B.S. is one of the abbreviations I pencil in the margin of prose I’m reviewing –my own or a client’s. It stands for Be Specific, though it evokes a different two-word expletive that means much the same thing.

The best way to be specific is to know what you want to say – and sometimes that takes several meandering drafts. Once you’ve figured out what you want to accomplish in a scene or a post, a chapter, a story or a report, you can guide your reader to understand you clearly with specific language – with words.

Words can be general, like the word food – the fuel that sustains life. A general word fails to give your reader much guidance, leaving her to imagine grapes when you imagined roast beef.

Words that are more specific are limited in scope, like the word snack – which is…

peace can never exist, it will always remain an impractical abstraction, a word without true form or definition.  peace has to disappear and become part of being itself.  like the quote imparts, “the way is not to peace, peace is the way.” just as from the human perspective, so as to distinguish ourselves from other creatures, we say we have agency, that is, self-awareness.  we don’t challenge this, we don’t think about it, we know it, we LIVE it.  peace has to be experienced under these terms to happen; therefore, it will never happen.

once peace can be thought of objectively, alternatives can be considered; once the purposes for these alternatives are understood, any number of circumstances could result in any number of these purposes and thus can be used to justify an alternative (peace is much more than just the absence of war, and although its exact opposite is…

Even if you were my Arabian princess
I wouldn’t have enough stories to build
you a proper sized palace. I’d hunt
down golden lamps for a chance to ask

for as many hands as a Hindu god shaped
like an elephant to accurately manipulate
the extra dimension geometry required
for a suitable monument to your beauty.

I’d open my arms against a wave of crusades
like a wall Ali Baba forgot the lyrics to

and spill the 5 Pillars of Islam for scrap piety
to keep your 7 veils of innocence as sacrosanct.
I’d use the smoke and mirrors of metered verse
and a second hand knowledge of

Near Eastern cultures and a command
of mathematics that oddly resembles mysticism
and a non-terminating non-repeating vocabulary
to convince you I want more than your body – but I don’t.
Civility is a mask I wear like how

corporate employers pretend to…

Antibiotics are over used. Period. End of sentence.

My pharmacy is getting ready to install a robotic dispensing system. It takes your pharmacy’s top 200 or so drugs and automatically counts them for you, saving the pharmacist time. To determine those 200 drugs we ran reports based off of 12 months of previous medications dispensed. The number 1 drug dispensed was Zithromax, a what was once a powerful antibiotic is now used to treat the common cold and mild respiratory infections. Among those 200 drugs are an additional 27 antibiotics. This is just at my pharmacy. I’m sure this is the trend throughout the United States and into Europe. This is scary. Before penicillin existed people died from infections. Penicillin was discovered and helped save hundreds if not thousands of lives in World War II. More antibiotics were developed in response to bacterial resistance to penicillin. Medicine advanced because of…

In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor  of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated 3.30 dollars as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). [2]

If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or…

Of the many things that I do not like to do in life (and you’d be surprised at how long a list that’ll end up being), writing comes at the very top of the list. When I say writing, I mean, of course, the act of taking a pen in hand and actually scribbling out the words. Stringing words together in order to form sentences is rather a pleasing task, particularly when performed on my own laptop (remind me to tell you more about this in about 400 words or so).

But when the stringing of words is to be done with a pen or pencil, my enthusiasm for said task is lower than the chances of Narendra Modi contesting the Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket. I’ve never been an enthusiastic exponent of the art, and I’m not about to begin now.

Frankly, and I say this to…

This is a haiku
I am almost twenty-one
I’m high as fuck, dude