When Camyar Tejani, Venture Capitalist, embarks on a journey of self-discovery by moving in with the Nineteen Year-Old Ballet Dancer, his wife Joan begins redecorating the house on Chestnut Crescent. She hires a small army of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, tinsmiths and stonemasons. She installs radiant tile in the bathroom and track lighting in the kitchen… Read more »
Life indeed works in mysterious ways. Finding myself in need of a little extra cash so I could lay my hands on some particularly fragrant Afghan hash that an ex-roommate of mine happened to be peddling, I was sitting in front of my computer last night, with my trusty hookah pipe at my side, waiting… Read more »
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so… Read more »
As a whole, humanity is a pretty dysfunctional organism, far more than just a tweak or two away from a completely healthy state of consciousness. Why do I say this? Well, for one thing, in classic dysfunctional mode, we seem to have a very shaky understanding of our own true nature. For instance, we tend… Read more »
It’s one of those End of the World sort of days. Nature is pissed off, or wildly drunk, or maybe just letting her hair down and putting her foot to the gas pedal. Everything is transformed, charged with a tension that crackles like static electricity. Late in the afternoon, I’m jogging along the seawall and… Read more »
Every two or three weeks, there is a rabbit hole that takes the place of one of the rigid black-outlined squares on my desk calendar. It’s a rabbit hole of free time, unaccounted for time. It’s a tunnel of solitude down which I can disappear and emerge into a slightly different universe, a parallel dimension… Read more »
I was watching late, late night TV a few months ago, and I came across a documentary about some European goth-metal band. There was concert footage interspersed with taped interviews with the members of the band. Watching the rock mockumentary This is Spinal Tap in my youth has all but ruined this kind of thing… Read more »
The defining moment of the holiday season came on Christmas Eve this year. We had invited a group over for turkey dinner, and one of our guests showed up about an hour late, just as we were carving up the bird, explaining that she’d been held up by a couple of minor accidents. Apparently she’d… Read more »
I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made — W.B. Yeats Sometimes, standing before the bathroom mirror, I find myself confronting the wraith. Like a swamp creature, he rises up to meet me as if from the depths of a great dark pool. In a gesture of friendship or demonstration of… Read more »
I would imagine that anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of “Once upon a time,” the enchantment of a well told story, has examples they can cite of books, plays, essays, pieces of poetry, or songs that have fundamentally changed and enriched the way they see the world. It’s possible that this consciousness-altering… Read more »