I am reading with my ears The Road by the late Cormac McCarthy. I imagine this is similar to a blind man experiencing art through touch. Obviously there is more than one route into the brain for the outside world to take. I wonder, though, how the story feels different, sentence for sentence, as it is interpreted by the auditory cortex versus the visual cortex. The narrator was born to read aloud this book. I mean the haunting timbre of his voice, especially as the narrative segues between its spare points of view, is just excellent. Sadly, as with McCarthy, the narrator is no longer with us.

The book feels like a tocsin for the times. There’s an ever-present sense of doom as the boy and his father make their way south through apocalyptic ruin. I read somewhere that there is a renewed enthusiasm in the country for prepping for the end of times. Especially by the monied class. Some dude built an elaborate underground bunker made of reinforced concrete in the middle of a man-made lake. The bunker is accessible only through its “roof”, the only portion above the surface of the lake, which is connected to the shore by a retractable drawbridge of sorts. Except the lake isn’t filled only with water, it can’t be, because as it encircles the roof it functions more like a moat that can be set on fire with the click of a button on a remote. Surely the intention here is to keep the cannibals at bay and the bunker inhabitants uneaten.

In 2007 The Road was announced as the next novel to read by Oprah’s book club. “Enjoy this hellscape adventure ladies!”^* Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that discussion group.

* Specific gender demographics of the Oprah book club are not available, however it is thought to be composed of predominantly women.

Consider Alaska’s southeast strip of land, a modern landmass including Alexander’s Archipelago so vast that if it were overlain on the eastern seaboard of the continental US would have entire states disappear beneath its footprint. My words here exist in utter obscurity. I am not well known for being well known. Consider a single stone, no larger than your thumb, existing on the margin of a short spur of sandy asphalt that leads from a parking lot to an unremarkable Delaware beach, mindlessly kicked off the path into some anonymous mound of windblown sand by a flip-flop wearing child as she recklessly bounds from the car toward the summer sea. The child is at once young, green, and uncaring. There the neglected stone will lay, undisturbed, pretty in its own right among a trillion other stones strewn to equivalent anonymity up and down the shoreline. It is not as if the stone will exist as a stone forever, though, even as its hardbound constitution has rendered it durable. The stone has seen a lot in its tens of millions of years of existence. A mere shadow of its former self you might say, sure, but whereas once it was a boulder big as a house that could squash a car whole, it was helpless when faced with a two mile thick slab of ice coming for it. Finally subsumed in a frozen cocoon, the boulder was transported over tens of thousands of years, then ignominiously abandoned on an anonymous beach in a place come to be known as Delaware. There to be further remodeled and diminished by the unthinking forces of wind, rain, and sea. Fast forward another ten thousand years or more, and it finds its belittled-self disrespected, arrogantly kicked aside by some late-comer organism. That’s what timeworn, abject anonymity feels like.

The AmericanPeople^® woke up to learn that, consistent with its zeal to make great again all things, the executive branch of the United States of America, on behalf of its hard-working taxpayers (the ones who bankroll the military industrial complex), ordered big bombs be dropped from big planes on The Hooters in Yemen.

Hooters?

Yes.

Now, don’t go taking me literally, but do take me seriously. Or I may be joking. Or I may be exaggerating (only people who don’t love me would call it lying). And even if it is “lying,” so long as you get your tRuth across the goal line it’s not like anyone with the attention span of a fruit fly is going to detect the end run, amirite? tRuth lies on a spectrum. Don’t believe me? Google it. It’s true. The tRuth is like a mental health disorder. Or it’s like pornography, you know it when you see it, so long as you don’t gawk too long and overthink it, it’s ok. Like that horror in Ohio a while back. A neighborhood dog was spotted on an outdoor barbecue, medium-well. Or was it a cat? No matter. And it doesn’t matter if wasn’t either. The tRuth is that anyone who would do such a thing is a horrible person. Sometimes the tRuth has to go in search of its own evidence. But a tRuth teller can’t always wait for that.

