Tales from Dreamland

I enjoy my night dreams, when I have them. In fact, I find them so interesting that I keep a dream journal where I write down as much as I can remember about the dreams that I do manage to recall. To do it successfully, I have to have the presence of mind to actively run the dream back through my mind as soon as I wake up, and then either sit at the computer or jot down the key points in my bedside notebook. But it’s worth the effort.

The other night I was looking through my formal dream journal on my computer, and it came to me that some of those dreams could be the inspiration for some interesting stories. So I decided to try taking a few of the dreams, elaborating a bit, creating names for characters, and making some short stories out of them. I tried writing from different points of view (first person, second person, third person) and in a few different styles. What follows are a few examples:

Death by RV

You are motoring along a highway in a fairly large RV. You are not driving. Instead, you are sitting in a special seat toward the back of the vehicle. It is set up high so that your head and upper body reach through a special hatch in the top of the RV. From this vantage point, you look out over the roof of the vehicle, see the scenery all around you, and feel the sun on your head and the wind in your face as you race down the road.

It’s a bright summer day. The air is warm but fresh. All around you, everything is a succulent green. There is not a lot of traffic, and you are far from any city. As you pass through the semi-forested countryside, you catch the aroma of hay fields and stands of pine trees. From your perch atop the vehicle, it’s a perfectly beautiful day for traveling.

There are other people in the RV with you, but you don’t recall how many. You can hear them talking and laughing below you. One of them is your sister. You know this because she mentions that “Dad is up ahead of us” in a separate car. You are not sure who the other people are, but they seem to be having a good time.

Far up ahead, you can see that the road curves sharply to the left before running parallel to a large, wide river. It might be the Shenandoah. Way off to the left you can see that the road curves right again and crosses the river over a very long bridge. But you sense that you are approaching the first curve too fast. Something is wrong.

Instead of turning left with the highway, the RV barrels straight forward. It runs through the safety barrier, off the road, and toward a cliff. The ride becomes bumpy as the wheels run over uneven ground. At the edge of the cliff, you continue forward, flying out over the river, which is in a gorge far below. There is no way to stop it.

As you plummet toward the bottom of the gorge, the RV begins to turn over. You realize that the top of the vehicle, where you are now trapped, is going to hit the bottom first. As you turn over, you can see that you are headed toward huge rocks. You are going to be crushed. But you don’t scream; you can't.

Inside the RV, you can hear people yelling and crying. You hear glass and plates breaking. But you block out those noises and concentrate on the rocks that now seem to be racing up to meet you. Even though it is happening in an instant, it seems like slow motion to you.

You are keenly aware of everything around you. You can hear the whistling of the wind against the metal railings that line either side of the vehicle. You feel your hands grip the support bars along the hatch. You hold on so tight that it’s like either the bars or the bones in your hands will break. You can feel your hair, your lips, and the skin of your cheeks being thrust back by the force of the wind.

And still those rocks draw ever closer.

You know you are about to die a horrible, crushing death, and you wonder how much it will hurt. You want to look away, but you can’t. You wonder whether God – however you perceive the deity – will pull your soul out of your body at the last second to spare you the pain. Or will you die in agony?

And just as you are about to be smashed upon the rocks, everything goes black. There is nothing.

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Saving the Castle

It was medieval times, and there were thousands of people in and around a castle. The people of the castle were trying to defend themselves against an invading horde. The castle’s defenders were more sophisticated, knights and soldiers with better weapons and a sound defensive plan. They wore fine armor highlighted with cloth in sharp red and gold.

The invaders were barbarians, large men with great beards and long hair. They were clad mostly in leather and fur, but with rough iron breastplates and helmets, and they carried long swords and axes. Though they lacked the finery of their opponents, they had greater numbers and were ferocious fighters.

The battle was intense and moved into a tunnel complex below the castle. Despite heavy losses, the invaders were gaining ground toward taking the castle and the city. At one point, they had surged through the next-to-last defensive point, and most of their army was below the castle complex.

At this point, the commander of the castle’s defensive forces ordered

a black-powder fuse to be lit, and this caused a series of explosions that destroyed the castle and brought it down upon the attackers. The entire invading army was crushed and destroyed under the rubble of the castle. But the city had been saved.

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In the Kitchen

Derek and Cathy were in Derek’s kitchen peeling vegetables for dinner. The kitchen was not Cathy’s favorite place, and Derek was really more comfortable and capable in the kitchen than she was. But she enjoyed spending time together, even if it was in the kitchen.

