k1ypp

I was going to write something in honor of Veterans Day, but then my friend, Ed Tubbs, a Vietnam War veteran, out in Palm Springs, California said it better than I ever could...

A bit more than a week ago an elderly woman made the quip to me, “I’d rather fight them over there than here.” She was referring to the there-is-no-good-answer to the question President Obama is stewing over: whether to accede to General McChrystal’s request for an additional 40,000 - 80,000 additional ground forces for the war in Afghanistan.

Of course, on just about every level humanly imaginable, the woman was acutely, unforgivably ignorant. Her mindless quip, even when it was first issued back in 2002, when the combat theater under consideration was Iraq, was a horribly thin, horribly stale cliché. Not to mention it was part of the parcels of lies the Bush administration and its unthinking neocon PNAC (Project for a New American century) schmucks promulgated to sell the shameful misadventure to a tragically gullible country.

The remark was also despicably thoughtless because not only could “she” never be a part of the “we” whom we are blithely shoving into the physical and mental sausage making machine, when “she” was younger and had the chance to be one of those women (the field hospital nurses and Red Cross doughnut dolly volunteers who visited the combat units), she had “other priorities.”

Here I am not criticizing her failure to volunteer in her youth, rather I’m condemning a thought process that so merrily today trips over the stench and toxin filled Southeast Asian moat without even pausing to ponder what once was in that oozing moat. Could have taken an up-close-and-personal peek, but didn’t. And doesn’t even today give the first pause to ponder the subsurface ghastly, slime-covered creepy-crawlies that inhabit her words.

But . . .. Those in a moment.

In “Eye Opener: A focus on homeless vets,” of this Tuesday’s Washington Post, feature writer Ed O’Keefe raised another, one that is such a perfect reflection of a condition the government under Bush, and with the all too willing desires of this nation’s citizens, is damning. One third of all homeless men are veterans. O’Keefe writes, “One hundred thirty-one THOUSAND veterans may be homeless on any given night!” (Exclamation point mine) http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/11/eye_opener_a_focus_on_homeless.html?wprss=federal-eye

Everyone has seen them, the homeless vets. Across America, they’re in parking lots and at freeway on-ramps. Unwashed and unshaven and in soiled jeans and jackets, and with empty eyes that stare unfocused into the sunlight, they hold signs made from corrugated cardboard that say “Hungry.” Because they are!

I’ve seen the soccer moms in their late-model SUVs turn away. I’ve seen the whitest of white senior citizens swerve their shiny Cadillacs into the farthest lane from them. I’ve heard the disdain-filled comments deriding them. As if they — the veterans, the unwashed and homeless — should have at least a level of pride that would prevent them from discomforting those of us who are comfortable. “I don’t care — You would never catch me begging like that” is the tenor of the cast derision.

Yeah . . . you’re too good. Right?

Well, tell you what: I don’t see it quite that way. The way I see it, they’re so much a better person than all who scorn them. Those who look away remind me of the worthless, cowardly town folk in High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, or the middle-age couple in Hombre, starring Paul Newman; the upright citizens, the finer citizens who felt and feel that by some yet to be discovered right they are somehow entitled to being protected, to being rescued . . . by someone else. They could not and cannot picture themselves getting down in the dirt. That wouldn’t be who they were. So let me help out a bit.

What follows is “the moment” I promised five paragraphs earlier. And it matters not at all whether the soldier or marine was a draftee or a volunteer.

Basic training or boot camp was designed to peel away as much of the recruit’s civility and individuality as possible. He — and now she — must be able to kill another human being. It’s not a clean exercise. None of this John Wayne stuff. A round from a military weapon is not surgical. It’s messy. Take a 45-round to the hand or arm, or hit a human target with one, and the hand or the arm is rendered to a gristly rendition of stringy hamburger. A fifty caliber round leaves nothing but a tattered recollection of what had been there. Grenades are worse. Heads get blown completely away, as do guts. Guts splatter over everyone in the vicinity. And they’re smelly things. They stink of what they once contained. Same thing, mortar rounds. And I understand the IEDs that today’s Iraq and Afghanistan boots are facing are every bit as ugly.

Neither basic training nor boot camp changes the physical and psychological impact of witnessing, or being a victim of, any one of those experiences. Every moment of every day, that horrible mutilated soldier or marine, the one with the eyeball hanging from its socket, or the trail of bowel that got heaped atop his open belly . . . could have been you. And you know that, in your gut, as no one else who was there can.

Nor can basic training nor boot camp inure you from the horrors you inflicted on another human being, even if it was unintended. If it was unintended — that old lady who was inside the hooch, or the little girl, lying lifelessly in her mother’s arms . . . the mother looking up into your eyes, pleading with you to answer the “how” and the “why” questions that no one can answer — and you are especially bent and warped. Forever.

And it’s hour after hour, after day after day, after month after month, and time loses all meaning. It is its own macabre Clockwork Orange parallel universe.

Sleep becomes a bogeyman you hide from. There are dreams, and none of them sweet. None offer rest or respite. The whiter than white flashing glare. The eardrum splitting roar, and the terrified screams of agony. The harder you close your eyes the brighter the glare. Cover your ears with your hands and the roar and the screams get trapped inside you. Jim Beam is the only hope of solace. Like Jack Daniels and José Cuervo. And grass and weed and horse and white pills and red pills and whatever it will take to get out of today and into tomorrow . . . or never having to go back. But you do go back. You have to. Except it’s not you. It’s the “other” you that goes. And at last you come to the realization — or you don’t — that the person who once was you — that smiling confident kid, just out of high school with so many hopes and sweet dreams, is at long last dead; in fact, from all you can tell, he (or she) never even existed. Whomever he was is gone: it’s a hollow caricature of that once youthful man or woman who is now homeless on the streets of America.

And I cannot begin to say how much it sickens me to hear anyone say, “My taxes are high enough.” Because, so long as there is even one veteran, now lost to him- or herself and to the ages, your taxes will never be “high enough.” You can never, and will never be able to pay that debt you owe. Never. Because you can never put Humpty and all his pieces back together again. All that is possible now is to treat him or her with the respect to which he or she is due, and to try to see to it that the streets never become home. You owe it. We all owe it.

And it’s going to get more expensive. The report cited by the Department of Veterans Affairs states that, whereas the Vietnam vet “spent five to ten years trying to readjust to society before becoming homeless, Iraq and Afghanistan vets may end up homeless within 18 months.”

You want to “fight them over there” as opposed to “here”? Then you go. Know this, however, if you do: “You” will never, ever return. Someone with your name may make it back. But “you” won’t. Until that day — be very grateful you can try to pay a part of the tab . . . and respectfully shut the hell up!

— Ed Tubbs
Palm Springs

Something has bothered me for some time now. Has anyone bothered to inform the airline and aircraft industry in general that fossil fuels are coming to an end? The estimates of just how much petroleum is left in this earth can vary some, but even the optimists figure there is maybe 60-70 years of the stuff left in the earth. The pessimists see maybe 20-30 years before it’s “bottoms-up.”

The aircraft industry just keeps cruising along as if the stuff will never run out. The planes keep either getting bigger and thirstier (passenger/transport aircraft) or faster and less efficient (fighters and long-range bomber aircraft).

I’ve never been involved with the engineering side of the industry, but just a cursory look at what is going on makes no sense at all. U.S. oil production peaked in 1973-1974 and world production peaked just a few years ago. What this means, in simple terms, is that no matter how hard we try, how much we “explore,” and how much we drill for oil, there is a finite amount down there and it will become more and more difficult to recover it.

Think of a milkshake. When that drink is full and you start sipping it almost doesn’t matter how quickly or slowly you drink, the liquid is there to be enjoyed and it is so satisfying (if you enjoy such things). When it gets to about half-full you shake the container around a bit and things get back to normal, the enjoyment is still there, but you’re becoming conscience that the fun isn’t going to continue forever, but it is still really good.

As the drink gets down below a quarter-full it becomes a somber activity. Should you continue gulping, or maybe it is now time to slow down and savor what’s left? Regret starts to settle in; maybe you should have shared some with the kids, maybe if you’d gone slower in the beginning there’d be more left to enjoy now?

This is the situation with petroleum. We gulped, we enjoyed, we couldn’t help ourselves; this stuff was never going to run out! Our “container” isn’t empty yet, but we’re at the point where we had better face reality or pretty soon that container will be empty.

Now we’re looking to drill off the shore of Florida, in the Arctic Refuge and way out in the deep Gulf where very specialized drilling techniques are required to get down to the stuff that is thousands of feet below the water and then many thousands of feet below the earth from there. Why all this desperation to go after oil in places that we never did before? Two reasons: the first is “greed,” translated as “profit.” The second is because the stuff is no longer “easy” to get. You don’t see anybody “exploring” in Pennsylvania for oil any longer, there isn’t any new stuff to be found and all the old stuff is emptied out. The western oil fields are not too far behind. We don’t get 60% of our petroleum from our enemies in the Middle East because we like them, we get it because it is easy to get, and the profit is still there.

