Author: jono55

This past week I took my e-bike in for a tuneup. The gears weren’t shifting smoothly, and while I know that there are some sorts of routine maintenance that I might learn, the manual that I did purchase on the topic has so far turned out to be useless. So down to the shop I went.

A few hours later they called me to tell me that my chain was senescent. The bike is at 1600 miles on the odometer, and apparently because of the power of those electric motors, needing replacement at about 1000 miles is about the average lifespan of a chain. I did get a left-handed compliment from the mechanic. On the one hand he praised my driving style in that the chain had already lasted so long, but the unspoken flip side of that statement was that I was a timid rider, and perhaps not using that available power the way that I might.

If I wanted to have the bike spirit me away and free me from having to expend any effort at all, I would rather have a motorcycle as I once did. Of course, in those days I used to have quick reflexes and good balance as well, which is what kept me from ending up face-planted against an oak tree or in a drainage ditch.

So I wear my badge of timidity proudly. I will continue to use Level One as I do and learn to live with the gentle scorn of my more adventurous cycling colleagues.

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Last evening I went out for dinner with friend Rod, and we rendezvoused downtown at one of the cooler pizza joints in the area. (The place may be cool, but they do allow un-cool people to eat there as well, which explains how I got in). I had biked to the restaurant in daylight, but after our meal it was full dark, and I got to use those lights I’d purchased a couple of years ago for the first time. They are LEDs, and lord, don’t they put out the power! I almost felt that I needed a dimmer switch for the benefit of approaching cars. Flashing brilliant white light in front and a sturdy red in the back I had confidence that if someone should hit me with their automobile it would be because they wanted to, and not because they couldn’t see me. I was okay with that.

When we were walking around downtown after supper just to wear off a bit of that pizza, Rod was musing about bike locks and their utility. He made the observation that “such locks are useful only to ward off the inept and the half-hearted. Fortunately, this describes the majority of bicycle thieves.”

Nice turn of phrase, that.

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A friend recently asked me what I thought about Taylor Swift. I had to pause, because I really don’t think about that artist very often, and the last bit of music that I heard her perform was way back when she was still considered a teenaged country artist and was prancing the stage in her cowgirl boots.

So I went to Apple Music and listened to a handful of more recent cuts from “Taylor Swift Essentials,” and found that I didn’t really care much for any of them. Her voice and style of music are just not my thing, I guess.

According to a 2023 survey by Morning Consult, in the U.S., 53% of adults said they were fans of Swift, of whom 44% identified as Swifties and 16% as her “avid” fans. Of the fans, 52% were women while 48% were men. Racially, the 74% of the fans were white, 13% were Black, 9% were Asian and 4% from other races. Politically, 55% of the fans were Democratic, 23% were Republican, and 23% were independent. In terms of generations, 45% are millennials, 23% are baby boomers, 21% are Generation X, and 11% are Generation Z. Journalists have also noted an increase in Swift’s boomer and Generation X fans, known as ” senior Swifties”.

Wikipedia: Swifties

I realize that she is a phenomenon, and has crafted her public image and interactions very intelligently from the beginning. I applaud her being able to wrest control of her music from the evil empire of the record companies by re-recording all of her first albums, note for note. Smart woman, that. But although it hurts a people-pleaser like myself to admit it, I am not a “senior Swifty.” It’s just one more loop that I’m okay with being out of.

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As part of watching as many horror movies as we can leading up to Halloween, I sought out the original Frankenstein, from 1931. Expecting something that I could make fun of, I found instead that it was a pretty good film. The acting and the costumes were mannered, of course, but the plot was solid, the special effects were done well, and it followed its own logic, which a movie about putting a human together out of spare part has to do.

There were a couple of oddities that I noted even before the story began.

And then there was this one-minute introduction. Cute. Notice how his face is lit from below to get it to look spookier.

Anyway, it was well worth the four bucks to rent it, and now we’ve seen the classic Dracula and the classic Frankenstein. And still a few days to go until the Hallowed Eve itself.

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The last leaf has fallen from our backyard trees and been encouraged to take up residence over the fence with thousands of its compadres, where it will compost and continue the process of improving the soil back there. The leaf blower was a great help in doing this, even though it is far from a precision instrument. It is an electric model, so my stints blasting leaves were automatically limited to how long the two batteries lasted. That amount of time was just about right for me, and my decision not to buy bigger and longer-lasting batteries turned out to be genius.

I’ve been happy with my electric leaf blower, lawn mower, and weed-whacker. Even though they are not entirely silent, they make less noise than gas-powered models do, and enable me to keep BaseCamp looking like someone actually lives here, rather than taking on the appearance of an abandoned property (my outdoor-housekeeping goals are quite modest).

I’ve started looking for an electric snow shovel, but have had no luck so far. I don’t need a full-fledged big-time snow blowing machine, not with the small amount that falls here in Paradise. What would be perfect would be an outdoor equivalent of the robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba that would scamper up and down the sidewalks removing what snow did fall without any help needed from me. I could then stand at my living room window, coffee cup in hand and pajama-clad, watching while the device did the work and glorying in the wonderfulness of technology.

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We voted yesterday. An election with a couple of tax issues and local school board members on the ballot. The ballot itself had arrived in the mail only last evening.

We sat down at the table, filled in the proper circles with ballpoint pens, then put the ballots into the envelopes and mailed them off. That’s an election, Colorado-style. No sweat. No controversy. No scandal.

Another woman was concerned that there might be something LGBTQ+ going on already in the schools and was perfectly willing to root it out if elected. (It’s harder for LGBTQ+ issues to get as much traction in a state with a competent and thoughtful gay governor.)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

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Jason Isbell had some problems with chemicals. He met someone who he was drawn to but he also knew that she would have nothing to do with an addict, so he got sober and eventually married that person. Later on he told this story in a song, and I offer you a particularly good version. The tale is not completely different from my own, although it sounds better when he tells it.

My, oh my. How sweet it is.

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Because they need professional help and that doesn’t come cheap. Costs will include mandatory class attendance in Democracy 101 at historically black Howard University. Those white boys and girls need a little leavening.

I believe I’ll call it the Congressional Republican Assistance Plan, or C.R.A.P., for short. Fits the situation pretty well.

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I had the worst nightmare last night. I dreamed that hordes of Gay Trans Black Latino Asian Native American Islamic Socialists were streaming across the border to take my job, enslave my family, and force me to do recreational drugs. Everything the Republicans have been saying all along was being proved true.

But it got worse. A troop of horse-mounted knights rode into town to save us from the invaders, led by Sainte Lauren of Boebert who was vaping like a brushfire and groping everything in pants.

I hid behind a ficus plant but was soon discovered cowering there. I could see Boebert‘s fingers reaching for me, just as I (praise God) awakened.

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Let’s finish up with a little Sunday Mornin’ spiritual by Josh White, one of the best ever at what he does.

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Well, a solar eclipse came and went without us. Robin and I were distracted by an upcoming visit by the Hurley family, and by the time we realized that the event was underway, we had nothing available with which to look directly at the sun, and had to settle for the old pinhole camera trick.

For those of you who have not tried it, using a pinhole camera is about as exciting as watching paint dry … no … it’s less exciting by half. You take a cosmic happening and reduce it to a black and white squibble of an image on a white sheet of paper that’s the size of a pencil eraser. Wow. Be still, my heart.

So that was a fizzle. But the visit went well. I had talked Neil into bringing his fly fishing hardware and we went down to the river for a couple of hours to do absolutely no harm to the fish population. The thing about fishing is that when you start off on an outing that will get you nothing, you don’t know it. So all the hope and anticipation is there each time. It’s only toward the end that you get the idea that supper will be PB&J sandwiches once more, and not trout almandine.

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From The New Yorker

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Our cat Willow has developed a new habit. Formerly she would bring in a mouse, toss it around, and eventually get around to making a meal of it. That was yesterday. Now she brings in a mouse, gives it a couple of pats, and then watches it to see what it will do. Will it go behind the refrigerator? That’s interesting. Will it go into the master bedroom? How fun! How about under the sofa in the living room? Très amusant, she apparently thinks, as she makes no attempt at all to recapture it.

Her human companions are not amused. While the occasional episode of stepping on a leftover rodent part barefoot in the mornings was gross, this is worse. We are going to have to learn to be good at catching mice, because Willow seems to have lost interest in what to do with them once she nabs them and brings them indoors. Other than watching them, that is.

Last evening an attractive little critter ran under the washer and dryer. It may still be there, although I left a door open for it to escape to the garage. But this really can’t go on, or Robin will be leaving me the house and all of its occupants in the divorce settlement and taking everything else.

This song is by Brennen Leigh, from her album “Too Thin To Plow,” which title is borrowed from Mark Twain’s delightful comment about the Missouri River – It’s too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

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Yesterday we went for a drive up on the Grand Mesa, where we found some new snow scattered about. There were very few others up there except for workers at the resorts. It was a blue sky day and the air was clear and crisp. Trout were rising in every lake we passed, of course, since I’d taken no fishing gear along.

BTW, when it comes to angling, I have realized that all of my life I’ve been hearing one of these two phrases:

1. You should have been here yesterday, they were jumping into the boat.

2. The day after you left the fish went absolutely crazy.

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From The New Yorker

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I recently watched the series The Pacific, a Tom Hanks/Stephen Spielberg production.

Robin started out watching with me but the gore became too strong for her. The battle sequences were much like those in Saving Private Ryan, and if anything these were even harder to watch.

I had uncles in this theater of war, but never heard a word from them about their experiences. I can see why. What comes across clearly in this series is both the bravery exhibited and the extreme viciousness of the fighting. Fighting on the islands of Peleliu, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima seems to have been truly the nightmare of nightmares.

The series became even more interesting to me when I realized that all the characters were based on real people, and that one of those boys portrayed out there in that Pacific hell wrote a book about it years later. A book that I read three years ago. His name was Eugene Sledge, and the book was With The Old Breed.

When the military draft was discontinued I worried that having an all-volunteer army would make it more likely that leaders who were weaker men would use it. Which is what has happened. Iraq … Afghanistan … anyone?

More people need to see films like this series, which should be mandatory viewing for anyone who has anything to do with sending men and women into battle.

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There’s an early morning light rain falling, the first in a couple of weeks. It seems to have dampened the wish to hoot on the part of our local great horned owl, who is usually doing just that at this time of day. The ash trees in the back yard have released half their leaves, which means I can’t see the grass any longer. For whatever reason all of the houses in our area have five foot fences out back, including ours, which means that any leaf that falls in our yard stays in our yard.

In the past, I used to enjoy it when a windy day would carry my leaves over to a neighbor’s yard. It relieved me of one of the chores I like the least, which is raking. Two strokes of a rake and my lower back is already sending distress calls to my brain which go something like this: CONTINUE AT YOUR PERIL! If said neighbor were to complain I would shrug my shoulders and say It’s only natural, Bubba, the leaves fall and the wind blows. Not my fault.

But don’t get me started on Coloradans and their dogs. The average number of dogs per capita here in Paradise is 3.7. In our part of town, where many residents are senior citizens, the dogs are mostly of the miniature variety.

So the community walking path out back is filled with older folks with leashes in their hands. If you follow those leashes down and the light is just right, you can often actually see a dog on the other end. Should you also happen to be taking a walk at those times, the first inkling that a dog is present might be a sharp pain in your Achilles tendon and when you turn around there is what appears to be an empty leash racing away from you.

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From The New Yorker

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Let’s see now. Russia is still trying to devour Ukraine, the Israelis are about to erase Hamas and much of the Gaza strip from the face of the earth, and we are once again heading for a government shutdown. Surely these upheavals alone would demand the best effort by our elected officials. But wait … nothing is happening. At least, nothing that requires the House of Representatives’ participation. I am no political scholar, but the problem seems to be that the majority party in the House is headless.

There was a famous chicken in Fruita, Colorado, back in 1945, which survived 18 months without a head, but I think we should regard this as the exception rather than the rule, and begin looking for a replacement for the Elephantine Party or at the very least a new symbol for the tattered remnant of the existing one. I submit the graphic above as candidate for that new symbol.

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

Never more true than today.

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In Thursday morning’s Times of New York I discovered a reason to visit the state of Alabama. It is the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery. At a time when political revisionists are doing their level best to make it seem that slavery was not such a bad thing, really, to find that there is a place where this part of our history is faced straight on I think is hopeful for America’s future.

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Yesterday noon I received a couple of immunizations, one against the flu and the second was a version of the anti-Covid vaccine. This morning I feel moderately unwell, with two very sore arms, a slight fever, and a rather whiny outlook on life. For whatever reason the woman administering the flu shot couldn’t get the needle in deep enough on the first two tries. She asked me if I had scar tissue at that place on my arm, because that had never happened to her before. I assured her that there was nothing there but normal flesh, and it had never happened to me, either. I did share that I go to the gym regularly and it is possible that the culprit is my amazing muscle tone. She looked doubtful. On the third poke in it went.

My courage when dealing with medical procedures is just enough to cover one try at an intramuscular injection. Two is off into the moderate unknown, and three contains the possibility of my total mental collapse within it. I had resolved that if the third time was not the charm she would have to wrestle me to the floor to do a fourth attempt, and although she was a sturdy young person and would probably have won the contest, the whole business would have looked pretty unseemly there in the pharmacy area at City Market, what with a geezer being carted off in a straight jacket, clothes askew and sweating and all.

But … no drama, ultimately. A lost opportunity to make the local news and be briefly famous. At this age I am almost immune to embarrassment, so I fear not the press.

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From The New Yorker

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During my residency in pediatrics, I inhabited three very different worlds. One of them was at the university, where I breathed rarefied air, talked endlessly about uncommon metabolic and genetic diseases, some of whose names I had learned only before breakfast that very day.

The second world was at the private children’s hospital in St. Paul, where I was introduced to a whole new array of pathologic processes that were much more common and more likely by far to be those that I was going to encounter when I left the training programs. The air was more … normal … there. Discussions were practical and the topics of discussion were the child right in front of us, rather than children in general.

The third world was at Hennepin County Hospital, in Minneapolis. Take everything you might see at #2, and add the heavy weight of poverty. More diagnoses of failure to thrive, less support for families. One of the staff members at HCH was Dr. Bob ten Bensel, a very bright guy who somehow had got himself involved in a newly developing area of pediatrics that few of us residents really believed was important , much less wanted to pursue as a career – child abuse – physical and sexual.

Bob eventually authored one of the early textbooks on the subject, and by the time it was published all of us trainees had become believers. The change this knowledge made in our views of what it meant to be human was enormous. To truly confront the commonplace horror of severely pathologic child/parent relationships made you a different person from that moment forward.

