Category: Uncategorized

Vigilante Man

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Helpless, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On the Road

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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

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

Sober Dude

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

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

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

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For What It’s Worth

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia: For What It’s Worth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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50% Less Cluck

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(My favorite cartoon du jour)

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

Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams

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Curry at Christmas

jono55

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

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

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

I loved it.

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

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

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

Perhaps one personal example will be enlightening.

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

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

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

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

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

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Only You, by The Platters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

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

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

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, by The Platters

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Freak Flags Flown

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia

The Parting Glass, by boygenius and Ye Vagabonds

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Are We Eating Cake, or What?

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

NYTimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Samba Pa Ti, by Santana

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

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

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

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

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

Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits

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

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

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

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

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

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Children of Gaza

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

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

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

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

The Wings, by Gustavo Santaolalla

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Turning the Tables

jono55

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

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

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

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

It’s all Borders’ fault.

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

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Out In The Streets, by Trio

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FOR SHAME DEPARTMENT

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

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

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

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

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Screenshot

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Da Da Da, by Trio

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I don’t mind at all,” I lied.

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

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

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These Are The Days, by Van Morrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herbert Spencer

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

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Foodies

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hangman, by Tangle Eye

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

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

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

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

Thich Nhat Hanh

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

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

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

I have the very same issues.

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Not A Bad Man, by Patty Griffin

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

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

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The Fragrant Bowl

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Low Low Low, by James

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Screenshot

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

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

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

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One For My Baby, by Josh White

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

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

Like I said, it was startling.

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MUSHROOM NEWS

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

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

Wikipedia: Amanita phalloides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Frankie and Johnny, by Lonnie Donnegan

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

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

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Shinola

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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WARNING! METAPHOR ALERT!

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

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Memphis in the Meantime, by John Hiatt

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

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

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

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Tip Of My Tongue, by John Hiatt

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

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

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

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Thank You Girl, by John Hiatt

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

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

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More about Shinola.

*

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M.U.G.

jono55

On Sunday we had our first taste of snow here in Paradise. Only couple of inches fell, which is a good thing. This way we get the lovely landscape change without the hassles associated with larger amounts.

First warm day it will all melt away, and that’s okay too.

And look at this … how gorgeous! The combination of the snow/rain combination coupled with no wind at all has left windrows of snow along each branch.

The cliché that older people have nothing to say to each other than to talk about the weather has some truth in it. And a recurring theme is that there was much more snow when they were kids than there is now. For some locations this is true, although the reductions are modest, at best.

Conversations like this: “When I was a kid I remember the snow being so deep that we built igloos just by digging into the side of a drift. The snowdrifts along the road to our house were taller than I was.”

Well, I found the most amazing website dealing with snowfall*, going back to 1900, and I think that it explains a lot of things. For instance in Minneapolis, my old home town, the average yearly snowfall for the period 1981-2019 was 53.4 inches. The least amount fell in 1931, when only 14.2 inches fell. The greatest amount fell in 1983, and it was 98.6 inches.

If I were a kid in the 80s in Minneapolis what I would remember was that astounding year when 98 inches fell, forgetting about all the so-so years before and after. That’s how memory works. We recall the outliers and make them the norm until some know-it-all comes up with a chart than tells the truth.

Now comes the bragging, done by a licensed braggart. Here is a number to cause ooooohs and ahhhhhs to be uttered.

The record for total seasonal snowfall in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is 390.4 inches, set during the winter of 1978-79. This record was set in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is known for heavy snowfall due to its location. 

AI query

In the winter of 1978-79 I was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the Keweenaw Peninsula, to be exact. And I shoveled every last one of those inches.

We lived in a one-story house which required that someone climb onto the roof periodically to remove the snow lest the weight literally break through into the house. By February, when I stood on the roof and shoveled the snow into the back yard, I was throwing snow UP! The pile was already taller than the house. And when I … I could go on but that’s enough about this topic.

*The chart is for US cities only. We’re a parochial bunch here in the States. We get crazy only about our own weather.

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Wintertime, by the Steve Miller Band

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I went to the Apple app store today to do a little shopping (for free stuff because I am incurably cheap) and failed. What I wanted for my Mac was available only for my phone or an iPad. But it started me reminiscing about the early days of personal computing. At least of my early days, which began with the first Macintosh, in 1984.

Once I had purchased the machine, along with the very few pieces of software that it could run, I buried myself in finding out just what it could do. I had prepared myself to be amazed and I was.

Fast forward to wanting to have more … more … more information so I joined the tiny MUG (Mac User Group) in our small town. There were only five of us, and one member was the states attorney for our district.Why do I single him out? Because he had already acquired a considerable library of pirated software which he was willing to demonstrate and share with any in the group who were as open to intellectual theft as he was. The irony of a member of the justice system being an accomplished intellectual thief was noted but not discussed.

This all happened at a time when the total library of software that a Mac could run could easily be owned by any individual who had a few extra bucks around to spend. But it grew so rapidly that within a year our user group disbanded. Our interests now diverged because each of us had a flurry of apps to choose from, and they were being developed at a pace that was impossible to keep up with.

But the fun that we had when all was new and exciting … I can remember the feeling even now.

BTW, this all occurred in the village of Yankton South Dakota. It wasn’t the only time that an officer of the law was involved in illegal activity had come to my attention. During the period when I was looking for a place to relocate to from Michigan, I was watching television in my motel room on a visit to Yankton, and one news item was of a group of men who had been arrested for operating an illegal poker game from a motel somewhere in the state. One of those men arrested was the South Dakota state attorney general.

Hmmmm, I thought, that’s colorful. Then I heard about a pair of bank robbers who were apprehended a few doors down from that very bank where they were already spending the loot. In a bar. On beers. But the best SD crime story of all at that time was the discovery of a large jet cargo plane in a field along the interstate. It had landed and been abandoned. Why, you might ask would a huge cargo plane in a beanfield be of special interest? Because what this particular aircraft was filled with was marijuana.

How could I miss the opportunity to live in a state with such a fine Wild West litany of crime stories coming at you every day? I packed up my family and my books and moved to South Dakota forthwith.

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I will admit that the extensive library of cat and dog videos has provided laughs for yours truly, but this one is a little more interesting. It suggests very different processing by cats and dogs. Is this true? Anybody know?

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Swingtown, by the Steve Miller Band

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It’s the second of December and we’re still not at war with Venezuela. I have no idea what the Cluck administration is waiting for, because I have my bags packed and am waiting for the national call-up of retired and seniorized medical personnel to begin.

President Donald Cluck wearing his war camouflage and showing his willingness to lead the charge up the Venezuelan beaches. However, apparently his bone spurs have acted up again, so he will be there in spirit when our armed forces go ashore, rather than in person.

It has been years now that I have had trouble sleeping because of Venezuela. Not that the people of the country had ever done me harm of any kind … I just didn’t like having that country out there existing without proper American meddling. It vexed me. Thank heaven that President Cluck has a clear vision of the threat that Venezuela poses, and was only waiting until he could round up a bunch of ships and planes and stuff and also had a Secretary of War and Dim Offensives who could be counted on to do his bidding.

Secretary of War and Dim Offensives Pete Hegseth at work on battle plans for the upcoming war with Venezuela.

But no matter. I am sitting by the door with my Google Spanish-English Translator in my hand. I have my electronically-sound-boosted stethoscope around my neck. I have a month’s worth of my blood pressure pills, my anti-stroke pills, my cholesterol-reducing pills, and my Metamucil safely stowed in my duffel bag. I checked and was disappointed to learn that there isn’t a Golden Age version of the Air Force uniform for those of us who are being recalled, one with all Velcro closures. But hey, it wouldn’t be a war without hardships, would it?

Now where is that darn transport, anyway?

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A brief note about those little round images over there on the right side of the page. Those are examples of my button-crafting, done in support of our Indivisible group here in Montrose County. My fervent hope is that each one of them will go on to annoy the very hell out of the opposition.

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And a brief note about today’s music. I like many of the tunes that the Steve Miller Band recorded. They put out smart pop-rock as far as I am concerned. But I had a good friend who used to tell me that this affection of mine for the band meant:

  • that my brain had already turned into pablum (this was twenty-five years ago)
  • that it showed that I had no taste at all in music
  • that having a handful of SM songs in my library put my immortal soul at risk

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The Stake, by the Steve Miller Band

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Pawn to King 13

jono55

The trip to Durango was beautiful and free of winter hazards. Above 9000 feet there was a thin coating of snow everywhere but the highway, and when you combined this with the leafless aspen trunks it was like driving in a brown/black and white photograph.

On this latest journey we deliberately gave ourselves two extra hours, which allowed stopping in places we’d only driven by in the past. Nothing spectacular, just nooks that had raised our curiosity.

(Robin and I are definitely at the Ferdinand the Bull stage of life, where sniffing deeply in one field of flowers is preferred to motoring past a dozen.)

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When I made reference to Ferdinand the Bull above I had no idea of his whole history. I looked him up and found that both Hitler and Franco of Spain had banned the book as anti-fascist propaganda.

Sooooo … GO FERDINAND! HOO-RAH!

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Born to Lose, by Ray Charles

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Any thoughtful person who has been watching the quasi-military and perhaps illegal National Guard maneuvers of the Cluck regime knew that a tragedy like the one this week would eventually come in one form or another.

Either a civilian would be shot by a nervous guardsman or soldiers would become targets and be harmed by some unhinged individual. It was inevitable. Using the young men and women of the National Guard as pawns has been Cluck’s transparent tactic all along. One more reason, as if we needed another, to remove him from office ASAP.

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When I was an aimless undergraduate I heard about the book All Quiet on the Western Front, and that it was a classic. At the time I was looking for anything that would help me put down roots in this new and unclear world that growing up and separation from my family of origin had turned out to be. I thought perhaps reading “classics” would be one place to begin.

I read the book and was blown away by its beauty. So much so that I chose to immediately read another of Remarque’s books, Three Comrades. This time I was BLOWN AWAY!

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying – a little shove toward the end.

Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

For weeks I couldn’t get these characters out of my mind. Something about their struggles seemed achingly applicable to my own. They seemed more real to me than the people I saw shuffling about on campus every day.

Then when I am sad and understand nothing anymore, I say to myself that it’s better to die while you still want to live, than to live and want to die.

Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

Well, you can see by the quotes what morose neighborhoods I was inhabiting during those years. Obviously I made it through, although I think that I have been as much the antihero as the hero of my own story.

Time to re-read Three Comrades, I think.

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What’d I Say, by Ray Charles

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It was Thanksgiving evening around eight o’clock, and the call came from an emergency room at a small hospital in a small town fifteen miles north of where the pediatrician was comfortably lounging at home. Two pre-school children had been brought in, and there was no doctor available in that community. Could he come and see them?

Grumbling and in a very ill temper, the pediatrician got into his car and made the twenty minute drive on the narrow and snow-lined road.

He entered the examination room where he asked a few questions curtly, then looked the children over. One had a cold and the other an ear infection. He wrote out a prescription and then proceeded to give a stern lecture to the middle-aged woman who was with the kids.

“These children had their complaints all day long, and now you bring them in late, on a holiday … this is thoughtless planning.”

“We’re so sorry, doctor. I’m their aunt, and we’ve been taking care of them just since this afternoon, when their parents were killed in a car accident. We were just worried about the kids. Thank you so much for coming in to see them, we really appreciate it.”

The pediatrician mumbled something low and unintelligible, then slunk away, having gone in a heartbeat from an indignant and self-righteous ass to some low and nameless form of life, the sort you scrape off your shoes as soon as you become aware of its presence.

So often one learns their lessons after they have opened their mouths. How much better it would be to do the thinking before.

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Damn You, Richard Gere

jono55

The movie Ordinary People came out in 1980. It was the first film that Robert Redford directed, and won four Academy Awards. For me, the most memorable takeaway was a piece from the soundtrack, a work entitled Canon in D Major, by Johann Pachelbel. For a few months anyway, it might have been the most often-played classical selection in the country.

Even today I play it regularly, and there are several interpretations of the short composition in my music library. “Music library” has become one of those phrases that definitely dates a person, hasn’t it? I wonder how many songs a Gen Z actually owns, rather than rents? Never mind, here is a recording of “the Canon” that I own and can share with you. It’s from the soundtrack of Ordinary People.

Canon in D Major, arr. by John Williams

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This past week Robin mentioned in passing that she would like to see the film An Officer and A Gentleman again. It was one of those times that I instantly made it a quest for myself, to set up a romantic evening with my bride, perhaps to slightly burnish my image in her eyes. I had no trouble finding it, however, since it was available on six subscription services. Not much of a quest, really.

But when I presented it as the evening’s television watching I took full credit, much more than I deserved … that’s me all over. Puffing up my accomplishments and glossing over my failures has worked for me for the longest time, why would I change now?

The film was released in 1982, and starred very young versions of Richard Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, and Lou Gossett Jr. Not a bad film at all, even if a bit formulaic, but formulas often do work well. It was the final scene that made it a classic date movie, maybe in the top ten.

Got your lady handy? Play the video below. A typical American female will become very pliant upon viewing it. One caveat, however. While she might be embracing you at the moment, she is almost certainly imagining you are Richard Gere.

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I learned this week that there has been considerable research over the years on finding substances that smell so bad that they are actually incapacitating. Substances that cling to the victim, resisting being washed off. The use would predominantly be in crowd control, rather than at the battlefront. I found this idea amusing, although I can easily imagine that it could be a powerful deterrent. One man doing much of the research around World War Two eventually came to smell so bad he had to sleep in a public park.

Let’s suppose that I am twenty years old and participating in a vigorous civil protest against some authority. Let’s also suppose that I have a very promising date next Saturday night with someone I have been pursuing with great ardor for months. Now, if I knew that there was a good chance that I would be sprayed with something that would make me smell like a “rotting corpse lifted from a stagnant sewer” for the next month, I might skip the event altogether.

For some reason this all reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about the killer joke. Warning, do not watch this if you understand the German language. We’re not sure about the safety of the video even now.

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Our American Comic Opera production is not as yet entitled or completed, but the script is being added to daily. Most recently we have yet another Ukrainian “peace plan.” The origin of the plan was apparently in Russia and was leaked to someone on the American side who brought it to Cluck’s aides. Although he hadn’t actually read the program itself, Cluck became a great fan and has told the Ukrainians that they better wise up or the plan will be implemented. Word is that it gives Putin everything he wanted and more, which bothers Cluck not a bit.

The only problem with all of this is that there are some groups of people who think that the plan stinks to high heaven. Here is a partial listing:

  • More than three-fourths of the American public
  • Most members of Cluck’s own party
  • Every Democrat in existence, even unborn ones
  • All of Europe
  • The Falkland Islands
  • et al

If you disagree with the peace plan, there are Cluck-ers who have signaled that there might be a special gallows erected where the Rose Garden used to be at the White House, just for you (although I admit that this is more conjecture than fact).

Casting for the opera’s production will begin whenever there are more than two succeeding days which pass without an atrocity being committed by the Cluck regime. Hopes are therefore dim that we will ever hear a single note.

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What Are Their Names, by David Crosby

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We will be spending Thanksgiving with the Hurley family In Durango this year, and are grateful for the invitation. Whenever we do this, Robin and I are asked to bring the same two items. The first is a cranberry-marshmallow dessert salad that was Robin’s mother’s contribution for years. The second is a stuffing recipe made with pork sausage and safe as prominent ingredients.

We partially construct both of them here and then finish them on Thursday as the turkey roasts. It’s pretty easy to keep them cold for the two and a half hour journey. So far there have been no problems with snow on Highway 550, the road that still puts lumps in my throat, so we’ll probably go that way. The alternative route is an hour longer, and although less hazardous even that way requires prudence and planning when making the trip in winter. Both roads must cross mountain passes. Both have been problematic in the past.

I never have any difficulty coming up with a gratitude list on Turkey Day, because my cup truly overfloweth. First and foremost each year I spend time wondering how it was that Robin ever decided that marrying me was a good idea. For her, that is. For me it was unbelievably good fortune because, no exaggeration here, she had saved my life.

I know that there have been moments when she has wondered about her selection as I am not a great prize but more a thing cobbled together of many parts, like a shorter and less murderous creation of Victor Frankenstein. But here we are, on our thirty-third Thanksgiving together. And so down the road we go, salad and stuffing in hand. If we ever are stranded by car trouble on these trips there will always be something to eat in the cooler in the back of the car.

May your holiday go well and your clothing be elastic enough in the waist to accommodate a bit of excess.

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… there are places I’ll remember …

jono55

The following clip made me into an instant Elissa Slotkin fan. It also reminds me that there are plenty of men and women out there who can point the way for those working in the resistance to the Cluck regime. Who are they? Well, comedians like Jimmie Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, for instance. And the editorial cartoonists that I’ve been posting more of recently, and now the six serving members of Congress who made a video reminding members of the armed forces that not only can they refuse to obey illegal orders, but they are obligated to do so. Anyway, here’s the clip.

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Garrison Keillor came to Montrose this past Wednesday evening to present his one-man show to a respectful sellout crowd. He has been a beloved entertainer for nearly fifty years. There were many moments I could relate but I’ll pick just two.

All in all, Robin and I found the evening to be a moving experience. An elderly man of eighty-three years pacing the stage for nearly ninety minutes while basically giving a humorous and often touching autobiographical recitation. What made it so special was that as he did so he was also retracing parts of our own lives, since we have been fans of his for from the beginning.

Early on in the show he was talking about admiring the more popular hymns sung in his church and when he began to sing a line from one of them the entire audience sang quietly along with him as if we were being given cues and there was an invisible conductor. There was a soft murmur in the hall … a moment.

After speaking for nearly an hour and a half without an interruption he again lapsed into song and began to walk up the aisle toward the entrance to the auditorium. Just before he disappeared through the entry doors he shouted back to us “Goodnight, Everybody.” And he was gone.

The song was In My Life, by the Beatles.

In My Life

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There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed.
Some forever, not for better;
Some have gone and some remain.

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall.
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I’ve loved them all.

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you.
And these mem’ries lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.

Tho’ I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them,
In my life I love you more.

Tho’ I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them,
In my life I love you more.

In my life I love you more.

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Screenshot
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Okay, this is where I get serious. Don’t panic, it will be for only a moment. I’m a small-town boy in a small town in a part of the United States that is far enough from the seats of power that even ICE has trouble finding it when they want to persecute someone. I have no special talent for political divinations, no secret knowledge.

But I believe that Cluck is done.

He was never more than a bag of gas, like an ugly balloon sold at a holiday store. Inside there is nothing of substance. And the knives are in. It’s only necessary that we allow enough time to pass that the contained effluvium can make its way to the outside and he will collapse. At least politically. MAGA won’t disappear, but they are a mad minority, a delusional contingent that is forever stampeding in one direction or another, and without their figurehead they will retreat to where they came from, simmering in their own hatreds and looking for Cluck’s replacement.

But that leaves a whole lot of people who have found themselves standing up to their waists in a manure lagoon and wondering how they ever got there and how do they get out of it?

They know right from wrong, they know what putrefaction smells like, and they have been looking for an exit, a way back to fresher air and clearer thinking.

Don’t ask them what political faction they are in, that’s a waste of your time and theirs. Ask them instead if they want to get back to work they respect and understand. If they want solid schools for the children of their communities to attend. If they would like a return to living their lives as private ones, without government interference. If they would be willing to sacrifice when they could see the reason they were being asked to do so was real and worthwhile.

There is a Lakota saying which I first heard from the leader of a musical group of indigenous Americans called Brulé. The saying is Mitakuye Oyasin, and it translates into We are all related. It is what Mr. Schiller was thinking when he wrote the poem Ode to Joy which contains the line Alle Menschen werden Brüder … the translation is: Every man becomes a brother. It is a part of most of our religious traditions.

