Monday

It's barely seven and I have already donned my blogging shoes and am out for a run. Must mean I'm feeling better, which was not the case last week when my aged, but still trusty bod spent most of its waking hours trying to determine whether it was sick or not. I was reminded, perhaps because of his shuffling off this mortal coil, of George Carlin's bit about not feeling well. "I'm not sick, I just don't feeeeeel good." That was my story last week despite finding long lost old friends, making new ones and, never underestimate the importance of this next, playing decent golf.

So here it is Monday morning and I have welcomed the dawn, let out the dog, done in some dishes, downed some coffee and I am ready to go. I mean I am rarin' to go. (Maybe I shouldn't have had that third cup of coffee.) Oddly, the house is quiet as an empty church and outside my windows even the birds seem to be chirping tentatively. What's going on here? RTGFKAR (Ramon The Gringo Formerly Known As Raymond for you newcomers) and Woowoo Charly are still abed while R and ME have borrowed my car and are off to do something, I'm not sure what, with the other cruisers. Even Gus the Joe Cocker Spaniel seems unusually still this morning. There is something in the air I tell ya, and it's not rain. Well not yet anyway. What can it be? Maybe it is just the proverbial calm before the storm. If that ominous cloud to the north thickens up and slides our way, I'll have my answer. (Can you say thickens without feeling like you are lisping?)

Alrighty then, what shall we talk about to fill this noise void? How about politics?
Nah, that's Woowoo Charly's job. Give me Universal Health Care (That's health care for everything in the Universe in case you were uncertain of the meaning, tax relief for the middle class and the withdrawal of any troops that have invaded some other country in the last ten years and I will vote for you no matter if your party is Republican, Democratic, Independent or my own party, the Party Party with its platform of free golf for retirees, hors douvres and extended happy hours during all days of the week that end with the letter y. All in favor say aye! Here here. Or is it hear hear. No, politics need to be discussed on a philosophical level. (Philosophy is a word composed of two parts, Phil and Sophie. This pair were neighbors of Plato who was not only a thinker (that's not another lisp) but also, you might guess, a Spanish word meaning plate. Plato. Phil and Sophie bickered all the time over just about everything and tried to enlist anyone they encountered to their side of the argument. Phil's basic tenet was that everything should be tried out by the populace or demo-ed and he became known as a demo-crat. Sophie,on the other hand, became known as a Republican, a name she derived from - well, I don't really want to get into it, but if you break the word down, Re Pub - Lick Can, you will get the drift. As I am not philo and sophiecally conversant we will skip this for today and get on to the more important topic of sports. This is a word that clearly has something to do with spores and tees. However my hour is up, the Monkeymind has been loosed and it is time to move on to other things. If only I knew what they were.

Hanging With The Cruisers

One of the treats of living in a place like Boquete...or in fact, Boquete itself, (ha!) is meeting people who have come to visit from all over the world or, as in the case of friend A.T., from distant planets. This meeting with extranjeros seldom happened when we were in the wild and wooly woods of southwestern Colorado. There we met people who had traveled only as far as Denver or Alberquerque where they were terrified by shopping malls and rush hour and hastened to return to their rural environs. "It was spooky man. They have these poles on street corners with lights that tell you when to come and go and a lot of the people, now this is really weird, said they were Democrats! I couldn't wait to get home."

Last night Woowoo Charly, RTGFKAR and I sat on our patio sipping cocktails with cruisers - people who live on boats and sail about the world - listening to tales of the sea. One was an Aussie man named Rahja (Roger) from whom I learned the word ova-nite-ah (over nighter), another was a Craotian woman named Sasha whose accent reminded me of all the Russian women in James Bond movies and there were, additionally, four people from perhaps the most peculiar of all foreign lands, Texas. Left behind in Bocas Del Toro where their boats were docked, were two further pairs, one French and one British. I regretted not having their accents to tease my writer's ear. All had been sailing about the Caribbean for awhile in a sort of flotilla or armada or whatever the term is, island hopping together. Two of the Texans were our pals Randy and Maryellen who will be staying with us a week or so as they check on their property here in Boquete and polish off a checklist of chores. (From Randy I had earlier acquired the word barbwhar (barbed wire)). We heard tales of places with alluring names like Providencia, Guanaha and San Blas. "Be careful not to step in the guanaha" was my contribution, but then as you know, I can't be helped. And further, there were harrowing tales of rough seas, high winds and cranky customs officials along with cruisers either nutso or clueless. All the cruisers present were in their fifties and had made enough money to drop out early and sail about. Nice. I was jealous. Well, for about a minute anyway. My life is too good to be jealous of anything for long. It was, all in all, an excellent Boquete eve.

