Don't Stop for Anything

Dear Blog Reader;

I hope that this finds you doing well. We are currently nestled between Arctic Vortices. We are happily watching the tables being turned on the frozen tundra as the afternoon temp has snuck up to 40 degrees. A snowball has been placed up on the porch railing. We are gleefully looking out the window, watching as he wets himself. I particularly enjoy seeing the sweat break out on his forehead.  Hopefully, Mr. Arctic Vortex will arrive before he melts away, and his refrigerative powers will turn our little snowball into a solid crystalline mass. I will slip a hammer into my coat pocket as I go out to stoke the fire, I will shatter Mr. Ice Ball into a million tiny shards. Wear your safety goggles, folks.

The Sharritt’s have turned another corner in their lives. The last cold blast with the frozen chunks of ice on the interstate shook a filling loose on my 2000 Lexus ES300. It has been a great car these past five years. I had the pleasure of driving it from the 150,000 mark to the current tally of 272,567 miles. However, it was time to part ways.

People would ask me “what kind of gas mileage does it get?”

“It has leather seats.” I would reply.

“No, really what kind of gas mileage does a big car like that get?”

“It has leather seats.”

As I cleaned out the $6.67 of accumulated change from the consol, the pack of flossers, and the battery powered electric shaver for those emergency mornings when I had over slept, I became quite nostalgic. The memories flowed back over me; not only of the book listening obsession developed during the past 5 years but also of all of the cars that have been a part of my life. I know that I have friends who are big public transportation fans and have a healthy dislike of the auto. I applaud you. It is good to embrace causes before their time; causes that limit the mobility of the population. The ability to move around and find mates has certainly diversified the gene pool, and has gone on long enough. In fact, Kentucky has families whose trees no longer look like a wreath. It is time that kind of progress was halted.

My nostalgia settled on the first two cars that made an impact on my life; both of them before I could drive. There was Crackpot; 1960 Pontiac with big fins and was fire engine red. It was the car that was carrying me to kindergarten when it was rear ended as we slowed to turn into the parking lot. Those big fins were made of really thick steel. The mass from those fenders kept the car from being deflected off course. My father still navigated the turn. After exchanging insurance information, dad went ahead and delivered me to school and life went on. The dent in the driver’s side fender was never fixed. We were pretty poor back then and the settlement may well have been used for school supplies and cloths. I don’t really know.

Crackpot didn’t have many of the modern safety switches. As a result a young child, of six, practicing his driving skills, could move the shift lever without the key being in the ignition. I found this out while practicing on a slight hill on my grandmother’s driveway. I knew that in order to drive properly the big handle behind the steering wheel had to be rotated to the right. Panic gripped me as I and Crackpot rolled backwards into a plow that was in the grass at the bottom of the small drive. This gave the car a nice long scrape and ding on the passenger’s side rear fender. This solidified the red Pontiac’s name until it was retired a few years later. My dad loved that car. In fact, rather than trade it in, he had plans for restoring it as he gathered the resources to take it to the shop, beat out the fenders, and drop a new motor in that beast. It never happened. Finally, 10 years later, it was pried out of the mud and taken to the junk yard for scrap.

Crackpot was replaced by a blue Pontiac Bonneville wagon. That car took my family without dad to Virginia, Florida, and Washington DC for family vacations. Dad was always too busy for vacations with the farm. So mom would pack us up and off we would go to stay for a week with an uncle who served in the Air Force. That Pontiac lasted a long time and witnessed mom getting a nursing job after my sisters and I got into school. One night when I was 15 the timing chain broke on the car and would not start as my mom came out from second shift and got ready to come home. My years of practice driving, driving tractors and trucks on the farm had paid off. Dad took me to the hospital parking lot at 10:00 p.m. He hooked the truck to it. He said don’t worry no cop is going to pull someone over while towing a car in Anderson. “You’ll be fine. Oh and son, don’t stop for anything.” He knew that my starts might not be the smoothest since I was so nervous. So I was supposed to time the lights and roll through the stop signs and keep it moving.

