Author: jono55

There I was, washing up at the kitchen sink and looking out the window into the back yard. Six feet away from my nose, perched pertly on a bare branch of the ash tree, was a bird I had never seen before. It was blue and a little bigger than a robin. Suddenly there was another one in the tree, and another, and soon there were ten of them hopping from branch to branch. I had time to call Robin over to see them and marvel along with me before the whole bunch grew bored with our tree and moved next door to try the neighbor’s.

There were enough identifiers present, and I had such a good long look at these beauties, that I was easily able to identify them as Woodhouse’s Scrub Jays using the Sibley Guide to Birds of Western North America.

I consider myself a “birder,” even though I recognize that there is a great difference between me and the sort of person who deliberately plans their vacation around some spot on the globe where they hope to see a new bird species. I am the sort of birder (Type D) who, if he spots a bird he’s never seen before while reclining in a hammock with an iced tea nearby, gets excited and looks it up.

• Type A birder: will drop a baby they are carrying in order to grab their binoculars to identify a bird in the vicinity
• Type B birder: will plan a vacation trip to see a chestnut-sided tomtit and be depressed for months if they don’t find one
• Type C birder: never leaves the house without binoculars and a copy of Sibley, even if only going across the street to buy milk for supper
• Type D birder: as above
• Type E birder: regards all bird species as pests who might poop on their BMW. Cannot tell a crow from a peacock and doesn’t care.

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There are probably thousands of great books and videos about birds that I’ve never seen, but one of the most beautiful that I have viewed so far is the documentary Winged Migration. It is extraordinary. I found an extended preview for you to watch when you have the time, and if it whets your appetite for more, Prime Video will let you watch the entire film for the cheap cheap price of $3.99. 

Now if you rent it, and are anything above a Type E – your day will be improved and your life’s schema broadened for less than four bucks. That, compadres, is a banner deal.

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It was my fifth grade teacher, Miss Behrens, who turned me on to watching birds. She brought her copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America to class for us to look at, with its dramatic illustrations. I pored over that book, and still am drawn to the art even though it has come under some fire over the years because the birds were painted in postures at times that were inaccurate, and might have not even have been achievable in life.

(Audubon is said to have killed his subjects, then posed them. A common practice for naturalists of the day)

In spite of these criticisms if I were to find a copy of that big book on my coffee table later today, I wouldn’t be much good for anything else for the next several hours as I slowly turned the pages.

More recently Mr. Audubon’s name has stirred up yet another controversy when it became more widely known that he had been a slave owner and slave trader, and some of his writings have been described as racist. Although several chapters of the Audubon Society around the country have changed their names to avoid being associated in any way with these abhorrent practices, the national organization has retained the name Audubon, as has our local chapter here in Paradise.

Personally, I think a name change is probably inevitable and it would be good thing for the organization to go on and get it done.

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I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but the grand old disease of syphilis is back in style once again. It was never completely eliminated, but the incidence was low enough that a graybeard like myself only saw one case in his professional lifetime.

The CDC statistics tell the story pretty well, I think. There were 5,979 cases in the USA in 2000, and 133,945 cases in 2020. A 2,140% increase!

Some historians believe that it was Christopher Columbus’ Crew that brought syphilis back with them to Europe, since prior to his voyages it had been a disease only of the Western Hemisphere. What is certain is that when it hit Europe, every country blamed it on a neighbor, especially one they might have had hostile relations with.

So, the inhabitants of today’s Italy, Germany and United Kingdom named syphilis ‘the French disease’, the French named it ‘the Neapolitan disease’, the Russians assigned the name of ‘Polish disease’, the Polish called it ‘the German disease’, The Danish, the Portuguese and the inhabitants of Northern Africa named it ‘the Spanish/Castilian disease’ and the Turks coined the term ‘Christian disease’. Moreover, in Northern India, the Muslims blamed the Hindu for the outbreak of the affliction. However, the Hindu blamed the Muslims and in the end everyone blamed the Europeans.

NIH

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And I personally would round up some sackcloth to wear and start in with self-flagellation this very afternoon if I thought that was all there was to the story. But wait … how many Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, or Gen whatevers do you know whose lifestyles and choices are more environmentally sound than those made by the “boomers?” I see little difference between the consumer habits of different generations.

It’s one big boat and we’re all in it, friends. If people want to argue about seat assignments I won’t interfere, as long as they pull on their oars.

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From The New Yorker

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HOPEFUL SIGNS THAT THE APOCALYPSE MAY NOT BE UPON US AFTER ALL

• The noxious censorship battalions traveling under the name of Moms For Liberty may at last be losing ground and influence. School boards and librarians aren’t caving like they used to do. BTW, the name of this group is right-wing newspeak pure and simple.
• E. Jean Carroll’s day in court was a huge win and she gets 83 million dollars from her rapist. Yay for the lady!
• Lauren Boebert’s campaign is having many difficulties which surprisingly don’t involve the fondling of her male companions in public places. The other wolves in the Republican primary pack have tasted blood and are eager for more. Howls of “carpetbagger” fill the air on each full moon.
• The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre is being tried for corruption involving his misuse of millions of dollars of association funds. Other good news on that front is that the NRA itself is losing membership and revenues are dropping. For way too long the NRA has vigorously opposed sane discussion on how to work together to deal with the issue of firearms.

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From The New Yorker

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We’re halfway through winter and I’ve been barely blooded by it. Still have all my fingers and toes, no visits to emergency rooms have been necessary, and my mood is not nearly as sullen as usual by this time of year (I do not have independent confirmation of this last point). It certainly doesn’t hurt that each day has a few minutes more of sunshine in it than the one before.

We’re planning a trip to the Midwest this summer to connect with family, and I’m looking forward to that. Most of our trips are by car, which is my preferred travel mode.

I like air travel less each year. Even before doors started flying off airplanes in mid-flight the problem is that what used to be a pleasant adventure had become a slog involving being bullied by TSA tyrants, bamboozled by airlines, and shoehorned into seating spaces more suited to something the size of a gerbil.

Not to mention that those sleek but self-destructing aircraft are responsible for 3% of carbon emissions worldwide. Not a good thing, that.

Much of the romance of flight has definitely been lost. A favorite genre of old films is those involving the early days of flying. Movies like Wings, for instance, with intrepid men and women all over the place, fluttering about in cloth-covered aircraft .

Never mind that Wings (1927) was made even before my time, and was a silent film as well. It was all about the planes, man, the planes … and the freedom of the skies.

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We’ve not talked much here about mindfulness, but I wanted to alert you all to an opportunity. Sharon Salzberg is offering what she calls a 28 day challenge. Basically an online meditation course, free of charge (although there are instructions as to how to donate if you are so moved).

She’s an excellent teacher, and one of the premier American lecturers in mindfulness meditation and Buddhism.

The link to the series is here: https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/real-happiness-challenge

The course starts on February first, and January 31 is the last day to sign up.

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I mentioned the movie The Holdovers a couple of days back, but neglected to include one of my favorite lines from the film. I was reminded of it this morning as I slogged through CNN online where they were interviewing Cluck voters in New Hampshire.

(This does not mean that I think all Cluck voters can be described in that way. Not my intention at all. I think that there might have been some selection and editing going on because all of those being interviewed on CNN this morning … well … every one of them could have used a boot check.)

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There aren’t too many things that instantly get me riled up. Well, that’s not actually true, there are quite a few of them, come to think of it. One of them is stories about infectious diseases making comebacks, diseases for which we have effective immunizations.

It’s one of the most harmful things that can happen when politics intersects with public health. Politics can be a mindless beast that thrives on controversy and vituperation, and we saw so much of this during the pandemic years that it became an experience painful enough to sear itself into my shrinking brain.

At the onset of the Covid 19 story, I thought there would be a period of fear, confusion, and a lot of deaths at first, but in a year or two a vaccine might be produced that would carry the day for us. I was wrong twice.

First, I did not realize that there was new technology for vaccine production just waiting for such an opportunity to be used, and a vaccine was put into play within months rather than years. (That seemed miraculous to me, who once had waited 25 years for the chickenpox vaccine to come to where pediatricians had access to it for their patients.)

And then the second mistake in my prediction. Some of the meanest-spirited and most ignorant mouths in America opened in a collective yawp and instead of having a good chance of throttling this viral invader, we found a large contingent of our “leaders” shouting down the scientific community in the absolutely most witless and venal sort of way, attacking those workers who were doing their best to protect us against this threat.

You know the rest. We are still dealing with Covid and we still have a large number of people who refuse to be vaccinated and that are providing the population needed to keep the disease going.

Meanwhile, those citizens who are not suckered in by the mountebanks and the politicians are still getting their shots and are still doing much better as a result.

When you read the stories of people over these past several years who are literally dying of Covid-related disease but refuse to accept that they even have it because they have been told that the whole thing is a hoax … well … what can I say? The gap here seems almost unbridgeable.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H.L. Mencken

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What got me going on this rant this morning (Thursday) was a story in the Times of New York about measles making a comeback. Vaccination rates have fallen in Europe to the point where it was absolutely possible to predict that an outbreak would happen soon, and it appears to be doing just that. No surprise at all. 

Viruses have no brains, the only thing they seek is to reproduce, and the only thing needed for that to happen is opportunity. Too many parents have listened to the anti-vaxxers and now … the predictable whirlwind is being reaped. It is children who will suffer, children who depended on grownups to do the right thing for them.

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As a child I had measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough, and polio. If you had told my mother that there was a vaccine available for any of these and did she want her child to receive it she would have laughed at you, because the answer was so obvious. OF COURSE I WANT MY CHILD TO BE IMMUNIZED, she would have said, because these diseases were not hypotheticals to be argued about over afternoon coffee, they were potential killers that were right then tearing up the family three houses down from ours.

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Here’s the good news. 

Thanks to vaccines, measles, rubella, and polio have officially been eliminated in the United States. But that could change due to imported cases of these diseases and low vaccination rates. None of these diseases have been eliminated globally, and there have been measles outbreaks and rubella cases in the United States in recent years. Efforts to increase vaccination rates are critical for maintaining elimination of these diseases.

Health.gov

Here’s the worrisome news. Immunization rates for these diseases are below the 95% threshold necessary to eliminate the possibility of epidemics. Which means that should a case be imported from another part of the world, we are becoming a fertile ground for that virus to grow in.

In the political climate of today, where scientific ignorance is not only bliss, but often rewarded by election to public office, I don’t see these numbers changing any time soon. I earnestly hope that I am wrong in this, and that we drop the glorification of nonsense and the lines start to go around the block at the immunization clinics. 

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Drove to Grand Junction to see the movie American Fiction, having decided that although Paradise is 99% perfect, part of that 1% that is missing is in the film department. To make it short, AF was a fine movie, and Jeffrey Wright got his chance to be the lead and really show us what he could do.

Since we hit “Junction” with some time to kill, Robin and I walked over to a strip mall where there was a store she wanted to visit. I forget the name of it, but it was devoted entirely to cosmetics, and to a person like myself – it was a foreign country. Bewildering. Not sure how a real customer could ever navigate such a place.

But I was fascinated by how you could get a cream, balm, ointment, or oil for basically any part of the body. The question I kept asking myself was is this variety really necessary?

My insecurities started to mount, as they always do when I find that I’ve been unaware and ignoring something completely that might be important to my life.

