JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #25

I had my inaugural dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Inauguration Day, a week ago today. This came about as a result of a notification from the Centers for Disease Control that I, as a 75+geezer, was eligible for the vaccine; all I had to do was fill out an online form,...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #24

I had a long conversation the other day with “G” (the person addressed in #23). The main point of discussion was the possibility of a second American civil war breaking out in the near future, and what could be done to avert it. G., by the way, is a former...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 23

Text of an email i sent to a friend. His name has been deleted. G: I would describe myself as “cautiously pessimistic” about the country’s future, short-term and long-term. Pessimism comes almost naturally to me, mostly because I’ve seen too...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 22

About 25 years ago, I started to study Stoicism, the philosophy founded in Athens  in the 3d century B.C. by the Greek thinker, Zeno of Citium, developed by his pupils, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and carried on during the first and second centuries A.D. by Romans like...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 19

We here in Connecticut are learning to live with Covid19. While the virus is not our friend, we seem to have reached some sort of rapprochement with it. Most the state’s citizens wear masks in public places and observe social distancing mandates, without feeling...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #16

I recently received an email from someone who had read “The Longest Road”, the book I published several years ago describing an overland voyage Leslie and I made from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The purpose of that...