Being Grateful

THE DAY AFTER my routine doctor's visit I'm wondering what I was so worried about. if you can run five miles a day, there's a good chance you are healthy, or so it seems to me. And indeed I am, according to my doctor, with only a little hereditary high blood pressure which needs medication, of which there is an amazing amount. I remember when I was a kid, about nine, watching the 1964 World Series at my grandmother's house with my father. Her doctor, for her high blood pressure, had prescribed a regiman of cool and calm, with no emotional strees, strain, or ecitement of any sort. That was the best our medicine could do than. She came walking into the room just as Mickey Mantle launched on into the upper deck to win game three and just as we kids started to warn her, she heard the crows on TV, and turned riht around and walked right back into the kitchen. She wasnt going to allow Mickey Mantle to raise her blood pressure. My father died in 1986 from cigarettes, as did many people until rather recently. His high blood pressure was treated with pre Lisinopril meds, but his depression was never treated with oral meds, for not even Prozac had reached the market yet. I keep thinking of my father, and my grand parents, having acess to the same medical science that I do. Then too, we baby boomers, when our descendants look back on us, will note the many primitive forms of behavior in which we engaged, doubtless. I am really really glad I don't have to rely on controlling my own emotions to control my blood pressure. I hereby add modern blood pressure meds to the lengthening list of things for which I am deeply and sincerely grateful. My paternal grandfather, after whom I am partly named, had his first stroke at sixty three, was confined to a wheelchair at sixty six, and died at sixty eight, all from, essentially, poorly controlled or uncontrolled high blood pressure. An "atttude of gratitude" Coach Frank Broyles, and probably other people, used to say. I was raised on please thank you ma'am sir. My parents insisted on it, and I dared not defy my parents. I still don't, dead though they both be. Basking in the warm glow of a Democratic election landslide over my arch nemesis, Republicans, I'll concde, makes it a bit easier to be grateful. Also good health helps. But all that requires work. The Democrats, led from the top with a whole new generation of Democrats eighteen to forty nine, put their hearts and souls ito this recent election campaign, knowing it was a gold opportunity, and seiing on it. Obviously, the Republicans were and are running on fumes with Trump. The pedophile is a lame duck dead in the water, and its time for the Democrati Congressional caucus to step up, take the lead, and govern this great nation from Capital Hill. All vetoes can be overridden, although the Dems don't quite, unfortunately, have the numbers to automatically over-ride; for that they'll need a bit of Republican help, which they can get, if they play their cards right, such as respecting and cooperating to as great an extenst as possible, the Republicans. One must sometimes hold one's nose. Now is the time to attack Trump viciously, relentlessly, ceaselesssly - with facts. We must stop allwoing the media and the American public to ignore Trump's criminality and incompetance. J.D. Vance would be even worse, but we could endure a few months of him, then utterly destroy him and the Republicans, again, in the twenty twenty eight election. We need less war and corporate welfare, and more wealth distributed unto the poor, period. When you turn poor people into spending consumers, you expand the economy, including for the wealthy, by increasing demand, which stimulates production and supply. "Go thy way, and give whatsoever thou hast unto the poor, and thou shall have treasure, in heaven". Perhaps our "Christian" conservative Republican fellow citizens will recall who said that.

Scamming Me

THERE IS ONE THING of which I am irrevocably convinced, and, actually, I've been convinced of this a long time. That in these United States of Advertising, capitalism, free enterprise will win out, or shall prevail, like Donald Trump might say reading from a Que card, assuming he is still able, which is doubtful. I got in the snail mail an official looking white envelope, very formal, very business like in its appearance. I was hesitant to open it. When I did, it said that since my house had a reverse mortgage on it, that the reverse mortgage that I have is in dire jeopardy, dire peril, unless it is backed up by what the letter called home owner's insurance, or protection, or a warranty, or something like that. Currently, it is certainly not. This Home Owner's Warranty offer, I now recall, warned me that my situation was highly vulnerable, or tenuous, or something, but didn't really explain how or why. Botton line, the letter was very threatening. Take advantage of our great and kind offer, or else... Frightened, indeed initally terrified, I decided to run and get help. But not before stewing in fear for far too long, hours, or perhaps even a day or two. And yet, something about it seemed phony, suspect. So I took it a couple of blocks to a lady financial advisor. She wasn't there, but her husband was, who seems to know the financial services busiss as well. He took one look at the letter and told me flat: "they're fishing". What I think that means is that they are trying to scam me, a situation with which I should be and indeed am somewhat familiar. I must assume that of the approximately two billion human beings on Faceboook, that perhaps most if not all of them, over time, have been the victims of a "fishing" expedition, or scam attempt. I can't count the number of times somebody on Facebook has messaged me, tried to get to know me, and tried soon thereafter to scam me. I fell for it once, but never again. Only cost me a couple hundred, thank goodness. The problem with capitalism is that it does not come with a long established system of morality, nor a system of morality of any kind that I can detect. Its just plain cut throat dog eat dog capitalism, at its most basic, use any sales technique to lure and snag a victim, then move in for the kill. I have been told by professional sales people that you can sell anything to anybody, if you know how to do it properly, and I believe it. All this does not enhance my love of capitalism. I am a socialist through and through, who notices how well capitalism and socialism blend in Europe to create prosperity. Europe is far more prosperous than the United States, with a much higher standard of living. More importantly, Europe is rapidly weening away from fossil fuels, using more bikes and mass transit, to everyone's benefit. In the Netherlands, chldren must be competant in riding a bike, and must pass a test proving their skill, at the age of ten. Those folks know how to ride bikes safely, and yet fast and efficiently. Hell, they don't even bother to wear helmets, bicycle accidents in Europe are so vanishingly rare. That also seems to be the case in China, where, at quitting time the streets of their mega multi millions cities are flooded with tens of thousands of workers on bikes, riding in perfect harmony. The fact that the U.S. is large is no excuse not to convert from cars to bikes. I may live to see something like this. A huge percentage of the population on bikes, without automobiles. I'll be content to get rid of my car within a few years, but I will probably walk or use public transit, not a bike. Too many dangerous American drivers will still be on the roads in the forseeable future, I suspect. Public transit apeals to me, but doesn't sell well in the United States of Acquisition, where we still love our cars. Its a doomed romance.

