Notes From A Bear's Journey

A Huer hut revitalized in Newquay, Cornwall    One might think of sardines or even anchovies...but pilchards?  Yet here in the Cornish country the word is as embedded in their history as it is on a few menus (and in the town of Newquay, the pilchard is their town emblem). And lest we forget, as cardiologist Mimi Guarnari said in her lecture series on The Science of Natural Healing , one must think of S.M.A.S.H. when ordering healthy seafood... S ardines, M ackeral, A nchovies, S almon (wild, she emphasizes), and H erring.  High in Omega 3 and heart-healthy , the early Cornish must have been granted celestial nutrition advice as they  harvested, ate, and exported the plentiful schools (mostly to Italy which used both the fish and the oil extracted from them).  Those of you who may have peeked at the television series Poldark (based on the popular books and now filming its fifth season in the nearby town), the sighting of a school of pilchards was a cause for celebration and oft

    The wind here was seemingly gale force, the sort where one almost feels as if your legs will be swept out from under you.  Add in the rain that came in drizzles but combined with the wind felt like sleet, and that we were walking atop a cliff-like island, and suddenly the wind felt a bit more threatening as if an ally of the chomping and hungry-looking ocean just below.   But we were back in England, birthplace of my wife and even with the thirty-one hours of being awake, a place that felt quite refreshing.  The cooler air and crashing waves of this coastal town was a nice escape and change from our home which was still stuck in its drought and heat combo.  Being here, our windbreakers being put to the test, we felt as if we had gotten a privileged early admission ticket to fall. Plasticized money circa 2015    The changes in this coastal town of the U.K. were here of course since it had been five years since I had lasted visited.  The money for one, our old paper ten pound

   The wind continued through the night, the sort of flap-your-hanging-laundry-around wind as if it had escaped from the highlands of Scotland or the wild coast of Ireland.*  But this was a dry wind, a desert wind that was constant, it's heat pulling moisture from the leaves of the trees and they were listening, the scrub oak dropping their acorns by the thousands and the leaves turning a reddish brown as if not having enough water to fully present their usual fall display.  And one would have thought that with such a wind, such a constant wind, that our sky would have returned to its color, that azure blue that is so present and so common that one never even thinks about it until it is suddenly no more, as if watching the ocean turn a permanent green.  But with the winds came the fires, their drying power only adding to the lack of rain, the grasses and trees just tinder for the slightest spark whether natural or caused by a human, deliberately or accidentally.  And the fires came

   The bees got me, accidentally of course.  It was still early-morning dark and once again they had drained the hummingbird feeder and it needed refilling; and being sensitive to both temperature and light the bees should have all be gone.  But one remained and as I went to wash the feeder in the sink; it sacrificed it life and stung the inside of my palm (honeybees, in their stinging, leave their stinger which also means a good portion of their innards...they do this knowing that stinging My hand after 15 minutes an invader will cost them their lives but videos show that there is no hesitation when defending a hive or something viewed as done for the common good of the colony).  I immediately made a baking soda rub, scraped out the stinger with a credit card (one never squeezes or pinches a honeybee sting to remove it since doing so will push more of the stinger sac's venom into the skin) and waited; but within 15 minutes, my outer palm was already swelling.  In an hour,

   The other day my wife and I attended a celebration of life, a wake of sorts but unusual for our area, our country.  It was meant to celebrate the life of a co-worker and friend who had passed, years ahead of his time and perhaps due to a misdiagnosis or, as presented, a delayed one.  In many other countries, mourning is something left to private moments and in private places and then a party begins, a time filled with laughter and the recollection of good times and a life well lived, a wake (as in an awakening).  It's the way I would want to be remembered, to see my friends and family recalling the good moments, the times we all shared, my life summed up into a tiny black hole of memories and then...poof.  Sometimes such events are quite somber, the echoing halls of churches and gravesites almost casting its own dark cloud on the closure; and that may be necessary.  As author Judy Blunt wrote of her grandmother when attending her funeral: ... the whole of my father's face si

   So if you happened to read the last post you're aware of three things regarding opioids: 1) that overdose deaths and addicition due to both legal and illegal opioid drug use is skyrocketing in the U.S.; 2) that pharmaceutical companies which manufacture or distribute opiates or narcotics are making record profits and have spent little to none of those profits on education or treatment for both doctors and patients or users; and 3) as awareness among both physicians and states grows in the United States (many cities and states have filed their own lawsuits due to inaction by the federal government), many of the pharmaceutical companies are targeting other markets overseas, primarily those in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.  And on a note of clarification, the administration's declaration of a "health" emergency in October of last year, falls short of a "national" emergency which would have meant access to federal funds; thus, no real emergency de

   The power of addiction is strong, often overriding our normal impulses not with an urge, but with a seemingly unstoppable force.  Ask any long-time cigarette smoker and you'll get a brief idea; and in lumping them all together it would almost appear that of the three main "addictions" that alcohol and cigarettes may seem trivial (as difficult as they might be) as compared to pain killers.  Sometimes, the urge begins within 7 days, the prescribed drugs often prescribed and taken after a hip or knee surgery or other major operation; and for some, the stoppage (and effectiveness of the drugs) is not that big a deal.  But for many, it is huge, as in wanting the pain killers all the time and soon suffering the symptoms of withdrawals if they're stopped (just ask the once-popular radio host, Rush Limbaugh, who once said on his show : There’s nothing good about drug use.  We know it.  It destroys individuals.  It destroys families.  Drug use destroys societies.  Drug use,