Point out what we need to do, show us the why we are doing it, and then stand back. We’ll figure it out from there. (Would someone please pick up that collapsed balloon and toss it in the trash? Thanks, I know I could count on you.)

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We Are All Related by Brulé

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With our national holiday devoted to eating nearly upon us the cartoon at right below says it all, really. It’s a parody of the Normal Rockwell painting that is entitled Freedom From Want. This Thanksgiving we have plenty of want around the good ol’ US of A, and a whole lot of it has been deliberately engineered by Cluck and his Claque.

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We offer thanks for the sun and the rain and the earth and someone else’s hard work.

Buddhist table grace

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Brains on Autopilot

jono55

Today I feel nostalgia for events that have not happened.

I do not know what the previous sentence fully means, but I wrote it down just as I heard it in my mind as I stood in my garage staring out through the open overhead door at dark skies and a rainstorm moving east toward Montrose.

Sometimes you wake in the morning and read what you’ve written and it is as novel to you as it will be to the next person to see it. Thoughts, insights, inspirations can arise in my own brain completely ex nihilo. I know that I could not have written them because they are conveying information that is news to me.

I’ve read that this is not uncommon among writers, and their interpretations are always interesting. Some claim that it is “the Muse.” Some say it is God whispering. Some just admit that they have no idea how it occurs which is mostly the case with me, but … hey … what if …

We know that as long as we live that our brains never go totally dark. They are always at work at mundane things like keeping us from falling out of bed. They are always aware of time and this explains why we wake up so often a minute before the alarm is scheduled to go off. But I have a strong suspicion that our brains also never forget, even though we may. That they are always receiving, always cataloging, always filing away everything that our ears, nose, eyes, and skin bring in. And once in a great while they give us a phrase or a paragraph and we wonder, WTF?

So this afternoon I am being made wistful by hearing this phrase: Today I feel nostalgia for events that have not happened.

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For those who might also be wistful right now, here’s a good tune for the moment.

The Beautiful Lie, by the Amazing Rhythm Aces

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It’s mid-November and the kids are riding bicycles around the neighborhood while wearing t-shirts. It’s been that kind of month. I can handle warm without breaking stride. It’s freezing drizzles that get me down, and those are front and center in most of my memories of past Novembers.

I own two coats that are proof against really cold weather. Last winter I didn’t wear them at all. One is an old-fashioned thick woolen one, of a style that used to be called a Loden coat. The other is a “puffy,” a down-filled thing that weighs nothing and works wonderfully. I don’t love the look but I do like the comfort.

But if we’re still wearing t-shirts outdoors at Christmastime I will have to rethink my entire cold weather wardrobe. That will be a wrenching thing to have to do. Some of those garments I have owned for more than thirty years. Heavy and sartorially obsolete they might be, but they have served me well and will still be wearable when I am off walking those streets of gold.

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It came to me out of the blue as I fought with the treadmill at the recreation center yesterday. The treadmill, like all of the other machines in the building, is trying to kill me, I know it for a fact so don’t even bother trying to defend them.

I exercise wearing headphones, with basically all of the upbeat songs that I own in a single playlist, and the result is that tunes I haven’t listened to in years get their moment onstage once again. As this one played I realized that it was a perfect metaphor for the dilemma facing all of the lickspittle Republicans in Congress. See if you agree. The music is provided by the Clash, a British chamber music group of the 70s.

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[The following is information I gathered about something I had never thought I would have to deal with in the United States, a secret police force. Of course I was being naive, because although overall I have had great respect for the FBI, there have been times, especially under former director J. Edgar Hoover, when its behavior warranted such a definition.]

Secret Police, Police established by national governments to maintain political and social control. Generally clandestine, secret police have operated independently of the civil police. Particularly notorious examples were the Nazi Gestapo, the Russian KGB, and the East German Stasi. Secret-police tactics include arrest , imprisonment, torture, and execution of political enemies and intimidation of potential opposition members.

Britannica: Secret Police

The much maligned (deservedly so) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency of the Department of Homeland Security is thought by many to be a secret police force. I am one of those many. If we examine the quote above we know that ICE is guilty routinely of all but assassination. Which brings up our own los desaparecidos … what of them?

Here in Paradise we have had only one ICE encounter that I know of. Statewide there are several organizations that keep pretty good track of their depredations. If anyone observes any ICE activity in their community that person is urged to report it to the Colorado Rapid Response Network (CORRN) at their hotline which is operated 24 hours a day by volunteers. Their number is 1-844-864-8341.

There are many worthy organizations providing advice to us to follow if we are detained by ICE agents. One of them is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and I have included a link to their PDF delineating what we can do if we find ourselves involved with these criminals.

When the present regime falls, as it will, the agencies of repression that it has spawned will be disbanded and their members brought to justice. That, my friends, will be cause for outrageous and intemperate celebration. I am already planning some outrageous for myself, I will leave the intemperate to others.

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White Cliffs of Dover, by Vera Lynn

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Sandwich News

jono55

We had guests recently, and it turned out that we had some tasty pastrami left over, and I wanted to do something out of the ordinary (for me, that is) with it. So I decided on making Reuben sandwiches. For no good reason at all we never do Reubens so I bought some sauerkraut and thought I was okay. But I learned that there was more to it than I imagined, including the fact that Reubens are not made with pastrami but corned beef.

Oy! as my friend Rich Kaplan would have said while shaking his head in such situations, you are the whitest person I know!

Here is what the recipe called for:

  • rye bread
  • Russian dressing
  • Swiss cheese
  • corned beef
  • sauerkraut

Here is what I had on hand and made into our sandwiches:

  • rye bread
  • mayonnaise
  • pepper jack cheese
  • pastrami
  • sauerkraut

Not even close, was I? I was almost ashamed to put them on the table and I explained to Robin how it all happened and I hoped she wouldn’t think less of me and they were probably going to taste ridiculous and could we go out to eat if the sandwiches were inedible?

But … they were totally delicious. Not wishing to confuse the issue any further, I decided to give them their own name. Now, Reuben is a name taken from the Old Testament, and means “Behold, a son.” So I thought I’d turn to that august resource in my quest.

I picked Samuel. It was also Old Testament in origin and one of its meanings is “God has heard.” As in prayer. As in what I did when I realized that I was short several key ingredients.

So, my friends, if you drop by any time soon unannounced you might be served something like a Samuel. Let me know a day ahead and I’ll round up the right ingredients and make you a proper Reuben.

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Low Low Low, by James

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At the Thursday morning AA meeting this week, there were only six of us, all over sixty years old. It was a particularly enlightening get-together, starting with a reading from the book Daily Reflections. The last line of the reading went as follows:

… I practice a discipline in letting go of selfish attachments, caring for my fellows and preparing for the day when I will be required to let go of all earthly attachments.

The line struck me as soooo Buddhist, and I mentioned my feeling to the group. As we went around the tables each of us picked up on the theme of living a life with an eye cast toward its end, and it was interesting to hear from each member as they made their contributions. If there had been a younger member in the room that morning, they might have been repelled or bored to death by such musings, I don’t know. But to the six of us present talking of life and death was as natural as breathing.

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Brown Eyed Handsome Man, by Buddy Holly

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I do try to keep you all abreast of significant happenings in the world of cheese. I really do. But this year’s world competition sneaked up on me and dang, it was all over before I knew about it. This year a Swiss Gruyere won, but I’m not racing down to my local grocery store to look for it, because the production is small and the chances of a sample making its way to Paradise are the same as Kristi Noem being named Animal Friend of the Year by the ASPCA.

But there was a link in the article that caught my eye, suggesting something was the most dangerous cheese in the world. I mistakenly read the article, and now I am trying to find something to read that erases what I learned from my memory completely. All I will say is this – no freaking way would I knowingly have a bite. My suggestion would be to not follow the link I have provided and definitely not read the article.

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I’ve been a fan of the group U2 for more than forty years now. There have been a few albums that really hooked me and a few that I let slide and forgot about, but overall I notice that I responded most to those that explored social justice or spiritual themes.

Favorite album = The Joshua Tree, from 1987, no contest. Favorite song on the album … one of the most moving tunes I’ve ever heard … Mothers of the Disappeared.

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I would never have guessed that one day I would be playing that song while listening with new ears and appreciation. Because now we have our own version of Los Desaparecidos taking place here in America, what with the criminal gang ICE wandering our cities wearing masks and pulling people off the street without any pretense of following the law.

There will be a reckoning for these mobsters one day, their members’ names are being taken, in spite of the masks. But in the meantime brave citizens across this country are doing what they can to make ICE’s predations as difficult for them as they can.

What a challenge it is to live in what only can be called a rogue country and be governed by people you wouldn’t offer shelter to from a blizzard. There will be an end to this, I know, but Lord does it ever add a bitter taste to each day. When this rancid lump of spray-tanned avoirdupois is finally out of office and off the front pages perhaps we will have learned some lessons we need to learn to prevent another such dark time.

I say perhaps because if there is a lesson that I have taken to heart in my time on earth is that we know … the knowledge exists … of how humanity can live together in peace. We know how to feed one another, shelter one another, support one another, respect one another. We could do it. The problem has always been that we allow selfish considerations to keep us mired in mistrust and conflict.

A line from the King James version of the Bible offers a way of looking at the otherwise incomprehensible mess that is planet Earth, at least for me.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Indeed.

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Mothers of the Disappeared, by U2

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Here’s one of those true stories that can get friends going on for hours in a friendly fashion on a winter’s evening. Sigurd Olson was a northwoods guide, professor at a community college, author of more than a dozen books on wilderness, and a major player in getting the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota declared as a wilderness.

Any bookstore in northern Minnesota will stock Olson’s books, and I have read several. His first was named Singing Wilderness, and was published in 1956.

Olson lived with his wife in a modest home in Ely MN. Out back of the house was a small shack where he did much of his writing. On January 13, 1982 he had been working in the shack but decided to do a little snowshoeing and died out there of a heart attack.

On attending to his affairs this exact note was found which he had written earlier that day on his old typewriter.

(The print in the photo is rather small, so I will repeat it: “A new adventure is coming up and I’m sure it will be a good one.”)

