Coping

jono55

Some good things that come from the cold weather are the coping strategies that we use. A steaming bowl of steel cut oats is a warm and chewy way to start a morning. Aromatic soups both mundane and exotic are just the right thing for supper, and their preparation warms and perfumes the rooms.

Sharing a small blanket with a friend while watching television harkens back to the bundling practices of colonial America. And if you and your friend are of like mind, there are delightful liberties that can be taken under that covering.

Those puffy down jackets and coats are amazing armor against arctic weather. Even my 35 year-old Loden parka, heavy wool that it is, is a barrier no icy blast can penetrate.

And when your bathroom feels like the crisper drawer in a refrigerator as you strip down to take a shower, a small portable heater can create a micro-climate just for you.

I think that our cats feel much the same way. Without the need to constantly patrol the back yard against marauders of various species, they can remain indoors and devote themselves full-time to their true love … napping.

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Father’s Son, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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We still don’t have much snow here in Paradise, and the nearby ski areas are starting to complain that they would like quite a bit more, if you please. Ski resorts here in the mountains so frequently grumble about how much snow they’ve received that in this they are much like the farmers of the prairie states who absolutely never get the amount of sunshine or rainfall that they want.

In general talking to those farmers during the growing season is tiresome. They will rail against the weather of the present, and when they are done with that they will begin bringing up the meteorological misdeeds of the past several decades.

These orations are so similar to one another that farmers could really save themselves time and energy by transcribing one of them and then printing it as a handout to be passed around in place of conversation.

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I can’t recall if I’ve brought this up before, but my approach to cooking is to learn how to do everyday dishes well, and leave the more exotic and the gourmet to others.

So it’s a tasty roast chicken that might come from my stove, but probably not coq au vin. I don’t worry about the intricacies of working with phyllo dough because I skip over any recipe that contains it.

From time to time a new recipe will work out so well that I take one bite and my jaw drops and my pupils dilate. Although this is not a culinary blog, I am going to start sharing with you those times when something turns out that good that I can’t shut up about it. My first such share is for a chicken noodle soup that rocks, and is in a total ‘nother country.

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Cuckoo, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Readers of this blog over time have learned that I attend AA meetings pretty regularly. Even though I haven’t used alcohol for a very long time now, there are at least two reasons that I still go to those meetings.

  • First, one is never “cured” of whatever being an addict is, and so far there has been nothing found that works better than the comradeship and support of people in the same pickle that you are in in maintaining abstinence.
  • Second, if you have found a small boat to have been a lifesaving tool for you, gratitude leads you to personally want to make sure that such a useful watercraft is tied up to the dock and available for the next person who needs it. An AA meeting can be that boat.

Robin and I are watching the British television series Call the Midwife, and in one of its story threads it has subtly laid out the progression that many people who now suffer from alcohol addiction have followed in their lives. A main character in the show first enjoys the camaraderie and sophistication that she feels when having a dram on special occasions. Then it is on non-special occasions. Then nightly. Daily.

Because the series was so successful and lasted so long, this progression took place slowly over several years, as it often does in real life.

Eventually there come the attempts at self-control and their subsequent failures with accompanying guilt and dishonesty. The lucky ones eventually find their way to a therapeutic community, with AA being one example.

All of this has been laid out quite believably in the series. There are no big dramas, no surgeons passing out and pitching forward into the abdominal cavity (oh, the stories we accumulate), but only a good woman doing what other good women were doing but finding that somehow … inexplicably … she developed a problem while they did not.

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[Sometimes it helps to turn to poets to see through the smoke, at those times when life becomes a dance of perplexity and anguish. A friend of mine long gone used to say “Poets are the last truth-tellers.” Of course, he said a lot of things … some of them were true.]

Exquisite Politics

by Denise Duhamel

The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,

maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,

maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.

Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.

Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth

of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,

anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.

I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,

resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric

languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,

smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.

Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop

loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,

splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage

before the other side yells: Wow! America,

Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.

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I’m A Song, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Salsas de la Muerte

jono55

At City Market yesterday I was impressed by the proliferation of hot sauces available to use in flavoring our food. As far as this product is concerned we seem to be in a golden age. Every year the number of choices grows, way too fast for me to attempt to sample them all.

Although I didn’t count the offerings at that visit, there must have been more than a hundred of them to pick from. The labels of many boasted about their pepper of origin and how unbearable they were and what havoc they would soon be wreaking on your body. There were jalapeño sauces, habanero sauces, serrano sauces, ghost pepper sauces, Scotch Bonnet sauces, Carolina Reaper sauces, etc.

It is likely that none of them convey the full fury of the pepper to one’s gastrointestinal tract. The pepper power is usually considerably diluted in making the product you find on those shelves. The full experience of ingesting an untamed Carolina Reaper, for instance, is enjoyed by a very few of the hardiest of souls. And as my grandmother might have said, they may not be quite right in the head.

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Hot Stuff, by Donna Summer

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Robin and I went with friends to see A Complete Unknown, and it was the second time for us. Double awesome. On a Wednesday night in Paradise the theater was nearly filled, with the hair color of most of the attendees being gray. That is testament to the drawing power of Dylan and his music. This was, after all, just a movie about him, and covered only a short handful of years in his career.

BTW. When Bob left the Iron Range of Minnesota and stopped for a while in Minneapolis, he rented a room above Gray’s Drug in the Dinkytown area, just off the university campus. At one brief moment in my otherwise unremarkable life I too, stayed for a few days in a room over Gray’s Drug.

It wasn’t the same room that Dylan had occupied but hey, his was just down the hall. And my occupancy was many years after he had left for New York, but … let’s not quibble … I was that close to greatness.

Even more of this unbelievableness. He and I attended the University of Minnesota at the same time, and you know, he has never once mentioned me in any of his songs or interviews. If you ask him he may use the excuse that there were 35,000 other students attending that school at the same time, but that’s pretty weak, really. I guess when you get to the top you forget about the little people … .

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Our new/old POTUS, in one of his first official acts, pardoned everybody that participated in the January 6 insurrection, which he calls a festival. The sacrifices the capitol police made in protecting members of Congress are ignored or made light of. The Fraternal Order Of Police must be rethinking their support for Cluck in his three runs for the presidency. What the FOP might have easily known, if they had looked just a little deeper, is that loyalty is a one-way street for Cluck.

While I am all in favor of reducing prison populations, I would humbly suggest that first we let out everyone who is completely innocent. This would free up an estimated 4-6% of the prison population right there.

If we were making a list, there are many other groups more deserving of clemency than the traitors of January 6. We could have saved those bozos for last.

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From The New Yorker

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With God On Our Side, by Bob Dylan

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February is now officially within striking distance, with only 5 days of January to go. Not that February is any great shakes as a month, typically being the coldest of the year in these parts. And it only has a single holiday, one devoted to Hallmark Card’s version of romantic love, which has been shown over a very long time to have some serious holes in its implementation. If it were not for the unholy quartet of greeting card sellers, florists, jewelers, and candy makers, Valentine’s Day might have long ago been disposed of in history’s dustbin.

But I digress. The best thing about the month of February is that it has fewer days than all the rest. Because to get to good ol’ windy, rainy, unpredictable March is our goal. March is where the annual battle between weather we really like and the basket of deplorables* that constitutes Winter is fought.

There is a certain odor in the air that defines Autumn for me, and that is the lovely scent of dried and decaying leaves everywhere. Early spring also has its distinctive odor and it is of all the dog poop thawing that has been left behind by our friends at the IRCOA (Irresponsible Canine Owners of America). This is the perfume of March.

*I know you’ve heard this phrase somewhere before … somewhere.

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Robin and I finished a limited series on Netflix last night, and it was a relief to do so. The series was “American Primeval,” and we’re not quite sure why we stuck with it. Here’s a selection from a review in The Guardian.

American Primeval emerges as a study of human nature at its desperate best and unbridled worst, the whole existential mess parching beneath the sun like pegged-out animal skins. The wild west never looked so wild, nor as nasty, broken and desolate. Halfway though, I’m engrossed, but also genuinely shocked. Don’t watch it if you can’t take violence. Just don’t.

Barbara Ellen, The Guardian

And that quote was taken from a positive review, one that gave the show four out of five stars.

The main protagonists are the Utes, the Mormon church, the U.S. Army, and a ragtag bunch of settlers, trappers, and mountain scroungers. None of these groups conduct themselves well. Everybody is freezing, eneryone needs a bath very badly, and everyone is functioning with mostly their lizard brains. The weather ranges from simply bleak and windy to blizzards. The violence is off most charts.

And yet we finished it. Perhaps we saw some truth worth learning there. About what frontier life really might have been. Brutal, dirty, bloody, and often short. Being on the frontier was probably a lot less tidy than what Little House on the Prairie presented.

Our review: Interesting story but awfully grim in the telling. No comic relief in sight. Not a guffaw or a pratfall in the entire series.

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Where did this guy come from? I totally did not see him coming. Country grunge with thoughtful lyrics, great guitar playing, passé thrift shop clothing and scraggly hair? In this song he is reminiscing about a milestone year in his adolescence. I can relate to much of it without half-trying.

(I learned that he was/is a Nirvana fan and there is a tiny musical quote in this video at 012-018 from Nirvana’s recording of All Apologies.)

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Ole was hired to paint the yellow stripe down the highway. His first day, his boss handed him a brush and a can of paint and Ole painted ten miles. The second day he only painted five.

His boss, thinking that he was getting slower because he had started off too hard on the first day, decided to give him a day off to rest. But when Ole came back to work the next day, he only painted half a mile.

So his boss asked, “Excuse me, but why have you been painting less and less each day, even after I gave you a day off?”

“Well, ” Ole answered. “I’m getting further from the can!”

(It’s been a long time since I’ve subjected anyone to an Ole and Lena joke. Figured it was catch-up time.)

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What Do We Deserve?

jono55

It struck me that the Second Coming of Cluck is the perfect time to break out one of the wisest prayers I know, the Serenity Prayer. Written by Reinhold Niebuhr around 1934, its relevance is timeless, and I am choosing it as my mantra for the upcoming quadrennial.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

It’s that last line that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Until you get to it the question is “Sure, but how do I know what can and cannot be changed?”

Wisdom is the answer.

Some semblance of wisdom is at once essential to living a life worth mentioning, and a quality that is in ruefully short supply at the same time. I wish that I could say that I am a wise person, but the best I can do is to claim that, upon reflection, there have been a few widely separated times where I have behaved in a manner that might charitably be called wise. (Full disclaimer: Even those moments may have only been expressions of the stopped-clock principle (“even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”)

What I am not going to do is rent Mr. Cluck any space in my head. In our present climate where every one of his belches, hiccups, and exhalations are reported breathlessly by media outlets, this is not going to be a simple thing to do. His administration may well cause extensive disruptions in our national life, but what I believe and who I am and who and what are dear to me will not change. These things are far too valuable to be ever handed over to politicians. Any politicians.

(Or to anyone else, for that matter).

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The time is always right to do what is right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Spiritual Trilogy, by Odetta

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When we moved to Paradise, there were Apple product sales and repair facilities in both Montrose and Grand Junction. Both have blown away like milkweed seeds in September and there are no indications that they will ever return.

My present problem is an iPhone battery that is malfunctioning. There is a local guy working out of the back of a packaging store who does such replacements, but I already used him once and the battery he installed was a POS and which is the one now failing. Lasted less than a year.

Just today I got a callback from a Mac repairman in yet another nearby town who informed me that he doesn’t do phones but can recommend someone reliable who does. I don’t want to get my hopes up but … you know … desperate times, desperate measures.

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Stand By Me, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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I don’t usually think of David Brooks as a humorist, but he gets off a couple of good lines in his latest piece published in the Times of New York. Even the title makes me smile and cringe at the same time: We Deserve Pete Hegseth. Gallows humor.

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We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have now read 127 thinkpieces on the subject of why the Democrats lost the last election. They have provided me with 127 different points of view. I will give each of the authors credit for hubris, and it is possible that some of them are at least partially correct. But really … aren’t they the latest example of the classic story of blind men describing an elephant?

The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

Wikipedia

Let me add a 128th viewpoint. In this past election one candidate was a man whose sterling qualities included being a pathological liar, a rampant narcissist, a psychopath, an abuser of women, a serial oath-breaker, a con man of the most blatant stripe, a draft dodger, and a convicted felon.

If a political party manages to lose an election to such opposition there exists the possibility that said party has its collective head up its collective bum.

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Something unusual and beautiful happened in Paradise on January 20. There was an all-day celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Starting with speeches and a march in the frigid air of our coldest day this winter so far (Disclaimer – I did not march. My physician, Dr. Outlastia Permanentia, has told me that my fragile constitution will not allow for outdoor activities when shivering is even a remote possibility. She fears that such rapid movements will cause my body to fly apart).

There was live music where the audience shared voices both tuned and tuneless in singing songs of the civil rights era. There was a movie about John Lewis, another major figure in the fight for civil/human rights and justice. There were readings of quotations of MLK both in English and Spanish.

All in all it was very moving and an unexpected midwinter treat. When we are barraged every day with examples of mendacity, selfishness, and dimwittedness, it is good to be reminded that this is not all we humans are. Sometimes we are capable of generosity, selflessness, and even magnificence. Those qualities were celebrated today in several venues around town. With music, speeches, films, and audience participation.

We were also reminded that the battle against injustice is not a thing that is over and done. We are daily given opportunities to continue that struggle.

Also … there were cookies at nearly all of the venues. I am not so pure that I can’t be bribed by an oatmeal/raisin delicacy.

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We Shall Overcome, by Dorothy Cotton, Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger

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History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Words Failing

jono55

Ran across a short article in the Times about grief, and the discomfort most of us feel when in the presence of someone who has sustained a loss. The pangs of not knowing what to say. The piece describes one phrase that definitely should be off the table as something you could offer to the sufferer:

Everything happens for a reason.

This is like handing a nice glass of Gobi desert to someone dying of thirst. It doesn’t help and may make the situation even more painful. Having been the recipient of this advice on more than one occasion, I can say that in each case I felt anger. Such fatuity, I thought, really deserves a swift kick more than a thank you.

The advice given at the end of this article resonated with me as good and true, when it is suggested that sitting there quietly is often a better choice than trying to explain the hurt away or dismiss it with platitudes.

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It’s exactly what pets do for us at such times. Offer a silent presence without asking anything of the wounded. Like I said, it’s a short piece. What were you going to do with those two minutes, anyway?

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Grief Is Only Love, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Last night I told Robin that we must be at the halfway point for this episode of the frigid season. Give it a few more weeks and thaws will start to appear. It’s really hard for me to feel sorry for myself when it comes to winter, but I manage. The hardships of the season here in Paradise are so puny that none of my friends from back in the Midwest will commiserate with me at all. They don’t even pretend to try. If I begin to complain to one of them, I am quickly cut off in exchanges like this one:

Me: Lord, lord, it’s cold and I am sick to death of it.
Midwesterner: The temperature here is twenty-five degrees below zero, what is it there?
Me: Twenty-five above.
Midwesterner: I think I hear my momma calling.

