God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference. Who has not needed to hear those words? They were written, elegantly, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s. He was born near here, in Wright City, […]
Having the boat lifted out of the water and inspecting her props, rudder, and trim tabs took no more than 30 minutes. It cost the same as my monthly rent. Everything there was fine though, so Chris asked the marine mechanics to search until they found why Castaway was unable to get […]
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize […]
Chris invited me to help transit his new boat, Castaway, a thousand miles from Fort Pierce, Florida, to Havre de Grace, Maryland. We ran offshore for several days then took the Intracoastal Waterway north, on average. The coast was beautiful, varied, and often deserted. But there were also mechanical and electrical breakdowns, […]
“She has no inner voice.” A stark sentence, a friend explaining someone’s emotional inconsistency. It stayed with me, stripped of its context, for days. Was it possible to not have an inner voice, a self that was busy connecting experiences and memories, stringing together a continuous personhood? “When the voice that links the […]
As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.” He had no idea […]
Things can go swimmingly for so long that they seem to be proof you will make it. Success by sunk cost! Then, smack in the middle of a shouted discussion about politics, alcoholism, and past lovers, you run aground at full speed off some unnamed headland. Is that not always the way? […]
Being too cool for the Los Angeles rock band the Eagles was enshrined in the Coen Brothers’ classic film The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude (Jeff Bridges) has been doped by a pornographer and brained in the forehead with a coffee mug by the Malibu Police chief, yet he still retains the […]
“Oh, it’s just a print,” the homeowner says, waving toward the lithograph’s number and signature. Just a print? Does she realize humans learned to print art long before Gutenberg printed sentences? That printing a woodcut required an engraver to make more than a thousand cuts just to chip out slivers between the crosshatch […]
Lord, what a relief it is, to be obsessed with the Olympics. Most years, I catch glimpses, but this summer has been hot and hard, and I needed to obsess about something other than illness, home repairs, and work. Why not savor my favorite city and immerse myself in other people’s hard work, […]
