I’m not sure what you did the last time you moved into a new house but what we did was head for Costco. There was stuff we had to have…a couch in the living room, some office furniture, perhaps a bed….and we hoped they would have it, and in fact they did, and it all worked out well, except for the office furniture part. Did you know that you can buy stuff that’s labeled “easy to assemble” that actually has 54 major wood parts and over 300 pieces of hardware? All truth, and that stuff, no matter how good you are, is gonna take you a couple of days to assemble, and at the end you have furniture that’s too heavy to move, so if anybody besides us ever owns this house I bet they will own this same piece of furniture because I sure as heck know I’m not disassembling it, except perhaps with an ax.

Towards the end there was one step that I thought (even at the time) was especially amusing. Basically it was the installation of the “tower”, a piece consisting of a three-shelf mini-bookcase-looking thing about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-little wide. Since the overall construction is an odd combination of iron- or rubber-wood (very heavy) and ultra-dense fiberboard (even heavier) even this relatively small tower is, you guessed it, heavy. And for some unknown reason, where every other major piece is fitted together with metal dowels that snap into metal locking hubs, n this one piece sits on the desk with nothing more to secure it than six glue-strips, the backing of which you remove just before you put it into place. I thought this was odd….clearly glue wasn’t enough to hold a heavy piece in place….until Irene and I man-handled it onto the desk at which point it sucked onto the desk like a huge abalone on a rock, stuck like it would be there until the end of time, actually all good except that it was stuck in the wrong place by about half an inch, which to Irene and my perfectionists’ eyes was a miss as good as a mile. If you ever actually have been abalone diving you know how tough it is to pry one off its rock, right? It was twice that tough to get this thing to move, and the sound it made when it pried loose sent both Spryro the boy-dog and K.C. the girl-cat running at full speed for cover. I would have sworn it was taking the surface off the furniture at least, but it didn’t, and eventually all was well and it was properly re-secured, this time in its proper spot.

All is well  in truth, now, and I write to you from that very desk, and it doesn’t look awesome but pretty good, and I bet you, when you visit, can’t find where the “tower” initially went. Consider this your invitation.

Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads  massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement.  This indirectly led us to Table 10.

The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….

Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….

…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.

1.  Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?

2.  We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?

3.   Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?

Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.

Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?

Of course no essay that describes Las Vegas is complete without having some reflection on reality, as basically Las Vegas turns reality upside-down. Nothing is as it seems here. This includes, interestingly, The Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, which is, by my reckoning at least, is perhaps both the most upscale and least real Catholic Church I’ve ever seen. Located just off the strip, within an easy chip-toss, appropriately, of the Mirage, with a pastor who delivered a sermon in which he sang parts of Handel’s Messiah and who discussed his interview on Fox News the night before (where undoubtedly he gave his opinion on the economy and on China’s role in environmental affairs), nothing in this church looked like a Catholic Church is supposed to look.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s easier to answer by asking a few questions of my own. What other Catholic Church has two deacons whose job it is to follow along behind the priest when he is shaking holy water over the congregation with mops to immediately dry the marble floors?  What other Catholic Church has vocational candles that are actually electrified and turn on and off with individual switches instead of actually burning? What Christian church of any denomination has a “Last Supper” scene cast in bronze at a scale of about six times life? There are many other examples but you get the drift.

But I am probably making something out of nothing. At the same time I seem to be criticizing, I have to say, to be fair, that the angel-voiced priest spent as much time talking about the upcoming food drive and the church’s mission in assisting folks who are HIV-Positive as he did singing. And the people in this decidedly upper-class building were as friendly as any I’ve seen anywhere, including Sister Pat, the semi-retired nun sitting in the row in front of us who shared that she had lived many years in San Francisco and for many years before that in Redwood City, which is next to San Carlos, CA., which is where, South of San Francisco, that Irene and I lived for many years.

So what conclusions can I draw from this, after all? Only the same one that I’ve come to realize plays so big in so many parts of my life. I don’t know much and what I do know is subject to change ‘cuz I’m probably wrong about that, too.

That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.

This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.

What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.

