Life On A B-I7

I’m taking a “Writing is Fun” class at my local Senior Center. The first assignment was to write a story in five paragraphs. I recently saw a headline about a man that was about to finish the trek of a lifetime. He made it his goal to walk around the world, some 31,000 miles. It took him over 20 years. He will be arriving at his Mother’s home in Great Britain sometime next week. I chose his adventure as the inspiration for this writing challenge. This is fictional material based on a news headline…

Mr. Wilson reached the rank of Warrant Officer Class One in the British Army Paratroopers. He served with distinction and was highly decorated. Being a Paratrooper was his life. He served for 20 years and never experienced a moment of boredom.

When he turned 38 years old, he was forced to retire. He hadn’t prepared for this eventuality and wasn’t sure what he was going to do with himself. Jumping out of airplanes was in his blood. He knew that living a life without excitement was the last thing he wanted to do.

After returning home he looked for work to fill his days. Nothing seemed to fit him. He found a job as a sales associate in a sporting goods store. He was good with people, they loved listening to his stories, but every day after work he returned home and found himself feeling unfulfilled.

He quit his job and every day for the next month he spent his waking hours walking around town. He found himself tracing the same route around town over and over again. He knew his life lacked the adventure he desperately craved.

After a month of walking around town, he realized he was going nowhere… literally. That’s when he decided he would take up walking with a purpose. He would leave his hometown and not return until he had walked around the world.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

Does no one remember the fall of Rome? A nation cannot survive when its leaders look only toward self-enrichment and glorification rather than seeking to lead wisely. Nor can a nation survive when its electorate votes only for its self-interest and not for the interest of the body politic as a whole.

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.

–Emily Dickinson

This quote is from the letters of Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (August 16, 1870). Besides this notion being an important theme in Dickinson’s work, the quote feels especially relevant today. We have entered a period in history where truth is treated more like a commodity than it is a standard to be upheld for its own sake. When I say commodity, what I mean is something that is sold to us, not necessarily for its own sake, but for the sake of achieving some selfish goal on the behalf of the purveyor. In other words, truth has often become something akin to “fake news,” to quote a famous practitioner.

In November, I am starting a new project, “50 Quotes.”

All of the quotes will be from female authors, poets and novelists. The quotes I have chosen could have come from a man or a woman. Which gender you imagine wrote the quote will largely come down to the voice you hear when reading the quote and (what I imagine to be) your perception of the differences between men and women.

For the record, I don’t think there is any difference between the male brain and the female brain. I think the difference is largely one of our own experience and the influence of society on our view of one another. My suggestion is to try and hear both voices when reading these quotes.

I intend to follow each quote with a brief personal reflection. I don’t dare call these reflections a commentary, that would be too presumptuous. After all, my lifetime experience is not in the arts. That doesn’t stop me from admiring all of these thoughts, and finding them instructional and even motivating.

I hope you enjoy them. I’m placing them here so I can enjoy them now, and for years to come.

Yesterday I passed my IPTPA Pickleball Test for Level 3.5 certification. The IPTPA levels range from 2.0/2.5 to 5.0. 5.0 is considered Professional, 3.5 is considered “Upper Intermediate.” To obtain a rating of 3.5 you have to achieve a score of 80 out of 120 in a skills assessment and a minimum score of 23 points out of a possible 33 points in live play against a 3.5+ opponent. I scored 96 and 24 respectively. I passed the skills easily. The live play is a bit more challenging because there is pressure involved.

In the live play, I fell behind in the first of 3 games scoring only 5 points. By the time I got to the third game, I needed 11 points to pass. (Each game is played to 11.) I scored 11. It was quite the nail-biter. A lot like a goal line stand to win that game with only seconds remaining on the clock - a similar feeling.

Two days prior to my test day, I took a bad fall on the court. I landed on my head. Play stopped and everyone gathered around to see if I was all right. I’m fine. The owner of the club drove me home. (They are wonderful people.) I took it easy the next day but I have quite the abrasion on my forehead and gash above my right eye. I always wear safety glasses, I was chasing down a lob and I went down landing right on my safety glasses. I was playing against 3.5s and 4.0s, trying to show I belonged. I learned a valuable lesson, going back for a lob is fine, sometimes you have to, but don’t combine that with reaching out beyond your balance point. I’m won’t let that happen again.

