Author: jono55

Couple of days ago I heard someone say that a resounding win for Kamala Harris could be the chance for the Republican Party to reclaim itself. To be able shake off the noxious parasite that is D.J. Cluck once his influence is diminished.

I’m all for that. Wouldn’t it be an absolute treat to have a solid and sensible GOP again? Purged of its blatant racist, misogynistic, and fascistic elements? Not that this would mean a worry-free and comfortable cruise into the future. The plug-uglies on both the right and the left never go away completely, but bide their time and wait for weak moments.

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Last evening Robin and I attended a local school board meeting where public comments were being heard on whether or not an application to start a new charter school should be approved. I’ve been to such meetings before, in other parts of the country, and they have been very similar in tone. A group of well-meaning parents would like to have a “safe” environment where their kids could attend school. Very often these are the same people who have been doing home schooling.

When I say “safe” I mean ideologically safe, without the modern world intruding with its confusions and uncertainties and those pesky gray areas. The proposed school here in Paradise would deliver a “classical” curriculum (a term to be defined by the organization promoting it).

The counter argument is familiar as well. Monies will be taken from the public schools, which are rarely abundant enough in the first place. So a small subset of students benefit but the larger group loses out, no matter how the cake is cut.

I read through the manifesto of the proposed new school and found it to be composed of coded words galore. If it isn’t a right wing academy in sheep’s clothing, I am a potato.

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This morning I read something delightful and something awful. Let’s take the delightful first. Author Mick Canning’s post about the book he never wrote – a footpath book. The way he describes it I know that I would have liked it. When I explore new territory on foot, I very much appreciate guidebooks that do more than just say: … turn here and then turn there … , but that instruct and illuminate.

It’s a tossup at the trailhead about how to approach each new path. Do I just step out without preconceptions and build my own story or do I read another’s account of that same journey and add to what they have noticed or learned? There are territories where if I go my own way something is introduced that is not appealing – the possibility of getting lost. Being truly lost can change your day in ways you never imagined.

Yesterday I came across a story of a 90 year-old hiker who had been on a ramble and became lost … for ten days. He was a tough old bird and is happily alive to talk about it. It could have been a tragic tale, but instead became a warm-hearted one.

But there was something missing from the newspaper account and that was what he learned from being out there not knowing where he was or whether he would make it out. All those hours of all those days un-moored completely from the ordinary cares of the rest of the world and focussed on only one thing, surviving.

That is experience that is hard to come by. Invaluable.

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St. Joseph’s is only one of more than 500 such schools across North America that were similarly run by the Roman Catholic Church. Brutality and violence are patterns that mark the entire history of that institution, and as we have learned to our sorrow it is not just distant history. I wonder what God thinks about the Church representing Him here on Earth?

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What a great thunderstorm throughout last night. One epic booming after another. Funny how it never becomes boring or tiresome, with each blast like a new recording of the same song with different people playing. I think Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page were trading riffs last night, with Neil Peart and Keith Moon on drums.

At any rate the concert was deafening and awe-inspiring. That’s one thing about a thunderstorm in mountain country. The instantaneous reflecting back and forth of sounds from those rock piles gives a special lift to what surrounds the listener. We are grateful for the rain that fell during all of this although it was rather piddly in volume (now … that doesn’t sound grateful at all, does it?)

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A hot summer evening on my grandparents’ farm. Way off in the west there are flashes of light in the clouds on the horizon. Silent flashes. Grandma Jacobson looks at them and pronounces them “heat lightning.” Being a cautious eight year-old and not wanting to appear unusually doltish, I simply nod.

But I file away the information that there was regular lightning and there was heat lightning. Since the latter sort was always far off in the distance, I decide that it was harmless and not a source of those frightful and seemingly random killer bolts from the sky. I can safely forget about it entirely.

Later on I learned that heat lightning was not a separate genre after all, but just the regular old kind which was so far away that the sound of the thunder was lost. Here in Paradise we don’t seem to have heat lightning. Perha ps because the mountains prevent us from seeing those long distances. It was more of a prairie thing.

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You know when you go on a tour of a cave or mine the guide will at some point turn off the lights to show how dark real dark can be? That was what greeted me just before midnight on Sunday when Poco’s voice woke me and I found myself in total darkness. Only half conscious, I picked my way to the living room by feeling along the walls.

No electricity. Not in the house, not in our part of town. And the rainclouds took away the light from the stars. Like in a mineshaft.

The utility company was obviously having a night of it, because the juice came back in and then went out twice more before the show was over. It wasn’t until three a.m. that the electricity was steady on. And then it was nearly time to get ready for a trip on a steam train.

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From The New Yorker

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The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, often abbreviated as the D&SNG, is a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge heritage railroad that operates on 45.2 mi (72.7 km) of track between Durango and Silverton, in the U.S. state of Colorado. The railway is a federally-designated National Historic Landmark and was also designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1968.^[3]

The route was originally opened in 1882 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW) to transport silver and gold ore mined from the San Juan Mountains. 

Wikipedia

The dry description above is of the steam train trip Robin, Aiden, and I took on Monday. The three of us rendezvoused at a nowhere place called Rockwood, a brief stop on the Durango to Silverton route. It is nothing but a wooden platform alongside the tracks. No buildings, nothing to sit on. If the train knows it should stop for you it does, otherwise it rocks past and into the canyon carved by the Animas River.

The morning was blue/white skies and cool temperatures. We had purchased tickets on one of the gondolas, which are open-air platforms whose seats face toward the side, where all the scenery will be. Each car has a canopy to ward off rain and bird droppings, but that’s about it. You can ride in much more luxury in other cars, but I ask you … why would you do that? Sit in a stuffy box, facing forward, with nothing to smell but the other passengers, while the gondola riders are inhaling mountain air so bracing that the elderly are advised to go into one of the enclosed coaches in case they start to feel too healthy for their own good.

Now it is true that on the return trip it did rain, and some of that water did gain access to our persons, but when the sun came back out that brief sogginess was quickly forgotten.

I won’t bother trying to describe what one sees on the trip, there are a few photos in the gallery to whet your appetite. I will say that it was well worth the cost of the ticket, and who knows … I might do it again, perhaps in autumn, when all those aspens begin to glow.

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I tried to buy one of those camo print caps with the Harris/Walz embroidery and was disheartened to see that delivery dates are now moved out into October. How can this be? This is America, the land of the baseball cap. We invented the darn thing. Foul play! Fake manufacturing!

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(This post is a day late because I had neither internet access nor electricity. Makes it difficult to be on time)

Collegiate Peaks Campout 1

On the road again, but a much shorter journey this time. A two-day campout was planned for Monday-Wednesday at a place called Collegiate Peaks Campground. Ordinarily this would be a three hour trip from Montrose, but a crucial bridge on that route is being repaired which meant we needed to drive the long way round, about seven hours.

Robin and I took off Sunday afternoon and bunked in Glenwood Springs, about halfway to the destination. We walked a few blocks from our motel to a Mexican restaurant, ate well, and on our way back were caught in a sudden rainshower. If there is anything more delightful than a surprise summer rain on a sticky 92 degree evening I don’t know what it would be.

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From The New Yorker

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Collegiate Peaks Campout 2

Almost as soon as we reached the campground the thunder started cracking. Soon the rest of our group arrived and we were eight. After two hours of this symphony it began to rain … hard … for an hour. The rain let up for an hour, then began once more and continued at a less ferocious pace for about 8 hours. Spirits were definitely dampened.

Next day … same scenario. Blue sky morning, then thunder, then rain. At the first evening’s supper we learned that if you try to eat a pulled pork sandwich in the rain you are left with a handful of pork as the bun washes away. So the second evening some creative members of our group rigged a tarp to cover the picnic table which made things much better.

So … the outing was a flop? Nope. Not at all. On the one morning we had between the rains returned the eight of us drove to the top of Cottonwood Pass and took a walk under blue skies. Altitude 12,800 feet. Mountain views in every direction. Outstanding! It was worth a bit of dampness and inconvenience for a couple of hours of this experience.

One of the female members of our octet said there were similarities between camping and childbirth. In both instances there can be pain and misery but the next day all that is forgotten if the baby is fine or the sun comes out.

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t know exactly when it began, and the changes were so gradual that at first they passed almost unnoticed, but Robin and I now live in completely separate personal climatic universes.

There is no temperature at which we are both comfortable. If I am at my ambient ease she is too warm. Not a little bit too warm, but over the top too warm. When she smiles because she is finally in a body-friendly environment, I am over there shivering in a corner and wrapping myself in layers of afghans.

Oh well, if we are destined to become different subspecies I have confidence that we will do it with our usual panache. We’ve already worked through several dichotomies, including male/female, Buddhist/Lutheran, and lunkhead/sweetheart. Temperature misadventures … a piece of cake.

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Boar’s Head, a deli meats vendor, has issued a very big recall involving 71 of theirproducts. Listeria is the contaminating microorganism, and there have been two deaths reported.

Here in Paradise the Boar’s Head brand is carried by City Market. Actually I am not a fan of even the Listeria-free version of these products. There are less expensive competitors sold in the same store that I think taste better and as far as I know haven’t killed anyone.

