rumbleHUM

I think at times I am a horrible person, and, I mean horrible.  Just recently Hurricane Harvey barreled through a number of Texas coastal cities, including Houston, causing devastation amounting to billions of dollars of damage and years of clean-up and reconstruction.  Twenty-one people have already died. The first response that a normal person ought to have is empathy and sympathy for those who are suffering.  I have a brother-in-law who lives in Houston who is right now in limbo about whether or not he even has a home to come back to.  My wife and I have reached out to him and extended our offerings of help, to clean-up his house, to watch his beloved pet cat, to have him stay with us while the way home is blocked.  I have sympathy for him, and it hurts to for me to see him hurt so much.  I can sense the helplessness in his voice when I talk to him over the phone. There is also a certain amount of appreciation of the blessing that Hurricane Harvey did no...

I wonder if its worth having an opinion anymore. Basic supply/demand economics indicates that a commodity’s worth depends upon the demand for such a commodity. The higher the demand, the more the commodity is worth. The inverse is true; the less demand, the less the commodity is worth. To a certain extent, opinions are commodities. They have value. Professions are founded on the sole basis of the value of the opinion. Doctors are often paid to provide an opinion on the proper diagnosis and treatment. Attorneys are paid for to provide an opinion on the merits, or lack thereof, of a certain case or a certain course of action. Politicians are paid for an opinion on the proper course or direction of our great nation. But, it appears that the value of an opinion has lost its value. The only reasonable explanation for the devaluation of the opinion is the decrease in the demand for opinions. In the infancy of television cable, CNN came to be channel synonymous with news. Programming centered...

I am a provocateur of arguments, a perceiver of personally held beliefs, the erosion of which can cause the most violent reaction, the raising of voices and blood pressure, the defense tensing of minds, the arrangement of apologetic excuses for why one side is wrong and the other right.  I think that people should not be too comfortable with themselves.  I target those most sure and certain of their own world view as it is those people whose idealism and moral high ground is despicable, a perception that there is a right way to view an issue and a wrong way to view an issue without consideration of the complexities of the general issue as well as how perspective shifts when wearing the shoes of someone else. My wife and I recently watched the documentary called the Red Pill which explores the Men's Rights Movement on Hulu.  A local theatre has planned to screen the film in the next week, but curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to view it earlier.  I could exp...

  I. Ronald sat cross-legged in the middle of the coliseum on a floor of sand and blood, bone and tattered clothing. Above him stretched a black night pinpricked with tiny yellow-white twinkles. ‘Around one of those twinkles spins Earth,’ he thought. Around the top of the coliseum, a set of mellowed lights hummed a low intensity blue providing just enough illumination to show a crowd of humanoids of various shapes and sizes. They rumbled in a foreign language, something Ronald believed to be a hybrid of Chinese and bear. In addition to the language, they all shared similar skin tone, a pale yellow akin to sun-bleached daisy petal, large eyes which fell deep into their misshapen skulls, and long thin digits attached to a pair of meaty palms. Although most of the beings had hair, it grew in odd places and in odd ways. Some had long tails, for that is the way that Ronald thought of them, growing from the hollowed cheeks and from the thin arms. The hue of the tails varied in every ...

Gerry woke to the sun pushing on the white curtains covering the one of two windows in his bedroom. He laid on his side as he was wont, two pillows cradling his cropped haircut. Another pillow he hugged in his arms, and another he placed between his knees so that his knees didn’t knock as he slept. The large flat screen television he purchased at a Black Friday sale a few years back when his older, fatter, more compact television started to act like it wanted to be retired and started showing odd lines across the screen like wrinkles and when the images became distorted like looking through cataracts. He wore only a pair of underwear, one of fourteen he had in his possession, although he had three pairs of pajamas in his drawers which he could utilize if he needed to. They were rather large on him due to their being purchased prior to a period of time when Gerry was liquidate his weight. However, recently, he had began packing on the pounds again, reverting to old bad habits, i...

In the past, I would occasionally lag behind in my weekly reading of the comics I had bought.  By the time that Wednesday arrived, there were still a few issues still left on my read pile.  The temptation for the comic reader is to submit to the lure of the new comics, there covers suggesting so much that you betray those comics from the week before.  They can wait; there’s time; the next issue doesn’t come out for another thirty days. But reading comics is like running on a treadmill stuck on one speed.  If you don’t maintain the speed that your reading, you can trip up and fall off.  Comics build up in small piles and then larger piles. To avoid the clutter of having one or two books laying out, I bought a short box in which to keep the unread issues.  And after I filled that short box with unread comics, I bought a second one as well.  Now, at the side of my bed, I have two short boxes with multiple issues of runs that I have not read. One of ...

I’m giving fair warning.  This post will ramble, the result of series of encounters with an theme that flowing around inside my head for some time, all centered around the term “hipster.” The other day, at work, while conversing with a friend regarding music, he made the comment that he thought that I might be a hipster based on the music I was listening to and the fact that I had chosen to wear a bow tie that day.  We’ve only known each other for only a short time, and, really, only in a professional manner.  I mean how much can you really know anyone if you’ve only seen them in work clothes.  See a person when they are not restricted in what they wear or how they comb their hair, you’ll know who you’re dealing with.  See a person in the shoes they wear when they are not required to be anything, and you know the person. He had only seen me in the suits that I wear to court and the khaki’s and blazers I wore on less formal days, not in the jeans and t-shirt a...