Nobody in their right mind would go looking for oil miles down at the ocean floor if they could just sink a hole in their backyard. I often hear the mantra, “more exploration” for oil. Explore where? “Exploration,” has become a codeword for drilling where previous drilling just didn’t make sense, or was outright foolish. The Sarah Palin “Drill baby, drill,” was no idle campaign slogan; it was meant to mean drilling anywhere and everywhere.

This planet is a finite size; we’ve run out of places to explore. All we can do now is “fine tune” the exploration and go to places where we suspect there is oil and using either very high-tech methods to go after it, or change our political policies to allow us to drill in places that are foolish, such as right next to pristine beaches. That is all that is left, there is no “Oil Atlantis” hidden out there somewhere.

Which brings me back to aircraft. There are currently even larger and faster planes on the drawing boards that will use even more petroleum products in even larger quantities. This is madness. This industry should be looking at the near future and at what they should be building. Extremely high-speed rail, which is little more than aircraft on tracks, is FAR more efficient and not that much slower than air travel. Aircraft that uses far less fuel and takes advantage of air streams might have some possibilities. Research into efficient ocean going transport might make much more sense than flying.

Aircraft will be with us forever, but the sheer numbers of aircraft will dramatically decrease. Using five or ten thousand gallons of fuel to take a flight will very soon become a thing of the past. It will become impossible to justify that inefficiency.

Stop and think about it: Every aircraft in our skies today uses fossil fuel, none that I know of get up there without it. Rockets and missiles, relatives of airplanes are in a similar fix, they use products that are mostly petroleum based as well. Certainly, future aircraft can use fuels based on bio-products, such as alcohol and ethanol, but that production currently depends on petroleum as well, it can be created by other means, but not in the quantities used by the aircraft industry. Future military aircraft may continue to use fuels based on alcohol for example, but it will be astronomically expensive and not available for general transportation use. What will be available? I suspect there will be nothing, there is certainly nothing on the immediate horizon and it appears, nothing even on the distant horizon.

I don’t know what the answers are, but I can guarantee that it is not larger and faster airplanes.

Am I a Feminist?

Recently Jane had me and a few other men on her radio show on WSLR-LPFM, 96.5 here in Sarasota, Florida. The theme of the show was “MEN AND FEMINISM.” I consider myself a feminist. Prior to the show I checked the definition and it simply says: “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” I guess this means, even though I am a man, I can be a feminist. Interestingly, there are even a few male feminist blogs showing up, so I guess I’m not alone.

The radio show turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. The first half of the show evolves around women’s news and music and the second half of the show works with the featured guests for the evening. Jane introduced us, asked one or two questions and then basically sat back and let us talk about feminism on our terms.

The other two men on the show were Dave Helgager, a Sarasota resident, and Steve Schwartz. Steve called in from the Orlando area. Jane invited Steve because he has been very involved in the National Organization for Women here in Florida.

Jane’s first question to me was why I was involved in feminism and I started by using the above definition and then went on to elaborate on the Equal Rights Amendment, (ERA) and how popular belief is that it is now part of our Constitution—it is not. The ERA is quite simple, it says: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It says nothing about gay rights, marriage, men and women using the same bathrooms and so on. It is not written to be deceitful, it is written just as stated. There are two other clauses that go along with it that go along with any amendment that concern implementation dates and that Congress must enforce it.

The ERA passed through Congress and in 1973 and was sent to the states to be ratified. 35 States have ratified it and only three more are needed. It has languished for years now in a legislative limbo. States like Florida introduce it every year at the start of their legislative sessions and then it fades away as, supposedly, more important issues take precedence. It’s obviously become a game to keep it from ever being ratified. Why? Simply put, there are men out there that are either afraid of women, or just have a superiority complex and do not want to see women have the same rights as men.

Our Constitution does not guarantee rights between the sexes as written. It was written at a time that I believe they just didn’t think of it. Women were considered second-class citizens, as were Native Americans and people of color. Eventually, following the Civil War the color issue was addressed with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (at least Constitutionally) but women were left behind. Then finally in 1919 the Women’s Suffrage Amendment, the 19th, passed and women had the right to vote. Many argue that we don’t need an ERA because the 14th Amendment addressed that, if that were true, the 19th would never have been needed.

Why am I a feminist, why not some other cause? It’s feminism because there are so many important women in my life, my mom, my wife, my daughter are a few examples. It’s an area where I think maybe I can make a difference.

I’m an active member of NOW because I see NOW as the primary vehicle for moving women’s rights forward. One of the women’s movement’s problems is that the movement is too fractured, there are all sorts of groups fighting the good fight, but they’re un-united and not working together to further their cause.

I believe that any movement, to be successful, needs allies. Black people couldn’t have made the progress they have without white allies in the civil rights movement. I think Native Americans would have been totally wiped out if some of the invaders didn’t necessarily buy into the “Manifest Destiny” doctrine. Women’s suffrage would have never come about if there had not been sufficient men supporting it, even if begrudgingly; men were a minority, but had all the power. Child labor would still exist in this country if adults had not stepped forward as advocates for those children.

I want for the women in my life to have what I have. I go through life, as a male, totally uninhibited. I can be whatever I want to be, go where I want and am pretty much accepted everywhere for who I am. I grew up with newspapers with job listings separate for men and women, women couldn’t fill significant military positions, women couldn’t own property in many situations, women had to have their husband’s or father’s permission to have a bank account and the list goes on.

My wife, daughter and other female relatives deserve better and when they do better, I do better. There are some subtle things that can even make my life better if women’s lives are better.

For example, I’m retired. My wife still works, our lives depend on her earnings and healthcare coverage. My personal life is better if her income improves. Since women make, on average, 78 cents on the dollar, my life is directly affected by women’s wages. Also, since women make less than men over their lives, when my wife retires our combined income will be smaller than it should be, so that affects our overall retirement income, which affects me as a man.

Take the health care squawking of late. Much of it has to do with complaining about funding of abortion. Abortion, in my mind, is a woman’s health issue. I don’t expect women to decide my reproductive rights, whether I should have a vasectomy or not and I can’t expect them to have me make decisions about what goes on inside their bodies. Ultimately, it’s like the bumper sticker says, “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” The reality is, abortion is being used as a weapon to defeat nationwide healthcare for all, a women’s issue is being used to affect a much broader issue.

I digress. The show was rich with other ideas and stories. Dave told an interesting story about his experiences in West Virginia and how his early feminist views formed. Steve explained that his feminist values were an offshoot of the Civil Rights Movement. Have a listen to just the interview portion of the show archive when you have a chance at:

Women Matters Archive of show

My readers may not agree with all that I have put forth here, but that is the beauty of this media, you can leave comments, and please do. Honest dialog is healthy and ultimately can lead to solid conclusions. If there is interest in this, I can write more again some other time, if not, I’ll put it to rest.

A Violinist in the Metro

I gave the following as a Toastmasters speech at a recent meeting. It is based on a true story that has been circulating the Internet now for a couple of years:

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that several thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle-aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3-year-old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. Several other children repeated this action. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The question is: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing some of the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

This example can carry over into everything we do. There was a popular Television commercial a few years back. The setting was an airport terminal. The citizen population was going about its business, awaiting arriving planes, awaiting departures and in general occupying their time. Off camera we here someone starting to slowly clap; then we hear a second, then a third and soon the entire terminal is applauding. The camera pans around and we see a bunch of US soldiers arriving from their flight. They are men, women, black, white, Asian, a true cross section of this country. The message is clear; we appreciate them and the commitment they’ve made.

Fast-forward a few years: some of those soldiers are now jobless, homeless and maybe even suffering the ravages of a drug problem. Are we now applauding them, are they no longer the heroes they were? Would we pass them, have we passed them sleeping on a park bench? I’m not looking for answers here; I’m merely trying to open your eyes and mind to the world around you.

Perception is everything, or is it?

Recently, when I went into our credit union, I spied a pamphlet that proffered the question: “What are you saving for?” “That’s a good question,” I thought. The question was asked as part of an essay contest they were having. I started giving some serious thought to the question since I believe that one thing that can keep a person young is to always have something to look forward to and that something for me is going somewhere or doing something. I’m not too partial to expensive toys, i.e.; boats, planes or expensive cars, so saving for something like that, at least for me, is a waste of time.

Since, for the last few years, I have been running a deficit, I’m not certain “saving” is even applicable; “squandering” might be more appropriate. In any case it can’t hurt to dream and here is what I could be saving for.

Jane recently wrote in her livejournal.com blog about how she wonders if her life’s direction needs to change. I wonder if all of us over fifty go through this? Will her trajectory influence mine, will it intersect, will they parallel, or will something else happen? Only time can tell.

My life has been a series of adventures, some planned and well executed, others, the result of mitigating circumstances. More often than not, the spontaneous events have proved far more interesting and enjoyable.

I recall one vacation to Disney World that we carefully crafted and planned. Jane worked a second job for an extended period, just to raise the funds, and the trip was a disaster! The flight to Florida should have taken three hours and ended up taking twenty-four hours, the rental car wasn’t available when we arrived and Disney had lost our reservations. It was the vacation from hell. The good news is: Disney more than compensated us for our difficulty and did everything in their power to make the rest of the vacation enjoyable.

