Tag: politics

Changes

jono55

Here is a puff piece about Robert Plant taken from an Apple Music review of his recent album. It happens I agree with it.

“It’s hard to think of another artist from the 70s classic-rock era who has aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying to relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st-century recontextualizing his formative influences – American blues, English folk, early rock ‘n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical – into more earthy and ethereal realms.”

The man has evolved in full view of all of us from basically the poster boy for the excesses of rock and roll to a mature artist who keeps putting out really interesting music. I’ve included a couple here today from the album Saving Grace. Look at those photos and marvel at what time makes of a face. From beautiful boy to a Mount Rushmore sort of gravity.

A side note. My son Jonnie was into music from early on in life, buying albums before he was ten. When he found an artist he liked, he would often save up and buy everything that man or that band had recorded. Such was the case with Led Zeppelin, the band where Plant became a legend. At the time, they meant nothing at all to me. It took a long time after Jonnie had moved on for me to catch up with his tastes.

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Soul Of A Man, by Robert Plant

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Saw a Lewis’ Woodpecker on our neighborhood walk this week, pecking away in some dead branches. Thet are pretty easy to spot, once you know they exist. I only learned about them this summer, when I saw one on a visit to Durango.

The Lewis’s Woodpecker might have woodpecker in its name, but it forages like a flycatcher and flies like a crow. It has a color palette all its own, with a pink belly, gray collar, and dark green back unlike any other member of its family. From bare branches and posts, it grabs insects in midair, flying with slow and deep wingbeats. It calls open pine forests, woodlands, and burned forests home, but it often wanders around nomadically outside of the breeding season in search of nuts.

All About Birds

The description sounds a bit like a lot of us, who wandered from home and years later couldn’t quite figure out how to get back or remember clearly how we started out. “I know I was a woodpecker in the beginning, but how was that, again?”

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There came a period in my mid-adolescence when I chafed at being expected to attend each family gathering the way I had done as a younger child. One day I flatly refused, and quite a scene ensued, with the rest of the family eventually going on without me. Harsh words, lots of pent-up resentments released on both sides.

Finding myself alone and not enjoying the solitude one bit, I made the decision to leave home. I did own a car, had a part-time job, and thought I might be able to support myself in meager fashion. So I packed the trunk of that car with all that I owned of any value. (I will tell you that it made a pitifully small pile.) And then I took a nap.

When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned, and so I resolved to wait and leave in the morning. I never learned how it happened, but somehow my parents became aware of what was stored in my car’s trunk, and my father did a very uncharacteristic thing, for him. He sat down and had a talk with me. No recriminations, no lecturing. Just letting me know that he and I were not adversaries, and that my safety and happiness were very high on his list of concerns.

The next day, I unpacked, feeling relieved. I think that over those hours I had realized that although I was now perched on the edge of the nest, I was not quite ready for flight, and was glad to have been talked out of it.

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Too Far From You, by Robert Plant

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POETRY CORNER

Over my life I have written things that for want of a better name I call poems. Thought I’d put one up here once in a while, just to air them out.

Us

Our personalities 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 illness is a time

When many rows are dropped at once

And not 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

May 1983

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I Never Will Marry, by Robert Plant

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As of this morning our government has shut down, whatever that means. This might be a good time to push it into a hole, kick some dirt over it, and start afresh. In its present iteration it serves no one well but the criminals at the top.

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Who You Calling Evil?

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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Mr. Tambourine Man, by Odetta

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

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

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

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

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

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This Is Definitely A Rogue’s Gallery

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

The Fox, by Bill Staines

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

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

JOJOfROMJERZ AND THE SIREN

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

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

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

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

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.

Gandhi

Namaste, brothers and sisters.

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Pastures of Plenty, by Odetta

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Rise Up, Me Buckos

jono55

Okay, for some folks I guess it comes down to “Have you had enough, yet?” when dealing with the oleaginous monstrosity that is our present national government. We have incompetence throughout the executive branch, only half of the Senate with their wits about them, and a House of Representatives where the ability to tie one’s own shoelaces sets one apart from the herd. Add to this a corrupted Supreme Court and you have the full picture. Dismal, but full.

But we, the much-disrespected electorate, don’t have the sense to roll over and collaborate, as have some colleges and universities, CBS, ABC, and a distasteful number of our national institutions. Armed with our eighth grade civics lessons, a copy of the Constitution, a shred of decency, and a great deal of stubbornness, we persist in resisting. Go figure. There will be a nationwide rally on October 18 that calls itself NO KINGS 2.0.

It will be yet another chance to get together and see that you are not the only one who thinks our present situation is unsustainable madness. The first NO KINGS protest was massive, with more than 5 million people participating. This included 2500 souls who gathered here in Paradise, a small red town in a red corner of the state. It was peaceful protesting all the way. I have to give credit to the Cluck administration and Republican Party for doing so abysmally that it is easy to find a repellent situation to protest against. Too many to count, really. An embarrassment of riches.

My readership is spread around the globe, but if any of you are going to be in the US on October 18 you might want to drop over to Paradise and see small-town democracy at work. You can get more information at the national website for NO KINGS. Stop by, we’d love to have the opportunity to shake your hand and harangue the very beJesus out of you. (If you don’t have a place to stay we have more than a thousand square feet of floor space at our home and enough sleeping bags for six.)

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Watching the movie Out of Africa the other night at our own personal Robert Redford Film Festival, we were struck by how young and handsome Redford and Meryl Streep were in 1985. She was almost luminous at times. And then I thought … hey … forty years ago I was, if not luminous, doing okay as well. I could still run, leap without creaking, and I teetered very little.

I also owned a Honda Gold Wing at that time as did my friend Bill, and the two of us would take our motorcycles out to the wilds of a Nebraska two-lane highway and see how fast they would go. Mine topped out at 116 mph, and I have to confess that this was way past fast enough for this armchair cowboy. All it would have taken was a rabbit in the road and I would not be typing this deathless prose.

But Redford and Streep and the superstar of the show – Africa – what a trifecta that was! If you haven’t seen the film, it’s available on Prime and will cost you $3.99. Worth every penny.

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No One Is Watching You Now, by “Til Tuesday

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For those who are still silently waiting for our shared nightmare to be over, it’s time to wake up. Right now. A coup is under way. This time there is no cavalry coming to save us if we can just hold out. I keep seeing a phrase that goes with the spot we’re in very well, I think, and it is Silence is Complicity.

A quote from Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented”. 

Another, from Leonard Peltier: “Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is the message, just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and deed. Yes, become who you are. There’s no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are.“

And finally, one from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.“

I could go on, as I too frequently do. But if I have a point, my friends, it is that it is an illusion to think that there are sidelines for any of us to stand on.

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Friday we traveled with friend Rod to Telluride, looking for fall color. It was a good day for such an outing, but the only problem was that we anticipated the leaves really looking good by perhaps a week or two. So, the trip was a failure, right?

Wrong. What we did find was a beautiful herd of elk in the valley leading into Telluride, a village that was surprisingly crowded with people who seemed as pleased as we were to be there, and a lunch consisting of the best pizza on earth (IMHO) at the Brown Dog. Not too shabby, I’d say, not too shabby at all.

I tend to malign Telluride too often, I think. To be sure, it is an easy target due to being overpopulated by the very wealthy oozing with their tiresome self-importance. But I have to grudgingly admit that not every zillionaire is a pompous ass. Some of them obviously came from modest beginnings and have managed to hang onto their souls as their treasure grew.

