FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Retaining innocence in modernity

Is it even possible?  Moreover, what would such a state of Being be like, in contrast to the conceptual entanglements in the aggregate as defined, say, 50 – 100 – 200 years ago?  For, as deviancy has been defined downwards in an uncontrollable spiral of destructiveness, so the very concept of “innocence” has altered in meaning, tone and implications, has it not?  Is “innocence” now merely the absence of cynicism, or perhaps a greater form of naiveté?  Is lack of sophistication the same as being in a state of innocence, and if the latter is lost, does it necessarily mean the consumption of the former as well? […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Implicit Questions

In many questions, there are multiple sub-questions. Take, for example, the question: Why are you so tired? You may respond first by answering the unasked but implicit question by declaring: “But I am not tired”. That is not what the question asked. Such an answer is a response to the implied question within the question, of: “Are you tired?” To the question actually asked, the proper response might be: I stayed up late last night reading. The presumptive sub-question unstated and silent but implicit in the major question posited in duality of a contingent combination, is precisely what is often termed as “lawyerly”, and thus somehow deceitful, tricky and attempting to subvert by having the responder accept a non-explicit presumption of facts. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Conversation of one

Are we the only species which engages in it? Do we ever see a dog standing aside and participating in such a phenomena? Or a cardinal pausing in its morning melody of exuberant sing-song in order to address a non-existent other? And, it isn’t even an artifice or convention for which the actor is being paid, as in an “aside” or a “soliloquy” where private thoughts are spoken aloud for the benefit of the audience, but where others in the drama act “as if” such thoughts are unspoken and shared not. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Sedimentary Structures

In interpreting geological formations by natural deposits involving complex strata of ahistorical significance, we are better able to conceptualize the environment, the impact of changes by weather, temperature vicissitudes, and organic alterations whether man-made or neutral in their deliberations. River flows and their swirls of changing directions; droughts, sudden floods, or the soft and natural flow of a forming inlet; these all impact and influence the sedimentary structures which form over time, unnoticed to an ahistorical perspective. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Magic & the laziness factor

Magic is something we cling on to, if only as a last vestige of the light of hope, flickering ever so delicately against the tumultuous winds of a world gone mad. In childhood, it was an imagination enlivened by the pure delight of fairytales, mythologies and rhymes of wands in the single sweep where the golden dust of insurmountable problems is suddenly a trail of corrective bygones with mere words of incantations mysterious to eyes agape with wonderment and awe; and in the middle-to-growing times, the words altered somewhat, the concept changed and the linguistic construct evolved to imply an attitude, […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: A penchant for excess

Do the historicity and context of a given time determine the individual’s proclivity for behavior otherwise deemed unnatural? Does that concept even apply anymore, as normative constraints are denigrated, societal conventions become ignored, and new frontiers bypassing the ethos of communities are no more than mere irritants to swat away? There has always been, of course, a penchant for excess inherent in the human essence; the British Royal Family, the French aristocracy, the Russian Czar and the modern totalitarian state where wealth and abundance allows an opening for the limitless reach of man’s appetite and predilection for excess. […] Read More …