I was listening to a podcast earlier today about how to be “unstressed”. The general gist of it was that you are always going to have stress, so it’s not necessarily about eliminating stress from your life but that stress isn’t what happens to you; it’s how you handle what happens to you. I’ve had […]
Fate
I was a rather odd kid in that, from a very early age, I was fascinated by the past. In particular, the ancient past. I’m sure I have my dad to thank for sparking my interest by telling me all about geology and astronomy when I was still very small. These were subjects he was […]
Ride the Wave
Grief is such a crazy emotion. What’s even crazier, is you could research it … study it … but it is such a complex and shape-shifting thing I find it pretty impossible to confine it in a tidy box. There is nothing “tidy” about grief. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It’s definitely not linear. It can […]
A Case Study in Free Will
It’s been a slow week for me on the writing front, so I will give you Mario’s obituary, which I wrote on Valentine’s day, four days after The Day, because what else would I have done that Valentine’s day. I’m also a firm believer that obituaries should not be boring. Bonus points for humor and […]
Visiting the old places, isolation, and relaxation.
I never get lengthy vacations, but throughout the year, I try to schedule little trips to incorporate some fun and downtime into my life, As I’m writing this (it’s Wednesday 3/27), I’m currently at a hotel about 20 minutes from a ski resort. This was supposed to be my big birthday getaway, but I ended […]
Another Trip Around The Sun
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately. I go through phases like this where I turn inward and time travel through my past. Sometimes I’ll be able to almost relive moments in time in my mind. I can remember the smallest of details from days even when I was a small child. I’m not sure why […]
If Only
Spring is here in Southern Oregon and today is one of those perfect type of days. It’s about 60 degrees and sunny at 6pm. The sky is a rich shade of blue, making me long for warm summer days to come. I’m currently sitting on my deck. On one of the chairs next to me […]
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
Title quote: George Bernard Shaw I’ve agreed to come up with 10 questions for a weekly online chat with rotating topics. Next week’s topic is, “Connecting with the Inner Child through the Magic of Play!”. Honestly, this embodies two of my favorite topics: magic and play. I think Shaw’s quote rings so true for so […]
“The blackest day…”
It’s been one of those weeks where one looks for external factors to blame bumps in the road of life on. Is Mercury in retrograde? Maybe it’s solar flares? Full moon? But in my case, my personal funk was probably brought on by consuming too much in the way of news and social media. Not […]
A post where I ramble about football.
Like many other “fandoms”, being a fan of an NFL team has its ups and downs. And whether you like the NFL or hate it, or really have no opinion one way or the other, it’s a huge part of American sports. I first got into watching football when I was just a small kid. […]
Eras, Part II
A chunk of my friend circle at UCLA were not only artists, but also musicians or otherwise involved in music. One of my friends was a DJ and not long after I’d met Mario, I found out he was a DJ as well. I don’t mean disk jockey like on the radio, but DJ like […]
The Fool
Mario was a very talented and highly creative artist. Out of all of the visual art he created in his lifetime, none was such an undertaking and reached as many people as his tarot deck. It started like many of his personal illustration projects, as a stand alone “character” that came straight from his imagination […]