Author: No Name

People have made a valid attempt to shame me. However, someone living on their mother’s couch in Iowa has little influence on my actions. I spend most of my time in the mountains hiking, or mountain biking and it is shocking, and I mean shocking to me how ignorant people are of the actual risk of contracting COVID-19. News media hype notwithstanding, the risk of contracting it is extremely low if you follow very simple rules. However, I’ve had people claim I’m killing their grandmother, and children by going out of my house into the mountains and taking in nature. Evidently they’re unaware that the places I go are so remote, that the likely-hood of my interacting with people, let alone infecting anyone, including grandma is more remote than my being attacked by a mountain lion.

I work from home. I also travel. When I do go out i wear a mask. When I get home I wash my hands. I don’t touch my face, and I certainly don’t put my hands in my mouth, or fingers in my nose. Ironically, other than the mask, all other actions were common for me. My mother was a good teacher. This disease has managed to take hold because people don’t follow basic hygiene. If you watch the produce isle at a grocery store for 5 minutes, you’ll never again eat an apple. The behavior of people is most disgusting. People scratching parts of their bodies, or inserting their hands into their mouths or other places even worse and then touching food. It’s a wonder we all haven’t died of some horrible gastrointestinal issue long before COVID attacked our lungs!

I travel to and from Colorado to California, having homes in both places. I also travel for work, although that has been curtailed greatly since the pandemic, but not completely. When not on a plane, I travel with a 35ft camper (or what one friend calls the taj mahauler). It’s easy to stay safe when you have your own rolling apartment. Again, the only change I’ve made to my life is I wear a mask when required by law. I also keep my distance when inside. Most of all, I’m clean. It’s surprising how many people are not.

It is also surprising how many people don’t actually research the numbers of sick, or put two and two together on how they are getting sick. It’s a surprise to them that sitting in a room full of people with little or no ventilation will be a risk, yet being on the beach is not. Governments and municipalities have ZERO clue how to manage the disease because they’re not responding to science, but to political pressure. Hundreds of people on a windy beach are a political risk and bad optics, not a health risk. Masses of unmasked people in a church are a health risk, not a political one. Telling a morbidly obese 55 year old to wear a mask is easy, but convincing them to take a walk, and take off 80 lbs requires effort. No one wants to make the real effort. They all want the easy way through life.

If you go to the CDC site, or Worldometers.info and check the numbers, you’ll find that the current rate of infection against the world population is just below 1%. If you are just looking at the U.S. it’s about .5%. That’s just the infection rate. That doesn’t mean that someone is sick, or has any serious reaction to the disease. That number is .005%. That’s right, you have a .005% chance of having a serious illness. Death is even a lower risk. Seriously, the risk is low even if you do nothing to mitigate your behavior. If you bother to wear a mask, or stop hanging out in crowds at the rave, your risk goes to almost nothing.

If you take the time to read this, you will make the assumption that I am a conservative. It even reads pretty conservative to me when I go back through it. However, I’m actually quite liberal. I’m pro-choice, believe in gun control, universal healthcare, women’s rights, minority rights, and think we should be funding education 2 to 1 over the military. What I don’t believe is that COVID-19 is the death of our world. The numbers don’t even come close to proving that out. However, until after November, COVID will be the major story. Well…unless Biden loses.

Rex

It’s interesting what sets off memories.  My father passed away on March 13^th 2019.  He didn’t have any long illness, no memory issues, and in reality was as sharp the day he died as he was when I was a wayward teenager.  In fact he scheduled his own room at hospice, settled all his affairs on his own, and pretty much took care of everything.  As he said to me, he was just done. He was tired, and dammit, at 82, outliving all his siblings and most of his friends he wanted a rest.   

After he passed, I went to his apartment and cleaned out his things.  Among all the papers, books, pictures, and clothes I found the set of dominos my grandfather had actually left me when he passed.  I would sit for hours and watch my father and grandfather play dominos.  My grandmother would be milling around the kitchen making breakfast, talking to me while I intently tried to understand the game.  They kept score with two abacuses my grandfather made.  At that age I couldn’t really follow the scoring, but I understood the rules and how they matched the numbers.  

My grandfather claimed that the dominos were made of ivory. They’re not of course. But it was a good story for a five year old. They brought back a flood of memories of spending the night with my grandparents on weekends, getting up to the smell of bacon and sounds from the kitchen, and knowing that that house was to this day the safest place I have ever been.

