Fruit trees are blossoming!
Willows are leafing out!
Daffodils are showing!
Robins are back!
Blackbirds are back!
Bluebirds are back!
Calves in pastures
Lambs in meadows
People are smiling!
Boomboxes playing
What is happening?
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It has sprung.
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This lovely video above was filmed in the awesome Badlands National Park of South Dakota.
Back in 1987, I turned my ex-wife, and said: “You know, this October I am turning 58, and I haven’t had a mid-life crisis yet. Do you have any suggestions for me?” It turned to that she did, and it was a doozy. Before that very same birthday rolled around I was a single man.
As I have done since I was in my mid-teens, I turned to music when the clatter in my head grew too loud and a bit of respite was needed. I found that I could replace that mental static with a song. For the next couple of years, there was a short list of perhaps a dozen tunes that were in very frequent rotation. Looking back, I can’t see much of a pattern in them, and they would go in and out of the daily playlist depending on my sense of the world at that given moment. But they were always there, arrows in my quiver for use when life would place dragons on the stoop.
I’ll post a few of them here today.
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In 1956, driving home from work at the grocery store, I head a song on the radio that stuck in my head. You know how it is, you go through your day with noise of all sorts passing by you and your brain, luckily, ignores most of it. Then, for whatever reason, one of those sounds sticks, like a dart on a board. The tune was Frankie and Johnny, and the artist a man named Lonnie Donnegan. I bought the album and every song was a winner for me, even at that age. Playing that LP on the cheap equipment that I owned at the time I eventually wore it out, so I bought another copy. Later on that album was lost, and when digital music came ’round, it hadn’t made the cut. Still hasn’t. But I found later on that all of the tunes that had been on that original album were now available on other Donnegan collections. He and I have become great pals that never met.
Album title: An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs
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I ran across Richard Thompson in 1982, when I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights in Rolling Stone. Since then his music has been with me as a constant presence. Going through his catalog quite a while back I came across Beat the Retreat, which I absolutely loved. Such mournful guitar work … my, oh my. Later on in life when times were melancholy it was a song to turn to. Not for solace, perhaps, but to help put words to feelings that were as yet inchoate.*
*I’ve never used “inchoate” before. Nifty word.
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Phoenix is the sort of tune that might have been sung Karaoke-style way after midnight by a middle-aged man in his cups who was swimming in self-pity and loss.
If any of you know of such a Person of Pathos, recommend it to them. It contains something more than slender hope, it holds out the possibility of triumph.
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Friends, Elon Musk and I (we are bffs) would like to recommend the messaging app Signal to you.
Signal is free to use and available on both Android and iOS operating systems. Alongside the extra security protocols, it includes all of the basic messaging tools you’re going to need, including read receipts, emoji support, group chats, and voice and video calls.
Company website
Not only is it better at keeping your secrets than its predecessors, there is always the chance that you will get to sit in on a national security session where they talk about war, bombs, and other cool stuff!
And it doesn’t cost you a cent. With emojis, yet.
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There is a continuing puzzlement in the world of birds and their admirers. When it was discovered that John James Audubon was not only a slave owner himself but a dealer in slaves the National Audubon Society had to do some soul-searching vis-a vis the name of their organization. Two years ago the national group decided they would maintain the name as is.
But they set up a problem for themselves, because many of the individual smaller groups under their big umbrella have been repulsed by the knowledge of Audubon’s misdeeds and renamed themselves.
John James Audubon.
Dealer in slaves and painter of birds.
It seems a shortsighted move on the part of the National Audubon Society to keep a name that honors a man who we now know to have trafficked in human beings. I think it inevitable that they will make the change one day, but by then they may have lost connection with these smaller organizations who have been more progressive in this regard. All of those will have new names of which they may have grown fond.
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From The New Yorker
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Most of those who are reading this paragraph thought they were Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Greens when they got up this morning. But in reality, there are really only two political parties in this country at present. There is the party of Trump and there is everybody else.
I am only one voice. One person has very little power, but two people have twice as much, four people four times as much … you get the picture. For the longest time I sat on my posterior expecting the Democratic Party to fight my battles and to look out for my interests as a citizen. That was a mistake. I am looking for new banners to march under now, new allies in the struggles for a better world.
Why do anything? Why not let it all play out on its own? Well … I have a short list for thee:
Remember when I said “the party of everybody else?” Well, this amorphous party dwarfs the Trumpian grotesquerie in numbers, and if it can be awakened and shown the way to use its power I believe that much of the harm that has been done could be repaired. We could even go so far as to strengthen our institutions against intrusions by future crops of lowlifes.
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From The New Yorker
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How about a few quotes to get the old brain focussed on a Sunday morning?
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
Ahhhh, that felt good. There is more than enough knowledge out there that could be used to build a society where we could live in mutual respect and develop just relationships, while largely saying goodbye to fear and want.
If you dig through the accumulated wisdom of humankind you come up with a conundrum. If we know what to do, and have been offered clear instructions for thousands of years as to how to do it, why do humans find themselves in one pickle after another? Why do we keep making such eminently bad choices? Why is it so easy to exploit us and pit us against one another?
(Please note the absence of anything coming from me that approaches being an answer to these questions.)
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I do have one positive suggestion to offer. Remember the story of the old woman at her 100th birthday party? She had been married to her husband for seventy years until his passing a few years back. An interviewer asked her how she had maintained a happy marriage to one man for that long. Without a pause she answered: “Low expectations”.
That might sound like a rueful or negative answer, but isn’t it really a re-statement of Mr. Voltaire’s aphorism: “Don’t Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good.” The phrase reveals the pitfalls of perfectionism. The pursuit of perfection can lead to inaction or the abandonment of valuable, but imperfect, solutions.
The lady in the story recognized this and took her man for what he was rather than exhaust herself in making him into someone he might never be. Perhaps she kept the small hope that he wouldn’t chew his food with his mouth open or wear stripes with plaids, but she was willing to wait it out while enjoying his company.
A society could do the same thing. Pick the good stuff out of the mess in front of it, and accept that as a beginning. Then move forward in a process of continuous and methodical improvement rather than have some pre-formed idea of a perfect final product and fight over how to get there.
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At present we have a set of socio-political problems that don’t lend themselves as well to the gradual approach outlined above. May I offer a poor example of a parable?
A farmer looks out his window and sees that his fields need some serious tending or the crops will wither and die, but there is a grizzly bear in the yard between him and the fields. He knows what he needs to do to save his grain, but first … he needs to deal with the bear.
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Each year large flights of Sandhill Cranes pass near Paradise on their migration north, and spend an evening on a small reservoir near a very small town an hour away from our home. The local Audubon Society sets up spotting scopes in several places near the water and invites the public to come for a viewing. Friend Rod and I drove out Saturday morning and did just that.
We only saw nine cranes, which apparently were the vanguard of a much larger flock coming tomorrow and Monday. No matter. The ones we saw were big and beautiful.
The host birders also found a golden eagle sitting on some irrigation equipment and a nesting pair of bald eagles for us to look at.
At noon a livestock association served up a free meal for the public. Free. Food. Took a few photos.
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At what point do all of the awful misjudgments, illegalities, consorting with enemies, abandonment of principles, and corruption begin to add up to what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors?
How much damage does Cluck have to do to our country before he is thrown unceremoniously out of the office, and all of the locks changed on the doors behind him?
How bad do things have to get before Democrats are willing to do more than puff and splutter? These fractious times call more for our elected representatives to stand up like this heroic man in Tiananmen Square did.
Members of Congress need to begin acting more like Winston Churchill and less like Neville Chamberlain. To see clearly what is happening. To take their oaths to the Constitution as the deadly serious promise that they made.
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
If Cluck and his minions are not enemies of our Constitution I confess I don’t know what would be. In only three months they have done more damage to our government, to our reputation among the countries of the world, and to our national economy than I would have believed possible in so short a time.
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Sunday was like the unofficial first day of spring here in Paradise. The municipal golf course near our home was jammed, and so many motorized carts were in use that I actually saw someone pulling their clubs along in the ancient way, in a two-wheeled cart. Knowing the aversion to physical exertion that is the hallmark of the typical golfer, I wonder that the industry hasn’t gone the full mile and attached some sort of arm to the electric cart that will swat the ball for you into a perfect AI-guided arc. That way one would never have to leave the conveyance.
We dropped down to Riverside Park and found hundreds of people enjoying the day wandering on the paths or playing with their children on safely rounded-off equipment. Walking on the main path was like being in the middle of the Westminster Dog Show, with scores of canines being led around by harassed-looking owners. One particular woman seemed at the mercy of the Siberian Husky she had on leash and which was leading her wherever it wanted to go.
One young man was attempting to lead three strong animals. Watching this foursome reminded me of those gruesome scenes in old movies where a captive is dispatched by tying arms and legs to four horses … .
One grove of trees along the river was the place of origin of a chorus of red-winged blackbird calls and chatterings, the first such avian music this year. Lovely to hear.
It was a warm enough day that the aroma of last year’s dry leaves was everywhere in the park. Water levels in the Uncompahgre River were at the lowest we’ve seen them in a long time. Still pretty but not enough to float a raft or kayak.
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From The New Yorker
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The idea of self-denial during Lent seems to be fading in the general population, although I have no data to support my conclusion. It used to be that in almost any conversation during this part of the church year the phrase “What are you giving up for Lent?” came up. Haven’t heard it in years.
Personally, when I gave up alcohol almost twenty years ago I figured that this punched my Lenten card for the rest of my life. I had already stopped smoking a pipe, which had been a serious blow to my mental health (although my cough went away).
Enough was enough, said I. If I’m going to be sober and smoke-free, giving up one more thing for Lent would only turn me into a bitter man and an unfit person to be with.
As long as you brought up pipe-smoking … you didn’t … well, anyway, as long as we’re on the subject, that is one bad habit that I think back on fondly. I loved the rituals, rounding up the tools and equipment, ordering exotic tobaccos from British and Dutch companies, making my own blends … there I go, drooling on the keyboard. Buying a new pipe had taken on an almost religious significance. The patterns in the briar, the shape and size of the bowl, the materials used in the stem … ahhhh … those were the days.
The fact that I was basically a noxious cloud of secondary smoke on two feet never entered my mind. I smoked in automobiles, in restaurants, on airplanes, while making rounds in hospital. Really unbelievable, nest-ce pas? Now that I am so much closer to perfection as a human being I can look back on those days and say Tsk, tsk, what a bonehead!
(BTW, on the subject of smoking on commercial aircraft, it was only last October that the FAA did away with a rule that required an off-switch on the No Smoking sign on planes.)
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From The New Yorker
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I’ve learned something new this year, and it’s only March. If a group invites a politician to a “town hall,” and the invitee senses an uncomfortable evening and tells them to go ______ themselves, the group then sometimes holds the meeting without them and calls it an empty chair town hall.
Sweet.
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Here’s what it looked like when we attended such a town hall Monday evening via computer. The program originated in Colorado Springs.
You can see the cardboard man in front of the room. He represented Jeff Crank, the absent invitee. There were 250 people in the room and another 650 online. Good turnout on just a week’s notice.
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(The Ugly American was a best selling novel of the late fifties. It detailed blundering and arrogance in the US diplomatic service ini Southeast Asia, and its message is completely relevant today)
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David Brooks is just plain smart and a sensible conservative. In Friday’s New York Times he published an op/ed piece entitled: “It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.”
This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.
David Brooks
The article rings both sad and gut-wrenchingly true. My advice would be not to read it unless you have a strong cup of coffee at hand and your affairs in order. As for me, I have no intention of letting the sonofabitches just walk away with my America and I plan on being as big a pain in their ass as possible.
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From The New Yorker
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Every once in a while I place several versions of the same song on these pages just because I find them interesting. God’s Gonna Cut You Down is one of those. Basically it promises that even though “the long-tongued liar, midnight rider, rambler, gambler, and backbiter” may seem successful today, eventually they are due for a celestial kneecapping.
Since I personally know several people who I feel roundly deserve such attention from God, I find that the song has a comforting message. My hope is that I live long enough to see it happen, on a blue-sky day where I have a front row seat and a big box of popcorn.
It goes without saying that I hope the Deity doesn’t get around to my particular sorts of sins and my own exposed kneecaps, but focusses on those of others.
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Okay, I’m going to ask quite a bit of you in this next section. While wandering in the internet dreamscape (nightmarescape?), I came across a longer video. Against my will I watched it, because my natural inclination is to never watch a video more than 17 seconds long. I find that my personal attention span cannot be stretched further than this without mental pain, and I avoid that like the plague.
But the video purported to discuss some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work, and he is a hero of mine. Hero because he stood against Naziism when it meant his life, for he was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp. So I endured the discomfort, and mirabile dictu, was rewarded greatly.
The video is about a theory of stupidity, and at the end of it I said smugly to myself: Well, that explains a lot about _________ ! Now I get it!
And then, I thought (again to myself because who wants to get caught thinking about anything deep and thus becoming a terrible bore) – wait – could what I have just learned apply to me as well? Could I … cough … grumble … gasp … possibly … be stupid as well?
Unfortunately all I had to do was to review any week of my life to get the answer to my own question. The most gracious interpretation that I could come up with was it seemed that my own lengthy stupid periods were interrupted, however briefly, by rational thinking. But still …
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(Bonhoeffer said some good stuff. Here’s one that fits well with the present-day)
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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The past week the weather has been extraordinary. The temperature yesterday peaked at 63 degrees. I stared at my three snow shovels leaning against the inside garage wall, and wondered if I should store them out in the small shed to get them from underfoot. And then I thought: Fool! Dunderhead! You would ignore Life’s Axiom #42?
