politics – Little Home In The Valley

Whooo? Me? Cubist?

May 20, 2026jono55

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

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

Vocabulary.com

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

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

Why do I call him a polymath?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Santa Fe, by Tough Country

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My Man Cuco

May 17, 2026May 17, 2026jono55

Awright class, put away the phones and listen up. Today we’re covering a genre of Mexican music known as the rancheras. So here is a definition:

Ranchera, or canción ranchera, is a traditional Mexican music genre that emerged before the Mexican revolution, deeply tied to national identity and rural roots. Known for its emotive, passionate, and theatrical style, it features themes of love, nature, and patriotism, heavily influenced by mariachi music.

I’ve told this story before, but when I was sixteen I came across an album by a guy named Cuco Sanchez. In spite of being the poor and starving student that I was, I bought it when I could have had one by Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry instead. I’d never heard of Sanchez, had no idea of his importance (major) in Mexican music, and I didn’t know a ranchera from a quesadilla. (Actually, at that point in my life I didn’t know what a quesadilla was, either.)

But I fell in love with the album, and here I am sitting out on the backyard deck on a ninety degree day in May with an iced coffee on the table and Cuco Sanchez playing on my excellent Bose music system*. Cuco and I have a relationship that has lasted a loooooong time now, even with him having had the poor grace to pass away 26 years ago. That original vinyl album is long gone, but there are all these other ways to listen …

*The excellent Bose music system. Weighs only a pound, goes anywhere I go if I so choose, and reproduces most of the notes played by the musicians, I think.

I bought it refurbished several years ago and it looks like it is going to outlast me and become someone else’s treasure.

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Since every song Sanchez sang is done in a foreign language (bother), I will take this opportunity to reveal the lyrics of one of my favorites, Arrieros Somos.

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos
Y cada quien tendrá su merecido
Ya lo verás que al fin de tu camino
Renegarás hasta de haber nacido

Si todo el mundo salimos de la nada
Y a la nada por Dios que volveremos
Me rio del mundo que al fin ni él es eterno
Por esta vida nomás nomás pasamos

Tú me pediste amor y yo te quise
Tú me pediste mi vida y te la di
Si al fin de cuentas te vas, pues anda vete
Que la tristeza te lleve igual que a mí

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos

Oh, you want it translated? Sheesh. Who cuts up your meat for you?

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way
Everyone will have what they deserve
You’ll see that at the end of your path
You will deny even having been born

If we all came out of nowhere
And to nothing by God we will return
I laugh at the world that in the end not even it is eternal
For this life no more, no more we will pass

You asked me for love and I loved you
You asked me for my life and I gave it to you
If at the end of the day you leave, then go
May sadness take you the same as it does me

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way

Cheerful little ditty, no? I give it a ten for philosophical meandering, but a zero for danceability. Never mind the details, I’m a fan.

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Arrieros Somos, by Cuco Sanchez

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Cuco Sanchez, circa 1956. Both he and I have changed quite a bit since then.

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Friday morning I threw away several hours of my life and took the Subaru in for some scheduled service. At 90,000 miles, every “scheduled service” seems to cost a thousand dollars and take three hours. While that might be appropriate for a transmission flush, I really wonder if changing the rear window wiper blade is that involved. But I am not a mechanic, and don’t understand such things very well. It’s all a gamble, isn’t it … you pays your money and you takes your chances.

I recall reading an article decades ago that when It came to car service you only had a 30% chance of getting what was needed properly done. For myself, the high (or low) point was a long time ago when I took a new Volkswagen in for its first dealer service. The mechanic saved a little time by draining the old oil but not putting any new stuff in. When I left the dealership I turned almost immediately onto the freeway, and that was when I noted the warning light on the dash board. By the time I could safely pull over, the engine was toast. Morte.

However, there is always something interesting happening in the waiting room. Across from me is an old dude wearing a cap advertising a Belizean beer. Obviously that brew holds some special significance for him, although in the thousands of beers I put away when I was misbehaving in the alcohol department, I can’t recall one that would cause me to buy a hat to celebrate it.

On the other side of the room there was an elderly lady who was receiving a speech from the service representative regarding her latest car inspection. One thing after another was mentioned as not crucial at the moment, but which needed attention very soon. As the sixth or seventh item was read, she began to laugh softly. You could tell that she had reached the point at which any further listing of automotive needs and woes was a waste of time because the part of her brain that dealt with cars was completely full and could accept no new data.

All the way across the lobby is a younger man who is wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt along with what looks like a pajama bottom whose design I can only imagine was created by a person coming down from a seriously bad trip.

But I am serene. I cannot be shaken by problems that are beyond my comprehension. I simply take them as Divine Judgement, and am grateful that they are not more harsh than they are. It is possible, even likely, that I deserve quite a bit more.

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A great Pink Floyd tune, Fearless, here covered by Billy Strings. Respect + imagination + musicianship = good music. Crank it up.

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Things to be grateful for can sometimes be nasty things indeed. For instance, we can thank the Cluck administration for making no attempt to hide its rampant corruption, making it easier for prosecutors down the road. We can thank the Supreme Court for making it absolutely clear that it is little more than a modern version of the Reich Supreme Court that became a tool of Nazi Germany. We can thank the gallery of incompetents that is our Justice and Homeland Security Departments for revealing themselves to anyone with a perfusing brain that they are neither about justice nor homeland security, but intimidation.

So when it comes time to choose, it will be an easier thing to do. This November we have our first real chance to begin remaking our republic, following the guidelines provided by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. We can fire those Republican (and a few Democrats) toadies, and rethink how a healthier Supreme Court would look. We can start the process of removing Cluck’s fingers from the buttons that count.

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True Or False: The Sky Is Falling

May 13, 2026May 13, 2026jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Memphis In The Meantime, by John Hiatt

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

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

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

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

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

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Lipstick Sunset, by John Hiatt

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

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

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Dia De Las Madres

May 10, 2026jono55

Well, if I needed another reason to not go on a cruise, I found one this past week, when hantivirus was added to the number of things that a person can catch on one of those floating Petri dishes. An infected ship found itself anchored off Cape Verde, with nowhere to go. The people on the mainland didn’t want to take a chance by letting any of the passengers come ashore, so those poor sick souls were restricted to the kinds of medical care that one can find on a pleasure voyage.

Three passengers have died and several others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings

AP News

I am pretty sure that none of the passengers was warned of the possibility of inhaling rodent droppings as they slurped and chewed their way across the Atlantic, but this is just a guess. It might be time to revive the tradition of having a ship’s cat on board. Maybe two of them.

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Mother’s Day is nearly upon us, and for once I am totally ready. When it comes to some of these “special” days, I tend to be a little bit Scrooge-y, since it is my firm belief that they were invented by the Hallmark company to prop up sagging card sales. But honoring the mothers of the world … I can easily get behind that.

Without those brave souls who were willing to put their bodies (and sometimes minds) on the line the human race would have pretty much come to naught 300,000 years ago, as the first pair of homo sapiens would have been the last. There is not a doubt in my mind that if men had been appointed to bear the children we wouldn’t be anywhere in the fossil record.

Nope, the job of bearing children was given to the right people, that’s for certain. And this year I will gratefully honor the mom who lives with me. My own mother has been gone for nearly forty years, but on Sunday I will raise a salute to her as well.

We owe the mothers of the world. Big time.

¡Feliz día de las madres!

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When I was a medical student rotating through the clerkships, I had the chance to observe some really amazing people of the genre that we were taught to refer to as “patients.”

There was the young gentleman who managed to acquire a case of gonorrhea while up in double traction for two broken femurs. There was another young man who conversed in a lively manner with us as we were interviewing him in the Emergency Room, although there was a knife sticking out of his chest which we knew from the x-ray was in his heart.

But there was one young woman, a child really, that I remember today. She was only sixteen and at term, scheduled for a Cesarean section for reasons that I have forgotten. Cesareans were not as commonplace at that time as they are now.

Her surgeon was the head of OB/GYN at the University of Minnesota at the time, and he was both quite old and a misogynist as well. He had chosen to do the operation under local anesthesia, but the injected lidocaine did not work well and the girl screamed all through the procedure. When her baby was finally delivered she slipped into semi-consciousness from exhaustion as her wounds were repaired.

I was standing outside the operating room as she was wheeled out past our group of students and the surgeon who had performed the operation. She looked up at him as she passed, lying on the gurney, and gave him what I can only describe as a take-charge smile when she said:

“See you next year, Doc.”

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I rarely use this blog to express opinions, and I am rarely dogmatic when I do (long pause while snickering subsides). But on this tenth of May 2026 I can say without qualification that the world is better off for having cheese in it. What prompted this declaration was the slow savoring of a bit of Jarlsberg as part of my lunch.

I know that there are perfectly nice people who don’t eat cheese for a variety of reasons and I am sorry for their loss. When I try to imagine a planet without the following necessities of life I begin to weep uncontrollably.

~~Mac N’ Cheese~~
~~Cheeseburgers~~
~~Grilled cheese sandwiches~~
~~Cheetos~~
~~Cheese fondue~~
~~Cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster~~
~~Cheezits crackers~~
~~Veal parmesan~~
~~Potatoes au gratin~~
~~Quesadillas~~
~~Cheesecake~~
~~Philly cheesesteak~~
~~Fettuccine Alfredo~~
~~Pizza~~

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … can’t go on …

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One of the names for a group of weasels is a sneak. This pretty well describes our present government and the national Republican Party as well.

Here is an unretouched photograph of one such sneak, which includes Cluck and several members of his cabinet.

They are, quite simply, not to be trusted with anything that is dear to us.

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Zombie News

May 6, 2026May 6, 2026jono55

If you drive twenty miles east from Montrose on Highway 50, then make a right turn at the sign indicating the route to Silver Jack Reservoir and drive another 15 miles on a fairly good gravel road, you will come to Big Cimarron State Park. As parks go it is fairly small, with only a dozen or so campsites, but many of those campsites are along the Cimarron River and that makes all the difference.

Now, if you walk to the last campsite on the south end of the park and keep going on the narrow path you will find there, in a short while you come to one of those magical places, where the river leaves the woods and tumbles noisily past you as it makes its way toward its eventual union with the Gunnison River. There’s a pool that might as well have a sign posted in front of it declaring “Trout Present.”

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Just a couple of miles south of this campground is another one, on a small body of water called Beaver Lake. There are another dozen sites or so here that overlook the lake.

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And …. a couple of miles further along the road places you in the Silver Jack Campground, which is the largest of the three, on high ground looking down on Silver Jack Reservoir.

On the many visits we’ve made to this lovely area, there were always many campsites available, even on the busiest summer weekends. Really, these locations taken together constitute a treasure. And I haven’t even mentioned nearby Rowdy Lake, accessible on a short but rough road, and beyond that is Clear Lake which requires that you actually get out of your vehicle and walk a few hundred yards.

On our way back to Montrose we came upon a herd of elk grazing in a patch of open forest. About forty of them, big and healthy-looking and what can I say … majestic. Robin and I are always struck by the beauty of these animals whenever we are lucky enough to find them in the wild.

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Found this photograph on Substack, and thought there should be some sort of a medal that could be awarded this young woman for pluck and wit.

I suspect that the mastophobics who couldn’t bear to be in the presence of a visible breast were not mollified by her response.

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I have great respect for zombies. From what I’ve seen of them in movies, they are not to be trifled with, and can be surprisingly resourceful at times. They are never a force for good, being basically one of the forms that evil can take on Planet Earth.

So when I say that the Cluck administration is a zombie government I don’t dismiss at all the possibility that it can still do a great deal of harm before all of its members and their adherents are successfully neutralized. But they will be corralled, they will be removed from public office, and we will then be able to go back to ordinary legislative chicanery, which is unlovely but we know how to deal with it.

Unfortunately, while we have been stewing here in our zombie universe, the rest of the free world has moved on without us. We are already so untrustworthy that intelligence services of our former allies won’t tell us anything important because we can’t be counted on to keep a secret. On nearly every front we have moved backward while the world is going forward. Climate change? Human rights? Encouraging young democracies? Useful collaboration with governments that aren’t dictatorships? There really is not an end to this sad story.

