It's cloud illusions I recall...

So...who would have guessed?  iCloud isn't secure.  Really?  It's a cloud, folks.  Shouldn't that tell us something right away?  There are no real walls, no solid steel doors with multiple locks.  No twenty-four hour security cameras monitored by multiple shifts of armed guards.

It's just a friendly little "cloud" loaded with tetrabyte upon tetrabyte of information, ready to hail down on you at any given moment.  Ready to experience a cloudburst.  And all the thunder and lightning that go with it.

But there is hope.  A bit complicated and hard to follow, however.  Sort of a mysterious, difficult-to-access solution.  But here it is, revealed for the first time by your humble blogger:  Don't upload anything that you wouldn't want downloaded.  Don't upload anything that might cause you discomfort, concern, or embarrassment in the future.  Try to keep your itchy little finger off the buttons.

Especially photos, and, sticking with that genre - especially, especially selfies.  Photos taken in mirrors.  Photos taken by your current significant other.  With extra caution if their status is about to change from "current" to "past."  And, yes, dear reader, photos that show you in all the glamour and glory of your most recently acquired birthday suit.

Folks, your private parts are only private if you choose to keep them that way.  So Jennifer, Kim, Ariana, Kirsten - all of you famous, fine-bodied beauties - stop taking multiple pictures of yourself half dressed or not dressed.  And if snapping semi-nude or nude selfies is an uncontrollable, incurable addiction, then stop uploading them.  Stop storing them in the cloud.  Any cloud.  Or get over the fact that everyone on this globe has now had all the mystery removed.

And if anybody else... you...or you...or you...is so inclined to flash your flesh, then understand that iCloud, that fluffy little storage warehouse in the sky, can suddenly turn into the number one distributor of iCandy.

It's sort of upload at your own risk.  And, if nothing else, remember Sir Isaac Newton's age-old maxim:  "What goes up, must come down."  And, odd, isn't it, the folk tale connected to this quote insists that he was sitting under a tree when he came up with that little core of wisdom.  That little seed of smarts.  That stem of understanding.

Yep, you got it.  The tree he was lounging under:  none other than an Apple tree.

Ain't life great!

Robin, Lauren, and the ocean

I suppose there are people who don't like the ocean.  I don't recall meeting one.  I've heard people prefer a mountain vacation over a beach vacation.  I've heard people say that they can't go deep sea fishing because they get seasick.  I've heard people say that they don't like the feel of salt water drying on their skin.  But not liking the ocean...can't say that I've heard that claimed.

As we wind down our latest trip to the Gulf, I'm struck with the sense that time has been suspended. When nearly every waking moment and all sleeping moments are filled with the surf rhythmically and methodically slapping the shore, I suspect hypnosis occurs.  I like the sound.  It's original.  It becomes so common after a while that I only notice it when I don't hear it.  When we are away having a meal or cruising the aisles of the Walmart SuperCenter a few miles away.  Normal everyday sounds become...well...normal.  I'm thinking that after a few days, one might just come to depend upon that sound (along with the shrieks of gulls and sunburned toddlers).  A audible addiction.

I told a friend this week that I believe that the sound of the surf is so appealing because it mimics the sound of the womb.  That I was certain that as our hearing developed, every time our mother shifted in her chair or walked to the kitchen for a sweet or salty snack, we would hear the sound of rolling water...the lullaby of the surf.  She said she's pretty certain that it's much more of a "gloop, gloop, gloop," sound.  I thanked her for that image and for virtually destroying years of romantic notions about my nine months in the womb.

But, in a way, time is suspended at the beach.  Things happen, we see snippets of news.  We read headlines.  But the ocean whispers for us to not fixate on those things. Stay chilled.  Relax.  Relax.  Relax.  Listen to my voice.

So, when we return to our home tomorrow, we can re-contemplate what has occurred while we luxuriated under the spell of the Gulf of Mexico.  We can re-examine the death of Robin Williams and properly grieve the passing of a shooting star, a true comet of talent, moving so fast and burning so brightly.  And having such a wide path that, for years to come, we'll still have wonderful Robin Williams sparks showering around us, keeping us amazed and amused.

We can think about the passing of the beautiful Lauren Bacall, a woman who defined sexy for me before I knew what sexy was.  And fully clothed at that.  How she shared the screen with THE motion picture icon and held her own.  Heck, she didn't just hold her own.  She stole the whole darn movie in that one scene.  "You do know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."  It still makes me feel light-headed.  She does too.

