Nov 9, 2016
Mr Drumpf,
It is Wednesday morning, post-election Tuesday, and I am scared. Very scared. Deeply frightened for my country, community, my family and myself. For the last year and a half I have watched you shamble across the landscape, bellowing your fears and racial epithets, and listening to the roar of the answering crowds. My heart darkened, but never my belief that justice and truth would win out, that enough of my fellow citizens would unite to throw back the nativist racism you represented. And, now, on this sunny morning in the Pacific Northwest, I am finding that my worst fears are realized.
It all started with your candidacy, the escalator descent into a crowd of paid extras, to the tune of martial music. Some of the very first words out of your mouth were words of racial hatred and fear, and then you promised to build a wall. A wall. Which is not only a ludicrous notion, but flies in the face of centuries of the American tradition of welcoming immigrants from all over the world. Roundly criticized you doubled-down and moved on to recommending a religious test for immigrants, which again, spits in the face of honored American tradition. What you offered for political discourse was ugly, bullying bombast, without a shred of rational discourse; your usual stump speech was a mash of made up words, nonsensical sloganeering, and the blatant hustling of your fucking brand. In other words, what we got, from you, was the shrill huckstering of a carny barker.
But it seemed it wouldn't last. Surely in the primaries you would get bumped off by a more disciplined, more "reasonable", and articulate candidate. And so it went, and got worse by the day.You were absolutely correct when you bragged that you could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and your supporters wouldn’t care.During the course of your campaign you pretty much insulted just about every political and social constituency there is. The disabled, women, veterans (which includes me), people of color, LGBTQ folks, and even your own core, white constituency. Your performances during the primary televised debates were a travesty, an embarrassment and wretched preview of what was to come, as you lied about your record, your opponents records, interrupting anyone who spoke against you while lobbing insults at your opponents and the debate moderators. You proceeded to break every single rule of political decorum, with such arrogance it was astonishing. No, this does not make you some kind of political maverick, bucking against the Washington establishment and elites, it makes you a boor. And how could we take you seriously as a candidate when its terribly obvious you have zero respect for anyone, and certainly not our political process. Your rallies were open hate-fests as you dog-whistled racism, when you weren't openly speaking hate speech. You whipped up your followers, openly encouraging them to bring violence and physically attack those who spoke out against you. You seemed to be saying "Lets bring back an America where African-Americans, Gays&Lesbians, and women know their place", while trumpeting an appropriately vague slogan, "Make America Great Again", that could be taken to mean just about anything, but what you really seemed to be saying, and what your followers heard, "Lets make America Jim Crow land again; let's make America dangerous for Gays and Lesbians again; lets make America the land of 2nd class citizenship for anyone not white, male, heterosexual AGAIN".
So the only public good you offered was sending that milk-sop wet-brained weasel Ted Cruz screaming and crying into the weeds, waving his arms and sobbing like the petulant child he is. Its no wonder he is the most reviled member of Congress, per a straw vote of his peers, but I digress. However I am serious, that really is the only public good you have done this entire election season. Usually election seasons not only consist of rallies to whip up the base, robocalling and endless television ads, speechifying and sloganeering. Its all that and its position papers. Its all that and meetings with policy advisers to hammer out strategic foreign policy positions and then announce those positions in order to spark a civil discourse with the populace, to foster a debate on the great and important issues of our time. None of which you did. Absolutely nothing. Because you have nothing of import to offer, apparently. Given ample opportunity to discuss, substantively discuss, say....global climate change, or our position regarding the Middle East, or our trade policies in the Pacific Rim, what we got is that global climate change is a Chinese hoax, or that our trade policies are all bad, or....nothing. So, to sum up this point, you offer nothing of useful debate, instead filling our civil discourse with, again, insults, twitter tirades, braggadocio, and hot air. Why? Because apparently you cannot be bothered to pay attention long enough to listen and absorb the issues.
And dont get me started on your convention. Or would you rather have it referred to as your "coronation". Certainly you exhibited all the hallmarks of the demagogue and dictator, as you piled on the hate of your opponent and any other scapegoat that came to mind, such as "terrorists" or "immigrants"; really any bogeyman you could hang hate and fear on. So it became not so much a political convention as a shitshow of non-stop xenophobia, religious bigotry, negativism, nativism, sexism, and outright racial hatred. Which, sadly enough, became your template for the debates, where you continued your disgusting trend of bullying, outright lying, obfuscating, deflecting, and projecting your own worst sins onto your opponent. Better that than actually be truthful and honest, because as we all know by now, if you were to actually tell the truth, the honest truth, there would be no way you would have been able to squeeze out enough votes to win you the Electoral College.
You attacked a Gold Star family. You attacked a former beauty queen. You were caught, on tape, admitting to being a sexual predator, and then dismissed it as simple "locker room talk". Way to go sir, we are now in a age where sexual assault can be dismissed, by the president-elect, as boys behaving like boys. I am sure your daughters and women across the land can sleep soundly knowing that you have their best interests in your heart.
