Notes From A Bear's Journey

    There are all sorts of definitions to the word waste: wasted hours, wasted talent, wasted futures, wasted lives.  Even the late Doris Buffet (her younger brother is Warren Buffet), "...eschewed giving money to what she jokingly calls 'the SOBs' -- the symphony, opera, and ballet," according to her local news outlet, the Omaha World Herald.  And when asked what she wanted on her gravestone she replied, "She Made A Difference," adding, "unless you do, why were you here?"  Couple this with an opposing fact that Anna Mehler Paperny* mentioned in that you're 63% more likely to kill yourself than die in a car accident.  Wait, what??  She adds: If eight hundred thousand people around the world kill themselves every year, that means about twenty-two hundred a day, or three every two minutes.  Statistically, two dozen people killed themselves in the time it took you to get out of bed, showered and caffeinated.  Maybe forty-five during your commute...

     It started with a short piece in the New York Times that asked if your dreams have seemed a bit stranger these past few months.  If so, you're not alone, said National Geographic : The neurobiological signals and reactions that produce dreams are similar to those triggered by psychedelic drugs, according to McNamara (Patrick McNamara, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine) .  Psychedelics activate nerve receptors called serotonin 5-HT2A, which then turn off a part of the brain called the dorsal prefrontal cortex.  The result is known as “emotional disinhibition,” a state in which emotions flood the consciousness, especially during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, when we typically dream.   Though these processes happen nightly, most people don’t typically remember their dreams.  Living through the coronavirus pandemic might be changing that due to heightened isolation and stress, influen...

   I saw this re-wording in a London Review notice and felt that it represented (or re-presented, as LRB put it) a good summary of how many of us come to view the world, or at least how it is "presented" to us.   For those of you in other parts of the world or even this country, what is being shown on your media may appear quite puzzling.  Black Lives Matter, de-fund the police, recent executive "orders" (not really "orders," said The Washington Post , but more of a series of "memorandums" which have far less legal sway), the mounting toll of the coronavirus, protesters rioting against unidentified military enforcers, and on and on.  To sit back and watch the news, it would seem that the U.S. is in utter chaos.  And even for those of us residing here, it can be confusing (as Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newhour puts it when discussing issues, "to help make sense of all of this...").  What IS going on and how does the public feel?   Even Rol...

    There was an article in the London Review of Books simply titled, "All Hail the Microbe," a subject that went hand in hand with the book I was finishing, a book by author Ruth Kassinger titled Slime .  Yuck, who would think that was interesting?  But then, as with so many stereotypes we've grown up with, I became fascinated with the study of microscopic life and how difficult life is to just survive at that level, much less to evolve (but life is easy to end as this Covid-19 virus is now teaching us).  Okay, backing up a bit, here was how I basically viewed our early evolutionary beginnings: our cosmic start was fiery with a harsh atmosphere and little water but slowly bacteria emerged and evolved into multi-celled organisms that self-reproduced, then RNA and DNA and, well, throw in a few billions of years and out popped us...humans.  Author Mark O'Connell tried to explain it simply but with a bit more detail and wrote this about what he terms, the Gr...