Return to One Meat Ball

jono55

We are looking forward to watching the repopulation of the plants in the Black Canyon National Park. Readers will recall that last year there was a significant fire that torched much of the park, and has left us with fewer options on our visits. For instance, the campgrounds are closed, having suffered much damage to structures and campsites. The road down to the canyon floor at East Portal remains closed with no re-opening date set as yet. Concerns about rockslides and mudslides on this steep stretch of highway have kept visitors from having access to the Gunnison River.

But it is the plant life that I am interested in. The Gambel oaks and the serviceberries and the grasses and the lupines and the piñons … what are they going to do this coming Spring? Will they all come back? It’s a hard life for a plant up there, with rocky soil and scant water, even in good times. A story is about to unfold and I am ready to learn from it.

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One for My Baby, by Josh White

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The South Rim of the Black Canyon Nation Park has a single road of about seven miles in length that runs the length of the park. During the cold weather months the road is blocked off from the Visitor Center onward and becomes a cross-country ski trail. Each Spring there is a short period between when the narrow two-lane road is completely free of snow and when it is opened to automobile traffic. If you are lucky and can make it up there during that time, it is a wonderful and dramatic bicycle ride, completely un-bothered by cars. You have the road to yourselves.

You can ride your bikes the rest of the year, of course, but there is little in the way of a shoulder for much of the road, and there are few areas where cars can safely pass you, so they tend to pile up behind your bike and make you nervous. This makes for a lot of getting on and off the highway whenever possible just to let those frustrated drivers get on with their trip.

But that golden window is just about upon us when we have the trifecta of good weather, a dry road, and no cars. Can’t wait.

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Jelly, Jelly, by Josh White

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Robin and I have been using electric bicycles for the past four years, and really enjoy them. I don’t want to overplay the geezer card, but these machines really flatten the hills and enable us to take longer rides than we ordinarily would on non-motorized cycles. They only have two major drawbacks. One is that unless you are able to fork over more than about three grand for a luxo model you will be riding a heavier bike that weighs about 60 pounds or more. The second is that if you really want to cover a lot of ground on your ride you are limited to how far your particular bike will go on the battery’s charge. For the machines that Robin and I are using, the range is around 40 miles, depending on terrain.

The Optibike R22 Everest is presently  the e-bike with the longest range, boasting a 300-mile capacity (482 km) via a 3,260Wh dual-battery system. To acquire this technological marvel all you have to do is give the dealer something over $18,900.

I did give it just the briefest consideration but eventually decided against buying one, deciding that it was better for Robin and I to be able to eat.

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Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed, by Josh White

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Josh White has been a favorite of mine since I was sixteen and first heard him sing One For The Road while I was sitting in my car and gnawing on a bag lunch on the University of Minnesota farm campus. At the time I knew nothing about him and his life, just being entranced by the voice and the guitar. Turns out that he had a fascinating life and played several important roles along the way.

White was in many senses a trailblazer: popular country bluesman in the early 1930s, responsible for introducing a mass white audience to folk-blues in the 1940s, and the first black singer-guitarist to star in Hollywood films and on Broadway. On one hand he was famous for his civil rights songs, which made him a favorite of the Roosevelts, and on the other he was known for his sexy stage persona (a first for a black male artist).

He was the first black singer to give a White House command performance (1941), to perform in previously segregated hotels (1942), to get a million-selling record (“One Meatball”, 1944), and the first to make a solo concert tour of America (1945). He was also the first folk and blues artist to perform in a nightclub, the first to tour internationally, and (along with LeadBelly and Woody Guthrie) the first to be honored with a US postage stamp.

Wikipedia: Josh White

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One Meat Ball, by Josh White

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There is a struggle going on right now between humans trying to do their best and humans doing their worst. The good in us will triumph, I am certain of that, but there will be hardships enough along the way to satisfy the most masochistic. And when those standing for compassion and justice and tolerance once again take the reins those virtues will have their moment for as long as we are willing to fight for them. For as long as we can remember that they are maintained only by constant struggle.

I recall when I first read The Lord of the Rings that at the end there were still bad guys out there, and definite suggestions that they would come out of their hidey-holes one day down the road and mess things up once again. It was part of Tolkien’s genius to see that comfort could be the enemy of vigilance, which always gave evil renewed opportunities.

He didn’t give me the unmitigated hopeful ending that I wanted. It pissed me off. Never mind that this good/evil cycle had already been repeated during my own time on the planet, I wanted the happy ever after. Eventually … but grudgingly … I forgave him for telling me the truth.

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The Eyes Have It

jono55

Scientists have wondered for the longest time how we vertebrates got our complex eyes. And the short answer is … we still don’t know for sure. But they are working hard at tracing the path from a single patch of light-sensitive cells in a very primitive, cyclopean, and brainless organism to where we are today.

Not only are the above orbs more intriguing than those of a planaria (at right), but they have all sorts of differentiation of proteins so that some cells bend light rays, some absorb light, some transfer images, etc.

If you haven’t already read the article, here’s a link. So much to learn … .

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Here’s an image of a primitive and brainless cyclopean species. Believe it or not, this one was recently elected president of a large country.

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Thursday: Yesterday I watched cranes flying overhead, but this time they were moving northward. I keep looking for the changes in neighborhood birds that declare it to be Spring, but they have been slower in coming. Birds aren’t stupid. They know that weather has its ups and downs and snowstorms are bad news for hummingbirds and waxwings and other migrating species. Come back too soon and it can be curtains for you and yours.

BTW, one of the absolute signs of Spring that I used to rely upon is no longer trustworthy here in Paradise. When the snow has hung about for months and finally prolonged warmth melts it down to the level of the lawns and ditches and the ground is everywhere damp one is assailed by the aroma of thawing dog feces for about a week. But when the rains and snows don’t come and the winter is in effect a mini-drought, those reminders of the thoughtlessness of canine owners stay largely dry and odorless.

But I am snug and warm and looking forward to something on the balmy side this afternoon. Tonight a couple of inches of snow may fall, but by Saturday we’ll be back in the sixties once again.

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Silver Rider, by Low

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Robin and I are knee-deep in rewatching the series The Gilmore Girls, as I think I previously mentioned. The show first ran from 2000 to 2007. I must have slept through that first viewing because there is so much that I notice this time that is completely new to me.

What is new, you ask? Well, the absolute repulsiveness of the parents of the main character, Lorelei Gilmore. They are rich, vain, soulless, and perfectly shallow, gloating in their privilege and not pausing for a moment in their judgment of ‘lesser’ humans. By this time I have reached the point where I no longer want them to be relegated to being written out of further episodes. No, that’s not enough. I want them to be kidnapped by Barbary Pirates and slave-chained to the oars of galleys that operate in some sweltering part of the world.

What else, you ask? Well, there is Rory, the hyper-smart daughter of Lorelei. She’s been told so often that she is more intelligent than the rest of the world that she believes it and is desperate when she comes up against the occasional reality of failure. Also, from the first day of puberty onward she spends most of her waking and non-studying hours attaching herself to one male after another. Once she is attached, she begins to manipulate said male into her idea of what a young man should be, which is essentially a replica of herself. Doomed projects all.

The men who wander into the lives of the Gilmore Girls are mostly congenial people who can’t understand why just when everything seems to be going so well they find themselves standing alone under a street lamp in a cold rain. One day they were the lover or BFF of a smart and beautiful woman and the next it is whoa, baby, I’ll call you, okay?

It is not only the men in the series who are seduced by these talented women, it is the viewers as well. We watch the series for the witty dialogue, the sharp humor, and the truths about people and relationships that are revealed. It is a sitcom with scattered tragic episodes.

Kinda like life.

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Blue, by Lucinda Williams

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Oh Joy! Oh rapturous news! DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has been fired from a job she never knew how to do and sent to a new one that was invented just for her. The murderer of protestors and puppies has had ICE, the biggest and nastiest toy in the country, yanked from her hapless grasp and given to someone I never heard of from Oklahoma.

Since her new job has no duties or office as yet, perhaps Ms. Noem may return to her home state of South Dakota, or at least to the part of the state that will have her. The 12% that is occupied by Native American reservations has been closed to her for quite a while now. She is that popular.

Yes, folks, you heard that right. When she was governor of South Dakota she did such a lousy job for the Native Americans in that state that she was barred from entry into all of their reservations, which are sovereign, self-governing territories held in trust by the U.S. federal government.

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Barroom Girls, by Gillian Welch

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One last little thing. In today’s NYTimes, there was a small piece entitled The Badlands Hold Me As I Grieve. I thought it was one of the loveliest little essays I’ve read in a long time. Part of its attraction was that I lived in South Dakota for nearly 40 years and there were parts of its landscapes that absolutely matched something in me like nowhere else I’ve lived has. That windswept loneliness, for instance, and the Badlands. Especially the Badlands.

It won’t take long to read … you might give it a minute.

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Weather Comin’ In

jono55

The human beings of this planet are presently behaving at their most awful in so many places at once it is hard to keep one’s focus. I never aimed at having this be an anti-war, anti-fascist blog, and I try to put as much purely silly and inconsequential in each entry. But I am weak, and my anger is strong, and so it goes. I apologize for my inconstancy.

I also apologize for my country, which at present is governed by madmen and thieves. We have slipped at least six spaces back toward barbarism, and there are too many Americans who are cheering that slippage. Try as I might, I am unable to adopt the attitude expressed by Jesus while on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Part of my failure is, of course, that I am not Jesus. The other part is that I think that they do know what they do, and deserve a huge karmic slap upside the head.

And now …

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Shark Smile, by Big Thief

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Now this next one might come across as a bummer, but is it not meant that way at all. Think of it as rather a note of explanation. I am a man of eighty-six years, which means I am a potential target for a variety of problems. This week I found that one of those possibilities has taken a step forward when a very plain-spoken physician informed me that I have a cancer. It could have been a heart attack, or another stroke, but nope, it was something completely different. The extent of the problem and the treatment possibilities have yet to be determined, and are not the point of this posting.

I thought about it for a while before deciding to mention this development, because … well … I have no interest in writing a cancer journal. There are many who have done so, and have done it well. Their chronicles have given meaning and hope to a great many people. However, looking ahead I can see that there may be times that having this problem will color my attitudes and opinions in ways I can’t predict today, and I thought you readers deserved to be in on the game.

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Those of us in the resistance movements here in the good ol’ US of A are beginning to gear up for No Kings 3, which is coming on the 28th of this month. Our local Indivisible group is gathering its signboards and poster paint and costumes and is making plans to SHOW UP in as grand a style as we can muster. Do we think that a national event like this one will bring down the walls of tyranny and injustice and extremely bad taste? Of course not. So … what, exactly, are we doing?

Think of an event like this one as a county fair attended entirely by the appalled and the furious. In this bit of acting as one we give strength to one another, the sort that comes from knowing you are not alone. And we also give strength and encouragement to those who are not ready yet to stand in the street with their placard and say HELL NO to the powers that be. We want them to also see that they have millions of brothers and sisters who feel just as dismayed as they do.

It also doesn’t hurt that it seems to really piss off that clot at the top whenever we do one of these.

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Change, by Big Thief

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The crowd at the rec center is undergoing the sort of thinning that mild weather brings. Pickleballers take to the outoor courts, walkers return to the hills and paths around Montrose. The number of bicyclists on the streets has quadrupled. Motorcycles all over the place. New calves are showing up in the pastures surrounding the town. Dare I say Spring is here?

In the Midwest, where I came from, saying something like that was almost certain to bring on a killer April blizzard and send some poor souls to their eternal rest. So while thinking the words was impossible to prevent, saying them was taboo. The last one of those April calamities that I personally experienced was nearly forty years ago, in Yankton SD.

It arrived on a weekend and hit us out of bright blue skies and balmy weather. Suddenly drivers couldn’t see where they were going and were sent scuttling for home and hearth. The children were gathered in, stores were closed, streets were empty.

One gentleman pushed his luck a bit, and was the last one to leave a local bar to take the short walk to his car. He got into the vehicle, but didn’t start the engine. Perhaps all he wanted to do was rest a bit, maybe sleep off a whiskey or two. But when the wind and snow subsided the next day, he was still sitting there at the wheel, parked on that major thoroughfare, frozen to death.

The day after that I was scheduled to hold a pediatric clinic on the Santee Lakota Reservation, about an hour from Yankton. As I drove in on the narrow two-lane road, I noticed many men walking on top of the drifts along the highway, poking long bamboo poles down into the snow. When I reached the clinic I was told that there was a young couple who had been working in town, and when the bad weather came they decided to try to get home, out in the rural. That was yesterday. They never arrived.

We later received the news that the searchers’ bamboo poles hit something solid just about fifteen feet off the road I had come in on. Digging down they found the missing couple, still in their car. With the poor visibility that a blizzard affords, they had gone into a deep ditch, and there they perished, quietly waiting for the weather to clear up.

So I am not saying a durned word. It’s only March 4, and of course Spring is not here. Don’t even think about it.

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I’m reading a book on pictographs and petroglyphs written by the admirable Craig Childs. It is a captivating book, dealing primarily with the drawings left behind by natives on the Colorado Plateau more than a thousand years ago. As my interest grew, I looked around for a map and found this gem, which I now share with you. Tis a beauty. Robin and I have explored only the tiniest fraction of the riches within the 150,000 square miles that constitute the Plateau.

One of the really great things about the author is that he doesn’t tell you precisely where to find the drawings. He has no interest in sending legions of boobs out to vandalize these sites, which too often happens. If we want to bust our butts and go walking in the desert among the rattlesnakes and scorpions and across waterless cactus-scapes, we are welcome to search them out for ourselves.

(FYI: when asked once where he lived, Child gave not an address you could look up, but this statement instead: “between Telluride and Utah.”)

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Colors

jono55

Been thinking quite a bit about Robert Duvall, who passed away last week. How many of his films have been rafters holding up my personal cinematic roof. Of course there were the big deals like Apocalypse Now and Lonesome Dove, but so many others like The Apostle, Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, M*A*S*H, and Colors. All memorable.

I’ll take just one to talk about, and that is Colors, from 1988. You could say that it’s just another movie about cops and gangs in Los Angeles. But that would sell it so very short.

It’s a movie about people and relationships, with some of those people being policemen and some gang members. All are flesh and blood rather than caricatures. It’s been awhile since I first saw it, and … think I’ll go looking for it again. A good movie is always worth at least one revisit.

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Speaking of caricatures, the Cluckicans had their night with the State of the Union this week. I didn’t watch it, but then I never watch State of the Union addressses, even when I like the guy. Sounds like I saved a little part of my sanity by skipping the broadcast. Political theater is one of my least favorite entertainments. They are empty words for the most part, without usefulness or importance. A time for lies and fantasies.

My own one-word assessment of the State of the Union = fragile. Like Leonard Cohen said in that music video, Democracy is comin’ to the USA and the only question is how soon it will get here. There are many who are working very hard in making plans for when that happy day arrives, and we can be done with the vile man who is President and his lickspittle party. I believe that the resistance is succeeding, and my own problem now is impatience.

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All I Have To Do Is Dream, by the Everly Brothers

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Clattering branches
Their leafy cushions absent
Click like beetles’ wings

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Robin and I are watching the TV series The Closer, which is a cop procedural show that originally ran from 2005-2012. It tells the stories of a special detective squad within the Homicide Division in Los Angeles that handles “sensitive” cases. It’s pretty entertaining, actually, and LA always has stories to tell.