Naturally, this taxpayer clicked the link to learn more as to why the executive branch ordered the bombing. And here’s the craziest thing – I was redirected to a page with a report on the bombing, which included Ads for Hooters. To know me is to love me. And if you love me you know I’m being honest. Hooters! Our executive’s reasons for bombing The Hooters in Yemen were, of course, spotless and tRue. No problem there, and I’ll get to that. But those Ads, they just kept refreshing themselves and distracting me. Like you’re reading sugary drinks are bad for you while being coaxed to click an Ad for Coke. I mean it does make you wonder, right, how do they do it? You’re on a page reading about how bad X is and up pops an Ad for X!

Digression: Quite a while ago I had the temerity to apply for a job at a FAANG company. The screener I spoke with described the role the company was recruiting for. He said it would involve creating software to process a bazillion user clicks on Ads his company had hosted on a bazillion pages all over the Internet. My mission, were I to accept it (were he to offer it ;-)), would be to build a real-time system to process this continuous stream of user clicks on Ads, and then order the Ads according to their probability of popularity. And then use the result to prioritize which Ads to place on the page visited by new users. The theory being that the most popular Ads were more likely to be clicked and stuff purchased, so the company could make more money. The screener directed me to an interactive online whiteboard, then asked me to “sketch” out the program I would write to accomplish this task, as he looked on.

I failed. That’s right, thirty+ years of programming computers, two advanced STEM degrees, plus a head for math, and I failed. I failed because I am a slow-twitch builder of things. Like there are people with fast-twitch muscles and people with slow-twitch muscles. The former excel at activities that require explosive bursts of speed sustainable for a short period of time, whereas the latter tend to be slower but endurable. Think the Hare and the Tortioise. I am the Tortiose (goo-goo g’joob). FAANG companies don’t hire tortoises, they want hares. The screener was very gracious, I can tell you know what you’re doing but maybe this isn’t your particular “problem space?” That, and my heart simply wasn’t in it. We thanked each other and hung up.

So while those Ads for Hooters were insistently flashing at me, begging I click, I thought back to that interview and figured the company had eventually found its hare. Instead of an up and comer at the company I’d been diminished as its victim. The least I could do now was resist becoming another data point in the hare’s statistical model. So I didn’t click on an Ad. Take that! I did, however, continue with the article to learn the tRuth behind the bombings. Turns out the executive’s second in command had convinced the executive of the deviant nature of the business model at The Hooters in Yemen. It had gotten so out of hand in fact that twenty-something girly-girls, dressed in skimpy, skin-tight orange shorts and tank tops, had “weaponized” their breasts! They would position themselves on the shore of the Red Sea and on command lift their tank tops high over their heads to expose their naked breasts to the captains of US-flagged cargo ships! Wanting to get a closer look, naturally the captains turned to port, unfortunately at their peril, as the girly-girls did this very near a submerged offshore reef known for tearing massive holes in ships, even double-hulled ships.

On hearing of this terror, which the executive assumed was the tRuth – and even if not so what – he ordered the bomb bays filled and commanded America’s finest be dispatched from the airfields in Saudi Arabia to carry out the mission. Doubleplus, the pilots were equipped with helmet cams so the murder and carnage could be live-streamed, which it was, to a hi-res monitor placed on the executive’s desk, where his aids said he viewed the horror with a contemptuous smirk while downing his lunch of two McDonald’s quarter pounders and large Coke.