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Growing up surrounded by a bunch of Norwegians in Minnesota it wasn’t hard to be sheltered from parts of our country’s story. In fact, I can pretty much pick the moment when my real education in American History began to fill in what were some pretty large blanks.

Up until then, it was George Washington, a sanitized version of the Civil War (slavery not mentioned), and a whole lot of brave farmers with pitchforks and muskets going out to fight those bloody Redcoats.

(Let me hasten to add here that those bloody redcoats are now some of our BFFs)

Today there are strong forces that would have us pull a tarp over everywhere that America went wrong. Pretend that we don’t live in a land forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. Pretend that not being content with thievery, we resorted to malice of nearly every sort against them.

I believe that we are a great country. Part of that greatness comes when we can honestly approach our history, warts and all.

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Okay, I wasn’t going to do it, but here’s the clip from Song of the South (1946) which was my first education on the “peculiar institution” of slavery. You can see where I might have had a slanted takeaway.

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The two senior-est citizens in our household are Poco the cat and Jon the human. Poco is having some real issues with arthritis and with mental processes. He seems to get confused, performs some odd repetitive behaviors, and has developed a sleep disorder.

This latter problem involves me. Within an hour after I have gone to bed he comes into the room meowing loudly and repeatedly. This is not okay, and I have told him so on several hundred occasions, with little effect.

Once I am up and out of the room with him he stops singing his noisy serenade. And there we are. It’s eleven o’clock and we’re both awake, staring at one another. I curl up on the futon and go back to sleep. In two hours he gets me up again. Repeat. Repeat.

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The air is so thick right now with Kamala this and Biden that and Cluck this and Vance WTF that the weather app on my phone has added a new reading: BS level.

The reading right now here in Paradise is 67, which is interpreted as posing a moderate risk to sanity and one’s immortal soul.

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Looking back on my life there is one clear direction that I can see, and that is whenever possible I would avoid confrontation. Of any kind. In fact, I would go so far to avoid such confrontation as to cross a contested street in the middle of an urban gang war to avoid somebody who I knew wanted to sell me yet another unwanted lottery ticket where the grand prize was an all-expense paid weekend at the Motel 6 in Gary, Indiana. Saying “No” is just so … wrenching.

As you might expect, I experienced a great deal of internal conflict in the years 1969 to 1971 when I found myself a small part of a very large war machine called the United States Air Force, an organization devoted to the art and science of confrontation on a very large scale. It was just not me.

Being retired and living in a rural town in the mountains where few people know me has been very good for the shy violet that I am. Even the few that I have met look at me and think to themselves “Is there any point in asking? When I do he squirms so much it makes me itch.”

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For our let’s-leave-the-sweltering-temperatures-behind hike this week we chose Aspen Trail 125 up on the Uncompahgre Plateau, about an hour’s drive from home.When we arrived at the trailhead at altitude 9600 feet, it was 20 degrees cooler than the 92 degrees it had been in the valley.

The walk is a woodland walk, familiar to us from other places we have lived, and we never got that OMG feeling we get when we are striding along above tree level, but it was all very pleasant. The trail is used by hikers, mountain bikers, riders of horses, and dirt bikers. The only other humans we encountered were two men riding motorized cycles who were respectful and polite as they passed us.

However, we did cross paths with hundreds of non-human carbon-based life forms in the shape of sheep. Two large herds separated by about a mile. Although we had heard that both cattle and sheep were grazed on the huge Plateau somewhere, this was the first time we’d encountered any. No shepherds were seen, no threatening dogs protecting their flocks. Just sheep being sheep in the shade.

Sheep show up frequently in music, and one of my favorite examples is this one by J.S. Bach. Perhaps a bit of background.

The aria comes from a secular cantata dating from 1713, which celebrates the birthday of Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. The cantata “The lively hunt is all my heart’s desire,” also known as the “Hunt Cantata,” is an extended setting of text by Salomon Franck, the Weimar court poet.

Never letting anything go to waste, especially not fantastic music, Bach probably revived the works a few years after the original performance. Apparently, it subsequently honoured the Duck of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst August, and in 1742 the same music celebrated the name’s day of Augustus III. 

The music for this cantata was not published during Bach’s lifetime, but first appeared only in 1881 in the first complete edition of Bach’s work. And it was during the Bach revival in the 19th century that the aria “Schafe können sicher weiden” (Sheep may safely graze) became really popular. And in the 20th century, it became the all-time favourite music for weddings.

Interlude

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Morning prayer.

Please, dear God, let me get through this entire day without having to hear the word existential from the media one more time.
Failing that, let everyone who utters the word be immediately afflicted with large pustules.

(Except me)

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Great news! A giant millipede that was feared lost to us forever is not lost at all. In fact, it is living in comfortable numbers in a part of Madagascar where the locals weren’t paying much attention to it and didn’t feel the need to report on its existence.

It is ten inches long and is one of the gentle and non-harmful creatures of the world. In fact, there are websites extolling their virtue as pets. I thought about this for a while, and although Robin and I do allow our cats access to our bed, I’m thinking we would draw the line well before ten-inch creepy-crawlers. It’s all those little feet, you know …

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I don’t know if other sexual predators have as much of a problem talking to women as Donald Cluck does, but it would seem that beyond telling a female to “Go over there and take off your clothes!” he is limited to spewing a mixture of insults, foolish puns, and unimaginative nicknames he has created for them. To deal with women as equals seems to require a mindset that is beyond his reach.

The longer the present-day political grotesquery goes on the less respect that I have for hard-core Cluck supporters. Cult members, nincompoops, a waste of perfectly good oxygen … where do you start? And the looniest of all are the evangelical Christians who have swarmed around a man whose life story is a sordid list of the Commandments he has fractured (and shows no interest in repenting thereof).

Why so harsh, Jon? Come on, they are simply misguided and if you would take the time to sit down with them and have a heart to heart they might very well come over to different ways of thinking.

Nope. They wouldn’t.

As an example of cultic thought processes do you remember the Jonestown Massacre? When more than 900 people either committed suicide or were killed because their leader told them it was their only option? Remember that they gave the cyanide to their own children? Do you think having any one of them over for dinner and a chat would have made a difference?

No … these folks, bless their hearts, are fools because they choose to be and danged if they’re not proud of it.

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From The New Yorker

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Some of the best guitar work in rock today comes out of what would seem an unlikely place – the Sahara. For years I have admired Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen and Bombino and now I have a new group to listen to – Mdou Moctar. My, my, these people kick some serious musical butt.

Yesterday I listened to their album Afrique Victime on headphones while working out on our gym’s walking track and if the time didn’t fly by it at least moved more swiftly. The lead guitarist studied Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and his playing skills are in that rarefied company.

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From The New Yorker

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It’s a little bit paradoxical but Amazon, which started out selling books and went on to become the order-now-and-it’ll-be-there-in-an-hour colossus that owns US retail is now having trouble getting one line of products to the customer in a reasonable time.

And this is not an isolated instance. Methinks Mr. Bezos careth less about books these days than when he was a young and callow pre-billionaire.

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One more example of “everything old is new again.” A piece in the Times of New York about the simple motor hotels of the USA, which we’ve been calling “Mom and Pop motels” for-ever. It’s an interesting read.

To read that some of them are being improved and updated brings joy to my heart. Maybe the occasional bare wiring and rain-stained corners of the rooms will disappear altogether. For me the charm of these places is innate, it only needs to be made visible once more. I don’t need to be entertained by my motel room, what I do ask is that it be a clean and comfortable space with the weather on the other side of the door.

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Here’s the deal. If you have to ask, you aren’t. I had to ask.

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If you have ever motorcycled in the summer in a dry climate you know that it is akin to riding through a convection oven. My son and I took such a trip in western Nebraska one summer when the temp was in the 90s. We had to stop about every hour to rehydrate. We did not develop visible sweat, as any molecule of water that made it to our skin surface immediately evaporated from our bodies.

One can challenge the elements and sometimes it is counted as an heroic deed and makes for a good story. To ride a bike into Death Valley on a day like this one was something other than bravery. It almost qualifies as a death wish. They did not respect the territory.

Robin and I have talked about this. About when we were younger and we never carried water with us, but then we weren’t doing long hikes, either. Nowadays if we are going to trek from our bedroom to the other side of the house, a distance of less than forty feet, we put on our Camelbaks and start sipping.

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From The New Yorker

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My new computer is working swell. Marvy. Peachy, even. It is a MacBook Air with an M2 chip. In the old days when I thought I needed more power and flexibility (I didn’t) I would have purchased one with the newest chip, the M3, and added more memory than the one I have. I like to think I am more realistic now, but mostly I am more frugal.

My original Mac cost me $2400.00 back in 1984, which is equivalent to $7,400.00 now. My latest MacBook cost me $800.00. The difference in power and convenience between the first one and this latest computer is amazing. They are in different universes entirely. Beaucoup more bang for the buck today.

It’s been a long strange trip for both Apple and for me, these forty-odd years. Looking back I am glad I had those tools to work with, even though if you could compile everything I’ve ever created with all those computers and put it in the center of a room, you might wonder what the heck I’ve been doing, and did I really need them all?

