Tag: Books

Turning the Tables

jono55

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

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

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

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

It’s all Borders’ fault.

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

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Out In The Streets, by Trio

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FOR SHAME DEPARTMENT

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

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

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

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

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Screenshot

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Da Da Da, by Trio

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I don’t mind at all,” I lied.

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

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

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These Are The Days, by Van Morrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herbert Spencer

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

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Pawn to King 13

jono55

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

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

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

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

Sooooo … GO FERDINAND! HOO-RAH!

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Born to Lose, by Ray Charles

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

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

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

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

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

Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

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

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

Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

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

Time to re-read Three Comrades, I think.

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What’d I Say, by Ray Charles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It was the best of times …

jono55

Andy Borowitz is still out there seeing and telling it like it is (or at least as he sees it) Here is his latest.

Complicating Donald J. Trump’s plan to send troops to Chicago, on Tuesday thousands of National Guard members called in sick with bone spurs.
The White House was plunged into chaos after receiving over seven thousand notes from guardsmen’s podiatrists, sources said.
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed that he would get to the bottom of the bone spurs epidemic by enlisting the nation’s finest medical minds, including Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
“A sudden outbreak of this size is very suspicious,” Kennedy told reporters. “The most likely culprits are COVID-19 vaccinations.”

That is beautiful. Just beautiful. If he were here in Paradise I would hug him, even though I generally avoid those things like the plague. To me hugs are a socially acceptable form of assault.

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Finally – a break from the 90 degree-plus heat! I don’t know how to behave. Here it is mid-day and I am outdoors without a medical attendant and I am not pulling a wagonload of water bottles behind me.

Today I am reminded how summer once was, a season to be joyful and dancing and singing’s praises rather than cringing from it in fear and a double-slather of sunscreen.

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Sugar Magnolia, by the Grateful Dead, live at Fillmore East

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From The New Yorker

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Not one of you has asked me: “Hey, Jon, how is the psychedelic mushroom farm coming along?” So I will tell you, even though you obviously have no interest. First of all, I am growing small quantities of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, or shrooms. It’s not quite a farm, more like the smallest container garden you can imagine. Secondly, we have no plans to ingest these things in the amounts necessary to produce a psychedelic effect, but are microdosing to try something new in our approach to chronic pain struggles where standard methods have failed.

There is a lot of evidence, although it is largely anecdotal and sorely needs to be studied systematically, that many people are helped through this microdosing. Along the way if we inadvertently find ourselves in some celestial glade dealing with blue animals that eat from our hands and sing to us in Spanish, we will know that we are not in the land of microdosing any more and must retreat and reduce the amount we are taking.

That’s how it works, when it works. Anyone can buy the materials needed for mushroom culture online, but in only two states (Oregon and Colorado) can you legally grow shrooms for your personal use. But even here, try to sell the mushrooms to anyone else and you can be in trouble written large. Here’s a decent summary of the situation in our state.

So the basic rules here in Paradise are:

  • personal use has been decriminalized
  • selling them violates state law and fines or imprisonment could occur
  • you can share them with friends and family members
  • the physical space allotted to growing shrooms can be no bigger than 12×12 feet

My first crop was on the dismal side as far as quantity is concerned, but hey, so were my last couple of years with tomatoes in the back yard. If I were to describe my gardening skills I am not quite a black thumb, but I am more properly located in the “numb thumb” area.

Black thumb: This term implies a natural or notable inability to make plants grow successfully. 

Brown thumb: Similar to black thumb, “brown thumb” also signifies a lack of gardening skill and a tendency for plants to fail in one’s care.

Numb thumb: This is a more informal and sometimes preferred term for someone whose lack of success is due to a lack of effort or understanding, rather than a complete lack of skill. 

This is a photo taken from the web of a lovely crop of Golden Teacher shrooms, the species that I am presently fiddling with. At no time thus far has my production looked anything like this.

I am not too tempted to chomp down on a large mushroom to experience new worlds since I barely fit into this one. Remember, I was a practicing physician in the sixties, and was involved in the care of many who were having what was euphemistically called a “bad trip.” Three vignettes may reveal why I am reluctant to try them myself.

A young man is in the emergency room having been vomiting for hours and is moderately dehydrated. The nurse tells me that he has ingested some sort of mushroom. I ask if she has any idea what kind when a groaning voice from the man on the ER bed calls out “Amanita muscaria.” It’s not the only time a patient diagnosed their disease for me, but it was the only time that one did it in Latin.

