Checking In

 I don't remember if I told you guys about this or not.  When I fell asleep at the wheel last January 30 and ran my truck into a ditch, I told the cops about my medical condition, you know, how I had been falling asleep at inopportune times lately and intended to see somebody about it.  Over four months later, I was notified that I had to attend a "reassessment" meeting with somebody from the Secretary of State in Petoskey on June 8 to determine if I was physically fit to keep my driver's license.  I was, with two restrictions.  One was that I had to stay within a 50-mile radius of home, which I do anyway, and the other was that I couldn't drive at night, which I seldom do anyway.  These restrictions will be lifted in six months, if my health care provider sends in a form that says I'm all better now.

Meanwhile, I have gotten my CPAP machine and started using it.  It's not as bad as I expected, but it still blows.  I have heard enthusiastic reports about how it has benefitted many people, but I'll believe that when I see it.  In case you don't know what a CPAP machine is:

Continuous positive airway pressure - Wikipedia

Jumpin' Jack(fruit) Flash

My, how they've grown!  Yesterday's image was taken 5 days ago and here are some pix taken today.

This is the whole "stick" and you can see it only has one leaf left.  See that bud below the dead leaf?  Same bud, but today it's 20mm long, not the 2mm of yesterday's pic.

Here's a closer look...

You can see a tiny speck of green on the node below this bud; this little guy is only 1mm tall.

Further down the stem there's yet another little bud but the angle is wrong and you can't see it, ridiculously small at .5mm.  Crazy, huh?

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As a special treat for Uncle Ken, here's a pic I stumbled across the other day.  It might even be his condo but only he will know for sure.

Good day

I too have been reminiscing about my early life lately.

and

Sometimes the choices we make are neither good nor evil, they're just different one from the other.

Good ol' Mr. Beagles, once again bringing clarity to some of the conflicting ideas I've had about Uncle Ken's recent posts.  And let's not forget the words of the Pinstriped Sage, Yogi Berra, when he said "When you see a fork in the road, take it."

I don't do much reminiscing, what's done is done, but there are times when a name or idea will pop into my head and transport me many decades into the past and I'll ask myself, "Where did that come from?"  I don't dwell on these notions but I find them amusing, just another aspect of the marvelous human mind.

It occurs to me that as we age we develop our own personal philosophies which, if we had any sense, we would keep to ourselves.  And that's what I'll do.  You guys can create your own delusional realities; I'm happy with mine.

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Is there a name for this time of the year when it is not really springtime any longer but not yet full summer?  Whatever it is, I would call it lovely, giving my green thumb a workout.  Most of the plants are doing well but Monday I brought my little, sickly lemon tree to one of the planters on the 6th floor terrace in hope that plenty of fresh air and many hours of direct sunlight will give it a positive jolt.  It's cousin the Valencia orange is doing fine indoors so maybe the Fickle Finger of Mother Nature is just messing with me.

I had a pleasant surprise with the Jackfruit I planted last year.  It wasn't doing much, just a spindly stick with a couple of leaves on top and they turned yellow and dried out.  I thought the thing was dead but the other day I noticed a tiny bit of green on that stick, and then a few more.  So now there is fresh growth popping along that stick, and the growth is swift, noticeable from day to day.  Here is a pic of that first little bud, about 2mm tall. 

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How is the balcony doing this year, Uncle Ken?  Any new varietals in the planning?  I know that your condo rules frown on feeding birds but I was wondering if a birdbath would be acceptable?  It's gotta be better than that river water and no chance of getting snagged by a turtle.

Memorial Day 4

 As I am sure you guys are aware the USA spends more on defense then the next 10 military big spenders in the world.  Used to be the dems used to fight the reps to get more of that money to be spent on, you know, schools and roads and help out the poor, but lately they have begun to compete with with the reps to prove they are more patriotic, but whatever the dems propose the reps up it.

This was something I meant to get around to in the last couple posts, the awesome amount we pay the military and how little we get out of it.

But then along came Ukraine, the just war.  What could be more just than repelling a country that wanted to conquer you?  And what greater villain than Putin?  What better place to put those expensive weapons that have been in mothballs since we paid that big fat wad of cash for them?  

I began to think, maybe it was a good idea that we seemingly wasted that dough over all those years because now we had plenty of weapons to give to our allies who were fighting to defeat evil dictatorship?

I know you guys are not inside baseballers like me, but that budget deficit fight was a barn burner.  I really didn't think they would get there before the deadline but they did.

Unfair that the dems always give the reps a free pass on this while the reps always fight the dems and go on to spend like drunken sailors, but maybe that is an argument for another day.  For the nonce we had to give up something to keep the country from getting hit with a hammer, so we compromised.

What we compromised on was we gave them a freeze on all spending except of course defense.  That's not good enough for the freedom caucus maniacs and they are looking for some mechanism to spend even more on the military.

But like I said I am inclined to be lenient on this because maybe that largess goes to a good cause, namely the Ukes.

Except it isn't.  The freedom caucus doesn't want to spend on the Ukes anymore, some kind of fealty for Trump's warm and fuzzies towards Putin I suppose.  So they want to spend tons of dough on an institution but hold it in abeyance when it comes time to use it for what it is supposed to be used for.

