[In Part 1 I didn’t mention any specific songs from the 1980s, so let me first say that the song which probably brings that time surging back more than any other is Steve Winwood’s “While You See a Chance.” I hear it and immediately flash back to driving around midwestern cornfields under a huge moon…

I draw a metaphorical ring around myself and what’s inside is … the phrase in the title. Perhaps. I seem to be having something of an identity crisis: as a committed “JOAT” (Jack Of All Trades) I realize that I’ve never gone far enough in to anything to finally feel comfortable being considered, well, that…

At 60, I have found myself with a bit more money than I’d grown accustomed to expecting. This is, unfortunately, due to a couple of deaths in my immediate family. Because I have so little experience of dealing with money, I decided last year to hire a financial advisor. One of the things that that…

I whine a lot, but I’m not going to whine and tell you I don’t have any friends. I do have friends. Unfortunately, none of the people I really think of as [close?] friends are close to me in actual 3D ‘meat-space.’ A grim fact I roll around in my mind far too often is…

Humans do love their mysteries — preferring them, in some contexts, to facts. This is something of a mystery, itself: while I expect many of us, if presented with the opportunity, would pay big bucks to learn the true identity of, say, Jack the Ripper, there are others — there are doubtless parts of our…

Decades ago in undergraduate school, I was working on an independent study project about the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849 – 1912). People generally know Strindberg, if they know him at all, as something of a wack-job: he wrote groundbreaking (in that they sometimes incorporated a kind of “dream logic” and foregrounded aspects of the…

For no reason I can articulate, I’ve recently become interested in the assassination of JFK: I’ve been watching old coverage from the time (including the Zapruder film) on Youtube and trying to learn a little bit more about the event. In one of the videos I watched someone opined that every time one watched the…