Category: humor

On The Road

jono55

Wednesday: We are taking off for a few days to rendezvous with Justin and his crew near Page, Arizona. The purpose of the trip, beyond just getting out of town, is to put Robin and two delightful grandchildren together for two days. Of course we will not completely ignore their parents, but … you know. Zoom is just not where it’s at when it comes to keeping tabs on rapidly changing organisms. It’s a problem of scale.

Page is at the western end of Lake Powell, which was the reservoir created by the Glen Canyon Dam and against Edward Abbey’s will. Mr. Abbey even wrote a book about how what a good thing it would be to blow up the dam, a book that was called The Monkey Wrench Gang. Did I mention that he could be cranky at times?

When Abbey died, he left instructions for his friends to bear his body out into the Arizona desert somewhere, wrap it in his old sleeping bag, and to bury it there. Allegedly the only marker is a stone with these words written on it:

Edward Paul Abbey

1927-1989

No comment.

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It may well be that climate change will achieve Abbey’s goals. Right now the water levels are at record lows with no real hope that they will improve, as the western mega-drought continues. There are serious discussions about taking the dam out of service altogether, and allowing what water is stored in the reservoir to flow downstream to Lake Mead. I can’t say whether that would make Abbey’s spirit happy, that might not be possible. But it probably wouldn’t hurt his feelings any.

Notes: In our first hour of driving today we passed numerous small herds of elk, which taken together probably numbered close to 300 animals. In the small reservation town of Kayenta we went to lunch at Amigo restaurant, which had the most pleasant wait-staff we’d ever encountered. And they were deadly serious about Covid! You signed in when you entered with your name, address and phone number, and then you were ushered back outside. When they called you back in, a woman sprayed your hands with disinfectant and then seated you. Masking was required outdoors and in.

Much of the country we’ll be traveling through in Arizona is tribally owned, and they control access to many of the prime hiking and viewing opportunities. To get to these places now requires getting a permit and hiring a guide, which seems okay until you get to the price tag. It can cost from $65 per person to take a 90 minute walk all the way to $2200 each for a whole day and a chance to visit with one of the few remaining code talkers.

I hate seeing fees this high. There is no denying that the tribes have the right to charge what they will. After all, we’re all happy capitalists, aren’t we? But what it does yet one more time is deny most Americans, people who can’t fork out this much money for a brief walk in the desert, access to some of this country’s most spectacular scenery. That’s not okay.

Mahk Jchi, from The Native Americans

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From The New Yorker

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Thursday: The Glen Canyon gorge is absolutely beautiful. Perhaps even more so now that features formerly under water are emerging as the lake level declines.

I find myself feeling sorry for all those whose livelihoods will disappear as the lake draws down. In the sixty or so years since the dam was built a whole ecosystem grew up that depended on a large body of water. Boating, fishing, luxury homes, tourist lodging … basically the entire town of Page AZ. If this area returns to being the Colorado River there will still be rafting and canyon explorations for the adventurous, but not in the numbers supported by the more passive recreation that a lake provides.

Even if history decides that building the dam was in hindsight a mistake, it was not a mistake made by these working people. The owners of those triple-decker houseboats will pack up and move their toys somewhere else, but a job gone is just … gone. And a home that can’t be sold is a sadness and a burden .

Later today we will seek an area to do some modest hiking, since our crew is a modest bunch. Except for Justin, however, who is immodest in that regard. Thirty years ago I took Robin and her family, along with boyfriend Neil, on a backpacking trip in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area of the Rockies. On our first day we pushed it a little hard, and we were not altitude-adjusted as yet. When we reached the place we were going to set up camp, everyone quite literally collapsed on the ground, cradling their heads on their packs.

Everyone, that is, but Justin.

He wanted to continue on, go over to that ridge a mile or so away and look down on the other side. He was very insistent, but eventually disgustedly resigned himself to our overwhelming horizontalness. I think it dawned on him that if he did get the group up there, he would probably have had to shoot a couple of us, like horses pushed past their limits.

But today we will hike, as one does when in such a group, to the pace of the one person who really would rather not go hiking at all. Today that person is Leina. Our youngest and smallest. But she is also the possessor of one of the loveliest smiles in all of Christendom, and when all is said and done, the smile triumphs over any mere inconveniences encountered while walking together in the out of doors.

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From The New Yorker

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Friday: We moved on today as a convoy to the Grand Canyon area. At midday we will separate, as Justin and company drive south to the Phoenix airport to fly back to California, and Robin and I begin our return trip home.

I’ve been to the Grand Canyon only once before, and truthfully had no particular wish to see it again. You know how you go there with your camera the first time, snap dozens of photos, and then you go back home to rummage through the pics and find nothing worth keeping? Your camera couldn’t begin to capture the immensity of the thing. The canyon is amazing, but not nearly as interesting to me as something smaller in scale. Something more approachable. It’s as if a friend took me to the edge of a cliff and said: “There it is … Indiana!” And all I could respond was: “Are there any towns there we could look at?”

I have now been to the Grand Canyon twice. I have been to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison a hundred times or more. I much prefer the latter. In mid-afternoon we said goodbye to our friends and drove to our motel in Kayenta.

Saturday: Up early and a short drive up to Monument Valley Tribal Park. There is a 17 mile red dirt road that travels through the park and exposes one to some of the most inspiring scenery I’ve even seen. Much more moving than the Grand Canyon. It doesn’t take much more than an hour to do the tour, or you can linger as long as you like. The valley has been used in several western movies, so in a way it was like not my first visit. If you’re interested, here’s a Wikipedia list of times Monument Valley has been used in the media.

In terms of trip planning, we wouldn’t call it a destination, but if you are traveling within a two-hour drive of the Park, it would be shame to miss it. This following gallery contains some professional photos as well as a few of mine. Just didn’t get many “keepers” this time.

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When we returned to Kayenta we went to lunch at Amigo Cafe. Our unfailingly polite waiter brought us chips and salsa as we waited for our entrees. Robin and I each took a chip and dug out a scoopful of the salsa, which will be thought of from this day forward as The Green Death.

Within a millisecond of my hand placing the chip into my mouth I knew that I had a serious mistake. It was as if a blowtorch had been applied to my oral cavity. Gasping, I looked up to warn Robin but I was too late, as I watched her sliding down the banquette and disappearing beneath the table.

All of my extremities began to tremble, my eyes lost focus, and the next thing I knew I was being dragged by my heels to the outdoor patio and laid in a resting position prone against an adobe wall. As I looked about me I saw other patrons, including Robin, who had been lined up along the same wall to recover. Apparently this sauce is locally famous, and even among hardy Navajo citizens there have been one or two who had been similarly afflicted in the past.

In an hour or two we were able to sit up, brush ourselves off, and dazedly finish our lunches. Even though we have temporarily lost the ability to taste, and our upper and lower lips no longer match one another, we have been reassured that given enough time all will be well. If that doesn’t happen, the proprietor has promised that we can come back and have another lunch … on him.

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Our new cat-sitter, Howard, texts us each day to let us know how the cats are doing without us. It’s a nice touch and we appreciate it. Yesterday’s message is reproduced below. (He calls our kitties “the kids” and Howard is a man in love with emojis.)

Jon – kids are doing real well this morning! They are sooo sweet! Hope your trips going well! Your trash was picked up, put trash can back👍alls good here!😻😻👍😀😀

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Hey, Listen To What I Say … Not What I Said

jono55

Joe Biden has been around American politics a long, long time. He is famous for making gaffes, sometimes talks like he’s eating a peanut butter sandwich at the same time, and no one has ever (to my knowledge) referred to him as an intellectual or a scholar. But the other day when he declared that Putin must not remain in power … I understood him clearly. No matter what disclaimers are coming out of Washington DC trying to explain those words away. He now says “I didn’t mean regime change, folks, really I didn’t.” I don’t buy it.

Of course my own understanding is that of a know-nothing yahoo from the prairies without a political credential to his name. And of course world leaders don’t want anyone suggesting that forcibly removing world leaders from office is a good habit to develop. But when Biden said For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power, I heard – take him out. Period.

There were moments in history when disagreements between tribes were settled by having the leader of each group square off in combat. If your guy won, that was a great day, but even if he lost … at least both villages were still standing and there was always hope for a better result down the road.

The evolution of warfare that we see on display in Ukraine finds instead the Russian armies destroying cities, non-combatants, and children. It’s not new, just the latest iteration of the horror that is war. All this to achieve goals that are not completely obvious to those of us in the yokel-universe. Reverting to having one-on-one combat would be so much better than this.

Perhaps Russia would put up Putin as their champion, perhaps not, but I definitely wouldn’t use President Joe to carry our colors. Why, the man’s almost as old as I am! And I wouldn’t suggest having any warrior that superannuated defending anyone’s honor or any country’s borders. Nope. Who I would want as our champion would be someone who was strong, unscrupulous, dumb as a bunch of rocks, and who could hold only one thought at a time in their head and that was winning the duel.

I would send Marjorie Taylor-Greene. If she won we could give her a pat on the back, a medal, a pension, and send her back to to where she came from. A win.

If she lost, at least we wouldn’t have to deal with her particular brand of idiocy any longer. A win.

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We didn’t watch the Oscar ceremonies this year. Our television usage is strictly streaming and non-cable, and all of the choices available to us involved signing up for a free introductory week on some service and then dropping out later in the week. It’s legitimate but a tiresome dodge.

Last year I tried to do this end-around with Hulu Plus but their computer found me out and I received the message “Hey, you did this last year and what good did it do us? So get on out of here, you deadbeat. No more free lunches at this bar.”

I read, though, that I missed something a bit out of the ordinary Sunday night, when Will Smith punched Chris Rock onstage. Usually the attacks in situations like this are verbal ones, small daggers slipped so deftly between the ribs that hours might pass before you even knew you were dead. To have a direct physical confrontation so publicly … .

Rock may have made a thoughtless joke at Smith’s wife’s expense (after all, he makes his living as a smart-ass) but Will Smith … for cripes sake – use your words! And aren’t we past the time when powerful women need men to protect them from comedians at the Oscars? Jada Pinkett Smith is smart, not socially inhibited, and could have spoken up very well for herself.

It was a thug move on Smith’s part.

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Parker Palmer is an educator, lecturer, activist, author of several books, and a Quaker. Every once in a while I will come across a snippet taken from one of his books, or a short video on YouTube and I think “That is one thoughtful man, I should get busy and learn more about what he has to say.”

And then I am distracted, forget all about him, and go on with life in the maelstrom.

So I have no idea why I picked up his book A Hidden Wholeness this morning and started in reading it. In fact, I had no idea we owned the darn thing in the first place. But I ran into these paragraphs right there in the preface and I was hooked.

This seems such a great analogy, to me. The deadly confusion of a blizzard. The sometimes fatal consequences of being lost in one. I will admit to letting go of the rope at moments in my life, and to not always doing proper maintenance on those good old moral bearings.

This time … I will read Palmer’s book. Maybe there’s more good stuff on the inside. But, you know, at least I’ve read the preface.

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I have joined the Carhartt Universe. In fourscore plus years I have not owned so much as a bandanna manufactured by this venerable manufacturer of clothing for working men and women. Oh there were reasons … everything was this red dirt color, was constructed of the same material that they make heavy duty tarps with, and when wet the garments weighed enough to cause profusions of hernias to bloom.

Then there was always the potential for ridicule by people who actually worked with their hands and who might murmur “Impostor” under their breath as I walked by.

But Carhartt has broadened their lineup of products quite a bit in recent years – more colors, more styles, more sizes. So when we were at Murdoch’s yesterday I took the plunge and bought a T-shirt. It is sturdy, seems durable, and there is not one red-dirt thread in it. One small step for man … .

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Time Trudges On

jono55

Ahhhhhh, made it to another first day of daylight saving time. That first day, you really notice it. One night you are eating supper in the dark and the next night you have to turn your chair because the sun is in your eyes. Magic.

There are exactly twelve devices keeping time in our house. Six of them change themselves each year at this time and I don’t need to do a thing but keep them plugged in. The others must be changed by hand, with my making the rounds and checking the numbers on my iPhone at each stop. Most years I overlook the wall clock in Robin’s office, until one day in August when she will find herself an hour off-schedule because of my oversight and then there are all those comments on my genetics, moral fiber, and position in the firmament to deal with.

So this year when I not only changed its display but inserted a fresh battery I admit to feeling pretty smug. Such are my circumstances that I can coast for a day or two on just doing one thing right.

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One personal problem I have with the time change is that Robin and I are involved in a slow transition which involves going to bed earlier with each year’s passage. For instance, this past winter there were days when we could hardly make it to supper without flagging just a bit. And when we retired to the living room to watch some program or another on television I would begin to doze off as soon as my posterior hit the sofa cushion. There I would be, sitting frozen in time and space with the remote in my hand, as if placed there by a taxidermist.

This usually resulted in quite a large amount of elbowing on Robin’s part, trying to keep me alert enough that she might avoid repetitive questions like “What happened in the story?,” or “Where am I and who are you?” Or worse, have to deal with my embarrassed denials: “I wasn’t sleeping, I was testing the reaction time of my eyelids,” or “No, we don’t have to rerun the program, I only missed a second or two, if that.”

But DST throws a wrench into everything.

One simply cannot go to bed here at BaseCamp, no matter what one’s untrustworthy nervous system tells them, when you can still get a sunburn if you wander outdoors. For one thing, it is rare to find both of us being that tired at the same moment on any given day. This results in the would-be-sleeper having to contend with the Concerto for Clatter and Bang in A Minor, usually being played in the kitchen by the still conscious member of the partnership.

Nope … DST takes some getting used to each year.

