The Wild Winds of Fortune

An important five-year anniversary passed last June, and I failed to mark it.  June 24 was the fifth year since the Supreme Court decided Kelo v. City of New London  545 U.S. 468 (2005).  It’s odd to think it’s been five years; perhaps because it was such an atrocious decision it is clear in memory — it could have been only last week.

Very few  cases have engendered the outrage over the past ten years as Kelo has.  The Economist called it the worst decision of Justice John Paul Stevens career.  The aftermath stands as a cautionary tale about the limits of economic reliance upon private developers.

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Susette Kelo lived in the Ft. Trumbull area of New London, Connecticut.  She had made numerous improvements to her property; it also had a view of the water.  Another petitioner in the case, Wilhelmina Dery, had been  born in her house in 1918, and had lived there her entire life.  Her husband, Charles, had lived there sixty years.  All told, five petitioners owned nine lots in the area.

New London had development plans for the area adjacent to Fort Trumbull.  In addition to other development, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer had a facility there.  The entire plan was designed to provide “economic revitalization” to the city. The private developers proposing the development stood to lease the land for $1 per year.  A great deal if you can get it — especially for 91 acres of waterfront property.

Although the city had reached agreements with most of the landowners in the area, these five petitioners remained.  Since they were unable to reach agreement, the city exercised its right of eminent domain.  The landowners sued.

This was not a blighted area.  The eminent domain was exercised specifically to turn the property over to a private developer.  The city essentially acted as a go between, with the hope that the development would jump-start the economy.

The Supreme Court ruled that exercise of eminent domain for purely economic purposes was an acceptable public use under the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, prompting a stinging dissent by O’Connor, joined by Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.  This is one of the rare times I agreed with the conservative wing of the court.

In the opening of her dissent, O’Connor wrote:

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded—i. e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public—in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings “for public use” is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property—and thereby effectively to delete the words “for public use” from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. 

She was exactly right.

I am not a communist, nor am I prone to calling people communists, but this is, in effect, a communist idea: that property should be allowed to be used for what the government deems the “best” purpose, regardless of what the people who own it believe. That the entities who stand to benefit by this are developers and pharmaceutical companies does not change anything.*

What the city of New London ran up against, and what the Court ultimately dismissed as unimportant, was the attachment of people to the land they own.  A house becomes a home by loving it, by living in it, by accumulating history within its walls.  It is not true that “everyone has a price”:  how can you put a price on eighty years of a woman’s life?  There is a reason that eminent domains exists, and it is not only because people ask for more than the market values of the house.  People often hold onto their houses because of the meaning they have for them.  It is one thing for a house to be purchased for a road, or a park, or another clearly public use, but to be turned over to a private developer, even allegedly with the best interests of the city at heart, is appalling.

And even though it won in the courts, the story did not end well for the city.

In an move showing callousness towards the owners being displaced, the city originally announced it would charge the landowners rent for the five years the case had been winding through the courts.  Since they had exercised eminent domain, the theory went, the owners had been living on city land for five years and owed thousands of dollars in back taxes.  The case finally ended with New London paying a lot more for the landowner’s properties, and agreeing to move Susette Kelo’s house to a new location.  All of this freed up the waterfront for the development the city claimed it so desperately needed.

Except….

It never happened.  The developer couldn’t get financing.  Pfizer, the 500 pound gorilla in this picture, closed its New London facility and moved 1500 workers, just  before the tax breaks from the city were due to expire.

And the place where Susette Kelo’s house once stood is an empty lot. The city spent tens of millions on this enterprise just to see it evaporate.

I don’t know what the moral is in this story, of if there is one.  Cities are supposed to be about the people in them.  And yes, jobs are important too, but the idea that a corporation — any corporation — can be trusted not to take the least expensive route — or the route in its best economic interest, which may not be in line with the public’s — is naive.   And government at any level is supposed to protect its citizens from predations by private entities, not abet them.

*Somewhere in here is a ranting post about how the free-market system isn’t, but I don’t have the energy right now.

I rarely give reviews of any sort, but these people deserve it….


If you are ever in Baltimore, and you love beer, and you love burgers, you have got to go to Alewife. It has forty beers on draft (plus a lot of others) and a knowledgeable staff. The smoked tomato soup was wicked good. The Smoke burger (with smoked gouda, gruyere, grilled cippolini onions, and chipotle aioli) was, no joke, the Best. Burger. I. Have. Ever. Had. The fries are cooked in duck fat, and even the ketchup is amazing — it’s homemade. So. Good.

