Situated east of the Mediterranean, Lebanon is a rather small, but critical vessel, which, since Queen Dido in 815 BC, has had a large impact on the world as an important port for millennia between Asia and the West.
Read MoreI am trying to get Kinesis circa 1981. Trying to get the hurtling down. Hurtling down the side of a mountain toward my wife in Beirut, in the midst of war, on the most treacherous road in the Levant. And the punctuation is driving me crazy.
Read MoreFor most of us, Scientific Method was mothers milk. What had begun with Newton and his contemporaries had come to imbue much of our national fabric until 'prove it' was standard issue across America's playgrounds.
Read MoreWe, my generation, had ardent dreams, fueled by our post war ascent as the global hegemon. One was to see a person of color in the White House -- as commander in chief. Another was to witness the amalgamation of progressive principles from Vancouver to Vladivostok, as the saying went - in that fateful winter of 91/92 - when the Soviet enterprise collapsed and an American NGO (Non-Governmental Organization} looked for advantage.
Read MoreSo, there I was, not long ago, stuttering up the hill in Port-au-Prince, through the mess of vehicles and across roads that I was likening to those I had banged over in the African hinterlands in the early 70's and now with the chronic throb in my upper left molar increasingly aggravated, I began a “look out” or some kind of dentist who looked legit...
Read MoreMost friendships are made within the tribe. My friendship with Nizar was remarkably outside the tribe.
The first encounter had taken place one morning, back in 2005, as I noticed this stranger walking in circles outside the gate of my fledgling Internet Center in Khanaqin, Iraq, chatting to the sky with his handheld sat-phone and intermittently eyeing the Center with something akin to avarice.
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My friend just died. Reluctantly. He had been close to the end a few times earlier but had managed to step back, typically to resume the dead lifts in the neighborhood gym and to pace the road nearby. To maintain the hard muscle he had since I knew him in college.
But I think it killed him that he could not get his immunities back. Anymore than he could loosen the tension which had always been his essence.
Jumping from his chair in our room as if a round had just missed his head. Up and away from the text that had been so impenetrable to his stare. Pacing our little room like a jail cell, grabbing the window frame with all his might as if he would pull it out of the socket. And then only to drop back to his desk for another round.
And so while vitiated by cancer, that was how he confronted death and why, I venture, his immunities failed before they might have.
In the months before, as his defense could no longer hold---as the perimeter got tighter and tighter till he was alone at the center---he wrote a beautiful story. About a man in love. About him in love....called "A Hard Game."
That was, I imagine, his Yin Yang, which somehow lived as one within the man who flew up from his hunch over the books or who popped the veins on God Almighty dead lifts.
Read: Baseball: A Hard Game by Tony Judge