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A couple of days ago I went down to the Uncompahgre River and caught two small trout. It was a lovely day and there were few other fishermen around as competition. Add the two trout up and you might have enough fish for a single canapé, but I released them so not to worry.

To add to the method’s simplicity, you need use very few flies, with some of its practitioners using a single fly in all situations. I have therefore left the world of matching the hatch and all its intricacies. But how easy it is to carry the gear I need! The twelve-foot carbon fiber rod telescopes to 24 inches long which stores in a sturdy metal tube, and a handful of flies rounds out my kit. The equipment is perfectly suited to fishing the many smaller streams which are scattered about the San Juan mountains, and can easily be tossed into the back of my car on trips.

Like any recent convert I am enthusiastic about my new “religion”so should we meet you would do yourself a favor to not ask me about it at all, or be prepared to be buried under an avalanche of verbiage.

(If you have any interest in the method, there is a wealth of information and instruction on YouTube, a true embarrassment of riches)

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Six days now and no sign of our hummingbirds at the feeders. I think it’s safe to conclude that they are off on their journey southward with other avian migrants. Although I did get a mild surprise two days ago when a great blue heron rose out of a small marsh as I pedaled by. I thought they’d all left by now.

As I wondered at the hardships that must be associated with migration – the physical tolls, the searching for food in unfamiliar territories, the new threats from new predators, I mused. If birds were capable of thought, they might look at us, the creatures who remain behind, and think: Fools! Don’t they know what’s coming? Plunging temperatures, snow, ice, howling winds enough to freeze their marrows? Why aren’t they coming with us?

At least that’s what I think a bird would think if a bird thought.

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It’s funny what sticks with you from a given moment in time. Nearly twenty years ago I was listening to a rehab counselor go on at length about one thing or another when he unloaded a quote on me:

Forgiveness means giving up all hope of having a different past.

Anonymous

Hmmmmmmm. I chewed on that for a while and as I was doing so its message became embedded. It is now a permanent part of my mental makeup/tools.

If you hang around me long enough I may very well spring it on you one day and then it may become your problem as well. I don’t know about you, but for me it is painful being forced to think, what with the furrowing of the forehead and all.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

I think I’m gonna stop this segment for now. After this one. But you get the idea. It’s just that the c**p that comes on country radio when you are traveling and bored would make you think that mindless jingoistic nonsense is all that there was to the genre.

But there are thoughtful, intelligent people telling their stories all over country music, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, we just have to look for them. Jason Isbell is one such person. He can, on the fly, construct an entire sentence that contains no references to pickup trucks or beer.

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Reading about the college president who was ousted when he sexted a student, I realized that I have never considered indulging in this peculiar avenue of self expression. Sexting came along too late in life for me to reasonably take part.

However, the other day I happened to muse out loud on the subject and within minutes the police had come to my house and confiscated my phone. When I went before the judge to get it back, I had to make her a promise never to even mention the subject again, because the very idea of me sending out politically incorrect selfies was making my neighbors nauseous.

A medical photographer was then called in to take whole body nude photographs of me which were fed into the FBI’s facial recognition software. Apparently it’s not only faces this equipment can identify.

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The weather in Paradise is sooo sweet these days, for everybody except those who like to lay out in the sun and incubate the baby melanomas in their skin. Temps are in the 70s in the daytime, 40s at night. Excellent. Neither air conditioning nor furnaces are required to be comfortable. It does mean that on my bicycle trips around town I wear an extra layer. Wind chill and all that, you know.

The color change of the leaves is continuing at a measured pace. We haven’t had one of those storms that have the power to bring them all down overnight. So we are surrounded by all shades of yellow. Looking at the San Juan mountains south of town you see gold on their shoulders and new snow on their caps.

What those mountain views are telling me is not that I need to get out all of my winter clothing, but that I should at least check to see that it is within easy reach. While doing this I moved my favorite shirt of all time to the front of the closet rack. For my entire adult life I have had one of these, replacing one only when time and frequent wear have their way with it. But there is always one in my closet.

Several years ago Allyson asked me one day as I came out wearing the latest iteration of this paragon of garments: “How old is this shirt, Jon, that you wear all the time?” She didn’t realize that she was looking at the grandchild of the one she had first seen me in.

But even as I am putting this forth as a quintessential male shirt, I have to admit that women look quite fetching in it as well. In fact, I clearly remember having a serious crush on the nurse at 5th grade summer camp, and she frequently wore a red/black buffalo plaid shirt. Her camp nickname was “Huckleberry,” and I never got over the rejection when she wouldn’t run off with me to Canada. At the time I wasn’t entirely sure where Canada was, but I had read about it and it seemed a swell place to go.

I thought we made a great looking couple, she at 5 ft 2 in, and me at 4 ft 4 in. When you are truly in love, those height differences don’t mean nearly as much.

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Finishing up on a serious note, there was a piece in the New Yorker this week that summarized where we are with Mr. Cluck very well. The title was Trump’s Bloody Campaign Promises. There’s a lot at stake in politics during the next year. Definitely not a Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum situation at all.

In the new edition of the Great Big Dictionary you can find this man’s picture under ugly, traitor, fascist, narcissist, agent provacateur, braggart, bloated, and sexual predator. Quite a resumé, taken altogether.

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Naw, can’t finish on that downer. Here’s an upper, and it’s about Joan Baez. There’s a new documentary film just released in theaters, called Joan Baez: I Am A Noise. One way or another, I will be seeing it. She is not only one of my favorite singers since forever, but over the last sixty years, if there was a righteous cause out there she was marching for it or singing about it or supporting it in some other way. Want to track the right side of American social history since 1960? Just check her itinerary during that time.

I went to see her around 1960, when it was still early in her career and folk music was still on top of the heap at universities. She gave a concert at the U. of Minnesota at Coffman Union. There she was dressed in peasant garb and barefoot, holding a large audience spellbound. Just a girl and a guitar. Splendid performance. Splendid memory.

Nope, although she ain’t marchin’ anymore, nor is she doing concerts, I am still a fan and always will be. We are simpatico.

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I was recalling a few things from the days after I had a stroke, in October 2020. First of all, I was rescued principally by the quick actions taken by Robin. She got a babbling and confused dude from the periphery of Grand Junction to St. Mary’s Hospital, where a bunch of skilled people did for me exactly what I needed and dissolved the clot that was causing all of the mischief.

A short time after discharge from the hospital, I returned for followup to see my neurologist, who talked with me for a short time, and then couldn’t wait to show me the radiologic images of what had gone on inside my head. He pointed out where the occlusion was before I was given the miraculous medication, and what it looked like afterward. As he was describing that interior landscape I was struck by two things.

First of all, there were seemingly hundreds of narrowed little vessels sprinkled around in there, like stars in a summer sky, and all susceptible to blockage at some unknown future date. And the size of the vessel that had been occluded was quite small when you realized how much trouble it had caused. That was sobering indeed.

But this was my brain, my cranium, and my bigger pool of cerebrospinal fluid, and I didn’t like looking at it one bit. No wonder I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys, or the name of that movie that starred what’s his name. It seemed amazing that I could still tie my shoes with that remnant of my younger brain hanging out in there like a dried-up tangerine.

So while the neurologist was gleefully pointing here and there I was becoming less and less intrigued. What I really wanted to do was to get the hell out of there and go get some ice cream with Robin before the next stroke came along. If we hurried, maybe we could get in a sundae or a massive chocolate shake before the body bags had to be brought out … .

Of course, here I am three years later and I’m fine. Fone, I tell you, just fane.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Amanda Shires came across my radar a few years back when she did a duet on Dave Letterman’s show, singing a Warren Zevon song. Zevon was a favorite of Letterman’s and had passed not long before this appearance. Her duet partner was her husband Jason Isbell. It’s a beautiful song, beautifully done.

Shires writes and sings songs that are generally far enough away from the dispiriting country mainstream that they might inhabit alternative universes. Thoughtful, sometimes quite raw, they are story-songs worthy of taking the time to listen to the lyrics. One reason might be that in the past few years, along with singing, playing the fiddle, touring, recording, and raising a child, she managed to obtain a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

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Robin and I met up with Amy and Claire at Little Molas Lake, which is a few miles south of Silverton. It’s a convenient and beautiful midpoint between Durango and Montrose. On the way to Little Molas there were two things of significance to be seen, the first being the colors of the leaves which were not quite at peak, but pretty close. The second was that above 11,000 feet we saw the first new snow of the year on the northern faces of some of the peaks.

Robin was not feeling at her peak due to a cold, so it was not a day for epic walking. At 11,000 feet, Robin and I could definitely feel the altitude when out on the hike. You sort of wheeze your way from one oxygen molecule to the next.

There was a campground at Little Molas Lake, a primitive affair that offered places to park your car, a privy, and little else in the way of amenities. Bring your own water, carry away your own trash. But the views in all directions … wonderful.

(There was one oddity. The weather was beautiful, the trails and camping areas around the lake were well occupied, but the privy was already “Closed for the season.” You can imagine the disappointed faces as one person after another read the notice in disbelief, then headed for the forest to answer the call of nature, which knows no time nor season.)

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Last night we watched the original Dracula movie, which was entitled … of course … Dracula. (I know I know there was an earlier film about vampires called Nosferatu, but that was the first Nosferatu movie)

The film starred Bela Lugosi, and the rest of the cast I never heard of. It was made in 1931, and had surprisingly good production values. Most of the acting seemed dated compared with today, but I’ll bet it creeped them out in 1931!

Here’s the basic story. A young man named Renfield is traveling by coach in Transylvania, and in spite of all the eye-rolling and crossing themselves a group of villagers can do, is determined to go on to Borgo Pass, where he is to meet another coach at midnight which will carry him to Castle Dracula. He doesn’t give much credibility to the villagers’ talk of bats and wolves, but seems to think that a midnight rendezvous in the Carpathian Mountains is a reasonable thing.

At any rate, he eventually gets to the castle, where he meets the Count, a man who is always dressed for dinner, and who speaks and walks at about half the speed of the rest of the people in the movie. A very deliberate fellow, this Count Dracula. Renfield is a sort of real estate agent who has purchased an old abbey in London for Dracula, and is there to get the papers signed. Next step is to haul a bunch of coffins on a ship to London. We never see it, but quite a bit of nastiness happens on that boat because when it get to London only Renfield has survived, and he is definitely not the same young man we met before.

I’ll abbreviate things a bit. There is a stuffy house in London where we find a doctor, a scientist, a young dolt, and two women of the sort who lounge about in floor-length silk outfits all day long. Dracula meets the women, named Lucy and Mina, and before you know it Lucy hasn’t enough blood in her to sustain life, perishes, and now is suspected of midnight nibbling on schoolchildren in the neighborhood. Dracula then turns his attentions to Mina, and a pair of suspicious-looking puncture wounds appear on that girl’s neck while her energies are being gradually sapped.

Well, the scientist knows exactly what is going on, finds Dracula’s coffin at the abbey, and drives a piece of scrap lumber through his heart, saving Mina from a fate worse than death, which is never dying at all. End of story.

My favorite character was actually Renfield, the human who was Dracula’s helper. And here is his best scene, when he is discovered on that doomed ship in London harbor. A laugh for the ages.

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I’ve read about people describing their memories as a steel trap. God bless them. While it sounds like an altogether positive thing to have, the truth is that there are quite a few things that come up each year that I am happy to forget. Of course, I can’t tell you what they are because … you know …. I forgot.

My own memory power at this time of life I would describe as more of an aluminum colander. The sort that has large holes just big enough to contain something the size of a blueberry being washed. If I have a good idea, let’s say, when I am brushing my teeth, it has usually vanished by the time I can get to a computer to write it down. When I was eight years old and went off to summer camp, Mom would write my name inside my clothing. It is no trouble at all to imagine a future where when I am asked my name I turn my head to the side, stretch out the neck of my tee shirt to read the label, and answer “Fruit of the Loom.”

The other day at the gym I saw an attractive tattoo on the arm of a woman. It was of a flight of swallows soaring up one of her arms. I think I may have mentioned this in a previous post. If I were to get a personal tattoo today, it would be much more useful to get some identifier inked on my forearm, perhaps the username and password to my nytimes.com account, making it easier to look myself up and return myself to the right place.

Interesting that people have termed our mobile phones as “smart” phones. I am now codependent with mine because it allows me to access important data that I used to be able to recall, like my daily schedule, my phone number and address, the names of my children … stuff like that. In recovery meetings, much is made of one’s sobriety date, which is the day you took your last drink. If you were to torture me you could not get that information, because I recurrently forget it. What I do remember is that it was on the day that Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Soooo … look up Katrina and I’ve got it!

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Brandi Carlile doesn’t sweat the small stuff, I guess. She came out as gay in 2002 at the age of 15 with a no-nonsense statement that it was no big deal, others had already paved the way for her.

She started out her career backed up by the Hanseroth twins, and they are still the nucleus of her band. No dumping old friends when you make the grade, not for Brandi. I am suspicious that she may be a genuine person.

Here’s a music video of hers where you only see silhouettes of Carlile and her band. Cleverly done, that. The music is allowed to speak for itself.

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Why fear women? It may have escaped your notice, bro, but they are poised to take over completely any day now, and when the patriarchy goes away, amigo, it ain’t a-comin’ back. Check out those college entry and graduation stats, those life expectancies, those supernatural skills at networking … can you not feel the rumble of a steamroller coming your way?

And their skillset completely trumps our puny male counterpart … for one thing, they have a “killer app” … they can make new human beings. And they don’t need very many of us males to do a good job of this, thank you very much. The dustups in a couple of fertility clinics in the last couple of years where a seriously disturbed doctor used only his own sperm to produce scads of children illustrate this point quite clearly.

A small stud farm maintained in a nice warm state could make the rest of the male population as useful as a pile of carpet remnants. Those selected for this chore would gambol about the farm as fat, oblivious, and happy as clams, perhaps occasionally wondering what happened to the rest of the guys.

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My preferred way of traveling, which I admit has it practical limits, is to get in my car and drive. The present state of airline travel is so fraught, perhaps terminally fraught, that it’s like playing a lottery rather than dealing with a coherent operation. Cancellations, computer meltdowns, blown tires, short-staffing, tiny seats without room for regular inhalations … all are regular features today.

In addition, any flight may contain someone who goes ballistic for any reason and endangers the rest of the passengers. It was better in the good old hijack days of 1970. You might end up in Cuba, but at least the actions of the hijacker were predictable. Today’s bozos who won’t observe the airline’s rules which the rest of us accept with something like grudging good grace … what can I say? They are the loose ends of humanity.

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Perhaps Dianne Feinstein should have retired a year ago. Perhaps two years. It’s no longer important. Eventually those criticisms left over from last week’s news will fade away, and what will be remembered is the legacy of a woman who managed to do something amazing in today’s world. In most of her actions in public life, she was on the right side. Consistent, honest, untainted by today’s rampant corruption.

