Richard Thuss: Musings from the FROG

The End Of The World: (Humor)

2011-03-26T17:56:00.000-04:00

When you look at the TV and read the news, you can see that there is a prevailing theory that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. That phrase is one that my father often used, and it is difficult, at times of late to argue for a more positive destination.

Now you have to understand that, according to my wife, I’ve always been a negative ninny. In my retirement she has patiently tried to train me not to see the world through a set of glasses where fire and brimstone flicker bright along the edges, but to visualize an image of flower filled meadows surrounding me as I plod through the fields of life, all the while emphasizing that I should concentrate on smelling the roses, so to speak
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Her patience has been amazing, especially considering that I grew up with the concept in my head that God created the world just to get even with me when I wasn’t looking.

It’s sort of weird perspective when you think about it, since I often painted myself as a victim whose importance is second only to God, and then I picture God as a “Gotcha” type of deity who just got tired of creating universes and decided to concentrate instead on picking on me
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One by one my wife has exorcised those demons from my head with the patience of a saint. I’m her project in this life, and she figures if she can succeed with me, then she has earned a first class seat to her next incarnation. It’s in a place where I’m hoping she envisions me as her “boy toy.”
I had almost climbed out of that self dug hole until I opened up the paper today and found out that the world is going to end on May 21st.

Now I know that the end of the world has been predicted every few years, and often by the same predictor, but this time the guy says he has it right. Eight weeks from now a few people are going to be whisked off this earth to rapture, and the rest of us are in for some pretty hard times.

I don’t want to sound like I’m whining after all my wife’s hard work, but what really ticks me off about this upcoming event is that I’m never going to get to see the last Harry Potter movie. It’s been a long time since I read the book and I’ve forgotten who wins.

A Bird's Way Of Saying Thanks

2011-01-12T16:57:00.000-05:00

My middle daughter bought a toy for her first child that makes noises, plays a set of short tunes or says a few encouraging words when it is touched, moved, or any of the buttons on it are pushed. It is designed to encourage a baby from a few months old to a year old to reach out and grab it and get a verbal reward in the form of a short jingle of music or a few positive words such as “good job” or “thanks.”
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She used it for her first two children and offered it last week to her older sister who now has a four month old.

The unit is pretty touchy, and it will start speaking or making noise, at times, without any intentional input. It cannot be turned off without removing the batteries, and that fact made my oldest daughter say ”no thanks” when I took it to her in New York the other day.

The unit was therefore stuffed back into the bag, and it provided my wife and I more than a few smiles as we travelled on our three hundred mile journey home. Without warning it would start emitting some musical sound or a few words when we hit a big bump or sometimes without any seeming cause.

Whenever the window was opened to pay a toll, the air rushing into the back of our Jeep set it off, and I received a few strange looks from toll takers at my choice of music or the mumbled words that came from the back of the car where no one was seated.

When we got home last night I set the bag on the floor of our laundry room, planning to return it to my other daughter within a few days.

This morning’s routine of starting the coffee, walking down to get the newspaper, finish making the coffee, then read the newspaper was 3/4ths complete when I realized that the bird feeder on the back deck had not been filled for four days.

I wanted nothing more than to sit down with that cup of java, so it took the guilt trip of imagining a starving bird to get me to go out to the laundry room, grab the container of bird seed and run outside without my jacket on and load up the feeder.

When I came back inside my feet were covered with snow so I stamped my shoes on the doormat, and as soon as I finished stamping the toy said but one word: “Thank You.”

You can imagine my first look, then my laughter and I walked back to grab my coffee. And then the “Thank You” reminded me there was also no water in the birdbath so I filled a pitcher and did that task while fully expecting another “thank you” when I came back in and stamped my feet.

Nothing happened until I got back into the kitchen, and then I heard in a rising crescendo “Ta Da Da Da.”

I figured it was the birds’ way of saying thanks
(True story)

I'm No Longer A Father

2011-01-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

This morning I got up all happy and jolly. A new coating of snow was on the ground, fresh coffee was brewing, and then "whack" I read in the newspaper that I am no longer a dad.

I went to bed last night the father of three grown daughters and woke up this morning learning that I am no longer a father according to the US government: I am either "parent 1 or parent 2.

This is due to the fact that the State Department has decided to make passports gender neutral by changing the words mother and father to parent one or parent two.

Now I'm sitting here this morning, shaking because I'm afraid one of my daughters is going to call, and I won't know how to answer: Do I say " Hi this is parent 1," or "Hi this is parent 2?"

You see my wife is out of town, and we have not been able to discuss our ranking in this parent 1 or parent 2 situation. If she demands the parent 1 designation does that make me a lesser partner? And if I take it, will she feel that fifty years of progress in women's rights has just been thrown out the window?

The state department designations, by indicating a numerical order, imply that one came before the other, and for the life of me I can't remember which one of us came first during each of those three encounters.

Now I don't mind being a parent, but I always sort of like to be called dad.

I'm going to miss that.

It's January, and I want Something New

2011-01-05T17:51:00.000-05:00

My wife should never leave me home alone with the checkbook in January.

There is something about the first few weeks of the year that causes my wants and my needs to diverge greatly, and that divergence is an outright danger to the funds in our bank account.

In retirement you have to wisely budget the expenditures of the funds remaining unless you want to end up sitting on one of your children's doorsteps yelling, "remember me?" or asking the Salvation Army to friend you on Facebook.

I am embarrassed to admit it (well not really) but impulse control, for me, during this winter month is usually accomplished only when I look at my wife and realize I don't want her to lead a pauper’s life if I wink out early.

When my wife is around the sanity part of my personality, which is the smallest part, similar in size to an electron, rises up and slays my insanity demon, which is about the size of the current universe. I then usually make it to the end of the month when the huge, unpaid Christmas bills come in and writing those checks mostly cures my illness because the term "insufficient funds" looms in my future if I dare write another check.

When she is away, however, I am left to run amok. I start daydreaming about new cars, about buying a kit airplane and starting to fly again, and I begin my relentless search for the motorcycle that I just have to have to make my life complete. Foolishness realized does not mean foolishness conquered, and I've discovered that age and wisdom are inversely proportional in the male half of my lineage.

Well my wife is away. She's spending a few days watching my new granddaughter, and I'm here alone. Boy that new BMW motorcycle looks good. And the price isn't bad: It only costs as much as my first house.

I sort of feel like the little half man half fly caught in the spider's web in the movie "The Fly."

"Help me. Please"

Christmas Magic

2010-12-23T13:04:00.001-05:00

I usually try to embed a little humor in my posts and then surround it with an observation about the absurd behavior of someone who is on this wonderful journey we call life. Often that fool is me. (Microsoft word wants to change that last word to “I” but I prefer to use “me” because I’m writing this and not Bill Gates)

I do realize that my observations about life usually come from a fertile mind where the word fertile has the same meaning implied as when we say that mushrooms are grown in fertile soil
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I have wracked my few hundred still functioning brain cells for the past few days to come up with a piece about Christmas, but I have failed. And I’ve failed mostly because Christmas has always been a time when I revert to a small child both in my mind and my actions. And a small child’s mind is fixated on the magic of Christmas, and not the foibles of the more senior set.

Some would say using the term magic with Christmas is over used, and they would remind me that only a limited percentage of the world’s population celebrates the holiday, and that many millions of them are starving and lonely during this season. While that knowledge tempers my euphoria during this time of year, it does not extinguish it because there are still a billion people or more that for a few days a year can feel and act like a child again.

Since our thoughts have power. (After all they move our arms and legs don’t they?) I have always believed that conscious thoughts are the controller of the universe. And to me that means that the billions of thoughts over the past hundred years about a man in a red suit delivering presents on Christmas eve has certainly changed the world.

If we really do create our reality with our thoughts then a few positive muses about Santa by each of us can’t help but improve the state of the world even further.

I’m getting excited about that round, jolly guy that all of us created visiting me in a few nights and so are my grandchildren. Not just for the toys I’ll play with on Christmas morning, but for the wonder of it all.

And it might even snow.

The Inventor Of Friction

2010-12-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

Some of you who read this article will think that I am crazy, which is a fact that anyone who has read any of my previous writings already knew, so don’t feel alone. But this morning I started wondering about the person who invented friction.

Notice that I did not say “the man who invented friction,” and that’s because I’m gender neutral in my thinking even when it comes to deities. And in this case, friction is such an interesting phenomenon that I might place on the female side of the deity discussion during one of those, “Is God a he or a she,” arguments.

The reason for my sudden interest in friction is that as I was walking down to get the newspaper this morning, the wind almost knocked me over on my keister.

It’s only early December here in northern Virginia: a fact that’s pretty much true everywhere on this planet. But the point I am trying to make is that the thermal input from the sun has decided to take an early vacation in the south, and all the hot air from Washington must be blowing east.

The bitter cold, strong, gusty wind reacquainted me with how friction between the air and my face results in massive shivers running down my body, while my nose starts acting like a slowly leaking faucet.

At first I wasn’t really thinking about “who invented what” because the stones in my driveway and my shoes had agreed that when they get rubbed together, friction would be high: Which is a similar deal that many men try to negotiate with their wives.

The gusts dispersed all of the dry leaves and left a wet, thick, under-layer of fall tree droppings plastered to the ground.

Wet leaves, freezing temperatures, and a brisk gust of wind were combined. For a moment I was dancing with the same flare that convinced my wife to quit taking dancing lessons with me a few years ago, but with skill that I’m personally convinced would have qualified me for Dancing with the Stars.

Fortunately I remained upright, and I slid along until gravel replaced the leaves under my feet.

I think adrenalin rushes like that clear my brain for more expansive thinking: You know the big picture stuff like the creation of the universe, quantum physics, and whether my next step was going to result in one of my bones being broken, and if the crutches I threw out last year should have been stored in the basement a little longer.

If you’re wondering why I put the inventor of friction on the female side, it’s because whoever invented friction has a sense of humor. And I can tell you that when that last gust of cold wind hit me as I ran into the house, I wasn’t laughing.

Protecting The Ones Who Kill Us

2010-11-29T18:19:00.000-05:00

I read an article this morning about the results from a meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna. It seems that they rejected restrictions on the overfishing of bluefin tuna and swordfish, but instead adopted new protections for sharks.

Now, I'm completely for the protection of all marine animals, but I just wonder why the commission for the Conservation of Tuna decided to protect sharks instead of tuna.

It makes me think that the Atlantic tuna need a better PR team because the group chartered to protect them just sold out to the shark lobby. Those tuna guys and gals who were swimming in the ocean this morning all woke up to find that the people they have been paying to prevent their extinction, instead granted protection to a group of predators that just might decide to eat them for dinner. That's not what you would call a good investment of their limited fish dollars.

The sharks must have given a pretty good pitch to the delegates. Something like: "If youse guys don't give me protection, I'm a gonna eat your firstborn for lunch," And the tuna delegation probably made the mistake of sending Charlie the Tuna as their rep, who is a pretty nerdy looking guy with a very unimposing presentation style.

Think of it. Who would you side with if you were on the commission: Some fat, blue-colored fish who wears glasses or the second cousin once removed of Jaws?

I have no doubt that swordfish will learn the lesson of this convention pretty quickly, and within a few weeks we will start hearing about swordfish attacks along the coasts. Just a couple or three gorings ought to do the trick to get the delegates attention and pretty soon the swordfish will move up on the protected species list.

As for the tuna, they just need to add a little more mercury to their diets because if they can't get our attention by chewing on is or goring us, they can try poisoning us to death. Maybe then, all of us will become convinced to do what is right. And that, of course, is to stop the over fishing of our oceans.

