I was walking in a dripping rain yesterday, on my way to pick up my kids after taking the bus. It was one of my car-free days of splashing in puddles, something I enjoy a lot. The gas station at the corner drew my attention, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten yet that day. It was time for a snack.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Grace or Redemption
Popular fiction, at its best, is like walking down the street holding a mirror facing outward. It starts as nothing more than a reflection of who we are as a society, but the spectacle of it forces us to want to improve ourselves. Our image is never as attractive as we’d like, so the temptation to at least straighten our hair is instinctive.
Widgets
While dropping the kids off at school, I saw a bus picking up kids for a different school. We waited patiently as they clamored aboard and took their seats. Eventually, the flashing red arm folded up and the bus was on its way. Something occurred to me during this brief moment:
“Housewife”
The term “housewife” is antique, a relic of a bygone era. It isn’t used in polite conversation anymore because it is considered an insult. It appears a sneer, as the “Desperate Housewives” whose life is an unreflective farce where the comedy writes itself. Yet this role was once the foundation of family and community, a bedrock that shifted tectonically never to be the same.
Equinox
In time, a people and their culture come to resemble the land they live on and the climate around them more than anything else. I state that as a truism that seems to hold very well through history. Athens was a stable democracy as long as the wheat production went well, but descended into anarchy when the crops went badly. Sparta was comparatively rocky and always had poor yields, so the culture became one that stole from outsiders but valued order internally. Athens and Sparta were close together, but had very different pieces of land they inhabited.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 