When Time Finally Caught Up

Picture this:

1.  A cool morning, the river down the hill misty, the air fresh.  As the sun comes up--a beautiful red ball--the gauzy blues and greens of early morning sharpen as brilliant sunlight begins filling the day along with the sounds of birds, bells, and clattering kitchen pans.  Not many miles to the north--the direction of the river's source--distant-blue forested hills rise, giving way to wide stretches of remote upcountry wilderness where the only sounds (or so you imagine) are birds, monkeys, and maybe a wild pig or two. In this place-beyond-time, you find yourself easing into the languid and dusty days, the beauty, the quietude, the simplicity.

2.  You have been here a good week now, staying with the staff in a bungalow on the outskirts of what is little more than a village in this land of red earth and banana trees.  By afternoon, as the heat builds, sleepy dogs lie on the grass, yawning.  Roosters and pigs wander.  A green parrot chatters in its cage. Occasional jeeps scutter back and forth along the town's dirt roads. Down the hill, open-air shops sell cigarettes, soap, cans of condensed milk.  Belled pack ponies make their way through town as radio music filters throughout the neighborhood.  People wait beside the river for the ferry to take them to the small town on the opposite bank.  

3.  Other than that same small town on the opposite bank where you can buy textiles, wood carvings, embroidered shoulder bags, the next place of any size is maybe two days by boat.  But as you continue your work, your stay, you find occasional visitors appearing at the door.  From New Zealand, France, Australia, the U.S.  An anthropologist.  Someone gathering research for a doctorate.  A Defense Department official.  Each seems a bit dazed, as if they've just stepped into some far outpost.  You invite them in for iced tea and introduce them to the man in charge--a doctor from the Dominican Republic.  For this is part of a small hospital compound, the hospital being a 14-bed bungalow raised on cement blocks with a corrugated tin roof.

4.  So where are you?  Where is this timeless back-of-beyond spot?  It's in The Land of a Million Elephants--Laos:  the far northwestern corner, across the river from the town of Chiang Khong, Thailand, in what is known as The Golden Triangle.  Somewhere not that far away, opium is being processed and heroin refined, then transported by those pack ponies with their tinkling bells.  The river, of course, is the Mekong.

5.  Rather than 2019, however, and despite its remote quiet sense, this particular scene is set in the mid-'60s, in the middle of what has come to be called the Secret War when the CIA was working to push back the Communist Pathet Lao. Though it served the local people, the hospital also tended wounded Lao soldiers working with the CIA--brought in by unmarked U.S. helicopters.  The paradox, of course, lay in the fact that while maintaining that certain sense of peacefulness, the country was infiltrated with fighting.

6.  Okay.  Now picture this.  Remember looking north to those remote blue hills and the timelessness that seemed embodied there?  Those were the hills of Burma in hidden land filled with forests, wild orchids, and occasional CIA irregulars making forays into China.  That Burmese borderland, reached only by river boat, lay barely 28 miles from the little Lao town I've been describing--Ban Houei Sai.  Now, take that same borderland and put there instead a $500 million casino recently (in today's terms) built by the Chinese on Lao land given over to the Chinese where (mostly) Chinese tourists come to play. Here is their new playground with green domes and a tall gold-painted crown rising above what was once a canopy of jungly trees. Here are replicas of Greek and Roman statues and Michelangelo reproductions, enormous gambling rooms, a golf course, limousines galore.  With this being just one casino of what may be many to come in this Land of a Million Elephants.

7.  The country has gone from one extreme to another--from opium processing to garish tourism.  Tourism and kitsch are now king.  (And largely Chinese tourism it seems.)  A road now connects the casino those 28 miles to Houei Sai where a brand new bridge has replaced the ferry service to Thailand.  What time had left behind, it has now caught up with.

Ban Houei Sai (now Houay Xai) on the Mekong, Laos, 1966

N.B.  I had not planned on getting involved in a war, secret or not, but was newly employed by the NGO that supported this hospital, and I was soon sent off to the task I was originally hired for:  to work in Nepal.



I'd like to acknowledge the BBC's "The Mekong River with Sue Perkins" program for its Laos update.

A Bit of Reminiscing

Breakfast in the 1940s

We get so used to the way things are that we forget how they once were.  For instance, when I go to buy meat--I get pre-packaged meat; alas, our good butcher closed--there are basically five choices:  lamb, pork, beef, chicken with ground turkey in the freezer.  Back in the '40s and '50s, my mother used to come home with mutton, heart, tongue, liver.  Bones were free.  We also ate a lot of our own rabbit and chicken during the war, rabbit being as common on our table as chicken.

The veggie department, on the other hand, had many fewer choices.  Stores didn't carry such things as bok choy or broccolini or rainbow chard or fennel.  Or even a variety of fresh herbs, though there was always parsley, free for the taking, since it acted as a display decoration. So there was nowhere near today's choice, but then, if I'm correct, we also didn't have the problem of pesticides in our food, everything then being still organic.  And no one had yet invented that GMO horror.

Rainbow chard

When I was growing up, watermelons were a half cent a pound.  Except for bananas, if you wanted something exotic like papayas or mangoes, you had to visit a place with a tropical climate.  I remember my father (who, being an Easterner, had spent summers in Maine as a boy) once told the story about the time he was at Paramount filming a movie.  (In the '20s or '30s sometime.)  The film was set in Maine and had a scene where the set designer had placed a bowl of persimmons on the dining room table.  At that, my father complained, saying that was not realistic as no one in Maine even knew what a persimmon was.  Persimmons were a California thing.  (We even had a persimmon tree in our back yard.)  But the set designer didn't care and simply left it there.

I also remember the day mayonnaise came back on the shelves after having been non-existent during the war.  My mother sent my brother and me up to the corner grocery to buy a jar.  I was in third grade.  We also found bubble gum for sale, something I'd never heard of though my brother (who was older than I) seemed to know about it.  Soon after, we saw our first bag of corn chips.  I'd say that was 1947.

My mother was what is now called a "stay-at-home-mom"--then called "a housewife".  (No one called a woman "a mom"; only one's children used that term.  A woman with children was "a mother."  Like in Happy Mother's Day.)  So, staying home, she made fudge, pineapple upside down cake, scalloped potatoes, meatloaf, creamed tuna on toast, waffles --start to finish, everything from scratch.  There were no packaged mixes, no take-out, no micro-waves, no frozen dinners.  At least not just then.