An Irreverent View Of The Pat-down

2010-11-25T15:18:00.000-05:00

The US Government and the transportation security administration have really missed the ball (no pun intended) in this controversy over the enhanced pat down or full body image scan at airports.

Now the point they have missed is that most people don’t like to be poked or prodded or seen in the nude unless it’s by someone of our choice. And for some of us, to be seen in the nude we like the lighting to be on the dim side and our partner to have taken off their glasses.

For those people that don’t like to be groped at all, they will have to go to the full body scanner, and the real problem with this device is that it shows how we really look. With all the great technology in digital imaging we could just modify the software of this device so that every man’s image looked like George Clooney without clothes and every woman looked like Julia Roberts wearing Victoria Secret’s best We could then be given a copy of those images as we left the booth as a souvenir from our trip.

For those that don’t like the full body scan idea, there is a real easy set of fixes for this problem. First we need to be able to choose the person that is going to grope us. When we get to the airport we should be given a full color brochure of the candidates and their sexual preferences. That way we could choose the person who fit our profile of someone we would like to be groped by.

The second point is that women don’t generally like to be handled unless the atmosphere is right, so the TSA needs to install candle lit booths with a gentle smell of lavender in the air. And they need to make sure that at least one of the pat-down experts looks like Brad Pitt or Prince Andrew.

For men, the booth should just have a couple of beers in it.

What's Right? It Could Just Be Your Point Of View

2010-11-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

Kjar and Blake did not know each other. They were born into different worlds with a multitude of different experiences, and they spoke different languages. A great many things separated them, but tonight they both had the same objective and that was to capture an animal that they desperately needed for the collection in their zoos.

Although they were located continents apart, each one was hiding alone in a small, forested area, which at it's border opened into a wide-open plain covered in lush green grasses as far as the eye could see. Their four member support teams were each dozing in vehicles about a mile away and waiting for a signal that the capture had been successful or had failed. Nestled in at the edge of the forest was the habitat for their prey.

Neither one wanted an adult. Both had captured a mated pair in the past and in both cases the male kept fighting and resisting captivity until it weakened itself and died. The female, soon after it's mate's death, succumbed either to loneliness or disease.

This time they were after one of the young. Having recently captured a young male several years old, both of them were after a female because they hoped that raising the two young ones together might eventually result in the first babies born in their zoos.

The preparation had taken years but the execution of their plan would be swift. The parents, if they were around, would be quickly anesthetized and the young female taken before they awoke.

For both Kjar and Blake, everything went exactly as planned, and before sunrise they were back in their vehicles and heading home.

Blake never heard the screeching of the mother Rhesus monkey when she awoke and found her baby was gone. And Kjar, well she was already past the orbit of Jupiter when Mrs. Persing discovered that her daughter Sarah had been abducted.

Both the zoo in Bejing and the zoo on the third planet of Aldebaran now had their prize.

Being Judgmental

2010-11-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

I'm usually not judgmental, but something that happened yesterday spoiled my chance of beating my two-day record of non-judgementalism. That's a shame because if I had beaten that record, then I was going to take my wife out to dinner for a celebration where we could critique the chef. Now I have to start again.

What caused me to fail in my record setting was an observation I made about a group of workmen who were replacing the gutters on my home.

I recently had this epiphany that I was no longer young, which came from accidentally looking into a mirror. That insight forced me into the realization that cleaning gutters while hanging on a ladder thirty feet in the air was one of those joys in life that I needed to leave behind.

All that was required In order for me to say sayonara to that twice yearly chore of scooping up rotten leaves, worms and polluted water with my bare hands was to have my current gutters replaced with a type that was guaranteed not to clog. The gutter salesman informed me that I also needed an amount of money that exceeded four years of tuition when I went to college, but telling that part of the story fits much better into my complaining habit than my judgmental habit.

When the installers showed up yesterday morning, I was not surprised that the primary language they spoke and the primary language I spoke was different. Virginia is a border state, in that it borders other states. And like all of them, our state has a large population of people who sometime in the past two decades did not appreciate the idyllic lifestyle south of the U.S. border, and they moved north hoping for a better life.

I have learned over time that not speaking English very well does not prove anything about a person’s citizenship because Nancy Pelosi speaks in a language I do not understand, and I think she's a citizen, Isn't she?

Anyway, as soon as the workers and I communicated well enough to agree that I lived where I said I lived, they went to work and I went back into the warm house for another cup of coffee. The temperature was close to freezing, and watching them work with bare metal with ungloved hands for just a few minutes was enough to start my teeth chattering.

When their boss stopped by an hour later to have a look, the three installers were hustling around at full speed on the top of my roof, pulling off the old gutter, installing the new gutter and running up and down the thirty-foot ladders at half the speed of light.

After the boss’s ground survey from a distance was complete, he left and they must have felt pressured because they speeded up their work pace to twice warp speed and finished the job within another two hours. I got up on the ladder and checked it a few places and they had done quality work.

It was at that moment that my record for not being judgmental was doomed.
You see, I don’t know if those three men are citizens or not. If they are not, then I wish they were because in my lifetime I’ve noticed that people who work as hard as these men did make good citizens.

Now I know it' s not nice to be judgmental, but if I was opening a business, the not speaking of good English might be one of my requirements for hiring. And with the way I fracture the

Doggie Paddling To Stay Afloat

2010-11-05T18:15:00.000-04:00

About fifteen years ago my wife and I left our house to go to a doctor’s appointment, leaving our seventeen and fourteen year old daughters at home. It was early wintertime, and a deep layer of accumulated rainwater had fully submerged the protective cover over our in-ground swimming pool. The water layer above the cover was almost three feet deep in one area of the pool, and a few days of subfreezing weather had created an ice layer about an inch thick over the entire surface.

We always used the fenced in area around the pool as the wintertime dog run, especially at night, and so when our beautiful collie made it known he had to go out, one of my daughters let him into the enclosed yard.

A short time later she called to him to come back into the house and discovered that he had fallen into the pool, broken through the ice and was doing a self taught doggie paddle in the middle of the ice laden pool. The cover, most of it, which was underwater except for the edges, prevented him from paddling to an area where my daughters might have been able to help him get out.

It was the era before cell phones, and my wife and I had not yet arrived at the doctors, so they called the police, and an officer arrived in about ten minutes. He was not inclined to jump into the frigid water, and he could not reach the dog. His solution was to toss our patio furniture in to the pool one piece at a time, apparently with the hope that somehow the dog would grab hold of one of the chairs, and he could then pull our collie closer to the side.

By the time the officer exhausted the furniture supply, my daughters had managed to contact my wife and I, and we were on the way home.

When we reached the house, the dog had been in the freezing water for, at
Least, an hour and he was tiring quickly. The policeman was poking at him with a long handled pool skimmer, and when my wife rushed toward him, he responded, "He needs to work with me here."

This episode came back to me the other night as I was listening to the aftermath of Tuesday's election. Each side of the political spectrum was responding toward the other side by saying "They need to work with me here," and then they would throw their version of a verbal lawn chair at their opponents and in doing so hit all of those Americans who are doggie paddling just to stay afloat.

As soon as I saw the dog in the middle of the pool that night, I jumped into the water and eventually lifted him out. My hope is that every one of these politicians that were elected both in 2008 and this week jump in feet first to the task because if we all get tired and stop paddling, they are going to drown too.

Gremlins

2010-10-28T21:02:00.000-04:00

I'm sort of glad that I am not running for political office. And it's not for the obvious reason that I am easily corruptible when it comes to perks like free donuts during congressional hearings.

It's because I believe in Gremlins. When I see how Delaware's senatorial candidate has gotten pummeled by the press for dabbling in witchcraft when she was in college, I can easily visualize how they would treat me for believing in Gremlins, especially since I am no longer young and good looking. Not that I ever was good looking, but you can see my point.

Now to get back to my story about Gremlins: Yesterday the Gremlins were active in my household. They seem to have a sixth sense of knowing when I am in a bad mood, and it is on those days they flock to my house looking for any opportunity to bring my mood down a notch or two from miserable.

I am a whiz at buying and selling stocks. I can lose money with the best of them, and anyone that wants to make a killing in market just needs to do the exact opposite of what I do. When the market opened yesterday my latest trade was shown to be as dumb as the rest of them, and so the day started off with me in a bad mood and my wife handing me a book on how to be happy.

Now you really need to be in a good mood, maybe even a happy mood in order to read a book about being happy, so I decided to do some work in the garage instead. Sucking the remnants of a billion dead bugs, and spiders into a vacuum cleaner seemed to fit my mood better that reading a book written by a man that was obviously happy because he was making a fortune selling a million books about being happy.

As soon as I opened the garage door a Gremlin ran into the house. I couldn't actually see it, I'm not that crazy, but my keen sense of inductive reasoning traced the next series of events back to that moment.

Within a few minutes of the garage door being opened, an army of stink bugs was marching across my driveway. My defense against that army was to close the garage door, and when I pushed the close button, Gremlin number one went into action.

It is hard to describe the behavior of the automatic door closer, but if I had let it continue to run, within a few minutes my house would have been shaken loose from the foundation and then started hopping down the driveway.

The problem was that the door seemed to be confused as to whether it wanted to be open or closed, and it was changing its mind about five times a second.
The physics of the situation was beautiful. The vibrational-wave was self-reinforcing, and it's amplitude kept building over time. I finally got the door to calm down and close by disconnecting a wire from the unit's safety feature.

Some of you will question my assertion that this frenetic behavior was caused by a Gremlin, but by the time I made it back upstairs to search for that happiness book, the little sucker had also trashed my internet service as well as a computer.

Fast-forward until this morning. No sign of the invisible Gremlin, Internet service back up, hosed computer un-hosed, and garage door, well that thing was still making it's own version of a metal tsunami when I turned it on so I called the manufacturer.

The customer service rep didn't seem very interested in how my day was yesterday, and she interrupted my brilliant but wordy description of all the trouble shooting I had done. "Hook back up the wire you disconnected," she told me.

I proceeded to restate that I had tried that approach a dozen times to no avail. "Hook back up the wire," was the singular response.

Gremlins have a hearty laugh when they make a fool out of you, and I could hear that sarcastic chuckle coming through the phone after I told the woman it now worked perfectly.

I'm Taking Cash From Iran

2010-10-25T17:55:00.000-04:00

This morning's paper had an article about the leader of Afghanistan taking satchels full of cash from Iran. It was money which he said he was using to keep his presidential office running.

At just a million dollars at a time, he intoned that it's not like it is big money. And he was quick to explain that the U.S. Government also supplies him with a few large bags full of dollars every time he needs a candy bar from the vending machines in the presidential palace.

My guess is that our Government was forced into a quid pro quo after they learned about this unique re-use of Iranian shopping bags, and the state department has probably been been doing a ten to one match. We include free coupons in our shopping bags for an extra hundred percent off any future weapon system of the Afghan president's choice.

Like the fool that I am, I got angry for a few moments, but then the genius inside me kicked in.

I went upstairs and got an old satchel out of my closet, and I filled it with money. Well actually I wrapped a few one dollar bills around all the monopoly money I could find in my kids old toy box, and I then put a picture of the seal of Iran on the outside of a Wal Mart shopping bag

I then sent the White house a letter with a picture of me holding the bag and informing them that I wanted to offer them an equal opportunity to bribe me.

I just told them Iran had given me a hundred grand. I didn't want to appear greedy.

Making Decisions: Splitting The Universe

2010-10-21T17:34:00.001-04:00

I've always had a hard time making decisions. I hid that fact pretty well in my work life, showing confidence and bravado while my brain was fighting the "should I, or shouldn't I" battle.

