A gracious “thank you” to the unsung heroes of the day:
==> The Housekeeping Staff of the Westmark Inns/Hotels of Alaska/Yukon.
Tag Archives: vacation
Denali Diversion
So many to thank, too tired to think, too much fun in inclement weather:
Territory is a unique experience
Seems odd, definitely surreal, sitting in a wooden chair in a guest room of the McKinley Chalet Resort, writing this blog entry at 20:56 local (Alaska) time, strong WiFi signal connecting me to the world not far from the tallest mountain peak in North America, Denali, also known as Mount McKinley.
A land/sea tour for the comfortable middle class, sharing the wealth with hearty bodies, providing this moment.
The surreal continues…
Yesterday, my niece stood next to and shook the hand of the President of the United States of America, a photo of the two of them together appearing on MSNBC and Reuters International.
Today, my wife and I rode on a train that stopped in Wasilla, Alaska, USA, home to a former U.S. state governor and U.S. Vice President candidate, Sarah Palin.
But this is more than a journal entry in a travelogue.
This philosophical dissertation in miniature asks, “I know my destination but do I know where I’m going?”
What are we doing here together, you and I, observing a minute spot in the universe?
What are we trying to accomplish by interacting with the tour director/concierge, driver guide, train staff and hotel gift shop clerks?
In a moment like this, we live.
We allocate resources not only for larger missions outside of this spacetime but also nail down this spacetime in words and images.
All Ready To Go
Ever tried to keep up with all the people, places and names you encounter in the outer space of an inner social pace?
Well, it turns out that nametags are a key part of keeping up with the fellow travelers wandering the planet.
For instance, the nametags a company gives its employees.
I have fuzzy vision, especially in the morning when I’m not quite awake or the evening after partying drinking having a late-night snack.
Visit a hotel or tourist area in that condition and visualising the labels attached to a person’s lapel or chest can be daunting.
Especially the way the label/nametag is made.
For me, black letters on a white background are the easiest to read.
The most difficult are black letters on a shiny, gold background at the Westmark Hotel, where the staff is some of the most friendly you’ll meet but reading their names in order to memorise and later recall them here frustrates me on this rainy day in the paradise of the Pacific Northwest.
A few to thank today: Elizabeth, Doreen, Brendan; Tom; more to follow. To those whose names I have not written here, I apologise for the fuzziness of middle-aged eyes and having too much of a good time! 😉
Random acts of blog reposting
How many Big Gulps can you fit into one microunit?
All the Touch Pens have left the building, so why aren’t you drawing yourself a new iPad?
Meanwhile, soak up the ambiance in your personal oasis!
Have a great [day/afternoon/evening/night], y’all!
Time for a minibreak — see you in a few days…
Not all my heroes were cowboys…
A few weeks ago, while driving back from north Virginia, where my niece, Maggie, officially graduated from secondary school, I took my mother to dinner at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon.
We stopped in the quiet town to reminisce about my father’s days there as an extension agent and assistant professor for Virginia Tech.
His office was located at the Inn.
A block or so down the street is Barter Theatre, a venue for the performing arts.
I can remember more than one but less than a dozen times I took a date to see a play or musical at Barter Theatre, driving up from northeast Tennessee to show my female companions a bit of culture common to most cultures (but rarely, agar plate cultures).
As president of the Drama Club in our secondary school (for two years!), I felt it was my duty to support the arts.
The Barter Theatre presented mainly light entertainment such as, if my memory serves me well in this moment, I Do! I Do!, a musical that features the song, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
Right now, I cannot remember the names of the performers.
However, we were taught that more than one famous performer cut their teeth on the stage of Barter Theatre:
Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty and to tie this blog entry to a recent death, Ernest Borgnine.
The world is small.
On television, I watched Ernest Borgnine and his crazy cast of characters turn the U.S. Navy into a farcical front for jokes about bureaucratic nonsense, humour during wartime and the general state of the American sitcom exhibited in “McHale’s Navy.”
