Five Years

Five Years

A lot can happen in five years.

Sometimes not much happens. In places, locations, societies of poverty things can appear to regress in that same time.

Things can go drastically wrong in five short or long years: one, two, three, four, five, the number of digits of a typical human hand-- the interval of revolutions around our sun in our sector of the galaxy; in five years things can get much worse. Just on our little planet alone. World wars can happen in this period of time.

China had some much touted five year plans in the mid twentieth century that appeared to backfire. Those happened, or malfunctioned, in the last century, after being ravaged by Japan years shortly before. Worth acknowledging, studying, analyzing, remembering.

Avoiding?

Plans and ideas to avoid. Not too bad a way to move forward. Five year plans and developments to not repeat, at least not by choice.

It's been five years since my mother passed away. Meanwhile, the rest of us survived, which is good, no complaints. My youngest who was soon to turn 3 back then is soon to turn 8. A lifetime of her own without really knowing the lifetime of my own, the older generation's lifetime, that of my mom.

And the clock keeps ticking.

What were you doing five years ago?

What will you be doing five years from now?

What things ended five years ago?

What will be new to us in five years?

Five years in the Congo of Africa can bring fortune or ruin to them, like and unlike anyone else...

Again, China, with its plans of fortune and ruin.

Wars, projects, innovations, diseases, floods, storms, and hurricanes.

Five years can make a difference.

Five years after Katrina. 2010. Five years after "the tsunami", or the earthquake. Take your pick.

The hurricane. The bomb blast. The sniper shot. The IED emplacement. The stock crash.

Five years later the recovery moves on.

The loss to cancer. The suicide. The good news of the breakthrough in medicine.

The space advancement. The new smart technology. The new app. The new device.

The new protest. The new law. The new Justice. The new movement. The new social media. The new fad. The new president, the new congress. The new government initiative.

Five years ago, five years later.

The new actor. The new cause. The new newly placed newness. Like paint.

Old and new, new and old.

Cycles of cycles.

The old pestilence. The old pollution. The old crime issue. The old corruption schemes.

The old boys network.

Old school.

The same ole' same ole'.

Five years become ten years becomes fifteen and fifteen more. Fifty years, one hundred years.

The intervals go on and on. We find more space to lay our remains.

Mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, all of us move on...

In five years. Five hundred years.

Five thousand years.

Where are you?

Who are you?

What have you been doing for the last five years?

What will you do in the five years to come?

In five years I will still miss my mother. I hope I can walk to her grave in remote southern Indiana. Daviess County; even native Hoosiers are not sure where that is.

Five more years, 2024. A new Olympics, a new hope, a new cure. A new genocide, a new terror, a new threat. A new skyscraper, a new train, a new car. A new way to save the environment.

A new power, a new disaster, a new trend.

I hope to see you, talk to you, blog to you, in another five years.

I hope that five years from now finds you well.

Older, wiser, sorer, wealthier.

Perhaps we will go to the Congo in the next five years. Probably not.

Perhaps there will be more savings and less misery in five years. 

We can avoid the mistakes of the past.

We can choose to avoid mistakes of yesteryear.

Let's make the most of the next five years.

Start right now. We think we have another five years.

Indiana Basketball 2018-19: Improves a Bit

Indiana Basketball 2018-19: Improves a Bit

Miller's Second Year, they Need More Eye of the Tiger--Winning.

Now to Win the NIT! Five in a row like last year's women.

Please! THAT is an order.

If Archie Miller is the champion that many of us thought he was supposed to be, he needs to get these Hoosiers to win, in his second full season with a seeming one-and-done talent Romeo Langford. Even if only in the second best competition, the National Invitational Tournament that culminates in New York. IU has not been to the final since NIT final since 1986, and not won it entirely since 1979. However: remnants of both those teams won the national championship! (1981, 1987).

Correlation? Yes!

Last year at 16-15, not invited to even the second best national college basketball competition NIT, they declined the CBI and the CIT. Bad move, Hoosiers. No young man, or team, is too good for any post season tourney. Fred Glass, maybe this decision was as much your fault as anyone's. Too good to play competitive basketball?

Hogwash!

THEY LEARN! Young men ages 18-22 learn how to play! In games! Tourneys!

WOW!  What a revelation!

 In his first year, IU was run out of the building by the likes of Purdue-Fort Wayne and Indiana State, among other embarrassments. Too good for the College Basketball Invitational??

Not good enough. And that lack of teamwork and knowledge was reflected in coming up short this year.

Josh Smith chief among them, and Devonte Green. Even Aljami Durham would have benefitted so much!