In the middle of a deep winter night in the Upper Peninsula local police find a young man standing naked in a snow-filled churchyard and singing anti-war songs loudly enough to bother the neighbors.

He was admitted to hospital for hypothermia and being seriously out of tune. We never determined the exact species he’d eaten because not even he knew what he had been messing with.

One more young man who had sampled some shrooms was brought in in restraints by the Minneapolis police. His offense was to shout obscenities loudly and repeatedly on a downtown street and when the gendarmes tried to reason with him he became enraged and attacked them. They were having none of that, and thus the restraints. I was working a shift as an ER doctor and called the man’s physician of record. I reported that the patient was tied to a bed, incoherent, unable to have a conversation worth anything and asked the worthy doctor what we should do with him, expecting an order for a temporary protective psychiatric admission. I was surprised when his MD advised me to send him home and direct the patient to call the office in the morning and get an appointment to be seen. I sputtered in disbelief for a moment and said: “But doctor, the man is not in his right mind and will likely not remember anything we tell him.” The answer received was: “Put a note in his pocket.”

I hung up the telephone and called another attending physician who promptly admitted the unfortunate gentleman to psychiatry for a short stay.

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From The New Yorker

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

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If we were only to read the papers to form our view of present-day American life, there would be an epidemic of razor blades and warm baths, I’m afraid. Because all of the news is dominated by one very poor excuse for a man. We are living inside of that perfect storm where all of the elements came together that were necessary to bring our democratic experiment to a halt. A pause, not an ending.

One of those elements is the media who have revealed their own weaknesses by utterly failing to give “equal time”to the stories of resistance, and to the excitement building in that largely uncovered sphere.

There are millions upon millions of brave hearts out there, and some of them write so very well. If you need something to brace a tired spirit there is no shortage of people to provide just that. One of them is a guy named Jack Hopkins, who put this piece together, and who frames the story in a way that fits better with what I encounter on the ground here in Paradise. I offer you a repost of his substack entry: Outlasting the MAGA Darkness. Right On, Brother Jack, right on. (I am sooo fixated in the Sixties … you’d think i’d be embarrassed).

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair“

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

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Hand-sitting

jono55

Memo to “Normal” Republicans: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to Democrats: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to Independents: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to those who consider themselves above the political fray: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

This is no time for silence. Silence is complicity. Silence is collaboration. Silence is capitulation.

There, got it off my chest. Now I can blather on to other matters.

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Living Well Is The Best Revenge, by R.E.M.

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The header photograph today is of author Alexander Solzhenitsyn and it was taken on the day of his liberation from the Soviet gulag in 1953, after eight years of imprisonment. He went on to write several books, and the one that is considered his masterwork is The Gulag Archipelago, where he describes the system of forced labor camps that existed in Stalinist Russia and continued until it was officially abolished in 1960.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see parallels between that system and the camps that the Cluck administration is establishing around the United States to house immigrants who are being deported. The most glaring example being perhaps “Alligator Alcatraz,” in Florida.

Cluck’s Visit to Alligator Alcatraz, July 2025

In effect, they can be considered our political prisoners. They are being transported and incarcerated in these places at the whim of the Cluck regime. No habeas corpus. No due process. No recourse to the protections of our justice system. It is ugly and it is illegal.

To add to the rottenness, these people are being rounded up by our very own newly-minted secret police squads, which we euphemistically call Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

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I subscribe to the “Cooking” section of the New York Times, and I’m not quite sure why. I rarely use their recipes for a number of reasons, the most common is that so many of them call for ingredients that are simply not available in our corner of the world. Another is that some authors are almost unbearably precious and full of themselves. Where a more straightforward person might write “and then simmer for two hours,” their instruction might be paraphrased as “and then simper for two hours.”

But we’ve just been enjoying a NYT recipe, a superior vegetable chili that stars black beans and mushrooms and that is very tasty indeed. It is not difficult to make, does not involve using a single word of a foreign language, and is ready in only an hour. It is economical and nutritious to boot, unless you go too crazy in the variety of mushrooms that you use.

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I think that if my last name were Epstein I would change it ASAP. Perhaps to something lighter, like de Sade or Dahmer.

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The Internationale, by Ani di Franco and Utah Philips

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A gallery from Scotland. Makes the signs I’ve carried so far look a bit wimpy. There were others that were even more colorful, but there are words a gentleman like myself does not employ.

