The problem with being a garrulous old gent like myself is getting your victim to stand still long enough to unload your priceless cargo of stories on them. At first they get that cornered look in their rapidly shifting eyes and when they decide that more desperate measures are called for:
They take out their phones and pretend to receive important calls.
They develop abdominal pain that they are sure is appendicitis.
They remember a doctor’s appointment for that brain tumor they just learned they have.
They hear their mother calling.
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The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
Henry Wallace (1888-1965)
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There is an informative article in the local paper on the birthing pains of our Black Canyon National Park, which was established 25 years ago. It was that famous philanderer Bill Clinton who signed the bill creating the park, at a moment between dalliances.
One thing I didn’t know before reading the article is that while a national monument can be created by the president alone, it takes Congress to make a national park. Good article. Short. Non-taxing.
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Moonlight In Vermont, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio
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Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
Upton Sinclair
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I am presently reading a book by Craig Childs which is about animal encounters in the wild. In the first couple of tales I had been put off by what I thought was a too-frequent use of metaphors. But then I came to the story about a meetup with a mountain lion, one he had been observing for awhile from afar, and which had then wandered off out of sight.
A bit later he realized that it had circled around until it was behind him, and was very close indeed. It is a really gripping short tale, well enough written to make me sense the nakedness of standing by a desert waterhole thirty feet from a lion who is walking toward you, and you with nothing in your hand but a folding knife.
No metaphors here. Straight up, no ice.
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Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.
Aneurin Bevan
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Ai Ga Bani, by Ali Farka Touré
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Saturday I attended a birthday party for Archer, who lives next door. We barely know each other and have almost nothing in common. His tastes in music are deplorable and at least half the time he smells more than a little off. But he and Robin have become friends, so when she attended I went with her.
Anyway, Archer had his one-year old party on a lovely Fall day and he seemed to enjoy the whole thing. But he completely ignored the fact that it was also my birthday and monopolized the group’s attention. Rude child. Spiteful.
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After one of the most beautiful autumns I’ve ever experienced, it looks like our weather is finally going into the crapper. Ah well, October 31 is nearly here and what’s Halloween without hypothermic children out gathering things to eat that are not good for them?
This week I developed a minor infection for which my personal physician Dr. Ursula Major prescribed an antibiotic, one I have taken several times in the past. I took the first dose an hour before retiring, and two hours later I woke scratching. Everywhere. Top to bottom.
I got out of bed and checked my look in the bathroom mirror. My face was slightly puffy and red, and my chest a mass of hives. In fact, everywhere that I could see was a field of hives. There were even places where there seemed to be hives stacked upon hives.
I scratched my way to the first aid kit, which is where I keep a couple of household medications like Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and such. There was a vial of unlabeled pink tablets that I was almost certain were Benadryl, an antihistamine. But I was already having one drug problem, and didn’t want to take a chance on another, so I went to the internet at midnight and eventually identified the mystery tabs as Benadryl.*
Popped a couple of them, went back to bed, and slept as much as the itching would allow. Three days later the rash is nearly gone and I am taking a brand new antibiotic. Which is prompting a moderate degree of diarrhea.
And so between the fitful nights and days of scratching and the tender moments in the bathroom, I sometimes wistfully look back at that initial illness and wonder … was it really so bad after all? Would it have taken care of itself?
Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass), by Elisapie
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Daughter Kari put me onto something special in the way of music. An album of covers of rock and pop songs. Sung in the Inuk language by an Inuk woman.
One of the best things about a good cover is when it makes you listen to a well-known tune from a new perspective. One of those “getting new glasses” kind of moments. These songs do that for me.
Her professional name is Elisapie. The album is entitled Inuktitut.
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Taimangalimaaq (Time After Time), by Elisapie
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Plaisir d‘amour Ne dure qu’un moment Chagrin d’amour Dure toute la vie
One verse from a beautiful and wise song written in 1789. Translated it says: The joy of love is but a moment long. The pain of love lasts the whole life long.
We are going through some of the pain part these days with our cat friend Poco. The love part has always been easy, but this segment … not so much.
Age has brought a full slate of infirmities to this brave little guy. Arthritis, muscle atrophy, dental issues, intermittent confusion and forgetfulness, just to name a few. Thinking about the future brings on a jumble of thoughts. What to do when there is nothing to fix?
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Qimmijuat (Wild Horses), by Elisapie
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Listening to Colorado Public Radio the other day I caught these interesting statistics. The lowest point in Colorado is the Arikaree River where it flows out of the state into Kansas, at an elevation of 3,317 feet. This is also the highest low point of any U.S. state.
This low point is located in Yuma County, in the northeast corner of the state. The GPS coordinates for the lowest point are 39°58’41″N, 102°03’06″W.
Our lowest point is higher than the highest point in 18 states and the District of Columbia.
Robin is safely back home through flying the friendly but expensive skies of United Airlines. No wheels fell from the plane, no doors blew off, and none of the passengers (including Robin) had to be subdued or arrested for worrisome behavior. So … all good.
I no longer enjoy flying, and it has nothing to do with being 35,000 feet in the air and moving along at 500 miles per hour. It has everything to do with being jammed into smaller and smaller spaces over the years, overzealous and officious TSA screeners in airports, and increasingly complex websites in which to handle ticket purchases or rescheduling. Oh and yes, there is the ever-present worry about whether you will ever see your luggage again when you turn it over to the baggage handlers.
It doesn’t help that we must enter the plane up front and walk through the gilded first class section while putting up with the long-suffering expressions on the faces of the occupants of that exalted realm who seem to be afflicted by seeing the unwashed pass them by. All this in order to get to the rabbit warrens in the back of the plane where we lesser beings are being shoehorned together.
The last time I flew I think that I saw Marie Antoinette in the first class section, lifting a small cake to her lips as the bubbles rose in her champagne glass.
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Flying, by The Beatles
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For those people who are becoming interested in learning more about the fascinating world of birds there is an abundance of national and global resources that are eager to provide information.
One of these that I recommend is the American Bird Conservancy. Something that they offer that I particularly enjoy is to have free periodic Zoom seminars. The next one is on nightjars, is scheduled for October 29, and you can sign up on their website.
Another personal favorite is the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. There is loads of information here, with photos, bird calls, habitat descriptions, etc. Southern New Hampshire University posts an extensive list of resources on all things birds on their website. My point? There is no shortage of ways to add to one’s knowledge of birds and birding. Just you and your computer and a measure of time could get you firmly on the way to a lifelong hobby or interest.
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What is hardest to accept is not that there is a creature like Donald Cluck. Aberrations such as he exemplifies are occurring all the time among humans. No, the hardest thing is that nearly half of our co-citizens support him for our country’s highest office.
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Flying, by Chris Isaak
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Another hike at the Black Canyon National Park – the Warner Point Trail. Only 2 miles out and back. There are magnificent views of the Black Canyon on this trail, but the camera doesn’t do them justice.
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Attention K-Mart Shoppers, don’t let the doors hit you on the butt on your way out. The last one in the U.S. just went down the tube.
From Kresge’s to K-Mart to Super K-Mart to extinction, this icon was both a creation of capitalism and a victim. I can’t say that I will miss shopping there. When I had access to one while living in South Dakota I rarely found what I was looking for at the K-Mart.
Kresge’s started in 1899, and the first K-Mart opened in 1962, so they’ve been around for an eon. Notice the line at the top of the photograph: “Nothing Over 10 Cents In Store.” My only recollection of a Kresge’s was the one located in downtown Minneapolis, and that was when I was a kid. Even then it had wooden floors and a musty aroma. Now they are gone and I have the musty aroma. No fair.
With all that’s been written about “toxic masculinity,” there were many articles that I never read because … why would I? Surely they were just more paragraphs in the long and numbing description of the failings of my gender.
But recently I decided to check out just what was this toxic masculinity, anyway. Just for a lark, you understand. So I asked ChatGPT to write me a definition. In less than ten seconds my computer presented me with a really fine essay, from which I excerpted this passage:
Toxic masculinity refers to a set of socially constructed attitudes that reinforce male dominance, emotional repression, and aggression as defining traits of manhood. Rooted in patriarchal traditions, it perpetuates the belief that men must adhere to rigid gender norms, such as being physically strong, emotionally stoic, and assertive. This form of masculinity not only harms women and marginalized groups but also men themselves.
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Then I asked my new oracle for 300 words on “toxic femininity.” I wasn’t even sure there was such a term, but there was. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
Toxic femininity refers to a set of socially constructed behaviors and traits that pressure women to conform to restrictive and harmful ideals of traditional femininity. Just as toxic masculinity reinforces harmful stereotypes about men, toxic femininity stems from patriarchal systems that define women’s roles in limiting, often disempowering, ways.
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It did not escape me that both these examples of toxicity were being blamed on “the patriarchy.” Unfortunately, I am a lifelong member of that noxious fraternity. In the late 60s, my former wife and I were attending Unitarian church services in Minneapolis when the minister astounded me by telling us that a large number of women were unhappy with their lot and were not satisfied with having only the “big four” life choices offered to them.
homemaker
teacher
nurse
librarian
I turned to my ex-wife (a nurse) and asked … is this true? She looked at me with an expression that said volumes: Yes it is true, fool, and how could you have not noticed?
I walked out the door of the church, the scales newly fallen from my eyes, and soon discovered that there was something called feminism which was composed of battalions of fierce women who were marching, venting, and creatively expressing their collective anger.
Within feminist scholarship, patriarchy has been understood more broadly as the system in which men as a group are constructed as superior to women as a group and as such have authority over them.
And who were they mad at? You got it, the patriarchy. I took it all very personally. (Which was not too odd because this was at a point in my life when I was pretty much taking everything personally.) Not only was I a (gasp, puke) male and therefore one of the prime targets of feminism, but I was white, straight, and Protestant as well. Most of America was pissed off at at least one of the groups that I belonged to.
I’ve never quite gotten over that day at the Unitarian Church. Realizing how unobservant and unimaginative I had been was like getting a pail of ice water in the face. Humbling, depressing, and dampening all at once.
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Colorado Song, by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils
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One of our favorite hikes is up at the Black Canyon National Park. It starts at the Visitor Center and loops around and up and down for about 3 miles. ‘Tis a good workout for Robin and I. Thought I’d include a handful of pix for your edification. The course is an amalgam of three shorter paths, the Oakflat, Uplands, and Rimrock trails.
There were still a raft of visitors to the park, taking up the parking spaces at the visitor center. I find it quite annoying when foreigners in my park are too abundant. There was one amusing moment. I had just left my car and was heading for the trailhead when I was accosted by a woman about my age.
The lady came immediately to the point: “You look like someone who would know about the trails – do you know where the Rimrock Trail begins?“
It happened that I did know exactly that: “If you follow this rail fence behind me across the parking lot, it ends where your trail begins.”
She seemed satisfied, and added: “Thank you. I knew I had the right person.”
Leaving me to wonder just what look I was projecting. I decided that it was a positive one, and walked smugly away.
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The Colorado Trail, by Sand Sheff
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Robin has been away for nearly a week now, back in South Dakota renewing friendships and spending time with her sister Jill. As is my usual, I do no cleaning, dusting, or sprucing up until the very last day before she returns.
I find that I am comfortable with a certain level of grubbiness, and left to my own devices I would probably do nothing until the dust bunnies reached the height of the coffee table and one could actually trip over them.
I am much better at keeping the kitchen clean, however. I seem to have a talent for operating a dishwasher, and use it at every opportunity. My motto is Never Let The Sun Set On Leaving Something In The Dishwasher. What’s the point of owning the thing if you don’t give it a run now and then?
But my habit of turning it on and then going to bed is probably not the wisest course, since all mechanical things eventually fail, and waking to a kitchen flood would be a bad start to any day.
I am having my faith shored up in country music this month. That’s not really accurate because I still think that most of that genre is a musical waste of time. I’m talking about the wide swath of undistinguished pabulum that goes something like this: “picked up my baby in her cutoff jeans and we went down the dirt road in my pickup truck to have a beer and make sweet love but oh Lordy does my head feel bad this mornin’ “.
But there’s always been other threads running through those carpet sweepings. Like traditional Appalachian music, spirituals, work songs, and relatively recently “outlaw” and “alternative” country. Singers like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson have been examples. Where the lyrics are typically far from superficial.
This week I’ve spent time listening to a musician who has links to many of those threads of “country” and of rock and roll as well. His name is Jason Isbell and he could be the undeclared love child of Neil Young and Lucinda Williams.
Miles, by Jason Isbell
Isbell writes songs that tell good stories, he plays excellent guitar, and he sings well. Interviews he comes across as smart and humble, an attractive combination. Today’s tunes are from a live concert at the Ryman Theater in Nashville, where he and the 400 Unit, his backup band, are in good form. Makes me wish I had been there to hear it.
[BTW – there’s a line that I think we can all get behind in the song “Super 8.” It is “Don’t wanna die in a Super 8 motel.” Can I have an Amen?]
Super 8, by Jason Isbell
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We’re seeing more and more articles on eco-relocation. People packing up and moving to parts of the country where the long arm of climate change doesn’t reach. There is no such place, of course, but they seek at least a spot where hurricanes and rising sea levels aren’t daily concerns.
Paradise is one of those less-affected places, at least for today. Oh, these days we are hotter and drier, but at least our homes aren’t being blown skyward or washed out to sea, and for the less adventurous among us having your house stay in one place is important.
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Living in Colorado has been instructive. Before I became a resident it seemed all rocks and wilderness, and to some degree it still is. But it is harder even just ten years later to get that alone in nature feeling. One of the issues is the mechanization of the mountains.