My answer, of course, is that of course I did.

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Earlier this week I used a feature of Google that was new to me. You know when you start a Google search there is that little icon that says “search by image” when you hover over it? Well, I had a problem and this feature solved it. Out in the berm in front of our home there is a spectacular flower growing that the landscapers planted and whose name we have forgotten. When neighbors walk by it isn’t unusual for us to be asked what that beautiful thing is called? My erudite answer has always been Duh, dunno.

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Can’t help it. Promised myself to lay off posting videos of the Tedeschi-Trucks Band for awhile so as not to wear you out. And then daughter Kari mentioned the band had done “Layla.”

This was taken from a double LP where they cover the entire classic album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs … sooo … let’s do them one more time.

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It is March of 1977, and our family’s Jeep Wagoneer is stuffed to the gills with camping equipment, food, and four children (ages 9, 8, 6, and 5 years) who are in the final stages of cabin fever. We are driving nonstop from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Everglades National Park in Florida, about 1800 miles in 36 hours. My ex-wife and I are either driving or trying to sleep with our face jammed up against a sweaty child’s body or a sleeping bag. The radio is our lifesaver, where we wander from station to station as one after another appears and disappears.

One constant on this trip is the repetition of a song by a group which had recently gained favor in the U.S. and which was named after its four performers.The song is Dancing Queen and the group is ABBA.

God bless them, they kept pulling all six of us back from the edge of homicide. Each time the song came on the sharpened sticks and large rocks were quietly put away.

We arrived at the gates of Jellystone Park at 0300 hours, rolled up to our camping space, and set up the tent. The next step was ferrying four small and semi-conscious bodies into our tent. Then came the sleeping bags, and then the adults felt permitted to crash.

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Back in 1999, when the movie The Blair Witch Project was making its rounds, Robin and I were camping in a forest service campground about fifteen miles from Crested Butte. The area consisted of only four campsites, a water pump, and a privy. On the plus side was that we had it all to ourselves, and the surrounding forest was beautiful.

On the second day it started to rain lightly at dawn, and when this continued through the morning and into the afternoon we decided to go into Crested Butte to take in a matinee movie. Just to get away from the drizzly grayness of the day.

The film showing was The Blair Witch Project.

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From The New Yorker

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Among our present Supremes there are those who aren’t acting Supremely at all. There needs to be a mechanism to clean those tainted bench seats without waiting for mortality to do the job for us. Here are some suggestions that sound like improvements to me.

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Yet another item from our recent Woods Lake campout.

We were in our car and returning to our site when a young man crossed the road in front of us and Robin exclaimed: Look at that! He looks just like a movie star!

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From The New Yorker

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I’m typing this two days after yet another disturbed person with an AR-15 in his hands killed someone in America. There is so much heavy breathing going on right now in the chattering classes even though no one has any idea how this will play out that I’m not going to add to the clamor.

I do remember clearly the feeling that I had in November of 1963, after some of the dust had cleared, that violence was so poisonous to healthy political life that anyone who advocated for it should be immediately relegated to the sidelines and deprived of their megaphone.

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A quote to apply to today’s headlines, from a poignant source.

There is no defense against a determined man with a rifle.

John F. Kennedy

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Abject failure. Abysmal flame-out. Pathetic fizzle.

Robin and I set out to hike up to Black Bear Pass, which we did handily eight years ago. This time of year it is a grand walk, with waterfalls and flower-filled meadows and views … my oh my, the views.

We didn’t make it.

The path to the pass is 3.1 miles with a 1991 foot gain in altitude. We made it to within half a mile of the top, at 12,100 feet, and ran completely out of gas. Our bodies were yelling Basta! Enough! so loudly that we felt we might be disturbing the peace of others in this remote area. Somewhere in that eight years we had lost a step, at least it seemed that way that day.

So we trudged back to the car and drove down into Ouray, with the plan of drowning our sorrows and shame in ice cream from Chocolate Mousse. Treats in hand we stepped out to find all of the sidewalk tables occupied. We must have appeared a forlorn pair because a young couple invited us to share their table and we gratefully accepted.

They were from New Jersey and were on a long Western tour by car. The two were charming people and the conversation was delightful. When they took their leave we invited another pair of lost ice cream bearers to share what was now our space.

These folks were a middle aged couple who had only recently relocated from Boston to Boulder. Another interesting sharing of stories and experiences ensued.

So, actually, the afternoon was a resounding success, the only niggling bit being that we didn’t complete the planned hike.

But we totally scored on frozen desserts and making brand new best friends we’ll likely never see again. Not too shabby after all.

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We took no photos on this hike, so here are a handful from our successful one in July 2016.

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In 1968 Harry Nilsson recorded the song Everybody’s Talkin.’. It found its way onto the soundtrack of the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, which made it famous and a fairly big hit for Nilsson. Everyone alive that year in the USA heard it on their radios without even trying. Here is Nilsson in 1968, on a European stage.

Much much later some of my favorite people recorded it in 2012, with quite a different arrangement. It looks like everyone in the room was having a very good time. Why not? They were the best playing with the best.

(This band is so good it hurts to listen to them.)

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From The New Yorker

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Perhaps this is not true of you, but most of the people I know have quirks. For my own use I have developed a scoring system to help me sort things out:

• 1-5 obvious quirks = average person
• 5-10 obvious quirks = bit of a duck
• >10 obvious quirks = space cadet

I do not attach any value judgments, pejorative associations, or good/bad dichotomies to this scale. It is simply descriptive, numeric, gender-neutral, non-ageist, and possibly of no practical value at all.

I classify myself as “bit of a duck,” but another person might easily put me into the “space cadet” category by coming up with some behaviors that I don’t think of as odd at all, but which to them are totally bizarre.

There are the matters of popcorn and toast, for instance. I had noticed that when I popped corn at home and sprinkled on some melted butter it resembled what I would get at a movie theater. However if I melted any butter substitute the popped kernels would collapse as soon as I poured that noxious liquid onto them.

Looking into the matter I found these startling numbers:

• Butter is 10-15% water
• Margarines and other substitutes can contain up to 40% water

And then I began to notice that the same thing was happening in the morning when I applied these same spreads to my toast. Flaccidity reigned.

Pondering it all, I thought of ghee. Ghee has no water in it at all. In the process of ghee-making you heat butter until the moisture entirely evaporates.

I tried it on popcorn and the kernels did not wilt. I tried it on toast and the toast now had a crispy crunchiness to it.

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From The New Yorker

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This is one of those stories that make me laugh out loud. Some of the citizens of Barcelona are fed up with being squeezed out of affordable living spaces to accommodate an avalanche of tourists. They would like those wanderers and all of their AirBNBs and the like of the world to please go away.

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A NOTE FROM THE COLLECTIVE

Since most of you know of our existence and have read about our influence in the lives and thinking of our habitats (humans), we’ve decided collectively to address you this morning. We are microbiome zebulon and we operate from the body of the writer of this blog. Most of what you have read here that was worthwhile … we caused it to be written. It’s not that Jon doesn’t occasionally come up with something interesting on his own, it’s that he isn’t … gifted is the word that fits best, I think.

It’s not unusual for him to sit down at the computer to begin a blog entry and twenty minutes later there isn’t anything on the screen. When that happens we step in. It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum, and we abhor an empty page.

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Okay, I’m not in total despair yet, but I’ve slipped down a couple more rungs and as a result I’m closer than I ever was.

Here’s my reading of our present-day good ol’ USA. A too-large swath of the country is completely in denial about the sort of man ex-president Cluck really is and keeps repeating variations of that old boys will be boys or it’s just locker room stuff horsepucky. They are self-deluding nincompoops. They are not some group of gentle souls who have temporarily lost their way, that is their way.

Another substantial swath appears to be in denial about what they saw at that first debate last week. He just had a bad night … could happen to anyone … look how well he did the next day in North Carolina … he had a bad first fifteen minutes but got better … .

What???

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From The New Yorker

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It is 0230 hours in the precise way that the military keeps track of time, and a fine thunderstorm is underway outside. Lots of organic music which, along with the rattling sound of a heavy rain, makes me so glad that I was born into an age of houses and roofs.

Here, huddled in my perfectly dry robe on a chilly morning while I am draped with a light blanket I can appreciate the natural wonders out there so much better than if I were drenched and shivering.

Of course I know very little about cave life and I am sure that it must have had its charms. The closest I can come is standing in my garage with the overhead door open and watching the weather. Those moments can be quite pleasant, especially as I know that I can go indoors at any moment I choose.

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From The New Yorker

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The Tedeschi-Trucks Band usually plays indoor arenas as a big bunch of excellent musicians, blowing everything away. This morning I ran across this music video showing their quieter side. For those to who this stuff is unfamiliar, it is what music sounds like when played by real musicians with no audio manipulation.

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Robin and I wandered down to Riverfront Park on the evening of the 4th. It was jammed with kids and families and people grilling and clouds of smoke from a score of charcoal fires and meat being scorched.