Last Saturday, The Red Headed Menace and I had an adventure.

It started out as a simple trip to the beach.  A cold gray morning had turned into one of those magnificent autumn/winter Northern California afternoons, where the sky is a deep cerulean blue except where the sunlight dapples through the tree leaves.

I know the way to the beach.  I know several ways to the beach, as a matter of fact.  My planned route involved taking the Page Mill exit onto I-280, then getting off and Sand Hill and taking the roads back to pick up California 84.  (I realize that for all of you who live in other places this makes no sense.)

Except… somehow I forgot to exit off Page Mill.  I’m still not sure why; my mind was on other things, perhaps, or just caught up in the beauty around me.  At any rate, I was about a mile up Page Mill before I realized, oh, yeah, I don’t go this way.  Why not, I thought?  Page Mill runs through at least as far as Skyline.  So I kept going…. and then remembered exactly why I never took this route.

It’s been a long while since I have white-knuckled a road.  It’s been even longer since I white-knuckled a road in broad daylight.  This one had all the elements that scare the crap out of me: twists with blind curves, oncoming traffic that had a tendency to drift over the line, no shoulders, and freaking insane bicyclists.  Oh, yes, and the late afternoon sun hitting me in the eyes.  I kept telling RHM to enjoy the view, because I sure couldn’t.

After an eternity, we reached the major crossroads.  Hurrah! “But mom,” he said, “The sign says to go to Pescadero to go straight.” “No way, ” I said,pulling a sharp right. “From here it gets worse.”  So we drove north to 84, took that to 1 and drove south to Pescadero. The whole disaster probably costs us an additional forty minutes.

But when we got to the coast…

It was about forty-five minutes to sunset.  The late-afternoon sun hit the waves, turning them golden. we drove along in the cool, soft, mist-laden air towards Pescadero.  RHM and I talked about how, even though people say the ocean is blue, it often is not — being gold, or steel gray, or green.  To be with my son, on such an afternoon, was joy itself.

We decided to go to the Arcangeli Bakery in the town of Pescadero.  (If you are ever in our neck of woods, it is worth not merely a detour but a trip.)  Although we were in the store for only a few minutes, the golden late afternoon had been socked in with a thick blanket of clouds.  Ah, coastal California.  Wait five minutes and the weather changes.

We still went to the beach.  That’s why we were there, after all.

Alone among our family, RHM and I are ocean people.  We will go to see the ocean in a driving rainstorm (barring lightning) or, in the case of yesterday, in a cold overcast with winds that drove through my two layers of sweatshirts like they were chiffon.

“I’m sorry the weather is so bad.” “That’s okay, it is still wonderful.”

The best part of this was that, since the music player in the LGM (Little Green Mazda) was busted, we actually talked the whole way.  He said that when he was older he wanted to bring his wife/fiancee/girlfriend to the coast — “Are there any B&Bs around here?  I would love to wake up with someone and take breakfast on the beach.”  We talked philosophy. We talked about just why we were ocean people.

RHM is excited about the vast array of life that exists under the waves and along the shore.  Me, I am fascinated by the horizon — by the wonderful thought that on its other side is a whole new world, and all you need is a boat to get there.

I am very blessed.  I know people whose teenagers only talk to them to ask for money or what’s for dinner.  Without stopping being a parent (believe me, I get a fair amount of attitude and mete out a fair amount of discipline), I am a friend.

It was a wonderful experience, a reminder of how good life can be.

Steven D. Levitt can  bite my ass.

In his book, Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt, the “rogue economist,” includes a piece called “Why Vote?” from November 6, 2005.  In it he argues that any given vote does not really matter, since very few elections are decided by small margins anyway.  He then goes on to mention the 2000 presidential election:  “It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas.  And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home districts.”

He then posits three reasons for voting: 1) people are not very bright; 2) people tend to view the vote as a lottery: “you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings — much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.”  3) people vote out of some sort of civic pride.

He goes on to rather cavalierly dismiss the effect of large numbers of the population opting not to vote, analogizing it to telling your daughter not to pick flowers because if everyone did there would be no flowers left.

He also talks about the experience of the Swiss, who experienced a decline in voting rates following the move to all-mail voting.  In the end, he concludes that people vote because of social pressure to b e seen at the polls.

