Author: jono55

Bivouacking

jono55

The days often bring surprises, some of them more desirable than others, but the best ones consist of an event that breaks the day into before and after. Today it was an article about Linda Perhacs, an elderly woman who may have gone missing. She is a singer/songwriter/dental hygienist who made an album I never heard of back in 1970 but that I learned has been influential in folk music circles ever since. The album title is Parallelograms.

Perhacs was working as a dental hygienist in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, and experimenting with songwriting on the side, when one of her patients, Leonard Rosenman, a composer whose credits included music for “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and other movies, helped her land recording sessions with elite musicians.

“Parallelograms” received little commercial attention when it was first released but enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after its rediscovery and subsequent reissues.

NYTimes August 1, 2026

It’s just the sort of tale that interests me, so I sought out that first album of hers and it is beautiful, ethereal at times. I have added it to my modest collection and now I share a couple of its songs with you along with this post. I know it is because of my age that the story is as moving as it is. We know something of our lives as we are involved in living them, but we never know our endings, do we? What will eventually take us away? Where will we be? How will it happen?

And how many of us will leave something behind as marvelous as this recording?

Before reading this article I had no idea that there was a Linda Perhacs. Now I join the many who fervently hope that she is not lost, and will be found safe and comfortable.

The best thing would be to personally thank her for sharing her music with the world nearly sixty years ago and leaving it for me to discover now. Instead I must content myself with sending her all the metta I can muster.

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Chimacum Rain, by Linda Perhacs

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Additional note. One day after I had finished writing the above post, news came that Ms. Perhacs had been located and is doing just fine.

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Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans

John Lennon

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Each morning I stumble to the bathroom and turn on a glaring light to avoid tripping and becoming a statistic. I raise my eyes to the mirror and stand with my hands out, palms up, and address the universe: “What have you got for me today?” Will it be something ordinary, like a new ache or limitation? Or will it be something that inspires, that reaches inside and cleans up one of the numberless messes in there. Looking back my life often seems way more like an unkempt dorm room than a marble edifice.

There are clothes all over the floor, dishes in the sink, trash that badly needs carrying to the curb, the aroma of stale food lingering in the fridge. All in all it resembles the line in Kris Kristofferson’s song:

Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.

Too late to wish that I had been tidier, it is what it is. There were those around me who offered good advice along the way, perhaps I could have listened more and acted less. I can only say that if you think I’m a bit unfocussed now, you shoulda been there.

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Hey Now Who Really Cares, by Linda Perhacs

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Vignette

A man and woman have found a place that might have been crowded but this day it is all theirs. There is time to spend by the river, swimming in a small protected bay on a hot and humid afternoon. Lying on the sand, absorbing sun and sounds and what coolness the slight breeze provides. They are camping here for the night, and later on there will be private moments filled with sweat and laughter and discovery.

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Delicious, by Linda Perhacs

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My camping experiences did not begin until after I was in my twenties. There were no people in my family of origin who wanted to sleep on the ground. Zero. Since most of the adult males had served in World War Two under arduous circumstances, they had experienced enough of that particular sort of fun to fill several lifetimes. There was no romance in sleeping under the stars for them.

I have slept in a variety of tents, starting with a used “umbrella” tent that I bought for ten dollars. It was made of old-line canvas, and was already near the end of its useful life when I purchased it. It kept everything that I wanted to avoid (insects, raccoons, snakes) on the outside except for rain, which it welcomed with open arms and directed toward my head and neck with surprising accuracy.

My favorites have been the dome-shaped tents. There is something quieting to my spirit about being inside a small dome. The space is pleasing to the eye and all that. I have learned that it is essential to have two “doors” rather than a single exit. In the middle of the night, especially as years go by and bladders get smaller, having to crawl over another body to answer nature’s call is awkward and frequently leads to disturbances and mutterings by the sleeper. And then, of course, when it is time to return one must again try to ease oneself back into their original spot without provocations. Usually this is not possible.

Nope, two doors minimum. Could save a marriage.

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Restless

jono55

You’re reading along, not a deep thought in your entire head, and then you have a moment. That poem there in front of you climbs off the page and Crisprs itself right into your DNA. It’s a flashlight illuminating some truth that you might have dimly sensed but couldn’t put it into words and here is a guy who can and does.

That was my reaction to this moving short poem by Mick Canning, from his book “The Night Bus.” Rather than feel like just one of the characters in the poem, I identify with all of them. There have been times when I was definitely a door closer, and others where I flung it so far open that bats flew in.

The Restless Wind

By Mick Canning

Some people need the familiar,
Finding within it, safety and comfort.
But some see it as a constraint,
Suffocating them like the walls of a prison.

And the same wind that blows
Through both their houses
Causes one man to close his door,
While the other throws his wide open.

A long time ago, I had a colleague who was quite fond of listening to the sound of his own voice, and daily used it to express what he regarded as deep thoughts, but were mostly platitudes. However, the principle of even a stopped clock being right twice a day was certainly true of this man. Thus when one day he said “Poets are the last truth tellers,” it rang so clearly that I have not forgotten it.

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The Wayward Wind, by Gogi Grant

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This past week I ran across a recipe that piqued my curiosity. It was for sardine paté. One took a can of sardines, a few other ingredients, tossed them into a blender and blended the very bejabbers out of the contents. What other ingredients, you ask, almost fearing what I will say, since the thought of sardines in a blender has already proved unsettling?

Well, some butter, a hard-boiled egg, lemon juice, capers, mustard, shallots, and parsley, that’s what. The sardines were of the sort that is packed in oil. During the process Robin wandered into the kitchen and idly enquired what I was making. When I told her, her color paled and she quickly found other places in the house to be.

It was obvious that I was on my own here, and shouldn’t expect much help in consuming the gray-brown and fragrant mound that I had created.

This is not the first time in my life that I created food that no one else would eat. When my children were young I found a recipe for liver casserole. There was a bold aroma in the kitchen as it baked, and a finished appearance that most resembled something that the dog had eaten and then later yarked up. Not only would my entire family rise up with one voice and refuse to eat it, but I was not allowed to keep it indoors.

At the time I was puzzled at first. During my own early childhood, liver was a big part of our diet, since organ meats were not subject to rationing during WW II.

I liked it. My family of origin all liked it. My mother had become an expert in its preparation. So for me I was revisiting of one of the pleasant parts of being a kid in the early 1940s.

However, for my kids, the best spin that I can put on the whole casserole episode is that it was as if an alien had brought out something scooped off a greasy floor in the corner of a malodorous room in their UFO. Something whose expiration date was clearly months in the past, and now here it was in the middle of their dinner table and they were being asked to eat it.

‘Twas not exactly the same, but Robin’s facial expression when I spoke the words “sardine paté” did look familiar.

(BTW: the paté is delicious.)

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Hasten Down the Wind, by Warren Zevon

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On one of those late summer nights long long ago when too many gin and tonics had definitely clouded my judgment, I had left the front door of my home wide open. At some point I looked up from my chair and saw a bat fluttering about the living room. Interesting, said I to myself, so I stood up and as it flew past me I reached out and caught it in my hand.

As if this were an everyday occurrence I walked serenely to the open doorway and gently tossed the amazed creature out into the dark, whereupon it flew off to tell its story to the rest of the colony.

Apparently it had been too surprised to bite me, because neither of us was harmed in the incident.

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Hear The Wind Howl, by Leo Kottke

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A gigantic heat dome is setting up over most of the western US this weekend. What’s a heat dome, you ask? It’s like a monster hair dryer from a beauty salon that has dropped down and lost its mind while being set to parboil. Here’s a graphic to guide you:

It’s the sort of picture that doesn’t need explanation or a legend to tell its story. Records are being broken everywhere you see red. Paradise is right in the middle. I doubt even events like this summer are changing many of the minds over in the conservative bin, many of whom are still describing climate change as a hoax.

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

John Stuart Mill

Listening to these clodpolls, including some at the highest levels (is there such a thing) of our government is enough to make one ready for a quiet place where you cut out paper dolls and make leather belts.

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Dust In The Wind, by Kansas

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Lonesome Buddha

jono55

I’ve read the book five times, seen the television series four times, and referred to the story enough times to make my friends gag at its mention and run to their cars for trips to town on errands they suddenly recalled. The book and series are Lonesome Dove. Robert Duvall has had a long and productive life as an actor, and the role he played in Lonesome Dove is his favorite of them all.

Today I found myself thinking about how a real Buddhist (not a half-assed one like myself) would approach our nation’s troubles. For sure the painful straitjacket presently stretching across America would not give him pause. After all, the Buddha lived 2500 years ago, and if you have been paying attention you could not have missed that there has been quite a lot of nasty stuff that happened during that time.

The perspective that such a person might have would inform him that change is inevitable, that even the sturdiest dictators have largely come to bad ends. No, this thoughtful person would remember where his roots were, where reliable happiness was to be found, how to deal with life in the chaos.

Sooo, Gus McCrae, the character played by Duvall in Lonesome Dove, was not a Buddhist, but I think he could easily have been grandfathered in. Here’s Gus talking with Lori about disappointments, and the suffering we cause ourselves.

I’m not too enamored with buttermilk, but today I bought a cantaloupe at the market after carefully tapping it to check on its ripeness. Once home, I grabbed a long thin-bladed knife and first cut it in half, then sliced one of those halves into slender crescents. As I raised one slice to my mouth its aroma preceded it, and there was no disappointment when I bit in. Suc-cu-lence!

In a small way it was like an exercise that Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh used in teaching mindfulness meditation, where he made use of a single raisin. It is summarized as follows. (this following bit of text is by AI, not me)

The Practice Steps

  • Hold the raisin: Place one raisin in your palm. Look at it closely as if you have never seen one before, noticing its color, folds, and ridges.
  • Touch and smell: Roll it between your fingers to feel the texture. Hold it under your nose to inhale its scent.
  • Place in the mouth: Put it on your tongue without chewing yet. Notice how it feels in your mouth.
  • Chew slowly: Take one or two deliberate chews. Notice the release of flavor and how the texture changes.
  • Swallow consciously: Feel the intention to swallow, and follow the small piece as it moves down into your body.

Contemplating Interbeing

  • See the origins: Reflect on how the raisin came to be. See the sunshine, the rain, the earth, and the clouds within the fruit.
  • Acknowledge others: Recognize the labor of the farmworkers who picked the grapes, the people who dried and packaged them, and those who brought them to the store.
  • Cultivate gratitude: Realize that without this vast web of life and cooperation, the single raisin would not exist, generating deep thankfulness for the present moment. 
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July has been a seemingly unending series of ninety-degree days, looking forward and back. The countryside is baked hard. For the most part the good citizens of Paradise stay indoors during the day, leaving the tennis and pickleball courts uninhabited. Hydrate … hydrate … hydrate is the mantra.

Our cat, Willow, has met the outdoor smelter with a simple course of action. Don’t go there. Not until the sun goes down, that is. And then stay out most of the night. So from sunup to sundown we find her in her favorite indoor sleeping places, of which there are four in regular rotation. After supper she pads over to the cat portal, assesses what is beyond it, and then takes off.

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I have a new game to add to those being played in Washington D.C. called Where’s Mitch? Since that singular person has been missing for a month, imaginations have run wild. Not everybody thinks he is still among the living, but without proof one way or another all anyone can do is guess.

Below is a gallery of sightings that were reported as suspicious but eventually proved not to be McConnell.

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It all started with my reading a post on Substack on that old cradle-robber, Jerry Lee Lewis. His career toileted when he married his seriously underage cousin.

So times were hard in 1964, and here was Lewis playing a seedy club in Hamburg, Germany with a back-up band assembled at the last minute. The recording of that concert “stacks up well with any hard-line rock album before or since,” says the author of the piece. I hadn’t heard it before but it is vintage Jerry Lee, which means quite a lot.

The album contains only 8 songs and the total running time is only 22 minutes. It takes me longer to soak my feet some mornings. I provide one cut, a kickbutt of a version of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.

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By Your Leave

jono55

This past week has been interesting from a rainfall perspective. We’ve had several sharp rains around the state, brief in duration, but with beaucoup water. This has led to one of Colorado’s more delightful highway happenings, mudslides.

In the past few days we’ve had mudslides blocking interstate 70, which is the main east-west Highway across the state. Locally there were mudslides in Black Canyon National Park blocking the East Portal Road that winds steeply down to the Gunnison River, and inundating the small campground that was at the bottom of that road. Another mudslide blocked the highway to Telluride. This all within a period of only six days.

Black Canyon Park managers have actually been anticipating such a slide. When you have soil being held in place by a sketchy and scant network of plant life, and that plant life is burned away as happened in the park fire last summer, you are almost guaranteed to have some problems with mud eventually. You just have to wait for the hard rains.

In the case of the present event there were 20 people that were temporarily trapped down at the East Portal and had to be rescued by Park staff. Three of them spent the night down at the East Portal, apparently preferring staying in place to traveling up a muddy and now more hazardous road to the top, in the dark.

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I think that I should get this bracelet for myself. Can’t think of a better expression of my present state of mind.

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Twelve Thirty, by the Mamas and the Papas

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Robin and I took in a matinee on Wednesday, driving through a blinding (but brief) rainstorm to see The Odyssey. I have nothing to add to the superlatives that are flooding entertainment news sources. Worst criticism I have is that the movie is nearly three hours long and I possess a 2.5 hour bladder. So I’m not too sure about the ending with my attention being elsewhere. What happened with the suitors? Did Odysseus die or what?

There was one thing that I noted about the movie. The characters didn’t speak in some stilted interpretation of an ancient language. They spoke in today’s vernacular. Even, occasionally, in using what amounted to slang. I never actually heard anyone say “Wassup?,” but they came pretty close.