There was to be a free concert at the amphitheater but it was yet another s**tkicker band and we decided to skip it. I have a very small tolerance for most modern country music, but a heartfelt appreciation of more traditional forms. I’m kind of a snob about it, actually.

There was a plethora of people wearing red, white, and blue garments. One fellow dressed as Uncle Sam himself. Husbands and wives in identical patriotically-themed shirts (considered “cute” in the 1950s). Many, many American flag-themed tee shirts stretched over bellies carefully built up beer by beer.

We got ourselves a couple of cups of flavored ice and ambled through the crowd. A perfect summer evening, untroubled by wind, rain, or mosquitoes. Languorous, even.

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Aaahhhh how I loved this guy when he was young and hungry. Telling his New Jersey stories about boardwalks and snaps on jeans and fortune-telling:

… the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do …

I still like to listen to Bruce’s newer stuff, but it’s being made by an old multimillionaire, and such folks understandably have trouble remembering how it was. The sweat and grease and that unfocussed longing are missing from his work these days. Anyway, here’s an early Springsteen tune, dug up fresh for this fourth of July. If you crank it up you can smell the ocean.

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Those of us living in Paradise are experiencing something very unusual for this semi-arid location. More than enough rain. For the past week the gods of lightning, thunder, and precipitation have drenched us in water and in sound. In the upcoming week’s forecast it looks like there is more of the same coming our way.

Last night there were two instances where the flash of the lightning and the awesome, chasing-the-cats-under-the-bed crack of the thunder were nearly simultaneous. Enough so that I got up from my chair to see if anything in the neighborhood was smoking. I relaxed when I was reasssured that neither my friend’s homes nor myself were on fire.

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From The New Yorker

I was a brand new pediatric resident when I participated in the care of the only lightning victim I ever had as a patient.

He was a twelve year-old boy who had been caddying at a suburban golf course. When a shower caught the golfers out they sought shelter under a large tree, which failed to protect the boy.

Unfortunately nothing was done in the way of effective resuscitation by the golfers or the ambulance crew, and we didn’t receive him at the hospital until more than twenty minutes after the strike. That was far too much time to be able to bring him back, but when children are involved I have seen so many times when caregivers go off label and try what they know in their hearts will be absolutely futile for far longer than they would on an adult.

It was the only resuscitation I ever was a part of where open-chest heart massage was tried. When the code was called and we backed away from the table no one spoke, and most left the room wearing grim expressions. A couple of nurses started silently picking up the debris of the code – the gauze squares, needle covers, IV tubing sets, et al.

At that point I noticed for the first time the small burn mark on the boy’s scalp and on the bottom of one foot. Portals of entry and departure for the enormous electrical force that had stilled his heart.

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From The New Yorker

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My trusty MacBook Pro has died. It was nearly seven years old, which is ancient in the land of computers, but that stalwart device still did everything I wanted it to do. It now has a motherboard problem, and just like that wise old adage says; “When Mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy.”

This Mac always had its quirks, and on more than one occasion I had to restrain myself from chucking it into the trash can as its internal demons ruined a piece of work.

It also had the infamous evil Apple keyboard that had to be replaced in toto a few years back, and afterward forced me to become a bastardized sort of tech serviceperson whenever one of the keys key would become stuck and require cleaning. And there were moments when the cursor seemed not under my control but of some unseen force that was not my friend.

But until last Saturday it always came through for me, and I will miss the mini-combats and hair-tearings. In the Norwegian-American Book Of How Life Should Go, on page 78 or thereabouts, it clearly states that: “if life is too easy it tends to make one soft and gradually more useless. Aggravations are what built the Norwegian character that we would all be proud of if being proud wasn’t a sin.”

Therefore it is with mixed emotions that I will retire this machine, with honors. There were devils inside that brushed aluminum case, but they were my devils and if I was not fond of them, I was at least accustomed.

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I’ve been a Stephen King fan since he and I were pups. We have matured together, as he keeps getting better at his craft of writing and I get better at my role, which is that of the “Dear Reader.” The first book of his that I read was a short story collection entitled “Night Shift.” Lots of gore and gut-wrenching there. Just recently he published another such collection, “You Like It Darker,” and there are real differences between the two.

These are the best of his short stories yet. There is subtlety, for one thing, a quality not always present when he was a younger man. There is the maturity of recognizing that we don’t live in a black and white world, nor one that is simply shades of gray. We live in one that is filled with colors with fuzzy borders melding with one another rather than bumping up hard and sharp. The characters here have more depth as a result, are more interesting.

King took the title from the Leonard Cohen song, You Want It Darker, and apologizes in an epilog to Cohen for changing it slightly. Liked it.

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Some weighty events took center stage for my family in 1993, and I didn’t pay much attention to the music of the time. But even when our own small lives were in turmoil the rest of the world kept churning out the tunes, and as always, the better stuff hangs around until we have the time to appreciate it. There are a handful of my choices sprinkled in today’s post.

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All Apologies was released in September of 1993, as the last song on Nirvana’s third album. In April of 1994 Kurt Cobain killed himself. His suicide caught the world by surprise, even though his soul was certainly not an untroubled one. With a man of his talents we were left wondering what he might have done had he made a different choice.

During his final years, Cobain struggled with a heroin addiction and chronic depression. He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame, and was often in the spotlight for his tumultuous marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love. In March 1994, he overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol, subsequently undergoing an intervention and detox program. On April 8, 1994, he was found dead in the greenhouse of his Seattle home at the age of 27, with police concluding that he had died around three days earlier from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

Wikipedia: Kurt Cobain

Guns are so easy to get hold of. So easy to employ. So irretrievably final in their results.

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Our longest day of the year came and went once again without fanfare. This early in summer we don’t really notice that the tide just turned, and is sweeping things back out to sea. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more rapidly as the weeks pass.

I know, I know, why bring this up when we are just beginning the most easily enjoyable part of the year? It’s a bit like giving a “Memento Mori” sweatshirt to someone for their birthday. But the days begin to shorten at least two months before the temperatures begin to cool and then BANG! it is September and everybody wonders where the summer has gone? Well, if we had kept our eyes open, it began to go away on June 21.

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As I write this, I am angry. Not a good time to take computer in hand, perhaps, but there you are. Quite a few of the scenes in my life have been composed of a mixture of accidents and poor timing.

Robin and I started to watch the “debates” Thursday night but turned it off after perhaps twenty awful minutes. We expected Cluck’s toxic meanderings and were not disappointed. But Biden … what to say … if there needed to be a film made about how a the seasons of a man’s life come and go it could have been taken directly from the political tragedy we were witness to last evening .

So why be angry? Because it need not have happened. If Joe Biden and his advisers had looked clear-eyed at what our country needed instead of confusing it with what they wanted, we wouldn’t be staring down a gunbarrel at the possibility of a second Cluck term.

Mr. Biden might have bowed out a few months ago and helped pick his successor. It would have been a dignified and graceful end to a long career in public service of which he can be proud.

A second term for a liar, conjurer, fraud, felon, bigot, and rapist? Unbelievable that it is even a possibility.

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Proverb: “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”

At the beginning of the pandemic all those years ago, when the end of the world was thought to be upon us, the restaurateurs in our area went through one crisis after another. First we weren’t supposed to gather in public spaces at all, which included their establishments. Then when later on this prohibition was relaxed, they couldn’t get their former employees to come back to work.

Many gave up on the whole thing and shuttered their doors. Some radically altered their manner of doing business, as when buffets disappeared altogether, never to return. There were a few that saw an opportunity to gouge their customers and blame the price rises on COVID. One restaurant in Silverton suddenly raised their prices from a previous average of $12.00 to a loftier $17.00 per sandwich.

Gouging was not limited to restaurants, however. Everything cost more and then more again at our supermarkets, adding to the economic strain on families.

So I see the ill wind … where’s the good part, you ask? In our case it has been a push toward doing what we might have done already, and that is to change our eating habits. Less meat, fewer processed foods, more often chowing down on rice and beans than steak and potatoes.

We’re not vegetarians yet, but I think we’d fit into the “flexitarian” pigeonhole. Which is a category of gourmands comparable to agnosticism.

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From The New Yorker

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The debates are coming! The debates are coming! What debates, you ask? Surely you jest, I respond. When President Biden and ex-President Cluck face off on the evening of the 27th. In case by some magic you haven’t been forced to follow their respective back-stories, I have prepared a chart outlining a few of their differences.

	BIDEN	CLUCK
Political party	Democratic	Himself
Political philosophy	Democracy	neo-fascist
Moral fiber	highly developed	none found
Can be trusted to keep an oath	yes	oaths, shmoaths
Relationship with Russian dictators	adversarial	subservient
Attitude toward fallen soldiers	respectful	contemptuous
Honesty	95%	10%
Age	too old	too old
Would you have let him date your daughter?	no problem	where’s my shotgun?

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The over-warm days mount up. I finally gave up on waiting for something moderate, having been made (by myself) a prisoner of the weather. So out onto the streets and paths with my trusty electric steed went I. Carrying enough water on my back for a small company of the French Foreign Legion, I covered about 23 miles before putting the bike away for a recharge. Ambient temperature 94 degrees.

