Still Standing or Standing Still I am constantly in awe of the natural world. There are plenty of times in life when we go about our business of the moment and don’t give our immediate or broader surroundings a moment’s thought. I suppose that is the normal state of affairs for life forms that must struggle to keep the spark of existence alive. The Protozoa does not spend much time contemplating its existence or worrying…
The Population Irony In 2013 I published my first book about the global pension crisis. Pensions involve demographics and the demographics of China at the time were screaming that the thirty plus year old one-child policy of China was becoming an economic and pension issue for China. The fundamental issue is that economic growth cannot be had without population growth. It is an economic credo that is hard to avoid. And China had implemented what…
Into the Desert The desert is on my mind today for some reason. I’m sure it has something to do with all the rain that keeps on falling, but I want to go beyond that. I am always more inclined to head east from here than to head west. West means heading towards the throngs of people near the coast. The ocean can be pleasant, but the crowds rarely are. By contrast, if you head…
Scared in the Dark Today in the rain, I got hooked into a movie I had seen and resisted for some time. It’s called Genius and is the storyof Max Perkins, the famous editor at Scribner’s who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Jude Law plays Wolfe and he is a desperately troubled figure that has an overactive mind and an out-of-control literary ego that may have helped…
Rain, Rain Go Away I started writing about the rain on January 1 and here it is the middle of January’s and I’m still doing it. This has been an unusually wet month here on the hilltop. Last night sounded like the wrath of God with the wind howling and rain pelting the house and windows. It all started yesterday once I landed and it hasn’t let up yet. According to the online weather report,…
Seeing the World There are only a few pieces of promotional mail that I bother with. One of those that I can’t seem to ignore is that National Geographic Expeditions magazine. The magazine is a pretty fancy piece of literature that must be expensive to produce and is therefore probably not just sent out randomly. I must be of the preferred customer list as both a long-time subscriber to their magazine and an occasional buyer…
Garden Tours I first drove up to this house on Christmas Day, 2011, so eleven yeas ago. I was on my motorcycle and brother-in-law Jeff was on his bike and we we tooling around looking at what Zillow said was on offer in the general vicinity. Kim, Thomas (his official name at the time) and I had driven down from San Francisco over the course of a week and looked for what I guess we…
The Structure of Retirement Every stage of life has some degree of structure for most of us. Some of us prefer as little structure as possible and some of us need more structure to keep us on track. We are not only all different, but we are different differently at different times of our lives. I find that a certain amount of structure to my life and even to my day is preferable to fully…
Trailers Today I am hopeful of doing my first transaction for 2023 and it could be a meaningful one. A month or so ago I finally put an ad on a website called Trailer Traders. For ten years I have had a motorcycle trailer that I have used perhaps ten times to take my motorcycles across the desert to a place where I can comfortably ride them to one of my motorcycle club’s gatherings. I…
New Year Resolutions Getting older has its advantages. I don’t just mean the older and wiser issue, though there is plenty of truth to that. What I really mean is that there is a degree of reality and truth that stems from a clarity that escapes us when we are younger. I’m sure there are people who cannot help but delude themselves in their dotage so as not to spend their waning moments wallowing in…