“Whatsoever thou puttest away in a hard to get at place, verily thou wilt need it immediately thereafter.”
So they are still leaning against the wall, occasionally sliding down to where one could trip on them. Perhaps in July sometime …
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From The New Yorker
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Around 0100 some wet snow falling caught Poco out when he was attending to Nature’s call in the back yard. He returned through the pet door as indignant as an 18 year old cat can be. Which when one has the vocal gifts that Poco can lay claim to, is quite the racket.
I happened to be awake, and sprang into action before the noise he was making woke my bride up. Never a good thing, that. Robin takes such an event personally, and since I am the only other human around to blame … you can see why rapid action is the only course to take. I shushed Poco, rounded up something for him to eat, and brought him into my office, where he calmed down.
Poco is a very vocal animal. He has several mewling and meows that we have come to recognize:
Sometimes he will converse. He catches your eye and meows something whose content is a mystery. You answer “Sorry, old fellow, I don’t know what you want.” He answers. You say something again. He answers. And on and on, with him always having the last meow.
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There is a wonderful film out there called Winged Migration that I can recommend highly. If you have never seen it, perhaps your library has a copy to borrow, or you can rent it on Amazon for less than four bucks. It documents the truly amazing journeys of many species of birds around the world. The hardships they face, sometimes overcoming and sometimes … well … you have to see the film to appreciate them, I think.
One overarching theme is how long these epic flight paths have been in existence, and what changes have gone on in the world beneath their larger family over time. But the earth turns, the birds fly, and even if our own species eventually self-destructs, the migrations will go on and on. They are ancient, much more durable than humans and their dramas. What is obvious is that we rarely have a positive influence on the natural world. We are more of an insult.
But enough of this light-heartedness, let’s get serious for a moment. I don’t know if you can call it courage as we define it in our own lives, but these migrations seem courageous endeavors to me. If I could flap my arms and once travel even ten miles to a new location, I would be crowing about it for the rest of my life.
We have a tendency to denigrate the achievements of other species, our calculations somehow always making us come out at the top of the heap. It’s just instincts, we say, implying that these “lower” animals don’t put much thought into what they are doing. (Birdbrains, we call people who are missing a card or two in their deck.)
One of our problems in understanding other species is that we keep using our yardsticks to do the measuring. We prize problem-solving, so any creature that seems limited in that way is lesser. We are enamored of our houses, our tools, and our intellectual achievements. Never mind that our evolution to a “spiritual being” has resulted in widespread murder and injustices as our history reveals members of one group after another happily plotting the bloody demise of the other groups.
Nope, if I want to look for models of good behavior for a citizen of this planet, I have to look outside of our species. Take the greylag goose, for example. Both sexes care for the young, they travel in flocks where some members stay vigilant while others rest. They mate for life, which is something humans talk about but fail to do a great deal of the time. Up to 20 per cent of greylag geese are homosexual, which doesn’t seem to upset the other members of the flock one bit. And greylag geese have never ever committed genocide.
So I keep an open mind, because being called “silly as a goose” may not be such a bad thing after all.
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Think about it for a moment. We can’t fly, can’t breathe underwater, have relatively poor eyesight and sense of smell, couldn’t grow a fur coat if we tried, and our top speed is not quite as fast as a hippopotamus.
A tiger would smell us before we came into sight, spot us way before we could see it, and would be drooling at the finish line with a knife and fork in hand and a napkin tied neatly under its chin.
Add to this humbling scenario the fact that our young take more than a decade before they can fend for themselves and you wonder how we got this far as a species. If we hadn’t developed tools and weapons we would probably be no more than another case of scratchings on a Siberian cave wall that said Glorg Wuz Hear.
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It’s starting to get interesting (as in the curse: May you live uninteresting times). We may have a recession coming at us, which if it does, is clearly the work of only two men and their party. Usually recessions are a bit more nebulous in origin, but if this one arrives it will be the Truskcession for certain. Of course, if it weren’t for a spineless Republican party, they couldn’t mangle our economy the way they are doing. Have to give credit where credit is due.
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“Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
One of the famous lines from the famous play by the famous playwright Tennessee Williams. This one was spoken in the play by the character Blanche DuBois. But it could have been me uttering those words at many occasions in my life, and I suspect that there are a lot of people who could say the same thing.
Robin and I had been hiking up on the Grand Mesa on a beautiful autumn day. As we returned to our car, we decided to go down on the north side of the mesa to check out yet more of the fall colors.
Robin was driving, and as she made a turn onto the Grand Junction bypass something happened to me. I could not think clearly and could not speak at all, only garbled sounds would come. Her response was to pull into a convenience store parking lot and run into the store for help. At that point a battalion of strangers marched into the story, did their job, and as a result I am still here today to annoy multitudes with my words.
Here is an incomplete list of people I owe for that day alone.
The only non-stranger in this scenario was Robin, who never hesitated as she whipped our Subaru into that C-store parking lot and got that clerk’s attention. (Bless that girl.)
Problem was, for her, that she did such important and necessary work but all she got to take home for her efforts was the same doofus she’d started the day with a few hours earlier.
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From The New Yorker
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These days, I would guess that there are many Americans who start each morning as I do, by crying inside. At the lunacy, the corruption, the criminality, the disgusting spectacles unfolding. I certainly don’t blame any Canadian, Mexican, or European for saying “WTF” because that is exactly how I feel when reading my newspapers. It is very definitely WTF time in America.
In one month Cluck has done his best to take the office of the President all the way from leader of the free world to that of a turd in a punch bowl. Unbelievable, really, how quickly this has occurred. What his motives are … I have no idea, nor do I care. What he is doing is sabotaging generations of hard work done by much better and smarter men and women than he.
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turd in the punch bowl
n. A person who spoils a pleasant situation.
This metaphor is powered by a particularly vivid contrast: the inviting sensory appeal of a festive beverage juxtaposed with the revolting suggestion of feculent contagion . Therefore, labeling someone a turd in the punch bowl is most appropriate when the individual’s deleterious influence goes beyond mere faux pas or nuisance behaviors, and rises to the level of deliberate offense for its own sake. Consider that the literal act of depositing or excreting fecal matter into a communal food-service container would be sabotage.
The punch bowl and the feces connote certain additional nuances. The former is a symbol of public community, as such dispensers are frequently encountered at parties where they become a focal point for interaction. Freud famously identified feces with aggression and the possessive instinct. Thus a turd in the punch bowl suggests rage toward, and / or the urge to conquer, a community or society as a whole. … In particular then, to be a turd in the punch bowl is to be a willful and attention-seeking obstructor to the success of a social community.
Urban Dictionary.com
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From The New Yorker
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At some point in my life I realized that pain was the best teacher of all for me, for it always got and held my full attention like nothing else. I also realized that there was nearly always something positive that came from my misfortunes, if I looked for it hard enough. The misfortune may have been leagues worse than the benefit, but that nugget was still there. Something mitigating.
As an instance, now that I find myself governed by Ali Clucka and the Forty Thieves, my interest in reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has risen sharply. That’s a very good thing. In this particular regard I have been complacent for far too long.
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We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln
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The Girl Scouts have rounded up a few adults as helpers and are firmly established in front of our City Market, where in exchange for a few measly dollars they offer to sell me a product which is both delicious and unhealthy.
But, hey, if those were the only cookies that I was going to eat this year, there might be some justification in berating these kids for enabling me in my sugar cravings.
But alas, there will be others. And perhaps a slice of pie or two as well. And some cake.
Pudding … I think that’s a yes. Cobbler … bring it on.
I could save myself the trouble and expense of buying these ready-made products at the Market by simply sitting down with a pound of butter and a bowl of sugar and growling as I dove into them, but that would be gross and an ugly thing for any passing child to see.
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From The New Yorker
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This morning I was reading yet more reportage on the now infamous interaction between Zelensky, Cluck, and Vance this past week. The Cluck followers really are a sad bunch. Lost souls. I fear there is little hope for them.
I know that it’s a bit of a medieval outlook, but this mural from 1260 A.D. about sums up my views on the gaggle that is Cluck/MAGA.
In this painting Satan is devouring a passel of his devotees. Something very similar is happening on our American polítical stage. First their minds, then their souls, and then … .
One has only to listen to anything that comes out of Lindsey Graham’s mouth to see the truth of it.
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BTW, if anyone need a list of why we need to resist our present poisonous government, Margaret Renkl has graciously provided one in today’s NY Times.
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Granddaughter Elsa is staying with us for just under four days, and we are pleased as anything to have her here. There were more frequent visits when she was very young, but as she grew older they became fewer. As often happens.
It’s part of that becoming an adult stuff that parents and grandparents dread and kids can’t wait to have happen. What this all comes down to now is that no visits are taken for granted and no minutes are wasted.
When at long last I finally accepted the truth that change is inevitable and constant I began to treasure these moments more. Although they were always to be one-time occurrences, for the longest time it failed to cross my mind that they wouldn’t be repeated endlessly.
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From The New Yorker
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Out of the ten movies that were nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture this year, only three ever made it to the theater in Paradise. Sigggghhhhhh. I like small town life in so many ways, but it’s tough to be a movie buff when living in a hamlet. One small enough that Hamlet itself will probably never play there.
The powers-that-be in film scheduling for small towns obviously feel that we are mostly into car crashes and comic book heroes, and they feed us a constant stream of digital nonsense as a result. I have no idea if they are right or not, but I wonder if there aren’t more citizens who would appreciate watching an entire movie where nothing explodes than they calculate.
This complaint might come off as just another instance of me being a snob, but it’s really only a plea for fairness, or equal time, or something like that.
Call me a fool, but I love a movie that makes me think. One that holds up the world in its cinematic hand and turns it ever so slightly so that I see it with new eyes.
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Yesterday the air was filled with the noodling and calls of the collared doves that are so plentiful out here. Filled the air for the entire day. Non-stop.
It has to be sex. What else could grab them by their tiny brains and make them sing one passionate aria after another?
For a while the music is charming, but after ten solid hours even the most fervent love song starts to wear thin. Enough to bring on the uncharitable wish they would all just get a room and be done with it.
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We’ve had about a week of record breaking warm weather here in Paradise. Knowing what’s going on with the world’s climate makes it hard to fully enjoy a shirtsleeve February day, however. It nags at you.
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It has been described as a set-up. An ambush in the Oval Office. Schoolyard bullies, would-be gangsters playing a tag-team match of the most cowardly sort against a man who is a true hero. A man who is trying to defend his country against aggression, and now finds that a major ally has sided with the criminals who invaded his homeland.
Cluck and Vance chose the time and place for their degraded display, controlled the sound and video and everything about the event. But instead of coming off as tough guys, they revealed themselves as the sleazy con men that they are. Shame on us for allowing them to treat President Zelensky this way.
Shame on us for abandoning him and abandoning our obligations in Europe as well. Shame on us for electing such pitiful men.
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Welcome to the month of March. Month of the struggle between winter and spring that can sometimes be a bloody battle, at least for the plants and trees.
Eight years ago there was an early March warmup, just enough to get the trees excited, and then – whomp – a nasty freeze. Followed by warmth and yet another hard freeze. And then once more. Some trees gave up and died. Some limped along through the summer hoping for better days. Those that had wisely waited for April to bud out could be heard murmuring at twilight: “Told you so … told you so … .”
March is where you can have jonquils and daffodils poking flowers up through the snow. Good month. Reliable in its unreliability. Makes no promises. Takes no prisoners.
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Gene Hackman died recently. He was 95 years old at the time of his death, and hadn’t worked in films for a long time, which was the way he wanted it. There are a bunch of movies that he made that I have stored away in that loose aggregate of half-awake neurons that I call my mind. All of them are excellent. Robin and I watched one of them last night … The French Connection, from 1971. Two hours flew by, as he became “Popeye” Doyle, a cop with some bad habits but tenacity, man, tenacity.
Next I’m going to re-watch Mississippi Burning, then Hoosiers, and then Unforgiven. My memory skills these days are such that if I don’t act on something in this particular moment, there’s a good chance I never will. Just Do It, is my motto. What? Already used? Drat.
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A couple of weeks ago I introduced myself and you to a new artist, Stephen Wilson Jr.. Since that time, I have been listening to nothing but his music. His first and only album contain 34 songs, which is an unusual and formidable number, and has given me much material to listen to and to ponder.
What I have found is that he is a troubadour and whether he knows it or not, he is he is singing my younger Minnesota redneck life as well as his own. He sings it in the key of grunge and he sings it loud, with his own interesting guitar style.
You never heard of a Minnesota redneck? Check out the definition of the term right here.
- an uneducated white farm laborer, especially from the South.
- a bigot or reactionary, especially from the rural working class.
Dictionary.com
Nothing there about Southern exclusivity, is there? All you need to do is spend long hours in the field with the sun beating on the back of your neck and you qualify. It helps if you are dumb as a rock as well, but that’s not a requirement.
As for me personally, I have in turn been uneducated, white, bigoted, and still struggle with being reactionary at times. Also, the number of dumb things of which I have been guilty in my extended lifetime would make all but the most most adamantine rocks blush with shame.
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From The New Yorker
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On Stephen Wilson Jr’s album there are several songs that stand out for me.
Father’s Son describes the complexities in his relationship with his father over time. Complexities which many of us have dealt with in our roles as sons, fathers, even (as I am learning) grandfathers.
The Year to Be Young – 1994 : my own such year was 1956, but the rest of the lyrics could have come from my diary, if I had kept one.
