Captain Redux Not so long ago I wrote a piece called Captain America that was about my plans for an upcoming transcontinental ride this summer from Des Moines back to my hillside. Everything about that ride in terms of the reasons for doing it have changed as things do, so I am finding myself in change mode. The sequence went like this: first the testimony I was to give in Des Moines has been pushed…
Forgiveness One of my favorite movies that I happened on scanning Netflix tonight is the 2011 movie Warrior with Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte. The reason I am scanning Netflix is because Kim is off rehearsing with her Encore choral group for an early June concert, her first with Encore. Last night we watched three of the four second installments of the AppleTV series called WeCrashed about Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the founders…
“Free” Markets The very first lesson one used to learn in business school back when I went 50 years ago was that there was no such thing as a free lunch. We all sort of know what that is supposed to mean and there have been many euphemisms that have expanded on that notion, most notably in the tech world of social media where it is said that if you cannot find the product, that…
A Fistfull of Vomit One of my personal quirks is that I have only very rarely thrown-up over my 68 years. I know this isn’t a particularly pleasant topic, but it is one of life’s little events that we almost all have to face every once in a while. For my part, I can recall facing that physical requirement once in the 60s, once in the 70s and again once in the 90s. The first…
The Danger Zone Yesterday was Memorial Day, the day when we are supposed to honor those Americans who have given their vitality and perhaps their very lives in defense of our country, in defense of democracy. It is a day I take quite seriously and I made that small gesture of flying the American flag out in front of the house, like I try to do every year. You see, I was too young for…
Totems My life is now all about one totem after another. We all know what a totem pole is, but I’m not sure many of us have stopped to wonder about the underlying reasons why native people display them. A totem is a cultural symbol that tells people who we are and what we respect. They are most often a natural object or an animal that is believed by someone to have spiritual significance. I…
Adieu ADU There are two subjects that I keep returning to consider like a bee drawn to a flower. The first is getting an RV and using it to travel around the country. I think that one may finally have been put to rest two years ago when we rented a Sprinter van and went up to Ojai for what was supposed to be three days and turned out to be only two. That is…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre In 1974, almost fifty years ago, Leatherface burst onto the scene of the national pop consciousness as a cannibalistic mass murderer. Our culture loves a horror movie for reasons I can’t relate to (I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to enjoy any form of horror movie) and this particular horror franchise has spawned nine sequels, a video game and even comic books that have made somebody a lot of money off the…
An Aging Buffalo I know I should call it a bison and I know that a buffalo is something mostly found in Africa and India and not on the Great Plains of America, but everyone calls it a buffalo, so I often fall back into calling my Bison Boulder a buffalo. The beast is now seventeen months old and has been seen by 90% of the people who I expect will see it, but I…
So Hard…and then, So Easy I have lately been reminded over and over again about how hard life can sometimes be. That is actually a silly thing to say or think in a world overwhelmed with so many devastating events every day. For the better part of four months now we have lived day-by-day with the Ukrainian situation, one day exposing more atrocities by the Russians in their quest for Putin’s world dominance play, than…