Federal Employee Disability Retirement Benefits: The incoherent narrative

The squirrel jumped into the rabbit hole. Then, the floods came, and Noah didn’t like the color of his shoes because they matched the starboard and not the bow, and when the rudderless drift occurred, then did the turtle finally come out from the squirrel’s nest, high atop the water’s edge. The medical conditions caused a lot of stress, and if it wasn’t for the Supervisor who constantly harasses me, I wouldn’t have filed a complaint against him, but the doctors never said I couldn’t work except when the heart attack occurred and Bessie my dog ran across the street and got hit by a car. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Myth of Upward Progression

We like to think that life is represented by a linear curve of upward progression; in reality, most of us reach an apex, then remain static and content in the late summer years of our lives. There is nothing wrong with such a state of affairs; as contentment and comfort embrace a spectrum of stability, so the refusal of change and resistance to vicissitude are not indicators of laziness, as once thought in former days of youth where transition, sacrifice and relinquishment of stability were necessary for purposes of future advancement. Most of us, within a defined minefield of progress and regress, remain within an invisible glass casing of immobility. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Life as a Byproduct

When it happens, or how, is of insignificant notice; the incremental arrival, where past segments of time seemed to traverse epochs where memories captured mere millennia of lifetimes; and then, one day, you wake up and yawn, and your life has taken on an incidental, tertiary level of importance. One has been living by negation for so long, any positive or affirmative step has become a ghost of not just a Christmas past, but of decades evaporated. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Netherworld between Sleep and Wakefulness

There is that moment of haziness, where sleep has not yet overtaken and consciousness has not yet been fully lost, where the philosophical abyss of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or stands in relation to knowledge, truth, insight and puzzlement, and where questions abound concerning the relationship between words and the objective reality of constellations clashing amidst bursting stars and black holes. Sleep is a realm sought after; restorative sleep, a state of being which, without explanation or cause, we accept as a necessity of life’s conundrums. […] Read More …