Colorado’s history of mining left behind a spider web of old, rough roads connecting the small towns and leading to what once were productive mining areas. While ordinary vehicles can’t manage these bumpy and often deeply rutted tracks, Jeeps and other 4WD vehicles can. As soon as the snow melts these pathways are filled with such machines, often traveling in packs.
Some of the pilots of these cars are skilled in navigating mountain roads, but many are not. After all, you don’t need to know what you’re doing to get yourself out there, all you need is a fistful of disposable income and a Jeep. There are now so many unskilled drivers in the alpine areas that a few weeks back a local sheriff was publicly bemoaning the number of “assclowns” on the trails causing problems for drivers who knew what they were doing.
None of these things are impediments to the guy on foot, who can walk past a roadblock caused by a driver who fears going forward and is unable to back up. Hikers don’t get to cover as much ground as the motorized explorer, but they do get to know the ground they cover better. To each their own. I happen to prefer wearing out a pair of boots to a set of tires.
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Middle of the Morning, by Jason Isbell
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I don’t know how many of you are as fascinated by the story of the man eating lions of Tsavo as I am, but there was a tidbit on CNN that I thought worth sharing. The taxidermized lions have been on display at the Field Museum in Chicago for 100 years but recently some small hair fragments noted in their teeth drew the attention of researchers and the guns of DNA study were brought to bear.
What they found was that almost anything on four legs was included in their diet plan, including some large mammals not found today in what is usually considered to be the lions’ range.
And of course, some of the hairs were human.
In the photo of the mounted specimens they don’t look nearly as threatening as they must have in 1898, when they killed 35 railway workers who were involved in building a bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. This story was made into a pretty entertaining movie entitled “The Ghost and the Darkness.” There is a fair amount of quibbling about the film not telling the story exactly as it happened, but when has that ever occurred before? It still makes for a good story, and one disturbing enough to frighten small children.
There are suggestions that the lions turned more to dining on softer and easier to catch humans because of dental diseases. Having had many toothaches as a child I can easily imagine how that could occur. Either way, these famous cats are once again in the news.
This afternoon I was brushing our older cat, Poco, whose coat requires frequent attention. He can no longer keep himself tidy due to old age and arthritis. But he seems to very much appreciate the help we provide with brush and comb, purring and doing that rubbing thing cats do.
When this particular grooming session was finished he and I found ourselves staring at one another. I wondered – what would life have been like these past 17 years without him as a companion?
You know that old adage: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear?” That has been true for me on many fronts, but never more so than with the pets I’ve had.
I had to slow down the pace of my life before I could truly begin to notice what the smaller critters of the household had to teach me.
The most important lesson that I’ve learned from Poco? I think that it was this. When life spins out of control in the myriad ways that it can, there is enormous comfort in having another living creature just sit with you in the room, quietly, not speaking, perhaps not even understanding. Just being there.
I don’t know how it happens, but I am a witness to its power.
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Birds, by Neil Young
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Just in case that you haven’t yet had your fill of reminiscing about Kris Kristofferson, here’s a link for when you have 45 minutes to spend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZo_eMeGvg
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For the first time since we’ve lived here in Paradise, I have a problem with the local dove population. This year one of them has picked out a branch high in the ash tree that is directly over my chair at the table on the backyard deck. When said creature relieves itself, it leaves a mark on exactly that chair. Each day there is fresh evidence of its presence, and each day I must clean the chair before sitting down.
You might ask – why not move the chair? Aren’t you afraid of being bombed while occupying it? Questions like these are entirely appropriate and my answer to both is that it’s my chair and my space and bird be damned if I’m going to change either one of them.
If the dove wants war, it can continue its reprehensible behavior. I am slow to burn but once I get started, well, that little shitter better watch it is all I have to say.
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King of Birds, by R.E.M.
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Amy and Claire were here over the past weekend. The weather was lovely and we found many things to do to pass the time. Friday the three ladies toured our shopping establishments. Durango is actually much less of a shopper’s paradise than Montrose, believe it or not, and whenever these two come for a visit, there is at least one raid on the local Target.
Saturday we rented e-bikes for our guests and the four of us pedaled the bicycle/walking path along the Uncompahgre River. It’s a really pretty ride, six miles in length, and we did the twelve miles out and back without breaking a sweat. We stopped for lunch at Shelter, a brewpub which is right on the path and overlooks the river. Those hours passed delightfully.
There were quite a few people enjoying the path, brought out by the excellent weather, I suppose. We were in no hurry. It was a day to be sipped, not chugged.
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This Bird’s Gonna Fly, by Los Lobos
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A bit more about the National Audubon Society’s decision to keep its old name even after learning about the ugly history of John James Audubon and his family, who were not only slave owners but traffickers to boot.
This Science Friday podcast talks about this decision and why it might have been a poor choice. In an era when vestiges of systemic racism are being identified and removed one by one around the country, it does seem puzzling. So I googled the National Audubon Society and looked at the photos of the members of its various boards. What is striking is the underrepresentation of people of color.
When we know how sneaky racism can be, and how in so many ways it is the sea we all swim in, it makes you wonder if these boards looked a bit more like America that the vote would have been different.
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Finally, this photograph won the Wildlife Photograph of the Year competition in 2024. It is of tadpoles in a lake on Vancouver Island and was taken by photographer Shane Gross. So beautiful it almost looks unreal.
Breakfast with friend Rod yesterday. Something we hadn’t done in some time. Two hours and entirely too many calories later, after we had solved most of the world’s problems and come up with cures for nearly all the discomforts of age, we returned to our respective homes. This had to be done to allow the food we’d engulfed to come to some sort of détente with our bodies. It was nip and tuck for a while, but I finally forced those hash browns into submission.
I had made the serious mistake of ordering a “slam,” which meant that I was served two of everything you could imagine, when one egg and a slice of toast is my usual meal. I did some calculations and if I can survive the next four days my cholesterol will have returned to normal and my chances of survival improved by 15%.
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Brown-Eyed Girl, by Van Morrison
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These days ex-pres Cluck is telling such big, foolish, and easily disprovable lies that I have come to only two possible explanations that make any sense to me:
He has completely lost his marbles
He has grown tired of people coming forward to shoot at him and wants to be defeated in the election so they will stop, but to admit this to his supporters would be to lose too much face. His problem is that those same supporters seem to enjoy being lied to so much that as far as they are concerned, the bigger the whopper the better.
Can’t decide which is the case. Help me out here.
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Cyprus Avenue, by Van Morrison
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It was Willow’s turn to go to the veterinarian yesterday, and he was waiting for her with immunizations in hand. Last night she showed signs of not feeling well, and this morning she still doesn’t want to stir from the comfortable place she’s staked out. I have that “Dad” feeling of knowing that getting the shots was a necessary and good thing, but really hating to see the temporary suffering of the little animal for which I am responsible. (It was actually slightly easier with my children when they were small, since I could administer simple pain/fever relievers and could talk to them.)
Hopefully she will begin to feel better later today, but almost certainly tomorrow will bring improvement. In the meantime, soft words and touches along with offering food and water will have to do.
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The ash trees in the back yard have turned their many shades ranging from gold to red, and they have upped their ante in how many leaves fall per day in the last two days. So far I have been “mulching” them with my lawn mower, but that tool will soon not be equal to the job. There are only so many inches of “mulch” that a lawn will tolerate.
I will do almost anything to avoid raking the leaves, since I have a congenital condition called achingus backus which begins to spasm at just the mention of using any tool that has tines (except for a fork at mealtimes, where I excel).
Enter the leaf blower. This is admittedly a clumsy way of bringing the leaves together into one big heap, but there is something satisfying about blasting away at the problem. Just a squeeze of the trigger and away you go, roaring about the yard until the battery runs down and you get to take a break while it recharges. I am quite fond of those breaks. I could skip them simply by having a spare battery to press into use, but where’s the fun in that?
If we lived in one of those areas of the country where fall rains keep the leaves wet and cause them to mat together, I would have to alter my approach. But in our semi-arid world the leaves remain dry and eminently blow-able for weeks. There is only one drawback to my approach, and that is the one year-old who lives next door. I never know when he is napping, and the noise created by the blower is incompatible with sound sleep.
So far I have been lucky in my timing, but make repeated errors here and I can expect that the mother of said infant might have something pointed to say about my practices. I know that way back in time when I had babies in the house I personally was not very tolerant of anything that stood between me and the serenity of a sleeping infant.
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These Are The Days, by Van Morrison
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Van Morrison has had such a career! From a modest beginning with the great song “Brown Eyed Girl” to 45 studio albums and 7 live albums.
Released in 1967 on Van Morrison’s debut solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind!, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was swiftly associated with the “summer of love” which the singer despised.
… In 2009 he told Time magazine: “‘Brown Eyed Girl’ I didn’t perform for a long time because for me it was like a throwaway song. I’ve got about 300 other songs I think are better than that.”
Wikipedia
I never like to argue with my betters but if I could take only one Morrison song to the proverbial desert island it would be “Brown Eyed Eyed Girl.”
He made musical history with the album Astral Weeks.
Morrison’s first album for Warner Bros Records was Astral Weeks (which he had already performed in several clubs around Boston), a mystical song cycle, often considered to be his best work and one of the best albums of all time. Morrison has said, “When Astral Weeks came out, I was starving, literally.” Released in 1968, the album originally received an indifferent response from the public, but it eventually achieved critical acclaim.
The album is described by AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann as hypnotic, meditative, and as possessing a unique musical power. It has been compared to French Impressionism and mystical Celtic poetry. A 2004 Rolling Stone magazine review begins with the words: “This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description. Alan Light later described Astral Weeks as “like nothing he had done previously—and really, nothing anyone had done previously. Morrison sings of lost love, death, and nostalgia for childhood in the Celtic soul that would become his signature.” It has been placed on many lists of best albums of all time. In the 1995 Mojo list of 100 Best Albums, it was listed as number two and was number nineteen on the Rolling Stone magazine’s The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. In December 2009, it was voted the top Irish album of all time by a poll of leading Irish musicians conducted by Hot Press magazine.
Aaahhhhh, dang it. You know how there are people you’ve never actually met who have had a greater effect on you than people you see every day. For me, some of them wrote novels, some wrote poetry, some wrote music. Kris Kristofferson was one of the latter. When I read this past Monday morning that he’d died I felt a sharp hurt. There were tears shed at our home on Monday at the sense of loss that was felt.
Me and Bobby McGee
If Kris had only written the one tune, Me and Bobby McGee, it would have been enough to put him in my personal Hall of Fame, but he went on from there. He wrote the best hangover song I’ve ever heard in Sunday Morning Coming Down.
Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down
He also wrote some of the best breakup songs in For the Good Times and Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again.
For the Good TimesLoving Her Was Easier
And he wrote some songs that were at least partly autobiographical, using his wry sense of humor to great advantage. He was a good man who lived his life well enough that others can take lessons from it. Love the phrase from The Pilgrim: “He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on that lonely way back home.”
The Pilgrim, Chapter 33
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Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar, football and rugby player, boxer, helicopter pilot in the US Army, actor, singer, and songwriter. One of those folks whose life story absolutely forces one to accept that they are just more interesting than you are. (At least than I am.)
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I haven’t talked about his movie career at all, but he appeared in nearly 50 films, including two of my favorite movies, which are Heaven’s Gate and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Here’s a clip from Heaven’s Gate, featuring him waltzing with Isabelle Huppert. Sweet.
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Now it follows as the night the day that some of Kris’ music was recorded and made famous by others. A prime example was Me and Bobby McGee, recorded by a former lover from Port Arthur, Texas.
While Kristofferson’s original version was typically laid-back, Janis Joplin’s was kick-ass. I include it because I can’t help myself. It’s a favorite of both Robin and I.
Kristofferson recorded his own version of the song on his debut album Kristofferson in 1970. … Janis Joplin recorded the song for inclusion on her Pearl album only a few days before her death in October 1970. … Record World called it a “perfect matching of performer and material.” Joplin’s version topped the charts to become her only number one single.
Wikipedia: Me and Bobby McGee
Me and Bobby McGee, by Janis Joplin
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Just a thought. If Janis Joplin had lived, she would be 80 years old. Instead, she is forever twenty-seven.
The Israeli government has shown us something new this past week. That they were willing to cross a line in the sand and load hundreds of explosive charges into everyday handheld devices. It was done by infiltrating the supply chain at the company that produced them. In this way very many Hezbollah were harmed, as well as anyone unfortunate enough to be standing near them.
Think for a moment. If the Israelis are able do it, so are we. And so are our adversaries.
Our phones, our computers, even our automobiles could be weaponized and there you are driving down the road and your car swerves into oncoming traffic. Or your phone explodes and maims you and the child you are holding in your lap. Or your toaster starts to fling sourdough shuriken at you.
About that crossed line. Perhaps we should thank Mr. Netanyahu and his gang for bringing us up to date on just how vulnerable we all are. Quite a bloody demonstration, though, with all those bystanders hurt or killed and everything.
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Five years ago when I renewed my driver’s license, the photograph that was taken was awful. It was washed out, grim, and totally unrepresentative of my vibrant and devilishly attractive self. This year I had to renew that license, and now the photo is even more grotesque. I look like a startled corpse.
You know how in a horror movie when the camera moves forward and down into the coffin and then suddenly the eyes snap open? – that’s me in my official ID photo!
Fortunately very few people will get to see that photograph, and I am certainly not going to publish it here. After all, there may be children looking over your shoulder and their little psyches could be permanently scarred.
BTW, if any of you are wondering whether I should still be driving, calm thyselves. For some reason Nature has blessed me and I am still one of the most capable drivers ever seen in Paradise. And whatever you may have heard about that time last week when I crossed the median downtown and drove for three blocks into oncoming traffic, I have a perfectly logical explanation. A squirrel.
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I am disappointed when the fact-checkers of the world find that a member of the “Blue Team” is telling fibs. Doubly disappointed when they repeat the same mistruth the next day.
