Category Archives: Sport

Friends, Health, Politics, Sport

The Great Game

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Monday gratefuls: MLK Day. Inauguration Day. Cold -9. Senate Navy Bean Soup. Another batch. Catfish fillets. Beets. Peskyfowlatarian. Fish and Seafood and Chicken for protein. Making life easier. The thousand mile journey to Trump’s last day in office starts today.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: This land, our land

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for the week: Appreciation of Opposition   Haarecha shel machloket

One brief shining: Oh, watching football with Lake effect Snow, Bills and Ravens pounding away at each other, two young boys at quarterback who came into the league together in 2018, cold hands and slick footballs, not to the death gladiators leaving it all on the floor of our modern day Coliseums, our American Plaza del Toros.

 

Here is the vintage movie poster illustration inspired by your description

We did not invent the spectacle of grown men hurting each other or themselves for our entertainment. Far, far from it. That ball game the Mayan’s played. Sometimes sacrificing the winners. Toreadors. Gladiators. Buzhaski, played with the headless, stuffed body of a goat. Or now. Motor sports. Rugby. Lacrosse. Hockey. Even Basketball. Called games.

Suppose if you wanted to stretch the definition we could include traders on stock exchanges, commodity exchanges. C-suites. Hedge funds. Anywhere men, almost always men, put themselves at risk for some reward. Always a reward. A super bowl ring. A bull’s ear or tail. Death in order to play with the gods. Living another day. Trophies.

I’d like to say I have no interest in such things. That men concussing each other didn’t captivate me. But it does. Athleticism, yes. Of course. But the brutality? That, too. A non-evolved part of my brain I suppose.

Feeling for Mark Andrews, a dependable tight end, who fumbled in the fourth quarter, and most miserably of all, dropped the game tying 2-point conversion with less than 2 minutes left. Glad he’s not a gladiator.

 

Just a moment: No, I’ve not forgotten. Today is the first day. Only four more years to go. I hope. A lot of excellent material being written about liberalism, Democrats, what’s needed to restart the engine of our democracy after all these would be fascists put sugar in the gas tank.

I recommend a book Tom Crane sent me: The Storm Before the Calm. George Friedman. Without going into his argument he predicted a transformational presidency after which a new American Way would arise. Along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt’s reaction to the first Gilded Age. May it be so.

 

When the polar vortex heads back north Vince and his helper will come. They will move the dining table and three of its chairs upstairs to my loft, shift some wire shelving to the weird niche between my window walls and the pony wall, then bring downstairs my treadmill (so, so heavy), three stall mats, weight bench, kettle bells, exercise balls. No more schlepping up the garage stairs to workout.

They will also move a TV into that room. And they’ll switch out my new Morris Chair, taking it upstairs, while moving my old favorite leather chair downstairs. Finally, they’ll lift my new desktop tower next to my old one so I can start the change over to a new Windows 11 unit. Not sure quite yet when I’ll get the new 32″ curved monitor up and in place.

In yesteryear these last few things I could have and would have done myself. Not today. Far too weak.

 

 

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Family, GeekWorld, Literature, Science, Sport

Fun with our AI future overlords

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Monday gratefuls: Google calendar. Computers. NVidia. AI. Catastrophizing. Equalizing. Leveling. Great Britain. Scotland. England. Wales. Ireland. Brittany. Galicia. The Gaeltach. The Celtic Faery Faith. Wassailing. Yule logs. Evergreen Boughs and Trees. Singing and Feasting.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Echocardiograms

Kavannah: Perseverance and Love

One Brief Shining: The bigger and harder and more important project, supporting the liberal democratic vision of Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which, as Heather Richardson said, means having a government big enough and strong enough to fight off not only foreign foes, but especially domestic ones: the haters, the oligarchs, religious extremists like the Christian nationalists.

Another chatbot image

Having fun with chatbot and image creation. It often doesn’t spell too well and can approach the cartoonish rather than the beautiful. Still. I can get an image I know I have the right to post and that’s original. I’ll get better with my prompts and chatbotgpt will improve over time, too. I’m also using chatbot as a resource for the work I’m doing on the Great Wheel holidays.

