I spent 9/11 not knowing or believing 9/11 had happened. Well, that’s only half true. But I hope you’ll pardon my phrasing, because this is the first time I’ve ever shared this half-truth. Maybe I never shared it because there are millions of 9/11 stories more important than mine. But hey, if you’d like to know how anyone living in America could have even half-missed it, read on. On September 11, 2001, I was living by myself in an apartment […]

Today I have a very different sort of topic that I just want to get out there into my little blogosphere, then next week we can go back to more of the usual. I don’t feel good about my kids’ adulthood. Do other parents? There’s a wealth of research suggesting that America’s abundant years of the second half of the twentieth century were a historical aberration, and that we’re now regressing to the mean, and in the mean, your kids […]

December 31, 2020 At the beginning of the year, I said: we’re going green. Drop a car and add trees and solar panels. For realz. It’s so easy to hit a certain status quo of treading water and not actually do the things you really, really want to do. In January 2020 I said: not this year. We’re doing it!!! Well, we did it. And it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I hate to admit […]

I woke up this Thanksgiving morning and made a list of the first 100 things that came to my mind when I thought of what I’m grateful for this particular Thanksgiving 2020. Your list will not be the same. And that’s okay. HAPPY THANKSGIVING and I’m looking forward to seeing you on the other side of the pandemic. Wife Kids Pixie the cat House Savings Berkeley Friendships Doctors, nurses, and front-line workers during the pandemic Doctorate Ongoing Work   Ongoing […]

I don’t tell people it’s the most important election of their lifetime. They’re tired of hearing that. I tell them that it’ll be the best-feeling vote they ever cast. Probably at no other point in your lifetime will you get to pull one lever one time and feel that you have rejected 20,000 lies with the probability of 20,000 more lies, 200,000 deaths with the probability of 200,000 more deaths, and absolute disregard for the law, the military, the Constitution, […]

  My father died rather unexpectedly on February 16 at the age of 77.   When he moved in to the in-law unit of our house last summer, my wife and I understood that he had dementia, but he seemed physically fine. We thought he would last decades. Instead, according to the EMTs, he dropped dead at about 4pm on the 16th. He was discovered two hours later. The county coroner said that he died of “natural causes” and refused […]

For four years now, I have been writing 3000-plus words a week, spread over at least three entries a week. What a ride. What tremendous responses from friends old and new. My blog has been cross-posted in places like AwardsDaily, Sound on Sight, and Filmotomy, and the exposure has led to appearances/citation in The New Yorker, Al Jazeera, and The Christian Science Monitor. My blog has become part of a thriving and extraordinary community of blogs by parents of autistic […]

SIX MONTHS LATER Prime Minister Norine Maciel sipped her red wine. A lovely vintage. Whatever else you wanted to say about Mars’ weather, the prolonged seasons helped the vino. Pablo had escorted Julia and the grandkids into the little temple, leaving Norine alone at the picnic blanket. Unless you counted the little Mars ants. Actually, Norine didn’t find ants as strange as looking at foods without McPepsanto logos, or any logos at all. Martina’s birthday was next week, but Norine […]

Julia was reeling in and out of consciousness. Images flashed: Kenyatta, Mom, sims training, Martina, Aquinas, Godfrey, Olympus Mons, the mothership…Mom. Never surrender. Julia had to fight back. Had to. Whether it made sense or not, she couldn’t die on her knees. Or on her back. She began resisting, pushing, shoving…but then found she couldn’t move. She was frozen in place. The New Dagrebians were still pushing to pummel her. Jībā. No. “Back off!” Julia heard someone say from beyond […]

Martina Maciel couldn’t decide who she was more furious with, her mother or her sister. Her mother knew for months that she was outnumbered and outgunned, and had had to play a few long shots. But the resources she devoted to the Texrom battery dump – including the Ten-Percenters – could have been deployed in higher-percentage scenarios. I mean, fooling the A.A. into flying to Olympus Mons to restock energy? Back in the Galileo Room, her mother defended the idea […]