Calico Creek: the words that caught my attention talked about a deep creek that was dangerous in the spring, but by late Summer …
Where the rope swings are rotten
Had our toes touching bottom
It’ll be dry by July, but if you walk down the sides
You can find some Rapalas
That last line … we kids from low-income families knew well to walk along the newly exposed banks looking for Rapalas and other fishing lures caught on snags and rocks during times of higher water.
Enough! You get the idea. To find so many songs that revealed those common experiences … for me this guy’s music falls under the category of a big fat blessing.
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From The New Yorker
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PSA
This next piece is in the nature of a Public Service Announcement. Robin and I have discovered a substance of such addictive power that we aren’t even sure that we should put this information out there, on the outside chance that lives could be ruined.
A few weeks back we discovered a new recipe and decided to try it out. It sounded simple, promising, and could easily be manufactured at home using ingredients typically found around any kitchen.
The recipe was for a version of a rice pudding. A homely dessert if there ever was one, and ordinarily considered safe to eat. But our first batch was so tasty that within an hour we looked at one another across a table, spoons in hand, and realized we had eaten the entire bowlful. Little grains of rice were scattered on our shirt fronts, our eyes were glazed and out of focus, our pupils dilated.
To be sure that what had happened was not a fluke, we made another batch a week later, and this week yet one more. Each time with the same result. During the last episode Robin had to duct-tape me to a dining room chair and throw out most of the concoction. Flocks of birds descended upon it which then were unable to fly away without wobbling.
Here is the recipe. I publish so that you can avoid accidentally putting it together. It is the dessert equivalent of crack, and I can say with certainty that once you start on on it you will be unable to stop until you are rendered immobile and possibly nonverbal for hours.
Sharp objects and heavy machinery should not be available to those who ignore these warnings and commit to cooking up something they are not prepared to deal with. Like meth and rice pudding.
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Memento Mori
Roberta Flack, a great lady of American song, passed on this week. She had many, many hits, including one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard, entitled First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. It was featured on the album First Take, released in 1969.
Even if that had been the only tune she’d ever recorded, it would have been enough for me to remember her name.
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I’ve been “in crush” many times, but almost none of the women involved ever knew it. I was repeatedly the classic hopeless admirer from afar, pining away in a hut, clad in sackcloth. Names like Margie, Judy, Ferol, and Ingrid still have a place in memory even though there is nothing real to go with them, only what I imagined way back when.
One of my inamorata was Joan Baez. When she walked out on the stage of Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota in 1964, long hair, long dress, barefoot, guitar in hand … well, she had me at first pluck. The madonna of folk music had added yet another disciple to her already long list.
I confess that my infatuation crumbled away when she wed David Harris, and the albums that I still listen to are all from the earlier period of her career. I felt abandoned when she married, I always hoped she’d wait for me.
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I mentioned the name “Ingrid”above, and feel the need to flesh that out a bit. In 1943 the movie For Whom The Bell Tolls came out, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. I was only three years old at the time, so I didn’t get to check it out until much later, when it was shown at a cinema art house near the University of Minnesota. The movie was a fair one, with much Hemingway-esque dialogue and a bridge being blown up and all, but it was Ms. Bergman who captured my adolescent heart.
So much so that I bought and treasured the soundtrack for the film, primarily because the cover art on the album was the close-up at left.
Now at the time I saw the movie I was nineteen, and Ingrid was in her mid-forties. This would have made this February-December romance a bit of a challenge to pull off, and even I had to admit it. Especially since the woman I was infatuated with was Bergman as she had been in 1943. But when you are living in complete unreality … well … all things are possible.
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DISGRACE
Nicholas Kristof has nailed it in an op/ed piece in the NY Times. The damage that Cluck is doing right now as I type this and later as you read it, is monstrous. When we throw our allies under the bus and get into bed to spoon with Putin the Poisoner, what can people think of us Americans?
I really feel for the Europeans. They have always known they couldn’t trust Putin, a vicious bully, torturer, and murderer. But now our shambling dotard of a president has revealed that they can’t trust us, either. Revealed it both to Europe and also to any American who still remembers the meaning of words like loyalty, honor, and decency.
And who remembers why countries banded together in NATO in the first place. It wasn’t because of the Nazis, they were already beaten. It was because of the threats coming from the former Soviet Union under Stalin and his autocratic successors. Which includes … guess who? … Vladimir Putin.
Where are the Republican patriots? Have they forgotten how to tell friends from enemies? How can they let this debauched troll presently at the head of our government have his way? How can they continue to be Cluck’s enablers in such a sickening betrayal?
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda genius, had one honest moment when he admitted back in yet another terrible time:
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
Goebbels was talking about the ordinary German citizen. Cluck is counting on ordinary American citizens to believe his lies, and I believe that he will be proven wrong in his assumptions. But at what cost?
A shameful moment in time. Our president has disgraced us.
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The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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The lightest of snowfalls last night, right around suppertime. If you blinked, you missed it. No need for shovels, brooms, or leaf-blowers. Just enough to remind you to turn up the collar of your coat and to wear a cap. This week I will dig out my backpacking stuff from wherever I put it, and begin spring preparations for overnights in the area.
Robin and I are very aware that being seniors we seem to be more sensitive to dehydration. When we were in our twenties we would take off on hikes without carrying water and seemingly never miss it. Now we never go anywhere outdoors without having a plan for our next drink. Get even a little behind and our energy flags significantly,
I use the Sawyer filters because they are relatively inexpensive, lightweight, durable, easily maintained, and reliable. Sort of a can’t-miss product. Takes care of everything but viruses, which is more than adequate for our surroundings.
Even on the short overnight camping stays that Robin and I will be doing, we check out each item before heading out as if we were embarking on an expedition up the Amazon River. Failure of an essential item can have consequences ranging from highly inconvenient to quite unhealthy. Many of the camping and hiking areas here in Paradise are out of cellular range, and as we’ve not invested in satellite phones, falls, burns, dehydration and the like are ours to deal with as best we can. Ergo – gear reliability is an important quality.
For a hiker, Paradise is … well … Paradise. We have countless mountain trails to explore, ranging from short walks to epic journeys like the Colorado Trail. We also have the opposite situation, where instead of climbing we descend into the canyons especially to the north and west of us.
One of our personal favorites is Dominguez Canyon, with its trailhead about an hour’s drive from Montrose.
Though this is a desert walk, there is water available in a creek, so staying hydrated is not difficult, as long as we remember to take our water filters.
Is wilderness water safe to drink without filtration? Here’s a stat to make one think otherwise. It is estimated that 90% of the surface water in the U.S. is contaminated with giardia. I’ve not had giardiasis myself, but have cared for many patients who did. To a woman (or man) they did not find the experience delightful. There is nothing about taking a long walk in a hot and rocky country that is improved by having sharp cramps and profuse diarrhea.
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From The New Yorker
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You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Our King/Fuehrer/Emperor Cluck decided that the Gulf of Mexico is not a grand enough name for something adjacent to his realm. So he has re-named it the Gulf of America. The rest of the world is scratching their heads and wondering to themselves, is he really that bonkers?*
Google and Apple, on the other hand, revealing to all and sundry that they have the spine of a planaria**, immediately changed their maps to reflect this new unreality.
A day later, the Associated Press, which does business all over the world, had failed to make the change in their maps, and their reporters were banned from presidential events forthwith.
Never mind that it is only Cluck and his sycophants who call it the Gulf of America. Although this is only his latest delusional piece, we’ll be dealing with it for a while until he is out of office, and the name it has had for centuries can be restored. In the meantime I think I won’t be vacationing off the Texas coast any time soon. I’d be worried that if I should need a life guard and holler “I’m drowning in the Gulf of America,” they might not come to my aid quickly enough, not being up with the times and all.
* Answer = yes
**A microscopic flatworm familiar to high school biology students, at least to those who opened their textbooks.
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Dark shadow passes
Raven flying in snowfall
True black in true white
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Last evening we had friends over for dinner and spent a very pleasant couple of hours sharing a meal. Robin and I prefer hosting small dinner get-togethers of six persons or less. We find that conversations run smoother, everyone gets a chance to talk, and the occasional blowhard* is easier to control.
As the evening was winding down, we began sharing our physical complaints, adjustments to aging, and which of our acquaintances was in dire straits at the moment. As the misery toll mounted, I realized that the entire past hour’s discussion would not have happened if we had all perished before the age of forty, as in the good old days, like the year 1000 BC, perhaps. When life was “nasty, brutish, and short” there was no need for or profit in these mutual commiserative sessions.
“Nasty, brutish, and short” is a phrase that appears in Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan . It refers to life without government and the state of humanity in its natural, violent, and brutal form.
AI search
Back then we would simply be rubbed out, perhaps by being careless in the vicinity of a leopard and whoop! End of story. But these days, living into our seventies, eighties, or beyond (partly due to a scarcity of leopards), we have the dubious luxury of comparing aches and pains and thinking we’ve had a discussion.
*Often yours truly, I admit
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From The New Yorker
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I realized recently that I hardly ever recount “doctor stories” in this blog. I have them, of course, after more than 35 years in those trenches. They tend to accumulate. Any line of work where you bump up against humanity in stressful situations will do that. Jobs like teacher, firefighter, law officer, soldier, etc. Each of them has their own set of stories, and mine are no more interesting or precious or enlightening than anybody else’s. Their only claim to fame is that they are mine, and meaningful to me in one way or another as a result. Here are a couple.
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The small collection of patches and bumps and lumps on one’s skin that show up from time to time when one is young becomes a deluge of keratosis this and precancerous that as aging takes its toll on the dermis.
My dermatologist has even farmed out this tedious part of his business to a specialized PA so that he can devote himself to far more remunerative tasks, like fat freezing. Cosmetic procedures seem to be where it’s at if you want to buy a condominium of respectable size in a desirable location.
When a new patch shows up and looks benign to me, I use the OTC freezing kits you can buy almost anywhere. And for smaller lesions this works. But these rather wimpy tools are leagues away from what I had access to when I was a practicing physician. Back then I could call for a sturdy stainless steel thermos bottle containing liquid nitrogen, which was at a temperature of 320 degrees below zero. Now there’s a freezing agent with hair on its chest! (Note inexplicable use of archaic and sexist phrase).
There was a moment in my professional life when I had been on call too often and up at night too many times in a row and I said to my former wife (a registered nurse): “This is really too much. What would you think of my going back and taking a residency in dermatology?” Her answer took the wind out of that particular sail: “Why would you want to leave medicine?”
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From The New Yorker
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The New Yorker magazine of February 13 has in interesting article on space travel, including the fact that Musk and Cluck are excited about the prospect. I share their enthusiasm. In fact, I am so excited that I think this awesome pair should have the honor of being the first to make that voyage, and I suggest next Tuesday as a departure date.
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An intern on pediatrics has been assigned the duty of being on call at the University of Minnesota Hospital on Christmas Eve of 1966. At sign-out rounds it looks to be a quiet evening. No known disasters are looming, and any patient who could be discharged is at home with their family. It is a cold night in Minneapolis, with temperatures already below zero by supper time.
At 1900 hours there is a message from the emergency room. A sick infant, daughter of two graduate students, is waiting to be examined.The history is a brief one. The child has been ill for less than 24 hours, with symptoms of fever, poor appetite, and increasing listlessness. The examination reveals a generalized light pink rash, a neck that resists flexion, and the “soft spot” on the baby’s head bulges slightly.
The frightened parents are informed of the likely diagnosis and what must now be done quickly. A spinal tap reveals pus cells but does not give further clues as to the organism responsible. A sample is sent for culture. The working diagnosis is meningitis, etiology as yet unknown.
Treatment is immediately begun with what is called triple therapy – penicillin, a sulfa drug, and chloramphenicol. (This was at a time when the number of antibiotics available to a physician was very limited.)
The baby is moved to the infant ward at 2100 hours and at 2130 suffers her first cardiorespiratory arrest. The intern is able to resuscitate her using chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing. But there is to follow a second and then a third arrest. To the last one there is no response. Shortly after midnight resuscitative efforts are abandoned. The intern drops into a chair, exhausted, beaten.
In the morning the laboratory reports that they are growing the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis from the baby’s spinal fluid. Common name = meningococcus.
All personnel who came in contact with the child during its brief admission are advised to take antibiotics to try to protect themselves against developing the disease.This is implemented by placing a large jar of sulfa pills in the center of the infant ward, with dosage instructions taped to the side of the jar. Everyone was to help themselves to what they needed.
The intern reflected on his part in the resuscitations, grabbed a handful of the tablets and stuffed them into the pocket of his uniform. He turned and left the area. There were rounds to be made.
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Such was the state of the art in 1966. So primitive by standards of only a few years later. There were no pediatríc ICUs, few antibiotics, and little existed of equipment that had been downsized to where it was suitable for use in the care of very sick babies. For example, intravenous infusions were gravity-fed, with infusion pumps not yet on the horizon, so maintenance of a working IV was an art form.
And that big jar of sulfa tablets … the self-prescription … looking back that seems more like practicing medicine in a war zone. Perhaps that was what it was.
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Last weekend Robin and I drove up to Steamboat Springs to spend a couple of days with Ally and Kyle. It had been years.
For a midwinter trip, the traveling was amazingly easy, without any wintertime difficulties at all. From the character of the snow cover on the ground as we neared their home it was obvious that nothing new had fallen for at least a week or two. The snow was tired-looking, gray, in need of refreshment.
