Notes From A Bear's Journey

Pushing Limits    The other night my wife and I had the pleasure of watching the film Whiplash , a difficult-to-watch movie which rightfully was nominated for Best Picture at the recent Oscars.  Intense and having only a handful of actors, the film portrays a music conservatory which hosts an especially difficult teacher, one who is drill-instructor like in his demands and quest to bring out a student's potential, almost all of whom are musically talented.    Despite some of the negative input from jazz fans about the film, I felt that the movie brought out a larger point which is that sometimes a rare coach or teacher can spot that one person who just might be exceptional.  This can happen in sports or music or math or drama, anywhere really, even in business.  But it seems that the "exceptions" are few and far between.  Perhaps there are more talents that simply aren't recognized or developed or given the chance.  And perhaps, the gift is so absent because it th

Milestones    Magazines do this a lot, as do store fronts and airlines.  In truth, almost all of us do this, set goals to advertise milestones that we reach.  Anniversaries, accomplishments, we seem proud to reach a certain point, be it in years or days or miles or numbers...the addict who hits 100 days clean and sober or the cancer victim beating the odds, the family store in its third generation now hitting 100 years in business, or the couple celebrating their golden anniversary.    I've done this more than a few times, most recently counting the number of laps while swimming (ironically discovering that the indoor pool I use in winter was 25 yards in length while the outdoor pool was measured in meters requiring me to add extra laps to equal the old distance).  But the time I most vividly recall doing this was on a hike in the area I lived while in Northern California.  Morning after morning, I would arrive before dawn at the trail head, a Thermos of hot chocolate in my pa

Disappearing    It's not that easy to disappear, that is, vanish without anyone finding you, at least not as easy as the movies portray it.  Last year, a reporter from Wired attempted this ( Wired is more or less a layperson's technology magazine about how we communicate and advances in the field of computing), and challenged readers to find him .  The difficulty of this was that this was a person who specialized in knowing how today's tracking methods and cookies work , so off went his cell phone and his computer, although he did leave a few clues on social media, and... he was found .  Which was interesting since the media portrays satellites and the NSA and Verizon and who know what else collecting reams and reams of data on everyone...but not quite.    Over the years, there have been countless cases of people just vanishing, some coming from fame and money such as Everett Ruess (whose family was very wealthy, along the lines of William Randolph Hearst) and Amelia

Ebay    If you've never jumped onto Ebay, then you're likely working or too busy to bother or perhaps, jusr content with what you have.  After all, Ebay is somewhat like a thrift store, a site where people (and in many cases, major stores) unload excess or unwanted merchandise.  This can range from vinyl albums to clothing to major pieces of art (I used to purchase my work shoes from Ebay, primarily because Rockport quit making the style of shoe I enjoyed and several shoe stores were closing out their inventory; besides, my $110 shoes at Nordstrom's were only $19 on Ebay, and they were brand new and they were super comfortable for my 12-hour days of walking and standing...hey, the shoes cost $65 just to re-sole so it was a win-win for all concerned since I gave them to the homeless once I retired, like me, they had lots of life left in them).    So, a quick recap of the last two postings (of which this is part three).  I talked about time passing quickly, segments swi

The Fall    Lost Wages.  Sin City.  What Happens Here, Stays Here.  Whatever you want to term Las Vegas, that's what it is.  Glittering, phony, degrading, carefree, overindulgent, excessive, carnal.  Yes to all of those, at least as viewed from touristy eyes gazing down the Strip or staring up at the downtown Fremont Experience.  Not quite the same picture for those living there, the water supplies running suspiciously low, as if matching the wages for those who are tending to the tourists who seem to look just like them, only tossing money away willy-nilly.     But that was us, my wife and I.  After her nearly 39 years of work, and my nearly 37 years of work, we had a little willy-nilly left in us, a decadent reward of sorts to just escape to Las Vegas for a day and a half.  No dogs, no cats, no phone calls (alas, the cell phone does follow one everywhere), just a few dozen machines appearing to spin reels (the video slots have perfected this illusion of wheels spinning, their

Swiping Time    My wife and I just finished watching the movie Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson , a sci-fi sort of film that speculates what might happen if we used the entirety of our brain vs. the ballyhooed 10% (and I use those terms because most of today's scientific world dispels the 10% usage as a myth, even if a suspected large portion of our brain is simply used for storage and connections unknown).  What was interesting in the movie, however, was Lucy (the main character's name) says that our imagery of ones and zeros is wrong (albeit, the only concept we can comprehend), and that the only connecting factor holding life together is...time.  And to illustrate this, Lucy uses her newfound ability to stop and reverse time, to scan history in seconds, to see where we --and life-- all began.  If an organism can't become immortal, the scientist in the movie says, then it will seek its only other option which is to reproduce.    This premise of getting it wrong (tha

The Best of the Best    Recently, I've been finishing something totally not me, that of reading about sports.  This came up when I happened to glance at a bargain book, The Best American Sports Writing (2010), part of a series of "best American" books by the publishing company, Mariner Books (they do this type of book series such as Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing ).  I shouldn't have been surprised, since this was, after all, a best-of book;  but the writing stunned me, capturing me in ways I didn't expect, for you see, I'm not all that into sports.  I don't golf, but I found the golf story on the "ghost" course and how golf began way, way back, utterly fascinating.  Same with the basketball stories, and the football stories and the bicycling and running and tennis stories.    Some of the stories bring you to tears, such as the story in Runner's World about Jenny Crain.  A world class athlete and runner, she was