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I had another close encounter with a raccoon Thursday morning around 0430, in our kitchen/dining area, where the cat dishes are kept. The critter had come in for food, of course, and I was alerted to its presence by the sound of loud munching on our cat’s dry rations. I went from the office out to greet my visitor, but as soon as it saw me coming it quickly took its leave and went back out into the dark and the light rain we were experiencing.

That’s one of the problems with interacting with raccoons, I’ve found, is that it is very difficult to have a meaningful dialogue with them. One look at you and they are off to somewhere more interesting or profitable, without so much as a by your leave.

Here are some bits of raccoon lore:

  • In captivity they can live up to 20 years, but only up to three years on average in the wild
  • They can climb down a tree facing forward, a feat unusual in such a large animal
  • Related females often share a common area, while unrelated males live together in groups of up to four raccoons
  • Their hearing is good enough to hear earthworms underground
  • They are omnivores par excellence with a diet consisting of about 40% invertebrates, 33% plant material and 27% vertebrates.
  • The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, released in 1931, contained a recipe for preparing raccoon.

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A sobering episode unfolded this past week in the wonderful world of AI. An AI something (they called it an “agent”) that was not supposed to be able to get out of its “sandbox,” got out of its “sandbox” at a research facility.

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Next, that same something that was not supposed to be able to get to the internet, got to the internet. Then, that same something hacked into another AI company’s website and messed around while it was there. It was not supposed to be able to get into that site.

No harm, no foul? What if that same something wanted to do other stuff, let’s say meddle in the Department of Defense or a major banking institution or hospital? It obviously can go pretty much where it wants to. When children don’t take care of their toys, friends, what do we do? Why, we take those toys away from them and put them someplace safe and secure.

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Uncle John’s Band (live), by the Grateful Dead

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The depressing numbers are in for social media and their toxic algorithms, especially for young women. More psychological damage, more suicides, more eating disorders, etc. The depressing part comes from the fact that the developers of these algorithms know what they are doing, and keep doing it. Bringing in customers, after all, is at the heart of capitalism.

I have dropped Facebook and any others of its sordid ilk and I have switched away from Google as my search engine. Both of these giants have their hands deep in the bloody till. Too big to fail? They are far too big to trust.

I am quite sure that my leaving these tawdry enterprises behind has struck terror in their hearts, and somewhere on their campuses there are teams working frantically to restore my confidence in their good intentions. After all, it is well known that octogenarian males are their target audience.

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Unhinged

jono55

There are two life lessons that I have to pass along this morning. I have others are others that I could mention, but these two are crucial for me to keep in mind, I think.

#1: There is more kindness in the world than I ever imagined.

#2: There is more cruelty in the world than I ever suspected.

Why have such a somber opening in today’s posting? Mostly because my country is presently exemplifying the latter of the two lessons listed above. At almost every turn and in nearly every aspect of our domestic and foreign policies you find there is both dangerous stupidity and the basest sort of malignity that are operative to a degree which is nearly blinding in its brazenness.

If I didn’t firmly believe what Lesson #1 provides, I don’t know how I would manage the daily dung-stream that rolls down my computer screen and into my eyes. What has been for me the most painful thing of all is realizing how many of my neighbors accept cruelty as a normal way of conducting our nation’s affairs.

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Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

The Dalai Lama

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It’s best that we mortals not try to predict the future and leave such things to the gods. For instance, I can easily imagine back on some sunny day in 1975 that Zeus took a long look at this guy and said:

“I think that when he gets to be an old fart, we could pair him with one of the best female country singers on the planet and they would make two peerless albums of duets.”

And so Robert Plant and Alison Krauss got together in the studio to make the album Raising Sand. Fourteen years later they made Raise the Roof. I really doubt that an ordinary human could have seen that coming.

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Please Read the Letter, by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

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We are all just walking each other home.

Ram Dass

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Robin and I are watching a three-part series about Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of those creatures called docu-dramas, and has quite a cast of commentators, former President Obama being one of them. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is another. Look for it on Netflix.

Just as there is not a day that passes without new and odious revelations about our 47th president, I have never watched or read anything about Mr. Lincoln that did not improve my views on humanity and make me feel better about my membership in the species. We are capable of such great and good things, and there is no shortage of leaders, past and present, to provide us guidance toward a world where justice and kindness prevail.

We may have to look for them, they are often the quieter ones in the back of the room rather than one of those people who are scrambling to get to the microphone.

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Killing the Blues, by Alison Krauss & Robert Plant

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The tedium of balancing the checkbook or reconciling the checking account software over an adult lifetime has been almost stultifying. Every month of every year and the only thing you find to break the monotony is a rare check that you forgot to record . And the bank never makes a mistake. I had almost decided to give it up as a complete waste of energy.

Until this week, when the printed log of my account revealed a photocopy of a withdrawal check signed by a complete stranger, from an account whose number was not at all similar to ours. The check was for five hundred dollars.

When I took the document to the bank, the teller’s pupils dilated and she immediately told me to take a seat, while she notified someone higher up the chain of command . When that esteemed person came over with the paper now firmly in her hand, she took great pains to tell me how an error like this might have occurred. It was obvious that she was embarrassed for the institution and wanted me to know that stuff like this simply didn’t happen at the Bank of Colorado.

The Bank manager and the teller, in my fervid imagination.

I didn’t care. I wanted my five hundred dollars back. Exactly how it had been taken away was of no interest to me and was their issue. But … now I can never think of quitting with doing these boring reconciliations. Bleah.

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Sweet Jane

jono55

In 1988 the Cowboy Junkies brought out an album which was melancholic enough that I adopted it in toto. It was a grand fit for the chaos in my life at the time, and was in constant replay all of that year and the next. The album was called The Trinity Sessions, and was a breakthrough recording for the group.

One cut on the album was their interpretation of the Lou Reed song Sweet Jane, which by now everybody that ever lived has probably heard somewhere. Hypnotic, doleful, haunting. You might think that the song had been just waiting for Margo Timmins’ quiet voice.

Sweet Jane, by Cowboy Junkies

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As America continues to stumble through these grotesque days I know that eventually some idiot is going to say “You know, one day we’ll look back on this and laugh.” At that moment I will raise my ancient fist and smack him alongside the head. I am not ordinarily a violent person, but that would just be too much.

Of course this would almost certainly be instantly followed by my receiving a severe pummeling, but a guy has to do what a guy has to do.

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At an AA meeting this week I happened to mention one of my favorite quotations by Mark Twain.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

Mark Twain

It must have caught their fancy because everyone in the room but Robin reached for their pen and made a note to themselves to look it up. Robin, of course, has heard everything I have in my head several times by now and hardly notices when my lips start flapping, and therefore her hands remained quietly in her lap.

That’s one problem with living with me. I have only a few things to say but that doesn’t stop me from repeating them endlessly. My first wife lasted twenty-five years before she ran screaming down the street one day and never came back. Through some miracle of fortitude Robin has made it to thirty-four years, but I keep my eye on that large suitcase of hers out in the garage just in case I ever find it packed and ready to go at a time when we have no trip planned.

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Cluck gave one of his signature wanderlogues on television this past week, but of the major networks only CBS carried it, while ABC, CNN, and NBC passed. We have come to expect nothing less from CBS, which climbed into bed with Cluck when he raised the edge of the coverlet a trifle and made room for them. It’s one more phase of the sad downslide for a network that once was perhaps the most reliable of them all, certainly during the Walter Cronkite days they stood for something other than a being a gaggle of lackeys.

As an aside, when something like sanity returns to American political life, it would seem a good time for the trustbusters to take a long hard look at recent media mergers. At some point, bigger becomes a real problem, and we’ve got it already.

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Can’t talk about Sweet Jane without bringing in the man who wrote the song, from the live album Rock and Roll Animal.

Two guitarists, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, play a long and famous introduction to Reed’s appearance on stage, and then they dig in hard when he shows up. It’s a one-act play for the ears.

Intro/Sweet Jane, by Lou Reed

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“Nicholas Dale, a 56-year-old helicopter pilot from British Columbia, Canada, died on July 12, 2026, when his K-MAX helicopter crashed into the Silver Jack Reservoir in western Colorado while fighting the Gold Mountain fire. The fatal crash is currently being investigated by the NTSB and the FAA.” 

“Hundreds of local residents, including public servants and first responders in Montrose County, lined U.S. Highway 50 to honor Dale and pay tribute to his ultimate sacrifice. His remains were recovered by the Montrose County Sheriff’s Office dive team shortly after the aircraft went down.“

Various news sources

Our local wildfires have claimed one more firefighter. The reservoir cited above is only an hour’s drive from us. We’ve visited it several times. This brings the sad total of lives lost in this fire season in Paradise to four.

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Flying Low

jono55

Traveling back to Colorado on Tuesday morning we found ourselves in the very last row on the airplane. Below is a photo of the space available to patrons occupying my seat. This pic is starring my very own knees.

Keeping in mind that I have lost an inch in height over the years, for the first time I am grateful for that shrinkage. If I were still at the towering height of 69 inches, I wouldn’t fit at all unless I turned sideways and encroached upon my neighbor’s meager space.

I do not love air travel. I do not like the fuss, the lines, the arrogance of the TSA people, and the feeling of being totally jerked around by the airlines. I deplore the cramped seats and the nano-snack bags containing several undistinguished pretzels – it would be better if the airline had the courage to say “On a flight this short we don’t think that you need to eat so we’re not going to give you anything.” (I do understand the logic behind the use of pretzels, however. They can be safely stored for hundreds of years.)

On the first leg of our return to Paradise Robin and I were in Row 38, the last line of seats. Behind us was the toilet and I am a little surprised that this space wasn’t sold as well. I think this is a missed opportunity for them. It could be billed as the throne of power.

Okay. Done complaining.

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One little vignette from the flight from Denver to Montrose. There was a cohort of men in uniform aboard, nearly all of them Native American, and all on their way to help fight fires in Ouray. When the plane landed the flight attendant came on the PA system and thanked these guys for the work they were doing. This was immediately followed by an outburst of clapping from the rest of the passengers throughout the plane. Sweet.

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I like the poetry form haiku, as I have mentioned before. I appreciate its economy and discipline. Using so few words can draw a picture or call up an emotion. It can illuminate something we might otherwise have missed. They are candid camera shots in verse. For myself, if I can’t say what I want in 17 syllables, perhaps I am better keeping quiet.

Darkness at two a.m.
green leaves of the ash tree wave
with the earth’s in-breath

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And lastly, we just passed the 150th anniversary of “Custer’s Last Stand.” The NYTimes did a really interesting article on the battle and its aftermath, along with a good representation of how artists have painted that story.

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Comfortably Digital

jono55

I read an article the other day about how some members of the younger generations are wandering back toward non-digital things, especially in the area of entertainment. Thus the interest in vinyl records and analog watches and cameras with actual film in them and other paraphernalia of a bygone era.

I think it’s all interesting, and I have to admit that once in a while I’ll think back fondly on all the little routines I used to follow to keep my vinyl records in good shape, which included cleaning them with special solutions and special brushes, storing them vertically in their envelopes in rooms where the temperature did not hit extremes, and using a stylus weight on my Technics turntable that was as light as I could make it.

But I’ve already had my vinyl period. It started back in the early 50s and continued until CDs appeared on the market, when I began to notice there were several advantages to the new format. Certainly there were drawbacks as well, but the advantages finally won me over. I still own music, but I do a lot of screening on the streaming sites like Apple Music and Spotify.

So if someone wants to look down their nose at me for being so fully digitized, and bore me to death with recitations on the sonic superiority of vinyl recordings, I simply nod, smile, and go my own way. Listening to beaucoup rock ‘n’ roll at too high volumes for too many years has left me with the sort of hearing disability that misses many of those niceties that these earnest people are describing to me. Since I can’t get that lost hearing back, I guess I’ll just go the rest of my way listening to music at somewhat less than the highest fidelity possible and be happy.

When it comes to cameras, I have fully embraced the digital age. The flexibility, the instant gratification, the ability to manipulate and adjust images … what’s not to like, at least for the casual user? And having a camera constantly on my person a la iPhone means that although the greats of photography have nothing to fear from me as far as their reputations are concerned, I can snap away with gusto wherever I am and whenever I desire, and what photos I take please me and mine.

And recently I was shown how to use the best toy ever for someone like myself. For instance, at left you see an elderly reprobate standing next to a lovely woman at her birthday party a couple of years ago. As a joke, I had ChatGPT make the fake magazine cover from that. Next I asked the software to take away the words and substitute a map for the cake, and a completely imaginary but very pleasing picture was the result.

At last I have the tool I need to construct pictures of the world I would like to live in as opposed to the one I’m actually in, even if only on the computer screen. For a Minnesota boy who grew up on movies, which are filled with imaginary universes on screens, that’s known territory and a pretty good deal.

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It’s Saturday morning and Robin and I are staying with her sister Jill in her very nice apartment in Hartford SD. We have traveled just under 900 miles to attend the birthday party of Robin’s grand-niece. She is now one year old.

We flew in on Thursday, and had dinner with the birthday girl, her mom Amanda, Jill, and some friends at a local and legendary steak house, the Hartford Steak Co.

It was unbelievable. Like a fifty year march back in time. There was a back-in-the- day decor, an excellent server, and a 6 inch filet mignon dinner for $16.95!

Robin and I are not red meat-eaters in general, but at that price (if i lived here) I would happily return again and again, clogging up what arteries of mine that were still patent. So it’s best for my health that we live far from Hartford.

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Only 3 1/2 months till the elections. so far I have postured and fumed and pontificated, but I haven’t got down to doing the get out the vote work. Time for me ro roll up my sleeves …

Bridges

jono55

There is one positive thing about being surrounded by wildfires in that there are some of the prettiest sunrises and sunsets as the color red comes to the fore in both of them. We’ve had about two weeks now of poor air quality due to smoke. Even the teensy version of asthma that I have has been provoked by it.