Taking into consideration all of the harm Cluck has done to our republic, and all of the sycophantic enabling of him that the Republicans in Congress have done, is there a label that will better fit this whole unseemly gaggle other than traitors? And zombie traitors at that?

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(Periodically I will have what I have called a brain fart. Where a dormant group of neurons awakens for no apparent reason and provides me with a memory. Yesterday that recollection was of a joke which I used to tell often but it has been decades since the last time I did that. Before those unreliable nerve cells go dormant again, I will share it with you. What you have to imagine is that the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major speaks with a heavy brogue.)

A Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major comes into a pharmacy carrying a small box. Finding the pharmacist he opens the box, revealing a smaller one inside. Inside that box is yet another one and inside that one is a very bedraggled condom which he unrolls for the benefit of the pharmacist.

“How much for a new one,” says the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major

“Twenty shillings,” was the response.

“How much for repair?” says the soldier.

The druggist is a bit taken aback but answers: “That would be ten shillings,” came the response.

The Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major then rolls up the condom, places it carefully in the smallest box, then the next one, and finally into the largest of the three containers. He leaves the store.

The next day the soldier returns, calls the druggist over, and after opening all the boxes he takes out the condom, unrolls it, and declares: ‘The regiment votes for repair.”

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Trail Legs

May 3, 2026jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Taking Names

April 29, 2026April 29, 2026jono55

“They are fighting with Jesus.”

Comedian John Fugelsang came up with an awfully good shtick recently regarding the hypocrisy of Cluck, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson arguing that the Pope should stick to popery and let the three of them interpret the Bible. Here’s a couple of quotes from an interview published in Good Faith Media recently.

Fugelsang believes the U.S. media frames recent social media skirmishes between the pope, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson in an unhelpful way.

“I don’t think [the pope] is fighting them,” he said to attendees in Alexandria, Virginia. “He’s showing us all calmly and with no anger or visible outrage how to delegitimize and expose these frauds. He’s making them fight Jesus.”

and

Fugelsang also noted the challenge of what to call those who use Christianity for authoritarian goals, whether “conservative Christians,” “fundamentalists,” or “Christian nationalists.” He said he prefers the simpler term: “fake Christians.”

Couldn’t have said it better my own self.

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If you’ve been wasting your time reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a fan of Richard Thompson. Based on nothing, really, except that the man is capable of some of the best songwriting and guitar playing available on the planet.

I was late to join his fan club, because I hadn’t paid any attention at all to him until I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights back in 1982. The review made it sound interesting and when I sought out and listened to the music … I was gone, daddy, gone. I never came back.

There is a large selection of playlists that I listen to when I am involved in that most absolutely boring of activities – walking on the treadmill at the rec center. All of the music on those lists is from stuff that I own, but once in a while a piece comes on that I never actually heard before. I had bought an album for a particular cut or cuts and totally ignored the rest. I have no excuse for this reprehensible behavior but there you are. Mea culpa.

This happened just the other day, when the tune Her Love Was Meant For Me penetrated the standing fog in my brain as I was going into minute 22 of a 30 minute slog at incline #12 on the treadmill at 3 miles per hour. Whoa, said I, what kind of a fan can I be when a song this great is news to me? Especially since I own it? (Rhetorical question)

Here, take a listen, just to see what I’d overlooked.

Her Love Was Meant For Me

So what does all of this mean in the scheme of things? For dolts like myself? I dip into the past for the answer.

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When John F. Kennedy was murdered I didn’t know what to do with such horrific news. For days I was running on half my cylinders trying to make some sense of a world where one of its most important people could simply be blotted out by a nobody with a scoped rifle. Lots of water has flowed under that particular bridge since then, so when I learn that yesterday another bozo with a gun invaded a White House party I don’t miss a beat and continue eating my cereal. Life goes on, at least on the surface.

But deep down in there somewhere in my own personal dark web there is a pool of anger, cold as death. If I could learn about the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook and still do what was required of me the next day I can certainly do the same when a group of celebrities and politicians are briefly menaced. But that lake just deepened, even with this relatively minor episode. Numb? Don’t think so. Furious? Absolutely.

If the moment comes during my lifetime when we realize we don’t have to allow this particular insanity to continue and that we have the power to stop it whatever the difficulties may be, I plan to march while carrying my end of the banner in one hand and a taser in the other. You may have heard that there are men going ’round taking names … well, some of them are ancient souls. Like me, for instance.

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Taking Names, by Josh White

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The Orcs Of Congress

April 26, 2026April 26, 2026jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Her Love Was Meant For Me, by Richard Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shoot Out The Lights, by Richard Thompson

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Profiles

April 22, 2026April 22, 2026jono55

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

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

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

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

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Hasten Down The Wind, by Linda Ronstadt with Don Henley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blue Bayou, by Linda Ronstadt

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

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

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You’re No Good, by Linda Ronstadt

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

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

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

*professional: give it any definition you care to

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Can’t Find The Snow For The Fog

April 19, 2026April 19, 2026jono55

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

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

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

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

I think we’ll do just fine.

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

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

All Mixed Up, by Red House Painters

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

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

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

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Lonely Girls, by Lucinda Williams

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

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

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

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Some Day Soon, by Ian and Sylvia

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Scratching On Rocks

April 15, 2026April 15, 2026jono55

There is a CNN article which is calling this a “freakishly dry spring” in Colorado. Here in Paradise so far this year we’ve had 1.6 inches, which is less than half of normal, and our “normal” is already on the dry side. We are tentatively watering our brown lawns and hoping for the best. Unless a drastic change occurs I am looking for water restrictions by early summer.

But of course this has nothing to do with climate change, which is a well-known hoax, according to our clodpoll of a leader. He encourages us to use more petroleum products, turn our air conditioners way down until ice forms on the glassware in the kitchen cabinets, and in general behave in a way which all but guarantees that next year will be worse.

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No Expectations, by Jim Campilongo

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I’ve been reading Tracing Time, a book about the rock art of the Colorado Plateau, written by Craig Childs. While I thought that I knew a little about the subject, it is by now obvious that I am little more than a tabula rasa where such drawings are concerned. The excitement of acquiring new knowledge is in the room every time I pick it up, and that doesn’t happen every day.

All of the books I’ve read by this author are collections of stories, rather than learned recitations. He puts what he wants you to know into some character’s mouth as that person is talking to him over a low fire on a winter campout in the middle of a mountain. And after you are done shivering at the thought of sleeping on bare rock in freezing weather you realize that now you have an answer to a question that only an hour ago you didn’t know enough to ask.

Where we live here in Paradise is on the edge of a treasure trove of such art. The Fort Knox of pictographs and petroglyphs, if you will. Robin and I have explored a few of the closer collections and it only makes us curious about others. On one of our hikes that we’ve taken several times, the turnaround point is a boulder covered with such markings that is right on the trail. Unfortunately its accessibility means that some of the art is stuff like: “Rhonda + Derek.” I’ve made the assumption that such carvings are not ancient and indigenous in origin, but I suppose that there could have been a romantically inclined couple back in the year 1000 with those names, although I strongly doubt it.

One of the recurring images found in these treasuries is that of handprints. The artist dips a hand in the paint and presses it to the stone. Like a signature saying I am here. I am always moved by these. Even more than by the drawings of warriors or mountain goats. I am here.

My answer is Yes, I know you.

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My plea to anyone out there in Washington DC with an ounce of courage and patriotism is to push the damn button. Push it hard right now.

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If it weren’t for the fact that people are dying and the huge amount of physical destruction involved as well as the economic disruption worldwide, the Iran War That Is or Isn’t A War could almost have been written by Gilbert and Sullivan as one of their comic operas. It is being conducted through whims and tweets and asides at press conferences by a draft-dodging coward and a puffed-up religious dimbulb who was once a minor officer in the National Guard. A horrible joke of a war, but a joke nevertheless.

Any member of our armed forces who dies in this conflict is a life that has been wasted. The billions of dollars that have been spent already – thrown away. When you put buffoons in charge this is what you get.

Even if we toss Cluck out tomorrow and are able to put an end to this tragic chapter in American history, there is no overnight getting back our national honor, prestige, or claims to leadership. We have allowed ourselves to become a murderous third-rate country in the eyes of the world. Or perhaps fourth-rate, who knows? Post-Cluck we will have to start at the bottom and work our way up for a generation before anyone can begin to trust us again.

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Each of us
one face in the crowd
One nose pressed
against the window
One body marching
Watching

One witness out of millions
who say Enough!
We place ourselves
Between the helpless
And the oppressors
We are implacable

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You can find much written about the origins and meaning of this beautiful song. But when you listen you will probably find your own message, as I do. And that message may change from one moment to another. Because when you listen the second time you are not the same person as the on the first audition.

There is that very old saying that “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” When I first heard it, I thought yes, of course, the water flows past and changes constantly. Later on I realized that the man changes as well.

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East Wind From The Abattoir

April 12, 2026April 12, 2026jono55

I am presently re-exploring the delicious satisfactions of eating bagels. For quite a few years now they found no place in our pantry, being one of those high carb foods discarded way back when we were doing the keto thing. The keto thing went away, but for some reason bagels remained on the no-no list.

Now anyone looking at a map showing Montrose CO can see that we are about as far from a bagel-producing powerhouse as one could be, and the only choices here in Paradise are the dense things, fresh or frozen, that you can either eat or put under uneven table legs. Pale imitations, I know, of what one might find at a New York delicatessen.

But you can only eat what is in front of you, and pining for what you can’t have is lost time you won’t get back. Because even the bagels sold locally are tasty enough when you toast them up, and most of the fillings used in Gotham City are available locally.

So here I go, chomping away. I am a little puzzled about the variety called the “everything bagel,” which seems to be designed for people who are unable to make up their mind which bagel they really want. They can eat this thing and tell themselves that what they truly desire is in there somewhere.

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At an Indivisible social event this week the question was raised “Why does everybody in this room have the same color hair?” The reference to the omnipresent gray hair was completely apropos. Everyone in the group was over fifty years old, most were over sixty. One member of this pleasant gaggle mentioned a documentary he’d watched recently about the Viet Nam War protests, and everybody at those events was in their twenties. He wondered aloud “Where are the younger people today?”

It wasn’t the sort of venue in which to have a longer discussion, partly because the poor acoustics made listening difficult. But since I was marching back in 1969 and now I am marching in 2026 I can give you at least a partial “Why?”

During the troubled years of that Asian war a twenty-year old had a lot on his mind. He was learning that the government had been telling lies about the justification and the conduct of the war. He saw that thousands of men his age were being killed or damaged by being tossed into the meat grinder that is war.

And most important of all, he saw that he very well could be next one to go. That at almost any moment his body could be snatched up, suited up, and sent off to someplace with a name he couldn’t pronounce properly. He saw the unfairness of the draft, where rich white boys were often not being loaded onto those transport buses and ships, while everyone else had to take their turn. He learned not to trust authorities, finding that their goals and his were not always in synchrony.

So when the call came to take to the streets, his motives for showing up and burning that draft card or carrying that sign were not just for some lofty antiwar concept, they were self-preservative.

Now think about today’s twenty year-old. These people have never seen an American government that wasn’t openly venal, cynical, dishonest, or power-hungry above all things. Why should they believe that one could exist because some white-haired and arthritic dude says so?

I can hear some of you saying “Hey, wait just a minute, how about _______, he/she was a good one.” You’re right. There have been solid and trustworthy individuals, but the overall mass of it smells to high heaven. Reminds me of my childhood when a pungent and putrid aroma surrounded us when the wind blew in from the slaughterhouses ten miles east of our home.

Obama keeps coming up as an example of the good in government, and I mostly agree with that assessment. But when it came time for him to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, which was his right and duty to do, he was unable to get it accomplished because the Republican leadership had the power to completely block it. To not even let it come up for discussion. And this was not some singular or unusual event, but part of a standing pattern.

