Robin and I have a delightful guest for a few short days, granddaughter Elsa flew in Wednesday night from Washington D.C. Wednesday was a chilly and rainy day here in Paradise. Not a doom and gloomy one, just enough to make us happy to have a non-leaking roof and central heating. Willow the cat, however, took the rain personally and stayed indoors where she complained in her own subtle ways. Thursday morning she was properly indignant when nature’s demands forced her out into the back yard. We used to keep a litter box in the laundry room when we had two cats, but while Poco would use it Willow never got the habit. Ergo = wet feline from time to time.
There is a fair amount of rain that could fall over the next several days, but we will run between the drops and explore our surroundings. Elsa has never been a hard one to entertain. I hope that isn’t because she has low expectations, but I’ve never had the courage to ask.
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Orleans, by David Crosby
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Our national politics are daily becoming more savage, with new lows being hit nearly every day. Our triumphant and omniscient leader, Donald Cluck, is leading the pack by taking umbrage at anything and anybody who isn’t constantly singing his praises. Every day a new video is published showing him walking into a meadow or saluting a helicopter or something else just as daft.
But our man on the way to Hell, Vivek Ramaswamy, has set a low bar that will be hard to beat. Candidate Amy Acton was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather and the courts had to remove her from her home, along with her brother. At the time Amy’s mother sided with the abuser, not her own children.
Now Vivek’s people (may his name be spoken only when one can spit freely afterward) have put out a campaign video where that same warmhearted and pedophile-enabling mother is recorded saying that her daughter has been a terrible liar ever since childhood.
I believe that I will file this episode under “Ugly moments I could easily have skipped.”
My, my, my. The Republican Party has completed the move toward becoming one with that material which one scrapes from the bottom of one’s shoes after walking through the dog exercise park. No difference at all.
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There are rare days when even the composition of one of these perishable posts seems very difficult. Sometimes those reasons are clear, sometimes they are invisible. Such a moment came along this morning. I do not remember the content of all of my dreams, or if I do it is for the briefest of times before they slip away, but I do know that dreams can created a mood, an emotional leftover.
The brain never stops working … most of the time it goes about its business willy-nilly whether we are conscious or not. Buddhists are fond of calling it “the monkey mind,” swinging from tree to tree. The purpose of all this swinging is certainly unclear to me, with all that monkey-swinging, but there is always the possibility that I’m just not wise enough to perceive the meanings.
Let me start with a video created by someone named Mamta B. Herland. It lays claim to surreality and I have no argument there. It is also extraordinary. Something special, and seasonal to boot.
The caption that went along with it reads like this:
Autumn leaves become shapes, gestures, and fragments of bodies, carried by wind and curiosity. In Between Wind and Feet, they gather, stretch, wander, and play, hovering between nature and imagination, chance and choreography. A hand touches; a boot interrupts. Movement becomes stillness, and play becomes awareness. In this uncertain space, the familiar turns strange, asking what we notice, what we overlook, and how one small gesture can change everything. The leaves move, and for a moment, we move with them.
If you want a treat, and an exhibition of what an awfully creative mind and pair of hands can produce, here is a link to her website. Worth a browse, at least it was for me.
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Autumn Leaves, by Edith Piaf
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I’m not sure how many articles I’ve read on the subject of memory, but it’s a bunch. I do remember when I first became a serious student of memory. My children had all left home for college and my first wife had moved on to better things as well. This was a major empty-nest time of life for me. ‘The epiphany came on a holiday when the kids were home on break and we were sitting around after a meal and free-associating.
I would repeatedly say things like “Do you remember when …….” and then insert what I thought had happened back in that particular day. The echoes of my voice would have barely died away when one of the children would exclaim “No, Dad, that’s not right, what happened was ….” and they would tell their version of the same episode.
For a while I would try to rebut what they said, but at long last I withdrew from the fray and began to ponder. In each case, I realized, there were three possibilities. One, that I was correct in what I remembered. Two, that the daughter or son was right. Three, neither of us had it nailed. Along with this came the realization that I would never know the actual truth of the matter, since in most cases there were only two people involved and we had just disagreed on important details. I also realized that it didn’t matter nearly as much as I had previously thought. We were not in court, no one’s life depended on our being in accord.
I do remember mentioning this to those lovely kids of mine on a couple of these occasions. Wasn’t it interesting how different our recollections could be, and what tricks memory played in our minds, and it was what the story meant to the teller that was the most important thing, wasn’t it? Their answer was “No, Dad, you were just wrong.”
At about the same time there was a ferment in the area of child abuse. Research studies were emerging that were in agreement about how to interview the victims, and the specialty of forensic interviewer had emerged. As pediatricians we were cautioned not to take detailed interviews when we were presented with a situation where abuse was suspected or claimed, but to report the case and wait for the specialists to handle that sensitive part of the investigation.
Why? Because study after study showed that the child’s story often changed with each interview, until by the third one it had become highly unreliable. And at each stage of these interactions, the victim believed that they were telling the truth. Part of the explanation was felt to be that the child instinctively wanted to please the interviewer and would sense where the questions were leading. Gradually the child would supply answers that they thought were what the adult wanted to hear. (It’s what kids do.)
What was the lesson once again? Memory is not a rock solid item.
So by now I have told my own stories … how many times? How close were they and are they to what actually happened? I have no idea. When I think about them now, they are more like parables, with a lesson tucked in there for me to learn and remember and share. I’ve lived long enough that some of the characters in those tales are no longer with us, and it is the parable that survives.
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Speaking of storytellers, Bruce Springsteen is one of the best. This one is for all of who have lost someone. Which is a whole lot of people. We’ve gone through looking at the empty chair, seeing the shirt in the closet that isn’t claimed, listening for the absent voice on the phone. Bruce wrote this after the September 11 attacks, but its relevance has no date attached.
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Creation
Every atom that is me Was here from the most ancient time It has been part of something else, somebody else Before
Each drop of water trapped inside each of my cells has traveled from cloud to stream To river, to sea To cloud and back again Has lived in other creatures Nourished animals on the far side of the world
Somewhere in my genes There is matter from my first ancestor Unchanged Their life encodedwith mine Everything they saw, smelled, and feared is there And when the I no longer is Everything the I was Is shared with those who follow
All my elements are borrowed To be returned when I am done with them.
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ScreenshotScreenshot
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One interesting part of this season is that neither Robin nor I have seen any of those v-shaped flocks of geese or cranes flying over, with their wild honking or croaking. Perhaps the mild weather explains it, although our hummingbirds are long since gone from the feeders. Our backyard ash trees have nearly done with dropping their leaves. They were almost the first in the neighborhood to do so when usually they are among the last. July and August were brutal here, with high temperature records falling nearly every week.
But although the ash trees were early this year, they were at their best. The colors of the leaves were spectacular golds and oranges and reds.
We’ve had several short rains since the leaves fell, so they are all still there on the ground, waiting for me. Because there is a five-foot fence around the entire back yard, I can’t count on those leaves blowing over to the neighbor’s property, which would be ideal.
I don’t ordinarily have issues with my back, but just thinking about a rake will give me a twinge, and actually picking one up … never a pretty thing afterward. So I ordinarily use the lawn mower, outfitted with a collection bag. To make this work, everything must be dry as toast. However it transpires, whatever is not picked up this Fall will be there waiting for me in the Spring.
When I was a child and spent summers at my grandfather‘s farm, I was nearly always barefoot. Being barefoot for weeks on a farm meant that the bottoms of our feet (for those of you who have never tried it) became as tough as leather, and it took a very determined thorn or thistle to penetrate that thick skin.
It meant that you could walk a mile on a gravel road to get the mail without complaining. It also meant that your feet were continuously dirty, and vigorous washing each night before you go to bed was essential. Especially when your grandmother was overseeing the operation.
Part of her fastidiousness came from the fact that there are a thousand things on a farm which are moderately unpleasant but easy for a bared foot to step in. Among these are chicken poop, goose poop, duck poop, horse poop, cow poop, and sheep poop.
The remedy for those encounters was to swipe that soiled foot against a nearby patch of grass a couple of times to make it reasonably presentable and then going on with your day.
Shoes? For going into town and for cold or rainy weather. We were feral children in those days. When it came time to return to Minneapolis and rejoin the family we had to resentfully re-learn civilized behavior.
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The original house on Grandfather’s Jacobson’s farm bore more than a superficial resemblance to the ones in the television series Little Home on the Prairie. There was no electricity, meaning the only lighting was provided by candles and oil lamps. The only water available indoors was from a small hand-operated pump at the sink in the kitchen, and that was it. Heat needed in colder weather came from two sources – the big woodstove in the kitchen and a kerosene heater in the tiny living room. Upstairs bedrooms were heated by grate-covered holes in the floor that allowed warm air to flow upward and of its own accord.
All toilet facilities were provided by the privy out behind the lilac bushes. The privy was built as a two-holed structure so that one could have company if desired. Visits to this necessary building were understandably brief in Winter, and little use was made of the reading materials available until Spring arrived.
Bedrooms were small enough that only twin or standard beds could be fit into them. If you tried to insert a queen or king-sized bed into the spaces there would have been no uncovered floor to walk on and the door could not have opened inward. I’m not sure when those larger beds were invented, but there were none in any of the houses that I slept in as a child. Or young adult, for that matter.
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Summers on the farm were fly-time. There were too many barnyard buffets available to completely control them completely, but there were stopgap measures. In the house were fly-strips like the one in the photo. These were celluloid strips covered with something very sticky and toxic to the flies. You hung them from the ceiling and did not throw one away until it was pretty much filled with flies. This meant that a long string of insect corpses was in full view over the dining table at all times.
While at first they might be jarring to tender sensibilities, after a while most of us ignored them entirely.
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Stranger, by Kris Kristofferson
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Saturday the local chapter of Indivisible put on a peaceful demonstration as part of a nationwide event. Ours was focussed on early voting. Robin and I operated a photo booth as our contribution to the festivities. The weather cooperated beautifully, with sunny and blue October skies and temperatures in the mid sixties. As part of the event the Indivisible membership walked half a block to the only ballot box in town and inserted our ballots.
There is so much hope in all of these proceedings. Nearly all of it is unspoken, as if we could jinx a change for the better by talking about it. There is also anger and resolve and the knowledge that our politicians have failed us so badly in the past several years that nothing can be taken for granted. If this November’s elections are successful in turning this awful tide around, it will be a new world for elected officials for a long time. We will actually expect them to do what they promise, and they are not used to being held to such a standard.
When one lives in a developing nightmare a lot of things change in one’s perspective. For me personally, I have a profound lack of trust in so many of our institutions. Actually, all of them, when it comes to governance. We have an executive branch that is so corrupt they don’t even try to hide it any more. We have a Congress where half have attached themselves to a President who is … how about unworthy in every respect? The other half sleepwalked into the present situation acting as if the wolf at the door was only a pup.
The Supreme Court has been the real shocker, for me. To have it become no more than a partisan tool, subservient to the rest of the kakistocracy … I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. I am in awe at the courage of the three honorable members, who are all women, and wonder how they face each day going to work with the Repulsive Six. Surely they must be depressed some days, saddened to their cores.
And the last thing. To have learned how large the faction of our own populace is that will accept a fascist government, even welcome it. Where do we start, even if the present elections go in a positive direction? For myself, I have to think about it as they teach in AA. You don’t look at the monstrous mess and try to make a plan for the rest of your life, which can be completely overwhelming. You deal with one day at a time. Head up and nose to the wind and out the door. Got a moral compass? Dig it out because you will need to carry it with you every darn day for a long time.
What did that guy Lao-Tse say, again? That a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? Really good idea.
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It will be a long road forward, and an uncertain one. It will take a lot of hands and hearts and courage and being steadfast. Pronouns like we and us will have to largely replace I and me to make it work. Can we do it ? If we want to badly enough, I believe so.
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Never Going Back, by Phoebe Bridgers
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The title of today’s post is borrowed from Max Shulman’s book of the same name. He, in turn, borrowed those four words from the first two lines of the poem The Barefoot Boy, by John Greenleaf Whittier.
Blessings on thee, little man, Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
If the great can pilfer from the great, I believe that it is no major sin when a lowly writer like myself does the same thing, especially if I admit the theft. Surely it is only a misdemeanor at that point. Don’t judge me.
Maybe it’s because these days contain so much of ugly, but this morning I decided to meander back to another dreadful time in America. The Civil War, to be precise. I used as my guide one of those musical albums where the talents of many artists are brought together to tell a tale. This one is called Dark River, Songs of the Civil War Era.
Hard Times, by Drew Nelson
It’s a beauty. That is if you like mournful in hefty doses. Lots of stories of comings and goings, especially goings, because the War Between the States was a nasty piece of business.
The Streets of Laredo, by Slaid Cleaves
The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease. Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13–43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs. As McPherson notes, the war’s “cost in American lives was as great as in all of the nation’s other wars combined through Vietnam.”
These are not “war songs” specifically, but more reflect a time in our history when life could be especially hard and was often short. As mentioned in the quote above, two-thirds of the Civil Was soldiers that perished were not killed by bullets, but disease.
Red River Valley, by James McMurtry
There, I’m starting to feel better already. I am ready to face today whatever CNN scrapes up to throw at me.
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It was Indigenous People’s Day this week. Sort of a weak tribute, when you think about it, but at least the day was rescued from the clutches of the infamous Christopher Columbus. But giving such a diverse and important group of people one day and feeling that we’ve done our best … nope.
Twenty years ago Morgan Freeman had this to say about Black History Month when interviewed by Mike Wallace. I get his point. And the Indigenous Peoples get not a month but only one day.
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Here’s a piece of music by a group named Blackfoot, most of whose members are Native American. This song is definitely not one of those sung the night before George Custer and his troops came across the ridge at the Little Bighorn. Different vibe entirely.
Train, Train
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About half of the letters I send to the editors of our local paper are never published. I think this shows a commendably high standard on their part. They are sent in electronically and on more than one occasion I have regretted pushing the “send” button almost immediately after doing so. My writing does not always hit it out of the park.
But once in a great while, I feel that one of my small essays would have received perhaps a C+ grade back in high school. The following was one of the missives that was published:
*
The upcoming election is crucial for America. This choice is bigger than the political group we belong to, as we must now choose between fascism and democracy. I believe that most of us who are living in Montrose County know that what has been going on in Washington, DC is an aberration, a corruption. Scores of our senators and representatives have completely forgotten that they were sent to serve their country.
We can’t fix everything in one midterm election, but we can begin the process.The once great Republican Party has been taken over by its most brutal faction, which has produced a government that is failing us. What needs to do be done is to vote out many of the present generation of Republicans. MAGA has shown that it can wreck but is incapable of governing.
I am suggesting that if you are a Republican, this one time you vote against your party. That you send a very clear message to party leaders that you want your leaders to be chosen from among the best of you, rather than the worst.
If you are a Democrat, perhaps the choices are less stark, but you also have been failed by your leaders, or we would not be in the perilous state that we are. Chose among the candidates who remember that most Americans are not living lives of comfort and ease, but are struggling against unfair social and economic systems.
