It’s my page and I’ll post what I want to, post what I want to… Lots of people seem to read the things that show up here when I’m in need of a brain dump and I’d like to remind them that everything that appears here is colored by my thought processes, lived life experiences, inherent biases, educational background, and the phases of the moon. None of it should be taken as the revealed word from on high. I am frequently wrong, am perfectly OK with counter arguments which present ideas or thoughts that I might not have taken into account or of which I might be unaware, and I have been known to change my mind on subjects, especially political ones, over time. When I first became aware of national politics and how our system operates in the 1970s, I would have described myself as a moderate Republican of a type that has been drummed out of the party starting with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. I now cannot think of a single Republican policy on a national level which I can support.

I remain an individual who believes in rationality, expertise, the scientific method, consensus, inclusivity, stewardship of resources for future generations, and strategic use of finances to jump start the solving of problems. I believe that tradition has a place in holding a society together but that tradition should adapt itself to new realities rather than we try to alter reality to fit tradition. I believe that religion is important in grappling with the mysteries of life where science may not yet have the ability to provide answers, but I do not think that dogma should override science or set public policy. There are 330 million of us sharing this country each with our own interior lives and understandings and none of our religious conceptions or beliefs is more correct than any other.

I am saddened to think that a majority of my fellow citizens do not think the way I do, or at least did not cast votes last week suggesting that they think the way I do. But I’m used to being in a minority class. This country has been pulling away of Enlightenment liberal values toward a more authoritarian form of social organization my entire adult life, fueled by a rise in unbridled capitalism that had allowed an enormous percentage of the wealth of the richest society this planet has ever seen becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I voted for the first time in 1980. There was huge social shift at the time which I could see in my peers. As a freshman in college, when I looked at the upper classmen, they were using their educations to explore, to develop themselves, to figure out how they could use their skills and their privileges for better. As a senior, when I looked at the incoming freshmen, their motivation was how to use their educational opportunities solely to improve their personal financial position and make more money. Perhaps it was the influence of the economic conditions of the 70s and early 80s. Perhaps it was the skyrocketing cost of an education which really started to take off in that period. But I find it unsurprising that it’s my generation (45-65) that really broke for Trump while the Boomers and Silent Generation (65+) did not.

The breakdown in social order of the late 60s fueled the rise of a more conservative Republicanism under Richard Nixon which completely crushed the Democrats by 1972. Nixon, however, overreached in what we now call Watergate and, as the press and the American public of the time still cared about corruption and criminal activity in high office, the Democrats were able to temporarily rebound with Carter in the late 70s. The malaise of that time, in terms of the economy and foreign policy doomed his reelection and in 1980, the Reagan Republicans rode into town.

Reagan and Bush I (pretty much a third Reagan term) would likely have held on to power had not Ross Perot run his independent campaign in 1992 which shifted enough of the Republican vote away to allow Clinton to squeak through. His administration turned out to be well run and the 90s were an economically stable time and he won reelection. He should have been able to hand power over to Gore in the election of 2000 but a combination of an emboldened Supreme Court deciding that the separation of powers no longer really mattered plus some dirty tricks with vote counting in Florida doomed that. Bush II used war mongering to stay in power through two terms but the great recession of 2008 led to enough economic desperation for voters to want to try something else allowing for Obama to win. The Republican machine felt cheated and, starting with the TEA party and the reaction of Obamacare, built the current leviathan that will be very difficult to combat, giving us Trump. A pandemic limited Trump to one term but that was a wounding, not a mortal blow. Reagan/Bush II/Trump is a natural arc towards very specific ends. It’s been designed and executed by the Heritage Foundation and any number of other right wing, well funded civic groups, aided and abetted by a media machine with little respect for objectivity or truth. The left has had no similar infrastructure on a national level. The well organized and financed progressive groups also spend way too much of their time infighting or expending all of their resources on unimportant short term wins rather than working on long term strategy. Clinton/Obama/Biden were helped by specific events that coincided with their initial elections, not by a long term plan. Reaction rather than action.

What now? I may be grieving on some level but I’m not withdrawing with Edward under the office supply shelves and licking my wounds for the next four years. There’s work to be done. I can’t undo the election but I can get up, get dressed, go out, and do good in the world. And that’s what I am planning on for the foreseeable future. There are people who are likely to be hurt by new policies and laws. I can help care for them, one at a time. (That’s always been my motto for my medical career – save the world one patient at a time). I can shine a light on injustice and make sure it is seen for what it is. I can contribute my skills together with others to help create alternative ideas and ideals. I can take inspiration from the wonderful African-American community among whom I live and who have been repeatedly denied full participation in our society for four hundred years now and still live, love, create and have lives filled with joy. I can keep on writing now that I’ve figured out how to do it. Given that my books and essays have been critical of the incoming administration in the past, I shan’t be in the least surprised if I am eventually suppressed or deplatformed and, if I am, I’ll take it as a badge of honor.

I’ll probably write a bunch about politics the next few months as it’s occupying my mind. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working on my other projects. I’ve just found it healthy these last few years to do these brain dumps. I would start writing a Politically Incorrect Cabaret but I’ve gotten too dang old. Any twenty or thirty somethings out there want to pick up that torch? The moment is right.

