Take A Stand

President Obama and General David Petraeus have expressed their wish that more Americans will stand up and speak out against the proposed Koran burning on September 11 by a small Pentecostal congregation in Florida (50 members and their pastor).

My view is consistent with a theme I have discussed before.  This minister feels we need to take a strong stand but one does not combat bullies by being a bully.  That is not to say one shouldn't use force (intellectual and physical) when appropriate, but in this case it is just going to make the extremists angrier.  What does he think he will accomplish?  The terrorists are going to stop terrorizing?  No, they are only going to get more intractable and he must know this.  I can only assume he believes this is the beginning of the Rapture as foretold in Revelations and he is fighting God's War, whatever that means.  Maybe he has read one too many "Left Behind" books.

In any case there can be no reasoning with this pastor because God is on his side and that is that.  I am frightened for America and everything we stand for.  I have always disagreed with radical atheists (e.g. Sam Harris) who believe that even moderate religious views lead to the implicit condoning of more extremist views.  I believe that people are naturally  inclined to believe in something beyond themselves (whatever that may be) and this should in fact be a positive force in their life.  But with behavior like this I am beginning to think the extremist atheists have a point.  I know this is just one insignificant group in Florida but coupled with the "Glenn Beck types" in the media, I think we are losing all semblance of reasoned and reasonable discourse.  We are allowing emotions rather than rational thought to determine our response to extreme Islamic ideology and violence.

So to the Pastor I say; Put down the match and embrace tolerance, it's what Jesus would do.

What If, Redux

If you think living in the woods is relaxing you are sadly mistaken.  Okay, if you think living in the woods is relaxing for me then you have never actually met me.  I find myself at various times in the relaxation cycle staring at the many half dead, hundred foot tall trees surrounding my cabin.  There is ash borer infestation, hemlock woolly adelgid, hemlock bracket fungi, and hemlock rust, to name a few.   If you think I was heavy on the hemlock diseases it is because my cabin is surrounded by the eastern variety, and they are not in good health.  I have in mind one particular hundred foot tall hemlock which just happens to stand exactly opposite my perfectly situated Adirondack chair.  Sure, it lives across the stream, but that is little consolation due to its majestic height.  And it sits on state wilderness land so I have zero control over its management.  One stiff breeze and this thing is going to take out my Adirondack chair, the shed behind that, the road adjacent to the shed, and quite possibly my neighbor's house across the road.  I have not done the actual triangulation survey to determine it's exact height and the distance to my neighbor's house but just the idea of this tree is enough to turn my easy chair into an uneasy chair.

Most of the trees in my area are second or third growth so I don't know how this beast escaped the lumberjack's axe.  I am quite certain this tree was familiar to the actual last of the Mohicans.  The hemlock was an important tree commercially in the latter part of the nineteenth century due to it's high tannin content and tough wood. So I am sorry, but I wish this one was part of somebody's leather belt or kitchen table.  It isn't just that all the hemlocks are in trouble in the Catskills, but this one's root support system is also totally eroded away on the downhill side facing my property.  The photo is above.

My agitation is not limited to this one particular piece of wood.  Every half rotted tree, every woodpecker pecked trunk, every squirrel hollowed out still standing stump is a potential WMD.  I can't even take a relaxing walk down my beloved Woodland Valley Rd without feeling like I am walking through a mine field.
Most people visiting the valley, surrounded by sublime beauty, feel the presence of their Creator.  I on the other hand feel the presence of Shiva the Destroyer.  And if it is not the sickly trees that worry me, it is the abundance of undergrowth and dead fall, all fuel for a property destroying conflagration started by the careless flick of a cigarette butt out a car window.  If I could single-handedly tidy up the forest I would.  The fungi, moss, bacteria, and lichens do not work fast enough for me.  Come to think of it, they don't work fast enough for Mother Nature either and that is why she sends down lightening every so often, to hurry things along.

Maybe I shouldn't own a cabin in the woods, surrounded by the chaos of nature.  But living in the well groomed suburbs has not provided me with much solace either.   Right off the bat I can recall three incidents where a seemingly healthy oak tree fell on a house during a routine thunder storm.  And I have a couple of very old trees on my property in Woodbury that lean menacingly over my bedroom roof.  It's a wonder I get any sleep at all.  Maybe next time I'll buy a condo in the city, no higher than the third floor, so I can walk up....because, you know, elevators get stuck.