And so now it has come to this sorry and pathetic state of affairs. We have, as president-elect, a proven liar, a bald-faced hypocrite, a venal huckster too lazy to study up on the issues, a megalomaniac with an outsized ego, who will have access to the nuclear codes, while missing the empathy, intelligence and the patience needed to match these awesome responsibilities. And people are scared. Folks across this country, your fellow citizens, are frightened of what the future will hold for them, as already we are seeing reports from all over with gay bashing, attacks on minorities, women, and anyone looking different from what is perceived as the norm. And we all remember your promises to lock up your opponent, and we all remember that you keep enemies lists in your head. So know this, sir, and keep it close: if you come for immigrants, you come for me; if you come for the gays and lesbians, you come for me; if you take away the rights of women around healthcare and abortion, you also take away my rights, and I hate having my rights taken away. As you stand for everything that this country is not, I stand against you.
As I finish this up, its now Friday evening, November 11. Veterans Day. As a US Navy vet myself, I proudly served to protect the liberties and rights enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. You promise to do away with much, if not all of it. So, today, I am proudly standing with the majority of the electorate who voted against you. So when you are looking for someone to add to your enemies list, please add me. Nothing would make me prouder.
Daniel Johnson
Seattle WA
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Stuff I read
Nov 18
All apologies to Nick Hornby.....
I read some terribly interesting stuff. Mostly fiction and poetry, with a healthy smattering of histories (political, economic) and other non-fiction thrown in. But, yes, mostly fiction. And I love it. I am constantly smitten with book titles when I walk into bookstores, having spent many a happy hour curled up with a book or mag, in libraries, coffee shops and at home.
For instance, I can roll my chair over to the bookshelves (hells yes its plural) and open books by Murakami, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Paton and Annie Proulx, just to take a few M's thru P's.
So what am I reading lately?
"Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, published 1929.
Thus the extravagantly baroque tale of a Southern American family, spanning two generations. Its main beginning is with the birth of the protagonist Eugene Gant, and thus far, as I am still reading it, goes up to his seventeenth year. Its very much of a examination of the internal life and emotional struggle of Eugene, "He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught because he had no words to work with". This situation becomes magnified as he grows older as he comes to grip with the weight of familial expectations and the bald fact that his own family does not possess the language to express their own feelings, "We do not want to call things by their names, although we are willing to call each other bad ones".
And what a family. The father who shortens the family name from Gaunt to Gant, who is Elizabethan in his drunken speech, works as a carver and seller of grave stones; the mother is almost mute in her expressions of love and support, opens a boarding house much to the eternal shame of her children; the eldest a dissolute drunk, the second son a stutterer who's real genius is emotional deflection, the eldest daughter who, when not enabling her father's drunken sprees, is blaming her mother for every conceivable sin, and so on and so on.
Surrounding all this internal tension is the external world, which beats with its own rhythm and heart. Nature surrounds and suffuses Eugene, and the pressure of its beauty sometimes drives Eugene mad,with the madness every boy goes thru. Its also in the description of the natural world that gives rise to some of Wolfe's best language, the lovely soaring cadences of praise of the world around us. "The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.....The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this wonder". As is mine, when I read this. Wolfe's especial genius is getting us into Eugene's head, day by day, season by season, as the babe turns boy turns teen turns man. As he experiences the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, alongside the unexpected joys and blessings that make existence worth living.
However, be forewarned. This is not a casual book. It demands of the reader one's full attention, along with easy access to a dictionary. It carries a rhythm that has long since vanished from American letters, so it can be heavy lifting until one gets the hang of its very particular and peculiar jargon. It really wasnt until about page 120 that I felt I was in it for good, and this is my second time around with this book. And I can only read a few pages at a time, 10-20 or so, before I have to put it down, and think about what I have been reading, as this is very deep stuff. Its also taken me a few months to read; I started this time this last July, but I am in absolutely no rush, as reading this is akin to eating rich, dark, chocolate: small bites here and there go a long ways. But I had to come back, transfixed as I was by sentences like this: "Eugene was now loose in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself so that later the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of green apples; or as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright, windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of earth thaw, the feel of the fire."
Nov 29
'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' by Jose Saramago, published 1984, opens with a description of Lisbon, Portugal, as a grey anonymous city deluged by a constant rain. We are on a ocean liner tying up to the docks, and like a steady-cam film shot, showing first a crowd and then slowly zooming closer, we are not introduced to the titular character until he has disembarked and is going thru customs. The rain continues as a backdrop, suffusing the story with a liquid melancholy, until the reading of the narrative has taken on a watery quality of its own: it surrounds, seeps, moves to its own rhythms and threatens to drown. "When Ricardo Reis awakens, the room is plunged in darkness, the last glimmer dispersed on the windowpanes, in the mesh of the curtains. An enclosing heavy drape blocks one of the windows. There is not a sound to be heard in the hotel, now transformed into the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where Beauty has withdrawn or never was." Surely, for it is 1936, neighboring Spain is about to be plunged into bloody civil war and all Europe stands on the precipice of holocaust.
