Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Blink and you'll miss it.  Okay, you really can't  miss it because advertisers began marketing the "holidays" before Holiween (may as well just blend it all together). From a capitalistic viewpoint, you bought the candy to appease the kids and now begins your turn.  Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and Super Bowl!  Wait, did I leave something out?  Like Thanksgiving (which generates little money for retailers, unless you're an airline or a gas station) or Giving Tuesday, a very charitable idea carefully placed after  you've spent your cash on things you probably didn't really need.  Here's an idea: have Giving Tuesday come on Thanksgiving week, a time when people are feeling full of gratitude and thinking of others.  Heaven forbid...that would leave less to spend come Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the grandaddy of them all, Christmas.  Ho, ho, whoa...how dare I try to dampen the holiday spirit?  But while Jimmy...

     Quick warning: this post will sound a bit depressing but it does end on a happy note.  And while it begins with medical issues we could all face, it may prove helpful to know a few symptoms of the unexpected.  But to start, what's with that title of clea r ing vs. clea n ing?  It's amazing the similarities a single letter, or phrase --say, inside vs. outside-- can change not only a meaning but also change how you say it.  As an example, you can say IN the house, and have it make sense, but not OUT the house, unless you add "side" or sometimes a preposition such as "out OF the house."  To wit, if asked where are the keys, one could answer "in the house" but you couldn't say "out the house" unless you added "outSIDE the house."  Why is that?  Now imagine you're from Albania and trying to learn such nuances.  The bottom line, English is often a funny language when it comes to such odd and sometimes strict rules of gram...

Cartoon by  Sarah Kempa: New Yorker      In one sense, little seems to have changed with human history.  Certainly invention and methods of what could be termed progress have evolved in many fields, from transportation to agriculture, and other fields that made life easier (for some, anyway).  The Talking Heads sang about "letting the days go by" and "once in a lifetime."  But now, with my elastic memory shifting, I remember hearing that song as "many the days go by" and "many a lifttime."  In my look back at life, or the life I've led so far, it feels a bit like both, the days slipping by and also having slipped by.  It's as if we can all say that we've led many lives, and yet in reality, this time here may simply be "once in a lifetime."   So jump now to Desert Island Discs , now well past its 75th year and still going strong.  The format is that guests are to be placed on a desert island soon after revealing their life ...

     Bear with me since at times this may seem as a rant (yes, the temptation is to write it as "bare" with me, but this is not about a nudist colony).  No, I wasn't on the sidelines working as an unpaid air traffic controller, although in my earlier years I did glance at those "sample tests" books for becoming one (it only took a few questions to put that idea to rest).  But every now and then I tend to find my calm demeanor nearly pushed to the brink.  Not often, mind you, but sometimes.  It is at those moments (as my wife tells me) that I grow sarcastic, which is my version of showing anger.  It's a cowardly way, that of nipping and placing barbs, although I don't use the even more cowardly form of quickly adding, "I'm only kidding."  Even I hate that snidely way of giving a dig but not having the guts to acknowledge it.  Still, perhaps that curmudgeon side of me is popping out from behind the curtain more often as I age and near...

    Its an odd time of year for me, perhaps because of the delayed but approaching winter, it being that twilight season.  Tomorrow is schedule to be 72F, all at a time when our mountains usually brace for snow.  And the trees are only now beginning to drop their leaves, cocky as if feeling that snow will take even longer to arrive.  This is when large branches break under the one-off early storm that surprises with heavy, wet snow which melts slowly, a sticky weight that clings until it takes the branches with it to the ground.   Eugene O'Neill wrote the title play  above, one often hailed as one of the great age-old --or is that old age-- stories in the world of theater, that of tired muscles and crisp skin that add to those thoughts of being washed up, the free-flowing but cheap booze bringing what no plastic surgery can, a morphine cloud to blur what your eyes and brain so starkly show you.  Look at us, they cry like ghosts.  Look at...