I can understand how it could happen when you are asked to spew thousands of words a week in rallies, interviews, sound bites, scripted moments, etc. But even though it is a lot to expect, striving for honesty and admitting when you’re wrong … I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
I am just so tired of being lied to. Really tired of that whole shabby business. If someone is promoting themselves as an agent of change, talking straight would be a good place to start. I hope Harris and Walz will keep their focus and clean up their speeches. The Republicans supply more than enough reasons for criticism without them needing to make stuff up.
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Not Too Much To Ask, by Mary Chapin Carpenter
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One morning this week a large sign blossomed on our next-door neighbor’s garage.
The subtitle of the sign is “Make Liberals Cry Again.” That makes me sad. These are two decent people who have been hoodwinked by a charlatan. Cluck is not a conservative but an unprincipled opportunist. These neighbors are strongly “pro-life” and that makes it hard for them not to react viscerally to the Democratic platform, with its emphasis on reproductive freedom. I get that. What I don’t get is single-issue voting.
If liberals are crying it is because they see clearly the harm this orange-tinted crook has already done, and blatantly promises to keep doing if re-elected.
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Can’t Find My Way Home, by Stevie Winwood
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Frank Bruni is a good man and a very thoughtful columnist. Thursday’s posting in the Times I thought was worth linking to. Sort of summarizes where a lot of folks stand re: the two campaigners. (At least a lot of folks on the left, which means the right side of history.)
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The movie “Reagan” has been in town now for several weeks. Apparently there are enough local people interested in a time when Republicans were only (forgivably) mistaken in their politics, and had not yet become the gaggle of lunatics and criminals we see on television. Nostalgia for a dimly remembered past, I guess.
The film stars Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan. Quaid has recently revealed himself to be a Cluck supporter, which I’m thinking … is there anything that would cause Reagan to spin faster in his grave than knowing this bit of irony?
But Dennis’ coming out hasn’t bothered me like you’d think it would, because he is not the Quaid brother I respect the most. That honor falls to Randy, seen at right in the tasteful “the shitter’s full” scene from the movie AChristmas Vacation.
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The Road, by Euphoria
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Memento Mori: Maggie Smith (1934-2024)
For me, Maggie Smith was given the best lines in the series Downton Abbey. The rest of the cast played characters who were still trying to achieve something or other, but the grande dame Violet Crawley had already achieved it all, seen it all, and was not enamored of modern life.
Her specialty was the verbal dagger thrust, sometimes in and out before the person even knew they’d been wounded, and who were left wondering where all that blood on their shirtfront was coming from.
We have two veterinary clinics in Paradise. We’ve used them both in our time here. In the past two years each of them has sent notices that they would not be available for after hours or weekend emergencies, but recommended that we take our ailing friends to a veterinary emergency room in Grand Junction, which is a 75 minute drive. And that is in the summertime. There will be times in winter when it will be impossible.
My reaction to both announcements has been the same. I was steamed. WTF! That is absolutely not okay! What sort of dismal dedication is this? They are assuming little more professional responsibility than a clerk in a C-store.
If I had tried such a move when I was working as a pediatrician, this morning I would still be scraping off some of the tar and feathers that the parents in my practice would rightfully have applied to me decades ago.
I realize that my way of looking at how a doctor should provide care, whether that is for animals or humans, makes me a relic, a dinosaur. Other members of my generation of doctors feel much the same way as I do, but we are steadily becoming extinct.
Soon there will be no one who remembers that at one time in our history if you became ill after hours, there was a good chance your own physician would answer the call. Or at the very least, someone you knew.
Got a sick pet here in Paradise after 5:00 PM? Get in the car and don’t forget to fill up the tank on your way out of town.
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I Don’t Need No Doctor, by Ray Charles
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From The New Yorker
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Robin and I are signing up to do phone banks for Harris/Walz. We are also attending a meetup online to educate us on Project 2025. We are also contacting our precinct chair regarding “How can we help?”
Doing what we can to avoid waking up on November 6 feeling pole-axed and guilt-ridden with four more years of you-know-who in front of us.
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Rereading Lonesome Dove for the … I don’t know … fourth time. Never gets old. Renews my connection with a fascinating part of western history, with Larry McMurtry’s extraordinary portraits of ordinary people doing what today would be considered heroic deeds, but in their time were just life. I am reading it at a measured pace, savoring the writing and the story.
It’s the book that has caused me to annoy many, many people because I can’t keep myself from urging them to read it. Most of those I have thus leaned on have totally ignored me, sniffing that “it’s a cowboy book.” (Well, yeah, like the Old Testament is only a Hebrew travelogue.) It’s all in how the tale is told, and this is McMurtry’s masterpiece.
As a bonus, when you finish it you can watch the television series made from the book, which was one of the best miniseries ever. Nominated for eighteen Emmys and won seven.
No less an actor than Robert Duvall considers Augustus McCrae his favorite of all the roles he’s played. But I’m not going to beg you to read the book. That would be annoying.
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From The New Yorker
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Daily I try to find sane and thoughtful voices in the clamor that is today’s world. If I take CNN’s headlines at face value we are facing several Armageddons at once, it’s only a matter of chance which of them inevitably crushes us under its hammerblows. The New York Times tries to be more restrained, but is always a day behind, when a news cycle lasts 20 minutes.
It is dizzying. I really don’t want to go back, even in my imagination, to the days when news traveled slowly enough that you might miss Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train going by if you weren’t paying attention. But something between that and this morning’s clamor would be nice.
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Here’s a tune for the elephants of the Middle East, the Israeli and Arab leadership, who are trampling on the lives of their peoples. Who are using their ingenuity and power to kill and maim in both ancient and novel ways.
Masters of War, by The Staple Singers
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This post is too heavy by far, so far. How about a bit of Swedish vs Norwegian humor?
Sweden and Norway were playing a soccer match. About 20 minutes into the game a train rolled by and blew its whistle. The Swedes thought it was half time and left the field. The Norwegians scored 5 minutes later.
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“Out of the minds of babes oft times come gems.”
An old saw with much truth tucked inside. I thought of this when listening yesterday to a Neil Young song from 1974 entitled On The Beach. One perfect line went “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.”
Poor Tupperware. All they wanted to do was make durable little boxes for us to put our stuff in, and they did this awfully well for 78 years. When they started out, plastic was our bright and shiny new friend. But now … Chapter 11 bankruptcy is coming for the company.
There have been rumors for years that the company was in trouble. Plastic in any form has been a no-no for environmental reasons for quite a while, but when those micro-particles began showing up in male genitalia I knew that the handwriting was definitely on the wall.
After all, no matter how well those lids will seal or those containers stack, who wants to trade convenient food storage for a polystyrene penis?
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Every Day Is A Winding Road, by Sheryl Crow
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From The New Yorker
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It’s pretty obvious that Cluck and mini-Cluck don’t talk much. After the recent affair at the golf course, Vance went to work accusing Democrats of using inflammatory words like fascist and thereby inciting these unbalanced assassins. All the while Cluck is out there repeatedly calling Harris “fascist and communist.”
I’m not a very good political scholar but I’m not even sure you can be a fascist and a communist at the same time. However, making sense has never been Cluck’s strong suit, has it?
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SalvadorSanchez, by Mark Kozelek
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A serious note. Yet another study reporting the Times on Thursday about alcohol’s strong links with various cancers, especially bowel and liver. Yet nearly every month we have a wine and cheese something or other here in Paradise. Every fund-raising organizer makes sure that the alcohol supplies don’t run low or who will come to their event?
As a society we have come to grips with tobacco, another potent carcinogen, and life is better for having done so. We’ve only started with alcohol, but the present social modeling certainly isn’t being helpful. (In how many photos taken at “galas” do the celebrants not have a drink in their hands?)
So far we’ve only really dealt with one obvious negative consequence of drinking, which is driving while intoxicated. We need to get serious about alcohol’s other public health impacts with the same energy that we brought to those of tobacco.
The famous social experiment that was Prohibition was an utter disaster. But education and enlightened leadership could be the way forward.
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Still none of those beautiful overflights by Canada geese and sandhill cranes. The leaves of the trees, however, have definitely received the message that Fall is here. Our evening lows are all in the 40s and the mornings are crisp and cool. It’s nice to shiver ever so slightly when you step out on the deck in your bathrobe with a coffee cup in hand. Life can be good.
I tried to make a quiche the other day, including making the crust from scratch. The recipe indicated that the crust be called “savory” rather than “flaky,” and that was exactly the case. What the recipe left out, however, was that the crust was also nearly hard enough to use to level uneven table legs.
This episode reminds me of the time when I tried to bake unleavened bread. Lord knows why I was even interested, but my attempts to follow the Israelites’ recipe didn’t turn out as planned.
I mixed up the dough, and then as instructed I left it out in the room for a day or two to gather yeasts from the air. At the end of that time there was no evidence that the loaf had risen. Not at all. But being an optimistic sort I put it in the oven for the prescribed length of time, and out came a nice brown loaf.
What happened next was this. I wanted a slice of the bread to eat while it was still warm enough to melt the butter. But the loaf was so rock-hard that I could not cut it. First I used a slicing knife, then a serrated blade … nothing doing. I tried to stab it with a dagger without even making a dent. In desperation I got out an ice pick, which turned out to be yet one more useless thing to do.
So the loaf sat there unmoved by my efforts, all the while still looking like food, which by now I had concluded it was not. Once this brick was cool enough, I tossed it out into the back yard, where I kept two healthy husky dogs. Nice big dogs with nice big teeth. They were able to eat it, but it took the two of them three days to gnaw it down. How Moses and those Israelites made it through the desert was now even more of a mystery to me than it had been.
Let’s just begin by clearly stating my position. I hate waiting for call-backs. At this moment I have five of them pending.
When will the people come to put the lawn sprinkler system to bed for the year?
Where is my replacement tent fly?
When will the technician show up to fix my internet battery backup?
Where is the refund for a piece of clothing that was ordered and does not fit?
When will the stump grinder show up to remove the eyesore from in front of the house?
In each case I am in someone else’s hands, and they have the power to irritate, stonewall, or infuriate me. Or they can make me happy, grateful, and singing their praises to the heavens. But the point is … I am expected to be content with “we’ll get back to you” even when I think that they have completely forgotten me. In the case of the tent fly, my entreaties are almost certainly falling on ears that have long ago lost interest.
When I was a working stiff I (or my staff) dealt with 50-100 phone calls every day. Our aim was to be as clear and decisive on each occasion so that we didn’t turn one call into two or three. Also, when people were calling for advice about sick children, for some reason they wanted help now rather than in three business days.
To avoid delays in being called back, I have begun to try to make myself more memorable, thinking that if I am not quite as anonymous as the other 500 callers that day that perhaps my pleas will make it to the front of the line or top of the heap. So far I have found that flattery seems to work the best.
For instance if I begin a phone call with any of these phrases I usually get nowhere.
you idiot!
where the hell is my _____?
I’m calling my lawyer!
are you really that incompetent?
I know where you live
But if I say one of the following that seems to fit the situation my chances of getting what I need are improved.
you have a lovely telephone voice
are you calling from India? Is it awfully hot there today? I hope you are working in an air-conditioned room, you deserve it.
thank you so much for understanding
you have been very helpful
I have never had better service than you provided today
I think I love you
I only use this last one sparingly, since one never really knows who one is talking to, and they actually do know where I live.
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Stand By Me, by Tracy Chapman
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It is more than a bit ironic that the man who almost daily stokes or threatens violence of all sorts has now been the quarry of two different men with rifles. Despite his bluster, he must be just the slightest bit nervous. At least I would be if I were in his shoes.
I deplore this violence against him just as I deplore the threats and violent language he has used against others. Ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy I react to news like today’s with nausea. It’s a physical reaction, like a blow to the gut.
Realistically I know that with all the guns out there and all the mental screws that are loose in our large population it is probably going to happen again and again, but try to tell that to my mid-section. All it knows is to tighten into a fist.
The idea of settling affairs with a gun is such a persistent and deep-seated one with Americans. Boundary disputes, marital problems, disagreements with a teacher, disobedient children, need a little extra cash? Why, just get that ol’ AR -15 down from the wall and blow your troubles away. Instant resolution. If you need inspiration all you need to do is watch the John Wick movies or the old Death Wish series of films.
Every single day there are multiple shootings in this country. And we only read about the worst ones, not the near occasions as in the golf course incident involving the ex-president. If this hadn’t happened to Trump we’d never have heard about it.
As a retired pediatrician I was shocked the first time that I heard that guns were the number one cause of death in school-aged kids. Number one. It’s really not to be believed. The second amendment cannot remain absolute, as it is presently interpreted. Either reconcile it with modern realities, or repeal it altogether.
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I’ll Be Seeing You, by Vera Lynn
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Robin and I are still watching the series The Good Wife, which stars Julianna Margulies, formerly of ER fame. The show is a very well-done soaper about lawyers which reveals them to be conniving, amoral, jealous, dishonest, backbiting, and narcissistic. Reality TV, some might say.
It’s hard to cheer for any one of the characters in the series because they all take their turn in the wicked and nasty role, and that includes Alicia, the heroine of the title. But no one gets away with things forever, and much of the fun comes with the comeuppances that arrive, often cleverly done.
We are hooked. Margulies is great. The rest of the cast is first-rate. A steamy and sinful stew of smarm. IMHO.
Well, it’s all over now. Might as well start shopping for a good Oval Office chair for Kamala Harris, because she’ll be needing it in January. How can I be so confident? Because Taylor Swift has spoken.
We’ve never before thought of her as a Queen-maker, but here we are. The speakers of my television set had barely stopped reverberating from the Harris/Cluck debate when Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on Instagram. Now surely it will be only days before the Cluck campaign implodes altogether, and we can be rid of His Imperial Orangeness for a while.