Soooo, friends, did he have a premonition of his death? Or do people … some people anyway … read more into these few words than Olson meant? If you came over to visit this winter, we could make hot cocoas and argue about it until we tired and took to our beds. If we found that we really liked each other, we could argue about it the next night as well. I think that two successive nights would about do it.

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Impostor Syndrome

jono55

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day. I am a veteran, so I can legitimately stand up with other vets at public occasions when asked to do so. And although I did serve, wear the uniform, and go wherever the USAF wanted me to go, I always feel a bit of an impostor. Why, you ask?

Because:

  • I ended up in Nebraska, not Viet Nam.
  • I was never injured in action.
  • I was never under fire.
  • I spent the two years sleeping in my own bed, with my family comfortably nearby.
  • For me the worst part of national service was the inconvenience of a two-year interruption in my career plans. Pretty puny when put up against the sacrifices made by thousands of my brothers and sisters.

But technically speaking I am a veteran, and if you want to give up your seat at the opera or strew rose petals in my path, go right ahead. I would not be so rude as to correct you.

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Well Come Back Home, by the Byrds

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I have feelings galore about the weekend display of cowardice of many Democrats in the Senate, but Jon Stewart says it way better than I ever could.

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This has been a banner season for those who like political cartoons. At least for progressives. I like them because they cut right through any attempts at subterfuge and skewer those most in need of that attention.

The first one in the series is actually not a cartoon, but the back of a pumping truck seen while waiting for the light to change in Grand Junction this past Monday. It is the line at the top of the truck: “Filled with political promises” that started me laughing out loud.

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No snow as yet at the ski resorts nearby, Telluride and Powderhorn. The owners aren’t hopeful for Thanksgiving, but that’s not too unusual. Robin and I skied Alpine for the first 20 years or so we were together, but tired of the lines and the ever-increasing lift ticket prices. This year they are around $245 for a single day. We still enjoy Nordic skiing, but last year there were only a few days here in the valley that were good for that.

We are pretty demanding of perfect snow conditions, preferring days when the skis glide slower and control is as good as one can get. The idea of plowing into anything solid while wearing thin bits of wood and plastic on our feet is less and less attractive each year. When I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where several hundred inches of snow fell each year, Nordic skiing was wonderful. By December there were several feet of snow on the ground and new snow fell nearly every day. Going through a forest was almost surreal. All of the underbrush was buried and you moved silently through the trees, which were the only things protruding from the snow.

There was one drawback to this serene beauty, however, and that was that it attracted snowmobiles. Not content with the hundreds of miles of trails dedicated to their use, they brought the smell of exhaust and the deafening roar of their engines everywhere. Each time a line of them passed me I quietly wished I was armed with a rifle of a caliber large enough to pierce the motor of those beasts and send terror into the hearts of the riders. Yes, yes, I admit to violent reveries back then. And the language that echoed in my brain is embarrassing to recall.

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Snow (from the film Brokeback Mountain), by Gustavo Santaollalla

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talkin’ about your Madison shoes …

jono55

It’s now a couple of days since parts of America went to the polls and I am still basking in the warm glow that came from the burning of tyranny in effigy that took place on election day. It’s only a step, but as that guy Armstrong said in 1969: ” one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Of course there is still such a long way to go, and the outcome is still uncertain, but, hey, let’s just lie here for another few moments, sipping on our iced coffees and wondering whether Haagen-Dasz ice cream will ever come packaged with an Ozempic chewable nestled inside.

Here in Paradise there were mixed messages. The people whose first impulse at every election is to cover their fences with banners declaring “No New Taxes” even if there aren’t any tax-related issues on the ballot were successful in locally defeating a couple of state tax increases while across Colorado they passed handily. Our school board elections went entirely for conservatives and the hope is that at least they are among the Republicans who can read. It’s a high bar, but one can dream.

We had a recall election for a county commissioner who has been in office for only a year, but ha managed to reveal himself as incompetent, a bully, and a complete fool in that short time. He was recalled, and his replacement is an Independent who actually has credentials, experience, and can properly say the words aluminum and anonymous, which puts her above 99% of Americans in intellectual achievement.

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With our great leader now using children as pawns and denying food to millions of them just for spite, around our community people are bumping up their contributions to the local food banks.

Robin and I and some of our friends from Indivisible set up a table outside our City Market grocery on Friday loading as many canned goods into the back of the Subaru as the good people of Paradise will contribute.

We collected more than $1000 in canned goods and other non-perishable foods in just three chilly hours. It filled the back of our Subaru and spilled over into two more vehicles. When we delivered our stuff to Shepherd’s Hand, a local food bank, we were greeted by the workers with relief, for their shelves were becoming bare. At least two of them had tears in their eyes, and I scored three major hugs by large, strong, and grateful women.

It is beyond disgusting that our government is using the well-being of children to try to achieve their sorry ends. There appears to be no level of depravity too low for them. Really, it makes me wish I believed in Hell, that I might contemplate their futures with unholy glee.

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Let’s suppose that you are being interviewed by a visitor from another galaxy altogether. Let’s suppose that among the questions they put to you is this: “We keep hearing about something called rock and roll … what is that?” My suggestion would be to remain completely silent and play the following video for them. For me this is rock’s essence, being done by what must almost surely be one of the best American bar bands of all time. George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

Here they are playing I don’t know where at sometime in the past and when they were at their peak. I will now be completely silent.

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We had guests staying with us this weekend. Robin’s daughters Amy and Allyson were able to get away for a couple of days to come help Robin celebrate her birthday week.* A good time passed too quickly. Saturday we drove to the Black Canyon National Park to tour the burned areas and take the hike at the end of the road, which is named the Warner Point Trail. It winds through one of the remaining unburned sections and ends with a precipice on two sides.

Brisk autumn weather, good company, enough food to munch on and a warm place to do it in. Gracias a Dios.

*Robin and I are not sticklers for needing everything to happen on the actual anniversary of the date we were born, so we have renamed it birthweek. It is a much more flexible way to look at it as far as scheduling events, and you can have cake on enough successive days to be a serious health hazard. I am typing this while in the doctor’s office where I am being given purgatives to treat a bad case of the butter frosting blues..

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The Indifference of Heaven, by Warren Zevon

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We are slowly coming to the end of one of the most perfect Fall seasons I’ve experienced. Loooong slow turning of the leaf colors, along with cool days without the winds or freezing rains that tear the leaves from the trees prematurely. A slow-motion autumn.

I’ll close this post with a haiku by Matsuo Basho, an old friend of mine, notwithstanding that he passed away in 1694. We’ve had our moments together.

on a leafless bough
the perching and pausing of a crow
the end of autumn

[The photo was taken on a walk at the Black Canyon National Park in the year 2015.]

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Famous Last Words

jono55

Last night Robin and I watched the most unusual videotaped interview. It is apparently the first of a series, and it is presently available on Netflix. We thought it beautifully done. The title of the program is Famous Last Words. It was recorded in March 2025, and it had been deliberately planned that it would not be shown until after the interviewee had died. Throughout the hour there were numerous references to death, what it meant to her, what it would mean to those she left behind.

‘Twas a really remarkable summing up of the life of a really remarkable woman, Jane Goodall.

At one point she was asked if there were people that she didn’t like. Without missing a beat she listed several of them, and wouldn’t you know it, they were several of my least favorite people in the world as well.

Throughout the interview she sipped whiskey from a small and elegant glass, and she wanted us to know that she wasn’t an alcoholic, but that there were days where the cumulative insults to the planet called for a lot of sipping.

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Jane Goodall

Such a good program, such an interesting premise for a series.

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Leire Gotxi is a young woman who has made a career so far of. busking on the streets of London and posting videos of her performances. Her YouTube channel contains a surprisingly large catalog of covers and originals.

This one came to my attention quite by chance and well, it’s sharing time once again. This is a lovely cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.

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One of Colorado’s members of Congress, John Hickenlooper, is thinking of leaving the Senate and running for governor of the state. He is a Democrat, has actually been good for Colorado over a longish career now, but I hope that I don’t have to vote for him. He is not a “wartime consigliere.”

So far this year, he has largely been absent from the fray, posting perfunctory statements here and there. But we definitely need more vigorous prosecution of resistance to the Cluck regime than he is providing. We need warrior-statesmen, with emphasis on the warrior part.

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It’s the End of the World As We Know It, by R.E.M.

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Every once in a while somebody brings up the 25th Amendment to the Constitution as a way of removing Cluck from office. If he was deemed incapable of performing his duties, there is a mechanism for such removal, even if it is against his will.

One problem is that the mechanism requires that the vice-president and members of his cabinet must do the initial voting for removal. There is a built-in issue here, because it is this very group of incompetents that is part of the evidence for his incapacity.

This is Section Four of the amendment and has never been invoked.

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It’s uncanny how sometimes we will read of some new creature and then step out the door where BAM, there are two of them right on the lawn. Or think of a person who then proceeds to call you before you can even put the thought to bed.

That’s how I felt this morning, which was Robin’s birthday. Mine was just a week ago. But today I ran across a cassette which, if I can believe the identifiers on the tape, was recorded in the Garden of Eden. There is reason to believe that Adam and Eve set it up in secret, hoping to catch God out in some ungodlike pronouncement that they could use in the future. Politics was born right there.

But I digress. Here is part of the transcript, you can make up your own mind as to whether it sounds believable or not.

Adam: Birthday? What’s with that? Just this morning you told us that we were going to get old and wither and wrinkle and die. And for what? Stealing one apple. And now you say that each year we have to remind ourselves of our impending doom by counting off the trips around the sun.

God: Don’t come whining to me. We had a deal and you broke it. I can’t say “Oh Well Adam No Problem”, just go on as if nothing has happened and enjoy your eternal life in a body that will always be beautiful. If I let you two off the hook, one by one all the other animals will want special treatment.

Adam: It was all Eve’s fault, you know. I was happy with just the grapes and pomegranates. Didn’t need that apple at all.

God: You were in charge. You had the responsibility.