Like everyone else in the country, ad a good fraction of the world’s population as well, I am working through my reactions to the results of this week’s election. I am not surprised by the Trump victory. I had prepared myself for that weeks and weeks ago as while I found Kamala Harris a fine candidate, I was unsure of her electability. I am surprised by the decisiveness of Trump’s victory with a commanding lead in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. He was unable to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020 so I am still puzzling out why he did this time around. I’ve read dozens of opinion columns with pundits of various political stripes pointing fingers at all sorts of bogeymen but my guess is that Occam’s razor will leave us with the simplest answer. This country has always been and remains a patriarchy. It’s baked into our cultural DNA.

Our culture derives primarily from the British colonists who crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. People do not pull up stakes and undertake a difficult voyage fraught with the privations of travel at the time if their lives are going well. It’s the dispossessed, the endangered, the family that sees little hope for their children with the status quo, that are willing to make that sacrifice. (The same motives that are driving immigration northward from Latin America). The outgroup in the 17th century were the English puritans and related continental religious groups who rejected the empty pomp of the established state churches and came for religious freedom – The Congregationalists to Massachusetts, the Quakers to Pennsylvania etc. Their austere interpretation of religious doctrine and its role in public life infused the new world with a patriarchal world view, a culture of self denial, and the famous puritan work ethic. This way of seeing and doing things spread from the early metropolitan areas of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to the rest of the country as a formal union of the states created a national identity. (There are a few outliers – New Orleans, having developed from French/Spanish/Creole culture has a completely different set of mores from most of the rest of the country, most easily seen in the toleration of public drinking).

While we didn’t exactly relegate women entirely to the status of chattel, we certainly circumscribed their lives and made them dependent on the existence of their men folk in ways that the women of Saudi Arabia would recognize. Women were not granted the right to vote until 1920, 72 years after the famous Seneca Falls convention where the leading women’s rights advocates of the day met and drafter their strategies for empowering women politically. Women were not allowed financial independence from men until the mid 1970s when they were finally allowed to open bank accounts and have credit accounts in their own name. They could be legally raped by their husbands until 1993. They still have not achieved full bodily autonomy.

Patriarchal attitudes, especially as filtered through Victorian mores, have created a culture of idealized feminine purity which still infiltrates so much of what we do without thinking. The white wedding dress and veil and the giving away of the bride, the double standard in regards to sexual behavior and slut shaming, the idea that women and girls need to be protected from the harsher elements of life. When our culture ventures out of these unwritten rules, punishment is quick and severe. When Alfred Kinsey published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male’ in 1947, it was a cultural sensation and he was lauded for demystifying the subject. The intelligentsia all read it for titillation if for no other reason. When he published ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Female’ a year or so later, there was outrage. How dare such filthy things we said about wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. His career and research never recovered. When pop music in the late 70s was taken over by singers and creators who were predominantly female, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community, the culture responded with ‘Disco sucks’ and a quick elevation of straight male hard rock bands. (Dressed mainly in outfits from the Atlanta Eagle, courtesy of the influence of Rob Halford of Judas Priest). When then First Lady Hilary Clinton came up with quite reasonable solutions to the problems in the American health care system, she had to be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then there’s the sad tale of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Whatever the reason, patriarchy or other, we have the result that we have. The Democrats are too adult to march on the Capitol brandishing AK-47s and pooping on congressional desks so we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power (although I have the feeling that Biden has prepared for this moment and has a couple of tricks up his sleeve after the Supremes basically declared the president above the law). January 20th will roll around and we’ll be off to the races again. Just a reminder – when dealing with authoritarians – believe what they tell you. We will get at least parts of Project 2025. I hope the worst parts will become mired in constitutional challenges. We are likely to get a cabinet and senior government filled with sycophants rather than individuals of talent and capability. This may speed up my retirement plans. I’m not sure I can function in a health system guided by Joseph Ladapo and RFK Jr. (Between the pandemic and the aging of the boom, it’s already in crisis and that’s not the team that’s going to be able to shore it up). How much of the immigrant pronouncements are rhetoric and how much will be acted upon I simply don’t know. Rounding up and deporting tens of millions of undocumented individuals is possible (Nazi Germany showed us that – just take a look at the story of the Hungarian Jews). All I can say is if it begins, do not let it happen under cover of darkness and behind closed doors. Find out and publicize exactly what goes on in detention centers. Even a partially successful mass deportation will decimate the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors. There will be no nursing assistants in nursing homes so you’ll have to take grandma in. Tariffs will cause price spikes so be ready to forego those cheap and readily available consumer goods. If we withdraw from NATO, forget that European vacation. Those with American passports may not be welcome.

What am I not going to do? I am not going to cut people with differing political ideas completely out of my life. I am not them. I don’t know what combination and culmination of personal choices has allowed them to select as they have. I will be polite, but I am likely to give them a wider berth and share less but I will not be an absolutist. That leads to an even wider divide in society and it’s wide enough already. Plus, politics are a funny thing. Things can change much faster than you might think. When I lived in California in the 80s and 90s, it had a Republican governor and a very conservative state house. In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8 which made gay marriage illegal. Just a few years later, Windsor and Obergefell changed all of that and just this week, California voters passed a state constitutional amendment enshrining gay marriage as a right. It only took sixteen years for everything to change, not 72.

As the Chinese curse proverb goes – May you live in interesting times.

I think I need a drink.

