tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14160064625367871082024-03-14T15:21:04.816-07:00Geek Rant! Attack of the Giant Sized Ego!Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-42697511467980607702024-03-14T15:04:00.000-07:002024-03-14T15:04:56.524-07:00Gardens and Yards... <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QTN3rjWrU16ULRSE-bT_qUoFAnjMyO6z1_phCDM6KoG6M1bqOn3emkzpeRejm7JbmUrX_JQmDtKL9HmML5Vn7HjqrNoRoj8VCAx_GLsxa9o-buaXtCrsXjZb_ujJBh8PvsPZErCQ-Jjh7UFKlvxLuMZYvu5SOTrjrtGfbjNARIot2vse-VONQrfkWKs/s2016/429805086_779793697361374_6615985060926029041_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="908" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QTN3rjWrU16ULRSE-bT_qUoFAnjMyO6z1_phCDM6KoG6M1bqOn3emkzpeRejm7JbmUrX_JQmDtKL9HmML5Vn7HjqrNoRoj8VCAx_GLsxa9o-buaXtCrsXjZb_ujJBh8PvsPZErCQ-Jjh7UFKlvxLuMZYvu5SOTrjrtGfbjNARIot2vse-VONQrfkWKs/w288-h640/429805086_779793697361374_6615985060926029041_n.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><br /> Gardening came to me, unexpected and unbidden, floating in slightly on the gently warming breeze of an American Mid-Western spring. I had always loved gardens in some way or another as, I suspect, nearly all the British do somewhere deep down. Back home, this is evident all over the country, in any possible place you can think to look. Yes, there are stately homes with formal grounds and allotments and back gardens galore but even in the depths of the sprawling urban masses of cities like London or Manchester, we are surrounded by ordinary people’s attempts to bring some greenery into the landscape.<p></p><p><br /></p><p>A truism that is oft quoted is that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” and that there is something in the way that an Englishman (or woman for that matter) treats their domicile that is wholly unique. I say, wholly unique, for I fancy that it is an observation that doesn’t just count for Englishmen, but all who hail from the British Isles, in some small way.</p><p><br /></p><p>Our homes are fortresses, bastions against the endless encroaching waves of modern society and its pits and troughs. We are, at heart, a nation of eccentrics and, it has to be acknowledged, pleasantly happy to be so. We are not particularly concerned, in many cases, with what the world may think of us. So long as we can just close our doors at the end of the day and leave the rest of the world in a heap on our doorstep.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now that isn’t to say that we can’t and don’t put on masks and fronts when we leave our homes in the morning, of course we do. It is true, however that if there is a space for our eccentricities and oddities to be expressed away from prying eyes, then we are very often content with our lot in life. </p><p><br /></p><p>The British garden is, in some way, an extension of that idea. If the house is a fortress, then the garden functions as its moat, if the house is a stately home then the gardens function as its grounds. Since our ancestors first created the great earthworks of ancient hill forts and barrows we have always appreciated the allure of a good defensive ditch.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrK_pSzsaP1YB4aa7FfWW_AJw4S9DLegt57z4fkFd40SEElQel_PEyVwufGet8NIUL1NzqvUvPvn2RhQDzHxhPb4L6N86ir3WKhqaVuH4I-uDzanc0LLW2qy65aiwaXYhB9QJ3Xftki9MOZWKG9ntuEkmxvpA9ellCXFpKnIEEadybhHWhNi4fDQ9AkOc/s2016/367523106_1330103621250456_4604358083741150443_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="908" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrK_pSzsaP1YB4aa7FfWW_AJw4S9DLegt57z4fkFd40SEElQel_PEyVwufGet8NIUL1NzqvUvPvn2RhQDzHxhPb4L6N86ir3WKhqaVuH4I-uDzanc0LLW2qy65aiwaXYhB9QJ3Xftki9MOZWKG9ntuEkmxvpA9ellCXFpKnIEEadybhHWhNi4fDQ9AkOc/w288-h640/367523106_1330103621250456_4604358083741150443_n.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>The Americans don’t think of this in the same way, at least, not in my experience. The deep British need to have our own delineated and protected space; a desire driven, I suspect, by the relative population density of our small islands, is one that the Americans don’t appear to share. It seems to me, that for many Americans, their lives are taken up with trying to be more open, to have less barriers, less privacy, somehow. Their homes often feel like tools, functional items, places to sleep, eat and make plans for the day, not the cluttered, yet cosy, sanctuaries of their strange and weirdly accented British cousins.</p><p><br /></p><p>I relate this to you, dear readers, as merely introduction. It is simply a prelude or a preamble to try to explain how I never felt much need to garden in my own country, yet now am driven (to misquote Quantum Leap), “by some unstoppable force to change my garden for the better”.</p><p><br /></p><p> I feel lost somehow, an exile, far from my own land. I am unanchored, no longer connected to the ground which had brought forth my people, tossed like a boat on worsening seas. That doesn’t mean that I am not happy here or that I have forgotten that my living here is, in fact, my choice. It was my choice and I would not change it for anything.</p><p><br /></p><p> Still, I do feel lost, somehow. It can be a strange thing to admit to oneself, that despite living here in the United States for nearly nine years, I still feel very far from home. It doesn’t matter that I speak the same language (although some would say I don’t), have grown up watching American television shows and movies (I know who shot J.R. in Dallas after all), and arguably know the Bill of Rights better than many who were born here.</p><p><br /></p><p> I am not an American, not down in my heart. My subtext is different, my cultural touchstones not the same. My humour can seem harsh and negative, the British need to rant and complain about things that we are only mildly irritated about comes across as genuine anger, rather than a jocular attempt to process the craziness of the world. </p><p><br /></p><p> I miss the sea. I miss calling it “the sea” and not “the ocean”. I miss fish and chip shops, waiting in line with the smell of the fryers filling the room while the rain never seems to stop outside. I miss children in school uniforms and blazers trudging their way to schools. I didn’t frequent pubs at home much, but I miss them too. Especially the older rural ones, with horse brasses and farm implements hung on the walls and warm fireplaces blazing in the corner.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some days it can be hard because it can feel that every day serves to bring some way to reinforce just how far-away I am from where I began. It also reminds me that as I can’t change my own history and cultural background, I can’t change that of anyone else. I can bring something British to the Mid-West though.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb6DqFp7fKVJX-8vZx87l4uP0UlrFl7l6wRpShpvmktabIt9HMsAeJzfllhzkLXuM5Xu6KZQr5Z16ldmPCQzf-ecDiL3Dz_QVqYAdZIwO-LAPFkR6SQVTWjksjnsWlv8Kh89W53654k3LJPvEjk3cJian6l2nncOhESiDv7MV9K5ytvWKJScnsK11lNfk/s3660/345658558_1328780297672419_8574874676138603158_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3660" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb6DqFp7fKVJX-8vZx87l4uP0UlrFl7l6wRpShpvmktabIt9HMsAeJzfllhzkLXuM5Xu6KZQr5Z16ldmPCQzf-ecDiL3Dz_QVqYAdZIwO-LAPFkR6SQVTWjksjnsWlv8Kh89W53654k3LJPvEjk3cJian6l2nncOhESiDv7MV9K5ytvWKJScnsK11lNfk/w358-h640/345658558_1328780297672419_8574874676138603158_n.jpg" width="358" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>I can make a British style garden. A space that isn’t solely for me but that reminds me of home. That there is a place where people can rest and enjoy the flowers in somewhat private surroundings. For, just as they differ from the British in so many ways, the Americans differ in the way they garden (not that they call it a garden, that just means vegetables, they call it a yard).</p><p><br /></p><p>The Mid-Western garden often ends up being planted, in my experience, in one of two predominant ways. One technique employed is to plant a bunch of evergreens like juniper, shade loving plants like hostas and cover everything in huge piles of impermeable mulch so no weeds are ever to be seen and very little watering has to take place. The other technique is what is known in garden design as “prairie style” planting, this uses native plants like Coneflowers (Echinacea), Black Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia) and things like Goldenrod in big drifts of planting that again have huge amounts of mulch thrown upon it so again there are few weeds and limited watering. </p><p><br /></p><p>I generalise, of course, but the Mid-Western approach to gardening appears to be based on a need for conformity, “curb appeal” and low maintenance. There is a desire it seems for a garden you plant once, at the beginning of the season and then forget about. The only gardeners who approach this differently are vegetable gardeners who essentially create mini allotments somewhere on their property and very rarely seem to bother about flowers at all.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8nBrYSkQSJbomVb4BucTbteh2nqiCE6_6TO1TYIQwZjvOIkybAtzEXYW8rJKLmemdAsQEqWNMTaJvEvjxz051a5K0I67UiWubpn4zrjZ_Ag1LRzt5c6-Mq3OSE8PYWPEBxCzeEJ-AhyphenhyphenR3peIdzf1jbzn6qpGiCjCRCWv1CLAPPik5OwtMr7S_b85HjY/s3660/344519039_196973949877661_6490309100881643131_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3660" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8nBrYSkQSJbomVb4BucTbteh2nqiCE6_6TO1TYIQwZjvOIkybAtzEXYW8rJKLmemdAsQEqWNMTaJvEvjxz051a5K0I67UiWubpn4zrjZ_Ag1LRzt5c6-Mq3OSE8PYWPEBxCzeEJ-AhyphenhyphenR3peIdzf1jbzn6qpGiCjCRCWv1CLAPPik5OwtMr7S_b85HjY/w358-h640/344519039_196973949877661_6490309100881643131_n.jpg" width="358" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>I love, and miss, the English country garden, the window boxes of the urban high rises. When we drive through small Wisconsin villages, I find myself longing for dry stone walls and impossibly full and bursting cottage gardens, all wisteria climbing up the walls and roses in every corner.</p><p><br /></p><p>I like gardening. Gardening that I have to come back to, progress that I can track, the passing of the seasons. Seed trays and starter mix inside while there’s still snow on the ground outside; a table and chairs under the shade of our apple tree out on the patio.</p><p><br /></p><p> I don’t exactly like weeding, but I appreciate that its necessity means that I must be doing something right. I enjoy trimming trees with a hand saw not a chain saw and pruning bushes with a pair of secateurs not a hedge trimmer, because it's not about how quickly I can get things done. I love that much of my garden isn’t productive past flowers that are ephemeral in nature and a general feeling of well-being that it gives me. </p><p><br /></p><p>I love that gardening connects me to my mother and father, my grandparents and my whole nation. Somehow, gardening makes me able to square the circle of living as something of an exile, I can garden like an Englishman would garden and create a sanctuary in a Mid-western neighbourhood on the East-side of Madison, Wisconsin.</p><p><br /></p><p>I call it Heritage Hollow, because everyone knows that any self-respecting British house and garden needs a name and not just a number. Going forward I’m going to try to write about how well I’m succeeding and how I’m failing in this endeavour. I hope you’ll do bless with reading my humble scratchings. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHKpSJBNBD7NYNcZITCThxt9RkcGStKhEtjkcJrggi900NBMY-yjfDGahpq8QN1s0H2IwL2X-pO6-6BKXTBPDeibtaKHWWA9fGQwlkFA97k-0Vd8Jr_FQ6NFn6TdmC4JLn1UPOk_Hpcpx2UnK6wfby9dhuzLToZvlNuEGWUOThtY03VdgIOWaMCjwmrYI/s3660/344540848_3237315706549578_7919962079037539833_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3660" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHKpSJBNBD7NYNcZITCThxt9RkcGStKhEtjkcJrggi900NBMY-yjfDGahpq8QN1s0H2IwL2X-pO6-6BKXTBPDeibtaKHWWA9fGQwlkFA97k-0Vd8Jr_FQ6NFn6TdmC4JLn1UPOk_Hpcpx2UnK6wfby9dhuzLToZvlNuEGWUOThtY03VdgIOWaMCjwmrYI/w358-h640/344540848_3237315706549578_7919962079037539833_n.jpg" width="358" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-7524830112005120072022-08-16T21:26:00.004-07:002022-08-16T21:26:49.046-07:00America and the Road to wherever...<p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeVkLgqnPjtlHP1FmUHXlg8d5acSwxm9xn-f5D5_httqNWv7lbADWmpDp7QXNh9I8nDSCCuIaDoOKbiC2MCMaEFcxFdOurrtd5hqdHBWdVeMyuzeUGMDpltAigWdB89962JmD1ugoAU3tAk3-togH7CxndHfhe9lepdR_S3vyXWCK9P0jUDGiJK5Ee/s540/578C86ED-5A31-4F7F-8EE6-D3C4023FF8B0_4_5005_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="540" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeVkLgqnPjtlHP1FmUHXlg8d5acSwxm9xn-f5D5_httqNWv7lbADWmpDp7QXNh9I8nDSCCuIaDoOKbiC2MCMaEFcxFdOurrtd5hqdHBWdVeMyuzeUGMDpltAigWdB89962JmD1ugoAU3tAk3-togH7CxndHfhe9lepdR_S3vyXWCK9P0jUDGiJK5Ee/w640-h426/578C86ED-5A31-4F7F-8EE6-D3C4023FF8B0_4_5005_c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />Greetings Geekranters!<p></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">On all my travels that make up my sojourn through this, the land of my blessed exile, it is an invariable occurrence that somewhere along the myriad steps of every journey I will be struck by just how much the “Open Road” is an integral part of the American experience.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It might sound fanciful but it really can feel like somewhere, out there along that lonesome highway and the impossibly varied landscapes it runs through lies the soul of America, or a part of it at least.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Musicians, artists, poets, and other creative types of the first two centuries or so of the American experience have always found inspiration either in the road or in the nature that borders it.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Thus Springsteen in moments of longing speaks of “driving to the mansions of glory in the suicide machines” and Bob Dylan’s songs always seem to be mini-plays, distractions while journeying from place to another. Thoreau, Emerson and Muir need to lose themselves in the majestic enormity and verdant tranquility of the woods and wilderness.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Jack Kerouac finds his true identity not in the cities of the East or West Coast but in the tarmacadamed expanse connecting them. Samuel Clemens earns a living as a young man on the mighty Mississippi, the aquatic highway of its day, years later, when he becomes a writer, he borrows the riverboat pilots depth reading of Mark Twain as a pen name.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Somewhere in a hidden valley, Laura Ingalls Wilder remembers the history of the pioneer days of the U.S.A and the rest of the nation falls in love with her memories. No one ever forgets that Little House on the Prairie.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Lonesome roads apparently going nowhere, railroad goods yards still haunted by the ghosts of old prospectors heading out to the West to find their fortune and the footsteps of a thousand hobos who hung on to the boxcars and cabooses and slept beneath the stars. Secret valleys and one horse towns all lying hidden round the next corner of the trail and highway, river and railroad.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The hustle and bustle of the city might fill the pages of Superman comics but it is only in Kansas, in the centre of the great and unknowable vastness that is the North American continent, that Clark Kent is adopted and raised.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The silver screen might be full of stories of the naked city, bright lights and broken dreams; Hollywood selling a metropolis to the children of a million small towns from Waunakee, Wisconsin, to Wetwang, East Yorkshire but so much of America still seems to long for a empty road, leading to a log cabin by a lake in the middle of nowhere.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Tourists come from all across the globe, spending billions every year to have dinner with Beauty and Beast in Disneyland, to make marriage proposals atop the Empire State Building, to gaze upon the homes of the stars and put their hands in the palm prints of long dead film stars in some grubby pavement in southern California. Maybe America sells fantastical urban metropolises and purpose built funhouses stretching to the horizon under a subtropical sun, but it seems to me that so much of its people still long for the awe inspiring loneliness of the wilderness and the open road.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The backroads and far-flung corners of “America, the Beautiful” are intricate enough and contain more than a full measure of wonder to spend a lifetime getting lost in and many people have and still do, becoming ramblers along an ever more tranquil trail.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">In my time here so far, I have seen and paddled in the Pacific Ocean, swum and got out of my depth in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, driven past buffalo in the dying half-light of dusk on the edge of the Badlands. I have seen bald eagles make their nests high above the meandering Mississippi and searched for the oily banana slug in the dense redwoods of California. Hiked with my wife and dog to hidden roaring waterfalls in the iron rich mountains of the Minnesotan North Shore.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">There always seems to be something to find tucked around the next bend in the road.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Maybe its one of the reasons that I feel driven to write the things that I do, to try to understand the natural beauty of this country and the way that humanity has chosen to put its stamp on it. Sometimes it also seems to be to ask whether there is a tension between the wilderness and the road, the country and the city, the bustling metropolis and the sleepy village. To consider whether this tension is at the heart of so many of America’s strengths and weaknesses.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Is America a lady of liberty whose soul is torn in two? Caught between the rural simplicity of its past and a dream of an urbanised future? Do these places represent two different sides to this nation, two ways towards tomorrow’s realities, two streams issuing from the same headwater, endlessly travelling more and more separately?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe that’s what makes living here so fascinating for this is, after all, the only nation on this earth built solely on a dream and an idea. Perhaps every citizen of this country sees that dream as something different personally and possibly their individual is what lies undiscovered down the next winding turn in the road.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 18px;"><span> </span>Perhaps its okay I ask the questions, its possible that I'm taking too much upon myself, but this nation still entices, still seems to demand questions be asked of it, like an unsolvable riddle or an untouchable beauty; so if you don’t mind my notebook will come to every hidden cove and mountain lake, diner apple pie and New York Cheesecake and I’ll try to understand. Its possible I'll find a dream or two out there too.</span> </p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-29526315707111473842022-03-27T00:02:00.002-07:002022-03-30T13:12:53.128-07:00Geekrant vs the Old West Staging Post<p> <br /><br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8mHkLeQglopxLyP5hhefF6paCiApS9zi9IFx3r1orPvmLu0I5H2XZuWUsyOcLbdew6NrhM6n8Z37xWq-HuWToI526cyqrselMD2MHrcNz7Zas_0PoPT--Lkr0EHVH7EJPfOc35pOmSbwfk0Ha6hmb27f8Sc-R2Ny3U1pjduZXynBtyAQkxS2wI37/s540/BDD66427-C0BC-4121-A5E1-7BD4C3894402_4_5005_c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="540" height="362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8mHkLeQglopxLyP5hhefF6paCiApS9zi9IFx3r1orPvmLu0I5H2XZuWUsyOcLbdew6NrhM6n8Z37xWq-HuWToI526cyqrselMD2MHrcNz7Zas_0PoPT--Lkr0EHVH7EJPfOc35pOmSbwfk0Ha6hmb27f8Sc-R2Ny3U1pjduZXynBtyAQkxS2wI37/w640-h362/BDD66427-C0BC-4121-A5E1-7BD4C3894402_4_5005_c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; text-indent: 18px;">Greetings to you, my wonderful readers!</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; text-indent: 18px;"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Its always a blessing and privilege to write for you all and hope that I don’t disappoint and always inform and entertain. I’m also aware that months between blogs is not really a sign of a productive writer, so I made an effort to write my latest post as quickly as possible. An effort that my computer was not particularly onboard with, but such is the cooperative nature of technology at times.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Climate change, while a topical issue in much of today’s international political discourse, is, for many of us anyway, a somewhat abstract concept. We know that’s it an important issue and there are a myriad of opinions on the subject but do we really see its effect on our everyday lives?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">In the American Mid-West, in winter, this effect is much easier to see than in many other places. Much thought in the northern-most states of the Mid-West during this most frigid of seasons goes into trying to work out just how cold the weather is going to get, the related potential for temperatures that cause frostbite and of course, is it going to snow enough to run a snowmobile safely?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">This last question is often followed with the supplementary queries of whether the lake ice is thick enough to snowmobile/ice fish/drive snowmobiles and/or cars/trucks on to reach said ice fishing site/snowmobile/car/truck area in order to race them on a frozen lake and so on. Over the last few years, possibly due to climate change, the big freeze up and the first great snowfall has been late in coming, severely cutting into the length of the all important winter recreational season. This is, of course, an outcome that all Wisconsinites struggle with. After all, if there is no ice fishing, that is one less excuse to get together with friends, grill brats and drink copious amounts of beer in each other’s company.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The winter has finally arrived however, the snowfall covering the City of Four Lakes with its chilly white blanket; the temperatures have long since kissed freezing goodbye and have entered the frostbite zone. So with icy, blizzard choked streets outside and the heating on full blast inside, my mind is naturally cast back to the warmth and sunlight of Arizona where we spent some time visiting my wife’s great aunt last year.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Heat, in terms of the sort of climatic heat that America can bring, is something I still have to learn to adjust to. After all, I grew up on a damp, cool island on the edge of the north Atlantic, where temperatures never really break the bank, so to speak, it rains a lot and truly hot days generally feel oppressive and muggy.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On the rare occasion that the United Kingdom does have a heatwave, most of everyone’s time is spent complaining about the heat that we spent the rest of the year complaining that we didn’t get, seasoned with complaints about why shops don’t invest in expensive air conditioning systems they’ll only end up using once every three years, finally finishing up with complaints about how, when we finally did get the BBQs out it rained.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">There is a historical theory, that is not too crazy, that suggests the reason the British built a global Empire is that nobody wanted to stay on our rainy and chilly island motherland. But I digress, suffice it to say that myself and weather-based heat do not have that long or amicable a relationship.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Arizona was hot, extremely hot, in fact, some of the hottest places in America lie within the Grand Canyon State and it can seem relentless. In many places in the state, particularly around the state capital, Phoenix, its a heat that doesn’t often let up. The skies there are a perfect sapphire blue and cloudless, seemingly going on forever like echoes of something that only existed in the daydreams I had on grey, wet weekends when I was a child.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2EItBNtTQTKdO3k6SO1liRKmFXPEmzYMHChFL9BiXjSi3jGwD5a9t1rmBiErNZnUk0sYrVuzAPvvkhQqQksbt1Gzvna3XZ_6dHnzxbbLMcHabwLssBh-vgnNb5WyTJpmTAy2DhpfP61tK7V39NeSDIO8RiFEwqZbGXx7xviCtoh_rf52MkS12hL2/s540/B500F243-3904-44E3-9C2F-B8F8AF824AC0_4_5005_c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="360" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2EItBNtTQTKdO3k6SO1liRKmFXPEmzYMHChFL9BiXjSi3jGwD5a9t1rmBiErNZnUk0sYrVuzAPvvkhQqQksbt1Gzvna3XZ_6dHnzxbbLMcHabwLssBh-vgnNb5WyTJpmTAy2DhpfP61tK7V39NeSDIO8RiFEwqZbGXx7xviCtoh_rf52MkS12hL2/s320/B500F243-3904-44E3-9C2F-B8F8AF824AC0_4_5005_c.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><p></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s a deceptive heat though, fully lacking the oppressive humidity of a summer in the Mid-west, so it can be easy not to realise how hot it really is until you brush up against something metal and nearly burn yourself for life.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It can be quite amazing to think that people lived in this space before the advent of air conditioners and bottled water, before highways and gas stations, they did, however and that makes me think of Tortilla Flat.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was the morning of our first full day in Arizona, when my wife’s great aunt mentioned that we should go to Tortilla Flat. So we all piled into our rental car, my wife and I, my wife’s great aunt and my mother in law (Did I mention my mother in law came with us, No? Well she did). In we got and away we drove through the strange, arid, metropolis of Phoenix and its surrounding area.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Despite its location in the middle of the desert, Phoenix feels busy and somewhat overcrowded. Phoenix proper is the fifth most populous city in the United States and when combined with the rest of “The Valley of the Sun” makes one sprawling conurbated mass reaching to the horizon.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It wasn’t immediately easy to tell that as we drove along we were actually driving from city to city. Places whose names I had heard, like Tempe, Mesa and Scottsdale are actually difficult to distinguish from each other. Nearly 5 million people live in this metropolitan area, over two thirds of Arizona’s total population make their homes here and its still growing.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It felt faceless from the road, somehow, like someone had created a city without much character and dropped into the middle of the wasteland. As if it had grown too quickly to create its own identity. Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog, perhaps that is a result of building the American Dream in this desolate landscape, a need to keep building, keep creating, or Phoenix would have gone the same way as all the ghost-towns that haunt the backroads of the American Southwest.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Eventually we left the concrete and steel leviathan in our rear view mirror and headed out into what seemed more like the true south west.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Here the highway became somewhat lonely, no matter how many cars were on it. We were driving ever closer to the mountains which started to fill the windscreen, despite this proximity, details on the hills still eluded us. The heat made the very air appear hazy and dust seemed to be everywhere. Civilisation became a distant memory and the land seemed barren and dead, aside for the odd cacti and clumps of some sort of brown bushy looking plant. We didn’t know it yet but we were heading into the eerily named “Superstition Wilderness’.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">We were heading towards Tortilla Flat, a place that is considered Arizona’s smallest community having both a U.S. Post Office and a voter precinct for elections. It also has an official population of just 6, is the last remaining stagecoach post on the Apache Trail and has become something of a tourist attraction.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">As we climbed further into the mountains, we were ascending into a land of myth and legend. Some natives believed the entrance to their version of hell was in these mountains and all around can be found the remnants and ruins of many prospectors’s dreams of gold.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was eerie and lonely but also majestic and beautiful. The road became winding, weaving its way between rocky outcroppings and crags until we came upon, of all things, a lake.