Times were good. He felt the times were good, and getting better. Russ was leading with his gut on this. When his friend group came together and challenged his optimism with their yeah buts, he countered them one by one, with the evidence of his intuition. Growing up, Russ had heard the euphonious sign-off of Paul Harvey – Good Day – as more a proverb than a friendly wish. Even the family terrier, Rusty, the alacritous wag of his copper tail awaiting his bowl of kibble was just more evidence of what Russ’ gut was telling him: Things out there were getting better. This feeling wasn’t acute, like a rush of dopamine or a cigarette after sex or some sudden woo-woo alignment of the planets. No, as Russ grew older, what he felt inside him became stronger and stronger each day, larger with each passing month, for years it blossomed. The great wars were over. The country was back to work. Opportunity was everywhere, pregnant with possibility. Russ was going to get his! Soon, even the sky would not be the limit. Genetically gifted men would construct rocket ships, launch them and take their buddies into space to float at zero-g and look out the window at the big blue marble below with all its burgeoning opportunity. It would leave them speechless. And out the other window? Mars, the edge of the galaxies, the Reionization Era, and beyond (if there was a beyond, god only knew). One day millions of satellites placed in synchronous orbit would keep all the minds of the world enmeshed. A mathematical model of language would deliver readers lyrical prose at the push of a button. Be able to discern a cat from a dog from a fish, all by itself! Build and program our computers for us. Discover our cures. Refactor and staff our most revered institutions (or deprecate them for good, the Greater Good). Vacuum our homes while we’re away. Take Rusty v3.0 for a walk, even pick up after him! In the future, all the mundanity of human life would be handed down to augmented robots. So long as they were kept inline with what matters to Us, there should be no looming worry they may someday replace Us. Russ felt sure of this too.

And then many years later, as a mature adult, when Russ was getting what was his in this world, one day at work he found himself alone inside his colleague’s office. And not merely a colleague, but his friend and professional mentor as well. Now because Russ was a hard determinist, he understood full well that the act he was about to perform had been omnisciently known since the first Planck second after the Big Bang. And likely before that, if there was a before that. As such, what he was about to do was the only thing he could do, because, of course, as it is with the birds and the bees and the rocks and the trees, no human being can act otherwise. Given this worldview, Russ, a fully determined marionette, knew he was merely fulfilling The Universal Plan. Russ didn’t think his own thoughts, in other words. Nobody did.

So there alone in the office he pulled open the middle of three drawers of his friend’s (soon to be former friend) standalone wooden desk, and glanced at the contents therein – sundry office supplies and a few manila folders stuffed with petty documents. Yes, that will do just fine as a landing pad Russ thought. He turned around and undid his belt, lowered his khakis and underpants, and then while bent slightly at the knees he squatted precariously over the drawer and took a dump in it. What happened! Well, the most immediate cause of this vulgarity was, of course, Jill’s (Russ’ wife) full stack of banana pancakes. She’d lovingly prepared them for Russ that morning, in seeing him off to work. He rarely ate breakfast anymore, not since the advent of their working years, when he and Jill had gorged on all that opportunity out there, getting what was theirs. Except the future had arrived earlier than anticipated, earlier, that is, than Russ had anticipated. Because shortly after Jill had crammed and networked her brains out for years to go to work for one of the Five Great Companies, to develop and train an AI, she was, to her shock and dismay, laid off by one. Didn’t see that coming! Good thing was, it freed up her mornings to make breakfast for Russ, who was still employed, getting what was his. There was no world in which Jill did not work for and get laid off by the same Titanic Tech company. No world where the daily dishware she served Russ’ breakfast on was not purchased by her parents off the wedding registry, a list she’d created, having married Russ, who it seemed to her she had freely chosen to be her soulmate and husband. But when she centered herself and freed herself of the fantasy of free will, she knew, scientifically speaking, it could never have been otherwise. Jill had no role in choosing the future in making Russ her lawfully wedded husband, their love collision had already been determined. People who say Russ and Jill were always meant to be don’t understand how right they are! Objects collide. It was Physics 101.

Some days existence felt to Russ less like living the dream and more like being in a dream. The broader cause of his indiscretion on that fateful day was the deception his (former) friend had played out, fooling Russ into believing he was a man of character, a friend and colleague Russ could trust to do the right thing to save Russ’ job, and his friend Dale’s job, too, as both were threatened by a looming company-wide layoff. Instead, Russ felt betrayed to learn that this “friend” had instead all but signed Dale’s termination letter in exchange for adulterous sex with a hottie in HR. No contempt is too much in response to that kind of treachery. So Russ experienced only satisfaction and joy during that final peristaltic push of poop. On Russ’ office wall hung a portion of a torn sheet of yellow paper on which he’d scratched a lyric from a song that had always resonated with him: “And all this science, I don’t understand, it’s just my job five days a week.” Company managers who saw that were none amused. Some felt betrayed. After all, Russ had been recommended to company recruiters by a revered university professor known for mentoring eventual top performers in industry. And here he is now, mocking his own incompetency?