The weeping and moaning of my employees who were effected negatively by my decisions, and the holier than thou attitudes of some of those people who were effected positively by my decisions did little to help in this daily mental battle. That was especially true since some of those weeping I liked, and some of those gloating I did not.

Now the real problem with making decisions is that they are important, and not just because of the obvious reasons, like weeping and moaning employees or unlikeable gloaters. They are important because we may split the universe in two every time we make a decision.

I read this while I was growing up, and I am sure it is the real cause for my slowness in making crucial decisions.

You see, some physicists believe that in this crazy quantum world of probabilities that when we make a decision between two options that another universe pops into existence where another you has decided to do the opposite.

Decide to get married to the woman of your dreams, "bam," immediately another universe forms where you have decided to let her go, and because of that decision the other you winds up living alone and desperate for the rest of their life. Decide to invest in that speculative stock, "poof," there is universe in which you are rich and a parallel one where you are dirt poor.

This forming of other universes I have found to be a pretty heavy responsibility. Think of it: every time you see a homeless person there is another guy who looks like him drinking fancy wines in a New York sushi restaurant.

I'm sure you can understand why I am becoming much more indecisive as I get older. It's because I have gotten to live in the Universe where I've made all the right decisions: And I keep thinking about all those other me's who have not.

My Mistress Is A Tree

2010-10-01T16:02:00.002-04:00

I know this is a strange thing to admit, but I am a lover of trees. My wife is okay with me sharing my affections with these beautiful deciduous and coniferous friends, and she never seems to be threatened if I sneak out at night for a walk in the woods with my other love.

I do not fit into the category of a tree hugger, although I have been known to wrap my arms around a few of them when no one is looking, In fact a few dozen years ago my neighbors were about to summon the local arbor police when they saw me out in my back yard beating a few trees with a baseball bat. Lest you too think I am crazy, I read that if a tree is dying, then sometimes you can beat the outside bark with a bat, which apparently stimulates the tree to suck up more water and sometimes they recover. The beaten trees actually leafed out for several more years before they finally succumbed to the fact that I had dumped three feet of soil over their roots. I apologized to them when I realized the error of my ways, but by that time they were in no mood to listen.

This love affair with another life form began forty years ago when an old landlord gave me a dirt covered slice off of a tree he had cut down a few years earlier. "Try making something from this" he suggested, and my first thought was a fire. Up until that time I had done some wood-working using pine boards purchased from a lumberyard, but there is little connection to a tree when you sort through lengths of precut, planed lumber in the back corner of the 1970's version of a Home Depot

This gift of an outside slice from a two hundred year old walnut tree was different. And since the "try... this" suggestion was issued as a challenge by a man who thought he was superior to everyone, I started the process of proving to him that I had some skills in the art of crafting something useful from a tree.

I will admit to more than a little of second guessing my personal wisdom in having accepted this challenge as I scraped the mud, spiders, and several years of other barnyard crud from the surface of this wooden slab. But it was in that endeavor where I fell in love once again just a few months after I married my wife.

In just a few hours of cleaning, hand planing, and then sanding, I had uncovered the incredible beauty hidden inside a walnut tree. Hand rubbed boiled linseed oil took it's natural inner beauty to the level of a goddess when exposed to the warm muted light of a late afternoon sun.

Love can be described as the feeling you get when your physical and emotional senses become saturated, and as I stared at the swirling grain of the heartwood in that tree, perfection interrupted several times by an intense black color where the cells had been seared from a decades earlier lightning strike, there is no doubt I was once again in love.

For more than a dozen years I maintained this clandestine relationship, and every year I would sneak down to the basement workshop sometime in October to craft a piece of furniture for my wife's Christmas present. Coffee table, butler's table, corner cabinet, bell cabinet, wall sconces, cabinets in a plant room: all were hand crafted from the wood of walnut trees. I made a curio cabinet using oak one year, and whenever I look at it I always wonder why I strayed.

My first love, my wife, has never turned on me even though I have given her many reasons to do so, but my other love, after ten years together, exposed a side of her I never knew, and I became hyper-allergic to her poison. Fine cut shavings and dust from a walnut tree can kill a horse, but my reaction was different, I became intensely angry whenever she was cut in my presence, her poison somehow affecting my central nervous system.

My wife put an end to this affair when she realized what was happening, and for several decades I stayed away, momentarily tempted when a fine furniture catalog would arrive at our door with some exquisitely crafted piece made from solid walnut.

Every few years i would sneak down to the basement and craft something, but the first time I forgot to wear a mask my walnut goddess's venom would penetrate my skin and cause a severe neurological reaction. I know I needed to end the relationship, so I switched to using cherry for some furniture pieces: A nice wood, in fact a beautiful wood but one that when I look at her, she elicits feelings of friendship and not love.

I have remained on the straight and narrow for many years now, but several months ago I stopped in a new store that opened up in a warehouse a few miles from home. Local Woods was the name of the store, and I should have turned and walked away, but I did not. There in the front of the store stood my old love, majestic in her raw state, waiting for the sculptor to bring out all the beauty from within.

These boards in the photo below are now in my garage, calling to me everyday. And as each day passes, I am drawn tighter into her poison laden web.

Thank You, But I Want More

2010-09-28T10:55:00.000-04:00

Toward the end of each month I look at how much money is left in our checking account and then decide how much my wife and I can afford to give to charity. I know giving to others should be first on my list of payments each month, but somehow my other creditors don’t see it that way.
Each day as the month progresses I cull through the mailings we receive from a half dozen legitimate charities and a few questionable ones, and I put a stack of candidates-for-giving on my desk. I could never satisfy all of the charities in the stack unless I distributed five dollars to each, but I rotate through the list as the months go by.
There are a number of worthwhile charities that spend far too much on their mailings. Each month they send me more than a few additional requests for help, and those requests come independent of whether I gave to them last month or not. I have several times been tempted to stop giving to those charities that fill my recycling bins, but then I realize the post office would surely go broke without them and I grit my teeth and add another inch of paper to the stack.
There is another practice of charities, however, that makes me want to scream, and that is the practice of sending thank-you letters for your contribution. The letter starts with how the charity could not do its wondrous works without generous, kind, deity-like people such as myself, and then the letter quickly transitions to an appeal for more bucks. Most tell you how much to give in order to keep your deity-like status.
Now I know how hard it is to run a charity, but first of all they need to stop wasting money by sending thank-you notes. The work they do is thank-you enough. Second, if they do want to keep saying thanks, then they need to stop asking for more money at the end of the letter. It really is an attempt to make you feel guilty that you did not give enough and they would like more. Thank you notes should be for gratitude, not for greed. And when you ask for more from someone that has just given you something, then I qualify that as greed.

A Gift We Couldn't Refuse

2010-09-25T15:13:00.001-04:00

Over the past several years, northern Virginia has played an unwelcome host to a small ugly critter affectionately named the stinkbug. They have expanded into many states since they were brought into Pennsylvania in a shipping container in 2003 where it appears that they were included as a free sample from China.

It's been rumored that China's party leaders were upset at all the publicity the Japanese were getting for their beetles, and that they wanted their share of the U.S. Market for obnoxious bugs.

A few years ago the Japanese had most of the market share in our backyard, but this year the Chinese bug has just about wiped out any competition. My guess is that WalMart has rolled back their prices considerably on this Chinese product.

They are actually a very clever little import. Since they have no natural predators, they multiply rapidly and then attack a lot of crops but they particularly love sucking the juice out of apples. Apple juice used be one of the major agricultural products here in northern Virginia until the Chinese pretty much wiped out the business with cheap juice imports a half dozen years ago.

You have to give it to the Chinese, this was a very clever way to get rid of the rest of the competition, especially since they did it with a bug that emits a foul odor when it is scared or squashed. Sort of the ultimate example of "screw you, stronger message later."

This morning I read that our local milk producers are worried because their cows are being fed corn infested with these bugs and they may start producing milk that smells like stinky feet.

When I read that article, besides putting my bowl of Cheerios aside, and then running to another bowl where I made gagging noises for a while, I started seriously thinking about what we could provide back to China as a free gift in one of our shipping containers.

Considering the imbalance of trade, my guess is that we have about two billion of their containers coming in to this country and just one or two of ours going out each year, so it has to be something that that is pretty potent and smells bad.

I'm pretty much through the list of the members of congress and Senators, and there are more than enough candidates on both sides of the aisle for the next few years of shipments, especially since a few of them will be looking for work after November.

Killing Mother Earth

2010-09-25T14:30:00.001-04:00

Each day in the newspaper I read one or two articles about how humans are killing the planet. Too much carbon being emitted, too much pollution of the water supply, and too many people eating the animals and fish causing the extinction of a large number of species.

The scenarios of the effects of human action always end with a scorched, polluted planet, which is termed a dead planet because it is devoid of human life. The articles always finish with some form of plea that we should do something to save the planet.

Now I am not going to get into the issue of man made global warming, simply because it is a polarized issue with both smart and incredibly stupid people on both sides of that discussion. I worked several years of my life with people investigating that phenomena, and I learned that very smart people close their ears when they sense someone is questioning their findings, and that very dumb people open their mouths when the same event occurs.

What I will say is that we are experiencing climate change and that statement is irrefutable, simply because climate change has occurred since this planet first started cooling off nearly four billion years ago. And I feel that most people would agree that the current trend in climate change generally makes it more difficult for an expanding human population to survive.

It is obvious that all the rhetoric about killing the earth over the past thirty years or so has done very little to change the way the people of the world live their lives, and in this case, to a large degree, I include myself.

I have wondered why this is true, and I have come to what some will feel is a very bizarre conclusion. You see, I think we have adopted the wrong perspective and therefore misrepresented the real truth in this issue. By doing so it has given us a reason to do nothing or essentially nothing.

This issue is always couched in a statement that we are killing the planet. We have declared ourselves at the top of the food chain on this planet and we have also declared ourselves as the ultimate controller of the fate of the earth. It is a very egocentric view, and by having that perspective we form the opinion that when the Earth gets broken then we can fix it: If not today, then tomorrow.

I would like to suggest that the real food chain in the universe continues upward, and the level above us, and not below us is the earth. We don't control it. It has ultimate control of us. Now those of you who believe in the concept of Gaia will say "right on" and continue reading, and those of you that limit the concept of life to DNA based organisms will be sorely tempted to hit the back button on your web browser, but hear me out.

If you change your perspective of the pecking order in the universe, you can no longer say, "humans are going to kill the earth, because we are not. The Earth did just fine in regulating itself before us, and it will do just fine after we are long gone. It will be here until the sun turns into a red giant and consumes the Earth four billion years from now.

So I suggest we all change our way of thinking about this problem and admit that, the earth is really going to kill us all if we don't change our approach.

What should we do? I think we need to change the dialog from how do we stop climate change to how do we live with climate change. Embedded in that change of perspective, I think will come the realization of what we have to do to keep the Earth from killing us.