Derek noticed that Cathy was having trouble with the knife she was using, so he asked if she wanted to change with him. She said that she really did want to use the knife he was using, so he gave it to her gladly. Then Derek asked Cathy why she didn’t just ask him for it if she really wanted it. She just looked down, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know.”

Derek told her – reminded her, really – that he would give her anything or do anything for her. “You know that,” he said. She nodded and responded that she was trying to understand that, but it was hard for her to ask for what she really wanted. She said it had always been hard for her.

As they continued peeling vegetables, they got into a discussion about hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. Cathy said that she wanted to host a dinner for her friends, and Derek asked if that meant she would not be coming to his annual dinner. She said that she wanted to, of course, but she also wanted to get together with her friends, and it was a conflict on that date. Derek suggested that he could cancel his plan and help her with hers.

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The Never-Ending Search 

You are in an underground parking garage looking for your pickup truck. The garage is huge, and you don’t know exactly where the truck is because someone else had parked it there for you.

Suddenly the lights in the garage go out, and you have to search using only the light on your mobile phone. You walk and walk from one level to another, but you can’t find your truck, and you are getting frustrated.

Then it seems that you are not searching for a truck but for an airplane. It is an old B-25 twin-engine bomber from World War II that had been converted into a private civilian plane. You finally find such a plane, but it has tail guns, and you can see another gun turret on the bottom, so you know it’s not yours. You keep searching, but you never find it.

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A Strange Day

A group of guys were about to stage a robbery of some kind.  They were like mafia guys, perhaps even characters from the Sopranos television series. Greg wasn’t part of the robbery; he was just along as a kind of observer.

Suddenly three of the robbers turned their guns on the other two and shot them dead. Then the three killers ran off.  It was a "hit" that had been disguised as a robbery so that the two guys being clipped would not know. And to the police, it would look like the two guys were just victims of a botched robbery.

After that, the mafia guys were playing basketball. Greg was playing with them, but he missed a lot of shots. Embarrassed, he admitted to the guys that he had never been very good at the game.

After he left the basketball game, Greg was in a store with a group of people that included a family he knew. The mother in that family was a friend of Greg’s, and he knew that she was having an affair with another man. Greg had also had a short affair with her, and he knew that she had also had sex one time with the teenaged son of one of Greg’s other friends.

At one point, the whole group left the store and was walking to another place. Greg and the woman managed to cross a busy street ahead of the others who had to wait for the traffic lights. That gave Greg a chance to talk with her. He told her that she needed to figure out why she had such a need to cheat on her husband and either work things out or get a divorce. She asked him if he still wanted her, and he said not anymore. It wasn’t because he didn’t care, but because he knew he couldn’t trust her. She was very hurt and tried to hold back her tears as the rest of the group joined them.

After that, Greg was walking home to his apartment. He had been gone for a very long time, years in fact. It had been so long that he wasn’t sure which apartment was his, and he could not remember the combination to his mailbox. As he was going up the stairs, he suddenly remembered that he had left a cat and a dog alone in the apartment when he left, and he became filled with grief that they must have starved to death.

When he opened the door, he found the cat, alive but very hungry. Instead of crying like he usually did, the cat just reached up and hugged Greg’s leg. The dog was also there, but she was very weak. Greg felt terrible pangs of shame for having been so irresponsible with those little lives.

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Robbery and Attempted Murder

You live with your teenaged daughter in an apartment. You are awakened from your sleep by a noise. Then you feel a drop of water on your head. You decide to get up and check it out.

The lights don’t work, so you find a flashlight. Then you notice that something doesn’t smell right. You feel a bit light-headed, almost faint. You hear a sound coming from the kitchen and find that all the burners and the oven are open, but unlit, and they are spewing deadly gas into the apartment. You turn off the burners and open all the windows.

You go to the fuse box and see that all your circuit breakers have been shut off. So you reset the switches, and your lights work. You wonder why that lights had been turned off and the gas turned on, and you realize it had to be intentional. But you can’t understand who could have done it.

Looking around, you see that a lot of things are missing. Expensive stereo equipment, television, computers, and other items are all missing. You have been robbed. And it seems that the robbers turned on the gas to kill you in your sleep.

Suddenly there is a man in the apartment – one of the robbers who apparently had come back for something. But he sees you and quickly leaves. You see that there is a door between your apartment and the one next door. You look for a weapon and can only find a baseball bat. You open the door and go into the next apartment.

