Tag: nature

M.U.G.

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI query

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

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

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

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Wintertime, by the Steve Miller Band

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Swingtown, by the Steve Miller Band

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

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

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

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

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

Now where is that darn transport, anyway?

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

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

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

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The Stake, by the Steve Miller Band

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Famous Last Words

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Goodall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam: She’s not trainable

God: Part of the penalty

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

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

Adam and Eve: Cake? Wot … ?

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

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

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

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Zombie, by The Cranberries

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Leanin’

jono55

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

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

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Dreaming My Dreams With You, by Cowboy Junkies

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Came across this short film shot entirely with an iPhone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That’s All You Need, by Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rolling Stone Magazine

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

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

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Rumblin’

jono55

LIFE IN THE PLEISTOCENE (My Childhood)

Sometimes when I think back on my own early childhood, and compare it with the one my grandchildren inhabited, I am struck by the sheer miracle that any of us survived from that earlier time.

For instance, whenever we were shooshed outside to play, we were instructed to be home by dark. We were less than ten years old. There was no mention of where we could go or couldn’t go, no parent checking on us at intervals … just “be home by dark.” There was a small park about a four block walk from our home in Minneapolis, and we would pick up our baseball gloves and shout back to our mother that we were going to Powderhorn Park. “No problem,” she would say. “Just be home …” you know the rest.

This is a photo of the first family car that I can remember. Of course this is not the actual one we owned, but a well-kept one, and little resembles the plain gray, perpetually unwashed version that our family actually traveled in. And those lovely whitewall tires … nope, never happened.

That odd thing in the back was called a “rumble seat.” There were two cushions in the trunk, one to sit on, one to lean back on.

Since the car was a coupe and had only the single seat in its cab, you would stick a passenger back there, who was now out in the elements, cruising along with the wind and the rain and the flying insects and any large predators in the vicinity. Much like being in a modern convertible but for the fact that there was no top to put up for protection.

This was where my brother and I would ride, from the age of seven years forward. Never mind that there were no seat belts or any other sort of restraints, and that we weren’t even in the car! Now of course we were admonished by our parents not to stand up, wrestle, or do any other sort of exhibition passengering. After all, it was the 1940s and there were societal expectations of what made a good father or mother.

Even back in 1945 it was considered unseemly if one’s child were to fly out of the boot and go tumbling down the highway on their own. Bad form, and all that.

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Down the Road, by Stephen Stills and Manassas

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When I was about eight years old I was given a .22 caliber rifle. I have no recollection of being given safety instructions, operating instructions, or any advice other than “never point a rifle at anybody.” Up until that moment I had never given such pointing a thought.

I rushed to the hardware store and discovered that .22 caliber ammunition came in short, long rifle, and birdshot varieties. The short looked too puny and I had no idea why I would want birdshot, so it was “the long rifle, please.” Within hours there was not a can in the farm dump that didn’t have a .22 caliber hole in it, nor was any bottle unbroken.

At that point I asked what bigger game was allowed. Gophers, was the answer, striped gophers. (actually their true name was 13-lined ground squirrels). For some reason farmers didn’t like them, although I could not see what harm they did. But they were allowed as targets, and off I went.

Over the next few days I discovered a couple of things. One was that I was a sort of child marksman. What I aimed at I hit. So the striped gopher population declined sharply, tempered only by the fact that when the ammunition was gone I had to save up before I could buy any more. Looking back of course I am ashamed of those small lives taken, but this emotion is how I feel today, not when I was eight and about three-quarters feral.

The other discovery was that I had patience. Part of hunting is learning to wait, quietly, without doing much moving about. That is also key to wildlife observation of any kind, even when you are not thinking lethally.

I found that I saw more sitting still in a forest than I did tramping through it. And out on the prairies any animal that wishes to grow old sees the human coming long before it is itself seen, and hides. But if one stops and waits, they come back out to see what’s up.

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Migra, by Santana

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(Translation of lyrics to “Migra,” which song is more relevant today than when it first came out.
In the original translation “migra” was migration, today it would be I.C.E.)

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Today one of my self-assigned tasks is to find the snow shovels. Even on a small place like ours, things can be often difficult to locate. Mostly because I don’t take the proper care to put them in sensible places. And it’s not as if I’m going to need a shovel this week, but it’s much more pleasant to perform these searches when the sun is shining.

I had to clear my driveway and sidewalks perhaps six times last winter, and most of the time the snow depth was less than two inches, so shoveling is never much of a burden. I do it so that when the sun returns the walks quickly become dry and don’t threaten the senior citizens in the area. Including me. Icy patches on concrete and aging bodies are best kept apart from one another is my thinking.

Compare with winters in the midwest what we have here in Paradise is almost laughably tolerable. I’m estimating here, but there are less than ten days where the streets are even mildly treacherous. There are people in town who bicycle year-round. Not me, however, because those chilly breezes on my nether parts I find quite discouraging.

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Sweet Child, by Pentangle

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From a family budget standpoint, these are the golden weeks of the year, when neither the air conditioners nor the furnace need to run. Cool days and nights, my my my, where’s the pause button? I’d like to stay right here, please.

We now have the crunching underfoot and the aroma that dried leaves on the ground provide. Autumn, plain and simple. I am surprised that our hummingbirds haven’t taken their leave, but they still entertain us every day. A bear came into town last week, just a couple of blocks away. She was only looking to fatten a bit more before settling down for the winter ahead, but she caused quite a commotion before officers tranquilized her and moved her off to a safer spot. Safer for her, that is. Hanging around where people are gathered is not one of the best ideas that a large wild critter can have. Our tolerances are very small for rubbing elbows with anything larger than a squirrel.

The Uncompahgre River is looking its absolute best these days. Clear, clean water running fast and beautiful. Montrose is about 22 miles downstream from the dam that forms Ridgway Reservoir, so water flows here in town are governed by what those upstream engineers decree rather than any schedule of Momma Nature. They always draw down the reservoir quite a bit in the fall, preparing for the mountain snowmelt next year.

On our neighborhood walk last night, we saw a man walking about a new construction site along 6700 Road, a place where there have previously been no houses, only farmland. Being incurably nosy and having lost some of my filters along the way, I hollered across the road “Is that your house?” When he nodded yes, he made a serious mistake because in less than a minute I was in his face asking all sorts of questions. Poor Robin had to come along, fearing the worst whenever I do something like this.

Turns out he was a 33 year resident of Paradise, but now lived on the other side of town. He had decided to build a new house better suited to his family’s needs, and the foundation we were standing by was its beginning. The man had a delightful first name – Wellington. He is a Brazilian by birth but has been in the US for a generation or two. Speaking of delightful, he told us exactly where everything was going to be … garage over there … patio over there … fencing for the dachshund he had with him over there, and so on. He even brought out the blueprints to round out his presentation.

Wellington … great name. I have often wondered if having a cool name like that would have changed my life. My first name is Jon, and while it seems ordinary enough, you wouldn’t believe the number of times that not having an “h” in that moniker has caused me grief. When I am in a line for anything, and finally reached its head and the person at the desk is filling out the form asks for my name, the fun begins. I say “Jon, but there is no H in it, it’s just J.O.N.” Seems simple, right? But the bureaucrat has already written “John” before the latter part of that sentence registers with them. They then look up at me disgustedly and tear up the form they have begun with an exasperated flourish. Never a good start, that.

My last name is Flom, a stoutly Norwegian surname of which I have never been particularly fond. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, with that “fl” sound in the beginning lacking euphony, at least to me. Thirty-five years ago, the last time I gave it serious thought, I wondered how much trouble changing that name would be. In my mind I had already picked out “Snowdon” as its replacement.

Liked the ring of it. Smacked of the gentry, doncha know. But (sigh) it became just another one of my half-baked life projects abandoned in their infancy. However … think about it.

Jon Snowdon

Impresses the hell out of me even now. Think I missed the boat.

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Who You Calling Evil?

jono55

When I was a lad, a few dinosaurs still roamed the earth and most people lived in caves or slept out in the open. Television, computers, artificial intelligence, and air hadn’t been invented yet. It was that long ago.

We were ignorant but happy, living out our average lifespans of twenty years and then being gobbled by some scaly predator when our running speed had begun to slow.

So the difficulties of old age … almost nobody had ’em. Certainly not in enough numbers to care about. Actually, getting past a ripe old age at twenty drew suspicion that one might be possessed of some evil spirit, so my family of origin was forced to move frequently to avoid unpleasantness at the hands of our neighbors.

But, hey, who doesn’t have problems? Right? At some point we scuttled across the Bering Strait and invented real estate, whereupon we immediately began cutting up the new land into parcels to sell to the next new arrivals.

Today I look back on those growing-up years fondly, and yesterday when members of our present government were voicing the view that all progressives were possessed of evil spirits, I felt right at home. It was like old times.

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Mr. Tambourine Man, by Odetta

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Tale #1: One day when I was working at doctoring in South Dakota, my nurse handed me the charts of the next two patients who had come in for well-child examinations. They were from somewhere in the part of Nebraska that still hadn’t been named. Interesting was the fact that they had received no immunizations.

When I learned that the names of the two little girls were Quasar and Zanzibar, I paused with my hand on the doorknob of the room. At that point I knew that the chance I would change anyone’s mind and the vaccinations would begin that day was small … minuscule … and that proved to be the case. The kids were delightful, their mother polite and pleasant but adamant in not wanting to discuss issues of preventive medicine. I never saw them again.

Tale #2: There was a chiropractor who was fairly well-to-do, a complete charlatan, and rarely kept a wife for more than three or four years. When wife number four came along, it took almost no time at all for there to be two infants coming to our clinic. I was chosen as the family pediatrician and thus ran into the husband’s policy of NO IMMUNIZATIONS.

The children’s mother was from a New England state, and always had a sort of sorely stressed air about her. For she’d realized that her spouse was a fool who tired of his wives rather quickly, and that her old friends and family were thousands of miles away. After several years of marriage she made up her mind to take leave of the old prat, and this time it was she that filed for divorce.

During the drawn-out legal proceedings, she did something interesting. Bringing the kids in for routine exams, she had both of them immunized and brought right up-to-date, without telling their father. It was not quite the right motive and more than a little spiteful, but I obliged her in her important work of disobedience.

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This Is Definitely A Rogue’s Gallery

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Before daylight this morning as I was composing more of the trash that I affectionately call my writing, I noticed the motion-sensitive spotlights in front of my neighbor’s house light up. An instant later a vulpine silhouette crossed the beam running from stage right to stage left. The fox was out, on a chilly night.

The Fox, by Bill Staines

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Here’s part of a longer piece and all I can say is that I am glad she isn’t angry with me. At least I hope she’s not.

Of course, this isn’t really about what we need to do — we’re already doing it. It’s about what the mainstream media, and anyone still cowering in silence, needs to do. Because silence isn’t neutral — it’s surrender. It hands the microphone to a bully and pretends that’s balance. And I need to be clear — this isn’t just about him. It’s about the crowd that roars for him too. The ones who leap to their feet when he says he hates half the country. The ones who fist-pump when he spits bile and take it as permission to be their worst selves. They need to know we see them too. They need to know this isn’t patriotism — it’s corrosion. It isn’t strength — it’s rot. Every cheer is a confession of their own emptiness. Every laugh is proof of how small they’ve let themselves become. And we aren’t pretending it’s normal. We’re calling it what it is: indecency on parade, depravity dressed up as politics. And the minute we stop saying that out loud, the minute we start shrugging and moving on, is the minute they win.

JOJOfROMJERZ AND THE SIREN

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Our chapter of Indivisible got together Monday evening for a potluck supper. What savage revolutionaries we are! It was a small group, but we only see one another at events that are scheduled, and rarely get to talk about anything but the serious business of showing how democracy works to an unpleasant group of people who aren’t one bit interested – our national government..

All in all it was an enjoyable time. We even got to play a new card game whose name I have already forgotten and that’s okay because I sucked at it. The next meetings will all be in preparation for the second No Kings nationwide protest. It will happen on October 18. The last one back in June set records and showed how deep the distrust of the Cluck regime went. Since then they have done so many more bad things we anticipate a larger turnout.

A couple of days ago I was talking with one of my children on the phone, answering the perennial question: How are you doing? In answering I was to realize how much of my time is spent working on things political. I found myself wondering: Hey, you’re an impossibly old dude, what would you be doing now if you didn’t have a large bunch of fascists to deal with? And the answer is … probably nothing as interesting or compelling. So I guess I have Cluck and the gang to thank for providing a seemingly endless source of provocations to think about. Otherwise I might be just noodling in my rocking chair and wondering if it’s time for afternoon tea yet.

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I will close this post with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. I almost hesitate to put it here, because if I really think deeply about it, perhaps there would be nothing in this space to read.

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.

Gandhi

Namaste, brothers and sisters.

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Pastures of Plenty, by Odetta

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Los Olores del Otoño. 

jono55

All of the hallmarks of autumn are here but one. We have the cooler days, the rains that typically come in September, a level of humidity that is kinder to our skins, and leaves have been changing color at higher altitudes for several weeks now. what is missing is the aroma that only millions of leaves on the ground, some wet and some dry, can provide. It is as distinctive as a fingerprint.