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">We were now fifty miles away from Phoenix but it could have been the other side of the world. Here, in the middle of a wasteland, was a lake, a reservoir, to be more precise. The road into the hills had been like a scene from Young Guns, cacti, tumbleweeds and to my eye, desolation, but here, by the lake, everything around seemed green.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The importance of water to life can sometimes be lost on many in the western world, with our showers and baths, our Perrier waters and Evian. Our entire life seems to be on tap and we forget how water brings life into nothing-less. Here, the effect was obvious, the lake was beautiful, sparkling green and blue under an azure sky, with bushes and grasses forming a thin, verdant, emerald strip round its banks which contrasted sharply with the arid khaki of the hills.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">We lingered there for a moment, as tourists are want to do, then headed onward towards our final destination.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJQWbzemw4vaEHCCFVbVbuYzwBxx0-e6EK_oZ8wzIGox6AK3IzV14LBV8YIZCoWZKKCRPDovcuVFeyWzqwBvzYpFiFjCIGrdiUjg4wTtSgBb9zYlL_hVWU2G7XBMgErfqBIFoTmMedNrzlYp-9Oyb6lo_i6ykDn9BhfcNsx3IJab80i12O84VEm2f/s540/830E3F83-44E8-40AD-9356-F18C4D91C534_4_5005_c.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="540" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJQWbzemw4vaEHCCFVbVbuYzwBxx0-e6EK_oZ8wzIGox6AK3IzV14LBV8YIZCoWZKKCRPDovcuVFeyWzqwBvzYpFiFjCIGrdiUjg4wTtSgBb9zYlL_hVWU2G7XBMgErfqBIFoTmMedNrzlYp-9Oyb6lo_i6ykDn9BhfcNsx3IJab80i12O84VEm2f/w640-h426/830E3F83-44E8-40AD-9356-F18C4D91C534_4_5005_c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Tortilla Flat, when we reached it was, it has to be said, somewhat of a tourist trap. A unique and very striking tourist trap, I grant you, but a tourist trap, nonetheless. Its interesting to me, that no matter where I go, tourist traps are never really that different to the seafront at Skegness or Mablethorpe or any other British seaside resort.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The whole place seemed to be made up of no more than four buildings or so on either side of the highway backed up against a hillside. One was a restaurant whose walls and ceiling seemed to be totally covered with one dollar bills, the next was some kind of “general store” full of souvenirs, t-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets and the like. Another sold sodas and ice creams. All of it was built in an Old Western style, which I couldn’t decide was authentic or not.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Although Tortilla Flat was a stagecoach stop, it was a late one, not built until 1905, back when the state was still the Arizona Territory and days of the old west still felt very real.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Its a jarring thought to think that Arizona only became a state the same year the Titanic sailed and sank and that this old fashioned staging post was built two years after the Wright Brothers invented the aeroplane and only four years before Louis Bleriot flew one over the channel</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">America is an unusual place, because, for all its development, its still a very young nation, comparatively, to the rest of the world. Here in this simple setting, I was struck by just how ephemeral humanity’s hold on this world is, strip away the road and take down the buildings and this place would be just as it had always been. Maybe its the height of arrogance for us to imagine that as humans we have that much impact on the Earth to change its climate, especially when this landscape as existed in this way for eons. Maybe it isn’t.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It also caught me once again just how much courage, determination and desperation it must have taken to create anything out here in the middle of the wilderness and whether that spirit still lives on even in Americans today. Maybe that is one of the reasons why this nation is struggling within itself so much right now. Perhaps there’s nothing left to build, nothing left to pioneer and American’s don’t know how to deal with that. It really wasn’t that long ago, after all, that prospectors searched the hills for gold and shots rang out in the miner’s boomtowns. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-59598354865001392282022-01-27T12:31:00.000-08:002022-01-27T12:31:50.287-08:00Geekrant vs Arizona- the Fantasy Landscape<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUtMzlNFrTSGxURQv6MwiKnX-Q_t3qt8DmjJOg3VnE2DiU4UQayZSkGBNIvfEM4-Sp6_fyC7xW1NfFvXF-Gkmxili4NHt5mPGDwecRSMWfWn8bO295KP9N8Cadz5KatgLdmZJPj3dHBKfAHYANrhdNpAohp2gVvgy6qKpC9UuefeGaa-XMOxDOE2z1=s1086" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="1086" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhUtMzlNFrTSGxURQv6MwiKnX-Q_t3qt8DmjJOg3VnE2DiU4UQayZSkGBNIvfEM4-Sp6_fyC7xW1NfFvXF-Gkmxili4NHt5mPGDwecRSMWfWn8bO295KP9N8Cadz5KatgLdmZJPj3dHBKfAHYANrhdNpAohp2gVvgy6qKpC9UuefeGaa-XMOxDOE2z1=w640-h233" width="640" /></a></div><p><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; text-indent: 18px;">Greetings Geekranters!</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It has been far too long since I put pen to paper and updated this humble little blog of mine. Unfortunately this is the problem with a (hopefully) gifted amateur verses a professional writer; bills must be paid and overtime worked. Still I have not completely forgotten my self appointed responsibility to share with you, my dear readers, my reflections of being a person of two countries, an exile from one and a guest in the other. To share with you,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>my interest, amazement and awe in all the different ways humanity can exist on this Earth.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">As the years that I have spent living here in the United States start to grow, I have come to see even more, that this is a country full of contradictions, one might even say a country built upon them, a nation founded in the tension between one ideal and another, between the future and the past, between this landscape and the next.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Each state is so fundamentally different to the next and yet all are desperately trying to come together as part of a cohesive whole. The Founding Fathers who created this country, many of whom were Freemasons, used the Masonic symbol of the unfinished pyramid to represent the idea that their experiment in government was incomplete. Maybe that is the most crucial tension in the United States existence, the struggle between a nation that is still working towards what it was supposed to be and a nation that believes it has arrived.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Travelling across the continental U.S., particularly if you drive, is a lesson in just how vast this nation is, how great the distances can be between cities, towns, settlements and sometimes even the subcultures that exist in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Most of the time that I’ve spent living in America has been in the area known as “the Mid-West”, an area of the country defined by the US Census Bureau as 12 states that lie in the middle of the nation bordered by the Appalachians on one side and the Rocky Mountains on the other. They were founded in the first great push for settlement after Independence and were the first great unknown wilderness of the fledgling republic.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">This is an area of the nation typified by states with a definite rural, agricultural identity, many of which only have one or two large cities within them. They are full of small towns which, once upon a time, were often small scale industrial centres for the surrounding areas. These are some of the so-called “flyover states”. They are fertile, green landscapes where one can drive for hour upon hour and never find a settlement larger than a few thousand people, a place that can feel like it hasn’t changed much in the last fifty years.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It is, for the most part, a wonderful place to live, the people are generally unfailingly polite, always willing to go above and beyond to help anyone in need, they welcome you into their homes and families and never let you go. It is a place that rapidly becomes like home but it is also just one part of the US and there are thirty two other states out there, all of which are just as American but also just as unique as my adopted home in the Mid-West.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">So if I really want to understand the US with all of its contradictions, tensions, hopes and dreams, I have to get out there and discover the forgotten places, the lost highways and undiscovered gems of this unbelievably complex and ever surprising nation.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Surprising it might be, but I never expected it to feel truly alien, that was until we flew to Arizona to stay with my wife’s great aunt for a few days.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Truthfully, I should have known something was a little different when our plane landed in Phoenix, the capital and largest city in Arizona.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Most cities name their airport after their most famous son, such as Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport or simply the place itself as is the case with Manchester Airport in Manchester, England. Phoenix however, it has to be said, has gone in a slightly different direction. A direction that wouldn’t be out of place in a J.R.R. Tolkien novel or some other classic of the science fiction and fantasy genres.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It is definitely slightly strange therefore, to come into land at Sky Harbor International Airport and to walk out of the plane straight past a wall emblazoned with Phoenix’s official badge; a badge with is obviously supposed to look like a Phoenix, but in my opinion looks more like an aggressive Griffin or Wyvern. Then I discovered that Phoenix is located in the middle of The Valley of the Sun and I felt like I’d slipped into a parallel universe.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHsoqM4TDsvQqTd_Qq4JWGMPsn6Q5umTe28VHI0eYyltYsmfgN6bZA_FXgLjjVzTcTXoUSb7Ie1eDP3KxQM12L1RYyXTEomPw1hdlcYopbpUAxIY6_ibLfA8UcbJM445FdjYt_NCK-L3yaoIHoek1m6NBS9c9B_f9DurKX_Zvw3ycHU2AT3w5mOJLE=s540" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="540" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHsoqM4TDsvQqTd_Qq4JWGMPsn6Q5umTe28VHI0eYyltYsmfgN6bZA_FXgLjjVzTcTXoUSb7Ie1eDP3KxQM12L1RYyXTEomPw1hdlcYopbpUAxIY6_ibLfA8UcbJM445FdjYt_NCK-L3yaoIHoek1m6NBS9c9B_f9DurKX_Zvw3ycHU2AT3w5mOJLE=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Suddenly I could see it all, a fantasy hero landing his Griffin at Sky Harbor, walking into the only safe city in the Valley of the Sun, a haven within the scorched desert. I’m no fantasy hero, I’m accident prone and would trip over my cloak straight away and would probably accidentally impale myself on my own sword before I killed my first orc, but Phoenix is truly like no place that I have ever been. A place that inspires a different way of thinking. An oasis in the middle of the desert. A place that somehow feels unreal.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">From the moment you step out into the desert heat, see your first cactus and glimpse the mountains off in the distance surrounding the Valley of the Sun, you know that you’re literally not in Kansas anymore.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">As we drove through Phoenix, it was difficult not to marvel at how such a massive city could exist in the midst of such an apparently barren landscape. The land seemed totally devoid of water, every river we drove past was dry, a recurring theme in the gardens of all the houses and the medians of the highways was gravel. Everything seemed to scream sun-baked desolation and yet, here was a city and a large one at that. It was as far removed from the lakes and woodlands of Wisconsin or the gentle, flat farmland of Lincolnshire as the mountains are from the depths of the sea.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">This was a place that up to now I had only seen on the silver screen or read about on the printed page and even then had not truly understood. Here was an environment that appeared totally hostile to human existence and yet, as I would soon discover, Native Americans have lived in Arizona for thousands of years, lived, survived and thrived. Centuries later we were driving through a huge metropolis far beyond the imaginations of any of the ancient people of the Earth.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgubUt4yMoUp8F7HsCxAIlpUeYr9QS1qpusDr9NO8jveCnb4StxyrA9GIbQ-wcX8_OdhS5daFEfrE5GVsoyDjg4Ao149ydVnKPWbzxGxqLx41XWbRDWtAm5_sU9YA8-YxaSbV94ZX9HwsZ-XlxExLXL7M7amI5WasVkIRNkQZZwY8057tbzrOtS-BLt=s960" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="351" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgubUt4yMoUp8F7HsCxAIlpUeYr9QS1qpusDr9NO8jveCnb4StxyrA9GIbQ-wcX8_OdhS5daFEfrE5GVsoyDjg4Ao149ydVnKPWbzxGxqLx41XWbRDWtAm5_sU9YA8-YxaSbV94ZX9HwsZ-XlxExLXL7M7amI5WasVkIRNkQZZwY8057tbzrOtS-BLt=w234-h640" width="234" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The influence of ancient people’s and their descendants could still be felt everywhere we went, not just in Phoenix but in Arizona as a whole. From the walls and even the floors of Sky Harbor to the concrete medians and overpasses of the highways, native images and symbols adorned everything.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Everywhere totem like representations of animals such as quail or the primitive, yet strangely striking image of the flute playing deity Kokopelli show that Arizona’s embracing its native heritage defines much of its public and private architecture. Its exotically wonderful and totally alien to someone born in a small town in the North of England not far from the wild and chilly North Sea.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Arizona was one of the last states to be “admitted to the Union” and it still has the spirit of a frontier land. The state feels wild, its landscape and nature speaking a different language and singing a different melody to the rest of the world. A feeling, came over me, a feeling, both beautiful and unsettling to someone born on an island tamed for so long by humanity. How strange it seemed, to my British eyes, for a moment to feel lost in an ocean of rock and sand on the other side of the globe.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Its a setting that, in my opinion, seems to breed thought and introspection and I tried to imagine what those early pioneers must have felt all those years ago, scratching out a new life in a new world as far removed from the old one as you could possibly get. Oh, the desire and ambition that must have fueled them; to wander into the wilderness and have the foresight to look beyond the dry, hard-baked desolation and see the potential not just to homestead or mine, but to grow and bring forth massive cities like Phoenix.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">As we pulled up at my wife’s great aunt’s house in one of the seemingly endless communities for retired people all over Arizona, I found myself wondering if that very foresight is what makes Americans different from other nations and whether that is at the heart of so many of their contradictions.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Maybe, I thought to myself, they are still dreaming of all their nation can be, still imagining cities in the desert and a new world in place of the old. Perhaps its this dream that binds them together and also, at the same time, magnifies their differences, keeping them separate. After all, no two people ever really dream the same dream in exactly the same way and we all long for our personal futures in ways that the next person would never understand.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Still, the dream is still there in the heart of every American and it seemed that in this strange fantasy landscape I had glimpsed something more of just what that dream is, amongst the cacti and dry river beds, the scorpions and rattlesnakes and off in the distance, a coyote howled.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi247HEGZ_6XsDivu9eiJIOkbf-XgnASJLnhyGwJLHjPFpTKjpy97-qqzoJzkXGq1Zw47w3VhDQpiA6aUFzdVQocQaMgyN12FSQGREf-2ZuEBY6cuRPpKcZe9LqcT5Ii_3MPpxoTAVbcHQUh2RtMEHBS9iKoaH4fa1eej3QJspGiqsLKfgDARWYrz1Y=s960" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="630" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi247HEGZ_6XsDivu9eiJIOkbf-XgnASJLnhyGwJLHjPFpTKjpy97-qqzoJzkXGq1Zw47w3VhDQpiA6aUFzdVQocQaMgyN12FSQGREf-2ZuEBY6cuRPpKcZe9LqcT5Ii_3MPpxoTAVbcHQUh2RtMEHBS9iKoaH4fa1eej3QJspGiqsLKfgDARWYrz1Y=s320" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-27797106630291099522021-06-25T21:21:00.000-07:002021-06-25T21:21:01.878-07:00Why I write: eccentricities, revolutionaries and kitesurfers on a frigid Mid-western lake.<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjOQm4ZEmJMnN7LTH0j2QDgT0dcXWjy2ZDGlnO_sZOWPySQXI83gFfnsmp0bQt-RXPwnyhtU6_VpDYlGU5-AiAztqMZShgEIDi_0c1wNbq-gED-XrOLFCOYMHs_bioii_mNb8JCwmjMTk/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="807" data-original-width="974" height="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjOQm4ZEmJMnN7LTH0j2QDgT0dcXWjy2ZDGlnO_sZOWPySQXI83gFfnsmp0bQt-RXPwnyhtU6_VpDYlGU5-AiAztqMZShgEIDi_0c1wNbq-gED-XrOLFCOYMHs_bioii_mNb8JCwmjMTk/w666-h495/image.png" width="666" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> <span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 18px;">Greetings, Geekranters!</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I haven’t written much of late. I must admit, as I did in my last post, to struggling with motivation.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It seems that for many people this season of COVID 19 and its related restrictions have led to a period of introspection and a resulting cry for change. Change in themselves, in other people and the world around them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">This has led, it seems to me, to an increase, if that were possible, in people’s willingness to use the internet and social media to express such a desire and longing for change.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On the one hand, social media and the internet in general has become a battleground for opposing ideologies, differing philosophies and diametrically opposed world views; a digital and virtual conflict for hearts and minds. On the other hand, it has also become a location of cathartic release for many, a confessional for airing past hurts and speaking out grievances, a potential sanctuary for emotional healing.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">All of these voices seemingly fall into the prophetic, a broken voice in the electronic wilderness crying “ Declare the way of the…(insert personal cause or injustice here.) As the writer of a blog, a publication, which, by its very nature dwells in the electronically coded and constructed hallways and corridors of the internet; this is the new landscape I find myself writing into.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It has to be acknowledged that I am not much of an activist for anything and I’m not sure that I have a compelling personal story to share with the world. I’m not filled with righteous anger and indignation at any injustice in the world, because who am I?, in the final analysis, to judge the rest of the world when I have enough trouble keeping my own mind straight.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I don’t write for any of the grand and world shaking reasons that people seem to write today. I also don’t want to tell you what the best restaurant in town is or give my opinion on the latest Marvel movie. I don’t think I’m equipped to change the world.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I enjoy writing as a pursuit for its own sake, which is not to say I don’t enjoy people reading it or knowing that I have some level on impact on those readers. Writing is something that exercises my mind and maybe while it does that it will have the added benefit of entertaining anyone who happens to read it.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I enjoy the art of putting words on a page, the act of creating something out of seemingly nothing. I am enamoured with the way that rhythm and meter, sentence and paragraph, subject and emotion, work in seamless harmony to transmit ideas to the reader. Not just ideas, however, but dreams and imaginations, new worlds and ancient civilisations.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I write because I know that many times I communicate better through the written word rather than the spoken. I write for the reason artists practise drawing, I think I might have some small skill in my art and I hope to get better at it. I write out of the overflow of an enjoyment of reading and I hope that some people will get that same enjoyment out of the words that I commit to paper.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Now it seems, the internet is all about the polemic, the revolutionary statement, the digital call to arms of a new generation. Activism and Justice are the keywords of the day and everything that is written down must have a part to play in changing the world or so it seems that it must be deemed wasted.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I’m not sure my writing can change the world, I merely write about what I see, the peculiarities and eccentricities of life, the differences and similarities between the two worlds that I sometimes feel caught between.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The British eccentric is a classic stereotype in the culture and literature of my native land, all the way from the very alien (but still totally British) DR WHO to Margery Allingham’s detective/sleuth/adventurer/spy Campion, Douglas Adam’s hero Arthur Dent, trudging through the universe in nothing but his pajamas and dressing gown to Sherlock Holmes keeping tobacco in his slipper and other less salubrious aids to concentration in a drawer.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Eccentrics are everywhere, of course, not confined to a single culture, but maybe only the British have made them such a centrepiece of our fiction. Maybe we’re all a little eccentric in our way, and I think that’s enough. I want to write about eccentrics not unite behind a cause or try to find a label for them to use as a rallying cry.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">All of that which is to say, I’m not sure that my writing fits in the kind of world that now exists online but you will forgive me if I stop keeping silent and just try to write more regularly and in the way I always have, about the eccentricities of life and the beauty of the world.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Such as kite-surfing, which is a perfect way to change the subject and show my love of eccentrics all the time. In all my time writing this blog, I don’t feel I have really said much about Madison, the city I live in, itself. Possibly this is because Madison tends to defy categorisation. It is a very unique city, in so much as despite its uniqueness, it doesn’t need to tell you how unique it is at every possible turn like Portland, Oregon or San Francisco.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Kitesurfing on an inland lake in the middle of a midwestern city on windy day in April, however is definitely eccentric, totally unique and possibly extremely deranged, yet that is exactly what I saw a man doing out on Lake Monona as I drove home from work down Monona Drive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Spring is a strange time in the midwest, for it is both a herald of the coming summer and a reminder that the dying winter will return one day. Many of the nights are still full of frost and icy breath, the days occasionally showing hints of the sun drenched humidity that the year will bring eventually. The day that I saw the kite surfer was not one of those latter days.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The wind was whipping up like the beginnings of a spring storm out in the North Sea, the sun was skipping in and out of dark cumulonimbus clouds trying to decide whether it or the rain was going to win that day, Monona Drive was quiet that day and the whole stage seemed set for some epic event, when I saw him, a middle aged man in a wetsuit carried it seemed twenty feet in the air by his kite and the flip that he had just made.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">He seemed oblivious to the wind and the clouds, to the wintry chill in the air and the oncoming rain. He was, it seemed lost in the moment. The only thing that he needed, was for the lakes to be unfrozen and that was enough. I suddenly realised, as I watched him, that that is how I want to write. I wish to be oblivious to what the world thinks that a writer should write and instead be caught up so much in the moment that I just write for the sheer joy of it; if the paper is there and my mind isn’t frozen by writer’s block anyway. And that is why I write about the eccentrics.</p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-80582986971357923572020-10-28T21:09:00.000-07:002020-10-28T21:09:51.292-07:00Geekrant vs the Covid Autumn<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tnR5PL0BHSicdPepw7YJcabgMWUtkv01fhq7JPpXv5SIX-eDyGroV1aTAP4GMxjunhYwk57LINUyqlD74UxydCF_c0SPvSQqXXIsiR2IdxI9F12FEqzz-LIpl7TXOx8iMqSIS31W80Q/s1093/122550692_729003011037437_4900286898695471610_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1093" data-original-width="1070" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tnR5PL0BHSicdPepw7YJcabgMWUtkv01fhq7JPpXv5SIX-eDyGroV1aTAP4GMxjunhYwk57LINUyqlD74UxydCF_c0SPvSQqXXIsiR2IdxI9F12FEqzz-LIpl7TXOx8iMqSIS31W80Q/s320/122550692_729003011037437_4900286898695471610_n.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> <span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 18px;">Greetings Geekranters,</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Autumn has well and truly come to Wisconsin. As the winds get colder and the days shorter, I find myself struck by a thought that is at the same time both sobering and encouraging. It’s not a complex thought, mind you, no great epiphany on the nature of existence or deep journey into the deep interconnected nature of all reality. It is none of those things, it is just the simple realization that even in these chaotic times, the seasons still remain the same.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The air turns cool at the same time, the leaves sense the rhythms of change and begin their gentle, yet inexorable waltz through the dry frigid air towards the chilled ground and the end of the year. In the middle of a global pandemic the likes of which have not been seen for a hundred years, where people seem to fear losing their lives and their freedoms in equal measure; caught up in one of the most contentious American Presidential campaigns of all time, where friendships and civility fall afoul of the loyalty tests of the self appointed online Pharisees of both the left and right wing, the seasons tell us that maybe, just maybe, we’ll make it out the other side.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Not that as humans we tend to notice these things, however. Though we are capable, as a species, of the highest art and the sweetest poetry imaginable, the deepest philosophy and the most beautiful music conceivable, sometimes it seems to me that we are only capable of such things when the timings right.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">So often, in times of comfort and ease, our more artistic and creative endeavors seem to find nothing but the most fertile of ground, they all prosper, born high on the wings of dreams. In times of distress and difficulty however, we seem to slip all too easily into, at best simple pragmatism and at worst, paralysing apathy caught in a seemingly inescapable whirlwind of despair. The fertile ground becomes barren and our dreams are stillborn.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The strange thing is though, aren’t the “times of trouble” that the Beatles so memorably sang about, the moments when we most need to be reminded of beauty and serenity? Is it not on these days that we need to have our eyes taken off the direness of our circumstance, to look beyond and see what still seems transcendent.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It is, in my experience, quite simply, much easier to be creative when our lives seem to be going well and very difficult to do the same when we travel through hard times. It’s true that many artists love the romantic, yet morbid, image of of the starving artist slowly wasting away in his garret, penning masterpieces as his life wastes away before him, but none of us actually want to be in his place.