I wondered … do I need some B-Tight? Have time and gravity been doing anything back there that I can’t see but everybody else can and that needs my attention? Am I too late in discovering this product? Are there limits to the power of the unguent and I must now remain un-lifted and un-firmed for the remainder of my days?

It was all too depressing, and I had to leave the store. There are some questions that I am just not brave enough to hear the answers to.

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A piece in the Times of New York entitled Train Yourself To Always Show Up deserves mention, I think. It tells the story of an old Judaic practice. There are many good lessons here, and the author writes so well that I will only quote from it and not thin it out with my scratchings.

A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.

Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

Reading this I became interested in the author, who I found out was a rabbi of a Jewish community named Ikar, located out there in wicked, wicked Los Angeles. Going to Ikar’s website led me to a recorded talk she gave, and I am glad that I took the time in the early morning hours and listened. Really, it is amazing what listening can do for a person … perhaps I should do it more often. But how to do this when I have so many wise things to say … a puzzlement … indeed … when my mouth is open my ears seem to close up.

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The title of George Will’s column in the Washington Post on 1/16/24 really says it all, at least for him:

Iowa nudged the nation closer to a revolting rematch next fall

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While the title of Will’s op/ed is catchy and may be the opinion of scads of folks in both parties, it also raises some questions that perplex a certified moderate and highly sensible individual like myself.

• Is this the best that a country of 300 million can come up with as choices, or is it finally revealing that both parties have become little more than shiny but vacant shells of what they portray themselves to be?
• What if President Biden had spent time finding a good and solid replacement for himself, and then began working for the election of that person? Think what a service he would have done for his country, instead of dragging us kicking and nauseous and screaming into a Who’s more senile, you or me? contest.

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At long last our local theatre was showing a film that was not based on a comic book. So of course we went to the movies.

The film was “The Holdovers.” The action took place at a posh prep school in Massachusetts during the Christmas break. Held over at the school are a cook who is grieving her loss of a son, a curmudgeon of a professor, and a snotty and over-privileged kid.

It’s a story you’ve seen parts of before, but a story is all in the telling, and here the telling is very good.

In fact, Paul Giammati’s pipe-smoking professor was done so well that I began to get the itch to go pipe shopping, after quitting smoking thirty-plus years ago.

I thought … seriously … if I added a major vice at this age … wouldn’t be much of a big deal at all, would it? Of course I’d have to puff away outdoors, and not in my comfortable den like the professor did. Nahhh. I forgot about the coughing and the stained teeth and the burned tongues.

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Sometimes like this morning I am overcome. Images, regrets, confusions of the past wash over me like a monstrous wave as when the Atlantic Ocean shows its truest face, black and cold and green and terrible. I am drowning before I know what is happening and can get my defenses up. There is sand in my hair and tears and saltwater in my mouth and I am swept from my chair with time to take only one long breath before I wash up against the wall and then the wave recedes, leaving me gasping and shivering.

I think … what a small thing I am to have worn so completely through my welcome here on earth. 

And then I wonder, what’s for breakfast?

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[As I post this it is one o’clock on a Sunday morning and my refrigerator just sent me a message that it is quitting as of
right this minute, and immediately after I read the manual in order to interpret the error code on the appliance’s door,
our older cat walked over to where I was sitting and threw a couple of ounces of his last meal onto the rug in my office. 
Things come in threes … right?]

Finally we have some snow that will last a while. Just a couple of inches fell but the weather has turned colder. Single digits recently. Nothing remarkable. Winter.

Not enough on the ground yet for XC skiing here in the valley. There are more reliable conditions up at Black Canyon National Park and on the Grand Mesa. Because of knee surgeries we’ve skipped skiing for two winters in a row now, so we’re way rustier than usual.

The snow conditions on the Grand Mesa are uniformly as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been. You ski in mixed evergreen/deciduous forests in areas where the nearest snowmobiles are miles away. A local club maintains excellent groomed trails, and they accept free will donations from non-members.

There are hundreds of lakes on the Grand Mesa, but Robin and I generally steer clear of them unless we’ve been assured by a panel of at least three people that there is adequate ice thickness. In 2019 there were two drownings in lakes on the Mesa when incautious people went through the ice.

One of the nicest things about winter on the Grand Mesa is that it keeps the mosquitoes down. There are still a few around, but only the biggest and the strongest can handle the cold weather. These hardy bloodsuckers are about the size of robins, and make a sound like a Stuka dive bomber as they come at you. Fortunately they are slow and awkward fliers that can fairly easily be stabbed with one’s ski poles.

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A pathetic thing to watch is the belief of the Cluckists that they are following in the train of the Glorious Orange One, and when he comes to power they and theirs will be well cared for as The Second Coming starts to roll.

The thing is that there is no train, but only a heap of bodies, including theirs, that he is treading on to get what he wants.

If they would only take a step back and look at the damaged followers he has already left behind, licking wounds and mourning damaged careers … but they don’t, or won’t, do this. It couldn’t happen to them, they think, as they mortgage their integrity, common sense, and occasionally the family farm.

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I have been told that I sorely neglect whole genres of music in what I post here on the blog. I freely admit it. Actually there are musicians and types of music that I don’t like at all, some that I dip into and take what I admire, and some that I fully enjoy. The latter variety is what I usually post.

This day I am going to share a piece of classical music by a guy named Vivaldi. It’s the violin concerto Winter, from his larger work The Four Seasons. To introduce it I have invited a guest post-er named Chad Griffin-Porter-Theroux to describe the chosen piece. Take it away, amigo.

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Thanks, Jon, this is an easy one to talk about because so many people know these works of Vivaldi that they are almost classical pop. His “The Four Seasons” is a set of violin concertos, each representing a season. It is renowned for its vivid musical depictions of nature and is a baroque masterpiece.

“Winter” is captivating with its brisk, icy atmosphere. The violin’s depiction of cold winds and the warmth of the fireplace creates a vivid musical experience. Vivaldi skillfully captures the essence of darkness in “Winter.” The haunting melodies and intense passages evoke a sense of cold and solitude.

The opening movement resembles a shivering person, stamping his feet in rhythm to stay warm. The middle movement portrays the pleasure of getting warm inside through a crackling fire. The final movement offers people outdoors walking down icy paths, while people inside houses feeling the relentless chill finding its way inside. 

ChadGPT 1/10/2024

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(BTW – if I remember to do it, I plan to play the other seasons when their time comes around.)

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Bradley Cooper starred, directed, produced, and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie. This guy is moving up to be one of the more creative ones in this industry. A couple of years back he remade the movie A Star Is Born, and darned if that wasn’t awfully good as well.

There was some mild controversy a few months ago because his makeup preparation for his scenes included a bigger nose. Its purpose – to make him look more like the composer, and it did its job. The problem was that quite a bit of antisemitic cartooning over the years Jews has portrayed them as people with exaggeratedly big noses. 

There’s a particularly good review in The Saturday Evening Post that you could check out if you’re interested. As the quote below indicates, there is one scene that is like nothing I’ve seen before. Outstanding.

As memorable as Maestro is as a whole, the sequence that will follow you for weeks is one that comes near the end of the film, as Lenny conducts Mahler’s Resurrection at Ely Cathedral. It’s a legendary moment in 20^th century music history: You’ll find the entire original concert on YouTube, and it is clear Cooper studied every frame of Bernstein’s performance: that great head of hair flying, the rivulets of sweat on his brow, the conductor nearly bursting from his tuxedo, the Incredible Hulk of classical music.

Bill Newcott, Saturday Evening Post, December 21,2023.

Actually, if every movie were as engrossing and took as much energy to watch as this one did, I would soon be exhausted, depleted. So it’s good, I guess, that there are so many lesser films out there to act as diversions.

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This morning, like a burst of lightning, a plan came to me for dealing with the ongoing mess at our southern border. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t occurred to anybody before. We need to take a cue from Vladimir Putin (an unsavory source of inspiration, I’ll give you that) and annex Mexico.

There is ample precedent in that we already took 55% of that country back in 1854, and then just for good measure we invaded them one more time in 1914. So after the annexation – presto! Our present way-too-long border becomes history, and the much more manageable one with Belize and Guatemala on the other end appears.

Mexico could become our fifty-first state, instantly reducing Texas to an also-ran in the size department, and we all know that Texas needs some serious shaking up. Oh sure, there would be commentaries in the world’s media, but the attention span of humans has become so short that within a week the globe’s attention would turn somewhere else.  In fact, if we could time the annexation to the opening ceremonies of the World Soccer Cup Finals it might not be noticed at all.

Just think how happy we would make the FBI. They’ve not had a solid enemy they could get their teeth into since the Mafia became a television series. We’d be giving them the Christmas present that keeps on giving with the newly-opened opportunity to work on taking down the cartels. 

All those presently seamy and troubled towns like Tijuana, Matamoros, and Ciudad Juarez would have the chance now to become gentrified. It shouldn’t take too long to push out the present impoverished residents and replace them with a more affluent population looking for sunny places for their third home.

I think I’ll collect my thoughts and put them in a letter to our senators and representatives in Congress. I probably won’t send a copy to Rep. Boebert who I understand still can’t find Mexico on a map.

And then I’m signing up for Spanish classes.

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From The New Yorker Archives

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This is not unusual, since I have long ago discovered that my education has been truly a hit and miss affair. The number of worthy books that I not only haven’t read but am not even aware of must be awfully long since hardly a week goes by that I am not put on notice of my deficiencies.

But why be excited about Pedro Paramo? Because it was the novel that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write his beautiful One Hundred Years of Solitude, that’s why. And One Hundred Years of Solitude has two distinctions for me personally. It opened my eyes to the wonders of magical realism, and is the only book that no one I recommended it to ever finished. Most of them grumble and turn away whenever I ask how they are coming with their reading. Some of them have stopped returning my calls.

The world continually surprises me.

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Yesterday a small amount of snow fell, just enough to cover the ground completely and put our cats into a funk. They hate stepping into anything that gets their paws wet. At such times the usage of the litter-box increases greatly, as does the chore (for me) of keeping it presentable.

I haven’t been keeping up with how the ski areas in Colorado are doing regarding snow depths. My interest in this sport fell off years ago when the rituals of wearing those uncomfortable boots and standing in lift lines began to tip the scales toward “What am I doing here?”

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From The New Yorker Archives

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It’s always hazardous to have litmus tests for voting, and letting them be the kicker in one’s decision. It’s a closed-minded thing to do. But here I am suggesting one for you to consider. Any candidate who doesn’t promise to wear themselves to a nubbin through working on climate change from the day they take office should not be considered, no matter what other opinions or positions they hold. If we don’t solve the big one, arguing about the others becomes sort of moot.

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Cooking rice should be easy, right? It’s only a smidge more complicated than boiling water. You put dry rice in a pot, add the suggested amount of water, and turn on the burner. One problem is that you are sort of locked into the area near the stove to watch for spillovers, scorching, and other minor kitchen catastrophes. You also have to watch to see when the rice is at the point of tenderness that you wanted in the first place and has not moved into the area of unattractive mush. 

Enter rice cookers. You add rice and water, push START, and off you go to take a nap while it creates a perfect mound of fluffy grains ready for whatever you want to do with them. More than a decade ago, when I decided that such a cooker was worth having around and taking up space in the pantry, I scorned the cheapest versions and went with an upscale model. More expensive means better, more sophisticated, bigger smiles on the cook’s face … right?