In contrast, as most of my readers already know, I set off to hike the Appalachian Trail in May of 2007. I planned very little and just enjoyed the walk through the Appalachian Mountains, meeting people, observing wildlife up-close and keeping no particular schedule. In Virginia, after 650 miles of walking, I realized I was having heart problems, so I went home and had a six-artery heart bypass surgery and recovered. In May of 2008, after 300 days off the trail, I continued on from where I left off and enjoyed my second chance at living a full life. It was sheer bliss.

So, what am I saving for now? How about a coast-to-coast bicycle ride, from Oregon to New Hampshire? Five days after our daughter, Áine, graduated from high school in New Hampshire, she flew out to Oregon and rode her bicycle back to New Hampshire. She had the adventure of a lifetime and inspired both of her parents. Now, following in our daughter’s footsteps we’re looking forward to the day that we might do likewise.

There is so much more to see from the seat of a bicycle. The smells, the sounds, the very air one rides through immerses the rider in the experience. The isolation and speed of an automobile completely eradicates the connection with the world that is passing by; it is viewed, as if on some big-screened television, but not experienced.

If we save carefully and keep ourselves in good shape, we should be able to accomplish this. There will be no tight schedule, no plan to be in any specific place by any specific date, the only plan is to go out and experience this great country a few miles at a time. The only constraint would be nature, we need to finish before winter arrives, and even that isn’t a real constraint, if we don’t finish in one summer, then, maybe we’ll do it in two.

This is definitely what I’m saving for.

The road I grew up on, Stone Road was appropriately named, there were stones everywhere. The soil was fertile, but difficult to work because of all the stones and rocks everywhere. Many years later, when I visited Ireland, I felt very much at home, it was also rocky and hilly.

The road itself was paved a few years after we moved there, but it was one of those meandering, narrow, country roads with very little traffic. Of course it meandered because the road found its way around all the really large boulders and rocks, rather than cut through them.

The traffic on the road was such that we kids could usually identify which neighbor was coming up or down the road by the sound of the engine in their vehicle. Of course in those years, the vehicles were much more unique than today, what with many more body styles, engine configurations and usually by the time the vehicle was five years old it was starting to rust out, so the exhaust system would announce the arrival of the vehicle well in advance of it’s physical presence.

Our house was a few hundred feet beyond the top of a steep hill. Stone Road started down in the center of the village, as we used to refer to it. The village was merely a collection of a few old farms, intermingled with some post-war homes that cropped up like an invasive species. The newer homes were usually based on some post-war ranch style construction, whereas the farm homes usually had two or three stories, barns, outbuildings and fields and fences running off in odd directions from the home. Central Connecticut is hilly and rocky, so the fences tended to follow the natural confluence of the geography, and that geography, more often than not, dictated the farm boundaries.

Following the war, with the baby boom in full swing, many were anxious to move out from the cities into the suburbs. The automobile made this possible. Where a few short years before workers were forced to live near their factories in the city, they were now able to get an automobile and escape. My village, Whigville was just such a refuge. It was part of the Burlington Township, but was physically and logically more closely associated with Bristol, Connecticut.

Our house on the hill was small, even by the standards of the day (1950). It was actually more of a shed with several rooms. The kitchen measured 8’x10’, as did the master bedroom. The other room was a smallish, 8’x 8’, which I shared with my brother. Over the years my parents built a living room with scrap wood my father collected from work and brought home a few boards at a time in our old cars of the day. They then added a very narrow “back hall” as we used to call it, it was about five feet wide and maybe ten feet long.

The house had a front porch that eventually my Dad closed in and made into another odd shaped room. In the late sixties they had saved enough to have another small room and a garage added onto the house.

Ultimately, none of these rooms were standard size and the house was a virtual maze of rooms, with steps up and down to the various rooms. The house is still there today, I can’t imagine that anyone would have kept it, I would have knocked it down and started over.

The yard around the house in some ways matched the layout of the house. Mowing the lawn was a challenge. The yard had many levels because of all the rocks. For years all we had was one of those manual push-mowers, the ones with the blades that turned like a barrel rolling along. Adding to the difficulty of pushing the mower was all the rocks and stones that poked their ugly heads up just enough to catch the mower and force the operator to detour around them and come back and clear away the grass around the rock in a second operation.

One of my obligations as the oldest son was to help my father with the heavy yard chores. Oddly, one of these chores I really grew to enjoy. Stone Road, as noted earlier, was loaded with stones and rocks. At around twelve years old I found that I relished the challenge of removing rocks from the ground. I’m not talking about rocks that I could pick up and walk away with, I’m talking about monsters that would sometimes take as much as a month to work out of the ground and move to our property line as a stone wall.

The usual method for extracting them was to dig around the rock to get some idea of the size of the opponent. Next, I would “test” it for an edge or something that I could get a grab on with the end of a steel pipe or pry bar. The pipe would server as a lever; I’d usually prop it on another stone to give a pivot point. Once the target rock would show some sign of “wiggle” when pried I would try to get the rock up enough so I could stuff rocks or pipes or something under it to keep it raised. Once it relinquished its hold on the earth and I had moved it, even an inch or less I was confident that I would eventually win the contest.

Some of the rocks were memorable. I recall one that I pulled out of the ground that as large as a good-sized piano. I’m certain it weighed well over a ton or maybe even two, and it took me many, many weeks to get it out and moved. I was so proud of that effort. There was something so gratifying about the work; I guess it was because the end result was so tangible.

It was primitive, simple work, but I loved it and to this day I look back on it with a real sense of accomplishment. In some small way, somewhere on Stone Road, in Whigville, CT there’s a collection of rocks that represents my personal version of building the Pyramids. Now you know I really am crazy.

I like skunks. I’ve never had one as a pet, but I’ve had enough encounters to have a sincere appreciation for them. Funny, all this talk of politics lately has had me thinking about skunks, I wonder why that is?

My very earliest recollection of skunks goes back to somewhere around the third grade. We lived in a very rural home in Connecticut, the kind of place that you couldn’t really see the neighbor’s lights at night because the woods were too thick. Besides, there were not that many neighbors to begin with.

We had no neighbors at all across the road and only a few scattered sparingly up the road, before it turned into a dirt road through a local state forest. The forest around us abounded with wildlife and as a child that spent much of my time outdoors, I had all sorts of encounters. Above all, it seemed the skunk was the most encountered of the denizens of the woods.

Skunks would be the first to show up from their long winter naps, usually before the snow was seriously melted. I’ve never researched it, but I suspect they’re not sound sleepers and go out for a walk whenever the weather turns somewhat mild during the long, dark, winter.

My first really memorable encounter with a skunk was under just such conditions. One of my neighborhood friends was making money trapping muskrats. In those days, Sears and Roebuck paid for animal hides for clothing manufacture. This seemed easy money to me, so I rounded up a few traps and wanted to set them out. I was perhaps ten at the time and had no clue how to do this, so I enlisted my Dad’s help. Begrudgingly, he agreed to help me out with the project; he wasn’t in favor of trapping animals, but he didn’t want to stifle my entrepreneurial instincts either.

Late one afternoon after school, when he arrived home from work, we traipsed off into the woods behind our house and set out a few traps along a small brook that was there. I went home confident of the fortunes I was going to make, this was going to be like going out and picking up money, what could be easier?

He never admitted it, but I think my Dad went out later that evening and sprung the traps with a stick so nobody would step in them. I was under orders not to go check the traps until my Dad arrived home from work the next day; the suspense was killing me! He had to work overtime and didn’t get home until after dark. Darkness comes early in Connecticut in late winter.

It was snowing lightly when we grabbed our flashlights and headed out to check the trap line. Our old dog, Beauty, went with us. She always welcomed any opportunity to wander the woods with us. We clambered over the boulders and rocks and made our way down to the trap line. As we rounded the side of a large outcropping of granite and approached the first trap, Beauty growled and then lunged. In the darkness I couldn’t really make out what was happening but before either of us realized it, Beauty tangled with a large skunk that was right next to my trap. The trap had a stick in it and there was no danger to either animal, but the ensuing spray-fest totally covered all of us, and I do mean covered.

My eyes stung like nothing I had ever experienced. The smell was absolutely overpowering. After some time, when I was finally able to open my eyes enough to see, I could see Beauty rubbing her face in the snow and my Dad working to get his eyes to the point where he could see clearly enough so we could find our way home. The terrain there had huge rock outcroppings and it would have been very easy to fall a considerable distance in some places.

My visions of profits evaporated, I’d been skunked. With eyes stinging, and bodies stinking to the high heavens we made our way home through the darkness and falling snow. Arriving at the backside of our house my Dad opened the door and before he had even stepped inside, my Mom let out with a few Irish expletives that made it clear that we weren’t coming into her house until the smell was vanquished.

She tossed out soap, towels, ammonia, bleach and a host of other cleaning ingredients and told us to shower in the back yard. Evidentially, she didn’t want the bathroom to stink. My Dad and I stripped down and washed for a very long time in the cold water from our backyard hose. The cold water, cold air and snow had us near freezing before we were allowed entry. Of course, we had to wash the dog, Beauty, as well.

There were many other, more reasonable skunk encounters over the years. In fact, as Beauty aged, she became much more amenable to the skunks and eventually we would feed her and an old skunk would come out of the woods and eat with her.