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">All that as explanation, I suppose, for my lack of writing. I have had all the time in the world during lockdown, but how to combat the apathy that arises from social and emotional paralysis and instead look to how the seasons still change, the time and tide of the year waiting for no man? Nature finding its way when humanity is struggling. I admit to having failed in this effort somewhat.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">The state of Wisconsin has become something of a battleground these days, a strategic beachhead to both Democrats and Republicans. A state that up until the 2016 election had voted for the Democratic candidate every election since the Reagan era, is the biggest target for the Democrats to win back. The political adverts try to make it sound like some epic struggle between the powers of good and evil. To me it sounds like America’s Dairyland has become the ultimate prize in an exceptionally childish game of capture the flag. Both sides trying to claim the state for their own before a single ballot has been counted.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Its a strange identity for a place that seems to thrive on being laid back. A state that loves to relate. A realm of bars and supper clubs, where the backyard BBQ is a weekly occurrence and no argument can’t be set aside over beer and a bratwurst. Yet all that has been lost, a virus, a microscopic piece of mere existence has caused people to lose jobs, has separated them from friends and family, in some cases has led to people losing their lives. Even in Wisconsin, identity can be lost in the fear of Covid and the polemical nature of politics and it can make everything seem so helpless.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">In this atmosphere I don’t feel like writing most days, my words feeling empty, like leaves blown by the wind, not making an impact on anything, not telling any kind of story, words for the sake of words, a waste of time. Apathy can sink into every syllable, killing the desire to form the next letter.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Then I look at Autumn, the brown coated old man of the year, and I see the natural world going about its every day business, oblivious to all our troubles. As I look there are no squirrels wearing masks as they look for food to store for winter, my garden will have mostly died back by November and will return next year, whether the Amazing Cheeto Man or the Spectacular Mr Masked Geriatric win the presidency. Our new dog Orion loves playing in the autumn leaves as much as any dog ever has.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDJB-_xvN0ITJB-b6uAkk9wpn_JdWWleGjFB9DXFintqH_jCo3c2ULjpY3Lmup_5rom4XxVrzBl4-0CXqKxMXfdiXZF4MqNxda_SafcMpeMxWYx8zSpnhF9fk5__gS-7hTn0KRjPeGCE/s1836/122795068_1609291079464036_783601507484314770_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1447" data-original-width="1836" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDJB-_xvN0ITJB-b6uAkk9wpn_JdWWleGjFB9DXFintqH_jCo3c2ULjpY3Lmup_5rom4XxVrzBl4-0CXqKxMXfdiXZF4MqNxda_SafcMpeMxWYx8zSpnhF9fk5__gS-7hTn0KRjPeGCE/s320/122795068_1609291079464036_783601507484314770_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As truly helpless as I feel, I must remember that its not the end of the world as we know it, despite all the prophets of doom and the social media experts who think they know everything about everything because they read a Buzzfeed article once upon a time. Whatever I think of either of candidate, Donald Trump hasn’t started the Nazi party of America and Joe Biden isn’t carrying around a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It’s not the end of the world as we know it. Whatever happens in November, people will survive and move on. We have to. We have to because nature finds a way and so eventually will humanity.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Football still defines autumn in Wisconsin, the Packers have had their best start to a season in years and the Badgers will suit up and play, the apple orchards and pumpkin patches are still doing a brisk trade, restaurants and cafes are doing their best to find a way to meet people’s social needs while still keeping their distance. Maybe things aren’t hopeless, no matter how much I may feel it sometimes, because as I look outside the leaves are still falling and no virus or politician can prevent.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">My words may only be as a substantial as a fallen leaf, but those leaves don’t fall alone, as my words aren’t written detached from each other, no, they get blown and raked into great piles, full of faded beauty, bringing joy and happiness even in the dying of the year. So maybe as I force myself to write, as the words will fall from my pen and get caught up by you, the reader. Maybe becoming something beautiful and maybe I won’t feel so helpless, because the Autumn leaves still fall and that means new ones will grow next year and that is something that brings me hope.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgiwQM_jH1LM00Gseej_2m_SxtZty2qsyMgbOn8k9RD2UlKlw69Nl7ipZqf0-7RWvTBrhNBYtF6MnM-8pG67OuwPkClN_rMn8jJqSrjFkgYCNZqEGnfhZHBPk3LpCX24IubSIbHH2a3bk/s2048/120562291_3456345361097388_854979309005176017_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgiwQM_jH1LM00Gseej_2m_SxtZty2qsyMgbOn8k9RD2UlKlw69Nl7ipZqf0-7RWvTBrhNBYtF6MnM-8pG67OuwPkClN_rMn8jJqSrjFkgYCNZqEGnfhZHBPk3LpCX24IubSIbHH2a3bk/s320/120562291_3456345361097388_854979309005176017_n.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-68399156291729591212020-08-06T20:21:00.000-07:002020-08-06T20:21:10.386-07:00Snapdragons. A Eulogy of Sorts.<p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I think I will grow Snapdragons in my garden next year.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">My wife’s Grandma left this life and joined the next one last week. In one of the last conversations she had with Kelly, she talked about the Snapdragons that she had in the garden (or yard, if you prefer) of the house she once lived in.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Kelly was telling her about the garden that I’ve been attempting to occupy my time with while the Coronavirus stalks its indiscriminate path across the country and the world. Kelly’s grand<span style="background-color: white;">ma, Di</span>ane asked if I had Snapdragons, on account of those same flowers growing at one time in her own yard. Kelly said that no, I didn’t and probably thought no more about it; but the comment stayed with with me and I resolved to plant Snapdragons the first moment that presented itself.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">A strange thing happened to me when we moved into our house, eighteen months or so ago, I started wanting to garden. That desire, in itself, is not such a strange thing to be motivated by, you might think. I would, in most cases be inclined to agree, but until this moment I had never really had a desire to garden or cultivate anything, not even a humble window box.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">Suddenly though, here I found myself, with my own private space, my own land for the first time in my life and quite out of the blue, I wanted to garden. I longed to plant pretty perennials along the periphery of a garden path, I ached to grow ardent annuals all through the gently controlled chaos of a herbaceous border, I hankered after home grown herbs. All of a sudden, all I wanted was a hoe in one hand and a garden fork in the other, to create a sanctuary away from the pressures of the world, a still place filled with beauty and serenity.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">At first, as I puzzled over this, I thought my desire must come from growing up in my parents’ garden. My mother always had, in my opinion, a lovely garden; a difficult task, as the soil, at times is little better than brown coloured sand. Still, with my father’s help, she made it beautiful, the perfect combination of a flower filled garden and playground of imaginary worlds for four children to grow up in. It was beautiful and it was, though we didn’t feel so at the time, as idyllic a garden as suburban children in a gently declining industrial town in the North of England could have asked for.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It wasn’t the memories of this garden that were driving me, I realised, after some thought. My parents garden though altered somewhat from when I lived and played in it, is still there. It still exists. My grandparents garden, on the other hand, is gone forever.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">It took me a while to realise this, as much as anything because it surprised me. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have really, the neighbourhood that we now live in is not really anything like the one I grew up in, whereas the plethora of mature trees dotted throughout our neighbouring streets remind me, on a daily basis, of the large oak tree that grew in my grandparents back garden.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I feel the connection to my grandparents is deeper than just a vague familiarity found in the landscape of our neighbourhood. They are gone, my parents are still alive. My grandparents story on this earth and in this life is finished but I still remember them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I think Kelly sometimes can’t understand the pictures that I have in my head of what I want our land to look like, sometimes she gets frustrated, many times, I’m sure, she wonders why it matters so much to me. I struggle to articulate my feelings in those moments. I’m sure that part of the answer to that question is found in the memory of my grandparents. My grandparents never saw my life here, my grandma dying not long after I met Kelly, my grandpa reading postcards that I would send him of all the things that I did in my first years here but he never stood here and saw it in the flesh.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I can’t copy their garden, I can’t recreate it anew in another place on another continent, but as I work on it, I always ask myself, “would my grandpa have liked it?”</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I’m nearing forty now, a passage of time that seems to have passed at an alarming rate, and all my grandparents are gone. I am no longer a part of the youngest generation of my family. Time keeps moving, there are nieces and nephews who are nearly as tall as my diminutive self and I realise that the task of keeping my grandparents memory alive falls, in some part, to me, even if I do it obliquely and in my own way through landscaping and planting schemes. One day I will have to the same task for my parents also, then finally someone will do it for me.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">My wife’s grandma’s house is gone now, they knocked it down not long after she moved into assisted living for the ignominious purpose of extending the car-lot of the local Culver’s fast food restaurant. As I write this I’m sat at my in-laws kitchen table in their house, which is over one hundred and thirty years old, with pictures of Kelly’s grandma, Diane covering the surface in front of me. Her high school diploma is here and her yearbook. A “Senior Memories” booklet from her last year at high school which she filled in with name of the class president and the Homecoming Game “Royalty” and other such details also finds its place on the wooden surface of the table.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">I am only the Grandson-in-law, the husband of her only granddaughter, I didn’t know her all that long, Kelly and I having found each other later in life than some. There are many grandparents who would care little for who their grandchild’s significant other was but they were not Mrs Diane L. Bredehoft of Red Wing, Minnesota, who, it seemed to me, never ran out of space in her heart for other people, who constantly longed to know how you were doing, the one member of my wife’s family who called me by the diminitive form of my name, Steve, even though Kelly told her otherwise. A woman who longed most of all to be remembered.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">A lady like her is not easily forgotten, in the same way that I find my gardening is driven by the memory of my grandparents, so the love, care and acceptance of an entire family is and still will be, driven by her memory. Somewhere in the distant future, when we are gone and my nieces and nephews are grandparents themselves, their grandchildren will be blessed by the memory of Grandma Diane.</p><p class="p2" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;">She was a woman of simple speech, which is often so much more comforting than all the fancy words we writers use. Still I would use eloquence to describe her, even though I would lay down all my talents just to be able to colour a colouring book with her skill. Alas I can’t, so I will write my thoughts here and next year make sure Snapdragons bloom in my garden.</p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUtTJ3b1A-ky6A2v-kn1-BV5DH0Oj3ovsj4keYw3c_gAmbTw18CQJVTNZw-s-YNkaAdNDebpzORVmr8uOlugCFAWkFJ7mHcyKHZbQQ68Y8VJGHcUdj1Pdp7fdbu2_kMTNvtZ5nXV4rw48/s2048/117219380_1404339413091543_3164144251687451405_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUtTJ3b1A-ky6A2v-kn1-BV5DH0Oj3ovsj4keYw3c_gAmbTw18CQJVTNZw-s-YNkaAdNDebpzORVmr8uOlugCFAWkFJ7mHcyKHZbQQ68Y8VJGHcUdj1Pdp7fdbu2_kMTNvtZ5nXV4rw48/s640/117219380_1404339413091543_3164144251687451405_n.jpg" /></a></div><p class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px;"><br /></p>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-5076565702601976962020-04-09T16:07:00.000-07:002020-05-11T15:46:37.530-07:00Geekrant vs the Language of Gardening<div class="p1" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 18px;">
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Greetings Geekranters!</div>
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And So, it has come to pass that our modern civilisation, that we all have a tendency to feel is so invincible, has fallen to the machinations of a subversive collection of sub-microscopic molecules called a virus. When I write it like that it does sound incredibly post-apocalyptic and epic. For those of our society who have caught this terrible disease, those who have survived and sadly, those who have died, it is an incredibly frightening and life changing moment. The same is true for their families.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The trouble is, as with all of the challenging moments in history, we all experience them differently. Some of us have been greatly hurt by these times, some of us have lost friends and family, some of us work on the frontlines or we know people who do. Some of us are essential workers and look enviously at those of us who aren’t, wishing that we too could have that time of seclusion away from the dangers of the virus. Some of us aren’t essential workers and are stuck at home, wishing we could work, as we don’t know where the next pay packet is going to come from, or when. I say, us, because we are all in this together and we are the unwilling participants of this moment in history, reluctant partners in the virus’ dance if you will.</div>
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My point is, I’m just a writer and I’m not sure I’m all that good. So I've refrained from writing my blog in this moment, even though I now have much time on<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>my hands, in case by doing so, I merely add to the plethora of opinions and attitudes that this chaos has brought upon us which are negative and serve simply to cast blame on this person or that group of people for how this virus may have treated us personally. I always want to encourage when I write and hopefully I do so, as a result, my pen has been silent of late.</div>
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Having said all that and keeping all of these things in mind, I have to write something, if only to save myself from stir crazy cabin fever. Still I do not feel myself qualified to write about anything that relates to the silent foe that is the Coronavirus. So I’m going to write about gardens. Now, I hear you ask, what does a British ex-pat with no adult qualifications past a Certificate of Higher Education in History and a One Star Award in Kayaking know about gardens. The answer is I know very little. Save that I like them and I want to have a nice one. Ah! But there does the interest, I would argue, in my story lie.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I arrived in the United States for good, that is to live, in September of 2015 and at that time the idea of having a garden had hardly crossed my mind. From that point until December 2018, we lived in a smallish second floor apartment on Madison’s East Side, with access to a balcony and a small storage unit in the basement. Not really a great place to stimulate an hitherto unknown desire to develop a green thumb. We were happy enough, we had good neighbours, we got on well with our landlord and we found a greater sense of community at our church, Damascus Road, on Park Street (truly, without the friendships of many people there, I’m not sure I would have survived the transition to another country with relatively little homesickness) which is located on the near West Side of Madison.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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We were, and are, very happy, but we decided the time had finally come to find a house to live in. A home to truly call our own. This was a task that we thought would take a long time and much searching but with the help of a realtor (that’s an estate agent for all my British readers who don’t know) friend of ours, we seemed to find a house, signed everything, moved in and settled down in the blink of an eye. It really was pretty quick I’m told, in comparison to how these things often go.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So there we were, the brand new owners of a forty year old house, with forty year old gutters, a twenty year old roof, many smaller items to update and a quarter acre of land on a corner lot in a quiet, leafy, suburban neighbourhood called Heritage Heights.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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This is where gardening, home improvement and landscaping comes in, and also where the different expectations, ideas and even words that separate the British and Americans serve to cause some confusion, differences of opinion and, dare I say, even arguments between my wife and I. It really doesn’t occur to you, when you spend the first 14 months of your marriage separated by an entire ocean, that communication can be harder for you when you’re in the same room than it was when you were in different continents but sometimes it is. Most of the time it's much, much, better but upon the odd occasion, it's harder.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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It has been noted by someone, somewhere in the past, that the British and Americans are like “one people separated by a common language” which is, in my opinion, about as well as anyone can say it. That language though, is not just made up of words, but of culture and ideas, shared history and shared dreams or sometimes the lack thereof. That is not to say that I don’t enjoy living here or that I wish I was living in the UK, it just means that sometimes its easy to misunderstand what the other person means.</div>
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Take the word “garden” itself, for instance. In the UK, in general usage anyway, a garden pretty much refers to the whole of the usable land that goes along with your house and is not part of your driveway. We call them, for the most part, front and back gardens and although there are regional differences throughout the UK, it is pretty much universally accepted that if you refer to your garden and refer to having “a garden”, you’re referring to the whole thing. An area that will have probably have a lawn, maybe with some flowers and a shed, possibly with a patio and maybe some herbs in pots and a vegetable patch, if you have room. This is where the confusion started.</div>
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When I told my wife that I wanted to have a garden at beginning of last year, January 2019, she was enthusiastic for me, but she also may have had a slightly bemused look on her face which I might have missed at the time. She told some regulars who frequent the coffee shop she manages about this and they suggested we went to the Wisconsin Gardening Expo at the Alliant Energy Center. It sounded great, but I should have been more aware that I had seriously got the wrong end of the stick, or garden cane in this case, after I had been there.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I sat through a seminar on soil health to reap the best harvest from your vegetables, I listened to a seminar on the growing of vegetables and herbs in containers, I took notes on a seminar about how small spaces are no barrier to getting great yields from your vegetables (are you detecting a theme here, dear reader? For I must confess I was clueless to the obvious implication found in the subjects of these seminars) and I shopped for plants.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I was lost in dreams of Wordsworth’s daffodils and there I was like Rupert Brooke imagining<br />
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“The lilac is in bloom,<br />
all before my little room;<br />
And in my flower-beds, I think,<br />
Smile the Carnation and the pink;<br />
And down the borders, well I know,<br />
The poppy and the pansy blow…”.<br />
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("The Old Vicarage, Grantchester")<br />
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It didn’t occur to me that there were very few flowers being sold at the Expo, I just told myself it wasn’t the season for them yet. I was too caught up in the words and dreams of the Romantic poets.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>So I grew lettuce, which died, and chives, which died, and basil, which died, and oregano, which also died, and peppers, which, you’ve guessed it, died and I grew tomatoes of which a few hardy examples resisted my best attempts at horticultural homicide and survived. I was waiting for flower season and when all the vegetables died and I got upset and told my wife that all I’d asked for is some flowers she got very upset. Still I didn’t understand.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was pretty much a loss in terms of the outdoor situation until my parents visited and my mother went with us to Menards and helped pick out petunias, foxgloves and zinnias for planter boxes in our front garden and basil, oregano, citronella and a beautiful little Dianthus (pinks)plant for the flowerpots on our back deck. It helped a lot and the tomatoes that survived grew well in raised beds and one of Kelly’s co-workers gave us pepper plants which produced good fruit and in the sun dappled, tree shaded light of late summer, it suddenly occurred to me what I had missed in all that time.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I realised why my wife looked bemused and upset with me when I said that I’d be asking for flowers since January, why there were no flowers at the Expo and why when I told people about wanting to have a gardern all they could talk about was what the Americans call “produce”. I realised, at some point, that in American English, a garden refers to a vegetable plot, nothing else. That when I said I wanted to garden, my wife heard that I wanted to raise vegetables, when I told my friends about having a garden, they wanted to know what vegetables I was going to grow and when I went to a state wide Expo, of course, they only talked about vegetables.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Sometimes the hardest thing about being married to someone from another culture, is that you can reaffirm your point in the clearest terms either of you know and often you completely agree with each other on a subject and you still end up either misunderstanding each other or arguing. All I wanted last year was flowers, I thought vegetables was a bonus and I must admit that I got upset when my wife seemed to think that I had changed my mind and messed up all the hard work she did to help me. She was right in the end and so, for that matter, was I. We just had to learn what the other person actually meant.</div>
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This year, I planned better and understood what certain terms mean and I got a little grow light to start plants indoors. And my tomatoes are still alive, so are my peppers. The chives and basil are beginning to emit their strong fragrances and I even planted some dianthus to see if they would grow from seed indoors. My mother in law’s found some peonies and phlox that someone doesn’t want in Minnesota and when the “safe-at-home” is finished, I’m going to get some more petunias. This year we know what I mean by a garden and what my wife means by a garden and we’re learning to understand each other’s ideas all the more.</div>
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Sometimes I wonder if things like the problems that the Coronavirus cause aren’t a little bit like me, my wife and our garden. We both wanted something to grow, we both wanted the best out of the ground but we misunderstood what each other was saying. Maybe, the one thing we should remember in these times, is we’re all in this together and we all want it to end, we just have different opinions on how to end it. Maybe we just need to agree that we all want good things to grow and start “planting some petunias” together.</div>
Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-38383464503506652202019-08-31T14:13:00.000-07:002019-08-31T14:13:00.998-07:00Geekrant vs the Youngish Man and the Sea
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Greetings Geekranters!</div>
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I’ve lived in the Upper Midwest and more specifically the friendly and welcoming state of Wisconsin for nearly 4 years now. In fact it will the 4th anniversary of my moving here on September 20<span class="s1"><sup>th</sup></span>, just in case you wanted to know. Its a funny thing, that while I feel welcomed here in Wisconsin and may actually fit in better with the laidback attitude people have here than I ever did back home, I still spent 32 years of my life living in the United Kingdom and we are all, in some ways, products of the places we’re from.</div>
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Over the last week, my wife and I have spent a delightful time at a small cabin on the shores, that is to say, right on the beach, of Lake Michigan. We have spent a wonderful 5 days away from much of the stress of our everyday lives in the wonderful Door County, Wisconsin’s easternmost county. We have listened to great live music, been to multiple wine and distillery tastings, met up with friends, eaten some great food and generally had a whale of a time. Whales bring me to a slight problem though.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Door County is the county that covers the vast majority of the Door Peninsula; A long, relatively thin, finger of land that protrudes from the eastern side of Wisconsin into Lake Michigan. At one point it was a true peninsula, but once they built a canal through it, it can be argued that, despite its name, it is now an island. I have spent 5 days surrounded by water, for a man born of an island nation, I should have enjoyed every minute of it, and I did, with the exception of the hitherto unforeseen problem… Lake Michigan isn’t the sea and I find that like a pod of whales lost in shallow waters and caught in a river’s mouth, I miss the sea.</div>
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Water has always defined my life and, in truth, the life of all my countrymen. It seems to me that whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, we are island people, our boundaries set by the mighty waters. In purely historical terms, our prominence as a nation was founded upon our mastery of the waves and our exploration of the furthest reaches of Neptune’s aquatic empire.</div>