Time, Ticking

ACCORDING TO THE EXPERTS, at our present rate of production and consumption of material goods, we humans have about seventy five years left of reasonably decent planetary health left before the cumulative effects of cliamte change and all manner of human pollution and degradation of the Earth finally accumulate sufficiently to throw the planetary climate totally off kilter, with catastrophic amounts of added heat enrgy accelerating the motion of the atmosphere, aka wind, sufficiently to produce constant, violant, unliveable weather, a climate out of control, deadly rather than amenable to human life, like a planet gone wild, out of control, vastly departed from its former self. Granted, seventy five years is a fairly long ways off, but not really. Hell, soon I will be seventy five years old, and it certainly does not seem to me as if the time I have lived is all that lengthy. In fact, its gone by fast, and as we all learn by living, the longer we live, the older we get, the faster time seems to pass. Many explanations have bene offered to eplain this seemingly universal pehnomenon; none totally fill the bill. One "expert" suggested that the older we get, the smaller, as a percantage of our lives, any given amount of time becomes. Fr a young whild two weeks is a very long time, a high percntage of their life thus far. Not os foraloderfolks, t wom two wees,or yws months, or two years goes by in a seeming flash. You could think that we could do something about that, something to reduce the sensatin of our lives passing like lightening; maybr a pill or something. A pill which seems to make time go more slowly.But that would probably only bore us. At my age, seventy oe, I won't live long enough to experience the worst effects of climate change, even though I am, we are, let's make no mistake, experiencing them now. The climate, where I live,and where everyoe els lives, has changed. Unless I'm dreaming, people, most people, all over the world are now agreeing on this. climate change denial is vanishing as it becomes more and more difficult to deny the obvious. It lokd like I am going to get out of her in teh nick of time. Even if I live to be a hundred, I won't see the worst ofit, but, on second thought, I will see as much if nor more than I want. The scientists keep shortening their estimates of the amount of time we have left before we suffer severs climate change, and recently the number seventy five years is being suggested. There are, we now think, about seventy five years left of sane climatic conditions before the Earth's atmosphere collapses in chaos, with straight line winds of perpas hundreds of milse per hour, wildly fluctuating temperatures from extreme cold to heat, and constant violent storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. All this is coming just as sure as can be, and we must do two things. One, we must start to do something about it to change it, and two, we must begin to prepare to live with that which we cannot change and control. Between now and then humanity will doublless learn much more about Earth's atmosphere, weather, and climate, and will develop methods of ameliorating, to whatever extent, the worst effects of global warming, We can slow it down, maybe even stop and reverse it. We can make Earth green again, We can control population growth, and so forth. As I age, and approach the end of my life, my growing obsession is with the preservation of life on Earth long after my lifetime. I don't have children, but all children ultimately belong to all of us, in a sense, and I want the children of the future to come into and live in a healthy world, and maybe remember us.

