Tag: TRump

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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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.

Pozole News

jono55

After this long on the planet It is very annoying to learn that there is basic information missing from my personal portfolio. But yesterday I was listening to a woman on NPR who was talking about our Black Canyon fire and who used the term “dry thunderstorm.” I had never heard that term before.

So I looked it up.

What it means is precisely what happened here last Thursday morning. Ferocious lightning without any significant rainfall. These sorts of storms occur primarily in very dry areas of the country, as found in the Western US. They are a very common cause of wildfires, exemplified by the fact that our recent “dry thunderstorm” produced four fires in this area, which are still burning.

Dry thunderstorm … polar vortex … downbursts … the meteorologists have their own arcane vocabulary which they use to maintain their power and lord it over the rest of us. Someone should fire them all. I’m calling DOGE.

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Main Title Theme (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), by Bob Dylan

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Robin and I are presently exploring the joys of pozole, a Mexican stew made with hominy (dried corn). Yesterday I put together a pozole verde, made with hominy, tomatillos, jalapeños, chicken, and a few spices. It was delicious. The helpful publisher of the recipe provided instructions for making it in an either a crockpot or a pressure cooker.

I started out with a package of dry hominy, which is the consistency of a bag of rocks and requires some serious soaking and cooking to soften up. Once you get this part done, the rest of the recipe kicks in quickly.

Simple techniques, no special skills required, delicious output. What’s not to like?

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Went with friends Joe and Caroline to a chamber music concert at a local church. Three young musicians played for us, with violin, viola, and a double bass the size of a compact car. The music was excellent.

The bassist was a member of the Navajo nation and he played two of his own compositions. The first of of those was so beautiful and dramatic that I sought him out after the concert and asked if he had recorded it, hoping I might purchase a copy. But no, it was his most recent work and he was still trying it out.

A pity. Would have loved to have had it in my library.

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Not Dark Yet, by Bob Dylan

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I am so totally confused now about the Jeffrey Epstein affair that I don’t know where to start. And the White House isn’t helping by trotting out one scenario after another hoping to find one that will make us all magically forget our names and where we put the car keys and everything else.

The whole business is a good reminder of one of those adages you can hear at any AA meeting. “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember what you said before.” Exactly. And the hapless consortium at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can’t remember in mid-afternoon what they said before lunch.

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“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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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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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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1984 Revisited

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia: 1984.

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

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

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

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

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

Can I have a double OMG, brothers and sisters?

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

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

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It Is Written

jono55

One morning this week I was looking to find something cheerful in the newspapers at around 6 o’clock A.M.. The first thing I learned is that the rice that I love to eat is loaded with cadmium and arsenic at “dangerous“ levels. So, to be an informed rice-eater, I researched and made a short list of what cadmium could do to me:

  • Pulmonary edema
  • Chemical pneumonia
  • Nausea
  • Vomiting
  • Diarrhea
  • Kidney disease
  • Osteoporosis
  • COPD
  • Lung cancer
  • Dysfunction of my liver, pancreas, and testes
  • Death

I was going to check on arsenic’s toxicity as well, but by the time I finished with cadmium I was already bummed. Hmmmmm … let’s see … a choice between shrimp fried rice and a trip straight to metabolic hell …

This information comes on the heels of my learning a couple of days ago that eating bagged lettuce is also more dangerous now because the Cluck administration has so reduced the number of food inspectors who protect us as our veggies make the long trip from farm to table that the hazards are increased. So I guess it’s back to good ol’ Soylent Green for me …. wait, what’s that … a little louder, please …

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Grift, graft, corruption, schmorruption … who is surprised by any of Cluck’s vigorous attempts to stuff money into his pockets in these days of dishonor and disrepute? He is a crook, a draft-dodger, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and one of the champion liars of any generation. He is a caricature of a man. An empty suit.

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From The New Yorker

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Omigosh, our secrets are out! Here is Springsteen opening at a concert in Manchester, England. Damn. Now everyone will know what a bunch of twits are running our show here at home.

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Springsteen is catching four kinds of hell from MAGAland for his speech at the concert. (Because he called American out in a foreign land, he is even called a traitor, as if every word of every celebrity isn’t available instantly worldwide wherever it is uttered.) Over decades, maybe centuries, each time any singer brings up an issue that is in the forefront at the time this sort of reaction happens. And the criticisms are always the same: “He should just sing and leave the politics outside!” They try to ignore one important point, which is that music and politics have a long history together.

