“Holy Cow!”

I have the privilege of knowing Bob and Linda Meehan of La Honda, California. I know them because Linda was the Head Lifeguard when I was the Recreation Director in the Cuesta La Honda Guild. Our public pool was at the centre of summertime fun for several years. But it was a comment Bob made once is the genesis of this post.

Bob Meehan is the good kind of good ol’ boy: small hat, lots of cattle, (actually uses his camo). He was the manager of Driscoll Ranch until it was sold to the Peninsula Open Space Trust a couple years ago. Toward the end of that era (cattle ranching and rodeos), just before he retired, Bob took me out on quads to see the place. We stopped a couple times to check on the cows, the water, and stuff. I could tell Bob liked cows as much as he liked to eat them. At one point, at the crest of a hill facing the Pacific Ocean some miles off, he pointed out that the cows liked to sit there in that place and feel the breeze.

The point: cows enjoying a cool breeze from across the seas – life should be that simple. It can be more complicated and we can enjoy the complications, but we should appreciate the wisdom of the cow. After a long day eating grass, to rest in that same grass feeling the coolness of the air that we breathe, should that not be enough? It is gentle simplicity, the milk of enlightenment.

As I started this, we were packing our suitcases in cramped AirBnb in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome getting ready to go to Leonardo DaVinci airport for a flight to Bengaluru, India. My hope is to keep the spirit of a cow in the breeze, in spite of what may be a less than gentle experience, or so I’ve been warned. The diatribes I didn’t write were to be on how humanity ridiculously diverges from this simplicity to the peril of our peace, or prosperity, and our planet. Maybe I’ll get my hackle up again?

Some solutions. A lifestyle of simplicity, humility, and service would help. Cultures that value nature, naturalness, and time in various senses would also help. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs might merge with Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain to be sung about in popular music. The long view, the seventh generation, arcs of many kinds might be arranged with serendipity, grace, and adventure for our entertainments. Ecology and Economics would harmonize. Conversation would be art. And the breeze, the breeze would be the hand of science or a God of no religion touching our short lives…

“It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” ~Confucius

Study Questions:

1. Simple pleasures? Make a list.
2. Are cows sacred? Why/whynot?
3. Write a song about Maslow & Bloom.

Rantastic!

Well, this was going to be the turbo rant, the curmudgeon-on-steroids kvetch. I was going to go from all the stuff I think I don’t need to all the stuff I think humanity doesn’t need. I planned rants about department stores and shopping malls, golf courses and professional sports in general, cut flowers, tourist junk, mean people, poseurs, and pretense. However, my spleen vents over night so my jeremiad rant sort of fizzled. Short version…

I did once walk all over a Macy’s trying to spend the gift certificate that someone had given me, and there just wasn’t anything in there I wanted. Re-gifted it. Only yesterday, we were directed to go check out this new fabulous shopping mall in Bengaluru, but I redirected our taxi driver to something less fabulous. And dumping oceans of freshwater on massive lawns so guys in plaid shorts can hit the little ball in the little hole? Lame! I love playing sports and I don’t mind watching Superbowls, World Series, and various Finals, but when you’ve seen a thousand plays, what’s another? Once, invited to a Giants game in ATT park, I noticed the hundreds of bags of trash piled up when it was over and imagined all the games in all the parks in just one season. (BTW, Giants lost.)

Instead of cut flowers, buy living plants. I realize it is Scroogesque to shun flowers for weddings, funerals, lovers, Moms, sick people, and whimsy, but it’s an icky business. Poor folks exposed to chemicals just to ship roses from overseas to wilt in some vase? Maybe it adds some biomass to the plastic in a landfill? In the meantime, grow your own!