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The vast majority of the days of my life have been spent living less than 40 miles from the sea, and although I never thought much about the ocean from day to day, it was always there. Somewhere, just down the road, lay the sea, two train stops away and all you needed was a spare day to get away for a while and feel the salt spray on your skin and feel renewed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Over the last few years I have to admit that I’ve grown quite fond of Wisconsin and it has, in its own way, become just as much home as the place I grew up ever was. It may have taken some time but I’m as happy here as I was in the land of my birth. That’s not to say that I don’t get homesick. There are a myriad of tiny things that like Chinese water torture can build up and build up until I find that I want to rail at the entire US population about spelling things the correct English way or to tell them that I don’t need news anchors with perfect teeth to tell me how I should feel about current affairs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Still these are minor things, things that distract from the larger, more existential, questions that building a life in such a different place from where you began can bring.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Wisconsin is about at far from an ocean or sea as you can get in the Continental United States, even in desert states like Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico, people have less drive-time until they can stare out into the never-ending blue of the ocean until it merges with the sky along the hazy smudge which is the horizon. Wisconsin is full of beautiful forests, lakes as calm as glass under the early morning sun and the most successful team in NFL history*. Its full of spectacular wildlife, hidden places of beauty that take your breath away and, in all honesty, a lot more bars than a state of 5 million people probably needs.</div>
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The one thing it doesn’t have is the sea. Ah! The Sea how I miss thee, let me count the ways! When I was a child on at least one occasion, they had to drag me out of the near freezing sea under slate grey clouds threatening to break and pour a deluge down upon us. Even though my mother says that the first time I sat on a beach I cried relentlessly, as only a toddler can, at the sound of the surf, I miss the sea.</div>
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So, when we go on vacation/holiday, my wife (who plans such things, a hundred times better than I do) takes into account my desire for a maritime intermission in the middle of our journey, despite the fact that she’s in love with forests and whimsical paths that curve through the woods and not so much enamoured with acres of blue stretching off into the distance. She tries to find me an oasis of the nautical variety.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Last year, we journeyed down much of the length of the Pacific Coast and saw some of the most sensational seascapes and beautiful beaches that I have ever seen, but this year, having bought a house in December, we have less money to spend on losing ourselves in the wilderness of the Lost Coasts of America and so she found the next best thing, or what a Mid-Westerner bought up a thousand miles away from the sea would think of the next best thing. Lake Michigan and Door County.</div>
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Door County is an interesting place. Geologically it sits on the escarpment, which seems to be the scientific term for a really large and long cliff, that Niagara Falls pours over on the other side of the Great Lakes, which is called, unsurprisingly “The Niagara Escarpment”. It also has a strange feeling of isolation to it, not a bad feeling, but a realisation that while most of Wisconsin and the Mid-West, is tied to the patterns of the earth and the seasons of the farming year, that Door County, historically at least, is defined by the times and tides of its mini sea, Lake Michigan.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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America, as a whole, I find, is a world of contradictions. On the one hand, it can feel like a monolithic place, a giant cultural leviathan spreading American culture and ideas around the world through Hollywood and the American recording industry. A collective thinking with one mind about things, “E Pluribus Unum”, “out of many, one.”. On the other hand, it can feel like a myriad of different communities, an infinity of different ideas, a universe of different worlds unique from one another. My life here often feels like a journey of understanding and experience to reconcile the conflicting sides of the United States within my own heart and mind, while still working out what it means to be a British man, lost in a sea of Cheeseheads.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Door County is a world all of its own. This is the place, culturally speaking where New England meets the Mid-West. This is definitely Wisconsin and the people here are as in love with good dairy, good cheese curds and good beer as much as anywhere else in the Badger State, however, once you take into account its seafood, the waves crashing upon rocks and its huge amount of lighthouses in such a small space of land, you might be forgiven for thinking you’d slipped through a wormhole somewhere and ended up in Maine or Massachusetts.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The small villages, that hug the line of the quiet bays and serve as magnets to droves of tourists in the summer months, feel like they’re exactly the place you could imagine the Kennedys having a second compound, that JFK wouldn’t seem out of place strolling down the street in a nice preppy shirt and sweater combination, Tommy Hilfiger could film ads here and the Great Gatsby could still hold a killer party.</div>
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Driving the backroads though, is pure Wisconsin. If there’s one thing that Wisconsin seems to do better than anywhere else that I’ve ever been in the world, its in making use of the fruits of its labours. This is a state that has perfected the art of the farm store. We hardly seem to be able to drive a mile before coming to a farm store with seemingly endless amounts of fresh produce and preserves, meats and eggs. One boasted that they stocked over 500 different types of craft beers, another still sold perfect jams and jellies. Every other town seemed to have a local winery with associated wine tasting and a place to sit by the lake and just enjoy the scenery.</div>
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It was a wonderful place to visit. We ended up staying in a small cabin right on the shores of Lake Michigan and the sound of the waves sweeping in and out was soothing to the soul. There was a stillness there, away from the hustle and the harsh lights of the city that made a thousand stars you never knew existed be visible and our thoughts and dreams be amplified in the silence punctuated only by the inexorable crashing of the surf.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Still though, for all this place felt wonderful and I felt that we had been blessed with a nearly moment in time, I am still a child of an island nation and Lake Michigan isn’t the sea. We are all so much a product of every experience that we have in life and often it seems that we can’t escape from our beginnings. I find myself asking God if this will always be the way it is. That living in Wisconsin, while it is my adopted home, will always have something missing that the place I left had, something primal, something gained from cultural osmosis when I was very young. “Genius Loci”, they say in Latin, “the spirit of the place”. I don’t have an answer yet but as I remember the water crashing on the beach outside the cabin, I know two things, I still miss the sea and Wisconsin is definitely trying to make up for it.</div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">*<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">To all Patriot, Steeler, 49er and Cowboy fans out there, you can't erase half a century of success just because they happened before the Superbowl era. So the Pack are still 7 championships ahead of the most successful of all of you. Just an important editorial point that needed to be made.</span></span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-1498781693212623742019-08-21T21:34:00.000-07:002019-08-21T21:34:40.639-07:00Geekrant vs The Dairyland Summer
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Greetings Geekranters,</div>
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Sometimes, it seems that every good writer that anyone has ever read has some kind of angsty family trauma in their past. Apparently it’s a prerequisite to good story-telling to have an extremely messed-up upbringing. Or some personal issue that verges on the severely anti-social.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Many authors have an alcoholic father who never thought they’d amount to anything or an emotionally distant mother who had always thought the writer should have been born the opposite gender or been a lawyer or something. Bukowski seems to have spent half his life on a barstool, Hemingway and Fitzgerald<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>apparently reveled in their dissolution. Jane Austen was almost certainly considered to be an old maid, an unmarried spinster and possibly pitied for it. Dickens was working at a ridiculously young age in terrible conditions to help pay the debts of his family.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Now, while I maybe generalising, it’s something I’m want to do when the mood is upon me, after all. It’s still true, however, that personal tragedy informs much of what we value in art and literature. So sometimes I wonder whether I should be writing at all, because my young life, while not always easy, was anything but tragic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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My parents, to me at least, often seemed as stable and even keeled as Ma and Pa Walton, and while age has revealed to me the fact that they do argue and disagree like any couple, they did a pretty good job with my siblings and I. We weren’t the richest family but neither could it be argued that we lived in abject poverty. We always had food to eat and we always knew that we were loved.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>My mother would save money all year though, just so that for two weeks at Christmas and two weeks on our Summer holidays, her and my father didn’t have to say no when we asked for things as much as they did the rest of the year. For a month a year, we could pretend that we weren’t quite as poor as we were.</div>
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Christmas Eve, therefore was a special time for us. My father would often have to work that day, his Christmas time-off from the Steelworks not beginning until he walked through the door that evening. The sun would set, the roads would grow quiet , Christmas trees could be seen in every window as our smallish Northern town prepared to celebrate the Virgin Birth and…we’d walk down to the newsagent and rent a video. Is there anything more 1990s than that?</div>
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It never really ever snows that much in my hometown but when you’re a child watching “Home Alone” on Christmas Eve, you could almost imagine white flakes beginning to fall from the dark, early evening skies onto the empty streets. That’s when I had my first encounter with the state that I’d, somewhat improbably, end up living in.</div>
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Now it was definitely not on my list of my life goals to move to the American Mid-West but love takes us to strange places and makes us do amazing things. Still all those years ago, I had been shown much that is good about the average Wisconsinite. Where you ask? That’s right, on one of those Christmas movies.</div>
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My first exposure to Wisconsin, was John Candy’s travelling polka musician who gives Kevin Mcallister’s mother a lift in a moving van in the iconic “Home Alone”, which is slightly ironic as John Candy was Canadian. Still, the man who wrote the movie was John Hughes, a man seemingly so in love with his home state of Illinois that every single one of his films seems to take place in Chicago or some suburb of that great city. A man who obviously felt that he needed to pay homage to Illinois’ neighbouring state with an injection of Wisconsin stereotypes in his script for “Home Alone”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Gus Polinski, the character John Candy played in the movie, is a bittersweet character, well aware of how much his job has affected his family life. Still he plays polka music, gives a lift to a perfect stranger, and wears a jacket which has a glass of beer as a badge on it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The return of Summer started me along the pathway of thinking about all of this. About what makes a Wisconsinite and how does it affect me. It’s a recurring joke here that Wisconsin has only two seasons- winter and road construction. In reality that’s not far from the truth, spring and autumn often feel like transitional zones between summer and winter rather than full seasons in their own right. And after all its in the way Wisconsinites respond to the weather that makes you fall in love with this place and the people who live here.</div>
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As Candy’s character shows, whether it’s summer or winter and seemingly no matter how bad life is, Wisconsinites are going to find some way to have fun, which isn’t to say that they’re lazy, in fact quite the opposite, but they make sure that they have fun along the way, after all, life’s too short.</div>
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Snow can last well into April on many years so when Summer comes around, pretty much everyone in Wisconsin can’t wait to make the most of it. The weather forecasts give advice on the best days for grilling seemingly from the moment the temperature rises above freezing and everyone watches to see the moment the ice retreats from the state’s lakes and ponds.</div>
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Not that they were strangers to the water while it was frozen, what with Ice Fishing and snowshoeing and playing “Broomball” (a variant of Ice Hockey defined by its use of shoes rather than skates, a plastic “broom” instead of a stick and played on frozen ponds.) there is barely a time when the water is empty in this state.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Still Summer truly is the time when aquatic recreation reigns supreme. This is the season of the lake house and the family cabin, boating on lakes and inner tubing down rivers, cookouts and the balmy warmth of minor league baseball in old fashioned ballparks. This is the time when Wisconsin shows a laid back part of its soul, after the tough battle for survival that is winter and before the quest for glory that is the hunting and American football of autumn, Wisconsin relaxes beside tranquil waters in some hidden wood, down a lost backroad, in the cabin that their family has owned for generations.</div>
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There is something timeless about the way that Wisconsin, and much of the Mid-West for that matter, chooses to spend its summers. This is something that hasn’t changed particularly in a hundred years. Families returning year after year to the same spot, to boat on the same lakes, to fish the same waters, to stare at the same stars… to be bitten by the same bugs. Well, maybe not exactly the same bugs, but you get the idea. There is something elemental and unchanging in their pursuit of their time at the lake. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Its strange for me coming from the United Kingdom, because for all the British Isles are beautiful and full of expressions of nature so spectacular they are breathtaking to behold, we tamed them all a long, long, time ago. This part of America was completely wild barely 200 years ago, the Native Americans not wanting to domesticate the landscape, as much as live in harmony with it. Some would say that much of the land here still is wild. It is, in many ways, a state that still remembers when mankind was yet sparse in these parts and the seemingly never ending quest for progress had not yet begun.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The early European descended settlers in Wisconsin had none of the comforts of the modern world that we enjoy today. The landscape here could be brutal with the frigid winters and humid summers. Somehow though, they survived and thrived. They started to carve a life out in the midst of the trees and lakes, the oak savannah and the prairie. They brought the cultures of the nations they came from with them and they started to learn how to make this landscape their own.</div>
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A Wisconsinite is conditioned, it seems to me, to see the bright side in everything. To look for a party in every single movement, to see a way to turn every single event into an opportunity to have fun. They revel in the state’s unofficial nickname as “The Badger State”, given not because there is an over abundance of Badgers here but because the first settlers had to live in mine shafts to survive the brutal winters.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So it is that when Wisconsin goes away for a weekend to the lake or goes snowmobiling across a snow covered pond; When the people find a place to drink beer by a boat dock or grill up some brats on their home deck; When they stop to here a polka band or sing “Roll out the Barrel” in the stands at Miller Park; They are continuing the legacy and lesson of generations before them that found a new world in the wild and decided to celebrate it every chance they got.</div>
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As an immigrant to these shores, a transplant to this fair land, it is something very welcoming and also uplifting to be invited to share in all the bounty that this place has to offer. To see the sun rise above the calm surface of a forest lake, the light reflecting of the glass like surface in a myriad of sparks and dreams, to get lost down a maze of cornfields and wetlands, to see Lake Michigan and wonder how it looks so much like the sea and yet isn’t. To sit down and eat at a Friday night fish fry and feel the warmth of community or to see the sun set over Lake Monona from the Union Terrace and hear a lone musician start to sing.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>These are things that I will remember all my life, because Summer has come and Summer is just another excuse to lay back and prove that you’re a Wisconsinite, even if you’re only an adopted son of America’s Dairyland.</div>
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Till next time, Good Bye Geekranters.</div>
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<br />Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-22497713243455631832019-04-18T15:07:00.001-07:002019-04-18T15:07:15.151-07:00Geekrant vs The Wharf that never sleeps.<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Welcome to another exciting installment of my peculiar sojourn through life in the United States of America, or The Colonies as we British say when we’re trying to be superior and spoiling for a fight. This is, of course, a wildly inaccurate description of the present day United States, as the vast majority of the modern day states were never Crown Colonies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There were, in fact, only thirteen original colonies who fought in the War of Independence against the British (a conflict now more often known as The American Revolution), they sat then, and still sit now, on the eastern seaboard of the continent. They, without a doubt, are some of the most famous states in the whole country: Pennsylvania, founded by Quakers out of a desire for religious tolerance, Virginia, founded by rich Episcopalians looking for a “fast buck” in the New World, New York, home to a soon bustling metropolis that shared its name. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Still, so much of the land was initially claimed by the French or the Spanish; Wisconsin, where I live, falling roughly in the territory of “New France”. The state we spent the majority of our holiday/vacation in, was also never a British colony, it belonged to the empire of Spain. And they gave it a truly magical name.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Each of the names of the individual states was chosen, either out of respect for the native American history of the land, or from the history of Europe that the settlers brought with them. Some are practical, like New York or New Jersey (merely the new version of an older place), others are practical names disguised as something posher (Pennsylvania, founded by a man named William Penn, means “the land of Penn’s Woods” in Latin.), others still are Native American names describing the nature of the state in question (Minnesota and Wisconsin’s seem to refer to Native American opinions about the quality of the water in said states.).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">One state’s name though is truly mythical. California was named for an island in a medieval Spanish novel. From its very establishment, there has always been some otherworldly about California.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It is truly a fantastical place. A land full of the myths and legends of this modern world. A fairytale kingdom on the edge of reality and the American continent, that would take a lifetime to understand and a millennia to experience all that it has to offer. That’s very impressive for a state whose development didn’t really start until the San Francisco Gold Rush of 1849.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">California also felt to me like a state of two worlds, the northern portion, still, majestic, serene, defined by nature and the wild tides of the sea crashing on lonely communities which hug the coastline and face the winds alone. The Southern part is a different story, it may have been a quiet place once, but that was before the prospectors came and the Gold Rush started.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As I walked the streets of San Francisco, the day after Independence Day, all hot and bothered, in the middle of a crowd of people, I realised that this was a different sort of California to that which we had previously seen. I also found myself asking the question, “Did the Gold Rush ever truly end or did it just become a quest for something else?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">San Francisco was as busy as any place I had ever seen in my life. I think before visiting the city that I had some quaint romantic notion that it wasn’t that busy. That a place that had spawned the Summer of Love, Full House, Ironside and the West Coast offense in the NFL, couldn’t truly be that busy. I erroneously believed that everything would be chilled and laid back. It wasn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The city does have a charm all of its own. Its hilly streets, while obviously using the American block layout in most places, feel tight and winding, like some medieval mountain city in Italy or Spain. Only urban and not so ruined. It is truly an iconic place to visit. It also seemed nearly impossible for us to find a parking space, to go to any of the landmarks without being mobbed by a gang of people and getting a seat for lunch took us 45 minutes… at a fast food restaurant.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Now it has to be noted that we had arrived there on Independence Day and last year, July 4<span class="s1"><sup>th</sup></span> had fallen on a Wednesday, I believe, and so, many people were making the most of the national holiday and taking the end of the week off. We had probably come to the city on the worst possible day for traffic, of both the automobile and foot kinds.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We did love our time in San Francisco and its interesting to be in a place that you’ve seen so much of on television and in movies and then finally visit to see its reality. Still, it was a shock, after nearly 4 days of driving through and experiencing Northern California’s peaceful greenery, to be confronted by San Francisco’s humming streets. This was definitely a different California to the one we’d previously seen.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">That afternoon, we headed to Fisherman’s Wharf, which has to be one of San Francisco’s most well known attractions both to tourists and apparently locals as well. I found it a strange place but I’ve found that much of the American cities that I’ve been to can seem strange to the non initiated.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When I look at my life growing up in the UK and the places that I visited, every single town that I ever saw seemed to know exactly what it was, and what it had been and seemed to have a pretty good guess about what its going to be in the future. Maybe its the age of the country and the age of the towns, I’m not sure. America is different though, it almost seems like so much of the land is still trying to define who it is and what it is.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Fisherman’s Wharf had this feeling in spades. On first glance it looked like what it had once been, an area originally used for fishing. Somewhat self explanatory, given its name, however as I looked closer, I realised it was so much more than that. The place was a tourist mecca, much of the old piers and wharfs filled with high end shops and restaurants galore.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">Parts of it didn’t look real somehow, the piers stretching out into the bay like an ever advancing frontline of concession stands and restaurants in a war against authenticity. Disney World by the Pacific. A world of fantasy. History coopted for the world of today. We bought chocolate and sweets in a massive sweetshop and saw a guy balance saws on fifteen tables in front of a passing crowd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The real working port still appeared from time to time, there were still boats in the bay and the seafood sold there was indeed fresh. Still it seemed difficult to get to the heart of what this place once was, let alone what it was going to be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We struggled that day in San Francisco, after days of winding our way through a place that is still, in many ways, a frontier kind of culture, it was a shock. Everywhere we went, it seemed, were crowds. The quiet serenity of the redwood forests and the untamed wildness of the Pacific Ocean crashing on the rocks, were replaced by a huge mass of people herding themselves from one place to another, desperate to get hold of a piece of this City of the Gold Rush.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was hot and sunny, which apparently was unusual for that time of year and after so much stillness, it was enough to make you run for the hills, literally. It might merely have been that it was so close to Independence Day but it seemed that the city piers would sink into the sea with the sheer weight of all the tourists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">No-one was there, the endless hubbub of the torrent of tourists cutting off abruptly as it we stepped through the door. It was a pity we hadn’t found the place earlier because I would have liked to look around. Here, it turned out, was the history so obviously missing from the commercialised roadways outside. This was the San Francisco that Jack London would have known and Mark Twain also. This seemed to show the reality of the bay’s history but it seemed left behind and ignored, next to little key-rings of prisoners in stripes trying to escape from Alcatraz or bags with the California flag on them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">San Francisco was wonderful, but it left me feeling incomplete, asking unanswered questions, looking, at least in that area of the city for something or anything real and finding genuine experience to be in short supply.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">California is a land of two parts, it seemed. One, sparsely populated and filled with nature’s giants, seemingly unconcerned with anyone’s opinion of it. The second, endlessly busy, endlessly on the go, but made of plastic and dreams. A land seemingly created just to please people who have fallen in love with California through music or films. Defined by everyone’s opinion of it. .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In the final analysis, the Gold Rush never seems to have gone away, it just became a quest for the perfect place to be. I’m not sure that there is such a place on Earth, however California lives up to the spirit of its name and seems<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>determined to prove me wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Good Bye Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-2435908816971637992019-04-06T23:21:00.001-07:002019-04-06T23:21:24.284-07:00Geekrant vs the forest John saved.