After pulling up his pants he rushed back to his own office, collected his personal effects in a small box then hurried to the elevators, took an empty one to the first floor, hurried through the atrium and out to the parking lot where he got into his car and drove a leisurely route back home. Jill was away when he arrived, and it was nearly dark. He poured himself a large bulb of Cabernet and stepped outside onto the patio and sat in a favorite Adirondack chair. He swirled the wine in the glass as he gazed at the night sky, wondering where the evidence was for all this meaning philosophers go on about. He waited for the phone to ring.

My application was accepted. My membership is official. I was assigned an alphanumeric ID and instructed not to lose it. I may commit it as a tattoo. I’ll need it for the rest of my life. I’ve been ensnared in the Safety Net. Made party to the Social Contract. It’s the feeling of being annexed, like Greenland. I also feel a bit like an apostate. I will explain.

Over thirty years ago I was dogearing the pages of von Mises’ Socialism. Highlighting whole paragraphs of Road To Serfdom. Reading and re-reading Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I gorged on all of it, and a lot more. More than I now can recall, short of taking inventory of the many books archived on my shelves, sagging beneath their weight. It felt to me at the time I couldn’t read enough. I would stand inside bookstores and experience anxiety, flummoxed by all those titles staring back at me, overwhelmed to the point of not knowing where to begin. I was wide-eyed and young. Someone online – and here I’m talking early 90s online, when going online was preceded by that burst of blinking lights and carnival sounds, a prescient alert to the user that you are about to enter a realm where not everything you read is necessarily true – got me jump-started to reading Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical. Most people first discover Rand in high school. I’d never heard of her. Not surprising, I suppose, given I’d attended a religious high school where the assignment to write a report on a book written by an atheist would have been anathema to the Christian curriculum. I was probably thirty-five when I devoured The Virtues of Selfishness on a beach in Kona. Finally, I thought, someone gets me! I don’t recall it as a religious-adjacent experience or anything like that, it was more an ah-ha moment for me, an epiphany without the supernatural baggage. As if I had just learned something true about the real world I had never known before, never been exposed to before. I subsequently slogged my way through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (AS). Hard to explain, but the books humbled me in a way. True, I thought, I was no Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart, but then again who was? And Who is John Galt? For anyone who’s read AS, that was the one true mystery in the novel, posited in the very first sentence, revealed at the end of the novel by way of a prolix soliloquy by The Mystery himself. For starters, John was no Republican, certainly not a Democrat. Because it is of course impossible to read Rand and not intuit the political implications of her ethical prescription for an individual to lead a virtuous life, which is really what those two books are about. AS and Fountainhead are not economic treatises pandering to capitalism, even as Rand left no doubt in the reader’s mind that she despises socialism and communism. To get to the United States, she had to sneak out of Russia in the dark of night by bribing a Lithuanian border guard. When she eventually arrived in New York (ninety-nine years ago now), a beacon in the west, it must of felt to her like she’d just entered a candy store. The answer to the mystery then, Who is John Galt?, is not, He was a Capitalist. No, John Galt was Rand’s ethical avatar, the apotheosis of the virtuous man. As was the more down-to-earth architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. At least that was my take, and in that way, as I had tirelessly argued in those 90’s online forums devoted to Rand’s philosophy (Objectivisim), AS is an allegory. Just as Animal Farm was an allegory, except John Galt was human (a gifted engineer). Allegory or not, though, it all made sense to me, the message got through: Man good, Government bad. Although to be fair, Rand would concede in her non-fiction that a proper Government was an inescapable necessity to protect even rational and virtuous men when and where their better angels failed them. Rand was no Utopian; she was also not an Anarchist. But just to be sure, at some point I read Nozick’s tome: Anarchy, State and Utopia. It must have left a mark on me because sometime later a close friend remarked to me during a night of carousing, “You are too much of an anarchist to get married again.” All these books I’d read, they were published decades earlier. Why weren’t people convinced by them as I was? Was I getting sucked into a cult of crackpot beliefs? I concluded I wasn’t. I wasn’t in need of an intervention. This wasn’t philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo I was reading. It wasn’t new age woo-woo either, certainly not a self-help handbook. I wasn’t in need of psychological help, I certainly didn’t need to be fixed in any sense. Rand’s arguments for Rational Egoism were unassailable – an ethical prescription for a real person living in the real world. A kind of over-the-counter medicine for anyone who wanted to live a virtuous and happy life, period. Plus her arguments had the feature of parsimony, in that they were derived from just a few self-evident truths about our nature as human beings. One or two genetic determinists I argued with way back then claimed Rand didn’t understand biology, therefore her premise that a man’s ultimate purpose in life is survival, was wrong. As any biologist knows, they claimed, reproductive success, not survival, is Man’s ultimate purpose in life. Just as it is for every other living organism on earth. And so all her arguments downstream of that premise were flawed as well, they claimed. So much for their counterfactual, we now know DNA influences but does not determine human behavior. Rand’s premise is safe. Here. A man’s purpose in life is not to be found in the genome. In any case, ever since Rand, the negative connotations of selfishness (all there were at the time) would need to step aside and make room for virtue. And, without a great deal of arm-waving involved, the advocacy to lead a rationally selfish individual life could scale nicely to a society of millions of individuals, with the addition of one simple maxim: Your natural rights end where my virtuous nose begins. What more to it was there than that?