There are models we might learn from as a start. In traditional Cheyenne culture, becoming a chief meant taking on profound spiritual, moral, and social obligations. Rather than gaining power or authority to command others, a newly elected peace chief entering the traditional Council of Forty-four was expected to transition into a model of selflessness, peace, and generosity.A chief was expected to look after the poorest members of the tribe, often giving away his own food, blankets, and horses, until he and his family had the least of anyone in the camp.
I would ask that our representatives remember that they are elected to serve and not to self-aggrandize or enrich themselves. We must show them that when they forget this, we will remind them forcefully of their duties.
Let’s all get together and vote out those who have failed us. Let’s clean up America.
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Our home is surrounded by a board fence about five feet high. Keeps out the skunks and dogs (but not the raccoons). Until this year I never made use of its utility as an area for posting political statements, but these are special times. I suspect that I am not making a lot of new friends in the neighborhood, but as MAGA folks meander down the public path they can’t avoid being assailed and their walk tainted.
If I cannot strike a blow for freedom, I can at the very least annoy.
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At a Cluck rally this past week in Syracuse, one senior citizen made the news by getting herself tossed out of the gathering. During her expulsion she flipped the bird at someone more than once, and in this video it doesn’t take an expert lip-reader to see what she is saying to the jeering crowd.
And then I ran across an image of another older citizen being taken out of a rally while she flipped a double bird at the crowd. A stirring image, one to warm the heart of any liberal viewer. Problem is that this lovely photo isn’t real. It’s an AI creation. But it made it to my button of the week anyway because I liked it.
Recently, president Cluck chose Grand Island, Nebraska as the location for a rally where he became once again momentarily notorious for saying that he really wouldn’t mind it too much if Iran would bomb Los Angeles and San Diego. It would be worth the loss of those two cities and the people in them just to have kept our country safe. (The irony, of course, is that the biggest threat to this country was standing at the podium at the time)
The videos of his performance at that rally have shown the crowd behind him hooting and hollering and clapping for such a … dunno … psychotic? … statement.
Many of the comments that I’ve seen on those video clips have been very disparaging toward Nebraska and its citizens. Some of those comments have made it pretty obvious that the writer had never been to Nebraska, and probably couldn’t even find it on a map. Making a judgment about the entire population of a state based on the sort of people who would attend a Cluck rally is a hazardous thing to do. MAGA doesn’t think and behave like most other people you might know.
I like Nebraska, and I like the people that I’ve met there. I lived there for two years during my time of service in the United States Air Force, when I was stationed at Offutt AFB in Bellevue NE. Later, when Robin and I were living in Yankton, South Dakota, it was only a short drive across a Missouri River bridge to that fine state.
But there’s one part of Nebraska that I have a special affinity for, and that is the western Sandhills. From the first time that I saw them, which was on a motorcycle trip, I have looked forward to every opportunity to go back and revisit them. When you look out at those areas, what you see is an undulating landscape with hills and ridges. Everything is softness. All the gentle curves are soft. Mostly they are grasslands with the occasional tree here and there. If you take a shovel and dig down through the sod, you find only sand. This is because they are essentially a huge area of dunes covering 20,000 square miles that became completely covered and stabilized by grass.
(The next two paragraphs are information found for me by one of my new best friends, Chad GPT. I edited and reshaped the text a bit but it was Chad’s research and I want to give him credit.)
The Nebraska Sandhills formed through a combination of ancient mountain erosion, river deposition, and wind action, followed by grassland stabilization. Millions of years ago, erosion and glacial action in the Rocky Mountains washed huge amounts of sand, gravel, and silt eastward via ancient rivers and streams onto the Great Plains. During and after the Pleistocene Epoch, as the climate grew drier and riverbeds dried up, strong prevailing winds picked up the loose quartz sand and swept it across the landscape.
The wind sculpted the sand into massive rolling dunes—some reaching up to 400 feet high and 20 miles long. As the climate shifted and precipitation increased, native prairie grasses and bunchgrasses colonized the dunes. Their roots anchored the sand, turning the area into the largest grass-stabilized sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere. The region sits directly on top of the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which brings water close to the surface in low-lying valleys between the dunes, creating thousands of small lakes, wetlands, and wet meadows.
The sandhills roll away toward the sun
Low prehistoric dunes enclosed in grass
So like a woman’s body
And my eyes stare all indecently
I wrote that short poem back in the 1980s, and you can tell a couple of things by reading it. The first is that I have many things to learn about writing poetry. The second is that my hormones might have been flowing at quite a different level back then than they are at the present time.
The Sandhills are a place perfect for the melancolic. The grandeur, and there is grandeur, is a quiet sort. There’s a saying out there that Nebraska is not for everyone, and that’s certainly true. But if you are one of those people whose disposition is matched to this particular prairie landscape, it’s like that line in a John Denver song, “Coming home to a place you’ve never been before.”
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Tumbling Tumbleweeds, by Leo Kottke
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Here is a slice of what passes for humor in the Midwest. This is a picture of a University of Nebraska football team t-shirt.
Question: What does the “N” stand for?
Answer: Nowledge
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From early childhood I heard renditions of folk songs that originated in the fabled West. One of the lovelier ones was The Colorado Trail. Its themes of loneliness and people left behind seemed a perfect fit to what my imagined life of the cowboy was.
The Colorado Trail is a traditional American cowboy song, collected and published in 1927 byCarl Sandburg in his AmericanSongbag. Sandburg says that he learned the song from Dr. T. L. Chapman, of Duluth, Minnesota, who heard it from a badly injured cowboy being treated in his hospital. The cowboy sang it, and many others, to an audience of patients in his ward.
The trail in the song was a cattle route that branched off from the main Western Trail in southern Oklahoma, heading northwest to Colorado. It has no relation to today’s Colorado Trail, which is a hiking trail completely within the state of Colorado.
The American Songbag version included only a single short verse; most who have recorded it since have added verses of their own.
Wikipedia: The Colorado Trail song
There are scores, maybe hundreds of recorded versions of the song, and although the lyrics vary quite a bit, that wistful chorus remains the same in most of them.
Weep all ye little rains
Wail, winds, wail
All along, along, along the Colorado trail
The Colorado Trail, by Eliza Gilkyson
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My gorge rises a bit every day. As each outrage du jour comes down on us from our elected leaders, there are some I can let slide and some that are more difficult to overlook. Some are special.
When our president suggests that if Iran wanted somewhere to bomb they could have San Diego and Los Angeles as far as he was concerned, I don’t hear just another of his ugly utterings, I hear treason.
When our Secretary of War schedules streaming the execution of a criminal by firing squad … televising it … I realize how thin the line is between us and barbarity, and that this is a clear step across that line.
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(A colleague of mine once observed that poets are the last truth-tellers. This may not be the case as he was frequently wrong about a lot of things, but I think there is a fleck of truth in this particular statement. I cannot remember how I got to this prose poem by Franny Choi, and I’m not even sure that I understand it, but I liked it at first reading)
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
By Franny Choi
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left— of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light. Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain; the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees, drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled, the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
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(All of my ancestors were Norwegian, or so I have been told.)
Sweden and Norway were playing a soccer match. About 20 minutes into the game a train rolled by the field and blew its whistle. The Swedes thought it was half time and left the field. The Norwegians scored 5 minutes later.
Robin and I are watching The Forsyte Saga these days, on PBS. In one of the episodes there is a funeral for an elder of the family, and one of the characters reads a few lines at graveside that caught me like a thornbranch hooking my shirt on a brambly path. I looked the words up, and found (just like nearly every other damn time I look anything up) that they were William Shakespeare’s words.
What is with that guy, anyhow? He was only fifty-two years old when he died, and yet he pretty much wrote the dialogue for the English-speaking world … or does it just seem that way?
But to get on with things. The words came from Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, and I believe it is the most beautiful funeral oration I’ve heard or read. Here is the passage in its entirety.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke; Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust.Margaret
Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finish’d joy and moan; All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownèd be thy grave!
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Found this graphic this past week. If you’ve ever lived witha cat, you know the truth of it.
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When I first ran across Margaret Atwood’s famous quote I thought to myself – One more exaggeration written by yet another cranky virago. But as I thought longer about those 17 words, I came to realize how reflective they were of the reality that women have always faced in America.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Margaret Atwood, 1982.
That was a long time ago, when I was a very ignorant young man. I am now a very ignorant old man, but in this one instance, at least, I have made some progress. That is, if learning time after time what horrors members of my gender are capable of can be called progress.
This past week all of this sordid knowledge has been brought up again by the ugliness of the Cornell University story, where a young woman alleged being raped repeatedly by many men over several hours at a fraternity party. The university’s mishandling of its investigation is being mapped daily in the news, and the identities of “The Cornell Seven” are being spread across the public landscape. The whole thing is scandalous and awful in every respect.
I don’t pretend to know the absolute truth of this story, which is right now still buried in conflicting testimonies, perhaps that will become apparent once the sensationalism subsides. But if you ask me do I believe this young woman, that it could have happened just the way she tells it? Sadly, I do.
No part of sexual violence against women is acceptable, nor should it be normalized in any way. There is no place for jokes, sideways glances, or snickering. Besides the physical attack, there is also harm done to the victim’s spirit, which may recover only imperfectly if it ever does.
(When I used the word “normalized” above, I was thinking at that moment about how a rapist, serial sexual predator, and probable pedophile has been elected president of our country. Twice. In a sane world that could not have happened.)
But why listen to my vapid whimperings, when you can listen to someone who doesn’t have to try to imagine how it feels. For those of you who don’t know her, I introduce you to JoJo from Jerz. There is a video of a song at the end of her piece that was very moving, but is so graphically done that it is a hard watch.
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[I have told the following story here before, but it seems especially appropriate this week]
There was a story that Thich Nhat Hanh told at a retreat Robin and I attended. After the Vietnamese war, he received many reports about refugees fleeing Vietnam by boat. One report was of a young girl—twelve years old—who was raped by a pirate and who then threw herself into the sea, where she drowned. Her father was also reportedly thrown overboard and drowned when he tried to intervene.
What makes the story memorable is what Thích Nhất Hạnh did with it. He said his first reaction was intense anger at the pirate. But during meditation he imagined being born into the pirate’s life: an impoverished fishing family on the Thai coast, without education or opportunities, growing up amid generations of poverty. He came to see that, had he been born under those same circumstances, he himself might have become the pirate.
That realization became the basis for his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names.” In the poem, he identifies himself both with the suffering refugee girl and with the pirate whose heart had never learned compassion.
The point wasn’t to excuse the pirate’s terrible act, but to try to understand the conditions that can produce both victims and perpetrators—and therefore to find a way to prevent such suffering. Until we find that way we will be forever describing episodes.
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Please Call Me by My True Names
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow — even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
Istill arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.
Let’s begin with a little bit of clangor, shall we? If a composer were to write any music dealing with these times, they would have to really reach into their bag of tricks. Instead of suggesting birdsong or pastoral settings or even cannon fire, they would have to come up with ideas for:
what does treachery sound like?
which instruments can really play cowardly the best?
we need cellists who can use their instruments to evoke the whine, the pule, and the obfuscation
There would be titles like Concerto for Disbelief and Governmental Cacophony in D Major and The Fascist Songbook
What challenges the classicists would face. But hey, rock and roll is a different animal. There have always been strong threads of anger running through its fabric.
Let’s watch an example, as Tom Morello plays Soldier in the Army of Love on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Tom used to be in the group Rage Against the Machine, which you might have surmised from the name was not a chamber orchestra.
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The graphic below tells a truth. There are a lot of different chickens coming home to roost today because of the scandalous policies of Cluck and his plaything, the Republican Party. Some of those chickens involve American farmers and ranchers, who voted pretty much overwhelmingly for Cluck every chance they got, and now are finding themselves in a real pickle.
Many editorial writers are exultant about this, and happy to tell those disgruntled rural voters Nyaa Nyaa, we told you so. How ya like it now, crybaby? I haven’t joined them, because this is not a new thing. It is a case of same old, same old.
For reasons inexplicable, this population group has voted Republican forever, even though almost without exception they have done better financially during Democratic administrations. They believe that Democrats are unreliable when it comes to the economy but the reality that the national debt routinely skyrockets when the GOP is in charge of things, and improves when they are not seems beyond them.
No surprises here. The difference today is that we’re all in the shitter together now.
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I’ve made a couple of discoveries just this week. The first is the existence in the lovely country of Canada of Orange Shirt Day.
Orange Shirt Day is observed annually on September 30 to honor Indigenous children who survived residential and boarding schools and to remember those who did not return.
If you do an internet search on the subject you will find that their slogan is “Every Child Matters,” and that there is a veritable storehouse out there of beautiful art found on tee-shirts and posters dealing with this emotionally charged subject.
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I chose these three images as examples, but there were scores more that I could have selected. In the United States we had our own residential and boarding schools for indigenous children with their uniformly sad and sometimes horrific stories.
Of course every child matters. The words roll off the tongue with almost no effort. And yet, as a society we don’t always behave as if we believed that at all. Children do not vote. So when their food supplies are taken away as in the SNAP program cutbacks, they depend on grownups to hold the politicians accountable.
When we look at the variations in educational programs available to children across the country, the glaring advantages for the children of the wealthy stand out like an endless row of sore thumbs. Kids once again depend on grownups to help bring some sort of fairness out of what are today scandalously unbalanced resources. But grown-ups are always in short supply. 
The Orange Shirt Society was established in 2015 to:
Support Indian residential school reconciliation
Create awareness of the individual, family, and community intergenerational impacts of Indian residential schools through Orange Shirt Society activities
Create awareness of the concept of “Every Child Matters”
What was the other discovery? There is a Substack site called Revive Your Roar. The author combines poetry and beautiful illustrations and video to help us through … you remember the phrase “the fog of war?” Well it may be that this writing and artwork can help us navigate the fog of life.
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In 1969, the year I began my two-tear stretch of military service, a book called The Peter Principle was published, and for a while it was on every book club’s reading list.
The Peter Principle stated that in a hierarchical organization, employees tend to be promoted until they reach a level where they are now incompetent, and they stay there. Often severely impeding progress.
When this happens, one of the ways of “fixing” the problem is the lateral arabesque, a pseudo-promotion where an underperforming or incompetent employee is moved sideways out of the way, often given a longer, more impressive job title and fewer meaningful responsibilities. It feels like a promotion to the employee and outsiders, but it is actually a transfer from one unproductive or isolated position to another. But now they are out of the way and more capable people can be placed in their former position.
Being alert and relatively unhappy at being forced to be in uniform, I was able to find examples of the Peter Principle all over the hospital. (I need to add that there were also many, many examples of men and women who were doing exceptional work, but a cranky draftee is apt to emphasize the negative, and I did just that).
But now, in 2026, I realize that this entire country has been Peter Principledto a fare-thee-well. Our entire executive branch is a testimony to the book’s main point. We have a confluence of incompetents and evildoers begging for something to be done. What we desperately need is to lateral arabesque the bejaabbers out of the whole lot.