It’s getting late on election day. The polls are closing and now we wait. I don’t know about turn out nationally, but locally it’s a good deal higher than it has been for some time with long lines at some polling places. I got up and voted prior to heading in to work, arriving about 7:45 and it took me about 45 minutes to wind my way through the line to collect, fill out, and deposit my ballot. I haven’t a clue what will happen tonight, but whatever it is, I’ll be getting up tomorrow and going in and taking care of patients because that’s what I do and that’s what’s really important – people helping others rather than trying to destroy them in pursuit of temporary political power.

I also see the spinal surgeons tomorrow in regards to my cervical spondylosis which has been causing spasms in my left shoulder girdle for the last six months. I have no intention of actually having surgery on my neck as I can deal with the pain and I haven’t had any functional issues, but I think it’s wise to know all of the alternatives. My guess is I’ll end up with some physical therapy and traction. The only issue will be trying to figure out how to fit in some physical therapy appointments into my already overly crowded schedule.

I was supposed to be at Little Women rehearsal this evening but illness in a key team member caused a quick adjustment to the rehearsal schedule and I am not needed. I thought about taking myself out to dinner and a movie, but decided instead to stay home and do some writing, catch up on progress notes, and go to bed early. I’m a bit fatigued after this weekend. As I didn’t have anything specific on the schedule, I raced over to South Carolina on Saturday to see Frank Thompson as Mortimer Brewster in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace (it was a bucket list role for him) and raced back on Sunday. It would have been relatively uneventful but in my throwing things into a duffel for the overnight, I somehow forgot to pack my CPAP and therefore slept very badly Saturday night. That combined with twelve hours of driving has left me a little bushed.

It has been some years since I last saw Arsenic and Old Lace produced on stage. I had forgotten what a singularly odd play it is – a farcical comedy about mass murder with galloping insanity, spoofing of religion and the police, and various 30s horror movie tropes thrown in for good measure. There’s nothing else quite like it in the American theater cannon. It still works with all the grisly humor played for laughs leaving the audience giggling at highly inappropriate subjects, similar to Sweeney Todd, although many of the references, while au courant for 1941, have fallen into obscurity. There are few under the age of sixty who will understand a joke about Judith Anderson. I don’t remember the last time it was produced locally (probably the South City production I saw about fifteen years ago) but I can think of a number of members of the theater community who would be perfect for various roles. I’ve aged out of the juicer roles myself and would probably have to settle for one of the lonely old men in the cellar.

Covid is still very much out there. It’s not at the 1/40 Americans infected that it was this summer, it’s more like 1/120 Americans currently has a case. Vaccination rates with the current booster remain low. I saw a statistic today that bothered me. Only 15% of currently employed health care workers have taken advantage of the most recent booster since it became available a couple of months ago. For the most part, it’s mandatory that health care workers receive flu shots. Both UAB and VA employee health start chasing me every October until I get one and I won’t be allowed to work in patient care until I can either prove my adherence or provide a medical reason why I cannot be vaccinated. No such rules have come down for covid boosters. I’m not saying that they should necessarily, but I find it interesting to compare and contrast.

The big issue is not acute covid infections. For the most part, between vaccine and natural immunities we’re doing pretty well at keeping ourselves out of the hospital. The issue is the long term complications of long covid which has somewhere between a 3 and 10 percent chance of occurring after even mild cases. Long covid significantly raises the chance of chronic respiratory illness, heart disease including heart attack and congestive failure, stroke, and dementia. For those in my generation who are starting to see the dementia belt approaching, keeping up to date on covid immunity is probably statistically the best thing you can do for yourself to stave dementia off.

One of the essays I’m toying with is something along the lines of ‘We Will All Have Long Covid’. If we are so lack luster at taking preventive steps, have significant chances of developing the issue, and enough time passes, by the 2030s we may have an enormous burden of what should have been preventable chronic disease above and beyond that brought by the aging processes of the baby boom (now fourteen months away from turning eighty). I sit and ponder these things and start flipping calendar pages and calculating my retirement date again.

I am not raising my blood pressure by watching the election returns tonight. I can do nothing about them and it’s not like I won’t find out. I’m sure to be beaten over the head with the result tomorrow morning when I wake up and open my computer. Good night and good luck.

Ghost cat Edward remains a ghost cat. He’s moved out from behind the dryer, and also abandoned his hole under the spare leaf for the dining room table. He seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence in the bottom of the office supply closet. I check to make sure he’s breathing. Leave him some kitty treats and make sure there’s food and water in his bowls and that there are signs of litterbox use. He may decide to emerge at some point. He may decide that life is better hiding under a shelf with a large box of legal envelopes next to the paper cutter. And given the mass hysteria gripping the land eight days prior to the election, he may have the right idea.

So far today, I have received three e-mails and six text messages begging me to contribute to a national political campaign. I don’t watch commercial TV so I am spared the barrage of television advertisements. I tend to get my political news from a number of national digests that repackage AP, Reuters, the WaPo, NYT, NPR, and various other major dailies. My take aways are as follows. Is there actually anyone who has not yet made up their mind regarding whom they support in the presidential race? I think the mythical undecideds that the last minute push is chasing is a huge waste of money, which various consultancies and media companies are all too happy to accept. The Democrats great weaknesses are an inability to communicate how national policies will translate into actual effects for the majority of the population, especially regarding kitchen table issues such as the spike in housing, energy and food costs which have increased far beyond the ability of most wages to keep up. Combine this with the usual circular firing squad tactics and ridiculous ideological purity tests and there’s no way to shift middle America. The Republicans great weaknesses are a candidate whose behavior is, at best, reprehensible and who seems to be in the early stages of cognitive decline, and a replacement of seasoned politicos with fantasists who think that truth comes from belief rather than the other way round. I may crawl into the closet with Edward and remain there until long after election day. Somebody come in the morning and leave me pastry and coffee rather than kitty treats though.