My Mom was a nurse and she helped a neighbor that was dying of lung cancer. She walked to the neighbor’s home several times a day and near the end her visits were around midnight and again around 3 AM. A skunk took to following my Mom every time she walked down the road and followed her back home on the return trip. One night a man in a passing pickup truck slowed to inform my mother she had a skunk following her, she just shrugged and told him it was her pet. He shook his head and drove off.

My mother made braided rugs. She kept all the materials in the cellar. The cellar was poorly lit. Late in the autumn she went into the cellar to cut up material for more rugs. She grabbed an old coat in the pile of rags and proceeded to pull the fur collar off. She pulled and pulled, to no avail, the collar wouldn’t tear away, then, much to her amazement, the collar moved; it was a skunk. The skunk was quite groggy; it was then my Mom realized the poor thing had crawled into our cellar to hibernate. Mom ran up the stairs and then started throwing pans down the stairs to make as much noise as possible. Eventually, tiring of the noise, the animal left the cellar.

In the late seventies a friend was very ill. He called to ask me to come over and help him. It seems he had a homemade “live trap” and had a skunk caught in it. He was too sick to release the animal and was uncertain as to just how that was to be accomplished. I studied the situation and then found an old piece of carpet and slowly, ever so slowly, approached the trap, holding the rug in front of me as a shield. Eventually, it seemed a lifetime, I made it to the trap and gradually slid the gate open and the miffed skunk strolled out, looked at me with that “you’re late” look and then roamed off. This time I didn’t need a shower.

On another occasion a few years ago, I was in our backyard in New Hampshire doing some stargazing. I have these huge 20 x 80 binoculars; they must weigh about 8 pounds. They’re great for my amateur astronomy, but so heavy that I usually put them on a camera tripod. I put a beach chair directly beneath the tripod and then slip into it and look up through the binoculars. It works well, but getting into and out of the contraption is unwieldy.

It was a beautiful, cool, autumn night and our cat kept bothering me for attention. She would rub against the tripod, shaking things so I couldn’t see a thing. I would pet her for a while to distract her from the tripod, and then she would walk off and leave me alone for a while so I could check the heavens.

It was about 2 AM. The cat came back so I reached down to stroke her back and it felt like she had gotten into something. Her hair was course and felt “dirty.” She just didn’t feel right, so finally I looked down and froze. It wasn’t the cat, it was a skunk and it seemed to be enjoying the back scratch immensely. In my awkward sitting position I couldn’t just get up and run away. I didn’t know what to do: keep stroking or just stop and see if it would go away.

After a few moments it looked up at me as if to say, “Hey, why ya’ stopping, that was great?” Eventually, it tired of waiting and waddled off. I started breathing again.

I haven’t had a skunk encounter since arriving in Florida and hopefully I haven’t voted for any. If you have any interesting skunk stories, I’d love to hear them.

I had a kingdom and I had an idea. My plan was to borrow a whole bunch of money and just give it away. Of course there were some rules. First of all, I couldn’t just give it to anybody; they might just run off and waste it on things like food, or health care or some other nonsense. It only logical that I would have to give the money to the nobility.

So I borrowed a load of money and made a bunch of nobles really happy, who wouldn’t be? Eventually, I knew somebody would have to get around to paying it back (even though I pretended I didn’t know) but I wasn’t going to worry about that. As they say, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” I knew the nobles that I gave the money to wouldn’t really give it back, and since they’re good friends, I really didn’t want them to. Assuming I could make up the rules as I went along (and I could, I was the King), here is what I planned to do. I’d raise the tithe on the serfs; there are so many of them that it wouldn’t be too difficult. They’re used to pain anyway and as long as I could keep them scared and distracted the plan should have worked.

The money from all the serfs was to be used to pay back the loan. The serfs don’t understand money (why should they, they don’t have that much of it) and they’re not really in any position to do much about these financial manipulations. This was a plan for a real transfer of wealth.

I was really proud of my plan; its simplicity was simultaneously exquisite and yet complicated. It was a case of the nobles getting richer and the serfs getting poorer and both factions would blame the other, but it didn’t really matter, the nobles held all the marbles, all the serfs could do was complain. The poor would ultimately fund the rich. All that was needed was some time and the serfs would forget where the money went.

Unfortunately, like so often happens, the unforeseen happened. The serfs overthrew me and sent me packing. I guess they were upset because I didn’t watch out for any of their interests, just my friends, but hey, what are friends for? I guess the serfs were really upset; I had raided the royal coffers and emptied them. On top of that, for some unexplained reason, the kingdom’s entire economy went south as well.

Of course, like any king, I had my wars. War is good, it distracts from issues close to home and helps keep funds flowing to my friends. My wars were funded with borrowed money, the serfs will have to pay for that too, plus the serfs are the ones that make up the “grunts” that served in my army.

Now the serfs are upset because there’s not much money left and they just don’t know what to do. With the sour economy they don’t have enough work to keep them busy and I guess that means finding food and ways to stay healthy are of concern, particularly the health thing.

The current king has a dilemma. Some number of the serfs have a bee in their bonnet (a bee that the ever-smart nobles planted there). They believe in voodoo and magic and you can tell them almost anything and they’ll believe it; I ought to know. The nobility have a pretty tight grip on all the funding for the serf health care and now the current king is trying to mess that up. Fortunately, voodoo and magic has worked wonders on those serfs that have no clue; they’re all riled up and making such a ruckus that hardly anyone is paying attention to the real issue, the health care, they’re too worked up about the voodoo and magic about the insurance. Who says history doesn’t repeat itself.
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I don’t want to turn this into a political blog, but some issues just go begging for attention, and the current health care debate is one of them. By now I suspect you can see that I’m not too in favor of all these protesters screaming about changing the way we get health care in this country. There is way too much screaming and way too little substance. First of all, the debate isn’t about health care, it is about funding for health care, which means insurance companies, not doctors, not hospitals and not medical procedures. I repeat: it is about insurance companies.

I have no love for insurance companies. I don’t have the time to sit down and figure it out, but I would guess that over my working lifetime I have paid insurance companies as much as a half-million dollars if you factor in what my employers paid in on my behalf plus what I’ve paid in, plus the interest on that money had I just put it in the bank. I also suspect that they have probably paid maybe half of that back in covering all the injuries, illnesses and heart surgery I have had over the years; that still leaves a pretty good profit margin.

Hopefully, this time around, rational people that can see what a disaster the present system is will prevail. I know too many people that have absolutely no health care insurance whatsoever, and a good number of them have jobs. I can’t understand why the employers of this country are not screaming at the top of their lungs for health insurance for everyone; then they could get out from under that burden entirely. It would put them on an even playing field with the rest of the world. We, as a nation, are trying to compete with countries that DO have national health care and DO take care of their citizens. We have this crazy hodge-podge network of insurance, some insurance, some insurance under certain circumstances, no insurance and so on. This is not a plan folks, this is not acting as a community, this is acting under the “every man for himself” philosophy and I thought we were better than that.

Certainly the economy is in dire straits, it probably hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression. The only reason we dug our way out of the Great Depression was massive government spending and oversight. The market and private enterprise un-tethered is what got us into the Great Depression, not the government.

I love this country and one of the reasons I love it is because it does have a government “Of the People, By the People” and it may not always get it right, but our government does bend to the will of the people over time. It isn’t perfect and every now and then we get a “king” that usurps more power than the founders originally intended, but we the people usually wrest that power back, as we should; now is the time to do that again. Over the last thirty years we’ve become complacent, we cannot continue to ignore this issue.

Today there are those on the right that argue we shouldn’t do anything, that everything is fine, but they are the nobles living in their castle, they have lots of wealth and are not aware that the castle walls are crumbling and if we don’t do something, and soon, the roof will come crashing down. Now is the time to fix this thing once and for all, or we shall soon find ourselves all drowning in the moat together.

41 Years ago today I lost my brother. I was off doing my military duty in Germany. We were getting ready to do a deployment, I don’t recall where, I think Greece. I was in a tactical outfit and we traveled lots and were deployed all over the world from time to time.

My brother had been in Vietnam for exactly 30 days. We had this belief that if you survived for a minimum of 30 days, your odds were better that you might finish out your whole tour. There was some truth to that theory, you gained experience and you had fewer days left in the tour, so of course your odds would be better.

We never did get a clear description from the US Marine Corp. as to what actually happened to my brother. There were conflicting stories but ultimately he died in combat up near the DMZ. It was only a short period of time before the Tet Offensive began in 1968, I suspect he was meeting up with the advancing troops gathering for the Offensive.

It may seem like a long time, 41 years; yet it seems like yesterday. He was 18 and had a long life ahead of him. It all came to end in that far-away war, a war that he never expressed much interest in. He was typical of so many young people, the old people decide where and when we have the wars and the young go off and fight them.

I really thought that our country had learned something from the Vietnam experience, sadly, we didn’t. We let the last administration march us off to the two recent wars without much thought, and in the case of Iraq, outright lies. Now another generation of young people (and not so young) are going off to die and we’re still not certain as to why.

At least with Afghanistan we were going after somebody that killed a bunch of Americans on our soil, but we soon lost sight of that goal and now I’m not so certain we know what the goal is.