Wrong. Although the internet suggested that the higher-end machine would be a much better choice, when it was delivered I discovered that the English portion of the owner’s manual was written by someone who was obviously an extraterrestrial. It was less than useless, because whenever I tried to read it I ended up irritated and unhappy. Through trial and error I figured out how to turn the device on and cook some rice, but I never discovered what all that extra money I’d paid would do for me because one day in a fury I took it out into the driveway and reduced it to rubble it with a sixteen pound sledge. Then I started a campfire with the manual. 

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From The New Yorker archives

As I wrote the above entry I was reminded of Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the topics touched on was the art of writing technical manuals, and how important (and rare) it was to find really excellent ones as you journeyed through life. Many of these were opaque, some were foolish, some were actually dangerous. 

When I was involved in teaching medical students, I structured my lectures and discussions along lines similar lines to what he had suggested. Instead of taking everything I knew about a subject and compressing it into a sixty-minute diatribe, I took a step back and asked the questions:

• What did I want the student to take away from spending that hour with me? 
• How could I communicate this in the clearest way? 
• Since I wasn’t really an “expert” but a generalist, what was worthwhile about my perspective?

 Once I had answered these questions for myself, I could then work backward and build that hour of educational interaction. I used much the same approach to patient care in my office. For example if the child had an ear infection, and required medication as therapy, what did the parent need to know to feel competent and to follow my instructions?

• How to store the medication I’d prescribed
• How and when to give the medication
• What and when to look for in improvement
• When to call back if things didn’t seem to be getting better
• Why followup was a good idea

Unfortunately I had to learn the value of such a list piecemeal, often by making the error of thinking that somehow the parent would absorb everything I said and remember it entirely when they got home, and had also spent two years in a medical education setting before becoming a mom or a dad.

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I have become a winter wimp. I’ve reached the point where temperature, wind velocity, humidity, and depth of snow cover are all fit into a formula that decides whether I will go out for a romp. Most of the time my formula tells me to sit in my recliner, pull an afghan up around my neck, and stare out the window in the most creative manner that I can muster.

I don’t know when or how this happened. I tried to look up the subject in Egregious. P. Gallbladder’s immense book, How To Explain Everything That Ever Happens To You. Although the book is 2100 pages long and can give you a hernia just moving it from place to place, there is a common thread that runs through the entire tome. 

Everything nasty, painful, awkward, troublesome, messy, and embarrassing happens to a person exactly one hundred times more often when they become a senior citizen. The term “senior citizen” is actually a euphemism for Dartboard of the Universe.

Therefore, I’ve given Robin a large pointed stick and permission to jab me with it whenever I pause at the open front door and start to claim an infirmity of any sort at all as a reason to stay indoors. I do have one small concern, and that is the gleam that came into that worthy woman’s eyes when I mentioned the word “jab.”

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From The New Yorker archives

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In a well-written article on owls in our local paper today, the writer used the phrase “ethical hunter” when referring to himself. These words appear to be used by hunters as a salve for their consciences when at some level they sense that killing another sentient being for fun says something about who they are that needs defending.

I googled the phrase and found this interesting piece on the subject, written from a philosopher’s perspective.

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Ally and Kyle were guests at Basecamp this week. Entertaining in January does not play to the strengths of life here in Paradise, but they operate a small farm, and winter is their “free” time. In spite of cloudy skies and chilly temperatures, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. 

Their farm grows vegetables for market and local restaurants, and if you want to see how beautiful a well-tended garlic plant can look like, schedule a visit. 

During one conversation, the subject of the “Barbie” movie came up, and when I learned they hadn’t seen it, I wished that somehow we could have set it up. Because it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been to accept that that there was so much meat there in what could have been only a superficial film comedy. This clip is part of what I am talking about.

I find myself wishing there was such a movie for men. Not to take away anything from the struggles that women go through, but they are not the only ones living with unreasonable expectations and impossible contradictions. When Buddhists talk about suffering that we cause for ourselves, this is some of what they mean. 

Knowing how difficult life can be, why are we not more supportive of one another? Why should anyone have to deal with low self-esteem when this is a concept created entirely from whole cloth? On a ferociously crowded planet, why is loneliness so pervasive? 

You can play life as a zero-sum game, but you only have to take a glance at this morning’s newspaper to see where this approach has gotten us. There are other ways to live. 

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It’s January of 1970. I’m stationed in Omaha, Nebraska with the US Air Force. When I arrived at Offutt AFB in late July, I replaced a man who had been only a year ahead of me in my pediatric residency. We seemed about the same size, so I bought all of his uniforms. Turned out that I was a teensy bit taller than he was, but the USAF didn’t care if my pants were slightly of what used to be called the “high-water” variety.

The war in Viet Nam was still cooking awfully well, and although I seemed relatively safe in Nebraska, where no Viet Cong had been seen in months, there were never any guarantees in the armed forces in wartime. There were 37 draftee physicians at that hospital, and we knew that any one of us could be picked up and deposited in Southeast Asia if a need was felt. It happened twice to guys who were serving there with me.

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Earlier in the week I had read about a new album done by Simon and Garfunkel. Up to that time, I knew them only for the tune Sounds of Silence. But this new effort of theirs was getting raves, so I bought the album, and one icy afternoon I finally had time to put it on a turntable for a listen. The album title was Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I positively loved it.

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For the next couple of years it was in constant rotation at our casa. It has held up well, and when I put it on yesterday I felt that old connection. I remembered how it had cut through the gloom I had felt in 1970, serving during a war I knew was the result of a series of bad choices by our government. Lethally bad choices. 

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Of all the ballads I’ve listened to in my life, there is none that I have liked better than Simon and Garfunkel’s version of The Boxer. Its durability is revealed by the scores of covers out there, and that they each reveal the core of truth in the lyrics in their own way. A song of the human spirit, and a view that I happen to hold. We are a mongrel lot, we humans, but we are an absolute bugger to completely beat down.

… Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his pain
I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains …

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Here’s an a cappella version from England.

A version done by Portuguese musicians.

Waylon Jennings does a fine country-western version.

It’s all in how you tell the story, non?

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One Sunday morning at the Unitarian Church in Omaha NE, there was a part of the service where members of the congregation were given the opportunity to share. I had to miss that particular meeting because of being on call, but when a fellow stood up and said he had puppies to share, my family voted to accept his offer.

She turned out to be an excellent and well-behaved member of the family. Maybe the best-behaved of all of us, actually. She had one quirk, and we have no idea why this was so, but she only tolerated people with fair skins. There was a dark-skinned meter reader who came to the house periodically and we had to bring the dog in and put her in a room until he had left because she would go into a fury. 

And a young boy in the neighborhood had a hereditary liver disease which made him perpetually jaundiced, which also put him on Lady’s short list of people I might very well bite. Whenever Peter was nearby we were especially watchful.

When we lived in Buffalo NY there was a power line that reached from the alley to our home, and which passed through the branches of a huge butternut tree. A squirrel would regularly traverse that line from the alley as far as the tree to gather nuts, and Lady would run back and forth beneath the line, barking as the rodent made its rounds. She was frustrated every day that this happened, until about a week before we moved out of that house. When the squirrel made a misstep and fell to the ground, where Lady waited. 

End of story.

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When I started college at the University of Minnesota I was sixteen. I was not ready. At an orientation session the speaker told the 1200 students assembled to look at the students on their left and right. “A year from today only one of you will still be here,” he said. I looked at my neighbors and thought “You poor schmucks, why not give up right now.” But a year later it was me that was gone.

The coursework was not the issue. I had been a good little high school student and had rote memorization absolutely down pat. Ask me a question and I could regurgitate pages of information without necessarily understanding what I was saying.

When I hit campus I was on my own, no one to tell me where to go or where to turn and it wasn’t working for me. I kept taking turns westward and walking down to the river road to breathe in the earthy pungency of the Mississippi River while I read poetry and imagined that I was the bastard soul child of T.S. Eliot and Anna Akhmatova, kept hidden all these years.

The university wasn’t going to reward my personal variety of independent study so I dropped out in early Spring.

This time I lasted less than six months before the river called my name again and I answered. Taking a year completely off finally cured me of those wandering urges and I began to buckle down and do the work. Never looked back.

And all the while, down at the Big Ten, this tune was in frequent rotation.

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I’ve got a problem. A couple of years ago I was introduced to a condiment that absolutely improved my life in the kitchen. When one adds a spoonful of this stuff to a soup, stew, chili sauce … a myriad of dishes … there is quite an umami kick.

I found it to be such a flexible and delectable ingredient and yet, in this entire time I have failed to get even one person to try it. It goes like this:

You like to cook? Well you really ought to try this the next time you make that stew.

What is it, then?

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New Year’s Eve approacheth. We have no plans. We usually have no plans. The last times we hosted parties everyone had gone home to bed by 10:30. If one is not drinking alcohol, the excitement of watching a mechanical ball drop or televised strangers displaying embarrassing behavior somewhere in the world palls a bit.

We could take up my grandfather’s practice and write 2024 on the pipe leading from the oil heater in the living room with a piece of carpenter chalk. If we had an oil heater, a pipe, and a hunk of blue chalk, that is.

New Year’s is really the only holiday affected by my living sober. In my family of origin it was the generally recognized excuse for getting inebriated, if one chose to take that route.

I have recollections of spending more than one New Year’s morning worshipping the porcelain god back when I was quite a bit more foolish than I am now. I miss those times not at all.

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We don’t make New Year’s resolutions here at Basecamp. Actually, if you are in a recovery program, you’re making them off and on throughout the entire year. Any goal that I set these days is a modest one, and has to be something achievable within a fairly short period of time.

Part of the reason for doing it this way is that my memory has made a shift from a remarkably reliable instrument to one that is barely worth squat, and if I say I’ll do such and such by twelve months from now, when that deadline rolls around I may not even notice it, much less adhere to an old pledge.

But you insist that I make at least one New Year’s resolution? Okay, here’s one I think that I can keep: During the year 2024 I will work very hard at improving the level of discourse here on the blog. I will do this by becoming as politically neutral as I can, and stop calling former president Cluck a malignant blowhard. Henceforth he will be referred to as the Turncoat in Chief.

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Robin and I spent Christmas in Durango this year. The weather was mild but there were enough icy patches that it took us three hours to cover the first 120 miles. While we basically have no snow on the ground here in Paradise, there was a thin layer on the other side of the southern passes.

I had a long talk with my friend Bill H. yesterday, who reminded me of times when my acrophobia caused some awkwardness in our travels together.

These days I am much more … I was going to say “comfortable” but that’s not quite right. I can now drive across the Red Mountain Road (also known as the Million Dollar Highway or Forty Miles of Abject Terror) in either direction without freezing at the wheel in a panic. I can even appreciate some of the scenery as I motor along.

This didn’t happen by accident. When we moved to Paradise, I found a small book on “curing” oneself of acrophobia entitled Overcoming Fear of Heights, and followed its instructions. Basically, they went like this:Walk out as far on the path as you can go until you just barely begin to feel distress, then stop and just stand there. Wait. If panic rises, go back two steps and pause there.

[Clicking on the link above will take you to a downloadable PDF of the entire book, if you know someone who might benefit from reading it.]

The advice has worked, although progress was by millimeters and not miles. There are places I cannot and probably never will be able to go, and I accept that. But I am not nearly the prisoner of geography and topography that I was when I first came to this country.

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Our pets have adapted to winter pretty well so far. It’s been mild enough that they can make short forays outside without too much inconvenience.