Working with the idea from a couple of days ago. Write Ancientrails. Eat breakfast. Write five hundred to a thousand words on the Great Wheel. Workout. I like this rhythm and it gets my candle lit. A key reinforcer.

 

Brother Mark has flown back to Bangkok, awaiting January 1 and a flight to his old stomping grounds in Hafar, Saudi Arabia. He’s also figuring out what he needs to do to retire. A task all of us have faced or will face.

I admire his ability to live what he himself calls his unconventional lifestyle. Not many have seen as much of the world as he has. Not many Americans know Saudi Arabia and its citizens as well as he does. Mark shows  what it is to be an American by traveling to spots where our kind is not common. An important role and one he does well.

 

Just a moment: My heart goes out to Colorado skier Mikaela Shiffrin. Puncture wound from the gate at the top of her run. Having had Kate with a feeding tube I know how troublesome these kind of wounds can be. Often requiring expert management. She’s a phenom not only while skiing at speed, but in her mental toughness, yet her public vulnerability, too. This last noticeable after her father’s untimely death a couple of years ago. She’ll come back and snag that 100th victory. I’ll be skiing with her when she does.

As long I’m writing about young women I admire, let me add, again, Zöe Schlanger. Her sensitivity to the Plant world, her depth of research, and her own inquisitive intellect. You go, Zöe.

 

I understand Joe. You had the power. You love your son. 45/47 will do the same for so many, too. Not sure what I’d do. An ethical/emotional vice I hope never to encounter. My take? It’s holiseason. With an emphasis on light and family and the warmth of human community. In the spirit of the season, I’ll say.

Great Wheel, Minnesota, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Sport

Memories

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Ruth and Gabe here. The darkness before dawn. Using the Lenovo. Family. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Mary. Mark. Diane. The Good Fight. Jon. Kate, always Kate. Electric blanket and a down comforter. Plus a cool night. Winter storms next week.

Sparks of joy and awe: Time with the grandkids

Kavannah: UNDERSTANDING   Bina     Understanding, differentiation, deep insight; from בּוּן to split, pierce/penetrate; also בֵּין between  Third Sefirah = Left brain (opposite Chochmah/Wisdom) (Tevunah,  Comprehension, analytical thought, reason & intellect)

One brief shining: After a good day at Boulder on Thursday, good day=not in pain or overly exhausted, began to rethink my life, yeah, I know, again, maybe getting out even more, or maybe moving around more, not exercise, but going places, doing something for fun, spontaneity and joy mixed in with seriousness and focus.

 

Right now, late October, when I turn off the light as I go to bed, I can look up at a tall Lodgepole in my backyard and placed as if by an angel is a star that crowns it. Twas the Night Before Christmas comes to mind. More though. I see how crowning a “Christmas” tree with a star probably came to be. Christmas is in quotes because the Evergreen Tree in mid-Winter is part of the Yule tradition, symbolizing eternal life.

I plan to have a Yule log this Winter. Still haven’t gotten down to Variety Firewood to look for sizable hardwood logs and pinõn, but I will. Maybe Sunday after lunch with Alan.

Hanukah, the Jewish festival of fire and light for the darkness, comes very late this year starting on Christmas day and ending on January 2nd, in the new year 2025.

Long ago and far away from the Rocky Mountains in the bustling small town of Alexandria, Indiana, I carried newspapers for the Alexandria Times-Tribune where my dad worked. I had two routes. The first one I thought of as the Monroe Street route. It started on Monroe Street a block or so west of the Nickleplate railroad tracks. It wound through neighborhoods near Thurston Elementary School, the new one where I attended 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.

The second route, the Harrison route, had more customers, started north of Monroe Street and ran to the town limits out near the ruins of the Kelly Ax Factory.

On both of them I enjoyed the time alone, folding newspapers into small squares and deftly curling them onto my customers porches. All except the big edition on Thursdays that carried all the grocery store ads my dad had sold the previous week. That one we rolled up and put a rubber band around. They flew through the air pretty well, but not as accurately as the smaller squares.

Point of this? Saw a brief story about Freddie Freeman’s walkoff home-run in the bottom of the 10th against the Yankees in the World Series. I used some of my paper route money to buy a transistor radio I could clip on my belt while I carried papers. I often used it to listen to baseball games. I was a Dodger fan.

