Author: abendelow
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Memoir: Goodbye, old friend (1982-98)
Dear Mes, I wasn’t at your side in 1998 when you crossed the “rainbow bridge” to your afterlife, which I suppose holds endless green meadows teeming with flocks of pliant sheep that you direct and protect for eternity. You had your father’s shepherd heart, and you shepherded me and my growing family through my young…
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Memoir: first experiences with Punk (1976)
Last Saturday, as authoritarians in charge continued steering society over the guardrails and into the ditch of savagery and greed, the 20th annual Riotfest took place in Douglass Park, Chicago. The three-day festival features musical acts inspired by and spawned during the Punk rock era, when I was a youngster. It celebrates an attitude of…
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Music: Back to my squirrel gun
Here’s another song to emerge recently from Beach Avenue garage, a copyright 2025 number by Bendelow/Harris that explores what it might be like to de-urbanize oneself. The images are all from the pollinator activity around here. And for the record, I do not now, nor have I ever owned a squirrel gun.
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Reflection: American dreaming 2025
Last weekend the American president continued his evisceration of constitutional norms by militarizing the police, taking over museums, and personally choosing who gets the national Kennedy Center honors. He wants to be seen as a strong, fearsome father, and he sides with war criminal Putin’ to set’s terms to stop the carnage in Ukraine. His…
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Reflection: Dreams then and now
“…whoever directs my dreams deserves an Emmy. I find myself mid-dream, blown away by the ingenuity of the plot as it unfolds. These “lucid” dreams are as good or better than any Hollywood production I’ve seen.”
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Memoir: Safe spaces (animist edition) (2023)
Is it a coincidence that when there was nothing but lawn about those beds, we were sorely preyed on?
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Reflection: What I can no longer do
I find that with the loss of that youthful confidence in eternal sunshine, I cannot live a day without the grounding awareness of mortality, disease, and disability.
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Memoir: Every song that mattered to you can tell a story (1971)
“Yes,” I could say, “my family life might be shameful, but I know who bats third for the Cubs (Joe Pepitone) and who guested on the Flip Wilson Show last week (Bill Cosby, Gina Lollabrigita, and John Sebastian).”
The Wikiness 