I can go where it is colder if I choose. All I would have to do is put on some crampons, bundle up, and start up any mountain trail above 9000 feet. But why would I do such a lamebrained thing? If I told any of my friends that I was planning to deliberately seek frostbite or fatality, they would arrange psychiatric care for me in the twinkling of an eye, and provide moral support for Robin until I got over the affliction.

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Winter, by the Rolling Stones

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From The New Yorker

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I was talking with a friend the other day about winter hardships, and happened to mention the term “ground blizzard.” This was a new term to him, so I explained it in a story.

I was returning from a visit to family members in Minneapolis, and had been asked to transport three college friends of one of my children back to South Dakota. The four of us were tooling along on Interstate 90 on a brilliant blue-sky day with so much sunshine that even with sunglasses on I squinted as I drove. It had snowed several inches over the previous week and the winter landscape was smooth, white, and beautiful. At one point as we were nearing Worthington, Minnesota I happened to glance to my right and a long way off across a large field I could see what looked like a white fog which was moving in our direction.

It was upon us so quickly that as even as I said to my passengers “What the hell … ?” we were suddenly surrounded on all sides by snow and what was now nearly zero forward visibility.

Looking out my side window I could see the white lines in the center of the road alongside our car and I crept along with only them to guide me.

I knew that we were about six miles from an exit, which now became our destination. The trip to that exit took nearly an hour, and when we pulled into the first motel we came across we took the very last room that was available. Anyone who arrived after us was given a few square feet around the swimming pool area or in the meeting rooms to use as sleeping space. All traffic in that part of the state came to an abrupt halt.

A ground blizzard occurs when a sudden and powerful gust of wind crosses an area where the snow is not packed or crusted over. It picks up that loose material and the result can present the same dangers as a true blizzard does, even though not a flake of new snow is falling.

The wind blew all that night and didn’t let up until dawn of the next day. By noon we were back to blue skies and I-90 was open. The rest of the trip was without incident.

This was the first and still the only time I’d experienced such an event, and it was unsettling. To have such extreme weather come upon you with no warning at all … can’t say I cared for it.

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Winter, by Matt Corby

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I was a precocious reader when still a sprout, starting somewhere in my fourth year and going through books and stories like a riding lawn mower through tall grass from then to the present moment, although my attention seems to wander these days more than it did.

There are literary milestones along the way that I remember clearly, markers that are idiosyncratic in my own journey rather than what yours might have been. One of them was reading Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway in which a rape takes place. I was still too young to understand the meaning of what I had read, but I knew it must be something bad, because when I shouted out to the kitchen, where my mother and aunt Addie were talking, what does “rape” mean, they became totally quiet and did not answer.

Then there was Jack London’s short story To Build A Fire. It might have been the very first story I ever read where the hero does not prevail.

Up until that time heroes pretty much had always won the day, but here the guy freezes to death, and I didn’t know how to process that information. Was this what life could be like? You do all the right stuff and then a random blob of snow puts out your fire and you perish? My life-view took a real hit with that one, and never completely recovered.

Reflecting, I can see that I have read quite a few stories that I was not prepared to fully understand when I first came upon them, and only looking back did they finally reveal themselves to me. Each re-read clearer than the one before.

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From The New Yorker

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Winter Light, by Linda Ronstadt

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Happy Talk

jono55

Today I offer an instructional session on how to get into your happy place. It works 100% of the time for me. Remember the Jerusalema craze of four years ago, when there were scads of groups of various sizes performing the song as a sort of global dance challenge? Well, boys and girls, all of those videos are still out there ready to work their magic. I rounded up three of my favorites, but maybe you prefer 400 flight attendants or a group of nuns or a flash mob all doing roughly the same dance … those videos all still out there.

The dance trend began when Fenómenos do Semba, a group in Angola, south-west Africa, recorded themselves dancing to the song while eating and without dropping their plates.

Irish Post

So here are the instigators.

My plan is to keep this panel of videos handy during the next four years, as a refreshment for the spirit. I did try to do the dance moves once on my own but by the second chorus I needed orthopedic care. Apparently my time for performing these sorts of maneuvers came and went without my knowledge or assent.

Here are the adorables.

The lyrics are those of a gospel song, a yearning for a place of peace. Who doesn’t have such a yearning, whether one is adherent to a religious point of view or not?

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Jerusalema ikhaya lami (Jerusalem is my home)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Save me, and walk with me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)

Ndawo yami, ayikho lana (My place, is not here)
Mbuso wami, awukho lana (My kingdom, is not here)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Preserve me, and go with me) (Repeat)

Ngilondoloze (Save me)
Ngilondoloze (Preserve me)
Ngilondoloze (Guard me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)

Ndawo yami, ayikho lana (My place, is not here)
Mbuso wami, awukho lana (My kingdom, is not here)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Save me, and walk with me) (Repeat)

Jerusalema ikhaya lami (Jerusalem is my home)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Preserve me, and go with me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)

Ngilondoloze (Save me)
Ngilondoloze (Preserve me)
Ngilondoloze (Guard me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)

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And now here are the Cubans. Their talent is obvious, their joy infectious. Please, dear readers, these people are professionals. Do not try this at home. But if you do and suffer a mishap, you can call Dr. Hemispherium Bonesmith. He has an international practice composed entirely of senior citizens who tried to do that hip thing and seized up.

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With it being cold and all, and without enough snow to have fun with nordic skiing or snowshoeing, I am starting to plan the next year’s outings. I do this every winter and while most of the plans don’t come to fruition, it keeps me out of mischief. In this it closely parallels my attempts at gardening, but no matter, there is much pleasure in the planning.

There is a canyon not too far away from us, Dominguez Canyon to be exact, that Robin and I have hiked in several times. Lovely place of desert and lizards and a great many spiky plants. Usually we walk up-canyon a little over three miles, have a lunch, and come back down. But this year I would like to go a little farther in and stay overnight, so that’s one of the plans.

Peaceful Easy Feeling, by The Eagles

Another thought is to find a properly long bicycle trail and take those e-bikes of ours for an extended cruise in different territory. It is tempting to return to the Mickelson Trail in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which we pedaled on standard bikes 15 years ago, and which is a gorgeous bit of rails-to-trails pathway. But there is that longish drive involved to get there … more study needed.

The range of our brand of cycles is about 40 miles on relatively level ground. Using electric bicycles means that you either spend the night with in a room that has an electrical outlet to recharge the batteries or you carry a spare. So there is at least that much forethought required.

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Mr. Biden was ungracious enough this past week to make the claim that he thinks he could have beaten Mr. Cluck in the last election. He seems to have dis-remembered his deer-in-the-headlights performance at the first debate.

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From The New Yorker

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Made a vegetarian chili this week that was excellent, from a NYTimes recipe. Minced mushrooms were the substitute for meat, and we missed the animal protein not at all. Moving toward a plant-based diet seems to suit us, but we know that depending on fungi to fill in all of the places that meat used to be is being short-sighted.

So we thought … well, how about insect protein if the fungal thing isn’t doing the whole job for us? Until we read this article, that is.

Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.

Scientific American

Dang. There went our guilt-free dreams of roach flambé and grasshopper scramble, and we fell into a funk.

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Truth is, without having any chlorophyll of our own with which to meet our personal nutritional needs … but wait … maybe there is hope for a non-violent diet after all, if this photograph shows what I think it does.

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Followup on my hesitant review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” We have now watched all eight episodes. Two thumbs up. The magic was there, after all.

One of the stalwart roles is played by this magnificent tree, right in the middle of everything.

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Arrieros Somos, by Cuco Sanchez

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Urbane Cowboy

jono55

The lightest dusting of snow fell during the night. January is being its usual self, cold and gray and not playing well with others.

One of the bleakest sights is that of a winter sun, trying to shine through the frosted atmosphere. A round image with fuzzy borders, nearly white, with little of the sun’s usual gold or red tones, and little or no heat in it.

Just looking at it sets the marrow to tingling. Pass me that cocoa, would you please?

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I confess that I subscribe to the New Yorker to impress the easily impressed with my worldliness and sophistication. Of course, that doesn’t work with you guys who know that underneath my polished and urbane surface I am nothing more than a country cracker and s**tkicker of the first magnitude. But I love having access to the magazine’s cartoon archives, and plunder them mercilessly. When that bill comes due I will be looking to resettle in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

But this week there is an article that amazed even the most jaded part of my psyche. It dealt with the memory facility that some species of birds have in recalling where they buried seeds in storing them for the cold weather months. The title is: The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds.

The author starts out with his own problems with a lost beard trimmer and a misplaced pair of pants. He then moves on to the almost unbelievable feats of memory that these birds perform every winter to accomplish that most important piece of business … staying alive.

But his personal trials pale before those that Robin and I deal with every day. Most of our conversations now start with the words: Do you know where I put my ______? This query is then answered by the phrase: Don’t worry, it’ll turn up. While that used to occasionally be the case, it is no longer tue. When I can’t find something after a five minute search, I know that I will never see it again. It is gone. Vanished. Scotty has beamed it up and it resides in some other galaxy. Its molecules have left the building.

Several times each day Robin and I pass one another as we wander through the house with identical furrowed brows and frustrated facial expressions, she on her latest quest and I on mine. We don’t have time to commiserate what with all the opening of drawers and looking under sofas. When we empty the vacuum cleaner into the trash we now pick through the contents of the dust-bag and often find things that we didn’t even know we’d lost yet.

So it is yet another case where other animal species have skills and talents that homo sapiens can only dream of. I do admit that when I begin to regard woodpeckers as paragons, I just don’t know where it is all going.

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From The New Yorker

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Waggoner’s Lad, by Bud and Travis

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Even though I reside in The state of Colorado, which is filled with mountains and ranches, I am neither mountaineer nor cowboy. I am a transplanted flatlander from the Midwest and will never be able to shake the prairie dust from my shoes and soul. I’m not even trying.

Being a newcomer, though, has its benefits. I am continually gaping in awe at the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Whenever the moment allows I am poking my nose around mesas and over passes to see what is on the other side. My curiosity leadeth me.

What I have found is that often after I have lived in a new location for a few years I often know more about the immediate surrounding territory than some lifelong residents do. It’s almost as if when one grows up in Paradise, one takes for granted that Paradise will always be there to explore whenever they want to do so, so why not wait until next week or the week after that? Whereas the newcomer may realize that life is a collection of transient moments, and that they had better take advantage of opportunities as they come along.

That’s my take on it, any way. The most striking example I’ve run up against personally is when I moved to the village of Hancock, Michigan. That town only had a population of 4700 or so, and one could easily drive across it in two minutes.

Trying to find a part-time childsitter for our kids, I was interviewing an elderly woman who ultimately declined to take the job. When asked why, she simply stated that she’d never been that far north and was uncomfortable thinking about it. From where the good woman lived on the south side of Hancock it was only a distance of a mile or so to our home. I was dumbfounded, but accepted that one mile or a hundred, she wasn’t budging in our direction. Apparently there is such a thing as too much north.

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From The New Yorker

[Lord, I do love this cartoon.]

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In a previous post I sneaked in a folk artist who may have been new to you, at least he was to me, although he has recorded five albums and apparently has a strong following.

We have a local radio station, KVNF, which plays all sorts of excellent music, and several times a year introduces me to artists that I never heard of but instantly adopt. Such was the case when I learned about the existence of Jake Xerxes Fussell.

Unflashy, unpretentious, without a moonwalk to his name. He is the genuine article.

Here’s one more track.

When I’m Called

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A few decades ago I realized that in some aspects I was a mobile tabula rasa. Whenever I reside in a new area, even if it is for a relatively short time, I find myself speaking with local accents. If I make a new friend from a different part of the country, let’s say Alabama, the same thing happens. This happens without any intent on my part, as if I were little more than a tape recorder.

Lately, and to my dismay, I have begun imitating myself. Not my speaking voice, but the written one. I will be talking to a friend and realize that I am dictating paragraphs rather than using casual speech. I am verbally blogging instead of conversing. Any day now and I suppose that I will begin saying things like What a nice day it is comma do you have any plans for this afternoon question mark?

I begin to suspect that there is a diagnosis here, but I don’t know what it is. Parrot syndrome? Magpie disease? Dictaphrenia?

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Returning to the ongoing and seemingly never-ending story of vaccine disinformation, there is an op/ed in Saturday’s NYTimes entitled I’m the Governor of Hawaii. I’ve Seen What Vaccine Skepticism Can Do that I can recommend heartily. Well written, heartbreaking, anger-producing. Makes me want to find a pointed stick and begin some serious poking .

Pair this with one from last November entitled I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and I can just about guarantee that your blood pressure will rise ten points, so remember to take your meds and sit in a comfortable chair before reading them. If you can find someone to rub your neck … even better.

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No Expectations, by the Black Crowes

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Surely I Jest

jono55

I just read the sort of news item that sends my head spinning. Not that it takes that much to produce a spin, even standing up quickly can do it, but here’s the item I was talking about:

“Scientists estimate that we’ve identified only one-tenth of all species on Earth,” said Dr.
Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, in a statement.

CNN online

Ten per cent! Holy Statistics, Batman, that’s incredible! What in earth have all of those biologists and zoologists been doing with their time all of these years? Sipping endless lattes on too-long coffee breaks? Making out in the janitor’s closet?

But to get back to the story, one of the new identify-ees is a vegetarian piranha which has been named Myloplus sauron after the villain Sauron from Lord of the Rings. To the scientists responsible for bringing it to our attention, the vertical stripe looks like that evil eye in the sky.

Its vegetarian habits are comforting to hear about, and even if it wasn’t, its mouth looks too small to take that much of a bite, really.

For comparison, here is a photo of a meat-eating piranha.

Even I can tell them apart.

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Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing On A Sweet Potato Vine, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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A couple of days ago a friend was lamenting the fact that those Disney nature documentaries of decades ago are not more readily available on television. He’s right. They aren’t. Some of them were quite lovely.

It’s not that excellent documentaries are not being made today, and available from several sources, but they are different in tone. There’s a bit more of the horrible in the newer ones. For example, a cheetah not only is shown to be very sleek and very fast but we see it catching its prey and then (we are shown in great detail) what happens afterwards. Much biting and tearing that Disney used to leave out. A more realistic portrayal, to be sure, but lacking the quieter aura of some of the earlier Disney efforts.

[Frank Disclaimer Time: I loved those older films, and grew up watching Walt Disney Presents on Sunday evenings, slurping up everything I saw as gospel.]

On the other hand. Those films were produced at a time when we were more accepting of what was being shown us as True Life Adventures. Some newer revelations have popped up indicating that there might have been an admixture in what was presented, with real stuff being mixed in with … well … fake news.

Looking for an old clip from that series, I ran across this one. Sort of wish I hadn’t found it.

