Notes From A Bear's Journey

    Right off the bat (or club), I don't understand golf, which is not saying much because I don't understand a lot of things.  And if you chanced to read the last post, you already know that sports are quite low on the totem pole of my interests (no offense meant because I don'tunderstand how to read totem poles either).  Onsides, offsides, green lines, blue lines, birdies, double-eagles, black diamonds, Parkinson's...wait, what??  I'll get that to back in a minute, but have me watch a hockey or soccer game and I'll enjoy it even if not fully understanding it.  No harm, no foul.  But golf?  While most folks keep being told to tear up their sidewalk strips of grass and take shorter showers, I keep seeing bright green golf courses contrasted by players who are primarily Caucasian (and have the money to pay for the green fees).  As the late George Carlin asked, when have you regularly seen a black, brown, red, yellow (or whatever other color yo...

      Apologies to the popular NPR radio show  but in this case, it was the latter half of that phrase that caught my attention.  With the show, the meaning is one of not revealing the answer, as if to say, "wait, I know this and just give me a moment."  But it can also be a phrase of denial as when a doctor may walk in the room with your results and you simply say, "don't tell me."  Of course there's the mother that shows the dad the empty cookie jar (do such things still exist?) and the dad says with a roll of his eyes, "don't tell me."  The scenes of childhood are the memories of future years , wrote The Farmers Almanac ...in 1850!  And it was thus that I happened upon a rather large batch of both sports and motivational books being cleared out at my library.  It was seemingly all there, the "best" sports writings of earlier years, the "extreme" limits of professional athletes, the blah-blah-blah of sports.  Alas, I am so...

     A wave of the wand, the curtain drops and poof...gone.  What happened?  Where did they go?  We hold our breath and applause, as if waiting for the surprise finale when the "illusionist" will call to the back of the room and --like magic-- the person will walk calmly to the stage and take a bow.  But what if that didn't happen?  What if the "magician" simply walked off the stage and left us all wondering.  Was that it?, we'd ask.  Are they  ever  coming back, and where the heck did they go?  The lights go on and I turn around.  Wait, my brother .  And where's my mom , or my aunt and uncle?  What happened to them?  They were right here!  Show's over folks...time to go.      We now live in a world of illusions and smoke & mirrors, so I'll be blunt in saying that this post will not be uplifting for the most part.  It is one thing to be entertained, and quite another...

     Truth is, I never intended to head this direction, at least not while pushing my cart through my local Costco.  Like most "middle" class folk, I was starting to notice the $2 and $3 jumps in most of the prices there: bags of frozen vegetables, jams & preserves, granola-like energy bars, those bulky but everyday items that end up in your pantry or freezer because at such wholesale retailers, they're generally cheaper than the smaller (if more usable) sizes one finds in everyday grocery stores.  But from what I've read, this is just the beginning of prices increasing as even the major chains deplete their pre-tariff inventories.  And if I was noticing it, imagine what the struggling single mom, or middle-class couple still renting or eeking by on their mortgage, was seeing.  Of course, looking back to my childhood days when I was that 7-year old hanging onto the grocery cart as my mom shopped, I didn't think about any of that: rising prices...