Month: December 2018

In Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut portrayed a vision of a world in which robots make everything. Human beings relegated to the sidelines, do either nothing or road construction, the one operation purposely not automated so it can provide work for the masses. Vonnegut wrote in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, that…

Another Christmas Day fed, lounged, movied, ate, and goofed off. It was all-around successful. No flare ups or emotional jags disturbed our family time. We had just the immediate family—daughter Sydney, son Nick, and Virginia and me. Gifts lay under the tree. Stockings hung on the sills of the living…

There are so few days left. That’s the feeling I get when I meet with my compatriots. Some are my age, or almost. Others are much younger. Either way, my mortality shifts before me like a vision. When they are as old as me or older, I’m reminded how little…

I haven’t had an 8-to-5 job since 2003. The intervening years have had me undertake a number of endeavors to make a living. What has made me most happy is I haven’t had to sit behind a desk for a decade and a half. I consider myself lucky to have…