One of those right places to be was her part in laying out the use of torture by our government, principally by the CIA. That American leaders were not only ordering “enhanced methods” of interrogation, but defending their use. At that point I realized that perhaps I had already lived too long … seen one too many bad things. At least in this instance, America was no better than the “bad guys” of the world.

She was also on the side of women’s reproductive rights, children’s welfare, marriage equality, sane gun regulation – if you spend thirty years in Congress you can pile up quite a list of achievements. There are always too few of her sort in politics, people of principle. People that one can trust. We can ill afford to lose even one of them.

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Appalling Numbers Department

Firearms are now the No. 1 killer of children and teens in America, having surpassed motor vehicles, which had been the leading cause of death among America’s youth until 2020.

CNN

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Took a long drive on Sunday morning, going up and over the Uncompahgre Plateau and down on the far side, ending up in Naturita. The ride goes roughly like this: Ten miles of asphalt, ten miles of good gravel road, ten miles of single-track rutted cowpath, ten miles of good gravel, and finally ten miles of asphalt.

On the cowpath part the scenery was outstanding. Broad valleys, cliffs you could just drive right off of, little rivers winding here and there … made driving the narrow road and all the rut-straddling worth the trouble. I circled back home on comfortable and undemanding asphalt.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Maren Morris has never been a comfortable fit in Nashville. Part of the problem is that she has a mind and uses it. That hasn’t always worked well for women in this genre in the last couple of decades, where sitting on a tailgate in a pair of cutoffs was more the model. You may recall the time that the Dixie Chicks were immediately consigned to the country-western sub-cellar when they had the audacity to criticize George W. and his war in Iraq during one of their concerts.

The example I’ve chosen for this morning is from her latest EP, which some regard as her swan song as she drives off with corporate Nashville in the rearview mirror. I hope not, but like I said, she has her own mind.

(You could ask Where is Willie Nelson in all this? Isn’t he one of the good guys? And my answer would be that of course he is. But at 90 years old, he’s from two generations of artists ago, when things weren’t deplorable yet.)

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Robin has been off visiting her sister in Sioux Falls SD for the past several days. From her telephone reports they have left a trail through some of the most rugged shopping destinations, knocked off at least one decadent pastry shop, and in general behaved about as well as one could expect from a pair of country girls on a rampage.

My problem has always been that my idea of tidiness and Robin’s are not precisely the same. So I never quite pull off that con job of being the well-behaved husband that I strive for.

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Ran across this very thoughtful piece on the NYTimes opinion page entitled “Being There.” It hit a nerve, a raw one in me, touching on an area where I have so often felt myself to be sadly lacking. Of feeling sort of paralyzed by someone’s need when they are going through a particularly rough patch. Recurrently having the idea that I should have done more, should have said this or that, should have been a better friend. Ultimately wondering if I really am that good friend that I thought I was.

The author describes what he regards as one of his own worst failures, not “being there” for a friend whose mother had passed away. I’m not going to list them, but I have my own tawdry compilation of inactions to regret.

When I was still a working stiff in the halls of medicine, I had opportunities galore to “be there.” And sometimes I was. Sometimes a phrase would pop out of my mouth that obviously gave comfort, and I tried to learn from that. But often I was mute, could not think for a moment of what I might say that would be just right, and so said nothing.

But, and here comes my point, there were times when I did step up. How? By literally being there, physically in the room with that person, saying nothing out loud but using the act of putting my body quietly in a chair to offer myself in whatever way was needed. Looking back, I realize that I was saying … tell me what I can do.

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Good article in the NYTimes about aging, strongly suggesting that having a positive attitude is a good thing, and may add a couple of years to your existence schedule. I spend quite a bit of time in this blog dissing getting old, primarily because my basic posture has been to whine about my life situation at every stage. Another aspect is that I am amused by the ridiculous in life, and aging certainly provides material for that conversation.

Yesterday I had lunch with friend Rod, chomping down on a couple of chile rellenos at a local restaurant. Our chat ranged widely, but it was inevitable that age was on the table, if only briefly, several times. That somewhat hoary adage, “getting old is not for sissies” came up, and both the truth of it and the humor in it were noted. He mentioned that a drawback of having his cataract surgery was that once his vision had been surgically improved, he was unprepared for the face he now saw clearly in the mirror. My response was to describe my typical morning visit to the same mirror in the mornings. I rub my eyes, put on my glasses, throw out my arms to the side and declare to my image “Well, what fresh hell have you got for me today?”

(I’m sorry, I so love that phrase of Dorothy Parker’s, What fresh hell is this?, that I keep using it in almost any kind of situation. If repeating myself is a sin, I am doubly doomed.)

One of my children, bless her heart, has been making fun of my addiction to Metamucil for decades, ever since on a long-ago visit to her home I had to make a late night trip to a grocery store to refresh my supply. I assured her that she didn’t want to be around me if I was forced to go into withdrawal, so would she please get out of my way and tell me the shortest route to the store.

The husks of the seeds of this plant have magical properties, some proven and others claimed but which fall more into the area of faith than of science. I am satisfied with science once again and will leave the rest of the discussion to others. And that’s all I am going to say about that.

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While this might not have been the best year to grow tomatoes in my backyard, it was a banner year for growing peaches on the Western Slope in Colorado. I’m serious, you had to eat them leaning over the sink to avoid dripping juice on your floor and clothing. And flavorful? My oh my!

This time it was two friends who each gave us a grocery sack full of peaches, way more than we could eat without doing ourselves harm, so we’ve preserved them, after a fashion. Following a recommendation found on the web, we cut them in half, brushed the cut side with diluted lemon juice, then flash froze them.

Now all we have to do this fall and winter is thaw out a few, enough to make a cobbler, and indulge!

Growing up, having fresh fruit was a luxury, and I never got over feeling that way. So to be buried in freestones too many to eat at once … I do believe I’ve died and gone to heaven.

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On January 23, 2016, candidate Donald Cluck said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

He was possibly correct in this assumption.

And that’s what I think he did this past weekend on Meet the Press, when he basically said Yep, trying to overthrow the results of a democratic election and continue as president was my idea. He fired that gun down Fifth Avenue, and he is challenging us to do something about it by putting the ugly deed out there where we can’t mistake the who and the what. My own feeling is that we take up his challenge as the bit of high unpleasantness that it is and beat the living s**t out of him at the polls in 2024.

Our problem is that it looks like we’ll be trying to use an 80 year-old warrior to do it with. Ah weel, laddies and lassies, it’s a poor workman who blames his tools, eh? We’ll just need to put a bit of extra starch in Uncle Joe’s boxer shorts when we send him out to do battle.

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Recently I ran across an article that made my gray hair stand on end. It was about the apparently incontrovertible fact that old people have their own smell. And that everybody who ever walked into a nursing home knows it. That faint but slightly suffocating aroma is the accumulation of the scents of all the residents, and not the result of poor housekeeping.

I am of a certain age. In addition to looking old, walking old, thinking old, and being unable to vertically jump more than a few centimeters (thus taking dunking a basketball forever out of my grasp), do I (gasp, wheeze, urk) smell that way?

Gaaaaaccck! How would I know? The affected persons probably don’t have a clue that they are walking around with a heady cloud of Eau de Dotage trailing behind them.

Anecdotally, the unique scent of the elderly lingers wherever they live and in any confined spaces they have recently occupied, such as taxis and elevators. 

Scientific American

And who would you ask? Certainly not young persons, who already hate the boomers for all sorts of things and don’t need another reason to have them put away. Another senior citizen? Can they discern something in others that they, too, are carrying along with them? The only reassurance is that even though we stand out with our own special bouquets, they apparently aren’t as revolting as the armpits of the middle-aged.

Contrary to common complaints about “old people smell,” the volunteers’ blind ratings revealed that they found elderly people’s odors both less intense and less unpleasant than odors from young and middle-aged people. Middle-aged man musk took top prize for intensity and unpleasantness, whereas volunteers rated the odors of middle-aged women most pleasant and whiffs of old man as least intense.

Scientific American

But I am taking no chances. I take four showers a day, tape floral arrangements under my arms, and eat at least one cup of alfalfa at every meal. In addition, my clothes are washed twice in cider vinegar and not rinsed. I’d rather smell like a gherkin than you know what.

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From The New Yorker

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The New Yorker magazine had two articles that caught my eye this week. The first one was about Larry McMurtry, who is the author of Lonesome Dove, one of my favorite novels. I’ve read it several times, and here’s the crazy part, I believe that it represents a truer view of good old late 19th century Texas than any other book. Why crazy? How would I know? I’ve spent a few weeks of my life in that politically benighted state, but was never a cowboy nor did I know one personally, and certainly I have no cred when it comes to knowing the minds of the state’s early residents, white, brown, or red.

But the words of the book … truth ringing like bells on every page for me.

The second article dealt with something more recent, a little movie about yet another world I’ve never inhabited, Theater Camp. Again, I have no trouble believing that anything on the screen couldn’t have happened in real life. My only window onto this world has been through the eyes and actions of grandson Aiden, whose dedication to his acting and singing craft in high school paralleled that of the characters in the movie. He’s an impressive young man, and one of the good people of this world.

Worth a watch, I think. On Hulu.

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MORE REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

Emmy Lou Harris is the reigning queen of country, at least for me. A class act with impeccable musicianship. I first ran across her music in 1975, when her second album Pieces of the Sky was released and I was laid low by the song Boulder to Birmingham. Here is a sampler from her extensive (and eclectic) catalog. For instance, May This Be Love is her cover of a Jimi Hendrix tune.

The lady simply does not put out anything second-rate.

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I am accustomed to brook trout being pretty and small, but on Saturday morning I went fishing down at the East Portal in the Black Canyon N.P. and saw one do a slow roll out in the water in front of me that was perhaps 16 inches long. It had that unmistakable and striking red belly coloration that made it stand out from all of the other fish I sighted that morning.

Sighted, but didn’t catch. Although there was one very young, very foolish, and very small brown trout that managed to embarrass itself by letting me hook it. Poor thing must be the laughingstock of the Gunnison River even as I write this down.

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SOME REASONS NOT TO COMPLETELY DESPAIR ABOUT THE DEPLORABLE STATE OF COUNTRY MUSIC

These days when I accidentally tune in to a country station while driving, I am nearly driven to tears and occasional nausea. So much of it is … actually, crap would be a euphemistic way of describing it. But then I catch myself and think, hey, there are real country singers singing real songs out there, they just aren’t being played as much. Songs by Patti Griffin, Amanda Shires, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Brandi Carlile, and Emmylou Harris. For whatever reason, only female names occur to me this morning.

Way too many of the guy singers are of the sleeveless shirt, pickup truck, flag-waving, and let’s get blitzed variety. They also tend to reduce women to objects, but hey, that’s what guys do when they are drunk, don’t they? You know, “locker-room talk” and all that.

So today we are dropping in a couple of tunes by one of the most thoughtful singer/songwriters out there – Mary Chapin Carpenter.

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Our leaves are beginning to turn color now, here in the valley. The Canada geese are getting together in small groups and practicing flying from field to field and pond to pond. Judging by the amount of honking they’re doing, they are pretty excited about the whole process.

Each fall for the past several years we’ve had a two-day “Salute to Aviation” at our local airport. The armed forces fly in a handful of planes, park them near the terminal, and allow the public to come by and walk around the aircraft.

Of course at this point in life I don’t need to experience those big-time G-forces while pulling out of a dive in a fighter jet. All I need to do to lose consciousness is stand up.

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t know if I’ve ever described my morning routine to you. Once I’ve had my first cup of coffee and am almost fully awake, I walk to the bathroom and turn toward the mirror. I plant my feet firmly about 24 inches apart and square my shoulders.

Only then do I raise my eyes to regard my reflected image and say: “Okay, what you got for me today? A new bump or lump? Something else will stop working? Breaking new ground in the sagging department?”

If I can’t see any new damages I count myself lucky and go on with the business of tidying up the ruins of the Adonis-like creature that I once was. Who knew how important gravity would become? I suspect that if I woke up in the International Space Station I wouldn’t recognize myself in the mirror at all, absent the wrinkles and bags.

Tempus seems to fugit faster and faster every day.

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A couple of days ago I was taking off on my e-bike to ride to the gym when I made some error and ended up dumping my self and the bike on the ground. A quick damage assessment showed only a scraped left knee and a sore spot on the opposite quad.

That wasn’t what was most bothersome . It was when the bike righted itself, backed up a few feet, and took another run at me. Like a toreador, I dodged to the right and grabbed the handlebars as it passed, avoiding further injury.

Now this episode will come as no surprise to long-term readers of this blog, who are familiar with my belief that inanimate objects are not. Inanimate, that is. How else to explain so many oddnesses?

For instance, the car keys that you know you put in the drawer where they belong but are now in the pocket of the jeans that just came out of the washing machine.

Or the jar lid that simply will not come off even with the proper cursing and sweating, but then twirls off like a ballerina when your wife takes her shot at it.

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From The New Yorker

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Let me take a moment to praise the homely apple. Available in scads of varieties, the number of which is added to every year, delicious eaten raw or baked into some of the best comfort food in the universe, and handsome to look at, I think it may not be getting the respect it deserves.

Our local market tries to interest us in dragonfruit, papayas, and kiwis, which are all commendable fruits. But they ain’t from here. Apples don’t like the tropics, requiring colder climates to do their thing. If you’re looking hard to find a blessing in cold country living, the apple is one you might consider.

Yesterday a friend who has a small orchard gave us a large bag of Honeycrisp apples, and we are presently gorging ourselves on them (at least I am). it is also entirely possible that there is an apple crisp in my future.

And no matter which variety you choose to eat, you are almost guaranteed to be happy and satisfied. Almost. We need to be warned that there exists that paradox of fruits. The only apple variety which has none of the attributes we cherish. With its thick skin, mushy interior, and uninteresting flavor, the only thing it has going for itself is that it looks good. But its name itself is a lie.

So how did we get stuck with this loser? Here’s a young man who seems to know the answer. You don’t have to watch the video if you aren’t curious. Just don’t buy the dratted apple.

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If there was ever a time to hope that we Americans will collectively keep our heads, it will be the next twelve months. And I’m talking to both sides of the so-called culture wars, to lefties and righties and even those political agnostics, the independents. It’s likely that there will be a fire or two set during this time, with some well-known blowhards puffing on the flames like strutting blacksmith’s bellows.

I am also talking to the “media,” who have been known to fan a flame or two themselves whenever it helped their circulation. No one should feel that they need to give up any firmly held political principle, but we need a safe space where such things can be debated, and some of the actors in our national drama would take this space away from us and use it only for themselves.

