Category: Uncategorized
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George And The Postman
Uncle George pulled his black Dodge sedan into the garage, just like he did every other night. He closed the garage door and unlocked the side door to the house. Beauty was waiting patiently for him to arrive home, in the kitchen, right where she belonged. He walked to the front door and she walked…
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The Shop, The Train, The Girl
Five hours was a long time to kill between trains, and having finished his book he was desperate for something to do. He browsed the little book store, more like a kiosk actually, and found a lot of books but not any that he was interested in. His tastes did not run to pathetic CEO…
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The City In The Rain
They say it muffles sounds, the rain. But for me it amplifies sounds. Or maybe certain sounds. Or maybe that’s just the way my senses work. Or maybe there is some undiscovered sense that causes feelings for which we have no words to burrow themselves into the back of our minds. We are no two…
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Advice To My Teenage Self
“The only way to break a law of physics is with another law of physics.” – Ensign LaForge, Star Trek – Picard The conceit is that somehow you could apply the thousands and thousands of days of accumulated dents and dings; the accumulated triumph and trauma and be something different than what you were. But…
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Uncle George’s House
The grownups visited in the basement That basement that George was so proud of He paneled it in that 1960’s style Cheap, but effective, like a boys clubhouse – Leonia and George hosted parties and dinners down there She cooked and he tended behind the bar he built Gossip and politics; One cousin was lazy…
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Strange Changes
I just passed on an opportunity for a meeting with other professionals in my field. I know many of these people, we are like minded; we are friends. But I ain’t going. The flu is going around, there’s a new variant of Covid circulating and I have a ski vacation planned in 3 weeks. I…
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Island Memories
It was before most cars had air-conditioning; so even on the hottest days we drove with the windows rolled down. Always in that black ’63 Impala, or later on, the blue one. And finally the Nova. My grandparents were working class people with union jobs. They bought American. They bought Chevy. WMCA New York was…
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Stupid Career Advice
Or, how to tell if someone is completely full of shit. “Never say it’s not my job.” Great advice if you want to get pimped and punked for the rest of your life. “You make your own luck.” Anyone that says this sucks at math. “Be patient.” We’ll pay you what you deserve when we…
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Yes, You Can Be Friends
Don’t Be A Soulless Weasel. Someone I follow on LinkedIn, a “career expert” with a lot of followers threw this out. I never found myself disagreeing with her before. But this time she lost me. She was adamant: “Managers cannot be friends with subordinates.” There are other prohibitions that so-called wise people like to throw…
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The Restaurant Around The Corner
The wind off the Danube was biting and ancient. It tore downriver, curled around the Parliament and whipped past portraits of battles and kings in Buda Castle before doing a crack the whip through the Chain Bridge. The same way it had for years and decades and centuries and millennia. At home, we’d all be…