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loyalty

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February 13, 2012

Love your name is loyalty.

Loyalty sits on the edge of the bed when no one else comes to call.

Traitors stab you in the back, but the loyal smack you on the lips.

Loyalty is the champion who asks for no medals.

A true friend offers you loyalty when you can’t find it in yourself.

Loyalty loses no good it might win by fearing to attempt.

Loyalty kisses fragility on both cheeks.

Loyalty is always gushing behind her lover’s back.

Loyalty can hold hands for sixty years withour tiring.

Love is always loyal and whatever is not loyal is not love.

True lovers are forever smitten by the drop-dead gorgeous eyes of loyalty.

Loyalty is the soul of kin.

Loyalty hath no mean and hungry look.

These aphoristic thoughts on loyalty were inspired by the most loyal person I know, my sweet wife Linda.

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cars

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February 12, 2012

Whenever I go out for a drive, I know that someone, somewhere in a little room, sends out a mass of selfishly mindless and maddeningly slow motorists to navigate themselves into my way.

A navigation system is a back-seat driver minus the attitude.

A civilized man abandons his coach and finds again the use of his feet.

If it has an overage of sheet metal, extensive plastic bling and massive stretches of chrome, then it’s American.

The invention of the wheel was progress until the invention of gasoline.

The modern car has become an mobile cafe, office and living room.

A world of gas-powered cars may end the world.

Sheet metal is chiton for humans.

You are what you won’t drive.

In California, cars are clothes.

At some point we all want transportation that gets us there before we leave.

Slow bodies want fast cars.

A flashing, blurring, narrowing field of view —  speed thrills just before it kills.

Touring is a tight suspension, a turbo charger and a turning road.

Alcohol, oil and gas don’t mix.

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politics

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February 7, 2012

What you must do to win an election generally disqualifies you from being elected.

A  presidential candidate may have no secrets, a President, many.

Politics  is apparently sport; it seems to be an opportunity to score.

Law is order — until people get involved.

Politics plus anything equals politics.

Re-election was invented so that something might finally get done.

When a political campaign reduces a candidate to smiles, handshakes, slogans and promises then unfortunately, that is what they are.

Politically, brutality is not a liability.

Man is a vicious elected animal.

All political life owes its existence to physical death.

Heredity and wealth are forever the political enemy of competence and good will.

Politics is a public brawl in suits and ties.

Politics sides.

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acceptance

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February 4, 2012

Gentleness with others thrives in the very places that we shelter our own weaknesses.

Acceptance slides the handcuffed a key.

When I accept you,  I love myself and you.

Acceptance shines in the eyes but radiates from the heart.

To you, I am what you allow me to be.

What I do not accept I murder and leave lying in a pool of judgment.

Acceptance debrides the wounded past.

The house of acceptance becomes the home of the condemned.

The blamed have an opportunity to stop blaming.

I am not safe with you if you do not love yourself.

The judged learn not to judge.

Your safety with me lies in my love of myself.

The condemned have a unique opportunity to make a sharp turn toward perfection.

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rhetoric

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January 10, 2012

For your enjoyment, each of the following “proverbs” define a rhetorical technique while modeling the technique defined.

To antithesis is human; to simile divine.

Amplification is layer cake, ice cream of two flavors and a cherry on top.

Synecdoche reduces humans to derrières.

To seduce, fashion a style, hyperbatonic.

Aanadiplosis leads to repetitivenes, repetitiveness to bordom, bordom to neglect and neglect to “out of print.

Analogy is the mouse that unchews the bound lion.

Epizeuxis suffers a fancy, fancy, fancy rhetorical stutter.

Aposiopesis leaves it to the  imagination to …

Slam, bam, pow, pop, fizz — onomatopoeia conjures reality.

Litotes triumphs by understabbing the victim.

What  is written chiastically, may be chiastically unwritten.

She calmly talked him off the ledge with epistrophe, after epistrophe,  after epistrophe.

Zeugma flirts, prozeugma courts,  diazeugma dominates and hypozeugma apologizes and bows demurely at the door.

To anaphora, or not to anaphora –  that is the anaphora.

Ton-like lies the line that wears the hyperbole.

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fun

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December 19, 2011

Lies are  boring; the truth is fun.

Seriousness is exhausting, but silliness energizing.

The most fun story opens the most closed mind.

Psyche freedom lies in the bosom of silliness.

Fun is life twisted, warped, bent and mangled just short of beyond-recognition.

Humor truths best.

Most of the time have fun, and the rest of the time have more fun.

Fun occurs most often off-center, kilter, flopping, tripping and falling down.

Laughter washes sad eyes with happy tears.

Guffaw by exaggeration.

If you haven’t made up a new word lately, nicknamed a friend or babbled incoherently to your pets, then you have totally and utterly lost touch with the thrill of creative thriving.

My happiest life-long aim is found in avoiding being dead.

It’s most fun to do what’s possible.

In an aging population, nakedness is frightening, clothes are fun and closed coffins are hilarious.

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education

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December 13, 2011

Knowledge is ever the boss of ignornance.

The most honest, most educate.

