OPM Retirement for Mental or Physical Incapacity: Gatherings

What is it about human beings that compel and necessitate it?  Unlike the wandering Cheetah or the lone wolf, human gatherings have been the imprint of psycho-social requirements since the dawn of day.  The tribal gatherings around the campfire; the Thanksgiving feast that celebrates survival and the new season; the corporate board, the large-scale concerts and the network of social media; […] Read More …

Postal & Federal Employee Medical Retirement: The source of despair

There are searches for origins and those for solutions, regardless of the source.  One hears about the “source of the Nile” or of the Mississippi river; or of the origin of the species, how Man came about to become who he or she is, why and what of the destination.  To ask, “From where?” is quite different from the query, “How?”  The former inquires as to the source of X, while the latter is more concerned with the rationality behind the origin. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement for Federal & Postal Employees: Staring into nowhere

Except in the slumber of darkness, it is an impossibility of a feat unperformed; yet, the metaphor itself works well, because we all engage in those periods of vacant stares where someone suddenly nudges you back into reality and comments, “It was as if you were lost in thought.”  What does that really mean?  The fact that we can stare, perceive through organically mechanistic means of refractive light upon the cornea of our eyes and yet fail to be “conscious” about the bodily functioning […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Intestinal Fortitude

It is a word past its prime; one which was prevalent and pervasive in use during this author’s childhood, and represented a more refined way of saying, “guts” or “courage”. It is one which brought forth a seeming awe and sense of credibility to the person who uttered the words, and once stated, it spread like wildfire amongst the pseudo-intellectuals and wanna-be William-F-Buckley-Jrs of the world. Of course, no one could effortlessly drop a line of Latin like he could, and just as the death of an icon can fade the philosophical context of a given epoch, so words can lose their efficacy from generational transfer to the next; yet, […] 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 …

OPM Disability Retirement: The Generational Transfer of Wisdom

If wisdom is the collective knowledge, information and experience of a culture, then the loss, refusal or rejection of such historical amassing of purposive accrual of cognitive aggregation would result in the disintegration of a cohesive identity. Foolishness can therefore be defined as the state of reinventing the wheel at every turn, merely because of a stubborn refusal to listen and learn. And that is precisely the current state of modernity; youth portends to pretentiousness; all of knowledge is discovered only today, and the older generation knows not the profundities of present-day philosophers who tweet daily gems of lifestyle advisories and post declarative idleness of incomprehensible vacuities. […] Read More …