by Eric Le Roy (in collaboration with Anthony, Chinese student)
Content 18+ Recently a disillusioned teenager strolled into an elementary school and mowed down dozens of young children, making the incident the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012. Apart from giving adolescents yet another reason not to go outside the home to get their education, the shootings cast the public eye back towards the fact that many gun-toting … Read the rest
The Circus Is In Town
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As time goes by, I get more nervous. And fatalistic. I confess to suspecting that some of it is just my age. 73 as of 8 May 2022. I measure my future in terms of every new sunrise experienced, and this is good because it encourages a sharp focus on matters at hand.
But it also breeds fear, and for now I am not … Read the rest
Killers Of the Future
Content 16+
Take a break, open a bottle, drink fresh water, throw away the bottle, kill one more grandchild, repeat. Shocking? Quite recently, even though the idea was swirling in my mind for quite a while already, I realized with all the pain that it brings - most of us - even those who don’t realize that - or maybe especially those - are killers of the future.
Each … Read the rest
Crowds
Content 18+
by Eric Le Roy
We move among them much of our lives, especially people of the cities. At first, when young, we dive in, intrigued and enraptured by as yet unknown entities in which -- like vines of limitless fecundity -- we hope to entwine ourselves. (Some will be poisonous.) Surely, we imagine, as we head out of the station and enter the boundless flesh fabric of New … Read the rest
The Digital Zoo
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ (obscene language)
There are a number of things in the ‘developed’ nations that everybody hates but evidently are powerless to do anything about. They are: banks, insurance companies, and customer service.
‘Service’. What service?? We are plagued with euphemisms in our culture. You pay a fee to attend some buffet lunch function and they call it a ‘donation’. … Read the rest
Nothing Was There
Content 18+
Once upon a time, I was a little boy who lived with his grandparents in Charleston, West Virginia. It was long ago. I used to imagine, fearfully, that the dinosaurs were still around, and at night they would come slithering over to our house at the end of the hilly street. They would reach my upstairs bedroom window with their long necks and poke their rough lizard tongues … Read the rest
The Long, Long, LONG road to Varna
Content 18+
My wife Liuba is from Omsk, and many hard, frozen, poverty-stricken years there did nothing to damage her health.But all it took was four winters amid the belching smokestacks and poisoned atmosphere of Moscow for her to contract a chronic bronchial infection. During her last two years in the megapolis, often amid endless bleak rains that more and more prevail there because of climate change, our apartment was … Read the rest