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Greetings Geekranters!</div>
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Sometimes I find myself thinking that the more I see of America, the homeland of my wife and the nation of my voluntary exile, the more I realise, that the thing that defines America more than anything else is stories. It is a land of stories, formed by ideas and shaped by dreamers, fought over by opinions, dominated by the myths of our modern times.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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It is true that for millennia before the creation of the United States, there were people living in the landscape that said mighty nation now covers and that whole civilisations rose and fell long before a single European foot stepped on an American shore. Still, the United States, itself, as a nation, is a nation invented by just such Europeans and added to by wave after wave of immigrants bringing their cultures to this place on the edge of the world.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLmOz3qd2hBEL5rdnhk8KQEyAwlR-Iq-OHHEeqexMmBoWc_1PSliba3SUp5gpJBPX8nXnAuIWcd5fROWxYKScvnSCOPKP0909nq5nxRkQwI7lcA92BlfVKYiirAYLqheO7LzOcLS9_ks/s1600/IMG_7472.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLmOz3qd2hBEL5rdnhk8KQEyAwlR-Iq-OHHEeqexMmBoWc_1PSliba3SUp5gpJBPX8nXnAuIWcd5fROWxYKScvnSCOPKP0909nq5nxRkQwI7lcA92BlfVKYiirAYLqheO7LzOcLS9_ks/s320/IMG_7472.jpg" width="213" /></a>The United States defines itself by dreams and desires, tall tales and family histories, proclamations and manifestos. The tapestry of this country’s society is where all these modern myths and legends meet.</div>
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Now I find myself part of that nation defining its future through the stories of its immigrant past and the hopes of previous generations longing for a better life. Its very different to where I’m from. The UK, is an old nation, but not one, in general, where people don’t have the mindset of the immigrant. Often, though we might love our own family history, it doesn’t contribute a lot to our day to day lives, our identity.</div>
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America, in my experience, is different. Here ancestry and family is how a person came to be here, not just in terms of this physical world but in terms of this new world. Each person’s family story building the collective legend of America.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Case in point, my father’s grandparents on his mother’s side were Scottish, members of the Clan Douglas, yet I wouldn’t call myself a Scot. Still, I have met people here much further removed from their ancestral roots in the “Auld” Country than I, who will nevertheless tell me proudly that they are Scottish. It used to bother me a little, until I realised why they feel that. Their Scottishness is what their ancestors bought to the American story or to put it another way, they’re American because they were once Scottish.</div>
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I might have been thinking this, when I stood in the visitor centre of Muir Woods, just up the road from San Francisco, if I’d done my homework on just who the woods were named after and why they were still there. John Muir is the namesake of the woods, his life story influencing naturalists, conservationists and environmental activists all over the world..</div>
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John Muir was an immigrant, much like myself and he moved to the United States from his native Scotland 165 years before I travelled across the Atlantic towards my new home in America. John Muir’s fingerprints can still be felt on the landscape of this modern world and in the woods named after him.</div>
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The forested area that bears his name is a truly fantastic place. It is so popular a place, that it requires you to reserve parking in its parking lots, days in advance. The woods can best be described as a kind of wooded canyon, that lies in the hills across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Despite their popularity though they’re easy to miss. Its a good thing that my wife is a much better travel planner than I could ever be, because I would never have found out about this place on my own.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8VLhAAG-JY6FQXOD2k3pqUUSOYM-vCYr6ThTqkVCN0ZOwBqusaHmLWz-wazfk0FPJ6IJgTOzJXXHthsBfW5Om7H-D4GGhkhD0q16rnisXG8Qkl69uZhcFe-q_Ae7HfTixuU5yUjzy28/s1600/IMG_7412-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="752" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8VLhAAG-JY6FQXOD2k3pqUUSOYM-vCYr6ThTqkVCN0ZOwBqusaHmLWz-wazfk0FPJ6IJgTOzJXXHthsBfW5Om7H-D4GGhkhD0q16rnisXG8Qkl69uZhcFe-q_Ae7HfTixuU5yUjzy28/s320/IMG_7412-1.jpg" width="150" /></a>Our second day in San Francisco, we woke up early and travelled through the gentle morning light of a San Francisco that was just waking up to a brand new day. The streets gently hummed with commuters on their way to work, workmen caused traffic jams with roadworks, excavating the tarmac right in front of the cars. It seemed that even at this early hour the city had no other purpose than to bustle. We were searching for the serene however and the wondrous wildness od nature so<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>we headed out of San Francisco the same way we had come into the city the day before. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the mist covered hills of Marin County, heading for the slopes of Mount Tamalpais and its forested canyon of wonder.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In this part of California, the mountains and hills often come right up to the Pacific Ocean and so the road is forced to take a winding course through them, as if gripping, through sheer force of will, the sides of the hills themselves. As we pressed on we were caught between two worlds, the green verdant wall of the hill on one side, the steep drop off into nothing-less on the other, all framed by the wispy embrace of the mist that was everywhere around.</div>
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Arriving at our destination, we rapidly realized that is was very different from the Redwoods National Park that we had visited earlier in our journey. There the environment had been defined by a stillness and a wildness so profound that it was possible to imagine that all the centuries that this continent has been settled had passed away and we were the only people left within its confines. Muir Woods, on the other hand, while definitely a place of conservation and great beauty, was full of tourists. Never, in my entire life, have I seen so many people in one place to look at… trees.</div>
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There were, it appeared, multiple car parks, although the forest made it difficult to see just how many. The place was different, unique to me. On the one hand it reminded me of a National Trust site back in the UK, with a visitor centre full of overpriced fleeces and those huge oversized pencils that no child has ever actually used but still will show off in their pencil case at school. On the other hand it was still a wild place, ancient, untouched and primordial. Nature standing as a bulwark against the ever increasing tendrils of human civilisation, determined never to fall the onslaught.</div>
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As I we walked along the assigned pathways, underneath the high canopy of the mighty redwoods and glimpsed moments of true beauty, I was struck by how, America, like all nations, is also defined as much by its contradictions and compromises as it is by its great dreams and successes. Here stood a monument to nature, a place specifically purchased and given to the government with the express purpose of conserving nature and it was nearly impossible to pass a tree that people weren’t posing in front of for selfies and family photos.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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It makes me think about John Muir, the Scottish emigre that I mentioned earlier and how his influence is still felt far and wide in this great country. Until he was well past 40, John Muir lived a relatively reclusive lifestyle, at least as far as people and the rest of the world were concerned. Scorning a conventional career, Muir chose to discover this new world through long jaunts into the countryside, mammoth journeys into places of untouched beauty and serenity that most of us will never see.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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He lived, mostly alone and for years, in what would become Yosemite National Park, in an effort to experience nature. He climbed mountains and he explored entire places so far removed from the Scottish countryside of his youth that they must truly have seemed like another planet. Eventually John Muir wrote about his experiences and everything changed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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John Muir was a celebrity, he was sought out by philosophers and newspaper editors, writers and railroad barons. He was a legend. The first environmentalist, you might say. The Original Eco Warrior. Yet he still looked like an old bearded Scottish farmer who never lost his accent. H He helped found The Sierra Club, one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the world and he was tireless in fighting to protect nature in its most untouched form.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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America, is about stories, I mentioned earlier, and it truly is, for everyone has tale of how their family came to be here and what they did. Living here, I realise that I’m writing a story for my descendants, the ones will who come after me, with<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>my actions. Travelling through the wild unending forests of Northern California is a part of this and following the pathways through the managed wildness and beauty of Muir Woods, across strategically placed bridges and stopping for photo ops is another.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Still, I have to wonder whether my descendants will understand my story as I understand it, will they choose to see things the same way as I? Muir Woods was truly beautiful and it felt like nothing else on Earth, even with the visitor centre and cafe and the gift shop make to look like an old mountain cabin, but is it what a conservationist like John Muir would have wanted?</div>
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When the government acquired the land from the private individual who gave them it, they called it Muir Woods, in honour of the great gentlemen himself. Maybe he was flattered and maybe not. Still I’m not sure that he could have foreseen how his legend would grow and this relatively small section of land become a national monument.</div>
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Muir was committed to the preservation of wild, untouched, landscapes. In his world, the intrusion of man’s endless pursuit of modernity into primal environment of nature was, in many ways, a bad thing. So it’s ironic to think that the place that bears his name and therefore his legacy, in some ways, was the least untouched of the landscapes that we visited in that area of the world.</div>
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It was, truly magnificent! A real otherworldly place of beauty and serenity, cathedrals of trees their branches reaching to the sky, capturing you in time and space. It was also full of the trudge of the tourist’s shoes and the endless longing to preserve, not the trees, but the moment of being with the trees..<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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America is a land of stories, legends that define both where this country has been and where it is going. So many of us, across the world try to take hold of the dreams of the great men and women of the past and take ownership of them. We seamlessly fold them into our own desires for our nation and ignoring any evidence that our ancestors might have felt differently to us.</div>
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America is an idea and a dream, but all come to it on these dreams on their own terms and in their own way. We are all writing our own stories in this life, in many ways to contribute to this beautiful world, just like John Muir, just like I am writing my words down now.</div>
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Till next time,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Goodbye, Geekranters.</div>
<br />Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-86372322058336507972019-03-30T22:18:00.001-07:002019-03-30T22:18:53.923-07:00Geek Rant vs The Summers of Memory
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Greetings Geekranters!</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Its snowing outside, in case you’re interested. Well there’s snow on the ground at least. Its getting hard to keep track these days. Snowstorm after snowstorm seems to fly across the western United States and batter Wisconsin against Lake Michigan. The wind blows and the snow drifts, icicles are everywhere and frostbite is a real worry. I think it looks equal parts beautiful fairyland and nightmarishly post apocalyptic landscape out there. Wisconsinites, on the other hand, merely use it as an excuse to use their deck as an extra beer cooler during parties. Come to think of it, I can do that, I have a deck after all, but you wouldn’t know that, I haven’t told you.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been a little busy. Life has intervened. Kelly and I moved into our first house, I finally passed my driving test, we were leaders on a youth retreat, we hosted my wife’s family in our still half put together house and all in the last three months. Its amazing how life seems to happen all at once and then, other times, it seems to take forever for something to change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So I’m writing this from my “office” in our new house, (well, new to us, it was actually built in 1979, which happens to be the same year my parents were married) the snow is supposed to be falling at some point tonight and I’m wondering whether we’ll have to dig our driveway out in the morning or whether it’ll be deep enough to snowblow. These are the things, I’m finding, that homeowners in the American Mid-West are concerned about.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wisconsin has been pretty bad this year, its been the worst I’ve known it anyway, Minnesota has been hit harder, I’m sure my in-laws will say, but that’s to be expected. I have started to realise that Wisconsin looks down on Illinois for not being as wild and cold and Minnesota tells Wisconsin that it has no idea about real cold and then North Dakota tells them all to “stop moaning, at least people live in your states, I’m so frozen, I’m Antartica’s understudy”.</div>
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Winters like this are not totally uncommon in this area of the world and most of the people just seem to take it in their stride. I tend to think I’m not adjusting to it at all until I see some social media post from the UK, worrying that the solitary centimetre of snow will bring the nation’s roads to their knees; I had more snow than that my first ever commute, as a driver, home from work.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Winter, is respected here though. Frostbite being a very real possibility then you’re not going to catch anyone staggering home from town drunk, wearing their nice jeans, a Ted Baker shirt and a pair of Timberlands and then passing out in the town park on the way. Its not that people here don’t party in the winter, its just that they do it in a good Ice Fishing shack, with some protection from the elements.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Winter has me thinking about so many things. I think a lot, as anyone who knows me will tell you, probably too much. I’m also making an attempt at being a writer and maybe it goes with the territory, isn’t writing after all just the communication of thoughts onto paper? Memories given physical form and captured onto the ivory landscape of the page.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Winter leads my mind down all the pathways of my past and all the places I have seen and the things I have done since I’ve moved here. This is probably the worst winter that I have ever seen in this place and I’m thankful to say that I’ve dealt with it quite well, at least I think I have.</div>
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Winter has me thinking about summer and all the things that we saw when we drove the length of California and Oregon. Redwoods to Surf Meccas, Portland to Los Angeles and everything in between. Right now I see, in the snapshot of memory, the sun twinkling on the waters of the San Francisco Bay just as I mentioned in my last post.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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That moment, stood looking over that bay, seemed to last for forever. Etched in the seeming eternity of the minds imagination. There are always new things to see and new experiences to be had, but there are instances that are forever new in our recollections. My wife could have done without the unique experience of driving in San Francisco traffic though.</div>
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The San Francisco Bay area is the second most densely populated part of the United States, trailing only the huge metropolis of New York for the sheer mass of humanity packed into such relatively small confines of verdant hills and azure waters. It also has some of the worst traffic that I have ever seen, both driving on the roads and making our way through the streets.</div>
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If Winter has me thinking about what summer is like here on these American shores, it also makes me flash back to the summers of my youth. A multiple of British seaside resorts melding into one, fused together within the alchemy of memory.</div>
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Back then, hoping for sunny days, swimming in the sea with my sister, the other sister already developing her love of lazing on the beach, my brother refusing to touch the ocean bottom because he’d read too many books about sea dwelling creepy crawlies. Tacky souvenirs, we insisted on buying with our pocket money, never seemed worth it on rainy days back home and back at school. Those days when it seemed like half of Britain was at the seaside, before everyone started going to Benidorm for fish and chips under Spanish skies with no worry of the threat of English rain.</div>
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If there could have been a perfect expression of all our childhood dreams, a place where it never rained, with a hundred tacky storefronts selling souvenir shirts by the truckload. If that place had existed, it would have been San Francisco on the second day that we were there.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>If there was a place that could have captured my childhood longing to look out on a perfect blue sea under a cloudless sky and do nothing for entire day but gaze into aquatic eternity then it would have been Santa Barbara. Its funny how what happens now is still so connected to what happened then. How in truth those childish longings never truly go away and as broken and beaten as we think we are, somewhere, deep inside, we are as innocent and as carefree as we ever were in the halcyon days of youth.</div>
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Winter has me thinking about summer, which has me thinking about today and tomorrow, the future and the past, who I will be and who I was. This winter has been full of busyness, a multitude of life events that I could write a book about.</div>
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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It seems the last few months have been full of trying to catch my breath, trying to work out what it all means, snow falling on Mid-western streets, sun beating down on California’s West Coast Paradises; a history of British countryside holidays remind me that just as the weather changes from season to season, so my heart grows and changes from place to place. Maybe it took me moving 4,000 miles to truly understand what that means.</div>
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So I’m hopefully going to be writing a lot more as I try to understand what all of this means to a British boy cast free into this ocean of Transatlanticism. I’m going to finish the story of our trip to California, that I dropped so unforgivably last year, I might tell you about our house, then again I might not. I might let you know about my driving tests and my truck. (yes I drive a truck, no I’m not developing a love of Nascar and Garth Brooks). I might write about a lot of things that I haven’t thought of yet but there is one thing that I am determined I will do. I will write.</div>
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So as the snow falls out my window tonight, I tell you that my hibernation is over… Till next time…</div>
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Good Bye, Geekranters.</div>
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<br />Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-1551357070699427312018-09-16T14:52:00.001-07:002018-09-16T14:52:24.876-07:00Geekrant vs the Guardians of the Bay<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">Greetings, Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When we're younger, life often seems simpler. Back then, everything existed in black and white rather than shades of grey, I don't think any of us imagined that life would be so full of compromise. Childhood and youth is full of the beautiful and innocent yet ultimately foolish passion of youth, we imagine that we can change the world just by wishing it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Then, however, the grown up world seems to crash in and our life becomes defined more by necessity than by our dreams. We seem in many cases to become creatures of compromise, a mass of contradictions. That isn't to say that our dreams can't still inspire us, drive us on or indeed come true in the end. Still we often have hard choices to make and all these things can define the landscape of our lifetimes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">San Francisco was a city that seemed to personify this observation of life's tendencies. Californian yet not endlessly sunny, eco friendly yet the second greatest area of population density in the United States. Modern yet somehow old fashioned. Monumental and instantly recognisable yet at the same time as unremarkable as a thousand city streets. A place utterly unique but in places in danger of drowning in conformity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As I mentioned in my last blog, we had driven into San Francisco on Independence Day, coasting down out of the warm sun dappled hills and over the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge crosses the San Francisco Bay at its entrance like some modern day Colossus of Rhodes. On one side of it lies the protected bay area, sheltered by the surrounding hills from the winds, waves and other ravages the ocean can cause, on the other side, said ocean stretches ever onwards, disappearing into the hazy horizon, the endless Pacific.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">After the isolated landscape of the Redwood country, a place that while very beautiful was suffused with a grand monotony, San Francisco itself was an assault on the senses. The city seemed to be everywhere at first glance, covering the hills in every direction. Here and there however patches of green poked through the concrete jungle but even then they seemed a mere accent as much a part of the city as the buildings themselves. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Still it was beautiful, in a busy, breath-taking way, all multi coloured streets zig-zagging this way and that underneath the golden sun, the azure blue water forming a perfect backdrop to the scene shimmering like a sapphire, clear as crystal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It looked different, of course, when the Spanish discovered it, back before great metal bridges and traffic filled streets when all was hills and sea, earth and water, land and sky. Maybe they saw beauty in it, maybe they just saw fertile land and a protected harbour, whatever the reason, they settled here and people have been drawn to this place ever since. Called by a hundred different reasons to these gently sparkling waters under the shadows of the surrounding hills. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The prospectors came in 1849, following the steps of the Spanish and the luster of gold, carving a path across the rockies and into the history books. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the city birthed much of the counter culture that would come to define a generation within its steep streets. The city was busy, the roads chock-full of traffic, my wife, Kelly had wanted to stop on the north bank and look out at the city and its monumental gatekeeper, The Golden Gate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Unfortunately we were onto the bridge seemingly before we knew it, swept along by the traffic towards the city that appeared out of nowhere. Its strange to think that something so famous and internationally known as the Golden Gate can in the end feel somehow ordinary. To drive over that bridge was just that, ordinary. It felt like a let-down somehow, for in the end, a bridge is still only a bridge, no matter how iconic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">On the other side of this seemingly ordinary bridge, we pulled in the Presidio, which is, it turns out, a great place to take pictures of said architectural wonder. In this modern tourists are blessed in ways that previous generations visiting this spot weren't. Until the early 1990s the Presidio was a U.S. Army base for well over a century. Now, I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure camera toting tourists were not a desirable feature of a functioning military installation and therefore probably discouraged.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Since then, however, the Presidio has become an important part of San Francisco's National Parks and Monuments. It is a National Historic Landmark, although as we saw, such hallowed status doesn't protect its buildings from the ravages of the odd graffiti tag. In that area of the Presidio we walked through the remains of underground bunkers, squat grey affairs, brutalistic mounds of concrete guarding the narrow entrance to the bay.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Here, although we could forget about the traffic, it was still busy, full of tourists and locals making the most of Independence Day, here amongst the concrete rabbit warrens that have protected the city for so long. Past the greyness however, lay a simple path and hilltop crested with trees like giant bonsai, shaped by the years of wind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The whole place brought me back to thoughts of contradictions, the grey and the green, the man-made and the natural, peace and the machinery of war. Looking across towards the bridge, we saw seemingly the most profound contradiction of all. What had seemed so ordinary when driven across had now become something almost elemental when viewed from a short distance away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Golden Gate Bridge looked like a perfectly composed photograph, set against the backdrop of land and ocean, the late afternoon sun still bright and full, in that instance we had entered a singular moment of serenity and time seemed to stand still. If the first half of our journey had been defined by nature and the second half would be defined by man and his works then this was the place the two met and achieved an unlikely harmony. The perfect straight yet also sweeping lines of the bridge standing out against the hills, their outlines abstract and less distinct. A scene so artificial, a testament to man's ingenuity and power over nature, that it should have jarred the sight like one of those wind farms that my father loves to complain about, but it didn't. It fitted seamlessly into the landscape, as if it had been there since the dawn of creation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">San Francisco, therefore greeted us as most of California had, a beautiful contradiction, complete in its opposites. A city swelled with buildings and people and yet a place many so readily associate with environmentalism and the hippies of the 1960s.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sometimes, I think God likes to joke with us. Someone once said "Men make plans, God laughs" and I think I agree with that sentiment, for the Spanish who named this place could never imagined the delicious irony and contradiction in such a title. To name it all after Saint Francis, a rich man who gave all his money away and lived much as life as a friar in the midst of nature, was just asking for it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">So there San Francisco sits, a city in the midst of a divine masterpiece and never looking out of place. We stood there and I wondered what St Francis would have made of the city and all its contradictions... on thinking about it, he probably would have told me just to lose myself in scene and not try to puzzle out the mystery of a perfect afternoon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Until next time, Good bye Geekranters </span><br />
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<br />Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-36855793863538619282018-09-02T19:34:00.004-07:002018-09-02T19:35:16.397-07:00Geek Rant vs The Gold Rush Highway<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Memories, as I noted in my last blog post, seem to have greater resonance the further I get from the town that I once called home. The more that I adjust to this discordantly different and strangely similar new homeland, the more my thoughts are captivated by the past. Drawn by echoes to things that I had thought long forgotten.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Or maybe, its just a function of getting older, merely amplified by distance, looking through rose colored lenses at the golden tinged summerland of youth forgetting that in its own time, it had difficulties and pains a plenty, just as much as today does.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The sea, all memory, spoke to me on those seaside highways and sang to me, filtering through the windows of our hotel room in Shelter Cove, California, sounding like the sea has always sounded yet still the song was subtly different. Maybe California just captivates the human spirit without us even realising.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This is the state, after all, that set the hearts of The Doors on fire, led The Eagles down the inescapable corridors of Hotel California and offered The Beach Boys an idyllic teenage lifestyle to sell to the rest of the world. This is the land of Hollywood, the land of cities and landmarks that even now saturate and dominate modern western culture. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Waking up in Shelter Cove, that morning, I had to acknowledge that there was something otherworldly to this place, here was so much that was familiar but at the same time strangely unknowable. Hauntingly alien, but not in a negative sense, it was merely that here was a place so much bigger, more immense and more wild than any place I had been before. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Shelter Cove was, in many ways, this feeling made manifest. To me, it was totally different to anything that I had ever imagined California to be and I'm pretty sure that sentiment would be echoed by many others if they visited that eerily beautiful place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was in a myriad of ways, very similar to Crescent City, with the same haphazard quality in its building and layout and the general isolated feel to the surroundings. Here, however that feeling was magnified many times over. Rather than a small yet bustling town standing on green scrubland and fields gently sloping towards, Shelter Cove seemed to cling to rocks that jutted out into the Pacific, a final bastion of civilisation caught between the tempestuous sea and the steep incline of the surrounding hills.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Everywhere, the houses seemed old and neglected, the paint peeling, seemingly deserted. On closer inspection, however, it became clear the houses were a lot newer than they at first appeared, their exteriors doubtless showing the ongoing impact of living so close to the weatherbeaten might of the Pacific Ocean. Nothing resists such forces for very long.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">One road ran in and out of the strange little town, the tarmac winding backwards and forwards through high hills, clinging to the side of them at impossible angles. It felt like the lair of old smugglers and pirates long since gone down to the inky blackness of Davy Jones' Locker and it may well have been, once upon a time. All I knew at that moment is that it was the most isolated place I had ever been to in my life, but still it spoke of mankind's ability to survive and thrive wherever life takes us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Shelter Cove was the last of the settlements on that lonesome highway that we stayed in. If, as I have said, our journey through California had been the partial discovery of an unknowable place, an enigma, something that seemed to have no relationship to what we had previously envisioned in our minds. That in those moments we had glimpsed a landscape defined by nature and characterised by a rural sparseness of population and habitation. A location that sometimes made you question whether the rest of the world existed. If, if it was that and more, then the California we were about to drive into was everything we thought California was and still was nothing we had imagined.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">That day, which just so happened to be U.S. Independence Day, was our longest uninterrupted drive of the trip so far. This was to be our big push, taking us from the rural wilderness of the Redwoods and the northernmost reaches of the state to the more populated regions further south. By the time we'd finished on that day the distance we would have travelled, including all our detours and trips, would be nearing one thousand miles. To quote Otis Redding, we were "headed for the 'Frisco Bay", four hours later we would be there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Memory is a funny thing, especially I've found when I try to recount all the hours of driving that we did, it jumbles in my recollection, the places that we didn't stop bleeding into one, names on a road sign. The bigger towns and cities and the places we stayed were easy to recall but so much of America is made up of the in-between places, the towns that lie on the way to somewhere else. A great proportion of this country lies beyond the knowledge of many of us who only know this land through osmosis, through books, television and movies, through music and culture, or those of us who once went on a weekend getaway to New York City and now think that we are experts on a whole land. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">After traveling so far and seeing a lot more than I ever imagined I would of this fine nation, I realised that it is those places that define this nation of ideas and dreams. It is not, as far as I could tell, a country of huge cities, jungles of concrete, glass and steel that dominate the landscape. It has those places, to be sure, but the America I have started to see is a country defined by its backcountry, its out of the way places. This is a country it seems, unremarked and unlooked for, a land most tourists don't discover, founded on communities built with the stuff of dreams on the border of the wild.