I haven't seen the news today.  I don't know if there was the death of a third celebrity, as the old superstition goes.  I hope not.  But if there was, I believe that that voice, as well as the voices of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, was not silenced, but rather became a part of the hum and murmur of the surf.  Just another set of voices, personalized frequencies, to add to millions of other voices from the near and distant past to contribute to one of the most pleasing sounds in the world.  I believe that their drops of essence become a part of an ocean of essence.  The tangy scent of salt on the breeze, the marching swells of turquoise and emerald waters, the slow and easy birth of the sun every morning, and, several hours later,  the western sky becoming a strawberry sundae mess as gentle evening reaches out to draw us near.

Another kind of evening drew Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall near this week.  And I pray that they have encountered another womb, another hypnotic drumming of life, another world in which to give and receive laughter and tears.  Laughter strikingly similar to the shrieks of gulls and sunburned toddlers.  Tears akin to the taste of the ocean on the tongue.  Newly released droplets in the shimmering ocean spray.  Newly released meteors showering across the night sky.   Newly released souls gently rising and falling on an eternal sea held afloat by the hand of God.

Intuition

Well...after eight years of impeccable service, our '97 4Runner had a spell today.  As I write this, I wait to hear the news from the shop.  My intuition tells me that the timing belt broke.  Of course, this is what I call useless intuition.  If I had heeded a piece of useful intuition, a tidbit that has been interjecting itself into my thought process for two weeks now, I wouldn't be having this problem.  That piece of useful intuition that bombarded my brain for days was:  it's time to replace the timing belt on the 4Runner.

Intuition is a wonderful thing.  Unfortunately, it's also a close companion with Monday morning quarterbacking.  In other words, I seldom think about intuition until I fail to follow it.  Then I realize all those thoughts I've been having about something...thoughts that tend to the nagging side...were meant to be helpful.  I do remember a time about 42 years ago when my young family at the time was traveling between Fayetteville and Chattanooga.  The only way to get there was to go up what is known as Monteagle Mountain: two lanes and curvy.  Anyway, something told me to pull over on the side of the road prior to the ascent.  So, I pulled my little robin egg blue Maverick to the side and sat there for several minutes.  Finally, a tractor trailer came down the mountain and passed us.  Something told me it was okay to continue, so I pulled back onto the highway and started up the mountain.  As I drove along, I noticed serious damage on both sides of the road...trees down, rocks scraped, and lots of black rubber marks on the asphalt.

It was obvious that the tractor trailer I had watched exit the mountain had been a runaway and had careened back and forth along that road for about three miles.  Long enough, heavy enough, and fast enough to gobble up and spit out a little robin egg blue Maverick with a young couple and a two year old inside.

Yeah, intuition is interesting.  Take Aeschylus, for example.  A Greek tragedian of the likes of Sophocles and Euripides, living somewhere around 500 B.C and a veteran of the Persian Wars.  You can still read his stuff if you're interested.  "Prometheus Bound" is my favorite.

Anyway, Aeschylus spent the last years of his life outdoors because of his intuition telling him that he was going to be killed by a falling object.  In fact, it had been prophesied, so his intuition had pretty decent backing.  So old Aeschylus is sitting outside one day, as far from the trees and boulders as he could get, leaning back and thinking about his next tragedy and getting some sun on his face, when an eagle flew overhead.  Seems like mister eagle had just managed to snag a nice, fat tortoise for his lunch and was looking for a big round rock to drop it on to crack the shell.  When he spotted what he thought was the perfect turtle shell cracking rock, he let go with the skill of an ace bomber in a B57.

Yes, the eagle had spotted Aeschylus' shiny bald head and the intuitive tragedian suffered death by turtle.

Really great intuition.  Really bad timing.

Like me...really great intuition...really bad timing belt.

Needlework

When I was small (a nice old fashioned way of saying "when I was very young"), my grandmother would hand me a needle and a spool of thread and ask me to thread the needle for her.  She claimed that she just couldn't see that well anymore and that her hands and fingers refused to mind her.  As a matter of fact, she was several years younger at that time than I am now.  When she would ask me to do that, something told me that she could thread a needle as well as she ever could and that she was just being kind and giving a bored little kid something to do.  Something to make him feel good.  Something to make him feel helpful and important.  She was good about things like that.  So I dutifully took the needle and thread, bit off the length she needed, wet the threading end between my lips, twisted it with my thumb and forefinger down to the smallest finite size possible, and expertly pierced the eye of the needle with the end of the thread.  I let the needle slide to the halfway point of the thread's length and tied the end.  On first try.  "There," I would say, "all done."