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Take Five, by Dave Brubeck
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Our skies are not showing their own particular signs of Fall. The hummingbirds are still fussing at one another at our feeders and there have been no big overflights by Canada geese or the sandhill cranes. Quiet up there so far.
We’ve really come to appreciate those hummingbirds close up. If you are sitting outside at the table, which is about six feet from the feeders, every so often one of the birds will come right over to you, hover for a second or two, then buzz off. Like they are curious and want a closer look. Sometimes they actually come uncomfortably close to your face, and those pointy little beaks now look like potential threats.
Nearly all of the birds we see here at our home are the black-chinned variety, with a rufous hummingbird sighted occasionally. You can see by the graphic that the black chins are not among the birds who make those unbelievable migratory journeys. When ours take off they might end up in southern Mexico, but that’s about it.
Actually, that’s a pretty awesome trip for a few grams of bird, now that I think more about it.
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Black-chinned hummingbirds, male and female >
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Poinciana, by Ahmad Jamal
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There was a time in the past when I was really starting to get knowledgeable about folk music and just beginning to learn about jazz, when rock came along and while it didn’t kill them off altogether, they couldn’t compete either in the marketplace or in my highly suggestible mind.
Occasionally today I will encounter an article about jazz which provokes that old interest, but usually damps it down at the same time. So many of those writers choose to discuss the intricate mechanics of the music itself, while I, a non-musician, have little appreciation for meter or key or phrasing or any of the ways that the cognoscenti can look at a composition. I am yet one more case of “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”
But and however. Over a lifetime I have accumulated some favorites from that genre, and the tiniest bit of lore. I’ve sprinkled a few of them into this post. Dave Brubeck’s big hit was Take Five, a song that was huge in colleges in 1959. There was a bar and grill called the Big Ten just off campus at the University of Minnesota that had a jukebox with a decent set of speakers and it seemed that I never had a beer there without that song playing in the background.
The other selections are by Ahmad Jamal, Cannonball Adderley, the Johnny Smith Quintet, and Melody Gardot. All hold high places in the regard of this codger who, admittedly, doesn’t know much about music.
[An anecdote. When I was a senior in high school, there was a member of the junior class who played jazz piano well enough to sit in with musicians in local clubs. He did this even though he wasn’t nearly old enough to legally drink. It was rumored, but never proven, that he indulged in (gasp, wheeze, recoil in horror) marijuana.]
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Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet
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Who Will Comfort Me, by Melody Gardot
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Moonlight In Vermont, by the Johnny Smith Quintet
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Ahhh, the Pope recently commented on the US elections. He says that the best we can do is to select “the lesser of two evils,” and must be guided by our consciences when we vote. Whatta guy, to take time out from his busy schedule to comment on our politics. I am reminded, though, of the oft-quoted Bible verse, which might apply here:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
New International Version of the Bible; Matthew 7, 3-5
I think that the Pope and the church he represents have had a serious plank problem for decades now and which never gets resolved because of ecclesiastical chicanery and stonewalling. I would suggest that he allow us to work out our messy political processes on our own, and devote a lot more time to cleaning up the Augean situation in his own house.
The barbarity and perversity of the human enterprise known as war was again displayed openly on Saturday last when there were two news items published on CNN online. The first was a video purportedly of three Ukrainian soldiers being executed after they had surrendered. The second was an announcement that the Ukrainians are using drones to rain thermite, which is molten metal, on Russian positions as shown in this photograph.
I’ve never quite understood how they came up with some of the accepted practices of war. One moment ago you and your opponents are doing your level best to kill one another. But once a group of enemy combatants surrenders, you are directed to feed and house those people without using violence toward them of any kind. But let them try to escape and you are once again encouraged to shoot at them. The whole business is horrible. Having rules governing how we can legally slaughter one another is insane. Raining molten metal on other humans is evil.
We’ve already agreed not to use chemical weapons in war, why not go through the entire arsenal and keep on banning one item after another? There have been nuclear treaties to reduce the likelihood of one particular type of calamity. Much progress has been made in ridding the world of antipersonnel land mines, a project which most countries in the world are signed onto. Let’s not stop there, but keep shrinking the tools and means to make war until we get to war itself.
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Masters of War, by Odetta
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I’m not a fan of the Cheney family of Wyoming, especially Darth Dick, but I absolutely agree with Liz this one time, when she produced a quote worth remembering. Cheney made a statement on July 21, 2022, during her closing remarks at a public hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. As the vice chair of the committee, Cheney addressed those Republicans who continued to defend former President Donald Trump despite evidence presented regarding his role in the events leading up to and during the attack.
Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
Liz Cheney
Amen, Sister!
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I saw this cartoon in the New Yorker, and an old memory popped into my head immediately. You will soon learn why.
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When I was about eight years old, I organized an urban fishing adventure and led a trio of boys of the same age into misbehavior. Yes, I admit it, I was the kid that your parents told you not to hang around with. Instead of going to the Saturday movie matinee as we did nearly every week, we planned instead to take a side trip to a nearby lake in Minneapolis. Of course we would not tell our parents of the change in plans, since we knew that they would not approve. Deception and mendacity were skills we had obviously learned early in life.
I rounded up the following materials that I thought we would need on the journey.
about ten feet of stout braided fishing line (we would not have a fishing rod because there was no way we could see to conceal it)
two lead sinkers
one bobber
several hooks of suitable size
a pocket knife
some matches
several earthworms
an empty butternut coffee can
Off we went, first taking the direction we would ordinarily use to go to the theater, but then doubling back and heading out to Lake Harriet, which was a mile or two away.
After some time we reached the lake, and after rigging our single line and tossing it into the water, we waited for the action to begin. When a half an hour had passed and nothing was happening, our spirits began to flag somewhat. After an hour we were becoming desperate. To have planned all this, to have taken the risks involved, and now to be denied the fruits of our disobedience seemed unfair.
And then we saw it. A small yellow perch, floating dead in the water. To us it still looked a pretty shade of bright green, not faded as fish will do when dead in the water for a long time. So after some discussion and by mutual agreement, we scooped up the fish, scaled and cleaned it with our knife. A small fire was built of available twigs, and when it seemed hot enough, we began to fry the deceased creature in the coffee can.
Turns out that we were about as proficient as cooks as we had been as fishermen. We learned that frying a perch in a coffee can without a lubricant of any kind can only lead to disappointments. The fish stuck to the hot metal, everywhere. Trying to turn it using more sticks was a minor disaster.
But the lesson here is never to underestimate the grit and determination of eight year-old boys who have already lied to their parents, walked a couple of miles, failed to catch a legitimate fish, and needed to leave in ten minutes to get home on time and avoid discovery. At some point we declared that our meal was cooked, distributed the set of fish fragments that had resulted from the cooking process, and ate them.
After stuffing ourselves on our diminutive “catch,” we returned home at what was our planned ETA. Looking back if I was to score our adventure honestly I would do it this way: Fishing = F, Cooking = F, being conniving little delinquents = A+.
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Fishing, by Widespread Panic
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Last night’s presidential debate was a balm to my psyche. As sweet as the wine of the gods. VP Harris was in charge the entire evening, as she prodded what’s his name into one furious falsehood after another. She looked confident and comfortable up there, smiling or laughing a good deal of the time. He squinted, fumed, ranted, lied profusely and continuously, and looked ancient.
I admit to being highly prejudiced but I would score it this way: Harris = presidential material, Cluck = malignant fool. I grant that the MAGA universe has the right to vote as they wish, but I do not respect anyone who will vote to turn this country over to the “leadership” of such a man.
Everybody knows that when the Dalai Lama gets on in years and finally checks out that there is a search for the person who is his reincarnation that goes on until a child is found that meets the criteria, whatever they are. Then that child becomes the Dalai Lama until … and so it goes. I don’t know how much of this mysticism that I believe but I am happy that it seems to have worked for Tibetan Buddhists for a long time now. And I don’t know of a nicer human being than the present incarnation of the Dalai Lama, whose answer to the question about characterizing his faith was “My religion is kindness.”
Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, by MJ Lenderman
But today I read an article in the Times of New York about a possible reincarnation occurring in rock and roll. It was all about a singer/songwriter/guitarist named MJ Lenderman.
Neil Young hasn’t passed away, and is still coming out with new stuff, but he is definitely an older gentleman and we all flame out one day. As I listened to an album of Lenderman’s, I kept thinking … this music would be the carrying on of a tradition of whatever it is that Young has been doing for about 200 years now. There was even a post-music-video comment that I came across that went “My dad had Neil Young, now I’ve got Lenderman.”
Reincarnation prior to passing away. I like the concept. Less jarring. They could even get together and jam.
Heartbreak Blues, by MJ Lenderman
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From The New Yorker
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This might not be of help to any of you, but I’m passing it along anyway. Robin and I use Osprey Packs when cycling, hiking, backpacking, sometimes as luggage. They are well designed, attractive, and reliable. But they do wear out, at least some of ours have. When they do, Osprey has a program of repairing the pack for free, or if unrepairable replacing it with a similar model, again for free. Forever!
Twice in the past I had problems with two packs after several years, where all of the nylon straps were disintegrating. I sent the packs back to Osprey and received two completely new packs without meeting any resistance at all from the company. You send them the pack and if they can’t repair it, they decide on the replacement. The new pack comes to your door and suddenly it’s Christmas!
Now Robin’s Osprey Cirrus 24 has developed the same fraying strap problem. It is no longer a pack that can be relied on. One could easily end up carrying it in your arms on a longer hike which is really missing the point of having a backpack in the first place.
I will box it up and mail it to Osprey HQ which is located in Cortez CO. Mailing it to them is my only expense, from here on there will be no charge for anything. It’s really a heckuva program because if you like their stuff you will never have to buy another pack. (And we have happily used this old pack for more than a decade.)
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In just a couple of days we will be presented with the first Harris/Trump debate. At least it’s scheduled that way as of this writing. In general, I have not watched the bulk of the “presidential debates” since Kennedy/Nixon. The ones I did watch were for the most part shout-fests filled with sniping, griping, one-upping, and non-edifying balderdash. Also they are a nationally televised opportunity for telling lies on a grand scale. But, I don’t know, I might watch this one. With the same expectation that I would bring to being a spectator at a cage match.
Nixon “lost” his debates because he wasn’t schooled in how to look good on black and white television. What he actually said was as thoughtful as anything that came out of John Kennedy’s mouth, but Jack looked better and that was that.
You could describe the debates as improvisational theater. The announcers toss out questions that are thoughtful for the most part. And then the candidates attack the helpless question as if it were the shuttlecock in a bad game of badminton. Sometimes they answer it. Sometimes they ignore the question altogether. Oh, my, the suspense of it all.
But on the other hand, I do want to see how VP Harris carries herself against Mr. Respectful of Nothing and No One. Cluck is not the only rancid guy in this world, but he is definitely one of them.
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From The New Yorker
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The signs of autumn are all around us here in Paradise. The butterflies have largely packed up and gone. It’s been at least a month since I’ve seen one of those beautiful swallowtails floating past. Some of the trees are doing their Fall thing. Our next door neighbor is putting out Halloween decorations already. Fall is a favorite season for a lot of folks and I am one of them. Its beauties, its brevity, its aromas, its poignant reminders of change and inevitability.
I love the fruits of the season. The peaches from Palisade (which are what Nature intended when she made a peach in the first place) are starting to fade from the markets and roadside stands. This year’s apples will soon show up and a local apple festival in Cedaredge will pull us in as it does most years. Try to imagine wandering in a small town’s public park and having your sense of smell flooded with the scent of competing apple pies and cobblers being served at the booths? Excuse me for a moment … I seem to be drooling on my keyboard.
This is the month that I begin looking for where I put my snow shovels at the end of last winter. Not that I need them often, but better prepared than not, I say. With such a small home and limited storage facilities it is a wonder how long it can take to find something. Even something as large as a shovel. I fully anticipate the morning when I turn to Robin and say: “Dear, I know that I put the car away last night but do you have any idea where that might have been, by any chance?”
There was an article in the Times recently about how the original Volkswagen Beetles are alive and thriving in Mexico, even though they have nearly disappeared from the rest of the world. The article warmed my heart.
My first new car was a 1964 VW sedan and it was red. I loved that car. It cost me a dollar a pound ($1600) and was worth every cent.
It had its foibles, the major one being an inability to keep the cabin temperature warm enough to support life on anything approaching a cold winter day.
In snow it would plow straight ahead and was nearly unstoppable. But if the engine being over the rear wheels gave it great traction it left the front end a bit light. Translated: you could always GO but you couldn’t always TURN.
I did have one time where I was alone and stuck in a bit of snow, so I put it into low, got out of the car to push it from behind while the wheels turned slowly in low gear, then ran alongside to hop back into the driver’s seat once I had it out of the drift. (Try that maneuver with your Land Rover!)
For a long time I was a fan of the brand, owning two beetles, one squareback sedan, two regular minivans, and one camper at various times. Then the cars’ engineering and quality control began to falter, the dealers disappeared one by one, and eventually I quit Volkswagen altogether.
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In the ‘60s and ‘70s VW had the very best ad campaign. A sampling follows.
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Former president Bonespurs has stepped in it again. File this under “Rules, Schmules! Those are for suckers.” I’m talking about the recent incident at Arlington National Cemetery.
All that was asked of him and his entourage was that they respect the part of the cemetery that they were visiting and not take photos or videos to be used politically. They couldn’t manage this simple request. It was not possible for them to be thoughtful and respectful for even a few moments.
No surprises here. Gang of Thugs, n’est-ce pas?.