Idiot.

Firstly, he ignored a much more relevant example than the Swiss:  Washington State, which since 1997 has had vote-by-mail in all counties but one.  In 1996 general Presidential election, the turnout for eligible registered voters was 54.77%.  In 2000, it was 60.7%.  In 2004, it was 66.9 %.  In 2008 it was 66.5%  Even taking into account that the three latter elections were more hotly contested than 1996, it is still a marked improvement in turnout.  It is certainly not the case that, at least statewide, voter participation decreased.

Secondly, and much more importantly, whenever you are analyzing elections results, the issue is not just what the effect that individual votes cast have, but those that are not cast.  Until 2007, Florida did not allow anyone who had ever been convicted of a felony to vote.  Ever.  Given that a sizeable proportion of those (primarily) men were African-Americans, who tend to vote more heavily Democratic, that would have affected the outcome of the race.  And that is without taking into account the “purge list” of 173,000 names used by Florida officials to disenfranchise people who, it turned out, were only guilty of misdemeanors.  Hasty efforts to return individuals to the rolls before election day were imperfect, at best.

Those four men and one women were only allowed to determine the outcome of that 2000 election because so many people down the line had not been given a voice.  Ask any of those people how they felt about being not allowed to vote, and my hunch is a lot of them were outraged.

Ask any Proposition 8 proponent — or opponent — whether their vote “had some impact on policy.”  Damn straight it did.  And this also completely ignores the effect on local races, which turnouts affect even more heavily.

Voting matters.  For all of us.  There is a reason why so many people have fought — and in some cases, died — to secure that right.  And it is not just so their neighbors will think well of them.

Elections are like streams.  They are chaotic systems.  Yes, removing one drop of water from the stream may not have an effect, but as you remove more and more, the stream changes course and power.  Since no one droplet can be identified as determinative, but removal of too many of them is disastrous, then all of them must be considered crucial.

It is hard enough to get people to vote.  (Especially young people; and two of the people who lauded this book to the skies to me were under twenty-five.)  The last thing we need is some “rogue economist” effectively dismissing its importance.

I’ve always wanted to be a top Google hit.  For something.  Silly, I know, but it’s nice to have goals in life.

This blog has a top Google hit.  It turns out that if you Google the phrase “children ardent for some desperate glory,”  this post, which gives the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen in full, comes up at the top of the list.  I have put up a disclaimer up encouraging people — most likely students — to seek out sites with more of Owen’s poetry.

I feel vaguely guilty.*

*I also have a vague feeling that I need to check and see whether the poem is in the public domain.

“This is Lego being a corporate bitch.”  The Red Headed Menace.*

*He and Railfan are massively invested in Lego Bionicles.  (Yes, I know that they’re teenagers.  I don’t get it either.)  They buy sets for the sole purpose of re-using the parts to create new figures. A little while ago, Lego replaced Bionicle with “Hero Factory,” which looks similar, and which, apparently, Lego promised would be backwards compatible.  The two of them had gone out and bought two sets, only to find that the skeleton was not capable of disassembly and the rest of the parts wouldn’t work with anything but the set they were bought with.  Railfan’s comment was “You broke my childhood, you no good …..”


The level of dramatic utterances around the house right now rivals Off-Broadway.

 It was a cool (out of respect for my friends with snow I will refrain from saying “cold”), wet day yesterday here in my neck of the woods.  There was football on television and melancholy in the air.

Lately, I have craved soup.  I think the gray days have made me need something warm and comforting.  Soup is not usually one of my comfort foods, though.  My biggest comfort food is red beans and rice, by far.

I was born in New Orleans, although I really grew up in Florida.  My mom is not necessarily the best of cooks (sorry, Mom), but she made killer red beans and rice, having learned when we lived in Louisiana.  Since when I was growing up andouille sausage was not readily available where I lived, Mom used kielbasa, which worked wonderfully.  Rich, creamy, spicy bean gravy over white fluffy rice.  Hmmmmm.

I’m the only one in my household who likes proper red beans and rice.  The carnivores hate beans, and the vegetarians keep insisting that I should make a vegetarian version.  Just… no.  Real red beans and rice is never vegetarian, since it contains both bacon or pancetta (you use the fat to cook the “trinity” — onion, celery, green pepper) and sausage, preferably andouille.*

It is more than a dish.  It is a reminder of someone who loves me.

There is such a connection between food and love, and food and places. 

