Friday, January 31, 2014

When Now Becomes Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

January 31, 2014

I took a long mysterious trip down memory lane today.  Friends held my hand and it was inspiring how 1974 came back to life so clearly in specific ways.  That year I was married to Lyn, Jessica was born, friends from the Air Force were still visiting Lyn and I in Kenai and our soul mates Susan and Raymond were so close to us we didn't know if we lived in separate houses or if we had two houses we lived together in as a family.  Today as the memories of that time rushed to surface like a fish after a mayfly, and the friends and kin of that time:  Lyn, Jessica, Steve Leyden, Jim Hallock, the Carrs, Sharon, Mike, others at the Air Force, new friends at the hydroponics research facility in Kenai, etc.,  I felt as if I was there again.  A picture sent to me by Steve placed me back inside the body and age I was then and it was like I could not get out of that body to put on my older man, my widowed man, my orphaned man suit back on and into the present day-moment.  I was texting and FacePaging and emailing and singing out to the survivors of that time who would respond and the feelings I had for them 40 years ago were alive and well within me as if they were root memories sending tendrils all over my body and stimulating my brain and tingling my heart.  You know the term, surreal; yes, it was surreal.  I renewed myself with Steve and Susan and Jessica today as we chattered via the Internet and it was as if we were all sitting in a room and living the "back then" as it was happening.  I saw myself in Steve's picture as a 26 year old, Steve was 19.  Susan was probably "jailbait" that year, or at least she looked it, but her and Raymond were all but walking up the hill to their marriage vows about then of shortly afterward.  Lyn was 23 and lovely of course.  And she was the center of the universe again today, as she often is when I mentally deal with letting her  be dead.  Ha!!  Fat chance.  As long as my head works in the fashion it did today she lives it seems.

What changed as the day wore on and I tried to imagine myself sleeping tonight?  Not much.  I was essentially locked into the then that was chatted about.  That time was the foundation of who we became and it affected and charged our courage when we walked away from those first intimate friends outside of the college dorm or the hometown or the family reunion.  We were on our own then.  Lyn and I were making our family and Jess was proof of it and Steve celebrated that by visiting from Elmemdoff Air Force Base.  Susan wrote again today of the deep influence Lyn had on her life and how she continues to reinforce her acceptance of Lyn's philosophy that you take what you get and call it good enough.  And you love the one who loves you and rides shotgun at your hip.  I kept seeing Jim Hallock with us too and complaining to Steve that he had abandoned the "tribe".  He has misplaced us and his unknown whereabouts to us was upsetting me.  Well, at least until I admitted that I'd have to be upset with Lyn then too (and I know I am some days when I need her) for her whereabouts are unknown to us now too.  Did I mention it was a surreal day?  Yeah, guess I did, huh?

I was reminded a while ago, before I started writing this post of something Steinbeck wrote in his "Travels with Charlie" (Copyright;  1961, 1962).  I am rereading that book in anticipation of my summer on the highway with Tess.  Steinbeck was lonesome on his travels with Charlie and at one point admitted that the only way to deal with "aloneness" was to be alone.  I know that and nodded when I read it.  It felt good to have someone as honored by me as Steinbeck is as a writer to write something of his guts that matched my guts.  Humanity, you know.  Universality.  We all have to concur aloneness at some point by facing it; by being alone, until we're ready to be with others and accept aloneness when it arrives again and again.  And each time it does show up we get stronger in living with; when we just go off and be alone with it's hull, it's empty hull.  It's non-ness. 

Something else Steinbeck talked to me about in "Travels..." that hit home even harder and I feel is more pertinent to this conversation I'm having with myself and anyone who chooses to read along after I post this blog-note.  He said that, "Only through imitation do we develop toward originality."  When I think of my grand kids I have to concur with him.  When I think about us young and restless one's in Anchorage and Kenai back in 1974, I agree with him again.  I believe the power we young adults felt in our friendship then, growing as it was between us, within us, around us we imitated some of the special and new the traits of our new found "adult" (away from home) friends.  We did some "absorbing" of those personalities into ourselves. We somehow knew after we separated how to become "original" and live our separate lives encourage and strengthened by the acts of imitation these dear pals we had been living closely with, no intimately in a genuine way in order to ward off the "aloneness" we felt being really away from home and on our own for the first time of our new age lives.

I want to quote something else from Steinbeck here before I end this epiphany if it's fair to call this post such an awakening.  Steinbeck is referring in "Travels...", (page 100 of my version) to a note he made, "Relationship Time to Aloneness" to himself.  He writes on, "And I remember about that.  Having a companion fixes you in time and that (my emphasis) the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together.  A memory, a present event and a forecast all equally present." He writes this as if he's aiming it right at me, his future reader 50+ years later.  I have to work to interpret this for myself and you might read it differently.  For me, he is reminding his readers of a discovery on his traveling alone.  He misses his wife.  And when he is with his wife-companion he senses time, life actually, as in present tense.  NOW.  Normally we all strive for this in our daily lives and state it often I think, "Hey, live in the present", or something like that, right?  That is possible when you're with someone, alongside your mate, in the company of another compatible companion. 

But, then Steinbeck strikes a note for me, that again I have to agree with him on fully.  "As aloneness settles" he writes and I have been in the state of settling aloneness for almost a year now without my mate who is not anywhere to be found.  And what happened to me today in communing with my old friends from Anchorage and Kenai is confirming.  My entire day was a condensation of the past, the present and the future.  I could not separate out these "times" into separate tics of the clock.  They all became one.  And it is a state I have felt myself in for some time now.  Not knowing if I'm here in the now, living in the past or planning like hell for a future that feels better than so many days in this state of settling aloneness.  This past year I've acted out being 100 years old and that future was an experience in reality.  Just as this writing now at age 65 on this computer is real, yet still part of my forecast of being 100.  And I've painfully relived a life at age 26 with my Kenai pals.  Which today was a dose of joy and sorrow.  Joy in their memory, while sorrow was somewhat overwhelming in not being able to relive that wonderful time.  And yet, I've also, for some time now, lived many current days in some kind of a fantasy with a friend of about 25 who I cannot imagine is 40 years younger than me by the calendar we call "real" time.  It's really not all that fascinating from the standpoint of my emotional health.   I might very much like to act on the opportunities being her age might present.  And I will tell you, dear reader, this has been a struggle for me.  A twist of fate that has injured me some days and caused me to write to her as if I am living her age.  Realizing all the while that a romantic relationship is completely wacko (she coined the phase "batshit crazy" which I love and know I am in real time and real life).  And during this phase of my grieving for Lyn, my living a life in the past, present and future I have been bounced around like a beach ball in bad surf not being sure which person I am; the 26 year old, the 65 year old or the 100 year old. 

