The Online Photographer

Open Mike: New Habits

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

• Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
• Wear compression socks;
• Lose weight;
• Resume using CPAP; and
• Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

A Thing I Wish the Internet Would Learn

...Is that a "quote" (or quotation) isn't just the quotation itself. It also needs a citation to be complete. Where is it written? Or what was the first known attribution?

"'Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country' —John F. Kennedy"

...is not enough, because there's not enough information there to check. It could be attributed to Patrick Hale or Franklin D. Roosevelt and the ignorant would be none the wiser.

"'And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.' —U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20th, 1961"

...That's a quotation.

What the person said or wrote is half of a proper quote or quotation. The citation is the other half.

Almost all of the "quotes" on the Internet need to say "(attributed to) X" (italics mine). It also doesn't really matter how many times an attribution has been repeated—it can still be wrong. And often is. The Internet has long-tailed echoes. People want what they quote to have been said by someone regarded as famous and wise. I read some time back that in the U.S., mis-attributed quotes are most often put into the mouths of Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, or Albert Einstein (and who says so? I don't remember).

And if someone famous repeats something that's already been said, they often get the credit for it. For example, John Lennon did say, or rather sing, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," but the quotation, with slightly different wording, was first attributed to one Allen Saunders, at least according to Reader's Digest in January of 1957. However, Reader's Digest itself doesn't give the full citation, so we're not actually sure whether the Allen Saunders who said it was the Allen Saunders who wrote the comic strip "Mary Worth," or where he said it, or even if he did. But the quotation predates Lennon. And the sentiment goes back to ancient times. (Source: Quote Investigator.)

I used to read the dictionary (my beloved Webster's Second, which is lost—I'm hoping it's in the barn somewhere), and I like to read Quote Investigator.

I'm only writing this now because I'm embarrassed that I attributed that Pascal quote the other day to Mark Twain. Just like an ignoramus would do. Lazy.

But anyway, quotes out on the wilds of the Internets ought to be tagged with "....Somebody said that." That's about all most Internet attributions are worth, in my experience. Searching for quotes on the Web can be very frustrating, if it's something QI hasn't covered.

/rant,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ernest Zarate: "I saw a trailer for stand up comedian Marc Maron's Netflix show, 'End Times Fun.' He said (and I’m heavily paraphrasing), 'If you made a column of all the things you think you know, and another column of how you know those things, most of that second column is "Oh, some guy told me." Goes into your head, locks on to a feeling…"that sounds good. I’m going to tell other people that!"' Seems to fit your explanation of quotes. 'Misquoting and mis-attributing qoutes is a time honored and long standing tradition, far predating the internet,' said someone, somewhere, at some time."

John Camp: "I had to read Henry James in college literature classes, and I did, but I never understood why. For years afterward, I'd quote Mark Twain's famous line, that James 'chewed more than he bit off.' Unfortunately, Twain never said that. Marilyn 'Clover' Adams did: 'It's not that he "bites off more than he can chew," but he chews more than he bites off.'"

Arg: "'A "quote" (or quotation) isn't just the quotation itself. It also needs a citation to be complete.' —Mike Johnston, posted in his blog The Online Photographer, Monday, 24 April 2023 at 8:51 a.m."

Mike replies: Exackalackly.

Parachute (The Writing Life)

Since I posted the previous post, and got so many interesting replies from readers, I've done more thinking about what I would do if I had resources. And as for what I would want for myself, I come down to two things.

[Warning: Bloviation alert. This post is long and possibly not interesting! Proceed according to your level of boredom. :-) ]

Any Car People Out There? (OT)

If you know cars, a question: what's better as a car to keep long-term, the RAV-4 Prime or the RAV-4 Hybrid?

Asking for my neighbor and friend Ilene Wexler, who was recently widowed. She hasn't bought a new car since Reagan was President and wants to treat herself, but she also hopes to keep it a long time.

Anyone up on that?

"As soon as this baby gives out, Barn, I'm
going to sell it to Ilene Wexler."

I believe Ilene's current Buick was manufactured during the Pleistocene Epoch and now has to be propelled with her feet, like Fred Flintstone's car. [UPDATE: What I was trying to get across here (perhaps I was being too jokey about this) is that she has a pretty urgent need for a new vehicle of some sort. The old one is unreliable and has been sucking down a lot of money for various repairs, leaving her without transportation when it needs fixing. I'm guessing she's already paid for a repair or two that exceeds the value of the car, with more looming.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "From what I know the Prime is more desirable but so much that it’s sometimes hard to get. The are both hybrids, but the Prime can drive 20 miles or so on a charge before using gas, so if you only drive short distances, you don’t use much if any gas."

Mike replies: Yes, the terms are "PHEV" (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) and "HEV" (hybrid electric vehicle). "Prime" is Toyota's term for PHEVs. They both run on gas and battery power, but the plug-in can be charged up from an outlet and has a longer range in electric-only power mode. That's good for us because town is about eight miles away, so a trip to and from town with some stops there (it's a very small town, only a few stoplights) would not exceed 20 miles of driving typically. That's probably the most common trip for us. Neither are pure electric cars (EVs). In fact I'm not sure if Toyota makes a pure EV yet. On the other hand, electricity has just doubled in price and is pretty expensive here. However you can sign up to get your electricity from solar fields if you want that.

Another consideration is that Ilene doesn't have a garage. I would think this would make charging more problematic, because the charging station and the car would have to be out in the weather in rain and snow. 

Greg: "We just sold our 2008 Toyota Prius (Hybrid). Maybe $300 in repairs. 185k miles. There shouldn't be much difference in reliability between the two. They are both hybrids. The Prime just has a bigger battery so you're not burning gasoline for short (25 mile?) trips. But I've read that many who buy plug in hybrids don't bother to plug it in. If that's your neighbor, don't get the Prime. We bought a 2022 Prius. Would have got the Prime except we really need the space and the Prime battery takes about 5" of height from the storage. We use ours like most people use a pickup or SUV—camping, skiing. Two bikes in the back for local trips (bikes go on a rack for camping trips). 55 mpg. Would have liked to wait for the 2023 but we just couldn't wait any longer. Toyota has been making hybrids for about 20 years. Most of the taxis in LA are Prii."

Tom Passin: "I have a 2019 RAV4 hybrid. I like it very much but I was all set to trade it in for a Prime (which is a plug-in hybrid that can run farther on electricity-only). I mostly drive in my small city, and the Prime would let me drive anywhere in the city on electricity only. But my dealer hasn't been able to get one. My RAV is three years old and has required no maintenance except for the usual oil changes and so forth. It doesn't even need tires, with 23,000 miles on it (pre-COVID, it would have gone on many road trips and racked up many more miles by now). It almost seems like a new car to me. I'd go for the Prime if I could get one."

ASW: "At a basic level, the Prime is the Hybrid with a larger battery and the ability to drive 40-ish miles using only said battery. It also allows you to plug in the vehicle to charge the battery, whereas a traditional hybrid does not allow independent charging of the battery and does not allow battery-only driving. If you do a lot of short/local driving the Prime might be a good option. Of course, the Prime is quite a bit more expensive, so if your typical drives won't benefit from the EV range then there's little point in spending the extra cash."

Open Mike: More On Money (OT)

In Friday's post, "How Is TOP Doing?", I talked, in the Featured Comments, a little about the relative nature of money. Money is a subject I know little about. Still, I was surprised by Dave Millier's comment. It doesn't jibe with what I know of housing prices in the UK; I remember that when I bought my house, my British friends were flabbergasted by how much house I was able to buy in Wisconsin for $260k. One sent me some links to properties available for the same price in her area (Brighton), and the comparisons were risible. Let's just say the equivalent in pounds didn't buy much. So if British people are earning so little, how are they buying houses to live in?

Furthermore, the "standard" I chose for a good salary (my last corporate salary, $55k in 2000), was in no way high-end for the U.S. It was approximately the median family income for the Chicago suburb where I lived (Forest Park, Illinois), and that suburb was not as prosperous as several of the others around it (Oak Park, River Forest).

I do recall that I was proud when I first earned $60k for a year, because that's what my father earned at his high- but not top-level corporate job when I first learned what he earned. (At the time, he worked for Congoleum Corp. and was charged with returning the Bath Iron Works, a shipyard in Maine, to profitability.) Little problem with that: he was earning that salary in about 1970, as near as I can place it. Adjusted for inflation, that was about $240,000 when I earned the same nominal dollar amount. Today it's a whopping $477,500! So I never matched him, not by a long shot. I guess I knew that at the time.

My father dropped out of Harvard Business School after his first year because he couldn't pay for the second year. He then joined his two brothers in founding a company. When they sold the company—the closest estimate I can come up with for that would be about 1961, when Dad was 32—his stock was worth more than $1 million. Adjusted, that's about $10 million today. So when he went back to finish Harvard Business School in 1963 he was a minor celebrity among his classmates—someone who had already done what they aspired to do. Yet we were far from the richest family at the prep school I attended. We considered ourselves "upper middle class," and lived well but not ostentatiously.

He did like to travel, and I'm sure we spent a lot of money on trips. I got to travel a whole lot as a kid. By the time I was 20 I had been to Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, the Bahamas on a cabin cruiser with a crew, a dude ranch in Wyoming, the Florida Keys, Switzerland, Austria, and Monaco—and France, my father's favorite destination, many times. On one of those trips we crossed the Atlantic on a then-new ocean liner, the S.S. France. My brothers have ventured farther afield, to places like Istanbul and Singapore, but I've only been to North America and Europe. That early travel sort of scratched that itch for me—I haven't done much traveling as an adult. I would love to take a guided tour of Europe again before I shuffle off to Buffalo, but I'm not organized enough to plan such an undertaking on my own, even if I could afford it, and I guess it wouldn't be much fun to do by myself.

The S.S. France, the longest and fastest ocean liner ever built when she was launched in 1956, pictured in 1962, the year before my family sailed on her to France when I was six. The prow is now preserved at the Paris Yacht Marina at Port de Grenelle in Paris.

The old ship, much modified, awaiting scrapping at the Alang ship-breaking yard in India in 2007. The prow is ceremoniously cut off to mark the commencement of of the dismantling.

Going back further, my grandfather once told me that in 1950, he was earning $350,000 a year in stock dividends alone. That's nearly $4.5 million today. And they were unabashedly rich, with two large houses and a number of servants, and a beautiful 29-foot sloop my great-grandfather bought from General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur. (I sometimes characterize their lifestyle as "Downton Abbey at 1/8th scale.") I have lots of relatives who are in a different social class than I am.

I'm unclear about the difference between "mean" and "median," but, "according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median weekly income (including overtime, commission and tips) for full-time workers (excluding those who are self-employed) in America was $1,041 as of the second quarter of 2022. If that rate persists for the entire year, that would equal $54,132 a year. The mean American income in 2020, according to Statista, was $71,456" (quote from firstrepublic.com). That's below my benchmark of 2000, of course, but it does indicate that my benchmark isn't crazy high. In any case, I'm not earning as much as my benchmark any more.

However, I'm still good to go to keep TOP hoppin' for "the foreseeable," thanks to all of you. Next up, my final thoughts about "process vs. project." And I'm going to get back on topic for a while! I have my strength and balance class on Monday and Friday mornings now, and didn't have time to write a real post this morning. I set the alarm early, but still don't have time to get my work done and get out of the house by 10.

As ever, more anon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Lee R: "'Mean' and 'average' are the same.

"Median is as follows: if you line up everything low-to-high, the median is the exact middle. This is especially helpful to know when talking about average/median incomes. Let's say we have 11 households. The first earns $1 per year, the second $2, so on until the 10th person makes $10 per year. The 11th person makes $1 million per year. The median income of that group is the household in the exact middle: the household earning $6. There are 5 earning less, 5 earning more. The mean (average), however, is the sum of all the households ($1,000,055) divided by the number of households (11). The mean income for this group is $90,914 and some change. But if you ask 10 out of 11 of the group, that number isn't representative of their income. These are ridiculous numbers, but they illustrate why mean household income and median household income differ: a small number of extremely high-earning households (say the top 1% of earners) will increase the average disproportionately. My takeaway is when you're looking at incomes it helps to know both averages and medians, but the median is probably more representative of what the 'middle' looks like."

Mike replies: A great explanation. Thanks.

Richard Parkin: "How do people in UK afford houses? They can’t currently. I’m no expert on this but it happens I know the three-bedroom flat I bought new in 1970 cost £6,250 to build (land, profit, everything by a large very company). According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, that would be about £80k today; but I’ve just checked and see a neighbouring identical flat sold for £300k a year ago. This is in a not very fashionable area of south London."

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): " In the medical field, these sorts of numbers [mean and median —Ed.] have caused a lot of pain. People who have a cancer, or other serious diagnosis are frequently quoted a 'median five year survival' and that's the number they hear and hold on to in terms of how long they will live. However, what it really means is that of 100 people with that diagnosis at that stage, 50 people won't live that long, but 50 people will live longer—sometimes way longer. It's usually a bell-shaped curve and there are people who define the far edges of that curve on both sides. When patients used to tell me that they had read online that they only had two years to live, I would review all this with them and tell them there was no reason to assume that they wouldn't be in the group that defined the better end of the curve and that we would hope for that. I had patients that I thought wouldn't live three months still coming to see me 20 years later, and other patients I thought were doing well drop dead the following week. After that I gave up on the illusion that I could accurately prognosticate. Every person is, after all, an 'n of 1.'"

