• The Generator Failed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar falls 30.16 0mph NW dew-point 36  Beltane, twilight

                  Last Quarter of the Hare Moon 

     This story grabbed me.  See below it to see why.

    “MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

    Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.

    “We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” said Beyer, who was called to the home shortly after the power failed. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”

    Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews were called to the scene, but could do little to help.

    Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.”

     I learned a couple of years ago that I spent some time in an iron lung during my episode with bulbar polio.  It was a shock to me.   Paralysis struck my left side and lasted for about a year.  I recall one event in an emergency room or an operating room, lights above my body, people in white working on me.  I saw all this from a spot up near the ceiling.  I know this sounds weird, but the memory has permanent residence in me.  The remarkable part is that no one from the family was in this  room.  Just me.  And the medical team.

    Seeing this story reminds me of all the others, like me, who were victims of the post-war polio epidemic.  Most of us made it through with little physical aftermath, but some died.  Some still wear braces.  Some required breathing support of one kind or another for their entire life.  It all seems so long ago, but this woman was exactly my age. 

    I wrote some today on Superior Wolf, about 1,500 words.  Moving forward.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Writing 📎and tagged

  • Vanished

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    67  bar falls 30.34 1mph WSW dew-point 29  Beltane, sunny

                        Last Quarter Hare Moon

    The piles are no more.  One more phase’s detritus has gone into the trash bin or file folder or magazine holders.  It feels good to have them gone, a relief.  Financial information up to date.  Philosophy News, SF Bulletin, Parabola, Scientific American and Wired are in places where I will read them now.  Hmmm.  Guess the upstairs on the kitchen table pile remains.  Gotta work on that.  But not now.  It’s of more recent vintage.

    Sleepy.  Nap time.  Then some outdoor work and some more writing on Superior Wolf.  Had a good idea yesterday that I will implement today.  It’s an old idea, in a way the first idea for this novel.  It has energy.  Which is good.


    📂This entry was posted in Writing 📎and tagged

  • Sensuality Awakened in a Hindu Temple

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    47  bar steep rise 30.04 6mph N dew-point 38  Beltane

                Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

    There are frost warnings not 75 miles north of us.  Frost.  On Memorial Day.  OMG.

    Kate came home after a busy holiday clinic, today and yesterday were both very busy.  I cooked walleye, pasta with morels I found in our woods with a sauce Kate made earlier and asparagus.  We ate it while watching Passage to India.  This is an old movie, so you probably saw it long before I did, but it’s a stunner visually.  David Lean and Merchant Ivory, goes without saying.  The plot worked well in exposing the basic contradictions in the colonial exploitation of India by the British Raj.  The major plot point, however, an incident in the caves of Marabara still eludes me. 

    It seems that Adela, played by Judy Davis, awakened to her sensuality while visiting a Hindu temple in ruins.  It seems further that her on again/off again marriage to the City Magistrate created a level of cognitive dissonance with this awakened sensuality.   It all came to a head when she fled a wonderful day organized by a Muslim doctor.  She made an accusation of attempted rape, or, was manipulated into making one.  Then she recanted.  Puzzling.

    Kate’s off to bed.  I plan to finish Lush Life by Richard Price tonight.  A wonderful novel in many ways, though it is so thick in its content that I become weary of it and need a rest.  It is a tour de force of urban conflict, parsed out on the shockwaves of a brutal murder on the lower east side.  If you want to read a genuine American voice on a quintessential American topic, I recommend it.

    No writing by me yesterday or today on Superior Wolf.  In a bit of a general funk, the dream surfacing some of it.  Not sure where it’s going, doesn’t seem so oppressive tonight.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Family Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • A Chute Shot from Mars Orbit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar steep rise 29.80 3mph WNW dew-point 51  Beltane, cloudy

                  Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

         phoenix-lander-from-mro.jpg

    This amazing shot shows Phoenix as its chute brakes entry velocity on its descent.  A camera aboard the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter took the shot. 

    A muggy day, cool enough, but I’m tired.  Wore myself out getting down on myself in my dreams.  Need a nap.  Things go better with sleep.

