Easter miracle, true story...

Two Weeks ago, my best friend of many, many years (ok, will "several decades" do? And no, I did not grow up with Julius Caesar, I just met my best friend when I was a kid), anyway he had massive cardiac arrest (5 ressuscitations) then an infarctus (coronary) when they got him to the hospital.
Now, we are talking: the brother I never had, or rather the brother I chose and who chose me. I know the guy, his kids are basically mine, his wife was my best friend in college, I have known her too for a long, long time, they met through me, it's all almost incestuous, I know.
I know him so well that I still today can picture what he was wearing when I met him, I was six years old, and yet my mind recorded the scene of meeting this kid, as if it KNEW I was going to meet my life's best friend. I don't remember anyone else or anythign else, but if I could paint or sketch, I can reproduce the scene, the clothes, the haircut, how he turned back, climbing two steps then one, to announce the arrival of "a new kid" (me) to the neighborhood school carpool.
Throughout my life, I have always had the luck, the light in the tunnel of knowing that no matter what, I could always count on a best friend (and others, yes, sorry, guys, but that is not the point tonight).
Anyway, massive heart problem in a foreign country while on a business trip. Five days in a coma, finally a sign, a roll of the eye or an attemtped wink that lets everybody know he is not brain dead. His daughter is to go to his bedside, she is the only one who can go, she will.
I then felt that my watch that I had left with my friend a few years back as a kind of keepsafe HAD to go. (Don't ask, I am not a religious man, I am not a fetichist, somehow I left my watch with him (we both like watches, and he had a "mild" heart attack five years ago, so I left my watch with him for him to wear at times).
You don't spend your entire life with friends from your days almost in diapers without some weird connections, leave it at that.
Now his grandmother--whom I do not remember--had "magnetic" powers. Used to have "catalyzers" (magnets?) between her hands, she would get them "recharged" by a man with similar powers, a "magnetizer", and it seems this genetic trait has permeated the daughter who left with my watch on her wrist to take to her dad. The daughter "kills" watches, cell phones, anythign closeto her that runs on batteries in record time, she has a magnetic... "aura"? My watch arrives to my friend, kaputt. He puts it in his toiletry kit, gets it back out when finally back home two continents away, two weeks later. He puts the watch on his wrist: it works again, just like his heart. I KNEW he would be alright if the watch went to his side (I even wrote if before his daughter left to see her dad, I told her so by e-mail).
I can't explain it, it is just that there is what some call a "Soul", a link between people that remains, no matter what, just like nerves trouble amputees who feel pain in a limb they have lost. It is the same thing here. I KNOW, I went through this with another friend who died a long, long time ago.
Weird story, but all true....
Miracle maybe.... Resurrection, no doubt.

race relations & Obama

When was the last time ANY presidential candidate has been able to talk about race? And do it with brains and experience?
And when was the last time any politician has done it with common sense and conviction?

If anyone still had doubts, now things should be clearer.

Not that we never succeed in shooting ourselves in the foot!

Say "what the hey!" - fiction fragment

Sometimes, you have to say "what the hey!"
The weather is stunning, crisp, clear, warm but not too much and you still can feel some cool in it.
Somehow the music is playing something deeper with a raspy voice that delivers well-written gems.
On your way to work, it all seems herd-like, boring, bovine, Bovary... Cows going to the slaughterhouse for the day, for another day.
As Camus would say: "All the decors collapse and you ask: "Why?" "

And so, keep on driving, hit the highway, the Interstate, the true American experience, devouring miles, space, infinity, the last vestige of Freedom as it used to be, as it all started in fact in this country--travel, see more and new, leave it all behind...

Call work, "I am sick, on way to see the doc"... Yes, you are, the open road is your doc, fill yourself with space, horizon, and blue sky... (yes, you pollute. Yes, there will be pollen and allergens inhaled..) Call it "a day". Really! "Life is here, simple and tranquil," deeper....

Sometimes you HAVE to say "What the hey!"
This... IS living, the true, the deeper....

"The intense life"1 - condensed draft 2 flat

Madame de Thoux (pronounce just like "two") was a beauty, a past beauty queen, in fact, child or teenage, I forgot. A muscular, dark-skinned blonde, petite, with a magnetism radiating from her pale, milky eyes that could pierce through you like an ice floe slicing off of a glacier.
She had grace, yes, but maybe not class. She had brains, but knew her power over others, over men especially, and so she never fully cultivated her potential, and never had to use it to its fullest. Older, moneyed, with a light touch that denoted a life of certain ease. Not that she had not suffered, but things had been smoothed over with time.