We ate home-cooked, wholesome.  Not exotic.  No garlic, no mushrooms.  A little tabasco or paprika was about as adventurous as we got.  Plus poultry seasoning in turkey stuffing.  The only pasta was spaghetti or macaroni. Chicken was usually floured and fried in fat.  Or it was boiled, boned, and made into a gelatin aspic, particularly nice on hot days.  Salads were iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise.  Or Waldorf salad with apples and walnuts.

Then things started shifting and the first fast food burgers arrived.  They cost 15¢.  That was maybe 1954.  I had my first pizza in 1955.  It was then called pizza pie.

Until they closed up, my mother adored going to drug store soda fountains, sitting on a stool, and getting a nice coke with a squirt of cherry or lemon syrup mixed in.  Or else she got a chocolate ice cream soda.  The "soda-jerk" (usually a young man) made it as you watched.  A tall glass with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some chocolate syrup, and a splash of soda water, all mixed together with a long spoon.  Then more ice cream, syrup, and soda water with whipped cream on top.  Being so fond of them, my mother used to reminisce about the last ice cream soda she ever got.  It was at the drug store on San Ysidro in Santa Barbara.  It had cost 45¢.  She could make them herself and did sometimes.  But it was never quite the same.





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A Few Words About Voice Pitch and Speech ... Plus a Gorgeous Reading of Sonnet 130

Lauren Bacall apparently started out with a high nasal speaking voice (and a Brooklyn accent), Richard Burton with a light voice, Kenneth Branagh with his native Irish brogue.  Michael Caine, however, didn't alter his Cockney speech but cashed in on it.  As Sean Connery did with his Scottish.

As for the "perfect" male English-speaking voice, I've read that that would be a combination of Jeremy Irons and the late Alan Rickman.  With Judi Dench being among those with the "perfect" female voice.  Then there are those actors (such as Rupert Penry-Jones, Samuel West, and Jeremy Irons) who also do narration. Really listen to them sometime.  Each syllable is given its due. Their speech is slow, precise, crisp, beautifully articulated.  No slurring rush about any of it.  It's a pleasure to listen to.  The tone color and resonance of a voice is also highly important.  Sorry to say, I hear a lot of too-high, little girl voices by women (Americans, often) who, to my mind, might do well to re-see Singing in the Rain--which was all about using a well-modulated voice (Debbie Reynolds's) to dub over the story-line's leading lady's laughable pitch and pronunciation.

So (getting back to the subject) what did Lauren, Richard, and Kenneth do to deepen their voices or change their regional speech?  Or, what did their directors or voice coaches have them do?  For two--Lauren and Richard--the hills became alive with the sound of Shakespeare as they shouted out verses (it is said) for "hours at a time."  Whereas Kenneth turned to something called Received Pronunciation.  Or RP for short.  He was born Northern Irish but, at age 9, moved with his family to England where he is said to have acquired RP in order to stop being bullied about his accent.

So what is Received Pronunciation?  It's something like a BBC-tinted English-language pronunciation based on educated speech reflecting an upper middle-class status.  It is clear and precise.  Short vowels, not drawn-out drawls.  Enunciation.  Taking time to speak, not rushing it.  It is not "a royal accent" as the royals are said to have their own way of speaking. It is thought of as neutral, not reflecting the speaker's geographical origins. Anthony Hopkins, for instance, is a Welshman (as was Burton) but did not play Lear with a Welsh accent. He and other Shakespearean actors and actresses--unless, say, they were playing Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing--used RP or something akin.  Dame Eileen Aitkens, who spoke with a Cockney accent as a child, switched to RP when beginning her work in the theater.  I read somewhere that she said that one's native regional accent would not do for the theater's great roles.

As for RP, I guess one could conclude by calling it something of an Oxbridge style.  It is also said to be Bond's accent, the 007 guy.

Getting back to the most pleasing English-speaking male voices, those would include Ronald Colman, Jack Hawkins, Pierce Brosnan, Burton, Hopkins, Irons, and Rickman.  Female speaking voices would include the great ladies: Julie, Maggie, Judi, and Helen.

Finally, speaking of Alan Rickman, listen to his reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130.  It's amazingly beautiful.  (If for some reason it does not come up here, Google it.)


click here

Your Unsaved Changes Will Be Lost

I don't do Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.  I don't tweet and I don't text.  I don't shop online preferring to support local businesses.  Nor am I into smart phones.  I do have a cell phone which I got about a decade ago.  It makes and receives calls (when I turn it on) so if faced with an emergency and if I have my little book with everyone's phone numbers in it (no, I don't program them into my phone), I don't go into panic mode unless I then find myself in a place with no cell-phone coverage.  Now all those public phones are a thing of the past.  With a dime ... and then a quarter ... and then a calling card .... they came in quite handy.  And you didn't have to make sure you had a pocket or a bag to keep one in.

Then my computer presents problems with such messages as "An error occurred ...."  Or "It will take some moments while we upgrade your ..."  Or the modem is behaving improperly.  Or the wi-fi apparently didn't like the last thunderstorm.  Or the grid is down.  Or the grid isn't down but acts as if it were, so you have to fiddle with things you know nothing about to try and fix some oblique problem.  I admit to liking a computer for writing as opposed to typewriters of old, but then you have to have a separate printer to get any hard copy. (Though hard copy itself may be obsolete one of these days.)   Plus pay more than $100 for an ink cartridge to fit into the printer. You used to get a typing ribbon for a couple of dollars and that would do for all the letters you wrote for a good year or so.  Of course, I realize no one writes letters anymore.

A bunch of hand-written and typed letters from the old days.   Yep, I kept them!! 

Then who besides me finds it harder now to hear people on the other end of the line if those people are on smart phones or cell phones.  I prefer my land-line which gives me a better connection.  More grounded, you might say.  So often, nowadays, it sounds as if the person on the other end is multi-tasking deep in some Mayan well or talking while surfing a kahuna.

Then there's the nuisance-phone-call thing ... like several a day sometimes. About the back brace they say I ordered -- but never did. Or my Microsoft connection which is about to fail. Or some problem with my bank account. Or something else which I don't pay attention to because I've already hung up by then.  One nuisance person called and asked if he could speak to me and I said, "No, you can't."  "Why not?" he asked.  "Because you're a fraud," I said. "I'm not a fraud," he replied, then giggled and hung up.  (I've gotten so I can recognize their voices.)  I used to keep track of nuisance-call numbers so I could report them to the Do Not Call listing, but then I realized the callers kept switching numbers.  They also began using local numbers so you'd think it was some friend.