The rehearsal process has started for Little Women. We have six weeks to whip it into shape. After a week of music rehearsal, the songs are starting to come together. We start blocking this next week. Now that I’ve had some time to study the script and score, I’m not as worried about it as I was. Everything I am being called on to do is well within my wheelhouse. I don’t have anything theatrical set for winter/spring as of yet but there’s likely to be some push on writing projects so it may be best if I do not overload myself too much. I always say that and then someone offers me a part I want to do or a show I love or the chance to work with others in the theater community whom I sincerely admire and we’re off to the races again and I’m running around trying to make sure that all the parts of life are evenly balanced and I’m in the right building at the right time on the right day. I can see myself coming down with an early dementia and singing show tunes while making house calls and trying to do histories and physicals on the stage crew at the theater. I have found, in my senior life with many years of experience under my belt, that showing up is the most important part of the task. If you do that, you can usually wing the rest.

My editor/publisher (who is becoming coauthor on the next series of books given the way they are developing) as all sorts of ideas regarding the material that became The Accidental Plague Diaries (and which I continue to dash off at uneven intervals – you’re reading today’s variation on a theme now). It seems to include websites. interactivity, artificial intelligence, and new publishing models. I don’t understand half of it. I’m letting him figure all that out. All I know how to do is write. I’ve told him tell me what you need an essay on and I should be able to get it to you by the end of the week. I’m fine if it becomes a living document with clickable links, and AI pulls from the historical record but I’m not the guy who’s going to figure that all out. I may have grown up four or five blocks away from Bill Gates but I did not get his programming skills. Must have been something in the water in our part of Laurelhurst. That being said, we may be beta testing some things in a few months and I will direct my readers (all six of you) at that time to read some things and try some stuff out.

The essay I am working on at the moment involves how the pandemic has changed our perceptions of time in various ways. It’s something I have noticed as being pretty universal among my friends and acquaintances. The accurate assessment of time and past and relative order of events has taken a blow due to two plus years of disruption in all of the usual orders and patterns of our lives. Whether we like it or not, evolution helped condition us to live with a certain rhythm of life, dictated by seasons and seasonal rituals, all of which went to hell in a handbasket in the early 2020s. I think becoming untethered form those cycles has had some rather profound effects. I’m not going to write them down today. I’m still working out my ideas and I want you all to have your interest piqued regarding the next writing project. (It does not yet have a title.)

I haven’t done a Covid update for a while so I took a look at the latest numbers this afternoon. We seem to be coming out of the summer surge. Test positivity rate has been dropping from over 10% to about 6% this past week. Waste water surveillance shows less virus. Deaths are under 600 a week nationwide (mainly in elderly and chronically ill individuals but there are still cases of robust healthy young people catching it and dying in ways that they did early in the pandemic). The updated Covid booster has been available since Labor Day. To date, about 30% of senior adults over 65 have been boosted. The general adult population is not racing out for their boosters though. They’re at about 13% boosted. Pro tip: the best reason to stay up to date with boosters is not to prevent the disease but to prevent long covid which can be disastrous. Even mild cases can turn into long covid in some individuals but the vaccine data shows remarkable protection against these complications.

There are still a large number of people opposed to the vaccine on philosophical grounds. I believe in bodily autonomy so I never argue with people about it. I will just take my chances with a vaccine with a documented complication rate of about 1/100,000 over a disease that killed one out of every 250 people in the country and has the possibility of crippling me every time I come down with it. But that’s just me.

It’s the calm before the storm. Or perhaps I’m in the eye of a hurricane. (Trivia of the day: hurricane is one of four Arawak words still in common use in modern English – the other three are canoe, hammock, and barbecue.) I suppose if one were to calibrate one’s speed of travel exactly and could follow the correct course, one could always remain in the eye of the hurricane and be relatively safe from the winds and the rain. But that seems rather impractical for most of us as we aren’t exactly nomads in this day and age. And so we get warming gulf waters and the effects of Helene and Milton (shortly to be joined by Oscar if I read my weather news correctly). I’ve heard from all of my friends in the Asheville area and everyone is safe but the extent of the disruption to basic infrastructure such as water and sewer and electricity and telecommunications will require years to repair and restore. Not to mention the number of major roads which have essentially ceased to exist, making it difficult to get the crews and equipment to where they need to be.

