SmokeSound

"A potpourri:  a stew made of different kinds of meat." "From French:  literally, "rotten pot".   A mixture of things.  A medley. Thus: We had a dinner, recently, a most pleasant dinner.  We had a bit of a ragged time getting started, but our company--all of us there, composed of family and family-friends and friends of friends--settled into a most agreeable bond around food and talk and the season. The wind howled outside, in a most unusual way. Things blew, and went bump in the night. The wind picked up the rain and threw it at the windows up under the eaves. In the morning, I picked up the potted plants blown over onto their sides. It was just punctuation for our pleasantries. *     *     * Our table is a foundation in my life. It was, once, a bakery table, hammered together on the diagonal by carpenters as if laying a maple floor at waist level, layers thick, standing first on heavy pipe legs, and worn down to tell a sto...

Cooper thinks he is a big dog. He keeps boasting about the size of his paws. Boasting aside, the vet assures us that his small paws are appropriate to the amended state of his . . .                            to his amended state. We have a big beautiful wall between us the herds of javelinas who pass this way more than daily: the big beautiful wall--truth be told-- is not really a wall, at all.  It is a fence, but it keeps the javelinas out. It cannot keep bobcats out, nor coyotes, but Cooper does not know that. He charges to the wall, threatening to escalate hostilities to a nuclear point. I have tried to explain to him that there is more than one way to get past a wall, or a fence, but he won't listen.  He says he is a bright dog, a very bright dog, the brightest dog in his class, that he is a graduate of the best obedience and business-trick school, and that we could not be...

It is, after all, the dead of winter, and a tough one it has been, too, with the election of Our Glorious New Leader, which brings to mind the fact that our new guard dog still pees on the floor whenever he get a chance, and that he (Cooper) still refuses to attend daily briefings since he says he is a smart dog, and smart dogs don't need no stinking briefings. We took the Cooper with us when we drove to the southeast part of town to Saguaro East. "Hey, there!", somebody said to me as we walked up to the Visitor's Center--Cooper at one end of the leash and I on the other--"You should go home and get the rest of the dog!" OK.  He is not very big. The Park is big, climbing easily up the side of the Rincons:  the mountains bending around to form the east side of the city.  Together with the Santa Catalinas north of them, they funnel every stray cloud into a corner--an elbow--and squeeze out whatever humidity can be intimidated to nurture the...

How strange it is-- this marriage between religion and sports! How strange it is that almost no one thinks it strange to drive to the high school stadium to watch the kids play football, knowing that someone prayed with the team for . . . well, not that we beat the snot out of the kids from Left Elbow High School, but for . . . maybe . . . just a good clean game with as few injuries as it will take to beat the snot out of the Left Elbow Bluebonnets. The game cannot start, of course, until we sing the national anthem, or until someone with musical aspirations sings the national anthem for us. Everybody hopes that Colin Kaepernick does not show up and sit through the rockets red glare, which would put lives in danger at the suggestion that racism is still real right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is as if religion, and sports, and patriotism were a seamless blend of everything worth believing: god is on everybody's side--the Lef...

There you have it:  proof! The dime is gone! If that does not prove, conclusively , that the Gubbamint is invading our privacies and back yards, then nothing does! As you undoubtedly know, because you undoubtedly read my earlier post, "Just an ordinary guy, thinking it through" (a couple back), I became concerned that the Gubbamint was using the Hubble telescope, built with our money, not to look back in time and space at what things were like billions of years ago--that was just a ruse--but to spy on things happening in our back yard.  And when I read that, should they do that, they could read the print on a dime, it all became clear to me:   the Gubbamint was going to confiscate our money; especially our dimes!   Anyway, as every fool knows, the Creation from Intelligent Design happened no more than ten thousand years ago, and probably less:  there wasn't a Garden of Eden billions of years ago because even god is not that old, not measured in ...

I just took our dog, Cooper, for a walk around Silverbell Lake. Cooper hopped out of the pickup before I could leash him. He had no long-range plans:  he was just happy to be somewhere new. He ran in tight circles fast enough to generate a dustdevil, then came to be tethered.  Just wayward youth, I thought, practicing for the day he would give it a serious try. I blue-bagged what we had come to encourage, and then we dogged it around the whole lake. A great blue heron measured him for size, but decided to fly out to the tiny island supporting their nest, instead. Every tuft of dried grass-- and year-end in Tucson has a lot of dried grass-- required a territorial marker. Cooper is young, and I am old, but we understand each other. We live symbolically, not actually, in bursts. We stopped to talk to a man curious about what a Mini-Doberman and Chihuahua dog look like, and traded coyote tales. He used to have three dogs, but now he has one:...