I packed the dominos with a smile, remembering the drives there, sometimes at 4 or 5 on a Sunday morning when I didn’t spend the weekend to have breakfast and watch two of my favorite people play a game of dominos. In fact, it is my father and grandmother that my wife can blame for me getting up at the crack of the day before when she wants to sleep.

Shortly after I got all these things home, I found I had lost one of the dominos.  I had no idea where it went.  It broke my heart.  My grandfather died when I was 11.  I was devastated that after all these decades I lost one of them from the set.  I know, it’s only a domino, but it meant something to me.  It was my childhood, a memory that is more important to me than so many other memories I carry.  

The dominos along with a few other keepsakes from my father, like his jewelry box, and his class ring, decks of cards, eyeglasses sit in the bookcase behind me with pictures of our family when we were all together…we were all so young.  Even my parents in that picture were likely 20 years younger than I am today. 

I’m moving in a few weeks, and have been ransacking my office, tossing old books, papers, and who knows what that’s been rolling around in my desk.  I’m a bit of a pack rat.  As I was pulling books from the shelves that sit behind me in my office, low and behold, there lay the number 3 domino.  A flood of memories came to me.  Sitting listening to my dad and grandfather talk, watching my grandmother, the kindest and most Christian person I’ve ever known, make me breakfast, and wishing, wishing with everything in my being that I could just sit and watch one more game.

Rex 

Irony and hypocrisy are rampant among the parties and the party faithful.  I have always touted myself as a card-carrying Democrat, but as of late have found myself on the outside looking in.  I am astonished by the reactions to the response to COVID-19.  If you’re on the Left you think that the only way to survive is to hide in your basement, having the government pay for your rent and groceries until this threat is gone, while you’re screaming at those who don’t.  If you’re on the right, then you think all is well, and you should just live your life as if “well…I’ve gotta die of something” and never mind if you risk the lives of anyone other than yourself.  As with all things the truth is in the middle, and I get to sit back and enjoy the spectacle. 

First, let’s look at the world back in 2001 when we were attacked by a terrorist organization who flew three planes full of passengers into three buildings full of people and one plane full of passengers directly into the ground.  After that happened, the conservative wing of the country decided that they needed to be protected.  The government needed to lock the entire country down, and we needed armed police searching our luggage and person, warrantless wiretaps for all our communications, and there was an idea that the loss of personal freedom and loss of personal liberties far outweighed the need for personal safety, and the conservative party was MORE than happy to give it all up.  All this from a government that gave every indication they had no idea of what they were doing.

When the Left saw how easily the Right was willing to give up their personal rights for personal safety, they went nuts!  I know.  I was one of them that went nuts.  The loss of personal liberty because of an attack on our country because they hated our personal liberties was a sign that the enemy has won.  The fact that we require a pat down every time we step on a plane, or enter a large event, or that the government can listen in on our personal conversations, or that we can be, without warrant, trial, or due process removed from our homes and taken to a non-disclosed location (Cuba) all in the name of public safety is appalling. 

Now let’s fast forward to 2020.  In just 19 short years, we’re in the exact same place, talking about the exact same issues, for the exact same reasons.  The only difference is that our enemy isn’t some unknown religious fanatic, but an unseen disease.  In addition, the roles have reversed.  Now the Left is more than willing to give up all their personal liberties for their personal safety.  No longer can you get on a plane, go to a restaurant, a movie, the beach, or even exit your own home without the express permission of a government organization who, frankly, has given every indication they have no idea what they’re doing. 

This time it’s the Right who are screaming about losing their personal liberties.  They argue that a few lives lost are more than an acceptable risk for their personal freedoms.  The government through their incompetence at the reaction to this pandemic has overstepped their authority, put even more lives at risk, and jeopardized the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the lives of a few hundred thousand.  There’s zero logic in the reaction from either the government or the supporters within the government for the decisions being made to put even more lives at risk of starvation, poor or no healthcare, lack of housing, personal safety or general well-being.

I love irony that the problems are exactly the same but the enemy is different.  It appears that a seen enemy gets the Right’s panties in a bunch and one you can’t see wads the ones on the Left.  Both groups however, are more than willing to give up all their personal rights if they get a little frightened.  I guess sending troops into battle to die for their rights doesn’t bother either of them but when it comes to ponying up their own lives they say , “Fuck it, I’ll stay inside.”  I personally find this so hilarious that I was literally up at 2 a.m. giggling thinking of writing about it. 

