Fairfax, VA, USA. Surely you have been tempted by the call of a Bucket List. Perhaps you even made one for yourself, despite the fear it will become the proverbial bucket of spit.

They are the contemporary Cat’s Meow. So why not make one? I can be as truly intellectual as the next person, up to the challenge, consumed with thoughts about my impending mortality.

Fairfax, VA, USA. We have been at war for as long as I have been alive. I have high school classmates, some of whom I knew in elementary school, who did not make it back from Viet Nam.

I have relatives who fought and died or were injured in World War II. My father fought in China, my uncles in Europe, my cousin in the Pacific for the Navy. The Fifth Column killed a relative after the war had officially ended.

Washington, DC, USA. Science observes the universe, records what has occurred, and then develops a testable theory that can explain those observations and make predictions on future ones.

Albert Einstein was very good at this. He took his observations about space and time and formed a coherent theory that explains the universe we see all around us.

Washington, DC, USA. In this, our all so post-modern world, the left and right extremes, the political base of Democrats and Republicans respectively, treat reality as if truth is freely exchangeable, in whole or in part, with some fantastical gospel that conforms to their own self-fabricated artifacts and fables.

Left and Right, Right and Left, following their own drummers in a march, humming hymns and anthems, chanting repetitive slogans, and waving their splendid banners and gloriously constructed flags while expecting the rest of us to stand at the curb urging them with cheers.

Washington, DC, USA. We have grown accustomed to hearing gunfire in the streets. Casually launched personal attacks are routine in the half-civilized, lawless existence that is the internet.

Rather than some shiny exemplar of modernity, the internet is more like a sprawling jumbled mass of huts, tents, cabins and saloons. A small town; in many ways, a very strange small town.