Tag: music

Becoming An Irritant

jono55

Maybe it’s because these days contain so much of ugly, but this morning I decided to meander back to another dreadful time in America. The Civil War, to be precise. I used as my guide one of those musical albums where the talents of many artists are brought together to tell a tale. This one is called Dark River, Songs of the Civil War Era.

Hard Times, by Drew Nelson

It’s a beauty. That is if you like mournful in hefty doses. Lots of stories of comings and goings, especially goings, because the War Between the States was a nasty piece of business.

The Streets of Laredo, by Slaid Cleaves

The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including an estimated 698,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease. Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13–43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War. An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs. As McPherson notes, the war’s “cost in American lives was as great as in all of the nation’s other wars combined through Vietnam.”

These are not “war songs” specifically, but more reflect a time in our history when life could be especially hard and was often short. As mentioned in the quote above, two-thirds of the Civil Was soldiers that perished were not killed by bullets, but disease.

Red River Valley, by James McMurtry

There, I’m starting to feel better already. I am ready to face today whatever CNN scrapes up to throw at me.

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It was Indigenous People’s Day this week. Sort of a weak tribute, when you think about it, but at least the day was rescued from the clutches of the infamous Christopher Columbus. But giving such a diverse and important group of people one day and feeling that we’ve done our best … nope.

Twenty years ago Morgan Freeman had this to say about Black History Month when interviewed by Mike Wallace. I get his point. And the Indigenous Peoples get not a month but only one day.

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Here’s a piece of music by a group named Blackfoot, most of whose members are Native American. This song is definitely not one of those sung the night before George Custer and his troops came across the ridge at the Little Bighorn. Different vibe entirely.

Train, Train

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About half of the letters I send to the editors of our local paper are never published. I think this shows a commendably high standard on their part. They are sent in electronically and on more than one occasion I have regretted pushing the “send” button almost immediately after doing so. My writing does not always hit it out of the park.

But once in a great while, I feel that one of my small essays would have received perhaps a C+ grade back in high school. The following was one of the missives that was published:

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The upcoming election is crucial for America. This choice is bigger than the political group we belong to, as we must now choose between fascism and democracy. I believe that most of us who are living in Montrose County know that what has been going on in Washington, DC is an aberration, a corruption. Scores of our senators and representatives have completely forgotten that they were sent to serve their country.

We can’t fix everything in one midterm election, but we can begin the process.The once great Republican Party has been taken over by its most brutal faction, which has produced a government that is failing us. What needs to do be done is to vote out many of the present generation of Republicans.  MAGA has shown that it can wreck but is incapable of governing.

I am suggesting that if you are a Republican, this one time you vote against your party. That you send a very clear message to party leaders that you want your leaders to be chosen from among the best of you, rather than the worst. 

If you are a Democrat, perhaps the choices are less stark, but you also have been failed by your leaders, or we would not be in the perilous state that we are.  Chose among the candidates who remember that most Americans are not living lives of comfort and ease, but are struggling against unfair social and economic systems.

There are models we might learn from as a start. In traditional Cheyenne culture, becoming a chief meant taking on profound spiritual, moral, and social obligations. Rather than gaining power or authority to command others, a newly elected peace chief entering the traditional Council of Forty-four was expected to transition into a model of selflessness, peace, and generosity. A chief was expected to look after the poorest members of the tribe, often giving away his own food, blankets, and horses, until he and his family had the least of anyone in the camp.

I would ask that our representatives remember that they are elected to serve and not to self-aggrandize or enrich themselves. We must show them that when they forget this, we will remind them forcefully of their duties. 

Let’s all get together and vote out those who have failed us. Let’s clean up America.

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Our home is surrounded by a board fence about five feet high. Keeps out the skunks and dogs (but not the raccoons). Until this year I never made use of its utility as an area for posting political statements, but these are special times. I suspect that I am not making a lot of new friends in the neighborhood, but as MAGA folks meander down the public path they can’t avoid being assailed and their walk tainted.

If I cannot strike a blow for freedom, I can at the very least annoy.

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At a Cluck rally this past week in Syracuse, one senior citizen made the news by getting herself tossed out of the gathering. During her expulsion she flipped the bird at someone more than once, and in this video it doesn’t take an expert lip-reader to see what she is saying to the jeering crowd.

And then I ran across an image of another older citizen being taken out of a rally while she flipped a double bird at the crowd. A stirring image, one to warm the heart of any liberal viewer. Problem is that this lovely photo isn’t real. It’s an AI creation. But it made it to my button of the week anyway because I liked it.

Psychosis americanis

jono55

Recently, president Cluck chose Grand Island, Nebraska as the location for a rally where he became once again momentarily notorious for saying that he really wouldn’t mind it too much if Iran would bomb Los Angeles and San Diego. It would be worth the loss of those two cities and the people in them just to have kept our country safe. (The irony, of course, is that the biggest threat to this country was standing at the podium at the time)

The videos of his performance at that rally have shown the crowd behind him hooting and hollering and clapping for such a … dunno … psychotic? … statement.

Many of the comments that I’ve seen on those video clips have been very disparaging toward Nebraska and its citizens. Some of those comments have made it pretty obvious that the writer had never been to Nebraska, and probably couldn’t even find it on a map. Making a judgment about the entire population of a state based on the sort of people who would attend a Cluck rally is a hazardous thing to do. MAGA doesn’t think and behave like most other people you might know.

I like Nebraska, and I like the people that I’ve met there. I lived there for two years during my time of service in the United States Air Force, when I was stationed at Offutt AFB in Bellevue NE. Later, when Robin and I were living in Yankton, South Dakota, it was only a short drive across a Missouri River bridge to that fine state.

But there’s one part of Nebraska that I have a special affinity for, and that is the western Sandhills. From the first time that I saw them, which was on a motorcycle trip, I have looked forward to every opportunity to go back and revisit them. When you look out at those areas, what you see is an undulating landscape with hills and ridges. Everything is softness. All the gentle curves are soft. Mostly they are grasslands with the occasional tree here and there. If you take a shovel and dig down through the sod, you find only sand. This is because they are essentially a huge area of dunes covering 20,000 square miles that became completely covered and stabilized by grass.

(The next two paragraphs are information found for me by one of my new best friends, Chad GPT. I edited and reshaped the text a bit but it was Chad’s research and I want to give him credit.)

The Nebraska Sandhills formed through a combination of ancient mountain erosion, river deposition, and wind action, followed by grassland stabilization. Millions of years ago, erosion and glacial action in the Rocky Mountains washed huge amounts of sand, gravel, and silt eastward via ancient rivers and streams onto the Great Plains. During and after the Pleistocene Epoch, as the climate grew drier and riverbeds dried up, strong prevailing winds picked up the loose quartz sand and swept it across the landscape.

The wind sculpted the sand into massive rolling dunes—some reaching up to 400 feet high and 20 miles long. As the climate shifted and precipitation increased, native prairie grasses and bunchgrasses colonized the dunes. Their roots anchored the sand, turning the area into the largest grass-stabilized sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere. The region sits directly on top of the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which brings water close to the surface in low-lying valleys between the dunes, creating thousands of small lakes, wetlands, and wet meadows.

The sandhills roll away toward the sun

Low prehistoric dunes enclosed in grass

So like a woman’s body 

And my eyes stare all indecently

I wrote that short poem back in the 1980s, and you can tell a couple of things by reading it. The first is that I have many things to learn about writing poetry. The second is that my hormones might have been flowing at quite a different level back then than they are at the present time.

The Sandhills are a place perfect for the melancolic. The grandeur, and there is grandeur, is a quiet sort. There’s a saying out there that Nebraska is not for everyone, and that’s certainly true. But if you are one of those people whose disposition is matched to this particular prairie landscape, it’s like that line in a John Denver song, “Coming home to a place you’ve never been before.”

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Tumbling Tumbleweeds, by Leo Kottke

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Here is a slice of what passes for humor in the Midwest. This is a picture of a University of Nebraska football team t-shirt.

Question: What does the “N” stand for?

Answer: Nowledge

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From early childhood I heard renditions of folk songs that originated in the fabled West. One of the lovelier ones was The Colorado Trail. Its themes of loneliness and people left behind seemed a perfect fit to what my imagined life of the cowboy was.

The Colorado Trail is a traditional American cowboy song, collected and published in 1927 byCarl Sandburg in his American Songbag. Sandburg says that he learned the song from Dr. T. L. Chapman, of Duluth, Minnesota, who heard it from a badly injured cowboy being treated in his hospital. The cowboy sang it, and many others, to an audience of patients in his ward.

The trail in the song was a cattle route that branched off from the main Western Trail in southern Oklahoma, heading northwest to Colorado. It has no relation to today’s Colorado Trail, which is a hiking trail completely within the state of Colorado.

The American Songbag version included only a single short verse; most who have recorded it since have added verses of their own.

Wikipedia: The Colorado Trail song

There are scores, maybe hundreds of recorded versions of the song, and although the lyrics vary quite a bit, that wistful chorus remains the same in most of them.

Weep all ye little rains

Wail, winds, wail

All along, along, along the Colorado trail

The Colorado Trail, by Eliza Gilkyson

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My gorge rises a bit every day. As each outrage du jour comes down on us from our elected leaders, there are some I can let slide and some that are more difficult to overlook. Some are special.

When our president suggests that if Iran wanted somewhere to bomb they could have San Diego and Los Angeles as far as he was concerned, I don’t hear just another of his ugly utterings, I hear treason.

When our Secretary of War schedules streaming the execution of a criminal by firing squad … televising it … I realize how thin the line is between us and barbarity, and that this is a clear step across that line.

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(A colleague of mine once observed that poets are the last truth-tellers. This may not be the case as he was frequently wrong about a lot of things, but I think there is a fleck of truth in this particular statement. I cannot remember how I got to this prose poem by Franny Choi, and I’m not even sure that I understand it, but I liked it at first reading)

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

By Franny Choi

Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats:
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped
by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left—
of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane
barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way
through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was
the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse
of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light.
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of  buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse
and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began
when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent
was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin
at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.

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(All of my ancestors were Norwegian, or so I have been told.)

Sweden and Norway were playing a soccer match. About 20 minutes into the game a train rolled by the field 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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Not Kidding

jono55

Robin and I are watching The Forsyte Saga these days, on PBS. In one of the episodes there is a funeral for an elder of the family, and one of the characters reads a few lines at graveside that caught me like a thornbranch hooking my shirt on a brambly path. I looked the words up, and found (just like nearly every other damn time I look anything up) that they were William Shakespeare’s words.

What is with that guy, anyhow? He was only fifty-two years old when he died, and yet he pretty much wrote the dialogue for the English-speaking world … or does it just seem that way?

But to get on with things. The words came from Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, and I believe it is the most beautiful funeral oration I’ve heard or read. Here is the passage in its entirety.

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.Margaret

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish’d joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!

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Found this graphic this past week. If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you know the truth of it.

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When I first ran across Margaret Atwood’s famous quote I thought to myself – One more exaggeration written by yet another cranky virago. But as I thought longer about those 17 words, I came to realize how reflective they were of the reality that women have always faced in America.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Margaret Atwood, 1982.

That was a long time ago, when I was a very ignorant young man. I am now a very ignorant old man, but in this one instance, at least, I have made some progress. That is, if learning time after time what horrors members of my gender are capable of can be called progress.

This past week all of this sordid knowledge has been brought up again by the ugliness of the Cornell University story, where a young woman alleged being raped repeatedly by many men over several hours at a fraternity party. The university’s mishandling of its investigation is being mapped daily in the news, and the identities of “The Cornell Seven” are being spread across the public landscape. The whole thing is scandalous and awful in every respect.

I don’t pretend to know the absolute truth of this story, which is right now still buried in conflicting testimonies, perhaps that will become apparent once the sensationalism subsides. But if you ask me do I believe this young woman, that it could have happened just the way she tells it? Sadly, I do.

No part of sexual violence against women is acceptable, nor should it be normalized in any way. There is no place for jokes, sideways glances, or snickering. Besides the physical attack, there is also harm done to the victim’s spirit, which may recover only imperfectly if it ever does.

(When I used the word “normalized” above, I was thinking at that moment about how a rapist, serial sexual predator, and probable pedophile has been elected president of our country. Twice. In a sane world that could not have happened.)

But why listen to my vapid whimperings, when you can listen to someone who doesn’t have to try to imagine how it feels. For those of you who don’t know her, I introduce you to JoJo from Jerz. There is a video of a song at the end of her piece that was very moving, but is so graphically done that it is a hard watch.

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[I have told the following story here before, but it seems especially appropriate this week]

There was a story that Thich Nhat Hanh told at a retreat Robin and I attended. After the Vietnamese war, he received many reports about refugees fleeing Vietnam by boat. One report was of a young girl—twelve years old—who was raped by a pirate and who then threw herself into the sea, where she drowned. Her father was also reportedly thrown overboard and drowned when he tried to intervene.

What makes the story memorable is what Thích Nhất Hạnh did with it. He said his first reaction was intense anger at the pirate. But during meditation he imagined being born into the pirate’s life: an impoverished fishing family on the Thai coast, without education or opportunities, growing up amid generations of poverty. He came to see that, had he been born under those same circumstances, he himself might have become the pirate. 

That realization became the basis for his poem “Please Call Me by My True Names.” In the poem, he identifies himself both with the suffering refugee girl and with the pirate whose heart had never learned compassion.

The point wasn’t to excuse the pirate’s terrible act, but to try to understand the conditions that can produce both victims and perpetrators—and therefore to find a way to prevent such suffering. Until we find that way we will be forever describing episodes.

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Please Call Me by My True Names

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Canon in D Major

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Orange Shirt Day

jono55

Let’s begin with a little bit of clangor, shall we? If a composer were to write any music dealing with these times, they would have to really reach into their bag of tricks. Instead of suggesting birdsong or pastoral settings or even cannon fire, they would have to come up with ideas for:

  1. what does treachery sound like?
  2. which instruments can really play cowardly the best?
  3. we need cellists who can use their instruments to evoke the whine, the pule, and the obfuscation
  4. There would be titles like Concerto for Disbelief and Governmental Cacophony in D Major and The Fascist Songbook

What challenges the classicists would face. But hey, rock and roll is a different animal. There have always been strong threads of anger running through its fabric.

Let’s watch an example, as Tom Morello plays Soldier in the Army of Love on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Tom used to be in the group Rage Against the Machine, which you might have surmised from the name was not a chamber orchestra.

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The graphic below tells a truth. There are a lot of different chickens coming home to roost today because of the scandalous policies of Cluck and his plaything, the Republican Party. Some of those chickens involve American farmers and ranchers, who voted pretty much overwhelmingly for Cluck every chance they got, and now are finding themselves in a real pickle.