Denver, Family, Fourth Phase, Politics, Sport

Buy me some peanuts…

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Monday gratefuls: Friends. Family. Coors Field. RTD. The W Line. Walking. Lidocaine patch and two nsaids. Cool weather. The Rockies. The Giants. Homeruns and broken bats. Hot dogs and pretzels. Shaded seats. The umpire pulling his arm in fast. A strike! Gabe. Who likes baseball. My son, who does, too. A long sleep afterwards. Life of July 21st, 2024. Play.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Grandsons

One brief shining: Seats 12 and 13 in section 135, shaded throughout the whole game, hard wooden seats, narrow aisles, cupholders and a baseball diamond lit by Great Sol spread out below with the umpire squatting using his whisk broom on home plate, the catcher in his armor down on one leg waiting, while designated hitter Charlie Blackmon, he of the luxuriant black beard, swings his bat, then, Batter up!

 

The Rockies are in competition for the least capable team in the major leagues. They played the Giants, one rank above them in the National League West. Only the also hapless Marlins are further out of a division race. 28 games to the Rockies 22. Still. It was baseball, major league baseball. And it was sun hat day! I gave mine to Gabe to give to Ruth.

View from section 135

The new rules have sped the game up. I found I liked it better. No more drift into the setting sun as pitchers chawed, spit, pondered, and us fans waited. Might go a bit more often. With a lidocaine patch and a couple of nsaids my back was not impossible though it was a 23 minute walk from the train to Coors Field. Glad to have a seat at the end of the walk.

First time taking the light rail in for a game. Did it because Coors Field is not too far from the end of the W line near Union Station. No driving in downtown. Cheaper than parking and much less hassle. Will do it again next Sunday when Ruth and I go to the Jewish music concert at Cheri and Alan’s. $5.50 round trip. Uber then to their home on the 38th floor of the Spire Condominiums.

Gabe and the straw hats. He’s a kind kid. Enjoyed spending the time with him.

Warming up

Had a hot dog, sang take me out to the ball game, stood for the Anthem and, again, for God Bless America played by a trumpeter from the Air Force Academy band. Reflected on the years when I wouldn’t stand for the Anthem. I do now, but for a very different reason than before Vietnam. It’s important for those who, as I saw on a hat of a Never Trumper, want to make red hats wearable again.

 

Just a moment: And, he’s outta there! Another curve ball for election 2024. Though not an unexpected one. What is unexpected. How all this will effect the campaign. Who will be the candidate? Probably Kamala, but not necessarily. And can any one put the orange jinn back in the lamp? If they can, I personally volunteer to carry the lamp to the Marianna’s Trench and drop it over the side of the boat.

 

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Judaism, Politics, Sport, Wild Neighbors

It’s a New Day, It’s a New Life…

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Beltane and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Shirley Waste. Taking out the garbage. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’. 46 degrees this morning. The Mule Deer Doe resting in my back yard. The shema. Lunch with Ruth and Gabe. Insurance and cancer. Sullen Sky. Gyros. Kafta Kabob. Irv. Ode. Bill. Zoom. Guns at CBE. Concealed carry? Rich. Tara. Veronica. Diane’s great card.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Summer Solstice tomorrow

One brief shining: On the Summer Solstice Swedes get naked and dance around huge bonfires, a form of sympathetic magic I suppose, celebrating Fire with Fire, heat with heat, the growing season still needing Great Sol; sure and I get that, but I celebrate it in a quieter, less obvious way since the Summer Solstice, the longest day, also marks the gradual triumph of the dark-the night grows minute by minute after this sweaty Solstice, moving toward the longest night of the year.

 

Each morning I wake up and look out in the back. Hoping for an Elk or a Mule Deer to be there. This morning, far back in the tall Grass growing over my drain field lay a Mule Deer Doe, gently gazing around, comfortable and quiet. I find a satisfaction in these instances. Unearned, of course. Even so. For a while my temporary property feels safe enough, welcoming enough for a rest, a moment in a life lived on the move hunting for nourishment, avoiding Mountain Lions, drinking from our Mountain Streams. Ichi-go, ichi-e.

