To the powers that be at CNN …

Shut the f*ck up already.  Really.  Your incessant repetition of nothing is so getting on my nerves.  The endless speculation that goes nowhere.  The constant questions.  The meaningless questions.  The ever-growing stream of ‘experts’ who have no answers because there are no answers.  Your relentless prying and probing and the never-ending exploitation of people’s sadness and grief.  Please.  Stop.

Enough already.  Give it a rest.

It’s bad enough when there’s a snowstorm and your poor, unfortunate, frost-bitten reporters are sent hither, thither and yon to freeze their asses off, so you can keep tabs on how high the snow drifts are.  Or when a plane goes down.

You just can’t get enough of the gory details.  Over and over and over and over again you ask what it must have been like to be a passenger on that plane as it spun out of control and it became

Hanging on for dear life …

Me. The poster child for looking on the bright side. Positive thinking. Seeing the glass half full. A true believer in everything working out in the end. Me. That one. That girl. That woman.

Not so much at the moment, though. I’ve got to admit I’m struggling. So much bad news. Everywhere you turn. It’s absolutely unavoidable. We are just in one helluva mess. The whole world. All of us.

So much hatred. So much prejudice. So much anger. So much violence. So much bloodshed. So much death. So much destruction. So much rubble. So much despair. So much unrest. So much imbalance. So much poverty. So much hunger. So much misery. So much suffering. So much fear. So much grief. So many tears. So many scars. So much injustice.

So little hope.

So little respect. For each other. For life. For human rights. For freedom. Maybe even for ourselves.

Such a crisis.

There has to be something we can do. Why aren’t we?

Why aren’t we marching on our Nations’ capitals? Why aren’t we more selective about who we elect? Why don’t we demand more from them? Why don’t we hold

Day 253. My Weekend

What a weekend!  David Sedaris on Friday night.  And a play on Sunday afternoon.  Following a pretty hectic week.  With an even more hectic week to come, this week.  Maybe I should double my vitamins.  Don’t be surprised if I post a bit later in the morning in the next several days.

A friend of mine received the theatre tickets as a Christmas gift.  And I was the beneficiary of her niece’s (and her hubby’s) generosity.  Thanks, by the way.  We went to see “RACE”, by David Mamet.

Very provocative.  Very politically incorrect.

I had no idea what to expect.  Usually I’d google it before hand, but this time I didn’t.  My friend invited me, I accepted, I made note of the day and time in my calendar, and promptly put it out of my mind.  I guess I was preoccupied.

If you’re not familiar with him (David Mamet), he’s an American author, playwright, screenwriter and film

Day 181. Extraordinary Reunion

In 1965 a white, Jewish, twenty-one year old living in Toronto was sitting, in his family home, watching the news on television.  What he saw so moved him, so disgusted him, he was compelled to go to Greenwood, Mississippi.  To help.  To do something.  To get involved.  To join the fight for equal rights. To be part of the Civil Rights Movement.

To help black residents register to vote.

The twenty-one year old Canadian was Paul Saltzman; and, while on his way into a Greenwood courthouse, he was stopped, and chased, by three white youths.  Even though he ran for his life, they caught up with him.  One slugged him, knocking him to the ground.  In hindsight he was very lucky.  They might just as easily have shot

Day 60. A Milestone

It’s been two months, since I first had the crazy idea of attempting to write something new, every day, for a year.  Sixty days.  Sixty stories.  Sixty different topics.  Six hundred and twenty-one tags.  Forty-four thousand, seven hundred nineteen words.

And sixty grande Pike’s to keep me going.

Damn!  That’s half a novel’s worth of work.  That’s one mother load of a blog.  And I’m not even close to being done.  Done in, occasionally.  But not done.  I’ve written on more subjects I could ever have imagined, from aging to atoning.  From beauty to books.  The Caribbean to cycles.  Distractions.  Entertainment.  And fantasies.

On googling.  Health and history.  From ignorance to intentions.  Joy and love.  From mischief to  music and naturopathy.  Politics and prejudice.  Refining to rituals.