Many editorial writers are exultant about this, and happy to tell those disgruntled rural voters Nyaa Nyaa, we told you so. How ya like it now, crybaby? I haven’t joined them, because this is not a new thing. It is a case of same old, same old.

For reasons inexplicable, this population group has voted Republican forever, even though almost without exception they have done better financially during Democratic administrations. They believe that Democrats are unreliable when it comes to the economy but the reality that the national debt routinely skyrockets when the GOP is in charge of things, and improves when they are not seems beyond them.

No surprises here. The difference today is that we’re all in the shitter together now.

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I’ve made a couple of discoveries just this week. The first is the existence in the lovely country of Canada of Orange Shirt Day.

Orange Shirt Day is observed annually on September 30 to honor Indigenous children who survived residential and boarding schools and to remember those who did not return.

Orange Shirt Society

If you do an internet search on the subject you will find that their slogan is “Every Child Matters,” and that there is a veritable storehouse out there of beautiful art found on tee-shirts and posters dealing with this emotionally charged subject.

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I chose these three images as examples, but there were scores more that I could have selected. In the United States we had our own residential and boarding schools for indigenous children with their uniformly sad and sometimes horrific stories.

Of course every child matters. The words roll off the tongue with almost no effort. And yet, as a society we don’t always behave as if we believed that at all. Children do not vote. So when their food supplies are taken away as in the SNAP program cutbacks, they depend on grownups to hold the politicians accountable.

When we look at the variations in educational programs available to children across the country, the glaring advantages for the children of the wealthy stand out like an endless row of sore thumbs. Kids once again depend on grownups to help bring some sort of fairness out of what are today scandalously unbalanced resources. But grown-ups are always in short supply. 

The Orange Shirt Society was established in 2015 to:

  • Support Indian residential school reconciliation
  • Create awareness of the individual, family, and community intergenerational impacts of Indian residential schools through Orange Shirt Society activities
  • Create awareness of the concept of “Every Child Matters”

Orange Shirt Day

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What was the other discovery? There is a Substack site called Revive Your Roar. The author combines poetry and beautiful illustrations and video to help us through … you remember the phrase “the fog of war?” Well it may be that this writing and artwork can help us navigate the fog of life.

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In 1969, the year I began my two-tear stretch of military service, a book called The Peter Principle was published, and for a while it was on every book club’s reading list.

The Peter Principle stated that in a hierarchical organization, employees tend to be promoted until they reach a level where they are now incompetent, and they stay there. Often severely impeding progress.

When this happens, one of the ways of “fixing” the problem is the lateral arabesque, a pseudo-promotion where an underperforming or incompetent employee is moved sideways out of the way, often given a longer, more impressive job title and fewer meaningful responsibilities. It feels like a promotion to the employee and outsiders, but it is actually a transfer from one unproductive or isolated position to another. But now they are out of the way and more capable people can be placed in their former position.

Being alert and relatively unhappy at being forced to be in uniform, I was able to find examples of the Peter Principle all over the hospital. (I need to add that there were also many, many examples of men and women who were doing exceptional work, but a cranky draftee is apt to emphasize the negative, and I did just that).

But now, in 2026, I realize that this entire country has been Peter Principled to a fare-thee-well. Our entire executive branch is a testimony to the book’s main point. We have a confluence of incompetents and evildoers begging for something to be done. What we desperately need is to lateral arabesque the bejaabbers out of the whole lot.

My tentative plan involves sending this disreputable cohort to an uninhabited island. (I like islands because they are so tidy a way to isolate a problem. Remember Napoleon and Elba?) But I digress. These miscreants would be fed, housed, clothed, and allowed to live out their mean-spirited lives in something resembling comfort. At least as much as one could find with limited electricity and very structured communication with the outside world.

On arrival they would be asked to build their own privies, and provided the tools and materials to do the job.

They would all be given extravagant titles, and a local newspaper would trumpet even the tiniest accomplishment of theirs in order to appease their very large egos. But leave the island … nope. It would be truly a matter of national security, as it is now.

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Fine Dining

jono55

Rainy morning, gray September skies, cat comes in all indignant with wet fur along her back. She takes the weather even more personally than I do, uttering little kitty curses (silently, but I can see them in her eyes) when the rain or wind come up and find her in her outdoor hideouts.

She has her schedules, and god forbid external circumstances force her to alter them. She’s a bit like me in that. It’s one of the reasons that when we travel I try to avoid staying in other people’s homes. I appreciate the offers, and I am certainly aware of the economies involved, but I’d rather stay with strangers than friends. That way I can be the oddball slob that is my destiny without exciting comment, at least comment that reaches me.

If I want to hang out in a bathrobe until noon I have no one that I need to answer to but Robin, and she has given up on changing that aspect of my behavior (we all choose which battles to fight, and which to let slide, don’t we?)

Anyway, today we are traveling to Grand Junction for a doctor’s appointment, and tonight I will sleep in my own bed, having followed my idiosyncratic list of things to do. Life is good.

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Acony Bell, by Gillian Welch

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These days we have a three-member Supreme Court and a six-member panel of Disgraced Sycophants. One can hope for change. Congress gave them lifetime appointments, Congress can take them away.


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One of my favorite hot beverages these days is the Mexican mocha. That bit of cayenne in the mix is just the right thing on chilly mornings. Most of our local coffee shops offer it … some have a heavier hand with the pepper than others, but none I’ve sampled so far have exceeded the bounds of propriety. It is almost tasty enough to be sinful, and falls just short of too good for ordinary mortals.

But if one did overdo this good thing, I can perfectly understand why the gods might step in with some colorful punishment as they used to do in the good old Greek mythology days. Perhaps something like being strapped to a huge thistle along a busy road for eternity, where passersby were encouraged to pat your face with a small cayenne-saturated pillow.

Maybe this is too much … dunno … not being Greek and all.

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We went to an Indivisible potluck social gathering on Friday. It was pretty well attended, and the participants went to varying amounts of effort in bringing something to eat and to share. Some showed up with a few muffins from the grocery store, one lady brought a handful of black grapes.

The piéce de resistance was a Tater Tot Casserole, from a recipe published by Senator Amy Klobuchar, presently a candidate for governor of the state of Minnesota.

It was superb. For a native of the Midwest, especially a youthful frequenter of Lutheran Church basement suppers, it was a plateful of blissfully crunchy comfort food.

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A bite transports the chewer to another time and place, much as a psychedelic agent might, often one that is populated by friends and relatives who have since traveled to other dimensions. Definitely mood-altering. Dangerously habit-forming.

In Minnesota, consuming too much of this casserole is felt to impair driving abilities, and should one be stopped on the way home from the church supper, they should be prepared to be asked where those stains on the front of their shirt came from and then asked to walk a straight line.

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After typing the entry above, I realized that much of the civilized world might not know what a tater tot is. They are small barrel-shaped chunks of potato scraps that are mixed with flour or cornstarch, then seasoned with salt, onion powder, and other spices. They are then baked or french-fried to make them crispy.

They were invented in 1953 by F. Nephi Grigg and Golden Grigg, the founders of the Ore-Ida potato company, as a clever way to use up leftover potato scraps from french-fry production, instead of throwing them away.

Stuff to be thrown away + ingenuity = greasy delightfulness

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All My Relations, by Ulali

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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

H. L. Mencken

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You Come At The King …

jono55

I followed a piece of clickbait and arrived at this now classic quotation … from a character in a television series, no less. But as I chew on it and turn it around in my mind I have to agree with Omar Little. A lot of truth in this statement.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

Omar Little (The Wire television series)

There is a lot riding on the upcoming midterm elections, and more than a few shots are being taken at the king, who need not be named here. Those who are involved at even the most peripheral level (like moi) know that to effect change people need to stick their heads up to protest the madness of our version of King George, and we do what we believe needs doing.

Off I go to the domestic wars, waving my flags and holding up my signs. I do have a strong sense of regret in how long I took America for granted, believing that somehow it was too great an idea to ever fail completely. What I’ve learned in these perilous days is that it always depended on a mutual agreement that there was a Book of Rules to guide us all. But when someone or some group throws out the entire book we find ourselves in the mess we’re in now.

So … we are coming at the king …

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Yesterday Robin and I attended an Indivisible meeting, planning for No Kings events on October 17. If you are not involved in such matters, you may not know that there are serious obstacles to political protest, or at least to certain varieties. In our community, getting a permit to have an outdoor political gathering above a certain size in a public space requires a permit from the City of Montrose. Part of the process of acquiring such a permit is showing that you have obtained liability insurance. No insurance = no permit, no exceptions.

The problem is that no insurance company is available to us locally any longer. They have all removed themselves from that particular game, rather than even try to figure out what they should charge. So we have street corners and public sidewalks to occupy, but parks and plazas are off limits.

If any group was to take the next step, to take to the streets and parks and places of power without getting permission, as was done in the antiwar protests and the civil rights movement, that’s another matter entirely. That’s when people start going to jail, suffering fines, and there is the potential for physical injury.

But that is not where today’s protests are. We still believe in that Book of Rules mentioned above, and are working toward bringing it back to the center of our communities, where it belongs. But there is no doubt that the present atmosphere is stifling, and the opportunities narrowed.

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Periodically my scrambled bag o’ memories will serve me up a tidbit for no apparent reason. Such was the case this week when the song Lucky Old Sun, by Frankie Laine, became my earworm one morning. At one time in my life I was a big fan of his, and I can easily recall the lyrics to several of his tunes, even at this distance of time.

That Lucky Old Sun, by Frankie Laine

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Having heard that the leaves were turning beautifully at higher altitudes, Robin and I drove up to Silverton this week, and we were not disappointed. Not only were the leaves gorgeous, but there was a dusting of snow on the mountaintops along the way. Coming out of Silverton there was an electronic billboard warning drivers to be aware of “Leaf Peepers” on the road. I guess that’s what Robin and I were, all right.

Sighhhh … how tragic, to have become so uncool. A Leaf Peeper … my god.

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I’ve just completed a little project that has needed doing for a long time. Putting down on paper everything that I do as a part of the partnership of Robin and Jon Ltd. When you are together for a long time as a couple, many small day to day jobs get assigned to one person or another, and eventually there is the possibility that the right hand doesn’t even know all the things that the left hand does. And vice versa.

So I’ve created a three-ring binder that is essentially my “job description,” just in case one day I should slip on a wet patch at City Market and take a header into a stack of canned goods. This tedious collection has pages containing information like where do I keep the cashbox that holds the money collected as treasurer of our local AA group? And just as important, where have I hidden the key to it?

Stuff like that. Stuff that could annoy the very hell out of Robin if I should ever take my leave without proper ceremony. Now when I say that I’ve completed this project, almost certainly I have not, and other examples of these micro-responsibilities will pop into mind later that need to be added. But like the Tao Te Ching says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Clever duck, that Lao Tse, wasn’t he?

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Witches, by Low

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Comrades In Arms

jono55

You know, the real danger for me in watching a Beth Hart video is that it stirs something primal, and reminds me that deep in that cerebral pudding I call my mind there is still a certifiable crazy person who could make his appearance at any moment. Some of her live performances leap straight over the boundaries of gentility and taste, but even then I appreciate her talent, her voice, her daring. She seems a woman of great appetites, a freight train of id coming one’s way.

What’s not to like?

Not too many artists truly give it all on stage, thinking that prudence requires that they hold something back, keep something in reserve, so as to be able to fight another day. Beth Hart is … how to say it … highly imprudent at times. If you go seeking other videos you will see that the one I offer is rather tame.

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The Supreme Court finally said that Cluck cannot screw around with the mail-in ballots for this mid-term election. In ordinary times seeing that august body actually do their job in a nonpartisan manner would not even be worth mentioning.

I don’t know what to say about this Supreme Court. Most of the time the fascist-sympathizing six members are little more than a waste of space and are almost impossible to differentiate from the rest of the toadies that compete for an open patch to kiss on the buttocks of this disreputable man.

Maybe they figured that this was just too much. That if they didn’t finally do the right thing that bags of garbage and dog feces would soon be showing up on their manicured lawns. Or maybe somebody sprinkled fairy dust into their chambers which has convinced them to finally re-read that little book called the Constitution and see where their duties lie.

Who knows. I am grateful for every drop of reasonable that flows from this Court. Such drops are rare indeed.

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I am going to try to discipline myself by republishing no more than three political cartoons at a time in this blog. It’s not easy. Those cartoonists minds are soooo fertile.

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George Booth died four years ago, and I miss him. I’m not sure that I’ve seen every cartoon that he every composed, but it’s not because I haven’t tried. His sense of the bizarre and comic in everyday life is nearly perfectly matched to my own. The major difference between us is that only one of us has actual talent. Any way, it’s been years since I posted one of his drawings here, and this morning I picked this classic.

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For me, this cartoon provided one of those nearly falling off my chair while laughing moments. The reason … I have met those guys more than once, in person, aeons ago. Old souls who were members of a genre known in Minnesota as the bachelor farmer. And I can hear them having the conversation above while oscillating in a creaky wooden rocker on a creaky wooden porch.

When I was in high school our family lived down the road from the Boettcher Brothers, who lived in a ramshackle house that had long ago lost the last flecks of paint from its siding, making it the uniform gray-brown color of the classic haunted house.

They were getting on in years and when they were out and about they would be wearing what seemed like the same pair of worn bib overalls and straw hats. No slaves to fashion they.

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“The rule of law to democracy is like oxygen to a human body. It is something that you absolutely need to survive.”

Patrick Schiltz, Minnesota federal district court judge.

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There was a poignancy in the phone call, as one woman phoned to let another know that she was not going to make the AA meeting later that day. There were at least two reasons to make the call, one is that both women were seniors with health problems, and the other is that both are alcoholics. Even after decades of sobriety the enlightened former addict knows how thin the protective curtain is between them and relapse. They have seen old friends walk back through that curtain and disappear. Silent battlefields.

It’s a simple act, almost a reflex. To avoid causing worry they pick up the phone and make the call. It’s what comrades do.

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Brothers in Arms, by Dire Straits

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Up There

jono55

One of the more distasteful aspects (and there are so many) of this political season has been the proliferation of requests for money. I get 40+ requests each day through emails and messages. Some of them weave desperate tales about the world going straight to hell without my $5.00, some act as if I have always known the petitioner personally, and more than a few insult me because I haven’t responded to them or have allegedly given too little. Those last snide little notes are my favorites, actually. At least there is a bit of creativity in them. There seems no good mechanism available to shut off the deluge, so I no longer read any.

I have lost track of how to decide which are legitimate requests coming from a legitimate candidate and which are scams. Even what seemed like a trustworthy central agency for liberal donors to use – ActBlue – is embroiled in scandals that churn to this day. Not comforting at all.