Ants Swarming In My Head

2010-02-26T11:02:00.000-05:00

The human mind is a wondrous thing, but it seems that far too often the voices we hear in our heads are more against us than for us. One author has labeled those thoughts of negativity as “ANTS” or Automatic Negative Thoughts, and I like that imagery because these little stealers of my life just keep coming no matter how much I try to shoo them away. ANTS emanate from a primitive section of our brains, and those that study the brain have humorously referred to their voice as “The Itty Bitty Shitty Committee.”
I think these ANTS, just like real ants, need three things to survive: a place to live, food, and a way to reproduce. Since these little critters make their home in my head, I cannot literally destroy that home without undesirable consequences, and therefore I’m left with the dilemma of finding a way to take away their food, and in a way, take away their chance for having sex.
I should have said reproduce, but writers know that if you use the word sex once or twice in an article more people will read it to the end.
We writers like books for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that sometimes by reading we find an answer to a question that has plagued us for a long time. In this case I found a way to kill these little life suckers.
Every time I begin to think one of these negative thoughts, I now yell in my mind the word “Cancel,” and I imagine stepping on the thing, so that I stop its reproductive cycle.
Yesterday was one of those days when the critters were swarming, and several times I let them take control. But as I worked through the day, I got better and better in getting rid of them. I don’t know yet if I’ve killed their queen, but I do know I’ve got them on the run.

Paying For The Person Behind Me

2010-02-23T16:17:00.000-05:00

I do a lot of long distance motorcycle riding with an old college friend. Since both of us reach the age of Medicare this year, the term old means that the I’ve known him a long time, and so has the earth. Being old friends, we watch out for each other when we ride. I keep scanning the roadside for a Starbucks for him and he keeps scanning the road for telltale signs of a Dunkin Donuts for me. I prefer their coffee, and of course with good coffee you have to have a donut.
We watch out and take care of each other in many other ways, and one of them happens when we pull up to a tollbooth. When you’re fully encased from head to toe in a motorcycle riding-suit with leather gloves, it is a challenge to get the money out of your pocket to pay the toll. It’s a process that takes a few minutes, which includes: get the bike stable, take off your gloves, find the ticket, find the money in one of your pockets, unzip it, pay the toll, cram the change and receipt in the pocket, zip it up, put the gloves back on, put it in gear and get moving.
That process makes anyone sitting in a car behind you start to play the national anthem on their horn. When there are two of us in line, an entire symphony is playing before both of us get moving.
After the first trip together we just started paying for the one behind. This makes the total process much faster, and the people behind you in line usually don’t give you the finger when they speed by.
I really started thinking about this today when I read about the new, proposed health care legislation. The proposal includes a provision that delays implementing one of the ways to pay for the bill until 2018. It’s sort of like me saying to the toll taker, “The guy behind me is going to pay.”
I don’t treat my friends that way. And let’s be honest, each one of us that enjoy the freedom of being an American in one-way or another are friends. In this case we are passing the costs on not only to our friends but also to our children.
No one should be comfortable with this concept. I hope that whatever happens in the health care debate that our leaders decide that we need to implement a pay as you go policy. And then maybe in the future, we can even start to pay for the person behind.

Winning The Lottery

2010-02-18T11:22:00.000-05:00

I’m mad: ranting, raving, flaming mad. I just checked my lottery ticket and I did not win. Now this outcome is no different from every other week in the past twenty-five years, but this time I just knew things were going to change. This time I was going to win
You know how you get this feeling that the stars are finally aligning in your favor? The feeling that the days of bad luck are over, and easy street is the place where you are going to spend the rest of your life? You know that feeling? Well don’t despair, I didn’t either until the day before yesterday.
On Monday I bought four lottery tickets: two for the Mega Millions, and two for the Powerball. I stopped buying lottery tickets several months ago when I looked at my retirement investments and figured that my four-dollar a week gambling addiction was going to break me if I did not get a handle on it soon.
The lottery powers to be must have sensed my departure, because they came up with a new way to pull me back. They added the Powerball to their mile long list of lotteries you can put your cash into and buy a few moments of hope.
I was good, really good, because I resisted the temptation of instant wealth for over two weeks. And for those cynics among you, it wasn’t just because the snow kept me from getting out my driveway and down to the corner store. I could have walked those three miles through four-foot drifts if I had wanted to.
Anyway, after I bought the tickets I stuffed them in my wallet and went home. I needed to get something out of the basement, and as I was walking by the mound of accumulations my wife and I should have thrown away years ago, there on the top of one of the smaller peaks was this little book titled The Good Luck Book.
I turned it over and there on the back cover the first words were, “Want to win the lottery? Sprinkle nutmeg over your lottery tickets.”
Now my wife already thinks I’m a nutcase, so she said very little when I took out the two tickets and started grating fresh nutmeg all over them.
Yesterday I dusted the Mega Millions ticket off and checked to see if I won. With not one of the numbers matching, I figured that the Powerball ticket might need a little more seasoning.
This morning I checked the Powerball. When I told my wife we didn’t win, she suggested I use paprika the next time.

Drinking beer for better health.

2010-02-14T17:55:00.001-05:00

I read today that drinking beer improves the strength of our bones, and reduces a man’s chance of prostate cancer. I’m interested in having strong bones and not getting cancer, so I figured this was something I needed to look into.
The research is showing that one of the compounds in beer blocks the estrogen in the male body by binding to its receptor.
Now I always knew I had estrogen in my body, and I knew that because Arnold Schwarzenegger made us all aware of that problem when he started calling a few male members of the species “girly men.” But before this, I never thought I could do much about it.
Now I learn that all those guys sitting in the bar each night are really doing it for their health. You can tell that their bones are getting stronger, because if I carried the weight that most of them are carrying, my knees would buckle.
Next time you see one of these guys on the beach wearing a speedo, you need to think differently about them. They are just taking care of their health.
But now I’m conflicted. You see I never really liked beer. I was told when I was young that it was an acquired taste, and that meant that you had to drink a lot of it to like it, but I never liked it well enough to drink a lot of it.
Now I am ready to try again. But the only beer I have in the house are a few bottles in the garage refrigerator that I bought for a holiday party during Bush’s first term.
I opened one to taste it.
I think I am going to wait until tomorrow to improve my health.

Surviving the snow? Marry Well.

2010-02-10T09:46:00.001-05:00

My father believed a real man must be able to do anything, well almost anything. He didn’t think I should be able to build a nuclear power plant, which I actually could, but he sure believed I should be able to build a house, build a tractor, fix a car, and repair anything else that broke.
And he also believed that when things got tough, it was a man’s job to figure out what to do to protect his wife and family. He taught my brother and I the art of jury-rigging, that ancient magic of using pieces of things that do not naturally belong together to fix something that is broken. The repaired article always looks a little funny, funny both in the laughing sense and the peculiar sense, but it functions until you can buy a replacement
This concept of figuring out a solution to a problem using only what you have available to you has been a centerpiece of my life, and it applies not only to things but also to situations, including snowstorms.
This past weekend one of those test situations came up in the form of a thirty-two inch snowfall that shortly after it started took out the electric to our house, which means we had no heat or water.
About an hour before the electric went out my wife started to fill the bathtub. “What are you doing?” was the question from the man who was supposed to know everything.
“Saving water to use for the toilets if the power goes out” was my wife’s answer.
“We won’t lose power,” was my know-it-all reply, and I shut off the water when the tub was half full.
“Sure glad I filled the tub,” she said as the power went out.
The next morning we were snowed in, with at least two days before the snowplows would get to our road. The only heat we had was from a small gas fireplace in the family room and the know-it-all member of this husband and wife team had changed gas companies the previous day and they never filled the tanks. That left us with just a few gallons of the stuff to wait out the effects of the storm.
I went into engineer mode: Calculating the number of usable gallons in the tank; the number of BTU’s per gallon, searching with a flashlight to find the BTU rating of the fireplace, and then combining it all to figure out how many hours of heat we had remaining.
My wife just quietly went to work putting up sheets and blankets over all the doors from our family room and kitchen to isolate the one room with heat from the rest of the house. When she was finished she made window sealers out of towels to keep the small amount of heat we were generating from easily escaping out the windows.
She then filled some pans with snow and put them in our refrigerator to slow the rise in temperature of all the food we had stored, and then quietly moved some of the things into the freezing garage.
While she was doing all of this I was trying to design a sled that I could build in the basement so that I could drag a four hundred pound propane tank on the other side of our house to replace the one that was about to give out.
As I said, my father taught me that a man should be resourceful in times of crisis, but he also taught me one other important thing: Marry well.

Earth Like Planets

2010-01-06T16:43:00.001-05:00

The folks at NASA announced this week that they have discovered five new and unusual planets orbiting stars a few thousand light years away. They’re close neighbors according to the article, but they are probably not conducive to life as we know it. And it’s a hard thing to decide if that’s a good thing or bad.
The real prize is the search for an Earth-like planet, one that orbits a distant star within the habitable zone. And that means a place where liquid water can exist to support beings that may or may not look like us.
I’m really glad that NASA is doing this research, and my joy is not just for the obvious reasons, like hoping that my alter ego on that planet is rich.
My real reason for liking this research is selfish and I’ll admit it, because you see that before the discovery of an Earthlike planet is announced to the public, NASA must first tell the president and congress.
The way I see it is that as soon as congress gets word that there’s another civilization out there, that they will all rush to go on a fact finding trip to see if the residents of that planet will buy Georgia peanuts, or a GM car.
Think of it: Every congress person and Senator quickly leaving on a set of spaceships heading to another star system.
I sure hope they find one of those planets fast.

The Aging Brain

2010-01-06T16:41:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine sent me an article from the New York Times today dealing with the aging brain. She kept insisting that I read it, and so it didn’t take me long to realize that her suggestion probably had something to do with her hope that I would not travel much further down the “stupid,” path.
Now I am pretty proud of my brain. It serves me well. It’s sort of like a 1986 Ford Taurus, rather than a new Ferrari, and although there are definitely times when all the cylinders aren’t firing, it still gets me where I want to go: especially with the help of a GPS.
After I started to read the article, I realized that they defined an aging brain as one belonging to anyone over forty, and since I am a long way past that birthday, I figured that I better pay attention to what was written, that I might learn something.
I would probably forget it quickly, because that’s the sign of an aging brain, but I figured if I ran downstairs right after reading it, that I could tell my wife about it, and she would gain a little hope that my rate of progress down the “Stupid” path might have slowed.
The article dealt with the fact that we need to mix things up as we age. Hear different viewpoints, do things a different way. My wife read an article like this a few years ago that suggested that to improve our brainpower, that we should use the opposite hand in the morning to brush our teeth and comb our hair. She gave up on that idea after the first day when I came downstairs that morning with both halitosis and hair that looked like it belonged on a rhesus monkey.
I decided to try the concept once again when writing this article, and that is I would use a different finger for my typing. I gave up after realizing that there are not that many words with a “Q” in them in the English language.