So how to get younger people involved? Heck of a question. What would be my first suggestion? Get rid of Citizens United. Reduce as much as possible the influence of those unimaginably large fortunes. Make it possible for someone to hold office for the laudable reason of wanting to truly serve the people they directly represent, and the larger body politic as well. To elevate the influence of character, rather than connections.

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Transcendental Blues, by Steve Earle

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This week my blog got a “like” from Edge of Humanity Magazine. I wandered over there and found all sorts of artistic treasures. One of its recent posts was a photo essay entitled “The Seduction of the Invisible.”

The essay’s theme is the particular beauty and mystery that fog brings to a scene, where the edges of what one can see blend into something resembling infinity. Worth a read, and the photos are lovely.

I am into fogs, except when I am driving, when they make me acutely uneasy. I am way more worried about who is behind me than ahead.

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Who You Are, by Pearl Jam

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Friday evening Robin and I drove an hour to Cedaredge CO, a lovely mountain town of 2300 souls which is located in the foothills of the Grand Mesa.

We were attending the Fifth Annual Grand Mesa Arts and Event Center Film Festival. Only short films are shown, and those with some connection to the state of Colorado. That connection could be the theme of the film or one of the people responsible for making it.

We were motivated to burn some of our expensive Cluck Gas and make the drive because one of the movies being shown had been submitted by grandson Aiden. It ended up receiving the People’s Choice award on this evening. Son-in-law Neil had also come to Cedaredge for the showing, and we had supper with him at a really good Mexican restaurant in town, La Familia.

Some of the other showings were enjoyable, some were puzzling, some were just odd. But none of them were boring. Totally fun evening, but for one sobering artistic display.

And that was composed of 168 pairs of used children’s shoes arranged in a circle. They represented the 168 young people that our military, led by incompetents and madmen, killed at the start of the Iran war. The reporting on that tragedy has already vanished from the news cycle, but it should be the preface for any article written about the senseless Cluckian conflict we are still wading through. A war completely absent a rational plan. We should be seeing interviews with the grieving parents . We should be seeing biographies of the hundred and sixty-eight lives that were lost to no purpose. We should not be allowed to so easily forget what we have done.

Their deaths are yet more blood on the hands of Cluck and Hegseth. Our men in Washington.

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Illusions

April 8, 2026jono55

Easter Sunday was a beautiful day here in Paradise. Amy, Neil, and Claire were here for a quick visit and we all took a walk around Lake Chipeta, a small body of water just on the edge of our metropolis. There were several fishermen and one fisherwoman working the water, mostly staring at quiet lines. We saw hundreds of trout swimming in the clear water who showed no interest at all in what the anglers were doing.

I had mentioned before we got to the lake that if we were lucky the pair of ospreys who sometimes hunt there would be around, and there they were! Such handsome birds. We were treated to the sight of one of them diving into the water and coming up with dinner in its talons.

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This morning I was thinking back on some old trials and as I remembered the healing that came from writing poetry I realized that I was not making present-day use of what had helped me in the past. I’m sorry, but it’s possible that my coping strategy may become your burden.

A life entwined with ours
And now it is returning
To its spirit home

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There is much to grieve these days as more and more Americans come to grips with the knowledge that their country is not and perhaps never was what they thought it was. It’s silly to think of someone my age suffering from a loss of innocence, but how else can I describe it? I thought at heart we were a good people, dedicated to the principles outlined in the Constitution and its amendments. I believed that racism, our most serious flaw, was slowly being diminished, an abscess in the body politic that was steadily being drained.

Now I am not so sure. The very fact that enough of my countrymen were vicious or dumb enough to elect someone like Cluck means that I was too much living in La La Land. But I believe that there are more than enough people who share my version of governmental and social naiveté and who can together face down this ugliness. The growing turnouts across the country in the No Kings rallies attests to that. The amazing strength that was and is Minneapolis when they braced the evil that ICE has become attests to that. But I harbor fewer illusions that this will be easy.

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No One Said It Would Be Easy, by Sheryl Crow

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A true tale. There was a very old and confused woman who had been hospitalized for weeks because she was so severely constipated. This was back in a day when someone could be admitted to hospital “for a rest.” At any rate, enemas and laxatives and the full force and variety of nursing and physician skills had been brought to bear over many days without much to show for it. Until on one momentous evening the lady, with a great deal of howling and many many curses, finally produced a monumental bowel movement.

The nurses were exhausted. The patient was exhausted. Suddenly the old woman spoke, not with her usual low-pitched murmuring, but in the loud and clear voice of a Shakespearean actor on stage:

Next time let HIM bear the child!

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Theme from Southern Comfort, by Ry Cooder

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Last evening Robin and I attended a lecture/performance by Craig Childs here in Montrose. The auditorium seats 602 souls and it was packed. He is a very popular author out here in Paradise, and has written several books on science, archeology, and the natural world. As he spoke there were photos and videos projected behind him on a large screen, all dealing with his most recent book subject, The Wild Dark.

There has been a ton published in recent decades on light pollution and the importance of holding on to all of our dark places around the globe. His talk illustrated that through the mechanism of two men bicycling out an abandoned road into the Mojave Desert on a course straight out from Las Vegas. Each night they would take readings on some sort of specialized meter, and they had to journey almost 160 miles before the lights of that city were no longer a factor.

The good news is that we are aware of this form of damage to our earth and the rhythms of our lives, and the world is slowly but steadily getting darker. Who knew? Humans capable of rational thought and action … c’est incroyable!

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Joyful Journey

April 5, 2026jono55

Living in the Land of the Mad King forces one into a sort of unreality mental bubble. Cluck does daily what would have brought down any other President in my lifetime. Or in the history of our Republic. He remains in office through the complicity of 95+% of the political party that put him there in the first place. This larger group has completely given up on what is good for the country and the rest of the world and focuses only on what will please their diseased potentate and keep each of them personally in office. Even thinking about them disgusts me and makes my food taste bad.

So down the road when His Rabid Imperialness finally succumbs, and he finally lies insensate on the floor of the Oval Office surrounded by the jackals who have kept him in power, remember that we need to extirpate the whole snarling lot of them. Root and branch, my friends, root and branch. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

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Could We Start Again, Please, from Jesus Christ Superstar

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A few posts back I mentioned briefly that I had just discovered that I harbored a malignant growth. Since then there have been many worried days, but now there is a happy resolution to report. There are cancers that are extremely difficult and there are those that are merely annoying. Two days ago the investigations finally revealed that I have the merely annoying kind. With regular maintenance examinations I will live until I unlive from some other catastrophe, such as a piece of the Space Station falling on me, or gluttony, or … you get the picture, I think. So, no more on this topic.

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Robin and I are now viewing the last year of the series The Gilmore Girls. The level of the writing has done pretty far downhill, and the latest episode “jumped the shark” when they placed two main characters in a faux Paris just so they could stare longingly into each other’s eyes while the Eiffel Tower glowed beyond their window. The series has always been entranced with the hyper-wealthy, and now there are Lorelei’s parents (hyper-rich), Rory’s boyfriend (hyper-rich), and Lorelei’s new husband Christopher (hyper-rich). We are beginning to watch merely because we’ve already put in so much time that we are morbidly curious about what will happen in the last episodes.

But we will stick it out, looking to the smaller characters for traces of what made the series charming in the first place.

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On Thursday, Robin and I rendezvoused with Allyson, Kyle, Justin, Jenny, Kaia, and Leina, at small spa outside of a minuscule town named Moffatt Colorado. The name of the spa is Joyful Journey. It was the sort of place where you could camp in a your tent or recreational vehicle, or you could choose to stay in a yurt, motel room, or a teepee.

Meals were included in the price of lodging, as were trips to take the waters. Everything about it was pleasant and low-key and would’ve been totally relaxing if it were not for the fact that there was a wind that blew continuously all day and until well after dark at 30+ miles per hour.

After walking around in a gale like this for a few hours, one feels totally beaten up by it and we didn’t stay up late to chat as much as we would have ordinarily. We basically walked from sheltered space to sheltered space as much as possible, but at evening the breeze relented in time for us to watch a beautiful moonrise. ‘Twas a good place to spend a day or two or even more.

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I Don’t Know How To Love Him, from Jesus Christ Superstar

Robin had taken a liking to one of my old poems and posted it on our bulletin board in the kitchen. When a friend noticed it, read it, and then commented favorably without knowing who had written the thing, I could almost feel my ego puffing up. It was written forty years ago, during a particularly stressful part of my life, when living in a temporary world of pain and disruption were producing some changes in me that forced my hand. I let out the poet.

That is my pattern. When things are going well, no poetry. When the feces has hit the ventilation device, out comes this person who writes two kinds of verse. Good ones and sappy ones. By now the sappiest have been long ago purged, and it does give me pleasure to occasionally go back through the remaining few, remembering the chaos that surrounded me when I wrote them. At this distance I am in control, when I wrote them that was often not the case. Today it is safe for me to read them.

I have been a fool many times in my life. Not always the same sort of fool, mind you, there is some variety there. In AA I hear often the phrase “I have no regrets” and I think … I could never say such a thing. Of course I have regrets, principally surrounding the hurt I have done others, especially my children. I wish fervently that I had behaved differently so many times, but at this distance all I can do is to try not to repeat the same mistakes.

Though today my former Christian beliefs have undergone quite a bit of transformation, I have not lost touch with them. Easter is where it all comes together. Some of the season’s trappings are amusing, with the bunnies and the chicks and all, but underneath the dressing up in one’s finery and the ham dinners and the parades there is the most solemn of all the stories. The concept of sin, the sacrifice, the ideas of death and resurrection. Powerful.

This poem was entitled “Easter Sunday,” and was written in 1986, when my first marriage was flying apart at Concorde speeds.

A cycle races through the countryside
White lines blur beneath the wheels
Gyroscopic forces hold us up
And keep our bodies from the road
I could have used a similar device
To guide me these past years
Whenever I was off the track
The wheel would right itself
Resisting that careen down
A painful and a witless path

No such luck was mine, or hers
We two pitched back and forth in time
Upon a vehicle already downed
I only heard the sound this year
A drawn-out grinding wail
As blood and bones of what we were
Were strewn along the road

People do survive these things
But never as they were before the crash
A part of me was left there on the ground
To dry and harden in the sun
The part of her that cared for me
Had hardened too
Out there on the road
Somewhere in territories west

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Everything’s Alright, from Jesus Christ Superstar

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Warmakers

April 1, 2026jono55

This photograph showed up on Substack on Sunday. Of an exhausted Ukrainian soldier sleeping in a trench with his companion. Harshness and tenderness in one heartbreaking frame. He is so young, so bruised and muddy. The cat holding on to his shirt with that single paw. There are tears to be shed for this pair of soldier-friends. They should be home, not out where people are trying to kill them. May God please damn all to hell the men who make wars.

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I have been so glad that our troubadours are raising their voices against Cluck’s depredations. In the Twin Cities on No Kings 3 there were musicians Tom Morello, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and Maggie Rogers. Music has such power. It slices right past any defenses or cynicism we might be holding up to shield ourselves and hits us where it sticks. Baez and Rogers singing The Times They Are A-Changing was a linear connection, a passing of torches.

There are many American men and women who have been on the right side of change and history, but none more consistently than Joan Baez. Her life and her music are well embedded in my DNA … CRISPR-ed in by time and circumstance.

Colours, by Joan Baez

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How fragile we all really are
Like straws of glass
In a windy field
We feel so strong
So confident
When standing on our own
Admiring of ourselves
Our beauty and the distance we have come
When suddenly a wayward wind
Breaks off a piece of us
And sends it tumbling to the earth

It’s when we soften, when we flex
And bend before the gale
That we survive
And when the wind dies down
We spring up
Wiser, stronger, taller than before
Ready now to leap another hurdle in the row
That circumstance has left there in our way

We can’t complain that life is not the way we wish
It’s not a promise
Of a road, a list of happy guarantees
Life is life
No more, no less
Perhaps it could be looked at
As a set of chances
To attain a goal, a happiness
And if we reach one, why, let out that joy
Crack open that champagne that you’ve saved
And celebrate your little victory
Before the day is done.