You see more people and all kinds of stolen items. Not only are your things there, but there are many other stolen items. These robbers are able to pass through doors into other apartments as well. You yell at two men who are there and demand that they return your property. They ignore you and speak to each other in Russian.

Thinking angrily about how they had turned on the gas and tried to kill you and your daughter, you yell “pochemu?” (why?). Then you lift the bat to bash one of the men, but you can’t bring yourself to actually hit him.

The men go out of the apartment, leaving three women behind. The women are part of the gang of thieves, and their job is to process everything. You identify your items among all the stolen goods, and you demand that they be returned. But no one does anything. They ignore you.

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Caught Between Worlds

I was alone at the trailing edge of twilight, camped on a relatively flat spot, part way up a very tall hill.  It was a grassy hill, fairly round or conical, with even slopes except for the small plateau I was on.  Below me, perhaps 100 yards away, was the edge of a dark wood, from which I could hear the sounds of the forest night: tree frogs singing their monotonous love songs and crickets voicing their praises of a warm summer night.

Occasionally, the precise call of a bird would add a bit of spice to the chorus, but with the gathering dark, birds were mostly silent.  Those sounds from below were comforting, and together with the crackling of my campfire and the aroma of burning wood, I felt very comfortable. Looking at the edge of the forest below, I could see almost nothing except a dim vision of the facing sides of trees, which seemed to dance with the flickering light of my small fire.

Far above me, framed by the very last glow of a day fading beyond the jagged horizon of mountain peaks, was the top of the hill, and on that hilltop was a building, a resort of some kind. There were small white lights, but it was much too distant for the lights to bother me much.  Behind and beyond this building were others, separate, yet connected in some way that I couldn’t entirely discern. 

From the top of the hill I could hear intermittent voices and even laughter from some kind of gathering or party.  But like the lights, the sounds were too distant to distract me and only floated down on the breeze every now and then.  They were just an occasional reminder of what was up there.

After a while, there was a rustle from the bushes around the trees below me, and a mountain lion emerged. It walked up leisurely and sat beside me at the fire.  The lion and I knew each other well, and we talked.  We reminisced about walking for days through the forest without ever crossing a road, walking under a power line, seeing an airplane overhead or hearing the sounds of people.

We remembered going to the tops of mountains and looking out over a world that seemed ours alone.  We recalled the warmth of the sun and the close comfort of finding a cave, hollow or some other refuge from the rain or snow.  And we remembered too those times when there was no shelter and we shivered in the rain until it was done.  As we exchanged memories, those times came alive for us. They were special.

We talked of freedom, of “owning the world,” and of starry nights you could get lost in. The cougar pointed out that there was a clear sky and endless stars over the forest. But looking back toward the top of the hill, we could see none – the sky behind the buildings was bleak and gray. Then she asked me to go back into the forest with her. I said it wasn’t the same any longer; what we had was lost forever. I didn’t belong there any more and I’d only be disappointed.

Then she motioned with her head and eyes toward the top of the hill and asked me if I was going back up there. I replied that I didn’t belong there either; there was no one and nothing up there for me. I said there were sometimes when it was OK, but that mostly I felt separate from what went on up there, different from the others and very out of place. Still, I added, it seems I have no choice but to return and do my best to get by.

“There is no freedom anywhere,” I said, “and no place left to find happiness.”

“Your soul is not there,” she said.  “There is nothing there of spirit, nothing that fills your eyes and soul with awe or takes you beyond yourself, nothing that makes you grow or gives you life.”

“I’m lost,” I told her. “It’s just my fate to be lost.”  Then we just sat for a long time, quietly watching the fire.

After a time, I turned to say something and found that the mountain lion had become a beautiful woman. She was a bit exotic looking with a roundish face, high cheekbones, large green-gray eyes, and brown hair that flowed just past her shoulders. She looked at me at first with a kind of sad expression that spoke of carrying a heavy burden of emotion. I looked deeply into her eyes and tried to relieve her of that sadness.

After a few moments, she allowed a smile to creep on to her face, slowly at first. I answered with a smile, and then she opened up into a broad smile that was like a bright light that released all of her hidden beauty.

She placed her hand on my cheek, looked at me plaintively, and said that I didn’t have to be lost and that she would be with me always, just as she always had been. I just needed to learn to “recognize her” again when the time was right. Then she laid me back and lwe made love. While we were locked together, my vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of color, becoming evermore brighter until it was like fire. 