Pete Seeger made an entire career out of reminding us of the place that songs had in our own history, especially in labor and antiwar movements. Bob Dylan picked up that torch and carried it for years. Crosby Stills Nash and Young sung beautiful harmonies over sharp words dealing with the Vietnam War and social unrest. Sooo many others.

Music is powerful, and we all know it. It can change minds, sooth or inflame, elevate or depress moods. I don’t pretend to know why, but the far right has much more difficulty coming up with something a guy can hum than the other side does. Seems they are a hort on creativity, as it were. Perhaps that’s one reason they resent it when a Bruce or a Bob or a CSNY belts out yet another moving anthem. They know they have lost another round.

Chimes of Freedom, by The Byrds

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Every year it is the same. In the spring we sort out the camping gear, toss out the broken items, and replace those as well as the ones we just lost somewhere. We arrange the stuff perfectly logically and neatly until it is a joy to behold. By mid-summer chaos has sneaked in and taken over everywhere. As we set up our tent it becomes obvious that neither of us knows where the rubber hammer the we use to pound tent stakes into hard ground has got itself.

We find that if we are to eat anything which requires a tool we must make do, because all we have are spoons. The rest went into the house after the last camping trip and never made it back into the storage boxes. There are now six bottles of insect repellent and no sunscreen at all in the bag of necessaries. A cut finger provokes a search for a Band-Aid and we can only come up with two of them. Where is the First Aid Kit? Abducted by aliens is what we deduce. The first night of any trip when we can’t find the small flashlights that we need to find a bathroom during those early morning hours … it’s not the predators we worry about as much as rocks, cacti, thistles, and tripping over those accursed tree roots.

In short, we go from perfection to woefully unprepared without even noticing, and we do it every blessed year. As of this writing, I have all our stuff laid out in front of me on the garage floor and am preparing to put it back just the way that the universe knows that it should be done … all the while aware that ultimately I will find myself this autumn with only two Band-Aids and no sunscreen once again.

As Sharif Ali says to Major Lawrence in the movie Lawrence of Arabia:

It Is Written.

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Chimes of Freedom, by the Lynne Arriale Trio

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On Perspiring

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cartoon du Jour

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


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

CNN Online, May 13

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

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

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

The Long-nosed Leopard Lizard.

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

The Great Basin Gopher Snake. Harmless. Beautiful coloration.

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Two of a Kind, by John Kay

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Power to the People

jono55

Robin and I set a personal record by attending two political rallies only one day apart. On Thursday we drove to Grand Junction to march in their May 1 observation. On Friday we attended a smaller demonstration here on Montrose. Both of these focused on the harm to working families brought about by the present government.

We’re excited about the continuation of the protests around the country. They continue to grow in number and in size, and it should come as no surprise that this is happening. Every day the haphazardness of our federal government supplies fuel for the fire in the breast and the anger in the heart.

I’ve had good people ask questions as to why get involved in demonstrations? Each time it reminds me of the (perhaps apocryphal) conversation between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau had been arrested and jailed for not paying a poll tax which he regarded as unjust. His refusal was an act of civil disobedience. When Emerson came to visit his friend in the hoosegow he asked “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau’s classic answer was “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

While my natural bent is to sit in the shade in a comfortable chair with an iced coffee near at hand, today’s realities have forced me to do something quite different. I am very clear as to why I am taking to the streets with many other good people. Firstly, I have seen such demonstrations work … twice … in my lifetime. The long hard protest for civil rights was one of those times, and the other was the fight against the war in Viet Nam.

Secondly, I know that everything Cluck and his adherents are doing has been done by every totalitarian government trying to take power. There are no mysteries here. It is the same playbook over and over again.

Our present Congress is has proved itself too weak an instrument to resist these machinations. Our Supreme Court is too compromised to be counted on. If there is anything that can stop the present march to non-democracy, it is the people themselves. People who see the inequities, the injustices, and the corruption for what they are. And who then step forward in numbers great enough to show those we hired to do this work how it should be done.

One person doesn’t count at all, really. But millions of people will get the attention of our elected representatives and they will finally find the courage to do the right thing. Perhaps grudgingly, but they will do it. It has happened before and it will happen again.

So I am one of the millions now and the millions more to be. No more and no less. A speck. One cell of a body that is gaining strength every day.

