I recalled how Jay and Elle took us down the shared dirt and gravel driveway to Shelly Junior’s “compound” where his divorced wife and son lived at one end of the property. Junior was in the midst of building out a massive wooden deck on the second or third story home — underneath a gigantic Confederate flag waving in the occasional breeze beneath the trees.
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Hi and welcome to Friday’s 35th Episode in Season 4 of “Our Disruptively Resilient Year” on this 6th day of May in the spring of 2022.
What’s Going On …
Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll
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- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines, according to my analytics, grew from 12817 this week to 12880 organically grown followers.
- Orange County Beach Towns 220 viewers stopped by the week before.
Foresight
Quality-of-Life
Context
“How was your trip?” Jay had been looking for us to pull into his driveway after we texted Siri’s estimated arrival time.
His house like many of the other neighbors we noticed as we drove uphill to his shared driveway proudly displayed the Stars and Stripes as a signal each housed Patriots.
“Park here” he directed us to a pad in the front near the front door for easy unloading.
He had been expecting us an hour earlier, based on how long he and Elle usually took to make the reverse trip to visit their kids in Ladera Ranch. “Yeah, well we stopped to eat at Chipotle near the Outlet stores and the Morongo Resort Casino just outside of Palm Desert.”
Later, on Mother’s Day as when we recounted the entire vacation, Delta Girl said she too felt disappointed when she drove out of her way for an advertised bowl that the restaurant no longer offered.
Emma the Baroness and I both ordered substitute bowls and chips and overstuffed ourselves. Returning to the CR-V the wind blasted us. Not like the hot oven wind we’d grown accustomed to when enjoying long desert weekends at Shadow Mountain, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, or La Quinta.
In Prescott with Jay and Elle, we sat around in their large dark wood dining room table after being shown to our first floor guest room and laying out our suitcases.
Dinner was ready.
Later we retired to the back yard porch for more wine and desert, while former fireman Jay, turned on his natural gas flame momentarily which in turn ignited the wood he piled meticulously on top of the outdoor fireplace grate.
I stuffed myself again overeating, but couldn’t help it. The approaching nighttime darkness found us catching up with stories about our Italy vacation and what it’s like for them living now in Prescott instead of in California.
I wanted to know about how Jay’s longtime fireman friend was. “How long has he been confined to a wheelchair and when did he suffer his accident?”
Jay thoughtfully paused for a moment and told us his first back problem occurred when they were both new recruits training together. And, then a dozen back surgeries later he remains in pain. We briefly stopped by their house when we had visited Durango, Colorado the second time and stayed at Jay and Elle’s home there.
“Didn’t he and his son own some property together in Durango?”
“Yeah,” Jay ran some calculations in his head. “Originally 40 acres and Shelby gave his son a couple of acres while selling off most of the other acres.”
I recalled how Jay and Elle took us down the shared dirt and gravel driveway to Shelby junior’s “compound” where his divorced wife and son lived at one end of the property and Junior was in the midst of building out a massive wooden deck on the second or third story home — underneath a gigantic Confederate flag waving in the occasional breeze beneath the trees.
Back then I didn’t realize the significance until driving from Durango to Dillon with stop in Telluride.
If you’re like me your mind wanders as you drive between destinations on long trips. I was day dreaming about our last vacation trip to this region
We simply ran out of time and skipped Telluride.
This year we skipped a stop in Silverton, because as empty nesters both of us felt the community was just too small and remote for us. We passed ranches and old mines dotted with buildings in various states of disrepair.
And then a strange incident popped into my head.
One that just seemed odd at the time and remained just that until much later after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Only then did it connect two things political.
Our Durango friends reintroduced us to their life long friends. And, took us to visit their friends divorced son. Junior greeted us at his home which was undergoing a major remodel.
Two things.
We hadn’t seen such gigantic log beams supporting his new roof. And, we hadn’t seen someone proudly displaying a huge Confederate flag on the top of the roof. This in contrast to the flowing American flag at the entrance of our friends best friends.
We just hadn’t encountered that before.
On our short vacation it just seemed odd. We didn’t attach any importance to it We were totally clueless. Naively we asked our friends about it.
They glossed it over with a back story that Gen-X Junior had always been rebellious growing up and in school. Now, I wonder if they guessed we knew the significance of it.
But at the time we didn’t.
It just seemed odd flowing so magnificently there, clearly thousands and thousands of miles from the deep South.
We might have figured it out.
Especially when Junior’s mother told him to take it down, in that scolding tone all young boys feel in their bones. But he didn’t, although now it reminds me of the headline about the previous election.
“Swastika On Campaign Sign Sparks Outrage”
On Tuesday, Jeff Widen, a volunteer with the La Plata County Democrats, looks at a Barack Obama campaign sign he put up the previous day near U.S. Highway 160 and County Road 222 east of Durango.
Sure, I can fess up to drinking too much, but not enough to where I lost my balance more than usual or fell victim to my eyes crossing. But I threw up twice in the night — elevation sickness?