    Amended soil around the one juniper stump I pulled and worked on a second one.  No joy yet.  I’ll get it, just takes patience.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden GeekWorld

  • A Guy Type Sunday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     66  bar falls 29.88 1mph W dew-point 43 Beltane, night

                     Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

    Tomorrow:  the 500.  And a few hours after, Phoenix Lander arrives at its destination.  The following information is from the NASA website about the lander. 

    “With three days and 3 million miles left to fly before arriving at Mars, NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft is on track for its destination in the Martian arctic.

    The spacecraft is closing in on the scariest seven minutes of the mission.

    On Sunday, shortly after the annual 500-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Phoenix will be approaching Mars at about 12,750 miles per hour, a speed that could cover 500 miles in 2 minutes and 22 seconds. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at that velocity, it must use superheated friction with the atmosphere, a strong parachute and a set of pulsing retrorockets to achieve a safe, three-legged standstill touchdown on the surface in just seven minutes.

    The earliest possible time when mission controllers could get confirmation from Phoenix indicating it has survived landing will be at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday (7:53 p.m. Eastern Time). Of 11 previous attempts that various nations have made to land spacecraft on Mars, only five have succeeded.”

    Geez, 3 days and 3 million miles to go.  That’s what I would call rapid transit.  1 million miles a day.  At that speed, in 93 days, you’d be roasting at Club Sun.  It’s taken Phoenix 10 months to reach Mars.  10 months. 

    So, automobile racing in the early afternoon, a Mars landing around 7:30PM.  What more could a guy ask for on a holiday?
     


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld

  • Why Did They Get The Boat With Holes?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    66  bar falls 30.06  6mph NE dew-point 38  Beltane, cloudy

                  Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

    The grocery store on Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, quiet.  I suppose all those up norther’s have abandoned the first home for the second.  Made for an easy trip through the check out lane.  Though not purchasing much, I thought, I still rang up $155.  Surprised me. 

    Some shrimp, a walleye fillet, milk, bread, snacks, some fruit (that $10 bag of cherries maybe not such a wise purchase), butter, turkey for the dogs.  That’s about it.  Combine that with the $42 it took me to fill up the Celica, around 11 gallons, and you can feel the pincers of rising commodity prices clamp down. 

    Kate and I can afford it, don’t get me wrong, but I’m thinking about the person who checked me out at Festival, who put the items in the bags, theWalmart employee, the person who works in the convenience store, janitors and other back of the shop employees we rarely see.  Or, the  unemployed.  Or, the person whose income each month comes fixed by an annuity, social security, a meager pension.  Consider a person making 30-40,000 dollars a year.  With two or three kids.  A mortgage and a commute.  Thank you free market capitalism.  Why did they get the boat with holes?

    Planted a couple of ferns in the shade garden underneath the river birch, then went over to the second tier, where I began a shade garden 3 years ago.  Gophers have eaten much of the hosta and the daylillies, survivors from my attempt to clear them out back then have overgrown a lot of the rest.  I’ve decided to treat daylilies in this half moon shaped garden as weeds.  I’m moving them to other places, places where their wonderfully dogged lifestyle will help us rather than get in the way.  Any that grow from tubers left behind, though.  Out they  go. 

    Spent 45 or minutes or so writing on Superior Wolf, too.  Keeps on coming.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Mechanist or Vitalist?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    58  bar steep fall 30.12  7mpn ENE dew-point 41  Beltane, Sunny

                     Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

    “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

    Wittegenstein is a notoriously opaque, but very influential philosopher.  His Tractatus is a seminal work of 20th century philosophy, amazing for its brevity.  In this quote, though, I grasp his line of thought.  How often do you consider the solidity of a table, for example?  The beating of your heart?  The exquisite elegance of your hands?  The comfort of darkness?  The revelation in sunlight? 