I had to write this post tonight.  Not every post do I feel this way.  Tonight, however, needed to have this post see itself against white paper and let me talk it out.  I needed to tell companions about it so I might be closer to imitating a real life and therefore, like a child growing out of imitation of all that is around me new and exciting.  Ah haa,  I might just be edging forward to a new originality for myself.  I don't believe in hope.  Some of my pals know this about me.  Yet, I do know that February 14th is a New Year for me and a full year without Lyn.  And if I cannot hope, I can be glad to have this revelation today that without her companionship and during my settling into "aloneness" for this past year, I may have just arrived at explanation of why the loss of a true kindred spirit as Lyn was for me, I might find himself in a kind of "batshit crazy" state of mind.  A state of some serious mental business.  A mindset defining itself as that state of consciousness where the mind cannot discriminate between a life lived in the past, one in the here and now and one forecasting a life beyond the present. 

I find it amusing that we draw the line between normal and loony based upon being able to know that the past and the future are non- existent states of the mind, while the present is all we can really experience.  Yesterday won't be back and tomorrow never gets here we're told.  Yet, I have lived in all three at once this year and it has had a tendency to wear me out emotionally.  And I fear is has probably worn out a valued friendship or two that were once solid and true.  I'm ready for my dues to have been paid.  I mean, if I'm likely to go on living for a while,  I'm ready for the bill to be taken off the books.  I see no reason not to live on and live with all the gusto I've known my entire batshit crazy life.  Especially now that I might have struck on some understanding of how the mind deals with grief in opposition to relative time.  I have to believe I've just lived through Einstein's theory of relativity where space is curved and time may only be 60 seconds per minute to the minds of the "sane" traveling together on earth at less than the speed of light.

"Hey, bartender, pour me a double, will you?"

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Wisdom of Making Ice


The Wisdom of Making Ice

Riverside.
The floods of other years
Have created a scour-shelf for me
To sit on and ponder the cobble
Deposited since God knows when.
I’m here on a colder day then usual.
I want to listen to the river
As it forms ice floe
And floats them like saucers down a whispering glide.
A distance above and below I see riffles.
They are chattering away I know.
Probably talking to Norman Maclean
About the foundation of time
As the riffle-words crawl out
From under the rocks
Like the stoneflies will
In another week or two.
Here though, heat is a ghost rising
As the ice forms.  I know the formula.
I’m a scientist and measure such things
As how much heat is given off
When water changes to ice.
I’ll say 144 BTUs per pound of ice.
That is probably a sacred number in mythology.
No one else in Hamilton, Montana cares about that.
They should be here now though
To hear the ice maker speak
During this 20-degree day and night water parade.
Unlike the riffles, the glide speaks gently and is reassuring.
Now and then a platter of ice runs against another.
“Clink” such a collision said.  I wonder what that means in River-Talk.
Its simple words are not literature.
The riffles speak in parables.
Glides speak in romantic subtleties.
“Hush” is the main suggestion
And I heed it as I watch from my perch.
A bald eagle flies upstream not 50 feet from me,
Perfectly intent on the business of looking for anomaly.
“Hush!” The ice slides by again and commands.
I reply, “I was only watching the eagle, but you heard me”.
“Hush!
And I obey.  Here alone, the workings of the aged connections
Of this place are not altered. 
Should you and I, my love, take watch here
The river might glide by and hold its tongue.
In that case, I would lean over to you
Place my chin on your shoulder and whisper,
“Hush”.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Now It's About Loneliness

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Loneliness.  Another one of those human conditions that at some point in life requires a psychological procedure known as "A Complete Personality Change."  Fortunately for me I had mine done before I got lonesome.  My friend Mike taught me in college to practice procedures that might be necessary should one become disabled sometime during life, but before the disability afflicts oneself.  I won't get into details as I believe there are disabled people out there who might take Mike's sense of reality as an insult to the disability they have to contend with now.  I can only say to them; maybe you should have practiced some skill sets you need now a long time ago and you'd be better able to be disabled.  I'm not mocking here.  I'm one to assist the disadvantaged when it seems appropriate or I'm asked.  I know something about 'horseshit luck' so I'm again, not one to bring up this because my personality change resulted in me being a shithead.  It did, but that's beside the point, right beside it, in fact.  For example, when I cross streets here in my town, I always wait for some little kid to come along and help me across.  Another case in point I wrote about in previous blogs.  I don't shovel snow anymore due to my Minnesotaiasis.  This disability causes one to get irritating pains in the back of the neck and running down along the trapezoid muscles and causing a type of irritation I usually vocalize as, "Damn that sonofabitch is back".  So, I'm writing today about the disability or disadvantage I call "loneliness" and as Tess, you know, my dog,  can tell you, on some days it's better to roam far out and not come in when commanded with the suffix used after, "Come, Tess, Come" aka, "You sonofabitch, Come".  Here's how I believe the personality change has benefited me.

First, when did I have the procedure?  I believe it was within about 7 minutes of having a robotic prostatectomy.   How many of you have had a "robot" in your abdomen with four remote controlled alloy appendages and equipped with tiny stainless steel tools designed to snip, and tuck, sometimes suck, remove and stitch?  Okay, that's a reasonable response.  Well, for those of you who haven't enjoyed your own personal inter-abdominal robot, fear not.  You'll hardly know he's been in there, kinda, if you have an anesthesiologist who is worth her salt.  "Drugs help keep the robot seemingly away", is the mantra of my surgical experience not just in the Air Force as a surgical techy, but also having been on the rubber conducting surgery table a couple of times and being completely drugged out of my obituary column.  After the surgeon, who operates on you from the other side of the room inside his own personal plastic bubble video studio, removes the robotic appendages via his "joystick" (Do you see how the jargon of the video era is coming back to haunt us?) the personality is replaced simultaneously. The assisting surgeon then applies about three stitches to each of the lacerations that were needed to get the 'robotic arms' into one's gut.  So, when all is said and done and you've had a day or two to get unhappily undrugged, you look to your gut and you have four little bandages covering four (sometimes three) scalpel divots where the robot inserted his "tools" to remove your personality or that and your prostate, in my case.

Now, it takes a day to recover from robotic surgery.  Yes, you heard me, a day.  Wonderful, right?  Right!  Had I bent over the table and had a rear end entry prostate removal by a surgeon with hands that helped him win All American honors for Stanford's NCAA tournament winning basketball team, I'd be in the hospital a bit longer, maybe six or seven years.  This second method is like having a 17 lb. baby vaginally delivered if you mothers out there get my idea here.  Yes.  By all means men, when cancer starts making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of your prostate it's time to call for "The Robot" s'il vous plait.  Now, back to the overt changes noticed post "men-o-paused" surgery.  I'm putting on my clothes to leave the hospital room when I notice the flowers on the window sill.  How beautiful, how anther-obvious, how wonderfully lavender.  Huh, one says to himself.  Never noticed that before as the process of hoisting on one's pants begins with some abdominal anguish.  Yes.  The robot still had to do some splitting of the abdominal wall and like any good hernia surgery there is that sensation that you are about to buckle over and puke for hope of relieving some of the pressure of that butcher knife the robot left sticking in about six inches below your navel.  A call for more drugs is okay at this point, you've earned it.  Finally, though, the nurse gets bitchy and hustles one through the dressing process.  Your ride home caregiver is pacing not knowing what to expect as the day moves toward night and the pain moves toward druglessness....

