Tried to Make Something of This Sunday Despite Feelings

 After what amounted to a poor night of sleep, I managed to get on with today, Sunday, the last day in November 2025.  Our friend Lisa paid us a wonderful visit and, after some rest, I set out on my neighborhood walk.  While on the course, I decided to slightly extend the distance to 4.8 miles.  It wasn't a speed walk per se, but I gave it an honest effort as brisk exercise, listening to my phone collection of some favorite songs, arranged as if they were tracks on a double album.  The whole walk was an exercise in fatigue, although the outside temperature remained moderate around 79 degrees with a dry 42% humidity.  Melissa has everything set up now to where, as long as I'm carrying my phone with me, she can determine where I am I on a map...that's reassuring for me.  After the walk (and a deliberately light dinner) my heart rate is getting close to dipping below 90, which is the boundary of Zone One.  Now I've eaten enough for myself and would like to settle down for the evening with a cooler home environment.  Tomorrow I'm due to resume chemotherapy in the morning and radiation treatments in the afternoon. I'm skipping the news, which I think is pretty crappy: is our national motto Make America Grim Again? The wise words of Sting ring out: Our so-called leaders speak.  With words they try to jail you.  They subjugate the meek.  But it's the rhetoric of failure.  MY so-called leaders, that OTHERS elected.  I'm grateful that. at least for today, I didn't have to go out and meet any appointments.  But tomorrow presents a completely different picture.  Not fun, but it's life... 

Excessive Smiling: An American Pecularity

Back when I was twelve and in the seventh grade in junior high school, I had an assigned afternoon slot on my schedule for math study lab, which I shared with a small number of classmates.  One of these, Randy, was a bit of a smart-ass snobby extrovert who would fit into the general depiction of an "alpha male".  He was a stout believer in grinning, and seemed to have a problem about me not sharing his outlook, calling me "Smiley" in sarcasm.  The idea was to make me feel bad and inferior because I wasn't constantly beaming like him (and other students): I just shook it off with the best of humor that I could muster.  In truth, though, it's this insistence in American culture for people to always be smiling with their teeth on grand display that the rest of the world sees as peculiar and worth criticizing.  Most folks, it turns out, are like me in that they are much more hesitant to smile, using that expression more in alignment with actual feelings and tending to be more close-mouthed with it.  Here, though, it's seen as a sign of social confidence and strength and emphasized much more.  I recently saw a YouTube posting in Russian where the host delved into this curious American phenomenon: it was a revelation to me.  So all these years I was the normal dude...should have known.  I know when I do those weekly Depot Parkruns, there's always a photographer present who gets shots of the participants during the event and then posts them within a day or two on Facebook.  Most everyone is grinning from ear to ear at the camera while I usually appear as deep in a frown even though I'm feeling quite happy...that's just me, and I'm guessing that's how the larger part of humanity does it as well...

Jigsaw Puzzle of St. Louis' Gateway Arch

I've never been to St. Louis, but I always liked its Gateway Arch.  A few weeks ago Melissa and I went to Daytona Beach and while there visited their Marshalls store off A1A.  There I got a box loaded with jigsaw puzzles depicting various famous American scenes.  I think that from time to time I'll show one of them that I've put together...

Country Deserves Incoming CCC-in-Chief

The incoming CCC-in Chief (Convict, Conman, Clown) is up to his old tricks, deliberately saying anything he can to steal the media spotlight from other people and events, in this case the solemn observance honoring former president Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100.  CCC is working mass and social media up into a frenzy, making hints of annexing Greenland, the Panama Canal...even Canada,,,along with renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".  The latter gesture, I'm guessing, was aimed at the hard-core voters who supported him from the start and thought twenty years ago that the old "change" from French fries to "Freedom" fries was a good idea.  When I went to school many decades ago, we had a bus stop bully who practiced the same kind of manipulation, threatening and deriding others he felt he could intimidate and always talking loudly about random subjects with outrageous statements abounding...just to keep attention on himself.  Now this dude, at an advanced age, is plaguing my high school reunion website...probably the same old narcissist he always was...sound familiar?  So, returning to our current collective problem, my country knew all about CCC yet elected him, even giving the degenerate a popular vote victory.  So this coming presidential term is on America, a country that has abandoned its sense of reason and decency in favor of self-brainwashing and fascism.  If you want to frequent Facebook (which has just abandoned its fact-checking policy after pressure from you-know-who) or those obnoxious cable news and opinion channels to get your news input, be my guest...all we're going to get in the next four years is more of the same constant, deliberately outrageous crap.  And my country deserves it for what they did on Election Day.  Enjoy...

