A Day In The Life...

A day in the life…

A day of intensive thoughts… Went for my walk with Bill, and told him about the interview with Ninoslav Randjelovic, I saw yesterday on Russia Television… Nino, a Serb Movie Director was complaining that he was unable to get anyone interested in the disappearance of some 1,300 people from Kosovo over the last ten years…
Pouf… these people disappear “without a trace”… like they never existed… none were found… none escaped… no remains… nothing… and nobody cares…
His theory was that they were victims of a trade in “body parts”… apparently bodies go for a million Euro each… you do the math…

Is this for real… is there a post nazi world which allows the killing of individuals as in a slaughterhouse… what are we becoming…

Later, on the same day… I heard that the catholic bishop (which I refuse to give him the importance of mentioning his name)… who refuses to acknowledge the holocaust, has been found in Argentina… and the Argentino government told him to leave…
I thought that it might be good to send him to Guantanamo… for a refresher…

I then saw on PBS a program on Himmler’s doctor… who saved some 60,000 Jews and Gentiles…

Another program I saw (on PBS) was on slavery and their ancestral roots… one of the people interviewed was Mae Jamyson… the first black woman astronaut… I was thinking, when she looks up and says “i’ve been up there…” what a feat… from slavery to astronaut…

A Doll

A Doll

When Gal was four… we were living in Paris at that time… we came to California on vacation. In addition to Disneyland… the San Diego Zoo and other marvels… there was one place Gal was in awe… ToysRus…

Being at the Barbie age… she wanted to get a couple of Barbies… one of them was a black female Barbie… she already had a Ken… so she bought some dresses and some other stuff… She might remember what other stuff we got…

About a year later we went to Florida on vacation… Gal wanted a doll so we stopped in a Woolworth in Miami and went to the toy department looking for the Barbie section… and we found it, but… impossible to find a black Ken… Luckily one of the sales clerk spoke French… and he had heard Gal ask about the black Ken… he interjected and told us… black dolls are far from being popular over here… When I told him that they were sold in California… he told me that California is different…

Today… some thirty odd years later… I wonder what color dolls did the Obama children bring with them in the White House…

Gratitude

Gratitude

This morning, as I was driving in San Jose I crossed two “bums” as my friend Bill defined them…. I must say it surprised me… because Bill is very learned in his knowledge of the English language… why did he choose that term… to depict these two unfortunate men crossing the street…
Are we really set to consider ourselves in an “us versus them” world… a world divided into privileged and under privileged… and if that is so… where do I fit in… have I graduated upstairs… because I look far from looking like a “bum”…
But did I… did I graduate from “bummery”… just because I am clean and drive a car…
When I look at these “bums”… I feel a deep sadness, knowing that I detached from them just because of sheer luck…
Lucky that I stopped taking Requip and went through Deep Brain Stymulation (DBS)… and for that I am deeply indebted to the Neuro-surgery staff at Stanford…

Thank you…

Live with Less

Live With Less

In these days of crisis we keep hearing… the banks need money for us to borrow…
Why do we need to borrow more money… I thought we are having these problems because we borrowed too much… to the point of overextending ourselves and losing our homes… and now we need to borrow more so we can buy more…. Where has the sound Economics 101… gone… Gone away are the basics of an equilibrium… Saving equal Investment…
Watching the news we hear a lot on the decline of sales… whether it is retail, or automobiles, or even homes… One word, though, which I failed to hear was Savings… looks like that word is out of our vocabulary… for good…

Instead of overextending ourselves… we should, maybe look at spending less… which is OK if we need less… so I had an idea… we could start by shrinking the size of our closet… by making our closets smaller will force us to require less stuff… anything wrong with that… living with less… try it… it will make you enjoy living with less…
Peace…

Cat's soul...

Cat’s soul…

This morning, walking back from my morning coffee at the mall… I saw a cat… lying in a sunny spot amongst the autumn leaves…. So I kneeled and rubbed his neck… the way cats like it… He looked up and said “thank you”… and he continued to lay and enjoy the sun…

Does this cat have a soul… does the soul have a dimension… is this soul bigger than my little Tikva’s… and what about the sole on the shoes of the Arab journalist…. Does that soul have a sole… oops… I mean does the journalist’s sole have a soul… or was I right the first time…

What difference does it make… my Tikva’s soul is a place in our soul which we reserve for her…. Forever, ever ever… to use an expression from Dahlia…beyond dimension… any dimension…

On the other hand...

On the other hand…

This morning, as I was walking to drink my coffee in the mall… I admired the quietness of my surrounding… It seems more like Palo Alto… the clean pavement… occupied by autumn leaves… and an occasional neighbor sweeping off this foliage… I can hear, in my head, Yves Montand singing…

On the other hand… I also remember the ordeal of my “compulsive behavior…” the trash one had to go around to enter the crack house…. All this for what… for the illusion of an elixir which is only an illusion… without any real and homely holy feeling…

When I look back on what I went through… I tell myself “Ivo my dear friend… this is more a Palo Alto type surrounding than a crack surrounding…”

Let’s make sure it stays that way…

Shelter

Shelter
Early this morning I was listening to the radio and noticed that they were talking about homeless people and shelters… It brought memories of the times I went to the various shelters… and having to leave at 5am… It was December and the wind was blowing… with a windshield factor in the twenties… and we had to wait outside till 6am… for the kitchen to open… or else panhandle for a cup of coffee at the gas station…
For the less lucky times, when the shelter was full… I spent the cccold night on the 22 bus… because this was an all night bus line…
How lucky I am today… with enough shelter for me to say… I will turn off the heater now, I have enough heat to keep me warm…

All this came to my mind because a friend told me about a social program I can subscribe to… and reduce or refund my Medicare payment of $96… and she gave me the phone number to call…
Thinking of the homeless whose dream is to find a place to stay dry… I said to myself… “There are people less fortunate than I” let me leave it to them to take advantage of this program…