IF IT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK

  “In every life you have some trouble, but if you worry you make it double. Don’t worry, be happy.” Bobby McFerrin wrote that song thirty seven years ago and I still turn to it for a breath of fresh air. In sync with that is the clever axiom, “The only two things you should never worry about are the things you control and the things you can't control.” Don’t worry, be happy. 
The only problem I see is that our primitive forebearers evolved through a time when there was good reason to feel anxiety and uncertainty and whether we agree or not, the way our brain works now has not evolved from our Hunter-Gatherer ancestor’s. We don’t get to pick and choose which underlying fears we can disregard. Still I catch myself mouthing the words; “. . . if you worry you make it double; don’t worry, be happy.” Often it helps for a few minutes or a few hours, like a Tylenol with a tooth ache. So when fears come back I am preconditioned to accept, even if just for a while, the fate I cannot prevent. 
I can’t remember a time when Americans were so divided. Both sides worry the other will gain ground and the dispute falls just short of organized violence, and that’s on a good day. Our Civil War came on a bad day. Southern conservatives defended their God given right to buy and sell human beings, to use and abuse them as slaves. After General Lee surrender the country was tired of killing each other and turned to the west. Manifest Destiny would drive the next ideological purge. It was a national movement to conquer, exploit and rule over all the lands west of America’s existing borders. Ironic that we had just fought a six year war to undo slavery only to follow up with a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against indigenous nations that had sustained their culture in those contested lands for thousands of years. It seems when God is on your side then war is a righteous instrument and killing is how we keep score. 
Again in the early 1900’s it was conservative ideology that resisted and fought fiercely against Women’s Suffrage. It was considered necessary to keep women ‘Bare-foot and pregnant at home where they belong’. The struggle to give women voting rights and move toward gender equality was a very big deal. They got the vote but gender equality still moves two steps forward and one step back.
Then, just when the slavery issue had been put to bed the 1960’s unraveled with Civil Rights legislation. The laws changed but the culture did not and we looked the other way rather than address prejudicial practice and ‘Jim Crow’ injustice. Historically the South has been deeply conservative socially but their economy was based on agriculture and they favored the Democratic Party as a hedge against big banks and industry in the North. But that changed dramatically with Civil Rights in the LBJ years. With the stroke of a pen LBJ flipped the South into the conservative Republican camp.
Currently there is a political ideology gaining support that comes right out of the 1800’s. White Christian Nationalism asserts that American identity and institutions should be explicitly Christian, primarily white, and patriarchal. It is a political construct, not a theological one. What could be more conservative than guaranteeing white male privilege by marrying it to centuries old Christian tradition? Resisting change & preserving tradition are the pillars of conservative ideology; the powerful stay rich and the weak stay poor. 
‘Ain’t no place to lay your head; Somebody came and took your bed. Don’t worry, be happy.’  That’s about all I can do. I’m too old to make a fight of it but I refuse to let the bigots spoil my old age. Our rulers rule as if the country was a corporation. They are the CEO’s and Board of Directors who can hire and fire whoever you please for any reason, any time and as long as the privileged white men profit and nobody else matters. 

I realize that an articulate conservative could present an equally biased observation in the other direction. But ideologies tend to remain static and fixed while politics and practice change when it serves the purpose. They can change their names and pledge allegiance to whose ever star is rising but conservative ideology doesn't change. I’ll keep asking the question: Who exactly: Who profits from what you would have us do? If it looks like a duck, if it waddles and quacks like a duck then I’m going to presume that it is in fact a duck. All I can do is vote and I do vote, even though the bastards are scheming to gerrymander congressional districts to their advantage. What I truly believe is that nobody is in control, no one to save us from ourselves and God doesn’t give a damn, why should she? What is certain is; the rule of unintended consequence is timeless and proves itself every day. In every human undertaking there has been unintended, unexpected consequences that may be either a blessing or a curse. All things being equal that suggests that half of the time our best efforts yield damaging, costrly, unintended consequences. So I do worry, feel uneasy and suffer anxiey with feral humans and their nuclear weapons. Short sighted and self obsessed, their only constant is to win at any cost. But if you want to sleep easy, Don’t worry, be happy. 

