Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Some words have constrained, limiting and restricted meanings, available only in esoteric whispers of academic thunderings; others, of common and every day usage, but through monotony of repetition and sheer ordinariness, loses any luster of royal patronage; and yet others, because of the expansive and varied contextual applications, can be applicable afresh, when needs require service of exposure. […]
Profundity is overvalued. With the advent of the internet and information technology, the widespread dissemination of seemingly esoteric array of knowledge and know-how (yes, there is a distinction with a difference between the two), everyone is vying for the heard voice, and the break-out from the herd. One becomes easily fatigued by seemingly deep insights, or “new” data and facts upon otherwise mundane concerns. […]
The genre represents the highest form of literature. Poetry possesses its eccentric beauty; the short story its ease of brevity for the reader to pick up and finish in convenience of time, and thus its popularity; the biography and the epistemologically privileged cousin, the autobiography, its authentic historicity; and others by design of self-promotion, as Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” (an oxymoron?). But the novel is the king of prose; of a narrative form which allows for many rooms in an endless castle of hidden trap doors and secret galleys full of antiquities and doorways […]
We learn it early on; the unstated rules, the lines which may not be crossed, and to be weary of those whose reputation precedes them for the blatant disregard of both. How they are learned; what they are; whether explicitly stated or impliedly conveyed; few, if any, have a memory where the Head Mistress of the Universe of Playgrounds sat us all down and said, “Now young ladies and gentlemen, here are the 10 rules of fair play.” Regardless, we all somehow came to recognized and apply them. […]
The known quantity provides a semblance of comfort; the unknown, a stirring of unease. That which has been repetitively engaged, through monotony of routine and familiarity of choice, is preferable to the haphazard disorientation of the disrupted interlude. As one grows older, entrenchment to routine and the known universe becomes the comfort zone of defaulted alternatives, and the youthful vigor or happenstance and unplanned rendezvous with destiny is merely a silliness to be avoided. […]
The inescapable tangles and chains of oblivion are often those dark recesses within one’s psyche; Houdini merely performed to the public the capacity and ability to escape physical constraints; the greater challenge for most continues in the deterioration of the psychology of despondency. Whatever the paradigm of modern medicine bases its treatment approach, whether on an organic component, subconscious repression of childhood trauma, […]