OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: The picture album

Time was, every family had a picture album – that anachronism bound carefully in a large leather book-shaped monstrosity, kept safe where dust settles and mice scurry around; taken out for occasions where boredom is accentuated and friends or neighbors have stayed long past their welcome, and so it is taken out carefully, dusted off and laboriously paged through, telling of a history for each page, each photograph laid meticulously upon the thick plaster-backboard of a person’s history. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Bugs

Some are systematically exterminated; others, kept by organic farmers for their predatory advantages, including killing others; and still others are quickly brushed off as pesky little creatures not necessarily bothersome in numbers or even in appearance, but because “bugs” are simply not tolerated in an antiseptic universe where good order and neatness cannot include the appearance of a creature […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Leaving without a Blip

Remember those old films, of silence, submarines and sonars (an acronym we have forgotten from the combination of terms, SOund, Navigation And Radar)? There were those tense moments of complete silence, where heartbeats and perspiration could be palpably heard when life and death depended upon it, and the moment when someone coughed or dropped an object at the crucial moment; then, the sudden entrance of old Navy footage of depth charges being flung like spitballs from a rubber band, splashing into the ocean, then the angst of awaiting the slow sinking until the violent detonation of that camera-shaking explosion. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Those bare moments of honesty

They come in flashes of rare instances; sometimes, in a more subtle manner, like encroachments by a nimble adversary; at others, tantamount to ugly boils erupting in the middle of one’s forehead while interviewing for a sought-after position.  We cloak ourselves in lies, more lies, and obfuscations wrapped in greater deceptions of self-doubt. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: A Series of Refinements

Age does not necessarily result in greater wisdom; rather, for many, it merely sits in a puddle of stale intransigence. As well, palpable advancement on a linear scale occurs only in the context of the capacity to make progress, but remains in a state of limbo without an intermediate causal impetus. Throughout life, it is the refinements made which make for differentiation. A minor tweak here; a self-reproachful reminder here; for, very few begin the journey needing a complete overhaul, but merely a readjustment and cleaning of those spark-plugs gone bad. […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The Peril of Bypassing Process

Efficiency negates process naturally; or, if not in pure extinguishment, a progressive curtailing of the methodology of reaching from initiation Point A to finality of journey at Point B.  Additionally, when American Pragmatism combined with capitalism of the tallest order sets about to attain the greatest return in the shortest time possible, with minimizing effort and curtailing human toil, it is the end-product which is the focus, and the profit to be gained. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: An Inventory of One

Throughout life, whether by force of habit or necessity of accumulated overstock of items amassed, shelves forgotten and goods remaining unpopular despite an overzealous belief in them “at the time”, we need to take an inventory of our “store”, whether concerning possessions, beliefs, relationships or business endeavors. Inventories are difficult tasks; they remind us of the lack we possess, and the oversupply of that which we do not need. Shelves of emotional overloads mirror the abundance of false confidence we placed in something; and lack of characteristic comforts tell of a narrative of avoidance, […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: In troves of battered grey

It is the crisis point of one’s life, and the interruption of plans, which seems to define the value of the narrative. We tend to judge by leaps of negation; in a hurry to determine worth, we skim the beginning chapters, then rush through the middle, and read with intensive interest the last few pages and conclude the life of a character based not upon the lengthy experiences of amoral devices, but by the standards of terminal avalanches. A short story is merely a slice of life; a novel, a jagged graph of extrapolated instances cumulatively garnered to present a coherent and systematized itinerary. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: The Demarcation between Sanity and…

The dividing line itself may be a false option; for, there may well exist a spectrum of alternatives prior to falling off of the fathomless cliff into the netherworld of the opposite. Yet, human behavior often reveals to us the tenuous hold we have upon this thin reed we identify as the “civilized” world, where conformity to standards of behavior are relatively followed, and the social contract between citizens constrains open aggression towards one another; and from the individual’s viewpoint, the internal mechanism of orderliness remains fairly intact. […] Read More …