Crooked Thinking

Emptiness. The fuel that drives missiles and bullets. Dark, sinister emptiness. It propels knives through tender skin. Bones shatter in the presence of emptiness. Emptiness triggers explosions and ignites fuses that transform oil storage tanks into fiery cauldrons of liquid diamonds. Emptiness, as thick and fiercely hot as molten steel.  So monstrously hot that the sun is ice in comparison. Entire galaxies dissolve into steamy mists in its presence. Emptiness fills a dangerous void, converting space and time and mass and volume and distance into everything…and nothing that remains.

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I am too old to be the leader of the free world…whether in fact or merely in my own mind. That role belongs to someone old enough to have shed the vanity and arrogance of youth and young enough to maintain a firm grip on the wisdom of age and experience. Age, though, and its tendency to correlate with (or not) such characteristics is just one qualifying or disqualifying attribute. Intelligence is another—I’m not bright enough to qualify, either. Charisma has a role to play, too, but only when paired with trustworthiness, compassion, honesty, altruism, and an sense of moral obligation cast in stone. Given that candidates who possess the requisite criteria exist only in my imagination, the ongoing search for someone to fill the role is an exercise in futility.

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It has long been my belief that reading English language versions of newspapers based in other countries can enable readers to understand perspectives not documented in domestic news sources. Reading articles written in native languages probably would be eve more enlightening, but are impossible with my language limitations. This morning, I read an article—obviously an opinion piece—in the English language Turkish newspaper, Yeni Şafak. Whether or not the opinions expressed by the writer, İhsan Aktaş, are based on defensible facts, the positions he takes clearly express both deeply-held beliefs and long-standing frustrations. True or not, the “facts” as he sees them color his world-view and are sufficient to allow him to feel justified in his perspectives. To give oneself the opportunity to learn from such articles, one occasionally must overlook “inflammatory” or “triggering” language. This particular article to which I refer is entitled Will the Stench of Colonialism Be Cleansed from Africa’s Scorched Lands? Another paper that can help readers appreciate perspectives other than the ones usually presented to Western readers is the Tehran Times, (which, by the way, published an interesting op-ed piece (dated May 18, 2025) entitled President Trump and the Name Persian Gulf). I suspect radically differing perspectives will be available in the coming days to people who read both Israeli and Iranian papers. I am confident reality exists somewhere in the tangle between the biased motives that drive the papers to publish their unique viewpoints on “truth.”

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I woke to the sound of wire shears snapping barbed wire.  I lay awake for several minutes, listening to the wire being stripped off the fence and rolled into loops. Soon, after the air became quiet, I heard the soft padding of footsteps on the wooden slats of the porch floor. And, then, a new sound. Razor wire being released from a tightly-wound roll makes a sharper sound than barbed wire being collected into loops. A higher pitch, almost like the reverberations of a coiled spring freed from tension. When I peeked out the window, I saw that the thieves had placed the roles of barbed wire on the bed of a pickup. And I saw razor wire wrapped tightly around my cabin. Strips of razor wire spread only a couple of inches apart at every window and every door.  If I tried to escape, I would be cut to pieces. But when I smelled sulfur matches and gasoline and smoke and saw the flames all around the cabin, I realized I had no choice. They had spilled the contents of all my petrol cans along the base of the outer walls and lit it with kitchen matches. I  had no choice; I had to through the roof. Fortunately, reacting to a recent horoscope in Sunday’s paper, I had installed a hydraulic-powered roof when I built the helicopter. Romeo and Gretel were waiting for me in the copter cab; Hansel and Juliet had lashed themselves to the rear rotor. I was disappointed in Hansel and Juliet, who had lost their son, Chris, when they ran over his legs with a propeller attached to a powerful Evinrude motor on their new boat. I would have thought they would have learned a little something about propeller safety from that snafu, but apparently not. I had no time, though, so I started the chopper motor and watched Hansel get decapitated and Juliet lose her right arm as the rotor spun. With luck, though, we all got away before the cabin exploded into a fireball. Ben Casey, M.D. happened to be nearby and he managed to save H & J. But they were subsequently lost in a freak desert snowstorm in the Ouachita Mountains.