Living In the Anthropocene

THE WORD "Anthropocene", one'll have to admit, is pretty darned fancy. What it means of course is the geological age, the era, the epoch of human beings. "Anthro" means human". The period of time upon planet Earth during which homo sapien sapiens exists. That period, now estimated at about a quarter of a million years, so far, traces the migration of our primitive ancestors out of Africa, and into Europe, and eventually out of Africa and into Asia, and then eventually across the Bering Strait and into North America. Then, of course, all the way down to the tip of South America, ever so close to the frozen Antarctic, went our nomadic ancestors. The fact that humans settled Polynesia, on islands all over the vast south Pacific, and setteled hundreds of them while missing a few, says a lot about the human urge for exploration, discovery, and learning, and its curious spirit and intelligence. Anyone who has a cat knows exactly how curious they are. Either cats are highly intelligent, or curiosity is not a sign of intelligence. Its the former, obviously. The sheer variety of highly intelligent species of aninals should be sufficient to tell us that there is nothing "special" about human intelligence, and that homo sapien sapiens considers itself above and superior to other species of animal and plant life only through hubris bias. Our key human attribute turns out to be thumbs which "oppose" fingers, all of which work together from opposite sides of the human hand to skillfully manipulate its envrionment. Chimps can do much the same thing, and one wonders, had homo sapien sapiens not taken charge of this planet over the most recent few thousand years, would there have been another species, perhaps another variety of primate, that would have? In a poem "Concerning Poor B.B.", Bertolt Brecht writes "we are makeshift, and after us will come...practically naught". Maybe, maybe not, but notwithstanding the fact that we tend to assume that not only will we live forever as individuals in our difficulty of comprehending death, we often seem to think that people have been here since Adam and Eve, and will either remain on Earth for a much longer time, or will be raptured into heaven, or sent to hell. Any real human "reincarnation" probably is brought about by infinite reincarnations of the whole universe, in which somebody very much like you will, does, or has already existed in another galaxy, universe, or dimension, take your pick. Our smallness and ostenible insignificance need not automatically require that we deem ourselves meaningless, or unimportant. With every passing day our modern telescopes tell us that the universe is brimming with Earth like planets. The close up pictures we are now getting of some of them are remarkable in their apparent suitability for advanced organic life forms to have evolved, like we did. For us to actually encounter and learn from another advanced form of life would be life changing, as we say these days. More than ever we tend believe in an abundance of life in the Milky Way galaxy on the basis of this alone, the mere demonstrated fact that we now know, beynd all doubt, that planets do indeed tend to form and orbit around stars in seemingly every instance. All stars seem to have planets. Amazing. With billions of planets to choose from, our chances of living in a truly fertile universe now seem better than ever. Somebody said that either we are alone in the universe, or there are other, probably many other intelligent lifeforms, and that either possibility is equally frightening. So are living forever, and dying, the only two possible choices. Both are scary. We are star matter, Carl Sagan said, and he said that 'we are a way for the cosmos to know itself." The same is presumably true of life all over the universe, a vast multitude of similar means and methods of the cosmos becoming self aware, aware of itself.

Electing Environmentalists

EXCITED AS I AM about the composition of the newly elected House of representatives, what with a strong Democratic majority and all the self described democratic socialists and all, my jury is still out on whether this will finally be the incarnation of Congress which steps up to the plate, frankly acknowledges that we are rapidly destroying the Earth's ecosystem and with it ourselves, and at least begins behaving more like the European countries, taking action to do something about it. The United States, by all measurements, lags far behind most of the rest of the world in taking action to ameliorate and reduce global warming which causes climate change. The world's greatest polluter, also the world's greatest climate denier, acts almost as if by refusing to see the problem, it will somehow mysteriously, magically just go away. My best guess is that pressure will be put on the House, which will in turn put pressure on the Senate and whatever administration is in power after 2028, to lead the United States away from fossil fuels by breaking the power of the oil-fuel industry, which is so pervasive that up until now, the great American oil cartel has essentially dictated and determined American energy policy, rendering the EPA, for instance, weak and impotent, as weak and impotent as the sum total of federal government action thus far to bring the United States into the fight against the greatest single threat to our continued existence. We now know, please bear in mind, that as early as the nineteen sixties and seventies internal memos and discussions within the cloistered, elite world of fossil fuel corporate management indicated their awareness that fossil fuels are causing catastrophic damage to the environment, and kept it as a carefully guarded secret from the public, with a good degree of cooperation from the political leadership class, which, of course, has long been bought and paid for by big oil. Saving ourselves and the planetary ecosystem is going to require a fundamental change in human behavior, changing from deadly dirty energy sources to clean, renewable sources like wind, solar, and geothermal. The survival of the human species and of the Earth's environment is of course of no concern to corporate America, which cares only for its own ever increasing profits, an elite class of billlionaires whose members would much rather become trillionaires than preserve the planet. Our corporate and billionaire masters have no concern for long term human survival, but only for their own pocketbooks, and their intent on leaving the bulk of their wealth to their family descendents, to perpetuate a dynasty, and to make themselves remembered, immortal. People like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who have given away much of their wealth to noble causes, are exceptions to this patttern of behavior, and are to be admired and emulated, as they are indeed urging their fellow billionaires to also engage in healthy forms of societal giving. Perhaps the incoming Congress, so full of self proclaimed pro- environment progressives, will change the course of the American government, and begin, belatedly, to use its enormous power to actually do something worthwhile, such as cleaning the planet up, instead of spearheading its eventual destruction.