What little we know of our protagonist is that he is back after a self-imposed Brazilian exile, 16 years long, he is a doctor, but doesnt seem to have any intention on setting up his practice and receiving patients. Instead he spends his time walking the chimerical streets of Lisbon, at times remarking on the historical events that occurred at various spots, "Doctor Ricard Reis reads.....near the place where a man was hanged, as everyone knows, almost two hundred and twenty-three years ago....They hanged a Genoese swindler who for the sake of a single piece of cloth killed one of our countrymen, stabbing him in the throat with a knife, then doing the same to the dead man's mistress, who died on the spot."
I am always struck by these works of overwhelming creativity. What is the deep well the authors draw from? What is their muse? As I am writing this I have a picture up on another monitor, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the Veil Nebula, which is the remnant of a supernova. Even though the picture is a closeup of one arm of the nebula, the structure pictured spans lightyears; blown out in the supernova rupture, the structure has formed a tight spiral of gas and dust, colored by NASA to enhance our understanding....and yet, there is no understanding. Yes, we can run spectrum analysis on the gases and minutely define what gases are there and why, and what was the chemical composition of the star before it blew itself apart, and what was its age. But, yet, there is something that is still beyond our understanding. The picture is stunningly lovely, a diaphanous gauze of swirling yellow, gold, red, pink and blue, on a black background speckled with stars. And I understand completely the forces that went into this...creation....and yet there is still the mystery, of not just why, but the sheer size and scope defies my best intent to wrap my conscience around it; its too big, too beautiful, and too far away.
Dec 8
Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist writer, has a story of a halved-knight. "The Cloven Viscount" was published 1959, and is purportedly the story of Merdardo, a Viscount who was bisected cleanly in half by a cannonball during battle with the Turks. One half of the former whole Viscount manages to make it home to his castle where he embarks on a life of lavish evil, terrorizing the countryside and its denizens with his capricious acts of cleaving the living into two. "A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there", said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks...As they went on the servants met half a frog, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went".
And because this is Calvino, events such as the above are given the weight of truth. Yes, its a complete work of imaginative fiction, rather macabre in tone, with tongue firmly planted into cheek. So what I mean by these unrealistic events given the weight of truth, is that it strikes me that of the time that Calvino is writing about, late 18th century Italy, there were still published, and verbal stories circulating, that described the most fantastic of events, as being real; that the civilian populace was for the most part very isolated, with little knowledge of the outside world, the "fact" that a man could be cut in two by a cannon-ball and live, is taken as accepted, albeit unusual by the other inhabitants of the story.
But its also a essay on the inherent duality of human existence. "That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all around us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it." These words are spoken by Merdado's good half, aka "The Good 'Un". That's correct, the other half of the cloven Viscount has returned home also, although having spent his time doing good deeds along the way. The Good 'Un is as focused on doing good as the bad half is intent on doing evil. While the Bad 'Un spends his days dreaming up ever more elaborate methods of torture and death, the Good 'Un is working to not only heal the lepers but save their souls. "And he was forever among them, moralizing away, putting his nose into their affairs, being scandalized and preaching. The lepers could not endure him...But it was not only among the lepers that admiration for the Good 'Un was decreasing. "Lucky that cannonball only split him in two", everyone was saying. "If it had been done in three who knows what'd we have to put up with!" Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman".
All apologies to Nick Hornby.....
I read some terribly interesting stuff. Mostly fiction and poetry, with a healthy smattering of histories (political, economic) and other non-fiction thrown in. But, yes, mostly fiction. And I love it. I am constantly smitten with book titles when I walk into bookstores, having spent many a happy hour curled up with a book or mag, in libraries, coffee shops and at home.
For instance, I can roll my chair over to the bookshelves (hells yes its plural) and open books by Murakami, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Paton and Annie Proulx, just to take a few M's thru P's.
So what am I reading lately?
"Look Homeward, Angel" by Thomas Wolfe, published 1929.
Thus the extravagantly baroque tale of a Southern American family, spanning two generations. Its main beginning is with the birth of the protagonist Eugene Gant, and thus far, as I am still reading it, goes up to his seventeenth year. Its very much of a examination of the internal life and emotional struggle of Eugene, "He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught because he had no words to work with". This situation becomes magnified as he grows older as he comes to grip with the weight of familial expectations and the bald fact that his own family does not possess the language to express their own feelings, "We do not want to call things by their names, although we are willing to call each other bad ones".
