There was a bit on twitter the other day where someone asked others to describe their weirdest dream in five words. This followed describing favorite books and movies also with the five-word limitation. This prompted me to remember a dream from 1977 when I was sixteen and spending the summer with my older sister,

My niece Heather was an infant and as is the way of infants rarely slept through the night. By a quirk of chance the times that I went to sleep, rather late, synchronized with Heather’s cycles in such a manner that when she awoke in the night it often interrupted my middle of the night dreaming. People dream on a roughly 90 minute cycle and those dream from the middle of my sleep are particularly odd.

I remember bits and pieces of those strange phantasms but this one I think is the strangest. First off I am not in the dream. I do not know how common this is for other but I will occasionally have dreams in which I never appear. In these I am a spectator, much like watching a fully realized film that happens to carry smell, taste, and touch in addition to visuals and sound. In fact I have had dream that really were movies, complete with known actors in some of the parts. This dream had no named actors.

The situation is a newly wed couple. The husband has come home from work and they have seated themselves to the dinner she prepared, a whole roasted chicken. Their conversation slides from loving to sniping and arguing. As the scene progresses it becomes obvious, though I could not say how, that the chicken, the dead and cooked bird centered in the table, is manipulating their minds with its own psychic powers. The couple’s disagreement turns to shouting but on the cusp of becoming violent they recognize that it is not their own will at work but the chicken’s. (My, that’s a strange sentence all by itself.) Before they can do anything about the foul fowl the chicken reveals further psychic abilities and takes control of their bodies, forcing the couple to grab a broom handle and feed it into the kitchen’s garbage disposal. Unable to release their grip on the shaft the pair struggles in horror as they are drawn down into the strangely deadly device.

And that’s where I woke up to Heather’s cries for a feeding. I laid there in the dark waiting for Rod Serling to step out of the corner and begun to post episode wrap up. It would have been nice if someone explained that dream.

There were other weird dream that summer, humanoid aliens with glowing spots in their forehead invading New England but stopped by the alligators and so on but nothing as odd at the mental, mad chicken.

For many years now most Sunday finds my Sweetie-wife and I at the World Famous San Diego Zoo. It’s a lovely way to get in a few miles of walking while seeing lovely animals from around the globe. If you follow my social media accounts you’ll often see photos snapped with my iPhone whenever I am lucky enough to capture an interesting moment.

In all the years and all the Sundays of these Zoo excursions we have never seen the mountain lion our side of its den.

This is not surprising as mountain lions are crepuscular, that is they hunt during twilight, the dim light of dawn and dusk are when they stalk their prey. Midmornings, when my Sweetie-Wife and I would arrive at the enclosure located near the back of the facility, the big can is found in its den, sleeping.

This Sunday was different.

We had crossed the recently completed canopy bridge that spans over the canyon where you can find the pandas, and emerged just outside of the Elephant Odyssey exhibit when she noticed that there was a crowd at the mountain lion enclosure. We walked over just as a zookeeper, standing in the enclosure itself, was completing a talk. Evidently we had arrived just as they were about to feed the feline. I scanned the enclosure and spotted the lion’s meal, a dead rabbit the usual meal offered carnivores at the zoon, placed on a tree limb. The keeper finished his and left the cage. A few moments later the mountain lion entered.

These two photos are the best ones I got and it was such a treat seeing that big cat stalking about his home.

Art is never finished, only abandoned. -Leonardo da Vinci

Anyone who has hung around writers or artists is familiar with the concept of WIP, the Work In Progress and da Vinci’s quote when coupled with the idea of the WIP leads us to the conclusion that all art is a WIP until it is abandoned.
While an artist is crafting their piece they may go through a number of drafts, revisions, and alterations as they search for the right expression of the motivating ideas. A work in progress has flaws, expression that in conflict with the ideals of the piece, sometimes you have to wave your hands around the troubles, sometimes you have to cut them out entirely, and sometimes you have to incorporate them, turning defects into admirable qualities. The artist must struggle to maintain a clear vision of their art, neither refusing to be dragged into despair by the faults nor allowing the beauty to blind them to the required work and corrections.
The United States of America is a social and political work of art and like all art it remains a work in progress. More importantly America is a collaborative work, all of use, left and right, majority and minority, are the artists working together crafting this monumental, lasting, and inspiring project. We suffer the same pitfalls of any artist as work. It is easy to see only the flaws in our history the terrible crimes committed by the artists before us and feel the temptation to burn the canvas in defeat and despair. It is also easy to see only the shining moments of greatness, to see only the ideals and be blind to real and continue pain falling short of those ideals inflict upon others. Both views are necessary and seeing the work in only one aspect leads to walking away, either because you hate the flaws or because you refuse to see the work that lies ahead, but the work waits for us. It is up to us to continue the craft of this amazing piece, this inspiring project, and to pass on to another generation of artists the vision of what is the United States of America,
Let us not abandon this art.

