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Yearly Archives: 2018

City on a Hill? Hah!

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Their Equivalent of Greyhound: Better Than Us—By Far!

We like to talk big about the United States, but we are fifty years too late, or more! The one time we were reckoned to be the A-Number-One Country in the World, the rest of the world lay in ruins. Now instead of being the City on a Hill, we are more like the lopsided shitshack being dragged downriver by a flooded, polluted stream.

What brought this to mind was Martine’s story of her travels to Portland, Oregon, then Sacramento, then back to Los Angeles. Unless you are flying—and even then, sometimes—you are treated like scabby vermin. Both Amtrak and Greyhound will dig into your back with horribly designed seating. On the Amtrak dining car, you get a microwaved hamburger with pretensions to fanciness. In fact, everything on the menu has pretensions to fanciness. And it all tastes like nuked camel dung.

I remember the buses I took in South America. There was one fifteen-hour ride from Buenos Aires to Bariloche aboard a Via Bariloche tutto letto bus with seats that reclined a full 180º, with blanket and pillow.  In addition, there was a steward who served us three meals, whose price was included in the cheap ticket price. (Okay, the food was not perfect, but was adequate.) And there was a clean restroom on board. Try getting that on Greyhound!

Rio Uruguay Ticket Office in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina

BTW, the customer service is better, too—even if you have trouble speaking the language.

We tend to run down Latin Americans as being somehow backwards. We gringos are actually the backward ones—primarily because of our greed. When I went to pick up Martine at the Greyhound station in Los Angeles (located in Skid Row), no one knew when buses arrived. I was told to wait in the ticket line, which had something like seventy-five people plus their bags and children. I wasn’t about to spend an hour asking when the bus from Sacramento was to arrive. More greed!

It makes me want to spend more time in Latin America, even if they are rapists. At least they’re not so greedy with their people.

 

Jim Carrey Takes on the Trump Troll

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I Scream, You Scream …

Actor Jim Carrey looks to be on the point of starting a brilliant new career, as an Anti-Trump Twitter Troll. The tweet that went with the above picture is:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 Dear Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery @NPG, I know it’s early but I’d like to submit this as the official portrait of our 45th President, Donald J. Trump. It’s called, ‘You Scream. I Scream. Will We Ever Stop Screaming?’

Even more artistic is this one about General Kelly:

 

Guess Who

The accompanying tweet reads as follows:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 All who enter his crooked carnival with integrity are doomed to leave without it. General Kelly has been trampled by his own compromise. Who dares be the next to ride the carousel of fools?! Muahahaha!!!

Finally, I couldn’t pass up this attack on the current Speaker of the House of Representatives:

Paul Ryan

And the tweet thereunto appertaining:

Jim Carrey

✔ @JimCarrey

 Tone deaf Paul Ryan brags that his tax bill is going to make low income voters an extra $1.50 a week! That’s almost enough for a box of Band-Aids. Who needs healthcare? WAKE UP REPUBLICAN BASE! You are parked on the tracks, cheering for the train that’s about to run you down. ;^P

You can see all the pictures by clicking here.

Bukowski: “A Dog Walking Backwards”

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Poet Charles Bukowski

The title of this poem is “For the Foxes.” I do not understand why. But that’s okay with poetry. It takes quite a lot of readings sometimes to understand what is going on. Whatever it means—specifically—I like the feel of this poem.

Don’t feel sorry for me.
I am a competent,
satisfied human being.

be sorry for the others
who
fidget
complain

who
constantly
rearrange their
lives
like
furniture.

juggling mates
and
attitudes

their
confusion is
constant

and it will
touch
whoever they
deal with.

beware of them:
one of their
key words is
‘love’

and beware those who
only take
instructions from their
God

for they have
failed completely to live their own
lives.

don’t feel sorry for me
because I am alone

for even
at the most terrible
moments
humor
is my
companion.

