InMotion

Spotted on St. Charles in New Orleans.  This animal may be enrolled in the pre-human stage of the Covid-19 Challenge Vaccine Study.  Thank you for masking.  I was out bike riding in New Orleans yesterday evening, crossing the French Quarter, the Central Business District, and the Lower Garden District on my way deeper Uptown.  Traffic is down considerably.   Everything feels and looks different and yet it’s exactly the same.   It is very, very weird.   All this and no one here to enjoy it, with PERFECT weather.   I just had to keep riding upriver, taking it all in. Where are y’all!?   Just before turning around to head back downriver to the restaurant (Seed) where we ordered takeout food and the brewery (Courtyard) where our 3 crowlers  were waiting for us to pick up, I spotted the creature in the picture.   Ha!   When we “start opening back up”, we are all going to have to decide what our risk will be.   It’s going to be really hard.   I mean, to transition from trying to have

This post is inspired by writers.   After an uncharacteristic 8 hours of sleep, this morning I biked over to my local grocery to get the Sunday Times.   Having missed the special seniors-only hour of 7-8am, I was happy to find that the store was not crowded, and the staff were wearing masks as was I.   After using dilute bleach solution to wipe down my packages of bacon, coffee, orange juice and half&half, I perused the paper. As I often do, I turned to the Book Review section first, and leafed thru the Sunday Magazine next. Therein was inspiration. In the early 1990’s, I discovered the writer Michael Ventura .   I think my first encounter with his writing was a piece he wrote for his LA Weekly column Letters at 3 AM in January, 1991 just before the US started bombing Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.   It was an essay about the run-up to U.S. military action, and was entitled The Ghost of Randolph Bourne.     Bourne was an early 20 th Century journalist, social crit

This is a  pretty short post about my lifelong struggle with what in the past I’ve called “mild depression and anxiety” or “dysthymia” but will now call something else.  Thanks for reading.  I do not plan to focus on this in upcoming posts, but no guarantees.  I’ve mentioned struggles in the past, and may do so again. It’s a big challenge, and I am stoked to make some fundamental changes.  Is it possible that I could simply give something a name and in so doing change my relationship to it altogether, in a transformative way?  The new name would be LSE, or Low Self-Esteem.  I think it’s possible.  I am working from that position, in any case.  Here’s why: my therapist recommended that I read a book by Marilyn Sorensen.  Called  Low Self-Esteem: Misunderstood and Misdiagnosed , it was written primarily for therapists and rather than talk about how to address the problem, it calls out modern therapists for not understanding this or being able to really help sufferers of LSE.  I got