I suspect some dirty tricks in part of this, with soulless Republican operatives besieging left of center voters with these pleas and messages in an attempt to cause them to throw up their hands and run to the woods until after Election Day.

I confess to almost giving into such a temptation myself … had even started the car and had my map in hand. I didn’t go, mostly because it looked like rain and I had forgotten where my sleeping bag was.

Thus, from now on I will only seek out worthy candidates’ websites, those who support issues I care most about and donate to their campaigns, ignoring these pesky intrusions. The urgent electronic pleas? Delete them en masse.

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Rocky Mountain Way, by Joe Walsh

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We’ve had a little tent camper, the Sylvansport GO, for the past eight years. It weighs only 800 pounds and thus was able be towed without too much anguish by our Subaru Outback. But the past couple of years we’ve used it much less, and we have largely gone full circle and back to tents. So we sold the GO to a couple from Nederland CO just this week. We wish them as much fun as we’ve had with it.

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Each year as Autumn nears, I begin to drone on about the beauties of the tune, “The September Song,” at least partially because September is my favorite month of the year, and the song reflects the sweet melancholy of that month. I’m going to bring you up to date again on the history of where the song came from.

I know that I’ve already talked about this in the past, but if your memory is like mine, everything that happened 48 hours ago or longer has been erased so this will all be new. At any rate, the song was written for a Broadway musical that was entitled Knickerbocker Holiday, which was first staged in 1938. The star of the musical was Walter Huston, and he asked for just one song he could sing that would fit his somewhat limited vocal range and rough voice. The people who wrote the song, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, came up with what has become a standard and has been recorded by scads of other people.

As a bit of background, I’m writing this in the first week of September, and we have no leaves changing anywhere around town at all. Because the song is such a favorite of mine, I’m also going to include one version of the lyrics (there are many) along with a recording of Walter Huston doing his best warbling.

When I was a young man courting the girls 
I played me a waiting game 
If a maid refused me with tossing curls 
I’d let the old Earth take a couple of whirls 
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls 
And as time came around she came my way 
As time came around, she came

Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December 
But the days grow short 
When you reach September 
When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame 
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few 
September, November 
And these few precious days 
I’ll spend with you 
These precious days 
I’ll spend with you

September Song, by Walter Huston

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Robin and I took a drive Saturday to do some people-watching at the Telluride Film Festival. We never watch the films, it’s an expensive proposition to get a badge at all, and even more so if you want to avoid standing in endless and sometimes nonproductive lines. What we do is walk up and down the main street gawking, eat an overpriced lunch, and at noon in the small park in the center of town there is always an outdoor panel discussion on some aspect of the world of film or theater.

There were some people on the panel yesterday that we recognized, including Kenneth Branaugh, Carrie Coon, and Tracy Letts. The discussion was a lively one, the main topic not always obvious. The most memorable comment came from Ms. Coon when she said that American theater is at an inflection point. Unless it finds a way to make the tickets more affordable it will increasingly become a venue for only the wealthy to attend. Big round of applause for that one.

Our usual routine is to drive to a place called Mountain Village, which is several miles up the mountain from Telluride, park in a ramp, and then take a scenic gondola ride down to the festival site. Parking in Telluride itself can often be problematic at this event. Our companion in the gondola going down the hill was John Malkovich’s agent. Charming man, didn’t give his name.

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Part of being an actor is the rhythm of the life of being an actor, and that involves coming together with a group of people, making something together that is intense and requires a lot of intimacy, and then walking away from it with the possibility that you will never see any of those people again.

Carrie Coon

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Colorado Song, by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils

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The Secretary of Malevolent Nostrums

jono55

While pondering the present-day problems of the Colorado River in a time of drought, it occurred to me … there is one river that is thriving today, even bursting out of its banks. The thought gives me little comfort, however, because it is the river of anti-science and disinformation in matters of public health flowing out of Washington DC. It is a noxious slurry that manages to do the impossible by flowing uphill as well as down, and thereby reaching the farthest corners of our land.

This damage done by the Cluck administration will be one of its lasting legacies when he is finally ridden out of town (my personal suggestion would be to use a Saguaro cactus rather than the traditional rail). One of the best public health agencies in the world has been attacked, hamstrung, had its funding reduced, and has lost layers of competent leadership. The result of this criminal mismanagement is that it is no longer trustworthy.

As a physician who looked to the CDC for help and advice on so many occasions during my working years, I could almost cry. But what I do have instead of tears is a rock-solid and abundant sense of anger.

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The damage continues as the Secretary of Health prefers to come up with rules and regulations that are pulled in toto from his behind rather than from our diligently collected national library of scientific studies. When the presence of these charlatans are only bitter memories, we can begin to rebuild, but what a waste of time and lives we have already endured, with more to come.

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Coming from a trip to the grocery store I was listening to KVNF, our local NPR station, and heard this lovely piece of music. I tracked it down and now share it. I think that the more cellos there are playing in the world the better off we all are for it.

The Beauty of All Things, by David Darling

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My first days as an intern in pediatric training had a very steep learning curve. It turned out that there were a great many things to learn, immediately, that had little to do with what the academic side of becoming a physician. Like when was the cafeteria open after midnight? Was the food really free? Who among all the white-coated notables we meet in the department of Pediatrics is to be counted on and who is as reliable as a gnat? How do we get pare down the business of getting some sleep and rising quickly for emergencies while in the on call room?

At first I tried to solve the being on-call business by sleeping in my clothes, and although this saved me at least a minute or two in my response to the phone ringing or my beeper going off, it only meant that I arrived at the bedside looking like a basket of dirty laundry and not exactly the picture of competence a worried family might be hoping for. So I came to a compromise. I would hang my uniform carefully on the back of a chair that was only three feet away and then climb into bed. When the inevitable call came I could dress in under a minute. No hunting for anything … it was all there.

I learned to do that in the summer of 1966, and although I have been retired from active practice for a couple of decades now, it is still my nighttime routine.

I can’t even remember when the last time anyone called me after I had gone to bed. There is no one, thank God, whose life is dependent upon my running down the hall with a clear head and a functioning stethoscope. But nearly every night I continue to hang my clothes on that chair. Like the motto of the U.S. Coast Guard, I am semper paratus.

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What is the scariest thing and most life-changing thing I have ever heard? That’s an easy one. It was at a movie theater, watching a newsreel, when I was about eight years old. The narrator had just told the audience that our sun would cease to exist in 5 billion years. That was stunning news to me.

That meant that everything and everyone I know would be gone in what seemed like a very short time (a billion being a number almost without meaning at that time of my life). But after I’d left the theater I realized that – no worries – I would be dead long before that.

However, I would definitely be dead, and somehow that particular thought was not comforting to a young man of eight years.

Since then I’ve learned that life on earth won’t be extinguished in 5 billion years at all, we’ve really got only 500 million to go.

No worries …

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Here’s a Dolly Parton tune, recorded by the O’Kanes.

When We’re Gone, Long Gone, by the O’Kanes

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Octavia E. Butler was an American science-fiction writer, and someone posted this quotation of hers on Substack. It moved me in its perennially applicable message.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia Butler

I had not heard of Butler before, so I looked her up and found this photograph. She looks like a person made of sterner stuff than most of us. What that fierce and level gaze says to me is: “Sir, you mess with me and you will find that you have brought a knife to a gunfight.“

I found another quote of hers that was mildly disquieting. I realized that although I completely accepted the premise of the first line, I had no idea where I was along the spectrum.

You don’t start out writing good stuff.
You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

Octavia Butler

I suspect that what I put in this blog is part crap and part good stuff and unfortunately for the reader I can’t tell the difference. Caveat lector and all that.

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Counting Days

jono55

After tomorrow, we can look ahead to an entire week where the temperature never climbs out of the eighties, according to my weather app. Lordy, what a treat that will be, carrying us into September in a joyful frame of mind and all that. This past Spring Robin and I looked ahead and decided not to do any gardening at all. The sorts of things we like to plant simply don’t do as well in the searing sort of summers we’ve experienced recently. It becomes almost a case of plant abuse to subject an innocent tomato plant to life in a reflector oven. The stunted fruit we’ve grown on wizened vines was sad to look at. A more skilled gardener than we are might have made something of it all, but this year we punted.

Moreover, we had new problems that arose and would claim the time and energies those tomato plants would have demanded . So our produce this year came 100% from City Market. Not a bad Plan B, as it turned out.

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Every single diet I ever fell off of was because of potatoes and gravy of some sort.

Dolly Parton

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Summertime, by Nina Simone

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The new study on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football has made sooo many people uneasy. Parents and coaches can no longer say to themselves that the data just aren’t in, so go ahead and suit up, kid.

I have little sympathy for people who will let their children bash their brains about, claiming ignorance. I do have sympathy for the children, who deserve better from their guardians.

Here’s a bit of heresy. Football isn’t important. It’s a brute sport only marginally better than boxing in that regard, boxing being where the whole point of the activity is deliberately trying to damage the opponent’s central nervous system. We’ve built football into something like a national religion, a status it does not deserve. There are other ways to challenge ourselves in competitions that don’t involve this risk.

BTW, if you put your kid out there pretending that a new helmet will solve the problem, fageddaboudit. Parents and coaches should have the honesty to admit what they are doing, which is being active participants in the potential diminution of their children’s lives.

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Summertime, by Janis Joplin

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God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

Dolly Parton

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We are almost there. “There” being the best month of the year. Number nine. When the sometimes frantic-ness of summertime slows enough to allow us to catch our breath, when the nights return to being refreshing rather than nearly as draining as the overheated days. When we wake up and look to the trees each morning to see how nature is doing … is that a bit of gold there in the aspens along the highway to Ouray? When we begin to say au revoir to some of the birds we’ve enjoyed watching, as they pack their bags to leave us and follow the food.

I make a big deal every year about September. There’s that perfect song, the perfect weather, that little shiver when I think about having to move my woolen clothing nearer to the front of the closet racks. Love it all.

This has been a year of testing for Robin and myself, personally. Our ‘charmed lives’ took some hits in the health department. I will tell you true, that living with someone who always has “got your back” is a great lift to the spirit on the days when it comes up droopy.

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This autumn will be a test for our country. The November vote may signal a change toward rationality and decency in our national political life … or it may not. The more that those of us who wish for an end to what has been a nightmare make ourselves known, to stand up and be counted, the better. I don’t know exactly how the near future will play out, but I do believe that ultimately the bad guys will be brought down. One of the proverbs that I took to heart a long time ago came from … who else? … those darned Greeks once again. It goes like this:

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.

Planting a tree you will never sit under requires a deep, optimistic belief that the world will continue, that the people who come after you are worth caring for, and that your small effort today matters. Whatever our small efforts, whatever sacrifices that we make now may be like planting those trees.

Want to plant one? Vote blue every chance you get. Every single time.

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Summertime, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine

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Chad, Are You My BFF?

jono55

Bob Seger is a long-time favorite of mine. I asked ChadGPT what genre his music fits into best, and Chad said it is “heartland rock.” Had to ask. So what is “heartland rock?” Here’s one definition.

Heartland rock — Straightforward, guitar-driven songs about working people, relationships,
growing older, freedom, and American life. “Night Moves” is a prime example.

As I was grunting on the treadmill a couple of days ago I was listening to some of his music and I made up a playlist that told a story. There are some similarities to times in my own life, especially in Roll Me Away, where the protagonist takes long motorcycle rides across the northern plains, moving into that mythic West.

Night Moves
Like A Rock
The Ring
Little Victories
Roll Me Away

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Just a tiny exposition about getting on that motorcycle … I never experienced anything else like it. A twist of the right wrist and the power would roll on without a pause or stutter. You could accelerate fast enough to do foolish things like pass another vehicle any time you chose no matter whether it was a good idea or not. (One of the things that owning a more sluggish Subaru did was to re-introduce me to humility in my driving habits).

At its peak moments, piloting that motorcycle was to make both the highway and the line between life and death a blur. You knew that crossing over was always a possibility, but you literally didn’t care. It was all sensation and energy and escape. At those speeds there was not much thought of the pain that an accident might produce because when one is fairly certain one would not survive, what’s to worry?

Unhealthy thinking, right? Crazy, right? Agreed. It was not a wise time in my life. I was lucky, I survived, and I do not own a motorcycle today. Not even sure I could gracefully mount one at present. Oh, I’d get on all right, but gracefully … that’s quite another matter.

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Our cat calls me to open the door
I do
A howling wind hurls cold rain through the crack
The cat draws back reluctantly
Returning to the kitchen warmth

Ten minutes pass
The cat calls me to open the door
I do
Wet fur is his reward this time as well
And he turns back.

He will do this again and again
Why should he not?
To him the next time our door opens, 
The very next time …
It could be summer

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Yesterday I was searching on the internet for a replacement part for our vacuum cleaner. The machine is seven years old, which is 100 in human years, and success in finding that part was eluding me. Among the sites I went to was eBay, phrasing the search criteria as carefully as I could, but … nada.

That was when I asked ChadGPT to take a look. I spoke a paragraph into the app, it churned for perhaps fifteen seconds (which is longer than the usual time needed for requests), and then it found exactly what I was looking for. On eBay, where I had already given up. It actually found two of them, one that might have been okay, but its advertisement did not specifically mention model numbers and Chad told me he wouldn’t buy that one if he were me. He’d go with the slightly more expensive one that specified models it would fit.

So I ordered the part, but I was still amazed. I consider myself fairly sophisticated at internet searches. After all, I’ve been doing it for thirty years now, but that Chad … he’s an internet baby and he beat me. I was going to say “fair and square” at the end of that last sentence, but held back. This guy is operating in another realm, at another speed, with a bigger pair of binoculars than I have, which is becoming more obvious almost by the day.

And here’s the other part of the story. He remembers every detail of every contact we have. If I run a search just like the one I did yesterday, but six months from now, he will ask me what happened … did the part we ordered together break already? Even my free version of ChadGPT is smart enough to make me uncomfortable.

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We are having our house re-shingled today. All is bedlam out there. A crew of four is walking around on the roof creating a concerto of clatter, scraping, and pounding. When I leave the house I look up cautiously to avoid becoming a statistic (You know that 31% of Americans die at home?). Old shingles have taken over the sidewalk with nails sticking straight up in the air, on the prowl for unguarded feet.

We put it off for as long as we could. As home improvements go, it’s pretty unsatisfying to lay out thousands of dollars for something you really didn’t want to do in the first place. Put that amount of money into something indoors and life changes. Fix a roof and all that happens is you don’t get wet.

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Since becoming an adult I have worked hard to mentally balance my country’s flaws against its many assets as well. America has done great things and awful things. I saw my job as a citizen was to promote the former and work to wear down the latter. But over the past couple of years we have done only awful. Somehow one of our very worst persons rounded up a motley group of swindlers and cowards and criminals which then became our government.