There is something unusual about the squad. It is almost perfectly diverse, with men, women, whites, blacks, an Asian, a Hispanic, a grumpy older cop, a toothpick-chewing younger cop, etc. But that’s it. There is no hint of intrasquad tensions or signs of racism, intolerance, or condescension as a result of this diversity. Mutual respect, professionalism, and intelligence are qualities each member embodies. It is therefore very pleasant to watch. To peek into a world where those differences are not drawbacks but strengths that further the work of the group.

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Robin and I have been in Steamboat Springs this weekend, catching up with Ally and Kyle, and with Ethan and Xian, who we haven’t seen in years. Good weather, good times. Steamboat is a total tourist town, but an attractive one. The only reason to buy anything here is if you really like being held up and robbed. So your mother’s admonition of “You can look but don’t touch” still holds as true as it ever did, here in Steamboat.

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Blister in the Sun, by the Violent Femmes

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I’m just going to toss in one little item at the very end about Cluck and his latest misadventures. He has now invaded another country, this time along with his co-criminal Netanyahu, and we have no idea what the consequences of this extremely rash act are going to be, nor is he.

There is something of course, missing in all of this, and that is the Congress of the United States. If anyone has any idea where this once august body could be, could you contact your representative and ask them if they wouldn’t please show up and do their freaking job.

We are in need of an impeachment and removal from office of a madman. Any time this week would be fine.

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Special Edition

jono55

This video came up on Substack today and it was such a spirit-lifter that I couldn’t wait to pass it on. Leonard Cohen recorded it in 1993, and it is called “Democracy.”

Wonderful! A perfect fit for today! Not only a summary of where we were but a blueprint for what needs to happen when Golden Baba and The Forty Thieves are finally brought to whatever justice we can extract from them. This is that different drummer that we could happily march to.

Put it on and crank it up, companyeros! Democracy is coming like a wave, like retribution, like a promise.

Lyrics to Democracy

It′s coming through a hole in the air,
From those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
That this ain′t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.


It′s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don′t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.


It′s coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

chorus

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

It′s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it′s here they got the spiritual thirst
It’s here the family’s broken
And it′s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It′s coming from the women and the men
O baby, we’ll be making love again
We′ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep
And the mountain′s going to shout Amen!
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

chorus

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

verse

I′m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I′m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I′m stubborn as those garbage bags
That Time cannot decay
I’m junk but I′m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

A Sneak of Weasels

jono55

Brothers and Sisters, let’s have a moment together in a place where music and words of the Spirit and art and technology come together. Brought to you by those whose ancestors were very definitely here first.

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My journey into the history of the Native American peoples began with this book. It was in the library of the father of a high school friend of mine, and it was my first exposure to the knowledge of the cruelty and treachery involved in the early dealings with Europeans.

It was to be the first time, but far from the last, that I felt shame for crimes in which I had no direct part.

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Well, I won’t be watching Cluck’s State of the Union Tuesday night. Why not? Let us count the ways. To watch a pedophilic dotard malignant narcissist rapist idiot read from the teleprompter to a fawning audience of weak-minded sleazeballs … I know that this sounds too attractive to pass up, but I just don’t have two hours that I am willing to completely toss away.

Instead I will watch the People’s State of the Union, which sounds like a lot more fun. It’s being put on by the Meidas Touch Network and Move On.

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I have my own candidates for a new term I’ve discovered, but if you ever have need of it, be my guest.

One of the names for a group of weasels is a sneak. How perfect! Any ideas where the phrase a sneak of weasels might come in handy?

I have several.

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Johns Hopkins is doing a great deal of research in psychedelics, and part of that studying is keeping tabs on people while they are taking full transformative doses. It seems to be important that a nice quiet place without disturbing activity is necessary for a trip to go smoothly. To this end, they have developed the “Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Playlist.” It is nearly all classical pieces, and the tunes are grouped like this:

  • Opening/Settling
  • Deepening/Emotional Peak
  • Resolution/Integration

It’s all slow-moving, a little mournful at times, but listening to it does induce a pleasant ‘I believe I’ll just become part of this chair’ sort of feeling. One suspects that the researchers might have taken such care in the selection of the music for their own benefit, for use on their personal psychopharmacologic journeys. This playlist is just under five hours long, so you know that somebody did a bit of work.

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I have an upside-down schedule as far as sleep is concerned, primarily because our old friend Poco keeps really odd hours, and can summon a caterwaul capable of waking the dead if he chooses. Last night, for instance, he was walking around just doing his normal vocalizations and although it woke me up I had hopes of not having to leave the bed. Suddenly he went full throat and there was no avoiding getting up and finding out what was needed to make him happy. Or, if not happy, at least quiet.

But once I am up I have the privilege of watching the night stories being told outside my home. Sometimes it is the red fox padding up the street. Sometimes it is a young neighbor getting home at a scandalous hour. Sometimes it is a surprise wind strong enough to move the big trash containers out on the street waiting for the morning pickup.

Sometimes, although very rarely this winter, it is a snowfall with those big flakes drifting through the beam of the yard light out back. Much of what you find in this blog is written at those hours. I love the night, at least when safe in the house. There are enough mountain lions out here in Colorado to make one cautious, and if you check out the menu at Cafe Puma you will find that humans are on it.

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We started out today with a work by Indigenous people, we’ll close with one as well. I have never seen anything quite like the performance of this woman, Snow Raven. I found it boundary-moving for me, to realize that there is so much more that is possible than I knew.

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You Can Have First Shower Today, Dear, I’ll Be On The Street …

jono55

Just study this photo for a moment. Everything you need to know about why the fascists are going to be eliminated is right there in the frame. In frigid Minneapolis a young woman comes out of her house in bathrobe and slippers with her phone in hand to film the goons of ICE. Now look at the number of other people who are also filming this scene.

ICE is an army composed of the sort of humans you find when you turn over rocks, led by cruel people whose grasp on power is slipping away daily. This casually dressed woman knows that she is only one of many but, by God, if her pictures can be of any help she is out there shivering and taking them.

A message for the criminals of ICE and their handlers. Once America regains its sanity, we will find you. We are writing everything down.

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I had another letter to the editor published Wednesday. Not anything earthshaking, just enough to annoy some of the hard-right citizens of Montrose County, which is my principal goal. I’m getting better at the process, and more of these letters are getting through. If the paper doesn’t like one, you never hear back from them, it simply vanishes and is never seen again.

So … I have found a few things that are important if you seek success in having your letters printed. Here’s my personal list.

  • Never drop an f-bomb in your opening sentence
  • Keep the word count well under 9000
  • Do not suggest assassinations as a way of improving society
  • Avoid topics that are ultra-passé. For instance, forget the Barry Manilow stories …
  • Cannibalism, diarrhea, and large pustules have limited audience appeal

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White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane

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(Ahhhhhh, that one about the psychiatrist’s couch. Coarse language, I know, but I cannot stop laughing at it.)

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A dusting of snow has fallen over the past 24 hours. Not enough to require anything of me. I can safely ignore it without having to worry about the elderly slipping and falling on my part of the sidewalk. Friday evening was the first fish fry of the year at the local Catholic Church. Each year, during Lent, the church serves up a dinner for $15.00 per person that includes either deep fried or baked fish, fries, coleslaw, Mac n’ cheese, and a delightful selection of desserts made by ladies of the congregation. It is dispensed from a buffet line in a large, barn-like room.

The quality of what is offered varies from year to year, so the first one is the tell. Here’s my breakdown on the offerings.

  • Cole slaw was excellent, with good flavors, bright colors, and someone actually paid attention to proper seasonings
  • French fries: made sometime this week, limp, gaunt, pale in color
  • Mac n’ cheese: baked in a very large pan to the point where the pieces of pasta were beginning to lose their boundaries and were turning into one great twenty pound pasta rectangle
  • Fish: it would seem that the person responsible for the deep fried variety must also operate the local crematorium. My pieces were fried until whatever fish there was had shriveled to a nubbin inside the armor of the breading. The breading was also not penetrable with a fork, but required attack with a knife as well. Some pieces had to be picked up in one’s hands and eaten like fish-on-the-cob.
  • Desserts: superb examples of the best of church basement food

So, the verdict overall for this year is: not bad, better than average. We went with friends and will no doubt attend at least one more session before Easter rolls around to end all the fun. Sometimes it’s about the company, and not the food at all.

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Robin and I will sometimes fill the odd moment playing games on our phones. Each game comes with a free version and a paid version. Take the free one and you get commercials, just like on television. The ads come in waves, and the wave this week is making the assumption that I am a large-breasted woman over 60 years of age. I am offered brand after brand that will make my life a joy, and in each ad there is at least one lady who jumps up and down wearing the bra being offered to show me how little ‘jiggling’ there is with this undergarment.

As a male senior citizen I find all of this interesting, and while at present I have no need for such masterpieces of support, I now know that if things go south and I do need one, I will absolutely go for the model that snaps in front. It just makes such sense.

The last time I really thought about brassieres I was an adolescent, and my concerns at that time were to develop the dexterity needed for the one-handed-behind-the-back-unsnapping from the en face position. The secret, I learned way back in those uncertain years, was practice.

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Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, by Kris Kristofferson

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Lastly. I think that I mentioned once or twice before that I have learned how to grow mushrooms in my home. The sort that contain psilocybin. The reason? To see if some thorny chronic pain issues could be improved upon, as has been reported in the literature. I am microdosing with the dried mushrooms, and the jury is still out on whether there is improvement. It can take a while.

But I have about a pound of powdered magic mushrooms in my freezer, which is enough for at least a hundred full-blown trips, according to my informants. In Colorado it it legal to grow them, use them however you want, and to dole them out to family or friends. What one cannot do is sell them. Colorado is one of those few states with a relaxed attitude toward psychedelics, but they are very serious about money exchanging hands.

It has occurred to me that I might be able to use my supply to brew up a batch of cream of mushroom soup that would be legendary and be talked about in Lutheran Church basement kitchens forever. Imagine, if you will, one hundred Scandinavian-Americans who have slipped the surly bonds of earth, put out their hands, and touched the face of God … all at one time.**

Of course I wouldn’t do such a thing. Perish the thought. But it would be something to see …

** (Lines borrowed from the poem High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee Jr.)

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Pearl Jamming

jono55

I have a cold. A common cold. Once I realized that my dripping nose and sneezing wasn’t going to heal itself overnight like a mild bout of allergies would, I switched immediately into full whine.

When it comes to personal illnesses my psychological reaction meter only has two numbers on it, one and ten. Robin knows this, and was desperately trying to set up a weekend away with friends when I caught her at it and called in my markers. If I was going to have a fatal upper respiratory infection, by God, she was going to sit with me as I perished. I asked her to recall her wedding vows, especially the “in sickness and in health”part. She feigned forgetfulness.

Maybe this isn’t the BIG ONE, but just another minor URI which will run its course in a few days. Maybe. But why, I ask myself, should I take that chance when I can unfurl the big Pity Me flag that I keep in my clothes closet and get all that lovely attention?

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Quite a performance by Pam Bondi at the recent congressional hearing. In several hours she failed to answer a single question, but instead behaved much like a cat caught in a gopher trap. Snarling and spitting and hurling invectives at all within earshot … I made a promise to myself to stay out of courtrooms altogether until she is safely in Hell.

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This is just the best. Old George Will, who I used to think was just a stuffy old conservative writer (and that was sixty years ago) has come up with this video statement that I agree with completely. One of the best summaries of where we are and what is needed to finish the job. The job? Ridding our country of the fascists and then going coffin by coffin and driving a stake through the heart of racism everywhere we can find it. It is still, 250 years later on, the American cancer, and we will be the healthier for its extirpation, however painful that surgery might be.

But don’t take my word for it, pull up a chair and listen to George himself.

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Update on the “cold” I mentioned above … when the illness reached full flower it became croup, with the barking cough, hoarse voice, mild stridor and all. Robin asked if I should go to the doctor and I had to remind her that I used to be a doctor, and if there is any illness that pediatricians know something about it is croup. So I treated myself, ignoring the old adage that “a doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” Because the treatment is to accept the will of the universe and wait until it goes away. And so it shall.

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I was going through some poems I had written decades ago. Basically I only write them when some strong emotion has hold of me, so there are great gaps in the folder marked “Poems,” marking years when life was easy, comfortable. But I ran across this one that thought I’d share with you. Perhaps a bit of background would be in order.

My son Jon had just graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and was coming to Yankton SD for a visit before going off to Greece to teach English. En route he lost control of the motorcycle he was riding and drove into a ditch about twenty miles from where I was sitting up late, waiting for him to arrive. In that accident he was paralyzed from just above the waist.

There followed a very difficult year for him as he tried to accommodate to his new limitations, and in addition had to deal with so many of the medical complications of his paralysis. He became depressed and sought psychiatric help, but on the eve of his 24th birthday ended his own life.

The night before his funeral, I sat down and wrote this, which I read the next day at the service.

When an old man dies
The river enters the sea
The sun sets
The leaves drop from the tree in Autumn
It is an ending
Comforting us even as we weep together
with a sense of rightness and of flow

When a young man dies
The bird falls from the nest
The thunder and the lightning roam the earth
Shadows pass across the sun
It is an interruption
And we are jarred by the reminder
Of how fragile is a future that we take for granted
And that this day
Is the only one we really have

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How long does it take to ‘get over’ something like this? I can only speak from my own experience. Never. You learn some way to live with it, and then you go on. I will be forever indebted to Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder for this song, which was a perfect match for the emotions I was working with back then, and is a perfect match today for my memories.

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Vale, Robert Duvall. So many roles to think about during that long career, from Boo Radley onward. But my favorite will always be than of Augustus McCrae, in Lonesome Dove. I had loved the book, and was dreading the butchery I expected when I learned than a miniseries was on its way. But Duvall inhabited that role, and helped make television history in the process.

Viva Los Lobos

jono55

Poco is not as happy these days as he once was. He’s nearly 20 years old, has arthritis, cataracts, and some variety of kitty neurologic decline. He is very slender and less steady on his feet. At times he seems to take fright from things I can’t see.

But he sleeps well, still goes outdoors when the weather is clement, takes care of his litter box needs without requiring any help from Robin and I, and l.o.v.e.s to be brushed. His appetite suits his activity level, and he is not fussy about what we serve up.

It is not hard to imagine that his fragile situation could change fairly quickly. An injury, a stroke, a serious illness … any of these could put the thumb on the scale for an old guy like him, and I have wondered … when does the subject of euthanasia become part of the conversation?

If you search the internet for help with these sorts of questions, you aren’t much smarter at the end of your queries that when you started. And don’t even bother to ask “Is there some way I could help my old friend along if I ever decide that it is the kind thing to do?” Because you will only be apprised of the dogma that you should let your veterinarian decide such matters and manage whatever medications and treatments are needed.

I bristle at this a bit. If I were to follow that advice here in Paradise I would have to bundle Poco into a carrier (which frightens him), load the box into the car and drive for ten minutes to the vet (which terrifies him even more), and then hand him over to relative strangers ( very alarming) for an IV line to be placed. Then a barbiturate would be pushed in and that’s all she wrote.