She never went anywhere without being noticed. I worked with her, briefly. Kept my distance, but did notice the quickness of mind, the mind. She also was, surprisingly, not averse to a risque' comment --she did it on purpose, knowing full well that no one, especially the younger ones, ever expected the classy lady to go earthy or crass.
Her husband was an older man, a kind of stick in the mud, a traditional macho--and, I suspect, could be a mean son of a gun. I met him once, briefly, did not care for him, but did not really pay attention anyway. Not my world, nothing in common, a smooth, good-looking older guy, with a cold streak. Part French,-- hence the name--, the haughty type.

I worked with her on a project, acted as if I did not care about her (in a way, she was not of my world: different values, different wayof living, different upbringing, I was a newfie of sorts, too much of an outlaw,and she was, or they were, old, established types. We did good work together: it came naturally, without effort. Without knowing each other, we found ourselves working smoothly and efficiently together. The project went on, reached its maturity.

One day, she suggested we lunch together. Sure, why not?
She was stunning that day. A clear, spring day. She was dressed in bright,light colors, white pants, a light green sweater broadly open on the shoulders, nice shoulders, small though. Not an lounce of fat on the woman, hyper-exercised, no doubt,but not spastic as so many of those Spandex women are.
She had reserved, it seemed. We ended up at a table at the end of a cavernous secondary or side room, with a few patrons in the front part of it, along the windows-- blinded by the light, I did not really see them--, while we were in the far back, barely visible, I think, for anyone who would not make the effort to approach our table. I sat facing her and the back of the restaurant, she faced me with all the light of the fierce southern high noon splashing her face, in fact illuminating her like a stage actress up for her grand soliloquy.
Her eyes shone like diamonds; her tanned, smooth skin, and blond hair a perfect frame for her face. People had looked at her as we walked to our table. I could see why. Indeed, once a beauty queen, always a beauty queen; atleast, she was.

We ordered, ate this and that. She was lively, talked about our project, how well we worked together, how she enjoyed working--I was tempted to ask if she was working for fun, maybe to get out of the gilded cage her life seemed to be--, when she stopped, leaned forward, planted her eyes in me, rested her head on her hand, somewhat of a theater or almost rehearsed pose, I thought--but I knew it was not: she was a natural. I looked at her with some surprise. She took note of my reaction and started:
-- You are naturally charming. But that is not why.
--why what?
She ignored me. "What I like about you is the way your mind works. You think on a different plane, on different levels at the same time. I have never known anyone with a mind like yours.
-- What is this? Are we playing "The Genius and the Goddess?"
-- What is that?
-- A book by Aldous Huxley, not his best, by the way, by far.
-- I'll have to read that one day. But that is not it. Do you know?
-- Know what?

She paused, reclined back in her chair, away from the table, looked at me, looked around. She had indeed graceful movements. I do not know why I remembered at that point that she was part Mediterranean, part Scandinavavian. It showed, The skin versus the hair and eyes, or maybe, rather: the skin AND the hair and eyes, the South and the North, not a Civil War thing, (althouhg it also worked, she was a Northern transplant--visibly so--in a near-tropical climate) no, it was more a completeness. There was somethign about this woman. Over thirty-five, oh yes, clearly, a real woman, not a kid. Before thirty-five, they are not... "ripe", not finished, yet. A Septentrion girl in Meridion; she had it all.

She looked at me, leaned forward.
--You know I love you, don't you?

I was so stunned I don't remember the end of the meal or how we got back to work. I never responded, and she had, again, correctly anticipated that I would not be able to handle this, anyway. We never talked about it. Never.
But we wrote one another, or rather I wrote and she responded. It all started that way. In a sense, it only started years later, many years later, well after this false start in that restaurant confession, and well after her husband, the gun owner, found our letters (she had asked to have them all, I had known right there and then that that was a mistake).

[CUT]

A short German lesson for the day

I do not speak German (maybe under torture--but then, I might also speak Chinese, Turkish, and a host of other languages I do not know yet...)

However, I received this line from Albert Einstein (no, not in my sleep, thank you)
and took a shot at translating it as I understand it

----
"Ich habe keine besondere Begabung, sondern bin nur leidenschaftlich neugierig" --Albert Einstein
----

Which I know will seem obscure to many, but that is probably because Einstein is a whole lot brighter than the rest of us:

Here it is, and please remember to live by this wisdom:

"I have no bethundered bugaboo, nor have I been, like, newly leathershafted or neutered" signed: Al

On second thoughts: mightn't there be ein error? maybe it is: " I have no bethundered bed-a-bugs"???? This changes everything, but is equally deep.