My grandmother would smile and tell me thank you.  And that she was proud of me.

As I sat on the screened-in back porch of the farm this morning, attempting to rig my new rod and reel, I saw things a little differently.  I saw things through her failing eyes.  Getting the line through the eye of the swivel, twisting it a few times before looping it back through the eye again, attempting to tie the monofilament into a tight knot, and attaching the weight and the hook, I realized that, even with glasses, my eyesight was passable at best and that my hands and fingers refused to mind the commands of my brain.  Clumsy sausages on chunks of ham.  Finally, I had it rigged to my satisfaction and I said to no one in particular, "There.  All done."

But you know what?  There was a bobwhite calling every few seconds, an unseasonably cool July breeze was ruffling the leaves and carressing my face, and Jelly Belly had found her favorite position in my lap and was snuggly settled into it.  From a limb of the stubborn old hackberry that survived the April tornado, a bright red hummingbird feeder swayed back and forth, alerting me to the fact that it needed a fresh helping of sugar water.  Its immediate neighbor, the wind chimes, chinged, changed, and chunged a variant melody.  Forty acres of teenage corn danced the shimmy while the glassy blue sky dared even a wisp of cloud to intrude upon its vast perfection.

Yeah, the eyes...the hands...those doggone out-of-warranty body parts...grumbled quietly of age and passing time.  Joints creak and crackle.  Pain visits like a irritating uncle.  The body aging ain't no tea party.

But, my God!  What a wonderful morning it was!  What a pleasure to be alive!  Did my free and timeless soul not sing out with unadulterated joy?  Did not my spirit celebrate like a weaned puppy on its first jaunt in the vast and uncharted outdoors?  Did my winged psyche not soar into that glorious and perfect sky and pierce an invisible and diaphanous membrane giving me a brief but glorious glint of heaven.

Yes, yes, and yes.

I threaded that needle this morning.  On first try.  My grandmother would have smiled.  She would have been proud.

Crawl

I don't know.  I really don't.

 I certainly don't think I'm a communist or a socialist.  I do believe in free enterprise and letting the market determine the economy.  Supply and demand and all that rot.  I don't think I'm either liberal or conservative...it probably depends on the issue, and, even at that, it finally is laid upon the beholder's perception of me and the cause celebre.  But I had two items juxtaposed upon my psyche recently, and, for the life of me, I can't shake what has settled itself upon my mind and heart as, at best, disparity, and, at worst, insanity.

North West, the infant brought into this world by the coupling of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, celebrated her first birthday recently.  I'm sure she's a nice enough little girl and my angst has nothing to do with her personally.  The birthday celebration was held on the grounds of Aunt Kourtney's multi-million dollar digs in Calabasas, CA and included 150 guests.  There were teepees for hair-braiding, karaoke, and a Ferris wheel.  Not a little party rental Ferris wheel but one that would do a county fair proud. There was the traditional bouncy house and a customized basketball court.  Costumed adult guests sipped adult beverages and the kids had every sugar frenzy goody within arm's reach at all times.

I wouldn't even venture a guess at what this whole shebang cost Double K (maybe low six figures?) but I feel pretty confident that little Miss North West will not remember a micro-second of the day.  And all of her nicely wrapped presents will be as forgotten as the weather that day in a very short while.

The same day I read that article, I watched a special on HBO about illegal kidney trafficking.  One of the people featured was a middle-aged man in Manila who had approached a broker about selling one of his kidneys for $2500.  Why?  Because he and his family live in the crawl space below a friend's hovel and his teenage boys were reaching an age in which he would like for them to be able to stand up while at home.  Do you understand that?  He was going to use the money to build a simple place for his family to live.  So he could have electricity.  And maybe running water.  So his kids could stand straight up.  So his children did not have to crawl and squat and duck while maneuvering around what was being called "home" at the time.

He and his family live in the donated confines a freaking crawl space!  Of a shack that's falling apart!

Unfortunately, he was competing against a younger Filipino who had several kids who didn't have enough food to eat or sufficient clothing, and the younger kidney won out, condemning the other man's kids to continue to stoop their way through life.  Why the broker couldn't take both kidneys is a mystery to me but that's probably another story.