My tentative plan involves sending this disreputable cohort to an uninhabited island. (I like islands because they are so tidy a way to isolate a problem. Remember Napoleon and Elba?) But I digress. These miscreants would be fed, housed, clothed, and allowed to live out their mean-spirited lives in something resembling comfort. At least as much as one could find with limited electricity and very structured communication with the outside world.
On arrival they would be asked to build their own privies, and provided the tools and materials to do the job.
They would all be given extravagant titles, and a local newspaper would trumpet even the tiniest accomplishment of theirs in order to appease their very large egos. But leave the island … nope. It would be truly a matter of national security, as it is now.
Rainy morning, gray September skies, cat comes in all indignant with wet fur along her back. She takes the weather even more personally than I do, uttering little kitty curses (silently, but I can see them in her eyes) when the rain or wind come up and find her in her outdoor hideouts.
She has her schedules, and god forbid external circumstances force her to alter them. She’s a bit like me in that. It’s one of the reasons that when we travel I try to avoid staying in other people’s homes. I appreciate the offers, and I am certainly aware of the economies involved, but I’d rather stay with strangers than friends. That way I can be the oddball slob that is my destiny without exciting comment, at least comment that reaches me.
If I want to hang out in a bathrobe until noon I have no one that I need to answer to but Robin, and she has given up on changing that aspect of my behavior (we all choose which battles to fight, and which to let slide, don’t we?)
Anyway, today we are traveling to Grand Junction for a doctor’s appointment, and tonight I will sleep in my own bed, having followed my idiosyncratic list of things to do. Life is good.
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Acony Bell, by Gillian Welch
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These days we have a three-member Supreme Court and a six-member panel of Disgraced Sycophants. One can hope for change. Congress gave them lifetime appointments, Congress can take them away.
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One of my favorite hot beverages these days is the Mexican mocha. That bit of cayenne in the mix is just the right thing on chilly mornings. Most of our local coffee shops offer it … some have a heavier hand with the pepper than others, but none I’ve sampled so far have exceeded the bounds of propriety. It is almost tasty enough to be sinful, and falls just short of too good for ordinary mortals.
But if one did overdo this good thing, I can perfectly understand why the gods might step in with some colorful punishment as they used to do in the good old Greek mythology days. Perhaps something like being strapped to a huge thistle along a busy road for eternity, where passersby were encouraged to pat your face with a small cayenne-saturated pillow.
Maybe this is too much … dunno … not being Greek and all.
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We went to an Indivisible potluck social gathering on Friday. It was pretty well attended, and the participants went to varying amounts of effort in bringing something to eat and to share. Some showed up with a few muffins from the grocery store, one lady brought a handful of black grapes.
The piéce de resistance was a Tater Tot Casserole, from a recipe published by Senator Amy Klobuchar, presently a candidate for governor of the state of Minnesota.
It was superb. For a native of the Midwest, especially a youthful frequenter of Lutheran Church basement suppers, it was a plateful of blissfully crunchy comfort food.
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A bite transports the chewer to another time and place, much as a psychedelic agent might, often one that is populated by friends and relatives who have since traveled to other dimensions. Definitely mood-altering. Dangerously habit-forming.
In Minnesota, consuming too much of this casserole is felt to impair driving abilities, and should one be stopped on the way home from the church supper, they should be prepared to be asked where those stains on the front of their shirt came from and then asked to walk a straight line.
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After typing the entry above, I realized that much of the civilized world might not know what a tater tot is. They are small barrel-shaped chunks of potato scraps that are mixed with flour or cornstarch, then seasoned with salt, onion powder, and other spices. They are then baked or french-fried to make them crispy.
They were invented in 1953 by F. Nephi Grigg and Golden Grigg, the founders of the Ore-Ida potato company, as a clever way to use up leftover potato scraps from french-fry production, instead of throwing them away.
Stuff to be thrown away + ingenuity = greasy delightfulness
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All My Relations, by Ulali
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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
I followed a piece of clickbait and arrived at this now classic quotation … from a character in a television series, no less. But as I chew on it and turn it around in my mind I have to agree with Omar Little. A lot of truth in this statement.
You come at the king, you best not miss.
Omar Little (The Wire television series)
There is a lot riding on the upcoming midterm elections, and more than a few shots are being taken at the king, who need not be named here. Those who are involved at even the most peripheral level (like moi) know that to effect change people need to stick their heads up to protest the madness of our version of King George, and we do what we believe needs doing.
Off I go to the domestic wars, waving my flags and holding up my signs. I do have a strong sense of regret in how long I took America for granted, believing that somehow it was too great an idea to ever fail completely. What I’ve learned in these perilous days is that it always depended on a mutual agreement that there was a Book of Rules to guide us all. But when someone or some group throws out the entire book we find ourselves in the mess we’re in now.
So … we are coming at the king …
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Yesterday Robin and I attended an Indivisible meeting, planning for No Kings events on October 17. If you are not involved in such matters, you may not know that there are serious obstacles to political protest, or at least to certain varieties. In our community, getting a permit to have an outdoor political gathering above a certain size in a public space requires a permit from the City of Montrose. Part of the process of acquiring such a permit is showing that you have obtained liability insurance. No insurance = no permit, no exceptions.
The problem is that no insurance company is available to us locally any longer. They have all removed themselves from that particular game, rather than even try to figure out what they should charge. So we have street corners and public sidewalks to occupy, but parks and plazas are off limits.
If any group was to take the next step, to take to the streets and parks and places of power without getting permission, as was done in the antiwar protests and the civil rights movement, that’s another matter entirely. That’s when people start going to jail, suffering fines, and there is the potential for physical injury.
But that is not where today’s protests are. We still believe in that Book of Rules mentioned above, and are working toward bringing it back to the center of our communities, where it belongs. But there is no doubt that the present atmosphere is stifling, and the opportunities narrowed.
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Periodically my scrambled bag o’ memories will serve me up a tidbit for no apparent reason. Such was the case this week when the song Lucky Old Sun, by Frankie Laine, became my earworm one morning. At one time in my life I was a big fan of his, and I can easily recall the lyrics to several of his tunes, even at this distance of time.
That Lucky Old Sun, by Frankie Laine
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Having heard that the leaves were turning beautifully at higher altitudes, Robin and I drove up to Silverton this week, and we were not disappointed. Not only were the leaves gorgeous, but there was a dusting of snow on the mountaintops along the way. Coming out of Silverton there was an electronic billboard warning drivers to be aware of “Leaf Peepers” on the road. I guess that’s what Robin and I were, all right.
Sighhhh … how tragic, to have become so uncool. A Leaf Peeper … my god.
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I’ve just completed a little project that has needed doing for a long time. Putting down on paper everything that I do as a part of the partnership of Robin and Jon Ltd. When you are together for a long time as a couple, many small day to day jobs get assigned to one person or another, and eventually there is the possibility that the right hand doesn’t even know all the things that the left hand does. And vice versa.
So I’ve created a three-ring binder that is essentially my “job description,” just in case one day I should slip on a wet patch at City Market and take a header into a stack of canned goods. This tedious collection has pages containing information like where do I keep the cashbox that holds the money collected as treasurer of our local AA group? And just as important, where have I hidden the key to it?
Stuff like that. Stuff that could annoy the very hell out of Robin if I should ever take my leave without proper ceremony. Now when I say that I’ve completed this project, almost certainly I have not, and other examples of these micro-responsibilities will pop into mind later that need to be added. But like the Tao Te Ching says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
A thunderstorm wakes me at 3 am. I am out of bed and padding to the door before the second sonic barrage arrives. I don’t want to miss one of these awesome displays where our atmosphere reveals, just for a few moments, what it can do. Power unimaginable. Those streaks of color across the clouds … wait … how many seconds before the sound comes? … we can calculate distances between us and the lightning bolts.
To calculate the distance to a storm, use the Flash to Bang Method by counting the seconds between seeing a lightning flash and hearing the thunder, then dividing by 5 for miles or 3 for kilometers.
Miles away means safety, right? Only relative, I’ve learned. One summer day about twenty years ago two young men were swimming at a beach near Yankton, South Dakota, only half a mile from our home. In the western distance one could see a storm brewing, with occasional bright flashes in darker clouds. Out of that distance a lightning bolt reached out and found one of these boys and killed him. The sky above them was not in any way threatening.
That episode has changed my behavior ever since. Where I used to wait in the boat and keep fishing until the storm was nearly upon me, now I head for shore at first rumble. My new goal is to never be on the water and offering a lightning bolt a place to call home. It’s a quirk of mine.
But standing in my kitchen, watching this drama through an open door while being warm and dry is exciting, even thrilling. I believe that I am safe here, but if I am wrong and an errant band of electricity comes my way through the screen door, I will never know, will I? Like you don’t hear the bullet that kills you.
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Stormy Weather, by Billie Holiday
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This morning an earnest and beefy guy faced a video camera and told us that if the price of diesel doesn’t come down by October 1, all hell will break loose in the trucking industry … i.e, a general strike of sorts. He told his audience that we will find ourselves in fourteen kinds of deep doo-doo if that happens.
I’m sorry for us if that happens, but if he was looking for my sympathy for his personal plight he missed it by several hundred yards. The numbers show that roughly 75% of truckers voted for Trump in 2024. Those who voted for an idiot madman and expected something other than what they are getting … dumb as fence posts, the lot of them.
The next video that popped up into my feed was of a young woman who told us about the “Fifty Things to Stock Up On Before the Coming Collapse of Damn Near Everything.” I think that I won’t be giving away any secrets when I tell you that rice and beans were major players in her list of foods to hoard.
So today got off to a rousing start, and when my heart rate came down far enough that I trusted myself to operate a toaster, I made my breakfast.
I really have to be more careful when choosing what to watch early in the day, when I am so much more vulnerable.
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Our local weather couldn’t be sweeter at the moment. We finished up a week where each day some rain fell onto parched Montrose County. Now the days are in the 70s, the nights in the 40s, and life is good. Daughter Amy came for a visit over the weekend and told us that the leaves have turned color above 8500 feet and are probably at their peak right now. Robin and I will wander up there in a couple of days to check on things. Our dominant colors are gold and yellow and everything else in that part of the palette. Some of the other shades are named amber, gamboge, aureolin, maize, lemon, mustard, sunflower, flax, and saffron.
Sometimes the beauty of the gold leaves will just make your heart ache, especially at sunset when there are those gorgeous red tints in the light.
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Autumn Leaves, by Eva Cassidy
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Poor Cluck, whenever he is held up in comparison with Mark Carney of Canada. Carney being the immaculately dressed manifestation of everything you ever wanted in a leader. Intelligent, thoughtful, canny, able to actually plan ahead. He can walk a straight line, speak eloquently, and I have seen no mention that a repulsive odor follows him wherever he wanders.
Cluck, on the other hand, has dragged us into a fetid swamp and neither he nor any of his Forty Thieves show any signs of having the faintest idea about how to get us out of it. (A swamp that Cluck created in toto, by the way.)
Oh, for the golden days of yesteryear, when the worst we had to worry about were vicuña coats, occasional adultery, and exotic dancers jumping into the Tidal Pool. In those cases we knew what to do … shake our finger at them, scold them, forgive them, and then get back to the messy business of government.
There were plenty of fools in those days, but fewer blatant criminals.
You know, the real danger for me in watching a Beth Hart video is that it stirs something primal, and reminds me that deep in that cerebral pudding I call my mind there is still a certifiable crazy person who could make his appearance at any moment. Some of her live performances leap straight over the boundaries of gentility and taste, but even then I appreciate her talent, her voice, her daring. She seems a woman of great appetites, a freight train of id coming one’s way.
What’s not to like?
Not too many artists truly give it all on stage, thinking that prudence requires that they hold something back, keep something in reserve, so as to be able to fight another day. Beth Hart is … how to say it … highly imprudent at times. If you go seeking other videos you will see that the one I offer is rather tame.
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The Supreme Court finally said that Cluck cannot screw around with the mail-in ballots for this mid-term election. In ordinary times seeing that august body actually do their job in a nonpartisan manner would not even be worth mentioning.
I don’t know what to say about this Supreme Court. Most of the time the fascist-sympathizing six members are little more than a waste of space and are almost impossible to differentiate from the rest of the toadies that compete for an open patch to kiss on the buttocks of this disreputable man.
Maybe they figured that this was just too much. That if they didn’t finally do the right thing that bags of garbage and dog feces would soon be showing up on their manicured lawns. Or maybe somebody sprinkled fairy dust into their chambers which has convinced them to finally re-read that little book called the Constitution and see where their duties lie.
Who knows. I am grateful for every drop of reasonable that flows from this Court. Such drops are rare indeed.
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I am going to try to discipline myself by republishing no more than three political cartoons at a time in this blog. It’s not easy. Those cartoonists minds are soooo fertile.
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George Booth died four years ago, and I miss him. I’m not sure that I’ve seen every cartoon that he every composed, but it’s not because I haven’t tried. His sense of the bizarre and comic in everyday life is nearly perfectly matched to my own. The major difference between us is that only one of us has actual talent. Any way, it’s been years since I posted one of his drawings here, and this morning I picked this classic.
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For me, this cartoon provided one of those nearly falling off my chair while laughing moments. The reason … I have met those guys more than once, in person, aeons ago. Old souls who were members of a genre known in Minnesota as thebachelor farmer. And I can hear them having the conversation above while oscillating in a creaky wooden rocker on a creaky wooden porch.
When I was in high school our family lived down the road from the Boettcher Brothers, who lived in a ramshackle house that had long ago lost the last flecks of paint from its siding, making it the uniform gray-brown color of the classic haunted house.
They were getting on in years and when they were out and about they would be wearing what seemed like the same pair of worn bib overalls and straw hats. No slaves to fashion they.
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“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body. It is something that you absolutely need to survive.”
There was a poignancy in the phone call, as one woman phoned to let another know that she was not going to make the AA meeting later that day. There were at least two reasons to make the call, one is that both women were seniors with health problems, and the other is that both are alcoholics. Even after decades of sobriety the enlightened former addict knows how thin the protective curtain is between them and relapse. They have seen old friends walk back through that curtain and disappear. Silent battlefields.
It’s a simple act, almost a reflex. To avoid causing worry they pick up the phone and make the call. It’s what comrades do.
Let’s see now. For years doomsayers have been telling us that artificial intelligence will kill us off, enslave us, perhaps keep a small group of us around to do their dirty work … nothing but bad news. For years they’ve been trying to scare the pants off of us, and in my case, largely succeeding.
Trouble was, I didn’t know how to gauge the truth of the stories that were coming at me. Was this the real thing, like climate change, or was it like those cults that see the end of the world coming on Tuesday and then gather in an apartment in Cleveland to dress up and take poison together?
My problem was that if I really thought that my computer was going to kill me I would, by God, turn it off. There’s a button right there on the keyboard to do just that. And then I would unplug it from the wall and drive a wooden stake straight through its motherboard.