Robin and I cancelled on walking with Indivisible in the local parade on the 4th of July. We decided that if we were going to be taking a chance on sunstroke or smoke inhalation or both, ’twas time to bow out. Fair weather rebels, we.

The smoke is heavy enough that you can begin to see a faint haze between you and any object more than twenty feet away. Our friends on oxygen are staying home, eating what’s left in the pantry before they venture to the grocery store. We volunteer to run those errands but they are stubborn folk and insist on doing it themselves.

Just to reassure, Robin and I are in no danger. None of the fires are close enough or in the right location to threaten Montrose.

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The image of the masked “patriots” on the bus tells a story, doesn’t it? A young black woman surrounded by a gaggle of MOLC (Men Of Little Courage) on public transportation.

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The men, of course, are on their way to a white nationalist demonstration, where they will do their best to get that woman to her proper place in the back of the bus once again. These cowardly dipsticks have nowhere to swim but upstream, although it seems that they haven’t the wit to realize it.

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The Way It Is, by Bruce Hornsby and the Range

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The header image today is of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell entitled the The Problem We All Live With. It portrays a six year-old girl named Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by federal marshals in 1960. She was, all by her small self, integrating a New Orleans school.

My imagination falls short each time I hear this story. The courage of that family, to send their child through the hate-filled mob each day. Who has courage like that?

The mob that came together to threaten and hurl imprecations at a six year-old girl. What is wrong with people who could do that to a child?

Here’s a video with some of Ruby’s story.

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Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Simon and Garfunkel

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Today’s button image is worn by a group of citizens who attend and monitor the Montrose City Council meetings. At present the council is 60% MAGA … ’nuff said?

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The Fifth of July

jono55

We finished re-watching the television series Breaking Bad this past week, and I was actually surprised at how many things I had forgotten from the first viewing. What was more clear this time was that Walter White was evil from the get-go. He didn’t develop into a bad guy, he was a bad guy waiting to be given his chance. He taught himself to make methamphetamine, one of the worst of the addictive drugs, and sold it without a qualm.

The last episode of the series blew me away this time. Maybe the best single hour of TV I’ve watched. It was crafted out of that New Mexican desert, turning slowly and coloring like a water jar from an archeology dig.

There was a song played over the final scene that was perfect. So much so that I checked it out and found that the series’ creator Vice Gilligan had known for some time that this was what he wanted to be played when the five seasons came to an end. I’m not going to say any more just in case there are those among you who haven’t watched the series as yet. Listen up.

Baby Blue, by Badfinger

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It’s 0400 hours and the strong winds of the day to come haven’t begun as yet. Leaves on the ash tree in the yard are rustling just enough to trigger the backyard motion detector repeatedly and I turn it off.

Last night’s sunset was glorious. Everywhere its light touched in our house was overlain with a rich deep red, all due to smoke on the western horizon. There is the scent of a campfire everywhere in Montrose from grasses and trees burning sixty miles away.

Older parents tear up at scenes like this one from the Gold Mountain fire near Ouray, seeing brave children out there along such a precarious line. Looks a bit like an impressionist version of Hell.

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Many mornings here in the mountains are cool enough to make having hot cereal for breakfast a comfort food. For years one of my favorites was oatmeal. You know, those flattened things called “rolled oats”in the tall round boxes ? I became a sort of connoisseur of oatmeals, eventually settling on a 5-grain mixture from the Red Mill people as the best I could find.

I had tried the steel-cut oats on a couple of occasions but was put off by the long cooking times necessary. That was until the Instant Pot came along and made the process quick and easy. Now it is steel-cut for this (drugstore) cowboy every time. Here is one recipe.

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When you have a criminal for president, the outrages come at you several at a time and day after day. At first one tries to keep up with each one until you realize that is their plan. To numb you out. There is no dealing with this gang of stooges on their schedule. Pick out the most egregious scandals and stick with opposing those bits of awfulness until we get the whole sorry blood-stained bunch out of the White House, and then we can begin dealing with the stragglers one by one.

We don’t have to indulge in revenge fantasies, which can be personally poisonous. Crimes have been committed and there are still enough untainted judges to help sort out the innocent from the felons.

*

I did search for learned quotes about revenge, since I did bring up the subject, and found these opposing views.

The person who seeks revenge should dig two graves. One for himself and one for his enemy.
– Author uncertain

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.
― Heinrich Heine

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Lola, by The Kinks

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On a recent visit to the REI store in Grand Junction, we found that visitors to the bathrooms were greeted with this sign.

I was in a bit of a hurry, and didn’t have time for pondering, but I found the idea of being nude in the REI restroom so unappealing that I chose to disobey the instruction.

There were no consequences.

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The Taylor Swift multi-day wedding extravaganza is apparently underway. I was not invited so anything I say about it could easily be interpreted as a spiteful reaction to being left out.

But my review of the whole proceeding is this: meh. Tone deaf and ultra-wealthy celebrities flaunt their wealth in a party of preposterous dimensions while the majority of Americans are struggling to pay their bills.

The ghosts of ancient Roman citizens are nodding their heads, because they’ve seen all this before.

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Lastly, this is part of an address given Friday morning by Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. It reads like music, like poetry. How welcome are thoughts like these, how true observations like these.

For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.

We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all….

You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again—including 250 years ago—those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty…hither have they fled.”

And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted—but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.

As we mark 250 years, what do we see? We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world—one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.  We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. 

We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands—those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone—and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few. Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor.

Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model.  We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and still believes his country can do better by his family. Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. 

Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors—without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have—as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more—not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.

There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it, they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?
…

Those ideals upon which our nation was built—they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.

Zohran Mamdani, 6/3/2026

You can watch the full address on YouTube by clicking this link. I do believe, at this moment in time, that this guy is my favorite immigrant.

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Fire In The Hole

jono55

This past week we took a tour of the Old Hundred Mine, located near Silverton CO. At $29 per person, it was by far the most expensive such tour we’d ever encountered. By a factor of at least two. But I think it was worth it. First we were loaded into tram cars and then we were whistled straight into a mountain for three miles, in nearly complete darkness.

When we reached the turning around point, the tram stopped and we disembarked and gathered around the leader/spokesperson. We learned about the history of mining drills and drilling, and the demonstrations of those implements were dramatic and deafening. Next he covered how miners communicated through visual signals, since the environment was often a very noisy one. We also heard about ore handling, the history of lighting in mines, and some differences between hard rock mining and coal mining.

What made this all more meaningful was that this man was a lifelong resident of Silverton, and had worked for two decades at the same job he was telling us about, with its rewards and dangers. The takeaway impressions of our little group were almost unanimous. We were:

  1. fascinated by the information he provided
  2. repelled by some of the tragic stories of injury and death that he shared, of people he had known personally
  3. appreciative of the humor woven throughout his presentation
  4. absolutely grateful that we had never been put into a situation where working as a miner was asked of us, because we would have bolted immediately

One sidebar. At one place outside the mine if you looked up you could see the remains of the famous Old Hundred Boarding House very near the top of the mountain. Since back in the day the trip up to that level was by mule and was both slow and hazardous, a boarding house was built at the top. It was bolted to the mountain itself, and had a front deck that was pretty dramatic.

While trying to sleep in a building that had to be fastened to a mountain to keep it from sliding off into the abyss would have likely been impossible for an acrophobic like myself, I can easily recognize that it saved hours and hours of travel time to and from the ground thousands of feet below. Here’s a small boarding house gallery to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

So that $29 ticket price … pretty high but worth it for the realistic scenes and the colorful word painting by our tour guide.

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My personal journey in non-violence greatly intensified the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Like so many of us I was staggered by that event, going from disbelief to grief to anger and back to disbelief countless times in the succeeding hours and days. We know now that he was far from a perfect man, but at the time he and his wife represented courage and possibility and brought out the vision of a shining America of which we could be proud. So how could a single bullet take all of that away?

That’s the problem with death. There is no reprieve, no walking it back. No second chances or do-overs. In those golden but bloody years when Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and Bobby Kennedy walked the earth and were then murdered my revulsion at political violence only strengthened. It is why even though Cluck is the loathsome creature that he is and even though he is harming our country almost with every in-breath and out-breath, I don’t want some yahoo with a rifle to make him a tawdry martyr.

Make no mistake, I want him gone, and if given the opportunity I would happily volunteer to drive the van carrying him to prison, but if humans are going to make lasting progress, violence in all spheres needs to be dialed back to as close to zero as we can get it.

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In 1976 Tom Waits was becoming the kind of alcoholic that I had hoped to become when I grew up. One that wandered smoky bars and midnight avenues in the company of colorful characters. An artist sacrificing his body to follow his muse and then perishing while mourners filled all the barstools but the one held empty in his honor.

Only problem was that while I was capable of bending my elbow with the best (or worst) of them I wasn’t an artist. I was just another doofus who didn’t know when to stop and then found that he couldn’t.

Waits came up with a new album that year, Small Change, and this was the song that led it off.

Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), by Tom Waits

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Saturday evening the smoke blew in, coming from southwest Colorado and southeastern Utah. Enough to irritate the eyes, trigger a cough of two. The aroma of a campfire was everywhere.

On the map, Montrose would be located just south of Delta.

On last Saturday three firefighters lost their lives near the Colorado-Utah border. A tragic loss. There are times when fires are burning nearer to us that I see members of firefighting crews in town, usually shopping for groceries or grabbing coffees at a Starbuck’s. They are all young and fit and there is such an obvious camaraderie present it is a joy to watch.

They are one more bunch of people in uniforms that keep us safe by doing work that is dangerous and they know it but they still go out there. Such courage is a rare commodity, something never to be wasted.

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Song to the Siren, by Nobody’s Wolf Child

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Much Ado About Something

jono55

This is a confession. Supposedly doing it is good for the soul, cleansing and renewal and all that … we will see. There have certainly been times in my life when I confessed one thing or another and it didn’t turn out well for me at all, but let’s not go into that, okay? My present admission of wrongdoing is that I am using ChatGPT to muck about with my own photographs, and having quite a bit of fun doing it.

An example is today’s header image of the White River. I took a perfectly good photo, loaded it into ChatGPT, and told the program to make the pic into something on the order of a plein air painting, and you can see the result. I liked it enough to use it for today’s blog entry. Here is the whole deal in a nutshell:

  • there is nothing that the program can do that a skilled user of any high-quality photo editing program, like Photoshop, hasn’t been able to do for ages
  • I am not a skilled photo editor user, being actually embarrassingly incompetent at it
  • all that was required of me in this instance is that I told my AI co-conspirator what to do, in the simplest of terms
  • the result made me happy, so I am likely to repeat the offense and the resultant deception of the viewer
  • I have no conscience twinges at all about this manipulation
  • this is the last time I will ever mention it, from here on in I will take full credit for having talents that I do not in the slightest possess

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So. Central Rain (I/m Sorry), by R.E.M.

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I created something in the food department this past week. Earlier I had made another dish that required caramelized onions as an ingredient, and as I was sampling them I thought … you know, I bet these would taste awfully good in that home-made hummus that I brew up periodically. I did a quick web search and found that there are few hummus-making companies that make such a product. Apparently cooking those onions takes time and doesn’t fit well into an industrial model.

So I tried it and voila! ‘Twas delicious! My appreciation for the sweet/savory dish that is caramelized onions is easy to trace. Back in the 1940s my mother would cook liver and onions for our family, and by the time everything was ready to serve those onions were black/brown, crispy, and addictive. We had this tasty stuff rather frequently for a couple of reasons, the first being economy. Organ meats were cheap and available, even in a time of wartime rationing.

The second reason was that every member of our family liked it. As a quasi-cook myself, I know that having something to serve that everyone likes is just too seductive. Such a dish will show up on the table way more often than food that produces grimaces and revulsion.

So, if you are ever served my onion-flavored hummus, know that you are on my A-list. Because making it is some trouble, after all.

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There are some small fires burning here on the Western Slope, and Wednesday morning here’s what our sun looked like through smoke drifting past us.

The fires are in remote areas and not threatening lives or buildings, so don’t get much attention in the media even locally. With so little rain this year, tinder is basically everywhere.

Today I remembered the lines from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner as I walked out onto the now creaking wooden deck in the backyard:

“Water, water, everywhere
And all the boards did shrink”

Yep, shrunk and creaking they are.

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It wouldn’t be a giant leap to call me an escapist. From reality, that is. I like movies and I love music, and both of them provide moments when my thoughts are completely diverted from where I am and what I am doing and what is going on about me. I am escaping. As a card-carrying geezer now I take time to look backward at my life and try to make sense of it, usually failing. It’s a haphazard script with no distinct plot line, but it’s what I have to work with.

Movies hold a special place in that retrospective. From the time I took my 17 cent allowance and walked to a Saturday matinee at the Nokomis Theater in Minneapolis right up to today, I have noticed one continuous thread. When I would leave the theater as a nine year-old, for about an hour or two I would take on the characteristics of the hero of the film, acting like him or talking like him. I was taller, smarter, stronger than everyone else, who were now boring creatures that I was doomed to deal with. I absolutely reeked with suavity and savoir-faire.

Jump forward to 1969 as I was leaving the theater after viewing “The Godfather” along with several friends. This time I felt those same stirrings, but this time I felt guilty about them. I recognized that I had seen something more than an entertainment, I had witnessed a great movie. But what was it about? A bunch of fascinating people who killed other people without a thought. They had a sort of code that they lived and died by, which only meant that while women and children were not to be touched, it was open season on any adult male who stood in their way. So now I walked and talked like an amalgam of Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, but I felt very very uneasy about what had just happened to me. I recognized that I had been completely manipulated. All of that evening’s “heroes” were murderers, and I cared what happened to them.