Steve C (partial comment): "I'm in Australia and also remember being shocked at how cheap housing is (was?) in the 'States. Prices here are particularly inflated because home ownership is as much about wealth generation as it is about housing, maybe more so, which drives money into homes, which in turn drives the price (and around it goes). Obviously, there's a lot more to the economy and to general well-being than property prices, though. In relative terms we pay little for health care and education, fresh food is cheap, cities are accessible, the average worker gets four to five weeks of paid leave a year, and permanent employees have a degree of job security (no-fault dismissal of permanent employees is illegal up to around the $160k wage mark)."

Dan Khong: "You have left us with many questions and one of them would be, 'What happened to the family wealth acquired by your grandfather?'"

Mike replies: You'll have to wait for my memoir to come out, if it ever does.

John Camp: "I can give you one example of median and mean that really startled me—I think I saw it in the Wall Street Journal. The numbers I give are not exact, because I can't find the article, but they're close. The average (mean) American has a net worth of $750,000. The median American has a net worth of $170,000. If you lined up up all Americans from richest to poorest, the middle guy, the median, would be worth ~$170,000 (that's including his or her house.) If you counted all Americans and added up their wealth, then divided by the number of Americans, you'd get the $750,000 number (the average.) That's because the richest Americans have so much money that it wildly skews the average (the mean.)

"The third commonly used statistical descriptor, the mode, would be the most frequent amount that Americans are worth, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. But the discrepancy between the mean and the median sort of skizzes me out."

Mike Plews: "Now into my third year of retirement I can say I have at least one life lesson worth passing on to your younger readers. It is this. Managing money is a lot like sex. Most of us think we are a lot better at it than we really are."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I have fond memories of my two crossings on the S.S. France, 1966 and '67. Even in tourist class it was fancy, butter from a different part of France every meal and things like that. The food was excellent. Huh; there ought to be pictures somewhere. I have pictures from a lot of other places on that year-long trip (my father, a math professor, took a sabbatical year and spent it in Zurich). Glad I didn't rush to explain mean vs. median! That's been quite well covered."

Open Mike: The Last of the Old Americans

Here's an exercise to try: don't complain at all for a whole week. I learned this from a man who never complained, Loyle Egger. He was a WWII veteran whose father, Fred, served in the armed forces for every minute of both WWI and WWII—not just of the US involvement, but the entire time hostilities were going on, anywhere.

If you complained, Loyle would let you go on for a while and then say, "aw, too bad!" As if to say, stop whining. I always figured it was probably something he heard a lot from Fred.

It's not that Loyle was perfect. He was cheerful, but with an edge—he'd argue with you, and he could be critical, and sometimes he would needle you until you wanted to strangle him. But he almost never complained.

One time he showed up for pool with a big bandage on his forearm. When we asked what happened, he said he was taking a drink to one of his guests, and while he was stepping over the sleeping dog, the dog decided to get up. "And I had to take the fall on my left arm because I was holding the drink in my right. So I hurt my arm. But I didn't spill a drop!"

I said, "Loyle, you're 89. At what age does it start to be prudent to walk around the dog?" He just shrugged and made a dismissive noise. Later, our friend Jerry said to me, "He's never going to walk around the dog. He just thinks he can do everything like he always did. That's the attitude that got him to 89 in the first place."

Sleeping in the garage
Here's my favorite Loyle story. Before he moved to his daughter's house in his dotage, he had some ten acres, give or take, parts of which were grassland, wetland, or woods. A key point to the story is that he had very few near neighbors—and they weren't very near. A large chunk of the land was lawn, and until fairly recently he still mowed his own grass himself with his John Deere. Anyway, one day, after finishing, he backed the John Deere into the garage as usual, but, as he was getting off, he fell backwards. He ended up lying awkwardly on his back on the concrete, jammed between the wall and the mower, with his legs awkwardly tangled up in the tractor. He tried to extricate himself but couldn't. So he lay there for a while. "I thought, well, I can't get up. So, what can I do?" he told me.

He decided the answer was...to scream. So he started screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Within just a few minutes he realized he wasn't going to be able to keep that up for very long, so he revised the plan. He would scream for help every fifteen minutes, in two stages. Scream for a minute or two, pause, then repeat. The idea was that people would hear him the first time, and then, while they were listening more intently, they'd zero in on the second round.

So he kept this up for three or four cycles. At that point there happened to be some workers across the road retrieving a load of yard waste for pretty much the only neighboring house within earshot. They weren't regular workers, weren't normally there, and were only there that day for a short time. But the plan worked: they heard Loyle screaming for help, went in the direction of the noise to investigate, heard the second set of screams, and eventually located Loyle and helped him out of his predicament.

"So everything worked out fine!" Loyle said cheerfully.

"Well, not really!" I retorted.

"What do you mean?"

"What would you have done if those people hadn't just happened to be there at that moment?"

"I guess I would have spent the night in the garage," he admitted. "But I would have been all right. My daughter Marsha calls me in the middle of every morning to check if I'm all right. If she didn't get an answer, she would have come over. Marsha would have found me. I wasn't in any danger."

"But Loyle, you would have had to spend the whole night on your back on the garage floor! It's Fall. It gets cold at night. What about dinner? What if you had to pee?"

"Oh, I would have been all right," he said, then added, in a quiet, rather annoyed tone, "I hope would have slept at least part of the night." You're 89, and you occasionally sleep on your back in the garage trapped behind the lawnmower. No big deal.

A good ending
I have a snapshot of Loyle in extreme old age that I might show you someday. But here's the picture I have of Loyle in my mind. A group of us used to play pool at the Moose Club. One day several years ago, before COVID, it was raining when we were leaving the Moose. I had parked on the far side of the parking lot, and for some reason was just sitting there in the car—maybe I was looking at my phone, or just thinking, I don't know. Anyway, I watched Loyle and his good friend Norm Wilson come out of the Moose. They were both lean but frail—Norm is a retired Xerox executive, as far as I know, a few years Loyle's senior (he's 98 now, despite the fact that he gets pneumonia every winter), and they're both widowers. Both could still get around pretty well at that point, although they might not have beaten the tortoise to the finish line. Well, Loyle was walking Norm to his car, shielding him with his umbrella. Loyle had his hand protectively on Norm's shoulder, and they were walking side by side, two old friends. I don't think they knew I was there. They walked into and out of the perfect composition—the right angle, the right distance, wonderful expressions, the protective gesture, the umbrella, the gray day, one guy protecting the other from the rain. I didn't have my camera with me. But I can see the picture in my mind's eye still. I could reconstruct it pretty precisely with stand-ins. I figure the two of them will be the last of the WWII generation that I know, anyway.

Loyle died last October, and he had a good death. The two of us and our friend Dan played pool just ten days before he died, at the bowling alley, with him ratcheting around the table using his walker, and at lunch he re-told a few of his favorite WWII stories that we had heard many times before. He died after an illness of just a few days, during which he was able to call some old friends, including Norm, to tell them he would never be seeing them again.

In my observation—I saw him every week for the last five years of his life, more or less—Loyle had about a three-year decline, soldiered through his extreme dotage stoically (with much help from Marsha and his granddaughter Becky and other family members, I'm sure), and expired at the end of a very short hospital stay. We should all be so lucky.

And here's the coda to the above: when I told the story of the fall behind the John Deere to his daughter Marsha, on a phone call just this past week, she had never heard it before! He never even told her. It would have been too much like complaining, I suppose. That was Loyle.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Duffy: "The story reminds me of my sainted mother, God rest her soul. At 87 we insisted she use a medical alert pendant. She'd been resistant because of the monthly fee, despite money not being a concern.

"A week later I got a call, in the middle of the night, from the servicing company, saying the pendant had been activated. I drove to her apartment and opened the door for the police who had also been notified. We found my mother lying in the bathtub unable to extricate herself. After we got her back to bed I told her I was glad she had got the pendant. She insisted she didn't need it. 'Mom, you were stuck in the bathtub and couldn't get out.' 'I was perfectly prepared to spend the night in the tub!'

"I guess living through the Depression and World War II gives you some perspective."

darlene: "Your words weave worlds of wonderment, Mike. I feel like I got to know Loyle through your memories and storytelling."

Moose: "'Never explain, never complain!' I explain all too often, I suspect. I very seldom complain. I can't claim the apparent perfection of your late friend, but I'm pretty darn good. One benefit is that, when one eschews complaining, it seems that the number of things worth complaint diminish, rather dramatically."

Richard Nugent: "I am reminded of a story about my mother-in-law, Mary, who immigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager. A widow in her mid-eighties living alone, she was very self sufficient, if a bit frail. During a visit I suggested that she might want to put a smoke detector in her home. She demurred, objecting that if it went off in the middle of the night it would “scare the b’jesus out of me.” Will our generation ever be as endearing?"

No New Post Today

There won't be a post today. I know things have been torn up around here lately—unsteady—but I'm going to take the day to work on my book.

Very inconveniently, it's not a book about photography. This probably means it will die in a drawer, as they say. Photography is all anyone ever wanted from me; nobody has ever been interested in anything else I have to say. But I can't help it—I have other stories to tell before I shuffle off to Buffalo. (That's an old euphemism for kicking the bucket, itself a colloquialism. It's ironically symbolic that the actual Buffalo is close by.)

I always wanted to be a writer, and I am, so I can't complain. I made the decision when I was a freshman in high school, and I still remember where I was when it came to me—I was running an errand for a teacher in the middle of the hour, so the hallways of the school were deserted, and as I walked I was mulling over what I was going to do in life. It came down to painter or writer. Everybody knew me as an art geek, but I knew a lot about modern art by that time, how idea-laden it had to be, how obfuscatory the intellectual scaffolding had to be, and I had my doubts I could negotiate it. Halfway down the staircase, by the courtyard at the old South Campus of the University School of Milwaukee, I stopped cold and stood stock still for a while in the silence, thinking. I realized that writing was all I was good at, so I had better aim at that.

The idea was put in my head by an eighth-grade teacher, Worden L. "Sandy" McCallum. We called him Mr. McCallum, of course. He wanted to see me after school one day. I thought I was in trouble again and was going to get yelled at—I was very often in trouble. But usually, I knew what for. So I was mildly curious to find out what I had done wrong this time.

I was enamored of Mr. McCallum. English was my favorite class even with teachers I didn't like, and I liked him. He was different from the other teachers—for one thing, he wasn't a professional educator and I don't think he had been trained. He was a "gentleman teacher" of the sort who used to "pitch in" at old-time independent prep schools like USM—a volunteer, essentially. He only taught one or two courses. He seemed to be independently wealthy as far as I knew, and he had at least a few fine antique cars. I liked cars, so I would always go to the window of our fourth-floor classroom early and look down at the parking lot to see what car he would arrive in. My favorite was an MG, although at this remove I can't remember what model. Mr. McCallum was good-looking in a sort of preppie way and had the imperious air of old "quiet" money and the invisible upper class. I wanted to be like him.

When I got to the classroom—I could find it in that building today, and I can picture it in my mind—he had one of my papers in front of him, and he proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions about it. But he kept complimenting it. He read one sentence and said something like, "how do you do that? How do you know which words to use and how to put them together?" To which I thought, what? I decided he thought I had copied the paper and it wasn't my work.

I remember he had me read aloud a sentence with a semicolon in it. "That's right," he said, after I spoke it. "How do you know what a semicolon sounds like?"

"...Dickens?" I answered. I didn't know.

It might have been Mrs. Memmel, my fifth-grade teacher at the Bayside Elementary School. I didn't like her at all—she had teacher's pets who could do no wrong, and then another category of "bad kids" she persecuted, and I was one of the latter. But she did me a huge favor. For an hour after lunch, every day, she would read a book aloud and we had to follow along in our own copies of the book. Every now and then she would pause and call out a kid's name, and the kid would have to give the next word—that's how she tested whether you were following along like you were supposed to. She never called on me because she learned early that I was always right there with her. I learned how written words sound from Mrs. Memmel. Not only the proper pronunciations of lots of words, but the music of writing—the cadences, the flow, the starts and stops, the emphases, the silences in the right places. I still read aloud to myself occasionally, just to remind myself that the symbols on the page are actually sounds.

I later learned that Mr. McCallum was fascinated by a certain question, namely, how he could love writing so much and not be good at it. He didn't think I had copied that paper: he was merely interested in why it was so good and how I did it. Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave, he was still looking at the paper, and he asked me a question: "Have you ever considered being a writer?" I honestly didn't know what to say to that. So I just said "no," because that was the truth, and left. But obviously it stuck with me. 

He lived in fine big modernistic house in the woods across the ravine from my house, and when I was in high school he invited me to continue to write for him. So I would write stories and cross the ravine and walk through the woods and take them to his house. It was what would now be called an "inappropriate" relationship, because he and I would sit in his study and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and discuss our work and the work of other writers, like two friends, and I was only fifteen or sixteen. But other than the beer and tobacco he never acted the least bit inappropriate, ever, in any way. He had some number of sons, I think, who were all grown and gone, and a much younger daughter who was still at home. Maybe he just missed his sons. But he was one of the only adults in my life who treated me like an adult, or who ever bothered to "see" me as a person. I was grateful for that then, and I still am. My relationship with my own father was fraught and dangerous, and my father had remarkably little interest in what kind of person I was. I was always casting about for substitute fathers.

If you are looking for a post to read, try "Like a Sack of Bricks," from March about ten years ago.

I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands. If I were a book-writer kind of writer, I would have written a book by now. After trying two articles for The New Yorker and closely reading about fifty more with my tinfoil analyzing hat on, I've come down to the conclusion that I'm naturally a columnist. But I am trying, with the book, I mean, because I only have this one life—and, you know, there's Buffalo, down the road just a couple of hours from here. Time and tide wait for no man.