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A comment on the guy in the cartoon above. For all of the times I have seen this motto on a T-shirt in my lifetime, whatever the legend states after “You can have my …. ” has so far never been something that I wanted in the first place. But if it came to that, I have seen quite a few cold dead fingers along my way, and I would have no qualms about prying them apart if they were holding something that I needed or wanted.

For instance, the teddy bear.

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At the recreation center Monday, I noticed this interesting turnaround. An instructor was giving a private pickleball lesson to a member. It says something about the sport, I think, that the student was the young and supple one while the teacher was the graybeard.

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A Dick Guindon Cartoon

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I think I posted some stuff on the shuffle dance before, but YouTube served this up to me unbidden this morning. Apparently the trend started in Melbourne AU in the 1980s, and has since spread around the globe. The first video is of some impossibly talented performers, “hot” young men and women doing what would send me to hospital within seconds.

The second video is from Sven Otten, a young German with a sense of style and humor who apparently is making a partial career of it.

The third video … well … what is the opposite of “hot” and impossibly fit? (Actually, this is Paul Shelnutt, a champion buck dancer .)

Whenever I see one of these they make me smile. Happy dances take me to my happy place.

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Tuesday Robin and I took our first bicycle ride since her surgery, and it went well. We were using the e-bikes, which I am convinced were one of the better investments I’ve ever made. Now you would know that this isn’t saying much if you had the ability to scan everything that I’ve called an investment over a lifetime. Most of them were purchases that rose out of thinly veiled fictions that were dreamed up to cover my buying something that I wanted anyway.

But the true value of these bikes is that you can adjust the effort needed to ride them by pushing a button. When you are trying out a knee that’s been rebuilt this is no small matter, and it was a morale booster for the two of us for sure.

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Where Do You Get This Stuff?

jono55

A friend once asked me where I came up with the things that I put on this blog. I don’t recall what I said to her at the time, but it comes out of my everyday life, because every single day that I take a breath I am confronted with either my own ridiculous behaviors or those of other people. Each daily newspaper provides more than enough grist for my small mill. (Some of what I read does make me angry or depressed, and I try to avoid writing about those things. I admit to not being 100% successful in this.)

What I do enjoy writing about is when we are really being preposterous. With our pretensions, our guarded conversations, our raising of our eyebrows. And if nothing is happening in the world, the stream of thoughts that my brain generates produces some really amusing stuff if I just pay attention. Maybe one out of ten thoughts that I have are absurd or laughable (it could even be as frequent as one out of five). I have no control over them popping into consciousness at all. When I really notice them is when I am trying not to think, as in mindfulness mediation sessions. It is at those times that I see that what I have read is true – that the mind never stops going, but jumps from one branch to another continuously, like some monkeys do, giving rise to the phrase “monkey mind.”

And some of what my mind brings up for brief consideration is hilarious. At least to me it is. Occasionally I will stop the flow for a moment and think to myself – that was almost unbelievably arrogant. I must really be that pompous ass that people have called me at times. Robin would be the expert on whether I am or not. One of the most useful things she does for me at times is to gaze deeply into my eyes and repeat: “Pedant, pedant, pedant .. .

But it is exactly those flaws that I often find endearing. Our human sillinesses. Our foibles. Considering those and writing about them is part of my personal plan in order to hang on to the shreds of sanity that I still possess. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade now, and it is still working for me. Truth is, studying a well-executed pratfall does much more for my state of mind than anything I will likely find on CNN today.

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Public Service Announcement

The Surgeon General announced at a press conference yesterday that a food product has been declared so severely addicting that it will be handled as such. That product is Cheetos Popcorn. To quote the good doctor: “This is a snack combining the seductive flavors of regular Cheetos with those of one of the most popular snack foods of all time – popcorn. They potentiate one another so that the combination is much more potent than you might expect.”

It’s one of those cases where 1+1= 3. From now on you can only get this snack by prescription, and there will be severe limitations on quantities dispensed as well.

You may recall that old folk tune, The Blue-Tail Fly, that goes like this:

When I was young, I used to wait
On the master and give him his plate
And pass him the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue tail fly

Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care
Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care
Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care
My master’s gone away

We now believe that this is evidence that the authors of this song had access to something much like Cheetos Popcorn way back in the 19th century. Perhaps they made it themselves out of the homely ingredients they had at hand and kept the recipe secret until now, when it has been unearthed and newly marketed. It is worth noticing in the song’s chorus that when you get some of that crack corn you don’t care. Typical addict behavior.

Fortunately there is an easily observable marker which will help us identify victims of this scourge and get them the therapy they so sorely need – their fingertips are universally stained a bright orange.

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There seems to be quite a buzz about the fact that television journalist Chris Wallace is quitting Fox News and moving to CNN. An interesting choice for him, with CNN being the most anti-Fox of them all. The running thread is that it is bad publicity for Fox News to have one of the rare “legitimate” newsmen on its staff leave off and move on.

That may be true. I have a slightly different take. For seventeen years Wallace cashed those checks while lending his name to what is essentially a journalistic hogsnort. For me, that’s taking an awfully long time to decide that you finally care about the s**t on your shoes at the end of every working day.

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We watched another Christmas story last night where the holiday was really just the subtext. It all started out that morning when I ran across a YouTube video taken from an episode of the series The West Wing. It was intriguing enough that I searched for the original episode and found that I was going to have to pay for it, which usually causes my interest to fall pretty precipitously. For some unfathomable reason I persisted. Good that I did, for Robin and I found ourselves in a story that was funny, intelligent, and so moving at the end that we turned to each other choked up and in tears.

The video was from Season 1, Episode 10, and entitled In Excelsis Deo. Here is the clip running on YouTube that attracted me to spending the considerable sum of $2.99. You can watch the clip if you like but be warned, it may end up costing you.

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I can’t exactly recall the day when I realized that the world was even more complicated than I had previously thought, but it could have been the day that I discovered that Velveeta didn’t require refrigeration. As I stared at that display of variously sized yellow boxes all sitting there on a grocery store end-cap without needing any special environmental care, the thought came to me that all that other cheeses needed to be kept cool … why not this stuff?

There is a list of answers to this and other Velveeta-related questions at delish.com if you wish to pursue your education further.

In the early 1900s, Monroe Cheese Company wanted to salvage its Swiss cheese wheels that were either broken or misshapen. So it enlisted the help of Emil Frey, a Swiss immigrant who tinkered with the scraps until discovering he could melt them together and add byproducts like whey until they melded back together in a velvety consistency.

delish.com

If you’ve ever worked with Velveeta, you know that keeping the loaf covered when being stored is supremely important. Else the stuff will turn into something completely inedible, and the now brick-like material is even dangerous. A five-pound chuck of dried-up Velveeta falling from an airplane at 20,000 feet would be traveling at more than 1000 mph when it hit the ground and would leave a crater 100 feet across. (I have no idea why it would be falling from an aircraft, but the point is to look out if it does.)

Another fact is that the knife you used to cut Velveeta into slices must be immediately washed. If this product dries on the blade, you can never get it off, and the tool must regrettably be thrown away.

Originally Velveeta was made from real cheese. Today, it’s mainly whey protein concentrate, milk protein concentrate, milk, fat, and preservatives. By the Food and Drug Administration’s standards, that’s not real cheese—which is why the FDA forced Kraft to change its label from “cheese spread” to “cheese product.”

delish.com

So why do we even buy it? Because it is delicious. Because it melts so very well. Because it makes some of the absolute best mac n’ cheese there is.

Robin and I were discussing this interesting stuff last night at supper, as we ate our non-Velveeta-based mac n’ cheese. We mused that foodies would probably never allow themselves to be seen buying a loaf of Velveeta. If they just couldn’t help themselves and felt they needed a couple of pounds of this liquid gold they would probably have to steal it, sneaking it from the store under their clothing to avoid being seen at the checkout stand as they made their purchase.

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Postscript: the kids in the photo are named Allyson, Justin and Amy. I am their wicked stepfather.

Postpostscript: by way of followup on my do-it-yourself follies discussed in a previous post, I have taken out a protection order against myself so that if I get within 100 yards of a hardware store I am immediately arrested and taken to the calaboose. Robin is the only person who has the authority to arrange my release.

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Do It Thyself

jono55

A week or so ago I did what I know better not to do. Something that has been proven to be a bad idea for several decades now. I decided to fix something that was awry with the house, on my own, with nothing but YouTube as my instructor.

The drain on the left side of the kitchen sink had developed some rust, as do many old things, and I deemed it unsightly enough to warrant replacement. So I did my “research,” bought the parts needed, and set to the project

I first unscrewed several things under the sink, and loosening one of them unleashed a small torrent of water from something called the “trap.” Apparently I should have known about this water, but I had missed that on the video. I pulled out the rusty drain and installed the shiny new one. YouTube had suggested using a particular goo around the device, which I applied liberally. I then reconnected all of the plastic pipes, bumped my head on the door frame, and exited the workspace cursing only lightly and under my breath.

Now I filled the sink … no leaking. Later I ran the dishwasher … no leaking. But my joy was short-lived because over the next few days it began to leak – somewhere – I just couldn’t find where the water was coming from. So I finally gave up and called a plumber. Within two minutes after arrival at our home he made the diagnosis, and asked me:

Plumber: What did you do with the conical washer that came from here (he pointed at a joint)?

Me: There was no conical washer.

Plumber: Of course there was. It hadn’t leaked for the seven years you have been living here, and didn’t start leaking until you messed about with the pipes. There had to have been a washer at that position, or it would have leaked every day you have lived in the house. You just missed it while you were clumsily tearing apart the fixture.

Me: I tell you that there was no such washer, and what you call “clumsily tearing apart” was in my case careful attention to detail.

Plumber: Sure, sure, have it your way. But that washer was as big as a golf ball and you never saw it.

Me: Look here, I am tiring of arguing with a plumber, something which I long ago vowed never to do, and would like you to take your wrenches and cements and opinions and leave my home immediately. My last word on the subject is that there never was a washer.

Plumber: Had to be there

Me: Never was

Plumber: You are a fool!

Me: Imbecile!

(The plumber picks up a hefty wrench for himself, and holds out another to me.)

Plumber: Defend yourself, Sir!

(I grab a can from the pantry behind me which turns out to be PAM. I point the nozzle at the miscreant.)

Me: Drop that hardware, you dimwit, or I will lubricate you within an inch of your life!

At this point I am not sure what would have happened had not Robin entered the room with a look on her face that caused a quick exit by the tradesman. I too slunk away, hoping to avoid a conversation for as long as possible. In this I was to be disappointed, but I won’t bore you with all of the details of what Robin said as she held me by the scruff of my neck. I can, however, say that much of her monologue touched on various sorts of incompetency to be found in certain people who lived at her address.

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From The New Yorker

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From The New Yorker

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Last night we watched a movie called “The Boy Called Christmas.” You never know with modern films created for the yuletide market. Most of them are losers. This one isn’t. It’s a smart fable, with elves, woodcutters, kidnappings, blizzards, and enough beautiful winter photography to make you pull your afghan up around your neck.

There is also excellent CGI stuff throughout the movie, especially a gorgeous reindeer who goes by the name of Blitzen. You get to watch Maggie Smith and Kristen Wiig do their thing, and the kid who plays the title role … where do they get these excellent child actors? He doesn’t miss a beat.

There is some serious stuff in the story, like the loss of a parent, that are dealt with without drowning in either grief or platitudes. There are also some mildly scary episodes that might be better skipped by kids under five. One of them involves a famished troll who comes to a bad end (really, do you recall any time that a troll in a story doesn’t come to a bad end?).

And did I mention the mouse? There is a right smart CGI rodent in this one.

So this movie was a winner for us. And frankly, any film that stars Maggie Smith is granted four stars before we even see it. She is one of those people that dominate the camera’s frame. When I grow up I would love to be able to speak the King’s English like Maggie does. Some of the photography was shot in Lapland and Finland, and as I mentioned before, is outstanding … the ability to use drones in camera work has provided us such beautiful perspectives.

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Friday was the day that Robin and I decided to call the first real day of winter. It snowed about an inch of those tiny icy flakes that as they pile up become instant hazards to walking. A blustery wind blew all day long and the temperature never got above 25 degrees. The sun didn’t make its brief appearance until suppertime. A cloudy day, dark and dank, with substantial wind chills.

So we are finally here in that period of the year that nearly everybody wishes was shorter. We are a spoiled bunch, we humans of the temperate zones. We want four seasons, but we don’t want them to be of equal length. If I were doing the planning, I would grant winter no more than a month before it would be expected to be on it way. In that way I could actually look at it fondly, treasuring each frosty day because I knew that too soon they would be replaced by sunny and warm ones.

For moi, there is really nothing wrong with winter that a little editing wouldn’t fix.

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I haven’t begun my Christmas shopping yet. It’s something that I am usually slow to finish, but this year is setting new records. There has been no shortage of reminders sent to me to get going and get it done. Catalogs fall out of our mailbox as soon as we turn the key, and this has been going on for weeks.

What do you call such procrastination when it reaches heights never achieved before? Hyper-procrastination? Acute procrastination syndrome? Shop-o-phobia? Whatever you want to call it, I’ve got it bad. When you can’t even pick up your laptop and one-click your way to doing what needs to be done, is there any hope at all? Is it an early sign of something coming that is even worse, like trench foot or trichotillomania? Should I be consulting somebody?

Wait a moment. I could turn this whole anxiety-ridden business around right now, because here I sit with the tool I need in my hands. Excuse me, if you will, but I’m going leave off writing and give it a try. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean I love you less.

******

Postscript: the children in the header photo are (from left to right) Maja, Kari, & Sarah Flom. No fair calculating how old they would be now.

