The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: control

  • Wind

    The day I wrote this, we had 60 mph wind gusts in Seattle. Isn’t nature amazing? I watched as someone’s umbrella turned inside out as they crossed the bridge. Think about that for a minute. A completely invisible force had the power to physically alter an object. That very same completely invisible force had the…

  • You Are What You “Eat”

    I totally get why this country is so divided. It is really easy to hang out in a news realm that confirms what you want to believe. For every Fox News, there’s a Huffington Post. For every Breitbart there’s a Natural News. If you really want to know what’s going on in the world, you…

  • Giving Your Artistic Baby Away

    There comes a time in the creative process when you have to place your art in the hands of someone else. This happens with writers, painters, musicians, sculptors, and anyone else who forms something in his or her imagination and goes on to give it life. If you can conceive of something and make it…

  • The Tragic Tale of Twenty-Two Bears

    It pains me to write this so hard on the heels of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, but the only way I can get this horrible story out of my head, it seems, is by putting it into yours. Our National Parks have a very checkered past. Our efforts to “tame” nature…

  • It Takes All Kinds

    I used to work with someone whose anxiety came out in the form of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). On really bad nights, she’d actually walk up to the bridge on the roadway, on the dotted yellow line, because to her way of thinking, encountering a 4,000 pound vehicle was vastly preferable to walking on the…

  • Gilding Your Cage

    All too many of us find ourselves trapped in situations not of our own making. Untenable working conditions. Desperate poverty. Bad marriages. Unsafe living conditions. By all means, if you can get out of these situations, move heaven and earth to do so. But each of us has our own story. Some of us are stuck,…

  • Hands at Ten and Two

    When learning to drive a car, one of the most fundamental lessons you are taught is to view the steering wheel as if it were a clock, and place your hands at ten and two. Pretty basic. Pretty obvious. You’d think. Unfortunately, many people fail to apply that lesson to the wider world. Keep your…

  • M.A.D. — Mutually Assured Dysfunction

    I have a distant acquaintance who is a very self-destructive alcoholic. Watching him is like witnessing a train wreck in slow motion. And it’s even more tragic because when he’s off the sauce, he seems to be able to lead a very successful life. Alas, he’s almost never sober. A couple years ago he met…

  • The Life Penalty

    As sick as I am right now with the head cold from hell, death sounds very appealing to me. Please put me out of my misery. Please. Sure, I know that in a few days (God willing) I’ll be feeling better and my attitude will change. But right now, I’d dearly love to shuffle off…

  • You Cannot Put an Ocean in Your Pocket

    I heard that saying the other day and my gut reaction was, “What kind of crunchy granola bullsh** is that?” I mean, it sounds very Eastern, very Zen, and I often love that sort of thing. I’m open-minded. I’m spiritual. I’m philosophical. But for Pete’s sake, there are limits. But then I sat with it…