Quite a lot it turns out. The messiness of the real world has a way of defeating the idealized notions of how its inhabitants ought to behave. In all that time that I was reading, my pay-stubs showed a deduction that went to the government to pay for the Social Safety Net. What a positively unselfish program! And coercive to boot. I have a very dim memory of placing a call to the payroll department where I worked at the time, demanding they stop this larceny at once. Uh huh. Thank for your concern, employee. Now move along.

Years passed. Attitudes softened. The safety net extended. Acquiescence happened. Nowadays, when I go online I no longer care to debate or argue with people over the virtue of selfishness. It almost seems like a quaint notion to me now. What’s the point in shaking your fist at the rain? Maybe it Ought not be raining, but it Is raining; suck it up, Boomer. Living selfishly may be a virtue, but it sure ain’t practical, not in the real world we live in. C’est la vie.

Why, even The Russian Radical herself was eventually enrolled in medicare. Talk about your apostasy!

I disturbed the Sandpipers.

Earlier in the day, HW had phoned me at home to say that on the way to the store she saw hundreds gathered at the shore near the bridge over California Creek. She thought they were Plovers. More likely Sandpipers. Undisturbed, their phenotype is to forage the shoreline, piping their beaks into the sand in search of food. They don’t brook onlookers. Which is why HW said I should have my camera ready, you might catch them in a swoosh! What a spellbinding display that is to observe, never mind photograph. Because the thing is, if you get close, and these birds startle, they rise up suddenly in a disorganized frenzy and fly away. But then, as if there were a gene for group behavior, they rapidly self-organize out over the water. The swarm comes together into a cohesive avian object, a murmuration, the alternating pattern of brown wings and white breasts flares as it surges and swooshes, left and right, back and forth, up and down, daring the water’s surface, drawing evanescent lines in the air. It was magical to see. Until, that is, the magic turned to fury, and like I were living a Hitchcockian nightmare, it headed straight for me. Maybe still pissed at me for disturbing their forage, the swarm did a fly-by, coming within mere feet of my cowering self before turning a final time and flying away, as if to flip me off.