There are moments when I get all tensed up as il fascisti strike their poses and do their acting out in the public square, and I see those puffed-up warriors wearing their camo outfits and brandishing their AR 15s. Do we need a clearer picture as to their intent? They are made of the same clay as the blackshirts and the storm troopers from another time.

As boring and tedious and mind-numbing as our political debates can be, they are essential to keeping the best of what we have and offering a better future for us all. When the scales finally fell from Italian eyes back in 1945 and they threw off fascist rule, they did it with some grisly fluorishes, including hanging a bunch of them from a girder, Mussolini included.

But it had taken nearly thirty years for enough of them to come to their senses. We need to do that before November 2024, and reject authoritarianism and its ugly buddies – power cults, looking for the strongman, threats of violence, rejection of the very ideas that have made the ideals of America worth supporting. Authoritarianism tends to carry the seeds of its own destruction along with it, but there can be so much harm done along the way.

In our past, a respect for fair-mindedness and decency have kept us strong and united even in our fractiousness. Taken together they are a heady blend, something to get quietly high on.

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We’ve had the pleasure of having Cynthia, a good friend of Robin’s from South Dakota, stay with us for several days. She is a delightful person, and from my standpoint it was great fun to watch these old buddies get a chance to chat and laugh and flat out enjoy one another’s company.

On the other hand, being caught in a small house with two intelligent and fast-talking women at the same time is a harrowing experience for me. I simply could not keep up, and had to keep inventing excuses to go off to my room to catch a breath.

(I am much more at my ease in the company of a bunch of typical male louts, scratching and farting together and dealing with the deeper questions of life like “How ‘bout dem Broncos, eh?”)

Of course, having a guest means we got a chance to show off this part of Colorado, which offers much to show off. The weather wasn’t perfectly cooperative, with some rains here and there, but there was just enough sunshine to keep our plans on track and our mood light.

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In our conversations I was reminded of the first time I took Robin canoeing in the Boundary Waters. We put in at an entry point that I had used several times before and headed for a portage a few miles ahead. An hour or so later I realized that I was seeing a shoreline I had never seen before, which meant that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere and we were now in unfamiliar territory.

As I was fuming at myself for my chuckleheadedness, Robin spoke up and suggested that we return to where we had started out and begin the journey anew. I stared at her for the longest time before I came up with this response:

Robin, dear, if I knew how to get to where we started out, we wouldn’t be lost.

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I am a sucker for signs that bring a laugh or even a grimace if they are bad enough. Collected these this week. I especially appreciate the desperation of the one covering the urinal in the men’s room in a restaurant in Silverton CO.

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The number of people who follow this blog puts me somewhat short of enough to qualify as a macro-influencer. I am definitely in the “nano” category.

People with followers in the range between 500,000 and 1 million followers on a social network are macro-influencers. Most influencers are micro-influencers with between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. In really specialist niches, you have nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers.

Influence Marketing Hub.com

Which brings me to acknowledging the latest follower to sign on to the blog, who is from Nigeria. I am delighted to welcome them as my first followers from Africa.

Amazing, isn’t it? The ease of communicating with people thousands of miles away, separated from us by vast oceans. There is certainly a darker side to what the internet can be used for, but I believe it is far outweighed by the positives. So I will return the favor and follow this new blog from the folks in Nigeria with hope that I will learn something about a country other than my own, from the people who live there.

It serves as a reminder that what we now refer to as the internet was once commonly called the world-wide web. We no longer need to type in the “www” on a web address, our computers make that assumption for us, but it’s still true.

[Now would be the time, I think to admit that I am not any sort of influencer at all. Just a rambling sort of writer. I just wanted to talk about it as if I were, for a moment. If you need corroboration of this, you need only contact my children, who will tell you straight up that I have never influenced them in the slightest.]

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One of the table conversations with Robin and Cynthia was about early rock and rollers, including Elvis Presley. I consider myself a fan of his, but only of the too-short period before he was drafted. After that he was mistakenly guided toward turning out some sort of canned pop-rock that had obvious appeal because he sold a gazillion records. But I didn’t buy any of them.

Following up on our discussion I have included three tunes today from that golden time when he was young and fresh and thought to present a clear and present danger to public morals.

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I had it on continuous, repeated headphone play during my routine at the rec center, as I sang silently along, the words “Black Myself “ ringing inside my cranium.

But, dear hearts, I am not black, but of Norwegian ancestry, which makes me a poster boy for pallid. No matter. A good soul-stirring anthem is what I needed today at the gym and that is exactly what I got. Cultural appropriation … possibly. But I don’t know any Norse exercise songs that can carry one through the paces like this tune does.

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From The New Yorker

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I admit to having taken cheap shots from time to time at the world of fashion. It is a world beyond my understanding or caring, but obviously means a great deal to some people, and it is unkind of me to be so dismissive. It is, after all, art of a sort and I have no qualifications to judge art.

But I will remain silent and let the picture speak for itself.

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Life has offered me opportunities too many to mention, to be a good example. I have taken advantage of so few of them … . For instance:

A. I was given a substantial four year scholarship upon graduation from high school. After two years of spending more time wandering the bluffs of the Mississippi River than I did in class, the scholarship committee cut off the last two years.

B. When seat belts were first offered in cars, I ignored them entirely. It wasn’t until going without a belt was against the law that I finally gave in and put the blasted things on.

C. I was repeatedly told that going bareheaded while bicycling was a poor example to set before children in our small town. I cared not a fig. I was already working overtime with those same children in other venues, what @&&$$#%^*% claim did they have on my free time? But the incessant badgering finally wore me down.

D. Motorcycling? Helmets? Take away my freedom to ride the way I wanted? I grudgingly relented, but with much pouting. I’m still pouting and I don’t even have the motorcycle anymore.

And so on.

But that was the old me. The new man that I am sits up straight at the table, uses his knife and fork properly, and closes his mouth when he chews. I keep my lawn trimmed and follow the recommended schedule for maintaining my automobile. I try to be a good listener even when the speaker is spewing pure bilgewater. I pat the errant children of others on the head, even when their hygiene is questionable.

At long last I am making an effort to become a grownup, and leave those bad behaviors behind. What are the odds in my favor? I would guess about 10%.

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From The New Yorker

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I like to point out the hypocrisy of others. It helps me to avoid dealing with my own. But there has been quite a hoorah about women over the past several years about their right to wear whatever they want and wherever they might be. Appeals to caution generally fall on deaf ears.

No matter. Their theme is wear what they want and any adverse consequences are somebody else’s fault.

Now the hypocrisy I mentioned comes in at exactly the speedo point. This is where these same people do not granted males the same freedom of clothing expression . To refresh your memory, the speedo is a garment which is the male equivalent of the bikini, but one that has almost no defenders.

If I were to go to a beach wearing this patch of material, I imagine it would be a very short while before the beach police covered me with a horse blanket and hauled me off for fashion counseling. If I were stubborn about it I might even be charged with creating a public nuisance, and brought before a jury that would consist of twelve persons good and true wearing identical expressions of disgust.

The only people who are allowed to wear a speedo without becoming targets of derision and hurled tomatoes are the young and extremely fit. And even for them it is a chancy thing to wear one in public in America.

The last time I ever put on a Speedo was in Mexico, when I was eons younger and a good deal more fit. Today I have enough respect for the public’s sensitivities to not want to provoke their horror by wearing this abbreviated bit of cloth.

So, where we are at present it is women – wear what you please. Men – don’t even think about it.

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When I was a little kid, staying on grandpa’s farm, I would occasionally be sent to the cornfield to select a few ears for supper. Grandpa never planted sweet corn for the table, but thought that if field corn was good enough for his hogs, it was good enough for us. So off I’d go to do my duty. Somewhere along in life I was taught to examine the cobs for worms, which was a gross thing to do and therefore interesting to a kid.

I was reminded of this childhood process when this summer an infestation of corn earworm developed in the fields of Olathe, about ten miles from us. Olathe is a very small town, almost completely dependent on sweet corn for its livelihood so the local effects were, if not disastrous, certainly harmful to the local economy.

But all this ado and fuss has made me paranoid enough that today when I shopped for corn, I peeled back the husk just enough to check for unwanted travelers. Call me fussy, but I don’t like it when my meat moves on my plate.

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There’s been a boatload of information in recent years on how bowel flora can influence behavior in creatures who we think are far beneath us on the scale of how living things are ranked on this planet. Of course that’s our ranking, and we have no idea what theirs would be, since we ascribe little importance to the mental life of anything but our own species.

The idea that microorganisms could be doing the same thing to us, the ultimate in evolution’s grand progression, is not worth considering and can easily dismissed with a haughty sniff.

Perhaps rather too easily.

Here are a few recurring situations that are possibilities, perhaps you have noticed some as well.

• A person who has everything to lose has an overnight sexual dalliance when thinge chance of discovery is nearly guaranteed
• A person has already eaten way more than they should have and feels a bit ill as a result, their waistline is straining at their belt, and then they reach for one more shrimp. Or two.
• A person reads an article about someone using high colonics in a wackadoo health regimen and finds that they have a low opinion on such maneuvers even though they really don’t know what one is.

I think that we should look into the off chance that we are being pushed around on a regular basis by our bowel flora, just like those “lower” organisms are. I can tell you for certain that in my own case, and this has happened many, many times, a touch of diarrhea will routinely make me move toward the loo much faster than I had believed possible.

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From The New Yorker

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Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? And it was so early one morning at the South Fork Campground until a couple of small bits of burning pine jumped onto my fleece pajama bottoms and quickly burned two holes in the garment and one in my anterior thigh. Some, but not all of the magic went out of the moment as I flapped my hands to put myself out.

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Of all the Colorado rivers I’ve seen so far in this state which is filled with beautiful rivers and streams, the White River is my present favorite. I’ve spent a little time on both the north and south forks which join up to create the main river and brother, gorgeous just don’t do them justice. Here’s a couple of pix along the South Fork taken this past week.

We camped one night at the South Fork Campground, which is at the end of Highway 10. It’s a “primitive” location, which means fewer amenities. But the restrooms were well maintained, the sites were far enough apart, and it was right on the river.

We were using a two-person backpacking tent and I have to tell you that getting into that thing in the evening, with all of our senior citizen creakings and groanings, was hilarious. Once installed we were quite comfortable and slept well in 40 degree temperatures.

In the morning, as we sipped our coffees, two trains of pack horses passed through the campground carrying elk hunters and their gear up into the Flattop Mountains. Each train was about ten horses long. You could tell the outfitters from the hunters pretty easily, they were the ones who looked like they knew what they were doing. The others were dressed in brand-new camouflage clothing and did not appear to have been born to the saddle.

As they passed I sent out all the good wishes and karma that I could muster – to the elk. Essentially these guys were going to all this trouble to have a chance to shoot at a peaceful herbivore bigger than a cow while it was grazing and standing perfectly still.

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Today, while I was waiting at the pharmacy I saw a man wearing a cap with an inscription I hadn’t seen before – “I Miss The America I Grew Up In.“ At first I thought that it might be code for MAGA, but there is a wistful quality to this new one that is lacking in the Cluck slogan.

I miss the world I grew up in, too, but that was because I had it pretty good, while so many others did not. Some of the things I was lucky enough to enjoy back then:

• Riding bikes up and down the streets of my home neighborhood in Minneapolis where the elms formed a complete arch
• Walking a mile to attend Saturday matinees at the Nokomis theater without parents hovering over my every step
• Every boy I knew played baseball, owned his own glove and bat, and could be counted on to help get up a game at a moment’s notice
• Adults in my family who were adults, and we could take for granted that they had our back, every day
• Never going to bed hungry

Although I “miss” these things, I don’t really want to go back and relive those times. The charms of sketchy electrical wiring, unreliable indoor plumbing, no antibiotics, and car tires that went flat on every other trip would wear thin very quickly for modern me, I think.

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I don’t know how it is with you, but my spiritual side is a patchwork quilt, with pieces from time spent in churches, in hospitals, reading books, watching films … a basketful of patches retrieved from the ordinary messes of an ordinary life. One of those patches came from a phrase in a middling sort of movie, Beyond Rangoon. Way before I came across Buddhism, I came across this actor reading the line “Suffering is the one promise that life always keeps.”

Apparently I was at that moment fertile ground for this particular teaching, because it stuck, and slowly grew into a sort of acceptance. That this might truly be how life operated. Randomness. No one needed to be blamed, no one was being punished, no tortuous explanations were necessary. When bad things happened, they just happened. As did good things.

I began to appreciate more the varieties of suffering that always been around me, and I saw more clearly what my own path forward should be. To not add, if possible, to the sufferings of this world, and to help reduce it wherever I could.

I see these practices as ordinary tasks for ordinary people like myself. Not saints, not holy men or women. Just regular, everyday, unremarkable folks.

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From The New Yorker

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I am re-reading one of the best books about Native American history that I’ve come across: Empire of the Summer Moon. It is a fascinating story in so many ways. Of course, the overall arc is the same as nearly all of the other stories dealing with what happened to Native American tribes when they encountered the European invasion. The tribe encounters the whites, who lie and cheat and murder their way to driving them out of their home territories.

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From The New Yorker

We are at the Classic Sheepdog Trials, in Meeker CO. They’ve been holding this event for a couple of decades now, and it has become well- known in sheepdog circles. We rendezvoused with Ally and Kyle, who took a day out of their very busy schedule to join us.

Now there are those of you who wonder why a guy who doesn’t own a dog, and who has never shown the slightest interest in sheep would go to such an event, let alone buy a ticket to attend. My answer is the same one given by George Mallory when asked why he climbed Mount Everest: “Because it is there.“

That’s about as far as I care to go in making a comparison because Mallory perished in his attempt in 1924, and if there was any chance that this was a possible outcome of watching a bunch of dogs chase a bunch of not too bright animals around a pasture I wouldn’t be here at all. I may be occasionally unhinged but I’m no fool.

Meeker is one of the towns we pass through on our way to visit Ally and Kyle in Steamboat Springs. I learned about this event a few years ago when I perused a poster in a Meeker cafe. A mental note was made that it might be interesting to come see it some day, and for whatever reason I didn’t instantly forget about it (Forgetting having become one of my major talents).

So here we are. Meeker has a population of 2374 on a good day, but there are quite a few more people here today. You might even say it is bustling.

Ordinarily you wouldn’t travel here in the Fall unless you were one of the brave and intrepid souls who show up with their rifles to shoot at elk grazing in mountain meadows. I wouldn’t drive six feet to watch that sorry sight, but we are assured that nothing of the kind happens at a sheepdog trial.

Ah, but it is Autumn and the air at 6200 feet is bracing and cool, and there is nothing but sunshine promised for the duration of the meet. Life could be a lot worse.

