Occupation of Independence

 One of the things that is good about old age is that you are forced to confront the brutal truth that the universe doesn't revolve around your own ego, which in fact, will soon be gone.  Freed of that delusion, you can pay more attention to other people in the world.  Sometimes these people have remarkable and admirable qualities that deserve more notice and praise. For instance, my camping neighbor .  Normally I am resentful towards camping neighbors.  I dreaded the coming conversation with this oldster.  You know how it goes: endless, long-winded anecdotes, told with irrelevant details.  Sometimes a single anecdote can turn into a 10 minute soliloquy that bores the listener to death.  Then they forget many of the details and hold things up even more. But this guy had none of those faults.  He had many anecdotes that fit into the topic of conversation  -- and it did feel like a conversation because his stories only lasted three senten...

 It seems like every "fall back" season, when Daylight Time goes back to Standard Time , I am traveling near the junctions of Utah , Arizona , and Nevada .  What a mess that makes! I start off with Mountain Daylight Time , then Mountain Standard , then Arizona Time , and finally Pacific Standard .  The only thing I miss is Pacific Daylight . I hate resetting the clock in the van.  Various electronic devices in my trailer do not adjust themselves -- perhaps they would if I spent an hour wading through the Settings menu.  The phone is the only gadget that is adjusted automatically, but I have always wondered if it uses the Time at the celltower or the time at the phone's location. And my poor little dog.  When do I feed her?  She only cares about the Tummy Time Zone. Still, this area makes for a nice visit.  Yes St. George Utah now has the traffic of Las Vegas .  What a skill it is to allow yourself to visit a place that used to b e good, and...

 Has it finally come to this?  The Traitor-in-Chief in the White House calls MTG a "traitor", despite his ambassador to Israel, Huckabee , having had a meeting with a convicted spy and traitor, Jonathan Pollard . Is there no limit to how craven the US government can be towards Israel? Anyway,  Kim Iversen deserves to be praised for her recent video on this topic. Maybe it is time to plant FBI agents in the congregations of Protestant Evangelical churches , make Christian Zionists register as foreign agents, and keep them on electronic bracelets in the mean time. The Wall of Shame for American politicians

  Israel's war of extermination in Gaza has radicalized me.  It has made me openly contemptuous of anything connected with the old Canaanite storm god, Jahweh. (Or El , if you prefer.)  This bumped my You Tube algorithm towards the " Cold Reason " channel.  Typically they beat up on Christianity, probably because it is an easy and obvious target.  I would rather see them go after other religions, for a change.  And they finally did:  They savaged Buddhism recently. Buddhism usually gets a lot of good press, but does it really deserve it?  Perhaps it gets off too easily, just because it is a non-Abrahamic religion  and because the European and American audience wants to rebel against the religion of its parents. Buddhism likes to promise tranquillity, coming from the extinction of desire  and pulling away from the world.  But we will all be peaceful enough when we are dead, so why brag up Quiescence while we are still alive? In ...

 I did a double-take when I saw the sign at the grocery cart corral: Was the grocery store bragging about not charging you for a grocery cart?  What the heck was going on? Next to this line of grocery carts was another: Now they are bragging about not needing an app to go grocery shopping?  Wait a minute: they had tablets built into the dashboard of the grocery cart! And fancy charging stations for the grocery cart tablets.  Can someone please explain how this lowers the price of groceries ? What is the purpose of the tablets, anyway?  Was it to encourage you to use digital coupons, something that I never use in stores?  Actually I never understood the purpose of coupons of any kind. Ahh, but wait.  The real purpose of electronic tablets attached to the grocery carts must be to force advertisements and obnoxious music on the shopper, like those damn videos and music at the gas pump. Recall that funny dialog in " The Mirror Has Two Faces ," when t...

 What's the official inflation rate these days?  2.9%?  And they wonder why ordinary people don't believe the government anymore.  I looked twice because I was so shocked.  The washer was a large one; it should have cost $5 or so. There weren't any customers there.  And I left too.  There was an old-fashioned laundromat a few blocks anyway that had good machines and reasonable prices. A long-suffering reader probably thinks, "Why should we listen to you?  You are just an old cheap-skate." But actually, I happily spend a little more at laundromats that have an attendant who keeps things clean and orderly.  I don't mind spending a little more if it is going to a real person. But the laundromat with the $11 washer had been redesigned to look like a Starbucks or something.  Let me guess: some giant Wall Street firm like Blackrock is buying up small, modestly priced, old-fashioned laundromats across American, and then "upscaling" them.  ...

 Most people born before 1980 have memories of the demise of the Soviet Union around 1990 and 1991.  Do you remember how unreal and sudden it seemed?  It seemed too good to be true.  At the time, I wondered most about how nuclear weapons were going to be divided up amongst the constituent parts of the old Soviet Union. Much to everyone's relief, the world made it through those times without any mushroom clouds.  Then Wall Street went to work on the Soviet carcass.  And NATO began expanding.  The military-security industry shifted its justification from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror . And now many Baby Boomers have lived to see another extraordinary political earthquake: the sudden dissolution of Zionist support in the USA.  Of course, I am only talking about public opinion.  How exactly will this trickle up to the institutions?  It is hard to imagine a tangible path.  The political elites in Europe and America have...

 It can take so many years to become a good walker , but it is worth the thought and effort.  I was camped in such a nice place and with such good weather that I fell easily into a slow, leisurely sauntering.  Perhaps the slowness helped me spot a pretty and rare orange flower , at the beginning of November.  At this time of year?  Flowers seemed completely out of place, here. A couple days later, the small handful of such flowers was gone. I have always appreciated autumn flowers .  They are, to the more voluptuous flowers of early summer, what a sturdy, dependable 35 year old wife is to a beautiful 19 year old girl. Having a good role model certainly helps one become a good walker, and you know who mine is: If you think I praise dogs too much, the photo above shows that humans can add something positive to the world.  What care somebody had gone to, in building this emergency shelter !  Still, dogs really do have the right attitude to being good...

' Wadi ' is an Arabic term that you might remember from the movie, " Lawrence of Arabia ."  It is a valley that is dry most of the year, and sees water flow a couple days per year.  My area in central Utah has a wadi with a lot of mud deposited on the floor.  But water concentrates and carves out steep-walled slots 10 to 20 feet deep, in this otherwise flat area. The edge of the slot is almost a perfect 90 degree corner.  I was reluctant to walk within 3 feet of this edge, out of fear of it crumbling away.  Looking along the mud slot I could see a lot of places where the walls had collapsed.  In the narrower slots, this would trap a man. But I poked at those 90 degree corners with my hiking pole, and found them surprisingly strong. My little sweetie pie walked along the edge, close enough to give her daddy a heart attack.  At one spot she stumbled when she was only a couple inches from the edge.  But she quickly recovered. She might not have been...