But it was still enough for starting the 112th running of the Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival. Late Friday we trooped over to a park in town and watched local ski jumpers and something that was new to us and often hilarious – downhill bicycle racing in snow.
We broke away for supper, and when we left the building it was raining, which turned to snow before we got out of town. The snowfall was huge flakes that reflected the headlight beams back at us and made visibility poor and the driving treacherous. Four inches of fluff fell that night, and it transformed the town and the surrounding countryside, which went from a gray background to pure white.
Saturday was an all-day snowshow finishing with spectacular fireworks. (I’ve included a gallery, but none of the pix are mine. The crowds were not oppressive, but they did prevent my getting access to good photo-talking locations.)
Lovely time, in all.
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Remember the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words?”
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I confess that I don’t know quite what to make of Musk. While he has a certain amount of technical knowledge and skills, he is otherwise lacking in a host of other areas. One has only to read the sad history of what used to be Twitter to see that. I’m not a huge fan of social media, but Musk took Twitter from a service that was at least trying to keep itself clean to “X,” which is now little more than a megaphone for hate speech.
And he seems to be challenging us to ignore (or accept) his Third Reich-style speeches and gestures. Don’t know about how you see it, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …
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From The New Yorker
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BTW, if anyone is having trouble making sense of what is happening in Washington DC, I can recommend a book. It’s The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer.
It is compelling reading, as it lays out in detail the steps that are the playbook for the rise of authoritarian regimes wherever they may occur. (Think of it as Project 1934). It is neither a dull nor stodgy history, and totally apropos in our moment.
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Normally I am the soul of tolerance. A poster boy for acceptance. Forbearing to the point of being a saint. But something happens to me at the gym when I am using the weight-training devices and another client breaks etiquette by doing one of these things:
If any of these behaviors occurs and I witness it, the sequence runs something like this: visual data to optic nerve to visual cortex to lizard brain to murderous impulse.
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So far I have been able to stop at this point and not do something which requires that I be incarcerated, but if some Christian teachings are correct and the thought is equal to the deed, I am a serial killer. And an unrepentant one to boot.
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From The New Yorker
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Let’s face it, folks. Elon and his junior partner Donald are no friends of America. What they are doing is what an invading army does when it takes over a country. Dismantling the government, then installing their toadies and sycophants into the spaces left behind after firing the people who knew what they were doing.
It’s hard to tell which one of these evil twins is the poorest example of a leader. They treat a great nation as a corporate raider would treat a chain of hardware stores they were taking over, blowing it up and then pretending they know how to put it back together.
Hubris describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning “to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people”. To arrogate means “to claim or seize without justification… To make undue claims to having”, or “to claim or seize without right… to ascribe or attribute without reason”.
Wikipedia
They couldn’t pull this off without the help of the Republicans in Congress. That batch of quislings must share the blame for every part of the ugly mess being created daily.
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Robin and I have slipped into a new pattern, at least for us. When we got together 33 years ago, both of us were coming off of unpleasant divorces (are there pleasant ones?).
One of the great attractions of a new relationship is that you have no mutual baggage. Every conversation is brand new, a fresh and exciting exploration of the other person. Our recent pasts were still so heavily filled with events involving our former marriages that neither one of us wanted to spend much time in those neighborhoods. So we didn’t.
Time flew and there were new memories being created almost faster than we could catalog them. But time eventually slows down, and now we are exploring parts of our histories before we met, one tidbit at a time. This son or daughter did this, when I was ten I did that … some of you may know how that drill goes.
But it has been really interesting to learn so many new/old things about someone I’ve been living with for quite a while now. Today we talked about lean times in our families of origin when bread and butter with sugar on it was supper.
A small thing. Not remembered as a hardship. Just two a decade and hundreds of miles apart who eventually would have a conversation at a supper table and realize yet one more thing they had in common.
Perhaps a photo of these nutritional victims would be in order here.
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In a recent post I spoke lightly about mounting the barricades if the need for revolution ever came. I may have been boasting. It’s a common practice of mine, as you may have noticed if you’ve been regular readers. Perhaps better to think of it as a metaphor.
These days if one puts up a barricade they will soon have a bulldozer in front of them and a drone behind, neither machine caring much about a man’s cause or well-being.
But there was a time when pure valor went a long way … this song from Les Miserables is of that time and is my favorite from the film.
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Today’s header photograph is labeled simply “Boundary Waters.” It’s been a while since I explained what that meant, so indulge me for a moment.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BW) is in northern Minnesota, and for many decades has for me been a place of beauty, mystery, and almost mythological significance. It is a million acres of forest, water, and rock. The only watercraft allowed within its boundaries are those that one paddles, primarily canoes with a few kayaks thrown in.
The BWCAW extends nearly 150 miles along the International Boundary, adjacent to Canada’s Quetico and La Verendrye Provincial Parks, is bordered on the west by Voyageurs National Park, and by Grand Portage National Monument to the east. The BWCAW contains over 1,200 miles of canoe routes, 12 hiking trails and 2,000 designated campsites.
I have visited the “BW” more than fifty times. Some of those trips only involved driving to the town of Ely MN for a touristy visit, some to rent a lake cabin on its periphery for a few days, but most of them were to take a canoe along with a bit of camping gear and push off from an entry point to enter one of the few places left in the US where industrial life is shut out.
What to find there? Well, solitude, natural beauty, aching muscles, loons and their library of calls, occasional bears and wolves, rocks under your camping pad, blisters, and spiritual renewal. That’s just to start with. I used to go twice a year, but the Rockies are a long way from the BW, and the last time now was six years ago, when Robin and I took grandson Aiden for his first trip in. The header photo was taken when Robin and I visited in 2011, and was marked by very warm days, grand scenery, and occasional attacks by hordes of particularly bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
It’s a piece of America that requires something of the visitor, but is worth the effort ten times over.
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Things to feel positive about when each day seems chockablock with disheartening news.
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Kristi Noem has been confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. While that is not great news for the U.S. as a whole (she has an unfortunate tendency to shoot creatures who displease her), within seconds of that confirmation we received a phone call from a lifelong South Dakotan who was so ecstatic to be rid of her as governor that her joy could not be contained.
Before she gained renown for blasting away at her pets and livestock she was already famous for mostly ignoring COVID in South Dakota and for getting herself barred from all Native American reservations in her own state.
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[Some people have an antipathy toward poetry. Perhaps it might help to think of a poem as sometimes serving as a hone, sharpening their senses and appreciation for what was already there in front of them. Here is one by a pediatrician/poet, written in 1921. ]
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Winter Trees
by William Carlos Williams
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
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From The New Yorker
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On the subject of pediatricians (you didn’t know we were discussing them?), long ago I had a mentor named Henry Staub M.D. who I met only after my formal pediatric training was completed. Henry was a children’s physician, an ardent community activist, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. As a young man with Jewish parentage he, he had left Nazi Germany just in time to avoid being drafted into the army and thus discovered.
There is much of what I became in my own professional life that I took on from Henry by osmosis, but there were two sayings of his that I still think of frequently.
“The best doctor is the one that hurts the most.” On the surface this might seem paradoxical, but what he had observed was that there was a strong tendency to be “kind” to sick children, and for that “kindness” to delay discovery of sometimes serious illness.
For example, suppose that a child presented with symptoms that might be early signs of something really damaging. If the patient had been an adult, there would have been no question about doing the required but often uncomfortable testing, but in this case the physician decides to wait and watch for a while, to be certain that investigation is required since the patient is so young. However, in not wanting to cause pain to the small one the doctor instead sometimes hurts it far more by delaying diagnosis and proper treatment.
The second was a brief description of his own hypothetical professional journey, and was always told with a smile at the end. “I went into pediatrics because I didn’t like adults. After a few years, I didn’t like children, either.”
But Henry did love children, and was their constant advocate. Not for just those in his practice, but the larger community as well. A wise guy.
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“I heard a very good joke yesterday, someone said: ‘Musk is not a Nazi, Nazis made really good cars.’”
Stephen Fry
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Hypnotic. Beautiful. Don’t worry that you can’t understand the lyrics. No one can.
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I believe myself to be living in a revolutionary time, where many of my long-held standards and beliefs about my country are being dissected and discarded, their fragility revealed, the spider’s web of a platform on which they rested found to be riddled with gaps … easy pickings for the unscrupulous.
One one hand there is the thuggery and brutishness of MAGA, a collection of the benighted if there ever was one. On another hand there is the aging creakiness of the Democratic Party leadership, which seems unable find the laces on its Louboutins in order to tie them properly and so to get on with the people’s business. Yet another hand says a pox on both those houses. There are other “hands” as well. We may only have two official political parties but there exist oh so many constituencies.
One of those constituencies is the most influential of all, and that is that of the extremely wealthy. This one is actually more powerful than any of the parties.
In the old days (anything more than one election cycle ago) those people ran the country and the world but much preferred being invisible. These days the one percenters have not been not just taking blatantly more than their fair share of everything, they have used their fortunes to stack every deck they can get their hands on to perpetuate and increase their privilege.
Our history shows how easy it has been to pit us one against the other so that we would ignore their machinations. For instance, in our Civil War there were 620,000 deaths. While slavery may have been the spark that started the whole bloody mess, only a very tiny fraction of the men who died in either army had ever owned a slave. So why would a threadbare farmer from Minnesota travel a thousand miles to shoot at threadbare farmers in Virginia? What was their quarrel?
Who told them that taking up arms was the proper thing to do?
Guess.
So if there is a revolution coming, count me in. I may not mount the barricades as nimbly as a couple of days ago, but if nothing else I am more dangerous because I have good eyesight and less to lose.
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There are people in this world who deliberately create chaos in order to draw attention to themselves. They walk into a room where people are gathered and instinctively know what to say to create empuzzlement. Then they leave those people to sort out the mess they have created as they move on to other rooms. I’m not sure exactly what the psychodynamics are, but some of you may recognize the type. Ordinarily such occasions are only annoying, and with practice you can let them slip away without affecting the course of the rest of your day. Small change, as it were.
But it’s another matter when the offender has acquired power and the willingness to use chaos to increase that power. We have such a person now occupying the center chair in the Oval Office. He has little idea of how to govern, but he is fully capable of creating messes and breaking things. Like the proverbial bull in a china shop. Or the two year-old smearing its own feces on the wallpaper outside of its crib.
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Everyday YouTube serves up videos to me promising that if I only would click on the link I can watch someone “own” or “crush” or “take down” another person. Since YouTube knows where I live and everything that I have ever clicked on from the beginning of internet time, they usually promise me a moment where a liberally-minded person reduces a conservative to mush. (I have no doubt that people on the right side of the political spectrum receive a diet of liberals ending up becoming oily puddles on the linoleum.)
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
It’s all pretty shameless pandering. Whenever I have unwisely clicked on one of those links I regret it. In an interview recently Lady GaGa was asked a question about what someone had said about her on social media. She got off a pretty good retort: “First of all, social media is the toilet of the internet.” Couldn’t agree more.
I am presently not on Meta, Instagram, X, or any of the gossipy platforms. I do remain attached to YouTube, however, for this reason. Not being a good problem-solver when it comes to the thousand things an aging house can do to my serenity, I have come to treasure the “how-to-do-it” videos that this service provides. Even if all they tell me is “for god’s sake don’t touch anything!”
I worked for more than 35 years as a physician, which required a rather complex and specific skillset, and I fancy that I did a proper job of it. Home repairs, on the other hand … the words dolt, idiot, and lamebrain do not do my performances justice.
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A little foreword to the upcoming song, Is That All There Is?
The song was inspired by the 1896 story “Disillusionment” by Thomas Mann. … The lines “Is that all there is to a fire?/Is that all there is/is that all there is?” and three of the events in the song (the fire, failed love, imagined death) are based on the narrator’s words in Mann’s story; the central idea of both the short story and the song are the same.
Wikipedia
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Who knew that Chinese retribution for our kicking TikTok out would be so swift and awesome? Instead of getting mad, they got even … actually, way more than even. They have come up with DeepSeek, an AI model that apparently operates at only a fraction of the cost of how we have been doing things till now.
The population of Wall Street, which is a neighborhood where a subspecies known as Chicken Littles live, went into high tizzy when they learned of it. Nvidia, who makes the big dog AI chip, lost nearly 600 billion dollars in stock value earlier this week.
I’m not sure how best to deal with such a number, but this might help. Six hundred billion dollars is enough to make a stack of dollar bills 40,740 miles high. Does that make it clearer or cloudier?
You can get a copy of the DeepSeek mobile app for free on the app store, and put it in that space where you used to keep TikTok. I’m sure it’s perfectly safe, and won’t collect anything you don’t want the Chinese to have. Any doubts, why, just look at that cute and innocent whale on the logo. How could the people who created that have any subversive intentions?
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Some of the AI stuff being endlessly written about over the past several years has been flavored in a way to cause high anxiety in certain non-digital life forms (humans). The overall impression is that something is coming that will take your job, destroy your life as you know it, and place you naked and afraid on an island you never heard of filled with things that want to kill you.
It so reminds me of the good old days when HAL was only a sci-fi nightmare and not something coming to living rooms, everywhere.
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Now, you might ask the experts involved in AI research some questions like these if you can get them to stand still long enough.
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Let me put how I see this all coming together as simply as I can.
This is the world I want to live in.
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This is the world I find myself living in
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At City Market yesterday I was impressed by the proliferation of hot sauces available to use in flavoring our food. As far as this product is concerned we seem to be in a golden age. Every year the number of choices grows, way too fast for me to attempt to sample them all.
