Author: Vic Socotra

Severe Acute Retirement Syndrome

It cleared yesterday, the skies suddenly deep and blue and the clouds reverted to soft cotton balls instead of the pervasion damp wool that has blanketed us for a month. I had the top down on the car and the golf clubs at the ready. It is astonishing what a little sunshine can do for […]

Soft Dairy

Bob Hope is 100 years old today, he made it to the century mark and somewhere a lot of people are smiling. Elsewhere they aren’t and it looks like the 3rd Armored Cav is going to be sticking around Baghdad a little longer than planned. Another American was shot dead yesterday, and at this rate […]

Sedimentary Layers

I took a class in Geology back in college. It was a hard science requirement imposed on the lit students that I had to kill and it looked like an interesting way to do it. I was impressed by the atomic numbers of the elements, and looking through the microscope at thinly shaved pieces of […]

Stones in the Rain

It had rained for four days. It rained on me in Washington and the stationary front hung like a great balloon tethered over the East Coast and it poured down on us in New York and Massachusetts and all the points between. Yesterday was Memorial Day yesterday all over America, but I went to Arlington […]

The Hundred Days

I’m up. My fingers don’t feel very agile this morning. My brain is a monolithic mass. I have put on something for breakfast. It is cloudy with a 60% chance of rain. It is 57, colder than it should be, and rain is likely for all the days of the weekend. We will be traveling, […]

The Untouchable

Today bands of rain are sweeping across the District. The commute will be lousy, and a hundred thousand grim-faced drivers have already climbed into their cars for the slog toward their jobs in the Imperial City. It is Friday, that is the good news, but there is the troublesome last 20% of the working week […]

Hot Wash

I am going to deal with the impending death of exercise Top Officials 2 today. It doesn’t know it is dying, but most of the press conferences are over, and Governor Ridge is going to have the limelight up in Chicago today. The senior people are going to stop going to the videconferences, and the […]

Chicagoland

I gave up this morning. Exercise Top Officials 2 has eaten my lunch, or rather my breakfast. Oh, sure, I was up early enough, I got the coffee started and then went back to lie down just for a moment. Then some flaw in the space-time continuum occurred, a temporal fugue. I suddenly was nearing […]

Measles

I’m whipped. I didn’t get home until near nine last night and getting up early enough to churn out the electronic version of the daily fish-wrapper is kicking my butt. I stagger through the ritual of making the coffee and filling the fry pan with something or other. I ate so late that I am […]

Into the Slipstream

ARLINGTON, May 12, 2003- God it is early. I am not reaqdy to get sucked into the vortex of this week. I stayed up late last night, talking to my Mother on her day, and even a remarkably civil conversation with my ex, the first such I have had in a couple years. Her call […]