Last night I played in a masquerade pickleball tournament. I dressed as a cyclist (not a huge stretch). Part of my costume was my bicycling helmet. I’m sure I will get plenty of comments (and laughs) like, “you should wear that helmet all the time!”

Maybe I should…

The Cambridge Dictionary defines megalomaniac as:

Someone who has an unnaturally strong wish for power and control, or thinks that they are much more important and powerful than they really are.

I can’t imagine whom this might be describing…

Sadly for us, he is the most powerful man in the world. So he doesn’t have to imagine how powerful he is. Combined with his lack of humanity, this is bad news for all of us, not just here at home, but the entire world.

PCE is a measure of how people are adjusting their spending based on the impact of inflation on their overall financial situation. In other words, their overall ability to afford life’s necessities. Viewed another way, will I buy chicken or beef, or will I eat baked beans…

Wealthy people are not impacted by inflation to the degree that ordinary people are. PCE for the wealthy stays relatively flat. The biggest impact of inflation on the wealthy is their calculation of when to trade in their yacht for a larger one.

Have you given any thought to a degree from Harvard? Here is the syllabus for Humanities 10a and 10b, Fall ‘26 and Spring ‘27. This is a popular course limited to only 90 students. Use the syllabus below to join the fun (sans classroom discussion and final exam).

My score is 5 out of 22. That’s not great, but I’m still working on it…

Fall 10a covers classics from antiquity to the modern era, in chronological order. Here is the reading list:

The Odyssey (Homer)
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Sappho).
Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
The Symposium (Plato)
The Aeneid (Virgil)

Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio)
Hamlet (WIlliam Shakespeare)

Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene’ Descartes)
The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Du Bois)
The Metamorphosis (Frank Kafka)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Ulysses (James Joyce)

Spring 10b covers classic literature from the modern era back to the ancient world. Here is the reading list:

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth & Coleridge)
Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

On LIberty (John Stuart Mill)
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller)

Confessions (Saint Augustine)
The Golden Ass (Apuleius)
Antigone (Sophocles)

Brazil’s legal model rests on the premise that the right to truthful information in elections supersedes an unfettered right to free speech.

—Andrew Weissmann

Free Speech is not the right to say whatever you want to say regardless of whether it is true or not. It is not the right to lie without legal encumbrance.

Wealthy people buying and controlling our Social Media gives those few outsized power over us. Their ability to propagate lies and give their platform the ability to control what is fed to us is a violation of what boils down to free speech. It is not free speech, It is speech that has been bent to propagate lies in a way that society has never had to deal with before. It is directed, coercive, speech, intended to insidiously control you and your view of reality. The only tool we have right now to counter this phenomena Is critical thinking. We all must employ that tool and share it as best we can with as many people as we can. Politics is not supposed to be a reality show that is packaged for our entertainment. It is not a race to the bottom of what constitutes societal morals and decency.

Treating politics as if it were those things is placing us on a path that jeopardizes the survival of a free society.

No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the sapped breach in America’s sacred tradition of peaceful transition of power.

—Judge Tanya Chutkan

We should all remember these words, spoken in a court of law upon the pardon of the convicted J6 Perpetrators. We must not forget the atrocities and disgrace of that day. If anyone argues that the events of that day were justified, simply ask them, “why was the violence and degradation justified?” If their answer avoids any acknowledgement of the seriousness of that event, keep asking.

Under US Law, it is a crime for any publicly elected figure to knowingly and intentionally tell a material lie about the state of the Union or any issue of public concern.

Oops! That’s a lie.

I guess you would call this a teaser. In November and December I plan to post 50 quotes that I find meaningful. (A quote a day for 50 days.) All of the quotes I will be sharing have been written by female authors. I chose female authors because I realized my personal reading has been heavily weighted toward the works of male authors. It’s time to diversify a bit.

It’s not a matter of male vs. female. Everyone has a unique perspective to share. Society makes a big deal about the “differences” between men and women. I think that perception is largely nonsense. What is different between men and women is not the way they think, or how talented they are with words; The difference comes down to the experiences we have as we move through life. I have found looking over the quotes I plan to share, that all of the ideas stem from the author’s experience. Many of those experiences are ones I have not had, so I expect these quotes to open up new vistas for me.

