Posted inHome life

To: CEO, United Airlines

Re: Have you ridden in economy class lately? Dear Mr. or Ms. CEO, forgive me for not addressing you by name, but in this open weblog posting I purposely have avoided learning anything about you—such as your sex, age, religion, body type—so that you will be more impressed if the following guesses about some of your personal characteristics turn out to be true. I am assuming that you do some flying on your own airline. Isn’t this what CEOs are supposed to do these days, get down in the trenches with their customers and employees, and learn about the company…
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Posted inFamily

A wedding miracle: I dance!

There is something magic about every wedding, though Britney Spears’ Las Vegas escapade just sprung to mind, which demolishes the universal applicability of my topic sentence. Okay, let’s make it: There is something magic about almost every wedding, including Brook and Corey’s here in Indiana yesterday (Brook is Laurel’s niece). Laurel got to read a poem that she also had read at the wedding of Brook’s parents, Dee and Jerry, more years ago than any of them would want to remember. We worked on her delivery the night before. Laurel’s performance was great, in this drama coach’s entirely biased opinion.…
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Posted inFamily Recreation

Images of Indiana

Even with a bit of jet lag we’re pretty sure this is Indiana. I took some photographic evidence today to confirm that we’ve left Oregon. I’ve never seen a Kudzu attack in the Northwest. I thought that Kudzu was a purely southern botanical nightmare, but the tenacious tendrils around the attackee here, Jerry Pagac (husband of Laurel’s sister, Mardee), prove otherwise. Jerry is the director of state parks in Indiana, so you'd think he'd know better than to get so close to rapidly growing Kudzu. Hopefully this non-native nuisance can't grow in Oregon. It'd be the devil's twin if it…
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Posted inHome life

Crucial quiz: how long will you live?

It’s a sign of the (aging) times. Laurel used to read Cosmopolitan, and I would enjoy taking the infamous Cosmo quizzes, though often a bit of gender-bending was needed: “The hunky guy sitting next to you at the bar brushes his hand against your thigh. You’re not sure if it was an accident or on purpose, but you liked it. Do you …(A) …(B) …(C) …(D).” Hmmmm. It would take me a while to get the picture of a hunky guy stroking my thigh out of my mind, but once I did, and reinserted an image of Angelina Jolie, say,…
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Posted inHome life

I am picture hanger, hear me roar!

Last night Laurel and I watched “Tigers of the Emerald Forest” on Animal Planet. I got to fantasize about being a big male tiger whose sole jobs are to (1) roam around the forest looking tough and oh-so-cool, (2) mate with every female tiger you can, and (3) kill a defenseless deer once in a while to keep up the energy to roam around and mate. Sounds pretty good to me. Well, except for (4) fight off the other male tigers that want to take over your roaming and mating grounds. But, hey, that comes with being the top tiger…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

Sacrifice religion for God

It isn’t often that I recommend a 300 page book after reading just 30 pages. But I can already tell that “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” is a book well worth recommending. I’d been feeling listless all day until I took a first look at Sam Harris’ warnings against religion. Right away I felt energized. Brutally honest words can do that to you, especially when well-written, as Harris’ book is. I sense that Harris is a kindred spirit. He’s working on a doctorate in neuroscience, so his mind is attuned to the scientific method.…
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Posted inHome life

Our vitamin creation story

Lo, in the beginning there was but a single substance, One undivided, complete unto itself yet containing all within its grasp. In the fullness of time this One could not but be fruitful and multiply. For such was commanded by the holy scriptures. And the people gazed upon the Creation with wonder. Bounty piled upon bounty, filling all space, soaring heavenward. Yea, but the people were called to journey. And they couldst not leave the Fruit of the One behind. So the sacraments were placed in sacred vessels, and the people couldst worship wheresoever they found themselves. But the Garden…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Liberals are losing at language

Why is it that liberals seem to have the facts on their side, but don’t have a clear majority of voters on their side? Yesterday I came across two persuasive arguments for a simple answer: It’s the language, stupid! Liberals don’t know how to use words effectively. Conservatives do. In the July/August issue of the Sierra Club magazine there’s a fascinating article called “Winning Words” (available online). The author, Katy Butler, says: “It’s not for want of solid facts and rational arguments that the environment has lost ground, says cognitive scientist George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and…
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Posted inPhilosophy Plotinus

Plotinus and me: Spirituality is seeing, not believing

One of the worst things about writing is that your thoughts are visible, always to yourself and often to others. This also is one of the best things about writing. Worst, best? To me it depends on how honest my writing is, and how well my words comport with my actions. I hate to re-read something I’ve written and realize that I don’t believe my own words. Yet, even if I’ve written something true to my beliefs, it is painful to read if I’m not acting as if I believe my purported beliefs. Is there anything worse than hypocrisy? Well,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