Basking

QUITE NATURALLY I was elated at the results of the election. Devout Democrat that I have long been, it feels great to win big. Now, perhaps, Trump is dead in the water, inert, a true lame duck serving out the rest of his term impotent. The Democrats seem to be engendring a new young generation of political leaders, attractive folks, ready to replace the Trump-Biden generation, which badly needs doing. The new Democratic majority Congress seems poised to take on Trump, and force a new, progressive agenda down his raspy throat. Trump'll doubtless utilize the veto pen more often than even, say, Gerald R. Ford who, as president in the liberal seventies, was not only weakened by his status as Nixon's theraputic replacement, but was at odds not only with the heavily Democratic Congress, but with a solid majority of the American people as well. This Democratic landslide is just what the doctor ordered, ideologically, and clearly demonstrates, yet again, that the United States is a fundamentally progressive country, European culturally, with strong fundamental egalitatian impulses. As it has been for more than a hundred years, the Republican party remains the party of big business, of the wealthy. Lincoln's free soil party was captured by big business in the post Civil War American industrial revolution, and has remained captive ever since. The G.O.P. is also the white Christian party, as contemporary scholars often point out. Today's Republican leaders are well aware that their party has become bottlenecked by white upper middle class Christianity in a country increasingly darkly colored and multicultural, including spiritually. Only about fifty percent of the American people are caucasian. Only about half of the American people self identify as "Christian" and attend church. Republican leaders and pundits are talking about how the G.O.P. must become more broadly appealing, to expand beyond its white Christian base. Pure, unadultered conservatism inherently hurts the G.O.P., in that, over time, over the years and decades, society and history move towards the left, in that, people and societies seek circumstantial self improvement, which can only come from change, change being the foundation of societal advancement of any sort and progressive liberal ideology in particular. There is of course the possibility that the new Democratic Congress will turn out to be a bunch of lackluster wimps, who will backtrack from their ambitious promises, but early indications are other- wise. Generally speaking, the newly elected young liberal Democrats seem truly intent on opposing and defeating Trumpism and leading the country from their end of Pennsylvania Ave. But history hath shown that they had better get started right out of the blocks, because their window of opportunity will not remain open forever.

Voting Part II

I ENJOYED THE HECK out of voting, as I have always and always do, very in the morning, standing there in the dawn chill, dreaming of a better, democraticlly governed America. like filling out a paper ballot, and dropping it personally into the ballot box, as I suspect most Americans do. Enough of this electronic machine stuff. I didn't go toe the trouble of staying up till midnight watching the results roll in, as I have done most of my life. I remember going to bed late as a thirteen year old in 1968, riveted by the HUmphrey - Nixon election, hanging on every voe count report. I think Nixon won by about tweny nine million to twenty eight million votes, if memory serves. I had grown so tired during the campaign of hearing HHH berate and verbally lambast Nixon that he drove me out of the Democratic party, but only temporarity. Four yera later, when I was a high school senior, I was chanting in the hallways "reelect the president!"...I liked the 1964 joke about washing your car with Goldwater and shining it with Johnson's wax. I was nine, and got it. As I sipped coffee the day after, and started paying closer attention, and it began to dawn on me that election day was a big, big win for the Democrats, my mood kept imporving, even becoming celebratory. Not of course Trump is reminding us about his veto pen. I hope the democratic congress reminds Trump of the constitutional process of "over-riding a presidential veto". I love teh idea of having a solid, Democat majority Congress, both houses, arrayed against the felonious reprobate president. Bot hosues of Congress Democratic, aligned against the Felon, is my heart's desire, come true. I have come, like millions of Americans, to despise the Republican party under Trump, and to despise the MAGA movement so much, that to see it wither out from under the reprobate, with two years of a lame, impotent presidency in store for us until we finally get to the glorious electio of 2026 is fine by me and, if, for example, J>D. Vance steps forth as a continuation of Trumpism, I hope the G.O.P. tries runnig hime for presiednt in twenty six, which surely they will have to good sense not to do. I live ina backwoods so deep in Republican terrirory that in mot local political contests, you can't even find a Democrat on the ballot. You either vote for the Republican running for, say, dog cathcer or city council, or you leave it blank, I left a lot blank. The good news started to turn good early last night on election night, and got better as the day after proceeded. A bunch of Democrats elected to governorships. Dems taking the U.S. Senate, and the House. Trump and his administration, isolated, listless, impotent. The criminal bastared is finally a lame duck. Who knows, by 2028, America might be ready for more Trumpism, and might elect J.D. Vance as our next president, for example. More likely, it seems, is that the Republcain party wil undergo a substantial revamping, to try to become more popular with mainstream America. It has simply moves to far to the right. The Democrats, on teh other hand, might wish to consider pushing ahead with the socialist stuff- Several self described democratic socialists are now going to be sitting, serving in Congress, as members. Each election day after cup of coffee tastes better, as all this begins to sluggishly dawn on me.don the Con is now more of a lame duck, more irrelevant than ever. Certainly, this situation with an American president has disadvantages internationally as well as domestically, but, considering the alternative, its probably the best we can do, at least for the time being.

