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ALS Diary (part 60): Calling It Quits

I’ve been promising to put an end to this ill-advised account of my decline, and I think the proper moment has arrived. I came to this decision because on the one hand, it was becoming too much like a compulsion, one that urged an over-dramatization of the banal condition of dying, and on the otherContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 60): Calling It Quits”

ALS Diary (part 59): My Changing Condition Two Years In

I decided to cut back on and cap my diary entries. The increasingly political material will go on another site. On this one, I will report tangible changes in my condition. I realized that the compulsion to keep an ALS Diary was pushing me to overdramatize what is in fact a completely boring decline. True,Continue reading “ALS Diary (part 59): My Changing Condition Two Years In”

ALS Diary (part 58): Losing My Legs, A Warning to be Strategic about Bowel Movements, and Reading

In my last ALS Diary post I expressed my regret for subjecting readers to so much of the same thing (it’s always “a little worse”) along with so many extraneous thoughts and comments with a kind of cheap solemnity and faux depth. I decided that I should limit the entries and cap their number. ThisContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 58): Losing My Legs, A Warning to be Strategic about Bowel Movements, and Reading”

What can I say about Gaza?

Yes, in its own unprecedented way, there is something uniquely horrible about a well-armed state raining down bombs and fire on a densely populated area where two million civilians are ordered to flee this way and that without the protection of their houses that are being blasted to rubble and without dependable sources of water,Continue reading “What can I say about Gaza?”

ALS Diary (part 57): The Circularity of Regrets; Kicking the Habit of Living

First of all, I regret having started this ALS Diary to begin with. I must have expected it to elicit some ultimate profundity, which of course it cannot. I expected it to confer a sense of control over the process of decline; but that sense instead morphed into a kind of self-imposed tyranny. I haveContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 57): The Circularity of Regrets; Kicking the Habit of Living”

Realism and Revolution: Franz Kafka

It’s not easy for post-millennials and digital natives to recapture the dimensionality of pre-internet communications. Where once a single movie commanded the simultaneous attention of hundreds of viewers, now each of us commands, Alladin-like, a hundred thousand genies to be summoned by the stroke of a fingertip. Has this vastly augmented power instilled confidence andContinue reading “Realism and Revolution: Franz Kafka”

Balli Kombëtar, Albanian Fascism, and the Death of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

I’ve recently returned to my Albanian history ways. I became interested in the subject after my application to be a Peace Corps English teacher in Kosovo was accepted. I began reading about Albanian history in January 2020, but after COVID made the Peace Corps impossible, I found myself sucked into the world of Albanian history.Continue reading “Balli Kombëtar, Albanian Fascism, and the Death of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism”

ALS Diary (part 56): Reflections on the Brink

One peculiarity of ALS: you feel your body slowly dying even while your mind is unaffected, free to contemplate your whole existence even as you are soon to depart it. Since throughout life you’ve been haunted by the feeling of things needing to be done (Good heavens! how onerous that was for me as aContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 56): Reflections on the Brink”

ALS Diary (part 55): Some Things I’ll Never Understand

I don’t get it. Here is a site under the aegis of a self-declared Marxist and socialist, Freddie DeBoer, whose followers (though clearly not all of them) regularly applaud his posts with the warmest accolades, yet one gets the impression that such terms as “expropriation” or “worker solidarity” are absurdly out of place here. TheseContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 55): Some Things I’ll Never Understand”

ALS Diary (part 54): Isn’t Killing Worse than Dying?

Here are my thoughts on the present cacophony of responses to the situation in Israel/ Palestine: One man can kill another man but one truth can’t kill another truth. Many things on the ground are invisible from a height of 10,000 feet or from an equivalent historical distance. Their invisibility isn’t the same as theirContinue reading “ALS Diary (part 54): Isn’t Killing Worse than Dying?”