I try to think like a terrorist

Well, that’s a gutsy title for a posting. Hopefully we won’t be getting any middle of the night knocks on the door from Homeland Security. Note to Tom Ridge: focus on the word “try” in the subject line and the unlikelihood of a real terrorist openly posting his thoughts on a weblog. Which gets at what I’ve been thinking about—the utter improbability that all of the Homeland Security alerts and efforts, both here and abroad, really are seriously disrupting Al Qaeda’s terror plans. Of course, I’m entirely willing to admit, and I certainly hope (given our upcoming travel plans), that…
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Posted inHome life

Clancy, a corn on the cob consuming cat

It’s a pretty slow news day in the Hines home, but fortunately I have a pet-interest photo on my digital camera that is begging to be uploaded: Clancy, the cat, eating corn on the cob! If this was the State Fair you’d have to buy a ticket to see such a sight (though maybe Clancy would be bundled with the two-headed calf), but right here on this weblog we’ve got the photo for free. Clancy belongs to Paul and Kelly Wilson of Corvallis, who invited Laurel and me to dinner last night. They are cat people. Cats people, actually, to…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Life as a vapor trail

Lying in my Camp Sherman hammock, a jet flies overhead, lit by the setting sun. Passing through an opening framed by the branches of Ponderosa pines, the jet and its vapor trail leave as quickly as they came. Soon, no trace. I find myself going back in time two hundred years. I am an Indian staring at the same patch of sky. I see a hawk, not a jet, coursing across the heavens. Now I leap ahead two hundred years. I am a child of the future watching the passage of an anti-gravity hovercraft. The jet of the present is…
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Posted inRecreation

Whitewater and wading on the Deschutes River Trail

Here’s our experientially confirmed advice about the Deschutes River Trail: walk it, don’t bike it. This is what we also advised last summer, after concluding that if you’re going to walk your mountain bike over all the “mountain” parts of a trail, and those parts constitute a healthy proportion of the trail, then you might as well simply walk the whole way rather than having to struggle to both walk and push your bike half the way. This assumes, of course, that you are not one of the hell-bent (or emergency room-bent) mountain bikers who abound in Central Oregon, and…
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Posted inPhilosophy Plotinus

Plotinus and me: To think or not to think?

To think or not to think, that indeed is the question—the endlessly repeated question that consciously or unconsciously gets asked and answered almost every waking moment. I spend a lot of time pondering the pluses and minuses of thinking, though not infrequently a still small intuitive voice inside of me whispers, “Are you using the right tool for this investigatory job?” Thinking about thinking is a peculiarly human enterprise. Even if animals think, that seems to be the end of the road. I don’t see any sign that our dog agonizes whether she is too attached to thoughts of chasing…
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Posted inRecreation

Black Butte ups and downs

Staggering along dead tired, less than halfway up Black Butte on this warm sunny August afternoon, I kept hearing myself mutter, “Whose damn idea was this anyway?” And through my parched lips the muttered answer came, “You, you idiot.” It always seems like a good idea to climb Black Butte when I’m coolly sitting at the kitchen table of our Metolius river cabin, reading the Bend “Bulletin” and having a breakfast of blueberry pancakes at the eminently reasonable hour of noon. It doesn’t seem like such a good idea when we arrive at the trailhead. A glance at the sign…
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Posted inHome life

Corn on the cob: my calling

Global warming, terror alerts, stock market decline, rising oil prices, Bush/Kerry shenanigans. My friends, we can’t do much about these things, but we can act to solve a problem that, before yesterday, I blithely ignored. Certain synchronicities have convinced me that this is my calling: to urge each of you to make the world a better place by not—repeat, not—peeling down the husk when you’re considering buying an ear of corn. A passage from the last chapter of Thoreau’s “Walden” comes to mind: “Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom…
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Posted inHome life

Moral angst in the grocery store

I am the designated grocery shopper in the Hines household. Laurel pretty much is the designated everything-else shopper, aside from such necessities of life as books, computers, and other techno gadgets. I take my duty seriously. I am not a creative grocery shopper. Hewing to our evolutionary designed sex roles, my mantra is: “Get everything on the list; do not get anything not on the list.” Using every available dwindling ounce of testosterone in my aging body, each Wednesday I dedicate myself to hunting down the assigned items on the list. If I fail to catch a quarry, I am…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Church of the Churchless

Fame? Hah. Money? Hah-hah. Creative compulsion? Um, closer. But one of the real reasons I like to write books is being able to have conversations with like-minded souls, such as artist/philosopher/writer Patricia Herron, whom I had the good-fortune to chat with at the south Salem Beanery coffee shop this afternoon. Right away I knew that we had been around the same spiritual bends. That doesn’t mean either of us is close to our destination, but there was no doubt that we’ve traveled similar courses. It isn’t often that I can talk so smoothly about what is most succinctly described as…
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