I’ve been going to Asheville intermittently for decades. My first trip was in 1992 when Steve and I did the first of several cross country jaunts so he could work on the Spivey genealogy and peruse records in various Appalachian courthouses. I spent more time in the 90s then I care to think about flipping through microfiches of birth and death records and property transfer deeds. There are two clans of Spiveys in the US. The lowland Spiveys who originated in Virginia in the late 17th century after emigrating from the British Isles. These were the Spiveys with money. Then there are the mountain Spiveys from the hollers of Appalachia. Steve did a great job tracing all the blood lines down finding that they all converged on three brothers who settled in the Asheville area (Buncombe county NC) around 1770. Where the three brothers came from is a bit of a mystery. Spivey could be Scots-Irish or it could be an Anglicization of the Czech Spivak. (Some branches of the family had a legend that the Spiveys were originally from Bohemia so that would fit). Try as he might, he could find no record of them prior to 1770 tax rolls. The grandson of one of the brothers, WIlliam Spivey, lived just outside of Ashville from about 1840-1930 and ‘Old Billy’ was apparently a local fixture to the point that the hill on which he lived is Spivey mountain to this day. In the 1990s, Steve found a number of distant cousins in the Ashville area who had known old Billy when they were young which makes you realize just how young the country is in some ways. My grandparents were born 1894-1903 and I have a couple of great-grandparents born in the 1850s. That’s pushing two hundred years ago.

So Steve and I spent time in Asheville as ground zero for the hillbilly Spiveys. I suppose it served me well years later when I had my contract with the United Mine Workers Funds and would spend a week a quarter in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia. If you haven’t been to that part of the world, the topography is interesting. The mountains aren’t terribly high, but they are incredibly steep and separated from each other by very narrow valleys and chasms caused by water running off into streams and rivers. You live in the few places where the river valleys have created relatively flat land. This is why Helene’s floods were so devastating. Trillions of gallons of water was dumped in a small geographic area very quickly. The ground was saturated by prior rain storms so the water all raced down into the river valleys which, being confined, led to rapid rises and flooding. And, as all of the population lives in the stream and river valleys the infrastructure was carried away as well.

Tommy loved Asheville as well and we would usually go about once a year. He loved the river arts district, Biltmore village and, of course the Biltmore estate. He wasn’t too keen on the house, finding it highly impractical, but he loved the winery and we usually came home with a case of assorted in the back of the car. I haven’t been back since Tommy’s death. I haven’t really had cause to. And now I’m not sure if I ever will. I want to remember it as it was, rather than as what it will turn itself into. I have the same feelings about Maui after the burning of Lahaina. If I go back to Hawaii, I’ll probably hang out in Kailua-Kona. It’s not a Sondheim quote coming to mind but a Kander and Ebb one. ‘Somebody loses, and somebody wins. One day it’s kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins. But the planet spins and the world goes round and round’. And because of that, we live in cycles of constant change. Human nature is one of inertia, of trying to keep everything the same – but that’s a losing strategy. The best thing any of us can do is work on our resilience and adaptability because none of us has any real control over much of anything.

It’s calm around here because it’s a weekend without a barrage of deadlines hanging over my head. Added to that, the weather has been gorgeous. It’s Alabama fall meaning cool mornings, rapidly warming up to the 70s and, most importantly, not a trace of humidity. Yesterday morning, I toddled off to the Avondale Park amphitheater to see Opera Birmingham’s annual children’s opera (An adaptation of Dvorak’s Russalka into the Little Mermaid story, lasting about 45 minutes). Children’s opera at the amphitheater has caught on the last few years and there were lots of preschool and early elementary tots wearing their Ariel outfits and playing in the bubbles, and occasionally trying very unsuccessfully to sing along. But for the most part they paid attention and this is how you build new audiences; get them while they’re young and convince their parents they want to see La Boheme for date night. The amphitheater shows are a happy accident of Covid. The venue has been there since the 30s but has been relatively neglected and underused in recent years. In the spring of 2021, when indoor performance of opera was not yet possible, Opera Birmingham did an abbreviated Pirates of Penzance there (I was one of the policemen) and it was a huge success, being one of the first music theater offerings locally in over a year. The venue is outdoors, family friendly, easy to get to, and it became natural to put the children’s opera there in subsequent years. So not all Covid changes are necessarily bad.

I thought about getting out on my newly renovated terrace and doing some work, but the first thing that needs to be done is for me to finish spray painting my patio furniture, a job that was interrupted two years ago when the terrace refurbishment from hell got underway. I just didn’t feel like that kind of exertion (I think I’ll hire some teenagers of my acquaintance who need extra money) so that will wait for another day. But I did get a hundred pages read in my book for book club, a number of things written, a start on this years CME, completed all of my progress notes and still had time to laze around this afternoon. But I don’t think this languid pace is going to continue.

Rehearsals begin on Tuesday for my next theater project (The 2005 musical version of Little Women which originally starred Sutton Foster). Despite my lobbying for Beth, I have been cast as Mr. Laurence, Laurie’s grumpy grandfather from next door. Once again, aging up for the stage. I’ll probably have to grow out the white whiskers and look a little weird for a bit. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a cast of ten, most of whom I have known for years and usually, with a cast that small, it’s easy to bond and become an ensemble with minimal perturbations. Then there’s the writing projects. My publisher is working on a grand plan which would include websites, ebook editions, audio editions, republication with updated material, and a second trio of books which we’re referring to as the Four Horsemen series, the first of which looks at how Covid changed things. (Spoiler: What didn’t it change?). How and when I’m supposed to write all of this without the enforced seclusion of a pandemic and shutdown I’m not sure but something should come of it. I’m putting my faith into his planning. I just hope there’s some ROI.

Thank you to all of you who have expressed interest in telling your Covid/Pandemic story as part of the new book. We’re slowly figuring out interviews and topics. You’re not forgotten. If anyone has a particular change they have noted in society, behavior, public policy, healthcare or anything else they think I should explore, let me know and I’ll take it under advisement. I have figured out some of the themes but there are more out there.