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Reflections on a car window, blurred images rushing past, gone in an instance, merging in my mind into one. Still, they are a significant part of what makes America what it is. Traveling south through this environment, I remember feelings rather than definite places, the spirit of the place rather than its geography. The colour of the hillsides changing, the forests receding and giving way to cultivated fields. Gone were the dramatic rock-cuts and lonesome wind blown highways giving way to a pastoral dream that felt like some lost part of the Mediterranean, six thousand miles away from Europe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This was truly a land of plenty, in many ways an agrarian paradise. This was also the beginnings of American wine country. As we drove along, small billboards next to the roadside advertised wine tasting after wine tasting, tours of vineyards, fresh fruits and vegetables available at ridiculously cheap prices, which admittedly was the only cheap thing about California that we found. It was something of an ongoing struggle to persuade ourselves that we didn't have time for such diversions. Here was an area that could have been a holiday all on its own and many people do merely come here to sample the wine and marvel at the vineyards.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It all rolled past lazily, like a mid-summer afternoon does in the halcyon days of our youth when your heart doesn't know what work or responsibilities are yet and all of life seems to move at a slower rate. My memory was stirred but not memory of a particular place or event, instead it was a recollection of feeling, a calling of the heart. The whole place steeped in innocence and those summers of childhood that never seemed to end, stretching forward for weeks on end in warmth, friendship and adventure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The traffic increased from this point onward however, crashing into my pre-adolescent reverie like the first overtime shift that I ever did, blowing the warm feeling apart. Still, despite its increase, it was nowhere near yet the non-moving gridlock of LA and its surrounding counties. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0-OfKgEuEMrwC4Hb1ChQXc9m1kNjl2K6eLSQuFlLhoaPoBb7vdzr5tRdmDFDuEIRHuXK-jGANtuCi6D6n5LZ6AqsX3pIe-tN27LaCX2TNA48e_UbttTcjRpjiOiwTMu86hKO0OsM7K6Q/s1600/IMG_7213_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="721" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0-OfKgEuEMrwC4Hb1ChQXc9m1kNjl2K6eLSQuFlLhoaPoBb7vdzr5tRdmDFDuEIRHuXK-jGANtuCi6D6n5LZ6AqsX3pIe-tN27LaCX2TNA48e_UbttTcjRpjiOiwTMu86hKO0OsM7K6Q/s320/IMG_7213_Fotor.jpg" width="144" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">In the end, San Francisco seemed to appear out of nowhere, at least it did for us, approaching the city from the North. In most of the towns of any great size that I have visited in my lifetime, One hits the suburbs of a city first, outliers drawing you into the centre of the conurbated mass. This is especially true, it seems of much of the Mid-West where many towns lie on great plains and can been seen long before they are reached. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As we approached the city, a narrow road winds through the hills, turning to and fro and leads to a simple looking road tunnel, the Robin Williams tunnel. On the other side, the entirety of San Francisco Bay opened before us, the blue water glittering in the sun, directly in front of us, the Golden Gate rose majestically in front of us. The whole scene unravelled in front of us, a panorama of blue, green and rusty red. The Bridge guarding the entrance of the bay, a safe haven against the elemental power of the ocean. All over the hills were covered in buildings. This was definitely different to the sparsely inhabited wilderness we have grown accustomed to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Here was the end of the lonely highway and the beginning of a California that was more familiar but also still strangely different. It is at times like this that I am amazed at how far I've come from where I began and all the lonesome highways that led me here. Its strange how much of my life now is a safe haven against the ravages of the world's oceans and tempests and how much I have yet to discover of this world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Until next time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Goodbye Geekranters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-30956326942969308292018-08-26T21:33:00.000-07:002018-08-26T21:58:04.123-07:00Geekrant vs the Landscape of Memory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Greetings, Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sometimes living so far away from where you began, your heart, emotions and mind can surprise you. Surprise you with just how much the places you once knew are not really that distant while they live on in your soul.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Memories sparking suddenly like forked lightening striking from a mid-western sky in the dying days of summer. The feelings caused persisting long after the event, lingering in the smell of ozone on the wind.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha5yfUhxc3njpglNrxhbe8BNpMUu4lLPkjb6zhE6eIF7ufl9upNYam0JKhfANidFY5nVI40RajEYZRoPFHIkSHihKKXQ9NkS06NgG7c9W7pSEoLNMn2rcJyviDZdIud_dn0LGoSx43QGA/s1600/IMG_6604_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha5yfUhxc3njpglNrxhbe8BNpMUu4lLPkjb6zhE6eIF7ufl9upNYam0JKhfANidFY5nVI40RajEYZRoPFHIkSHihKKXQ9NkS06NgG7c9W7pSEoLNMn2rcJyviDZdIud_dn0LGoSx43QGA/s320/IMG_6604_Fotor.jpg" width="257" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There are moments in my life here when all that should seem so different to what I knew, at least in theory, become strangely familiar in practise. A sight or a sound taking me back to a childhood, four thousand miles and what feels like a hundred years ago.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Memory brings me back and forth, in and out, like the tides of the sea breaking over and over onto a lonely beach. The ebb and flow, the surf crashing into my mind and breaking into my conscious thoughts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Perhaps its because some things don't change in this world, and the further you get from the start, the more you can see that. The sea is the sea, wherever you go and whatever name it takes. Eternal, gifted with more permanence than all of mankind's civilisations and discoveries.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The sun still rises in the morning, no matter where in the world it finds me when it does. The wind still blows from here to there...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">So it came to be, that standing on a beach in Crescent City, California, in the dying moments of the day, with the sun dropping ever more speedily towards the western horizon; a thousand memories cascaded through my mind, echoes of a myriad of holidays before, childhood moments on beaches the length and breadth of the British Isles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And always the sea...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As far back as I can remember I have loved the sea, although my mother says that when I first saw it I did nothing but wail, crying incessantly on a beach towel somewhere on a British beach when the 1980s were still young.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Maybe that is a way that the British are different from the Americans. We are an island race, our identity and our history wrapped up in that most mercurial of mistresses, the sea. We are tied up with the ocean, its ups and downs, its tempestuous winters and placid summers, its calm surface and rolling undercurrents. Many mid-westerners assume that when I see Lake Michigan, my longing for the sea will be satisfied, but it doesn't the feeling in my soul. It is a lake, large as it is and I was born on an island by miles and miles of sea. It is not the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The sea is a wild thing, a force to be respected, barely thirty miles from where I was born, in the fishing port of Grimsby, fleets of trawlers would tempt fate and head out into that indigo expanse, never knowing whether it would be their last voyage. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">So often, it seems to me, the ocean portrayed on American t.v. or in Hollywood movies, is a playground, a tamed landscape of ultramarine blue, created by the divine for our recreation. To surf, scuba dive and swim with the dolphins. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The sea of northern California was not that sea, sanitized and bluer than blue has ever been and ever will be in nature. As if such things like hurricanes never came from the sea. This was like the sea of my youth, beautiful but dangerous, wild but untamed. Waves building seemingly miles away from the shore crashing like the angry thunder of a displeased ancient deity and breaking into a billion sparkling jewels of surf.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Crescent City lies, isolated and seemingly overlooked by many, on the Pacific coast of California, only a few miles from the Oregon border and the Jedidiah Smith Redwood Park that I mentioned in my last post. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We arrived there late in the afternoon, winding our way out of the hills to this northern most of Californian seaside towns. It was a strange place to our eyes, I'm not sure what we were expecting, but it whatever it was, it wasn't what we saw.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The whole town had a haphazard quality to it, not ugly, but seemingly thrown together, no two buildings looking quite the same. Startlingly different to the miles and miles of suburban housing that can be seen throughout the United States. Even the fast food joints and restaurants seem to have been placed where there was a space at the time. This far off the beaten track, it seemed, town planning was not a priority.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Still, the place possessed a peculiar sort of beauty, as we walked along the beach, the wind whipped in from the Pacific, catching the sand and sending it flying across the beach like miniature sandstorm and I found that something that was missing since I moved to America was filled. Something in the soul, the unspoken desire of every natural-born citizen of the British Isles to see the sea. To feel salt spray on the skin, apparently makes me feel complete.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Here was the beginning of a California unseen, a forgotten highway if you will. A collection of isolated and disparate settlements, each unique in itself, cast away, flotsam on the waves. An enigma in the American state that influences so much.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">California here, felt less like the sun drenched, celebrity filled, densely populated land of surfers and endless sunlight and plenty, a Beach Boys soundtrack floating on the wind; instead here was a land of barely tamed wilderness, where the giant forms of prehistoric trees crested craggy hills that fell steeply towards the waiting waves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was somehow a place where time had ceased to be, a neolithic landscape that had never really got used to the human intrusion.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4V7z9HRJbD5NyddOQNWVsWHADYzEZvpObxKY6O0q-PtUL9D42NvlUs46tZk2UjmqWWaGWb7Z1LNOJ0n8k3cId3O6FHOc0ZXnkbM3cCC7Nu5NiDwNmBUIuP2MgbrtzQo1cblhmTgCEFHc/s1600/IMG_7016_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1255" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4V7z9HRJbD5NyddOQNWVsWHADYzEZvpObxKY6O0q-PtUL9D42NvlUs46tZk2UjmqWWaGWb7Z1LNOJ0n8k3cId3O6FHOc0ZXnkbM3cCC7Nu5NiDwNmBUIuP2MgbrtzQo1cblhmTgCEFHc/s320/IMG_7016_Fotor.jpg" width="251" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Even in this moment, memory persisted, driving down the lonesome highway in the bright light of the early morning. It bought to mind Scotland, of all places, echoing in the awesome untamed nature of the craggy cliffs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My Grandfather, that is my mother's father, was a painter, an artist. It wasn't his profession, he made his career as a jeweler and had been in the British Army in Italy around the end of the Second World War. Still he was a painter, though in all that time I never heard of him selling even one of his magnificent landscapes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My Grandparents house was full of his work, breathtaking renderings of the Lake District or quiet Scottish glens, places that he loved to be. His paintings had a serenity to them, a stillness, that transmitted the awe that monumental landscape imparts to a soul and how my Grandfather felt about those places.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As we drove that road, between sea and scrubby grassland, through verdant tunnels of mammoth trees and deep rock cuts through ancient hills, I thought, not for the first time, of my Grandfather's paintings, I wondered what he would have made of these high forests touching the sky, the sparkling sea, the strange souvenir shops that appeared as if by magic out of the undergrowth at the side of the road.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Memory is a strange thing, for it tells as much about who we are today as it does about who we were then. I realised in that moment that in many ways when I write about these places, I am trying to do with my words what my Grandfather seemed to do so effortlessly with paints, brush and canvas. I attempt to paint a picture with words, to impart the feeling that a place that has given me or describe the landscape of society. I use so many different methods to do this, tidbits of information, pieces of trivia, I highlight the differences between the United Kingdom and the United States, even the general weirdness of being me. Still, I am in a sense trying to paint landscapes of the mind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Then there are places, that can't be explained with words, that have a feeling that can not be captured in a bottle. Places that spark both memories and hopes, the past and the future. Highways so vast and immense they overwhelm and make us look deep into our own selves. This forgotten coast was just such a place. In a place like this, I try to write as best I can and wish that I could paint like my Grandpa.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Till next time,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Goodbye, Geekranters!</span><br />
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Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-17191591404584643712018-08-15T19:41:00.000-07:002018-08-15T19:56:36.578-07:00Geek Rant vs the Redwoods Rally- Stage Two. "The Monoliths of Nature"<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Welcome once more to the cornucopia of creative chattering that is my ever humble blog. I as always blessed that you are here, I hope you enjoy it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Last time, I left you on somewhat of a cliffhanger, with my wife and I heading intrepidly onward into unknown territory. Okay, so it wasn't that gripping a cliffhanger and it wasn't for us either, but cliff hanging would come. But more about that later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I have two younger sisters who are twins. Now, why would I bring such a piece of information up like that, in the middle of talking about something else entirely, I hear you cry. Well the answer to that question has a lot to do with... penguins. "What about penguins?!", I hear you call out in confusion!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The younger of my sisters loves penguins, always has and always will. Someone wants to get her a present, even now at 27, with her being a fully qualified nurse and all that, still the way to her heart is through penguins. Most of us have something like that in our lives, an animal we like above all others, a fandom that no one else quite gets. A place that we just have to see and we can't quite say why. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">My wife felt the same way about the Redwoods. I'm not claiming for one moment that I wasn't monumentally impressed by the majesty beauty of these arboreal wonders but, in the long run, I got used to them much quicker than my wife did. She loved the Redwoods and much of the next few days of our journey was to be dominated by that desire to see all of them that could be seen. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDzGVdzSdmXixg-PVWRvwjTdBysf9empEH50Knhq1GtlCgeKsKFn5RocBIGRbGMDJOnHvEW8wFqGsJNr3tKK7-rwB-sLHIyCf9E5xWgI_Un9eDEHDwTHrS6gH2pP00NVx7y8FfGhNjh8/s1600/IMG_6461_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDzGVdzSdmXixg-PVWRvwjTdBysf9empEH50Knhq1GtlCgeKsKFn5RocBIGRbGMDJOnHvEW8wFqGsJNr3tKK7-rwB-sLHIyCf9E5xWgI_Un9eDEHDwTHrS6gH2pP00NVx7y8FfGhNjh8/s320/IMG_6461_Fotor.jpg" width="213" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We entered California on a early July afternoon in which the sun filtered gently through the green canopy of a thousand evergreens onto a road that seemed to stretch off endlessly into sun dappled oblivion. Everything seemed so still, the air close around us and strangely deadened. Its like that old philosophical question, "if a tree falls in the forest with no-one to hear it, does it make a sound?", I'm pretty sure that a tree could have fallen right in front of us and we would never have heard so much as a whisper. We were entering a secret place, a landscape far older than most of human civilisation. It wasn't that there was no life here, just the opposite in fact. The place teemed with life, still it was a life untamed and unaffected by human existence. A life that kept its secrets close to its chest, as it were.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We were driving into history, through trees thousands of years old, the only visible change in the landscape in all those millennia was the thin asphalt colored ribbon of the road snaking off into hazy verdant imagination. The one sign that we had even crossed into a different state was the simple "Welcome to California" sign, blue against the green of the forest. It would be days before we saw anything that could have been described as a major city or even large town. We were cast loose, it seemed from everything that we had once known, feeling both incredibly small and incredibly blessed at the same time, dwarfed by everything that surrounded us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our first destination within California was the Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park, part of California's Redwood National and State Parks. The park sits in the very northern fringe of California in the suitably named "Del Norte County" and only a small distance from the sea, although as we to find out, distance in California is truly relative.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Now while both the UK and the US both possess national parks as a means towards the conservation and preservation of areas of natural beauty and scientific interest, in practice they are not totally the same thing. I've been in many of the U.K.'s national parks in my lifetime and while they are areas of often tremendous beauty and are preserved in a wonderful manner, they are still landscapes defined by humanity's existence. What would the Yorkshires Dales or the Moors be without dry stone walls to separate one field from another, the rocks skillfully balanced without mortar, echoes of man's relationship with the land?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">American National Parks on the other hand, seem to concentrate more on the preservation and conservation of landscapes that man hasn't bent to his will yet. Places where nature somehow dwells in its primeval state, fantasy lands more amazing than a thousand movie sets. Therefore, as we drove into the park, we could forgiven for thinking we had entered some Tolkienian landscape. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Redwoods were now huge, towering so far above the road that they blocked the sun and signs ahead warned us to turn on our headlights though it was still relatively early in the day. We were surrounded, enveloped by a universe of green, driving blindly onward. The only building we saw was the visitor centre for the park, which sat set back from the road in a slight clearing with a car park. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Even here, the trees rose high above us like ancient monoliths, their branches touching the sky, as we ate our picnic lunch seated at a simple table on the edge of the car park. It was beautiful and definitely a welcome antidote to the busyness of our everyday life. There was barely a breath of wind but here the space beneath the great boughs was cool although wherever the sun broke through it was stunningly bright.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmxmFPznVowlCN-8P_q1uic6ye4b4XNjNemUsxYnCGqOYDZeQQqbnVcQkT9oCcM8aSTux_GuA8VHdXNt2vBRUdBGuHiGzol2QUQDlP1SkFtO2FgP1Qyp_dzSRtdruRS3EdqNZWenqKn8/s1600/IMG_6503_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmxmFPznVowlCN-8P_q1uic6ye4b4XNjNemUsxYnCGqOYDZeQQqbnVcQkT9oCcM8aSTux_GuA8VHdXNt2vBRUdBGuHiGzol2QUQDlP1SkFtO2FgP1Qyp_dzSRtdruRS3EdqNZWenqKn8/s320/IMG_6503_Fotor.jpg" width="213" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We walked trails that afternoon, getting lost amongst the greenery, walking past fallen trees the width of motor cars which the forest had already started to grow upon once more. We were overcome by the peace of this place and even now I struggle to find the words to describe it. We drove to a river, the cleanest I had ever seen outside of books and tv. and I sat in front of it for what seemed like hours watching the sun dance along its surface. We saw trees that had been touched by massive fires and survived, huge ferns and my wife's personal favorite, a banana slug.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was beautiful, it was peaceful, it was epic, it was...impossible to truly describe. As I have written this blog, I have found myself out of my depth, how can I hope to describe such beauty? How can I adequately express such sights? They lie in my memory and yet the true glory of them lies there and then. Lies only in the moment when the place commands your attention and everything else fades away. Like a symphony echoing in the heart long after it is played but only truly as an echo.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Yes, my wife loved the Redwoods and I was overcome by them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Till next time,</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Goodbye Geekranters. </span><br />
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Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-25299010972683749732018-07-14T15:09:00.002-07:002018-07-14T15:09:48.839-07:00Geek Rant vs the Redwoods Rally: Stage One-Oregon Backcountry Expressway.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Your friendly neighbourhood bloggerman coming at you once more with my overly eloquent recounting of my transatlantic life. Go on, carry on reading, you know it makes sense...
Now, while its certainly true that when I think of the words that I write, they really do make sense, I'm not sure they do when they reach the page. Still, people still seem to read them, so something must be working.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">So, when I last wrote my blog, I talked about the Pacific Northwestern city of Portland, Oregon and the beginnings of the epic West Coast vacation/holiday of Team Geekrant! (that's the wife and I). Now I find myself in another motel room late at night, with my wife already asleep in bed, while I try to put into words the last week of our lives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Now that might sound overly dramatic, but no words can be overly dramatic when it comes to describing the landscape of the American West Coast. There are times, in life, when a place takes your breath away by simply existing. I believe that God created everything in this world and his workmanship is always fantastic to behold and in those moments his handiwork is seen. Then there are times, I believe, when God simply shows off, that in creating some things he just decided to blow humanity's mind. To give us sights that we truly struggle to comprehend with our senses. That is the category that so much of the West Coast falls into, as if nature itself was singing out "be amazed".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We got our first feeling of this, as we started to drive from Portland on a Sunday evening, we needed to make a distance of some 170 miles, at five o'clock in the evening. In truth, where I come from that's a journey you should be planning out well in advance and getting up early in the morning for, where my wife's from that's something you ram through in the evening so you can start fresh the next day. As we drove through the state of Oregon, we got our first glimpses of landscape that was like nothing we'd seen before. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Leaving Portland, we drove though flat tan grasslands bordered by the deep brown of hills receding into the distance while far off in the haze of the horizon, we glimpsed the white capped tops of the mountains known as the Cascades. Gradually the land that we were driving through grew hillier and oddly shaped ridges rose seemingly from out of nowhere beside the roadway. It appeared sparsely populated, although there were many cars on the road. We were heading for a place called Roseburg, which lay roughly half-way between Portland and the Californian border. This was our first stopping point. It was a town held high in the arms of the advancing wooded hills which gave us our first echo of the Redwoods.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Redwoods area of California, is I would wager, like no other area on Earth. Now, that, I now know could be said of most of the West Coast of the United States. Although close comparisons can be found for much of the landscape here, nothing quite fits or exactly replicates the almost otherworldly landscape here.
The Giant Redwood is an incredibly tall and incredibly old tree. There are some that are thousands of years old and when you drive, cycle or walk amongst them, it is hard not to be affected by the sheer majesty of such ancient things. All other trees seem somehow merely a reverberation of these behemoths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It is hard for a man such as myself, born on a relatively small island to see such vastness, so close. This is a land of discovery, so little of this area was mapped even two hundred years ago and even though the world now revels in GPS and satellite navigation, still we are dwarfed by the awe inspiring massiveness of nature. Can anyone ever truly know a place like this and can anyone ever truly know themselves in such a place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The morning of our second full day on vacation/holiday, we woke up in a Motel 6 in Roseburg,. Motel 6's are, I'm learning, often the most bare bones basic motel chain found on the roadsides of America. They have a bed in the room and a decent and clean shower with a T.V. but no fridge, no ironing board, no kitchenette, no minibar with over priced selections of cheap rum and even cheaper blended malt whiskies. This suited us pretty well, as for the next few days, the moment we got to our room we collapsed into bed, exhausted. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ1Q-RuRCgo7GbbTWj-Ws0Cok9KV3ASnSvIKyMEI36nxmV-aLgdxKJL46ITgdQ-Fs185W5zeE28KCeH9DfrORS6NwMAnrqepar6srfTV07A_7DpwUbi0F3jM0-fF2aXBW4AMD4zWCtJW0/s1600/IMG_6330_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="980" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ1Q-RuRCgo7GbbTWj-Ws0Cok9KV3ASnSvIKyMEI36nxmV-aLgdxKJL46ITgdQ-Fs185W5zeE28KCeH9DfrORS6NwMAnrqepar6srfTV07A_7DpwUbi0F3jM0-fF2aXBW4AMD4zWCtJW0/s320/IMG_6330_Fotor.jpg" width="196" /></a><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">That day, we were heading for our first glimpse of the mighty Redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth. That meant crossing the border into California, it also meant an early start. For many Europeans, it is seldom that we will make drives of the length that we made during our trip. The size of this country still overwhelms me. By the end of our second day we already would have driven nearly 350 miles and that was just a tiny amount of our overall journey.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Having eaten a breakfast on the run and being fueled up and ready to go, we drove down Interstate 5 aiming for the dramatically named town of Grant's Pass. As the road kept on rising and vast vistas of evergreen covered hilltops and deep valleys opened up before us, I envisioned a hardy frontier town, a rural collection of wooden huts at high altitude with outdoorsy feel. A narrow rock cut through treacherous hills where many a pioneer died on his way to the coast... Yes, as so often in the end, the truth was a little more less epic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Grants Pass was a charming and surprisingly busy town, lit brightly by the early morning sunshine. It bustled with activity and a good number of people. It would be our last reminder of anything remotely approaching a large town until we came to Eureka, California, a day and a half later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">We left Grants Pass by US Route 199 and headed onto the "Redwoods Highway", the local name for the collection of roads running through this area of north western California. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It is fair to say that I seldom seem so much greenery in my entire life. Even before we reached California, trees seemed to be everywhere hugging every hillside, overhanging seemingly every roadway that we drove around. As we drove onward, it seemed as if we drove further away from modern civilisation, from a world of computers and mobile devices, tablets and smartphones, Kim Kardashian and reality T.V. Here was a world seemingly untouched by the ever encroaching tendrils of modernity, the tarmacadamed surface beneath our wheels apparently the only ounce of tribute to any other world but this. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">These were true backwoods, a forgotten place, protected by the desire to conserve and preserve nature and filled with a collection of characters, who for whatever reason, chose to live so far away from the modern urbanised universe. Aging hippies, hillbillies, mountain men, the people were all of these and none of these. My wife chose to stop at a shop called the "Crystal Kaleidoscope", hoping that it would be a cute tourist shop with postcards and "I <3 Sasquatch" t-shirts, I thought otherwise... I was right. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Now its not generally a sensible idea for a husband to declare his rightness over his wife in such a loud way and it is to be acknowledged that she generally has the drop on me when it comes to common sense, when it comes to weird however, I have a radar like no one else on this planet. After all, like knows like when push comes to shove.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Someone should have told the owners of said road-side attraction, that the 60s had ended, that crystals are not something one wants to drag around half of the American countryside with them and that no-one has had a dying need to listen to Enya since 1991. Still who am I to judge, if thats the shop they wanted to keep then that's up to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As we headed resolutely for the Californian border and the Redwoods, I reflected on just how disconnected everything was from the rest of society. If Portland had reveled in its socially conscious weirdness, shouting out to the world, spoiling for an incident and entreated you to do the same, then the Oregon back country simply didn't care what you thought, here was a place that was truly honest to what it was. It didn't much care who drove through, knowing that you'd be gone in a minute, heading onward to who knows where. They didn't seem to give much thought to politics or society although in the "Crystal Kaleidoscope" they were probably still wondering when Nixon was going to get impeached.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">America is "one nation, united under God" but in truth, this trip is showing me that it is many nations, many creeds and many attitudes all looking into the wilderness and the raw materials of this land and trying to carve out a future. "E Pluribus Unum", so states the motto of the United States, "out of many, one", so much of what I have seen leads me to the conclusion that the question that has always driven the United States onward, is just how true is that motto and what does it look like in practise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Maybe the U.S. is a nation always in search of its "better angels" and its American dreams. Already on this journey I feel that I understand a little more. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Until next time...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Goodbye Geekranters! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-47692949017107033042018-07-06T00:54:00.001-07:002018-07-06T01:47:48.408-07:00Geekrant vs the Counterculture Citadel<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinPIP5gBzT2w5P2MPe4L4pY1OkVBum7Mgp1sVHXPl34sJ9MUZmAb1L6hc6ANkmfxStW3Glq7wBOCCmzN2Y7HIUsNW7zlOsLbTs-qP87gUlzODLLyPpofD1iYhkytTNRZ3EN0p8tYDzDDY/s1600/IMG_6087_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="962" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinPIP5gBzT2w5P2MPe4L4pY1OkVBum7Mgp1sVHXPl34sJ9MUZmAb1L6hc6ANkmfxStW3Glq7wBOCCmzN2Y7HIUsNW7zlOsLbTs-qP87gUlzODLLyPpofD1iYhkytTNRZ3EN0p8tYDzDDY/s320/IMG_6087_Fotor.jpg" width="192" /></a><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Greetings, Geekranters!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As usual, I hope my writing finds you in fine fettle and raring to read more of my fantastical adventures from all across the globe!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Last time I wrote, I was in a hotel room on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, on the first step of my wife and I's vacation/holiday along the West Coast of the United States. That was four days ago. Oh! how I have aged in those four days.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Now, of course I exaggerate, but during an American road trip of this type, it can seem like far too many hours pass between waking in the morning and then collapsing into bed that night. It turns out a trip like this is not for the faint of heart after all. </span><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The landscape changes so quickly, the road takes you so far in a day, it can feel like several trips in one.
When I last wrote, I was nearly 650 miles further North than where I am now, by the quickest route. We have driven that now, and many more miles beside, to explore out of the way places and areas.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Americans truly seem to take this in their stride, seeming barely phased by such a journey. Maybe it is the experience of growing up in a such a large country that prepares them for the experience. All I know is I'm exhausted, and we're less than halfway through our holiday.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><u><b>Portland, Oregon</b></u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Our first full day on vacation, the lone full day that we experienced in Portland, feels a long time ago now. Indeed it feels like a couple of months has passed, not four days, since we were there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We flew into the city on the evening of the 30th of June, arriving to a cool climate much removed from the heatwave that Madison was currently sweltering under.
Portland, for those of my readers who are unaware, lies in the area of the United States generally referred to as "the Pacific Northwest".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Realistically, in my eyes and for simplicity's sake, this definition really only truly applies to two full states, Washington, which lies on the border of the U.S. and Canada, and Oregon which sits just beneath Washington on the Pacific coast of America (although Idaho is often counted in this area, I'm trying to keep this simple, so my apologies.). As, a result of its location in the Northwest of the country, it has a climate and general weather that myself and my British readers are much more familiar with than many Americans.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The city lies on the Willamette River not far from where said river flows into the Columbia river which is probably the most prominent river in the United States that flows into the Pacific.
This much I knew, or at least had something inkling of, before Mrs Geekrant and I ventured into the city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Still, if anything living in this country has taught me, there's only so much information can prepare you for.
