Don’t mess with mariner because his genome comes from his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother. Her name is Lucy.
Ancient Mariner
Photograph from Scientific American.
When mariner reviewed his post to correct grammar and spelling, he noticed that he had zeroed in on ways to continue productivity as part of continued collaboration. Actually, productivity is a minor issue. It is collaboration that really counts.
For example, mariner used to visit a poker club every Saturday. The players were of a common stripe, each dressed in scrubby clothes, needing a shave or wearing beards and having the typical old man belly (mariner must note that by this time he was slim though his wife wished he would shave more often). These men came to play poker but that wasn’t the real reason – the poker was atrocious because of many ‘special’ rules that made typical odds irrelevant. They came to associate with fellow humans; they needed to collaborate. Every attendee brought a simple snack of some kind, a subconscious desire to provide sustenance for the occasion.
These collaborative gatherings are quite informal and frequently available in established communities – for example, small towns or traditional neighborhood settings. They can be found at restaurants, golf courses, bowling alleys, community events and even within more structured environments like churches, Lion’s Club and VA clubs. Mariner’s town has a special women’s gathering called “The Red Hatters”, aptly descriptive. The sustenance piece is that everyone must wear a red hat.
So remember that the central goal is collaboration. If the reader also can profit, more power to them!
Ancient Mariner
Mariner is older than most folks. Old enough, in fact, to look back on that time when a person suddenly becomes old – retired from career, lifelong friends and family are disappearing, maybe even die, institutions that were the core of society back in the day are not mainstream anymore, children and grandchildren are off living that life an old person remembers with melancholy.
Humans, by their nature, are born and raised to be collaborative. Each person contributes to the sustenance needed by themselves and their family and even, in these modern times, needed by God and Country. It is natural for a person to take on a role that contributes to others as well as to themselves.
But what to do when that role disappears, when that role is no longer meaningful to the day-to-day world, when the role a person played in life has become passé? The answer is to keep it going. Remember the old days when a person had to look for a job or go hungry? Remember when parents had to move to a new region and it meant having to find new friends at school? Remember when the company laid off people and they had to start over?
It’s that time again.
No one does this job for the new oldster. The oldster must make a concerted effort, often taking a year or two, to find a new way to collaborate with fellow humans. Most adjustments relate to known skills and social behavior but don’t overlook something completely new.
One of mariner’s old friends had a career working 40 years in the offices of a large corporation. When he retired, he became a carpenter specializing in refurbishing home attics. Word-of-mouth recommendations kept him busy full time.
Mariner’s wife, a career librarian and author, has established a busy day by working whenever needed at the town library, belonging to writers and readers clubs, is active in her church, maintains a visiting network with friends who go back to her childhood in the town, remaining on a daily contact basis with lifetime friends and her children, participating in art and exercise programs – and still takes care of mariner!
A couple mariner knows are retired from running a grocery store. The wife makes artistic refrigerator magnets and sells them at town fairs across the midwest, saying that the fair sales and a tax write off pay for their vacation.
For most new oldsters, collaborative participation comes from continuing the skills and behaviors of their lifetime. For example, carpenters can continue their trade by taking on smaller projects that full time contractors find unprofitable. Hobbyists who knit, make jewelry or create artwork of any kind can use their hobby by connecting with small stores, charitable organizations and selling at fairs and yard sales.
New oldsters with a background in humanities may have to be a bit more creative to find a way to use their skills. Search politics, religion, social work or presentations in retirement homes, charity organizations, community and local government organizations. History has many famous examples of old folks becoming authors – social media is waiting.
If the new oldster is sitting in a recliner watching television and scrolling games on the smartphone, get off your ass and find a new collaboration. Otherwise, depression, loneliness and boredom will be the new lifestyle.
