Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
It is a time away; perhaps, a momentary lapse; that fifteen minutes of drinking one’s coffee while daydreaming, or lost in the saucer of one’s teacup in a vintage reflection where the slight crack in the china allows for memories to reclusively drift into never-ending smiles of forlorn embraces. The respite is that time of getting away, of a break from this maddening world; […]
It is the creativity of the human imagination that both excels and dissipates. But for it, we would not have the advances attained; but because of it, despair and angst presides and dominates. Other species grapple with the present existential circumstances directed by one’s appetitive nature bundled up by needs and current desires. Human beings, while embodied by those same animalistic sensations, […]
Do other species engage in the same games of options and alternative scenarios? Does the Lioness, just before the charge and race to overtake its noontime meal, say to herself, “Yes, that one looks good; but on the other hand…”? Or, does the fact that a subjective state of consciousness fails to include verbal statements or conceptual constructs coherent by human standards constitute an absence of such option-choosing methodology of thought processes? […]
As a verb used with an object, the meaning is lost because the context of antiquity remains as mere pages in the history books of a former era, when horses needed shoeing and the hammer and anvil heard the rhythmic pounding of sweat and hard work from the center of town; and without the combined usage with an object, it can include the act of imitation and fakery, as in illegitimately replicating documents without the originator’s consent. The former sense implicates a vision of strenuous input; the latter, a meticulous care to reinvent or mirror that which fools a third party into thinking that it is the original, […]
It is the lasting image we hold onto. On a warm, sunny day, in the carefree tapestry of a summer month, without cares or worries to haunt or ruminate by; perhaps the gentle sounds of a nearby stream and a cool breeze whispering softly the rustling leaves bright green in their early unravelling, still months away before the harsh August sun turns them into the crinkly brown of late Fall. We dream of those times; perhaps, there never was a moment when life was without difficulties and lying beneath the shade of that big oak tree allowed for smiles of quiet content and soothing moments of careless thoughts. […]
It must be strange to live in a constant cacophony of anger; of a persistent and unrelenting fire pit, where demons jump from ashen glowering of hot red coals to roaring flames of unceasing rage, and back again and yet for more, ever fuming from the slights and hurts both imagined and real, but never able to escape from the corridors of one’s own making. It is, in the end, an emotion of self-destructive turmoil, perpetrating a defiance of civility in order to engage in the ultimate self-immolation, but without honor or quietude, and thus left with the emptiness of seppuku without meditative resilience. […]
Long ago, it was figured out; by men and women smarter than the general population, the ingredients of democracy and seizing of power became fixed in a formula of compromise; in politics, discontent is the source of unrest, and change is the power switch that turns the electorate around. Rousseau over-romanticized that mythological “State of Nature“, but accurately recognized the human tendency towards the need to accumulate the leisurely graces of societal accouterments. […]