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From The New Yorker

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I was musing this morning about the heyday of MTV when it began in 1981, with its stable of interesting VeeJays and nonstop music videos. When my own children were teenagers MTV was playing in the background all day long (minor exaggeration here), even if no one was watching it. Anytime you passed the television set, you could check out what was current in pop music. It was how a relatively obtuse dude like myself knew a little bit about the popular music of the day.

Sadly, MTV went down the chute into “reality TV” and I never turned it on again. But people still make those videos, and every once in a while I discover one that improves my day. The following offering by Maria BC is one of those.

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August 1947 in Kenyon, Minnesota.

Kenyon, I learned later in life, contained only 900 people when I was a boy. A farm town in the middle of rich farmlands. It had a grain elevator, a dairy, a movie theater, two grocery stores, two restaurants, a drugstore, a farm implement dealer and a hardware store. Most of its residents back then were Scandinavian, and nearly all of them were Lutheran. As you left town taking Highway 60 west toward Faribault, you passed the only “rambler” style home in the community. That was where “the Catholic” lived, according to my grandfather.

My brother and I often spent the summer at grandpa’s farm, which to us was a never-ending source of wonder and intrigue. We ran like ferrets all day long exploring barns and sheds and creeks and valleys. We trapped pocket gophers. We fished for very small fish in the small pond that forty years later would take my cousin’s life, as he and his snowmobile crashed through the ice together. There was just enough water to cover them both.

Bud pitched or played outfield and he was our by-god hero. Just to be able to tell some other kid at the games that look there was our uncle out on the mound with his uniform and everything and did you see that he just struck that guy out! Struck him out cold! When I grow up I’m gonna play softball just like him.

He owned a black 1946 Ford two-seater coupe with a cool V-8 symbol on the hood. Inside the car there was a tiny electric fan on the dash that you could turn to blow in your face on hot days. There was also an AM radio that never played anything but polka music.

Bud didn’t take us home every night. Olaf and Harold were friends of Bud’s and on some evenings they would ferry us safely back to the farm. Apparently there were some team issues that had to be occasionally sorted out at a local tavern after the games. Grown-up stuff. Some of them involved a lady in the community who was nicknamed Moonbeam.

I never met Miss Moonbeam but I’m sure that she was a very nice person because nearly all of the men on the team spoke very highly of her.

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There was a moment when one of the non-idyllic parts of farm life was revealed in the starkest of terms. Uncle Bud was attending the birth of piglets, in the hay-fragrant twilight that was the barn’s interior.

I watched fascinated as each small glistening body was delivered. Then one piglet was born that was half the size of all the rest.Without a word, Bud picked up that tiny animal and flung it, hard, against the barn’s cinderblock wall. The creature dropped, lifeless, to the floor.

To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. I could not believe what I had seen. I couldn’t put my idol’s hands and the killing of that poor creature together in my mind. When Bud then said the word “runt” it didn’t help at all. I had no frame of reference for that word. All I knew was that something completely inexplicable had happened. And I felt like I was an accomplice, somehow, because I hadn’t stepped in on the piglet’s behalf. Even though there actually hadn’t been enough time to do so.

Later someone explained to me what being the runt of the litter meant. That trying to raise one to adulthood was wasting money, something that was always in short supply on a small farm.

Known as runts, the smallest-born pigs often get the short end when it comes to feeding and attention from their mother, two factors that diminish their chance to survive. Runt pigs often weigh 1.1 kilograms — about 2 1/2 pounds — or less at birth. They may die on their own, or may be euthanized because of quality of life or welfare issues.

Kansas State University Bulletin

However logical my uncle’s actions might have been to him, the event was my first brush with cognitive dissonance, and it was a doozy.

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From The New Yorker

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Yesterday at City Market I had just put my purchases into the bike’s panniers when an elderly man came up to ask how I liked riding an e-bicycle.

A little background:

• This happens with some regularity
• I am very enthusiastic about the utility of e-bikes
• I am very enthusiastic about bicycling in general
• I am a consummate bore when it comes to expounding on my favorite topics

I don’t seem to be able to help myself. Robin knows how to deal with these episodes which is by hollering Pedant! Pedant! at me. But some poor sods like this gentleman have no clue what to do but to awkwardly stumble off.

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The summer days here in Paradise have been warmer than I would have chosen if I had been asked, but the nights … they are something else.

Take last night for instance. At 9 PM the temperature was just cool enough to be at the point where you might have put on another layer but are still okay without it. No wind. Just a few stars and the moon only half up. Bugs jamming around the lights (they seem to like LEDs just as well as incandescents).

Those insects reminded me of a camping experience we had. I don’t remember where we were, actually, but I do remember the toad.

It didn’t budge an inch as I walked by, and I wondered … how did it get so big? … but then I saw how. Several feet above its bumpy head the insects were fluttering around the light, and every once in a while one of them would fall to the ground. Where the toad waited patiently. No muss, no fuss, just putting electricity to good use. Every night that light would turn on automatically, and the feast would begin.

On the whole I don’t give toads credit for being very smart, but the one had something going for it.

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From The New Yorker

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I don’t like Mitch McConnell much. I think his partisan power-grabbing shenanigans went way past the point of okay when he refused to allow even a vote on Merrick Garland’s appointment. Basically he’s been an example of the worst sort of behavior in politics.

But I wouldn’t wish what’s in the video below on anyone. Notice how his aides are right there, showing no signs of surprise that their boss just lost it for awhile. Keep in mind that this man is one of the most powerful people in America.

There is a time, friends, when the elders of the tribe should retire to the shade of the great oak tree and spend their time chucking acorns at squirrels and telling stories to small children.

When are we going to get serious about dealing with the fact that human brains do burn out, and that it is neither surprising nor shameful when it happens, but a natural event. At present we are tiptoeing around the subject because it is an awkward one to discuss. Sooner or later those who try to bring it up are shouted down as “ageists”and discussion comes to a halt.

One cannot become U.S. President before attaining a certain age. How about one cannot do so after a certain age?

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I remember the first time I heard the song Rhiannon. It was on a day in 1976, while I was motoring in the UP of Michigan. I had my four kids in the car at the time, and they were all in fine voice that day as they were going through their back-seat arguing and infighting routines. Somehow the song’s melody made its way through the cacophony inside the automobile, grabbed my organs of hearing, and implanted itself in my brain.

On FM airplay the song had a haunting sort of melody, the kind that held up just fine under repeated listening, and caused me to actually spend a few bucks buying the album. It became my song of the month for at least three months.

But then I saw Fleetwood Mac do it on the Midnight Special, and I was never the same. No, I mean really, I wasn’t. This performance was perfect rock n’roll, and we knew it. It blew right past our eyes and ears and into our amygdalas, that strange small place in our brains where emotion and feeling mill around (and often cause us great mischief).

To watch this video is to remember. See for yourself.

Whew. I think I’ll get me a nice cold shower.

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From The New Yorker

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We’ve had some little rains this past week. Nothing of an order to make us wonder where we’d parked the Ark, but still, any rain in a dry country is cause for celebration. And the are some cool things that come along with it.

• the aromas of the plants and the earth are heightened to the point that even our limited human sense of smell can’t miss them
• the cats coming in through the pet entrance highly put out at their fur being wet, and somehow it seems to be our fault
• the thrilling sound of thunder and how tiny it can make us feel
• the gamble of standing out in the rain and watching the spectacle that is lightning (even more fun when somebody is yelling at you to “get in here right this minute, are you crazy?”)

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Cro-Magnon dialog to be read while above video is running

Hey kids, get those wet bearskins off you then go sit by the fire to warm up

Where’s Fluffy?

She’s not in the cave?

Dad, she will get all wet!

If she’s not in here, she is already wet. Go over by the fire and try not to set yourselves ablaze again, like last night.

I’m hungry.

Supper’s just about ready.

What are we having?

Squirrels and gruel

Can I eat over at Yarmik’s?

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I mentioned my friend Rich Kaplan in a previous post. Rich and I traveled to the Boundary Waters together perhaps thirty times over the years. Most of these trips were not the sort of epic journeys that make good story-telling, but they were satisfying in their own low-key way.

The last couple of times we went into the “BW,” we had made a deal with each other. Both of us were getting older, and the probability of injury or other health problems while in the wilderness was slowly but steadily increasing. So we decided that if either of us were stricken in some way, and could not be safely loaded into the canoe for a return trip, the other would leave him and go for help. Anything else, we thought, was Plan B.

Even as we made those terms with ourselves, they sounded rational, but harsh. No one wants to be left behind if they are hurting, no one wants to feel like they are abandoning a friend. But if there is something to be done for the afflicted person, it will more likely be found in a town, and not out in the bush, leaning against a stump.

Of course, once we had made that brave decision, the opportunity to see if we would carry out the plan never came up. One of those rules of life – if you bring your rain gear, it doesn’t rain. The opposite is also true.

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Had friends over for dinner last night, good people we haven’t spent nearly enough time with this past year. I had decided to grill some salmon on a cedar plank, something I’d done before, but it had been quite a while. And lo and behold, it turned out exactly the way I hoped that it would.

When it works, it’s pretty cool and you don’t have to worry about the fish sticking to the bars of the grill and being torn to pieces in the cooking process. After the cooking’s done you haul in a fragrant, charred board with your supper on it and make this beautiful presentation to your guests. It is kind of a cave man moment.

Morg bring meat to friends on burning board because frying pan not invented yet. Eat.

In preparing to cook the fish this way, I had boned up on the process, and in none of the videos I watched did the plank burst into flames. Nor was this potential catastrophe ever mentioned. Of course, you soak the board in water for at least an hour before you put it on the grill to prevent this. But I thought: Surely someone somewhere sometime put one into the cavernous maw of a Weber gas grill, closed the lid, and before you knew it the neighbors had called out the fire department, and the police were writing you a citation for disturbing their peace and creating a public nuisance.

But … apparently … doesn’t happen?

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From The New Yorker

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It’s 2:15 on Wednesday morning, and I stepped out onto the backyard deck where I was assaulted by a full moon so bright it gave me something of the feeling that a criminal must have when those helicopter spotlights pick them up and won’t let go. Amazing.

Terrifying. Our television weather people nationwide do a great job, I think. They have a tendency to overblow a little, their business being to cry “Wolf”whenever there is a chance of real nastiness. Many of those dire predictions don’t develop into anything serious and we begin to say: “Yeah, Yeah, I hear ya” and just keep going about our business.

But this thing called Hurricane Idalia which is roaring up onto Florida’s coast right now … winds of 125 mph and still gaining strength … this looks like the real deal and I hope that the people there have had enough time to get as far away from it as they can. What awesome power.

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I was raised in the Lutheran Church. For the longest time I was never told what being a Lutheran meant, except that it was better than being a Catholic. And what was the Catholic Church? When I was a little kid this question would prompt a lot of head-shaking and eye-rolling from the adults around me. Without much more to go on, I made a note to myself:

Catholics bad, Lutherans good.

Later, in my mid-teens, I met and fell for a Catholic girl. Since I was infatuated and thus she was incapable of error I had to make an adjustment to my thinking, and it came out like this:

Catholics great (also smell wonderful), Lutherans irrelevant.

That love affair fell through, and shortly thereafter so did my enthusiasm for attending daily mass and spending my Saturday afternoons trying to tot up my peccadilloes before going to confession. I had already decided that the number of “Hail Marys” I was being given as penances was excessive. Especially since at that point in life most of my sins were those of thought, and pathetically venial to boot. So it was back to Martin L. and the Lutheran fold for me.

Lutherans okay, Catholics tedious.

In college I read the book Here I Stand!, which was a best-seller at the time. It was a biography of Luther, and I remember that it painted him in heroic colors, and gave relatively little space to examining his “attitude” toward the Jews. Fast forward to my friendship thirty years later with Rich Kaplan, who referred to Luther one day, quite casually, as a “vicious antisemite.”

[A bit of background here. It was not uncommon for Rich to freely use phrases in general conversation like vicious antisemite, rabid antisemite, and antisemitic fuckstick. It was never clear to me which was the worst category.]

But later on I did some reading and found that Mr. Luther was indeed highly prejudiced against the Jews. In fact, he wrote a 65,000 word treatise entitled On the Jews and Their Lies.

Lutherans okay, Luther not so hot.

So how do we deal with the legacies of people who do very good and very bad things? Disqualify their positive achievements? Baby with the bath water and all that? I don’t have an answer. My own error-filled approach is to do it on a case by case basis. But I have no problem with those who topple the statues and erase the names. It may be the better way after all.

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Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, in his individual statement appended to the 1974 report by the Senate committee on Watergate, warned that “law alone will not suffice to prevent future Watergates.” Ervin wrote that “the only sure antidote” is to elect leaders who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them. Their election is not in the hands of prosecutors or lawmakers but of voters.

New York Times, August 24, 2023

So, friends, when the 2024 elections roll around, let’s all look hard for men and women “who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them.”

That shouldn’t be too hard. Anyone with those qualities will stand out from the generally unsavory herd.

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I admit that I didn’t watch the “debate “ this week. By now we all know pretty much what’s going to come out of those particular mouths, so it was unlikely that any surprises were in store for viewers.

Plus my personal physician , Dr. Perpetua Longstocking, told me that my psyche was too vulnerable at the moment to watch big fat liars for more than ten consecutive minutes. So I stayed away. All of the accounts I’ve read so far make me feel that I missed only an acute bout of nausea.

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I saw a genuine Cluckster at the grocery store last evening. Strange-looking fellow, strangely clothed, strangely bearded. But with a bright, clean, red MAGA cap on. This on the day that Mr. MAGA’s mug shot was released. Maybe it was his only cap. Maybe he likes being played the sucker. Maybe anyone who gives the world the finger, no matter how phony that person might be, is his hero. Maybe he doesn’t give a **** what I think. Maybe all of the above.

Perhaps one fine morning he’ll wake up and say to himself – could I really have been that dumb all this time? That unconscious? That unaware? That big a chump? Maybe none of the above.

It would be nice if I thought, as a traditional liberal, that we human beings are all walking on the road toward perfection and are perfectly capable of seeing the truth if it is presented to us … but these guys in the red hats … I don’t know about them. What I do know is that they had the country to play with for four years and I really disliked the results, the tone, the ugliness. They are today’s equivalent of the fascisti, and no good can come of letting them back in.

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Robin and are watching an excellent series on Netflix entitled Amend. It deals with the origin and application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

The story is told imaginatively and has captivated us more than anything we’ve watched recently. As a refresher to those who may not carry the entire Constitution in their heads, here is the first section:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The third section will be discussed much in the months to come, I am pretty certain.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This amendment is a biggie. Huge. What’s obvious to me in viewing the series is that it is responsible for the America that I thought was always there, from the very beginning. Nossir, not the case at all. We’re still working on it.

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They are also not edible, it’s like trying to eat a mutant reddened sponge ball.