Then, not long ago, when I was on the phone to one of our Top Computer Companies, I kept getting interference from their Hold Music.  There I was, trying to hear what they were telling me as we worked together to solve a computer problem, all with Johnny Cash on the line, too, as if he were blowing bubbles through a Ring of Fire off in some bog.

"Your call is important to us."
     "Our options have changed."
          "I'm either on another line or out of the office."

Working to Untwist Things

Alternative media:

1.  Stuart Jeanne Bramhall--stuartjeannebramhall.com (An American activist and retired child psychiatrist who moved to New Zealand.  Daily.)

2.  James Howard Kunstler--kunstler.com (Intelligent, graphic political writer. New blog every Monday.)

3.  Paul Craig Roberts--paulcraigroberts.org (Trustworthy writer, former Asst. Secretary of the Treasury.  Daily.)

4.  Chris Hedges--truthdig.com (Great human being, great activist.  New posting every Sunday.)

5.  activistpost.com (Also good is Peter Kirby in the environmental section on chemtrails/geoengineering. Activist Post is daily; Peter Kirby is not.)

6.  off-guardian.org  (Daily.)

7.  usawatchdog.com  (New postings every few days.)

Progress

I've been thinking about Southern California which I visited just a year ago. Particularly the coastal region.  On my previous visit in 2000 when I attended a college reunion, I flew into the Ontario International airport--Ontario, California, in San Bernardino Country, some 35 miles east of L.A. Attractive tile-art on the walls showed California's iconic orange groves. But, as I already knew, those orange groves were gone.

My grandmother owned one in the '20s.  An aunt and uncle raised avocados. Lemons were also abundant as were walnuts.  But even as a child, those very groves were being bulldozed to be replaced by tract housing with pink-tiled bathrooms.  What was so beautiful about the area, what was bringing in residents was that which was being destroyed so that contractors could rip out, build up, and earn bucks by housing those same new residents.  Instead of enjoying the reality of orange groves, people had to make do with old-timers' descriptions of them.

In fact, there's now a state citrus park in Riverside where you can see some fabled orange groves.  Doesn't that sound just a little too familiar?  Like what's happened with the Tibetan monasteries.  Tear them down, then keep one or two as museums.  Or the American buffalo.  Shoot them all, then put a few into a protected park.  Let destruction take over.  Then when what you loved about the place is no longer there, charge admission to experience a commercialized version, turning it into some sort of folklore.  The Old West. California's Orange Groves.  Pretty Little Coastal Towns.  (Even fables themselves have been commercialized, to wit:  Disneyland.)

I'm the first to agree that the region has a perfect climate and the opportunity for great beauty.  But even the pretty little coastal towns are becoming caricatures of themselves with property values so expensive, many residents can no longer afford to live there.   One Santa Barbara acquaintance said she'll have to go into a mobile home.  (Now called a manufactured home.)  A chiropractor told me he can't afford to retire there and is thinking of moving to Mexico.

Santa Barbara .... yes, it's beautiful!

An artist in Laguna Beach related how she had to keep switching galleries where she showed her work because each Now-Best Gallery had to fold from increasingly high rents.  Now, she says, those former spaces sell t-shirts.

Of course, it's not relegated to the West.  When last visiting Ogunquit, Maine, a t-shirt shop was standing where a splendid bookstore had been.

More About Improvements

I sometimes flirt with an odd notion:  that there are so many innovative people out there, each wanting To Make Changes, each with a view of How Things Can Be Done Better that they sometimes come in conflict with how things should be.  Some things are just fine the way they are.  Or the way they were.  Maybe we don't need those changes. Or quite so many.

Let me take my last winter's visit to Santa Barbara as an example.  When we lived there many years ago, State Street was a wide enough street that you could fit in two lanes of traffic plus parallel parking.  Today it's wide enough for two lanes but now the old (and very handy) parking space is planted with quite handsome trees.  Rather than what I might call useful stores, those have been edged out by the more glitzy that attract not the local residents so much as the now-plethora of tourists.  Gone is the dry-goods--a wonderful place with pneumatic tubes that whizzed off your payment and whizzed back your change.  My mother and I went there regularly to buy yardage and patterns with which to sew our clothes.  The candy store.  Gone.  The children's clothing shop.  The hardware store.  The incense-scented store with goods from China.   The splendid family style cafeteria where my mother, grandmother, and I lunched on chicken pot pie with blackberry pie for dessert.

Santa Fe is similar.  Almost all the nice little local shops that lined the Plaza are now selling touristy items so that residents now retreat to outlying malls. One friend said he even thought people would soon be charged simply to enter the Plaza area.  I doubt that ... but you never know.

May I be allowed to paraphrase from Alexander McCall Smith's recent book, The Handsome Man's DeLuxe Cafe, when one of his characters--when told that moving forward was the modern way--says that he is not modern and does not want to be.  There are many people, he says, who "want to stay exactly where we are, because there is nothing wrong with that place."  He likes where he is (geographically, emotionally, etc) so why be told that it's the modern way to "move forwards."

Improvements come in so many forms--yet another leadership workshop, another governmental regulation/decision, more town planning ideas, another tax hike. Let's just all go out and lie in the sun for awhile and let improvements take a coffee break.  We could also give our laptops, smart phones, emails, twitters, and tweets a vacation.  I think there is great glory in going off into the "wilds" and being incommunicado. Or living in a place where you don't speak the language and have no idea what the nightly reporters are talking about so can come up with your own summation of things.

I know when I lived Away, it felt splendid.  A bit like Marco Polo, off someplace in the wilds of the world. Well, anyway, those are thoughts I play with sometimes.

Flavors of the Day

A new day dawns ... during which I don't tweet, I don't twitter, I don't text.  I don't do Facebook.  I don't have a tablet or a kindle.  I don't have a BlackBerry, and I don't do Bluetooth or Blu-ray.  I don't have a smart phone or a smart meter for the electric company to instantly monitor my needs. I don't buy smart beef or smart hot dogs.  I don't even know what they are.  It's not that I'm against these things; I prefer the simple life.  There's too much to try and figure as it is.  Any mail with my name on it to shred, any account numbers, any old bills.  Passwords to remember where to look up, batteries to recharge, computer to defragment, old emails to clean up, internet history to delete.  (Yes, I do have a desktop computer plus a laptop for when I'm traveling. I also have a land line ... and a cell phone for emergencies.)