It all makes me wonder what would become of my ragged personality should I become rich through some windfall. I already have an overdeveloped sense of superiority in my present economic circumstances, and I suspect that there is at least an even chance that I would join the ranks of the insufferable. Saying things like “Oh, look there, Robin, a peasant. Be careful not to touch it, I’ve heard that they carry germs.”

Maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t forget from whence I came. Not every one of my character traits is of the gold star variety, but maybe I’d still find a way to keep it real. Quien sabe?

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The Beautiful Lie, by the Amazing Rhythm Aces

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As a closer, I have not one but two day brighteners for you. The first is a piece from the Colbert show: https://substack.com/@demwinsmedia/note/c-157661556

The second is from CNN’s article on this manga pirate flag that is showing up in protests all over Asia. It is taken from a popular Japanese comic strip and flying it indicates dissatisfaction with the government. ‘Nuff said? Methinks I might need one of these. Maybe two of them.

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Los Olores del Otoño. 

jono55

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

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

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

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Honky Tonk Pt. 1, by Bill Doggett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Honky Tonk Pt. 2, by Bill Doggett

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MEMENTO MORI

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

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Hummmmmmmm …

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lightning Crashes, by LIVE

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

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

Precious Memories, by J.J. Cale

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

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

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

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

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

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En****tification

jono55

Even a classical music troglodyte like myself can’t help being affected. Over time there are pieces that insinuate themselves into the most sluggish chunks of gray brainmatter, including mine. For me, one such work is Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Way way back when I was a kid with little money to spend on such things, I decided that I should try to learn at least a little about classical music, including why people listened to it at all, since it seemed boring to me and was impossible to dance to.

Being a pauper meant looking in the record store for classical music on the budget Nonesuch label. For a couple of bucks you could buy a vinyl album, usually recorded by an orchestra or ensemble you never heard of. My first such purchase was The Four Seasons. I don’t recall the name of the orchestra, but I played the album quite a bit over several years before it was lost during one of my spasmodic downsizings.

Recently, though, I ran across this newer album starring a violinist named Justine Jansen. I immediately liked it. It seems so … I dunno … sprightly and quick on its feet compared in with some of the more lumbering versions I have heard in the past. Perhaps because it is being played by a small ensemble rather than a larger orchestra (but that is for people to answer who know something about music, which does not include me).

Here is her version of the first part of Concerto #3 of The Four Seasons: Autumn.

1. Allegro

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BTW, there are more than 1000 recordings of The Four Seasons out there. And that count was done in 2011, so who knows by now?

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In response to the reeking river of garbage information oozing from from the Department of Health and Human Services, many medical groups and societies are putting out accurate and scientifically sound health information to help the public make good decisions, especially with regard to vaccines.

My own American Academy of Pediatrics has a site where they refute many of Secretary Kennedy’s know-nothing claims and another where they publish evidence-based recommendations for all childhood vaccines.

Some people think that doctors are in the immunization “business” to make huge profits. Let me clarify this tired canard for you. When I practiced pediatrics in South Dakota, the state provided all of the mandated vaccines to our offices for free, and we were not allowed to charge for them. We did, however, have to purchase, on our own, special refrigerators in which to store the vaccines, and had to keep meticulous records on the refrigerator’s performance and on each dose of vaccine we dispensed.

We were allowed to make a small charge for the nurses’ time spent in preparing individual doses and actually giving the injections. But reimbursements for that time were routinely less than our actual cost.

So instead of being a generous profit-maker, prociding vaccinations was actually an expense for the participating physician. This state/physician partnership worked because both recognized how important vaccines were to the health of the state’s children, and that small sacrifices were well worth it to remove any financial barriers.

But an economic windfall? Fageddaboudit!

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One of the absolute delights of reading is when you come across a word that moves humanity forward. That happened to me today when I read an article by Jennifer Louden on Substack entitled How To Age Without Enshittifying.

Whut? Where did that one come from?

And thus I was off to rummage in my online resources where I found:

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services  decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Wikipedia

Originally defined within the digital world (and that was only two years ago, when the word was first coined) it has broadened to include other areas of life. Like the pound of bacon that cost $5.99 becomes the 12 ounce package of bacon that costs $5.99.

Therefore when Ms. Louden provides me with some pearls of advice, I pay attention. Who wants to become part of the problem in yet one more way? Not me, bucko. My momma didn’t raise no enshittified children.

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In a piece on Substack I found this interesting graphic, which was created to try to make some sort of sense out of the manure lagoon swirling around Cluck. It’s one of those times when a picture is worth, if not a thousand words, quite a few.

If the diagram intrigues you, you might want to read the whole piece, which is entitled: Making Sense of MAGA. As I mentioned in last Sunday’s post, “Get your programs here, you can’t tell the players without a program.”

I have to admit that just looking at this repulsive entwinement makes my right hand want to reach for a can of disinfectant and give it a good spritz. Forcing my Macintosh to display it might even be a violation of the laptop’s rights.

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Another fine neologism I picked up this week was coined by Andy Borowitz, when he dubbed the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Metamucilini.

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And finally, out of the blue, comes a piece of news that shoves all of the government’s criminality and assaults on our collective lives aside for a few blessed moments.

New Mexico has this week guaranteed child care for every child, regardless of family income. Read the how and the why and the whole story by clicking the link.

Imagine this if you will. A politician who is using her office to make the lives of New Mexicans better. Whose main goal is not to grift, steal, or murder.

Es increible! Es magnifico! Gracias a la gobernadora Michelle Lujan Grisham de Nuevo Mexico por hacer muy algo correcto!

(And thanks to Google translate for doing all the work of creating that last sentence)

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I Don’t Do That, Do I?

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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Emily, by Los Lobos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using a stout stick to get their attention whenever needed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It was the best of times …

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

So the basic rules here in Paradise are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

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If It Quacks Like A Duck …

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

American Bird Conservancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, by Bob Dylan

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Bearly Worth Mentioning

jono55

Robin and I drove to Durango on Tuesday morning, and we noticed that above 9000 feet many of the aspens are turning yellow. Now, I have a dim recollection that this means something about the coming weeks and months, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it is.

Maybe ChatGPT will know. They are my oracle when it comes to stuff like this.

**

ChatGPT: what do you want now?

Moi: I was wondering if you knew what it means when the tree leaves turn colors in August..

ChatGPT: You have got to be kidding.

Moi: No, I’m just an ancient person and have forgotten many things.

ChatGPT: Sigghhhhhh … it’s one of the signs that autumn is coming.

Moi: But isn’t this sort of early for that?

ChatGPT: Not when you have a drought. The leaves turn early and their colors aren’t usually as bright.

Moi: How interesting. Did you in that one nanosecond that has passed since I posed the question scour the libraries of the world for your answer?

ChatGPT: No.

Moi: Then …

ChatGPT: It was in this morning’s paper.

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Robin is in Durango, spending time with Claire when her parents are away. The home is several miles out of town in an area that not infrequently sees bear activity. So much so that every home must keep their trash in a bear-proof container.

The problem is not just one of having one’s trash spread about, but of safety for the bear. If one of them becomes accustomed to finding food in garbage cans and starts hanging around human dwellings regularly, any aggressiveness on its part means a call to a wildlife officer, and often a bullet for the bear.

Wednesday, as Robin was retrieving the family’s container from the roadside collection site, a black bear approached to within less than ten yards. Robin neither moved toward nor away from the critter, and after a moment or two it continued on down the road, uninterested in anything that did not promise easy access to food. No threats offered, no offense taken, no phone calls made.