Not that they weren’t correct, mind you.

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A One-line Curriculum Vitae Created For He Who Will Not Be Named

Cheatliardelusionalrapistabuser
whorermongerbigotbankruptfelon
traitornarcissistdraftdodger
pedophileimmoraldisloyalhypocrite
fascistdementedbullyscoundrel
adulterersoullesspeckerwood.

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No breaks from the plus-90 heat here in Paradise. But my kids and friends living in Minnesota and South Dakota recently had to deal with heat and then some. There were tornadoes, thunderstorms, Biblical-style rains, and a by-god derecho. (These pix are not mine, but no matter. The view is the same)

Now, I make absolutely no claims to meteorological expertise beyond phrases like “When the rain is from the East then the fishing is the least.” But if I should ever look up and see something like in these photos, I’m pretty sure it would be quick-step to the root cellar for me. Even if I couldn’t explain what I saw, I would take it as a direct message from the Almighty that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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There are blogs that I follow that from time to time provide absolute gems for me to read and thing about. One of those came along this week. It included this poem, which I found quite beautiful and provocative (that is, it provoked me to actually think). The author is Mick Canning and he lives in the UK. He is a real writer, as opposed to a trafficker in poppycock and dither like myself.

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La Marseillaise, by Isla St. Clair

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Nature Is Not A Place To Visit

jono55

Why go camping? Why put this seasoned carcass on a thin pad on the ground in a tent in a remote spot where one’s serenity could be interrupted at any moment by a thunderstorm, a tree falling, or the crack of a dry branch in the night as a large creature travels near the tent. Why go days without a proper bath? Perhaps the following paragraphs will provide some ragged sort of explanation.

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A long time ago I was reading … something … I can’t even recall whether it was non-fiction or a novel, but I came across this phrase which has stuck with me and become part of my DNA.

What the white man calls wilderness, we call home.

Reading it back in that dimly remembered day was one of those scales falling from the eyes moments. For I recognized for the first time that my attraction to the outdoors, the woods and the deserts and remote places, was homesickness. I was living my life in a town, in a house which was centrally heated and air conditioned. I drove a car along marked streets to grocery stores where I traded money for the food I needed, without ever producing a morsel of my own. I followed the rules of social living, became a high school graduate, a college boy, a physician, a husband and father. But I knew that I was living in a foreign country called America, when my true home was somewhere else entirely.

I am sitting by a campfire, lively breeze blowing through  giant pine trees, granite cliffs on one side, distant snow-capped mountains on the other; a stream flowing downhill over pebbles and boulders can be heard in the distance; at night the pitch black sky lights up with seemingly endless stars, somewhere far off an owl hooting….  I make a cup of coffee over the fire and converse with this wilderness…. 

Mostly we don’t think of that starry sky as also a wilderness, but it is that.  It is “wild” in the root meaning of that word, not humanly controlled or manipulated, not running by human wisdom, but by its own inner wisdom which the ancient Chinese called the Tao.  I look at the Milky Way, that fuzzy white spread of millions of stars like our sun, our galaxy, and millions of other galaxies out there whose light takes millions, even billions of years to get here….it is all so incomprehensibly and unimaginably vast, and yet in a very real way it is all our home.  Every atom of every fiber of our being was made in those stars billions of years ago…and so with everything we touch, we breathe, we eat….  In the deepest sense there is nothing “out there” that is alien to us.

The Tao of the Wilderness

The lure of leaving safety, comfort, recognizable landmarks and finding one’s own way is such a strong one. Whenever I would step off the shore into a canoe leaving on a Boundary Waters trip I had that delicious and necessary feeling of disconnection from all of the things that civilization is. Even now, at a time of life when I creak in places I didn’t even know that I had, I am eager for the next trip, the next step away from the shore.

I took many small voyages into those Boundary Waters with an old friend Rich, and for the most part we agreed on things. But there came a day when we argued (both unsuccessfully) with each other over something that we had almost no control over. Some company wanted to build a communication tower on the edge of that wilderness, tall enough that the signal could reach a cell phone anywhere out in the BW. Rich wanted it to happen, to be able to stay in touch with his family at all times. I could understand his position, at least it was the truth for him.

But as for me, I idly thought: “If they build that goddam thing perhaps I will come back and blow it up.”I was pretty sure that Edward Abbey would have my back on that one, even as they dressed me in new orange pajamas and showed me to my exclusive room at the Stillwater State Prison.