Although I didn’t count the offerings at that visit, there must have been more than a hundred of them to pick from. The labels of many boasted about their pepper of origin and how unbearable they were and what havoc they would soon be wreaking on your body. There were jalapeño sauces, habanero sauces, serrano sauces, ghost pepper sauces, Scotch Bonnet sauces, Carolina Reaper sauces, etc.
It is likely that none of them convey the full fury of the pepper to one’s gastrointestinal tract. The pepper power is usually considerably diluted in making the product you find on those shelves. The full experience of ingesting an untamed Carolina Reaper, for instance, is enjoyed by a very few of the hardiest of souls. And as my grandmother might have said, they may not be quite right in the head.
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Robin and I went with friends to see A Complete Unknown, and it was the second time for us. Double awesome. On a Wednesday night in Paradise the theater was nearly filled, with the hair color of most of the attendees being gray. That is testament to the drawing power of Dylan and his music. This was, after all, just a movie about him, and covered only a short handful of years in his career.
BTW. When Bob left the Iron Range of Minnesota and stopped for a while in Minneapolis, he rented a room above Gray’s Drug in the Dinkytown area, just off the university campus. At one brief moment in my otherwise unremarkable life I too, stayed for a few days in a room over Gray’s Drug.
It wasn’t the same room that Dylan had occupied but hey, his was just down the hall. And my occupancy was many years after he had left for New York, but … let’s not quibble … I was that close to greatness.
Even more of this unbelievableness. He and I attended the University of Minnesota at the same time, and you know, he has never once mentioned me in any of his songs or interviews. If you ask him he may use the excuse that there were 35,000 other students attending that school at the same time, but that’s pretty weak, really. I guess when you get to the top you forget about the little people … .
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Our new/old POTUS, in one of his first official acts, pardoned everybody that participated in the January 6 insurrection, which he calls a festival. The sacrifices the capitol police made in protecting members of Congress are ignored or made light of. The Fraternal Order Of Police must be rethinking their support for Cluck in his three runs for the presidency. What the FOP might have easily known, if they had looked just a little deeper, is that loyalty is a one-way street for Cluck.
While I am all in favor of reducing prison populations, I would humbly suggest that first we let out everyone who is completely innocent. This would free up an estimated 4-6% of the prison population right there.
If we were making a list, there are many other groups more deserving of clemency than the traitors of January 6. We could have saved those bozos for last.
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From The New Yorker
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February is now officially within striking distance, with only 5 days of January to go. Not that February is any great shakes as a month, typically being the coldest of the year in these parts. And it only has a single holiday, one devoted to Hallmark Card’s version of romantic love, which has been shown over a very long time to have some serious holes in its implementation. If it were not for the unholy quartet of greeting card sellers, florists, jewelers, and candy makers, Valentine’s Day might have long ago been disposed of in history’s dustbin.
But I digress. The best thing about the month of February is that it has fewer days than all the rest. Because to get to good ol’ windy, rainy, unpredictable March is our goal. March is where the annual battle between weather we really like and the basket of deplorables* that constitutes Winter is fought.
There is a certain odor in the air that defines Autumn for me, and that is the lovely scent of dried and decaying leaves everywhere. Early spring also has its distinctive odor and it is of all the dog poop thawing that has been left behind by our friends at the IRCOA (Irresponsible Canine Owners of America). This is the perfume of March.
*I know you’ve heard this phrase somewhere before … somewhere.
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Robin and I finished a limited series on Netflix last night, and it was a relief to do so. The series was “American Primeval,” and we’re not quite sure why we stuck with it. Here’s a selection from a review in The Guardian.
American Primeval emerges as a study of human nature at its desperate best and unbridled worst, the whole existential mess parching beneath the sun like pegged-out animal skins. The wild west never looked so wild, nor as nasty, broken and desolate. Halfway though, I’m engrossed, but also genuinely shocked. Don’t watch it if you can’t take violence. Just don’t.
And that quote was taken from a positive review, one that gave the show four out of five stars.
The main protagonists are the Utes, the Mormon church, the U.S. Army, and a ragtag bunch of settlers, trappers, and mountain scroungers. None of these groups conduct themselves well. Everybody is freezing, eneryone needs a bath very badly, and everyone is functioning with mostly their lizard brains. The weather ranges from simply bleak and windy to blizzards. The violence is off most charts.
And yet we finished it. Perhaps we saw some truth worth learning there. About what frontier life really might have been. Brutal, dirty, bloody, and often short. Being on the frontier was probably a lot less tidy than what Little House on the Prairie presented.
Our review: Interesting story but awfully grim in the telling. No comic relief in sight. Not a guffaw or a pratfall in the entire series.
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Where did this guy come from? I totally did not see him coming. Country grunge with thoughtful lyrics, great guitar playing, passé thrift shop clothing and scraggly hair? In this song he is reminiscing about a milestone year in his adolescence. I can relate to much of it without half-trying.
(I learned that he was/is a Nirvana fan and there is a tiny musical quote in this video at 012-018 from Nirvana’s recording of All Apologies.)
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Ole was hired to paint the yellow stripe down the highway. His first day, his boss handed him a brush and a can of paint and Ole painted ten miles. The second day he only painted five.
His boss, thinking that he was getting slower because he had started off too hard on the first day, decided to give him a day off to rest. But when Ole came back to work the next day, he only painted half a mile.
So his boss asked, “Excuse me, but why have you been painting less and less each day, even after I gave you a day off?”
“Well, ” Ole answered. “I’m getting further from the can!”
(It’s been a long time since I’ve subjected anyone to an Ole and Lena joke. Figured it was catch-up time.)
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It struck me that the Second Coming of Cluck is the perfect time to break out one of the wisest prayers I know, the Serenity Prayer. Written by Reinhold Niebuhr around 1934, its relevance is timeless, and I am choosing it as my mantra for the upcoming quadrennial.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
It’s that last line that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Until you get to it the question is “Sure, but how do I know what can and cannot be changed?”
Wisdom is the answer.
Some semblance of wisdom is at once essential to living a life worth mentioning, and a quality that is in ruefully short supply at the same time. I wish that I could say that I am a wise person, but the best I can do is to claim that, upon reflection, there have been a few widely separated times where I have behaved in a manner that might charitably be called wise. (Full disclaimer: Even those moments may have only been expressions of the stopped-clock principle (“even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”)
What I am not going to do is rent Mr. Cluck any space in my head. In our present climate where every one of his belches, hiccups, and exhalations are reported breathlessly by media outlets, this is not going to be a simple thing to do. His administration may well cause extensive disruptions in our national life, but what I believe and who I am and who and what are dear to me will not change. These things are far too valuable to be ever handed over to politicians. Any politicians.
(Or to anyone else, for that matter).
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The time is always right to do what is right.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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When we moved to Paradise, there were Apple product sales and repair facilities in both Montrose and Grand Junction. Both have blown away like milkweed seeds in September and there are no indications that they will ever return.
My present problem is an iPhone battery that is malfunctioning. There is a local guy working out of the back of a packaging store who does such replacements, but I already used him once and the battery he installed was a POS and which is the one now failing. Lasted less than a year.
Just today I got a callback from a Mac repairman in yet another nearby town who informed me that he doesn’t do phones but can recommend someone reliable who does. I don’t want to get my hopes up but … you know … desperate times, desperate measures.
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I don’t usually think of David Brooks as a humorist, but he gets off a couple of good lines in his latest piece published in the Times of New York. Even the title makes me smile and cringe at the same time: We Deserve Pete Hegseth. Gallows humor.
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We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have now read 127 thinkpieces on the subject of why the Democrats lost the last election. They have provided me with 127 different points of view. I will give each of the authors credit for hubris, and it is possible that some of them are at least partially correct. But really … aren’t they the latest example of the classic story of blind men describing an elephant?
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.
Let me add a 128th viewpoint. In this past election one candidate was a man whose sterling qualities included being a pathological liar, a rampant narcissist, a psychopath, an abuser of women, a serial oath-breaker, a con man of the most blatant stripe, a draft dodger, and a convicted felon.
If a political party manages to lose an election to such opposition there exists the possibility that said party has its collective head up its collective bum.
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Something unusual and beautiful happened in Paradise on January 20. There was an all-day celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Starting with speeches and a march in the frigid air of our coldest day this winter so far (Disclaimer – I did not march. My physician, Dr. Outlastia Permanentia, has told me that my fragile constitution will not allow for outdoor activities when shivering is even a remote possibility. She fears that such rapid movements will cause my body to fly apart).
There was live music where the audience shared voices both tuned and tuneless in singing songs of the civil rights era. There was a movie about John Lewis, another major figure in the fight for civil/human rights and justice. There were readings of quotations of MLK both in English and Spanish.
All in all it was very moving and an unexpected midwinter treat. When we are barraged every day with examples of mendacity, selfishness, and dimwittedness, it is good to be reminded that this is not all we humans are. Sometimes we are capable of generosity, selflessness, and even magnificence. Those qualities were celebrated today in several venues around town. With music, speeches, films, and audience participation.
We were also reminded that the battle against injustice is not a thing that is over and done. We are daily given opportunities to continue that struggle.
Also … there were cookies at nearly all of the venues. I am not so pure that I can’t be bribed by an oatmeal/raisin delicacy.
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History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ran across a short article in the Times about grief, and the discomfort most of us feel when in the presence of someone who has sustained a loss. The pangs of not knowing what to say. The piece describes one phrase that definitely should be off the table as something you could offer to the sufferer:
Everything happens for a reason.
This is like handing a nice glass of Gobi desert to someone dying of thirst. It doesn’t help and may make the situation even more painful. Having been the recipient of this advice on more than one occasion, I can say that in each case I felt anger. Such fatuity, I thought, really deserves a swift kick more than a thank you.
The advice given at the end of this article resonated with me as good and true, when it is suggested that sitting there quietly is often a better choice than trying to explain the hurt away or dismiss it with platitudes.
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It’s exactly what pets do for us at such times. Offer a silent presence without asking anything of the wounded. Like I said, it’s a short piece. What were you going to do with those two minutes, anyway?
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Last night I told Robin that we must be at the halfway point for this episode of the frigid season. Give it a few more weeks and thaws will start to appear. It’s really hard for me to feel sorry for myself when it comes to winter, but I manage. The hardships of the season here in Paradise are so puny that none of my friends from back in the Midwest will commiserate with me at all. They don’t even pretend to try. If I begin to complain to one of them, I am quickly cut off in exchanges like this one:
Me: Lord, lord, it’s cold and I am sick to death of it.
Midwesterner: The temperature here is twenty-five degrees below zero, what is it there?
Me: Twenty-five above.
Midwesterner: I think I hear my momma calling.
I can go where it is colder if I choose. All I would have to do is put on some crampons, bundle up, and start up any mountain trail above 9000 feet. But why would I do such a lamebrained thing? If I told any of my friends that I was planning to deliberately seek frostbite or fatality, they would arrange psychiatric care for me in the twinkling of an eye, and provide moral support for Robin until I got over the affliction.
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From The New Yorker
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I was talking with a friend the other day about winter hardships, and happened to mention the term “ground blizzard.” This was a new term to him, so I explained it in a story.
I was returning from a visit to family members in Minneapolis, and had been asked to transport three college friends of one of my children back to South Dakota. The four of us were tooling along on Interstate 90 on a brilliant blue-sky day with so much sunshine that even with sunglasses on I squinted as I drove. It had snowed several inches over the previous week and the winter landscape was smooth, white, and beautiful. At one point as we were nearing Worthington, Minnesota I happened to glance to my right and a long way off across a large field I could see what looked like a white fog which was moving in our direction.
It was upon us so quickly that as even as I said to my passengers “What the hell … ?” we were suddenly surrounded on all sides by snow and what was now nearly zero forward visibility.
Looking out my side window I could see the white lines in the center of the road alongside our car and I crept along with only them to guide me.
I knew that we were about six miles from an exit, which now became our destination. The trip to that exit took nearly an hour, and when we pulled into the first motel we came across we took the very last room that was available. Anyone who arrived after us was given a few square feet around the swimming pool area or in the meeting rooms to use as sleeping space. All traffic in that part of the state came to an abrupt halt.
A ground blizzard occurs when a sudden and powerful gust of wind crosses an area where the snow is not packed or crusted over. It picks up that loose material and the result can present the same dangers as a true blizzard does, even though not a flake of new snow is falling.
The wind blew all that night and didn’t let up until dawn of the next day. By noon we were back to blue skies and I-90 was open. The rest of the trip was without incident.
This was the first and still the only time I’d experienced such an event, and it was unsettling. To have such extreme weather come upon you with no warning at all … can’t say I cared for it.
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I was a precocious reader when still a sprout, starting somewhere in my fourth year and going through books and stories like a riding lawn mower through tall grass from then to the present moment, although my attention seems to wander these days more than it did.
There are literary milestones along the way that I remember clearly, markers that are idiosyncratic in my own journey rather than what yours might have been. One of them was reading Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway in which a rape takes place. I was still too young to understand the meaning of what I had read, but I knew it must be something bad, because when I shouted out to the kitchen, where my mother and aunt Addie were talking, what does “rape” mean, they became totally quiet and did not answer.
Then there was Jack London’s short story To Build A Fire. It might have been the very first story I ever read where the hero does not prevail.
Up until that time heroes pretty much had always won the day, but here the guy freezes to death, and I didn’t know how to process that information. Was this what life could be like? You do all the right stuff and then a random blob of snow puts out your fire and you perish? My life-view took a real hit with that one, and never completely recovered.