When you can sweat and evaporate you can tolerate quite a lot of heat, unless your water runs out.

There is a new restaurant along the bike path, a brewpub called Shelter. It has the best restaurant location in town, right along the bicycle path and Uncompahgre River. Toward the end of my ride I stopped in for a light supper and found that the menu included a “BLT salad.” Curious as to what this might be, I ordered it.

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Verdict = tasty, but way too much lettuce. In fact, I had to take a trip to the ER to be treated for Romaine overdose. This is not a pleasant activity, involving tubes and solutions and what can best be described as a medically enthusiastic Roto-Rootering.

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It’s a little known fact that Norwegian-Americans (I am one of those) have a motto, which is often displayed on their battle flags and escutcheons. It is Multum de arte nescio, sed quid mihi placet scio. The reason that no one knows about it is simple. When was the last time you paid attention to a Norwegian escutcheon? Or battle flag?

The motto’s translation is: I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.

Since I come from that venerable tradition, I will state without hesitation that I really like the work of Edward Hopper. Everyone is familiar with “Nighthawks,” which might be his most famous painting. But if you google Edward Hopper, you will find a treasure trove of other stuff that echoes that same lonely and alienated feeling that I feel when I look at it. Of course, remember that I freely admit to not knowing much about art at all.

Here’s a small gallery taken from the internet’s large store of his works.

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Here in Paradise we are not suffering from the heat as much as many others in the US. Oh, we hit the 90s occasionally but when the humidity is 10% or less the hurt is lessened.

It also helps that nearly all of our nights are cool, so we can wake up much fresher than I did as a kid in Minnesota. My childhood homes were not air-conditioned and I clearly recall rotating my body during the night trying in vain to find a cool part of the bedsheet. Pillows were too hot to use at all. I tried to learn to hover without much success.

Another burden we have been spared this far is wildfire. Five hundred miles south of us near Ruidoso, New Mexico, the South Fork Fire has burned 20,000 acres and 1500 structures have been destroyed. So while I will often whine* about the local climate on occasion, I truly cannot complain.

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*I claim the fundamental rights of every American:

• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of peaceful assembly
• The right to own as many guns as your typical Colonial regiment might have on hand
• Unlimited kvetching

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Normally the Uncompahgre River is clear water and Class I-II rapids as it passes through the park. This weekend it is higher than at any time since we’ve moved here, with much faster water that is the color of milky coffee. A combination of snowmelt and the solid rain of yesterday have boosted its power.

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From The New Yorker

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I’m thinking this grabs most people’s attention, if only briefly. Certainly got mine.

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Montrose is riddled with roses this time of the year. Before I moved to Paradise, I hadn’t thought of them as plants so well-suited to a dry country. We have an orange bush rose out front that has never been watered by us … ever. In fact, when we moved here it was so scraggly looking that we ignored it assuming that it would perish. Months later when it was still scraggly but showed no signs of going away, I began to trim it and have done so each year since then.

These are not delicate tea roses filling the air with their perfumes, but shrub roses, tree roses, and climbing roses that give up the faintest of scents only if one plunges their nose deep into the blossom.

Risky business … though … that plunge.

Thorns, you know.

Bees, too.

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From The New Yorker

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Governor Landry of Louisiana just signed into law a statute requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public classroom in that state. This is one more example of the perniciousness of “Christian Nationalists.” These are a group of largely white supremacists who hang a gold cross around their neck and try to pass themselves off as Christians. They have little or nothing in common with those who truly practice that faith. Theirs is a political show.

The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”

NYTimes, June 20

“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.

“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

NYTimes, June20

There is more than a little irony in Mr. Landry telling us to respect the law even as he is ignoring the Constitution. The folks who sat down and invented America came from a Europe where religious violence and bigotry had been on prominent display for centuries. They were resolved not to repeat those errors.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

People like Landry who profess to want religion to take a more prominent role in political life always want it to be their particular religion, of course. Throughout human history it has only been a short step from establishing a state religion to the moment when persecution of other belief systems begins.

So I respectfully suggest to Governor Landry that he should make his posters even bigger and then put them where the sun don’t shine, while in the meantime I will make a contribution to the ACLU.

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Memento Mori

Ahhhh, Donald Sutherland. It never occurred to me that you might pass away before I did. I blithely assumed that there would be yet another movie in another season where your particular ability to dominate any scene you were in would be there for me to enjoy.

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When I am out on our backyard deck, writing or listening to music, I have taken to bringing binoculars along with me. The topography out there is a long bike/walk pathway between two widely spaced rows of houses. The path is lined with a variety of trees, grasses, and shrubs, providing cover and in some instances food, for birds.

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Back a few years I read some of the poet Gary Snyder’s prose that left a mark. He was talking about how important having roots or a sense of place was to the development of our spirits, and how often modern life disallowed that.

We take it for granted that we will move every few years because of the demands of our jobs, that our children will live hundreds if not thousands of miles away. The chance to put down those roots can be diminished or lost altogether.

When I read Snyder’s work I realized that this was largely how my own life had unfolded. I then resolved to dig in more and to set my heels deeper wherever I happened to be.

Now I’ve reached a place where I want to know where the creeks are, where the canyons lead, what creatures I am sharing this space with. I will try to learn the names of the flowers, one at a time.

When I retired, people would immediately ask if I was going to “travel” and where I planned to go. As if that were a given.

To me it was always my choice to deepen my knowledge of where I already was than travel briefly to distant places and come away with a more superficial understanding of them.

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From all the mentions of camping, hiking, etc. throughout the years on this blog, you might think that I came from “camping people.” Nothing could be further from the truth. None of my “people” were campers, except for those who served in WWII, and most of them came back having had their fill of sleeping in tents.

The next one was ordered from a well-known outfitter named Herter’s, out of Waseca MN. It was a pup tent style, and according to the blurb in the catalog it was six feet long. That seemed okay, since I have never been taller than 5 2/3 feet tall. After setting it up for the first time in a Minnesota state park, I climbed inside and found that it was really a 5 1/2 foot-long thing, which meant that I would forever sleep slightly bunched up.

I put up with that for one year and then ordered one with more generous proportions. When I returned to that same park, I thoughtlessly brought the food into the tent with us, not enclosed in a hard container. During the night I heard some rustling and growling noises. Turning a flashlight beam on the origin of the sounds I was startled to see a furry arm reach through a newly-chewed hole in the tent wall and grab a slice of bread. When the arm retracted the bread vanished from view.

I stood up, flashlight in hand, and stepped out of the tent to shoo the creature away and found myself standing barefoot in my briefs in the middle of a herd of what seemed to be giant raccoons, who were busy rummaging through the campsite and eating my bread.

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Robin and I watched the Hunter Biden saga with sorrowful interest. I think the best piece I’ve yet read came from Patti Davis, and was published in the NYTimes on Wednesday June 12. Ms. Davis is an actor, author, daughter of a president, and an addict in recovery. She has a unique perspective and a talent for writing as well.

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* Apologies to Anne Lamott for pilfering the title of her fine book

Robin and I took our kayaks to the Grand Mesa for a paddle one morning this week. We were running from the promised 97 degrees down in the valley and toward the 77 degrees predicted for the Mesa. It turned out to be an excellent idea. The lake we chose was Island Lake, which is a short drive from the visitor center. It is long and ovoid and beautiful. Also deep and cold. Plus there is a small island at one end.

I trolled a Panther Martin spinner behind my boat and caught:

• One 15 inch brown trout.
• One strand of lakeweed which did a wonderful imitation of a fish.
• One strand of lakeweed which gave up without a whimper.
• The bottom of the lake which fought me to a standstill, finally spitting my lure back at me in contempt.

At this point a wind came up which was stiff enough to produce whitecaps. Now my reading of the Sit-on-top Kayak Owner’s Manual is that such a situation is not the perfect environment for this type of boat. They are much happier with calmer water surfaces so we called it a day. We’d been paddling for a couple of hours so were ready to do that anyway.

On the way home we saw a good-sized weasel which dashed across the road in front of us, and a red-tailed hawk which flew across that stretch of road just six feet off the ground and a couple of yards in front of the car. It was a rare and closeup look at this dramatic bird, in flight.

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While it is true that at one time in my life I was the Prince of Pediatricians, the road to this esteemed position was not a straight line, by any means. There were fits and starts and other career choices that had to be tried and then scrapped. For instance, there was a period when I was in training to become the Voldemort of Veterinarians.

I graduated high school at the tender age of 16 due to loopholes in our educational system, without a clear idea in my head as to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. At one point I decided that since I liked animals very much, and loved the life that I thought a farmer lived, it was almost a given that I should study veterinary medicine. So off the the “farm campus” of the University of Minnesota I went, enrolled in the pre-vet curriculum.

As far as I could determine, all of the other members of my freshman class were the offspring of farmers and had spent their entire lives in that milieu. That difference began to show immediately in my grade slips. After a lifetime of getting A’s and B’s, other letters of the alphabet began to appear. The very first one went something like this:

• A in English
• A in Math
• F in Poultry husbandry

I had never had a D in my life, much less an F, and after one more quarter with similar results I switched majors and left the farm campus behind forever.

