After agonizing whether to head south to Milan or east to Vienna, I decided to head east. I took the ICE (inter-city express; a high-speed train) from Amsterdam to Duisburg, then connected from Duisburg to an overnight train for Vienna. I was dreading it but wanted the experience.
Read the rest of this entry »
Had she been warmer, I might not have left.
She, who had somehow trained her girls to run, on cobblestone, in heels, and look great doing so. She, who brought a type of Scandic modernness together with a thousand years of history and made it look like it belonged together. She who, despite being a bit rough with me, had finally whispered – no, sung – into my ear what I’d been aching to hear: that I could stay as long as I wanted. But, she and I had to say good-bye.
It was a summer-vacation kind of love; you know, the love under whose light anything seems possible – infinity visible again in the everyday – even swirling around right there in your coffee cup. The kind that can take all the dreams that long ago rusted away under the rain of your own mediocrity and make them shine again. Or – was that just me, more awake?
And likewise, it was an end-of-summer-vacation good-bye; just like that girl who hugged me before she got into her parents’ station wagon to head home for school, I told her we’d see each other again soon. We’d stay in touch – somehow be together again, I said – and then felt the heartache as she faded off into a darkening sky. But later would come new friends, new adventures, and so on – and before you know it, that rain kicks in and you start to forget…
I woke up in my Brussels room five minutes before the alarm went off, with a nasty feeling of head congestion that felt like I could barely breathe. As I got up and about it dissipated, and I hope the blame can be laid on the air in the room rather than some developing malady.
Since I want to be in Amsterdam for the Hallowe’en weekend, I decided to head up there today via the intercity train from Brussels. Today Brussels was rather gray, with a light morning coat of rain. Rather than getting lost by taking the wrong tram, which I did my first night here, I was very proud of myself for catching the proper tram and making it right into Brussels Midi station without a hitch.
Then I stepped into the train station ticket area and within a couple of minutes spoke with an agent who stamped my ticket and told me where I should board … in ten minutes. Ten minutes? What? No lines, no waiting? No pointless security checks? For this American that was pleasant news. Off to platform 20 I went…
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve long advocated for the rational exploration of the psychological and spiritual benefits of psychedelics. I believe, as do many, that they have therapeutic potential unlike anything found in pharmacology today. Luckily, the medical research is catching up with us.
The medical journal Psychopharmacology has just published the results of a study at Johns Hopkins that explored the impact of psilocybin on a group of healthy, normal middle-aged adults, and there seems to be little room for interpretation. I am ecstatic that rational scientific inquiry is backing up what many have known for eons – that these are powerful chemicals that offer access to the subconscious and the Divine.
Read the rest of this entry »
I have had the pleasure of working with some very talented, brave law enforcement officials who upheld civility with honor and dedication. I think police officers form a vital part of our social fabric.
But this whole counter-terrorism cop-march of the last five years is a march in the wrong direction.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been debating – for well over a year – how much of this I should thrash out in public. But knowing that there are a great deal of young people in the world struggling with this, and wanting to tell them how wonderful their pain can be, I think I’ve finally figured out a way to put it out there without hurting anyone.
My father abandoned my mother, brother and me when I was very young. I know now that there were many reasons – the situation he was in personally at the time, his own psychoemotional capacity, his perception of what was best for my brother and me, and his relationship with my mother. I have seen him once (an awkward and near-wordless exchange in a courthouse in 1987) in the last 25 years.
Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last 24 hours or so, the media has gone wild with this story about the pot muffins that were delivered to a school in Texas. Today, the MSNBC news babes are parroting that the muffins “made 18 people sick.” The Fort Worth Star Telegram and UPI are using similar language. Can we at least all agree that these people were stoned, not sick? What this person did is wrong and properly illegal, but I am continually baffled that in 2006 we still suffer from the most absurd and irrational case of reefer madness.
In today’s Dallas Morning News piece, reporter Kristine Hughes does her part to perpetuate the mythological madness by reiterating that 19 people “became ill” from the muffins. Ill, Kristine? Don’t you mean high, stoned, freaked out, or – if you really want to be gentle – affected? But ill? That’s just intellectually dishonest.
Read the rest of this entry »
[EDIT: See Zeller's New York Times piece that followed, and my wet-blanket remarks therein.]
Over the past couple of months, there’s been a great deal of fresh hysteria about Myspace, sex offenders and the “dangers” of kids going online without draconian supervision. (Which, I’d like to remind parents, your children will subvert. Consider fostering trust and openness. I know it’s harder work than just instilling fear, but it produces much brighter humans.)
This moral panic is nothing new. Every year or two there’s a fresh bout of breathless reporting about a predator who used the Internet to lure some 14-year-old out of her Kentucky trailer and into a Taco Bell, then before she knew it she was in the back of a van in Miami being used as an ashtray. Setting aside the underlying chronic social horror that this guy seemed a better option than whatever was going on back in that trailer, this is another example of confusion about what is dangerous and what is not.
Much like plane crashes and anorexia, the media – in reporting these rare but sad situations – conducts a feat as stunning for its logical acrobatics as it is its fallacy by positing that these situations should force us to ask if the Internet is organically dangerous.
Read the rest of this entry »
Alex Williams penned a salacious piece in today’s New York Times centered around the “weight anxiety” experienced by girls leading up to Spring Break. That we are, for “sufferers of eating disorders,” moving into “the most dangerous time of year.”
Self-denial and restraint in America? Now that’s dangerous – to our way of life.
Setting aside that the backdrop of alcohol abuse over Spring Break dwarfs any danger of starving oneself into a bikini, I should start by saying that I understand anorexia nervosa can be debilitating and dangerous for those affected by it. Just as I sympathize with people in plane crashes or victims of pit viper bites and lightning burns.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve never been exposed to a solid intellectual argument for prevailing US drug policy that, if followed to its logical conclusion, wouldn’t turn sweet cream butter into a Schedule A substance.
Something’s wrong when advertisements that warn of the “dangers” of marijuana are immediately followed by ads glorifying alcohol – a dangerous drug which is involved in nearly half of the nation’s accidental deaths. Or when we miss the haunting surreality of a talk show segment that explores the “dangers of ecstasy” then tells us how a troubled teen found help with Prozac.
Read the rest of this entry »
