Notes From A Bear's Journey

     There was a piece in Orion  in which the author, whose mother was badly disabled by a mass shooter, questions a few of her decsions, one of which was to give up meat and of course, to shy away from using a gun; but then she wonders if she is merely avoiding the inevitable, that she should face something directly: ... as I first looked through the scope at the thick, gray-brown fur of the deer’s shoulder, my chest locked up.  If I pulled the trigger, I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been before.  I’d have to live with myself as someone who’d made this decision.  Someone who’d used a gun to kill a fellow animal.  I waited to feel ready for what seemed like a long time.  This same dilemma faced Robin Wright in the film Land (mentioned in the last post), her decision not to shoot sending her to the brink of starvation.  And it likely confronts anyone facing the decision of whether or not to pull the trigger...a deer, a squirrel, a ...

     This is my rant.  Or maybe "rant' is too strong a word, so just consider this a bit of clearing the air and letting a few things out, of me unloading if you will.  And who doesn't want to do that these days?  With all that is happening in the world we seem to all be struggling to figure out our priorities.  Suddenly (or perhaps not so suddenly) political posturing and campaigning seems frivolous, all while Ukraine dreads yet another winter of fighting, where the death toll has now passed 100,000.  Throw in the situation in the Palestinian territory of Gaza and Israeli jets striking ambulances trying to help the wounded (according to Aljazeera ) and things do seem bleak.  How can things get worse?  Then your daughter is killed in a(nother) random mass shooting, or you suffer a stroke, or your friend tells you that she has cancer, and your priorities shift again.  So yes, you'll have to forgive me if I use this platform to vent ...

Painting by Ecuadorian artist,  Oswaldo Guayasamin       At the end of any vacation there is nothing like the end.  If it's been a long vacation, say two weeks or (tortuously) even more, then the time to head home begins to look brighter and brighter.  Clean clothes, your own bed, seeing your animals, all that good stuff.  Certainly there'd be a lot of cleaning up and catching up and paying bills, all the bad stuff.  But you'd be home.  Home.  So all that said, it was finally my turn and, as fate would have it, I would have to work for that luxury.  Back to a middle seat, back to an all-nighter, back to not being able to sleep despite everyone else locked in contorted poses and yes, sound asleep.  Back to a tired, fuzzy head trying to make sense of how many more times could I do this?  Where were all the afternoon flights, the ones that had 2-3-2 seating?  What's with the perpetual 3-3 seating down single aisles with ...