Topic: Arts & Literature

Jenny was awakened about ten oclock on Christmas Eve by a noise coming from the living room downstairs. She knew that it was her mother and father putting the Christmas gifts under the tree and filling the stockings, so that in the morning they could claim it was all the work of Santa Claus. For a moment she laid in bed listening, huddling under the covers as the street light cast a cool glow through the window, illuminating a bedroom filled with dolls.

How does one explain this pain?
How does one keep from going insane?
How can you keep from playing this awful game?
We all know the cursed name.

I became infatuated by Johnny Cash when I was only eight years old. The year was 1959 and my father had brought home a copy of the album The Fabulous Johnny Cash. The cover pictured Cash wearing a white shirt and black suit jacket, sitting on a stool, leaning on an acoustic guitar that was balanced on his knee. One hand was laying flat on the guitar, the other was balled into a fist with the thumb sticking out and placed beneath his chin, a common pose often used by family portrait photographers.

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Several months back, when I received an email advertisement for Gail Evans’ then unpublished book Meditations In My Favorite Places In Southern Africa: A Travelogue For Inner And Outer Jounries, I became excited. This book, I figured, would offer insight into sacred places and practices on a continent that remains largely unknown to most Americans. Unfortunately, Evans’ offering turns out to be New Age pabulum at its worst.

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Sometimes I feel a little bit like great grandmother must have felt when the first automobiles showed-up or when her house was electrified. What a wondrous world that must have seemed, and what a wondrous world we live in today. I'm reminded of this everyday as I use the Internet, which puts more information at my fingertips than any library.

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The smooth glass could not lie,
 so he knew that he was do die.
Could such a blow to kind mortals fall?
 Must he so soon, hear the reaper's call?

Back in the sixties, as the spirit of the counter-culture spread across the land, there emerged a breed of business person, the hip capitalist. The hippies, freaks, student radicals, black nationalists and other assorted types that made-up the counter culture of the day learned to have a love/hate relationship with these hip merchants, who sometimes made fortunes hawking everything from t-shirts and waterbeds to concert tickets.