It was obvious that she needed emergency psychiatric help, so I tapped her just behind the right ear with the sap I carry for special occasions and self-defense. Gently loading her into the Subaru I took her to see Dr. Hermione Crock, who we keep on retainer. She’s not an MD, but a practitioner of ayurvedic socialistic humanistic opportunistic fairy dust quackalism.

Listening to my story, her august brow became so deeply furrowed that it began to trap lint from the atmosphere. She then raised a single finger and I was quickly subdued by two large and white-suited orderlies and whisked away to a comfortable room with the softest walls you’ll find anywhere.

“You can’t keep bringing your wife in whenever you disagree with her,” she said to me. “It’s just not done.”

It’s really not too bad here. Robin comes to visit every day, I was allowed to keep a crayon and some writing paper, and my only real complaint is that because I don’t have a belt my pants keep falling down. But they tell me that if I behave myself, I’ll be out in a fortnight.

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Yesterday afternoon I betook myself down to the stream that runs through our village, and put on the costume that on other person’s bodies might indicate a skilled fisherman, including waders and boots to keep a person from sliding about on mossy rocks. I then proceeded to vigorously flail the waters with my Tenkara rod and line while doing absolutely no damage to the fish population thereabouts.

There was a young couple upstream from me who were having the same luck, and were still enjoying themselves as much as I was. It was mid-December and the three of us were out there, with no shivering, no frozen fingers, no snow or ice … a complete absence of misery.

I wear sunglasses with Polaroid lenses when fishing, allowing me to cut through the normal glare on the clear water and see fish if any are present. I saw none at all. I have no idea where they went and why they weren’t on that particular stretch of water. I know that if I were a trout, that’s where I’d be, no doubt about it. It was lovely.

Walking around in flowing rivers is not the perfect milieu for a geezer. You know how it is to watch an infant who is just learning to walk? How they careen unsteadily across the room looking as if at any moment they will take a header into the furniture? I’m pretty sure that’s how I look walking in streams. Seniors like myself have enough problems navigating on dry and level surfaces, and our balance issues are magnified when walking on slippery and rocky-bottomed streams.

Yesterday I felt as if I were going to go in swimming … let’s see … about a gazillion times during my two hours on the river. Somehow that never happened, but I think that I am realistic in accepting that if I go out there enough times I will eventually take a cool bath.

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Biting The Hand That Feeds Me Department

Most of my posts over the years have contained at least one purloined cartoon from the New Yorker archives. That wonderful storehouse is an amazing thing to wander. Type in the name of your subject and be rewarded with the best that the art form can offer. I publish a handful of them here because I love them, and try always to attribute them properly, hoping to be given a more comfortable prison cell when the magazine gets down to prosecuting small-change thieves like myself.

But when I get to the present-day version of the magazine, I find nothing worth stealing. Every week I go through these cartoons and am saddened by how pathetic they are, how unfunny, how they are repeatedly guilty of terminal archness. The old guard cartoonists have died off one by one and been replaced by, I don’t know, unimaginative people who draw fairly well. Don’t look for the lovely dementedness of a George Booth panel like the one above because you won’t find it in today’s bland drawings.

So how ungrateful can an unworthy burglar be, to criticize the people he is stealing from? It’s an upside-down world my friends, is the only explanation I can offer.

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A Repeated And Enormous Puzzlement

Not infrequently I will order cole slaw as a side when eating out in casual restaurants. This, in spite of the fact that most of the time I will be brought a highly disappointing bowl of chopped and undistinguished cabbage that remains uneaten when I have departed my table.

I love cole slaw. It is a simple dish, requires no cooking, and asks very little of the preparer in order to be attractive and tasty. But over and over the words tasteless, insipid, plain, weak, unsavory, watery, thin, and dead come to mind as the first forkful reaches my taste buds.

It’s an affront of the highest order, and can mean only one of two things. Either the cook never tasted what they were sending out to the customers, or they did but didn’t care. Their eyes were on the main entrée and not on the sides.

The world of recipes available on the internet contains hundreds of formulas that one can follow to make excellent cole slaw. A few ingredients and no cooking skills are all that is required. We’re not talking Michelin stars here, just the most basic kitchen stuff.

I have begun to regard a limp and tasteless bowl of cabbage as an indicator, and marking the whole meal down as a minus score for the establishment.

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I am a morning person. More so every year, with my tendency these days to rise before 0500 hours. I never thought of it as something to be concerned about, the world was divided into early people and late people, and that was that. Until today, that is.

This morning the New York Times published a piece in their Science section that stated:

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What I will not do is get one of those DNA analyses that purport to show who dallied with who a few thousand years ago and eventually produced me. My self-image is fragile enough without having to accept that just because I like to rise early every day that my distant ancestor’s name was likely to have been Glurk rather than Olaf. 

However, the more I look at the photograph, the more I realize that the guy is a dead ringer for a second cousin on my father’s side.  He was a little slow in school but by God he could throw a spear like nobody’s business.

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‘Twas not always so. There were many years when there were emergency trips to shops on the afternoon of the 24th, plugging gaps in a doomed attempt to create the seamless fabric of a perfect Christmas.

It never happened, of course. Last year, for example, our guests arrived and within hours I had developed a febrile illness which I spread to several others before I knew I was ill.

Then there was the Christmas Eve a couple of decades ago when one of my children was stuck in Morocco of all places, as a coup was under way outside her hotel door.

Or when I was eight years old and I inadvertently tripped over the bicycles that Dad had hidden in a stairwell, and as I recall I received at least three undeserved swats to a tender behind before I could convince him that it was an innocent act on my part, and that I wasn’t trying to see what my present was ahead of time.

And yet I remain an absolute sucker for Christmas. For the stories, the legends, the traditions, the foods, the music. Especially the music. Robin’s tolerance for my playing the same tunes over and over during the season has grown a bit shorter over time, and who can blame her? Even I have a problem with hearing Jingle Bell Rock more than once a year.

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Those darlin’ congressional Republicans are just chunks of fun, aren’t they? They have just opened a congressional inquiry to see whether President Biden has done anything that they could impeach him for.

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Vignette #1

Spring day in Buffalo NY, 1972. I am out on the backyard patio at the gas grill. Behind me is my young daughter.

She says: What dat white tuff? What dat boo tuff?I am puzzled for a moment, and ask her to repeat her question.What dat white tuff? What dat boo duff? This time she points at the sky.

Then the answer dawns. The skies have been gray and gloomy for weeks on end. Today is the first day with blue skies and white clouds in months.

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You know how an odor can just snap you back into a room in your memory? I just had one of those. I was making yogurt this morning and lingered over the pot of hot milk that was being set to cooling until I could add the cultures. That aroma was linked to one of my mother’s remedies for nearly everything. Warm milk and saltine crackers in a bowl.

That concoction carried me through measles, rubella, whooping cough, mumps, and a host of nameless maladies. Obviously it worked, because here I am.

Since I left home and went out on my own, I haven’t used this amazing curative at all. Lord knows how much suffering I have experienced unnecessarily. I believe I’ll resurrect it during my next illness, whatever that turns out to be.

(BTW. Mom had two remedies in her arsenal. The other one was Canada Dry Ginger Ale.)

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Vignette #2

Thanksgiving Day in Buffalo NY, 1972. I am once again at the grill, having just finished doing the ceremonial bird out there.

I set the platter containing the turkey on the picnic table behind me and turn to attend to closing down the grill.When I turn back, our large Siberian Husky is standing on the table with the entire bird in its mouth.

Without thinking I give him a swat with the spatula I am holding and he drops the turkey back onto the platter.

I carry the bird indoors and we go on with the meal. Only I have the secret knowledge.

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Most of the people I know well in AA are looking for spiritual connections of one sort or another. Some are Christians who found that the straight ahead approach in their churches of origin didn’t help at all when they discovered they were addicts. There was a lot of being judged, a lot of bad advice given (just STOP, for cripes’ sake!), and a loss of the feeling they once had that there was a God and that he/she cared for them.

Nearly all of those whose recovery is solid have found a source of personal … power … for lack of a better word. I tend to believe that these strengths, this power was always present in us, and what happened was that we became able to access it. Approaches were unique to individuals, but the result was the same.

You admitted to being lost. You admitted having hurt others, and made resolutions to make amends to those people when it was possible to do so. You let go, and you emptied yourself. You began to meditate in one form or another, and replaced bad self-talk with a better variety. You talked about this process as it was going on while in meetings, and welcomed the stories of other members’ journeys, borrowing practices of theirs that seemed to apply to your situation. You kept coming back and sharing what you had in hopes that someone else might benefit from hearing of your successes and errors, and in this way you were aways polishing, paring, shaping your own internal life and thought.

Those simple acts were enough to bring me back to that moment, instead of doing what I had been doing which was rushing ahead in my mind to tomorrow … next month … next year … all of them absolutely uncertain, none with a guarantee.

But all I had to do right then was to accept the companionship that this small animal was offering, and not to try to solve the rest of my life in an evening.  Over and over again, the process was enough to maintain a smidgen of sanity and the rudiments of direction. With the passage of time, I began to see the truths in the Zen proverb:

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

If you are intrigued by this proverb, there is a really good article I can recommend: On Enlightenment: 3 Meanings of the “Chop Wood, Carry Water” Zen quote.

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I’ve started in on War & Peace, and I believe this will be the fourth time I’ve read it.  It’s an amazing novel, an all time favorite.

It’s quite a fat book, and thus completely unsuited to putting under the odd leg of a wobbly coffee table. It would, however, be great for throwing at intruders should the need arise. Used in this way I think the force generated would be similar to that produced by a brisk swing with your average truncheon.

There are quite a few famous people who think that War & Peace is the greatest novel of all time, which is an interesting thing to say, since there is no one on this planet who has read every novel. And even if they had read everything up until last week, there would be enough new ones published since that time to keep them so busy they wouldn’t have time to write book blurbs at all.

Since I am not an intellectual or a serious writer, I can’t comment on the writer’s art, the book’s form, or anything else smacking of pretensions that I know what I am talking about. What I can say is that each time I read it I was swept up in the stories and came to care about the characters too much to comfortably leave them behind when I finished my reading. Each and every time, I grieved a little that I was done with the book. ‘Nuff said.

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From The New Yorker

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When I was a lad one of my favorite things to eat was green olives. We rarely had them except at holiday meals. I recall one Thanksgiving that I sidled out to the kitchen hoping to score one more olive, but found the serving dish on full empty.

My spirits fell, and then I spied the bottle that the olives had come in, but there were only a few ounces of liquid in it. I stared at it, wondering … could a kid drink that stuff? Would the kid croak? There was no one around, and cautiously I raised the bottle to my mouth and took first a sip and then a great swallow.

It was delicious.

At that very moment my mother snatched the bottle from my hand exclaiming “Don’t DO that, there’s too much salt in it and you could get sick and you could just die!”

(At this point I should mention that this was my mother’s standard exclamation whenever we kids ate something-anything-that she would prefer we not ingest, which included many perfectly safe substances and foodstuffs).

Why tell this story now? Because yesterday when I retrieved a jar of green olives from the refrigerator, there was only one left, which I quickly and quite selfishly ate. But it was not enough olive for me for that particular moment.

I looked at the jar, with that couple of ounces of faintly green brine within. Checking to see that I was alone, I raised the bottle to my lips and swigged away for the first time in more than a half-century.

It was delicious.

