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 (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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Music Weekend (3 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 Joy of Being Overpaid

Throughout my life, there’s typically been one person who decides how much I get paid; me. Since so much of that time has been involved in starting up a small business, oftentimes my salary – – if you want to call it that – – was just minuscule.

I remember quite well in 1993 that I was only able to pay myself $1,000 per month. Let’s just say that was a challenging time.

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