We had slept the previous night in a motel and had picked up our hire car at the airport and now found ourselves in a multi-storey car park in downtown Portland.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We planned to take in the city's renowned "Saturday Market", which also, apparently, takes place on a Sunday. It also takes place under a bridge. Now, when my wife talks about a market to me, I immediately think about classic British soap opera, Eastenders, classic British comedy, Only Fools and Horses, and Scunthorpe Market. That means I think about fruit and veg, dodgy items that have fallen of the back of a lorry/truck and an indoor market where, last time I checked they still haven't changed the advertising hoardings since before my 27 year old sisters were born.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">However, this isn't that type of market. Its website talks about a "community of artists', which is true, with the exception of food venues dotted here and there, this place is full of artists selling their various wares, from people making candles out of geodes to a woman selling clay whistles in the shape of various animals. There is definitely no sign of a weather-beaten cockney selling "Fresh Fruuuiiiiiiitttttt! Six Apples for a paaaannnnnnddddddd!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There's also not a lot of sign of what many might call normality here either. Portland revels in its weirdness, even in the market could be seen the city's unofficial slogan "Keep Portland Weird". The counterculture is strong here and it showed in the stalls. The weird and wonderful was definitely on display, from an artist who described himself as a psychonaut and looked just like you'd expect such a man to look to a lovely lady who sold paintings where the only drawn lines were mathematical equations and formulae.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The market took up far more of our time than my wife had expected and was also much more extensive. Chaotic, yet ordered, counter culture, yet fully aware of simple realities. Walking through the tents and stalls, it was easy to see what had made hippies so attractive so many years ago and what makes hipsters so attractive now. A refusal to fit in with societies norms, a free flowing creativity that knows no bounds, a community that supports all of these things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Somewhere across the street, a herbal smell was beginning to blow in our direction, a smell I knew from the recreational habits of some friends I had in University. It reminded me that marijuana use is legal in Oregon which was very obvious as we walked through the market. It wasn't as if we saw a lot of people smoking but it was evident in the small wooden boxes being sold to keep the herb in to stalls selling hemp extract. Portland is a city that definitely revels in its reputation and identity as a hub for the counter-culture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was a pretty city, full of bridges and water, trees and flowers, hippies and hipsters. As we walked down "Burnside Street", one of the main streets through the city, however, it no longer felt like a city but a citadel preparing for war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There are some who say that America is headed for a civil war and there are those who argue say it has already arrived. That it is a war of beliefs and ideologies carried on through speeches and newspaper columns, social media accounts and youtube videos. That America has become increasingly polarised and its been happening silently for a long time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As we walked through Portland, it was easy to believe these people. Signs were in nearly every window declaring their intent to serve everybody regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Rainbow flags flew from the tops of buildings as if daring people to take offense. Powell's City of Books, one of the most famous independent bookshops in America, was selling a whole range of "Read, Rise, Resist" merchandise. It was like an army of people were stating their position and daring their opposition to do their worst.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We ate briefly in a pizza place however in Portland that meant a place called "Sizzle Pie", all punk rock ambience and alternative attitude. Again Kelly and I felt more than a little bit too ordinary for the place. Many people might point to the current American president as the cause of the stand that these people have made, but it felt like this had been building for a lot longer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">America, it so often seems to me, is a country founded on an ideology and a dream. The trouble is, everyone in the country sees the dream slightly differently. More and more these individual dreams seem more and more separate from each other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Powell's City of Books felt like some sort of massive staging area for radical and, some might say, enlightened thought and living. In my whole life I have never seen a book store like it, it filled an entire city block and in some places occupied two floors. It was full of people, especially young people, searching the shelves for hints to the fulfillment of their personal dreams and answers to the polarized American dream. Books shelves stood floor to ceiling but also merchandise was everywhere, a capitalist intrusion into such an egalitarian location.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It was, truthfully, a wonderful place, a dream for a bibliophile like me. I wish I could have spent longer there, gazing at forgotten book titles and old stories, but the market had worn us out and had given us a brief hint of how with had a long way left to go on our journey.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We found our way on the city's transit system back to our starting point and picked up the car. Our hotel for the night lay nearly 200 miles away in a town called Roseburg, Oregon and the sooner we got driving, the better. As we headed out from Portland heading south, I reflected, as wannabe writers are want to do, on the place that I had just been.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I really liked Portland, in the end, the climate, the buildings, the environmentally friendly bikes and public transit systems were all wonderful. It was a blast, a real enjoyable place to start our journey. It was also far too "out there' for my taste, not that there's anything wrong with that, but as I get older I realise I'm far too boring and ordinary to keep up with such shenanigans. It was tiring to adjust to so much "difference". Maybe I'm missing out, but anyone who's met me knows that I'm quite weird myself and its quite that I can't cope with any more weird than myself, right now. Or maybe I'm just boring...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Portland was wonderful, if you visit, remember you've got to keep your freak flag flying and carry on resisting.
Until next time...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Goodnight Geekranters!!!
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-7912110903047184482018-06-30T23:41:00.001-07:002018-06-30T23:59:17.021-07:00Geekrant vs The Oregon AirTrail<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij2GRH4uodg3esUAbfbFxdw9X3gAC0fA6A2himrr1sAQ_zjwrPnoEus5GHWDst7Me8NS8IRK7nsnCJKoLRsf4CsRLLENWhk8PotF4ZQiNxiokgBBT7fFlvxQez-0UVwKOcAKoatsRHj9E/s1600/36432310_10155490475367611_5944728955255783424_n_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij2GRH4uodg3esUAbfbFxdw9X3gAC0fA6A2himrr1sAQ_zjwrPnoEus5GHWDst7Me8NS8IRK7nsnCJKoLRsf4CsRLLENWhk8PotF4ZQiNxiokgBBT7fFlvxQez-0UVwKOcAKoatsRHj9E/s320/36432310_10155490475367611_5944728955255783424_n_Fotor.jpg" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Welcome back to the pages of my blog! It truly is a blessing to be able to write to you and I'm touched that anyone reads my words. I really appreciate it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As I'm learning the more that I write these blogs and post them online, our words have power. So many of us in these modern inter-connected times, share all of our innermost thoughts with the world. We post onto the message boards, social media and websites of the internet, with no filter. The relative anonymity of a computer keyboard or smart phone touch-screen creates a separation between the reader and ourselves which causes us to write so often without care. We wail at the world, we explode in anger, we call the powers to be to account. As if we were the only judge, jury and executioners that matter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Our way of seeing the world becomes the only way. Anyone who allies with the other side of an argument or even merely suggests that we exercise restraint when expressing our views is naive at best and a moronic simpleton at worst.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">When I was a teenager, it seemed that the internet offered so much hope of a more accepting and tolerant world, I'm sad to say that it hasn't followed through on that promise, at least in my eyes.
The internet has, it seems, become the perfect place to craft our own world and world view, blocking anyone who disagrees with us. Secret Gardens which only the partisan faithful may enter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I'm not attacking people who write like that, they are merely trying to work out their world just as I am, mine. I simply mean to say, that when I write, it is for you, as much as for me. I am no judge, I'm a university drop-out who struggles with feelings of inadequacy. I try to explain the way the things I see in this transatlantic life of mine make me feel, but I have no true certainty in my conclusions. I'm simply trying to let you see through my eyes for a moment. I hope I do that well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">America is a fascinating country and although I have lived here for nearly 3 years now, I have still seen relatively little of its massive area. Most of my writing, therefore, has been about what I have so far experienced and observed, which tends to mean the American Mid-West.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Today, that changed. My wife and I decided to take our first proper holiday together in the U.S. A road trip from Portland, Oregon, all the way down the West Coast of America to Camarillo, California, where Mrs Geekrant has family. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Today, I took my first "commuter" short haul flight across the United States. The first flight I have ever been on where my passport wasn't needed once. I have glimpsed the mighty Rocky Mountains from thousands of feet in the air, the massive expanse of prairie plains stretched majestically below us too.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I am still amazed that I get to live in the U.S.. I never thought I would ever see the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific ocean, or the massive redwood trees reaching for the skies. And yet soon I will have done all three.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I like flying, which is ironic for someone who is as afraid of heights as I am. Airports are a little too much for me however, all the rushing around, the hustle and bustle, the delays. The flights, however, I enjoy. They help me think.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As I looked out, from the plane window, on a land so vast and strange to my comfortable island-bred eyes, I was struck again at the bravery and, truthfully, the possible insanity, of the men who pioneered this country, stepping into nowhere, walking landscapes as alien to them as the Moon was to Neil Armstrong.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I realised, and not for the first time, that America is as much an idea and an ideology as it is a nation. The land these men found was a dream to them and to so many who came after. They built the foundation of the West Coast of America, The Old, Wild, West. They were legends.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Legends made the land here. Heroes who, in their own time were as famous as any celebrity who exists today.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> America is still figuring itself out, however, trying to understand the dream and just who's interpretation of the dream matters most. It is an argument that so often in recent months has become more and more violent, even in the online world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> As I flew towards Portland, however, looking out at all of God's beauty scattered over the landscape, I understood that America has weathered greater storms than this and built a nation out of nothing. For that, I am grateful to them as a people. As I sit here tapping away at my keyboard in a Portland hotel room, I am blessed to be here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It maybe easy for us as non-Americans to take sides in the online fights of our American cousins, judging them through the medium of meme and smart mouthed internet comments. We miss the point when we do that, I would argue. We are not a part of the nation that carved modern civilization out of this land and the President of this country isn't our President. Its not our job to call him to account when, for many British people I see making comments online, he has nothing to do with us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Rocky Mountains made me feel small, dwarfed by such beauty, I am nothing and my opinions matter little. It is not for me, or any other outsider to make judgements on the U.S.. I just say what I see.
This journey is about so much, personally. About my wife and I getting away and having a good time. Its also about opening my eyes to what makes America what it is or at least to make a start in finding out.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I hope you will read my humble writings along the way, it truly is a blessing to know people do and find something in them.
Until then...
Good Bye
Geekranters!</span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-7134285435872906412018-06-24T14:43:00.003-07:002018-06-24T14:43:39.196-07:00Geek Rant vs The Immigrant Condition.<img alt="36121273 10155476375502611 7638069019144093696 n" border="0" height="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirFkiiPNwIoTBlo4TOaEiAHlosp856qOdVD7IVkZ6T2Z7bgp5Adhpo5YQhqjDXuxrTvbU8FZf2oO0wrs7PutLYOJodct31lbLNiB8yozRUwyQNiDsU1-6Pgg2-jlL58GH9GQxfAwYo73Y/s0/36121273_10155476375502611_7638069019144093696_n.jpg" title="36121273_10155476375502611_7638069019144093696_n.jpg" width="450" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Greetings Geekranters!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> I am sorry that it has been so long since the last of my epistles graced the glowing screens of the electronic super-highway. I have been distracted, of late, the pressures and stresses of work, relationships and life in general combining to limit the desire I have to continue my blog. I could leave the subject of the distance between each blog post at that. A small, badly constructed sentence, with too many commas, about vague stress and life. That would be to do you a disservice, dear readers, to become, if you will an unreliable narrator, which I never want to be.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">All of the existential stress and angst that I deal with has an impact on my writing, on the very reason for this blog. If I'm to talk about the differences between the U.S.A and the U.K., at some point that will affect my mental state.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I must make a confession, at least to myself as much as anyone else. I am an immigrant. A title that has been in the news for much of the past ten years or so. I am not the sort of immigrant who makes headlines on television, with “waves” of me waiting at border posts. I have not fled atrocities in my native country, I have not struggled across rain swelled rivers, raging seas or burning deserts to get to this place. There was no great human bravery in my journey here, other than the basic human bravery that we can all partake in which allows us to step out into the unknown.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I treat this that as "a confession" of sorts because so often I think that I try to ignore and hide from that simple truth. For most of my life, this has not been true of me. For most of my life I lived less than a mile from the hospital that I was born in. I emigrated to the United States when I was 32 years old and until that time I had never before felt what it means to be separated from the society that I came from and, by extension, the society that I now live in.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I can act with bravado, as if my exposure to the culture, literature, products and politics of America prior to my moving here somehow make my adjustments to this life, inconsequential. When I do that, I am invariably acting against what my heart is actually feeling.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Living in a country other than the one that you were born in, can at times be both unbelievably wonderful and impossibly difficult in equal measure. The subconscious cultural shorthand of what we see as our "own people" that we have developed through sheer osmosis, is no longer present.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I am not a child of this culture, no matter how much I may like Hollywood movies and Mcdonalds burgers. That is not to say that America is a culture that is lacking in some way, but simply that it is not the world of my youth and therefore always somewhat alien to me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I am an immigrant and sometimes that status can be a source of great joy and sometimes of great loneliness. I came here following the call of my heart and the love of my life and it has never failed to be the right decision. Still, as Robert Frost noted "I have taken the road less traveled by, and it has made all the difference."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I write my blog, a lot of the time, to try and speak about the differences between one culture and another. My blogs have, upon occasion have been many things, but most of all, they are about a man miles from the place of his birth trying to make sense of it all.
Now it is certainly true that we all experience these feelings in part, if we only ever move to the town next to the one we were born in. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Somehow, however, the distance between all I was and all I am, can make this feeling even more disorientating than it would otherwise. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">It can be tempting for all of us to believe that the Internet has made the world so much smaller than it once was. That borders are no longer barriers, barriers to nations that are unimportant now, the preserve of old men who can't move on with the rest of the world. We are a global village, they say. The problems of this world are not mine to solve, or to comment on for that matter, still I would speak on what little I have experienced.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">It seems that the closer we get online and in an electronic world that sometimes seems more real than the one that we spend each day living and working in, the further away we get from each other in that physical world. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">In the same moment that the Internet has given me a wonderful life here and an equally wonderful wife to live it with and all the technology to keep me in touch with home, it has also failed to make it any easier for me to adjust to this place with all of its complexities and simplicities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">As such the technology both unites and divides. It helps us find our voices but does not bring with it the wisdom and saving actions we need to change the world</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">. We are all experts in our own lunchtimes, we are in community but still separated by culture and expectation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">So I write these words to make some sense of all of these things and sometimes I run from writing them for the same reason. I don't intend to make definitive statements, yet many times I do. I can write as if I am oblivious to the world's tragedies, as if I the only person that matters and I can be broken to tears by an internet video. I am a walking contradiction, after all, just as this whole, crazy, human race is one huge contradiction. We are separate but we are also one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">So I'm thankful that some of you are still reading what I write and I apologise for my absence. I also apologise if I ever say anything that offends.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Next time, I'm sure I'll get back to something humourous and interesting that happened to me recently.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"> Until then, I hope that this explains some of the feelings many immigrants must feel deep down.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"> Goodbye Geekranters!</span>Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-61851644169721079782018-02-10T19:56:00.002-08:002018-02-10T19:56:38.853-08:00Geekrant vs The Return of The Native<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Greetings
Geekranters!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">I'm
glad to see that you've made your way once more to my world renowned
blog for yet more of my, possibly, slightly deranged, musings of this
crazy yet mundane life that I find myself living in these United
States. Welcome! I hope that you enjoy reading these words to the
same degree that I enjoy writing them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
I recounted previously in the pages of this journal, this Christmas
just past, Mrs Geekrant and I returned to my hometown for the first
time since I moved to this breathtaking land. Although I don't
necessarily like to admit this kind of truth to myself, such a
journey is always going to have a profound impact on the brave
sojourner, the footsore traveller pausing on the roadway of his life
to look backwards from whence he came. </span>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
is a literary cliché that the “past is prologue”, a mantra that
a fiction writer repeats to himself to remind himself that his
characters have a history that must be contended with, a truism that
the self help guru recites to his faithful followers desperate for
some kind of healing. It is, I realise, both of these things and so
much more but most of all, a fundamental truth that is often truly
inescapable until we acknowledge its existence and its impact on our
lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Returning
home reminded me that all that I am and much that I will become still
has its roots, and a fair amount of its branches too, in the smallish
town in the North of England where I was born nearly thirty five
years ago this year. I am a product of that place, even 4,000 miles
distant from it, across one of the largest oceans on the planet, I
feel its impact in nearly every moment of my life. </span>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">My
mother is one of the most well read people I know, at least when it
comes to fiction (I can't speak to her mastery of the arena of non
fiction literature). She has read all of Dickens, certainly most, if
not all, of Jane Austen's works and she complains about how evil she
feels Heathcliff is in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. She also
once had nearly every single book written by notable late 19</span><sup><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">
and early 20</span><sup><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">th</span></sup><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">
century author and all around literary misery, Thomas Hardy. </span>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
you might be wondering why I started this post talking about a
journey my wife and I took home over Christmas and have digressed to
talk about the books my dear mother has read in her lifetime. There
is method in my madness, please, bear with me. You see, all the while
I was flying home to the United Kingdom, in fact on our whole
holiday/vacation, one phrase kept rising to the surface of my mind, a
phrase and a book title... “The Return of the Native” by Thomas
Hardy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Now,
it is a well trodden trope in the world of television and movies for
a prodigal son to return to the place he came from to write some
wrong or free the Western mining town from the iron fist of the
mining company's hired goons, but one of the first places I heard
this basic story of a man's voyage home was by watching a adaptation
of Hardy's “ The Return of the Native”.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
would be a mistake to call this story, a comedy, it would equally be
a mistake to call it even slightly uplifting. Hardy dealt in
tragedy, most of his stories are about people trying to avoid the
inescapable fingers of fate and basically getting nowhere and ruining
their life in the process.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
“Native” of the book's title, Clym Yeobright is a successful
diamond merchant who returns from Paris to his home on the blasted
Egdon Heath, falls in love with a girl who wants nothing to do with
the place, nearly blinds himself training to be a schoolmaster, takes
up basic labouring out on the heath and ends up losing his wife (who
drowns in a weir) and becomes a itinerant preacher wandering said
heath. So, as I said, not a comedy, so why could I not escape this
phrase?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Looking
from the outside in, the explanation for my fixation is obvious to
most and in hindsight, is to me as well. Coming home after living so
far away, this was my own “Return of the Native”, like Pip in
“Great Expectations”, it was my return to life that had once been
so familiar but that time and distance had now fundamentally
separated me from.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
heart of Hardy's book looks at different attitudes to a place that we
have grown up. Some have always longed to leave, while others never
had any inclination to do anything but stay in that town for the
duration of their natural born days. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
the question becomes, how have I changed? How has this Midwestern
land made me anew? We are always moving on but what part of my soul
still finds itself drawn to the place it all began?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">All
this was running through my mind has we drove up from London,
charting a course away from that bustling metropolis through the
heart of “England's green and pleasant land” towards the
northern part of England, in particular, a small area close to where
the historical counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire meet. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Anyone
familiar with my writings will notice that when I talk about my home
country I use more than one name for the place I come from. I have
talked about the United Kingdom, England, the North of England and
Scunthorpe. I realise that this might seem confusing to the casual
reader, but if I could beg your indulgence for a brief moment, my
friends, I will endeavour to explain.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So,
for my British readers, this is the reality of our nation, something
we deal with every day growing up, but to my American audience, the
U.K.s unique political, geographical and cultural situation is often
a very unknown quantity. One that must be explained.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So,
to begin with, off the north-western coast of the continent of Europe
lies a collection of islands, called the “British Isles”, the
ancient Greeks referred to them as “Albion”. The two largest of
these islands are called Great Britain (the larger of the two
islands) and Ireland (the smaller of the two islands).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give it its
full name is technically the Union of three separate kingdoms, the
Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of
Ireland and also contains one principal principality, Wales. After
many years of struggle, most of Ireland gained independence from the
British Crown and so, in purely geographical terms the UK makes up
the entirety of the island of Great Britain and the top six counties
of the island of Ireland (known as Northern Ireland).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
when I talk about the UK, I'm actually talking about four separate
countries in one: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Over
centuries the English crown unified the two other kingdoms and
subjugated the tribes of the Welsh, who ironically were the original
“Britons”. I was born in England, which literally means “Land
of the Angles”, named after the Germanic tribe, who with the Jutes
and Saxons, chased the Britons out and into Wales. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Then
finally, within England itself, a social, economic and slightly
cultural difference can be see between the North and South of the
country.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
South, and in particular the South East, the area around London, has
always been the seat of government, a hub of activity and influence.
A land of art and culture. The great river port city of London has
stood, since Roman times, when it was known as Londinium, as one of
the most influential cities in the world. The home to the mother of
Parliaments, the beating heart of the financial world. There are
banks in London older than the United States itself. It is proud of
itself and its history and definitely had and, some would say, still
has a haughty attitude in regards to the rest of the country, which
it has always viewed as provincial and uncouth. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
North of England, on the other hand, has always stood as the tough,
unyielding side of the country. This is a land of rebellions and
social upheaval, of tough warriors and hard working industrial
labourers and craftsman. This is where the Industrial Revolution had
its birth. The place where Stephenson built the Rocket, textile mills
appeared as if out of nowhere and the blast furnaces reached into the
sky. It is, in fact, this revolution that led to the great opening up
of the American interior through railroads and industrial
development.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The people of the North are tough, hard working,
pragmatic with a welcoming spirit and a low tolerance level for
affected airs and graces. If you ever feel your ego is getting the
better of you, come to the North, you won't leave with it destroyed,
but you'll know your place in this world. They also think Southerners
are wimps who drink fizzy beer and talk with silly accents.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
we drove onward, the signs appeared on the motorway simply for “The
North” as if the people of London were saying, “turn back now,
its your last chance, stay here where people are normal!”, we
ignored them, heading directly in that direction towards the town of
Scunthorpe.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Scunthorpe
is my birthplace and my only real home for the first thirty two years
of my life. It lies around ten miles south of the River Humber, a
great river on the east coast of England that is really nothing more
than a giant estuary feeding into the North Sea. It also lies only
three miles east of the River Trent, one of the Humber's tributaries.
Most of the town was built on top of a hill range than runs further
in Lincolnshire and are the only hills for miles around. Beneath the
town, the flood plain stretches away as far as the eye can see and
until it was drained by Dutch experts, was boggy fen-land whose ways
were unknown to all but the hardy people who lived there.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">This
is the land, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was born into, in
fact he and I were born only fifteen miles away from each other...
two hundred and eighty years apart but, what can I say, I still feel
a certain kinship.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
we drove into the area, I felt instantly a sense of belonging, the
land might not be as flat as the land in Illinois say and it is all
of a lesser scale than America, but it was as if the land itself
spoke to me, through the farmland, the villages that have stood there
for nearly a thousand years, it called my name. As I looked on the
drainage ditches and the long brownish coloured Trent, snaking its
way through the flat land I knew that I was nearly home.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Then,
upon the crest of the hills, I saw it, the town of my birth,
Scunthorpe. I'd been down this road more times that I can count, seen
the town far off in the distance at the end of so many journeys home,
but it never meant as much as it did on that day. Scunthorpe, my
hometown. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Scunthorpe
isn't an old town, while there are parts of it that have been extant
since medieval times and its name is actually Viking in origin, most
of its existence is modern in nature and can be traced to the
discovery of Iron Ore in the area and its manufacture into steel.
