In the travelogue subplot of my life, the oddest moments stand out. The oddity comes with my physical condition, I suppose. So what I remember of this latest trip to the UK is standing up in a United Airlines toilet and feeling the general difficulty of maneuvering in such a tight space. The stiffness that has taken over my body may reflect age, but as far as I'm concerned, something terrible has gone wrong. Things shouldn't be this way. I mean it was only yesterday that I would swing myself into Read more [...]

Sic Transit Omni. This pseudo-Latinate motto from Britain's satirical 'Private Eye’ magazine was directed at London Transport 45 years ago. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. In any case, things have changed. All transit isn’t ‘sic’ (sic). The urban machine is a fine mechanism, its parts meshing as smoothly as gears in a Swiss watch. Right? And think of the teeth in those gears, and then of my own, this very morning, as they worked over a bran muffin at Destination Bakery. Read more [...]

If my disabled life seems to be narrowing in scope, damned it also doesn't get wedged. Like a bit of flotsam caught between the rocks. Stuck. Jammed. Going nowhere, not even downstream, fast. But before we get into the details, does it matter? At this stage of life, there cannot be a more worthwhile question. Time's winged chariot is flapping along at a record pace, and since chasing after it requires considerable effort, should one bother? Arriving in the Twin Cities for an annual conference, Read more [...]

There is a difference between parking on the lower slopes of Twin Peaks and successful microsurgery…but it is too subtle to discern. No, to the naked eye they are one and the same. For once I had wedged my Dodge Caravan between a driveway and a BMW, The available airspace amounted to less than one inch. Go, Paul. All this after a preemptive strike on the nearby mobile phone shop, a highly successful raid that netted if not a new iPhone, the promise of one. Yes, there I was in a suburban mall Read more [...]

Ever feel like changing your mobile phone service? I mean, after all, it is not a radical notion…is it? That's why after years of overpriced and technologically backward service from AT&T, you've decided to throw a little business to T-Mobile. What the hell. What the hell, indeed. Turns out that your phone has to be ‘unlocked.' Why? Did you recall ‘locking’ your phone in the first place? Precisely what it is locke in my piddly little iPhone is totally beyond me. In fact, I seemed to have Read more [...]

I don't know what it is about the calendar currently in use, for the last 2000 years or so. But I find it singularly challenging to understand Tuesdays and Fridays, those being the days when the city fathers of San Francisco take it upon themselves to run a street cleaning machine up and down our hill. Naturally this machine is accompanied by a traffic warden who issues tickets to those of us who are calendar-challenged. At $71 a ticket, one would think it was high time…. But it has been high time Read more [...]