This excepts State Parks, naturally. State Parks very wildly, so much that it’s almost comical. You can have parks that have nothing at all in facilities, parks whose most attractive feature is that they are there and nothing more. And you can have places like the one we went to last year in West Virginia that had terraced sites a million miles apart from each other, sites so long you could land jets in them, so level they could have been pool tables, high above a lake pretty as a postcard, across from a golf course as green as the fruit of a ripe Kiwi. A beautiful park, if somewhat orderly in its beauty.

Soaring high above even that nice park is this one, Henry’s Lake near Last Chance, Idaho. Not that it’s the fanciest ornament on the tree; it’s not. It’s rather plain and on a plain as well, a high-desert plain with a mountain range over 10,000 feet rising behind it. The sites are large and well-spaced and level enough for government work, but what this park has is surprises of the natural kind. Last time we were here, a year ago I think, I almost feel over a cow moose and we released at least six magnificent Cut-Bows, an unusual hybrid between a Cutthroat and a Rainbow Trout that can reproduce and grow like crazy…the six we caught were at all at least 20 and mostly 22-23 inches, making them all between 3 + and 5 pounds, good fish for any fly-fisher and the highlight of last year’s Western States swing. But so far our visit here has equaled last year by the simple unexpected arrival of two magnificent bald eagles….one of which was promptly chased and scared away by two very aggresive seaguls; the second of which cruised our site repeatedly looking for something….a dead rabbit? A small Cairn Terrier?….and in the doing making us feel as if we were, just for a moment, part of his life, and it’s a nice feeling, being part of the life of an eagle.

I’ll trade off full-hookups for an eagle any time.

I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.

I favor Obama. It’s been years since I’ve really felt that any president was working as hard as I’d like them to, plus displaying the ability to be articulate about what he’s doing at the same time. These are the best of times for me, with a communicator in office better than anybody since perhaps Regan, and I like THIS guy’s politics OH-so-much-more, so what could make the day even brighter?

Well, since you asked, he COULD be just a little more definite about this health-care mess, which concerns me personally, since Irene and I haven’t had GOOD health care insurance since perhaps last September or so. I was the happiest of the faithful when he uncovered, re-adopted and started to prosletize the public option…..an idea that’s been around since Jimmy Carter at least and has been brought up and discarded under fire at least four times that I can think of.

I’m somewhat LESS happy now that he is re-defining it as “only one of the slivers of the program” and not mandatory. Oh, of course, I understand why he’s saying what he’s saying….he’s truly a compromiser, he’s trying to work both sides of the aisle even though the haters are clear they want to sink his administration on this program and won’t compromise on anything, and…and this surprises me…even though, if you count the “blue dogs”, he’s already got the votes to jam through reform if he wants to.

But my impatience is ill-founded, and even I know that. Why? Because, simply stated, no worthwhile national program has been enacted without the eventual cooperation of a wide variety of highly unlikely bed-partners. For instance, bot Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security required the active involvement of both the Republican party AND the ultra-conservative deep-south Democrats who really are more Republican for the most part than most Repubs short of Newt Gingrich. It’s startlingly clear, if you go back and read up on it a bit, that compromise is ALWAYS necessary to get this legislation enacted and to have it last. ALWAYS.

So…do I think that O’s program, which so obviously consists of NOT insisting on specific planks in favor of making the HofR and the Senate take some ownership, will eventually result in the enactment of legislation that will enable Irene and I to then go out and buy meaningful health care insurance? Yes, I do. I wish I could also say that the Public Option will be right there as the plank of gold in the platform, but I can’t go that far. That, I don’t know about. It could get negotiated out, when all is said and done, and I think it’s a crying shame. There was a report today that one of the Chairmen of one of the major health insurance company is earning, right now, $106,000….per hour. I think this is outrageous greed, especially in the face of every other challenge in our economy, and speaks reams for why we CANNOT trust the insurance companies to keep their rates down no matter how much they say that, yessiree-bob, we’re sittin’ at the negotiating table with you. They are, but they aren’t worried about the same things that you and I care about.