Eventually you are on your way home and you are practicing your new personality on your wife or boyfriend if you've already changed brands because the prostate is one of your testosterone producing buddies.   Looking out the window and trying not to laugh lest the knife in your lower abdomen begins to rotate, you notice all the birds are flitting about, the automobiles and semis are racing about frantically, the sun is 286,000 miles per second closer to the earth than you've ever noticed before and your goddamn sunglasses are in the other car.  No problem.  You have a new personality.  You'll just close your eyes and try not to puke because your driver is swerving all over the lane and you can't do a damn thing about it belted into your disabled corner of the car.  You begin to daydream about what you just had done and hoping that before long you'll have a real "BM" and not have to live with a catheter up the wizzoo for the rest of your life.  Ahhh, the new personality kicks in and the little guy that now lives on your shoulder (the one without the horns) whispers in your left ear, "No sweat, lots of folks learn to live with a catheter".  So, your new personality is already teaching you tolerance for your  first symptom of your new closet full of disabilities.  You lean toward your driver with a smerk on your face and say, "This catheter will be great in the boat, don't you think?"  She smiles and swerves back into her lane only crossing the double yellow line once and  not engaging any police sirens in response to the near head-on collision with a Collin's Furniture Van.

Finally at home.  All the comforts are there again.  The catheter is now irritating the delicate lining of your urethra and the bag is full of reddish yellow matter you don't even want to claim ownership of and you decide to practice emptying the bag in the bathroom that now after five years of using it carefree as a dog on the lawn, you notice is too small to perform bag emptying duties.  You can hardly turn around in it in fact and you yell to your caregiver, "Has this bathroom always been this small".  "Of course Mr. Crete.  Remember you wanted a small farmhouse so there would be little need to be cleaning house with all the other farm chores that are so much more fun than cleaning a large bathroom."  "Yeah, forgot about that."   A few days go by adjusting to the inconveniences of everything that was once conveniently taken for granted and you begin to get feeling quite well and sort of back in the groove.  The next round of personality changes kick in.

Horniness.  Not a chance down there.  But, your new personality isn't located down there anymore.  We had a significant portion of that robotically removed, remember(prostate, testosterone, blood supply, etc., etc.,)  But, your new psyche is starting to fire on all cylinders and your personal caregiver is looking mighty fine and the checkout girl at the grocery is lovelier than ever, the clouds above are forming little circles in all their glory and all the commercials on TV are now announced by high school girls in full bloom.  Your new personality can't tell ages of women anymore, just secondary sex characteristics are proportionately obscene, yet winking at you.  Of course your "urologist" has given you excersises to reinvent your manliness and you've been diligently practicing them ever since your new personality has begun to inform you that you should not think of yourself as a "unick", but as an infertile, hormone reduced anomaly in a world set anew on a course of sexuality never before known in any global culture. You are living in the first global culture of sexuality.  After a visit with the "urologist" (I'm beginning to want to punch him for not telling me everything, but making me read about certain personality changes that would or could occur 99 times out of 100 in prostate excavated males aged 65 or older, you think he should be called a "unickologist", not to coin a psychologically damaging phrase.

Fine.  My new personality realizes that life as a man as I once knew it has changed.  "They have pills for that, you know".  So you ask your "prickologist" for a case of them in doses appropriate to match the statements made in the commercials you now noticed come on World News, NBC News, CBS News and The News Hour every night at precisely 10 minutes before the hour AND so you can't escape the joy of knowing "your are a man that gets things done" and other such catch phrases.  But, as I was saying you realize you are on this new journey, your urologist will go away eventually, your caregiver will jump ship, your catheter will age and be tossed and your pills will save your life if you ever again need such elevating experiences.  Your new personality carries you out into the void of your new world and you feel free at last,  "Lord, I am free at last" as the saying goes and you actually do experience a sense of freedom when your life has completely changed and your personality is totally not your old self and you still have all your mental agility to carry you forward into a "NEW LIFE".   So, off you go--after you sell all that old stuff that seems to weigh down your new lightness of being.

One day, lets say, yesterday, your new personality leans over into your least tinnitus affected earhole and says, "You're lonely."  Christ.  You almost swallow your gum.  You turn around 180 degrees looking for someone or something to be standing there ready to explain "loneliness" to you and there is no one there.  "No inside, dummy!" your new personality says over the dinging din of your tinnitus.  Inside?, you say to yourself.  "I thought I had all that cut out by a robot", you say out loud to no one.  So, you go deep within yourself for about 60 days seeking this new personality trait called "loneliness" and you kind of believe you're starting to feel it.  First, though you wonder, is it something you feel in your guts or chest, or does it stink or taste; this loneliness?.  About five months later you start getting the feeling that your dog Tess is providing great opportunities to get off your ass and go for walks everyday, sometimes twice a day, but she is not exactly the cribbage player you'd hoped for.  And you also realize you have not slept for 11 months, in fact you have not slept well enough since your mother blew you out into the atmosphere on your 'birthday'.  You're new personality has no idea how to respond to this because it lacks any sense of the feelings that come with a good game of cribbage or a seven or eight hour nights sleep or for that matter what a poor replacement a body pillow is for your personal caregiver now fast asleep in eternity or maybe in some cases hustling men who have not had a personality change like the one we're talking about in this missive.

There's always the "Internet", right.  So, going there and reading about "loneliness" brings up about 1,124, 841 pages of scantily clad illegal women you hope are older than 18 so you and your new personality don't have to go to prison just yet.  That's not what you're looking for anyway.  The Internet fails miserable except for those sites that advertise what harmony there is in buying a page of advertising on their site and providing all the information you want to publish to the universe about yourself to attract "unloneliness".   You have no idea what the chances are of getting a reasonably likable person via this route of un-loneliness seeking for a fee other than recommendations from your best friends who got lucky going this route.  You take Tess for another walk.  Walk number seven that day I believe it was.

So, there seems to be no choice.  You decide to do up a bio of yourself and post it on all the telephone poles in your town like people do looking for lost pets or kids or odd socks missing after the last washday.  Hey, why not?  Well, maybe because you have no data  whether those pets, etc., ever got found.  You only know the signs get unstapled or torn down and sometimes new sets are put up every so often as if the last set really did work.  It's about as lucky as playing for companionship via a game of marbles as previously discussed in the last blog I hope you didn't have to read.  So here goes.  Let's get a poster ready to go and I'll get them up until May when I take off for the wild blue yonder in search of what Steinbeck and Charlie found in 1960, a notebook full of anecdotes.  Problem is now in 2014 times are only worse than 1960 because we're still in a "growth economy mindset" and we know it can't work, but like a guy without a prostate, you have to believe there are more ways to meet a cougar than trying to build an economy on the catch phrase; "How much is enough".  Which, bye the bye is not a bad way for a 65 year old to look at a future companionship given a good roll of the dice.