Blatant and Brassy

Raise your hand if you enjoy staying at a bed and breakfast while on vacation.  I thought so. The women and the gay couple in the back of the room. I don't know at what point the B and B niche went from being a source of an inexpensive room and a decent meal to being a destination in and of itself.  Which brings me to my first complaint; They are not cheap.  Why pay $150.00 to sleep on a bed that the cat has most assuredly peed on, when you can get a room and continental breakfast at the Super 8 for $69.99 double occupancy?  And all the Super 8s now have that cool make your own waffle, waffle iron thing.   Plus you don't have to act like you give a damn about the desk clerk's personal life.  And this brings me to my second and third points.

What if you don't feel like having breakfast at exactly 7:25 AM?  At the Super 8 there is a breakfast window of opportunity. Usually 6 AM to 9:30 AM on weekdays and 7 AM to 10 AM on weekends.  Did I mention the cool do it yourself waffle iron?  One time, at "The Cat's Tongue B&B", I was served one half of a bran muffin and one half cup of fruit salad.  Period.  Another time, at "The Bearded Muskrat B&B", I was served curried poached eggs with  sugar free allspice sour apple chutney and gluten free spelt toast with tarragon herbed butter.  Seriously.  At the Super 8 I put whipped cream and maple syrup on my waffle, grab a bagel, cream cheese, and banana to go, and I have now included lunch in the $69.99 room rate.  And I don't have to ask Sinjay the desk clerk how he slept, nor does he ask me.  And I never ever, ever ask the other guests in the Super 8 dining area what they have on tap for the day.  Because, really, I don't give a crap.

At a quaint little B&B in Bar Harbor Maine I  was roped into buying a book the Innkeeper wrote.  Apparently Mount Desert Island (where Acadia National Park is located) is actually the mythical island of Atlantis.  It seems it never sank after all, but instead drifted over to Maine so Rockefeller could buy it and selflessly donate it back to the citizens of America.  I only know all this because our hostess was gracious enough to regale us with the story over a hearty breakfast of  Madagascar cinnamon scented toast and poached egg (singular) with Hollandaise sauce.  What man eats poached eggs with cream sauce for breakfast, let alone have to choke them down while pretending to pay attention to some gasbag who's house you happen to be trapped in?  And pay for the privilege?

And all this after a night of having to sleep in a room like the one pictured above.  I now know why Victorian England was populated by sexually repressed and sleep deprived souls.  Laying on a mattress six feet off the ground with another three feet of pillows, comforters, and lace provides enough extraneous sensory input to make even the most somnolent among us stare wide eyed at the ornamental canopy all night long.   Never mind if there are also milk faced porcelain dolls sitting upright and at attention on every chair.  Have you ever tried to have marital relations with your spouse while a preternaturally human looking tweenage doll is staring at you and there is a 65 year old prudish innkeeper sleeping one hairs breadth away in the room next to the headboard?  And even if you are successful in pleasing your spouse, the entire act has to be performed while you cover her mouth with your hand so she doesn't accidentally scream out and inform the entire household that, well, you know.

Then of course there is the  facilities factor.  One must pay extra for the room with the bathroom.  Do I really want a house full of strangers to know the status of my prostate health?  Plus there is always way too much furniture in the hallway. If I didn't wake everyone with my lovemaking, I surely will wake everyone when I scream out after stubbing my toe on the side table groping my way down the dark hallway.  A few years ago at the "Captain Conch Shell Guesthouse" in Cape May, NJ, I had a bad night after eating some raw oysters.  The next morning at breakfast, with two other couples sitting at the table, our hostess served me dry toast and tea because "I could hear you had a rough night".

Click on the link below for Super 8 world wide reservations.  I recommend the waffles.
SUPER 8

More People in the World Drive on the Left Than on the Right

Did you miss me?  I didn't think so.  My posts were getting preachy so I stopped for a while.  They are supposed to be funny and possibly thought provoking but it seems to me they were just provoking.  I'll try again.

