Glenn Miller, seventy years later

Last night we took my mother to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra at a small theater northwest of here, and everyone in attendance thought the show was superb! At the band's peak in the early 1940's, Miller volunteered for the army, then disappeared in a plane crash while flying from England to France in 1944. The band has been touring the world in it's reincarnated form since 1956- with a revolving set of musicians of course, all of them top of the line players. They still sell out venues-playing the old swing hits and some modern sound-a-likes- while performing about 300 shows a year...So if you like swing music at all, they were the Beatles of their time, and still every bit as talented!!

Random

This entry has been a long time coming and will be a rambling mesh of disjointed thoughts, self-therapy really, and probably not wisely meant for public consumption, but every so often I find myself losing my focus, or rather , my emotional confidence, and that generally means that I have neglected something deep within me, something personal or spiritual which I have to retouch-or purge-in order that I may get back to my normally positive outlook. Being of a solitary nature, I recharge myself in solitude rather than society, so when I neglect solitude..that is, the Good, Reflective, Primal, Prayerful solitude, for too long- and the writing which often accompanies it- my sense of self suffers. I start to lose ME...and that must never happen, for with it all my intuitive confidence and self worth start to be questioned by over analysis, or timidity, rather than simply being who and whatever I am in the moment.
Such moods do not diminish immediately,and I suppose have a few pressure points which set them off and which then fester awhile before I am ready to confront the hard emotions at their core. At any rate, I have not really written from my soul for over a month -until a few days ago- and this is my raw journal entry from that day, July 7th:
" Solitude. How rare in body, how elusive in mind! To take the time to think. To feel. To be! ...Beth, Mother, Chelsee, my Family, Work, Sleep. My life is not my own again-willingly-and becomes a bit off kilter some hours. Not for lack of solitude, rather for my best use of that solitude. That is, my Prayers are lacking. My discipline. My confidence. Without Proper solitude, I lose Me...I lose my core. My faith. My soul. And I have neglected me too long like the fool I am sometimes. So I walk today determined to balance the uncertainty that threatens to creep into me. And to purge vestiges of my former lives that ended badly yet carry their debris into this one. To write from the heart if I still remember how. Hell! It has been too long. It has been forever it seems. Not by the calender but by everything I have disused or forgotten. Words? What are they? Pieces of things I thought mattered once..that Did matter...profoundly..foolishly..necessarily..like nothing else I have ever known. Decades of words as meaningless as flowers on my fathers grave. They are gone like figments of my imagination. It is the old Buddhist wisdom all over again-Nothing survives so long as the illusion of what we expected it to be. Let one go and another replaces it to carry us on to death. Of course. How could it be otherwise? It is all we can do to stay sane in an insane world and not worry over it."
In the past weeks I have watched my niece mourn the unexpected stillborn death of her infant son-killed it seems by a taxoplasmosis bacterium which she easily resisted. Nine months of dreams gone in minutes, and a family trying to make sense of it. And me looking beyond them to so many others here in town and around the world suffering problems and tragedies I cannot conceive of. Larger lessons learned I remind myself, while forgetting my own.
Today I walked the dog into the mountains and screamed that primal rage against myself and the world-that anger that has men drinking themselves to death and killing one another like sub human rats lost in their cesspool of pain. The amygdala and hypothalamus rule our prefrontal cortex more than we admit some hours- we who do anything rather than look in the mirror at the flawed beings we are. I scream at the trees in such hours, and reset the balance within me the best I can. Nature is my church more than the pews of mankind. All the world is home to this personal God I know, which most of all demands my sober attention to the best parts of myself. It is my neglect of those parts that drives me to these words in the first place-to find the self love I call my own, without judgment or analysis, implied or self created, and enjoy the moment again, so that I may share it with others

Walkfit, HSN , my Mother, and Writing...

