Margaret C. Laureys's Blog – December 2016 Archive (4)

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.   ~~ Dalai Lama

What a glorious thing it is to experience the essential kindness of human beings -- especially strangers, and especially young ones. Last night I was rescued by two such kind, young strangers when I…

I thought there was nothing more I could know about Bruce Springsteen especially since his world is already evoked in his songs. Listen to a Springsteen song and you see a hardscrabble, working class Jersey boy kicking it around in garage bands; sitting on the hood of the Chevy with a long haired, barefoot girl wearing bell-bottoms and a lost, moony gaze on her face; beers with the boys after a shift at their dead end job at the tire factory, all of them griping about the boss…

My friend and fellow Netcong native, Christopher Warnash, recently posted something on Facebook about Netcong which got me thinking about how much I love our hometown.  Christopher had said something which particularly struck me and gave me so many thoughts about our town that I want to share them with all of my other fellow Netcong natives. 

Christopher said that he and his boyfriend were passing through Netcong when his boyfriend…

Willy Wonka: Stop, don’t, come back

It’s a slight, seemingly empty bit of dialogue, isn’t it?  Yet imbued with Gene Wilder’s sarcastic intonation the dialogue expresses that he actually couldn’t care less if the kid to whom he’s speaking comes back or not.  He speaks the ostensibly dull sentence in an unflappable, flat tone such that it becomes richly, perversely, funny.  It is is also, oh, just a teensy bit mean. As…