Someone explained to me recently that the optics of the Hubbel telescope, purportedly kept busy looking at galaxies and planets and other light-hearted things, were so keen that if it were turned around to view us, it could read a dime in our backyard. I am not sure why it would do that but, then again, I am careless about conspiracies. But just to test the theory, I put a dime out in our backyard, in good light. I suppose I should not be surprised if I receive a post card from the F.B.I., or maybe Donald Trump, in case our backyard is not early on the list of backyard dimes the government in interested in, that explains that we owe tax on that dime. Stranger things have happened, I guess, if one is to believe the baloney that people want to believe about us being in a struggle against the wickedness of our own government. As I see it--and I am probably not complicated enough to understand just how evil government is:  I am one of those guys who grew up t...

That is what I had hoped for when I built the platform for the quail block:  quail!  Gambel's Quail, and other small birds, or even other large birds. But we have a surfeit of critters around our yard.  Javelinas, especially, come by wishing for a garden patch, but content to insure that not a single seed kicked out of the bird feeder goes to waste.  Once they had found a way to worry my first quail block to the ground--where a scene ensued reminiscent of football fans who had watched the game from the bar--very quickly demolished the whole block in about four minutes, I built the present platform, higher up, on posts driven into the ground.  Then our resident gray squirrel, who noticed the "q" in quail block, quite like the "q" in squirrel, claimed it for his own, as much as he could. I do not "q"uite resent him, or her.  Squirrels have to survive, too, a task complicated by the need of coyotes to make a living.   And it keeps her, or him, a...

Two Dogs and Mari and Elliot "There are worse things than losing an election; the worst thing is to lose one's convictions. . . ."   Adlai Stevenson said that, in 1952, sixty-four years ago. My life is lived on a much more ordinary scale than that of people who run for the Presidency, but even here, in a small house in Tucson, elections matter, where it hurts.   It has been a good year, even though gravity has become a more powerful force than when we were young.  More often, I decide not to follow things dropped to the floor, lest we stay there, both.  I mentally map their coordinates.  Of course I exaggerate!  A little.  We shall visit our newest grand-daughter again, soon.  Elliot is evidence that life—just life itself—is a glory.  Jao is almost enough for us to wish life were endless, just to see what else shall be.  Spencer is going to graduate from high school, and Sophie has a driver’s license.  But the list...

David Duke is a white nationalist, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who denies the Holocaust, and is a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  That ought to be enough to embarrass anyone to silence, but it isn't.  David Duke said, recently: "We are losing our country. . . . We are being outnumbered and outvoted in our own country." Obviously, David Duke (I am reluctant to call him, "Mister" Duke.  It sounds honorable.) is worried about the time when white people will not, alone, constitute a majority of American citizens, and American voters.  We white people, while still constituting almost half of the population, will be slightly outnumbered by the mix of black people, brown people, and indigo blue people who constitute America.  We will, in other words, while still having a white population that is proportionately larger than our numbers in the whole world, not be quite so disproportionately in charge. There is no consensus about who is whit...

We have winterized the Big Rig for the season. That's it there, just to the right of center, whilst on its most recent excursion. We have had to concede the onslaught of winter: it almost froze last night, and the weather magi are promising more brutalities to come. 'Tis the season to plan outings, as soon as earth can wobble us back to spring, when young men's hearts turn lightly to thoughts young women have been thinking all winter. Our spring fantasies are less enticing: draining the anti-freeze,  reconnecting the battery, hefting the propane tanks, studying maps and asking if-whats. We have a reason to consider new roads! The election has sharpened our minds; made us appreciative of time and choices. Samuel Johnson  said,  "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." No one here is to be hanged, but spring follows closely behind a Tucson winter. Nothin...

That is not a stunning photo, but is is a photo taken on November 28th, and for reasons known only to a meteorologist and to a Tucsonan, it brings uncommon pleasure.

One can become weary fighting other people's religious wars. (It is bad enough fighting one's own.) What is worse is getting involved without knowing what it is all about. That is us, fighting in the Middle East. A long time ago-- before Hector was a pup-- when Muhammad died, the question was who should succeed him. It was a family dispute. (It is even worse getting into someone else's family fights.) A large part of the family, centered around Saudi Arabia, are now called Sunnis. A smaller part of the family, now identified with Iran and part of Iraq, are now called Shiites. Everybody in the family chooses sides, and every few hundred years, they shoot at each other. Christians know all about that kind of stuff: once it was the Christians loyal to Rome, and the Christians loyal to Constantinople and, later, Moscow.  West and East.  Oh, dear Lord! Then it was a division among those in the West: those loyal to Rome, and the Protestants. The...