Sorry if I ramble, but I just fail to see how we can make the same mistakes over-and-over again and not learn from them. Maybe someday, somehow, we will learn, until then I just have to live with visions of what might have been my brother’s life.

Texting. Video games. Email. YouTube. FaceBook. None of this existed thirty years ago, and certainly not when I was a kid. Right at the moment I am listening to Irish music on a web broadcast from Ireland. I read news from the Boston Globe today, even though I live in Sarasota, Florida. The woman I love spent most of her day balancing the books on our finances on a computer.

I looked at a few comics online today (from our local newspaper site, http://www.heraldtribune.com/section/FEATURES79 ). I had to see some of the ones I enjoy at that site because the paper no longer prints them to save publishing costs. Soon, I’m afraid, the paper won’t be able to print the news; there won’t be a paper. Therein lies the problem with all this technology, the efficiencies become so great it gets difficult to make a profit. Of course one can argue the reverse, that the technology creates jobs. True, it does, but ultimately the overall efficiency of technology eliminates mundane work and tasks.

Today I read in our local paper about Ruth Clark, a local woman that turned 110 years old. I can just imagine how this world must appear to her, the world is a very different place from when she was born in 1898. I repeat, I read it in the paper today. I still subscribe to a hard-copy newspaper. I know, this seems very “old fashioned” to young readers of this but might I explain why I enjoy the newspaper?

First of all, there is something enjoyable about sitting down to a newspaper, be it at breakfast, on the train, bus, or perhaps at a break time at work. I don’t have to sort through a myriad of web ads and pop-ups all vying for my attention. I can ignore the ads; no matter how large they print them, I ignore them.

Secondly, the paper is portable, needs no batteries and is very predictable. They don’t change the paper every week/month to give it a new look and move everything around so I have to go find it and learn all over again how it works because some programmer has decided to change things to justify their existence.

Thirdly, the paper pays for itself; at least for now. The Sunday edition alone has enough coupons in it to more than pay for the paper and actually saves money, even if it does take some time to cut them out.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, the stuff that ends up in print in a paper has usually had somebody look it over first and there is at least some sense of accuracy. Of course it isn’t error free and papers that have a serious ideological bent can print skewed information that can be worthless, but fortunately they are the minority.

The "right wing" is constantly complaining about the “Liberal Media” but if it were truly "liberal" then right wing news would never be in the papers. Take a look at any mainstream paper and there are plenty of news stories, editorials, op-ed pieces and letters-to-the-editor from the right. I think the “Liberal Media” tag is just that, a tag to distract from any paper that dares print anything that might lean to the left.

A good example of this is our local paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The paper has pieces by Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks and George Will, just to name a few, and they’re certainly on the right. They have two comics that are always controversial, Mallard Fillmore and Doonesbury. Every now and then there are letters from the right or left complaining about one of them, but it seems to me the paper’s doing it’s job, staying in the middle and letting the rest of us decide for ourselves.

As I’ve stated before I like to think of myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. I don’t complain about taxes, I just want to be certain that they’re not wasted and well spent. I like having good roads, schools, healthcare, veteran’s care and a good national defense. These things cost money, but let’s only buy what we need.

Anyway, I digress. The newspapers across the country are in trouble. They jumped on the bandwagon early on with the World Wide Web and started putting their material on the web for free. I think the assumption was that people would still buy a paper for the reasons I listed earlier, but sadly they didn’t consider the next generation of people that were raised sitting in front of a computer screen. Book publishers are experiencing some of the same problems. Now we have the Kindle (an electronic book) and portable devices that allow us to access all the major news sites from our pockets. To make a bad situation worse, many now get their news and information from blog sites and sites with a serious ideological lean; the news they get is often little more than opinion and rarely substantiated.

I am forever replying to emails from friends that send me things that are proclaimed to be the absolute truth (and that I should forward it on to at least ten others or my nose will fall off), but even a casual glance at the material usually proves the premise of the piece is way off to the left or right (lately most of the stuff I have been getting is so far to the right as to be ridiculous). The people that create this stuff (not the ones that forward it) need to really start taking a serious look at what they’re generating. At some point either enough of their readers will start to feel like they’re being taken for fools or the readers will just drift away; tired of the rants.

The people that forward this stuff need to start asking the right questions and shouldn’t forward anything until they do at least some basic fact checking. Two sites that seem to a decent job are http://factcheck.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/ . There are other “fact checking” sites out there, but a good number are run by organizations that have their ideological interests at heart and give erroneous information; further obscuring the truth.

Ultimately, get a newspaper, read it, absorb it and thank your lucky stars that you live in a country that has a free press, the cost of buying a paper is worth every penny you pay.

Katahdin Highest peak in Maine at around 5,270 feet. Photo taken on 11 July, 2009

Thirty-five years ago, on August 2nd, I married the most wonderful woman. Amazingly, after all these years, she still puts up with me. It has been bliss. Oh, there have been tough times, and times that tested us, but overall I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We met in one of those dark, noisy nightclubs that are so popular with singles that are looking to become couples. I wasn’t actually looking, in fact, on the night we met I really was planning on just getting drunk and drowning my sorrows. I was put off with women at the time, it had been a dry spell and I hadn’t really had anything that resembled good times with a woman companion. We all go through such spells and I was deeply into one.

This last weekend I went for a hike with a friend, Jason, but I call him “New York Minute” (NYM). That may seem an odd name, but it is a trail name, or nickname that he picked up on the Appalachian Trail. I met him hiking there and we did half of the trail together. I think he ended up with the NYM name because he used to talk very quickly, like a “New York Minute.”

NYM and I climbed Mt. Katahdin in Maine. We had climbed it once before, on October 1st last year, but the weather conditions were abominable. We couldn’t see a thing, the winds were upwards of eighty miles per hour and it was cold. We decided it would be fun to go back and see what it really looked like.

What does this have to meeting the woman of my dreams thirty-five years ago you’re wondering? Well this weekend as NYM and I started up the Knife Edge Trail on Katahdin we met up with a threesome from New Brunswick, Canada. It was a man, a dentist, and two of his assistants from his practice. Very often he takes out anyone from the office that is interested on going on an adventure hike and there are about fifteen people in the office and at various times any number of them will hit the trail with him. On this particular weekend he had two lovely young ladies hiking with him. Normally his wife goes along, but she is three months pregnant and she decided it might be best to forego something that strenuous for the time being.

What struck me about these two wonderful young ladies was how much they brought back that original encounter with my lifelong partner. They had these lilting, almost musical French accents and combined with their youth I was just adrift in a sea of memories. I remembered just how enamored I was with my lovers linguistics and how struck I was with her beauty and intelligence—I couldn’t believe she was giving me the time of day, much less attention. The best part is: I still see her that way.

I found myself drifting along on the trail lost in thought, so much so that at times I lost all track of time and would find myself startled to realize that an hour or two had passed and I hadn’t even noticed. Isn’t it funny how something can key a memory and bring back things that may not have passed through the synapses for a very long time? Where does the brain keep all this stuff anyway?

All I can say is thanks to those two wonderful young ladies for their conversation and inspiration, and their boss for bringing them along. At the end of the hike I gave them both a big hug and told them what I’m telling you now. Isn’t it fabulous how one never knows what the day will bring? I had no idea that I would be so inspired on a hike up a mountain in Maine. I’m looking forward to the next thirty-five years.

I had forgotten what it was like to bicycle up a hill! You see, I’ve been living in Florida for the last five years; Florida does not have hills. The Florida average elevation is only 100 feet above sea level. Only Delaware is lower at 60 feet. The highest point in the city of Lakewood, in the panhandle, is the highest point in the state at 345 feet above sea level, the lowest of any state’s highest point. I believe the highest non-natural point in the state is a landfill at about 375 feet.

It’s interesting traveling by bicycle. In an urban area like Sarasota, Florida, I can usually get just about anywhere in about twice the time it takes to drive it in an automobile, up to about twenty miles or so anyway. Often in the winter I can do much better than that since we have all the “snowbirds” and traffic comes to a crawl. With all the bike lanes I can really make time under those circumstances.

There is an almost total lack of hills in Sarasota. The biggest hill is the Ringling Causeway Bridge that goes out to Longboat Key, I would guess it is about 150 feet high and is a good workout pedaling over it.

The one surprise I did get when moving to Florida was the amount of headwind one encounters. In some ways it is worse than hills; it is steady and has the uncanny ability to change direction when you do, so you’re always riding into it. In many ways it can be more tiring than hills; at least with hills there is an occasional downhill for a reprieve.

Today I managed to ride around my old stomping grounds in New Hampshire. I rode from my daughter Áine’s home up to the Hampstead, NH area where we lived for 26 years. There were hills galore. A few miles out I realized my front derailleur (the front gear shifter that moves the chain to different gears) had a broken spring and it wouldn’t downshift into the lower ranges. Not long ago I had replaced the derailleur because it had a broken spring; this one didn’t last six months.

The broken spring reminds me of an earlier piece I wrote about all the junk we buy these days is made in China; proving once again that it looks nice, but it is still junk. Of course they don’t make them in this country any longer, so now we’re stuck with the junk ones. I stopped at a hardware store along the way and purchased a spring for an appliance and rigged it to work in place of the original unit. This spring was made in the USA; it will probably last for the life of the bike.