My very earliest memory is of food:  when I was about three, and we still lived in New Orleans, I would go in the back of a neighbor’s VW Beetle (the very back, behind the back seat — next to the window, standing up looking backwards) to get sno-cones.  Sno-cones still make me smile.

I have written how my memories are tied up in music.  They are tied up in food as well.

Mom is red beans and rice, and macaroni and cheese.  Not the fake-orange type: Mom used to make macaroni the way I taught my kids — make pasta, drain, dump lots of real cheese in, stir.  If you get the proportions right, and the timing, you get really wonderful mac ‘n’ cheese that only needs black pepper or hot sauce. And the best banana pudding ever:  the Rocket Scientist likes my cooking better than Mom’s, except for the banana pudding.  When we’re with her, she always makes it for him.  As I said, food as love.

Food as family: turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes, ambrosia, relics of so many Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with me and my kids, or with the Rocket Scientist’s family.

Food as time and place:  Grouper, shrimp, scallops are Florida, and home.  As are tangelos from the tree and okra.  Egg noodles with parmesan cheese (we had a big box of them on my floor at Wellesley one year) are college, as is clam chowder (what I would not give for a bowl of chowder from No-Name’s), as is oddly, sometimes, tea. I never really drank tea before college, but Wellesley is a civilized place, and every Wednesday afternoon we would have tea (no silver tea service, sadly) in the living room of the dorm.  There are the other school memories: graduate school and Georgia Tech was homemade bread** and fresh ground beef made into the best chili ever.  Law school was Jose’s Caribbean food and Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream.

Food memories are made all the time:  jambalaya is not associated with New Orleans, but with my former parish and a parishioner who would make jambalaya and gumbo for Mardi Gras. Apple Martinis are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I had my first two (and was correspondingly buzzed) and wandered around looking at the paintings and giggling.  Latkes are my housemate, the Resident Shrink, who is Jewish and who, in what is becoming a tradition, makes them for the family the second or third day of Hanukkah.

Food brings travel memories, most of them almost stereotypical: tapas and churros con chocolat are Madrid; real vanilla ice cream and crepes, Paris; fruit-flavored beer, Belgium; fish and chips, London; meat pastries, Bath.

There is joy in creating other people’s memories.  My brownies are making memories, for my children and others.  My chocolate pudding has become a comfort food of the first order for at least two people in my house.

My hope is one day, my kids will say… “It’s a miserable day.  Let’s make some brownies to cheer ourselves up.”

I will be smiling in my grave.

*One of the members of my household who is most bemused about my insistence on non-veg red beans is a New Yorker who refuses to accept that either proper pizza or (especially) proper bagels exist outside the five boroughs.


**I have sourdough starter in my fridge that is older than my eldest son, that has been transported across country four times.  The pioneers would be proud of us.

I missed an important anniversary yesterday.  On the other hand, at least one source says it is today.  In any case…

On either January 16th or 17th, 1605, the novel Don Quixote was published  (or at least the first half).

I do not know whether I stand up to the good knight’s example anymore:  I tend to be a great deal more introspective these days.  “Writing about what you know” has led to far more personal than social or political posts.  The windmills seem to be standing all by themselves, without me jousting with them.

Still, the desire to engage in what seems like ridiculous endeavors still haunts me.

I  went to lunch with my friend PLD* today.  Towards the end of a lovely meal (if you are ever in Los Altos, California, go by The Cravery and grab a bowl of tomato-bisque soup), I talked about the crossroads where I find myself.

All I really want to do out of life is write.  And write this.  The mini-essay form (for what are blog posts — good ones, at any rate –but mini-essays?)  is where I find my comfort zone.**  It’s where I find love of the craft.  Where I find joy.  And, if not this, then other writing.  But writing is what I do.  I am not as thorough about it as I should be, and I place a whole host of obstacles in my own way, but I am a writer.

My friend looked at me, and said, baldly and matter of factly, “You need to just do it.  Find a way to make it happen. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone.  Don’t worry about making it perfect.”

He referred me to Seth Godin, for which I am very grateful. He told me about an exhibit he had seen about Tim Burton, about how many ventures Tim Burton has been involved with that went nowhere — that we never hear about precisely because they went nowhere.

He left me thinking about possibilities.  About how fear so often gets in  my way.  About how I do worry about whether or not people are listening.  About fearing success as much as failure.

After all, once you subdue the windmill, what do you do with it?