Here goes, then.  I'll get a picture for the telephone pole ad before I print this out and take Tess around town sniffing every pole whilst I staple up my bio:

Single, no Widowed, young 65 year old somewhat disabled male
Seeks companionship with a attractive 40++ year old unmarried female.
Personality has been changed to protect the innocent.
Owns dog who demands most of the bed, begs at all meals and
Has to be walked two or three times a day to relieve chronic anxiety.
Dog does not need a personality change, she loves everyone and has to go
Everywhere no matter what, when, where or how you try to leave her behind
For five minutes of your own personal peace and quite.
Lonely person pictured on this post (add picture here of course)
Is not bat-shit crazy as sometimes referred to by the millennial generation.
This seeker is not seeking an immediate commitment on either side 
Of a monogamist friendship, yet will go with whatever the hell is in the cards.
Will do dishes, laundry and pick up dog turds, etc. 
Hand holding or other seemingly harmless body contact relieves loneliness.
There should be no expectations of missionary erotica, much encouragement 
In alternative means of "having sex" may be relevant and discussed quickly 
If prospective "female"partner is in a hurry for a frustration abatement episode.
Likes, movies, reading, cribbage and walking or trekking. 
Person is reliably psychotic and probably safe to take out in public.
New personality is in place having been installed post robotic surgery.
Person is mechanically functional kinda.  
Training to basic commands has been completed.
A certainty exists that dependency will be apparent once taken home.
Eats "paleo" foods and occasionally sneaks snacks violating all dogma.
This guy is a keeper.  Has monthly paycheck and loves shopping for food.
If you tear this post down, it will be replaced.  I'm serious, ain't you?

Well, that should about do it, don't you think?  I'll save the rest of the good news for that first coffee klatch should anyone call the number posted under the picture of Sean Connery.

 

Monday, January 27, 2014

It's About Time I Find Someone to Play With

Monday, January 29, 2014

Let's suppose a person is roaming around the planet like a kid on the playground.  He kind of has his eye peeled for someone to play with.  Hey, recess is only so long, right?  And pretty soon he'll be back in class sitting at his desk shut down or tossed in the cloakroam all by himself again if he isn't quiet and obedient.  So, this person is like that kid, looking for someone to hang out with and play, let's say a good game of marbles.  Age doesn't matter to the universe, just to the individuals on the playground (most likely).

1.  Senario One:  He spies a little beauty, and says to himself, "Hey, there's someone.  Wonder if she would like to play marbles with me.  Well, marbles is a good choice because it too is a game of chance with a bit of skill involved to get the marble to fall into the hole you've dug in the ground with your boot heel and back from which you are standing deciding who will go first to roll their marble into the "pot" (this game of marbles is called, "pots").  She says she'll play if I can beat her in a game of pots. 

The analogy in adult life that comes to mind is like going to Las Vegas to play roulette.  If you pick the right color and the marble falls in that color you win a playmate.  It's either "red" or "black", right; 50/50 chance.  Which in adult life is pretty good odds I'd think.  So, let's say I try a game.  What do I have to lose.  I don't have a playmate now, so I have nothing to loose and something good possibly to gain.

So, I put my bet on "red".  My little playmate is standing by and in a way she becomes the marble that the table manager will roll around the spinning roulette wheel.  So, here we go.  The manager spins the wheel, flicks the marble into the rim of the spinning wheel in the opposite direction the wheel is spinning.  And, around and 'round and 'round the wheel and the opposite spinning ball go and the anticipation builds.  Fingers are crossed, the manager is starting to look at my all or nothing bet with non-caring eyes--he's just the table manager after all.  I'm about half-way done biting my nails and the potential playmate is riding the rim of the wheel like a kid in a roller coaster, yelling; "Weeeeeeee"....

Soon, the wheel slows and the ball loses it's momentum and begins to fall into the hollow of the roulette wheel with all it's alternating colors and scrambled numbers.  In no time it seems, the ball starts to flutter and bounce in and out of the various cavities depicting the numbers and colors and it bounces a few times and finally, before the wheel stops spinning, but slows noticable, the ball clatters around in one of the pigeon holes and stays put.  The crowd goes, "Ahh"....  I drop my jaw and my shoulders as the little ball has fallen into a "black" square.  The manager picks up my potential playmate and holds her in his hands for the next game of chance.

The End.

2.  Scenario Two:  This time I want to be a little star just hanging about 1200 miles above the earth trying to shine my little light down on someone hoping she'll be my playmate.  Whooeee, there are a lot of potential playmates down there from up here in space 1200 miles above ol' Mother Earth with all her 7.2 billion earthlings--half of which are girls and 25% of those are legal, maybe.   Still, in finding a playmate, there has to be some attention played to details from 1200 miles up or one could end up with a guy pushing a shopping cart that looks like a girl and I ain't gay (yet), so I'm shinnin' my little light around and eventually one of my rays lights up a potential playmate who seems to be roaming around playing the field, but not necessarily too good at picking a dull non-star bi-pedding her neighborhood.  So, I focus my light on that one; taking a chance she'll see my star.  Odds are quite different than roulette of course.  She gets to decide.  It ain't chance.  It's the real deal, like everyone has to play in the real deal called life.

So, I'm shinning away up here 1200 miles above this potential playmate and nope.  Not a chance.  I turn up the brightness of my star and kinda filter my light through a prism to make little rainbows and twinkle off of snowflakes when I get the chance and even make light come out of raindrops so she can see herself in drops on the window on those days when she wants to go out and play, but it's too wet.  A good day to watch yourself in the raindrop mirror I"d say.

Time passes as it always does--slowly when you're anxious to have someone to play with--quickly when you want to take a pee.  Well, there's a problem for my star.  It only can shine so long.  Think of it as love being the shinning part of my star.  You only get issued so many hours of love-shine and even if you had your Ever-Ready batteries in the freezer most of you starlife, the power of love is going to burn out at some point.  So, I'm really pouring on the rays if you know what I mean.  Focus, Ronnie, Focus....

Well time keeps traveling like the Lone Ranger and nuttin'.  Bad guess.  Picked the wrong playmate I guess.  So many still around to pick, but now I've gotten used to shinning on this one little bugger for a while and I can't seem to keep my rays off of her.  Trouble.  Pure unadulatrated trouble.  I can smell it.  Can you?  Then, wouldn't you know it...SUPERNOVA....  My little star runs out of battery power and KERPLOWEE I'm shedding little tiny shards of love all over the place 1200 miles below. Those rays are falling like lightning bugs with their tail lights on, but going out fast.  Lights Out.  Curtain.

The End

So, folks, this seems to be where I'm at in the next phase of my life.  Getting all excited to pack up in May and do a "Travels with Tess" gun and tobacco traveling show and I suspect I'm going to be looking for someone to play marbles with along the way.  Not like a game of permanent marbles you understand.  Just a game of "Hey, wanna play marbles or something, drink a glass of wine, hold hands and take it as it comes or goes".  Mostly I like the idea that the Universe doesn't give a shit.  That's like all the encouragement I need I think for now. 

