Medical Retirement under FERS & CSRS: Closet of skeletons

It is a metaphor that is familiar; of secrets, or near-secrets; of those cluttered past incidents and events that need to be kept in the hallway closet, perhaps even locked for safety and security, whether of embarrassment, regret or shame.  Yet, modernity has less of them.  With the disappearance of shame, of openness of societal mores and normative values disappearing, almost vanishing, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Urban decay and the relevance of rye

There is a reason why phoniness cannot survive or endure for long on a farm, as opposed to the urban decay of mass population centers; the animals won’t stand for it, and there is no one to be pretentious for, when hard work, sweat and toil replaces the incessant striving for acceptance, consumption and coercive condescensions. It is not an accident that Caulfield spends his time in the decay of urban life, amongst people who display a duality of faces and concealed motives, while all the time dreaming of an imaginary existence in a field of rye, catching all of the children who may run astray in the innocence of their blinded youth. […] Read More …

OPM Disability: Those Winds of Change That Portend to Pretend Promises

Change is an inevitable circumstance of life; it is what we seek when we are discontented; what we demand when threatened; and of which we fear, when least we expected it. For Plato and Aristotle, the puzzle of life and the winds of change had precursors who, in the tradition of ancestral doomsayers, declared the natural corollaries reflecting discontent, despair and fear, as represented by Heraclitus and Parmenides. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: An Expectation of Disaster

Most lives are lived with an expectation of unease; if things are going smoothly, we look with suspicion at what will come from around the corner; if calm and quietude prevails, we consider it merely a precursor to a major storm; and if good fortune comes our way, there is a leeriness as to the strings attached. Perhaps distrust is based upon justifiable historical events; or, as news is merely the compilation of tragic events gathered into a compendium of daily interests, so our skewed perspective of the world merely reinforces what our childhoods entertained. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Medical Retirement: The Beast of Burden

Is there a limit to the capacity for a draught animal that engages in the heavy toil so assigned? Like the proverbial reed of hay which breaks the camel’s back, what is the limit, the absolute capacity, the outer stretches of what the psyche can absorb, the ultimate strain upon the human physical endurance and the will to survive; until the beast of burden crumples upon an exhausted heap of fatigue and loss of hope, a broken mass of bones, organic matter and mindless assemblage of shattered void?

 
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OPM Medical Retirement: The Paradigm of Disarray

One can go through life with the belief that the wider geopolitical universe as reflected through countless media outlets represents the true state of everyday existence; as wars, earthquakes, floods and famine destroy families, communities and conduits of chaos, so such a paradigm of disarray can color the subjective perspective which we carry about in the monotony of routine existence. The extreme rejection of such a model viewpoint is to be a hermit; or, the balanced approach is to “keep things in perspective”, as the general advice goes, but what does it exactly mean to keep something in proper perspective? […]

 
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