Wallpaper and Cotton Briefs: I worked at a wallpaper warehouse briefly, while finishing up some classes. My younger brother worked there, as did my best friend from grade school, and several guys from our old neighborhood. Part of the job included carrying boxes of wallpaper up ladders and putting them on shelves. The boxes ...
Crime is an emotional issue and a political issue. We get bogged down in our knee-jerk reactions and our agendas, and we lose our ability to problem solve. When we look objectively at the problem and take a practical approach, we find there are factors that are out of anyone's control and that we've likely been focusing on t...
My Last Communion: I once made the mistake of assuming Victor was Catholic. I was telling him how I disliked Catholic Church because I never knew if they were gonna go up or down, or sit. I'd had too much trauma in my life always being the outsider; being so obviously out of sync made Catholic Church unpleasant for me. I was...
Everything I needed to know in life I would have learned in kindergarten had I been paying attention I often use my idle time to think about what to name my autobiography. Or, just good names for books. When we were teenagers, we used to think up names for bands, you know, just in case we were ever in one. We filled spiral b...
Small World: (Can Six Degrees Be Proved?) I meet people all the time that I have some weird connection too. For example: I'm in Houston, and a woman calls from Ohio for a price quote. She has an uncommon last name, so I ask her if she's any relation to a guy I know with the same last name. Turns out, she's his cousin. This h...
A Moderate View of Socialized Medicine More and more I identify as a Moderate. I feel increasingly alienated from both the "left" and the "right". Neither side represents my values. I wish there were better terminology; moderate sounds so passive. Centrist doesn't seem quite right either. For now, that's what I have to work ...
In the popular song, You're Beautiful, James Blunt laments the tale of a man who sees a beautiful woman in a crowd and for a fleeting instant their eyes meet and they share an intimate moment of forbidden longing. The woman is accompanied by another man; she is obviously unavailable. The narrator develops and nurtures an obs...
I love America. I love that I was born into freedom, and that it is so ingrained in me I take it for granted. I cherish my personal history; my family, my hometown, all the people I grew up with, and those I've met along the way. I've been to 47 of the States, and I love the variation in geography and culture. I especially l...
I've studied a lot of those two dimensional political models. Most are some version of the four quadrant type, but I've seen a triangle and another where "left" and "right" wrap around to where they almost touch. Many models use different terminology, suggesting no one can exactly agree on what defines the political spectrum...
Seeing the Light through Both Eyes As a child, I was a dreamer. I wondered about things a lot. I asked myself: Who am I? Why am I here? What is true? What is real? What is the nature of reality? And other things too. Many people have these same questions. I was perplexed by how different people, all confronted with the same ...
Jack Cheiky
Member since: October 2007
Articles Written: 10