Conrad Memories from the Future

As I write today's blog, I don't do so feeling unbridled optimism, more a deadly serious realism.  Most of our lives are spent with real, but relatively personal issues, superficial on a global scale.  That doesn't mean that global scale issues don't exist, it just means that they are relegated largely to scholars, specialists in fields, and national leaders.  Not now, for they are in the forefront for a plethora of reasons.  I am going to try to give my view on these important issues, not in a dispassionate way, but in a manner as realistic as possible from one American man's armchair perspective. Below is a comic piece from the political cartoonist for the Washington Post, Tom Toles.  He summarizes beautifully many of these essential challenges facing America.  They are American, but many in varying degrees are also global in implication.  America is fortunately or unfortunately still a powerful force in the world.  It is also a force that has d...

8:00 AM Nice morning.  Check the news and see if the world has fallen the rest of the way apart.  It hasn't.  The rest of the way still is to go.  Better eat some breakfast.  Oatmeal and banana sounds good this morning. 8:45 AM Check my email and Facebook, etc.  Nothing big yet.  Ordered a book series by Zelazny.  It's his full 10 book Amber series.  I enjoy his books. 9:15 AM Hmmm ...  It's Thursday.  I know because they are doing trash pick up.  Better check the air quality, because my doctor wants me to walk 1 hour in the morning and 45 minutes each evening.  That hasn't been working very well, because I have susceptibility to bad air conditions causing asthma and I don't go out unless the 2.5 micron particle count is in the good range, below 50.  California fires don't care about my walking schedule.  So, let's see ... Nope, too high.  I'll find something else to do until it gets better.  If it does...

 Let's get something cleared up right away - I am not a cook.  Other than the Barbecue and I could always cook them up some hamburgers or fish or veggies there, but that would be the end of this post.  As much as you might wish that, I am going to instead forge ahead on a quite different path. I have four grandkids that I will list later, but it is important to lay the groundwork for the tale I have to tell.  I had two grandfathers, the most relevant people for my background as a grandfather.  One of them was a bar room brawler with alcohol problems in his early grandfatherly years, but all of that was hidden from the view of me as a child.  He was after all a good provider and was warm enough with us kids, so there was never a problem there. My other grandfather was, as we were told when we were young since there was just too much to hide, a bit eccentric.  In reality, as my mother so aptly phrased it, he was nutty as a fruitcake.  That is unkind...

 I am changing my original path on this topic, for my impulses until this morning was to go with a combinations of science (physics) and sports (baseball).  In other words, I was going to be on typical guy thinker territory.  I'm a guy. This morning, I deflected as I reflected - Johnny Cochran would have appreciated that delightful use of the language - reflecting upon last night's debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence.  And the fly, of course, for any of you who watched.  Pence I have watched for four years and Kamala, being local, for a longer time.  Everyone was waiting for Kamala to eviscerate Pence and the Democrats would jump up and down in joyous celebration while the Republicans would claim that she was the nasty, angry woman they had warned America about.  She had eviscerated Brett Kavanaugh during his hearings, leaving him speechless, a reflection of her extensive past as a prosecutor.  But, she didn't do that.  She lost no gr...

Living in the now is to relate what I am experiencing.  Now.  My outer experience is constrained by circumstances.  I have a 70-year old body that is vulnerable to the current environmental conditions with smoke in the air and a pandemic.  My psychological environment is challenged by an unhinged national leader becoming more desperate and extreme.  I feel concern and empathy for my daughter who is experiencing difficult physical distress. What is the state of my psyche?  Surprisingly good.  As my outer world contracts, my inner experience expands.  I am finding time and motivation for inner exploration. I am thinking, but something much richer than thinking.  Likewise, I am experiencing more than simple feeling and emotion.  There are subtle shifts I am experiencing that would be drowned out by busy external activity.  Not thought, not emotion, hard to put words to.  It's like the background of my being. It has its own express...