I am a dog walking
backwards

I am a broken
banjo

I am a telephone wire
strung up in
Toledo, Ohio

I am a man
eating a meal
this night
in the month of
September.

put your sympathy
aside.
they say
water held up
Christ:
to come
through
you better be
nearly as
lucky.

 

An Inflammation of the Eyelid Margin

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Inflamed Eyelids of a Blepharitis Sufferer

No sooner did Martine return to Los Angeles than I broke out into an array of allergic responses. On one hand, I started going into sneezing fits and blowing my nose. More serious was a siege of blepharitis, a condition in which the eyelids feel like inflamed constantly itching parchment. The only thing that works against it is an expensive drug called Avenova, which, for some obscure reason, is not on Blue Cross’s approved drug formulary. I was able to pick up some today, so I am sure that the current infestation will not continue much longer.

Allergies have been one of the banes of my existence. In high school, I had a seborrheic dermatitis that made my scalp look full of snowflakes. Then there were the usual spring and fall respiratory allergies, which I still have to some degree. I am not able to eat shrimp or lobster unless it is caught in near-Arctic waters without getting a reaction that feels like a severe strep throat which lasts for two or three hours.

The worry and stress about Martine has certainly contributed to the intensity of my allergic responses. In time, it will gradually subside. I hope.

 

Not Out of the Woods Yet

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The Conditions That Led to Martine’s Leaving Are Still in Place

I was happy to see Martine again yesterday, but her return had more to do with the discomfort of land travel over long distances on the cheap, and the fact that she had come down with a cold. She still hates Los Angeles and wants to leave. Yet, at the same time, she said she missed me and thought of me daily. (I also thought of her daily.)

Ultimately, to be cured of this mania, she has to takes steps to confront her depression: She spends some twelve hours a day in bad, and about six hours a day lying flat on her back on the couch. She does the laundry, washes the dishes, and cleans up around the apartment. That accounts for most of her time.

Today, I made a big pot of lentil soup with vegetables cooked in chicken stock. I hope it helps her with her cold.

I do not give Martine money to leave town, and on each of this trips, she wastes more of her own funds, which are dwindling rapidly. While she is with me, I will continue to pay for her food, rent, health, and recreation. I don’t think she can afford more than one or two at the most of these little escapes. But we are not talking about rational behavior here.

Whatever I can do without hurting myself, I will do. I feel no real resentment at her escapes, just sadness. I try to leave her with the feeling that, when the escape attempt fails, I will be there to try to pick up the pieces again.

 

Together Again

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Martine and I in the Coachella Valley

Martine called me this morning from Sacramento and said she was returning home. Apparently her trip was marred by a combination of a bad cold and uncomfortable travel. Whatever the reason, I am happy to welcome her back. I hope she doesn’t plan any more of these departures (this was her third).  I just got back from the Greyhound Depot in downtown L.A., so I don’t have time for any further details at this time.

 

Five Epiphanies

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Ushuaia from the Air

It was James Joyce who, in Stephen Hero and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, coined the term epiphanies to refer to moments of clarity and sudden recognition of another perspective. There were several points in my life in which I had a shock of recognition and that I looked back on as pivotal points in my development as a person. In this post, I recognize five such epiphanies that occurred in my life:

Dartmouth College 1962

It was a bad year. It looked as if my parents were headed for divorce, and rare was the day when there were no mutual recriminations. I was delighted that I was accepted at Dartmouth. When, during the summer, my future roommate’s parents drove me up to the campus, I fell in love with the place, deciding that here was a place I could heal.