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Little Victories, by Bob Seger

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To me there are few pleasures in this world better than sitting down to a steaming bowl of soup. Not just any old slop, mind you, but something warm and liquid and composed mostly of umami. And if one lives long enough a list of favorites begins to arise. One of my own faves I first encountered at the chain of restaurants called Olive Garden. Its name? Zuppa Toscana. It knocked me off my chair.

Such flavor, such delicacy … even a bouquet! I gobbled it up and immediately ordered a refill, which I have been doing ever since when offered the opportunity. Like last evening at a local restaurant. Last night’s version was good, but not quite up to the original.

But here comes the good part. At least a couple of decades ago I ran across a bootleg recipe that promised exactly the same flavors as those of the Olive Garden version. It lived up to that promise and has done so every time I make it. So anyone with the recipe in their hand has a power that can only be granted by the gods – and now, standing in for them, me. Click on the link and be empowered, but don’t stint. Use a good grade of sausage and you can’t go wrong. Zuppa Toscana. You got it.

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Magic In The Machines

March 29, 2026jono55

Well, Dipstick Donald got his butt handed to him in Iran. He seems to have been caught off guard when the Iranians quite unfairly started blowing up the entire Middle East and blocking off of 20% of the world’s oil shipping. Every day there has been a new justification coming out of the White House for starting the whole mess, the latest being that Cluck was coming down with a cold and was out of sorts. If Melania would have been kind enough to rub his chest with a mixture of beef tallow and Vicks Vaporub we might have been spared the whole bloody mess and the deaths already accumulated.

How pleasant it will be when he is finally stamped with the letter “P” (for pedophile) on his forehead and can be placed on a sexual offenders list. That way we can keep track of him once he’s been booted out of office.

My own preference would be to haul him to Mar-El-Lago, lock him in there and never let him out. Only adult family members would be allowed to visit, that is, if any of them want to do so. He would be assigned the duties of PLO (permanent latrine officer), with regular and rigorous inspections by that loony Kennedy over at Health and Human Services, who could thus resume his old habit of sniffing cocaine off toilet seats to his heart’s content.

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Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, by MJ Lenderman

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Thursday we received a new refrigerator. When we moved into this house the departing owners left us a nearly-new fridge, but that new one became 13 years old and about two weeks ago turned itself off. Then on. Then off. Then on. We read up on the matter and learned that the average lifespan of such an appliance is around seven years, so ours is ancient by those standards. After much pondering we decided to replace it, rather than beginning a cycle of expensive repairs that were strongly suggested were coming our way.

To me these things are still a marvel, with their automatic defrosting, in-door ice dispensers, deli drawers, and mostly awesome reliability. As a very young child I knew only the word “icebox.” This was essentially a large and very well insulated cooler. It was not electrified and thus had to be fed ice periodically to do its job.

Such ice was available from two sources, one of them being a building three blocks from our home where you put in some money and blocks of ice came sliding down from somewhere that you could put in your wagon to transport home. The other source was a medium-sized truck that made deliveries of ice to the homes, and in the summertime there was a steady dripping of melt-water behind it as it slowly made its rounds, since the truck was not independently refrigerated. On a hot July day we kids learned that if we looked pathetic enough and held out our hands the driver of the truck would give each of us a large chip of ice to suck on. For FREE!

Then came the refrigerator. Magic. Bye-bye to the ice houses and the ice trucks of the world. You now had something you could plug into the wall socket and forget about all that mess … until it frosted up. The freezer compartment would build up a thick layer of ice that ultimately brought the machine to its knees and then there was nothing for it but to take everything out and open the doors to thaw things.

Anyway, Thursday we get delivery of a new fridge, and all we had to do is come up with a couple of grand to make it happen.

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My having some surgery a few days ago means that I’m missing No Kings 3! Damn. COVID already kept Robin and I out of No Kings 2. How in the world will the revolution go forward without me there to carry my spear, raise my dudgeon, spew my vituperations? It will be a pale thing indeed if this pattern keeps up.

I’ve been gathering Old English curse words and phrases, since the sturdy old f-bombs are so over used these days. I think that some of those in the following list show real promise, but now I will have to wait until another time to use them fully. Too bad, because we have way more than our share of jobbernol goosecaps here in Paradise, and they deserve to be pointed out.

Wærloga: Meaning “oathbreaker,” which evolved into “warlock”.

Bædling: An insulting term for an effeminate man or hermaphrodite.

Fussock: A fat, lazy, or scruffy woman.

Saddle-goose: A foolish person.

Puttock: A greedy person.

Gnashgab: Someone who complains constantly.

Scunner: A loathsome or horrible person.

Fopdoodle: An insignificant or foolish man.

Whoreson: A common insulting term.

Sard: Often cited as the Old English version of the F-bomb.

Fuccian: A weak class 2 verb, indicating an early form of sexual profanity.

Lickorous glutton: A lascivious or greedy person.

Jobbernol goosecap: A fool or blockhead.

Ninny lobcock: A foolish, clumsy person.

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An item touching on the recent death of our cat friend, Poco. A few days after his final office visit, we received this card from the veterinarian’s office. I thought it was a lovely gesture, and perfectly suited our present mood. Forever, of course, would have worked only if he could have still been young and strong and not living in pain and confusion. Loved the card, though.

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Awright … one more gallery. These images of Poco were photos taken by Robin and I that were then manipulated with ChatGPT to have a particular appearance, which they call the “Norman Rockwell”” effect. Cheating, right? But isn’t any alteration of a photo, whether by Photoshop or other editing programs, much the same? I know that this is carrying it quite a bit further, but it’s all along the same line, I think. What it means is that a rather inept guy like myself can produce interesting photo effects by clicking away without knowledge or understanding.

I am posting them because somehow these imitations of life are no longer specific to a time or place. They mean something particular to me, of course, but in a way they have become representative of the life of a tabby cat in general, and it could be one you have met, a cat who was looking out of a window or walking in fall leaves in a yard.

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Here are the originals, for comparison.

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I first heard the song Ashokan Farewell as the main theme for the Ken Burns series: The Civil War. I always assumed it was a period piece, perhaps dating back to the 1860s. But no … it was composed in 1982, by Jay Ungar. Such a lovely and wistful and evocative piece it is. One of those tunes that you’d have sworn was present, playing in the back ground, during your entire life.

Until I ran across this cover by Priscilla Herdman, though, I had not heard the lyrics. Of course they are sad. It’s a farewell, for God’s sake.

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Inner Children

March 22, 2026March 22, 2026jono55

I can remember too few things from my early childhood, but some of the clearest memories involve feelings. I remember when a puppy who I had bonded with was killed by a passing car on an elm-shadowed Minneapolis street. The implacability and irreversibility of the loss were things I could not process. How monstrously unfair it all was. For a time I made a mental fetish out of the puppy’s short life, and each day for weeks my thoughts swung back and forth from the crushing sense of loss to brief episodes when I forgot for a moment or two about grieving and simply enjoyed something. Anything. Then when I realized that I was actually living a “normal” life I would feel a terrible sense of being unfaithful to the absent pet. Slowly time took over and life began to ease as those feelings took their proper place, a place one could live in.

The oscillations between nonacceptance to guilt to nonacceptance to guilt ad infinitum in a landscape of misery and self-pity … I recall them very well. So this week when I found myself doing the exact same thing eighty years later I was not completely surprised. My skills of compartmentalization are much better now and I recognized that when the episodes of chest pains and flooding silent tears come suddenly I know that they are not permanent states but are of grief that will ease with time. And the guilt of surviving and being happy once again will also alchemically change into a deep respect and appreciation for the life which had been shared.

But the grieving is still an awesome force. It is the price to be paid for loving something or someone if that precious bit of life is taken away. It’s not a case of me over here and my late friend Poco over there. Our lives had become intertwined, grown imperceptibly together over nearly two decades so that his death has been a ripping away of a part of myself. An amputation. A violent lessening.

And just as when I was six years old and that puppy was killed, today I find myself crying out “This is not fair!” It seems that I don’t have to look far for my inner child at all. He is right here typing away at a Macintosh.

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Ashokan Farewell, by Priscilla Herdman

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We’re having 80 degree days this week, the forsythia are blooming hard and fast, and the fruit trees are following their lead. The stores that sell seeds and plants are already filling their shelves.

It is late at night and I couldn’t sleep so I took a cup of herbal tea out onto the backyard deck where it was a lovely 60 degrees. The slimmest sliver of a moon is nearly settled below the western horizon. The Big Dipper hangs right above my head. The heavens seem to be properly arranged. Kudos to whomever is in charge.

In the distance someone revs a car loud enough to possibly interest the local police, I don’t know. Maybe this sort of disturbance of the peace is one they let slide. Across the way from our house someone’s dog barks. Our cat Willow hasn’t come in from her evening rounds yet, nights like this one are just too interesting to her. So much night stuff going on.

During this afternoon I noticed a bunch of yellowjackets buzzing around looking for homesites. Time to get out the wasp traps. It is best if you can get them out early and catch the queens to shut down nests before they get started. Spring has sprung in full.

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Apple Tree, by Why Bonnie

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Our lives are like sweaters
Which are never finished
For as we add a row or two
Of length, to fit where we are now
A cuff or collar may unravel just a bit
And need repair

I think that sorrow is a time
When many rows are dropped at once
And slow replaced
The wind blows through the holes
That have appeared for others
To appreciate

We stop, pull back
Repair enough to make it wearable
Then go on as before
All knitting
And unraveling
Together

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A Pillow of Winds, by Pink Floyd

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King Oscar

March 18, 2026jono55

Well, we watched all 3.5 hours of the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night. I was yawning by 2 hours, even though there were some entertaining moments scattered here and there. But hearing for the umpteenth time in my life about how important sound engineering is to movies has not made it interesting to me. Call me apathetic about the whole technical side of the business.

If someone has to explain to the audience why what someone else in the industry does is a big deal … well, maybe it isn’t … at least in terms of entertainment value. Of course the movie industry cares about those people and how well they perform but to most of the millions watching they are an interruption in the glittering fantasy we tuned in to see.

Why not break out the shiny beautiful people for an hour and a half, create a flashy program aimed directly at the mindless and drooling hoi-polloi (of which I am a charter member) and let those terribly important and worthy folks have their own separate, beautifully organized shindig. (BTW, I know that there already exists another such ceremony, I only suggest that it be expanded.)

Perhaps I am completely out to lunch here, but I shamefully admit that in the 70+ Oscar ceremonies that I have witnessed I can not remember the name of a single Best Cinematographer, including the person who won last night. Maybe, just maybe, there many other clots like myself out there in the audience who are the ones dropping out as the years go by.

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Travelin’ Riverside Blues, by Robert Johnson

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I went looking for why the ceremonies are called “Oscar,” and came away with the realization that no one knows, there are only attractive guesses.

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This is a sardine, and this is a story about them. They are a small, oily fish that lives in the ocean, which is a long way from where I live in Paradise. So basically the only sardines that I encounter on a daily basis are found in cans, headless and stacked in neat rows.

When I was a boy and spending time on my grandfather’s small farm in southern Minnesota, sardines and pickled herring were nearly always available. Because Grandpa Jacobson liked them, and he was one of my major heroes, I liked them, too. But when I became an adult, and tried to introduce others to the beauties of sardine-ness, I nearly always failed.

Tinned sardines available to Midwestern and Mountain landlubbers are basically headless, but otherwise they are presented as Nature made them. You take a fish out of the can and you eat it. On a cracker or a slice of bread, perhaps, or all by itself. It has a smoky flavor and very small soft bones and goes down quite easily. It also tastes like a fish. For some reason, a fish that tastes like a fish is disturbing to many Americans, and if you add that to the fact that the creature is being eaten whole, well … I long ago gave up my missionary work among the heathens in this regard.

Somehow over the last thirty years I have become a moderately overweight man, a state that I am now attempting to reverse for reasons of health and appearance. The turning point in my going from svelte youth to pudgy senior citizen was during a three-month stint at St. Paul Children’s Hospital where pediatric residents were given free and unlimited access to one of the finest hospital cuisines I have ever experienced. But that is another story.

