Occupation of Independence

O nce, I almost read a book of the under-rated role of the health problems of famous leaders and events. For instance President Kennedy was a symbol of youthful vigor and charisma as the baton of leadership passed to men who had been soldiers in World War 2. Apparently he took some very strong medications for his bad back. Did I say "apparently?" That's the problem: how much was hidden at the time? What can ever really be proved? How open was the press with President Roosevelt's wheelchair? Hitler might have been heavily drugged by a quack doctor. How did this affect the fortunes of the Third Reich? Did the masses in the early Soviet Union understand the strokes that Lenin had had? A few years before that, how open was the press allowed to be about the quackery of Rasputin in helping the doomed Romanov dynasty in dealing with the hemophilia of the heir-apparent? I read a biography of Bonaparte recently. The historian thought that his famous stamina had been und

There is something to be said for hitting rock bottom. You've survived the worst the world can give you. It's all 'up' from now on, you c ould say. The other day I was at the library of a small town in New Mexico. On the way to the men's restroom, I saw a funny sign on the "women's" restroom. It was just a simple black-and-white line drawing of... what the heck is this? It was an explanatory diagram that clarified what female anatomy looked like. I hadn't known that there was any confusion about this. But then I remembered the President's transgender diktat was making the news. I went away thinking, 'Has it really come to this?' _________________________________ Recently I went to the men's restroom at a Walmart. I'm sure you've noticed how gigantic stores will sometimes only have a single stall, which is big enough to handle all the motorized wheelchairs that 1/3 of the customers require. I was in a bit of a hurr

I wrote the last post after being so affected by the contrast between holiday tourist traffic and the total isolation I had just enjoyed on a mountain bike ride, earlier in the morning. If uncrowdedness were so great, why doesn't everybody avail themselves of it? I suppose it is just human nature to go where everybody else does, by chasing brown signs put up by the forest service, park service, and BLM. It seems undesirable to think for themselves. But the mass-tourist would probably n ot agree with that. They would argue that crowded places are crowded because they are more beautiful than the average place. If you then asked him, "What is beauty?', he would think you are being silly or argumentative, since beauty is "obvious." He means anything that is BIG, vertical, or freakish. Although few tourists would consider the location of my morning mountain bike ride to be ugly, t hey would think it less entertaining than where they were. But I was quite ent

Unaccustomed as we are to wasting time and money at coffee shops, Coffee Girl and I were sitting in the cool September shade outside a coffee shop in Gunnison, CO. We had just finished a satisfying mountain bike ride up steep sagebrush hills. Just think: it was Labor Day weekend, and we didn't run into a si ngle person out there. Not even any " Texas wheelchairs!" Great views and land, and pretty good dirt roads. But it wasn't a "brand name" location. (And if you don't lea rn anything else from this blog, Grasshopper...) Looking at the stream of gigantic vehicles drive by (mostly from Crested Butte), I was at a loss for the right word to describe my feelings. Earlier in life, when I was a hothead, I might have looked at this tidal flow with disdain. A few years later, I would have rolled my eyes. But what about now? 'Perspicacity' comes to mind. Normally that word seems right for high altitude, when looking down towards all the little scur

The Labor Day weekend is a good time to think about 'work'. Lately I have felt a desire for a project of some kind. Don't most people need a project to be happy ? Channel-surfing-with-gasoline is not my idea of a "project." Nor is looking at pretty scenery. Laugh if you will, but I am going to look into applying for campground host jobs for next year. Perhaps it will help to apply in person this year, while I am still in the area. Many, if not most, retirees give some thought to volunteer work. I did too. Perhaps I gave up too quickly. Most of the volunteer jobs, that I know of, are rather petty tasks that should be done by a teenager or a minimum wage employee, if the organization in question could actually afford a minimum wage employee. Worse yet, there is some (paid) officious 'volunteer coordinator' who sits in her cubicle and dreams up rigid and arbitrary schedules for the volunteers, complete with pages and pages of guidelines, application

