A Day in the Life of Chaos

Warning:  This is one of those postings that really shows my age. When I was a child visiting my grandfather an ex Navy WW2 Veteran in California I always remembered one familiar cry.  "O9!" he would say as I entered the room and picked up the clicker.  We called the remote a clicker in those days and when I visited my grandparents it seemed like an amazing luxury.  Television back home was still get up and change the dial when you wanted to watch another channel.  Of course it didn't hurt that there were only three to four channels to watch in Anchorage, Alaska.  In my room I had the black and white TV cast off when my parents upgraded to color.  It was so decrepit the actual dial was broken off an not only did you have to turn it by hand, you had to wedge a pencil in the side to get it to stay on the selected channel. When I visited my grandparents their 27" TV seemed positively enormous and the accompanying remote simply magical.  Los Angeles had something un

Gore Vidal This week we lost an intellectual giant. Gore Vidal died.  Love him or hate him there was no question he had a mind larger than most.  From literature to politics and opinion Gore Vidal had a talent for the artistry of the mind.  He was a devout liberal who believed in a progressive society and often frustratingly to conservatives found a way to represent his opinions with logic and fact. He was an eminent historian and wrote several comprehensive novels.  The grandson of a blind Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, he lived a gifted North Eastern life.  Despite his privileged when it came time to enter an Ivy League University he instead chose to be a warrant officer in the United States Navy during World War II.  He followed in the footsteps of his father who was an officer and flight instructor at the United States Military Academy.  He was filled with contrasts.  He had both male and female lovers and while labeled a liberal actually considered himself a conservative. 

As children grow older they progressively separate themselves from their parents.  This isn't a bad thing, it is part of their own preparation for life.  Still it can be a hard and at times torturous process as they reach for independence and still want security.  As parents, we do our best to provide security but know in our hearts we have to let them go. For most teenagers their ambitions and activities take them away from their parents.  I would look rather odd riding around in the back seat of my son's friends car.  I would most certainly at best wind up in traction and at worst kill myself if I ever tried to step on one of my son's skateboards or long boards.   Still I think we as parents try to think up activities to keep our children close to us.  Often they are things that we desire more than they do and the activity itself becomes a torture to the very child we want to hold close.  In a sense our very attempt to be with our child drives them further away. I

La Paz, Bolivia Humans always seem to be going some where.  It can be in reality or simply in our minds.  One way or the other we all seem to be making a journey.  Many of my titles I use for my blogs are hyperbole.  This is most certainly not one of them.  The road has been profiled in numerous adventure shows symbolizing a level of obscene terror.  It is the kind of place that people in suburban America will look at, gasp and wonder why in the hell anyone would ever journey down it.  At some point during my tenure in Bolivia it was my pleasure or misfortune depending on your perspective to experience it with my father and my neurotic Jew friend Ira.  Bolivia is an odd place that often defies explanation.  Things that shouldn't be are and things that are shouldn't be.  When the Spanish first ventured into the area and encountered the remnants of the Incan and Aymara civilizations on the shores of Lake Titicaca they decided to build a city.  It would be a grand city and

The street cars of La Paz Bolivia is a vast country nearly void of effective transportation.  Highways are often little more than dirt tracks that are closed from transit large parts of the year.  Like many colonial nations in Africa once the colonizers departed so did the infrastructure.  Once upon a time in La Paz street cars traversed the cities.  Images from the past have a strange tendency to seem more refined and more organized than images from the present. While Bolivia achieved independence in 1825 the colonial occupiers should be redefined from nations to commercial interests.  There was once a rail road that threatened to connect the country but never did.  Part of it stretches through the Andean highlands connecting Chile and Argentina with Oruro, La Paz and Cochabamba.   A second part of a different gauge runs from Santa Cruz to the Bolivia - Brazil border town of Puerto Suarez and south to Paraguay. A third and fascinating railroad was constructed in the far nort