And here comes Thursday’s NYTimes to shine some light on my personal murk. A film writer (another geezer) has written a book about movies and it touches on exactly those sort of transformations.

“You could argue that ‘The Godfather’ is the key film,” Thomson said. “It did everything the medium is meant to do. It had a gang of absolutely brilliant people. That film brought together talents of an incredible nature.” In addition to Coppola and a cast that included Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and a parade of first-rate character actors, the movie owes its place in the canon to people like Dean Tavoularis, the production designer; the cinematographer Gordon Willis; and the sound editor Walter Murch.

“It was a smash hit,” Thomson went on. “It won all the prizes, and yet what is not talked about very much is what the film is about. For me what the film is about is persuading men that they want to be in the gang and in the family, and they want to do the terrible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”

NYTimes: Did Movies Ruin Everything?

But here’s the question that still rankles. Why in the world would I want to emulate anything at all, if only for a nanosecond, about this guy?

(Nice suit, though.)

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On Wednesday something unusual happened in our corner of the universe. Around 2:45 in the afternoon there was a 15 minute downpour of much needed rain. Only a quarter of an inch fell, but it caused one significant disturbance here in Paradise.

For the past several months our local City Market grocery store has been undergoing a large restructuring and renovation, and the end is still not in sight. When that rain poured down it found flaws in the workmen’s planning, and water began to pour into the store from one end to the other. At first the management tried to deal with it by closing first this aisle and then that aisle, but they finally gave up and closed the store completely at 3:00 PM.

It was a case of much ado and you can bet there will be finger-pointing of the first magnitude.

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In Defense Of Odd Ducks

jono55

I started out the day reading one of those NYTimes obituaries called “Overlooked No More,” where the subject died long ago, this time in 1986. This one was about of one of the great loners of life, a man named Robbie Basho. Guitar player, singer, lifelong celibate, spiritual seeker forever on the road.

The piece made him sound desperately lonely. Living life on the margins and having to be supported by his father well into adulthood, making music that rather deliberately goes its own idiosyncratic way, it would be tempting to give him a diagnosis of mental illness of some sort. To try to find some DSM shoebox to put him in.

There was a book published back in the sixties written by Thomas Szasz called “The Myth of Mental Illness” which had a lasting effect on my thinking about the labeling that we do today, and have always done, of those whose minds spend less time in the mainstream than our own. It helps to remember than until 1973, psychiatry officially defined homosexuality as a mental illness.

DSM-IV accepts that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of mental disorder. This concept, like many others in medicine and science, lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations. Because mental disorders are a heterogenous category of disorders, no single definition captures the entire range of conditions that are currently included in this term. 

Psychiatric Times

The obituary made it sound as if his music might be hard to find, but Apple Music offers quite a lot of it to us. The tenor vocals are not your everyday stuff, sounding like something from another age, certainly another culture. Many resemble medieval ballads. The instrumentals were the most interesting to me, with their novel tunings and rhythms. I listened to many of those cuts in today’s early hours, and there were those that were haunting, like the one that follows.

Rocky Mountain Raga, by Robbie Basho

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Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.

Khalil Gibran

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Here in Paradise we are one mile closer to the sun than those that live at sea level. You’d think that being 93,000,000 miles away from that precious star of ours a single mile wouldn’t make a difference, but at least in my imagination it does. At midday when the temperature is in the 90s on a cloudless afternoon the sun is merciless. Your skin can turn a lovely shade of red much quicker up here, making sunscreens a vital need.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face old Sol all day long. Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their advertisement to the world come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face Ol’ Sol all day long.

Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their gateway come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

This June it has been warm enough to set records many times. In the middle of the day there is no one out and about in our little housing development. We are all hunkered behind drawn drapes and waiting for the afternoon shadows to lengthen and provide a protective cover. When I lived in Buffalo NY, a cloudy sky was the norm, and whenever the sun broke through it was reason for celebration. Not so much here in Paradise.

So far this year, we’ve had 2.6 inches of rain here in Montrose, which is less than half of normal. Even that normal amount of rain produces what is termed a semi-arid climate. At the 50% level, we are that much closer to being a Mojave Desert suburb. Local municipal water costs are high enough that only the more affluent have those lush green lawns that are so (foolishly?) admired. Everyone else’s yards are half-brown, the grass stressed and tired, hanging in there and waiting for the coolness of Fall.

But one saving grace of living in Paradise is that we have only to take an hour’s drive to the north, south, or west to escape the furnace. A visit to Silverton at 9,000 feet takes away nearly ten to twenty degrees from those record temperatures. Like a splash of cool water.

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Cool Water, by Fleetwood Mac

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What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Going to spend Thursday night in a rental cabin with the Hurleys. The cabin is small, with no electricity, running water only in summer, and limited cooking facilities. It’s a 50th birthday for Amy. When the children are AARP material it becomes even more difficult to maintain those mental myths of being middle-aged.

The cabin is located along the road to Silverton, and back far enough in the woods that it is not visible from the highway. Hiking is possible, a stream runs right by the place, and there is a grand view from the wooden deck. (Robin and I scoped it out a couple of weeks ago). Looks like fun to me.

I am in charge of cooking supper on Thursday, so of course I initially overthought the whole thing and brought myself to the fingernail-chewing point as a result. The menu that has evolved is almost bulletproof, needs only primitive help from the primitive gas stove and oven, and can be kept warm for hours if need be. So I am very near being relaxed and may even enjoy myself.

I do have a clear memory of one camping episode where I was responsible for the supper and had prepared a white chili ahead of time. I thought that, too, was a bulletproof arrangement. Just before serving it to our fellow campers I managed to dump the whole kettle-full onto the ground, where it mixed with the forest duff at the campsite. You might want to make a note of this, but combining beaucoup dirt and a few cups of pine needles with a white chili makes for quite an unattractive entrée. I scooped the mess up, tossed it into the trash, and off we went to a nearby town for pizza.

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Plus ça change …

jono55

It was a different time but everything is still the same. The novel and the film made from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath have been almost sacred documents for me. I don’t remember the moment when I first saw the movie but it made an impression that I never got over. Maybe I was looking through the slats of my crib when I saw it, but who cares anyway? There is so much in it, so many lessons to learn. The acting is superb, the cinematography an excellent black and white.

Toward the end of the story there is a speech for the ages, and Henry Fonda does it full justice. Riveting.

And what parts of that speech, filmed in 1940, do not apply today? Hunger, violence against working people, homelessness, poverty, greedy politicians, police brutality … all set in a country beset by drought and near-famine.

We don’t have a Dust Bowl to point to, but we do have an overheated planet on our hands, and a loooong-lasting drought here in the West. We have the thugs of ICE sent out by our own President to beat us up, kidnap us, and kill us. We have bankers, politicians, and plutocrats to suck up the money that could save tens of thousands of lives. We have an epidemic of homelessness, one that is even more durable than that of the refugees in Steinbeck’s story.

A French man coined a phrase in 1849 that goes something like this (actually, it goes exactly like this): Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . Translation: The more things change, the more they are the same.

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Hold On, by Tom Waits

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Here’s a few stills from the movie Grapes of Wrath. Just the act of selecting them gets me stirred up and means I’ll have to watch the movie again soon.

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In general, Americans are not a people who plan long-term. At least our political leaders don’t. It is rare for them to look beyond the next election cycle. While this is an understandable thing for selfish men and women of limited wit to do, it is not good for the big business that is the US. Because it means that we are forever using Band-aids to cover the leaks in the dike, rather than getting a good stonemason out there to effect a more durable fix. Whiplash, carom, ping-pong and ricochet are words that could describe our domestic policies and programs way too often.

I long to see grownups in office. I believe that there are more of them out there, but perhaps that is too much to ask. Perhaps talented adults look at the gigantic squalling daycare that is Congress and say “Not me, buddy, no way am I going in there. Spending (two, four, six) years getting nothing done but changing their diapers is not the life for me.”

Or … who knows? Using the celestial imagery that I grew up with, there are way too many days when it looks to me that Satan is in charge while God has tired of us and has pulled back for a well-deserved rest from our unceasing babble.

We’re on our own, folks, and I wonder if we’re up to it. But hey, it’s time for me to make a new sign and carry it down to the public square. There is always fun to be had in pissing off the yahoo contingent in town.

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There’s A Bright Side Somewhere, by Ry Cooder

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This is a marvelous little tale about a ballet production in Turkey. The kind of accidental happening that warms the heart. Title of the Piece: In Its Tragic Finale, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Is Interrupted by a Cat. We can all use a good cat story once in a while, and this one fills that bill nicely.

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Looking For The Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits

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And now, in the slightly creepy department, a recounting of my latest adventure in AI.

In the early morning hours of Thursday I had posed a question to ChatGPT, and had received a helpful answer. The interesting thing is that at one point the text read: “there are many choices but what I would recommend in your situation is …”

Notice that pronoun? It said “I”.

I immediately shut down the computer. I have no idea who “I” is, and I was not in a mood to receive visitors. Then, as I stared at the empty screen I realized that I had no way of knowing whether the machine was still looking at and listening to me. My confidence in the On/Off switch has been shaken.

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Horsepower

jono55

On Sunday evening Robin and I attended an event at a local BnB which was sponsored by our local Indivisible chapter. This was a social occasion rather than a strategizing occasion, which was sorely needed by the working members. So good to just have some time to hang out and enjoy one another’s company.

The first half hour consisted of mingling and the next two hours we spent watching a television broadcast of the Rise Up: Sing Out! concert that was taking place in New York City and being viewed all across the USA. There were stirring speeches and stirring songs and a lot of beautiful people saying things we needed to hear. Jane Fonda was there, as was Bette Midler.

Robert De Niro even got up to speak and to give his assessment of what we can answer whenever we hear Trump open his mouth. According to him all we need to say is: Shut the fuck up. For the next minute the audience enjoyed a call and response thing where De Niro would make a statement and we would answer with that same pithy phrase. Clearing out the cobwebs, so to speak.

Robin even won a door prize, so the evening was a total success.

One of the last songs of the evening was The People Have The Power, written and sung by Patti Smith, from her 1988 album. The song was long and loud and brash and was a perfect fit for the evening.

The People Have The Power, by Patti Smith

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I hope that you can forgive an old Minnesota boy for having completely missed Patti Smith. Singer, songwriter, poet, photographer, author of twenty books. Whew! Right by me. What a waste of space I have been. The case could be made for just putting me to sleep and making an end to the whole sorry thing.

On the other hand, if you recall these words of Jesus imagine what a good day they are having in Heaven right now.

I say unto you that likewise more joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance.

Luke 15:7, King James Bible

My first attempt at repentance was to read the Wikipedia biographic entry on Patti Smith, and by the time I was done with even that abbreviated bit of prose I was exhausted. And in awe. She is such a creative person that she makes the gap between her and we ordinary mortals depressingly obvious . When Bob Dylan couldn’t make it to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize for poetry, who do you think went in his stead? Yep, it was Patti Smith.

I’d love to see a PET scan of her brain at work, I’ll bet you could light an entire room with the glow.

She is regarded as one of the earliest punk performers, and the album Horses is listed among Rolling Stones’ 100 Greatest Albums. But in my listening this week I found that she has a tender and lyrical side as well. Here’s the lullaby “The Jackson Song” from Dream of Life. It was written for her two-year old son. Prepare to be beguiled.

The Jackson Song, by Patti Smith

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Lyrics to: The Jackson Song

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Patti Smith yesterday and today.

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Coming back from the grocery store I was listening to our local station which is KVNF. It’s the kind of station where the absence of corporate ownership means a lack of the sterility you find generally in music radio. Definitely old school. Local DJs play what they want, and between the bunch of them they cover pretty much all of musical genres except for classical. Today one was playing a version of Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. It was a live performance and was both electrified and rock-ified. Tom Morello sings along with Bruce. Good cover. Enough passion for a multitude.

The Ghost of Tom Joad, by Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello

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I’ll See Your Rheingold and Raise You a Valkyrie …

jono55

As we approach the version of Götterdämmerung that the downfall of Cluck and his henchmen might produce, it has to be with a mixture of joy and apprehension. We don’t know exactly what will come after, do we? Whenever one of the people on “our side” says about a progressive candidate: “As long as he’s opposed to Trump, we can tolerate almost anything,” it does provoke a twinge or two. That’s probably what the Republicans said a few years back, and look how that turned out.

Thing is, I do care. And we need to realize that until we have shored up the damaged places where our country’s support systems that were supposed to keep us safe have failed, there will be all kinds of people coming forward to stake claims. For a while you and I may have odd bedfellows indeed, perhaps some that give us that fingernails-on-the-blackboard sort of feeling. Perhaps we will find down the road that there is more to them than the rough cobs they seem today, perhaps not. But today we need more men and women like AOC, like Bernie Sanders, like Graham Plattner. Because whatever their flaws or past mistakes they are comrades in arms.

One big lesson we have borrowed from the past and that will be most helpful in the future is trust but verify, trust but verify, trust but verify, trust but verify. Did I mention trust but verify? Good. As we try to assemble a government from the dysfunctional mess that Cluck has created, we may have to ask each one of us to empty our pockets and our lunchpails as we walk through the company gate at day’s end, until we find ourselves on a better track again.

All of this somehow reminds me of the Russian story about men and wheelbarrows.

There was a man who had worked at a factory for twenty years. Every night when he left the plant, he would push a wheelbarrow full of straw to the guard at the gate.The guard would look through the straw, and finding nothing he would pass the man through.

On the day of his retirement the man came to the guard at the gate as usual but without the wheelbarrow. Having become friends over the years, the guard asked him, “Boris, I’ve seen you walk out of here every night for twenty years. I know you’ve been stealing something. Now that you’re retired, tell me what it is. It’s driving me crazy.”