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As far as I can tell, our federal government is presently doing everything it can to avoid governing. There are now scores of proceedings where one bunch is trying to unseat, impugn, impeach, or otherwise do harm to another individual or group. Too many to keep track of, really. This keeps them so busy squabbling that they can’t possibly have time to even go to the bathroom at proper intervals, which accounts for some of their irritability.

They seem to have completely lost their minds, at least the part that would allow them to do the people’s business. It has also become obvious that the word “impeachment” has lost whatever negative meaning it ever had, and now is about as important or useful as the airplane you made from a sheet of paper in the fifth grade and tried to sail into the hair of the student in front of you.

In fact, I can foresee the day when if you haven’t been impeached for something your status will be considered diminished, and people begin to wonder just what you are doing in Washington, anyway.

It’s enough to make you want to drink an entire quart of olive brine and kiss the world goodbye..

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From The New Yorker

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It’s only a couple of weeks now until the old guy in the red suit makes his rounds. We don’t go through the routine of chimney, fireplace, milk, and cookies. For one thing we have a hot water baseboard heating system, so it’s come in the front door or fageddaboudit.

One year I had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes as the sleigh was getting a stripped bolt replaced on a runner, and I asked him how it was to be still working when no one believed in him anymore.

He said: “First of all, there’s not 100% disbelief, but more like 75%. That’s really not so bad when you compare it to some others. Check out this chart I carry with me to refer to whenever I’m on feeling a little low.”

BELIEVABILITY PERCENTAGES

• Lawyers. <1%
• Parents. 10%
• Grandparents. 50%
• Monster under bed. 93%

“So you see, I’m not doing all that bad, really. Context, me bucko, context,”

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Livin’ large at that time of life when every Christmas there is at least one less friend at the table than there was last year. It’s a perfect time of life for a natural melancholic. When I was twenty and walked around brooding about things even I recognized that I was a fraud, and that I hadn’t lived long enough to be wearing such world-weary garments. But now there isn’t any need to pretend. I ran out of fingers and toes to count the rings on my trunk a while back.

One problem is that when you achieve geezer status, and have all that experience to share, no one wants to hear about it. The young can’t relate to anything emanating from something as ancient as you, and your older friends simply wait for you to take an in-breath and then they break in with their own stories before you can finish your own.

I find myself gravitating toward the wistful music of the world more than I once did. Not exclusively, but more often. Like this one.

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From The New Yorker

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As a general pediatrician, I was frequently called in to stand by at the delivery of a child whenever there was a possibility that the baby would need more than the usual support and care. Gowned, gloved, and masked I would stand over in the corner of the room by the infant warmer, making sure that it was ready to receive the infant. Since I had nothing to do when things went well, I stood there, hands clasped in front of me so I wouldn’t inadvertently touch something and contaminate the gloves.

After one such delivery where the baby was just fine and needed no help from yours truly, the exhausted mother was giddy and thanking everyone in the room for their help. At the end of her litany she said: “Oh, and thank you to the priest over in the corner for coming.”

That masked clergyman in the corner, of course, was me.

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Even though it’s not really about Christmas, and only mentions the holiday very briefly, I still have it in the corner of my poorly assorted mind as Christmas music. YouTube served this up to me this to enjoy on a December morning. One of Joni Mitchell’s beautiful tunes done beautifully.

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Tuesday friend Joe and I went fishing at Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park, near Ridgway. It was a bluebird day, temp in the lower 50s. Right now the river water flows are down at winter levels. I managed to do three things that morning: catch a nice rainbow, get a nasty aircast that cost me half an hour to straighten out, and come within a hair of dumping myself in the Uncompahgre River.

If it hadn’t have been for a convenient boulder that I fetched up against, my spirits would definitely have been dampened (the water is low enough that all that would have happened is that I would have become cold and wet and used up my curse word allotment for the entire month).

At one pool we could see 8 large trout just hanging out together in some slower water. Seeing us didn’t spook them at all. Nor were they enticed by anything we tossed at them, but for one moment when a trout the size of Jaws wandered slowly over to my fly, took it in his mouth, and immediately spit it out again. Too quickly for me to react.

I never take my camera/phone while actually out in the river. Eventually I know that I will make a misstep and stumble into the drink so I don’t carry anything that wouldn’t tolerate being immersed. Therefore, I haven’t any photos of my own of the river in this location, but here’s a handful that I borrowed from the web.

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Just got a seed catalog in the mail. An odd time of year for such a thing, you might say, and I’d agree with you. Since It’s snowing here and the temp is 40 degrees, it’s hard to put myself into an agricultural frame of mind.

I received it because I ordered two packets of seeds from them last Spring, from their website. After last year’s poor experience I wasn’t even sure I wanted to have a garden next year, but hey, mebbe I will.

Here are scans of three sample pages:

So if any of you would like to grow your own wasabi to clear your sinuses with, or cabbages that weigh 25 pounds, here’s the address.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

2278 Baker Creek Road

Mansfield, MO 65704

(Disclaimer: I get no remuneration from manufacturers of products that I might mention in this blog. Although several of them have offered to pay me money if I promise never to mention their wares ever again. Apparently they fear being associated in the public mind with substandard literary endeavors.)

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From The New Yorker

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And here it is, the full-bore, two-hanky weeper from Les Miserables that you might have known was coming, had you taken the time to think bout it. Here is Marius returning to the tavern where he had spent hours planning a revolution with his comrades, who then perished while he was saved.

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Finished trimming the tree, a fragrant little spruce of nearly perfect symmetry. It’s only six feet high, which suits the room just fine.

After this many years Robin and I no longer have any tree decorations that can break. All of those were swept into the trash long ago and gradually replaced with sturdier ones that are equally pretty. Tree trimming is so much easier now than when my dad would struggle and mutter each Christmas. The only things that are the same are the tree and the stand that it sits in.

Lights: our tiny but very bright light-strings never seem to wear out. Just put them away and take them out again next year. Dad had to deal with larger glass incandescent bulbs where if one burned out the whole string went dark. Which meant laboriously trying a new bulb in each socket until you found the right one. And each year several bulbs would go dead during the season. Which was where much of the aforementioned muttering came in.

Ornaments: nearly all were made of a sort of glass that if you even looked at one sideways it would break into exactly one thousand tiny particles. Each one somehow became invisible until the opportunity arose to stick itself into the foot of a passing barefoot child.

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From The New Yorker

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Driving around town one day this week I heard such a heartening story, and it was all about the fact that labor unions have removed themselves from life support and raised their banners once again.

I could not be happier. Ever since the handlers of Ronald Reagan told him to fire all the air traffic controllers back in 1981, large corporations have had things their own way, using the Republican Party as a vise to crush the unions in order to be able to treat their workers as disposable industrial fodder. I am not faulting the corporations here, it is what we should expect them to do when there are no constraints. They are not moral or beneficent entities.

.

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If we are going to reverse the race to the bottom, workers must have the right to engage in collective bargaining.

Bernie Sanders

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“Lili Marleen” is a German love song that gained immense popularity during World War II. The song’s history is intertwined with the experiences of soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

The lyrics were written in 1915 by Hans Leip, a German school teacher and poet. Leip wrote the poem as a love letter to his girlfriend Lili, who was waiting for him at home. The poem was published in 1937 in the poetry collection “Die kleine Hafenorgel” (“The Little Harbor Organ”).

In 1938, Norbert Schultze, a German composer, discovered Leip’s poem and decided to set it to music. The song was first recorded by Lale Andersen, a German singer, in 1939. However, it initially received little attention.

The turning point for “Lili Marleen” came when German soldiers stationed in North Africa heard the song on the radio. It struck a chord with them, and they began requesting it frequently. The song’s popularity spread rapidly among German troops, and it became an unofficial anthem for the soldiers on the front lines.

Simultaneously, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) picked up on the song’s popularity among German troops and began broadcasting it as part of their “Soldiers’ Request” program. This ironic turn of events led to the song becoming famous among both Allied and Axis forces.

“Lili Marleen” became a symbol of the universal experience of soldiers longing for their loved ones during wartime. The song’s melancholic melody and poignant lyrics resonated with the emotions of separation and yearning. It transcended national boundaries and became a shared cultural phenomenon.

After the war, the song continued to be popular, and numerous artists recorded their versions in various languages. Lale Andersen, the original singer, continued to perform the song throughout her career. Over the years, “Lili Marleen” has become a classic and is considered one of the most famous and enduring songs associated with World War II.

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That’s pretty interesting, right? Love the story of how both sides adopted the song, and love the wistful melody as well.

Underneath the lantern,
By the barrack gate
Darling I remember
The way you used to wait
T’was there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me,
You’d always be,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Time would come for roll call,
Time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you
And press you to my heart,
And there ‘neath that far-off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight ,
We’d kiss good night,
My Lilli of the Lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene

Orders came for sailing,
Somewhere over there
All confined to barracks
was more than I could bear
I knew you were waiting in the street
I heard your feet,
But could not meet,
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
my own Lilly Marlene

Resting in our billets,
Just behind the lines
Even tho’ we’re parted,
Your lips are close to mine
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems
To haunt my dreams
My Lilly of the Lamplight,
My own Lilly Marlene

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BTW, if you want to play with ChatGPT, you start at the address https://chat.openai.com. It’s free.

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From The New Yorker

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Dressing for winter here in Paradise is not difficult. Your wardrobe need contain only a single light jacket and a rain shell. There is no need for feather-stuffed clothing of any kind. Our stores don’t even sell long-sleeved garments because there is so little use for them. Pajama bottoms? Boxer-style will do the trick nicely the year around.

I was lounging in shorts and a t-shirt on a chaise in the back yard last February when I was turned in my neighbor for violating a Stoney Creek HOA rule against indecent exposure. When I appealed the decision, the board informed me that in my particular case, any exposure was considered indecent, no matter how minuscule. But, I sputtered, I was not even close to being nude.

A visible shudder rippled through the members of the HOA board as they put together the concepts of me and being nude in their minds. Chairperson Parsnip Lively (bless her heart) turned mint green and Secretary Abner Thrushfinger looked positively apoplectic.

But that is life here in Stoney Creek. A little give, a little take, some indigestion.

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From The New Yorker

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Christmas approacheth. We prepareth. The fake tree is up on the patio, and the colored overhead lights are strung out there as well. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are in their places on a flat rock on the berm in front, having replaced Buddha, who spends the Yuletide in the garage.

We have a few items in the Christmas Village series that are on the sofa table. We used to have maybe twenty of those buildings but as our homes grew smaller and smaller we doled them out to family members.

Robin thinks we ought to put up stockings for the cats. I chimed in that those would really be for we humans, because the kitties care not a farthing for them. Cats not being impressed by surfaces, but only by what’s inside.

Nevertheless, it’s very possible that there are pet stockings in our future.

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Every once in a great while surprises pop up where you least expect them. For instance, earlier today there were four salted almonds left in a bag in the pantry. Now the foursome and the bag they were in is gone. Robin has eaten them all.

You know about the principle of choosing which battles to fight? In this case I chose to remain silent, even though I was down one almond that I was probably never going to get back.

Takes a big man to let stuff like this go, but …

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From The New Yorker

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Friday the House of Representatives was going to vote to expel a Big Liar. Panic set in when the Republicans discovered that they had forgotten which one of their number was going to get the boot. The problem being that there were so many potential candidates.

After hours of rending of garments and tearing of hair they had still come to no conclusion when George Santos walked through the door of their caucus room.