When the lights finally dimmed and my vision returned, she was gone and I was alone. The forest was still there, with the night sounds and blanket of stars. And when I looked back up the hill where the buildings and people had been, I saw nothing, except a clear, starry night.

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Christmas Lights

I was alone on Christmas Eve, which was to be expected and not a big deal. I decided to sit for several hours in my apartment with the only illumination coming from the Christmas/New Year lights I had put up the previous week. To heighten the ambiance, I played Christmas music.

And I did a lot of thinking.

I tried to steer my thoughts clear of the fact that I was alone, and it wasn’t a problem. That will be a lot harder in a week when it is New Year’s Eve and being alone will be tougher to deal with. But for Christmas Eve, I focused on the lights. I just watched all the lights shining, blinking and cycling through their colors, and let them take me away, far away in time. And it was good.

The lights on my small tree progressed through several programmed phases, and my favorites were the slow alternations between red, green and yellow. But the flashing and sparkling were enjoyable too.

What really piqued my imagination were the multicolored lights I had put up along the top of my front wall and the string of blue lights along the top of a storage unit on the adjacent wall. It was the way the colors and shadows played off the ceiling and walls that made them special.

The front-wall string cast undulating spotlights of red, green and blue against the ceiling from one side wall to the other and threw shafts of color down upon the front wall. Meanwhile, the blue lights produced eerie, yet comforting shadows upon the ceiling and even the opposite wall. All together, they produced a show that, for a time, brought me back to my childhood.

Those Young Days

Christmas lights were among my greatest joys as a child. More than just being symbols of the magic of Christmas, they were magic themselves. Decorating our family Christmas tree was special, and it always started with the lights. Our lights had to be multicolored, and in those days we always had the strings with the large bulbs that have not been in style for decades.

What was even more impressive than our family tree, however, were all the different arrangements of lights outside, all over the town, all over the region – all of the world, for all I knew. Many families put lights on the outside of their houses, or on trees or bushes in the yard.

One of my strongest childhood memories of Christmas is driving to visit relatives in Taunton, the town where I was born, which was between 30 and 60 minutes away, depending on the weather. Along the way there were many houses lit up beautifully, and the city streets were always decorated with magical colored lights.

Some houses even had replicas of Santa, reindeer and sleighs in the front yards, lifelike caricatures with back and front lighting or steel frames turned into realistic images through the magic of colored lights. In those days, it was rare to see the boring, septic arrangements of white lights that you see today in so many American suburbs. It was all about color, and it was the color that really made the magic.

There were two places in particular that were extra special for this young boy: La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, and Taunton Green, a small park in the center of that city. Both were, and I assume still are, famous all over New England for their displays of Christmas lights. We would ride past La Salette sometimes on our way to Taunton, and a few times we even made it a destination where we would get out and walk around to get an “up close and personal” look at the lights and figurines.

Taunton Green was unique for its large traffic circle that ran all around the park and its two “lunch wagons,” small diners set in what looked like old train cars. Usually, we would take a couple of slow laps around the Green to take in all the lights before moving on to our relatives’ house. In those days, the center of that small city was virtually unchanged from times before the Second World War, and you could imagine old-style cars, right out of a 1930s movie, motoring around the snowy circle years before to the same kind of holiday display. The Green has been renovated and changed quite a bit since my childhood, but I’m sure it’s still a beautiful sight around Christmas.

There were other things that helped a kid feel the magic of Christmas: cold weather and a blanket of white snow, traditional holiday songs, the smell of pies and other special dishes baking and cooling. But there was nothing quite as memorable as those wonderful colored lights.

The Years Since

At times throughout my adult life, I attempted to recapture that magic, but it has never been quite the same, and I struggle to really recall any “magic” Christmases since my childhood. I suppose there were some nice ones when my girls were little, but there is no indelible memory.

As I was working on this post, I took some time to look through my collection of photos to try and find some memories of Christmases past. I found almost nothing. I did find a couple of photos that reminded me that I did put up a Christmas tree most years when I lived in Parker, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. I had a large window that faced the street, and the tree went in front of that window so that it could be seen from outside. But I did nothing else.

Sadly, I couldn’t find any evidence that I ever decorated my forest home in Bailey, Colorado, for Christmas, nor do I remember doing so. I don’t think I even put up a Christmas tree there. I lived alone and never expected to have anyone over for Christmas, plus I had an active little cat who probably would have pulled the whole thing down.

