Manic Day Bliss

 Today I find myself in a very happy place. If I am a manic/depressive being (aren't we all to some degree) I am definitely in a manic phase and I love it. Some of my delight is triggered by the warm golden sunshine streaming down from above. (Two days in a row, it must be a record for this summer.) I'm sure yesterdays stroll through the Top of The Word on Wickersham Dome also is effecting the chemistry of bain. Indeed, one of yesterday's events most certainly is contributing to the smile in my brain.

During my hike yesterday I forgot my walking stick at a point along the trail. The stick was of a stem of diamond willow which my son had harvest from the banks of the Chena River. He gave it to me several years ago and I carved,sanded and finished it to a golden rod with deep, blood colored diamond shapes contrasting with its light golden wood. It formed the perfect shape to fit my hands with its curving, gnarled   surface. Normally such a loss would have tinted my world a bit in to depressed gray but the events that followed had an opposite effect.

When I got home I posted a blurb on Facebook about losing it. Within a very short time I received a response from a fine young lady informing me that they had found the object and were delighted to be able to put it back in my hands. She and her family of 4 had encountered me along the trail and we had briefly exchanged pleasantries. They found the stick propped up in a trailside bush and remembered that fine walking stick in my grubby hands during that brief encounter. Her young son had dutifully carried it back to the trailhead in hopes that they could return it to me. Alas, I had already departed when they arrived.

This morning I awoke to marvelous sunshine and the knowledge that I would be re-united with the lost object. While picking up the stick at Paige's home I learned that Paige and knows my daughter, Rachel, through their mutual nursing jobs at the hospital. Sometimes it truly is a small world. I love this place where I live! I exist among boundless landscapes in which I  roam and people who aren't afraid to share a bit of themselves with each other. How did I come to be so blessed?

Weird Place of My Mind

 My mind is strange place. Since my wife if gone at work, fighting the dreaded Covid-19 dragon, I find myself alone in the house on yet another cool,rainy and gloomy morning. At first my thoughts busied themselves with contemplating the evolution of the fishes of this world and then the more general evolution of life. (Did you know that 75% of fishes in today's world evolved in fresh water?)  In my mental model of life, I see all life as existing in an eddy in the river of time. It exists in the counter-current flowing opposite to the universal headlong rush to entropy, the lowest energy state. Like all the water in a river it can flow backwards to the main current, perhaps due to some obstruction, but it eventually rejoins the unrelenting rush to oblivion. Perhaps, and most likely, this analogy applies not just to life but also to existence itself. I think of existing in terms of mass and matter, but are not mass and matter not also just eddies within this steam flowing to oblivion? Matter eventually "degrades" to energy, but energy itself eventually expands and dilutes until it is nonexistent. A photon emitted from a star like our sun, streaks through space, getting less intense until it exists no more. Indeed, nothing can be said to exist unless there is an opposite state we term nonexistence. An immutable duality that that seems to permeate everything. There is no such thing as nonexistent without there also being existence and vice-avcercea. There is no good without there being evil; no god without there being a satan; no life without a death. Is the ultimate peace nonexistence?

My mind can not handle contemplating such deep trains of thought for too long before getting distracted by more mundane activities; before returning to the comfort of the circular flow of the eddies of existence. An object that my wife gave me snapped me back into more comfortable thoughts. The object is a wooden rectangle about 10 inches in length and 3 inches of width. Its sides are constructed of 3/4 inch boards with metal pegs inserted into the wood sides, so that they protrude upwards out of the sides to a height about 3/4 of an inch. The two long sides are separated from each other by end pieces of about 1.5 inches long wedged between the long sides of the rectangle and a similar piece supporting the middle of it My wife had given me the object as a way to support my cell phone in an upright position for the duration of a vides call I was expecting. I was intrigued as to what purpose this object was built to perform. It was obviously engineered for some reason but I was at a loss as to what that purpose was. Examining it closer I noticed that it was stamped with the words, "www.knittingboard.com." Like any good twenty-first century man I immediately got on the internet and navigated to this "location" in the digital world. There I found video instructions on how to use this device to tie specific knots in yarn around the metal pegs to create fabric and form it into socks or hats. The ingenuity of humans amazes me! 

From this point my mind wandered to a myriad of other directions in this eddy I find myself trapped inside. Why do I know so little about textiles and the processes of creating them? Why in my current society are these processes relegated so much to the female gender? Have they always been primarily so relegated in human history? Could knot tying be a form of communication? The Mayan culture sure made an attempt to do so. Communication, at its core, is an attempt to pass our information on to "others", both through time and space. Even our genes are attempts at such. But time and space is nothing without the duality of existence and nonexistence. I'm trapped in this eternal eddy so I might as well enjoy however it flows. There is no alternative.

Sex

 I think young people mistakenly believe that they have a monopoly on good sex. They think their lithe bodies and exquisite senses must surely make them champions in arena of sex. They don't even want to see or even think about old people engaging in such activity. I say, "ba-humbub!"

Like any sport, practice makes perfect, ..... Well not perfect, as with anything there is always room for improvement. This time should always be the best ever, but it takes takes the wisdom and perspective of age to see this is truly the case.

I probably should end this post now. After all, if my children ever read this they will probably be appalled; but I bet they will continue to read it it anyway. That is the way our current society treats this subject. Hiding it, not talking about it, yet at the same time seeking it out, exalting it even commercializing it. (Hey,  we commercialize everything. Why not SEX? ) Sex is a natural enjoyable act like eating and drinking. If it weren't for sex our species would not be here. We humans are blessed with brains that add more dimensions to sex than most other species can not even dream about. The social media sites are full of peoples' photos and intricate descriptions of their last scrumptious meal, or the perfect glass of wine they consumed but polite people don't post pictures and descriptions of their latest copulation feats or feast. I don't want to be tortured with images of many of my acquaintances so engaged, but hey, I also don't want to see the images of their last meals either. 

Sex is great in all its forms and contortions. Frivolous sex, sex for a purpose, angry sex, make-up sex, stranger sex, marital sex. This list could go on and on. Its all good. I'm a great fan of it. More people should try it. Maybe we should get rid of the taboos; but hey, the taboos give sex give sex some spice. As for me, the last sex I had was the best ever. And so will be the next time. Sex is transcendent.  

The Last Days

 It has been many suns since I last wrote on this blog;too many perhaps. Its been so long that I forget exactly how to use this media. I would swear I have made other posts, perhaps on other blogs that I created but I cannot find any of them in this digital ocean. Perhaps they will turn up among the flotsam of my life.

Yesterday I took a hike to visit the tors of Angel Rocks. Being a Sunday, and one of the few recent days where the sun poked through the gray shroud of clouds, there were many other humans paying tribute to these ancient granite gods of the past. Families with tag-along kids, youth groups of rutting adolescents with beleaguered adult leaders trying to keep them corralled the confines of "mature" expectations. An endeavor that is about as likely of success as stopping earth from spinning or keeping one's body from growing older. 

Initially disappointed at seeing so many other humans gathered at the trailhead I waited to initiate my hike. However quickly my mind slipped into being happy that so many of my kind were also out to enjoy this beautiful day of sunshine. Young people, old people and every age between, forgoing the comfort of cell phones, television screens and pre-winter chores in order to bask in the beauty of this planet for what little time we have left.

Perhaps the title of this post is influenced by my current reading of Craig Childs book, Apocalyptic Planet.  While not necessarily a favorite book of mine, it certainly as got me thinking about geologic time and our and my insignificance in the universe. Do we have any purpose as individuals, as societies, as species or even as a planet? It seems to me that we're just flotsam bobbing on the ripples of the ocean of time.