Today a lunch of sardines on Wasa crackers is relatively low in calories and very high in calcium, protein, and those desirable Omega 3 fatty acids that nutritionists push at us at every opportunity. So I’ve added a few cans to my pantry. Robin doesn’t share my feelings bout these little finny things, but isn’t revulsed if I eat them where she can see me doing it, so our peaceful coexistence isn’t disturbed when I open a can.

I’ve added a photo of a can of King Oscar sardines for your education. These are the creme de la creme in the world of sardines. you can see that when you open the can everything is neat and tidy. They are uniform and uniformly delicious.

If you choose a budget brand, do not expect that they will look like this, but rather they will appear as diminutive victims of gang violence, irregular and thrown into the cans with little ceremony. They taste just as good, however, and are as good for you as the loftier-appearing variety. Usually at half the price.

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Travelin’ Riverside Blues, by Led Zeppelin

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Leonard Pitts Jr. writes so well … I’ve been a fan for decades. So when I found this piece on Substack this morning that was even better than his usual level of excellence I had to share it.

Title of the piece? “The Fatal Incompetence of Donald J. Trump.”

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From the ridiculous to the sublime. The production number shown at the Oscar ceremonies. Ay ay ay, what beautiful things imaginative people can bring into existence. There is a great line early on in this video, and that is: “You keep dancin’ with the Devil … one day … he’s gonna follow you home.” I will only say Amen to that, Brother.

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Writing Gibberish And Proud Of It

March 15, 2026jono55

I just did something that I try to avoid, and that’s look at a long-term weather prediction. Long-term meaning anything beyond 48 hours. But the weather apps are fearless, and they will routinely take a shot at the next two weeks or even longer periods. Which is how I discovered that the high temperature this coming Friday is predicted to be 87 degrees here in Paradise.

Zounds … I say … zounds! There is still much of March to come! A handful of the trees in town are beginning to leaf out. Any minute now the forsythia will be blooming. The beaches will soon fill with tourists.

Merde! Wait a minute! There are no beaches here in Paradise! I speaketh gibberish!

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Every Day Is A Winding Road

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I recently had to admit to myself that I’ve never given Sheryl Crow proper respect as an artist. Which is odd, since I’ve liked almost everything she has recorded. Fortunately for Ms. Crow, there are millions of people who are smarter about that than I. My favorite album of hers so far is entitled Sheryl Crow and Friends, which was recorded live in Central Park in NYCity in 1999, and I’ve provided three cuts from it.

She is one tough lady, having survived breast cancer, a brain tumor, and Lance Armstrong.

When Crow wanted a family and a reliable man could not be located, she adopted two boys who are now young men. A strong move for a single woman in the entertainment industry. Reminds me of this feminist poster from way back then.

Leaving Las Vegas

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Cartoons to warm the heart of just about anyone with an intact soul. Love the George Washington quote.

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It’s less than two weeks now until No Kings 3. If you are anywhere near our corner of the world and wish to poke your metaphoric thumb into the figurative eye of the MAGA cultists, come and join us on March 28. We’re going to have a band, a good long honk and wave session along Highway 550, and some appropriate (but brief) speechifying. It’s shoestring grassroots resistance at its best.

There will also be a contest based on the theme: Where the hell is Congress? The winner will be anyone who can tell us the location of this important and woefully impotent body of representatives.

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If It Makes You Happy

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Saturday one more of my letters to the editor was published in the Montrose Press. I was a little surprised because it is the crankiest one yet, and there have been less fiery missives which have not seen the light of day in that newspaper. Here it is.

As we enter yet another phase of our national Trumpian nightmare and invade yet another country, the consequences of which could be very bad indeed, I find myself wondering again how anybody could support such a man. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, should we?

Maybe they don’t know what a pedophile is
Maybe they don’t know what human trafficking is
Maybe they don’t know what a felony is
Maybe they don’t understand what a traitor is
Maybe they can’t see grift and corruption as the enemies of democracy that they are … maybe they don’t care
Maybe they don’t have the imagination necessary to see the importance of living in a country based on economic and social justice and the rule of law
Maybe they haven’t looked up the meaning of the word degeneracy yet

So many questions come to mind. But one thing is clear. If anyone supports this man and his cronies, they share the blame for the harm that is being done to our country and the rest of the world, and it is legitimate to make judgements as to their wisdom, their morality, and their fitness as American citizens.

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Return to One Meat Ball

March 11, 2026March 11, 2026jono55

We are looking forward to watching the repopulation of the plants in the Black Canyon National Park. Readers will recall that last year there was a significant fire that torched much of the park, and has left us with fewer options on our visits. For instance, the campgrounds are closed, having suffered much damage to structures and campsites. The road down to the canyon floor at East Portal remains closed with no re-opening date set as yet. Concerns about rockslides and mudslides on this steep stretch of highway have kept visitors from having access to the Gunnison River.

But it is the plant life that I am interested in. The Gambel oaks and the serviceberries and the grasses and the lupines and the piñons … what are they going to do this coming Spring? Will they all come back? It’s a hard life for a plant up there, with rocky soil and scant water, even in good times. A story is about to unfold and I am ready to learn from it.

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One for My Baby, by Josh White

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The South Rim of the Black Canyon Nation Park has a single road of about seven miles in length that runs the length of the park. During the cold weather months the road is blocked off from the Visitor Center onward and becomes a cross-country ski trail. Each Spring there is a short period between when the narrow two-lane road is completely free of snow and when it is opened to automobile traffic. If you are lucky and can make it up there during that time, it is a wonderful and dramatic bicycle ride, completely un-bothered by cars. You have the road to yourselves.

You can ride your bikes the rest of the year, of course, but there is little in the way of a shoulder for much of the road, and there are few areas where cars can safely pass you, so they tend to pile up behind your bike and make you nervous. This makes for a lot of getting on and off the highway whenever possible just to let those frustrated drivers get on with their trip.

But that golden window is just about upon us when we have the trifecta of good weather, a dry road, and no cars. Can’t wait.

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Jelly, Jelly, by Josh White

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Robin and I have been using electric bicycles for the past four years, and really enjoy them. I don’t want to overplay the geezer card, but these machines really flatten the hills and enable us to take longer rides than we ordinarily would on non-motorized cycles. They only have two major drawbacks. One is that unless you are able to fork over more than about three grand for a luxo model you will be riding a heavier bike that weighs about 60 pounds or more. The second is that if you really want to cover a lot of ground on your ride you are limited to how far your particular bike will go on the battery’s charge. For the machines that Robin and I are using, the range is around 40 miles, depending on terrain.

The Optibike R22 Everest is presently the e-bike with the longest range, boasting a 300-mile capacity (482 km) via a 3,260Wh dual-battery system. To acquire this technological marvel all you have to do is give the dealer something over $18,900.

I did give it just the briefest consideration but eventually decided against buying one, deciding that it was better for Robin and I to be able to eat.

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Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed, by Josh White

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Josh White has been a favorite of mine since I was sixteen and first heard him sing One For The Road while I was sitting in my car and gnawing on a bag lunch on the University of Minnesota farm campus. At the time I knew nothing about him and his life, just being entranced by the voice and the guitar. Turns out that he had a fascinating life and played several important roles along the way.

White was in many senses a trailblazer: popular country bluesman in the early 1930s, responsible for introducing a mass white audience to folk-blues in the 1940s, and the first black singer-guitarist to star in Hollywood films and on Broadway. On one hand he was famous for his civil rights songs, which made him a favorite of the Roosevelts, and on the other he was known for his sexy stage persona (a first for a black male artist).

He was the first black singer to give a White House command performance (1941), to perform in previously segregated hotels (1942), to get a million-selling record (“One Meatball”, 1944), and the first to make a solo concert tour of America (1945). He was also the first folk and blues artist to perform in a nightclub, the first to tour internationally, and (along with LeadBelly and Woody Guthrie) the first to be honored with a US postage stamp.

Wikipedia: Josh White

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One Meat Ball, by Josh White

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There is a struggle going on right now between humans trying to do their best and humans doing their worst. The good in us will triumph, I am certain of that, but there will be hardships enough along the way to satisfy the most masochistic. And when those standing for compassion and justice and tolerance once again take the reins those virtues will have their moment for as long as we are willing to fight for them. For as long as we can remember that they are maintained only by constant struggle.

I recall when I first read The Lord of the Rings that at the end there were still bad guys out there, and definite suggestions that they would come out of their hidey-holes one day down the road and mess things up once again. It was part of Tolkien’s genius to see that comfort could be the enemy of vigilance, which always gave evil renewed opportunities.

He didn’t give me the unmitigated hopeful ending that I wanted. It pissed me off. Never mind that this good/evil cycle had already been repeated during my own time on the planet, I wanted the happy ever after. Eventually … but grudgingly … I forgave him for telling me the truth.

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Weather Comin’ In

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026jono55

The human beings of this planet are presently behaving at their most awful in so many places at once it is hard to keep one’s focus. I never aimed at having this be an anti-war, anti-fascist blog, and I try to put as much purely silly and inconsequential in each entry. But I am weak, and my anger is strong, and so it goes. I apologize for my inconstancy.

I also apologize for my country, which at present is governed by madmen and thieves. We have slipped at least six spaces back toward barbarism, and there are too many Americans who are cheering that slippage. Try as I might, I am unable to adopt the attitude expressed by Jesus while on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Part of my failure is, of course, that I am not Jesus. The other part is that I think that they do know what they do, and deserve a huge karmic slap upside the head.

And now …

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Shark Smile, by Big Thief

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Now this next one might come across as a bummer, but is it not meant that way at all. Think of it as rather a note of explanation. I am a man of eighty-six years, which means I am a potential target for a variety of problems. This week I found that one of those possibilities has taken a step forward when a very plain-spoken physician informed me that I have a cancer. It could have been a heart attack, or another stroke, but nope, it was something completely different. The extent of the problem and the treatment possibilities have yet to be determined, and are not the point of this posting.

I thought about it for a while before deciding to mention this development, because … well … I have no interest in writing a cancer journal. There are many who have done so, and have done it well. Their chronicles have given meaning and hope to a great many people. However, looking ahead I can see that there may be times that having this problem will color my attitudes and opinions in ways I can’t predict today, and I thought you readers deserved to be in on the game.

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Those of us in the resistance movements here in the good ol’ US of A are beginning to gear up for No Kings 3, which is coming on the 28th of this month. Our local Indivisible group is gathering its signboards and poster paint and costumes and is making plans to SHOW UP in as grand a style as we can muster. Do we think that a national event like this one will bring down the walls of tyranny and injustice and extremely bad taste? Of course not. So … what, exactly, are we doing?

Think of an event like this one as a county fair attended entirely by the appalled and the furious. In this bit of acting as one we give strength to one another, the sort that comes from knowing you are not alone. And we also give strength and encouragement to those who are not ready yet to stand in the street with their placard and say HELL NO to the powers that be. We want them to also see that they have millions of brothers and sisters who feel just as dismayed as they do.

It also doesn’t hurt that it seems to really piss off that clot at the top whenever we do one of these.

******

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Change, by Big Thief

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The crowd at the rec center is undergoing the sort of thinning that mild weather brings. Pickleballers take to the outoor courts, walkers return to the hills and paths around Montrose. The number of bicyclists on the streets has quadrupled. Motorcycles all over the place. New calves are showing up in the pastures surrounding the town. Dare I say Spring is here?

In the Midwest, where I came from, saying something like that was almost certain to bring on a killer April blizzard and send some poor souls to their eternal rest. So while thinking the words was impossible to prevent, saying them was taboo. The last one of those April calamities that I personally experienced was nearly forty years ago, in Yankton SD.

It arrived on a weekend and hit us out of bright blue skies and balmy weather. Suddenly drivers couldn’t see where they were going and were sent scuttling for home and hearth. The children were gathered in, stores were closed, streets were empty.

One gentleman pushed his luck a bit, and was the last one to leave a local bar to take the short walk to his car. He got into the vehicle, but didn’t start the engine. Perhaps all he wanted to do was rest a bit, maybe sleep off a whiskey or two. But when the wind and snow subsided the next day, he was still sitting there at the wheel, parked on that major thoroughfare, frozen to death.

