Lucas J. Draeger
Banish me to a dark corner, chain me to a keyboard, and I will gladly be a word slave. I'd sit there all day, with only an occasional demand for a coffee break.
I'm a would-be (wanna be) author, middle aged, fairly repressed, but extremely BLESSED with an amazing wife and two brilliant boys.
For several years, I've been haunted by images of the starving, drug addicted, victimized teens of the streets. I write about them a lot.
I did some work years ago at an elderly home; Shady Acres, the guys and I used to call it, even though it wasn’t really named that. We were updating the electrical in parts of the building. There were worse places to work. Some of the old folks […]
The forever cliché,You can’t trust (fill in the blank), is cliché for a reason. Because for many, it’s true. And what happens when the blank is filled with so many persons and entities that the untrustworthiness of the world overwhelms a person? It happened to Henry, beginning with […]
She says, follow me through the magic portal; there’s a party on the other side. I’ve never cared for magic. Not the biggest fan of parties either. Both those things remind me too much of cruise ships, which I dislike because they float on the ocean, and when […]
Accept who you are. Almost everyone gets this wrong. Ours is a culture of dreamers. People say it all the time: “You can be anything you want to be.” It’s not true. You can experience joy in this life, not by aspiring to do the impossible, but by […]
Alan Watts often said in his lectures, “Imagine your ideal world, and if you really think about it, you’ll find your ideal world is the one in which you currently live.” I have done this, imagined my ideal world, really thought about it, and I’ve concluded Alan Watts […]
The first evidence of our pug’s hearing loss was her sudden disinterest in barking at the garbage man. We mistook it for age related apathy at the time, the same sort that overtakes older humans, should we live long enough. Then she stopped noticing when people walked into […]
The world is different than the one I grew up in. Used to be, when I rang your doorbell, I had a product in hand: some gizmo or another meant to solve one of life’s nagging problems. Something to remove the metallic taste from your tap water, or […]
I don’t know if it was the time of day or the geography that explains why the grocery store was so overrun with canes and walkers. The human to walker ratio at this particular Safeway was somewhere in the four to one range. The man in line before […]
Friday night at the mall. “Meet Santa”, outside Macy’s. Empty line. Nobody wants to meet Santa. Poor old guy is slumped in his velveteen chair, dejected over the lack of Christmas spirit in this place. I am killing time, walking around while my kid bowls with buddies at […]
I’m starting to wonder if it’ll be burnout that kills us. Not nuclear war, not climate change, not the androgenizing of frogs; just old fashioned fatigue. The whole human race collapsing on itself like an old brittle building, a tired packhorse burdened with one load too many. It’s […]