Reflecting, I can see that I have read quite a few stories that I was not prepared to fully understand when I first came upon them, and only looking back did they finally reveal themselves to me. Each re-read clearer than the one before.
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From The New Yorker
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Today I offer an instructional session on how to get into your happy place. It works 100% of the time for me. Remember the Jerusalema craze of four years ago, when there were scads of groups of various sizes performing the song as a sort of global dance challenge? Well, boys and girls, all of those videos are still out there ready to work their magic. I rounded up three of my favorites, but maybe you prefer 400 flight attendants or a group of nuns or a flash mob all doing roughly the same dance … those videos all still out there.
The dance trend began when Fenómenos do Semba, a group in Angola, south-west Africa, recorded themselves dancing to the song while eating and without dropping their plates.
So here are the instigators.
My plan is to keep this panel of videos handy during the next four years, as a refreshment for the spirit. I did try to do the dance moves once on my own but by the second chorus I needed orthopedic care. Apparently my time for performing these sorts of maneuvers came and went without my knowledge or assent.
Here are the adorables.
The lyrics are those of a gospel song, a yearning for a place of peace. Who doesn’t have such a yearning, whether one is adherent to a religious point of view or not?
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Jerusalema ikhaya lami (Jerusalem is my home)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Save me, and walk with me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)
Ndawo yami, ayikho lana (My place, is not here)
Mbuso wami, awukho lana (My kingdom, is not here)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Preserve me, and go with me) (Repeat)
Ngilondoloze (Save me)
Ngilondoloze (Preserve me)
Ngilondoloze (Guard me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)
Ndawo yami, ayikho lana (My place, is not here)
Mbuso wami, awukho lana (My kingdom, is not here)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Save me, and walk with me) (Repeat)
Jerusalema ikhaya lami (Jerusalem is my home)
Ngilondoloze, uhambe nami (Preserve me, and go with me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)
Ngilondoloze (Save me)
Ngilondoloze (Preserve me)
Ngilondoloze (Guard me)
Zungangishiyi lana (Do not leave me here) (Repeat)
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And now here are the Cubans. Their talent is obvious, their joy infectious. Please, dear readers, these people are professionals. Do not try this at home. But if you do and suffer a mishap, you can call Dr. Hemispherium Bonesmith. He has an international practice composed entirely of senior citizens who tried to do that hip thing and seized up.
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With it being cold and all, and without enough snow to have fun with nordic skiing or snowshoeing, I am starting to plan the next year’s outings. I do this every winter and while most of the plans don’t come to fruition, it keeps me out of mischief. In this it closely parallels my attempts at gardening, but no matter, there is much pleasure in the planning.
There is a canyon not too far away from us, Dominguez Canyon to be exact, that Robin and I have hiked in several times. Lovely place of desert and lizards and a great many spiky plants. Usually we walk up-canyon a little over three miles, have a lunch, and come back down. But this year I would like to go a little farther in and stay overnight, so that’s one of the plans.
Another thought is to find a properly long bicycle trail and take those e-bikes of ours for an extended cruise in different territory. It is tempting to return to the Mickelson Trail in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which we pedaled on standard bikes 15 years ago, and which is a gorgeous bit of rails-to-trails pathway. But there is that longish drive involved to get there … more study needed.
The range of our brand of cycles is about 40 miles on relatively level ground. Using electric bicycles means that you either spend the night with in a room that has an electrical outlet to recharge the batteries or you carry a spare. So there is at least that much forethought required.
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Mr. Biden was ungracious enough this past week to make the claim that he thinks he could have beaten Mr. Cluck in the last election. He seems to have dis-remembered his deer-in-the-headlights performance at the first debate.
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From The New Yorker
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Made a vegetarian chili this week that was excellent, from a NYTimes recipe. Minced mushrooms were the substitute for meat, and we missed the animal protein not at all. Moving toward a plant-based diet seems to suit us, but we know that depending on fungi to fill in all of the places that meat used to be is being short-sighted.
So we thought … well, how about insect protein if the fungal thing isn’t doing the whole job for us? Until we read this article, that is.
Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.
Dang. There went our guilt-free dreams of roach flambé and grasshopper scramble, and we fell into a funk.
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Truth is, without having any chlorophyll of our own with which to meet our personal nutritional needs … but wait … maybe there is hope for a non-violent diet after all, if this photograph shows what I think it does.
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Followup on my hesitant review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” We have now watched all eight episodes. Two thumbs up. The magic was there, after all.
One of the stalwart roles is played by this magnificent tree, right in the middle of everything.
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The lightest dusting of snow fell during the night. January is being its usual self, cold and gray and not playing well with others.
One of the bleakest sights is that of a winter sun, trying to shine through the frosted atmosphere. A round image with fuzzy borders, nearly white, with little of the sun’s usual gold or red tones, and little or no heat in it.
Just looking at it sets the marrow to tingling. Pass me that cocoa, would you please?
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I confess that I subscribe to the New Yorker to impress the easily impressed with my worldliness and sophistication. Of course, that doesn’t work with you guys who know that underneath my polished and urbane surface I am nothing more than a country cracker and s**tkicker of the first magnitude. But I love having access to the magazine’s cartoon archives, and plunder them mercilessly. When that bill comes due I will be looking to resettle in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
But this week there is an article that amazed even the most jaded part of my psyche. It dealt with the memory facility that some species of birds have in recalling where they buried seeds in storing them for the cold weather months. The title is: The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds.
The author starts out with his own problems with a lost beard trimmer and a misplaced pair of pants. He then moves on to the almost unbelievable feats of memory that these birds perform every winter to accomplish that most important piece of business … staying alive.
But his personal trials pale before those that Robin and I deal with every day. Most of our conversations now start with the words: Do you know where I put my ______? This query is then answered by the phrase: Don’t worry, it’ll turn up. While that used to occasionally be the case, it is no longer tue. When I can’t find something after a five minute search, I know that I will never see it again. It is gone. Vanished. Scotty has beamed it up and it resides in some other galaxy. Its molecules have left the building.
Several times each day Robin and I pass one another as we wander through the house with identical furrowed brows and frustrated facial expressions, she on her latest quest and I on mine. We don’t have time to commiserate what with all the opening of drawers and looking under sofas. When we empty the vacuum cleaner into the trash we now pick through the contents of the dust-bag and often find things that we didn’t even know we’d lost yet.
So it is yet another case where other animal species have skills and talents that homo sapiens can only dream of. I do admit that when I begin to regard woodpeckers as paragons, I just don’t know where it is all going.
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From The New Yorker
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Even though I reside in The state of Colorado, which is filled with mountains and ranches, I am neither mountaineer nor cowboy. I am a transplanted flatlander from the Midwest and will never be able to shake the prairie dust from my shoes and soul. I’m not even trying.
Being a newcomer, though, has its benefits. I am continually gaping in awe at the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Whenever the moment allows I am poking my nose around mesas and over passes to see what is on the other side. My curiosity leadeth me.
What I have found is that often after I have lived in a new location for a few years I often know more about the immediate surrounding territory than some lifelong residents do. It’s almost as if when one grows up in Paradise, one takes for granted that Paradise will always be there to explore whenever they want to do so, so why not wait until next week or the week after that? Whereas the newcomer may realize that life is a collection of transient moments, and that they had better take advantage of opportunities as they come along.
That’s my take on it, any way. The most striking example I’ve run up against personally is when I moved to the village of Hancock, Michigan. That town only had a population of 4700 or so, and one could easily drive across it in two minutes.
Trying to find a part-time childsitter for our kids, I was interviewing an elderly woman who ultimately declined to take the job. When asked why, she simply stated that she’d never been that far north and was uncomfortable thinking about it. From where the good woman lived on the south side of Hancock it was only a distance of a mile or so to our home. I was dumbfounded, but accepted that one mile or a hundred, she wasn’t budging in our direction. Apparently there is such a thing as too much north.
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From The New Yorker
[Lord, I do love this cartoon.]
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In a previous post I sneaked in a folk artist who may have been new to you, at least he was to me, although he has recorded five albums and apparently has a strong following.
We have a local radio station, KVNF, which plays all sorts of excellent music, and several times a year introduces me to artists that I never heard of but instantly adopt. Such was the case when I learned about the existence of Jake Xerxes Fussell.
Unflashy, unpretentious, without a moonwalk to his name. He is the genuine article.
Here’s one more track.
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A few decades ago I realized that in some aspects I was a mobile tabula rasa. Whenever I reside in a new area, even if it is for a relatively short time, I find myself speaking with local accents. If I make a new friend from a different part of the country, let’s say Alabama, the same thing happens. This happens without any intent on my part, as if I were little more than a tape recorder.
Lately, and to my dismay, I have begun imitating myself. Not my speaking voice, but the written one. I will be talking to a friend and realize that I am dictating paragraphs rather than using casual speech. I am verbally blogging instead of conversing. Any day now and I suppose that I will begin saying things like What a nice day it is comma do you have any plans for this afternoon question mark?
I begin to suspect that there is a diagnosis here, but I don’t know what it is. Parrot syndrome? Magpie disease? Dictaphrenia?
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Returning to the ongoing and seemingly never-ending story of vaccine disinformation, there is an op/ed in Saturday’s NYTimes entitled I’m the Governor of Hawaii. I’ve Seen What Vaccine Skepticism Can Do that I can recommend heartily. Well written, heartbreaking, anger-producing. Makes me want to find a pointed stick and begin some serious poking .
Pair this with one from last November entitled I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and I can just about guarantee that your blood pressure will rise ten points, so remember to take your meds and sit in a comfortable chair before reading them. If you can find someone to rub your neck … even better.
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I just read the sort of news item that sends my head spinning. Not that it takes that much to produce a spin, even standing up quickly can do it, but here’s the item I was talking about:
“Scientists estimate that we’ve identified only one-tenth of all species on Earth,” said Dr.
Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
Ten per cent! Holy Statistics, Batman, that’s incredible! What in earth have all of those biologists and zoologists been doing with their time all of these years? Sipping endless lattes on too-long coffee breaks? Making out in the janitor’s closet?
But to get back to the story, one of the new identify-ees is a vegetarian piranha which has been named Myloplus sauron after the villain Sauron from Lord of the Rings. To the scientists responsible for bringing it to our attention, the vertical stripe looks like that evil eye in the sky.
Its vegetarian habits are comforting to hear about, and even if it wasn’t, its mouth looks too small to take that much of a bite, really.
For comparison, here is a photo of a meat-eating piranha.
Even I can tell them apart.
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A couple of days ago a friend was lamenting the fact that those Disney nature documentaries of decades ago are not more readily available on television. He’s right. They aren’t. Some of them were quite lovely.
It’s not that excellent documentaries are not being made today, and available from several sources, but they are different in tone. There’s a bit more of the horrible in the newer ones. For example, a cheetah not only is shown to be very sleek and very fast but we see it catching its prey and then (we are shown in great detail) what happens afterwards. Much biting and tearing that Disney used to leave out. A more realistic portrayal, to be sure, but lacking the quieter aura of some of the earlier Disney efforts.
[Frank Disclaimer Time: I loved those older films, and grew up watching Walt Disney Presents on Sunday evenings, slurping up everything I saw as gospel.]
On the other hand. Those films were produced at a time when we were more accepting of what was being shown us as True Life Adventures. Some newer revelations have popped up indicating that there might have been an admixture in what was presented, with real stuff being mixed in with … well … fake news.
Looking for an old clip from that series, I ran across this one. Sort of wish I hadn’t found it.
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Robin and I are watching the series One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix. It is a film version of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel of the same name. I am enjoying it, although there was a magical quality to the novel that hasn’t quite transferred to the screen, at least for me. I love what they did in creating the village of Macondo. It’s all of what I had imagined, and more.
I’ve read the novel thrice, as new things are revealed each time. If you read articles about “How to write a story,” you will frequently find the advice given that you should construct your opening sentence so as to grab the readers and pull them in. If that’s as important as they say it is, I submit that the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude qualifies as a pretty good example:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Now there’s a doozy of an opening line. You introduce an important character and a second later you announce his imminent demise. If an author does that, they had better come up with something pretty good as followup. I won’t spoil it for you except to say that Marquez does just that.
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We did our first cross-country skiing of the season this past Saturday. Our equipment is aging and wasn’t of the most durable quality in the first place, so we drove the relatively short distance to Black Canyon National Park and tried everything out. Good for another year was the assessment.
I’ve mentioned this before, but there is only a single road that runs along the South Rim of the park, about six miles long. Get to the end and you return the same way you came in. One road, no looping, no branching. The park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery.
I’ve mentioned this before, but there is only a single road that runs along the South Rim of the park, about six miles long. Get to the end and you return the same way you came in. One road, no looping, no branching.
In winter the park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery. The snow wasn’t in great condition Saturday morning, much crustier than we like. Each year these skinny skis seem more treacherous, as if being guided by diabolical forces that are pushing us toward needing orthopedic care. Our vulnerability is especially felt on this road where there are occasional narrow places that have a half-mile deep gorge very near at hand and no guard rails. Don’t want to go on fast snow anywhere near those narrow places … I may ski poorly but I don’t fly well at all.
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During the recent political campaign I would watch James Carville on YouTube fairly regularly. He was knowledgeable, cranky, and reliably profane. He’s a smart guy, but he called this latest election wrong.
After pondering things for a couple of months, he delivered an editorial to the New York Times, which I thought was pretty good. There exists the possibility that this time he might be correct as well as colorful. The title of the piece was: James Carville: I Was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.