There are many steel cities in the world but this is the “Steeltown”.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">A microsm of the Industrial Revolution, it grew out of nowhere. In
1850, five villages stood where the town now stands, of which
Scunthorpe was only one, within the space of thirty years, steel and
iron manufacture built a town and it didn't stop growing for years
afterwards. Now over 70,000 people call the Steeltown home.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">In
the early 1980s, when I was born, the steel industry had definitely
started to slow down but not long before that time thirty thousand
people had worked on the works. This is a town built by the
Industrial Revolution and the needs of the modern world. This is the
town this native returns to.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">No
matter whether me admit to ourselves, we are caught up in the DNA of
the places we came from, no matter how much we may love or hate our
hometown, it still made us the people we are today. We all try to
craft out another home for ourselves, a niche out of the wilderness
of life, somewhere to hide away from the world. Like our ancestors we
seek to create a new life for ourselves.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Still,
our past lives, good or bad, echo through the corridors of our heart
and lead us where they may. Our lives are a story and every story has
a beginning, my story begins in an industrial town in the North of
England called Scunthorpe and I can never quite leave it behind. I will always love it and in some ways it will always be home.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Join
me next time...</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Goodbye
Geekranters</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-72976058986634250452018-02-07T15:11:00.000-08:002018-02-07T15:11:13.031-08:00Geekrant vs the Grey Christmas.<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Greetings
Geekranters!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Welcome
to another edition of my ever popular blog. Over the last few
editions, it feels like I am getting into a rhythm with my writing
and I hope that you are enjoying the more regular appearance of my
literary offerings. You, dear readers, drive me on to continue
telling my tales and I hope that they are never found to be lacking
in interest or excitement.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
you may remember from my last post, Christmas Eve found Mrs Geekrant
and</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">
I</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"> flying across the
Atlantic, a day later than planned. It goes without saying that we
would much rather have been already in the house of my parents, but
sometimes the fickleness of fate and the mechanical requirements of
the jumbo jet, do not listen to the desires of ordinary folks such as
you or I. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
that was where we found ourselves after all of our adventures in the
Windy City. On a plane, in the last possible seats we could get, a
plane headed not to Manchester, as we had originally aimed for, but a
plane inbound to Heathrow, London's busy hub of international
exchange. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Mrs
Geekrant worried about how my father would deal with our rearranged
flight, as he would now have to pick us up, as he had offered to do
not from an airport two hours distance across the Pennines from my
hometown, but from the nation's capital. A much busier and longer
journey. One that would require my father to venture from the safe
haven of the North of England into the urbanised, and in many
Northerners opinion, overrated, mass of the south east of England.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Now
to many Americans, a journey that takes only an hour longer in
driving time, would seem to be a feat knowing no great hardship. My
wife's worry would seemingly unfounded and just the natural desire of
a daughter in law not to put her father in law out. My American
readers should, however, take note that as the United Kingdom is a
much smaller nation than the United States and is in many places much
more built up and urbanised, with much narrower roads and more
frequent traffic jams, the journeys people undertake are often of a
much shorter length.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
is one of the ways, in fact, that I see that my thinking has been
affected by time here in the United States. I now see a journey of
three or four hours as no great feat, whereas when I was growing up
in the land of my birth it would be seen as a serious journey,
requiring preparation and planning.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Luckily
my father has always seemed to quite enjoy driving and as Heathrow
isn't really in London proper, he saw it as merely a longer drive,
not something to fret over. Still, it would have been easier if it
had been the shorter journey to Manchester and also, as it happens, a
prettier one.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
was raining when we landed, flying into a grey and chill London
morning, all mists and drizzle. This, of course, is not unusual for
the United Kingdom at this time of year. However somehow it seems
antithetical to all the cultural images of Christmas that have been
cultivated in our lives. Even in the UK, out of all the Christmas
cards that I have seen, I have yet to see one where the picture is of
a grey windswept landscape, yet many times that is what the United
Kingdom experiences. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">My
father was waiting for us, and he was a welcome sight after all the
drama and anxiety that had gone before. He stood there, looking just
the same as he always had, only perhaps a little older. A tangible
sign that we had completed the first and longest step of our journey
and would soon be in the house of my parents and the quiet streets of
my hometown. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Sometimes,
even in the middle of all my writing upon the subject, </span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">I
forget </span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">just how
different one country feels from the other. I wager that if I moved
away to France or Germany or some</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">exotic clim</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">e</span><span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">
in the far east indies and then returned home, I would expect a
difference, if for no other reason than the fact that the language
would be different. Also the speech, the faiths and the food. The
United Kingdom and the United States are strange in a different way,
in that, at first glance, they seem so similar. Sometimes, looking
from a distance, one might be fooled into thinking they are the same
culturally speaking. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">If
one thought that, then one would be wrong. Returning home, I felt,
unbidden, the same sensation as when I first visited the United
States. A sense of disorientation almost, as if all the parts of the
place you live were picked up and moved 4,000 miles away from where
it started and put back down in the incorrect order. So much of this
feeling is, of course, subconscious in nature. A sign that looks the
same as one on a street at home but not quite, a road marking that
doesn't fit somehow. Landscape flashing past the window is so
familiar and yet somehow so strange. How unusual a sensation it is to
feel like a foreigner in your own land.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">We
started out from Heathrow, with Mrs Geekrant and I feeling the first
echoes of jet-lag, and headed due north towards my home town,
Scunthorpe and the promise of a freshly made bed. Unsurprisingly,
although the rain had let up slightly, the grey skies still remained
as we drove down the surprisingly empty motorways of the country that
will always hold a significant part of my heart.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Still,
despite my love of this land, the grey outlook of a British winter
has never totally agreed with me. In American culture, Bing Crosby
longed for a White Christmas, Elvis had a Blue Christmas “without
youuuuuuu!” And you could argue that the Grinch really made
Christmas, Green, in the end. The one thing that no American has ever
sung about is a “Grey Christmas”. In the end, no American has any
experience that can really compare to the completely un-festive
feeling, weather-wise, of a British Christmas. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
I look back over my upbringing, I must admit that I can't really
complain about any aspect of our family Christmases or any part of
our basic existence in the North of England. My parents might not
have been the richest people in town and they did have four children
to feed and clothe, but I never felt like we missed out on anything
and we always had plenty for Christmas and as for Christmas
dinner...! (My mother is much more skilled in that area than she
would ever admit and the food is always wonderful!)We did pretty
well, all things considered.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Having
said all that, as I alluded to earlier, there is one thing that
always disappointed me about Christmases in the UK. That would be the
weather, in particular the heavens, the miserable greyness of the
climate, the dull monotony of the skies. Anyone can see the affect
this has on the British psyche if they look at the difference in
contempory Christmas songs in the two countries.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
when Americans choose to write songs about Christmas weather, its all
about snow, the festive feeling of snuggling down with a loved one in
front of a log fire, the atmosphere of a cold that brings a subtle
beauty with it. Nat King Cole sings about “folks dressed up like
Eskimos”, Mariah Carey cavorts around in a Santa inspired snow suit
and even the Californian dwelling Beach Boys bring a hint of snow and
ice to the Golden State in “Little Saint Nick”.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">On
the other hand it doesn't really snow anymore in Britain in the
winter, unless you're on some high peak in Scotland and you've run
out of Kendal Mint Cake and Mountain Rescue's out looking for you
because the similarities between the Cairngorms and the Himalayas are
easy to see to any British person and your tauntaun will freeze
before you reach the first marker... (sorry, that last part was Star
Wars not something that might happen in the Wilds of Scotland.) I
digress, of course, but the simple fact is we have no snow at
Christmas, which given the British preoccupation with complaining
about the weather seeps into our Christmas tunes.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
Greg Lake sings about a “veil of tears for the virgin birth”,
Slade only ask if you're hoping the “snow will start to fall” and
when realising it won't, move straight on to the question of Santa's
sobriety on Christmas Eve, Band Aid rubs our faces in it by saying
that “there won't be snow in Africa this Christmaaaaasssss!!!”.
They're right, of course, but when I was a child I just wanted to
know why there was no snow in Scunthorpppppeeeee!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">American
Christmas songs and Christmas culture in general, tell tales of a
perfect yuletide moment, as if all the bad things in the world pass
away in the midst of a Hallmark moment. Its not even a particularly
Christian moment, as this is so much a celebration of a
commercialised, secular moment, where all hatred is put away and
everyone dreams of skating on the Ice Rink outside Rockefeller
Centre. Peace and Goodwill to all men embodied in a festive sweater
and an Andy Williams Christmas Special. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">British
Christmas culture is based at least in some ways upon the simple
realisation that nobody has written a festive ditty called “Let it
Rain” yet, (at least not outside of an evangelical Church revival
service) and the truth that we're pretty certain they'll never be a
song called “dirty, grey and miserable, wonderland”. We're
realists after all.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Okay,
so I maybe exaggerating the cultural differences somewhat. In some
ways, however, I understand that this is what coming home means, it
means a return to a place that you once knew so well. So well that
you knew all of its ways on a subconscious level and then realising
that the cultural responses are no longer automatic to you. The place
you were born feels foreign and alien, not that the country you have
moved to feels any better, any less alien, but is somewhat
disconcerting when you feel these feelings about the place you're
from.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
could be argued that there is something naturally optimistic and
idealistic in the American psyche, life here is referred to as the
American dream, after all. This is the land that a whole continent
emigrated to and explored to find a new meaning to what it meant to
live. It is generations of expectation in geographical form. It is,
therefore, a place equally utopia and dystopia, dream and nightmare
(for some) depending on the person, whatever else it may be though it
is always hopeful.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">On
the flipside, the British are no less hope filled, however its
certainly true that the native Brit is a realist rather than an
idealist. Its not that we, as a race, are wary of dreams but we tend
to use practicality to guide us rather than whimsy. Simply stated,
There's no point writing about snow if rain's falling outside, no
matter how much you love “Elf'. Deal with what's in front of you
first and remember that idealism doesn't always put food on the
table.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
we drove up the M1 and towards the steeltown of my youth, I came to
an epiphany, a moment of realisation, that I fit neither nation
totally anymore. I am as much a realist as these grey skies taught me
to be and I have felt a cold wind rolling off the North Sea and I
know that in life, to borrow a phrase from George R.R. Martin,
“Winter is Coming”.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">I
have also though, looked upon azure blue skies at the places where
the prairies begin and seen them go on forever and I am affected by
the dreams that lie beyond those horizons.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">I am, in my heart,
somehow, a citizen of both nations, I am affected by both traditions,
my cultural mindset straddling the ancient Atlantic. I am now at home
as much in the Mid-West of the USA as the North of England and each
land tugs at my heart. I am a student of Mark Twain and Dickens both
now, in equal measure. Still though, after all that is acknowledged,
British Christmas music is definitely more fun...</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Till
next time</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Goodbye
Geekranters! </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-28594560705744513202018-01-29T21:03:00.000-08:002018-01-29T21:03:31.972-08:00Geekrant vs the Sci-Fi Hotel.<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Greetings
Geekranters!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Welcome
once more, to this record of my crazy life on these transatlantic
shores. I'm continually blessed that so many of you choose to join me
in my quest to understand the differences, this new life has bought
me. So I knew I must continue my writings in record time, for I feel
it would be unfair to leave you caught in narrative limbo waiting for
the resolution of my own epic tale of airport bound purgatory.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">As
you may remember from last time, December 23<sup>rd</sup> 2017 found
us, Mrs Geekrant and I, caught by the mercurial fickleness of
mechanical difficulties, in the halls of O'Hare International
Airport, Chicago, Illinois. We had just found out that our flight had
been canceled and would not now leave until 7 o'clock the next
morning, Christmas Eve.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Right
then, my homeland somehow seemed more distant than it ever had until
that moment. Still, I have always thought that, one must make the
best of the circumstances that we are handed in the meandering walk
that is life. If I didn't think that, I'm not sure I would have ever
made it to the U.S., let alone have made it back home again. One
thing that does help in circumstances like these, is the lengths that
airlines will go to to make arrangements for hotels and meals. Also
finding shuttles traveling to aforementioned hotels and meals. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
it turns out that there was an upside to our tale of aeronautical
woe, we were blessed with a stay in a four star hotel, the Hyatt
Regency O'Hare, for free. Now, it has to be said, no hotel stay can
really ever totally compare to sleeping in the house you grew up in.
Neither can it assuage completely the anxiety that a canceled flight
can bring to the travel-worn voyager. It really can't but it can come
very, very, close. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">In
all these months since I moved here, I have realised that one thing
my northern English upbringing and Mrs Geekrant's Minnesotan
childhood have in common is we were both were taught to assess a life
situation relatively pragmatically and learn what a lost cause looks
like. So while other airline passengers herded around the gate,
trying desperately to get seats on another airline leaving that
night, we took our meal vouchers and left in search of the shuttle.
In our wake, it was as if the anxiety and annoyance in people reached
such a crescendo that it was if the atmosphere around the gate seemed
to be filled with chaos, hanging like a cloud.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So,
as a result of the silent riot building back at the gate, when we
reached the shuttle it was fairly empty. We made the five minute
journey to the hotel, through still, quiet streets that seemed to
have decided that even the busy traffic of the Windy City could take
a break for the Christmas season. Looking out into those silence
drenched roadways, I tried to lessen the anxiety that threatened to
overwhelm me with the powerlessness of the situation that we found
ourselves in, conjuring out of the quiet concrete and tarmac, some
kind of urban peace, as we reached our place of refuge for the night.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
may have occurred to you, dear readers, from the stories that I told
in my last post, that growing up, I had little experience of hotels.
Raising four children in a small town in the north of England, my
parents never really had the money to afford a stay in hotel. My
mother would spend forever, it seemed, planning our summer holiday,
trying to decide the right place to stay. Making the most of what
little money they did have. Country cottages and static caravans on
holiday camps were generally our forte. Holidays abroad were
definitely well beyond our reach for much of my childhood. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Not
that I ever minded, I have seen most of the different areas of the
United Kingdom and all the beauty it has to offer. I have seen Jane
Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral, walked through medieval
market streets, trod in the footprints of the saints on the Holy
Island of Lindisfarne. I have felt the wind chasing in off the
Atlantic, breaking on the cliffs of Cornwall and sat on a heather
strewn hillside in Scotland. I have heard the stories of a thousand
years of history and the beauty that is unique to Britain.
Considering where I would end up living, it seems somehow ironic that
I didn't leave British shores for the first time, until a few months
after my sixteenth birthday.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So
it has to be said that staying at a fancy hotel like the Hyatt
Regency, was never really something I ever expected to be doing in my
life. It was a lovely hotel, but also somehow, a creepy one.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
shuttle dropped us off outside the doors of the hotel at around
8'oclock that evening. The night air was frigid and ripe with the
promise of snow. In the reflected light of the streetlamps, the hotel
stood still and silent, like some modern day fortress, a safe haven
in the icy depths of the night. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">In
the moment that we walked into the hotel's lobby, I realised that
there was a reason the airline was able to find us hotel rooms for
the night. It turns out that a hotel for businessmen, five minutes
from the airport, on the eve of Christmas Eve, is deader than a
consumer electronics store in an Amish village. It also happens to
feel like a set from some paranoid sci-fi film from the mid-1970s.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
lobby was huge, with a central area that had four elevators with
glowing lights underneath them, only a few hotel staff could be seen
behind the desk. Strange looking sculptures hung from ceilings or
protruded from the ground like other-worldly plants. Brutalistic
concrete clad the walls, accentuated by wooden paneling and mezzanine
floor after mezzanine floor rose to the ceiling, each level planted
with seemingly fake greenery (although my wife assured me it was
real).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
may have been my upbringing, the friday nights spent with my father
watching old sci-fi films or action blockbusters in the early hours
of the morning, but in that moment, I felt like had stepped into
Logan's Run, or was about to see just where Soylent Green was made.
This perhaps was where the alien invasion was to begin, where all the
conspiracy theories had started. It should also be noted that similar
to Michael York in Logan's Run, my life-clock felt a little low, the
stress and anxiety of the delay had taken their toll. So maybe I
could be forgiven for an overactive imagination... oh who am I trying
to fool, I don't need an excuse to see science fiction in... pretty
much anything.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Somehow
though, all of the delay, the canceled flight, the distance, made me
think all the more of home, the home I grew up in. It seems that
stepping out into this world and leaving all that we have known
brings us into a new appreciation of where we came from. Our memories
become transformed in the alchemy of experience and time and become
something more than when we made them.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Memory,
I'm learning, only becomes of benefit to us when we step out and try
to tell a story that lies beyond what we have known. The day we are
willing to let memory inform us, guide us and no longer trap us.
Every day, it seems this life and the one I knew get further away
physically and temporally from each other and yet come ever closer in
the peculiar corridors of the inner workings of our hearts. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">All
that to say, in that moment, I remembered watching 70s sci fi films
with my father and my mother complaining about the implausibility of
plot and heading to bed while we watched on into the night. It
brought me home, in that moment of weakness and powerlessness, and
made me realise how no trouble truly lasts forever and home is still
waiting for me. Both here, on Earth, in the U.K and the U.S. and one
day, in the home we never leave, beyond this life. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">I
couldn't sleep that night, we had had a nice meal downstairs in the
hotel bar/restaurant, all dim mood lighting with neon bar signs, but
I still couldn't sleep. Maybe it was too many movie moments running
through my mind or simply the knowledge that I mentioned in my last
blog, that breakdowns, accidents and mishaps always happen in the
early stages of a journey or on the way home. Whatever the reason, I
awoke suddenly at 3'oclock in the morning, which was, in hindsight, a
very good thing. My phone blinked with a message from my mother, Our
flight had been canceled ... again.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
has to be said that at this point I had had enough and Mrs Geekrant
also had. This was definitely a good thing. My wife is one of the
most patient people on this Earth and comes with the birthright of
being “Minnesota nice”, which means she can express exasperation
with someone and still make them feel like they've had a wonderful
day. Maybe it comes from her job as a coffee shop manager, who knows.
However when she saw the message and found out that a rescheduled
flight wouldn't leave Chicago until Christmas Day, she decided that
enough was enough.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Logan
might have ran in the movie but we ran that night, or early morning,
as it now was. In our tiredness and stress it all happened in a blur.
We were down in the lobby in a flash, headed out onto the shuttle by
three thirty in the morning, into the airport lickety split, where my
wife charmed a British Airways flight, leaving that evening, out of
the airline representative. We headed back to the hotel, slept some
more and made our way back to the airport for our new flight. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
may seem that I am rushing to the end of this part of the story but
by this time, everything was passing in a waking dream and I have
little desire to recount the same things in reverse. We had nothing
left, and although the new flight we were on flew into Heathrow not
our usual airport in Manchester, all we cared about right then was
the fact that we were well on the way to my homeland. They were some
of the last seats on the flight and we lost the upgrade we had
purchased on the previous flight, we were cramped, suffering from
sleep deprivation, full on worn out but we had bested this stage of
the journey and we were flying into the rising sun and a new day.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Until
next time, which will hopefully find me talking finally about my
actual visit home.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Goodbye
Geekranters! </span>
</div>
Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1416006462536787108.post-52414304497605039322018-01-28T14:20:00.001-08:002018-01-28T14:20:25.792-08:00Geek Rant vs the Mid-West Delay.<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Greetings
Geekranters!</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"> My
pen rides again or rather it writes, as I promised it would! After
all, how could I leave you without more of my observations of the
life I have come to live? In, all honesty, I think I write for myself
as much for anyone else. This place and the differences it has from
the place whence I came, leads me ever onward in a quest for
understanding. If I get to share it you, my dear readers, all the
better. My thanks to you, for tagging along for the ride. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">So,
welcome to the continuation of my latest series, the mad-cap, laden
with mis-hap, far from drab, story of my return to the land of my
birth. It is literally, the land of my birth, by the way. From the
back bedroom windows of my parent's house I can see, up on the hill,
the hospital I was born in, barely a mile away. That's very close to
be to your birthplace wouldn't you say?</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
description and discussion of the environs in which I grew up must
wait a while, however. First, there is the matter of leaving the
United States and crossing that greatest of all great lakes, the
Atlantic Ocean. Often, it seems to me, the start of a journey, takes
as much effort and time as any other part of it, whether that's
crossing the seven seas in an aeroplane or my parents, 20 years ago,
jamming their four children, into the family car for the summer
holiday. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">One
thing I learned from my parents and those holidays long ago, if
something's going to go wrong, its going to go wrong then. For
instance, I am reminded of the time we'd already driven over an hour
away from home and my brother realised belatedly that he'd neglected
to put on his shoes. There he was in the back seat with nothing but
socks on his feet. He had to wear his old worn out, spare set of
shoes for the rest of the holiday, a serious purgatory for a young
teenager. I sometimes wonder if his extensive Adidas Samba collection
stems from this past hurt. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Things
can go even more wrong the more inanimate objects and other things
outside our control are involved, especially companies and machines.
For instance, when you arrive at the airport three hours early, get
through security quicker than you ever have, have a romantic
“beginning of vacation/holiday” meal, get to the gate early and
then... get delayed. And then your flight gets cancelled. Yes, my
childhood observances were correct, if things are going to go wrong,
they'll do it from the start. However one thing kept me going during
the tense moments of the story I shall relate. In the midst of all
the chaos... I least I was wearing shoes... my brother taught me
that.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">A
visit to an airport in the United States is an interesting event, not
least because every airport is different. Also because Americans very
often have a different attitude to air travel, than say, the
reserved, queue etiquette observing, British have. A British
traveler, in my experience, will get to the airport hours early. They
will queue in an orderly fashion for security and check in, wait
patiently at the gate as if every chance to queue is our birthright,
an hereditary chance to remember Dunkirk. Americans, on the other
hand, seem to arrive ten minutes before boarding and expect to be
able to complete all that they need to in said ten minutes while all
the while wolfing down a Big Mac. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Now,
it may seem that I am doing Americans a disservice, going for the
cheap laugh, utilising widely drawn stereotypes of different
nationalities. I'm not, in fact, when I'm checking my passport is
where I left it for the fifteenth time, I wish I had more of a laid
back attitude to flying. The truth is, the Americans' commuter-like
approach to air travel can be attributed to the way that many smaller
flights, internal to the US, are just like catching a bus or a train.
Arriving early is not always required.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">This
is reflected in the design and feel of airports within different
cities within the U.S. For many British and international travelers,
we only tend to see larger transit hubs on our journeys in the
States, huge exchanges of planes and human cargo, labyrinthine mazes
with multiple terminals and futuristic feeling monorails zipping us
from one terminal to the other. We very rarely see the smaller
airports of this massive land.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Dane
County Regional Airport, Madison's airport which stands only 5
minutes drive from where I now write, has a very different vibe to
O'Hare or any other large airport. Its small, has one terminal and
last time I went through it, security took me 5 minutes, literally.
Its pretty quiet and is easy to get to and leave from, unless you're
my mother who somehow managed to set off the metal detector last time
she was in there. Still, to anyone but the matriarch of my family, it
does have the chilled out feel of a provincial bus station. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">O'Hare
definitely doesn't feel like a provincial bus station and its no
Thomas the Tank Engine railway branch line either. We were very
happy, on our visit, to have got through the Dante inspired seven
circles of security required for transatlantic travel in these post
9-11 days, in reasonable speed. We'd left Madison at around one
o-clock that afternoon, driving out of Wisconsin and through
Illinois' flat landscape under icy blue winter skies that seemed to
go on forever, we'd left our car with a friend, got our bags checked
in double quick time and, as I said, got through security just as
quickly. We had a lovely meal in an Italian restaurant and then made
our way to the gate.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">The
gate is really where it all went pear-shaped, as the British say.
Sitting opposite the gate alongside a young family, parents and a
couple of children, the boarding time displayed on the gate was six
thirty, then it was seven thirty, then it was ten thirty. The family
started to look worried, we were worried, their toddler started to
tire and we realised that we better call my parents and then tell we
were going to be delayed for a couple of hours.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Then
the announcement came over the public address system, “This flight
will not be leaving today.”</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
is hard to describe the feeling that goes through your mind in that
moment, for most people, it can be difficult to know you'll be
delayed. I've now know that when the journey that is being delayed is
your first trip home in two years, things can easily become
overwhelming. Suddenly, a simple mechanical difficulty on an
aeroplane becomes something liable to cause a metaphysical crisis in
the exile looking towards the shores of his homeland. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">In
the two years that I have been away from home, I realise that
distance, both makes the heart grow fonder of the things we have left
behind and, by necessity, makes us adept at hiding that fondness and
the fact we have missed all those things so much. It is, I feel,
something central to the survival of the immigrant who leaves not
because he dislikes the land he started out in but as found something
greater in the land he is going to. We protect our hearts from the
pain that the differences bring sometimes, so we might embrace with a
whole heart, all of the things this new land has to bring.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">To
hold such fondness and look with such anticipation at the day of your
return and a delay looms in front of you, then it feels like all the
separation once again is built anew in your heart.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
would be wrong to suggest that I dislike my life here, or this
country, for I do not and have learned to love it as nearly as much
as my own. Still, in that moment, I was truly filled with an
exhausted feeling of despair which showed my unspoken homesickness. I
also wondered what we were going to do. The airline people had said
the same flight would take off at six the next morning, but that
would be Christmas Eve and we had wanted to be in the UK by then.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">They
gave us meal vouchers and sent us to hotels that they had secured
bookings in for us. So deflated and wondering about what the other
passengers, especially the young family were going to do, we set off
through the airport's plethora of corridors, seeking the exit and a
warm bed for the night. We didn't trust the airline's promise of a
flight and it was a good thing that we didn't as I will tell in my
next post. In that moment, however, we were just glad to be going to
a hotel.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">It
made me think about my parents, packing up the car for two weeks in
whatever country cottage or holiday camp they could find. Four
children and all our supplies, for want of a better word, piled into
a car that suddenly felt a lot smaller than it had merely a day
before. Then we would set off out onto the road, like the covered
wagons of the pioneers of the great American wildernesses. Still it
was never easy, and things always went wrong on the way. I once
decided to develop car sickness, in the middle of Bristol, on the
hottest day imaginable, inside a car that had no air-con, being
driven by a father who wouldn't open a window because it would “throw
off the balance of the car” Did I mention there was a traffic jam? </span>
</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">All
of this happened on the way to our holidays, so I'm thankful every
time I travel, for the things my family taught me. Thankful for the
knowledge that the best travel plans of mice and men fly out of the
window the moment you start travelling. I'm also thankful that I know
that when being sick out of a car window make sure to lean all the
way out, otherwise you'll get it all down you and your mother will
throw out your favourite Captain Scarlet t-shirt and you'll never see
it again.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Finally
I'm thankful that I know that there are some things you can never
forget to travel with... passport, money, change of clothes, shoes on
your feet. Its true! I pretty much survive international travel
because one morning Andy forgot to put his shoes on. Every journey to
see Mrs Geekrant and back again, has been coloured by one morning,
twenty years ago, halfway down the M1. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">My
family taught me all that... and in the next few blogs I'll talk
about seeing them once again and how good that was, oh and how Mrs
Geekrant thought she was going to drive us into a waterfall.</span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Until
next time...</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, monospace;">Goodbye
Geekranters.</span></div>
Stephen J Fennellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00304771342582603252noreply@blogger.com0