Then I'm supposed to quantify my satisfaction based on a one-to-five scale as to how well the service crew last changed my oil ... or how well the new compost program is doing ... or if I'd recommend my car dealership to anyone wanting to buy a new car.  Or how much pain I'm in on a scale of one to ten (that is, if I happen to be in pain).  Speaking of which:  we now have to follow increased medical red tape to satisfy their need for numbers: weight, blood pressure, code numbers, then see a doctor who keeps his/her eyes on the computer screen, not on you, as well as update your meds, re-read their privacy policy, and fill out yet another questionnaire determining just which insurance will pay for the visit.  Never-ending paper work to stick in your paper recyclables--as opposed to your approved-plastic and glass recyclables, your yucky non-recyclables (yellow bag if small, purple if large), and your specially purchased natural fiber "Bag to Earth" for food-waste composting.  

Since I'm starting to feel worn out, except for my book club, I pretty much stay away from regular commitments.  I don't want to find that I have to go out in inclement weather.  I no longer feel comfortable driving at night.  I also feel "I've done all that ... time to let others take over."  Every time I signed up for yoga, I then had to go see a chiropractor.  Whenever I joined a chorus, the music flooded my head later when I was trying to sleep.  Going to evening events, I could find myself out in the boonies (lots of boonies around here) having to get home in the dark.  (And now realizing there's not necessarily cell reception in the event of an emergency.)  It's much simpler staying home and reading a good book.

A good book because I watch very little TV.  Some Masterpiece Theatre but not all including the new Indian Summers.  (To my mind, filming it in Malaysia instead of India is like setting a Colorado story in Florida though that isn't why I'm not watching.)  The Great British Baking Show is fun, sappy, and sweet.  Of course, I'll finish out Downton Abbey.  Week-end C-SPAN is okay, especially their coverage of literary festivals and first-Sunday-of-the-month In Depth interviews.  Sometimes I watch a house renovation program with sledgehammers ripping out walls to create "an open concept," as they call it--an important feature these days so that the cook in the family isn't stuck off in the kitchen while the rest of the party is having a good time elsewhere. One program featured Tiny Houses--with the same square footage some people insist on having for their walk-in closets.  (I've also noticed a tendency for women, when viewing a potential house with a large walk-in closet, to turn to their husbands and say, "This is going to be my closet; I don't know where you're going to put your things."  Some are joking but some aren't.  Easy solution:  toss half the stuff.)

Finally, I also don't watch anything to do with the upcoming (still a year away!!) election.  You'd be surprised how soothing something like that can be.
 

What Some of the Future May Look Like (Which Is What Some of the Past Looked Like)

It might be interesting to think ahead to what the future might look like once there are changes in the financial system, fewer resources, and various environmental exigencies.  For one thing, I believe we will be thinking on a more regional basis.  (Such as:  not sending produce all the way across the country in trucks that use gasoline but in seasonally eating what our particular area grows even if that means mostly stored root veggies in winter.)  As well as thinking on a more community-oriented--or even neighborhood--basis.  In New York City, for instance, people think in terms of their own little neighborhoods and support the shops and eateries right there where they live.

We can come up with our own barter systems.  If we need to keep the car in the garage because of the cost or lack of fuel, we can support our neighborhoods by opening up nearby mom and pop stores.  Or places where vendors can set up a temporary side-walk stall if they have extra tomatoes, say, to sell.  So I see more places that one can easily reach by walking or bicycling.

I see something of a return to a farming life with more communal help--putting up pickles, sauerkraut, and applesauce.  Milking cows, raising chickens, putting a veggie garden in place of a lawn.  Stockpiling non-GMO seeds, acquiring garden tools.

With more back-to-the-land activities, there may not be time for TV or video games--which, to me, seems a plus.  I would like us to sit down with the family to eat--and to eat home-cooked food--as we also share time talking together.  As well, to save on electricity, we may well have quieter lives without the currently ever-present "music" playing in the background wherever we go.  We might even fish our ukuleles out of the closet and create our own music.  But we also need more silence so that we can think our own thoughts without distraction.

I would appreciate, too, if there were free education including college and graduate studies.  Free health care.  Better public transport.  Even a proportionally representational government such as the Dutch have.  As for the Presidential elections, they need a complete overhaul to do away with the billions of dollars spent and the lengthy waste of time the process now takes.

Then we need to abandon the ever-present war mentality that keeps this country afloat with its proliferation of "bona-fide" (ha!) reasons why we should go to war in some poor country or why that same spot needs our troops, our drones, our contractors as we then take over and drain their resources and our war machine hauls in big bucks. (It was the war in Viet Nam that used up much of our own domestic oil supply.)

With their community, their off-the-grid life, their buggies and farms, I often think the Amish are among the best prepared for the future.  Obviously, I don't know what it will look like, but I dare say we'll have an opportunity to be creative!

What getting ready for winter looks like in these parts.

Dimmer Days

Before I began living alone, it was nice to be able to split the duties.  You see that the car is kept in good shape, I'll tally the finances each month.  Or ... together we'll decide what to do about winter.  People around here, if they go anywhere at all, seem to go to Florida.  I prefer the western part of the country, myself.  There's also something to be said for staying home in order to be here if the power goes out, pipes freeze, roof leaks, etc.  Okay, so I now figure things out myself ... though I don't want to find myself obsessing about one thing and neglecting something else.  And there are big things like the economy where my research leads me to such terminology as debt-based money, market manipulation, and black swans. What to do  ...  except proceed one day at a time.

And then there's the dimmer days thing.  Less sunlight by something like 20% I think I read, though that's not an exact figure.  Caused by intentional spraying.  If you've been looking up--though you may not have known what they were--you've probably seen the frequent aerosol trails high up in the sky as nano particulates spread out over the entire sky, create a haze, and purposefully obscure sunlight from reaching the earth in an effort to modify the climate, all being done, or so it seems, with no oversight.  And all treated as if it were a non-subject ... though there are plenty of on-line sites that talk about it.  And, no, it's not harmless condensation trails; those are ice crystals that quickly dissipate and don't create a haze.  No, this is a program called SRM for Solar Radiation Management.  It may scatter light and reduce solar radiation, but it can also result in a depletion of the ozone layer, change rain patterns, and hinder photosynthesis. And then what about whatever is in that aerosol drifting into our soil and watersheds? Anyway, I'm keeping up my vitamin D.  "D for dimmer days," I say to myself.

Those aren't clouds; those are trails of aerosol spraying ...

... which produce this haze.  (You can see another trail in the background.)

