Tag: RDP

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Egress

If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

The famous, and some would say infamous, P.T. Barnum owned a popular emporium of the absurd and mysterious in New York City. For a paid admission, one could see all the wondrous items he had gathered for the gullible and easily led. In fact, it was too famous. Once inside, people refused to leave, and no more could enter. Seeing this as a cramp in his ability to make money, Phineas T chanced upon a solution. Near the rear of the exhibition, he placed a large sign and arrow. It read: This way to the EGRESS. Assuming that it was the next fantastic object to be viewed, people streamed through the door only to find themselves on the street. Seeing so many go through the door others followed. Want to get back in? Pay another admission.

I think a Freeway sign is needed for this society: this way to the EGRESS . We need to get off the particular highway to hell we seem to be driving on. And do a serious reset.

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around four Am

Four AM is the best time to catch me playing guitar these days. And I just remembered that it was around four AM that my “day” used to end when I was performing as a folksinger.

So, since August, I’ll have these waking periods while it’s still dark. Then, unable to get back to sleep, I’ll slip into my office, pick up my old guitar and start practicing.

I used to distinguish between practice, which I did daily for two or so hours, and rehearsal, which I did to prepare for a gig. When I lived in Boston, I liked to practice in the kitchen but rehearse on the apartment building’s roof. The two things are similar but different. Practice was playing the guitar. Rehearsal was that, but it was also planning how each set of a gig should be structured because warming up was a lot different than a more mellow set when many in the audience had heard the first set and were interested in what you had. The final set was for winding down, relaxing, and sending home. There were variables you planned for if the house you were playing had a lot of inter-set churn, was rowdy or drunk.

Then there was the patter, the amusing, sometimes dubious stories and anecdotes you told while tuning or just for fun between songs. One of the old goofy ones was the ancient ( among folksingers, anyway) monolog about there being three ways to remove peanut butter from the roof of your mouth. This one was golden if the house was in a goofy mood that evening. Don’t try it in a bar room.

When I traveled, practice and rehearsal happened wherever I was staying. I often stayed with married friends, so “Uncle Wes” was a source of merriment. Dave Van Ronks’ children’s song “Oh Mister Noah” was a hit with many, but I rarely performed it in a set unless there happened to be kids in the audience. Kids in the audience made my life hard because I had a lot of “adult” material in my repertoire.

So here I am, coming on like some Folkie guru of folk music. But that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ with it.

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Exploration

Exploration. That’s why I write. The keyboard is a sort of gateway to new and old experiences. A long time ago, I discovered a curious thing; I can verbalize something, and one stream of consciousness comes out, or I can write about it, and something divergent is the result. So writing is a sweet way of exploring my thought process, history, and world views.

This is not always without tears. Over the years, I have swept much out of sight and consideration. In lots of my writing, those things come oozing out of the dark corners, and I must come to terms with them. This is where driving comes in. I’ll be driving on a back road, and my mind is keying in on something I’ve written – say, my time on the road in the 1960s. Suddenly I’ll view an event differently as my understanding of that time shifts.
I also startle myself with how many idealistic views of youth remain intact. The abrasive nature of time has not been able to eradicate it – knock the corners off, perhaps – but not destroy it.

There’s a touch of surprise about what I write. It’s new to readers and new to me. So yes, I write to explore and a bit to wonder.

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Restoration

When we purchased our home in Central Massachusetts, we asked the previous owners to do a clean sweep before the sale. So the day we moved into the house was reasonably pristine. However, they left some things they were confident we’d need. In the basement was the giant bag of some “weed and feed” products.
Looking outside at what passed for the lawn, I realized that for many years the owners had been committed to creating a European-style lawn on the top of a hill that was ninety percent glacial till. As a result, there were barely three-quarters of an inch of soil before you hit gravel and sand. The lawn was a straggling bunch of grasses mixed with invasive weeds. Behind us was a wildlife sanctuary that shaded the rear third of the lot. That back section was choked with invasive vines.

Moving in late fall, just before Halloween, meant I had more immediate issues than dealing with the yard. So we started on wallpaper stripping, painting, and the usual stuff that needed to be done in a new old house.

