The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

If people I've never met or don't know say that what I've written or done or said means anything to them, then I'm happy to take it at face value, for once. It cheers me up.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.