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From The New Yorker

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Recently Rachel Maddow had this to say:

So if suiting up and showing up helps our country in any small way to get out of the unholy mess that the Cluck gang is deliberately creating, I will do so with alarming frequency and ridiculous fervor.

Perhaps I should carry a sheaf of signed waivers to hand out to rally organizers absolving them of any responsibility should my particular cosmic and eternal number come up during a demonstration.

(I know that croaking on a march with my sign in my hand would be bad form and a definite downer, and promise to do what I can to avoid making such a scene.)

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Power to the People, by John Lennon

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Supper Thursday in Grand Junction was at one of our favorite restaurants, Namaste. It’s a small place in a strip mall on the southern edge of town. Our waiter was the most upbeat and chatty guy, almost as if he was an emcee and we were an audience of two. Snippets of his monologue would be:

When I was a little boy in Nepal, we had kings and queens. When the queen got an automobile for the first time, bearers carried the car with her in it.

I came to this country when I was eight years old, and I thought I was just moving to another state in Nepal. Then I got off the transport and there were all these people with light hair and blue eyes. I had never noticed the difference in the eyes before.

All in all, delightful. Good food and a memory tour of Nepal.

For most of my life whenever I played the game “If you were marooned on a desert isle and could eat only one cuisine for the rest of your life what would it be?” I chose Italian. But at some point a few years back, that choice became Indian, and still is. I love the respect that they have for vegetables.

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Aad Guray, by Deva Premal

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From The New Yorker

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There are a lot of colorful characters to be met at AA meetings. We are definitely a motley bunch. Early on in sobriety I met a man named Jim at a meeting who was about 7 degrees off to port most of the time, but while this exasperated some of the other attendees I found him interesting, and we became friends. He introduced me to Krishna Das and kirtan music.

Krishna Das started out in music as a rock musician, and he was part of a group that eventually became Blue Oyster Cult, but this was before it had taken on that name.

However, he met Ram Dass along the way and his life’s trajectory was definitely altered. After than it was off to India to study, and learning the use of music as a form of meditation. It doesn’t take a hard listen, though, to hear rock and roll underpinning his stuff here and there.

Check out this one, taken from a concert in New York City, see what I mean. He’s one of the good guys.

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Yesterday as I was cruising the streets of Paradise NPR was playing and a woman whose name I never learned was describing the epiphany that being able to make one’s own mixtapes truly was. To be able to make a tape recording containing only the tunes I wanted to hear in the order I wanted to hear them was so liberating it was not to be believed.

Just spending time with this advance in technology I believe cumulatively used up enough minutes to make up about four of the years I have spent on the planet. And then along came the double tape deck machine that allowed me to make duplicates of a cassette to distribute to friends and random people I met along the way … my oh my oh my. I never thought of it as a hobby based on theft, but it was of course, as soon as I made the first copy not for my own use. Up until then the music belonged to me and I could, by God, do with it whatever I wanted was my thought line.

Late at night I would get lost in the process of creation, finally looking up at a clock and realizing that I’d better quit and go to bed or I would be going directly from the tape deck to work. And I was a thirty year-old married guy with four kids and a day job … the mind shudders at trying to imagine what would have happened to me without these anchors to reality.

Anyway, who would have thought that listening to NPR could be dangerous to one’s peace of mind? Maybe I shouldn’t be driving when I do it?

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Apropos of the above rant, here is a glimpse of how it was … from the movie High Fidelity. The original one. (Warning: lots of naughty words here)

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On The Trails

jono55

The movie “Sinners” took the #1 box office slot this past weekend, and Robin and I were happy to help them attain that economic honor, even though we had to drive to Grand Junction to do our part. I had read a large handful of reviews of the film, and all of them had been glowing. (When you are going to spend 2.5 hours driving back and forth from the theater to see a movie, it is prudent to do a little research.)

As we walked out after the show, we asked each other the same question (as we always do) and it was “What did you think of it?” Turned out we both thought it was very good. And then we asked ourselves … who can we recommend it to? Because it is definitely a rough cob of a movie, and depends heartily on what one thinks of all the telling and retelling of the vampire legends you have already consumed in your life. But here’s the thing. It is a story with vampires in it, but it is not a “vampire movie.” It is much more than that.