May our lives as we live them provide safe harbor for the souls of others, Mule Deer and humans alike.

 

Conversation with Ruth yesterday over lunch. She’s pro-Palestinian, anti-IDF war, pro-Israel, anti-Hammas. Same as me. She’s frustrated because her peers, even her Jewish peers, reduce thought about the war in Gaza to slogans and simplistic analysis. As she says, it’s complicated. Luke, of Leo and Luke, has become so pro-Palestinian that he bridles at the mere mention of a pro-Israeli sentiment. Others at CBE want the IDF to eliminate Hamas and do whatever it takes to accomplish that. Easy to see where eliminate Hamas no matter what it takes and the River to the Sea have taken root as contrasting driving forces.

As I talked with her, I imagined her in her dorm room holding these debates with her roommates, others from down the hall. A teeny bit of envy crept up. I loved that part of college. Loved it so much that I never quit with the radical questioning of that time. She’s so bright and thoughtful. A rapidly maturing mind at work. Amazing and gratifying to see.

 

Just a moment: Willie Mays is dead. 93. Baseball back when. Back when I listened to the Brooklyn Dodger’s games on the transistor radio I clipped to my belt while delivering the Alexandria Times-Tribune. There was a purity in my love of the game which Willie Mays played so well. My son still has it, bless his heart.

I imagine in fact that some of the MAGA nostalgia comes from remembering those days of the 1950’s, the time after World War II when American life exploded with children and UFO sightings. And the next decade with NASA and high-finned cars. Easy to remember the 104 stolen bases of Maury Wills and forget the budding war in Vietnam, the Jim Crow south, women in the kitchens and gay folks in the closet.

Asia, Judaism, Politics, Sport

Rebels

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Beltane and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Shabbat. Bar mitzvah decisions. Regaining confidence. Purpose. Shekinah. Trees. Great Wheel. Great work. Rabbi Jamie. Zornberg. Mordecai Kaplan. Mah Tovu. Mussar. Luke and his passion. Leo. A long immersion in matters Jewish. Alan and First Watch. Diane and the Sea Lions of Fisherman’s Wharf. Mark and Bangkok. Familiar turf for him.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mordecai Kaplan

One brief shining: We sat there around his circular table, his library wall filled with texts in Hebrew as well as English, Rabbi Jamie and me, he showed me the Haggadah by Mordecai Kaplan, this one got him excommunicated, oh, my attention piqued, I’ve got to have one I said because I love stories of rebellion and its consequences.

 

Finished reading all 2,000 plus pages of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A significant classic of Chinese literature. And a good read. Took a while. One takeaway from it. Rebels are the bad guys. The guys who support the Emperor are the good guys. This was an important learning for me since we Americans valorize the rebel, the American revolutionary. Our country was born in rebellion whereas China’s civilization honors it long, continuous history.

The mandate of heaven takes the place of the rebel. So long as an Emperor could claim the mandate of heaven*, he could rule. But, if he lost the mandate of heaven**, it became the people’s responsibility to overthrow him and usher in a new dynasty. Even in this case though the rebel served the new dynasty to be born from the old one. No experimentation in political form.

I admire Mordecai Kaplan and his willingness to follow his own thinking, to de-supernaturalize Judaism and to demote tradition from decider of all questions to a factor with a vote but not a veto. I love the expectation of debate, of doubt, of honoring the other’s perspective. Kaplan and my kind would not fare well in Chinese culture. Either under the old dynastic pattern or under the very similar Chinese Communist Party. Rule from the top down is the Chinese way.

 

Just a moment: A bit about the Caitlin Clark story. Yes, she’s a whitebread Midwesterner playing in a state, Indiana, that has not been celebrated for its moves towards racial justice. Yes, she’s touted as the next big thing that will push the WNBA higher up in the world of professional sports. And, most important, yes, the media has portrayed her first games as a pro with the breathless and hyperbolic ideas that often accompany writing about a new sports superstar.

She’s getting knocked around, shoved, posted hard. Many of those playing her like hockey enforcers are black. So villainous? Right? How dare they play hard against the white savior of their sport? Isn’t that self-defeating for women’s basketball as a whole?