Except for the excited call to me here in Montrose to relate the story of the encounter.

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Bear, by The Shouting Matches

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From The New Yorker

When I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we would see bears often while camping, about half the time, in fact. Their only interest was in food, so we kept ours all in the VW bus we traveled in. On one of these trips we were still in the process of setting up camp when one of our kids noticed a bear going through the campground, site by site, and opening each trash can to check out the contents.

When the animal approached our trashcan, the six of us got into the van to watch the bear do its inspection. Finding nothing, it moved on along its route. (I should add that this was nearly fifty years ago, when campers were not nearly so knowledgeable as to proper behavior with trash and around bears.)

During those years in the UP, there was only one episode of physical harm from a bear that I knew of. A teen-aged boy was camping without a tent all by himself in a wooded area. When he turned in for the night, he unwisely took his food into the sleeping bag along with himself so that the raccoons wouldn’t get at it. Along came a bear which found itself staring at what was (to the bear) essentially a large human burrito, and he began chomping away. The boy managed to get out of the bag and run off, eventually making his way to a local hospital, where he received some minor patching up.

The sleeping bag, unfortunately, was a total loss.

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Black Bear, by Railroad Earth

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From the New Yorker

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We are only one week away from September, that month each year when I give over to my most sappy, maudlin, mawkish, corny, and moony side. It might not happen if there weren’t that song* to play and listen to. Something about its wistfulness brings out these drippy weeps, and I don’t seem to have the will to not play it. Every autumn. Like clockwork.

If I am dreading it, I really can’t imagine what must be going through your minds. Perhaps if we all buck up we’ll get through to the other side and October, where lies safety. Hold that thought.

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As of this morning, I have reached one of those milestones. I am twenty years sober. This is not a boast, and I don’t publish as self-puffery, but to speak to anyone out there who is wondering about whether their use of alcohol is helping or hurting them … there are other possibilities.

One day at a discussion in a rehab center, a client stood up and said that he was one year sober and many in the room clapped. The moderator interrupted and asked “Why are you clapping? All he said was that for the past year he has behaved like a normal person and has stopped harming himself and those around him.”

And that moderator was right, I think. We announce our sobriety anniversaries to reach out to those whose hands are still shaking, not to show that we are some sort of paragons. To point out to those still carrying the weight of alcohol addiction that they can put down the rock and walk away. It’s no more than doing the next right thing.

And did I do that next right thing by myself? Surely you jest.

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*September Song

I Have No Thought Of Time …

jono55

Sandy Denny was an English folksinger and songwriter with a gorgeous voice who sang with several groups including Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, and who put out a handful of solo albums as well. One of the most enduring pieces she wrote was Who Knows Where The Time Goes, a marvelously thoughtful and melancholic song about the passage of time.

I first listened to it as a much younger man and was instantly caught up in the lyrics, which seemed to speak directly to me and I thought How could Denny have written such a personal song when I had never met her and there was no way … but I imagine that’s everyone’s reaction to this lovely musical meditation. At every age I’ve been through since then it has spoken to me with an even clearer meaning, until at my present time of life when I listen it seems just the perfect fit, carrying the message of one of life’s most constant truths.

And yet she was only twenty when she wrote it. Amazing. Breaks your heart, really. It was the last song she ever sang at a public performance. Denny died after a fall down a flight of stairs, at the age of only 31. But even if this piece of music had been her only legacy … aahhh, love … it is timeless.

“Who Knows” has been covered by so many people. Each one that i’ve listened to beautifuin its own right, but none eclipsing the original by Sandy Denny herself.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Sandy Denny

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There are three people whose clear-minded writing about our present national political manure pile that I read regularly. They are Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, and Timothy Snyder. There are many others producing worthy material, but the day is only so long and, alas, my attention span has its limits.

I marvel at each piece they post, and especially in the case of Richardson and Reich, they post nearly every day. E.v.e.r.y d.a.y they produce an essay that would get an “A” in Civics class. All three are available on Substack and can be followed on its app. I find that they cut through the clamor and smoke very well, pointing out over and over the lessons of the Andersen fairy tale: The Emperor’s New Clothes.

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Upon reflection, I have found that an almost perfect metaphor for the present-day version of the Republican Party would be the Freudian concept of the Id. I was going to ask Sigmund if he agreed, but was disappointed to find that the man was completely dead.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Nina Simone

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Yesterday I made a fine meal of New England Clam Chowder, which Robin and I wolfed down with much lip-licking and slurping. It was only later when washing the dishes that I noticed a stinging on the tip of my right middle finger, and found that it was missing a bit of tissue measuring about 2×2 millimeters. Apparently during the slicing and dicing of the vegetables that went into the mix I nicked the finger but didn’t notice at the time. There exists the distinct possibility that the missing piece of me went into the chowder.

It’s a tiny thing, I know, but I have chosen not to share this information with my wife. She has a tender stomach, poor dear, and this might affect her attitude toward me and my meal preparations in general.

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From The New Yorker

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I visited the Black Canyon Park on Monday forenoon. It is only partially open, and there is no walking about in the burned areas at all, anywhere, said the burly Park Ranger to me as I came strolling back down a charred hummock. He also said that my hiking where I had no business being would encourage all the other people who were presently in that same parking lot to start doing it. And he definitely implied that this could be the end of civilization as we know it.

I assumed the humbled, craven posture that is my best weapon against angry authority figures and skittered away.

But even such a tense situation couldn’t hide the fact that only 40 days since the onset of the fire, there were one-foot tall Gambrel Oak seedlings already coming up from the rootstocks of the burned trees.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. Nature holds the cards. She started the whole mess with those lightning strikes, and now shows that she is repentant and can put it right again.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Judy Collins

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Across the evening sky
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire
I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad deserted shore
Your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know
It’s time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving

I do not count the time
For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone
While my love is near me
I know it will be so
‘Til it’s time to go
So come the storms of winter
And then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

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Oh Happy Day!

jono55

Let me apprise you of a bit of cat behavior that I have found interesting. When our younger cat, Willow, decides to go out into the back yard through the pet door, she pauses with her nose at exactly the interface between in and out, sniffing, looking slowly from left to right and back again, studying the landscape with eyes and nose. This process might take a full minute and when it is deemed safe to do so, she exits. There is never a variation in this routine.

Curiosity may have killed a cat here and there, but it is wariness that has kept ours alive. Poco has been an indoor/outdoor cat for eighteen years, and you don’t hit that mark without having a care now and then about where you go and what you do.

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All Mixed Up, by The Cars

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I like Neil de Grasse Tyson, even though he can (like myself) be a little full of himself at times, but here is a fascinating short tale about who he thinks is the greatest scientific mind of all time. Love it.

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All Mixed Up, by the Red House Painters

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I have spent enough years on the planet that when I think back on my early career in pediatrics, even I am impressed at what has happened to the discipline during that time. Compared to the humming and beeping and LCDs flashing on the machines in an NICU today, those first years were like working in a cave without light or power, and poor access to water as well.

An example. When I was in my junior year in medical school, I watched the network news and followed a story along with the rest of the country. On August 7, 1963, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born prematurely. He was actually a good-sized infant at 4 pounds 10 ounces, but developed respiratory distress syndrome within a very short time. Today his care would have been almost routine, with survival all but assured.