I have also given up on basil. Each time I tried, a plant would flourish and then one fine morning the leaves began to turn black from their tips inward. It was like watching a forest fire from an airplane, as the flames converged on the center of the plant leaving only burned vegetation behind.

This happened repeatedly in spite of my following all the good advice that I‘ve been given. Eventually I took pity on the world of basil and withdrew, leaving it for others to colonize.

Things have reached the point where my neighbors have taken out protection orders against me and I am not allowed within 50 yards of their domiciles. In an attempt to encourage me to move elsewhere, those same people are directing episodes of nighttime drive-by doggie defecation at our home. A blacked-out car with hooded driver will pull slowly to the curb, a door opens, and a masked dog rushes from the automobile to my lawn where it immediately relieves itself. It then jumps back into the car and the vehicle vanishes into the night.

One has to admire the time and effort it must have taken to train such animals.

Ah well, you’ll have to excuse me, one of those cars is driving up right now. I’ve saved the last ten canine deposits and built a small version of a catapult which is loaded with them and trained on the spot where the car is stopping.

Wouldn’t want to miss their surprised looks for the world. I call it setting boundaries.

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From The New Yorker

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We all have times that there are no words for, I suspect. Both of joy and of sorrow. Depths and heights … when we really need them we find that everyday life has already used up the special words. It’s like you come running to the end of the pier and there is nothing to do but jump and let the wind wipe away your tears as you tumble into space.

For me, tears have become the replacement for those missing words, as when I was a child and would cry when I was extremely frustrated for one reason or another. Tears can be symbols, the placeholders for words yet to be coined.

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Charles Whitman killed seventeen individuals and wounded at least thirty-one others over the course of thirteen hours before he was killed on the observation deck of the UT Tower on August 1, 1966. All but two of those killed and all injured sustained their wounds after Whitman reached the 28th floor of the main building less than two hours before his own death.

Wikipedia: The Texas Tower Shooting.

Funny, but not really. Back then, shootings like this were not the commonplace event that they have become. It was quite a sensation. There was even a movie made about the whole sorry business, starring Kurt Russell.

We’ve made precious little progress since then in curbing this particularly disturbing sort of violence. Too many of the people who buy these t-shirts out there.

If they would only just shoot at each other, and leave the rest of us alone, the problem would eventually solve itself.

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From The New Yorker

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How many times have you seen a line like this as clickbait on CNN online?

You won’t believe what a daring dress she wore to the Oscar ceremonies.

A hundred? A thousand? And what is it that is so daring … why, the draping of fabric in such a way, perhaps defying gravity, to conceal all but the tiniest peek at … a nipple. That’s it! That’s the whole huge and unbelievable deal! A few square millimeters of pigmented tissue.

Don’t you just despair, sometimes? We can be such a silly species. Well, I’m not one of those sheep, those gutless wonders. I do not fear a little bit of skin. Here is a photograph of a full-fledged nipple from a full-fledged person for you to start your day with. Think of it as a blow for freedom and sanity. 

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Remember the “disaster” that was the movie Heaven’s Gate? Way back in 1980? The critics piled so much manure on it in their reviews that you could have met the fertilizer needs of a small farm with it. Theaters pulled it. The public (possibly because the reviews were so bad) stayed away by the gazillions. The film’s tsunami of expenses killed a movie studio (United Artists) and permanently damaged the career of its director, Michael Cimino. Those early reviews said it was too long, fatuous, boring, repetitive, repellent, ugly, and aimless.

Maybe ten years ago I read about the movie and decided to watch it. Why? No reason but curiosity. Could a film be that bad?

So I bought it, I liked it very much, and now I watch about once a year. About five years ago, folks in the industry began to think more positively about the movie and now it is regarded as not only worth watching, but a classic (at least to some).

A few days ago I watched the movie Babylon. Critics have torn it apart, calling it too long, fatuous, boring, repetitive, repellent, ugly, and aimless.

I liked it. So did Stephen King. He thinks it may eventually be called (what else?) a classic. I vote with King. It is a fascinating look into a world that may or not have existed exactly as portrayed, but I suspect that it is pretty close.

The movie is loud and lusty and pulsating and shocking and highly improper. But if you are going to make a film about people who behaved shockingly and improperly, what to do? If you are going to tell a story about an industry that can be highly destructive of the people in it but produces objects that are often so beautiful, how not to make it sad and exultant at the same time?

It earns a strong “R” rating. No argument there. Perhaps an “R 2.0,”to be more accurate.

Where did I watch it? Amazon Prime, for free.

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Would you like to see something gorgeous? Silly question. Of course you would. As host at her last book club meeting, Robin served up this charcuterie board.

My oh my oh my. You shoulda been.

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Horror of horrors!

We should have guessed it, but we just learned that all that old, beloved, practical Tupperware we’ve been storing our food in for decades is loaded with BPA. Arrrrhggghhhhhh.

Hormone levels. Some experts believe that BPA could theoretically act like a hormone in the body, disrupting normal hormone levels and development in fetuses, babies, and children.

https://www.webmd.com/children/bpa

I might have suspected that I was being overloaded with estrogen when I found myself shopping for a training bra. And here I thought it was just due to my putting on a few pounds.

And when my voice went up a couple of registers and made me eligible to join a local castrati choir? I didn’t catch on then, either.

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There is a very small lake on the southern edge of town named Chipeta. While Robin hosted book club one evening, I went fishing there. The only things biting were micro-bluegills and mosquitoes, but the setting made up for it that evening.

Turn the photo on its side and it is a Rorschach test.

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One of my favorite cynics has for the longest time has been H.L. Mencken. But when his diaries were opened in 1981, we discovered that he harbored bigoted thoughts toward Jews and blacks and for a time I discarded him as a source on any subject.

Years later I began using his often outrageous quotes once again in this blog. Not to forgive his failings but to accept that very few have never uttered a prejudicial word or had a racist thought. Myself included. If all of us who have sinned in this way were disallowed the privilege of writing there would be some bare shelves in the public library, I think. When reading Mencken reminds me to re-examine my own blindnesses, it does me a service.

Some of our present political problems come from fanatics attempting to put their views up as edicts, and to burn (figuratively if not literally) the books containing alternative suggestions.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

H.L. Mencken

Some problems, of course, come from the fact that there are politicians who are complete idiots. Quite a few in there right now.

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Robin has started to make fun of me for watching them as much as I do. She’s right again, of course, because they don’t do anything special beyond sipping that sugar water, but they are doing it just outside our living room windows and I find their flight patterns to and fro are fascinating.

Also, I know sometime within the next month they will be starting out on their migration journeys, and I won’t get to gawk at them again until next May or June. So I soldier on with hoots of derision ringing about my ears.

If you’ve never watched it, there is a film entitled Winged Migration that is so worth your time. Maybe your public library has it, or you can rent it on Amazon Prime for $3.99. Beautifully photographed and mind expanding. The film makers actually flew with the birds!

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Let’s set the scene. The temperature is 80 degrees, the skies are mostly blue, and there’s just enough breeze to make the prayer flags flutter ever so slightly. Keola Beamer is playing The King’s Serenade, and if there is a prettier summer tune I don’t know what it would be.

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Our long hot summer here in Paradise is beginning to mellow just the slightest, as if it is getting tired of having its way with us. Daytime temps have returned to the upper 80s, falling into the 50s at night. Oh blessed relief! O happy meteorology!

If this isn’t happening out your way … condolences.

The sad garden that came out of Spring’s optimistic startings is grudgingly giving up a tomato or two instead of the gold and crimson avalanche dreamed of in May. One does learn from one’s mistakes, however, even though the number I made this year almost choked up my learning channels altogether. Most importantly I learned that I won’t have much of a garden next year, if at all. Freedom from the chores of watering, fertilizing, watering, weeding, watering, and smacking grasshoppers is looking pretty good at the present moment.

Did I mention watering? Rain has pretty much been absent during this growing season. So of course I would try to grow one of the most water-hungry plants (tomatoes) that I could find. And not just one or two of them, but more than a dozen. Fools rush in, where … and now that I think about it, there have been no angels around recently, either.

This sort of weather is not good for growing things, at least not the things we usually try to raise in these parts. My very uneven tomato experience is echoed by that of my neighbors. Local strawberries are small and wizened things. One of our favorite seasonal delicacies is corn-on-the-cob, but this year the ears are half their usual size, with kernels that are shallower and less sweet.

Maybe … next year … bananas would work better? I would have to be aware of those deadly black tarantulas, but otherwise … .

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Visitors can play some classic old games at the booth by throwing darts at balloons or knocking milk “bottles” down by pegging baseballs at them. One very popular new game with Repubicans this year is Hide The Ballot Box. This is where a standard ballot box is hidden somewhere on the grounds, and if you can find it you win one of those oversized stuffed bears. White persons are provided an easy-to-follow map, while other visitors must search without the help of visual aids while wearing a ball and chain.

But, hey, it’s Iowa. What can you expect? I used to have a brother-in-law who was in the Iowa Chamber of Commerce for a while. One year he was on a committee which was assigned the task of developing a list of the Top Ten Best Places to Visit in Iowa. They could only come up with eight.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Ron DeSantis. Even if he were the only guy running in that primary, he’d still come in at Number Two in the polls.

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From The New Yorker

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Something kinda remarkable is happening in the world of country music. A song written and released by a black female urban folk artist more than thirty years ago is presently #1 on the country Billboard charts. It is a cover version by Luke Combs. A very respectful cover, I might add, with few changes from the original.

It’s like I always say (to the exasperation of everyone that I know personally), a good story well told never goes out of fashion. Fast Car is a ballad that tells such a story.

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I seem to have transferred my enthusiasm from motorcycles to bicycles, especially the electric ones. That was not a planned occurrence. But for a couple of decades the innovations in motorcycling had been trending toward more power, bigger bikes, and almost no environmental awareness or sense of responsibility. Last week in Silverton I saw a Honda Gold Wing trike that was almost absurd.

A gargantuan mass of metal covered with another huge pile of plastic. All to carry two persons who probably think of themselves as adventurers. The price of that thing was more than $60,000.

In using bicycles as transportation, however, there is a big reduction in carbon emissions, along with improvement in the rider’s physical strength and wellbeing. Developments to watch in e-bikes include:

• Efficiency of the motors
• Use of belt drives versus chains
• Transmissions instead of external gears and shifters
• More options for passengers and cargo
• Building safer and lighter tricycles for riders with special needs

Unfortunately with the explosion of interest in electric bikes, there has come a sort of horsepower race as well, at least among a few manufacturers. Just like back in the day you can burn rubber, but now it’s with a bicycle.

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Movie special effects people go to great lengths and use their fantastic imaginations to create screen monsters that will give us a chill. One of those that was particularly effective in causing me to feel unsettled was the one in Alien. But actually there is a critter here on earth that just looking at it makes me grateful to be here in Paradise, where they are not found. And that is the biggest reptile on earth, the salt water crocodile.

Now here’s a creepy fact that I came across this morning. They can sleep, and still keep a close eye on you, with one eye open.

Australian legend has it that crocodiles sleep with one eye open – and scientists have now proved it to be true. Australian saltwater crocodiles join several aquatic mammals and birds in being capable of unihemispheric sleep, which involves shutting down only one half of their brain at a time, keeping the other half alert to danger.

The central nervous system is wired up such that the right eye remains open when the left side of the brain is awake, and vice versa.

Discover Wildlife.com

Unihemispheric sleep … I think that I’ve got it, too. It would explain a lot of things. It would explain, for instance, why I don’t fall out of bed at night. Or why when I set the alarm for 6:00 AM I will wake up at 5:59 AM. Perhaps if Robin would stay awake and watch me for a few nights she could see if one of my peepers was constantly keeping track of everything around me.

That’s not going to happen, of course, because Robin treasures her sleep more than she is curious about whether I have yet another peculiarity for her to deal with. And truth be told, it would give me a shiver if I got up one night to use the bathroom and found one of her eyeballs tracking me even as she slept. I think I might begin sleeping on the couch.

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From The New Yorker

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A few miles past Silverton there is a sign on the highway we’ve ignored every time we pass it on our trips to and from Durango. It indicated that something called Andrews Lake was somewhere over there on the left and out of sight. On Wednesday we arranged to rendezvous with the Hurley family at exactly that place.

It’s a pretty little body of water formed by an earthen dam put up some sixty years ago. The views of the mountains on all sides are beautiful. We ate a simple picnic lunch and then did the 0.8 mile walk around the lake itself. Cool temperatures up there at 10,750 feet, with no flying/biting nasties to spoil the day.

Coming back home, Robin and I noticed a replica of an old wooden-wheeled cart at a roadhouse bar whose owner had obviously watched too much Monty Python episodes at some time in their life. A few miles further on we pulled over to watch three moose meandering along a ravine. All in all ’twas a fine way to spend a day.

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Robbie Robertson passed away this week. He was one of the founders of the music group The Band, and went on to make significant musical contributions once the group broke up.

The double album Rock of Ages, and the epic “rockumentary” film The Last Waltz, were personal favorites of mine. The Last Waltz was directed by some guy named Martin Scorsese, and I never heard what happened to him after that. Wonder where he is now, he seemed so talented.

There are many differences between the lives of the truly creative and we Ordinary Mortals. One that stands out today is that Robertson is just as alive to me now as he was last week. When an O.M. passes, those closest to them grieve, but no one else in the universe is the wiser or feels any sense of loss.

I never met Robbie, was not his friend or relative – all of my connections to him were through listening to his music, and all of those works remain behind for me to enjoy as his legacy, unchanged. I can sit down with my iced coffee this afternoon out under the ash tree in the backyard and crank up his playlist and – lo and behold – time and mortality haven’t intruded. That part of him will never die for as long as recorded music is played.

I do have one anecdote involving The Band’s music. In 1972 my family and I went camping on Kelley’s Island, Ohio. We took the ferry from Toledo to the island on a Thursday and enjoyed two peaceful, sleep-filled nights in our tent after spending the days exploring the area.

And then came Saturday, which is forever ensconced in memory as Black Saturday. All afternoon the ferry kept unloading boatload after boatload of revelers who moved into “our” campground, which was by evening filled to capacity with loud people and cases of Budweiser. At 4 A.M., as I lay unable to sleep while the speakers on the roof of the Volkswagen camping in the space next to our tent played The Band’s first album over and over, I contemplated violent acts.

The first such series of acts would be to take my (imaginary) sniper rifle equipped with a night-vision scope and begin shooting all of the boomboxes I could locate. The next series would involve picking off the owners of those pestilential boomboxes, one by one.

Looking back I am glad that I had no firearms with me, as I would probably still be a guest of the state of Ohio, in a barred-window accommodation that would almost surely afford me fewer opportunities to choose the music I would like to play than I now enjoy.