No. The opposite is true. Were Caitlin given kid glove treatment she would never have the chance to mature into a true star. This hazing, some no doubt with malice, shows she’ll get no special favors on the court. That her game has to take over at a high level or she’ll remain a journeywoman player.

Should intentional fouls be called? Of course. There’s no excuse for casual violence in any sport. Well, ok, MMA. Otherwise, let everybody play their game.

 

 

*…the Mandate of Heaven was that although a ruler was given great power, he also had a moral obligation to use it for the good of his people. If a ruler did not do this, then his state would suffer terrible disasters and he would lose the right to govern.  World History Encyclopedia

**The sign that the mandate had been lost would be made evident by all kinds of calamities including natural ones: earthquakes, storms, solar eclipses, floods, drought, famine and plague. Other signs could be a more personal evidence from the emperor’s own behavior: cruelty, corruption, military defeat and incompetence. These were all interpreted as signs of the displeasure of heaven. To rise in rebellion when these signs occurred was justified. ChinaSage

Colorado, Health, Holidays, Sport

Mary Jane Hits Number One

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Beltane and the Moon of Shadow Mountain

Friday gratefuls: Ginny. Marilyn. Rick. Luke. Sally. Carol. Fran. Mussar Thursday. Mediguard. My phone/handheld computer. Mark in Bangkok. Mary in K.L. Me on Shadow Mountain. Distributed siblings. A new laptop. Bonobos. USA cleaners. Shirts. Breakfast. Fountain Barbecue. Chicken. Mac and cheese. Barbecue beans. New tires. Big O.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: These two

One brief shining: The snow has melted in the back, on the ski runs of Black Mountain, the Streams carry Water from the melt, from the Rains of this week; the Grass turned green, inviting Mule Deer adults and young ones over for a quick bite, loving too the dandelion delights all yellow and waiting.

 

Cannabis is now number one, passing even sturdy alcohol as America’s drug of choice. See this NYT article for more. I recall being in Colorado in 2012 when dispensaries first opened. I went into one, a strange transgressive thrill passed over me. Marijuana! Legal? Nah. Now, a short twelve years later, this news. I suppose all us old folks, each who bought his or her or their share of oregano no doubt, were already primed. Lots of articles too about seniors-neither high school nor college, but demographic-adopting cannabis for regular use.

Folks who visit me still want to go to the dispensaries. Colorado figured out to how make this transition first and did it pretty well. I used edibles for sleep for a year or two, but no longer. Though I am finding that after a day when my back pounds at me, 5 milligrams of a chill pill (indica) calms me. Of course, that’s not much use when I travel.

Amtrak reminded us several different times that its trains and stations were Federal property on which Federal law enforcement would snag riders who got off the train at a stop and lit up a joint. Since state law and federal law are in an odd balance, one ignoring the other, manifesting mostly in the now obviously silly Federal ban on banking for dispensaries, it leaves those of us in the many states where cannabis is now legal: 38 for medicinal, 24 for medicinal and recreational, in an odd patchwork of jurisdictions when leaving our home states.

 

Just a moment: three weeks to my bar mitzvah. Learning goes well. Torah portion learned. Readings for leading the morning service getting there. Need to work on my prayer shawl moves, bending the knee.

 

Memorial day weekend. The Indianapolis 500. The 108th running. Used to be in the Formula 1 circuit way back. Basketball and the Indy 500, Hoosier sports. Hard to credit how completely the 500 (as we called it) takes over life and news in an Indiana May. Race car trivia, time trails, practice runs. Gossip about the drivers. About the probable size of the crowd. The Greatest Spectacle in Racing. Capped at the end with the chugging of milk from a glass bottle. A nod to Indiana’s dairy farms and the wholesomeness of the Midwest. (spare me on this last one)

Health, Sport, Travel
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Beltane and the 1% Moon of Liberation

Tuesday gratefuls: 29 degrees. Freeze warning. Spits of Snow. Not in the Bay Area anymore. Windy, a cold white Sky. Ah, the merry, merry month of May! Mark in Bangkok. Where it’s hot, dense, different from his last visit. Staying at home, letting the food poisoning resolve. Shadow Mountain. A Lodgepole topped by high Winds. Food. Water. Rest. As buddy Mark Odegard observed, “At our age traveling is hard work.”