Sorry for the lack of a post today, but, like I say, there are other stories to tell.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

DaveB: "I drop into TOP…occasionally. I don’t really do it for the 'photography.' I like what else you write…kinda 'Off Topic.' Today’s post was EXACTLY the type of writing that you do that I like best. You hit the sweet spot for me with this one. My one suggestion…do more of it! There have been few writers in my 73 years who paint the picture in my mind with the way you use words.

"P.S., I’d like to read your book before you get to Buffalo!"

Anthony: "From the above post: 'Sorry for the lack of a post today....' Moving into koans?"

Mark P Morris: "Morning—it almost seems that you are downplaying what you write here. I enjoyed this essay very much. It was revealing but in a very good way. So, thanks for writing it and letting us in on how you feel and how you developed as a person."

Robert: "Re 'I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands.' Exactly why you should lean in and keep on doing it. Don't let fear stop you."

Mike replies: One of my favorite books for artists is Art and Fear by Orland and Bayles. And one of my favorite recent cartoons is two arty-student kids looking at a droopy computer, and one is saying "The AI art generator became self-aware, and now it just procrastinates and questions itself." (Looks like the author is "Coverly" of speedbump.com.)

Mike Chisholm: "Hey, don't think we didn't see what you didn't do there...."

Stephanie Luke: "Just discovered this today, and how delightful it is. I couldn't help hearing it with an upper-class English accent. Your work is done. By all means, write!"

Luci: "Hello, I am not sure what the definition of 'post' is nowadays for you, but let me tell you I enjoyed reading what you wrote today. Yes, photography's fine, but pieces like this are at least as enjoyable. To me, at least. So, thank you!"

Mike replies: You are welcome.

Kenneth Voight: "Very well written. This is why I read you. Have you ever considered being a writer?"

Mike replies: I'm gonna think about it.

Chris Kern: "Mike: 'There won’t be a new post today.' Mark Twain: 'It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.'"

Peter Barnes: "I do like it when you don't post."

Sunday Open Mike: Romance at the Movies (OT)

May I just say how much I miss Roger Ebert? He was for a time the nation's foremost movie critic. He was also a foursquare writer with a plainspoken style who never showed off, the kind of businesslike wordsmith I approve of. I only had contact with him one time, when I tried to commission him to write an article about movies that include photography in their plots. I had arranged to pay him what was, for the company I worked for, a lot, but which was probably too little for him. Even so, he was interested—he came up with a pretty serviceable list right off the top of his head. But in the end had to back away because he was overcommitted. I didn't get the sense that that was an excuse. He just didn't have time. A pity.

Last night I looked up an old rom-com about a May–September romance—As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt was a fine actress who seemed to vanish from public view at some point. For a while she was everywhere, then she wasn't. In her heyday she was one of my relatively few screen crushes. I endured many episodes of "Mad About You" because she was in it. I loved her. (Using that expression is a little embarrassing. As I write it, I hear my psychologist kid brother Scott correcting me: "You don't love her. You love her character.") When James L. Brooks made As Good As It Gets in 1997, Jack Nicholson was 60 and Helen Hunt was 34. That alone makes the romance unlikely. I looked it up the other day: less than 1% of intact couples have 28 or more years in age between them. The common cliché when there's an age disparity is that the man is always older (and usually rich), but it's not that uncommon for it to be the other way around. Mary Tyler Moore's husband of 33 years, for instance, was 15 years her junior.

Mary Tyler Moore, by the way, as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, was my first screen crush—when I was eight years old! Looking back on it I think she (or rather her character, as Scott would be quick to point out) somehow ruined me for women forever. I'm not being serious. But I did think she was as beautiful as humans could get.

Of course, screen crushes aren't real, and "types" aren't determinants. Physical appearance alone is never enough to make a relationship. What really attracts me is another mysterious quality: soul. That's a vague and opaque word, one that doesn't communicate much. But I know what I mean. And I know it when I come across it.Women who truly attract me are rare, and only come along once in a great while. "Soul" as I perceive it is treasurable and uncommon. Strange that it often appears in women who don't know they have it—and who sometimes don't even think all that much of themselves.

Mary Tyler Moore, who stole my tender heart in childhood, was also the only screen crush I got to meet in person. Well, meet might be overstating it. I was visiting Hanover, where Dartmouth College is, and my old friend Jim and I went to the Top of the Hop, a big open lounge and event space on the second floor of the college arts center, to talk. We picked a pair of armchairs in an out-of-the-way corner, and talked all afternoon. As the hours rolled by, the room filled up. There was a buzz in the air. It turned out that Mary Tyler Moore was going to speak. So we decided to stay. We had inadvertently claimed the best seats in the house: after arriving late, she made her way over to where we were, to give her talk. I can tell you one thing: although she was famous as a girl-next-door type, in real life she was uncommonly beautiful. So there I was, right next to Laura Petrie, thinking of myself at age eight sitting in front of our black-and-white television in my pajamas watching her cook for Dick Van Dyke after he tripped over that same ottoman week after week.

Life is strange.

By the time she arrived, the room was packed. Downstairs, another crowd of people had gathered who were being shut out by the fire marshalls. Intermittently we heard rumbles and cries of complaint from the disappointed crowd below, and halfway through Mary's talk she was interrupted by a loud yell from downstairs: "F--- YOU, Mary!" After just a beat, in her best brave-but-querulous Laura Petrie / Mary Richards voice, Mary yelled back, with just the right inflection, "You too-ooo!"

But back to As Good As It Gets. Many of Roger Ebert's reviews spend a good deal of their allotment of space simply laying out the film. This happened, that happened. Yet he manages to hit the nail on the head time after time. If you happen to remember that now 25-year-old movie, read his review of it. He hits it on the nose. "If the movie had been either more or less ambitious," writes Roger, "it might have been more successful. Less ambitious, and it would have been a sitcom crowd-pleaser, in which a grumpy Scrooge allows his heart to melt. More ambitious, and it would have touched on the underlying irony of this lonely man's bitter life. But 'As Good as It Gets' is a compromise, a film that forces a smile onto material that doesn't wear one easily." A narrow miss, but a miss all the same. I'm going to watch it again tonight anyway, I guess.

Mike

UPDATE in the cold light of the next morning: I actually remembered very little of the movie, so it was entertaining a quarter of a century later. But it's also a weirder movie than I remember. Roger Ebert says, "[Nicholson's character] hurls racist, sexist, homophobic and physical insults at everyone he meets, and because it's Nicholson, we let him; we know there has to be a payback somehow." But in today's atmosphere, some of those "hurled" comments seem startlingly vile. The movie as a whole shoehorns what is a grim and sorry story—a desperate, lonely, beleaguered woman allowing herself to be manipulated by a much older, psychologically ill misanthrope, for purposes neither of them quite understands—into the gauzy, feelgood arc of the standard rom-com. That in itself is a little shocking. But there is very fine acting (I think Helen Hunt out-acts Jack Nicholson, frankly, although all the performances are good, even the dog's) and plenty of fine writing, and more than a few moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor. I was less impressed with the romance aspect of it—even at the end when the big kiss happens, you still feel they're both making a terrible mistake and that there can't be anything but pain and strain in their shared future.

But hey, it's a movie. What are movies for if not for telling us unreal and entertaining concocted stories? So, okay.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Lost to History (OT)

Yesterday was the day of America's other Christmas, the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs won, but they had to have help from the refs. The game was high scoring and tied right near the end—both things we normally want to see in a Super Bowl—but then the game got ruined. With less than two minutes to go the Chiefs were given an unearned extra set of downs. So we'll never actually get to know what would have happened. Could have gone one way; could have gone the other. Lost to history now.

No dog in the fight. No connection to either team.

Here's CCN's curated collection of the best still photos from the event. And one extra for good measure, for halftime show fans. And finally, some great photos from the other 56 Super Bowls, starting at number one in 1967.

Herodotus, in Book I of his Histories, tells us that the great Athenian statesman Solon, one of the seven great wise men of ancient Greece, wouldn't call anyone happy until their life had ended; for only then could it be certain that no further catastrophe lay waiting. "O Solon! O Solon! O Solon!" cried poor doomed King Croesus on the pyre, "Count no man happy until his end is known!"

Great game, till it was ruined. Now it has a big fat asterisk next to it forever. Too bad.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Richard Barbour: "Sorry, I don't know where it's written that the refs don't call deserved penalties near the end of a game. Or even why anyone would question it."

Mike replies: Sorry, no sale. 1.) The refs hadn't been calling penalties for minor holding all game long. 2.) Neither the grab nor the hand on the back impeded the progress of the receiver or changed his course in any way. 3.) The ball was un-catchable, thrown way over the receiver's head. 4.) The ref didn't call the momentary jersey grab when it happened, but waited till he saw the play didn't work, which meant the Chiefs would have faced fourth down and a field goal leaving time on the clock. I can't speak to motive, so I won't, but it was a bad call.

The Chiefs got robbed as much as the Eagles. They were deprived of the opportunity to win the game on merit.

Albert Smith (partial comment): "I know that I'm in the extreme minority, but I have less than zero interest in any of these sports events, Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, etc. ... When I was a kid there were many movies made in the '50s about WWII, and one recurring thing was when soldiers were trying to determine the authenticity of other soldiers encountered, they'd ask something like, 'Who won the 1939 World Series?' The German soldiers in American uniforms would be tripped up and exposed. The number of times that this trope appeared in movies made me think that I could never be in the military. I couldn't tell you who won any sporting event last week."

Jeff (partial comment): "Also no dog in the fight here. ... The Eagles could have won instead had they not: 1.) given up the longest punt return in Super Bowl history (and at a crucial time)…their special teams were horrible all year; 2.) committed the only significant turnover of the game, a fumble by the QB, resulting in an opposing TD; and 3.) failed miserably on defense in the always crucial second half, permitting the Chiefs to complete every pass attempt (except a deliberate throw-away), and allowing six yards per carry on rushing attempts, with every drive resulting in a Chiefs’ score."

The Healthy Thing I'm Most Ashamed Of (OT)

I'm sorry for the lack of focus around here lately—I'm doing the best I can. I've got a lot of stuff on my plate. It's a little overwhelming actually. Ever feel like you're behind on everything? That's how I feel. I've got a to-do list that's longer than my arm.

I'll just observe that making several lifestyle changes all at once is not the best way. I know people don't like specific (individualized) advice, but just a small tidbit of generalized advice: if you know you need to make changes in your life, get to it. Just begin. Don't wait till you have to do everything at once.

I'm suddenly on blood thinners, and using a CPAP at night, and trying to get back on my old diet after a year and a half and stop eating sugar, and starting exercising at the gym I just joined. And it's a lot all at once.

And the thing I'm most ashamed of? There's one more. I almost don't even want to mention it. I'm supposed to start wearing "support hose."

It's not that big a deal. They're just tight knee socks. I don't know why I'm so put off by a pair of socks, but I am. Evidently all the sludge in your body kind of moves down with gravity and collects in your feet and legs, and you're trying to give your heart a little boost in getting it going back upwards again. I find the term itself cringeworthy. Hose? Yeah, I know, hosiery. But gentlemen wore "hose" when they also wore knickers (or were they breeches?), and it's been a while since showing a little calf was sexy. The equivalent was showing a little ankle if you were a female. "Support hose" is the single most ancient-old-person-ish thing I can think of. White hair; false teeth; walkers; hearing aids, yeah yeah, but hey, white hair on a person can look good, and if you can't walk or hear, fine, you buck up and do what you have to and soldier on. None of those things seems quite as pathetic as "support hose."

OK, adult diapers maybe. I don't need those. Yet.

Maybe there should be a contest to think up a better name than "support hose." Maybe that particular bit of attire just has a bad PR agent. They ought to be called "vitality socks" or "heart-health socks" or something. There has to be a better name that would soften the insult a bit. Isn't indignity enough of a problem already?

I'll get over it. The socks are kinda comfortable if I'm honest. Gotta do what you gotta do.

Inspiration to others
Speaking of bucking up, I have to tell this story again. When I lived in my second house in Waukesha, I had a next-door neighbor named Walter who was 80 and suffered from Parkinson's disease. I was walk-jogging two miles every day at the time. So one day I was standing at the picture window in my living room, looking at the late fall weather. I was 57 or 58 then. It was a blustery, nasty sort of day, cold and kinda wet, and there were random snowflakes in the air. So I was thinking, maybe I shouldn't go out walking today—the weather's too bad.

As if on cue, who hoves into sight but Walter. He's dressed in a "warmup suit" that looks like he bought it in the 1970s: zip-up jacket with a big collar and white stripes down the legs. And he's out for his walk—using his walker! He's hunched over the walker and laboriously following it up the street. Needless to say, I sucked it up and did my two miles. If an 80-year-old who has Parkinson's and needs a walker can get out in the weather, it was pretty obvious there was nothing stopping me. From then on, every time I was tempted to dish up an excuse for myself, the mental image of 80-year-old Walter and his warmup suit and walker popped into my head. Before I moved away I thanked him for being an inspiration, too. I still think of his example from time to time.

My idea with the gym is to go over at 2:00 every afternoon. That's going to take more than just motivation—it's going to require a little planning. Yesterday I had to go to the cardiologist at 2:00 (neither of us knew what the appointment was for—I guess they just want to guard against surprises). Today I have a haircut at 2:00. My barber is kinda hard to schedule, too—she works out of her house and she has a life. I guess I'll head over to the gym after I get my few remaining hairs cut.

By the way, the cardiologist gave the green light to exercise, as long as I take it very easy at first. I did ask.

But I wasn't looking for an excuse to get out of it.