The Past Decade

Here in Ukraine, Christmas is not so important. It’s New Year that takes on all the focus here in much the same way that Christmas does in the U.S. Whether I decorate or not has always depended on my mood: whether I feel celebratory or just feel alone and depressed. Some years, like the end of 2015, there seemed to be no point in decorating, so I didn’t.

Some other years, like last year, I put up the lights and other decorations in an attempt to raise my mood, even though I knew it was likely I would spend New Year’s Eve alone. This year, in a new apartment, I’ve decided to decorate like I haven’t done in years. I guess part of that was due to throwing a holiday party the night before Christmas Eve.

The decorations will stay up until at least a little past New Year. I don’t know what will happen on the evening of December 31; New Year’s Eve presents an entirely different feeling here than Christmas Eve. And I know that I run the highly probable risk of just sitting here alone again, looking at the lights and getting drowned in a tide of melancholy. But I hope for better. I will try.

But Christmas Eve this year was notable because I discovered that the lights still mean something to me. They may not hold the same magic as they did all those many years ago, but they still have something for me, something to tell me, something to raise my spirits.

It’s funny how you can go for so long in your adult life not thinking about the magic of childhood, only to find a new appreciation of it in later years. If only we could keep that childlike wonder all our lives.

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It's Not Seventh Heaven

Sometimes specific situations seem like a microcosm of your entire life.

Between July and October, our company moved to a new building. There are more than a thousand people crammed into eight floors of mostly open space, and more are coming. Some like it, many don’t. For me, there are some definite pros and just a few cons. But this week I realized a big con.

I was among the first to move at the beginning of August. I have my own room, which functions as my office and my classroom. Each of the other teachers have similar office/classrooms, each of us on a different floor. Being on the seventh floor, I am the furthest removed from the others and, as I see now, the most isolated.

Having my own office is great, mostly. I can work without interruption, mostly. The noise in the hallways or from adjacent meeting rooms can make it difficult to concentrate sometimes, but that’s not a serious problem, mostly. And I have a private place to relax, have my morning coffee, or eat lunch in peace, which is a luxury afforded to very few in the building. For that, I am very fortunate.

And until recently, my room was a place where friends could stop by to talk for a while. Enjoying the company of good people who I know and like, for a half hour or more, has always been one of the highlights of my day. And even when you don't sit and talk, it's always nice to see a special face when walking to or from the rest room, etc. and stop to say hello and chat for just a few minutes. There were always at least a few such people on my floor, which made visiting easy.

But not any longer.

People are constantly moved from one floor to another as project teams jockey for space and try to get their people as close to each other as possible. This week, the last of my friends on the seventh floor was relocated far below. Now there is no one left.

There are a few familiar faces on the seventh floor, but very few and none who I know well. They are barely acquaintences. The vast majority are complete strangers. At the coffee point and elsewhere, all I see most of the time are blank, generic faces.

Each floor in our building seems to exist in isolation from the others. People tend to meet up with those on their own floors, only venturing further for their closest friends. If you aren’t on the same floor or aren’t particularly close, you just don’t bother.

My teaching colleagues are on lower floors, and I almost never see them. Everyone is “too busy” to make time to maintain the working relationships we had when we shared a room. Make no mistake: having a private, individual workspace is far better, but there is something wrong with a “team” that never makes time to meet. We have pretty much become strangers to one another. It’s not a team at all.

One person, whom I consider my best friend in the company, used to come up for lunch or coffee at least several times a week. I enjoyed those visits immensely. But nothing good lasts, and her project requirements have cut those meetings down to maybe once in two weeks. It’s not her fault; some projects can be pretty demanding. I was spoiled for a time, but that’s life.

So when my last friend on the seventh floor moved away early this week, it was the end of easy socializing for me. I realized today that I am in isolation on the seventh floor. I have a few hours of classes with students who are nice people, mostly, but not “friends.” And beyond that, I work alone, eat lunch alone, walk the floor alone – spend my work time alone. 

I am in exile.

And at this holiday time of year, which behind the colorful trees, decorations, music and merriment, always carries a dark reminder just below the surface that I exist here alone, my day on the seventh floor is a real reflection of my life.