Listened to a Couple of This Year's Albums...by The Smile and Green Day

After writing on yesterday's article about how I wanted to check out some of this year's music, I started out by listening to The Smile's Wall of Eyes album.  The Smile is for all practical purposes a kind of Radiohead band, with that group's Jonny Greenwood and vocalist Thom Yorke teaming up with drummer Tom Skinner to produce what is essentially Radiohead music.  Greenwood wanted to produce more material and his original band was going too slow...hence The Smile.  Two songs I liked a lot from Wall of Eyes: I Quit and Read the Room.  The other album I began listening to was from another, more established trio: the punk rock Green Day's Savior, and its opening track is a piece I've already heard: The American Dream is Killing Me.  It's refreshing to hear good old fashioned rock with the heavy guitar riffs and Billy Joe Armstrong's trademark working class voice, but the opening lyrics for that song were especially gripping and true: "The American dream is killing me, the American dream is killing me, when it's all double talk and conspiracy".  The song continues along this line, spelling out a grim assessment of where people in our country have come down to...my instincts tell me, though, that this is a worldwide phenomenon: the insanity has spread!  I didn't care too much, though, for the rest of this album: onward to the next of several from 2024...

Just Finished Reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has written a number of books...A Walk in the Woods, from 1998 and describing his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail...is my first of his but most probably not my last.  His humorous style, mixed in with a copious presentation of facts about this great American walkway that stretches all the way from northern Georgia through Maine, is something I'd like to see more of in my books.  After beginning reading...my wonderful sister had given it to me as a present...it soon occurred to me that in some ways it resembled a 2015 movie I had recently seen starring Robert Redford.  Sure enough, it was the cinematic adaptation of this very book, with the same title...apparently Redford had read it and was determined to make a movie based on it.  I didn't care too much for the movie, which to me leaned to the maudlin side of things a bit too much, but the book was sharp and funny.  Bryson wants to walk the Appalachian Trail but is concerned that maybe having a partner on the trek would make it safer and more endurable, so he recruits his friend "Stephen Katz" (a pseudonym for the book) to accompany him.  He probably should have picked somebody a little more prepared than Katz, although their stumbling adventures, interactions and conversations would fill many of the book's pages.  Long story short, the two don't even come close to covering the whole trail, although after a break Bryson returns to hike sections and Katz even rejoins him at the end.  If you want to read a humorous account of hiking while learning some real facts about the Appalachian Trail and this part of America, this is a good starting point...

Happy Fourth of July

Whoopee, I'm off from work!  Now that I got that off my chest, let me just wish you and your loved ones a happy American Independence Day.  Stay safe with the firecrackers and on the road.  As a dear recent president would say on many occasions, "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."  And may I just interject one little word of advice to those getting carried away with politics and perceived conspiracies: set aside a little, teensy-weensy bit of time in your hectic schedule to try first to get your facts straight, and then to try to see things...if only for a couple of minutes...from the other guy's point of view.  I think if enough folks did that, it would make my beloved country stronger and healthier...whad'ya say, all you patriots out there?

Just Finished Rereading The Long Walk by Stephen King

Before I began writing this blog back in April of 2007, I had already read most of Stephen King's published novels.  Since I tend to review books here that I just read, this means that I never got around to discussing those earlier books.  King early on liked to publish come of his works under the pseudonym Richard Bachman...The Long Walk, from 1979, was one of them.  And I just finished reading it...again. The setting...as in so many other Stephen King stories...is Maine.  America has turned into an authoritarian, militaristic state and the big sport on the day of the story is the annual Long Walk, where everyone wagers on who will survive the grueling ordeal...and only the last one left walking will.  Survive, because any participant who dips below the four miles per hour threshold will be warned three times and then shot dead by the soldiers patrolling the route.  Yet many young men volunteer for this "race", because if they do survive, they will pretty much have anything they want for the remainder of their lives.  Ray Garraty, a native of Maine, throws his hat into the ring and, along with 99 other boys, sets off.  The tale is about surviving, giving up, the limits of human endurance and the meaning of friendship and honor while the walkers all know that the others must die in order for them to continue living.  Ray has his friends and foes, and the story gets pretty worked up as you might imagine whenever a boy cannot physically go on any further...and here come the soldiers.  I picked The Long Walk as the first of a series of rereads I plan to continue with because, well, although I'm not going to go out on such a race myself, I have been working on my walking speed both around the neighborhood and at my gym on the treadmill.  The plan is to develop an athletic level of performance with walking, past the 4-mph standard of King's novel.  Oh, although the author was depicting a cruel American society that didn't exist, I might add that it doesn't exist yet: it will happen, though, if its people allow it to happen...