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Thought I would share with you a t-shirt I saw advertised recently. I broke out laughing when I first saw it, recognizing the basic truth of its statement.

Then I felt guilty for taking delight in what is really a depressing story behind the phrase on the shirt. That we are now down to a 1.3 party country, instead of the much preferable 2.0. That has been true ever since the GOP leadership joined the mob section of their party. (We all know who the guy at the head of that mob is, so we don’t need to dwell on him.)

Now what the mob section of either party wants to do is to burn everything to the ground and then build it back the way they would like it. Their problem is that they are so fractious they can’t work together or with others, having discarded compromise as a way of doing business.

So I won’t be buying the shirt. Why wear something that makes me sad … even if I would look damn good in it?

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From time to time I’ve mentioned bringing home the groceries via bicycle. If it’s just a few items, I will use panniers (saddlebags). But when it’s a full-bore trip I fall back on my trusty Burley Nomad cargo trailer.

We bought it nearly fifteen years ago when we were making plans to bike the Mickelson Trail in South Dakota (a beautiful trip, I might add).

It will carry 100 pounds of whatever, keeps some of the rain off the contents, weighs only 15 pounds and is easy to tow. It is covered with a coated fabric which will, of course, eventually need replacement, but it’s been fifteen years so far … . Its only real drawback is the price – $349 this year. About double what I paid way back when.

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I went looking for what could be done and the only real suggestion was to put up multiple feeders spaced as far apart as possible, making it difficult for the little brawlers to be in all those places at once.

That seems like a lot of work to rectify a problem that I created by putting up the feeder in the first place. Surely in these enlightened times there is a hummingbird whisperer somewhere who could be called in to work with us. The rufous duo may have unresolved fledging issues, perhaps dating from that awkward time when they had to leave the nest.

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There was an oddness tonight at supper. I had found a new recipe that would make use of two items taking up space on my refrigerator shelves, a head of broccoli and a chicken breast. The recipe: Chinese chicken and broccoli.

It looked good, and I followed the instructions to a tee, even though it seemed that there was an awful lot of cornstarch used, at not one but two steps in the recipe. But hey, what do I know, eh? The authors were both Chinese and they looked so happy and trustworthy … .

However, when it was finished the food was filled with those big gelatinous globs of cornstarch that I not only detest but am made nauseous by.

People talk about certain “mouth feels” that disgust them, but a cornstarch glob repels me from the moment I set eyes on it. God forbid one would ever get as far as my mouth. I don’t know what the world record for distance emeses is, but in that instance I have no doubt that I could hit thirty feet without a problem.

And I don’t know how it is in your house, but in my family it is considered bad form when the cook throws up from looking at the food they’ve prepared.

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From The New Yorker

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Last Friday we visited a park belonging to the city of Montrose that is 22 miles away, and is at an altitude of 9700 feet. It lies on the shoulders of Storm King mountain, south and slightly east of us. Its name: Buckhorn Lakes.

There are two small lakes, a bunch of picnic tables and some fine views of the Uncompahgre River valley and the San Juans. People do fish there, but we had gone to check it out, have a picnic, and get away from the heat in the valley. Once you reach the park there is a maze of old roads, many of which require 4WD vehicles, but just about any car can make it to the park. Our Subaru had no problems, although the last three miles were rocky, bumpy, and the road was narrow. Not quite 4WD territory but slow-driving for certain.

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Let’s talk about CardioPulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR, for a minute. There’s a very thoughtful piece in the New Yorker dealing with what the author refers to as a “brutal” procedure. It’s worth a read, because if you enter a hospital for any reason, and you suffer an arrest, unless you specify something different your body will be probably subjected to CPR by default. Which may not be what you want at all.

When I had a stroke a couple of years back, my treatment in the emergency room had already cleared the vessel blockage that had produced my symptoms, but I was admitted for observation. I felt fine and was back to my normal self. But when the nurse came around to officially admit me to the unit, I made sure that Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) was clearly noted on my chart and wherever needed. Why? Because the statistics regarding doing CPR on persons my age are so dismal that having someone pound on my chest and shock me would be akin to elder abuse.

One anecdote doesn’t prove a thing, of course, but I’m going to relate one, anyway. I was a junior medical student on my surgery clerkship, rotating through the county hospital. One of the patients on the service I had been assigned to was an octogenarian woman with well-advanced dementia. This was in the dark ages, when DNR guidelines weren’t talked much about as yet. At least not where I was, or to me as a student.

So when the woman suffered a cardiac arrest, my resident ordered me to begin chest compressions while he rounded up the defibrillator and the CPR cart. On my very first compression of this woman’s chest, I could feel the snapping as her ribs broke away from her breastbone. And that was the end of things. Everything stopped. Being so inexperienced, just for a moment I was afraid that I had done the procedure incorrectly and had indeed killed her.

The surgery resident quickly calmed me, and assured me that there was actually nothing that could have saved this poor soul, and that was my eventual takeaway. But the emotional charge of that first thought of mine hung on for the longest time, and it was not a good feeling to have.

But keep this in mind … it is often the default to begin CPR in hospitals, unless we do something to prevent its happening.

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While putting together our first caprese salad of the season, the tearing of the basil filled the air in the kitchen with that wonderful aroma.

I swear, if there was a cologne that smelled like basil I would wear it. The only problem would be that I would probably have to fight off “foodies” all day long, as they would be drawn to the scent.

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(The disclaimer first. If I mention a product on this blog by name I get nothing out of it. No money, no job offers, not even a coupon good on my next purchase. It’s not that I wouldn’t prostitute myself if the offer was a good one, but I’ve never received any. Turns out that it’s quite easy to maintain your virginity when no one is after it.)

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From The New Yorker

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Teaching myself how to cook, which is a project I’ve been involved in ever since my first wife gathered up the Le Creuset cookware and headed for the door, has not been made any easier by the fact that Scandinavians are born with only 25% of the taste buds that other nationalities possess.

You all know how evolution works, right? Over long periods of time a species drops what it no longer needs and acquires characteristics that improve its survival chances. Taste buds were one of those “no longer needs” things. Living in a cold country surrounded by cold water and basically living on hake and herring … well, who needs a broad palette of receptors?

Normally the taste buds include those for sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness (umami). Extensive research has shown that Norwegians have no umami receptors at all. Which works just fine when your spice cabinet contains only salt and pepper, but puts you at a disadvantage out in the larger world. For instance, there are very few Norwegian foodies. Online you can spend months and months watching videos of people cooking Chinese, Korean, French, Latin American, Jamaican … but Google Norwegian cooking shows and see how few sites come up. It’s a bit sad.

But what can a guy do but soldier on and pretend he knows what he is doing and what he is tasting? When a plateful of coq au vin or a wok-ful of General Tso’s Chicken taste to him pretty much the same as a bowl of cornflakes.

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We’ve put out a hummingbird feeder in front of the house this year, and it has proved very popular. The critters are pretty to look at and fun to watch. There are at least two species, maybe three, that are coming to the feeder. My problem in identification is that from the living room window they are all backlit, so subtle color variations are hard to distinguish.

Interesting how aggressive they are. Even though there are five little perches on the feeder, there is almost never more than one bird present at a time, because they drive one another away with their dive-bombing.

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Interviewer: We haven’t talked in a while, but I would really like to know what you think about a couple of things going on down here. I realize that you must be quite busy up there in Valhalla, what with your daily battles and all, but if you have the time, could you tell us what you think about the Cluck affair as it now stands?

Ragnar: Please, I was just quaffing a flagon of mead when you broke in.

Interviewer: Drinking in the morning?

Ragnar: It’s not morning here, thou dimbulb, we’re a few time zones away from where you are.

Interviewer: Sorry, didn’t mean to judge. Not my business.

Ragnar: Don’t do it again, or these little conversations will come to a pretty swift halt. But your question … I’ve been talking about your problems with some friends recently, namely Halvor the Toothless and Sven the Malingerer. We are unanimous in thinking that what you need is a good defenestration*.

Interviewer: I miss your meaning.

Ragnar: You’ve got the guy dead to rights, right?

Interviewer: Well, yes.

Ragnar: There is really no doubt as to his guilt, the only problem is what to do with him, right?

Interviewer: Well, he is innocent until proven guilty.

Ragnar: Are you going to waste my time … ?

Interviewer: Okay, there is no doubt.

Ragnar: So he’s a snollygoster** and a traitor to boot, right?

Interviewer: Yes. But, violence? Throwing people out of windows?

Ragnar: Mmmmmm … Okay, then just use a window on the first floor. He’ll get the point.

*

*Defenestration – the action of throwing someone out of a window

**Snollygoster – a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. Not to be confused with a snallygaster, which is a mythical bird-reptile hybrid associated with rural Maryland

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Looking Up At The Clouds Department

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After I’d placed that silhouetted image above, I studied it more deeply and realized that what this leaping figure is doing … the only part of that posture that I could have achieved at any time in my life was the curving downward of the foot in front. And that would happen only when I got a cramp in it.

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I’ve noticed that Robin and I are getting some of the signs of cabin fever. You know, the kind you’re supposed to get in winter when the snowdrifts build up around your home and you are stuck indoors for waaay too long?

Cabin fever is not a medically defined condition but a ‘folk syndrome’ commonly understood to refer to a combination of anxiety, lassitude, irritability, moodiness, boredom, depression, or feeling of dissatisfaction in response to confinement, bad weather, routine, isolation, or lack of stimulation. A person subject to cabin fever may suffer from sleeplessness (insomnia) or sleepfulness (hypersomnia). They may even develop paranoia and difficulty in rational decision‐making. At its extreme, people may feel compelled to escape their spatial restrictions or limited routines, regardless of external conditions or the cost to themselves or others.

National Library of Medicine: Cabin fever – the impact of lockdown on children and young people

But this time it is the heat that’s trapping us. The relentless, unforgiving, dad-blasted rays of good ol’ Sol. Here in Paradise we’re not experiencing the awfulness of some places in Arizona and Texas, but even when it’s in the nineties for weeks on end it pinches off your possibilities.

Every day in the media we are treated to the Dr. Sanjay Guptas of the world telling us that, really, we codgers shouldn’t go outdoors at all, because we will die of a heat stroke within five or six minutes and then the city will have to come out and scoop up our inert forms for disposal. An unnecessary expense for the taxpayer that could be avoided if we would just stay indoors with all of the shades drawn like well-behaved senior citizens.

But eventually we must go out, because it is either that or homicide begins to be a real possibility, and we must take enough water along to drink a cupful every few minutes to try to keep up with the body’s losses. That’s an easy plan if we’re only going to walk from the car to the grocery store, but not if we’re out there for a while.

Robin and I have small backpacks containing water bladders that hold 2 liters that we carry on most of our walks, even when the temperatures are less dramatic than they are at present. Both of us have had experiences with dehydration that have made us cautious. Nothing life-threatening, but each time they were enough to definitely diminish our endurance.

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David Brooks has a very good piece in Friday’s New York Times entitled “What If We’re The Bad Guys Here?” I think it might be good reading for anyone who wonders about the direction our democracy has taken.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy, David Brooks, New York Times August 5, 2023

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Looked at the moon this morning, which was veiled by clouds. Still quite visible but the borders are fuzzy, as if dodged lightly with Photoshop. It’s a full moon, and a beauty. A brilliant icy white.

Since it was one a.m. and I knew that it would be at least an hour before sleep would return, I was maundering about the premises when I looked up and noticed our old friend in the sky.

Maundering? I come from a long line of maunderers, going all the way back to Olaf the Feckless around 700 CE. He was supposed to be caring for the hogs on a hardscrabble farm in Norway, but lost interest and instead strolled idly away. When Olaf finally snapped to and paid full attention to where he was, it was on the coast of Greenland.

He sat down on a big chunk of driftwood, pulled a herring from his pants pocket, and began to munch. Always being careful to avoid those little bones, just as his mother had told him to do a thousand times.

Olaf, slow down, you are eating that fish too fast. You will choke on a bone and just die! And I won’t even help you because you are such a dumbcluck!

While reciting this litany his mother would mime someone choking and it was such a ghastly spectacle that Olaf never forgot it.

When he tried to put down roots there in Greenland, though, he realized that the night life was severely wanting in just about every way imaginable, and there were no women at all. This set him maundering again and before he knew it he was in Minnesota where he opened a C-store to sell stuff to the Native residents. It wasn’t much … some firewater, jerky, books on woodcraft… but it was a living.

And he spent time looking at the moon. We know this because of runes that were discovered on some large rocks on the shores of Lake Minnewaska. Olaf had scratched them onto the stones while admiring lunar displays, probably much like the one I am looking at today.

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As regular readers know I started plants from seed this Spring, and at first everything went swimmingly. They sprouted, became strong little seedlings, sturdy plants, and before long all of them together formed a jungle of tomato vines that were a bit dangerous to walk past, as they would make a snatch at you if you weren’t cautious.

But then came BER. Not to all of them, but only to the varieties that were to provide the allstars. The kind you bring out to show off when the neighbors come by.

And here’s where you can start to hear the guffaws emanating from above. There were two identical planters containing the identical tomato variety, watered and fertilized identically, and located side by side. Both had been given calcium supplementation of the proper sort in the recommended amounts.

One plant is turning out beautiful fruit, the other … every single tomato a loss to BER. One planter 100 % success, one planter 100 % loss.

Go figure. I can only explain it through the concept of adverse divine intervention.

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Not quite sure where this summer is going. We’ve had two Augusts already in terms of heat and aridity, and you have to wonder what this third one will be like.

Apparently this summer has been an eye-opener to a handful of local Republicans, who brought the matter up at a recent conclave. Their resolution read something like: “Resolved that there may actually be such a thing as global warming, and furthermore it is possible that humans had something to do with it.”

They were, of course, shouted down by the rest of the attendees, who far outnumbered them. (It helps to remember that we are in Cluck Country here on the Western Slope.) Once the tarring and feathering of these upstarts was over, the conference concluded by issuing a statement denying that anything of the sort was happening at all.

Their thesis was that the problem is that the Chinese-made thermometers that we are using to measure the temperature are faulty, and that every one of them reads at least ten degrees high. All the rest is hysteria raised by the liberal mob that is ruining America by woking it to death.

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On one of our trips to the Yucatan peninsula, we rented a small casita right on the beach near Tulum. There was a day when we bought a few groceries to nibble on when we tired of sun and ocean and watching pelicans and acquiring a tan. We bought a couple of mangoes, which were grown locally.

The expression “to die for” is terribly overused, but it would describe these things to a tee. After eating the two we had purchased, we returned to town to buy all we could find. Then we returned to the casita and … there is no other word for it … we pigged out on fruit. Our shirtfronts were soppy with dripped-on mango juices, our eyes were glazed, our speech thickened and clumsy. Anyone walking in through our door and seeing the growling, crazed beasts we had become would probably have called the Mexican equivalent of 911, or perhaps the police.