Adam: She’s not trainable

God: Part of the penalty

Eve: Hey, I’m right here! I can hear everything you say. It was a fake rule. The snake is probably a plant of yours. I agree totally with Adam. It’s bad enough to be mortal without having to talk about it every year in front of others. There is no good side to all of this.

God: Okay … because there is some truth in your feeling of being mistreated, I have created cake.

Adam and Eve: Cake? Wot … ?

God: I’ll send some over. You’ll like it.

And God saw that it was good, and Adam and Eve saw that it was good. And then God rested … with a small slice and some good black coffee.

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On our last trip to Grand Junction I snapped these photos in a single short alley. Murals are very popular out here in western Colorado, even in the smaller towns. This set has a definite indigenous flavor.

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Zombie, by The Cranberries

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Capitalist … Moi?

jono55

So I’m driving to the grocery store which is in the midst of a major reconstruction and rearrangement, so much that each trip there is like taking part blindfolded in a mad scavenger hunt where the host changes the location of everything every day. But that’s my pain and why should I make it yours?

On the drive over I heard a song on the radio that contained a line that caught my attention. Really, a great line, one that the song does not fully explain. But I have been there many, many times in my short life. Here’s the chorus:

I’m living a war with time
I could still reach out and touch you and I
Wish I didn’t know the things I know
I’m standing in an open door
None of it was overrated and I
Never gonna wanna let you go
But I want you to go
Don’t even ask me, just go

It’s the line “Wish I didn’t know the things I know” that opened the door of a room filled with recollections and remembrances for me … knowledge I could have happily done without … learning from experiences I didn’t plan to have.

In AA meetings I often hear the expression “I have no regrets.” I think to myself – are they bonkers? Is that really possible? Because it’s a bit of bravado that I certainly don’t share. I don’t dote on them, ruminate on them endlessly, or become entrapped by them, but regrets … I’ve had a few. But then again, as Frank Sinatra often sang, too few to mention.

Wish I didn’t know the things I know. Quite a line.

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The song I’m talking about, BTW, is entitled War With Time, by Brandi Carlile.

War With Time, by Brandi Carlile

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For me, at least, there is a short list of voices that I read nearly every day during these awkward times. Among them is the indestructible ancient Robert Reich, who wields a fiery pen and draws on a long lifetime hanging around politicians of all stripes. Right up there with him is Heather Cox Richardson, with her cool and level-headed assessments of the carnage as it happens. Next would be Timothy Snyder, whose book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century I read last Spring to fortify myself against the avalanche of horsepucky that Cluck and his enablers were bringing down upon our heads.

I came across the trenchant comment on the right, and even though it relates to No Kings by name, it could have been applied to the reading I do without changing the meaning one bit.

It helps to know that some very intelligent people are walking point for us, and that they can see that a positive resolution is possible, down what they predict is going to be a rough road. But success will come only if we are intrepid.

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What a striking image it is that accompanies the article on Mike Lee’s war on wilderness.

Woof.

I love it.

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A recollection dusted itself off and presented itself last Thursday, unbidden and unwelcome. Because it reveals that at heart I am just another damned capitalist.

When I was around six years old, my family acquired a new puppy named Mollie. She was, like all the dogs in our extended family were, of mixed parentage. We brought her to our home on Second Avenue, and she was the darling of the family for the week that she lived with us. Her visit was cut short by her escaping through the backyard gate and running into the street where a passing car … you know the rest.

I was heartbroken. I gathered her up and placed her small body in a shoebox, to be buried in the backyard later that morning. At some point I decided that a creature as cute and lively as she had been deserved a funeral, so I scheduled one which was attended by the other boys my age from the neighborhood. There was a eulogy (me), some memorial stuff on display (collar, food dish), and then the interment.

Where does the capitalism come in, you ask? Well … I charged a five cent admission.

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Once a year, because I don’t want to spoil you, I serve up this song of songs. It goes beyond being a favorite of mine, whatever the next rung up would be. I think it was CRISPR-ed into my DNA while I slept.

Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams, who is an American original.

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Leanin’

jono55

It’s 1946 and my family is decorating the Christmas tree while Perry Como is crooning songs from his new holiday album being played on an ancient 78 rpm record player which had been rescued from a rummage sale.

I am seven years old and this is the first Christmas that I know there is no Santa Claus. I don’t remember who told me, but no matter, I am still as excited as if that dreadful information had never reached my ears. I have chosen to accept both the literal truth (no Santa) and the imaginative truth (Santa) at the same time. Today, December 24, 1946, the imagination is holding perfect sway, and the power of Santa Claus is everywhere.

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Dreaming My Dreams With You, by Cowboy Junkies

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Came across this short film shot entirely with an iPhone.

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What we have all learned together these past years is that capitalism has a bunch of dirty secrets. One of them is that once you reach a certain level of wealth, you are almost immune to the problems that ordinary citizens face every day. And I’m not just talking about how much money they have. I’m talking about access to the levers of the machines that run the country, the stock market, the court system, etc. I’m talking about access to the politicians who are largely your own creatures, picked to do what you want to have done.

Turns out that the majority of people in politics seem unable to resist the smell of currency and the possibility of one day having piles of it around the house.

When Robin and I moved to Montrose, we considered ourselves Democrats, and once everything was unpacked we began to seek out others of our kind. Each year the local Democratic Party would put on a barbecue dinner for the membership, and we found it a very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. But each year we would look at the attendees and knit our brows.

Those sitting at the tables were very nice people, but almost all of them were white and either senior citizens or on the brink of becoming one. Youth was absent. People of color were largely absent. All in all it looked like a political party on its way to self-extinction.

And the came the year when the casual barbecues of the past were left behind. Now it was to be a 50 dollar a plate dinner at a “better” venue. That was the point we stopped going to these yearly get-togethers. If anyone needed to see why the Democratic membership was such a narrow slice of the electorate you didn’t have to look any further than the ticket price. It was automatic exclusion of anyone for whom that was a significant amount of money.

So the two of us became Independents, and remain so.

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That’s All You Need, by Faces

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Sunday was my birthday and Robin and I decided to celebrate by taking a hike at the Colorado National Monument. The trail we took wasn’t a long one, and we’re still feeling the COVID effects just a bit, but it was a beautiful day and the scenery was grand. We hiked the Serpent’s Trail, named because within a relatively short distance there are sixteen switchbacks.

We may have overdone it, feeling some mild malaise when we had returned home, but ’twas well worth it. And at the end of the day there was cake. Of course there was cake. You may leave off the gifts, the cards, the well-wishing, the parties. But if there isn’t cake a birthday simply does not happen.

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One of the facts of living at altitude 5900 feet is that we can see winter for weeks before it gets to us here in the valley. Because we have those magnificent San Juan Mountains in view. First a tentative whitening on the mountaintops that goes away with the first sunny day, then a snow covering that remains … at around 11,000 feet … then 10,000 feet … 9,000 feet. Then a few flakes on a chilly morning whistling down the streets of Montrose. A very gradual introduction to the winter season.

With all this warning going on, there is really little excuse for being caught short. If you haven’t got the snow shovels out and placed them where you will need them, if you haven’t winterized your lawn sprinkling system, if you haven’t checked the tread on the tires of your car for seasonal suitability … well, I just don’t know.

And yet every year there is something that I don’t get done. Something that didn’t get put away well enough. I like to think that these minor mistakes are part of a built-in DNA package that keeps me from becoming too satisfied with myself. The question becomes: How could I ever think that I was perfect if I did that? It’s what a boob would do.

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When Bill Withers wrote “Lean On Me” in 1972, toying around on a small piano with only the phrase ‘lean on me’ to guide him, he never could have expected the song — about a rural man’s loneliness in the big city — would become an inspirational anthem to those rising up after tragedy, or a celebratory rallying cry of togetherness and resilience in times of trouble.

Rolling Stone Magazine

Re-listening to this tune 53 years after it was first released I am struck by how well it fits our time. It is a song made for those loneliest moments in life. Simple lyrics but man, what comfort (and solid advice) they have to offer.

Lean On Me (Carnegie Hall concert), by Bill Withers

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Venom

jono55

When I was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, my family did a fair amount of camping. The territory was beautiful, the streams clear, and the evenings reliably cool. There were a lot of black bears around, enough that we would see one about half the time when we camped out. Be careful, give them their space, and never get between a mother bear and her cubs were common bits of advice.

Then on one camping trip, when we were two families backpacking to a cabin in the Porcupine Mountains, we encountered a puzzlement. Miles into the forest and walking on a good path we came across two small black bear cubs in a tree. Our kids were young and very excited, dancing about the tree in hope that these cute little critters might come down where they could get a good and proper petting.

The adults in the party were not as charmed by the situation. The puzzle was this. When you are looking UP at the cubs and have no idea where their mother is … which way do you go now?

We resolved the dilemma by deciding that where we were standing was the worst place of all to be, and without any more information to guide us than that, we pushed on ahead toward the cabin. We never saw the mother bear.

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Crunchy Granola Suite

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I’m not quite sure what variant of ADHD I have, but I’m pretty sure I am somewhere in the spectrum. Finding out exactly which niche isn’t important at my stage of life, and so I am not pursuing it. But it does get in my way at times. Not because it has held me back in my education or profession, but … let me give a for instance or two.

Flickering images draw my attention immediately and drown out other stimuli. What’s the problem? It means that having lunch and a conversation in a sports bar is nearly impossible. Having a dozen television screens all screaming silently “LOOK AT ME” simultaneously is completely distracting. I mean completely. Robin and I avoid such places whenever possible, but even our favorite pizza emporium (The Brown Dog) in Telluride has several screens going and I wouldn’t consider it a “sports bar” at all. What I must do (to indulge myself in the pizza that I am certain is the one served in Heaven) is to turn my chair to where I can’t see any of the screens. It works but also means a lot of staring at unadorned wall coverings. A compromise.

These days the political circus is much like the sports bar. There are myriad voices shouting at the same time “Here … here … watch … listen … I’m talking to you, dammit.” Not just the “bad” voices, but the “good guys” as well. When I click on a link indicating that I will attend a virtual discussion on, let’s say, the problems posed by ICE, I immediately get an email advertising a half dozen other worthy discussions in the future that I can also sign up for right this very minute. Each of them offers six more opportunities … there is no end to it.