The ash trees in our backyard are still full green, but they aren’t really good harbingers because these trees are the last each year to give up the ghost and to go dormant.

Nope, it just ain’t Fall until you can smell those dead leaves breakin’ down in the damp.

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Honky Tonk Pt. 1, by Bill Doggett

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The air is full of wails and shudders as a thousand frightened “influencers” become available for interviews these days. All because of an assassination in Utah. They are wondering whether their career choices, which a few days ago seemed just fine, might have been the wrong way to go.

They are wondering about personal security … whether they have enough … whether they have the right kind … whether any security can really do the job. And they are correct in at least one thing, perfect safety is beyond them.

Become available to the adoring public and there are all those rifles out there in all those gun cabinets, and there are all those disturbed people looking around for some way to make their mark.

I would be, of course, be a poor target for one of those shooters of celebrities. I have no celebrity and am not worth the trouble. When the smoke had cleared, the murmurs would sound something like: “He shot who? Who the hell is that?”

On the other hand, in the past several years here in Colorado alone, I could have been a victim in a nightclub, movie theater, or grocery store. Those murderers didn’t care who they killed, the victims’ anonymity was no protection.

Nope, reducing firearm availability is what will eventually make a dent in the awful numbers of shooting deaths in the US, but that will take quite a while. It might take a repeal of the Second Amendment (can you imagine the uproar during such a campaign, as thousands of neurologically damaged malcontents writhed in rage when their sacred tools became just so much hardware that could be confiscated?)

Barring taking those sorts of steps, anything else is just whistling in the dark. Start a program to pick out those unwell proto-perpetrators using mental health screenings? Have you ever tried to get an appointment for yourself with a psychiatrist and found you must wait until Christmas after next when something might open up?

I asked Google what my odds of being shot today might be, and received this answer: “Instead of focusing on a statistically insignificant daily number, it’s more helpful to consider the lifetime odds of dying from gun violence. For an average American, the lifetime odds of death from a gun assault are approximately 1 in 238. However, this aggregate figure is not representative of everyone’s specific risk. For most people who live low-risk lifestyles, the chance is far lower. 

So cowering at home might be the best protection available. Never saying anything the least bit provocative might be another strategy (volitional mutism an even better one). And this entire blog post … I never wrote it.

BTW: for reference, our lifetime chances of being killed in a car accident in the US are 1 in 95.

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If I sit quietly on the front patio beneath the hummingbird feeders the birds often come within a meter of my head. They hover there, moving effortlessly from side to side, back and forth, always in a position of watchfulness. When their curiosity is satisfied they return to the feeders.

This afternoon is one of unsettled weather, clouds of all sorts moving through the sky. You can see on the radar image that quite a shower went by us, it missed but was close enough that we could hear the thunder.

I have a playlist on my Mac that is called “Latin,” and that’s what’s playing on the little blue box this afternoon. A lot of Cuco Sanchez, some Buena Vista Social Club, and even a dash of Nana Mouskouri. And … wait … how did that Enrique Iglesias get in there?

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I have discovered doing the plank as a new way to make my abdominal muscles hurt, without going through all that sitting up and everything. Just haul my prone self off the floor for 30 seconds and it happens almost magically. YouTube has a genre of videos dedicated to making senior citizens feel bad about the inevitable days of fallen arches and most everything else. They want you to be a miserable as you were in your thirties trying to get a set of six-pack abs so that you could impress … who was it again that you wanted to impress?

One video after another proposes that if you do these ten things (five things … four things … one thing) you will be happier, healthier, and never fall down again. Plus you will finally get that six-pack you’ve been wanting for fifty years now.

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Honky Tonk Pt. 2, by Bill Doggett

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MEMENTO MORI

When we learned of Robert Redford’s passing, of course we had to watch one of his films last night. We chose “Out of Africa.” It was the perfect choice for the night.

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Hummmmmmmm …

jono55

At least one of our hummingbird families has moved on to new opportunities. But there are still four birds visiting the feeders regularly. I will miss them when they all leave, as I do each year. I have never tired of watching the way they hover and dart, their endless squabbling with one another, and the swooping zoom-bys as they fly in for a visit. Tiny, tiny creatures. Beautiful.

An addition has been made to our outdoor neighborhood zoo. Yesterday morning, in broad daylight, a red fox trotted across our driveway and up the street. Really a handsome animal who didn’t seem too concerned about its exposure. As opposed to the case of coyotes, owls, large hawks, and eagles, our local pets aren’t much threatened by the foxes.

Red foxes only average about 15 pounds under all that fur and this is only a hair bigger than a household cat or one of those whateverdoodle dogs. I may not be lucky enough to see the fox again, but I like the feeling of knowing it’s out there.

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We’ve finally had a little rain here in the valley, something September promises and usually delivers. By the end of the month snow should appear on the tops of the San Juan mountains to the south of us. Last Saturday I had the pleasure of talking with a new neighbor, a woman who had lived for forty years in Gunnison CO, which is just an hour east of Montrose. She moved here because of grandchildren, who are a common attractant, particularly for senior women.

When Robin and I were scouting locations prior to moving here, Gunnison was one of the towns we looked at. Our impressions were initially positive, although it is a smaller village than this one, until someone told us that it is the coldest spot in Colorado in mid-winter.

Hearing that, we cancelled any plans for a Gunnison move. Coldest spot … no, thank you, not after freezing our patooties off in the Midwest all of our lives. The moderate climate here in Paradise looked much better to us eleven years ago and we haven’t been disappointed.

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Lightning flashing, wind gusting, thunder rolling – all of these came down on us Wednesday night after dark. Some little rain, but mostly that sound and light show.

On one of my trips into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota, my companion and I had camped on a small island. We hadn’t traveled very far from the put-in, which was only a few miles and a single portage away, but no matter. Covering large distances was never our goal. We were not voyageurs, after all.

But a storm rolled in after dark that was to continue all night and into the next day, lasting nearly twelve hours. Sooo much lightning … sooo much rain … sooo much wind. All night the elements battered our small tent. The lightning was spectacular and nearly continuous. Sleep was impossible with all the noise, and we played every mind game we could think of lying there in the dark. When our bladders had expanded to our breastbones we were forced to leave the shelter and stand in the torrential rain while we felt like electrical targets all the while.

When the storm was over, all of our gear was wet and we were wetter. We decided to return to the world and get a cabin for the next night to allow our stuff to dry out (did I not mention that we were not voyageurs?). At that point we learned that eleven inches of rain had fallen during the downpour. Which had proven several inches too many for our poor tent, which simply hadn’t been up to the task of keeping the water on the outside.

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Lightning Crashes, by LIVE

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J.J. Cale emigrated from Earth in 2013 and is not expected to return any time soon. This is a guy who never hit a bad note, never recorded a song sloppily. Each tune had a beginning and an end, with tight musicianship in between.

On the album Okie he covered this old gospel song from 1925.

Precious Memories, by J.J. Cale

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There was another political assassination in our beleaguered country this past week, and we are still in the phase where small-hearted people are trying to use the man’s death to score points for their personal agendas. This will go on for another week or two, and then we will move on to the next outrage.

We have a rather a toxic mess of pottage stewing in the US right now, with what passes for leadership pouring gasoline on any fire they can find. Forget about being rational, forget about introspection. Finger-pointing and counter-finger-pointing are the orders of the day.

I am sick of it. The whole episode, from the shooting to the present nauseating debacle of mutual blaming, reveals humans at their worst. Only one thing is certain. When a country has nearly two guns per adult circulating among its civilians, we will continue to see these deaths. I am an old dude who had his first chance to vote in a national election and was lucky enough to be able to choose John F. Kennedy. Three years later an unstable citizen with a rifle took Kennedy’s life. That left a scar on my young psyche that has never had the chance to completely heal, because there has never been a shortage of fresh killings to deal with.

Looking for sanity in a society that so often seems insane is my first order of business. The path couldn’t be clearer. Non-violence is the only road worth following, the only way that offers the opportunity for meaningful change. We are not a highest-order species, but we are all that we’ve got to work with right now. Robin and I are contributing our time and treasure to political groups that are clear in their dedication to non-violence as a first principle. Anything else is madness.

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First snow, San Juan mountains, September 13, 2025. Now where did I put that long underwear, anyway?

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I Don’t Do That, Do I?

jono55

It’s a backyard late afternoon under the ash tree, waiting for a promised rain to blow in. This morning I tended my shroom farm, looking for any sign of fruiting – none found today, but it’s still early.

Next we were off to attend an AA meeting where ten people grappled with the meaning of spirituality – a consensus was not attained. It never will be attained, which is a great part of the fun in bringing it up.

Following this Robin and I cooked up a batch of corn chowder to take to a friend who lives alone and is suffering from some fairly severe postoperative pain. We are two of the many friends looking in on her.

Then I climbed into the saddle of our Schwinn stationary bicycle to punish my crotch for 30 minutes. It starts out just fine but at about twenty minutes the seat becomes a cruel device that would not be allowed under the rules of the Geneva Convention. Tomorrow I will walk standing straight up jonce again, I’m pretty sure. I would have thought that by now there would be some callus development in that sensitive area, but nooooo, seems to not be the case.

So I‘m waiting for the rain … what can I say … it’s a downright pleasure. It requires no effort on my part whatsoever.

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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Watched snippets of the grilling that Secretary Kennedy got in the Senate hearing. It was pretty much D- performances on both sides. There are so many legitimate questions to be asked, but the senators keep saying things like “One word answer, yes or no.” As if.

Kennedy is a doctrinaire quack and we deserved to get more information on the depth of his incompetence, but we won’t get it when all the Democratic questioners seem to be looking for are personal photo-ops and gotchas.

Breaking up the CDC is a public health disaster, and those responsible have put their irresponsiblity on clear display. It may take years to repair the damage they have done. It is beyond shameful. I fear that the phrase from Hosea: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” describes the outcomes we can expect in the near future.

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When I was a kid I remember the guy wandering up and down the aisles at the Minneapolis Millers baseball stadium shouting: “Programs, Programs, You Can’t Tell The Players Without A Program!” Well, following the news these days requires someone running up and down the streets shouting the same thing. Except this time the program is the Constitution of the United States. Every member of Congress, every President is required to take this oath upon assumption of their office.

I obtained a copy of the Constitution from the website of the National Constitution Center, and offer it to you here. Even with all of the Amendments it is only 19 pages long. A trifle in terms of reading time. And yet, when the governed agree to be bound by it, it is the most important 19 pages in our lives as Americans.

But now we find that when a serial oathbreaker is elected to office there is a problem. Such a person may not pay any attention to its provisions, and if Congress (and, God forbid, the Court) goes along with the transgressor … it becomes only words on paper.

Unless we, the people, remind those in power what the Constitution requires of them.

Using a stout stick to get their attention whenever needed.

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I have had a detente-like relationship with my bathroom mirror ever since adolescence, when it began displaying small versions of Mount Vesuvius on what had been perfectly acceptable face just the day before. After that betrayal, I began to approach it under mostly dim light conditions, to avoid unpleasantness before breakfast. Before any meal, for that matter.

About twenty years ago, I was told a story involving a nice elderly couple named Ethel and Jerry. They were both in their mid-70s and fairly spry. So when Jerry told his wife one morning: “Ethel, you need ironing,” and then Ethel passed the joke along to the rest of us, I laughed along with her. Of course, Ethel was aged, aged people have wrinkles, and I never bothered to look ahead that far.

But now to get back to that bathroom mirror, which is no longer satisfied with detente but is in full war regalia and marching straight at me. I, to my horror and perplexity, see clearly that I need ironing.

So it’s back to dimming the lights from now on. Lose a pound or two, I told myself this morning, and you will be smooth again. Just avoid looking into that glass.

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Dimming of the Day/Dargai, by Richard and Linda Thompson

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There is a British television series, Unforgotten, which I can recommend without a qualm. It’s a police procedural series, and there are six seasons of it available to us on PBS. Yesterday we finished the last episode of Season Four and something unusual happened to me. The episode was particularly moving, and when I tried to talk to Robin about how well done it was, I burst into tears and could only speak with difficulty.

I don’t do that. I am not a blubberer. At least I didn’t think I was. But there I was, having been manipulated so well by the writers talents and the actors’ skills that I felt for each of the characters in the story. For a moment I cared about imaginary people and their imaginary lives as much as if they had truly existed. Their losses meant something to me.

This wasn’t some AI deception, but a story well told, by human beings. Enough that while watching, the barriers in my brain that serve to separate real from unreal were down altogether. I’d been had and I was not troubled by it at all.

One more thing. The lead actor in the series is Nicola Walker. I’ve seen her in several series now, and she never disappoints.

If she’s in it, it’s worth watching, and that is a pretty useful yardstick to have in choosing television programming.

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If It Quacks Like A Duck …

jono55

Well, let’s see … in only six months this charlatan has managed to turn a solidly evidence-based public health system into a caricature of itself. Rather than being a guardian, his office has now become a threat to our health and our welfare.

Apparently it has come as a great surprise to some, that turning the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over to an idiot will produce idiotic results. People are already dying because of what he’s done and we have only begun to reap that grim harvest.