I won't venture a guess at how uncomfortable it is to live in the crawl space of a tottering shack,  but I'm certain that those young men will remember for the rest of their lives having to spend their teenage years trying to keep from hitting their heads on the floor joists of a dank, smelly enclosure.

Which leaves me to wonder if, as I read from time to time, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting wider.  And, if it is, what, if anything, is the consequence?  Should the gap be embraced as a shining monument to the existence of capitalism?  Should the separation of net worth be saluted as proof that free enterprise exists?  Is this a textbook example of survival of the economic fittest?

And is it unfair of me to feel disdain toward over-the-top, theatrical birthday celebrations for one-year-olds?  Perhaps.  I'll work on it.

Then again, would it be so awful to wish that Kanye and Kim, instead of renting the Ferris Wheel, had given little North a card that said that they, on her behalf, had donated $2500 to a family in Manila and that because of that small, but heart-felt gesture of generosity, there's now a family able to live in a house with electricity and running water and room to stand up straight?  Would it be so bad to imagine that when little North reached the appropriate age, she would have something really good to reflect upon and feel good about?

And should I stop fixating on the irony that North and the young Filipinos are both in a crawling phase of life with the innate desire to walk upright?  With the future extremely bright for one and extremely limited for the other?

Too many questions.  With too few answers.

Yep.

I don't know.  I really don't.

A single candle

On the evening of April 28th, an F3 tornado barreled its way through a large portion of Lincoln County, Tennessee.  Two human lives were lost.  Animals perished.  Property was destroyed.  When it swooped northward from the Big Cut area and crossed the Elk River, it had its way with the Gray Farm, now divided into two parts between my brother and myself.  It took thousands of trees - old growth trees, trees that were standing when the farm was established somewhere around 1840.  It wiped out every fence line.  It looked like a bombing scene from a war movie.

They say that anger is rooted in either hurt or fear or both.  My anger springs from a deep sense of hurt, not for myself, but for "the farm."  That acreage is not an inanimate object.  It is much more than trees and river and pastures and woods.  It is much more than a farmhouse and some barns and sheds.  It is a member of the family.  And it was brutally raped by a funnel cloud that made its way from the sky and found things to destroy on the ground.  The farm was beaten and raped and left for dead while that ugly blast of wind continued north and chewed up more beauty, more innocence, and harmed more lives in its path.

I am very capable of hating that tornado.  I'm very capable of being angry at the entity that we refer to as Mother Nature.  There was a Chiffon margarine commercial in the 70s that reminded us that it's not nice to fool mother nature.  It pictured a smiling middle aged woman dressed all sweet and chiffony with a wreath of flowers in her hair.  Everything is hunky dory until the insufferable wench discovers that it's not butter that has made everything taste so nice, but rather margarine.  When she discovers she has been fooled, she unleashes her wrath at everything within reach.

Well, Mother Nature, you won the battle with your little F3, but you didn't win the war.

I've spent way too much time mourning the loss of leafy beauty that has taken almost two centuries of creation.  I've over-comtemplated how two centuries of growth can be taken out in two minutes of rotating winds.  I've gazed at 180 acres of devastation through brimming eyes for too many days now.  It's time to stop mourning.

It has been said many times that it's better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.  There's also a parable in Matthew about wheat and weeds.  Simply, an enemy comes and plants weeds among the good wheat seed in a field.  The workers ask the owner if they should pull up the weeds.  The owner responds that to pull up the weeds would destroy much of the wheat.  A better plan is to let them grow together until harvest time and then the weeds can be gathered and burned and the wheat can be harvested.  It's a matter of whether we place our thoughts and focus around the wheat or the weeds.  I need to choose the wheat.  I need to light a candle.

Today I hope to start healing as the land heals.  A track hoe and a bulldozer are slowly but surely gathering the devastated remains in piles. When diesel fuel is applied,  the piles become pyres.  When you are right upon them, the flames are huge and the heat is immense.  But, at night, when you sit on the back porch and watch the piles continue to burn, the distance diminishes the size of the flame.  If you're far enough away, it glows like the light of a candle.  We will light several candles and one day, in the not so distant future, corn rather than wheat will spring from the cleared fields.  The trees will be gone for generations but the beautiful rolling contours will be visible until the trees return.  Many years will have passed and I can only hope and pray that others will continue to love the farm as I do and that they will spend the appropriate amount of time loving and nurturing the land.  I sincerely hope they will see the wheat and light a candle.

