Paul A. Merkley
Bio
Mental traveller. Idealist. Try to be low-key but sometimes hothead. Curious George. "Ardent desire is the squire of the heart." Love Tolkien, Cinephile. Awards ASCAP, Royal Society. Music as Brain Fitness: www.musicandmemoryjunction.com
Achievements (1)
Stories (101)
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Twelfth Night
I started my first paragraph explaining that I need an extra winter ritual because I live in a city with a cold winter and the hours of daylight are too few, but I realized that is not true. First of all there is always a colder, darker city, for example Thunder Bay, Ontario, or the military bases at Alert or Thule, to take more extreme examples. Secondly, there already are rituals to bring light to the dark: Christmas lights, Diwali, or one could join the Druids at Stonehenge on the Solstice, for example. More importantly, that is not the reason for my ritual. I do it for social connection.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a month ago in Humans
A Mere Bagatelle
Damned arthritis. Thank God I put in the corkscrew staircase. You can't fall very far on that. The fellow who installed it demonstrated that vividly. He knocked me off balance. I fell two steps and stopped. Ingenious. Of course I could always fall upstairs, but, as my father explained, that's good luck. When I asked him what made it good luck he said, because you didn't fall downstairs of course.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a month ago in Fiction
To Run or to Pass?
It is that time of year when thoughts turn to aspirations on the gridiron. I live on the north shore of Lake Ontario, so in some respects college football is on a much smaller scale here. There are no television revenues to speak of, no paid college players, smaller stadiums and so on.
By Paul A. Merkley4 months ago in Cleats
On-Court Discourtesy
It's clear to me that I don't have the expertise to write about psychology or sports psychology in a clinical way, but I think if these disciplines are to be valuable, it's important that they make sense to everyone. A few years ago there was a movement in the Law to make legal writing comprehensible for a broad population whom it affected, and I felt that was a big step forward. So here goes.
By Paul A. Merkley5 months ago in Psyche
