When was it lost? Does it become fractured and irrelevant once a society grows too large, looms too complicated, decides to go off in different directions? Once upon a time, villages had a specific narrative, identifiable, accepted, the mythology of its unique character. […]
In the expansive version of a narrative, we might include extraneous or even irrelevant information in telling a story. Until quite recently, most movies and television shows avoided scenes of people brushing their teeth, using a urinal, or otherwise utilizing the bathroom facilities (unless, of course, you include that scene in the Hitchcock movie, Psycho, of the woman in the shower). […]
The narrative we write tells much about ourselves. That is quite an obvious statement. What is not obvious, however, is the discretion we apply, the self-restraint we reveal, and the manifested fences we install through invisible means of editing and erasing. For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers […]
The pendulum between a swollen ego and a timid conscience can be wide and vast; or of the difference between panicked shyness amounting to a hermit’s refuge, and arrogance in man that betrays the smallness of one’s heart. Being “puffed up” is one thing; demanding one’s rights without persuasive argumentation, quite another. In formulating one’s “story” in preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, specifically on SF 3112A, Applicant’s Statement of Disability, the undersigned lawyer has seen […]
Why do we believe that adding the repetition of words, especially adverbs, will create a compelling narrative? If you ascribe an adjective to an object, then ad an adverb – say, “very” – does repeating and inserting another magnify the significance of the narrative itself, or detract by placing a grammatical marker by bringing attention that the very necessity of the addition undermines the efficacy of the noun to which all of the additions point to, in the first place? […]
Do we all carry about multiple narratives within? Perhaps, one for public consumption; another, for family gatherings; yet another the edited version only for the ears of the young and uninitiated; and perhaps more, depending upon the audience, the susceptibility to believe, and the necessity for coherence as opposed to self-promotion and puffing up? How about those “Service experiences” – where we get carried away in exaggerating the feats of bravery and encounters with the enemy? […]
Each of us carries a narrative within; the David Copperfield segment of our otherwise unrevealed lives. It is who we are; the past that enlivens or diminishes; the memories of yesteryear or just a fortnight ago; and it resides continually until that day of atonement or the diminishment though dementia of fated unkindness. What we say; how it is written; how it is related through the handed-down oral traditions of storytelling and bemused tales of a Dickensian happy endings (excepting Little Nell and other debatable few unnamed); and how it is told, in what manner, with what punctuations and unctuous phraseology applied; these matter, especially when others are listening. […]
The ability to expunge, extinguish or recant is only available to the extent that memory serves us well; for, as the last veteran of a war once fought follows to a grave avoided in the skirmishes and battles long forgotten, so the discarding of memorialized narratives will survive long past, or be placed upon the dusty shelves of books unread and periodicals unsealed. Human memory itself, of course, is fickle and fraught with errors of judgment and contextual intermingling of past vestiges, present impressions and future anticipatory angst of what should be; […]
The Age of Modernity is too cynical to believe; or, at the very least, too arrogant not to disbelieve. It was once thought that information is all that is necessary to propel humankind into a state of sophistication, but time has revealed that Orwell’s reverse effect merely compels us to rely upon devices more and more, and that neither knowledge nor greater wisdom is gained by the wide dissemination of data and content. We want a “cause” to believe in; yet, each day, we encounter those who allegedly toiled throughout their lives for just such a motivating core, […]
The squirrel jumped into the rabbit hole. Then, the floods came, and Noah didn’t like the color of his shoes because they matched the starboard and not the bow, and when the rudderless drift occurred, then did the turtle finally come out from the squirrel’s nest, high atop the water’s edge. The medical conditions caused a lot of stress, and if it wasn’t for the Supervisor who constantly harasses me, I wouldn’t have filed a complaint against him, but the doctors never said I couldn’t work except when the heart attack occurred and Bessie my dog ran across the street and got hit by a car. […]
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 