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
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
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
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
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
Content 18+
I am blessed by the fact that my students and other friends are always sending me interesting things to read. One I got recently was an excellent article by a writer I hadn’t heard of named Cody Delistraty on the theme of what he termed the “relentless, competitive” quest for ‘Happiness” and how people today often make themselves miserable trying to obtain it.
I use the word “obtain” … Read the rest
Content 18+
I remember flying into Moscow in 2007 with delicious misgivings. Brought up in America during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was always presented to me as the Factory of Godless Communism, and I knew I would never see the inside of it. But I was curious (a common response to Russia on the part of non-Russians everywhere then and now).
Then suddenly, after becoming a teacher … Read the rest