But an impressive array of medical organizations has now lined up against this fool and his tinted master and is calling them out for the quacks that they are. Among them, I am happy to report, is my own American Academy of Pediatrics. Proud of them I am. Proud of anyone who resists, who does not join the sorry ranks of the collaborators.

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Robin and I are back in Paradise after a brief sojourn in Durango. I was with her for only the last three days of her stay, and it rained each of those days. Actual rain. During the same period not a drop fell on our home at Basecamp. Sheesh.

On one of those drizzly afternoons I found myself staring out the window at the birdbath, and found there was an impressive number of visitors coming and going. In just one hour I saw the following species:

  • Robin
  • Collared Dove
  • White-breasted Nuthatch
  • Red-shafted Flicker
  • Downy Woodpecker
  • Canada Jay
  • Steller’s Jay
  • Evening Grosbeak (dozens in a flock)
  • Ruby-crowned Kinglet
  • Lewis’ Woodpecker.

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The last one on the list was a new bird to me, and I learned that it was named after Meriwether Lewis, who first described it.* The bird exhibits some very interesting and non-woodpeckery behaviors.

In the summer, Lewis’s Woodpeckers eat mostly insects, catching them in flight by swooping out from a perch like a flycatcher or by foraging in flight like a swallow. Their wide, rounded wings give them a buoyant, straight-line flight, more like a jay or crow than a woodpecker.

The birds seldom excavate for wood-boring insects; unlike other woodpeckers, this species lacks the strong head and neck muscles needed to drill into hard wood.

In the fall, Lewis’s Woodpeckers switch to eating nuts and fruit, chopping up acorns and other nuts and caching them in bark crevices for later consumption. During the winter they aggressively guard these storage areas against intruders, including other woodpecker species.

American Bird Conservancy

You may remember the age-old question: How much wood would a woodpecker peck if a woodpecker would peck wood? In the case of Lewis’ Woodpecker, the answer would therefore be precious little.

*Actually, Meriwether Lewis was the first person of European descent to describe it. The indigenous peoples knew about it for quite some time before he arrived on the scene. But the deal is, if you’ve got the ink and the quill, you get to tell the story.

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Theme from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, by Bob Dylan

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I call myself a Buddhist, even though I strongly suspect that hearing my claim would have brought tears to the eyes of Siddhartha himself. But I digress.

I have learned quite a lot in the past several decades that I might have overlooked without the guidance of a handful of Buddhist teachers. One of those things is the truth of the saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” In my shallower days if I gave the saying a thought at all, it was: what a bit of quaint and magical thinking that suddenly there is a teacher where there was not one before.

I learned that was not what was meant at all, but then remember, I was shallow.

The phrase “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” means that opportunities to learn and gain knowledge become apparent when someone is truly open and receptive to them, whether it’s through a formal teacher, a mentor, life experiences, or even an event. The idea is not that a literal teacher will magically show up, but rather that the necessary guidance, information, or opportunity will present itself once the student has cultivated the necessary mindset, awareness, and readiness for that specific lesson. The saying highlights that learning is an internal process of readiness, not just an external delivery of information.

(The above is an unasked-for paragraph that Google generated without being asked and displayed at the beginning of some search results. AI at work. I was prepared to be incensed when I noticed that it wasn’t such a bad paragraph at all and decided to share it with you.)

To simplify even further, when you truly open your eyes you see that there are teachers all around you. They were always there. You can hardly walk down the street without bumping into half a dozen or more. That windbag droning on at the AA meeting is giving instruction in patience and forbearance to everyone in the room. Valuable lessons that they will use over and over throughout their lives. That is, if they don’t fall into the trap of becoming annoyed and start looking out the window at the blackbirds on the lawn.

I know that I’ve said this before, but there was a point half my life ago when I realized that one of the best teachers I’d ever had was pain. At the time it was emotional pain, one of those dark nights of the soul that went on and on. Since that epiphany I’ve developed a habit of looking for the lesson at times of high stress and discomfort, wondering what it will be this time.

Sometimes the lesson is nothing more than this – I will survive.

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That intrusive AI paragraph above just reminded me of a theme that runs through any discussion of artificial intelligence I’ve read. The theme that eventually, and sooner rather than later, AI will do us in. The real pessimists say that this doom is unavoidable. If they are correct, it only reinforces my observations that our species will not require aliens to land and vaporize us, we are going to extinguish ourselves.

A sensible species would say: Artificial Intelligence is too dangerous to trifle with, we stand to lose control of it, so let’s just stop studying it. And that would be that. Finito. But we’ve never done that. Alfred Nobel invented gunpowder to ease many of man’s burdens and was dismayed that our major use of his gift to us was to blow each other apart.

Scientists during World War II raced to develop an atomic bomb and were successful, even though many of those same scientists weren’t sure that when we set the first bomb off that the world wouldn’t end at that exact minute.

Space has become so crowded with dead satellites and other man-made debris that going to the moon for a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk is now almost too hazardous an enterprise to consider.

So will we back off from developing this suicide machine, this doomsday device? Even though it is horrifically expensive and uses so much energy to operate that at present we are unable to meet the needs of the beast? Even though not a single person who lives on my street wants it at all? I doubt it. Our track record would indicate otherwise.

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Last night Robin and I watched “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” a Sam Peckinpah film from 1973. It was my fault, because the movie would have been more useful as a cautionary tale for new filmmakers as to what sorts of things to avoid in making movies, and a treatise on the value of editing.

But in spite of containing what I saw as errors of judgment, I enjoyed myself. The cast was amazing, almost unbelievable. Here is a partial list, just to whet your appetite, should you ever have two hours to spend on watching a kind of glorious mess. It’s almost a Who’s Who of western character actors.

  • James Coburn
  • Kris Kristofferson
  • Richard Jaeckel
  • Jason Robards
  • Bob Dylan
  • Rita Coolidge
  • Chill Wills
  • Barry Sullivan
  • R.G. Armstrong
  • Jack Elam
  • Paul Fix
  • L.Q. Jones
  • Slim Pickens
  • Charles Martin Smith
  • Katy Jurado
  • Harry Dean Stanton
  • Elisha Cook Jr.
  • Sam Peckinpah
  • Bruce Dern
  • Dub Taylor

BTW, about Bob Dylan. His performance in the film shows how it was proper to give him the Nobel Prize for poetry, and not for acting. He is apparently supposed to be a man of mystery but only succeeds at being a twerpish sort of character. He did write the excellent score, however, which won him a Grammy nomination. And the timeless song Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door was its centerpiece.

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Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, by Bob Dylan

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Nature Is Not A Place To Visit

jono55

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

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

What the white man calls wilderness, we call home.

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

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

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

The Tao of the Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Snyder

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Ends of the Earth, by Lord Huron

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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Hard Times Come Again No More, by Gangstagrass

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Two Miles Up

jono55

This will be a rather short post due to the fact that Robin and I have been away from home and not in contact with the world and its problems. For two days we camped a few miles south of Aspen CO with daughter Ally and friend Kyle. The internet goes away about three miles before the entrance to the campground, which is mostly a blessing and less a curse.

The place we stayed is called Difficult Campground and is named for the Difficult Creek which flows through it. There is only one hike leading away from it and it is the Difficult Creek Trail. We have no idea why everything is Difficult, we found it quite lovely and not particularly difficult at all.

There are a little over forty sites at the campground which are relatively close together but the trees and underbrush are so dense that you feel quite private even so. I encountered campers from many places in the U.S. and from France and Poland. With mega-rich Aspen so close the clientele is somewhat better mounted than we lowlife cowboys from small-town Colorado. There were some awfully comfortable-looking recreational vehicles sharing the area with us. Big and roomy and expensive.

We encountered a problem that is new to me. These days camping in the U.S. is largely done by reservation, and this campground had been solidly booked for months. But only about two-thirds of the campers actually showed up for to occupy the spot they had reserved. Affluent campers now often reserve spaces at several campgrounds early on in the season at the same dates, to cover the time they had available for recreation. Then at the last minute they could go to whichever spot they preferred. Of course that meant that they were paying $30.00 a night for each campsite they didn’t use, but if you are at a certain place economically this is pretty small potatoes compared to the convenience it affords.

But this means that you are freezing out another camper who would love to have used that site now which was now empty and unavailable. It is a selfish behavior, but I hate to admit it … there are selfish Americans. There, I’ve got it out there. I feel better now.

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The Eagle and the Hawk, by John Denver

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From Aspen to Independence Pass is a distance of 19.7 miles. We spent our second day exploring as much of this area as we could. For me the highlight was the walking about the area surrounding the Pass itself. You are well above treeline and at an altitude of more 12,000 feet. The spot we chose to eat our picnic lunch was at 12,160 feet according to the app on my phone. Turns out that food tastes exactly the same even though the act of chewing can leave you breathless (gross exaggeration here).

This road is classic Colorado mountain driving. Two lanes of steep and tight and twisting curves with no guardrails. There are two short segments where there is no center line because the road is so narrow that you pass an oncoming car v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y with only a foot or two to spare between you. Being an acrophobic, I do not like such passages. Here’s an interesting graphic from a bicycling journal.

And yes, you share this narrow piece of asphalt with bicyclists. Bicyclists with a death wish is what I have come to believe. When you encounter a person on a bike on a curvy stretch you cannot pass due to limited visibility, so you travel at their speed. It is a journey that I simply could not make. The guy on the bike at times is only a couple of feet from the cliff edge and that is about ten feet too little for this timid soul.

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A few miles before the summit is the ghost town of Independence. It once was a gold mining town, established in 1879 and abandoned in 1899. All but one member of the population left at that later date during the worst winter in Colorado’s history, when snow cut them off completely from supplies. At one point many residents took planks from the buildings to fashion skis and in that way traveled back down the mountains to Aspen and safety.

One of the plaques at the townsite discussed a local Elks Lodge having brought new elk in to repopulate the valley, and that herd’s descendants now now still roam the area. Why, you ask, did they do this? Well, because in that isolated and harsh environment the miners and their families had eaten nearly all of the deer, elk, and marmots before they abandoned the town. Yes, even the marmots did not escape those ravenous appetites.

Here’s a few pics I borrowed from the internet. I took none of my own because my phone had run out of gas.

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Rocky Mountain High, by John Denver

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This morning I returned to modern life by reading articles about President Cluck’s continuing war on democracy and decency and wondering to myself … where’s a good heart attack when you really need one?

I know, I know. An unworthy thought. I will give myself a time out.

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Comic Relief: sign found in the bathroom at the top of Independence Pass.

Fire On The Mountain

jono55

Something remarkable happened to the family living next door. The woman went into the hospital on Sunday evening and on Monday morning a surgeon reached into her abdomen and pulled out a brand new American. Mother and child are doing well.

By the time that child reaches the age where he cares about such things, these troubled present days of ugly political behavior will be only paragraphs in history books. Paragraphs that delineate what can go wrong when those who cherish democracy are complacent. When those same folks make the mistake of assuming that you have triumphed over wickedness once and for all because you have beaten it back one time.

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For some reason Nathan Hale came to mind this morning. He may have been America’s first spy. I rarely think of him, which is a pity, because there is much to learn from his example.

He was caught on his first mission, however, and hanged shortly thereafter. Nathan was only twenty-one years old at the time of his death.

.

“On the morning of his execution,” continued the officer, “my station was near the fatal spot, and I requested the Provost Marshal to permit the prisoner to sit in my marquee, while he was making the necessary preparations. Captain Hale entered: he was calm, and bore himself with gentle dignity, in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him: he wrote two letters, one to his mother and one to a brother officer. He was shortly after summoned to the gallows. But a few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, ‘I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.'”

Captain John Montresor

There is not unanimity of opinions about whether he said exactly those words, but after this long stretch of time I doubt whether anyone cares but some historians. The lessons to be taken of courage, sacrifice, and dedication to country would not be altered by the transposition of a few vowels and consonants.

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Fading Fires (Of The Great Chiefs), by AIRO

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Robin and I have just finished watching the series “Endeavour” on PBS, and thoroughly enjoyed it, in spite of the fact that it was at times more than a bit talky and occasionally preposterous. Now while the word “preposterous ” might seem harsh, I like to have a bit of it in anything I watch, since dry reality is so tawdry and boring these days.

The series covers several years in the life of a young policeman whose private life is that of an opera-loving loner. It is as much about relationships as it is about criminal activity. He has a mentor, a reputation for being prickly as well as a brilliant crime-solver, and yet somehow fails to hear Robin and I call out repeatedly “That’s the girl for you, fool!”

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The temperature reading stood at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and I believed it. Our younger cat, Willow, chose this stressful day to change her habits and remain outdoors all the livelong day, instead of sleeping on a cool chair in our bedroom. Of course our anxiety levels rose as the number of hours added up, until nearly six PM, when she made her appearance.

We pictured her gasping in a ditch, drowned in the irrigation canal that runs behind our home, or gobbled up by any number of large creatures, including coyotes, mountain lions, and the Yeti.

But all our concerns were for nought, she is in fine shape, and for all we know, may enjoy getting away from us for longer periods of time, whether the weather be clement or not. There may be repeats, but without the panic.