All of this unpleasantness reeks as far as I am concerned. If the need arises, and I hope that it does not, why should a pet’s last hour be so distressing? Surely there are less traumatic ways to take one’s leave.

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Mas Y Mas, by Los Lobos

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I am letting the political cartoons tell most of the story for a while. Our present government is a monstrosity, contaminating everything it touches, and I’ll get back to railing at it again one day. But some of these drawings, my my my, don’t they go straight to the heart of things?

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One of my favorite posters of the anti-Viet Nam War years was this one. I thought it struck just the right balance – the heart and the head at the same time. For me, much more effective than any tirade. I was able to identify without too much trouble that the original was created by a woman named Lorraine Schneider.

Two by two inches — that was the space allotted to artist Lorraine Schneider when making work for a miniature art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. In that small space, the artist, printmaker and peace and civil rights activist found a message that filled whole worlds.

That artwork, titled “Primer,” features the sentence “war is not healthy for children and other living things” in childlike script, juxtaposed with a black and white sunflower. It was made in response to the Vietnam War, but like other great works of art, has found a life well beyond that moment in history …

Kveller: Lorraine Schneider

Substitute “ICE” for “war” and you have something perfectly applicable to today’s news headlines. In fact, I have done just that for, what else, a button.

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On a wander along the Uncompahgre River last week I was reminded of how little fishing I’ve done over the past year, and how easy it would be to get out there and annoy some fish to no end. I don’t catch very many, but it must be very distracting to the fish to have me bouncing artificial lures of various sizes and colors off their heads. The heads of perfectly serene trout who want nothing more than to eat an occasional insect drifting by and who clearly know the difference between a real bug and a fake one.

But I love the rituals, the casting into tree branches and onto power lines, the regular insertion of sharp hooks into soft fingers while attempting to tie on a new fly. My angling experience has advanced to a whole new level since there is now a tiny hole in my waders, and I am too cheap to buy a new pair. An hour in the stream produces one cup of ice water in that right boot, and from then on it is a race between how much of a cold wet foot I will tolerate and how many fish I am catching. Usually the discomfort wins out.

No matter. Most waders will eventually leak, whether they are the bargain basement variety or a primo set made by Simms or Patagonia. Sun and storage and time are enemies of whatever is used to keep the water out. Part of the game.

BTW, I’m still using the Tenkara style of fishing, rather than a traditional rod and reel combination, and I enjoy it very much. The rod breaks down to fit into a 20 inch case, and with that and a line or two and a handful of flies you are good to go. The whole rig is so easy to throw into a car or a backpack as it is small and almost weightless.

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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Valentine’s Day came arrived and departed. We actually have a pair of chocolatiers here in Paradise, whose services are heavily utilized on this holiday every year. These artistes love their work and will fill your ears with information about every single piece you buy. I made my purchase on Friday and hid the box in a safe place overnight in the garage.

These are not the sort of concoctions you jam into a pocket and munch without thinking as you walk along. They are tenderly taken from the box one at a time and slowly savored. It is not only women who are vulnerable to the mysteries and charms of the cacao bean.

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We have a new restaurant in town, named La Michoacána. It is an ice cream shop, with a few twists Robin and I sampled the ice creams last Friday, and they were very good. While we were eating out treats, we notice a couple of things. One of the menu items was nachos, and here’s how that goes. You take a bag of Doritos or Tostitos, slice open along one side, top to bottom and then pour the queso and extras right into the bag. Then you take your prize and a fork and sit down to stuff yourself.

The other interesting thing was that all of the posted menus were in Spanish. Totally. No English whatsoever. It was Bad Bunny deja vu. We loved it! Takes some cojones to do that in a red town in a red county where ICE might have more supporters than they did in Minneapolis. But for me, one sweet day I’m heading back for one of those nacho bags, and I will report to you all about it complete with any medical complications that might develop. With photos.

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Stand In The Fire

jono55

Yesterday … a February picnic! Amy and Neil had been here for a lovely overnight visit, and we decided on Sunday morning that we’d all drive south to Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park, have a walk and some sandwiches, and then they would continue on back to Durango while we returned to Paradise. Since the temperature was brushing sixty degrees and the sun was everywhere, it turned out to be a very good plan.

A handful of magpies hung around our table waiting for handouts, which we eventually provided. They are strikingly beautiful birds, and they’ve been shown to be scary smart as well.

The common magpie is one of the most intelligent birds—and one of the most intelligent animals to exist. Their brain-to-body-mass ratio is outmatched only by that of humans and equals that of  aquatic mammals and great apes. Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams. When one of their own kind dies, a grouping will form around the body for a “funeral” of squawks and cries. To portion food to their young, magpies will use self-made utensils to cut meals into proper sizes.

Magpies are also capable of passing a cognitive experiment called the “mirror test,” which proves an organism’s ability to recognize itself in a reflection. To perform this test, a colored dot is placed on animals, or humans, in a place that they will be able to see only by looking into a mirror. Subjects pass if they can look at their reflection and recognize that the mark is on themselves and not another, often by attempting to reach and remove it. Passing the mirror test is a feat of intelligence that only four other animal species can accomplish.

Britannica.com

After a bit the birds tired of being offered a few meager breadcrusts, and moved on to more promising-looking visitors in the park. There are people who dislike these creatures because they will raid nests of other birds. But really, if we are going to judge what other animals do to survive, how many species carry more baggage than our own?

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What was the worst time in my life? What was the best time?

There is a lot of competition for the best time, and I can’t honestly come up with just one. I’ve been a pretty lucky guy. Truly spoiled by the abundance of unearned gifts that have come my way.

But there is one clear worst time. That’s an easy one. And that was the whole process of becoming divorced from my first wife. A good measure of why it was so bad is that I was so completely unprepared for a failure of that magnitude. When I was married that first time I was … how to say it … unformed. My confidence in myself, in my decisions, in my various roles were all paper thin. And to be set aside in that way pretty much broke everything. I was dissassembled, and for the longest time did not know the way back to being whole again.

My nights and days were turbulent, regular sleep hours ignored. Drinking myself to sleep but then waking up at three AM in a hyper-alert state. I read, I listened to music, I wrote poem after poem after poem. The writing turned out to be an important way to ground myself, and yet there were mornings when I read what I had written the night before and I didn’t recognize the author.

Eventually the pieces were put back together, but not in the same way they had been before. Some of the old scraps were left on the floor and swept out with the trash, and the result was someone leaner, less encumbered and more resilient. I was still a basket case in many ways, but I at least now I knew what kind of basket I was, and that was an improvement.

Why this confessional? Perhaps there will be someone out there who is going through a similar trial, and who will read it on a day when they were feeling their lowest, maybe at the point where they are looking up gunshops and bridge abutments. They will go through this mess of literary pottage and say to themselves “Well, I’m not that loony! Perhaps there is hope after all.“

***

I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, by Beth Orton and the Chemical Brothers

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(I will share one poem from those troubled years, one written in 1989 that came from a time when I knew that I would survive and could see that there were good things I had learned while coming through the fire. I ask your indulgence of the primitive poesic skills.)

Hides

I have been tanned
I am an animal skinned out
Hanging on a cabin wall
Still recognizable
But tougher now
I’ll wear much
Longer as I am
Than what I was

I am a leaf on the breeze
Lighter than the air itself
Rising on a thermal
Settling
Sailing
Fluttering from the tallest tree of all
Towards the ground all miles and miles below

I am baking bread, rising
Pushing against the confines of the pan
Promises still unfulfilled
A bit more heat and I’ll be done
Then you can take a bite
My friends

I am an empty suitcase open, waiting
Put inside the clothes we need
And we will take that trip
The one that only now
Is possible

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Stand In The Fire, by Warren Zevon

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Lost And Found In The Woods

jono55

I have come to the conclusion that Robert Reich is not human. That he must be an AI creation to be capable of writing more than one column per day, every day, all of which are interesting and appropriate to our perilous times. No human being I’ve ever known could do that. I believe that he is some sort of an ambulatory software consortium on two legs.

One of yesterday’s columns really hit the mark. This week the focus in Washington DC has been about what to do with ICE. They should wear body cameras, they should obey the Constitution and its application to law enforcement, they shouldn’t shoot people for jaywalking. You know, basic stuff. But this Reichian column discussed the novel idea that they should also obey all court orders. You know, like everyone else.

Under the prominent puppycidalist Kristi Noem, ICE has ignored such orders almost at will. Orders, shmorders, they say. Those apply to lesser beings. Nothing should be allowed to get in the way of our door and window-breaking, pepper- spraying, and gun-brandishing wherever and whenever we want.

But Reich says NO, THIS IS NOT OKAY. He points out that ICE and its leadership have shown themselves to be little more than a band of bloody vigilantes, a modern version of the notorious slave-catchers of pre-Civil War days. (Or a Gestapo, or a bunch of Nazi-style brownshirts … many descriptors have been applied to them, all of them unsavory and all of them having merit)

He makes this statement: Failure to obey any court order will immediately terminate all funding for ICE or the Border Patrol. Startling in its simplicity. Easy to understand. Fair to all. A good start. But it is something that probably won’t happen as long as the present dismal crop of Cluck-based toadies are in charge. That party does not exemplify clarity in its judgements or respect for our Constitution. Whatever the opposite of intelligence is, they have it in ample supply.

But that Reich … he’s a caution, ain’t he?

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What Are Their Names, by David Crosby

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Young goose remembers
Ancient paths whose endings
It has never seen

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I lost a good friend this past week, a cousin who was a very important part of the first half of my life. We lost touch after that, for complicated reasons that were not of his making. He was honest, funny, goofy, and courageous. An unfailingly good man, and can there ever be too many of those? He died of a cancer, which is rarely a pleasant way to leave this world. But when you get on in years and spend a bit of time thinking about the end of life, you realize that there aren’t that many comfortable ways to take that leave.

Shortly after Robin and I moved to Paradise, there was an item in the local newspaper about the disappearance of an elderly woman. One late autumn evening she got into her car and drove off from a friend’s house and then she was gone. There were concerns that she might have lost her way because she had been experiencing some neurological problems. When no trace of her could be found, her name eventually disappeared from the headlines as well.

Until the next Spring, that is, when her car was found by hunters up on the Uncompahgre Plateau, back in a wild area accessible only by a primitive dirt road. Searchers fanned out and found her body sitting on the ground and leaning up against a tree, where she had died alone, probably of hypothermia. It was concluded by investigators that this had been her choice, and was not due to some accident or foul play.

I was reminded as I read this last chapter of her story of a piece of writing that I have started and stopped many times over several decades. In this story an old man did much the same thing as this woman had done. The difference was that he had climbed into a canoe and paddled out into the Boundary Waters Wilderness, where he counted on the coming winter to help himself to end things quietly and without struggles in a beautiful place that held meaning for him.

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OMG! I have such a new hero. Her name is Elissa Slotkin and I would follow her anywhere. She was one of the six people who were in that famed video a few weeks back. The one where we were reminded that members of the military have an obligation to not follow illegal orders. The one where the entire DOJ the FBI and that executive … what’s his name … Flump? … Clump? … I forget … where all of these people got their knickers in a serious twist simultaneously. A mass knicker-twisting that would surely earn them a Guinness Book of Records prize if they bothered to apply for it.

And they are all still chewing on that bone. But my hero Elissa, an actual person in government who reads and writes, has pored over the Constitution and seems to like it a lot. Here she is responding to a request for an interview. See if she doesn’t win you over as well. I’m sending her a valentine for sure.

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There may be some who never saw the original video, and here it is. BTW, I am sending ALL these people a valentine!

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I read this morning that Cluck has promised to release a large chunk of funds to New York if they will name another couple of places after him. Hasn’t anyone told him that as soon as his feet hit Pennsylvania Avenue on the way out of the White House we’re going to change everything back to what it was? My further suggestions, which I admit haven’t been asked for, is that his name be redacted from as many places and documents as possible and that his official portrait be used as floor covering for a chicken coop in Minnesota.

The name Cluck will take its place right up there with others of infamy. Like Vidkun Quisling the Norwegian traitor, who sold out his countrymen to the Nazis. Or Attila the Hun, famous for slaughtering without mercy. Or Vlad the Impaler, who was the inspiration for all of the vampire foofaraw. I have learned from confidential sources that son Eric is quietly going about changing his last name to be ready the moment this regime falls. My sources say that the new name that he has chosen is Merde. He doesn’t know what it means, but knows that it is French and he very much likes the way it sits on the tongue.

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Let’s finish on a high note, okay? Here is Lucinda Williams providing her answer to the neanderthals of Project 2025 who would move women back to the class of chattels. Lovely song from her latest album. We might well memorize the words.

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Past Fast Draws

jono55

The 30-day Paradise weather forecast is for mild temperatures through to March. No one is guessing as to snowfall. Robin and I took a long walk Sunday in 48 degree sunshine. Winter has been no trial at all, although we did have to cancel a weekend getaway at the end of January due to harsh conditions at Monarch Pass. We had wanted to spend time in Buena Vista and Salida, but at the pass were cold temperatures, blowing snow, and twenty miles of the roadway described as snow-covered and icy.

Now for an acrophobe like myself, tell me that there are icy roads for 10 miles before and 10 miles after a pass above 9000 feet and you have talked me right back onto the sofa, from which I cannot be budged without my making an awful scene. If there were lives to be saved by my attempting that drive perhaps I would have taken the chance. But when fun was the only goal, fageddaboudit.

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If I Had A Heart, by Fever Ray

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We have received the official notice that there will be the third national No Kings Day on March 28. So we have two months to plan what our Indivisible chapter is going to do. So much is going on nationally right now, that who knows what will be the burning issues two months hence. Our focus is, as always, getting the tyrant government out of power and replacing it with the regular batch of crooks, posers, and tosspots that we are more comfortable with.

I was dismayed to read today that gun purchases and firearm safety classes have become hot items for liberals to sign up for. In some locations one has to take a number to get a class and a permit. On the one hand, it is easy to understand how the murderous excesses of ICE can make people fearful, make us look around for some way to try to cut the risks of daily life when these rats come to your town by the thousands. On the other hand, yet one more armed segment of the population … . I don’t trust a liberal’s aim or judgment when it comes to handguns any more than I do one of the MAGA morons. Taking friendly fire on Main Street?

I doubt that my buying a pistol would accomplish much for me. ICE has armor, sophisticated weaponry, gases of several sorts, and specialized communication devices. They may be an army of thugs, but they are an army. I think my best defense is to look as pathetic as I possibly can, and to practice loud whimpering as my weapon of choice. If I can assume the posture of someone not worth shooting at and get these barbarians to believe it … then I’ve achieved my tactical goal.

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I did own a handgun once in my life. In the late 1950s television broadcasting was full of western series with names like Gunsmoke, Wanted Dead or Alive, Paladin, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Lawman, and on and on. Impressionable young men everywhere were taking up the art of the fast draw, and there were competitions around the country, often associated with saloons and bars.

Being nothing if not an impressionable young man I bought a Colt .22 caliber pistol and a fast draw holster. I would take it to the country and shoot any tin can that moved or threatened me in any way. Then I would come home feeling like a reincarnation of Wyatt Earp and lovingly clean the weapon. Ahhhhhh, the smell of gun oil. More manly than Old Spice aftershave.