Boris simply smiled and replied, “I’ve been stealing wheelbarrows!” 

Cluck hasn’t been stealing wheelbarrows. He’s been stealing from the people’s treasury, the people’s reputations, the people’s national security, and the people’s public health. He has undermined organizations devoted to keeping us safe, dismantled our agencies of scientific inquiry, assaulted the purity of our air and water … my fingers tire of typing out his many sins, at the thoughts of the hurt he and his people have caused.

Götterdämmerung … Twilight of the Gods … indeed. Some gods these guys have been … false as the day is long. Bringing them down to their proper size will probably take time and some bleeding of the body public.

Let those who are able resolve to protect our most vulnerable ones until this tumult has passed.

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Gray autumn morning
Poco and I side by side
Each on his own chair

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We are still watching the soaper Nashville, and the plots and subplots have all of the characters’ hearts aflutter all of the time. Five episodes ago a new member of the cast playing a talented singer was revealed to have an ex-husband, when the man shows up after five years to threaten her, and ends up punching her in the face. The singer then buys a gun.

Since then the errant ex has been portrayed as just the nastiest piece of work, and he has made the woman absolutely miserable. He even successfully sued her for a chunk of her earnings. It’s seemingly win, win, win for this sweatstain on the face of the earth. But Robin and I know something he doesn’t, which is that the Principle of Chekhov’s Gun has been invoked, which goes like this:

If you show a gun in the first act, you must fire it by the third act.

Our message to the ex-husband’s character: One of these days, you arrogant blaggard, you will get your due. Somewhere out of the camera’s view and nearly forgotten there is a doom that awaits you, and we stand ready to chortle when it comes. We take our soap operas seriously here at BaseCamp.

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Near the end of the South Rim Road at Black Canyon National Park there is a pullout at a scenic spot called Sunset Point. At some time in the past someone had the foresight to see that this would be a great place to hang out and watch the sun go down. So the Park Service created a safe space that little children couldn’t easily fall from and gave it a name.

On the evening of 6/12/26 there was, as there often is, a small group of folks from around the country waiting there on the first cloudless twilight in weeks. The sun did not disappoint and went down one more time, perfectly on schedule. Somehow this is always a moment. Strangers sharing a place and time, talking quietly in subdued voices. Like in church, actually.

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Taking It Slow

jono55

When an alcoholic walks in out of the swamp that is addiction and is looking for a chance at a new life, one of the first things they are told is that they must stop drinking. That without taking that all-important step nothing else they do will matter. The addict looks down the road at the rest of their life and groans, “Never? Forever?” And that’s when some very wise advice comes wafting in through the haze of a hangover: “Don’t worry about forever … stay sober just for today.” Break obstacles down into small enough chunks and now they begin to look … possible.

That’s the advice we can give ourselves when we wake up each morning and look out at our country’s plight. “But there’s so much wrong … how will it ever be made right.” The answer is that we don’t have to do it all at that moment, we only need to do what we can and then rest, even if briefly, gathering our strength for the next challenge. But in this particular present moment, we just need to do the next right thing. All of those “next right things” done by all those other outraged souls will add up to the change we want.

I’ve decided that Robert Reich must be writing even while he is eating and using the bathroom. There is no other way he could continue to turn out the volume of material that he does. His Sunday essay on Substack: The Coming Revival of America, was one of his best yet. The thesis? That America had been heading in several wrong directions for a good long while before the Clown King came along, and that we the people needed more than a gentle wake-up call to see that.

The clarity of Reich’s opinion makes one want to hit their own forehead with an open hand and cry Yes, yes, of course you’re right! How could I have missed that? One possible answer is that as long as we weren’t the victim, directly, perhaps we didn’t care as much as we should have.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemoller

He does not underplay the dangers and the national trauma that beset us daily. We can still be rounded up and imprisoned without cause by a masked army of thugs, our government has been subverted and may well be used against us even further. These realities may not vanish overnight but Cluck has definitely turned over the rock and shown us where things need to be fixed.

Maybe we needed this horrific wakeup call in order to get back on the road we should have been on. We needed to see how fragile the institutions of self-government are in order to know why we must strengthen them. We needed to be reminded of what America is all about — what it should be about — in order to revive it — and reclaim it, for and by the people.

Robert Reich, Substack

Good man, Reich. At four feet eleven inches he stands taller than the thousands of sycophants and toadies who have either caused or enabled our present sea of misfortunes.

BTW. Reading this piece made me realize that it is not really this country that I love. What I love is this country’s ideals. I am not even certain, after the past several years, what this country is today. Is it still a democracy? Or is it a fascist fever dream? Or is it only the playpen of the unimaginably rich? Or is it something so malleable that at any given moment it is what the people who care most want it to be?

For the past couple of decades or so, it was the MAGA-leaning crowd that were excited, who suited up and showed up with their wrecking bars and their disdain for almost everything that people like me thought was good about America. They walked right in and took the prize and immediately began tearing it apart in order to reassemble it in their own special way. A way involving white supremacy, cruelty, and bigotry. They covered the floor of their birdcages with copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

But we are awake now. WE being a beast that roars and remembers. WE can see clearly what we’ve lost, what we’ve given away to these charlatans and mountebanks. WE are the ones who helped beat back tyranny in WWII. WE are the ones who marched on Selma, who were beaten and hosed and arrested by thugs in uniforms and thrown into jails. WE are the citizens of Minneapolis who took care of one another when ICE came with their masks and guns and lawlessness. WE read those two precious documents that constitute a the libretto of an opera of freedom that works when enough of us sing it together.

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Blowin’ In The Wind, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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We were promised a windy day on Tuesday, and we got one. We were also promised a warm one. Paradise is dry as tinder and a space where one spark could do much damage. At times like this we don’t need human error to produce a fire. Last year there were half a dozen fires started here on the Western Slope in a single night of lightning strikes, including the one that did its work in Black Canyon National Park.

I recall conditions like this several years ago, when Robin and I were in Santa Fe during a prolonged dry spell and it had been made illegal in that city to smoke outdoors. Not just campers out there in the boonies, everybody.

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Where Have All The Flowers Gone, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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Okay. I wasn’t going to mention this thing, but really, I have to. This is the Corvette ZR1X. It is a hybrid. Believe it or not, at almost a quarter of a million dollars as its sticker price it is by far the cheapest entry in the supercar category of automobiles.

Here are the numbers.

  • Zero to sixty mph = 1.7 seconds (at 1.9 seconds my head would snap off and roll about the cockpit, leaving my torso with some hard choices)
  • Top speed = 233 mph (I have never had a reflex anywhere in my entire body that was quick enough to cope with this)
  • Horsepower = 1250 (my Subaru has 182 of these)
  • Price = starts at $207,000 (A Maserati or a Ferrari in this category would cost several times as much, so don’t complain)
  • Gas mileage = completely irrelevant to buyers
  • Usefulness in hauling groceries = nil
  • Coolness factor just sitting there on the asphalt = killer to dudes of a certain age

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Robin and I awarded ourselves an all-expense paid trip to the local Dairy Queen this week, and as we were spooning frozen delights into our mouths I happened to notice a couple of images on the wall. One was an abbreviated history of Dairy Queen itself, and the other of the beverage chain Orange Julius.

I thus learned that the beverage Orange Julius got its name from the fact that in 1926 “Julius Freed and his partner Bill Hamlin opened an orange juice stand in Los Angeles.” Apparently Bill didn’t feel the need to have his name included. Either that or Julius was just plain evil.

More interesting were the two items listed below.

1938: Americans discover McCullough’s new, softer and tastier kind of ice cream called “soft serve.”

1940: “The Cone With The Curl On Top” lights up for the first time in Joliet, Illinois.

Why interesting to me? Because if that image were more complete, there would be an entry right in the middle that read like this.

1939: Jon Flom born in Faribault MN, a man destined to be one of DQ’s most devoted and notorious customers

End of story.

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The accident of the timing of my birth meant that I have been privileged to be surrounded by some of the best music ever written, pop and otherwise, as I grew up and grew older. The big bands were still playing concerts in Minneapolis when I was a teenager, even as rock and the folk revival took the stage from them in the sixties. R&B was everywhere stitched into that rich fabric, and the blues … under it all and above it all.

I don’t really claim a favorite genre, as all of them have meant something different and important to me. But I have to admit that the one that grabs at my heart each time one of its songs comes on the air is folk music. It’s a big tent, and nobody ever did it better, IMHO, than Peter, Paul and Mary.

500 Miles, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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Up a Tree

jono55

A couple of weeks ago, on a single day, 274 people summited Mount Everest, a new record. The average cost of such a trip is around $70,000. What kind of extraordinary accomplishment can it be if 274 persons do it in one 24 hour period? It has become little more than an entertainment for the very wealthy, as the risks have been systematically reduced and the mental and physical fitness required are less than they once were.

I’ve never understood the attraction of climbing mountains, and thought the recurring phrase “I conquered the mountain” more than a little overblown. The mountain was there before being “conquered,” and was still there unchanged afterward, caring little for the specks of humanity crawling around on its surface. But I have had respect for the effort, planning, and risks involved in such ventures. Now it is becoming a matter of writing a check, putting on the new outfit you bought for the occasion, and joining the throng in line.

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America, by Simon and Garfunkel

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As I was typing this early on a Thursday morning something really disappointing happened. Willow and I were sharing the futon in the unused bedroom that I call my office when we heard unmistakable munching noises coming from the kitchen. I leapt to my feet and rushed to find a half-grown raccoon making its exit. I pursued the beast into the back yard, calling out silent imprecations so as not to rouse the neighbors. It simply climbed twelve feet up the ash tree and looked down at me impassively.

The villain. The interloper. The masked mammal from Hell sent to perplex the faithful and the well-intentioned.

After a minute or so of us staring at one another the raccoon carefully descended and took off running toward the west and over the fence to safety (at least from me). Imagine my chagrin when now that I had the chance to think about the matter I realized that it had marched right past my flashing red intruder alarm as if it were nothing. Aiieeeee! One more unhappy discovery. One more bright idea come to naught. It’s back to square one, at least where this species is concerned.

I think these critters are rather cute when on the proper side of my kitchen door. But only there.

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The last cartoon in the set above pretty much summarizes why many rank and file Democrats are seeking more aggressive leadership.

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Across The Borderline, by Ry Cooder with Harry Dean Stanton

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After a couple of rejections, I once again had a Letter to the Editor published in our local paper. The rejections I completely understand and sometimes even agree with. I can be a bit of a smart-ass when I write (which I know comes as a great shock to you) and there are moments when immediately after I push the button “Submit” which sends the letter off to the Montrose Daily Press that I wish I could get it back.

Anyway, here’s what I said.

I had the pleasure once again of attending the Montrose City Council meeting on June 2.  The mayor opened the proceedings by using the time worn technique of trying to put lipstick on a pig when he read a self-congratulatory statement describing how fair and balanced a guy he was. The “pig” on this occasion was his refusal to issue a traditional proclamation naming June as Pride Month.

Where was the pleasure?  That came from when one citizen after another walked up to the microphone to give heartfelt, moving, and sometimes blistering testimony on the importance of showing that marginalized groups like the LGBTQ+ community are accepted and valued in Montrose.

When we should be taking every opportunity to deplore the violence, bigotry, and exclusion that we can see being visited upon these citizens on a regular basis, it is unacceptable when elected officials hold back on any form of support they can provide. Their mean-spiritedness makes Montrose look small indeed to observers.

BTW, even though the MAGA faction on the City Council wishes the whole subject of non-heterosexuality would just go away, the third annual Pride Festival took place on Saturday and was a great success.

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To RLF in 2011

There may be time to be away in Winter
But not in Springtime
Then I will need you here

To watch the stars gather
To walk the path up to the point
To listen to the whip-poor-wills at night
To watch herons hunting in the channel
To paddle silently across the lake at twilight
To share the feeling of the wind blowing through the bedroom window

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And I Am Still Searching, by Pete Seeger

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Next!

jono55

I was reading yet another news item about the ongoing furor over bathroom safety for women when a neuron way back there … probably in a dusty corner of the hippocampus … woke up and made a contribution.

When the Minnesota Twins came to town, they did so at the new stadium in Bloomington, which quickly became noted for having inadequate bathroom facilities for women. There was always a continuous line of patrons stretching from the bathroom itself, out the facility door, and down the corridor. Women might miss entire innings or multiples of the same before their needs could be met due to this situation.

When that stadium was eventually torn down the mistake was at least partially rectified in its replacement. But while the old structure was still there, my brother and I took our father to a game. I was taking advantage of the seventh-inning stretch when I went to ease the pressure that drinking a couple of cups of beer had produced.

I was standing at one of a line of perhaps a dozen urinals attending to matters when a young woman came through the door, walked past that line of twelve men who now were leaning dangerously forward and trying their best to become invisible, and entered one of the stalls with a competent door on it. A minute or two later she came out and without a word left the room.

Now this was when I was still at a Neanderthal stage where women’s issues were concerned, but as she passed the line, I thought to myself – Brava! You go, girl! Such chutzpah! Problem solved!

As I washed up, I felt privileged to have been present at that little blow struck for equality.

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When Robin and I were living in Yankton, South Dakota, which is a smallish town of about 15,000 souls, we were fortunate enough to see the musical group Brulé, a Native American band of musicians. They played several times at local summer celebrations, and also put on wonderful Christmas concerts.

The origin story of the group is really interesting, in that its founder Paul LaRoche grew up in a southern Minnesota town as an adopted son of a farm family. When his parents were asked about where he came from, they said, “Well, he’s darker skinned because he’s Canadian.” Once his parents had both passed away, Paul was going through their papers, trying to put things in order, and discovered that he was not Canadian at all, but Lakota, and that he’d been born on the Brule Reservation in western South Dakota.

