For the past two years I have felt like some kind of marionette floating around rather a small puppet theater, my strings controlled by some mysterious outside forces.
I know that I am not alone and that others everywhere yearn to participate fully in life again without the shackles we have endured over the past two years.
Just as I was beginning to feel that the world was crawling back to “normal,” our economy experienced what, to me and many others, seemed like a collapse of independence, our political system becoming more and more a child-like war game based upon scored points and awful opportunities to sneer at the opposition. This led to my psychotic fantasy of everyone from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News being given actual weapons to obliterate each other as in a computer war game.
Then came the news items about Vladimir Putin attacking the Ukraine, resulting in the devastation and continuing violence that brings me to tears. Once again, the world I thought I knew, at least in part just a few years ago, has become a cesspool of suspicion, snide political criticism along with too many “truths” turning out to be like Fake Rolex watches. JB
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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