Once the shifter was repaired I was able to attack all the hills and it was a joy to do so. I’ve always loved climbing hills. It was exhilarating and after 20+ miles I was ready to call it a day. I had spent the afternoon wandering aimlessly around the area; attacking hills wherever I could find them, it was bliss.

Now if I can do a bit of hiking before I return to Florida I will have had my minimum dosage of hill climbs.

“Keep yer cottin’ pickin’ hands to yerself.” How many times did you hear that, or some variation of it, during your childhood? I was raised with the belief that I wasn’t supposed to touch anything that wasn’t mine. I remember thinking I couldn’t dry my hands when visiting friends because the towels weren’t mine and I didn’t bring one. Ultimately, I would wipe them on my pants or shirt.

Time and again I was warned that I couldn’t touch the television. In the fifties a TV essentially had two knobs, one to select the three stations that were receivable and a volume control. There were a few others that adjusted things like roll and sync, but today’s kids would have no clue about those. Mainly there was the channel knob and the volume, but kids were not supposed to touch those. Understandably, the parents didn’t want kids touching this new electronic marvel because it usually cost more than a new car and it was far more mysterious.

Usually, by the time we kids reached somewhere around the teens the adults realized we were better at tuning in the TV than they were and then we became the “remote” control. “Hey son, could you change the channel to the news?”

It was right around the time that I reached the “remote” stage in my life that I started feeling a bit liberated…I could take control of things, I could change things (even if it was just a TV channel) and sometimes nobody complained. I still wasn’t very outgoing and in school I was still lost in a sea of kids, hoping nobody would spot me. I lived in constant fear of being called upon to answer a question, or even answer “here” in roll call.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier posting, in the seventh grade I was kicked out of the Parochial School and entered the Connecticut public school system. In Burlington, CT at that time the schools were bursting at the seams with baby-boomer kids. To handle the masses the school system built an Annex to the main school. It had four classrooms, two for seventh grade and two for eighth grade.

In the seventh grade I would spend the morning in the English, Latin, and History class, and then in the afternoon we would switch classrooms for Math, Music and Science classes. This meant that each student essentially had two desks, the homeroom (morning) desk and the temporary (afternoon) desk. The homeroom desk was considered “your’ desk and you were considered a “visitor” at the afternoon desk.

Trusting soul that I was I would leave my personal treasures in my morning desk; things such as treats, favorite writing implements, comics, gum, squirt guns and other things vital to survival in the seventh grade.

As the year passed things started disappearing from my desk. Whoever was sitting at my desk in the afternoon had found it a treasure trove of massive proportions. I was starting to feel like a government agency without funding. I complained to the teachers of course, but nothing ever came of it, so, I complained to my mother.

My mother always had simple solutions to things; if something mechanical didn’t work properly she would kick or whack it, her file cabinet was a box with all the papers dropped in it and if we had a medical complaint, like a sore foot, she’d tell us to walk on the other one. When I told her someone was taking my things from my desk and nobody would do anything about it she told me to put a mousetrap in the desk. Since objects in the desk could only be reached from the seat (the top didn’t flip up) this would be perfect, the perpetrator would not be able to see the mousetrap.

Unfortunately I was always one to execute plans so that they would never fail. I figured if a mousetrap was good, then a rattrap HAD to be better! That was it, a rattrap. I found one in our cellar and brought it to school the very next day. I was full of myself, for a change, I couldn’t wait for afternoon class. This was it, I was circling for the kill, the Coup de grace.

I waited it seemed for hours. I anticipated hearing a “snap” as the trap engaged and slapped my invisible opponent across the knuckles; that would teach him (it never occurred to me that it might be a “her,” girls never did that sort of thing, did they?). After considerable time I started imagining that my plan had been foiled, surely my opponent must have stumbled upon my defensive weapons system and disarmed it and would now steal that as well; the world just wasn’t fair, but I kept thinking that it was still a pretty good idea.

BANG, YEOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!! A blood-curdling scream filled the hall between the classrooms. This was no ordinary cry of pain this was death being summoned. I could imagine the hooded scythe carrier approaching with haste and maybe too late. I sat innocently enough, after all, I didn’t do anything wrong, I merely had a rattrap in my desk, what harm could there be in that?

Shortly, after a mob-scene of teachers from all over the building descended on the hapless victims classroom, my homeroom teacher came looking for me. She asked me to come with her, and with a look of complete surprise I complied. It seems a student had been injured and there was some suspicion that I may have had something to do with it.

Poor Steve, he was a nice enough fellow. His real name is being withheld because a few years later, after getting back from Vietnam he died in a tragic house fire and it wouldn’t be fair to pick on him. I guess he had accidentally managed to slip his hand in my desk and fell victim to my weapons system. I don’t recall now, but I know he had some seriously injured fingers, perhaps broken and I know he wore bandages on his hand for some time, but oddly enough I never had anything else missing from my desk.

I don’t recall my punishment; I was so elated it didn’t really matter. Drawing and Quartering wouldn’t have changed my mind. Strangely, it was one of the few times in my life when I screwed up that my mother really didn’t get on my case about it. Secretly, I think she was proud of me. You can be certain of one thing, Steve learned what it meant to “Keep yer cottin’ pickin’ hands to yerself.”

Guns In National Parks

We need guns in National Parks. I often hear the argument that if we just had more guns in the hands of citizens we wouldn’t have as many crazy shootings. Following that logic, wouldn’t it make sense to have more cars on the American highways so we would have fewer fatalities? I don’t think so.

We are already the most heavily armed citizenry on the planet. According to my quick search on the Internet, approximately half of all the households in the US have guns. Breaking this down further there are something like 70-80 million handguns, about 130 million rifles and shotguns and over a million assault weapons. These numbers can be quite speculative since nobody knows for certain. The reality is, there are a lot of guns in this country. We know how many cars there are, how many airplanes we own, and how many times a day we flush toilets (Toilet Flush Meter) but we don’t know how many guns we have.

The good news is most people are well behaved with guns; otherwise it would be anarchy. The bad news is there are a lot of people who don’t behave with these weapons.

Anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 people die each year in the United States from gunshots. Around half of that number is from self-inflicted suicide wounds and the other half from homicides or intentional killings, such as confrontations with police. Nearly 70,000 people are injured with non-fatal wounds from shootings each year.

Something on the order of 80 people a day die from gunshot wounds in this country. I suppose one could argue that those numbers aren’t all that bad, after all, there are about 300 million people in the country. I would venture that argument is fine as long as you’re not one of the victims.

I cannot begin here to argue the why and how of most of these needless deaths, but maybe I can address the issue of what we could do to bring some sanity to all of this. If I were in a position to do so I would commission a group to assemble from all sides of the issue: The Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, The National Rifle Association, various police organizations, gun clubs; essentially anyone interested. I would lock them all in a room and supply food and water until they all hammer out a workable agreement that is satisfactory to all.

Most organizations that have a view on this issue can scream at the top of their lungs about their views, but they’re not accountable, they merely espouse ideology and fund lobbyists, instead of actually trying to solve the problem. How about actually putting them in a position to come up with a solution that actually works?

There would have to be a few ground rules of course:

1. The solution has to be realistic; not pie-in-the-sky. For example, we can’t outlaw guns; there is a good possibility that the majority of existing weapons are already unregistered, so there would be no accountability.
2. Some sort of licensing program would more than likely be the result. The program should make it easy enough for gun owners to get the license and yet have enough “teeth” in it to make the license effective. Why is there such vehement opposition to keeping records and being a registered gun owner? Why are we letting conspiracy nuts make the rules?
3. Manufacturers would have to share responsibility in the process. Producing guns that are not for hunting and sport does nothing to reduce crime. Why do they even make these weapons: profit of course.
4. Take a serious look at the second amendment to the Constitution. Most of the time it is quoted out of context. It is even etched in concrete at the NRA Headquarters out of context, the words, “A well regulated militia,” for some reason gets left out. Why is that? If the 2nd Amendment is all that they say it is, then everyone that wants a gun should be in a militia and we can send them off to fight our stupid (and not so stupid on rare occasions) wars.
5. Since it is impossible to get a handle on the guns out there I suspect any solution will have to look at ammunition supply. Like an automobile without gasoline, a gun doesn’t work well without ammunition. Like gasoline, ammunition is expendable and needs replacing; a gun lasts practically forever, not so ammunition. Maybe all new weapons manufactured should be of new calibers and over a very long time the older calibers can be phased out, except for serious hobbyists and collectors of course. I don’t have the answers, these are just ideas.

When I was a kid, people could go to Sears and Roebuck and buy dynamite. Our neighbors used it to remove stumps and dig wells. Finally somebody realized that this probably wasn’t such a good idea (dynamite, not wells and stumps) and they put a licensing process into place. The same holds for automobiles, planes and other things that can hurt lots of people, but guns get the slip on this one.