BTW, the humidity was in single digits this afternoon. This means that unless you drink your water quickly you are behind a couple of ounces by the time you finish the glass. Walking a few hundred feet searching for a cat meant not being able to formulate words clearly after only a few minutes, the inside of the mouth being roughly the same texture as an old pair of dried-up leather work gloves.

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Fire On The Mountain, by Jimmy Cliff, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart

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Early Thursday morning there were a handful of lightning flashes and thunder blasts here in Paradise. No rain, just the fireworks. But up at the Black Canyon National Park there was much more going on. Some of those lightning strikes started fires, one on the north side of the canyon and one on the south. Our valley became filled with a smoky haze, enough that the horizons were obscured.

Access to the park entry road is barricaded off, to keep idiot looky-loos like myself from wandering about the area, bothering the firefighters and becoming problems when those brave people have to stop more important work to hose us down.

Wildfires are always a possibility here in Paradise, a dry country in a good year. But this is the closest one in the eleven years we’ve lived out here. The Black Canyon is one of our favorite places … to walk … to drive through … or just to grab a rock, sit on it, and think about stuff. It will certainly be changed the next time we see it.

(Addendum: As of Saturday afternoon the fire had burned 3000 acres and was zero per cent contained. The park only contains 30,000 acres.)

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This is the view of the Black Canyon Fire from the end of our street. It’s about nine miles away.

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Psychedelia

jono55

One more tag-end to our recent trip. On the return leg we overnighted in FairPlay CO. I believe Fairplay, Colorado might be one of the least gentrified communities in the entire state. Perhaps the entire country. We sought advice from the motel desk clerk and went to Otto‘s for supper. Otto’s was located in one of my favorite sort of venues, a simple wooden-frame structure whose bathrooms were approached by going out the side door and around the back. The kitchen was very busy with young men working hard at preparing a large number of their signature dishes which are fried chicken sandwiches.

Robin and I each ordered one of those and sat down at a table to wait. The music coming at us from the small Bose speaker in the corner was straight out of a late sixties psychedelic playlist.

It was all wonderful stuff, but there was one particular song that came on which I had never heard before and admired greatly. I went to the desk where we had ordered our food to ask the gentleman if he knew what was playing on the overhead. He immediately came up with the answer, which was Fearless, by Pink Floyd, from their album Meddle.

I have included that gem in today’s post.

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Fearless, by Pink Floyd

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From The New Yorker

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Robert Reich reposted a message a couple of days ago that I wish I had written. It brings together what was an inchoate mess of thoughts ricocheting around in my own cranium and then organizes them. It calls for action by all of us who are sickened by current events, and does not at any point suggest that we sit back and watch in bemusement.

It especially calls for the leaders in the Democratic Party to be … well … leaders. To leave their comfort zones so far behind they can’t remember where the keys are and really dig in while digging is still possible.

As the graphic indicates, democracy is not a spectator sport. The house is on fire, friends. The next right thing to do is to grab a bucket and join a brigade!

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From The New Yorker

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It’s a bit after one a.m., and while I am computerscribbling in my office I hear a scuffling noise out in the kitchen area. The pet door is open to the outdoors, and rarely another feline will wander in to sample whatever we’re feeding our own cats. So I walk quietly to that room and discover not one, but three young raccoons, each the size of a small kitty.

They took poorly to being discovered and went out the door, across the yard, and over the board fence in a dignified hurry.

That’ll be about that for a while, I say as I button down the cat portal. I do like these intelligent critters, but only outdoors. They are quite good at probing human defense systems, and it is likely that our home is now on their list of good places to visit.

Oh well.

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Rainbows

jono55

Last night, one of those amazements that the skies put on for us seldom enough that each one dazzles. There were a few raindrops falling on an otherwise sunny evening when the double rainbow started to appear. Slowly growing more intense, the colors strengthening, the whole VIBGYOR sequence eventually easily discernible in both of them.

Both rainbows stretched from horizon to horizon. They lasted for perhaps ten minutes and then gracefully faded. There was no reason for us to feel awe-inspired, but we were, as always. After all, a rainbow is only a trick of the light, isn’t it? Completely explicable in the language of physics.

As the lifelong buffoon that I am, I chose the moment to break into me Lucky Charms leprechaun accent as I babbled on about pots of gold and the like. Can’t seem to help myself.

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When I’m Called, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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We experienced a death this week in our little menagerie here at Basecamp. I found one of the garter snakes who live under our front steps lying dead at the edge of the lawn, not a dozen feet from the entrance to its burrow. No outward marks of violence, just a sad small half-coiled and lifeless creature.

For whatever reason I began ruminating on all the skeletons of snakes I’ve ever seen, in photos or museums. Remembering the too-graceful-to-be-real beauty of their assembly.

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There is still too much snow in the San Juans for me to go there, but I am itching to get out hiking on some of the trails. There is nothing quite like walking above treeline. It’s almost as if you are leaving the earth behind and there you go, only on foot. Of course, I could go right now, if I weren’t such a fussbutt.

We have a friend who is already walking those mountains using crampons to get him over the snowy and icy portions of the trail. A man who takes pleasure in slogging through the inevitable muddy portions.

I’m just too fastidious for all that. My idea of a great walk in the hills is a nice dry trail with no sliding off cliffs or falling into mudholes, and then returning to town still clean enough to sit in an ice cream parlor with something tasty in front of me without drawing attention because of my being completely crusted over.

I have my standards.

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Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams

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Don’t know whether to be outraged at Senator Alex Padilla’s manhandling this week at Kristi Noem’s press conference or grateful that she didn’t shoot him.

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Robin and I decided not to attend Cluck’s birthday party in Washington D.C. and to take part instead in an Indivisible-sponsored No Kings rally and march on Saturday here in Paradise. We had been part of the planning committee for the event, and it has been very satisfying to see it taking shape.

The ambient temperature was in the 90s and the humidity was low, which meant that water was evaporating from the body so rapidly you could almost hear it hissing.

The event was marked by music, readings of poetry, excellent behavior, sweltering temperatures, and smiles galore at knowing they were part of something special. Actually, even the yahoos driving by in their Clucktrucks behaved themselves with only a minimum of their dysphonious hooting.

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The unofficial count of attendees was 2,256, here in little ol’ Montrose CO. Robin and I helped with setup and takedown, and in between we marched the designated route and then took care of the table where the buttons we’d made were available for free-will donations. One gentleman dropped by, picked up one button, and left a one hundred dollar bill as his contribution. I tried to find him later and make him my new BFF but he got away.

Dang! I’ll bet we had a lot in common, too. Could have been the start of a beautiful friendship.

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Moving Toward Plan B

jono55

We’ve entered a new phase now in the protest movements against this government’s unlawful policies. This past weekend Cluck has called out the California National Guard to intimidate people who were demonstrating against the Gestapo-style tactics of his ICE agents. Tactics that have involved episodes where masked men are grabbing persons off the streets and disappearing them into unmarked vans. There is quite a disconnect between the Armageddon-is-at-our-doors rhetoric coming from the Federal government and the much quieter statements from California law enforcement.

Cluck’s move is a transparent one that all totalitarians use, where they magnify a threat and give themselves an excuse to bring out the truncheons and the tear gas. In the weeks to come we will see jails filled with demonstrators. We will unfortunately probably see violence and people injured on both sides.  Tyranny thrives on violence.

But we will also see mass non-violent actions all across the country, by groups like Move On, Indivisible, 50501, and many, many others. Eventually these actions will prevail, as they must, but our beloved and imperfect country is likely to undergo a painful wrenching before that happens.

A possible peaceful resolution to this present situation is in the hands of the disagreeable people in the White House.  If they could begin to behave as a representative government, instead of a gang of thugs on a pocket-filling rampage, these dark times could end. Right at this moment I don’t see that happening.

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Robert Reich wrote a stirring piece on Substack on Sunday, which I can recommend to you. Its title: Time for Nonviolent Disobedience.

(There was another guy who wrote an essay on the same topic, quite a while back. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? I’m so bad with names.)

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Drift Away, by Dobie Gray

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We’re about a week and a half away from our journey to Minneapolis for our granddaughter Elsa’s wedding. It will be a time to touch bases with my children as well. The wedding will be a special occasion for me as well as the wedding couple, as I am giving the bride away. Which means I will be wearing a dress suit for the first time in many years. ( I lead a simple life )

Trepidation? Not too much, but in recent days I have seen reruns of old men tripping going up steps into airplanes, both Cluck and Biden, and they are years younger than I am. I am doing what I can do to not repeat their faux pas in front of the assembled guests. This will be complicated by the fact that I will be wearing rented shoes, and who knows where they have been or what embarrassments they have already caused? The rental store assured me that they are not evil shoes, and I have to take them at their word. But how do they really know?

My usual footgear are built for trails and paths that require non-slip soles and sturdy construction. Brands like Oboz and Hoka are in my closet these days, for very good and utilitarian reasons. I had briefly thought of wearing them with the rented outfit but then that same granddaughter discouraged my making such a fashion statement at her party. I acceded to her wishes

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Shelter From The Storm, by Bob Dylan

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One of my favorite moments from the movie Gandhi. The line: “They are not in control … we are” rang out clearly when the film was released in 1982. It rings out even more clearly today.

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Last evening was one of those with a golden twilight. Where the seemingly aimless flight paths of countless insects were backlit and it is a beautiful thing to see. Hypnotic, really.

Now I realize that using the word “aimless” when talking about another species is an arrogant thing to do. A more honest phrase would be “I don’t understand why they do what they do.” As simple as that.

How can I possibly presume to make assessments of these flying creatures’ behavior when I can’t even understand or explain why my own species does what it does half the time?

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Where Have All The Flowers Gone, by the Kingston Trio

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I seem to be quite busy these days. My involvement with Indivisible is taking up a fair amount of time, I am painfully trying to learn some Spanish with Duolingo as my cranky guide, and I am now growing psilocybin-containing mushrooms in my pajama drawer.

Without going into detail, there are many, many people who struggle with chronic pain and depression that does not respond to present-day therapies. It turns out that there is an accumulated mountain of anecdotal evidence that psilocybin can provide help to many of these people. Not in doses that produce a “high” or a psychedelic experience, but in tiny fractions of that dose. Microdosing is the term that is used.

Here in Colorado it is now legal to grow “magic” mushrooms and to ingest them. It is also legal to give some away to friends.

It is not okay to sell them, however, so there are no legal commercial outlets.

Exploring the world of mushroom culture has been really interesting. What I did was purchase something called a “grow bag,” containing a sterile mixture of everything an aspiring mushroom spore needs to thrive. From another source I bought a syringe filled with spores of a variety of mushroom called Golden Teacher and injected that solution into the bag. The instructions were to then keep it in a warm dark place for some weeks until a certain stage is reached. Thus, the pajama drawer.

There are other stages to come that require other sorts of care for the growing mushrooms, but no more than you experience in any sort of gardening. There is also the possibility of failure, since my previous gardening experiences have been … shall we say … only occasionally magnificent ones.

Stay tuned.

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Bruceland

jono55

Well, of course I bought it. If Bruce Springsteen can bring out an EP that just might piss off president Cluck, I am all in. It contains the now famous introductions that the world has heard, emanating from concerts in Manchester, England. Music to my ears, they are. The EP is called Land of Hope and Dreams, and retails for $4.95.

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Introduction to Land of Hope and Dreams

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My way of looking at it is that for a very modest sum I can send Cluck one more mosquito to stab at that thin skin. It’s a small and petty thing to do, but I never claimed to be anything else, now, did I?

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Introduction to My City of Ruins

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Bruce finishes the EP with a cover of what some folks think is Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, Chimes of Freedom. It’s one of those rare songs will never go out of style, principally because freedom can never be taken for granted, but must be earned and re-earned by one generation after another. (NB: if you live long enough you may get to re-earn it more than once)

Chimes of Freedom

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And in our present day here in America …

  • when you can’t see the way forward
  • when it all seems overwhelming
  • when the voices of hate threaten to drown out the music
  • when just getting out of bed in the morning seems a struggle

It’s all just like the man said – every step you take forward is a little victory.

Little Victories, by Bob Seger

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It is 82 degrees in Paradise, no wind, humidity 17% , Wes Montgomery playing Down Here On The Ground over the little blue Bose speaker. I’m out in front on the patio with a can of Spindrift. A couple of the neighborhood teenagers are hunched over the handlebars of their bikes, unsure of their next move. They are pretty good kids, so our lives and property are probably not in jeopardy.

Now in the background it’s Ali Farka Touré playing Soukora. Perfect.

Since I am at the time of life that I am, it behooves me to take little for granted. Not an interesting cloud, not a new flower out in the berm, not a single strawberry is ignored.

Soukora, by Ali Farka Touré

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It tickles me that a columnist for the citadel of conservative fiscalism, the Wall Street Journal, came up with an acronym that apparently does not please His Tangerine Sublimity. It is T.A.C.O.

Translated, it refers to the crazy ups and downs of Cluck’s tariffs. Trump Always Chickens Out is what it stands for. How exceedingly droll and perfectly disrespectful.

The T.A.C.O. Meme has exploded on the web. I gathered a handful for your enlightenment.

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Chicken Train, by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils

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Today Robin and I hiked on the Upland Trail at Black Canyon National Park. Halfway through the walk I saw a large red fox with a world-class bushy tail. He ran into some scrub oaks and disappeared in a second. First fox we’d seen in the Park.