And what a family. The father who shortens the family name from Gaunt to Gant, who is Elizabethan in his drunken speech, works as a carver and seller of grave stones; the mother is almost mute in her expressions of love and support, opens a boarding house much to the eternal shame of her children; the eldest a dissolute drunk, the second son a stutterer who's real genius is emotional deflection, the eldest daughter who, when not enabling her father's drunken sprees, is blaming her mother for every conceivable sin, and so on and so on.
Surrounding all this internal tension is the external world, which beats with its own rhythm and heart. Nature surrounds and suffuses Eugene, and the pressure of its beauty sometimes drives Eugene mad,with the madness every boy goes thru. Its also in the description of the natural world that gives rise to some of Wolfe's best language, the lovely soaring cadences of praise of the world around us. "The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water all over the land. A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.....The boy grew blind with love and desire: the cup of his heart was glutted with all this wonder". As is mine, when I read this. Wolfe's especial genius is getting us into Eugene's head, day by day, season by season, as the babe turns boy turns teen turns man. As he experiences the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, alongside the unexpected joys and blessings that make existence worth living.
However, be forewarned. This is not a casual book. It demands of the reader one's full attention, along with easy access to a dictionary. It carries a rhythm that has long since vanished from American letters, so it can be heavy lifting until one gets the hang of its very particular and peculiar jargon. It really wasnt until about page 120 that I felt I was in it for good, and this is my second time around with this book. And I can only read a few pages at a time, 10-20 or so, before I have to put it down, and think about what I have been reading, as this is very deep stuff. Its also taken me a few months to read; I started this time this last July, but I am in absolutely no rush, as reading this is akin to eating rich, dark, chocolate: small bites here and there go a long ways. But I had to come back, transfixed as I was by sentences like this: "Eugene was now loose in the limitless meadows of sensation: his sensory equipment was so complete that at the moment of perception of a single thing, the whole background of color, warmth, odor, sound, taste established itself so that later the breath of hot dandelion brought back the grass-warm banks of Spring, a day, a place, the rustling of young leaves, or the page of a book, the thin exotic smell of tangerine, the wintry bite of green apples; or as with Gulliver's Travels, a bright, windy day in March, the spurting moments of warmth, the drip and reek of earth thaw, the feel of the fire."
Nov 29
'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' by Jose Saramago, published 1984, opens with a description of Lisbon, Portugal, as a grey anonymous city deluged by a constant rain. We are on a ocean liner tying up to the docks, and like a steady-cam film shot, showing first a crowd and then slowly zooming closer, we are not introduced to the titular character until he has disembarked and is going thru customs. The rain continues as a backdrop, suffusing the story with a liquid melancholy, until the reading of the narrative has taken on a watery quality of its own: it surrounds, seeps, moves to its own rhythms and threatens to drown. "When Ricardo Reis awakens, the room is plunged in darkness, the last glimmer dispersed on the windowpanes, in the mesh of the curtains. An enclosing heavy drape blocks one of the windows. There is not a sound to be heard in the hotel, now transformed into the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, where Beauty has withdrawn or never was." Surely, for it is 1936, neighboring Spain is about to be plunged into bloody civil war and all Europe stands on the precipice of holocaust.
What little we know of our protagonist is that he is back after a self-imposed Brazilian exile, 16 years long, he is a doctor, but doesnt seem to have any intention on setting up his practice and receiving patients. Instead he spends his time walking the chimerical streets of Lisbon, at times remarking on the historical events that occurred at various spots, "Doctor Ricard Reis reads.....near the place where a man was hanged, as everyone knows, almost two hundred and twenty-three years ago....They hanged a Genoese swindler who for the sake of a single piece of cloth killed one of our countrymen, stabbing him in the throat with a knife, then doing the same to the dead man's mistress, who died on the spot."
I am always struck by these works of overwhelming creativity. What is the deep well the authors draw from? What is their muse? As I am writing this I have a picture up on another monitor, a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the Veil Nebula, which is the remnant of a supernova. Even though the picture is a closeup of one arm of the nebula, the structure pictured spans lightyears; blown out in the supernova rupture, the structure has formed a tight spiral of gas and dust, colored by NASA to enhance our understanding....and yet, there is no understanding. Yes, we can run spectrum analysis on the gases and minutely define what gases are there and why, and what was the chemical composition of the star before it blew itself apart, and what was its age. But, yet, there is something that is still beyond our understanding. The picture is stunningly lovely, a diaphanous gauze of swirling yellow, gold, red, pink and blue, on a black background speckled with stars. And I understand completely the forces that went into this...creation....and yet there is still the mystery, of not just why, but the sheer size and scope defies my best intent to wrap my conscience around it; its too big, too beautiful, and too far away.
Dec 8
Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist writer, has a story of a halved-knight. "The Cloven Viscount" was published 1959, and is purportedly the story of Merdardo, a Viscount who was bisected cleanly in half by a cannonball during battle with the Turks. One half of the former whole Viscount manages to make it home to his castle where he embarks on a life of lavish evil, terrorizing the countryside and its denizens with his capricious acts of cleaving the living into two. "A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there", said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks...As they went on the servants met half a frog, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went".
