Tsunami,Typhoon,Earthquake

9/30/09

News bulletins screaming of horrific natural disasters can hardly convey the suffering and aftermath of the events on people's lives. Sometimes you are swept into the disaster. Sometimes you have just escaped its wrath and are stuck with the burning mental images of people you know caught in the maelstrom. You are thankful. You are helpless. You can only write to yourself to relieve your conscience.

Samoan Tsunami
The full affects of the earthquake miles beneath the sea and its resultant wall of water may not be known for weeks. Already the news is of familiar places and people I may have known being washed away by the sea. The death toll continues to mount as we learn about no warnings being sounded in time, the low lying nature of the seaside villages, and of people being killed by a second wave as they followed the receding first wave to gather trapped fish in the lagoons.

Manila Typhoon
A heavy rain hit Manila during my recent visit there last month causing vast areas of floating sewage and garbage. I can only describe Manila as a cesspool of humanity. I have no idea what is the condition of those with whom I ate bulat and drank beer; of those who work so hard to have their lives dramatically altered by fate; of those who call this place home.

BULGARIA!?

9/28/09

Just when I think my Peace Corps days were over and a faint sense of assimilation was in the air, POW!, a surprise smacked me in the kisser.

While visiting my daughter and her family this past weekend, I got an email from the Peace Corps in Washington, DC requesting a phone interview this Monday am for a 10 month assignment in Bulgaria. After talking with my wife, Mary, I responded in the affirmative.

The position was for a Business Development Officer with the Alumni Center of the Faculity of Economics and Business Administration at Sofia University with a desired start date of October, 2009. There was a detailed "Job Description" with goals, and a lot of MBA-type buzz words. I read it to mean they wanted someone to help them setup up business alliances to raise levs (Bulgarian money). The interviewer said I would know by next week whether to pack my bags or not.

As an aside, a retired couple from the nearby town of Hudson, Wisconsin contacted me after reading my blog before they joined the Peace Corps and recently were assigned as teachers in Bulgaria's second largest city of Plovdiv.

CIA link: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bu.html

At this Moment

9/20/09
Some people want to know what it is like returning from the Peace Corps.

This morning I feel like an airline passenger trapped in a terminal by a sudden snowstorm while changing planes on a return flight home. The airport is like any other with familiar shops, lounges, bars, TVs, and chairs. My actions are predictabile as I wonder about trying to fill the empty hours, looking every few minutes at the electronic listings of cancelled flights, with no indication of when they begin again.

Retrogression

9/17/09

There
Here

For the past week I thought I was over the Samoa hump, on my way back to American acclimatization, then having to deal with cable TV tuners and companies, cell phone plans, 800#'s, life/health insurance, dog ladies, driving, dropping temperatures, purpose, political reasoning. an overabundance of trivia, erectile dysfunction, stress relief, incontinence ads, manufactured beauty, car alarms, dinner parties, and the web of metropolitan bike trails has left me homesick for Samoa and Peace Corps.

Can I be suffering from "overloaditis"?

Kirby Puckett is Dead

9/15/09

Kirby Puckett inducted into Hall of Fame

The Kirby to be remembered, heading for home plate.

In the waning days of the Minnesota Twins playing baseball at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, built to make watching baseball in Minnesota more pleasurable in an expanded baseball season, to a new open air , baseball only stadium, I noticed several large banners of Twins with retired numbers and one of Jackie Robinson. I remarked to my son and his girlfriend, Heidi, that I didn't think Jackie Robinson was ever a Twin. They said that all major league teams retired Jackie Robinson's number 42. I then asked, "I wonder what Kirby Puckett is doing now?". Heidi, a girl who has lived almost her entire life in Iowa, looked mortified at me and said, "Kirby Puckett is dead". How could I have forgotten an event in 2006 akin to Minnesotans, as the moving in the dead of night of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis was to Marylanders?

Kirby Puckett Note:
Kirby never did fully recover from his shortened baseball career due to glaucoma. He became fat, had a meaningless job as a Twin promotional person, divorced, and had a lengthy trail for accosting and dragging a woman into a restaurant bathroom, for which he was acquitted.

Puckett Facts:
1) Died at age 42 from a stroke.
2) Second youngest player induced to the Hall of Fame. Lou Gehrig, the youngest.
3) Highest lifetime batting average of any major league player in second half of twentieth century.
4) One of two players to get 2,000 hits in first ten years of career.
5) Played for Twins his entire career.
6) Lead Twins to two World Championships.

This is my tribute to the passage of time, people, and events.

Lost

9/14/09

We all know the terror of being lost, but being lost and not being aware you are lost is a condition which can only strike terror in the minds of others. Alzheimer's is such a condition. To search for a person with Alzheimer's, who a few moments before seemed lucid, is an experience edging on panic. Such an event is what happened today on the St Paul Bike Tour, only the found "Lost" person enjoying the subsequent night's sleep.

I wonder whether Alzheimer's is a distinct condition or a more obvious manifestation of a condition from which we all suffer. Each of us lives within our own rational world, yet the behavior of others makes little sense to our own way of thinking. Maybe we all are "Lost" in a sea of our own cognition.

Where is the Sky?

9/12/09

Samoan Sunrise

Dawn Brilliance

The Horizon

The Heavens are missing. At night only a few specks of hazy light exist replacing the brilliance of the Milky Way and the millions of lamps beckoning the unknown. The dawn is nondescript, no cloud layers to scatter Sol's spectrum. Horizons are of brick and stone, confining with no hint of the vastness of my existence. I float in a cube feeding on a diet of piped megabytes, yearning to see the firmaments again.

For pictures of earth from space: http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.2&thid=1237b55e6abcdcc5&mt=application%2Fvnd.ms-powerpoint