A re-post but a damn good one if I do say so myself.

Now I know how the Inca’s may have felt. Or the Hittites. Or even those stone worshipping people on New Guinea – sheesh. 

The life and society I have lived is being buried. First, you take away a man’s beer like Budweiser and replace it with Moose Drool or something equally stupid. Then you make him wear lycra shorts and a helmet to go for a bike ride. Isn’t that enough?  Apparently not and now they’ve gone too far; they’re stealing my childhood food.

Listen to this (From Sept 15 Star Tribune Food section): ” Delicately spiced pork shoulder defies it’s bologna shape; its thinly sliced, warmed and slightly scorched on the stove, cloaked with Gruyere and sharp cheddar and tucked into a toasted and buttered roll.” All for only $11. This is the modern replacement for the good old bologna, Wonder Bread and chunk - of - cheddar cheese sandwich. Really.

First, if you even know what Gruyere cheese is I don’t want anything to do with you!  Next, why would anyone do this? Can you imagine your mom saying, when you come in from a morning of playing ball with your buddies (without a single adult interaction), “Come on, honey, it's almost done, I’m just slightly scorching your pork shoulder and Gruyere sandwich. I’ll get the sugar free kool aid and low salt chips in a second.” Yeah.

Thanks, mom, but could I just have a hotdog? “Sure, dear, I’ll get your Limousin beef dog blanketed with a barrage of Asian inspirations: tangy kimshi, yuzu fruit mayonnaise, avocado, chopped egg, charred shishito peppers, pickled ginger. . .” Limousin beef?! Fruity mayonnaise? First, I only use Miracle Whip and second, NEVER on a hot dog. (Although I do put it on my bologna sandwich - and almost everything else.) I’ve got your shishito right here!  

Well, can’t screw up dessert, right? How about S’Mores? Sure, as long as it’s “a light, spongy graham cake indulged with chocolate cremeux (fancy word for pudding) with picture perfect pillows of meringue marshmallows strategically placed around the artful plate.” Picture perfect pillows. . . huh. That will NOT look good on the camp fire. Is nothing sacred!?

You know, it’s okay if all stores have to be "upscale." It’s also fine if we only build “upper end” homes and apartments. It’s even okay if no hip person would be caught dead going to a regular restaurant. (Gotta be a trendy joint that serves this kind of stuff – and covered with kale, no doubt. Yuck.) But this is going too far! Taking the remnants of my youth and trashing it by charging $11 dollars for a bologna and cheese sandwich (replacement), well, that’s just too much. 

I guess this is a not too subtle reminder that I might be just a bit out of step with the times and need to go gently into that good night (on the town at Olive Garden.)

Move it on over, Inca’s, a big old dog is movin’ in! 

                Pandemic TV Viewing                  Echo in the Canyon

Turn Turn Turn  The Byrds

We finally got around to watching "Echo in the Canyon," the marvelous show about all the musicians and music that cross pollinated in LA and specifically in the Laurel Canyon area of the Hollywood Hills in the early 60's. It opens with those wonderful 6 opening chords from the song above . . . and bang zoom I’m a senior in high school! Why do you think that is? This dude has an answer:

"It has long been held that, just as objective time is dictated by clocks, subjective time (barring external influences) aligns to physiological metronomes. Music creates discrete temporal units but ones that do not typically align with the discrete temporal units in which we measure time. Rather, music embodies (or, rather, is embodied within) a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate “clock-time.” This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time.  Perhaps the clearest evidence of musical hijacking is this: In 2004, the Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring deemed Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie” the most dangerous music to listen to while driving. It is not so much the distraction, but the substitution of the frenzied tempo of the music that challenges drivers’ normal sense of speed—and the objective cue of the speedometer—and causes them to speed."  JONATHAN BERGER, COMPOSER

That’s exactly what I was thinking! Okay, maybe not exactly but close. Everyone knows/thinks that music has a special effect on us, it’s a real time machine – albeit it only goes in one direction – and we understand how it can launch you back to a specific time and place with as much accuracy as memory allows.

Jakob Dylan (yeah, the son of OUR Dylan) does a great job interviewing many of the prime movers from that time interspersed with some of the best music of the era. Guys like Jim McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, Jackson Brown, Michelle Phillips of Mamas and Papas - even Ringo Starr - and countless others. (Yeah, I know there were a LOT of talented women like Joni Mitchell, Carol King and Judy Collins who, sadly, don’t get nearly enough credit.) This was when American music was just coming out of the old 50’s stuff and the boring folk era in the early 60’s. I won’t ruin it for you but I will just say there was lot more than free love and marijuana going around out there then, hint:  a lot of it had to do with The Beatles (duh) and Brian Wilson (who Tom Petty equated with Mozart - who am I to argue?) But enough about them, let’s talk about me.