Maybe I'll find me a nice mountain overlooking a village of possible playmates and I'll just shine away on 'em until one looks up and spots me glowing like the eyes of a hoot owl on a full moon night.  I've learned a lot this year about time and solitude and the Universe doesn't seem to give a shit about either of those too.  So, it doesn't seem like I have a choice, but to crawl up on a pony along side of the Lone Ranger and take off my bandanna and yell: "Aroar-harr"....

Not Quite The End...closer to the beginning, actually.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

The Sun, Rise you Rascal, Rise Above that Southern Horizon

Sunday, January 26, 2014

My old Air Force buddy Steve Leyden suggested my summer plans of running off with my dog Tess and roaming the American landscape for a few months reminded him of his favorite author, John Steinbeck and "Travels With Charley - In Search of America".  I could not disagree with Steve when I think about my plan to just load up and go bumming around the West.  So, I went out and bought a copy of Steinbeck's book and started to read it.  First, I noticed Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition is the 50th Anniversary Edition of Steinbeck's journey with his poodle Charley.  I had to look at the original copyright date.  Yup, 1961, 1962.  Let's think about that.  I was leaving St. Mary's of the Lake Catholic School that year so I was 1962-1948 = 14 years old.  To my recollection, Mike Buesseler. suggested I read the book when we were either in St. Cloud State classes (1966-68) (or cutting classes) or he was in the Navy and I was in the Air Force (1970-72).  I know we both loved it when we read it.  We were so juiced to hit the road after reading it we made Jack Kerouac seem like a Clam on the Road.   So, in either case within 6 or 8 years of it's publication I read "Travels...".   I ought to be more bothered that I was alive when it was first published and I persist beyond it's 50th Anniversary Edition.  It seems like yesterday I wanted to go out with Mary H. in first grade.  Now, I'm a homeless, widowed orphan and couldn't get a date with a shopping cart bag lady if I bought her dinner.  Where in the hell does Time think it's taking us, anyway?

I started reading the book as soon as I got it home as you might have suspected by now.  Wonderful and relevant still--Ol' Steiny's travelogue.  I have to admit I'm only up to Part II of the book, but I'm not about to put it down until it's realigned all the pathways it once set up in my more robust brain back in the late 60s.  I have to point out that Steiny saw America being ravaged in a way back in say 1960 that we are still engaged in violating now,  more than 50 years later.  My point of course, is that if we have made an effort to overcome some of the concerns he saw in the conversion of America from a workforce to a couch force, the building of rows of houses that looked to him to be relatives of an inbred clan, and the early signs of the rusting of America, I wonder what Steiny would editorialize about our cultural state of affairs today.  I suggest we don't exhume him and take him of a 'roadtrip' and ask him what he thinks.

I believe our problem is bigger than what Steiny has to say about things today.  His journal is a mirror of the past for us to look into and see what it reflects from behind us and then compare differences.  He was even talking about "conservation" back then.  Hell's bells our conservation record seems miserable compared to what was left to conserve in 1960.  We have made some progress on some fronts, no question about it, but like we used to say in the wildlife business I worked in for many years, "we're just documenting the demise, we scientists".  He didn't like the looks of city water and sewage and garbage heaps, either back then.  Say what?  Hell, he becomes like the father of modern environmentalism given his observations in "Travels...". 

I do know there is much waiting for me in rereading this book and I hope I get a few hits on this blog and can influence others to read this one again.  It's not like "ancient history" you know.  It's like yesterday to those of us older than 50 and for those of you who read this and can't imagine becoming 50 yet, I suggest you read this edition.  When the 100 Anniversary Edition comes out in your time, I hope to hell, for your sake, you can say you've cleaned up the mess previous Industrial generations left for you.  However, I know from recently reading enough of Norman Maclean's works that his papa, being the Presbyterian minister and dedicated Bible affection ado he was, would be quick to remind us that; 'man has been a mess' for a long time.  I think he was referring to Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden with that fundamental statement, but Norman would be quick to retort 'man has continued to be a mess since the Garden of Eden'.

I can't encourage my few readers with anything more hopeful than Norman's update on man's condition.  I left Montana in 2006 and returned in October 2013.  I have to say, it appears there was "progress" here in Montana since I left.  Yes, roads are wider, some buildings are higher, some trailers look a bit closer to needed remodeling on at least three sides out of four and it appears that man is still a 'mess'.  You find the progress in that sentence, OK?  Like me for instance sitting here at the keyboard typing away while the Bitterroot River slides past me nary a mile away just begging for someone to come admire it.  Yup.  Guilty.  Yessiree, I'm a mess.  And 50 years ago, almost, when I read Steiny's and Charley's account of making the big loop around America I was out there chanting in the streets about Vietnam.  I was all for Blacks getting to do whatever everyone else was doing (the fact that blacks didn't have equality yet in 1960 really bugged Steiny).   I was singing songs about all the "little boxes" being built in those days too.  A few laws are working on some of this, but some of the "improvements" to be noted are happenstance more than 'the world is a better place for man showing up'.  I'm glad for the Human Rights Laws, but when I read and watch the news it seems the advances are far overwhelmed by the slope of the curve toward poverty in America as compared to the slope of the middle class wealth curve in the 1950s and '60s.  You're right to ask, "What Middle Class?" at this point of my essay.

Not the best news to report I guess, but I have to make a point out of this or Mr. Steinbeck's mass of cannonizable literature fell on deaf ears.  I'm certain that Steiny wouldn't be spouting off a list of solutions to aid us in our quandary laden world, but I would imagine at the age, now, of about 112 years he would be one boisterous old curmudgeon making dialog about the condition of his favorite places.  Certainly he'd have something to say about the way we talk--all computer geeky, slangy and truncated in an English he'd not be able to do well with in a new version of "East of Eden."  A version he might have to retitle, "Who Shat on Eden?" 

I may have hit on the answer to the age old question of why people don't live to be 112 years old very often.  Some do, but you can bet your Adam's Apple they are not able to write a sentence or paragraph or travelogue the way Steiny did with "Travels with Charley".  If they could write we'd see stories that would put "Blade Runner" in the Romance or Drama category instead of Science Fiction.  Now, it's back to "Travels..." for me.

Friday, January 10, 2014

A Good Day in the Life of Gustave Ludwig Johnson

Gust knew he was going to have a good day.  He knew it as soon as the train pulled out of the Duluth-Superior train station headed for Minneapolis.  The month since he had left Sweden had been a test of his ability to keep his temper and keep his mind on his destination, North Branch, Minnesota.  He was fifteen and had never left the farm in Eksjo, Sweden before this trip.  He never wanted to leave the farm, but his older brother was to have it and that was not to be discussed or resented.  It was the way it was and land was hard to come by in Sweden  So he saved and his parents saved and his aunts saved; everyone saved a little which became enough to try his hand at America rather than move into Stockholm and have to live a city life.  He looked out the window of this American train as it rumbled along.  The sun was on his side as it moved along its slow arch toward setting.  He was lost in the landscape of lakes and trees and swamps; so much like Eksjo he hardly felt homesick.  He saw oak trees that could have been on his father's farm and the pines were so big he could not see the tops of them from inside the coach he was riding in.  Now and then he saw a small field freshly plowed and humped with boulders, some the size of his trunk.  Another field had a man behind his horse just turning a sod and the earth looked dark like peat as it curled between the farmer's legs.  As the train pulled up to a platform in Askov he had to look twice to believe his eyes.  Was he in Sweden or America?  He just knew it was a good day and he was happily in the middle of his luck.