Mom was in the truck with me. To this day, I don’t know how I was designated the expert here. Dad was in the blue Bonneville jockeying the emergency brake as I would slow down, timing lights; releasing it as I would speed up. Dad timing momentum so that I didn’t rip the bumper off. The trip went surprisingly well. We had traversed the 15 miles from Anderson and were just pulling into Ingalls down SR 67. The last turn required going over a railroad track. Our route had been running parallel to the tracks for 6 miles or so. Dad had told me to use the middle crossing in town because it was the flattest. I was just starting to breathe easily when I looked up and saw a train coming. Crap! It was almost too close. I think I can make it. The warning lights had started to blink. The horn could be heard easily through the closed truck windows. Dad said “don’t stop for any thing.” I down shifted. Mom’s hands went to the dash board. She had heard his admonition and wanted her bumper unharmed. She offered no advice but could do the physics and knew that it would be close. Sure the truck would make it. It was 12 feet long but the 12 foot Bonneville and the 6 foot chain made us a 30 foot target. Crap, Crap, Crap! Don’t stop for any thing. A train was a thing; a really big thing.

I had down shifted. This was no time to get bogged down and have the truck hesitate for a lack of power. I had not even braked heading up to the apron of the crossing. I was just letting out on the clutch and giving it the gas when I knew the physics wasn’t going to work. I depressed the clutch; train horn blaring. I moved my right foot from gas to brake; the train’s cyclopic light blazing in my eyes. The truck stopped and just kissed the crossing arm. Setting the emergency brake, I jumped out of the cab and ran back to say that I thought I really had to stop. Dad’s foot must have been hovering on his emergency brake because he stopped that car in five feet saving the front bumper. He got out and patted me on the back. “It would have been close. I would have followed you right on across if you had gone, but I’m glad you stopped,” he said.

We stood there buffeted by the backwash off of those train cars. The maddening clack of steel wheel bumping over a miss-aligned rail joint distracted our thoughts of what could have been.

Thirty-seven years later the light still blazes. The wind still buffets. My dad still pats me on the back and says “I would have followed you across, but I’m glad you stopped.”

Take care,

Roger

Arctic Vortex Science?

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine; sitting in my warm living room enjoying the sight of a light six inch dusting of snow. It is nice to see that the weather people can change world views in just a few short weather fronts. In the old days of late December, they would have posted winter storm warnings for six inches of snow. We would have experienced a run on the dairy counter in the grocery store. It is fortunate that we have adjusted. Bessy the cow still has not recovered from the last run two weeks ago.

I can just hear her in her best Scottish brogue. “I can’t do it farmer Kirk!

“Damn it Bessy. You have to do it. The people won’t be able to make their French toast while stuck at home with one another waiting for the snow emergency to lift. They may be forced to eat their young.”

“You don’t understand farmer. You can’t expect me to drink any more water and eat any more hay and then magically turn it all into milk! It can’t be done!”

“Damn it cow. Try!”

We have adjusted and things are returning to a deep winter rhythm. Just in time, in 3 weeks, during a thaw, it will be time for the orchardist to wander up and down the fruit trees, pruners in hand, making room for this year’s crop. The horticulturist will wander out to the green house, digging out the soil mix, dusting off the heating pads, and starting pansies, begonias and setting Easter Lilies. Don’t worry; we are going to make a comeback. This current condition won’t last forever. We just need to stay vigilant for the signs and rejoice as they are seen.

While waiting for the signs of spring, the lovely Miss Beverly and I have been seeing other signs; signs that are not as pleasing to the soul; signs that give us pause and cause a  shudder to run down our spines. It appears that the Arctic Vortex swirling around the Midwest has created a vacuum of sorts. Not only is it sucking the heat from our houses, our bones and our very souls, it appears to be sucking mice into our houses. This phenomenon has been harder on the lovely Miss Beverly. Her years of indoctrination as a young child left her with voices in her head that said “Well of course your housekeeping in subpar, you have mice in the house.”

Thankfully, I listened to my 7^th grade science teacher. Mr. Clifford was explaining how scientific thought evolved through out the ages. He explained that the alchemists observing some of the facts would make leaps of logic to explain the rest of the facts that they had not observed. Mr. Clifford went on to give the following example. Scientists would leave a small amount of grain on a shelf with some rags. They would do this in a mouse free castle laboratory. They would watch the rags and no mice would approach this. They would vigilantly watch said grain and rag pile and viola a couple of weeks later after they were tired of their stupid experiment, they would clean up the rags and grain and find that a mouse had indeed spontaneously generated and be living happily in the new nest they had created. Unfortunately for the mice, the scientists had been commissioned by the king to test the allergenic affects of mascara that the queen was thinking of using. So the mice became lab rats and the rest is history so to speak.

The whole misunderstanding could have been cleared up if the early alchemists had focused on optics, film and motion centers instead of the biological sciences. Today, any alchemist worth his salt could go to Amazon and order a motion-sensor activated wildlife camera. He would be able to observe that as the Arctic Vortex sucked the heat from our homes, bones, and souls; mice were being sucked into the heat escaping vacuum. Of course to observe heat being sucked from our souls, the alchemist would have to get the mass spectr-al-ometer motion-sensor activated game camera.)