“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”
“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “The mind gets stronger in the same way muscles do — through lifting. In today’s case the work includes words and concepts, feelings, puzzles and a few logistical problems too.” Aries
We concluded the three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed — during the “normal” pre-pandemic year compared to the pandemic year, and more recently to the paradoxically normal year.
Season Four continues now within domestic and global chaos.
Previously in Season Four, The Disruptively Resilient Year
S4 E34 — Preconceived Notions Hit the Road for Prescott; S4 E33 — When Was The Last Time Honesty and Character Counted?; S4 E32 — A Rudy By Any Other Name Still Smells …
Related from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year
S3 E35 — This Ain’t No Zemblanity; S3 E34 — Why You’re Susceptible to Subliminal Suggestions Like …; S3 E33 — Do Meaningful Coincidences Really Exist?; S3 E32 — But, Why Should You Care?
Related from Season Two, the Pandemic Year
S2 E35 — Was this Pandemic Year a 1-Off or New Way of Life?; S2 E34 — Why Is This Kicking Off the 4th Industrial Revolution?; S2 E33 — What Happens When Your Business Collapses?; S2 E32 — Trapped and Bored? Or Unleashing a Reinvention Wave?
Related from Season One, the Normal Year
S1 E35 — Day 35 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E34 — Day 34 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E33 — Day 33 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E32 — Day 32 of My 1-Year Experiment
Evidence
Holiday Theme:
… it’s a fine weekend for hosting. And while a main joy will be the company of others, a side perk is the way you see yourself and your home through the eyes of your guests. Other people are better mirrors than actual mirrors. We are all too familiar with our own visage to properly see ourselves.
We didn’t leave much room in our schedule for a getaway vacation on a roadtrip to Arizona. First stop, Prescott. And then a driving tour of Jerome, Cottonwood and Montezuma’s Castle. Second stop, Sedona. Then back to southern California in time for the long delayed remodel or our master bathroom — due to pandemic supply chain disruptions. And finally, hosting the family in honor of Emma the Baroness on Mother’s Day.
Random ones that make me want change my sign.
“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “The mind gets stronger in the same way muscles do — through lifting. In today’s case the work includes words and concepts, feelings, puzzles and a few logistical problems too.” Aries
Wait, did you include memories and connections? And conversations and topics that spark associations that ignite other “spark-able” links to shared moments?
“4” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “People are drawn to the comfort of your warmth. You don’t need to fix anyone or provide structure or direction. To offer your acceptance and love will do more than you know.” Taurus
I’m accepting this compliment on behalf of Emma the Baroness, the true recipient, even though I add offbeat dad’s humor good for a laugh or two.
“4” Steve Howey, 42: “What you’re doing is inherently important. That means whether you make sure everyone knows this, or hide out and act in secret, it’s just as essential. Right now, the work is what matters, not how popular it is.” Cancer
So operating in stealth mode counts? Mostly with Emma the Baroness’ friends we find we have to avoid conservative’s topics like religious beliefs and political persuasions — although many who voted for him the first time, could stand to do so the second time.
“4” Steve Aoki, 41; Steven Spielberg, 74: “People concerned with proving their superiority are typically overcompensating for a deep sense of inadequacy. Align with the successful and laid-back types who live like we are all in this together.” Sagittarius
So just how do you accomplish this TauBit of Wisdom graciously. It seems like at any given moment 45% of us are against them and visa versa.
Long-Form
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- “Here, Right Matters: An American Story” by Alexander Vindman. “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States’ most pressing major adversary. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The biggest change was to Ukraine’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars.”
- David Enrich begins his book with a suicide in “Deutsche Bank Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction” and then meticulously details the bank’s Russian money laundering operations. Deutsche’s Russian business surged after revenues had fallen 50% due to the 2008 financial crisis. Putin’s Russia, poured in to Deutsche from deals it did with VTB Bank, linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus. Deutsche positioned itself as a crucial cog in “The Laundromat” by doing what couldn’t be done — processing cross-border transactions for banks that were too small and didn’t have offices outside their home countries.
- “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy” by Jamie Raskin recalls one tragedy no parent should endure — the suicide of his son — and then a second tragedy at almost the same time — the insurrection on January 6th 2021, that terrified he and his congressional peers who were tasked by the Constitution to routinely oversee the orderly transfer of power from one former president to the duly elected new President.
- “A Warning” by Anonymous (Miles Taylor) written prior to the January 6th Insurrection as an insider’s account documenting how frequently the former President’s behavior and rage without any “guard rails” showed just how far he would go to win the next election at any cost while spinning lies and misinformation on top of each other.
- “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides anecdotes, stories and inside reporting documenting the controversial last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden.
- “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising,” by Joshua Green tracks the money behind the scenes leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the growing influence of Steve Bannon’s network of extreme nationalists.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Inspired by Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate
CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION
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