Book of Job tagged posts

So we have arrived at “full containment” of the fires ravaging Northern California over the past two weeks. Keeping a close eye on the “containment” percentage has been but one of the obsessions affecting the local population through these days. Or at least those of us who had not lost our homes and were casting nervous eyes on the local hillsides to gauge the chances of it still happening.

Living not far from the oak and fir forests of Annadel State Park as I do, I used to look up at the nearby hills periodically and think that a fire would surely sweep through there someday. But I was just as sure that it would never jump down here to the flatlands, thick with residential neighborhoods, roads and schools.

It’s one thing for a fire to sweep up and across open canyons and ridges where only the wildlife and adjacent hillside homeowners need flee...

An old friend of mine has been stricken with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease, in some ways the most devastating medical diagnosis a human being can receive. There is little to no pain in ALS, so at least that takes it out of the realm of suffering common to rheumatoid arthritis, bone cancer and other diabolical conditions specializing in pain delivery to undeserving innocents.

But in its eventual robbery of nearly all human muscular activity save for blinking the eyes and perhaps an occasional partial smile or frown from a minutely functioning facial muscle or two, ALS has no parallel in its reduction of human physical function to levels not seen even in newborns and embryos.

Almost making it worse is that there is zero loss of cognition, so there is no escaping the full gravity of one’s plight.

And last week, we found out that playwright and sometime actor Sam Shepard died of the same wretched disease, a de...