Some early mornings, like this one, I get drawn down one rabbit hole after another by this cacophanous din. My filters can’t keep up with the stimuli, and I have to just shut things off. The computer, the television set, my iPhone … all of them. I step outside and shiver in the night air … looking up at more stars than this Minnesota boy ever saw growing up in a big city. Nature allows me to compose myself and get a bearing. Just before hypothermia sets in I go back indoors and attempt to keep the clamor at low volume by turning one thing back on at a time.

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Cherry, Cherry

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Our yearly war with the yellowjackets, those creatures that come straight from Hell without stopping, has become little more than a series of light skirmishes for the past two years. A change in strategy has made the difference. There is a company that makes plastic devices which you hang about the yard.

You next open the small sealed packet and take out a pod that contains a potent enough attractant that it warns you to handle it carefully and wash your hands after you are done to avoid becoming very interesting to the pests. You put the pod into the device and walk away. Hundreds of the wasps come in and can’t find their way back out.

But the change we’ve made has been in the timing. Very early in the season the queens show up looking for places to set up housekeeping. They build their nests all over the house, the backyard fence – anywhere they get a little protection from the elements. If you get the traps out and catch the queens before they get a chance to fully establish themselves and raise their families, your summer is much more serene.

Oh, you don’t have yellowjackets where you live and aren’t sure what I’m talking about? Well, o thou inquisitive one, here is what they look like. They each come with a potent offense, can sting you several times, and are exceedingly cranky. You don’t need to do anything to get stabbed except to be outdoors.

Like I said … from Hell.

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In late 1972 Neil Diamond brought out a live album called Hot August Night. At the time I was an impressionable lad of 33 years with a family, living and working in Buffalo, New York. I was really just beginning my exploration of alcohol back then, never thought of it as a problem, even though if my life was a movie and I was watching it now I would say “Of course … there it is.”

After everyone else was in bed and asleep I would take my beverage of choice to the small attic room on the third floor of our home and put this album on, cranking the volume to the point where the groundwork for the ringing in my ears I now enjoy every day was laid. I did love that album then, and even now it can stir me.

I’ve included three cuts from Hot August Night here today. I suggest playing it loud enough that you can’t think of anything else. At that point it became, at least for me, an almost transcendental experience.

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Holly Holy

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Adrenaline Junkie

jono55

I woke last night out of one of those reality-based dreams where for a moment or two after waking I was still half in it. It went like this.

A friend and colleague of mine who was working with me in pediatrics called me on the phone to tell me how my patients were doing. At the time I was out of town bicycling somewhere with Robin and staying in a small cabin.

As he was talking I became overcome with guilt and worry. When he told me that baby Murray was doing okay I thought who the heck is baby Murray and why haven’t I been going in to see him? How long have I been AWOL? Whatever am I going to tell his parents now when I do make rounds tomorrow? That I’ve been ill? Away on a vacation?

I got up and walked into the kitchen with a head full of miseries but as I was filling a glass with water I realized – Hey! I haven’t been practicing for twenty years. There is no baby Murray that I have been neglecting. It was a dream! I am off the hook!

I might also add that the colleague who had called me died eleven years ago.

But some of the emotional charge of the dream is still with me as I type this. Whatever chemicals are released in such a fight or flight fantasy-drama take time to dissipate. But they are being tempered by the huge sense of relief that came over me when I fully realized that I had done nothing wrong and there was nothing that I needed to atone for.

I’m not one to parse dreams looking for why this or why that or any kind of meaning. The fact that my brain is not wholly in my control becomes obvious every time I sit down to meditate. As I am trying to clear my mind that gelatinous ball of mischief keeps on spinning yarns and making stuff up. I assume that it loves when I go to sleep because it can then create scenarios without being interrupted.

Anyway, how are things with you? I am just peachy here.

***

Do I miss practicing pediatrics? Yes. No. Actually I’m still doing it, just secretly. If there is a person standing in front of me who is talking about some puzzling symptom their children are dealing with my mind takes the facts and runs with them, working to come up with a set of diagnoses. Happens automatically. Like a ChatGPT that is never off duty.

But, and this is a big one. I have no medical license any longer (too expensive to keep as a memento) and my clinical skills are -shall we be kind – rusty. Only if one of the diagnoses that I have come up with is a serious one that deserves being explored right now do I speak at all. And then I recommend that they see their physician ASAP. Otherwise I nod and listen without really listening.

I loved the challenges of emergency situations. This was when my variant of adrenaline junkie came into play. When you don’t know yet what is going on but you know that the clock is running and you get the chance to take everything you have learned up until that moment and bring it into play to try to solve a very high-stakes problem … that is a real high, my friends.

But there are those times when the clock runs out too soon and there is a crash to deal with. A version of depression mixed with self-recrimination sets in. I never learned to handle the losses well, but lordy did I love the wins.

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Fearless, by Pink Floyd

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By any account you are to read, except those emanating from Club Cluck, No Kings 2 was a dramatic and positive event. Prompted by the unholy mess that the New Fascist Party is making of our country, we found ways to rejoice in the feeling of solidarity that comes from finding thousands upon thousands of people who, like us, are shocked at our leaders’ bad behavior, ashamed of what is being done in our name, and resolute in taking the steps needed to replace this regime with thoughtful, firm, and honest leaders.

We are figuratively marching toward Washington DC right now. And we can already hear the mewling of the cowards there as they stare into crystal ball after crystal ball trying to find one with a good future in it for themselves.

Perhaps one day we will need to march there in person to show them where the door is and to turn them into the street where they can spend the remainder of their lives snapping at each other in dishonor and disgrace.

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Screenshot
Screenshot

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I was introduced to Sister Rosetta Tharpe way too late in my life. Here’s a link to a recent article on Substack with a whole bunch of videos of this amazing musician.

She told the truth about her craft in a way only the greats dare to: “These kids and rock and roll—this is just sped up rhythm and blues. I’ve been doing that forever.” And she was right. Before Presley shook his hips, before Berry duck-walked, before Little Richard shrieked his way into immortality, Sister Rosetta had already been there, guitar in hand, voice like a hurricane, planting seeds in soil that would grow the rock and roll forest.

Bill King, Substack

BTW, if you need more, there is way more. All you have to do is go to YouTube and type in her name. Riches will flow into your life.

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There is record of only one protestor being arrested during the national No Kings event, and that was a woman in Fairhope, Alabama. She was carrying a sign that read NO DICK TATOR! However, it wasn’t the sign that got her arrested, but her costume. If there is to be a No Kings Hall of Fame one day, surely this courageous and resourceful lass will be one of the very first to be inducted.

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Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd

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Under The Banyan Tree

jono55

Well, dang. After passing over us for years, COVID finally reached its clammy fingers into BaseCamp, our home. Robin came down with fever and a cough on a Monday night, and the diagnosis was confirmed a couple of days later. By Thursday I had symptoms as well, but much milder than poor Robin. Only three weeks ago we both received COVID boosters, so we hope to skip the worst part.

What burns most is that after the planning, making of signs and buttons, working with our committee on routes and safety issues … knowing that this may well be a historically important rally … we can’t go. Even if we felt physically able, there is the small matter of contagion. We are temporary pariahs and that’s all there is to it. What we may do is get into our car and do a bunch of drive-bys, adding some positive honking to the mix as the march passes by. We’ll see.

No matter. The 18th promises to be fascinating as millions of people (who so obviously hate America) get together to talk about our freedoms, the Constitution, redressing wrongs, taking care of our most vulnerable … and giving the good ol’ gang of thugs on Pennsylvania Avenue something to think about.

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Apparently Cluck has taken issue with being on the cover of Time Magazine. It’s the photograph. He thinks it is a poor one, and doesn’t catch a single one of his good angles. I don’t know … he’s got that Mussolini-chin raised, his eyes are on I dunno where, but it’s that neck and its doubled dewlap that seems to be the issue. Some observers have made scatologic fun of its appearance, but you won’t find any of that low sort of humor on this blog. Nossir.

Poor fellow. One of the most powerful men on the planet is turning into this creature in front of our eyes. Can’t the White House dermatologist do something? Isn’t there a lotion … ?

.

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Last night we watched a fine old film, one that both of us had seen years ago, but enough time had passed that only the faintest recollections remained. It was Elizabeth, from 1998 and starring Cate Blanchett and a host of fine actors including Daniel Craig and Kelly McDonald in small roles before they became really famous. Both Robin and I are seemingly endlessly interested in that part of English history beginning with Henry VIII and through to the end of Elizabeth’s reign.

I mean, geez, all that chicanery, plotting, religious warring, those heads being lopped off and all, what’s not to love? And what wouldn’t I have given to play the teensy part of an armored guard and having the chance to say: “Well, it’s off to the Tower for you, milady. Best pack a light bag.”

Nope, that’s back when politics was really fun, and the losers didn’t hang around to gripe over and over about things when each dustup was over. That’s because the losers were hung, beheaded, or chopped into several pieces and distributed around England to be displayed as object lessons. We could learn a lot from the past about what to do when a regime fell. ‘Twould make it more interesting if the consequences were a bit more substantial.

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Poco and I were spending some quality time with each other the other day, comparing aches and pains and the virtues of becoming old as dirt. It is his opinion that any energy spent on anything other than lying in a sunny spot during the warm part of the day is wasted. Being over the hill means that you are just that … over the hill. Accept it and get over it is his message. You can make a fuss, splutter and steam to your heart’s content, but it is a rare old gent or lady who is really listened to. Or if they are listened to it’s like: “Isn’t that cute? It can talk just like you or me.”

No, the days when the people of the tribe walked over to the banyan tree to consult with an elder are largely over. It’s too easy to say to oneself “What could someone who isn’t fluent on Instagram or TikTok possibly say that would be meaningful to me?” And I get it, I really do.

The pity is that so many of our problems are old ones dating back centuries and some of them do have remedies that have been worked out over generations. And thus that neglected information needs to be relearned and relearned anew, often painfully.