So I go camping, backpacking, walking out. These are tiny gestures, really, and if I were to be “out there” totally on my own I suspect that I would not last long at all. Within a month or two the porcupines would be gnawing the leather belt on my pants to extract the salt they crave. But as poet/naturalist Gary Snyder put it:

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gary Snyder

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Ends of the Earth, by Lord Huron

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From The New Yorker

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The fire in the Black Canyon National Park is not done with us yet, but has slowed and is being contained. No loss of life. No homes burned. The Visitor Center preserved. But the residents of the area are not yet being allowed to return to their homes.

Photographs started to become available once the media was given an official tour, while the general public is still denied access to the area. Something like 14% of the park area has burned. Here are some pix taken from our local newspaper.

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What a rotten caricature of a human being we have at the helm. Each day we are given a reminder of the values of honesty, uprightness, and mercy as we follow the slime trail of a man who possesses none of those virtues. He has the power to hurt so many people and is using it full-time to do just that, while the country is run as if it were a garage sale rather than a sovereign state.

Ahhhhhhhh … the waiting for the end of this particular time of tribulation is a difficult thing. Hard times … hard times … come again no more.

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Hard Times Come Again No More, by Gangstagrass

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1984 Revisited

jono55

I am watching with great interest the political goings-on regarding a post on Instagram that James Comey had made. In the post he placed a photo of some seashells that formed a number.

The symbol “86/47” is being regarded by the Trump administration as a referring to assassination, and they are accusing Comey of fomenting violence. I am especially interested because my homemade sign says exactly the same thing, and I have now carried it in two rallies.

I had seen 86/47 in a post somewhere, thought it a clever symbol, and copied it for my own use. I frequently copy other people’s work and claim it as my own, so I thought nothing more of it. (I’m not too worried because in the photo above I had given the sign to Robin to hold for me, and thus I have plausible deniability.)

But before I ever went out with that placard in my hand I had checked out the definition of the “86” part of it and found no references to assassination or killings or violence of any sort. It appeared to have been an anonymously originated term without any sinister implications whatsoever.

Eighty-six is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of,” or “to refuse service to.” It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I doubt that the Department of Justice is going to come to Montrose to examine my sign and haul me off to the Grand Inquisitors of the Cluck administration. But in the present era of newspeak in Washington D.C., we really don’t know what to expect, do we? I shudder at the thought of being chained in a dank dungeon while Kristi Noem parades in full tactical gear sputtering things her dog and goat once overheard and then she had to shoot them.

I offer a gallery taken from a Google search for the term 86/47 that I just performed. There were no mentions of assassinations in any of these products being sold. Could it be that it’s just another of Cluck’s diversions, another smoke screen to cover his rampant incompetence? Could it possibly be?

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Another Brick In The Wall, Pt.1, by Pink Floyd

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If George Orwell were still alive, and if he got a penny for every time his novel 1984 was referred to in metaphors or political discourse, his fortune would exceed that of Elon Musk, I think. Too bad for George that the novel was published in 1949 and he said his last goodbyes in 1950.

But I will send $0.01 off to the Orwell Foundation instanter because I am going to use it again. The novel casts such a helpful light on our present government (I use the term “government” lightly) that I can’t help myself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg  as Orwell’s ninth and final completed book. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a staunch believer in democratic socialism and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, modelled Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union  in the era of Stalinism and on the very similar practices of both censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany.  More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.

Wikipedia: 1984.

Rather than subject you to more of my tedious ranting at this time, I have gathered a gallery of cartoons prompted by the novel with which to assail you.

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Another Brick In The Wall, Pt.2, by Pink Floyd

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Another Brick In The Wall, Pt.3, by Pink Floyd

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I found while putting this piece together that George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. (Why do the British seem to be forever taking pen names, anyway? For myself, I would have been quite happy with Eric Arthur Blair.)

While digging around I found this gem, an interview of Orwell on his deathbed, dating back to 1950. It was chilling to listen to, as he predicted a future that we live in today.

Can I have a double OMG, brothers and sisters?

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In a sometimes glum season, it helps to occasionally bring out something anthemic and get lost in it. At least for me it does. For today I went back to the Glastonbury Festival in 2014 for Arcade Fire’s performance of “Wake Up.” Nothing intimate or quietly thoughtful here, but loads of showmanship, percussion, color, very costly costuming … a bright bit of rock and roll theater.