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Robin and I are watching the series One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix. It is a film version of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel of the same name. I am enjoying it, although there was a magical quality to the novel that hasn’t quite transferred to the screen, at least for me. I love what they did in creating the village of Macondo. It’s all of what I had imagined, and more.

I’ve read the novel thrice, as new things are revealed each time. If you read articles about “How to write a story,” you will frequently find the advice given that you should construct your opening sentence so as to grab the readers and pull them in. If that’s as important as they say it is, I submit that the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude qualifies as a pretty good example:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Now there’s a doozy of an opening line. You introduce an important character and a second later you announce his imminent demise. If an author does that, they had better come up with something pretty good as followup. I won’t spoil it for you except to say that Marquez does just that.

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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal

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We did our first cross-country skiing of the season this past Saturday. Our equipment is aging and wasn’t of the most durable quality in the first place, so we drove the relatively short distance to Black Canyon National Park and tried everything out. Good for another year was the assessment.

I’ve mentioned this before, but there is only a single road that runs along the South Rim of the park, about six miles long. Get to the end and you return the same way you came in. One road, no looping, no branching. The park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery.

I’ve mentioned this before, but there is only a single road that runs along the South Rim of the park, about six miles long. Get to the end and you return the same way you came in. One road, no looping, no branching.

In winter the park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery. The snow wasn’t in great condition Saturday morning, much crustier than we like. Each year these skinny skis seem more treacherous, as if being guided by diabolical forces that are pushing us toward needing orthopedic care. Our vulnerability is especially felt on this road where there are occasional narrow places that have a half-mile deep gorge very near at hand and no guard rails. Don’t want to go on fast snow anywhere near those narrow places … I may ski poorly but I don’t fly well at all.

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16-20, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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During the recent political campaign I would watch James Carville on YouTube fairly regularly. He was knowledgeable, cranky, and reliably profane. He’s a smart guy, but he called this latest election wrong.

After pondering things for a couple of months, he delivered an editorial to the New York Times, which I thought was pretty good. There exists the possibility that this time he might be correct as well as colorful. The title of the piece was: James Carville: I Was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.

One line of thought especially caught my attention. He says that we need to take our focus off of Cluck and go after the votes of those working folks that we know the Republican Party is going to throw under the bus just as surely as God made those little green apples. Yes, Cluck is a degenerate and yes, he’s a fascist, but he’s a lame duck degenerate fascist. Is that the aroma of opportunity I smell?

This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.

James Carville, NYTimes, January 6

“Force them to oppose what they cannot be for.” I like that. If you ever meet up with a Democrat, point it out to them. They need our help.

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Radical!

jono55

This past week as I was distractedly driving home and listening to NPR I heard the phrase “Joy is a radical act.” It intrigued me enough that when I got home I took out my computer to search for the source of the statement. I found it in an essay entitled “The World’s On Fire,”written by a woman named Rebecca Makkai.

The theme of her essay is : since there is a never-ending news barrage that is awful and horrible, and millions of people all over the planet that could use every bit of our resources and all of our waking moments, how can we ever justify taking time for personal happiness of any kind? For joy?

It reminded me of the story of Mitch Snyder. Mitch was a community activist who worked tirelessly for the homeless in Washington DC.

He became nationally famous for the tactics he used to bring the country’s attention to their problems, including well-publicized hunger strikes. He was colorful, brilliant, intense, and a dedicated and selfless worker for others. A serious man who took little time off.

.

Then one day he hung himself in his rooms in a homeless shelter that he had helped establish, stunning his friends and his co-workers because he had been a symbol of hope and resilience for the community he served. Some of Snyder’s friends and colleagues attributed his despair to the pressures of his work and the challenges of combating homelessness.

The lesson for me was that while there might be rare people who can meet the worst the world has to offer on a 24/7 basis and still go on, most of us do better and last longer if we perform that very radical act and take time for joy.

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From The New Yorker

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I have become quite a cynic when it comes to what appears to be a free lunch, being one of those whose response is: There is no such thing!

That’s why I am puzzled by a recent discovery of something called BookBub.com. You go to the web address, sign up for their newsletter, and after that every single day you receive an email listing a group of very worthy books that you can buy for a small fraction of their usual cost. Most sell for $0.99 or $1.99. They are not physical volumes, but e-books that are then delivered to your reader. If there is nothing that intrigues you, just delete the email.

But still … at those prices I can afford to add good stuff to my personal library on my Kindle, which takes up almost no space in our small home. I keep looking for the catch. Maybe my name has been unwittingly added to an email list operated by ISIS or Al Qaeda. Or worse, one of our political parties’ potential donor lists.

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Stir It Up, by Bob Marley

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True story. At least as close to the truth as you will find on these pages. This year I decided to give Robin a Bluecorn Candle from the shop of the same name here in Paradise. Apparently the brand is well known among candle connoisseurs, and Robin had expressed some interest in the past.

Safe ground, I thought. Buy one of these overpriced waxen towers and earn some points with my bride. So I went to their tables containing candles of a shape that pleased me, and I sniffed every sample on that display. One of them had a scent that I really liked, which that was very different from the florally inflected rest.

So I bought this candle, after reading the label to see what was so pleasant and finding basil and fir in the ingredient list on the cover. This is what I remember seeing while in the store.

But after Robin had opened her gift and I looked for a second time, I realized that I had entirely missed noting one of the ingredients.

What to do? Having the aroma of an addicting substance in the home is considered by some workers in the field of addiction medicine as an unnecessary provocation. Also, there is the question of what to do if I am ever surrounded by a pack of drug-sniffing dogs who now have shown great interest in me. Perhaps the answer is to burn the candle in moderation, and never drive after inhaling it at great length.

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From The New Yorker

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The new year is firmly established by this time. On January 1 it’s always a bit shaky, like a newborn fawn wobbling on those impossibly slender legs. But, like the fawn, two days later it’s off and running and getting sturdier by the hour.

There’s no turning back. It is 2025 whether we like it or not, and the year itself is not apologetic. It only has those 365 days to do what it has a mind to do, and worrying about our feelings and comfort is nowhere on its agenda.

So my advice is to wear sturdy shoes every day and be dressed for weather when you leave the house. I’ve told the following story here before, but when I was a medical student on my surgery rotation I was spending the day in the emergency room at the old Hennepin County General Hospital. It was a dripping hot July day, and this hospital was built long before air-conditioning was even dreamed of, so all of the staff members were walking around with as many buttons undone as propriety would allow, when through the door walked an apparition.

He was a very old man, wearing layer upon layer of woolen clothing, tall winter boots, a heavy army surplus overcoat, and a stocking cap. His stated purpose for coming in that day was that he was searching for the King of Poland. The surgical intern, clad in a white and short-sleeved uniform asked him if he wasn’t a bit uncomfortable in all those garments when the town was sweltering. The patient’s answer was logically unimpeachable : “Yes, I am, but you know, when you leave the house in the morning you never know what’s going to happen before you get back.”

This is my approach now to the year 2025. The politicians have mostly gone mad, the media following them is tirelessly recording every one of their flatulent utterances, and to find a sensible public voice is to become as excited as a dehydrated man being handed a glass of cool water. When I leave the house each day, I will do so using high caution and low expectations. I think that both are very much called for.

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Redemption Song, by Bob Marley

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Grace, Actually

jono55

Jimmy Carter passed away this week, at the age of 100 years. He had been our 39th president of these United States. Carter’s entire adult life was one of devotion to public service. When he was voted out of office, he picked up a hammer and went to work with Habitat for Humanity. He was also a humble man who taught Sunday School and who traveled the world as a private citizen, working always for peace, human rights, and the dignity of all men and women.

He and I shared a love of music in nearly all of its forms, without either of us being able to play an instrument. I learned just this morning that one of his favorite songs was Amazing Grace. So that’s two things that he and I shared.

Amazing Grace, by Judy Collins

The contrasts between this good man and the one recently re-elected could not be greater. Words like decency, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, moral rectitude, unselfishness, courage, honesty … all of these words have been used for many decades now in describing Mr. Carter and his works. None of them are ever used in describing our incoming president.

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From The New Yorker

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In the language of the land of divorced people, there are basically two groups, unceremoniously named dumpers and dumpees. Robin and I were dumpees. Neither of us had found the process of getting divorced to be pleasant in any way, and when we began dating were both still nursing bruises of varying degrees. We fell in love and in 1992 were married. We had decided that rather than have a subdued and quiet marriage ceremony, perhaps at a midnight chapel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, we would instead celebrate how good can sometimes alchemically arise out of unhappy events.

Part of our planning was to sit down with the church organist, who was in charge of helping people select music for such ceremonies. We told her that one of the selections we wanted was Amazing Grace, a song we both admired. At first the organist knitted her brow “Well, we usually play that at funerals … but … hmmm … just a minute … if you think about the lyrics… hmmm … they could also apply to happier occasions, couldn’t they?” We nodded assent, and into the program it went.

What we couldn’t have predicted is what the large group of friends we had invited would do with it. Robin and I stood at the front of the church and facing the minister, while those friends began to sing the hymn behind us. We had chosen only the first three verses to be sung, and the first one was performed in a rather standard and church-y way, but the next two steadily increased in volume and passion to become expressions of joy that swelled and filled the church. We received lots of presents from those same people, but what I remember most clearly thirty-two years later is their gift of that song.

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
   And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear
   The hour I first believ’d!

Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
   I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
   And grace will lead me home.

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Amazing Grace, by Walela

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From The New Yorker

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For me, she nailed it.

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Amazing Grace, by the Scottish National Pipe and Drum Corps and Military Band

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So this morning we begin the laborious process of learning to write a new date on our correspondence. I usually complete the task by mid-July, but then I was never a quick study. Six months later I’m right back in a muddle once again. Hardly worth the trouble, really. If any of you receive a letter from me, you’ll pretty much know that it was written in 2025 whether I put it on the page or not, so not to worry.

We’ve got our work cut out for us in the upcoming 12 months. Slightly less than half of the American citizenry decided that they would like to have a degenerate for president and so in three weeks he takes office. He is assembling a band of quacks, charlatans, and marauders to assist him in cleaning out the vaults, men and women whose curriculum vitae under normal circumstances would disqualify them from any job other than brigand. I have no crystal ball, but like my great-great-grand-daddy might have said, you don’t get apples from a shit-tree, son.

Hang on, friends, it’s going to be a ride. It might help to remember that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose. At least that’s what good ol’ Ecclesiastes said, and I’ll go with him every time.

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Turn, Turn, Turn, by the Byrds

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Most of the Time

jono55

I think that I might have already read about thirty short blurbs about the new Bob Dylan biopic, and I’ve done that without even trying. The hoopla machine must be starting to smoke from overuse by now, and perhaps it needs to be shut down and given a bit of preventive maintenance.

So I am totally tenderized and ready to watch it should it come within range, which means if it comes to Grand Junction. (By the way, if you were wondering about the origin of that town’s name, wonder no longer. It sits at the junction of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers, and the Colorado was once named the Grand River.)

Why would I go to see such a movie when I already know all the songs and much of how his life has unfolded? Well, that’s a fair question.

Perhaps because we are both Minnesota boys of about the same age. Or that the lyrics to some of his songs have spoken truth to me since I was a lad. Or that it’s nearly January and some mid-winter boredom is setting in. Or that I suspect that much of what I think that I know about Mr. Dylan’s life story is wrong, and perhaps I’ll learn something new .

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Most of the Time, by Bob Dylan

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A dense fog rolled in yesterday afternoon and is still hanging ’round. Visibility is less than half a city block. Travel in our part of the world is moving at a sensible speed as a result. Unusual, a fog like this here in Paradise.

Quite unlike on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, where I lived for several years. The Keweenaw was a finger of land about 15 miles wide and 40 miles long that stuck out into Lake Superior. When you are nearly surrounded by one of the largest lakes in the world, fogs are a regular part of life.

FOG

(by Carl Sandburg)

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Unlike Carl Sandburg’s fogs rolling in on little cat’s feet, the Lake Superior version would materialize around you. One minute visibility would be unlimited and the next you couldn’t see to tie your shoelace.

One fall evening I had traveled to a small-town hospital fifteen miles north of where I lived to consult on an infant. There were clear daytime skies on the ride up, but darkness and dense fog when I stepped out the hospital door two hours later.

To make things even more uncomfortable on that return trip, I was driving a small motorcycle, a Kawasaki KZ 400, to be precise.

Tooling along at 10-15 mph I wasn’t much worried about hitting something in front of me. No, it was someone in a car or truck smacking into me from behind that was the main concern. I’ve never felt more vulnerable when motoring than I did that night, because I knew that the taillight on that bike was too small to be much help in the fog.

So in this grand mist this morning? I’m not going anywhere at all. The poet’s cat will need to get off its haunches and pad out of town before I even start the car.

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I’ll go no further without sharing an image of my first motorcycle love, the Kawasaki machine mentioned above. there were bigger and faster bikes to come later, but none did more to free me from the four-wheeled cage that is a car than this one. You don’t forget your first time.

Risk-averse people used to ask me why I would ever ride a motorcycle. What could I possibly get out of it that was worth the hazard? I would answer: “You remember when you were a kid on your bicycle and you were riding down a long hill? How much fun that was?” They would always nod in assent. “Well, on my cycle I get that same feeling going uphill.“

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Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, by Bob Dylan

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There is an interesting article in Saturday’s NYTimes about saunas and sauna culture. It takes the form of a 750 mile road trip from Grand Marais MN to Copper Harbor MI, sampling some of the luxury offerings that tourists might enjoy, or at lease pretend to love. Some of you might question the sanity of sitting in a 200 degree sweat-room and then leaping into Lake Superior in the winter then back to the steam room and back to the lake … you get the picture. But there are those that give this exercise in the treatment of one’s body (that would likely violate the terms of the Geneva Convention) credit for their health and peace of mind.

What is missing from the article are the thousands of residents of this same area who quietly install small personal saunas on their property for much less than the $50,000 units that are discussed. Ordinary folk who just want to percolate themselves whenever they feel the need, and do so without spending a small fortune.

My first sauna experience was at the home of a friend of mine in high school. Mike’s parents were artists and their home couldn’t have been more different from that of my family of origin. His mother taught modern dance in the Twin Cities and his father was a sculptor and painter.

On learning that I’d never sauna-ed, Mike invited me for an evening when his parents happened to be throwing a party. Most of the other attendees were middle-aged inhabitants of a world unknown to me, but I knew I was not in Kansas any more when a slightly portly Lonnie (Mike’s father) walked through the crowd carrying a tray of hors d’ouevres and wearing nothing at all. Although I was slightly hungry, I declined to take a canapé, being unsure of the hygienics of the situation.

Mike then took me out back to the sauna, showed me where to leave my clothes, and I undressed and entered the steamy wood-scented room, where others had already gathered. Not accustomed to being in a completely nude environment with both men and women present, I found a piece of bench as far from the light as I could get. Although I was a curious 15 year-old, and would really have liked to look more carefully at the first nude adult females I had ever been that close to, I neither wanted to be seen or to be seen see-ing, so I hunkered over and stared at the wooden floor.