Two weeks ago today I underwent a minor surgical procedure. Anyone who has met me knows that my eyelids droop and that my right eyelid dipped much farther than my left. During an eye exam last year it was discovered that the lid was drooping far enough to begin to interfere with my vision and it was suggested that I have an operation to correct it. Being that the surgeon was booked up for months and my day-job was hitting its busiest period of the year we delayed the surgery until this month.

I live just a couple of miles away from the hospital where he performed the surgery. It was an interesting experience/. They used a local to make sure I felt no pain or discomfort and a sedative to make me relaxed but there was no general anesthetic, throughout the entire operation I was awake and aware.

We started, after I closed my eyes, with the doctor making marks on my lids to guide his incisions. I could tell, even though there was no discomfort, when he switched from inking up the area to slicing it with a scalpel. As he worked he listened to Motown and R&B songs prompting me to think about the scene Doctor Strangewhen we are introduced to character in a surgical theater. Occasionally either he or someone else would ask me to make sure I was doing well and no feeling any pain and aside from the bride lighting, which penetrated my lids, I was comfortable.

I spent about an hour and half in post-op and recovery, exhibited no signs of any adverse reactions to the drugs they had administered and by late afternoon I was sent home.

The first several days with tedious, ice packs applied every hour to my eyelids and pretty much stuck in a reclining chair unable to do any of my normal activities. The doctor had instructed me to stay home from the day-job for a week and that is what I did.

Now I have been back on my feet doing things normally and everything is healing as expected. My lids are dis discolored and inflamed but I am able to work, read, and most of the time simply ignore the slight discomfort they present.

Today is the day I have a minor surgical procedure. It’s outpatient and I should be back home this afternoon. As it deals with my eyelids I suspect that for the next several days I shall not be posting on this blog.

Have a good time everyone

I awoke with asymmetrical sinus congestion and a migraine. While I have made it to the day-job there will be no essay posted today.

As I may not be feeling my best in the morning, here is a preloaded video from last week’s Saturday Night Live.

Consider it a Friday Funny.

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I awoke with a migraine this morning so here, have a picture of a tiger.

I took a day off from work yesterday staying home and giving my knees a chance to recover. While I was home I watched the French Language movie Elle. It is a controversial movie from Paul Verhoeven about a business-woman who is attacked and raped in her home by a masked assailant. The title character is cold, hard and keep peoples at a distance, making it hard for the audience to sympathize with her situation. I’ll admit that I lost most of my connection to her when at one point in the movie she has a car accident on a wooded road. She calls her best friend, voicemail; she calls her best friends husband with whom she is having an affair more voicemail; then she calls her rapist. (By this point in the film is has discovered his identity.) Not calling emergency services and calling her attacker simply broke the film for me.

We appear to be getting a bit of order in the White House. I do not think it will last. The saying goes that a leopard can’t change his spots and Trump thrives on chaos, it will return. Where the Russian thing I have no idea but once a special counsel has been empowered, as it has, there’s no telling where you will end up. I think this is far from over.

It’s really humid here in San Diego. It’s like mother nature is prepping me for the vacation to Florida later this month. When I climbed out of my air-conditioned car at work this morning I truly regretted not getting the anti-fog coating for my eye glasses, that said I am still looking forward to the trip.

This is a word that is so often abused; intolerable. The strict definition is something which can not be tolerated, but all too often it is used as something is that terrible but still endured. However occasionally something comes along that I think truly encompasses that meaning of intolerable.

Clearly the citizens of the 13 colonies felt that further political union with the British Empire had become intolerable and severed those ties.

The citizens of the Tsar found the war, the starvation, and the corruption intolerable and removed the tyrant, only to replace him with another.

It will remain t be see if the modern GOP can foresee that throwing 24 million or more people off their insurance is a situation that will be intolerable.

The political atmosphere has changed. A majority of American now consider having healthcare, not merely the ability to buy it, but actual healthcare, for all citizens a good thing. The old status quo is no more. Pay note that the current leader of the GOP is making promise after promise, empty ones to be sure but all of his are, to make everyone’s insurance better, to make no cuts of Medicare or Medicaid while his conspirators do the exact opposite. Should the Senate follow the House, and that is something well within the possibility because elected Republicans fear not the general electorate but only the primary voters, then 2018 election could be one in which millions of people have found that they, or someone they know, has been tossed onto the hard rocks of the uninsured by the GOP eternal quest for tax cuts.

Can anyone look on that and honestly think it will remain business as usual for the election?

In my view there are only three core issues that the modern GOP truly care about and will move heaven and earth to achieve; Tax cutting, Abortion, and Gun Rights. Healthcare has never been one of their priorities but now after eight years of beating the war drums over the hated ‘Obamacare’ and lying about the law they have painted themselves into a corner, caught between a changing general electorate and the pitchfork armed primary voters. If any of those three core issues matter to you they I think you should work very hard to stop this madness, because if 24 million or more are tossed off to fend for themselves in this environment the devastation to the GOP and to your issues will be massive.

The situation will be truly intolerable and those that created it will not be tolerated.