But Patrick died at age 39 hours of his lung disease, although he had been given the best neonatal care in the country. Even being the son of the sitting President of the United States couldn’t save him, when pediatrics had little more to offer than to run oxygen into the incubator and hope for the best. There were no infusion pumps to control IV rates and maintain those precious lines. There were no ventilators of a size that could be used on small infants. There was no surfactant to give, a substance that keeps the alveoli of infant lungs open so that oxygen can pass into the baby’s bloodstream.

By 1967, when I was a second-year resident in pediatrics, I spent three months studying under the best neonatologist in Minnesota. How do I know this? Because Dr. Martha Strickland was the only neonatologist in Minnesota. And there weren’t any in either of the Dakotas, Wisconsin, or Iowa. The early versions of the machines had begun to appear that would eventually change the dismal neonatal picture, but the first ones were clumsy and unreliable. By 1969 we had some decent ventilators and early infusion pumps, but it wasn’t until 1989 that surfactant received FDA approval.

One more example. In 1967 the five-year survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia was 0%. Every child who came to us with that disease died, usually within a few months. Today, survival is 90%.

Like I said. I started working in pediatrics in the clan of the cave bear era.

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Oh Happy Day! Our little jewel of a national park will re-open tomorrow, August 18! The campgrounds will remain closed for the rest of the year due to damage to rest rooms, picnic tables, etc., but we will have access to most everything else. I am so curious I can taste it. It’s been just over 40 days since this drama began with those lightning strikes, and we would have usually been up there several times during this month plus.

So, Rejoice And Be Glad is the message for today! Our sins have been forgiven and the stone has been rolled away and tomorrow we will drive the length of the park with jubilation in our hearts!

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Oh Happy Day, by the Edwin Hawkins Singers

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A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight …

jono55

Our guests of the past weekend came and went. Our home is returning to normal as everything that was shifted has been moved back to its rightful spot in the cosmic scheme of things. The refrigerator is half-filled with leftovers of good foods that somehow were overstocked at meals and were too tasty to throw out.

No matter. Prudence and parsimony require that those leftover baked beans must be consumed right down to the last gaseous molecule. The old gag line: “We had a thousand things for supper … all of ’em beans” was never more true than at supper the last two nights. By Friday we should be able to look once more ahead rather than backwards in our menu planning.

Even though the teenagers largely ignored the adults, it was good to see those kids at play and to hear all that enthusiastic giggling. And as I went through the paces of cleaning my bathroom, which had been turned over to them, I was reminded of a constant thread that runs through all the generations that we are so fond of naming. Teenagers might be meticulous in their appearance, but they are positively slobs at the makeup mirror. Thorough cleaning required my use of a firehose and a strong right arm.

Good to know that some things remain the same.

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It has become so depressing to read the news. We have become a nation where the only thing that other nations can trust about is that we can’t be trusted. We are the bad guys in all corners of the world. Perhaps not the only bad guys, but … damn. I find myself cheering for Canada every time they stick it to us in yet one more way. When British Columbia threatens to shut down the trans-Canada highway to Alaska, which is our lone land connection to the 49th state, some little interior voice says DOITDOIT!

Of course this regime will eventually fall apart, it is too villainous and selfish to last, but when will that downfall occur, and what amount of damage will have been done in the interim? What a shame. How many lives wasted, torn apart, spent in pain and sorrow that is completely unnecessary? It is truly our age of dishonor.

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Hurdy-Gurdy Man, by Donovan

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Well, that’s it. I’m tired of global warming and there’s no going around it. This endless succession of 90° days is making it impossible for me to grow my one tomato per year, and have become very tiresome.

I’m sure there must be some way of turning it off, and I would like the government to get about it as soon as possible. This just won’t do.

Right now, of course, our government is consumed with trying to decide whether the president is a pedophile or not. The insiders in his regime have decided that of course he’s not and is instead quite a wonderful person. Never mind that the rest of the world knows that he is almost entirely abominable.

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Runaway Train, by Soul Asylum

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Colorado is in the midst of a looooong drought. It has made things very crispy out here in Paradise, and one result was that bundle of wildfires that started a month ago during a dry thunderstorm. But we are not the only ones dealing with this natural but uncomfortable phenomenon. Right now the Lee wildfire near Meeker has consumed more than 110,000 acres, and there are many smaller ones scattered about. Here is a map of their locations as of yesterday.

The Lee wildfire, the fifth largest in Colorado’s history, has caused many people to have to leave their homes, and an entire prison needed to be evacuated and the population moved to one far away from fire activity. Schools are closed, parks are closed, some highways are unsafe to travel … it’s all a large and dangerous mess.

The only real bright spot is that to date no lives have been lost, neither of residents nor firefighters. Each year I marvel of the courage of those battling to contain the blazes. Whenever a fire is nearby, I will see these young people in the grocery store, shopping for supplies in small groups of very fit-looking men and women wearing a variety of uniforms. They are a cadre, proud and resourceful.

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Aye, Aye, Ma’am!

jono55

Robin and I tuned in to the regularly scheduled (Wednesdays at 1800 hours) Zoom meeting of Solidarity Warriors, a branch of Indivisible Colorado. Their first guest was a woman who is running in the Democratic primary and who hopes to eventually take on and defeat Rep. Lauren Boebert.

For those of you who are not from Colorado, Ms. Boebert is most famous not for her diligence in representing her district, but for publicly fondling her date at a performance of Beetlejuice. The name of the person who hopes to unseat her is Eileen Laubacher.

You don’t know Ms. Laubacher’s name nearly as well, possibly because she hasn’t engaged in any indecencies while occupying a theater seat. Instead, she quietly raised five children, none of whom have been arrested. During this same period of time, she kept her day job which was as an Admiral in the U.S. Navy.

Yep, you heard right, an Admiral.

She has recently retired and finding herself growing more restive and nauseous by the day at the destructive antics of Cluck’s administration has decided to run for public office.

She spoke for nearly an hour, with solid answers to questions from the other Zoom attendees, and by the end of that time we wanted to just hug her to bits. Both of us. It was the first time for me. Wanting to hug a retired admiral, that is. (You’ll have to ask Robin about her own history). She was forthright, no nonsense, honest, blunt when bluntness was called for, and all with a grand sense of humor. A woman whose love of country instead of self came through so clearly it was like a glass of cool water on a climate-change 94 degree August day in the desert. Completely refreshing is what it was.

The Zoom meetings are being archived on YouTube so you can check this one out and see for yourself.

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Howl At The Moon, by Ellen McIlwaine

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We have house guests this weekend. Justin and Jenny are here from California on one of their too-rare visits, and Amy/Neil and the kids have joined them here in Paradise. We are ten at table.

I’m definitely out of practice in cooking for a multitude. And when four of the attendees are adolescents, whose appetites can range from birdlike to frightening, sometimes within the snap of a finger … ay, ay, ay.

Thursday it was 95 degrees here in Paradise. I have reached the mental stage where when it gets over 90 I just stay in the house and sip tasty beverages in a leisurely fashion. I think it’s why I’m still alive. But I also think I’ve carried things too far when I begin to wonder whether it is safe to push the trash barrel to the curb on collection day and whether that brilliant sunshine will do me in like a vampire who stayed out too late.

I’m not sure how it all came about, but during the past few days we had three female teenagers sleeping here, while their parents took refuge from the heat in local motels. The trio occupied a single room by placing a futon next to a blowup single bed, leaving a walkway of about six inches. Saturday night their light finally went out around 0100 hours.

Polite, thoughtful, kind, silly, energetic, smart … they can come back any time they choose.

