Notes From A Bear's Journey

Expectations     Quite a number of posts back, I wrote a bit about expectations.  We all have them, I said.  And here the moment arrives where this becomes my 300th post, at least on this form of media.  Yet I can probably count on one hand the number of close friends and family members who read this blog or its postings.  Usually this becomes evident during a discussion, say a show they've watched on the high usage of prescription narcotics or the crisis in the food production industry; and I'll nod politely and quietly mention that I had written about that subject in a post some months earlier.  Hmm, they'll say, I'll have to take a look, and generally that's where it ends (not sure if they really follow-up or not).  Even my wife and brother rarely (and that means perhaps once a year) peek at my blog unless I mention that there's something relevant about our immediate family or something about a trip or adventure we'd experienced.  None of this bothers m

The Force     Call it what you will, the force, the natural order, the flow of the universe, there are days when you feel that you are fighting it, when it seems that you want to go one way and the "it" doesn't.  Bags break, your thumb jams, you need an extra part...the things can all be minor, but bit by bit they all add up throughout the day and before long you feel as if everything is going wrong.  As the Borg would say, resistance is futile.  I often notice this when I swim for even after all these years, there are people older, fatter, more athletically mis-shapen in appearance who plunge in the water and are suddenly gliding past me as if they are Olympic athletes.  How unfair is that?  But surely it is because they are only doing one tiny lap and they are sprinting, I try to rationalize; but often they are swimming as much, or more, than I am?  How can that be?  But long ago I let that go, that comparing myself to others and trying to be the fastest or the fittes

Mosquitoes -- Updated     Perky rascals, aren't they?  Okay, so they have over 3500 different species within their ranks, big deal (more are being identified each year, however).  And so what if only the females are the ones that bite (the males generally feed on nectar, much as do hummingbirds, although the latter also eat tons of bugs).  And so it should be since the males only live about a week, and the females less than a month.  But they really are everywhere (except Antarctica) and now, because of Zika, are once again making the covers of magazines ( Smithsonian being the most recent) each asking if we (humans) should get rid of mosquitoes entirely.  Our Congress of course, has used the mosquito rage to again mount an effort to give the pesticide industry a way around regulations (the industry runs a big lobby and adds to the re-election coffers of many in Congress) with the House passing the Zika Vector Control Act, a law which has little to do with mosquitoes (or the Zi

Sixteen     That number represents the number of phone calls from my mother last night.  A loss of muscle strength in her legs and arms, something that has been happening over the past few weeks, worried her.  She wanted to see a doctor, something was wrong.  It could be fixed, she thought...or maybe not.  She was scared.  And as frustrating as it was for both of us, I couldn't help but put myself into her place and try to recognize all the thoughts that must be happening when you're in your 9th decade on this earth.  Surely, the feeling that the clock is ticking has to be up there, for even if you reach the ripe old age of 95 or so, that basically leaves you only a few years ahead at most.  Then there are the changes happening in your body, whether it is loss of strength or mental clarity (memory) or bowel control, all things that (as the majority of us now still feel) we once thought were fail-safe, things that would go on forever or at least for awhile longer...no need to

Prick     Defined by the Oxford dictionary as a verb, to "... make a small hole in (something) with a sharp point; pierce slightly" (ex.-- "prick the potatoes with a fork"); as a noun it is "... an act of piercing something with a fine, sharp point." (ex.-- "the pin prick had produced a drop of blood").  Of course, as with every language, there are slang versions of this word which was exactly the version that we had heard (usually meaning someone who's a jerk or has done you wrong).  But our friend was laughing and saying that she hadn't even heard that word used in years; and thus began a series of words and things we felt had more or less faded into the background...pluck, sloe gin and Galliano, even wry.  Here's how the late David Brinkley (of the famed broadcast team Huntley-Brinkley) put it in his biography, Brinkley's Beat (ironically, published in the year he died): One of the words people often used to describe me whe

    Yesterday saw me having another visit with my mother, a mother who it seems is slowly disappearing or at the least, transitioning into someone I've not known before.  She is still quite coherent and quite alert, even as she tells me that she can't remember where's she's put things (this especially pertains to things such a gift of $20 and feeling that she has to quickly hide the money lest it be stolen).  This frustrates her, her alertness ironically keeping her well aware that another part of her memory is growing worse.  Then there are the occasional outbursts, nothing too loud but loud enough for me to notice and often not caring whether other people are standing nearby (sometimes, she feels no hesitancy to point out a person directly).  Usually, she is upset over something simple, an item moved or a late response or a smaller serving on her plate.  This is not my mother (or at least not the mother I knew when I was growing up or in later years would visit).  

