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When I Knew
 
Now I'm in the theater hoping you'll join me after all, that my anxiety is groundless. I want to be like the other couples who are murmuring, laughing, and sharing their popcorn. I want to pretend that this is just a normal day in my uneventful life. I want desperately to be writing someone else's story, not actually living it.
 
Jill Stegman

 

I Find Myself at 7:00
 
Except in my head, I am playing back Saturday night's SNL skit where the fake news anchor attacked Cliff Huxtable (not Bill Cosby) and the audience's initial reaction was negative—an ironic twist where one black man, in newsman character, is mocking another black man's portrayal of a certain type of black man to the dismay of (one presumes) a predominantly white audience, with a taunt (again one presumes) written by a non-black...
 
Michael R. Hassler

 

Good Guys, Bad Guys: The War on Drugs
 
As far back as I can remember, the "War on Drugs" has been an Orwellian combat on a distant horizon, an ever-present media presentation that surfaces primarily during election campaigns in the United States and in Mexico. War on anything arouses patriotic sentiments and indicates a real seriousness of purpose. But a "War on Drugs"? Drugs can do a lot of things to those who use them, from dulling sensibilities to exploding internal organs, but they don't possess or manipulate guns or tanks or helicopters and they don't have a geographical or political presence, the usual requirement for defining the object of a war on, against or with another nation, religion, or ideology.
 
Robert Joe Stout

 

Humanities, Anyone?
 
Which digression at the outset leads me to the following observations. It's loudly lamented (by whom, aside from those who teach the Humanities?) that our colleges are losing faith in, and (funding) support for, the humanities. At the same time, people seem universally excited and entranced, deliriously engrossed by instant electronic communication and what they think is knowledge, enhanced and ubiquitously available on their portable screens.
 
Jascha Kessler