Ancient Mariner
The visiting season approaches. Be sure to have bags packed for visits and pantries full for visitors. The holiday season is upon us. Shop early, especially if the reader plans to use the US Postal Service. Mariner has lost some plants due to a three-week delivery time. The US Postal Service would appreciate it if readers would mail greeting cards instead of using internet resources – mail early! On a related matter, if the reader is using a mail-in ballot, don’t wait until the last moment.
An interesting side note: The largest group of people moving to Florida today are foreigners. Perhaps evidence that global warming isn’t just an American issue. On the other hand, with 20 wars raging around the globe, decent neighborhoods may be hard to find.
To those suffering the news broadcasts, the coverage is so iterative that almost any reader can write copy for the next broadcast. There are a very few news agencies that don’t chase the common, gossipy news. Mariner recommends ProPublica.com; other issues are growing in the nation’s large societal map.
However, one news story to which readers should be paying close attention is the disruptive activity no matter who wins the Presidential election. More and more sitting judges, both liberal and conservative, are giving fair warning. From the AP:
“Judges at Washington’s federal courthouse have punished hundreds of Capitol rioters since 2021. Before recently sentencing another to prison, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he prays Americans accept the outcome of next month’s election, but expressed concern that Donald Trump and his allies are spreading the same sort of conspiracy theories that fueled the 2021 attack.”
Mariner has read other reports that suggest organized resistance groups have been in training since the last election.
One more seasonal flavor to add: Book early and do research and training before engaging in airports, airplanes, trains and traffic jams.
Have a wonderful holiday season! Really!
Ancient Mariner
This column from AXIOS:
“What if instead of getting presents on our birthdays, we gave gifts?
Why it matters: Acts of kindness go even further than the giver realizes.
🥳 Zoom in: Pink decided to celebrate a milestone birthday — his 60th — by giving gifts to all the people who’ve shaped his life and matter to him.
✏️ Selecting a gift was the tough part, he writes. It had to have universal utility and appeal, and it had to be cheap enough to buy in bulk.
The bottom line: Generosity takes many forms — from cooking dinner for a sick friend to donating to the local winter coats drive. Flipping birthdays is another way to give back.”
* * * * *
Mariner has always wanted his friends and family to be as happy as possible. He has collected all your birthday dates and will dutifully wait for you to have the best birthday possible by sending him your gift.
Ancient Mariner
There are a few things about which to take note.
֎ First, read the following quote from Scientific American:
” Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.”
Briefly, it’s about light energy entering a transparent thing like glass but seems to take longer to pass through except the light energy already has exited.
Back in the old days Albert Einstein said unequivocally that it may be possible to travel into the future but it is not possible to go back in time. Is time a situational fantasy? Mariner always has thought that we live in multiple dimensions. For example, mariner fills his prescription box every week but it takes just a few days before it is empty again – or so it seems. Is AI being honest with our scientists?
֎ A new alter ego metaphor has been chosen to replace Chicken Little: Nosey Mole.
Nosey Mole lives in a large maze of tunnels. The food is good and there is little concern for catastrophe. Still, being nosy, he pops to the surface periodically to see what’s happenin’. Every time he pops up to look around, he gets whacked by the swirl of reality and returns to his tunnels. There is no great historical theme in Nosey’s life that must be feared or hoped. Life is pleasant in the tunnels.
֎ This topic is too broad to address in essay form. Mariner strongly recommends his readers make the subject of public education something of a conscious interest that induces them to learn more and do more about the state of education. There are several large issues: Public schools no longer mandate that children learn how their society works – whether its government or group behavior or issues of physiological morality.
The field of education has been set adrift for half a century. It has gone the way of unions, free speech and equal rights. In today’s world, education is confronted by extremism, technology and shifting family economics. Education is infected with obsolete teaching techniques, life threatening lack of funding and a loss of raison d’etre.
The loss of a reason to be has allowed other disciplines to invade education. Public issues like health, sexuality, classism, public funding of private schools and replacing expansive learning with extreme restrictionist objectives.
