Remembering Dennis Ferdon

Today is the 13th anniversary of my brother's death. 

Dennis A. Ferdon Obituary

I resorted to Google this year for ideas on how to honor him. The Suicide Prevention Hotline website offered the best counsel:

"The best way to honor our fallen loved ones is simply by living. Live life joyfully and abundantly, the way that they would have wished. Spread love and hope and encouragement, and the message that no person is alone. Thousands of voices are silenced to suicide each year.. but not forever. We can be the voices of those lost."

We miss you brother!!!!

See also - 

Previous Posts re Dennis and Suicide

Happy New Year!!!!

Current State of Affairs

 

Curse of a Charmed Life - Kim Stafford

 

The Wave - Excerpt from Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Strange Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971)

Hero

HST is one of my heroes. This is a great movie about him, his passion, and those heady days of my generation in the late 1960s-70s. This movie captures the excitement, the struggle and the hope of those days. 

Thompson was a true patriot. George W. Bush killed him. We can only imagine his views on Donald Trump and what Trumpism says about America and the American Dream. 

I wish that he could have stood it and was here to put his words to the frustration, fear, loathing and lost hope we have felt since Trump's emergence as a force in the Republican Party. Nobody could do it better.

More NYC Stories - Pretend It's A City

New York City Stories

This is from today's "The Metropolitan Diary," a weekly section of the New York Times on Sundays that publishes letters from readers sharing their stories about New York City. I read it religiously every Sunday. I love New York City.

Trying To Understand What Drives People to Suicide

The New York Times Sunday Review recently had a long article by Jennifer Senior titled, "Happiness Won't Save You," about of Phil Brickman, a man who’d done one of psychology’s foundational studies about happiness. 

In addition to being about the life and suicide of Brickman, the article had much to say generally about about suicide and its effects on us that are left behind. It prompted the following letter to the editor in today's NYT. It breaks my heart:

 

Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb

Quote of the Day

This isn't original but it is appropriate:

"If you don't like wearing a mask, you are definitely not going to like a ventilator."

Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

I read my first science fiction book in the early 1970s when I read the first of the Foundation Trilogy recommended by a new college friend who shared my enthusiasm for books.

It started my appreciation and love for the genre.

I've just started re-reading it. Like my friendship with that college friend, it has held up well after all of these years.

Thank you my friend.

8:46

Songbird Guards a Twig

Daily Challenge

"To learn something new take the path that you took yesterday."

-- The explorer John Burroughs as quoted by Pico Uyer in "The Beauty of the Ordinary," New York Times, September 22, 2019

Shantaram

Too many great quotes, sentences, images of real life to quote here. Read them for yourself.

Happy Midsummer Night's Eve!

"The course of true love never did run smooth"

- William Shakespeare - Midsummer Night's Dream

"Midsummer Night is not long but sets many a cradle rocking"

- Swedish proverb

From Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac

Feast of the Epiphany

Excerpts from today's Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac -  

"Today is the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “striking appearance.” Before Christianity, the word was used to record occasions when Greek gods and goddesses made appearances on earth. . .  

Around the time that Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word “epiphany.” . . .  

He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of “inadvertent revelations” and said they were “little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.” 

He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment when “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.” 

. . . Joyce’s Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, “The Dead,” and the story ends: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”"

Good Thanksgiving Advice