Anywho, we have mice. They are vegetarian mice. They appear to love those little sweet peppers that you buy in the big 15 gallon bags from Costco. They taste like candy. They are so sweet and colorful. They help make any winter salad a colorful diversion from the desultory landscapes we see outside our windows in late January. Well some of these wonderful peppers went bad in the fridge. Yes, they are good and good for you, but there were 15 gallons of them and there is still pie, chocolate fudge, and ice cream to eat. One must eat a balanced diet; besides eating only vegetables can be unhealthy as this little story will show in a few minutes as it unfolds.

So, the peppers ended up in the compost bucket on the kitchen counter. This is where the vegetarian, closet eating, mice found them. They were such gluttons. Yet, so filled with self loathing, they dragged these colorful, midwinter delicacies over behind the dish drainer and behind the sugar and flour cans and had a feast. It was sad when we found the remains. You could sense that they could not help themselves.  There were 5 or 6 skeletal remains of the peppers in each place. One wasn’t enough. Their gluttonous little appetites took them back to the compost pile over and over. They would pick out the next tasty morsel and drag it back to their closeted space where they would try to hide their guilt in the dark, secret place.

You have seen my hints for mouse capture in these pages before. In the past, I have relied on JIFF peanut butter for prior trap baits. In the past, the organic stuff was unappealing for the four legged intruders of the Sharritt house. I think that we had a group of mice who went for the sweets. In that case, JIFF was the appropriate brand to use. Obviously, vegetarian mice need a different tact. I pulled out the organic peanut butter and their fates were sealed. See! Healthy eating isn’t all that its cracked up to be.

I am on the hunt; fulfilling one of the designated manly functions. Two of my adversaries are down; some more are to go. Each day, I take the nightly harvest out and stack up the little brown eyed druids in the snow. This too will become a sign of spring. The Arctic Vortex will stop sucking. It will stop vacuuming mice into the house. I will stop using the wretched little mice’s self-loathing weaknesses against them. The sun will shine and spring will come. It’s science.

Take care,

Roger

A classic wasted on the young?

Dear Blog Reader.     

I hope that this finds you doing well. I hope that your pipes did not freeze. If they did, I hope that they did not burst. In central Indiana, we have lost our constant vigilance in guarding against frozen pipes. Years of global warming, excellent heat tape, and preformed, Styrofoam, pipe insulation, have made us complacent. The Sharritts refer to it as better living through chemicals. It appears that these improvements in chemistry have protected us to the single digits below zero. 14 below with 30 mph winds is another level of cold. Many were humbled.

Even our dogs, Henry and Hugo, were affected by the cold weather. Obviously, they were watching too much of the Weather Channel huddled under a blanket with the lovely Miss Beverly sitting on the couch in front of a space heater. They kept looking up at us with their inquisitive brown eyes as they watched weather person after weather person throw boiling cups of water into the air. The physics impaired weather persons squealed in amazement as the water vapor turned to ice crystals before it hit the ground. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, the dogs could not wait to get outside for their own experiments. Their hypothesis? It was so cold that their dog doo would turn to tootsie rolls before it hit the ground. It certainly looked like tootsie rolls. It felt like tootsie rolls. Unfortunately, the researchers report that the artifacts were lacking in the tootsie roll smell and taste department. Conclusion? Dog doo does not turn into tootsie rolls in extreme polar vortices.

It is hard to believe but 6 months from the time of this writing, I will be participating in the Ride Across, INdiana. The RAIN is a day long ride across Indiana along SR40; 160 miles. The ride will be on July 12^th this year. Last year, I rode in the Circle Indiana ride, which was 360 miles over 6 days. It was a fund raiser for Habitat for Humanity. Loyal readers came together and pledged over $1,500 in support of Habitat. RAIN is not a charity event, but I figure that we are all flexible enough in our thought processes and generous enough that I can ask for donations and you can donate to Habitat again. We’ll get the money where it needs to go.

Last year I provided a giving incentive. Anyone who donated $100 had the opportunity to pick the topic for the daily blog that I wrote at the end of each day. The format will have to be different this year. Everything is compressed to one day. This will dictate the compression of the communication. Thankfully, modern communications have devolved to a point that this can be accommodated also. If you donate $100, I will write a limerick addressing any topic you wish, during one of the 6 or 7 rest stops. These creations will be posted on Twitter, live, during the ride.

Don’t donate now. This is just a heads up. I’ll let you know in late May or early June.