Tuesdays Child

2009-11-02T19:46:00.002-05:00

Mondays child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, but that is not always so.
Tuesday Wells was born on a Tuesday so that should have given her a double chance, but grace was not an attribute she had or had acquired from the moment she was born, and she was one of those children you see with her parents in the supermarket that make you glad she was born to someone else.
When you met her parents, it took you all of a few seconds to decide that Tuesday had been given a bum selection from those available to raise her. Her father was always conniving to get more than he deserved, and her mother, well her mother was the object of every tongue wager in town.
“Do you know what a balloon word is Tuesday?” her father asked her the day after her eighth birthday.
Tuesday usually ignored her father when he spoke, a byproduct of that lack of grace I mentioned earlier, and she continued with her self appointed job of pulling the feathers out of the pillow on the sofa. Her father got her attention by the back of his hand, a technique he learned from his parents, they learned from their parents, and so on, back as far as the stunted Neanderthal that began their lineage.
“Listen to me Tuesday, I need to teach you something. Now I’ve always made it clear to you that people that have more than us don’t really deserve it as much as we do, and that taking some of what they have is really just getting our fair share. Well we haven’t been getting our fair share lately, so I have a plan to rectify that, and you’re going to help.”
Tuesday was facing her father, but she was listening to the voice in her head that kept repeating, “I hate him, I wish he wasn’t my father, and I wish he was in jail.”
“Now balloon words are words that make us forget what the other person was saying,” her father said, “and when we hear a balloon word, we go off and think about something else, ignoring the rest of what the other person is trying to tell us. So you and I are going to use balloon words to get a little money out of some people’s pockets. Here’s how it works.”
Her father explained that she would be the diverter of attention using a series of balloon words he would teach her, and when the sucker’s attention was somewhere else, he would lighten their wallets of all the paper money.
Her father wasn’t particular, so he taught her how to use the words, “sex, dog poop, your fly is down mister, and lady that outfit is ugly,” to divert someone’s attention long enough for him to redistribute some of the wealth in the world.
The first few times out worked perfectly. Five hundred dollars in two days had made her father generous, and instead of a slap in the face when she messed up her part, he simply yelled at her. He learned that if he timed his hand to grab the wallet at the exact moment his daughter said the balloon word, that he was always successful.
Tuesday understood the game a little too well, and she knew something about her father that few others knew, so when they went out the next day, she had a plan.
Tuesday waited for just the right victim, a young man whose time at the gym was obvious. Young men’s thoughts were usually diverted by the “your fly is down” series, and she began with, “Hey mister,” as her father got in position, his hand just inches from the young man’s back pocket.
“There’s a spider on the back of your pants!”
Her father’s balloon word was “spider,” he was afraid of them, and for a minute he forgot what he was doing, which was just long enough for the young man, to turn, feel the man’s hand on his wallet, and knock him unconscious with one blow.
“It worked,” Tuesday thought as they took her father off to jail, “now how can I use this on my mom.”

Reporting Bad Things: The Demise of the Printed Newspaper

2009-08-19T18:26:00.001-04:00

I’ve been wondering lately if the demise of the big city printed newspaper is being driven by a fundamental difference in what we can find in the print media and on the Internet.
That difference is that in newspapers I can find very little other than bad news in the articles covering most of the pages. The lowest attributes of people are documented daily, interspersed only once in a while with a positive event or the showing of simple human kindness. I find that the only time I smile when reading the Washington post each morning is reading the comic strip “Pickles and a few others on the comics pages.
On the Internet I can see and preview all of that if I want, but I can also easily find articles about good things that have occurred in the world, articles about the creative spirit of many people, and articles that create hope for humanity’s future.
On the Internet I can choose if I want to be soured that day on the state of humanity, or if I want to concentrate on the good, the nice, the funny, or the creative spirit of mankind, and by doing so I can start my own day feeling good, or feeling fearful and down.
I’m trying hard lately to concentrate more on the positive events in the world than on the negative ones, and I’m starting to think about ending my subscription to the Post.

Being a Writer

2009-08-16T20:15:00.000-04:00

My daughter tells me that to be a writer, all you need to do is write. “If you tend a garden, you call yourself a gardener,” she has said, “so, if you write, then call yourself a writer.”
By her definition I am a writer, because since I retired five years ago, I have made writing the central focus of almost every day of my life.
I have created short stories about my motorcycle rides through forty-nine of the fifty United States, and seven Canadian Provinces. I’ve written several three to four page pieces on important lessons I have learned in my life, like how not to kill a snake, but they have been but a small diversion from my main focus, that of writing novels.
I have completed two novels; both nestled in close to what some would call a science fiction genre, neither yet published, and totaling more than 200,000 worlds. Over a million characters typed, all using a two-finger approach.
Both stories were started decades earlier, then put aside, because I made the excuse that while working for a living I had no time. “No time to be creative,” a thought that seems silly to me now that I have matured a little more, but that foolish thought kept me from the practice of novel writing for over thirty years.
More than three years ago, my first novel was finished for the first time. I sent out eight or nine query letters, a two-paragraph description of my work attempting to convince a literary agent that I was ready for my name to appear in the New York Times book section within a few months. I used the term “finished for the first time,” because after receiving, four form letter “no thanks,” one hand written “not for me,” and silence from the others, I spent another year rewriting it. It now sits there on my shelf, read only by a dozen family members and friends.
It sits there awaiting its future because I finished my second novel before completing my rewriting of the first. My second novel is shorter than the first, a story about some of the dangers we will face when the computers on our desks reach an intelligence level rivaling our own. I love the story. When I finished editing it for the fourth time I was confident it was a novel that would attract a literary agent and then be published. That confidence has been strained during the past year.
I have heard so many stories of how difficult it is to find an agent. “I submitted my book to over a hundred literary agents before it was accepted,” seemed to be a general theme for all those writers that did not start as a recognized national figure. And so I began my quest for recognition by putting one hundred pennies in a jar, each representing a query package I would send to an agent listed in “The Guide To Literary Agents.”
This books theme, which I made up over two decades ago, is about the destruction of the US Banking system, and after twenty or so query packages sent out last year during the time the US economy was imploding, my wife wisely suggested I wait for a little while.
I did, and when the first glimmer of hope of economic recovery began, I launched into sending out the next seventy query packages, each consisting of a letter, a three-page synopsis and the first four chapters, about four bucks a pop with postage and mailer.
I have received a lot of nice comments and encouragement in the sixty-three “no thank you” letters so far. Fourteen more never acknowledged my efforts, and nineteen more are out there, still within that time frame where there remains a chance for a yes. Four more pennies remain before my jar is empty.
My reason for this blog is not to bemoan my miserable fate, because no one that loves writing fiction can be miserable for a long time. We are given the privilege to create within our minds and put it on paper, and when you realize what a privilege that is, it sort of makes you smile.
Tomorrow I will send the final four of my hundred queries out, but I will not quit. There are a lot of pennies still waiting in my penny jar.

Time again to explore

2009-07-16T19:04:00.001-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot today; withdrawing into myself and just wondering why forty years after Apollo 11 took off we are still relegated to living and exploring our planet and just a tiny slice of space above. The TV picture signals sent from the moon of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon’s surface went by our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, more than 35 years ago, they whizzed past the bright star Sirius over thirty years ago and passed Zeta Reticuli just a few months ago. The inhabitants of the planets around seventy nine stars could have already looked at those images, and they may be thinking how intelligent of a species we are, and wondering, “What did they do next, I can’t wait to find out.”
I’m afraid as a species we have disappointed any nearby celestial neighbors. Forty years after mankind represented by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon we remain almost earthbound.
I am sure there are many that believe this is best; those that say “why spend money in space, there are more important things to do here on earth,” and those that think we should use robotic devices to explore other worlds. “Why” is a valid question, but to me it has one, and only one, simple answer, and that is because humans were not meant to be caged. Like all animals we were meant to be free, and for humans that freedom means to explore the universe that has been placed before us.
I dearly hope that my children’s generation and my grandchildren make up for the mistake my generation made in slowing space exploration to a virtual halt. We need to open the door of this cage called earth and allow those that want to be truly free to explore.

Ride To enlightenment

2009-06-06T13:40:00.001-04:00

Ride To Enlightenment:

This title for this log of my annual cross country motorcycle trip may sound a little grandiose just to describe a simple ride from northern Virginia to Colorado and back. However, things that appear simple on the surface can often produce an event that is very important, sometimes life changing, and on rare occasions, nothing less than a turning point for one’s soul. This trip included one of those rare events.

I therefore plan to say very little to say about the journey on the bike, which means avoiding my usual attempts to make you laugh by describing the hours spent cursing the heavy, often torrential, rains at the beginning of the trip, or working hard to find the right words to describe the breathtaking snow capped Rocky mountain scenery I encountered in the middle of it, or finally, describing the interesting people I met whose lives I got to interact with for a few moments at every stop along the way.

Instead, I will ask you to read about several events that occurred within just a few hours during the fourth day of the journey, less than sixteen hours of elapsed time that produced within me, a wholly new perspective of life.

My trip this year was delayed, almost canceled, after my 92 years old mother fell in her apartment, and my middle daughter experienced premature labor with her second child. At first, I was hesitant to go, somewhat afraid, and feeling guilty about leaving my unsettled family, but I am lucky to be blessed with a wife that really understands my need to get away each year on a journey where I try to shed both life induced, and self induced stress. For me, long distance motorcycle riding is cathartic, because it is one of the few times where present moment living can effectively drown out those ruminating voices in my head that are incessant in reminding me of past failures and future worries.

Leaving Virginia several days later than planned, I narrowed my itinerary and set just two small goals for this trip. The first was to stop in a small town in southern Colorado to visit, Kim, the grown daughter of an old neighbor and friend, a young woman who spent countless hours at our house playing with my three daughters when she was growing up and who now, thirty some years later remains a friend. The second objective was to meet up in northern Nevada with my motorcycle riding buddy and college friend, Jim who was returning from a trip to California. Somewhere near Reno we would meet and then start our riding journey together back to our homes on the east coast.

Those of you that have suffered through my previous motorcycle journals know that I do not like rain, that I do not like dust covered gravel roads, and that I hate and fear when they join in combination. Falling off my motorcycle three times in the Yukon and Alaska mud has solidified that fear into what some might describe as an irrational paranoia.
That fear is so real to me, however, that I am not even ashamed to admit it, because mud, my riding skill, and an almost thousand pound motorcycle with slick tires has not always produced a positive outcome for both my ego and my aging body.

On day four of my journey, and in the late afternoon, I arrived at the turnoff to the tiny town of Crestone, in southern Colorado. The town, which sits adjacent to the Great Sand dunes national park, is nestled at the western base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the scenery is not over described by using the term breathtaking. Fourteen thousand foot high snow covered peaks rise on one side of the valley, and similar mountain peaks are on the other side of the eighty five hundred foot high, miles wide plateau.

My plan was to have dinner with Kim and catch up on what has happened in the past several years of her life before heading toward Nevada the next morning, so I had made a reservation to stay at a small bed and breakfast inn outside of town, which was located high up on one of the hills at the base of the mountains.
After making the room reservation the previous night, I discovered on the inn’s web site that the last half-mile of travel up the mountain would be on a dirt and gravel road, and my “fear of mud” alarm started buzzing.

All of the day up to that point had been mostly sunny, just a few cumulus clouds dotting a clear azure blue sky which seemed just a shade darker, but much clearer at the high altitude. As I descended into the valley and then turned off the main highway toward town, a very local, but heavy, rain shower began behind me and seemed intent on chasing me along the road into town. My almost primal fear of mud and motorcycles came in play as I started up the gravel road, and I was more than a fair amount relieved, actually I was overjoyed, that my repetitive prayers, in the form of pleading to my creator were answered, and the rain ceased just before I came to a stop at the small, five-room Inn.

The town of Crestone is known as a spiritual and new age retreat center, and it is populated with several dozen diverse organizations ranging from a Hindu temple and several Tibetan centers, to a Japanese spiritual group dedicated to natural agriculture. For those of you that are fans of the, “Lost” TV show, there is also a “Dharma Foundation” somewhere up on the hills. Crestone has been called “little Tibet” by some people, in recognition of the stunning beauty of the surrounding mountains and the spiritual feel many get when they go there. Being a spiritual center, it attracts true believers of the faiths and organizations represented, as well as individuals who are running away from the reality of a modern world they do not understand and therefore fear. Monks, hippies and drug addicts intermingle in a town located in the morning shadow of a mountain where long-term residents believe “the veil is thin,” a term used to indicate that in Crestone, the spirit world resides very close to the physical world we live in, and that boundary can be easily, and unknowingly crossed.

I was warned about that by the innkeeper Marcia, and also by my young friend, Kim, but to a sixty three year old retired engineer, those words, “The Veil is Thin,” were more than slightly outside the boundary of my rational mind.