After what seemed to be an acceptable period of discomfort, I rose and left the room to find my clothing and resume normal existence. All in all, when looking back, I wish I had done things differently. Today I would take one of those canapés and think nothing of it.

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Like A Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan

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Saturday evening: Just left the theater after viewing “A Complete Unknown.” The film rocked us both. Not a single disappointment and nothing but respect for the actors playing people that many of us grew up listening to and watching from a distance.

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Where To Start

jono55

Last night I started rereading the Tao te Ching for perhaps the third time. Each time I go through it I am given the gift of learning new things. Last night there was a quotation in the book’s foreword which contained information that I badly needed to read right now. Here’s the story.

Our next-door neighbor had a big Vote for Cluck sign on his garage door during the last campaign season and I put up a Harris/Walz sign in front of our house. We have not spoken since the big vote last November.

Post-election I have constituted myself as a large pile of resentment toward those who voted for the other guy. All sorts of negative adjectives run through my mind each time I think about it. All the way up to idiocy and treason. Actually, I go beyond even that and rain down vigorous calumnies on their ancestors as well, going back several generations to question the manliness of great-grandfathers and the virtue of great-grandmothers.

This needs to stop. I am making myself miserable to no purpose. But the self-righteous part of my brain tells me that by God I am right and that I should never forget that, and also that I am a much more moral person than all the rest of those b****rds put together.

So I have quite a lot to deal with, as you can see. It makes little difference that I am causing most of my own problems. They are still problems. And now in the middle of all this the Tao has made its move. Here is the quotation:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand, this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.

One interpretation that (which is awfully tempting) is that I am the good guy and the superior being and if I could just get this man’s head scrooched around to where I could lecture him face-to-face all would be well.

Of course, there might be other interpretations. And then my thought is how does all this “teaching” really come about? Lecturing and the pounding of fists on desks (my default strategy)? No, somehow I suspect that the word humility is going to come in to play and when that happens resentment will have a harder time holding its ground.

Looks like I need to read further, I am obviously not yet one with everything.

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Hold On, by Tom Waits

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From The New Yorker

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I truly don’t know anyone else like Tom Waits. Writer, singer, actor, raconteur … you might say he has a way with words as the bare minimum, but I think that it goes further than that.

Mostly he tells stories, and the thing is that each one of them ends up feeling like part of my own story in some transmuted way. The particulars may not be different, but the universals are all there.

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When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.

Tom Waits

If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it’s good. I’m not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don’t cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don’t stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you’ll never see it again.

Tom Waits

Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.

Tom Waits

Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You, by Tom Waits

When I was younger I bought into the idea of the suffering artist, with a glass of scotch in one hand and a dangling cigarette in the other. Becoming an attractive dissolute was my goal, and an early and “romantic” death was my clear endpoint. Like a male Camille but without the tuberculosis. The only problem was although I could and did learn to drink I wasn’t an artist at all. I wasn’t a musician but a guy who played records on a stereo. I read books but didn’t write any. I had become a periodic drunk without ever becoming charming.

So if I kept going I would just die in a very ordinary fashion, and no one would write precious stuff about me and how pure my heart was and how sad it was that a man with such talent perished so soon. I was wasting the single life I’d been issued.

So I quit.

Lots of good people stepped forward to give me a hand, and right at the head of that worthy and necessary bunch was a lady name of Robin. At some point I started to pay it forward, becoming one of a multitude helping to keep the doors open for the next person unsteadily weaving up the path to a rented room in the back of a church.

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From The New Yorker

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Looking For The Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits

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Bang A Gong

jono55

As I unpacked the groceries a couple of days back I set aside the three small bags of mixed nuts in-the-shell. You know, the kind you struggle to break open without smashing the contents to smithereens, failing most of the time even on a good day.

And I mused.

The purchased mix was English walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, and Brazil nuts. With some trepidation based on years of dashed expectations, I picked up a nutcracker and had at a walnut. As I applied pressure to the arms of the tool the walnut suddenly shot out and hit the wall.

I had forgotten that while we have two nutcrackers, one of them is so lacking in all aspects of performance that what just happened was not actually a malfunction, it was what it does! Each year I think that I’ve thrown it away but then the next December rolls around and out pops the Nutcracker from Hell to darken one more day.

Here are the two crackers we own. The one on the right works beautifully. The one on the left is diabolic.

Apparently simply trashing it is not enough, it needs to be buried by someone acting quite alone and under a full moon. If a silver spade is handy it is the preferred practice, but if not a steel one will do the job most of the time.

The hole must be at least three feet deep, and the device buried face down. This is where things often go wrong because it is exceedingly difficult to tell the face from the back on a nutcracker.

In my childhood it was Grandpa Jacobson who put out the nuts to shell each year at Christmas, and I still attempt to maintain that tradition when I can. It is the reason I purchase these bags of frustration each year.

He would set them out in a bowl exactly like this one. I found this item on Etsy where you can purchase such a bowl for a measly $276.00. (I strongly suspect that Grandpa paid much less for his.)

In my family of origin, the only nuts occasionally found in the cupboard were walnuts used in baking, and salted peanuts for snacking. So the varieties offered at Christmas time were special.

But what was this? Here came the cosmic joke. These delicacies were not just be picked up , be amazed at, and then eaten. Nossir. You needed a tool to bring them out into the open. And even when the tool worked properly, you might have these problems to deal with:

  • the frequent mummified nutmeat, inedible and very sad-looking
  • the process of removing the nuts from their shells resulted in their being shattered 99% of the time
  • the shell fragments are sharp and pointy things of various sizes that find their way to the floor and would be discovered by barefooted early risers the next morning, producing much involuntary hooting followed by careful tweezering to remove them.

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Joy to the World, by Train

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Another sad article in the Times of New York on Thursday. The death rate from measles in the Congo is much higher this year than in the past, the reason unclear. The disease is epidemic there, not because of resistance to the idea of vaccines but because of problems with getting the highly effective preventative to the people in that beleaguered country. People who want their children protected but either have inadequate local medical resources or none at all.

Here in the U.S. we have a more than adequate supply of the measles vaccine, and enough medical personnel to get it to every child. The only problem is what is euphemistically called vaccine resistance. My own take is that it could be better named epidemic vaccine ignoramus syndrome. Parents who will summon their inner gullible and listen to an anti-science influencer peddling bad information, and in doing so place their children’s health and life at risk on either the flimsiest of grounds or no grounds at all.

The whole sorry mess doth make the blood boil in an ancient pediatrician’s breast. We were so close to eradicating this particular bit of nastiness from the world that it is appalling to watch what is happening out there now. I would like to see those influencers dealt with using the shouting fire in a crowded theater rule. Turn over their rock and somehow hold them responsible for the effects of spreading deluded misinformation. Perhaps make them pallbearers at the childrens’ funerals.

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Ravel: Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte, by Erich Appel, Oliver Colbentson

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Read a review today of a new film that sounded intriguing. When I reached the end of the piece I ran headlong into this paragraph:

Almodóvar’s films often explore doubles: mothers and daughters, pairs of lovers, twisted friends. “The Room Next Door” does the same, in several different registers, and I think that’s the point of the title. We cannot really know what another person is going through. Even if we follow Weil’s exhortation and ask, we’re incapable of fully inhabiting another person. We can’t live inside of them. The real act of friendship, of love, is to check on one another in the morning and make sure we’re still there. 

NYTimes: The Room Next Door

What that bit of writing meant to me is that living out here hundreds of miles from any metropolis as I do, I will not ever be able to walk into our local theater here in Paradise and watch the movie. It might not even make it as far as Grand Junction. Very thoughtful films with deep themes and deep characters just don’t sell enough tickets to be able to compete with the comic-book universe.

I went back through the review one more time and found absolutely no reference to superpowers, things being blown sky-high, or hyper-powered automobiles and their drivers being pitted against one another in meaningless confrontations. Don’t get me wrong, I am not whimpering about the situation but only describing a reality. I’ve met one of the theater owners and like him. I appreciate very much that occasionally he will bring a film to town that surprises me, and that the convenience of driving only a couple of miles to see it is gratifying. I also realize that showing films like “The Room Next Door” week after week would probably mean that the theater would not survive and even those rare surprises would go away.

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Every great once in a while when I am hiking a particularly beautiful stretch of trail above treeline I will break out into my butchered version of the following song. In doing so I embarrass my companions and alarm others we meet on the path. I can see those strangers checking their phones to see if there is cellular coverage in case I am coming down with trail rage.

I don’t care. It’s me and my inner Pavarotti and some mild hypoxia having a great time together.

The Happy Wanderer, by Frank Weir and his Orchestra

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Lastly, and because it is Christmas and all, I feel the need to make a confession. In 1958, when I was a stripling and completely devoid of anything approaching musical taste, I first heard the Harry Simeone Chorale version of “Little Drummer Boy” while piloting my 1950 Ford coupe on a nameless highway somewhere in Minnesota, probably on my way to doing something slightly illegal involving spiritus fermenti. The little fable and simple arrangement stayed with me, and I was not surprised when it later became a big hit, eventually joining that select list of tunes and carols that are played at Christmastime every year.

Here is the Chorale appearing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1959. Pretty, tasteful, melodic, serene.

Over time there were many many other artists who covered this song, most of them respectful of the original vibe, most of them not quite coming up to the original, IMHO. (But remember, devoid of musical taste). And then a few short years ago, these brothers came along, blew the song apart, restructured it, and had a hit on their hands. With modern stagecraft, enough percussion to be the background music for Sherman’s march through Georgia, and strobe lighting of the sort that brings on seizures, King and Country added their version to the canon.

Where does the confession come in? Well, my favorite version is still the original one by the Chorale. But there is a little militaristic and mindless part of me that can be sucked right up into a bit of bombast. So once each year I play King and Country for myself, watching the video on YouTube and listening on headphones, so that no one is aware of my solitary and shameful vice.

And I know I can count on you not to rat me out, right?

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Haiku, Winter

jono55

I have started to write the Great American Novel scores of times. Each effort was eventually scrapped. If I have any talent at all it seems to be in shorter pieces, essays, poems … the sort of meanderings found in this blog, for instance.

Which is why when I first came across haiku and bothered to learn something about it, I knew instantly that I was among friends. It was the economy of it all, the formalities, the natural themes that appealed to me. The Japanese must take all of the blame for starting me on this path. Traditionally haiku are three-lined poems, of 5-7-5 syllables per line. Most of those I selected today but the very last one are by Japanese masters of the art, but that 5-7-5 format did not survive translation.

To me, they are like photographs, whereas a novel might represent a movie. It’s not too hard to put myself or my experiences into the picture with haiku, which is part of its charm.

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When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.

Basho

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Song For A Winter’s Night, by Gordon Lightfoot

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Here,
I’m here—
The snow falling

Issa

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Going home,
The horse stumbles
In the winter wind.

Buson

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Colder Than Winter, by Vince Gill

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Cover my head
Or my feet?
The winter quilt.

Buson

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Winter solitude—
In a world of one color
The sound of wind.

Basho

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Winter, by Tori Amos

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Miles of frost –
On the lake
The moon’s my own.

Buson

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The snowstorm howling,
A cautious man treads upon
Bare and frozen earth

Anonymous

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Winter, by Peter Kater

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Some comments on the music –

Song for a winter’s night: there’s a cabin, a crackling fire, and a big ol’ down quilt to get under. We just have to find where Gordon put them all.

Colder than winter: I have experienced winters of the heart, and since I know that I am not unique, perhaps you have as well. Vince Gill never sounded better or more plaintive.

Winter: from Tori Amos’ first album, an exceptionally brave and talented young artist just getting her career underway.

Winter: yes, yes, of course Peter Kater is New Age-y as he can be, but it’s still a rather nice way to pass a few minutes. Remember how way back in those dim dark days (almost) beyond recall when your teacher in “music appreciation class” would put on a piece of music and ask that you imagine that it was snowing or raining or that the oboe’s voice was a duck quacking? Well … have at it.

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Meeting That Deductible

jono55

The assassin who murdered that health insurance CEO recently was caught at a McDonald’s in Altoona PA when another patron recognized him from online photos and called the police. Authorities now have the gun, the guy, and what seems enough evidence to bake him hard in court.

He might not come to trial for a year or two because if you are affluent enough you can spend quite a bit of time waiting for your case to come up as your legal teams place tire-puncturing devices across every road leading to you and prosecutors must clear them one at a time.

But there is still a question regarding this story that I’ve heard nothing about so far.

  • If a perfect stranger could look at a photo and pick him out instanter … where were all the people that he knew who didn’t do anything even when they saw his image on the evening news? All of his buddies and all of his family and all of his classmates in school … did even one of them make a call?

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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

H.L. Mencken

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O Come All Ye Faithful, by James Bla Pahinui

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Somewhere along the way I realized that my social and moral education was improved more by listening to the stories told by oppressed peoples than those related by their oppressors. Nothing I have learned since that epiphanic moment has changed this outlook.

My early life was a sheltered one but in the 60s I became aware that not everyone in the USA was of Scandinavian ancestry. Well, I thought, there’s something to be learned here. So I bought some books, attended some lectures, listened to some blues and spirituals and ultimately decided that I was enlightened. I’ve got this, thought I, and it wasn’t all that hard.

Well, I didn’t have it, and still don’t. Intellectually I was able to go only so far on my own, and I have had to turn to others for help. That’s why a piece in Thursday’s NYTimes on Nikki Giovanni was so interesting. I knew of her, but had not read much of what she has written, so for me there was much to learn from this article.

But the real treat was a link to a video conversation between Giovanni and James Baldwin that was recorded in 1971. It was fascinating to see two brilliant people spend two hours talking about ideas. To argue respectfully as black intellectuals even as they each had to lean in from their respective sides in order to bridge a generation gap.

My personal needle felt it had moved an inch or two toward understanding when I had finished watching these videos. Maybe I’m wrong and I am just as obtuse as I was when I got up this morning, but I don’t think so. I may not ever know fully what it means to be black or red or brown or yellow, but I do believe that I can do human better than I have done in the past and that what I have just watched was one step moving in that direction.

Here are the links:

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On the Wings of A Nightingale, by The Everly Brothers

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Holy Highway 61 Revisited, Batman! I just watched a trailer for a film that comes out Christmas Day and while I know it likely won’t come to Paradise, which the pandemic turned from movie Heaven (sorta) to movie Limbo (pretty much), I will by God drive to see it when it comes within range. It’s called A Complete Unknown and is about a relatively short period in the life of a guy that we geezers grew up and old with. His name is Bob Zimmerman.

He might not have known at the time that he was writing the background music for our lives, but that’s what happened. Those lyrics of his … well … they won him a Nobel Prize. What territory do they cover? Not much, really, just human rights, civil disobedience, war, injustice, aging, grief, love, loss, Billy the Kid … and on and on. Not a bubble-gum piece in the lot.

