The Day Before

In real life, on the day before they don’t announce disasters that will happen the following day. In real life, no one tells you that you will break your leg tomorrow, or that a car coming the other way will cross over the centerline tomorrow and kill a loved one.

I’ve noticed some disturbing Facebook videos lately. I suspect that the people who post these disaster videos do it for the shock value, for grotesque entertainment. The fact that security cameras are everywhere means that people can easily find these video snippets of bizarre disasters, because these cameras are always running, so they are always ready to capture the banal and the extraordinary. In one of these videos, a heavy load drops on top of a pedestrian who was minding his business walking down the sidewalk. In another video, a man was walking with his female friend when a runaway mounted tire bounced across the roadway at high speed, hitting his upper back and slamming his head to the concrete. Stunned, the woman leans down to attend to his apparently lifeless body and then the clip suddenly ends.

No one wrote that man a warning note the day before: “You will be hit by a runaway tire tomorrow and you will die.”

No one tells you that this is the last day before you start having a pain that turns into a chronic pain.

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A few highlights from the Lambert Airport Outreach Meeting by FLY314 Privatization Working Group

Tonight (October 29, 2019), I traveled to the Carpenter Branch Library in South St. Louis to attend an event known as the “Airport Outreach Meeting by Fly314 Privatization Consultants.” I prefer to think of this group as the “Acolytes of Ayn Rand," people who think that private for-profit is always superior to government. I spoke up several times tonight. Some of my comments can be heard on the attached video and other comments will be on KWMU Radio tomorrow. My overriding fear is that when the "Working Group" actually comes up with a detailed proposal, its allies in the Board of Aldermen will declare an emergency session and force a vote before anyone has a chance to read and absorb the legislation. This is standard operating procedure in many publicly unpopular cases like this, where the citizens have nothing to gain. Hence, my cross-examination of the consultants, which you can hear on the attached two-minute recording, along with the non-answers. When I pressed them for assurances that the Board Members would have ample time to discuss the ultimate detailed piece of legislation with their constituents before any vote, one presenter stated that my question was “unfair.” On this recording (which I made on my iPhone) you’ll first hear the claim that the group has been “transparent.” We heard that claim a lot tonight. Next, you’ll hear another presenter telling the citizens that they should RIGHT NOW be speaking to their representative on the Board of Aldermen about the airport deal. Never mind that there isn’t yet any deal and never mind that members of the Board of Aldermen do not have any meaningful information to discuss with their constituents.

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Art and New Friends in St. Genevieve, Missouri

A few weeks ago, I walked through an art gallery in St. Genevieve. Really beautiful studio run by Leon and Lynn Basler. By the time we walked out, they had invited the two of us to be among the featured artists for their display for the upcoming St. Genevieve Art Show, Dec 7th and 8th. My art is photography. Really cool! Not coincidentally, I've been learning a new photo program for doing HDR: Aurora HDR 2019. It offers layers, blend modes and many other things that weren't on the program I had been using. If you're looking for something to do on Dec 7 and 8th, think about coming down to look at the many art galleries in beautiful St. Genevieve. It's really a special place, so much so that the city is in the process of being designated as a National Historic Park.

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The countless things to which you owe your existence

I sometimes ponder how many things had to happen in order for me to exist. There are countless things that happen on this planet every day, of course, but some of these things absolutely positively had to happen in order for me (and you) to exist. In this post, I will discuss a few of these contingencies that had to happen in order for you to be reading this post. This is a tale permeated with sex and violence.



The correct egg needed to meet the correct sperm or else we wouldn't have been born. Given that there are more than 40 million sperm in each ejaculation, it was almost mathematically impossible for the "correct" sperm to get to my mother's egg on the "correct" day. But for that sperm and egg to have met, my parents needed to meet. And they needed to court each other in such a way that they, to at least some minimal degree, liked each other on the "correct" evening.

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The Lack of Free Play is Damaging our Children

"In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children." From the NYT, it's really getting difficult to find happy well adjusted young adults because we've (their caretakers) deprived them of many opportunities to attempt (and sometimes, to fail) to form relationships all on their own. Too much well-intentioned parent-structured play time is making for anxiety-ridden and depressed young adults.  They are struggling to figure out this alien-seeming thing of learning to form meaningful relationships, and it's driving more than a few of them to suicide.

What follows is anecdotal, but I am sure it could be established statistically: When I and many of my well-adjusted peers were kids, we left the house in the morning and we played all day. We came home when it started to get dark.  When we disagreed with each other, there were no adults to adjudicate the differences. We did that ourselves and we figured it out well enough often enough. We didn't have ANY adults telling us how to play. No one arranged play dates for us. We chose who to spend time with. If another kid was a pain in the ass, we avoided him/her, and he/she would need to learn make adjustments in order to get back in our social graces. Same thing for me, of course. If any of us offended someone, we didn't run to our parents to negotiate with their parents; rather, we needed to go to the fear and figure something out on our own (though many parents did provide a good listening ear in the evening).
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