One day I was lying in my upstairs bedroom, caught up in my role as a bored and irritable adolescent. The clothes closet door was ajar, and I could see one of the sturdy ceiling beams that supported the house. The longer I stared at it the more it seemed to me that I should shoot it, and so I took that Colt Frontier Scout and plugged the beam dead center.

It turned out that even a small pistol makes quite a bit of noise when discharged indoors, and that thunderclap caught my mother’s attention. There were several discussions about the propriety of shooting at the house from inside (or outside, for that matter). Shooting the house was therefore strictly forbidden from then on, on pain of permanent confiscation of the offending weapon. There were also other conversations about the soundness of my mind, my moral character, and my overall judgment. Many of these tete-a-tetes began with the words: “What in the world.”

But what finally led to my pride and joy being taken away for good was entirely the fault of my younger brother. One afternoon he asked to borrow the gun to go the a local dump and shoot at bottles, and I let him take it. While he was at the landfill accompanied by a cousin of ours, he decided that just shooting bottles was not good enough. He was going to challenge a bottle to a gunfight.

The victim was selected, the paces counted off, and in a flash he drew the pistol. Well, actually, he didn’t … not quite. He only got the gun halfway out of the holster before he pulled the trigger, shooting himself in the leg in the process. The wound was fairly superficial, but was going to need some stitching, so our cousin drove said brother to the nearest hospital emergency room. In Minnesota all gunshot wounds must be reported to the police, no matter how trivial or how stupid the story. This meant a call to the police > who then called our mother > who then confiscated the pistol > and I never saw it again.

Of course I was indignant about the punishment since as far as I was concerned I was a complete innocent. But my parents were now beyond the range of entreaties, and simply didn’t want to hear about that particular item ever again. I can’t tell you what they did with it, they went completely silent whenever the subject came up and took this secret to the grave with them.

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If There’s A God, by Ry Cooder

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So far there has been only one seed catalog in our mailbox this year. This does not bother me at all. Since we moved to Colorado our gardening has been less rewarding than I had hoped. My limited skillset goes like this:

  • dig small trench in ground
  • sprinkles seeds in trench
  • cover seeds with dirt
  • water liberally
  • stand back and be ready at all times to reap bountiful harvests

Any variations from this untroubled scenario are met with ignorance and chagrin. For instance, when one lives in a semi-arid environment, watering properly is a real art. Too little and the plant dies. Too much and the plant dies. Then if you happen to get the watering just right, the plants are now food for an alarming variety of insects big and little. The little ones are the worst, because in many instances once you see their effects the game is already over, and the plant dies.

For the unskilled individual like myself, gardening is a series of disappointments that lasts for months. That kale that looks so good and costs $1.99 a bunch in the market will cost me $3.99 to grow in my own garden. That is, if I get any at all.

We have friends that live only a couple of blocks from us. They have a lush garden each year that could easily feed several families. I try not to visit them during the growing season because if I do I must take the mandatory tour of their many raised beds and somehow come up with compliments while herbicidal (and sometimes homicidal) thoughts are competing for my attention. They are nice people with gardening skills while I am a ill-tempered person with a black thumb. The contrast can be almost too great to bear.

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Romance In Durango, by Bob Dylan

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In the Land of Zoom

jono55

Robin and I attended a Zoom conference this week on taking risks and staying safe. These might seem contradictory goals, but … not really. When authoritarianism descends on a society, there are two basic choices. One is to accept the darkness, and the other is to promote light wherever one can. There is no 100% safety in either choice.

If a person chooses the latter path, they will stand out like candles burning in a darkened church. This would be taking risks, but doing nothing brings its own set of penalties. One of the speakers tossed out a phrase that stuck with me, and still is echoing around my brainpan three days later. The phrase? Joy is coming. That’s it. So simple.

But it helps me focus on the why of resistance. It’s not hard to get disoriented when the insults and assaults come at you as rapidly as they have this past year. Like dried morsels of cowflop fired from a Gatling gun. It’s also easy to become disheartened, until you hear someone start talking about joy. About finding some of that precious substance in every day. Small bites. The hand of a friend or a song that cuts right through the noxious fog emanating from Washington DC. “Joy is coming” resonates because those in the resistance believe that we will eventually succeed, and what a day that will be!

The only questions are when that will happen and how many more tragedies like the murders of Renee Flood and Alex Pretti will take place before it does. The deaths of these two people are drawing much attention because of the their brazenness and the so-easily disproven lies of the administration. But last year there were 32 deaths of men and women held in custody by ICE. Thirty-two! If these ICE goons act so brutally when out in the open, one wonders what horrors are happening inside their walled-off detention centers.

However … joy is coming. Do not wonder if it is. Do not forget what needs doing.

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I recently learned that there is a frontline warrior in our own family. I have a granddaughter who lives in south Minneapolis. Yesterday her mom emailed me this update on that young woman’s daily reality:

“I thought you all would like to know that ***** (and *****) are on the front lines of the Mpls protests. They are trained in safety/medical and carry rapid response gear. ***** has witnessed two abductions and a car ramming by ICE. They have organized grocery delivery for 8 families. They set up a Go Fund Me for their neighbors too afraid to work. At her job, ***** works directly with low/no income brown and black staff and interns under deep stress. She is struggling with keeping a hopeful and helpful attitude. But doing ok. There are more heroes than demons in Minneapolis!”

Warms my heart and gives me so much hope. I am sending every good wish, every scrap of metta that I possess to her and all those who are doing such good work for the rest of the country out there in Minneapolis.

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Ahhhhh, once again, Bruce Springsteen takes his art to the streets, this time those of Minneapolis. His heart has always been with the people, rather than the princes of the world.

And one more thing, my friends. On Friday Bruce went to Minneapolis and played this song on the stage of the First Avenue, a landmark bar and music venue. The First Avenue was where Prince played whenever … .

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A story. I was living and working in Hancock MI, which was at that time a town of 4600 souls located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. One evening a woman delivered a healthy baby boy in the local hospitl, but I was called immediately because the child and mother had a problem with Rh factor incompatibility in their red blood cells, and the child was affected. I won’t go into detail on the mechanics of this disease but what happens is that the child can become severely jaundiced, to the point where its brain can be permanently damaged if the jaundice level gets too high. Lab tests done on the infant shortly after birth revealed that an exchange transfusion was indicated, the earlier the better.

Pediatricians of that era were nearly all experienced in doing this procedure, and I went to talk to the parents of the baby about what needed to be done. The problem was, and I knew this before I entered their room, was that they were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, which forbids transfusions of blood of any size at any age. I told the parents that my duty was to safeguard the health of the child, and in this case there were no medical alternatives to what amounted to exchanging the child’s blood with that of a donor.

The parents refused to allow me to do the procedure, I told them that I would then contact legal authorities to attempt to override their wishes. By now it was getting pretty close to midnight, so when I called the judge on duty to procure such permission, he was a bit put out at me at having wakened him, and proceeded to instruct me in why it was not a good idea to wake judges from a sound sleep. None of this improved my already low opinion of the legal profession, but I listened with all the humility I could muster to his tirade because I needed something from him that could not wait until morning, and I finally got it. Now all I had to do was to round up the blood and equipment and personnel to do the transfusion and get it done as soon as I could.

But while I was receiving advice on dealing with judges, there was another drama in play. The OB/Nursery area was immediately adjacent to the passenger elevators. The child’s mother, dressed in a nightgown, asked to be given her baby for a feeding. She then walked to the elevator which was being held open by her husband.

The door closed and the trio was whisked down to ground level and from there they walked quickly to the hospital exit, where a warmed car was waiting, being driven by a member of their church.

And off they went into the winter night. In effect, since the courts had just taken custody of the infant, she had kidnapped her own baby.

Down the hall I came still smarting from the judge’s lecture, and when the nurse told me that my patient had now disappeared, I … well … maybe the best characterization would be that I lost my composure. Pretty completely. My normal cool and professional demeanor was nowhere to be found. I ranted, I raved, I asked to be given the papers needed to file a child neglect report. And then I was informed of something I found even more unbelievable. The baby’s father had remained at the hospital after his wife had been driven away, and would like to talk to me.

He and I had an uncomfortable conversation where he repeated his belief that the transfusion would have caused irreparable spiritual harm to his son, and that was why they had acted as they did. He apologized to me for not following medical advice, but was firm in believing that he had done the right thing. I had calmed down quite a bit by the time he was finished, but I told him that I would be reporting him and his wife to social services for exposing the infant to possible great harm, and we went our separate ways.

Six weeks later I was working in my office when my nurse informed me that the family was now in Room 3 with their baby, for a routine well child visit. The child was still slightly jaundiced, but otherwise seemed healthy. One caveat was that if there had been neurological injury caused by a high jaundice level, it might not be detectable at such an early age, so I can’t say that I know the true end of the story, because that was the last time I saw the family or heard anything further about the baby.

And my new BFF the judge? Well, I always hoped that some evening when I was on emergency room call, he would be brought in with some painful malady or another (perhaps having been shot in the ass by Dick Cheney), and that I could have moved oh so slowly, and delayed over the longest time possible, to provide him with the comfort he needed. That opportunity never presented itself.

Petty? More than a little, I’ll grant, but can you recall any time that I claimed I was perfect?

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Another song inspired by the heroic uprising in Minneapolis, this time written by someone less famous but no less skillful, Marc Skjervem.

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May I Have This Dance … ?

jono55
Screenshot

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When the news is merde piled upon merde
what’s left to do but dance
shaking off those flooding tears
and dancing

Angel Dance, by Los Lobos

take your bad knees and your trick hips
and put them through their paces
dancing, forgetting nothing
while body blows are dealt to flooring
and rhythmic shoes and boots pound yesterday’s
unvacuumed mirk into resolve

Mary Jane’s Last Dance, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers


dance like fools, like motes in sunlight
like lovers parting
dance for those whose time is up
their names pressed into ice and asphalt
dance for the Renees that were
and the Alex-es that are yet to come

Cosmic Dancer, by T. Rex

dance for kindness
dance for hope
dance for when you were
a child at a party
unbound, unaware, unafraid

When You Dance (I Can Really Love), by Neil Young


dance that good old Brownian motion
that you do when no one’s looking
dance for those who would but can’t

Dance Me To The End Of Love, by The Civil Wars


in the firelight
in the moonlight
in the floodlights

Dance the Night Away, by Van Halen



in the middle of a berserk world
why, look at us,
with tremors, rage and fear
we’re dancing

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Deja Vu All Over Again

jono55

On Monday we attended all of the several activities available here in Paradise that were celebrating Martin Luther King day. The free community breakfast, the hour of heartfelt speeches by men and women from a wide spectrum of the citizenry, the awards for organizations that help our town be a kinder one, the ten minute march to Centennial Square and then later watching an HBO documentary of the last couple of years of MLK’s life. All in all … six hours of talking about heroes and heroism. There are worse ways to spend one’s time.

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On Tuesday we were part of a political demonstration against fascism that took place on the old courthouse steps.

(Just in case the DOJ might be wondering, we are the couple with the yellow arrows pointing at us.)

After each of these activities we found ourselves wanting to do more, to resist in other ways the insanity of Cluck and the Gang. If you have an appetite for more reading, Rick Wilson has put together an excellent paper entitled A Declaration of Independence from the Mad King.

Read it and then tell me that what we now see every day are the acts of someone who is compos mentis.

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Sons and Daughters, by the Neville Brothers

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Still too little snow to speak of here in Paradise. Mutterings among the citizenry about fears of water shortages are becoming more and more frequent. Most of Colorado is dependent on snow piling up in those beautiful mountains each winter to feed our streams and rivers as it melts in spring and summer. We are way behind this year, locally and statewide. There’s just not enough of that wonderful stuff.

Friday mid-day it started to snow the tiniest of flakes, falling straight down on an absolutely windless day. At first they melted away instantly, but by evening there was a coating of white in the valley. Perhaps only an inch, but a precious inch indeed. The climate niche Paradise occupies is entitled “semi-arid,” which translates into almost a desert but not quite.

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We’re halfway through the winter now, moving about town in what must seem unbelievable comfort to our compatriots in Minnesota, those brave souls who are carrying the fight against the autocracy in below-zero conditions. They are up against the weather, tear gas, pepper spray, and thugs with guns yet still they come out to demonstrate and sow discord in the hearts of the enemy … the enemy being other Americans who were sent to control and intimidate them.

I am inspired beyond words. And we are all learning as we watch. Learning how to confront and confound this modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.

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Sons and Daughters (reprise) by the Neville Brothers

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Alex Pretti

Murdered by ICE agents in broad daylight in Minneapolis

1/24/26

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Heroes

jono55

Something I’ve noticed recently out here in Paradise. The nearly complete absence of MAGA caps. For years they were one of the core items of Montrosian male dress. Why, on any trip to the grocery store I would see at least five men wearing them, and interestingly, they were mostly cross-looking senior citizens.

The same thing has happened with the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia , the stars and bars. I would guess that a decade ago at least five percent of pickups in town were daily flying these emblems of slavery and treason. While this might seem a small number, keep in mind that pickup trucks are the signature vehicle of our community. Five percent of a bunch is a bunch.

I don’t know the reasons for the decline, I just make observations. Those crabby-looking older dudes might just have died off of advanced constipation. The flag-waving yahoos might have actually taken a closer look at those banners and decided to be offensive in some less complicated manner. Either way, it is getting that much harder to easily identify the dim bulb segment of our community.

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Lord, this is good. Until today I thought no one would ever touch Emmylou Harris’ rendition of her beautiful song Boulder to Birmingham. Dead wrong is what I was. Here’s Jessie Buckley.

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The pickings were sooo good this past few days. Here’s a prescient prose poem from 2011. Honestly, how could we not see this coming? Terry Ehret did and put it down clear as spring water.

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Wade In The Water, by The Rigs

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ICE in 1933 (reverse metaphor)

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Heather Cox Richardson’s postings Letters From An American have been like flashlights, something to find your way with on darker days. On Martin Luther King Jr. day, Monday, she posted this beauty:

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

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Stepping back and looking closely at this post I realize that the quality of writing is definitely improved. That’s the good news. The bad news is … (sigh) … it’s because I did so little of it.

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In The Trenches

jono55

Minneapolis is, right now, the front line of the entire country’s resistance to our fascist government and its agents. Those freezing January streets filled with people and the sounds of whistles and flash-bangs … the thousands of smartphone recordings that have been made and the thousands to come that reveal ICE’s now-naked war on America. There can be no doubt about it after the events of this past week. If you don’t see it, you never will … not until it is your door that ICE is knocking down.

Minneapolis is my old home town, where I spent the first thirty years of my life. I know those streets, recognize those addresses, have walked in areas now lit by police floodlights. Renee Good was shot and killed six blocks from my childhood home. I will never not be a Minnesotan, at least in part. This morning I can’t shake the ridiculous idea that I should be there. That I belong on that line. What is ridiculous is that I would probably be a liability to the those involved in the struggle. Someone that needed tending rather than someone who was good at carrying torches or blowing whistles.

Maybe not. Maybe I could be of some help, but no matter. The line will come to Colorado one day, who knows … perhaps even politically red Montrose will see its share of conflict because the Cluck machine is neither blue nor red. It is out only for itself, serving its masters both visible and hidden. I don’t have to travel across the country to mount the barricades … that opportunity will come to me.