Richard B. Spencer is, perhaps, the leading advocate of what has become known as the Alt-Right movement.  At a rally in Washington, D.C., recently, he said that America belonged to White people, whom he called, "children of the sun".  White people, he said, were a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized, but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were awakening to their own identity.   I will let Mr. Spencer speak for himself.  Joseph Goldstein reported what he said.   At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea. “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.” “To be white is to be a creator,...

I didn't hear how it began, but a band of Whitefaces were keenly commenting about a pipeline being built in North Dakota--sometimes Whitefaces gather 'round in a circle and smoke an oil pipeline together:  bonding, you know:  worry about lung and liver cancer later--and someone must have said something about the Standing Rock Sioux and the others protesting that the pipeline endangered their sacred grounds in North Dakota. Nobody said it, but you could see the scorn in the air, like pipe smoke.  Sacred grounds!  North Dakota ain't no Lourdes or Jerusalem!  Sacred grounds! "They don't even want to be called "Indians", someone said.  "They want to be called . . . " (you could smell the smoke) "Native Americans" ! Actually, it was our government that decided to call the people native to America when Christopher Columbus got lost, "Native Americans".  No explorer into the Americas ever met anyone who introduced him- or ...

(I only wish I had said it, but I was -11 at the time.)

Oh, dear good lord, the media are gagging on their analyses of why Trump won, and Clinton lost, the election!  Well, Clinton handily won the total vote, but Trump won the electoral college numbers, so America will be great again.  What would really be great is if we got rid of the electoral college, which originally was intended to take the election out of the hands of the uninformed general public, and put it into the hands of gentlemen who understood what was going on.  It has come to be nothing more than an absurd artifact skewing the popular vote. The election was not won or lost because Latinos voted as they did. The election was not won or lost because women voted as they did. Neither was the election decided because Trump was not a woman nor because Clinton was not a man. James Comey did not determine the outcome of the election: he only made it clear that the FBI is not pristine, and that he is a clumsy, self-absorbed oaf with no ballet training. Do...

We have gotten mostly past the pain of helping our elderly cats and dogs die. Helping was surely more painful than the dying itself.  I should know. I am nearly 85.  And I recognize my own end up there on the road ahead is much easier to admit than thinking of helping another animal-companion die. Cooper is 5.  I said, "What the hell! I will die before he does." So we got a dog; a small dog, a mixture of miniature things. He was quiet, alert, and inquisitive. He didn't bark. He just stood proud, ears up, glancing at us as if to ask, "What's that?" That was days ago. Cooper has discovered his bark, and maybe his lisp and pith and pitch, too. He has discovered birds, and as an intelligent dog should, he has decided to protect us against birds.  He barks at them. "Goldfish,"  I said to myself, "Guppies."

There is good light this morning: you can see what fear of other races looks like. There is good light: you can see how male dominance looks when frightened. In the good light, you can see what fear of what is coming looks like. There is good light: you can see how small the world really is. You can see your relatives and neighbors who did this, who think that e-mails are more dangerous than sexual predators, who probably put up with this kind of thing silently because . . . maybe for the same reasons. There is good light this morning.

I will tell you what really irritates me. What really irritates me is  logging onto what purports to be a news site and being deluged with an avalanche of ads for crap I don't want and imitation news reports about somebody's boobs. I used to have an e-mail account at a college where I taught.   I logged in to it one day after I retired and it was filled with offers to enlarge my penis. Huffington Post, for instance,  has become nearly a joke about news. It is virtually impossible to navigate from the top to the bottom of an article without being ambushed. Google News is deadly dull, visually, and a delightful relief. I almost yearn for  Courier font and a greater-than prompt. Maybe a dot matrix printer. Almost.

What do we know  is happening all around us? We know that burning as much coal, oil, and gas as we do is warming the planet.  Most of us can read a thermometer. We know  that we are a nation of immigrants, and always have been.  We know  that it will not be long before we shall be a nation with a more-or-less brown-skinned majority.  After all, 60% of the world population is Asian, about 15% is Black, and 11% is White.  The world isn't all White.  It is more-or-less Brown. We know  that we actually live in a global economy.  Global trade is almost everybody's lifeblood.  Going back to traveling by wagon train isn't a pleasant idea. We know  that most of our evolutionary male ancestors were bigger and stronger than most of our female ancestors, and that, in our country, we only allowed women, even to vote, only in 1920, even though some women were smaller than some men. We know those things.  They aren't...

