Author: abendelow
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Memoir: a stomach-churning event (1976)
But kids who did “drugs”? I was not them. My preferred stupifiant was respectable. Wasn’t it advertised endlessly with catchy jingles? And didn’t the most popular shows drinking on TV?
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Memoir: “And then everything changed” (1988-89)
We’d missed the window for a pain-blocker, so the monitors foretold waves of excruciation that would seismically rip through your torso.
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Music: Puritan death march to the right (2024)
Here’s a song that emerged after the November elections. The lyrics: This world would be my fourteenth change of a nation’s blood This place has been leaning ever since the flood. The game looks like forever, he said we could all go home. What follows is a process over which we’ve no control (no control).…
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Music: Welcome, cold December (2024)
Here’s a song that sort of fell out of my acoustic Yamaha last week. I picked it up and an odd voicing came out when my hands hit the strings. I looped it in GarageBand and added words that grew from the feel. The most innovative element was picking up my wife’s violin for the…
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Memoir: Rest in peace, Brenda. You never gave yourself away (1978)
Those lyrics described the way you lived your life–with bold individuality, yet also compassion–revolutionary subversion alongside radical acceptance.
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Reflection: Joy, joy, despair (2024)
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.” –MLK’s Nobel lecture, 1964 Notwithstanding Dr. King’s claim, here’s my attempt to describe it in words. The most pleasing of all human…
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Memoir: belief-based action (1986)
Belief is a powerful thing. It brings into being all manner of people and institutions. It asserts that certain things are, even when evidence for them is inconclusive. It’s another word for “conjecture.” But what a fruitful conjecture! When theories gain a critical mass of support, empires are built, paradigms shift, and people’s lives get…
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Presidential election analysis: a clash of beliefs around our governance (2024)
Next Tuesday’s election will manifest a divergence of belief around our national government–not belief in the value of specific policies, but belief in the established norms and institutions of our government themselves, in whether the game of republican democracy should even continue. One side more-or-less still believes in equality of persons before the law, accountability,…
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Music: 4th Quarter song
No, it’s not about the epic failure at the end of yesterday’s Bears game, but about autumn, the end of things, death and transformation in relationships and status too. In other words, a sad song that came from me in as the green of Chicagoland summer turned slowly brown a couple weeks ago. Here is…
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Fantasy drinking companion (2024)
I feel emboldened. “Bob, one of your songs declares, ‘Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’. I just might tell you the truth.’ So I’m not gonna ask you nothin’ about nothin’. We’ll deal with whatever truth arises.”
The Wikiness 