The blog of a North Country Swede!

Saturday, August 28, 2004

Dump the guilt!

I walk the house dog in the South Mountain Reservation most mornings for at least an hour. The walk has become a time for randomly wandering the woodland trails while randomly wandering through my mind.



Thinking by myself (well, with the dog) is one of my fondest activities. I love the way my mind works. spontaneously generating new connections among the bits and pieces of information and experience I feed into it.

Having worked through my repressed negative emotions, releasing the pent-up energy blocking spontaneity ... before that, all the repressed stuff would pop out whenever I let go ... and I thought I would have to clamp the lid back on (and was that stressful, or what?!) ... until I learned how to simply let it go, and now I can let my mind freely go wherever it goes ... and that is wild and creative and exciting and rewards me with joy.

And that is what I experience walking the house dog in the South Mountain Reservation most every morning.

By the way, the dog is a blond lab/terrier mix, still a playful puppy at 7+ months.

Life is so damn good!

Just to calm everyone down, I am a floater in the atheist-agnostic-pantheist range of the philosophical/religious spectrum. However, I believe a little bit of the "born-again" experience to relieve the psychological burden of guilt and shame for offending the communal mores of one's "tribe" is a good thing. Likewise, twelve-step programs and professionally guided therapy.

My personal mantra is: Dump the guilt! Get to where being alone is part of a healthy, joyfilled life ... rather than something to be dreaded.

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Letter to Bob Herbert, New YorkTimes

Author's Note: Are we surrendering to fascism in order to fight terrorism?

Dear Mr. Herbert:

Your recent columns on the gestapo tactics of the Florida state troopers in focusing onAfrican-Americans were needed to expose these fascist characteristics of the Bush Administration at both Federal and State levels.

Why is it in this nation that even an infinitesimally small taint of communism in a policy immediately brings cries of subversion, but even an obscene amount of fascism escapes its obvious label in our mainstream political discussions?

Is it because we don't know our own history when before WWII some of our most powerful citizens and corporations supported the Nazi's rise to power as a bulwark against Communism?

While we have been irrationally fighting the bugaboo of Communism and drifting closer and closer to fascism, Scandinavian countries have used rational capitalism to advance their citizens' standard of living to the highest in the world while retaining the benefits of rational socialism.

Regards,
HGL

Link to Bob Herbert, New York Times Columnist

On fascism from Britannica Online

Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal and democratic values are disparaged. Fascism arose during the 1920s and '30s partly out of fear of the rising power of the working classes; it differed from contemporary communism (as practiced under Joseph Stalin) by its protection of business and landowning elites and its preservation of class systems. The leaders of the fascist governments of Italy (1922–43), Germany (1933–45), and Spain (1939–75)—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco—were portrayed to their publics as embodiments of the strength and resolve necessary to rescue their nations from political and economic chaos.
Link to Britannica Online

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Another trip to JFK Airport

I drove out to Terminal 8 at JFK Airport on Long Island again today to pick up a friend returning from Beijing via Helsinki on Finnair. It's a tad over 43 miles one way, and it took me over two hours to get there. I spent forty-five minutes on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge alone. I was late in picking her up, put not too late because I had allowed myself an hour-and-a-half to get there by the arrival time, and she had to then pass through immigration and customs.

And the drive wasn't too bad. I brought along Beethoven's 9th, and a 3 CD set of Willie Nelson tunes. I was set. I kept the windows rolled up, the AC on, and the music at the highest volume my eardrums could handle. I still had plenty of music left when I rolled into the parking garage at the airport.

I made the roundtrip in my friend's 1999 Toyota Camry LE. I've put a lot of miles on Tercels and 4-Runners, now a Camry. I can fully understand why Toyota sells so many cars. In Alaska where I lived from September, 1995, to September, 2002, a little hatchback Tercel with front-wheel drive was the perfect year-round gofer car, and the 4-Runners were awesome. I used to make the 127 mile run up the Steese Highway to Crabb's Corner in Central from Fairbanks in the dead of winter in a 4-Runner as often as I could squeeze it in, without a doubt about making it. Yup, Toyota is setting quite a high standard ... and now with their hybrid car ... awesome. Check 'em out:

Toyota's website

www.freecycle.org

WOW! Look what I found. Check it out, my friends:

www.freecycle.org


From their home page:

The worldwide (!) Freecycle Network is made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. Each local group is run by a local volunteer moderator (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your city by clicking on the region on the right. It will generate a automatic e-mail which, when sent, will sign you up for your local group and send you an response with instructions on how it works. Or, go directly to the webpage for your city's group by clicking on your city's link on the left. Can't find your city? It takes about ten minutes to start your own (click on "Start your own" for instructions). Have fun and keep on Freecyclin'!