We are doomed to repeat what we don’t interpret.

Experience has a lesson for those who avoid it.

Wild dreams spring from boring lessons.

Open a book and learn; open reality and revise.

Realtity morphs into books; books morph under the scrutiny of reality.

Silence distances; lectures unite; actions divide.

Ideas planted in a book turn to grain and then  bread in a teacher’s hands.

Brokeness is a classroom.

 

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stress

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December 4, 2011

Stress is the downside of awareness and the upside of action.

No good is done without stress. Step up, stress out, surge forward.

Strike when the stress is hot.

Injustice stresses what fairness calms.

The birth of Jesus was full of stress, so also the birth of every great thing.

Prestressed concrete is like a person who has been through it — stronger.

Stress kills, apathy.

Stress slowly kills you while it informs  you that you’re still alive.

Stress deploys at home after the war.

When I decide if your crisis is mine,  I determine if your stress is viral or not.

Sleep salves stress.

The stressed irritate the calm, and the calm craze the stressed.

For the irresponsibility of  one, ten pay with stress.

God is not only found in contemplative, peaceful, private moments,  but as Jesus showed us, God  is also found in the stressful experience of poverty, illnesses, loss and brokenness.

Stress narrows focus, but so does calm.

Revisionist history  is academic stress reduction.

Stress is an interpretation.

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dance

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November 21, 2011

Not dancing is sin.

Dancing heals loneliness.

To misstep is better than to nonstep.

Those who never risk being awkward, never enjoy being graceful.

The world would be a better place if we all danced.

The dance floor is one of the few places in the world where a man is always right — or left.

The dance floor is the only place in the world where a man should treat a woman like a shopping cart.

To dance is to make ones soul a drum.

Dance is the public language of the soul.

Living, like dancing, is often awkward before it is graceful.

To dance or live is to  step on a few toes.

More women should dance; where else can they can get a man to be their picture frame?

Men should dance more; it affords such opportunity.

Dance with the stars; buy a telescope.

When we dance, we don’t fight, mostly.

Women were backward, men forward– on the old-fashioned dance floor.

There are fewer lonely dancers than lonely spectators.

The dance floor is a great place for couples to expand their floor plan without a home equity line of credit.

Some thing are best done alone, brushing your teeth, reading, snoring, not dancing.

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beginnings

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November 3, 2011

Rejoice in small beginnings; the first two-ton pumpkin will begin with a seed.

If you want something to happen do nothing and it will.

Beginnings are like guppies; get a couple going and pretty soon you have twenty.

End an ending by beginning a beginning.

End parenting by beginning the marriage again.

If you want to learn from your failures, start a small business.

You can’t “just do it” unless you “just start it.”

After the tsunami we surf, sail and fish again.

The beginning is the fastest way to the end.

The first is in the last, the last in the first.

“In the beginning …”  forsaw the end.

An end is made out of a sequential series of beginnings.

Science is a beginning built on an ending.

Redemption is a dead end that becomes a life-giving beginning.

Be careful what you begin and where you begin it; the roots of the one gallon tree you planted last week may one day crack your sidewwalk.

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environment

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October 31, 2011

The wilderness is a cafe, and the goal is to stay off the plate.

Love earth; love life.

Our planet gets high mark for guest relations, but not the guests.

Coffee good hot; earth not.

The city heals us from the country and the country from the city.

A fanged touch reminds us that all the world is not kin.

A forest is a cathedral; leaf, branch and trunk praise.

The first environment to respect is within.

A star-spangled sky advertizes a healthy earth.

Gardens are safe wildernesses.

Oxygen, hydrogen and carbon form a choir.

Tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes ended romanticism.

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technology

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October 18, 2011

To topple tyrants, tweet.

The family that Skypes together stays together.

Modern living is 700 friends on Facebook and no one to dinner.

Computer hardware comes and goes,  but wisdom’s OS will never be obsolete.

A flat screen is no substitute for a natural scene.

Social networks unite, but old technologies still divide and crush the world –  wheels, walls and bullets.

It is the prerogative of man to perish at the hands of the machines he controls.

Technology may have shrunk the globe to the size of the human ear, but it is compassion that will bring people close enough to hear each other.

The control of fire bookends history; it cooked the first meal and sent the first human being out of the atmosphere.

The smart phone places global knowledge in our pockets, but what we do with that is still up to us.

Machines may extend our bodies and expand our minds, but they may also shrink our souls.

With clicks we can now annihilate eyes we have never seen, but morality will never be vaporized.

Abandon technology may be turning earth and space into a junkyard, but the footprint I leave on the earth is still up to me.

Technology teeters precariously  between making the world better, or worse.

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health

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October 17, 2011

Calm is an anti-accident; take two and go to bed.

Unhealthy emotions follow family commotions, but kindness calms the raging herd.

If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken worse care of myself.

Dying is eventually a healthy choice.

Don’t let bodily functions become your compunctions.

A proverb a day keeps the fool at bay.

A proverb applied is a physician inside.

Late to bed and late to re-engage — healthy, unwealthy, stealthy and teenage.

The ocean is an anti-depressant.