Gourds

jono55

I have found Garrison Keillor. I had thought that he was done for when he was accused of allowing his fingers to play along the bare back of a woman on his show and when confronted he exited stage left rather than argue about it in public, with cowardly PBS kicking him in the seat of his pants as he walked off. I don’t know whether he actually did what he was accused of or not, nor do I know what the surrounding circumstances were, we never got the chance to fully hear the parties out who were involved. But at that time in our recent history he was not the only man in public life who was being similarly drummed out of the corps without what one might call a proper courts-martial.

I assumed that this might be the end of his humor, insights, and general drollery, so I never looked for it anywhere. Today I stumbled across not one but two web locations where his voice can be heard. If anyone is interested, that is.

The web addresses are:

Please know that my delight in being able to read more of Mr. Keillor’s writing in no way endorses letting one’s hands go roaming around anyone’s back who does not welcome it. That is definitely not okay. So is roaming around their front, for that matter. I just wish there were a better way to deal with these accusations of impropriety, and that when called for we could find penalties that are appropriate to the offenses.

******

Yesterday afternoon Poco was overdue for the afternoon meal. He always comes back from his roaming around three o’clock, and now it was four-thirty and there was no sign of him. He’s an old guy, you know, and we worry sometimes. So I went out walking along some of his favorite territory down the irrigation canal that runs behind our home, calling out his name.

I looked back and trotting about thirty yards behind me there was Willow, who had now joined me in the search. As we reached the point where Poco finally answered my call, Willow ran ahead into the thicket and in a very short time out the two of them came. No longer worried, I started back for home, only to find that the two cats had lined up and were now trailing me, and they did so all the way back into our yard.

******

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The cartoon above is one of those that delight me when I run across them. Just the right amount of surrealism coupled with imagination to brighten a person’s day. And really, where do those damned things come from? Do you personally know anybody who has a gourd garden? I know that I don’t. And yet every autumn … .

There are times when I have a thought that I believe would make into a great cartoon. But we will never know because I can’t draw to save my soul, and whatever illustration I created would only distract from the the caption. Perhaps if I applied myself and got some serious instruction I could remedy this with years and years of practice, but would it be worth the time and trouble? I have my doubts.

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On Monday grandson Tanner joined our growing Colorado family for a few days. Dakota had picked him up at the Denver airport, and they were making their way back to Montrose when they got held up with the ongoing highway construction on Highway 50 for nearly two hours. So they arrived hungry and tired, and after Robin and I finally let them off the hook, they went immediately to their rooms.

Early on Tuesday morning a light rain came through, accompanied by the forceful whooshing sound that the ash tree in the back yard makes whenever a stiff breeze blows. Lovely to listen to, and it’s not unlike that feeling you get when camping by a stream. For the most part, natural sounds like these don’t keep one awake, but have the opposite effect. There are exceptions, however, and one that comes to mind is the freight-train-like announcement of an approaching tornado. That one wakes you up, hopefully before you are airborne.

A hailstorm is another waker-upper. There’s nothing quite like the symphony produced by tens of thousands of missiles of varying sizes pummeling your roof, your car, and anything else you forgot to bring into the house last night. I will share only one hailstorm story.

Robin and I were bicycling out in the Colorado rural several years ago, when hailstones began smacking us on our helmets and shoulders. We were miles from our car, but started pedaling like crazy to get there as quickly as we could. There was no shelter available anywhere in sight until we came around a corner and – unbelievable – there was a Porta-P0tti a quarter of a mile away, in the middle of nowhere. The storm, seeing we had an option to escape it, now began in earnest to try to kill us off by increasing the size of the hailstones and their numbers as well. (Lord, that was a painful moment). When we reached the little structure we threw our bikes to the ground and rushed inside.

What a din there was in that malodorous space! But it was so much better than the death of a thousand pebbles that we had left behind. When the hail stopped we emerged from our plastic cocoon as two bruised and grateful souls.

******

Lastly for today, I will address a topic that is daily on all of our minds, I know. One that has occasionally kept me awake at night, unable to sleep because the answer to the question is so elusive. What is the question, you ask?

Why don’t we have tails?

Researchers think they may have discovered the gene mutation that lopped off the tails that our ancestors surely had, and this has them all a-twitter. I am happy for them, people looking for gene mutations on tail-less animals must live a lonely life. I do not in any way begrudge them this success.

But although this might throw some light on how we became tail-challenged, it does nothing to tell us why. Usually a successful mutation confers some advantage on those who have it. But why in the world did those ancestors of ours do better when what might have been a perfectly beautiful and useful tail suddenly went missing from Cousin Norma?

There are so many times that I have leaned back to rest on that tail before I remember that I don’t have one. And when swinging through the forest canopy I can see where my balance would be better with a good sized prehensile member to employ. So I will follow this research with interest, while I grieve my loss and wonder what life would have been like had this genetic accident not occurred?

It’s all I can do not to take it personally.

******

Animated By Animus

jono55

I will freely admit that I have an animus towards those people who are eligible but have refused to be vaccinated against Covid. Maybe an animus and a half. For all the right reasons, of course, because almost by definition, my reasons are the correct ones to have.

I think they are being fools in allowing their behavior to be influenced by politicians in this regard.* Double fools for going along with all of the rest of the sack of rubbish being handed out by a malevolent squad of public personages who have no one’s interests in mind but their own.

I think they are being fools in allowing their behavior on anything Covid-related to be influenced by politicians. Double fools for going along with all of the rest of the sack of rubbish being handed out by the Red Squad, a malevolent group of public personages who appear to have no one’s interests in mind but their own.

On the bright side, the Red Squad is doing us all a real service. They are showing us what happens when good men do nothing. I believe that there are good men and women among the Republicans, but they have silenced themselves for expedient reasons, thinking they might wait out the aberrancy that is cluckism. Instead they have found themselves with chicken poo all over their nice suits and reputations.

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BTW, I learned this morning that although Edmund Burke is often credited with the aphorism “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” he never said it.

The closest attribution might be from an address by John Stuart Mill, in 1867. Still just as true as ever more than 250 years later.

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

John Stuart Mill

Johnny Mill hit the old nail there, didn’t he? “Allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply … .” Kind of makes me squirm just a tish. When might I have done just that, is my question to myself?

******

This t-shirt’s message could well be applied to many of my endeavors in this short life. Love it.

******

Robin and I are planning a three-day getaway this coming week, starting Tuesday. We’re traveling to Fort Collins CO to revisit old stomping grounds. Amy, Ally, and Neil lived and worked in Fort Collins for a time, and we have a tote-ful of good memories associated with our visits to them. Since it has been well over a decade since our last time in F.C., we anticipate some of the stuff that we liked won’t be there any longer, change being inevitable and all that. Will let you know what we find.

It’s a college town, so there are some givens. There will be pizza, there will be taco joints and buffalo wing palaces, and there will be many places where a young man or woman can slake their thirst. The more generous-minded of these emporia may also allow senior citizens to come in as long as they behave themselves and sit over there in the corner where passersby don’t notice them. Get too many of the ancient ones in a place and they can be a bit of a drag on the revelry.

For instance, you will probably never hear someone in a group of hardbodies saying: “Let’s go down to the Sunset Home and get wasted.”

I just don’t see that happening.

******

The weather app on my phone had a hissie fit this afternoon. Out of my pocket arose the sound ordinarily reserved for announcing that Armageddon is upon us (It is an app put out by the Gideons, who had noticed that last year’s restricted travel had cut down severely on the need for New Testaments in motel rooms. Ergo, the app. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss the end-times because they hadn’t been notified). A severe weather warning had been issued, and damage to life and property was to be expected. I had barely adjusted to that disturbing intelligence when the second notice came along which basically said “Oops, never mind.”

I rushed outside to see for myself, and found nothing but a skyful of grey clouds drifting along in a perfectly peaceful manner. No different from yesterday or the day before. No threats to be seen in any direction.

Well, we’ll let this one go since it is their first app, but the Gideons better sharpen things up or it will never be the hit those New Testaments have been.

[My apologies to the Gideon Society. They’ve never done me harm and here I am poking fun at them while making awfully free with the truth at the same time. It’s almost as if I had no scruples at all. Heh, heh, heh.]

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From The New Yorker

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There is a habit that develops in some older citizens where they start to say things like “This is the last car I will ever buy.” I humbly suggest that this is not a good habit to acquire. It may be that the statement turns out to be true, but if you think about it, that could also have been true of the very first car you ever bought, had things gone differently in your life.

We have never known at any point in our lives when and what our final act would be like, and we don’t become any wiser in this regard just because we’ve added a few decades. At some point each of us will take our leave and that’s the only surety in this ride we’re all on. But thinking about that “last car” seems to me to be closing doors that don’t need closing. What fun is there in reading about a seductive new automobile if you only end up saying to yourself “Whatever I’m looking at is not for me. I won’t be around that long.” Bumming yourself out unnecessarily? I think so!

I had a forceful reminder of mortality’s possibilities last October when a blood clot not much large than a grain of rice took the powers of clear thinking and of speech away from me for an hour. Only an hour, thanks to Robin and her gang of helpers.(The speech came back for certain, but I suspect that you may not accept the clear thinking part, and who could blame you?). But even that short time was instructive.

However, I am still reading auto reviews in Car and Driver magazine, still buying shirts that will last a very long time even though they may be slightly more expensive, and still think that anything offering a “lifetime supply” is a good deal. Call me a loon … you won’t be the first to do so. And I have no idea if you will be the last.

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Good Will(ow) Hunting

jono55

Willow is our hunter-cat. Poco used to be one too, but age and infirmities have slowed him to the point where everything else runs faster than he does. I know exactly how he feels.

But to get back to Willow.

She is now four years old, and catches small rodents regularly. One of the ways we have of telling is when she comes in through the pet door with something dangling from her mouth. Half the time she drops it and it stays put, the other half of the time it doesn’t, but gets up and runs for cover. When this happens it energizes all of the humans in the room and elicits many loud cries and expostulations.

Willow! Go outside! Take that with you! Get it! There it goes! Don’t let it get under the couch! Open the door! Where is it now? I see it behind the TV! Willow – there it is … aaaahhhhhh, she’s got it, now take it outside, Willow. No – don’t drop it! There it goes again …

That’s one of the ways we can tell what she catches. Another derives from the fact that if she catches something during the hours that I am sleeping, she will consume it entire except for one part, which she leaves behind wherever she has dined. That leftover is the creature’s cranium. Leading to the repeating scenario where I pad barefooted to the refrigerator in the pre-dawn darkness and step on something hard. I think I need not dwell on this further.

To use a phrase borrowed from St.Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, Willow does not suffer fools gladly. And in her eyes all humans are fools. She is not a cat that one can pick up, place in one’s lap, and pet it. To do so is to invite bodily damage of various degrees as she brings those eighteen claws into play.
On the other hand, if on rare occasions that lap looks pretty good to her, she will march right over and stare at you until you clear away whatever else you are doing and make room for her. Then she curls up and goes to sleep and what does a person do?

But when she wants to be petted, she will walk back and forth beside your outstretched hand for the longest time, purring away. The look upon her small face at such times is bliss. We find it irresistible.

******

Three from the New Yorker Archives

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***

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Monday afternoon I was swept up into an immobilizing time-warp as my ears were being bathed in the music of another era. Robin says that my pupils were fully dilated and although I was breathing evenly and had a regular pulse she could not break through to me. So she did the best she could on a holiday and called some of her girlfriends to ask their advice.

One of them, a nutritional cosmetician, said that it sounded like Vitamin E deficiency to her, and Robin should do what she could to insert capsules of that substance into every orifice she could reasonably reach. Then she was to rub the oil onto my face and chest.

Friend Adele, a behavioral podiatrist, said she had no idea what was wrong with me at all, but shared that her uncle once had a certain tick which paralyzed him for hours and that Robin should turn me about and tip me over to look for ticks. If one were found, removal could effect a cure.

Yet another amie who leans toward the occult began to warble about demonic possession, but Robin hung up on her when she got going on animal sacrifice and the proper strewing of entrails.

Keep in mind that I knew nothing of any of this, although I do remember clearly every tune that was played. This continued until around dinnertime when I spontaneously returned to my senses and frightened Robin nearly half to death because I came up behind her in the kitchen and asked “What’s for supper?”

I still have the lump where she caressed my head with the skillet she had in her hand at the time.

I put some of the tunes that had transported me over on the right in the Jukebox area. Listen to them with care, or you could wake up slathered with Vitamin E oil.

(BTW, if Atlantis isn’t one of the trippiest tunes ever written, I’ll eat my vaccine passport.)

******

I’ll have to re-watch it to be sure, but in my memory Body Heat is a movie that conjures up the feeling of heat and humidity like none other. Even in an air-conditioned theater you found yourself wiping non-existent sweat from your brow. And then there was this scene … a hymn to lust if ever there was one.

Every time I watch this I need to take a cold shower afterward.

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Right In Front Of Me

jono55

It isn’t every day that I feel completely stupid. Oh, 45% stupid is pretty common, that would fit a whole lot of days, but 100%? And it all started a week ago, when I was trying to dig out the last bit of peanut butter from a jar that I had taken from the refrigerator. The PB was the consistency of sun-dried adobe, and I was having my difficulties.

I would say that 99% of the PB that I ingest is done at breakfast, on toast. A time of day when I am only partially conscious and really not ready for serious confrontations. But that last spoonful would not come out of the jar. So I put the container in the microwave and hit “Start”and within a fraction of a second the teeny-tiny bit of metal that must have been on the teeny-tiny bit of the seal which remained atop the jar’s rim began acting like the Fourth of July and throwing off quite a fireworks display.