Voting

I INHERITED MY ADDICTION to voting from my parents, directly. My father, an early retired attorney, said he'd be happy to vote on anything, anytime, anywhere, as if he'd like to mosey over to the polling place every day or two. My mother considered voting to be her sacred obligation to the country. She forgot to vote one time in a minor local election, and I thought she was gonna flog herself. I told her "For Chrissake, mom, you're a retired nurse, you tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but your family wouldn't let you, you wear red, white, and blue about half the time, and this is the first vote you've missed since World War Two, if not before. Don't ya think you owe yourself a break, some slack? We all make mistakes. She wasn't having any part of it. She had not voted, She had failed in her duty as an American. I remember how excited I was, in 1971 when I was sixteen, when they lowered the voting age to eighteen, just in time for me to take advantage of it. For presidential elections I usuallly hook up with the local Democrats, start going to meetings, and work the polls. I confess I supported Nixon when I was a high school senior in 1972, I hope by now I have absolved myself of that sin, somehow. I share my parent's fervor for voting (damned Republicans), and I feel great every time I come out of the voting place wearing one of those goofy little "I voted" stickers. What really got me into politcs at the tender age of eight was the JFK assassination, because of all the meledramatic political activity of the day. The riotous, violent Democratic National Convention of 1968 really got my attention. As a thirteen year old, I supported Nixon, probably becaus he promised to end the war in Viet Nam which even I, at the tender age or twelve, knew was nothing but a disaster for America. The assassinations of 1968 messed me even more. I was a big Bobby Kennedy fan, and his violent death sickened and gisgusted my pre teen self, and still does. I wish RFK had become president, and sinc ehe didn't, I wish Ted kennedy had. I'm not sure about both of them. A dynasty needs limits, especially in "Democratic" America. According to people like Gore Vidal America is not a democratic republic, but rather, a plutocratic oligarchy. I can see his point, and am happy to explain it to anyone has doesn't. Gore Vidal maintained tha the United States of America is a sham, a scam, and always has been. A plutocracy cleverly but thinly disguised as a true democracy, our votes having little meaning, because who we vote for and what we vote for is spoon fed to us by our corporate masters, says Vidal. I say it too, because vidal proves it. So my vote is window dressing. The one one percent who own and operate this money machine have everything neatly under their control and ownership. People like to talk about how the United States constitution guarantees freedon and liberty within and throughout the American economic and political systems. What they don't mention is that wealth purchases power, and that there is no mechanism in America to safeguard the interests of the poor masses against the predatory exploitational tendences of the wealthy corporate owners and masters. The corporate elite like to present themselves as bulwarks for capitalisim and thus freedom in our glorious democracy where everybody has what they laughably call "equal opportunity". We all start from square one, and the talented and hard working rise to the top of the economic pyramid, so goes the Darwinistic rationale. Competition is natural, and therefore, desirable. Also unmentioned is that cooperation, rather than competition between groups of people and between people within the group forms the basis of all human civilization. The establishment of a nation and of its economic system is an act of large scale cooperation, If there is anything "unnatural", it is for a group of people to set up an economic system in which competiton allow for some to survive and others to perish. rahter than one which ensures the safety and well being of all members of the group, who, after all, have something to contribute mersly by existing, like all humans. We can compete all we want in the glorious arena of the sacred capitalistic cow, but the more people whom the system excludes from even minimal prosperity, the more the system consumes and destroys itself. All you hard core right wing capitalists had better count your lucky stars that there are good, solid pillars of socialism, cooperative economics, like public schools and utilities, like Social Security and Medicare, supporting and buffering a cut throat corporate capitalistic monstrosity which, otherwise, left to its own devices, would beyond all shadow of a doubt consume itself in a frenzy of private dod eat dog economic enterprise if but given the chance to do so. Thank you, socialism, for saving the American economy, and thus, for saving America.

Learning, and Living

AMONG THE MOST unpleasant aspects of living a life as a human being on a tiny planet at the edge of a nondescript galaxy is living long enough to witness the death of not only your elders, but your age peers as well, and even people younger than you. That, and all the other slings and arrows, well documented. I learned about death at the tender age of five, when my maternal step grandfather "passed" as we say. Why my mother, a woman who firmly believed that that the best time to learn all about real life is right now, decided to take me with her to "visitation" at the mortuary is still unknown to me; either she thought the best time to encounter and deal with death is right now, or, she couldn't find or wouldn't take the time to find a baby sitter.I still wish she had found one. The image of my grandfather in his casket still stays with me, probably because it was formed at such an eary age, and was so deply impactufl upon my unformed mind. Long ago a friend of mine remarked that people seem to beautiful to die. Maybe, but without limited life spans and mortality, exactly how "beautiful" would we all seem to each other, is a topic which invites deep thought, and can engender unexpected gratitude. Merely glancing around at the known universe is sufficient to instill within us a sense of our relative smallness; whenever one of the people closest to us passes away, the sense is reinforced. I don't think I'd ever take a six year old for a viewing of an open casket, but, well, maybe that's just me. I do this; maybe most or all older people do: whenever somebody younger than I dies, I reflect back to what I was doing when I was his or her age, and imagine what it would have been like, how things, especially my life, would have been different, had I died at that point in my life. Such musings are more than ample to reignite the most soured appreciation for life. I like to think that my mind is nearly as open to learning as it was all those decades ago, a thought which boils down to no more than a wishful fantasy. It freaks me out, as we say, that the young lady who was the director of our local senior center as the tender age of forty three passed away three days or so ago, of stomach cancer. Maybe we learn more about ourselves through our reactions to the misfortunes and deaths of others. With all this, with individual and societal death always close by in the immediate bacground. We are tod and so we believe that humans are the only animals aware of their own mortality, who even give the matter a first or second thought. Maybe that is our curse, maybe, our blessing. But an living organism unable to comprehend its own mortality is also undoubtedly unable to comprehend a great deal more, more than any normal, halfway curious, intelligent person would want to miss My experience is that dealing with death does indeed become "easier" with experience, but not easier enough to make it worthwhile. or desirable Still,we now that we don't want to live forever, at least not in our current inarnation. I think my plan would be to reincarnate my essense time and again in various shapes and forms of life, perhpas on different planets in different parts of the universe. And maybe, just maybe, take a little bit of whatever I might learn each lifetime forward with me into the next lifetime. Or maybe we are all "gifted" one lifetime per universe. With every subsequent cyclical big bang, we, as individuals, emerge and live again, in one form or another. It may be that we our living our nine billionth lifetime, to borrow a number from Arthur C. Clarke. In this context, I hope and plan to see my friend Ashley again.