Blog Neglect

"What's the charge Officer?"

"You are under arrest for Blog Neglect. You have the right to remain silent but that would just add to the evidence."

"Jeez Officer, I've been busy. I've been editing the Keely story, working on something new, been in touch with my High School reunion committee chair-person and finding old friends. C'mon, give me a break, it's a first offense."

"All right, I'm going to let you off with just a warning this time, but next time you're doing time. Got me?"

"Yes sir."

Boy those Blog Police are tough guys. I've got to get busy.

Okay, so what should I write about? How many of you are interested in the European Futbol championship? Thought so. How about I rehash Tuesday's round of golf? No,eh. Alrighty then, books? Politics? Religion? How about a religiously political book. Sorry don't have one. Not sure I'd read it if I did.

Movies yes! There's the answer. Everybody likes movies. There's a channel here, Cinema Classics, that I'm hooked on. I climb on the old Elyptical Glider and pedal away while trying to put names to all the faces on the black and white screen. I'm pretty good too. I even know a lot of the character actors. Of course I also experience the "what the heck is that guy's name he was in that other movie with the blonde whatsername that starred in the pirate movie with that British actor and he was in some dance flicks with that guy who was good but not as good as Astaire or Kelly and then he was in that TV show in the Fifties I'm thinking a western don't tell me it'll come to me in a minute" moments. They force me to hang around until the credits roll so I can say, "Oh Man I shoud have known that one. He was in that flick with Gable and whatsername the redhead. What was the name of that picture anyway?" I'm still preparing for the pop quiz in my Film Class.

If I had a Film Class. When I went to school there were no film classes. We had subjects like Math, History, Science, English and Health. (Does anyone remember Health?) For an elective you could take Chess. There were no film classes. If you were shown a film in school it was about the dangers of drugs, drink, driving or how to not get pregnant while doing drugs, drinking and driving. These were black and white classics also and were usually produced by a branch of our armed forces. Fortunately they don't show these gems on the Cinema Classics Channel. If they did I would have to switch to HBO where you seldom get movies that played for more than a weekend in regular theaters.

And speaking of theaters, the last movie I saw in a regular theater was the most recent King Kong. The one with Jack Black and Naomi Watts. It was dubbed in Spanish but that was okay, we all know the story. Movies are dirt cheap here, two and a half bucks, but the nearest theater is in David an hour each way away. Too far to drive for a flick you can rent in a few months. Do wish someone would build one here in Boquete though. I love the big screen experience with the sights, sounds and smells of an audience around you.

"Okay Officer. I'm done for now. Promise I'll keep busy."

Tuesday Golf Woes and More

So there's Tiger Woods out in the rough surveying a shot he has hit 70 yards right of the fairway. He takes out one club or another, the crowd gives way and he smashes the ball onto the green. Wimp. Try that on our golf course and you'll never be heard from again. If the snakes don't get you, the swamp will swallow you up. Every time we play our course we see Panamanian rescue teams with machetes in hand hacking away at the jungle in search of lost golfers. At least I think that's what they're doing. Yes, ours is a manly golf course even if the targets aren't as far away as some Tiger might play. We face dangers unheard of on the PGA tour. I mean what if that horse kicks you while you're hopping the fence to his corral to rescue your wayward Titleist? And what about that bridge you walk over on number 6? That looks a little Indiana Jonesy to me. It's true, we don't keep stats like "greens in regulation" or "putts made inside of six feet", but we do have "lost balls per nine" and " how many times you make it past past noon before your game drives you to drink." I hold the record for that one at two only because I don't carry a flask.