My grandmother would have said: “Bloom where you’re planted.” Good advice, that. I will do my blooming right here.

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Our streets come alive
Injustice quickening cold
Fury in our souls

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Screenshot

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How about something sweet and temperate? One of the best voices of this or any other time. Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves and making it hers.

Autumn Leaves, by Eva Cassidy

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Our local recreation center has been so successful in recruiting members that it is becoming more and more frustrating to try to use its equipment. So far Robin and I have been unable to find some sweet spot in the day when the crowd is thinner and the machines we use in our respective programs are free.

Being able to move smoothly between devices is an important thing for my own training regimen, since at the slightest delay I am prone to simply leaving the building and returning home. Home being any place that doesn’t require physical effort and bulging neck veins.

The perfect venue for me, therefore, would be a large hall completely furnished with the latest and most scientifically studied equipment, with small loveseats sprinkled here and there to rest between exercises … and no one else allowed to be present when I was working out. Bank presidents, governors, and one percenters of all stripes would be shown the door as soon as I appeared.

I know, I know, there are some obvious hurdles to be overcome, but why not dream?

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Another tune from Eva Cassidy, submitted by daughter Kari. Sublime. Cassidy died in 1996 of melanoma, at the age of 33 years. Such has been the respect for and appreciation of her gifts that there have been nine posthumous albums released. Nine.

One of those albums was with the London Symphony Orchestra. A cut from the album was this version of Time After Time.

The story of Eva Cassidy and the London Symphony Orchestra is a posthumous collaboration, bringing her acclaimed voice to a wider audience through the 2023 album I Can Only Be Me, where the LSO performed new orchestral arrangements for her classic recordings, fulfilling a dream she never lived to see due to her early death from cancer in 1996, with technology allowing her isolated vocals to blend with the full orchestra.

Google AI search

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Every once in while I see a film that reminds me why we need filmmakers and darkened theaters to tell some stories. Tales so well told that you know you are a different person when you leave the theater than when you came in. You can feel it. Yesterday Robin and I took in such a performance, when we went to see Hamnet.

It was a tale of love and grief and their inseparability. Wrenching. Soulful. Beautiful.

Wore us right out. To the point where we needed ice cream right away.

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There are many emotions that today’s troubles bring up for me, and I recognize grief among them. There is such a deep sense of loss when I read the headlines, see the videos, hear the spoken cruelties. No matter that this convulsion will be over one day, with the skies cleared and some sanity restored to public life.

I have lost a certain naïveté. Once I realized the sheer numbers of my countrymen who can allow and even support horrors to be visited upon their fellow citizens as long as it doesn’t touch them personally. Who believe that the killings and torturings and imprisonments and the orphans and the lost children are likely deserved punishments. No matter that my ‘innocence’ has been clearly shown to have been always a fantasy, no matter that I now work every day with people who share my convictions, a loss is still a loss.

Music, as always, can be a balm for the wounded spirit. Here’s a bit of that.

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Open Range

jono55

Awright, here’s my opener for today. I have no idea who this woman is, where she is, and I could care less. She is one of the truth-tellers out here on the open range, and they are all over the place if you look for them. This is a saving grace of an otherwise gruesome time, the chance to meet people you admire and band together with them spiritually if not actually.

(sorry about the enormous size of this video, I can’t find a way to make it smaller.)

The ugliest among us are running the show today, but there is some serious reckoning coming, and I hope they all have a good retirement plan … they are going to need it. The man who killed Renee Good has become famous. I saw a video where his name was painted on the side of a van, along with details of his crime. I don’t know where he lives but many do, and his life has certainly changed since he pulled that trigger a few days ago.

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One of the pleasures of daily life here in Paradise has been the proliferation of murals on the bare sides of buildings on the Western Slope. I love it. In Montrose some enterprising artists have painted a bunch of new ones recently. No fanfare, just one day you look up and see something beautiful or interesting where there had been nothing. When it is warm again, I’m going to walk around town and photograph a few to share with you. Until then, here’s three examples.

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My coffee perfumes
The kitchen at four a.m.
Without being asked

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Our more typical and much colder weather this week has prompted some Canada geese who were thinking of setting up permanent homes here in our pleasant valley to get up and go. Large flocks were seen overhead yesterday, moving south.

I love the fact that most of the planet keeps to its ancient rhythms and movements while we humans seemingly cannot find our way. It’s not that there aren’t maps for us to follow, they are plentiful and available everywhere. What is our problem anyhow? Was it when we left the caves that things went sour?

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Both Robin and I are a little under the weather this week, with annoying coughs and just enough malaise to make us cranky. Since I was in my sixth day of this grayness and going about the house mewling about not feeling hungry and maybe we could just skip supper and all, Robin put on her big girl pants and went to the store for … chicken soup.

Two big 22 ounce cans of Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup appeared in the kitchen. I can’t remember the last time I had this particular food. Of course I make a decent chicken noodle soup myself, with fresh herbs and the whole show, but this stuff … a connection with the earliest food memories that I have.

Into the kettle went the can’s contents, along with an equal amount of water. That’s it. Apply some heat and you’re done. Campbell’s knew their people back in 1934 when they first put it on the shelves. Make it affordable, make it easy to cook, make it tasty. All of those things were in evidence last night.

One thing. There was almost a complete absence of chicken. From the bits I came upon here and there as I gobbled down my two bowlsful I would estimate that one could make at least three hundred gallons of soup from a single bird. (I am not complaining, just observing.) But no matter, this morning I already feel slightly better, and I look forward to finishing off the leftovers today.

[BTW, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup was also introduced in 1934, without which Lutheran churches all over Minnesota may not have survived in those early post-depression days. The sheer number of church-basement casseroles using this soup as a base, along with some egg noodles and a little tuna fish … astronomic.]

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There are days when I
Am no more than my anger
In wintry discontent

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Robin and I rented and watched the movie Spartacus this week. Originally released in 1960, it was hugely successful at the box office, took hard shots at the right-wing witch-hunts that were in progress in our country at the time, and was a young Stanley Kubrick’s first big-budget film.

It was the only film directed by Kubrick where he did not have complete artistic control. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted at the time as one of the Hollywood Ten. Douglas publicly announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter of Spartacus, and President John F. Kennedy crossed American Legion picket lines to view the film, helping to end blacklisting.

Wikipedia

Soooo … a politically astute film filmed by some of the best technicians in Hollywood with an amazing cast, one that won four Oscars and whose creation and showing were surrounded by important off-screen dramas. Not too shabby an origin story.

The only problem for Robin and I was its running time … 197 minutes. This substantially exceeded our attention spans, which typically clock in at around 120 minutes. Therefore we watched it over two successive nights.

The film also had one of the strangest last scenes I’ve ever watched. A combination of horror and inspirational in the frame at the same time. Odd indeed. One felt two wildly disparate emotions simultaneously.

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Vigilante Man

jono55

When I go to the grocery store, I like to think that I am a knowledgeable shopper. I’ve received a smattering of nutritional teaching in medical school, can read most food labels without referring more than three or four times to an encyclopedia, and I can tell a parsnip from a carrot without fail.

But once in a while, serendipity takes a hand in things. Such was the case a few years ago when I was standing in front of the freezer case where the frozen pizzas were stored. Too many choices, thought I, and while some of the old brands that I recognized had memories of lackluster eating attached to them, I was willing to try them again, thinking “maybe they’ve improved in the past twenty years.”

When suddenly a hand was placed on my shoulder, and when I spun around to see where the assault was coming from I found myself facing a young man with wilderness hair, a full beard, cutoffs, and a t-shirt that really needed either laundry attention or to be discarded in the sort of bag one uses to dispose of nuclear waste. This unlikely oracle then spoke: “Screaming Sicilian, man, it’s the only way to go.” He then waited a moment without saying anything more, till finally I caught his drift and reached into the freezer to extract a Screaming Sicilian Supreme, and placed it in my cart. At that moment, he moved away and disappeared. I’ve not seen him since.

At first I was going to put the pizza back, but then I thought “Why not try it? What’s to lose?”

And it turned out to be the best frozen pizza ever. Within a couple of centimeters of being as good as a freshly baked one from the parlor down the street.

All thanks to that stranger’s exclamation: “Screaming Sicilian, man, it’s the only way to go.”

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Feel Your Love, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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We’re finally getting some snow here in the valley. It started Thursday as those tiny flakes that might as well be raindrops because they melt on contact. It fell all day, mostly melting away as fast as it came down. At 5:30 a small group of people stood out in that snow/rain and held a vigil for Renee Nicole Good, who had been murdered by an ICE agent the day before.

Most of the candles being “lit” were LEDs and were thus invulnerable to the snow, but Robin and I had traditional candles that we’d purchased ten minutes earlier on our way to the vigil. Their tiny flames were threatened by each wet flake but never went out.

Some of Good’s own poetry was read, and many heartfelt things were said about the death of one of our comrades at the hands of a government thug. She had been doing nothing but non-violently protesting the unjustified and unconstitutional ICE occupation of Minneapolis. In our hearts those of us assembled know that there will be more vigils to come, with more empty chairs at family tables, before the horror passes. We know that the possibility exists that there will be a vigil one night where they say nice things about one of us. Such is life in a Cluckian country.

The ceremony was cut a bit short because of the unpleasant weather. Nearly all of us who were there were senior citizens who really should have been at home by our fires, not out on a Montrose street corner in danger of ‘catching our death.’ But it seems to be one of those odd paradoxes where the generation whose vision is daily failing is the one that can best see what must be faced. I like to think that we are blazing a trail that younger citizens can follow when it comes time to change regimes.

(BTW, I was proud of the Minneapolis mayor, who had used some colorful language at an earlier interview and when he was later asked if he wasn’t going a bit too far with his use of profanity, he answered that if we compare shooting a woman in the face for no reason with the dropping of an f-bomb … which gave the greater public affront?)

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Helpless, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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Our cats don’t seem troubled by today’s politics at all. None of their habits have changed. None of their demands can be ignored lest they decide to rip open a sofa or forget where the litterbox is located. They trade purrs and snuggles for food and shelter and are content. As are we.

This snow that has fallen makes them think deeper before they venture out through the cat door to answer nature’s calls. They stare through the opening for a moment or two, and the expression on their faces is omigod … again? Were we not done with this?

One of the least lovely features of sharing spaces with cats and being responsible for their nutrition is a certain fickleness. A food that has been accepted for months or years is suddenly treated like it was nuclear waste and they walk away from it. A year from now that same dish of ‘toxic’ shreds might be just what it takes to make them ecstatic at mealtimes.

Now, the truth zone. I look at what I just wrote and realize that it applies to me as well. When Robin and I first got together she had two teenaged daughters still living at home. These three women had decided that the only meat that was safe to eat for any person who didn’t want to turn into a walking bag of suet was chicken. As a result, chicken was served at almost every meal but breakfast. After a few months of this, I had reached a point where even the mention of that medium-sized squawking bird was enough to provoke nausea and a near-seizure involving trembling of the extremities and paralysis of speech.

Once this trio was separated by time into three households and thus the influence of chicken monomania was broken, I slowly began to appreciate it as a part of a healthy diet. I can now hold a chicken sandwich without wondering where to throw it, and even occasionally order one in a restaurant without being forced or shamed into doing it.

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While I am on the subject of body weight, I am going to have to drop a couple of pounds. To my chagrin I have discovered that I have exactly the same BMI as the Pillsbury Doughboy.

What happened to me can be described by the following equation: mildly plump + Halloween candy + Thanksgiving poundage + Christmas poundage + less activity = all my clothes have shrunk.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …

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Political cartoonists have never had such riches to work with. It is impossible for them to keep up with the daily misdeeds and outrages committed by Cluck and his gang.

Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot

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Ry Cooder has always been one of the good guys in music. This video is from 1973 and was originally shown on the BBC. Rings just as true this morning as it did then, and also as it did in 1940 when it was first recorded.

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On Saturday Robin and I drove to Grand Junction to take part in yet another rally, this time honoring Renee Good and more than thirty others who have died at the hands of ICE. An affecting bit of cold weather theater was where each of their names was held up by a member of the local Indivisible group. There was a moment where each name was read aloud to the assembled crowd, which numbered pretty close to 1000 (by our estimation).

The anger that these senseless and lawless acts of our federal government provoke was obvious in the expressions of crowd members. We were told to take that anger and let it be part of the energy we bring to our engagement, in whatever role we are playing.

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On the Road

jono55

It was noon on Sunday and Robin and I were lined up along Highway 550 as it runs down into Ouray from the north, protest signs in our hands. At times the breeze demanded a firm two-handed grip on the sign’s post. All told, there were 34 of us out there to show our opinion of Cluck’s mucking about in Venezuela.

But the amazing thing about the whole afternoon was that it was 58 degrees and sunny. In January. We had made plans to suffer for our cause in a whirling snowstorm, or at least a freezing drizzle, but nooooo, we were denied the opportunity to feel heroic. Instead, we basked.

As cars pass by, there are several types of driver responses that we have observed. Among them are:

  • The driver stares straight ahead and refuses to make eye contact with low creatures like ourselves
  • The driver extends a middle finger as a sign they see what we are doing and need to express disagreement
  • The driver revs his engine as loudly as they can to register contempt in an adolescent way
  • The driver gives us a vigorous thumbs-up
  • The driver honks joyfully
  • The driver waves happily

Overall the responses are more often positive than negative. We’ve noticed that we are statistically more likely to get a warm response from occupants of a Subaru than a pickup truck. (We noticed especially yesterday that the drivers of Land Rovers, and there were many, ignored us 100% of the time. Draw whatever conclusions you wish from this. I have my own unflattering opinions)

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We are watching the television series “Victoria,” which started out its life on PBS and is now on Netflix. It tells the story of Queen Victoria of England, beginning when she ascended to the throne at age of eighteen years. It’s a romanced version of her life, but still a great deal of fun. A very high-class soap opera, if you will.

I have only one caveat. Although Victoria is positively smitten with her husband Albert, I find his character as played is a wavy-haired pompous ass. It is irritating enough to make me want to toss pillows at the television screen when he goes on one of his broom-up-the-butt Teutonic rants.

Victoria, on the other hand, is played by Jenna Coleman, small but spirited. I never want to toss pillows when she is on screen.

There is a lovely soundtrack for the series , which I also have found captivating. (Mediaeval Baebes indeed!)

Victoria, the Suite, by Martin Phipps and the Mediaeval Baebes

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There are times when I am embarrassed for the media, especially that part tilting ever so slightly to the left. I count those among my friends, so it is especially hurtful to me whenever one of them begins to Rumpelstiltskinize on the outrage of the moment. This is where we have an event, say, like the kidnapping of the leader of another country after having invaded such country. These chatterers begin to try to turn straw into gold, postulating and pontificating in every direction about international this and international that but all they manage to do is to create an atmosphere filled with dusty golden fibers that dance in the wind they have created.

I would give an “A” and shout out a lusty “Amen, brother!” to any online ‘columnist’ who could turn their microphone on and say “You know, I don’t know squat about that, and neither does anyone else here in the room, so instead of droning on we will play some great recorded music rather than waste your time. I’ll be back when I have something to say.”