It was the best hour of my day. Parking the car, prowling the beach, sneaking up on a group of them. I was dressed in jeans, kneeling in an emulsion of mud and sand still wet from the outgoing tide. I had the camera in my right hand, steadying it on my left arm, which I’d formed into a makeshift support by gripping my right shoulder. (Internet pro-tip for field photographers). I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from the closest birds. Why haven’t they spooked yet? Surely they’ve sensed me by now. With no small stones within arms reach, I stood up and gently stepped closer. In a second they were off. I pointed the lens in the center of the confusion and pressed the shutter. Back at home I lightly cropped the photo, brought up the shadows and added some vibrancy. Click (or tap) the photo above, and then zoom, you’ll see there’s no evidence of order among those fifty or more birds in flight. It looks chaotic, each bird for himself – it’s remarkable enough they don’t collide in air. But I’m telling you, to stand there and watch, in mere seconds you’d witness the murmuration emerge

There’s a math that describes self-organized order in nature. But there’s no math I’m aware of that accounts for its immediate cause. Just as there’s no math to explain beauty in nature. What we have from biologists are not much more than just-so stories. My intuition is that disorganized chaos, not collected order, should be more difficult for predators to target. I mean, c’mon, the Sandpiper predator would only need to fly headlong into the swarm with its maw and talons wide open. Easy pickins. Compare that to the effort of fixing a bead on a single bird and chasing after it, possibly unproductively. Wasted effort.^* True, there can be safety in numbers, but as every biologist will admit, one’s genetic endowment does not code for group behavior. Where order obtains in nature, it comes for free.

The plan for next time is to have HW and I coordinate, her on one end of the shore near the birds to startle them, while I’m down the beach steady and prepared to capture the magic as it swooshes by me.

* To be fair, note the diving bird (peregrine falcon?) at thirteen seconds; targeting a stray? Even so, every bird’s a stray absent a swarm.

I got a new camera. It takes good pictures. Click (or tap) to embiggen, you might agree. While out for a walk with The Dog the other day I captured her (the girls are larger than the boys), hunting. Probably not an area where you’d want to walk an especially small dog. Just sayin’. During the next couple months I want to get well practiced using this rig, in preparation for a bucket-list adventure overseas we’ve signed up for, which promises intimate photo ops of wildlife and other natural wonders aplenty. At sea and on land. No, we have no interest in going on a cruise. For the 50+ of you who received our annual newsletter (The Nibblet), you know where.

…

I would say Je Suis Los Angeles if I felt I had a deeper feeling of solidarity with the place, as HW and I felt we had with the idyll that was Lahaina. I have no words for the scale of the tragedy going down in LA. We have close friends who live in the high desert, well north of the fires. We chatted the other day. They are out of harms way and safe – for now. Beyond that, and being honest, I feel about LA like I feel about any other area of the world and its people devastated by natural disaster, numb and helpless. A charitable contribution may help salve the conscience, but not much more. The World Wide Web has connected all the people of the world now, but for all its promise to do so, it has served to deliver exactly the opposite experience for many people, loneliness and despair. No geography is forever safe from nature. And if what happened in LA was not “natural” but instead caused by an arsonist, then look away when justice is meted, it will be ugly to watch. Even where we live now, with our above average annual rainfall and proximity to the ocean, the ubiquity of water can lull one into a sense of complacency regarding the threat of devastating fires. Yet, we are surrounded by fuel. One hundred year old Western Cedar trees and Douglas Fir trees are magical, yes, until the forest floor ignites. Pacific Palisades was on the ocean, too, although I read they haven’t seen a drop of rain in over eight months. So water is protective, but it matters where, precisely, it resides. And just as soon as you become cozy with ocean waves gently lapping the shore outside your VRBO beach house, unbeknownst to you a deep sea quake occurs, and minutes later you’re facing an unimaginable wall of water coming ashore. Savior turns murderer. The earth is dynamic, mother nature has been fouling her own nest for hundreds of millions of years. The rest of the natural world shrugs, “Get used to it humans, your recent existence has only made things worse.”

Happy New Year! Next year I’ll be wishing you happy second quarter (of the century). Will we make it to see the start of the third quarter? Dunno, the future is unknown to the present. Although, according to Gemini, the latest research indicates that moderate coffee consumption is associated with longer life, via a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, high coffee consumption is associated with increased risk. So what’s an espresso lover to do?