Yesterday I received a phone call from Walkfit about an upcoming promotion on the Home Shopping Network, Sunday evening, June 14th, possibly to be of the people who phones in with a testimonial. As far as I know this is the first time Sylmark corporation has tried HSN, so hopefully it all pays off for them. As I have said before, my endorsement is 100% sincere and I was using their inserts-which literally cured my plantar fasciitis-long before I became a spokesman.
Talking with them after the long silence had me re-examining the progress I have made on the book, which is in a re-write of the first draft, and everything else that has transpired since I finished the walk in early June of '07...on that day I sauntered alone onto the beach in Oceanside, CA at about three in the afternoon after completing the final 24 or 25 miles, and asked some tourists to take a picture to document the occasion. Emotionally I was surprisingly muted, for the highs and lows had been expressed all along the way, and by that point I was weary and relieved that I had finished in one piece. I savored the ocean for a couple hours, then caught a bus to Los Angeles, where a niece and her boyfriend let me sleep on the couch for a week. I had written a letter to Walkfit in January of '06, right after I had purchased their product, and told them of my planned walk, and they called me to see if I was legitimate. I suggested that I re-contact them if and when I reached California, which I did, and that led to the endorsement.
Living here in Warren I have been busy working on the book, helping my elderly mother-who is now 85 and has been in the hospital or housebound for the past month-and working for the medical group to which my MD brother-in-law belongs, doing odds and ends part time. Combined with walking several hours a day and other activities, I am amazed at how quickly the months have passed. Sometimes I wonder how I ever accomplished anything when I was working full time, although I know that there are more than enough hours in a day if I discipline myself properly-which doesn't always happen. The book is called Anti-Clock specifically to dismiss our culture's obsession with time and obligations, so I try to go with the flow as they say, and do what needs doing in the moment, and trust that everything gets done eventually with nothing neglected. My essential promise to God-or whatever you want to call it-remains to finish the book, although writing can be slow going when I labor over individual words like I do. Being a conscientious person I sometimes put everything aside when my mother needs assistance, for she does not want to be in a nursing home and I promised her that I would help her die...As of today she has rebounded and may even return to work for awhile, but she is not getting any younger and eventually one of these setbacks will be her last. So overall life is good, and I have met the woman of my dreams, and now I'm just trying to stay focused so that old promises stay honored in their proper place among the new ones...
POSTSCRIPT: I did not make the Sunday night show, but the saleswomen they had on did a fantastic job I thought, and a female caller gave a testimonial as powerful as anything I could have done...They seemed to be selling well, so I think the Walkfit people will be pleased, although I don't know what the break even point is for that kind of advertising...

Eagles & Rocks

This Bald eagle nest is about a mile from town in a tree near the Allegheny river, and is one of two nests that I know of nearby. The two fledglings may have left the since this picture was taken in early May, but it shows that they are making a comeback locally.
The rock formation is one of several in the mountains and was formed from sandstone conglomerates laid down 350 million years ago when there used to be an inland sea around here. I stumbled upon this one and another while hiking, although there are others, including an "official" formation called Rimrock on which climbers rapel, and at which the conservation corps built steps and railings during the 1930's.

Porcupines, Bees, Frost

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-Our dog (Chelsea, a dachshund/terrier mix) had her first encounter with a porcupine while we were hiking the six mile Morrison trail near Kinzua resevoir a few weeks back. She approached it with curiosity and probably a little aggression, to which the porcupine responded with seven or eight quills in the snout before climbing up a nearby tree. There were two or three near her nose which no doubt stung when I yanked on them one by one, and she responded like a little kid getting splinters removed, but all in all appreciated that I was helping and within a few minutes was running happily down the trail. I assume that she learned something from the experience, because porcupines are common around here and we often see them killed along the roadsides. They are slow moving animals, as big as a large groundhog and bloated looking from all the quills, yet seem to be as vulnerable to automobiles as opossums are in the eastern part of the state.
The wild honeybee hive is in a tree near the town of Russell, a few miles from here, and is one of two that I am aware of in the area. I am attentive to such things because of the apparent virus that has been killing off honeybees in the last few years, and which could be extremely serious to agriculture and our food supply if it continues. Fortunately, proper hygiene seems to help lower the risk for commercial hives and scientists think they have isolated the culprit which will help find a cure. For awhile everything from pesticides to electromagnetic radiation to stress was being suggested as the cause.
The frost was on the railing outside my door on May 18th, which just goes to illustrate the mountain weather here. There were isolated incidences of frost in the mountains until the end of the month and even a little snow in upstate New York. So far Warren has had mixed weather with some highs near sixty, some near seventy, and one or two eighty degrees days since spring. Warren is definitely the place to be if you don't like oppressive heat, because you rarely see ninety degrees, although fortunately the sun shines much more than in winter.

