A Year after the Parkland Shootings

On Valentine’s Day 2018, Nicolas Cruz murdered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Bonding together in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy, the students confronted their grief and pain and turned it into activism. They organized the March for Our Lives (MFOL) movement. In March, hundreds of thousands of people gathered together…

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Good News About Love and Compassion #WATWB

In my search for good news about love, I came across an article on the website of Jim Hopper, PhD. that, as a caregiver, gives me great hope and pause for reflection. Titled Mindfulness and Meditation: Kindness, Compassion & Love, the article gives us a roadmap for cultivating these qualities. In discovering and practicing new…

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My Last Valentine

Barry’s nickname, Ashtar the Magnificent, came about because of his psychic—he called it psycho—ability. I only had to be in the same room with him to feel better.  I wrote briefly about falling in love with my partner Barry 13 years after Vic died (a coworker hunk I’d secretly been in love with), toward the…

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Revenge, Fear and Self-Preservation

Brian Smith, like most of the firemen at the department, feared Jaku. After swearing me to secrecy he told me that the firefighters laughed at Jaku’s stories to appease him, but they all knew better than to believe the outrageous sexually oriented lies he’d told about me. Brian said the guys knew Jaku lied whenever…

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Liar Liar: How a Sociopath Lies to Manipulate and Control

It happened in October of ’83, a few weeks after I transferred from the Army Fire Department into the alarm room on Whaler Air Force Base. I’d just finished my initial two weeks of dispatching training on day shift, and was working the midnight shift solo. I’d turned the lights down low to keep an…

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