The time to ask that question, though, is after you have the windmill at your mercy.  Sometimes the first — and most important — windmill exists mainly in your own head.


*No, those are not his initials.  No, I am not going to tell you what they stand for, other than to say it is in no way suggestive.  Mind out of the gutter, folks.

**There is of course the question of the extent to which moving out of my comfort zone would cause me to grow as a person and a writer, but that’s a different issue for a different day.

A few minutes ago, while driving home, I saw a dog off-leash crossing the road. In the crosswalk. He waited for a break in traffic, then trotted across, staying between the lines the whole time.   I stopped, of course, because in California pedestrians in the crosswalk have right-of-way over motorists.

Nothing says those pedestrians have to be human.*

*No, I would not have hit the dog in any case.  What sort of person do you think I am?

Lately, it occurred to me that no one in my family outside my husband and occasionally one of my kids had ever read my writing.  My mom never uses a computer, neither do my sisters or eldest brother, and while both my younger brother and my brother-in-law use computers extensively, they have never been told about the existence of this blog.

So I am compiling a book for them.  Although I am not including everything, I certainly am including a lot of political/social posts.  I am far, far more liberal than the rest of my family. (The closest I have gotten to a political discussion in the past five years was with my eldest sister who was explaining to me how global warming was a load of hogwash.  I ended the conversation because her daughter was getting married and as mother-of-the bride she did not need the extra stress of arguing with me.)  There are other issues in my life that I do not blog about that I may discuss with them as well — I have not decided. This is a sort of coming out, as it were.

I expect that at least one of them will not be talking to me when this is all over.  My mom will be talking to me — if for no other reason than to tell me she’s praying for me, but then she does that anyway.

I plan to do it anyway.  I am far too old — as are they — for me to be hiding who I am.

I am seriously considering giving up my Facebook account.

It’s not that I don’t love all my friends — I do.  It’s just that I find that I rarely post anything of substance, merely repost interesting links I find.  I do post links to this blog sometimes, sending along posts I am particularly pleased with or proud of.  I don’t talk about what is going on (in part because there is nothing interesting going on that I care to talk about).  I am more likely to post information here than there — if for no other reason that the character limits drive me crazy.  (Same reason I don’t use Twitter: it seems I am constitutionally unable to say anything in 140 characters.) Delicate issues, to the limited extent that I talk about them, are reserved for a small filter on my LiveJournal.

It is a time sink of the first order.  I have managed to break my Bejeweled addiction (losing the computer it was stored on helped a lot with that one), only to replace it with Facebook.  I don’t have time for this — it is hard enough for me to get things done without following links to Sarah Palin speeches or excerpts from the Daily Show.

The people whom I got it for — the people who I am most interested in following — are too busy living their lives to post about it.  The difficulty is that there are some among my friends who use the service in the best possible way — letting people know about important aspects of their lives.  (Not to mention the Rocket Scientist, who tends to post things like the fact that he landed safely in wherever, which helps my peace of mind.) I don’t want to give up that connection, especially to friends who are far away.*

It exacerbates what I see as my greatest failing:  my absolute difficulty in getting things done in the absence of externally imposed structure.  I need the structure of someone telling me “I need this by Thursday” or even “I needed this yesterday, can you help me” to be effective.  I can move mountains, if I have to, to meet important deadlines. (Yes, I tend to procrastinate — I still get things done.)  I thrive in academia, in large part because there are such deadlines. (And that someone has to be a concrete entity or person, not simply “x is going to happen to you personally.” I have far more of a sense of responsibility towards others than towards myself. Or my family, unfortunately.) I am somewhat tempted to make a comment about it being in keeping with my newly discovered Pisces orientation, but then again, not.

I have been working on imposing my own structure with mixed success.  I guess that’s the part of being a grownup I’ve never really mastered.  Maybe it’s time to grow up some more.

* Yes, know you can use filters.  I can never figure out whom to put on them.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars ,
but in ourselves, that we are underlings… 
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I’m sure you’ve seen the news: because of shifts in the earth’s rotation, the old zodiac no longer applies.  There is a new sign “Ophiucus”* and most of the other signs have had their dates changed.

Apparently all this is due to a statement by an astronomer at the Minneapolis Planetarium, who explained that in fact the sun did not move through the constellations which corresponded to the zodiac, but in a different pattern.  Which means we’ve been doing it all wrong.