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Black Myself, by Amethyst Kiah

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Talking with Justin about ICE and its violations of the law and any sense of common decency, I began to use the trite comparison with the Nazi Gestapo, but then stopped myself in mid-sentence. Even that evil army of psychopaths wore uniforms and were not masked. The thugs of ICE don’t observe conventions like that. Their behavior is instead that of criminals.

While our guests were here, we watched the first two episodes of the new season of South Park, episodes that have been generating quite a bit of comment for their take on the Cluck regime. They were just as ferocious and rude and tasteless as had been promised. They were also very funny and satisfying. The South Park brand of fantasy was much more entertaining than that of the administration, which steers daily toward the tragic, without a trace of humor.

My favorite scene? Kristi Noem and her ICE thugs on a kidnapping rampage in Heaven while she exclaims: “Just take the brown ones!”

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Followup on our mushroom farming. It all looked like a failure for a while, with only a few puny specimens being produced. I had been following the instructions provided by several videos, all of which were filmed in areas with a more moderate climate than we enjoy here in Paradise.. So I said to myself: “Self, what have you got to lose? Let’s move from prudent to imprudent and see what happens.”

From that moment I began to water the very bejeezus out of the mycelial brick and within a couple of days there was new growth everywhere and I just finished gathering a very respectable harvest.

It’s all turning out to be a little more labor-intensive than I thought it would be, but when your efforts finally pay off, it’s a proper gas.

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Hand-sitting

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cluck’s Visit to Alligator Alcatraz, July 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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The Internationale, by Ani di Franco and Utah Philips

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

Not that they weren’t correct, mind you.

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

Cheatliardelusionalrapistabuser
whorermongerbigotbankruptfelon
traitornarcissistdraftdodger
pedophileimmoraldisloyalhypocrite
fascistdementedbullyscoundrel
adulterersoullesspeckerwood.

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

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

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

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La Marseillaise, by Isla St. Clair

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Beaten

jono55

Those among you who are wholesome adults and children and have no interest in the sordid business that rock and roll has occasionally been can just skip this section. I am dedicating it to a tune that is either one of the most or least offensive songs in the entire genre, and that is the Kingsmen’s rendition of Louie, Louie. It was prompted by a recent article in the New Yorker entitled: Is This The Dirtiest Song of the Sixties?

Just to start things off, here is the original, by Richard Berry

Louie, Louie, by Richard Berry

And here is the version that actually had the FBI up nights trying to decipher the lyrics.

Louie, Louie, by the Kingsmen

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of cover versions out there, making Louie, Louie one of the more durable arrows in the rock quiver. Sooooo … what’s your verdict? Read the article. It’s amusing but you won’t learn a thing that helps to clarify the issue.

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Here is a perfect point/counterpoint. Our president and his gang of thugs are rounding up latinos and latinas as fast as they can and sending them illegally to prison camps where they live under deplorable conditions. But what’s this? A group from Mexico (the land of rapists and drug lords according to Cluck), came northwards across the border to help Texas in rescue and recovery operations immediately after the Guadalupe River catastrophe.

Cluck and his newly created League of Incompetent Bastards would have trouble understanding something like this. It is the sort of unselfish and courageous thing that people do for other people when disaster strikes. Borders, languages, and politics are set aside as humans respond to tragedies. There are days when I despair of our species for many reasons, but stories like this … maybe we will make it after all.

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In an idle moment I spent some time searching for a photo of my old elementary school online and was at long last successful. I did find that Warrington Elementary ceased to be a school in 1966, and was reborn as an apartment building.

Our family home at the time I attended Warrington was on Second Avenue south and everybody on that street was white. Two blocks away, on Fourth Street, that color pattern was reversed. We all went to Warrington, however, and I have no recollection at all of any black/white tensions in the school, no sorting out according to color on the playground. I only had one playground fight in all those years and that was with the biggest girl in the fifth grade who trounced me, on the spot indicated by the arrow. I do not recall what my offense was, but her remedy was a doozy.

I do recall an African-American boy who was the best singer in the entire school, and his name was Plouis Moore. At an assembly one day he sang Danny Boy in the finest Irish tenor voice imaginable. Even a clot like myself could recognize his talent. Because of that one day, that one song, his is the only name that I remember from all those years in that school.

Except for Marjorie Heath, of course, my unspoken and thus unrequited love of the fourth and fifth grade. She never knew it but I would have been her slave and would have done anything she asked.

I have only a few memories of elementary school, but one that is still vivid involves adhesives. In many of the projects that we were assigned in class there was quite a bit of gluing of one piece of paper to another. This was done with the aid of a giant jar of white library paste. By the time we had finished any of those projects, I had been licking that paste from my fingers for at least an hour, just to keep them usable.

Over the years I developed a strange liking for the stuff. Fortunately for my health, in the junior high years the paste pot was no longer on the scene. Lord knows whether I would have made it out of seventh grade if that weren’t true, but instead might have been found under my desk, white paste smeared around my mouth and on my hands, moribund.

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Came across this photo of a gravestone in Goldfield, Nevada. Whew! Narrow escape for me.

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We are presently beset by hummingbirds, who are here in such numbers that they empty the feeders in 36 hours. At times there are up to six birds at the two stations. If one is to be beset by anything this is a good kind

I have identified two species, the Rufous (at left) and the Black-chinned. All day long they drink and squabble among themselves, and their day begins well before sunup.

It would appear that I need to shop for more feeders. Just having the two isn’t handling the traffic.

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Bullet the Blue Sky (Jacknife Lee Remix), by U2

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Nature Is Not A Place To Visit

jono55

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

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

What the white man calls wilderness, we call home.

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

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

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

The Tao of the Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Snyder

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Ends of the Earth, by Lord Huron

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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Hard Times Come Again No More, by Gangstagrass

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Two Miles Up

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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The Eagle and the Hawk, by John Denver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rocky Mountain High, by John Denver

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

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

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

Triviality

jono55

Robin and I started with a new physician this week. The doc we’ve had since moving to Paradise is retiring, and we wish her well.

The new MD is thirtyish, asks all the right questions, gives lots of solicited advice, and has definite opinions about things she should have definite opinions about.

I like her.

I don’t mind at all being ordered about by a female physician, it fits well with the pattern of the rest of my life. It turns out that I do better at taking orders from women than my own gender because, in general, those orders have a higher sensible/thoughtful score and rank lower on the bluster/buffoon index.

(Actually I’d rather not take orders at all, but that part seems unavoidable.)

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I mentioned a couple of posts back that our house has been recurrently invaded by three young raccoons.

They’ve been back several times since that first visit and I’ve been straining my brain trying to figure out how to get them to stop coming in without harming them. Then I remembered that farmers and gardeners have been using the urine of predators sprinkled around their trees and plants to discourage deer and small animals (including raccoons) from eating or damaging them.

So we left the cat door open as it’s always been, but I’ve started putting the T-shirt that I’ve worn during the day right by the door at night. Interestingly the raccoons have not come in since.

I don’t know if they’ve given up on us or if they’ve just decided to wait me out, but our home is presently raccoon-free. I feel that I should add for the sake of propriety that there is no urine involved in this operation. None whatsoever.

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Last evening Robin and I watched a 2016 concert on PBS where some of the stars in the country music world paid tribute to Kris Kristofferson. People like Willie Nelson, Reba McIntire, Martina McBride, etc. It was nicely done, and the performances of KK’s songs were excellent.

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Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down

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Kristofferson’s music has played its part in both of our lives, starting long before we met and I’m pretty sure that it will continue through the rest of our personal stories. What stands out in his writing is truth and honesty. If he’d only written Me and Bobby McGee, just that one tune, he’d be on our fave list. But there is so much more.