The day after that I was scheduled to hold a pediatric clinic on the Santee Lakota Reservation, about an hour from Yankton. As I drove in on the narrow two-lane road, I noticed many men walking on top of the drifts along the highway, poking long bamboo poles down into the snow. When I reached the clinic I was told that there was a young couple who had been working in town, and when the bad weather came they decided to try to get home, out in the rural. That was yesterday. They never arrived.

We later received the news that the searchers’ bamboo poles hit something solid just about fifteen feet off the road I had come in on. Digging down they found the missing couple, still in their car. With the poor visibility that a blizzard affords, they had gone into a deep ditch, and there they perished, quietly waiting for the weather to clear up.

So I am not saying a durned word. It’s only March 4, and of course Spring is not here. Don’t even think about it.

******

I’m reading a book on pictographs and petroglyphs written by the admirable Craig Childs. It is a captivating book, dealing primarily with the drawings left behind by natives on the Colorado Plateau more than a thousand years ago. As my interest grew, I looked around for a map and found this gem, which I now share with you. Tis a beauty. Robin and I have explored only the tiniest fraction of the riches within the 150,000 square miles that constitute the Plateau.

One of the really great things about the author is that he doesn’t tell you precisely where to find the drawings. He has no interest in sending legions of boobs out to vandalize these sites, which too often happens. If we want to bust our butts and go walking in the desert among the rattlesnakes and scorpions and across waterless cactus-scapes, we are welcome to search them out for ourselves.

(FYI: when asked once where he lived, Child gave not an address you could look up, but this statement instead: “between Telluride and Utah.”)

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You Can Have First Shower Today, Dear, I’ll Be On The Street …

February 22, 2026jono55

Just study this photo for a moment. Everything you need to know about why the fascists are going to be eliminated is right there in the frame. In frigid Minneapolis a young woman comes out of her house in bathrobe and slippers with her phone in hand to film the goons of ICE. Now look at the number of other people who are also filming this scene.

ICE is an army composed of the sort of humans you find when you turn over rocks, led by cruel people whose grasp on power is slipping away daily. This casually dressed woman knows that she is only one of many but, by God, if her pictures can be of any help she is out there shivering and taking them.

A message for the criminals of ICE and their handlers. Once America regains its sanity, we will find you. We are writing everything down.

******

I had another letter to the editor published Wednesday. Not anything earthshaking, just enough to annoy some of the hard-right citizens of Montrose County, which is my principal goal. I’m getting better at the process, and more of these letters are getting through. If the paper doesn’t like one, you never hear back from them, it simply vanishes and is never seen again.

So … I have found a few things that are important if you seek success in having your letters printed. Here’s my personal list.

Never drop an f-bomb in your opening sentence
Keep the word count well under 9000
Do not suggest assassinations as a way of improving society
Avoid topics that are ultra-passé. For instance, forget the Barry Manilow stories …
Cannibalism, diarrhea, and large pustules have limited audience appeal

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White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane

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(Ahhhhhh, that one about the psychiatrist’s couch. Coarse language, I know, but I cannot stop laughing at it.)

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A dusting of snow has fallen over the past 24 hours. Not enough to require anything of me. I can safely ignore it without having to worry about the elderly slipping and falling on my part of the sidewalk. Friday evening was the first fish fry of the year at the local Catholic Church. Each year, during Lent, the church serves up a dinner for $15.00 per person that includes either deep fried or baked fish, fries, coleslaw, Mac n’ cheese, and a delightful selection of desserts made by ladies of the congregation. It is dispensed from a buffet line in a large, barn-like room.

The quality of what is offered varies from year to year, so the first one is the tell. Here’s my breakdown on the offerings.

Cole slaw was excellent, with good flavors, bright colors, and someone actually paid attention to proper seasonings
French fries: made sometime this week, limp, gaunt, pale in color
Mac n’ cheese: baked in a very large pan to the point where the pieces of pasta were beginning to lose their boundaries and were turning into one great twenty pound pasta rectangle
Fish: it would seem that the person responsible for the deep fried variety must also operate the local crematorium. My pieces were fried until whatever fish there was had shriveled to a nubbin inside the armor of the breading. The breading was also not penetrable with a fork, but required attack with a knife as well. Some pieces had to be picked up in one’s hands and eaten like fish-on-the-cob.
Desserts: superb examples of the best of church basement food

So, the verdict overall for this year is: not bad, better than average. We went with friends and will no doubt attend at least one more session before Easter rolls around to end all the fun. Sometimes it’s about the company, and not the food at all.

******

Robin and I will sometimes fill the odd moment playing games on our phones. Each game comes with a free version and a paid version. Take the free one and you get commercials, just like on television. The ads come in waves, and the wave this week is making the assumption that I am a large-breasted woman over 60 years of age. I am offered brand after brand that will make my life a joy, and in each ad there is at least one lady who jumps up and down wearing the bra being offered to show me how little ‘jiggling’ there is with this undergarment.

As a male senior citizen I find all of this interesting, and while at present I have no need for such masterpieces of support, I now know that if things go south and I do need one, I will absolutely go for the model that snaps in front. It just makes such sense.

The last time I really thought about brassieres I was an adolescent, and my concerns at that time were to develop the dexterity needed for the one-handed-behind-the-back-unsnapping from the en face position. The secret, I learned way back in those uncertain years, was practice.

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Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, by Kris Kristofferson

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Lastly. I think that I mentioned once or twice before that I have learned how to grow mushrooms in my home. The sort that contain psilocybin. The reason? To see if some thorny chronic pain issues could be improved upon, as has been reported in the literature. I am microdosing with the dried mushrooms, and the jury is still out on whether there is improvement. It can take a while.

But I have about a pound of powdered magic mushrooms in my freezer, which is enough for at least a hundred full-blown trips, according to my informants. In Colorado it it legal to grow them, use them however you want, and to dole them out to family or friends. What one cannot do is sell them. Colorado is one of those few states with a relaxed attitude toward psychedelics, but they are very serious about money exchanging hands.

It has occurred to me that I might be able to use my supply to brew up a batch of cream of mushroom soup that would be legendary and be talked about in Lutheran Church basement kitchens forever. Imagine, if you will, one hundred Scandinavian-Americans who have slipped the surly bonds of earth, put out their hands, and touched the face of God … all at one time.**

Of course I wouldn’t do such a thing. Perish the thought. But it would be something to see …

** (Lines borrowed from the poem High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee Jr.)

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Pearl Jamming

February 18, 2026February 18, 2026jono55

I have a cold. A common cold. Once I realized that my dripping nose and sneezing wasn’t going to heal itself overnight like a mild bout of allergies would, I switched immediately into full whine.

When it comes to personal illnesses my psychological reaction meter only has two numbers on it, one and ten. Robin knows this, and was desperately trying to set up a weekend away with friends when I caught her at it and called in my markers. If I was going to have a fatal upper respiratory infection, by God, she was going to sit with me as I perished. I asked her to recall her wedding vows, especially the “in sickness and in health”part. She feigned forgetfulness.

Maybe this isn’t the BIG ONE, but just another minor URI which will run its course in a few days. Maybe. But why, I ask myself, should I take that chance when I can unfurl the big Pity Me flag that I keep in my clothes closet and get all that lovely attention?

******

Quite a performance by Pam Bondi at the recent congressional hearing. In several hours she failed to answer a single question, but instead behaved much like a cat caught in a gopher trap. Snarling and spitting and hurling invectives at all within earshot … I made a promise to myself to stay out of courtrooms altogether until she is safely in Hell.

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This is just the best. Old George Will, who I used to think was just a stuffy old conservative writer (and that was sixty years ago) has come up with this video statement that I agree with completely. One of the best summaries of where we are and what is needed to finish the job. The job? Ridding our country of the fascists and then going coffin by coffin and driving a stake through the heart of racism everywhere we can find it. It is still, 250 years later on, the American cancer, and we will be the healthier for its extirpation, however painful that surgery might be.

But don’t take my word for it, pull up a chair and listen to George himself.

******

Update on the “cold” I mentioned above … when the illness reached full flower it became croup, with the barking cough, hoarse voice, mild stridor and all. Robin asked if I should go to the doctor and I had to remind her that I used to be a doctor, and if there is any illness that pediatricians know something about it is croup. So I treated myself, ignoring the old adage that “a doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” Because the treatment is to accept the will of the universe and wait until it goes away. And so it shall.

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I was going through some poems I had written decades ago. Basically I only write them when some strong emotion has hold of me, so there are great gaps in the folder marked “Poems,” marking years when life was easy, comfortable. But I ran across this one that thought I’d share with you. Perhaps a bit of background would be in order.

My son Jon had just graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and was coming to Yankton SD for a visit before going off to Greece to teach English. En route he lost control of the motorcycle he was riding and drove into a ditch about twenty miles from where I was sitting up late, waiting for him to arrive. In that accident he was paralyzed from just above the waist.

There followed a very difficult year for him as he tried to accommodate to his new limitations, and in addition had to deal with so many of the medical complications of his paralysis. He became depressed and sought psychiatric help, but on the eve of his 24th birthday ended his own life.

The night before his funeral, I sat down and wrote this, which I read the next day at the service.

When an old man dies
The river enters the sea
The sun sets
The leaves drop from the tree in Autumn
It is an ending
Comforting us even as we weep together
with a sense of rightness and of flow

When a young man dies
The bird falls from the nest
The thunder and the lightning roam the earth
Shadows pass across the sun
It is an interruption
And we are jarred by the reminder
Of how fragile is a future that we take for granted
And that this day
Is the only one we really have

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How long does it take to ‘get over’ something like this? I can only speak from my own experience. Never. You learn some way to live with it, and then you go on. I will be forever indebted to Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder for this song, which was a perfect match for the emotions I was working with back then, and is a perfect match today for my memories.

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Vale, Robert Duvall. So many roles to think about during that long career, from Boo Radley onward. But my favorite will always be than of Augustus McCrae, in Lonesome Dove. I had loved the book, and was dreading the butchery I expected when I learned than a miniseries was on its way. But Duvall inhabited that role, and helped make television history in the process.

Viva Los Lobos

February 14, 2026March 2, 2026jono55

Poco is not as happy these days as he once was. He’s nearly 20 years old, has arthritis, cataracts, and some variety of kitty neurologic decline. He is very slender and less steady on his feet. At times he seems to take fright from things I can’t see.

But he sleeps well, still goes outdoors when the weather is clement, takes care of his litter box needs without requiring any help from Robin and I, and l.o.v.e.s to be brushed. His appetite suits his activity level, and he is not fussy about what we serve up.

It is not hard to imagine that his fragile situation could change fairly quickly. An injury, a stroke, a serious illness … any of these could put the thumb on the scale for an old guy like him, and I have wondered … when does the subject of euthanasia become part of the conversation?

If you search the internet for help with these sorts of questions, you aren’t much smarter at the end of your queries that when you started. And don’t even bother to ask “Is there some way I could help my old friend along if I ever decide that it is the kind thing to do?” Because you will only be apprised of the dogma that you should let your veterinarian decide such matters and manage whatever medications and treatments are needed.

I bristle at this a bit. If I were to follow that advice here in Paradise I would have to bundle Poco into a carrier (which frightens him), load the box into the car and drive for ten minutes to the vet (which terrifies him even more), and then hand him over to relative strangers ( very alarming) for an IV line to be placed. Then a barbiturate would be pushed in and that’s all she wrote.

All of this unpleasantness reeks as far as I am concerned. If the need arises, and I hope that it does not, why should a pet’s last hour be so distressing? Surely there are less traumatic ways to take one’s leave.

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Mas Y Mas, by Los Lobos

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I am letting the political cartoons tell most of the story for a while. Our present government is a monstrosity, contaminating everything it touches, and I’ll get back to railing at it again one day. But some of these drawings, my my my, don’t they go straight to the heart of things?