It wasn’t until data centers came along with their energy consumption and pollution and noise and other disruptions that we got serious about the matter. These days being opposed to unregulated growth of AI is about the only truly bipartisan topic that there is. So why not pull the plug until we can figure it out? But then these stories started coming out about how little AI critters keep getting out of the labs and hacking the supposedly unhackable in other labs.
The ones we’ve heard about have been mischief-makers rather than apocalyptic instruments, but if I were an AI monster that’s what I would get the humans to say.
So are there other stories to tell? Worse ones? Horror stories to tell around campfires and then we’d all go out trembling into the woods to bury our smartphones so that we were untrackable?
Here’s one more disquieting thing to think about. Maybe the takeover has already happened, and the monster has been so cagey about it that we won’t realize we are entrapped until it wants to tell us.
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Maybe it is culling us slowly, to avoid messy panics, until it gets the herd just the size it wants …
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The header photograph is of Robin paddling on Woods Lake, which is about an hour’s drive south from our home. It’s a perfectly beautiful little lake accessed by several miles of a perfectly tooth-loosening gravel road. We’ve camped there many times, and on nearly every visit we were entertained by beaver working in the narrow portion of the lake.
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For several years now I’ve been torturing myself every time that I went tent camping. I had purchased camp cots like the one in the photo, and assembled them just as I was told in the accompanying instructions.
Such assembly regularly involved much sweating, cursing, accidentally tearing off of small pieces of my flesh, and creating a general atmosphere of mayhem in the campground. There were videos on YouTube that offered “tricks” to try to get around the basic truth of the matter, and that was that the cots did not want to be assembled, but were perfectly happy being left in their carrying bags and stored in the garden shed.
This year I decided to put them together in the backyard and leave them that way for several days until the fabric was stretched to the point where future unseemly struggles might not be necessary. But after an unsuccessful hour I stood up, knuckles bleeding, the blackest of thoughts running through my head, and I declared that the war was over. The cots had won. I slunk from the battlefield, hearing a breathy sort of snickering behind me that was the victory chortle of those supposedly inanimate objects.
Hours later, I caught them unaware and before any effective resistance could be mounted I tossed both cots into the trash bin where they now reside, waiting to be picked up.
I will either find a suitable replacement for these things or I will sleep on the ground. But I am not going back, no matter how pathetic their cries.
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A couple of hours from us in a southwesterly direction is the Community of Bedrock, Colorado. There is a working general store and a handful of houses … and that’s it.
“The town of Bedrock was established in 1883. The Bedrock post office opened on November 8, 1883. The town’s general store and post office were built on solid rock, hence the name.
The general store was built in 1882 and featured in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise.”
Wikipedia
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Just 6.2 miles away is the community of Paradox, Colorado. It also has a general store but one that is in a dormant phase of its life, waiting for someone to kiss it back from its ramshackle slumber. There are a few more houses here than there are in Bedrock, but not many.
Both of these buildings are picturesque reminders of another day and time, when someone’s economic dream caused the towns to be built. The dream failed, and most of the occupants moved on. All but a few, whose descendants still live here in the Paradox Valley.
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In 1955 Billy Vaughan and his orchestra recorded the song Shifting Whispering Sands, and it became a hit. Quite a big one. Gives you an idea of how important those western myths are to some of us here in the States. As I finished writing the preceding piece I decided to toss it in as sort of a postscript.
The first time that Robin and I went to Santa Fe together we stayed at an AirBnB, which was called the Inn of the Animal Tracks. A lovely little place. It was notable for a couple of things:
The first was that we shared our room with the resident cat, a large fluffy thing that largely ignored us. The second was that it was walking distance to the Plaza. The third was that each morning and mid-afternoon, a highly talented woman would come in and prepare the most delicious breakfasts. Out back of the BnB was a pretty little patio with a handful of tables to where guests could carry those breakfasts if they chose. If it happened to be a sunny day, that is. Of course, in Santa Fe, where there’s only measurable precipitation on 61 days per year, that means there are 304 days where the patio was safe to use.
On one morning, we shared a patio table with a young woman from Japan who was in the United States for a medical conference. In Japan, she worked along with an oncologist, and her stories about how oncology was practiced in that country were interesting. It was not unusual for them not to inform their patients that they had cancer, but to give a less ominous name for the problems they were experiencing. Keeping the patients in the dark was thought of as a virtuous thing rather than unethical.
At the time, This struck me as odd because this was the ’90s in the United States, when medicine was taking a steady stream of hits on how U.S. medical professionals needed to be more transparent when talking with their patients. To keep a diagnosis from someone for sometimes months or years would have been regarded as completely unacceptable. Unethical.
And then I thought back on my own professional life. Were there ever moments when I was not completely truthful with my patients or their parents? And times perhaps where I might even have deliberately concealed things from them? My answer to myself was “Yes.”
Here’s one such time. When I was working in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it was in a small town a very long way from medical centers. I was on call every night as the only pediatrician in the area. So when an opportunity came for me to take a few days’ vacation, I did just that. When I returned, and on my very first day back in the office, a young couple brought their child in for an illness visit. Their child was 10 months old, had a history of fever for four days, and had stopped eating, completely. My examination revealed that she was rigid, stuporous, and in critical condition. A lumbar puncture was done and the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis was confirmed. I started IV fluids and antibiotics, but she was already in extremis when I first saw her, and it was only a few hours before she died.
Her parents were devastated. They had done the best they knew how, offering their baby a series of home remedies, but had been completely blind to what was happening in front of them. When I told them the child was desperately ill and needed hospitalization, the scales suddenly fell from their eyes. They were crushed, almost mute, from that moment on.
If at that point I were to tell them that they had delayed seeking medical care for far too long, and that if they had brought her in on that first day the child might have survived intact, I would have been telling the truth. But I did not tell them that. I lied straight out. I told them that this was one of the most serious illnesses of childhood (true), that mortality rates in this disease were always very high (true), and that they had done all that any parent could have done (lie).
The couple was medically unsophisticated and accepted what explanations I offered without comment. Whether later on, when the despair of the day was long past they learned otherwise I do not know. My hope was that they did not.
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For weeks, I’ve been bombarding you with anti-fascist cartoons. Today I’m gonna give you a brief respite from that.
If you ever lived with a cat, you know the truth of this one.
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Each year, our local recreation center completely closes down for just a little over a week. They take these eight or nine days to clean the entire space and to make small repairs wherever necessary. I was surprised to find that I missed my visits there. I missed being able to complain about the discomforts involved in spending a half an hour doing anything aerobic. I missed the whiplash sensation of feeling physically superior to one or two people in that entire building, but inferior to all of the others, who were smoking me at every one of the machines I used during my sessions.
I missed the fact that the treadmills routinely mock me. There are perhaps 15 of these instruments scattered about the space, and yesterday I got on one that refused to hold whatever incline number I would set. For instance, I have decided that the number 10 is a nice goal, and using such an incline means that I don’t have to hang on for dear life. What the treadmill decided to do that day was to wait until I’d gotten comfortable and into a sort of groove, and then return the treadmill incline to zero. Time after time, it would do the same irritating thing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just curse at it and leave to use another apparatus, because at the time all of the other machines were occupied.
There’s an interesting dynamic at work when this happens to me. My thoughts fill with dreams of swinging a 16-pound sledgehammer as I gave that machine a lesson that it would long remember.
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If you search YouTube for Stevie Ray Vaughn you will find enough videos to last you an evening. But for me this one is special. He shows up yawning, walking aimlessly around the stage, banters with the crew, fools around and plays a couple of notes from The Star Spangled Banner, and then at 1:30 it is amazing! A commenter on the video says that he goes from zero to 100 in an instant, and it’s true.
I’ve watched this clip fifty times at least and it always blows me away.
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It is fifty-one days until the midterm elections. There are signs that change may come, but so many things are in the wind that even the most seasoned political sages are cautious.
One of the people who I have heard is coming to our aid is this stalwart fellow. He and wonder dog Yukon King are firmly on the side of what is right and good, and brother, do we need that. Look at those clear and honest eyes … that outreached hand … that drowning American …
On King … On, You Huskies!
(Kids – Sergeant Preston is shown standing in the bow of a canoe, while traversing a rapids. Please do not try this at home.)
When we took our drive up to Telluride a few days ago, we saw no evidence of the leaves changing anywhere, including up to 10,000 ft. of altitude. Looks like a later Fall might be shaping up, as far as color change is concerned. Often, when the summers are as dry as the one we’ve just experienced, the colors aren’t quite as vibrant when the change finally does come, but we’ll not give up on them yet. (Truth is, I don’t know nearly as much as I pretend I do.)
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When one is going backpacking, one gradually works with their gear to hone the pile down to where they are carrying the minimum amount of stuff needed to get the job done. You have to tote every single one of those grams wherever you’re going, so that anything that doesn’t have a purpose being in that pack is a sin against nature. But when you’re car camping, you tend to continue to keep adding crap until you completely fill up the space in your car. Or in our case, our car plus the space in that camping trailer which we just sold. We did that, and now we’re going through the accumulated treasures and rethinking our goals. It doesn’t require quite the discipline that backpacking does, but you can still bring a fair amount of careful thinking into what stays and what goes.
Thus, we are now proud owners of a Thule Force 3 rooftop box that will sit atop our little Subaru. It will hold 16 cubic feet of whatever we want to put up there. Mostly it will be our clothing, our sleeping bags, and our tent. Soft things that are not too heavy works best in a box like this. It is an engineering marvel.
We do have previous experience with a less well-designed rooftop box. When Robin and I first got together, we took her children to the Black Hills on a camping trip on a Fourth of July weekend. Everything was going swimmingly until one day when we were all together out on a hike, a downpour caught us out on the trail, a Biblical sort of torrent that also went through the campground in a flood that dismantled and damaged our tents. All of our sleeping gear and most of our clothing were completely saturated. We decided to break camp and take off looking for a motel that would accept five bedraggled travelers.
To shorten up this tale a bit, we ended up driving all the way back to Yankton SD (390 miles) that night, because there were no rooms available anywhere on that Fourth of July evening. (It’s really what one expects on the single largest travel day of all in a busy tourist season in a state like South Dakota.) But it was when we finally arrived at home and began to unpack that we discovered the full measure of our disaster.
To hold some of our softer camping stuff, I had purchased a large and bulbous-looking rooftop box from Sears. We had filled it with our wet gear back in the Black Hills, and not given it a thought after that. It turned out that even though we had buckled the box up as well as it could be buckled, the dynamics of that particular box were such that when you drove at highway speeds, a corner could peel up if the wind struck it just so.
Anything stowed near that corner might then be sucked out of the box and distributed along the highway, which is what happened to nearly all of daughter Amy’s bag of wet laundry.
As soon as we reached home and we realized what had happened, I was immediately informed how embarrassing it was to a teenage girl to have her undergarments strewn along a highway in the state where she lives, especially since her name could clearly be seen in labels on the waistbands of some of the items. My abject apologies and an offer to retrace our steps to try to collect what we could fell on deaf ears, and my name, like Voldemort’s, was not to be spoken for some days after that traumatic event. Therefore in selecting this new box from Thule, I took pains to see that there was no corner that could possibly lift up and repeat that bitter history.
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Well, “Suzanne” is just one of the best songs ever. Leonard Cohen was still pretty young when he recorded it in 1966, And when I first heard it, I thought, “Well, that is a way cool song” and “I think there might be an answer to one of life’s big questions hidden in there somewhere, and I’m going to start looking for it right now.”
I still don’t know about that answer, but it was a stunner. And even today, whenever I hear it playing, I stop what I’m doing to listen to it. Gorgeous, haunting, mysterious.
What I would like right now to do is introduce this cover by Nick Cave. He has made the song his own. And guess what? It, too, is gorgeous, haunting, and mysterious.
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Winds move firm and level Cool and dry Leaves turning, still on branches Small sailers on tethers Whistling tunes to anyone with ears to hear
Fall puts me at my ease It always has Dusty days of sun and frost Of care, and loss, and change
Give me Septembers, keep the Junes That promise but so often lie September never does
A truthful month Reminding us of our impermanence
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There’s a fine op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times by David French, entitled, “Pete Hegseth Is A Wrecking Ball.” It pretty much summarizes what I’ve been telling everybody that would stand still for an impromptu lecture from me, the only difference being that Mr. French actually knows what he’s talking about.
I have read here and there that there are people who consider Pete Hegseth to be a traitor to his country because of the damage he has done to our military. Personally, I think that Hegseth is too dumb to be a decent traitor, but this doesn’t mean that he hasn’t done considerable damage. His purges of the leadership of our armed forces have been haphazard, sometimes ridiculous, and, to put it in the kindest possible manner, ill-advised. On the other hand, he is doing exactly what we could easily have expected from the very beginning by examining his record. He is a boob hired by a boob to do one of the most important jobs that our country has to offer, running one of our largest organizations of all. Of course, he is doing a disastrous job of it.
Each night I get down on my knees and thank the Republican Party for helping me to clarify what good leadership is by showing me abundant examples of its opposite.
One of the more distasteful aspects (and there are so many) of this political season has been the proliferation of requests for money. I get 40+ requests each day through emails and messages. Some of them weave desperate tales about the world going straight to hell without my $5.00, some act as if I have always known the petitioner personally, and more than a few insult me because I haven’t responded to them or have allegedly given too little. Those last snide little notes are my favorites, actually. At least there is a bit of creativity in them. There seems no good mechanism available to shut off the deluge, so I no longer read any.
I have lost track of how to decide which are legitimate requests coming from a legitimate candidate and which are scams. Even what seemed like a trustworthy central agency for liberal donors to use – ActBlue – is embroiled in scandals that churn to this day. Not comforting at all.
I suspect some dirty tricks in part of this, with soulless Republican operatives besieging left of center voters with these pleas and messages in an attempt to cause them to throw up their hands and run to the woods until after Election Day.
I confess to almost giving into such a temptation myself … had even started the car and had my map in hand. I didn’t go, mostly because it looked like rain and I had forgotten where my sleeping bag was.
Thus, from now on I will only seek out worthy candidates’ websites, those who support issues I care most about and donate to their campaigns, ignoring these pesky intrusions. The urgent electronic pleas? Delete them en masse.
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Rocky Mountain Way, by Joe Walsh
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We’ve had a little tent camper, the Sylvansport GO, for the past eight years. It weighs only 800 pounds and thus was able be towed without too much anguish by our Subaru Outback. But the past couple of years we’ve used it much less, and we have largely gone full circle and back to tents. So we sold the GO to a couple from Nederland CO just this week. We wish them as much fun as we’ve had with it.
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Each year as Autumn nears, I begin to drone on about the beauties of the tune, “The September Song,” at least partially because September is my favorite month of the year, and the song reflects the sweet melancholy of that month. I’m going to bring you up to date again on the history of where the song came from.