And because this is Calvino, events such as the above are given the weight of truth. Yes, its a complete work of imaginative fiction, rather macabre in tone, with tongue firmly planted into cheek. So what I mean by these unrealistic events given the weight of truth, is that it strikes me that of the time that Calvino is writing about, late 18th century Italy, there were still published, and verbal stories circulating, that described the most fantastic of events, as being real; that the civilian populace was for the most part very isolated, with little knowledge of the outside world, the "fact" that a man could be cut in two by a cannon-ball and live, is taken as accepted, albeit unusual by the other inhabitants of the story.
But its also a essay on the inherent duality of human existence. "That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all around us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it." These words are spoken by Merdado's good half, aka "The Good 'Un". That's correct, the other half of the cloven Viscount has returned home also, although having spent his time doing good deeds along the way. The Good 'Un is as focused on doing good as the bad half is intent on doing evil. While the Bad 'Un spends his days dreaming up ever more elaborate methods of torture and death, the Good 'Un is working to not only heal the lepers but save their souls. "And he was forever among them, moralizing away, putting his nose into their affairs, being scandalized and preaching. The lepers could not endure him...But it was not only among the lepers that admiration for the Good 'Un was decreasing. "Lucky that cannonball only split him in two", everyone was saying. "If it had been done in three who knows what'd we have to put up with!" Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman".
Friday, November 4, 2016
I have always been a evening person. There is something about the eventime that puts me in a more relaxed, yet lively mood. All the heat and monsters of the day have disappeared. When I was young my days could be populated by bullies, and running and dodging them was hot, sweaty work; but when the sun goes down they cannot get to me. People slowed down in the evening, due to having completed their work for the day, the adults relax and are easier to approach, especially if after a couple of cocktails. Everyone older than me always seemed cooler, more interesting, smarter, prettier, when the sun was going down, the shadows lengthen due to the sun lowering towards the horizon, the colors deepen. The green of the lawns darkens and softens, the blue on lakes and oceans turns from robin's egg to cyan. The heat of the day cools down to a softer ambiance, making riding my bike less of an exercise in sweltering heat than a cooling bath in softer, cleaner air. Radios would be heard from car and house windows, playing the Top 40 hits, or the blessed harmonious voice of Vin Scully broadcasting a Dodgers game.
With the shrinking of daylight comes the attendant darkening and lengthening of the human spirit; secrets that could not be whispered in the bright light of noon will be bandied between mouth and ear, I know of what I speak. Group games, consisting of neighborhood kids would last on, after a rushed dinner, until our mothers would come yelling for us to come inside, take a dreaded bath and then be confined to our beds until the process begins again with the rising sun. Many was the time when I would beg and plead to stay up later because, "Its still light out!", only to be denied again due to my age ("I cannot wait until I am old enough to stay up until 9!").
As I got older and was able to stay up later, past the bright demarcation of 9pm, I would take long bike rides and walks, thru the neighborhoods, as the evening's gold and reds would fade into dark blues and black. I would often make my route go past the house of a girl that I was in love with, on the very off-chance that she would be out in the yard; in such a way we would have some kind of accidental encounter wherein she would discover my inherent heroism and goodness and then fall in love with me, and we would live out our days in loved bliss. At least that's what played out in my imagination; reality was never so accommodating, as these chance encounters never happened in a way that satisfied my un-named and misunderstood longings. I also liked to look at the different houses and wonder what kind of life was being lived behind the closed doors and windows; were they happy, sad, in love, in rage? As much as I wanted to be the fly on all of their walls, I never took steps to spy, as that was a line that I could never cross, as afraid as I was of not only being caught, but the consequences of being apprehended loomed so large in my mind as to crowd out any desire for mischief.
I always wanted to be walking with my love, in scented gardens, under cool tall trees by babbling streams, glinting bright in the evening sun, smiling at her, her smiling back. That it only happened once was a source of embarrassment and disappointment, as much as I wondered how to make it happen I could never hit upon the magic formula for success.
Now that I am so much older that those days, with rivers of time having passed between me then, and me now, I remember those days with gold-tinged nostalgia, for the bright innocence of youth and a smile for the amount of pure fun I had. I still very much enjoy the evenings, but now as an adult I get to spend them in many ways denied to me as a youth, specifically relaxing over cocktails on the veranda of a dockside restaurant, crunching thru the snowy woods in my snowshoes, or even, taking simple walks and listening to the wind sighing thru the trees. Evening is still my favorite time of the day.
With the shrinking of daylight comes the attendant darkening and lengthening of the human spirit; secrets that could not be whispered in the bright light of noon will be bandied between mouth and ear, I know of what I speak. Group games, consisting of neighborhood kids would last on, after a rushed dinner, until our mothers would come yelling for us to come inside, take a dreaded bath and then be confined to our beds until the process begins again with the rising sun. Many was the time when I would beg and plead to stay up later because, "Its still light out!", only to be denied again due to my age ("I cannot wait until I am old enough to stay up until 9!").