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I found this beautiful image in a YouTube video slideshow about the battle at Little Big Horn. Nothing about where it came from or who produced it was identified. I couldn’t let it go. I thought it deserved to be shared.
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Our recreation center (the “gym”) has been closed for nine days now for its annual cleaning and doing repairs. The managers seem to be doing a first rate job, and during the rest of the year if something breaks it is fixed within a day or two. It is also a very clean space and somehow … in some magical way .. it doesn’t smell of sweat. It’s like there are several hundred hidden bottles of Febreeze firing off on a regular basis.
Of course, the building being closed means that all of my conditioning has gone to hell and my body is returning to its default appearance, which is much like that of this famous character from Star Wars.
One of the truths of aging is that once you reach your body’s own tipping point the numbers become sort of awkward. On a hard workout day you might improve 0.5% in strength and/or aerobic capacity. Take a day off and you drop 75%. I know, depressing, isn’t it? It’s Sisyphus and his rock all over again.
(The statistics quoted here are my own, made up by my very own imagination and although they may actually be true, that would be unlikely)
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BREAKING NEWS THIS VERY LABOR DAY ABOUT THE VERY THING I ALREADY TALKED ABOUT
Because of a tougher market for their vehicles, especially EVs, it is possible that Volkswagen may need to close some of its plants in … not the UK … not France … not the USA … but Germany! This has never occurred before, not in all of VWs 87 year history.
I have a message for the company: Bring back the 1964 Beetle at $1600 and I will be the first in line at the showroom. I don’t care if my feet freeze in the winter and electric tricycles are passing me on the highway. I want to go retro in my auto choices.
Give me a car:
Where I can’t see the hood at all when I’m driving.
Where there is little or no room for luggage.
Where A/C doesn’t exist and never has
Where I sit so low I can peer under semi-trailers from the driver’s seat
And, dammit, I want a car that floats!
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There was a period of time, from 1969-1971, when I did all that I could to win the war in Viet Nam. I was largely unsuccessful, and at least part of the difficulty was being stationed in Omaha, Nebraska, which was 8557 miles from Saigon. Some of my frustrations led me into bad habits, like listening over and over to this Creedence Clearwater Revival tune with the volume knob turned toward what the room and my inner ears should not have been asked to bear.
Fortunate Son, by Creedence Clearwater Revival
A righteous tune for sure, and at the time it seemed written for me. I took some comfort there.
Let’s think of the present political season as opera, shall we? It makes some sense that way. The participants are given to warbling daily arias that mostly involve loud vocalizations with small content. Every word of one person’s utterances is attacked by the opposite side who respond with their own attacks on everything from grammar to logic to underlying sinister meanings.
While we don’t have the “fat lady”singing as in the old jest, we do have the overweight and orange-tinted man, who is never given anything to sing that has an extended set of lyrics, because of his short attention-span. His companion is a man of darkness and twisted sense of humor who thinks nothing of resurrecting an old video that once nearly cost a young woman her life, as a joke.
On the other side we have our heroine, who is saying just as little as she can, having found that a picture (or a video) is truly worth a thousand words. Her sidekick is a wise and amiable dispenser of homespun truths who has already coined two words or phrases that have resonated with the electorate – “weird,” and “mind your own damn business.” Not bad for a Minnesotan, but then, no one knows what to expect from these denizens of a land where winter lasts eleven months and residents wear peat moss.
We’re still in the first act of this musical drama, and who knows what is to come? One of the problems with finding music for the Dark Side is that no first-rate musician wants to lend their tunes to them, leaving only Kid Rock to help with the score.
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On a walk yesterday we saw two Cedar Waxwings high in a bare tree. Just the two. It’s a very pretty little bird, always looking very well groomed. They were chatting away up there, too far away for us to hear what they were saying.
(Admission: This pic is not mine, but was pilfered from the internet.)
Their natty appearance is striking in comparison with the crow, for instance, which often looks as if it just got out of bed and hasn’t checked out its look in a mirror yet.
Actually, the bird in the photo closely resembles me this morning, when I found my mirror image especially unkempt. My hair was so vaguely directed that the only way I could orient myself as to front vs back was to look for my eyes.
(This pic isn’t mine, either)
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When my kids were in their teens the original and only true version of MTV was on screen in our home as soon as the sun came up. I couldn’t avoid being somewhat up to date on pop musical trends because the station was always there playing in the background to educate me. Life was good, but then MTV lost its mind and never came back.
Music videos are still out there, of course, but you have to go looking for them instead of having them curated for you and served up with a golden spoon. (Sigh). Once in a while one comes along than is really moving, like this anti-war and reflective tune by the group Green Day, 21 Guns.
The title refers to the salute given by an honor guard, as at a funeral. When the group’s album American Idiot went to Broadway as a musical it didn’t do so well, and was shelved after a run of just about a year. This is that Broadway cast, doing the best song of the bunch. On a video where these beautiful people will always sound just as good and will never age.
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My ear worm this morning is not a song, but a poem. It is Invictus, written by William Ernest Henley. It was one of those short writings that I was encouraged (forced, cajoled, pressed, threatened) to learn by rote and later to regurgitate in front of the class. Which I did. Rote memory and regurgitation were specialties of mine back then.
At the time I thought the poem overblown. “Who talks like that, anyway?” But I have been tenderized by life and find that I am more susceptible to things of the spirit because I have had ample opportunity to observe their importance. Or, more to the point, what their absence can mean to the soul of a person or of a nation.
Rather than blow any further smoke, I present Invictus to you. There is no need for you to memorize it. No test looms next Friday. It’s just a handful of words that I have carried in my head for a very long time.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears. Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
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Today I think that it is a pretty awesome piece of overblown. If I am not the captain of my soul, I think that I am at least a deckhand. Let me add this song by Bruce Springsteen, who I think is basically echoing some of the sentiments of Mr. Henley. I could be wrong about that but I’ll let The Boss tell the story.
Tougher Than The Rest, by Bruce Springsteen
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Amy Tan has written a book which is a journal that she kept of the birds she saw in her backyard. At the time she was a novice birder, and she decided to learn the art of sketching those birds as she journaled.
Since I have the drawing skills of a moribund slug, I am envious. It all takes me back to second grade, where the best artist (far and a-way)among my classmates was Geraldine Hong. I never handed a paper in if it was going to immediately follow one of Geraldine’s. Dreadful were the comparisons back then, and my talents haven’t improved in 77 years. When I finish a drawing even I can’t tell what it is.
The book is a delightful read, the illustrations showing the improvement in her artistic skills over the several months that the journal covers.
Now, if you are Amy Tan, an accomplished writer and you travel in elevated creative circles, you do get help along the way from scientists, artists, and the author of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds, David Allan Sibley. Not too shabby.
This has been the summer of thunder. Many nights we have been wakened by blasts that send the cats scurrying under the bed. Up to a point they trust us and look to us for protection but give them a good enough thunderclap and it is adiosmuchachos, you’re on your own! The measured amounts of rainfall haven’t been that impressive but each drop flies out of a brilliant soundscape.
I like the thunder, personally. it’s almost mythical. Think about it, if you were reading a book about a planet where electricity became visible and could snake down from the sky to seek out a single person’s life and take it. All of this accompanied by a dark crescendo that the victim never hears, but all of the spectators do. Wouldn’t that seem fantastic? Not necessarily “good” fantastic, but still …
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Dueling Banjos, by Erik Weissberg
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There have been periods of my life where there were significant bursts of knowledge acquisition, followed then by decades of embarrassingly flat learning curves. One such burst of positive cortical activity came during my divorce. First of all, the fact that I was becoming divorced at all was a learning experience, since I thought this only happened to people who forgot their wedding anniversaries, or were guilty of poor personal hygiene.
But more shocks were to come. I discovered that when I put my worn clothes in the hamper that they did not clean themselves and put themselves back in the closet. Some agency had obviously been responsible for doing that, and after several days of reflection I came to the conclusion that my former wife had been that agent, and that now it was apparently up to me.
It took me only a day or two to locate the laundry area and choose which large white metal object was the washing machine and which was the dryer. There were some problems I had in learning that if one cup of detergent did a good job, three cups didn’t do a better one, as I choked up the washer and foamed the laundry room floor . But eventually these things smoothed themselves out.
The dryer posed new challenges. It turned out that putting certain items into the machine, cranking the temperature up to good and hot, and then walking away for an hour or two converted them into a brand new size more appropriate to toddlers. This was especially grievous in one instance where a Pendleton woolen shirt that I had treasured for years was now as shrunken and withered as a plaid prune.
So today when I used the washer perfectly correctly, dried everything for only a few gentle minutes, and then hung the clothes outdoors in the sunshine of a Sunday noon, I felt wounded only two hours later when a raincloud opened just above our home and drenched those carefully tended garments which were helpless on the line.
I could hear the gods snickering as I plucked everything down and re-hung them indoors on some collapsible racks. The world is like that. Sometimes good intentions and hard work are rewarded with a swift kick.
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Robin and I had friend Rod over for supper and a movie the other night. The food part went well, but the film left something to be desired.
Since this had been a markedly political week, I thought it might be fun to watch an older movie with a political theme. The classic “All The King’s Men”of 1949 came to mind, and I proposed it to our group. While looking for a streaming source I came across something interesting. There was a much newer version available (2006), with a great cast, which included Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, and Mark Ruffalo. How could it miss? We decided to go for the new one.
Bad choice. Abysmal, actually.
So bad that at the end when I asked everyone what they had thought about the movie, the general consensus was that we had collectively wasted six hours of human life. In order to waste a minute or two more, I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the movie’s score had been, and the number was 12%. Twelve percent is an awful score, for those of you who don’t use this service. The kind of movie that you don’t go to see unless you are desperately trying to escape a hailstorm of life-threatening softball-sized stones and need to duck in somewhere.
And then, just to hurt myself further, I checked the RT score of the original film starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, and Mercedes McCambridge and found that it was 97%.
More insult was later added to the injury.
Released by Columbia Pictures on November 8, 1949, the film received widespread acclaim from critics, and was a commercial success. At the 22nd Academy Awards the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three; Best Picture, Best Actor for Crawford, and Best Supporting Actress for McCambridge, making an impressive film debut. The film also won five Golden Globes, and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
In 2001, All the King’s Men was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Wikipedia
Can I pick ’em or what?
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I found this disturbing photograph on CNN this morning. The caption read: People in Warsaw, Poland, enjoy Dinner in the Sky, a special dining experience where a crane holds their dinner party in midair, on Saturday, August 17. To an acrophobe like myself, that someone would voluntarily subject themselves to this is not to be believed.
To put me in one of those chairs would require general anesthesia, and when I came out of it my screaming would ruin the meal for everybody within earshot, which, as I study the photo, would be everybody. Even if I eventually dropped down to a level below hysteria, I would still need four-point restraints requiring someone to be appointed to feed me my gourmet meal.
Also, the floor of the contrivance appears to be transparent … I can’t go on.
To the “normal” people, however, there would still be some questions I might pose. What happens if you drop your napkin? Or a knife?
The odd bat flying past would certainly send some diners into major tizzies. And how much do you tip your waiter at 1000 feet in the air?
Well … after long and ponderous pondering I have decided. IMHO Michelle Obama gave one of the best political speeches that I have heard in a long while, at the Democratic Convention. And I am not a Michelle Obama fan.
She has always reminded me of the scold who barely walks through the door of your house before she begins to criticize and nag. Your hair … too long or short. Your clothes … not clean. Sit up straight. Chew your food. Those spots on the glassware … tsk, tsk, tsk. You could hardly wait for her to go home.
On Tuesday night, though, she hit a home run. The speech was almost totally inspirational (although toward the end she couldn’t help herself but gave yet one more scold-lecture again). The lady does not suffer from self-doubt.
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Want to read a story about qualities that you will not find anywhere in the curriculum vitae of either man at the top of the Red team? The NYTimes served this up on Wednesday. It is important to keep in mind that in all of the years Cluck has been rooting and snorting around in American political life, no one has ever accused him of an unselfish act.
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Fire On The Mountain, by Jimmy Cliff, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Phil Kreutzman
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An eon ago I decided to annoy my father during a political season. That was in 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower ran for the office of POTUS. Dad was a lifelong Democrat, a union member in both mind and body, and he believed strongly that there was nothing but antagonism for the working man to be found in the policies of the Republican Party. Kind of like today.
So to vex him I purchased and wore a button like this one, which somehow disappeared before Election Day. I suspected, but could never prove, that my mother confiscated it from the laundry when she decided that a joke was a joke and enough was enough.
There are days at this distance in time when I wonder why my parents ever fed and clothed such an ungrateful child.
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My present favorite tee shirt slogan, spotted at the gym a couple of days ago. I have to carry a mirror to re-orient myself several times a day because my brain keeps thinking I am twenty-one and might get me into some serious mischief if left on its own. The conversation goes something like this:
Q: Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest one of all?
A: You’re kidding, right?
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Twenty-One, by The Eagles
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Well, they’ve gone and done it now. The Democratic Party has done something that is neither boring nor feckless. Now we get to see if they can carry it all the way through. To have the spine to “encourage” a very old white man to take early retirement and put in his place as their standard bearer … I am almost afraid to say the word … a woman. And a highly capable and credentialed woman to boot. I love it.
A very brief example of how to do what is necessary is this clip from Harris’ address:
Masterful, but wait, there’s more. Her running mate is a football-coaching, duck-hunting, Runza-chewing bald white teacher from the middle of nowhere (Minnesota) who didn’t go to any of the following colleges:
Harvard
Yale
Columbia
Princeton
Brown
Cornell
Dartmouth
Then where did he attend college and how did he get there? Well, he got there on the GI bill, and he used it to attend Chadron State College in western Nebraska. If you ask the very nice folks on the East or West Coasts they have no idea where it is.
Where the hell is that?