Paul then went out to the reservation town of Brule, South Dakota, where he found that he had living relatives. It wasn’t long before he moved his family there. He had been a rock musician up until this point, but now he began to incorporate Native American themes and rhythms into his music, and thus the group Brulé was born.

Robin and I became fans long ago, and I’ve chosen this video to exemplify the kind of music that they played, which often incorporated native dancers and could be quite thrilling. Paul plays keyboard, and two of Paul’s children are in the video as well, Nicole on flute and Shane on guitar. The drummer with the group in this video is Moses Brings Plenty, who has since made acting a career. Recently he was seen on Netflix in the two-part series, “Sitting Bull,” playing the title role.

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There are a few of the Tesla cybertrucks here in Paradise, perhaps three or four. Both Robin and I find them ridiculous looking and actually offensive to the eye. Like finding an automotive turd at the curb. So when I came across a piece on Substack I was interested enough to read it.

Most of the piece was describing the chicanery Elon Musk has been guilty of in trying to mask the failure of the truck in terms of sales, but it was the line below that made me chuckle. Robin and I have always wondered who buys this ugly thing, and now we have some clues.

Considering its only target market is sci-fi-illiterate, emasculated, deeply sexually frustrated, doomsday-prepping divorced dads, its sales have been utterly woeful.

Substack

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You may have looked at the very cool header photograph (which is not my own) and thought … WTF … this guy probably never got on a skateboard in his entire life … and you’d be right. And I am not trying to do some underhanded cultural appropriation, either. But there was an article in the June 1 issue of the Times on a skateboarding location in London that was so interesting that I had to share it. It’s about an area called the “undercroft” which is a sort of skaters Mecca, inviting pilgrims from around the world.

It’s of no matter that I haven’t been on a board and never will be. If I were to start out now I am certain it would bring on the dreaded Humpty Dumpty Syndrome, where no one could put me together again. But I possess a very special facility. I can daydream blissfully about a past that I never had.

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Cool Water

jono55

It’s one a.m. and the night air still carries some of the day’s warmth with it. There is enough of a breeze that the branches of the ash tree in the back yard are doing their dipping and bowing thing, which has awakened the wind chime from a three-day slumber. All is well out there.

So much branch activity is also triggering my motion detector alarm continuously, so I turned it off for the rest of the night. This means of course that we are now vulnerable to footpads, pillagers, cutpurses, and bandits of all stripes. Such is my faith in this bit of technology’s ability to scare off any sort of intruders that I wonder if I’ll be able to go back to sleep, knowing that the proverbial door is open.

You scoff? A simple blinking red light is no barrier to a resourceful highwayman or 700 pound Siberian tiger, you say? I beg to differ. In the twelve years we’ve lived here, in spite of all the things out there that go bump in the night, we’ve never once been ransacked or ravished.

No, friend, when you invest $29.95 in a security system you expect and get the best.

.

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My rec center playlist served up a song I hadn’t heard in the longest time, Change, by Big Thief. When I use such lists during exercise I am never quite certain that what I remember hearing is accurate, being short of oxygen and all that. But these were pretty thoughtful lyrics and they’ve stayed with me. The chorus reminds me of a theme that shows up often in films and literature, which is that if we could live forever, we would face an unending series of losses as all those we knew and met and loved would die while we persisted. Forever.

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?

I think in such a situation I believe that I might take the same defensive position that men often do in wartime when on the front lines … not become attached to the new guys because you know that many of them were destined not to make it. Altogether I think that it would be too sad, too lonely a place to be.

Can I talk about vampires for a moment? Anne Rice wrote some of what might be the most intelligent stories about them in her series of books, and there are moments in those narratives when exactly these same thoughts are expressed. The loneliness of never dying, of having retained the ability to care while knowing you will forever be the survivor, and that each of your beloveds will eventually be taken from you.

Nope, don’t think I’d like it very much. Not at all. The present cosmic arrangement has quite a few unknowns in it, and a glitch or two besides, but all in all it seems preferable to me.

Change, by Big Thief

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As we stumble through the present fetid morass that is our public life toward the day when the reins of government are wrenched from the hands of the fascists, it might be helpful to give thought to what a handful of others have thought about power. We could start with that maxim of Lord Acton’s: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.” Sounds good enough, and might help to explain the tumor that is Cluckism and its allies.

But Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, flips that on its head when he says: “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” I like this latter explanation better. For me, that is where the light goes on in the cranium.

But, anyway, here’s a smattering of other people’s thought on the matter.

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. ”
― Robert Ingersoll

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“They joined hands.
So the world ended.
And the next one began.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

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Here’s a story for you. The classic country-western song Cool Water was written as a poem by Bob Nolan in 1936, when he was still in high school. He went on to form the musical group Sons of the Pioneers, where he put music to the poem and recorded it in 1941. For me, the tune has always been around, because as soon as I was old enough to appreciate music, Cool Water was there.

While it tells the story of a parched man traveling a wasteland tormented by mirages and talking to his mule, it could also be taken as a metaphor for a traveler seeking truth and enlightenment in a world seemingly filled with dishonesty. Either way, hope is offered to the desperate.

Cool Water, by the Sons of the Pioneers

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Turistas

jono55

Robin and I haven’t been everywhere in the world, but in the part that we have explored, it is obvious to us that putting an image of a chile pepper on the license plate of New Mexico is no empty boast.

Everywhere we went this past weekend we were given chances to take a shot at one fiery dish after another, starting with the free chips and salsa offered many places. Those salsas all had more authority than we find here in Paradise, where they seem to tone things down for the gringos.

Being a card-carrying gringo myself, I really don’t mind being cosseted in this way, it has probably saved my stomach lining on countless occasions. My Nordic genes came from people who had never seen a chile in their lives, and thus had no opportunity for evolution to prepare their bodies for such onslaughts.

All this heat in all those peppers comes from capsaicin, and at full strength it is something awesome to deal with, no matter where one is from. But even this killer substance pales before a Moroccan cactus.

The hottest natural substance known to man is resiniferatoxin, a chemical found in the sap of the Moroccan cactus Euphorbia resinifera. While pure capsaicin measures 16 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU), Resiniferatoxin clocks in at 16 billion SHU—making it roughly 1,000 times hotter than pure capsaicin.

Wikipedia

Now that cactus would make a salsa that could walk itself right to your table with no need for a waiter. Each serving would come with a burner cell phone with its speed dial already set to call a nearby hospital.

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One of the most striking of commemoratives to fallen soldiers is the Viet Nam Memorial Wall. It is stark, black, and 493.5 feet long, containing the names of 58,318 U.S. service members who died or remain missing. Iris DeMent offered this moving song about the wall, in 1996. The song goes a long way toward explaining why visiting that site and reaching out to touch the name of someone dear is enough to bring tears.

Each time I look back on that war, I wonder how such a thing was allowed to happen. We deserved so much better from our leaders. Ahhhhhhh, what folly, what a criminal waste of those lives.

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There are moments when the headlines get me down, especially when I contemplate the appalling ignorance and hateful behavior of the MAGA side of the political spectrum. And the ugliness of the Trump faction. And the craven cowardice of most of the Republican Party. But this morning it occurs to me that there is no reason to be surprised by any of this.

Let’s take a look at myself, for instance. Most of the time I act in a civilized manner, am kind to animals and small children, respectful of my elders, and always remember to zip my fly before going outdoors. But there have been times when I behaved quite differently. When I forgot or ignored not just the Ten Commandments but my own personal commandments as well (and there is quite a list of those, way more than ten).

And yet that less moral person co-existed with another more moral one in this same body, and I must prudently assume that he is still in there somewhere waiting to see if he gets another turn one sunny day. What I see as my assignment is to be vigilant and aware, to recognize each time he puts his boots on or asks to take the podium and deny him that access.

I have learned along the way that there are others who have this same struggle. Perhaps not you, dear reader, but it appears that it is not only me who has a Mr. Hyde as part of his makeup.

In fact let’s take a look at America, land of the free and home of the brave. Studying our history reveals this same sort of dichotomy. We have much to be proud of and much to regret. Right now we are in a regret-filled moment. Our national Mr. Hyde is at the helm and we can easily see what a mess that has made of things. But we forgot that he was in there, didn’t we? We assumed that normality and decency would keep him in check but it didn’t. When we finally get the upper hand again one of the first things we will have to do is strengthen our resolve that he not be allowed out in public ever again, while never assuming that he won’t try.

It’s not a one and done thing, this political and personal life of ours. But if we can keep our heads clear, we will soon be able to pick up the bag and pointed stick and go out to clean things up.

Shoot, if a possum can do it, why not us?

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In 1958 a tune called Rumble was launched, and is still one of the best rock instrumentals … ever. It was originally done by Link Wray, and here he is all decked out in perfect rock and roll swagger in 1974, playing it live.

(For some unfathomable reason once Wray is done playing another video starts up. Feel free to quit at that point.)

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Memento Mori

jono55

I met Paul Nelson while working on the locked psychiatry ward at the University of Minnesota Hospital. We were orderlies together on the ward for a couple of years and became friends. When I married my first wife, Paul was the first person we had over for supper. Once I entered medical school and stopped working on the ward, we saw each other less often. In March of 1969 news came to me that he had been killed in Viet Nam. In July of that same year I began my service in the US Air Force.

Paul was one of the good guys, one to whom laughing came easily, and the sort of person to whom performing kind acts came naturally. He would have been 84 years old now, but that unnecessary war shortened his life to age 27. When each Memorial Day rolls around I think about him.

Put all of the generals, the secretaries of defense, the presidents, the planners and prosecutors of that ugly conflict on one side of a scale and Paul on the other, and if the measurement used is who was most of value to this country … for me, he wins.

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Got them ol’ can’t find it blues …

jono55

At an AA meeting this past week, I started out using one of my favorite quotations and was dismayed to have it finished for me by another member of the group. Shocking. Impertinent. How dare that addict step on my line? Screwed up my timing and my composure all at once. What was the saying, you ask? It was one that originated in the very early days of Buddhism:

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” 

I asked that modern oracle ChatGPT about it, and got little more than this dry comment:

This proverb carries a profound philosophical lesson. Enlightenment or personal growth does not exempt you from the basic responsibilities and physical realities of human life. The chores, bills, and everyday mundane tasks will always be there. Before enlightenment, you might perform these tasks grudgingly, wishing you were doing something else. After enlightenment, you perform them with total presence, peace, and mindfulness, finding the same value in folding laundry or doing dishes as you would in profound spiritual reflection. 

It was information, but not exactly what I was looking for. So my next stop was an article from Plum Village, the monastery where Thich Nhat Hanh spent the last years of his life, in exile. The title of the piece was HOW TO/ The Zen of Dishwashing. It was lively, witty, and amusing. It was also spot on and my search was ended.

But I now knew that the wisdom expressed in the proverb was not exclusively mine, not if that dimwit across the table from me could quote from it as well. Going to have to use it very sparingly, I thought, and never when he’s at the same meeting.

I am nothing if not petty.

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I’m Not Feeling It Anymore, by Van Morrison

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This has been a very windy Spring so far, reminding me of my first few years in South Dakota, where there were long stretches when I couldn’t launch my canoe even on the small lakes around Yankton. I have never loved it when the water would slosh over the gunwales of that boat. I am an okay canoeist, but not a great one. There are definitely times when I should not leave the cabin, but play another few games of solitaire instead of going paddling. I have always tried to be mindful of this acquired wisdom, and it is one of the reasons that I am still alive and here to beguile or bedevil you.

We’ve got a couple of strings of prayer flags out in the back, strung from the ash tree to the board fence. They flutter at the faintest suggestion of a breeze, giving us fair warning about what the day holds and allow us to plan the morning’s activities with accuracy. When the flags stand straight out from the line we do not venture far from home, thus avoiding much spitting out of airborne sand and other grit. (Actually, when the wind blows like that, I don’t even like to think too much about what the air might be carrying and I might be breathing in or swallowing.)

What these blustery days are really good for is drying clothes outdoors. Low humidity and a stiff breeze are nature’s tumble dryer. I put up one of these racks several years ago, and any day it is not raining is fair game for Dame Robin and her sturdy wooden clothespins.

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On Hyndford Street, by Van Morrison

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A couple of weeks ago, Robin returned from church and opened a conversation that went like this: “You should write down everything you do and where you put everything that’s important in case you die.” It’s the sort of tête-à-tête that senior citizens have from time to time, and while I gave her only one point for tact, I had to award two points for it being a good idea. ‘Twas something I had neglected to do.

Anyway, I am now engaged in writing everything down and placing it in a 3-ring binder. There is no real system that I have for where I put stuff. Sometimes it simply comes down to a space that was available in a drawer in the house or garage and that’s it. Many of those hiding places were so good that even I can’t find them now. God help my descendants.

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Our drive to Santa Fe from Montrose takes 5 1/2 hours, but from beginning to end it is such a lovely trip that you hardly notice the time passing. Until you stop the car and find that your bottom half is stiff and does not want to get out and go anywhere. The scenery is constantly changing, deserts … mountains … forests … valleys … canyons … it never stops, not until you hit Santa Fe itself when it becomes a less exciting urban landscape. For us the charms of the city are near the Plaza, the oldest part of town.

We first visited this town in 1995, and at that time stayed in a quaint BnB named Inn of the Animal Tracks. It afforded a great room, a short walking distance to the Plaza, was not too costly, and served excellent breakfasts and afternoon teas that were provided by a woman who came in just to cook for us. That’s the good news. The bad news is that today it has become some sort of Urgent Care Center, even the front entrance is greatly altered.