The film has a pulse, and it is a thumper. Nearly all of the characters are bigger than life (the humans) or bigger than death (the vampires). All of them are involved in the struggle for their existence, and if that involves blood and sweat and great music and juke-joint dancing with a capital “D,” well, that’s just how it is. The story hurtles along and demands that you keep up with it for the two hours that is its running time. It was so engrossing that I still had popcorn left as the credits rolled. And that is something to say, if you ever saw me eat popcorn at the movies (not a pretty sight at all, what with using the hands as shovels and all that).

Here are my own ratings, on a scale of 5 :

  • Story = 5
  • Performances = 5
  • Sex = 4
  • Colorful language =5
  • Gore = 5, maybe 6
  • Cinematography = 5
  • Costumes = 5
  • Evocation of an historical era … time and place = 5

See it at your own risk. I nevah said nothin’.

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From The New Yorker

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There is a young woman who lives across the street from us, who bought a small Honda scooter last year. She doesn’t ride it often but when she does she goes helmetless.

I suppose that I could greatly endear myself to her with a harangue about cracked skulls and flying brain tissue and that such vehicles were called “donor cycles” by the neurosurgeons when I was a resident. I could do that.

But she’s young and bulletproof and would only nod tolerantly at some geezer giving her unsolicited advice. My own experience strongly suggests that if you’re ready to hear such advice you don’t need it. You’ve already bought the helmet.

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Yesterday morning I woke with this ear worm: Love’s Been A Little Hard On Me, by Juice Newton. You know about ear worms, right? A fragment of a song that keeps repeating in your brain, unwanted, often unloved, for no apparent reason? Well, scientists have created an earworm eraser, designed to get the darn thing out the way and preserve not only your sanity but that of those around you who must listen to you singing the same short phrase ad nauseam.

I make no claims as to the effectiveness of the “Eraser,” but hey, it’s free and it only takes 40 seconds to find out.

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Love’s Been A Little Bit Hard On Me

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There is an absolutely lovely stretch of bicycle path that runs from Ridgway State Park into the town of Ridgway itself. It follows the Uncompahgre River and offers picturebook scenes galore with often stunning views of the San Juan mountains. There is only one thing wrong with it and that is its length. Only three miles long.

Robin and I biked the path on Sunday, ending up in a coffee shop in Ridgway, where the kindhearted barista was able to conjure up a pair of mochas as good as your mother used to make … honest.

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From The New Yorker

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Secretary of Defense Hegseth apparently used the communication app Signal inappropriately yet another time, when he brought his wife, brother, and personal lawyer into conversations where he shared classified information. Information they were not at all cleared to hear.

President Cluck officially has full confidence in this blabbermouth, but somewhere in that morass of incompetence he calls an administration there must be be somebody who knows this is bonkers. Until they can figure out how to keep Hegseth from revealing even more secrets, I offer this simple fix. It would be removed only at mealtimes.

Either that or don’t tell him anything.

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Hard Times Come Again No More, by Ian Siegal

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Robin and I were on an exercise walk up in the Sunset Hills across the Uncompahgre River when we came across this item. Someone had taken the pains to create this tiny place-marker, carry it up the hiking path until they found just the right bit of natural material, and then insert it as an amusement to passersby.

We found two of these handmade op/ed structures, in different locations. I judged them to be completely disrespectful and almost perfect in their metaphoricness.

But of course it was littering. Tsk tsk.

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The Wolves Survive

jono55

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

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

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

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Hard Times, by Gangstagrass with Kaia Kater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

Will The Wolf Survive, by Los Lobos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wicked

jono55

I liked Chris Isaak, even before his video “Wicked Game” came out on VH1 in 1989. He seemed like a good guy, played beautiful guitar and worked with good material. And then Wicked Game came along, and my appreciation of the dramatic possibilities of sand sticking to skin rose to new heights. The video also showed how good a pair of men’s white skivvies could look when worn by the right woman.

Moments like that are why I look back on the MTV era fondly. MTV didn’t invent the music video, but they knew what to do with them and made them the background music for our lives for a few years. And then they stopped showing them and nobody picked up the concept and ran with it after that.

Everything changes. Things arise and things fall. This is the way of the universe. However … I wasn’t done with MTV yet when they quit the scene. It left me with a musicus interruptus sort of feeling.

(Don’t bother looking up that last phrase. It only looks like Latin).

But these creative short films are still out there. You just have to look for them. Being passive and spoon-fed (my favorite approach) doesn’t work as it did in the past. We have to do a little work.