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Sleep

One brief shining: Looked out my bedroom window and found a green Shrub that was unfamiliar, unfamiliar?, in the scene I see several times a day, I shook my head, no, can’t be, yet there, oh wait, my eye had traveled to the top of a Lodgepole next to the new Shrub, that fresh gash; it was a Tree top snapped off in one of our high Winds, yes the transition in weather can be brutal here.

 

Though the back dominated my trip the food poisoning of last Friday night has dominated its end and my return home. I know. I know. Debbie downer. Again. You can skip this without guilt. Still, I want to leave bread crumbs about life here. So. Not sure where I picked up the bad food, bad food stay down! Damn it. Possibly Japantown where Diane and I had lunch. Maybe that piece of tempura shrimp? Whatever it was by 9 pm on Friday I had both diarrhea and vomiting. And not just a little. I became weak, dehydrated, and, of course, did not sleep on that the night before I reboarded the California Zephyr for the return trip to Denver.

Packing seemed impossible. I called Diane and asked her to come help. Even when I did I knew, due to the parking situation, that she couldn’t. But she understood. A real sweetheart, my cousin. Instead of packing I stuffed things in the Travelpro. Going home that’s ok. All will need washing and care anyhow when back. At least that’s what I told myself. Finished up. Went downstairs and checked out. Diane came.

It was a Rainy Saturday after seven straight days of beautiful weather. Sunny. Light Breezes. Warm but never hot. Like a movie the weather signaled my inner world. I got on the Amtrak bus and headed across the Bay Bridge.

The journey home. Garret helped. The sleeping car attendant. Brought me my meals.  There was a bathroom just down the hall. My roomette was on the ground level of the sleeper along with five others, checked bags, and shower rooms. Couldn’t have asked for a better set up.

At Union Station Adam picked me up in his Tahoe (Now, I’ve been there. Sort of.) and deposited me on Shadow Mountain. I needed his help getting my bag in and out.

Now Tuesday morning. Trying to stay hydrated without getting my stomach excited enough to remember Friday night. Still eating bland food. Sleeping a lot. Nap after I write this.

Just a moment: Oh, the agony. NOW the Timberwolves get real.

 

 

 

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Politics, Sport, World History

The Good Boy. Again.

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Spring and the Moon of Liberation

Monday gratefuls: Power back on! Internet back up! Exclamation points available! Only a bit over 24 hours but felt longer. Bleed appointment reassuring. Working on the Good Boy and his fears. Finishing Three Body Problem book. Reading There, there. And The White Road. A beautiful, calm day in the neighborhood. C.O.R.E. linefolks. Good work.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Sparks of electricity

One brief shining: Not sure what your triggers might be, here are a few of mine: must, should, have to, no choice, get on it now which of course reveal an underlying trigger too often tripped by those with imagined authority over me, my life, my choices, you know, you’re not the boss of me.

 

Wanted to unveil an inner dialogue I had at 7:00 am today on the way to an appointment with a G.I. doc. While driving I rehearsed, “I’ve been without power and internet. I couldn’t have signed in.” “Are you even in the service business? Where do you get off telling me I must sign in?” “My late wife retired because she was so tired of this sort of medicine.” And other similar phrases.

I wasn’t sure I’d make the 7:30 appointment. The first trigger. One of my own. Rocky Mountain Gastroenterology text saying: You must sign in for your 7:30 appointment. Second trigger. Internet down and power out. Third trigger. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, late, angry, defensive. Ready to go to battle with the evil empire of capitalist medicine. For about 20 minutes of drive time.

And, I knew I was being this way. Tried to talk myself down. Failed. Finally got to a point where I could walk in and say, “Hi, I have a 7:30.” The folks behind the desk coudn’t have been nicer. They helped me get signed in, were solicitous, kind.

Ashley, the P.A., was sweet. Knowledgeable. The bleed. Scary, but not life threatening. Might happen again. Good to be prepared. She had a sensible plan that includes checking my anemia, considering then whether to do a more invasive exam. I liked her.