Although I've never felt much of a need to read Sigmund Freud, his "Civilization and its Discontents" was interesting. In it, Freud mentioned that some people had described a powerful "oceanic" feeling; but he had never experienced it. Perhaps Dr. Freud never had the experience of camping in drab, ugly, and half-dead forests in the summer -- to escape the heat -- and then busting out into the open in September. An oceanic feeling can be very powerful indeed. Better yet, this feeling can be used for a practical purpose: it helps to kee p an outdoorsy lifestyle interesting, long after the tourist phase is over. Recently this oceanic feeling provided a real phantasmagoria for me: breaking out into the sagebrush hills seemed like heading out to sea on a sailboat. Perhaps this was helped by reading Jack London's "South Sea Tales." (Gutenberg.org)  I even listened to some Jimmy Buffett songs for the first time in a long while. For instance, as you

Yes, 'sagebrush sea' is a bit of a cliché. But it's a good one. Strunk & White do not approve of burying readers under too many metaphors. Indeed, we have all been readers on the receiving end of a writer who was a metaphor drunk. And yet, how can writers suppress themselves when something wonderful has put them into an expansive mood? At such times, the mind naturally seeks out analogies with other good things. Every year I spend my canonical fourteen - days visiting my favorite mountain biking area, near Gunnison, CO. The topography, geology, altitude, town, and BLM management philosophy are responsible for making it a success. And every year I praise decomposed granite as geology's greatest hit. To make it even better, I ride downhill on singletracks, and then 'recharge the gravitational battery' by riding uphill on the roads, to complete the loop. Falling into one of those generous and expansive moods, I can't avoid comparing this experience to

Let no one confuse a retro-grouch with a human fossil. This retro-grouch made a giant leap forward when I bravely submitted to my first demonstration of Facebook. The fellow who gave the tutorial was quite good at giving demonstrations. Actually, I was impressed with Facebook as a platform. It seemed useful for certain types of groups. It seemed well integrated with other platforms on the internet. So then, if I was so impressed with it, why haven't I opened up an account? Two things are stopping me. 1. Won't I lose control of ad-blocking on Facebook? Please don't tell me that ads are not too obtrusive, so far. On an internet browser such as Firefox, you can use a free ad-blocking program that works 98% of the time. I am suspicious that most of the bandwagon towards smartphones and Facebook is ultimately motivated by the desire to get people addicted to a platform first, and then bury them under ads that they can't do anything about. 2. Thoreau's classic wise-crac

Once again it's here. My favorite time of year. Every year I am amazed to be so affected by the coming-on of cool weather. Some years I have been interested in analyzing this remarkable longevity. But this year, I just want to feel good about it and hope it keeps going year after year -- like my van! In a similar vein, I love camping at tree islands in the Gunnison area, year after year. Last year I was in the mood for deconstructing the romanticism of this. But this year, it suffices to bask in it. Perhaps there is a natural dialectic going on here. One year I reconstruct the visualization that I deconstructed the previous year. L et's hope that the new version is better in some way than the earlier one. There is something symbolic about tree islands -- something that is different than other features that people go ga-ga over. Oh sure, I am probably prone to some anti-tourist snobbery. But a natural feature ceases to have an effect on you when somebody sticks a bar-code on

During the recent 14 days with the Band of Boondockers, we had enjoyable, non-athletic walks up the road, twice a day. It was more like conversational sauntering than hiking. Some people would consider it pretentious to compare our conversational sauntering to the walks in the garden that the philosophers of ancient Greece took with each other, but an indulgence of this type is useful if it helps bring back a long-neglected, yet wonderful custom. To appreciate conversational sauntering to the fullest, compare it to the new cultural atrocity of people sitting down to a meal at the same table, with one eye on the people they are there to talk to, and the other eye on their damn smartphone. Consider how the mere act of walking naturally overcomes some of the defects of conversations. Those prone to over-intellectualizing (aka, building sand castles in the sky) might be affected by the physicality of walking: they are reminded that human beings have bodies, and that moods sometime depend

As I approach my canonical 14 day limit at a location that has internet, a sense of setback is understandable. I had been on a roll of internet-free living, before I backslid into sin, here. Let's back up a step and look at the Big Picture. This all starts from the premise that there are few better ways to spend the end of your life than in pursuing Moral Perfection, a la Ben Franklin. I'm afraid the results of this project have been disappointing, so far. Rather than merely dwelling on "Thou shalt not...", the pos itive agenda is to be more light-hearted when reading real books off-line, and to break my concentration whenever possible. In doing so I can co-opt the cheap trick that the internet uses to sink its hooks into its victims. Another positive approach is to dwell on the geographical freedom I gain when camping in places where the internet is not available. Tomorrow I have a chance to put this into practice. Ah dear me, let's hope this doesn