The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: library

  • The End

    The true sign of a civilized society is its investment in the arts and education. Once it has the ability and desire to support these pursuits, it has truly arrived at a level of sophistication that forever separates it from the barbarous dregs. Unfortunately in these troubling times more and more municipalities are suffering from…

  • Views from my Windows—Part Three

    To start from the beginning of this story, see Parts One and two. As I was saying, and then my mother got cancer. She suffered for two years. Seriously, you wouldn’t have let your dog suffer the way that she was forced to. The doctors kept saying they didn’t know why she was still alive.…

  • Views from my Windows—Part One

    One of my first memories of any type of view was the sagging wooden third floor balcony of our shabby tenement apartment. I lived in fear of this view, because every time I stepped out of the house it was a certainty that our neighbor would be lying in wait. She was this loud old…

  • Messed up by Tommy

    The other day I was at the public library perusing the DVDs, and came across the movie Tommy. This unexpected encounter produced a visceral reaction in me. I hadn’t thought about this film in decades, and yet it still made me sick to my stomach. “This is madness,” I thought. “How can you still be…

  • When Did “Intellectual” Become a Dirty Word?

    I really want to try to avoid getting political on this blog. I really do. I would like to demonstrate that there are many things we can all talk about without arguing or debating. But walking up to work today, I swear to God, I thought my head was going to explode. One coworker was…

  • “Enthusiosity”

    There’s a streak that runs through my family, and it’s as wide as the Mississippi River. For lack of a better word, I call it “enthusiosity”. It’s curiosity mixed with a great deal of enthusiasm. My mother had it more than anyone else. She’d get interested in a topic such as Australian History, and she’d…