THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Skateboarding in Boulder, Colorado with my son, Josh. My new skateboard was a dream-come-true. I cut the grip tape with scissors myself into the Chinese symbol of harmony in the Universe, a Yin Yang intersecting red and black wave curves with opposing dots to symbolize balance … perfect for a board deck. With red Kryptonic wheels, extended-axle kit Bennett trucks, and a laminated deck with a shaped kicktail, I was the envy of skate-rats across the expanse of my universe … our neighborhood. We lived in Laguna Beach, California, and rode the hills from our middle school at Top of the World down to the Pacific Ocean at the bottom. In the 1970s and 80s, we were the first to bomb Park Ave., Skyline Dr., High Dr., and other insane drops from mountain tops on tiny planks with plastic wheels. Most believed we were insane, doomed, and beyond the standard reason that we were fed with sharp forks by our parents and teachers. But, we were the future, something I knew in my cells. Our generati...

It was mad hot. There was no aircon in the family van. There were places for my feet on the floor if I jiggled them a bit … and then we skidded to a stop, again. Invariably we left skid marks at the recycling areas all over our little hilltop/beachside town of Zikhron Yaakov. We were building an art center smack in the middle of town, and really had no choice. There were limited resources and we needed to recycle, reuse, refurbish, and repurpose … or RRRR for short. So, growling in the heat and humidity, with the windows rolled down so a hot wind would whip across our faces, we collected the junk that had been thrown out by our neighbors. Talking about art and artists of old, careening through the streets with junk teetering from our roof and flowing into our laps, we were living. My partner, a religious man, had already developed an eye for the good stuff. I learned as we went how to RRRR, but understood right away the level of faith required to do so. Faith, I believe, comes much...

Carnival in La Paz, Mexico —  When I left Israel to fly to my Niece’s wedding in Southern California I was reeling from pain and loss. It’s difficult now to recall how I felt then, since so much has happened in the interim, but I remember walking in the woods. I remember crying to the Universe. I remember a feeling of loss, but more of confusion, since, even today, the loss still hasn’t set in. I remember standing in the hall of the hospital twiddling my thumbs, with nothing to do but to wonder about life, about friendship, about love, and about worlds other than this one: There has to be other worlds, right? I mean, maybe the fact that there are, according to scientific observations, so many distant, habitable worlds in just our Milky Way galaxy alone, it is an indicator of how our perceptions have been utterly warped by our individual belief systems into thinking like cartoons. You know, like: in this bubble goes the fantasy of Martians and Venusians, and in that bubble goes ...

I always thought of Madagascar as a big island with weird creatures inhabiting it. Actually, I wasn’t too far off from that assessment, my understanding having come from spending more than a month traversing its girth and length in road cars, dirt cars, water cars, boats of all sizes, planes that almost didn’t fly (Air Madagascar, you know…) and by foot, huffing it up and down steep wooded hills, crawling through dark geologically fascinating tunnels, cringing over rope bridges, wooden bridges and piers, and broken-down automobile bridges, too. We traversed as much as we could (barring the heavily touristic areas, of course), starting in Antananarivo (Tana), the capital city, where the head honchos rule, it seems, with a titanium gavel and inequity from everything physically binding including gravity, or is it gravidity. We met amazing people from all over the world, including … yes … from Madagascar. We chose our travel destination with a sense of logic, but you know how that goes … “...