Every time I turn around, someone is telling me I should adopt their mindset. I don’t know what it is about public exposure, but it immediately makes people start lecturing others on what to think. Is it the need to control? I never understood that particular urge. My father was so controlling that he’d stick…
Fake versus real
January 4, 2024
I’ve done some very stupid things in my life. One night in Norway I got drunk, climbed up a tower crane, and walked all the way out to the end of the boom. No idea how many hundred feet off the ground I was. When I got to the end of the boom, the wind kicked…
Caring is never wasted
January 3, 2024
Today I read “Al-Qaeda-linked force captures Fallujah amid rise in violence in Iraq.” The writers get a few facts wrong. For one thing they claim that only the US Marines fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah (November 7 to December 23, 2023). In reality army, navy, and air force units were present. The statement…
The matryoshka card
January 3, 2024
As some of you may know, the US Postal Service has me on a list. A large percentage of the valuable postcards I buy go missing, even when they’re registered. The Snowden revelations have convinced me that it would be the easiest thing in the world for my name and the names of my German…
War with China? Not a chance.
January 2, 2024
For whatever reason journalists, historians, pundits, and academics are permanently convinced that the US is right around the corner from catastrophic defeat at the hands of an invincible enemy. I’ve now lived through four major conflicts that involved American forces, and I’ve studied them all. My guess is that the gore crows who tell us…
I liked the first day of 2014
January 1, 2024
Today our friend Sandra came over to Tim’s house and cooked us a turkey. Sandra is a remarkable person. She took care of my Great-Aunt Marian for nine years, a job for which she could not have possibly been paid enough. Marian was…difficult in her prime. As an angry, elderly widow who’d suffered a debilitating…
The worst year of my life
December 31, 2023
This was the worst year of my life. For over a decade, Tim and I would say to each other, “This was the worst year yet,” but 2013 was the absolute bottom. I say than knowing full well that I’m daring the fates to make 2014 even worse, but it can’t be. The depths have…
I used to be a journalist
December 30, 2023
I was a history major, and I used to be a journalist. When I wrote about musicians, I never had preconceived ideas about the story I’d produce. It was entirely up to the interviewee. In my military-history books, I go only where the facts take me. So I get angry when I see “respected journalists”…
Why we had to kill Charles Darwin
December 29, 2023
I’ve had unbelievably strange dreams. Volume Three of the Ghosts Trilogy—Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian—will be available next month, I think. It’ll show you the mess inside my head. As I say in my sales pitch, Volume One is how my life was, Volume Two is how I wish it had been,…
I AM sorry but go away
December 28, 2023
August 20, 2012, was not a good day. I learned that someone was not at all who I thought. It was genuinely horrifying because I discovered that I’d been dealing with an insane person. She’d hid her insanity relatively well, but as always, I denied the little signs that things were awry. In August of…