Last week, the topic was a comparison between the Hunger Games and 1984. For some reason, I cannot let 1984 go. I read it a long time ago. I suppose in college. Marketing being what marketing is, I would have had to do the hip thing and read 1984 in 1984. The only thing that I remember about it was the drabness of Oceana. Everyone wore coveralls, exercised when told to exercise. Everyone was withholding all spontaneous emotion out of fear of Big Brother; everyone that is except the Proles. They were the only ones who had lives. Sure they were starving to death and had drab lives, but what they had was a freedom.

I wrote last week wondering if the teachers in the group, that we were chatting with, had taught 1984 in comparison to the Hunger Games. As I have thought about it, I hope that they had not. Why waste a classic on the young? I speak of the young here in generic terms. The young in the line may have been unusually bright. They may have gotten it. It may have made a tremendous impact on their lives and their world view. When I speak of the young, I only speak with authority that 1984 was wasted on me a 22 year old youth. It just made no sense to me. I understood that Orwell was writing about communism, describing what he saw happening in the newly minted Soviet Union in the late 40’s. In 1984, the Soviet Union was crumbling. Freedom was sweeping the globe. 1984 had little relevance. Sure, double speak was alive and well. However, as long as there are politicians and ad men, they will be telling us that 2+2=5. We just don’t worry about a cage of rats being strapped on our face if we do not believe that cell phone surveillance is not an intrusion of our rights; at least not yet.

Either I have changed or the world has changed. I do not know which. Every time that read Oceana’s slogan “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength, I hear Bill Clinton saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.” He did that under oath; swearing to tell the truth; 2+2=5. O’Brien, cue the rats. O’Brien was Winston Smith’s torturer for those of us who have cleared our minds of trivial facts in favor of important things like remembering the lovely Miss Beverly’s birthday.

1984 has been in the news lately. Eric Snowden said that 1984 paled in comparison to the scope of surveillance being conducted by our government. I don’t know how I feel about Eric Snowden; traitor or patriot. I am suspicious of government, but I am also a big rule follower. It creates an inner conflict that leaves me on edge. It would be better if he had not run to Russia for safe haven. In the end, I believe that he did the right thing. I do not believe that marathon runners were safer because of eavesdropping in place in Boston. I do believe that it was citizens who kept a jetliner from the White House or the Capital. So, we have Eric saying that Big Brother’s surveillance paled in comparison to Neighborhood Snowmageddon Associates eavesdropping through the internet and cell phones. That may seem like hyperbole, but we all know that someone knows that you are a big fan of You Said What. Roger?

I think that the saddest part of reading 1984 at a ripened age is recognizing the ruthlessness of making no martyrs, of breaking dissenters down until they love Big Brother. The inevitability of it, the unconquerability of it rings true. There is hand wringing over electronic eaves dropping, but the Niggling Slimy Automatons have not stopped collecting. Even if they said they had stopped, the American Public would not trust that they had. History would show that the public should be skeptical. They can claim that there is no personal information being collected, but I get the feeling that metadata is surely reduced to individual pieces of straw so that the chaff can be sorted from the needles if you have a big enough computer.

While reading 1984 at a wizened age I was left with a crushing sense of doom. It left me with a general dread that the worst thing is telling others what they have to do. Hopefully, wisdom has transformed me over the years. When I was young, I could be provoked by the insipid ideas of the other side. I was prepared to save them from themselves. If others lived in just such a way they would not have to suffer the consequences of their stupid behavior, or beliefs, or politics.

As a youth, I believed that I could change the world. Shoot, I believed that it has already changed because of me. The enthusiastic optimism of youth believes that it can change the powers and principalities; that it can make a difference. Yet that belief fosters the danger of more oppression; of becoming the power and principality. Jennifer Lawrence, the actress who portrayed the totalitarian fighting heroine in the Hunger Games was quoted last month saying that “calling people fat should be illegal.” When idealism doesn’t get its way, it almost always resorts to enforcing its will on the unrepentant, which is totalitarian, and while well intentioned, it is just cuing up the rats.

Take care,

Roger

Hungry?

Dear blog reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I hope that you have not succumbed to all of the snow and cold. The Sharritts have been better. We have had a loss in our lives. The mother hen, an electric space heater that the lovely Miss Beverly and I would drag from room to room allowing us to enjoy a 70 degree micro climate as we found a spot to sit, committed suicide. All of this talk of killer cold weather, stay inside, stay home from work, don't lick the flag pole, dispirited the mother hen so badly that she caught on fire.

