drmstream[writing]

Most men lead lives of quiet des­per­a­tion and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the expe­ri­ence of anonymity. Thoreau was mis­guided in his instinct to sep­a­rate him­self from the peo­ple around him and to envi­sion their lives as empty and use­less. The […]

The Bow­ery in New York City in the early 1920’s. Pro­hi­bi­tion is around the cor­ner — then the restau­rant will move up to street level and the liquor store down below.

The sky lit up sul­furous and unnat­ural. The dull thumps and whistling screeches rang in the air, a few beats off. We sat down by the water wait­ing for the town fire­works to start. The coun­try club up the hill was wind­ing their dis­play down. A fam­ily could have sat here 240 years ago and wit­nessed the […]

When­ever we find, in two forms of life that are unre­lated to each other, a sim­i­lar­ity of form or of behav­ior pat­terns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by par­al­lel adap­ta­tion to the same life-preserving func­tion. Kon­rad Lorenz One hot Fri­day after­noon a long time ago […]

Costi­gan ordered another round. The girl leaned into the bar. Mag­nus lis­tened to her ask ques­tions about their work. She was young and pretty, relaxed with the two men. Costi­gan began to touch her, a palm against the back or a fin­ger at her wrist, in a gen­tle sequence that Mag­nus had wit­nessed before. The […]

The first time I held you We were in the hos­pi­tal room before your mother Came out of recov­ery. I was ragged From the chaotic night, the fast change Into oper­at­ing scrubs, the paced urgency Of the nurs­ing staff as they rolled the gur­ney Through the dou­ble doors, two lives Hang­ing in the bal­ance. You were […]

They stopped us at the bot­tom of the jet­way. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tick­ets and paced down the car­peted walk­way with the pecu­liar metro­nomic inten­sity of reg­u­lar trav­el­ers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a mot­ley gath­er­ing: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face read­ing a faded […]

The artist who painted this works exclu­sively in images. In her fifty-year career, rep­re­sen­ta­tive images make up a tiny por­tion of her work. She is an abstract artist. This is one of the few works where she uses words. The oth­ers were in a series of reli­gious works that she did mainly in the 1970’s, […]

Some pho­tographs do us the favor of stop­ping us in a place. Look into this old barn. You couldn’t stand in front of it long enough in real life. Your legs would start to hurt, your mind would walk away, you would have places to go. It isn’t that your life is too hur­ried or that […]

Take a few min­utes to watch this.  Here are a few high­lights: “Cre­ativ­ity in edu­ca­tion is as impor­tant as lit­er­acy and we should treat it with the same sta­tus.” “Chil­dren have an extra­or­di­nary capac­ity for inno­va­tion.” “My con­tention is that all kids have excep­tional tal­ent and we squan­der it pretty ruth­lessly.” “If you’re not prepared […]