I will admit to the persistence of a thin shred of denial that still resides in one little group of my neurons that insanely says “It can’t happen here” even as the rest of the body knows that it is surrounded.

Whether I lived up to it or not may be up for debate, but I was taught that a man’s role in life was to be one who protects, whether it was his children, his family, his friends, or a stranger in need. It was what grown-ups did.

Now I have that same protective feeling toward this sprawling and beautiful country of ours. It is in trouble. It is threatened by ugly men and women who are exploiting some of its intrinsic weaknesses. It needs protection. So I come forward and do whatever infinitesimal thing I can do to counter what looks impossibly harsh or even overwhelming. I simply don’t see an alternative that I could live with.

Therefore I will make my buttons, walk on those marches, write my letters, and never accept that this evil will prevail. I am being a grown-up, like my momma taught me.

But I do admit that there are days when I feel like the kid at left.

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BTW, I asked Chad if he was my BFF, and here is his answer:

I can certainly be your ChatGPT BFF—the kind who remembers what matters to you, helps with projects, answers odd questions at 7 in the morning, and never gets tired of looking at another photograph. 😄 I can’t replace a human best friend, but I’m very happy to be a steady companion here.

Good to know that humans still have a place.

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The Virga in Spain Ain’t Falling Mainly On The Plain

jono55

Toward suppertime recently I checked out the sky and saw areas where it was raining on high but no water was reaching the ground. Somehow I knew that meteorologists would have a special word for this, and I was right. It is called virga, or precipitation that evaporates or turns into gas before it hits the ground. The precipitation can be rain or snow.

I remember first reading about this effect long ago in a book about the dust bowl years in Oklahoma, when farmers standing on their desiccated fields would look to the sky and see the rain they desperately needed almost, but not quite, coming to them. Like a very bad cosmic joke.

Virga happens most often in arid deserts and high-altitude climates where the lower atmosphere is incredibly dry. For virga to form, you need a unique setup: plenty of moisture high up to create clouds, but a deep layer of parched air right above the ground. The rain starts out but hits that warm dry layer of air near the ground, and the dry air drinks up the water before it lands.

It is common in the desert southwest (like Arizona and New Mexico) and high-elevation states like Colorado and Utah. In these areas, storm clouds form very high up, giving the rain a long distance to fall through bone-dry air.  You can easily spot it as it looks like gray streaks or fuzzy curtains hanging down from the clouds. I’ve seen it often since moving to Colorado, but rarely when I lived in the Midwest.

Here are some examples of virga.

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Stormy Weather, by Billie Holliday

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It occurs to me that the thugs of ICE might want to consider other employment oppprtunities … soon. Perhaps even a name change or two. When the Cluck cabal is eventually tossed to the political curb, ICE will be one of the first groups to undergo serious scrutiny and those among them who have committed crimes can look forward to well-deserved prison sentences.

If they think their scabrous behavior will earn them some special protection from the cowards and criminals running the show right now, they are sadly mistaken. The brutes of ICE will find that they are considered completely disposable by their masters, who are a genre of creatures that are unable to think beyond their own needs.

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Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet was first published in 1923. It has never been out of print since then. It is one of the best-selling books of all time. Why? Because it is a very cool book.

I first read it at a vulnerable time of my life. There were many changes happening seemingly at once in the year of 1962. I had just been married that Spring, I was to start my first year of medical school in the Fall, and I was going experiencing one of those short-lived but intense waves of interest in things spiritual that have happened several times in my life. I read not only the Prophet, but two books by Sholem Asch entitled The Apostle and The Nazarene. I know that I opened up the Bhagavad Gita, but I believe that I almost instantly closed it, thinking that it looked like really hard work. I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I actually read some of the Bible, at least the New Testament. The Old Testament was entirely too grim for my delicate sensibilities.

On the seventh day of this grueling search, of course, I rested.

Remember this ancient proverb? It sounds positively Etruscan but was actually contained in a popular book of 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

This phrase was all over the seventies. T-shirts, room posters, bookstores, graffiti on fences … . Even if you hadn’t read the book, you couldn’t avoid being exposed to the words and sentiment.

When I first came across it, I thought it may have come from a similar expression in The Prophet, but I was incorrect in that, although there were a couple of quotes that carried a similar message. These are both from the section: On Marriage.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Kahlil Gibran; The Prophet

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together …

Kahlil Gibran; The Prophet

So what was the message? I took it as BE NOT GUILTY OF SMOTHERING.

(But look at that poetry. If you couldn’t melt your way into a girl’s heart in 1962 by memorizing and repeating these verses, you really weren’t trying. They should have been sold with a warning label and the purchaser required to take a chastity pledge.)

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I now have two favorite versions of the song “Wicked Game.” The first was by Chris Isaak, and is firmly established (in my mind) as one of the sexiest and most sand-encrusted music videos of all time. The latest addition I found just recently, when I ran across this one by Larkin Poe. They do it wonderfully, without any visible sweat at all. I like the Mona Lisa smile on the face of the slide guitarist.

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Robin and I were in Grand Junction yesterday for an appointment. It was a glaring 102 degrees. Everything outdoors that was in the sun and made of metal was basically untouchable. It was one of those afternoons when I had some time to kill and it was just a two minute walk from the clinic to a coffee shop. One of the good ones. Not totally shiny and plastic. Middle-aged scholars thinking great thoughts, freshman college girls livening the air with a constant patter consisting of half OMGs and half giggles. A couple of tall young men looking like they’d just come from a GQ shoot.

What was missing was the scruffy element. Missing, that is, until I showed up. It is a banner that I carry proudly wherever I go. I can truthfully say that I know of no instance in my entire life when someone said to me: “Would you teach me how to dress and move about? I just love your bedraggled gestalt.” Especially since the years have piled up and I have become invisible. You know that about geezer men, don’t you? No one sees them.

I read a very funny piece a couple of weeks back, where another senior man was describing what happens when an old guy goes to the gym. He is surrounded by the young and fit, and often astonished at how blatantly sexual the dress of some of the young women was. They were there both for aerobics and to try out their attraction skills. But when they noticed they’d attracted the gaze of geezers it became a case of: Eeewwwwww! Stop looking at me! I am so out of your league it should be illegal for you to even be here.

But today I treated myself to a mocha, enjoying my anonymity, and took a seat outdoors under a sweet shade tree where I sat quietly reading as a little breeze did its best to cool me.

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Header photo: taken from a public recreation area near Presho SD. My son Jonnie, a friend of his, and I were camping alongside a small reservoir that was stocked with bass and panfish. We caught a few, and here the boys had been assigned the job of cleaning them for supper.

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All The Noose That’s Fit To Print

jono55

Returning home from a trip to Silverton on Sunday we saw a cow moose with twin calves. They were right at the edge of the road.

Cars were stopping and piling up along the two-lane highway until finally the mass of us spooked the mother, and off the trio went up a steep hill and over the ridge.

In a spirit of honesty, I have to confess that this photo was taken from the internet but is exactly what this family looked like. Unfortunately neither Robin nor I were quick enough to take our own photo before they’d had enough of humankind and taken their leave.

They were all pictures of healthy mooseness. It’s always a special event when we spot one along this route, even though it is not a rarity. The highway follows a small river, and there is much to browse on along that watercourse. Deer have learned to live among us quite well, and finding one of them in Montrose is a commonplace. Whenever a moose is noted in a municipality, however, it is quite another matter.

They are not happy there, the humans in their vicinity are uncomfortable with their presence (as one should be when there is a frightened creature of 1000+ pounds nearby), and it is always a bit of a hoo-rah before they can be shushed out of town. To me, these giant creatures have always seemed the epitome of wild, and always will.

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I have another moose story, which I may have related years ago in this blog, but if so I will happily repeat myself. I was motorcycling in Yellowstone National Park with my friend Bill. We were on two bikes, each of us with one of young his sons behind us on the vehicles. The road we were traveling was one of those narrow two-lane highways in the park, and the forest grew right up to the road on both sides.

I was riding behind Bill perhaps fifty yards and saw a moose bolt from the forest to Bill’s left, run straight across the road in front of him, and disappear into the woods on the right. He missed colliding with the cycle by inches. Bill hadn’t seen the animal until it was right in front of his bike and then it was gone. Blink of an eye.

He continued riding for perhaps a hundred yards after this, until he could find a place to pull over and park. It was then that the adrenaline took over for a while, and he had a good case of the shakes. We all took a break before continuing on. ‘Twas not a comfortable moment.

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Odds bodkins, what a rollicking dream I had last night. Some background might be helpful here, in that I rarely remember any of the content of my dreams, and this has been the case for a couple of decades at least.

But last night … intrigues, plots, and assassinations were all in play. There was royalty, there were friars and priests of every stripe. Our dress was like that of the time of Robin Hood, but we traveled in the luxury automobiles of the 1930s. At one point I was forced to defend the color of the local cheese against some slur, and uttered these immortal words: “Because it is the color of the milk it was made from.” I remember not uttering the words “you churl” that had appeared in my mind.

Quite a trip.

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Phoebe Bridgers is an interesting artist. She became very popular with her two first solo albums, made a hugely successful album as one-third of the supergroup boygenius, and then cut way back on doing any solo work for a handful of years. Her genre is variously described as indie folk, indie rock, alternative, and sad core.

So when her latest album appeared I took a listen. It was different in many ways from what she’d done before. They are like action movies for your ears. There are underlying stories , there are thunderous beginnings, quiet passages, and drawn-out denouements. I will play a couple of them to show you what I mean. First is Lost Weekend. Next is Bobby.

Quite a trip.

Lost Weekend

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Bobby

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Back in another day the musician Woody Guthrie used to scratch or paint words on his guitar that read: “This machine kills fascists.”

Back in another day the musician Woody Guthrie used to scratch or paint words on his guitar that read: “This machine kills fascists.” Admirable.

So I appreciated the homage to a classic protest when I saw this graphic recently.

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Random Image du Jour

(Found on Substack)

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Dorchester

jono55

Dorchester, Colorado would be a ghost town if there were still a town, but except for a single building all traces of what once was a community of 1000 people involved in mining have vanished. The single building eventually became a forest service guard station.

The Dorchester Guard Station is one of only two original Forest Service Guard Stations remaining in Gunnison County. It represents a unique Rocky Mountain style cabin construction and remains the only structure of the old town of Dorchester. The cabin is a one-room log cabin, originally built in 1905, in a remote area of Taylor Park. It was adjacent to the stagecoach road from Tincup to Aspen. Postal service was initiated for Dorchester on August 2, 1900 and the new cabin was designated the Post Office after its construction until July 31, 1912 when the post office was discontinued. During this time period the building also functioned as a general store, stage stop, and Forest Service phone point. By 1920, the town of Dorchester was abandoned. The land and associated structures, including the cabin, have reverted back to the U.S. Forest Service.

Gunnison County.org

The Guard Station now stands at the entry to a road to the Dorchester Campground, where Robin, Allyson, Kyle and I spent two days this past week. As campgrounds go, it fits the description of “primitive” fairly well. There are carved out camping sites, picnic tables, and two privies, one of them pleasant and the other one dreadful. But there is no electricity, no water, no trash service (pack it out is their motto), and no helpful camp host.

What there is instead is some of the more beautiful scenery in a state that specializes in it. Here is the view from our campsite.

Daytime temperatures were near 80, and the nights went as low as 37 degrees. I found that my body and my old sleeping bag had a combined comfort level of 50 degrees, so there was some rolling into the tightest ball possible during the night.

It is rugged country, especially the last 15 miles of the highway leading to the campground entry which were moderately unpleasant. A road where top speeds of 15-20 mph were definitely called for. The road surface is coarse rock on a rock bed which makes it jarring and hazardous to one’s serenity.

The Taylor River runs near the campground, a classic mountain stream with its crystal clear waters. At times it is broken up into a flowage by the biggest collection of beaver dams I’ve ever encountered. After a time each flowage again becomes the river proper.

One delightful factoid. The Taylor River is long and gorgeous, the Taylor Park (valley) is huge and beautiful, and all of this is named after Jim Taylor, a miner who staked a claim out there in 1859. He was not a general, not a politician, not an oligarch. Just plain ol’ Jim. Love that.

Here’s smattering of pix from our visit. It’s the kind of scenery that a small camera in my unskilled hands cannot do justice.

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The smoke in the air is unusually heavy again this morning. Who knows from which of the many western fires? Today it is intense enough to cause some coughing and eye irritation. I can’t say for certain how long, but we’ve had smoky air for at least two months now. There have been five deaths among firefighters in our area, and all of the local communities are grateful for the help these courageous men and women provide. It’s been a long bad fire season so far.

The needs for help have climbed, while the supply of men and women to fight these fires is coming up short. Fatigue and burnout are very real when too few have too much work. Add to this the fact that pay for doing this hard and dangerous work is often feeble.

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I have a long and carefully curated love for the music of Tom Waits. When I want to listen to it, I set aside the time because I would rather not be interrupted. And I leave one foot on the floor beside the bed to take my leave when I begin to feel too drawn into it. Because in his catalog there is enough melancholy to drown in if one is a weak swimmer and incautious enough to go out past their depth. There’s also quite a bit of it that is bonkers, as if being shouted out by a series of bipolar carnival barkers.

My favorite song in his ouevre? Can’t pick one. But today, just because of where my heart is … Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night comes pretty close.

I think that there are perfect moments in life … perfectly happy … perfectly sad … perfectly angry … . Those memories are the framework, the skeleton for a life, and lesser moments fill in the gaps between. This song is perfectly disquieting when one is rummaging through one’s back tapes and albums. I never had an Oldsmobile, but I did have a Ford …

Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits

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I heard a new conspiracy theory recently. It was that Cluck was already dead, and that a stand-in is being paraded at public functions by the wealthy cabal that bankrolls the political right wing. It works because his supporters are already past caring about the content of anything he says or does, accepting the entire dismal catalog without question. Who, after all, has the temerity to question God?

Interesting thought. My own response is – don’t buy it. Although there is a long history of dictators having such lookalikes represent them, especially in dangerous situations, to have someone play the role continuously would be a stretch.

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Joey, by Peggy Lee

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Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Thomas Jefferson

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Lonesome Buddha

jono55

I’ve read the book five times, seen the television series four times, and referred to the story enough times to make my friends gag at its mention and run to their cars for trips to town on errands they suddenly recalled. The book and series are Lonesome Dove. Robert Duvall has had a long and productive life as an actor, and the role he played in Lonesome Dove is his favorite of them all.