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Saben the Woodcutter, by Gordon Bok

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As of Sunday morning Robin and I are gradually winning our battle against a virus as muscular as a microbial Hercules and as unpleasant as finding president-elect Cluck sleeping in the guest room would be.

Robin is her eighth day and I have as yet had only four days to whinge about my problems. Friday night I barely slept because my nose had become a raging cataract to the point where I could not lie horizontal and had to spend the night sitting up in Robin’s recliner.

We’ve also developed the sort of cough that makes anyone near us in the grocery aisle cross themselves and reach for their prayer beads.

This too shall pass, is what we tell ourselves between whoops and cringes. I have a suspicion that the culprit may be RSV, which is doing to me exactly what I saw it do to a thousand infants in a dozen hospitals. But although I may be ancient I have big lungs, unlike all those babies back then who struggled for days to catch their breath.

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Here’s Yawping At You

jono55

We have a middling sort of winter so far. Too chilly for outdoor summer sports, not enough snow for skiing or snowshoes. At least not nearby.

So what I do is sit inside and complain. I don’t like to brag, but I’m good at it … really good. In fact if there was a merit badge for kvetching I would have a chestful of honors. An international whining competition? Just hand me the first-place cup, buddy, and it will save us all a lot of time.

And that’s not because the competition is weak. Most people love to complain. It’s even expressed in our language. You know how Eskimos are supposed to have 50 words for snow because of its importance in their lives? In my online Merriam-Webster Thesaurus there are 55 synonyms for complain.

And some of them are the greatest words! A delight to any logophile! My typical day is when I get up in the morning, stretch a bit, and then begin the day with a good yawp, blubber, or caterwaul before breakfast. Couldn’t be off to a better start! Here is the list that Merriam-Webster provides:

Whine

Grumble

Bitch

Cry

Gripe

Nag

Inveigh

Wail

Bellyache

Beef

Yowl

Caterwaul

Grizzle

Crab

Yawp

Quarrel (with)

Lament

Bewail

Blubber

Scream

Mutter

Growl

Kvetch

Kick

Squawk

Holler

Grouse

Bleat

Fuss

Kick up a fuss

Carp

Grump

Yaup

Object (to)

Quibble

Fret

Deplore

Moan

Worry

Squeal

Whimper

Whinge

Murmur

Repine

Keen

Protest

Yammer

Kick up a stink

Grouch

Croak

Sob

Maunder

Cavil

Bemoan

Stew

There. Don’t you feel better knowing what a wealth there is available to you for use in such a good cause? (I especially like “deplore” because one uses it from a position of moral superiority, looking down the length of one’s nose.)

Notice that I called it a “good” cause. Think about it. Many of us have learned that our existence is not that fabled bed of roses. Things could be going along sweet as you please and suddenly a truck backs up and unloads a metric ton of horse excrement on your life.

This is where the usefulness of complaining comes in. It is something to do while you’re picking straw and other oddments out of your hair. It is a blow struck for sanity and survival when the world is just too much with us.

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Lo Siento Mi Vida, by Linda Ronstadt

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I’ve tried to recall just how old I was when my belief in Santa took the big hit. I was pretty young, maybe five or six years old … don’t know for certain. Thinking back I wonder why it took so long. After all, the presents had always borne tags that read: To Jack from Aunt Addie, or To Jack from Dad and Mom, etc. etc. None of them had ever said from Santa. I guess I was a slow learner.

Even when the myth was busted I do remember desperately wanting it to still be true. Sheesh. What a soft-headed little citizen was I.

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I had a sort of epiphany last night. Get to be old enough and you start going round for the second time in places. Like that old shirt that went out of style long ago but didn’t wear out and now it is just the thing once again. Last evening the realization that I was involved in yet another of those time circles was when I was getting ready for bed and I was just at that moment when the clothes of the day had been tossed aside but the flannel pajamas were not yet in place and much dermis was at the mercy of a very cool room.

When I was a child we did not have central heating in our home, but an oil burner in the kitchen that depended on air currents to distribute the warmth to other rooms. There were lots and lots of shivery rooms and corners under such an arrangement. But by my adolescent years we had left that all behind and now there was central heating, with shining ductwork carrying blessed warmth to all areas equally. Fuel was cheap, global warming as yet undreamt of, and our homes were toasty warm throughout the season. A person could hang out in their living room in January wearing a t-shirt and pair of shorts without risking chilblains or the loss of digits.

Which brings us to today, where our winters are being spent layered up in our own living rooms as if we were going walking to the mailbox a block away, as we keep cutting back on the thermostat settings to reduce expenses and be good citizens of a warming planet.

The French have a phrase that I think fits this phenomenon: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, which translates to – the more things change, the more they are the same. The French are really good at coming up with pithy phrases. Surely you remember that there was quite an excitement that accompanied this one: “Let them eat cake!”

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Long Way Around the Sea, by Low

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Rapturous

jono55

One day while I was wrestling myself into a more comfortable position in my reclining chair, I had some thoughts about the apocalypse. This happens all the time.

You may remember that it all begins with the rapture, when all the good folk are swooped up into Paradise, leaving the wretched refuse behind on earth to sort things out. Doesn’t sound like a good deal for many of us, myself included.

Now along comes Mr. Cluck, the eminent Bible scholar and Scripture salesman who is BFF to all conservative Christians as long as they are properly obeisant. To him, that is. He has amassed a large flock of people who fervently believe that he will save them from accidentally becoming what they fear most in life, being thought of as “woke.”

And I thought … what if we could somehow adjust the parameters of the rapture just the teensiest bit? If we could arrange that all those who voted for Cluck would be the ones inhaled and transported to Paradise or Limbo or wherever they are supposed to end up?

.

I thought to myself, if that happened this country could then undergo some changes. So I started a list.

  • A very large number of billionaires would be gone. These folks really don’t make much of a positive contribution to America but they do have the habit of moving large chunks of money around which disrupts and sometimes ruins the lives of ordinary people. We’d not miss the chaos.
  • The loony-bin section of the gun owners of America would be suddenly absent, and perhaps we could at long last get something done in the area of firearms limitation to make all of our lives safer.
  • With the population suddenly cut by 40%, our national housing shortage would cease to exist.
  • Say goodbye to long lines at the DMV.
  • You could get a good campsite anywhere in the country with no problem, even without a reservation.
  • Fox News would dry up overnight as its customer base sailed away into the raptosphere. The network’s collection of gratingly inane voices would be blessedly absent from waiting rooms all over town.
  • Dialogues dealing with racism, climate change, gender equity (and many other topics) would no longer be thought controversial but instead as useful exercises in moving toward a more equitable and sustainable future for those who were left behind.
  • The Fascist population of the US would be reduced immediately to zero.

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Blue Christmas, by Low

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Well, another year has passed and I am still not making my own lefse. For those of you who aren’t sure what lefse is, it’s a particular sort of soft flatbread that Scandinavians of all types use to fill with anything in sight. Butter and sugar, mashed potatoes, leftover turkey stuffing … if it can be bent or squished, it can be rolled up into a piece of lefse. Think Norwegian burrito.

For a boy with Norwegian heritage, this inactivity is something akin to a mortal sin against the motherland. (It’s basically a given that I will never be allowed to enter Valhalla). Every December I think: Hey, I need to get one of those sets of lefse-making tools and get started. And then I go to the websites and find that today’s best price for a set is $222.51. And it is highly unlikely that it will arrive in time for the holidays.

So each year I decide to put off buying one until the following summer thinking that then I’ll have lots of time to practice before December rolls around. And each year I forget to do it.

It’s one of my longest-running holiday rituals.

So don’t expect anything from yours truly, but if someone more reliable offers you a piece of lefse to try you should accept it gratefully. There are commercial varieties occasionally available, but they retail for about a hundred dollars a pound, and although this stuff is tasty, nothing is that good.

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Magdalena, by Los Lobos

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From The New Yorker

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We have a new group of birds in the berm this morning. Now that our latest snowfall has melted away there are a handful of juncos picking up what’s been scattered on the ground.

They’re humble little creatures, quite happy to eat what falls from the plates of more fastidious birds. There is apparently no 5-second rule in junco-land. No matter how long a delectable has been down there it’s still fair game.

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A coward comes from behind, an armed man against an unarmed one, and kills him. The victim was the CEO of a health insurance company. The perpetrator has labeled the discarded cartridge cases to try to put a face of protest on his crime. But it is murder. There is no justification for such a crime.

The shooter has not been located or identified as yet, but there are presumptions being made that he felt wronged by the company and pursued his resentments to an extreme. Again, no justification. We can hope that the criminal will soon be apprehended.

On another hand entirely, health insurance is an industry whose members I have long believed should be forced by law to fly this banner, so as to reflect their true nature.

Anyone who has enough dealings with health insurers will eventually find themselves tearing the hair from their head and rending their garments. In my own contretemps with them it never occurred to me to shoot the s.o.b. on the other end of the phone conversation, but if they had been nearer to hand I might have pinched them good and hard.

We buy these policies to try to avoid bankruptcy when and if a major illness comes along. And at those times we too often find that instead of the insurance company supporting us, it backs quickly out of the room, salaaming as it leaves, all the while exclaiming “Not our problem.”

I can recommend an article in today’s New Yorker: What the death of a health-insurance C.E.O. means to America.

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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Happy Thoughts

jono55

I had a happy thought this morning. In just three weeks the hours of daylight will start increasing. More sunlight, less gloom … what’s not to like? Of course it’s a bit like getting a brighter bulb when you’re still living in the refrigerator, but hey – it’s a start.

I am reminded of the oft-uttered phrases:

  • It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.
  • It isn’t that it’s cold, it’s a damp cold.

In both cases it is water vapor that is being blamed for all our troubles, rather than the obvious fact that the temperature levels may not be compatible with (comfortable) life.

Over the years I have made an exhaustive study of just what the optimal environmental temperature is for human beings. I will admit that my study sample is rather small, being limited to … me. But I believe my findings are still worthy of your consideration.

Summary of findings: the optimal room temperature is exactly 73 degrees Fahrenheit.

Anything above this and a human may suffer antiperspirant breakthrough. Anything below 73 and you’re wondering: where did I put that afghan, anyway?

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The Parting Glass, by boygenius

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From The New Yorker

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Flights of Sandhill cranes going by off and on all afternoon. Often so high you have to squint to see them, but that unique cronking sound is unmistakable. They are tidily and sensibly arranged in vee formations heading south.

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If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Lewis Carroll

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Day after day the bad odor of the yet-to-be-unleashed Cluck administration increases as it is almost entirely based on slavish loyalty and nepotism. I would describe the scent as fetid swamp mixed with hints of decay and limburger cheese.

And just when I was about to enter the state of high dudgeon over these awful Republican choices the leader of the Democratic party breaks his promise to us all and pardons his son.

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Mr. Biden and Mr. Cluck are showing us as clearly as they can that the problem with electing humans to office is to be continually disappointed. Where now is all of the posturing of either party about no person being above the law? If it weren’t for the fact that my computer sometimes behaves completely irresponsibly and illogically I would cry out: Bring on AI and the robots!

Ultimately it’s up to us, isn’t it? And we would so love to give that job to someone else while we plant our gardens and play a few more rounds of golf.* It isn’t distracted driving that’s the biggest problem out there, it’s distracted living.

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*Full disclosure here. I garden little and never played golf. I could have said go kayaking or hiking but then it would have applied to me, which I did not want it to do at all. I’m above all that. Really.

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Happy Christmas (War Is Over), by John Lennon

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From The New Yorker

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We’re getting on with the task of Christmas-izing the little space we call home. I would say we peaked in about the year 2000 or so with the amount of holiday decorations we placed about a much larger dwelling, and we have been divesting ever since. For example we’ve gone from something like thirty or forty Snow Village pieces to a modest five. From eight-foot decorated evergreen trees to 4 1/2 foot trees. We move the Buddha from his place on the berm and install statues of Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus.

And presto! We’re done! To us the feeling is the same. Turns out that for us it’s not the size of the observance, but the observance itself that matters. Our plan is to be at home this year, and if there are others among our friends and neighbors who are doing the same we will see if we can’t get together for an evening or two.

So – three weeks till Christmas. I give myself carte blanche to bring out the holiday music each day until Robin exclaims: STOP WITH THE MUSIC ALREADY IT IS DRIVING ME MAD! At one time in our history together I had only purchased Christmas tunes to play, but now between Apple Music and Pandora I have access to enough new and old, profane and sacred, tacky and treasured Christmas music to choke the proverbial horse. Or, as in our case, to drive someone utterly mad.

I might even share some tunes here on this journal. BTW, I have never liked the term “blog.” Just saying the word makes me sound like I’m about to cough up something gross. Anyway, if the music starts to make you crazy, please indicate and I may or may not retreat.

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Oíche Chiúin, by Enya

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Alarum!

jono55

There are way too many alarmists working in the weather service. We were told to expect 1-2 feet of snow in the mountains above 8000 feet along with sub-zero temperatures. None of this sounded good to Robin and I as we tried to plan our Thanksgiving journey to Durango. We hunched over the weather app on my phone on Wednesday, waiting and watching, finally calling the pet sitter at mid-day to tell her “Game On.”

Predicted driving conditions

Our wills were in order, we had food for two days survival, enough warm clothing, and a reliable vehicle. We said our prayers and climbed into the Outback, looking tenderly at our little home for perhaps the last time. Off we went, anticipating treacherous patches of glare ice, hard drifts across the highway that could make you lose control, and trucks skating sideways right at us coming down a mountain two-lane road.

What we found was no snow at all on 99.4 % of the road, and temperatures in the thirties. The countryside was beautiful under a couple of inches of new and trackless snow. It was a breeze.

Actual driving conditions

I tried to imagine the home life of those prognosticators, how each flutter of a leaf or errant drop of moisture must send them into fearful spasms where they rush their families into basements or attics, handing out stored hardtack when their little ones cried out from hunger.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

I’m looking for a hive of valiant meteorologists. Growing less interested in what the Chicken Little variety has to say.

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Elon Musk is naming people that he might recommend to be fired when the new administration takes over. Naming people might be thought of as reckless of life (by uncharitable folks like me) when he and his new orange BFF have a large following of blackshirts and brownshirts who like nothing better than than to be given an excuse to hit people.

The richest man in the world publicly picking on ordinary citizens … anybody see a problem here?

Where’s my dictionary … let’s look under “bully” … ahhh … there we are. Perhaps that should be the name of his Musk’s new quasi-official-department: The Office of Cravens.

He fits right in with his new pal, President-elect Bonespurs.

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(Ran across a line from this poem, and just had to look it up.)

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die
and our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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There are those who speak our language, this English we trample on and murder daily, in such a way as to ennoble it. Or perhaps to show how innately noble our mother tongue really is. Maya Angelou had one of those voices. Each syllable ringing clearly as any bell. No mumbling. No idiosyncratic elisions. Poetry.