OKAY, so win now.

5-0, build your team and your culture.

Do it! All games and tourneys mean something.

Ask Ray Tolbert, Ted Kitchell, Steve Alford, and Daryl Thomas.

Heard of them? Younger IU players who won a lot of NIT games and brought home banners.

The NIT matters for IU. Games do. All of them.

Weeks and Months of Anything, Carving Out the Stone of Value, the Diamond Cut Fine

Weeks and Months of Anything, Carving Out the Stone of Value, the Diamond Cut Fine

10,000 hours, they say, make you a master.

I heard this recently from a young man much younger than me. Or was he?

Maybe he was my age, maybe it was at church.

Regardless, we spend our time and efforts carving out our existence, yes, as Mazlo iterates, but eventually our will may carve out our piece d 'resistance, perhaps a work of art.

A work, a labor, a habit, a legacy, an identity.

Go to church. Refine your soul.

Go to early morning seminary, refine your spirit, tone your muscles, awake your body and mind.

Day after day, week after week, submit to yourself and God and grind away sharpening that axe.

Learn the Bible, learn the holy Books...

Wake up, get up, get back to it.

Rinse and repeat, wake up early, get the job done.

Sometimes sweat a lot, sometimes bleed. Sometimes cry and be consternated.

But keep going all the time.

Do it.

Pacific Tales of Memory

Pacific Tales of Memory

I did not see the Pacific Ocean with my eyes until I was 19. 

I did not go and visit it for the first time as I had thought I might. I was compelled to see it, by others. Kind of forced. The people that I lived with at the end of Mahuzier Street found out I had never seen it. They made me go! (We lived about 30 minutes away). Perhaps I had viewed it, this largest chunk of earth surface area, a little bit on the way down to Chile from the airplane, 30 thousand feet up, or descending to Santiago or Concepcion six months before in the summer of South America...

I saw it later with less coercion; times that were by my own will and with proper permission, that Chilean winter and spring following. 

It was a thing to do, and I did it. That was 1990. And 1991.

I saw the island where Moby Dick was inspirational to Melville, off the Eighth Region waters of south-central Chile. Far off from where Selkirk was inspired to write Robinson Crusoe. Dreams shared and recreated...

I saw it again, this massive thing called Pacific, in San Diego in 1993. I sort of forced my way there, after being initially invited from the Inter-Mountain West. I swam in it. I coasted on it. I soaked it in.

Again, I saw it San Diego in 1994. And Los Angeles in 1996. San Francisco in 1997 and 1998-99.

1994 was the return to Chile and I was able to see it at Vina del Mar, many other beaches; some spectacular. Cobquecura and Curanipe. Further south towards Chiloe. Up and down the country, way up on the beach of Serena/Coquimbo. Maybe where President Kimball felt Lehi. Maybe.

I saw the Pacific Seattle and British Columbia, 1994 and 1997...
I moved to California in 1999 and went to Manhattan Beach, Corona del Mar, Long Beach, Santa Monica.

Throughout the 2000s with trips to Baja California North, South, Guerrero, later Sonora and Sinaloa.

Swimming and snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez, aka the Sea of California.

Sleeping above it my first night of marriage, at the Finisterra luxury hotel. It goes on forever.

Swimming in Oahu in 2003... Hawai'i is nice, every side of the island that I frequented.

Washington again, as late as 2012, in the winter when the snows came... The frosty foam invigorating as I parked on the beach.

Oregon and its craggy bays and dune swept coastline. Dunes look over it, conceal it from mere passers by. You have to explore to find it. Drive down through the trees to see its crags and crevices.

Over the years since 1990... The last time southern California sleeping on a tent at Doheny Beach, Orange County, or maybe northern San Diego...

My birthday in 2001 at Point Magoo, with my small family and the ward on a campout.

The next year near Ventura, or as it is called the City of San Buenaventura.

Night fires and hot dogs and marshmallows, songs with guitars.

La Bufadora and Ensenada in Baja North, Mexico... San Diego Bays, the beaches of Monterey and Aptos, Santa Cruz and other small villages.

I would run along its bays as a soldier. Mostly early morning. Look out on it by day and night, listening to the call of the sea lions.

Wolf Point and down the coast towards Big Sur, down the 17 Mile Way, past Carmel. Across the bay from Pebble Beach. Pacific Grove.

San Francisco and Muir Woods, the Red Woods above the northern California coast...

Morro Bay and  Pismo Beach, the Elephant Seals and Big Sur farther north...

Vancouver Island in Canada, Victoria and its stately harbors...