Today I found myself thinking about how a real Buddhist (not a half-assed one like myself) would approach our nation’s troubles. For sure the painful straitjacket presently stretching across America would not give him pause. After all, the Buddha lived 2500 years ago, and if you have been paying attention you could not have missed that there has been quite a lot of nasty stuff that happened during that time.

The perspective that such a person might have would inform him that change is inevitable, that even the sturdiest dictators have largely come to bad ends. No, this thoughtful person would remember where his roots were, where reliable happiness was to be found, how to deal with life in the chaos.

Sooo, Gus McCrae, the character played by Duvall in Lonesome Dove, was not a Buddhist, but I think he could easily have been grandfathered in. Here’s Gus talking with Lori about disappointments, and the suffering we cause ourselves.

I’m not too enamored with buttermilk, but today I bought a cantaloupe at the market after carefully tapping it to check on its ripeness. Once home, I grabbed a long thin-bladed knife and first cut it in half, then sliced one of those halves into slender crescents. As I raised one slice to my mouth its aroma preceded it, and there was no disappointment when I bit in. Suc-cu-lence!

In a small way it was like an exercise that Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh used in teaching mindfulness meditation, where he made use of a single raisin. It is summarized as follows. (this following bit of text is by AI, not me)

The Practice Steps

  • Hold the raisin: Place one raisin in your palm. Look at it closely as if you have never seen one before, noticing its color, folds, and ridges.
  • Touch and smell: Roll it between your fingers to feel the texture. Hold it under your nose to inhale its scent.
  • Place in the mouth: Put it on your tongue without chewing yet. Notice how it feels in your mouth.
  • Chew slowly: Take one or two deliberate chews. Notice the release of flavor and how the texture changes.
  • Swallow consciously: Feel the intention to swallow, and follow the small piece as it moves down into your body.

Contemplating Interbeing

  • See the origins: Reflect on how the raisin came to be. See the sunshine, the rain, the earth, and the clouds within the fruit.
  • Acknowledge others: Recognize the labor of the farmworkers who picked the grapes, the people who dried and packaged them, and those who brought them to the store.
  • Cultivate gratitude: Realize that without this vast web of life and cooperation, the single raisin would not exist, generating deep thankfulness for the present moment. 
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July has been a seemingly unending series of ninety-degree days, looking forward and back. The countryside is baked hard. For the most part the good citizens of Paradise stay indoors during the day, leaving the tennis and pickleball courts uninhabited. Hydrate … hydrate … hydrate is the mantra.

Our cat, Willow, has met the outdoor smelter with a simple course of action. Don’t go there. Not until the sun goes down, that is. And then stay out most of the night. So from sunup to sundown we find her in her favorite indoor sleeping places, of which there are four in regular rotation. After supper she pads over to the cat portal, assesses what is beyond it, and then takes off.

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I have a new game to add to those being played in Washington D.C. called Where’s Mitch? Since that singular person has been missing for a month, imaginations have run wild. Not everybody thinks he is still among the living, but without proof one way or another all anyone can do is guess.

Below is a gallery of sightings that were reported as suspicious but eventually proved not to be McConnell.

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It all started with my reading a post on Substack on that old cradle-robber, Jerry Lee Lewis. His career toileted when he married his seriously underage cousin.

So times were hard in 1964, and here was Lewis playing a seedy club in Hamburg, Germany with a back-up band assembled at the last minute. The recording of that concert “stacks up well with any hard-line rock album before or since,” says the author of the piece. I hadn’t heard it before but it is vintage Jerry Lee, which means quite a lot.

The album contains only 8 songs and the total running time is only 22 minutes. It takes me longer to soak my feet some mornings. I provide one cut, a kickbutt of a version of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.

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Unhinged

jono55

There are two life lessons that I have to pass along this morning. I have others are others that I could mention, but these two are crucial for me to keep in mind, I think.

#1: There is more kindness in the world than I ever imagined.

#2: There is more cruelty in the world than I ever suspected.

Why have such a somber opening in today’s posting? Mostly because my country is presently exemplifying the latter of the two lessons listed above. At almost every turn and in nearly every aspect of our domestic and foreign policies you find there is both dangerous stupidity and the basest sort of malignity that are operative to a degree which is nearly blinding in its brazenness.

If I didn’t firmly believe what Lesson #1 provides, I don’t know how I would manage the daily dung-stream that rolls down my computer screen and into my eyes. What has been for me the most painful thing of all is realizing how many of my neighbors accept cruelty as a normal way of conducting our nation’s affairs.

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Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

The Dalai Lama

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It’s best that we mortals not try to predict the future and leave such things to the gods. For instance, I can easily imagine back on some sunny day in 1975 that Zeus took a long look at this guy and said:

“I think that when he gets to be an old fart, we could pair him with one of the best female country singers on the planet and they would make two peerless albums of duets.”

And so Robert Plant and Alison Krauss got together in the studio to make the album Raising Sand. Fourteen years later they made Raise the Roof. I really doubt that an ordinary human could have seen that coming.

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Please Read the Letter, by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

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We are all just walking each other home.

Ram Dass

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Robin and I are watching a three-part series about Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of those creatures called docu-dramas, and has quite a cast of commentators, former President Obama being one of them. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is another. Look for it on Netflix.

Just as there is not a day that passes without new and odious revelations about our 47th president, I have never watched or read anything about Mr. Lincoln that did not improve my views on humanity and make me feel better about my membership in the species. We are capable of such great and good things, and there is no shortage of leaders, past and present, to provide us guidance toward a world where justice and kindness prevail.

We may have to look for them, they are often the quieter ones in the back of the room rather than one of those people who are scrambling to get to the microphone.

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Killing the Blues, by Alison Krauss & Robert Plant

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The tedium of balancing the checkbook or reconciling the checking account software over an adult lifetime has been almost stultifying. Every month of every year and the only thing you find to break the monotony is a rare check that you forgot to record . And the bank never makes a mistake. I had almost decided to give it up as a complete waste of energy.

Until this week, when the printed log of my account revealed a photocopy of a withdrawal check signed by a complete stranger, from an account whose number was not at all similar to ours. The check was for five hundred dollars.

When I took the document to the bank, the teller’s pupils dilated and she immediately told me to take a seat, while she notified someone higher up the chain of command . When that esteemed person came over with the paper now firmly in her hand, she took great pains to tell me how an error like this might have occurred. It was obvious that she was embarrassed for the institution and wanted me to know that stuff like this simply didn’t happen at the Bank of Colorado.

The Bank manager and the teller, in my fervid imagination.

I didn’t care. I wanted my five hundred dollars back. Exactly how it had been taken away was of no interest to me and was their issue. But … now I can never think of quitting with doing these boring reconciliations. Bleah.

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Sweet Jane

jono55

In 1988 the Cowboy Junkies brought out an album which was melancholic enough that I adopted it in toto. It was a grand fit for the chaos in my life at the time, and was in constant replay all of that year and the next. The album was called The Trinity Sessions, and was a breakthrough recording for the group.

One cut on the album was their interpretation of the Lou Reed song Sweet Jane, which by now everybody that ever lived has probably heard somewhere. Hypnotic, doleful, haunting. You might think that the song had been just waiting for Margo Timmins’ quiet voice.

Sweet Jane, by Cowboy Junkies

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As America continues to stumble through these grotesque days I know that eventually some idiot is going to say “You know, one day we’ll look back on this and laugh.” At that moment I will raise my ancient fist and smack him alongside the head. I am not ordinarily a violent person, but that would just be too much.

Of course this would almost certainly be instantly followed by my receiving a severe pummeling, but a guy has to do what a guy has to do.

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At an AA meeting this week I happened to mention one of my favorite quotations by Mark Twain.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

Mark Twain

It must have caught their fancy because everyone in the room but Robin reached for their pen and made a note to themselves to look it up. Robin, of course, has heard everything I have in my head several times by now and hardly notices when my lips start flapping, and therefore her hands remained quietly in her lap.

That’s one problem with living with me. I have only a few things to say but that doesn’t stop me from repeating them endlessly. My first wife lasted twenty-five years before she ran screaming down the street one day and never came back. Through some miracle of fortitude Robin has made it to thirty-four years, but I keep my eye on that large suitcase of hers out in the garage just in case I ever find it packed and ready to go at a time when we have no trip planned.

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Cluck gave one of his signature wanderlogues on television this past week, but of the major networks only CBS carried it, while ABC, CNN, and NBC passed. We have come to expect nothing less from CBS, which climbed into bed with Cluck when he raised the edge of the coverlet a trifle and made room for them. It’s one more phase of the sad downslide for a network that once was perhaps the most reliable of them all, certainly during the Walter Cronkite days they stood for something other than a being a gaggle of lackeys.

As an aside, when something like sanity returns to American political life, it would seem a good time for the trustbusters to take a long hard look at recent media mergers. At some point, bigger becomes a real problem, and we’ve got it already.

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Can’t talk about Sweet Jane without bringing in the man who wrote the song, from the live album Rock and Roll Animal.

Two guitarists, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, play a long and famous introduction to Reed’s appearance on stage, and then they dig in hard when he shows up. It’s a one-act play for the ears.

Intro/Sweet Jane, by Lou Reed

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“Nicholas Dale, a 56-year-old helicopter pilot from British Columbia, Canada, died on July 12, 2026, when his K-MAX helicopter crashed into the Silver Jack Reservoir in western Colorado while fighting the Gold Mountain fire. The fatal crash is currently being investigated by the NTSB and the FAA.” 

“Hundreds of local residents, including public servants and first responders in Montrose County, lined U.S. Highway 50 to honor Dale and pay tribute to his ultimate sacrifice. His remains were recovered by the Montrose County Sheriff’s Office dive team shortly after the aircraft went down.“

Various news sources

Our local wildfires have claimed one more firefighter. The reservoir cited above is only an hour’s drive from us. We’ve visited it several times. This brings the sad total of lives lost in this fire season in Paradise to four.

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Bridges

jono55

There is one positive thing about being surrounded by wildfires in that there are some of the prettiest sunrises and sunsets as the color red comes to the fore in both of them. We’ve had about two weeks now of poor air quality due to smoke. Even the teensy version of asthma that I have has been provoked by it.

Robin and I cancelled on walking with Indivisible in the local parade on the 4th of July. We decided that if we were going to be taking a chance on sunstroke or smoke inhalation or both, ’twas time to bow out. Fair weather rebels, we.

The smoke is heavy enough that you can begin to see a faint haze between you and any object more than twenty feet away. Our friends on oxygen are staying home, eating what’s left in the pantry before they venture to the grocery store. We volunteer to run those errands but they are stubborn folk and insist on doing it themselves.

Just to reassure, Robin and I are in no danger. None of the fires are close enough or in the right location to threaten Montrose.

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The image of the masked “patriots” on the bus tells a story, doesn’t it? A young black woman surrounded by a gaggle of MOLC (Men Of Little Courage) on public transportation.

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The men, of course, are on their way to a white nationalist demonstration, where they will do their best to get that woman to her proper place in the back of the bus once again. These cowardly dipsticks have nowhere to swim but upstream, although it seems that they haven’t the wit to realize it.

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The Way It Is, by Bruce Hornsby and the Range

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The header image today is of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell entitled the The Problem We All Live With. It portrays a six year-old girl named Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by federal marshals in 1960. She was, all by her small self, integrating a New Orleans school.

My imagination falls short each time I hear this story. The courage of that family, to send their child through the hate-filled mob each day. Who has courage like that?

The mob that came together to threaten and hurl imprecations at a six year-old girl. What is wrong with people who could do that to a child?

Here’s a video with some of Ruby’s story.

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Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Simon and Garfunkel

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Today’s button image is worn by a group of citizens who attend and monitor the Montrose City Council meetings. At present the council is 60% MAGA … ’nuff said?

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Fire In The Hole

jono55

This past week we took a tour of the Old Hundred Mine, located near Silverton CO. At $29 per person, it was by far the most expensive such tour we’d ever encountered. By a factor of at least two. But I think it was worth it. First we were loaded into tram cars and then we were whistled straight into a mountain for three miles, in nearly complete darkness.

When we reached the turning around point, the tram stopped and we disembarked and gathered around the leader/spokesperson. We learned about the history of mining drills and drilling, and the demonstrations of those implements were dramatic and deafening. Next he covered how miners communicated through visual signals, since the environment was often a very noisy one. We also heard about ore handling, the history of lighting in mines, and some differences between hard rock mining and coal mining.

What made this all more meaningful was that this man was a lifelong resident of Silverton, and had worked for two decades at the same job he was telling us about, with its rewards and dangers. The takeaway impressions of our little group were almost unanimous. We were:

  1. fascinated by the information he provided
  2. repelled by some of the tragic stories of injury and death that he shared, of people he had known personally
  3. appreciative of the humor woven throughout his presentation
  4. absolutely grateful that we had never been put into a situation where working as a miner was asked of us, because we would have bolted immediately

One sidebar. At one place outside the mine if you looked up you could see the remains of the famous Old Hundred Boarding House very near the top of the mountain. Since back in the day the trip up to that level was by mule and was both slow and hazardous, a boarding house was built at the top. It was bolted to the mountain itself, and had a front deck that was pretty dramatic.

While trying to sleep in a building that had to be fastened to a mountain to keep it from sliding off into the abyss would have likely been impossible for an acrophobic like myself, I can easily recognize that it saved hours and hours of travel time to and from the ground thousands of feet below. Here’s a small boarding house gallery to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

So that $29 ticket price … pretty high but worth it for the realistic scenes and the colorful word painting by our tour guide.

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My personal journey in non-violence greatly intensified the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Like so many of us I was staggered by that event, going from disbelief to grief to anger and back to disbelief countless times in the succeeding hours and days. We know now that he was far from a perfect man, but at the time he and his wife represented courage and possibility and brought out the vision of a shining America of which we could be proud. So how could a single bullet take all of that away?

That’s the problem with death. There is no reprieve, no walking it back. No second chances or do-overs. In those golden but bloody years when Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and Bobby Kennedy walked the earth and were then murdered my revulsion at political violence only strengthened. It is why even though Cluck is the loathsome creature that he is and even though he is harming our country almost with every in-breath and out-breath, I don’t want some yahoo with a rifle to make him a tawdry martyr.

Make no mistake, I want him gone, and if given the opportunity I would happily volunteer to drive the van carrying him to prison, but if humans are going to make lasting progress, violence in all spheres needs to be dialed back to as close to zero as we can get it.

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In 1976 Tom Waits was becoming the kind of alcoholic that I had hoped to become when I grew up. One that wandered smoky bars and midnight avenues in the company of colorful characters. An artist sacrificing his body to follow his muse and then perishing while mourners filled all the barstools but the one held empty in his honor.

Only problem was that while I was capable of bending my elbow with the best (or worst) of them I wasn’t an artist. I was just another doofus who didn’t know when to stop and then found that he couldn’t.