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Repeal the 17th Amendment or Abolish the Senate

The United States federal government is a mess. It is a bloated, ineffective bureaucracy that wastes money by the billions, overly controls people’s lives, and runs completely contrary to the original intent of the nation’s founders.

It is run by a self-serving governing elite in Washington who get themselves elected only to enrich themselves and their benefactors, not to do right by the people, are as detached from the people as medieval monarchs used to be, and are supported by a “deep state” monolith of entrenched career bureaucrats who view themselves as sort of mid-level “rulers” over the people they are supposed to be serving.

The government “of the people, by the people and for the people” has become a government “of the ‘elites,’ by the lawyers, and for the special interests.”

The Washington political establishment is, as our current president likes to say, “a swamp.” It has taken many decades, well over a century, to create this swollen, tangled and corrupt swamp, and draining it will not be easy. In fact, short of a complete national catastrophe, it might be just about impossible.

One of the worst parts of this Washington swamp, and a part that could be reformed, is the United States Senate. At best, the Senate is ineffective. At worst it is the people’s second worst enemy after the bureaucracy.

Something needs to be done about the Senate.

A Bit of Historical Background

The United States was envisioned by its founders as just that: a union of individual, sovereign states – not a single, homogeneous, amorphous blob of a country. The states had different characters, cultures and interests. In framing the Constitution so that these individual states could bind themselves together successfully into a unified country, they knew they had to carefully balance the rights of these states with those that the states would surrender to a federal government.

The balancing act included a number of provisions that we commonly call the “checks and balances” of government. The federal government was divided into three branches – executive, legislative and judicial – which had specific functions and responsibilities, and even more important, the ability to check the power of the other two branches. At that time, a “deep state” bureaucracy could not even have been imagined.

But at the nation’s founding, the “balance of powers” was more about balancing power between the federal government and the states than it was about balancing power among the branches of the federal government. Many of the founders were highly suspicious of a powerful central government and insisted that the states must be strong to protect the rights of the people and prevent the central government from overpowering and imposing the will of a governing elite on the people.

One way to give the states significant power in the policies and operation of the federal government was the United States Senate. The founders divided the legislative branch – the Congress – into two houses: the House of Representatives, to directly represent the people, and the Senate, to represent the governments of the states.

The people would elect their representatives to the House every two years, and the number of representatives would reflect the population. As population grew, new House districts would be added and the number of representatives would increase. States with large populations would have more representatives than states with smaller populations, but this did not matter because Congressmen were supposed to directly represent the people, not the states.

If this were the only form of a federal legislature, it was clear that more populous states would dominate the smaller states; thus, the rights of the smaller states would be in danger of being trampled on by the larger ones. At the time of the convention, there was no way that Delaware, Rhode Island, or other small states would ratify a Constitution that gave more rights to New York, Virginia, Massachusetts or Pennsylvania.

The founders knew also that a straight democracy was not the best form of government for a country. Direct democracy can work for a town or city, but because people’s passions can be easily enflamed, a straight democracy can result in tyranny almost as sure as autocratic rule. So they created a republican form of democracy.

As part of that republican democracy, and to ensure that the interests of the states were served equally, the legislative branch included a second, “higher” chamber made up of representatives of the states: the Senate. Each state was to have two representatives to the Senate, each selected by the legislature of that state, so that the states would have equal power in that body.

The essence of a senator’s duty was to act as a sovereign representative of his (there were no women in government at that time) state in the federal government. Fisher Ames, a member of the Massachusetts committee for ratification of the Constitution referred to senators as “ambassadors of their states” to the federal government.

The Senate also adopted a number of procedures and rules that differed greatly from the House of Representatives. For many purposes, a motion required two-thirds of the members to approve measures, instead of just a simple majority. In the current Senate, with 100 total members, for example, the threshold for passage of many bills is 60, not 51.

And only the Senate employs the maneuver called a filibuster, where one member can keep the floor as long as he or she (there are women there now) is able, and in so doing can hold up or even block a measure from being voted on.

The framers had it basically right. The system did provide a greater balance of power between the states and the federal government and kept Washington from taking too much power… for a time.

Bad Things Happened

The first bad thing that happened was the Civil War. When a group of southern states decided that the federal government had gone too far in infringing on their economic rights over the issue of slavery, they decided to secede from the union and form a new confederation. They were wrong, of course, to practice and insist on continuing slavery. But I am not so sure that they were wrong to insist on upholding their rights against the federal government.

