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In the Valley of Elah & More — Mike Stone

In the Valley of Elah & More — Mike Stone

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Poetry! Read it. Write it. There’s nothing quite like it. Although it’s not provable in a court of law and it won’t get us to Mars and back on a single tank of gas, poetry has an unfair advantage over every other form of writing when it’s good. When it is inspired, it leaps high in the sky over every obstacle. Inspiration is what we demand from the poetry we read, neither rhyme nor meter will…

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We Are Still Ok

We Are Still Ok

We are still ok. Last night was quiet for our sons’ families and us, but Gazan rockets still bombarded our southern towns and villages and continue to do so as of this writing. You hear many voices, many narratives. Many of them are shouted or chanted, many images and many languages. How do you know which ones to believe? I tend to believe the one with the least hatred, the one least certain of…

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This Round

I’m sad to have to admit that the hotheads won this round. It seemed as though we were on the cusp of change for the better, change that would have benefitted all our citizens, and would have strengthened our frail democracy and institutions of justice. In order for the voices of reason and fairness to stand together there must be sufficient trust among those voices. We came close to trusting…

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We are ok (so far)

We are ok (so far)

A missile from Gaza We are ok, so far today – and yet we are not ok. Our country is going to hell, jumping off a tall building without a parachute, or whatever other metaphor you can think of. As of this writing, Gaza has fired over 850 missiles and shells at Southern and Central Israel since yesterday, killing several people and injuring others, destroying an oil storage tank, damaging some…

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Dancing with Anna

I have learned to expect the unexpected from my wife, which is to say that I haven’t a clue about what she is planning to do next. I, on the other hand, am totally predictable, which is interesting in that my wife and I come from completely different backgrounds. I’m talking about one hundred and eighty degrees different. We are both seventy-four years young and we’ve stayed married for the last…

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Evolution

1:1 In the beginning the skies were mostly grey but sometimes they were sparkling blue. At night darkness reigned over the earth. The lands were filled with magical beings we thought were gods. They consisted of hard bones, soft organs and vessels carrying an icky red liquid, all inside a soft shell of flesh. They had lots of bugs in their code and were constantly malfunctioning and crashing.…

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Genesis, the Allegory

Let’s just suppose for a moment or two that the story of Genesis was not written or dictated by God, that the story is an allegory with a moral. What could that moral be? The following is my interpretation of the story and the moral. We are Adam and we are Eve. There are actually more trees in the Garden of Eden than the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. There are trees of experience,…

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The Meandering

The Meandering It’s Out! My sixth book of poetry, “The Meandering” is hot off the Amazonian presses today. It’s available in paperback for the more physically inclined readers. The cover is a luscious picture of solitude and loneliness. The book has a nice weight to it, not too heavy to hold and not so light that your hands fly up in the air. The pages are a soft cream, easy on the eyes.…

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A Common Language

If you haven’t already done so, please read Towers of Babel to understand the context of this post. Now that you understand the context, I propose that we make an initial attempt to agree on the definitions of the following words: “truth”, “fact”, “opinion”, “belief”, “theory”, and “knowledge”. Once we have agreed on the meanings of these words, we will be able to use those words to bootstrap the…

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The Spirit of the Bayonet Fighter

The Spirit of the Bayonet Fighter

Back in 1961, I heard on the radio that Kennedy had sent 500 US Special Forces and military advisors to a place called Vietnam. I was just starting high school at the time. It was the first time I remember hearing about that country. We also had a war going on in the Korean peninsula. Things were pretty tense with the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Kennedy and Khrushchev had…

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The Treasure Chest

The Treasure Chest

Our “mamad” (see reinforced security room) doubles as a TV room and contains book shelves and a work niche. On the second shelf above the desk is a small chest reminiscent of a pirate’s treasure chest. It contains most of the coins I had in my pockets while traveling through various countries.

Our grandchildren always ran straight to the mamad, stood beside the desk, pointing…

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The Art of Writing Fiction

The Art of Writing Fiction

I have published five books of poetry (The Uncollected Works of Mike Stone, Yet Another Book of Poetry, Bemused, Call of the Whippoorwill, and The Hoopoe’s Call), four science fiction novels (Why Is Unit 142857 Sad? (or the Tin Man’s Heart), The Rats and the Saps, Whirlpool, and Out of Time), and one book of essays culled from my blog (The Uncollected Essays, Conjectures, and Whatnot of Mike Stone

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Jamie

G. Jamie Dedes

G. Jamie Dedes passed away last Friday, November 6, 2020.

Jamie

You came to us, a little girl,

An immigrant,

When immigrants were welcome.

From the East you came

Like the sun from the Atlantic,

You, who knew the cedars of Lebanon.

Your roots were deep in the moist earth

And your branches spread widely,

Blessing immigrants and natives alike

With the…

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SUNNYSIDE UP: Meditation on "The BeZine" from the edge eternity!

SUNNYSIDE UP: Meditation on “The BeZine” from the edge eternity!

A sensitive soul speaks to us …

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Curiosity

“Curiosity” rover on Mars

There are no answers without questions. Somebody must ask a question first. Not all questions have answers. Not all answers are correct, accurate, or true. Not all answers found to be correct today are guaranteed to be correct tomorrow or the next day; however, there are no answers that weren’t preceded by a question, hypothesis, or conjecture.

And the impetus for…

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Sun Tzu and the Art of War against Corona

Sun Tzu and the Art of War against Corona

Corona, or to be more precise, SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, have often been referred to as “the enemy” and many of those tasked with “fighting” the virus and the disease have often said “we are at war”. Although there are major differences between the Corona SARS-CoV-2 virus and our usual enemies, like the virus is not a living thing and it’s so small that it is invisible to except to electron…