One line of thought especially caught my attention. He says that we need to take our focus off of Cluck and go after the votes of those working folks that we know the Republican Party is going to throw under the bus just as surely as God made those little green apples. Yes, Cluck is a degenerate and yes, he’s a fascist, but he’s a lame duck degenerate fascist. Is that the aroma of opportunity I smell?
This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.
James Carville, NYTimes, January 6
“Force them to oppose what they cannot be for.” I like that. If you ever meet up with a Democrat, point it out to them. They need our help.
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This past week as I was distractedly driving home and listening to NPR I heard the phrase “Joy is a radical act.” It intrigued me enough that when I got home I took out my computer to search for the source of the statement. I found it in an essay entitled “The World’s On Fire,”written by a woman named Rebecca Makkai.
The theme of her essay is : since there is a never-ending news barrage that is awful and horrible, and millions of people all over the planet that could use every bit of our resources and all of our waking moments, how can we ever justify taking time for personal happiness of any kind? For joy?
It reminded me of the story of Mitch Snyder. Mitch was a community activist who worked tirelessly for the homeless in Washington DC.
He became nationally famous for the tactics he used to bring the country’s attention to their problems, including well-publicized hunger strikes. He was colorful, brilliant, intense, and a dedicated and selfless worker for others. A serious man who took little time off.
.
Then one day he hung himself in his rooms in a homeless shelter that he had helped establish, stunning his friends and his co-workers because he had been a symbol of hope and resilience for the community he served. Some of Snyder’s friends and colleagues attributed his despair to the pressures of his work and the challenges of combating homelessness.
The lesson for me was that while there might be rare people who can meet the worst the world has to offer on a 24/7 basis and still go on, most of us do better and last longer if we perform that very radical act and take time for joy.
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From The New Yorker
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I have become quite a cynic when it comes to what appears to be a free lunch, being one of those whose response is: There is no such thing!
That’s why I am puzzled by a recent discovery of something called BookBub.com. You go to the web address, sign up for their newsletter, and after that every single day you receive an email listing a group of very worthy books that you can buy for a small fraction of their usual cost. Most sell for $0.99 or $1.99. They are not physical volumes, but e-books that are then delivered to your reader. If there is nothing that intrigues you, just delete the email.
But still … at those prices I can afford to add good stuff to my personal library on my Kindle, which takes up almost no space in our small home. I keep looking for the catch. Maybe my name has been unwittingly added to an email list operated by ISIS or Al Qaeda. Or worse, one of our political parties’ potential donor lists.
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True story. At least as close to the truth as you will find on these pages. This year I decided to give Robin a Bluecorn Candle from the shop of the same name here in Paradise. Apparently the brand is well known among candle connoisseurs, and Robin had expressed some interest in the past.
Safe ground, I thought. Buy one of these overpriced waxen towers and earn some points with my bride. So I went to their tables containing candles of a shape that pleased me, and I sniffed every sample on that display. One of them had a scent that I really liked, which that was very different from the florally inflected rest.
So I bought this candle, after reading the label to see what was so pleasant and finding basil and fir in the ingredient list on the cover. This is what I remember seeing while in the store.
But after Robin had opened her gift and I looked for a second time, I realized that I had entirely missed noting one of the ingredients.
What to do? Having the aroma of an addicting substance in the home is considered by some workers in the field of addiction medicine as an unnecessary provocation. Also, there is the question of what to do if I am ever surrounded by a pack of drug-sniffing dogs who now have shown great interest in me. Perhaps the answer is to burn the candle in moderation, and never drive after inhaling it at great length.
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From The New Yorker
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The new year is firmly established by this time. On January 1 it’s always a bit shaky, like a newborn fawn wobbling on those impossibly slender legs. But, like the fawn, two days later it’s off and running and getting sturdier by the hour.
There’s no turning back. It is 2025 whether we like it or not, and the year itself is not apologetic. It only has those 365 days to do what it has a mind to do, and worrying about our feelings and comfort is nowhere on its agenda.
So my advice is to wear sturdy shoes every day and be dressed for weather when you leave the house. I’ve told the following story here before, but when I was a medical student on my surgery rotation I was spending the day in the emergency room at the old Hennepin County General Hospital. It was a dripping hot July day, and this hospital was built long before air-conditioning was even dreamed of, so all of the staff members were walking around with as many buttons undone as propriety would allow, when through the door walked an apparition.
He was a very old man, wearing layer upon layer of woolen clothing, tall winter boots, a heavy army surplus overcoat, and a stocking cap. His stated purpose for coming in that day was that he was searching for the King of Poland. The surgical intern, clad in a white and short-sleeved uniform asked him if he wasn’t a bit uncomfortable in all those garments when the town was sweltering. The patient’s answer was logically unimpeachable : “Yes, I am, but you know, when you leave the house in the morning you never know what’s going to happen before you get back.”
This is my approach now to the year 2025. The politicians have mostly gone mad, the media following them is tirelessly recording every one of their flatulent utterances, and to find a sensible public voice is to become as excited as a dehydrated man being handed a glass of cool water. When I leave the house each day, I will do so using high caution and low expectations. I think that both are very much called for.
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Jimmy Carter passed away this week, at the age of 100 years. He had been our 39th president of these United States. Carter’s entire adult life was one of devotion to public service. When he was voted out of office, he picked up a hammer and went to work with Habitat for Humanity. He was also a humble man who taught Sunday School and who traveled the world as a private citizen, working always for peace, human rights, and the dignity of all men and women.
He and I shared a love of music in nearly all of its forms, without either of us being able to play an instrument. I learned just this morning that one of his favorite songs was Amazing Grace. So that’s two things that he and I shared.
The contrasts between this good man and the one recently re-elected could not be greater. Words like decency, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, moral rectitude, unselfishness, courage, honesty … all of these words have been used for many decades now in describing Mr. Carter and his works. None of them are ever used in describing our incoming president.
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From The New Yorker
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In the language of the land of divorced people, there are basically two groups, unceremoniously named dumpers and dumpees. Robin and I were dumpees. Neither of us had found the process of getting divorced to be pleasant in any way, and when we began dating were both still nursing bruises of varying degrees. We fell in love and in 1992 were married. We had decided that rather than have a subdued and quiet marriage ceremony, perhaps at a midnight chapel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, we would instead celebrate how good can sometimes alchemically arise out of unhappy events.
Part of our planning was to sit down with the church organist, who was in charge of helping people select music for such ceremonies. We told her that one of the selections we wanted was Amazing Grace, a song we both admired. At first the organist knitted her brow “Well, we usually play that at funerals … but … hmmm … just a minute … if you think about the lyrics… hmmm … they could also apply to happier occasions, couldn’t they?” We nodded assent, and into the program it went.
What we couldn’t have predicted is what the large group of friends we had invited would do with it. Robin and I stood at the front of the church and facing the minister, while those friends began to sing the hymn behind us. We had chosen only the first three verses to be sung, and the first one was performed in a rather standard and church-y way, but the next two steadily increased in volume and passion to become expressions of joy that swelled and filled the church. We received lots of presents from those same people, but what I remember most clearly thirty-two years later is their gift of that song.
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believ’d!
Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
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From The New Yorker
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For me, she nailed it.
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So this morning we begin the laborious process of learning to write a new date on our correspondence. I usually complete the task by mid-July, but then I was never a quick study. Six months later I’m right back in a muddle once again. Hardly worth the trouble, really. If any of you receive a letter from me, you’ll pretty much know that it was written in 2025 whether I put it on the page or not, so not to worry.
We’ve got our work cut out for us in the upcoming 12 months. Slightly less than half of the American citizenry decided that they would like to have a degenerate for president and so in three weeks he takes office. He is assembling a band of quacks, charlatans, and marauders to assist him in cleaning out the vaults, men and women whose curriculum vitae under normal circumstances would disqualify them from any job other than brigand. I have no crystal ball, but like my great-great-grand-daddy might have said, you don’t get apples from a shit-tree, son.
Hang on, friends, it’s going to be a ride. It might help to remember that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose. At least that’s what good ol’ Ecclesiastes said, and I’ll go with him every time.
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I think that I might have already read about thirty short blurbs about the new Bob Dylan biopic, and I’ve done that without even trying. The hoopla machine must be starting to smoke from overuse by now, and perhaps it needs to be shut down and given a bit of preventive maintenance.
So I am totally tenderized and ready to watch it should it come within range, which means if it comes to Grand Junction. (By the way, if you were wondering about the origin of that town’s name, wonder no longer. It sits at the junction of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers, and the Colorado was once named the Grand River.)
Why would I go to see such a movie when I already know all the songs and much of how his life has unfolded? Well, that’s a fair question.
Perhaps because we are both Minnesota boys of about the same age. Or that the lyrics to some of his songs have spoken truth to me since I was a lad. Or that it’s nearly January and some mid-winter boredom is setting in. Or that I suspect that much of what I think that I know about Mr. Dylan’s life story is wrong, and perhaps I’ll learn something new .
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A dense fog rolled in yesterday afternoon and is still hanging ’round. Visibility is less than half a city block. Travel in our part of the world is moving at a sensible speed as a result. Unusual, a fog like this here in Paradise.
Quite unlike on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, where I lived for several years. The Keweenaw was a finger of land about 15 miles wide and 40 miles long that stuck out into Lake Superior. When you are nearly surrounded by one of the largest lakes in the world, fogs are a regular part of life.
FOG
(by Carl Sandburg)
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Unlike Carl Sandburg’s fogs rolling in on little cat’s feet, the Lake Superior version would materialize around you. One minute visibility would be unlimited and the next you couldn’t see to tie your shoelace.
One fall evening I had traveled to a small-town hospital fifteen miles north of where I lived to consult on an infant. There were clear daytime skies on the ride up, but darkness and dense fog when I stepped out the hospital door two hours later.
To make things even more uncomfortable on that return trip, I was driving a small motorcycle, a Kawasaki KZ 400, to be precise.
Tooling along at 10-15 mph I wasn’t much worried about hitting something in front of me. No, it was someone in a car or truck smacking into me from behind that was the main concern. I’ve never felt more vulnerable when motoring than I did that night, because I knew that the taillight on that bike was too small to be much help in the fog.
So in this grand mist this morning? I’m not going anywhere at all. The poet’s cat will need to get off its haunches and pad out of town before I even start the car.
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I’ll go no further without sharing an image of my first motorcycle love, the Kawasaki machine mentioned above. there were bigger and faster bikes to come later, but none did more to free me from the four-wheeled cage that is a car than this one. You don’t forget your first time.
Risk-averse people used to ask me why I would ever ride a motorcycle. What could I possibly get out of it that was worth the hazard? I would answer: “You remember when you were a kid on your bicycle and you were riding down a long hill? How much fun that was?” They would always nod in assent. “Well, on my cycle I get that same feeling going uphill.“
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There is an interesting article in Saturday’s NYTimes about saunas and sauna culture. It takes the form of a 750 mile road trip from Grand Marais MN to Copper Harbor MI, sampling some of the luxury offerings that tourists might enjoy, or at lease pretend to love. Some of you might question the sanity of sitting in a 200 degree sweat-room and then leaping into Lake Superior in the winter then back to the steam room and back to the lake … you get the picture. But there are those that give this exercise in the treatment of one’s body (that would likely violate the terms of the Geneva Convention) credit for their health and peace of mind.
What is missing from the article are the thousands of residents of this same area who quietly install small personal saunas on their property for much less than the $50,000 units that are discussed. Ordinary folk who just want to percolate themselves whenever they feel the need, and do so without spending a small fortune.
My first sauna experience was at the home of a friend of mine in high school. Mike’s parents were artists and their home couldn’t have been more different from that of my family of origin. His mother taught modern dance in the Twin Cities and his father was a sculptor and painter.
On learning that I’d never sauna-ed, Mike invited me for an evening when his parents happened to be throwing a party. Most of the other attendees were middle-aged inhabitants of a world unknown to me, but I knew I was not in Kansas any more when a slightly portly Lonnie (Mike’s father) walked through the crowd carrying a tray of hors d’ouevres and wearing nothing at all. Although I was slightly hungry, I declined to take a canapé, being unsure of the hygienics of the situation.
Mike then took me out back to the sauna, showed me where to leave my clothes, and I undressed and entered the steamy wood-scented room, where others had already gathered. Not accustomed to being in a completely nude environment with both men and women present, I found a piece of bench as far from the light as I could get. Although I was a curious 15 year-old, and would really have liked to look more carefully at the first nude adult females I had ever been that close to, I neither wanted to be seen or to be seen see-ing, so I hunkered over and stared at the wooden floor.
After what seemed to be an acceptable period of discomfort, I rose and left the room to find my clothing and resume normal existence. All in all, when looking back, I wish I had done things differently. Today I would take one of those canapés and think nothing of it.
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Saturday evening: Just left the theater after viewing “A Complete Unknown.” The film rocked us both. Not a single disappointment and nothing but respect for the actors playing people that many of us grew up listening to and watching from a distance.
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Last night I started rereading the Tao te Ching for perhaps the third time. Each time I go through it I am given the gift of learning new things. Last night there was a quotation in the book’s foreword which contained information that I badly needed to read right now. Here’s the story.
Our next-door neighbor had a big Vote for Cluck sign on his garage door during the last campaign season and I put up a Harris/Walz sign in front of our house. We have not spoken since the big vote last November.
Post-election I have constituted myself as a large pile of resentment toward those who voted for the other guy. All sorts of negative adjectives run through my mind each time I think about it. All the way up to idiocy and treason. Actually, I go beyond even that and rain down vigorous calumnies on their ancestors as well, going back several generations to question the manliness of great-grandfathers and the virtue of great-grandmothers.
