Kevin Robinson's Blog, page 2

Okay, So That Just Happened......

So, my friend Drew (from Eudora, KS���out near where I used to live) and I hung out��with guitar god, Steve Vai last night at the Palladium in St. Pete. Fourth row center seats, no less!��Neither of us have much hair, but it was all blown straight back anyway. I thought Vai would be doing one of his orchestral related gigs; but, as usual, I failed to read the small print. He cut an obscure album 25 years ago���maybe outdoing his old bandmate, Frank Zappa, for pushing complicated scoring and heavy

Taking Up Space

At my age, any day that there���s not a Silver Alert out on me--blowing up people���s cellphones and flashing at drivers on the Florida Turnpike--is a GREAT day! And (to be honest), even if there was a Silver Alert describing my wheelchair lift van in all its beastly glory, it would likely mean that I was still on the loose! That���s worth celebrating!

I was reading one of my old columns this morning��and was startled by the glaring amount of space existing between the period at the end of one

Words in My Wake

This morning as I opened the slider in my office loft, the oil tanker Lacanau was apparently finished with it business here in Channelside. I watched her steam off toward the sea, thinking: ���It���s a long way to Marseille.��� The famous French city notwithstanding, the word ���Marseille��� still makes me shutter after more than fifty years. And it���s not even the French word that embarrassed me as a boy. It just reminds me of it.

At the age of eight or ten, at the house of family friends I loved, I

It's Only Words...

An acquaintance allegedly once said to another of my acquaintances: ���You know how Kevin writes. And why does he use all those unfamiliar words?���

It���s a fair question. I suspect friends and family members of most committed writers get remarks like that raised in their wake. The answer is easy. The only widely effective way to learn a broader vocabulary is to read, to come across new words and tumble them around in their contextual lottery bins, anxiously waiting to see what drops out. This is

The Search for the Perfect Metaphor

Being someone who loves to read and write in the ���age of the tweet��� is challenging.�� But it���s the same challenge writers have always faced: how to educate and enlighten others to an idea succinctly, efficiently.�� Storytellers have always relied on the metaphor.�� Now, more than ever, finding the perfect metaphor is the equivalent of a search for the holy grail.

There are myriad good metaphors out there, and even a host of great ones, but the perfect metaphor remains elusive. Like persistent

Royal Not-So-Straight Flush

In the early��days of America--that overly idealized period when we killed Native Americans, slaves, each other (north and south) Mexicans, and then Germans--there were at least two��items��of civic consensus: (1) a good merchant was honorable and fair, and a bad merchant lied and cheated in order to swindle as many Americans as possible before moving on to a new town; and, (2) the��government's job was to protect us from them, to catch and prosecute the crooked merchants.��There's��at least one

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

"Last night I had the strangest dream
I've ever dreamed before.
I dreamed the world��had all agreed,
to put an end to war."�� ~~ Ed McCurdy

The 1976 song by Ed McCurdy has been covered by a host of celebrities and is the official theme song of the Peace Corp. Like most truly great songs, it leaves you with a feeling--a feeling that can bring wisdom if you let it. I had a dream like that last night.

My daughter and her cousins are a ceaseless source of joy in my life. They each have profound

Move Along...There's Nothing to See Here

For my generation, "that man behind the curtain" in The Wizard of Oz has been a near-perfect metaphor for what passes for truth, justice, and "the American way." Take telephones for example. Prior to the 1970's, our phones were all black. Then came "designer colors." A black phone cost about $5.00/month to rent from Ma Bell, but if you wanted a designer colored princess phone, it would cost you almost three times as much. So, each time I moved, I insisted on a black phone...until, overnight,

And the Answer Is...

Fans of Douglas Adams' famous novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and it's delightful subsidiaries) know that when the great oracle computer was asked the question "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?", the answer (which took centuries to compute) was "42."

As you might imagine, the humans (and the mice) who had waited so long for this momentous��proclamation were more than a little perplexed. In the years since Adams' book came out, there have been myriad theories

Leafblowing Politics

OK, so I once co-owned an Orlando landscaping company, and this subject is a bit personal, but moving to the Florida Keys has taught me many lessons about how the "whatever" mentality impacts a community. I suspect that what I'm seeing is also a great metaphor for how our Congress is impacting our nation.

In Orlando, I landed contract after contract for Evergreen Lawn Maintenance by parking my El Camino on the street where a competitor's crew was working��on��one of their customer's professional