You might garner from this that I had a tough day on the links yesterday. Alas, I was not alone. Woowoo Charly and the Old Redneck suffered golf indignities the equal of my own. Shots gone astray like a good teen in a bad crowd were the order of the day and though a couple of long putts found the bottom of the hole, most were short, long, pulled, pushed or snubbed like a leisure suit at a black tie affair. Hit a good shot and there was almost no point in hitting the next. It was doomed, cursed, reviled and destined for the Golf Hall Of Shame. Sure an it t'was a grim day laddie, but we slogged on through thick and thin...thick of hitting it thin, and at day's end there was, mercifully, alcohol.

You see we had been joined on the course by a newcomer named Ron whose golf game was better than ours even on a day when we might have played closer to our B game. (We three don't really have an A game.) Of course having a witness to each shot hooked, sliced, topped, chili dipped and generally butchered in all duffer ways possible only added to our collective grief, but at round's end Ron graciously invited us to his new home over looking the second hole's tee box and fairway for a post round cocktail. (From his balcony you can also see the river that is now home to, I'm sure, hundreds of golf balls, many of them mine.) We met Ron's wife Janet and after chatting amiably for awhile, we invited them to join us for dinner later, which they did.

So, our golf game was a flop like many of our shots, but new friends were made. That's a trade-off that works for me.

Blogging For No Reason

I'm reading a book entitled "Special Topics In Calamity Physics". Doesn't that seem like an unlikely title for a novel? But then my last book "I Am Charlotte Simmons" was oddly titled too. Or at least I think so. Maybe all the good titles have been used up. Gone with the wind, so to speak.

I'm at a loss for words this morning which is crazy as there are books all around me just full of them. Hold on while I go get a few.

If you apologize to the spider before you step on it or swat it, you are my kind of person. That's from a note I left myself that was probably meant to lead to another thought. I can't imagine what it is. Here's another: ask your doctor if Global Warming is right for you. I'm sure that was supposed to inspire something profound. What do you suppose it could be? A diatribe on commercials or something political? Maybe it has to do with the greatest phrase ever uttered in the history of television ads, to wit, "If you have an erection lasting more than four hours..." There's not a Stand Up at a Comedy Club who isn't taking a run at that one.

Don't spread this next around because we don't want the place to get too crowded. Delicias Del Peru is running specials during the rainy season that are increible!
We got an appetizer (some kind of cold soup), an entree of corvina smothered in a shrimp sauce, rice and a chicken breast smothered in a spicy brown gravy, a small cucumber salad, a glass of wine and a dessert called Suspiro(which means sigh in English)that is a flan like pudding only lighter, for $9.95. I'll say that again, $9.95! Niiiiiiice.

Latest Bit

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT


“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. That’s the ethic I was raised with. And by that I mean if you give your all and still lose, you can walk away with your head up knowing you did your best.”

That’s Pete Winslow talking, Winnie to his friends, and the oldest of the three sucking down beers at their local sports emporium. He’s feeling a little smug, thinking he has the moral high ground in this conversation.

“Yeah that’s the best all right” pipes in Eddie Dey, the group’s youngest, “the best way to win diddly squat.” There’s a lot more to winning than just giving your all. There’s psyching your opponent, working the refs, seeing what you can get away with and, you know, finding an edge and working it. If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’ is how I look at it.”

Winnie is horror stricken. He’s never heard anything like that before. He says, “That’s not an ethic that’s…that’s…whatever is the opposite of an ethic!” He’s befuddled, at a loss for words. He looks across the table for support from Frank Means, the third member of the group, “What do you think Frank?” he asks. “Can he be right?”

Frank Means is in the middle, age-wise. The three are a sixty something, a forty something and a twenty something. Three generations who as neighbors became friends playing H-o-r-s-e and shooting hoops in Frank’s driveway. “You’re both right” he says. “I believe in playing fair, but winning is the most important thing.”

“How does that make Eddie right?” Winnie asks, looking confused.