It was all too much for me, so at that point I changed my mind and dished up some cereal. As I crunched away, my mind would not let the incident go. Finally I retrieved the PB jar from the trash and studied it for several minutes. The answer that has changed my life was right there. Nowhere on the label, not once, did it say that it “Must be refrigerated when opened.”

All those years … all that torn and disfigured toast … all that completely unnecessary cursing on mornings like this one. Robin found me with my head face down on the table, blubbering away. Worried that I might drown in my own tears, she gently turned my head to the side. At first she couldn’t make out what I was saying, but finally it came through clearly as:

(Melodrama and I are old buddies. Old and very fond of one another.)

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Robin and I have been wearing these lapel/hat pins for a while now, and several people have asked where they could get one for themselves. The answer is at wokeface.com. They cost ten bucks each, and “100% of proceeds are donated to the national Black Lives Matter and local social justice and Black-led organizations.”

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Bicycles are blossoming all over Paradise as the weather warms. The hardiest cyclists never put their bikes away at all, but continued to pedal their often fat-tired machines around town throughout the winter. What holds me back from seriously considering cold-weather cycling are those freezing breezes wafting past my unprotected nether regions and up under my jacket.

My unscientific impression is that there are more people mounted on bikes this Spring than ever before. All the way from kids who pedal down to the river to fish, to seniors on bikes of every description, including electric trikes (very useful if you dislike tipping over onto the pavement). Of course there is the Spandex Army that believes the walking/biking path along the river belongs to them alone and who cruise along at 20+ mph without much regard for others. Usually they don’t even signal their approach, but we strollers must depend on the eyes in the back of our heads to avoid having bike-tire tracks all over the back of our nice clean jackets.

As they pass by I frequently indulge a fantasy where I pull out a blowgun and hit them with a dart or two. Not to kill, mind you, but my missiles are coated with a compound that causes temporary loss of bowel control, and which becomes active within thirty seconds of exposure.

There is a newer type of vehicle that is found on the path this year in large numbers, and that is the electric skateboard. They look like they would be a gas to ride if they had come along when I still had a sense of balance. I am not tempted to ask if I could try one out at the present moment, since I have clear visions of being pitched screaming into the shrubbery should I make the attempt.

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I am becoming this guy. Yesterday I had to toss out a pair of sneakers that were only two years old and had many miles left on them but … my feet had grown too big for them in those two years and my toes were being treated harshly.

Oh, I could go on about the sense of humor that Mother Nature has, where she shrinks the body while the feet grow apace, but I will not waste your time here. Except to say that when I was a stripling (ahhh, those lovely stripling years) I wore size 10 shoes. Yesterday the new ones that I purchased were size 12.

WHAT IN THE EVERLOVIN’ WORLD IS FAIR ABOUT THIS, I ASK YOU! SHEEESH … ENOUGH ALREADY!

******

Since Robin was to be engaged in not one, but two Zoomed book club meetings on Wednesday evening, I had made tentative plans to haul myself down to the river and attempt fish-catching. But as we nibbled on our supper, I glanced out the window and saw the Buddhist prayer flags standing straight out and fluttering madly toward the West.

Now when this occurs, and mind you I am still relatively new to the sport of fishing with flies, I have found that casting my lure becomes more than awkward. Perhaps it is my technique but the fly simply does not obey me when the wind blows at more than 20 mph. I can manage my wrist and forearm movements perfectly but instead of settling on the river the fly suddenly appears in the skin between my nose and eye with the point of the hook looking to embed itself in my brain. So I abandoned that plan and took up watching television for the evening, an activity which is wind-independent.

When viewing on my own, I typically will choose something without any redeeming qualities at all. The television equivalent of those mindless books you buy in an airport to take your mind off the fact that airplanes are simply not meant to fly and that the rivets on the one you are scheduled to board are very likely falling off even as you relax in the waiting area.

So I watched a pair of episodes of The Serpent. Apparently back in the seventies I missed the news stories about a French-speaking couple who were making a career out of murdering backpacking hippies in Thailand and pocketing their valuables. Because I never heard of these people. In this series they were very attractive looking psychopaths, though, and you could understand that if the real pair resembled the actors in this program that their victims might have willingly gone astray.

The series turns on the fact that a dweeby fellow at the Dutch Embassy catches onto the fact that a few citizens of the Netherlands have come to untimely and horrible ends while visiting Bangkok, and decides to investigate. Of course he receives little support – his superiors think he’s barmy, the local police think he’s a pain in the posterior, and even his girlfriend wants to push him into the lily pond now and again. But the man is obsessed.

So the deal is – how many more young and trusting travelers will perish at the hands of The Serpent, and will the Dutchman ever catch up with them?

I’ll never know.

Because even I have standards as to how I will squander the handful of remaining hours I have on earth, although they are very low standards indeed. Is it enough to say that The Serpent does not meet them.

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The Hero

jono55

Like Sam Elliot? Who doesn’t? Last night Robin and I stumbled across a little movie in which he stars, rather than supports. Title: The Hero. It’s got what you might call a short dramatic arc, but it crams a lot into that space. Fatherhood, aging, death, poetry, the often baffling elements of love. It may not be a great date movie, nor it is aimed at the adolescent mind (whatever that bewildering thing was … sheesh), but if you want a quiet and lovely film with Sam in it, and a fine performance by a lady named Laura Prepon, it’s on Hulu right this minute.

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Did somebody say poetry? Two of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems are featured in the movie. The first one I knew, the second one, I didn’t. Why didn’t I know the second? And why do I know almost nothing about Edna St. Vincent Millay? There’s no excuse, it is because I’m a philistine, and there you have it.

*

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

*

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

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But not everything in the world is so solemn. Some of it is beautifully silly, like this moment on the Conan show. Where a perfect man with turkey legs can wish things were different.

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A member of my family who has been hospitalized for two months returned to her apartment in Lima, Peru this week. She still requires help in many things, but the direction is clearly toward getting better. Those of us who have watched and waited at a distance are very grateful for the recovery she has made, and look forward to seeing her in person later this year.

There have been many times in this life of mine that I have been forcefully reminded of just how fragile a “normal” existence really is. And what a mistake it is to take any day for granted, when all it takes is a phone call to turn a sunny day into a tragic drama in which we are the players.

Sometimes the metaphor that occurs to me is the proverbial thin ice. Sometimes it is that of a marionette and all those strings it takes to keep matters going well. Drop even a single string and it’s a brand new day.

One that you didn’t see coming at all.

.

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Deep In The Heart Of Texas

jono55

As the latest Texas disaster follows its course, leaving millions of those intrepid folk finding out just how intrepid they are without heat or electricity at a very nasty time weather-wise, I follow the story at a comfortable, warm, and well-lighted distance. In this way I am like Texas senator Ted Cruz, who has been watching his state suffer from the safety of the beaches and hotels of Cancun, where he was vacationing. That is yet another level of comfortable distance from the fray.

And I thought – you know what? Texas needs very badly to bring back Molly Ivins, who was, apparently, the last clear-thinking public figure in that state when she passed away in 2007. It was a serious mistake to let her do so, and I think that Texas ought to see what can be done about resurrecting her.

For those whose memories have even larger black holes in them than mine, Molly was a liberally-inclined columnist from the Lone Star State who found enough targets there for her deadly wit that after a brief flirtation with the New York Times she never felt the need to live anywhere else.

Molly was unusual in many respects. Six feet tall and regularly outrageous in her writing and speeches, she occasionally showed us that beneath a colorful and outsize persona beat a very wise heart. Here is one such moment.

Yep, she is sorely missed in the part of the world that admired her. Which was always way bigger than just Texas.

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My friend Joe spoke an interesting truth yesterday. We hadn’t seen one another much during these pandemic months, and were doing some rapid catching up through an open car window. He had recently gone through some problems with a knee injury, and his observation was that apparently the warranty had expired on some of his body’s parts. We laughed when he said it, and the recollection still brings a smile.

A somewhat rueful smile.

When I was twenty-five I could break a leg, walk home on it, have a serious debate with myself as to whether I should consult a physician about my injury, and no matter what I did within a week the leg would have healed. Such was the wonder of the recuperative powers of a twenty-five year old corpus. But even back then I remember reading (in that era of personal bullet-proofedness) that supposedly most of my body’s parts and systems had peaked, and it was all downhill from that moment on. Of course I scoffed. That is, until the fateful day that I had to admit that my hairline seemed to have receded … so could those prophets of biological doom be right about the rest of the stuff as well?

Turns out they were.

So now I inhabit a body that was never supposed to still be walking around on the planet at this age. Humans evolved at a time when life expectancy was measured as extending to the very day that you forgot how quietly a saber-toothed cat could move as it came up behind you. When being a “senior” probably meant you were twenty-nine years old.

So if there were such a thing as a freshness label on humans, mine would read something like “Best If Used Before 1964.” To put this in perspective, that was the year these four gentlemen landed in New York on their first world tour.

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Take That, Pandemovirus!

jono55

We got our Covid vaccine (Moderna) shots Thursday morning. In a large exhibition hall. All in all it went well, without any big snafus and with adequate respect for social distancing. Everyone there had an “appointment” of sorts, so there wasn’t a mob milling around getting cranky. And we were all senior citizens from Colorado, a group of citizens that is renowned worldwide for our politeness and consideration of others.

By Thursday evening our arms had become moderately sore, and I was experiencing a not-quite-ill-but-not-quite-right feeling before I went to bed. I strongly suspect a psychosomatic illness, being fairly susceptible to those, what with my psyche being more than a match for my soma.

In four weeks we will be getting our second injections and then … not sure. I have no intention of declaring victory until the last Confederate-flag-waving and unmasked nincompoop is either vaccinated or transported to an internment camp on a large and mosquito-infested island off the coast of Alaska. One like in in the photo at right.

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My life has just improved by a pleasant notch. Maybe a notch and a half. Somewhere I ran across a review of a comic who has a ton of videos that anyone can watch, for free. Her name is Lilly Singh. Funny, smart, and no f-bombs at all. I’ll start you out with one video, and the rest is up to you.

Remember, all for free.

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How interesting that the FBI has been rounding up miscreants from the January 6 insurrection so quickly. Turns out that it’s much easier to catch crooks when they take the pictures themselves for their Wanted posters. This week this guy was identified and arrested.

It was only a matter of time, really. If I were from his hometown and saw this pic, I would have been dialing 1-800-FBI-GETM before he even got back on the bus to return home.

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And now for a story about electric eels that is a bit creepy. With video. Probably best to not watch it after dark, or just before going in swimming. I know that there are some things that I am not meant to see. And a fish climbing up someone’s arm like a mucus-covered, living taser is one of them.

Therein lies one of the conundrums of life. How to unsee what you’ve seen, or unhear what you’ve heard, when you found whatever it was so disturbing that you reached for your brain’s “Delete” key, only to come up empty-handed. My most recent such moment was just after the recent election, when I learned that so many millions of people had voted for p.cluck even after all we’ve learned about him, and all we’ve gone through because of him.

I am one of those persons whose opinion of the species Homo sapiens is a conflicted one. Buddhism teaches that within all of us is an essential goodness, but I admit that I am not always able to see that shining quality. Let’s forget for a moment about the serial killers and the Hitlers and the handiworks of the seriously maladjusted. On Election Day seventy million people voted for a man so undeserving that this number is literally fantastic. Unbelievable. Deeply depressing to those of us who tend toward the melancholy even on the sunniest of days. In my home district, Montrose County, two-thirds of voters went for a clearly Fascist regime. An administration that is the very definition of corruption.

When Covid finally eases up, and I can leave the house to move about freely and without reservations, I will be out there looking for that essential goodness, one person at a time. To do otherwise, for me, is to give over to cynicism, and I have spent enough time in that soul-destroying neighborhood, thank you very much. I have no need to ever return.

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From The New Yorker

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No Complaints. No, Really.

jono55

We’ve been in a meteorologic twilight zone for several weeks now. Not cold enough to really expect that people will sympathize with us if we should complain, and not warm enough to elevate our moods from the Basic Winter setting (and that setting is only two millimeters above mild depression). When Robin and I go for outdoor aerobic walking we are still picking our way past icy patches no matter where we go.

[n.b.: senior citizens hate icy patches. Wherever these are to be found, in a senior’s mind all such hazards bear the symbol at left imprinted upon them. They speak of pain and trips to emergency rooms and x-rays and hospitals and traction apparati and casts and funerals.]

One of those walks of ours takes us past a pasture where about thirty horses are kept, and have been all winter. Yesterday the temperature rose to the point where it thawed two months worth of their droppings all at once. The resulting perfume was a heady one indeed. At first it pleasantly reminded me of boyhood days on my grandfather’s farm, but then it intensified to the point that survival became an issue, and we nearly ran until we were clear of the invisible but highly aromatic cloud.

Just past the toxic zone Robin spied a bald eagle high in a nearby tree. Its white head shone brilliantly in the winter sunshine. While seeing an eagle near the river is not a rarity, they never fail to impress. I don’t really care that some of their eating behaviors might not always be noble and inspiring – a bald eagle is still a grand symbol for a proud nation. Now if we could just get back on the path to fully becoming that nation, that would even be more grand.

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Pressure is being applied to Mike Pence to use the 25th amendment to remove p.cluck from office. Having not been asked to make any decisions at all for four years, he is having trouble imagining getting anything done in the few days he has left in office. He can’t do it by himself, of course, he needs seven cabinet members to go along with him. Think about that for a moment. Getting seven members of the most dysfunctional cabinet in modern times to do something that while it might be good for their country, is potentially bad for them.

