Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Music Weekend (7 of 13)

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Preface to all posts: in an effort to get me out of a lifelong rut of avoiding humans and events at all costs, some friends are having me spend the weekend at a musical event. I’m driving very extensively and will be largely offline, so I’m putting up some Very Best of Slope posts in my absence. See you Monday morning!

The Old College Try

Over the course of writing thousands and thousands of posts on this blog (personally, about 15,000, although Slope itself has well in excess of 20,000), I take a certain amount of liberty with the topics I choose. By no means are all my posts related to charts or trading. Sometimes I talk about personal (but not too personal) stuff. This will be one of those posts.

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Music Weekend (6 of 13)

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Preface to all posts: in an effort to get me out of a lifelong rut of avoiding humans and events at all costs, some friends are having me spend the weekend at a musical event. I’m driving very extensively and will be largely offline, so I’m putting up some Very Best of Slope posts in my absence. See you Monday morning!

The Virgin Suicides

“How ya doing? Your energy level OK? Everyone all right?”

Our children, treading water in Trunk Bay just as I was, signalled to me that they were fine. Unlike their doughy father, my beloved children are athletic and strong, and they have the kind of stamina that makes a lengthy snorkeling adventure a pleasure. Like their father, however, they are sanctimonious about going au naturel and not relying on fins for their exploration like some of the obese Americans we witnessed.

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Music Weekend (5 of 13)

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Preface to all posts: in an effort to get me out of a lifelong rut of avoiding humans and events at all costs, some friends are having me spend the weekend at a musical event. I’m driving very extensively and will be largely offline, so I’m putting up some Very Best of Slope posts in my absence. See you Monday morning!

My Life as a Stand-Up

OK, I finally figured it out. It took me long enough, but now I get it.

For years, I’ve had a fascination with stand-up comics. I’m not just talking about their comedy, which I certainly appreciate on its own. Indeed, George Carlin has been Slope’s patron saint for years. I mean my ceaseless interest in their work. What they do. How they do it. What their life as a comic is like. What it really means to be a comic day after day.

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Music Weekend (4 of 13)

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Preface to all posts: in an effort to get me out of a lifelong rut of avoiding humans and events at all costs, some friends are having me spend the weekend at a musical event. I’m driving very extensively and will be largely offline, so I’m putting up some Very Best of Slope posts in my absence. See you Monday morning!

Good Boy

I’ve made no secret of my fondness for dogs. I grew up with them, and ever since I moved away from my parents as a young person, I’ve had at least one dog (and, more commonly, three) in my life. I’ve written about my experiences with dogs here from time to time on Slope, and the picture on the right is me on Saturday getting to hold a three month old Bernese a friend recently brought into his own family.

This is not a story about the purebred cutie-pie shown here, however. The dog I have in mind was one I saw much earlier in the day, just around sunrise, when I was traipsing around the parking lot of the East Palo Alto Home Depot (AKA not the most elegant place on the planet). I was charging my car up and taking my two larger dogs on their customary morning walk, which at this particular location means examining every single box and bag the find on the ground just in case there are any crusts or tidbits leftover. (There have been occasions when entire pizzas have been found, which to them is like Christmas Day).

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