Today on the first day of the new year I came across the above photo of a young lady in front of all the books she read in 2021.  The new year 2022 has arrived, and the stage is set for her, me, and you to journey through the next twelve months of literary adventures. How wonderful is that moment when you open a book to page one and start a narrative journey with the author! What interesting characters and involving scenarios will a person encounter by the end? The only thing really new in the world are all the books you have not read yet. It is like a…

I saw this ad the other day, asking me what was the death which most affected me: That is easy for me to answer. I saw this ad the other day, asking me what was the death which most affected me. That is easy. It was the death of Viktor Frankl on September 2, 1997. I was floored. His book Man’s Search For Meaning was one of the most important books of the 20th century. But let’s first examine who Viktor Frankl was not. He was not Elie Wiesel. Wiesel had embraced despair and nihilism after suffering in a Nazi death camp, as can be evidenced in his book Night.…

NOTE: On December 1, 2021 I received notice of my USTA reclassification as a 5.0 NTRP tennis player. The following is my letter of appeal in response: December 11, 2021 To Whom it May Concern, I am writing this letter to appeal my rating bump from 4.5 to 5.0 NTRB rating. I suspect my recent rating change happened because of a USTA computer algorithm, and that no living person was involved in this decision. So I am writing this appeal to an actual human being who is knowledgeable about tennis and who can better judge who I am as a competitive player. Or maybe it was that I had an…

This week I read four articles which seem to sum up the zeitgeist at the moment.  Walk with me through them and let’s see what we can see. “Where Have All the Grown-ups Gone?”by Paul Krugman I normally never read anything by columnist Paul Krugman: he is generally a one-dimensional thinker, and you know what his predictable columns will say by just reading the headline. After reading the title, why read the whole article? You know what it is going to say. Krugman’s latest column talks about how Bob Dole was an old-school conservative, and now the last 20 years of conservativism is a history of serious moral decline from…

Some years ago I had a giant purge of my Facebook contacts. I got rid of almost all my former students and current co-workers here in beachside Ventura, California. I miss hearing some of the news about former students, but I don’t miss hearing about my co-workers. I decided to semi-strictly wall off my work life from my private life. It was a major moment. With a few notable exceptions, I don’t socialize with co-workers anymore. Work defines me so much less as a person than it did in the past. I do have a vocation and a career, but in the end it is also just a job.  As…

The news of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 first identified in South Africa – the one designated “Omicron” – took the world by storm last week. Without any details or much of any information – the world panicked. The stock market significantly dropped. Headlines were full of non-stop news on anything of note. Governments shut their borders to international travel from affected regions. After almost 20 months of pandemic the air is rife with anxiety, almost hysteria, about COVID and any new mutation of the virus. Might the situation get worse? Commentators talked for hours about what would happen next with Omicron and new virus restrictions in the near…

On the evening of December 1, 2021 I felt a bit vertiginous. First of all, I had suddenly been reclassified as a 5.0 tennis player. That unexpected event totally took me by surprise. I was on my heels at the news this morning. Then this afternoon I read the accounts of the oral arguments held in the Supreme Court in the case of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It would appear, from the comments, that the Supreme Court is prepared to overrule Roe v. Wade. This has been the settled law of the land with respect to abortion for almost five decades. Almost my entire life has had…

I was teaching my second period class this morning when I received the text. A friend informed me I had been booted up to the NTRP 5.0 tennis level for the next year by the United States Tennis Association. “Noooooo!” I had seen this happen to others. They are moved up to the higher 5.0 level of tennis competition where they have no friends, and they languish without any USTA leagues to join or matches to play, and then the next calendar year they get reclassified back down to a 4.5 player — whereupon they can rejoin humanity and get matches again. But until that point they are exiled to…

Like a snail with its shell it feels as if I have carried them around on my back for decades.  My books. I own many of them. Too many? From apartment to apartment, even while in college and early adulthood, I never threw away any book I enjoyed. They added up. A buddy laughingly likes to remind me of the time the Spanish-speaking day-laborer I hired to help me move sighed as he lifted another box full of books and muttered, “Más libros, más libros…” Those boxes were heavy. There were many of them. Books were like ¾ of all my earthly possessions. Truth be told, I knew I would…

It has been three full months since this school year began. I hear stories of my fellow teachers around the country pulling out their hair, claiming the students post-pandemic are “feral” in misbehavior and way behind in their studies. Some schools seem to be out of control. Teachers are fed up and quitting mid-year. Most schools can’t seem to find bus drivers or substitute teachers or cafeteria workers. The educational system struggles to recover from the COVID crisis which began in March 2020, the same as the economy overall and other industries individually. I am lucky to be in a school mostly insulated from all this. I have been THRILLED…