We had the pleasure this weekend of hosting my brother in law, Jeff, and his long lost but now reconnected friend from college, Eric.  I don't know how, but after 25 years of not seeing each other, it's as if they were never apart.  It takes a lot of work to maintain long distance friendships and I admire them for trying.  We all had a fun filled weekend of hiking, eating, drinking (Jeff had a beer), and swimming in the freezing creeks we encountered (well, me at least) along the way.  But of course none of this is funny.  Getting Jeff to drink a beer (full can, by himself), and a cup of full on caffeinated coffee, at night, is not haha funny but it is odd funny in a  self-satisfying sort of way.  The beer drinking incident was really just icing on the cake for me.  The real treat was seeing Jeff dressed in my own official hiking uniform;  Nylon hiking pants, polyester sweat wicking shirt, full sun hat, ankle supporting hiking boots, and name brand day pack .  Not a stitch of cotton or plaid.  I was tempted to ask him to drop his pants so I could check the underwear for unauthorized cotton whiteys but I didn't want to risk being disappointed.  I was so happy with his outfit that I didn't even let the extraneous fanny pack annoy me.  And hey, it contained one of those possibly life saving emergency blankets, along with assorted antibiotics, anesthetic agents, and a fully equipped collapsible ER, so who can argue with preparedness, especially if someone else is hauling the gear.

I should also mention that in preparation for our Saturday hike we dropped off a car in the parking area at the end of the trail.  This we did at eleven o'clock at night and the drop off was a good forty-five minute drive from the cabin.  This was a very smart move, made even smarter by the fact that the driver, Eric, did not forget to bring the keys on the hike.  Which of course brings me to the actual subject of this post;  Who has the right of way on a narrow trail, the uphill or the downhill hikers?

It has always been my position that the uphill hikers should stop and yield to the downhill hikers due to the fact that momentum and speed make it more difficult, and maddening, for the downhillers to put on the brakes and stop. The uphill walkers have zero momentum and it takes no energy to stop.  Many people might argue that it is more difficult to start moving again on the uphill but if one is performing the proper rest step mountaineering cadence, that really is an insignificant factor anyway.  I am not saying one totally stops during the rest step technique but if you are familiar with uphill slogging you will get my drift.  Well it just so happened that during our hike, Tammy stopped and yielded for two hikers coming down Cornell Mountain.  She casually told them to proceed as downhill hikers have the right of way anyway.  "No they don't", replied one of the backpackers, "uphill hikers have the right of way, but thanks".

To say I was flabbergasted might be a bit of an exaggeration but for my entire adult hiking life (I was more tolerant as a teen hiker) I have been regularly irked  (not an exaggeration) by the many thoughtless uphill hikers who did not yield to me as I careened downhill. So as an opening to get some closure, I asked this apparently experienced backpacker where he was from.  Colorado.  "And is this the convention in Colorado?", I asked, struggling to keep my discontentment under wraps.

"Of course.  It is much easier to get going again once you have stopped if you are going downhill" he cheerfully informed us.  And so, rather than engage in a footpath face-off, I merely smirked the way one does at the woefully misinformed and bid them a good day.  And, of course to make matters worse, my chosen companion in life and hiking used this opportunity to gleefully berate me for the next two miles as we struggled to summit Slide Mountain. "If it turns out you were wrong all these years you won't change your mind will you?" she laid into me, as if I have never engaged in contrition my entire life.  "It is not simply a matter of preference like driving on the right or left",  I countered.  "It is a matter best decided by the Newtonian Law of conservation of momentum".

So when we got back to the cabin I finally "googled" the controversy.  It seems, my fellow trekkers, that it may actually be an East vs West debate.  Most of the western (i.e. Rocky Mountains) located opinions were for the downhill hiker to yield, due to the idea that once a cadence is attained in walking uphill it is harder to restart the rhythm.  This is in direct opposition to my previously stated theory about the rest step so I must now place the controversy into the court of public opinion.  I am once again asking for my faithful readers feedback on the matter.  Only experienced hikers should respond.  And since my readership consists of basically fewer than any meaningful N value, minus those who don't hike, I am basically left with only my opinion.  Which is all I really care about anyway.

Aint Gonna Fight No War No More Redux

I do not know if all Philadelphia Inquirer articles are available online, but in case any of you still harbored doubts about  the accuracy and relevancy of my opinions, find this article online; "The immeasurable costs of war" by Colonel Daniel Davis, an army cavalry officer.  He basically reinforced and eloquently expanded upon a thought, stated in my previous post, only in a much more elegant and personal fashion as he is a veteran with real life experience.

How Heavy is Your Balloon?