When asked where he had been he answered: “I’ve been doing the people’s work, meeting with the Democrats on climate change, immigration, and trying to find a way to reduce deaths from firearms.”

You could hear a sigh of relief pass thru the assembled GOP members. They had their man.

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Time marches on, goes the saying. The imputation is that it is somehow something that is relentless, unchanging, doesn’t give a damn how we feel about what its passage does to us.

But it doesn’t always march, sometimes it creeps imperceptibly, glacially, as back when I had suffered a broken rib for the third time. Through past experience I knew it would feel less painful in a couple of weeks, but right then it hurt when I moved, when I laughed, when I coughed … when I breathed.

And then there are times when it simply hurtles. There was a day in summer on a rural highway in western Nebraska when I wound my motorcycle up to its limit, which turned out to be 116 mph. I glanced down at the highway below my feet and saw a complete blur that (sensibly) freaked me out and I slowed to a more reasonable rate of travel. That was how this past summer flew by.

I bent over the raised bed to plant a tomato in June and when I straightened up it was September. By the time I had absorbed this fact it was the end of November. That, my friends, is life winding up the motorbike for me, without my touching the throttle. No matter how rational I am on my good days – no matter how much I accept the natural order of being born, of living a life, and then passing away – there are moments when I look down below my feet and see the blur and feel a twinge.

That happened last night just before I fell asleep. Our elder cat, Poco, joins us when we read in bed. After we turn out the light he takes off for his preferred sleeping place, wherever that is. I was looking at him, at his scruffy fur, his thinness, his irregular breathing, and remembering the sleek and powerful creature that he had been and now he was at the point where I was checking on his breathing.

At that moment, I was feeling rather scruffy myself. And I know that Robin checks my breathing occasionally. I thought … hmmmm … this is what amigos do for one another. I smiled to myself, rolled over, and went to sleep.

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Since I am on the subject of time, I thought I’d bring in the observations of some of the great philosophers to give us their take. They are much more interesting than my own. Some of them you can even dance to.

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The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Albert Einstein

I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Steven Wright

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Henry David Thoreau

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

Pericles

Time is bunk.

Douglas Adams

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Heading into winter with a fraction of an inch of snow on the ground and the chill is definitely in the air. Winter here in Paradise is never a hardship, not really. Not for an old Minnesota boy and a South Dakota girl. We’ve been here a decade now and the worst thing that Winter has thrown at us is to close the mountain passes once in a while. But since we’ve really scaled back on even thinking about traveling in the sketchy-road season … even that is not much of an inconvenience.

In South Dakota there was always less certainty. You’d read the weather report suggesting that a frozen calamity was en route to where you were or wanted to go while you looked out the window at a sunny day. And you’d take that chance. And sometimes … sometimes … this attitude and practice left you spending the night in the Bide-A-Wee Motel in Last Chance SD, population 12. Watching the wallpaper peel, listening to the bathroom faucet drip, and being glad to be anywhere with the blizzard on the outside and you within. What a difference a door makes.

There was that one day that I still don’t understand completely. We started out from Minneapolis on a return trip to Yankton SD. The air temperature was minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. We were maybe one hour into the trip when it started to rain. Rain! How does that even happen when it’s 15 degrees below zero?

Everything, the car, the highway, the trees, became instant ice. All of the cars had to pull over to the shoulder because there was no way that defrosters could clear the windshield under those conditions. And, of course, even if you could see ahead, the road was an ice rink. Days like that it’s good to have enough gas in the tank to run the engine and keep you warm until travel is once again possible. (Update: Or enough juice in the battery for EV drivers)

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(The header image today is not a photo that I took myself. I rarely do this, but Saturday morning’s
Montrose Daily Press had printed this image, and I thought it too pretty not to share it.)

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For some reason, I was thinking about my wife Robin the other day. Actually, I think about her pretty much every day. It’s hard not to, when there are only two people living in a smallish house. There is a definite tendency to bump into one another in such a situation. So how did we end up together? I will tell you.

It had been several years since my first wife had walked out the front door and off to better things. During those years I had become a sort of hermit, living alone in the house I had previously shared with five other people. To help fill the big hole I now had in my spare time, I was becoming a self-taught expert on the preparation and consumption of gin and tonics and the sampling of expensive scotch whiskies. I was very successful at that enterprise.

My day job was that of a pediatrician in a small South Dakota town. In that capacity I provided pediatric care to the three children of a very lovely lady named Robin. Robin had also been divorced, by a man who was an idiot to have left her. Actually, from what I hear, he still is an idiot.

At any rate, in small towns the married women abhor a vacuum, and having single adults around in society was considered a hazard to peace and social stability. So they began placing the two of us in proximity to one another to see if anything came of it.

For a time, nothing was happening, primarily because of my intractability. I was averse to any significant change in my life, and the very idea of entering into a new relationship was:

• frightening
• disturbing
• incomprehensible
• never gonna happen
• irrational, considering that I was not even sure how I’d become a single person in the first place

That last point was a biggie. The divorce that ended my first marriage was like I had been taking flight instruction but on one memorable solo lesson I flew through a barn, under a footbridge, and into an oak tree. I had little incentive for trying something again in that direction.

That was in 1991, and we were married the following year. I gave up my hobby of exploring fermented beverages and signed up for “How To Be A Better Husband Than You Were The First Time,” which is an ongoing post-graduate work-study program. (I think that Robin has graded me a C plus so far, which is way better than the D minus I got on my first time out.)

As an aside, a counselor that Robin was seeing in 1991 told her that her relationship with me was a transitional one, and not to get too serious about it. That was 31 years ago, which means that he was either really poor at predictions or that we are really, really slow at transitioning.

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From The New Yorker

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The sharper-eyed among you might have noted my use of the term fascism here and there recently. I had resisted doing so in the past because any reading on the subject reveals that defining this particular political set of beliefs is a slippery pursuit.

Fascism may be amorphous, but it does have some definite free-floating characteristics. So far, the best short dissertation on that subject that I have come across was in Wikipedia. (I say “short,” but even that one goes on for quite a few pages.)

So I will try to be specific if I use the term in the future, even though I freely admit that no one in their right mind should be taking political instruction from me. I have very little to offer in that sphere, other than to join H.L. Mencken in rejoicing that I am not a Republican.

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Now that I’ve published a disclaimer and all, let me say that I believe former president Cluck and his gang of thugs, miscreants, and generally bad actors are as close to fascists as you are going to find in the United States in our present day.

All they need to do to complete the picture is to adopt a uniform and come up with a name. Let’s see … brownshirts taken by the Nazis, blackshirts taken by Mussolini … how about orangeshirts to match Cluck’s coiffure, or yellowshirts to match his courage under fire during the Viet Nam years?

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From The New Yorker

Robin and I spent Thanksgiving with the Hurley family in Durango this year. Driving there on the Nasty Highway was a breeze, and totally on dry pavement. The mountains had a light dusting of snow on them which rendered them newly spectacular. It was a case of one mountainous Currier and Ives print after another.

Grandson Aiden is home for the holiday and so far he has not been obviously damaged by spending the past several months at the University of Texas in Austin. Apparently the university’s liberal attitudes have offset the poisonous ones emanating from the state capitol building.

Thanksgiving afternoon, we watched the classic movie Stand By Me. It’s a favorite in our clan, and my personal #2 Best Movie. It hits so many right notes about being a twelve year-old boy that it is uncanny. One of author Stephen King’s best traits is that he has such a clear memory of how it was to be a kid. (It is possible that he still is, actually, and that’s his trick.)

Robin and I had to cut our stay short due to a winter storm that was heading that way, so returned Friday evening instead of Saturday. Our thesis being that if you’re going to be trapped on one side of a mountain pass, it was better to be trapped on the side where home is.

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I would place myself somewhere between a technophile and a technophobe. I’m not sure what that should be called … perhaps a technodilettante would be closest. If a tool comes along that I think would improve my life and that of those around me, I try to learn how to use it.

Occasionally the motive isn’t quite as high-minded. Sometimes If it just looks like fun, I might be off and running with it as well.

For instance, I had a friend who was into personal computers before they were even called that. He would puzzle over a dark screen with bright green letters on it, trying to get the device to do something fairly simple, like transmit a page of text. Problem for this guy was, he didn’t know very many people who wanted to (or were able to) receive that page of text. Watching him sitting at a console with his furrowed brow I put his efforts down as harmless enough, but an electrified waste of time.

Within five minutes I had figured out what that little thing to the right in the photo was for (the mouse), and what the menus on the screen were for. Within ten minutes I had typed a paragraph and discovered the revolution that the commands “Cut” and “Paste” were for anyone who wanted to or needed to write.

And I was off. I joined a local Macintosh User’s Group, which was a bunch of bozos like myself who were excited by the machine and were eager to share every little new bit of information about it. We were fans in the truest sense, meaning fanatics.

One of the members of our little group was the local states attorney, and he was able to obtain copies of the few pieces of Macintosh software that were available to demonstrate for us. He had all of them because he had stolen them. I made a mental note never to trust this guy and then joined the rest of the group in learning what the software had to offer, which made me an accessory to piracy, I suppose.

My curiosity and sense of fun have carried me along for 39 years now, and I have owned quite a few Macintosh computers in that time. The Mac laptop I am typing this blog post on today cost half of what that first one set me back, and it is a gazillion times more powerful. I mean … a gazillion!

So those of you who regard these blog posts as a blight upon mankind, and cannot read what I just wrote without being nearly overcome with regrets that I am able to do so, may blame two things for this miserable state of affairs. They are the invention of the Apple Macintosh computer and my odd personality.

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For those who think that it couldn’t happen here, it already nearly did. There were many Americans who wanted us to enter World War II much earlier than we did, but on the side of the Nazis. Yes, friends, they wanted us to support the people responsible for the greatest horrorshow of the twentieth century. Which makes this video a sobering watch.

Fascists were out in large numbers in America in 1939 and they are out there now in numbers too large to ignore. The problem for you and me is that we can’t use the excuse that we don’t know what’s going on. This modern variant of the brownshirts/blackshirts consists of a group of people exhibiting the worst impulses of our species and which takes its energy from fear.

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Those of you who have younger children might have to explain the above cartoon to them. Not the carton of Asian takeout but the darker flat thing.

Watch their eyes go out of focus as you try to explain what a VCR and a cassette tape were and how people used to have to actually go to a Blockbuster store to pick out a movie rather than click on a streaming channel. It’s not that they don’t love and respect you but they might see your explanation about as relevant to them as how to churn butter or trim the wick of an oil lamp.

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We are told that artificial intelligence holds many dangers and that we might be made extinct once the bots of AI know everything there is to know about everything. After this past week, I think that those hazards might be preferable to what passes for intelligence now, in a world where in a single week:

• A senator who is angry with another senator jabs him hard in the back as he passes him in a hallway
• Another senator who is a panel member at a hearing threatens to vault over the table and attack a witness and must be verbally restrained
• A congressman is revealed to have used campaign contributions for Botox treatments and a porn channel subscription.
• University presidents are besieged by donors who are taking their money back because they aren’t doing enough to support Israel. On the other hand, they are also besieged by student groups who are threatening mayhem if they don’t do more to support the Palestinians.
• Every in-breath and out-breath of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is being recorded even as the oceans rise and the glaciers disappear.
• An ultramarathoner admits she took a car ride for part of her route.
• A sports newscaster admitted that sometimes she just made s**t up.