Be kind to Nosey Mole as he adapts to a role in mariner’s life. If a reader can explain negative time, let mariner know. Do become focused on education; if our children don’t have the intellectual tools to survive during Armageddon, things will get worse than we can imagine. Think ‘Israeli-Hamas war’ in the United States. . .
Ancient Mariner
Afraid so. It is true that evolution is the dynamic element in all the universe – including galaxies, solar systems, life of every kind and certainly every conceivable element of existence – including the planet Earth itself – is subject to change over time. So, too, fantasy and whimsy move on as reality paves a new future.
What was important about Chicken Little’s presence was his belief that it was possible for things to behave as expected – it was just a matter of adjusting a bit to keep reality chugging along. Like the Chicken Little of children’s storybook fame, he often overreacted to what others felt was not so important as to warrant hysterical behavior.
The belief in adjusting has faded as all the world’s activity is in disarray. Human history has become a demolition derby where every conceivable idea is an effort to dismantle rational, logical behavior. Mariner, like Chicken Little, is acutely aware of the abrasion of industrial development against the evolutionary limitations not only of Homo sapiens but all of the planet’s life forms. Homo’s dangerous ability to imagine things that do not exist has been the fire that has set off an Armageddon. For casual readers who may not be familiar, mariner’s examples are any industrial development requiring chemical, environmental or any other destruction of the biosphere. For example, internal combustion engines, killing millions of species for greedy reasons, leveling quantum amounts of forest for commercial purposes, forcing every biological behavior of every species to compensate or die, etc. The result today is, of course, a destabilized, biospheric condition humans call ‘global warming’ which is most commonly observed as changes in the climate.
So mariner is interviewing several applicants to replace Chicken Little. An applicant that has caught mariner’s eye is the squirrel – especially urban squirrels. Squirrels already know that Homo sappians is a destructive creature, said and done. What concerns mariner is that the squirrel already has a bit of skepticism about it’s obsessive neighbors; Amos, another alter ego, already has more than enough skepticism.
Perhaps this is all a sign that mariner is growing old. He’s old enough to be receiving social security but young enough to see it disappear. His brain has been throwing out to trash memories that aren’t relevant anymore. Sadly, he cannot forget Lawrence Welk or Hyacinth Bucket on the British series, Keeping Up Appearances.
Suggestions for a new icon to replace Chicken Little are welcome – an icon that has come to accept Homo sappians as the failure it is but with an innocence that there is a looming Armageddon.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner loves metaphors. One came to mind as he pondered the last post on college education: 40% of the nation’s young people went to college. Perhaps 95% of these students studied the same textbooks and learned the same interpretation of democracy, philosophy and history. The movie ‘Matrix’ couldn’t have done it better!
Let’s test this militaristic march to a common but separate culture for college students. Let’s try some passwords to validate membership: ‘William Faulkner’, ‘Plato’, ‘Pythagoras’, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, ‘Alan Turing’, ‘Joseph Campbell’, ‘Euclid’, ‘Adam Smith’, ‘Milton Friedman’, ‘David Halberstam’. . . The reader gets the point. 40% of US citizens have an identical, if exclusive, understanding of what the values are for the American culture.
Could it be helped that colleges created a national identity that was quite exclusive in its requirements for citizenship? Somewhere along the line ‘all men are created equal’ fell by the roadside and was replaced by ‘college students know what is right’. The opinion exists that colleges stopped providing a right to education, replacing it with a right to pay to join the club.
Is this militaristic approach to education why plutocrats have attacked both labor unions and liberal arts?
Do enough wealthy citizens exist to reinvent the mores of student life? John Adams would be proud.
Is this why colleges are dropping liberal arts and creating a new syllabus called STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics)? – a strategy that can end up only in partnership with corporations and government – socializing the citizenry be damned.
All this bouncing about, along with GPT and climate change, makes it hard for Guru to speculate the future.
