"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
Why, oh why do I keep seeing your faces on magazines and in the news. I don’t care what you do or where you go. Angelina is clearly nuts. There is something not quite right there, maybe it is the incest thing with her brother and Brad Pitt is just a pretty face with limited acting ability.
Go away.
Of course no one mentions that Egypt occupied Gaza from 1948-67. At no time did they ever offer the land to anyone. Strange how things work, or perhaps not so strange.
GAZA CITY (AFP) – A senior Egyptian envoy told the Palestinian parliament that Cairo would work “hand in hand” with the Palestinians for an end to Israel’soccupation of all territory seized in 1967.”
I have the pleasure of being with you to convey the congratulations of President (Hosni) Mubarak and his commitment that we stay hand in hand with you until all Palestinian territory, in the West Banknd as well as Gaza, is liberated,” Egypt’s intelligence chief Omar Suleiman said on Tuesday.
He was addressing Palestinian MPs on behalf of Mubarak during a visit aimed at shoring up a de facto Palestinian militant truce and discussing border crossings after Israel’s landmark pullout from the Gaza Strip.
He said Egypt supported Palestinian efforts towards “the complete and total freedom of land occupied in 1967 to pave the way to the creation of a Palestinian state that will take its place in the Arab nation.”
“Our security cannot be guaranteed while you are being threatened. We cannot rejoice while you suffer. We will not be silent until you have recovered your legitimate rights,” he added.
Suleiman also said Egypt would work together with the Palestinians “to bring an end to the suffering which has lasted for so long” and in order to assure the “territorial and human links” between Gaza and neighbouring Egypt.”
I wrote this last month but decided to dig it up again.
The Akedah- All Sorts of Questions
I have been engaging in a discussion outside of the MOT circles about the Akedah over here that brought up a number of questions for me that I have mulled over the years.
1) Old Abe fought with G-d about Sdom and tried to save the city, where is argument here?
2) How can you sacrifice your children?
3) What happened to Yitzhak afterwards?Now I suppose I can kind of buy into the line that discusses this within a historical context in which it may not have been seen as being completely meshugah to be asked to sacrifice a child, but that is a little tenuous for me.
I have wondered if this experience is part of the reason that Yitzhak was the father he was. Here is what I mean by this and some of this may stem from ignorance of the text, but I don’t recall hearing much that makes me think of him as being father of the year material. Clearly his relationship with Yaacov and Esav suffered because of this and one could extrapolate that the lesson of not playing favorites was lost on Yaacov.
In theory if Yitzhak had been more evenhanded there might not have arisen a situation of such acrimony with Joseph and his brothers.
Thoughts, comments, questions?
I am tired and cranky and not really in the mood to blog. I owe a couple of people a meme and should respond to your comments. I apologize, I just don’t have it in me today. I may tomorrow, or I may end up taking some time off from blogging, or maybe not.
I try not to make decisions when I am irritated. I learned today that my rock is leaving LA. We met on the first day of kindergarten and now 31 years later he has decided to move to D.C.
It may sound silly, but I am pretty upset about this. When all hell broke loose he was there and even if things were fine it was reassuring knowing that the old man was around. We have been through a lot, but today is not the time to review it.
If you don’t see any updates entertain yourself with the links to my personal favorites or alternatively you can tell stories that end in non-sequiturs and get the same affect as you would reading my stuff.
Back tomorrow or maybe not.
One of the things that I love about blogging is the opportunity it affords to search for answers about the questions that bother me. The web is filled with similar blogs, thousands of souls like mine searching cyberspace a communal quest to find that thing or thing that provides fulfillment.
Some are looking for something to fill the empty space in their beds, some in their hearts and others are not quite sure what they are looking for, they just are.
I have had my heart broken several times. It was ripped out from behind my ribs and my chest was sown back up, devoid of the thing that made me human, or so I thought. I grew accustomed to being sad, to looking at others with a longing to just be normal again, to wonder how they could laugh and how they could still see a world full of colors.
And then one day I woke up and realized that I had lost a companion, a old familiar friend had left me. The pain that I carried with me was gone and I hadn’t realized that it had left me. I no longer needed to walk around in a world of gray skies, the fog had lifted and I rejoined the world.