Dear Elizabeth, So I sit here across the table from you at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf store at the corner of Telephone Rd. and Main St. here in Ventura, CA. You are enjoying a hot chocolate with whipping cream which you assure me is delicious. Your older sister Julia had soccer practice this evening, and you agreed to come with me. I had to drop her off and hang out somewhere until her training session was over and it was time to drive her home. So you agreed to pal around with me for ninety minutes. I am so happy! Normally I would be waiting here by myself…

Two days ago, on November 7th, 2021, we ended daylight savings time. Now it gets dark as soon as 5:00 pm. That is early. This is what is on my mind tonight. The change in time has got me a bit off my game. The clock says it is 7:30 pm but it feels like it is 10:30 pm. It is dark outside and cold. Is it better to change the clocks every autumn and get up in daylight, with the sun setting so early? Well, farmers like that schedule better. But few Americans nowadays are farmers who milk the cows before breakfast. But still we turn our clocks back…

There is a malady which plagues my country. It is the malady of political division — of intense political ideology, and the denunciation of others because they disagree with you. Where will you find the source of this division? In the political extremes. In our two party political system, there are the populist Republicans who follow Donald Trump denounce any Republicans who didn’t follow Trump, in addition to all Democrats. Similarly, there are the progressive Democrats who denounce any moderate Democrats who don’t toe the “anti-racism” line of far left politics, as well as all Republicans. It used to be that moderate Democrats and Republicans could find common ground and…

It must have been around 1988 or 1989. I had a college job where I was wont to be at a desk for long hours at night without much to do. I would arrive to work and unload my backpack with my materials for the night. As was my custom, I would often push aside my assigned reading in political science to pour over my unassigned reading for pleasure. If I was going to sit at a desk with little to do for eight hours, I would bring a Kafka novel to read. But I would also bring one by Dostoevsky and another by Steinbeck. When I bogged down in…

It has been over seven weeks since Kabul fell to the Taliban, and I read the following article today which had the following attention-getting headline — “I will never become a Taliban wife. I would rather die.” This is so predictable. And so sad. The United States leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban takes over, and you have the resumption of a certain kind of Islamic rule. And life in Afghanistan moving forward becomes very different than it was before. Maybe there will be less fighting and a certain kind of peace in Afghanistan moving forward, as long as one does not confront the Taliban. The little folk will “go-along to get-along”…

I figured I would take a step back and write a birthday message about my personal webpage on the 25th anniversary of its inception. I intend to explain why it came into being and how it evolved over time, and to show some of the back-side technology details and performance statistics. I started my website on October 9th, 1996 as a way of both exercising my creative side and mourning my mother’s impending death. I had a number of “commonplace books” from my college days in the style of famous Renaissance thinkers or Americans like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain who also had them. They sort of…

I am 54-years old. I have been a teacher for 27 years, exactly half of my life. I went to school and then college. I got a job and worked. Got married and raised a family. Does my adult life consist mainly of sustaining myself and my wife, helping to pay our bills, and raising our two daughters? Much of it does. Do I like my job? Well, much of my job as a writing and history teacher coincides with my personal interests. I have a passion for what I teach, and so it is fair to say that I have a vocation. That might mean I don’t just have…

A day in the life — Sunday September 17, 2021.  A snapshot into my daily existence. An exposition on the choices we all make on how we choose to live. I woke up yesterday and went to the grocery store with my wife, who needed milk to make pancakes for our daughters for Sunday morning breakfast. We had a family breakfast. I then left for my 11:00 am USTA doubles tennis league match. It was a beautiful morning in Southern California. My partner and I played a solid 4.5 doubles team, and we played well in the first set, not so well in the second set, but surged in the…

Dear Julia, Six days from today you will embark upon your high school career in the classroom. It will be the first day of your freshman year. But as you have already started high school athletics, I will take this moment to write to you moving forward. You are fourteen years old, and high school brings with it the process by which you will earn the good grades which will open up doors for university acceptance, or not. During the teenage years you develop the personality traits which will coalesce into your adult persona. Hormones and the opposite sex; confusion and angst; extreme lows and extreme highs: you will deal…

I have to admit I have paid almost no attention to the recall of Gov. Newsom and consequent upcoming special election. But I did sign the recall. Over a year ago I was biking along the boardwalk near the Ventura promenade when I spied two men sitting under an awning gathering signatures for the recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom. I happily biked over there and happily added my signature to the list of others. I have substantial anger at the authorities in my home state over their handling of the COVID pandemic. Anger all the way from the governor to school boards and teacher unions and city politicians and…