It was March before I began to tackle the mess outside. I started by removing the weed and feed, removing all the vines, and clearing a sunny garden area. The rear of the lot needed significant work, but we weren’t exactly sure what type. It was so shaded and had been covered by vines for so long that almost nothing grew there. Beyond our property line was a typical New England “Old Field” succession that had filled in an old orchard and pastureland.
I did a lot of sitting on an old stump fretting about the future of this land.
It was a depauperated woodland border. Elsewhere a semi-shaded area like those would be full of a mixture of plants that thrived on the edge of the woods. On hiking trips with the Appalachian Mountain Club, I’d walked through thousands of small glades like that. So I decided to recreate a typical woodland border.
Local nurseries, the local conservation district, and mail-order plant providers have figured large in this effort. It can’t all be done in a year or a decade. Some plants don’t succeed, and others do too well. There is no font of knowledge readily available for data on this process, but if your community has a knowledgeable conservation agent, they might be able to guide you.

Although it’s January as I write this, and an ice storm is on its way, my mind is already turning to how I can repair the damage that last year’s severe drought did. I won’t know until April which plants merely went dormant early and which plants didn’t make it. As I said, there is no textbook available. But I have restored a more regional and natural woodland border where only invasives thrived before.

  • Trillium
    Trillium
  • Canadian Ginger
    Canadian Ginger
  • Anemone
    Anemone
  • Woods Phlox
  • pagoda dogwood and nannyberry viburnum
  • rhododendron
  • rhododendron
  • The Bog-complete with carnivorous plant
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Apocolypse Now!

I can be brazen in putting down conspiracy theories. There is something about the repetition of themes that irritates me – the world is going to end because of :

  •  the godlessness of society;
  •   the worldliness of society;
  • mind control chemicals put into the chemtrails by the deep state;
  •  the greed of corporations

Just enough fact is in the recipe that otherwise sane people get drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. At holiday gatherings, it can take courage to argue with uncle John who has generously purchased the high-tech equivalent of tinfoil hats for each family member. These cost eighty dollars on the same site that offers AR-15 rifles, doomsday shelters, survivalist supplies, and dehydrated food to see you through your choice of the apocalypse or the rapture.

These tactics offer simple but frequently expensive solutions to complex problems – You and your dear ones will retreat to your basement and wait out the Final Days – to emerge in two weeks and repopulate the earth. Noah didn’t have it this easy.

For people falling for this brand of fantasy, there should be some prize for magical thinking. 

Most of us know by now that the problems facing our continued existence can’t be solved by stop-gap measures or mere hunkering down for a week or two. We’ve lost the treasure of pristine earth, and actual work, not magical BS, will be required to regain some semblance of what was lost – in a hundred years.

But instead of working to reduce our use of fossil fuels, plastic, or other things, it’s easier to seek an easy way out.

And considering our societal penchant for shopping, what could be better than buying a solution on our favorite online store?

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JAFFA!

What are your biggest challenges?

Acronyms have a nasty way of creeping into our daily language, nestling in, and, poof; we forget the original meaning, and they are a word of their own – if they are pronounceable. This happened to radar and other terms. You’ll have to Google the meaning because I’ve forgotten. There see what I mean?
A university puts out an annual list of words that should be retired because of overuse. This year GOAT, the acronym for greatest of all time, is leading the list. They seem to think that we’ll all obey just because they say so. That’s not the way language operates.

Perhaps we should be more reserved in constructing these selections of letters, so they don’t trip so well off the English-speaking tongue. The inquisitive mind will find thousands of snappy acronyms popular in print but not easy to pronounce as a word in English: WYSIWYG( what you see is what you get) comes to mind. In English, it does not trip so smoothly across the tongue. Which raises the question, what about acronyms in other languages? would WYSIWYG fluidly flow from the tip of a tongue speaking another language?

Pursuing this a bit further, if WYSIWYG became an overused word, would it wind up on the banned word list? Or is there a rampant preference for banning only English words here? Prejudice?

