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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Out-of-Network Medical Insurance Hell

What Happens When You Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill? This article in the Atlantic gives detailed accounts. Every day you wake up not needing a hospital, you need to give gratitude. Where are all of the free-marketers when this rampant out-of-network bullshit is destroying people's lives. The government is not causing this, but it could offer solutions. Desperate and unconscious people WITH health insurance should not be unwittingly signing up for lives of harassment and economic destitution when they enter hospitals seeking medical care.

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