As I got older and was able to stay up later, past the bright demarcation of 9pm, I would take long bike rides and walks, thru the neighborhoods, as the evening's gold and reds would fade into dark blues and black. I would often make my route go past the house of a girl that I was in love with, on the very off-chance that she would be out in the yard; in such a way we would have some kind of accidental encounter wherein she would discover my inherent heroism and goodness and then fall in love with me, and we would live out our days in loved bliss. At least that's what played out in my imagination; reality was never so accommodating, as these chance encounters never happened in a way that satisfied my un-named and misunderstood longings. I also liked to look at the different houses and wonder what kind of life was being lived behind the closed doors and windows; were they happy, sad, in love, in rage? As much as I wanted to be the fly on all of their walls, I never took steps to spy, as that was a line that I could never cross, as afraid as I was of not only being caught, but the consequences of being apprehended loomed so large in my mind as to crowd out any desire for mischief.
I always wanted to be walking with my love, in scented gardens, under cool tall trees by babbling streams, glinting bright in the evening sun, smiling at her, her smiling back. That it only happened once was a source of embarrassment and disappointment, as much as I wondered how to make it happen I could never hit upon the magic formula for success.
Now that I am so much older that those days, with rivers of time having passed between me then, and me now, I remember those days with gold-tinged nostalgia, for the bright innocence of youth and a smile for the amount of pure fun I had. I still very much enjoy the evenings, but now as an adult I get to spend them in many ways denied to me as a youth, specifically relaxing over cocktails on the veranda of a dockside restaurant, crunching thru the snowy woods in my snowshoes, or even, taking simple walks and listening to the wind sighing thru the trees. Evening is still my favorite time of the day.
7 Nights 8 Days in Mexico
(A post I never finished, or published.)
I just got back, last Sunday night, from a week in Mexico. Specifically Cabo San Lucas, on the very southern tip of Baja California. I have always found Mexico to be such a interesting, deeply fascinating, and beautiful place, and I have seen so little. I've traveled extensively thru Baja and have been to Cancun, a couple of border towns in Texas, but little elsewhere. Still, enough to get something of the flavor of the place. And as this was my first trip to Baja I was looking forward, as I always do, to seeing as much of the place as possible, learn about the culture and the history.
After a 4 hour direct flight from Seattle, Baby and I touched down in Cabo International airport, a flight that was thankfully drama free, as was the short journey thru Mexican customs. Its always a blessing when you can say your flight was uneventful; not only that SeaTac has finally wised up and does not require travelers to remove shoes for the body scans, a practice that was both counterproductive and stupid. Anyways, that all behind us, we landed in a cool afternoon of scattered clouds, warm temps and a cool breeze. A drive from the airport took us thru the desert countryside, which consists of saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, sagebrush, and scrub plants; its a desert, but a lovely one, especially coupled with the view of the local mountain range, hovering close by, all rocky and pointed peaks. The road brought us to the coast at San Jose del Cabo, a tourist town of modern hotels and shops much damaged by last September's hurricane; we noticed that the McDonalds was still gutted, one of the very few businesses that hasnt been rebuilt or started on a rebuild; there is a God and He does watch over Mexico.
Now the reason for this trip was the opportunity to repeat a trip taken by my family, without me, last year at this time, to the same resort. My family, all living in Sonoma County CA, with the exception of my brother in Brooklyn, are fans of the SF Giants (a story of such horrible apostasy and heresy that it will have to wait for another time, needless to say, Go Dodgers), and are friends with a local radio sports commentator Marty Lurie. Every year Marty likes to come to this resort, this time of the year, relax in the sun for a week and chat baseball with invited friends. So this was my year to join.
We arrived at our resort as the sun was setting, on a warm and lovely day. The resort, La Estancia, is fairly nondescript, low-key establishment that was still exclusive and built for the well-to-do, but still managed to pull off a understated, albeit immaculate, ambiance. There is a small army of staff attending to guests needs, the grounds are very well-kept, the suites are well appointed and do not have a anonymous cookie-cutter feel to them, the way too many hotel rooms do. It was a sublime pleasure to be able to walk on stone floors barefoot, and the thick adobe walls help keep the temperatures down. We had a package deal that included all meals (free booze!), so we were free to eat at any time the restaurants were open, the food was delicious, overall and my favorite cocktail was a Mezcal/watermelon juice concoction that I drank frequently and liberally. It would be a ridiculous understatement to say that staying in this resort was relaxing, lovely, and dreamlike, as its hard not to fall under a spell when you fall asleep and wake to the sound of the surf, when a half-mile away from your balcony is the rock arches that mark where the Sea of Cortes meets the Pacific Ocean.