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You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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I ran across this post on Substack the other day, written by Sober Dude. Its title was: A Dozen Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Sobriety. The writing was warm, filled with good humor, and told some truths I hadn’t thought about in years. Especially #1.

#1. You’re about to have a shocking amount of spare time. Drinking is a full-time job. Planning it. Hiding it. Recovering from it. Apologizing for it. Thinking about it. When you stop, entire hours appear out of nowhere. Whole evenings. Weekends. Empty space. At first, this feels like boredom. Or restlessness. Or existential dread. It’s not. It’s opportunity without a syllabus. Fill your schedule early. Walks. Meetings. Gym. Writing. Coffee with humans. Structure isn’t prison—it’s scaffolding. You can decorate later.

Sober Dude

A couple of decades ago when I hung up my drinking duds for good … there I was, blinking in the full light of day and wondering … now what? All of those hours I had previously spent walking around in general anesthesia were staring me in the face and it was going to be forever before I could go to bed. And, BTW, I thought, what does one drink when one doesn’t have access to _____________ ? (You may fill in any of the following: whisky, gin, vodka, beer, stout, ale, wine, sherry, cordials, Listerine, vanilla extract, et al)

While some of these choices may seem trivial or obvious or even ridiculous to the unaddicted, they are quite real, and I can tell you that from remembered experience.

So if you know someone that you care about who has recently put down their glass and seems a bit at loose ends, you could send this link to them. It’s kind of a love letter, really.

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For What It’s Worth

jono55

Although celebrating New Year’s Eve quietly without Señor Ethanol anywhere in view rarely gives us those colorful stories to tell, we are content.

What we did do is drive to Delta CO and take a left turn out into the rural, looking for the resident population of sandhill cranes that live there all year. And we found them, in groups ranging from a dozen to fifty individuals, all feeding in picked-over cornfields. If we added them all together I would say that we saw more than five hundred birds in all. At times they were only a few yards from the car as we pulled over for closer looks.

Marvelous birds. Stately movements, smooth plumage, with that striking prehistoric voice of theirs. When new birds were coming in to land with their wings set, the scene was one of slow-motion grace, carrying serenity to the observer.

After this satisfying period of bird-watching we dropped into a restaurant in Delta and ordered some Navajo tacos that were … just okay … but which still qualified as solid comfort food. By now it was full dark for the drive back to Montrose, where we watched a couple of television programs until the call of a warm bed could not be ignored.

See, I told you, not colorful at all. But here I am, typing away on New Year’s Day. No hangover, full memory of the preceding evening’s events, and no new amends to make. Life is good.

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Screenshot

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I dunno, maybe not everybody gets off on the stories behind the songs like I do, and truth be told, there aren’t a whole lot of tunes whose history even I will pursue. But beginning back in the late 60s I began singing along with For What It’s Worth. It was at a time when every day’s news was filled with tales of protest and fires and marches and shootings and responsive brutality. I listened to the lyrics and took it for an addition to the literature of that time.

Now, it turns out that it was a protest song, but not about the Viet Nam war or the national unrest dealing with civil rights, but something else. Here’s a bit of explanation from Wikipedia:

Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots  in Los Angeles in November 1966, a series of early counterculture-era clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California, the same year Buffalo Springfield had become the house band at the Whisky A Go Go . Local residents and businesses had become annoyed by how crowds of young people going to clubs and music venues along the Strip had caused late-night traffic congestion. In response, they lobbied Los Angeles County to pass local ordinances stopping loitering, and enforced a strict curfew on the Strip after 10 p.m. The young music fans, however, felt the new laws infringed upon their civil rights. 

Wikipedia: For What It’s Worth

Sooo, civil rights, perhaps, but on a narrower scale. No matter. For me, in my ignorance, its message was easily applied to those larger theaters of unrest.

In my mind I am now applying the lyrics to today’s political situation. And the fit is nearly perfect. A really good song like this doesn’t go out of style but can be recycled in new ways, new places and times. Why is that? Well, child, because we human beings keep making the same mistakes over and over would be my answer.

Here is Buffalo Springfield singing the original version, from 1966.

As you listen, think about the invasions of our cities by Cluck’s armies, about ICE’s depradations being visited upon innocents across this country. Think about a national health department made up of quacks which is promoting unscientific health practices using stuff they just plain made up, stuff that is killing people at home and across the world. Think about … we could go on and on. There’s something happening here for sure, and there is very definitely a man with a gun over there.

Here is a lovely cover version by the Del McCoury Band, from eight years ago.

BTW: just in case you didn’t know the origin f that original group’s name, here is the Buffalo Springfield steam tractor.

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I’ve been doing this thing, this blog, for nearly twenty years. I’ve gone through three software changes during that time, things that I accepted only when there was no choice. That’s my uneasy truce with change … resist as long as I can, then going along with it when the feces is just about to hit the fan.

I archive an entry for a couple of years, and then delete it. This was my deal with myself, to create something that was the verbal equivalent of a Buddhist prayer flag. To hang out there in the wind and rain and freezing weather as thread by thread was teased out to drift away, leaving less and less behind. Eventually to vanish.

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Of course, I can do this because what I write is so perishable. If there is meaning in it on a given day, that meaning is for the day alone. A man like Tolstoy writes for the ages, I write for the forenoons. And in twenty years some of what I believed so strongly at the time is in the dustbin today. My body is certainly going the way of the prayer flag, why not my thoughts as well?

At any rate, this blog is mounted on WordPress, which has been kind enough to ask me to change only once. I refused, of course, because there was an out. A back door I could use. I could maintain the legacy theme if I called it “customizing.” Perhaps one day WordPress will message me one morning and tell me that I am no longer worth their trouble and would I please choose one of the other fine themes that they offer? When that moment comes I will move on to the new with what grace I can muster. And some grumbling, spread with a veneer of profanity.

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So now the Soprano family has taken over the territory of the Corleone family. Criminals fighting among each other, while ordinary citizens stand blinking in the searchlights and the bomb flares. Just another day in Cluck’s perverted version of America.

A couple of tunes come to mind on after yesterday’s ugly news.

Lives In The Balance, by Jackson Browne
Bullet the Blue Sky, by U2

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50% Less Cluck

jono55

We are finally getting a taste of winter here in Paradise. Temperatures are down in the teens at night, although snow is still playing hard to get here in the Uncompahgre Valley. Last weekend we were supposed to rendezvous with daughter Allison in a small town named Rangely, northwest of us about three hours. But we dropped those plans when a snowstorm of about four inches came into the forecasts. Rangely is in a lonely part of the state, and services are thin up there for stranded motorists. Taking into consideration that my whole thrust in travel for the remainder of my life is to not become a stranded motorist in a lonely area in the winter, we cancelled and stayed right here in good ol’ Montrose.

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It’s New Year’s Eve and we have no plans. It turns out that senior citizens often have no plans for New Year’s Eve, so we are not alone in this. The raucous and often tipsy parties of the past have evidently lost their luster, whether one is in recovery or not. Staying up until midnight to watch a mechanical ball fall in New York City seems a scant way to spend one’s time. We are aware of the change of the years, of course, it’s just that wNewhen the ceremonies are over, there you are. Take away the calendar and December 31 is just like January 1. Not one problem or opportunity had changed one jot or tittle.

There are many New Year’s Eve parties that I would like to forget but the vagaries of memory keep them on file. Those are the ones where I learned what alcohol can do to the brain, stomach, and one’s behavior. I will not go into details, in the unlikely case that children might be reading this.

But one that I do remember in a mildly fond manner is the millennial change, 1999-2000, when we stayed up to see if the world came, not to an end, but to a colossal cluster-freak as all of the computers on the planet lost their minds. Mercifully that did not happen, but there was a good lesson in the fact that those geniuses who set up all those programs that we depended on didn’t have a clue as to what was going to happen at midnight 1999 because they hadn’t coded proper time changes into them. The geniuses turned out not to be gods, after all. Strangely reassuring.

The last New Year’s Eve Party we personally threw was more than fifteen years ago. We had several couples over and it was very nice but we found that by the time that the magic hour had rolled around everyone had left for the comforts of home and their own warm beds. By midnight every single one of the seasoned wastrels at the party was fast asleep, including the hosts.

And yet, here I am feeling all well-wishy and hoping that you all have a warm and lovely new year celebration, and a 2026 with 50% less Cluck in it.

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So Much Trouble In The World, Lucinda Williams with Mavis Staples

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Our national Department of Justice is moving right along developing its own variety of Newspeak. As of today, the definition of domestic terrorist includes just about anyone who is doing something that President Cluck doesn’t like. To the Attorney General, this definition seems tidy and is flexible enough to suit her. She knows that eventually they will run out of immigrants to abuse and be on the lookout for new victims, so creating a sizable pool of them in advance is a necessary strategy.

It pretty much goes without saying that our friends in the Indivisible organization will be on the naughty list. Almost everything this disreputable and seedy bunch does is deemed undesirable by the Cluck regime, especially their annoying insistence that the government ought to follow the Constitution in its actions. Cluck finds this document way too confining for a creative gentleman like himself, so he has tossed it into the bin and has the Department of Minions at work on a new one which will be out in Spring. Rumor has it that in the NEW CONSTITUTION the President is to be called GOD OF ALL THINGS, and worship services are to be held continuously.

Stay tuned.

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There are a thousand voices out there trying to tell the Democratic Party that business as usual isn’t working at all, and that their keepin’ on keepin’ on brings to mind the old definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

What those thousand voices haven’t come up with yet is a clear statement of purpose for the party they hope to enliven. I couldn’t help notice that the infamous Project 2025 that the Republican white-power-faux-Christian nationalists came up with gave them a real headstart once Cluck was in office. All they had to do was hand a page to each henchperson along with a sledge hammer and tell them to go to work.

Every four years at the national conventions it has been traditional for parties to draft a platform, but nothing like Project 2025 had come along before. So … what if the Democrats came up with a Let’s Be Gettin’ Down To It 2028? A clear statement from a party that hasn’t completely lost its mind and actually has clearly stated goals which include working to benefit the people who get things done. Something you don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand.

The Democrats can’t afford to wait until 2028 actually arrives, but should be hammering out their proposal right now. Or else why should we respond to those incessant calls for donations that they send out?

Donate to what? The same old same old? No thanks, guys. I’d rather fold that money into paper airplanes* and see how far they would fly in the San Juans on a breezy day.

*N.B.: The bill in the graphic is a C-note. This graphic was taken from the web, and is somewhat more generous than a typical donation of the writer would be.

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(My favorite cartoon du jour)

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Magnolia, IMHO, is magnificent. My favorite of Lucinda’s.

Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams

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Curry at Christmas

jono55

What was the most intense year of my seven years of medical school and residency? No contest! It was my junior year in medical school. This was where we were turned out of the laboratories and libraries and shoved with little grace into the middle of a hundred patients’ stories at once. Stories that had predeeded our arrival and that would go on after we’d moved on to another clerkship.

[Definition: a clerkship was a portion of the junior year devoted to a specialty in medicine. A taste of everything, at least nominally to help the student pick out the discipline he or she would specialize in as a resident. The traditional clerkships were surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. ]

My first clerkship was on surgery, at the ancient Minneapolis General Hospital, a structure left over from the 19th century, with soaring ceilings, twenty-bed wards, inadequate wiring, no air-conditioning to speak of, and a patient population consisting of some of the nicest, some of the hardest-working, and some of the most dangerous people in town.

I loved it.

If you were being cared for on one of those ward there was only a curtain drawn to separate you from the other nineteen patients. There were few secrets to be kept, not when one loud-voiced medical attendant after another came to move or massage or feed you.

For the bookish student that I was it was almost unbearably exciting and completely exhausting at the same time. I would be on call every third night, and be up continuously that night. Next morning I would go to the outpatient clinics to act as if I weren’t half asleep, stumbling from litter to table to bed and seeing what kind of composure I could maintain in this new and desperate life.

The house staff, consisting of the interns and residents, and who were being abused in the same way, often regarded a medical student as yet another problem to be solved. Someone too earnest to ignore but too dumb to trust.

Perhaps one personal example will be enlightening.

I was spending the afternoon in orthopedic clinic, and had been assigned to change a cast on a twenty-two year old woman who had fractured her tibia weeks before. All I had to do was cut off the old cast and put on a new one, since by that time the bones had gone a long way toward knitting. The resident had informed me that the woman in question was a “working girl.” I was actually unfamiliar with that term but a couple of questions brought me right up to speed.

I thought to myself, well, then it’s nothing more than the meeting of two professionals and things ought to go well. I introduced myself, got out the cast saw and within no time at all removed the old and unsightly plaster.

Next I applied wrap after wrap of plaster cast material up and down the lady’s leg from just north of her toes to her upper thigh. If there was a bulge or a dent in this masterpiece I was creating I smoothed it over with a bit more plaster.

And then it was done, a thing of absolutely glistening porcelain beauty on one of the shapelier legs in Hennepin Country, I thought. I stood up and stood back and asked her to walk. The patient got to her feet, tried to take a step, and suddenly burst into tears. I had made a cast so heavy that she could not move it. It might have functioned as a construction pillar for a large department store.

I scurried to get the resident, who quickly diagnosed the problem. He consoled the sobbing lady and then, before he applied himself to taking off this monstrosity and replacing it with a workable version, sent me away for the afternoon. The look on his face was so clearly “Lord, what have I done to deserve this?,” that I did not quibble.

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Only You, by The Platters

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That same year, that same clerkship … a boundary was set for me. Remember I said that I was on call and up all night every three days? Well, on the days I wasn’t on call I would hang around the hospital, looking and listening to what was going on in that great beast. I loved every minute, even those where I screwed up or ran myself into walls. It was just such a vat of ferment.

But after two weeks of that very first adventure in the surgery rotation, I came home at eleven o’clock one night and the patient woman who was my wife was waiting up for me. I can’t quote her exactly but the sense of what she said went something like this:

“You have a wife and a baby daughter who need to see you. You can’t stay at the hospital when you aren’t required to be there and ignore us. If you keep doing that, one day we won’t be here when you do decide to come home.”

At that moment a boundary was set that I knew that I would violate at my own risk. I can’t say that there weren’t a few slips here and there, but there were significant periods of time between them. The problem was that those nights in the old barn that was General Hospital were among the most memorable … ever. So seductive. Such an attraction. Such a world had opened up there.

Aaaahhhhhhh … to be 24 years old again, wearing an ill-fitting scrub suit and eating free but tasteless cafeteria food and drinking free but thin coffee at three a.m. in the company of a cadre involved in fighting some of the best fights ever. Talk about your foxhole mentality … we had it.

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This Christmas Eve Robin and I were by ourselves. We did leave the house to drive to the village of Ridgway (population 1200) at suppertime, where our favorite Thai restaurant was keeping its doors open. There are several Thai restaurants on the Western Slope where we live, but the very small one in Ridgway has an artist in the kitchen.

They are not afraid to charge what they think their food is worth, and the Mango Curry was $19.95, which is high for such a dish in this part of the world. But what a curry!

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As I left the restaurant, I grieved that I hadn’t been able to completely empty my bowl, and had left an ounce or two of broth behind. But my lips had already passed from intense capsaicin-induced pain to complete swollen anesthesia and I feared that the rest of my face would follow suit.