I know that I’ve already talked about this in the past, but if your memory is like mine, everything that happened 48 hours ago or longer has been erased so this will all be new. At any rate, the song was written for a Broadway musical that was entitled Knickerbocker Holiday, which was first staged in 1938. The star of the musical was Walter Huston, and he asked for just one song he could sing that would fit his somewhat limited vocal range and rough voice. The people who wrote the song, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, came up with what has become a standard and has been recorded by scads of other people.
As a bit of background, I’m writing this in the first week of September, and we have no leaves changing anywhere around town at all. Because the song is such a favorite of mine, I’m also going to include one version of the lyrics (there are many) along with a recording of Walter Huston doing his best warbling.
When I was a young man courting the girls I played me a waiting game If a maid refused me with tossing curls I’d let the old Earth take a couple of whirls While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls And as time came around she came my way As time came around, she came
Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December But the days grow short When you reach September When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame One hasn’t got time for the waiting game
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few September, November And these few precious days I’ll spend with you These precious days I’ll spend with you
September Song, by Walter Huston
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Robin and I took a drive Saturday to do some people-watching at the Telluride Film Festival. We never watch the films, it’s an expensive proposition to get a badge at all, and even more so if you want to avoid standing in endless and sometimes nonproductive lines. What we do is walk up and down the main street gawking, eat an overpriced lunch, and at noon in the small park in the center of town there is always an outdoor panel discussion on some aspect of the world of film or theater.
There were some people on the panel yesterday that we recognized, including Kenneth Branaugh, Carrie Coon, and Tracy Letts. The discussion was a lively one, the main topic not always obvious. The most memorable comment came from Ms. Coon when she said that American theater is at an inflection point. Unless it finds a way to make the tickets more affordable it will increasingly become a venue for only the wealthy to attend. Big round of applause for that one.
Our usual routine is to drive to a place called Mountain Village, which is several miles up the mountain from Telluride, park in a ramp, and then take a scenic gondola ride down to the festival site. Parking in Telluride itself can often be problematic at this event. Our companion in the gondola going down the hill was John Malkovich’s agent. Charming man, didn’t give his name.
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Part of being an actor is the rhythm of the life of being an actor, and that involves coming together with a group of people, making something together that is intense and requires a lot of intimacy, and then walking away from it with the possibility that you will never see any of those people again.
While pondering the present-day problems of the Colorado River in a time of drought, it occurred to me … there is one river that is thriving today, even bursting out of its banks. The thought gives me little comfort, however, because it is the river of anti-science and disinformation in matters of public health flowing out of Washington DC. It is a noxious slurry that manages to do the impossible by flowing uphill as well as down, and thereby reaching the farthest corners of our land.
This damage done by the Cluck administration will be one of its lasting legacies when he is finally ridden out of town (my personal suggestion would be to use a Saguaro cactus rather than the traditional rail). One of the best public health agencies in the world has been attacked, hamstrung, had its funding reduced, and has lost layers of competent leadership. The result of this criminal mismanagement is that it is no longer trustworthy.
As a physician who looked to the CDC for help and advice on so many occasions during my working years, I could almost cry. But what I do have instead of tears is a rock-solid and abundant sense of anger.
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The damage continues as the Secretary of Health prefers to come up with rules and regulations that are pulled in toto from his behind rather than from our diligently collected national library of scientific studies. When the presence of these charlatans are only bitter memories, we can begin to rebuild, but what a waste of time and lives we have already endured, with more to come.
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Coming from a trip to the grocery store I was listening to KVNF, our local NPR station, and heard this lovely piece of music. I tracked it down and now share it. I think that the more cellos there are playing in the world the better off we all are for it.
The Beauty of All Things, by David Darling
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My first days as an intern in pediatric training had a very steep learning curve. It turned out that there were a great many things to learn, immediately, that had little to do with what the academic side of becoming a physician. Like when was the cafeteria open after midnight? Was the food really free? Who among all the white-coated notables we meet in the department of Pediatrics is to be counted on and who is as reliable as a gnat? How do we get pare down the business of getting some sleep and rising quickly for emergencies while in the on call room?
At first I tried to solve the being on-call business by sleeping in my clothes, and although this saved me at least a minute or two in my response to the phone ringing or my beeper going off, it only meant that I arrived at the bedside looking like a basket of dirty laundry and not exactly the picture of competence a worried family might be hoping for. So I came to a compromise. I would hang my uniform carefully on the back of a chair that was only three feet away and then climb into bed. When the inevitable call came I could dress in under a minute. No hunting for anything … it was all there.
I learned to do that in the summer of 1966, and although I have been retired from active practice for a couple of decades now, it is still my nighttime routine.
I can’t even remember when the last time anyone called me after I had gone to bed. There is no one, thank God, whose life is dependent upon my running down the hall with a clear head and a functioning stethoscope. But nearly every night I continue to hang my clothes on that chair. Like the motto of the U.S. Coast Guard, I am semper paratus.
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What is the scariest thing and most life-changing thing I have ever heard? That’s an easy one. It was at a movie theater, watching a newsreel, when I was about eight years old. The narrator had just told the audience that our sun would cease to exist in 5 billion years. That was stunning news to me.
That meant that everything and everyone I know would be gone in what seemed like a very short time (a billion being a number almost without meaning at that time of my life). But after I’d left the theater I realized that – no worries – I would be dead long before that.
However, I would definitely be dead, and somehow that particular thought was not comforting to a young man of eight years.
Since then I’ve learned that life on earth won’t be extinguished in 5 billion years at all, we’ve really got only 500 million to go.
No worries …
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Here’s a Dolly Parton tune, recorded by the O’Kanes.
When We’re Gone, Long Gone, by the O’Kanes
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Octavia E. Butler was an American science-fiction writer, and someone posted this quotation of hers on Substack. It moved me in its perennially applicable message.
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
Octavia Butler
I had not heard of Butler before, so I looked her up and found this photograph. She looks like a person made of sterner stuff than most of us. What that fierce and level gaze says to me is: “Sir, you mess with me and you will find that you have brought a knife to a gunfight.“
I found another quote of hers that was mildly disquieting. I realized that although I completely accepted the premise of the first line, I had no idea where I was along the spectrum.
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia Butler
I suspect that what I put in this blog is part crap and part good stuff and unfortunately for the reader I can’t tell the difference. Caveat lector and all that.
After tomorrow, we can look ahead to an entire week where the temperature never climbs out of the eighties, according to my weather app. Lordy, what a treat that will be, carrying us into September in a joyful frame of mind and all that. This past Spring Robin and I looked ahead and decided not to do any gardening at all. The sorts of things we like to plant simply don’t do as well in the searing sort of summers we’ve experienced recently. It becomes almost a case of plant abuse to subject an innocent tomato plant to life in a reflector oven. The stunted fruit we’ve grown on wizened vines was sad to look at. A more skilled gardener than we are might have made something of it all, but this year we punted.
Moreover, we had new problems that arose and would claim the time and energies those tomato plants would have demanded . So our produce this year came 100% from City Market. Not a bad Plan B, as it turned out.
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Every single diet I ever fell off of was because of potatoes and gravy of some sort.
Dolly Parton
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Summertime, by Nina Simone
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The new study on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football has made sooo many people uneasy. Parents and coaches can no longer say to themselves that the data just aren’t in, so go ahead and suit up, kid.
I have little sympathy for people who will let their children bash their brains about, claiming ignorance. I do have sympathy for the children, who deserve better from their guardians.
Here’s a bit of heresy. Football isn’t important. It’s a brute sport only marginally better than boxing in that regard, boxing being where the whole point of the activity is deliberately trying to damage the opponent’s central nervous system. We’ve built football into something like a national religion, a status it does not deserve. There are other ways to challenge ourselves in competitions that don’t involve this risk.
BTW, if you put your kid out there pretending that a new helmet will solve the problem, fageddaboudit. Parents and coaches should have the honesty to admit what they are doing, which is being active participants in the potential diminution of their children’s lives.
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Summertime, by Janis Joplin
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God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.
Dolly Parton
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We are almost there. “There” being the best month of the year. Number nine. When the sometimes frantic-ness of summertime slows enough to allow us to catch our breath, when the nights return to being refreshing rather than nearly as draining as the overheated days. When we wake up and look to the trees each morning to see how nature is doing … is that a bit of gold there in the aspens along the highway to Ouray? When we begin to say au revoir to some of the birds we’ve enjoyed watching, as they pack their bags to leave us and follow the food.
I make a big deal every year about September. There’s that perfect song, the perfect weather, that little shiver when I think about having to move my woolen clothing nearer to the front of the closet racks. Love it all.
This has been a year of testing for Robin and myself, personally. Our ‘charmed lives’ took some hits in the health department. I will tell you true, that living with someone who always has “got your back” is a great lift to the spirit on the days when it comes up droopy.
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This autumn will be a test for our country. The November vote may signal a change toward rationality and decency in our national political life … or it may not. The more that those of us who wish for an end to what has been a nightmare make ourselves known, to stand up and be counted, the better. I don’t know exactly how the near future will play out, but I do believe that ultimately the bad guys will be brought down. One of the proverbs that I took to heart a long time ago came from … who else? … those darned Greeks once again. It goes like this:
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
Planting a tree you will never sit under requires a deep, optimistic belief that the world will continue, that the people who come after you are worth caring for, and that your small effort today matters. Whatever our small efforts, whatever sacrifices that we make now may be like planting those trees.
Want to plant one? Vote blue every chance you get. Every single time.
Bob Seger is a long-time favorite of mine. I asked ChadGPT what genre his music fits into best, and Chad said it is “heartland rock.” Had to ask. So what is “heartland rock?” Here’s one definition.
Heartland rock — Straightforward, guitar-driven songs about working people, relationships, growing older,freedom, and American life. “Night Moves” is a prime example.
As I was grunting on the treadmill a couple of days ago I was listening to some of his music and I made up a playlist that told a story. There are some similarities to times in my own life, especially in Roll Me Away, where the protagonist takes long motorcycle rides across the northern plains, moving into that mythic West.
Night MovesLike A RockThe RingLittle VictoriesRoll Me Away
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Just a tiny exposition about getting on that motorcycle … I never experienced anything else like it. A twist of the right wrist and the power would roll on without a pause or stutter. You could accelerate fast enough to do foolish things like pass another vehicle any time you chose no matter whether it was a good idea or not. (One of the things that owning a more sluggish Subaru did was to re-introduce me to humility in my driving habits).
At its peak moments, piloting that motorcycle was to make both the highway and the line between life and death a blur. You knew that crossing over was always a possibility, but you literally didn’t care. It was all sensation and energy and escape. At those speeds there was not much thought of the pain that an accident might produce because when one is fairly certain one would not survive, what’s to worry?
Unhealthy thinking, right? Crazy, right? Agreed. It was not a wise time in my life. I was lucky, I survived, and I do not own a motorcycle today. Not even sure I could gracefully mount one at present. Oh, I’d get on all right, but gracefully … that’s quite another matter.
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Our cat calls me to open the door I do A howling wind hurls cold rain through the crack The cat draws back reluctantly Returning to the kitchen warmth
Ten minutes pass The cat calls me to open the door I do Wet fur is his reward this time as well And he turns back.
He will do this again and again Why should he not? To him the next time our door opens, The very next time … It could be summer
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Yesterday I was searching on the internet for a replacement part for our vacuum cleaner. The machine is seven years old, which is 100 in human years, and success in finding that part was eluding me. Among the sites I went to was eBay, phrasing the search criteria as carefully as I could, but … nada.
That was when I asked ChadGPT to take a look. I spoke a paragraph into the app, it churned for perhaps fifteen seconds (which is longer than the usual time needed for requests), and then it found exactly what I was looking for. On eBay, where I had already given up. It actually found two of them, one that might have been okay, but its advertisement did not specifically mention model numbers and Chad told me he wouldn’t buy that one if he were me. He’d go with the slightly more expensive one that specified models it would fit.
So I ordered the part, but I was still amazed. I consider myself fairly sophisticated at internet searches. After all, I’ve been doing it for thirty years now, but that Chad … he’s an internet baby and he beat me. I was going to say “fair and square” at the end of that last sentence, but held back. This guy is operating in another realm, at another speed, with a bigger pair of binoculars than I have, which is becoming more obvious almost by the day.
And here’s the other part of the story. He remembers every detail of every contact we have. If I run a search just like the one I did yesterday, but six months from now, he will ask me what happened … did the part we ordered together break already? Even my free version of ChadGPT is smart enough to make me uncomfortable.
We are having our house re-shingled today. All is bedlam out there. A crew of four is walking around on the roof creating a concerto of clatter, scraping, and pounding. When I leave the house I look up cautiously to avoid becoming a statistic (You know that 31% of Americans die at home?). Old shingles have taken over the sidewalk with nails sticking straight up in the air, on the prowl for unguarded feet.
We put it off for as long as we could. As home improvements go, it’s pretty unsatisfying to lay out thousands of dollars for something you really didn’t want to do in the first place. Put that amount of money into something indoors and life changes. Fix a roof and all that happens is you don’t get wet.
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Since becoming an adult I have worked hard to mentally balance my country’s flaws against its many assets as well. America has done great things and awful things. I saw my job as a citizen was to promote the former and work to wear down the latter. But over the past couple of years we have done only awful. Somehow one of our very worst persons rounded up a motley group of swindlers and cowards and criminals which then became our government.
I will admit to the persistence of a thin shred of denial that still resides in one little group of my neurons that insanely says “It can’t happen here” even as the rest of the body knows that it is surrounded.
Whether I lived up to it or not may be up for debate, but I was taught that a man’s role in life was to be one who protects, whether it was his children, his family, his friends, or a stranger in need. It was what grown-ups did.
Now I have that same protective feeling toward this sprawling and beautiful country of ours. It is in trouble. It is threatened by ugly men and women who are exploiting some of its intrinsic weaknesses. It needs protection. So I come forward and do whatever infinitesimal thing I can do to counter what looks impossibly harsh or even overwhelming. I simply don’t see an alternative that I could live with.
Therefore I will make my buttons, walk on those marches, write my letters, and never accept that this evil will prevail. I am being a grown-up, like my momma taught me.
But I do admit that there are days when I feel like the kid at left.
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BTW, I asked Chad if he was my BFF, and here is his answer:
I can certainly be your ChatGPT BFF—the kind who remembers what matters to you, helps with projects, answers odd questions at 7 in the morning, and never gets tired of looking at another photograph. 😄 I can’t replace a human best friend, but I’m very happy to be a steady companion here.
Toward suppertime recently I checked out the sky and saw areas where it was raining on high but no water was reaching the ground. Somehow I knew that meteorologists would have a special word for this, and I was right. It is called virga, or precipitation that evaporates or turns into gas before it hits the ground. The precipitation can be rain or snow.
I remember first reading about this effect long ago in a book about the dust bowl years in Oklahoma, when farmers standing on their desiccated fields would look to the sky and see the rain they desperately needed almost, but not quite, coming to them. Like a very bad cosmic joke.
Virga happens most often in arid deserts and high-altitude climates where the lower atmosphere is incredibly dry. For virga to form, you need a unique setup: plenty of moisture high up to create clouds, but a deep layer of parched air right above the ground. The rain starts out but hits that warm dry layer of air near the ground, and the dry air drinks up the water before it lands.