Standing Up To My Rack

AGAIN, walking into a library and sitting down at a computer which gives you sixty minutes of time to write a meaningful essay of some sort without prior prep can be a bit of a challenge, but as Davy Crockett said about Andrew Jackson, whom he nicknamed "the government", "Well ah reckon the government's a mite prickly, but I'm wrathy as a screamin' painter, and I'll stand up too my rack, all hollar, fodder or no fodder, and may the devil take the hindmost" No, you didn't wanna mess with Davy Crockett. Nor, for that matter, did you want fo mess with Andrew Jackson, the kind who'd get into a duel, take a bullet, laugh at it, then walk over to his assailant and knock him out cold with a right hook to the jaw. Crockett and Old Hickory hated each other's guts, most of the hatred belonging to Jackson, who, as president, resented that the hillbilly congressman from the backwoods of Tennessee was more popular than he. Hell, Davy Crockett was a nicer person, flat out. He's the one you'd go out for a beer or three with...Anyway, you know that there is something inside you, even if you aint quite sure what it is. and you know it needs to come out, like everything does. So, sit down and write an essay. Hell, even the semi literate David Crockett wrote a book. I guess for me, its "when in doubt, write about David Crockett". But I do think that Andrew Jackson, who was smart, well educated, and articulate, carried at least one bullet around with him, in him, for much of his adult life. Both Crockett and Albert Einstein, my other hero, played the violin, albeit in distinctly different styles... I'd like to start either a writer's group or a book club at the senior center, or maybe a combination of both. Everyone pick out a book, read it, and give report. There is an amazing number of really good books being written and published these days, an explosion of it, which to me seems all for the good, one of the positive signs regarding the state of humankind. More than fifty thousand books a year are published in significant hard copy numbers in the United States, if my memory serves, which it does with alarmingly decreasing frequency nowadays... Guy just walked in to the library and sat down at the computer station next to mine, a friend of mine. Fellow senior center attendee. I had to tellhim about Ashley, our beautiful forty three year old director who died three days ago. It still sucks, and always will. Ashley was a Penn State and Houston Astors fan, and, boy, have they ever lost a good fan. I've said this for years; that I wish everybody would write an autobiography of some sort, of sit in front of a camera, or something. Since we have the power of preservation, let's do it. What we in teh twenty first century have ofthe ancient Greeks and Romans is priceless, invaluable to us, and we wish we had more, a lot more, so? Let's give the future as much if not more than it can handle.

Hanging In There

SO, I COME TO the library to type in my daily essay, not necessarily having much of an idea what I intend to say, but still, still, feeling it, somehow. Of course the death of my dear friend and local senior center director Ashley, at the tender age of forty three or so, just two or three days ago, still has me by the short hairs, as we used to indelicately say. It'll take awhile to get over this one, or, rather, to file it away in the memory banks and let it fester as it will, as we do, evidently because we must. As you age, of course, more and more people you like and love die, and you accumulate, as it were, a bunch of "mortality baggage" one might say. Now, it seems to me that all the great thinkers, all the great philosophers throughout history have deemed life worth living, with the exception of an existentialist or two. Einstein got a letter from a disenchanted college student questioning the purpose, value, and worth of living a life in the form of a human being, one of these negative intellectual types, and Einstein put him in his place in a heartbeart, by writing back, and saying in his letter that he found his life resoundingly worthwhile, interesting, full of wirthwhile things to think about and things to do. On that, I go with Einstein. He died at seventy six, and I am seventy one now, and of cousre I know the end is near, as Sinatra used to sing. Man, is it ever worthwhile. Even as ordinary and perhaps mediocre as my life has been compared to, say, somebody else's life, my assessment is that my life has been and still remains richly rewarding, if only because of an interesting accumulation of minor events and circumstances, and because I say so. No complaints. No, I didn't "do it all", but I did a lot of it, and for that, I am extremely grateful. About fifty years ago I tried to write poetry, but failed. One of my failures was to be titled "Hanging In There", a sort of ode to the human spirit and nobility of never giving up, etc. Now, I almost wish I had actually written it, and maybe I still should and could, because that's what I believe in, more than almost anything. You hang in there, because this too shall pass, all comes out even at the end of the day, and if you keep swinging the bat you'll get some hits. If you are a sports fan, as I am, you learn that, imtimately, all corny metaphors aside. And its well worth learning. When I was fifteeen my dad told me that I would, in my coming life, get knocked down over and over, but that I would get back up every time. Here's to you, dad.