I don’t understand the fascination with these weapons. As a kid I did some hunting (and fishing) but got bored with it. I haven’t done either since my early twenties. In the military I qualified as a marksman and I suspect I could still hit the target if needed. It was fun for a while, but I never felt the need to pack heat to go to the local convenience store. I know people who won’t leave home without their weapon. Have we become that paranoid? Is this country really that dangerous? What are they afraid of; I would guess other gun owners.

I just finished walking all 2,176 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. I encountered 3 rattlesnakes and 38 bears and even in those encounters the need for a weapon never popped into my head, I just didn’t need one and chances are if I had one an animal or fellow hiker may have been injured or killed for no good reason.

I’m certain that a few of the thousands of hikers I encountered on the hike carried illegal weapons. I would venture that not many did, the weapons and ammunition are heavy and useless on a hike but there are those that just can’t leave home without them. The proof is in the numbers: nearly five million people hike some portion of the trail every year, not to mention all of the other trails in the nations parks. Violent attacks on hikers are practically non-existent; they don’t have guns to shoot each other. Will that change with the change in the law, probably not dramatically, but I can safely predict there will be more dead animals and more killings and murders than there were before. Time will tell.

In the military we would get chewed up and down if we called our M16 a “gun.” The drill instructor would jump all over us; ranting that it is not a “gun,” it is a “weapon.” It is a weapon; it ultimately serves one purpose, to kill. That is why these things came into existence and until the general public realizes that is why these weapons exist they will continue to be viewed as toys.

I take Memorial Day very seriously. I find it disgusting that it is for most a day to go shopping. My own brother was killed in action as a Marine in Vietnam; somehow I just don't make the connection between shopping and dying for ones country.

Lately there have been tributes to America’s fallen circulating on the Internet. At first blush it seems a tribute to those unfortunate troops that never came home. There are spectacular photos of the gravesites all over Europe; they’re very impressive. However, what troubles me is the text accompanying the photos, and the underlying message; that somehow, those countries, home to those grave sites, are somehow disrespectful of the USA. There is an inference that they have forgotten our sacrifice and that they “owe” us something. I would argue that they have not forgotten at all.

One of the things that always angered me about the previous (Bush) administration was the "Freedom Fries" nonsense and the disrespect for the countries that have these grave sites for our hero's. I have been to some of those sites and they honor our dead as they would their own. They showed me nothing but respect when I visited there. True, the cemeteries in these countries are managed by the US based American Battle Monument Commission, but residents of those countries handle most of the local maintenance and care.

In 1984, my father was to celebrate his 70th birthday. He was a highly decorated paratrooper in WW II, with both the 82nd and 101st Airborne. He spent a good number of the later years of his life suffering from the wounds received and from nearly freezing to death in Bastogne, Belgium. A number of months before his September birthday I took it upon myself to write to the cities of Bastogne, Belgium, Ste. Mère-Eglise (Normandy, France), Nijmegen, Holland and others to ask if they could somehow send him a birthday card.

I immediately received WAY more than I requested. I received packages from the mayors of these cities and more. They were full of medallions, personal letters of thanks, birthday wishes, photographs and all sorts of honorable documents from these places he fought. They were heartfelt, touching and honest.

Sadly, a few days before his birthday on September 28th, 1984, he passed away in the night. I think what broke my heart more than anything else was that I was keeping everything to give it to him on his birthday. He never saw any of it. If there were anything that I could relive in my life, it would be to give him all that I received.

Additionally, on his birthday I received telephone calls from many of the Mayors of these cities. It nearly killed me to hear them call to offer birthday wishes to him and then have it turn to condolences. I'm getting emotional and teary eyed now just thinking about it.

When I saw all the bashing of these places when they merely disagreed with our bogus invasion in the Middle East it destroyed me. These countries knew we had made a mistake and we flushed them down the toilet because they voiced a different opinion than the one we wanted to hear. As an American, and an ex-GI myself, I was ashamed and embarrassed. I saw these people in a very different light, they still maintain the graves of some of my relatives, in some cases better than we maintain our own, and paid the greatest honor to my father in his final days...I for one will never forget that.

I just realized that it has been a long time since I have written anything here. Since I’ve returned from the hike it seems there have been a million things to get caught up on and I’m just not caught up yet.

Much of my time lately has been consumed working on my book about the hike. I’m calling it 300 ZERO’s. It is best to take a day off every now and then when hiking long distances. Hikers refer to this as taking a “Zero Day,” since they do zero miles for the day. I had the heart surgery right in the middle of my hike and had to take 300 zero days; hence the title. I’ve finished the first pass on the book, now I am going through with a second pass and making it readable, cohesive, organized and correcting things. The first pass is just an attempt to get everything into text. The second pass is much more difficult, it requires careful reading, editing and taking out the stuff that really isn’t important.

It’s tough taking things out, everything is important in a writers mind but the publishing world just wants to see what will sell and keep the story moving. I can see their point to some degree. I recall reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.” Even though the book sold 4 million copies, in twenty-seven languages, I thought the middle of the book, for about 100 pages dragged on.

I suspect I wasn’t the only one that thought this. I read on Wikipedia that 121 publishers originally rejected it before finally getting it published; this was a Guinness Record for a bestselling book. It looks like it might be a long road to getting mine published.

You’re wondering, “What will be in the book, what’s it about?” Good question, I was hoping you’d ask. Here's the short story: I set out in May 2007 from Springer Mountain in northern Georgia and attempted to hike to Mt. Katahdin in Maine before winter arrived. Unfortunately, (or fortunately as the case may be) I walked as far as southern Virginia where I finally concluded that the chest pains I had been having almost since the beginning of the hike might be trying to tell me something. I returned to Florida for a quick check-up; figuring I would lose a week or so of time from the hike getting things sorted out and then ended up in surgery for a six-artery bypass and ended up taking 300 zero days before heading back to the trail.

I managed to get back on the Appalachian Trail in May of 2008 and now I am here in Florida finishing a book about the experience. The book is loaded with goofy moments; bear encounters, rattlesnake attacks and moments of fighting off the opposite sex. If you think you might be interested in reading about the adventure, do leave a comment at the end of this with an email address and I’ll let you know when it is available. At some point I will create a blog dedicated to the book and all it entails, but I don’t have time at the moment.

Til’ next time, take care. I promise I will try to post here more often.

Volunteers. I did an online search on the word “volunteers” and was amazed at how many do volunteer for things. To narrow the search I had to eliminate things, such as sports teams with the word “volunteer” in it. Incidentally, did you know you can a search to NOT find things? For example, in my first pass at searching most of what I found had to do with basketball teams bearing that name. To eliminate them from the search merely put a minus sign in front of basketball, like this “ –basketball “ in the text you’re searching. This tells Google or other search tools that you want it to eliminate anything that if finds with “basketball” in it. Since many of the hits also had “tickets”, I told it “–tickets” too. This negation process can really help with a search.

Anyway, I digress. I found that almost every state in the union has had groups known as “volunteers” at one time or another. Most went off to the Revolutionary War, Civil War and World War I. Today of course we have an all “volunteer” military. I volunteered during the Vietnam War, but I volunteered for selfish reasons, I liked electronics and wanted to use my talents while in the service; a volunteer often got to choose a military career field they were interested in rather leaving the choice up to the clerk in the draft office. I was certain I would get drafted sooner or later.

Today I still volunteer for all sorts of things. Most of my volunteer time goes to non-profits; organizations that I feel I can make a difference with. Sometimes I feel like I’m shoveling against the tide; the challenges can be so daunting. I plod on, hoping against hope that somehow, some way I will make a difference. If I don’t make a significant difference I hope that my influence may inspire others to make a difference.

One of my favorite activities is doing volunteer work for a local community low-power FM radio station, WSLR.org. Recently they called and asked if I could do some repair work on the studio control panel. I had attempted to repair a few switches on it previously and hoped that some lubricating spray would help the switches revive for a while; but it was not to be. The station manager ordered a new circuit board to replace the one giving difficulty. The board controls the station microphones and phone line connections. It doesn’t affect external Internet feeds. I knew I could work on the board while the station used an Internet feed and didn’t need the microphones for live operators.

Working on the studio control board is a challenge. The whole panel lifts up like the hood of an automobile and under it there is a myriad of circuit boards, wires and components. Additionally, the part that lifts up, the underside of the hood if you will, is festooned with an array of stalactite like circuit boards hanging down from it! Adding to the challenge is the fact that the station only has one operating studio board. If the power is turned off to the board, the station goes of the air for the duration of the maintenance period. The station is 24/7 so it is difficult to get “off air” time to do things.

Each afternoon from 5-6 PM the station has a feed from Amy Goodman on Democracy Now . I figured I could get in there and do what is known as a hot swap; changing the board while the power is still on. There isn’t any particular danger in this, the voltages I’m working with are low, but if I drop a tool, or short something, the station can be off the air for some time, making a bad situation worse.

On the chosen afternoon I peddled my bicycle up to the station to do the board swap. I ended up getting there late and wasn’t able to start the work until 5:15; my window of opportunity was already closing. In the rush to get there I had worked up a serious sweat and my body was really hot; the sweat was pouring off of me. Foolishly, I decided to go ahead with the operation, instead of waiting until the next day.