I don’t believe I’ll hold my breath.

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Went down to the river on Sunday, not to pray but to fish. I still don’t know what I’m doing wrong because I caught another one. It could be that by some mischance I chose the right fly for the time and place. The part of the Uncompahgre River that I was wading around in was lovely, and the waterway was all mine, at least as far as humans were concerned. My only companions were small birds.

The only imperfection, really, was the footing. Walking on cobblestones in the water is awkward, especially when the stones are the size of grapefruit. And while the river posed no threat to life, running at the low flow levels typical of a mid-winter day, the prospect of falling down and filling my waders with near-freezing water was one that I have resolved to avoid at all costs.

I could only stay out for a couple of hours because as the afternoon began to cool there was ice forming along my fly line, and by then my fingers had lost the ability to tie a knot in anything smaller than a hawser.

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Just to get out in front of the critics, I am going to admit that not everything is perfect here in Paradise. For instance, in this past election Coloradans chose to send Lauren Boebert to the U.S. House of Representatives. Her opponent in that contest had been an intelligent, experienced, and thoughtful woman who would have brought some serious skills to Congress.

Instead, we elected Boebert, and I must now cringe whenever her name comes up on a television screen, wondering what inanity she might be involved in now. But why should I natter further? Here she is. Our very own entry into the one-trick-pony sweepstakes.

(Rep. Boebert is the one in the middle, pointing her weapon at the floor of her restaurant in Rifle, CO. Perhaps to shoot at a cockroach, who knows?)

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Mea Culpa, Already

jono55

It is a fact that I pilfer regularly from the archives of cartoonists, principally those who draw for the New Yorker magazine. In my defense, I nearly always attribute them properly, and in a way my larceny is a form of respect. You don’t ordinarily steal what you don’t value.

I wouldn’t have to do this if I were able to draw. But my attempts at even the crudest sketching would have been rejected by the original people in charge of the Lascaux caves as being unworthy. Any child’s sidewalk scribble outshines me. I have a clear memory of art classes in first and second grades where for years I would draw the exact same thing and turn it in. I don’t recall my teachers as ever calling me on it, and I was very happy when by the third grade we no longer had to do this activity.

This was the piece that I drew over and over. Part of a house, part of a tree, and the sun. Occasionally I would add a few blades of grass, but that was it.

No people or animals. The sun, the tree, the house. This was my best work. I look back at it fondly.

.

So whenever I have need for something graphic to add life to my blog pages, I must resort to piracy. I am quite sure that you readers would quickly tire of the dismal artistic triad shown in the drawing above, and be less forgiving than my early childhood teachers were. In uncharitable moments you might easily refer to it as pathetic.

But here we go again …

From The New Yorker

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On Thursday I once again sallied forth to do a little stream fishing. In brand new boots. What I failed to mention in a post a few days ago is that I had outgrown my old boots to the point where walking about in them was uncomfortable and gave me insight into the ancient Chinese practice of binding feet. There are so many jokes that Mother Nature has in her repertoire, and one of them that I hadn’t heard of until I experienced it was that while aging shortens so many things, including one’s height and memory, it lengthens one’s feet. Yes, they keep growing. I imagine that if I lived long enough, eventually my baseball cap would rest upon a huge pair of shoes, and inside that cap would basically be me.

At any rate the new footgear performed flawlessly.

There was something odd, however, that happened on this particular Thursday. I hooked two trout. This was completely unexpected, and both times it caught me so off guard that I allowed them to escape. In all of my lifetime of hours spent angling upon the waters of this great land of ours, I am rarely interrupted by fish.

This has been especially true of fly fishing, something that I had barely tried before I moved to Paradise. But the attraction of these beautiful mountain streams was too strong, and so I purchased the basic equipment and now I try to go to places where it is unlikely that I will be observed in my flailing.

Initially I took a few lessons, one of which involved turning over rocks in the streams to see what grotesque creatures were clinging to them, the idea being that this would give me an idea what the local fish had available for eating. I could then choose what flies to tie on, thus greatly improving my chances of catching something. Since those early days I confess that I have not turned over a single stone. I will admit that I am beginning to think that my poor performance in streamside entomology might have something to do with my regularly empty creels.

But hey, this way I don’t have to worry about the size, number, or variety of the fish I don’t catch. If I wish to embellish a story or two, there is no evidence to the contrary. I always practice catch and release wherever I go, even when it is not required, sez I to questioners.

[So here is a photo that I did not take of a fish that I did not catch. No matter.] Landing this behemoth was such a struggle, you wouldn’t believe it . There I was, all alone in the wilderness, when the vicious thing lunged at me even as I stood on the shoreline. The gnashing of its razor-sharp teeth was a horrible thing to hear … its murderous eye enough to strike fear into the heart of the bravest man … .

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From The New Yorker

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I have a plan. After P.Cluck is impeached for the second time, he should then be tried in the civil courts for his numerous offenses against man and God. Once this process is over, his sentence would include lifetime housing for him and his noxious clan in this luxurious but drafty thirty bed bungalow. There would, of course, be no internet access or electricity, and I would give him the new title of Permanent Goatherd and Latrine Orderly.

.

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Tripping Badly

jono55

Robin and I watched the movie Phantom Stitch the other night, a film in which mushrooms play an important role. Now, one of the basic hazards of life (for listeners) is that when a person attains a certain age, nearly everything reminds him or her of something in his or her past. So here’s a personal mushroom story.

I was living and working in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and had been there for a couple of years. There was a substantial “counterculture” contingent living up there, who enjoyed the natural gorgeousness and lack of close supervision by authorities.

One summer afternoon I was taking my turn covering the Emergency Room, when I was called to see a young man with a beard and shoulder-length hair, attired in well-worn jeans and a faded flannel shirt, and who had ingested some mushrooms that had made him quite ill. He had been vomiting for hours and was moderately dehydrated as a result. I examined him quickly and then turned to the nurse, who happened to be a person who had quite a lot of knowledge of local fungi.

“Did he bring in any of what he ate?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve been saving what he threw up in case we need to send it away for study,”the nurse replied.

“How to find out what it was … ?”

At that point, the patient, who had been lying there motionless but for the rise and fall of his chest with his breathing, eyes closed and looking as completely miserable as you care to imagine, said two words in a low and groaning voice:

“Amanita muscaria.”

Amanita Muscaria is not “poisonous” per se, rather it is a hallucinogen/narcotic. When you eat it dried, freshly cooked, or drink water it has been cooked in, you will become intoxicated, or possibly just get sick and vomit all over the place.

Forager Chef.com

Et voila! It turned out that the man had been seeking hallucinations by ingesting that fungus but instead ran headlong into a common effect which was to become extremely nauseous. He was provided with intravenous hydration, moved into a quiet space, and discharged a few hours later in good condition.

Amanita muscaria

So the first and last case of mushroom poisoning I ever saw was diagnosed by the patient himself, and that diagnosis communicated to me in Latin. You might not believe this, but that didn’t happen every day.

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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Love this song, from 1986. The video is by a group called ‘Til Tuesday, which was fronted by Aimee Mann, a very talented woman who has gone on to do some beautiful things in music.

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Please Pass The Bucket

jono55

There is a little story behind the header photograph. Robin and I had met up with her kids for a short skiing vacation over the New Year Holiday. We chose a very small town not far from Winter Park CO, and took rooms for a couple of nights. Skiing during the day, enjoying the company in the evening … that was the plan.

But on New Year’s Eve, one member of our party (whose name is withheld to protect the innocent) became ill with gastroenteritis at midday, and her condition progressed to moderate dehydration over the next several hours. At that time we didn’t know much about the medical care available in Tabernash, so our rooms became the E.R.. Late in the evening her vomiting finally quit, and slow improvement began. But by then we had let go of any ideas of joining the party scene that we could see down at the ski lift area. So we stayed in and celebrated quite modestly instead.

But the party was watchable from our window, and this pic was of a moment in time, when the sounds of retching had subsided and our collective worries began to diminish.

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At one time in my life New Year’s Eves were an excuse for getting sozzled to a degree incompatible with having a pleasant New Year’s Day, if you get my drift. Fortunately for me (and others in the room) I no longer try to pickle myself by midnight on this holiday. In fact, I am no longer awake at midnight at all. Robin and I will pick an hour well before that and call out Happy New Year along with Japan, or some such nation well to the East.

And we have found that no matter how she and I celebrate the evening, quietly or uproariously, the year changes right on schedule.

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In the later years of their time together, my Grandpa and Grandma Jacobson lived in a small house across the farm road from the larger one that they had occupied for most of their married life. It was heated by an oil burner in the living room, and a plain metal pipe ran from the device to the chimney. On New Year’s Eve in 1950 I was their guest, and on the stroke of midnight Grandpa performed his routine which involved picking up a piece of blue carpenter’s chalk and writing the number of the year on the pipe. It was his way of marking the turning of the year. Simple and quiet. And then it was off to bed for all of us.

I do have such a piece of chalk somewhere, because hardware stores have no scruples about selling it to anyone whether they have any carpenter-ic skills or not. But I hesitate to start writing on things in our living room. If I should get started there is no telling where it will stop.

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Found this tune, New Year’s Prayer, by Jeff Buckley, in my library. Strange little thing. Lyrics follow.

Oooo
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, fall in light.
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
As you now are in your heart
Fall in light
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel it as a water fall
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, grow in light.
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing.
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing.
Past the sound within the sound
Past the voice within the voice.
Ah. Ah. Ah.
Leave your office, run past your funeral,
Leave your home, car, leave your pulpit.
Join us in the streets where we
Join us in the streets where we
Don’t belong
Don’t belong
You and the stars
Throwing light
Ooo (repeat)
Fall, fall.
Ooo
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, ooh.
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light, grow in light.

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Oh, and yes, may a Happy New Year be there waiting, for all of us.

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Windfall

jono55

I received wonderful news this morning, and it came just in time to take care of those pesky Christmas bills and quite a bit more. I’m thinking new car, home remodel, trip to some country that will accept Americans … . It all started with this message in my inbox. It’s the second such note that I’ve received, but instead of just deleting it, I pondered.

At first I thought “scam.” And then I thought, how lucky for Mr. Landolt (if it isn’t a fraud). And then I thought … maybe I am Mr. Landolt. There are seven letters in his last name, and there are seven letters if you combine my first and last and name. Perhaps it’s a code. That’s it! It’s possible that I am now 850,000 dollars wealthier than I was at breakfast.

I can hardly wait to hear back from the folks at financialtrustfunds024 about how the funds are to be transferred to my personal accounts. So if I owe any of you a debt that I have somehow forgotten, this would be the time to remind me. Otherwise I can be found online later today trying to spend 850,000 dollars in the most imaginative way. Let’s see … is foreign travel even a possibility yet … ?

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Well, I have a new car ordered to be paid for through my windfall. I wanted something reliable, economical to operate, good-looking, and comfortable. This is what I chose.

It’s a Rolls-Royce Phantom, which gets surprisingly good mileage, comes with pretty much everything you could imagine as standard equipment, and they even send a small British man to live with you who can adjust anything that goes amiss. On long drives you keep him in the boot. The only problem is that I think it’s a foot longer than my garage.

The runner-up was this thing in the pic below, which the salesman guaranteed could just about get me anywhere I wanted to go, and came in an armored, bullet-proof version. It also has enough ground clearance that it could run over a medium-sized cow (a recumbent one) without hurting the animal. But it was seriously deficient in the cupholder department, so I went with the Rolls.

And after all, how many times a week do you need the capacity to drive over livestock?

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Next I plan to turn to my physical appearance. Imagine my delight when I found that I could purchase six-pack abs! Here is a before and after of a patient who had such a plastic procedure done. The process is called abdominal etching. And you don’t need to do a single sit-up or plank to get them. Just be appropriately wealthy and slightly nuts.

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I see no reason to stop with the abs, if you can afford it, and can have your entire body “etched”all over. My only problem is that all of the “before and after” shots that I found are of men who are fifty years younger than myself, and I’m not sure what the surgeon would do about that. Maybe better think about it for a while longer … .

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The Covid vaccination programs are, of course, being reported on minutely, and there are screwups galore in who gets one and who doesn’t, plus the ethical problem of rich countries buying up all the doses and leaving poorer nations scrambling for help. I said “of course” because this is a never before type of massive human endeavor and how could we not be clumsy at it? The important part is that they are getting the vaccine out there, people are being immunized, and if it takes longer than was originally planned that’s unfortunate, but the direction is clear. At some point during 2021 we will be able to walk out our front doors, unmasked, and greet our fellow humans with handshakes and hugs and in so doing catch influenza just like in the good old days.

I’m looking forward to it.

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The Best Eve Of Them All

jono55

Ahhhhh, of course it is Christmas Eve of which I speak. There is no other eve quite like it. Compare it with All Hallows Eve, for instance, which has only a handful of songs and the possibility of a mere bag of candy as a prize. Christmas fair knocks it! Some of my clearest childhood memories are associated with this day. I think that I can recall someof those thoughts verbatim, actually, from one of those December 24ths.

Ohhhhhh, yawnnn, it’s cold in here, wish Dad would turn up the dang furnace … I’m not getting out of bed until …wait! It’s Christmas Eve! Presents! Mixed nuts in a bowl! Presents! Special supper! Presents! Singing around the tree! Presents! Perry Como 78 rpm records on the phonograph. Presents!