As for other things going on now, I'll leave them to people like Chris Hedges.  If you're a fan of his, as I am, you will appreciate this week's posting.  Click here 

James Howard Kunstler--a writer, blogger, gardener--is good too.  Colorful language.  His site is kunstler.com

As for the skies, our local environmental gathering will soon be showing "What in the World Are They Spraying?" which is found on YouTube.

Up, Up, Up and Outta Sight

As a precaution against winter blues, I recently gave some thought to extending my time away this next winter and going off for a few weeks before heading to my spot in Santa Barbara mid-February to the end of March.  (A Minneapolis woman has it before then.)  But in looking on-line, I came up with big sticker shock.  Of course, Key West, which is walkable and colorful (good photos), was totally out.  But so were St. Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, San Clemente, the Caribbean, etc. all with plenty of nice places for $200 and $300 a night.  Even the tiny accommodation I had in Hawaii only four years ago had gone up by a good $1000 a month.  (And a friend said her place there went from $1900 to $2800 a month in just a year's time.)  I always wonder:  how can people pay that!

Where I stayed

And then people seem to justify such high prices by saying, "Well, things keep going up," as if that was news I'd never heard before. I can tell you one thing that doesn't keep going up and that's income.  Mine, yours, most people's.  In looking around, I wanted a place that was warm, sunny, where I didn't need a car (just more expense) and could walk to town for groceries.  Also, a place I could reach by train or plane.  (Since I wouldn't be taking my car.)  Just for the fun of it I started pulling place-names out of an internet hat to see what the world offered.  I didn't try Moldavia or Bulgaria which I figured were cheap, but I did look at Split, Croatia, which I know nothing about but which turned out to have "reasonable" accommodations, meaning under $100 a night.  As did Nicosia, Cyprus, where I stayed once--guest of a friend.  An interesting city, half Greek, half Turkish.

Of course, that would mean paying air fare to Europe (as well as going through that highly unpleasant experience these days of flying) ... plus transportation from here to Logan Airport in Boston.  Only a very few years ago hiring a driver from here to Boston cost something like $150 one way plus gratuity.  Now the price is $320 one way.  Sticker shock!!  I remember one year when I flew across the Atlantic for less than it cost me to get to Logan.

Then (same subject, different example) I recently read that the minimum wage required to rent a two bedroom apartment in this state is $20.68 an hour ... and that 40% of the households in this town do not make that much.  We used to say that one paid a quarter of one's income on housing.  No more, my lads and lassies.  I could easily move to an apartment in town that would take 100% of my income.  (And they call that good housing for seniors?)  (Maybe they figure you won't mind using up all you made by selling your house, but, I ask, what happens when you get to be 83, you've reached the bottom of the pile, and they turf you out?)

Well, as we're gradually bumped out of one market after another, let's acquire a few flexibility skills.  For instance:  it would seem to me that not all these vacation rentals are full all the time.  So rather than being empty, why not fill them by really decreasing the price!  What do you say to that!

A Child's Life Without Television

(Continuing from last week's posting)

I've long considered myself fortunate to have spent my formative years without television.  First, it didn't exist.  Then, buying a set was beyond our budget.  And rather than having programmed images and stale interpretations set before our daughter (or us, for that matter), my husband and I chose to keep television out of our house, as well.  We did not try to coerce her out of watching it at friends' houses.  But we always felt there were more important things to do, even if that was sitting and gazing out a window.

As children back in the '40s and '50s, my brother and I felt there was more to fill each day than there was time.  Daydreaming reverie, of course, was still an honorable pastime.  As well, we swam in a nearby creek with its yellow-green scummy boulders.  We nibbled our rabbits' food-pellets from an open barrel in the garage.  We played 78 RPM records or got out our John Thompson's First and Second Grade music books to practice the piano.  My brother read the children's classics, many illustrated by N.C. Wyeth.  I wrote poems and studied ballet with Madame Katrina who wore her hair up off the back of her neck.  We went down to the wharf (we lived in Santa Barbara) and fished or roller-skated along the beach-walk.  We played Robin Hood with bow and arrow, built forts in the bushes behind the house, or, butterfly net in hand, collected Lepidoptera.  At one point, I rode my bicycle ten times around the block, no hands.

Boy Scout sharpening his knife.

That's how children grew up then.  Until one day everything changed.  For the society we were, what had seemed a cradle of boundless space became confined to half-hour segments.  Where the experience of life itself had stirred us and helped make us wise, we were asked to hand over reality to a fictional substitute.  What we had accepted as ours without price--ritual, play, celebration, fantasy, discussion, leisure--we gave away only to have it restructured and sold back to us.  What had given little cause for concern became potential dark corners for real or imagined fear.  Where we had celebrated function, we became addicted to dysfunction.  What we had once mulled over, we were now asked to evaluate at flash-point speed so that we could accelerate our absorption of crises, enabling us to go on to the next and the next and the next, dulling our senses, disconnecting us from ourselves, exhausting our sweet, fragile selves into a weariness of boredom, isolation, cynicism, and malaise.  When visiting relatives, we now sat in their darkened room watching stilted figures performing the raucous and slapstick.

Perhaps this disconnect/disconnection would enable us to re-connect later with a broader plug.  But it's no state secret what appeared in the early '50s that changed us completely.  Those of us born early enough to have escaped its brain-altering influence from the verbal to the visual and those of us financially disadvantaged enough never to have had it enter our house, surely have more in common with earlier generations than with the very one that followed ours.

So what did we come away with?  Without the daily bombardment of info-junk, we could look at our present and at our future as worthy times, times in which to do the necessary work and play in order to turn us into those ready to go out in the world and make our mark.  We were not brow-beaten by info-litter or an entertainment mentality or disastrously clownish and truly stupid politics, or quite so much greed and hubris.  Of course, we had things still to learn, attitudes still to hone.  But somehow things then felt a bit better (for many of us, at any rate) than they came to feel.

The Way of Conversation

(I'll be away next weekend so look for my next posting the week after that.)



I've always enjoyed a good conversation, even as a child--sitting listening to parents or relatives hash things out at the dinner table or in someone's living room.  It's how we children learned about life (that and going to the movies) and heard the old family tales about where we came from and what our elders thought about things.  Then, as an adult, my family and I always sat together at meals and expounded on this or that!

Too, a lot of conversations took place over the phone.  But then, as the years went on and land lines (as they came to be called) gave way to cell phones, those conversations became harder to hear, as if they were originating from the bottom of a well or off in the middle of an ocean.  And phone chat from a car was constantly breaking up.