Going to watch a movie for MNM and then heading out to dinner with my travel agent for a post mortem on South America and starting to think about what the major 2025 trip should be.

I’ve been reflecting on life choices the last couple of days. I do that every once in a while. Wonder whether I’ve chosen the correct road through the yellow wood and if where I am is inevitable or if I had made a wiser choice at some point in the past I might be at some greater apogee of achievement. And then I think I’ve actually done OK by myself. The career has been relatively successful, I have a full life full of interesting activities and people, I have things to look forward to and (according to my quarterly statements), I need not panic about my finances yet. I suppose I have the mindset of those of us who belong to Generation Jones – that micro generation born 1957-65 who are nothing like the older boomers and not quite Generation X. Always Jonesing for something more and never quite content with what we have.

As far as a quick update goes, the medical work life is fairly placid. I’m a little tired of people taking a stupid pill before paging me or sending me a portal message but I can usually put on my professional demeanor and answer even the most inane questions with a quiet rationality. (Yes, you may take more than one pill for nausea a day if you’re still being bothered. It says so on the bottle. No, you need not worry that your cholesterol was a little high at the age of ninety-four. High cholesterol is linked to premature cardiovascular disease, a condition not possible at your stage of life. No, I cannot stop the ambulance that dad called for mom and reroute it to a different hospital.) Every month that goes by is a month closer to retirement. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

My publisher and I have worked out a structure for the next book. It’s going to be a look, from five years on, at how the pandemic and Covid has changed us. It will be divided into a number of themed chapters, each looking at a different social aspect of the pandemic and what has ensued. There will be an introductory essay laying out the theme, a longer essay talking about the specifics of the pandemic, and an interview with an individual whose story of their experiences with the pandemic illustrates that change. If we can keep to schedule, we should have it done shortly after the new year.

I have a request of all of my readers. We will need about fifteen interviews/stories/narratives of people who were affected in some way by the pandemic or its aftermath. If you have an interesting or unique experience or know of someone who has or would just like more information, drop me a direct message. We would particularly like to talk to someone who had a major hospitalization, a long covid experience, a business that failed, a business that changed in some fundamental way, an experience of being trapped in a place during the shut down that made it difficult to get home, or anything else that might make compelling reading. We have a half dozen lined up and need more. I’ve written drafts of some of the essays and I may put them up somewhere for beta readers and comments.

Covid numbers are down (only about 1/80 people you meet are currently actively infectious compared to the 1/40 that was prevalent earlier this summer). They do, however, remain somewhat higher than they were a year ago and we’re still losing about 1,000 people a week nationwide to the disease. If annualized, this brings the death toll to roughly the same magnitude as breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and motor vehicle accidents. (All between 42,000 – 52,000 deaths a year in the US). Will we have another surge with winter weather? It’s still unknown. The newly formulated Covid booster is now widely available. (Most insurances are paying for one annual Covid booster, two if you’re over age 65). I had mine a month ago. I really have no interest in enjoying long Covid which is the major risk factor for most of us.

I sang tonight with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra chorus which joined together with Samford University’s A Cappella Choir and Orchestra for a brief program of music from the opera world. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious singing. The voice lessons are helping a lot but I’m still having a lot of trouble when things go above an E-flat. Someday… Rehearsals for my next show start in a couple of weeks. Can’t really post anything about that yet. I have signed the contract but the theater hasn’t officially announced the cast list. Let’s just say it will keep me off the streets in November and early December.

Hurricane Helene made a mess of Appalachia last week and now Hurricane Milton threatens to make a mess of the Tampa Bay area this week. We used to come together in times of crisis and make sure our fellow countrymen were OK and helped them through the difficult times. Now I see bald faced and easily disprovable lies circulating for partisan political advantage everywhere I turn. When scoring political points becomes more important than helping those in need, there’s a serious sickness in society – and it seems to have infected even religious institutions. There are days when I want to retreat into my condo, lock the door and shut everyone out other than the door dash delivery person. And I don’t think it’s going to get any better the first week of November, no matter who wins. I fully expect it to actually get worse. Maybe it is time to let it all collapse and see if younger generations can pick up the pieces and build something better.

If I had a lawn, I’d be yelling at kids to get off it. I suppose I’m entering my geezer phase.

Reality bites. It really does. I’ve had to come back down to earth as I have spent the last few days getting my life in order for the next few months. I’ve been double checking calendars, looking at rehearsal schedules, trying to figure out a writing schedule to be able to start knocking out chunks of the new book, and trying to cope with all the material that built up from work during the two weeks I was on the opposite side of the equator. I think the pieces are all in place and my personal life should go relatively smoothly. The only performance gig I have is a symphony chorus concert on the 8th where we’re singing a couple of famous opera choruses (all of which I’ve sung before). I’ve missed a few rehearsals but I should be able to get that back in my head in the two we have coming up.

Of course coming back into the country has submerged me into the fever pitch hysteria of the current election cycle. We’ve got a minimum of five weeks left of this crap. Potentially quite a bit longer if the results are not clear cut or if any of the promised chicanery actually comes to pass. The first rule of an authoritarian regime is believe what they tell you the first time and the Republican party has made it very clear between it’s full endorsement of project 2025, it’s interfering in a partisan way with election procedures in swing states, that they have no problem with the end justifying the means to regain executive power. They know they cannot win the popular vote but they don’t have to. All they have to do is prevent Kamala Harris from collecting 270 out of 538 electoral votes and throw the election into the House of Representatives. The constitutional procedures in place for such an eventuality pretty much guarantee a Trump victory.