Now … this week … there was a sale on mangoes in our local market. And they were just as miraculously delicious and melt-in-your-mouthy as those in Tulum, all those years ago. A total flashback. The only thing missing was the Gulf of Mexico.

A small matter, really, but one we noticed.

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In my never-ending quest for a wide, thin layer of knowledge of all sorts so I can annoy the hell out of anyone within earshot, this week I revisited a short piece of classical music. It was written by Johann Pachelbel a few hundred years ago, but never quite caught on at the time and remained obscure. A pity because it is quite hummable.

Obscure, that is, until 1980, when Robert Redford decided to direct his first movie, which was called Ordinary People and was an excellent film. The soundtrack of the movie featured Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and made it a flat-out hit. Go figure.

Whenever it shows up on radio I will still pause and give it a listen. Beautiful.

But … there’s more. I learned that many pop songs have been written which were based on this tune. It’s not unusual for a pop composer to rip off the classics, but sooooo many? Here’s a nice British guy named David Bennett, to give us a little education.

Quite a little talker, isn’t he? But interesting.

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No rain that amounts to anything for more than a month now. Everything in town that isn’t watered is crispy. ‘Twas not the best year to have a large bunch of tomato plants, perhaps, they are thirsty little devils. But the first fruits are now ripening.

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I’ve not been a fan of Nikki Haley’s. She left me behind when she joined the Cluck team, and it doesn’t help that she is a member of a political party presently in thrall to its most rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth faction. But at a political event this past week she gave a compassionate and thoughtful response to a serious question.

The question was:

“You said on TV that women who get abortions should not be put in jail and should not be subject to the death penalty. But how exactly should women who get illegal abortions — women like me — how do you specifically think we should be punished?”

And Haley’s answer was:

“In order for us to have a federal law, we’re going to have to have consensus. What does that consensus look like? Can’t we all agree that we don’t want late-term abortion? Can’t we all agree that we want to encourage more adoptions and good-quality adoption so that children feel more love, not less? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be accessible? And can’t we all agree that a woman who gets an abortion should not be subject to the death penalty or get arrested? That’s where I think we start — we start, and we do it with a level of respect. No more demonizing this issue. We’re going to humanize this issue. I had a roommate who was raped in college. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what she went through, wondering if she was OK. Everybody has a story. Let’s be respectful of everybody’s story, and let’s figure out what we can do together instead of sitting there and tearing each other apart.”

I couldn’t agree more with her – “No more demonizing this issue”.

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Went to see the movie Oppenheimer this week. It did not disappoint. Christopher Nolan directed the film. It’s amazing, but he has managed to put together a body of work that contains no comic book characters at all. Who knew you could do that?

I know that we aren’t done with the comic-book franchise movies yet. That point will be announced by a film title something along this line: Donald Duck versus the Fantastic Four – Quackalypse!

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A woman with a stronger moral compass than most of us passed away this week. Sinead O’Connor has died at age 56. Hers was a unique voice that often cut through the hypocrisy and deliberate blindness that we use to keep ourselves comfortable. In 1992 she became famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) for her performance on Saturday Night Live, a brave performance that harmed her career and caused her to be banned from the show.

Here is that SNL moment.

When she tore up the picture of the pope, the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church had already been roaring for five years in Ireland, but America had been sleeping through it all, and was still able to be shocked at a photograph being torn. Of course we learned that O’Connor was right, that there was a world of children whose lives were being damaged, all around us. A world so large and so repugnant that at first we couldn’t believe its size and its horrors.

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For me, there is a song of hers that could be her epitaph if music could somehow be inscribed on a stone. It is from the musical Evita.

Brings a tear every time.

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I mentioned the movie Oppenheimer. It is a full-bore three hour sensory assault on the viewer’s brain, one where you are rarely given a moment to relax and compose yourself. The soundtrack is a mixture of music that is recognizable as such, along with a bewildering cacophony of clanks and hammer sounds and boots stomping and I have no idea what else, banging around in those surround speakers.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t love linear moviemaking, where one scene neatly segues into the next. In fact, there isn’t a single good segue in the entire three hours. He goes back and forth in time and memories and imaginations and events and somehow the bomb gets built and dropped off. We are spared all but a filmy suggestion of how dreadful it all was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We went with friends, and while we each said that we liked it, all four brows were furrowed when we exited the theater. The group conclusion was that we had experienced something extraordinary, but we weren’t quite sure what it was. That we should see it again was our concluding advice to one another.

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But, and here is the cautionary note, they still pressed the button when the time came.

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I’ve been trying to see if there isn’t a bright side to our climate changing, which hasn’t been easy. But as we heat up, I suppose that some of nature’s creatures who have always thought Colorado too cold to be attractive might change their minds.

It might not be beyond the realm of possibility that the corpses of armadillos will begin to decorate our highways as they do now in south Texas, and that when we shake out our sleeping bags in the morning we find that we’ve been cohabiting with new and exciting reptile varieties. Jaguars may move northward from the Mexican border to locations here in Paradise, which would be interesting since they tend to run bigger than our resident mountain lions and could decide to sample the local cuisine, which includes us.

If all of this turns out to become a real thing, I’ll have to learn about these critters and how to deal with them. As of today, I don’t have a plan. Except to run away.

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When I read up on the music’s history, I found that it was written to celebrate the Russians finally turning Napoleon’s Grande Armée around and sending it packing.

On 7 September 1812, at Borodino , 120 km (75 mi) west of Moscow, Napoleon’s forces met those of General Mikhail Kutuzov in a concerted stand made by Russia against the seemingly invincible French Army. The Battle of Borodino saw casualties estimated as high as 100,000 and the French were masters of the field. It was, however, ultimately a pyrrhic victory for the French invasion.

With resources depleted and supply lines overextended, Napoleon’s weakened forces moved into Moscow, which they occupied with no delegation to receive the conquerors. Expecting a capitulation from Tsar Alexander I, the French instead found themselves in a barren and desolate city. To make things worse, 48 hours after Napoleon’s entry to the Russian city on 14 September 1812, three quarters of Moscow was burned to the ground.

Deprived of winter stores, Napoleon had to retreat. Beginning on 19 October and lasting well into December, the French Army faced several overwhelming obstacles on its long retreat: famine, typhus, freezing temperatures, harassing cossacks, and Russian forces barring the way out of the country. Abandoned by Napoleon in November, the Grande Armée was reduced to one-tenth of its original size by the time it reached Poland and relative safety.

Wikipedia, 1812 Overture

Well, it wasn’t enough for the Russians to lick these guys in 1812. They wanted to beat up on France a little more in 1880, with Tchaikovsky’s assistance. And so, this overture was commissioned. Listening to it today I found an amusing tidbit that I missed when I listened in 1959. At 11:12 you begin to hear quotes from La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. That short phrase is played twice without incident, but on the third repetition at 11:45 the Russian cannons blow it to smithereens.

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Robin was away for four days this past week, preserving the well-being of two semi-abandoned children in Durango, so I decided to make things easy on myself re: meal preparation.

So I cooked up a half gallon of clam chowder, and ate it at every meal. This gave me the opportunity to think quite a lot about clams, something I ordinarily do rarely. Each night before retiring I have been dragging out the Water Pik and trying to dislodge clam bits from between my teeth.

It took a while each time because the motes of mollusk refused to be dislodged. They are like barnacles in the mouth. I came to the belief that canned clams really were the soles of old running shoes that had been run through a blender and then packed in sea water.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to take a canful and spend a few hours rearranging the pieces the way archeologists do when they go through bone fragments to reconstruct a skeleton, you would find that they spell out the words Adidas or Nike. Maybe a vowel missing here and there, but you would get the picture.

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The other day my one remaining functional neuron took a day off and I decided to ride up to the Black Canyon and back, something I’ve done twice before. The round trip distance is 37 miles, and with electrical assistance is ordinarily a breeze.

Coming back I ran out of juice about a mile from the park boundary. You can still pedal the unelectrified bike but it is a heavy beast indeed, and I began to pay careful attention to that turkey buzzard circling over head, since the temperature was now 90 degrees.

I began to wonder … was my will in order … had I left food for the cats … did I have any water left … would I be forced to drink my own urine to survive? Would I soon drop by the wayside and my dried husk found by the highway department tomorrow?

I cried out, I’m too young to go … not today … not when I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet!

And then I crested the hill and realized that it was all downhill now, right to the door of my house. Soon I was balancing an iced tea on my knee and reaching for the remote control.

As my old mentor Scarlett O’Hara used to say – “Tomorrow is another day.”

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For instance, Robert Oppenheimer led the project in a town that Army engineers created on the top of a mesa that was accessible by a hazardous mountain road. A large group of the best scientists in the country were hauled up there, along with their families. They could not tell anyone the truth about what they were doing or where they were living for the 27 months that they were up there.

Oppenheimer’s story is dramatic, and many of us know at least part of his story. But he had a wife. What happened to her during these two years? How did all of these people get through what must have been a sort of madness when they were thrown together in the middle of nowhere?

So when the movie comes to town we will hustle down to see it. This is a great story and we can hope that the film does it justice.

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A little ditty from the early sixties when “the bomb” was very much on people’s minds.

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Utilitarian? This means riding to work, school, shopping, the public library, movies, meetings, etc. Our town lends itself very well to bicycling because there isn’t a lot of change in elevation from one section to the next. From our home on the eastern edge of town it is a long sloooow downhill west to the river. Probably drops less than 200 feet in that 2 miles.

Our weather also makes bicycling an option for most of the year. The streets are free of ice and snow all but, let’s say, 15 days of the year. (Unofficial figure). So if you don’t mind the feel of a cold saddle on a warm behind on a chilly January morning, why, you can bike year-round.

But one can easily cycle 8 months of the year without being a weather hero. It has made being a one-car family much easier for Robin and I. Rain and snow? On average, Montrose gets some form of precipitation only 79 days a year. And it never rains all day … we are an arid spot on the planet surface.

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From The New Yorker, a smattering of past covers.

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While musing last week after listening to yet one more person ask the question “How can those people still follow Cluck?” it occurred to me that I might know the answer. Or more properly stated, where someone else wrote the answer down. Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman who wrote a book that described his view of how mass movements arose. (And Cluckism whether we want to accept it or not, is a mass movement.) The book was called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and was published in 1951. The book has become a classic in socio-politics. It’s a sobering read.

Here is a paragraph from the Wikipedia article about the book that I thought put things very well.

Hoffer states that mass movements begin with a widespread “desire for change” from discontented people who place their locus of control outside their power and who also have no confidence in existing culture or traditions. Feeling their lives are “irredeemably spoiled” and believing there is no hope for advancement or satisfaction as an individual, true believers seek “self-renunciation”. Thus, such people are ripe to participate in a movement that offers the option of subsuming their individual lives in a larger collective. Leaders are vital in the growth of a mass movement, as outlined below, but for the leader to find any success, the seeds of the mass movement must already exist in people’s hearts.

The True Believer, Wikipedia

Doesn’t that all sound familiar? Loss of control, lack of confidence in existing traditions, feeling that life has been “spoiled” somehow … isn’t that what’s at the heart of MAGA territory, along with bigotry, white nationalism, and various sorts of felonious behavior ? But note that last sentence: for the leader to find any success, the seeds of the mass movement must already exist in people’s hearts. These people were there before Cluck came along, and will still be there when and if the orange man takes up residence in Cluckcatraz.

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What is it about our brains that they are not content with befuddling us during the day, but must mess with us during sleep as well?

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At last, someone has truly nailed the ethics mess at the U.S. Supreme Court. And it’s a judge who does it, for god’s sake. In Sunday’s NYTimes, that stout fellow published a piece entitled:

A Federal Judge Asks: Does the Supreme Court Realize How Bad It Smells?

It makes awfully good reading, a little on the depressing side, but well worth the time put in. To find this immensely powerful group of people who have been so corrupted by the privilege they have been given that they can no longer see for themselves how rancid their behavior is. So far not all nine of them have been outed, but where is the outrage of those members who have not? We are way past the stage when you could ask the question with a straight face: Do I trust that I could obtain justice if I came before this court?

The operative word here is trust. That is the precious commodity that this court has squandered. It is not the fault of the citizenry that the reputation of the Supremes has suffered, they have brought this upon themselves. And it is not a good thing for anyone, this diminished trust. The Supreme Court has no army, no police force, no mechanism to compel us that we do not grant them.

I think we should start their return to reality by moving them to less palatial offices. Something like the space left behind by a defunct Anytime Fitness franchise.

Give them a tin desk, one four-drawer file cabinet, and ask them to provide their own robes. Let them know that the only ones who believe them to be princes of the realm are themselves.

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Warning to viewers. By the end of the video you may find that you have fallen in love with Brittany Howard. Even if you don’t like kick-ass electric blues at all. This is something special.

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One of the quaint things about the Santa Fe Opera is, believe it or not, the tailgating in the patron’s parking lot before the performances.

Yes, tailgating, although it is not beer, BBQ, and a large gang variety as it would be, say, at a Vikings game.

No, in these cases it is a couple who are wearing clothing that did not come off a rack anywhere, and who are sitting at a card table and chairs behind the open back door of their Land Rover Defender.

Out comes a linen tablecloth, candles, crystal glasses, and full table service. There are wines and delicacies, and an attitude of “Try to ignore those peasants passing by, dear, now would you please pass the champignons?”

It all did seem competitive and very show-offy, but we liked it as performance art. The only element missing was the servants, who presumably set everything up and then were told to vanish until it was time to clear it away.

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Relationship Tip

If you have a significant other who at times becomes enraptured with their own thinking and the sound of their own voice, you might consider a technique that Robin has found very effective.

Whenever I enter such an “emote” mode, she looks me in the eye, and when I pause to take an in-breath will say quietly in that tiny space of silence : Pedant! Pedant!.

Works every time.

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Sometimes in the rush of day to day activities, I forget to pause and hit the gratitude button. To say thank you to the people who have affected my life. I’m going to try to catch up a bit this morning.

I would like to offer thanks to the climate change deniers for their foot-dragging and/or outright obstructionism which has hindered efforts to make the progress needed to address the serious problems that now hit us in the face at every turn. They have made a magnificent contribution to the fact that each year we now set new records for high temperatures around the world.

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• Some of them are deliberately ignorant, and worked as hard as they could to stay that way
• Some of them were in too deep to those who profited by the suffering, like the fossil fuel industry
• Some of them are lunatics and thus might actually be forgiven for the pain they are causing
• Some of them are just plain dumb as a rock

Did I leave anybody out? Would hate to do that, because you do deserve recognition for your important part in this slow-motion disaster movie we are all in. You are the headliners.

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