I don't think.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ASW: "Hey Mike. In the running world, 'compression' socks and sleeves are quite popular. There are companies (e.g., Compressport, 2XU) that sell full lines of compression gear. So, just consider yourself one step down the path to better fitness."

Pritam Singh: "Try 'sarvangasana,' among other asanas, from Iyengar yoga to keep away from support hose. I guarantee it's more dignified."

Dan D: "Are you talking medical grade compression socks? If just mild compression socks there are many choices that look and feel great. I was in the sock business for many years and started wearing mild compression socks on flights to the west coast (four hour flights from Chicago). My feet felt great when we landed. Many runners wear compression socks too. Sockwell merino wool were my favorite."

Mitch W: "Compression socks. Triathletes use them. I cycle a lot, and after suffering a heretofore unexplained/unprovoked blood clot, I noticed my IronMan friends all wore them. Plenty of configurations in terms of size, strength of compression, wild colors. I detest this phrase but they have been a 'game changer' for typical photo days in the field consisting of one to 14 hours on assignment, too. Far better performance than those, uh, likely-drugstore 'hose.'"

John Camp: "The wife of a friend of mine flew to Italy and back a month ago. She was told to wear compression socks (also called support hose, but 'compression socks' sounds more medical and less elderly.) She didn't. She got back with some leg pain, discovered she has a blood clot in her leg, and is now doing semi-weekly doctor visits to deal with it."

V.I. Voltz: "Due to crummy veins and an injury that made things worse, I’ve worn compression socks since I was about 30 (I am now 48). I wear Supcare Extreme with Drirelease socks every day. My nine-year-old son calls them ‘sport socks.’ About every month we talk about why I need them, and what he needs to look out for to keep his circulation healthy. It’s not that big a deal."

Mike replies: Dr. Greger recommends arugula and citrus fruit for vascular health. Beets and watermelon are also good. I've stumbled on a heady elixir: one large seedless orange, peeled; half a small seedless watermelon; and a racquetball-sized cooked and peeled beet, all tossed in the blender. I keep the ingredients in the fridge so it'll be cold when prepared. Delicious—the flavors balance, and none "win"—and brightly colorful too. I put some chopped arugula into my daily salad, and sprinkle a handful on my nightly bowl of soup after the soup is hot; the arugula wilts and gives soups a slight but pleasant peppery accent.

Joeb: "Compression sox. Nothing wrong with them. Real athletes wear them, people who hike, run, work out. Even people with heart/circulation issues wear them. They come in all colors, patterns, and compression strength. They are not the white, hospital style that 'old' people wear. Not any more. Soldier on!"

Kristine Hinrichs: "There is another name for support hose—compression socks. They are very popular with long distance runners, particularly ultramarathoners. If you have a running or outdoors store nearby they would have them—or try REI online. They come in lots of colors, including your basic black socks. They are also a lot more durable and comfortable. I wore them back when I ran marathons and ultras and all my friends did, too."

Open Mike: Sleep Apnea

UPDATE: Today I joined a gym that has six different kinds of cardio machines. My insurance covered the entire cost. My son has been very encouraging—he's very athletic and likes to exercise. I'll publish updates every couple of months. Thanks so much for all the good and informative comments—I learned a lot. —Mike 

Just wanted to report for those who might be interested that I'm doing much better after resuming treatment for sleep apnea.

Open Mike: One More Wee Piece of Advice (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, which used to appear on Sundays and sometimes still does.]

-

Before we leave behind the subject of the advancing years, one wee bit of advice to younger people: never stop exercising. I've come to believe that the important thing about exercise is doing it without stopping. Consistently, over the years, from when you're young to when you're old.

Mostly I say this because it's the opposite of what I've done, and I've had troubles because of it.

My observation has been that people typically exercise in two "shifts" in life: in one period when they're young adults and emphasizing secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of advertising abundant health to attract partners; and in another period when they're "young old people" and it finally hits them that they'd better take care of themselves. Personified by the late-fiftysomething out walking while doing that thing with their arms where they hold their forearms and hands up and swing them back and forth to signify that they're not just walking, they're exercising. In the years in between, life gets in the way and many of us don't exercise much. Except briefly in the wake of resolutions and spells of determination, or on vacations maybe.

...Or maybe that was just me. When I was 57, I reconnected with a woman I had carried a torch for "in another life," twenty years earlier, and we began a relationship. She was a marathoner, and went to the YMCA at a truly ungodly hour (4:30 a.m.) three times a week to exercise. I went with her. She suspiciously dubbed this "courting behavior," to which my reaction was, of course it was courting behavior—I was courting her, wasn't I? I also made the bed every morning after she went to work and did the breakfast dishes, and that was courting behavior too. (The campaign failed despite my exertions, alas.) Long story short, I made repeated attempts, even after she left me, to get back into running, which I had enjoyed throughout my youth in various ways. It began one morning—one very early morning—while she was "spinning" for an hour. ("Spinning" means furiously pedaling a stationary bike going absolutely nowhere.) Left to my own devices, I decided to run around the 1/8th-mile track. I ran hard for one lap, and then walked a lap to recover. It felt marvelous. It reminded me of youth, reconnected me with my long-ago love of running, and powerfully inspired me. So I repeated the process—eleven times. 

The next day, my knees were in such ferocious pain that I could barely make it down the stairs for breakfast. And my knees hurt for so long—like, six weeks—that after three weeks I was convinced I had damaged myself permanently. That's my tendency, I will admit—go overboard with a new idea and overdo it. 

Eventually my knees fully recovered, thank God. Over the next four or five years, I made repeated attempts to get back to running. Again and again, the same pattern repeated: I would start slowly, gain strength and stamina, gradually increase my workout, and then something would go sproing and I'd injure myself somehow. Sprained ankle, aching or "trick" knee, something called "pes anserine pain syndrome," back trouble, inflamed toe, whatever. Then I'd have to take two to five weeks off to recover, and lose whatever progress I had made. It happened again and again. My only success in that period was walking two miles a day interspersed with very short stretches of mild jogging. I made a conscious effort to jog like an old guy, in a sort of shuffle, to minimize impact, and I'd only go one or two hundred feet before resuming a walking pace. That worked, or seemed to.

But it stands to reason that people can run in the their late fifties, sixties, seventies, and even older—you see it and hear about it all the time. Why couldn't I? I finally concluded that it was probably because I had just taken too long a time off in the middle of my life. When I was in my late teens and twenties my habit was to jog three miles a day in the three months of the spring and the three months of the fall. My idea, even at the time, was that it would be good to get into the habit of running regularly and then carry the habit into older ages. But I probably only sustained that for five or six years. Then I didn't run for three decades. By the time I got back to it, it was too late. That was just my experience—"your mileage may vary."

I did the same thing with a car once. Neglected normal upkeep for 40,000 miles in the middle of its first 100k, and then got slammed with everything going wrong at once.

It just seems to me that the people who successfully exercise into their older years are the ones who never stopped. I acknowledge that it's better to exercise than not to, and now is always a good time to start, for any value of "now," regardless of how long you've been a butt in a chair. But if you are young and planning your life, somebody ought to tell you that a little exercise consistently over your lifetime is probably better than a whole lot of exercise for a short period every now and then. Start early and keep at it. Make it a habit. And do it continuously.

Push-ups
A while back I talked to Nick, the kindly young man who used to help me load dog food purchases into the trunk before the True Value went belly-up. On doctor's orders, I'm not supposed to lift more than 50 pounds because I have shoulder impingement in both shoulders—what they would call "rotator cuff injuries" if you happen to be a baseball pitcher. I asked Nick if he did pushups, and he told me a typical story. He said he he had very into doing pushups for a while in high school, and improved for a while, but then he hit a wall at 95(!) pushups, got discouraged, and quit.

That seems typical. Young people get all into something, do it to excess, and then never do it again. It would really be a lot better if you started doing three pushups every day when you're fifteen, and just add one more every year on your birthday. By the time you're forty you'd be doing 28 pushups a day and not thinking a thing of it. It would really be much better for you in the long run.

None of this is science. It's just my belief. "An observation amplified," as Thom put it recently. As to whether it's really true, "more studies are needed," I guess.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aaron: "I hate running, but there's a history in my family of heart troubles. I'm 46 and so far my heart is fine. I decided that I should start exercising while I can. But, I know myself. I won't stick to a running plan that requires very much of me. So, I decided that I could run for 10 minutes a day. I'll hate every minute of it. But, I can make myself do it for 10 minutes a day. I'm doing it on a treadmill, so I've raised the incline so it's at least hard work. I've started out very slowly—I don't even get to a mile in my 10 minutes. But, so far I've stuck with it because I can make myself do something hard for 10 minutes. Then I'm out. And, while it's still well short of recommended exercise time in a week, it's more than I was doing before! Well, that's not quite true. I love going for walks and do that pretty regularly."

Franz Amador: "I hear you, brother, though I suspect you're going to get a lot of responses from people who have always been active and still are suffering from increasing injuries as they get older. It sounds like you could really use a good physical therapist. Also, something cheaper and more convenient that I really like is Coach Eric's videos from Precision Movement. There are paid options, but he has lots of free content on YouTube. Highly recommended, in some ways even more than a PT."

mark: "Your thesis about old age and exercise is spot-on. My father, who died at age 93, fought diabetes to a standstill for the last thirty years of his life with daily trips to the gym. He was, by decades, the oldest regular there, and garnered support and admiration from youngsters in their 50s. His weights and treadmill regimen was successful, with diabetes and related problems catching up only after a fall prevented him from going to the gym. My own plan involves cycling until I can no longer do it, and then some combination of walking and weights. Maybe yoga, too. I don't think my knees would tolerate much running. As to you own plan, just remember that pool isn't exercise."

DavidB: " I started running in high school. I quit for a few years while in college but have been running...or walking when injured...ever since. Now in my late 60s and so...so...slow that it bothers me if I think about it. So I don't think about it. I just run."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Could I please add to your observation. I attend exercise classes run by a woman of similar age to me (mid-40s). She has people in 30s–60s attending. Her view is that in general, you need both exercise and stretching / flexibility. As a sweeping generalisation, men tend to focus on strength and ignore the flexibility, while and women tend to focus on flexibility and ignore the strength. The thirties and forties are the years to establish good habits. It gets increasingly harder to pick them up after that; the body takes longer to get fit, and longer to recover from injuries, with increasing age. I’m still working through some functional issues that result in sore back/shoulder. Having a young child isn’t helping. Trying to establish a routine is an exercise in futility (sorry, pun not intended). I really miss the jogging too."

Kirk: "Walk. Bike. Swim or do something else to get your heart rate up for an hour straight. Start now. Do it every day. Or don't. But the evidence and studies are abundant and clear. Exercising is vital for maintaining health and mobility. No excuses apply. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. And don't neglect things like yoga to enhance flexibility. Also vital for healthy existence."

Damien: "I'm only 37, but I've had my version of all your injury stories! There is something in there that is not strictly about age. Muscles grow fast and recover in the blink of an eye; tendons and ligaments need way, way more time to adapt and to recover—months or years instead of days. I remember a certain story about patience in the darkroom; well, this also applies to the gym.  ;-) 

"My new rule is, any novel inflammatory joint pain means: ease off until it's gone. That's the only way I've been able to break the cycle of one step forward, two steps back."

Stray Thought (OT)

All of you know this already (all of you that it pertains to, anyway—not you young-uns, in your forties, or younger than that), but I thought I'd try expressing it anyway. It just strikes me that as we get older, we have to be harsh with ourselves and just do whatever's needed. You have to adapt.

I know a guy in his 50s who is not adapting at all. He acts just like a twentysomething free spirit. Girlfriends all over, needs to get laid every night, drinks to celebrate every occasion and, when there's no occasion, drinks. Carelessly blows his paychecks. Lives in a group house where they're sometimes late with the rent and sometimes get the electricity cut off. Every drug anyone can get, he's up for it and into it. He strikes me as the sort of guy who might die of drinking because he prefers that to becoming a grownup.

Because you can't live to be too old acting like a young person. At some point the body just can't take the wear and tear. (Not to mention that your brain shrinks. Did you know your brain shrinks as you get older? Terrifies me—my brain was barely large enough to begin with. Bah-dum-pah.) Anyway, what I'm saying is, you have to make changes as you need to. In 2018, I had to give up coffee on account of a-fib. I was unsentimental about it, despite having been so far into the bean that I even roasted my own private-stock Kona* for a while. All in all, I drank coffee for forty-five years, starting when I was sixteen and had to go to work one Sunday morning on zero hours sleep. But at the end it became obvious it was bad for my heart, so I walked away. All I did was tell myself that I had enjoyed coffee, but the time for it in my life was over. Don't cry.

We have to do that as we age. Stop drinking alcohol, change our diets, start exercising. Or dial back our exercising, whichever's called for. Or start to consider mere walking to be exercising! Take pills, get hearing aids, wear a hat so a bald spot doesn't get too much sun. Whatever it is. Acquaint ourselves with strange new kinds of healthcare providers. There must be a thousand ways it can manifest itself. We each have specific deficits or infirmities, but everybody probably has something. Nobody gets out of here alive.

You have to be hard about it. Unsentimental and matter-of-fact. It requires a quality prized by long-gone generations and not much in favor now: self-discipline. You can hold aging back, stave it off, refuse to give in, but then one day you have to accommodate it, and at that point you just...do it. Whatever it is.

So now I have to adjust to the CPAP machine again. A crazy Rube Goldberg contraption that makes you feel like an invalid and is about as dignified as clown shoes. As David Vestal used to say, "So, okay." It's time for that, I need to do it, so just do it. No complaints, no self-pity. Other people deal with worse things. And it's better than the alternatives.

