Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Reality is the existence of Being; perspective, the Kantian structures of how we see things; and a medical condition is that intervening, interrupting and corroding event that may render the first and second of this tripartite concept into a skewering of prospects. […]
There are such fairytales, as well as reminiscences of a bygone era; or, when a traumatic event in one’s life bifurcates a “before” and differentiates from the “after”, such that we wanly smile and with eyes distant for yearning of a time now gone forever, we whisper to ourselves, “Once upon a time…” […]
By the title is not meant the terminus of the literary genre; that would be too great a claim to consider. No; instead, it is the more subtle manner of thought, the perspective of viewing, and the approach to living. We live by metaphors and analogies; that is what the rise of language has accomplished, where the raw violence of predatory insights in nature’s setting of surviving could no longer tolerate, but where some amount of leisure, such little calculation of foresight, and a crumb of thoughtful reserve allowed for a world of mythological beauty. […]
Treachery must by definition remain speechless; and it is in the silence of back stabbing in the cloak of darkness that one’s malevolent intentions become known. In war, the act of such duplicitous betrayal is termed as an offense justifying execution; in business, the meter of rascality on a pendulum of public opinion ranges on a spectrum of embezzlement, insider trading or a keen sense of capitalistic endurance; and in friendship, it is merely the weeping vicissitudes of emotional upheavals. It is the faithless double-cross of dual lives; of informants tipping the scale to the advantage of one’s sworn enemy and allowing for massacre of innocents to occur. […]
There are things in life which we cannot understand; others, that though we may engage the subject, invest the necessary time and beyond, and yet there seems always to remain a component which continues to escape; and yet, the ease with which others seem to comprehend that which cannot be grasped. People often mistake wisdom for knowledge, when in fact the latter is merely the capacity to accumulate, whereas the former is the ability to recognize that which is relevant for successful living and to separate it from the abyss of insignificance. […]
The mounts littered throughout the roundabout can be diverse and captivating; in the swirl of the rotating platform, the child in us wants to sit upon every creature, from unicorns to zebras, the traditional horse and the mythological creatures of one’s limitless imagination. As we grow older, we come to realize that the spinning sensation itself remains static; the difference between climbing into the bosom of one creature as opposed to another, is indistinct and ultimately irrelevant; when one’s childlike imagination and excitement wrought in ignorance of the cruel world becomes extinguished, the fun of being naive and clueless is no longer an option. Cynicism comes with maturity; the older we get, […]
The oversized iron pot hangs over the open fire, and the gurgling of ingredients steams and burps the lid in predictable sequences of rhythmic timing; the aroma is an admixture of sweet and mysterious combinations of one knows-not-what; perhaps of bones, marrow and herbs, here a whiff of something which touches upon the dark recesses of one’s memory, and there a hint of harboring horrors, reminding us of past deeds and loathsome reminiscences. […]