By Eric Le Roy
First, I support no ideology under this shining sun. You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right, and vice versa. All my life, I have involved myself in civil discourse with all comers. Often it has seemed modestly productive, although rare is the occasion when I’ve noticed any radical shifts of opinion. Most people, including me, walk away with our convictions … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
‘We have fallen in the dreams the ever living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”
(Yeats)
My life at an advanced age vacillates between flashes of murderous rage and periods of unaccountable serenity. When I sense the futility of thinking that anything much is going to change during my ‘golden years’, I … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Have you ever gazed into a circus mirror that stretched you until you looked like a tapeworm or a spaghetti noodle with eyes? Or breathed in a blast of helium and then tried to talk, sounding like an idiot from Looney Tunes, so bad that even a therapist would piss himself laughing?
These are distortions, of course, but then so is a cartoonist’s … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Suppose you spend long enough consuming Western news. In that case, you start to feel a kind of informational tinnitus — a high, continuous whine behind everything, a reminder that the machine is always running even when you’re not paying attention. It’s not a sound you can locate. It’s simply there, like an aftertaste, evidence that someone has been vibrating the air around your … Read the rest