Oh well, I said to Poco, c’est la vie. Could you move over just a hair, I need a bit more sun on my left side.

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In November of 1975, I had only recently moved my family to Hancock, a small town on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The Keweenaw is a finger of land that sticks out into Lake Superior, on of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world.

On the night of November 10, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the big ore boats on the Great Lakes, disappeared in a Lake Superior storm. It was all the news in Hancock at the time, as was anything that happened on the Lake, but it wasn’t until Gordon Lightfoot recorded his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that the story was burned into our memories. The song played seemingly continuously on the radio back then, and every November afterward that we lived there. Lightfoot donated proceeds from his music to a fund for the widows and children of the lost sailors.

The NY Times ran a piece this week that brought up this old chestful of memories for me. I was working as a pediatrician in Hancock in 1975, and I had nothing to do with Great Lakes shipping, but if you lived anywhere that touched Lake Superior you were affected because of the enormity of the lake and of it’s caprices. Taking a boat ride out on the lake? Better have a good boat with working radar because fogs didn’t always roll in on you like they were supposed to do, sometimes they materialized in a minute all around you and finding your way back home became a measure of your skill as a navigator.

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot

The song is a haunting one, and some of that feeling of dread and loss comes up when it is played, even fifty years on. There is a line toward the end of the song that stands out for me.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

It could also apply to any of those situations in life where one minute you are living in your everyday world and the next you are trying to survive what has blindsided you. Time slows down as horror slips in and now nothing is the same and never will be again.

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The national No Kings protest of October 18 was larger by millions than the first one, back in June. I don’t have local numbers at the time of this writing, but the crowd was solid. Robin and I weren’t well enough to mingle and march, and certainly didn’t want to spread our misfortunes to the celebrants, but we couldn’t stand missing the event completely so we got into our car and drive down to where the rally was taking place.

We had attached a large NO KINGS sign to the door of the car on the passenger side and we drove slowly along the line of marchers on the sidewalk with the windows open and the radio blaring Fire On The Mountain over and over again. The crowd responded vigorously and clapped for us as our Subaru “float” drove past and we in turn clapped for them. After circling the marchers’ route several times we dropped out and returned home to the infirmary to continue with more boring routines involving lots of well-earned coughing and self-pity.

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Fire On The Mountain, by Jimmy Cliff and others

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

jono55

Well, we’re three days away from the already infamous upcoming demonstration called No Kings. I’ve learned from listening to the Speaker of the House of Representatives that it’s going to be nothing but a collection of Antifa traitors, paid demonstrators, and people who hate America.

Funny, I thought it was more a collection of people who were opposed to tyranny and to being governed by spitwads. But, I have been wrong before …

I guess we’ll just have to wait until the weekend comes and determine for ourselves what the truth is. For my part, I’ve got my signs made, my buttons in order, and an umbrella in the car just in case our present monsoon season carries through to Saturday. Looking forward to a brisk walk along a line of middle fingers being extended from pickup windows.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott-Heron

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There is no good news today for those who have clung to the belief that a little bit of poison was somehow still a good thing. A very large and well-done recent study came to the conclusion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. Even sporadic usage increases the drinker’s risk of developing a host of disorders.

For myself, of course, I found out quite a while ago that alcohol dramatically increased my chances of making a fool of myself, bumping into walls and doorknobs, and finding that I’d parked my car in a stranger’s garage with me in it. Magically, all of those things improved when I switched beverages.

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What’s Going On?, by Marvin Gaye

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Robin and I drove to Grand Junction to see a three-hour long movie about authoritarianism and an ongoing revolt against it. Kind of cinema verité, non? But the film was quite a ride, and the hours flew by. Near the end, there was a car chase unlike any I’d ever seen, the cameras turning the road into something akin to a roller coaster track.

Let’s see, what was the theme? Oligarchs versus the oppressed? Fascism versus freedom? Sobriety versus soddenness? Old powerful white men versus everybody else? Hard to pin it down.

But there are heroes, ferocity aplenty, and even small doses of humor.

We were glad we made the trip. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 95%. The only downer, and one that is still smarting hours to a cheapskate like myself long after we’d returned home, is that the Regal Theater charged us $6.99 for a small Diet Pepsi. Unbelievable. They should be flying the Jolly Roger at the concession stand, and the concession workers outfitted in buckle and swash.

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The Wheel, by the Grateful Dead (Live at Fox Theater)

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A very long time ago my friend Rich and I were attending an Academy of Pediatrics meeting in New York City. We shared a room, went to lectures and presentations together, walked about the area near our hotel together, and took most of our meals together.

One evening we decided to attend an off-Broadway production, and selected Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. It was a mildly outrageous production and truthfully all these years later I couldn’t tell you one song or line of dialogue.

What I do remember is that while we were joking to ourselves about how much time we were spending in each other’s company we looked around at the audience, which we now realized was composed entirely of same-sex couples. We did not stand out at all.

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Some “No Kings” items. More than 2500 demonstrations are now planned for October 18 across the 50 states. Here’s a map.

What is just as interesting to me is that demonstrations are being planned in at least 18 countries around the world in solidarity with U.S. citizens. They include Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Japan. Like the man said, we have friends everywhere.

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Burning the Marigolds

jono55

Those of us living in Paradise are a long, long way from the turmoil in Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles, but we do have television sets and newspapers and while all of us are alarmed at the indiscriminate violence being unleashed by the Cluck administration, some are frightened enough to be rethinking their involvement in resistance movements. The realities of being involved in protest against lawless regimes are becoming more real. The more successful these movements become, the more they will be targeted. It is not to be expected that thugs with power will relinquish or restrain that power with good grace.

Having already been schooled in Nonviolent Protest 101 (civil rights movement) and Nonviolent Protest 102 (anti-Viet Nam-war protests), I have been aware since the beginning that there were risks, so while I can’t claim to be unconcerned, I am not at all surprised. The next large national demonstration (No Kings 2) is only six days away, on October 18, and the members of our small-town chapter of Indivisible will be out there doing our thing. Indivisible, of course, is not the only group involved in this movement, it is one part of a large and growing network of organizations who share a repulsion at what the Cluck gang is doing, and who come together to work at limiting the damage they can do.

We have been very much encouraged by the neutrality and professionalism of our local police department. The presence of their black and white cruisers seems to cool the ardor of the occupants of the flagged-up pickup trucks who roar past shouting obscenities and extending middle fingers.

Thus far there have been no episodes of direct confrontation, no scuffling or punches traded. Our plan is always to keep that number at zero if possible. Those of us who are involved in the planning of the demonstrations are getting quite a lot of training in the de-escalation of threats and in what we can do to stay safe.

On a lighter side, one of the aims of our local leadership is to gently discourage the carrying of signs prominently displaying the “F” word. Of course there is no censorship, but guidance is definitely provided.

But if you come to Paradise on the 18th and want to carry a banner that says Eff The Effing Fascists you will be warmly welcomed. Your presence is more important than the precise language you choose to express yourself.

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Chicago, by Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young

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This week Robin and I re-watched the movie Ghandi. What an excellent and inspiring story, revealing what change a single determined man or woman might achieve if their motives and objectives were clear. The film won seven Oscars in 1983, and deserved every one of them.

It’s available for viewing on Prime for the princely sum of 354 rupees.

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Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot

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One of the sure signs of impending cold weather is the death of the marigolds. At 33 degrees Fahrenheit they are fine, at 32 they all die. Back during the several-year-period between my divorce and meeting Robin, my friend (who will remain unnamed to protect his exemplary reputation) and I would celebrate the changing of the seasons by gathering all those dead flowers after that first hard frost, open several bottles of Pilsner Urquell, and sit around a ceremonial campfire in my backyard. I think we were trying to work out what it all means … you know … meaning of life and that sort of stuff.

It wasn’t Burning Man by any means, but the Burning of the Marigolds was a short-lived tradition that did not survive the two of us going off and starting new marriages and new lives.

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For What It’s Worth, by Buffalo Springfield

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The calling out of the National Guard is not a new thing at all. What is new is that this time it isn’t needed at all, but is instead part of a traveling roadshow being staged by the present regime. There are hazards in calling up the Guard, and especially when they are armed. These are not combat-ready, steel-nerved and battle-hardened troops. They are younger servicemen and women, weekend warriors and summer soldiers from down the street.

One fine day in May of 1970 a group of such National Guardsmen faced a large group of protesters at a rally at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio. Some of these protesters threw stones at the Guardsmen. Things went very wrong and suddenly there were four dead students, victims of rifle fire of frightened young men in uniform. Nine other students were also wounded in the volley.

Within a very short time, this next song was on the charts.

Ohio, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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Yesterday being a dreary day, with clouds and damp and all, we betook ourselves to the town of Delta, a 20 mile drive from home. Our aim was to find a new spot to eat lunch, and voila! – there it was, the Taqueria Master. The food was good enough to merit a return visit on another day. I had my first chorizo taco and it was tasty.

One of the menu items was a taco where the meat source was labeled “cabeza.” That gave me pause, and I asked myself: “On this day, the 10th of October in the year of our lord 2025 do you really want to find out what goes into a cabeza taco?” And my answer to myself was “No.”

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This cartoon came across my computer/desk this week, and for me it is one of those haunting images that I cannot shake. I don’t know exactly what its author meant to tell us, and a search for that person’s identity ended when I ran into only Arabic language resources. But what I see is a father returning to a ruined city in Gaza where the ghosts of his children play.

The children’s names below appear on a list of victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, maintained by health authorities in the territory. As of the end of July it ran to 60,199 names, of whom 18,457 were under 18s. Far from comprehensive, the list does not include the thousands still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, as well as the war’s many indirect victims.

The Guardian

If one child is killed during a military offensive it is a tragedy, the euphemism “collateral damage” is often applied to such deaths. But on this scale … it is a crime that goes beyond anything that can be so categorized. Hamas bears responsibility for the ugliness and horrific violence of October 7 two years ago. But the Israeli government, its leadership, and its army committed this crime against humanity. You do not kill this many children unless you make no distinction between combatants and civilians. I believe that the briefest glance at the article in The Guardian from which the above quote was taken will sicken most readers, as it did me.

