Sphera Motis

The frame up on this one is a doozy. Bear with me. [A question, future moi: Is there a pandemic, a recession, a once-in-a-quadrancentennial protest movement, not a small number of crackdowns and an orange Nazi in the white house? No? Blessings.]  I write from somewhere within the pensive rhythm of curfew and lockdown on an island in the Bahamas. If you'll recall, class, this was the first bit of earth Columbus ran in to 528 years ago. We are recovering from YET another once in a lifetime hurricane, dodging a pandemic, staring down the barrel of a protracted recession, and I'm feeling pretty left out of all the civil disobedience in the lower 48. The largest civil rights movement in history and I'm quarantined with my sea turtles. Such a Try Hard. Columbus has just been decapitated in Boston. His hands painted red in Miami. And I'm grappling with how brutal we must be to divest from a brutal history.  The Black Lives Matter movement has coalesced aro

**For the sake of authenticity, I should state that I wrote this post five months prior to actually posting it. I expect you would understand why** I won't bury the lead - I hit a motorcycle yesterday. This post is not about how terribly I feel for hurting another human being, or traumatizing my passengers, for impacting his family, and for the time I took from all the kind folks who stopped to help. It could be about all that, but that's for me to own and this blog's purpose has never been as a cathartic outlet for my guilt, though I'll concede it is a theme. To clear the mud - my vehicle was hardly moving and acted more as a barrier to the bike, who because of the tractor ahead of us, or my unfamiliarity with right hand drive, or (possibly) his speed, I just didn't see coming over the hill opposite us as I was turning in to a driveway on a country road at mid-day. His leg was injured, and the bike scratched up, but no blood or unconsciousness or screaming. Th

Quick update - I live in New Zealand now. I have a house in a neighborhood, and a car and a driver's license. I have a bank account and a visa. I go grocery shopping. I complain about the trash pick-up schedule in my neighborhood. This is the status of my livelihood here in Auckland. It's also an odd time to be here, I think, if one steps back and observes the arch of human history. In 50 years, I imagine historians and cultural anthropologists will study the trend lines and tell us all about how rural America gave it's last fit before it succumbed to tide of urbanization, mechanised agronomy, and the crush of opiates - all our lives the worse for it. In eight years, I'd put money on the Academy Award for Best Picture going to some two and a half hour epic on EITHER the Washington Post's coverage of 2017 - the year of "Where there's smoke, there's fire! And there's a lot of smoke!" Or something with a morbid backtrack and a lot of cut shot

Hello again, faithful readers (ahem, Mom and Grandma) I haven't posted in a while. Years, in fact. And I've had a half-year deployment in Nepal in the mean time, so I've truly let you down. And by "You" what I really mean is the evenings of wine-drenched narcissism I'll enjoy at 45 when I look back on when I used to do cool things. Anyway - moving on. It is November 9, 2016 here in Biu, Nigeria, and Donald Trump has just hit that magic threshold of 270 electoral votes. And I don't really want to talk about it, or the electorate. Let's instead talk about these geese! They live at my hotel. They're cranky and territorial. As geese are wont to do... jerks. Actually, I do want to talk about what I'm doing here, which I typically refuse to do. My personal blog is not the right place to discuss the complexities of development and relief work, nor to represent the agency I work for. But I am going to tell you how I'm feeling, supporti

  I come to you with the sage wisdom gleaned from a whole week here. Near expert by now. And I don’t have answers to all my questions, but I have informed my opinion a bit. As I mentioned previously, UAE and the rest of the Arab Monarchies get a lot of shade and rhetoric about how it’s only a matter of time before their people insist upon representation and democracy. And I’ve posited that that may, in fact, be total bull shit. Read on for mind-blowing argument: People don’t protest, demand representation and topple regimes if they’re satisfied, fulfilled, have their basic needs met and feel reasonably assured that their children will enjoy the same. If there is a secret recipe that sparks a democratic revolution, UAE is missing all the ingredients. They aren’t even in the kitchen. They actually looked down the hallway at the kitchen, thought to themselves “Meh” and went out to a 7-star restaurant instead to eat Indo-Mexican-Polynesian fusion food. We also make a

I’m watching the sunrise in Amsterdam and beginning another blog-worthy adventure while 'Getting Jiggy Wit It' plays in the coffee shop. For those of you who are new to the blog (cough cough), I shall reiterate my disclaimer: I try really hard to be objective, well-researched within the confines of state-controlled internet access, and culturally understanding when I write these, but inevitably I fail. So, just know that I’m giving it my best shot, but I’m only human and an oft-jetlagged one at that. Also, sometimes I cuss.   Sorry Grandma. You’ve been warned. Also, I usually write one of these pre-entries. But the rest have nice photos to break up the self-indulgent sprawl of my own internal dialogue. Feel free to skip this one altogether. Moving on: On this auspicious morning, I am off to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. I even bought books this time to study up, not just antiquated biographies about long-dead pharaohs (