Here's an exercise that was suggested to me by the example of my late friend and pool-playing compadre Loyle Egger, who died a few months ago after a long life and a short illness: try to go a week without complaining. About anything. It's an instructive experiment! Loyle seldom complained. Hell, I walk around the house complaining aloud to myself. I'll just warn you: not complaining about anything for a week is as tough as living for a year without buying anything made in China. It almost can't be done. Sure makes you think, though.

Remember the words on Yeats's tombstone: Cast a cold Eye. That's the spirit!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

*Provided by a photographer / reader / coffee grower on the Big Island, Phil Rosenberg—thanks again, Phil. It was a lovely experience.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "For me, my real wake up call to get serious about preemptively doing good things for my body after acting 'bulletproof' for decades was being my Mother's care giver in her final two years. The things she never did for herself, not out of selfishness but to make sure everyone else in the house was taken care of, caught up with her. To see a strong, never too tired woman unable to get herself across the room with her walker was heartbreaking. I accompanied her to multiple stays in rehab facilities and was surrounded by people just as physically incapable as her, many dozens of years younger. No one escapes; it's just a matter of when and how severe.

"The positive things that you don't do today (or years ago) will come back to haunt you some day just as surely as all the negative things will lead to problems. I saw that and made my changes accordingly. Never smoked, but gave up drinking. I exercise religiously; this will stave off many ailments that cause older people problems. Watching someone who can't get off a toilet will motivate you to do your squats now.

"Can't say it's never too late. It just might be. But control the things you can control while you can."

Stan B.: "IF (big if) you keep yourself in shape, you can front till you're sixty. But no one comes outta that decade unscathed. Yeah, accommodations, sacrifices, out-and-out pain—they will become your new partners in crime, and your body the crime scene. Not an easy concept to contemplate, not an easy reality to live with. You deal with it best you can…."

dan: "You have to do what it takes, which is 'more.' More exercise. More discipline about eating and sleeping. More learning about truly new things. Age is the most destructive of excuses because once you accept the idea of 'dialing back' you go into a death spiral."

John Maxim: "I never did, and still do not, understand what the lines on the tombstone mean. Perhaps you can elucidate?"

Mike replies: There are a great many interpretations out there, and mine is no more special than anyone else's. First, the lines come from the poem "Under Ben Bulben," published shortly after his death, Ben Bulben being a beautiful mountain in County Sligo near the churchyard. So the first step is to read the poem a few times until it starts to seep into you. He had written a number of elegies for others; in this poem he sings his own elegy. He first wrote the epitaph, however, as a marginal note in a volume of essays by Rilke, whose ideas about death "annoyed" him (that's Yeats's own word). The marginal note, in verse, was:

Draw rein; draw breath.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.

That first line, in other words, being, hold on there dude! You need to take a deep breath!

So I take a rather forthright impression from the epitaph, approximately this: "Look, we're animals, we're born, we live some allotment of years, make of them what we make of them, and we die. It's not a tragedy, it's just nature. So if you're in front of my grave, don't weep, don't mourn or be sentimental. Just move along."

This shortchanges the transcendental nature of the poem and its mystical allusions, though. For Yeats the "indomitable Irishry" casts back to before Christianity and the ancient pagan times when mountains were the remote homes of gods. Yeats said in his Autobiography, discussing mountains, "Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill?" To look into it further than my simple take on it, I'd probably counsel reading some interpretations of "Under Ben Bulben," starting perhaps with the Wikipedia article, then moving to a closer reading of the poem like this one at Litbug, and from there to more serious essays of literary criticism, which I don't know well enough to recommend. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Bear.: "Ah—mortality—don't want it but can't live without it!"

Jnny [Wednesday morning]: "I weaned myself off CPAP by sleeping upright in a recliner. My (world class) snoring and apneas disappeared, and my back feels so much better."

Mike replies: I've been attracted to that idea for a while—I looked into getting a "hospital" bed a few years ago with the idea of sleeping halfway sitting up. I'd love to try it. I worry, though, that it would just be another of my expensive enthusiasms. I have too many of those!

Tom Duffy: "I've been a volunteer EMT for 18 years. Probably about 60% of our calls are 'old people' calls. The lesson that gets driven home to me over and over is that Mobility Equals Life. Stay active and exercise!"

Tom Burke: "Re coffee drinking: I can't comment on whether stopping drinking coffee was the right thing for you to do or not. However, I will say that the cup you gave me when I visited TOP World HQ in April 2016 was the best I have ever drunk. It was a great coffee and I still remember it. Thank you!"

More Car Talk (OT)

Sorry I got so carried away with that car post. I started out to convey my son's insight about the trapped consumer, and the more research I did the more I needed to do, and it kind of ate away the whole workday. His story about those people resonated with me because I hate the feeling of being trapped.

Don't get me wrong, though: I would love to own three cars, or even five, if I could. And I'm quite sure I would buy them for all the wrong reasons...I'd be no more logical than the next guy if I didn't have to be. Eric Brody wrote, "Me? I like red cars," and, yeah, even that—I could buy a Soul Red Mazda CX-5 just for the color. That paint is just gorgeous, the best you can get on a production car.

I'm not all Mr. Rational, is what I'm saying.

I bought two indulgence cars in my life, a $24,000 used Mercedes C-Class that I kept for three years, and a 2001 Mazda Miata I bought for $10k and sold for $6k three years later (to a TOP reader who might still have it, I don't know). The three years with the Miata was the only time in my life I ever had two cars. The Mercedes lost as much value while I owned it as the purchase price of the Miata. I ditched it when Mercedes wanted $540 for a cheap little plastic interior part that broke. Honestly, the bit that broke couldn't have cost as much as $10. It was a clear sign from the car gods that I was on the wrong playground.

The Miata bought me great pleasure—I really loved my brief ownership experience—and I would dearly love to have another one. I sold it to help fund my move to New York, and that was the exact wrong time to sell it—the roads up here are made for Miatas and I would have had much more fun with it here than was possible on the mostly flat grids of Wisconsin. And there are more of them up here, so I wouldn't have stuck out so much. (Car people have strong opinions about Miatas and I didn't like being the butt of their bigotry.) That reminds me: I know a photographer here, a tintype artist, who wished to live a 19th century lifestyle. He moved to this area because his chosen mode of transportation—a horse and wagon—wouldn't stick out and attract attention! Because the people in this area are used to seeing Mennonite horse-drawn conveyances on a regular basis. There seem to be a lot of lake-house people who keep Miatas around to have fun with in the Summertime, so one more middle-aged dude in a Miata wouldn't have drawn any attention.

The used Miata was as far as I could ever stretch as far as a fun car is concerned. I test-drove a used Porsche Boxster once, and it was great fun to drive, but I really disliked all the hateful luxury features like the motorized roof and, especially, the fact that the entire cockpit was swaddled in leather. I hated that so much it must have been irrational, but it just really rubbed me the wrong way. A leather-clad dash. Sheesh. So not me, as the kids might say.

The main source of my own inefficiencies with car costs has been my own irrational behavior. I've done fairly well with my current car, however. When I test drove it in 2014, it had already been marked down $5k from the $31k sticker price. I liked it a lot, but I procrastinated about getting back to the salesman, and he ended up calling me with an offer that was further sweetened—they'd knock another $2k off the price if I bought it before their fiscal year closed. No wonder they didn't want to carry it into another year—Wisconsin had a take-rate of well under 3% on manual transmissions, and most of those were no doubt in Corvettes and GTIs. The natural demand for the poorly-reviewed ILX with a stick shift must have been very low, and once they found me, they didn't want to let me go. Anyway, the $24k purchase price was well under 35% of my annual income when I bought it (oh, to have 2014 back again...), and I put $10k down on it, so my payment was low.

I have never done what Dave Levingston recommends and driven a car "till the wheels come off," but that's what I intend to try this time. I've had this car for eight years and it currently has 109k miles on it. It's been paid off for three years now. I mean to try to keep it till 200k miles and maybe even more, depending. That should take me to 2030, give or take.

Will I be able to do that? Only if I go on needing to be frugal! Because if by some chance I get prosperous again, watch out.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ernest Zarate (partial comment): "Humans are complicated. Twisted, convulsed, contradictory, we imbue emotions into functional decisions, and detach ourselves where emotional investment is warranted. Go figure. Cars rank high in all that. Even those who claim using only rationality, frugality, and spreadsheets when making purchases are deeply ensnared in emotions. Doubt me? Ask them about car buying—they’ll wax on forever about the virtues of their process, and list all the salient points of their virtue mobile. Look into their eyes while they go on and on. You’ll see the same heightened level of passion as you would listening to some gear-head going on and on about the '68 Mustang they're rebuilding or the new Corvette some other guy just got. There’s just no escaping it."

Keith Cartmell: "The hard part about driving a car till the wheels fall off is knowing when to cut the cord. Eventually the repairs start piling up, and it costs more than any rational assessment of the car's value. Sell it, and put the money into a newer one. I learned that on an '83 Accord hatchback that I loved. At 325,000 km or so it started blowing oil, so I put a rebuilt motor in, thinking I'd get lots more years out of it. Big mistake. It was never as good, and other things started going wrong. Only 15,000 Km later I had to scrap it. So then there was an 98 Caravan that did really well for a while, then at 170,000 Km or so, a repair came up. I asked the mechanic (who was a buddy of mine) to first do an inspection as if I was bringing it to them as a potential purchase. Halfway through the assessment of various problems the report stopped, and said, 'don't buy.' We sold it that night, and were amazed we got as much as we did."

Doug Vaughn: "I was too late to comment on the original post but am also amazed at what people spend on vehicles. We live in a small town that bills itself at the Cowboy Capitol of the World. It's more like wannabe cowboys driving their enormous trucks with lift kits and giant tires. In other words, they aren't even functional as grocery-getters.

"We have always bought new cars because we hate not knowing how much a used car has been abused by the previous owner. We do try to drive them long enough to make it worthwhile. A few weeks ago, we spent the most we ever had on a vehicle and bought a new Mazda CX-5 in white (the only color my wife would consider). We mostly went that route because Mazda was the least aggressive in price gouging. We also save up until we can afford to pay cash as we have become very debt-averse.

"I agree with your thoughts on the Mazda soul red. A Miata RF in red calls my name on a regular basis. The two most fun cars I've owned were a 2002 Miata and a 2013 Mini Cooper S, both with manual transmissions. It doesn't get much more fun on a middle class budget.

"Enjoy the new year with the monochrome camera. I've used a Leica M246 and Q2M for extended periods and loved shooting B&W. If they ever introduce a Q2M with a 40mm lens, they will successfully pry away a chunk of my hard earned cash."

Thomas Mc Cann: "I have a friend with a business selling those huge SUVs. He tells me customers just want to know what the monthly payment will be. Nothing else matters. As to big shiny cars outside low income homes: my mother always said the week money was scarce was the week she bought buns. If money was plentiful it encouraged her to save, She bought a new house in her sixties and paid cash for it. (She was a widow with five school age kids when my father died at the young age of 56.)"

JH (partial comment): "I got rid of my first Miata when even Boston became filled with giant pickup trucks and SUVs. One day I looked into the rearview mirror and all I could see was a giant bumper of a truck. Had he hit me that bumper was at the height of my head. Sold the Miata shortly afterwards. When we moved to California, I bought another—a '94, because it was really cheap and we lived near roads that were perfect Miata territory. Sold it in less than a month for the same reason as the first. I was stopped at traffic signal and looked over—no, under—the lifted-up pickup next to me. Sold that one quickly too. Now I drive Honda CR-Vs where I might survive being hit by one of those trucks."

Mike replies: I nearly had a slow-motion accident with a woman in an SUV. She was backing out of an angled parking space and I was right in back of her stuck in traffic. She obviously had no backup camera and was using her rearview mirror to guide herself. My Miata's pathetic little beep-beep horn was of no use, and I ended up standing up in the car and yelling like a nut. She barely realized in time that she was about to hit me.

Jeff Hohner (partial comment): "We will be buying a car in 2023 despite all foreboding. We will retire our beloved 2004 Toyota Echo [Yaris in the US —Ed.] hatchback (stick, no power locks, no power windows) which is in great condition and will run forever. So fun to drive, superb gas mileage, and roomy enough for hauling most building materials—really! Why are we letting it go? Because it's time to get with the program and get an EV. Well past time. The state of the climate demands it. We can't in good conscience wait any longer for electric car tech to mature to some more optimal, affordable point. We've waited for years for government and business leadership on the energy transition, and since both are still slow-walking this, we're going to do our bit and move forward on our own."

Severian: "I'm so glad you write so much and about so many different topics. My keeper was this sentence of yours, which I intend to redeploy for myself at the earliest opportunity: 'It was a clear sign from the car gods that I was on the wrong playground.' Love it!"

Kodachromeguy: "I must be an extreme among even your frugal readers. I still regularly (several times a week) drive my 1981 BMW 320i, which I bought new. Original engine, transmission, and even starter. The freon R12 AC works. And annual tax is zero. Manual steering and five-speed transmission. Fun, fun, fun."

Mike replies: Guys like you are the reason I could never have one of those. Virtually all of them were driven to death before they ever made it to the used market. The very rare exceptions were priced accordingly. I'm going to die wanting an '80s BMW, and no, I'm not really blaming you.  :-)

Joel Becker: "See, Mike, I am a car person. And people who like to drive cars (as opposed to people who like to show off cars) are not bigoted against Miatas; we know they are a continuous through-line to the proper sports cars of the past. We were sad when the S2000 and the MR2 went away, and we are thankful that the BRZ and GR86 have appeared to join the MX-5 on the road. I think it's like the Leica owner who never takes it out of the dust cover except to tell you that your Fuji X100 isn't a 'real' camera. I hope you're enjoying the ILX. I've heard only good things about its fun-to-drive qualities. No, it's not a roadster, but fun-to-drive comes in many packages. Years ago, I drove my Acura Integra until thieves stripped it out, even in the face of 'nicer' cars that I was starting to be able to afford.