I popped up the hood and located the board in question. With the power on, I carefully inserted my metal tools in amongst the boards and with the cool temperament of a bomb disposal technician I successfully extracted the errant board. I could hear Amy Goodman still talking to me in the monitor so the station was still on the air. Sweat was in my eyes and I was concerned it would drip onto the circuits so I requested some towels to keep drying myself. I think some of the sweat was from nervousness, it never seemed to subside; even when I knew I was cooler.

Now the difficult part, I had to get the new board in and connected. Unlike many boards in the system this board doesn’t plug in, it is mounted with bolts and has numerous wires and plugs that go into it. With sweat-blurred eyes I ever so carefully slipped the new board onto its mounting posts and with the delicacy of snake charmer I carefully bolted down the board. Next, I connected the various cables. The last cable that had to be connected is a special cable made of what is known as “flat ribbon cable.” The connector for it is very tiny and the pins on it are extremely fragile. They can take some bending, but over time they’re prone to snapping off. This control panel has a few miles on it and with the aging of the materials due to heating I knew I was playing with fire. The sweat was blurring my vision, I was essentially working almost upside down and the clock was running. As I picked up the cable/plug to insert it I saw one of the pins on the cable disintegrate and fly off into space. It landed harmlessly on the table, but now I had one pin of 16 gone from the cable. How important was it, I couldn’t tell, and didn’t have time to go get the system drawings and see which function that one line served; I only had minutes left.

I successfully inserted the plug and buttoned the system back up; hoping against hope that the broken line wouldn’t affect things too dramatically. The good news was, the microphones and CD players still worked, the station was still on the air! The bad news was the station operators could not hear their show in their headphones. In addition, the telephone lines couldn’t be transferred to the airtime show. The show following Amy Goodman was my wife’s show, Jane Blanchard’s, WOMEN MATTERS and of course a portion of her show was done with a call-in correspondent that does the news with her. Jane had to wing it, and trooper that she is she succeeded.

Now I was under the gun to get things repaired. I left the studio and went out to various local electronic stores, such as Radio Shack and Best Buy hoping they’d have the connector I needed, but they didn’t.

All I could do was wait until the next day, and hit the local electronics supply store (thank goodness we still have one). They were closed for the day when I broke the pin. I purchased some spares the next morning and was back at the station the following evening for Amy Goodman again. This time, I arrived early, studied the drawings so I could determine exactly which pin had broken to determine if there was a work around and took some time to relax and get mentally ready for the task ahead.

I managed to carefully unplug the broken plug and take a close look at it. The connecting plug needs a special tool to attach it to the cable; of course I didn’t have the tool, but I’ve had success doing such things in the past using two needle nose pliers. Fortunately, the new plug was identical to the one I was to remove. I was now at the point of no return. I could see that if I attempted to take off the old plug it would probably disintegrate and then I would HAVE to install the new plug, there would be no alternative. I decided to do it! I pried at the old one and as predicted, it fell apart.

My theory was that I could remove the old one carefully and slip the new one into the same position and clamp it on. The plug is known as an “Insulation Displacement Plug;” there is no soldering, it “bites” into the cable and makes the connection under pressure. The “tooth” marks from the old one were nice and clean. I slipped the new connector on and ever so carefully aligned it with the old tooth marks and slowly; as slowly and carefully as I could brought pressure to bear on it and gradually it sunk it’s teeth into the old marks and then replied with a tiny “click” as the grips on the sides mated.

Before plugging it back into the new board, I plugged it into the old board that I had removed and the cable seemed to be functioning so I carefully, more carefully than I have ever done in my life, inserted the plug in the new board on the studio panel. Instantly I heard audio roaring out of the headphones on the table next to me; Amy Goodman never sounded so good! Victory!

I buttoned things up, sat down in the operator’s chair and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t exactly a Jack Bauer moment on the TV series “24,” but the personal pressure was there. My last 24 hours were as stressful as any I had experienced over my working career. I knew there were all these folks that work at the station that depended on having that panel working; no panel, no show. Other volunteers were depending on this volunteer to do my part correctly; I couldn’t let them down.

Volunteering can be serious business. For all of those volunteers that went off to war, it was serious, for all the volunteers that work at blood banks, homeless shelters, animal shelters, rape crisis centers, suicide hot lines and so on, it is serious business. If you spend most of your time in front of a television wasting time, consider being a volunteer; throw yourself into something. You may discover that you could find real-life thrills that far exceed anything that the fantasy world of television has to offer; I certainly did.

I've had an Opinion Editorial posted on a web based Op Ed site. I originally started writing it for here in my journal but decided it was too political. It's about taxes and Ponzi schemes. If you'd like to read it see this link:

Taxes and Ponzi schemes

You can enter comments at the bottom of the piece.

Thanks and Enjoy.

I have a friend. Actually, I have a few but this is about an extraordinary friend. We shouldn’t measure friends in quantity, just quality; then again I suppose that makes them all “extraordinary”. We should never think of “friends” collectively. Each and every one is unique and special. In our mind's eye we never envision true friends as a faceless crowd, rather, we tend to picture each and every one individually and that is as it should be.

My friend, who as the expression goes, “doesn’t have a pot to piss in,” is generous and caring to a fault and is always there should I need her. No matter the situation, she is always funny and can joke about the worst that life throws at her. I know that things must get to her, but she never burdens me with her problems. Occasionally she asks for help but only when there is nowhere else to turn. These days there are fewer places to turn.

One thing that she shares with me is her animal friends. She has a number of “rescue” dogs and cats. Her home is a sea of eyes, paws, claws, barks and meows. The pack and the pride are always glad to see me, even the shyest ones in the bunch and they clamor and jockey for the best petting positions every time I visit; which isn’t often enough.

I can’t sit down anywhere without at least two or three dogs or cats, or both vying for my lap. I only have two hands to dole out attention with and they’re usually kept busy for the entire visit.

My dogs passed a few years ago and haven’t been replaced. My lifestyle is just too busy now and animals need attention; attention I just wouldn’t be able to give. Thanks to these visits I get my ration of animal attention—I recently realized that I’m not giving them the attention, they’re giving it to me. They make me feel wanted and the center of their universe. I’m the receiver, not the giver—what an emotional high!

My friend is the lifeboat that keeps these animals afloat; without her care and loving I shudder to think where they would be. Each one of them was rescued from a dead-end situation. I just want to say thanks for being my friend, and more importantly, for being their rescuer, you’re making the world a better place one paw at a time. It’s wonderful to have such a special friend.

I’m not going to live forever. Surprised? I hope not? I have some thoughts on what my self-delivered eulogy should say and I’m sharing them with you here today. I think it would be so appropriate if we could deliver our own eulogy, after all, who knows us better than ourselves? Of course we could record something and play it back, but that is so much like watching a re-run; I’d love to be able to do it “real-time!” Anyway, if I could talk to you from the other side, here is what I would say:

“I speculate the rumors of my death were not all that exaggerated this time? They had to get it right eventually. Hopefully I went quietly, I hate to think I made the front page of the National Enquirer: “Florida Man Killed Attempting Sex With 18 Foot Alligator…”

If I could sum my life up in a sentence it would read; “He lived for the moment, racing motorcycles, bicycles, hiking, a serious Ham Radio enthusiast, devoted Toastmaster, loved good food and helping others.” I tried to live by one rule; “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

My family will go on. My family—that still sounds a bit odd to my ears. I never pictured myself married with a family. It is a concept that always seemed was for other people. I was never going to get married and in some ways, I never did. I’ve spent the majority of my life with my best friend, Jane. We have two wonderful kids and they’re merely an outgrowth of the love that the two of us have for each other.

We were never supposed to be able to have children and I had come to accept that. Then one night at our local Chinese restaurant I opened my fortune cookie and it said I would, "be expecting a bundle of joy in August.” Jane had planted it there with the staff and was beaming at me across the table.

All these years later, she still beams. As we’ve grown together over the years we haven’t grown up. We seem to laugh more and suffer each other’s pranks more than ever; it’s what life is supposed to be. Years ago we made an agreement to love and cherish until death do we part; and that is what I’m addressing here; the “part” part.

I can envision a scenario where Jane goes to the local paper to write my obituary. Jane is very efficient and economical. When the ad rep tells her the fee for a submitted obituary is $1.00 per word she’ll pause, reflect, and then say, "Well, then, let it read, 'Dennis Blanchard died.' " "Sorry, ma'am, replies the editor," but I'm afraid there's a seven-word minimum on all submitted obituaries."

Flustered, Jane thinks for a minute and then instructs the ad rep to write, "Dennis Blanchard died. Selling Ham Radio station..."

I want everyone to know that I never died — rather, I lived! Dying wasn’t a particularly frightening notion for me, its part of living and have I lived! Sometimes I’ve pondered: given the choice would I like to win a big lottery jackpot, or live life over…without a doubt I would do it again, it has been one hell of a ride! Money could never buy my wealth — memories of travels, accomplishments, failures, kids and the love of my life, there is no purchase of that; it is earned.

This is not a time for despair, this is a time for fond memories, stories about all the good times and food, yes, food! This is a celebration of a life and I loved any celebration that involved food. Good food is good comfort and that’s what is needed now. Put away the hankies grab a knife and fork and live for the moment; that would the best tribute I can think of.