This was all about the Good Boy. The part of me that wants always to slip through authoritarian gates unnoticed. Neither defensive nor obeisant. Not sure why I’m so conflicted about authority, so eager to avoid its grasp. Might be Dad. Might be a more generalized angst about being trapped because of someone else’s rules.

 

Just a moment: Iowa lost. But Caitlin. Ah, Caitlin. “I never sit and sulk about things that didn’t happen.” NYT

This young woman is the complete package. Skilled, persistent, determined, sound work ethic, and now with inner calm. Be like Caitlin.

 

In other news: Wars and rumors of war. Elections and rumors of denial. An eclipse with a prediction of clouds. And it has ever been so. The immediate, the happening causes us to gaze into the future, dragging it with us as we look. Ukraine and Gaza. Can WWIII be far behind? Biden and Trump. Who will claim to have won? Totality. What does it look like under cloud cover? Might be easier to live with what is and not wonder what will be.

 

 

Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Sport, The West, Travel, US History, Weather +Climate

No Loyalty

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: My Lodgepole companion, Needles again covered with Snow. A cold Mountain morning. Remembering Andover (see header image). Being where you are. Wendel Berry. Regenerative Farming. Loving the place. Knowing the place. Where the Mule Deer come. Where the Creek blasts down the Mountain in Spring. Where the Dogwood blooms. Where Fawns and Calves move up and down the Mountains on wobbly legs.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Moisture on the Mountain and the Forest

One brief shining: You know I looked out at the Snow yesterday, falling sometimes gently, sometimes vigorously, and I thought beautiful, then when I saw the same Snow coming down on my driveway I screamed enough, no more, we’ve had plenty thank you very much, however; I did not mean it, I meant bring as much moisture as long as you can and I will be grateful.

 

Yes. Cabin fever time. That moment when what looked serene and beautiful a few short months ago now scrapes across the seasonal blackboard like bad chalk. Up here it produces a split personality. One tired of the cold, the Snow, driving on Ice, huddling up all about hygge. Wanting to run outside in a t-shirt, arms spread wide, soaking in Great Sol. The other remembering summers past when the Smokey the Bear sign pegged Extreme Fire Danger. Snow as far into April, hell, even May as you want. In fact, Snow until the Monsoons return. Please.

I’m cutting a middle ground between these two. Gonna take off for San Francisco at the end of the month. See a lot of art, maybe a Redwood or two, visit my cousin in her native habitat. Eat. Sleep. Test my back in a safe environment.

Of course. I would for sure wear Flowers in my hair if I had enough left. Gonna ride the Amtrak route between Denver and SFC. Really, Oakland, then a bus. Or, Diane. With a roomette. See the Rockies and the intermountain West without having to drive.

A way to discover if I can travel, probably back to Korea again. Maybe to Israel if this war ever ends. Perhaps this year for both.

 

Just a Moment: Caitlin Clark. Wow. 41 points. Final Four. Iowa! Once more, with feeling: Go, Hawkeyes! Iowa feels like Minnesota’s younger sister. Which would make Caitlin our niece? Always nice to see family doing well.

45. His $175 million dollar bond. His legal peril. Or, from the MAGA perspective, the persecutions not prosecutions.

Brother Mark asked if Trump won how would I be the loyal opposition?

I wouldn’t. Be loyal. Though I would be in opposition. Loyal opposition as an idea implies mutuality, a framework in which political opponents serve as testers of ideas, as citizens of a shared form of government. A form of government which all sides agree has the best interests of a nation as its true purpose.

Trump is not a politician in that sense. He is a politician though, one of the oldest kinds. A brute seeking total power. Power with which he can punish his enemies and reward his sycophants. Kings, Queen, Pharaohs, and Emperors, autocrats and dictators all are this sort of politician.

Loyalty has as its sister virtue respect. No respect for pussy grabbers, for those who provide safe harbor for white supremacists, misogynists, anti-Semites. No respect for insurrectionists, for anti-constitutionalists. No respect for frauds, for payers of hush money, for election deniers. Therefore. Q.E.D. No loyalty.