Waits came up with a new album that year, Small Change, and this was the song that led it off.

Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), by Tom Waits

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Saturday evening the smoke blew in, coming from southwest Colorado and southeastern Utah. Enough to irritate the eyes, trigger a cough of two. The aroma of a campfire was everywhere.

On the map, Montrose would be located just south of Delta.

On last Saturday three firefighters lost their lives near the Colorado-Utah border. A tragic loss. There are times when fires are burning nearer to us that I see members of firefighting crews in town, usually shopping for groceries or grabbing coffees at a Starbuck’s. They are all young and fit and there is such an obvious camaraderie present it is a joy to watch.

They are one more bunch of people in uniforms that keep us safe by doing work that is dangerous and they know it but they still go out there. Such courage is a rare commodity, something never to be wasted.

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Song to the Siren, by Nobody’s Wolf Child

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In Defense Of Odd Ducks

jono55

I started out the day reading one of those NYTimes obituaries called “Overlooked No More,” where the subject died long ago, this time in 1986. This one was about of one of the great loners of life, a man named Robbie Basho. Guitar player, singer, lifelong celibate, spiritual seeker forever on the road.

The piece made him sound desperately lonely. Living life on the margins and having to be supported by his father well into adulthood, making music that rather deliberately goes its own idiosyncratic way, it would be tempting to give him a diagnosis of mental illness of some sort. To try to find some DSM shoebox to put him in.

There was a book published back in the sixties written by Thomas Szasz called “The Myth of Mental Illness” which had a lasting effect on my thinking about the labeling that we do today, and have always done, of those whose minds spend less time in the mainstream than our own. It helps to remember than until 1973, psychiatry officially defined homosexuality as a mental illness.

DSM-IV accepts that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of mental disorder. This concept, like many others in medicine and science, lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations. Because mental disorders are a heterogenous category of disorders, no single definition captures the entire range of conditions that are currently included in this term. 

Psychiatric Times

The obituary made it sound as if his music might be hard to find, but Apple Music offers quite a lot of it to us. The tenor vocals are not your everyday stuff, sounding like something from another age, certainly another culture. Many resemble medieval ballads. The instrumentals were the most interesting to me, with their novel tunings and rhythms. I listened to many of those cuts in today’s early hours, and there were those that were haunting, like the one that follows.

Rocky Mountain Raga, by Robbie Basho

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Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.

Khalil Gibran

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Here in Paradise we are one mile closer to the sun than those that live at sea level. You’d think that being 93,000,000 miles away from that precious star of ours a single mile wouldn’t make a difference, but at least in my imagination it does. At midday when the temperature is in the 90s on a cloudless afternoon the sun is merciless. Your skin can turn a lovely shade of red much quicker up here, making sunscreens a vital need.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face old Sol all day long. Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their advertisement to the world come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face Ol’ Sol all day long.

Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their gateway come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

This June it has been warm enough to set records many times. In the middle of the day there is no one out and about in our little housing development. We are all hunkered behind drawn drapes and waiting for the afternoon shadows to lengthen and provide a protective cover. When I lived in Buffalo NY, a cloudy sky was the norm, and whenever the sun broke through it was reason for celebration. Not so much here in Paradise.

So far this year, we’ve had 2.6 inches of rain here in Montrose, which is less than half of normal. Even that normal amount of rain produces what is termed a semi-arid climate. At the 50% level, we are that much closer to being a Mojave Desert suburb. Local municipal water costs are high enough that only the more affluent have those lush green lawns that are so (foolishly?) admired. Everyone else’s yards are half-brown, the grass stressed and tired, hanging in there and waiting for the coolness of Fall.

But one saving grace of living in Paradise is that we have only to take an hour’s drive to the north, south, or west to escape the furnace. A visit to Silverton at 9,000 feet takes away nearly ten to twenty degrees from those record temperatures. Like a splash of cool water.

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Cool Water, by Fleetwood Mac

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What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Going to spend Thursday night in a rental cabin with the Hurleys. The cabin is small, with no electricity, running water only in summer, and limited cooking facilities. It’s a 50th birthday for Amy. When the children are AARP material it becomes even more difficult to maintain those mental myths of being middle-aged.

The cabin is located along the road to Silverton, and back far enough in the woods that it is not visible from the highway. Hiking is possible, a stream runs right by the place, and there is a grand view from the wooden deck. (Robin and I scoped it out a couple of weeks ago). Looks like fun to me.

I am in charge of cooking supper on Thursday, so of course I initially overthought the whole thing and brought myself to the fingernail-chewing point as a result. The menu that has evolved is almost bulletproof, needs only primitive help from the primitive gas stove and oven, and can be kept warm for hours if need be. So I am very near being relaxed and may even enjoy myself.

I do have a clear memory of one camping episode where I was responsible for the supper and had prepared a white chili ahead of time. I thought that, too, was a bulletproof arrangement. Just before serving it to our fellow campers I managed to dump the whole kettle-full onto the ground, where it mixed with the forest duff at the campsite. You might want to make a note of this, but combining beaucoup dirt and a few cups of pine needles with a white chili makes for quite an unattractive entrée. I scooped the mess up, tossed it into the trash, and off we went to a nearby town for pizza.

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Plus ça change …

jono55

It was a different time but everything is still the same. The novel and the film made from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath have been almost sacred documents for me. I don’t remember the moment when I first saw the movie but it made an impression that I never got over. Maybe I was looking through the slats of my crib when I saw it, but who cares anyway? There is so much in it, so many lessons to learn. The acting is superb, the cinematography an excellent black and white.

Toward the end of the story there is a speech for the ages, and Henry Fonda does it full justice. Riveting.

And what parts of that speech, filmed in 1940, do not apply today? Hunger, violence against working people, homelessness, poverty, greedy politicians, police brutality … all set in a country beset by drought and near-famine.

We don’t have a Dust Bowl to point to, but we do have an overheated planet on our hands, and a loooong-lasting drought here in the West. We have the thugs of ICE sent out by our own President to beat us up, kidnap us, and kill us. We have bankers, politicians, and plutocrats to suck up the money that could save tens of thousands of lives. We have an epidemic of homelessness, one that is even more durable than that of the refugees in Steinbeck’s story.

A French man coined a phrase in 1849 that goes something like this (actually, it goes exactly like this): Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . Translation: The more things change, the more they are the same.

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Hold On, by Tom Waits

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Here’s a few stills from the movie Grapes of Wrath. Just the act of selecting them gets me stirred up and means I’ll have to watch the movie again soon.

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In general, Americans are not a people who plan long-term. At least our political leaders don’t. It is rare for them to look beyond the next election cycle. While this is an understandable thing for selfish men and women of limited wit to do, it is not good for the big business that is the US. Because it means that we are forever using Band-aids to cover the leaks in the dike, rather than getting a good stonemason out there to effect a more durable fix. Whiplash, carom, ping-pong and ricochet are words that could describe our domestic policies and programs way too often.

I long to see grownups in office. I believe that there are more of them out there, but perhaps that is too much to ask. Perhaps talented adults look at the gigantic squalling daycare that is Congress and say “Not me, buddy, no way am I going in there. Spending (two, four, six) years getting nothing done but changing their diapers is not the life for me.”

Or … who knows? Using the celestial imagery that I grew up with, there are way too many days when it looks to me that Satan is in charge while God has tired of us and has pulled back for a well-deserved rest from our unceasing babble.

We’re on our own, folks, and I wonder if we’re up to it. But hey, it’s time for me to make a new sign and carry it down to the public square. There is always fun to be had in pissing off the yahoo contingent in town.

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There’s A Bright Side Somewhere, by Ry Cooder

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This is a marvelous little tale about a ballet production in Turkey. The kind of accidental happening that warms the heart. Title of the Piece: In Its Tragic Finale, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Is Interrupted by a Cat. We can all use a good cat story once in a while, and this one fills that bill nicely.

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Looking For The Heart of Saturday Night, by Tom Waits

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And now, in the slightly creepy department, a recounting of my latest adventure in AI.

In the early morning hours of Thursday I had posed a question to ChatGPT, and had received a helpful answer. The interesting thing is that at one point the text read: “there are many choices but what I would recommend in your situation is …”

Notice that pronoun? It said “I”.

I immediately shut down the computer. I have no idea who “I” is, and I was not in a mood to receive visitors. Then, as I stared at the empty screen I realized that I had no way of knowing whether the machine was still looking at and listening to me. My confidence in the On/Off switch has been shaken.

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Taking It Slow

jono55

When an alcoholic walks in out of the swamp that is addiction and is looking for a chance at a new life, one of the first things they are told is that they must stop drinking. That without taking that all-important step nothing else they do will matter. The addict looks down the road at the rest of their life and groans, “Never? Forever?” And that’s when some very wise advice comes wafting in through the haze of a hangover: “Don’t worry about forever … stay sober just for today.” Break obstacles down into small enough chunks and now they begin to look … possible.

That’s the advice we can give ourselves when we wake up each morning and look out at our country’s plight. “But there’s so much wrong … how will it ever be made right.” The answer is that we don’t have to do it all at that moment, we only need to do what we can and then rest, even if briefly, gathering our strength for the next challenge. But in this particular present moment, we just need to do the next right thing. All of those “next right things” done by all those other outraged souls will add up to the change we want.

I’ve decided that Robert Reich must be writing even while he is eating and using the bathroom. There is no other way he could continue to turn out the volume of material that he does. His Sunday essay on Substack: The Coming Revival of America, was one of his best yet. The thesis? That America had been heading in several wrong directions for a good long while before the Clown King came along, and that we the people needed more than a gentle wake-up call to see that.

The clarity of Reich’s opinion makes one want to hit their own forehead with an open hand and cry Yes, yes, of course you’re right! How could I have missed that? One possible answer is that as long as we weren’t the victim, directly, perhaps we didn’t care as much as we should have.

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

He does not underplay the dangers and the national trauma that beset us daily. We can still be rounded up and imprisoned without cause by a masked army of thugs, our government has been subverted and may well be used against us even further. These realities may not vanish overnight but Cluck has definitely turned over the rock and shown us where things need to be fixed.

Maybe we needed this horrific wakeup call in order to get back on the road we should have been on. We needed to see how fragile the institutions of self-government are in order to know why we must strengthen them. We needed to be reminded of what America is all about — what it should be about — in order to revive it — and reclaim it, for and by the people.

Robert Reich, Substack

Good man, Reich. At four feet eleven inches he stands taller than the thousands of sycophants and toadies who have either caused or enabled our present sea of misfortunes.

BTW. Reading this piece made me realize that it is not really this country that I love. What I love is this country’s ideals. I am not even certain, after the past several years, what this country is today. Is it still a democracy? Or is it a fascist fever dream? Or is it only the playpen of the unimaginably rich? Or is it something so malleable that at any given moment it is what the people who care most want it to be?

For the past couple of decades or so, it was the MAGA-leaning crowd that were excited, who suited up and showed up with their wrecking bars and their disdain for almost everything that people like me thought was good about America. They walked right in and took the prize and immediately began tearing it apart in order to reassemble it in their own special way. A way involving white supremacy, cruelty, and bigotry. They covered the floor of their birdcages with copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

But we are awake now. WE being a beast that roars and remembers. WE can see clearly what we’ve lost, what we’ve given away to these charlatans and mountebanks. WE are the ones who helped beat back tyranny in WWII. WE are the ones who marched on Selma, who were beaten and hosed and arrested by thugs in uniforms and thrown into jails. WE are the citizens of Minneapolis who took care of one another when ICE came with their masks and guns and lawlessness. WE read those two precious documents that constitute a the libretto of an opera of freedom that works when enough of us sing it together.

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Blowin’ In The Wind, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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We were promised a windy day on Tuesday, and we got one. We were also promised a warm one. Paradise is dry as tinder and a space where one spark could do much damage. At times like this we don’t need human error to produce a fire. Last year there were half a dozen fires started here on the Western Slope in a single night of lightning strikes, including the one that did its work in Black Canyon National Park.

I recall conditions like this several years ago, when Robin and I were in Santa Fe during a prolonged dry spell and it had been made illegal in that city to smoke outdoors. Not just campers out there in the boonies, everybody.

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Where Have All The Flowers Gone, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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Okay. I wasn’t going to mention this thing, but really, I have to. This is the Corvette ZR1X. It is a hybrid. Believe it or not, at almost a quarter of a million dollars as its sticker price it is by far the cheapest entry in the supercar category of automobiles.

Here are the numbers.

  • Zero to sixty mph = 1.7 seconds (at 1.9 seconds my head would snap off and roll about the cockpit, leaving my torso with some hard choices)
  • Top speed = 233 mph (I have never had a reflex anywhere in my entire body that was quick enough to cope with this)
  • Horsepower = 1250 (my Subaru has 182 of these)
  • Price = starts at $207,000 (A Maserati or a Ferrari in this category would cost several times as much, so don’t complain)
  • Gas mileage = completely irrelevant to buyers
  • Usefulness in hauling groceries = nil
  • Coolness factor just sitting there on the asphalt = killer to dudes of a certain age

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Robin and I awarded ourselves an all-expense paid trip to the local Dairy Queen this week, and as we were spooning frozen delights into our mouths I happened to notice a couple of images on the wall. One was an abbreviated history of Dairy Queen itself, and the other of the beverage chain Orange Julius.

I thus learned that the beverage Orange Julius got its name from the fact that in 1926 “Julius Freed and his partner Bill Hamlin opened an orange juice stand in Los Angeles.” Apparently Bill didn’t feel the need to have his name included. Either that or Julius was just plain evil.

More interesting were the two items listed below.

1938: Americans discover McCullough’s new, softer and tastier kind of ice cream called “soft serve.”

1940: “The Cone With The Curl On Top” lights up for the first time in Joliet, Illinois.

Why interesting to me? Because if that image were more complete, there would be an entry right in the middle that read like this.

1939: Jon Flom born in Faribault MN, a man destined to be one of DQ’s most devoted and notorious customers

End of story.

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The accident of the timing of my birth meant that I have been privileged to be surrounded by some of the best music ever written, pop and otherwise, as I grew up and grew older. The big bands were still playing concerts in Minneapolis when I was a teenager, even as rock and the folk revival took the stage from them in the sixties. R&B was everywhere stitched into that rich fabric, and the blues … under it all and above it all.

I don’t really claim a favorite genre, as all of them have meant something different and important to me. But I have to admit that the one that grabs at my heart each time one of its songs comes on the air is folk music. It’s a big tent, and nobody ever did it better, IMHO, than Peter, Paul and Mary.

500 Miles, by Peter, Paul and Mary

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Next!

jono55

I was reading yet another news item about the ongoing furor over bathroom safety for women when a neuron way back there … probably in a dusty corner of the hippocampus … woke up and made a contribution.