Then emails came on the scene.  And as tablets and smaller and smaller devices entered the picture, smaller and smaller keyboards made it more and more difficult to write much more than an indecipherable short hand.

Emails are excellent for the easy exchange of info but not much good for dialogue.  "Oh, you say you spoke with her.  Do you mean that you went to see her or that you spoke over the phone?"  So you email your question back.  No answer.  In time, you learn not to even try for a response.  The person is too busy  ... they figure they answered you ... they don't want to be too precise.  Take your pick.  At least on the phone, if you ask a question, more times than not, you'll get an immediate reply.  You don't have to do Follow Up. 

Of course, a good conversation means that one has to be able to talk, to be able to come up with ideas.  I recently saw that movie, Nebraska, where the siblings all got together for the first time in a long time and had nothing to say to each other, other than ball scores or car parts, and so just sat in the front room silently watching a ball game.  Conversation had gone the way.  One no longer had to converse; we'd given that away to media personalities.  And modern day gadgets seemed to help reduce the very communication it had set out to make easier.  A bit like Morse Code.  Dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot.  Which spells SOS.

Where Have All the Songs Gone?

It had been a pretty day.  The late afternoon sun was slanting through the windows.  I could see robins, cardinals, blue jays flitting around outside.  First iris were blooming ... my Evening Lights azalea.  Too early for supper, I poured myself a nice, light vinho verde and put on a CD--a compilation of music from the '60s that a friend had made me some years back.  Very soon, I found myself dancing around the room ... and singing along as an enormous nostalgia nearly overwhelmed me.  I hadn't listened to these songs in a long time, but this day, just a week ago, I was right there with each and every one of them.

These were MY songs, OUR songs, the songs of my generation.  I thought of that book by Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, about our parents--they who went through the Depression and World War II.  But I realized that mine was a great generation, too.  In high school, we were told that we were apathetic.  Later, we were called The Silent Generation.  But then we exploded.  We were out there with our counter-culture, our songs that helped stop the Vietnam War, that contributed toward wiping out oppression, prejudice, or that simply joined us together as a generation.  We had our guitars, our marches, our heroes:  Bob Dylan, The Mamas and the Papas, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Trini Lopez, Scott McKenzie--he who wrote the lyrics to "If You're Going to San Francisco." (The man I married and I went to San Francisco at that very time--to get married.  Now I can barely hear that song without feeling all of it sweep over me.  Those days, that time, the person I was and the people I loved, lived with, knew, to say nothing of our passion, adventurousness, energy.)

Waiting for the train to San Francisco ... in my hippie goat coat.  Brown leather with orange embroidery ... all-fur inside.  Later, in San Francisco, passers-by complimented me on it.  I'd bought it when living in the Middle East and wore it for years.

Where are today's songs?  Rather than giving up, giving in, where are today's protest songs that we can hear over and over, that are melodic enough to sing, with powerful lyrics and sweet, simple accompaniment?  I think we're the poorer for not having them.  And, if someone says that such songs do exist, well, I don't hear them.   I wonder if our attention is too scattered ... if we're too out of practice to stop a moment, take a deep breath, and get such songs to speak for us again.

Last week I wrote about joining a six-week senior singalong.  Well, you should have seen us when we tucked into those '60s songs.  Let me tell you:  we had energy and passion as we belted them out.  They were part of us ... of who we still are.

Then

My maternal grandmother, the only grandparent I ever knew, was born in the decade following the Civil War.  With her birthday coming up this week, I've been thinking about her and some of the things she did (or didn't do) in her day compared to what we grandmothers do (or don't do) today.

Here's what I've come up with.

1.  She never wore trousers.
2.  She wore a light amount of lipstick and powder but never eye makeup.
3.  She never applied polish to her toes or, for that matter, wore sandals.
4.  She may never have gone out without wearing a girdle and stockings.
5.  Sometimes she had her white hair slightly blued.
6.  She rarely went to town without wearing a hat.

One of her favorite hats

7.  She never drove a car during the time I knew her but took the bus instead.
8.  She may never have voted during those years.
9.  She never drank alcoholic beverages.
10.  She never took a yoga class or firmed after age 50--or before age 50, for that matter.
11.  She never concerned herself with eating organic--everything was organic.
12.  She never did a high-five.  Or said, OMG.
13.  She never owned a TV.
14.  She cooked in aluminum pots.
15.  And, as mentioned in an earlier posting, she spoke of cars as being "machines."

She taught piano in her home until she was in her late eighties and gave an annual recital at which the boys bowed and we girls curtsied.  She was a lovely, gracious, generous person.

Why Am I Surprised?

I just finished an eleven-week survey of the cost of food per item.  I used to think you could take a $5 bill into the grocery store and come out with several items.  "Several" isn't the operative word anymore.  One or barely two would be more like it since I found the average cost per item to be $4.  Okay, $3.96.  And that with my coop's 10% senior discount ... and no meat since I've been getting mine from the local farmer or the local butcher shop and don't count that into my shopping tab.  (Yes, mine is a casual survey.)  The least expensive item was a single banana--and organic, at that--for a quarter.  The most expensive was a container of good-quality (free-and-clear of all fragrances) laundry soap for $17.99 but that supposedly provided some 60+ washes.

I bought one head of cauliflower for $8, then had to pick through it for bugs, resorting to breaking it into very small florets and soaking them in a bowl of water.  You'd be surprised how many bugs I found.  Then I bought another less buggy cauliflower--which cost the same.  I divided that into eight $1 piles.

Here, then, is $1 worth of cauliflower

I was going to do an apple pie comparison--the cost if I made one as opposed to the cost of purchasing one at the farmers market, but the pie lady apparently died this past winter.  And then I was off gluten and sugar for awhile so I chucked that experiment.

When I gave a little dinner party recently--there were four of us in all--I figured it cost around $100.  Two bottles of wine, fresh apple cider, plus two nice cheeses for a cheese and cracker platter.  Some little munchy nibbles.  Four bone-in chicken breasts.  Cauliflower, chicken broth, half and half with which to make soup.  Spinach, potatoes, onions.  Ice cream plus a couple of bakery-made lemon bars.  The maple liqueur which we poured on the ice cream--yum!--had been a gift, so I figured that was free.  Of course, if we'd gone out to eat, the entree alone (with soup and dessert extra) would have come to around $28 each.  That plus tax and tip, and I dare say the cost would have risen by another $100.  So, I guess I saved $100 by doing the cooking and serving.