We had driven up shortly after breakfast because the forecast for the day was to hit the low 90s. Since senior bodies tend to wilt in the heat we took our hike when and where it was cooler.

One unexpectedtreat was the discovery of many small clumps of Claret Cup cacti. They like rocky outcroppings and their brilliant red flowers are exquisite. (For reference: these blossoms are only about 1.5 inch across)

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When Authority Always Wins …

jono55

There’s a person who posts on Substack as “Rosie the Resister.” On Thursday she came up with the beauty at right.

My comment on Rosie’s post is that America wasn’t ready for Cluck. Too many didn’t believe that fascism could happen here. Next time someone like him comes along, hopefully, we will smell them coming in time.

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The first election that I ever voted in was in 1960, when the question was “Is America ready for a Catholic president?” There were pamphlets placed on public buses in my hometown of Minneapolis suggesting that if JFK were elected we’d all become subjects of the Pope, and after that it would be all fish on Fridays and burnings at the stake and everything.

Well, Kennedy was elected and, mirabile dictu, that particular nightmare never happened. Turns out that our society makes progress by fits and starts rather than smooth transitions. On Monday being Catholic was an obstacle, but on Wednesday it’s a fading line in the sand. It’s what we do.

My first choice back in the 2020 election season was Amy Klobuchar (woman), and my second was Pete Buttigieg (gay). Both lost. Really, as if sex was the most important thing to consider when it comes to choosing leaders. How quaint. The all-male game is doomed to die an ungainly death and all one has to do is check the numbers. Within a generation women will make up an overwhelming majority of educated persons. Add to that the fact that they have always been better at networking and it’s Katie bar the door for bearers of the Y chromosome.

My own opinion is that this will change the sum of political life very little. For instance, by taking a close look at some of the women already in Congress we can see that stupidity, inanity, and cowardice are not exclusively male virtues. We can also see that steadiness, compassion, and common sense can be brought into the mix no matter what our genders might be.

After the present season of Cluck, I will be ready for almost anything and anybody as an improvement. Perhaps, since humans have brought this chaotic circus into existence, we should be considering other primates as candidates for public office.

I would have no trouble voting for the fellow at right, for instance. He has what is now in short supply on the national stage – an intelligent gaze.

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From The New Yorker

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There seems to be something about being the wealthiest people in our country that makes them insatiable. There is never enough of anything for them. Whatever machinations that Cluck is doing today to shovel more and more of our nations’ treasure into their bank accounts, all but a few of them seem to want more. An even more monstrous share.

They live in a completely different world than the rest of us, which would seem to make them unqualified to make the rules that we live by, but that’s not what happens. Right now our social safety net (which has never been up to the job at best) is being in danger of being completely shredded. Hundreds of billions of dollars are scheduled to be removed from health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, if the Republican budget bill is passed. Money is to be taken from children’s food programs to be funneled into the pockets of billionaires.

Unfortunately many of us will perversely persist in becoming ill even if our health insurance is taken away or cut back severely, and too many will eventually become unable to work or support our families or take care of ourselves. Well, I guess we should have planned better, is the refrain echoing down Republican halls. Even though history has repeatedly shown this only means that small problems will become larger ones as people are forced to prioritize, and more immediate needs like food and shelter must be met.

Even as I type this stuff, eventually I have to take a break because too much thinking about our present circumstances is just that dreadful an enterprise. I have no idea why I don’t have a feeling of hopelessness, even though I admit that I can’t see a clear way out of the godawful mess Click and his troupe of bozos have created. Maybe we’re like John Mellencamp’s protagonist … too dumb to know when we’re beaten and should just give it up … instead we turn up our collars against the wind, put our heads down, and soldier on.

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Yesterday we took a very nice bicycle ride, thank you very much, into the countryside. It was a total bird show. We heard but did not see a Gambel’s Quail. Meadowlarks provided glorious background music for our trip. A huge, and I mean HUGE, Great Blue Heron had been hunting in a small creek when it took off right in front of us.

And then along came a large Red-tailed Hawk, at first flying just a few yards over our heads, giving us a great look at the patterns of its feathers, and then it began to ride the thermals, rising in lazy circles without so much as a wing flap until it was no longer visible.

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Where The Hawkwind Kills, by Daniel Lanois

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Yesterday was the 33rd wedding anniversary for Robin and I. To repeat an old story, after our respective former spouses left us for what they thought were greener pastures, she and I began to “date” and one thing led to another and a wedding became imminent. The counselor that Robin was seeing told her that making such a move might be unwise, that it was too soon after her divorce. He told her that this new relationship was a “transitional” one for her.

We have obviously been very slow about the whole thing, because it’s now 33 years on and we’re still transitioning. I’m not sure we’ve enough years left to make it to whatever the next level is supposed to be.

Oh well. One does what one can.

We celebrated quietly with supper at a new Italian restaurant in town. The food was delicious. I had the carbonara and Robin the mushroom tortellini, and our waitress couldn’t have been more pleasant.

Really, she couldn’t have. Would I lie?

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From The New Yorker

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When asked a question several years ago, the present Dalai Lama responded with the famous line: “My religion is kindness.“

This week the Senate is considering one of the unkindest budget bills in a long, long while. It strips money from health care, food programs, and childhood enrichment programs to pass the funds along to the very wealthy in the form of tax cuts. It is so blatantly unwise and unfair that it is a nightmare caricature of what a thoughtful government might do.

There is still time to telephone our senators and ask them to do the right thing. For some of them, our call might be just the nudge they need.

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On Perspiring

jono55

We’re coming on the time when temperatures will get high enough that people begin to think about turning on their air conditioners. I’m not one of those that waits until the last minute to do so. At the first bead of sweat on my forehead in the middle of the day, I’m reaching for the switch on the cooling system.

I’ve had friends in the past who made it a point each year await absolutely as long as they could to turn on the air conditioning in their home. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but they also made a point of telling every single person they were doing it, including myself, as if this was some sort of public virtue.

I call this delay in accepting the blessing of air conditioning as comfortus interruptus, and classify it under mental aberrations. Why someone would have air conditioning that could make them comfortable and keep them from sweating and becoming rancid and not use it I doubt that I will ever completely understand. All I know is that I will never be an entry in the sad race to be the last person to turn on their AC in Montrose County. In fact, I may well be the first.

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There are times, however, when sweat is admirable. Desirable. Delightful in the recalling. And it all has to do with s.e.x. My personal favorite movie that intricately weaves enough perspiration to fill a pool with the slip-slap clash of testosterone and estrogen is Body Heat. It’s a noirish kind of thing with sweat-stained shirts and ceiling fans galore. Here’s a scene that is an illustration of why prudence and chastity require air conditioning.

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Surely by now the Republicans who have fastened themselves like ticks to Emperor Cluck are wetting themselves regularly as they see their political futures becoming cloudier and cloudier. His latest offense against taste and ethics is that he wants to accept an airplane from Qatar. A really BIG airplane.

I keep forgetting … how do you spell putrescence, anyway? This is way beyond ordinary corruption.

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There was an article in Monday’s Times of New York that brought a smile. For those who have not heard of Rhiannon Giddens, she is a woman who has spent her adult life bringing music to us all. And she does it with class and humor and scholarship and style. The news that she has recently started a festival is the point of the article. The gathering is called the Biscuits and Banjos Festival, and it took place in Boone, North Carolina. A high point was the reunion of members of the group Carolina Chocolate Drops.

You know when you see those pictures from space of the earth at night and there are these points of light? Giddens is one of those points. She contributes, contributes, contributes. That’s a very nice thing to see in an era when so many are subtracting, subtracting, subtracting.

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Cartoon du Jour

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Today’s entry in the chucklehead sweepstakes is an article at CNN online entitled: “Why men are shaving off their eyelashes.”


From stopping dust and dirt getting into the eyes to prompting our blink reflex, eyelashes do more than just look pretty. Which makes it hard to explain the social media trend of men trimming down — or even entirely shaving off — their eyelashes in a bid to look “more masculine.”

CNN Online, May 13

Staggering. To look more masculine we need to cut away a major protector for the only two eyes we’ve got? I know that as a group we males aren’t too bright, but … does being “masculine” require that much stupid?

Now, I know that to take any advice on personal adornment from a man who still thinks cargo pants don’t look all that bad may not be the wisest course. But please, if you know someone who is considering eyelash-shaving, try to talk them into doing something else just as ridiculous but less harmful. Like wearing elephant pants. I did that in 1972 and lived to tell about it.

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On our camping excursion last weekend we saw two creatures that were new to us. The book says that neither of them is a rarity, but no member of our party had seen them before.

The Long-nosed Leopard Lizard.

(Say the name out loud. Sort of rolls off the tongue.)

The Great Basin Gopher Snake. Harmless. Beautiful coloration.

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Two of a Kind, by John Kay

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The Birds

jono55

The hummingbirds are back at the feeders! I’ve been putting fresh sugar/water out there for the past three weeks or so, watching every day, and Sunday afternoon the first black-chinned traveler showed up.

You can clearly see a purple bib in this pic (not mine) below the black chin.

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The black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) has a pretty distinct migration pattern:

Spring Migration (northward): They leave their wintering grounds in western Mexico (especially along the Pacific coast and parts of central Mexico) around February to March. They move north through the southwestern U.S. and reach their breeding grounds by late March to early May.

Breeding Range (summer): They breed mainly in the western United States — places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California, and into southern British Columbia.

Fall Migration (southward): By late August through September, they start moving south again toward Mexico for the winter.

Wintering Grounds: Mostly western and central Mexico, but some may overwinter in southern Texas along the Gulf Coast.

AI generated text in response to the query: Describe the migration pattern of the black-throated hummingbird.

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Transcendental Blues, by Steve Earle

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It was well known that director Alfred Hitchcock had a thing about casting blonde women as heroines in his films. The quintet at left is (clockwise) June Howard-Tripp, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Eva Marie Saint. There were others.

As far as Hitchcock was concerned, blonde was all there was to say about female beauty.

This obsession led him to cast Hedren in The Birds. Now I’ve seen this movie a couple of times, and although I have absolutely no credentials as a critic, It appears to me that Ms. Hedren could not act her way out of a paper bag, whatever other sterling qualities she might have had.

The Birds, for younger readers, was a film where the ornithologic fauna of a small seaside town turned on the humans, pecking them in all sorts of horrible ways (the eyes … why did they go for the eyes?). While being pursued by murderous titmice wouldn’t be too scary, when the bird in question is the size of a big seagull or raven, the grim possibilities were more obvious.

Here Hedren is shown expressing abject terror, which is almost the same look as she had in the photo above where she was smoking a cigarette in a diner. Although there is an errant lock of hair in the attack photo she reveals not a wrinkle or a squint in either one.

But back in 1963 when the movie came out, one could easily overlook her limitations and allow oneself to actually ponder what it would be like if terror came fluttering from the skies to seek you out. Yes, even hummingbirds. Those little beaks are ever so pointy.

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Who You Are, by Pearl Jam

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We have a family of garter snakes that lives under the concrete platform outside our front door. Even though I know that they’re there, occasionally I am still startled when a nearly three-foot long member of the family comes undulating by me a few inches below my feet. Neighbors have told me that I could just fill the small hole that is the entrance to their burrow and it would be goodbye snakes.

Problem is that there is no way for me to know if any members of that family are at home should I decide to mix up a little concrete and pour it in. And trapping any of them in there would be completely unacceptable.

If there is a creature in this universe that offers less harm to me than the garter snake I don’t know what it would be.

It’s quite the other way around, actually. The small patch of grass that is our front lawn is one place that the snakes hunt for food. Unfortunately I learned this by accidentally killing one with the lawn mower, as it was invisible in the grass in front of me. Now when I mow the area I move as slowly as the machine will go, watching carefully for blades of grass that start waving suspiciously.

At one point in my kid-ship our family lived on an acre of land a couple of miles out of town. Next to our home was a grass-covered vacant lot. Our dog at the time was named Sandy. He was a very goodhearted dog of uncertain parentage that my father had taken in. Sandy loved to wander in that tall grass next door, and every once in a while would come up with a garter snake in his mouth that he would carefully bring unharmed to our lawn, where he released it. Catch and release, like a trout fisherman.

One day as I was up to no good at all reading Mad magazines, I heard my mother scream from somewhere outside the house. The horror registered in that outcry brought the entire family to the scene, where we found Mom with a full laundry basket in her hands, standing under the clotheslines, and surrounded by at least fifteen snakes that we could count. Sandy had been busy.

Bravely I waded in to her rescue, clearing away all reptiles from her path back to safety. I don’t remember her ever thanking me for that good deed, perhaps she took umbrage because I was laughing so hard.

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People have been trying to write rock’s obituary ever since its birth. Already in 1957 the group Danny and the Juniors felt that they had to offer up the defensive tune Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay. Gaslighting critics clamp themselves like barnacles on to the shiny next thing and off they go, leaving the supposed corpse of the genre behind. And yet here we are, new bands continuously arising. Some we become aware of, others just as worthy, perhaps, never get out of the bar scene. But rock obviously means something to its audience. It is music that resonates.

