In many cases, I find it very helpful to start fresh from a clean slate. My mother’s strict rules of neatness and cleanliness, or my father’s requirements for order in everything, or some genetic switch someplace on either or both sides of the family tree have resulted in what my wife calls a clear case of OCD. As expected, I am convinced that this need for order is not a disorder (she thought “auditory” as she finished reading that)…

I made a comment about the easy debt/credit cycle possibly ending to which someone responded with a long letter. The first two lines in it were “I’m appealing to you to use whatever influence you might have to take the first step in righting a great wrong. I know you’re an obscure member of an otherwise brilliant List, but seeing that your contributions are negligible…

It feels like a century since my last update. Today was a very special graduation day for me and must be celebrated by a line in the proverbial sand. With over two dozen bids, my 4×8 trailer was sold for $100 to the next slave of manual labor who will certainly get good value for his investment…

My beautiful wife runs the Armenian Sunday school at our church. Last night was their main annual fundraiser. This time I was helping an Armenian family originally from Iran make the koobideh. In the process I heard their story of running from Iran, walking fifteen days in a desert to Pakistan, running from Pakistan to Singapore, from there to Germany as refugees, from there to the United States…

I cannot get my childhood out my head in the past couple weeks. Nostalgia is an old acquaintance of mine whose visits are no longer welcome. This time my cousin’s death prompted it to pay me a visit. This clever magician has its distinguished seat at the table of our worst enemies such as worry, greed, hate, dishonesty, and fear among others. This one pretends to be a close friend, one who has only good intentions, but under the elaborate disguise is a ruthless controlling pig with the singular objective of getting in our way of living the current moment to its fullest. I have seen most of the tricks this one plays to trap us in its web. Once captured, it infects our lens through which we see life, the world, and ourselves and causes all kinds of distortions…