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Loving Her Was Easier

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The irony of one of this week’s events on the political stage … you couldn’t make this stuff up, honey. When a man avoiding an international arrest warrant for criminal acts of war comes to Washington DC to announce that he has officially nominated President Cluck for the Nobel Peace Prize.

My, my, my. Another chapter in the malignant fantasy that is Cluckland.

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The two friends in the header photograph have moved on to camping and paddling in another part of the cosmos. I wonder how the scent of woodsmoke registers there.

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Mindless On Purpose

jono55

Once in a great while I have to leave the world of reality behind and slip into that space where ordinary life is not allowed to go. Where age and situation and doing the right thing are irrelevant. It’s a bit more difficult to do since I became a sober person, but I can if I puts my mind to it … enter music.

Back when I was shooting at my brain with single malt scotches and Pouilly-Fuissé I would put some Neil Young on the turntable, power up the Bose speakers to dangerous levels (capable of killing roaches within a thirty foot radius), and sink into a soft leather chair with my glass in hand. At those moments rock and roll and I became one, similar to the unity that Buddhists talk about.

Problem was, of course, that the next day those ecstasies had been replaced by that painful bit of instant karma called the hangover, which was ever more durable than the “fun” had been. And where did that bruise come from? And what day was it, anyway?

Today there are all sorts of nastinesses out there to sabotage one’s mood and serenity. To get away from them without chemicals requires different sorts of thinking. Meditation … yoga … deliberately letting go of the attachments to the news cycles (which are a form of poison in themselves). And sometimes it is as simple as listening to music. Today I am one with the universe and George Thorogood.

Who Do You Love, by George Thorogood

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This fashion note was prompted by a Times article on Sunday dealing with the present trendiness of very small swimsuits on men. It’s not so much worrying about that small area that the suit covers but the vast area that is now open to the public gaze that would trouble me.

The gentleman in the photo above with his smoothly muscled body and delicately tattooed dermis might as well be a different species entirely, in that he does not represent in any way what I would look like in such a garment.

In my case, time has worked its wonders behind the closed doors of cotton and polyester, and I fully intend that those doors remain firmly shut. Therefore, in response to as yet no questions at all from the reading public, I make this promise: In spite of my wish to be a model of sartorial perfection at all times, I will not be purchasing or wearing any swimming outfits that are smaller than a large Band-aid.

You can take that to the bank.

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If, after I have left this earth behind, anyone wished to play something to remind themselves of me (and why in God’s name would they do this?), this song would do handily. Bob Dylan wrote the gently mournful tune, and there are numerous excellent covers out there. I came upon this special one this morning and thought I should share it with you.

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There is a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen

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What? Two music videos? Is this an MTV flashback?

Nope. These two are really to remind us that although there are people loudly shouting shit every day into our faces … let’s name names, shall we … although our president is loudly shouting shit every day into our faces, because that is what he does best … there are people all around the country and the world who are every day working hard, raising families, contributing to their societies, creating beauty.

This morning I came across one of those moments where somebody had the cameras rolling and an interesting experiment became a joy to be shared. A slender blade with which to cut through the ordure and let the light through.

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Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.”

Zen Proverb

I’m looking at the week ahead and there is much work to be done. Fortunately I don’t have to do it all, which is a good thing, due to my being better suited to dozing in a rocker than carrying a torch.

One by one people are waking to the possibility that our national nightmare need not continue. That we water carriers and wood choppers of the earth can join together to make a wave that will cleanse our country and make it stronger.

(end of sermon)

And now, dear hearts, if you would turn in your hymnals to …

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The Sound of Two Hands Slapping

jono55

Robin was in Durango on Wednesday night, while I hung around Paradise to attend an Indivisible meeting on the Disappeared Ones. The meeting went well and at present I am out on the backyard deck where the overwarm day is cooling off right on schedule. The ongoing violation of constitutional protections is one of the more repellent programs Cluck has put into play. It’s straight KGB stuff, Gestapo stuff. The clay that authoritarians use to mold their citizens into subjects.

I took some time to read more tonight about the courage of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who kept coming back and asking the question of the brutish government “Where are our children?” They came back even when they were being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and in some cases becoming los desaparecidos themselves.

Cluck is now breaking the law and disappearing people every day, using the masked thugs of ICE as his henchmen in our own version of the brutish Argentine government of 1977. There is no safety under such a president for any of us. To think otherwise is foolhardy.

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Mothers of the Disappeared, by U2

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Since Robin was away, that evening I went out to supper alone. At the next table was a family consisting of mom, dad, grandma, and three young children. The adults, as far as I could tell, spent way more time corralling their imps than they did enjoying their food.

It wasn’t that the kids were unusually naughty, it was that their energies couldn’t be contained on a chair. My takeaway from watching this drama was twofold. First, that kids in a restaurant can be amusing to watch if they are not yours. Second, I am grateful that I don’t have any small kids of my own any longer, and thus am able to eat serenely while others lose their cool and their appetites.

I still shudder thinking back to the time when my own kids were in their feral stage and the carpeting under our restaurant table looked like a picnic that had exploded. I’m quite sure that the waiters of that time looked on our arrivals with resignation and our departures with relief.

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This is the time of year when visiting the Grand Mesa must be done cautiously. Right after the snows have melted up there, the gods turn loose one of the great plagues of mankind. Instead of saying “Release the Kraken,” however, they smile and whisper “Release the mosquitoes.”

The top of the Grand Mesa, billed as the largest flat-topped mountain in the US (or world), is very different from the valley floor. The types of trees and the abundance of lakes make it much like northern Minnesota. And the month of June in that fine state is another place to find all manner of tiny bloodsucking demons whose names start with the words Culex, Anopheles, or Aedes (there are actually 112 genera of mosquitoes).

Twelve years ago when Robin and I were looking for a place in Colorado to settle and were visiting Montrose we used one afternoon to explore the Mesa just a bit. Taking a short hike proved challenging in that we could not stop to breathe once the beasties zeroed in on the carbon dioxide in our outbreaths. Slapping frantically we ran to the safety of our car, slammed the doors shut, and vowed never to go back in early Summer again.

My father used to awe us children when he would allow a mosquito to light on his arm and completely fill itself with blood, turning its abdomen quite red. We could not imagine ourselves doing such a thing, but watching his recurring performances was both horrifying and fascinating.

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One of Us, by Joan Osborne

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Here’s something anyone of my tender years can use to strike awe into kids. They already know that we were born before digital cameras, before computers, even before television moved from the lab into our homes. So reciting those items won’t stun them one bit. But here’s the phrase that will be absolutely incomprehensible to them and will bring them to their knees, slack-jawed and unbelieving:

“I was born before ball-point pens.“

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Psychedelia

jono55

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

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

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

I have included that gem in today’s post.

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Fearless, by Pink Floyd

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

Oh well.

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Travelog

jono55

The past several days we’ve been traveling and there has been little time for blogging. We’ve moved along by car, which is my favorite way to go, and so passed through Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and southern Minnesota. All along the route and at each bathroom stop on the freeway system, the humidity increased, until I estimate that it is above 100% here in Minneapolis. Or at least that’s what it seems to desert dwellers like ourselves. If you listen carefully you can hear your hair matting on your forehead and the creases falling from your trousers to the floor.

The purpose for the trip was to attend our granddaughter’s wedding. I had been asked to give the bride away, and everyone hoped that I could perform that brief duty without tripping, drooling, exhibiting excessive flatulence, or in any other way embarrassing the family. I think that I did okay, although the reviews are still coming in.