Finally, and this is a point made clearly by the excellent and beautifully-researched book just published entitled The Healing of America by T. R. Reid, (albeit a point that Obama seems to have only recently discovered), we have a moral responsibility here to provide health insurance to EVERYONE…..yes, illegal aliens, or if you draw the line there, at LEAST all of our citizens, irrespective of pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. WHY? Very simple. We’re a wealthy nation. One of the wealthiest. All wealthy nations have an obligation to provide health care. And you know what? ALL THE REST OF THEM DO! We are the ONLY so-called wealthy nation that does NOT provide health care to everybody. You don’t believe it? Hey…back to my new phrase…do the work! Start with Reid’s book. And, if you want to make it fiscally responsible to provide this at the same time, drive health-care costs down and make the CEO of that insurance company take a little bit of a cut to, say, $1,000 an hour. I could live on that, couldn’t you?

Getting complacent about things isn’t acceptable when one is searching for truth, any truth. For instance, a good friend, albeit a bit misguided, told me recently that it doesn’t matter what economists I quoted to reinforce the obvious truth that Obama’s economic polices are working and are rapidly bringing us back from the economic slide-to-suicide begun with Reganomics and carried blithfully forward even into “W”‘s ignorance-as-a-virtue day, he could quote a different, more conservative economist that thinks the big O’s policies are akin to devil worshop.

He may be right, of course, but can we both we equally right? It doesn’t mean that these opposite points of view can co-exist, does it? It seems there has to be ONE truth in there somewhere, especially when the two points of view are fundamentally so different.

One risk is that we, as Americans, seem to be inculcated in believing that ALL viewpoints are healthy, that there is NO absolute truth, that everything should be considered a respectful shade of gray, that things that are labeled theories are therefore still devoid of fact and are unproven (while the scientific meaning of theory has nothing to do whatsoever with whether anything is based on fact or PROVEN or not, it’s just more ignorance making it’s way into the maintstream). This is wrong, and it brings me around to the real point I’m making here, which is really about a definition of pimping that I think is really beneficial for society at large.

Ignoring the classic or even Wikepedian definitions of pimping, that the word has mostly to do with the act of soliciting women into prostitution, either on the street or in a brothel, and managing them for profit, an activity that may have social good in it somewhere but I wouldn’t know about that, having only been in a brothel once in my life and that time only to see if Al Kalgren and Frank Marino could really trade trout for sex, a classic entreprenurial endeavor if I had ever seen one set up and something I wanted to see play out, although as it turned out it didn’t. Pimping as I’m using it doesn’t even have to do with adding a third or fourth TV set to your recently renovated 1987 Cadillac Hearse, although I applaud the activity generally.

No, the definition of pimping I’m refering to here has to do with the activity of trolling things by people in the hopes of stirring them up, knocking the complacent pins from under their tired feet and making them think differently about something, ANYTHING. I believe in pimping in this sense because I believe there ARE absolute truths out there…not ALL points of view are created equal, we do NOT have to give equal weight to all silliness, and we would be far better off as individuals and by extension as a society if we DO THE MATH (a nifty colloquialism I’m using here as a metaphor for “Do The Work”…whether math is involved in the research or not).

I love pimping people out of complacency and into the light, and once they finally get moving I love it when people do the work. That’s why when 0ur financial advisor, Kevin Hatch, calls and we discuss our portfolio for two hours and I question him about everything I inevitably take his recommendations almost without question across the board because he has DONE THE WORK. It’s when Jack and Diana Reynolds call and say, hey, there is a start-up that we want you to invest it, we say “where’s the checkbook?”, because they(and their own advisors) have DONE THE WORK. It’s why, when I go back and read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and understand from that how he came up with the remarkably fully-featured philosophy of evolution that tends to explain our world’s existence better than the thousands of years of sacrificing virgins (assuming that’s what they really were), or the reading of chicken entrails, or the placement of the pillars at Stonehenge by (assumably) the Druids or somebody like them, ever did…it isn’t because his shit is newer, it’s belycause Darwin, bless his soul, DID THE WORK.

However, and admittedly, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody out there on the other side of the equation that isn’t doing an equal and opposite amount of work, is there? No, I suppose it doesn’t…..