was taking pieces at random from a folder of stuff I saved (I actually have them labelled by year). This was 1985: Read more about Awash in NGB's

1985 - A farewell card from Doug - "It's rare to find an open mind. I love you for the freedom you've inspired in me." Amazing note to get from a biker. I inspired freedom in HIM? Hmmmm. Doug stories - almost too numerous to tell. I'll tell one. He was doing some time in the county jail for some traffic snafu or something equally meaningless. The jail was having some construction work done on the top floor (of what was a three-five story building, I don't remember which). Read more about Goodbyes From Green Bay

1983. A card from another long lost friend. Nancy. She had just returned from South America, and was living in Boston "but without a stable address" as so many of us were in those days. We graduated college together. I know I saw her a year or so later, back in Green Bay, because she called the day after my first beating from a now long-gone ex-boyfriend. She helped me pull myself together, and told me that her ex used to beat her as well. So many things were not out in the open in those days. I was embarrassed. How did I have the bad taste to pick someone who would beat on me? Read more about It Was All Material

Scraps from an old letter: Read more about Salmon Beach

In the Wayback Machine, there's a letter postmarked 11 Aug 1979, Oakland, CA on Amtrak stationary - from someone named Danny Biggs -

As adventuresome travellers are wont to do, we met at a pub/disco in London last February for a fleeting moment (Trafalgar's club on King's Road, I think). I'll be in Wisconsin during the last 2 weeks of September. Shall I look you up?

Eyes screwed shut, holding my nose, and jumping off a cliff. I've never even been able to jump off a diving board without panicking in midair and belly-flopping painfully into the water, and yet that first sentence is how I have described several sudden moves I've made over the years. An inveterate tree-climber as a child(see earlier posts), I'm not particularly afraid of heights, but that rush of air past my body reminds me, much too late, that I'm actually terrified of falling.

Which is probably why I've gotten a little more cautious over the years. How cautious, remains to be seen. Read more about Dangerous Liasons

In April of 2003 I was looking for an analogy to explain why the Iraqi people weren't out in the streets hurling rosebuds at our troops: Read more about Remember Iraq?

There is a big maple tree in my back garden. Four foot-thick trunks rise from a large single trunk, with many smaller branches arcing from them. From these smaller branches, most no more than an inch or two or three in diameter, spring a myriad of twigs. Tiny lacy twigs that fill the winter sky like a spider web.

Looking up at that bare-ribbed umbrella of a tree one January morning, I had to ask myself, "Where does it keep all those leaves?" Read more about Where Does It Keep the Leaves?