Given all of the talented politicians in the Democratic party nationally, Kamala is not the one I personally would pick to be the standard bearer but nobody asked me. I am much more centrist in my politics than most people think given my history in progressive politics, especially in a satirical vein. I believe we are strongest when opposing points of view work together and pull against each other, but with comity and compromise to find middle ground. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of that going on these days (thank you Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, the architects of the scorched earth partisanship of the last thirty years). I actually pay attention to issues and position papers and plans, not to stump speech rhetoric. I haven’t seen much on the R side in terms of policy that makes sense. Isolationism is no longer an option in a global economy. Immigration is a distraction, much like the pool table in River City Iowa, a scary thing not completely understood that can be used to gin up the base. The inflation of the last few years is not a result of Democratic policies, but a reaction to a world wide pandemic that unraveled supply and demand, transportation, and a host of other things and would have happened no matter who won the 2020 election. We’re actually in much better economic shape than most of the rest of the world, coming out of the pandemic over the last few years with a robust rebound that doesn’t exist elsewhere. The D side has hard data and facts, rather than talking points to bolster their positions.

Speaking of immigrants, we’re marching right along the ten steps of genocide with the rhetoric and the plans coming out of the Stephen Millers of the world. We seem to be at about stage 7 where we’re prepping the population and the bureaucracy to start rounding up ‘undesirables’. The current rhetoric against Haitians isn’t all that different than one would have found in Mittel Europa in the 1930s. Angry citizens have besieged more than one recent Alabama town council meeting practically ready to break out the torches and pitchforks to run a small number of Haitian immigrants, here legally and gainfully employed, out of town on rails. We seem to have cooled down a bit on the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and we’re only on stage 6 there. I guess it doesn’t play quite as well as most LGBTQ folk are native born with families and friends who would start asking a lot of unpleasant questions if authorities started rounding them up and marching them off. The only piece of that which seems to be sticking is book bannings and trying to protect children from drag queens. I have never heard of a drag queen molesting a child. I hear about conservative clergy being caught doing that on an almost daily basis.

If you look at actual crime statistics and not if it bleeds, it leads exploitation headlines, violent crime rates amongst immigrants are a good deal lower than they are amongst native borns. If there is a Republican victory and the worst begins to happen and authorities and social pressures make it dangerous for immigrants to continue to live their lives, what will you do? One of the comments I see on right wing news sites all the time is a variation on ‘if you think they’re so great, how many do you have living in your house?’ If things start going from bad to worse, there may be a number of them with me in my condo.

I don’t watch TV news. I haven’t for years. It’s all about grabbing attention, creating low level anxiety, and a need for a continued feeding of those limbic system centers with even more anxiety to keep the ratings up. I won’t participate. I read. I try to read things from both perspectives but I discount anything that has no hard data or fact to back up the opinion. I can tell the difference between the two. Pity that twenty years of No Child Left Behind and teaching to the test rather than critical thinking skills has created a population with some difficulties in understanding that opinions are fine and dandy but they are no substitute for facts and that a Google search is not adequate research on any topic and that you really should trust the people with years of experience and expertise over the charlatan with a good time slot and flashy graphics.

News today has been dominated by the god awful flooding in eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina from hurricane Helene. The damage there looks to dwarf anything that actually happened on the gulf coast. From what I can tell, there had been a few days of rain storms just prior saturating the ground in the area so when Helene made her Fujiwara effect turn to the left, it dropped ten inches of rain on ground that could not absorb any of it. All that water immediately hit the streams and then the rivers and, as they are constrained in narrow valleys, flash floods, rapidly rising waters, and whole towns gone in a matter of minutes. Never underestimate the power of water. The Appalachians, in the fullness of geologic time, were a mightier mountain range than the Rockies once. Of course, project 2025 gets rid of the National Weather Service and the NOAA which provide us with what tools we have to protect ourselves against such events.

To add insult to injury, UAB announced last week that they are scrapping the EMR system, installed just twelve years ago at great expense, in favor of a completely new EMR system to go live in about two and a half years. I put them on notice that I would adjust my retirement date to make sure it happens before that change. I am not learning yet another data system at my time of life.

I need a drink.

Rant over.

Dateline – Birmingham, Alabama by way of Santiago, Chile

In the interest of completeness, here’s the last entry in the South American travelogue (or, as I am referring to it in my mind, the ABC trip for Argentina, Brazil and Chile – the quasi visit to Paraguay doesn’t fit the mnemonic well so we’ll leave that out). As I am writing this from the comfort of my own bedroom with Binx the cat having got over his butt hurt at having been left behind for a few weeks (I had someone come watch over him – he’s been fine) I’ve given away the ending which is pretty much home again, home again jiggety jig. But let us go back 36 hours or so to the wine country of Chile.

It was another gorgeous cool but sunny morning in the Chilean coastal range. I found out we were less than ten miles from the coast where we were, but you would never know. So I guess the microclimate is very equivalent to the California wine growing valleys tucked in among the folds of that coastal range – Napa, Sonoma, and Ukiah. And similar latitude only south rather than north. No wonder it felt so familiar. I spent years in that part of the world. There wasn’t much to do other than get packed for the trip home and then get on the bus for a couple of hour ride back to the metropolis of Santiago. We got a bit of a bus tour of the city (uninspiring due to an uninspiring guide) and then dropped off at the Ritz Carlton in one of the nicer parts of town. Then, the obligatory three course lunch with three different wines.