What time is it? It’s eight o’clock. If we start opening presents at six o’clock that is … ten hours from now. I can’t stand it. How can a person wait that long? Lunchtime … only six hours to go. I’ve got to think about something else. I’ll go outside and play for a while. That’s it! Play outside. Where there are no presents under the tree to stare at. Supper? Why? Can’t we just skip it? I’m not hungry at all. We can eat any day, but this is CHRISTMAS, for God’s sake! What? I can’t believe what you’re saying. You’re going to wash the dishes before we open presents? That is so dumb. Leave them. Cover them with a towel if you can’t stand the sight of them. Even better, toss them out and get new dishes tomorrow! NOOOOOOOOOO! You can’t be serious. We’re going to sing carols? I hate carols. I hate singing. Where did you go to parent school? This is torture. I want a new family.

Ohhhhhhh, everything is just what I wanted. Thank you, Mom and Dad.

And if you see her, thank Aunt Clothilde for those (bo-ring) socks, would you?

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One day, as I was in a particularly idle frame of mind (one of my more common such frames), I wondered: where is the exact opposite, on the globe, of Montrose CO? And through this remarkable thing called the internet I learned where it was, and what it was called … the antipode. Every single spot on the planet has its antipode.

And there is ours. The red dot represents Port-aux-Français, a tiny town on an island in the South Indian Ocean (actually, the true antipode is a spot in the water a bit north of that, but Port-aux-Français is the closest city).

I learned that it may not be one of the great cities of the world, not if the Wikipedia description is accurate.

The port station is located on the Gulf of Morbihan. The station has about 45 inhabitants in winter; the population can rise to more than 120 in summer. The location was selected in 1949 by the chief of mission Pierre Sicaud because of its sheltered position which was suitable for a runway that was never built.

Wikipedia
Port-aux-Français

So planning for a visit to the Port? … maybe in the summertime when it is really bustling at 120 residents? If you were planning on flying in, remember that the runway was never built. I will suggest that as an alternative you could come visit Robin and I here in the antipode of Port-aux-Français.

Much closer. Runway operating. And we are such nice people. Just bring your vaccination certificate along, would you? There’s a dear.

(BTW – do you know where your antipode is?)

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Tuesday morning I spent a couple of hours sitting in the waiting room at our Subaru dealer, getting some repairs done on our car. My guard was down and as I was looking out their showroom windows at the cars lined up in the parking lot, I caught the fever. The ‘I should really have a different car‘ fever.

I was in a vulnerable state for several reasons. Our little Forester has been making an irritating noise whose source is as yet unknown, and it has just under 100,000 miles on its odometer. I am quite sure that the noise represents something that will completely break down in the middle of the desert somewhere near a sign that says “No services in any direction for 100 miles.” I see us hiking through tumbleweed forests on windswept two-lane roads with buzzards circling and we are passing what used to be diners or gas stations but are now abandoned victims of changing tastes and needs.

I see all this so clearly. So it’s really a matter of life and death, isn’t it? Think I’ll amble over to that salesperson and ask a couple of questions. Couldn’t hurt. He looks harmless enough. What’s that? My car’s ready? I’ll be right there.

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From The New Yorker

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Merry Christmas, Friends. We wish you the very best for this holiday season, and for every season that follows. Although we may be physically celebrating apart from one another, in our hearts we are with you all. And one day with care and good fortune we will be able to do all of that corny and necessary stuff that we could before Covid rearranged all of our agendas. We’ll do it right, next year. I believe it.

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Sacrifice For The Good …

jono55

There are a lot of frustrating moments involved in reading the Times of New York on a regular basis. It’s worth it, of course, because then you are able to say “I saw in the NYTimes this morning,” a phrase that immediately stamps one as a person of culture, discernment, and general superiorness (at least to one’s own way of thinking).

But you have to wade through quite a lot of dross to sort out what you came there for. You have to read about hundreds of plays that you will never see, poetry readings that you will never attend, restaurants where you will never be seated, and excellent-looking movies that will never make it across the Rockies.

.

You end up reading all-too-frequent love letters to NYCity written by residents of NYCity who really can’t imagine why the rest of the country has to exist at all and what kind of dullards would ever live anywhere but NYCity? There are the stories about weddings that you missed where the couple was too charming for words, real estate that only the 1% could aspire to owning, and a food column that is at least one-third about the intricacies of which wine you should be buying at which shop (wine may be a lot of things, but it isn’t food).

So when I say “I saw in the NYTimes this morning,” I hope you all realize the sacrifices that I make in reading this newspaper just to be able to name-drop an article or two each week.

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There is a song by the group Talking Heads that deals with those of us who don’t live in NYCity. It’s called “The Big Country,” and the chorus goes like this:

I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.
I wouldn’t live like that, no siree!
I wouldn’t do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.

The Big Country, by Talking Heads

I have liked the song since first I heard it, snobbish little ditty that it is. It is almost perfect in its attitude, and helps keep my sense of humor honed.

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I saw in the NYTimes this morning that there are people lining up to be upset about Joe Biden’s cabinet picks. Of course they are. They should be. We really aren’t simply divided into red and blue factions, but to all shades of those two colors, each with its advocates for a point of view.

So when Biden picks a retired four-star general for Secretary of Defense, he stirs up any shade of blue that thinks the man is not as civilian as he should be to hold this post. After all, we have a long-established principle involved here, the control of the military by civilian authority. I think personally that this principle is a good thing, and find it helpful to be reminded of it through the present controversy.

Whoever Biden picks for whatever cabinet post will not please all of us. It’s possible that when they have all been selected that each will be a disappointment to you, or to me, in some way. From then on, we will watch to see what they do, won’t we? I wasn’t happy when Robert Kennedy was chosen by his brother as Attorney General, even though I liked JFK. I thought – NEPOTISM – in all caps. But in his abbreviated career his actions pleased me in too many ways to count.

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It’s not common knowledge but my navel is off slightly more than one centimeter to the right. And I lay it all off onto the medical/industrial complex.

When I was retiring from practice, I had excellent health insurance, so I decided that before I left for parts unknown that I would have as many of my defects repaired as time would allow and my insurance would cover. It turned out that I had a hernia in many of the places that a person can have one, and they totaled three. So I visited a surgeon of good repute and we made the required arrangements. One of those defects was at my umbilicus, where during the repair the physician would tunnel in and patch the problem area with … I don’t know … some burlap or pieces of recycled radial tire belts.

The surgeries were all small ones, and I went home a happy man. Until I took a shower later on, and noticed that I was no longer symmetric. Either my navel had shifted to the right or my entire body had shifted to the left, but something unplanned had happened. At my first post-op followup visit, I brought this up to the surgeon.

I don’t know if you noticed, doctor, but my umbilicus is askew.

Why, so it is. Has it always been that way?

No, not until my surgery.

Have you proof of this?

Yes, many photos in my family albums show an admirable centering.

Well … ?

I didn’t want to talk bout legal action, but I remember reading about a woman who had a similar problem after plastic surgery, and she received a handsome settlement.

I know of the case. Of course, she was an attractive woman in her forties, while you are a rather plain man in your sixties.

Your meaning, sir?

There’s not a jury in the country that will think that the proposition that you are less attractive than you were holds any water. In fact, the case could be made that you are now more interesting than ever.

So I should be grateful?

Indeed you should, especially since there will be no additional professional fees involved.

Thank you so much, doctor, you are exceptionally kind and considerate.

Don’t mention it. On your way out, could you send in the next post-op patient? He’ll be the one whose right ear flops about something terrible.

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Dialogue Before Dessert

jono55

We get to read the comic strip Dilbert in our local paper, but for some strange reason the editors hide the strip way back on the classified ad page, all by itself, and far away from the rest of the comics. This sort of quarantine preceded Covid, however, so we can’t blame the virus for the odd placement.

It’s as if the editors like the strip, but find it too subversive to be mixed in with the likes of The Born Loser or Alley Oop. Why they think that people who are scanning the Want Ads could be safely entrusted with its hit-the-nail-on-the-head type of satire I have no idea. But there you are.

I thought the one above fit our times perfectly. And me in particular. A couple of years back Robin told me about a practice that was going around the country where someone would hold a dinner party and deliberately invite persons who held viewpoints that were in opposition to theirs. There were some ground rules, of course, in that no weapons could be brought into the dining room, and personal attacks had to be limited to no more than 5 minutes of red-facedness and spittle-spewing.

When Robin told me about this “movement,” my first thought was how sweetly optimistic, and my second thought was who would ever waste a whole evening and risk terminal dyspepsia by engaging in such a quixotic pursuit?

That’s when I realized that one of my dearest and longest-held beliefs had been dealt a severe blow somewhere along the way without my even realizing it. A belief in the power and value of argument.

Argument: an address or composition intended to convince or persuade; persuasive discourse.

Dictionary.com

This is not a good thing to find out about oneself. What it meant is that a person has become the mirror image of the self-righteous blockhead they are trying to avoid. It could also mean that I am no longer someone who is willing to participate in a discussion and risk having my opinions changed as a result because I have made up my mind forever on the subject.

So far I have not been invited to one of these dinners. And I will be the first to admit that I would have to know that the food was going to be something special before I would accept. If I am going to do the work of actively and honestly talking to members of the opposition, I want to at least be fed well.

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About 30 miles south of us one can take a right turn, go up a dirt road for a few miles (suitable for 4WD) and then go over Black Bear Pass. No problem until you start down the other side of the pass, really. At that point it becomes a narrow, winding shelf road with a series of narrow switchbacks that look unnerving on the videos. If you make it to the bottom of this road you will find yourself in Telluride CO.

Each year thousands of Jeep enthusiasts travel this road to prove something to themselves, and I’m not sure what that is. The drivers are mostly older men with enough money to spend on a vehicle that is really only designed for outings like this and second or third best for anything else.

As for me, I am missing two things that would make this journey possible. The first is a Jeep. The second is a non-acrophobic state of mind. But I digress.

I ran across this short video that I think you will find remarkable. The camera is looking out the front window of a 4WD vehicle traversing one of those tight switchbacks, and then the machine settles into a straightaway for a short while. Keep watching to the end. Amazing.

The story is that the woman driving the red Jeep was seriously injured (no kidding), but not killed (whuh!).

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Sign O’ The Times

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Hallelujah! The General Services Administration has signed off on Joe Biden and his bunch. Until this past month I didn’t even know that they had anything important to say on the matter. This doesn’t mean that P.Cluck isn’t doing what he can to poison as many of America’s wells before he is shown the door. Isn’t he a caution? Who knew that a buffoon could be so nasty?

Actually, we all did. In horror films, what has ever been scarier than the clown face on a stuffed toy over there in the corner of the child’s bedroom? The supernatural malice of the clown’s perpetual grin comes through to us even before the creature makes its first move.

The thing about it is that soon we won’t have to look at this particular clown any longer, unless we want to. For instance, it’s been years since I wasted time on any of the characters over there in the far-right-wing crazy museum. The Limbaughs and the Ingrahams of the world will now be joined by the Clucks, in a space where they can fulminate all they want but don’t have their fingers on any of the major buttons.

I am supremely down with that.

******

What the … ?

jono55

I lost control the other day of a very small part of my life, but these days who wants to lose anything more at all? It happened when the climate control knob on our Forester underwent a psychotic break and began selecting programs all on its own, spontaneously switching from one to the other. Back and forth it would go, and when I became exasperated it took two pushes on the OFF button to stop it.

And then it would turn itself on again to begin the maddening cycling once again.

Now call me a fussbutt, but any device that can turn itself on and by so doing damage my serenity evokes memories of all those movies involving robots that won’t accept orders any longer, or blobs of artificial intelligence taking charge once and for all. In the clip below from 2001: A Space Odyssey, if you substitute me for Keir Dullea and my climate control for Hal you might get a hint of why the situation was freaking me out.

It all seems to have been resolved after a trip to the Subaru service department, but it will take time for the wounds to heal. I may need therapy, actually. I guess that I should be grateful that the control could not talk to me. Think of the nightmares if it suddenly said in that chilling monotone:

I’m sorry, Jon, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

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From The New Yorker. (This one made me actually think for a moment)

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Thursday night we watched for an hour or so while Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and others gave a presentation from the stage of the cathedral in Washington DC. It was a real joy to be presented with the facts as we know them as of that evening about Covid-19, the vaccines on the verge of being deployed, and other more personal matters, like how to deal with the upcoming holidays.

Straight information, no hemming or hawing or tortuous language. No lies, good science. So refreshing that the hour passed very quickly. Maybe life will never be exactly the same even after Covid dies down, but that evening was like the “good old days.”

Here’s Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot waking up from a nightmare.

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I am admiring Mr. Biden’s calm and decidedly un-flashy approach to P.Cluck’s demented rantings since Election Day. Rather than respond to the latest from the tweetmeister, Biden just ignores them and quietly goes about the business of doing what must be done during the transition on his side of the fence. It makes the absence of any such activity on the other side even more glaring.

I like un-flashy soooo much better. It’s easier on the heart.

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It’s been more than a month now since my aborted stroke, and I thought I’d toss in an update. I am fine, and seem to have no sequelae at all, thanks to Robin’s quick actions and the medical team’s dramatic therapies. I am taking two medications to keep my platelets a healthy distance from one another and so far experiencing no unpleasant side effects.

For a month I wore a monitor to keep track of my heart rhythms, but that month is now behind me and the equipment that I wore constantly has been shipped back to the company. Some time in the next couple of weeks they will send a report to my neurologist. The purpose for the monitoring was to see if there are any occult episodes of something called atrial fibrillation, which can predispose a person to recurrent strokes. (At this point I have no way of knowing what that little monitor said about me, there is no information provided to the patient. For all I know, it could have been hacked and somewhere in the world there is an untidy little man who knows everything I said and did for a month).

I think that I am being a good patient. I’m not entirely passive, of course, I put in my two (and sometimes three) cents whenever I feel the need, but I am perfectly aware that my present good health is because I dodged a fairly large caliber bullet on October 3. I will listen to what the doctors have to say, and unless they get too crazy, I will do what they suggest.