That “F” still smarts even after nearly seventy years, but I positively deserved it. It happened this way. Along the course of the quarter we students were given copies of a booklet from the US Department of Agriculture entitled Ventilation of Chicken Houses (or something to that effect). It was an exceedingly boring and detailed description of the need for proper ventilation and the mechanics of making sure that when large numbers of chickens were being kept enclosed that they had fresh air to breathe. There were calculations of cubic feet and air flows and the like and after scanning several pages I chose to store the pamphlet in the trash can where it was ultimately tossed out.

At final examination time, one of the questions made me regret my storage decision. We were given the dimensions of a large building destined to become a chicken dwelling and asked to describe how we would ventilate it. Our answer would represent 40% of the grade on our test. Since I had not a single ventilatory idea in my head beyond leaving the windows open, that is what I put down. The professor probably didn’t pause for a moment when he failed me. And there was no possibility of appeal since not only had my work been … shall we say … lacking a certain luster, but the professor had the bad taste to die of a heart attack the day before we took the test.

Pre-med and medical school proved more suited to what nature and experience had given me to work with. Turns out that I did well whenever there was not a single question about exhaust fans or hens.

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From The New Yorker

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On a morning that was otherwise unremarkable it occurred to me that we hear very little about swooning anymore. Personally, I have never known someone who swooned, nor have I ever done so myself. And yet the practice was evidently once common enough that there was a piece of furniture designed for and devoted to it, the fainting couch.

It does strike me that the possibility of swooning re-emerging into modern life is unlikely, due to the fact that women are understandably suspicious of any word or phrases suggesting yet another quaint weakness of the “fairer sex.” Apparently they’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing.

No, I thought, if we were ever to regain our national swoon it would have to be men who led the way. Ladies, before you make up your minds forever on the subject, think about your lover reclining langourously on the couch in the photo.

Could you imagine a time when it might be swell if your swain swooned?

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From The New Yorker

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Late Friday afternoon we had a strong thunderstorm for the first time in months. Delightful. I was standing at the front door watching the rain falling as if it were a major sports event. Then slowly and gracefully a deer began walking across the yard of the neighbor directly across the street from us. Lovely. She was grazing in a dignified manner, taking her sweet time and possible enjoying the rain as much as Robin and I did.

Then out of that blue-black sky came small hail. Size of a pea. And that deer did exactly what I would have done if I were standing naked in the street in a hailstorm – she shifted into high gear and ran like blazes to get something between her and those painful little pebbles. From 1 mph to 30 mph in three steps.

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Robin and I set out to hike up the Black Bear Pass on Saturday morning. The day was beautiful, and we found that most of the snow that had turned me around a couple of weeks ago was now gone. However, at about 2 1/2 miles up the trail, we found another snow collection which was blocking the path in a way that suggested that trying to cross it would be clumsy at best and unpleasant to a high degree at worst.

At this point, we turned around and went back down. There was no sense of failure because hadn’t gained the pass. We had enjoyed the walk and had met several very nice people with whom we chatted briefly along the way.

Wildlife seen: one elk, two marmots.

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Today I was listening through my headphones as I trundled around the track at the gym. (In the summertime I prefer exercising outdoors but the ambient temperatures today were in the 90s which is where I absolutely positively wilt.) Anyway, up comes this Springsteen song in a version I hadn’t heard before. The introductory patter could almost be the story of my mom and dad … but let’s let Bruce tell it.

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*I do this annoying schtick of inserting a bit of French from time to time for two reasons. One is to wake up the reader who may be dozing off. The other is to boast that I had a minor in French at university in 1957.

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Becoming a father was easy, the whole “birds and bees” setup that Nature has built into the system took care of that. It was in those long years afterward where there were opportunities for happy glory and for mud-spattered failures. I’m not certain what the glory:mud ratio was for me but I’m pretty sure it could have been improved upon.

When it became my turn to be a parent, I had quite reasonably resolved not to make the same mistakes that I thought my own parents had made. Unfortunately I came up with an entire set of new ones of my own. It was my creative side at work.

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On the CNN website was an article about a film from 1983. Title: The Day After. Subject: aftermath of nuclear war.

Perhaps it was the recent rattling of the nuclear sabers by Mr. Putin that prompted the film’s review at this time, I don’t know.

But it intrigued Robin and I so we searched and found the movie on YouTube. It is very well done and one of the grimmest movies you’ll ever click “Play” on. It is not about the powerful players who sent the missiles back and forth but about ordinary terrified Kansas folk trying to hold together shattered lives that no longer could be held together.

The Day After was filmed 39 years after Hiroshima. It is now 41 years since the movie was released. Foolishly I had believed that the M.A.D.* years had been put safely to bed but it turns out they were only reading under the covers with a flashlight.

* Mutually Assured Destruction

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Usually I take Father’s Day as the inspiration for a major rant, but I’m going to tone it down this year. This particular “day” is no worse or better than all the other artificial ceremonial days or weeks or months. Most of them have been co-opted by commercial interests of various sorts. My modest list of examples might include:

• Christmas: celebrating the birthday of God by playing Jingle Bell Rock ad nauseam while shopping in full panic mode
• Black Music History Month: okay, this month we will play some blues, jazz, rock, gospel, and soul music. Wait … we do that all year … every year … why not just lay back and be cool about it? How much non-classical music is not black, I wonder?
• Memorial Day: turned it into a three-day weekend so the barbecue grills get a real good workout
• Father’s and Mother’s Days: how much better to acknowledge their contributions, if you want to, in some non-obligatory manner at some non-obligatory time. A simple Love Ya, Mom next Saturday might do the trick
• Halloween: hmmmm … I think we probably do this one just right

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From the fine movie “Smoke Signals.”

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The numbers of electric bikes continue to increase here in Paradise. Most of them are being piloted by people with gray hair. My guess this is because their combination of fun and utility is attractive to seasoned humans.

They can now ride farther, faster, and the hills are largely flattened out. The other day I saw a young mom on an e-cargo bike with two smiling kids buckled in behind her. Sensible and fun all at once. Most of our days being rainless also means more riding hours are available.

Electric bikes are not without problems. Some of the cheaper models come with batteries that can explode and set buildings on fire. One of our neighbors bought a beautiful electric mountain bike, and for a while everything was great. She used it around town and could take it into the hills if she wanted to. Then some wrist and forearm issues developed and pretty soon she wasn’t riding at all. Those longer hours in the saddle gave her overuse injuries.

The number of new brands is bewildering. The old line manufacturers (Trek, Specialized, Giant, Cannondale, etc.) offer electric models, but here in Montrose they are outnumbered by machines made by companies I never heard of before.

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As I write this, sitting in a relatively cool and desert-dry backyard in Colorado, Robin is sweltering in humid California under the developing heat dome. The edges of that unpleasant heavenly structure will be here soon. So I bask while basking is possible.

For my lazing-about soundtrack I am listening to the music of the Greek electronic composer Vangelis. Beautiful stuff and a bit of a balm for a basker. I first became a fan of his in 1981 when the title tune from the movie Chariots of Fire hit number one across the country. And then there was his lovely little piece, L’Enfant, that showed up in the film The Year of Living Dangerously, in 1982. After that the score from the original Blade Runner came along, also in 1982. I was hooked from then on. This in spite of my general avoidance of electronic music up until then.

Wherever my switch for electronica was located, Vangelis’ music snaked in and turned it on.

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From the score of Chariots of Fire, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four.

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From The Year of Living Dangerously, another moving composition – L’Enfant. So moving.

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From the soundtrack for Blade Runner here’s that famous scene of the programmed death of the replicant Roy Batty . Rutger Hauer wrote the speech himself, with Vangelis’ music quietly playing in the background.

Aaahhhh, I’ve seen so many great films … heard so much fine music … but I have never seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion … don’t know where I was that weekend, but I missed the whole thing. Blast!

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Drove to Denver on Thursday to pick up Robin at the airport. ‘Twas an easy drive with almost no construction bother. Even the traffic was relatively light.

Our local version of the heat dome is still under 100 degrees, but just barely. Sometimes I long for the simpler weather reports of my childhood, which didn’t have terms like heat dome, polar vortex, katabatic winds, helicity, et al. Instead they were framed simply as:

• Hot or cold
• Tornado warning
• Rain or shine
• Tornado warning
• Windy or calm
• Tornado warning

We didn’t have a glossary of specialized terms tossed at us, all of which I suppose are dailyspeak for meteorologists. Somehow using their arcane terminology makes everything seem more ominous.

Heat dome? I’m staying in, thank you very much.

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A couple of days ago I was driving by a stretch of electrical wires where I have often seen American kestrels perching on those wires. I spotted one just as it plummeted straight down at some prey invisible to me. The dive must have been successful as the little falcon didn’t re-emerge from the tall grass as the scene receded in my car’s mirror.

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This morning my head is crowded with thought-threads running here and there with about the same amount of coherence that you might find if an angry dog parachuted into a cat parade. It all started with playing that very excellent music that Mavis Staples recorded. My recollections of the civil rights era of the sixties and seventies comes through so vividly in her songs.