Actually, I don't find that people give dinner parties anymore.  If they get together--other than lunch or a summer outdoor barbecue (do people get together anymore to eat?)--it seems to be pot luck.  Casual.  "What can I bring?" they say when invited.  No, I want to reply--I'm doing the food; you're my guest.  It seems a bit of an odd concept these days.  Or, I'm finding that to be the case.  But don't you think it's fun to be invited out to dinner?  You dress up, you take a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates as a house gift, and you let your host/hostess prepare the evening.  Then, when it's your turn, you do the same for them.  Pot lucks have their place.  But so do dinner parties.

Point of Reference

I know a few people--admittedly, only a few--who take a week or two each summer and go off to a cabin with no running water or electricity where they enjoy following simpler pursuits.  Thinking about those people, I came up with a list of activities now thought to be old fashioned.   Activities, say, that were common around the 1940s--the time of my first memories--which, of course, would most certainly include having running water and electricity.

• Taking a walk.  Along a beach is always nice.
• Singing (including family sing-alongs).
• Playing a harmonica, a non-electric piano, or a guitar.
• Doing a jig-saw puzzle.
• Playing vinyl records.
• Playing cards, dominoes, chess, backgammon, bad-mitten.
• Riding a bike.
• Using a handkerchief rather than a tissue ... and cloth napkins instead of paper.  Then washing, drying, and ironing them.
• Drinking from a glass or a cup and saucer.
• Making a cake from scratch.
• Making a telephone call from a land line.
• Paying in cash or by check.
• Signaling a turn when driving by opening your window and sticking out your hand--straight for a left-hand turn, bent up at the elbow for a right-hand turn.
• Having an attendant fill your gas tank while also washing your windows and checking your oil and radiator.
• Writing a letter with a typewriter, pencil, or pen and ink.
• Using fans to cool off.  
• Making sure the cottons in your laundry don't shrink or bleed their color onto the whole load.
• Then hanging the laundry on a line.
• Listening to a radio.
• If you're a woman, wearing dresses or skirts and blouses (no t-shirts). 
• Paying half-a-cent per pound for watermelon in high season.

So .... No e-books, credit cards, trips to Disneyland (it didn't exist then), computers, cell phones, TV, microwaves, rock concerts, video games, packaged mixes, catalogs in the mail, AC (house or car), or drinks with high fructose corn syrup.  Of course, the list goes on.

The Storm ... from My Perspective

My emergency station

We here in Vermont were told to have five days of non-perishable food on hand in the event of power outages from mega-storm Sandy--or what blogger James Howard Kunstler called Apocalyptoween.  We were also told to be prepared for flood and wind damage.  (Having experienced Tropical Storm Irene just a year ago, everyone was playing it safe.)  At least it seemed we wouldn't be in the direct path this time, but since the storm covered such a wide territory, was moving so slowly, and had such a low barometric pressure, we knew we'd be impacted.

So I did the responsible thing and made preparations.  I filled my gas tank and even organized a small evacuation bag.  (Might a tree fall on the house?  Or something go awry at our local nuclear plant?)  I bought extra non-perishable food and started eating the perishable (including what was in my freezer).  I set up a little "emergency station" with candles, matches, large and small flashlights, a battery-operated radio, and my newly-charged cell phone.  Though I'm on town water, I set aside drinking water in case the tap supply became contaminated.  (Glad not to have an electric stove, I knew I could cook by lighting my gas burners with a match.  And I figured that since it was a tropical storm, the temperature would stay warm enough that my pipes wouldn't freeze in the event of no heat.  I have an oil furnace but it's triggered by an electric spark.)   

With trees, trees, trees up and down the East Coast, power outages were a sure thing.  Okay, what then?  What does one do during a prolonged power outage, especially after dark?  My eyes wouldn't thank me for reading by candlelight.  There would be no television, no computer, no catching up on emails or sending queries out to friends in harm's way.  With Mozart-like candlelight, I could conceivably sit at the piano and play something.  Call friends on my cell phone if my land line went out and the cell phone towers stayed put.   Wonder how long we'd have this archaic system of above-ground power lines.  Worry about coastal nuclear reactors.  Wonder about such possibly extensive damage that it would impact people's ability to vote.  Wonder, as well, about New Yorkers particularly--conceivably trapped in high rises with no egress if the elevators weren't working.  (One Manhattan friend's elderly mother died in the 1965 Great Northeast Blackout because she had to climb the stairs to reach her high-up apartment.) 

But ... as it turned out, I needn't have done any prep work at all.  Our area did get high winds and bursts of heavy rain plus a bit of tree damage and some power outages, but right here, all was well.  No downed trees, no live wires littering the road, no broken windows or roof damage.  Power still on, what I ended up doing was watching the devastation on television (though since the storm's landfall and nightfall pretty well coincided, much wasn't apparent until next day).

Even as I watched, I wondered about the storm's ripple effect--the changes it would make in an enormous number of lives.  There would be the initial misery as a result of the destruction, but there would also be a new appreciation of what was truly important.  There would be new people in one's life as a result of the storm ... plus new resolve to put aside weary old ways, weary old attitudes and begin to work in new directions whether in hydrology, cinema, politics, banking, energy, food supply.  Along with those hints of roads to now travel (and roads to give up), there could even be great epiphanies including some that might help lead this country's power-mongers out of their hubris, greed, manipulation, and obstructionism.  As a result of the storm, someone might decide to leave the East Coast and go solar in Colorado.  Or finish up that degree at UCLA.  Or figure how to finally bury East Coast power lines.  Or go down the block and help a new neighbor.  So, yes, I was thinking about all this as I watched ... and as I listened to the wind pummel my tall trees, making a great whooshing sound, and the rain spatter the windows as if someone were tossing gravel against the glass.

A Word About Lyme

Old Lyme, Connecticut, looking up the Lieutenant River.  The neighboring town of Lyme gave its name to this disease after several cases were found there in the '70s.  (From a watercolor sketch I made one May.)

I'm not going to go into great detail about my experience with Lyme disease but after a friend suggested it might be helpful to others, I thought I'd briefly describe this situation which came to me early June in the form of a tick, producing full-blown rashes all over my body and a positive blood test.  Plus a depleted summer, if I might say so, that left me with deep fatigue, fuzzy mindedness, a couple of protocols that brought on dietary restrictions, nausea, plus what I call "the wobblies"--feeling as if I'm on a rocking ship crossing the Atlantic or else wearing someone else's glasses.  So it was a punk summer--cancelling visitors, not feeling good for much, staying out of the sun because of sun toxicity from the antibiotic.  (I even wore winter mittens when driving so the sun wouldn't burn my hands on the steering wheel as it did even though I'd been using sunscreen.)