"Speaking of sexist car bigots (it's all sexism), the MR2 Spyder was a beaut of a car, but the bigots all called it the 'MRS2' to denigrate male owners. Me? I love my Honda Odyssey. Takes up less space than an SUV, but drives better, gets more mileage, fits more people and things inside, and is still going at over 15 years old."

Should You Buy a New Car in 2023? (OT)

I've read a number of articles recently claiming it would be a bad idea to buy a new car in 2023. Reasons include higher interest rates, supply chain shortages driving up the cost of new vehicles, and the high price of new vehicles driving up the price of used ones.

Meanwhile, people in my area seem to persist in buying what to me are show-offy, oversized vehicles. And that's no problem, except if it is—for instance if those impressive vehicles might be more expensive than the new owners can really afford, which sometimes seems to be the case as far as I can tell. Why would people buy cars they can't afford? The most obvious reason is that they want a nice car to tool around in. Sometimes it's to display wealth and status. But a vehicle, of course (I'm just going to call them "cars" even though most of them aren't) is for many people an asset. And it's a poor investment: it requires maintenance and debt servicing at the same time as it's depreciating...in the case of new vehicles, depreciating ferociously. The more money you put into a bad asset, the more you will lose. So we arrive at a very strange situation: citizens being actively impoverished by the very possessions they hope will make them look cash-fat and flush to their neighbors.

Transportation budget as a percentage of take-home pay
Consider a few of the strange numbers. First of all, budgeting guides usually recommend that you spend no more than 20% of your take-home pay on your vehicle. But that includes all vehicle expenses:

• Car payment
• Insurance
• Gas
• Maintenance
• Registration, licensing, and fees

It also should include your regular monthly saving plan for your next car down payment, but not very many people try to make that fit into their 20%. According to Triple A, the average of all those costs now amounts to $10,700 annually—pushed over $10k for the first time this year because of the sudden rise in fuel costs. Meaning, your personal take-home pay needs to be $53,500 per year, or about $1,029 a week, just to hit the average cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

Vehicle cost as a percentage of gross salary
Let's look at it a different way. As a percentage of their gross annual income, most working people pay somewhere from 10% to 50% for their motor vehicle. However, the standard recommendation from many budgeting advisors is that you shouldn't pay more than the equivalent of 35% of your gross annual salary for a new car. Here's where that gets dicey. Kelley Blue Book says the average price of a new car in November 2022 was $48,681. Well, unless my arithmetic is wrong (and Lord knows it could be), for that to be 35% of your gross salary, your yearly pay needs to be more than $139,000. And if you earn $140k to $144k—enough to sensibly afford that average new car—you're in the top 9.03% of Americans in terms of earnings.

Meanwhile, the average household income (which includes two-earner families) in the US is a little less than $71,000, according to the Annual Social and Economic Supplement from the US Census Bureau. That means that the average household can comfortably afford one car that costs about $25,000. Even with the percentage of salary maxed out to 50%, the average household should only be paying $35,500 for a new vehicle or a new-to-them used vehicle. As you perceive, neither of those numbers are reaching up to the average new car price.

The conclusion of both these ways of looking at the situation is: the average American can't afford the average new car.

The ugly truth
This would seem to mean that a lot of people are paying more than they should for their cars. One thing I've been tempted to photograph around here are truly shabby and run-down houses with large, gleaming, late-model pickup trucks parked next to them. Social relevance of that sort isn't really my thing, though, because it feels like it would be insulting to the actual people who own the houses and the trucks, and I try not to go around putting that kind of negative energy into the world. Holding real people up as negative examples isn't my thing.

My son worked selling good- to excellent-quality used cars part-time for a while after he moved to Illinois. (He's in graduate school now and got straight A's last semester <—parental brag.) He enjoyed the job generally, but told me that the most interesting part about it was getting to peek into customers' finances. I imagine it must have put him into an awkward position sometimes: he was supposed to sell cars—that was his job—but, because he was objective and hard-headed about it when his customers themselves weren't, he could see clearly when they really shouldn't have been buying the cars they were trying to buy.

The worst situation was one he estimated that all the salesmen at the dealership, averaged across the entire year, encountered maybe two or three times a week. A customer would come in needing a lower car payment. They wanted to trade in their existing car, for which they were paying far too much. They were having trouble meeting the payments, or they were one to several payments in arrears, and urgently needed to eliminate that car payment and replace it with a more manageable one. But they also owed substantially more on the vehicle they were trading in than it was worth. So their idea was to roll that debt into a more favorable new loan—without realizing that the bank would want a large down payment to cover the shortfall, a down payment which those customers almost never had. This was often worse if they were buying a cheaper car, because the amount they wanted to roll over would then become a larger percentage of the price of the new car. It's one thing to roll $5,000 of debt into a $60,000 car, but quite another to roll a $10,000 debt into a $15,000 car.

So they wanted a new car, a lower payment, and a minimal down payment. And, in some cases, he said they also somehow expected to be able to get a nicer car than the one they already had! I guess they thought they'd just sign on the dotted line for a 12-year loan with 0% APR despite their history of non-payment and a lousy credit score. He said some of them were financially literate enough to understand when he explained to them why the dealership wasn't going to be doing that, but that others were mystified as to why it wasn't possible, even when he tried to explain it to them over and over again.

It must be a tough situation, to own a car you can't pay for and yet can't get rid of, when you also, well, need a car. Because a car has an appliance factor along with all its other meanings. Presumably the people who thought they were going to get those magic loans needed some sort of transportation to get back and forth to work, pick up and drop off kids, do errands, go to appointments, etc., etc. They couldn't live without a car, but they were between a rock and a hard place when it came to paying the piper for bad decisions they had already made in the past.

I feel for them. I wish there were a way to optimize the necessity of car ownership, but it doesn't seem possible—unless you really are rich, and don't need to optimize it! I know a retired executive who simply paid cash for a Toyota Corolla with a stick shift and a service plan. I asked him about it, and he shrugged and said, "it gets me around." But I can also name not one but two friends who had huge, gleaming, late-model pickup trucks, both of whom traded their trucks in for even huger, even more gleaming, even newer pickup trucks. I was perplexed. The deciding factor seemed to be truck-love, something to which I am personally utterly immune. And then there's the friend who bought a new pickup truck and couldn't even bring himself to get rid of the old one. He acts like he's collecting vehicles—has quite a few, including motorcycles. To me it's like an open sluice on his bank account that he keeps wide open. But it's his business, and not mine to say.

A motor vehicle is sometimes—often?—the second-biggest asset that a poorer working person might own. And it is almost always an exceptionally poor-performing one, far more likely to diminish our prosperity than to increase it. It's a losing proposition that we must accept we need. Unless you really are rich, it pays to be conservative and realistic when it comes to ownership of these appliances, and to ignore whatever it is you think your car says about you. Because, really, you're probably the only one who cares what you drive.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Eric Brody (partial comment): "I live in a well-to-do town where Maseratis are common and there are even a few Lamborghinis. Given their reliability records in Consumer Reports, there are a surprising number of Jeeps, very few Cadillacs, tons of Mercedes and BMWs though. Me? I like red cars."

James: "I used to work as the law clerk to a bankruptcy judge, so I would read all of the motions that came through. There was always a thick stack of motions for permission to borrow—the debtors had declared chapter 13 bankruptcy, so were working repayment plans, and needed permission to take out new loans. Stacks and stacks of these motions. This was in Chicago, with one of the better mass transit systems in the country. The motions had the loan documents attached, so I could mentally map where these debtors lived. At least some could have done without the cars. Sometimes, the motions included where the debtors worked as a justification for needing too drive. One wanted to drive what would have been a 25 minute train ride downtown. These motions were routine, and were routinely granted. So, the great wheel turns."

Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "Wow! Excellent text. Cars as a desire to display power and status seem like a worldwide plague. It seemed to me that you described the average Brazilian!"

John Camp: "Maybe people who don't have much money are looking for a little status and happiness in their lives?"

Tex Andrews: "Yes, folks do tend to pay more than they have to...and especially today, when lower end cars are packed with features that used to be high end. For us, the sweet spot was/is the Subaru Crosstrek. We got one in 2017 (Volkswagen diesel buyout), our youngest daughter has one, one of my nephews has one—and my oldest daughter has the related Impreza from 2012. Just a great car. Gas mileage could be better, but rain, snow, ice handling is great. And they last. And the parts aren't expensive."

Geoffrey Wittig: "Spot-on, Mike. It really does blow my mind how many otherwise sensible working class folks drop a huge fraction of their yearly income on a huge shiny new pickup truck or SUV, when they would be far better served by something like a Corolla or Civic, or a Prius. And then they complain bitterly about the cost of fuel required to move their giant beast back and forth to the grocery store and on a 50-mile commute to work every day. I don't get it."

Henri van der Sluis: "For me a car is a transportation tool, not a showcase…I look at fuel consumption and reliability when buying a new one, and use it as long as is economical to use it."

Gaspar Heurtley: "I agree 100% with your post, but…

"When I got my first job (a crappy, underpaid one, off course), for months I spent almost everything on payments for a brand new DSLR and two lenses. I remember one of my father’s friends lecturing me about savings and the 'right way' to spend my hard-earned money. Some people save for buying a house, some people keep traveling; we spend money on cameras, or cars, or…you get the idea. My point is, everyone spends a lot of money on something, yet everyone thinks other people are wasting it."

Robert Roaldi: "What irritates me is that small low-end models have disappeared in North America. No more Honda Fits, Toyota Yarises, etc. Here in Canada, you can't get a regular Golf anymore; they only sell pocket rocket GTIs now. I come from a (minor) motorsport background and I just laugh when I hear phrases like 'North America's love affair with the car.' It has become pretty obvious that what North Americans want is living rooms on wheels. If we truly liked driving, we wouldn't be driving three-ton pickup trucks to the grocery store and we wouldn't be spending time and money on self-driving features. What we want are taxis."

Gary: "This is a great analysis. You have a future as an accountant or financial analyst!  :-) 

"Here are two links for people who want some training re: effective financial management.

Money Smart

MoneySkill

"Money Smart is an FDIC site. MoneySkill is a program designed by the American Financial Services Association education foundation. I'm familiar with MoneySkill; I think it's an excellent program."

Dave Levingston: "There are two ways to maximize your car financial situation. 1.) Buy cheap junkers. When one dies, get rid of it and buy another. In my younger days when money was in short supply I drove a bunch of $700 cars. Some of them lasted several years. 2.) Buy new and keep it until the wheels fall off. I like to take road trips, so that's what I do now. I usually get more than 200,000 miles out of a new car. I have gotten as much as 320,000. We are a two-car family, so I stagger the purchases so we always have a newer vehicle for our trips. More often than not this means we have no car payment since we pay them off well before we have to buy another. And we do save for the next purchase, although with 0% loans having been available we've just been financing them in recent years."

SIX: The Twelve Links of Christmas 2022*: Dr. Grip Ballpoint Pen

Pilot Dr. Grip Center of Gravity Refillable and Retractable Ballpoint

If I buy a whole box of pens, for instance these Paper Mates, which are pretty nice until the ink starts to leak, or the all-time classic Bic Cristal, my house eventually absorbs them all. Where do they disappear to? By all rights, the floor of my car should be covered in pens and there should be pens strewn everywhere in every house I've ever lived in. But can I ever find a pen when I need one?

To fight back, I tried a trick in high school: I went to our local independently-owned pharmacy (remember those?), which sold fancy pens in a glass case by the cash register, and bought a Parker pen made of real wood—walnut—for the princely sum of $12, equal to $80 today. Then I threw all my other pens away and resolved to keep track of that one single expensive pen. It worked. I used my walnut-bodied Parker for more than a decade, and as recently as the early 2000s could still put my hands on it.

This is my current favorite. I own, you guessed it, one. List price is $10, which makes it expensive for contemporary times—you can buy a new Bic Cristal for 8¢ if you buy enough of them, and those nice Paper Mates cost less than a buck apiece. But a Dr. Grip is worth the dosh. It's solid, nicely balanced, satisfying to write with, and has a large soft grippy area for my fumbly fingers. Mikey likes. And hey, I know right where mine is.

Mike

P.S. For an unexpected treat, Google "Bic pen art" and hit "Images." It's a thing that's a thing.

*A list of a dozen beautiful gifty things in the spirit of the season.

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Krumm (partial comment): "I like Pilot pens in general. Recently I've really enjoyed using a Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. [Should be findable from here —Ed.] Not messy, mostly smooth with just a hint of scratch, and it seems to improve my not very good handwriting."

Jim Arthur: "I’ve been using the uni-ball Jetstream for the last few years and really like it, but the girth of the Dr. Grip looks interesting. I have big hands so a bigger pen seems like a good idea. I’ll give it a try."

Gordon Lewis: "I agree that if you look on a pen as being disposible you're more likely to lose it than if you see it as an important tool. As a lefty, I also appreciate the fact that ballpoint pens are generally less susceptible to smearing. This is important when your writing hand is behind rather than ahead of what you're writing. That said, I prefer the stronger line and bolder contrast of a rollerball. For overall quality, comfort, low-smear, and water resistance (important when signing checks), I find the uni-ball AIR hard to beat. The minimum quantity is a three-pack, but I have a set of blue and black and haven't lost one yet."