We all start somewhere.
If an ugly mug like Borgnine’s can become a nationally-recognized figure, anyone can.
We celebrate beauty in women with “Miss [name your region]” contests all the time.
How often could a woman proudly say she made the Ten Ugliest Faces of Hollywood list?
Borgnine did, along with Karl Malden and many others.
When they did, it made me smile and think, “Well, if they don’t care about their looks, why should I?”
You don’t have to be a cowboy or handsome to be successful.
Persistence is the key.
That, and an outstanding personality.
I have both.
That’s why I’m here, remembering my mother, my father, Barter Theatre and the actor who went from Abingdon to Hollywood decades ago, Ernest Borgnine, who became one of my heroes, both local and national, along the way.
My father was my first hero and will be my last. Borgnine was one of many important ones in-between.
May we laugh with our last breath or die trying!
Images, old and new
From inside “Here Is Your War”:
Ever seen a face on a box and thought you recognised the owner of that face?
Box:
Presumed owner is Coleen, example here:
The lips aren’t the same but I’ll never look at my hair colour box the same again.
Scenes from yesterday
Lady Liberty eyes her mohawked successor:
Really big candlesticks!:
Rocket’s red glare
Oldies but goodies
Oh, bombs bursting in air…safely away from tourists, that is!
A giant dandelion blooms behind the Space Shot amusement park ride…
Lady Liberty inspires youth with song.
Can one’s sordid youth serve as a warning to others?
Don’t forget the bands:
How many Finns have finished fins päädyssä “le fin”?
While I wait for an inspiration to hit me or simply rub up against me and go, “Me now!,” I wait.
I wait for a style, a period, an influence, to work its magic upon my video clips of a trip to Alaska.
I have given up wanting a lead candidate to get my vote, now that the two leading candidates for U.S. President have declared themselves alike and equally adept at being either a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing as the situation requires.
C’est la vie.
I had given up reading books when my mother in-law got real sick and died. I resigned myself to not reading a book again after my father got real sick and died.
The complexities that I wished to weave in brainwave pattern matching/synching/syncopating have dissipated.
My vocabulary shrinking.
My wry, sarcastic sense of humour intact, mild but biting.
My automatically-correcting grammatical radar falling into disuse.
‘Tis me, here, though, isn’t it?
Not another.
Time…time, time, time…time to consider new possibilities.
My country is no longer my own — it belongs and has always belonged to the wealthy alpha leaders.
My sights are set farther, out there in space and time.
I want to go further.
See a furrier.
Tell PETA, “Look, I slowly squeezed the main artery to the brain so that the animal went to sleep and died before I skinned it for my wife’s warm coat to wear to the opera, a more humane death than being eaten alive in the wild, or hearing your ranting chants.”
Look through my “complete” collections of National Geographic, MAD magazine, the New Yorker and other desk reference volumes.
Read my father’s copy of Pyle’s “THIS IS YOUR WAR.”
Stop thinking while this moment of memories with my father rushes through my endocrine system.
Stop feeling this pain.
Stop wanting to lash out and attack others for their successes, knowing death gets us all, no matter how far or short we got relative to fellow members of our species, dead or alive.
Your struggles and successes are not mine.
I slow down, soaking in the mixed emotions, the son standing here in place of his father, regardless of historical significance one may have or may not have had more than the other.
I cannot eat memories but they can eat me.
I can rewrite memories but not the events on which they are based.
The molecules, atoms and subatomic particles have moved on.
Why can’t I?
The animated graphic novel will have to wait.
So, too, the Alaskan travelogues, new and old.
I have only myself at the centre of this known universe in this current version of a dream/illusion/fantasy I try to get you to align with, just like everybody else.
How can I be different from and yet the same as you?
I wait for an inspiration.
Earth spins on its axis.
Our solar system spins around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
Toward or away from what are we expanding?
When time is meaningless, what are dreams about a future on another world?