Weathering the weather

It's on, folks!  Tornado season, at least in the Twister Belt of the United States, is here.  And if the states of the Southeast are in the buckle of the belt, then I'm pretty sure the little county in Tennessee I sit in is the prong.  There's about five or six counties in central northern Alabama bordered by three counties in southern central Tennessee, and Lincoln County sits squarely between the other two.  And Fayetteville is pretty much dead center Lincoln County.  Yep, I'm pretty certain that we are the prong.

I suspect that all media programming this evening will be interrupted by solemn looking and speaking men and women with huge radar screens of reds and yellows and purples and they will be talking about supercells and hooks and vertical wind shear.  In fact, the most likely scenario will be that weather alerts will be interrupted by five minute segments of regular programming.

Listen.  I'm not trying to minimize this.  I just think we all did a lot better when we knew a lot less.  I know that tornadoes do a ton of property damage every year, all over the country, and that many people lose their lives to them.  But having to sit and listen to weather men and women...excuse me...meteorologists...induce their audiences into a frenzy of fear seems counterproductive.  Especially if you consider that the chances of a particular house in a tornado prone area has only around a one in 10 million chance of being struck.  (Please don't hold me to my statistics.  I'm not a statistician, as my close friends will tell you.  But I do consult several choices before reaching a conclusion.  Thank you, Google.)

When I was a kid, I barely remember how much information we received about violent weather.  Of course, that had to travel via Pony Express and then, later, telegraph, so that's understandable.  I'm pretty sure that I simply consulted my parents or grandparents as to their opinion, and I don't really remember anyone freaking out or being even mildly concerned about it.  There was a great deal more conversation around what weather had occurred the day before than what weather would occur later in the day or tomorrow.

But...

... if I put my cavalier attitude aside for a moment and look into facts instead of the vacuum of my skull, I discover enough information to cause a few beads of sweat to trickle from my armpits.

 On February 29, 1952, an F-4 (207-260 mph winds) struck Fayetteville, Tennessee and was on the ground continuously for seven miles.  It destroyed 139 homes, wreaked major damage to 152 more, and took two lives.  One hundred and sixty-six people were injured.  This was the 4th tornado that followed more or less a similar track over a 100 year period.

On April 29, 1974, two F5s slammed into the Fayetteville and surrounding area, taking six lives in Tennessee and destroying over 1000 buildings.

In all, around 40 tornadoes have toggled the prong of the Twister Belt since 1890.

Uh...that's about one every three years.  Looking more closely, there have been 15 since 2000.

So, listen...instead of me sitting here on the south side of the house and typing away at this keyboard as the sky turns to heavy lead all above me,  I'll cozy up to the TV and find me some really wise meteorologists to spend some time with.  With my wife, the leashes for my dogs, and a fully charged iPhone with a flashlight app.

You see, Toto, we aren't in Kansas anymore.  But we are in Tennessee, right square in the doggone prong of the Twister Belt.  And that's close enough for me.

                          *******************************************

Update:  11:28 p.m. CDT...a large tornado touched down in Kelso, TN this evening at around 8:45.  The family farm of 175 years took a direct hit.  Early reports from Ryan and Callie Hardiman, our co-farmers, is that the buildings didn't suffer a great deal of damage...just some fallen trees.  However, and this is in the dark of night, it appears that the land...the trees, the fields, the pastures, the bottom...was devastated.  Many head of cattle and calves are unaccounted for.  I try not to be angry.  I try not to be hurt.  I try to put this in the perspective that there has been a lot of devastation over the past couple of days with more on the menu tomorrow.  I try to put it in the perspective that lives have been lost.  I try to be thankful.  As soon as first light appears tomorrow, Geri and I will try to make our way to the farm.  We believe our domestic animals are fine.  We believe that there is superficial house and barn damage that can be repaired.  We fear for the cows and cattle.  But I most am dreading the moment my eyes first encounter the devastated land, the century old trees cut down to trunk size or completely pulled up by their roots.  I'm dreading gazing upon the ravaged beauty of "the farm," a sight that has brought me many years of joy and peace.  And I will probably be angry.  And more than sad.  I'll just try to make it short and not wallow in it.  And get busy trying to put things back together again.

Damn tornadoes.