“Secret Places” Acrylic on canvas by author

The Best Christmas Present Came from -wait for this- MEDIUM!

End-of-the-year fatigue makes me take a rather bleary and teary view of the world. Humanity seems like a lost cause. The year has flashed by on quicksilver wings and my unfinished magical realism book of short stories sits sighing in a drawer. Incidentally, I still write with H2 pencils in $1 notebooks. The kind that have a splotchy black and white cover. I love those and they smell so untainted. A throwback to ages of quills by candlelight And It’s been a while since I posted a poem on Medium. To paint and write at the same time is well nigh impossible for me. I’m strange that way. So slapping paint on canvas has possessed me for now. Frequently I do read and respond to a poem or essay.

As it happened, I commented on an essay that my son Umair Haque posted on Medium recently. Read it here https://link.medium.com/75Pz35H7u2

It’s about the decline of our society here in USA. Since I feel pretty much like a hapless bystander while fascism takes root, my approach to keeping sane is — wait for this — to practice small acts of kindness. Am I losing you at this point? Hang on a few more seconds. At any rate, I wrote the following response to his piece.

“It may sound pedestrian and trite, a cliche. In our ‘me’ society we have forgotten to practice kindness.