UPS FedX and USPS

Fore Street facing East during a crisp winter night in Portland.  This little city is beautiful and I don't recall any sirens which meant that there were no public emergencies during my stroll downtown.  We used this shot/thought for our annual Christmas card because we had used a stylized pinecone last year and wanted to identify more with the urban part of our lives in southern Maine.  The luminescent, transparent, color light spheres are festive and welcoming; the electric lighting poles are very convincing gaslight reproductions.  Peace was in the air this night and I pray that it spreads contagiously throughout the family to the neighborhood down and up 302 to Portland and to Bridgton on Prancer and Vixen to Alaska and Cuba and the caves of Afghanistan and back.  Its snowing tonight and the same street is jammed with skidding first-storm commuters compounded by last minute shopping crises.  We're home fireside and toasty with our coffee and plush Santa hat thanking UPS and FedX and USPS carriers for their skill and productivity and logistical mastery. Chestnuts are not roasting because we don't believe in chestnuts but there's some great homemade fruitcake calling. We wish you a very Merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas and a very Merry Christmas if you don't.  The reality of Christmas is hard to escape if you breathe.   Peace.

The Snipe

The poke is a nudge without prejudice. It encourages attention without distraction and allows friendship without conversation.   Its like a postcard announcing that a letter is coming.  Or headlights flashing to say Hi but not warning of a speed trap.  Pokes can't warn and pokes can't opine.  But some have suggested that since the Poke Salad plant was used to paint the faces of Native American warriors that inkberry be used to mark the battle faces of the combatants in a Facebook Poke war.  I fear this movement due to the high risk of virtual bruising and I would rather negotiate a Poke Free demilitarized zone.  But lest I be branded as poke-averse I will most probably actuate the snipe, which is a focused invisible targeted action that will come out of nowhere and still retain the harmless humility of the POKE or even the POKE BACK.

Sixty

It presents with stealth and subtle warning. Mathematically, the accrual began a few years sooner but now the reckoning and the adjustments to the stigma of achieving, reaching, getting, and accumulating heartbeats begins in earnest.  Its just heartbeats and synapses, like a tachometer for the cardiovascular/nervous system. That is important because the need to pump blood and think thoughts is the real value measured by the number 60.

I am now in the business of downsizing the number of heartbeats because there are a finite number before my warranty runs out.  Someone once lamented to me that jogging causes the heart rate to rise, spending the lifetime allotment of beats prematurely.  It is known that the resting heart rate or pulse is slower in a runner and the heart pumps more blood per stroke, conserving strokes while fulfilling volume.  I want it below 60 bpm. So I run but I need sneakers every 500 miles and iPod updates more often than that. If it were not for age I would have no CV risk factors at all so I am working on raising HDL above sixty (60) so I can claim one less risk factor, namely a couple years.  The drug* I sell can do that;  In partnership with my good doctor, good diet and regular exercise, like running 3 miles and using stairs, I am the poster man for reverse cholesterol transport.  I am now dangerously close to the promotional brink here and it is a little tacky, I know, but I was the same way when I quit smoking and became a militant anti-puffer so indulge me its my birthday Live with it or die from it!

 "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now", says Bob Dylan and friends who are beyond 60 and still idling. Neil Young,  Mick Jagger & the premature deaths of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin educated me.  Clapton experienced the death of a child and survived it by immersion into the Blues and I went with him without the tragedy but with compassion still.  Layla rings on my phone.

My much younger wife has sponsored my energy and cooked up a strategy to purge rocking chairs from our lives. Together on the porch we'll be seen staining it or shucking corn but not rocking in a chair. The hammock is quarantined by the fallen branch episode so my John Deere has become my lounge and the lawn my canvas.  And the kayaks keep us afloat.

Try to keep up.  The moral of this story is that my best gift is my good health and its value improves with age.


* Niaspan

We Don't Talk Anymore

Today I got a voice mail to remind me that I should check my Email for an important message. The Email said to confirm receipt of the important message by text. A return text suggested that I check my messages on FaceBook which contained a website link to something. (I can't remember what and I cant find it again) I think that important stuff rolls off the bottom of the page just as you need to see it. I have spent considerable editing time deleting the Farm Game Application which keeps piling up like manure which has sticky stinky properties. Voice mail from 4 hours ago just now showed up and must have come in whilst I was out of towers in a steel building with antenna jamming sophistication. The message said, "Call me" so I texted back and asked if I was still needed so I got an Instant Message saying the the messenger could not remember what they wanted. Another text sent a link to some great music and earlier I played Pandora collection of alison strauss for lunch background music.

Facebook has a poke feature that simulates unspoken interest and establishes a connection but allows only a metaphor for contact.

Voice mail allows a rehearsed summary of some thought lineage and is usually used because the wrong option was selected on the originating phone. Since a message was left inviting a message back if you leave your name and time and reason for the call you are bound to say something like "Text me"

But after all this, I am resigned to high approval of all these devices for they allow and encourage reaching out and receiving back thought-flights from friends who would not otherwise have even blinked at me. So pokes, and winks, and text, and IM, and voice mail and email and blogspot (You're on it) are grand substitutes for conversation because we just don't talk anymore.

So keep it up. Knowledge is power. There are no stupid questions. I will accept your communication in any form it comes and thank you for recognizing the excesses and addictions inherent in these methods.

Facebook and Networking Upstages Blog

Blog clog is the dynamic in cyber social circles that occupies so much of the available creative space like "Brink Think Link" that fewer postings happen. Updates and postings to Facebook and other sites are superseding public comment like this. The immediacy and addiction of open public opinion has us spellbound and time compromised. Facebook is linked to mobile publishing and n'ary a thought gets formed but we all see it for comment or judgement or dismissal or deletion. The power of the blog-hit has been overwhelmed by the poke and Blog Publishing is even link-attached to Facebook entry for thumbs up but not down peer review. Facebook thinks that you either approve or support or "like" a communication but dislike means delete or a comment explaining why the dislike. There is a bias for the positive. Naysayers must explain their disdain; the yaytrain gets a neat little thumb icon that serves to numb communication about what is disliked or why. I have been sucked into the whirlpool of immediate gratification and now recognize how a presidential campaign gained such parochial feel from internet savvy that a junior legislator with community organizing credentials was able to ipad the election. The pencil is a noble instrument but way too slow. The writer's callous has been replaced by carpal thumb. Even now, I am plotting to post this on my Facebook Profile so it can be seen by more readers. Shamelessly, I hope the Blog Clog is snaked out by a Drano-like reaction that says No with as much aplomb as the Yayhoos who need not explain what they like but like Jack Horner, they hide in a corner and pull out a plum. Thumbs Up Nay Sayers: "No" is responsible and accountable. Persist in explaining yourselves and avoid the error of using the wrong finger.