Not having had a graduation speech as fine as yours, I don't feel properly graduated.

Your reiteration of the term "reality-based" - your pounding of it, actually, fortunately - reminded me of the phrase, "life on life's terms," which is a staple of 12 Step recovery. Had Bush used AA &/or NA in recoverying from his alcoholism/drug addiction, rather than fanatical pro-torture Christianity, we might have been treated to a whole different 8 years. There is something to be said for an egoless spirituality - whether religious or atheist, among other choices - that knows something about the visceral reality of treating neighbors as oneself, and that suggests, moreover, per the 10th Step, that we promptly admit when we are wrong.

Best,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

and good sober reactions. Interesting, too, the variety of ways others just had to be irritated by it. It's not always easy to bear.

At a certain point in life I realized I was going to die, and that made me appreciate being alive. I don't remember when that was. Probably in my 20s. But the appreciation faded, and then in time the sudden realization of ageing and death's inevitability reappeared, in a new form, as did the appreciation of life in my body. The cycle continues. Sometimes my seeing the value of immediate life doesn't need awareness of death. Sometimes it does.

Yes, this is a time-limited phenomena we're living. There is something in each of us now that makes us more than a thing. Our bodies and our lifiness will at some point go separate ways, relative to this incarnation. (Not that there necessarily are other incarnations.) This moment in this incarnation is unique. I do what I can to be here to experience it, though sometimes my mind does wander. But as to meaning and purpose, I don't see that there's anything to be said for not as accurately as possible, in a letting-go kind of way, being here for the journey.

Best,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

It sounds like two problems - how to get your butt out the door into vacationland, and workaholism. Cary's answer to the first is ideal, and the other responses give many useful variants on that theme. This may do the trick. A vacation may lead to a personal realization of how not to work workaholically.

I know a workaholic who loves vacations, relaxing deeply, letting a vacation lead them around gently by nose for a week or two or three. But, back to work, the workaholism soon kicks in as addictively as ever. The problem was that they relaxed addictively; not in a workaholic way, but in an addictive way; much as I no longer drink cheap beer addictively, but I can eat addictively or watch TV addictively or play in the creek addictively or write letters to Salon addictively. Whether I'm fast or slow, the addictiveness can be there.

If you don't like the word addiction, try attachment. Preoccupation. It may not be clinically obsessive compulsive, but it's obsessive compulsive.

Any vacation worth its salt has those same components which, actually, any work should have, which is the space to be breathe and be in the present moment, letting the juices flow. Have fun. Fart around, per Kurt Vonnegut.

But workaholism addiction/attachment is serious business. It feels like survival, that to stop doing it is death, death of the self, because if I stop, is there an inner self? I'll die if I don't stop, but I'll die if I stop. So if a return of the real you doesn't come with a couple weeks off - plus a way to bring it to work - check out some help for yourself.

Good luck,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

Yes, the problems of privatization over government: While our government is in the web of checks and balances, and elections, and generally good intentions, privatization is in the web of greed, and, if not dictatorship, Not Freedom. Power.

I see and am glad that we're going in the direction of democracy at work. Stockholders and the bottom line will come to know its benefits, though a while after the rest of us.

Bush encouraging freedom is the encouragement of the rich (and husbands) to be free to strengthen what Not Freedom they have over the rest of us. The question is whether the present conservative plague is a temporary backlash against the '60s or a more permenant lack of American nerve. For it is, after all, our nerve, our willingness or lack of willingness to look at ourselves, and make what we can of ourselves - to exercise our healthy freedom, and healthy audacity - that makes us what we are, and what America is.

Best,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")