The southern states lost the war and, in that loss, they also lost – for all the states – a large portion of their sovereignty. In winning the war, and in actions taken in the following decades, the federal government became stronger and exercised even greater power over the states and the people.

The Main Point: The 17^th Amendment

During the 19^th century, there were a number of people who argued that senators should be popularly elected by the people of their states and not by the state legislatures. State legislatures were seen as corrupt, and it was viewed as easy for aspiring senators to “buy votes” from those state legislators. By contrast, it was naively assumed that in a popular vote, corruption would not play a part.

In fact, corruption did exist in many of the legislatures, just as it existed in cities and counties all across America and in the federal government itself. The 19^th century was a particularly corrupt time in American history. Some of the most famous stories of American political corruption came out of big cities in the second half of the that century – the Democrat Tammany Hall political machine in New York, for example.

Eventually, in the early 20^th century, the 17^th Amendment to the Constitution, for the popular election of senators, was passed and ratified. This, along with several other “progressive” (socialist) ideas – like the 16^th Amendment, the national income tax – had been successfully pushed by the administration of one of America’s worst presidents, Woodrow Wilson. It was seen as a reform to counter the corruption.

But eventually, leading up to the present, the 17^th Amendment created a whole new and much larger kind of corruption in the election of senators. Even worse, it has completely trashed the founders’ notion of the Senate as a balance on behalf of the states. In fact, all the Senate is now is a place where good ideas go to die and where senators get immensely wealthy.

What’s Wrong with the Senate

Popular election of senators created a body in which the members no longer represented their state governments. They used to take the positions of their state legislators and governors with them to the Senate floor, and their arguments were (ideally) based on what was in the best interests of their states.

But now, they totally ignore what’s best for their states. They are representatives of their political parties, not the states or even the people. Even worse, they are bought and paid for by special interests: corporations, labor unions, banks and other financial interests, religious or antireligious interests, hardcore environmentalists, social identity interests, and the list goes on.

The 17^th Amendment promised an end to corruption in the selection of senators, but in every election millions of dollars pour into key state races from outside of those states. The money comes from the national Democratic or Republican parties and from the many special interests. It may not be corruption in the classical sense, but it is all about outside interests working to influence the election within the state. If you are a Libertarian, Green or other “independent” trying to get elected to a Senate seat, you haven’t got a chance because of the power of outside money.

The worst part of this is that senators now are almost completely detached from their states. They don’t stand up for the rights of their states or the people of those states because they are part of the federal establishment in Washington. Their money and support comes from the lobbyists who haunt the halls of Congress and from the national political parties.

Ostensibly, there are now only two competing interests in the Senate: the Republicans vs. the Democrats. But in reality, it is the Washington political “establishment” (Republicans and Democrats together) against the people of all the states. States hardly matter anymore, but they should.

Repeal the 17^th Amendment or Abolish the Senate

I would love to see the 17^th Amendment repealed and the founders’ original intent in the Constitution reinstated. If our senators were selected by the state legislatures, I believe they would be more responsive to their states and, in turn, to the people of those states.

Today, we have greater means to catch the kind of corruption that the proponents of the 17^th Amendment were so concerned about. And if the corrupt power of the national parties and special interests over the senators could be broken, the Senate might actually be able to get something accomplished.

I would also like to see some kind of meaningful control over the influence of the national political parties and – especially – special-interest money in all our elections, at every level. There is no doubt that running for office requires money, and that giving money to a political candidate is a form of free speech. But there has to be a line drawn between the regular citizen supporting a candidate and a megawealthy corporation essentially “buying” that politician.

But if the 17^th Amendment can’t be repealed, then perhaps we need an amendment to simply abolish the Senate altogether. The original intent of the Senate has been completely lost, and it no longer serves a useful purpose. Even worse, with its arcane rules and procedures, it often prevents good legislation from the House from getting enacted.

Those rules and procedures worked a long time ago when the purpose of the Senate was to protect the rights of the states against the federal government or the threat of direct democratic tyranny from the House. But now those rules and procedures are just used by the political parties to fight with one another or by the political “elites” to kill anything that might actually benefit the people at the expense of the “ruling class” and their benefactors.

Either way, the Senate needs to revert back to its original purpose, or it has to go.

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Big Change

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about change. For some time now, I’ve been feeling a very strong urge to make a major change, a redirection of my life. It seemed increasingly like this meant leaving Ukraine, but I haven't had a good vision of what would be next if I left. Plus, I've had this nagging feeling that I still have unfinished business here.