As the tour was set up with the expectation that flights would depart the next morning, we were all booked into very nice rooms at the Ritz Carlton. I did not realize they were one of those establishments that rented rooms by the hour because I had all of about two and a half hours between the end of lunch and my needing to board the shuttle van to the airport as I was on the red eye back to Atlanta last night. I had fairly minimal time in Santiago but I did walk around a bit and snap a few pictures. It reminded me a lot of LA. A large city with a backdrop of snow capped mountains with a lovely warm climate, full of mid rise apartment and condo buildings (at least the parts of it I could see) with a cement channeled river running through the middle. No coast. That’s an hour and a half away in Valparaiso. I suppose the LA analogy holds true if you consider Valparaiso Santa Monica and Santiago the San Gabriel Valley.

There was worry about the flight back being majorly inconvenienced by hurricane Helene churning up the Gulf of Mexico but we went around or over it in some way and there were no more bumps than usual and got into Atlanta about half an hour ahead of schedule. This was a bit of a problem as customs was not yet open so we had to sit around while TSA early shift came to work. Being the first flight in of the day, the lines were short to get through passport control. The lines through security were another matter as they had obviously not scheduled enough workers to handle the incoming flights. Fortunately, I had a couple of hour layover so I wasn’t pressed for time. The Birmingham flight was a bit late as they held it for late passengers. Delta wanted to try and get as many people where they belonged before airports started shutting down across the Southeast. A friend picked me up, and I got home just after 9 am.

I’ve been dragging, but teleworking today trying to empty out all of my boxes and things prior to in person work on Monday. I’m slowly getting there and should be pretty caught up by the end of tomorrow. I hope. I even made my noon board meeting much to the surprise of the other members who assumed I would not be capable three hours after finishing international travel. I survived residency pre-workhour limitations. I know how to function without sleep. I just don’t enjoy doing it.

And so the trip is over. I’ll go back into travelogue mode at the end of December when I go off to London for a theater week with some of the usual gang. In the meantime, you’ll have to read me opining about public health, elder care, politics, theater, and all the usual things I write about. It may be a few days.

Dateline – Millahue Valley, Chile

Today was sort of a spa day, a palate cleanser before the very long day of tomorrow bleeding into Thursday which is the last leg of the journey. Most people are flying out Thursday morning or afternoon. For schedule and cost reasons I am on a red-eye Wednesday night and due back in Birmingham around 8 AM on Thursday. While I am technically working on Thursday and Friday, I am teleworking and I will get things done as I get them done as allowed by jet lag and all of that jazz. The one good thing about all of this is I am going to beat Hurricane Helene to the US by about 15 hours so I should get home without incident. Those trying to fly into the South East the next day may not be so lucky.

There actually is a spa at this chi-chi very upscale boutique mountain retreat in which i find myself, but I’m not particularly a fam of spa services so I took advantage instead of the spectacular views, the abundance of free wine, and a few organized programs that required minimal thought and effort. Those started this morning with a horseback ride through the vineyards. It’s been several decades since I was last on a horse but i was quite a good rider in my youth and I and Illusion, the bay gelding to whom I was introduced, soon came to an understanding about who was boss and the ride through the burning off morning fogs, the slumbering grape vines, and a variety of bird species which I did not recognize. I did see a rather lovely bevy of quail (I looked that collective up-I would have guessed covey and would have been wrong) which are instantly recognizable by their unique body shape and their adorable little topknots. We used to have a lot of quail on the Stanford campus and it was always fun in the spring to watch the mamas leading their little lines of babies around, sort of a live action version of The Partridge Family credits. I did not fall off and my muscle memory for riding returned rather quickly.

Then, after a brief interlude to get the horse smell off, a quick class on wine and chocolate pairing. Just the first of several wine centered activities for the day. Well, when one is staying in the middle of a vineyard on a winery property. Fortunately, I like wine and I’m also smart enough not to drink to much too fast. The cabernet paired best with a dark raspberry chocolate, at least to my palate. Then lunch (more wine) with a crab ceviche/seafood bisque and a fresh caught white fish. (We’re only ten miles from the coast – but then in Chile, pretty much everywhere is about ten miles form the coast. Apres diner, a nap.

Late afternoon we went back down the hill to tour the Vik winery. It’s a very 21st century construction, full of sustainable energy design, very modern architecture, and hundreds of large tanks and thousands of oak barrels. I’ve been through many wineries in the past and that was nothing new but this winery actually makes its own oak barrels and we saw the cooperage which was something I had not really had a chance to look at in the past. Then yet another multicourse meal (even more wine – both with hors d’oeuvres and with the meal itself) in the winery restaurant as the sun set over the hills. We returned up the hill to the hotel in total darkness and I took a few minutes to go out where there were no lights and look up at the southern heavens, identifying the southern cross and getting a really good look at the milky way as we are far away from city light pollution. And now, my last chance to get some decent sleep for about thirty-six hours. The last installment of this travelogue covering Santiago and the journey home may be a bit late depending on how I’m feeling when I finally get back to Birmingham. But I will write it.