Joy of life approaching 70

This is not how I expected to see myself when I turned age seventy.

About seven weeks short of seventy, today I told my nephrologist, Dr. Majid, that when I was twenty, I could not have imagined my life at this point or that I would even be alive. At the same time, I ask myself why I can't feel and act as I did when I was twenty. It's the same body. Even Dr Majid acknowledges that I'm in pretty good shape, save a few extra pounds that I hope the Streetstrider will help me eliminate, starting as soon as our streets are asphalt, not gravel. We will host a driveway celebration tonight, noting that Touchdown's curb, sidewalk and driveway concrete pours are complete; we just have to wait until Wednesday to drive on the aprons.

So yes, I feel a little stuffed, bloated, and/or fat. The pandemic policies are to blame. Since March 13, 2020, life has been restricted, mentally, legally, physically and more. Mental health globally suffers greatly; for me, it is more an attitude of sloth combined with a semi-consistent state of canon fever, where I either feel or know that I can't travel about freely, that my established friends live far away and it has been hard to meet and to make new friends, that despite the advantages of Zoom in allowing some form of visual contact, the virtual, remote life is not fulfilling, that although the internet, cell phones and social media have provided some essential platforms for work and life over the past seventeen months, those media have some real limits as well as some negative consequences, some of them intended.

Beneath or behind the mask, there is still much joy to be found, even if some of it can be found in the fact that Wisconsin continues to be a sort of cocoon, or bubble, or refuge from the social, cultural and political madness enveloping government and providing daily examples of tyranny, madness, illogic, and outright lunacy, perhaps best exemplified by our cognitively impaired president.

Gaby has landed firmly on the ground in New York, living in Chelsea and working on Park Avenue South, near Union Square. Jane is trying to figure her next move, in or from Juneau, after her Discovery Southeast assignment ends in two weeks. Dena is juggling clients, accounts and potential new job prospects, continuing to work from home. Outside, the construction continues, with road construction taking priority at the moment in our neighborhood while home construction continues to boom unabated two hundred yards behind us, in the new phase of our development.

At times, the clearest thing I sense as to any anomie comes from the loss of key pals that for years provided a sympathetic ear and comparable values. In high school it was Jeff Striebich. At Binghamton, the role passed through several people, including Gary Greenberg and Gary Levine. There was no one at Penn State; that was part of the social dilemma of those three years. At Kansas it was Bobby Friedmann, and he was a long-term peer wit shared experiences, tastes and interests. At Marquette, Joe Fox filled that role until I left in 1992. After that, the best friendships were with Bobby and with Larry Timm, until Bobby's death in 2011 and then Larry's, in 2018. Hank played a more spiritual role since I hired him in 199, but that was a relationship wholly unlike the ones I had with Bobby and Larry.

Bobby Friedmann would earn the all-time confidant and wingman. Starting with his grad student days at Kansas, with experiences threading through sororities, classes, Gammons, The Wheel, the Smokehouse, Johnny's, Sergeant Preston's, Key West, Kansas City and more, and with long ago friends like Jill Docking, Mary Reed, Susanna Miranda, Jack Call, Sid Hollister and a few more.

The bottom line is that I have not had a fully simpatico male pal since Larry died three years ago, including none of the time I have been in Wisconsin (the past 22 months), meaning that the lack of new friends is matched by the absence of old friends.

As I tell my three women, I am happy when they are happy (and healthy and safe). My primary role in Wisconsin, exacerbated by the pandemic follies, has been to provide for, pray for and protect the three women in my immediate family. While they do pretty well on their own, they are still a source of steady and occasionally flaring up anxiety.

And then there are social media misdirections and manipulations, like the Facebook survey from Carnegie Mellon re Covid practices and beliefs. The problem is that they make non effort I have found in providing the critical limit to their findings and that is that those who respond can in no sense of the word be considered a representative or random sample. A survey from Facebook begets participation by all sorts of people with an axe to grind or an anxiety to spread. So I can find great joy in knowing that I am not so stupid as to believe the 'results' of the survey to be of any practical value, no matter how many times people fill out the survey, no matter how many people have filled it, no matter how long they have been conducting the survey, and no matter how neat, clean and simple the graphs look in posting the results of these 'surveys.' Garbage in, garbage out. Worse, they do not appear to report data collected about who people trust, nor do they mention that the response to asking people what they 'believe to be true' is as meaningless as can be, given the wording and scaling of the question. Some more joy in dismissing what pretends to be a survey of some value, credibility or import, when all it is is an online survey of meaningless value.

Another joy that has surfaced is that I think I have found the cold weather of Wisconsin to often be preferable to the hot, humid and buggy summer clime. And this is not due to all the exaggerated claims about climate change being behind the fires and floods of this summer. As shown with data and analysis by Tony Heller, the history of fires, floods and damages show these claims to be better classified as lies, not just exaggerations. As just one example, the difference between what NASA reports as the record cold of 1921 is refuted by the contemporary news about the massive heat waves of that year worldwide. In my college days, the coming ice age was a major topic, even before people ever thought of the term, climate change. Even the floods in Germany are not at record level, and the problems have more to do with very poor flood management, pointed out this morning by Bjorn Lomberg in the Wall Street Journal (PDF attached).

Climate Change Doesn’t Cause All Disasters - WSJ.pdf

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