Hello!

Welcome to The Epic! I am launching this blog as a manifesto for and a guide to living well. The title and motto of the blog are taken from the Epicureans, at least some of whom believed in the notion that not one minute of the future was guaranteed to them and that as a result they had the duty to live life to its fullest every moment.

I believe in discovering fun and pleasurable things wherever I find myself each day and I am told I have a knack for unearthing them. My hope is that by sharing in my pleasures and some of my ways of finding them you will begin to collect all the riches that lie in the moments of your life. They are there. Take them! All our lives should be.....Epic.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Fly On


Some years ago....

ME [to a real Top Gun]:  Does it bother you to fly in really bad weather?

TG:  Not really. If things like that bothered me I wouldn't be an aviator.  Besides.....there is always blue sky up there somewhere...you just have to keep flying until you find it.

Now...

I really feel like I am flying blind in an endless cloud bank. I do regular things most days but that cloud is still enveloping me. Flying about.  Hoping to God I don't run out of fuel.

I have to just remember.  There is ALWAYS blue sky up there somewhere.  I just have to keep flying the plane until I find it.  I know it's true.  A Top Gun told me so.

Monday, March 20, 2017

William Penn on Loss of Love


They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the root and record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not Death, neither is theirs.
Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still.
For they must needs be present that love and live in that which is Omnipresent.
In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure.
This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are in the best sense, ever present, because Immortal.

ML

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Good Lord, What Next?




According to Bloomberg and many other news outlets, my favorite New York hotel, the Waldorf Astoria, is closing for "refurbishing" and when it reopens it will be "primarily" condominiums.  That is what happens when an insurance company land trust buys the place.

In other words, they are going to "Plaza-ize" this grand old hotel and we can pretty much count on it being no more.  I hope I'm wrong.  When Conrad Hilton was a young man with one hotel in Texas he cut out a newspaper photo of the Waldorf Astoria and pinned it up by his desk.  He swore he would own the magnificent hotel one day.  One day he did.

Today, I am just glad he can't see what is happening to the apple of his entrepreneurial eye.  If you can get by the Bull & Bear or Sir Harry's Bar and have one last toast, please think of me.