Now what I find most ironic is that during both these fucktastrophies was the complete incompetence of a single political party who were in charge.  In both cases that party completely ignored the warnings of the experts, and the previous Administrations on what they needed to look out for, and what plans should be followed in the event of the impending disaster.  Can you guess which party that is?  If you said Republican, give yourself a sucker.  In both cases it has been the complete and utter incompetence of the leader at the top of the Republican party that put us into these situations.  It has also been the leaders of the Democratic party that were both prepared, and ignored, when these things came to pass.  When we had George W. Bush people, including myself, thought “what the fuck have they done?  This guy’s a complete idiot!”  Then we had eight years of steady growth, leadership of an economic bailout, the death of Osama Bin Laden, and a booming economy that surpassed any reasonable person’s expectations, all brought to you by a black Democrat with a Muslim sounding name.  Then when all was well and good, and we thought there was no way on earth anyone could fuck it up as bad as George W. Bush, the Republicans came along and said “wait a minute.  Hold my Beer.

Everyone needs to make their own decisions on their own personal safety.  That doesn’t mean you get to make everyone else’s decisions on theirs.  Want to wear a mask? Wear one.  Want to hide in your basement?  Stay there.  Want to be in public?  Be considerate of others.  It isn’t that hard.  Everything you learned in this world to survive and be a good person you learned before first grade.  That doesn’t mean you get to act like six-year-old for the rest of your life. 

All of ya just need to grow the fuck up.

Rex

Much of my father’s and my relationship was like most father/son relationships.  He told me what I should do, and I ignored him completely:  Often to my own detriment.  When I was 11 years old, I watched as my father gave the eulogy for his father.  He swore then, and many times hence that he didn’t want a funeral because, for one thing, he never wanted me to have to go through what he went through.  Therefore, in keeping with tradition, I’m ignoring him completely.

Dad was a giant of a man, for many years in stature, and certainly in personality.  Few people have the ability to befriend individuals from any walk of life.  Dad had the ability.  He could carry on with lawyers, doctors, politicians, rich, poor, young, and old with equal skill.  It’s likely why he was able to deal with a wayward teenager without killing him.  

Part of this skill, I have no doubt came from the fact that he was born to a construction worker with a 6^th grade education and a school teacher.  That kind of lineage tends to offer opportunity rarely found in today’s world.  You get to see two sides of an argument and understand them.  That’s a rare skill, and one that is in short supply today.  He could be kind and caring for sure, but he could also be obstinate and unreasonable.  It’s a good thing none of that rubbed off on his children.  

With that said, he absolutely loved all of us.  He loved talking to his kids, and our spouses equally.  Sometimes the spouses even got top billing.  It was no matter.  He adored hearing from us and talked to anyone within earshot about what we were up to.  I’m sure many people knew more about what his children were doing than his children knew.   He was proud of all of us, and happy he could rely on us when he needed us.  We certainly relied on him when we needed him.  Over the years he helped us with cars, cash, food, and even school supplies.  This is how most men of his generation said I love you.

He lived almost his entire adult life near his family.  He loved all of you by the way, every niece, nephew, grand niece and grand nephew and loved it when he could see and talk to you.  Visits and calls were talked about for weeks after, and he was proud, very proud of everyone’s accomplishments.  While he was the last of his surviving siblings to pass, he never forgot them, or his parents for that matter.  Especially granny.  As with all of us that remember her, especially her.  

He adored his grandchildren as well.  He loved talking to you all on the phone and listening to what you were up to.  I’m sure he would have loved to meet his great grandchildren as well.  They certainly would have loved him.  It was hard not to love him.  

Dad was always happy to hear, and distribute, the latest gossip, and more than generous with his advice, whether you asked for it or not.  After a point we learned that rather than being annoyed by it, we found it entertaining.  Eventually we found it endearing, and in the end, loving.  

You know, it’s funny but my parents divorced when I was just out of high school.  However, they stayed close even until his death.  One time when dad was very sick, this was decades ago, I wanted him to go to the doctor or the hospital, and he refused.  My parents were divorced of course so I called my aunt Rose for assistance.  She laughed and said 

“are you kidding?  Honey, the only person that could get him to do what he doesn’t want to do is your mother.  She’s the only person he’ll listen to.”  She was right.  

When dad could still drive he showed up at mom’s every Sunday for years with donuts, a news paper, and a carton of camel non filters.  When he could no longer drive, he got others to drive him there.  He was very grateful for that, for sure.  