Now, I confess that I was never, repeat – never, directly involved in any of the million brave and courageous acts, nor did I ever face any of the dangers that those activists dealt with at that time. I was always comfortably safe wherever I was, more like an observer from a Martian newspaper reporting back on the conflict. But I admired those mostly uncelebrated warriors greatly and supported them where I could.

The series Eyes on the Prize is on PBS where it can be watched for free. You like seeing heroes in action? Forget the tiresome Marvel Universe – the scenes in these videos are filled with heroes. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is truly humbling to see what courage actually looks like in action.

Right now we’ve got one major political party trying to bury the history of slavery and its consequences as much as it can, while the other party has gone on to other things as if the struggle were completely over. The story here is not that America is a uniquely barbaric country because of our history, but that just about all of world history is of one group exploiting, enslaving, or in some way dominating another group, often through murder and torture.

Our takeaway lesson must be to look clearly at what has been done in our past and continue to steadily move away from such violent and harsh practices and behaviors. To accept that evils did occur and then reject the thinking that made them possible.

What to put in place of bigotry and violence? Well, compassion and mutual respect would be a couple of places to start. The Earth is not really a very big place, and we are all in this together whether we realize it or not. Whether we like it or not.

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Robin is off to California to spend time with grandchildren Kaia and Leina. Being eleven years younger than I am, she somehow worries that if she isn’t around to tend me that I will do something unacceptable, like keel over.

Being a rationalist I accept that concerns about octogenarians dropping off the planet are not unreasonable, but I respond that while our days might be numbered none of us know what that number is.

So I will send a daily text that says: I am presently alive and typing furiously.

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From The New Yorker

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GUILTY x 34

This thug of a past president is now officially a felon. Unless you live in the Fox News universe you already know that he is guilty of much worse things than this, because YOU SAW HIM DO THEM ON TELEVISION back in January of 2020. Now I believe that being a felon can be forgiven if the person sees the error of their ways, makes amends, and sincerely repents of their wicked ways.

Will Cluck spend one day in jail as a result of these verdicts? I would be surprised. Actually, I don’t think it is even called for. Prisons are not good places for anyone to be, and as good as he would look in an XXL orange jumpsuit, I think some form of probation and community service would be a better alternative. Plus there would be those innocent Secret Service personnel that would have to go wherever he did.

After all, he owes New York state big time for the costs they have accrued in putting him on trial, and I think that while it might take a while, starting to pay them back in these simple and straightforward ways would be a good first step in any attempts at his rehabilitation.

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From The New Yorker

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I am watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War for the second or third time, not sure which it is. It is a masterful thing from start to finish. I am ashamed to say that this crucial conflict was for me little more than a long list of so many dates and names until I watched Mr. Burns’ videos. He put flesh on those dry bones of the histories that I had already consumed.

This afternoon I watched the episode where Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to dedicate a new Union cemetery.

As the narrator read the famous lines tears came to my eyes. I don’t know if Lincoln was the greatest American of us all, but he gets my vote every time. We are having our problems these days with politics that are by comparison an unseemly shambling. Men and women serve in Congress who I would not hire to sit our cats. It all seems such a mess on occasion that I wish I could learn to power-spit in order to express my feelings about it fittingly.

But think of what Lincoln faced. His country had split in two, and then the dying began in earnest. Before it was over 650,000 Americans had perished. Mr. Lincoln spent agonizing years trying to find a general to lead the Union army, and time after time after time their incompetence brought him to the brink of despair. The South was better led at that period, and an overall Confederate victory seemed to be nearly within their grasp.

Lincoln finally found his man. He drank too much, was decidedly un-flashy, and did not sit a horse with the dash of a George Custer or a Joe Hooker. But in battle he bit down hard on the enemy before him and would not be dislodged until he won. The tides of battle turned and after four bitter years the war would finally be over, with the Union preserved.

Is there another Lincoln out there? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that there are better women and men than most of those we see being interviewed repeatedly on our television news programs. We need to find those capable and honest souls and quit electing one self-serving SOB after another.

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In the category of How On Earth Did They Do This Study, comes this one from the University of Michigan. The investigators estimated that eating a single hot dog took 36 minutes off of one’s life.

Thirty-six minutes. The average package of hot dogs at City Market contains 10 sausages, which translates into 10 x 36 = 360 minutes down the drain.

That means that by eating 4 packages of these homicidal tubes I would lose an entire day.

Now there have been days in my life that I wish that I could have skipped, looking back, but we don’t get to choose, going forward. I do know what I have to do to hang onto those 36 minutes. I will just re-read this article.

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Mavis Staples was a big part of the musical history in the civil rights movement. She can still carry water, as this 2007 album shows. Ry Cooder produced it and does backup guitar. I love it when a cover of a song makes it new for me, and this one does.

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Yesterday Robin and I revisited the supper tables of our families of origin. While unsuccessfully looking for a certain condiment at City Market I noticed this long and tall pair of cans taped together. It was La Choy Chicken Chow Mein.

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From The New Yorker

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I am re-reading Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I found it to be an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation on my first read (although I’m not sure that I finished it back then). This time around I am even more impressed. The style of his writing is that of a good teacher at his work.

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We live near a golf course, not so close that one can actually see it but close enough that the fluffy seeds from its cottonwood trees soar over the houses and directly into my garage whenever the door is open even for a moment.

I may be allergic to them, for if one seed brushes my face I instantly develop the horticultural equivalent of road rage. I scratch and sneeze and think the very worst thoughts about these lovely trees. It doesn’t help that there were “cottonless” varieties available when they were planted and if a little more money had been spent , well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, for one thing.

It’s a princess and the pea sort of thing. Only we royals can truly understand.

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The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men
Gang aft agley.

We’ve all had those days, when there seemed to be a lot more agley going on than there are schemes being well laid. Why, just the other day by noon I already had so much agley on my hands I forgot to scheme altogether.

It all made me wonder, so last night I looked up the origin of this famous quotation, which comes from a poem called To A Mouse.

All of this carried much more weight than I was expecting, while I was in my usual flippant mode. But I continued.

This poem explores the following themes:

• The heartbreaking futility of planning for the future in an uncertain world
• Extreme difficulty of life for poor people and the injustice of a world where they have so little
• Our life-enhancing, human duty to understand the importance of all life, however insignificant it might seem

BBC

Whew.

If you’d like, you can read the entire poem here, although I warn you, it was written by a Scotsman and although it is not in Scottish Gaelic, it might as well have been. Full of that “agley” sort of thing, you know.

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I have developed that most annoying of illnesses. One that makes me feel miserable but is going to disappear on its own in a short handful of days. Because of this I get not nearly as much attention as I would like, and way less sympathy than I feel I deserve.

I have a cold, even worse, a “common” one. I suffer such things poorly.

Since I stopped practicing pediatrics and thus have had much less contact with those most dangerous spreaders of all sorts of disease – children – I rarely get colds, or any other contagious illness, for that matter. While there are kids living in our neighborhood, I discourage friendly relations with them. Should one of them approach too closely * I make a face or say something mildly unpleasant and away they go to tattle on me. Better to be called “mean old man” than dealing with unnecessary episodes of my present affliction is my calculus.

Too harsh, you say? My response is that i have already gone through 1 1/2 boxes of Kleenex with no sign as yet that the disease is waning. My nose runneth, my eyes ache-eth, and my patience weareth exceedingly thin. I am quite the self-pitying mess this morning, completely deaf to pleas for logic, fairness, or compassion. Did I not tell you? I have a cold.

*Too close = less than the radius of viral spread in a sneeze. Research has shown that sneeze particles travel at 100 mph for a radius of 23-27 feet. Yes, real research.

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Bob rode a motorcycle, I rode a motorcycle. He plays straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll. I like straight -ahead rock ‘n’ roll. He occasionally has objectified women in his songs, while I blush to admit to that same fault … but only very rarely, you understand. After all, I am a card-carrying member of a benighted generation of men.

(How benighted? There was a period of a year in my life when I was a member of the Catholic Church. One of the causes of my falling away was that on Saturday evening I would go to confession, lay out my not very original sins, and receive absolution. Sunday morning I would line up for communion to receive the sacrament and then I would notice the awfully attractive legs of the girl ahead of me in line and before you knew it my mind was no longer in a state of grace and I had to go back to the pew and sit down.)

When I look back, I enjoy his music as much as or more than any other artist I’ve listened to. Bob played humble. He never suffered from the “big star” syndrome. Even when he could fill a stadium, he was still writing songs about the common man and about the life they had.

All of it good stuff. I attended a concert of his forty years ago. The auditorium was filled with fans who were totally into his music. When the band played Like A Rock and that first beautiful guitar break came along, suddenly all of the stage lights went out except for a single perfect spot playing on the lead guitarist. It was a moment.

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We are daily bombarded by bad behaviors from our leaders. So much so that a visiting alien’s takeaway would almost certainly be that humans are incapable of honesty, if their opinion was based on media reports.

Former president Cluck is the premier liar right now, and sets a new low bar each time he opens his mouth. Most of the Republican Party leadership repeats his big lie about a stolen election. But President Biden also keeps the fact-checkers busy as he stretches and embellishes in his statements. I’m not suggesting equivalence here, just that lying is a bad habit of a lot of folks.

