Right From the Hip

Coffee House Discourse # 1, in which  a Vagabond Appears. Coffee houses are staging areas for a broad variety of activities, including rants, raves and discourses from the patrons. These spring forth, unbidden, for the benefit of anyone who happens to be sitting nearby drinking an espresso, threads in the tapestry of coffee house background ambience. No revolution was ever launched without at least one heated discussion in a coffee house or its local equivalent. In the spirit of ventilating […]

Recently, in the wake of the Parkland shootings, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.  Below is my posted response. The real purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to prevent the federal government from disarming the states. It was, as all the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights were, a limit on federal power, not directives or prohibitions to any state by or from […]

He sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing . . . The wings of my dove are sheathed with silver, Her feathers with shining gold. – Psalm 68 Background music of ‘Song to Woody’ by Bob Dylan. My adventure in hitchhiking across the United States in June of 1967, from Lansdale, Pennsylvania to San Francisco along Route 66, stalled in Elk City, Oklahoma. Prior to that I had gotten two long rides through Pennsylvania and […]