Chiloe in the 10th Region of Chile, Valdivia, Isla Negra, Lota and Coronel. The profane graffiti of Lebu, scrawled on the park fountain. Posing with it, defiantly attacking my religion, my identity there mere short years before.

Canada. The United States. Mexico. Chile. Hawai'i, out further...

I have seen it. I have heard it. At night, in the morning, in the full day sun.

It is large, it goes on and on... I have only seen parts, like our universe beyond the moon and the sun and the other stars.

I have ran its sands through my hands and feet.

I have seen the natural rock Arch in Cabo San Lucas where I kissed my new wife...

Huntington Beach, Balboa Beach, with those from Utah, from those from other lands, like China,  like South America.

The memories are there, if I can see them.

I see them.

I saw the baby cub of the sea lions lost on its shores. A place called Curanipe. Or Cobquecura. We ate at restaurants by its shores.

Years later with my mother-in-law and daughter in tow, by Vina del Mar, looking at the necklaces and trinkets, and washed up bones of yesterday.

I saw the thousands of people populating its surfs. In and out of the water.

I walked the docks of Cannery Row and smelled the fish, heard the Whale watching boats, saw the far off buoys and oil platforms. I see the bridges of Golden Gate and others, the Mexican fisherman at sun set and the large, fast dogs on the isolated Sonoran beach in the wind.

Do you remember all of it?

I can't.

But I can dream of the real memories that are under my eyelids.

They are there. As are you.

We go back to the Pacific whenever we want.

It is ours, and we belong to it, the planet with its biggest surface area.

Remember that, please.

El Pacifico. El mar immenso del poeta Neruda. El Poeta and the Sea.

Muheet el-hada'.

لمحيط الهادئ


 Go back and see it, feel it, and go further to other lands.

There are thousands of more beaches. Thousands of more skies.

But not so much time on earth.

Go there.

Take in the breeze.

Take in the nights and waves.

Avalon and the Catalinas. The Korean Peace Bell in San Pedro. The kayaks of Orange County, Newport beach and rows of yachts and speedboats, fishing vessels and tankers further up shore. The aquariums of Monterey or Cabrillo Beach, or the Queen Mary on the dock, the long shoremen lined up for pay checks on the way to the Spanish restaurant in Long Beach, the long break out to no where, the cliffs of Dana Point, the tour boat ferry of Long Beach Bay, the kites in the wind along the hills...

Battle ships and aircraft carriers, moored peacefully after historic runs across this expanse, this super highway of Magellan and Cook...



The endless docks and towering conex lifts...

Lonely piers at sunset, populated piers at night, ferris wheels and video games. Dancing and music.

Lonely expanses of beach and sky, endless waves rolling out to China and Japan. Whales and dolphins push through the kelp and the sea weed.

Shells and plankton wash ashore. Dark sand, light sand, crusty rocks and boulders.

Fireworks from platforms, from the side of the docks and jetties...

Lawn chairs and fire pits, music from radios and volleyball nets, paddle ball and frizbees...

Towels and blankets, wet hair and sandy toes, umbrellas and coolers and picnic baskets.

Parking lots with paid booths, empty beach lots with no one around.

A lone rider on a horse comes around the scraggly sand dune.

The crash of the surf. The thunder of the waves. The trees blowing in gales of storms or gentler days...

And more.

These memories small and large of the vast Pacific.

Tales of the memories go on into the night, and rise again the next day.

Going on forever.

Life Finds a Way

Life Finds a Way-- Written Meanings and Messages

Scribblers, chroniclers, scribes, writers. 

We are billions across thousands of years.

Those (of us) that wrote something. Some wrote many things. Many of those writings, or carvings, were kept. We record our words and voices. In many different ways.

Written messages and tales; these are older and more telling.

We see them now in caves or museums, or archived on film and webpage. 

Books and Ipads. Tablets and notepads.

Scribbles. Journals. Diaries. Notes.

Sketches. Musings.

We come from the womb struggling to breathe and feed and move.

We, mostly can hear and see and observe, and we eventually learn to analyze and connect.

Letters, alphabets, codes, sequences.

Lessons, morals, stories, formulas, tables of life and form. 

We write to remember, to understand, to take note for future use. To plan and organize, we record all these words and meanings.

We write to exist, to make some expression of who and what we are, to somehow live forever, foregoing death.

To make more of life while we are here. To figure a few things out.

And move on.

Bark at the moon! Said someone, sang someone, yelled someone.

Howl! Said the man slash hippie beatster on the Road.

The Road is is our tablet.

On Beyond Sumeria.