That being said, to truly travel (in my book anyway) one has to deliberately step out of one's comfort zone and get to know your surroundings. For me this could mean walking thru the night market in Kowloon (1983), river kayaking the Rogue in Oregon (1998), biking thru the Irish countryside (2006), hitchhiking across the US (1990), wintercamping on the Gunflint Trail, upstate Minnesota (1993 and '94), and dancing along the banks of the Seine in Paris, under the moonlight (2013). All of which I have done, deliberately so, to create memories and experiences. My point being is that real travel begins when we step off the established tourist trails and push the boundaries. With this in mind Baby and I made a concentrated effort to absorb as much of the local flavor and fauna as possible. Wednesday was spent snorkeling and kayaking off a local beach cove, surrounded on two sides by rocky cliffs. The water was clear and warm, I had forgotten the simple and sublime pleasure of floating in the water, face down, mask below the waterline, watching schools of tropical fish swim around and below, nibbling my fingers in search of food. After a short break Baby and I kayaked out to the mouth of the cove and floated in the tide, with a clear view of the shoreline for miles in either direction. After making it back to shore the guide offered to take me on a short snorkel, to which I readily accepted. Paddling slowly towards some rocks, he turned in the water, ahead of me about 10 yards and started shouting words at me, words I was never able to make clear because at that exact instance I was stung on the arm and lips by a jellyfish. Imagine being punched and stabbed by knitting needles in the arm and you get some idea as to what it feels like. Despite having never been stung by jellyfish before, known locally as "badwater", I knew immediately what it was, yelled, tore my mask off and immediately swam towards shore. On the inside of my left forearm was three blue dots surrounded by angry red skin, my guide, also stung, suggested urinating on the bites, and if we had the beach to ourselves I would have immediately agreed, as urinating on poison bites is a known way of immediate treatment. The pain was shocking, there was no position of holding my arm that was comfortable and I was having radiating pain up my arm all the way into my chest. Once back at the hotel I was able to gain relief from a bag of ice and a piece of aloe vera, which grows everywhere in the region. Fortunately my lips were lightly stung and that pain quickly went away. To this day I still have healing skin on my arm from the sting, and this will not stop me from snorkeling in the future.
The next day Thursday we wanted to take a local bus to the town of Todos Santos, about 90 miles away up the Pacific coast. Unfortunately that day was also the start of the national holiday to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary so local buses were not running on normal schedule. We rented a van and piled my family, sans mother, brought a friend from the baseball group and drove up to Todos Santos. The countryside, again scrub desert all the way down to the sandy beaches, stretched open for miles to the mountains. We arrived in Todos Santos about noon and spent the next few hours shopping in the local shops. Its a much more quiet scene than Cabo San Lucas, yes there are tourist spots, including the Hotel California (billed as The hotel made famous by the Eagles), but overall it was much more relaxed, which suited me just fine. Arriving back in Cabo gave us time to relax, bathe, have a lovely dinner, watch the sun go down and then about 8pm Baby and I drove back into Cabo San Lucas to the local cathedral for the celebration of the birth of the Virgin. Arriving at the cathedral we encountered a very large crowd in a relaxed and celebratory mood. Hundreds were filling the pews of the church to receive blessings and give their thanks, hundreds more were outside watching dancers in native costumes, enjoying the street vendor food, watching the trapeze artists in native costume, and buying up religious icons. We seemed to be the only gringos in attendance and it was just about the most fun I had all week.
I just got back, last Sunday night, from a week in Mexico. Specifically Cabo San Lucas, on the very southern tip of Baja California. I have always found Mexico to be such a interesting, deeply fascinating, and beautiful place, and I have seen so little. I've traveled extensively thru Baja and have been to Cancun, a couple of border towns in Texas, but little elsewhere. Still, enough to get something of the flavor of the place. And as this was my first trip to Baja I was looking forward, as I always do, to seeing as much of the place as possible, learn about the culture and the history.
After a 4 hour direct flight from Seattle, Baby and I touched down in Cabo International airport, a flight that was thankfully drama free, as was the short journey thru Mexican customs. Its always a blessing when you can say your flight was uneventful; not only that SeaTac has finally wised up and does not require travelers to remove shoes for the body scans, a practice that was both counterproductive and stupid. Anyways, that all behind us, we landed in a cool afternoon of scattered clouds, warm temps and a cool breeze. A drive from the airport took us thru the desert countryside, which consists of saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, sagebrush, and scrub plants; its a desert, but a lovely one, especially coupled with the view of the local mountain range, hovering close by, all rocky and pointed peaks. The road brought us to the coast at San Jose del Cabo, a tourist town of modern hotels and shops much damaged by last September's hurricane; we noticed that the McDonalds was still gutted, one of the very few businesses that hasnt been rebuilt or started on a rebuild; there is a God and He does watch over Mexico.