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You Always Hurt the One You Love, by the Mills Brothers

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We had one of the best Christmas Days this year, compliments of three good friends. All of the food dishes that Robin and I had prepared turned out well, the weather was impossibly beautiful, and the conversations ranged from the historically interesting to the nitty gritty of today’s politics.

All five of us were liberals, two being Independents and three Democrats. At some point one of the our guests said something to the effect that when things are this bad there is nothing to do but hunker down until the bad guys go away. Give them enough time and they will implode, they said.

It was at exactly that point when the patriot Patrick Henry, whose words American schoolboys have had to learn for centuries, took over my body and began to speak. I began to make statements, outline resistance strategies, and make impassioned pronouncements as to the need for and the what of such resistance using words I only dimly understood and information to which I had little claim.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

When my mouth finally shut for a moment, there was no one more startled than I. I began to back off from what I’d said, and admit that there was no reason at all to listen to any of it because I was a known widely as a repeatedly convicted peddler of rampant nonsense. The rest of the group then settled down and lips that had tightened relaxed. When we parted amicably at the end of the evening and were still friends I silently thanked the gods for stopping me before I ruined what shreds of a reputation for probity that I still had.

But then Mr. Henry returned to say one more thing: “Well, Jon my boy, you’re a fainthearted patriot and that’s for certain. But give me a bit more time … I’ll make a bloody rebel of you yet.”

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, by The Platters

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Freak Flags Flown

jono55

Sunday afternoon Robin and I drove down the Million Dollar Highway (US 550) to a point a few miles past Ouray on a scouting expedition. We were checking snow conditions, since in the valley the small amount of snow that had fallen in the past couple of weeks still lingered only in small patches where the sun couldn’t get at it. Otherwise – bare brown ground is the order of the day. What we found? No White Christmas this year, folks.

Higher up, the ski area at Telluride has only a few runs open, mostly blue and green ones. Thrill seekers will just have to wait a little longer to get their kicks. Behind the scenes at Telluride there are labor disputes to worry about as well. So not such good news in the Land of Shiny People for the holidays.

However, the restaurants, liquor stores, and shops that sell expensive things you could easily do without are all open and humming. It turns out that a person can aprés-ski with verve and panache even when they can’t actually ski. Good to know.

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Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming, by Ane Btun

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Our holiday plans are completely local this year. None of our children will be within easy reach, so we’ve invited several friends for dinner on Christmas Day. This group is composed of the sort of people who don’t need any prodding to begin a conversation that will start the moment they come through the door and end only when they have pulled away at the end of it all. Politically we are of similar mind, so there will be no need for wit sharpening. We can toss clichés at one another without fear of contradiction.

While that might sound boring and dreadful, one has to remember that we are living in an area where two-thirds of the voters picked a felon/rapist for President in November of 2024. So feeling slightly more comfortable in flying our freak flags is a treat. A blessed respite.

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Yesterday the temperature here in Paradise hit 68 degrees. Two days before Christmas Eve. In the mountains of Colorado. At times like these I feel sorry for those old-timers whose store of weather knowledge has been rendered nearly useless by climate change. They can’t predict things any more. The game is so changed that all they can do is ruefully shake their heads.

Of course I am also one of the ancients, but I am not so affected as some. As I went through life for the most part I was oblivious to what was going on around me. If I walked out the door and it was raining I might notice that I was wet but didn’t think more about it.

I had other things to think about that I believed more important. Things involving my work and family. I couldn’t do anything about the weather so I ignored it. In this way I was almost the polar opposite of a farmer, whose livelihood was so dependent on sun and rain and temperatures.

I took care of children indoors, and bother what was going on outside. It didn’t touch me unless the power went out in a thunderstorm and we had to somehow keep our machines operating on emergency systems.

So ask me anything you want about the weather … past, present, or future. I will smile and say “I have no idea.” Perhaps this will bring you some comfort if you realize that you are not the only one in that position.

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O Holy Night (Po Hemolele), by Joanie Komatsu & Ruth Komatsu

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God bless the political cartoonists. Actually, God bless cartoonist of any stripe. The best of them have the ability to boil a truth down from a chapter to a page to just the fewest words possible and then place it in a frame and offer it up to us. To me it’s much like when you are cooking and you make a reduction. Heating a liquid until just the right amount of water is evaporated and the contents couldn’t be distilled any further. They become the purest essence of what is contained in the pan.

That’s what the best cartoonists do. One thing I can say about the Cluck Gang, they come up with more than enough fodder for these entrepreneurs to chew on. Every single rock that one turns over has a snake under it, fanged and venomous and ready to go.

One interesting thing about political cartooning. To really get the full benefit from the better ones, the reader has to be reasonably well-informed. Look at this one, for instance.

First of all, the mask and bindings are right out of the movie Silence of the Lambs. The red tie and blonde hairdo identify the person being restrained as Cluck.

The elephant is the symbol of the GOP, and its support of at least one possible pedophile has become obvious from the ongoing Epstein saga.

I know that in the US of A we are supposed to be presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law. But get serious, folks. If there were nothing rotten about the Cluckster-in-chief in those files wouldn’t they have been released months ago, just to be done with it and regain the narrative? Can you think of any other reason for this drawn-out and clumsy cover-up? Really … I’m asking.

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Tonight is Christmas Eve. I love the story. When you’ve heard it as many times as I have, it gets Crispr-d into your DNA, and it’s hard to stand back and really look at it objectively. To paraphrase Jon Kabat-Zinn , “Wherever you go, there you are, and thy DNA tags along.”

So I enjoy the carols, watch all the Christmas specials on television, send out my cards, purchase my share of gifts … nothing has changed for me for generations now in how I observe the holiday, and I suspect that it never will. For one thing, the tale keeps on being repeated in daily life, with different characters.

Today the United States has its own version of Herod sending out armies to find the Josés and the Marias and the babies and do them harm. We have people who are without homes and must take shelter where they can. We have women delivering their infants in the equivalent of stables where infant mortality is so much higher than in better regulated and managed facilities.

So you can see that the legend is always fresh for me, even if the particulars are altered.

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Here’s a beauty to end the post on. I googled its origins and found that the Scots and the Irish have both claimed the tune as their own. We’ll let them carry on the fight while we enjoy its lovely melancholy, which is universal.

“The Parting Glass” is a Scottish traditional song, often sung at the end of a gathering of friends. It has also long been popular in Ireland, and modern versions reflect strong Irish and North American influences. It was the most popular parting song sung in Scotland before Robert Burns wrote “Auld Lang Syne.”

Wikipedia

The Parting Glass, by boygenius and Ye Vagabonds

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Are We Eating Cake, or What?

jono55

The title of an op/ed in Wednesday’s NYTimes caught my eye: The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV. It was as good a discussion as to where we are vis a vis the oligarchy as any I’ve read to date.

This whole sorry business of the Cluckian regime will be behind us sooner or later, at least partially because its members are such a group of incompetents and fools to a degree that would be laughable if it weren’t for the misery and dislocation they are bringing daily to so many people here at home and around the world. But the billionaires … they will still be there when he and his gang are gone, using their immense stores of treasure to advance their interests, which on almost no point are coincident with ours. That reckoning will be the one to follow closely.

The op/ed I mentioned above claims that we are at a point where nearly three-quarters of our population believe that there should be a wealth tax, and if it happens the process of reducing the fortunes of the very very rich will likely be a painful period. Perhaps not as bad as that which followed the opulent reign of Louis XV, a little dust-up called The French Revolution).

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… billionaires can’t grasp how the real world is convulsing outside their well-secured gates.

And convulsing it is. According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.

NYTimes

Like I said. Bumpy roads coming. Girding loins and all that.

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As long as we’re reading articles and commenting on them, which is so much easier than coming up with content of my own, let’s move on to a piece from CNN with the overly long title: Your grocery store is a bewildering sea of overly processed food. Here’s why and what to do. The article is a discussion, a harangue, an exposé, a depressing recitation … all of these and more. Kid

When the rubber hits the road what it means is that just possibly my favorite food of all time is not food at all, but something which started as a slurry and was then treated with a plethora of chemicals that made it colorful, indestructible, and irresistible to people like myself.

My downfall, and the reason that I will never make it to the age of 120 years. The poster child of ultra processed foods, Cheetos.

Rip open a bag of these in front of me and you are taking the chance of being mauled by an octogenarian, which is a sorry spectacle at best. I was thinking that one practical guideline for avoiding ultraprocessed foods is to never eat anything that stains your fingers yellow-orange, but then I remember that the flaw in this reasoning is turmeric. Everything that this spice touches is stained yellow-orange.

In my past there are many things that I would rather not remember, but one of them is that I have on occasion eaten Cheetos until I was nauseous and I still wanted more. At those moments I would raise my orange-tinted hands to God and pray for deliverance, having hit yet one more spiritual, moral, and nutritional bottom. Pathetic, I mumbled to myself, while wiping away the crumbs.

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Samba Pa Ti, by Santana

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Living hundreds of miles from many of our loved ones has turned Christmas around in one important way. The rituals of wrapping presents are largely things of the past. Shipping costs are such that it is not hard to spend more on getting a gift to a son or daughter than the gift cost in the first place. So we go online and send off a package we have never actually seen or held.

Most often the process today is this: purchase gift online > ship directly to recipient. The present arrives at its destination in a plain cardboard box or brown paper package. Open either one of them and there it is. Naked. No mystery. No eager anticipation. No admiration for the art of the wrapping papers. No colors under the tree. Gift-giving reduced to its barest essentials.

The new ways are sensible, but there is something missing, at least for me. Wrapping gifts used to be a pain in the behind, and getting that perfect and seamless result eluded me 100% of the time. But I would take it back, with all its heacaches and frustrations, if I could reasonably do so.

And Santa … where is he in this brave new world of Christmas commerce? Why, friends, he has abandoned the sleigh and reindeer and now drives a UPS truck. The red outfit exchanged for the brown one.

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Here is a live, high-energy version of the classic Dire Straits tune. If, dear readers, you know of a better guitarist than Mark Knopfler, please send their name along to me that I might check them out.

Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits

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This morning I was musing … I think that I muse more often than I used to. In fact, there is a portion of nearly every day devoted to this craft, often prompted by something as small as a dust mote floating in a beam of sunlight heading for the coffee table. Since I realize full well that the temptation for older people is increasingly to look back in time, I have made it an issue for myself to avoid this trap.

But this year … my mental guard must be down because I find that I am more often filling idle moments with thoughts of the long line of Christmases of which I have been a part. And of the people who once sang and played in them as well, but have moved along to wherever that next cosmic stop is. I’ve reached the station in life where everyone in the generation before me has left the building.

Muse on this: the word muse comes from the Anglo-French verb muser, meaning “to gape, to idle, to muse.” The image evoked is one of a thinker so absorbed in thought as to be unconsciously open-mouthed. 

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Notice the word “gape” in the definition above. I certainly hope that I have not started gaping. Someday when I have the courage I will ask Robin if she notices me doing it. In the meantime I will see if I can come up with an anti-gaping preventive strategy. Surely there must be such a thing.

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Children of Gaza

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Watching the daily parade of loathsome behavior that is our present national government, there is one thing that is very striking. They don’t care that we know what they are up to. They believe that they can do whatever they want without consequence. Our country is being made into some sort of medieval fortress with the rest of the world on the outside, and us prisoners within.

This regime promotes a lie so gigantic that its adherents have to bend their minds into pretzels in order to accept it – that we don’t need anybody else. The lie is that we can run a country completely independently from the rest of the world.This idea, and the plans and programs developed from it are so removed from reality as to collectively represent a national psychosis. At present, the United States is more of an insane asylum, and the inmates are in charge.

Those out there who still think that they can sit on their hands and the delirium will pass of its own accord are misleading themselves. They are letting others do their work for them, take their risks for them. It is past time for this. If they are not active in resisting the assaults on the Constitution, the constant stream of authoritarian and illegal actions, and the miasmic cloud of immorality that has settled over us … they must be considered a part of the problem. The middle ground has been taken away by events. There is still time to choose what sort of political system one wants to live under. But they should make no mistake, inactivity is choosing chaos.

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Music played at the end of the movie Brokeback Mountain. A beautiful coda to the film.

The Wings, by Gustavo Santaolalla

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Turning the Tables

jono55

Borders bookstores went bankrupt in 2011, not because they weren’t pleasant places to lose oneself in, and perhaps down a well-made coffee while doing so, but because their management lost its way in the digital forest which had materialized around them. That happened to lots of businesses just as worthy, especially when they didn’t look back over their shoulder and see Amazon pulling up behind them.

But while the chain was still alive it was at least partly responsible for my becoming a Buddhist. (My calling myself a Buddhist, however, is a claim that the National Association of Buddhists vigorously rejects, and I am picketed by orange-clad monks whenever I appear in public under this banner). It happened this way.

I was in a spiritually vulnerable state, having just come to the end of the fourth volume in the Joseph Campbell series entitled The Masks of God. To say that I was unmoored in that department would have been an understatement. But there on a small table just as you entered the Borders store in Sioux Falls SD was a collection of books on Buddhism, and smack dab in the center was one with the name Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. I went for it, read it, went back for more books on the subject, and that was the beginning of a new way of looking at the world and beyond.

After a lifetime of being told that one way was the truth and that was all there was to it, the openness of Buddhism was what was attractive. It also followed a quasi-scientific method which was appealing to someone who thought of himself as a scientist. Those writers told me not to take their word for things, but to find out for myself. And that is what I have done now for the past thirty years.

It’s all Borders’ fault.

Before that adventure with the small table at the bookseller, my only real exposure to Eastern thought had come from a phrase in the movie Beyond Rangoon, where a wise Buddhist man says to the heroine: “Suffering is a promise that life always keeps.” To a man with a strong melancholic streak, this told it like it was.

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Out In The Streets, by Trio

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FOR SHAME DEPARTMENT

Last October there was, of all things, a comedy festival in Saudi Arabia to which many American comedians were invited. The money offered them was apparently good enough to quiet any qualms they might have had about the Saudi government’s appalling human rights record, tangential participation in the 9-11 tragedy, and its role in the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi leaders seem to believe that if they sponsor enough non-bloody entertainments that we will forget what sanguineous SOBs they are.

Many of these comedians were already very wealthy people who really didn’t need the money. I was disappointed to find several of my favorites on the list, but I will not bother them any longer with my attention or support. Below is the list.

  • Mo Amer
  • Aziz Ansari
  • Wayne Brady
  • Hannibal Buress
  • Bill Burr
  • Jimmy Carr
  • Dave Chappelle
  • Louis C.K.
  • Whitney Cummings
  • Pete Davidson
  • Chris Distefano
  • Omid Djalili
  • Zarna Garg
  • Ben Hart
  • Kevin Hart
  • Gabriel Iglesias (“Fluffy”)
  • Jim Jefferies
  • Jimeoin
  • Maz Jobrani
  • Jessica Kirson
  • Jo Koy
  • Bobby Lee
  • Sebastian Maniscalco
  • Sam Morril
  • Mark Normand
  • Russell Peters
  • Jeff Ross
  • Sugar Sammy
  • Andrew Santino
  • Andrew Schulz
  • Tom Segura
  • Ali Siddiq
  • Aries Spears
  • Chris Tucker
  • Jack Whitehall

Every one of these men and women now knows their price. Knows just how much it took to turn them into dancing bears performing for the amusement of some very unsavory people, some of whom were quite capable of cutting a man into pieces and hauling him away stuffed into luggage.

