Pittsburgh

Just a couple shots of P-Burg, a neat city situated along three rivers and in between mountains...It is still on the distressed cities list after losing it's steel industry, but seems to hold it's pride up with the Steelers Superbowl winning streak. My niece's wedding was on a riverboat which cruised the water, and everyone had a good time as far as I could tell. We rode the incline the next day(a cable car up a nearby slope) which offered this view of the skyline-but rain canceled a planned zoo trip...maybe next time. Unfortunately, the east has been inundated with rain all season-the wettest on record in New England-so this week will be another washout. At such times I miss that dry heat in the southwest...Wildfires? what wildfires?

Goldenrod

This is an entire hill filled with goldenrod, which is very common in the fields at this time of year...fortunately I am not allergic......The temperature has averaged about 60-70F, the sun has been out at least part time, and within another month the surrounding mountains will be wholly transformed into the fall foliage. In some regards it has been the summer that wasn't-cooler and wetter than usual-but the showers were passing, with enough sun in between to keep me happy during my walks. I'm still toiling...s-l-ow-l-y...on a rewrite of the first draft, which for some reason is taking much longer the second time around...probably because I am more obsessive about each word, and more distracted by other things, and have not set a time limit thus far. I find comfort in knowing that Walden took Thoreau almost seven years and Gone With The Wind took Mitchell ten years, so I'm simply trying to meet my own standards. On the home front my mother continues to work and play bridge and do her crossword puzzles, and Beth and I are as committed as ever-truly friends and lovers in a way I only imagined to have been possible before meeting her. My niece will be getting married in Pittsburgh on the 26th, so that will give us the opportunity to see the city and see my kids and for all of us to do a little sight seeing. I hope that everyone reading this-if anyone reads this blog-is doing well and has an enjoyable autumn...keep the faith!

Health Care

My brother in law is an MD, my sister manages three offices in a medical group owned by the Warren hospital, and I am a casual, part time worker for that hospital. Everyone agrees that the system is broken, but no one agrees on the solutions, and either way escalating costs and an aging population will force future changes. As I have filed charts this past year I have noticed that many of the patients are the same people over and over-about 35% of the total population-and some of the more costly patients are the elderly, such as my own mother, age 85. In the past five years she has amassed at least $50,000 in bills, mostly paid for by Medicare and her private insurance, for problems that can best be described as normal for her age bracket. I regularly pick up her six or seven medications, which often have co-pays of one or two hundred dollars a month. At some point in the future the question of whether it is economically feasible to pay exorbitant amounts for people only a few years from death will need to be answered. Call that rationing or call it bankruptcy, it will happen;the national debt cannot afford either limitless entitlements, lawsuits, or compensations. Of the other 35%, many have self induced lifestyle problems caused by smoking, drinking and obesity, so unless the system includes incentives to change peoples behavior, it will fail. One must also remember that the high cost of healthcare occurs within a system that employs thousands of volunteers- more than any other business, so efficiency is not it's strength.
Basically, I observe the health care system-and Americans generally-as having a profound fear of illness and death, which is understandable considering how removed our society has become from the natural world. At root that also indicates to me a profound lack of faith-as though all the lip service to God and Heaven have no conviction. If one expands one horizon, it is easy to make the case that our moral will is misguided to suppose that $50,000 spent keeping an elderly woman alive could not be better spent treating malnutrition or dysentery in impoverished children. Tough choices, but not that tough if one lives a good life and accepts death as part of life.

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.