I am a lousy student. I'm dreading the end of term when my grades will be published for everyone to see. It's nobody's fault but mine. I pay enough attention to know what the homework is but I don't work steadily on it. My study habits remind me of learning to drive a stick-shift. I spit, sputter, and jerk until something either stalls or engages with frightening acceleration.

I am thinking about my father today. He is no longer among the living but he is fully alive in my mind. It's like he never left. He and I struggled to understand one another when he was alive. When I was a teenager, I made the nearly fatal mistake of thinking that I understood him perfectly. Of course, that was just youthful arrogance.

Sometimes, things stick with you. I took a Humanities class at a Community College way back in 1977. I don't remember a thing from that class except for one story the Professor shared. The story involved Dr. Jacob Bronkowski, who was part of a British team of scientists that went to Japan after WWW II to study the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When I was a kid I would sometimes watch the Ed Sullivan show with my parents. But I only really remember a couple of the acts. One of them was a ventriloquist who went by the name Señor Wences. The other was Eric Brenn, who spun bowls and plates. Señor Wences was fun to watch but for some reason some of his puppets kinda freaked me out.

I'm remembering watching some sort of tribute show to Mr. Rogers on PBS a few years ago. That man was real...authentic. Hearing him being interviewed made me want to be real as well...or at least a little more real. No matter what kind of communication you are engaged in. . .one on one. . .letter writing. . .the host of a children's TV show.

Last night I was ambushed by depression. It had been stalking me for a few days brought about by who knows what. Living in the Northwest in the winter doesn't help and the long nights do seem to be the natural habitat for some of those demons. I've learned to live with it over the years and most of the time I can escape unharmed.

It's ironic but gratitude seems to be one of the first things we jettison when things are going well. At least that seems to be true for me. When life is just swell for a while gratitude slowly morphs into expectation. Eventually expectation hardens into entitlement...which is a big clue I've lost true perspective. That sets me up for the next rude awakening, followed by gratitude if and when tragedy is averted and the cycle repeats.

Apparently, Donald Trump's current grip on power allows him to... Put his name on whatever federal building he wants to "Encourage" Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to redact every reference to him in the Epstein files "Encourage" Pete Hegseth to murder people in the Caribbean for no good reason Start a war with Venuzuala to steal their oil Create a Gestapo-like police force to do his will…

I write songs in spurts. . .sometimes with years in-between. Sometimes I feel guilty about it. . .like I'm a slacker or something. While there is undoubtably some truth in that I don't think that gets to the heart of the matter. I think it might have more to do with my motivation to write songs in the first place. …

Earlier this morning I made a run to Peet's and on the way back home listened to an interview on NPR of Steve Hartman, a CBS News correspondent who participated in a new Netflix documentary called 'All the Empty Rooms'. It really shook me...to the point that I'm not sure I have the courage to actually watch the documentary itself.

Life is kinda like an iceberg. . .much more under the surface than above. Pieces tend to break off, some bigger than others, and rock my little row boat now and again. When that happens the temptat…

What does it mean when rage replaces rational discourse? Is it a cheap surrogate for authentic human connection? Does it signal that we’ve lost the ability or desire to really be ou…

I grew up in the mountains of Southwest Virginia which is pretty much smack dab in the heart of bluegrass music country. My mom went to high school with Ralph Stanley who is a Bluegrass icon. According to mom, the Stanley Brothers would play at some of their high school assemblies and she hated it. Thought it was embarrassing. Like her, I didn't like bluegrass either when I was growing up because I was too cool.

Note: The illustration for this post was done by Jim Abegg, one of my best friends in the world. He sent it to me years ago along with a note that had nothing to do with my big head. But he's a perceptive guy and I always suspected he knew something I didn't. Click on the link and you won't be disappointed.

With a raging sociopath seated in the White House it is easy to forget that America is full of genuinely kind people. I'm trying to get over the nausea induced by Trump's evil self-conceit served up in his post about Rob Reiner's murder. I couldn't escape it. It was all over the news. The only antidote I know to take after ingesting such poison is to reflect on the goodness that is easily found in everyday people.

I first learned about Nazi atrocities as a kid via war movies and historic newsreel footage that theaters would sometimes play as a prelude to a war movie. I can very distinctly remember being angry and wondering how the German people could have allowed those atrocities to happen. I was a kid. I didn't understand "the ways of the world". However, my instinct was right.

Not long after we married, Macrina looked into my eyes and before I knew it we were slow dancing to Van Morrison's Hymns to the Silence on a Saturday morning. It was nice for a couple of minutes and then it happened. I became self-conscious. It wasn't about my dancing. I have a sense of rhythm and knew how to hold her tenderly without stepping on her toes.