What … Chadron State College?
No … Nebraska.
When I served in the Air Force, one of my co-draftees was a surgeon from New Jersey. He related that when he found that he was not going to be sent to Viet Nam, he was greatly relieved, but when he learned that he was going to Bellevue NE he had to get out an atlas to see where indeed that Nebraska was.
Robin and I watched Night 4 of the Democratic Convention pretty much start to finish. VP Harris hit a home run of an acceptance speech, without a single false note, at least for us. We heard our own hopes for the country articulated in inspiring words. My first opportunity to vote was in 1960, for John F. Kennedy, which was an inspirational moment for me. And now I have lived long enough to get to vote for Kamala Harris … which is exciting on yet another level. My country is growing up.
It is hard to imagine that the dissolute pair that the Republican Party has put out there as their “best and brightest” could stand a chance against intelligence, compassion, humor, honor, respect and decency. But the brand of snake oil that Cluck has been selling has a powerful attraction to some people, and the outcome of this election is not a foregone conclusion.
So I cannot decide what I will wear once my Harris/Walz sign is out in the yard and my blue bumper sticker is fastened firmly onto the Subaru. I already have the camo hat, but not a single messaging tee shirt. Hmmmm, so many choices …
Independent for Harris/Walz
Veteran for Harris/Walz
Buddhist for Harris/Walz
Old White Guy for Harris/Walz
Highly Unsuccessful Fisherman for Harris/Walz
Man With Only One Marble Left for Harris/Walz
The possibilities, it seems, are endless.
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Neil Young said “Yes” to allowing the Democrats to use his song at the convention. The same song that he sued Donald Cluck to stop using a few years ago. I wonder if anyone on either side listened to the lyrics. The title sounds positive, but all in all it’s a bit of a downer.
Melon rant. Today Robin and I are eating and enjoying a cantaloupe that is supreme. Sweet and so tender you could eat it without teeth. Easily an 8 on a 10 scale … maybe a 9.
It set me off on thinking about melons in general. First of all, when I was a child I ate as a child, and watermelons were not just one thing but the only thing. Canteloupe (whose name I first learned as muskmelon) was a definite number two on the list and I thought of it as grownup food, which meant I couldn’t imagine why anybody would put it in their mouth. Somehow this got reversed and it has been many years since I’ve enjoyed a watermelon. I’ve eaten some, but they seemed pale imitations of the ones that I remember.
Honeydew melons … what can I say? Are they food? Should we be eating them? In all of their appearances in restaurant servings of “fruit” as a menu choice I have never eaten one morsel that made me wonder where the rest of it was so that I could finish it off myself. They seem to be the melon equivalent of a Delicious apple (which of course is not delicious at all and barely an apple to boot).
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From The New Yorker
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Watermelon Man, by Chris Thomas King
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Awright now, here’s my Tedeschi/Trucks Band fix for the day. If there is anything that can put a smile on my naturally morose countenance it is seeing excellent musicians obviously having fun playing excellent music. And the audience in this video includes Eric Clapton and Bill Murray, who seem to feel the same way about it all. A day brightener.
If there are any Cluck-ites within hearing distance when you are listening it is possible that they may find the naturally downturned corners of their mouths curling up without their permission. If such happens and they ask you about it, please reassure them that they are not having a stroke, but that it is the deeply suppressed bright part of their souls which came to the fore for a brief instant.
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From The New Yorker
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Writing this early on Monday morning from Room 210 of the Econolodge in Durango. Grandson Aiden’s movie was shown here last night and of course we had to see it. After all, Robin and Jill were extras in the film. The movie was a short one, a double love story, if you will. Aiden’s camera work and editing skills have grown with each new effort.
Here in the pre-dawn darkness I have made some personal discoveries:
I like rising early and sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a darkened motel room.
I like the odd cup of coffee that the motel provides with those tiny drip machines and the hard to open foil packages containing the unrecognizable brands of “coffee” that may actually be carpet sweepings.
I like the game of needing to creep about in a small room in dim light trying not to wake my wife while I attend to my imagined needs.
I like these mom and pop style motels, most of which are aged well past their prime and are on the brink of seediness but not quite there yet. (True seediness being defined as when the motel features hourly rates and the room clerk sits behind a barred window.)
All of these “defects” were part of my travel experience before moderate affluence corrupted me. Returning to the semi-hobo-ness of it all is strangely rejuvenating.
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Hotel California (Live), by The Eagles
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My cap arrived in yesterday’s mail. Since the Harris/Walz merchandise store wasn’t going to offer me the chance to buy one until well into October, I went to Etsy.com who were glad to provide a clone. With the names embroidered, yet.
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The Democratic convention got under way with its message of hope for those citizens who still think that democracy is a good idea, that decency hasn’t gone out of style, and that lying should be reserved for special instances like:
Where did you go?
Out.
What did you do?
Nothing.
Of course there are interminable speeches, endless repetition of slogans, and much scheduled spontaneity. This is politics, after all, not a religious pageant. The speeches routinely include impassioned statements of what the candidate will do once elected, most of which are impossible without the cooperation of a substantial proportion of the hundreds of senators and congresspersons in Washington DC (which is the rub).
Even though at present I consider myself an Independent (which means that I don’t play well with others), my temperament is much closer to the Democrats, so the goings-on this week in Chicago are of interest. There is no drama in who will be the candidate this time, Harris having already sewn that up pretty snappily in the past month, and we already know her choice of running mate. So it’s a party rather than a give and take, at least on that level.
Outside the doors of the convention center are protestors, most of them seem to be asking for changes in our relationship with the state of Israel, and the munitions support we provide for them. The protests so far are mild, nothing approaching the violence and assorted mayhem of 1968 in Chicago, when the police gave themselves carte blanche to beat up or arrest anyone whose looks they didn’t like.
Chicago, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
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Robin and I watched Bernie Sanders’ speech last night, at least a part of it. Bernie is still right on message, which is not hard for him to do. He clearly sees the problems, their causes, and some of the solutions, and since the problems have changed little over the past four … or the last eight … or the last twelve years, the message can remain the same and still be unfortunately spot on.
When you think about it, why after all this time do we still have only a small handful of -isms? And why must we feel that our particular one needs to be defended to the last man or woman? Capitalism, socialism, communism … are they the best we can do?
Capitalism has been great at producing shiny things and big buildings, but at its heart is a poisonous and heartless philosophy which greatly benefits a few and pits the rest against one another. And yet our big and successfully capitalist country is not a happy one. Our suicide rate is sobering, our use of drugs and alcohol to numb ourselves has produced an entire genre of workers whose purpose is to serve us yet another plateful or glassful of toxic substances to take us briefly away from the fact that we cannot find purpose or meaning.
So what, at heart, is Bernie Sanders trying to tell us? It is something that each of us knows instinctively, but is very easy to lose sight of. When you lend someone a hand that really needs it, when you give of your time to repair broken things or right wrongs, how good it feels, no? We are truly at our best and our happiest at those moments when we are not working so hard at grabbing our share but when we are serving our fellow creatures, human and non-human.
When we see and accept that the earth is really quite a small lifeboat, and we are all in it, the way becomes a little clearer.
Couple of days ago I heard someone say that a resounding win for Kamala Harris could be the chance for the Republican Party to reclaim itself. To be able shake off the noxious parasite that is D.J. Cluck once his influence is diminished.
I’m all for that. Wouldn’t it be an absolute treat to have a solid and sensible GOP again? Purged of its blatant racist, misogynistic, and fascistic elements? Not that this would mean a worry-free and comfortable cruise into the future. The plug-uglies on both the right and the left never go away completely, but bide their time and wait for weak moments.
Complacency allowed the orange-tinted showboat to take up way too much of our time. Really … you have to wonder … how did we ever allow this sack of gas to do this much harm?
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Last evening Robin and I attended a local school board meeting where public comments were being heard on whether or not an application to start a new charter school should be approved. I’ve been to such meetings before, in other parts of the country, and they have been very similar in tone. A group of well-meaning parents would like to have a “safe” environment where their kids could attend school. Very often these are the same people who have been doing home schooling.
When I say “safe” I mean ideologically safe, without the modern world intruding with its confusions and uncertainties and those pesky gray areas. The proposed school here in Paradise would deliver a “classical” curriculum (a term to be defined by the organization promoting it).
The counter argument is familiar as well. Monies will be taken from the public schools, which are rarely abundant enough in the first place. So a small subset of students benefit but the larger group loses out, no matter how the cake is cut.
I read through the manifesto of the proposed new school and found it to be composed of coded words galore. If it isn’t a right wing academy in sheep’s clothing, I am a potato.
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Found this graphic on a National Park Service site, and liked it. Not exactly sure what it means, though.
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This morning I read something delightful and something awful. Let’s take the delightful first. Author Mick Canning’s post about the book he never wrote – a footpath book. The way he describes it I know that I would have liked it. When I explore new territory on foot, I very much appreciate guidebooks that do more than just say: … turn here and then turn there … , but that instruct and illuminate.
It’s a tossup at the trailhead about how to approach each new path. Do I just step out without preconceptions and build my own story or do I read another’s account of that same journey and add to what they have noticed or learned? There are territories where if I go my own way something is introduced that is not appealing – the possibility of getting lost. Being truly lost can change your day in ways you never imagined.
Yesterday I came across a story of a 90 year-old hiker who had been on a ramble and became lost … for ten days. He was a tough old bird and is happily alive to talk about it. It could have been a tragic tale, but instead became a warm-hearted one.
But there was something missing from the newspaper account and that was what he learned from being out there not knowing where he was or whether he would make it out. All those hours of all those days un-moored completely from the ordinary cares of the rest of the world and focussed on only one thing, surviving.
That is experience that is hard to come by. Invaluable.
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And the something awful? A new film lays out the story of the abuses suffered and the deaths of children in the St. Joseph Mission, a residential school for indigenous peoples in British Columbia. The name of the movie is Sugarcane.
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St. Joseph’s is only one of more than 500 such schools across North America that were similarly run by the Roman Catholic Church. Brutality and violence are patterns that mark the entire history of that institution, and as we have learned to our sorrow it is not just distant history. I wonder what God thinks about the Church representing Him here on Earth?
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Burn Down the Mission, by Elton John
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One more railroad story. Back in the years following the Great Depression a man named William Nelson Flom tried his hand at farming in North Dakota. Unfortunately this was during the Dust Bowl years and the farm failed.
So he and his wife Bergetha packed up everything they could carry, along with their seven children, and headed for the possibility of finding work and a better life in the big city of Minneapolis. They traveled the only way they could afford, in a freight car.
William Nelson was my grandfather. I only heard this story after he had passed, but would have loved to hear him tell it. A freight car … my, oh my.
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Freight Train, by Rusty Draper
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What a great thunderstorm throughout last night. One epic booming after another. Funny how it never becomes boring or tiresome, with each blast like a new recording of the same song with different people playing. I think Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page were trading riffs last night, with Neil Peart and Keith Moon on drums.
At any rate the concert was deafening and awe-inspiring. That’s one thing about a thunderstorm in mountain country. The instantaneous reflecting back and forth of sounds from those rock piles gives a special lift to what surrounds the listener. We are grateful for the rain that fell during all of this although it was rather piddly in volume (now … that doesn’t sound grateful at all, does it?)
A hot summer evening on my grandparents’ farm. Way off in the west there are flashes of light in the clouds on the horizon. Silent flashes. Grandma Jacobson looks at them and pronounces them “heat lightning.” Being a cautious eight year-old and not wanting to appear unusually doltish, I simply nod.
But I file away the information that there was regular lightning and there was heat lightning. Since the latter sort was always far off in the distance, I decide that it was harmless and not a source of those frightful and seemingly random killer bolts from the sky. I can safely forget about it entirely.
Later on I learned that heat lightning was not a separate genre after all, but just the regular old kind which was so far away that the sound of the thunder was lost. Here in Paradise we don’t seem to have heat lightning. Perha ps because the mountains prevent us from seeing those long distances. It was more of a prairie thing.
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Train of Love, by Johnny Cash
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You know when you go on a tour of a cave or mine the guide will at some point turn off the lights to show how dark real dark can be? That was what greeted me just before midnight on Sunday when Poco’s voice woke me and I found myself in total darkness. Only half conscious, I picked my way to the living room by feeling along the walls.
No electricity. Not in the house, not in our part of town. And the rainclouds took away the light from the stars. Like in a mineshaft.
The utility company was obviously having a night of it, because the juice came back in and then went out twice more before the show was over. It wasn’t until three a.m. that the electricity was steady on. And then it was nearly time to get ready for a trip on a steam train.
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Mystery Train, by Elvis Presley
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From The New Yorker
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The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, often abbreviated as the D&SNG, is a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge heritage railroad that operates on 45.2 mi (72.7 km) of track between Durango and Silverton, in the U.S. state of Colorado. The railway is a federally-designated National Historic Landmark and was also designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1968.[3]
The route was originally opened in 1882 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW) to transport silver and gold ore mined from the San Juan Mountains.
Wikipedia
The dry description above is of the steam train trip Robin, Aiden, and I took on Monday. The three of us rendezvoused at a nowhere place called Rockwood, a brief stop on the Durango to Silverton route. It is nothing but a wooden platform alongside the tracks. No buildings, nothing to sit on. If the train knows it should stop for you it does, otherwise it rocks past and into the canyon carved by the Animas River.
The morning was blue/white skies and cool temperatures. We had purchased tickets on one of the gondolas, which are open-air platforms whose seats face toward the side, where all the scenery will be. Each car has a canopy to ward off rain and bird droppings, but that’s about it. You can ride in much more luxury in other cars, but I ask you … why would you do that? Sit in a stuffy box, facing forward, with nothing to smell but the other passengers, while the gondola riders are inhaling mountain air so bracing that the elderly are advised to go into one of the enclosed coaches in case they start to feel too healthy for their own good.
gondola car: the only way to go
Now it is true that on the return trip it did rain, and some of that water did gain access to our persons, but when the sun came back out that brief sogginess was quickly forgotten.