Within that genre there are jam bands. Goose is the latest to come to my attention, and when I played that first cut on Apple Music there was an instant connection made. I looked through their albums and Perfecto! They have an album called “Live At The Capitol Theater,” which contains 53 songs. Who would have the nerve to do such a thing but a jam band? And a concert film on YouTube that is three hours long? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQSavJ-sULs . What can I say?

Give It Time, by Goose

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A day brightener … sorta …

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The Wolves Survive

jono55

It’s around midnight and we’re headed for a possible freeze tonight. There’s a small rain falling … turning to snow … not enough to do much good in a parched countryside but more than enough to dampen a cat’s spirits, and they are complaining.

Of our two cats, Poco is the one who grouses loudly. Willow is much more the stoic. Her attitude is to silently shrug her shoulders and take on a look that says quite clearly “Whatever.”

As for me, I take a sip of my tea and thank the gods that be for central heating and a good roof.

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Hard Times, by Gangstagrass with Kaia Kater

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I dunno, there are days when I think that president Cluck is giving billionaires a bad name, don’t you? Most of the oligarchs that I know personally* are not showoffs at all, but much prefer to do their work behind doors or Chinese screens or on yachts well beyond the reach of landlubbing paparazzi and their telephoto lenses. But Cluck can’t stand it if the attention wanders even for an instant from his ever-enlarging corpus.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can sympathize with many of the sayings that have accumulated over the centuries about the ultra wealthy. Let’s examine just a few of them:

  • The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. Karl Marx
  • When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die. Jean-Paul Sartre
  • It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus Christ
  • Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Honore Balzac

There is one saying that goes all the way back to a guy named Plutarch, and that is: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” That’s one we are dealing with right now. The amount of the world’s wealth that is today in the hands of a very few men and women reliably excites emotions like jealousy and envy among the not-so-fortunate, as it creates a class of people who feel they have little to lose by resorting to theft or violence.

Innately we know that such a situation cannot long endure, but eventually is likely to end in some form of high unpleasantness.

*Actually, I don’t know a single oligarch personally. My family of origin is 100% oligarch-free.

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It’s not too hard to see how this Los Lobos song from 1984 can be applied to the confusion and disorder of today. The lyrics have become less a metaphor and more a documentary.

Through the chill of winter
Running across a frozen lake
Hunters are out on his trail
All odds are against him
With a family to provide for
The one thing he must keep alive
Will the wolf survive?


Driftin’ by the roadside
Lines etched on an aging face
Wants to make some honest pay
Losing to the range war
He’s got two strong legs to guide him
Two strong arms keep him alive
Will the wolf survive?


Standing in the pouring rain
All alone in a world that’s changed
Running scared, now forced to hide
In a land where he once stood with pride
But he’ll find his way by the morning light


Sounds across the nation
Coming from young hearts and minds
Battered drums and old guitars
Singing songs of passion
It’s the truth that they all look for
Something they must keep alive
Will the wolf survive?
Will the wolf survive?

Will The Wolf Survive, by Los Lobos

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While we’re on the subject of wolves, one of my photographer heroes died on April 4 of this year. Jim Brandenburg was his name and most Minnesotans have seen his work, even if they didn’t always know his name. He had two galleries, one located in Luverne MN, where he grew up. The other was in Ely MN, one of my favorite places in the world.

One of his recurring subjects was the wolf, and perhaps his best known photograph was this one, “Brother Wolf.”

Brandenburg’s work was published many times in National Geographic magazine, giving him a following well beyond the borders of my old home state. Every one of the photographs in every one of those books he published is so good it makes me want to just throw away my camera. Truly extraordinary.

Here’s the briefest of galleries of his work. Want to make someone who loves the natural world happy? … give them one of his books, or perhaps a print. Or, even better, a print and a book.

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David Brooks is my favorite kind of conservative. One with a functioning cerebrum. His op-ed piece in Friday’s Times is spot on, and quite different from his usual take-it-easy approach. The title of the piece gave me a chuckle.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IS NOT NORMAL. AMERICA NEEDS AN UPRISING THAT IS NOT NORMAL.

What he is saying is what a growing number of grassroots organizations have been telling us for a while now, and having only relatively recently waked from my own personal stupor I am glad to see Brooks join the movement.

So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.

David Brooks: What’s Happening Is Not Normal, New York TImes of April 18, 2025.

So David is thinking about hitting the streets, and that will be good for his soul and the causes he believes in. He will attract others more cautious than he is. If enough Brookses and like-minded folks get out there together under the same banner the right will prevail. History has shown the way.

I remember the day when, after years of scattered protests and much impassioned rhetoric that I watched the news and saw a very large parade of mothers marching against the war in Viet Nam. It was at that moment that I knew the war was finally over, and President Nixon was going to have to wind it down the best he could. Such a broad and passionate political force could not be withstood, and he was smart enough to know it.

Cluck’s lust for power has already created an effluvium that now touches the life of every single person in this country, mostly for ill. When enough people wake up and realize what is happening to them, there won’t be a parking place to be found anywhere near the rallies that will erupt around the US. At that point, this “war,” too, will be over.

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(Migra or La migra is an informal Spanish language term for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), United States Border Patrol, and related institutions. It has negative connotations)

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No Bad News

jono55

It is so tempting for a weak-willed man like myself to say something about the World of Cluck every day, because the insults and outrages come at us just that fast. That is how that particular crapslinger-in-chief works, jabbing and then oozing away, leaving a slime trail and the listener off balance.

What I will say is that the healthiest thing for any one of us to do is step back, let Cluck flail away in a vacuum, and work hard to hollow out the ground under his feet.

We are now witness to the damage possible when two mentally unstable billionaires get together and run a country, so this would be one good place to start. I doubt that there has been any time in history when wealthy men didn’t have more power than the peasantry, but it is greatly magnified right now, and we can clearly see that it is not in America’s interest to let it continue unchecked.

Speaking as a lifelong peasant, getting rid of Citizens United would be my first step. Allowing another farce like this past election, where one man bought himself a president, should not be allowed to happen again.

Right now Congress is too weak to do the job, so my question would be – what do you and I do to change the composition of those two bodies in the upcoming mid-term elections? Where best to put our energies?

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No Bad News, by Patty Griffin

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When a limited cook like myself looks for something new to try, these days the internet is just too tempting as a resource. But what has become obvious to me is that the old and disciplined recipe books of the past provided something that an internet search on “How to make the best omelet in the universe” does not. Reliability and editing are the differences.

Generally any book-published recipe has been tested and retested over time, and the text has been proof-read. All sorts of mischief can come into play when these are lacking. For instance:

  • You may find that following the recipe faithfully and executing each step perfectly produces a nice plateful of heartburn
  • You may find that there are ingredients listed that never show up in the Directions section, and then … where to put them?
  • You may find that tablespoonful measurements are inadvertently substituted for teaspoonfuls – chaos being the result
  • You may find that although all of the nutrition is there in the final product, it is simply too ugly to eat

And yet, there is at least a 30% chance that later today I will look for yet another version of Mac n’ Cheese out there in the ether. I will type it into Google and trust to the result to feed my wife and I. It’s a mystery to me why I keep doing this. My grandmother would have said that I was soft in the head.

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Come On In My Kitchen, by Crooked Still

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Richard Chamberlain died this past week, after reaching the ripe old age of 90. Actually, when you get to that point you are past ripe, and well into the fruit leather category. I wasn’t a big fan of his, although I thought he did a good job in the original “Shogun”series back in the early 80s.

What I remember very clearly, though, was his effect on middle-aged American womanhood in 1983, when he was the male lead in the television series “The Thorn Birds.” He played a priest in that series, and each week millions of women tuned in, hoping with all their hearts that this would be the week that he broke his vow of chastity.

At work the nurses and female staff would recount the previous night’s episode in detail, and you could tell from their conversation that they were having a bit of trouble with the line that runs between reality and make-believe.

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Go Wherever You Wanna Go, by Patty Griffin

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Our cat Willow is on the road to recovery from … whatever she had. After seven long and heart-wrenching days she is finally up and about and beginning to eat once again. She is far from thriving still, and perhaps I am jinxing things by claiming victory … but it is her victory, we humans being mere cheerleaders.

A sick pet can be emotionally draining, because wherever love goes it goes full tilt and that is not a rational act but a step into a place that is neither wise nor completely sane. At each of the times in my life when my heart had been bruised I resolved to get out of the love business from then on. Too painful when it goes awry, I would say to myself.

A resolution that I never kept.

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Monday our beautiful weather took a turn from unusually nice to far from pleasant. The wind blew hard all that day, and that fast air passed over dry and open fields, carrying dust into our noses and eyes. Even though the temperature was around 60 degrees, wind chills were much lower.

Then on Tuesday we received the double blessing of even colder weather plus a snowstorm. Tonight the temp is headed for 20, and that can do some serious mischief among all those blossoming trees in Paradise.

So we’re socked in for the moment, but with a warm home, food, coffee, two cats, and absolutely nowhere we have to be. Life is good.

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One Word … Plastics

jono55

Robin and I just finished up the series Adolescence, on Netflix. There are only four episodes, for which I am oddly grateful, because at the end we were both wrung out, which is a testament to the skill and passion of those who brought the story to life. There was not a wasted moment in its telling.

I have witnessed enough real-life tragedies to have developed some defenses, in order that I don’t become a salty puddle on the floor with each one. But this one got to me, and at the end, the very last words uttered brought tears.

“I’m sorry, son … I should have done better.”

I suspect there are many parents out there who have said exactly these words at one time or another in their lives. I know that I have.

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From The New Yorker

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Fire On The Mountain, by Jimmy Cliff, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart & Bill Kreutzmann

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Since I last mentioned it, there have been more articles where investigators find microplastics in our body organs. It seems that wherever they look, they find.

Perhaps we shall soon be required to wear tattooed-on labels that read something like this;

  • Do not microwave
  • Do not put in oven
  • Not dishwasher safe
  • Use only mild detergents
  • Dispose of properly

Cremation may eventually be forbidden because of the toxins released when plastics are burned. We shall have to be recycled instead and be reincarnated as travel cups.

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The Graduate (1967)

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In the post just previous to this one I put up a music video that starred the Badlands of South Dakota in the back ground. The Lakota called this place mako sica, the early French trappers named the area les mauvaises terres à traverser, or difficult lands to cross. It’s one of my favorite places, and has much to offer in beauty and uplifts to the spirit.

I have camped there, hiked there, ridden motorcycles through there, suffered dehydration there, been repeatedly awed there.

Whenever offered an opportunity to visit this unforgiving land, I take it.

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Ripple, by The Grateful Dead

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Our younger cat, Willow, has given me a few more gray hairs this week (actually, that is impossible as there is nothing but gray strands up top). I am typing this while waiting in the veterinarian’s exam room.

This is the fifth day of an illness without a clear-cut origin or resolution in view. Blood work, urinalysis, abdominal X-rays, subcutaneous fluids given twice, two visits to vets … it all adds up to a metric ton of concern.

I was going to write that this business of worrying is one of the drawbacks of loving something or somebody, but … not really a drawback, I think. It’s where I get to put to good use those muscles of compassion and empathy that I haven’t used recently. Growing pains is what it is.

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From The New Yorker

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Eyewash, Brainwash, Hogwash

jono55

There is a continuing puzzlement in the world of birds and their admirers. When it was discovered that John James Audubon was not only a slave owner himself but a dealer in slaves the National Audubon Society had to do some soul-searching vis-a vis the name of their organization. Two years ago the national group decided they would maintain the name as is.

But they set up a problem for themselves, because many of the individual smaller groups under their big umbrella have been repulsed by the knowledge of Audubon’s misdeeds and renamed themselves.

John James Audubon.

Dealer in slaves and painter of birds.

It seems a shortsighted move on the part of the National Audubon Society to keep a name that honors a man who we now know to have trafficked in human beings. I think it inevitable that they will make the change one day, but by then they may have lost connection with these smaller organizations who have been more progressive in this regard. All of those will have new names of which they may have grown fond.

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From The New Yorker

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Biloxi, by Rosanne Cash

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Most of those who are reading this paragraph thought they were Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Greens when they got up this morning. But in reality, there are really only two political parties in this country at present. There is the party of Trump and there is everybody else.

I am only one voice. One person has very little power, but two people have twice as much, four people four times as much … you get the picture. For the longest time I sat on my posterior expecting the Democratic Party to fight my battles and to look out for my interests as a citizen. That was a mistake. I am looking for new banners to march under now, new allies in the struggles for a better world.

Why do anything? Why not let it all play out on its own? Well … I have a short list for thee:

  • We are now cohabiting with Communists rather than consulting with long-time friends in our international relationships.
  • We have dropped connections with the World Health Organization when we are the epicenter of avian flu. The CDC is being reduced to a shadow of its former self, and is run by people using hearsay rather than science, people who suggest vitamins rather than vaccinations in the worst measles epidemic in generations.
  • Offices that we depend on such as Social Security, Veteran’s Affairs, the Department of Education and many others have become a total mess because of intrusion by people given license by Cluck to do whatever damage they can.
  • The DOGE workers are not really as interested in to achieve economies as they are trying to produce chaos, because small men like Trump and Musk profit in times of chaos.
  • The hard working men and women in our government need a sane atmosphere in which to do their work, but sanity is in very short supply.
  • When the people in charge of our nuclear arsenal and stockpiles are fired and then have to be sought out and hired back something is seriously wrong.
  • When the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is already underpowered, has its staff diminished by thousands of members and cannot keep our promises to our veterans, something is seriously wrong.
  • When the guardians of our national parks are reduced in numbers by the thousands at a time when they already are too few, something is seriously wrong.
  • When all of this is being done to be able to offer more money to a very small group of people who already have more wealth than they know what to do with, something is seriously wrong.