When the Minnesota Twins came to town, they did so at the new stadium in Bloomington, which quickly became noted for having inadequate bathroom facilities for women. There was always a continuous line of patrons stretching from the bathroom itself, out the facility door, and down the corridor. Women might miss entire innings or multiples of the same before their needs could be met due to this situation.

When that stadium was eventually torn down the mistake was at least partially rectified in its replacement. But while the old structure was still there, my brother and I took our father to a game. I was taking advantage of the seventh-inning stretch when I went to ease the pressure that drinking a couple of cups of beer had produced.

I was standing at one of a line of perhaps a dozen urinals attending to matters when a young woman came through the door, walked past that line of twelve men who now were leaning dangerously forward and trying their best to become invisible, and entered one of the stalls with a competent door on it. A minute or two later she came out and without a word left the room.

Now this was when I was still at a Neanderthal stage where women’s issues were concerned, but as she passed the line, I thought to myself – Brava! You go, girl! Such chutzpah! Problem solved!

As I washed up, I felt privileged to have been present at that little blow struck for equality.

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When Robin and I were living in Yankton, South Dakota, which is a smallish town of about 15,000 souls, we were fortunate enough to see the musical group Brulé, a Native American band of musicians. They played several times at local summer celebrations, and also put on wonderful Christmas concerts.

The origin story of the group is really interesting, in that its founder Paul LaRoche grew up in a southern Minnesota town as an adopted son of a farm family. When his parents were asked about where he came from, they said, “Well, he’s darker skinned because he’s Canadian.” Once his parents had both passed away, Paul was going through their papers, trying to put things in order, and discovered that he was not Canadian at all, but Lakota, and that he’d been born on the Brule Reservation in western South Dakota.

Paul then went out to the reservation town of Brule, South Dakota, where he found that he had living relatives. It wasn’t long before he moved his family there. He had been a rock musician up until this point, but now he began to incorporate Native American themes and rhythms into his music, and thus the group Brulé was born.

Robin and I became fans long ago, and I’ve chosen this video to exemplify the kind of music that they played, which often incorporated native dancers and could be quite thrilling. Paul plays keyboard, and two of Paul’s children are in the video as well, Nicole on flute and Shane on guitar. The drummer with the group in this video is Moses Brings Plenty, who has since made acting a career. Recently he was seen on Netflix in the two-part series, “Sitting Bull,” playing the title role.

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There are a few of the Tesla cybertrucks here in Paradise, perhaps three or four. Both Robin and I find them ridiculous looking and actually offensive to the eye. Like finding an automotive turd at the curb. So when I came across a piece on Substack I was interested enough to read it.

Most of the piece was describing the chicanery Elon Musk has been guilty of in trying to mask the failure of the truck in terms of sales, but it was the line below that made me chuckle. Robin and I have always wondered who buys this ugly thing, and now we have some clues.

Considering its only target market is sci-fi-illiterate, emasculated, deeply sexually frustrated, doomsday-prepping divorced dads, its sales have been utterly woeful.

Substack

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You may have looked at the very cool header photograph (which is not my own) and thought … WTF … this guy probably never got on a skateboard in his entire life … and you’d be right. And I am not trying to do some underhanded cultural appropriation, either. But there was an article in the June 1 issue of the Times on a skateboarding location in London that was so interesting that I had to share it. It’s about an area called the “undercroft” which is a sort of skaters Mecca, inviting pilgrims from around the world.

It’s of no matter that I haven’t been on a board and never will be. If I were to start out now I am certain it would bring on the dreaded Humpty Dumpty Syndrome, where no one could put me together again. But I possess a very special facility. I can daydream blissfully about a past that I never had.

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Cool Water

jono55

It’s one a.m. and the night air still carries some of the day’s warmth with it. There is enough of a breeze that the branches of the ash tree in the back yard are doing their dipping and bowing thing, which has awakened the wind chime from a three-day slumber. All is well out there.

So much branch activity is also triggering my motion detector alarm continuously, so I turned it off for the rest of the night. This means of course that we are now vulnerable to footpads, pillagers, cutpurses, and bandits of all stripes. Such is my faith in this bit of technology’s ability to scare off any sort of intruders that I wonder if I’ll be able to go back to sleep, knowing that the proverbial door is open.

You scoff? A simple blinking red light is no barrier to a resourceful highwayman or 700 pound Siberian tiger, you say? I beg to differ. In the twelve years we’ve lived here, in spite of all the things out there that go bump in the night, we’ve never once been ransacked or ravished.

No, friend, when you invest $29.95 in a security system you expect and get the best.

.

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My rec center playlist served up a song I hadn’t heard in the longest time, Change, by Big Thief. When I use such lists during exercise I am never quite certain that what I remember hearing is accurate, being short of oxygen and all that. But these were pretty thoughtful lyrics and they’ve stayed with me. The chorus reminds me of a theme that shows up often in films and literature, which is that if we could live forever, we would face an unending series of losses as all those we knew and met and loved would die while we persisted. Forever.

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?

I think in such a situation I believe that I might take the same defensive position that men often do in wartime when on the front lines … not become attached to the new guys because you know that many of them were destined not to make it. Altogether I think that it would be too sad, too lonely a place to be.

Can I talk about vampires for a moment? Anne Rice wrote some of what might be the most intelligent stories about them in her series of books, and there are moments in those narratives when exactly these same thoughts are expressed. The loneliness of never dying, of having retained the ability to care while knowing you will forever be the survivor, and that each of your beloveds will eventually be taken from you.

Nope, don’t think I’d like it very much. Not at all. The present cosmic arrangement has quite a few unknowns in it, and a glitch or two besides, but all in all it seems preferable to me.

Change, by Big Thief

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As we stumble through the present fetid morass that is our public life toward the day when the reins of government are wrenched from the hands of the fascists, it might be helpful to give thought to what a handful of others have thought about power. We could start with that maxim of Lord Acton’s: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.” Sounds good enough, and might help to explain the tumor that is Cluckism and its allies.

But Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, flips that on its head when he says: “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” I like this latter explanation better. For me, that is where the light goes on in the cranium.

But, anyway, here’s a smattering of other people’s thought on the matter.

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. ”
― Robert Ingersoll

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“They joined hands.
So the world ended.
And the next one began.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

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Here’s a story for you. The classic country-western song Cool Water was written as a poem by Bob Nolan in 1936, when he was still in high school. He went on to form the musical group Sons of the Pioneers, where he put music to the poem and recorded it in 1941. For me, the tune has always been around, because as soon as I was old enough to appreciate music, Cool Water was there.

While it tells the story of a parched man traveling a wasteland tormented by mirages and talking to his mule, it could also be taken as a metaphor for a traveler seeking truth and enlightenment in a world seemingly filled with dishonesty. Either way, hope is offered to the desperate.

Cool Water, by the Sons of the Pioneers

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Whooo? Me? Cubist?

jono55

I had the good fortune this past week to attend a lecture/presentation by a polymath. Yes, a polymath, and I know what I’m talking about because I just looked up the word and now I am allowed to call myself an expert.*

A polymath is a person who knows a lot about a lot of subjects. If your friend is not only a brilliant physics student but has also published a poetry collection and won prizes at political debates, you can describe her as a polymath.

Vocabulary.com

Robin and I had been invited to a talk about small owls in Colorado by our friends, the Evanses. The local chapter of the Audubon Society was sponsoring the evening’s program. The speaker, Scott Rashid, was a slender middle-aged man in a baseball-style cap, plaid shirt, and the sort of pants one wears when camping or hiking. He seemed eager to get started, so was handed the microphone and a remote control, and off he went.

What followed might have been the single best Powerpoint I’ve seen, and I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, mostly of the stunningly boring kind, each image stuffed beyond measure with more information than one human being should ever have to bear. This presentation was smoothly constructed and filled with imaginatively arranged images that appeared without fail due to his mastery of the remote control. His knowledge of the four owl species that collectively made up his topic seemed encyclopedic to this rank amateur. I don’t believe he took a breath during the entire hour, keeping oxygenated somehow by absorbing gas through his skin.

Why do I call him a polymath?

  • Great fund of knowledge of his subject and related birds
  • Has created an organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured and orphaned birds (CARRI)
  • Author of several books
  • Skilled wildlife photographer
  • And the killer is this – he is a gifted artist who paints scenes which combine principles of cubism and wildlife painting

Yep, you heard me, cubism. And the paintings are beautiful, like nothing I’ve even seen, combining several views of the same bird, for instance, in a single portrait. Like this one of the northern pygmy owl.

This art is for sale in several forms, and the proceeds help to support his work.

You might be interested in a short video about Rashid and need a link to his website, so here it is. Once there, take a look at his art work. It is extraordinary.

*When I was in pediatric residency training, the working definition of an “expert” was: an SOB from out of town with slides.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Heartless Bastards play Gates of Dawn for your listening and dancing pleasure. Cranking the volume is allowed.


(As an aside, is this the best name for a rock band or what? Seriously!)

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Water warm as blood
Drips along the paddle shaft
Ducklings hide in reeds

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This next weekend Robin and I are driving down to Santa Fe for the weekend. The occasion is our 34th wedding anniversary. It’s the second marriage for both of us.

During the years immediately after our divorces, we both sought counseling at times. The counselor who Robin was seeing wasn’t sure about her re-marrying relatively soon after going through such a traumatic period, and expressed the view that she and I getting together was probably only a “transitional relationship.” Meaning that once she came to her senses and took a good long look at me she would toss an “Adios” back over her shoulder as she moved on to the real thing.

Well, the “transition” will be starting on its 35th year next Sunday, so either he was wrong or Robin is really slow at making up her mind. Either way, I am a clear winner.

(Here we are on that excellent day in 1992. I can hear you thinking and you are quite right … I definitely married out of my league.)

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We’ve visited Santa Fe several times before, and have enjoyed ourselves each time. For us, the town has such a pleasing vibe. Art galleries and museums galore, the Santa Fe Opera, the historic plaza, the presence of adobe buildings everywhere you look. Good restaurants, great food.

There is also the important connection with Los Alamos during the years when the Manhattan Project was operating. The small but busy office that managed access to Los Alamos and everything that was going on up there was at 109 East Palace, in Santa Fe. Before you took that rough mountain road and drove 33 miles to your new home you had to walk through that doorway. There is a bronze plaque that reads:

109 EAST PALACE
1943 SANTA FE OFFICE 1963
LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
All the men and women who made the first atomic
bomb passed through this portal to their secret
mission at Los Alamos. Their creation in 27 months
of the weapons that ended World War II was one of
the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

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Santa Fe, by Tough Country

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True Or False: The Sky Is Falling

jono55

It has become increasingly hard to decide whether the sky is falling or not. The bewailings of my newsfeed plus the profuse clamor in my messaging app makes it appear as if the world is composed of mostly people of the Henny Penny variety. You remember Henny Penny … right? Well, for those who don’t or who have never heard the classic European folk tale, it goes like this:

The inciting incident: Henny Penny is hit on the head by a falling acorn and panics, believing the sky is falling. 

The journey: She sets off to tell the king, gathering other farm animals (Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Lucy, Turkey Lurky) who join her quest. 

The trick: They meet Foxy Locky, who offers to show them a shortcut to the king’s palace. 

The ending: The group follows the fox into his den, where they are never seen again, and the king never hears their warning. 

There it is, simple and plain and perfectly appropriate to our times. Our problem is not a lack of warnings, it is the din of their profusion.

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Memphis In The Meantime, by John Hiatt

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It is something very close to Summer here in Paradise. Once this past winter’s not-very-hard grip on our lives had relaxed we have been seeing record warm temperatures. This week everything is in the 80s, and it is only May. Oh well …

Tomorrow’s weather forecast is: windy, hot, and dry. There is a possibility of “dry thunderstorms” as well. This is not a term that I have heard before. Is it possible that the weathermen and weatherwomen of the world have become totally bored saying the same old stuff from day to day and so they get together to coin new words and phrases to make their lives more tolerable?

When I was a lad we did just fine with the words fair, rain, windy, cold, and stormy. There were no polar vortices or dry thunderstorms or bomb cyclones back then, nossir. We made do with the simple terminology that we had and were glad to have it. My mother never sent me off to elementary school with the words “Now put your mittens in your pockets and wear those overshoes like I told you, there is a chance of thundersnow this afternoon and you want to be ready for it.”

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It’s nearly two a.m. and I have the back door open to let in some cool night air. There is a great horned owl out there in the dark who is excited about something and is letting us know about it. Some of my favorite creatures, owls. Endlessly interesting. Cruising silently in the blackness only to drop down on some unlucky small critter who never knew what hit it. Those eerie calls … the variety of habitats they occupy … just have a look at this gallery.

From upper left they are great gray owl, barn owl, boreal owl, great horned owl, and snowy owl. If I could wish for one of their attributes it would be the ability to turn my head around nearly 180 degrees to check out what’s behind me. It would be an immense help while driving my car, for one thing. And just think if you were going to try to sneak up on me from behind to cover my eyes and say “Guess who?” and suddenly there I was staring you right in the face. Unnerving, eh?

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Lipstick Sunset, by John Hiatt

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That little blue dot button over there in the sidebar may need an explanation. In the 2024 election year Democrats in the Omaha area came up with this simple image that says volumes. They were surrounded by Republicans and the idea that they were a blue oasis in a highly red district caught on.

I like the idea enough to have stolen it from the Nebraskans to apply it to our own situation here in Paradise. Two-thirds of the votes cast here in Montrose County were for a criminal for president in 2024. Two thirds. My, my, my.

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Trail Legs

jono55

Sooo … there is this genre of videos on YouTube that go like this: “If you are a senior and you do these ten exercises pretty much everything will be just great. You will look better, run faster, be unbelievably attractive to the opposite sex, and Army recruiters may mistake you for an 18 year-old.”

Or it may be five exercises, or something that requires a kettlebell or learning how to do Pilates on the wall. But all of them agree – if you don’t do something starting right now you might as well pick out your casket tomorrow and save your relatives the trouble of doing so later on.

There was one Asian gentleman who absolutely swore that if I do 50 of these and 50 of those and 50 … at this point I switched away from the guy because if there is one thing that is certain in this otherwise uncertain world it is that I will never follow any regimen that requires that I do 50 of anything.

One video did catch my eye, and I might actually follow up on it. It is called the medicine ball slam.

While there may be many excellent physiological results, like core strengthening and improved flexibility, what I can see immediately is how good it will be for the days when the world seems composed of two parts cowflop and one part thistles. Slamming that thing into the earth or the driveway … oh baby … I can already feel my spirit rising just thinking about it, tension and aggression slipping off my shoulders like raindrops on a tin roof.