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One of my favorite posters of the anti-Viet Nam War years was this one. I thought it struck just the right balance – the heart and the head at the same time. For me, much more effective than any tirade. I was able to identify without too much trouble that the original was created by a woman named Lorraine Schneider.

Two by two inches — that was the space allotted to artist Lorraine Schneider when making work for a miniature art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. In that small space, the artist, printmaker and peace and civil rights activist found a message that filled whole worlds.

That artwork, titled “Primer,” features the sentence “war is not healthy for children and other living things” in childlike script, juxtaposed with a black and white sunflower. It was made in response to the Vietnam War, but like other great works of art, has found a life well beyond that moment in history …

Kveller : Lorraine Schneider

Substitute “ICE” for “war” and you have something perfectly applicable to today’s news headlines. In fact, I have done just that for, what else, a button.

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On a wander along the Uncompahgre River last week I was reminded of how little fishing I’ve done over the past year, and how easy it would be to get out there and annoy some fish to no end. I don’t catch very many, but it must be very distracting to the fish to have me bouncing artificial lures of various sizes and colors off their heads. The heads of perfectly serene trout who want nothing more than to eat an occasional insect drifting by and who clearly know the difference between a real bug and a fake one.

But I love the rituals, the casting into tree branches and onto power lines, the regular insertion of sharp hooks into soft fingers while attempting to tie on a new fly. My angling experience has advanced to a whole new level since there is now a tiny hole in my waders, and I am too cheap to buy a new pair. An hour in the stream produces one cup of ice water in that right boot, and from then on it is a race between how much of a cold wet foot I will tolerate and how many fish I am catching. Usually the discomfort wins out.

No matter. Most waders will eventually leak, whether they are the bargain basement variety or a primo set made by Simms or Patagonia. Sun and storage and time are enemies of whatever is used to keep the water out. Part of the game.

BTW, I’m still using the Tenkara style of fishing, rather than a traditional rod and reel combination, and I enjoy it very much. The rod breaks down to fit into a 20 inch case, and with that and a line or two and a handful of flies you are good to go. The whole rig is so easy to throw into a car or a backpack as it is small and almost weightless.

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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Valentine’s Day came arrived and departed. We actually have a pair of chocolatiers here in Paradise, whose services are heavily utilized on this holiday every year. These artistes love their work and will fill your ears with information about every single piece you buy. I made my purchase on Friday and hid the box in a safe place overnight in the garage.

These are not the sort of concoctions you jam into a pocket and munch without thinking as you walk along. They are tenderly taken from the box one at a time and slowly savored. It is not only women who are vulnerable to the mysteries and charms of the cacao bean.

******

We have a new restaurant in town, named La Michoacána. It is an ice cream shop, with a few twists Robin and I sampled the ice creams last Friday, and they were very good. While we were eating out treats, we notice a couple of things. One of the menu items was nachos, and here’s how that goes. You take a bag of Doritos or Tostitos, slice open along one side, top to bottom and then pour the queso and extras right into the bag. Then you take your prize and a fork and sit down to stuff yourself.

The other interesting thing was that all of the posted menus were in Spanish. Totally. No English whatsoever. It was Bad Bunny deja vu. We loved it! Takes some cojones to do that in a red town in a red county where ICE might have more supporters than they did in Minneapolis. But for me, one sweet day I’m heading back for one of those nacho bags, and I will report to you all about it complete with any medical complications that might develop. With photos.

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Stand In The Fire

February 11, 2026February 11, 2026jono55

Yesterday … a February picnic! Amy and Neil had been here for a lovely overnight visit, and we decided on Sunday morning that we’d all drive south to Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park, have a walk and some sandwiches, and then they would continue on back to Durango while we returned to Paradise. Since the temperature was brushing sixty degrees and the sun was everywhere, it turned out to be a very good plan.

A handful of magpies hung around our table waiting for handouts, which we eventually provided. They are strikingly beautiful birds, and they’ve been shown to be scary smart as well.

The common magpie is one of the most intelligent birds—and one of the most intelligent animals to exist. Their brain-to-body-mass ratio is outmatched only by that of humans and equals that of aquatic mammals and great apes. Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams. When one of their own kind dies, a grouping will form around the body for a “funeral” of squawks and cries. To portion food to their young, magpies will use self-made utensils to cut meals into proper sizes.

Magpies are also capable of passing a cognitive experiment called the “mirror test,” which proves an organism’s ability to recognize itself in a reflection. To perform this test, a colored dot is placed on animals, or humans, in a place that they will be able to see only by looking into a mirror. Subjects pass if they can look at their reflection and recognize that the mark is on themselves and not another, often by attempting to reach and remove it. Passing the mirror test is a feat of intelligence that only four other animal species can accomplish.

Britannica.com

After a bit the birds tired of being offered a few meager breadcrusts, and moved on to more promising-looking visitors in the park. There are people who dislike these creatures because they will raid nests of other birds. But really, if we are going to judge what other animals do to survive, how many species carry more baggage than our own?

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What was the worst time in my life? What was the best time?

There is a lot of competition for the best time, and I can’t honestly come up with just one. I’ve been a pretty lucky guy. Truly spoiled by the abundance of unearned gifts that have come my way.

But there is one clear worst time. That’s an easy one. And that was the whole process of becoming divorced from my first wife. A good measure of why it was so bad is that I was so completely unprepared for a failure of that magnitude. When I was married that first time I was … how to say it … unformed. My confidence in myself, in my decisions, in my various roles were all paper thin. And to be set aside in that way pretty much broke everything. I was dissassembled, and for the longest time did not know the way back to being whole again.

My nights and days were turbulent, regular sleep hours ignored. Drinking myself to sleep but then waking up at three AM in a hyper-alert state. I read, I listened to music, I wrote poem after poem after poem. The writing turned out to be an important way to ground myself, and yet there were mornings when I read what I had written the night before and I didn’t recognize the author.

Eventually the pieces were put back together, but not in the same way they had been before. Some of the old scraps were left on the floor and swept out with the trash, and the result was someone leaner, less encumbered and more resilient. I was still a basket case in many ways, but I at least now I knew what kind of basket I was, and that was an improvement.

Why this confessional? Perhaps there will be someone out there who is going through a similar trial, and who will read it on a day when they were feeling their lowest, maybe at the point where they are looking up gunshops and bridge abutments. They will go through this mess of literary pottage and say to themselves “Well, I’m not that loony! Perhaps there is hope after all.“

***

I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, by Beth Orton and the Chemical Brothers

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(I will share one poem from those troubled years, one written in 1989 that came from a time when I knew that I would survive and could see that there were good things I had learned while coming through the fire. I ask your indulgence of the primitive poesic skills.)

Hides

I have been tanned
I am an animal skinned out
Hanging on a cabin wall
Still recognizable
But tougher now
I’ll wear much
Longer as I am
Than what I was

I am a leaf on the breeze
Lighter than the air itself
Rising on a thermal
Settling
Sailing
Fluttering from the tallest tree of all
Towards the ground all miles and miles below

I am baking bread, rising
Pushing against the confines of the pan
Promises still unfulfilled
A bit more heat and I’ll be done
Then you can take a bite
My friends

I am an empty suitcase open, waiting
Put inside the clothes we need
And we will take that trip
The one that only now
Is possible

******

Stand In The Fire, by Warren Zevon

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Past Fast Draws

February 4, 2026jono55

The 30-day Paradise weather forecast is for mild temperatures through to March. No one is guessing as to snowfall. Robin and I took a long walk Sunday in 48 degree sunshine. Winter has been no trial at all, although we did have to cancel a weekend getaway at the end of January due to harsh conditions at Monarch Pass. We had wanted to spend time in Buena Vista and Salida, but at the pass were cold temperatures, blowing snow, and twenty miles of the roadway described as snow-covered and icy.

Now for an acrophobe like myself, tell me that there are icy roads for 10 miles before and 10 miles after a pass above 9000 feet and you have talked me right back onto the sofa, from which I cannot be budged without my making an awful scene. If there were lives to be saved by my attempting that drive perhaps I would have taken the chance. But when fun was the only goal, fageddaboudit.

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If I Had A Heart, by Fever Ray

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We have received the official notice that there will be the third national No Kings Day on March 28. So we have two months to plan what our Indivisible chapter is going to do. So much is going on nationally right now, that who knows what will be the burning issues two months hence. Our focus is, as always, getting the tyrant government out of power and replacing it with the regular batch of crooks, posers, and tosspots that we are more comfortable with.

I was dismayed to read today that gun purchases and firearm safety classes have become hot items for liberals to sign up for. In some locations one has to take a number to get a class and a permit. On the one hand, it is easy to understand how the murderous excesses of ICE can make people fearful, make us look around for some way to try to cut the risks of daily life when these rats come to your town by the thousands. On the other hand, yet one more armed segment of the population … . I don’t trust a liberal’s aim or judgment when it comes to handguns any more than I do one of the MAGA morons. Taking friendly fire on Main Street?

I doubt that my buying a pistol would accomplish much for me. ICE has armor, sophisticated weaponry, gases of several sorts, and specialized communication devices. They may be an army of thugs, but they are an army. I think my best defense is to look as pathetic as I possibly can, and to practice loud whimpering as my weapon of choice. If I can assume the posture of someone not worth shooting at and get these barbarians to believe it … then I’ve achieved my tactical goal.

******

I did own a handgun once in my life. In the late 1950s television broadcasting was full of western series with names like Gunsmoke, Wanted Dead or Alive, Paladin, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Lawman, and on and on. Impressionable young men everywhere were taking up the art of the fast draw, and there were competitions around the country, often associated with saloons and bars.

Being nothing if not an impressionable young man I bought a Colt .22 caliber pistol and a fast draw holster. I would take it to the country and shoot any tin can that moved or threatened me in any way. Then I would come home feeling like a reincarnation of Wyatt Earp and lovingly clean the weapon. Ahhhhhh, the smell of gun oil. More manly than Old Spice aftershave.

One day I was lying in my upstairs bedroom, caught up in my role as a bored and irritable adolescent. The clothes closet door was ajar, and I could see one of the sturdy ceiling beams that supported the house. The longer I stared at it the more it seemed to me that I should shoot it, and so I took that Colt Frontier Scout and plugged the beam dead center.

It turned out that even a small pistol makes quite a bit of noise when discharged indoors, and that thunderclap caught my mother’s attention. There were several discussions about the propriety of shooting at the house from inside (or outside, for that matter). Shooting the house was therefore strictly forbidden from then on, on pain of permanent confiscation of the offending weapon. There were also other conversations about the soundness of my mind, my moral character, and my overall judgment. Many of these tete-a-tetes began with the words: “What in the world.”

But what finally led to my pride and joy being taken away for good was entirely the fault of my younger brother. One afternoon he asked to borrow the gun to go the a local dump and shoot at bottles, and I let him take it. While he was at the landfill accompanied by a cousin of ours, he decided that just shooting bottles was not good enough. He was going to challenge a bottle to a gunfight.

The victim was selected, the paces counted off, and in a flash he drew the pistol. Well, actually, he didn’t … not quite. He only got the gun halfway out of the holster before he pulled the trigger, shooting himself in the leg in the process. The wound was fairly superficial, but was going to need some stitching, so our cousin drove said brother to the nearest hospital emergency room. In Minnesota all gunshot wounds must be reported to the police, no matter how trivial or how stupid the story. This meant a call to the police > who then called our mother > who then confiscated the pistol > and I never saw it again.

Of course I was indignant about the punishment since as far as I was concerned I was a complete innocent. But my parents were now beyond the range of entreaties, and simply didn’t want to hear about that particular item ever again. I can’t tell you what they did with it, they went completely silent whenever the subject came up and took this secret to the grave with them.

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If There’s A God, by Ry Cooder

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So far there has been only one seed catalog in our mailbox this year. This does not bother me at all. Since we moved to Colorado our gardening has been less rewarding than I had hoped. My limited skillset goes like this:

dig small trench in ground
sprinkles seeds in trench
cover seeds with dirt
water liberally
stand back and be ready at all times to reap bountiful harvests

Any variations from this untroubled scenario are met with ignorance and chagrin. For instance, when one lives in a semi-arid environment, watering properly is a real art. Too little and the plant dies. Too much and the plant dies. Then if you happen to get the watering just right, the plants are now food for an alarming variety of insects big and little. The little ones are the worst, because in many instances once you see their effects the game is already over, and the plant dies.

