Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
It is the classic question which allegedly reveals something about a person’s inner psyche: Of whether you would rather die from a thousand cuts, or quickly and instantaneously? Of course, the third option is never allowed within the hypothetical, because to include it would defeat the whole purpose of the question: Of continuing to live, or even of a “middle” ground, […]
Remember the child who used to stand in front of the mirror and make faces at him/herself? It was great fun to “make-believe” and perform visual contortions to stretch the limits of muscular pretzels of interactions between eyes, tongue and bursting cheeks; or the imaginative stance of being the sheriff in town, eyes narrowing; or perhaps just seeing whether the twitches of a reflection can fool the reality of timeless childhood. […]
How does one “prove” a standard of “incompatibility”? Physical injuries often allow for a medical opinion to impose certain restrictions: No lifting more than X-pounds; no standing more than 2 hours within an 8-hour period, etc. These, then, can directly “prove” that a Federal or Postal employee […]
It is always the private conversation that is the most dangerous and unpredictable; for, the voices within are unknown to the surrounding conversations without amidst the public domain, and are most persuasive precisely because the multiple participants come down to a single voice: The “I” or “me” of the inner ego. […]
How is it that a tourist can see the same building which local people pass by every day, as something of an attraction worthy of encapsulating and embalming for posterity’s sake, with a click of the camera? What is it about the eye of the traveler which is different from the staid repetitiveness of the citizen occupying for decades, centuries, and eons long forgotten, which challenges the uniqueness of stability and contrasts it as against the unwanted forces of change? Like tectonic shifts, mass migrations armed with Smartphones […]
It is a familiar refrain to note that everyone has a self-contained “private hell”; and an even greater understanding that it is well that such thoughts of other hells are both private, and for the most part, left silent without conveyance or communication. But that is changing, in large part, because people believe that mass dissemination of information has now unleashed any unspoken decorum of dignified discretion. We believe, now, that everyone should “tell all”; that private matters once left as remnants of shameful self-confessions should be publicized because it is healthy for the inner soul to be uncovered. […]
Can a verse stand alone, isolated in its metrical composition, without preceding or succeeding contextual delineations? Of what value can the singular have, without the surrounding aggregation of the whole? Like a scrap or fragment of a larger narrative revelation, of archaeologists and anthropologists working with but a piece of the greater story, the verse of 1-liners forever echoes for a harkening of others to join. John Donne poetically captured the sense of that isolation, and Thomas Merton wrote a reflective narrative upon that very theme […]
The repetitive recurrence of mirroring sounds or letters at the beginning of adjacent words is merely a reflection of how we live our lives. What is inherent in human beings that we would discover, create or otherwise compile an aggregation of such a linguistic phenomena? The universe could have continued happily on its mindless course of fated determinism without people engaging in such nonsensical rhythms of prose and poetry; but as each act of indeterminate vacuity [… ]
It is always that minor impurity which devalues the whole; “but for” the element identified as an invasive component, the rest would constitute the purity of perfections. It is how we point fingers and bemoan the state of our own affairs; and how we make of a peripheral inconsequence the centrality of our problems. The evil that we identify as the foundational source of a problem is merely the canard for justification, and in the end, we don’t want it to go away, but to remain as fodder to fester as the legitimate basis of an illegitimate claim. […]