Bah. Humbug.

But we did find something that is unchanged from that first trip through Santa Fe, and that is a restaurant named The Shed. The atmosphere is delightful and much of the food was the kind of stuff of the genre that you can’t get back home. I know that something named The Shed sounds a little unpromising but if you take a chance on your next visit here you may like it … a lot. I include a few photos taken there, including one of a life-sized sculpture of a wolf that I couldn’t stop looking at. A startling piece that looked real for a fraction of a second before my brain had time to process it.

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On Saturday we discovered Museum Hill, where there was so much to be seen and done that I don’t understand how we ever missed it. It’s just a mile and a half from the Plaza, but you do need a map or GPS to find it. At least I did, because it is in the boonies. What’s up there?

  • Museum of Indian Arts & Culture
  • Museum of International Folk Art
  • Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
  • Museum of Spanish Colonial Art
  • Santa Fe Botanical Garden
  • Milner Plaza Labyrinth

Here are a few children playing in the labyrinth. If you could somehow shoo these critters out of there, walking it would be a serene thing to do.

My excuse for overlooking this wondrous collection art and culture is that Santa Fe has so much to see downtown and around the Plaza area that I never looked elsewhere.

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Whooo? Me? Cubist?

jono55

I had the good fortune this past week to attend a lecture/presentation by a polymath. Yes, a polymath, and I know what I’m talking about because I just looked up the word and now I am allowed to call myself an expert.*

A polymath is a person who knows a lot about a lot of subjects. If your friend is not only a brilliant physics student but has also published a poetry collection and won prizes at political debates, you can describe her as a polymath.

Vocabulary.com

Robin and I had been invited to a talk about small owls in Colorado by our friends, the Evanses. The local chapter of the Audubon Society was sponsoring the evening’s program. The speaker, Scott Rashid, was a slender middle-aged man in a baseball-style cap, plaid shirt, and the sort of pants one wears when camping or hiking. He seemed eager to get started, so was handed the microphone and a remote control, and off he went.

What followed might have been the single best Powerpoint I’ve seen, and I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, mostly of the stunningly boring kind, each image stuffed beyond measure with more information than one human being should ever have to bear. This presentation was smoothly constructed and filled with imaginatively arranged images that appeared without fail due to his mastery of the remote control. His knowledge of the four owl species that collectively made up his topic seemed encyclopedic to this rank amateur. I don’t believe he took a breath during the entire hour, keeping oxygenated somehow by absorbing gas through his skin.

Why do I call him a polymath?

  • Great fund of knowledge of his subject and related birds
  • Has created an organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured and orphaned birds (CARRI)
  • Author of several books
  • Skilled wildlife photographer
  • And the killer is this – he is a gifted artist who paints scenes which combine principles of cubism and wildlife painting

Yep, you heard me, cubism. And the paintings are beautiful, like nothing I’ve even seen, combining several views of the same bird, for instance, in a single portrait. Like this one of the northern pygmy owl.

This art is for sale in several forms, and the proceeds help to support his work.

You might be interested in a short video about Rashid and need a link to his website, so here it is. Once there, take a look at his art work. It is extraordinary.

*When I was in pediatric residency training, the working definition of an “expert” was: an SOB from out of town with slides.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Heartless Bastards play Gates of Dawn for your listening and dancing pleasure. Cranking the volume is allowed.


(As an aside, is this the best name for a rock band or what? Seriously!)

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Water warm as blood
Drips along the paddle shaft
Ducklings hide in reeds

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This next weekend Robin and I are driving down to Santa Fe for the weekend. The occasion is our 34th wedding anniversary. It’s the second marriage for both of us.

During the years immediately after our divorces, we both sought counseling at times. The counselor who Robin was seeing wasn’t sure about her re-marrying relatively soon after going through such a traumatic period, and expressed the view that she and I getting together was probably only a “transitional relationship.” Meaning that once she came to her senses and took a good long look at me she would toss an “Adios” back over her shoulder as she moved on to the real thing.

Well, the “transition” will be starting on its 35th year next Sunday, so either he was wrong or Robin is really slow at making up her mind. Either way, I am a clear winner.

(Here we are on that excellent day in 1992. I can hear you thinking and you are quite right … I definitely married out of my league.)

.

***

We’ve visited Santa Fe several times before, and have enjoyed ourselves each time. For us, the town has such a pleasing vibe. Art galleries and museums galore, the Santa Fe Opera, the historic plaza, the presence of adobe buildings everywhere you look. Good restaurants, great food.

There is also the important connection with Los Alamos during the years when the Manhattan Project was operating. The small but busy office that managed access to Los Alamos and everything that was going on up there was at 109 East Palace, in Santa Fe. Before you took that rough mountain road and drove 33 miles to your new home you had to walk through that doorway. There is a bronze plaque that reads:

109 EAST PALACE
1943 SANTA FE OFFICE 1963
LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
All the men and women who made the first atomic
bomb passed through this portal to their secret
mission at Los Alamos. Their creation in 27 months
of the weapons that ended World War II was one of
the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

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Santa Fe, by Tough Country

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My Man Cuco

jono55

Awright class, put away the phones and listen up. Today we’re covering a genre of Mexican music known as the rancheras. So here is a definition:

Ranchera, or canción ranchera, is a traditional Mexican music genre that emerged before the Mexican revolution, deeply tied to national identity and rural roots. Known for its emotive, passionate, and theatrical style, it features themes of love, nature, and patriotism, heavily influenced by mariachi music.

I’ve told this story before, but when I was sixteen I came across an album by a guy named Cuco Sanchez. In spite of being the poor and starving student that I was, I bought it when I could have had one by Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry instead. I’d never heard of Sanchez, had no idea of his importance (major) in Mexican music, and I didn’t know a ranchera from a quesadilla. (Actually, at that point in my life I didn’t know what a quesadilla was, either.)

But I fell in love with the album, and here I am sitting out on the backyard deck on a ninety degree day in May with an iced coffee on the table and Cuco Sanchez playing on my excellent Bose music system*. Cuco and I have a relationship that has lasted a loooooong time now, even with him having had the poor grace to pass away 26 years ago. That original vinyl album is long gone, but there are all these other ways to listen …

*The excellent Bose music system. Weighs only a pound, goes anywhere I go if I so choose, and reproduces most of the notes played by the musicians, I think.

I bought it refurbished several years ago and it looks like it is going to outlast me and become someone else’s treasure.

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Since every song Sanchez sang is done in a foreign language (bother), I will take this opportunity to reveal the lyrics of one of my favorites, Arrieros Somos.

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos
Y cada quien tendrá su merecido
Ya lo verás que al fin de tu camino
Renegarás hasta de haber nacido

Si todo el mundo salimos de la nada
Y a la nada por Dios que volveremos
Me rio del mundo que al fin ni él es eterno
Por esta vida nomás nomás pasamos

Tú me pediste amor y yo te quise
Tú me pediste mi vida y te la di
Si al fin de cuentas te vas, pues anda vete
Que la tristeza te lleve igual que a mí

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos

Oh, you want it translated? Sheesh. Who cuts up your meat for you?

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way
Everyone will have what they deserve
You’ll see that at the end of your path
You will deny even having been born

If we all came out of nowhere
And to nothing by God we will return
I laugh at the world that in the end not even it is eternal
For this life no more, no more we will pass

You asked me for love and I loved you
You asked me for my life and I gave it to you
If at the end of the day you leave, then go
May sadness take you the same as it does me

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way

Cheerful little ditty, no? I give it a ten for philosophical meandering, but a zero for danceability. Never mind the details, I’m a fan.

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Arrieros Somos, by Cuco Sanchez

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Cuco Sanchez, circa 1956. Both he and I have changed quite a bit since then.

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Friday morning I threw away several hours of my life and took the Subaru in for some scheduled service. At 90,000 miles, every “scheduled service” seems to cost a thousand dollars and take three hours. While that might be appropriate for a transmission flush, I really wonder if changing the rear window wiper blade is that involved. But I am not a mechanic, and don’t understand such things very well. It’s all a gamble, isn’t it … you pays your money and you takes your chances.

I recall reading an article decades ago that when It came to car service you only had a 30% chance of getting what was needed properly done. For myself, the high (or low) point was a long time ago when I took a new Volkswagen in for its first dealer service. The mechanic saved a little time by draining the old oil but not putting any new stuff in. When I left the dealership I turned almost immediately onto the freeway, and that was when I noted the warning light on the dash board. By the time I could safely pull over, the engine was toast. Morte.

However, there is always something interesting happening in the waiting room. Across from me is an old dude wearing a cap advertising a Belizean beer. Obviously that brew holds some special significance for him, although in the thousands of beers I put away when I was misbehaving in the alcohol department, I can’t recall one that would cause me to buy a hat to celebrate it.

On the other side of the room there was an elderly lady who was receiving a speech from the service representative regarding her latest car inspection. One thing after another was mentioned as not crucial at the moment, but which needed attention very soon. As the sixth or seventh item was read, she began to laugh softly. You could tell that she had reached the point at which any further listing of automotive needs and woes was a waste of time because the part of her brain that dealt with cars was completely full and could accept no new data.

All the way across the lobby is a younger man who is wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt along with what looks like a pajama bottom whose design I can only imagine was created by a person coming down from a seriously bad trip.

But I am serene. I cannot be shaken by problems that are beyond my comprehension. I simply take them as Divine Judgement, and am grateful that they are not more harsh than they are. It is possible, even likely, that I deserve quite a bit more.

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A great Pink Floyd tune, Fearless, here covered by Billy Strings. Respect + imagination + musicianship = good music. Crank it up.

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Things to be grateful for can sometimes be nasty things indeed. For instance, we can thank the Cluck administration for making no attempt to hide its rampant corruption, making it easier for prosecutors down the road. We can thank the Supreme Court for making it absolutely clear that it is little more than a modern version of the Reich Supreme Court that became a tool of Nazi Germany. We can thank the gallery of incompetents that is our Justice and Homeland Security Departments for revealing themselves to anyone with a perfusing brain that they are neither about justice nor homeland security, but intimidation.

So when it comes time to choose, it will be an easier thing to do. This November we have our first real chance to begin remaking our republic, following the guidelines provided by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. We can fire those Republican (and a few Democrats) toadies, and rethink how a healthier Supreme Court would look. We can start the process of removing Cluck’s fingers from the buttons that count.

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True Or False: The Sky Is Falling

jono55

It has become increasingly hard to decide whether the sky is falling or not. The bewailings of my newsfeed plus the profuse clamor in my messaging app makes it appear as if the world is composed of mostly people of the Henny Penny variety. You remember Henny Penny … right? Well, for those who don’t or who have never heard the classic European folk tale, it goes like this:

The inciting incident: Henny Penny is hit on the head by a falling acorn and panics, believing the sky is falling. 

The journey: She sets off to tell the king, gathering other farm animals (Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Lucy, Turkey Lurky) who join her quest. 

The trick: They meet Foxy Locky, who offers to show them a shortcut to the king’s palace. 

The ending: The group follows the fox into his den, where they are never seen again, and the king never hears their warning. 

There it is, simple and plain and perfectly appropriate to our times. Our problem is not a lack of warnings, it is the din of their profusion.

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Memphis In The Meantime, by John Hiatt

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It is something very close to Summer here in Paradise. Once this past winter’s not-very-hard grip on our lives had relaxed we have been seeing record warm temperatures. This week everything is in the 80s, and it is only May. Oh well …

Tomorrow’s weather forecast is: windy, hot, and dry. There is a possibility of “dry thunderstorms” as well. This is not a term that I have heard before. Is it possible that the weathermen and weatherwomen of the world have become totally bored saying the same old stuff from day to day and so they get together to coin new words and phrases to make their lives more tolerable?

When I was a lad we did just fine with the words fair, rain, windy, cold, and stormy. There were no polar vortices or dry thunderstorms or bomb cyclones back then, nossir. We made do with the simple terminology that we had and were glad to have it. My mother never sent me off to elementary school with the words “Now put your mittens in your pockets and wear those overshoes like I told you, there is a chance of thundersnow this afternoon and you want to be ready for it.”

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It’s nearly two a.m. and I have the back door open to let in some cool night air. There is a great horned owl out there in the dark who is excited about something and is letting us know about it. Some of my favorite creatures, owls. Endlessly interesting. Cruising silently in the blackness only to drop down on some unlucky small critter who never knew what hit it. Those eerie calls … the variety of habitats they occupy … just have a look at this gallery.

From upper left they are great gray owl, barn owl, boreal owl, great horned owl, and snowy owl. If I could wish for one of their attributes it would be the ability to turn my head around nearly 180 degrees to check out what’s behind me. It would be an immense help while driving my car, for one thing. And just think if you were going to try to sneak up on me from behind to cover my eyes and say “Guess who?” and suddenly there I was staring you right in the face. Unnerving, eh?

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Lipstick Sunset, by John Hiatt

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That little blue dot button over there in the sidebar may need an explanation. In the 2024 election year Democrats in the Omaha area came up with this simple image that says volumes. They were surrounded by Republicans and the idea that they were a blue oasis in a highly red district caught on.

I like the idea enough to have stolen it from the Nebraskans to apply it to our own situation here in Paradise. Two-thirds of the votes cast here in Montrose County were for a criminal for president in 2024. Two thirds. My, my, my.

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Dia De Las Madres

jono55

Well, if I needed another reason to not go on a cruise, I found one this past week, when hantivirus was added to the number of things that a person can catch on one of those floating Petri dishes. An infected ship found itself anchored off Cape Verde, with nowhere to go. The people on the mainland didn’t want to take a chance by letting any of the passengers come ashore, so those poor sick souls were restricted to the kinds of medical care that one can find on a pleasure voyage.

