A big shout out to all those who have subscribed to the rohn report. We have reached 100! And a special thank you to the paid subscribers, all 14 of you! I am deeply appreciative of your patronage.
Well we finally got rain. Felt good. It rained for several hours, soaked into the ground and fed the little roots of the little arugulas and the spinach and the collards and the kale and the sweet corn. They had been struggling. I love God again.
Gabriela Novevska from Macedonia is singing her folk song and Russia is blasting the heck out of targets in the Ukraine, taking over the place. Macedonia is 500 miles from Ukraine, down by Greece, so they’re probably in no danger. Although where she lives, Skopje, used to be part of Serbia, then it became part of the new nation of Yugoslavia. During World War II the Germans took it over and garrisoned Bulgarian troops there, then it was liberated and became Macedonia. Borders change. The music stays the same.
I’ve got a new ride. A Chevy Astro. Classic truck. It really is a truck. Feels like a truck, drives like a truck. But it’s cool. At least it starts and goes which is more than I can say for my other car, a Volkswagen Jetta that just ran out of ganas. That means it doesn’t work anymore. With my Chevy Astro I can go camping and escape the apocalypse if my neighborhood is on fire.
I got an eye test. They found not good things. Now they want to shine a laser into my eye and zap the retina where there’s a tiny hole, patch it up. Then they want to blast my lens into tiny pieces and suck it out thru a tiny incision and put a plastic lens back in its place. Bionic. This is my worry: that we’re becoming cyborgs. If we don’t destroy ourselves first we may be walking around with six legs and a small antenna on the back of our heads permanently connecting us to Elon Musk’s Starlink. Never miss a Facebook post again.
The raccoon is back, tearing up the pickerelweed in the pool behind my house. Cute as the dickens but destructive. We’ll have to come to an agreement. The opossum and her joey are much nicer neighbors, they only try to move into my bedroom.
Oh, while we’re talking about animals, Betos, the new cat arrival that I picked up from the Humane Society to replace Tee Tah who I thought had been eaten by a coyote but come to find out was run over by the neighbor’s truck (not sure which is worse), anyways Betos has a gnarly attitude and refuses to be nice to Kybo the resident cat. Whew, that was a long sentence. He snarls and mews whenever he encounters her. Very annoying. And Kybo, for his part, waits behind the wall for Betos to pass by and then ambushes him, beats the snot out of him for awhile and then walks away. Betos doesn’t like that at all. So anyways today they actually touched noses almost while they were having dinner on the dining room table. That’s a first. Maybe he will mellow out eventually and not be a recalcitrant, imperious, irascible bitch.
Bike riding is going great. I had a Couchsurfing guest from Italy and we rode, past the Blue Hole (currently brown and empty) along the Riverwalk and thru the deep urban forest of downtown. She was a trooper. And when we got back she made pasta Italian style. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to eat salad with pasta. Yeah, according to the official Italian tradition it’s pasta and only pasta. Eat your salad later or before. And pizza is just tomato sauce on the pie crust with a thin layer of mozzarella. Who knew?
The world spins on, time marches forward, the present moment passes into history. Are you having a good time? That seems to be the pertinent question.
I once had a project called ‘The Human Story Project’ and I would interview people with my video camera and ask them all kinds of zany questions. One of my zany questions was, “What is the most important question a person can ask themselves?”
So I asked this question to an acquaintance of mine in his office on campus (he was an esteemed professor). He thought about it for an inordinately long time and then looked at me and laughed, “This had better be good, right?” Then after a few minutes more of cogitating he responded with, “The most important question I could ask myself is . . . am I living? Am I really living or am I just going thru the motions.” Wow. That’s brilliant. Time marches on and becomes the past, indeed, and we can only choose to truly be alive or not.
A little philosophy there. He was a philosophy professor. I guess we could all use a little philosophy in our lives. ‘Know thyself’. Socrates. The one they poisoned for corrupting the youth with dangerous ideas. Right.
I personally feel that all the news and all the views could be simplified into just three categories: the wars and the crimes and the macabre behavior of human beings being one, the selfless servants of humanity sincerely trying to make this world a better place, two, and simply enjoying oneself in the most sincere way possible. What else is there? If aliens came down from the heavens and took over the whole planet, it would still be the same. We might be enslaved to our overlords but we would still be human. Unless they drained our brains and filled them up with minutiae and trivia to keep us distracted. Oh wait that’s already happened.
News and Views