I can crush the crystal ball with one hand, the shards opening fissures, wounds, tears in the fabric of spacetime.
We all know we have to eat. Most of us reproduce.
The moments we spend in-between, here, there, any/every where, what are they?
…so this is what it’s like to float in weightlessness…how long can I stay here?…do I have to leave?…there is no waiting when there is neither time nor space that waits for the me that is not-me which does not exist…
Five Minutes Until Closing Time
The situation is this: what do you want after the crisis in Syria is less violent in chaotic parts of that geopolitical zone? How do you want the people suffering the worst economic conditions in the Eurozone to react? If you don’t have to pay your medical bills, who’s going to determine if you got your money’s worth?
Tuned in to Pandora radio, picked the Soundgarden station and an advert for “Meet Singles in Your Area” popped up. Switched to the Claire Lynch station and an advert for “Viagra” popped up. Stayed up when Alison Kraus started playing. Very punny.
Anyway, so we’ve got supply lines to regional energy sources which we want to stay open.
We’ve got people in the Middle East who claim that civilisation originated there.
We have people in China trying to prove the same thing.
Thing is, does it matter?
What is civilisation? Violent suppression? Censorship? Surveillance?
And that’s just in the UK.
When is a revolution acceptable?
Who gets to choose when to participate in an uprising?
Is every wealthy person an “alpha?”
Is every person in a position of authority — in charge of military forces, that is — an “alpha” or a “beta?”
[Cue references to “Brave New World”]
What does it mean to be an American or a world citizen?
Can you claim membership in both groups?
I’m blending in with my surroundings, the chameleon nearly invisible, a reflection of the intersecting waves of social [in]justice, letting words, images, labels and such flow through and around me.
Some call it happiness.
I call it being me/not-me.
On Canada Day, I consider a visit to the country via Alaska, wondering if I should move to the land of depleting boreal forests, oil shale field fracking and old gold rushes.
I trust our species to use as much fossil fuel as is in-the-slightest-bit feasible to extract because alternative energy sources are expensive in comparison to…well, pick your chart, select your argument and present to a skeptical public the why’s and wherefore’s of the social/economic/ecological cost of running a modern-day civilisation.
Meanwhile, I’m slapping some money down on a trip to the land of Molson, moose and moist towelettes.
Trekking over tourist traps and snow country.
Working my network of associates and colleagues.
Wondering if monsters sleep under rusted truck cabs in desert conditions near tundras.
Or was that a deserted Tundra truck under seeping monster cabs in rusty conditions?
Maybe ol’ Dusty Rhodes’ll be singing a sad song on the way to the next WWE Hall of Fame induction.
Time for another hand-drawn animated satirical cartoon disguised as what? The last time, a horror novel. The next time…?
Stay tuned!
Alone on this lonesome highway, the Wandering Wonderer meditates on the universe that revolves around him solely for his lifetime entertainment, the illusions enjoyable, if tragic or funny in forgotten moments of timeless navelgazing.
This is my dream, my illusion — getting our states of energy, our living, breath bodies in one form or another, out into the solar system, not just our electronic, robotic companions escaping the heliosphere — carrying on the work of our species for millennia, using stories, humour and Earth’s resources to make my [adopted] dream a reality worth living for.
Everything else is just a game in your dreams and illusions. I’ll play your games sometimes but I promise I soon get bored. If the alphas and betas want to fight each other to the death, go for it — don’t let me stop your madness, battling over the same ground your ancestors wasted their time killing each other to claim again for the very first time. If those kinds of games of yours are all there is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then end mine here.
No? I’m still alive? Good! Time to explore new fields where resources and repurposed technology may make my dream come true…
The water sprinkler in the woods
Yes, the new leader of the Committee is right. I moved part of the supercomputer out of the sub-sub-subbasement and into the cave network stretched across parts of north Alabama, north Georgia, southeastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.
Some of my colleagues are investigating the feasibility of extending the network to subnetworks our subcommittees set up in Kentucky and Virginia centuries ago.
Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I’m retired. Although I am tired and losing my ability to maintain an understanding of this symbol set — the communication method you call the language of [American] English — to record these thoughts in the second decade of the 21st century.
I still keep in touch with my associates, of course. After all, I have to eat and feed my family.
This very morning, I looked over some data analysis reports and found this tidbit of the future interesting.
A young boy, while watching “Real Steel,” came up with the idea of merging NASCAR, “The Last Starfighter,” “Real Steel,” and Google autonomous vehicles to give underutilised racetrack owners a way to make money when they aren’t hosting main events.
Without the need for human drivers and protective cages, racecars have taken on new shapes, much more interesting than the “win on Sunday, drive on Monday” models that have dominated the sport since its infancy.
Much more fun to watch, what with people sitting at home getting their fifteen seconds of driving their favourite car around the track, randomly picked throughout the race so that no viewer with special gaming equipment at home purchased just for this type of sport can leave the screen because anyone at any time can be picked to take over his or her (or its!) favourite car.
No one knows when other popular racecars have been taken over by autonomous software routines.
Seems like we have been here before, doesn’t it?
Didn’t Formula 1 already patent the invention of the robot driver called Michael Schumacher, discovering that even automatons like Mike deteriorate when pushed to the limit race after race, becoming less efficient, less successful, eventually?
Which brings us to the Olympics. The sentient being we created for the U.S. Swim Team, Michael Phelps, is still performing well. The early prototypes such as Muhammad Ali, Nadia Comăneci, and Lance Armstrong gave us trouble in the long run, but we learn from our construction projects no matter what they look like at the end.
How do we create these superstars of sports?
Easy. We listen to the ignorance of the crowd. Where they almost hit genius moments, like this writer, Jenna Wortham, who thinks interfaces with computing devices will only take place via our five senses.
Long ago, we learned how to put enhanced computing devices inside every part of the body, making individual body parts smarter, faster, cheaper. Chemical, organic, undetectable — microorganisms that release designer molecules (phrases like “human growth hormone” are out of fashion, don’t you know?); microorganisms that clean up waste products such as urine, feces and sweat before they’re released from the body; microorganisms that attach to specific cells of the body (muscle tissue, for instance) without flooding the bloodstream with the appearance of banned substances.
Waiting for the slow feedback loop between our sensory organs and computing devices is just a plain waste of time and effort.
For now, we’ll let the populace believe their antiquated interface devices like mobile phones and tablet PCs are somehow making them more productive busybodies — not much better in retrospective than a group of Neanderthals sitting around the person who discovered fire, asking, “Okay, fine! But can it cut up the meat for us afterward?” — because we know they don’t know better, and are stuck in this time period.
We’ll let dilettante comedians convince their audiences that they’re one step away from the great breakthrough, as long as you pay for their humour-filled advice.
After all, those who can’t see the future have only this moment in which to live.
Well, yes, I’ve told you you also only have this moment in which to live, but then that’s what I wanted you to believe at the moment I wrote it.
How else am I supposed to show you that every moment matters because no moment matters?
Anyway, I’ve an experiment to check.
If you put a water sprinkler in the woods and nobody noticed, would the birds that sipped water from dripping tree leaves have an effect on your future?
If I don’t humour myself, who will? If I can’t humour myself, who can?
If a movie like “Into The Wild” is probably a false retelling of history, why tell it?
How can I find out? Use an upcoming holiday trip to test the theories that supercomputers create to entertain themselves.
Repeating thoughts and news of natural events as a form of long-distance-over-time communication is more tiring than I first thought when I was invited to lead the Committee. They hinted but didn’t tell me that a leader never stops leading.
Lucky me!
Back to my cup of hot tea on a day when 105 deg F is no big deal, watching a tick crawl up my leg and nestle into a break in my skin, releasing chemicals into my bloodstream that affect my immediate future, much less my future 1000 years from now.
treetrunkdings 