Remember when I said “the party of everybody else?” Well, this amorphous party dwarfs the Trumpian grotesquerie in numbers, and if it can be awakened and shown the way to use its power I believe that much of the harm that has been done could be repaired. We could even go so far as to strengthen our institutions against intrusions by future crops of lowlifes.

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You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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From The New Yorker

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How about a few quotes to get the old brain focussed on a Sunday morning?

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis D. Brandeis

Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.

Thurgood Marshall

Ahhhh, that felt good. There is more than enough knowledge out there that could be used to build a society where we could live in mutual respect and develop just relationships, while largely saying goodbye to fear and want.

If you dig through the accumulated wisdom of humankind you come up with a conundrum. If we know what to do, and have been offered clear instructions for thousands of years as to how to do it, why do humans find themselves in one pickle after another? Why do we keep making such eminently bad choices? Why is it so easy to exploit us and pit us against one another?

(Please note the absence of anything coming from me that approaches being an answer to these questions.)

**

I do have one positive suggestion to offer. Remember the story of the old woman at her 100th birthday party? She had been married to her husband for seventy years until his passing a few years back. An interviewer asked her how she had maintained a happy marriage to one man for that long. Without a pause she answered: “Low expectations”.

That might sound like a rueful or negative answer, but isn’t it really a re-statement of Mr. Voltaire’s aphorism: “Don’t Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good.” The phrase reveals the pitfalls of perfectionism.  The pursuit of perfection can lead to inaction or the abandonment of valuable, but imperfect, solutions. 

The lady in the story recognized this and took her man for what he was rather than exhaust herself in making him into someone he might never be. Perhaps she kept the small hope that he wouldn’t chew his food with his mouth open or wear stripes with plaids, but she was willing to wait it out while enjoying his company.

A society could do the same thing. Pick the good stuff out of the mess in front of it, and accept that as a beginning. Then move forward in a process of continuous and methodical improvement rather than have some pre-formed idea of a perfect final product and fight over how to get there.

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At present we have a set of socio-political problems that don’t lend themselves as well to the gradual approach outlined above. May I offer a poor example of a parable?

A farmer looks out his window and sees that his fields need some serious tending or the crops will wither and die, but there is a grizzly bear in the yard between him and the fields. He knows what he needs to do to save his grain, but first … he needs to deal with the bear.

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Angel Dance, by Los Lobos

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Each year large flights of Sandhill Cranes pass near Paradise on their migration north, and spend an evening on a small reservoir near a very small town an hour away from our home. The local Audubon Society sets up spotting scopes in several places near the water and invites the public to come for a viewing. Friend Rod and I drove out Saturday morning and did just that.

We only saw nine cranes, which apparently were the vanguard of a much larger flock coming tomorrow and Monday. No matter. The ones we saw were big and beautiful.

The host birders also found a golden eagle sitting on some irrigation equipment and a nesting pair of bald eagles for us to look at.

At noon a livestock association served up a free meal for the public. Free. Food. Took a few photos.

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Goosed

jono55

There is a wonderful film out there called Winged Migration that I can recommend highly. If you have never seen it, perhaps your library has a copy to borrow, or you can rent it on Amazon for less than four bucks. It documents the truly amazing journeys of many species of birds around the world. The hardships they face, sometimes overcoming and sometimes … well … you have to see the film to appreciate them, I think.

One overarching theme is how long these epic flight paths have been in existence, and what changes have gone on in the world beneath their larger family over time. But the earth turns, the birds fly, and even if our own species eventually self-destructs, the migrations will go on and on. They are ancient, much more durable than humans and their dramas. What is obvious is that we rarely have a positive influence on the natural world. We are more of an insult.

But enough of this light-heartedness, let’s get serious for a moment. I don’t know if you can call it courage as we define it in our own lives, but these migrations seem courageous endeavors to me. If I could flap my arms and once travel even ten miles to a new location, I would be crowing about it for the rest of my life.

We have a tendency to denigrate the achievements of other species, our calculations somehow always making us come out at the top of the heap. It’s just instincts, we say, implying that these “lower” animals don’t put much thought into what they are doing. (Birdbrains, we call people who are missing a card or two in their deck.)

One of our problems in understanding other species is that we keep using our yardsticks to do the measuring. We prize problem-solving, so any creature that seems limited in that way is lesser. We are enamored of our houses, our tools, and our intellectual achievements. Never mind that our evolution to a “spiritual being” has resulted in widespread murder and injustices as our history reveals members of one group after another happily plotting the bloody demise of the other groups.

Nope, if I want to look for models of good behavior for a citizen of this planet, I have to look outside of our species. Take the greylag goose, for example. Both sexes care for the young, they travel in flocks where some members stay vigilant while others rest. They mate for life, which is something humans talk about but fail to do a great deal of the time. Up to 20 per cent of greylag geese are homosexual, which doesn’t seem to upset the other members of the flock one bit. And greylag geese have never ever committed genocide.

So I keep an open mind, because being called “silly as a goose” may not be such a bad thing after all.

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Flying, by The Beatles

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Think about it for a moment. We can’t fly, can’t breathe underwater, have relatively poor eyesight and sense of smell, couldn’t grow a fur coat if we tried, and our top speed is not quite as fast as a hippopotamus. 

A tiger would smell us before we came into sight, spot us way before we could see it, and would be drooling at the finish line with a knife and fork in hand and a napkin tied neatly under its chin.

Add to this humbling scenario the fact that our young take more than a decade before they can fend for themselves and you wonder how we got this far as a species. If we hadn’t developed tools and weapons we would probably be no more than another case of scratchings on a Siberian cave wall that said Glorg Wuz Hear.

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I’m A Song, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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It’s starting to get interesting (as in the curse: May you live uninteresting times). We may have a recession coming at us, which if it does, is clearly the work of only two men and their party. Usually recessions are a bit more nebulous in origin, but if this one arrives it will be the Truskcession for certain. Of course, if it weren’t for a spineless Republican party, they couldn’t mangle our economy the way they are doing. Have to give credit where credit is due.

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Wind Behind The Rain, by Jason Isbell

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Cool Water

jono55

The lightest of snowfalls last night, right around suppertime. If you blinked, you missed it. No need for shovels, brooms, or leaf-blowers. Just enough to remind you to turn up the collar of your coat and to wear a cap. This week I will dig out my backpacking stuff from wherever I put it, and begin spring preparations for overnights in the area.

Robin and I are very aware that being seniors we seem to be more sensitive to dehydration. When we were in our twenties we would take off on hikes without carrying water and seemingly never miss it. Now we never go anywhere outdoors without having a plan for our next drink. Get even a little behind and our energy flags significantly,

I use the Sawyer filters because they are relatively inexpensive, lightweight, durable, easily maintained, and reliable. Sort of a can’t-miss product. Takes care of everything but viruses, which is more than adequate for our surroundings.

Even on the short overnight camping stays that Robin and I will be doing, we check out each item before heading out as if we were embarking on an expedition up the Amazon River. Failure of an essential item can have consequences ranging from highly inconvenient to quite unhealthy. Many of the camping and hiking areas here in Paradise are out of cellular range, and as we’ve not invested in satellite phones, falls, burns, dehydration and the like are ours to deal with as best we can. Ergo – gear reliability is an important quality.

For a hiker, Paradise is … well … Paradise. We have countless mountain trails to explore, ranging from short walks to epic journeys like the Colorado Trail. We also have the opposite situation, where instead of climbing we descend into the canyons especially to the north and west of us.

One of our personal favorites is Dominguez Canyon, with its trailhead about an hour’s drive from Montrose.

Though this is a desert walk, there is water available in a creek, so staying hydrated is not difficult, as long as we remember to take our water filters.

Is wilderness water safe to drink without filtration? Here’s a stat to make one think otherwise. It is estimated that 90% of the surface water in the U.S. is contaminated with giardia. I’ve not had giardiasis myself, but have cared for many patients who did. To a woman (or man) they did not find the experience delightful. There is nothing about taking a long walk in a hot and rocky country that is improved by having sharp cramps and profuse diarrhea.

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Everyday Is A Winding Road, by Sheryl Crow

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From The New Yorker

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You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Our King/Fuehrer/Emperor Cluck decided that the Gulf of Mexico is not a grand enough name for something adjacent to his realm. So he has re-named it the Gulf of America. The rest of the world is scratching their heads and wondering to themselves, is he really that bonkers?*

Google and Apple, on the other hand, revealing to all and sundry that they have the spine of a planaria**, immediately changed their maps to reflect this new unreality.

A day later, the Associated Press, which does business all over the world, had failed to make the change in their maps, and their reporters were banned from presidential events forthwith.

Never mind that it is only Cluck and his sycophants who call it the Gulf of America. Although this is only his latest delusional piece, we’ll be dealing with it for a while until he is out of office, and the name it has had for centuries can be restored. In the meantime I think I won’t be vacationing off the Texas coast any time soon. I’d be worried that if I should need a life guard and holler “I’m drowning in the Gulf of America,” they might not come to my aid quickly enough, not being up with the times and all.

* Answer = yes
**A microscopic flatworm familiar to high school biology students, at least to those who opened their textbooks.

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Give A Little Bit, by the Goo Goo Dolls

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Dark shadow passes

Raven flying in snowfall

True black in true white

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Last evening we had friends over for dinner and spent a very pleasant couple of hours sharing a meal. Robin and I prefer hosting small dinner get-togethers of six persons or less. We find that conversations run smoother, everyone gets a chance to talk, and the occasional blowhard* is easier to control.

As the evening was winding down, we began sharing our physical complaints, adjustments to aging, and which of our acquaintances was in dire straits at the moment. As the misery toll mounted, I realized that the entire past hour’s discussion would not have happened if we had all perished before the age of forty, as in the good old days, like the year 1000 BC, perhaps. When life was “nasty, brutish, and short” there was no need for or profit in these mutual commiserative sessions.

“Nasty, brutish, and short” is a phrase that appears in Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan . It refers to life without government and the state of humanity in its natural, violent, and brutal form. 

AI search

Back then we would simply be rubbed out, perhaps by being careless in the vicinity of a leopard and whoop! End of story. But these days, living into our seventies, eighties, or beyond (partly due to a scarcity of leopards), we have the dubious luxury of comparing aches and pains and thinking we’ve had a discussion.

*Often yours truly, I admit

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From The New Yorker

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Urbane Cowboy

jono55

The lightest dusting of snow fell during the night. January is being its usual self, cold and gray and not playing well with others.

One of the bleakest sights is that of a winter sun, trying to shine through the frosted atmosphere. A round image with fuzzy borders, nearly white, with little of the sun’s usual gold or red tones, and little or no heat in it.

Just looking at it sets the marrow to tingling. Pass me that cocoa, would you please?

.

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I confess that I subscribe to the New Yorker to impress the easily impressed with my worldliness and sophistication. Of course, that doesn’t work with you guys who know that underneath my polished and urbane surface I am nothing more than a country cracker and s**tkicker of the first magnitude. But I love having access to the magazine’s cartoon archives, and plunder them mercilessly. When that bill comes due I will be looking to resettle in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

But this week there is an article that amazed even the most jaded part of my psyche. It dealt with the memory facility that some species of birds have in recalling where they buried seeds in storing them for the cold weather months. The title is: The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds.

The author starts out with his own problems with a lost beard trimmer and a misplaced pair of pants. He then moves on to the almost unbelievable feats of memory that these birds perform every winter to accomplish that most important piece of business … staying alive.

But his personal trials pale before those that Robin and I deal with every day. Most of our conversations now start with the words: Do you know where I put my ______? This query is then answered by the phrase: Don’t worry, it’ll turn up. While that used to occasionally be the case, it is no longer tue. When I can’t find something after a five minute search, I know that I will never see it again. It is gone. Vanished. Scotty has beamed it up and it resides in some other galaxy. Its molecules have left the building.

Several times each day Robin and I pass one another as we wander through the house with identical furrowed brows and frustrated facial expressions, she on her latest quest and I on mine. We don’t have time to commiserate what with all the opening of drawers and looking under sofas. When we empty the vacuum cleaner into the trash we now pick through the contents of the dust-bag and often find things that we didn’t even know we’d lost yet.

So it is yet another case where other animal species have skills and talents that homo sapiens can only dream of. I do admit that when I begin to regard woodpeckers as paragons, I just don’t know where it is all going.

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From The New Yorker

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Waggoner’s Lad, by Bud and Travis

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Even though I reside in The state of Colorado, which is filled with mountains and ranches, I am neither mountaineer nor cowboy. I am a transplanted flatlander from the Midwest and will never be able to shake the prairie dust from my shoes and soul. I’m not even trying.