Nope, I think I’d like to take my chances with artificial intelligence as opposed to the limited form we are presently dealing with.

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Rosalynn Carter’s most lasting individual legacy will be her efforts to diminish the stigma attached to people with mental illnesses and her fight for parity and access for mental health treatment. She also devoted her time to the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at her alma mater, Georgia Southwestern State University, to help families and professional caregivers living with disabilities and illnesses.

In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton presented both Carters with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He said they had “done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on Earth.”

CNN Online

It’s nice to be able to talk about decent people once in a while. We all know people like that, and thinking about them can brighten a gloomy day. Most of the time they don’t get to be President and First Lady of the United States.

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The Uncompahgre River that flows through Montrose varies greatly in flow rates. Much of this variation is due to releases from a dam twenty miles upstream. So far this fall the level has been too high for me to feel comfortable. I had visions of myself tumbling downstream like a large chunk of flotsam with my head underwater and my posterior pointed toward the heavens.

It’s an undignified prospect and not a thought to be entertained for long.

But Wednesday I checked and the river was perfect. Pools and eddies and pockets galore. Unfortunately this didn’t translate into fish caught because I lost two due to my inexperience with barbless hooks.

Later that same day I once more tried my luck, again on the Uncompahgre River, but 22 miles upstream, at Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park. It was almost full dark when I caught a beautiful 16 inch rainbow trout. There was so little light left in the day that I could barely see well enough to release it properly.

Of course when I returned home and announced my success to the assembled members of Robin’s book club, not one person believed me. It is possible that I might, perhaps, maybe, possibly have stretched the truth a time or two in their presence in the past, but still … .

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From The New Yorker

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Many of the people who write about things political keep telling us that the Democrats are losing ground with persons of color and the blue collar world. That the party has become enthralled with hanging out with celebrities and those who own boats longer than 100 feet. That they have forgotten where they came from.

(Growing up in the Midwest I became well acquainted with the DFL, or the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, which was the local branch of the national Democratic party. You had to look no further than the name to see their roots.)

The pundits could be right. Think back on Mr. Obama who so obviously loved the galas and the balls and the White House musical performances and being a guest on talk shows … the man liked to dress up and looked good when he did.

But he might have done more for his party (and his country) if he’d gone to fewer soirées and more barbecues. And perhaps a quinceañera or two.

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From The New Yorker

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By now you have almost surely read the story of the old man who went hiking with his dog in August, and for whatever reason died out there on the trail. Just this week his body was discovered, and the dog was still with him, and alive.

The animal was malnourished and had lost half its weight after so long a time, but had not abandoned its owner. An amazing and very touching story.

I suspect that if I were hiking with one of our cats and keeled over that the scenario would be quite different. Poco might watch over me until the 5:00 P.M. feeding time came and went, but then he would quite sensibly take his leave and find his way home.

Cats are much more practical than dogs in these matters.

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I am having a little trouble bringing my usual smarmy self to the enterprise this morning. So I will fill in the spaces where my mordant wit would have been with stuff that might be more useful to you.

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The first thing is a movie review. The movie: The Half Of It. Let’s see … it’s a coming of age movie that doesn’t make you want to puke and an interesting re-working of Cyrano de Bergerac done in small-town teenage style. It is thoughtful, never condescending, and sweet without a hint of saccharine-ness.

Okay, enough. Here’s a trailer. If it looks like your kind of movie, watch it on Netflix. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 97%. And they know everything.

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Everyone has problems. Mine are truly no more severe nor interesting than anyone else’s (even if they might seem so to me). When these issues come along one at a time I can usually deal with them, even some pretty big ones. It is when they come in bunches that the water starts to come in over the side of the boat, and there is nothing for it then but furious bailing. I reach for a bucket and if I can find a big enough one I stay afloat.

That’s what I learned to pray for a few years ago, neither for relief nor for release but for a big enough bucket to see me through. And here I am and here you are. Works okay.

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From The New Yorker

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I used to blame God when the world turned sour for me. In fact, I can recall a particular one-sided shouting match as I loudly listed the ways that I thought God had let me down. I had taken it really personally and wanted to make that clear.

I don’t do that any more. I know much less about God’s nature now than I did then, but I am pretty sure that my problems are of little concern to the Master of the Universe, who is now off the hook as far as I’m concerned.

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The concept of “fairness” has been a hard one for me to shake. If your ears are open at all you will occasionally hear a child on the playground say to another “That’s not fair!” I was one of those kids, believing that a guiding principle of the Universe was fairness. In our games we would be fair with one another. My parents would treat me fairly, and my portion of our family’s resources would be exactly the same as my brother’s or sister’s.

If I followed certain moral admonitions, I just knew that my life would be a necessarily happy one, because it was only fair that this should happen. When my first marriage was coming apart, I recall thinking that it was unfair to the extreme. Hadn’t I done my best? (Probably not) Wasn’t I therefore entitled to the fruits of my labors? (Certainly not) Unfair, thought my inner child, unfair!

Finally the message got through to me. I had been trying to impose my personal standards upon the Universe at large, and it wisely ignored me and went rolling implacably along. The only “fairness” that existed was what I or somebody else inserted there. It was me nailing my theses upon the door of some ancient cathedral on a cold morning. Theses that said “I basically disagree with the way things are, and you know why … because they are unfair, that’s why.”

Some of us never learn. That woodpeckery knocking sound that you hear out there in the distance is that of my head repeatedly banging into reality.

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From The New Yorker

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Finally, about the title of today’s post. Doldrums can have different meanings, although if you read them through they are certainly related.

• a spell of listlessness or despondency
• a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or slump
• a part of the ocean near the equator abounding in calms, squalls, and light shifting winds

The “Doldrums” is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.

National Ocean Service

The Doldrums holds a distinct place in maritime history, having developed a reputation as a potentially deadly zone which could strand sailing ships for weeks on end, causing them to run out of food and drinking water.

National Ocean Service

So, I’m only temporarily becalmed and before you know it I’ll be back to full-bore irritating once again. Anything else would be totally unfair.

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President Biden continues to soldier on even though the most recent polls suggest that the only man in America less popular than him is the Boston Strangler. This in spite of the fact that he goes to work every day with shoes shined and suit pressed, and his job performance has been a mixture of mistakes and things well done, mostly well done. Pretty good for a man who is almost as old as I am.

But neither of us is in our prime, and both of us have a somewhat smallish chance of making it through the next five years. Robin is unsure enough about me that during the night she sometimes checks to see if I am still breathing. Can’t help but wonder if Jill Biden does the same thing.

(I’ve never asked Robin but always assumed that when she finds signs of life she is relieved, not disappointed)

So who knows what will happen between now and the first Tuesday in November 2024? If Mr. Biden turns out to be the nominee of the Democratic Party of course I will support him, even with my misgivings. Because on the other side, barring some completely unforeseeable and miraculous transformations in the next year, we will be presented with a person whose candidacy can only provoke nausea in a thoughtful person.

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I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.

Mark Twain

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From The New Yorker

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This piece of music gets around quite a bit. We’ve all heard it played in venues from concert halls to when a pro hockey team comes onto the ice. It’s the Fanfare for the Common Man, written by Aaron Copland.

In 1942, Copland was commissioned by the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to write a fanfare. The U.S. had entered World War II, and then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace was trying to rally Americans against imperialism. Copland was inspired by a speech Wallace gave that spring at the Free World Association in New York City.

“Some have spoken of the American Century,” Wallace proclaimed. “I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.” Copland would later echo that sentiment himself, saying, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”

NPR: American Anthem

It’s a fanfare for the ordinary man or woman, the GI, the “grunt,”the hoi polloi, for those on whose broad shoulders our idea of America has always truly rested. A strong piece, inspired in its origins.

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From The New Yorker

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I am not a huge fan of awards shows, at least not to the point where I think you can really pick out the best one of any group of artists or works in any given year. But this year something unusual happened Wednesday evening at the Country Music Awards.

Tracy Chapman continues to make history with her 1988 hit “Fast Car” after winning song of the year at Wednesday’s Country Music Awards  …The CMA win is a remarkable achievement given “Fast Car” debuted 35 years ago, and saw a resurgence in popularity in July after country star Luke Combs released a cover of the hit single. Combs’ cover went on to reach No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart, making Chapman the first Black woman to top the chart since it came into existence in 1990.

CNN Online

Fast Car is a great song from Chapman’s first album, written by an artist who was very wise at 24 years of age. It is a ballad, a story song. And if we are not the protagonist in the story, we probably know somebody who is.

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In keeping with the theme of this post, which is ducks of various stripes, I searched the cartoon archives of the New Yorker for “ducks,” and one of those that came up in the search was this one. Now a staple of the thinking of New Yorkers is that the rest of the country, especially the Midwest, consists of a population of buffoons residing in a land that nobody important wants to live in.

But even the buffoon-est of those of us who grew up in the Midwest knows that this is not a cartoon of a duck at all, but of a loon. And loons are their own category of waterfowl. Remembering that old saying “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck” should have informed the staff at the New Yorker. Loons simply do not quack.

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Robin was out of town for a couple of days, so I had to come up with some constructive things to do while she was away. Therefore, and with much thought given to the matter, I went fishing.

It’s a very scenic hour’s drive from Montrose to Silver Jack Reservoir, and the last fifteen miles you are on a decent gravel road. At this time of year the reservoir is at a low level, and it’s a bit of work to get down to it, but it wasn’t my destination, anyway. What I was interested in was nearby Beaver Lake and the Big Cimarron River.

Beaver Lake is a little thing, with a campground along one side. The morning I arrived there were no humans present, but there was a single black steer grazing beside the fisherman’s path that encircled the lake. We ignored one another as I walked past him. I fished all along the bank without experiencing so much as a nibble, but the views in all directions had begun the work of restoring my soul by the time I gave it up.

Next stop was Big Cimarron Campground, which was right on the river of the same name, and only a mile or so from Beaver Lake. Beautiful river, fast flowing. The water wasn’t too deep this time of year, but wading it was challenging. The riverbed consisted of stones the size of footballs that were slippery with moss. After struggling for an hour to go only a relatively few yards, I gave it up and from then on chose spots where I could fish from shore. At one point I came across this pool. You can see that the water is a bit murky with runoff from last weekend’s snowfall, but otherwise … .

https://videopress.com/v/JDl73MRU?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

It might have been better if I had caught a fish, but only marginally so. To be lucky enough to be have the opportunity to scramble along this trail and see places like this was my reward. As the author Robert Traver once said when asked why he fished for trout, “Because you can only do it in beautiful places.”

I ate the simple lunch I had brought along, which had been prepared for me by the highly tattooed and very pleasant man at Subway a few hours earlier. It was an Italian-style sandwich that might have been easier to eat with half the amount of olive oil he had applied to it, but I simply waded through to the end before even trying to clean up. The provided napkins were not enough to clean up the oil slick I had become, and I had to fall back on some paper towels we carry in the car.

Smelling a bit like an oregano-scented air freshener, I moved on to my next destination, a part of the Gunnison River located within Black Canyon National Park. You get there by turning right just after passing the park’s guard station and driving down the East Portal road. When I say “down the road,” that is an accurate description, because portions of it are on a 16% grade.

There were a few other fishermen working the river, which was low enough to make wading possible. We did not need to get too close to one another, but were well spread out. For the first hour nothing was happening, when suddenly I could see fish rising everywhere on the river. Over the next couple of minutes I caught two small rainbows before the excitement turned off as quickly as it had begun, and the water’s surface was once again quiet. That was something I had never experienced before.