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Studs & Suzanne

Friday, August 20, I listened to Survival Kit hosted by Leonard Lopate at 1:30 P.M. on WNYC 93.9 FM. Studs Terkel was the guest. I was driving back from JFK Airport on Long Island where I had dropped off a friend who was flying to Asia. Instead of a stressful drive in moderate to heavy traffic back along the Beltway then across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Staten Island, and the Goethals Bridges, and finally north on the New Jersey Turnpike and west on Highway 78, I had a stimulating, provocative, and entertaining trip listening to Lopate and Terkel. You can read about the show and listen to it by clicking on:

Studs Terkel's Survival Kit

That evening at home I inadvertently tuned into Deborah Norville's program (9:00 P.M. on MSNBC) while she was interviewing Suzanne Somers. Before I could change the channel, I was drawn in by Somers' frank account of her childhood and what she had overcome in the way of an abusive father. This is some kind of woman! You can get to her website by clicking on:

Suzanne Somers Home Page

Together Terkel and Somers made my day.

As an afterthought: one reason I like magazines and newspapers so much is that lots of stuff I don't plan on reading or even know about snags my attention as I flip the pages. Just the information in the little ads and small articles--the filler, or whatever the technical term is--helps broaden my horizons.

P.S. Isn't Somers' website wild, or what? Gawd, ain't that something?! I didn't look at it myself until I set up the link. Blew me away! Amazing, literally amazing.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Went to Asbury Park again ...

Drove down to Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore again today. It was a gorgeous day at the shore, and--if you know anything about Asbury Park--no crowds on the beach.



I walked the length of the new boardwalk--just in this summer--from the boarded up carousel to the convention center, and had a chicken breast salad and an Aquafina bottled water at the Tiki Beach Bar on the side of the center. It's out in the open on the south promenade running along the building from the boardwalk to the ocean... covered but no walls, just pillars and then the beach. Ahhhhh...



If I was young ...

The place is FINALLY turning around. What a ground floor opportunity!

I took some pictures of The Stone Pony, got two jelly-filled donuts and a medium coffee at the Dunkin Donuts on Main Street for $2.21 including tax, then drove home and walked the house dog, six to seven month old blond lab/terrier mix male. We had him neutered August 10th.



I'll post the photos I took today on www.ncswede.com at some point. I'll let you know when I do it.

www.ncswede.com/asburypark.html

Cheers!

Monday, August 16, 2004

Letter to Bob Braun, Star Ledger columnist

Date:    Mon, 16 Aug 2004 07:32:46 -0700 (PDT)

Subject: McGreevey's resignation announcement

Dear Mr. Braun-

You're nailing McGreevey and he deserves it! I mean
this is about as bad as it gets in my book for this
type of wrong-doing.

Hiding behind the public's growing sympathy for
differences in sexual orientation rather than come
clean on the corruption in his sphere of influence is
comic tragedy ... is he serious? ... do we laugh, cry,
get mad? ... same famous sayings stay current even
with repetitive use: "What did he know and when did he
know it?" and "Have you no shame?"

My gawd, hubris is as crippling to one's character as
jealousy and greed. It is absolutely mind-boggling
that anyone in a high-profile public position would so
openly flout the public's sense of right and wrong
(and I mean the extreme act of OPEN favoritism to a
lover, not the fact that he had an extramarital affair
... it's the knowledge that McGreevey obviously
thought he could get away with it in such a blatant,
in your face, way). It means there has to be such a
deep level of cronyism and corruption that they think
they can get away with ANYTHING!

You're right on target with a superior writing talent.
Keep it up. I love your work!

Regards,

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Introduction

Charley has passed through New Jersey. I didn't notice the remnants of the hurricane.

Earlier McGreevey resigned as governor. I sat glued to the TV throughout his speech announcing his sexual orientation and resignation. Political theatre at a drammatic apogee.

Mostly I agree with those who characterize McGreevey's coming out of the closet as a cover act for the corruption that permeated his tenure in office.

I consider myself a progressive democrat. There are some elements of traditional liberalism with which I do not agree. That backgound sets up the following: Bob Braun, a Star Ledger columnist wrote:
"The truth is McGreevy wanted to be governor more than

he wanted to be the real Jim McGreevy."
My first thought as I mentally agreed with that statement, was that I feel the same way about John Kerry wanting to be president. There's no authenticity there ... in either one. I'm old enough to have been there and sentient when Harry S. Truman was president. He was authentic.

The banal and mundane: This evening I picked up the 18-year-old son of a friend and colleague at JFK Airport on Long Island. The young man was returning from a couple of weeks in Spain. In a couple more weeks he will be off to college as a freshman, pursuing a dergree in Physics.

I drove to the airport with his father, my friend. It's a trip I know well.

This is my first post to my blogger.com blog. There will be more.