    Have you ever considered, I mean really considered, the wonder of life itself?  We are animate, moving through the world with intention.  So are dogs, mosquitoes and groundhogs.  The seed listens to its own voice, expresses itself and its genome through time and space.  Alive.  But.  What is life?  We see the results of life around us all the time; we experience it within ourselves, but what is it?  What is the difference between the elements in my body–the same as those in a rock or in soil, or in the air–and their inanimate counter parts still locked in the fiery cauldron of a star or the massif of a mountain range?

    A book I purchased recently, but have not yet read, argues against what the author calls the Gallilean conspiracy.  I’ve forgotten why he calls it that, something about Gallileo’s approach to science, but the point is this:  even if we knew all the laws of particles and quantum mechanics and could apply them with precision to all the matter in the universe, we could still not predict the future, though there is strong element of what he calls scientistic thinking that suggests just this possibility. 

    Why can’t we predict the future based on fundamental laws of nature?  Because of complexity. As things grow more complex, the complexity itself inserts a new dimension, something that does not obey the fundamental laws: intention.  Intention and complexity reach an apex in the phenomenon of life.  You could not analyze the physical elements within  my body, apply the laws of relativity and Newtonian physics to them, and predict what I will choose to have for breakfast.  Why?  Because consciousness adds intention, guided by will, and none of these added realities of complexity follow the laws of thermodynamics, say.  Is the action of complex entities constrained and guided by laws of nature?  Of course.  Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, will snuff out the complexity that I am.  But not right now.  While I’m upright and consciousness, and yes, you, too, I can choose to defy entropy by taking my blood pressure medication and staying on that good cholestrol lowering drug.  Exercising.  Good diet.  None of these, nor my decision to go to the grocery store this morning have a necessary predicate in my constituent parts.

    In part this all boils down to a divide which remains an abyss between, say, the Richard Dawkins and Sam Harrises of the world, and those of us who insist on considering the divine:  vitalist or mechanist?  That is, is any organism merely the sum of its parts–mechanist, or, is it the whole more than the sum of its parts–vitalist.  I side with the vitalists.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality GeekWorld Great Work

  • An Appetite for Nutrient Fluid (not an alien)

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    56  bar steady 30.05 4mph N dew-point 43  Beltane, sunny and cool

                              Waning Gibbous Hare Moons 

    “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

    Less is more -always; and explore constantly.  Mario Odegard, Viking Explorer and Woolly Mammoth

    Up earlier again this morning to take advantage of the cool temps.  Amended the second tier bed close to the house where we have had problem after problem with growing things.  This time I added two bags composted manure and a cubic foot or so of sphagnum moss. 

    It’s too shady for sun plants and too sunny for shade plants.  Gotta find something that swings both ways and can tolerate our winters. 

    Meanwhile on the hydroponic front my tomato plant started from an heirloom seed now reaches close to the ceiling.  It’s a good 2.5 feet tall, headed toward its interior limitation.  It has several small yellow flowers, but no fruit as yet.  Yes, the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.  The astonishing thing is its appetite for nutrient fluid.  It’s going through about a gallon every four to five days.  When the fruit begins developing, I imagine its appetite will increase again.  The lettuce produces enough leaves every few days for a salad a meal for lunch and dinner.  Both the lettuce and the tomato plant are the products of one seed germinating, coming to maturity and growing its edible product.

    Outside, however, if we were pioneers and our lives depended on the crop, I’d be seeking part time employment.  To pay for food next winter.  The cucumbers and morning glories I grew inside so well atrophied and died outside.  The three tomato plants, on the other hand, have done fine outside.  After puzzling over the difference for a week, it came to me this morning.  The tomato plants were in soil in pressed peat moss containers.  They had a much larger soil contained root system.   The morning glories and the cucumber were in smaller, compressed soil seed starting clumps.  That meant their root system was much more exposed, having grown in the nutrient solution rather than soil. 

    The take away for me is this:  if I’m going to transplant it outside, start it in a larger ground ready pot with potting soil.  It’s a learning curve.

    On the other hand, we do finally have several germinated seeds in the garden, too.  The Country Gentleman corn has begun its skyward journey as have the Ireland Annie, Dragon’s Tongue and another one I can’t recall.  We also have beets, carrots, peppers and onions, lots of onions, doing well.  We need a stretch of hot weather to get these puppies on their way.  So far they’ve been sluggards.