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If We Make It Through December, by Phoebe Bridgers

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So it is December. I must now join the consumer herd in search of some small remembrance for a handful of people. It is a dangerous thing, this entering a large and crazed group of people which has already been in motion for at least a month now. The herd slavers as it passes, every pupil dilated, every nostril flared, every breath labored. They have only just left one of the seemingly endless Black Fridays behind, and are looking desperately over their shoulders at signs reading: Only (X) shopping days till Christmas.

I will do my duty. I am no shirker. If overconsumption is required of me, overconsume I will. I am a full-blooded American, after all, and once I am galloping with the rest of the swarm it pays onlookers to be cautious of those sharp hooves and horns!

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Riding Off From It

jono55

DISCLAIMER

I don’t do jokes on this blog, mainly because I can’t tell jokes very well and often leave my listener scratching their head and wondering just what it was that was supposed to be funny. But for some reason, the story of the Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major that I first heard sixty years ago is an exception to those woeful facts. For one thing, I remember the whole joke (amazing). For another, when I tell it in conversation I can bring to bear what I believe to be an absolutely irresistibly humorous Scottish accent. ( I summon my inner Billy Connolly). All of this is to preface an off-color joke which might offend tender sensibilities, and for that I apologize in advance.

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A Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major in full dress marches into a drugstore and asks for the pharmacist. The Sergeant opens his waist pouch and pulls out a neatly folded cotton bandanna, opening it to reveal a smaller silk square which he unfolds to reveal a severely battered condom.

“How much for repair?” the Sergeant Major asks the pharmacist.

“Six pence,” he replies.

“How much for a new one?”

“Ten pence.”

The Sergeant Major folds the condom into the silk square and the cotton bandana, places it in back in his kit bag and marches down the aisle and out the door.

Next day the Sergeant Major walks back into the drugstore and asks for the same pharmacist. He pulls out the folded cotton 
bandanna, then opens the smaller silk square which once again reveals the ill-used bit of latex. He then declares:

“The regiment votes for repair.”

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Having mentioned Billy Connolly, I feel obliged to share one of my favorite bits of his, taken from a concert in New York.

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One of my daughters once said that in our family when something bad happened you were given 5 minutes to grieve, and then you had to make a joke about it.

It’s true that there have been times that my discomforts whenever I have come face to face with the appalling in life made me into a stuffer, someone who puts his feelings away until there is a more convenient time to deal with them. Being a time which may or may not ever come along. I do that less now at this season of my life, but a lifetime of such putting-things-off is not an easy habit to break off completely.

This clip from Lonesome Dove illustrates pretty well what I’ve been talking about. A boy dies of snakebite while on a cattle drive, and his compañeros are burying him. As Woodrow F. Call says, the best thing to do with death is to “ride off from it.”

And there are times when “riding off from it” is necessary. In another time and place when I found myself (believe it or not) in charge of running codes on children who had arrested, my mind all on its own would click into a cool and quiet groove where the alarmed and frantic behaviors of those around me were only static, and what I needed to do was laser-clear to me. There was a need to bring order to this clamor and I took that as my role. The other personnel in the room needed to be rapidly given assignments without raising their panic level, and I found that I could do that.

Finding that I had this facility came to be a useful thing in my emergency room work. Looking back, though, I can see where a problem gradually developed in that I began to apply it to everyday life, in relationships and situations where it wasn’t appropriate or constructive.

Because sometimes the best thing is not to “ride off from it,” but to sit down and weep. Not in some vague tomorrow but right then, on that very chair in front of you. With friends, if you are fortunate.

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Took a longish drive on Monday to Basalt CO, to the Steadman Orthopedic Clinic, for consultation on a bunion. You know, one of those foot things where for no good reason your big toe decides to go off and do its own thing.

.It’s one more case of life’s attempts at humor which falls flat. Life isn’t very good at humor, actually, being much more adept in the role of sorrow-bringer or day-screwer-upper. We met a very pleasant surgeon who was not completely full of himself, which I have found to be quite an unusual thing. He was an excellent communicator as well, and what he communicated was that if possible he would like to avoid surgery altogether, but if it became necessary how that would be accomplished. We left the clinic with a plan and we’ll see how things go from here.

En route we saw three small herds of antelope pronghorns, each group containing about twenty individuals. It’s been several years since we’ve seen even one, so it was a banner day in that department. Some light snow had been predicted, which did not materialize.

We stopped in Grand Junction on the way home to do some shoe shopping that the surgeon had suggested, and visited the Mesa Mall to do just that. It was like stepping back into 1980, because here was a vibrant mall with a great many stores (and nearly completely absent those ghostly empty stores), a bustling food court, and gaggles of teenaged girls wandering about in what seemed aimlessness, but was probably not. There were teenaged boys as well, and one sturdy group of four walked by us as we consumed some fast-food Chinese cuisine, all four young men being tall and strong and wearing identical haircuts.

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Each year at this time I try to find a particular table grace of Garrison Keillor’s and I fail to do so. What I do succeed at finding each year is yet another prayer that cuts through the gourmandic fog of the day. Here is this year’s.

O, heavenly Father, we thank thee for food and remember the hungry. We thank thee for health and remember the sick. We thank thee for friends and remember the friendless. We thank thee for freedom and remember the enslaved.

There are so many people on this planet that it is quite likely that somewhere in the world there is a man who was born on the same exact day that I was and at exactly the same hour and minute. He may be living halfway across the globe and have had the hardest of lives, such trials that if I knew them they would make my own problems seem positively trivial. In this season of Thanksgiving I think of him and my wish is that in the years to come the blessings would be distributed more evenly between he and I.

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Thank You For A Life, by Kris Kristofferson

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Moving On

jono55

A bit about our family story. Every family has its tales, and this one is about geography. I moved from Michigan to South Dakota with my former wife and four kids. This was in 1980. Within seven years all had fled the state but me. My children ended up in a variety of places, including Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri, China … but none of them anywhere near where I was living.

After a few years of bachelorhood I married Robin, and took up residence with her and her three children. Robin was 11 years my junior, so her children were still in school in Yankton SD. But within a decade that trio had also packed up and left, this time headed for Colorado.

Robin and I had good friends in South Dakota, so stayed right where we were. Until a new crop of grandchildren started to appear, that is, who were all out there in the Rockies. Eventually those small creatures proved to be very powerful magnets, strong enough to draw us out to the mountains. We triangulated and chose to live between these pockets of kids, who were located in Denver, Steamboat Springs, and Durango. The closest to us was a 2.5 hour drive, the furthest was 6 hours away.

Today those grandchildren live in North Carolina, California, and Texas, with only one still here in the Columbine state. That last survivor is still in high school, so who knows where she might choose to settle once she graduates? It’s a common story of familial mobility, with nobody presently living anywhere near where they grew up, including Robin and I. There is no “old home place” for anyone of us to return to, except for the one we carry with us in our minds. Our blended family empire now stretches from Washington DC to Walnut Grove, California. Making in-person contact with everyone, every year, has not been always been possible, especially as the years pile on.

But I do have some small sense of what those mothers and fathers felt long ago as they watched their children walk up gangplanks onto ships that would take them to the New World, when the possibility of never seeing them again was always present. Those wharfside moments must have been some serious tug on the heart.

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Wooden Ships, by Crosby, Stills, and Nash

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Some new birds showed up on the berm in our front yard this week. I identified them as a pair of lesser goldfinches. Very pretty coloration, although not quite as showy as the variety of goldfinches who came to our feeders in South Dakota. They were picking through the dried heads of the black-eyed Susans for seeds that other birds had missed.

Jabbering clouds of yellow, green, and black Lesser Goldfinches gather in scrubby oak, cottonwood, and willow habitats of the western U.S., or visit suburban yards for seeds and water. These finches primarily eat seeds of plants in the sunflower family, and they occur all the way south to the Peruvian Andes.

All About Birds

(The black eyed Susans we saw them chomping on out front are in the sunflower family, just like the book says they should be.)

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Drift Away, by Dobie Gray

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From The New Yorker

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One of the joys of streaming television is locking on to a program that enriched you in some way, and then being able to revisit it down the road whenever you want to. Taking the same lessons away that you originally did, or finding new ones because you are not the same person you were then.

Robin and I are revisiting Call The Midwife. A series that ran for 13 years. One of those rarities where you could believe in all of the characters as they grew older or grew up. It begins in London, in a neighborhood named Poplar. A part of town that is about as far from posh as you can get.

A small group of nuns operate a public health nursing/midwifery service, being assisted by young female nurses who are laity. Many other characters round out an excellent ensemble.

The timing of the series begins in 1957, when the last of the rubble from WWII has barely been cleared away. There are sentimental stories mixed in with large doses of the profound grittiness that is life in Poplar. None of them rings false. Some nights, like last night’s episode about the harms perpetrated by the old London workhouse system, can be a hard watch, actually.

The people who put this series together did their research. Seeing what was available as medical/nursing care in 1957 in a poverty-stricken area and watching this evolve over more than a decade was very engaging for me.

It’s a series where no one is omniscient and mistakes are sometimes made, but the major characters have one thing in common, and that is devotion to helping people. The show has a beating heart.

On Netflix.

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Rank Stranger, by Crooked Still

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From The New Yorker

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Oh me, oh my. The company that kept me alive for five years has gone under. Is kaput. Those yellow trucks will no longer be rolling up rural driveways bringing real food to malnourished bachelors. I am, of course, talking about the Schwan’s company.

When my first wife had taken her Le Creuset cookware and moved on to better things, I found myself in a medium large house with a full kitchen but without the will to cook anything. I gave up on meal planning altogether and allowed the package to determine what supper was going to be. One of my favorite dodges was to buy a package of hot dogs and eat that every evening until it was gone. Eight dogs in a package eaten at the rate of two dogs a night meant that four days were covered. I was not fool enough to believe that I was eating healthily, since I knew that one cannot live on fat and pig lips alone, but that reckoning was for some future day and I was hungry right now.

Bread would go moldy, anything in the fridge in Tupperware became a culture medium for some of the most colorful fungi I have ever seen. Works of art, really. I had acquired a microwave oven for the first time, but had not taken the time to learn how to use it properly. It worked well for heating water, but when I would put anything that was meat into it what came out was more suitable for making shoes than for eating.

And then I discovered Schwan’s. An entire yellow truckful of deliciousness would show up in my driveway and all I had to do was to pick out what I wanted and give the man some money.

No waste, no steady streams of hot dogs, no interesting growths in the refrigerator. Instead I could eat chicken cordon bleu and it was pretty darn good for frozen food. Plus I now found something to do with that microwave sitting useless on the counter.

So I experienced a tender moment this morning when I read about the company’s struggles over the past decades, and their painful decision to retire the fleet. If it means anything to them, I am here typing this only because they fed me when I was a man in need.

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Byte Me, Universe

jono55

Before Apple’s Macintosh came out, I had no interest in puttering around with personal computers at all. They seemed perfect nerd fodder, with their dark screens and blinking green cursors. Who cared?

Then one day in 1984 I wandered into Team Electronics in Yankton SD and there was a new Macintosh sitting on a table with a sign that said “Try Me.” So I did. All I had to do was find out that there was such a thing as cut and paste to make me realize that for anyone who needed to write this was a magical tool.

So I bought one. And I installed it on a table on the lower level of our home where I could explore its possibilities without being in the way of normal household activity. I wrote letters, wrote poetry, fiddled with MacPaint to create primitive graphics … a kid in the proverbial candy store was I.

One evening, after I had been working on a talk I was going to give at a staff meeting, I was looking over the several pages I’d created for typos, when my son came down the stairs and flicked a light switch. At that moment I discovered two things. One, that the outlet my Macintosh was plugged into was controlled by that switch, and two, that when the Mac went dark all that precious writing went away. Forever. I had not yet learned to save as I wrote because I didn’t know you needed to. Who could imagine a machine that would take your hard work and allow it to vanish?

For a few frantic minutes I couldn’t believe that my stuff was gone. I read through the computer’s manual several times looking for some loophole, some place within its CPU where that speech still existed, and all I had to do was figure it out. At long last I gave up and gave in. Rather than go look for a shotgun to deal with the problem directly, I resolved to save and save and save my work from then on. Whenever I purchased new software I looked to see if auto-save was a feature or not. If it was, the sale was made.

There were other smaller and less dramatic losses to come before I truly learned my lesson, but that first one was the mind-bender, my “I can’t believe it” moment. Even today when I think back on that moment, I can see where my sense of how the universe should be ordered was disturbed. And in my perfect universe several hours of one’s work did not disappear at the flick of a switch.

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Loser, by Beck

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I used to have a friend who was paranoid-ish. He didn’t own a credit card of any kind, being suspicious that there were people out there who would steal his money. He owned a computer but used it basically as a large calculator/paperweight, since it was never connected to the internet. He worried that someone might get inside his head and he had no intention of letting that happen.

And that was in a much more innocent time, 40 years ago. He and I have lost touch, and I can’t help but wonder what he thinks today of social networking, online banking, and sexting. Must be hard for him to sleep at night, worrying about someone breaking into his home and surreptitiously connecting him to an ISP without his knowledge or permission. It would be a new sort of cyber-crime, in that they don’t take anything the night they enter your home, but over the years to come you are electronically whittled down to poverty and insignificance.

Because once you turn that sucker on and hit that first clickbait screen telling you to come see the 100 most vicious dog breeds owned by 100 of the worst actors of all time, you have a 50/50 chance of disappearing forever into bogus-land.

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I have what might charitably be called irregular sleep habits. Robin and I retire early, as befits persons of our seasoning, but I am usually up again before midnight. Then there will be a variable period of hours where I completely waste my time using the internet as my tool of choice, next it’s back to sleep once again, then awakening before 0400, when I finally decide I’ve had enough of this circus and just get up.

This morning during the internet phase I got it into my head that I wanted to listen to the song Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead. And I wanted to listen to the very best version of the song. So I posed that question to the cloud, and while there was not unanimity, the version played at a concert at the Swing Auditorium on February 26, 1977 kept coming up.

This morning during the internet phase I got it into my head that I wanted to listen to the song Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead. And I wanted to listen to the very best version of the song. So I posed that question to the Cloud, and while there was not unanimity, the version played at a concert at the Swing Auditorium on February 26, 1977 kept coming up.

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On Amazon the triple CD of the concert containing the “album only” cut was priced at $135.00, which was not a budget item that I had submitted for approval, so I searched further and found the song once again at the Internet Archive, where it could not be downloaded legally. And yet here it is now for your listening pleasure. Don’t judge me.

Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead

After I was done messing around with all of the above electronic stuff, I got up to stretch my legs and found that a beautiful light snow had fallen. Only a fraction of an inch, but enough to make the world pure white. Trackless.

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BTW. The world of the Grateful Dead is not one to enter without a guide. They have released more than 200 albums, mostly live concert recordings, and there is quite a bit of variability in sound quality and occasionally the enthusiasm of the musicians. Fortunately the Deadheads have not all died off as yet, and they are out there vigorously commenting on each band on each album.