Since the track was not yet completed all the way to Minneapolis he was transferred to one of many wagons used to continue moving himself and others toward their destination; North Branch, about two more hours south by horse-drawn wagon.  Gust felt his eyes grow heavy and sleep came quickly even if the ride was rough.  His dreams went back to the rough seas he had crossed to get to New York from Stockholm.  The Baltic Sea was not so bad, but once he rounded the Peninsula of Denmark and entered the North Sea everything changed.  He wondered as he fought seas sickness if he had made the right choice.  He was not a seaman.  His home was interior, east of Stockholm.   After suffering the torrential rains of the North Sea and the waves as big as the boat he would learn to hate from below deck in the passenger hold, the rest of the Atlantic seemed like a row-boat ride on his favorite lake, the Runn.  He found the seas of the Great Lakes to be rough too.  Especially the one they called Lake Superior.  It was indeed superior to the other lakes in size, but even the narrows going from Lake Michigan into Superior was rough enough for Gust to want the sea-going part of his month long journey to be over.

Today, May 8th of 1884, just days days short of a month after his 15th birthday, all the ocean Gust would ever see was memory and he felt sleep his friend now as the wagon lumbered its way toward the big cities of Minnesota.   He slept deeply and dreamed too of which way he would turn when he pulled into the Town of North Branch just an hour or two ahead.  He had heard talk of work on the railroad as the company wanted to complete the line quickly.  He was hopeful he could work on the Soo Line as the railroad was called.  He began to hear his native tongue spoken in an excited manner and it woke him like his mother used to back in Sweden.  Although he spoke English well enough to understand the wagon driver,  it seemed no one else did.  He was riding in a wagon full of Swedes all anxious, like himself,  to get on firm ground, connect with Lutherans who would sponsor them until they found foster homes or found their own land,  settled down and farmed or found work their hands were used to doing in Sweden.  The churches in Almelund east of North Branch toward a river named by the French, the St. Croix,  and the Town of Cambridge west of North Branch would have members waiting with wagons to take himself and others to their respective settlements.  There would be much help in these Swedish settlements to teach them American customs and enough English to get by for a while.  In the next minutes he would have to decide which wagon to throw his small trunk into and climb aboard.  All this had been explained in the sponsor letter he received before leaving Sweden.  Whatever expectations he had before arriving on this sunny day in Minnesota were not at all what he was seeing from his bench seat in the wagon he was sick of rumbling around in and bouncing off the his bench mates Olaf and Leif.

The wagon stopped finally in town.  A settlement really and about the size of his hometown in Sweden.  People were rushing everywhere around him trying to be the first one's into a wagon for a last ride on this arduous journey.   He sat and watched for a time.  He felt more curious than hurried like the others.  He was noticing the clothes of the people he saw on the street.  Not much difference  did he see from his clothes.  But, then he remembered most of the people that would meet him today had probably come from Sweden recently too.  He was sure of this when he noticed all the little children in their shaggy blonde hair, blue eyes and pale rosy cheeks.  Everyone was wearing wool jackets.  Gust knew then that early May in Minnesota was going to be like the weather in his far away Town of Eksjo.  Many collars were pulled up around those pink cheeks and the smoke and steam from the train that continued on from North Branch to Minneapolis was blowing south down the new looking track leaving town.  A north wind was not unfamiliar to him.   Gust thought about those big cities a few miles south.  He was glad not to be getting on the train that continued south.  Now he wondered if that middle part of the railroad was where he could hope to find work to connect the track between North Branch and Askov.  There would be time enough to see another big city like Stockholm.  He could not know, of course,  he would someday live in place called White Bear Lake, just a stop or two on the train from St. Paul and Minneapolis.   Today he was unaware of that fate and was instead growing anxious for the men, women and children to move out of the way so he too could try his feet on this place he would call home and Minnesota for the rest of his life.

Through the chaos that followed, Gust didn't have to make a choice which of the wagons or which of the people waiting most appealed to his senses as family.  He soon found himself in the back of another wagon with three other men, two women and two children pulling away from North Branch and headed toward a setting sun.  He realized some of the anxiousness of the drivers was related to that sun setting behind the marshes and woodlots west of North Branch.  It appeared he was headed toward Cambridge and would be joining a congregation belonging to the Spring Lake Lutheran Church.  He was happy enough to have such a place where he could join neighbors and tend to his spiritual needs.  Sundays were days of celebration of more than the Almighty.  They were days to get together with neighbors and plan the coming weeks work and share food just as they did back in Sweden.   He had heard rumors that the Spring Lake Lutherans met in a barn and only hoped to have a church of their own like the Almelund folks had.  If there wasn't a church he'd help build one.

Gustave Ludwig Johnson was safely aboard a sturdy wagon heading for his new home and foster family a few miles west of North Branch.  As he gazed, mouth open, at the shadowed light of the setting sun and tried to ignore the rambling excited Swedish conversations  all around him, he felt a warm sensation deep inside his chest.  A rush of joy he decided it was and it made him feel certain there was nothing to keep him from making a good life in this fine land.  In front of him sat a jovial,  broad-backed man driving his wagon by shouting strict commands at his team while keeping an eye on his overfilled wagon of overjoyed Swedes.  Gust thought of this driver as a Viking sailor moving a ship away from the shore in one of the Norse Myths he had read as a child as they left North Branch fading into the darkness behind.  This Swede's commands to the horses, split between Swedish and  English  already seemed normal to Gust who found himself already thinking of things in English.   What Gust could not detect was the future this man would play in his life in America.  Gust was too filled with happy thoughts of each of the moments ahead in his life to realize he might be riding in the wagon of his future father-in-law.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

What Would You Say?

Just so you know how the mind of a writer works, here's this mornings vision of a conundrum.  I often find myself day-dreaming stories in my head since I've come to live alone.  No, it's not a lonliness kind of thing.  It's more of a "too much time on my hands" kind of experience.  This morning while reading a great set of short stories by David James Duncan titled; "River Teeth" I drifted off into my little corner of the ozone and here's what came to mind.
-------------------------------
It's a new day in Hamilton and I'm feeling some excitement about a get together with a woman I met while working on my Norman Maclean project.  We've decided to have a coffee together and enjoy some "well, who are you anyway" kind of conversation and maybe a bit of chatter about the weather if I turn out to be a bore.  She has decided to come by my place and we'll walk over to the coffee house just a block up the road for our visit.  River Rising Coffee, the same place a couple of us met the other day and played some cribbage to kill time and to help Colleen, a woman I met at the dog walking place, learn the card game.  It's all very Platonic these days you know.