    Though I’m signed out now for the summer, I’m headed into the art museum today for a noon tour.  Carol Wedin, a fellow docent who prefers Asian tours, called me, sick with a cold and asked me for help.  Sure.  She is a wonderful botanical illustrator/artist.

    Kate’s off getting her nails done; Lois is here cleaning house and I’ve got to get in the shower to get ready for my tour.  Bye for now.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Garden 📎and tagged

  • Jazzed Up and Ready to Rock

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    63  bar steep rise 29.90 0mph NNE dew-point 40  Beltane, sunny

    Up at 6AM.  It’s light!  Out the door at 6:30 AM.  Drive fast to Hwy. 252.  Stop, edge forward.  Repeat.  Repeat. Repeat.  All this fossil fuel going up in exhausts of vehicles barely accomplishing anything. 

    It took me an  hour, as I thought it would, to get to the Sierra Club office on Franklin Avenue for a meeting with Cathy Duvall, the national Sierra Club’s director of political activity.  It was worth it.  Cathy is a political insider, in this case, too, a Beltway insider.  That means she takes politics for what it is, not for what it could be in the best of all possible worlds, but as a place where competing forces drive against each other for power and resources.

    The non-profit world, including the church, often works much like the traffic jam going into the city this morning.  Every body gets revved up, drives fast, then gets stuck in the resolutionary lane, confusing action with intention.  And a lot of political energy goes up in the exhaust, barely accomplishing anything.

    Not for Cathy and the Sierra Club.  She understands the numbers, the people, the zeitgeist and still believes this could be a transformative year for the environmental agenda.  Could be.  Could be if we put the effort into a ground level campaign to educate the public.  Could be if we identify voters sensitive to our issues and see they could get to the polls.  Could be if we identify those races where a bit of extra oomph, in allies or dollars or both, could make a difference and deploy our resources wisely.  Could be.

    I got jazzed up by the meeting, ready to rock.  The political committee, it turns out, has not yet formed and I may have a chance of getting involved.  This kind of energy is so different from the MIA, fiction creating and scholarly work.  It’s also different from, but closely related to the gardening energy.  This energy has an edge, a buzz.  It makes my finger tips tingle.  Old neuronal paths, long abandoned, have begun to fire.  We’ll see where it goes, if anywhere.

    That said, there’s still plants to get in the ground, weeds to kill and dig up and trees to cut down, land to level.   All things in their time.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Politics

  • Making My Soul Hum

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Superior Wolf is underway again.  The other day I hit on the point that had me stuck, a character I’d carried over from another novel.  He didn’t belong in this one, but it took me 25,000 words or so to figure that out.  Now a new plotline, more salient and tight, has emerged with a strong character, a protagonist who will drive the book.

    It feels good to be back at fiction, a long caesura, and I hope the next one is brief.  Fiction speaks from my soul, the rest tends to be, as we said in the sixties, a head trip.  Over the years since then, I’ve learned to respect head trips.  I earned a living with them for many years and they’ve kept me engaged with the world.  They do not make my soul hum, though my  Self speaks through them as well.

    Kate made a trip to the Green Barn, a nursery she really likes on Highway 65 near Isanti.  She picked up composted manure, sphagnum moss and several plants.  We have some new ferns, cucumbers, morning glories (the ones I grew in the hydroponics died outside, though the tomatoes have done fine.) squash and several grasses. 

    Tomorrow morning I’m going in for a breakfast meeting at the Sierra Club, a meeting with the political director of the national Sierra Club. Politics makes my soul hum, too.  Though I can’t say exactly why, water issues matter a lot to me, so I’m angling (ha, ha) to get on the committees that deal with Lake Superior, rivers, lakes and streams.  Watersheds seem very important to me, so I hope to work on projects related to watersheds, too.  One thing I know about politics is that showing up matters, so I’m gonna show up.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Writing 📎and tagged