It’s your friends, neighbors and a few blood relatives doing this, not El Presidente
Language matters in mental health. The words we use shape how we see the world–and ourselves. The words we choose and the meanings we...
A brief recounting of the Balkan getaway in February, 2025
Obsessions can be of lasting duration, as with my history of 47 pilgrimages to the European continent since 1985, or they can be more...
Diary: Let’s keep those mine shafts to a minimum in 2025
(Cover photo: Split before surgery.)
Twenty-three days ago I had hip replacement surgery (left side), and the recovery proceeds apace. Gradually strength is returning, and...
Beers with a Stoic: Sacraments, sanctuaries and homes away from home
Several iterations of this essay were published at the old NA Confidential.
A few years ago one Sunday we went for a stroll and passed...
Diary: 17 years ago, the New Albany Historic Home Tour and the Schwartzel family
It so happens that today was the New Albany Historic Home Tour, which appears to have debuted in 2006. My opinion about this event...
Diary: “Beer: Why not for breakfast?” (2009 – 2010)
"Mug Shots"
From 2009 - 2011, I wrote a column for Louisville Eccentric Observer (aka LEO Weekly) called "Mug Shots."
If I recall, it was Cary...
Diary: Looking for a good biography of Eugene V. Debs? This isn’t it
This being an election year — and accordingly, utterly infuriating on a daily basis for the MAGA stupidity it embodies — I thought it...
Diary: Atlas Shrugged and how Bob Youngblood taught me to appreciate Charles Dickens
At best, I tend to regard Ayn Rand as a sociopath, and yet I’ve read her ball-boiling pot-buster (and seemingly interminable) novel Atlas Shrugged.
Why...
When I’m 64? Now that I’m 64? Can we go back to Europa yet?
If memory serves, we sang snippets of this song by The Beatles in swing choir during high school. I never really imagined it would...
Two negatives seldom equal a positive, but enough of toxic fortune cookies
Yesterday I undertook to facilitate resolution of a few matters that have proven vexing, and while I'm usually not much for statements like the...
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40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 76: A boy can dream – about...
Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 75: My shoes are filled with Volga mud (1999).
This installment was terribly hard to write. Kindly...
The abstract modernism of “monuments and memory” in Tito’s Yugoslavia
Controversies over the newer monuments in Yugoslavia also came up as we talked. We discussed the memorial at Tjentište in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Ćosić argued that...
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 75: My shoes are filled with Volga...
Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 74: Down a rabbit hole, deep into the Belgian beer paradise (1998).
Insofar as ordinary Americans know to...