Along with each quote I plan to add some thoughts of my own. I’m looking at this as a writing exercise. November is “Writing is Fun” month at my local Senior Center. I plan to attend the weekly class in November to write. I think the quotes I have found will be excellent fodder for my own writing and posting.

November is going to be fun. I’m looking forward to sharing these quotes and my thoughts about them. Here is one that I will be including. You can read about this one on November 9th…

I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

–Charlotte Brontë

Check back on November 9th for my reflection on this quote.

I start each day with this Mantra:

I acknowledge the Creator and give thanks for the opportunity to greet another day. It is my intention to honor this day by presenting my best self to the world.

It is my goal for today to be kind to everyone I meet. I will look for the best in everyone and treat everyone I meet with kindness and respect.

I will share a smile whenever I can because I believe a smile has the power to make lives better.

I start each day with these Chants. I typically repeat each one three times.

Chant #1

Ohm Nama Shivaya.
Ohm Nama Shivaya.
Ohm Nama Shivaya.
Ohm Nama Shivaya.

Chant #2

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare,
Hare Rama, Hare Rama,
Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

Chant #3

Krishna,
Jehovah,
Allah,
Buddha,
Yahweh,
Shanghai,
All Are One.

No one can take away your accomplishments, they are yours. Even if someone does a thing better than you, that has no impact on what you have achieved. Enjoy your accomplishments. Hold on to them, strive to improve them to the best of your ability.

It is customary to dip the rear wheel in the Pacific Ocean before beginning a West to East trans-continental bicycle journey.

Family and Friends gathered for a send-off dinner a Dockside Dogs. Not only home of the “Anacortes Dog,” but possible the best dog on the West Coast. (Open to interpretation, but the owner of the restaurant agreed with me.)

The official start was June 1. That was to make counting the days easier…

I was only able to cover 61 miles out of Anacortes on June 1 before reaching a road closure, a winter rock slide had closed The North Cascades Highway at Ross Dam.

My SAG (Support and Gear) drove me around the closure.

Two days later I met Todd. Todd is retired Navy. He served with distinction. I couldn’t get enough of his stories during the short time we had together.

It looked like we might make the rest of the trip to Bar Harbor together. We rode for three days before he unexpectedly had to return home. My SAG took him to Spokane, Washington and helped him get his bike shipped home and gave him a lift to the Spokane airport.

My route followed U.S. Highway 2 through Northern Idaho and much of Montana.

U.S. Route 2 goes all the way from Bellingham Washington to Bar Harbor Maine. Once I reached the central states I mainly followed county roads instead of Route 2. That allowed me to avoid the more congested stretches of Route 2.

The Northern route across the U.S. offers spectacular scenery. It is my favorite of the three major bicycling routes across the country.

You can see the spring run-off at peak flow. The river is very swift. This would be a fun kayaking adventure.

I camped most of the time, getting a motel every 4th or 5th night.

I enjoy camping. It is nice to sleep in a real bed occasionally and it saves a lot of money.

It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing to persuade my friend to pose for a photo with me. He did insist on a treat and he’s not the sort of fellow you say no to.

I stayed in the Chalet Motel in Whitefish.

This is a photo with the owner. Her son ran the restaurant attached to the Motel. She told me he made the best pizza and Italian food in Northern Montana, and she was not kidding.

She was a sweetheart. She even did my laundry for me.

Whitefish is the first major stop-off point for the Great Divide Mountain Bike race from Banff to Mexico. I arrived the same day the racers hit town.

The bike shop in Whitefish had 6 bicycle mechanics working that week. Not only did they service all the racer’s bikes but they even took care of mine on very short turn-around.

Whitefish is a very cool town.

I’m starting my climb up to the summit of the Tetons and the Continental Divide.

I wasn’t fully prepared for the climb, but I made it. Having SAG support across Washington was a big help in getting me ready for this part of the route.

This was still a bit of a struggle.

My SAG left me after I crossed into Idaho. I suspect Pickleball tournaments back home may have had something to do with that…