Notes From A Bear's Journey

   One only has to look at your local market to feel that there are still a lot of fish in the sea; daily offerings at your restaurant or sushi outlet seem to always have "fresh" tuna, causing my friend to ask, "how can tuna be endangered if Costco always has it?"  And indeed, it would seem to be the case.  Wondering around coastal markets in Mexico and other areas there would appear to be an abundance of fish every single day...or is there?  I've been watching the 2012 New Zealand series, Sachie's Kitchen on Netflix, the opening episode showing the tuna auction held at the old Tsujiki Fish Market (the market has since moved to the man-made island of Toyosu ) and it's rather visible to view the dwindling offerings of the highly-prized bluefin tuna now being offered as compared to what was there just seven years ago when the series was filmed.  Couple this with the announcement from Science Advances that most high-seas fishing wouldn't be profitabl...

   Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you were, said Neil Young in a song that pretty much bought him a ranch.  The version he told in a documentary was this:  About that time when I wrote ("Heart of Gold"), and I was touring, I had also --just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time-- I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today.  And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife Clara.  And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep.  He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there's this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, "Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?"  And I said, "Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky."  And he said, "Well, that's the darnedest thing I ever heard."  And I wrote this song for him.   An...

    If the above title were to end without the three periods (grammatically termed an ellipsis), the question would be simply one which was challenging in a sense, as in questioning what "good" came out of something or what "good" was there in the world (another example might be in presenting something and then asking, "what good" would that do?)   But with the ellipsis at the end, the question becomes far more open-ended.  What good...am I?  What good...are you?  What good...is a mosquito?  Much of this came from a piece by the late Ann Zwinger titled "What Good Is A Desert?"   I pull my sleeping bag close and think about the question of what good a desert is.  In this luminescent sparkling morning, such a query seems to me a nonquestion.  As well ask what good is a human, what good is a moon, what good is a spider, what good is a bat, what good is a butterfly whose brilliant colors delight us, what good is an exquisite caddis fly case...

  Sometimes one can stare down a path or walkway and hear a small voice that tells you that you shouldn't go down there; one might call this intuition or a gut feeling, but often it is just a tiny whisper that is loud enough to hear internally but soft enough to let you make the decision.  Sometimes this leads to unexpected and perhaps negative outcomes as when predators take advantage be it a salesperson selling a timeshare or someone just takes advantage of your trusting nature.  And as one ages it seems that these voices or feelings begin to grow a bit more protective; something as simple as checking our a new club or restaurant or country becomes like a piece of Velcro that leaves you stuck in a rut and unwilling to try many (or any) new adventures.  Danger Will Robinson.  But are those your "real" voices or just ones you've made up because you're scared?  So where's the middle, that frission that excites us just enough to discover new things, even if i...

   Reading the previous post you've likely discovered (or dreaded) that the slurry of info would continue and thus, you have my advance apologies for this rambling and almost unsorted compilation.  On the bright side, it helps me to clear those side piles which we all seem to have, piles of this and that which are never really enough to grab their own space, be it in the closet or on the bookshelf or the desktop or wherever.  Ellen DeGeneres noted in her recent standup special that this is primarily a trait of older people, to have drawers that have a little bit of everything, a stray key, a broken tape holder, a red pen, a couple of rubber bands (yes, I do have such collections, even a jar filled with stray bolts and screws in the garage); and for some reason such stuff seems to accumulate even more while its actual usage drops...keep those pencils even if the erasers are so dried out that they're now useless (and who, other than accountants and construction workers...