OK, WYSIWYG is indeed just one measly little acronym from the Trans Voltaic Urdu family of languages. But dammit! the sheer ” English privilege” of this list bothers me. Can we sanction such linguistic exclusivity in a world seemingly growing smaller every year?
I say no and shall spend the year fighting it. It will be my biggest challenge of 2023, but I will persevere.

Justice and fairplay for all – JAFFA!

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Late at Night

What makes you feel nostalgic?

I try to avoid being up late. Staring into the fire can stir up too many memories, and nostalgia comes around stalking me from the roots of my recollections.

Nostalgia is a deadly foe. I know there is a natural shedding of details with older memories. Over time the edges are worn off both the sweet and the sorrowful.
It’s the sort of thing that makes a beautiful salubrious event out of an absolute hell-whacker of a day at sea in the middle of a hurricane. The details of how you “chummed the fishes” – tossed your cookies- are hidden.
But I can live with the sort of nostalgia that sanitizes the merely hellacious. It’s those dread trips down Memory Lane that scare me. The ones where you consider the woman with whom you never quite got together—those border on dangerous. You wind up turning a nasty little peccadillo into a sentimental affair.

The present may have its traps, but they are nothing on the traps set by memory.

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Ruby Tuesday

Memory is an iffy sort of thing. I’ve had friends with major disconnects in their lives; they had adult children but somehow seemed to think it was still July of 1967. July of 1967 was a great time, mind you. It was pure frolic. But it is very much gone.
Before you go snickering about how people in your grandparent’s generation are living in second adolescence, I’ll dispel any feelings of youthful superiority. Remember last week when you were reminiscing about the good old days of 2015? That’s right. In thirty years, you, too, will be an embarrassment to your children as you get caught doing some weird dance step that was justifiably forgotten before they were born.

To be honest, my father warned me about this. But in the flush of youth, I ignored the warning. He just smiled. I guess because he knew what was coming. He exercised constraint, knowing that in the future, he’d be watching me from the way beyond as I embarrassed myself in front of my children.

So take a bit of advice. Next time you wander into the living room and see Granpa dancing around and singing the words to ” Ruby Tuesday,” cut him some slack.

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Ummmmmm! Good!

You can hide a lot behind carefully chosen words. For example, an edible but not very remarkable meal can be propped up with a smile and a comment about how esculent it was. The word means that the meal was edible. It sounds terrific, but in this case, it conceals the gaseous nature of the meal’s outcome. ” Carl! It was absolutely esculent!”
Language is lovely that way, and while most of us learn to be cautious with claims posted in advertisements, personal flattery, done subtly, is hard to resist.
Most cooks have soft spots in their repertoire that stand out. Excellent cooks have plotted the territory and understand their limits. A friend of mine, a professional chef, yields ground to his wife on baking. ” I cook, but she is the baker!” He maintains that they are very different realms.
Regrettably, some feel that being equipped with an entire library of cookbooks, they have the mandate to make the rest of us eat merely esculent cooking.

My advice is this: if you have to look the words of praise up in a dictionary, you are in trouble.

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Stillness

I have more than a few weaknesses. A quick look into my carving shop reveals a backlog of projects, so getting things done on time is not one of them. Do you think it odd that I should put this up as a virtue? But, with so many failings, I have to count all the small affirmations I can among the positives.
Isn’t that one of the things those self-help books are always saying?
It took me a long time to get the gumption up to count this way. But now that I’ve seen how to do it, I realize how fantastic a method it is.

The other day I was reading in a gardening journal about how fall cleanups should leave the flower and seed heads on for the birds to eat and how the leaves should be left to mulch. I admit that I may have overdone it this year – to the point of neglect- in the garden. But I have decided to look on the positive side and view it not as laziness but as a sort of ecological gift to the local fauna.

In the new year, I am going to resolve to find as many affirmations like these as I can. Admittedly, they seem to cluster around my unwillingness to work, but people are such workaholics these days. They should find ways to affirm the positive aspects of stillness.

Stillness… hmmm…sounds less like laziness and more like Zen. I like it.