We began as hunters and gatherers. Generally, the men hunted and the women gathered. Our earliest ancestors went to where the game was; went to where the seed plants and roots were. They were travelers, following seeds and game.      Ten thousand years ago,      someone with a bent back and tired feet      figured out that she could plant the seeds,      near the river, and watch and wait,      and someone else snared a rabbit,      putting it into an improvised pen. Historians said they started a revolution: agricultural revolutions, near rivers everywhere. They made places to store the extra grain, and settled down to stay in shelters, making villages, ten thousand years ago.           An idea became a village,           and a few people quit gathering and hunting           and began to make sandals, ...

A few more hours, that all the time we've got! That, of course, is almost what Lerner and Lowe wrote for Alfred P. Doolittle, in My Fair Lady.  Alfred P. was facing his own end time--that is to say:  marriage. We, three hundred million of us, are at election day, and it is clear to many a religious pundit that having to choose between Alfred P. Trump and Eliza Clinton. . . .   ( "No!",  I am saying to myself, "Stop!" , but I cannot.  I am mesmerized by this deep understanding of what an election is.) People like Michael Brendon Dougherty say that this election is God's way of pronouncing judgment upon us .  I do not know who Michael Brendon Dougherty is, but he seems to represent a Band of Believers who say that when God wants to condemn a nation, he gives them a Presidential election, or something like that, and Boom!  Kawhop!  The end of the world is upon them!  Armageddon!  Judgment Day!  Orange Hair!  Ticks and ...

Mornings are not what they used to be. The quiet hour, sipping half a cup of coffee, maybe or maybe not having made breakfast-- maybe just a snap of Costco biscotti or two-- the Times and the local Tucson paper, have become a juggling act. We have what purports to be a dog now, again after a couple of decades with cats, and the mutt insists that we bond. I don't want to bond: I want to rehearse political madness; not the madness of the candidates, but the lamentable basket of shallow voters that we are, unable to see that the scientific, economic, demographic, and social and psychological facts have shifted everything, something like the earth wobbling on a new axis, but we stumble along, mumbling old slogans, offering modified New Deal programs on the one hand and semi-fascist aspirations for a Strong Man on the other. Because neither represents a clear articulation of the tectonic shifts beneath our feet-- that the old economy and the old jobs and the...

It has been almost 500 years since the Great Reformation in Europe, when the Church that had been the symbol-bearer of the society split apart, most notably between the establishment, centered in Rome, and the followers of Martin Luther, located in Germany.  What had been the old Roman Empire and the uncouth Germanic tribes came raggedly apart; not along neat lines. The Roman Empire, the old Roman Empire, had stretched itself too far, and had found itself, a thousand years earlier, coming undone.  The barbarians in the north--those Germanic tribes who did not understand that the Emperor was divine, and all that, crowded in.  The Jews, over there on the other side of the Mediterranean, had spawned a Jesus cult, and it was spreading like cancer.  So the Empire adopted the new religion for itself--you use the glue you can find--and the Holy Roman Empire was formed.  The Holy Roman Empire had, in fact, two heads:  the Emperor and the Bishop at Rome. Eve...

To watch for autumn colors in Tucson is something like looking for bananas in the Yukon. You might find some but you probably won't believe it. I read, however, something in the paper about the colors up on Mt. Lemmon, a mountain 9,000 feet high, wearing a ski run almost like a necklace, almost in our backyard. I do not want to shovel snow, ever again, but who can deny the glory of autumn colors. "I am off!", I cried to Mari, who knew better than to chase ghosts of Christmases past, and I drove up as far as the road can go. It is not necessary for friends who spend their weekends sharpening their snow shovels to send scornful notes.  There is a beauty in being warm, too, kinder than real icicles hanging from the gutters. The campgrounds along the way are closed for the season, and the hikers at 8,000 feet had stripped to their undershirts, pioneers of the season, looking hardy, convincing each other that the 60 degree weather was s...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French priest and paleontologist. Paleontologists are concerned about fossil plants and animals. Maybe priests are, too.  Somewhere in my heap of books, I have highlighted a sentence that said something like this: We human beings, spread all over the earth, looked up  and saw ourselves coming over the horizon. That is where we are. It is not just that we have walked everywhere: even when we have spread out as far as we could, we are almost instantly accessible to each other. Mari and I flew to Atlanta over the weekend to enjoy Marcia's fiftieth birthday celebration. Other people came from other far places. Communications technology is almost instantaneous. Flowers at the florists come from South America. A close look at the food on the grocer's shelves will mirror a map of the world. Cars, phones, tools, steel, oil, fish, and music come to us from everywhere. To watch the evening news is to watch the world coming to us ...