User Info

• a gay male. I'm fully out of the closet -- you can read my coming out story here -- but knowing I'm gay tells you very little about me. I reject the stereotypes that apply to gay people, but such rejection doesn't mean I embrace straight male stereotypes either. I am who I am, and you'll just have to get to know me. There are no shortcuts.
  
  
• a Jew. Although I am not a religious person per se, Jewish culture and tradition plays a significant role in my life, and always has. I am the grandson of Jews who survived the Shoah, and the story of Jewish survival and persistence is inseparable from my life.
  
  
• a member of my family. Disconnection from extended family is common nowadays, but my relatives are unusually close and involved in one another's lives, despite being spread over Canada, the United States, and Israel. I am an only child, but I feel connected to a very large family, many of whom are among the most important people in my life.
  
  
• an aspiring writer. Currently, I'm writing both fiction and nonfiction, and increasingly think I'd like to do it as a career. This comes as something of a surprise to me; we'll see how it turns out.
  
  
• an avid scuba diver. I'm a PADI-certified Advanced Open Water Diver, with specialty Deep Diver, Boat Diver, Drift Diver, Multilevel Diver, and Underwater Naturalist certifications.
  
  
• a geek. I've always been the weird kid, the bookish kid, the kid they described as seven-going-on-thirty. I survive and find friendship because it turns out that a lot more kids are like me than is apparent to the naked eye. Intellectuals, like gays, stay in the closet for fear of ostracism.
  
  
• a skeptic. Much of human thought is infused with wishful thinking, fear, and imagination. Clear, rational thought and skepticism are antidotes to a world haunted by the closet of our fears. I am highly skeptical of the dogmas of the left and the right, of pseudoscientific claims, of utopian ideologies, and of irrational thinking everywhere. I believe the truth is inherently liberating; I believe you grow up a little when you learn that recycling your newspapers doesn't do a damn bit of good.
  
  
• a nice guy. The smoky allure of the bad boy may be attractive, but I am, in so many ways, the prototypical Nice Jewish Boy, and every effort I've made to escape that identity left me looking and feeling ridiculous. I am who I am, and embracing it proved liberating. I try to be a loyal and trustworthy friend; I try to do what's right, not just what feels right. I consider myself an intellectual, but not of the stripe that uses intellect as a perch from which to look down on humanity with some knowing combination of contempt, disappointment and pity. Knowledge is not my truncheon. I am not above the simple pleasures in life.

"Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries." -- Carl Sagan

---

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." -- Richard Dawkins

---

"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death." -- Jerome Lawrence, Auntie Mame

---

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." -- T.S. Eliot

---

"Let us remember what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander." -- Elie Wiesel

---

"In the time of your life, live -- so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live -- so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it." -- William Saroyan

---

"Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves." -- Blaise Pascal

---

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill

---

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -- Thomas Sowell

---

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race; this small tribe of unimportant people whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915; there is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world. You sons of bitches. Go ahead, try to destroy them." -- William Saroyan

---

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Anne Lamott

---

"I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading, a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company." -- Gaston Bachelard

---

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it." -- George Orwell

---

"Ever since the Russian Revolution, many sincere intellectuals from John Reed to Jean-Paul Sartre, though they might have admitted that Communism was often brutal and cynical, usually in the end came back to the same point: its stand against exploitation was nearer to the Sermon on the Mount than was Capitalism. Whenever presented with a choice between the two, many men of good will were inclined to give Communism the benefit of the doubt... Despite the Russian war against Finland, despite the horror of the labor camps and slaughter trials, the great myth of the 20th Century remained intact, though battered. Only a few brave and lonely souls like George Orwell fully understood the nature of the betrayal. It is this myth that the Russian tanks crushed as they lurched into Budapest." -- "Myth with Nine Lives" in The New Republic, November 26, 1956

The contents of this journal are copyright © 2001-2004 by the author. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any medium without express written permission is strictly forbidden.