The message of the song’s lyrics? To forgive our own past mistakes and be more open to life before we get older and eventually drift away. (Some of us have to hurry, because drifting away is a wee bit closer.)

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When Resistance Becomes Duty

jono55

On Friday Robin and I drove to Ridgway to join in a rally being held there against some of Cluck’s policies. I was going to say “”more reprehensible” policies but stopped myself – they are nearly all reprehensible.

It was a breezy day and sometimes two hands were required to keep the signs under control. Ridgway is a smaller village so there was not a huge crowd, but it was an enthusiastic one. A local grocer brought out two cases of bottled water as his contribution to the event.

Just that day I had learned about yet another man who had been whisked away by ICE and this time for a while there was no record to be found anywhere of what had happened to him. He had become the latest of our Desaparecidos. After several days had passed our government confessed that he was in prison in El Salvador. He has not been accused of any crime.

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Across the Borderline, by Ry Cooder with Harry Dean Stanton

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On Saturday I attended a meeting of the local Indivisible group that was held at a church in Montrose. This chapter of Indivisible had been dormant since the end of the first Cluck administration, but new governance has resuscitated it.

Robin and I had lunch with the leader a couple of weeks ago to get more information and to volunteer our services in whatever capacity is needed.

Brought together by a practical guide to resist the Trump agenda, Indivisible is a movement of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.

From the Indivisible.org website

The group is just getting up and running, and Robin and I are excited at being part of something positive in this era of routine and rampant negativity.

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Robin is ecstatic, and when Momma is happy, it’s ditto for moi. While we were watching one program on PBS there appeared a “commercial” for another. It seems that the Earth was short at least one more season of “Call the Midwife,” so the gods mercifully have come up with the fix. Season 14 is now available for your viewing pleasure. There are only 8 episodes, and no assurances that a Season 15 is to come, so to treasure them and watch them s-l-o-w-l-y would be my advice, savoring each wholesome morsel.

I say “wholesome” not because the program is something bland and fluffy straight out of la la land, which it is not. But because it is based on realities, rather than something wholly imaginary. The problems that the characters deal with are sometimes harsh ones, are not always solvable, and are presented in a way that leaves the viewer smarter than they were when they started.

Someone is giving good medical advice to the writers of the series, and as a result I have almost no negative criticisms of the science presented, which is a rarity for me. Usually I am leaping from my chair, fists raised, and exclaiming: “That never happens like that, you jumble of blooming idiots!”

(At present we are watching the PBS series Marie Antionette. It is only two seasons long, and we pretty much know there won’t be a third group of episodes. That’s the problem with the baked-in spoiler that comes with a historical program like this one.)

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Uncle John’s Band, by the Grateful Dead

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The song Uncle John’s Band is my favorite cut from the first Grateful Dead album I ever purchased, which was Workingman’s Dead. Bought it in 1970, right after the album’s release. Loved it then, love it now.

Here’s a link to the lyrics.

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Yesterday in a supermarket parking lot, I saw this sticker in a car window. It did not please me. Especially not at a time when we are experiencing a major measles outbreak here in the U.S. The largest in decades and it shows no signs of slowing.

I know that this is an example of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. And I know that this means that people who say the most awful and stupid things have exactly the same rights as I do when I utter my unassailable truths and scientific verities in the most beautiful and mellifluous tones.

But the sticker is stupid and untrue and dangerous and children will die. Completely unnecessarily.

What I want now is a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution that would allow me to take a propane torch to stickers like that and give them a good frying. Now I grant that this would also be stupid and dangerous, because if the owner saw me do it and took offense (how could they not?) the ensuing melee would end unpleasantly for me, I am pretty sure.

But there is a difference between children suffering and dying and an ancient dude getting what he deserved for vandalism. While this sticker may be protected speech, it is the sort of ignorant discourse that kills. Today it is measles … I wonder what will be the next preventable disease that we all get to learn about because like a vampire it has risen in its un-deadness to once again stalk our streets?

Forget that propane torch … what I really want is a stout cudgel. I feel the need to administer some vigorous corrections, and there is a particular group of students who have shown themselves unreachable by ordinary instructional methods.

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How It Ends, by Goose

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It is a good time to speak out. This is not a drill.

