Escalator Riding For Beginners

I've just lay in bed for no more than two minutes and then this thought insisted itself on me. So now I pass it on to you because that's part of my job.  It's not so much that it's the left verses the right, or the young verses the elderly, or the poor verses the rich, or the black verses the white verses the yellow verses the brown, or the new verses the old, or the analogue verses the digital or the bitcoin verses the dollar, or women verses men, or Jesus verses Muhammed or Krishna or Buddha or the great Joo Joo up the mountain. It's darkness verses light.  And this battle is being waged in every small interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial. This is where hell lives - in the everyday, in the mundane, in seeing the worst in everything. And heaven, heaven is the opposite of that. Shining a light - through love, kindnesses, wisdom, patience, understanding, empathy, sympathy. If the world was a great warehouse there are now more than enough people trying to...

The river of Ad is ancient, broad and voluminous. Its tendrils reach every creek bed, every gully, every nook, every bend every rivulet, stream and oxbow, and nowadays of course every strip, every high street, every mall.  The ancient Egyptians, it is said, manufactured a sweeping detour of the Nile near old Cairo so that boatsmen, usually naked but predominantly elbows and knees, could wield their low-tech craft by the squared feet of the pentacled pentagram adorning the Grea t Pyramid, there to be visually asphyxiated also, suffice it to say their eyes momentarily affixed on the unsuffixed Sphinx, by the brethren and schwesterthren of the Great Pyramid - Larry, Moe, Curly, Groucho, Harpo (who always carried a chromatic harmonica) and Karl. The river of Ad is now, with the advent of bits and ones and bound-to-fail start-ups, inside our pockets, on every flat mat surface worth the name. One is deluged by Ad and it's descendants all day every day and 24 hours every night. 48 hours ...

I am one of those people who never saw the attraction in 'Second Life'... a kind of online role-playing alternate reality. I say alternate reality because that's what the SL people like to think of it as.  But it ain't exactly alternate reality. Not in equal doses. It's like 100 percent alternate and zero percent reality.  If you like imagining making out with a drawing of a woman that sometimes flickers or walks through poorly drawn walls, bars, fences or swimming pools then S econd Life may be your cup of tea.  Sorry, drawing of a cup of tea.  And now, today, I discover ASMR. This is a phenomena where people are extra turned on by textural things - whispering, blow-drying towels, scratching sounds, peeling bananas and god knows what else.  Now if the stiffs at Second Life ever got together with the stiffs a ASMR, or AMSR, or ARSM, they might have 50 percent of something. But I guess they never will, cos, you know, the whole flickering cartoon thing.....

I woke up to the sunlight streaming in through the slanted roof window. Tiny birds sang a chaotic chorus out in the world, the manicured gardens, the spaces between houses and apartment towers. "We're still here," they sang.  "None of us are getting out of this alive," I thought.  I slipped on my trousers, changed shirts, clambered down the spiral wooden staircase, my mind two steps behind. The children were already up, bent over cereal bowls and leaning in to the morning. Su nshine here is a rare commodity. Mostly it is strangled by the cloud cover, fleets of dark panzas floating in tight formation and determined to vomit at the slightest glitch. I looked at my daughters, five and 12, their eyes huge and glowing, and wondered what kind of world could I personally leave for them. I keep pumping them, priming their minds with sets of tools, with turns of phrase, with oblique and askew ways of seeing totally normal things, to show them where the exits are, where t...

There's a certain element of preclusion that allows all religions to continue to exist and even to recruit new generations of followers and it includes this: It may be that creationists do not believe in evolution not because their belief system prevents such a belief but because their belief system offers up ignorance such as theirs as the solution, the end point, the ceiling, the finish line. It is a kind of circular argument that threads through ones image of oneself and through the eye of one's beliefs. To admit to evolution one has to be the kind of person who is themselves evolved enough to have finally crawled out from the darkness of pre-medieval superstition and what we now call ignorance and therefore evolved enough to have already discarded the creationist belief. In this kind of argument, this kind of philosophical entanglement there is no actual entanglement. No segment of the circle of creationist belief at any time crosses over any segment of the circle of ev...

I was at the local pool the other day with my daughter, little Bonnie. The local pool, or "Bad", is this fun-theme-park thing called, wait for it, Filderado. It's in a town called Filderstadt. When I heard the name I thought it was a Mexican restaurant chain. But no, it's a water park. It's got a big loopy-loopy water slide. It's got a double decker water slide. It's got a water jump slide. It's got a little pink elephant next to the wading pool (more my speed) and it's got a sauna, a salt crystal room (heaven, mostly cos no one except me is ever in there), and heated pools of different temperatures and salt/chloride mixtures. Being a German pool it is packed to the rafters with shower sandals. If there is a national German garment then the shower sandal is it. The shower sandal is specifically designed to make other swimmers aware that yes, you do in fact own and are prepared to wear your shower sandals to the pool, in the public shower, th...

Though it shames me to admit it, to feel it in the first place, I confess I am deeply in love with Ivanka Trump. Her face so streamlined and non-wind-resistant it must have been worn down over the years from all that bluster snorting out of Papa's open maw. The exquisite play between her chin and bottom lip betray a real human inside that body, that frame, that life. Her father. His world-devouring ego. How unfortunate to have been given everything in life and still, still... I like to imagine that Papa Trump gives family talks the way he gives public speeches - his potholed cantelope of a head pivoting first extreme right, then rolling across to extreme left to read from the two sets of identical prompters set up at the sides of the room. I always am overcome by a temptation to stuff ping pong balls into his mouth as it swings from one side to the other. When you first notice it it seems hilarious, awkward, extreme, stiff, over-coached. And then later on, after you've seen...