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Note: the dramatic header photograph is not my own, but weakling that I am it was so striking
that I simply couldn’t avoid borrowing it.

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Finally broke out the electric bike. Many, many others with more fortitude than myself have been seen cycling around town since early March, so I am rather late to the party. It’s those chilly breezes that hold me back. But the machine itself needed no encouragement, all I had to do was turn it on and off we went.

Each summer I put about 600 miles on the bike just going to the grocery store and running errands. It replaces the missing second car very nicely. Especially in a country where rain falleth on many fewer days than it did back in South Dakota. Robin and I have panniers to carry stuff on the lighter errands and a Burley Nomad trailer for bigger loads.

We’ve had our Burley trailer for sixteen years now, so I haven’t looked at that market for a long time. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many brands and styles there are to choose from these days. When we picked up ours back in 2009 there might have been three or four brands to choose from, but that limited selection is history.

There are trailers for hauling kids, cargo, dogs, and even stand-up paddleboards. Teensy camper trailers . One-wheelers, two-wheelers, homemade ones … it’s a brave new world out there.

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The presidents of the United States and El Salvador have told us that there is nothing they can do about the innocent man now incarcerated in an El Salvadorean prison.

Do they think that the matter is thus closed? That we will accept this Alice in Wonderland brand of insanity? Are they so dangerously removed from reality?

Who would have thought that we would now have our own version of Los Desaparecidos here in America? If this man is not returned to the United States and freed, we are none of us safe. None of us.

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Mothers of the Disappeared, by U2

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I count myself a lucky man. To have had delivered to my door a problem I can sink my teeth into at this stage of my life. And I have Donald Cluck to thank for it. He has brought fascism home to us, with all of its colorful horrors intact. It is possible that most of the people who voted for him still think he’s a good guy and when the dust settles all will be well. But they are daily being disabused of that quaint notion, because this particular “good guy” has used them to get what he wanted and doesn’t need them any more.

He has taken a functioning economy and thrown it into the Vitamix. Of course there will be a little pain for awhile, he admits, but eventually this will pass and there will be endless possibilities of getting richer ahead of us. What he leaves out is that the pain is to be borne by the 99%, and the increased wealth will go to the 1%. Not a good sound bite, that ending, so he leaves it off.

Like all fascist leaders before him he has employed the tactic of providing us with enemies who are at our doors and who are reaching for our throats. And what an abundance he provides. People of any color other than white. People of any faith other than Christian Nationalism (which isn’t a faith at all). People who won’t do what he tells them when he tells them to do it. People who don’t lick boots or kiss behinds with enough fervor. Facts and truth being inconvenient, he has dispensed with them completely.

So what is my new job? To join with others who see clearly the tragedy unfolding in front of us. To work for the removal of Cluck from office. To work with others to address the injustices and inequalities that allowed someone as unworthy as Cluck to get power in the first place.

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Find the Cost of Freedom, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

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It was a blue sky day. The temperature was around seventy degrees. The road through the Black Canyon National Park was still closed to automobiles two days ago, while open to bike and foot traffic. Sooooo … I loaded our machines on the rack and off we went.

When we reached the park, we found the road had unfortunately just been opened to cars, but we decided to head out anyway. Shortly thereafter a wind came up, the blue sky disappeared, the temperature dropped 15 degrees, and a light rain set in. When we finally reached the end of the road and our halfway point, we went into the only shelter, an outdoor privy, and stood there for a while to warm up a bit.

The rain finally quit and we returned to the bikes to finish the trip. But, oh what a ride this few miles of highway provides! It’s a narrow two-lane road that twists its way along, with the lip of the dramatic Black Canyon of the Gunnison River just a few yards away much of the time.

Well worth a bit of damp and shiver.

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Ridin’ the Storm Out, by REO Speedwagon

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Changes

jono55

My friend Poco the cat is the same age that I am, according to the complex ways of comparing creatures. We share a great many attributes as a result. Some instances would be:

  • Entering a room and then realizing you can’t recall what you’d come in there for in the first place.
  • The act of running is problematic, and if either of us had to catch our own dinners to survive, we wouldn’t last a day.
  • Jumping vertically is something our minds bring up and our bodies immediately vote down … with extreme prejudice.
  • Our fur tends towards the scraggly.
  • We are much more demanding of comfort in places we choose to curl up. Quietness, warmth, and the sun on our backs are prized.
  • There are times when you just want to stand in the middle of the room and miaow at the top of your lungs. Poco does so with gusto. I whimper.

