Notes From A Bear's Journey

The Grand Canyon...Photo: AARP     One hears that decluttering phrase over and over: if you haven't used, worn, read or listened to it in a year, toss it out.  It sure sounds like good advice but I'm terrible at it.  I fondle my non-repairable hiking boots as if they have at least as much wear left as the newer ones next to them; and my old tee shirts just seem to grow more comfortable with each wash; and that music, well, how can streaming ever show those liner notes I once used to read a long, long time ago.  So when an unexpected bill arrived for several hosting sites I had pretty much forgotten about, the ones that used Filezilla and CuteFTP and those sort of upload programs that help reveal how current a business or shop keeps its site updated (wait, is that a 2017 copyright in the corner?), I called the hosting service and said that since I had retired that it was time to do the same with those sites (and save me $300 in the process) and that I wanted to s...

    So see if any of this sounds familiar? ... we have more access to information than any other people in the history of humankind and yet, it seems more difficult than ever for us to arrive at a consensus about what is true.  It is even more difficult to determine what is right and ethical.  This year has been one of confusion, disorder, and disagreement.  Our good ship appears to be drifting somewhere, but we are not looking at the same maps, cannot agree on the direction of the prevailing winds, and several of us claim to have scurvy while others dispute the existence of scurvy and believe it is a hoax invented by the Chinese.  How did we get here?  And how do we chart our way forward?   If you felt that this was from a current political speech, the answer is no...those words came from the editor of a book from three years ago, a book compiled by high school students and aptly titled The Best American Nonrequired Reading (the series has been d...