Swiss anti-abstention law: right or wrong?

It used to be that in Switzerland, if you didn't vote once (at the local, regional, or federal/national level), you would receive a warning; the second time you did not vote, you'd get fined; the third time you did not vote, you'd lose your voting rights. What do you think of this? right or wrong?

You canpose the problem as: Can a democracy function with not even half of the voters actually voting?
For example, say that only 50% of eligible voters do vote for one or the other candidate in a presidential election: the winner can just gather 50% of that plus1 vote and become president, i.e., 25% of potential voters. Is this a democratic vote? No, it takes a fraction of voters (here, 1 of 4) to lead us (into... what? temptation? doom? Hell?..)

Another question logically follows: SHOULD a democracy be allowed to function, electing individuals with 50% + 1 vote of say 40% of potential votes? Should we have a quorum? Or will it take a hijacking of our democracy for people to vote?

Scary, isn't it, that we could legally be under the presidential powers of a motivated, well-organized fringe minority?
Check history, it has happened... And it could happen in the Good ol' US of A...

the luxury of pain and grief

Have you noticed that life goes on while you are in pain, grieving, mourning, or any shade of all this. Aldous Huxley said in 1928 that "privacy is a luxury" (in "Point Counterpoint"), true. But so is pain. You HAVE to keep functioning, going to work, paying your bills, etc..
and even those who mean well torture you by stirring your emotions.
Yeap, privacy is a luxury; so is pain..

kids learn...

beware, kids assimilate stuff like sponges. I used to drive around peacefully insulting whoever I wanted in the privacy of my own vehicle until one of my kids (then about 14, give or take) decided (in western Canada--thank God, no one I knew--and that may have livened thigns up a bit in that very quiet part of the world...) to open the window and express his views of a bad driver by letting out, in a foreign language, a string of perfectly-pitched insults that would have sent my late mother... well, probably peeing herself with laughter. But I was stunned, scolded him, and he coolly responded: " So what? YOU have been saying this kind of stuff for 15 years, where do you think I learned it??!!"

So now, I warn my friends and others: you may swear in Urdu, French, or English, and never hear a peep from the back seat but they acquire the zingers alright! (After that, I used to fine $ 10 per incident --never had to, after I laid down the law-- and esp. in professional context (meeting my coworkers>> no bad language in any language). And they will love to dish it back out to you atthe perfectly wrong time...

But er,.... now my kids have the ways & means to defend themselves VERBALLY as young adults (thanks, Dad!--thank you, kids!) AND the biggest pain ended up being for ...me... I could not express myself any more while driving... deprived myself of my first amendment rights... (on the other hand,with all the guns in this country--it is now reported to be 270 million guns -- I thought we still were at 200 million,naive me!-- you can't afford any more a little contrary social interaction or difference of opinion... So I would have to roll up my windows to express my views of some drivers (great in the winter only...)

Yeap, file under domestic origins of erosion of basic civil & legal rights!!

Climate glory and injustices

Dear Bloggers:

It is a gorgeous day in Coastal Carolina, crisp, clear, limpid, as we only get in the Spring (still too humid in the Fall, and right now the bugs are not alive yet, most of them still in gestattion), something akin to what residents of Seattle experience whenever Rainier is visible, but it is much warmer here and not deep down humid (yet--don't worry we pay our dues with dripping hot humidity about 300 days of the year...)

Which reminds me of somethign Albert Camus once noted: the injustice of climate. Born dirt poor in French Algeria, he never knew, he said, the greatest injustice of them all until he went to Paris: the one of climate. I shall paraphrase him (but closely)with a touch of Baudelaire's urban "spleen": "We all were poor, but we all shared the natural beauty and the warmth of the sun. I did not know true despair until I got to see the great metropoles of the North, with their industrial sprawl, and their pervading greyness: people are grey, the pigeons are grey, the skies are hopeless, the human soul imprisoned..."

And so, savor the day when it is as glorious as today in downeast "cawlina"...

Y'all enjoy!

Un-familiar spaces

Have you noticed how your own space -- bedroom, kitchen, study, what have you -- looks completely different the day you have to clear the room for repairs?
It echoes, looks bigger, probably nicer, and you wonder how this is no longer you, just because all your mess and clutter (possessions, excuse me!) has disappeared. And you also get the benefit of new boxes of old stuff you did not know you have--not to mention that you decide also to throw stuff away, just because you have to (too much stuff, too much dust, too old), only to remember after garbage day that the phone number you threw away with a random handful or armful of old papers, old magazines, and "stuff", the number weirdly scribbled in your own hand writing on an unknown piece of paper was in fact that of a long lost friend who called you out of the blue after 20 years of silence and now.. it is gone again... (Maybe it was meant to remain confined to your past?)