I decide to get get the day underway after a couple good stories by Duncan.   The chores of the house come to mind since I've done a bit of writing  and Duncan's chapters have satisfied my reading for now.  I decide first to see what I might have for clean clothes to wear for the coffee klatch.  I'm in luck.  I have a decent pair of jeans and a shirt that looks only slightly out of date and containing only a smidge of wear on the collar.  So, I'm good to go.  Looking around though I see a pile of laundry on the floor in the corner by the dresser and decide I have plenty of time to wash and maybe get after the bathroom a bit just in case there is a call for the "ladies room" before my friend and I head out for coffee.  I grab at the clothes on the floor and realize there isn't really a load there.  Then I spy the bed flung open and think about filling the load with bedding.  There is no doubt based on conversations with my 'bed-buddy pillow' that its time to have some clean sheets and pillow cases for the coming weeks.  Now I have an arm load and after gathering a couple of far flung socks I head to the basement and conduct the tricky operation of an out of date, somewhat abused washing machine.

Back upstairs I tackle the bathroom and give it a 'lick and a promise' as mom used to always say.  Working through that I hear the washing machine give up with a "ding" and go down and transfer the load into the dryer.  A dryer that requires a mechanic to figure out how to set the dials just right so the clothes, no matter the size of the load, get dry in less than three resettings.  Back to the upstairs to finish some dishes and sit for a chapter of Duncan or maybe I'll try a 'coyote story' or who cares.

Finally I hear the dryer "gachunk" to a stop and it's unique 'dang' and head down with the basket to get the clothes.  Upstairs I place the basket in the chair and start folding clothes.  Time somehow gets away from me.  Well, I space out actually because my daily routine is scrambled with my coffee event and to be honest, I'm more nervous than I realized about going out for a coffee with someone other than Tess.  I get the clothes folded, stacked, put away and have a bundle of bedding left.  I manage the bundle and head into the bedroom to make the bed.

Pillow cases are always fun.  Do you bite the old pillow and then try to pull on the case from your waist up or do you try to stuff the pillow in the case opening while laying the case on the bed and pushing the pillow into the inside out case?  Okay, reverse the pillow case to outside out and get it done.  Next the fitted sheet.  Always my favorite since it just goes on and stays on and there is no measuring or anything as long as the tag is toward the feet, right?  Now the top sheet.  Just then the doorbell rings for the first time since I've moved into this place in Hamilton, Montana.    It dawns on me, it's Judy.  Where has the time gone?  So, I nervously broadcast the top sheet over the bed and head to the door.

"Hey, Judy.  How you doing?  Come on in.  I lost track of time and I need to get out of my house cleaning outfit."

"Hi, Ron.  No problem.  Neat old house you're renting here.  Pink walls.  That's a treat.  Well, maybe a guy would call them coral."

"Yeah.  Those are coral walls, but they could be purple since I hardly pay any attention to this place.  Here.  I'll show you around a bit then I'll get out of these sweats and throw on some jeans and we'll head over to River Rising for a coffee or tea; whichever you prefer."

I show her the living room.  A circular affair of a couch, my computer table, a reading chair, a light table I do my mapping project on and then semi-point into the kitchen while she leans around the entrance door to see inside.

"Ahh, your landlord is a 50s commercial Americana knick-knack collector I see." 

"Yup.  Want a Coca-Cola dinner plate with a sandwich", I reply.

"Funny," she chimes back.

We walk back through the small livingroom to the hall going into the bathroom.  I bow and offer "the ladies room", to which she just smiles and responds, "Sunflower yellow.  How cheery."

Then its three steps to my bedroom.  And there it is.  A bed with freshly washed sheets fitted or piled along with a stack of pillows nicely covered in their downy softened fragrance of pine stacked in the chair next to the bed.  I look at her and she is silently looking at me.

What would you say?

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Our World Is On Fire



Well, first blog of the new year is coming out.  I've at least three other writing tasks I ought to be working on tonight.  I just couldn't help but share the latest book I wandered through and find myself stuck in its message.  The book is "Fire  -Nature and Culture" by Steven J. Pyne.  I can only recommend it.  Dr. Pyne takes us on a journey in this book.  A journey back in time to when fire existed only as a condition of combustion resulting from the spark of lightning, -rarely spontaneous combustion- and a time we were still a gleam in Nature's eye.  Nice starting point for a mythologist like me these days.  The kind of book I sink my canines into as I read along and wonder, "Where have I been all my life?"

Yes, I know, you have caught me walking graveyards in France looking for my "roots" and now you have me reading about the origin of "fire".  From the beginnings in Dr. Pyne's book we move to man's discovery of it after some eons of calling it "god" and of evolving to a point where we got a hair-brained idea that instead of just wishing we could have something warm to eat besides sun-ripened carrion, we figured how to capture fire and eat some BBQd left overs from a savannah fire just a little west of the Serengeti or Fergus Falls, Minnesota.  (I'll let Dr. Pyne tell you more about it.  My memory is way to weak on first reading to have the recall I'd like for this post).  So, man, about 1,000,000+ years ago, maybe, has experienced some hot lunches even without Federal Hot Lunch Programs being invented yet.  Things start cooking in his evolution then too.  Mostly his brain starts getting bigger because of better nutrition.  Then, to hell with trees for nests, and we're off on foot with our crew and mammoth bladders full of nuts, berries, seeds and wildfire heated lunches.  Suddenly, and one of us, say, Mary Jane McCarthy gets the idea to poke a stick in a wildfire and run off to her cave with the tip of her stick ablaze.  When she gets to the cave her loyal husband, Ronnie Bob, lets say, is laying in his nest of sedges and grasses when Mary Jane runs up and in trying to wake him from his all day nap drops the stick in the nesting material setting Ronnie Bob ablaze.  "Holy Shit!", Mary Jane cries out, "You kids get over here and try this roost I just invented."  So, it's not good for Ronnie Bob, but Mary Jane and the kids are off and running with a new technology everyone in Little Rock, France is all "fired" up about and man continues to evolve like crazy as the one and only creature in 5 or so billion years of earth's evolutionary processes to be a "fire carrier".  Great news for the newly evolved Homo sapiens, but "whoa be tied" to the rest of the planet and it's inhabitants.  Humans now have "fire by the ass" so to speak, and they aren't about to teach all the other little live things how to be the tenders of the flame.