I listen to a lot music because Mrs. Dear Leader listens to a lot of music. She is more up to date than I but we both still mostly prefer music from past. You know, I admire the people - people of a certain age - who wholeheartedly embrace the most recent music (and I acknowledge that there are a lot of talented people out there now) but generally I’m not one of them. Do I think “my” music is so superior that it’s not worth my time to even listen to new stuff? No - as long as they can top the Beatles or Steely Dan!

Is it because I can’t relate to the people who are creating new music? (Well, Bruno Mars and I do have the same kind of hat.)  Maybe I just don’t have the energy, ambition or desire to stay up to date (I’m very busy you know.) Or maybe, like comfort food, there’s comfort music, music that you are familiar with and that you identify with; music that allows you to instantaneously escape your current situation (even a pandemic) and maybe revisit the younger you or at least who the younger you was when that music came out. (Huh?) Anyway, it allows us to forget the whole aging process and slip back to that young, svelte handsome dude of yesteryear.

Perhaps. But perhaps it’s not my fault, perhaps I’m a victim! I read somewhere that another smart guy theorized that like a lot of other things, many of us stop paying attention to new music somewhere in our early 30’s. Thus, we just get stuck in a particular era (sort of like a lot of my friend’s golf wardrobes) and our tastes live there forever. I don’t know, maybe that’s right. As Mr. Berger says, music “distorts clock-time” allowing us to actually relive some other period of our life. And it’s not just the “good” times but also the bad times so it’s an equal opportunity device. On the other hand, it could be more than just revisiting your youth. Time speeds by so fast leaving all in its wake – including our youth – that it’s easy to think that our lives kind of lose their meaning in the debris. So maybe these musical journeys back help to validate us, to prove that, hey, I lived on this planet too, you know!

It occurs to me that during our “prime,” music is just enjoyed in that moment. After all, when we're young we're sure there are certain to be many more moments ahead. I don’t think anyone thinks about how music will affect us in the future – ha, little did we know!

Ah well, on the other hand, maybe this all just bunch of psychobabble. Maybe it’s because we all just turn into fuddy duddies like our parents. Carn sarn that hip hop! Where are The Eagles and Chicago – and The Doors - when you need them?! 

If you don’t get anything else out of this just Put Echo in the Canyon on your watch list today.

California Dreaming    Mamas and Papas

After the Storm

     Well I’ll be damned. It seems like it was just the other day that I was just sitting around with my buddies wondering if we would ever get through this mess and what would happen after. Now, here we are, a couple years later already (time really does fly when you get to be a certain age) and it turns out all of us were a little right and also a little wrong. Okay, a lot wrong.

     I'm shocked! Despite all those folks hoarding toilet paper and buying guns we made it without total collapse. It was touch and go for a while there around the time of 2020 election – a little mass hysteria going on there - but in the end it all worked out. Not everything is going well, of course, it never does. For example, the economy – and my IRA – still haven’t recovered but it seems to be getting better. Also, a lot of jobs never came back because a lot of industries never came back so there's tons of change there - can you say too many restaurants and retail stores? But there’s a lot of change a foot anyway, which shouldn’t be too be a shock; after every earth-shaking event like this including, the Civil War, Great Depression and both World Wars, left behind was a very different, usually better country. That, and a whole generation who will never forget lessons they learned during the Great Pandemic of 2020 (like never take their job or going to the grocery store for granted again and that maybe having savings isn't so stupid after all.) 

Anyway, here’s some of the things that surprised, amazed or shocked my buddies and me.

    Our peerless leaders finally saw that this never-ending cycle of boom/bust/bailout is not a sustainable model. A country built on debt, debt and more debt is not healthy and perhaps we need to get rid of policies that encourage bad behavior by everyone and especially big business. So the Fed is finally trying to normalize interest rates and the rest of us start to be smart. (Pretty sure this is happening but hard to tell in current mess of economy.)

    I guess we’ve lost our taste for consumerism. After weeks or months of social distancing or sheltering in place we've learned that it isn’t necessary to go shopping – online or otherwise - for every new, shiny object and that we really can live without many of the things that have consumed us as we consumed them in the past. (Remains to be seen what this means for the economy that depends 70% on consumerism not to mention jobs in retail.)

