With all the fog of political divides, it is sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. It appears that there are a thousand issues that separate the political right from the left without an unifying theme. It appears that racially-motivated police brutality of people is yet another unrelated issue in which we disagree.…

Robert Fulghum wrote the best selling book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten in 1986. That book was so successful because he was able to clear out the fog of a complex society and point out the simple things of what it means to be human, things we all learned in…

This posting below is from a year ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons. I did edit out some stories about my personal family, not because those stories were not true, but because I made some people in my family very angry that I had shared those stories with the public. I did…

A while back I received a text from someone that they feared that cancer had turned me into an angry and bitter man. That was a bit painful to hear, yet I spent 24 hours soul searching about that. It is not true. I am no different than before, except maybe caring even less what…

Someone once said to me, “So, you think you’re so smart.” I think it was in a social setting (reception) and I voiced an opinion on a variety of wide topics from medicine to history to geology and space exploration. I quickly corrected the person explaining that I certainly don’t see myself as smart. I…

I have a backlog within the filing cabinet of my mind of dozens of articles I want to write. I put these all aside while I worked on my novel, tirelessly day after day. Now that the manuscript is in the hands of the editor, I have a window of opportunity to put some of…

If you have ever worked with a professional editor, you know the process can be brutal and cuts to the heart of you. I have mentioned before that even John Updike (a fantastic writer and one of only four of which to win the Pulitzer Prize more than once) described in his last book Endpoint,…

Housekeeping: The article below, while having strong Christian overtones, is not necessarily a Christian article, meaning a subject that only Christians would be interested in. It has a lot of psychological questions, which from my perspective is the same as spiritual (look at the Greek roots to Psyche and Soul, they are the same). I…

My labs have returned. On a positive note, after going six weeks without labs, my kidney function tests are still stable, awful but stable, with a GFR of 22, where normal is above 60 and dialysis starts at 15. The anemia is slightly worse but not worth worrying about. Looking at the cancer, the evil…

I just went six weeks between tests and seeing my oncologist, which is the longest since I’ve been sick. I was getting labs every other day, then once a week, then every six hours (after my bone marrow transplant) then weekly, biweekly and now this long jump. The space between was defined by the fact…