Looking At A Casket

IF I'VE TOLD YOU this before, stop me. It might not do any good, because I'm a mentally deteriorating old man, but, give it a shot. it might work. When I was about six years old, my grandfather died. This was 1961, I think. I remember, clear a a bell, standing in the mortuary looking at my grandfather (actually "step" grandfather) lying in his casket. My grandmother, having just lost her second of two beloved husbands, looked painfuly, agonizingly down at her soul mate, said "Oh Papa, come back to me". She called him "papa". I distinctly remember that. He was considerably older than she, grandma having been born in 1892, and he, in 1878, only a couple of years after Custer bit the dust, amazingly. I now consider it amazing to have personally known truly nineteenth cntury people. Well, even at my tender age, when she said that to her deceased husband, I fully knew that, as we say "it aint hapnin". The next day grandma was over at our house, sitting on t he patio with my mom,just hanging out, being with her only daughter in her time of great need.My mother did mmore. She said, to her mother, in a sort of impatient tone of voice "everybody has to die, mother". I think that was the moment when the full awareness of death impinged upon me, although, on the other hand, by the time I was six I had years and years of "Gunsmoke" and "Have Gun Will Travel" under my belt. But no doubt, I understand, knew what was going on. Looking back, I almost wish mom had dropped me off at a baby sitter then made her merry wayy to the mortuary childless, but, as they say, that's another matter. But actions have consequences. I have spent my entire life sleeping on my right side, my left side, and my stomach, but never, and I mean never, on my back. I don't sleep on my back, because I would probably wake up myself and the neighborhood with snorning, and...because...I cannot dislodge from my tortured mind the notion that I am lying here just like a corpse in a casket. Well, we all have our little psychoses and what not, and I just put one of mine on the internet, perhaps unwisely. Where all this is coming from is from my broken heart, the death of a good friend of mine, see previous essay. All my beloved who have died I'd have 'em all back again, and maybe that's why we invent heaven. I am among those who believe in something beyond death, as we say; I think maybe our atoms disperse and reconverge in endlessly new and diffferent forms, and that maybe we live trillions of lives, all versions of the same universe, and all that. But one thing I do believe is that there is something going on here, and to put it eloquently, or to put it in terms of criminology, the universe is up to something.

Losing

SOMETIMES, if not often, life simply slaps you in the face, as we all know. This morning I got a phone call from a good friend of mine, a fellow member of our local senior center. Her news was that our director, a young lady of about forty four, with three kids and and dynamic personality, had passed away. At forty four. A room full of old fogeys like me, and a dynamic young woman with three young childern who adore their excellent mother, passes away. My mother, a nurse, said that she didn't like the watered down expression "passed away", that she much preferred just comning out and saying that somebody died. Fair enough, mom. You're the expert. Sometimes, though, it helps softies like me soften things up a bit, expecially when things are so damnably miserably hard that you think they might become unendurable. Well, I can't speak for anyone else, as as for me, and as for today, as far as I am concerned. I am the loser. Dear God, what a loss. Yes, I am grateful for having lived to be seventy one and a half years old. I thank the dear lord, whatever that is, daily. But wasn't it Bertrand Russell, probably Bertrand Russell and a lot of other people, who questioned the "goodness" of a god who would permit or allow such suffering, even on a planet on which primitive barbaric little bipedal primates scramble around, misguidedly thinking that they have to kill somebody to survive? Either the force which created us is amenable to our suffering, or indifferent to it, or so it seems. Let's get that straight. It was Archibald MacLeish, I think, who said that If god is good he is not god, and if god is god he is not good. Makes sense if you think about it. I can't count the number of times I have quoted it. But my goodness was this lady ever special, mother of three great kids, the whole package. I can't imagine what it must be like to be "angry at God". I simpy cannpt conceive of myself engaging that state of mind. And I think it was Bertrand Russell who said something to the effect that any belief he otherwise might have had in an omnipotent God vanished wen he visited a hospital for for terminally ill children. I mean, look, either god intends for and wants us to suffer, or he can't do anything to prevent it. Chistian apololgists for this tend to scatter like newly enlightened cockroaches when confronted with this stark, unavoidable reality. My plan is to hopover to the senior center and see who's there. The kicthen staff, and perhaps a few others,would be my guess. We can help comfort each other just by being together. I don't worry about god's plan. The universe is seemingly functioning precisely as intended by "the great eternal genius who built the world" as Einstein put it. Einstein's religiosity which he said "consisted in humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit" covers all the bases for me. "We are indeed immortal, made so by the effects of our actions", said Goethe. And, I don't question, or get angry at God. I'm incapable of it. And I think that Ashly, my friend forever, is too. "one does not always lose when one has to do without, said Goethe. We haven't lost Ashley. we've just watched while the force which created the universe has moved her to another, better place.

