Originally posted March 24th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Thanks to our good looks, superior intelligence, and unimaginable privilege, we’re rich! Do you know how much calla lilies cost at a reputable flower purveyor? We’ve got hundreds of them in our garden. Blood oranges? Also hundreds.
We can’t eat them all, so we give them away. Same thing with our money. Since we’re into sharing, spreading the goodness around, we’ve decided this year to take a portion of our vast wealth and endow a nonprofit foundation – a charitable foundation – to serve our brothers and sisters, to lessen the suffering of every living creature, to leave the world a slightly better place than we found it.
So many issues. So many problems. So many broken people needing to be fixed. If we were Bill Gates or Carlos Slim, we’d have the kind of money to back an infinite number of projects. Alas, we’re not that . . . → Read More: Sharing, Caring, Giving
Originally posted January 27th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Books are far too long, right? Who has time for 300-pages of blabbering on about nothing? Do you know how many tweets you can read in the amount of time it takes to slog through one stupid novel?
A lot. And they’re usually way funnier. And unlike books they’ve got hashtags, like #betterthanactuallyreading.
Still, in their own weird way books can still be useful. Especially if they’re short. Especially if they’re short and they answer some niggling question you’ve been having, a question maybe you couldn’t answer to your satisfaction just by searching the Web.
We’ve published several of the old-fashioned boring kind of books. No one is interested in that. So now we’re pledging to get with the times and start publishing modern fun kind of books. Very short books. You don’t have to download them, or pay for them or anything. You can just read . . . → Read More: Very Short Books
Originally posted January 20th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Certain amorphous concepts exist only in the theoretical realm: truth, justice, beauty. Time. Yet we “know” (or think we know) they’re there. Indeed, we’re the ones who manifest them. By observing, say, a ravishing Southern California sunset, or the blossoms of a cherry tree, or our lover’s face, we feel quite sure that Beauty is not merely an amorphous concept but something tangible and present. And in those moments it surely is.
Quantum physics suggests that this thing we call consciousness exists only in our Mind Reality, where we observe – and categorize and quantify – what seems to be the passage of time, our hurtling journey through space. In the Cosmic Reality, time does not trudge forward (or slip backwards). It just is.
Stress is one of these strange phenomena. It doesn’t really exist in any measurable form. We only know it’s there when someone tells . . . → Read More: Stress
Originally posted January 6th, 2013
By Michael Konik
If you wish to align yourself with a mindset that no one will dispute and most will acclaim, proclaim yourself a paragon of “family values.” Earn a reputation as a “family man.” Put “family” before self. Found a right-wing Christian political bribery machine and call it “Focus on the Family.” Do whatever it is you want to do with your life, but remind everyone that whatever it is you do with your life it’s all about the family.
Repeat the word. Family. Say it clearly and often. Family.
Is there anything better? Is there any concept more sacrosanct? Ah, how we love our children and how we love our parents. They’re more important than anyone or anything in the universe.
Family: the folks we can trust and love, celebrate and forgive, rescue and remember, support and adore and abide. Family is the greatest.
Originally posted December 9th, 2012
By Michael Konik
I helped an old man load his groceries into the trunk of his car, which was parked curbside near the entrance to a 99-Cent store. He walked with a cane and seemed to have trouble handling his bags. A watermelon had fallen to the sidewalk, somehow escaping unblemished. But things didn’t look as though they would end well.
Do they ever? According to the old man, they do not. He thanked me profusely for assisting, and then he seemed to want to explain why he needed help, and then he sensed that this was already understood by both of us. He shook his bald head, covered by a baseball cap. Then he said, “Don’t ever get old. Stay the way you are now. Getting old. It’s no good.”
At a birthday party for an elegant lady turning 100, the centarian’s daughter toasted her . . . → Read More: Bad Endings
Originally posted October 7th, 2012
By Michael Konik
He had a name that you might call Dickensian, except Barry Commoner, who died this week at 95, was anything but his nomenclature. A man of the people, yes. Common, no.
Barry Commoner was uncommon.
Today, millions of Earth’s inhabitants believe that overpopulation, increased affluence, and advanced technology are the root causes of environmental degradation. Back in 1971, when Commoner published his catalytic book, “The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology,” his ideas were considered radical, annoying, and revolutionary. Gasoline at the time cost 36-cents per gallon. Automobiles cost around $2,500. The phrases “peak oil” and “Middle Eastern jihadi” had not entered the lexicon. Many conservatives – those who liked things just the way they were – couldn’t understand why anyone would want to disrupt a fossil fuel energy model that seemed to provide human beings with a “better” . . . → Read More: In Praise of Barry Commoner
Originally posted September 3rd, 2012
By Michael Konik
Pick your favorite platitude: You can only do so much. You’re not going to change the way everybody else behaves (or thinks). You’re only one person.
Comforting, aren’t they? You are hereby excused from culpability in the grand disaster that is human civilization. May your acquittal be an abiding relief from that weird sense of responsibility we all feel intermittently, mostly in the moments when we’ve been distracted from our distractions and have a moment to think about silly old concepts that are more fun to talk about than enact. Such as the one that posits each of us ought to leave the planet an infinitesimally better place than how we found it.
We all do what we can. The problem is most of us decide that what we can do is absolutely nothing.
My dearest friend, my wife, is in Africa at the moment, enjoying what we shall delicately refer to as a birthday of significance.
Having gone through this getting older thing, I know that it’s easy to get caught up in mathematics – fractions, mostly – figuring what’s gone and what remains. When you arrive at a certain age (the number is different for every individual) the tendency is to note the wrinkles and the sags, the opportunities squandered and chances untaken. The time that’s slipped away while you weren’t paying attention.
This dark stock-taking, though, is counterbalanced by the dawning realization that you’ve done so much, lived so much, and that, secretly and without trying, you’ve become wise.
I see my best friend as someone who has accomplished and achieved, someone who has taught and inspired, someone who has wrung more out of her life than most people . . . → Read More: An Inspiring Friend
Originally posted March 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
If you’re an artist, or have an artistic impulse, or care deeply about art, you probably experience the kind of quiet despair that I find in many of my jazz musician friends, my poet friends, my painter friends, and frequently from myself. Yes, it’s heartbreaking to be part of a culture that finds the work that we do increasingly irrelevant and of little worth (at least in the marketplace sense). It’s depressing to be so astonishingly good at something and yet so relatively uncelebrated and unappreciated. But you must never stop. We — all of us who care in varying degrees about stuff other than acquiring and consuming — are out there. We’re reading, and listening, and looking, and cogitating, and arguing, and questioning, and loving. We can’t be co-opted. We’re too smart and too aware. We’re not going anywhere. And we need you, you specifically, with . . . → Read More: Encouraging Words for Despairing Artists
Originally posted April 24th, 2011
By Michael Konik
As Thomas Jefferson did in the 1700s, let us set aside the Bible’s confounding melange of mythic mysticism, foggy mumbo-jumbo and confusing contradictions. Instead, let us concentrate on the principles that a dangerous Jew from ancient Nazareth was willing to die for. Let us behave less like the charlatans who organize their businesses around lost souls and more like Mr. Christ himself.
Let us put the Christ back in Christianity.
Love thy brother. Love thy sister. Take care of each other. Recognize the divine spirit in the humblest receptacle.
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