Cleveland 1966

I was released from Fairview General Hospital after brain surgery to remove a pituitary tumor. As I was sitting as a passenger in our family automobile, I saw the people in the street almost as angelic beings. It was only after the operation that I was told how serious the operation was; and that my life was despaired of. I thought momentarily of Miranda’s lines in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

Oh, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
Uxmal 1975
On my first trip outside the United States, I arranged with Turistica Yucateca to have a driver take me to the Maya ruins at Uxmal in the Puuc Hills. As his car pulled up to the magnificent Templo del Adivino, he made a sign of the cross. I felt that I was on holy ground.
Death Valley 1979
It was my first camping trip and my first real introduction to the desert. We were at Furnace Creek, with desolation all around us. Just after sunrise, birds of every variety flocked to the campground and woke us up.
Ushuaia 2006
It was my first trip to South America. As our plane descended to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, only 600 miles from Antarctica, I felt a shiver of excitement. Never mind that I was to break my shoulder in a blizzard within a few days, Ushuaia has always stood for a kind of subarctic wilderness. I returned in 2011 with Martine and would gladly return again.

 

The Travel Cure

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Nariz del Diablo Train in Sibambe, Ecuador

I have a simple plan to cure the ignorance of most Americans who think themselves to be proud because they have lived in the same shithole all their lives. The idea came to me from reading Mark Twain, who wrote in The Innocents Abroad (1868):

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Lest we all become too place-proud, we need to send our people to travel in the so-called Third World. And I don’t mean First Class seating on jet aircraft and staying at luxury hotels and ordering room service. I mean forcing them to take buses and trains, struggle with the language, and eat what the ordinary people eat. In every way, such an experience will open their eyes and, when they return to East Jesus, Arkansas, they will be better people for it.

And no, it isn’t an ordeal—not by a long shot! When I first started to travel, I had experience of only four places: Cleveland, Ohio (most of my life to that point); Hanover, New Hampshire (my 4 years at Dartmouth); Los Angeles (eight years at UCLA and after); and Lake Worth Florida (just a few weeks, not counting my infancy). Growing up in the Midwest, we never went anywhere for any length of time. My first whiff of Yucatán not only opened my eyes, my nasal passages, and my taste buds, but I felt I was at the beginning of a more wondrous existence.

Work kept me from traveling as much as I wanted to, but I traveled enough to have many happy memories.

 

 

In Dubious Terrain

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Volcanic Steam Vents Near Þingvellir Iceland

It is almost five years since I last set foot in Iceland. Curiously, most of the vacations I have had since then have been in earthquake and volcanic zones. It is almost as if being in highly dubious terrain has become a metaphor for my life. All those Icelandic steam vents, all those fumaroles—they are a handy symbol for the curve balls that life can throw at you. I am reminded of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Pilgrim must walk a straight and narrow path from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, which is Heaven.

My first memory of Iceland, going back to my first visit in 2001, was of all the steam vents on the Reykjanes Peninsula between Keflavík Airport and Reykjavík. Then, too, there were those fields of geysers where one had to stay on the path if one didn’t want to fall through the crust and end up boiled to death within seconds.

The Volcano Sabancaya in Eruption Near Arequipa, Peru

In my seventy-third year on this earth, I find I must walk on the straight and narrow path lest I fall by the wayside. Living with Martine was a pleasant distraction—one I would gladly suffer again—but on my own, there are more things that can happen to me. I am determined to take good care of myself, insomuch as that is possible.

As you read these little squibs of mine, I should not be surprised if you could tell that something is wrong before I can inform you of the details.

In the meantime, I continue to plan for my vacation later this year in Guatemala, another land of earthquakes and volcanoes.

 

Rhyolite

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Martine at Rhyolite Ghost Town Near Death Valley

On this, the first full day after Martine’s departure, I have been reading, watching old movies, and waiting for a major rain event that is due this week. I probably will not go downtown this Thursday because that’s supposed to be the heaviest rain day. Soon, I will have to get up and wash the dishes. That is one of the things that Martine used to do. That and the laundry are going to be my new duties.

I look at some of the old photos I had on Flickr and found the above pic of Martine standing by a ruined caboose by the ghost town of Rhyolite, NV—an old mining town that sprang up out of nowhere, became a fairly major railroad destination, and suddenly melted away into the sands of the desert early in the 20th century.

While I know I’m going to miss Martine, I do not plan to let my whole life swirl down the drain. I have to be more active about contacting my old friends and making new ones. Wish me luck.