Three passengers have died and several others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings

AP News

I am pretty sure that none of the passengers was warned of the possibility of inhaling rodent droppings as they slurped and chewed their way across the Atlantic, but this is just a guess. It might be time to revive the tradition of having a ship’s cat on board. Maybe two of them.

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Mother’s Day is nearly upon us, and for once I am totally ready. When it comes to some of these “special” days, I tend to be a little bit Scrooge-y, since it is my firm belief that they were invented by the Hallmark company to prop up sagging card sales. But honoring the mothers of the world … I can easily get behind that.

Without those brave souls who were willing to put their bodies (and sometimes minds) on the line the human race would have pretty much come to naught 300,000 years ago, as the first pair of homo sapiens would have been the last. There is not a doubt in my mind that if men had been appointed to bear the children we wouldn’t be anywhere in the fossil record.

Nope, the job of bearing children was given to the right people, that’s for certain. And this year I will gratefully honor the mom who lives with me. My own mother has been gone for nearly forty years, but on Sunday I will raise a salute to her as well.

We owe the mothers of the world. Big time.

¡Feliz día de las madres!

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When I was a medical student rotating through the clerkships, I had the chance to observe some really amazing people of the genre that we were taught to refer to as “patients.”

There was the young gentleman who managed to acquire a case of gonorrhea while up in double traction for two broken femurs. There was another young man who conversed in a lively manner with us as we were interviewing him in the Emergency Room, although there was a knife sticking out of his chest which we knew from the x-ray was in his heart.

But there was one young woman, a child really, that I remember today. She was only sixteen and at term, scheduled for a Cesarean section for reasons that I have forgotten. Cesareans were not as commonplace at that time as they are now.

Her surgeon was the head of OB/GYN at the University of Minnesota at the time, and he was both quite old and a misogynist as well. He had chosen to do the operation under local anesthesia, but the injected lidocaine did not work well and the girl screamed all through the procedure. When her baby was finally delivered she slipped into semi-consciousness from exhaustion as her wounds were repaired.

I was standing outside the operating room as she was wheeled out past our group of students and the surgeon who had performed the operation. She looked up at him as she passed, lying on the gurney, and gave him what I can only describe as a take-charge smile when she said:

“See you next year, Doc.”

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I rarely use this blog to express opinions, and I am rarely dogmatic when I do (long pause while snickering subsides). But on this tenth of May 2026 I can say without qualification that the world is better off for having cheese in it. What prompted this declaration was the slow savoring of a bit of Jarlsberg as part of my lunch.

I know that there are perfectly nice people who don’t eat cheese for a variety of reasons and I am sorry for their loss. When I try to imagine a planet without the following necessities of life I begin to weep uncontrollably.

  1. Mac N’ Cheese
  2. Cheeseburgers
  3. Grilled cheese sandwiches
  4. Cheetos
  5. Cheese fondue
  6. Cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster
  7. Cheezits crackers
  8. Veal parmesan
  9. Potatoes au gratin
  10. Quesadillas
  11. Cheesecake
  12. Philly cheesesteak
  13. Fettuccine Alfredo
  14. Pizza

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … can’t go on …

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One of the names for a group of weasels is a sneak. This pretty well describes our present government and the national Republican Party as well.

Here is an unretouched photograph of one such sneak, which includes Cluck and several members of his cabinet.

They are, quite simply, not to be trusted with anything that is dear to us.

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Zombie News

jono55

If you drive twenty miles east from Montrose on Highway 50, then make a right turn at the sign indicating the route to Silver Jack Reservoir and drive another 15 miles on a fairly good gravel road, you will come to Big Cimarron State Park. As parks go it is fairly small, with only a dozen or so campsites, but many of those campsites are along the Cimarron River and that makes all the difference.

Now, if you walk to the last campsite on the south end of the park and keep going on the narrow path you will find there, in a short while you come to one of those magical places, where the river leaves the woods and tumbles noisily past you as it makes its way toward its eventual union with the Gunnison River. There’s a pool that might as well have a sign posted in front of it declaring “Trout Present.”

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Just a couple of miles south of this campground is another one, on a small body of water called Beaver Lake. There are another dozen sites or so here that overlook the lake.

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And …. a couple of miles further along the road places you in the Silver Jack Campground, which is the largest of the three, on high ground looking down on Silver Jack Reservoir.

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On the many visits we’ve made to this lovely area, there were always many campsites available, even on the busiest summer weekends. Really, these locations taken together constitute a treasure. And I haven’t even mentioned nearby Rowdy Lake, accessible on a short but rough road, and beyond that is Clear Lake which requires that you actually get out of your vehicle and walk a few hundred yards.

On our way back to Montrose we came upon a herd of elk grazing in a patch of open forest. About forty of them, big and healthy-looking and what can I say … majestic. Robin and I are always struck by the beauty of these animals whenever we are lucky enough to find them in the wild.

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Found this photograph on Substack, and thought there should be some sort of a medal that could be awarded this young woman for pluck and wit.

I suspect that the mastophobics who couldn’t bear to be in the presence of a visible breast were not mollified by her response.

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I have great respect for zombies. From what I’ve seen of them in movies, they are not to be trifled with, and can be surprisingly resourceful at times. They are never a force for good, being basically one of the forms that evil can take on Planet Earth.

So when I say that the Cluck administration is a zombie government I don’t dismiss at all the possibility that it can still do a great deal of harm before all of its members and their adherents are successfully neutralized. But they will be corralled, they will be removed from public office, and we will then be able to go back to ordinary legislative chicanery, which is unlovely but we know how to deal with it.

Unfortunately, while we have been stewing here in our zombie universe, the rest of the free world has moved on without us. We are already so untrustworthy that intelligence services of our former allies won’t tell us anything important because we can’t be counted on to keep a secret. On nearly every front we have moved backward while the world is going forward. Climate change? Human rights? Encouraging young democracies? Useful collaboration with governments that aren’t dictatorships? There really is not an end to this sad story.

Taking into consideration all of the harm Cluck has done to our republic, and all of the sycophantic enabling of him that the Republicans in Congress have done, is there a label that will better fit this whole unseemly gaggle other than traitors? And zombie traitors at that?

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(Periodically I will have what I have called a brain fart. Where a dormant group of neurons awakens for no apparent reason and provides me with a memory. Yesterday that recollection was of a joke which I used to tell often but it has been decades since the last time I did that. Before those unreliable nerve cells go dormant again, I will share it with you. What you have to imagine is that the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major speaks with a heavy brogue.)

A Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major comes into a pharmacy carrying a small box. Finding the pharmacist he opens the box, revealing a smaller one inside. Inside that box is yet another one and inside that one is a very bedraggled condom which he unrolls for the benefit of the pharmacist.

“How much for a new one,” says the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major

“Twenty shillings,” was the response.

“How much for repair?” says the soldier.

The druggist is a bit taken aback but answers: “That would be ten shillings,” came the response.

The Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major then rolls up the condom, places it carefully in the smallest box, then the next one, and finally into the largest of the three containers. He leaves the store.

The next day the soldier returns, calls the druggist over, and after opening all the boxes he takes out the condom, unrolls it, and declares: ‘The regiment votes for repair.”

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Trail Legs

jono55

Sooo … there is this genre of videos on YouTube that go like this: “If you are a senior and you do these ten exercises pretty much everything will be just great. You will look better, run faster, be unbelievably attractive to the opposite sex, and Army recruiters may mistake you for an 18 year-old.”

Or it may be five exercises, or something that requires a kettlebell or learning how to do Pilates on the wall. But all of them agree – if you don’t do something starting right now you might as well pick out your casket tomorrow and save your relatives the trouble of doing so later on.

There was one Asian gentleman who absolutely swore that if I do 50 of these and 50 of those and 50 … at this point I switched away from the guy because if there is one thing that is certain in this otherwise uncertain world it is that I will never follow any regimen that requires that I do 50 of anything.

One video did catch my eye, and I might actually follow up on it. It is called the medicine ball slam.

While there may be many excellent physiological results, like core strengthening and improved flexibility, what I can see immediately is how good it will be for the days when the world seems composed of two parts cowflop and one part thistles. Slamming that thing into the earth or the driveway … oh baby … I can already feel my spirit rising just thinking about it, tension and aggression slipping off my shoulders like raindrops on a tin roof.

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Tracy Chapman is a charter member of the good part of the human race, one of those rare people out there whose lives illuminate and support our own. Since her first album in 1988 that won all the prizes, she has created a body of work that is remarkable for its insistence on the value of each and every one of us, telling stories and raising consciousness all along her way.

This first clip is from 2015, with Chapman performing Stand By Me on late night television with a respectful David Letterman strewing compliments in her path.

The next video is from 1988, with the 24 year-old Chapman showing what all the fuss was about. Timeless and heartfelt and beautiful.

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We have now had a chance to see what happens when the Supreme Court of the land becomes completely corrupt and subservient to external power. Honor, rectitude, and a little thing called justice fly out the window and are nowhere to be found in their decisions. Except for the opinions of the minority, who came to the court believing in its role and obligations and have not lost their way.

Since most of the members of this august body have decided not to police themselves, to have even the teensiest idea of what good behavior might be, reforming the Court should be one of the first tasks of the post-Cluck era. As a first step, let’s get rid of those lifetime appointments. They are invitations to the Court becoming the festering mess we have today. Ten years … twenty years … some number that accepts the possibility that we might have made serious errors in the original selections.

Why saddle our republic with a Roberts or a Thomas or an Alito for generations? If we can’t completely stop their grift, let them take their motor homes and the stink of their decisions and ride off into an ignominious sunset. At the very least it would give us a chance to recover between bad apples.

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Fawn walks past our home
No comprehension of the
pleasure it provides

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On May first Robin and I joined in a small demonstration of “Workers over oligarchs.” Perfect day for signs and placards except for a sometimes vigorous breeze. At one one a driver pulled over and drove slowly past us shouting angrily: “Fuck You … Fuck You … Fuck You.”

Little he knew the satisfaction that it gave us knowing that our little signs were ruining his afternoon?

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Took our first hike on the burned-over area at the Black Canyon on Saturday. Perfect day for it. Interesting to be able to see so far ahead, because before the fire the Gambel oaks would have blocked our view. in most places. They were not tall plants, mostly under ten feet high, but quite bushy and leafy.

We brought our lunch with us and enjoyed a picnic at the Pulpit Rock overlook. Most people are familiar with the phrase “getting one’s sea legs,” where a person slowly becomes accustomed to the pitching and rolling of a marine vessel. There is something analogous in hiking, called “trail legs.” In this case it is the irregularity of the trail surfaces, the changing angles and composition of the earth beneath your feet. During the cold weather months most of our walking is on the smoother surfaces of the treadmills at the rec center or the trail systems of the city parks.

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Taking Names

jono55

“They are fighting with Jesus.”

Comedian John Fugelsang came up with an awfully good shtick recently regarding the hypocrisy of Cluck, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson arguing that the Pope should stick to popery and let the three of them interpret the Bible. Here’s a couple of quotes from an interview published in Good Faith Media recently.

Fugelsang believes the U.S. media frames recent social media skirmishes between the pope, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson in an unhelpful way.

“I don’t think [the pope] is fighting them,” he said to attendees in Alexandria, Virginia. “He’s showing us all calmly and with no anger or visible outrage how to delegitimize and expose these frauds. He’s making them fight Jesus.”

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Fugelsang also noted the challenge of what to call those who use Christianity for authoritarian goals, whether “conservative Christians,” “fundamentalists,” or “Christian nationalists.” He said he prefers the simpler term: “fake Christians.”

Couldn’t have said it better my own self.

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If you’ve been wasting your time reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a fan of Richard Thompson. Based on nothing, really, except that the man is capable of some of the best songwriting and guitar playing available on the planet.

I was late to join his fan club, because I hadn’t paid any attention at all to him until I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights back in 1982. The review made it sound interesting and when I sought out and listened to the music … I was gone, daddy, gone. I never came back.

There is a large selection of playlists that I listen to when I am involved in that most absolutely boring of activities – walking on the treadmill at the rec center. All of the music on those lists is from stuff that I own, but once in a while a piece comes on that I never actually heard before. I had bought an album for a particular cut or cuts and totally ignored the rest. I have no excuse for this reprehensible behavior but there you are. Mea culpa.

This happened just the other day, when the tune Her Love Was Meant For Me penetrated the standing fog in my brain as I was going into minute 22 of a 30 minute slog at incline #12 on the treadmill at 3 miles per hour. Whoa, said I, what kind of a fan can I be when a song this great is news to me? Especially since I own it? (Rhetorical question)

Here, take a listen, just to see what I’d overlooked.

Her Love Was Meant For Me

So what does all of this mean in the scheme of things? For dolts like myself? I dip into the past for the answer.

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When John F. Kennedy was murdered I didn’t know what to do with such horrific news. For days I was running on half my cylinders trying to make some sense of a world where one of its most important people could simply be blotted out by a nobody with a scoped rifle. Lots of water has flowed under that particular bridge since then, so when I learn that yesterday another bozo with a gun invaded a White House party I don’t miss a beat and continue eating my cereal. Life goes on, at least on the surface.

But deep down in there somewhere in my own personal dark web there is a pool of anger, cold as death. If I could learn about the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook and still do what was required of me the next day I can certainly do the same when a group of celebrities and politicians are briefly menaced. But that lake just deepened, even with this relatively minor episode. Numb? Don’t think so. Furious? Absolutely.

If the moment comes during my lifetime when we realize we don’t have to allow this particular insanity to continue and that we have the power to stop it whatever the difficulties may be, I plan to march while carrying my end of the banner in one hand and a taser in the other. You may have heard that there are men going ’round taking names … well, some of them are ancient souls. Like me, for instance.

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Taking Names, by Josh White

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