Energy, etc

Warren is in oil and gas producing country, so the surrounding mountains and nearby Allegheny National Forrest are filled with oil rigs and pipelines, and more are being drilled. In fact, the original oil rush began in western Pennsylvania in the late 1800's and continues to this day. I often use the access roads as hiking trails, and have a mixed mind as to the environmental, economic and political impact of all the development. There has been violence recently-mostly slashed tires and other mischief- involving disputes between the landowners and oil producers and the Forest service and environmental groups, apparently because of frustration with the federal bureaucracy that restricts what the producers view as personal rights. The latter own the subsurface mineral rights but have to build roads to reach the drill sites, which damages the publicly owned forest. As far as I can determine, the environmental effects are mostly visual, because water quality samples in 1998 of a local stream( Brown Run ) showed no noticeable effects from the oil and gas wells, and air quality in Warren County is rated "good" for 93% of the year. Of course, this relates to the larger questions of whether the nation and the world want to continue extracting fossil fuels or switch to renewables, and those require complicated answers.

      Around here, where United refinery, gas and oil exploration, and logging are economically important, the bias is towards development of the mountains, and despite my ecological leanings, I absolutely respect the hard physical labor required to reach some of the remote oil and gas fields. As I hike past them there is an occasional whiff of oil or gas, but no apparent irreversible damage that a hundred years left to nature would not repair. The most damaging spill in the last three years was the deliberate opening of valves by disgruntled, fired employees, so it seems that human nature is always the most pervasive threat. Yet I see bird nests in the old pumps which are rusting away, and the derricks of the 18th century are long gone and their access roads overgrown. The cumulative effects of over consumption may eventually cause planetary damage, and I personally believe solar power will offer the most abundant power supply, but until that day comes, it is clear from the local debate that strong emotions on both sides misrepresent the reality of what needs to be done. Meanwhile I continue to walk or bicycle and turn the lights off...

Wednesday

A young woman-25 years old- died in a car accident at about 6:30pm two days ago... I happened to be sitting on the back stairs about a hundred yards away and heard the bang when her SUV hit a pole dead center. Moving at a casual pace I put on my shoes and walked past the scene about 3-4 minutes afterward, where bystanders were looking at her unconscious body sprawled on the front seat. Apparently she had hit the steering wheel/windshield? and fell over onto her back. I did not see any blood nor severe injuries and as I glanced in I overheard one of them remark " Yes, she has a pulse." When I walked past two police cars arrived, so one of the bystanders asked the officers if they had a CPR machine, to which the answer was no. I noticed the lack of urgency in the police, who spent about a minute surveying the traffic and assessing a dangling ( harmless ) telephone wire before looking at the victim. While I circled the block, having neither the medical experience to help nor wishing to gawk, I finally heard an ambulance arrive about 5 or 6 minutes after the moment of the crash. Of course, this was far too late if she had been breathless the whole time, and I later heard that she had died at the scene-probably of internal injuries. Further gossip confirmed that she had led a troubled life and possibly had blacked out or seizured-or even made a deliberate turn-before hitting the pole. Fortunately no one on the sidewalk was injured, for this was directly in front of a music store and a short distance from a dance studio where young girls had been assembling.
When I returned to the house after observing the scene, it occurred to me that despite my curiosity I had neglected to say a prayer for the woman and her family, which I immediately did, and in retrospect that was probably the precise moment of her dying...I guess I have no lasting feelings either way, for I saw many roadside memorials while I was walking the country, so this accident-although tragic to the family-is one more death to me. Supposedly there are more hospital acquired infections resulting in death every year than traffic deaths, so maybe our concerns about risk are misplaced anyway...better to just get on with living...