    Apparently, our experience spending so much time together just talking, thinking and enjoying simple pleasures like a walk actually became a regular part of way of life for lot us. (And becoming even more hooked on streaming - much to the chagrin of theaters.)

A big shock is that we seem to have developed some empathy for each other and differing views. The extraordinary partisanship and anger about things that, weighed against millions of us getting a disease and thousands dying, just don’t seem that important anymore. Hopefully we will see people starting to think more about what’s good for their community and country, like my mom and dad and grandparents did, and not just our own individual interests. (Hope this is true but way to early to tell.)

    Looks like some of the practical solutions that were seemed necessary during our fight with the virus have become mainstream – hallelujah! Talking to your doc on the phone - telemedicine – proved it works and helps reduce costs for millions of people and God knows we need it! And I was right, online learning goes mainstream!  Note: I taught online college classes for several years and knew it works when done right. Not sure what the education-industrial complex thinks of this but oh well. I'll bet there a lot more things like this going too.

    Who knew?! It seems this mess has finally taught us that we need to streamline, simplify and reduce costs of our whole healthcare system.  I guess watching millions of our friends and neighbors losing their healthcare along with their jobs finally convinced us that our crappy system is no way to run healthcare in a modern country. Sadly, the healthcare-industrial complex is still fighting it but the wheels are turning.

   Well, well apparently experts aren’t so dumb and science seems to work afterall. Maybe using actual data and facts in our decisions is okay. When the facts change so do their conclusions – duh! e.g. face masks. All of a sudden we seemed re-learn something that we shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place, it is better to listen to smartest among us then the dumbest. (The quick acceptance of the new Covid 19 vaccination by anti-vaxxers maybe helped this along.

    I have to admit that this kind of surprised me, a closet cynic: there actually seems to be a renewal of hope. Instead of cynicism, anger, fear or despair there is a sense that there is a reason to believe. Call it a belief in God, belief in reason, belief in ourselves or, I don’t know, simply the belief that there is always a reason to go on and . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    Ouch, Prudie, get off me! Damn it, dog, you woke me and I was having such a great dream. 

   Okay, okay, I know it’s time for your walk. I need to find my mask and my rubber gloves before I can take you out. Crap, I hope this last shelter in place order since the stupid virus started again in October ends by the end of year and really is the last one cuz we need to get out of here for FL!

   I may not know much and no one has ever called me Pollyanna but I say hang in there, friends, the sun will return and if even only half of these things come true it would still be a great dream.     

            Beatles    Here Comes the Sun

Notes from a Prisoner in Solitary Confinement

So here we are, trapped in our own homes – the horror of it all! You’d think that a guy who has been retired for a few years would be comfortable with sitting around the house all day and pondering his navel. But no, one of the verities of life is that there’s a big difference between doing things we want to do and things you have to do – even if they’re the same things. Watch something on Netflix? Ha, you can’t make me! Take a nap? Who says?! How about cleaning the closet after 10 years of stalling? Who made you the boss?! (Besides there’s plenty of time for that later.) Have a cocktail? My god, are you nuts, it’s only two o’clock! Oh, well, okay.

Luckily, Mrs Dear Leader is very patient with me. In fact, she’s too patient with me – she just ignores me. She ignores my whining about no jelly beans in the house or that I’m tired of washing my freaking hands or that it’s stupid that the golf courses are closed. (Her pet name for me right now is Baby Dougie.) Also, I look stupid in a stupid mask. A mask, I might add, that she made and is busy making masks for neighbors and care givers. I know, right? She's just doing it to make me look stupid and whiny! Well, in fact, everything IS stupid! (Well, not the mask – but I do look stupid in it.)

Thank god, the dog hasn’t given up on me; Prudie is the one constant between the pre-pandemic life and the current sad state of affairs. We had a saying when I was in Thailand defending freedom from the dirty commies lo those many years ago that “every day is Tuesday and every meal is breakfast.” That’s because that’s what it felt like when you flew missions from 11PM until 5am every day, seven days a week, week in, week out.  Hey, pass the beer and waffles! Where was I going with that? Oh, yeah, that’s kind of the way a dog thinks (I think.) For them, every day is the same, every day is sheltering at home. Get up, go for a walk, go poop, have breakfast, take a nap,  have lunch, take a nap - what’s not to like?!