Thank you Seuess and ancient civilized ones.

Thank you written records.

 

 

12 Trips to Mexico: Leaving Out Details

12 13 Trips to Mexico: Leaving Out Details (Trying to Recover them)

Looking for vestiges and trails of that place and realm.

The two biggest trips that I have spent in Mexico I have not written about very much. (Nogales to Jalisco and back (2004), and Zihuatenejo to Mexico City and back (2000-01)).

Hmmm...

Writer's block, cramp, negligence, laziness, sublimation, transference, subconscious prejudice, ignorance. Waywardness, sloth, untrained wanton, lack of discipline, poor concentration, other distracting and tiring pursuits...

Mexico: my itinerant journey.  The book that began earlier in the century, (the 21st) traipsing back to the early 1980s, with conjecture on the centuries before...

Going on two decades now in to 2019. My book was not up to date even back to when I was living it, in 2004, 2005. I went back last summer, for only a few hours.

I had yearned for it and feared it. Dreams and nightmares. The whole assortment of surreality mixed with real outcomes. I got a job that dealt with, receiving daily reports... I have done this more than once, in 2010-2012 and now again since 2017.

I keep meeting Americans who are workers for the State Department in Mexico, subject matter experts. Others who work our side of the border, all with their combined experiences of dope and smuggling.

One could argue or think that my avoidance of writing about those trips, and postponing the most robust chapters of which I spent in Mexico is indicative of something.

Perhaps like the (going on) hundreds of books that I own that I have still not read, even those by some of my favorite authors, like Orwell, Allende, Michener, Connelly, Shaara, Lewis, Tollkien, on and on... Others by important masters, Dickens and others that I need to read. Tolstoy...

Pretending that life is forever and there will be time to read after the next slew of games on television, or other games and distractions.

Putting off this lifelong goal in a psychological game of procrastination.

My book can wait. Mexico can wait. Death can wait.

Life is less planned and organic. Work awaits, but more so play.

Mexico and writing about it can be work. Yeah, work. But work is good.

Keep writing. Do what they all do: Annie Dillard, Russell Scott Sanders, Orson Scott Card, James Alexander Thom, John Steineck, Lee Child.

Keep it up. Be consistent.

Remember, write, and compose. Organize.

Take the time.

Here it is.

Maria and Rene and James and other co-workers inspire me. All the ones that have worked there, that I see and talk to now.

Trip One: 10 hours (1982)
Trip Two: 6 hours (1983)
Trip Three: 4 hours (1993)
Trip Four:  4 hours (1995)
Trip Five: two days (1999)
Trip Six: ten days (2000)
Trip Seven: 8 days (2000-01)
Trip Eight: 2 days (2002)
Trip Nine: 3 days (2003)
Trip Ten: 7 days (2004)
Trip Eleven/Twelve: 10 hours (2005)
Trip Thirteen: 5 hours (2018) (Ahhh! 13, not just twelve trips)
_____________________

Summed up total days from 1983 to 2018: 37 days, or parts thereof, more or less

Less than I thought. I had believed it was closer to two months. Nevertheless, there were many days of the major trips that I have not chronicled.

Stupor and delay.

One might argue that there was not enough valuable to recount, not enough significant. Perhaps I did not see enough, feel enough, encounter enough to share, to recall, to analyze...

I buck that notion. All thirty seven days have had their impressions, strong and weak.

The Forgotten Chapter--Destination Jalisco (9)

The Forgotten Chapter--Destination Jalisco *(Chapter 9)

It has been years and years; time and memory obscure the details.

This is normal, this is life. Writing about it within the context of a book started 17 years ago is not as normal. Memories come and go, perhaps mostly go. I can get some help from my wife, some pictures, and context clues.

However, this book that I am in the process of writing has taken a long time to write; it covers many years, and it is being written over many years. 

Presently in 2019 I attempt to reflect back on a major Mexican trip that we took back in 2004. I was supposed to have written about it then. Maybe I did? Maybe it is contained on some old hard drive or some forgotten thumb drive, also known as "Pen drive", something I did own and use during and after my last time lived in Chile (2005). Maybe all this memory stuff is a re-hash...

We were attending a Spanish speaking church in 2003-4; we were very involved with Mexicans and Central Americans in the San Bernardino and Muscoy communities. Many of them might have been naturalized, all them wanted to be citizens, more or less.

I was intent on driving as far south in Mexico as comfortable with my pregnant wife and daughter of almost 3. 

I was also intent, in those years, to chronicle the accounts in this, my book on Mexico.

Dreams sublimated. Perhaps.