About tourist junk, since I’ve already described our difficulties in living out of suitcases you can imagine that we’re not game to buy many souvenirs, but I’m flummoxed at the volumes of vendors hocking schwid (esp. the migrants around Europe trying to sell wicker Harleys?). OK, maybe I was drawn to the leaning tower of salt & Pisa shakers, but only for a split second. In fact, I want to buy some of that crap just to help those poor saps feed their children, but I just can’t do it.

Does that make me mean? Mean people suck, we don’t need to discuss it. But poseurs? That could be anyone wearing fancy clothes, cosmetics, too much bling, etc., and looking nice is respectable (sans the blood diamonds and the designer anything). A subset of this personal ornamentation thing is tattoos. Maybe eventually you can donate blood, but if you like that image so much (especially those you can only see in a mirror), get it framed and put it on a wall. Maybe if you’re turning your moles into art, but even then, natural is sexiest. There’s more on the topic, but I’ll just leave you with this video. Yeah, and pretense? Same as mean people (and if you think any of this was mean, I apologize).

In conclusion, I’ll wrap it up with some curmudgeonly quotes and videos:

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” ~Charles de Gaulle

“I like long walks, especially when they’re taken by people who annoy me.” ~Fred Allen

“I’m allergic to stupidity. I break out in sarcasm.” ~Author unknown

Louis C.K. hates cell phones

15 Rants in 4 Minutes

George Carlin – The American Dream

Study Questions:

1. Make a list of Wants vs. Needs. Explain.
2. What bugs you? Rant!
3. What are you grateful for?

“Waste Not”

Living out of a suitcase can influence one’s sensibilities. Having to close other’s suitcases because squishing stuff requires a certain finesse and strength, further influences those sensibilities. Then, having to pay more for overweight luggage on airlines, well, those sensibilities are getting incensed.

Yes, this is another rant about stuff. And when your family of four is down to four suitcases and four backpacks it’s just about details and sweating the small stuff – losing an extra pair of socks, consolidating pill bottles, donating t-shirts and novels to the hosts, shaving weight like wrestlers, race car drivers, or astronauts (and no adverbs!). Cleaning a suitcase can be harder than cleaning a house, which brings me to the topic of soap.

When did bars of soap, which mercifully used to shrink on their own, become bottles of shower gel that stay cumbersome? While the shampoo & conditioner combo was a step in the right direction, liquid soap is not. While shower gel that combines soap and shampoo is a step in the right direction, the bottles take up space and adds weight.

OK, not much and yes, I’m being a persnickety fussbudget, so perhaps I (or you) will be the entrepreneur who develops the soap-shampoo-conditioner bar that drys in one minute and requires no packaging for the space/weight conscious traveler. Or, perhaps the new Paris protocols might mandate such a measure for environmental reasons? Nudge!

Beside paper in various forms, plastic packaging must constitute the majority of waste world-wide? So here’s where I translate a bottle of shower gel into the mountains of plastic that have eroded across parts of Europe, Morocco, India, and many other countries, not to mention various oceanic garbage patches. Bottles and bags, bags of bottles** = extinction by plastic? Anyway, the cataclysmic nightmare of garbage (& nurdles) is pretty well known. Reminds me of when I used to have students carry around all their waste for a 24 hour period, then do an inventory of it. A suitcase of rubbish, or just bottles of shower gel? When we see the light, too, we can feel the light weight.

*Title stolen from an anthology of the same name.

**Paraphrasing Eric Bogosian

Study Questions:

1. What is the largest man-made thing on earth? Why/how/where?
2. Nurdles? Garbage gyres? Trash stats globally?
3. Inventions to reduce waste?

Asalamalakum! Here’s a little slideshow especially for all the new friends we met in Morocco. It is not really in any order, certainly not chronological. In addition to our tour which included Marrakech, Agadir, Essouira, and more, there are some pix from Casablanca and Tangier (what’s where, why, and how?)…

 

Study Questions:

1. Research Morocco and the cities of Morocco. What is interesting to you.
2. Did you learn anything from the video? What do you remember?
3. Write a critique. How could it be improved?