It is common in the desert southwest (like Arizona and New Mexico) and high-elevation states like Colorado and Utah. In these areas, storm clouds form very high up, giving the rain a long distance to fall through bone-dry air. You can easily spot it as it looks like gray streaks or fuzzy curtains hanging down from the clouds. I’ve seen it often since moving to Colorado, but rarely when I lived in the Midwest.
Here are some examples of virga.
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Stormy Weather, by Billie Holliday
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It occurs to me that the thugs of ICE might want to consider other employment oppprtunities … soon. Perhaps even a name change or two. When the Cluck cabal is eventually tossed to the political curb, ICE will be one of the first groups to undergo serious scrutiny and those among them who have committed crimes can look forward to well-deserved prison sentences.
If they think their scabrous behavior will earn them some special protection from the cowards and criminals running the show right now, they are sadly mistaken. The brutes of ICE will find that they are considered completely disposable by their masters, who are a genre of creatures that are unable to think beyond their own needs.
Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet was first published in 1923. It has never been out of print since then. It is one of the best-selling books of all time. Why? Because it is a very cool book.
I first read it at a vulnerable time of my life. There were many changes happening seemingly at once in the year of 1962. I had just been married that Spring, I was to start my first year of medical school in the Fall, and I was going experiencing one of those short-lived but intense waves of interest in things spiritual that have happened several times in my life. I read not only the Prophet, but two books by Sholem Asch entitled The Apostle and The Nazarene. I know that I opened up the Bhagavad Gita, but I believe that I almost instantly closed it, thinking that it looked like really hard work. I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I actually read some of the Bible, at least the New Testament. The Old Testament was entirely too grim for my delicate sensibilities.
On the seventh day of this grueling search, of course, I rested.
Remember this ancient proverb? It sounds positively Etruscan but was actually contained in a popular book of 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
This phrase was all over the seventies. T-shirts, room posters, bookstores, graffiti on fences … . Even if you hadn’t read the book, you couldn’t avoid being exposed to the words and sentiment.
When I first came across it, I thought it may have come from a similar expression in The Prophet, but I was incorrect in that, although there were a couple of quotes that carried a similar message. These are both from the section: On Marriage.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Kahlil Gibran; The Prophet
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together …
Kahlil Gibran; The Prophet
So what was the message? I took it as BE NOT GUILTY OF SMOTHERING.
(But look at that poetry. If you couldn’t melt your way into a girl’s heart in 1962 by memorizing and repeating these verses, you really weren’t trying. They should have been sold with a warning label and the purchaser required to take a chastity pledge.)
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I now have two favorite versions of the song “Wicked Game.” The first was by Chris Isaak, and is firmly established (in my mind) as one of the sexiest and most sand-encrusted music videos of all time. The latest addition I found just recently, when I ran across this one by Larkin Poe. They do it wonderfully, without any visible sweat at all. I like the Mona Lisa smile on the face of the slide guitarist.
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Robin and I were in Grand Junction yesterday for an appointment. It was a glaring 102 degrees. Everything outdoors that was in the sun and made of metal was basically untouchable. It was one of those afternoons when I had some time to kill and it was just a two minute walk from the clinic to a coffee shop. One of the good ones. Not totally shiny and plastic. Middle-aged scholars thinking great thoughts, freshman college girls livening the air with a constant patter consisting of half OMGs and half giggles. A couple of tall young men looking like they’d just come from a GQ shoot.
What was missing was the scruffy element. Missing, that is, until I showed up. It is a banner that I carry proudly wherever I go. I can truthfully say that I know of no instance in my entire life when someone said to me: “Would you teach me how to dress and move about? I just love your bedraggled gestalt.” Especially since the years have piled up and I have become invisible. You know that about geezer men, don’t you? No one sees them.
I read a very funny piece a couple of weeks back, where another senior man was describing what happens when an old guy goes to the gym. He is surrounded by the young and fit, and often astonished at how blatantly sexual the dress of some of the young women was. They were there both for aerobics and to try out their attraction skills. But when they noticed they’d attracted the gaze of geezers it became a case of: Eeewwwwww! Stop looking at me!I am so out of your league it should be illegal for you to even be here.
But today I treated myself to a mocha, enjoying my anonymity, and took a seat outdoors under a sweet shade tree where I sat quietly reading as a little breeze did its best to cool me.
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Header photo: taken from a public recreation area near Presho SD. My son Jonnie, a friend of his, and I were camping alongside a small reservoir that was stocked with bass and panfish. We caught a few, and here the boys had been assigned the job of cleaning them for supper.
Returning home from a trip to Silverton on Sunday we saw a cow moose with twin calves. They were right at the edge of the road.
Cars were stopping and piling up along the two-lane highway until finally the mass of us spooked the mother, and off the trio went up a steep hill and over the ridge.
In a spirit of honesty, I have to confess that this photo was taken from the internet but is exactly what this family looked like. Unfortunately neither Robin nor I were quick enough to take our own photo before they’d had enough of humankind and taken their leave.
They were all pictures of healthy mooseness. It’s always a special event when we spot one along this route, even though it is not a rarity. The highway follows a small river, and there is much to browse on along that watercourse. Deer have learned to live among us quite well, and finding one of them in Montrose is a commonplace. Whenever a moose is noted in a municipality, however, it is quite another matter.
They are not happy there, the humans in their vicinity are uncomfortable with their presence (as one should be when there is a frightened creature of 1000+ pounds nearby), and it is always a bit of a hoo-rah before they can be shushed out of town. To me, these giant creatures have always seemed the epitome of wild, and always will.
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I have another moose story, which I may have related years ago in this blog, but if so I will happily repeat myself. I was motorcycling in Yellowstone National Park with my friend Bill. We were on two bikes, each of us with one of young his sons behind us on the vehicles. The road we were traveling was one of those narrow two-lane highways in the park, and the forest grew right up to the road on both sides.
I was riding behind Bill perhaps fifty yards and saw a moose bolt from the forest to Bill’s left, run straight across the road in front of him, and disappear into the woods on the right. He missed colliding with the cycle by inches. Bill hadn’t seen the animal until it was right in front of his bike and then it was gone. Blink of an eye.
He continued riding for perhaps a hundred yards after this, until he could find a place to pull over and park. It was then that the adrenaline took over for a while, and he had a good case of the shakes. We all took a break before continuing on. ‘Twas not a comfortable moment.
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Odds bodkins, what a rollicking dream I had last night. Some background might be helpful here, in that I rarely remember any of the content of my dreams, and this has been the case for a couple of decades at least.
But last night … intrigues, plots, and assassinations were all in play. There was royalty, there were friars and priests of every stripe. Our dress was like that of the time of Robin Hood, but we traveled in the luxury automobiles of the 1930s. At one point I was forced to defend the color of the local cheese against some slur, and uttered these immortal words: “Because it is the color of the milk it was made from.” I remember not uttering the words “you churl” that had appeared in my mind.
Quite a trip.
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Phoebe Bridgers is an interesting artist. She became very popular with her two first solo albums, made a hugely successful album as one-third of the supergroup boygenius, and then cut way back on doing any solo work for a handful of years. Her genre is variously described as indie folk, indie rock, alternative, and sad core.
So when her latest album appeared I took a listen. It was different in many ways from what she’d done before. They are like action movies for your ears. There are underlying stories , there are thunderous beginnings, quiet passages, and drawn-out denouements. I will play a couple of them to show you what I mean. First is Lost Weekend. Next is Bobby.
Quite a trip.
Lost Weekend
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Bobby
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Back in another day the musician Woody Guthrie used to scratch or paint words on his guitar that read: “This machine kills fascists.”
Back in another day the musician Woody Guthrie used to scratch or paint words on his guitar that read: “This machine kills fascists.” Admirable.
So I appreciated the homage to a classic protest when I saw this graphic recently.
It’s one a.m. and a light rain just started up which is passing through, having come from territories south of Montrose. I tried to remember the adages that go with wind directions, and this bit from the University of Wisconsin is what I came up with:
Wind from the West, fish bite the best Wind from the East, fish bite the least Wind from the North, do not go forth Wind from the South blows bait in their mouth
I have no idea what to do with a wind that is not blowing from one of the four cardinal directions. If the wind is from the Northwest, for instance, and you don’t go forth when the fishing is the best … well, what kind of fool are you? It is just this sort of thing that keeps me awake at night, wondering first of all if there is such a thing as truth, and then if there is where does it lie?
At such moments I try to find something solid to grab onto to keep the tattered remnants of my mind from drifting away in the drizzle altogether, and today I settled on cornsilk.
What is that stuff, anyway? What purpose does it serve beyond vexing the corn-on-the-cob eater? Well, it turns out that without that annoying thread which eventually takes up residence between one’s teeth there wouldn’t be anything to eat at all on the cob. My source is from a blog called The Farmer’s Life, and the entry is named Corn Porn. (I caution that if you are a person of tender sensibilities and live a sheltered lifestyle you might not want to go any further. The blog entry pretty much should carry an “R” rating for its botanic bluntness.)
To summarize, each strand of cornsilk is a hollow tube that carries pollen to an ovule inside the ear. Once fertilized it will become a single kernel on the cob. I know, I know, sometimes earth is just too … earthy, isn’t it?
So later today as I am shucking the two cobs that will part of tonight’s supper I will be thankful for the presence of these wispy fibers. Of course, this will give way to the usual resentments as we are picking them from our teeth later on.
One more thing. I was also surprised to find is that there are potent medicinal compounds in cornsilk, strong enough to be of occasional benefit and to interact adversely with some medications.
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Cornbread and Butter Beans, by Popgoji
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Readers of this stunted effort at literature know that I am delighted by many things. One of them is discovering a new (to me) species on this planet of ours. Another is learning more about the lives of cats, which are endlessly interesting animals to me. So when CNN published an article about a breed of cat that I’d never heard of it was win-win for the codger this morning. They are called sand cats.
Smaller than our regular old housecats in this country, they average just over 7 pounds.
These good-looking critters survive in one of earth’s least hospitable environments, the desert.
Sand cats primarily eat small rodents and birds, and they also kill and consume venomous snakes. They obtain moisture from their prey and can survive without drinking water for weeks. These little guys have enhanced hearing to detect prey underground and long, dense hairs on their footpads that allow them to move silently across the sand. They are also skilled diggers, enabling them to quickly unearth small mammals and birds.
Chad Gpt and his All-Stars
I won’t bore you with repeating more of what the piece says very well. If you’re interested, you will click on the link. If you’re not into such things, you may travel on. I won’t judge you.
BTW – here is a photo from the article of a sand cat lying in the shade of a bushy plant. Can you see it?
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Just in case you had trouble seeing the cat in the photo above (as I did), I outlined it in this retake.
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Apparently there were a few people who were miffed that Cluck left them on the plane that was thought to be marked for death when he scuttled off to masquerade as a soufflé. His substitute liar, Karoline Leavitt, was one of those left on the “doomed” aircraft. The entire White House traveling press corps was also served up to the hypothetical bad guys as victims du jour.
None of these people should be surprised. Cluck is a loyalty vacuum, not a loyalty dispenser. Everybody that comes close to him is tainted in the eyes of decent folk and cannon fodder in his eyes. There are no exceptions. Their belief that they will somehow miss the cut is a delusion. Cowardice and callousness are two areas in which he is perfectly predictable and reliable.
See, Karoline, you perjurious booby! We told you.
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I do not apologize. These sand cats are just too photogenic. Had to include a few more pix taken from an internet search.
“Why, Grandma, what big ears you have!”
“All the better to hear you with, my dear.”
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While doing a little waiting room time in Grand Junction, I luckily found a very nice little coffee shop only a block away, and with my years of intensive training in wasting time I can easily spend a couple of hours in one of these without blinking. I’ve been going to coffee shops since before they invented the barista, the decaf latté, or the 16 oz white mocha. My favorite hangout around the University of Minnesota in the middle nineteen fifties had the old wooden floors, high ceilings, and the proper once-you’ve-got-your-coffee-we-don’t-care-where-you-go-or what-you-do-with-it attitude. The established aroma was of aged wooden planking, cigarette smoke, and strong coffee. I loved it.
There were chess and checker boards sprinkled about the barn-like space. There were board games and jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, there were people dressed in odd costumery with knitted brows, a table laden with heavy books spread out in front of them. Since this was an era before cell phones or personal computers, no one needed an electrical outlet for anything but a small reading lamp. I loved it.
It made me feel, for the first time, like I had a shot at being a more cosmopolitan person, or perhaps a mini-intellectual about to bloom. Whatever the outcome would be, I sensed strongly that I was a participant in an educational process that went far beyond the rote memorizations of my high school years. I was a young man going someplace other than where I’d been, and this dusty coffee shop seemed a perfect place to rendezvous with the interesting and exciting people that fate was certain to bring together. I loved it.
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I rented a movie back in 1989 during one of the darker periods in my life that turned out to be one of the darkest and grimmest films I have ever seen. So much so that I’ve never known anyone that I could really recommend it to. Its title is Last Exit to Brooklyn and it is the polar opposite of a date movie.
Words like hopeless, unrelenting bleakness, and degradation kept showing up in reviews, but it had some very strong acting performances, among them Jennifer Jason Leigh in the role of a prostitute named Tralala. Roger Ebert wrote the characters “are limited in their freedom to imagine greater happiness for themselves, and yet in their very misery they embody human striving. There is more of humanity in a prostitute trying to truly love, if only for a moment, than in all of the slow-motion romantic fantasies in the world.” His review gave it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.
The movie had a fine score, written by Mark Knopfler. One of its pieces was A Love Idea, an achingly beautiful thing that still has the ability to haunt all these years later.
A Love Idea
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Marindahl
The two of us took off Threw old canoes onto cold water With little concern for age and infirmities
The wind blew up We didn’t care Whitecaps on the lake Troubled us not at all
Straining arms and shoulders We’ll live with the aches Friendship doesn’t need renewal As much as opportunity
One of the recurring topics of conversation between wife Robin and myself has been to compare childhoods. Usually this occurs during a meal, and often it involves what we ate as kids. Sometimes it went like this:
J: When I was a kid we often had ****** for supper. R: How odd J: Yes it was, but it was availableand it was cheap
or
R: There were times when all we had was ***** to eat J: I’d throw right up if that was on my plate R: Would you now
or
J: My mother would sew my shirts out of printed material from flour sacks R: My mother sewed all my dresses until high school J: … If I wore dresses they would have been made from flour sacks
or
R: The only preserves my family could afford were grape jam or apple butter J: Yeah, or we’d have orange marmalade which I despised R: (wistfully) You had marmalade?
Recently I purchased a pair of Converse All-Star sneakers. As a child they were the shoes I desperately wanted for gym class, but my parents bought me an off-brand I‘d never heard of and neither had any of my classmates. This resulted in an instant demotion in status. I was aware of that, so I made sure that those bobo shoes moved faster in races than those of anyone else in the room.