It was a terrible experience and like many things, I made it worse, I complicated the issues and made my own life more difficult than it had to be. But in some ways it was wonderful. It helped to teach me that I was tougher than I thought I was. My will and desire were like iron and would not break. (Can you tell that I think in very graphic terms.) I knew that if I let myself, if I gave myself permission to be happy and whole I would heal again and I did.
Since then I have been through some terrible moments, times in which I wondered why I had ever allowed myself to feel for anyone again. I considered myself a fool and there are some people out there who unfairly bore the brunt of my anger and my sorrow. But I never did fall back into the same hole that I had initially been in. I learned from each experience, added knowledge and scar tissue to my being and kept moving.
And if there is one thing that I did take from everything it was to stop beating myself up over not knowing the answers. I don’t know why some things happen. I don’t know why some women loved me and others could not or would not. I don’t know why so many friends and acquaintances have died at such a young age. I don’t like not knowing, but I don’t have to know everything because sometimes you cannot. And if you allow yourself to foster unhealthy ambition for too long there are consequences.
So what I have found is that by easing back on the throttle I am a happier man and many of the answers I seek have come to me. I don’t always like them or find them to be incredibly satisfying, but they are answers.
Here is what I know for certain…..Nothing and everything. I know that I have friends and family whom I would die for. I have known and know love that burns so fiercely it leaves me gasping for breath. I have experienced passion that leaves a sharp a pain in my side and a burning feeling that does not diminish with time.
What I know for certain is that I am alive. I feel it and I live it. What else can a man ask for.
(Originally posted on my blog here)
In my younger years we would have looked at the greasy haired guy and called him a hesher. Tall and skinny with long dirty blonde hair and a shirt that said Detroit Rock City he looked like he hadn’t bathed in months and he drove that old Camaro like an angry New York City cab driver.
It was his driving that garnered my attention. He was weaving in and out of the lanes fighting to get ahead. A big man in desperate need to get somewhere quickly he only managed to force me to slam on by brakes three times in three minutes. By the third time I was ready to forcibly remove his head from his shoulders and turn it into a hood ornament.
I told him so at a stop light and forgot about him, but he didn’t forget about me. He followed me down the street to my the parking lot of my office and confronted me in the lot.
When he unleashed a string of profanities in my direction I turned to face him. He as a few inches taller than me but not nearly as broad. Callused hands on small wrists were connected to a wiry body and a mouth that was as dirty as his hair.
I responded to his tirade by smiling at him and encouraging him to try an impossible anatomical feat. He returned the favor by launching a swift kick at my midsection. I tried to dodge but was a hair slow and took his foot into right side. The force of the blow and the momentum from my attempt to dodge it threw me back into the car.
And with that he was on top of me, raining punches down upon my body. I wasn’t willing to be used as a punching bag so I did what I could to defend myself. I was forced to suffer the indignity of being struck in the head twice, but I managed to wrap my arms around his body and slam him to the ground.
I made sure that my knee landed in his gut and followed that with a short headbut. For a moment we rolled around the parking lot as we strove to get the upper hand. The asphalt was hot. I could feel my leg burning, but since it was wrapped around his I couldn’t afford to release him.
Eventually I managed to get him in a headlock from which I was able to give him a personal introduction to the bumper of Jimmy Jack’s shiny Lexus. He was a slow learner and I was afraid to let him go on his own so I made sure to reintroduce him to the car.
I was about to help him meet some others when I was grabbed from behind by two people. It took a moment to realize that the object across my throat was a shiny police nightstick and that the man trying to restrain me was a cop.
A few hours later I sat in a cell at the station wondering how a sunny day had turned out to be so bad. When I made bail my lawyer explained to me that the charges had been dropped because the man I had been fighting was Kevin Beardsley, the ultimate fighting champion of the lightweight division.
I had gotten lucky that day because by all rights he should have left me lying on the ground, but somehow I had done more than prevent that. I had managed to not only take him out but send him to the hospital. I wondered if I could ask for his belt. I deserved some kind of prize.
(This was a work of fiction that I wrote in 23 minutes. If you want to know why I wrote it, all I can tell you is because, well just because.)