My thoughts for today originate in Philadelphia PA, not Phoenicia NY.  The concept, though, is universal and it crosses all cultural divides from the most technologically advanced civilizations to aboriginal tribes.  It involves understanding our parents.  I once read that in order to accept our parents as flawed individuals we must be able to think of them as people. This may seem like an obvious concept but because of our deep emotional bias  it can be very difficult to accept that they are simply imperfect human beings who, for the most part, try their best.

It can be safely assumed that a lot of health care dollars are spent on therapy in trying to figure out why our parents screwed us up so badly.  Parents are constantly being blamed for all our short comings.  Dad never took me to ball games, when my Dad wasn't at work working he was at home working, my mother smoked when she was pregnant with me (okay, that is clearly your mother's fault), we only went out to eat once a year, I had to use a hockey helmet because my parents wouldn't buy me a bicycle helmet, and blah blah blah.

Okay, fine, maybe your parents actually did screw you up but it is too late to do anything about it.  The one thing you can do is move on and accept them.  Blaming them is not going to get you anywhere except into therapy or a rehab "resort".  And here is the very easy way for you to have a little understanding;  Your Mom is just some chick your Dad married.  And your Dad is just some dude your Mom fell in love with. And just like you, your kids are going to blame you for screwing them up.  Our parents are just people like everyone else in the world and who in the world is perfect?  No one.  So do yourself a favor and don't blame them for your lack of self-satisfaction.  Put it in a balloon and cut the string.  It will save about $150/hr in therapy fees.

One thing that I always found upsetting was when my parents would argue over old grievances in my presence.  But once I realized they were just a couple, like myself and Tammy, separate from me as their child, I gained a certain measure of peace toward their relationship.  Now when they argue in front of me, I just think "Gee, that's a shame".  Or when I think back to how we would take long road trips, my parents smoking all the while in the car, I don't get angry.  I just calmly make an appointment to find out why I am coughing up blood. 

So try it.  Think of your parents as two people separate from  their capacity as your parents.  It will help to clarify their behavior and allow you to understand it in an unemotional and non-judgmental fashion.

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Ain't Gonna Fight No War No More

Tammy and I were sitting in downtown Phoenicia today enjoying a free outdoor concert by a local folk group.   I pointed to a sixty-ish,  long haired, black leather vest wearing dude and said to Tammy "He has to be a Vietnam vet, but if he is, he must have a patch on his vest saying so but I don't see one."  Then, as if on cue, he turned around and emblazoned across the back of the vest were the words Vietnam Vet.  It's hard to imagine that Vietnam vets are in their sixties or nearly so.  There are a lot of leather wearing, motorcycle riding, pony tail sporting, sixty year olds in Phoenicia but this particular man screamed war vet from the sixties to me.  Why?

There was no PTSD syndrome after the Vietnam war.  Well, there was of course, but it was a diagnosis that had not yet been formally recognized until 1980 when the youngest vets were in their early thirties. I neglect to mention veterans of earlier wars here because the thoughts I express in my blog are purely observational and therefore can only be applied to my generational knowledge base.  Even the Roman Centurions may have suffered from PTSD.  I believe, however, that it may be especially acute in the Vietnam vets because of a lingering bitterness over their feeling of being ostracized when they returned home.  And it was not just a feeling.  It was an unpopular war and many Americans wrongly blamed the young soldiers who went to war without protest.

So I am now wondering about the returning Afghanistan War veterans.  How will they be adjusting ten years from now?  We are already reading about the higher than normal suicide rate among young veterans.  And the war is becoming increasingly questionable especially with the recent leaking of classified documents.  Back in 2001-2003 the entire world supported our efforts.  All our vets were heros.  They are still brave heros of course but we hardly ever think about them unless we have a relative or close acquaintance in the armed services.  The public turmoil obviously added to the distress in the soldiers returning from Vietnam.  But now we barely give the war much thought especially since it is a volunteer army.  Back then we were all affected, now it is seemingly only a certain part of society.

Afghanistan is certainly as horrific a theater of war as Vietnam, maybe even more so.  Maybe the current crop of veterans are suffering more in silence thus the high rate of suicide.  Even if Vietnam vets got negative attention, at least it was attention.  That sounds horrible but most of us want to be validated or at least recognized for our actions.  Only time will tell how they integrate back into society.  It certainly isn't easy and I am thankful everyday that I never had to face that difficulty.  I do feel, though, that we can support the troops while not being in favor of a protracted presence in Afghanistan.  It is kind of like how the Church feels about homosexuality: Hate the sin, love the sinner.