MAKING LEMONADE

  My life evolved overnight in 2020 with the Covid pandemic. I’m not even a blip in my culture but I’m all I’ve got. So in April of ’20 I was well adapted to retirement and the self inflicted quarantine seemed easy enough. After five years it may seem like a small bump in the road but I’m still wrestling with the aftermath. Avoiding human contact when you live alone is like wearing shoes that don't fit. You push on through it but you walk funny and you never really get used to it. The President told us it was a liberal scheme to undermine his MAGA plans and that sick old people were going to die anyway. His shills are still bought into all the ‘Trumpfuckery’. The Urban Dictionary definition is; “any actions involving racism, misogyny and hate speech masquerading as patriotism.” But I don’t want to go there. Been there, done that. At my age I’m not going to let the narcissist bigot spoil the years I have left. When you get lemons, make lemonade.
Some people collect stamps or play golf or any number of hobbies to stay busy while navigating retirement. Neither stamps nor golf work for me, the house and yard require some attention and I have family I like to family with. But I live with a case of wanderlust, I love moving through time and space, moving my feet; don’t need a destination just need to be in motion. I’ve shared this often, what should I call it, (personality quirk) with whoever is listening. Like anything else, wanderlust is an ultimate freedom and sometimes it goes up in smoke with crash & burn. It’s not for everyone. All I can do is speak for myself and I’ve no regrets over any of it. 
There were a couple of health issues in the spring that I worked through but it was well into summer before I got all of my ducks lined up for a road trip. I put a couple of thousand miles on my truck, did my August 4 birthday on Lake Michigan's coast, made a concert in Grand Rapids with friends, a ferry ride across the big lake to visit with my kids in St. Paul, Minnesota. On return I felt so good I started thinking about my nest road trip. Fall is the perfect season to go exploring. It took a couple of days to hatch an idea (New Mexico) but I’ll be going out again 1st week of October. I write more and better I think when I’m on the road so there’s that to look forward to. Going alone I meet more people; I like that as well. 
Sitting here writing I’m listening to a play-list from my I-Tunes library. It’s not easy, do one or the other but both together I listen more and write less. Just listened to Helen Reddy sing Don McClean’s ‘And I Love You So’. I’m a sucker for good love songs and this one is about as good as it gets. I really identify with the 4th verse; “The book of life is brief, And once the page is read, All but love is dead, That is my belief.”
Just now as I write, the music bumps up to Kate Wolf singing; “Here In California.” Maybe not a standard but she died early in her career (1980’s) and this one is too good to skip over. In the 1st verse and the chorus a mother cautions her daughter; “She held me ‘round the shoulders, In a voice so soft and kind, She said love can make you happy, And love can rob you blind.” The chorus follows with a cautionary metaphor; “Here in California, Fruit hangs heavy on the vine, But there ain’t no gold, I thought I’d warn you, And the hills turn brown in the summertime.”  In 3 verses and a chorus she spins a story it would take an accomplished writer several chapters to write.

    They say that money is the root of all evil but money and power are interchangeable and I think it's the power part that goes sour first. So the shills have power now and I'm making lemonade. 

OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND

  By definition a ‘Peeve’ is something that you find annoying. A ‘Pet Peeve’ would be something most annoying. But there are some peeves that are so benign that they barely register on the ‘Annoyance’ scale, still you notice and process with a level of disbelief. I can think of three, one is for real, one I forgive and one that’s just a distraction. In high school I took Drivers Education class, a 17 year-old senior who already had a drivers license. It was an easy A grade and you got a discount on insurance if you passed a Drivers Ed. class. 
My pet peeve is drivers who switch lanes in heavy traffic while driving way-way too fast. Defensive driving was a big deal in the class. Our teacher reduced the idea to a simple rule; “You must believe that every car on the road is being driven by someone who is trying to kill you, so drive accordingly.” It’s like playing dodgeball with cars. Offensive (aggressive) driving belongs on a race track where getting there is not enough, you have to get there first and it doesn’t matter how you do it. But on streets and highways going twice the speed limit and cutting others off to meet your need for speed is extreme and not a good thing. I know I’m old and maybe that’s why I still pay attention to those defensive driving rules; observe the speed limit, keep close track of the traffic behind you, keep a safe cushion between cars. Yes, I get annoyed by aggressive, speeding, lane changing drivers.
The 2nd peeve is not a serious peeve but it can be annoying. As much as I appreciate my I-phone sometimes I hate it. I see well enough to keep my drivers license but reading fine print, I don’t even try anymore. My I-phone has a (zoom) app with a sliding zoom feature but it’s like a camera, it can’t take pictures of itself. Many texts have fine print and I might as well call the person and ask them to read it back to me. I can try the ‘pinch-in’ move to zoom in but a mild case of arthritis is enough to lose that fine touch. I bump too hard and it’s like the phone sneezes and goes someplace I don’t want to go. All it takes is once and I am annoyed. I’m better with other apps like my Spanish/English translator but the ‘pinch-in-pinch-out’ is a challenge. The annoyance gets my attention still I remember to be thankful for all the other good stuff I can do with my I-phone like texting photos and blocking spam numbers. 
The 3rd peeve is not annoying so much as distracting. My dad had eight tattoos, three on one arm, four on the other and one on his chest. As a kid I was fascinated with pictures on flesh and the fascination never went away. In the military tattoos are common, so common they don’t raise an eyebrow. I remember guys who woke up with a dreadful hangover and a new tattoo that they didn’t remember getting. My ‘Tat’ was more about identifying with my dad than an alcohol induced act of ‘crazy’. What I wanted was a small, inexpensive, animal located in a suitable location. I accepted that it would be with me for the rest of my life and hoping for a long life the idea of a faded, washed out image on flabby, wrinkled flesh was a turn-off. So the small gorilla landed on my right buttox. It was high enough I couldn’t sit on it and the recovery was amazingly easy. Some of my amigos thought it was cool and copied with their own, better tattoos. One got a mountain climber climbing up and out of the crack of his ass, another had a target with an arrow stuck in the bullseye. 
For the past 66 years ‘Kong’ has been living in obscurity under my jeans’ hip pocket. Only a few friends and family have seen him and nobody wants to bend over for a closer look. It’s never been big deal but it is a link back to my dad. But I like body art and often score it mentally like judges score gymnastics. To get a high score it has to look like it belongs there; I like leafy vines and flowers growing off the shoulder and down the arm, like it grew there. Don’t care much for flags, knives, names, symbols, anything that doesn’t fit the moment or needs an explanation. After many years of informal judging I consider myself a qualified expert. When I see half a dozen bad tattoos splattered up and down arms and legs I might roll my eyes and muse, “What were they thinking?” but I let it go without much thought.

        ‘Kong’ my gorilla is a bad tattoo. But nobody’s going to see it at Walmart or anywhere for that matter, not even on a shorts & T-shirt day. My dad smiled and that was good enough for me. On a 1-10 scale I would give ‘Kong’ a 3 for its location. The gorilla on my butt is not news, looks more like a bruise than a tattoo and hasn’t come up in conversation in a very long time. A better name for him might be; ‘’Out of Sight, Out of Mind.’