As an aside, I saw that a cat in Belgium caught the covid virus. (And now a freaking Tiger? What's with those felines?!) Yup, all the symptoms – fever, coughing, breathing issues (not sure how you would know with a cat.) Caught it from humans but the cat recovered. Anyway, the larger point is that if a cat can catch the virus, in theory a cat can give you the virus. Now luckily, cats are naturally so good at social distancing that it probably doesn’t matter. In other news, no word that dogs can catch it - thank god! - so score another one for mutts!

Anyway, it’s hard for we humans to embrace a dog’s life no matter how comfortable it might be IF someone is trying make us do it. This seems to be especially true of Americans; we have this independent streak that rears its head at the most inconvenient times. I mean, we put up with a two-party political system that is clearly a total failure without a peep but get mad when we aren’t allowed to infect our neighbors? Sheesh.

Finally, this whole social distancing thing and staying home is a pain but at least we’re all in it together. Well most of us anyway. So don’t be a whiner like me. If you’re retired, you’re lucky. If you still have a job, you’re lucky. If you have good neighbors, you’re lucky. If you have a dog, you’re lucky. (No comment on cats.) For those that aren’t so lucky let’s try to be as generous as possible in whatever way possible to them.

   Neighborhood Mensa club discussing string theory and social distancing

If you don’t have the effing virus you’re lucky so don’t be stupid!

Lucky Man Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Are You Essential?

Are You Essential?

Known for my gift for understatement let me just say that the coronavirus is really something. To say it is unprecedented would be a similarly redundant understatement. I mean the Spanish Flu in 1918-19 was an equally overwhelming event or so they say (I was pretty young then) but it is a different world and America now. It is impacting pretty much all aspects of human life and almost totally in a bad way. I say almost because one can always come up with something good about even the worst of human events – even if only half of us believe it. And it is safe to say that we are not going out the other end of this thing the same as we came in, especially those of us who are non-essential.

It’s an interesting term, non-essential. The kindest definition I could find was “not absolutely necessary.” I hope that makes all you folks whose non-essential businesses were closed feel better. Government workers, on the other hand, are very familiar with this term – and all the jokes that go along with it – when the government shut downs and most of them are furloughed. Who’s laughing now!? I’m sorry, it’s not funny but it is enlightening.

One of the things that we are learning is that our economy is a very fragile thing. In 1918, for example, 40% of people were farmers and 60% lived in rural areas, now it’s 1% and 20%. Life is always hard but it was definitely simpler then. I suppose we’ve all grasped this given that a simple thing like losing internet seems like mayhem and electricity going out for a day or two causes hysteria. In the modern world it’s sort of like the old knee bone connected to the thigh bone, connected to the hip bone, kind of thing – it just cascades down. Think nuclear plants, banks, utilities and airlines. Another thing we’ve learned that is also pretty interesting, apparently no one has enough money to last more than a week or two without a paycheck – and, not surprisingly, including most big corporations – and that makes times like this basically impossible. Thank god for big government, right?!

And now we also find out who is essential in our economy. In addition to doctors and nurses apparently what holds our whole economy together in desperate times are truckers, grocery store clerks, and the food delivery folks (and, praise the Lord, liquor stores!) I am very serious; they and a few others are actual heroes. Too bad they aren’t properly rewarded pay-wise. Then again perhaps being essential is reward enough.

As for us non-essentials, I guess we’re just faceless cogs in the big consumer wheel that is our economy. Well, everyone has a role. We just stay home and stare at each and occasionally order something from Amazon. We’re lucky though compared to the Golgafrinchans. Yeah, they . . . Wait, you don’t know who they are?

In Douglas Adams’ excellent book (and movie of the same name) “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” * he talks about these folks on a distant planet, Golgafrinch, that wanted to get rid of the “worthless third” (you could say, the non-essentials) of their population. In their case, that was the “population consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants and telephone sanitisers (sic).” (NOTE: don't take this list personally, if Adams were alive today I suspect he might change that a bit and also add hedge fund guys, investment bankers, advertising execs and most CEOs. Oh, and Apple store salesmen.) Anyway, to get rid of these hangers on the productive people told them that everyone on Golgafrinch had to escape because something horrible was going happen to their planet and so they put them all on a huge spaceship. They also told them that they were so important that they needed to go on the first rocket ship and everyone else would be right behind them.  Yup, you guessed it, nobody else left. Problem solved. Oh yeah, in the Adams book, the rest of Golgafrinchans "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone." I kid you not.

Is there a moral to this story? Probably not but at least many of us can come to appreciate our place in the scheme of things and maybe faceless cogs are lucky to be just that! 

*Really great trilogy, with some of best satire since Jonathan Swift - read it.