12 Years Ago Today: The wisdom to know the difference

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 15, 2008, without an image.]

A cousin wrote me yesterday that she’d meant to call some of our relatives in Arkansas to see whether they were okay in the wake of Hurricane Ike, but that “like always” she’d put it off and not done so. I told her that either our relatives are okay or they aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
    Her reply surprised me:

Side Story: A return to Tadpole Creek

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Ed, Paul Clark’s “Philosophical Nightmare” about feral pigs prompted a suggestion that we might re-run your Tadpole Creek story “about the wild pigs in the bottom [you] had to pass through to get to the church on New Year’s Eve.” Thank you for generously reminding me what you say below. —Moristotle

Reply by Ed Rogers

All Over the Place: Ends

(After an Aztec myth)

By Michael H. Brownstein

They gave me five wives for a year

and asked me to walk to the stone knife.

I did this willingly, not like the tales of history,

but because I had to.
I was a god,
the closest one to the sun,
the owner of the heart that grows larger.
Without me the sun will stop in the sky.
I alone walk the steps.
I alone meet the knife.
I alone give my heart.
I am sun.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Poetry & Portraits: Surprise Party

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Surprise Party
By Eric Meub

My current flame has given me a vase.
A vase. I spread a smile across my face
And gasp and gush about the thing too long:
It’s bright, exuberant, completely wrong.

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part Three

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Taking up arms, or not, was now a serious moral dilemma. So…back to Google and YouTube to see how one might go about shooting a few pigs. After watching just a couple of video clips I realized it might be a good deal more exciting than I at first imagined:

14 Years Ago Today: “The American’s Creed”

Site of the speech, more than
half a century later

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 10, 2006, without an image.]

This morning I came across the text of my eighth-grade graduation speech. Typed single-space on seventeen 3x5 cards, its opening paragraphs say that the graduating class has just recited “The American’s Creed,” written by William Tyler Page. [I later found out that Page wrote it in 1917 for a contest, which he won, in competition with over 3,000 other entrants.] The eighth-grader I was says he’s privileged to speak on the second of the creed’s two paragraphs: “I therefore believe it is my duty to my Country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its Flag; and to defend it against all enemies.”

13 Years Ago Today: All in or All out

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 9, 2007.]

I have talked approvingly of what I understood to be Søren Kierkegaard’s view, on the question of belief in God, that it was nobler (as well as more accurate) to hang with one hand from one ledge of the narrow chasm of religious belief and with the other hand from the opposite ledge than to transfer either hand to join the other on the same ledge. Hanging precariously from both ledges symbolized doubt. Kierkegaard thought doubt nobler because it consigned the doubter to the perpetual angst of his uncertainty whether to believe or not to believe, since, as a matter of accuracy, the person could not be objectively sure which belief was right.

Overthinking

By Blake Adamson

My mind races ahead
Questions, questions, questions
My mind races ahead
Tomorrow’s too soon, but too far away
My mind races ahead
Winding up my back, and tightening holds
My mind races ahead
Crying would be nice, but my eyes are dry

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part Two

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Wild hog 101: Let’s start at the beginning.
    As detailed in Part One, my friend’s farm had recently suffered an invasion of feral pigs – also colloquially called wild hogs or wild boars. Like most non-hunters, I was oblivious that feral/wild pigs/hogs were a problem. But I quickly learned that my friend’s farm was on the cutting edge of an ecological disaster now sweeping through Virginia and North Carolina – and much of the rest of the country – having long since overwhelmed the rest of the Southeast.

All Over the Place: Why I Teach

At the start
of a new school year

By Michael H. Brownstein

I never went to war. Korea ended a year before I was born, and we lost the war in Viet Nam the year I began college. I never had the hard, comfortable friendships true battle inspires, and I never had comrades passionate enough to link into that all-purpose male code – one man laying his life down for another. No, not me. I never had that.

Feral Pigs: A Philosophical Nightmare…

for a non-hunting animal rights advocate

Part One

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

When the text came in from my old friend Lee, I wondered if it was a prank. “Neighbors tell me wild hogs are trying to take over my farm up there. You’re closest, could you go by and shoot them?”

14 Years Ago Today: Billy Graham

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 4, 2006, without the image.]

A letter to the editor in the current issue of Newsweek reminds me that forty some-odd years ago a nephew of mine (then eight years old) went to a Billy Graham crusade and got saved.
    The letter writer, Ernest J. Zenker of Mandeville, LA, was responding to the magazine’s August 14 cover story, “Pilgrim’s Progress”:

Share Byedon with others

With a confession from the editor

By James Knudsen

Fits nicely on a 4"x6" index card and just $.35 – that’s thirty-five cents – to mail, first-class!

Goines On: Chocolate and tomato

Click image for more vignettes

The Goineses had a neighbor who brought them huge, sweet tomatoes from his garden. The neighbor brought with them the sweetest smiles of neighborliness, too, so sweet, Goines knew, that only an offer of chocolate in return might do for thanks.
    “Hershey’s milk chocolate,” Goines texted him, “or Toblerone?”
    The neighbor said chocolate wasn’t necessary, but if Goines was trying to turn over his stockpile, he preferred milk chocolate. “Just a little please,” he added.

11 Years Ago Today: Compassion and Justice

[Originally published on September 1, 2009.]

An email discussion I’ve been having about health care reform with a small circle of Yale classmates recently put me in mind of something I’d read about the political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). I’d read, perhaps in an obituary, that he held something like