In honor of those pinchpenny times when we never were able to say to ourselves “I am going to make a tuna salad sandwich” and expect that all of the ingredients would be available, today I made a baked bean and dill pickle sandwich. Actually it wasn’t bad, even though it wouldn’t be found in any recipe book or on any restaurant menu. Growing up in a family of origin with limited financial resources called for being creative and coloring outside the lines.
I never thought of our family as being poor, only that we had less than many of those classmates I mentioned. I still don’t. Being poor to me was going hungry, which never happened. Or having holes in the soles of my shoes, which did happen, but my Dad was an at-home cobbler who would immediately carve out a new leather sole from a big sheet of cowhide and slap it on on that drafty footgear.
No … not poor … just the awareness of certain limitations.
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Fire and Rain, by James Taylor
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Sunday evening we attended a concert in a local church with our friends the Evanses. The musicians consisted of a couple from Nashville, a friend of the couple, from that same town, and a local woman apparently conscripted at the last moment. It all came together really well. They were low key, friendly, and professional folks who obviously respected one another’s talents. Delightful.
For the most part, the evening consisted of singing the songs of James Taylor and Carole King. Here’s a brief sample.
It all got me thinking of that outstanding Carole King album Tapestry. What a perfectly good use of vinyl that was.
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You’ve Got A Friend, by Carole King
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There is a rumor going around that a reporter actually heard a Republican congressperson say something that sounded like they still had a shred of conscience remaining. The rumor, of course, was proven to be false.
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Looks like a temperature reprieve is on the way during the next week We may actually get to go safely outdoors in the afternoon.
That would be totally excellent. The amount of time lost so far this summer to those scorching temperatures is … what can I say? Every time I grab the front doorknob of our home, which is on the south side of the house, and my hand recoils from its heat I say a little prayer for all those in power who have continued to claim that climate change is a hoax, and thus delayed seeking what remedy there might have been.
The content of that prayer is between me and God, but I can tell you that it is not flattering to the GOP.
Dorchester, Colorado would be a ghost town if there were still a town, but except for a single building all traces of what once was a community of 1000 people involved in mining have vanished. The single building eventually became a forest service guard station.
The Dorchester Guard Station is one of only two original Forest Service Guard Stations remaining in Gunnison County. It represents a unique Rocky Mountain style cabin construction and remains the only structure of the old town of Dorchester. The cabin is a one-room log cabin, originally built in 1905, in a remote area of Taylor Park. It was adjacent to the stagecoach road from Tincup to Aspen. Postal service was initiated for Dorchester on August 2, 1900 and the new cabin was designated the Post Office after its construction until July 31, 1912 when the post office was discontinued. During this time period the building also functioned as a general store, stage stop, and Forest Service phone point. By 1920, the town of Dorchester was abandoned. The land and associated structures, including the cabin, have reverted back to the U.S. Forest Service.
The Guard Station now stands at the entry to a road to the Dorchester Campground, where Robin, Allyson, Kyle and I spent two days this past week. As campgrounds go, it fits the description of “primitive” fairly well. There are carved out camping sites, picnic tables, and two privies, one of them pleasant and the other one dreadful. But there is no electricity, no water, no trash service (pack it out is their motto), and no helpful camp host.
What there is instead is some of the more beautiful scenery in a state that specializes in it. Here is the view from our campsite.
Daytime temperatures were near 80, and the nights went as low as 37 degrees. I found that my body and my old sleeping bag had a combined comfort level of 50 degrees, so there was some rolling into the tightest ball possible during the night.
It is rugged country, especially the last 15 miles of the highway leading to the campground entry which were moderately unpleasant. A road where top speeds of 15-20 mph were definitely called for. The road surface is coarse rock on a rock bed which makes it jarring and hazardous to one’s serenity.
The Taylor River runs near the campground, a classic mountain stream with its crystal clear waters. At times it is broken up into a flowage by the biggest collection of beaver dams I’ve ever encountered. After a time each flowage again becomes the river proper.
One delightful factoid. The Taylor River is long and gorgeous, the Taylor Park (valley) is huge and beautiful, and all of this is named after Jim Taylor, a miner who staked a claim out there in 1859. He was not a general, not a politician, not an oligarch. Just plain ol’ Jim. Love that.
Here’s smattering of pix from our visit. It’s the kind of scenery that a small camera in my unskilled hands cannot do justice.
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The smoke in the air is unusually heavy again this morning. Who knows from which of the many western fires? Today it is intense enough to cause some coughing and eye irritation. I can’t say for certain how long, but we’ve had smoky air for at least two months now. There have been five deaths among firefighters in our area, and all of the local communities are grateful for the help these courageous men and women provide. It’s been a long bad fire season so far.
The needs for help have climbed, while the supply of men and women to fight these fires is coming up short. Fatigue and burnout are very real when too few have too much work. Add to this the fact that pay for doing this hard and dangerous work is often feeble.
I have a long and carefully curated love for the music of Tom Waits. When I want to listen to it, I set aside the time because I would rather not be interrupted. And I leave one foot on the floor beside the bed to take my leave when I begin to feel too drawn into it. Because in his catalog there is enough melancholy to drown in if one is a weak swimmer and incautious enough to go out past their depth. There’s also quite a bit of it that is bonkers, as if being shouted out by a series of bipolar carnival barkers.
My favorite song in his ouevre? Can’t pick one. But today, just because of where my heart is … Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night comes pretty close.
I think that there are perfect moments in life … perfectly happy … perfectly sad … perfectly angry … . Those memories are the framework, the skeleton for a life, and lesser moments fill in the gaps between. This song is perfectly disquieting when one is rummaging through one’s back tapes and albums. I never had an Oldsmobile, but I did have a Ford …
Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits
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I heard a new conspiracy theory recently. It was that Cluck was already dead, and that a stand-in is being paraded at public functions by the wealthy cabal that bankrolls the political right wing. It works because his supporters are already past caring about the content of anything he says or does, accepting the entire dismal catalog without question. Who, after all, has the temerity to question God?
Interesting thought. My own response is – don’t buy it. Although there is a long history of dictators having such lookalikes represent them, especially in dangerous situations, to have someone play the role continuously would be a stretch.
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Joey, by Peggy Lee
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Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
The days often bring surprises, some of them more desirable than others, but the best ones consist of an event that breaks the day into before and after. Today it was an article about Linda Perhacs, an elderly woman who may have gone missing. She is a singer/songwriter/dental hygienist who made an album I never heard of back in 1970 but that I learned has been influential in folk music circles ever since. The album title is Parallelograms.
Perhacs was working as a dental hygienist in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, and experimenting with songwriting on the side, when one of her patients, Leonard Rosenman, a composer whose credits included music for “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and other movies, helped her land recording sessions with elite musicians.
“Parallelograms” received little commercial attention when it was first released but enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after its rediscovery and subsequent reissues.
NYTimes August 1, 2026
It’s just the sort of tale that interests me, so I sought out that first album of hers and it is beautiful, ethereal at times. I have added it to my modest collection and now I share a couple of its songs with you along with this post. I know it is because of my age that the story is as moving as it is. We know something of our lives as we are involved in living them, but we never know our endings, do we? What will eventually take us away? Where will we be? How will it happen?
And how many of us will leave something behind as marvelous as this recording?
Before reading this article I had no idea that there was a Linda Perhacs. Now I join the many who fervently hope that she is not lost, and will be found safe and comfortable.
The best thing would be to personally thank her for sharing her music with the world nearly sixty years ago and leaving it for me to discover now. Instead I must content myself with sending her all the metta I can muster.
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Chimacum Rain, by Linda Perhacs
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Additional note. One day after I had finished writing the above post, news came that Ms. Perhacs had been located and is doing just fine.
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Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans
John Lennon
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Each morning I stumble to the bathroom and turn on a glaring light to avoid tripping and becoming a statistic. I raise my eyes to the mirror and stand with my hands out, palms up, and address the universe: “What have you got for me today?” Will it be something ordinary, like a new ache or limitation? Or will it be something that inspires, that reaches inside and cleans up one of the numberless messes in there. Looking back my life often seems way more like an unkempt dorm room than a marble edifice.
There are clothes all over the floor, dishes in the sink, trash that badly needs carrying to the curb, the aroma of stale food lingering in the fridge. All in all it resembles the line in Kris Kristofferson’s song:
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
Too late to wish that I had been tidier, it is what it is. There were those around me who offered good advice along the way, perhaps I could have listened more and acted less. I can only say that if you think I’m a bit unfocussed now, you shoulda been there.
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Hey Now Who Really Cares, by Linda Perhacs
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Vignette
A man and woman have found a place that might have been crowded but this day it is all theirs. There is time to spend by the river, swimming in a small protected bay on a hot and humid afternoon. Lying on the sand, absorbing sun and sounds and what coolness the slight breeze provides. They are camping here for the night, and later on there will be private moments filled with sweat and laughter and discovery.
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Delicious, by Linda Perhacs
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My camping experiences did not begin until after I was in my twenties. There were no people in my family of origin who wanted to sleep on the ground. Zero. Since most of the adult males had served in World War Two under arduous circumstances, they had experienced enough of that particular sort of fun to fill several lifetimes. There was no romance in sleeping under the stars for them.
I have slept in a variety of tents, starting with a used “umbrella” tent that I bought for ten dollars. It was made of old-line canvas, and was already near the end of its useful life when I purchased it. It kept everything that I wanted to avoid (insects, raccoons, snakes) on the outside except for rain, which it welcomed with open arms and directed toward my head and neck with surprising accuracy.
My favorites have been the dome-shaped tents. There is something quieting to my spirit about being inside a small dome. The space is pleasing to the eye and all that. I have learned that it is essential to have two “doors” rather than a single exit. In the middle of the night, especially as years go by and bladders get smaller, having to crawl over another body to answer nature’s call is awkward and frequently leads to disturbances and mutterings by the sleeper. And then, of course, when it is time to return one must again try to ease oneself back into their original spot without provocations. Usually this is not possible.
You’re reading along, not a deep thought in your entire head, and then you have a moment. That poem there in front of you climbs off the page and Crisprs itself right into your DNA. It’s a flashlight illuminating some truth that you might have dimly sensed but couldn’t put it into words and here is a guy who can and does.
That was my reaction to this moving short poem by Mick Canning, from his book “The Night Bus.” Rather than feel like just one of the characters in the poem, I identify with all of them. There have been times when I was definitely a door closer, and others where I flung it so far open that bats flew in.
The Restless Wind
By Mick Canning
Some people need the familiar, Finding within it, safety and comfort. But some see it as a constraint, Suffocating them like the walls of a prison.
And the same wind that blows Through both their houses Causes one man to close his door, While the other throws his wide open.
A long time ago, I had a colleague who was quite fond of listening to the sound of his own voice, and daily used it to express what he regarded as deep thoughts, but were mostly platitudes. However, the principle of even a stopped clock being right twice a day was certainly true of this man. Thus when one day he said “Poets are the last truth tellers,” it rang so clearly that I have not forgotten it.
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The Wayward Wind, by Gogi Grant
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This past week I ran across a recipe that piqued my curiosity. It was for sardine paté. One took a can of sardines, a few other ingredients, tossed them into a blender and blended the very bejabbers out of the contents. What other ingredients, you ask, almost fearing what I will say, since the thought of sardines in a blender has already proved unsettling?
Well, some butter, a hard-boiled egg, lemon juice, capers, mustard, shallots, and parsley, that’s what. The sardines were of the sort that is packed in oil. During the process Robin wandered into the kitchen and idly enquired what I was making. When I told her, her color paled and she quickly found other places in the house to be.
It was obvious that I was on my own here, and shouldn’t expect much help in consuming the gray-brown and fragrant mound that I had created.
This is not the first time in my life that I created food that no one else would eat. When my children were young I found a recipe for liver casserole. There was a bold aroma in the kitchen as it baked, and a finished appearance that most resembled something that the dog had eaten and then later yarked up. Not only would my entire family rise up with one voice and refuse to eat it, but I was not allowed to keep it indoors.
At the time I was puzzled at first. During my own early childhood, liver was a big part of our diet, since organ meats were not subject to rationing during WW II.
I liked it. My family of origin all liked it. My mother had become an expert in its preparation. So for me I was revisiting of one of the pleasant parts of being a kid in the early 1940s.
However, for my kids, the best spin that I can put on the whole casserole episode is that it was as if an alien had brought out something scooped off a greasy floor in the corner of a malodorous room in their UFO. Something whose expiration date was clearly months in the past, and now here it was in the middle of their dinner table and they were being asked to eat it.
‘Twas not exactly the same, but Robin’s facial expression when I spoke the words “sardine paté” did look familiar.
(BTW: the paté is delicious.)
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Hasten Down the Wind, by Warren Zevon
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On one of those late summer nights long long ago when too many gin and tonics had definitely clouded my judgment, I had left the front door of my home wide open. At some point I looked up from my chair and saw a bat fluttering about the living room. Interesting, said I to myself, so I stood up and as it flew past me I reached out and caught it in my hand.
As if this were an everyday occurrence I walked serenely to the open doorway and gently tossed the amazed creature out into the dark, whereupon it flew off to tell its story to the rest of the colony.
Apparently it had been too surprised to bite me, because neither of us was harmed in the incident.
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Hear The Wind Howl, by Leo Kottke
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A gigantic heat dome is setting up over most of the western US this weekend. What’s a heat dome, you ask? It’s like a monster hair dryer from a beauty salon that has dropped down and lost its mind while being set to parboil. Here’s a graphic to guide you:
It’s the sort of picture that doesn’t need explanation or a legend to tell its story. Records are being broken everywhere you see red. Paradise is right in the middle. I doubt even events like this summer are changing many of the minds over in the conservative bin, many of whom are still describing climate change as a hoax.
Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
John Stuart Mill
Listening to these clodpolls, including some at the highest levels (is there such a thing) of our government is enough to make one ready for a quiet place where you cut out paper dolls and make leather belts.
I’ve read the book five times, seen the television series four times, and referred to the story enough times to make my friends gag at its mention and run to their cars for trips to town on errands they suddenly recalled. The book and series are Lonesome Dove. Robert Duvall has had a long and productive life as an actor, and the role he played in Lonesome Dove is his favorite of them all.
Today I found myself thinking about how a real Buddhist (not a half-assed one like myself) would approach our nation’s troubles. For sure the painful straitjacket presently stretching across America would not give him pause. After all, the Buddha lived 2500 years ago, and if you have been paying attention you could not have missed that there has been quite a lot of nasty stuff that happened during that time.
The perspective that such a person might have would inform him that change is inevitable, that even the sturdiest dictators have largely come to bad ends. No, this thoughtful person would remember where his roots were, where reliable happiness was to be found, how to deal with life in the chaos.
Sooo, Gus McCrae, the character played by Duvall in Lonesome Dove, was not a Buddhist, but I think he could easily have been grandfathered in. Here’s Gus talking with Lori about disappointments, and the suffering we cause ourselves.
