Do you know someone who always seems to have something going wrong in their life? You know, like a country western song: my wife left me, my house burned down, my truck got stolen and my dog died. Is it really that some people just have remarkably bad luck? Or do they just complain more? Or, is it possible that all those things really happen out of the person's sheer will to believe that life is *that hard* and their only retribution is to complain loudly? I don't know... I was talking to my friend Indra tonight about the way life happens. We both believe that life is innately random and that it's self-centered and foolish to translate the events around you as pertaining to you; as being fai
Having lived my entire life in California, northern and southern, suffice to say I have felt my share of earthquakes. Hell, I've felt my share *and* your share. Often, when I'm just sitting still reading, or lying in bed, a sensation will wash over me that everything is beginning to shake - or is about to begin. My heart will pound as I suddenly become very tense, awaiting the onslaught. It doesn't come. It's just the oversensitive respiratory system of an overly-earthquaked individual. During those seconds, my well-trained mind starts telling my body, frozen in tense fear, which doorway to run to when the moment of confirmation comes that this is indeed The Big One. Then it passes, and I fe
Ch-ch-ch-chaaynges... If there's one thing I've gotten from all this, it's that change is inevitable, even when seemingly totally unnecessary. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a maxim utterly ignored by the universe at large. Your (or my) contentment with things could not be less relevant. Deal with it we must. Thus emerges my newly-designed (but incomplete) website, some of the manifestation of which you see right here (though I tried not to change my blog too much). [Ed note: that website survived 16 years until the next redesign in July of 2017.] The last six weeks have been torturous days of reading html books and screaming in torment as some typo somewhere, completely invisible to m
