THE YEAR GONE BY

I had gone back to my hometown to work hard and try to find myself again, which turned out to be more of a beginning than end.

On a whim I opened a place for people to eat, and realized that it was I, I still needed to meet.

“Look how happy you make people,” this was said to I, and then came that thought from the sky.

I’ve spent my whole life seeking fortune and fame, but not enough of either came.

Because there never is enough.

Why not just spend your time feeding people and making them happy?

So my penitence and personal protest transformed to purpose, and the I that had gone missing began to surface.

And in my quest to do things right, the employees and landlord did not delight.

The place where I cooked was both loved and hated, people who had not met me said I was not so nice, in the mirror it is they who should look twice.

I thought small town America might be different, so in my free time I drove around, in hope of finding some gentler ground. Continue reading THE YEAR GONE BY

THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2012

I woke up that morning, a few months ago, I’m not sure what the day or date was then—the importance of days or dates are no longer.

I don’t know why it came as such a surprise to so many people, in reality the European Union had failed when it bailed out its first member, but Spain and Italy were the final blows, which never needed to come, the EU should have ended at Ireland.

If there are economist in the future, or a United States for that matter, they’ll want to look back at the failure of the European Union, the national strike in China and the revolution in Saudi Arabia as the perfect storm that brought the Great Depression of 2012 to shore and now what appears to be the end of the world as we have known it. But just as they were wrong in the past, as this is now self-evident, this too would be a wrong-minded conclusion. And with riots in the cities, millions of Americans dying of starvation, and the Capitol burned to the ground, I don’t want to say I told people so, but I did write extensively on the topic for more than a decade; time will tell who did and did not heed my advice…

As I write this account, both for my own satisfaction as a writer, writers write, and as a history for future generations I sit in my home surrounded by more than a thousand acres of my own land. I have often been asked if, after a lifetime of the extravagances of the city, I did not suffer culture shock from living in such seclusion? Truth-be-told, for all of the excesses of my youth, I have always been a man of simple taste, preferring hard work, to mindless leisure. And nature has always struck me with awe. However, it would be disingenuous to say that the place, which I call home, is void of the necessities of culture. Like the storehouses I have filled with many lifetimes worth of food, I have supplied my home proper, with every type of musical instrument, thousands of books, records and movies—digital and hardcopy’s of all. I even went so far as to build not only a grand ballroom, but a theatre for plays and an outdoor amphitheatre, so Shakespeare may still be recited under the stars.

Also, it should be noted; that while I built what I simply named “The Farm”, as previously described, I lived in a small town, which gave me ample time to adjust to the pace of rustic life. In a very real way, I weaned myself off of the night and day continuum of social interaction I had been accustomed to all of the days of my life. Although I have enjoyed every minute of it, sad and cold is how I would describe the early part of my journey into solitude, but as time has advanced I find more moments of happy serenity in the hours of the day. I can offer this insight, I feel the least alone while tending to my farm or in the time that it takes to make my bread and churn the butter. I laugh aloud for a moment, because of the paradox presented by the occupation of my day—I feel the least alone when making bread, yet because I am capable of making more bread in a day than I can eat in a month, my own bounty is cause for concern, while at the very same moment in time the masses, who are far from lonely, starve. And this leads us to the discussion of producers and consumers, of which I wrote of for many years.

As the new century approached (2000) I was far more concerned about a shift in the core values of our nation than a computer glitch, known as Y2K. I wrote: code can be changed by the simple act of adding a zero, but a profound shift in the paradigm of the values that built our country, well, that could very conceivably cause a fracture of the foundation of our world, a defect that will lead to collapse. Continue reading THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2012