From the University of Rochester Medical Center comes this nice summation of why lying in general is not praiseworthy, but that there are exceptions to that rule. You all know this stuff, but it’s worth reviewing from time to time.

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Since we bought those beautiful new sit-on-top kayaks a month ago, we’ve been able to get out on them only twice. Rain, wind, family events, and travel have taken from the time available. But looking ahead I can see spaces that might work for exploring with them.

We encountered a family group of eight people fishing together, further on we passed a gaggle of teen-aged boys who carried fishing rods but seemed more interested in punching and insulting one another. There was a pair of oldsters were out on the lake in small kayaks, trying to add rainbow trout to their dinner choices.

All in all a menu of small-town scenes for us to appreciate that evening.

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Robin and Jill took off to Durango on Sunday afternoon to be extras in a film Aiden is making. The plan is that they will return Monday evening, but that’s only a guess.

Meanwhile the cats and I will continue to put the home place in order, which is necessary after being away for a week. It’s the weeds, doncha know. We’re not gardening this year but these sturdy plants leap out of cracks in the driveway, between perennials in the berm, anywhere they can grab one microgram of soil as their very own.

I sometimes wonder what’s holding the plant geneticists back. It seems so obvious that to win the battle we must join them, with hybrids of half-weed and half-whatever. For instance, get dandelions and crabgrass and bluegrass together in one hybrid and stand back. You’d get a lawn that doesn’t need watering or mowing, is a beautiful blue green color, and it would blossom twice a month.

The possibilities seem endless. Let’s get on it, you sons and daughters of Burpee!

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AS IF WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT DEPARTMENT!

Researchers have discovered that our testes contain microplastics at an alarming level. Humans more than other animals.They make the observation that our levels are even higher than that of dogs, and “they eat off the floor.”

One postulate put forward is that this may explain why sperm counts are declining in younger generations. But that’s only a guess at present. But whatever health problems are eventually laid at the door of this finding, it is pretty certain that no red-blooded American male wants to know the he carries around Testicles by Mattel.

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My Lord, don’t I love this song … this particular performance! It sounds particularly good out here on the backyard deck, coming out of that little Bose speaker. I have it on continuous replay, so every nine minutes or so the pleasure is all mine all over again. (When you don’t have a job you have so much time that you can do this).

I will admit that as the years have passed it has gotten a little harder to understand the words when Lucinda Williams sings, but the few that I do catch make it all worth while.

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We have a local public radio station that will occasionally play an hour of tunes by Native American artists. This was one that was interesting and I made it my quest to find a copy, finally locating one for download at Reverbnation.com. Finely honed sarcasm it is.

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To me former president Cluck is like smog. He’s been poisoning the air that I breathe for years now, and I do resent it. But I am a senior citizen, so at least I can remember an America without him in my face every day, and have some sense of perspective. But what if I were twelve years old or less? This unwholesome man would have been put into my awareness by many of my fellow citizens as a worthy leader, on every day of my life. That makes me sad. He teaches no lesson that I would have my grandchildren learn.

If the man has a core at all, it is rotten. We need to rid ourselves of the national disgrace of his presence. November can’t come too soon for me.

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On our recent trip we traveled 3078 miles in 8 days. The Subaru never let us down,
but I don’t want to look at it for a couple of days.

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Listening to a song on the road home we heard the phrase “they didn’t mean a thing,” where the singer refers to some sexual liaisons he’d had “on the side.” Robin and I agreed that we are awfully tired of hearing that phrase in songs and in movies.

Perhaps an affair means nothing to the spouse who utters the words but he or she is wrong in several ways:

• Broken trust means something
• Lies mean something
• Promises count

Perhaps the writers who create the weak dialogue should work a little harder and get away from just peddling cliches.

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The following entry has nothing to do with the previous one. It’s just how my monkey mind swings.

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Back a few years ago I found myself going from blithely sailing on the Sea of Matrimony to poling a leaky pirogue through the Great Dismal Swamp.

At the time I was able to look back and realize that my captaincy had been wanting in enough respects to rival that of the skipper of the Titanic when he told his first mate; “This is so boring I think I’ll take a nap. Wake me when you see the Statue of Liberty.”

So when my crew abandoned ship I could at least partially understand why. But I was sorely wounded and had to blame somebody … so I chose the opposition lawyer. I sent him at least two letters commenting colorfully on his character, profession, and how badly his mother must have raised him. (I believe I might have even asked if that same lady was still plying her trade in that bordello in Calcutta. I can be a terrible person when provoked)

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I thought that John Oliver’s offer to Clarence Thomas was a good one. The following three quotes are from The Guardian article of 2/19/2024.

The late-night talkshow host John Oliver has offered to pay Clarence Thomas $1m annually – as well as give him a $2m tour bus – if the Republican judge resigns from the US supreme court.

“So that’s the offer – $1m a year, Clarence. And a brand new condo on wheels. And all you have to do … is sign the contract and get the fuck off the supreme court,” Oliver remarked. “The clock starts now – 30 days, Clarence. Let’s do this!”

Neither Thomas nor the supreme court immediately commented publicly on Oliver’s offer. Oliver acknowledged he could end up going on “standup tours … for years” to be able to afford paying Thomas’s retirement if the justice accepts the proposal.

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This guy is an entertainer whose stage name is Charlamagne Tha God. Quite a claim, that. He gave an interview recently which was published in Sunday’s NY Times.

I’ve watched him over the past several years as he grew more popular and more powerful, but still had that core of common sense* that first won my respect.

Good interview.

*That phrase … what to say … how uncommon what we once called “common sense” seems to be these days.

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Today we start home, stopping briefly in Sioux Falls to pick up sister Jill, who will be staying with us for several days. Yesterday we spent with Kari and Jon touring the area, stopping in at two state parks (Bear’s Head, Vermillion) to spend time looking at water and trees and rocks and wildlife, charging our batteries from the source … nature itself.

We ate … my, my, didn’t we eat. We went to a restaurant that online promised us sandwiches but in person delivered only Indian food. We sat at tables overlooking beautiful Lake Shagawa while uniformed personnel brought us fried bluegill and mushroom ravioli. We ate tiny cheesecakes the size of chocolates. My plan is to seek out any under-the-table M.D. at home who will get me enough Ozempic to take off at least the cheesecake, fried potatoes and the last two fillets of bluegill that appeared in unseemly lumps on my waistline.

It’s 4:30 am as I am typing this entry, it is raining on the cabin roof, and in an hour we will load our precious possessions, most of which sorely need a laundering, into the Subaru and take off. However long it takes to get back to this special area, I know that what is essential about the Boundary Waters will still be here, waiting as it has for millennia. All I need to do is add me.

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After skipping the news for a week, I watched briefly last evening for a short time. Stepping back a foot or two it is obvious that our world is being run by children with bad upbringing and madmen. It deserves better and so do we all.

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Started out for Ely early this morning and made it to Harris MN, a place I had never heard of. The sign on the highway had read Good Food at the Kaffe Stuge., which was all we needed to leave the interstate behind and drive the mile into town.

Three elder statesmen of Harris, decently clad in bib overalls, were having breakfast at a table, filling the air with ardently declaimed nonsense that had to do with tractors, combines, liquid manure, and the young man in town who routinely broke speed limits whenever behind the wheel.

“One of these days that sumbitch is gonna put that pretty car right through that fence and into a tree.”

“Yah, well, just so he don’t hit anyone else on his way in.”

BTW, Kaffe Stuge is Swedish for Coffee Shop.

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Reached the town of Ely MN about noon and found our way to Stoney Ridge Resort, where we will be staying. This area has so many grand associations with past visits that it has almost the status of a second home.

Today we rendezvous with daughter Kari and husband Jon. On my very first trip to the Boundary Waters Kari and her sister Sarah were with me, nearly a half century ago. In between there have been scores of visits with Robin and friend Rich Kaplan.

Each time there were changes. This restaurant had closed but another opened. The cinema was running movies or closed and waiting for a better moment to reopen. The friend who worked at a local outfitter had retired and a man who was to become a new friend had taken his place.

Today I may make my way down to the entry point at Lake One, where most of my trips to the interior began. I started to get into a mindset of “Well, maybe this will be my last trip here, blah, blah, blah.” But I caught myself and realized that – when had that not been true? Life is such an uncertain enterprise that each outing could have been the last … but it wasn’t. The only thing that makes sense is to enjoy today, anything else is really a waste of time.

There are two truths operative here:

• I am not immortal
• I am breathing

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Today we’re connecting with daughter Maja and granddaughter Elsa in the Twin Cities. It’s only about 90 minutes from Mankato to Minneapolis. A breeze. We had good long conversations with Maja this morning and again in the pm. In between we met with Elsa for lunch.

Our trusty GPS found the BnB that granddaughter Cheyenne and husband Remy are operating, and we had supper with Remy at a very good vegan restaurant. The BnB is really nice and roomy, with a big kitchen. We settled in early with an eye to an early start in the morning.

The restaurant was part of an arts community, and pretty colorful.

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