EVEN LITTLE BIRDS KNOW

  I don’t remember exactly when but I must have been in Junior High, my grandpa lived with us. He was a cranky old man who kept to himself but we had an unspoken trust, what went on between us stayed between us. One day in the fall I came outside as he was coming around the corner of the house with a shovel and a bucket. I followed him to the middle of the front yard, asked what he was doing. There was some dirt in the bucket and a Maple whip (a small tree in its 1st or 2nd year with a single, unbranched trunk and a few leaves at the tip of its leader.) He was going to plant it.
He had me uncoil the garden hose at the corner of the house and drag it to he spot he had started digging. I asked questions and ran water into the hole then watched him nest the taproot into the mud at the bottom. He held the whip steady while I started back-filling dirt into the hole. We let the water trickle into the loose soil long enough for me to learn; “Planting a tree is always a good thing and the fall is the best time for it.” The house is still there, I don’t know who lives there but after 70 years, when I drive by the old place I see the tree is still making afternoon shade on the front porch. 
In the early 90’s I was a resource teacher at an Environmental Magnet Middle School and read an article that said; “People who have a keen sense of appreciation for nature and the environment can usually trace it back to a childhood experience that was shared with an elder role model.” That Maple whip was the first tree I ever helped plant and my grandpa and I did it together. 

        My job was infusing the environmental theme with plant science. I had a greenhouse and a lab where teachers brought their students for hands-on activities. We did lots of tip cuttings and seed plantings in paper cups with follow up to measure the seedling’s progress and took field trips to identify trees by their leaves. Before I got that assignment my biology had always favored animals. But the more one learns about any aspect of nature the more it draws you in. The chemistry of photosynthesis is complicated but it can be modeled with toothpicks and miniature marshmallows and we did that in small groups of 2 or 3. My plants vs. animals preference adapted considering that waste product of plants is the free oxygen we breathe and animal’s waste is - you know what cats try to bury and birds leave on your windshield. 
In the 1990’s Americans were polluting the environment at a record rate. Right wing politicians and big business knew what was happening but didn’t want to believe it. They stood to profit from irresponsible policy & practice and nothing would jeopardize those profits without a fight. In denial hey mocked and discredited researchers, called it a liberal hoax saying, “The sky is too big and there is too much water for us to do that.” and the threat of pollution had become a running joke. I was dismissed in my own family as a Tree-hugging, hippy, save-the-whales freak. After all, those plastic bottles and coal burning industry create jobs that drive the economy and corporate profit. We are still polluting at a record rate but everybody knows. Human nature is strange, they used to call cigarettes ‘coffin nails’ due to the cancer connection but millions keep on smoking. It’s no surprise that businesses that save money by polluting the air and water and land, they keep on doing it. 
John Muir was a pioneer naturalist in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s and instrumental in the formation of our National Parks system. He was quoted, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Out of sight-out of mind translates to, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Yet, that translates to, “Pay me now or pay me later.” Everything is connected, interconnected and the ‘Pay me later’ certainly will come around. When it does it may be too painful to bear. Even little birds know not to sh*t in their nest. 
I don’t know what my grandpa would think. His time was the 20th Century and suffered from the ‘Out of sight’ mentality. But he got the tree planting just right. In the 70+ years since we planted the Maple whip I have planted more trees than I can count. I like to think I would have grown to love and understand the nature of nature without my grandpa’s influence. 
I think about this stuff, I really do. If that makes me an old ‘save-the-whales’ freak then that’s alright. I do care about our Mother planet, especially the thin layer of air, land and sea that supports life. It is fragile, only about four miles thick and it’s the only place on earth where life can flourish. That’s not just human life but all life. Trees were here long before humans climbed down from the trees and started walking upright and trees will still be here when there are no more people. Thanks again Grandpa.

I GUESS IT DOESN'T MATTER

  I have deleted so much from so many unfinished written pieces I can’t remember what has survived and what was dumped without a second thought. Sometimes just framing the language meets the need to write. If nothing else it’s therapeutic.