The bride was beautiful, the groom seemed blissfully happy, and the assembly was refreshingly young. When you are a senior citizen you have a lot of social options you can choose from, but most of them are comprised of getting together with groups of other seniors. Moving to a room where the average age is under 30 is a treat. You are reminded of how sleek and supple the bodies of people are when they are in their twenties, and that once upon a time you owned one of those bodies. ‘Twas a pleasant recollection.

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Summertime, by Janis Joplin

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From The New Yorker

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I have let the world turn largely without me during these travel days, but it is a joy each morning to find that we are not yet at war, not in a depression, and have not yet set ourselves completely apart from the rest of humanity.

President Cluck, it seems, has become quite adept at lowering his rank in the opinion polls each time a new one is taken. My take is that the scales are finally dropping from the eyes of those who are willing to see what advanced thinkers like myself have noticed all along. That he is an unprincipled gasbag with no more right to be POTUS than your average intestinal roundworm.

(That may only be my opinion, of course, but you have to remember that once upon a time I was a physician and that makes my opinions so much more valuable than those of your run of the mill poltroon.)

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From The New Yorker

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The journey home has been uneventful so far, except for a 40mph headwind, rampant humidity, and a temperature that held right at 100 degrees all afternoon and early evening. The headwind was so forceful that our Subaru posted the worst mileage day of its life – 24.4 mpg. It was a long day of two-handed driving and subsequent cricks in the neck. At one point I was loading ice into our cooler when I dropped the bag and it flew away too fast for me to ever catch it, although I did run after it for a few yards. So, today I am a litterer. Ugh.

Were there any pluses, you ask? Well, yes, quite a few. Other drivers sharing the road with us on this trip have been remarkably polite and well-mannered. A young man at a gas station came out to the car to offer me a huge bag of ice at the same price as two lesser bags. Another very young man who we asked for restaurant recommendations suggested we try the Crystal Cafe. “I’ve been eating there since I was a kid, and it was always good,” he said. Of course to Robin and I he was still a kid, but the food was very good.

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Summertime Blues, by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

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Rainbows

jono55

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

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

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

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When I’m Called, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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

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

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

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

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

I have my standards.

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Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Moving Toward Plan B

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Drift Away, by Dobie Gray

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

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

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

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Shelter From The Storm, by Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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Where Have All The Flowers Gone, by the Kingston Trio

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

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Abomination du Jour

jono55

It’s not been a bad week at all for somebody who is not an admirer of fascism. Just a few few days ago, we discovered there was an acronym published in the Wall Street Journal to describe how well Cluck’s tariff manipulations are doing in his dealings with other countries. The acronym is TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. Apparently Cluck has taken exception to the label. Go figure.

And in another juicy moment this week, Elon Musk left his government position (allegedly having been fired by the Exalted Cluckster), and three days later comes up with a description of the “big beautiful bill” now in the United States Senate as a disgusting abomination.

Now I’m not sure that once you use the word abomination, you really need to add the descriptor disgusting, because I can’t imagine what other kind of abominations there might be. Are there non-disgusting ones? Perhaps abomination lite? Or petit abomination?

But, I quibble. The bill is an abomination and I am disgusted, so there you are. If we ever needed examples of how being unbelievably wealthy doesn’t solve all the problems a person could have, with Cluck and Musk we’ve got prime cases right in front of us. I am almost embarrassed for them. Almost.

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No Expectations, by the Black Crowes

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Last evening Robin and I watched a presentation on the use of the infamous app Signal. You know, the one that our Secretary of Defense uses to share American military strategies with our foes? Yeah, that one.

The presenter this evening took pains to let us know that the app is a good one, unless you invite the wrong person to join in on the chat. For instance, if you invite a reporter, you should anticipate that they will report.

Not to be too paranoid, she told us, but the more involved that we become in resistance to what our rogue government is doing, the more we show up on their radar screens, and the more interested they become in what we are saying. So if we want to limit idle discussion about our conversations in the future, we should really consider using such a piece of encryption software.

No app known will keep the most determined and skillful hackers in the world from listening to our conversations, she added, but for the other 99.99% of the time it works very well, and is free. I will present what we learned at the next meeting of our Indivisible group and see what everyone thinks. Indivisible is a determinedly non-violent organization, but still … sometimes you want to talk off the record, no?

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This morning an unusual headline in the “Arts”section of the New York Times caught my eye.

The notice prompted two questions immediately. Who is Sydney Sweeney? Who is Dr. Squatch?

Once I had wasted four minutes of my life doing the necessary research, I learned that Sweeney is an actor who is already famous for her bosom and hoping to become famous for her acting skills. Dr. Squatch is a seller of men’s personal care products made of what they call natural ingredients and “manly” scents.

The limited-edition bar of soap, made with sand, pine bark extract and a “touch” of Ms. Sweeney’s real bath water, according to the company, will go on sale June 6. Just so you don’t go out and purchase the wrong stuff, the bar is called “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss.”

The mind reels.

The above photograph accompanied the article, and although I usually refrain from commenting on another person’s appearance, I have to admit that she does have lovely collarbones.

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This is my nomination for the best song ever about sailing and failed relationships. Can’t hear it often enough, actually. The imagery in the lyrics completely cancels out whatever bad juju my head is involved with at that moment.

The story of the song’s origins were in a time when Stephen Stills was newly divorced and depressed. A friend invited him to get away from things for a while, to come with him on a sailing cruise in the south Pacific. Stills came back from the voyage with these lyrics in his hand. Beautiful.

Now, for contrast, I came back from my divorce without a thing to show for it but a large library of self-help books.

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Saturday Robin and I spent a couple of hours at the second annual Montrose Pride Festival. There was quite a crowd in Cerise Park on a beautiful afternoon. Live music, a drag show, a handful of food trucks. What’s not to love?

Some of the displays were delightful surprises. At least three local churches had booths, as well as the town’s only Pediatric Clinic. Indivisible had a booth and so did the Democrats. (I loved that the pediatricians were there, but then pediatrics has so often been on the right side of things).

Republicans … can I have a drum roll … were totally no-shows. In their view, I suppose, why would they attend an affair celebrating a community that they have decided doesn’t exist?

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Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot

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For Robin and I, last night’s performance on CNN of Good Night and Good Luck hit it out of the bleepin’ park. First time ever of a live broadcast of a Broadway play! Right on, George Clooney and CNN for doing it. A dose of the “right stuff” in a time of much wrong stuff.

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Warriors Of A Certain Age

jono55

Sunday afternoon Robin and I attended a Zoom training session on grassroots political strategies which was held at the Ute Indian museum out on the southern edge of town. There were probably 20 people in attendance. Besides myself there was only one other man present and he was only slightly younger than I am. Nearly everyone in the room was a senior citizen.

We wondered. Where are the men? Where are the young people?

This conference was broadcast nationwide, and had more than 1700 attendees from just about every state in the country. All of them were deeply interested in what we can do to more effectively oppose the destructive policies coming out of the Cluck administration.

The leader of the workshop was Representative Pramila Jayapal, a congresswoman from the state of Washington. She was an excellent moderator, was very well organized, and kept the session flowing so well that even though it was three hours long it never flagged.

Her enthusiasm was contagious.

What a civics lesson we are receiving! Perhaps it would have been better if the need to attend such lessons hadn’t arisen, and we could just have remained dumb and happy for the rest of our lives. However, it is another one of those situations in life where when bad things happen, the process of dealing with them often reveals something very good. Perhaps a strength you didn’t know you had, for instance.