Missing Church

I MISSED CHURCH today, which is unfortunate because I really wanted to go, but the congestion in my chest and bronchial tubes or whatever was too unpleasant to inflict on th epublic, so I stayed home with my trusty bottle of Robitussin. It may be that our long ry air is full ot pollen and mold and god only nows what all else, and that a good rain will wash it all clean. The reasons to hope for rain mount. I finally felt well enough to get out around noon, but only briefly, long enough to use the public library internet connection to connect my computer, then, to take my laptop home, online and us it online upon my arrival. Pretty slick if you ask me. I don't even know whether I still have an internet connection in my house; I haven't received a monnthly bill in the snail mail for what seems like a long time, As the day progressed, I bemae more convinced that skipping church was the right ove, and that treating today lke a "sick day" was the appropriate course of action. Had I left the house I might not've seen Obama on television. Evidently he has decided to once again come out of the wookwor a few weeks before a big election, and hit thestump trail for Democrats, bless him. Obama can be a great asset for Democrats, and thus for America's continued existence, as long as he is willing to remain engaged in public life, which he seems to have some appetite for, but a limited one. Since American presidents and their party never tend to do very well in off year elections, it seems highly lely that Trump and the Republicanswill take a beating on November 3, and, lord willing and the creek don't flood, the MAGA movement will spend the final two years of Trump's deflated, defeated presidency quietly lurking while Trump blusters and prevaricates his way through the rest of hisfun house presidency. Then the historical profession takes over. Trump's presidency will belong to history and to the historians who will write and speak about it. Over time, as the decades and centuries pass, historians from different generations write voluminous tomes detailing and analyzing all the former presidents and their administrations. I'm a life long Harry Truman fan, being from Missouri. in a graduate school history seminar in 1982 the profressor asked the class, a few graduate students, myself included, whether Truman's reputation, over time, is improving or declining. I triumphantly raised my hand and blurted out "Improving!". I was dead wrong, it turned out. Now nearly fifty years later, I have no idea what Truman's historical reputation is doing, rising or sinking, but historical analysis, inevitably, is a roller coaster.By far my favorite presidents are Truman and FDR, with Lincoln thrown in, and maybe Jefferson. Nobody even was handed more power and responsibility in a more diffficult situation than Harry Trump, in April, 1945. And, he rose to the occasion. For that alone, he is among my heroes. My hope is that the Robutissin helps me through this congestive illness, and that my voice can ring out loud in gospel choir tomorrow morning at the senior center. I can get right back into church next week. It'll still be there. So will my pantheism, according to which everything I see and experience is part of an ultimately perfect cosmic whole.

Posting...and Waiting

ONE THING I DO, out of all the little things I do and don't do, is to write and publish about one page of non fiction prose each and every day, usually early in the morning. I don't bother to edit it, or to even spend much time looking for and correcting mistakes and typos. Just, write, and hit click, and publish. The original idea was a creative writing essay website, with as many diffferent writers as possible, but it didn't turn out that way. What it seems to be turning out to be, at least recently, is a constant wringing of hands about climate change, aka "global warming", which is certainly a worthy enough purpose, even if it gets a bit old from time to time. If I haven't already confessed to beng obsessed about climate change, please consider this my confession. It just seems to me that all other issues, all other topics of conversation are of secondary or even tertiary importance compared to that of global warming, aka climate change. And here I am, seventy one years old, and though in reasonable good health, still, my time remaining on this Earth is limited, I think it would be fair to say. Climate change is either going to put an end to the human species, or the human species is going to stop changing the climate, and solve the problem itself. There is no reason why a super advanced high tech intelligent form of life can't live harmoniously on the surface of a small planet with highly advanced technology, and live, survive, and thrive quite nicely. Humanity's current level of technology and rate of advancement is of course unprecedented in human history, with the advance of human knowledge taking place at an utterly unprecedented rate. I want to live long enough to find out what happens in the great struggle between human survival and climate change, for instance. Also, I have always wanted humans to establish contact with another "intelligent" form of life from another planet during my lifetime, a wish which was always far fetched, and probably nearly impossible, despite the seemingly likely existence of life on billions of planets in this galaxy alone. What happens in our day to day lives is of the highest importance, if only to ourselves. We render our activities and lives meaningful by living them in such a way as to impart meaning to them. Sure, we are only small collections of atoms, like everything else. Why does anything exist at all?