In front of those now defamiliarized, if not totally unfamiliar, spaces, it all takes on a new dimension (Should it be spelled "demention," as it does not resemble anything familiar any more, and the destruction of your routine and familiar surroundings does drive you into dementia?), and maybe you should start anew, with clean and clear space. But you won't. Too much stuff piled up in the corners or in the next room waiting to go back where it was and to dip you right back into your old mess... Ah!.. Home!

Decent Doc

This was my day to see doctors, nothing special, just routine. I usually bring a book but did not this time, because I was not in the mood to waste time.. well, not TOO much time, I should say, since as we know they do not mind having you wait 2 hours and booking 4 people at the same time slot and seeing you on paper for 15 minutes. Imagine my surprise when at 2:30 on the dot, I am no longer in the common waiting room but in my own private little room (where you can at times spend quite some time, yes, I know, I have taken naps, sacked out on the examination table, I bring a coat for blanket, at tiems I go back out to bring in the snack I prepare, etc.. I even turned off the lights once for my nap--and also left once and they did not charge me (I was clearly not in the mood that day for that either.)

And then after 10 minutes, the doc comes in, to apologize, telling me he is going to need another 5 to 10 minutes with his current patient (a child, I could hear). It's quite alright, doc: you treat me humanly and with consideration, I shall do the same. And please, make sure the little girl is all OK. Imagine that! A doctor with a sense of time and decency. A rarity!

George Carlin, man vs.world, common sense

Years ago,-- I think in 1996--, George Carlin, whose common sense and straightforwardness people often fail to see because of the jokester persona, posited that airport security was impossible, if not an oxymoron, because too many people have access (technicians, caterers, maintenance personnel, mecanics, etc..--one could also mention that any individual can always be bribed or coerced and a breach of security is therefore always possible).

Likewise, he also stated a bit later (1999? 2000?) that we think too much of ourselves in assuming that we can wreck the planet with our pollution, etc. We are wrecking the planet, there is no doubt, George, but truth be told, you are also right in that when faced with the power of volcanoes, tsunamis, ice age cycles, etc.., we really are ants on the giant mud ball called Earth.

Twenty years after Chernobyl, life returns there (how warped, mutated, damaged, cancer-ridden, etc., all the forms of life are, I do not know). But it is quite possible that we overestimate our power and impact, and that the Earth can self-correct, even from our evil deeds..

Yet, we do have an impact, we use resources faster now than at any rate in this era (I mean over tens of thousands of years), faster and on a grander scale than in the known history of the world. 300 years ago, the United States was in harmony and synergy with the natural production cycle of all forms of life, allowing all resources to replenish while the American representatives of mankind were living off of it, and we have wrecked that very quickly (and it is not over).

So, there is a little bit of this, and a little bit of that; we need to accept flux and reflux, and a state of balance, however unsatisfying to one part or another each swing of the pendulum might be (expect more storms, floods, hurricane, blizzards, epidemics, etc.. as Nature swings back against us now..)
We like stability, one in the hand is always better, we like our certainties and truths -- religions, among other belief systems, are here for that ("you are right, my friend, all others are wrong, come with me/us")--. But we must accept that thigns are always in balance, uncertain, never for sure and written in stone, that the world is in a state of perennial change. We, the US, were on top for the last 50 years or so, and now it changes, as has been the case for every ancestor nation of ours: every European nation has been at one point or another on top of its world ,or even of The World, -- Italy (Rome), Greece, Spain, England, at one point or another was, have been THE top nation in their part of the world or of the world; Egypt, Persia, the mongol Empire, others, too; almost every part of the world has been the top dog at one point or another of our known history. But that was always so before that leading lost its top position and rejoined the ranks of its sister civilizations, cultures, or nations, in the (often cacophonious) concert of nations (and China's turn is coming up (again?).

And so, America's supremacy, airport security, save the world/save the planet, yes, we can, and indeed must, take those as facts, but only as part of a balanced view of the bigger picture. We might be only ants, but smart ants; we might impact the world, but only in part; we might be smart, but not as much as we think; we might save the world, but only in part. And it might save itself, without us (life after humans, part N?)...

That was today's plea for common sense and maturity.