Advice and Dissent    The other morning I was listening to Sirius XM, our "trial" to these virgin ears that were quite content to just listen to what the radio offered.  On this paid service, I was able to hear the full spectrum of music, news, broadway, sports and who knows what else on those 122+ channels (I certainly didn't expect to hear so many ads about hearing aids and ways to save on taxes, or for that matter, to hear ads at all since everyone told me that with "satellite," there were no ads which was why it was so worth it to pay for the service).  But it was while flipping through a dose of their five comedy channels that I noticed myself so unaffected by the raucous language now so common to today's comedians.  Wasn't it not all that long ago that Richard Pryor seemed so shocking to me, his language peppered with words I would never think of saying, and neither would my crowd of friends at the time.  Yet even then, there they were, all sort

Stuff at the End    There's an interesting memoir by Roz Chast ;  she's a cartoonist for The New Yorker and, as with many of us, is Woodstock-age which means having parents in their 80s and 90s.  In her case, her parents went from living in their same apartment, to assisted living, to a nursing home and eventually to a hospital (where her father passed at 95) and to palliative care (where her mother died at 97).  The Week rated her newest book its #1 pick for top non-fiction books of 2014, and The New Yorker featured an excerpt in one of their issues (her book is titled, " Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? ").    In her book, she vacillates from good daughter to bad daughter, or as she puts it, the angelic daughter named Gallant ("has forgiven her parents for all the transgressions of her youth, which she now knows were committed out of love") butting heads with the devilish daughter named Goofus ("is still seething with resentmen

Hysteria    The philosopher and psychologist, William James , is quoted as saying, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."   And prejudice, as defined, can emerge from "gender, political opinion, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language, nationality" and other causes.  But what leads to prejudice, whether brought about by family or social pressure, is usually fear.  Throw in a bunch of people, add a good dose of fear, mix it all together and you create hysteria.    The hysteria can come in many forms, from a disease such as ebola to a fear of animals such as Jaws and sharks (author Peter Benchley continued to apologize for the destruction his novel created on the shark population).  Sometimes this is due to quick and perhaps inaccurate reporting, the retractions coming far too late to matter (witness the recent apology by Rolling Stone for its one author embellishing

Poaching    To be clear, this has nothing to do with eggs.  Rather, I had been reading the recent statistics of certain animal populations and how they still continue to plummet, primarily due to poachers.  For the rebel armies and drug-fueled soldiers (for poaching has moved far beyond the everyday villager trying to make a bit more money to feed his family), an elephant -- one elephant-- can bring in as much as $600,000 with its tusks.  Admittedly, that's a lot of money.  But standing there facing such a magnificent creature, would you feel comfortable pulling the trigger and bringing it down?    Frankly, I just don't get it.  The mindset of poachers of all types is something so foreign to me, for even in India, the tiger population continues to be poached, the numbers now down to less than 1500.  And in Africa, the BBC reported that recent studies show that 7% of the elephant population is being killed each year, surpassing the birth rate.  And one has to ask, for what

And They Called the Wind       What might be a sleepless night for some proved quite the opposite last night, the winds howling and whistling throughout the moments I was awake.  Free from thoughts of falling trees and crashing windows, the winds almost lulled me to sleep, an animal hunkered down and ready for this invisible display of nature.  But it did get me thinking.  Other than a few giant wind power turbines (as mentioned, the newer propeller-like wind turbines stretch taller than the Empire State Building, which, if you've ever gazed up from the sidewalk below that building, you know is one almost-unimaginable height), I knew very little about wind itself.  As it turns out, there was much to learn.    The magical force of wind has inspired mythological gods and fairy tales (remember a cartoonish cloud face blowing things along?), has powered sail boats and airplanes, broken forested trees and spread fires, dried hanging clothes and dried soils into ruin;  but wind has b

Older Happiness    "Long after we're gone, the details of our existence will remain part of the public record; in time, they will be all that's known about us, a skeleton of facts, the human ways long decayed."  -- From Shadow Boxing by Wright Thompson, an article that originally appeared on ESPN.com    Lest I sound too maudlin, I had to step back and look at where the happiness had gone; after all, here I was in a beautiful location and things overall were not just good, they were excellent.  And truth be told, I was indeed quite happy.  Puzzled a bit, maybe, but quite happy.  Yes, my aunt had passed and I was growing a bit older and my belly was telling me that everything I now savored would come with a price; sweat or starve blackmail was all that it was, take it or leave it.    And from this period, there are several things that seem to stand out, at least for me, as I reach this point where relatives are passing more often, as if to mimic my memories of th

Lost in Space    Morning has broken, as they say, and today is another day.  It has taken 24 hours, far from the 92 minutes it takes to see the same thing aboard the International Space Station, a mammoth football field-sized object orbiting our planet, its path perched firmly in the middle of our ionosphere .  And on this Sunday morning when the airwaves flood the U.S. with one of sports' most lucrative franchises, the crypt of my aunt is now sealed, her ashes encased in a bronze urn, Hans Solo like, her husband's ashes just an inch away.    During the service yesterday, I spoke of being able to relate only from my viewpoint, one as a nephew whose eyes saw her and remember her from that vantage point.  I wasn't her sister, as I pointed out to the audience, noting my mother (her remaining sister) sitting nearby; and neither was I her child.  I could say all the words I wanted to while standing at the podium, but there was no way I could imagine what the feelings of my m