I will temper this slightly negative discourse with photos of the two of us when we were younger and none of the above applied. Again … when we were about the same age .

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Last evening we had just finished supper when I had the brilliant idea to go to the Dairy Queen for Dilly Bars. And somehow I was able to phrase it so well that Robin actually ended up paying for the dessert. These ice cream bars are an instant connection to childhood. So simple … a chunk of ice cream on a stick covered with chocolate.

But even those were a connection to yet another similar bar which I enjoyed as a kid. I had made a career out of returning pop bottles to get a bit of pocket change, and if it was summertime a Cheerio bar only cost a nickel and was an awesome way to spend five cents.

As you bit into it the chocolate coating fractured like a window hit with a rock, and as you continued to chow down those brown splinters fell onto your clothing, your hands, the table in front of you … where they instantly melted.

One such bar could produce a dozen tiny messes but, hey, I was young enough not to care about a stain on my tee shirt or some chocolate smeared at the corner of my mouth. The sublime nature of the treat was worth any indignities suffered.

Just like last night, when I bit into my Dilly Bar and then spent the next ten minutes dealing with melting chocolate bits.

But it was all okay, because grownups know about napkins.

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Talkin’ Bout A Revolution, by Tracy Chapman

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One of the big problems for Adolf Hitler was that early on he had some successes, which led a whole lot of MDGA (Make Deutschland Great Again) Germans to pat him continuously on the back and tell him what a genius he was. Which eventually led to him not being willing to take advice from … anyone. Because everyone else’s ideas were inferior and not to be trusted.

The blunders that ensued, from the invasion of Russia and continuing forward ended up with him cowering in an underground bunker in a ruined Berlin, all the while blaming the German population for not being worthy of his perfectitude. This was closely followed by suicide for himself and some of his close associates.

His co-fascist Benito Mussolini had similar difficulties with dealing with praise. But he wasn’t quite as impractical as Adolf was, so when he saw the end coming for his dreams of Italian empire he decided to make a break for it. He was headed for Switzerland with his girlfriend when he was recognized by some partisans and that was it for Benito. He and his paramour were shot and their corpses hung on display from a scaffolding in front of a Milan gas station.

My point? If you gain power through sowing hatreds, it is possible that it will one day bite you severely in the ass.

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While I’m on the subject of fascism, there is an editorial worth reading in Thursday’s New York Times. The title is We Should All Be Very Very Afraid. The first paragraph in the piece tells us what the fuss is.

“Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.“

Want a free plane ride to a tropical country? Fly Trump Air to El Salvador. And while you’re there you can stay (again, for free) at CECOT, an all-inclusive resort, for a totally unforgettable experience. You’ll like it so much you’ll probably never want to come back. Even if they would let you.

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Lawyers, Guns, and Money, by Warren Zevon

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l

Battle Songs

jono55

There’s an amusing article in Monday’s Times of New York on the British style of political humor being presently applied to Elon Musk. Of course they have their own bones to pick with the man, with his recent meddling in European politics, always on the far-right side of the bin.

If you are going to stick pins in a gasbag, it is much more enjoyable when they have a thin skin, and can reliably be provoked to outrage. Here Musk qualifies, in spades.

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Won’t Get Fooled Again, by The Who

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When Robin and I bicycle out into the rural we often see a few of the beautiful Gambel’s Quail. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a small handful of chicks as well.

But this photographer in Arizona stumbled upon something special.

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Winter is dragging its heels as we creep toward the inevitability of Spring. Daytime temperatures are going back up into pleasant territory, but nighttime freezes are still the mode of the day. So far all of the blossoming trees are doing quite well, thank you very much. Coming here from the prairies, it has been interesting to see what landscape plantings do well and are thus popular in the mountain climate. At least here at around 6000 feet of altitude.

We are presently moving toward the end of the local forsythia season, where those bright golden flowers stick out from the predominating gray and brown background colors of our yards.

This plant seems quite happy here in Paradise, although I’ve noticed that the size of the shrubs up here is more modest than those planted closer to sea level. When I lived for a time in Buffalo NY we had three large forsythias in the backyard that looked like the one in the purloined picture at right. Each one was briefly an explosion of color.