Ancient Mariner
It is certainly true and defensible that the first concern of any species is its own survival and Homo sapiens is an excellent example on a grand scale. But there is comfort to be found in that the rest of existence is in good shape and carrying on. The planet and its kin are doing fine. For example, reported in Scientific American:
The Helmetshrike
In the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve in South Africa, U.K. photographer Gary Collyer and his safari group heard noises above them and turned on a lamp. The result was Helmetshrikes preparing to sleep. They huddle together for warmth and balance. No concern about Homo’s trials and tribulations here.
One of the great tragedies caused by Homo was the elimination of the American Bison by white Americans. It was a tragedy to bison and Native Americans, both of which were slaughtered and dismembered without pause or recrimination. The important news is that Homo has managed to halt the elimination of a species – a rare event. The North American Indian still survives but without what one might call restoration to the norm.
Celebration of Community
The American broadcast industry is addicted to reporting troubling information, gossip and promoting news based on commercial value. The important news is that local communities still try their best to celebrate normalcy and unity. Togetherness is the mood of the occasion and fun is had by all. Perhaps there is a good element at the base of Homo behavior.
Legal migrants receive community assistance
Trashing immigrants is not the important news. What is important news is that destitute families are assisted by small communities and neighborhoods as the family makes its way to a new beginning – which any of us would do if we were in the same situation.
Will sanity return to Homo sapiens via its tribal/community societies? The plant kingdom understands this principal – it doesn’t start with the flower, it starts with the root.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner and his wife often schedule small day trips to places never visited or not visited in a long time. The destinations almost always are within fifty miles round trip. They have visited small parks, historical sites, certain stores or restaurants, fairs and other social events. Unbeknownst to them until they arrived, they even visited a town that wasn’t there anymore.
A day or two ago they traveled a whopping 27 miles west to visit a store they had not visited in many years. This was a special store for two reasons: first, it was an old store established in 1985 in a small town in the middle of nowhere that is run farm-to-store-shelf by members of the Pennsylvania Dutch denomination (one of many Anabaptist sects), second, the ‘Dutchman’s Store’ had a grand reopening at a new location last week. It is the only store of its kind that mariner and his wife know aside from smaller stores in the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania. When measuring this new store, think of Walmart.
Dutchman’s is entirely stocked for Anabaptist folks from kitchenware (does your store sell a flour mill to make your own flour or three versions of ice cream makers?) to clothing just for the Anabaptists (mariner was sorely tempted to buy a traditional brimmed straw hat that he would wear to scare his family when they visited) to special slaughtering bullets, to ancient used books for sale (slightly aligned with Anabaptist teachings), to an astounding produce market fresh from the farm and large cuts of meat from every kind of farm animal, goats too. His wife surprised him by buying two large lamb steaks, a meat seldom if ever seen in supermarkets – at least in Iowa.
But get this – mariner has lived in Iowa for 31 years. He has berated the ‘pork’ state for not having, nor even knowing about ‘scrapple’. It is one of his childhood memories and has disappeared from grocery markets, even in Iowa. Back in the 60’s when mariner lived in the town he lives in now, only one older woman knew what scrapple was. She made a batch for him. On this trip, his wife surprised him by buying a pack of scrapple from the Dutchman’s store. Wow! Then he read the small print: manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Iowa just doesn’t understand fine cuisine.
99% of the staff are dressed Dutchman style with beards and Anabaptist clothing and the women all wearing the same white bonnet. When mariner checked out, he asked the attractive young lady wearing the bonnet what the significance was of the hat since every woman was wearing one.
She said, “We regard the head covering as a mystical cloth that carries protective powers of angels for our women” (using 1Cor. 11:10—and yet the word protection is never used in this verse) “and empowers us to somehow live a more righteous life than those who do not wear it.”
Mariner asked if the bonnet was sort of like a halo? She grinned widely and said, “Yes.” Mariner responded that he was quite pleased to have met an angel ….. Only at Dutchman’s.
Ancient Mariner