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First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemoller

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Let It Snow, Baby

jono55

Last weekend Robin and I drove up to Steamboat Springs to spend a couple of days with Ally and Kyle. It had been years.

For a midwinter trip, the traveling was amazingly easy, without any wintertime difficulties at all. From the character of the snow cover on the ground as we neared their home it was obvious that nothing new had fallen for at least a week or two. The snow was tired-looking, gray, in need of refreshment.

But it was still enough for starting the 112th running of the Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival. Late Friday we trooped over to a park in town and watched local ski jumpers and something that was new to us and often hilarious – downhill bicycle racing in snow.

We broke away for supper, and when we left the building it was raining, which turned to snow before we got out of town. The snowfall was huge flakes that reflected the headlight beams back at us and made visibility poor and the driving treacherous. Four inches of fluff fell that night, and it transformed the town and the surrounding countryside, which went from a gray background to pure white.

Saturday was an all-day snowshow finishing with spectacular fireworks. (I’ve included a gallery, but none of the pix are mine. The crowds were not oppressive, but they did prevent my getting access to good photo-talking locations.)

Lovely time, in all.

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Cactus Country, by Scott Law

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Remember the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words?”

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I confess that I don’t know quite what to make of Musk. While he has a certain amount of technical knowledge and skills, he is otherwise lacking in a host of other areas. One has only to read the sad history of what used to be Twitter to see that. I’m not a huge fan of social media, but Musk took Twitter from a service that was at least trying to keep itself clean to “X,” which is now little more than a megaphone for hate speech.

And he seems to be challenging us to ignore (or accept) his Third Reich-style speeches and gestures. Don’t know about how you see it, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …

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From The New Yorker

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BTW, if anyone is having trouble making sense of what is happening in Washington DC, I can recommend a book. It’s The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer.

It is compelling reading, as it lays out in detail the steps that are the playbook for the rise of authoritarian regimes wherever they may occur. (Think of it as Project 1934). It is neither a dull nor stodgy history, and totally apropos in our moment.

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Learning the Game, by Leo Kottke

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Normally I am the soul of tolerance. A poster boy for acceptance. Forbearing to the point of being a saint. But something happens to me at the gym when I am using the weight-training devices and another client breaks etiquette by doing one of these things:

  • Dives in front of me and grabs the machine I have been obviously waiting for
  • Puts their water bottle on one machine to hold it while using another one, thus tying two of them up
  • Sits on a device while chatting with some other thoughtless bozo
  • Talks over their headphones while doing a set, turning 10 reps into a 10 minute-long workout
  • Makes no attempt to wipe their grime, sweat, and microflora from the device they have just used

If any of these behaviors occurs and I witness it, the sequence runs something like this: visual data to optic nerve to visual cortex to lizard brain to murderous impulse.

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So far I have been able to stop at this point and not do something which requires that I be incarcerated, but if some Christian teachings are correct and the thought is equal to the deed, I am a serial killer. And an unrepentant one to boot.

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From The New Yorker

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Words Failing

jono55

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

Everything happens for a reason.

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

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

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

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Grief Is Only Love, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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

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

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

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Winter, by the Rolling Stones

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Winter, by Matt Corby

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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Winter Light, by Linda Ronstadt

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Surely I Jest

jono55

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

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

CNN online

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

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

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

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

Even I can tell them apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal

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

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

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

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

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16-20, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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

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

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

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

James Carville, NYTimes, January 6

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

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Radical!

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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Stir It Up, by Bob Marley

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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Redemption Song, by Bob Marley

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It’s In The Book

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s In The Book, by Johnny Standley

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Touch the Hand of Love, by Renee Fleming and YoYoMa

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

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

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

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

Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues, p. 176.

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

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

Wikipedia: Pronghorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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Did I Ever Tell You … ?

jono55

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

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

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

Henry Wallace (1888-1965)

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

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

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Moonlight In Vermont, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio

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Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

Upton Sinclair

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

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

No metaphors here. Straight up, no ice.

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

Aneurin Bevan

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Ai Ga Bani, by Ali Farka Touré

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

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

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

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Everything Old Is New Again

jono55

As regular readers know, I am presently taking my time going through one of my favorite books, War & Peace. Some might ask “Why re-read anything when you know what the ending will be?”This of course sets them up for the classic rejoinder “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”

My own reasons are this. On each reading I have been impressed with what a modern book it is. Mr. Tolstoy was an uncanny observer of his society, of human nature in general, and he was a premier psychologist as well. There is one gem after another to discover. Last night I read a single paragraph that applies perfectly to some of the problems we are facing today.