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Da Da Da, by Trio

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Let me tell you the story of my vasectomy. Oh, don’t worry, we won’t go into barf-inducing technical details, it’s more the staging that I plan to talk about.

First of all, the need for such a procedure had become evident, because of my superpower, which was that I was exceedingly fertile. Because of this inborn “talent,” I had already accumulated four lovely children, and there didn’t seem to be any other reasonable way to avoid having that number keep climbing into double digits.

So the preliminaries had been accomplished at a previous visit, and all that was necessary now was for me to show up at the surgeon’s office and within a few minutes one of my problems would be over. All of this was happening during the final weeks of my pediatric residency, in 1969.

So I took a long lunch hour, drove to the doctor’s office, and was taken to the operating suite. I reclined on a table where a low curtain was placed across my chest so that I could see the face of the physician above the curtain, but not the operative area. As was usual, the procedure was to be done under local anesthesia, with me fully awake.

As I lay there, helpless and half-nude, the surgeon injected the anesthetic and then leaned toward me and said: “We have nursing students with us today, would you mind if they observed?”

Now you have to remember that I was at the end of a seven-year training program, and along the way perhaps hundreds of patients had been asked this same question so that we students could learn from each one of them. So I was either going to be a hypocrite and refuse, or ignore my misgivings and let the observers in.

“No, I don’t mind at all,” I lied.

Whereupon six young women were ushered into place around the operating table. I could easily look over the curtain and into all of their masked faces as the next minutes passed and I was being rendered (hopefully) infertile. As the minutes ticked off I watched them closely, thinking that as long as no horror or amusement was expressed in any of those twelve blue eyes my little surgery was going as planned.

Soon enough the students were led from the room, the physician tidied things up, and I dressed to go back to finish my workday at the University of Minnesota Hospital. But the memory of the time when the tables were turned is an indelible one.

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These Are The Days, by Van Morrison

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The mild December days continue here in Paradise. Nights get down to the mid-twenties, but daytime temperatures are around fifty. Our valley is snowless, although higher up there is enough of the white stuff to allow the ski areas to open. I am content. Although there used to be something deliciously primal about the feeling of being at home while a blizzard howled outside the window, it is not a feeling that I will be deliberately seeking out any time soon.

Winters as a youth in Minneapolis were something quite different. Plugging engine heaters into the electrical grid to ensure that the cars would start in the mornings. Daily shoveling snow away from the entrances and sidewalks. Patches of ice that hid themselves like highwaymen, waiting for unwary feet to strike them and the human attached to the feet become briefly airborne. Running your car for fifteen minutes just to make it habitable for the drive to school or work.

One below zero day when I was about seventeen, as I was walking to my job at a local grocery store in the early morning dark, I failed to protect my right ear. When I reached the store the ear was had a dead white appearance. As it thawed it became painful, and then it swelled to twice its size and became bright red in color. I didn’t lose any part of the ear, but I learned first hand just what frostbite was all about.

As much as I have loved camping, and have been willing to tolerate all sorts of inclement weather as a part of the experience, I could never work up any enthusiasm for winter camping.

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The idea of coming back to the tent after a day’s activities and then sitting about congealing in freezing weather seemed … not me. I could be accused of that indefensible intellectual position described by Herbert Spencer.

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

Herbert Spencer

It is true. I should not belittle an activity that apparently brings joy to thousands of people. I have done it only once, and that was for a single night. I should definitely stop thinking of those who pursue the practice of winter camping as “not quite right in the head” (to quote my Grandmother Jacobson). While I have my suspicions on the matter, I must accept that they may actually be quite sane, just in their own peculiar way.

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Foodies

jono55

Eons ago I occasionally watched, believe it or not, a television program starring a Catholic priest, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. He cut a dramatic figure in his cape and raiment and was an effective speaker. But it was his frequent use of the saying It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness that I remember best.

These days I have little truck with the Church. Any organization that in more than forty years has still not dealt with the sexual abuse of children committed by its clergy … well … that’s simply too long for the organization to be taken seriously.

However, I loved and still love the saying. Sheen used it to encourage people to take positive action rather than just lament the problems. It’s kind of a restatement of the glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty dichotomy.

That’s what we are trying to do in our work with the organization Indivisible. Light a candle here and there … it’s not that we are not doing our share of creative caterwauling these days as well, but doing just that never leaves us feeling clean, but disturbed instead.

In the past month Robin and I been instrumental in organizing three food collection drives for local food banks. The format is simple. We round up a couple of helpers, and then get permission from a local grocery store to set up a table on the sidewalk in front of of the store. We bring along a bunch of cardboard boxes, make a few signs supporting the task, and then suggest to people as they are going in to buy their groceries that they might pick up a little something for those who have been thrown under the bus by today’s politics.

We print out and give them this shopping list at right to use as a guideline, which some helpful soul created and put on the internet. After several hours we take what we have collected to food banks in Montrose. That’s it. To us, each time is lighting one candle. It’s not heroic, it’s not a big deal, but it’s a small positive step.

Far better would have been for the incompetent clots in Congress to have maintained the SNAP program, but hey … we work from where we are with what we have.

BTW. If you have need for a checklist like this one, go to this website and download the PDF. It is totally free, and very helpful. People seem to appreciate the guidance it provides.

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Hangman, by Tangle Eye

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I went looking for a Thich Nhat Hanh quote for this Christmas, and I found quite a few. As most of you know he was one of the people whose writings have been most instrumental in forming my own approach to Buddhism.

He was very much of the mind that there was no conflict between Buddhism and Christianity, that they complemented one another. He even wrote a book entitled Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers.

Anyway, here’s this year’s quotation from the small man with the big heart. It offers what is definitely a “one size fits all” gift.

If you love someone, the greatest gift that you can make to him or her is your presence. If you are not there, how could you love? And therefore, the most meaningful declaration when you are in love is this: ‘Darling, I am there for you.’ Your presence is very important for him or for her. And that cannot be bought with money.

Thich Nhat Hanh

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We age our pets Poco and Willow by going back through our photos and seeing in what year they first appeared. Poco’s being the eldest and his problems with aging have been in the forefront for quite a while now, and we’ve somewhat ignored the younger and more vigorous Willow.

So it was startling to check last week and find that she had joined our little family as a kitten nine years ago, making her 56 cat years old.

Here is a photo of the pair of them in December of 2016. Willow is now at the long end of middle age!. No wonder she is beginning to take longer naps and wants to be petted more often.

I have the very same issues.

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Not A Bad Man, by Patty Griffin

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The button view today … I Believe In America … some of you might recognize it as the opening line from the movie The Godfather, the accented voice coming at you from a darkened screen.

I chose it because it reflects how I feel today, and have for most of my adult life. Not the grotesquerie that I am living in at present, but an America where millions of people were clumsily moving degree by painful degree toward a just and rational society.

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The Fragrant Bowl

jono55

My cooking skills, which I have now spent many decades perfecting, are … sorta okay. If the subsistence level of chef-craft is a score of 2, and this means that you can reliably serve food that will not sicken your guests, I am perhaps at a 4, maybe a 5 on a good day (on a scale of 10). By the amount of time I spend talking about food preparation you would expect a much higher score, else why am I daring to speak about it at all? My problem is that I truly enjoy messing about in the kitchen, even if the output is not always legendary.

It’s very much like it is with my poetry, or my prose-writing. I can clearly SEE the enormous gap between myself and a Leo Tolstoy or a Robert Frost in those areas, and yet I enjoy doing what I can do very much. So I’m thinking that makes me a chef de peuple, rather than a chef royal. With a smile on my face and a Michelin 0.000005 star to boot.

Remember way back in time when I told you that my favorite meal, the one I would ask for on the eve of my hanging, was one of bread, soup, and cheese? It still is. But not just any old loaf, lump, or bowl, nossir.

I would be looking for a crusty loaf of bread, a crumbly wedge of cheddar or gouda cheese (the kind with a flavor that makes your eyes roll back in your head), and a soup that has already filled the kitchen air with amazing aromas all afternoon and now quivers in the bowl in front of you, with here and there a shred of carrot or potato peeping above the broth?

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I love making soups, especially those that force me to drag out the seasonings that I use so seldom that dust has collected on the caps of their bottles. I can dice and slice and chop all afternoon, watching small piles of onions and potatoes and celery and carrots rise in front of me. If I am careful, there is now a 99% certainty that I can do this prepping without lopping off and adding parts of my own body to the mixtures. (If you come to my home for dinner, just ask me to show you my hands. A complete lack of Band-Aids should reassure you on this subject. You might also count the fingers just to be certain).

My favorite soup recipe? There is no such thing. That honor is divided between so many as to be meaningless. My favorite so far this cooler season? That’s an easier question to answer. Last week I made Hungarian Mushroom Soup . Robin and I spooned up our portions and then shamelessly licked our bowls and spoons clean. It’s that good. I came across the recipe many years back and the soup has never failed to inspire.

I provide here the stovetop directions and the Instant Pot version of them.

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Low Low Low, by James

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I don’t ordinarily just post others’ photographs, but this one caught me and held on. It was taken in Yellowstone National Park by photographer Tom Murphy. The title given was “bison at 35 below.”

What extraordinary animals these are! I have seen them by the thousands driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota over the years, and have stopped hundreds of times to admire them.

(I have no photos of my own like this one, and I never will. Because at 35 below zero I would be quivering indoors and wearing anything warm I could get my hands on.)

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One For My Baby, by Josh White

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Mark Twain was a man of so many parts that I didn’t know about at the time I first read about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Later in life I ran across a bit of his writing so startling that I had trouble reconciling it with the humorist I thought I knew. But Twain was vigorously opposed to war, and wrote The War Prayer, which I now recommend to those of you who know of him only as a teller of amusing tales.

Like I said, it was startling.

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MUSHROOM NEWS

A reminder from the state of California that unless you are well trained in identifying fungal species you should not eat them. Some twenty-odd persons were stricken when they ingested death cap mushrooms, with fatalities.

Amanita phalloides is the most poisonous of all known mushrooms. It is estimated that as little as half a mushroom contains enough toxin to kill an adult human.  It is also the deadliest mushroom worldwide, responsible for 90% of mushroom-related fatalities every year.

Wikipedia: Amanita phalloides

When I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where its forests were a sort of wild mushroom paradise, I learned how to safely recognize a half dozen species that were safe to eat and were delectable as well. There were many more species that were delicious as well but were difficult to pick out from the unsafe ones, and I was advised not to take a chance on them.

My teacher taught me this categorization, which I have kept in mind all these years even though I no longer go wild-gathering for fungi.

  • Safe to eat but inedible
  • Safe to eat and tasty
  • Sickeners – those which made one briefly ill, often with beaucoup vomiting, but not lethal
  • Killers like the death caps, which typically did not make one feel ill for several hours, and by that time one began to have symptoms one’s fate was pretty much sealed

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A group of hikers in New York state decided to combine walking in the Catskill Mountains with ingesting “magic mushrooms” containing psilocybin. They were, need it even be said, young men in their twenties, one of the least cautious subspecies of humans in existence.

Eventually they had to be rescued because they had lost their way. Instead of following the clearly outlined trail, they made the group decision to travel in a straight line back to their car, which included crossing a bridge that one of the members of the party could see but could never get them to (and which did not exist).

This episode falls into the category of Type 2 fun. (It might be Type 3 for some people, depending on how embarrassing it would be to admit what an idiot you’d been.)

  • Type 1: enjoyable both at the moment and in the retelling
  • Type 2: difficult or uncomfortable while you are doing it, but can produce great stories to relate afterward
  • Type 3: no fun when occurring, and you don’t want to talk about it later

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Frankie and Johnny, by Lonnie Donnegan

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The button picture today is of the monarch butterfly, which has become a symbol to many immigrant communities. The butterfly migrates freely between Mexico and the U.S.

The artist has incorporated images of a family moving cautiously within the wings.

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Shinola

jono55

There are days when it is hard to begin to tell tales from my simple sort of life, when each day’s assaults on decency, morality, and just about everything I regard as the glue that holds things together is so incessant, it really has the character of a nightmare. One of those where you know you are still sleeping and hope someone wakes you up pretty soon … .

If it weren’t for my working with our Indivisible group here in Paradise getting out of bed in the morning would be a lot more difficult. But I have regular contact with people who are decent, unselfish, honest, and trustworthy. Their goals are largely the same as mine. To rid our country of this blight and re-establish our democracy. Not to go back to some old golden days, but to set in place a structure that allows and encourages us to move forward in the job of working toward a country which matches its promises.

These folks are willing to take their un-ease and translate it into works.

That’s what I find in our meetings and events. Ordinary people who can tell “shit from Shinola*“ and are not afraid to take some heat in speaking out. Although we live in what has come to be called a “red” city and county, we know that not everything “red” is awful. Not everyone who is a conservative is a bad guy. Among them are those who want exactly what we want but have different views as to the best way to get there. They are not filled with hate and vituperation. They are not grifters. They are not MAGA fools. They are potential allies.

Eventually I hope that these variant streams will join together, recognizing that we have a common enemy in the Cluck regime, and that any progress toward ideals we hold in common means that there is some serious clearing away to do before we can get back to constructive squabbling.

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WARNING! METAPHOR ALERT!

in South Dakota, where I used to live, there is a place where the silt-laden Milk River flows into the Missouri River. Where they meet you can easily see that the two streams are still largely separate because of the difference in the color of the water. But go a few miles downstream and it is now just one unified stream, a bigger and perhaps better Missouri.

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Memphis in the Meantime, by John Hiatt

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At an AA meeting this week, I observed out loud upon the similarities between a typical meeting and a typical Christian church service. A meeting goes like this:

  • We start with the Serenity Prayer
  • Next there are readings from our most important texts, including the Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions, and How It Works
  • We then take up a collection among the members present
  • Now comes a period of 40 minutes of sharing, with testimonies, observations on the meaning of AA in our lives, strategies for staying sober … anything at all that has a connection with alcoholism and/or sobriety.
  • Lastly, we close with a prayer once again.

There is a rule in meetings about something called crosstalk. It is not allowed. Crosstalk means that when one member shares, another then comments on what they have said. To avoid such incidents, which could sometimes be criticisms or attacks, we simply disallow them. Many of our members are shy people, and would avoid sharing if it meant they would be subject to cross-examination. Like most rules, there are occasional gentle breakages, but for the most part groups adhere firmly to this important working principle. It creates a safe space.

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Tip Of My Tongue, by John Hiatt

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The Serenity Prayer, written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is among the wisest I know. Short and sweet it is, but loaded.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Sometimes when I am saying the prayer I smile at the last line because that is where the kicker is, isn’t it? Knowing the difference between what must be accepted and what can and perhaps should be opposed. Oh, my, my. That Reinhold was a caution.

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Thank You Girl, by John Hiatt

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When daughter Kari introduced me to John Hiatt back in the 80s, I’m not sure that the genre “Americana” had been invented yet, but now I have learned that Hiatt’s music is firmly planted in it. What you get when you listen to a Hiatt album is a raspy voice, lyrics that tell a clear story, and some really good guitar.

Today’s tunes are from the album Bring The Family. It’s the album that made me a Hiatt fan.

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More about Shinola.

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