Burn all the letters.

          Life is a glorious cycle of song,

          A medley extemporaneous.

          Love is a thing which can never go wrong,

          And I am Marie of Roumania.

 

                                                - Dorothy Parker

 

 

          I wish I’d thought that up. I was thinking of it because the ‘glorious cycle of song’ part, as my friend Edna just died. She was in her eighties and suffered from this and that, so it wasn’t unexpected – the fullness of time being what it is- but it still puts a little hiccup into the relentless drone of a daily life filled with dreary repetition and hopelessness; an opportunity to reflect. Edna was the muse who inspired most of my Stories of My Sorry Life, and thus this blog. She had a group of girlfriends with whom she got together on a regular basis to play bridge or bingo or something. For all I know they assembled Molotov cocktails for the local anarchists. In my experience, underneath the veneer, those grannies you see rocking away in their cardigans are all tough old broads who are done with the niceties, and tell the best stories.

          Edna, out of loyalty to her daughter Bonnie, who married my father, used to buy all her stamps here. She always wanted the commemorative stamps and the ones that said “happy birthday” for

Life Lessons

          It may be trite to say, but life does give you the lessons you need at the time you need them. The trouble is that from the insides of our lives, the insides of our little fish-bowls where everything on the outside looks all distorted and strange, we never see that Cudgel of Learning descending upon us. We just see stars and our heads go doingy-boingy off the bottom of the aquarium a few times, and we wonder; “what the heck”?! On the outside of the fish bowl everyone watches and wonders why the heck we didn’t just move two inches to the left to avoid the whack of Life’s Cudgel. That’s just how Life Lessons happen. Some of us try to explain it

rant about cant

When it comes to monotonous monologues filled with platitudes, those “run government like a business” people take the cake, and I’m sick of it. Face it, people: government is not a business, is not intended to be a business and should never be a business. A business has the goal of making money for each of its stakeholders, and government has the goals, among others, of organizing communities, providing justice, fairness and public services. A rising tide may lift all boats, but some of those boats need patching.