Gerard DiLeo
Bio
Retired, not tired. In Life Phase II: Living and writing from a decommissioned Catholic church in Hull, MA. Phase I: was New Orleans (and everything that entails).
https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
email: [email protected]
Stories (480/0)
- Top Story - April 2022
A Dream Come TrueTop Story - April 2022
August 10, 1912, was a dream come true. My aunt and uncle had third-class tickets to board the RMS Titanic for a one-way trip to the USA. Uncle's illness was an ironic tragedy, for all his life he had dedicated every spare honest and ill-gotten penny toward his and his wife's emigration. When it came time to put up the 14 quid for the two tickets, he was more than prepared. Truth be told, his plan would launch him across the ocean just a step ahead of the regulators who would soon discover his embezzlement adventures and other fiscal misdeeds.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Fiction
It’s About Time We Addressed the 800-lb Nipple in the Room
It's about time we settled this whole nipple thing, once and for all. In the bud, so to speak. Are nipples really such a problem? Not for me; I'm for 'em. I'm all in, whether they come a pair at a time, singly, or even supramammary. Consider me an areolar, erectile enthusiast. Downright. Up-left, too.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Filthy
Birthday
On March 9, 2022, in Mariupol, Ukraine, after the World Health Organization already had verified 18 attacks on healthcare facilities, including those upon workers and ambulances, an attack apparently targeted a maternal and pediatric facility there. Children, newborns, and women in labor either escaped--or didn't--the rubble associated with the large crater impact. A world power casually stepped on the weakest and least powerful in a defining moment among a series of defining moments.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Humans
Package Deal
"When he was born, the doctors said it would be best if I didn't see him. He said his mind would never develop past the age of five and I should just put him in an institution. Because the burden of raisin' a child like that would be too great. So I smiled at him and I asked for the baby. Oh, how could anybody think that sweet, precious baby could ever be a burden?" --Idgie, Fried Green Tomatoes
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Families
- Runner-Up in We Have a Dream Challenge
SolipsismRunner-Up in We Have a Dream Challenge
We each make our own universe. All of the visible electromagnetic frequencies that strike our retinas, perturbations of air that oscillate our eardrums, temperatures that compare and contrast on our skin to derive a common sense of hot or cold, molecules that trigger our olfactory cranial nerve in a code deciphered higher up as smell--these are all data. The human brain, that majestic evolutionary assembler of such data and collator of it into meaning, is like a graphic user interface--a GUI like Windows or IOS. Others whom we encounter, with their own universes, are like the World Wide Web and have their own GUIs.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Humans
Juliet
Juliet was a friend long before she was a patient. That all changed when she divorced her first husband and met her true love, Dan. Before that, she couldn't see me as her physician because the previous husband imagined some voyeurism on my part or, worse, was paranoid over even more debaucherous suspicions. In all fairness, I can understand his reluctance, catching the way I would look at her; but my gazes weren't salacious, just an appreciation for the gift that Juliet was. My looks at her--not in any way longing for her on the outside--showed a love for her inner beauty, which is the rightful definition of true friendship.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Petlife
Self-Reports Take Precedence
6% of people self-report they are below average, but they are way above average in self-reporting. The 94% of people self-reporting to be above average are actually below average in self-reporting. The first shall be last and the last, first. Unless, of course, you're EXACTLY average. Then, you'll have to just wait in line with the rest of 'em. Average wait time for this ride is 80 or so years, unless you can somehow get a FastPass, which is by walking into a concentrated ghetto of ethnic homogeneity, chanting anti-ethnic slogans and slurs about said ethnic residents who live in the said ethnically concentrated homogeneity. When asked, 94% of people self-report that they can do this above average, but they only say that because they feel the other 6% live in said ethnically concentrated areas.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in FYI
Pose and Repose
In the state of nature when the sense of hunger is appeased by the stimulus of agreeable food, the business of the day is over, and the human savage is at peace with the world, he then exerts little attention to external objects, pleasing reveries of imagination succeed, and at length sleep is the result: till the nourishment which he has procured is carried over every part of the system to repair the injuries of action, and he awakens with fresh vigour, and feels a renewal of his sense of hunger. --Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, 1794
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Humans
Omens
The owl has portended good luck or bad luck, victory or defeat, death or a long life, over the ages, for those who had associated with it their own good luck, bad luck, victory, defeat, early death, or long life. A symbol of wisdom, solitude, and restraint, the owl lives a double life--one on the perch and one in the air, talons set.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Fiction
My Net Worth Is Nothing
In the beginning there was nothing, but nothing is unstable. A true vacuum is mythological and has about as much to do with the Universe as a unicorn. Unicorns are make-believe, but equaling zero is alchemy realized—real magic—when you consider the pluses and minuses that even out, the zero-sum-gain dynamic that invents infinite beauty in vacillating and fleeting apparitions.
By Gerard DiLeo2 years ago in Humans