A Day in the Life of Chaos

Road trips, especially in the Mountain and Southwest states always serve to remind me how big America is.  In the past days I have been on a journey that has taken me from Oregon to Texas.  Along the way we passed through some of the most beautiful landscape America has to offer stopping over in Canyonlands, Arches and Mesa Verde National Parks.  America’s National Parks are the jewels of the nation.  They are precious monuments to a wild and beautiful unsettled land.   Two guys at Mesa Verde, National Park As the miles slip away and we wind our way through miles of land with scarcely a single human present it reminds one of how empty and unsettled America is.  The tiny farm towns we cross through are monuments to the past and decaying representations of the present.  What little remains of a Main Street is often fronted by a few beautiful old brick buildings long since abandoned.  It makes me wonder how they ever served as a commercial center but I suppose in the era of Amazon they ar

In a way this posting is a form of “mea culpa.”  It is an act of contrition for a time of my life that when I look back, I feel sorry and ignorant.  I was a product of the society around me and in that I became what it wanted me to become.  As a man who tries his best to think logically and independently I am ashamed that I surrendered myself in the manner I did. I was the product of Alaska in the late 1960s and 1970s.  It was almost a frontier but not quite.  Alaskan’s proudly called it the “Last Frontier.”  Roads were still often dirty and dusty.  Nothing was manicured and most was created out of necessity as opposed to methodically planned.  Those that lived in the state were divided between a small subset of long term hardy Alaskans that arrived during World War II or an even smaller set that came before.  They were truly the hardy mountain man types.  The ones that had lines of seasons written in their faces like the rings of a tree.  My family was of a new class.  It was a group

Life is filled with a long list of people who cross our paths like firefly’s dancing in the night.   Some stay longer than others.   Some mark us in positive ways and some, not so much.   There is a precious list of those we love, a vastly larger list of those we know, perhaps admire and a hopefully shorter list of those we detest.   Bad feelings can stick to us like fungus yet a skill I have been working on for 56 years is how to let those feelings go.   Sometimes it can be terribly difficult.   Like the scorn I feel for a guy named Barry Wilson who back stabbed me in a previous office interfering with a chance for me to move back and resume a former job after an overseas assignment.   His actions caused me to sell my house and relocate my life.   Life can at times feel like a catalog of miserable interactions as they tend to stand out much more promi nently than the positive ones.  One particular memory reared its head this week when I learned that a previous boss of mine had passed

Edward Raymer (natural father) and me I really hate to admit this but I have passed an invisible line in life where my life is now a vivid contrast between a world I knew as a young boy and the world of today.   I have always wondered when this would happen.   When did my grandmother begin recanting the vastly historic and different world of her childhood, in the face of computers and internet?   Now I am becoming the old guy that shares stories of an intangible past to young people of today who, quietly wonder how did people in my generation survive such barbarism.   I think it often starts with technology because this is area where we can see the most visible change in our lives.  Paper to typewriters to computer screens, the evolution is dramatic.  It might be difficult for a young person today to comprehend but “in my day,” television was simple and almost unrecognizable in its current form.  I witnessed black and white tv’s evolve into to color.   The end of the aerial (that's

Karen Goerler I think a lot about aging.  I think it is because I am aging.  Well in truth we all are.  It is an inescapable reality of life.  I wrote a blog called “Today is the Youngest I Will Ever Be.”  I think as you grow older this phrase becomes increasingly apropos.  Like a computer we constantly run a systems diagnostic on our body and each pain, creak, or scatterbrained moment becomes a source of questions.  Is this a sign?  Is it the beginning of something or only momentary discomfort?  Did I do something I shouldn’t have or is this the moment of inevitable decline?   As we grow older our lives and physical well-being are impacted by the lives of those we have grown old with.  Like soldiers in a battle when one falls the others look around and wonder if they will get the next bullet.  Recently a high school classmate of mine passed away.  She was only 50.  She was a good person who lived a good life.  There was no simplistic explanation of why cancer should have ta