Dad either called, or came calling on mom at every opportunity to talk about his day and complain about whatever came to mind.  In reality It didn’t really matter the conversation, it just mattered that he got to speak to her.  He adored my mother until the end.  She was his first love, and his last.  She deeply cared for him as well.  Their mutual feelings of love and respect taught us that no matter what the disagreement.  No matter what the conflict, with love, patience, and a little time, anyone can come together.  Relationships change, but the core values, the important things that brought us together in the first place remain the same.  If anything good comes from the loss of my father it is this:  You don’t always have to like someone.  You don’t always have to agree with them.  But if you love them, and are always there for them, that’s all that matters. 

We love you Dad, thank you for all you did for us, and for all that you taught us.   We will miss you and love you to the end of our days.

Rest in peace

How do I say goodbye to the one person who is completely and utterly responsible for everything that is me? I was, am, and will always be a mama’s boy. My mother was my entire world and I can’t begin to reconcile what it is to not have her here to talk to, lean upon, and generally discuss for hours on end the one subject to which she was even more expert than I…me.  

As with most children, my relationship with my mother went full circle. When I was a toddler, she was my world, a pre-teen my teacher, a teenager, my jailer, a young adult, my cheerleader, and a young man, my confidant, and a grown man, again…my world. She was the first person I went to for a problem and the first I went to with my successes, and she was the voice and soul of comfort in all things.

I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good child. When I was in junior high, my father used to say that he was sure of one thing; It was that he made it to more of my classes than I did. In fact, on more than one occasion my mother would drop me off at one door, and I’d walk out another. However, if my father’s statement is true, then my mother made it to even more, for she was the one who was always there, making sure I was doing the work, even if I wasn’t making it to class. In fact, when everyone in the world, teachers, social workers, family even the occasional police officer had given up on me, and written me off as worthless she was there to tell them, no. He is not worthless. He is not worthless because he is smart, he is kind, and he is my son. He has just lost his way. He will be fine.

After graduating college at 33 (If you haven’t been paying attention, I was a bit of a late bloomer), I got a pretty decent job in Colorado Springs which enabled me to live in the mountains above the city, doing the things I love to do and living the life I always dreamed of living. Today I lead many efforts in the delivery of healthcare information to clinicians around the world including the use of cognitive and AI technologies to help clinicians treat patients in the field. In fact, our work is used today to help clinicians treat victims of the recent pandemic. I only bring this up to make my point that there isn’t anyone who knew me from middle school, high school, or even me, who would have bet a nickel 40 years ago that this would be my life. My mother would have, and she is the reason, the only reason, I have had the confidence, and the perseverance, to achieve any of the goals I have today.

I called mom one time after I moved to Colorado and I said “You know, when I was a teenager, I swore, I mean I SWORE, that when I was eighteen, I would leave Iowa and never speak to you ever again. Now it’s 20 years later, I live 800 miles away, and I call you at least once a day, if not more, and talk to you more than ever I did when I lived there. Without skipping a beat, she said “I planned it that way.”  

Mom had a wicked sense of humor. My brother has five children. I didn’t marry until I was 47, too busy trying to raise myself, than even thinking of trying to raise any other children (again…late bloomer). On one of my daily calls to mom she answered the phone and I said “Hi, it’s your favorite son,” again, without skipping a beat she said “How are the kids?” She wasn’t about to let anyone get the upper hand. I knew better though; I am the favorite;).  

Actually, that’s not true. My mother loved every one of us regardless of our gifts, or out faults. She was there to celebrate us when we won, pick us up when we failed, and kick us in the ass when we more than deserved. She was 4’11”, usually weighed in at a total of 97lbs and even my 360lb father toed the line when she laid down the law. One of the many times I was in trouble I made the mistake of lipping off to her, as an idiot 16-year-old. The police officer in the room told me later that he feared my father was going to come over the table and throttle his idiot son and there was nothing he could do about it. I laughed. That’s funny, I said. He and I were worried about the other one.  

My mother was not perfect, nor was she a saint, which are the exact qualities you want in a good parent. Parents lead by example, and perfection is impossible to achieve, and saints aren’t four steps ahead when you’re trying to put one over on them. 

One thing is for sure is that mom was one of a kind. She gave us love, made us laugh, and taught us the greatest lesson of all: to be human. I love you my mother. I am forever in your debt. I will miss your hugs, I will miss your laugh, and I will miss the way you say “Hi honey” after I say “Hi mama.”  

So with that I will say Bye mama. I love you. 

Rexy