This needs to stop. I am making myself miserable to no purpose. But the self-righteous part of my brain tells me that by God I am right and that I should never forget that, and also that I am a much more moral person than all the rest of those b****rds put together.
So I have quite a lot to deal with, as you can see. It makes little difference that I am causing most of my own problems. They are still problems. And now in the middle of all this the Tao has made its move. Here is the quotation:
What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand, this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
One interpretation that (which is awfully tempting) is that I am the good guy and the superior being and if I could just get this man’s head scrooched around to where I could lecture him face-to-face all would be well.
Of course, there might be other interpretations. And then my thought is how does all this “teaching” really come about? Lecturing and the pounding of fists on desks (my default strategy)? No, somehow I suspect that the word humility is going to come in to play and when that happens resentment will have a harder time holding its ground.
Looks like I need to read further, I am obviously not yet one with everything.
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From The New Yorker
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I truly don’t know anyone else like Tom Waits. Writer, singer, actor, raconteur … you might say he has a way with words as the bare minimum, but I think that it goes further than that.
Mostly he tells stories, and the thing is that each one of them ends up feeling like part of my own story in some transmuted way. The particulars may not be different, but the universals are all there.
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When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.
Tom Waits
If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it’s good. I’m not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don’t cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don’t stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you’ll never see it again.
Tom Waits
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
Tom Waits
When I was younger I bought into the idea of the suffering artist, with a glass of scotch in one hand and a dangling cigarette in the other. Becoming an attractive dissolute was my goal, and an early and “romantic” death was my clear endpoint. Like a male Camille but without the tuberculosis. The only problem was although I could and did learn to drink I wasn’t an artist at all. I wasn’t a musician but a guy who played records on a stereo. I read books but didn’t write any. I had become a periodic drunk without ever becoming charming.
So if I kept going I would just die in a very ordinary fashion, and no one would write precious stuff about me and how pure my heart was and how sad it was that a man with such talent perished so soon. I was wasting the single life I’d been issued.
So I quit.
Lots of good people stepped forward to give me a hand, and right at the head of that worthy and necessary bunch was a lady name of Robin. At some point I started to pay it forward, becoming one of a multitude helping to keep the doors open for the next person unsteadily weaving up the path to a rented room in the back of a church.
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From The New Yorker
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As I unpacked the groceries a couple of days back I set aside the three small bags of mixed nuts in-the-shell. You know, the kind you struggle to break open without smashing the contents to smithereens, failing most of the time even on a good day.
And I mused.
The purchased mix was English walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, and Brazil nuts. With some trepidation based on years of dashed expectations, I picked up a nutcracker and had at a walnut. As I applied pressure to the arms of the tool the walnut suddenly shot out and hit the wall.
I had forgotten that while we have two nutcrackers, one of them is so lacking in all aspects of performance that what just happened was not actually a malfunction, it was what it does! Each year I think that I’ve thrown it away but then the next December rolls around and out pops the Nutcracker from Hell to darken one more day.
Here are the two crackers we own. The one on the right works beautifully. The one on the left is diabolic.
Apparently simply trashing it is not enough, it needs to be buried by someone acting quite alone and under a full moon. If a silver spade is handy it is the preferred practice, but if not a steel one will do the job most of the time.
The hole must be at least three feet deep, and the device buried face down. This is where things often go wrong because it is exceedingly difficult to tell the face from the back on a nutcracker.
In my childhood it was Grandpa Jacobson who put out the nuts to shell each year at Christmas, and I still attempt to maintain that tradition when I can. It is the reason I purchase these bags of frustration each year.
He would set them out in a bowl exactly like this one. I found this item on Etsy where you can purchase such a bowl for a measly $276.00. (I strongly suspect that Grandpa paid much less for his.)
In my family of origin, the only nuts occasionally found in the cupboard were walnuts used in baking, and salted peanuts for snacking. So the varieties offered at Christmas time were special.
But what was this? Here came the cosmic joke. These delicacies were not just be picked up , be amazed at, and then eaten. Nossir. You needed a tool to bring them out into the open. And even when the tool worked properly, you might have these problems to deal with:
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Another sad article in the Times of New York on Thursday. The death rate from measles in the Congo is much higher this year than in the past, the reason unclear. The disease is epidemic there, not because of resistance to the idea of vaccines but because of problems with getting the highly effective preventative to the people in that beleaguered country. People who want their children protected but either have inadequate local medical resources or none at all.
Here in the U.S. we have a more than adequate supply of the measles vaccine, and enough medical personnel to get it to every child. The only problem is what is euphemistically called vaccine resistance. My own take is that it could be better named epidemic vaccine ignoramus syndrome. Parents who will summon their inner gullible and listen to an anti-science influencer peddling bad information, and in doing so place their children’s health and life at risk on either the flimsiest of grounds or no grounds at all.
The whole sorry mess doth make the blood boil in an ancient pediatrician’s breast. We were so close to eradicating this particular bit of nastiness from the world that it is appalling to watch what is happening out there now. I would like to see those influencers dealt with using the shouting fire in a crowded theater rule. Turn over their rock and somehow hold them responsible for the effects of spreading deluded misinformation. Perhaps make them pallbearers at the childrens’ funerals.
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Read a review today of a new film that sounded intriguing. When I reached the end of the piece I ran headlong into this paragraph:
Almodóvar’s films often explore doubles: mothers and daughters, pairs of lovers, twisted friends. “The Room Next Door” does the same, in several different registers, and I think that’s the point of the title. We cannot really know what another person is going through. Even if we follow Weil’s exhortation and ask, we’re incapable of fully inhabiting another person. We can’t live inside of them. The real act of friendship, of love, is to check on one another in the morning and make sure we’re still there.
NYTimes: The Room Next Door
What that bit of writing meant to me is that living out here hundreds of miles from any metropolis as I do, I will not ever be able to walk into our local theater here in Paradise and watch the movie. It might not even make it as far as Grand Junction. Very thoughtful films with deep themes and deep characters just don’t sell enough tickets to be able to compete with the comic-book universe.
I went back through the review one more time and found absolutely no reference to superpowers, things being blown sky-high, or hyper-powered automobiles and their drivers being pitted against one another in meaningless confrontations. Don’t get me wrong, I am not whimpering about the situation but only describing a reality. I’ve met one of the theater owners and like him. I appreciate very much that occasionally he will bring a film to town that surprises me, and that the convenience of driving only a couple of miles to see it is gratifying. I also realize that showing films like “The Room Next Door” week after week would probably mean that the theater would not survive and even those rare surprises would go away.
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Every great once in a while when I am hiking a particularly beautiful stretch of trail above treeline I will break out into my butchered version of the following song. In doing so I embarrass my companions and alarm others we meet on the path. I can see those strangers checking their phones to see if there is cellular coverage in case I am coming down with trail rage.
I don’t care. It’s me and my inner Pavarotti and some mild hypoxia having a great time together.
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Lastly, and because it is Christmas and all, I feel the need to make a confession. In 1958, when I was a stripling and completely devoid of anything approaching musical taste, I first heard the Harry Simeone Chorale version of “Little Drummer Boy” while piloting my 1950 Ford coupe on a nameless highway somewhere in Minnesota, probably on my way to doing something slightly illegal involving spiritus fermenti. The little fable and simple arrangement stayed with me, and I was not surprised when it later became a big hit, eventually joining that select list of tunes and carols that are played at Christmastime every year.
Here is the Chorale appearing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1959. Pretty, tasteful, melodic, serene.
Over time there were many many other artists who covered this song, most of them respectful of the original vibe, most of them not quite coming up to the original, IMHO. (But remember, devoid of musical taste). And then a few short years ago, these brothers came along, blew the song apart, restructured it, and had a hit on their hands. With modern stagecraft, enough percussion to be the background music for Sherman’s march through Georgia, and strobe lighting of the sort that brings on seizures, King and Country added their version to the canon.
Where does the confession come in? Well, my favorite version is still the original one by the Chorale. But there is a little militaristic and mindless part of me that can be sucked right up into a bit of bombast. So once each year I play King and Country for myself, watching the video on YouTube and listening on headphones, so that no one is aware of my solitary and shameful vice.
And I know I can count on you not to rat me out, right?
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I have started to write the Great American Novel scores of times. Each effort was eventually scrapped. If I have any talent at all it seems to be in shorter pieces, essays, poems … the sort of meanderings found in this blog, for instance.
Which is why when I first came across haiku and bothered to learn something about it, I knew instantly that I was among friends. It was the economy of it all, the formalities, the natural themes that appealed to me. The Japanese must take all of the blame for starting me on this path. Traditionally haiku are three-lined poems, of 5-7-5 syllables per line. Most of those I selected today but the very last one are by Japanese masters of the art, but that 5-7-5 format did not survive translation.
To me, they are like photographs, whereas a novel might represent a movie. It’s not too hard to put myself or my experiences into the picture with haiku, which is part of its charm.
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When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.
Basho
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Here,
I’m here—
The snow falling
Issa
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Going home,
The horse stumbles
In the winter wind.
Buson
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Cover my head
Or my feet?
The winter quilt.
Buson
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Winter solitude—
In a world of one color
The sound of wind.
Basho
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Miles of frost –
On the lake
The moon’s my own.
Buson
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The snowstorm howling,
A cautious man treads upon
Bare and frozen earth
Anonymous
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Some comments on the music –
Song for a winter’s night: there’s a cabin, a crackling fire, and a big ol’ down quilt to get under. We just have to find where Gordon put them all.
Colder than winter: I have experienced winters of the heart, and since I know that I am not unique, perhaps you have as well. Vince Gill never sounded better or more plaintive.
Winter: from Tori Amos’ first album, an exceptionally brave and talented young artist just getting her career underway.
Winter: yes, yes, of course Peter Kater is New Age-y as he can be, but it’s still a rather nice way to pass a few minutes. Remember how way back in those dim dark days (almost) beyond recall when your teacher in “music appreciation class” would put on a piece of music and ask that you imagine that it was snowing or raining or that the oboe’s voice was a duck quacking? Well … have at it.
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The assassin who murdered that health insurance CEO recently was caught at a McDonald’s in Altoona PA when another patron recognized him from online photos and called the police. Authorities now have the gun, the guy, and what seems enough evidence to bake him hard in court.
He might not come to trial for a year or two because if you are affluent enough you can spend quite a bit of time waiting for your case to come up as your legal teams place tire-puncturing devices across every road leading to you and prosecutors must clear them one at a time.
But there is still a question regarding this story that I’ve heard nothing about so far.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H.L. Mencken
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Somewhere along the way I realized that my social and moral education was improved more by listening to the stories told by oppressed peoples than those related by their oppressors. Nothing I have learned since that epiphanic moment has changed this outlook.
My early life was a sheltered one but in the 60s I became aware that not everyone in the USA was of Scandinavian ancestry. Well, I thought, there’s something to be learned here. So I bought some books, attended some lectures, listened to some blues and spirituals and ultimately decided that I was enlightened. I’ve got this, thought I, and it wasn’t all that hard.
Well, I didn’t have it, and still don’t. Intellectually I was able to go only so far on my own, and I have had to turn to others for help. That’s why a piece in Thursday’s NYTimes on Nikki Giovanni was so interesting. I knew of her, but had not read much of what she has written, so for me there was much to learn from this article.
But the real treat was a link to a video conversation between Giovanni and James Baldwin that was recorded in 1971. It was fascinating to see two brilliant people spend two hours talking about ideas. To argue respectfully as black intellectuals even as they each had to lean in from their respective sides in order to bridge a generation gap.
My personal needle felt it had moved an inch or two toward understanding when I had finished watching these videos. Maybe I’m wrong and I am just as obtuse as I was when I got up this morning, but I don’t think so. I may not ever know fully what it means to be black or red or brown or yellow, but I do believe that I can do human better than I have done in the past and that what I have just watched was one step moving in that direction.
Here are the links:
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Holy Highway 61 Revisited, Batman! I just watched a trailer for a film that comes out Christmas Day and while I know it likely won’t come to Paradise, which the pandemic turned from movie Heaven (sorta) to movie Limbo (pretty much), I will by God drive to see it when it comes within range. It’s called A Complete Unknown and is about a relatively short period in the life of a guy that we geezers grew up and old with. His name is Bob Zimmerman.
He might not have known at the time that he was writing the background music for our lives, but that’s what happened. Those lyrics of his … well … they won him a Nobel Prize. What territory do they cover? Not much, really, just human rights, civil disobedience, war, injustice, aging, grief, love, loss, Billy the Kid … and on and on. Not a bubble-gum piece in the lot.
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As of Sunday morning Robin and I are gradually winning our battle against a virus as muscular as a microbial Hercules and as unpleasant as finding president-elect Cluck sleeping in the guest room would be.
Robin is her eighth day and I have as yet had only four days to whinge about my problems. Friday night I barely slept because my nose had become a raging cataract to the point where I could not lie horizontal and had to spend the night sitting up in Robin’s recliner.
We’ve also developed the sort of cough that makes anyone near us in the grocery aisle cross themselves and reach for their prayer beads.
This too shall pass, is what we tell ourselves between whoops and cringes. I have a suspicion that the culprit may be RSV, which is doing to me exactly what I saw it do to a thousand infants in a dozen hospitals. But although I may be ancient I have big lungs, unlike all those babies back then who struggled for days to catch their breath.
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Little Home In The Valley 