Summary:  Don't get Lyme.  Watch where you walk.  Don't blithely get in there and weed your garden without taking precautions before and after.  Check your arms, legs, and shoes (plus the rest of you) when you come indoors.  Put any suspect clothing in the dryer for 15 minutes.  Move to a different part of the country where Lyme doesn't exist.  (Is there such a place?)

In the past--as with two frozen shoulders--I've found help by combining Western and alternative therapies including some that are Chinese based.  So I've done the same with this.  With Lyme, the Western includes two different trains of thought--one, that of the infectious disease people who call for an initial two-week dose of antibiotic and the other, that of the Lyme literate people who call for double the dosage for double the time.  I went for the latter.  (Of course, any antibiotic requires one to take a probiotic some two hours afterwards in order to restore intestinal flora.  I also upped my intake of magnesium since Lyme apparently depletes it.)

After that, my Western medical practitioner said there was "no follow up."  Not heeding that, I chose a naturopathic doctor who did believe in follow-up treatment.  In effect, she told me that as soon as the pathogens saw the gangbuster antibiotic coming down the pike, they protected themselves with a biofilm.  (Which means they could reappear later and do more damage.)  So I went through another month taking a very specific herbal treatment four times a day.  Since there is apparently no test to tell whether one is free of the pathogens once one has had them, I then went to an applied kinesiologist who muscle tested me.  (If there's another way to find out, no one I've spoken with knows what it is.)  At that point, it appeared that I was not yet free of the pathogens so I took another month of the naturopathic herbs.

Everyone agrees:  it's a complicated disease, especially if one doesn't realize one has been infected until much later.  Then, too, there's the possibility of finding Lyme-infected tick-bourne worms in the body's tissues after the above procedures have been completed.  (Not a nice image, that.)

My tally so far with the Lyme treatment has been:  Western medicine, acupuncture, naturopathic medicine, lymph-drainage massage, chiropractic work, applied kinesiology, BodyTalk (most easily described by looking it up online), reflexology, and chi gong energy work.

In meeting all this, I've mused on the difference between Western and Chinese medicine.  Rather like our foreign policy, the first seems to identify the culprit and send in the armaments.  (Anti-aircraft in the form of antibiotics:  pow, pow.  Plus talk of "battling" disease.)  As well as using herbs and tinctures, the second takes a more holistic approach clearing energy channels so the body can work to heal itself without gunky toxins clogging things up.  My bent is toward the latter, though in the case of Lyme, I feel that, to begin with, Western antibiotics are essential.

Reality Check

August can be something of a sleepy month during which we regular folks are getting in another swim, putting summer's last ribs on the grill, and buying school clothes while those-in-the-know are selling off their stocks, buying precious metals, and putting in extra provisions for some sort of autumn meltdown.  At least, it seems like that sometimes.

It used to be that we (as a family) spoke of leaving, of going off someplace else if whichever Presidential candidate we didn't want actually won.  In fact, some of those candidates did win, though we stayed put.  Later, alone, I thought again about living in another country.  But either a place was too expensive, or it had creepy bugs or the flying sort that gave you dengue fever, or its attraction was simply a good beach and brew, or it didn't want oldies like me coming in and taking advantage of its healthcare system.

The nice thing about having a blog is that I can write about whatever I want.  Though this blog's raison d'être is to reflect on what one of the older set thinks (namely, what I think), since we're all up to here with bad news of one sort or another, I tend to want to provide somewhat gentler topics.  But I also follow three social activists. 

One is Chris Hedges, a divinity student-turned-journalist who speaks of "human needs before corporate greed."  He believes in peaceful demonstration, in getting out into the streets since, as he says, voting misses the mark.  "To place faith in electoral politics is extremely naive," he said in a talk.  And, in his 1/23/12 Truthdig column:  "Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power.  Voting is an act of political theater.  Voting in the U.S. is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran, Iraq."  It was in his column, too, ("Criminalizing Dissent" 8/13/12) that I learned more about the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which Obama recently signed into law (also called The Homeland Battlefield Bill) whereby we can be incarcerated with no legal charges filed and no trial.  Those arrested are labeled terrorists or terrorist-friendly, but since no one is defining what that means, it could well include peaceful dissenters.

Another activist I follow is Stuart Bramhall, an American woman, a psychiatrist, who did, in fact, leave the country and move to New Zealand.  She writes on a wide range of topics:  the FDA's approval for putting micro-chip sensors in pills so that someone can monitor whether or not we take our meds ... banking executives resigning and buying what's known as "prepper properties" in the country where they can (they would hope) become self-sufficient.

The third is James Howard Kunstler who first attracted my attention when I read his book, The Long Emergency, about the perfect storm we face upon reaching peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation, and financial collapse.  He began his career at Rolling Stone and now salts his blog with highly colorful, articulate prose about how The Powers That Be are trying to sustain the unsustainable with a large mix of magic and falsehood.  His thesis is:  "We're going to have to learn to live totally different lives.  We have no idea what that will look like, but it's as necessary as rain and will take time."  He also says that "none of [the Democrats or Republicans] has a clue that reality has other plans for the U.S. economy which is to contract, de-globalize, downscale, and go local.  That so-called economy they're trying to bring back?  It's gone, baby, gone."

Anyway, August or not, it might be time for a reality check.  Here's mine.  I live within walking distance to town though not as close as I would prefer ... so I'm not absolutely dependent upon the car.  I have a lawn that can be turned into a veggie garden.  I've put aside a fair amount of non-perishable food (though Chris Hedges says that the Patriot Act says that anyone who has more than seven days of food is suspect).  We have a small town with a sense of community and a good batch of individualists who've already set up a preliminary barter system.  We have water and wood.  If totally dependent upon the grid (such as those with pellet stoves or oil furnaces), one needs a back-up source of heat.  And we mustn't forget a good stash of cash tucked under that proverbial mattress. 

So, yes, I'm staying put.  As I see it, whatever lies ahead will be part of an on-going, creative process.  Anyway, at this point in my life--and here's my real reality check--I want to be near the family and the grandkids.  Make peanut butter cookies together.  Lend a hand ... and have it lent to me.  You know--all that good family stuff.