I’m not too enamored with buttermilk, but today I bought a cantaloupe at the market after carefully tapping it to check on its ripeness. Once home, I grabbed a long thin-bladed knife and first cut it in half, then sliced one of those halves into slender crescents. As I raised one slice to my mouth its aroma preceded it, and there was no disappointment when I bit in. Suc-cu-lence!
In a small way it was like an exercise that Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh used in teaching mindfulness meditation, where he made use of a single raisin. It is summarized as follows. (this following bit of text is by AI, not me)
The Practice Steps
Hold the raisin: Place one raisin in your palm. Look at it closely as if you have never seen one before, noticing its color, folds, and ridges.
Touch and smell: Roll it between your fingers to feel the texture. Hold it under your nose to inhale its scent.
Place in the mouth: Put it on your tongue without chewing yet. Notice how it feels in your mouth.
Chew slowly: Take one or two deliberate chews. Notice the release of flavor and how the texture changes.
Swallow consciously: Feel the intention to swallow, and follow the small piece as it moves down into your body.
Contemplating Interbeing
See the origins: Reflect on how the raisin came to be. See the sunshine, the rain, the earth, and the clouds within the fruit.
Acknowledge others: Recognize the labor of the farmworkers who picked the grapes, the people who dried and packaged them, and those who brought them to the store.
Cultivate gratitude: Realize that without this vast web of life and cooperation, the single raisin would not exist, generating deep thankfulness for the present moment.
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July has been a seemingly unending series of ninety-degree days, looking forward and back. The countryside is baked hard. For the most part the good citizens of Paradise stay indoors during the day, leaving the tennis and pickleball courts uninhabited. Hydrate … hydrate … hydrate is the mantra.
Our cat, Willow, has met the outdoor smelter with a simple course of action. Don’t go there. Not until the sun goes down, that is. And then stay out most of the night. So from sunup to sundown we find her in her favorite indoor sleeping places, of which there are four in regular rotation. After supper she pads over to the cat portal, assesses what is beyond it, and then takes off.
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I have a new game to add to those being played in Washington D.C. called Where’s Mitch? Since that singular person has been missing for a month, imaginations have run wild. Not everybody thinks he is still among the living, but without proof one way or another all anyone can do is guess.
Below is a gallery of sightings that were reported as suspicious but eventually proved not to be McConnell.
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It all started with my reading a post on Substack on that old cradle-robber, Jerry Lee Lewis. His career toileted when he married his seriously underage cousin.
So times were hard in 1964, and here was Lewis playing a seedy club in Hamburg, Germany with a back-up band assembled at the last minute. The recording of that concert “stacks up well with any hard-line rock album before or since,” says the author of the piece. I hadn’t heard it before but it is vintage Jerry Lee, which means quite a lot.
The album contains only 8 songs and the total running time is only 22 minutes. It takes me longer to soak my feet some mornings. I provide one cut, a kickbutt of a version of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.
This past week has been interesting from a rainfall perspective. We’ve had several sharp rains around the state, brief in duration, but with beaucoup water. This has led to one of Colorado’s more delightful highway happenings, mudslides.
In the past few days we’ve had mudslides blocking interstate 70, which is the main east-west Highway across the state. Locally there were mudslides in Black Canyon National Park blocking the East Portal Road that winds steeply down to the Gunnison River, and inundating the small campground that was at the bottom of that road. Another mudslide blocked the highway to Telluride. This all within a period of only six days.
Black Canyon Park managers have actually been anticipating such a slide. When you have soil being held in place by a sketchy and scant network of plant life, and that plant life is burned away as happened in the park fire last summer, you are almost guaranteed to have some problems with mud eventually. You just have to wait for the hard rains.
In the case of the present event there were 20 people that were temporarily trapped down at the East Portal and had to be rescued by Park staff. Three of them spent the night down at the East Portal, apparently preferring staying in place to traveling up a muddy and now more hazardous road to the top, in the dark.
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I think that I should get this bracelet for myself. Can’t think of a better expression of my present state of mind.
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Twelve Thirty, by the Mamas and the Papas
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Robin and I took in a matinee on Wednesday, driving through a blinding (but brief) rainstorm to see The Odyssey. I have nothing to add to the superlatives that are flooding entertainment news sources. Worst criticism I have is that the movie is nearly three hours long and I possess a 2.5 hour bladder. So I’m not too sure about the ending with my attention being elsewhere. What happened with the suitors? Did Odysseus die or what?
There was one thing that I noted about the movie. The characters didn’t speak in some stilted interpretation of an ancient language. They spoke in today’s vernacular. Even, occasionally, in using what amounted to slang. I never actually heard anyone say “Wassup?,” but they came pretty close.
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I had another close encounter with a raccoon Thursday morning around 0430, in our kitchen/dining area, where the cat dishes are kept. The critter had come in for food, of course, and I was alerted to its presence by the sound of loud munching on our cat’s dry rations. I went from the office out to greet my visitor, but as soon as it saw me coming it quickly took its leave and went back out into the dark and the light rain we were experiencing.
That’s one of the problems with interacting with raccoons, I’ve found, is that it is very difficult to have a meaningful dialogue with them. One look at you and they are off to somewhere more interesting or profitable, without so much as a by your leave.
Here are some bits of raccoon lore:
In captivity they can live up to 20 years, but only up to three years on average in the wild
They can climb down a tree facing forward, a feat unusual in such a large animal
Related females often share a common area, while unrelated males live together in groups of up to four raccoons
Their hearing is good enough to hear earthworms underground
They are omnivores par excellence with a diet consisting of about 40% invertebrates, 33% plant material and 27% vertebrates.
The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, released in 1931, contained a recipe for preparing raccoon.
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A sobering episode unfolded this past week in the wonderful world of AI. An AI something (they called it an “agent”) that was not supposed to be able to get out of its “sandbox,” got out of its “sandbox” at a research facility.
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Next, that same something that was not supposed to be able to get to the internet, got to the internet. Then, that same something hacked into another AI company’s website and messed around while it was there. It was not supposed to be able to get into that site.
No harm, no foul? What if that same something wanted to do other stuff, let’s say meddle in the Department of Defense or a major banking institution or hospital? It obviously can go pretty much where it wants to. When children don’t take care of their toys, friends, what do we do? Why, we take those toys away from them and put them someplace safe and secure.
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Uncle John’s Band (live), by the Grateful Dead
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The depressing numbers are in for social media and their toxic algorithms, especially for young women. More psychological damage, more suicides, more eating disorders, etc. The depressing part comes from the fact that the developers of these algorithms know what they are doing, and keep doing it. Bringing in customers, after all, is at the heart of capitalism.
I have dropped Facebook and any others of its sordid ilk and I have switched away from Google as my search engine. Both of these giants have their hands deep in the bloody till. Too big to fail? They are far too big to trust.
I am quite sure that my leaving these tawdry enterprises behind has struck terror in their hearts, and somewhere on their campuses there are teams working frantically to restore my confidence in their good intentions. After all, it is well known that octogenarian males are their target audience.
There are two life lessons that I have to pass along this morning. I have others are others that I could mention, but these two are crucial for me to keep in mind, I think.
#1: There is more kindness in the world than I ever imagined.
#2: There is more cruelty in the world than I ever suspected.
Why have such a somber opening in today’s posting? Mostly because my country is presently exemplifying the latter of the two lessons listed above. At almost every turn and in nearly every aspect of our domestic and foreign policies you find there is both dangerous stupidity and the basest sort of malignity that are operative to a degree which is nearly blinding in its brazenness.
If I didn’t firmly believe what Lesson #1 provides, I don’t know how I would manage the daily dung-stream that rolls down my computer screen and into my eyes. What has been for me the most painful thing of all is realizing how many of my neighbors accept cruelty as a normal way of conducting our nation’s affairs.
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Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
The Dalai Lama
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It’s best that we mortals not try to predict the future and leave such things to the gods. For instance, I can easily imagine back on some sunny day in 1975 that Zeus took a long look at this guy and said:
“I think that when he gets to be an old fart, we could pair him with one of the best female country singers on the planet and they would make two peerless albums of duets.”
And so Robert Plant and Alison Krauss got together in the studio to make the album Raising Sand. Fourteen years later they made Raise the Roof. I really doubt that an ordinary human could have seen that coming.
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Please Read the Letter, by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
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We are all just walking each other home.
Ram Dass
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Robin and I are watching a three-part series about Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of those creatures called docu-dramas, and has quite a cast of commentators, former President Obama being one of them. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is another. Look for it on Netflix.
Just as there is not a day that passes without new and odious revelations about our 47th president, I have never watched or read anything about Mr. Lincoln that did not improve my views on humanity and make me feel better about my membership in the species. We are capable of such great and good things, and there is no shortage of leaders, past and present, to provide us guidance toward a world where justice and kindness prevail.
We may have to look for them, they are often the quieter ones in the back of the room rather than one of those people who are scrambling to get to the microphone.
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Killing the Blues, by Alison Krauss & Robert Plant
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The tedium of balancing the checkbook or reconciling the checking account software over an adult lifetime has been almost stultifying. Every month of every year and the only thing you find to break the monotony is a rare check that you forgot to record . And the bank never makes a mistake. I had almost decided to give it up as a complete waste of energy.
Until this week, when the printed log of my account revealed a photocopy of a withdrawal check signed by a complete stranger, from an account whose number was not at all similar to ours. The check was for five hundred dollars.
When I took the document to the bank, the teller’s pupils dilated and she immediately told me to take a seat, while she notified someone higher up the chain of command . When that esteemed person came over with the paper now firmly in her hand, she took great pains to tell me how an error like this might have occurred. It was obvious that she was embarrassed for the institution and wanted me to know that stuff like this simply didn’t happen at the Bank of Colorado.
The Bank manager and the teller, in my fervid imagination.
I didn’t care. I wanted my five hundred dollars back. Exactly how it had been taken away was of no interest to me and was their issue. But … now I can never think of quitting with doing these boring reconciliations. Bleah.
In 1988 the Cowboy Junkies brought out an album which was melancholic enough that I adopted it in toto. It was a grand fit for the chaos in my life at the time, and was in constant replay all of that year and the next. The album was called The Trinity Sessions, and was a breakthrough recording for the group.
One cut on the album was their interpretation of the Lou Reed song Sweet Jane, which by now everybody that ever lived has probably heard somewhere. Hypnotic, doleful, haunting. You might think that the song had been just waiting for Margo Timmins’ quiet voice.
Sweet Jane, by Cowboy Junkies
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As America continues to stumble through these grotesque days I know that eventually some idiot is going to say “You know, one day we’ll look back on this and laugh.” At that moment I will raise my ancient fist and smack him alongside the head. I am not ordinarily a violent person, but that would just be too much.
Of course this would almost certainly be instantly followed by my receiving a severe pummeling, but a guy has to do what a guy has to do.
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At an AA meeting this week I happened to mention one of my favorite quotations by Mark Twain.
Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.
Mark Twain
It must have caught their fancy because everyone in the room but Robin reached for their pen and made a note to themselves to look it up. Robin, of course, has heard everything I have in my head several times by now and hardly notices when my lips start flapping, and therefore her hands remained quietly in her lap.
That’s one problem with living with me. I have only a few things to say but that doesn’t stop me from repeating them endlessly. My first wife lasted twenty-five years before she ran screaming down the street one day and never came back. Through some miracle of fortitude Robin has made it to thirty-four years, but I keep my eye on that large suitcase of hers out in the garage just in case I ever find it packed and ready to go at a time when we have no trip planned.
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Cluck gave one of his signature wanderlogues on television this past week, but of the major networks only CBS carried it, while ABC, CNN, and NBC passed. We have come to expect nothing less from CBS, which climbed into bed with Cluck when he raised the edge of the coverlet a trifle and made room for them. It’s one more phase of the sad downslide for a network that once was perhaps the most reliable of them all, certainly during the Walter Cronkite days they stood for something other than a being a gaggle of lackeys.
As an aside, when something like sanity returns to American political life, it would seem a good time for the trustbusters to take a long hard look at recent media mergers. At some point, bigger becomes a real problem, and we’ve got it already.
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Can’t talk about Sweet Jane without bringing in the man who wrote the song, from the live album Rock and Roll Animal.
Two guitarists, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, play a long and famous introduction to Reed’s appearance on stage, and then they dig in hard when he shows up. It’s a one-act play for the ears.
Intro/Sweet Jane, by Lou Reed
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“Nicholas Dale, a 56-year-old helicopter pilot from British Columbia, Canada, died on July 12, 2026, when his K-MAX helicopter crashed into the Silver Jack Reservoir in western Colorado while fighting the Gold Mountain fire. The fatal crash is currently being investigated by the NTSB and the FAA.”
“Hundreds of local residents, including public servants and first responders in Montrose County, lined U.S. Highway 50 to honor Dale and pay tribute to his ultimate sacrifice. His remains were recovered by the Montrose County Sheriff’s Office dive team shortly after the aircraft went down.“
Various news sources
Our local wildfires have claimed one more firefighter. The reservoir cited above is only an hour’s drive from us. We’ve visited it several times. This brings the sad total of lives lost in this fire season in Paradise to four.
Traveling back to Colorado on Tuesday morning we found ourselves in the very last row on the airplane. Below is a photo of the space available to patrons occupying my seat. This pic is starring my very own knees.
Keeping in mind that I have lost an inch in height over the years, for the first time I am grateful for that shrinkage. If I were still at the towering height of 69 inches, I wouldn’t fit at all unless I turned sideways and encroached upon my neighbor’s meager space.
I do not love air travel. I do not like the fuss, the lines, the arrogance of the TSA people, and the feeling of being totally jerked around by the airlines. I deplore the cramped seats and the nano-snack bags containing several undistinguished pretzels – it would be better if the airline had the courage to say “On a flight this short we don’t think that you need to eat so we’re not going to give you anything.” (I do understand the logic behind the use of pretzels, however. They can be safely stored for hundreds of years.)
On the first leg of our return to Paradise Robin and I were in Row 38, the last line of seats. Behind us was the toilet and I am a little surprised that this space wasn’t sold as well. I think this is a missed opportunity for them. It could be billed as the throne of power.
Okay. Done complaining.
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One little vignette from the flight from Denver to Montrose. There was a cohort of men in uniform aboard, nearly all of them Native American, and all on their way to help fight fires in Ouray. When the plane landed the flight attendant came on the PA system and thanked these guys for the work they were doing. This was immediately followed by an outburst of clapping from the rest of the passengers throughout the plane. Sweet.
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I like the poetry form haiku, as I have mentioned before. I appreciate its economy and discipline. Using so few words can draw a picture or call up an emotion. It can illuminate something we might otherwise have missed. They are candid camera shots in verse. For myself, if I can’t say what I want in 17 syllables, perhaps I am better keeping quiet.
Darkness at two a.m. green leaves of the ash tree wave with the earth’s in-breath
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And lastly, we just passed the 150th anniversary of “Custer’s Last Stand.” The NYTimes did a really interesting article on the battle and its aftermath, along with a good representation of how artists have painted that story.