Mike replies: I found a single pack, although the three-packs are cheaper per pen.

Stan B.: "And if you practice enough, you can do this."

John Abee: "I've been a pen geek for many years and settled on the PaperMate InkJoy for the nice consistant line weight and glide on the paper. Cheap as dirt and a delight in the hand. They too tend to disappear but I finally solved that puzzle—the blue stains on my laundry gave it away."

Rube: "I taught for many a year in Japan, where the Dr. Grip is quite popular (and not that much more expensive than other pens). I always had an orange one, it was my favorite pen (except of course for my Olympus Pens!!!)."

Cookin' With Gas (OT)

I woke up this morning and...cooked.

I'm a terrible cook. Good cooks think it's impossible for anyone to be a terrible cook, because "all you have to do is follow directions." It's invisible to them how much of any recipe is assumed knowledge. And aptitude! For instance, this morning I prepared the red beans part of a red beans and rice sauce for the slow cooker, and it started off having me cook chopped onions for eight minutes in 1/4 cup of "vegetable oil." I used olive oil, because it's what I had. Olives are vegetables, right? One hour later, a vague memory glinted through my brain-pan like a ray of the setting sun after an overcast day...didn't I read someplace once that you shouldn't sauté in olive oil? A cook would know. I have no idea.

And then there's "...to taste." (That's the aptitude part. I'm a good photographic printmaker mainly because I'm very good at perceiving small visual differences and I have settled and well-established ideas as to what a print should look like. Good cooks can perceive small differences in taste and have settled and well-established ideas about what tastes good and what doesn't.) Many recipes tell you to add ingredients or spices "to taste." Well, I'm bad at tasting (and I was bad at it even before COVID-19). I have no idea what "to taste" means. Or rather, it means little to me. Vague instructions like "add 1/2 to 1 tsp. sage (optional)" are useless, and maddening, as well. (I flipped a coin and added it.)

I'm trying a couple of other things to help myself with cooking. One is to clean up right away. Historically, when I cook, the kitchen is a mess for hours and maybe days afterward, which is a bummer. Cleaning up right away is meant to break that association. Another observation is that cooking makes me tense. So I've been trying to relax and take it easy when I cook. Don't stress out; try to enjoy it; don't get mad; don't yell at the dog; no swearing; don't allow the feelings of tension in my innards to rise. Breathe. Let's just say I'm working on it. 

Why are we fat?
A really interesting new article in the Times (remember I'm American—"the Times" means the New York Times) yesterday talks about a scientific meeting at the Royal Society (now that would be Great Britain) called "Causes of obesity: theories, conjectures, and evidence." Turns out that researchers have no idea why everybody's getting fat, but they know one thing that isn't to blame: us.

"The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing. No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off, first in high-income countries‌, then in much of the rest of the world. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony‌‌ and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers. In stark contrast to a prevailing societal view of obesity, which assumes people have full control over their body size, they didn’t blame individuals for their condition, the same way we don’t blame people suffering from the effects of undernutrition, like stunting and wasting."

Starting in 1980, people started to get fatter. Not only are people in every single state in the U.S.A. fatter now, but the people in the slimmest State, Colorado, are on average fatter than the people in the fattest State in the Union, Mississippi, were in 1970. The article claims that the standard trope, "eat less, exercise more" is as useless as "take two aspirins and call me in the morning." Are we obese because we don't eat less? In these 40 years since 1980, our pets have gotten fatter. Are we obese because we don't exercise more? Marathoner runners now are heavier on average than they were in 1970. The trend is global, and pervasive. Not a single country in the world has been able to reverse it. Not a single demographic or ethnic group has escaped. As popular as the idea of "personal responsibility" is—we are very much in love with the idea that we're in control—that ain't it.

Personally, my experience aligns with the scientists who argued that "the problem is less about what we’re eating and more about what we’re not." In more than nine years of experimenting with my diet, what I've learned is that the body needs plants. Plants are overwhelmingly what humans ate for two hundred thousand years; it's the diet we evolved to fit. Plants are compounds that contain hundreds if not thousands of phytochemicals in complicated combinations. Many of them are simply things our bodies are adapted to use, and that we need. When I'm able to eat a sound diet of the seven healthiest foods, I don't have to regulate how much I eat, and I both lose weight and am less hungry. But what do I know?

I still struggle, because I'm a sugar and alcohol addict. And lax, if I'm honest.

And, well, a terrible cook.

Mike

Download 7 healthy foods

Sad UPDATE, the next day: The red beans and rice was very tasty—I had one large helping once it was done. But...unfortunately I somehow neglected to turn the slow cooker off. I don't know how I did that. But it ended up being cooked for an additional eight hours, to a total of 15. It did not survive this mistreatment, and I threw it all away this morning.  :-(

But at least I know how to make it now. And now I finally know how a dishwasher works, thanks to Aakin! (I know, "RTFM.")

Featured Comments from:

Brian O'Connor (partial comment): "Most processed 'foods' including sucrose (sugar) are not actual food. So a critical thing to figure out is 'what is food?'"

Mike Ferron: "Maybe I am wrong but the answer seems simple to me. In 1970 there were far fewer fast food restaurants available to most of us and we mostly ate at home. Not all the foods we ate at home were healthy but still we consumed more quality foods than we do now. Obesity is now an accepted standard here in the USA. Just watching the folks at work, especially the young ones raid the snack machine full of sugary junk washing that junk down with monster drinks and coffee drinks with whip cream or eating 1000 calories worth of fried food from the place across the parking lot reveals the truth. I encourage all to spend time studying healthy nutrition."

chris_scl: "There is sincerely no problem at all in using olive oil for sautéing. So, yeah, just relax and enjoy your cooking!"

Chris H: "An entertaining and thought provoking read! I'm a good cook. Possibly the greatest, in my humble opinion. One big stressor at play for cooking (and many other endeavors) is not allowing enough time for the job, and being rushed at the outset. I'm not sure what kind of superhuman can actually prep and cook a meal in the time frames quoted in a typical recipe, but I suspect those are all complete lies. Yeah, if you're on your game and have a few repetitions of a dish in your past then you can get there or close. Otherwise it's like looking at the distance times of a professional runner—not good for the ego. Taking the relaxed approach, as you say, and as part of that leaving plenty of time for the job, helps a bunch in my book."

Jay: "I've recently moved back to the USA after almost 30 years in Europe, mostly in Spain. Portion sizes here are approximately double and there is much higher consumption of fast food and packaged foods. There are basically no obese children in Spain and adults are generally thin or moderately overweight. You may draw your own conclusions...."

Benjamin Marks: "I have often thought that cookbooks are a good example of the limits of language for certain practical purposes. You can read the instruction, 'Brown the onions in a saucepan over a medium flame until carmelized.' But almost every noun and adjective in that sentence requires the cook to already know the punchline to the joke. To follow those instructions, you need to already have an intuitive feel for (or practical experience with) the following: What type of onion, how finely chopped, how fresh? Browned in oil? What type? Or in butter? How thick is the bottom of your saucepan and what's it made of? What fuel makes your fire (propane does not burn as hot as natural gas, and not all stovetops are created equal)? Then how do you know the distinction between 'carmelized' and 'burnt'? I feel for ya Mike! But don't take it too hard. The cookbooks are stacked against ya."

Kye Wood: "I'm stealing your genius. Anything optional from now on will get the coin flip arbiters decision."

Christopher Perez (partial comment): "Living in Europe, I can tell an American with 80 to 90 percent accuracy simply by body shape. Americans carry weight differently than, say, other overweight nations, like England. Most Americans I see here could be considered overweight."

Graham: "Mike—olive oil is perfect. In our house we virtually never use anything else, unless there is a specific (flavor) reason. Ditto for the entire country of Spain. And most of Italy.

"Cooking together has been the foundation of most of my friendships in adult life, not by design but by default, and for my wife and me it is a way of life.

"I find that by far the most important thing for good results is to use the best ingredients. This is hugely important, to the extent that I buy based on what looks good rather than what I had in mind. You won’t find this at chain stores or even most grocers; it really means getting to know the vendors at your local farmers markets on a first-name basis and enjoying the shopping process itself. I’ve only ever found one grocer that can rival the markets, blessedly close to us here in San Francisco—and I can go there just to enjoy being there, even if I don’t need anything.

"Other things that make a big difference for me are 1.) cooking with music, and 2.) cleaning up while cooking, always and immediately, every little thing (I don’t even like leaving things out to dry).

"Some of the chefs I’ve learned the most from focus on technique—Pepin, for example, says you really have to learn to use a knife so that you can cook with speed—if you get slowed down it all falls apart. Thomas Keller recommmends practicing pinching salt so that you know how much is in each pinch, again so that you don’t get slowed down measuring things. He’s also honest in saying that he can’t tell you how much oil to put in the pan—'you just have to know that,' he would say.

"Lastly, I’d offer that I find it quite hard to cook only for myself. The social aspect is part of the cooking for me, and vice-versa. So many happy memories."

Stan B.: "I remember looking at photographs of 'circus freaks' in the seventies, wondering how it was possible for human beings to ever get that large. Now you see people who easily surpass their size on any given day, on any given block in any given city or town."

Dogman: "During my first photography job at a weekly newspaper, I virtually lived on red beans and rice. A little sausage tossed in right after payday. Seasoned with a liberal amount of Tabasco or other hot sauce, it was always tasty and satisfying. There was also lots of cheap beer available in those days to keep it company. Ah, memories! How did I survive?

Open Mike: Going Gentle (OT)

I saw a headline the other day that said something like, "the hardest thing about growing old for most people is accepting that they're growing old." Made me laugh. True for me. The strange fact about getting old is that I honestly can't quite wrap my head around it. It doesn't seem...right, somehow.

I don't feel all that different from in here. But I also don't hang out with young people, and forty-year-olds look like twenty-somethings to me (and twenty-somethings look like teenagers!), and I've become surprisingly prudish, and the other day my feet felt so cold so persistently that I took the bull by the horns and soaked the ol' dogs for five minutes in a Rubbermaid tub of hot water like a sick guy in an old Norman Rockwell painting. (Big surprise:  it worked. My tootsies felt warm the whole rest of the afternoon.) That certainly isn't something young people do!

If you make a comment about your age, most people will reply with some homily like, you're only as old as you feel. Something that, deep down, means, "fight it." You know, the old Dylan Thomas lines: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I don't know about that. I think the harder fight might simply be accepting reality. "When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away...acceptance is the answer to all my problems today." Does "you're as young as you feel" mean I'm...two? Because sometimes I feel like I need a nap. LOL.

My consolation is that I might have a good life as an old guy ahead of me! I'm in good health. And the DSM defines middle age as being from 45 to 64. And I'm 65. So that means I'm a young old guy, right? Hello? You still there? Wake up!

I'll take it. As my bro' Dr. Charlie says, consider the alternative.

Mike

P.S. Our Print Sale starts at 10:00 a.m. today, but remember, that's PACIFIC TIME. So: noon in Chicago and Dallas and 1:00 p.m. in New England and Florida...and here at TOP World HQ in the heart of the old Burned-Over District. I'm excited!

Featured Comments from:

SteveW: "Thank you Mike, that was a the OT I needed today."

Herman Krieger: "For my 96th birthday, I changed my two-wheel recumbent for a three-wheel one."

Mike replies: Our friend Herman is TOP's honorary official oldest reader, and has been for years! Long may you prosper, Herman.

And thanks to all of you older guys who inspire me to not worry and keep enjoying life. I really liked the comments—I think there were two—about the seventies being the best decade so far. I'm going to aim for that and work toward it. I've had some not-so-good decades in my life, for sure, so it's a good time to aim to set that right.

Foxy Vixen Booty Call (OT)

I was out in the pool table shed yesterday around nightfall, knocking balls into the pockets, when I heard the most ungodly sound—a wild, haunting cry like something out of a horror movie; something between a shriek and a yowl. It seemed to come from close by. Butters, my nine-year-old dog, who was out in the pool shed with me, became agitated. I heard other dogs barking at the noise from much farther away. Butters dropped his ball and began whining and whimpering excitedly, racing between the door and the window. Again and again it sounded. I listened intently, trying to discern what it was. It seemed to be coming from somewhere down the road south of the house.

The first thing that occurs to me in such a situation is, do I need to help? But I quickly realized the sound was not human. Could it be a dying animal? Something run over by a car? Possibly. It was a mournful sound that seemed to trail off in a sort of moan; it seemed to imply that some sort of violence was occurring. I decided to get Butters inside—I have a slight fear of wild coyotes in the woods at night, as they are known to occasionally prey on domestic dogs. As we went through the back door I found myself shuddering at yet another of these cries and thinking, whatever the heck that is, I am not going to investigate. It's out there, and we'll just stay safely in here.

Then it struck me what it could be. And I thought: I am going out to investigate! Maybe I'll get a chance to see it? So I got my coat and boots on and grabbed a powerful flashlight. Leaving the dog behind, I headed off between my outbuildings out to the road. The scream sounded again, very close.

The temperature was just barely above freezing. It had been raining most of the day, and everything outdoors was wet. It was all but totally dark—there was just enough light left to discern that the sky was still overcast. The Summer people have all departed, so there were no cheerful porch lights or window lights anywhere—the houses were just hulking masses of blacker black against the fast-falling darkness. And the trees are all leafless now.

I stood listening in the cold, wet darkness. Nothing. Did it know I was there? Stepping gently and softly, I walked slowly down the road, barely able to see, keeping the light off so my night vision would improve. I reached the bridge over the creek, looking back into the gloom of the creekbed as it receded up the hillside, and paused again to listen.

