In the space of a couple of hundred square miles and nine cities, the state of California’s highest and lowest per capita incomes can be found. The winter “snowbirds” clear out in the summer heat for their second (or third) homes. The Palm Springs area boasts more private jets than commercial airlines.
HUNGER
“Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger.”
THE HUCKLEBERRY EXPLORERS CLUB
The entire Club is a freewill offering, not promoted on social media and with zero online presence. Neither Shuffy nor Morgan have cellphones. Local people simply stop by and for the rest, email suffices.
BRING BACK MIRTH!
We’re almost no longer “allowed” to have fun, or to read anything that hasn’t been vetted for “sensitivity triggers,” or to enjoy our day without taking sides, inwardly arguing, wringing our hands over climate change, bemoaning the misinformation-censorship complex, calling out those who won’t mask — or those who are still masking, as the case may be — or waiting for a civil war to break out.
THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS
The people of Omelas have no king, no sword, no stock exchange. They don’t resort to violence. They are joyous. But are they happy? The narrator isn’t taking sides, only observing. “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.”
JOIN ME AT KYLEMORE ABBEY!
The summer tourists will have gone and I, for one, cannot even imagine the beauty.
LYING FLAT IS JUSTICE
“Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.”
WRITING YOUR LIFE
“I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people,” van Gogh summed up the creative life.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
“The Church is ‘not a system, an idea, an ideology, a structure, a society, but the tremendous living establishment, which has existed since the apostles until today”…
FILM NOIR L.A.
Consider, for example, the closing lines of “Desert Fury” (1947), a deliriously over-the-top love pentangle directed by Lewis Allen and shot primarily in Arizona: one of the few noirs filmed in (lurid) color.
THE GARDENS AT ALCATRAZ
For four decades after the penitentiary closed, the gardens were abandoned. That so many plants survived the harsh climate and barren soil seems a metaphor for the inmates who served out their terms and went on to lead productive, useful lives after their release.