Author: Vic Socotra

A Walk in the Rain

Everyone in our personal movie knew this was not going to be a great day. This was one that happened in the first year of the administration before this one. Times were interesting, what with the economic collapse of the housing market, and challenges confronting me on the fancy car I drove to enhance my […]

Old School

The election is bearing down, and today’s media is leading us into it. Cleaning out old files, I found something long forgotten about how it worked. It was a sheaf of notes nineteen years old. It was stunning, reading about how this current reality was formed. The wounds of 9/11 were still raw and everyone […]

Swamp Postcard: Red Mirage

Marlow’s Note: Whenever America’s leaders point to what it values or way of life as being be threatened or directly attached, we can count on our working white Americans to go off in a homicidal swarm to “defend our way of life.” This is not just for cases of kinetic warfare. It’s a proven theorem […]

What’s Next?

Editor’s Note: Want the cartoon version? Several pals have been batting that around. It goes something like this for likelihood. Mr. Biden will do the best his handlers can manage. I have tried to mange the affairs of people who had varieties of progressive cognitive decline. This campaign incorporates many aspects of it. So, first […]

New Lists

Today is like the 210th rainy day in the Commonwealth of this wild and not so wonderful year. A Monday, in fact, which used to have a special significance in the working week. The beginning of the daunting mass of tasks, memos, calls and conversations to manage over the other four days. All of which […]

Life & Island Times: Batshittery

Editor’s Note: I was working on “What’s Next,” a jolly attempt to look at what is coming up the tracks to meet us as summer lurches to Fall in this strange year. Instead, Marlow cascaded into my world with this marvelous account of what he terms “Batshittery.” His part o the Coastal Empire seems a […]

Arrias: Sorates and the Duke of Earl

It’s a “well-known fact” that much of what we have of the great Greek and Roman philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, historians and playwrights came to us via the Islamic civilization. Except it wasn’t really that easy. While some of these great works and great thoughts were translated into modern languages inside the courts of the Sultans, […]

Point Loma: Star Wars

Editor’s Note: It is a rare and welcome thing to have contributions from the Socotra Writer’s Panel. I have a marvelous rumination from he redoubtable Marlow which is waiting for a September release. Today we have Point Loma’s take on SPACECOM and the future- one that appears to be marching ahead of us at every […]

More Fun With Numbers

Events, as they used to say as a bridge in the old motion picture serial adventures, continue. Some don’t. As you know, I am following the wild chaos of the election with great interest and more than a little humor. My experience in generating favorable public messaging ran alongside the real political pros, and I […]

Swamp Postcard: Election Frolics and Bring an Umbrella!

It has been a great week- a confluence of natural and other events that is quite remarkable. The Big Storm- this one is Laura- came ashore in Louisiana long after I surrendered and went to bed. I slept through the weakening of the maelstrom from Cat Four + down to Cat One as it plowed […]