“Well, sometimes your opponent makes the rules. If he’s grabbing, holding, stepping on your feet or whatever, and he’s getting away with it, then you better do the same or you’ll get your lunch handed to you. Fair is fair and like I said, it’s all about winning.”

There’s a sudden burst of noise in the room and all three look up at the television nearest them to see what’s going on in the ballgame.

Winnie though, is only half engaged. His eyes are on the screen, but his mind is still churning over what he has just heard. It’s not about the winning, he thinks, it’s about the playing. Well sure you’re trying to win, that’s why they keep score, but if you have to cheat to do it, what’s the point? Yeah, I know, the point is you win. Well it’s not worth it to me. He remembers another axiom from his childhood: winners never cheat and cheaters never win. Right, he thinks, tell it to these guys.
Winnie is a self described lifelong athlete and sports nut. Not big enough or good enough for anything professional, he still loved to play and was never without a game. Hoops and hockey, softball, tennis or ping pong, you name it, Winnie had given it a go. Now at sixty-two and nearing retirement as a divisional manager with a national sporting goods chain, his passion is golf. Cheating at golf is unthinkable to him and yet, while reading a biography of Michael Jordon, he had learned that Michael was not above throwing a ball out of a sand trap if no one could see him. How did this shift to winning at any cost occur? Could it all be traced to Vince Lombardi’s declaration “that winning isn’t everything it’s the ONLY thing”? He turns back to his companions and says, “Let me ask you something. How about fighting?”

Eddie and Frank both shoot back “What do you mean?”

“Well in my day, if you somehow came to blows with another guy, you know, pissed him off or something, you duked it out fair and square. If you knocked the guy down, you stepped back and let him get up, so you could knock him down again. Fight ended when you or he couldn’t go on; kind of like professional boxing in that way. There were unspoken rules. Things you could do and things you couldn’t do. Certainly, you never hit a man when he was down.”

Eddie was looking at him like he had gone round the bend, lost his mind, was doing the Alzheimer’s shuffle. But then Eddie was twenty-four. He had grown up a poor kid in an upscale suburb. His parents had put together enough money to buy a house there, but they really couldn’t afford the lifestyle. Eddie learned the only way to shut up the merciless taunting of his peers was to whip their asses at whatever sport they were playing on any given day. Cheating to him was not an edge or an advantage, it was part of the rules as he saw them. If that’s what it took to get his buddies off his back about his cheap sneakers or his off brand jeans, then so be it. He feels the same way now about life in general: whatever it takes to get ahead and stay ahead, he’s down with it. He WON’T be poor again. Before he can respond, however, Frank chimes in.

“If you knock the man down, you keep him down. Hell, if he gets up he might knock you down and he might not be as gentlemanly about allowing you back on your feet. You’ve got to keep him down, sit on him, punch him, whatever it takes to make him quit.”

Frank teaches English at a nearby junior college. He sees both Winnie and Eddie’s point of view. He is forty six and has witnessed the change in student’s attitudes over the years. He would like to side with Winnie, thinks that’s the way things should be, that’s the way, in fact, his father had taught him, but he knows the era of the gentleman, if it ever truly existed, is over. The world in general was now a harsher place and required harsher measures. He would never advise his students to be like Eddie, however, whose philosophy he thought too cold, too cutthroat, but he also couldn’t blame him. Nor would he suggest Winnie’s ethics. That would only serve to handicap his students in today’s more difficult cultural climate. Some sort of balance between the two schools of thought seemed the right place to be, the right tact to take, but defining that place was proving difficult. The best he could come up with was situational ethics and he was offering, “Of course it depends on the situation…” when Eddie cut in.

“If you knock him down, you kick him, you knee him, you beat him up so badly that he will never mess with you again. Otherwise, even if you win, he’ll be thinking of revenge and you will have to go through the whole thing again. And boxing Winnie, boxing is over. It’s Ultimate Fighting now and the Octagon rules. You watch a few of their fights and you’ll see guys doing exactly what I just described. I guarantee if there were no referees, there would be no rematches. Guys would be beat up way too badly to come back for more.”