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Daughter Sarah sent along this video taken near her home in Mankato MN. I’ve seen only two of these in my lifetime, and never two at one time.

https://videopress.com/v/EbUMjtKz?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Oh, you ask, what are they? Why, pileated woodpeckers! They are big birds, nearly the size of chickens, so are not easily confused with other species.

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I am on my second day of grumbling all because of DST being snatched away. I didn’t want it in the first place, but you know, you kinda get used to it and then BAM! it’s gone. There’s no hope of a change in this annual charade as long as the members of Congress remain unable to perform even the itsiest bit of governing.

Why, that would require that they actually sit in their chairs and vote on something, as opposed to what they do now which is flit from TV camera to TV camera in full prance.

In a week the federal government will be out of money, unless our misfit congresspersons pull their heads out of their nether regions and do the country’s work. I don’t know who paid for the curse on us to live in such interesting times, but they are certainly getting their money’s worth.

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Now this, my friends, is something interesting. An electric airplane. Take a look.

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Well, there was one drawback in that I had no rifle, for one thing. And there was not enough cash lying around to get a new one, so I went to the classified ads in the newspaper and soon became the proud owner of a Winchester Model 94 carbine, one of those storied firearms. Unfortunately I knew nearly nothing about calibers, and this particular rifle was a .25-35. Ammunition for this relic was difficult to find, and when I did locate some the guy who sold it to me suggested that while this was a good gun for shooting rats at a dump, it was far from a first choice for deer hunting. But at least, I thought, I was now armed.

We drove three hours due north before we took a right and turned down a small gravel road leading into the forest. Going toward some place Bob had heard about. It was a cold night, and there was about two feet of snow on the ground. On the way in we passed a hunting camp where a dozen men were seated in a circle around a huge campfire, the ground around them littered with empty beer cans.

Bob turned off the gravel road onto a level spot, and we slept in the wagon, starting it up periodically during the night to keep from freezing. Around four in the morning we gave up on sleep and went into the nearest small town where Bob had heard there was a Catholic church that offered an early “hunter’s mass.” It was interesting attending church services where all the attendees wore the same red clothing (hunter’s orange had not yet become the standard).

Then it was back to the forest to park the car and wander separately into the woods to find each a place to conceal ourselves and wait for the legions of deer that would surely pass by us. The season would legally begin at dawn.

An hour before dawn the firing began. It was at first sporadic, but by the time the sun came up it seemed that I was surrounded by nearly continuous rifle fire. My mind was now fully awake and alarmed, and it arrived at two clear thoughts. One was the memory of those drunken hunters sitting around that campfire who were now out there in the same forest someplace. The other is that there were not enough deer in the entire state of Minnesota to warrant the number of gunshots that I was hearing, so what was everybody shooting at?

At that point I heard a rifle report and a small branch was clipped from high up on a very tall pine tree, the one I happened to be sitting against at the time. Before that branch hit the ground I was on my feet. I took that rat-killer of a carbine, my half-filled Thermos of coffee, and I walked the few hundred yards back to the road. There I found a stump and sat on it for the rest of the day, trying as much as possible not to look like a deer. On that stump was where Bob found me toward dusk.

I never returned to that war zone laced with beer-filled bozos. Each year thereafter I would read about some poor shot-dead sod who had somehow been mistaken for a 300 pound, four-legged, antlered woodland creature, and I would think, Yep, I made the right choice once again.

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From The New Yorker

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This past year is going down with Robin and I as the Year of the Praying Mantis. While we see a couple of these fascinating bugs in our back yard every year, this summer they were present down by the river in greater numbers than ever. On a single walk in September we probably encountered 7 or 8 of them. All were of the same bright green color.

These guys have powerful arms, powerful jaws, and can strike in a fraction of a second. While it was not fearing for my life that caused me to drop the bug, there was always the possibility of being nipped slightly, which has less appeal than you might think to a tender soul like myself.

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From The New Yorker

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We finished the last season of Reservation Dogs, which is only the third one. No more are planned, and that’s a lovely idea.

This makes this series even more special, their quitting on top, so to speak. Of course you can’t make a ten season-long series about Native American teenagers because at some point they aren’t any more. Teenagers, that is. They are adults and let’s face it, films about adults have to be spiced up somehow because we aren’t nearly as interesting when we start to mold.

And Reservation Dogs is right up there with the best of all the television series about Native teenagers. In fact, as far as I know, it’s the only television series about them. As a taste, here’s an introduction to a spirit warrior who appears at various moments in the series. His name is William Knifeman, and he almost fought at the Little Big Horn. He’s special.

Even if you don’t have access to Hulu, it’s worth signing up for the free trial and then watching the hell out of that week or so. There is much to learn here, young warrior (of any age), much to learn.

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A song from the musical The Most Happy Fella, done by the great Peggy Lee. I think it’s just the right song for November, as the last leaves flutter down from the trees and delicate ice forms overnight on the ponds in the mountains. If there was ever a time for moving on, this is it.

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Take that, France! Take that, Holland! Take that, England! The new #1 cheese in the world is from … (let’s let the drum roll fade completely out) … NORWAY!

And there it is in the photograph below. Ignore the humans, they are only the cheese makers, Ole and Maren Gangstad. It’s that speckled green and white thing on the cutting board you should be looking at. This cheese has a name, and it is Nidelven Blå . There’s an entire article about the competition that is required reading for cheese admirers everywhere.

Even better, this is a blue cheese, one of my personal favorites. I learned to love the blues at my grandfather’s table, where my palate was broadened mightily in the area of cheeses. There were hits and misses there, but many more hits.

Now all I have to do is to figure out how to get an invitation to the next competition, one where I am not a judge but would be allowed to wander around the tables sampling each and every one I could get my hands on. I would do this until I was either comatose or had perished in the effort.

• Blue cheese: loved
• Cheddar: loved
• Primost: didn’t love, like eating sand that had gone off
• Limburger: loved, but must be eaten with clothespin on nose
• Gammelost: ehhhhh
• Roquefort: loved
• And so on and so on

This success story should also put to rest the discouraging myth that the only thing Norwegians can cook is pickled herring and salt cod.

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What a godawful mess is Gaza. A truly horrific attack on October 6, followed by a savage reply which continues unabated.

Only two things seem clear to me. One is that Hamas has declared itself to be an enemy of humanity. Not just Jews, but all of us. Its existence is an ongoing threat to any chance of Middle East peace in our lifetime. The second thing is that Israel could not do anything else but respond to the attack. It was too big, too many dead, too ugly.

That’s it. The last bit of clarity. Without having any special knowledge or insights, I find myself appalled by the Israeli government’s response so far. My mind says STOP, ENOUGH! But the Netanyahu government shows no signs of stopping, instead they are continuing to stack new horrors that they create upon the ones committed by Hamas and in so doing diluting the support that was theirs when Israel was clearly the victim.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Mahatma Gandhi

Thomas Friedman wrote something worth reading, published in Tuesday’s New York Times. The title is a bit long, but the piece itself comes to the point very quickly: The Israeli Officials I Speak With Tell Me They Know Two Things for Sure.

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Baked something new yesterday, at least new to me. YouTube had served up a video on making bannock. For those of you who are as ignorant as I was 24 hours ago, bannock is a non-yeasted bread that any number of people get credit for having invented, either the Scots or the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas or I don’t know who else.

Easily baked in a heavy frying pan, Dutch oven, or even wrapped around a stout stick, it is usually consumed out-of-doors. The loaf I created had a simple recipe using only water, baking powder, oil, salt, and flour. It tasted pretty good, actually. but mine was baked in a convenient LG range, which was blatant cheating. So I’ll have to try it again, this time over a campfire.

There are a bazillion different recipes out there, adding fruit or cheese or anything your heart desires. Some recipes even allow the bread to rise a bit, as in the video. It seems almost foolproof … let’s see … how to screw this up down the road … it will be difficult.

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So far, the best things about this new holder of the office are that (1) he isn’t Lauren Boebert, and (2) I never heard of him until yesterday. Which to me means that maybe he isn’t one of the worst of the certifiable loonies in that august body. I know that it’s a waste of my time to mention Boebert except that whenever I start to think of Colorado as a sensible state she cops a feel in a Denver theater, blows smoke in a pregnant woman’s face, and behaves in general more like a trollop than a congresswoman.

(Even as I typed that last line I realized that I was insulting trollops by including her in that group, and it was unfair of me to do so. Shame on me.)

As regards this new guy, I have only this to say.

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From The New Yorker

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We went out to the movies with friend Rod a couple of nights ago, to see Killers of the Flower Moon. We were completely prepared to find a “masterpiece,” another feather in Martin Scorsese’s very large headdress, a film for the ages. We were disappointed.

I don’t regret the time spent in the theater. The cinematography was brilliant. The grim story was there on the screen to be seen, I just wish that it had been presented more clearly than it was. I think the tale deserved a better telling.

But you know what? Even imperfect Scorsese is better than much of what the movie industry offers us these days. I’d rather watch a three hour misfire of his than any ten superhero films. Make that twenty.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 92 rating. It would not have scored quite as well if they had asked the three of us.

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This weekend we have been promised our first real chill, and perhaps our first snowfall here in the valley. Nothing epic in the works, just a drifting away from a nearly perfect autumn.

Going through a small shed the other day I found that I own three snow shovels. Which is one, perhaps two, more than I need or want. Of course they aren’t the sturdy sort that I was given to use when I was a kid pressed into sidewalk duty. No lightweight plastics then, since plastic hadn’t hit the streets yet. No aluminum either, until well after WW II was over.

No, these were heavy steel contraptions that were difficult for a child to move even when empty. I have no fond memories of pushing those beasts around.

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From The New Yorker

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Thursday evening we traveled to Ridgway for an outing, and ended up at that small town’s Thai Paradise restaurant. There we hit a trifecta of cheerful service, modest prices, and excellent food. After dinner we cruised Ridgway’s streets admiring the architecture of its homes. There is a bit of money in that village, and one of the places it shows up is in very interesting houses. Not blatantly showy or over-large, but interesting.

It was the time of day when the sun has set but there is still enough light to see well, and we noticed a couple of deer in one yard. I happened to muse that I’d wager that deer might sometimes move into town in sizable numbers when we rounded a corner and came across three, then five, then twelve of them. Before we left town we had seen about forty deer without even trying.

Unfortunately, this bounty in the village meant that the trip home was a watchful motoring past many more herds of deer between Ridgway and Montrose, a stretch of road notorious for deer/auto collisions.

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We’ve all dealt with the earworms of life, where a bit of music gets stuck on repeat play in our heads until we want never to hear it again. There is a complementary thing in my head where a non-musical phrase gets into the same sort of loop. This morning it is this quote, which I have mentioned before. Can’t imagine why I might be thinking this way.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

H.L. Mencken

I think I need another cup of coffee, to tide me over until the danger is past. That, or visit a cutlass shop and examine their offerings.

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Robin and I have a good friend who is critically ill and in hospital. A generous but greatly weakened heart is unable to do the work it needs to do, even with the best of what medicine has to offer as assistance, and she has bravely chosen what is called comfort care, where her therapies are being reduced.

More than once over the years she has gently rebuked me because I rarely append pieces from her favorite genre of music to this journal. That would be classical music, especially opera. Yet there was at least one song that we shared affection for, and it seems especially right for today.

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