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With God On Our Side, by the Neville Brothers

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We’ve got a problem here in Colorado. We have two Democratic senators who are decent, likable, hardworking, and honest. This is a problem, you ask? Well … they are trying to work toward bipartisan solutions to problems when the opposing party has lost its mind, backbone, and apparently any fleeting memory of what they are really supposed to be doing in Congress. Seems a waste of energy.

I find myself wishing that our two representatives had a bit more of the rogue in them these days and were willing to take some risks, perhaps even getting their hands a bit bruised and dirty. I remember Michelle Obama bragging back in the dimly remembered days of you’re about how important it was to take the high road. That admiration of clean fingernails may be one of the reasons we are in the pickle we are in. Because the other side has never had any such compunctions, that puts us often in the difficult position of bringing a dessert spoon to a gunfight.

For instance, somewhere deep in my heart I have the feeling that if her husband had been just a tad less fastidious that Merrick Garland may have made it to the Supreme Court. And what a difference that would have made in our lives! But Barack stayed clean and shiny and cool and hosted another White House musical evening and now women’s reproductive freedoms and a lot of other good things political are in the crapper.

( I know that I am probably being unfair to Barack O, and how would I know any of this, being a nobody out here in the boonies, but … maybe there’s some truth to what I am saying?)

Anyway, I plan to send our senators each a pair of work gloves and recommend that they put them on and dig in. Politics may not have to be a bloodsport, but it is definitely similar to making sausage. Not always pretty or enlightening to watch, but sometimes there can be tasty stuff that comes out of it.

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I’m posting my idea of “protest” music on this blog for a while. We need to find our voices and tunes suitable for marching, in this new uncivil war. As a country we’ve gone from Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever to Cluck’s version, which is Stars and Stripes -Meh! Need to move on from there.

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We Shall Overcome, by Dorothy Cotton, Freedom Singers, and Pete Seeger

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Somewhere in an El Salvadorean nightmare of a prison is a man who we now know doesn’t belong there. His name is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Our government, which sent him there, is refusing to cooperate with attempts to get him released. One court officer says “Get him out and return him immediately.” Chief Justice John Roberts says “Wait, put a pause on that.”

What am I missing here? Why is there any question of bringing him back as fast as we can?

I have that living in Wonderland feeling so often these days.

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Watched a special movie on Monday evening. On Netflix. It’s called The Outrun, and stars Saoirse Ronan. Usually I am not keen on watching films where alcoholism is a major theme, as my own personal story has provided me with enough of that sort of drama. But I started it and stuck with it because any chance to watch a Ronan performance is not to be missed. So glad I did because this is not just another 12-step movie.

It’s also not a simple linear watch, but well worth the small effort you will need to make if you take it on. And the last few seconds (literally) are a happy surprise and perfection as an ending.

BTW, much of the story takes place on Scottish islands. It is rock and sea and storms, and a cinematographer who appreciates them.

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The Sound of Both Hands Clapping

jono55

May all sentient beings praise Senator Cory Booker. He is a good man who has now broken the record of a very bad man (Sen. Strom Thurmond) and delivered a more than 25 hour-long speech in the Senate. All of it directed against the destructive and corrupt Cluck regime.

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This is not right or left, it is right or wrong. This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?

Cory Booker

Not every man or woman can do something as strenuous and public as what Booker has done, but every man or woman of conscience can now see where we are and what is happening and be disgusted on the one hand and encouraged on the other, because if sacrifice is called for we don’t have to hunt for the reason – it is there right in front of us.

Easy for me to say? I am only a coot in the corner with little to lose? Not true. Each one of us has only the day in front of them to do what is right. Only that moment. In that way we are all alike, as not one of us can see tomorrow.

If anyone in America can be arrested by masked men, thrown onto an airplane, and transported to a foreign country, all without due process, we are all of us vulnerable and should not be fooled into believing otherwise. These are the tactics of despots, of tsars and fuehrers. No one’s life or liberty is safe in such a country. A man called Martin Niemoller put it so very well, back in 1946, as he described Nazi Germany.

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

As you read this they are already coming for Hispanics, for Asians, for Muslims. We’ve had our wake-up call, folks.

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From The New Yorker

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Comic relief. Josh Johnson.

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Saturday afternoon Robin and I participated in a political rally/march here in Paradise that was directed against the Cluck administration and its policies.