I’m not an Aries anymore.  I am not strong and dynamic and full of leadership.  I am not independent and athletic. I’m a …. Pisces, given to directionless dreaming and compassion for others and a tendency towards self-pity.

Thing is, I want to be an Aries.  Aries are, as far as I am concerned, some of the coolest people on the earth. Maya Angelou is an Aries.  So is — or was — Rachel Maddow .  (On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was an Aries, and both Michaelangelo and Dr Seuss are Pisces.)  It always annoyed me that I was never more like the Aries described in the astrological manuals.  But if I am completely honest with myself, I do tend a lot more towards the so-called Piscean traits.

And I am a water person — and a winter person — much more than a sun and spring person.  So maybe there is something to this after all…

Except I am who I have always been.  Changing my sign did not change me (perhaps unfortunately).  And for every person trumpeted as a “typical” Aries, there are others who were more like Pisces, or Scorpio or Sagittarius.  (I personally know Sagittarians who are far more Arian than I am. Lucky them.)  And a lot of those “typical” Aries will become Pisces by this realignment just as I have.  And they will be no less full of fire and leadership than they ever were.

This is not news.  The stars have been aligned the way they are for a while now.  We are who we are, for good or ill.  I cannot blame them for my lack of focus any more than I can laud them for my sense of compassion towards others.

Which just goes to show what all of us who believe this is complete and utter hogwash were right all along. I’m not necessarily happy about this — there is something reassuring to feel that the reason we are the way we are is because of stellar influences far beyond our control.

I think I should have Weird Al have the last word on all this.  [Warning: seizure/migraine trigger for sensitive people.]

Now if I can just shut up all the people who claim that their life is going to hell in hand-basket this week because Mercury is in retrograde….

*Ophiucus is “The Snake Annoyer.”  How cool is that? Personally I think he should be represented by Harry Potter, but Harry was born the wrong time of year.  Pooh.

The universe, in the form of other people, might be trying to tell me something.

In the past month, I have had someone tell  me that I am beautiful, fascinating and complex.* (They also said something completely flattering about my writing, which is so amazing I am not going to repeat it here.)  I have had other people tell me how valued my service is.

Today, a person in a group that I participate in told me that she was impressed and moved by my participation.  She told me that I had influenced her in positive ways, and she was grateful for my presence in the group. She said she got annoyed when other people talked over me because she felt that I always had something wise and worthwhile to say.

I don’t know what to do with this information.  I have spent so much of my life feeling… inadequate.  I fail to recognize that sometimes just being who you are and contributing makes a difference in other people’s lives.

I have a husband who is one of literally a handful of people in the world who do what he does.  I have friends who have done mind-boggling things.  And I have often wondered about the extent to which I have squandered the opportunities — educational and otherwise — which I have been given. It is hard for me to feel as though my contribution to the world has been anything but insignificant.

And yet… the Rocket Scientist says I am often his muse.  I am the one who keeps the home-fires burning.  I  help people. I share what I know.  One at least one occasion, I have been told by someone that something I had written had changed their life and made it possible for them to heal from old wounds.

My goal these days needs to be to remember this.  To keep in mind that my life, while so mundane, has helped others live better lives.

I am disallowing comments to this post because, while I am writing it here to keep it where I can see it, I am in no way trolling for comments about how “wonderful” I am.

*Note to self: you should really decide whether or not to use Oxford commas.   Switching back and forth is ridiculous.

Regarding the last post:  I think it’s great.  Of course, I’m his mother, so I am a rather biased.  (I particularly like the “not wanting antagonism impaired” line:  I think it shows a good understanding of human nature.)

“Phobia”

Aquaphobia
Aerophobia
Scared of the clouds of rain that go to ya
There are no gathering storms
There are no people above the norm
Just phobia.

Terraphobia
Thermophobia
Scared of the earth that builds love
Slaughtering people foreign lands
Letting innocent blood flow in the drifting sands
It is just
Phobia.

Phobias just filter out doves
Keeping us scared of the victims
Homogenizing human horror
Phobia makes us say sh*t to ’em
It is what it is
Just phobia

Chronophobia
Astrophobia
Scared of the radiant beautiful outside world
Curled up not wanting antagonism impaired
Wishing for war
While not ready for dystopia
It takes a truly evil mind
To try to undermine
The destruction of phobia.

By the Red-Headed Menace, age 14.  (For a poetry slam at school.)