In the book Pierre, a rotund and amiable fellow, becomes extravagantly rich when his powerful father dies, and instantly those around him find that he is so much more interesting in every way. He is now a Count and every word from his mouth is worth cherishing. What used to be plain old fat is now stylish corporeal augmentation.

But when he gives a speech to a group of fellow Masons accentuating his take on the spiritual side of their raison d’être, he is verbally attacked by the leadership, and his opinions go right into the water closet.

But it gets worse. Even those who are on his side have revisions and suggestions that totally miss his intentions and lead off in directions that he cannot support. Pierre despairs.

I’ve never read a clearer or more concise description of the problem of trying to lead or reform any human endeavor. Groups of what one thought of as co-creators or at least as followers begin to fall away over doctrinal disagreements. It becomes impossible to keep the group together, and eventually one tires of fighting it and the original heart of the movement wastes away.

Personally, I definitely lean toward the political left side and the Democratic Party’s platforms, although I call myself an Independent. However I do give myself leave to call out the Democrats for what I see as their fecklessness and squabbling. Which means they aren’t doing what I want them to do at a given moment, but are broken up into groups that are at each other’s throats, poking one another in the eye, and pulling the chair out from under one another in perpetual prankism. I want them to be unified behind the projects dearest to me.

In this I am just like the character Pierre in Tolstoy’s novel, without the fabulously wealthy part. But I have an advantage over Pierre, in that I can look over at the Republican Party and see the horrorshow that it has become. No matter how frustrating or annoying the Dems can be, as a herd they are at least heading in a direction toward food and water. If they were only smarter and listened to me, they would get there a lot faster, but that’s another story altogether.

Human, by Rag’N’Bone Man

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A serving US Air Force officer was crowned Miss America on Sunday evening. She is Second Lieutenant Madison Marsh. I gasped in disbelief as I read the story.

During my tour of duty in the USAF I never encountered an officer of any gender remotely qualified to be a candidate in a beauty pageant.

We were instead rather a plain lot, suiting up and showing up each day without having to worry about the problems that possessing excessive physical attractiveness would engender.

Looking back I am grateful that this was the case. If a second lieutenant who resembled this woman had worked among us I think that less work would have gotten done, what with all the preening going on among most of the males and perhaps a few of the females as well.

No … much better the way it was.

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Each time that I leave the gym I am glad that I went. My body feels stronger, my step livelier. Every time I think about going to the gym there is a struggle against terminal inertia.

Each time I have finished mediating I feel clearer in my mind, more settled, glad that I took the time to do it. Every time I think about meditating I have a half-dozen other things I’d rather do, including the twiddling of my thumbs. 

There is a saying that circulates in AA groups to the effect that when becoming sober and wondering what to do with the rest of one’s often messy life, the answer is to pull up one’s jeans, tighten the belt, and do the next right thing. It’s sort of a reworking of the one day at a time slogan. Both pieces of advice are good ones, but taking good advice has never been my strongest suit.

For some reason, and I admit that I don’t understand it, I am presently exercising and meditating regularly. I’m sure that it’s only one of those phases we hear about, and will soon pass. 

Sloth never rests.

Get Up Stand Up, by Bob Marley

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This ad popped up on my computer screen the other day. It is a gigantic doggie bed meant to be occupied by humans. It costs $329.00. 

My first thought in seeing the ad was for goodness’ sake, what will they think of next?

My second thought was what a great idea, this thing has what a bed has always been missing … walls.

When I really needed it was when my children were young, and home life was sometimes chaotic, sort of like living in a pinball game, with small bodies ricocheting around the room constantly. All that was missing was lighting and sound effects.

But if I had owned one of these … it could have been declared to be “Dad’s Quiet Place, and when he is in it he is not to be disturbed.If you bother him he will call Social Services and report you.”

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Mom, can I ask Dad a question?

No, he is in his quiet place.

But I can see him … he’s right there.

He needs to rest his brain, it is on fire.

But he’s not sleeping – look – his eyes are open.

Never you mind. These are the rules.

The rules are stupid … why can’t I have a quiet place?

You are a kid. When you’re a grownup you can buy your own darn doggie bed.

That’s stupid.

You’re stupid.

No, you’re stupid.

Go to your room.

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The Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell

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