For the unskilled individual like myself, gardening is a series of disappointments that lasts for months. That kale that looks so good and costs $1.99 a bunch in the market will cost me $3.99 to grow in my own garden. That is, if I get any at all.

We have friends that live only a couple of blocks from us. They have a lush garden each year that could easily feed several families. I try not to visit them during the growing season because if I do I must take the mandatory tour of their many raised beds and somehow come up with compliments while herbicidal (and sometimes homicidal) thoughts are competing for my attention. They are nice people with gardening skills while I am a ill-tempered person with a black thumb. The contrast can be almost too great to bear.

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Romance In Durango, by Bob Dylan

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In the Land of Zoom

February 1, 2026February 1, 2026jono55

Robin and I attended a Zoom conference this week on taking risks and staying safe. These might seem contradictory goals, but … not really. When authoritarianism descends on a society, there are two basic choices. One is to accept the darkness, and the other is to promote light wherever one can. There is no 100% safety in either choice.

If a person chooses the latter path, they will stand out like candles burning in a darkened church. This would be taking risks, but doing nothing brings its own set of penalties. One of the speakers tossed out a phrase that stuck with me, and still is echoing around my brainpan three days later. The phrase? Joy is coming. That’s it. So simple.

But it helps me focus on the why of resistance. It’s not hard to get disoriented when the insults and assaults come at you as rapidly as they have this past year. Like dried morsels of cowflop fired from a Gatling gun. It’s also easy to become disheartened, until you hear someone start talking about joy. About finding some of that precious substance in every day. Small bites. The hand of a friend or a song that cuts right through the noxious fog emanating from Washington DC. “Joy is coming” resonates because those in the resistance believe that we will eventually succeed, and what a day that will be!

The only questions are when that will happen and how many more tragedies like the murders of Renee Flood and Alex Pretti will take place before it does. The deaths of these two people are drawing much attention because of the their brazenness and the so-easily disproven lies of the administration. But last year there were 32 deaths of men and women held in custody by ICE. Thirty-two! If these ICE goons act so brutally when out in the open, one wonders what horrors are happening inside their walled-off detention centers.

However … joy is coming. Do not wonder if it is. Do not forget what needs doing.

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I recently learned that there is a frontline warrior in our own family. I have a granddaughter who lives in south Minneapolis. Yesterday her mom emailed me this update on that young woman’s daily reality:

“I thought you all would like to know that ***** (and *****) are on the front lines of the Mpls protests. They are trained in safety/medical and carry rapid response gear. ***** has witnessed two abductions and a car ramming by ICE. They have organized grocery delivery for 8 families. They set up a Go Fund Me for their neighbors too afraid to work. At her job, ***** works directly with low/no income brown and black staff and interns under deep stress. She is struggling with keeping a hopeful and helpful attitude. But doing ok. There are more heroes than demons in Minneapolis!”

Warms my heart and gives me so much hope. I am sending every good wish, every scrap of metta that I possess to her and all those who are doing such good work for the rest of the country out there in Minneapolis.

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Ahhhhh, once again, Bruce Springsteen takes his art to the streets, this time those of Minneapolis. His heart has always been with the people, rather than the princes of the world.

And one more thing, my friends. On Friday Bruce went to Minneapolis and played this song on the stage of the First Avenue, a landmark bar and music venue. The First Avenue was where Prince played whenever … .

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A story. I was living and working in Hancock MI, which was at that time a town of 4600 souls located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. One evening a woman delivered a healthy baby boy in the local hospitl, but I was called immediately because the child and mother had a problem with Rh factor incompatibility in their red blood cells, and the child was affected. I won’t go into detail on the mechanics of this disease but what happens is that the child can become severely jaundiced, to the point where its brain can be permanently damaged if the jaundice level gets too high. Lab tests done on the infant shortly after birth revealed that an exchange transfusion was indicated, the earlier the better.

Pediatricians of that era were nearly all experienced in doing this procedure, and I went to talk to the parents of the baby about what needed to be done. The problem was, and I knew this before I entered their room, was that they were members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, which forbids transfusions of blood of any size at any age. I told the parents that my duty was to safeguard the health of the child, and in this case there were no medical alternatives to what amounted to exchanging the child’s blood with that of a donor.

The parents refused to allow me to do the procedure, I told them that I would then contact legal authorities to attempt to override their wishes. By now it was getting pretty close to midnight, so when I called the judge on duty to procure such permission, he was a bit put out at me at having wakened him, and proceeded to instruct me in why it was not a good idea to wake judges from a sound sleep. None of this improved my already low opinion of the legal profession, but I listened with all the humility I could muster to his tirade because I needed something from him that could not wait until morning, and I finally got it. Now all I had to do was to round up the blood and equipment and personnel to do the transfusion and get it done as soon as I could.

But while I was receiving advice on dealing with judges, there was another drama in play. The OB/Nursery area was immediately adjacent to the passenger elevators. The child’s mother, dressed in a nightgown, asked to be given her baby for a feeding. She then walked to the elevator which was being held open by her husband.

The door closed and the trio was whisked down to ground level and from there they walked quickly to the hospital exit, where a warmed car was waiting, being driven by a member of their church.

And off they went into the winter night. In effect, since the courts had just taken custody of the infant, she had kidnapped her own baby.

Down the hall I came still smarting from the judge’s lecture, and when the nurse told me that my patient had now disappeared, I … well … maybe the best characterization would be that I lost my composure. Pretty completely. My normal cool and professional demeanor was nowhere to be found. I ranted, I raved, I asked to be given the papers needed to file a child neglect report. And then I was informed of something I found even more unbelievable. The baby’s father had remained at the hospital after his wife had been driven away, and would like to talk to me.

He and I had an uncomfortable conversation where he repeated his belief that the transfusion would have caused irreparable spiritual harm to his son, and that was why they had acted as they did. He apologized to me for not following medical advice, but was firm in believing that he had done the right thing. I had calmed down quite a bit by the time he was finished, but I told him that I would be reporting him and his wife to social services for exposing the infant to possible great harm, and we went our separate ways.

Six weeks later I was working in my office when my nurse informed me that the family was now in Room 3 with their baby, for a routine well child visit. The child was still slightly jaundiced, but otherwise seemed healthy. One caveat was that if there had been neurological injury caused by a high jaundice level, it might not be detectable at such an early age, so I can’t say that I know the true end of the story, because that was the last time I saw the family or heard anything further about the baby.

And my new BFF the judge? Well, I always hoped that some evening when I was on emergency room call, he would be brought in with some painful malady or another (perhaps having been shot in the ass by Dick Cheney), and that I could have moved oh so slowly, and delayed over the longest time possible, to provide him with the comfort he needed. That opportunity never presented itself.

Petty? More than a little, I’ll grant, but can you recall any time that I claimed I was perfect?

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Another song inspired by the heroic uprising in Minneapolis, this time written by someone less famous but no less skillful, Marc Skjervem.

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May I Have This Dance … ?

January 28, 2026jono55

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When the news is merde piled upon merde
what’s left to do but dance
shaking off those flooding tears
and dancing

Angel Dance, by Los Lobos

take your bad knees and your trick hips
and put them through their paces
dancing, forgetting nothing
while body blows are dealt to flooring
and rhythmic shoes and boots pound yesterday’s
unvacuumed mirk into resolve

Mary Jane’s Last Dance, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

dance like fools, like motes in sunlight
like lovers parting
dance for those whose time is up
their names pressed into ice and asphalt
dance for the Renees that were
and the Alex-es that are yet to come

Cosmic Dancer, by T. Rex

dance for kindness
dance for hope
dance for when you were
a child at a party
unbound, unaware, unafraid

When You Dance (I Can Really Love), by Neil Young

dance that good old Brownian motion
that you do when no one’s looking
dance for those who would but can’t

Dance Me To The End Of Love, by The Civil Wars

in the firelight
in the moonlight
in the floodlights

Dance the Night Away, by Van Halen

in the middle of a berserk world
why, look at us,
with tremors, rage and fear
we’re dancing

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Deja Vu All Over Again

January 25, 2026jono55

On Monday we attended all of the several activities available here in Paradise that were celebrating Martin Luther King day. The free community breakfast, the hour of heartfelt speeches by men and women from a wide spectrum of the citizenry, the awards for organizations that help our town be a kinder one, the ten minute march to Centennial Square and then later watching an HBO documentary of the last couple of years of MLK’s life. All in all … six hours of talking about heroes and heroism. There are worse ways to spend one’s time.

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On Tuesday we were part of a political demonstration against fascism that took place on the old courthouse steps.

(Just in case the DOJ might be wondering, we are the couple with the yellow arrows pointing at us.)

After each of these activities we found ourselves wanting to do more, to resist in other ways the insanity of Cluck and the Gang. If you have an appetite for more reading, Rick Wilson has put together an excellent paper entitled A Declaration of Independence from the Mad King.

Read it and then tell me that what we now see every day are the acts of someone who is compos mentis.

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Sons and Daughters, by the Neville Brothers

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Still too little snow to speak of here in Paradise. Mutterings among the citizenry about fears of water shortages are becoming more and more frequent. Most of Colorado is dependent on snow piling up in those beautiful mountains each winter to feed our streams and rivers as it melts in spring and summer. We are way behind this year, locally and statewide. There’s just not enough of that wonderful stuff.

Friday mid-day it started to snow the tiniest of flakes, falling straight down on an absolutely windless day. At first they melted away instantly, but by evening there was a coating of white in the valley. Perhaps only an inch, but a precious inch indeed. The climate niche Paradise occupies is entitled “semi-arid,” which translates into almost a desert but not quite.

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We’re halfway through the winter now, moving about town in what must seem unbelievable comfort to our compatriots in Minnesota, those brave souls who are carrying the fight against the autocracy in below-zero conditions. They are up against the weather, tear gas, pepper spray, and thugs with guns yet still they come out to demonstrate and sow discord in the hearts of the enemy … the enemy being other Americans who were sent to control and intimidate them.

I am inspired beyond words. And we are all learning as we watch. Learning how to confront and confound this modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.

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Sons and Daughters (reprise) by the Neville Brothers

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Alex Pretti

Murdered by ICE agents in broad daylight in Minneapolis

1/24/26

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Heroes

January 21, 2026January 21, 2026jono55

Something I’ve noticed recently out here in Paradise. The nearly complete absence of MAGA caps. For years they were one of the core items of Montrosian male dress. Why, on any trip to the grocery store I would see at least five men wearing them, and interestingly, they were mostly cross-looking senior citizens.

The same thing has happened with the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia , the stars and bars. I would guess that a decade ago at least five percent of pickups in town were daily flying these emblems of slavery and treason. While this might seem a small number, keep in mind that pickup trucks are the signature vehicle of our community. Five percent of a bunch is a bunch.

I don’t know the reasons for the decline, I just make observations. Those crabby-looking older dudes might just have died off of advanced constipation. The flag-waving yahoos might have actually taken a closer look at those banners and decided to be offensive in some less complicated manner. Either way, it is getting that much harder to easily identify the dim bulb segment of our community.

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Lord, this is good. Until today I thought no one would ever touch Emmylou Harris’ rendition of her beautiful song Boulder to Birmingham. Dead wrong is what I was. Here’s Jessie Buckley.

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The pickings were sooo good this past few days. Here’s a prescient prose poem from 2011. Honestly, how could we not see this coming? Terry Ehret did and put it down clear as spring water.

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Wade In The Water, by The Rigs

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ICE in 1933 (reverse metaphor)

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Heather Cox Richardson’s postings Letters From An American have been like flashlights, something to find your way with on darker days. On Martin Luther King Jr. day, Monday, she posted this beauty:

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

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Stepping back and looking closely at this post I realize that the quality of writing is definitely improved. That’s the good news. The bad news is … (sigh) … it’s because I did so little of it.

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