On the bridge I was above the creek, but the creek comes down a gully or ravine, and, especially on the south side, opposite my land, the bank juts sharply upward and looms over the road. The big trees that cover it tower far above that.

The howl sounded again, loud, and seemingly right across from where I stood! 

I made my best guess, pointed the flashlight, and switched it on. It illuminated, dimly, the craggy line of the top of the steep bank, and cast a circle of light on the bank and the lower parts of the trees nearest me—right in the middle of which, unmistakably, were two animal eyes staring back at me, shining brilliantly with reflected light!

I looked for a moment and turned the light off, so as not to ruin my night vision, and the animal howled again, softer than before. Switching the light back on, I saw the two bright eyes watch me for a few seconds then turn away. As the animal got up and began to walk, she came out from behind the stump that had been obscuring most of her body and I could see her entire profile. Although she and everything else looked faint and greyish in the weak light, I saw her entire body from nose to the extravagant tail, called a brush. A red fox.

That's what I had realized it might be, back at the house. Conditions here this year have been kind to foxes—I've seen more of them than any other year I've lived here. And foxes scream—that's a usual term for the noise I had been hearing. The male, called the tod, or reynard, or dog fox, will scream to warn other males off his territory, but the ones who mostly scream are the females, to signify to nearby males that they are there and ready to mate. It's actually a little early for that yet, so maybe the one I saw was a male staking his claim to his turf; who knows?

So it's no wonder Butters got worked up at the sound of the screams—foxes are distantly related to dogs, fellow members of the canidae family. 

She—or he, as the case may be—disappeared into the woods and didn't scream again. The next time we hear that scary scream from the woods in the night, I will know exactly what it is, and I'll know not to worry—it doesn't mean some sort of horrible violence is has occurred in the night. It's the foxes, sending messages only other foxes can properly decode.

Mike

Featured Comments:

Mark Sampson: "When I lived in Alexandria, Virginia, red foxes were common in the neighborhood, and sometimes in the evening, or at night, they would scream like that. My wife said 'like someone was murdering a baby.' It was a quiet, if crowded, neighborhood of town houses...one evening I heard a fox's scream just before taking the dog out. As we went by the next row of buildings, I saw two policemen walking from their car. I asked 'what's up?' and one said 'we had a call for someone screaming.' I said 'I've just heard a fox.' And one cop said 'Yeah, that's what we thought, but we have to check it out, have a good evening,' and we went on our respective ways. There are stories about our dog getting loose and chasing the fox, but those are for another time...."

Mike Ferron: "Way back when there was a blood-curdling, non-human scream from the woods behind the house one night. It sounded otherworldly and yes it was disturbing. Just might have been a 🦊...."

Dave Millier: "I live in London. There are foxes everywhere. If you drive around the neighbourhood, you will see 20 in 10 minutes. A family lives next door to me. The cubs are hilarious; I can often watch them from my bedroom window, rolling around and play fighting. Not so amusing when one of them broke into our Eglu and ate the chickens. And they do make an unearthly horror-movie wailing and screaming that sounds like murder being done. They are not closely related to dogs (which come from wolf stock); more closely related to raccoons. There is a fox selective breeding experiment where foxes developed dog-like appearance and behaviour within a few generations. It is fascinating in itself but when I checked the details for this comment, it appears things may not be as they seem. Some light reading."

Mike replies: Or not so light; but thanks for that. The Russian Farm-Fox Experiment was featured in the NOVA documentary "Dogs Decoded," which I loved and recommend to anyone who will listen. (It's getting hard to find.) It was nice to catch up with that a little.

Open Mike: Are Ye Confused?

A little discursion onto the subject of "ye" this morn:

To begin with, ye as it exists in English is two words, not one. In one, the Y replaces thorn, which was a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, and Old Swedish alphabets and still exists in modern Icelandic. Thorn has been completely replaced by "th" in English now. Early printers replaced thorn with a Y, which they considered close enough, and used "y^e" for the, "y^t" for that, and "y^s" for this. So one meaning of "ye" is simply "the," and is properly pronounced "the." So when you see "Ye Olde Shoppe" or some such affectation, it's actually pronounced "the old shop." Which isn't very exciting, but there ye are.

...Which brings us to the second meaning of ye, which means the same thing as "you," plural. It's an archaism that carried over—for a while, anyway—from Old English, which used separate words for "you" when applied to one person, two people, or many people...or, in some cases, to someone of high rank, as in the so-called "royal we" (in Latin, the pluralis majestatis). "Ye" generally meant the same thing as "y'all" or "you guys" in modern English-American speech, and was pronounced "you" (or minimized to something like "yuh." Say "...so now you know" casually, quickly, with "you" de-emphasized, and you'll probably be within harrumphing distance to how "ye" was spoken).

When we say it as "yee," we're engaging in what's called a spelling pronunciation, by which the pronunciation of a word gradually shifts to the way it looks like it should be pronounced; for example when Versailles Road in Lexington, Kentucky, is pronounced "ver-SALES," startling French people and Québécois, or when people pronounce the silent "n" in kiln (real potters are mysteriously divided between "kiln" and the older pronunciation "kil"). Thus, the King James Bible's "judge not, that ye be not judged" should be read out loud simply as "judge not, that you be not judged." Modern translations all use you, as for instance the New International Version's "do not judge, or you too will be judged." As Popeye used to say, faskinatin'.

Finally, Ye is the name of the person who used to be named Kanye West. It's not what he "goes by"; it's not what he's calling himself now; it's his new legal name, as decreed in Los Angeles Superior Court by...er, Judge Court. Really, that's her name. He pronounced Kanye "CON-yay," so Ye is pronounced like the last syllable of that, thus: yay. It was his nickname for years among his friends and peers in the rap community. Interestingly, "Ye" as a name looks like it might fall victim to spelling pronunciation, meaning that some people whose only exposure to him is reading disturbing things in the news might start saying it "yee."

So there you have it: "ye" is two different words and is pronounced either "the" or "you," and "Ye" in the former K. West's case is a whole real legal name and is pronounced "yay."

So now ye know.

Mike

Featured Comments:

David Mackenzie: "Y’all is actually singular. The plural is 'all y’all.' FWIW."

Marcus Peddle: "I use 'ye' (yee) for second person plural because I'm from the Island of Newfoundland where the language got stuck in time in some ways. 'Youse' is an alternative to 'ye' in some parts of the island. I sometimes slipped when speaking to groups of students in my English as a Foreign Language classroom and asked things like, 'Are ye finished the activity?' Interestingly, they always understood what I mean, probably because I looked at all of them while saying it."

Richard Parkin: "On reflection, I wonder why ye would necessary to distinguish the plural of you. Thou (tha’) is still widely in use at least in this neck of the woods (Yorkshire, UK)."

Open Mike: COVID and Water (OT)

Tomorrow will mark two weeks I've had symptoms. I'm feeling generally better now, except for a few things: mainly fatigue and a cough. The cough isn't bad; it's what I'd describe as "nagging." I don't cough much, and it doesn't hurt much. I also have a dry congestion and some sinus pain. I've stopped losing weight.

The fatigue is what has power. I had difficulty staying awake all day yesterday—my mentation kept slipping into the "wakeful but confused" state that I recognize as stage 1 sleep. That's when you think you're awake but your thoughts are beginning to wander off in bizarre directions that aren't logical. Many people aren't consciously aware of this state—it's the normal first stage of falling asleep. At those times I'll have my eyes closed without realizing it, or catch myself beginning to doze. Happened all day long. I took naps twice yet still slept all night. Small chores are enough to make me tired, and I'll do things like sleep for 10 hours and then need a nap five hours after waking up. And I had a strange sensation two days ago—I was sitting at my desk, perfectly idle and relaxed, but at the same time was feeling a strong urge to go lie down. That was odd.

As a bonus, I'm sleeping soundly, which is a pleasure. I've had trouble with sleep literally all my life. I have vivid memories of learning how to get out of my crib for the first time when I was a toddler—one of the first skills I remember mastering. My parents would have to put me back to bed multiple times.

Danger, Will Robinson
I quarantined for five days as required (really six days, because the first day you notice symptoms is counted as day zero) and my doctor's office assures me that I'm no longer contagious, but I'm still keeping to myself and informing people that I've had COVID recently. I figure I'll let them make their own decisions as to whether they want to be around me. I'm doing most of my food shopping at open-air farmer's markets. I've been to grocery stores a few times, but I go at off hours and wear a KN95 mask.

Nationwide, we're still losing 517 people a day to COVID. That's the current five-day average. That's less than heart disease, cancer, and accidents, but more than stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. Older people and those with severe underlying conditions are most at risk. You're five times more likely to get the disease if you haven't been vaccinated, and several times more likely to have severe consequences. I could kick myself—I probably have the Omicron variant, and I didn't get the latest booster that covered that. I meant to...I just didn't get around to it. I don't get around to a lot of things. That's not age-related—I've been that way all my life.

I'm doing my best to take it easy. My life doesn't scale down well—there are just things that I have to keep up with. A downside of living alone. No one else is going to cut the grass. I can be sick, just not very sick.

Water
In the middle of all this, the water failed! That was a significant worry while it lasted, mainly because of ignorance: I didn't know what was going on or what was going to fix it. Did you read about those people in Jackson, Mississippi, who were without water for weeks? I don't know how they did it. I was only partially without water for two days and even that was a significant hassle. You can go two days pretty easily without washing clothes or taking a shower or running the dishwasher. That gets a lot more difficult if you're talking about two weeks. Never mind two months. I found it easy to consciously ignore the plight of the Jacksonians when I was just hearing about it tangentially on the news (you know, that's them, doesn't affect me)—but I have a lot more empathy for them now.

I couldn't find a plumber at first—didn't even manage to speak to one—but I'm fortunate to "know a guy." He's a contractor, and hires lots of tradesmen. So if he asks for a favor, people step up for him, because he's the guy who gives them work. He had a plumber here within hours.

We went on a scavenger hunt in the woods. I vaguely knew where the well head was, but not exactly. It seemed to have disappeared. But of course it was just all overgrown. It's on the neighbors' property, which used to be part of this property.

Here's my shiny new possession that I paid a lot of money for! I treasure it so much I had it buried 150 feet in the ground. As you can probably guess even if you don't recognize it, it's a well pump. The date of manufacture on the old one was 1993, so it lasted 29 years, seven of which benefited me. Lucky me...I'm the guy who gets to pay for the next 29 years. If and when I sell this house, the next owner will get a lot of the benefit. You know what they say: Oh well. (Get it? That must be one of my best puns ever.)

A lot of expenses in life are a sort of lottery. When did you buy your house? What was the market like and what were the interest rates? Is your car a lemon or a peach? Did you ever have to buy a new roof for a house you only lived in for a few years? How expensive are your vices? It's a lot cheaper to collect cameras than cars.

I need to clear out around the well head so it doesn't get buried, and so it drains. That's going to have to wait until I feel better, though. 

So I'm back above the wash line, to use Hans Rosling's term. (If you've never watched that video, you should: you'll probably never again wash clothes without being grateful.) I have just what I had four days ago, except I'm poorer, and yet I'm all the more grateful for what I have. In fact, I think I'll go experience some first world luxury...by doing a load of laundry. Ahhhhh.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

PaulW: "Nine years ago I had a new roof, and many upgrades, installed. Two weeks later my home was destroyed in a flood. I caculated that it cost me a bit over $1,000 a day to own that roof. I should have bought some Leica gear and saved money."

Kevin: "Re 'The fatigue is what has power.' You said it !! Saturday evening, the 17th, marked three weeks since I first had COVID symptoms. My case was mild, in the grand scheme of COVID. But it was quite enough for me. Leaving work on Friday, September 16th, I thought; 'I feel like myself again.' The first time I'd had that feeling since before I was COVIDed on August 27. You'll get there, Mike. Just gotta wait it out."

Kye Wood: "Ooh! I reckon on winning this one. Since March this year, I have...

• Had a professional house clean $2,600
• Had the four water tanks cleaned $1,800
• Had the roof cleaned $1,000
• Replaced the hot water system $2,200
• Replaced the toilet $1,700
• Installed a water purifier with ultraviolet and dual filters $2,200
• Installed a 6.6KW rooftop solar system $8,000
• Replaced a retaining wall that stops the mountain swallowing the house $11,000
• Replaced the electric meter box and circuits $2,200
• Replaced IT cabling in roof and connection to street optic fibre $2,500
• Had dangerous trees felled and mulched $3,800
• Installed a concrete driveway entrance $5,800

"But...my two water pumps are working perfectly. So there's that."

Mike replies: Whew. You're right, you definitely win. If that's the right word....  :-)

Dan Khong: "Thanks for pointing me to the video clip on the washing machine. Enjoyed that. I still remember the days when we had a washer lady come by every few days to wash the laundry. Because of her, my mother had more time to spend with me. Now we have washing machines—and laundromats—so people have more time to write for blogs, read books and take pictures."

Mike replies: A reader pointed out that video to me originally, so I can't take credit for finding it.

SA: "I had the post-COVID cough too this summer and it didn't go away for over a month and was even getting worse. Doctor gave me cough suppressants and steroid, which didn't help much. An acupuncture specialist in my town cured me with a single treatment. She said that she has helped a lot of patients like this.

"She said that COVID can leave the immune system in an activated state for months, which leads to such symptoms. (Note that inflammation is a sign that your body thinks it is still fighting infection.) She pointed out some some sore spots on my body—various lymph type areas, the adrenal gland, etc. She stuck needles in various places for half an hour and when I got up the cough was almost all gone. She did another followup treatment a few days later, and I have not had any trouble since then.

"(She has a master's degree in Aerospace engineering by the way! Very nice person.)"