Although I was raised in a loosely practicing Methodist household, my adult religious philosophy had migrated to what I call an appropriate mix of standard Christianity, new age philosophy, and a large dose of quantum physics. I believe in a creator that granted us “free will:” a world, in which by exercising that free will we can influence, and maybe even create the reality we live in, and that all possibilities exist within the quantum soup surrounding us. I said I believe in it, but until that day in Crestone I had never really lived it, and more important, I had never really exercised the real intent of “free will.”

My friend Kim showed me the area, and then we went to dinner where I caught up with her life, shared what was happening in my family, and listened to her description of what the town of Crestone was all about. I took several pictures of her using a very expensive digital camera loaned to me by my daughter and son-in law. The term “expensive” here means mid digit thousands, so I was being very careful not to drop it: At least at first.

After dinner, and in the dark, she drove me back to the inn, and by the time we started up the hill it was raining, and by the time we got to the inn it was raining hard, with the dust covered graveled road slowly turning into my nightmare. Kim helped me carry a few things to my room, and as we climbed the rain drenched outside stairs, I commented about my fear of mud covered gravel roads, and my fear of dropping the expensive camera that had been loaned to me and that I was trying to protect from the heavy rain.

When I opened the door, I took one step forward, and I found myself almost floating in mid air as my foot caught the threshold sending me sprawling forward. My first thought was the camera in my hand, so I held it out and up to keep it away from the floor that was coming to meet me, but I had not noticed the table in front of me, and as my body came crashing to the floor, the camera crashed hard against the wooden table before it too fell to the floor.

I got up and picked up the camera and did what all engineers do to see if something is working, I shook it, and I was greeted with a sound of something loose, something broken. I am sure that Kim could see the fear grow on my face as I took picture after picture with the camera, varying all settings and seeing nothing but a deep black image covering the display. I spent a few minutes trying everything, before I looked over at Kim and heard her say, “ I told you ‘the veil is thin’ here, I cannot believe how fast you manifest your fears.”

A broken, five thousand dollar camera in my hand, hard pelting rain outside turning the dust on the gravel road into mud, and she was saying this was my fault, my doing. I did not believe in very much of anything at that moment other than I hated the town of Crestone and was very sorry that I had come.

After Kim left, I tried the camera another dozen times, and the same black display greeted me, and the image’s histogram was blank indicating there was no output from the digital sensor when exposed to light. I went to bed in despair and spent the next four hours laying awake, listening to the heavy rain outside, wondering how I was going to get down the hill in the morning, and worrying how I would tell my daughter and son-in-law that I had broken their camera.
I was in one of those, “poor me, why me, the world sucks,” states until two-thirty in the morning, and I was not much into the concept that we create our own reality, especially since the next part of that equation had me falling off my motorcycle in the mud and watching it careen down the hill without me.

At two thirty in the morning I was praying for the rain to stop, and I heard the statement in my head, “The veil is thin here.” I stopped praying to the ultimate creator, and concentrated on the other creator, and that would be me. I said, “The rain will stop.” And it did, and it never started again throughout the night. When I woke in the morning the sun was out, and the mountain air had dried the road from the heavy rain that had fallen during the night.

Feeling more positive in my outlook, I tried the camera and was disappointed that it still did not work but not surprised, because my mind was telling me the rain stopped because the storm passed, and I had nothing to do with it. At that moment I did not care why, I was just thankful, and I went to the breakfast room in the inn.

Marcia, the owner of the Coll House Inn was in the kitchen and one other guest came in shortly after I say down. Marcia is one of those individuals who you want to start a conversation with: A very interesting history in standard medicine, homeopathic medicine and not surprisingly new age thinking. Stay at her inn if you go to Crestone.

We started talking about the town, the beliefs of its various residents, those both functional and dysfunctional, why people believe the place is “special,” and how we both can’t subscribe to the Buddhist philosophy of “suffering.” “Been there, done that,” was her view.

We started talking about what it really means when she and other residents use the term, “The veil is thin here,” to describe Crestone, and after a lively discussion, I shared my story of the rain and the broken camera as possible examples of manifesting one’s fears.

She shook her head and said, “the veil IS thin here: You can manifest not only what you fear but what you want.”

In the time it took me to walk back to my room I went from a practical engineer to a believer in my own philosophy. I stopped the rain, and I could fix the camera. Somewhat heady thinking for an engineer and probably bordering on the obnoxious to most of my friends, but it did not matter, because I believed it. Not just said it, but believed it. Not just wanted it, but believed it. And for the first time I knew the difference

I picked the camera up and said to myself, “before the end of the day, this camera will work,” and I took a picture. The image looked completely black, it still did not work, and the histogram appeared as blank as the night before. But here is the life changing experience, because I was not discouraged. I knew, I mean I really knew it would work before the end of the day, so I took another picture. An image of the mountain outside my window was on the screen, and I felt pleased but not surprised when the next images taken were perfect, the slight rattle in the camera now gone, along with a lot of my preconceived notions of the reality of my life. “Free will,” took on a much greater meaning than before.

I don’t expect all of you reading this tale to accept that we create our own reality, even though I do, but for a few of you I will ask you to look at the images from the camera that I took that morning. The real story is told in the middle image, the one I took after I knew I fixed it; the image I thought was blank. It is not. And the dark grey image with no detail, and a histogram that showed the sensor starting to work tell it all for me. You can make up your own mind about what happened to me and that is what “Free will” is all about.

I learned a lot more that morning, most of it from an incredible young lady named Kim, but that is another story for a later time.

What we remember: It's not always right

2009-04-28T09:24:00.002-04:00

When I was ten years old my parents moved our family from the city to the suburban countryside. We were part of that post World War 2 exodus from the city that felt that three-quarters of an acre of property was very close to owning a farm or maybe even an estate.
The builder of our house lived on a five-acre parcel of land right across the street from us, and one of his sons was my age, so we became friends. They lived in an old farmhouse, had a large barn, and owned several horses and a pony, something a boy of ten admires. Raised in the city, I was wiry and pale, and my new friend was taller, stronger, and tanned; a set of characteristics a transplanted city kid at that time had to admire.
That area in Bucks County Pennsylvania in the 1950's was a young boys dream, with cornfields for raiding, woods for building forts and camping, and a creek for swimming or searching for minnows and crayfish. Several miles away an old feed mill was still grinding feed using a water wheel powered by crystal clear cold water flowing over a small dam.
No one worried about crime or their kids being in danger. I would leave our house in the morning and sometimes not show up again until the sunset was pretty much finished, having wandered at various times of the day several miles from my home. “What did you do today” was the question I got from my mom, not “where were you.” In many ways it was a different time, but not all.
One day my friend and I were wandering aimlessly down by the mill, walking in the water just in front of the dam and looking for something. I think I was eleven years old at the time.
Two older boys came out of the woods and started first to follow us, then to corner us between the edge of the creek and the steep rocky embankment cut by that creek over many millennia. I remember nothing of their faces or their clothes, nothing about them including the color of their hair, nothing at all but what they said and how big they looked.
They were probably sixteen, maybe older and they had my friend and I trapped.
“Don’t even try to get away,” the one said. “We’ll beat the living shit out of you.”
They both sat down on a rock about ten feet from us, each with a big stick in their hand and the second one sneered at us and said. “You’re going to suck our….” He finished that sentence, but for the sensibility of the reader I will not.
He then stood up, pulled down his zipper and demonstrated the seriousness of his intentions.
I had never been scared in the woods before, but at that moment I will admit to being afraid. I saw my near future as being beaten up by a much larger person followed by being subjected to a humiliation even at my young age I knew I would never forget.
I looked over at my friend to see if he was as scared as I was, and I saw not a single sign of fear on his face. We both said almost simultaneously, “Go to hell,” but my friend took a step towards the two and I took a step back. He looked brave, I felt scared as the two lowered their pants. A few seconds later there was some noise in the woods that diverted their attention, and I said to my friend, “Come on, lets get out of here,” and we both ran across the creek, eventually finding our way out to the highway, and then walked almost silently home. I don’t remember ever talking about the incident. I was embarrassed that he seemed brave and I was scared, and I was sure he did not want to embarrass me further by bringing it up.
Now the point of this story has nothing to do with the attempted act of those two boys. From my point of view it has to do with something far more significant.
I harbored those feelings of not being as brave as I should have been for much of my adolescent and young adult life. Whenever the memory of that time in the woods would surface I just kept wishing I had been braver, wishing I had been willing to fight, wishing I had been like my friend, and angry at myself that I had not.
After high school we drifted apart, different colleges, different careers, and living in different parts of the country. Every few years I would hear something about my friend but not much, and we never got a chance to talk about all the great times we had growing up, or to ever mention this one event.
That was until almost thirty years later at our twentieth high school reunion.
After a lot of fun, and more than a few drinks we were talking by ourselves while our wives were getting acquainted and other friends were catching up. My grade school friend said, “Remember that time you and I were in the woods down by Mill Creek and those two older boys stopped us? I nodded my head, afraid that he was finally going to question me about my actions that day.
“I can’t believe how brave you were,” he said. “I was scared to death and you, well you just told them to go to hell and walked away.”
I’m sure that my face echoed my surprise. “ What the hell are you talking about,” I said. You were the one that stood up to them.” We countered each other for a few minutes with a bunch of, “You were, no you were’s”, before we stopped.
For almost thirty years each of us thought that we were the frightened one and that the other was brave. Thirty years of wishing we had been different, wishing that we had been just like the other person had seen us to be.
I may not be able to describe the lesson learned eloquently, but I did learn the lesson, and part of it is that we should not be so hard on ourselves. Sometimes our actions are far better than we think they are.

The Funnel of Life

2009-04-26T21:01:00.001-04:00

When I was in my twenties, an old boss imparted some wisdom that took me another thirty years or more to learn. I call him an old boss partly because it was a long time ago, and partly because he seemed old to me at the time. He was in his mid forties, a few decades younger than I am now.
I was riding home with him from work one night, having lost my drivers license after being unfairly penalized several times for speeding. Fortunately I had a boss who did not judge my bad driving habits, and one that was willing to drop me off at my house on his way home.
I was in the beginning of my career, and my marriage. He was in the middle of both of his.
I remember he started the conversation with, “You probably won’t understand this”, and I had learned earlier in life that this was a saying that older people often say to younger ones. And it is a saying that more often than not is correct.
“Life is like a funnel,” he then said, and I’m really not sure if I started listening intently because he was my boss, because nothing good was playing on the radio, or that some part of my brain intuitively knew what he was going to say was important. No matter what the reason, I became all ears as he continued.
“Every choice that we make in life seems to be the right one at the time. Marriage, kids, job; If you look at each one separately, then almost all of the time you would say you would make that choice again. But they all add up, and each choice you make seems to narrow your options for what you can do next. It’s like a funnel: at the top where initially you have a lot of room to maneuver, a chance to make changes to your course, but then things start to narrow down. Things start to happen quickly, and you find yourself almost spinning out of control in the middle of your life wondering how the hell you ever got there.
“No room to maneuver, no chance to make a change, you’re just been swept along in life by the choices you made earlier, wondering what the hell you life is going to be like when, spinning out of control, you exit the narrow neck.”
I remember the image he created as much as I do the words, maybe because I was in the funnel but still had a lot of room to maneuver, maybe because I knew I was in the funnel.
His words stuck with me, and as I aged that image took center stage in my own life.
In my late forties our roles had reversed. I was now his boss as he approached the end of his career, a situation that both of us may have been a little uncomfortable with, but nothing was ever said. I was deep into the neck of the funnel, questioning almost every choice I had ever made, and I remember driving him home from work one day and he brought up the funnel of life.
“Remember years ago when I told you about the funnel of life,” he said to me. I nodded yes and he then said. “The neat thing is that you eventually do come out of it, and it’s a pretty good feeling. A pretty good feeling.”

