Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
What do we say about a person who is told that his train has already left the station, and that another will not take him to his destination until the day after, yet insists upon remaining on the platform hoping that, somehow, another will arrive, perhaps in the next hour or so? Is it stubbornness? Or, perhaps a denying of reality? Or a refusal to admit to one’s mistake in arriving too late? […]
Parades are often forlorn events. The pomp and circumstance that brings forth the loud serenade of trumpets, drums and cadence of disparate groups; the sequence of human colonnades marching to the beat of rhythmic blares where medals gleam in the glint of sunlight’s twilight; and when the speeches end and the parade that fades […]
It is a strange concept that encompasses a sequence of duality in the willfulness of the mind – first, to recall, to bring out from the cognitive closet of one’s mind, a vestige of that which was once lost. Then, the act of the “un” – a negation which abandons that which was once rediscovered; to cast aside and set away an image, a piece of knowledge or a conceptual relic once recovered but now, with deliberative intent, to throw it back into that back room collection where things reviewed have been considered but found to be unworthy to keep in open exhibition. […]
Long before the 2008 debacle of economic turmoil; preceding epic movies following, of the lavish ineptitude of miscreants awash in money’s sale of souls in exchange for the temporal pleasures of limitless fantasies; when laughter could be heard yet, because the future still held some hope, there was a movie by the same title. It was a comedy of innocence – although, the language used may still blush for some, it reveals a period long gone and no longer found in today’s society where revealing all, telling everyone and showing unabashedly have become the normative course of behavior. […]
Whether used metaphorically or in stark linguistic pragmatism but described with a shroud of nicety cloaked by innuendo and oblique allusion, the aggregate of detritus produced and scattered is daunting when calculated by daily volume, multiplied by the current population, and exponentially projected […]
As an active noun, it can mean the protection accorded to a migrant seeking refuge and escape from persecution; in a passive sense, it is an institution with a historical connotation of ill-treatment and mistreatment, imposed against the will of another who may be unable to care for oneself. In either implied denotations, it reflects a protective refuge, either against the outside forces by within, or in response to inner spirits imagined without. In rarer moments of perceptive translucence, one sees the need for the imposition of both definitions upon an allegedly sane universe. […]
It was an old mining town, once boasting of a bustling main street, filled with commotion, commerce and conversation, where expectations of future success and advancement were brimming with hope and activity. People said that it would always be the bellwether of the country; as McKenna’s Pass went, so goes the nation. The origin of its name was somewhat in dispute. Old Timers who harkened of past days of glory tried to inject their hoarse voices over the din of youth to get their two cents in, […]