Just as Eddie makes this point a girls softball team comes whooping and shouting into the bar and the conversation quickly changes to men’s other favorite topic, the ladies. Sports and ethics are put on the back burner for another time.

When the game on the tube comes to an end, the three drink up and head for home, their disagreement unresolved, all but forgotten. And it’s no matter, really. Not one of them could change the opinion of the other two. Their opinions were, after all, their truth, their reality, their strategy for life. Their opinions defined who they were.


Doc Walton June, 2008

Just Desserts

I'm out of cigars. I have more ordered, but until they arrive I'll just have to avoid doing anything that deserves a reward. Either that or eat a cookie. Which reminds me that dessert is a reward. When I was a kid I had one "grown-up" after another tell me that if I didn't eat my dinner I wouldn't get dessert. Now I always eat my dinner, well almost always, and by god I want my reward for doing it... dessert. My two in house chefs, Woowoo Chuck and RTGFKAR don't actually make desserts though, so I keep the cookie jar well stocked. There WILL be dessert.(Defined by me as something that contains sugar, tastes good and is in no way good for you.) I have to make up for all the ice cream, cake, pie, pudding and cookies I missed as a kid because the aforementioned "grown-ups" weren't able to get me to unclench my teeth so they could shove foodstuffs down my throat and thereby appease their need to see to it that I got a well balanced diet. Their failure in this regard was clearly responsible for my dearth of desserts. Had they given me the desserts anyway, I wouldn't have been so skinny and hence, not look like I needed to be fed other stuff. Fortunately I did have grandmothers whom I got to visit on occassion. If I was polite and clean and smiled for their friends, they would give me desserts FOR dinner if that's what I wanted. Grandmothers are good people.

I want to add something else here but I can't decide what. Celtics vs Lakers, Lorena, Annika and the LPGA tourney, Tiger and The US Open, dissension in The Sox clubhouse, or whether Hilary can obtain the vice presidency and sleep with interns to finally get even with Bill, but none of these catch my fancy. I think I'll just...skip it.

MIND LOG

Spawn of Wrayjay sent me a "Mind Log" (Thank you Spawn)that contains chapters headed MOOD LOG, DREAM LOG, EPIPHANY LOG, REWARD LOG and GTATITUDE LOG. The Introduction contains this sentence that I find spot on: "People tend to be seekers or ostriches-either they are fascinated by the ongoing process of personal growth, or they are happier burying their heads in the proverbial sand." Having always been a "what's it all about Alfie?" kind of a guy, I'm looking forward to filling in the info asked for in each chapter so that the world will have an accurate picture of my mind, because, clearly, this is something the world really needs. Ha!

Alrighty then, let's start with MOOD. Let me think about this for a minute. Mood...mood. That's past tense for the sound a cow makes, right? It's kind of fun to say when you stretch it out...mooooood. Hmmm, mood...mood. Okay, what mood am in? I am in a ......good mood. So there we have that.

DREAM. I do that every night. Doesn't everyone? Last night's was something about a dog crying in the distance all damn night. Wait a minute. That wasn't a dream, that really happened. The dream was...I don't remember, but I do know...it was good.

Now we come to EPIPHANY. Yesterday's concerned getting my hands through quicker at the bottom of my golf swing. Eureka! The ball goes further! Others include not petting reptiles and such eye openers as it's good to have an umbrella when it's raining. As I see it these epiphany things are all, well...good.

REWARDS are next. I don't know what they mean by that. Let me look in the book. Okay, how do I reward myself seems to be the gist. Mostly, I light up a stogie to give myself a job well done pat on the back. Of course, sometimes I light up even when I haven't done diddly. But you know, when I think about it, not doing diddly when you are retired is an official accomplishment so those cigars are well earned too. Cigars are good. Rewards are good.

And then there is the GRATITUDE LOG. It's the shortest section of the book. Probably because once you've said "I'm grateful" it's pretty much done. I think you are supposed to list the what fors, but at my age that could take days so I'll just say "for every damn thing that's, ah,...good."

Going back and summing up this early effort in my MIND LOG, we find good, good, good, good and good. Already the world has an inkling into the depths of my old gray matter. I'm good. You?