Time passes and you know the story.  We burned the hell out of places to increase production of certain foods we liked and that liked to have a wild fire over them now and then.  Well in a couple hundred fifty thousand years, maybe, we start doing all kinds of things like domesticating animals after we get the hang of planting and growing seeds and hording food like crazy.  This all means we have to protect our food from Attila the Hun and his cousins and the Celts and maybe the Aborigines from Australia if they ever figure out how to get off that big island again.  On and on we go....Then pretty soon, like 5,000 years or so, and everyone is getting the hang of all cooking with fire and accumulating wealth for our favorite King and the fights begin in earnest.  Yup.  Too much KNOWLEDGE.  God then creates the world in seven days and the Jews create a handbook for dominion over the earth and religions are born and our mythologies begin to get their butts kicked (yes, our Fire Gods are long dead by now.  Who can afford them when the Jews have the one and only God and the Catholics are doing the same and the Muslims are also fighting like hell to keep the one and only God pole position while all the illiterates of the planet are just trying to eat and saying they want to go to heaven and trying not to get burned at the stake or have another great flood or have their false gods turn out badly for them, etc.

Well lets flash ahead before you burn me at the stake.  All of a sudden we get sick of our fire sticks and having to light the hearth every night and go fetch a sprig of fire from the Town Fire Manager when our night fire goes out.  (When you read the book you're going to like it when Dr. Pyne teaches you the origin of the word, "Curfew".  So cool, and here's a hint, it comes from a French word of course, kinda, sorta).  So, some guy comes along and decides he's going to harness fire into a box and create a kind of "internal combustion" machine and BOOM! out pops a STEAM ENGINE.  Well not quite that fast, but I'm trying to get through this so I can do something I'm supposed to be doing tonight-like take a bath-"pheweee"-finally).  Suddenly just like that some guys have the steam engine while the rest of mankind is still playing around with firesticks, firecrackers, dynamite and other extraordinary things, none of whom has yet "harnessed" fire in an internal combustion capacity like the white supremists going forth from the Renaissance:  And whoa be us up steps the "Industrial Revolution" and we are off to the races again.  Only this time our brain doesn't enlarge enough to make us realize we ought to think about the consequences of this new invention before it's too late.  Our brain does get smart enough in no time for us to realize that "wood" is a dumb way to run a steam engine so why not try some "bubbling crude" that Jeb Clampet has bubbling up out of the ground in Pennsylvania or Texas or Nigeria or wherever he was from.  So now look out.

Yes, fossil fuels are GREAT....Easy to handle (messy and stinky, but easy), easy to store, easy to transport and...FULL of energy compared to wood.  Even compared to coal which we got sick of smelling in London and couldn't see through.  I know.  This is too fast.  History doesn't move that fast, right?  Wrong.  History is instantaneous.  It's a great concept.  All you gotta do is think about it and you can go through 3 million years of history in a couple pages of a blog, even..., even if it doesn't make any sense like this blog doesn't yet.  Stay with me and I'll loose you, I promise.

Yes, men play with fire still and yet, eventually candles kind of die out, fireplaces become too risky in towns built of wood.  And its way more fun to have Stender's Standard Oil truck drive up to the house with a truck full of oil fill your tank in the basement and feed it into your furnace with a length of tubing and "poof" you have a warm house without a bucket of ashes to carry out every other day, AND, best yet, the kids don't play in the bucket and start the house on fire, etc., etc. 

We also have learned of course, during this long time, that we can use fire or fight fire depending on our dominion decisions.  If we want to save our renewable combustibles, we put the fires consuming them out when they happen.  (Think forest fire here).  If we want to weaken our enemies we burn them out, bomb them, nuke them, what ever with our invented fire sticks that are really, really something under the Geneva Convention.  (PS.  Gas warfare is still a kind of fire stick warfare, don't forget).  We are finally smart enough know to have moved beyond firesticks and have invented fire engines to put out house fires, airplane tankers to carry water over forest fires and in doing so saving our trees for important stuff like making corporate CEOs wealthy even if we have to "fire" them and throw them a golden parachute.

Suddenly, like overnight almost, we realize that our big fire prevention program is working really well in America, not so well in the Amazon (where we're making money off their trees by slash and burn and selling them cows to graze on the piss poor forage that comes up afterward and then fires come along and burn their grass villages down because we forgot to sell them fire engines and aero-tankers, etc.)  But, back here in America we've suppressed our need for free ranging fire cuz we have it all burning in a box (if you don't believe me go outside and start your car).  Also in the meantime not just the Amazon and Borneo are burning, but Siberia and northern Canada are pretty much burning  out of control because no one with a 5,000-20,0000 square foot house lives in those places and needs fire protection.  I mean who cares about "defensible space" around a Yurt in Mongolia or a melting igloo in due north Canada.  But, we're going to save our "forests" even if it kills our "hotshot crews", smoke jumpers, or innocent bystanders trying to protect houses that have not been prepared for surviving a wild fire with a defensible space cleared around them.  Oh, yes, this is the controversy in areas where we have wild lands coming up to urban sprawl or what the fire marshalls call the "urban interface".

In the meantime, what do you suppose is happening to all the communities of plants and animals that depend on fire for their renewal?  Yeah.  Don't know do you?  Oh, maybe you do know about this.  They're disappearing because they are becoming hugely combustible and the next wildfire is going to torch them to the quick. 

So I'm going to go away now, but leave you with a couple of things Dr. Pyne left with me at the end of his book.  Just some little quotes to wet your whistle more for getting a copy of his book or stealing mine.

Here's what he says about fire management agencies pondering the conundrum of public outcry from too much "FIRE" and the ecological problem of plant community and species extinctions are likely if fire is removed as a normal occurrence in such wild places:

 "A simple resolution would hold that they had too much of the wrong kind of fire and too little of the right." (Page; 187).

And in his "Epilogue" he amazes me once more as he concludes that we live on a fire planet; a planet that evolved with fire as a tool for evolution before man showed up to capture it and apply it wisely or otherwise.  And in referring to the biological or technological work fire has yet to do, the results will depend on how we, the only beings playing with matches, learn to understand its place in the cycles and circles of life on this planet and the deal we made with fire for the power it brought to our caves, pea-sized brains and moon-sized egos:
 
"Fire wild, fire tame, fire mechanized--the torch remains in our hands, subject to the whims and wishes of our heads

In the end, fire is not a thing.  Try to place it and command it "be still" without removing either oxygen or fuel, and it runs away.  It is not a spirit anymore either.  Like Nietzsche's God, we have tried to kill it by controlling it with science and technology.  It is now chemistry; fuel, plus oxygen and a spark = fire.  But, is that all it is, really?  Just chemistry?  Even as we now know some of the life on this planet that evolved with fire is in steep decline and likely walking into eternities black hole.  And what about this great cure we have for elusive fire; the containment of it in our internal combustion machines?  Are those black boxes not spuing forth great gases at rates nature cannot purify the soot and fumes fast enough for our breathing balloons to bathe our bodies in the precious oxygen rich, particulate poor,  atmosphere we simply call "air".  And likewise, how about those 99.5% of all climate scientists we are trying not to be Chicken Littles running around yelling, "The Sky is puking, The Air is warming, The Sun is disappearing, We are falling..."??.

Have you ever wondered about the wonders of fire while sitting around a campfire in a wild place and thought that we humans might not be quite as in charge of the dominions as have been told to be?

Producer:  "Break for Commercial. Camera One. Take."

Ron