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Music Hath Charms …

jono55

Students … STUDENTS! Take your seats, please. I am about to expostulate right in front of everyone (an act that is a misdemeanor in at least four of the red states , and a felony in two).

My statement for the morning is this. There are rock songs that are as worth studying as some pieces of classical music are, for they are every bit as intricate and complex.

Now I can already see a few haughty noses being raised in the back row there, those of you of privileged breeding who regard such suggestions as being quite preposterous. Must I remind you of the quotation from the philosopher Herbert Spencer:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

There. I’ve had my say. And now a musical example is provided by Jason Isbell and his band The 400 Unit. To begin with it’s an interesting ballad, but listen carefully to the long break after the second verse. Themes rise and fall, guitars move in and out, percussion waxes and wanes. What is this if not the rock and roll equivalent of chamber music?

Dreamsicle, by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

There will be a quiz on Friday next. Bring your Air-Pods.

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From The New Yorker

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If you accept ovo-lacto-vegetarianism as a thing, I have slowly moved to where I am about 95% vegetarian. Reasons? Health concerns, curiosity, economy … all of these have played their part. But the final straw (or straws) has been the cumulative addition of one horror story after another about how that piece of beef or pork or chicken made its way to my plate. The awfulness of that industry … if you would ask me why it took me so long to get to this point, my answer would probably be twofold, sloth and unwillingness to change.

I have no excuse. I read The Jungle as a teenager. During the ensuing decades since that eye-opener I’ve seen one documentary after another on the meat industry and felt shame each time when I was done viewing.

All of my life I have been picking up bits of knowledge about what it means to be a sentient being, and what our duties and responsibilities toward the rest of the animal kingdom might be. But my eating patterns remained largely unchanged.

So about that remaining 5%? Well, that’s my personal hypocrisy score, I guess. It’s a better number than it was a decade ago, and I confess there are many other areas of my existence where that score would be higher. Slow learner, moi.

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From The New Yorker

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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal

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Less than two weeks now until we celebrate the national holiday in support of obesity. The only one of the bunch where eating large quantities of food is the whole point. Oh, there are brief mentions here and there about being grateful and giving thanks and all that, but otherwise the articles dealing with Thanksgiving are mostly about recipes.

If I were to decide that each day for the rest of my life I would eat nothing but turkey stuffing, I am almost certain that I would not run out of instructions for preparing variations of these dishes until I was over the age of 125.

And by that time my bloodstream would be 50% creamery butter, I would likely weigh over 600 pounds and when I died I would have to be cremated with a flamethrower. If you Google overeating on turkey day, you will be inundated with suggestions as to how to avoid things like food coma, GI reflux emergencies, and trips to the emergency room for tryptophan overdose.

So you can see how far we’ve come from the first Thanksgiving where the Pilgrims sat down to platefuls of succotash and were grateful for not being dead of starvation, exposure, and disease.

I have my own gratitude list that I compiled some time ago, and keep amending from time to time. It is much like the Pilgrim’s might have been. Grateful for the roof over my head, clothing enough to keep me warm this winter, and food enough for the day. Grateful for the friends that I have now and have had over a considerable lifetime.

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Observations on what has transpired since the recent election. I have my own conspiracy theory which is no more crackpot than many others that are circulating. I think that it is possible that the leaders of North Korea, China, and Russia got together and decided that instead of continuing to amass nuclear arsenals and build up armies against the USA they would do what they could to get Donald Cluck elected to office. It was a far cheaper and more effective approach, knowing that he would appoint one incompetent after another, deliberately sow chaos and disunion in his own government, and undermine agencies, institutions, and programs that had been effective in promoting safety and stability for generations.

It was a genius idea, and we are seeing it play out daily in the media. Half of the country is still gloating in his re-election even as he is busily sawing a leg from the very stool they are standing on.

I would find it hard to feel sorry for them if they ever realize their error and the great national harm of which they have been a part. In fact, I will probably haul out my trusty “I TOLD YOU SO!” and use it as a club to lay about me at will.

I am nothing if not petty.

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Here is where I would like to spend eternity. At the World Cheese Awards. This year there were 4786 entries from 47 countries at the event. It was held in Portugal and the winner was a Portuguese cheese described thusly:

Made with vegetarian rennet created from thistles, the winner is described as a gooey, glossy, buttery cheese with a herby bitterness that’s typically served by slicing off the top and spooning out the center.

CNN Online, November 16

“Slicing off the top and spooning out the center” … have you ever read a more beautiful line in your life?

The photograph below was taken of the judging floor, and ( I am choking up just thinking about it ) those tables are filled with the best cheeses in the entire (bleeping) world. I mean, really, what wouldn’t I have done to get there? To get a chance to wear one of those tan coveralls I might not have killed, but I would certainly have bruised.

The Director of the Guild of Fine Food, which puts on the show, described the atmosphere:

Gathering thousands of cheeses at room temperature under one roof inevitably produces an intense aroma. “It’s very punchy,” is how John Farrand, managing director of The Guild of Fine Food, the contest’s UK-based organizer, described the atmosphere at the event.

CNN Online

So probably not for everyone. I have known people who swooned from the aroma of a single well-aged chunk of Roquefort unveiled at a party.

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That Smell, by Lynyrd Skynyrd

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It’s In The Book

jono55

Something very pleasant happened to me recently, and it had to do with my birthday. I was given the gift of a book. A physical book with pages and a spine and everything. How long has it been since that happened? I can’t remember the last time.

There was a time when it was normal and to give gifts of books and music. Pleasing on both ends of the transaction. Any excuse to through the stores that sold such things was appreciated. And spending money on such luxuries was not extravagance but a noble gesture …. because I was going to give it away. Win – win.

With books, it was the Kindle and its clones. Not only were the books generally cheaper, but you had access to a gazillion titles. And on a cold and rainy day when you didn’t want to get out of bed you could simply click “Purchase” and the book would magically wing its way through space and land exactly on that small device in your hand. But giving somebody an e-book … the magic is diluted, if not absent.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle. Why, I can carry hundreds of books with me when I travel, and who doesn’t need such a library when stranded in a Super 8 on a snowy night in Nowhere, USA?

But this new actual book that I was given … I am savoring it … turning pages … inserting bookmarks … what’s not to love about “old school?”

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It’s In The Book, by Johnny Standley

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Touch the Hand of Love, by Renee Fleming and YoYoMa

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Reading can be hazardous to your health. Every time I do a little bit of it, I can’t wait to run and tell somebody about what I’ve learned. In that I am much like the average four year-old.

This time it is once again something from the book The Animal Dialogues, and it was in the chapter dealing with pronghorns.

For a good part of my life I called them antelope, and even when I learned that this was not the proper terminology I wasn’t curious enough to pursue the obvious question – if they aren’t antelope, what the heck are they? When I finally did, I found that they weren’t anything in the world but … pronghorns.

Their genus, Antilocapra, belongs to no other species in the world but the pronghorn, endemic to North America. Since they are technically not antelope, and their genus is solitary, the pronghorn is the sole animal of its genetic kind in the world.

Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues, p. 176.

We have seen them occasionally here in Paradise when we drive to Grand Junction, along Highway 50. But not as often as we would like, perhaps a sighting every couple of years or so. They can survive in what looks to us like the most unpromising rangeland.

The pronghorn is the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, being built for maximum predator evasion through running. The top speed is dependent upon the length of time over which it is measured. It can run 56 km/h (35 mph) for 6.5 km (4 mi), 68 km/h (42 mph) for 1.5 km (1 mi), and 88.5 km/h (55 mph) for 800 m (0.5 mi). Although it is slower than the African cheetah, it can sustain top speeds much longer than cheetahs. The pronghorn may have evolved its running ability to escape from now-extinct predators such as the American cheetah, since its speed greatly exceeds that of all extant North American predators.

Wikipedia: Pronghorn

Imagine that. Not only could the pronghorn outrun those cheetahs, they outlasted them in the evolutionary story. Today there’s nothing left in North America that can keep up with them.

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Veteran’s Day came and went as always. Thank you for your service has become as frequent and almost as meaningful as other common phrases like I know just how you feel or thoughts and prayers. I always nod when it is said to me, even though I feel somewhat of an impostor. My military service consisted of putting on the uniform, setting aside two years of my life from my civilian career, and then going to work in a safe and comfortable environment. At no time during those two years was I in any danger greater than is encountered by anyone driving on an average American highway.

So those of us who were in the Armed Forces are not all heroes, no matter how many florid speakers on how many platforms proclaim the converse. Most of us worked far away from the sound of guns and bombs and cries of the wounded. The men and women who do that are true exemplars, but unfortunately at parades and public functions where we put on our uniforms we all look the same.

Yesterday I was listening to a discussion on PBS as to who soon-to-be-president Cluck would choose as his military advisers, since nearly all of the generals in his previous term came to detest and distrust him and have clearly said so in the past several years.

The speakers were talking about the ethos of a company of men and women who are going into danger. They must trust their leaders and their fellow warriors, and also must share the intangible ideals of sacrifice and honor. Such a unit cannot function well without all of these.

Our newly elected leader knows nothing of either sacrifice or honor. In his public statements over the past dozen years he has shown that he has little understanding of or respect for the men and women in the military, except as they can be a source of profit, as in his statement “We should have taken the oil.”

So technically speaking I am a veteran, but nowhere near a hero, not even on the same page with them. I did make small sacrifices, and I do know something about honor. I like to think that I would not have behaved badly had I been put into a combat area, but of course I have no way of knowing, and unless they start drafting octogenarians for combat work I will never find out.

So when I am thanked for my service I nod acceptance, because it is easier than going into a harangue like the one you have just been subjected to. But I do know the difference.

So to all of those who did the heavy lifting while I walked through my tour of duty in Omaha, Nebraska, a sincere thank you for your service.

.

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A moving scene from a fine movie – From Here To Eternity. Robert E. Lee Prewitt plays the bugle call Taps in honor of a friend who was killed. Something about these twenty-four notes has the power to halt people in whatever they are doing until the last one is played.

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Good Mourning, America

jono55

Wednesday morning we woke to find that two very different things had happened during the night. One of them was ugly, and the other beautiful.

Let’s do the ugly first. A man convicted of multiple felonies including sexual assault, and who is a racist, fascist, and bottomless liar was elected president of our unfortunate country yesterday. Those of us who are not Cluck-cult members are walking around humming dirges to ourselves.

Now for the beautiful. Several inches of snow fell, warm wet stuff that covers everything, including the plants on the berm in the front yard. Around breakfast time dozens of tiny birds appeared and were busying themselves in the dried foliage, eating seeds or bugs or whatever it is that they were seeking. They were all the same species, with olive coloration on their backs, white bars on their wings, and they were between a hummingbird and a chickadee in size. Because they were flitting about so much it was impossible to do an accurate count. But there were dozens.

I took a photo of the area, and there are five birds included in the photograph above. I identified them as ruby-crowned kinglets. Not rare sightings, but not everyday occurrences, either. They were sooo busy.

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Snow, by Gustavo Santaolalla

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Wednesday evening we had friend Rod over for dinner and a movie. Dinner was two new recipes, an instant pot chili and a cornbread (from scratch) cooked in cast iron.The film chosen was The Fisher King, which is an oddly satisfying movie. It’s a gritty fantasy and not every viewer becomes a fan. The cast is excellent, with Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Jeff Bridges, and Amanda Plummer all doing good work.

Ruehl won an Oscar for her role, and Jeff Bridges does the truest portrayal of a shit-faced drunk that I’ve seen on film. He is by turns pathetic and disgusting, which, if you’ve ever seen such a person, is accurate.

The director is Terry Gilliam, who was once a member of the Monty Python troupe, and that sensibility is layered everywhere in the movie. It is one of Robin’s lifetime favorite films.

[BTW. The food was awfully tasty on a cold and snowy evening. Two winning recipes. Comfort food for the end of an uncomfortable day.]

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City of New Orleans, by Steve Goodman

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Thursday morning, after a seven inch snowfall and the coldest night of the year so far, hundreds of Sandhill cranes got up and took off for the south land. They flew over our home, making that croaking call that would be quite at home in the soundtrack of Jurassic Park X.

Beautiful in flight. Dramatic in voice.

I have to smile when our local media calls Thursday’s precipitation a “snowstorm.” As tough and resourceful as the mountain people are, they obviously do not know a snowstorm from a soft taco. What we had was a snowfall. At no time was driving visibility impaired, commerce interrupted, or lives threatened.

No, a snowstorm is when you grip the steering wheel of your automobile so tightly you leave a mark. When you try to remember where you put your will, and hope that the kids will find it. When you navigate by following the white lines in the middle of the road because looking forward is pretty much useless. No, we didn’t have a snowstorm. Not even close.

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From The New Yorker

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I’ve been corresponding with various scholars, scientists, and other potentates over the past couple of years. I am trying to find the original blueprints for the human body.

Having come this far in life, I have dozens of ideas for improvements, but have failed to achieve an introduction to whoever is in charge to begin to re-work this troublesome and flawed corpus. I can only assume that it was an early prototype that was somehow released to the world before it could be properly finished.

For instance, and I realize that this is a trivial example, but there is the problem of hair on the human body. For nearly fifty years our body hair remains in roughly the same locations. And then the gloves come off and each hair regards itself as an independent agent free to wander about wherever it wishes.

Women get mustaches, men go bald at the same time forests grow from their ears, and there are four of those rebellious hairs who have settled on the tip of my nose perhaps hoping to one day rival the rhino’s horn.

Well, I’m not having it, and I know that with a modicum of genetic engineering we could do away with the entire circus. I just need to get to the right people.

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[The beautiful header photograph is not one that I took, but is from this site.]

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Special Edition

jono55

[I have taken a great liberty here, but Robert Reich’s piece in The Guardian today speaks to perhaps millions of Americans who are standing around wondering what our next move should be. Here is the piece, along with a link to it in its original location.]

A Peaceful But Determined Resistance to Trump Must Start Now

by Robert Reich, from The Guardian

I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken.  Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too. Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.

I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.

Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.

Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.

America has become less safe for trans people – including trans kids – who were already at risk of violence and discrimination.

Anyone who has already faced prejudice and marginalization is now in greater danger than before.

Also in danger are people who have stood up to Trump, who has promised to seek revenge against his political opponents.

Countless people are now endangered on a scale and intensity almost unheard of in modern America.

Our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way.

We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth.

We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children.

We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.

We will protect trans people and everyone else who is scapegoated because of how they look or what they believe. No one should have to be ashamed of who they are.

We will stop Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies. A free nation protects political dissent. A democracy needs people willing to stand up to tyranny.

How will we conduct this resistance?

By organizing our communities. By fighting through the courts. By arguing our cause through the media.

We will ask other Americans to join us – left and right, progressive and conservative, white people and people of color. It will be the largest and most powerful resistance since the American revolution.