Being a newcomer, though, has its benefits. I am continually gaping in awe at the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Whenever the moment allows I am poking my nose around mesas and over passes to see what is on the other side. My curiosity leadeth me.

What I have found is that often after I have lived in a new location for a few years I often know more about the immediate surrounding territory than some lifelong residents do. It’s almost as if when one grows up in Paradise, one takes for granted that Paradise will always be there to explore whenever they want to do so, so why not wait until next week or the week after that? Whereas the newcomer may realize that life is a collection of transient moments, and that they had better take advantage of opportunities as they come along.

That’s my take on it, any way. The most striking example I’ve run up against personally is when I moved to the village of Hancock, Michigan. That town only had a population of 4700 or so, and one could easily drive across it in two minutes.

Trying to find a part-time childsitter for our kids, I was interviewing an elderly woman who ultimately declined to take the job. When asked why, she simply stated that she’d never been that far north and was uncomfortable thinking about it. From where the good woman lived on the south side of Hancock it was only a distance of a mile or so to our home. I was dumbfounded, but accepted that one mile or a hundred, she wasn’t budging in our direction. Apparently there is such a thing as too much north.

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From The New Yorker

[Lord, I do love this cartoon.]

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In a previous post I sneaked in a folk artist who may have been new to you, at least he was to me, although he has recorded five albums and apparently has a strong following.

We have a local radio station, KVNF, which plays all sorts of excellent music, and several times a year introduces me to artists that I never heard of but instantly adopt. Such was the case when I learned about the existence of Jake Xerxes Fussell.

Unflashy, unpretentious, without a moonwalk to his name. He is the genuine article.

Here’s one more track.

When I’m Called

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A few decades ago I realized that in some aspects I was a mobile tabula rasa. Whenever I reside in a new area, even if it is for a relatively short time, I find myself speaking with local accents. If I make a new friend from a different part of the country, let’s say Alabama, the same thing happens. This happens without any intent on my part, as if I were little more than a tape recorder.

Lately, and to my dismay, I have begun imitating myself. Not my speaking voice, but the written one. I will be talking to a friend and realize that I am dictating paragraphs rather than using casual speech. I am verbally blogging instead of conversing. Any day now and I suppose that I will begin saying things like What a nice day it is comma do you have any plans for this afternoon question mark?

I begin to suspect that there is a diagnosis here, but I don’t know what it is. Parrot syndrome? Magpie disease? Dictaphrenia?

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Returning to the ongoing and seemingly never-ending story of vaccine disinformation, there is an op/ed in Saturday’s NYTimes entitled I’m the Governor of Hawaii. I’ve Seen What Vaccine Skepticism Can Do that I can recommend heartily. Well written, heartbreaking, anger-producing. Makes me want to find a pointed stick and begin some serious poking .

Pair this with one from last November entitled I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and I can just about guarantee that your blood pressure will rise ten points, so remember to take your meds and sit in a comfortable chair before reading them. If you can find someone to rub your neck … even better.

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No Expectations, by the Black Crowes

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Haiku, Winter

jono55

I have started to write the Great American Novel scores of times. Each effort was eventually scrapped. If I have any talent at all it seems to be in shorter pieces, essays, poems … the sort of meanderings found in this blog, for instance.

Which is why when I first came across haiku and bothered to learn something about it, I knew instantly that I was among friends. It was the economy of it all, the formalities, the natural themes that appealed to me. The Japanese must take all of the blame for starting me on this path. Traditionally haiku are three-lined poems, of 5-7-5 syllables per line. Most of those I selected today but the very last one are by Japanese masters of the art, but that 5-7-5 format did not survive translation.

To me, they are like photographs, whereas a novel might represent a movie. It’s not too hard to put myself or my experiences into the picture with haiku, which is part of its charm.

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When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.

Basho

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Song For A Winter’s Night, by Gordon Lightfoot

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Here,
I’m here—
The snow falling

Issa

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Going home,
The horse stumbles
In the winter wind.

Buson

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Colder Than Winter, by Vince Gill

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Cover my head
Or my feet?
The winter quilt.

Buson

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Winter solitude—
In a world of one color
The sound of wind.

Basho

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Winter, by Tori Amos

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Miles of frost –
On the lake
The moon’s my own.

Buson

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The snowstorm howling,
A cautious man treads upon
Bare and frozen earth

Anonymous

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Winter, by Peter Kater

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Some comments on the music –

Song for a winter’s night: there’s a cabin, a crackling fire, and a big ol’ down quilt to get under. We just have to find where Gordon put them all.

Colder than winter: I have experienced winters of the heart, and since I know that I am not unique, perhaps you have as well. Vince Gill never sounded better or more plaintive.

Winter: from Tori Amos’ first album, an exceptionally brave and talented young artist just getting her career underway.

Winter: yes, yes, of course Peter Kater is New Age-y as he can be, but it’s still a rather nice way to pass a few minutes. Remember how way back in those dim dark days (almost) beyond recall when your teacher in “music appreciation class” would put on a piece of music and ask that you imagine that it was snowing or raining or that the oboe’s voice was a duck quacking? Well … have at it.

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Alarum!

jono55

There are way too many alarmists working in the weather service. We were told to expect 1-2 feet of snow in the mountains above 8000 feet along with sub-zero temperatures. None of this sounded good to Robin and I as we tried to plan our Thanksgiving journey to Durango. We hunched over the weather app on my phone on Wednesday, waiting and watching, finally calling the pet sitter at mid-day to tell her “Game On.”

Predicted driving conditions

Our wills were in order, we had food for two days survival, enough warm clothing, and a reliable vehicle. We said our prayers and climbed into the Outback, looking tenderly at our little home for perhaps the last time. Off we went, anticipating treacherous patches of glare ice, hard drifts across the highway that could make you lose control, and trucks skating sideways right at us coming down a mountain two-lane road.

What we found was no snow at all on 99.4 % of the road, and temperatures in the thirties. The countryside was beautiful under a couple of inches of new and trackless snow. It was a breeze.

Actual driving conditions

I tried to imagine the home life of those prognosticators, how each flutter of a leaf or errant drop of moisture must send them into fearful spasms where they rush their families into basements or attics, handing out stored hardtack when their little ones cried out from hunger.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

I’m looking for a hive of valiant meteorologists. Growing less interested in what the Chicken Little variety has to say.

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Elon Musk is naming people that he might recommend to be fired when the new administration takes over. Naming people might be thought of as reckless of life (by uncharitable folks like me) when he and his new orange BFF have a large following of blackshirts and brownshirts who like nothing better than than to be given an excuse to hit people.

The richest man in the world publicly picking on ordinary citizens … anybody see a problem here?

Where’s my dictionary … let’s look under “bully” … ahhh … there we are. Perhaps that should be the name of his Musk’s new quasi-official-department: The Office of Cravens.

He fits right in with his new pal, President-elect Bonespurs.

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(Ran across a line from this poem, and just had to look it up.)

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die
and our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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There are those who speak our language, this English we trample on and murder daily, in such a way as to ennoble it. Or perhaps to show how innately noble our mother tongue really is. Maya Angelou had one of those voices. Each syllable ringing clearly as any bell. No mumbling. No idiosyncratic elisions. Poetry.

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If We Make It Through December, by Phoebe Bridgers

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So it is December. I must now join the consumer herd in search of some small remembrance for a handful of people. It is a dangerous thing, this entering a large and crazed group of people which has already been in motion for at least a month now. The herd slavers as it passes, every pupil dilated, every nostril flared, every breath labored. They have only just left one of the seemingly endless Black Fridays behind, and are looking desperately over their shoulders at signs reading: Only (X) shopping days till Christmas.

I will do my duty. I am no shirker. If overconsumption is required of me, overconsume I will. I am a full-blooded American, after all, and once I am galloping with the rest of the swarm it pays onlookers to be cautious of those sharp hooves and horns!

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Moving On

jono55

A bit about our family story. Every family has its tales, and this one is about geography. I moved from Michigan to South Dakota with my former wife and four kids. This was in 1980. Within seven years all had fled the state but me. My children ended up in a variety of places, including Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri, China … but none of them anywhere near where I was living.

After a few years of bachelorhood I married Robin, and took up residence with her and her three children. Robin was 11 years my junior, so her children were still in school in Yankton SD. But within a decade that trio had also packed up and left, this time headed for Colorado.

Robin and I had good friends in South Dakota, so stayed right where we were. Until a new crop of grandchildren started to appear, that is, who were all out there in the Rockies. Eventually those small creatures proved to be very powerful magnets, strong enough to draw us out to the mountains. We triangulated and chose to live between these pockets of kids, who were located in Denver, Steamboat Springs, and Durango. The closest to us was a 2.5 hour drive, the furthest was 6 hours away.

Today those grandchildren live in North Carolina, California, and Texas, with only one still here in the Columbine state. That last survivor is still in high school, so who knows where she might choose to settle once she graduates? It’s a common story of familial mobility, with nobody presently living anywhere near where they grew up, including Robin and I. There is no “old home place” for anyone of us to return to, except for the one we carry with us in our minds. Our blended family empire now stretches from Washington DC to Walnut Grove, California. Making in-person contact with everyone, every year, has not been always been possible, especially as the years pile on.

But I do have some small sense of what those mothers and fathers felt long ago as they watched their children walk up gangplanks onto ships that would take them to the New World, when the possibility of never seeing them again was always present. Those wharfside moments must have been some serious tug on the heart.

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Wooden Ships, by Crosby, Stills, and Nash

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Some new birds showed up on the berm in our front yard this week. I identified them as a pair of lesser goldfinches. Very pretty coloration, although not quite as showy as the variety of goldfinches who came to our feeders in South Dakota. They were picking through the dried heads of the black-eyed Susans for seeds that other birds had missed.

Jabbering clouds of yellow, green, and black Lesser Goldfinches gather in scrubby oak, cottonwood, and willow habitats of the western U.S., or visit suburban yards for seeds and water. These finches primarily eat seeds of plants in the sunflower family, and they occur all the way south to the Peruvian Andes.

All About Birds

(The black eyed Susans we saw them chomping on out front are in the sunflower family, just like the book says they should be.)

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Drift Away, by Dobie Gray

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From The New Yorker

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One of the joys of streaming television is locking on to a program that enriched you in some way, and then being able to revisit it down the road whenever you want to. Taking the same lessons away that you originally did, or finding new ones because you are not the same person you were then.

Robin and I are revisiting Call The Midwife. A series that ran for 13 years. One of those rarities where you could believe in all of the characters as they grew older or grew up. It begins in London, in a neighborhood named Poplar. A part of town that is about as far from posh as you can get.

A small group of nuns operate a public health nursing/midwifery service, being assisted by young female nurses who are laity. Many other characters round out an excellent ensemble.

The timing of the series begins in 1957, when the last of the rubble from WWII has barely been cleared away. There are sentimental stories mixed in with large doses of the profound grittiness that is life in Poplar. None of them rings false. Some nights, like last night’s episode about the harms perpetrated by the old London workhouse system, can be a hard watch, actually.

The people who put this series together did their research. Seeing what was available as medical/nursing care in 1957 in a poverty-stricken area and watching this evolve over more than a decade was very engaging for me.

It’s a series where no one is omniscient and mistakes are sometimes made, but the major characters have one thing in common, and that is devotion to helping people. The show has a beating heart.

On Netflix.

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Rank Stranger, by Crooked Still

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From The New Yorker

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Oh me, oh my. The company that kept me alive for five years has gone under. Is kaput. Those yellow trucks will no longer be rolling up rural driveways bringing real food to malnourished bachelors. I am, of course, talking about the Schwan’s company.

When my first wife had taken her Le Creuset cookware and moved on to better things, I found myself in a medium large house with a full kitchen but without the will to cook anything. I gave up on meal planning altogether and allowed the package to determine what supper was going to be. One of my favorite dodges was to buy a package of hot dogs and eat that every evening until it was gone. Eight dogs in a package eaten at the rate of two dogs a night meant that four days were covered. I was not fool enough to believe that I was eating healthily, since I knew that one cannot live on fat and pig lips alone, but that reckoning was for some future day and I was hungry right now.

Bread would go moldy, anything in the fridge in Tupperware became a culture medium for some of the most colorful fungi I have ever seen. Works of art, really. I had acquired a microwave oven for the first time, but had not taken the time to learn how to use it properly. It worked well for heating water, but when I would put anything that was meat into it what came out was more suitable for making shoes than for eating.

And then I discovered Schwan’s. An entire yellow truckful of deliciousness would show up in my driveway and all I had to do was to pick out what I wanted and give the man some money.

No waste, no steady streams of hot dogs, no interesting growths in the refrigerator. Instead I could eat chicken cordon bleu and it was pretty darn good for frozen food. Plus I now found something to do with that microwave sitting useless on the counter.

So I experienced a tender moment this morning when I read about the company’s struggles over the past decades, and their painful decision to retire the fleet. If it means anything to them, I am here typing this only because they fed me when I was a man in need.

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It’s In The Book

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s In The Book, by Johnny Standley

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Touch the Hand of Love, by Renee Fleming and YoYoMa

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

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

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

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

Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues, p. 176.

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

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

Wikipedia: Pronghorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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