Acceptance is the best analgesic for aging.

It may take a heart attack to begin to live so you won’t have another one.

Colors heal; try the leaves in the fall and the flowers in the spring.

The mountains, deserts, oceans and jungles are in the fine print on your doctor’s prescription.

Health food can  look beautiful but taste dutiful.

Sleep is an antibiotic for stress.

Health is harmony within.

Aging and illness uncover stunning beauty; the frail, aged mother on her daugther’s arm.

Love is health.

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spirituality

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October 13, 2011

Spirituality is never chrome plated.

The most spiritual — don’t know it.

Spirituality exists where broken servants wash the feet of diseased children.

Pseudo-spirituality sets up border checkpoints; authentic spirituality is an open road.

Spirituality isn’t a vague , spooky, subjectve piety; it is a tête-à-tête with God, the most concrete, substantial, specific being in the universe.

Spirituality exists in your next act of compassion.

A holy proximity to unholy people is the signature of spiritual maturity.

It is more spiritual to feed the poor than to attend a potluck at church.

Secular doesn’t exist; everything is spiritual.

Spiritually speaking, losing is winning.

More doors open to the “spiritual” than the Baptists.

Religion is most threatened by its tendancy to spiritualize and justify  hatred and violence.

Work is holy, but overwork ruins the rest of life.

Eating is holy communion.

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endings

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October 11, 2011

It often takes more courage to end a thing than to begin it.

Redemption turns endings into beginnings.

Hard endings may sprout tender beginnings.

The end for one is the beginning for another.

The end of aid may be the beginning of responsiblity.

It may be wise to begin with the end in mind, but it is realistic to end with the end in mind.

We cannot remember precisely when we began, and we cannot begin to know how we will end.

Love is the antitoxin for brutal endings.

At the end of my fingertips is the beginning of you.

Those who love themselves know when to end  a harmful relationship; those who hate themselves keep inviting abuse.

Heaven and hell are not endings; they are beginnings we choose.

In the ending, God creates the possibility of a beginning.

Graciously accepting the end of each day is the grand rehearsal for graciously accepting the end of the last day.

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junk

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October 4, 2011

If you put your junk beside your trash can instead of in it, somebody will steal it.

It is much easier to get rid of your children than their junk.

If you fill up your garage with cars, where will you park your junk?

A garage sale is about taking ownership of the means of reduction.

Mold, rust and dry rot turn one decade’s treasure into another decade’s junk.

Life begins pre-junk, enters mid-junk and ends post-junk.

Craig’s List: how one man’s junk becomes another man’s.

They say that sex sells, but not like junk.

Selling junk is the world’s second, third and fourth oldest professions.

To perfect your prophetic gift, visit land fills and junk yards.

A day can turn a whole city into junk — Otsuchi, Japan.

To understand the end of the world,  visit a junkyard.

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economy

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September 28, 2011

If you don’t like the returns you’ve gotten on stocks, cheer yourself up by investing in jewelry and time shares.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” is now, “It’s the stupid economy.”

All that is needed to inspire another young American to get some credit cards and  max them out is a grade school trip to Washington DC.

Economies morph; we once sold corn, then we sold corn syrup — now we sell corn-powered cars.

An economy occurs as soon as someone wants what someone else has.

The economy is the social network we belong to by default.

A shopper without a price anchor is like a shopper with ten million dollars; both will likely pay too much for too little.

The economy exists within our emotions; anxiety and hope rule the attribution of value.

In an economic recessions the “economy” transmogrifies into a Hydra.

In modern economies records have replaced relationships.

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anxiety

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September 26, 2011

Anxiety puts an end to  fun, but confidence is the life of the party.

Anxiety is a virus; you can catch it from your neighbors.

Anxiety is silent, but relief comes to those who speak up.

One of the best anti-anxiety medications is found in taking charge.

Anxiety oppresses its neighbor, but love hugs and kisses even those far off.

Worry substracts and anxiety divides, but faith adds and love multiplies.

Bravery imagines the worst and then proceeds.

To succeed, do the opposite of what anxiety tells you to do.

Anxiety whispers furiously about dangers that do not exist, but courage and action quiet false reports.

A worry-free life is not a life without risk; it is a life with a gentle, philosophical acceptance of loss and failure.

“You won’t always feel like this,” is wise counsel to the anxious.

Worship and prayer are anti-anxiety medications.

Good walks, good books, good music, good friends and good meals — these are among the good cures for anxious hearts.

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shame

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September 20, 2011

We were made with no shame and we are living to return there again.

The beginning of forgiveness is the end of shame.

Blame shames;understanding values.

I have done wrong, not I am wrong is the truth.

Guilt confesses to a crime; shame believes it is the crime.

Guilt is in the rind; shame is in the core.

Shame has a trigger; everyone who is shamed was once shot.

Fail and feel guilty; be failed and feel shame.

False shame has no father nor mother either, but the ability to blush is human.

Shame thrives in a dark corner but withers among safe friends.

Vulnerablity is shame therapy.

Find shame a place where it is homeless.

To recover from shame is to feel one thing and do the opposite.

Defeat shame by acting valued.

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