Monthly Archives: November 2010

Travel

Warning: Rant About Hands On Security At Airports

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Samhain                                              Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Boxers or briefs?  Hands on or a nude photo?  When did TSA become T&A?  In Minnesota we often use “you can only take off so many clothes.” to explain our preference for cold weather over hot.  You can always add more layers.  Here’s a real problem with the hands on approach to security:  you can only take off so many clothes.  Inch by inch the guberment has let its security obsession get us to just that point.

It’s nonsensical to ask for no security, but when the creeping hand of government has moved up my crotch, well then by gum, they’ve gone to far.  It reminds me of that mythical frog sitting on the stove in gradually warming water.  The security water has begun to boil and we’ve been the frogs.

A complete rethink has to come.  When thousands of ordinary travelers find themselves treated as terrorists until proven innocent, there has got be a better way.  In no other part of our quasi-libertarian culture would anything even close to this heavy handed be tolerated, but because it’s air travel we’re asked to bend over backward.  Well, actually not yet.  But it could be next.

All funning aside.  Living in a security state has a long and high profile career in science fiction, but it’s not the vision of the future I wanted to see come to pass.

My basic response to all this is to ride the train, drive or just not go, though the last couple of times I’ve flown I’ve actually found the whole process less onerous than before, but this new wrinkle seems designed to push us back in time, not forward.

Health, Sport, Weather +Climate

Extreme Cold?

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Cool today, even cooler tomorrow.  Then it begins to get chilly near the end of next week, just in time for Thanksgiving.  The accuweather folks call 9 degrees, the predicted low for November 24th, extreme cold.  Hmmm.  Can’t wait to see the adjectives in January.

(now this is extreme cold)

Got a good nights sleep last night, feeling pretty good today.  Just some residual thrumming, a low grade event.

I continue uninterested in the Vikings.  I’m taking this a Sunday at a time, but I feel my football habit beginning to weaken.  Hopefully, by the end of the season it will drop off and leave me alone.  On the other hand the Gopher’s basketball team…

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Retirement

Sheepshead

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The card gods were pretty good to me.  I had some good hands, some good luck and a lot of fun tonight at sheepshead.  We had a great evening with a lot of laughter.  It’s nice to be with guys who can see the humor in their own lives.

The wisdom teeth began to throb tonight, a bit surprising after a calm period since the extraction.  I’ve felt fatigued and a bit spacy, but no real pain until today.

I will be happy when Kate’s work is done in early January and she goes on casual time.  Having her here will make our home feel more vital.

Over the weekend I plan to put the bees to rest for the winter and make some more soup with the last of the leeks.  Latin tomorrow.

Cinema and Television, News of the Strange

A Hollywood Death

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Samhain                                                     Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

A high-flying publicist shot several times in the chest, her car, a Mercedes, crashing into a light pole.  Oh, Hollywood.  Ronni Chasen was on her way home when she was shot at the corner of Whittier Drive and Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.  Here’s the strange part:  it looks like she was shot before she crashed, but there were no shell casings  in the immediate vicinity.

She had attended an afterparty for the premier of Burlesque.  She was found around 12:30 pm.

Black Dahlia, Day of the Locust, Hollywood Homicide, LA Confidential, Mulholland Drive all have a ripped from the headlines feel; it’s difficult to imagine this murder won’t show up on the silver screen.  If, no, when it does, it will take the peculiar role of publicist to its logical extreme.  A movie featuring a Hollywood publicist whose murder creates a movie and in turn feeds the media mill for other publicists.

A terrible place, Hollywood, where often the most salient aspect of its denizens are their miscues and horrors.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.

Aging, Health, Politics

Getting Over the Pain

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Samhain                                             Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Well.  A good night’s sleep, little swelling this morning and no discernible pain.  So far this recovery has had no bite other than fatigue and disorientation, some of which continues this morning.  Still taking the ibuprofen but I only used one of the vicodin.

The new political reality has us all shuffling from meeting to meeting, trying to figure out what comes next.  Tomorrow afternoon I’ll attend a meeting of Minnesota progressives (leftists) to discuss the impact on a wider progressive agenda.  It’s not good, at least not in the short run.  If we can use the next two years to define and energize those who would benefit, we could find ourselves stronger in 2012 than we were 2010.  That’s a big if and it will take considerable work to make it happen.