The Storm     Yesterday evening a storm rolled through, the sky still bright enough to mimic daylight which seemed unusual for an evening storm.  But even without the darkened skies, the storm had arrived without the predicted fanfare, the high 60-mph winds and the raucous cold hail that was supposed to follow.  Instead, this storm was here to basically cash in my ticket, to treat me to a showing with its horizontal lightning and thunder that seemed to move more quickly than the artillery sounds of war.  As I stood in the patio doorway, the screen wide open to catch the light and the sound and the moisture, the storm seemed to grow in intensity as if a bully taunting me to step outside.  Come on out you wuss, it was saying.  Outside, the trees seemed caught in a conundrum, at once grateful to be so thoroughly cleaned and washed and yet recognizing that they were unable to move should the storm begin to grow angry, the winds perhaps forcing them to bend past the point that it was eith

Acu-rate     The other night I watched (now, don't laugh) Kung Fu Killers (originally titled Kung Fu Jungle), a homily of sorts to the martial arts genre.  This is not the classy shows of The Grandmaster or the Ip Man series (based on true parts of history), and nor is it the stuff of the late Bruce Lee.  And just to clarify, I am not at all trained in such self-defense techniques.  But for some reason, I have always been fascinated by these moves and movies, even as a child watching the swordplay of samurai movies such as Zatoichi (the movie remake is worth watching).  The recent film above blends many of these styles in a combination of slow-motion and too-fast filming (on the set of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon , he was supposedly told to purposely slow down his strikes because the viewing audience would think that the actions were fake and that the actors were falling down without being struck).  As Lee says in the movie (when one of the characters breaks a board in f

Old School     From the few comments I received regarding the last post , I by no means meant to downplay the world of small business and entrepreneurship in today's world.  Quite the opposite; new ideas and new products seem to be thriving. And I'm well aware of such exciting ventures as Utab and Slack , Shopify and Shyp .  Even GoFundMe and 3D printers make getting out one's product or prototype virtually risk-free (or at least at a much lower personal cost).  No, what I was describing about my product was old school, the old ways of getting the money and the vendors and the suppliers together.  Back then, it was the way of manufacturing...remember manufacturing?  Ask that question in a crowded bar and you'll likely see the room divide into age groups.  That'd be me on the old school side (which is why you wouldn't want me or my age group running your company--or perhaps even your government; just as Robert deNiro did in the movie The Intern

Giving Up     There are two ways of looking at giving up, for one usually immediately thinks of that phase as meaning that one is simply quitting.  It doesn't matter the subject --dieting, a crossword, finding a job, keeping your spirits up-- sometimes you really do want to simply quit.  Lack of time, frustration, missing a key element, whatever.  But then there are other times when giving up is simply a matter of facing reality.  There's a sadness there, certainly, but it isn't really a matter of quitting as much as a matter of moving on.  This became evident to me as a friend of mine came over for dinner.  He and I had met some 20 years ago at a gathering for new entrepreneurs, each of us full of hope and excitement that our brand new and exciting products would free us from work and send us into the world of the Fortune 500.  Imagine being far from the high of meeting venture capitalists or appearing on a show such as Shark Tank.  Didn't matter for now, in this tin

All Things Must Pass     Recently, I finished (quite belatedly, I might add) the book titled above, a rather thin semi-autobiographical book about George Harrison (I say "semi" because the book is filled with quips and quotes from many others besides Harrison).  Known primarily as one of the Beatles, he wrote in his book: ... you hear them talking about Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison but you just read it as if it's somebody else.  And I think that for me has been a good point throughout all this madness.  I see it as somebody else.  You know Beatles are something else quite apart from me, and this thing of being Beatle George--I'm not really Beatle George.  I'm sorry to disappoint you but that is just a little part that got played through in this life, I mean there is much more to me than Beatle George.  You flip through the pages and there he is a baby being held by his sister, then he's not quite 17 and playing in the Caver

Fire!     It's something that most of us learn as children, that when you hear someone scream that word there's only one thing to do...run.  This was never so clear as hearing the voices of people caught in the Alberta Canada fire at Fort McMurray.  Captured by Canada's Day Six , you can hear the desperation of people just being happy to escape the flames, some of them 30 feet high and right at the back door of their houses (many of the homes border the surrounding forest).  One man talks of having time to only grab his cat and his pillow, another of losing a $30,000 comic-book collection his mother had just mailed him a few weeks ago (from his childhood).  And now that the fire is slowly diminishing, the blaming is beginning, everything from a warming climate to building so close to a fragile boreal forest (an excellent story about boreal forests in general appeared in The NY Times ) to the roads built for logging trucks.  But to the many left homeless (to be fair and