If someone were to guarantee me I’d live one full year longer if I quit coffee today, I don’t think I’d stop. Two years longer? I dunno, maybe. Maybe in that case I’d reduce my consumption by half or something, thinking that a 50% reduction might buy me an additional year. But suppose the guarantor couldn’t tell you the precise year of your death, only that you’re certain to live one more year if you quit coffee. Then that’s a tough one. Because if I’m destined to die at 69, say (with coffee), then hell ya, I’ll stop if I’m certain to get to 70. But if I’m destined to die at 89 (with coffee), then quitting coffee now, just to become a nonagenarian twenty-five years hence, wouldn’t feel worth it to me. The opportunity to live twenty-five more years, versus twenty-four more, doesn’t seem like a rational basis for quitting something I really enjoy, every single morning. But somehow the guarantee of five more years versus four more does. I think behavioral economists call this time discounting. In any case, nobody can give me a guarantee like that, so I intend to keep on keeping on with my morning routine, til death do us part.

Last week Sunday and Monday, I cried, episodically. Altogether, for an hour or more, probably more than I’ve cried in the past ten years, combined.

The Friday before, we got Chloe comfortable in the backseat and drove south five-hundred miles to attend a celebration of life. One nice thing about having relocated from Alaska to the lower 48, is that we’re back on the road system, no need to fly to most places we want to go to now. We over-nighted somewhere about halfway to our destination, got up early the next day, exercised Chloe at a nearby dog park in the rain, then we all piled back into the car and drove the rest of the way. It had stopped raining by the time we arrived at our destination and checked in to the hotel. I didn’t sleep well that night (no fault of the hotel).

The next day HW was up early to feed Chloe. After that they were out the door, descending three flights of antique wooden stairs together into the lobby, where Chloe, I’m sure, paused to revel in the fawning remarks of many hotel guests (she gets that a lot), and from there the two of ’em ventured outside into the sub-freezing morning. Chilly yes, but sunny at least. Chloe preferred the urban oasis of green grass by the Wells Fargo bank to do her business. A couple hours later it was probably pushing fifty degrees. By then Chloe and HW had set out again for a long walk to explore the town. I finished a second Americano, put on a coat, slid my phone into my rear pants pocket, left the room and closed the door behind me. I avoided the elevator and took the stairs to the lobby. Outside the hotel, I phone-navigated to the venue. Turned out it was only a few blocks away.

It was there where we would gather the next day, with others, for the celebration of life. For the wife, soulmate really, of perhaps the only real mentor I’d had coming up as a young (and very green) professional in big oil, almost forty years ago. He had e-mailed me a month earlier to say she died suddenly after a short illness, and to invite us to a celebration of her life, which he’d arranged to be held at her favorite brewery in town. Beer and pizza will be provided, and please come prepared to share whatever memories of her life you care to. Reading that the first time, I cried, so I should probably add that to the tears total. I didn’t think twice; I was going. When I shared the news with HW, she said she wanted to be there with me. In the ensuing days I began to consider what story I might like to share. More tears flowed.

I’ve stayed in touch with these two all the years since we last worked together (his very talented wife also worked at the company), mostly via e-mail and holiday cards, though we hadn’t seen each other in over two decades now. As I shared with HW, it feels strange to me in a way that I could still feel so close to both of them, as you do with friends you frequently spend time with, even as we were separated by thousands of miles all the time I’d lived in Alaska, then in Cleveland, and then back in Alaska. Pretty clearly the connection I feel with these two was undiminished by time and distance. It’s because they were more than just friends and colleagues all those years ago; whether they knew it or not at the time, I looked up to them, because character matters to me, and as I said to my friend just yesterday in a follow-up email after our trip there, you two had it in spades.

After I confirmed the location of the venue, I continued walking about town, checking things out. I’d never been there before. I stopped at a bar and had a martini. The place had your ordinary local bar vibe. I imagined how many times my friends might have sat there on those very bar stools. Planning their next camping trip, or maybe pondering a meandering drive down the west coast (they enjoyed their road trips and munching sunflower seeds), or whatever else two irrepressibly-in-love retirees talk about when the sky’s the limit. And my god she could laugh. A thunderous laugh. And swim; she’d been a tireless, and at times, competitive swimmer much of her life. Loved her Coors Light, too. Also smart as a whip, a widely acknowledged good geophysicist. And in a flash, long before her light was out, this cold and uncaring world took her from us. My friend’s soulmate.