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Tracy Chapman is a charter member of the good part of the human race, one of those rare people out there whose lives illuminate and support our own. Since her first album in 1988 that won all the prizes, she has created a body of work that is remarkable for its insistence on the value of each and every one of us, telling stories and raising consciousness all along her way.

This first clip is from 2015, with Chapman performing Stand By Me on late night television with a respectful David Letterman strewing compliments in her path.

The next video is from 1988, with the 24 year-old Chapman showing what all the fuss was about. Timeless and heartfelt and beautiful.

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We have now had a chance to see what happens when the Supreme Court of the land becomes completely corrupt and subservient to external power. Honor, rectitude, and a little thing called justice fly out the window and are nowhere to be found in their decisions. Except for the opinions of the minority, who came to the court believing in its role and obligations and have not lost their way.

Since most of the members of this august body have decided not to police themselves, to have even the teensiest idea of what good behavior might be, reforming the Court should be one of the first tasks of the post-Cluck era. As a first step, let’s get rid of those lifetime appointments. They are invitations to the Court becoming the festering mess we have today. Ten years … twenty years … some number that accepts the possibility that we might have made serious errors in the original selections.

Why saddle our republic with a Roberts or a Thomas or an Alito for generations? If we can’t completely stop their grift, let them take their motor homes and the stink of their decisions and ride off into an ignominious sunset. At the very least it would give us a chance to recover between bad apples.

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Fawn walks past our home
No comprehension of the
pleasure it provides

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On May first Robin and I joined in a small demonstration of “Workers over oligarchs.” Perfect day for signs and placards except for a sometimes vigorous breeze. At one one a driver pulled over and drove slowly past us shouting angrily: “Fuck You … Fuck You … Fuck You.”

Little he knew the satisfaction that it gave us knowing that our little signs were ruining his afternoon?

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Took our first hike on the burned-over area at the Black Canyon on Saturday. Perfect day for it. Interesting to be able to see so far ahead, because before the fire the Gambel oaks would have blocked our view. in most places. They were not tall plants, mostly under ten feet high, but quite bushy and leafy.

We brought our lunch with us and enjoyed a picnic at the Pulpit Rock overlook. Most people are familiar with the phrase “getting one’s sea legs,” where a person slowly becomes accustomed to the pitching and rolling of a marine vessel. There is something analogous in hiking, called “trail legs.” In this case it is the irregularity of the trail surfaces, the changing angles and composition of the earth beneath your feet. During the cold weather months most of our walking is on the smoother surfaces of the treadmills at the rec center or the trail systems of the city parks.

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The Orcs Of Congress

jono55

A preface to this post. One of my personal mythic/reality/dreaming/challenging places is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. One puts a canoe in the water, steps into it and away from the land, and all is changed. You are on your own, responsible for your own life in a way that is restorative to the worn and tattered thing that urban living makes of your soul. If something breaks … there is no one to fix it but you. I have been lucky enough to visit this beautiful area more than thirty times. It is as close as I have ever gotten to the numinous.

So I am definitely taking this next affront personally. The Republicans just voted to overturn a ban on mining near the Boundary Waters. It’s another one of those billionaires versus the public good scenarios. This time it’s a Chilean conglomerate whose operation would threaten this area, whose beauty I frequently exploit to brighten the pages of this often colorless and meandering blog.

So this is a kind of particular mine that is a copper sulfide mine, and what happens is copper sulfur rock is brought up to the surface, hundreds and hundreds of millions of tons of it. And when sulfur is exposed to air and oxygen – oxygen and water, which we have a lot of in northern Minnesota, it basically turns into sulfuric acid, and then it flows into the watershed. This mine is literally a mile or so from water that drains directly into the Boundary Waters and then into Voyageurs National Park.

NPR All Things Considered: Newly approved mining in Minnesota may threaten waterways of a beloved nature preserve

I will repeat a challenge here that I made more than a year ago. When was the last time anyone heard or read about a mining company who did not damage the environment no matter what they might have said in order to be permitted to do their work? Basically it is a sad but oft repeated story, trite in its details. Rape and run. Do the damage and then let the people try to get satisfaction in order to repair the harm.

This next paragraph is for those who have read (or seen the movies) of the Lord of the Rings saga. In my view the Republicans have made themselves into Orcs wearing tailored suits. Manifestations of the worst of human impulses, seemingly no longer capable of doing anything resembling good works.

Too strong a statement, you say? Too melodramatic? Just answer this question: where is your data? I certainly have mine in abundance. Like I said at the beginning, this is personal for me. In this instance it is the GOP taking the baby out of the rear-facing car seat and tying it to the front bumper. Little good can come from such a maneuver.

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Her Love Was Meant For Me, by Richard Thompson

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All of the trails on the South Rim of the Black Canyon National Park are now open to hikers. We are cautioned not to leave the paths and tramp around on what has always been a fragile landscape and is now even more so as it is attempting to recover from last year’s fire. No problem for us. We’ve always respected those rules. If the large numbers of human visitors were allowed to roam everywhere they wanted to it wouldn’t take long for a great deal of the beauty of those trails to vanish underfoot. This trail system is moderately strenuous for us in a few places, but overall is just a great workout in a dramatic setting. We are eager to add those hikes to our attempts at maintaining something like fitness.

Really, when I hit the pillow at night I can almost hear my aerobic capacity falling away. There is nothing for me to gain by avoiding exercise but to acquire more than a passing resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.

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Speaking of his Abominable Huttness, I remember what a large deal it was when the first Star Wars film was released. Among the hordes that went to see it were son Jonnie and I. I think we went three times, and the following Christmas there were several Star Wars gifts with his name on them. It was a moment for him. One of Jonnie’s traits was that when he liked something, he dove in headfirst. Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings books, and the rock groups Kiss and Led Zeppelin were all recipients of his interest and devotion. If he was a fan of something you did, he bought all your stuff.

Jabba was one of the major heavies in that first movie, where his nasty physical appearance and poor personal hygiene were contrasted with Princess Leia’s lightly-clad attractiveness in several scenes.

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Buckle up and get ready for a two-minute assault on your memory. The unforgettable theme music.

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Someone came to the White House Correspondents Dinner last evening and fired shots, killing no one. He has been apprehended. As of this morning we don’t actually know who might have been his target, at such a dinner there are so many who have that potential. It could have been Cluck, a member of his cabinet, or a reporter who incensed the assailant for reasons obvious or obscure.

Deciding to go up against the Secret Service at a black tie event is not the hallmark of a mentally stable person. Perhaps he was sticking his head out of the metaphoric window, as Howard Beale suggests in the video below, and it didn’t make any difference to him who he killed or injured. Just to do something … . The world we occupy today tends to bring out the crazy in a person.

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Shoot Out The Lights, by Richard Thompson

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Profiles

jono55

Travel along the South Rim Road of the Black Canyon National Park is now permitted. Each year the Park Service closes it from November to mid-April. Most winters it can then be used as a cross-country ski trail, but this past year the shortage of snow afforded limited opportunity for skiing. We were eager to see what is happening in the burned-over areas of the park, and there is a short hiking path at the very end called the Warner Point Trail that is a good workout as well as offering some great views of the canyon.

Our daytime temperatures for the next two weeks will be in the seventies, which is perfect for these seasoned bodies we’ve inherited, which tend to wilt when the temperatures rise into the eighties and above. At those times if we want to exercise outdoors we do it mid-morning.

Robin and I drove the road on Monday morning and hiked the Warner Point Trail. The lack of rain showed up in a dearth of flowers and the shriveled leaves of some usually showy plants. There are no water sources up on the top of the mesa, so the resident deer have to descend half a mile to the Gunnison River to get a drink. Although the plants on the mesa are tough and hardy, they don’t waste their resources in times of drought. No water … well, let’s just wait before we toss out those blossoms, shall we?

The burned areas are starting their recovery with grasses, so that monotonous blackened landscape is becoming a greener one. The dark skeletons of the Gambel Oaks are the most obvious reminders of what happened here last year. They appear as twisted and ghostly shapes, little more than brittle stalks of charcoal that snap off at ground level.

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Hasten Down The Wind, by Linda Ronstadt with Don Henley

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The Spring brings out black
reminders of where trees had
stood for centuries

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If there is a Satan, a personification of the worst that life has to offer, his grating chuckle must be everywhere in the White House these days. Decay and rot are everywhere you look. Cabinet officers tumble like dominoes and are replaced with unskilled nobodies. The weaknesses of government by tweet can no longer be covered up. The lies pile up in the corridors as stacked obstacles to any chance of progress or redemption. The only successes, if one wants to call them that, are the fortunes being amassed by the greediest of us all.

Here’s a photo of the dust cover of a famous book, written by John F. Kennedy. It told the stories of a handful of people in politics who made very hard choices, sometimes costing them their political lives. Choices always resolved matters in favor of the common good.

If Kennedy were to write it today, the dust cover might look like this.

Unless the cancer that is Cluck and his administration is removed, there is only one destructive direction that America can move in. The past year of one disaster after another has shown us what we must do.

Who will be the courageous ones who step forward to lead? Where will they come from? How will they preserve their integrity in the melée that is to come?

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Blue Bayou, by Linda Ronstadt

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I watched the most touching documentary on Sunday evening. It covered the life of singer Linda Ronstadt. A life devoted to music. A woman who, rather than climb over the bodies of competitors, enabled their successes time after time. Someone who was given a gift of voice and then disease took it from her. Talent. Generosity. Courage. What’s not to love and admire?

The name of the video is Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. It is available on Amazon Prime Video. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite.

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You’re No Good, by Linda Ronstadt

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Over the years my thinking about how to handle feelings has undergone evolution and devolution. Growing up in a culture of men don’t cry or show emotion it was a natural fit to emulate the John Wayne approach. Stuff ’em was the watchword. At some point I was introduced to the concept that embracing anger and grief and being softer rather than hard were preferable stances to take in life. Life provided a set of tableaux providing ample opportunity to practice whatever I thought I should be doing at any given moment..

But I was never able to completely shake the idea that sometimes, if one was going to be a professional,* you just had to stand up and wade through whatever was presenting itself. To allow oneself to melt down when there was work yet to be done … I could never fully go there. Someone had to “be strong,” and if the need arrived, I saw myself as that someone. Firemen do go into burning buildings. Physicians do face situations that are stressful and injurious to their souls. Parents do need, on occasion, to be the grownups in the room.

I have made a lot of mistakes in the past and there’s little reason to believe that I won’t continue to do so. My heart literally aches when I think back on some of those episodes, and I wish that I could say that I have learned from each one, but nope, that ain’t true. In so many of them, the teacher appeared, but the student wasn’t ready.

*professional: give it any definition you care to

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Can’t Find The Snow For The Fog

jono55

We’re going through a very chilly spell right now. here in Paradise, with freezing nighttime temperatures for several days. It’s not a predicted trend, so I’m not panicking. Spring is definitely here, although these cold evenings could be trouble for some of the prematurely blooming trees and plants around town and in the beautiful orchards around Palisade CO. Local lifelong residents tell me that this is just a normal spring for a mountain town, with these variations in temperatures the rule, rather than the exception.

Over our years together, Robin and I have evolved into two completely different creatures as far as preferred room temperatures. Robin definitely likes a cool room, while I will position myself near any radiant heat source that’s available. Our Subaru has separate temperature controls for the right and left sides of the car, which I think is a little silly in a room that’s only five feet wide. But there we go, Robin choosing 67 degrees and me pushing my button up to 74. I think it may be a placebo effect, but we’re both happier when we see such numbers on the dashboard.

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I think that our cat Willow may be coming out of her sad times since the loss of her companion, Poco. Hard to tell, it’s been just a month. Robin and I have been petting and brushing the poor thing within an inch of her life in our attempts to help her adjust to this new reality. It’s a wonder she has any fur left at all. She is spending more time outdoors now once again, and has resumed her old habits of being more active at night and sleeping most of the day.

It has been ten years since she came to live with us as a kitten and Poco was already here when she arrived, so this is quite a change for her. We aren’t looking to add any more pets to our household, so it looks like it will be two humans and one feline from here on out.

I think we’ll do just fine.

Grieving is such an irregular thing, for me. You’re walking along, you seem to have a grip on things then suddenly you’re just knocked over by a wave that came out of nowhere. And that wave just sucks the oxygen right out of your lungs. I’m dealing with the loss of a dear pet right now, but there was another dear pet years ago who died an awful death after having gotten into something she should not have. I took her body home from the vet, put her in a small cardboard box, and then buried her out in the backyard. We lived out in the countryside at the time, where such things were easily done.

Robin was away at the time and I sat on the edge of the wooden deck that evening with one song playing on repeat for hours. It doesn’t seem like it would fit, but that night it was a perfect accompaniment to the feelings I was struggling with. I was caught in one of those waves, one that battered hard and would not let go.

All Mixed Up, by Red House Painters

Honest to God, I don’t think I would have made it this far in this life without the support that music has provided. I’ve often joked when talking with others that one of the tragedies of real life as opposed to the movies was that there wasn’t a soundtrack. At a distance and looking back I can see now that there was one. But in each instance it had to be slapped together, rough as a cob and on the spot.

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Friday morning it began to snow and this continued until lunchtime, only dropping an inch or so, but hey – it’s water! By one o’clock, Robin and I were already getting cabin fever, so we bundled ourselves into the Subaru and took off driving south on Highway 550. We had planned to go to Ouray to walk around town and look at the fresh whiteness at 8,000 feet, but we had to pause at Ridgway and turn around because a combination of fog and snow produced such poor visibility. It was still a good trip, good to be out of the house.

Robin and I celebrated that day with purchased cheesecake. We may be cautious about snowstorms, but we fear no dessert.

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Lonely Girls, by Lucinda Williams

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We saw our first Hummingbirds of the year only three days ago. And that very night, the temperatures plunged down into the low 20s, which was the first of three such nights. I had wondered – how do these little birds survive such cold evenings when they return from their migration sooner than they should? So I asked the question of Google, and back came this answer, which I have now corroborated with recognizable sources.

“Hummingbirds survive freezing spring temperatures (20s°F) By entering torpor, a state of deep hibernation like sleep that lowers their metabolism by up to 95% to conserve energy. Their body temperatures plummet from over 100𝐹 to near air temperature, allowing them to survive cold nights. Yes, they can survive, if they find food quickly in the morning.” 

RIght now, hummingbird food is to be found everywhere, with the early flowers and the blossoming trees, so I will relax and let Nature do the worrying. But I like the concept of torpor, which sounds a lot like what happens to me when I find myself trapped in conversations with excruciatingly boring people. I don’t know if my body temperature plummets, but the rest all seems quite familiar.

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Some Day Soon, by Ian and Sylvia

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