Why I ride

2009-04-23T10:14:00.004-04:00

When I was thirteen my father bought me a motorbike. It wasn’t legal for a thirteen year old to ride on the roads, but when my Dad saw the 14year old son of the chief of police riding his motorbike, he bought me one within a week.

The bike was brand new from Sears, and it cost $179, a lot of money in 1958. It was red, always started, and it did 35 MPH flat out in third gear. My best friend at the time had an old Whizzer brand motorbike. Every thing on it was either bent or scratched. Most of the time it wouldn’t start, but sometimes you could get it running by pushing it down a steep hill and jumping on. When the engine ran, it could do almost 50 MPH on the straightaway, fifteen MPH more than my bike. I was jealous.

Forty-five years passed, and I bought a new Honda motorcycle. Cruiser style, looks great, lots of leather and bright red in color. I had it up to 101MPH on a ride to the west coast with a good friend. He rode a new BMW touring cycle, and he had his bike up to 112MPH. Eleven MPH faster than my bike. I was jealous.

Some would say I am older but not wiser, and in this case they would be right.

But a trip on a motorcycle to the west coast isn’t just about how fast you can go; it’s about what you see, what you feel, and what you smell. It’s about living in the moment, about not worrying about tomorrow, or dwelling on the past where mistakes were made and wrongs were done. Over a period of 21 days, traveling through 19 states, I got to see and experience things planned and unplanned that made me realize what a gift we all have been given with our lives.

In September 2004 the rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan was predicted to start in northern Virginia at 8AM so I left for Pennsylvania at 7:30 planning to meet my friend Jim at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania turnpike. We had a cup of coffee and looked out the window to see the rain begin. A few minutes later, heading west towards Pittsburgh we both understood how heavy it can rain. The word "torrential" took on a new meaning; it was like having a pressure washer aimed at your entire body. My riding suit started out waterproof, but it couldn’t live up to Ivan's wrath, and it’s amazing just how much water leather boots can hold. Once soaked all the way through to our underwear we thought, “why stop,” so we rode on to Cleveland to meet an old college friend who bought us dinner and played a solo on his clarinet.

Our riding clothes were almost half dry by morning, and so on a warm cloudless day we headed up to the Michigan peninsula to see the scenery around the Great lakes.
Charlevoix is a beautiful little town located on the edge of lake Michigan at the 45th parallel. The kind of place you could vacation for a week or two and still not want to leave, that is if you are wealthy, actually very wealthy, so we stayed just an hour enjoying the espresso at the local coffee house.

My friend Jim looked a little like big bird in his yellow riding suit, and I looked like the Michelin man spray- painted black, but surprisingly people just came over to talk with us. It happened everywhere, and it’s one of the reasons to ride a motorcycle. People are really friendly to an old grey beard on a two-wheeler. Being a little silly looking, and certainly not intimidating, people seemed to want to share some of their life experiences with the old guys on the bikes.

We traveled north across the Mackinaw bridge from which you can see an absolutely beautiful view out over the great lakes: then headed west skirting the southern edge of lake Superior, constantly in awe of the size and beauty of that lake.
Over the next few days we rode across Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota and then into Montana.

In Montana we pulled in at the first rest stop on Interstate-94, and it was a bright sunny day with a view that really makes you understand why they call it "Big Sky country". Horizon to horizon views with no smog, just blue sky. Me, I just kept spontaneously smiling, while my friend, Jim, unpacked one saddlebag on his cycle and brought out a portable espresso maker, and a hand grinder for the coffee beans. He made my espresso in a tin cup, and he had his in a china cup on a saucer. My bike is a Honda, he has a BMW, so I guess that makes sense.

Montana is endless, and even big sky views get monotonous after twelve or thirteen hours, so at the end of the second day in Montana I was ready for Idaho, actually any other state, but we didn't make it by dusk, so we stopped in the town of Missoula, Montana.

Cold, misty weather greeted us the next morning as we made our way through the pass that Lewis and Clark took westward in 1805. It was cold, and my helmet kept fogging up, often obscuring some of my view of the road, but as the sun climbed high enough to illuminate the low clouds between the mountain ridges, the views in those mountains made any discomfort seem trivial. For over an hour we viewed the same landscape Lewis and Clark, walked, rode their horses and portaged their boats through. Humbled by the deeds of our ancestors are the only words to describe my feelings during that hour.

Finally we reached Idaho, and pulled into a small town called Wallace for gas and a cup of coffee. More correctly, my friend Jim was looking for an espresso. He denies it, but he is an espresso addict. Me, I admit to being a donut-holic. Jim denies his addiction, but he can smell an espresso shop a mile off the road while going 85 MPH on the interstate. We found a great coffee shop in that small town and went in for our caffeine fix. The woman running the place indicated she saw us coming down the street on the bikes and knew we would stop. She wore a Harley Davidson T-Shirt so I mentioned we were not riding Harleys. Her response was classic. She said: " I know, I said I saw you coming into town. I didn't say I heard you." We slinked out of town on quiet bikes with just a little "Harley" envy.

In Idaho we stopped at the Columbia River gorge. During the last Ice Age, the Western part of Montana and Idaho were covered with Glacial Ice and large lakes that at places were over 900 feet deep. Fifteen thousand years ago the Ice Dams at the end of the lake broke and over 500 cubic miles of water came rushing down this gorge in less than 3 days. The view of the river gorge by itself is worth a trip to Idaho.

Our goal for the first part of the trip was to ride to the northern most point on the West Coast in a Town called Blaine Washington. A very picturesque town located on the water along the Straights of Georgia. They had a combined bakery and coffee shop. With an espresso in one hand, and a freshly made crème-puff in the other, you had two happy riders.

Most days we stayed in a Comfort Inn or a Motel Six, hearing Tom Bodett's voice on the wake up phone call each morning, and a four dollar discount on each of our $36 rooms for being over age 55. In Seattle, however, we spent two nights downtown at a $200 per night hotel. At a Motel Six or a Days Inn you get a coffee maker and a free pack of coffee. At a $200/night hotel they charged $3.75 for the pack of coffee.

There is a coffee shop in Seattle that some people call “the best in the country.” Cafe D'Arte lived up to its reputation. Before visiting that place, an espresso was just a good strong cup of coffee to me. After Cafe D'Arte, regular coffee will never be the same. I am not suggesting you drive 3000 miles for a cup of espresso, but if you are ever in Seattle visit Cafe D"Arte. Ask for a "Restretto" (The first 17 seconds of an espresso brew). I think you will become a believer that even making a cup of coffee can be art.

For the next two days we just rode the interstate and stopped for the night in a small town called Button Willow, near Bakersfield CA on September 28th. By accident, luck, or divine providence, we found ourselves 90 miles from the town of Mojave the night before the first flight of Spaceship one for the X-Prize! With an altered plan, we left for Mojave in the dark, at five thirty in the morning. Riding at high speeds over the mountains when it's cold and dark is not enjoyable. Watching the sunrise over mountains covered with hundreds of windmills was.

We reached Mojave Airport and found ourselves in a place directly facing the end of the runway that the White Knight Aircraft with Spaceship one attached was planning its takeoff. A small digital camera view does not recreate the feeling watching that ship takeoff or later seeing Spaceship one land on the runway in front of us after its successful flight.

San Ysidro is the southernmost town on the west coast of the continental US. where we took our pictures at the post office and left quickly.

Truth be told, by this time I was getting homesick for my wife, and I wanted to motor as fast as possible towards home, so we left the San Diego area heading east on Interstate 8. Over 4500 miles traveled, and almost 3000 left to go.

The mountain passes are not high that far south in California. Maybe 4000 feet or so but the crosswinds can be intense. The road sign said "Severe Crosswinds Next 75 miles," but that was a lie! I think they died down after no more than 72 miles. My brain at times felt like it was in a milkshake maker, and clear thinking, hell even just thinking was difficult. This became obvious as we proceeded to cross, the Anza Borrego Desert.

By mid afternoon it was very hot with swirling dust storms peppered throughout the valley when I noticed a large dust devil meandering along the side of the road 1/2 mile ahead. For the next 15-20 seconds I was in awe of this miniature tornado about 30 feet wide and several hundred feet tall tearing up the brush and shrubs about 50 feet off the side of the road. Enough dust and small debris had been picked up to show clearly the swirling winds on the outside of the funnel. It was neat until it turned.

As I came within several hundred feet of it, it made an abrupt, ninety-degree turn and came straight into the road in front of me. I am not sure I had much of a choice but I made a conscious (probably stupid) decision to ride directly through the center of it. The winds at the outer wall forced the bike to lean over farther than I have ever dared to ride, my boot scraping the ground. After passing through the outer wall the inside was calm and, for an instant I tried to bring the bike upright before hitting the other side. Winds at the far side going in the other direction forced the bike upright, and I was riding down the road as if nothing happened.

The first moment, I just thanked God I was alive. The second moment, I chastised myself for being so stupid, but the third moment, I thanked God for letting me ride through a small Tornado. It was great!

Some would say I am older, but not wiser, and they would be right.

In Phoenix we stayed at the home of a friend. He was an early employee of a company called Intel. You may have heard of it. His home is nestled into the side of Camelback Mountain located in a place called Paradise Valley in Phoenix. Intel! Paradise Valley! Those two facts should give you a clear vision of the view from the patio balcony of their home. Treated like kings with good food, good wine, and friendship we left the next morning ready to start the trek home.

My wife Marilyn and I love Sedona Arizona. Some of you may love the Grand Canyon, but in Sedona, however, there is a saying: " God created the Grand Canyon but she lives in Sedona. I get that feeling every time I go there.

From Phoenix, We took the road to Sedona, and drove up Oak Creek Canyon road to Flagstaff. This ride was the last major diversion from Interstate highways on our way home. With a stop in Winslow Arizona we made it to Amarillo Texas that night.

For those of you that survived reading this far I am just about done.

Across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and then into southern Virginia on day 20 of the trip, and that night we stopped in Radford Virginia, where my daughter went to college. We rode home the next day, and my friend Jim sped past me as I turned of at the Winchester VA exit, and he headed home to Harrisburg. You all have had moments like that in your life. It's a keeper!

Given the bike envy I described above, and given the stupidity of riding through a small tornado, it is obvious that I have not completely grown up. But after that trip I realized what a beautiful country we live in, and I want to see more of it.

Some would say I am older, and some would say I am now wiser, and they would be right.