Robin and I feel that we know much more about what it means to consider ourselves an American citizen. Along with the benefits, there are simply things that need to get done. If we are not doing the work ourselves, there is someone somewhere who is carrying our burden as well as their own.

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Slim Slow Slider, by Van Morrison

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From The New Yorker

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One of Jayapal’s slides contained this diagram, and the explanation that went with it is that when working with people who may not be allies, your true goal is to try to nudge them over one category to the left, not all the way to “active allies.” Even moving them from “passive opposition” to “neutral” is a very positive step. It’s all about shifting balances.

I thought this an interesting approach, and a more useful way of assessing the effectiveness of one’s efforts than “Make any converts today?”

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Finally – a rain arrived on Monday. Actually an all-day drizzle. But we’ll take it and be joyful! It’s been a dry couple of months. While Robin and I are close to ecstatic, the cats feel quite the opposite way. Everything in their expressions says: “What’s this? Wet paws? Wet fur? This is HELL and I’m not having it!”

It is a rare moment indeed that all four of us agree on what is or is not a good day. If we can look at the graphic above, the best Robin and I can hope for at such times is to move the pets from passive opposition to neutral. If they are in the active opposition mode … well … we’re at an impasse and can expect some major scratching of household objects. Like the sofa, or the end tables.

A very long time ago and with another cat (who is now deceased), we experienced what happens when an unhappy animal goes nuclear and declares: “What you see is a carpeted clothes closet. What I see is a litterbox. Deal with it.”

Compared with that, a little grumpiness is okay.

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From The New Yorker

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I tried to follow a recipe for fried chicken breast, the kind with the bones and skin still present, and ran into a problem. The cooking time recommended in the recipe had to be almost doubled because the breasts were so large. Now, in a lifetime I’ve dealt with chickens on various levels, chased them, ran from them, slaughtered more than a hundred, and eaten many times that. I know what an undrugged chicken breast looks like. But these body parts are so huge that I would seriously consider walking across the street to avoid meeting the chicken that was once built of such materials.

The original bird must have been as big as a mastiff, and when you combine this muscularity with a brain the size of a caper, you’ve got a potentially lethal situation. I would hate to have my tombstone read: “Led a decent life until mortally pecked on a public thoroughfare.”

Perhaps there are other things that I should be worrying about, but we all have to deal with what’s on our respective plates, don’t we?

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Cyprus Avenue, by Van Morrison

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Van Morrison was only twenty-two years old when he recorded Astral Weeks, one of the more talked about albums that came out of the sixties. The two pieces I chose today are from that album. Lester Bangs was a prominent music critic of the time, and ten years after the release of the album he was still moved enough to pen these words.

What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

Heavy.

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Bruceland

jono55

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

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Introduction to Land of Hope and Dreams

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

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Introduction to My City of Ruins

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

Chimes of Freedom

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And in our present day here in America …

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

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

Little Victories, by Bob Seger

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

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

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

Soukora, by Ali Farka Touré

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

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

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

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Chicken Train, by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils

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

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

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

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Occupy Main Street

jono55

I have a new part-time occupation. I am the official button maker for our chapter of Indivisible, which is a politically progressive and activist organization with thousands of chapters throughout the United States. It is not affiliated with any political party.

Some say that it is primarily anti-Cluck, but it is more complicated than that. If tomorrow Mr. Cluck were to lose his footing and be washed away by the tsunami of bad karma he has accumulated, we would still have a problem, because he is far from the only Ugly American.

So here is what Indivisible is for:

  • Democracy Reform: Advocating for policies that enhance democratic processes, such as voting rights protections and reducing the influence of money in politics.
  • Social Justice: Supporting initiatives that address systemic inequalities, including racial justice, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.
  • Healthcare and Economic Equity: Promoting access to affordable healthcare and policies that aim to reduce economic disparities.
  • Climate Action: Pushing for environmental policies that address climate change and promote sustainability.

Now it happens that Cluck is today’s poster boy for opposition to these worthy goals, but one day he will be gone and many of those other less visible bad boys will still be there.

(BTW, Indivisible takes its name from our Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”)

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I thought that making pinback buttons would be a lark, a mere bagatelle. Turns out that there are several predictable mistakes that button-making newbies commit. I have made all of those and added a brand-new one of my own to the list.

But those pins that didn’t end up in the trash can are beginning to resemble something that a person might actually wear. Who knew? We’re getting these ready for the June 14th national “No Kings” celebration.

Robin and I bought the button press as our contribution to the presently cash-strapped local group. The hope is that there are at least a handful of progressives out there who have not lost everything yet in the tariff wars and who can make a small donation to a good cause, thereupon receiving a button as an expression of gratitude.

Bootstraps, you know.

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Slouching Toward the Millennium, by Kris Kristofferson

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From The New Yorker

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I am confident that the Cluckian attempt at a dictatorship will eventually fail. He’s just so bad at it. What I can’t predict is how much blood, both metaphoric and real, will be shed en route to that good and necessary goal.

A man who will snatch up innocent people and transport them to hellish prisons in another country is certainly capable of violence if threats to his power become something he can no longer ignore.

Someone asked me the other day if she should worry about some of her posts on Facebook that were negative re: Cluck. She was serious. Her question took me by surprise. Here … in America … to worry about posting on social media being a dangerous thing to do? To me it showed how far we’ve come along a very bad road. When good people are starting to practice self- censorship lest they find themselves on a midnight flight to El Salvador. Unfreakingbelievable!

I told the lady that I thought we were such small potatoes that we would not be picked up on Cluckian radar, unless they were looking for some random schmo to use as an example of how powerful and all- seeing they were. That may not have been reassuring to her.

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Friend Neil has introduced me to something amazing. the world of Raspberry Pi. It is a world of computers that you can hold in your hand. What caught my attention was a setup that would use microphones to record birdsongs, and then identify the birds for you. Easily transported to woodlands, prairies, wetlands – wherever birds are, the device records the calls and then feeds them to Birdnet at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology which makes the identification. If you record all night, It can generate a list of every bird that had sounded off while you slept.

This video has more information than you might need, and certainly more than I completely understood. But what came through was the relative ease of doing something truly remarkable.

S.w.e.e.t!

Should you find yourself sniffed at by true-blue birders deriding the use of technology to find and identify birds, just point out those binoculars they have hanging around their neck. Ask them what tree they plucked those from?

BTW, you can get Birdnet as a free app for your phone, and anytime you are listening to a birdsong you don’t recognize just bring up the app and it will start making a recording and eventually tell you what it is.

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From The New Yorker

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This next offering is in the nature of a Public Service Announcement. There was a piece written a couple of weeks ago by Timothy Snyder, a historian who is an expert on tyranny and terrorism. The piece is a longish one, but it’s worth taking the time to read it. Its title: The Next Terrorist Attack.

The people who have pointed out the menace that the Cluck administration represents are already out there writing, marching, giving speeches, telephoning, doing whatever is in their power to do to limit the damage that Cluck and his band are causing. They want and need all of our out-of-tune voices, our inexperience, our sore and tramping feet.

Read the column and then seriously consider joining one of the organizations that are working to preserve our democracy. It is a powerful thing to be part of, this saving one’s country.

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Bullet the Blue Sky, by U2 (live)

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When Authority Always Wins …

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Where The Hawkwind Kills, by Daniel Lanois

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

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

Oh well. One does what one can.

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

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

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From The New Yorker

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

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

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

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