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  • Swimming in the System

    About nine years ago I experienced a panic attack for the first time in my life. It is an odd feeling, as if the world is enclosing and wrapping you in a straight jacket but not in a claustrophobic sense. It is as everything you see or feel creates an unsettling pressure, the slightest thing creates tension or anxiety. I remember it got so unnerving that I went outside late at night with the hope that the open Arizona spaces and skies might ease the anxiety. Ironically it did not. I felt as if the stars themselves were pasted upon my eyelids.…

  • 5:08 A.M.

    It has been one of those days in my life in which a sense of mortality looms large or at least the awareness, yes, the abiding awareness, of a painful degrading of one’s integument years ahead. Diagnosed with a spinal lower back problem which has caused me terrific pain down the length of my leg like the insanely corrosive pain I had with sciatica decades ago, I am experiencing a mixture of despair, depression and sadness. I am left with my own unique problem of aging, for I am number 12,000,000,002 of humans who have lived on this planet.This summer I have…

  • H. Colthup (Kent,UK) “honest and challenging”

    This review is from: This Möbius Strip of Ifs (Paperback) This is a fascinating collection of essays that at times is almost too intimately honest; as if you’ve come across someone’s private diaries by accident. Mathias Freese does not hold back with his thoughts and insights as he looks back over his life and experiences. Often I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and in fact one essay, ‘Personal Posturings: Yahoos as Bloggers’ ends with Vonnegut’s famous line, “And so it goes.” Throughout the collection we are reminded that Freese’s background is both as an English teacher and as a…

  • Storming the Bastille

    I didn’t want to expend any energy writing about the writing “conference” I attended led by a freelance writer whose mind and approach to life was as narrow as a parrot’s ass. The day was to be composed of three workshops all dealing with the writing, publishing and marketing of a book. After giving her enough rope to hang herself with, I left after an hour, eating my packaged lunch outside while waiting for Jane to pick me up. If I had to throw up it would have been chunky as opposed to creamy style, the kind of splat we saw…