And that’s why I ride

Getting Older

2008-06-18T21:22:00.002-04:00

I've read in a number of places that getting older is not for sissies. So a year or two ago I decided to become a sissy. I figured then I wouldn't get any older.
Each year when my birthday forced me to add another one to my age I decided I would ignore it. After all I became a sissy just so I would not get any older. But that young man inside my head just kept laughing at that guy he saw in the mirror each morning, the kind of laughter that makes you want to hit someone. It's too bad my arthritis was acting up or he would have been a goner.
Anyway, I now think that this aging thing is really overrated. After all anyone can do it. You can just sit on a couch and wait. Pretty soon you are a year older, and at least one more joint has an ache.
Early last year I decided to approach my health a little different. I'm a baby boomer. Baby boomers can solve anything, or we can make enough noise that the next generation is forced to fix it for us. Actually I think it is fair for the next generation to solve things like immigration, social security, and health care. My generation had to solve getting Microsoft Windows to almost work. I think we did our share.
So last January, I figured that what I needed was a current status of my body, a good thorough checkup, a baseline from which to initiate my plan to defeat aging with wisdom. So, I made the first mistake, I went to the doctor.
"I want to have good health until I am in my nineties," I said to him. "I'm here to get a thorough checkup. I'm reasonably healthy, just a few aches and pains in my neck, and my hip, and yea also in my back. My arms go to sleep at night a lot but I can still …"
"How long have you had that aneurism," he said.
Now you have to understand that both my sister and my father died from ruptured aneurisms. It is a word that makes me, and everyone in my gene pool, sit up and pay attention.
I've learned recently that stuttering is a perfectly acceptable way to ask a question when you are a senior citizen, and I did my best to keep up with my generation.
"Wha…,Wha…, WHAT! Whe… Whe…, Where?" Each letter was repeated at least three times before the next one was pronounced.
"On your wrist" he said calmly, completely ignoring the look of fear on my face. "It's nothing to worry too much about."
Too much, now really, have you ever thought about how much is too much?
"OK doc, I won't worry too much, I'll just worry much."
While I was staring at that pencil eraser sized bulge on my wrist, pulsating with every heartbeat, it started hurting. I had never noticed it before, and now three minutes into my checkup I had another pain.
Then he started his detailed exam. "I feel a little bulge around your aorta. Could be an aneurism. Just to be safe lets get a CT Scan."
My anxiety level shot back to 100.Fears of early death elevated to level orange. Luckily it lasted for only a week and I was back in the doctor's office with positive, because they were negative CT scan test results.
Lulled by good results I was ready to start once again in my quest for retaining good health.
"Let's get an MRI of you neck to see why you are having that neck pain, and your arms are going to sleep at night."
That sounded like a good plan. I thought, "If anything is wrong, let's get it fixed now. I want to still be riding my motorcycle when I am in my eighties." So I went to get the neck MRI and waited to pick up the results.
"It's really a good thing you came in" said the nurse. "With all the trauma your neck has seen you…," and then she clammed up. "Here are the results. Take them to your doctor."
I really didn't like the fact that she was looking at her toes when she said that.
Now I consider myself a reasonably smart man, so I decided that I would read the report before I went back to see the doctor. Any of the words I didn't understand in that report I figured that I could find the definitions and descriptions on Wickapedia or Med.com.
Armed with a medical report filled with information I didn't understand, and a home computer, I was like a man with a loaded gun pointed at his head. And boy did I pull the trigger.
Scoliosis, bony fusion, fused facet joints, central stenosis, uncovertebral joint hypertrophy. These were the words in my MRI report that I was searching the internet for. It took just about an hour on the computer for me to decide that I should really be planning for my funeral.
I wasn't really surprised when my family doctor called after reading the report and said, "You should see a specialist." I was pricing canes and walkers when he called.
So I journeyed to the spine specialist. In his expensively paneled waiting room with marble floors and a thousand gallon fish tank there were many pictures of famous football players plastered on the walls. All of them had written on their photographs their praises for the doctor I was sent there to see. All of them smiling, announcing how happy they were with their surgery and glad that they could now go back to getting hit by three hundred pound lineman without worry.
It was a good thing, because for at least ten minutes I stopped worrying about my body and started worrying about my wallet.
That stopped when I went into the examining room.
There were times in my working life that I felt important. It was a good feeling.
Now at age sixty-one, I was sitting in a low, cold, metal chair dressed only in an ugly blue hospital gown that was not fully covering my rear. A tall, very young, resident doctor was asking me to walk a straight line across the room as a young perky nurse looked on and took notes. This situation did little for my self-esteem.
"You have, (completely unintelligible doctor speak), he said. "That is why your head is jutting forward when you walk."
It was amazing. I walked into that place worrying about my health. In the waiting room that quickly transitioned into my worrying about my bank account. Now, just a few minutes later, I was worrying about finding my dignity. The only pain I was now feeling was humiliation.
Before I could recover, the high powered senior surgeon then came in and did his best to make me feel even less important. He sat three feet from my face looking directly at me and started dictating my condition into his voice recorder as he was feigning talking to me. By that time the absurdity of the entire situation had me laughing inside.
"Patient states he does not want surgery, paragraph. He presents with (unintelligible doctor speak), paragraph. Recommend trying physical therapy, paragraph. Order x-rays of the thoracic spine area, paragraph. Order nerve conduction studies of the (unintelligible doctor speak), paragraph, and close.
Then he looked at me and said, "any questions?
Hell, I couldn't think of any thing to say. I just wanted to run outside and scream. Actually I did scream in the parking lot after realizing the doctor was out of network for my insurance coverage.
Starting down the path to good health by going to a doctor is a very slippery slope. Without even thinking about it, I had signed up for several months of physical therapy and another expensive out of network test to see how fast my nerves conduct.
Now the physical therapy twice a week was great. The first two weeks I was given electrical stimulation, hot packs on my neck and massages. I was almost lulled into believing I had done the right thing. That was until I had to start exercising. Paying ninety to a hundred bucks an hour to stretch a big thick rubber band a few hundred times just didn't seem smart, even if my insurance company was paying for eighty percent of it.
When those six weeks of therapy were over I finally got around to getting the nerve conduction test. It's a pretty simple test. Fifteen or twenty minutes of sticking long thin needles with wires attached into my arms by a nice young doctor that looked almost old enough to get his drivers license. We had a nice conversation about my motorcycle riding and the novel I was writing while he measured how fast electrons passed along the nerves in my arms.
"Strange, I thought, I came here for my neck."
"Moderate to severe carpal tunnel in both arms," he said. That's why you feel the burning in your wrists."
It's funny, the aneurism throbbing on my wrist for the past few months stopped hurting, and both wrists where they meet the palm started burning. I now had another set of pains I had never felt before.
Remember, at the beginning of this treatise I told all of you reading this that I was taking charge of my own health, so I asked the young doctor, "Okay what do I do about it?"
After a brief description of the surgery he would recommend, he said, "Stop riding your motorcycle. The vibration makes it worse. And stop writing on your computer, both of those will help."
Now I am a typical man. There are only two things I enjoy more than writing and riding my motorcycle and only my wife knows what they are. And it's going to stay that way, so don't ask. But I really love riding a hundred and twenty horsepower two-wheeler and I also love trying to be creative with words. Giving them up because electrons don't go down my arms fast enough just was not in the cards.
Two weeks later I was in the office with the Spine surgeon. His ideas to fix all the things I never knew I had, ranged from Surgery that would empty my largest retirement account, to taking Advil and see how it progresses.
I bought stock in Wyeth Corp the makers of Advil and went home.
After two months of no doctors I felt pretty good again.

But it's now January again. I'm supposed to make an appointment for my annual physical and I'm scared to death.

Snakes

2008-06-16T09:13:00.000-04:00

I was afraid of snakes when I was growing up. Until I was ten years old I had never seen a snake other than in a zoo, but they still frightened me. As a teenager I explored the woods and streams in rural Bucks County Pennsylvania. There I came face to face with a few Garter snakes, which are harmless, and several water moccasins and copperheads, which are not. Those encounters were few, but they added to that reptilian fear that most humans seem to carry in them from the day they are born.

As an adult I had only a few non-threatening encounters with this alien species until we bought a home on a mountain lake in Pennsylvania. The path from our house down to the lake was a stone stairway. A stone stairway that took me several years to construct from the many large and small rocks strewn across the property. During the construction, everyone once and a while I would see a snake’s head appear between a few rocks but then the snake would disappear quickly. I convinced myself they were afraid of me. Much later I realized that they were not afraid of me, they just didn't want me to see them until I had finished building their home. My carefully constructed, dry-stacked-stone stairway was a Taj Mahal for snakes.

Each summer at the lake house my fear of snakes would become elevated whenever a six foot long blacksnake decided to sun itself either on our small dock, or on one of the steps I'd built leading to the lake. Each year my trusty, shovel would be called into action and I would cut a few of them in half, or if I was lucky with my panicked swing, I’d manage to cut just the head off.

I knew these snakes were not venomous but whenever a six-foot long snake reared up and surprised me it made no difference, I went for the shovel. A blacksnake when cut in two lives for a long time. Sometimes an hour or two after swinging my dirt-digging guillotine I would find the severed head still able to strike at my foot, while the rear half of the snake was still writhing ten feet away.

I then got older and moved to rural Virginia. Here I finally seemed to be able to recognize that snakes are not to be feared but understood. Most snakes are what are called “beneficials.” That means they do more good than harm.

The last few years living here in Virginia I have moved large blacksnakes from our porch, pulled both black-snakes and garter snakes from their homes living underneath our greenhouse and our deck, and then gently tossed then into the woods. Each time I handled one that primal fear subsided a little more and I felt I had become a better person. That was until yesterday.

Yesterday I came home from a long cross-country motorcycle ride. As my wife and I were walking by our small greenhouse, something caught her eye. A big blacksnake was coiled up on one of the tables she uses to hold her plants and was looking out the window at her.

This was perfect, after seventeen days of being away from her I had an immediate chance to be a hero to my wife. I thought of grabbing the snake with my hands to earn even higher “hero” points but I quickly could tell the snake wanted no part of that plan.

A small three-tined garden rake with a six-foot handle was the perfect instrument to move the coiled snake over into the woods.

The snake cooperated for the first twenty feet but then it decided to slither off the rake and it fell to the ground. “No problem I’ll just lift it up again and move it over into the woods,” I thought. That was my plan. The snake had a different one.

As I approached it on the ground the six-foot long critter decided it wanted no part of me. It had decided to fight back. It took less than an instant for my desire to live peacefully with all God’s creatures to be replaced by my primal fear of snakes.

The rake in my hand accelerated quickly and the three tines pierced the snake about two feet back from its head. In fear, I had swung the rake so violently that when it hit the ground the tined head almost separated from the handle as the wood splintered. Remember for a moment that I used the term “almost separated.”

The poor creature was writhing with the three tines imbedded in its back and I quickly felt guilty. “Stupid” I said to myself. “Stupid. It can’t hurt you it’s just a blacksnake. Longer than I am tall, but still just a balcksnake.”

I carried it into the woods and flung it off of the rake’s tines into the brush. Within seconds a hundred flies were buzzing around the injured snake. Where they came from I have no idea but it was obvious that they somehow sensed a dying animal.

A few minutes later my guilt was really high, and I decided I needed to help the snake by killing it outright instead of leaving it to die a slow death tortured by flies.

Going back into the woods with a three-tined rake with a broken handle and looking for an injured snake was to prove to be one of my more stupid moves.

The blacksnake saw me a little before I saw it and it was not happy. When it came towards me I instinctively swung my almost-broken-handled rake down on its head.

The physics of what followed has me baffled but the head of the rake with its three tines that had pierced the snake came flying back toward me and hit me squarely in the face about an inch below my eye. Luckily just one tine punctured the skin. One tine of a rusty rake covered in snake guts. the slime from the snakes innards mixed with the blood on my hand.

Getting older makes you more philosophical. You look for the lesson, or the meaning in everything that happens. Last night with my face tingling I woke up several times telling myself that I should not have killed that snake.

That virtuous plan did not last through my coffee this morning. My face tingling and with my cheek starting to puff up a little I walked out the back door and down the back walk.

The black hose across the sidewalk didn’t really catch my eye until it moved. My desire to live in harmony with nature ended with a shovel swing that severed the second snake’s head. An hour later I took a trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot and antibiotics.

There’s a reason for our primal fear of snakes. I for one don’t plan to try to counter it anymore.