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I don’t do this very often but this will be one of those times. I am rewriting my last blog post. So it’s a different piece of work even though it deals with the same ideas. The idea I came up with originally isn’t bad but it feels a little fractured and I can do better. I have a fifty-ish friend about the age of my kids, we don’t always see things the same but it doesn’t get in the way. His backstory is wide and deep and he likes to think he knows all of the why’s and how’s of how his journey has shaped his personality, values, beliefs, etc. I like to think that the self-analysis task is a lot easier said than done. The human animal is hard wired to overestimate our own ability to read the tea leaves and connect the dots. That is the premiss that I began with. 
I introduced ‘Confabulation’, the unintentional creation of false or distorted memories to fill in the gaps in an incomplete memory. Those distorted memories are usually attributed to a medical condition (amnesia, dementia, etc.) but a healthy mind can also loose or misplace parts of a memory. The remembering part of the brain is subject to a constant stream of information and there has to be a way to sort out the irrelevant stuff and keep the rest. Even then the mind keeps sorting and deleting; short term memory. The point is; even though we pay attention a great amount of detail in a particular sequence of events is lost from memory. So said, even a healthy memory bank can lose things and the mind creates a fix like a patch on a flat tire; an alternate reflection. 
That remembering part of the brain is a lot like artificial intelligence (AI) software. Give it a story that is full of holes and it will fill in the holes with a plausible but fabricated substitute to complete the story. The person remembering has no reason to doubt the authenticity of the altered memory. A healthy case of Confabulation: If it doesn’t cause a problem then I guess it doesn’t matter. But I can connect the dots and understand that it is what it is. I am old enough there has been plenty of opportunity for my old mind to ‘Confab’ my backstory. I like to think I have a handle on how I got to be the present version of ‘Me’. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t trust memory to be perfect. Personality is a complicated soup and develops over time so whatever I am is what I’ve become, one day at a time rather than following a recipe (stir this stuff and then add that stuff and keep stirring).
I’ve been told that the lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client. I would think the same thing for those believing they can solve the riddle of how they got to be the person they are. My friend has a cut & dry rationale for the way he picked and chose his way up to the present. I cannot even address that idea without leaving space for the thousands of individuals whose finger prints are all over my backstory. It’s not only what one chooses but also experiences they never experienced and nobody lives in a vacuum. Add to that, how does one factor random chance into their own destiny?
How did I get to be the person I am? As I remember, I trusted and loved my parents. I always wanted to please my mother and going to church made her happy. I didn’t have to believe anything, just sit still and drop my coin in the offering when it came by. As a young adult my sanctified enthusiasm fell way short of the mark but Mom was looking the other way. It wasn’t until college I learned to question tradition and value the discipline of science and critical analysis. I never thought of it as a major change in course but what did I know? Since then “God is the metaphor that transcends all levels of human comprehension.” (Joseph Campbell). Everything mysterious that we cannot understand is attributed to the metaphor. It came easy, swapping Faith for Good Karma. How it came about is not as important as the fact that it did.
I’ve never been attracted to tobacco or booze. My dad smoked cigarettes but Mom got him to quit and she would not allow booze of any kind in the house. How that low profile unfolded I don’t know.
As memory would have it a good friend and I sneaked cigarettes out of our dad’s smokes and puffed away under a bridge near his house. After a week or so I couldn’t ignore that I didn’t like the taste or the smell and the buzz from getting away with mischief wasn’t fun anymore. It never made me feel grown up or cool. I quit before I could learn to inhale, he didn’t. My friend died of lung cancer twenty years ago. Dun! Good story I suppose, just can’t be sure it’s all true. 
I can only remember being drunk three times, twice in the army and once shortly after I was discharged. What I do remember is being sick and the vomit part. Whatever sense of uninhibited bliss it provided it did not survive the edit. I sip a little wine with food now and an occasional shot of peach brandy but the memory of my head in the toilet, vomit coming out my nose is both powerful and real, too much so for it to be a confabulation.
Yuval Harari is a scholar/writer/historian, the source for one of my favorite quotes: “Whatever it is that you believe, it doesn’t have to be true; it just has to work.” How we get to be the person we see in the mirror, the person others see from afar; that story doesn’t have to be true but it does have to work, to serve a purpose that can be either a virtue or a vice.
I’m going to change the title of this blog post. If nobody notices then it doesn’t matter either. I haven’t received any death threats and my retirement check has never been late so I’ll just stay with what’s been working for all these years.