A World of Speculation

Bus people 3

He’s a black man in his late 30s, six feet four, 280 or more, wearing a gray and red Columbia Sportswear jacket and an Oakland Raiders watch cap, with hoop earrings. He carries on a loud conversation with the bus driver about where to get a good steak. He...

Blogiversary

Blogiversaries are a good time for reflection, time to ask ourselves what we’re doing here in front of the keyboard in our pajamas (OK, sometimes it’s true) while the floors go unswept and the to-do lists grow longer. Mine is coming up on Oct. 29, and on...

On history and stories

Our priest gave a sermon today about the difficulty of ascribing meaning to specific events in history, whether national or personal, especially events of loss. Why does a child get cancer? Why do terrorists destroy the Twin Towers? Why does America declare war on...

Bus people 2

The No. 35 Macadam bus stopped outside an elementary school and picked up 27 fourth- and fifth-graders on their way to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. There were parents with them, each with six kids to keep count of, and a teacher in his mid-30s, carrying...

One author’s utopia is another author’s hell

The “wise” Macintosh in Spider Robinson’s The Callahan Touch has a utopian recipe for existential misery, if not species suicide. I dream of a world where humans have so little fear, so little to fear, that fear loses its obsessive fascination for...