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One of our favorite hikes for years has been a walk up Big Dominguez Canyon, which is about an hour’s drive north of us. It’s a desert walk, and can be brutally hot in July, but on Friday it was perfect. We started out at 9:00 AM in 29 degree weather but it quickly warmed to about 55 degrees by noon. Bright sunshine all the way up and back.

This time we chose to seek the path going to Little Dominguez Canyon, which had eluded us in the past. After crossing a small creek and going around a couple of big deadfalls, we finally located it. Most of the time over the next five hours we were walking on an old road which was sometimes two tracks, sometimes one, and sometimes we had to hunt in the sagebrush and rabbitbrush to stay on it at all. In the map above, the blue line shows our walk, while the yellow line is the track up Big Dominguez Canyon, where we usually had gone in the past.

And a beautiful hike it was, with something really interesting in the middle. That was when we came across an old cabin. The windows were boarded up, but peering between the boards you could see that there were two rooms, an iron cookstove, and what looked like handmade furniture. The cabin itself nestled up against a gigantic boulder that would have protected it from winds out of the west.

Scattered around the property were all of the implements that a small farmer would need. A two-bottom plow, a cultivator, and a harrow. There was a sickle bar and a dump rake for haying, as well as the wheels for what would have been small wagons. All of these would have been horse-drawn. It was interesting that when they decided to abandon the dwelling, they left all of these tools behind. Apparently it wasn’t worth the trouble to haul them back to civilization, which was several miles back down that dirt road.

You could see remnants of a trench where they would have run water from the Little Dominguez Creek for their crops. As we were leaving we ran into a man coming up the trail, who proved to know quite a bit about the occupants of the cabin. It had been homesteaded in the late 1800s by a family named Rambo, who lived there until 1984, when they donated the building and land to the BLM.

It would have been a life going against the grain, trying to make the desert bloom through sheer force of will. But the location was one where every morning you would get up, walk out the cabin door, and have nothing but starkly beautiful to look at.

Here are some pix from our outing.

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Mental Lint

jono55

This latest chapter in the nationally televised serial The Cluckshow is surprising even the gaggle of old hands who gather ’round the woodstove of a chilly morning. Yesterday the group, which hardly ever agrees on anything, unanimously came to the conclusion that there are a significant number of Americans who are perfectly daft.

No matter how many sober people come up to the mike and say that the election process wasn’t corrupted these misguided ones continue to believe the opposite and that somehow their champion will pull off a miracle.

.

It doesn’t help that they are supported in their delusions by some very corrupt people indeed, people like Senator Turtle, who stand to gain by keeping governmental matters in a continual state of chaos. So much of the public chatter is how Cluck disrespects our traditions and the nation’s best interests (and he does) but Cluck suffers from serious mental disturbances. This gets him exactly one smidgeon of sympathy. Sen. Turtle does the same thing but is completely venal, which qualifies him for no smidgeon at all.

So the members of the hot stove club went home yesterday wondering how things ever got so bad that we all agreed on something. It was unsettling, to say the least.

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A gallery of images of Senator Turtle

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Yesterday as I was listening to NPR I found that I had moved even further down the list of People Who Will Get The COVID Vaccine First. When this all started I felt confident that my age and many infirmities would put me right up there after emergency room physicians. But as each new draft proposal comes out my number gets further from being called.

So after spending some idle moments reflecting, I have voluntarily assigned myself to a new place in that therapeutic line. I plan on waiting until I see that all serial killers in solitary confinement in maximum security institutions have been protected, and then I will step forward. I believe that in this way I can avoid most disappointments.

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Some Perils of Electronic Mail

jono55

I just found this email in my inbox, which startled me for about 0.1 second.

And then I remembered what I’d read over the years about internet scams, and decided this must fall into that colorful category. Especially since my name wasn’t even “Landolt.”I did notice that the word “dolt” was in there, perhaps put there as an amusement by the perpetrators of the fraud.

Next I mused how handy 850,000.00 dollars could be in these uncertain times, and allowed myself to idly wish that I’d known Manuel Franco better.

But wait. Did I know him? Was he the quiet guy who sat behind me in chemistry class? The one whose chem notebook slipped from his arms one rainy afternoon on the university quad, spreading his notes over the sidewalk, and who I helped recover those precious papers before they were completely soaked and illegible? Wasn’t his name Franco? I think it was. And of course he was grateful at the time for my help, but could he have vowed all those years ago that he would repay me someday for my great kindness? Deciding only now to seek me out, after making his fortune in the world?

I think that was him. I’m sure that Franco was his surname, and did I ever know his first name? I’ll bet it was Manny, my oldest and dearest friend. Where was he now? Perhaps this bequest was coming out of his estate, and he had recently passed on to glory. Some sort of romantic but fatal illness acquired through all those years on his rubber plantations.

Ahhh, Manny, why didn’t we stay in touch? We were so young and so busy with life’s trivia that we didn’t take proper care of our friendship. Then I wondered about his lovely wife, and those beautiful children that he must have had by now. I was heartbroken for them. To lose such a man. And while not exactly in his prime, he should have had another decade or two to spend surrounded by family and friends and the luxuries he had earned.

And so I hit “Reply” and responded to the note. I told them that my name wasn’t “Landolt,” but that it was an obvious misspelling of Flom, and could they please point me toward my $850,000.00 windfall, so that I might claim it and bother them no more?

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Here are some photographs that I dug out of a shoebox of mi hermano, Manuel. It seems only yesterday … where does the time go?

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What would be at the opposite pole from turmoil, something we all have had quite enough of lately, thank you very much. Well, it might be … lullabies. Check out this science report from the Times of New York. Even reading about it made my heart rate slow down and my pupils become smaller.

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From The Mountains, To The Prairies …

jono55

The drive from Montrose to North Platte NE was remarkable only for the unending pall that hung over us. At no time did we see blue sky or an unfiltered sun. Smoke from those awful fires on the West Coast mixed with those of Colorado as we moved further east. Everything we looked at from the windows of our Forester had a look that was drained of color, and the horizon disappeared into the haze. It was all as if the cinematographer in charge of the movie we were in had chosen to provide us a palette common to horror films. One that was chilling and foreboding.

Our lunch stop was in Buena Vista CO, at the House Rock Cafe, a favorite of ours. How many places have you eaten in your life that were consistently good, never failed to satisfy? This is one of those. (Most of our visits to grandchildren in Denver involve passing through Buena Vista.) A warning – if that $13 charge for a burger seems on the high side, wait until you see the plateful of stuff that gets you, including a perfect green salad, some guacamole, fries that hold up through the whole meal, enough excellent sliced (and unusual) veggies to build a truly awesome sandwich … excuse me for a moment, I just drooled all over my keyboard.

We quickly found that the news of Covid 19 has apparently not reached western Nebraska as yet, as evidenced by the near-absence of facial masking. Fortunately our contact with this information-deprived populace was minimal, primarily involving asking for the location of the restroom. A notable exception was a late supper at the Runza restaurant in North Platte. The only masked people present were Robin, myself, and the blonde young woman behind the counter who greeted us. Immediately there was a problem in communication, due to the fact that the woman was masked, behind a plexiglas protector, and spoke at a speed I had thought impossible for human beings. It led to this exchange.

Wertoiaewroigafugfdoihr?
Huh?
Wertoiaewroigafugfdoihr?
Huh?
What.would.you.like. to.order? (Words delivered painstakingly slowly, as you might to a person you have judged to be an absolute dunce)
Oh, we’d like two Runzas, please.
Dwetoiraiogjignaergl?
What’s that?
Dwetoiraiogjignaergl?
Excuse me, what did you say?
Do.you.want.just.the.sandwich.or.a.meal?
The meal, please.
Tgtaghroiho;ihl;ihn.
What?
Tgtaghroiho;ihl;ihn.
Please?
That.will.be.$14.97.
(Pays for food)
Tatreiohohhohoiho;ita. Hasdlgsfbjblnby!
Could you repeat that?
Thank.you.for.choosing.Runza.Have.a.wonderful.day.

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A lot of the fun that I have in keeping this journal, and subsequently inflicting it upon you, is due to the years I spent reading the essays of S.J. Perelman. He was what used to be called a humorist, a category that has never had enough members to suit me. I remember reading his stuff during long boring shifts as the night orderly on an inpatient psychiatry station at University of Minnesota Hospitals. I used to own a couple of volumes of those pieces, but I think they have gone on to their eternal rewards by now.

So how does this make today’s writing fun? Because, in a very halting way I think I borrow from his style in some of what I put down on the screen. And this piracy, purloining, and pilfering – this clumsy hommage is somehow enjoyable to me. Here are some Perelman quotes for you to look over.

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.

I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage, and similar chlorophyll. Any dietitian will tell you that a running foot of apple strudel contains four times the vitamins of a bushel of beans.

See what I mean? He’s in my head and I couldn’t get rid of him if I wanted to. BTW, if you should ever look up Mr. Perelman and peruse his material, you would find that there’s a bit more acid there than in what I do. He was, at heart, not a happy man, although a very bright one.

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By Friday evening we had landed in Yankton, unpacked our small collection of our stuff we’d brought along, and found ourselves ordering a sackful of Tastee-Treat loose-meat sandwiches, a home-town tradition if ever there was one. We took our treasures to Riverside Park and did some reminiscing there while we ate an al fresco supper. To finish off the evening we walked across the old lift bridge, all the way to Nebraska and back.

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On this Saturday morning, the auspices are good for an outdoor wedding. So many things have to come together for these exercises in blind meteorologic faith to come off with anything approaching grace. A day that’s too warm can wilt the proceedings and bring about an epidemic of the vapors, with the noise of people collapsing near you being a significant distraction from one’s appreciation of the ceremony. Any breeze over 20 mph begins to fray at the edges of the decorations until finally veils are flying and words of betrothal are lost in the roar of the gale.

And rain. What about that blessed water from heaven that can affect the rites more than anything else, and send the assemblage scattering like an nestful of rabbits, holding their wedding programs over their heads? All that effort spent on the bride’s hairdo comes to naught in a soggy instant, and those spiffy rented tuxedos are so far from looking their best in a downpour.

And all this because when the wind does not blow, the sun does not wilt, and the rain does not fall, it can be quite lovely and memorable. You rolls your dice and you takes your chances.

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Burning Perfectly Good Food

jono55

We’re having the Manns over for dinner tonight (Wednesday). Grilling outdoors and serving on the deck, where any stray coronavirus particles can be puffed away by the evening breezes before they have a chance to land. All of the distancing stuff will be observed, food preparation is being carefully done, and we earnestly hope not to share anything with our guests but clean vittles and our lovely selves.

It’s our first such social foray since the outbreak began. The Manns live just up the street, and are people who frequently pop into our minds as “We should have those folks over sometime and get to know them better.”

The evening forecast promises that it will be rainless, warm, and almost windless. There will be tunes, of course. What summer night would be complete without them? It’s a touch of the homely at an extraordinary moment in time.

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There is a form of cancer called a pheochromocytoma. It originates in the adrenal gland, which normally produces several hormones, including adrenaline (epinephrine), which is a fight or flight hormone. A “pheo” can over-produce these hormones, and occasionally if one unwisely presses too hard on the tumor during a physical exam there can be a dangerous flood of these substances into the patient’s bloodstream.

So where am I going with this? The P. Cluck gang seems to me to be the political equivalent of a pheochromocytoma. They are a cancer on our body politic for certain, but not just any old tumor. If it is squeezed or threatened in any way out comes all manner of violent and unhealthy behaviors and pronouncements which do further harm to our citizenry and our country. When the moment comes in November this neoplasm needs to be cut away ruthlessly from the corridors of power.

Too overblown a comparison? Perhaps. I do tend to overblow. It’s one of the things I like most about myself.

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The cookout went very well. First of all, the gods of weather cooperated by providing one of those soft summer evenings you dream of in February. And the company was excellent. Zoom has been a boon and we are grateful for it, but there is nothing like face to face conversation. For me, all substitutes pale before it.

Unfortunately and eventually twilight turned to dusk turned to darkness and our guests had to go home, where they feared to find that their new puppy had probably reduced some rugs to shreds. It’s the difference between puppies and kittens. (Although a kitten can take a nice couch and turn it into a ratty-looking mess pretty quickly.)

I had a friend while in the Air Force who told stories about raising a St. Bernard from puppy-hood. One day he and his wife returned home to find that their new charge had chewed the entire arm from their couch. And when describing paper training, he grimly volunteered that when your puppy weighs fifty pounds, its toilet habits present an emergency.

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Heroism comes in all flavors and sizes. My own experiences have taught me that over and over. I will explain.

When I was working in Buffalo NY in the late 70s, it was at a hospital that was transitioning from an old-line private institution to a county hospital. Which led to a disconnect. The buildings themselves were located in an older and genteel part of town, while the populations that it served were elsewhere. At the pediatric clinic, I worked every day with a succession of grandmothers who were bringing in their children’s children for well-child care.

These women saw to it that those babies received their immunizations and examinations even when it required taking city buses and transferring two and sometimes three times, through the toughest part of town, to get there. Summer and winter. Rain or shine, they suited up and showed up. My own children were still small back then, and whenever it was my turn to bring them to their pediatrician for the same care, I generally regarded it as a chore eating into my precious day and would whine about the time spent.

But not these women. They saw the same visits as important enough to the lives of their charges to spend most of a day in transit just to get them done. To me their actions were heroism, of a very quiet and uncomplaining sort.