I won’t bother trying to describe what one sees on the trip, there are a few photos in the gallery to whet your appetite. I will say that it was well worth the cost of the ticket, and who knows … I might do it again, perhaps in autumn, when all those aspens begin to glow.
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Peace Train, by Cat Stevens
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I tried to buy one of those camo print caps with the Harris/Walz embroidery and was disheartened to see that delivery dates are now moved out into October. How can this be? This is America, the land of the baseball cap. We invented the darn thing. Foul play! Fake manufacturing!
What an interesting political season we are suddenly entering. Harris and Walz make a good match, IMHO. It also happens that I know someone who knows someone who knows Walz well. Here’s part of a message that I received from daughter Sarah:
“Hey fellow Dems, our next VP Tim Walz is an amazing man and we know this because he was a history teacher at my kids’ school Mankato West while they were there and he coached the football team to a state championship. Minnesota is pretty thrilled about the guy getting nominated. He also was the faculty advisor to the gay student organization that Cheyenne and friends got started. “
So right now the positive energy is on the Blue Team’s side while the Red Team slinks along spinning its nightmare web of fabrications. Their side of the fence is a lot like a cattle feedlot after a heavy rain. Looks bad, smells awful, and no sensible person would want to walk in it.
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From The New Yorker
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My nomination for the Genius Award in political merchandising is the hat. With one stroke the other side is put on notice – you don’t own all the gun owners, hunters, and outdoorsmen in the world.
I think it is a simple but very powerful symbol. There is no East Coast elitism in a camo cap. Not one fiber.
(It also says you can be a gun owner and not be psychotic.)
I do pay attention to symbols as I watch the flag-festooned pickup trucks that make every day a misanthropic parade as they trot their banners and slogans up and down the main drag. Refusing to give them ownership of the American flag, I fly one daily in front of our home. Christian Nationalists? … my backyard Buddhist prayer flags flutter in the slightest breeze.
I am outnumbered, of course, but that makes it even more fun, because I fancy that it is irritating to the people I want to irritate most. A few months ago a middle-aged couple was walking by the house and they thanked me for putting up a banner. “Up on our end of the street … well … we don’t feel comfortable doing it.”
I smiled and let them pass unmolested.
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I was only a small child during World War II, having been first placed upon this earth in late 1939, but there is a mental state that I can’t quite understand. I have a fondness for the music of that time, each tune edged with a feeling of nostalgia. A pre-schooler nostalgic for Glenn Miller and Vera Lynn eighty years later … how did that happen?
But this morning here I am, playing songs I couldn’t possibly have cared about but do.
We’ll Meet Again, by Vera Lynn
And old English movies with the RAF going out time after time to try to do the impossible … and getting it done. Or the courage of the British citizenry in dealing with the blitz and the rationing and the uncertainty of whether all of this would ultimately do any good. Or the millions of goodbyes all over the world as soldiers, sailors, airmen leave behind all that they know and love for the horror that is war.
I learned about courage from those movies, and even at this long distance now from that period of history, it is still my idea of what that word means.
In the Mood, by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra
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I arose this morning with a quest in mind – let me find the most ironic thing I can before breakfast. Almost immediately the universe provided J.D. Vance and his attacks on the 24 year Army service record of Tim Walz. Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura put it into perspective in this interview. I especially liked the part about Vance’s running mate, ex-President Bonespurs.
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From The New Yorker
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But enough of this meandering. It is Sunday morning and it may be that the convection oven that has been this summer is finally dialing back on its heat. Robin and I could actually go outdoors yesterday afternoon without wilting, stroking out, or having to scuttle desperately from one air-conditioned space to another.
Tomorrow we will have the pleasure of riding with grandson Aiden on the 1882 steam-powered train that runs from Durango to Silverton. He happened to mention one day that he would like to do this trip with us and that was all it took to get it on the schedule. We’re looking forward to it. Someone said a while back that Colorado was geologically blessed, and everything we know about this train ride suggests that we will get an eyeful.
It takes all day to do the round trip, three hours up and three back with a nearly three-hour layover in Silverton. We’ll see. If there is anything worth looking at I may bring back a photo or two to share.
(This post is a day late because I had neither internet access nor electricity. Makes it difficult to be on time)
Collegiate Peaks Campout 1
On the road again, but a much shorter journey this time. A two-day campout was planned for Monday-Wednesday at a place called Collegiate Peaks Campground. Ordinarily this would be a three hour trip from Montrose, but a crucial bridge on that route is being repaired which meant we needed to drive the long way round, about seven hours.
Robin and I took off Sunday afternoon and bunked in Glenwood Springs, about halfway to the destination. We walked a few blocks from our motel to a Mexican restaurant, ate well, and on our way back were caught in a sudden rainshower. If there is anything more delightful than a surprise summer rain on a sticky 92 degree evening I don’t know what it would be.
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Colorado Song, by Ozark Mountain Daredevils
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From The New Yorker
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Collegiate Peaks Campout 2
Almost as soon as we reached the campground the thunder started cracking. Soon the rest of our group arrived and we were eight. After two hours of this symphony it began to rain … hard … for an hour. The rain let up for an hour, then began once more and continued at a less ferocious pace for about 8 hours. Spirits were definitely dampened.
Next day … same scenario. Blue sky morning, then thunder, then rain. At the first evening’s supper we learned that if you try to eat a pulled pork sandwich in the rain you are left with a handful of pork as the bun washes away. So the second evening some creative members of our group rigged a tarp to cover the picnic table which made things much better.
So … the outing was a flop? Nope. Not at all. On the one morning we had between the rains returned the eight of us drove to the top of Cottonwood Pass and took a walk under blue skies. Altitude 12,800 feet. Mountain views in every direction. Outstanding! It was worth a bit of dampness and inconvenience for a couple of hours of this experience.
One of the female members of our octet said there were similarities between camping and childbirth. In both instances there can be pain and misery but the next day all that is forgotten if the baby is fine or the sun comes out.
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Love, Lay Me Blind, by The White Birch
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From The New Yorker
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I don’t know exactly when it began, and the changes were so gradual that at first they passed almost unnoticed, but Robin and I now live in completely separate personal climatic universes.
There is no temperature at which we are both comfortable. If I am at my ambient ease she is too warm. Not a little bit too warm, but over the top too warm. When she smiles because she is finally in a body-friendly environment, I am over there shivering in a corner and wrapping myself in layers of afghans.
Oh well, if we are destined to become different subspecies I have confidence that we will do it with our usual panache. We’ve already worked through several dichotomies, including male/female, Buddhist/Lutheran, and lunkhead/sweetheart. Temperature misadventures … a piece of cake.
Boar’s Head, a deli meats vendor, has issued a very big recall involving 71 of theirproducts. Listeria is the contaminating microorganism, and there have been two deaths reported.
Here in Paradise the Boar’s Head brand is carried by City Market. Actually I am not a fan of even the Listeria-free version of these products. There are less expensive competitors sold in the same store that I think taste better and as far as I know haven’t killed anyone.
To be fair, there are many places along the path from farm to table where such contamination can occur, and we learn through the media of many of the outbreaks as they occur.
What must it have been like 150 years ago? When not even the flawed supervision of today was in place? Were people dropping like flies … that is … the thousand flies hovering over the butcher’s table?
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BTW, in case you were wondering what Listeria look like, here’s a group out for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps on a sandwich near you.
(Also – those are not legs. Bacteria don’t have legs.)
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Sweet Child, by Pentangle
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Growing up surrounded by a bunch of Norwegians in Minnesota it wasn’t hard to be sheltered from parts of our country’s story. In fact, I can pretty much pick the moment when my real education in American History began to fill in what were some pretty large blanks.
Up until then, it was George Washington, a sanitized version of the Civil War (slavery not mentioned), and a whole lot of brave farmers with pitchforks and muskets going out to fight those bloody Redcoats.
(Let me hasten to add here that those bloody redcoats are now some of our BFFs)
No, my historical virginity was lost when a high school classmate’s father introduced me to the book “A Century of Dishonor,” by Helen Hunt Jackson (photo at right). Published in 1881, it laid out the systematic maltreatment of the indigenous peoples of America by European settlers. Once my ignorance had sprung a leak, it was not hard to find other literature on the subject.
So this week’s issuance of a report by the Interior Department on the infamous Indian boarding schools was not news, but an important official recognition of past misdeeds. By the report’s tally, nearly 1000 children are known to have died in those schools in the United States. And every child in those schools had been taken from their families where their Indian-ness was scorned and derided at every turn. Many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
Today there are strong forces that would have us pull a tarp over everywhere that America went wrong. Pretend that we don’t live in a land forcibly taken from its original inhabitants. Pretend that not being content with thievery, we resorted to malice of nearly every sort against them.
Pretend that slavery was portrayed accurately in the Disney movie “Song of the South,” with lovely lighting and an upbeat soundtrack. A land where slaves were happy, owners were kind, and Zip-a-Dee–Doo–Dah was the national anthem.
I believe that we are a great country. Part of that greatness comes when we can honestly approach our history, warts and all.
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Okay, I wasn’t going to do it, but here’s the clip from Song of the South (1946) which was my first education on the “peculiar institution” of slavery. You can see where I might have had a slanted takeaway.
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Give A Little Bit, by the Goo Goo Dolls
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The two senior-est citizens in our household are Poco the cat and Jon the human. Poco is having some real issues with arthritis and with mental processes. He seems to get confused, performs some odd repetitive behaviors, and has developed a sleep disorder.
This latter problem involves me. Within an hour after I have gone to bed he comes into the room meowing loudly and repeatedly. This is not okay, and I have told him so on several hundred occasions, with little effect.
Once I am up and out of the room with him he stops singing his noisy serenade. And there we are. It’s eleven o’clock and we’re both awake, staring at one another. I curl up on the futon and go back to sleep. In two hours he gets me up again. Repeat. Repeat.
It’s not his fault that aging has disturbed his sleep cycles, I have little doubt that he’d like to sleep through as much as I would. But that apparently is not to be.
So we’re spending more quality time together these nights. Sheeesh.
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The air is so thick right now with Kamala this and Biden that and Cluck this and Vance WTF that the weather app on my phone has added a new reading: BS level.
The reading right now here in Paradise is 67, which is interpreted as posing a moderate risk to sanity and one’s immortal soul.
Looking back on my life there is one clear direction that I can see, and that is whenever possible I would avoid confrontation. Of any kind. In fact, I would go so far to avoid such confrontation as to cross a contested street in the middle of an urban gang war to avoid somebody who I knew wanted to sell me yet another unwanted lottery ticket where the grand prize was an all-expense paid weekend at the Motel 6 in Gary, Indiana. Saying “No” is just so … wrenching.
As you might expect, I experienced a great deal of internal conflict in the years 1969 to 1971 when I found myself a small part of a very large war machine called the United States Air Force, an organization devoted to the art and science of confrontation on a very large scale. It was just not me.
Being retired and living in a rural town in the mountains where few people know me has been very good for the shy violet that I am. Even the few that I have met look at me and think to themselves “Is there any point in asking? When I do he squirms so much it makes me itch.”
In another time and place I might have been a cave-dwelling hermit or a Norwegian bachelor farmer, but those are difficult lifestyles to maintain in an era of Google and CCTV.
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For our let’s-leave-the-sweltering-temperatures-behind hike this week we chose Aspen Trail 125 up on the Uncompahgre Plateau, about an hour’s drive from home.When we arrived at the trailhead at altitude 9600 feet, it was 20 degrees cooler than the 92 degrees it had been in the valley.
The walk is a woodland walk, familiar to us from other places we have lived, and we never got that OMG feeling we get when we are striding along above tree level, but it was all very pleasant. The trail is used by hikers, mountain bikers, riders of horses, and dirt bikers. The only other humans we encountered were two men riding motorized cycles who were respectful and polite as they passed us.
However, we did cross paths with hundreds of non-human carbon-based life forms in the shape of sheep. Two large herds separated by about a mile. Although we had heard that both cattle and sheep were grazed on the huge Plateau somewhere, this was the first time we’d encountered any. No shepherds were seen, no threatening dogs protecting their flocks. Just sheep being sheep in the shade.
Sheep show up frequently in music, and one of my favorite examples is this one by J.S. Bach. Perhaps a bit of background.
The aria comes from a secular cantata dating from 1713, which celebrates the birthday of Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. The cantata “The lively hunt is all my heart’s desire,” also known as the “Hunt Cantata,” is an extended setting of text by Salomon Franck, the Weimar court poet.
Never letting anything go to waste, especially not fantastic music, Bach probably revived the works a few years after the original performance. Apparently, it subsequently honoured the Duck of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst August, and in 1742 the same music celebrated the name’s day of Augustus III.
The music for this cantata was not published during Bach’s lifetime, but first appeared only in 1881 in the first complete edition of Bach’s work. And it was during the Bach revival in the 19th century that the aria “Schafe können sicher weiden” (Sheep may safely graze) became really popular. And in the 20th century, it became the all-time favourite music for weddings.
Sheep May Safely Graze, by the Ohio All-State Choir
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Morning prayer.
Please, dear God, let me get through this entire day without having to hear the word existential from the media one more time. Failing that, let everyone who utters the word be immediately afflicted with large pustules.
(Except me)
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Great news! A giant millipede that was feared lost to us forever is not lost at all. In fact, it is living in comfortable numbers in a part of Madagascar where the locals weren’t paying much attention to it and didn’t feel the need to report on its existence.