Aging, Health

Here Comes the Pain

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The gauze is out and the long acting anesthetic still has control of the pain.  Cold packs on my right every half hour, ibuprofen and vicodin for bedtime.  Should be ok, though tomorrow could be worse than today.  Cheer up, things could be worse.  I cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse.

Right now I’m thinking this recovery will proceed pretty smoothly and I’m happy about that.

Kate sat out in the waiting room, tense, because she knows the things that can go wrong.  Meanwhile, I floated softly as a cloud among the daffodils.

Though I do try to avoid the medical world as much as possible, I am glad we have their work available.  It makes life easier and, often, even possible.

As I’ve written this, the analgesic from the procedure has begun to wear off and my jaw has a touch of ache to it.   It probably will not stay subsided for long now.  Have to roll out the heavier meds.  Not much more clear thinking now.  Adios.

Aging, Health

Apres Versid

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woke up on a blue plastic couch, a bit chilly.  A woman filled a syringe, I could see her through a small window.  There was a slight fog in my perception, a kind of garbling to my thought, courtesy of the versid and fentanyl.  Took me a moment to orient myself, feel the gauze on my right, filling up my mouth, giving me an overfull sensation.  A bit later a nurse took my blood pressure, put me in a wheel chair and wheeled me to the elevator then down to Kate who waited in the truck.

Back home now with pain meds.  The teeth came out smoothly which lessens the risk of complications.  A good thing.  Vicodin and ibuprofen for the rest of the day, a bit hazy as the day progresses.

Glad it’s over with and will be even gladder when the healing process finishes.

Aging, Health, Retirement

The Better Part of Wisdom?

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Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

 

Wisdom teeth.  Well, I still have a couple.  A while back I had the first two yanked out, but the ensuing weekend and week made me hold off on the other two.  Until now.  Faced with the imminent loss of dental insurance, or at least a changed plan, I asked my dentist what he thought I could do now to help my dental health long term.  The wisdom teeth, he said, out.

So, this morning out they come.  I woke up early this morning, a bit nervous I guess.  My goal, in general, is to stay away from the medical profession (except for my lovely wife), but once in a while it’s unavoidable.  Like today.

Wondering about wisdom teeth, I took a quick poke around the web and found a dentistry site that identified wisdom teeth as vestigial.  Interesting.  Seems at one point our diet consisted of much more abrasive material which needed the third molar to help grind it down.  Back then we didn’t need extra fiber in the diet, I’m guessing.  Now jaws stay fuller*, our diet’s smoother and we don’t create space by losing permanent teeth, thanks to modern dentistry.

Around 9:15 the procedure begins.  Oh, boy.

*Until quite recently, our diet included mostly very coarse food, as well as impurities such as dirt and sand. This coarseness would abrade teeth so significantly that they would take up less space in the jaw.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Self

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s house tonight.  Bill, Frank, Warren, Stefan, Scott, Tom, Mark, me.  Paul was there for a bit before he left to have dinner with his daughter Clare.

Topic tonight was what role a higher power plays in your life, if any.  We wandered here and there, but came back to a few themes:  some found matters of this sort best expressed through loss of the ego, others found the idea of a higher power important for their journey.  A few of us focused on the self, the authentic self or the integrated self or the deep self, a self that is sufficient to itself for worth, but eager to belong:  to belong to the earth, to each other, to a past, to a family, but in that belonging still the self remains what it is, validated and grounded in an accidental combination of genes that is unique and separate, yet also a part while remaining apart.  The key element to this perspective then becomes personal responsibility, willingness to make choices and accept their consequences.

We touched on the notion of the sacred as a created sense of belonging, of a self located in a context, a place, a family, a cemetery, a house.

Some found this perspective a product of aging, of graceful self-acceptance, of knowing who we are, warts and all, and loving that self, not an ideal self that others or external systems would have us mold ourselves toward.

We have different toe holds on our reality, on what we need to feel whole and authentic, but we agreed long ago to take this journey together, and we’ve accepted responsibility for the ride.