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The Buzz

jono55

You may have noticed that I haven’t complained about being stung by the yellowjackets that have terrorized us in our yard each summer that we’ve lived here in Paradise. The reason is that I think I’ve found the way, finally, to live an outdoor life at home without being annoyed by these aggressive bugs. I go for the queens.

In past years I’ve waited until the swarms arise in the warmth of the day and fly in malignant squadrons back and forth looking for innocent flesh into which to plunge their barbs. I never caught up, and was always two steps and a swollen forehead or finger behind the beasts.

But this year I put out the traps I have always used, but I put them out in March … before the little darlings even showed up for their summers’ target practice. These traps attract the insects and do them in, and I believe that in 2020 I got the devices out early enough to catch the queens wandering by with their retinues. Much more efficient to catch one queen than a thousand soldiers, I always say, or at least I will from now on.

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Here are three more cuts from Bob Dylan’s latest album:
I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
Black Rider
Goodbye Jimmy Reed

For those of you of tender years out there … try to imagine your life without Dylan songs playing all through it … putting words to thoughts and emotions you were carrying around but were having trouble expressing … imagine it, if you can.

I can’t.

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Hey, friends, did you ever think that OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY would be regarded as so pestilential that we couldn’t go visit foreign countries any time we wanted to? That’s where we are today. Even Canada doesn’t want us bringing our stuff up there. And really, who can blame them? We’re a soggy, highly infectious mess that can’t follow common sense rules.

There was even an incident where an American airline traveler refused to wear a mask.

On a plane.

In that crabbed and crowded passenger cabin which is a microorganisms paradise.

[I heard that the problem was solved by relocating the gentleman to a new seat in Aisle 13z, which was on the wing, while the plane was over Wyoming. With the low population density that that state enjoys it was thought unlikely that he would hit anyone on his way down. I must emphasize that this is only a rumor, and hasn’t been independently verified.]

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These are the elements of my new office-on-the-deck this summer of the plague. Robin has begun to mock me gently by saying that the only one who spends more time in the backyard than me is our senior cat, Poco. But he does it quietly, sleeping over behind the tomato planters in the shade, while I create more of a disturbance.

I don’t have much to say in my defense. I can be quite a bother, sometimes. If I wasn’t so damned charming I’m pretty certain she would have shown me the door long ago.

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Bedtime Follies

jono55

Need help explaining why Black Lives Matter fits the moment better than All Lives Matter? Perhaps these young ladies can be of some assistance.

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I’m still making my way through the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell. I’m about half-way through, but that’s not bad for a book on my nighttime reading stack.

My usual routine is to climb into bed with every intention of reading for an hour or so, as Robin does. I arrange the pillows, adjust the light on my nightstand, fluff the comforter and look about the room to see if there is anything left undone which would require me to leave this sweet nest I’ve created. Seeing no problems, I then begin to read.

Since my resting pulse is in the low 50s, I estimate that 37 heartbeats from the moment I open the book I have fallen asleep.

Becoming rapidly unconscious is never my plan, but there is nothing, believe me, that can stop this comatose juggernaut once it gets going.

But to get back to Studs. I mentioned that this series of books had such a powerful effect on the boy I was when I first read it, and was hoping that I would find out how and why that happened in the re-reading.

And finally, I think, I have it figured out. Studs was a tough kid from a working-class family growing up in Chicago in early 20th century. If you were to have met him in person you might have thought him supremely self-possessed. But the story is basically 95% told as his train of thought, and those thoughts are nearly completely fear-filled and insecure.

Fear of not being tough enough, of not being attractive to girls, of being thought soft by his gang, of being stifled by his parents’ wishes for him, of the Catholic Church and its many commandments (way more than the ten that were good enough for Moses), of not being handsome enough, not having enough money, etc. There are very few moments in the books where he has a self-confident thought.

Just like I was at the time I read them.

That was my connection with the character, and why it was so powerful a read. And why Studs’ premature death moved me in the way that it did.

Now, I don’t suppose that any of you are going to run out and get the books from the library, but if you do I hasten to add that there were quite a few differences between Studs and myself. For one thing, he curses way more than I do … really. And he is a blatant racist/bigot for all seasons.

Except for Irish Catholics, pretty much every other nationality or religion is described with words taken from the same lexicon where the N-word, the C-word, and the K-word et al can be found. Black, Jews, Protestants – some of you might have passing acquaintance with the words yourselves, although I know without question that you would never utter them.

So the identification of the young man in the photo below with Studs was not complete, but it was still a strong and a forceful one.

I get it now, I really do. I see what he saw.

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Occasionally when I am watching an old movie, I will wonder … what does those actors think when they see themselves walking and talking as a fifty-year-younger version of themselves? Sadness? Poignancy? Embarrassment?

I had a flash of an inkling on the subject when I included the old photo above, of myself reclining on a blanket sixty years ago. I had none of those feelings while looking at the picture. Instead, I wished him well.

Because I know his entire future, right up to this moment. And I have inside information that tells me he’s just flat out not ready for it.

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Guests are coming for lunch today! Amy, Neil and family are passing through Montrose on their way to an isolated cabin-vacation in the Black Hills and will be here around noon. They will be our first visitors since the plague began.

We’re going to serve the food as if we knew for a fact that we were both named Typhoid Mary. Lots of separateness, sanitizers, and plastic gloves. It’s awkward but do-able.

A small bit of quasi-normalcy in an unquiet time.

******

The Hills Are Alive …

jono55

Friday we left town to take a longer hike, and this one started out a few miles south of Ouray, at a place called Spirit Gulch. We’d done this one before, and found it to be a moderately strenuous walk over largely rocky terrain. Lots of those small stones that roll under your feet and try to upend you.

(Oh, yes, I am at heart an animist, and there are no rocks in this world that don’t have a mind of their own, and aren’t fond of their little jokes.)

But add to Friday’s excursion the following: dark skies, occasional rain, several bouts of sleet falling, and temperatures that never got above 60 degrees.

So why go? Because some of the views are spectacular and well worth the effort.

And when it comes right down to it why, what’s a little bit of sleet driven into your face, really? Think of it as an exfoliation, for free.

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From The New Yorker

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It looks like Robin will not be deterred from being nice to me today, Father’s Day 2020. She really is impossible that way.

Apparently we all have a gift-giving center in our brains that can be seen to glow increasingly brighter on PET scans as holidays approach. In Robin’s case, however, you don’t need any electronic hardware to observe this, as her entire body develops a sort of fluorescence. It is brightest at Christmastime, of course, when the light she gives off approximates the output of a 60 watt incandescent bulb. Those last few days of Advent I can’t even sleep in the same room with her as a result.

So a little while back when I was starting to go into my spoilsport spiel about the relevance of a holiday devoted to the (quite variable) virtues of male parents, and I noticed that her aura was already firmly in place, I gave it up as a lost cause.

Today I know that I will be celebrated. And just between you and me, and completely apart from whether I deserve it or not, I admit that I will very much enjoy it.

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From The New Yorker

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Never Have I Ever …

jono55

We finished up the first season of Never Have I Ever, on Netflix, and get this – there were no bad people on the screen in this series. Not one. The parents weren’t unbelievably stupid and the teenagers weren’t unbearably smart. There were minority characters galore, but nobody made fun of them or resorted to stereotypes.

Sexuality is a big topic in this show. The main characters are adolescents, after all. But no one is exploiting or abusing anyone else. So is it a too-nice universe? Not to Robin and me. This is a light-hearted comedy, yet one that touches on many serious topics, including the death of a parent, expectations of mothers vs. those of daughters, coming out as gay, the confusion of being an adolescent, cross-cultural rough spots, et al.

It never preached at us, grossed us out, made us depressed, or patronized us. Pretty darn good for 2020.

******

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So far using Zoom has been refreshingly free from melodrama. Until Tuesday, that is. The service underwent a major update a couple of days ago, and friends Bill, Sid, and I bumped up against some significant confusion in our third shot at videoconferencing.

We finally gave it up for the day after a trying 45 minutes, and went back to our drawing boards to prepare for a future session. Too bad we didn’t have a video recording of what went on, it was a classic demonstration of three senior amigos doing their best to pry open the doors of the electronic age one more crack. And finding this face peering back at us.

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When I saw this photo on the CNN website this morning, I immediately knew I was going to steal it. It’s a full frontal of a cassowary. You know, that large flightless bird with the enormous claws on its feet? That highly dangerous feathered friend? The article went on to discuss interesting things about its feather structure, but it was the picture that nailed me.

It’s a mad, mad, mad gaze if there ever was one. Merciless. If you could choose what the last thing you’d ever see in this life would be, what image to carry with you into eternity, I doubt many would pick the cassowary’s face.

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I’m so confused. Somewhere in my past I received the instruction that one should place two spaces after a period and before the next sentence. My right thumb does that automatically. Double tap.

A few months ago I read an article that discussed the origins of that practice and its uselessness in modern writing. I ignored it, and kept on with what I’d always done. Double tap.

But now no less an expert on things typographic than Microsoft has decreed that if I do it while using their product, it will be flagged as an error. One space is all that any self-respecting writer should need, and there’s no need to continue with this nonsense, says the software giant. You must follow their lead if you want to avoid that squiggly correction line appearing on your page.

Regard the above three paragraphs. I’ve used two spaces on the first two, and a single space on the third. Which looks best?

I’m was going to stick with two. Squiggly lines be damned. A guy can only be pushed so far before a stand must be taken. Besides, we Macintosh people have always known that Microsoft was The Evil Empire, and instinctually avoid them whenever possible.

But then I ran across this graphic, strongly suggesting that I was not only wrong, but that I was a cliché.

I wonder if the rest of my day can be salvaged? Quite a setback, this is.

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Piping Away

jono55

When I first went off to college, at the half-ripe age of sixteen years, I was baby-faced and completely un-collegiate in my appearance. I decided that I should do something about that, and so I took up pipe-smoking. In my mind, this made me appear more like this gentleman, a rugged-looking individual who might have interesting tales to tell.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. Any photos of me during those early years with the pipe in my mouth were so un-cool that I tore them up and burned the negatives, pledging whoever had taken the pictures to secrecy. Here is one that somehow survived.

As you can see, I did not achieve the result that I was going for.

But I kept at it, and eventually graduated with what would equate to a master’s degree in the black art of pipery. Along the way I burned holes in hundreds of shirts caused by sparks blowing back on windy days. I actually enjoyed the smoking part very much, but eventually I developed a cough that simply would not go away, and I began to experience the rumblings of a conscience about all those folks who traveled through the cloud of secondary smoke that trailed behind me.

It was with some small grieving that I gave up the habit and all of its attendant rituals. Rituals that included studying catalogs of beautiful briar creations, sniffing of hundreds (thousands?) of lovely aromas, cleaning the bowls of the pipes with special tools from London, and purchasing exotic varieties of tobacco with which to mix my custom blends.

Oh, yes, I was a snob when it came to tobacco. Just short of insufferable, I was.

Looking back, quitting was worth it, I know. My respiratory symptoms vanished and my shirts certainly look better. But … there are blue-skied autumn days when the air is crisp and the setting cries out for the pungent aroma of shreds of latakia smoldering in a briar bowl … .

(‘Scuse me while I cough into my elbow at just the thought.)

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I wonder what would happen if Cluck & Pence, our national pandemic comedy team, were rewarded for refusing to wear any sort of mask by catching the coronavirus. I’m not sure that even that would elicit anything like empathy from this ice-blooded pair, but there is the remote possibility.

They are the perfect examples of the let them eat cake approach of our plutocracy. Protected by wealth and position from any of the bad things that are happening out there among the hoi polloi, they pose and preen and posture and declare that they are put upon by life in a way that mere mortals can only guess at.

I think a proper bout of Covid-19 might be good for them. Oh, I don’t mean the awful variety where intensive care and ventilators are necessary. I just mean enough to scare them to death for a few days. To share the pain of tens of thousands of Americans in a decidedly non-metaphoric way for once.

I suppose it’s unworthy of me to think about such things. But there you are.

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From The New Yorker

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David Brooks has gone through a long period of navel-gazing recently, looking for the answers to the BIG QUESTIONS of U.S. society. So whenever he comes back to earth for a day or two I appreciate his insights. In the Times of New York recently, he posted this editorial: We Need National Service – Now.

Thoughtful and well-written, it goes over some familiar territory, and reiterates the fact that most Americans think that voluntary national service would be a good, perhaps a great, thing for our society. So the question always becomes – why hasn’t it happened?

I will own up to my personal prejudices here, in that I never thought that the military draft should have been stopped. In spite of the fact that the system was riddled with abuses, I thought that its benefits – those feelings of a shared experience that the majority of American men had – were worth it. And I also thought that having short-time soldiers like myself in the mix had a restraining effect on those in power. Not as easy to start a war when you know that you will receive some serious blowback from all those soldiers’ mothers out there, as happened in the Viet Nam war experience.

Instead of dropping it in 1973, I would have broadened it to include women, and done what was possible to reduce those abuses (most of which were due to people of various kinds of influence evading their responsibilities) and truly democratize the armed services.

But that’s neither here nor there, to coin a phrase. Wait … somebody already said that?

This new kind of national service could bring back some of that feeling of sacrifice and brotherhood/sisterhood that has been lost. Real, down-to-earth, tangible. Soooo valuable.

I’m for it. And if there was a branch of these new programs that made better use of the legion of wasted geezers out there as well … put me in, coach – I’m ready to play. Just make that obstacle course a little milder, and I’m your man.

[The sharp-eyed among you will notice those shoulder boards. Not American GIs, are they? Nope, they are Russian recruits on the obstacle course … but I loved the mud. And when you cover a man with mud, we all look about the same.]

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From The New Yorker