I have to give Mark Twain credit for the quote in the title above. Something happened recently to make this quote “How did I get inside this old body” jump in front of me. In my youth, when I visited my grandmother the thing I noticed first was the line of pill bottles that were on her dresser. She seemed to always be taking her medicine.
Fast forward to today, and given the fact that one of the most lucrative businesses to be in is pharmaceuticals, it is no surprise that many people over 60 have medicine cabinets that dwarf my grandma’s. My myriad of pills started in 2006 just after I turned sixty. I had a “heart event”. I didn’t know that is what it was at the time as no one in my immediate family ever had heart problems so I just didn’t consider it a possibility.
After a visit to the stent lab, I was given three prescriptions to help prevent another event. I have been taking them for twelve years now. But eventually, those three meds grew to seven I take now!
Getting to the point of this story, it seems my health is controlled by pills now! Recently my blood pressure has been lower than normal and when I mentioned that to my PCP she recommended cutting my blood pressure meds in half to see if that would help the problem. So now, in order for blood to flow through my veins in the correct manner, I have to take the correct amount of pills! I wonder how long I would last if I just quit taking any of them?
I have pretty much given up on the hope that those who are part of the Radical Right/Fear tribe will ever really understand my view of the world or that I will understand theirs. All we seem to be able to do lately is to scream at each other across the red/blue abyss that separates us. Is that a fruitful way to spend the rest my life? Maybe it’s time go down a different path? That is the thought in this post.
I read a statistic the other day that almost half the folks under forty say their primary news source is Facebook? That totally astounded me. Yes, Facebook is a nice tool to keep up with family and friends, and even some not-so-friends but a primary news source?
I think just about all of us can pretty quickly recall some of our worst times in our lives. For me, one of those times was the damage done to my wife when the small Evangelical congregation we belonged revoked my membership due to my failure to align with the belief that, among other things, the earth is only 6,000 year old and any seeming proof otherwise is just God trying to trick us. My wife, who was recuperating from cancer surgery, was devastated by the rejection but even more so by the sudden loss of so-called friends there. It would be the last time we ever had contact with most of them. The friendships that we thought were pretty deep ended up being very shallow!
Just what is the definition of “memorial”? Isn’t it as shown here to recognize meritorious service to our community. Surely no one can argue that meritorious service is provided only by our soldiers. Shouldn’t we be also recognizing others on this day? When I look at it, our soldiers stationed on the other side of the world dealing with local conflicts of one type or another just don’t seem to be providing an essential service to me. Looking back, I personally can’t even see that any foreign war or military conflict in my lifetime that has really done much to ensure our safety here at home. I could try to list all of those conflicts starting with the Korean conflict up to I guess Afganistan but I would surely miss one or two if I tried to do that.
I was in college in the 1960’s and I can remember that the nightly news was all about campus protests and sit-ins. If you believed the reports back then every kid who was in college was a pot-smoking hippie. The reality of it, for at least Purdue University, was that the vast majority of us were just going to classes and doing what was necessary to graduate. Occasionally I came upon some kids who were carrying picket signs but that seemed like a pretty rare event to me.
Walmart is trying to bring up a strong online presence but from my personal experiences, it is a pretty meager effort. Their “new” website is well (yawn) boring. It just lacks the pizzazz and speed of response of Amazon. But I have recently given them a chance. I was in need of a new twin mattress for my microRV and found that Walmart has the one I want for about the same price as Amazon, so I ordered it. They promised a 3 day delivery to my local store. When I went to pick it up I found a pretty much untrained staff to handle the transaction. I wish them luck but…
This post is in honor of the new Will Roger’s quote in the header above. For those folks who might be viewing the post from the archive in the future, I will put the words here too.
It seems that a very real reality for teenagers now is to consider the possibility that they will be shot dead before they graduate. I can’t imagine having that feeling when I was their age! But finally, they are ready to do something to stop the carnage. They want regulations on guns to quit making them so easy to be obtained by disgruntled and depresses teenagers. They want laws making those who supply guns to these assassins to be charged as an accessory to those murders, whether they be parents or just people selling guns to anyone with the dollars in hand.