But a pretty big change is now underway. In less than two weeks, I will be leaving the apartment I’ve called home for more than eight years to move into a new place. This isn’t as big a change as moving to another country, but changing apartments will suffice for now until the future becomes clearer.

Another reason for thinking about change is that this week will mark 10 years since I sold my dream home in the mountains of Colorado to make the move to Ukraine. One sunny day in late July, 2007, after all the papers had been signed and money exchanged, and after final packing and cleaning, I drove away from that beautiful place for the last time.

I still feel some sadness when I think of the sacrifice I made. But then, just as now, I had a strong need for change, and the change I was making required me to sell the house and be financially free to go off on my new adventure. It was all about change – it was always about change.

Change: the Only Thing that Doesn’t Change

A very well-known saying holds that “the only constant is change.”

Things change around us constantly. Usually the changes are small, building up over time. You never really see the changes in your own face in the mirror day after day, but look at a photo from 10 years ago and you wonder what the hell happened.

Everything changes. Our circles of friends and acquaintances change. The people who were part of my close circle at the start of this Ukrainian adventure are now either on the fringe or gone altogether. One is still a very real part of my world but living far away. The people around me now are different. It’s all changed.

Over the course of years, things can change so much that when you recall past people, places and events, you wonder whether they really happened at all. The present can be so different that those past episodes of your life seem more like dreams or movies than reality. I wrote more about this in a post several years ago called Life at the Speed of Time.

Major Change

Most of the change in our lives happens in small, gradual steps over time. But the changes that really get our attention are the big ones, the changes that are so great that they abruptly set us off in a new direction. These are the changes that represent milestones in our lives, things like graduating from college, getting married, having children, getting divorced, changing jobs, changing where you live, and of course, the death of someone close.

Some people really embrace big change; they become bored with their routines and find that a big change energizes them and makes life more interesting again. For most of my life, this has been my story.

Others resist change. They find comfort in being grounded, in having the safety and security of knowing what to expect tomorrow, in having everything be stable. They don’t like their boat to be rocked. Instead of being energized by change and looking forward to something better, they are terrified that things will be worse.

And there are others who are not really afraid of change but just don’t want to make the effort to change things. Maybe at one time they were the people who needed the energy that change brings, but now they’ve become kind of lazy and just settle for how things are. I fear that I’ve become this person in recent years.

Behind Schedule

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been feeling an overriding need for change for at least the first half of this year, maybe longer. I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with certain aspects of my life fow some time and have gone too long without shaking up my world. Looking back, it seems that I had some kind of big shakeup at least every couple of years. Usually it involved changing my work – not just my job, but even my career – or the place I lived. Sometimes it meant relationship changes.

I’ve gone from student to naval intelligence officer to student (again); to public relations, lottery management and marketing communications; to project management in mining engineering and environmental remediation (with more government and public relations thrown in); to business management; and finally to teaching English as a second language. The only constant among all of those careers was my writing and editing work, but the styles certainly changed.

The biggest changes were in where I’ve lived. Growing up in a small Massachusetts town where the idea of an “exotic” trip was going to Cape Cod or New York, no one could have imagined that I’d not only visit so much of the world, but actually live in so many far-flung places: Colorado, California, Texas, Illinois, Japan, Guam, Peru, and a few others. And, of course, Ukraine.

If I wasn’t taking a new career direction, I was moving to some new locale – or sometimes back to a previous one for a time. But never for too long. After a two-year stint back in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s, I settled back into another 10-year stretch in beautiful Colorado. But in those 10 years, I lived in three different places, from an apartment in Denver, to a new house in the suburbs south of the city, and finally to my dream home in the mountains to the west.

Something always had to change. I always seemed to have an itch. I would be satisfied with a situation for some time, but then after a while I would feel that it wasn’t enough. There was always something more that I needed.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been so restless the past few years. I’ve lived in Kharkiv for almost all of the past decade and in one apartment since May 2009. For me, that’s a very long time. And I’ve been doing essentially the same work for even longer.

Maybe I’ve slowed down with age and don’t have the same passion for change that I used to have. Or maybe I’ve just gotten complacent and lazy. But no matter which it might be, change is coming, and I do feel excited.

One of the benefits of making one big change is that in the process you can take that energy of change and apply it to a bunch of small things too. That energy might be enough to help you turn those small changes into lasting habits for a better direction.

That’s the plan.

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