It is ten inches long and is one of the gentle and non-harmful creatures of the world. In fact, there are websites extolling their virtue as pets. I thought about this for a while, and although Robin and I do allow our cats access to our bed, I’m thinking we would draw the line well before ten-inch creepy-crawlers. It’s all those little feet, you know …
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Sheep May Safely Graze, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
I don’t know if other sexual predators have as much of a problem talking to women as Donald Cluck does, but it would seem that beyond telling a female to “Go over there and take off your clothes!” he is limited to spewing a mixture of insults, foolish puns, and unimaginative nicknames he has created for them. To deal with women as equals seems to require a mindset that is beyond his reach.
My suggestion for the Democrats is that whenever possible they put the most “uppity” women they can find in his path and have them uppity the very bejesus out of him at every uppitytunity.
The longer the present-day political grotesquery goes on the less respect that I have for hard-core Cluck supporters. Cult members, nincompoops, a waste of perfectly good oxygen … where do you start? And the looniest of all are the evangelical Christians who have swarmed around a man whose life story is a sordid list of the Commandments he has fractured (and shows no interest in repenting thereof).
Why so harsh, Jon? Come on, they are simply misguided and if you would take the time to sit down with them and have a heart to heart they might very well come over to different ways of thinking.
Nope. They wouldn’t.
As an example of cultic thought processes do you remember the Jonestown Massacre? When more than 900 people either committed suicide or were killed because their leader told them it was their only option? Remember that they gave the cyanide to their own children? Do you think having any one of them over for dinner and a chat would have made a difference?
No … these folks, bless their hearts, are fools because they choose to be and danged if they’re not proud of it.
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From The New Yorker
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Some of the best guitar work in rock today comes out of what would seem an unlikely place – the Sahara. For years I have admired Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen and Bombino and now I have a new group to listen to – Mdou Moctar. My, my, these people kick some serious musical butt.
Yesterday I listened to their album Afrique Victime on headphones while working out on our gym’s walking track and if the time didn’t fly by it at least moved more swiftly. The lead guitarist studied Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and his playing skills are in that rarefied company.
Bismilahi Atagah, by Mdou Moctar
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From The New Yorker
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It’s a little bit paradoxical but Amazon, which started out selling books and went on to become the order-now-and-it’ll-be-there-in-an-hour colossus that owns US retail is now having trouble getting one line of products to the customer in a reasonable time.
And what would that line of product be? Why, it is books! Our most recent book order is now two weeks late and there’s perhaps another week to go, they tell us.
And this is not an isolated instance. Methinks Mr. Bezos careth less about books these days than when he was a young and callow pre-billionaire.
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One more example of “everything old is new again.” A piece in the Times of New York about the simple motor hotels of the USA, which we’ve been calling “Mom and Pop motels” for-ever. It’s an interesting read.
You know the places. You enter your room from the parking lot without passing through a lobby or having to find the elevator. You come and go as anonymously as anyone can in an era of CCTV. You only have to haul your luggage a few feet before you collapse on the bed, the particular fatigue of a long day’s driving already beginning to wear off ever so slightly.
To read that some of them are being improved and updated brings joy to my heart. Maybe the occasional bare wiring and rain-stained corners of the rooms will disappear altogether. For me the charm of these places is innate, it only needs to be made visible once more. I don’t need to be entertained by my motel room, what I do ask is that it be a clean and comfortable space with the weather on the other side of the door.
Home Motel, by Willie Nelson
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Here’s the deal. If you have to ask, you aren’t. I had to ask.
As Robin and I were breaking our fast one morning, my mind came loose from its moorings just slightly and I found myself thinking about themed restaurants. You know, where the items on the menu have cutesy names, like the John Wayne Burger or the Bugs Bunny Blueberry Cobbler.
When my mental Wheel of Fortune finally clicked to a halt, it was pointing towards what it might be like to create a literary-themed establishment.
First off, we would name it the Algonquin Cafe, and all of the tables would, of course, be round. The walls would be adorned with framed quotations written in bold calligraphic strokes.
Some examples of such decorative plums might be:
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
Dorothy Parker
or:
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley
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Then I moved on to thinking about the names of potential menu items, again using the loosely literary approach:
Finnegan’s Cake
For Whom The Bull Toils (Burger)
The Codfather (Fish n’ Chips)
Prawn With The Wind
War and Peas
The Sir Francis Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato(sandwich)
Julius Caesar Salad
Of Rice and Men
BloomingPaul B’onion
Edgar Allan Po’Boy
Eclair Lewis
Pepperjack Kerouac
I am sure that with the enormous amount of brainpower resident in the readership of this modest blog, there could easily be better entries. If you have a suggestion just put it in the comments and I will add it to the list. Keep in mind that the worse the pun the better.
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This morning Youtube served up this gem, with three of my favorite performers doing this tender song, one that is very meaningful to me. The venue was one of Neil Young’s Bridge Concerts, in 1999.
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Good Lord! As I read each paragraph in this story I became more and more amazed. A nine year-old girl has become one of England’s best chess players. She began to learn at the ripe old age of 5 years. It is obvious that she has some sort of gift for the game, some working-of-the-brain that most people don’t have.
I, for no particular reason that I can think of, have precisely the opposite sort of brain. I am unable to learn chess beyond reading the two sides of the small sheet of instructions that might accompany the purchase of a cheap playing board.
When I was trying to learn the game several decades ago, I would buy these little books that took you move by move through famous games. I learned words like gambit and en passant. But it was when I realized that those who played the game well were looking ahead a great many moves down the road that I knew it was never going to be my game. My level of play I will call Buddhist-ish. I am so much in the moment that the greatest number of moves that I can look ahead is two.
Therefore I content myself with the many wise adages that suggest that each of us has some talent that only waits to be discovered. I’m not sure what mine might be, but I do know that it doesn’t involve a chessboard.
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Don’t You Know What The Night Can Do, by Stevie Winwood
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Robin and I are painting our bedroom. We’re tired of the color, which we put on those walls ourselves about a decade ago. So we made a trip to the paint store to choose a new shade and replenish some of the things we needed to do the job, like brushes, new trays for paint rollers to play in, etc. The project is going well, and so far there have been no plops on the carpeting.
Over my lifetime I’ve painted lots of rooms. Things have changed greatly over that time, and nearly all for the better. I started out with oil-based paints that dissolved parts of your brain while you were using them. There were suggestions on the cans that it would be a good idea to do the job in a well-ventilated room, or you might find yourself doing odd or unpardonable things, like signing your checks wrong or joining the Republican party. Also, using these paints was quite a bit messier. When you raised the brush above chest level paint began flowing down the brush, onto your arm, down to your elbow, and thence onto the floor.
Robin and I are cautious about doing projects together, choosing them carefully and setting boundaries and tasks very clearly. We learned the value of this approach when we tried wallpapering a room as a couple in the first year we were together. Within an hour we were are each other’s throats and wrestling on the floor in a room littered with ladders, utility knives, and remnants of mis-cut wallpaper. When we were finally exhausted we retired to separate rooms to gather strength. Robin’s room had a phone in it, so she called a girlfriend who was talented at all things home-decorating-wise, and presto!, I was replaced. Discharged. Canned.
We have never tried papering together since that signature day more than thirty years ago. It’s not worth the threat of breaking up a marriage or losing body parts.
This past week a group of six motorcyclists attempted to drive through an area of Death Valley where the temperature reached a record 128 degrees. One of them died, another is in critical condition, the remaining four were treated and released.
It was an extraordinarily foolish endeavor on their part, somewhere in the territory way past tragic, actually.
If you have ever motorcycled in the summer in a dry climate you know that it is akin to riding through a convection oven. My son and I took such a trip in western Nebraska one summer when the temp was in the 90s. We had to stop about every hour to rehydrate. We did not develop visible sweat, as any molecule of water that made it to our skin surface immediately evaporated from our bodies.
One can challenge the elements and sometimes it is counted as an heroic deed and makes for a good story. To ride a bike into Death Valley on a day like this one was something other than bravery. It almost qualifies as a death wish. They did not respect the territory.
Robin and I have talked about this. About when we were younger and we never carried water with us, but then we weren’t doing long hikes, either. Nowadays if we are going to trek from our bedroom to the other side of the house, a distance of less than forty feet, we put on our Camelbaks and start sipping.
Over-cautious? Perhaps, but you won’t be finding our desiccated corpses straddling overturned e-bikes in Death Valley, either. Nossir.
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From The New Yorker
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My new computer is working swell. Marvy. Peachy, even. It is a MacBook Air with an M2 chip. In the old days when I thought I needed more power and flexibility (I didn’t) I would have purchased one with the newest chip, the M3, and added more memory than the one I have. I like to think I am more realistic now, but mostly I am more frugal.
My original Mac cost me $2400.00 back in 1984, which is equivalent to $7,400.00 now. My latest MacBook cost me $800.00. The difference in power and convenience between the first one and this latest computer is amazing. They are in different universes entirely. Beaucoup more bang for the buck today.
It’s been a long strange trip for both Apple and for me, these forty-odd years. Looking back I am glad I had those tools to work with, even though if you could compile everything I’ve ever created with all those computers and put it in the center of a room, you might wonder what the heck I’ve been doing, and did I really need them all?
My answer, of course, is that of course I did.
Truckin’, by the Grateful Dead
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Earlier this week I used a feature of Google that was new to me. You know when you start a Google search there is that little icon that says “search by image” when you hover over it? Well, I had a problem and this feature solved it. Out in the berm in front of our home there is a spectacular flower growing that the landscapers planted and whose name we have forgotten. When neighbors walk by it isn’t unusual for us to be asked what that beautiful thing is called? My erudite answer has always been Duh, dunno.
Not any longer. I went to the berm and took a photo of the plant and put in the Google search box. Presto! A monster number of photos came up from who knows how many sources with pictures of that exact flower. Its name is Crocosmia “Lucifer.”
Now that I know the name I would imagine that no one will ever ask again, but … whatever.
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Can’t help it. Promised myself to lay off posting videos of the Tedeschi-Trucks Band for awhile so as not to wear you out. And then daughter Kari mentioned the band had done “Layla.”
This was taken from a double LP where they cover the entire classic album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs … sooo … let’s do them one more time.
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It is March of 1977, and our family’s Jeep Wagoneer is stuffed to the gills with camping equipment, food, and four children (ages 9, 8, 6, and 5 years) who are in the final stages of cabin fever. We are driving nonstop from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Everglades National Park in Florida, about 1800 miles in 36 hours. My ex-wife and I are either driving or trying to sleep with our face jammed up against a sweaty child’s body or a sleeping bag. The radio is our lifesaver, where we wander from station to station as one after another appears and disappears.
One constant on this trip is the repetition of a song by a group which had recently gained favor in the U.S. and which was named after its four performers.The song is Dancing Queen and the group is ABBA.
God bless them, they kept pulling all six of us back from the edge of homicide. Each time the song came on the sharpened sticks and large rocks were quietly put away.
We arrived at the gates of Jellystone Park at 0300 hours, rolled up to our camping space, and set up the tent. The next step was ferrying four small and semi-conscious bodies into our tent. Then came the sleeping bags, and then the adults felt permitted to crash.
In the morning, sitting at the picnic table with my ex-wife, at the onset of an eight-day campout across south Florida, we were sipping coffees. The lady looked up from her cup and straight at me as she announced “I hate camping.”
Back in 1999, when the movie The Blair Witch Project was making its rounds, Robin and I were camping in a forest service campground about fifteen miles from Crested Butte. The area consisted of only four campsites, a water pump, and a privy. On the plus side was that we had it all to ourselves, and the surrounding forest was beautiful.
On the second day it started to rain lightly at dawn, and when this continued through the morning and into the afternoon we decided to go into Crested Butte to take in a matinee movie. Just to get away from the drizzly grayness of the day.
The film showing was The Blair Witch Project.
We found the movie to be creepy in the extreme, and when we left the theater we stepped out into the same monotonous rain and dreary day as we returned to our tent in the forest where we were once again totally alone. It was an unsettling evening. The movie had done its work well.
On our recent visit to Woods Lake I was reminded of that time by something we found on the far side of the lake and just a few yards in from the shoreline. Someone had spent time assembling this … whatever it was.
Look, I’m not sayin’ that spooks exist, or that there is any connection between this structure and those strange ones in the film. I’m just noticin,’ that’s all.
But neither did I wander in the woods around the lake after twilight.
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Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell
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From The New Yorker
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Among our present Supremes there are those who aren’t acting Supremely at all. There needs to be a mechanism to clean those tainted bench seats without waiting for mortality to do the job for us. Here are some suggestions that sound like improvements to me.
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Yet another item from our recent Woods Lake campout.
We were in our car and returning to our site when a young man crossed the road in front of us and Robin exclaimed: Look at that! He looks just like a movie star!
So I looked. I swear to God that the guy was a physically perfect human being. About six feet two, and if you put a pair of hiking shorts and a knit shirt on this statue it would look just like him.
Curly blonde hair and all. Without the wolf.
I had to rush Robin into our campsite and blindfold her until the man was well away from our part of the campground in order to allow her vital signs and sense of propriety to return to normal.
Good grief! Like I need the comparisons.
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From The New Yorker
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I’m typing this two days after yet another disturbed person with an AR-15 in his hands killed someone in America. There is so much heavy breathing going on right now in the chattering classes even though no one has any idea how this will play out that I’m not going to add to the clamor.
I do remember clearly the feeling that I had in November of 1963, after some of the dust had cleared, that violence was so poisonous to healthy political life that anyone who advocated for it should be immediately relegated to the sidelines and deprived of their megaphone.
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A quote to apply to today’s headlines, from a poignant source.
There is no defense against a determined man with a rifle.
John F. Kennedy
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Find The Cost Of Freedom, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Little Home In The Valley 