What was that book that was so popular among the Birchers about sixty years ago?  None Dare Call It Treason?  Sounds like treason to me.

The Road Not Taken

 I too have been reminiscing about my early life lately.  I have made some good decisions of which I am proud, as well as some not so good decisions which I regretted after the fact, although each one seemed to me to be the right thing to do at the time.  Sometimes we can mitigate the effects of our bad decisions, but we can never completely undo them.  Sometimes the choices we make are neither good nor evil, they're just different one from the other.  We will never know for sure what would have happened if we had taken that other fork in the road, like Robert Frost said in this poem.  

Mountain Interval/The Road Not Taken - Wikisource, the free online library

Maybe we would have chosen differently if we had known better at the time, but we didn't, and by the time we knew better, the ship had already sailed.  It's like that old German proverb:

"Ve get too soon olt und too late shmart."

Memorial Day Observations 2

 As Vietnam hove into the view of the US, safe behind my 2-S, I was more or less for it.  I remember reading that in China only socialist realism was allowed in their fiction. No characters were allowed who weren't either without fault (commies), or totally evil (anti commies).  I hated that good guy vs bad guy thing.  Even at that young age I liked stories where the good guy wasn't all that good and the bad guy wasn't all that bad, and I had hopes of becoming a writer, and what would be the point of writing good vs bad?  

So there it was.  Socialist realism was bad and we had to head them off in Vietnam lest literature fall into the dustbin of history.  When the gulf of Tonkin crap hit the papers I was all for giving those impertinent reds a swat.

It's kind of a mysterious thing to me but sometime around 1965 I went from being pro-war to anti-war.  I don't remember a specific day when I sat down and thought it out, I just changed.  Maybe it was because my 2-S was closer to running out.  Maybe it was because of the people around me.  Maybe it was a reasonable analysis.  Anyway there it was.

Nowadays I think that war was stupid, but back in the day I thought it was pure evil, naked Amelican aggression.  To take part in it would be wrong.  Well there were draft counselors all over campus, and there I was filling out the form.  The tricky thing was that you had to be against all wars.  And I didn't know.  Should we have just sat on our hands and let Hitler take over all of Europe?  I kind of just mumbled over that and the draft board didn't care because the army had told them to stop sending them guys that didn't want to be in the war.  Just too much damn trouble.

And then there was Al Gore, son of a senator who was anti war, anti war himself and yet he enlisted and went to Vietnam.  I used to think he did it entirely to help his political career and that would make him a pretty big hypocrite.  But morals in uneasy times can be tricky.  There was the argument that troubled me when I was getting my CO, wasn't I just shirking my slot and leaving some poor schlub, who didn't get to go to college where draft counselors were a dime a dozen, go in my place?  I didn't have an answer for that.

I didn't believe all wars were wrong (WW II) so didn't that mean that I believed some wars were just?  And if some wars were just then didn't we need an army?  And what good was an army where the soldiers decide what wars they wanted to take part in? 

Memorial Day Observations 1

 Never a fan of the military you know. 

When I was a kid I had a set of those green army men, some trucks, some tanks, some green planes, probably a battleship or two, though they were way out of scale and hard to imagine how they fit in the battle plan, but an eight year old kid can figure that shit out.  We played all day, one kid's army against the other kid's army.  Probably the most strategic part of the battle was setting up your lines, those guys lying down with machine guns first, then maybe the guys who were standing with a rifle, maybe the bazooka guys were next, bazookas were way cool, and I guess the tanks and the cannons further back, and way, way, back that battleship or two shooting from some distant sea.  Then I think we took turns leading some segment into battle and the other guy countering, and so on and so on as the day went on, and I don't remember either side ever winning conclusively.  Likely the waft of a newly opened Monopoly game and the sound of those little crisp bills and the irons and hats and shoes tromping across the board stole our attention and there was an instant truce.

And the guns. Oh lord, those cool cap guns and fancy holsters, plastic space squirt guns, just you fingers if need be.  I remember the Christmas of the burp guns.  Every boy in the hood wanted one for Christmas and every boy got one and we spent all of Our Savior's birthday blasting the shit out of each other.

Army comics were cool and so were the movies.  I thought flame throwers were cool, but then I had a flash about what it would be like to be on the other end.  Still cool though.

I was surprised when I learned sometime in my early adolescence that the Korean war had been over for like five years.  What the hell, we weren't fighting the commies anymore?  Shouldn't we still be doing that?

I was a little proud at the age of eighteen to show up at my local draft office and sign up.  Felt like a man with that little white card (still have it in my archives) in my wallet.  The Korean war was way over and there was nothing on the horizon, but it seemed like everybody got drafted as a matter of course, seemed like a rite of passage that I expected I would have to go through and I don't remember feeling much one way or the other.

Because the University of Illinois was a land grant college ROTC was mandatory for all men for the first two years.  They dropped it after my first year and I did not feel bad about it at all.  It was all inspection and standing at attention and some asshole looking you and down and decided that either your shoes or your brass was not shiny enough.  They dished out demerits and you had to go to their office and do clerical crap to get them off your record.

The worst was saluting.  If you were going to or coming back from Inspection and wearing your uniform you HAD to salute any officer who crossed your path.  Fuck that shit, fuck that guy.  I didn't like it at all.