While snuggling with the lovely Miss Beverly late on a cold Saturday morning, I snuck my arm out from under the covers and hit the on switch. Poof went the heater and an acrid gray smoke came out of the vents that had, here to for, bathed us with life invigorating heat. I scurried out of bed, unplugged the mother hen, and put her out on the front porch and snuggled back into bed with Bev. It is sad that all of the doom and gloom caused the mother hen to succumb, to give up and to pull the plug so to speak.

Anyway, I suppose that we will survive. The cold will ebb. The days will lengthen. We will have to learn to get along without the mother hen. Fortunately, everyone else was out buying eggs, milk and bread for winter storm French toast, leaving the space heater aisle unobstructed when the Lovely Miss Beverly went out later in the day. Luck was with her and she came home with the parabolic dish of glow. So far it has sustained us nicely.

It is tempting to write about the weather, or mother nature (I refuse to capitalize her so shut up spell checker.) It is tempting to write about how the b*&#% is out to kill us. 11 below (I know that is nothing to my friends in 44 below Minnesota) with 30 mile per hour windsl, this is not a trifling matter to my Indiana blog friends.

It really is too easy a target; writing about the weather when it is this extreme. It still is nothing compared to the blizzard of 78. I look out my window on the world now and I can see fences. I could not back then. They were covered in these gigantic snow drifts. So I just need to calm down a little; take a deep breath and write about what I had intended to write about all along.

Way back in November, the family went to see the Hunger Games. It was very enjoyable and convinced me to go ahead and get the trilogy of books so that I would be up to speed when the final installment hit the celluloid in the next year or so. As we were leaving, we met two of Ben and Grace’s high school teachers. They had their children and friends along. We were talking about the movie and it struck me; I wonder if these teachers had taught the kids about the book 1984. Isn’t that what the Hunger Games are really? They really are just 1984 with a hopeful message.

That was the other thing that struck me about the water cooler conversations about the Hunger Games. Person after person reported that the books really depressed them. As I was reading, I just couldn’t see it. You knew that Katniss was going to win. You should read 1984 if you want to slog through something with no hope. So that is what I did. I slogged through the Hunger Games Trilogy and then leapt straight into 1984.

These are some of the things that struck me. First, the Hunger Games was published by the Scholastic Corporation. You remember Scholastic don’t you; the monthly book club for kids. It was always trying to get us to buy the Witch of Blackbird Pond during my formative years. I only wanted to buy that year’s edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. Was the world Tallest Man still alive, and had anyone dethroned the worlds fattest man who was buried in a piano box? He was huge.  So Scholastic published the Hunger Games. By definition, they published this story for the youth of America. It just happened to cross over and sneak out of the furtive imaginations of our youth.

Second, the heroine was very self-centered. This isn’t surprising since the author, as many authors do, wrote a story with which her target audience recognize and make a connection. Now before the youth of America starts whining that it isn’t fair that I am stating they can recognize themselves in a self-centered, center of the universe heroine, I want to taunt them and say pay your own health insurance for a while child. Why wasn’t the premise that the President of a totalitarian state cares about a 16 year old girl dismissed out of hand? Only in an age of twitter, facebook, and viral videos would we have faith that one person could change the world and the delusion to think that it could be us.

Sure it is about martyrdom. The Hunger Games uses the device of martyrdom to change the world. Orwell, on the other hand, was very specific that the party and big brother made sure that there were no martyrs. You were rehabilitated until you loved the state and then killed. You were never allowed to check out in a state of hatred. That was how the party would never change. With no martyrs there was no hatred to stoke the masses, this left no hope of over throwing the state.

It is interesting however that in the new world order, the Hunger Games does not martyr the heroine either. In a self-centered world, the heroine can have surrogates die for them. They provide the emotional energy to turn the crowds, to spur them on, while the heroine channels their energy with just a few scratches on her chinny chin chin to show that she too was down for the fight. In the end, it was just the threat of self-annihilation that was enough to turn the tide. I bet there are some Vietnamese Buddhist monks that are kicking their charged remains right now. “You mean I didn’t have to strike the match and self emulate? Damn!”

It strikes me that Orwell hit the nail on the head when his protagonist, who was just as individualized, was hunted down, tortured, broken and then killed; not making a dent in the totalitarian rule that had enslaved society. That view, while bleak, is more realistic of the individual disconnected from those around them making a difference.

The individual does not change society. We are not the center of the universe. When we see ourselves as individuals; unconnected, unable to empathize or recognize other person’s motivations, desires and contributions, we delude ourselves. We see ourselves as saviors, and yet have nothing to save.

Take care

Roger