HW and I split a Ribeye dinner and a bottle of Cabernet that night at a really good steakhouse in town. I think I drank most of the bottle. I knew it later when I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. A bad headache kept me up most of the night. I’m not a frequent sufferer of headaches anymore, and HW asked me more than once in the middle of the night if this one was the worst I’d ever experienced (a common symptom of someone with a brain tumor), to which I answered, No. Then I thought back to that martini, plus the wine, and the high elevation of the town, and knew it must be one of those low-pressure, dehydration headaches I’d suffered in the past. HW made me drink a ton of water. I finally drifted off. The next day I was better.

We attended the celebration in the late afternoon. I didn’t know if I’d recognize my friend after twenty plus years. But there he was, looking no worse for his years, standing among a small gathering of folks who’d come to celebrate his wife’s life. He was unmistakable. And, evidently, I to him. We instantly locked eyes and walked toward each other. I threw my arms around him and started to cry. He did too. Imagine: two “mathy, techy” guys all their lives, in a bear hug, bawling their eyes out. When the time came, I stood up, went to the front of the room, and shared a little story about the first time I met his wife, at the company. I nearly made it to the end of the story when I turned to look at him sitting at the table with HW, tears streaming down his face. And then it was my turn, again. All the while hundreds of photos of her, living her vibrant life of sixty-seven years, cycled across an overhead screen.

The next morning before heading back home we had breakfast together, at a local diner my friend had said had great biscuits and gravy. More sharing and crying at the table, but with a side of hope and an offering of good will. We hugged again outside the restaurant, and yes, cried some more. Finally, with Chloe settled in the back seat, we were off. I cannot get the memory of the look of grief and despair on his face out of my mind. And maybe I shouldn’t even try.

…

Her Highness, showing off at a rest stop between here and there.

Like the new byline?! It’s a hat tip to all the doggos who’ve companion-ed me over the past four decades, and in doing so have in a way I’m sure I don’t entirely understand shaped my worldview and inner monologue. Therapeutically speaking, they’ve been the curbs I’ve needed to stay centered in my lane. In this way, all dogs are service dogs. You cannot spend tens of thousands of hours in the company of dogs, walk, run and ride with them for thousands of miles, and be left unchanged by their company in a very important way. You can’t avoid learning something about yourself. And dogs’ company is one hundred percent judgement free, a feature rarely if ever observed even in relationships with our conspecifics. No matter how good or awful you’ve been, when you walk in the door the tail wags all the same.

Not saying dogs are unique in this way – equine therapy also offers real benefits for a lot of people. And like dogs, horses also are judgement free in their relation to us. Think about Mister Ed. That hapless and klutzy Wilbur was the only one in the world who heard and understood that rapscallion Palomino speak. But even a child knows horses can’t talk. And even if they could, they’d speak horse thoughts. Because “Of course, of course, a horse is a horse.” I think the real genius of Mister Ed may have been the use of a domestic animal to give voice to one of the two voices in Wilbur’s head, an entertaining device to share with the audience the tragicomedy of Wilbur’s ongoing inner dialogue. Mister Ed isn’t about a talking horse, that’s just a gag. It’s really a story about Wilbur’s inner struggle, at times his feelings of low self-esteem and self-consciousness over how others perceive him, as goofy. Because just as a horse is a horse, so a man is a man – we all engage an inner dialog with ourselves. It’s a feature of the human condition. Which can be absurdly funny sometimes! Would the show have been as successful with a talking dog? Probably not. Though a talking Lama Alpaca might’ve worked. Lamas Alpacas have a look of wisdom and erudition about them, like Lydia up there. On the way home we like to drive by the local farm to check in on her. This day she was out patrolling the fence line with an Emu. We usually roll down the window to say “Hi.” Never once have we heard her say Hi back. Not that nobody has.