Now the reason for this trip was the opportunity to repeat a trip taken by my family, without me, last year at this time, to the same resort. My family, all living in Sonoma County CA, with the exception of my brother in Brooklyn, are fans of the SF Giants (a story of such horrible apostasy and heresy that it will have to wait for another time, needless to say, Go Dodgers), and are friends with a local radio sports commentator Marty Lurie. Every year Marty likes to come to this resort, this time of the year, relax in the sun for a week and chat baseball with invited friends. So this was my year to join.
We arrived at our resort as the sun was setting, on a warm and lovely day. The resort, La Estancia, is fairly nondescript, low-key establishment that was still exclusive and built for the well-to-do, but still managed to pull off a understated, albeit immaculate, ambiance. There is a small army of staff attending to guests needs, the grounds are very well-kept, the suites are well appointed and do not have a anonymous cookie-cutter feel to them, the way too many hotel rooms do. It was a sublime pleasure to be able to walk on stone floors barefoot, and the thick adobe walls help keep the temperatures down. We had a package deal that included all meals (free booze!), so we were free to eat at any time the restaurants were open, the food was delicious, overall and my favorite cocktail was a Mezcal/watermelon juice concoction that I drank frequently and liberally. It would be a ridiculous understatement to say that staying in this resort was relaxing, lovely, and dreamlike, as its hard not to fall under a spell when you fall asleep and wake to the sound of the surf, when a half-mile away from your balcony is the rock arches that mark where the Sea of Cortes meets the Pacific Ocean.
That being said, to truly travel (in my book anyway) one has to deliberately step out of one's comfort zone and get to know your surroundings. For me this could mean walking thru the night market in Kowloon (1983), river kayaking the Rogue in Oregon (1998), biking thru the Irish countryside (2006), hitchhiking across the US (1990), wintercamping on the Gunflint Trail, upstate Minnesota (1993 and '94), and dancing along the banks of the Seine in Paris, under the moonlight (2013). All of which I have done, deliberately so, to create memories and experiences. My point being is that real travel begins when we step off the established tourist trails and push the boundaries. With this in mind Baby and I made a concentrated effort to absorb as much of the local flavor and fauna as possible. Wednesday was spent snorkeling and kayaking off a local beach cove, surrounded on two sides by rocky cliffs. The water was clear and warm, I had forgotten the simple and sublime pleasure of floating in the water, face down, mask below the waterline, watching schools of tropical fish swim around and below, nibbling my fingers in search of food. After a short break Baby and I kayaked out to the mouth of the cove and floated in the tide, with a clear view of the shoreline for miles in either direction. After making it back to shore the guide offered to take me on a short snorkel, to which I readily accepted. Paddling slowly towards some rocks, he turned in the water, ahead of me about 10 yards and started shouting words at me, words I was never able to make clear because at that exact instance I was stung on the arm and lips by a jellyfish. Imagine being punched and stabbed by knitting needles in the arm and you get some idea as to what it feels like. Despite having never been stung by jellyfish before, known locally as "badwater", I knew immediately what it was, yelled, tore my mask off and immediately swam towards shore. On the inside of my left forearm was three blue dots surrounded by angry red skin, my guide, also stung, suggested urinating on the bites, and if we had the beach to ourselves I would have immediately agreed, as urinating on poison bites is a known way of immediate treatment. The pain was shocking, there was no position of holding my arm that was comfortable and I was having radiating pain up my arm all the way into my chest. Once back at the hotel I was able to gain relief from a bag of ice and a piece of aloe vera, which grows everywhere in the region. Fortunately my lips were lightly stung and that pain quickly went away. To this day I still have healing skin on my arm from the sting, and this will not stop me from snorkeling in the future.
The next day Thursday we wanted to take a local bus to the town of Todos Santos, about 90 miles away up the Pacific coast. Unfortunately that day was also the start of the national holiday to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary so local buses were not running on normal schedule. We rented a van and piled my family, sans mother, brought a friend from the baseball group and drove up to Todos Santos. The countryside, again scrub desert all the way down to the sandy beaches, stretched open for miles to the mountains. We arrived in Todos Santos about noon and spent the next few hours shopping in the local shops. Its a much more quiet scene than Cabo San Lucas, yes there are tourist spots, including the Hotel California (billed as The hotel made famous by the Eagles), but overall it was much more relaxed, which suited me just fine. Arriving back in Cabo gave us time to relax, bathe, have a lovely dinner, watch the sun go down and then about 8pm Baby and I drove back into Cabo San Lucas to the local cathedral for the celebration of the birth of the Virgin. Arriving at the cathedral we encountered a very large crowd in a relaxed and celebratory mood. Hundreds were filling the pews of the church to receive blessings and give their thanks, hundreds more were outside watching dancers in native costumes, enjoying the street vendor food, watching the trapeze artists in native costume, and buying up religious icons. We seemed to be the only gringos in attendance and it was just about the most fun I had all week.
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