It was part of a demonstration by worried, frustrated, appalled, and just plain fed up people across the country, and which was coordinated by Indivisible.org. Robin and I were amazed at the turnout, 1200 people in a small town. It seems that there are few things that make people angrier than an attempted coup being prosecuted by an incompetent delusional.

The signs on the street today ranged from really imaginative and attractive to my own blunt message scribbled with a fat black marker on a hunk of white poster board: IMPEACH.

A guy can dream, right? Here’s a few pix.

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From The New Yorker

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We don’t eat many casseroles here at Basecamp. That’s okay with me because they were constantly on the menu in my family of origin. But a ripple of nostalgia moved me this week and I decided to make a salmon loaf, which turned out not to be half bad.

What one does is take a single 16 oz can of salmon and throw a bushel of bread crumbs at it. It’s probably the back story for that famous episode in the Bible.

Matthew 14:17-19 KJV

And they say unto him, We have here but five loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them hither to me. And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

My own guess is that they made salmon loaves. You could definitely feed a multitude this way. And there would be plenty of leftovers because of that irreducible group that always says in such instances: “It tastes fishy,” and won’t eat it.

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For What It’s Worth, by Lucinda Williams

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A friend sent along this gem of a link. We liked it very much. It is entitled “Twenty Lessons.”

https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-read-by-john-lithgow?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

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No Bad News

jono55

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

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

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

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

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

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No Bad News, by Patty Griffin

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

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

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

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

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Come On In My Kitchen, by Crooked Still

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

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

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

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Go Wherever You Wanna Go, by Patty Griffin

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

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

A resolution that I never kept.

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

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

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

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Playlists

jono55

Back in 1987, I turned my ex-wife, and said: “You know, this October I am turning 58, and I haven’t had a mid-life crisis yet. Do you have any suggestions for me?” It turned to that she did, and it was a doozy. Before that very same birthday rolled around I was a single man.

As I have done since I was in my mid-teens, I turned to music when the clatter in my head grew too loud and a bit of respite was needed. I found that I could replace that mental static with a song. For the next couple of years, there was a short list of perhaps a dozen tunes that were in very frequent rotation. Looking back, I can’t see much of a pattern in them, and they would go in and out of the daily playlist depending on my sense of the world at that given moment. But they were always there, arrows in my quiver for use when life would place dragons on the stoop.

I’ll post a few of them here today.

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In 1956, driving home from work at the grocery store, I head a song on the radio that stuck in my head. You know how it is, you go through your day with noise of all sorts passing by you and your brain, luckily, ignores most of it. Then, for whatever reason, one of those sounds sticks, like a dart on a board. The tune was Frankie and Johnny, and the artist a man named Lonnie Donnegan. I bought the album and every song was a winner for me, even at that age. Playing that LP on the cheap equipment that I owned at the time I eventually wore it out, so I bought another copy. Later on that album was lost, and when digital music came ’round, it hadn’t made the cut. Still hasn’t. But I found later on that all of the tunes that had been on that original album were now available on other Donnegan collections. He and I have become great pals that never met.

Album title: An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs

You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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I ran across Richard Thompson in 1982, when I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights in Rolling Stone. Since then his music has been with me as a constant presence. Going through his catalog quite a while back I came across Beat the Retreat, which I absolutely loved. Such mournful guitar work … my, oh my. Later on in life when times were melancholy it was a song to turn to. Not for solace, perhaps, but to help put words to feelings that were as yet inchoate.*

*I’ve never used “inchoate” before. Nifty word.

Beat the Retreat, by Richard Thompson

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Phoenix is the sort of tune that might have been sung Karaoke-style way after midnight by a middle-aged man in his cups who was swimming in self-pity and loss.

If any of you know of such a Person of Pathos, recommend it to them. It contains something more than slender hope, it holds out the possibility of triumph.

Phoenix, by Dan Fogelberg

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Friends, Elon Musk and I (we are bffs) would like to recommend the messaging app Signal to you.

Signal is free to use and available on both Android and iOS operating systems. Alongside the extra security protocols, it includes all of the basic messaging tools you’re going to need, including read receipts, emoji support, group chats, and voice and video calls.

Company website

Not only is it better at keeping your secrets than its predecessors, there is always the chance that you will get to sit in on a national security session where they talk about war, bombs, and other cool stuff!

And it doesn’t cost you a cent. With emojis, yet.

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