12.5.2024 – New ways – live longer

New ways – live longer
but years added at the end
not in the middle

The news abounds with stories of how folks are living longer and as there are more and more people (hard to believe that the population of the United States has doubled since World War 2), more and more people are living longer.

Looks like getting off cigarettes and caffeinated coffee is working.

There is a catch.

Much like the people who go jogging for sixty minutes every day and claim it adds 15 years to their life.

Well, those years were spent … jogging.

Live to be 65 and not jog.

Or live to be 80 and spend 15 years jogging.

Almost sounds like a prison sentence.

Back to the point there are lots of actions we can take, things we can do and things we can avoid and add years to life.

But … those years are added at the end.

What if we can add years in the middle?

What if somehow the years between 30 and 50 could be doubled.

The years when I felt good or at least better.

The years when going to the beach where nothing but fun and not filled with anxieties not the least of which is how far will we end up from the restrooms.

That might be worth considering …

Add those 20 years to my life when I am 70 and live to 90?

Makes me appreciate the age I am and enjoy the years I have and not live with an eye on how what I am doing or eating may or may not add to my years.

It can become an obsession.

Consider what JRR Tolkien wrote in The Two Towers, the middle book of his The Lord of the Rings.

Death was ever present, because the Nmenoreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging.

Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons.

Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars.

And the last king of the line of Anarion had no heir.

Hungered after endless life unchanging.

Life changes.

As Jim Harrison once wrote (or words to this effect) “Eat that delicious fat with your Prime Rib. Then take a long walk to justify it.”

10.4.2024 – he wrote we have proved

he wrote we have proved
ourselves inept fools on so
many mortal fronts

I suspect that it’s inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts — from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war — that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for ten hours a day required an ample breakfast and three big sandwiches for lunch. At the time, I don’t think I believed I was all that different from the other farm animals.

Jim Harrison in A Really Big Lunch published in the New Yorker, Aug 29, 2004.

Garrison Keillor wrote in his 1991 book, WLT: A Radio Romance, “Don’t concern yourself with things you can’t change, I say. It’s more important to make a very good cup of coffee in the morning and a very good piece of toast than it is to worry about Josef Stalin, because I can do something about breakfast and I can’t do anything about Stalin, and I’m sure he’s having a wonderful breakfast.”

There seems to a synergy here.

9.16.2024 – cannot read papers

cannot read papers
as they no longer reflect
the world I perceive

Adapted from the passage:

“After twenty years of studying them I am no longer able to read newspapers.

Why?

It’s because they no longer reflect the world I perceive.

I will have to go along with the way I see it even if wrong.

And if they are right, it lacks interest.”

Written by Jim Harrison in the novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, published in the collection titled, “Legends of the Fall” by Jim Harrison, New York, Grove Press, 2016.

I still try to read The Guardian and the New York Times every morning with my morning coffee.

I used to try and read USA Today but it’s website defies any real effort to read the stories without a lot of perseverance.

I am speaking of perseverance, of course, from a technical point of view.

Oh to handle all the ads and popups and pop downs and such that make reading online news such a challange.

But of late I am having more and more issues with what I am reading.

I keep asking, what world are these people living in.

The world described more and more in newspapers does not reflect the world I percieve.

One side of the paper can decry the end of the world and those dire portents in the next elections and how if we all could really care about what was happening, we could stop it.

And on the other side of the paper are heart felt discussions of the clothes people wore on the red carpet of the Emmy’s and how the Emmy’s was rigged and whole lot of other stuff that is supposed to be of interest to me.

Maybe it is getting older.

I recently went to a major college football game and while there was much I recognized from when I went to this college as a student, there was much that did not reflect on college football as I perceived it.

I chatted with the lady next to me and she said that they were searching for ways to make if fun for kids.

I guess getting together with your friends along with a keg of beer and going someplace where you could drink in public and yell your head off is no longer fun enough.

Reading this as I type it I decided I better check my drivers license and it says I was born in 1960.

I think I am right on schedule.

9.4.2024 – I was self-appointed

I was self-appointed
surveyor of forest paths
keeping them open

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

Sometimes the non conformity is living in the Hilton Head area … but wearing a Tybee Island T Shirt

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.

Inspecting my salt marshes and the Broad River, looking towards Parris Island US Marine Corps Recruit Depot

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

Path not taken … maybe – Lemon Island, South Carolina

For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation.

All passages from Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1854).

Wikipedia quotes EB White on Mr. Thoreau, that to write Walden, “Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives— the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.”

Mr. Thoreau was in his mid 30’s when he went forth to battle.

I am in my mid 60’s and my urge to set the world straight is waning.

My desire to enjoy the world is growing.

That last line I quote from Walden happens to be the very last line of the book.

I can tweak it to read, “For over two thousand years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation.“

It was Jim Harrison who once wrote along the lines that the United States had passed some 1.5 million laws … trying to enforce the 10 commandments.

It was Mr. Churchill who said in a speech in 1947, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

If Mr. Churchill is correct, BOY HOWDY, but do I feel sorry for all those other countries.

Is it any wonder that I embrace my role as a self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms and reporter for my own journal of small circulation.

However, in this case my pains are their own reward.

PS: Thank you to my wife and co-self-appointed-inspector for the photos of our adventure on Widgeon Point, South Carolina.

7.25.2024 – people never know

people never know
more than vaguely where they are
in the scheme of things

People can be truly amazing …

I got this little theory, an utterly unimportant theory, that most people never know more than vaguely where they are, either in time or in the scheme of things.

People can’t read contracts or time schedules or identify countries on blank maps.

Why should they?

I don’t know.

There’s a wonderful fraudulence to literacy.

Yet these same people have emotional lives as intricate as that Bach piece …

From the book Sundog by Jim Harrison.