But it will be peaceful. We will not succumb to violence, which would only give Trump and his regime an excuse to use organized violence against us.

We will keep alive the flames of freedom and the common good, and we will preserve our democracy. We will fight for the same things Americans have fought for since the founding of our nation – rights enshrined in the constitution and Bill of Rights.

The preamble to the constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people”, conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare”, as the preamble goes on to say.

We the people will fight for the general welfare.

We the people will resist tyranny. We will preserve the common good. We will protect our democracy.

This will not be easy, but if the American experiment in self-government is to continue, it is essential.

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I.

If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do.

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.

It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.

We will never give up on America.

The resistance starts now.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Any Old Time

jono55

Sunday morning we were entirely ready for the %^*%^^ semiannual time change. The four wall clocks were all reset. The two digital readouts on major appliances were changed. Our wristwatches were brought into synchronization with the rest. The only things we couldn’t adjust were our stomachs which told us it was lunchtime when our clocks told us that it positively was not.

It says something about the inertia and dysfunctional nature of Congress that despite the desire of 63% of Americans to do away with this noxious practice we must still play the time game twice each year.

When I was single, I was routinely late for Sunday services in the Spring, and arrived an hour early nearly every Fall. Remembering the axiom “Spring ahead, Fall back” seemed beyond my ken, like some temporal learning disability. And it is all for nought! It serves no purpose! It is a leftover from the past that is less useful than corset stays and spats.

I am of the belief that when I have checked out and am on my way to glory DST will still be the practice. And people will either be an hour late or an hour early to the funeral.

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Time After Time, by Cyndi Lauper

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On a recent visit to Silverton I collected some photos of the pickings in a tourist-oriented shop. I am a fan of the creatively tawdry, as you can see. Please don’t blame my parents … this is all on me.

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Time For Me To Fly, by REO Speedwagon

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Even quietly perched on a church roof or under the arm of a bridge, ravens are obviously brooding, grumbling among one another, plotting the end of the world.

Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues, p.129

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At the end of the chapter on ravens, Craig Childs muses on our human arrogance when we talk about other animals’ “intelligence.”

Anthropomorphism is generally frowned upon. It is said to be improper to see animals the same way we view ourselves. We are asked to temper our language when speaking of animal traits, lest we call them by a name that is not theirs, forming words in our mouths that do not sound like a snake’s whisper, a grasshopper’s clicking. It just seems as odd, though, to sequester ourselves in a cheerless vault of sentience, sole proprietors of smarts and charm. Bees form a mind of a hive, don’t they? Doesn’t the bear dream when it sleeps, and don’t grasses stretch with all their might toward the sun? Every living thing has the same wish to flourish again and again. Beyond that, our differences are quibbles.

Craig Childs: The Animal Dialogues, p. 138.

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Any Old Time, by Maria Muldaur

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Dreadful

jono55

Halloween here in Paradise is generally a tame affair, as it was this year. A gaggle of well-costumed children are paraded by our house, all accompanied by their parents. They come with collection bags open to receive our safely packaged bits of candy. All things considered, it’s a pretty sanitary evening, especially since it celebrates the demonic.

As a kid I would be sent out into the world wearing a cheap mask and carrying a pillowcase. I don’t recall ever having parental accompaniment. The world of treats had not yet devolved into the present-day tiny avatars of candy bars, but might feature a host of unpackaged things to eat. Among this bounty might be found:

  • home-made popcorn balls
  • apples, with or without caramel
  • handfuls of candy corn or peanuts
  • cookies out of the host’s oven
  • full-sized candy bars

There was a complete absence of razor blades, brownies containing psychedelics, or any of the other scary materials or objects that addled conspiracy theorists dreamed up to alarm the populace. (As a species we are so easily frightened that I wonder sometimes how we ever found the courage to leave the caves?)

After Robin and I had turned out the lights and got out of the giving away stuff business for the night, we watched a movie, Late Night With The Devil. It was one of the better horror films I’ve seen. I’d rate it a mild gross-out, but there is so much else to watch.

A movie to be savored. Rotten Tomatoes loved it.

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Rivers of Babylon, by the Melodians

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When I was quite young, and spent summers on Grandpa Jacobson’s farm, going to get the mail was a big deal. The large galvanized mailbox was located up on the county road about a mile from the farm. So when we opened that thing one day and found that it contained a large and heavy package, it was enough to be an excitement. The package was addressed to:

Nels Jacobson
Rural Route 3
Kenyon, Minnesota

At that age I was a bundle of barefoot curiosity, and when Grandpa was taking way too long to open the darn thing to suit me, I began to badger him about it until finally he reached down into the pocket of this Oshkosh B’Gosh bib overalls and retrieved his pocket knife. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought, as the knife did its work and the carton flew open.

It was a book! A huge book! On the cover were the words “Holy Bible.” It was a true extravagance of a book, and Grandpa lived in a world of very few extravagances .

That farm, which I loved like no patch of earth since, was never big enough to support his family, and taking off-the-farm extra jobs was always a necessity. Leftover money at the end of any given month … or at the end of the year … zero.

But somehow this treasure had come to him. From then on it always rested on the small table alongside his armchair. Table and book to the right, coffee-can spittoon to the left. Evenings he would sit and read, the last thing done before going to bed.

Long years later, after his and Grandma’s passing, the well-worn book came to be mine. Grandpa had made me a gift of it. Inside the front cover were these words:

This Holy Bible shall be presented to our first and oldest grandchild, Jon O. Flom, by Grandpa and Grandma Jacobson, whenever I and Grandma are dead .

Nels was a man of short stature, but had been a giant in my world as a kid. His was a gift that was not taken lightly. Even today, just opening it has the power to bring memories flooding in.

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In the Mississippi River, by Mavis Staples

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In two days the U.S. takes its National Civics and Morals test, as Election Day arrives. It’s pretty obvious that a whole lot of folks haven’t studied for it at all. I am as prepared as I can get myself to deal with either depression or relief, but no matter how it goes, there will be a bad taste in my mouth.

In studying the history of the Third Reich, and the role that “Ordinary Germans*” played in that horrorshow, I had realized long ago that we must have at least a few of the same sort of people here at home. People who seem outwardly normal but given half a chance will quickly revert to barbarism. While in my gut I knew this, I hadn’t realized until recently how many of them there were … how many of our neighbors have kept a brown or black shirt in their closet, ready to put on at the first opportunity.

Fool me once … fool me twice …

*Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Goldhagen

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River, by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

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Our first snowfall of the year happened on Wednesday last. Big flakes off and on all day. Each one melted immediately on contact.

We’ve seen snow at higher elevations for at least a month now, but not in the valley. The San Juans are looking quite beautiful in their “snow-capped mountain majesty.” (Can’t remember where I heard that phrase but I’m quoting it anyway).

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Today is Robin’s birthday. It is not up to me to tell you which one that is. We will celebrate it sensibly, as behooves sensible people, no matter what their years. No late-night partying, no extravagances, no hangover from the ingestion of an inordinate amount of cake frosting. Just quiet recognition of the passage of time, with perhaps a remembrance tossed in here and there.

We know our way around birthdays, we two. Experts, you might say.

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Doom, Interrupted

jono55

When I was in my twenties I acquired a strong sense that I wouldn’t live to be thirty. (Later in life I found out that this delusion was not uncommon among young men of my generation, especially wastrels like myself)

Well, you can imagine my chagrin when I woke on the morning of my 30th birthday not only alive, but a family man. With a wife, multiple children, and a regular job to boot.

And me with the soul of a Byron, a buccaneer, a would-be surfer on the breaking waves of decadence.

However, since I was not dead, I checked the calendar and found that it was a Sunday morning. Good, I thought, at least I didn’t have to go to work.

Going to work frequently brought on an incompatible collision of feelings. The first was that I was a well-trained and competent physician perhaps at the peak of my game. The second was that I was a charlatan, a masquerading quack who knew so little he was a danger to society. Sooner or later I would be discovered and then it would be the stocks for me from then on.

But right at this moment it was Sunday, leisure was the plan, and with any luck it would be a day with cake in it.

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Springtime, by Allison Russell

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Only a week to go till election day, and what a ride it has been. As each day passes the differences between the opposing sides become clearer, almost extravagantly so. What this campaign has revealed about a large segment of my countrymen is ugly, but does not come as a complete surprise. To borrow from Mr. Freud, it’s like the U.S. is a single personality, and what we’re seeing now is our ego running against our id.

The history of human beings is filled with scenes of blood and horror. Violence between groups of humans, any that could be identified as other, has been the rule rather than the exception. The present-day Republican party has deliberately made itself into an avatar representing some of the worst traits of humanity, and Mr. Cluck (bless his heart) is trying to help us make informed choices by telling us that on a daily basis.

So what happens if Harris wins? My neighbor with the big Cluck sign on his garage door will still have been a proud member of this malignant cult, and how to trust him again, if ever?

Perhaps I can begin to do so if I keep in mind what I learned so well from Buddhism, and that is that the seeds of everything good are within me, and the seeds of everything not good as well. The choice that I have is which seeds to water.

I could have been the guy pointing out to the Nazis where Anne Frank was hiding or I could have been the guy who owned the house she used as refuge and thus helped hide her family.

My personal views and ideas have been shaped by the fact that the rooms I walked into during my life have contained more peacemakers and truth tellers than fearmongers and haters. Seeing what prominent roles chance and luck have played … it is difficult to feel superior.

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The Last of My Kind, by Jason Isbell

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I don’t know why, but the above cartoon makes me laugh out loud every time I look at it

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I’m in the process of learning to speak Spanish, using the free online version of a program called Duolingo. I have heard that trying to pick up a new language at my age is difficult, due to memory issues. I don’t know why they say that. Why, I can remember what I’ve learned in a lesson for up to two hours after I’ve put the computer away.

Here – let me show you what I can say after only six months of working with Duolingo.

Buenos días, Señor Herrera, como está usted?

That’s it. A puny outcome, you say? My response is: one small step for man …

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Can’t Find My Way Home, by Chowder

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Did I Ever Tell You … ?

jono55

The problem with being a garrulous old gent like myself is getting your victim to stand still long enough to unload your priceless cargo of stories on them. At first they get that cornered look in their rapidly shifting eyes and when they decide that more desperate measures are called for:

  • They take out their phones and pretend to receive important calls.
  • They develop abdominal pain that they are sure is appendicitis.
  • They remember a doctor’s appointment for that brain tumor they just learned they have.
  • They hear their mother calling.

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The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

Henry Wallace (1888-1965)

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There is an informative article in the local paper on the birthing pains of our Black Canyon National Park, which was established 25 years ago. It was that famous philanderer Bill Clinton who signed the bill creating the park, at a moment between dalliances.

One thing I didn’t know before reading the article is that while a national monument can be created by the president alone, it takes Congress to make a national park. Good article. Short. Non-taxing.

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Moonlight In Vermont, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio

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Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

Upton Sinclair

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I am presently reading a book by Craig Childs which is about animal encounters in the wild. In the first couple of tales I had been put off by what I thought was a too-frequent use of metaphors. But then I came to the story about a meetup with a mountain lion, one he had been observing for awhile from afar, and which had then wandered off out of sight.

A bit later he realized that it had circled around until it was behind him, and was very close indeed. It is a really gripping short tale, well enough written to make me sense the nakedness of standing by a desert waterhole thirty feet from a lion who is walking toward you, and you with nothing in your hand but a folding knife.

No metaphors here. Straight up, no ice.

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Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

Aneurin Bevan

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Ai Ga Bani, by Ali Farka Touré

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Saturday I attended a birthday party for Archer, who lives next door. We barely know each other and have almost nothing in common. His tastes in music are deplorable and at least half the time he smells more than a little off. But he and Robin have become friends, so when she attended I went with her.

Anyway, Archer had his one-year old party on a lovely Fall day and he seemed to enjoy the whole thing. But he completely ignored the fact that it was also my birthday and monopolized the group’s attention. Rude child. Spiteful.

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After one of the most beautiful autumns I’ve ever experienced, it looks like our weather is finally going into the crapper. Ah well, October 31 is nearly here and what’s Halloween without hypothermic children out gathering things to eat that are not good for them?

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What the hey ?

jono55

This week I developed a minor infection for which my personal physician Dr. Ursula Major prescribed an antibiotic, one I have taken several times in the past. I took the first dose an hour before retiring, and two hours later I woke scratching. Everywhere. Top to bottom.

I got out of bed and checked my look in the bathroom mirror. My face was slightly puffy and red, and my chest a mass of hives. In fact, everywhere that I could see was a field of hives. There were even places where there seemed to be hives stacked upon hives.

I scratched my way to the first aid kit, which is where I keep a couple of household medications like Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and such. There was a vial of unlabeled pink tablets that I was almost certain were Benadryl, an antihistamine. But I was already having one drug problem, and didn’t want to take a chance on another, so I went to the internet at midnight and eventually identified the mystery tabs as Benadryl.*

Popped a couple of them, went back to bed, and slept as much as the itching would allow. Three days later the rash is nearly gone and I am taking a brand new antibiotic. Which is prompting a moderate degree of diarrhea.

And so between the fitful nights and days of scratching and the tender moments in the bathroom, I sometimes wistfully look back at that initial illness and wonder … was it really so bad after all? Would it have taken care of itself?

*BTW: if you need to quickly identify a medication one good resource is at https://www.webmd.com/pill-identification/default.htm

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Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass), by Elisapie

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Daughter Kari put me onto something special in the way of music. An album of covers of rock and pop songs. Sung in the Inuk language by an Inuk woman.

One of the best things about a good cover is when it makes you listen to a well-known tune from a new perspective. One of those “getting new glasses” kind of moments. These songs do that for me.

Her professional name is Elisapie. The album is entitled Inuktitut.

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Taimangalimaaq (Time After Time), by Elisapie

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Plaisir d‘amour
Ne dure qu’un moment
Chagrin d’amour
Dure toute la vie

One verse from a beautiful and wise song written in 1789. Translated it says: The joy of love is but a moment long. The pain of love lasts the whole life long.

We are going through some of the pain part these days with our cat friend Poco. The love part has always been easy, but this segment … not so much.

Age has brought a full slate of infirmities to this brave little guy. Arthritis, muscle atrophy, dental issues, intermittent confusion and forgetfulness, just to name a few. Thinking about the future brings on a jumble of thoughts. What to do when there is nothing to fix?

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Qimmijuat (Wild Horses), by Elisapie

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Listening to Colorado Public Radio the other day I caught these interesting statistics. The lowest point in Colorado is the Arikaree River where it flows out of the state into Kansas, at an elevation of 3,317 feet. This is also the highest low point of any U.S. state.

This low point is located in Yuma County, in the northeast corner of the state. The GPS coordinates for the lowest point are 39°58’41″N, 102°03’06″W.

Our lowest point is higher than the highest point in 18 states and the District of Columbia.

[FYI: Our altitude here at home is 5920 ft.]

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