The murderers on both sides should be exposed and brought to judgment. We must speak for the silenced children.

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Life Gets Teejus, Don’t It?

jono55

Good morning to you all, let me welcome you to the nascent police state that our nation’s highest “public servants” are trying their best to establish. I say “trying” because so far they are running a script resembling that of the movie “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Not that they aren’t doing awful, horrible things. They may be inept and clumsy, but they are a bunch of killers and psychopaths and traitors and pedophiles and Lord knows what else who are holding some pretty sturdy reins of power. Until they are all taken down and put someplace where they can’t hurt people any more, we will keep reading of or experiencing events that are foreign to the America I grew up in and any country that I would want to live in.

I will return to an idea that I have voiced at least once before. Remember after World War Two was over and quite a few Nazis were executed? Of course you do. But a handful were imprisoned, and one of them, a Rudolf Hess, served out his life sentence, finally dying in prison in 1987.

After the war, Hess was tried at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, convicted, and given a life sentence. He served his sentence at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where from 1966 he was the sole inmate. After his death in 1987, Hess was buried in Wunsiedel, Bavaria, and his grave later became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In 2011 it was decided that his body should be moved. Hess’s remains were subsequently cremated, and his ashes were scattered in an unidentified lake.

Britannica.com

My idea, since there would be many convicted of treason when Cluck goes down, is to give them a small island of their very own, and never allow them to leave. I don’t know, maybe something like Devil’s Island is available, we could ask the French. But either way, an island where there is no communication with the outside world, no internet, no theaters, and the only books in the library were autobiographies of Democrats.

One by one, as they passed away in isolation their ashes could be scattered in unidentified lakes and fish hatcheries. I can’t imagine any punishment more awful or tedious for this nasty group than the lifelong company of one another.

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Bird On A Wire, by Jennifer Warnes

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Our hummingbirds have left. It’s now been five days without a sighting. That means autumn is officially here. By now these birds who have been our official cheerer-uppers are halfway to Mexico, where they have winter homes. It’s a good plan. Robin and I will have to cheer each other, which is handicapped by the fact that neither of us can hover.

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Yesterday Amy and Neil took Robin and I for a ride up to a ghost town named Animas Forks. It is located a few miles above the town of Silverton, at altitude 11,000 feet, and the last few miles of the old road there require serious four wheel driving. It’s not hazardous or technical, but basically is a path of hard, sharp, and irregular rock that could do harm to ordinary tires.

(Disclaimer: yesterday was not a particularly good day for photos, so these pix are not mine, but are taken from the internet.)

The buildings there are in pretty good shape, and we were allowed to enter them and explore, with posted caution signs everywhere to watch our step since the floorboards are … shall we say … old.

I found a revelation up there. Outhouses that were inhouses. At least two of the dwellings had hallways that led to those venerable toilets, which also had a door directly to the outside. Since a ton of snow fell up there each year and the miners were in the town year-round, it would have been a blessing not to have to trek through several feet of snow to answer each call of nature. But I had never seen such an arrangement before, and mine is a life containing quite a bit of acquaintance with privies.

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We’ve been watching a series on PBS called “Indian Summers.” Apparently during the Raj some of the British governing class went to the mountains to escape the lowland heat. There they spun their webs, had their affairs, schemed, plotted, and did all sorts of the things that entitled people do. In this series, the characters are interesting, the sub-plots numerous, and an awful lot of history is crammed into a few episodes. I’m not sure what the Indian word for soap opera would be, but this was a tasty one and was expensively filmed to boot.

It’s a different animal — leaning more toward sex-charged melodrama than genteel parlor comedy — but if you have a taste for good-looking British people misbehaving in beautiful surroundings, it may do just fine.

New York Times

We’ve enjoyed it, but the two seasons are now over and it’s on to other things. One of them will be to re-watch Ghandhi, a classic film about India which is on quite a different level, and a favorite of both of ours.

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Not Dark Yet, by Steinar Raknes

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If you look at the quietly comfortable mess that is my “office,” you get only one hint at the national turmoil outside. There are political pinback buttons everywhere, in different stages of production. I’m well into my second thousand of them by now, and have had a lot of fun with the project.

There have been frustrating days when the simple machines that I use choose non-cooperation as their rallying cry, and not every button begun has ended up on someone’s lapel, but there are those flung into the trash instead.

You do know by now that I do not regard machines as inanimate, but having their own … souls … I guess might be the word. We only see this when they choose to go rogue, denying us whatever pleasure we were supposed to have in using them. I do everything that I have been doing for weeks and suddenly I can’t get a proper button out of them to save my neck.

Cries of aaarrrrgggh and noooooohhhhgodnooooohhh ring through the house as I leaf through the Yellow Pages looking for the phone number of a nearby exorcist. At such times I can clearly hear the demons snickering just around the corner in another room.

But hey – it’s onward and upward and don’t spare the horses and Rome wasn’t built in a day and what’s that smell, anyway? There’s a country to save and supper to be made and I haven’t been to the gym in four days. Best to get at it.

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Little Frigates

jono55

I can point to a short list of writings that have been truly formative when it comes to my view of life as a human being on a small planet. Their messages somehow stuck in a brain that too often seems to have a teflon surface, allowing many bits of knowledge that might have been important to fall to the floor and be swept away with the crumbs of that last bag of Cheetos. Put these books together and they could easily be carried in a knapsack.

What might these wonders be called, you ask? Here’s my list:

  • Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • The Bible
  • Buddhism Without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor
  • The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
  • Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry (yes, yes, a Western novel)
  • The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

At the head of the class is “The Four Agreements.” I really didn’t fully take it in until the second reading, and each subsequent perusal has reinforced its lessons. It is a straightforward owner’s manual for a freer life. Free of what, you say? Well, of shame and self-hatred and personal bigotry, just to mention a few items.

  • Be impeccable with your word: Speak with integrity, meaning, and truth. Use the power of your word to express yourself and your needs, rather than to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.
  • Don’t Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you; their words and actions are a reflection of their own reality, not yours. You won’t be the victim of needless suffering if you are immune to the opinions and actions of others.
  • Don’t Make Assumptions: You avoid misunderstandings and drama by finding the courage to ask questions and express what you truly want. Communicate clearly with others to prevent confusion and sadness.
  • Always Do Your Best. Your “best” is not static; it changes depending on your health, energy, and the circumstances of the moment. Accept that your best will vary and give your all in every situation.

Simple, right? Turns out that I like simple very much.

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There Is No Frigate Like A Book

by Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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What’s missing from the list above? Well, almost anything written by the man who I took as my teacher, even though we never met. His name is Thich Nhat Hanh. A Buddhist monk who worked all of his life for peace, and who taught that the way that I can contribute to peace in this world is to become peace in myself.

He told a story taken from the tragedy of the boat people in Viet Nam, who fled the country after the turmoil of the war. Of a twelve year-old girl who was raped by pirates and who then threw herself into the sea to drown.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.
When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate.

Thich Nhat Hanh, from the website Plum Village.

This story gave rise to a poem of his, Please Call My By My True Names. Here is a recording of Thich reading his poem.

Please Call Me By My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh

These days I am finding this teaching of his helpful in dealing with the conundrum posed by living among MAGA adherents. My first impulse when I hear one of them speak is usually to want to part the person’s hair with a stout cudgel. What holds me back is a suspicion that “if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate.” Substitute MAGA for pirate and there I might be.

I have no illusions about anyone being able to love these misguided ones back to happy normalcy. They are people so filled with hate and anger and fear that some of them are actually dangerous as a result and are quite capable of committing violent acts. But I can keep myself from letting their fear and hatred infect me by realizing that repulsive as their thinking and behaviors might be, I need not answer them in kind. It is chance that put me on one side and not the other.

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A Life of Illusion, by Joe Walsh

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I am reclaiming for myself the word “comrade.” For most of my life, that word was ceded to Communists for their private use by books, movies, plays … not a single one of the good guys in those stories was ever called “comrade.”

Comrade: a member of the same political group, especially a communist or socialist group or a labor union

Cambridge English Dictionary

But I like the word. It feels good rolling off the tongue. Do you know of a better expression of solidarity with someone, or a group of someones? So I am taking it back. Sorry, all you Communists and Socialists and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks … you have to share. It’s the right thing to do.

Comrade: a friend or trusted companion, esp. one with whom you have been involved in difficult or dangerous activities, or another soldier in a soldier’s group

Cambridge English Dictionary

And how appropriate for these troubled days we’re living in. Difficult or dangerous activities? You might call protesting the governance of a madman with a secret police force of masked unprincipled thugs a risky enterprise. A man who is presently showing us his disdain for life and the law by blowing up boats and the people in them? I don’t want to overstate things, but I don’t put anything past the noxious criminal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So if I call you comrade, I hope that you don’t take offense. Even if you don’t particularly care for the term, I am expressing my respect for you and what you are doing.

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EXPLANATORY NOTE: I have made a small change in the image on the margin of these digital pages, substituting the Straw Hat pirate flag for the upside-down American flag. The Straw Hat pirate flag has come to symbolize freedom, dreams, unity, and defiance against oppression. Although its origins are in a comic strip, in the real world the flag has been adopted by protesters in countries like Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, England, France, and even the United States as a banner for youth-led protest and resistance to authoritarianism. I may not be a youth on the outside, but my inner child (NO FAIR! I’M TELLING!) has definitely been awakened and is now pulling many of my strings. 

And, BTW, my inner child loves the pirate flag.

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MEMENTO MORI

Earth lost a real human being this past week, which is really too bad. There are never enough of them around. Jane Goodall came into my awareness in the late sixties and following her career has been an inspiration to me ever since.

Not a plaster saint, she was a forceful and determined worker for the rights of animals, including our own species. Wish I could’ve had her over for coffee, just to talk about those things that moved her most. Perhaps she’d have been too busy, what with working to save the planet and all, but I still could’ve asked. Missed that boat.

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