There has been a rise in gun violence in the United States recently. Mostly in the big cities, the murder stats speak for themselves: I live out in the suburbs and there has not been an increase in “gun violence” here. Much of the rest of the country can say the same. It is in the place that always struggled with gangs, murders, etc. Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Washington D.C., etc. President Biden has publicly decried this outbreak of “gun violence,” as if it were the same as an outbreak of “viral flu.” It is strange the language Democratic politicians and “social justice warriors” use when…

It is just over one month since California officially reopened and face masks were no longer mandated. I was thrilled about about it. But the virulent “Delta strain” is out and about, and the numbers of COVID-19 infected has risen recently. Although small compared to previous “surges,” there has been an increase in the numbers of Coronavirus ill in California. The virus is still out there, and people are getting infected by it. Neighboring Los Angeles County has had an even larger outbreak than where I live in Ventura, and starting tomorrow night they are reinstating indoor masking by law, even for the vaccinated. But this is an outbreak almost…

Behold the boy. He sits alone and listens to a piece of music, and he starts to cry. Why is he crying? Watch the below video and ask yourself that question — — this little boy grows up to become the famous concert pianist Glenn Gould, best known for his recordings of J.S. Bach’s keyboard music. It would be hard to find a more idiosyncratic and brilliant musician than the semi-recluse, semi-savant Glenn Gould. There was no one like him before or since. But why is the ten-year old Gould crying while listening to the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde? When you listen to it, dear reader, does…

My friend sent me the following text message today: My friend lives in Atlanta, Georgia and often has occasion to decry the strident blowhards he sees in the South from the conservative side of the political spectrum. I can sympathize, although I have never lived in the South or had much exposure to “Red state” politics.  I live in California and work in the public schools there, so I have the same problem from the opposite problem: aggressive “progressive” liberals. So I responded to his message from Georgia with one from “Blue state” California: Why are there so many blowhards in political life nowadays? Why does this kind of outlandish…

“That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” I never liked the above quote by Frederick Nietizsche. More accurately I suspected a conflict which almost kills you leaves you traumatized. It scars and leaves you less than you were. Instead of being strong and active, you are passive and vulnerable. I preferred the Chinese saying, “When two tigers clash, one is killed and the other is maimed.” Social science has recently documented how “adverse childhood events” can leave lasting psychological wounds which can stay with one for life. The tender inner lives we lead can take only so much brutalizing. Yet the opposite is true, too. Adversity and suffering…

Today California “re-opened” officially. If you are vaccinated you can enter stores without a mask. I did so this morning, and it felt wonderful. To wear a facemask for some twenty minutes while at the grocery store is not the end of the world, and in the larger scheme of things it is a minor inconvenience. But how nice it was to be in a grocery store without a mask for the first time in fifteen months! To see the faces of other people, and even maybe to get their germs. I will take it all! So this is what happened this morning: I walked into a Ralph’s grocery store…

I had my first long summer bike ride along the beach yesterday. I rode some 35 miles total from downtown Ventura to Rincon Point along the beach, and back. It was my favorite time of the day for such a bike ride: approaching sunset. The temperature was dropping as the dying sun reflected a rust color off the seaside cliffs. It was beautiful. This bike ride takes me two hours, and by the time I finish I am pleasantly exhausted and ravenously hungry. I refuel over dinner at a restaurant, with my bike on my car outside, and it is dark when I arrive home. Being outdoors in the sun…

My school year comes to an end tomorrow.  It was my 27th. But my first full one during an epidemic. So it has been a long year of (distance) learning. I taught my students the best I could over the Internet using Zoom (and Canvas). I was there day-in, day-out for my students as much as I could. Even in the darker moments of the pandemic, they always had my full attention. I was gratified to have many of them recognize that and thank me during the last week of school. Not an ideal year of teaching, but I did the best I could. “Control what you can control.” Then…

I never thought I would see the day. A long-term friend of mine is about the best candidate for a concealed weapon permit I have ever known. His criminal record is entirely unblemished. He also owns his own business and regularly handles large amounts of cash, lives and works in a high-crime area, and has been a civilian volunteer for a police department for years. He very much wanted a CCW license, but because he lived in LA County he thought he never would get one. He is the poster child for the “license to carry” permit holder. This fact notwithstanding, I thought hell would freeze over before ultra-liberal Los…

Today is my birthday. I turn 54-years old. I hear some complain of “getting older.” They don’t want to hear out loud the number associated with the span of their years. They seem almost to want to keep their age a secret. That is not me. I enjoy getting older. I have earned my gray hairs. I am 54 today. I don’t enjoy the increasing aches and pains of an aging body. I don’t enjoy seeing those in the generation ahead of me fall into disrepair and even die. I don’t. My father mentioned that he wanted to invite two good friends to our joint birthday party, but neither of…