When the fog shrouds...

          Our summer nights have been cozy, wrapped in fog.

      The spirited vapor rolls in from the coast as late evening sun and shadows play across the Santa Lucia slopes. As darkness descends, the fog rises from the valleys and thickens.

        I've taken it as a sedative. It's a shroud, buffering and insulating, changing the appearance of things. It helps take the edge off life's pain, if only temporally and if only in an illusory way.

        We live in a season of madness. We postulate extinction. My generation will not see the end of the whirlwinds we have given flight. Our friends are disappearing. We are no longer fleet. We are increasingly irrelevant. But we, some of us, rage against the insanity, the short sightedness, the decline, and demise.

        Those hard lines and sharp edges of life soften in the fog. 

        Fog may hide things, but we do not hide from life. 

        It seems a lifetime of reporting is calling in IOU's. I am now clobbered by war, disaster, broken hearts, frightening futures, wasted chances, toxic personality, and disappearing evidence of heart and soul. Like many of you, we worry about heirs and the yet unborn. And in every headline and news break is a connective nerve to the moments that soak the brains and hearts of old journalists in the pain, suffering, death, misdeeds and carnival of inhumanity that we saw and felt and can never seem to forget. It is our pass into club PTSD. Of course there are others here too, and some more grievously wounded. 

        The older I get the more resilient the ghosts are. The fog is a cocoon, but only a pretender.

        The Frontline Documentary Ukraine: Life Under Russia's Attack, left me depleted and ranting that a lethal drone should be addressed to Vladimir Putin. Another madman is loose in Europe, again. Why can't we learn from history? And already we are starting to forget. Old news, exactly what he counted on. 

        I had to step out for a walk, in the cool mist.

        It is life out of balance. Election deniers, a radical Supreme Court turning back the calendar on human rights, people tossed out of homes, working poor unable to get by, huge wealth getting larger, oil companies gouging for record profits, fires, floods, and human kind seems paralyzed. Where is the common sense? Where is decency?

        I sat in a briefing this week with a just retired Lt. General who had directed the Department of Defense's  Joint Center on Artificial Intelligence. You probably don't want to hear this, but the Chinese are way ahead of us in digital transformation, global interconnectivity and Artificial Intelligence. As he said the issues are Organization and Innovation. The question is How does an organized and innovative adversary fare on the battlefield?

        The US Military struggles mightily and lags in digital organization and innovation. Same old, same old. Turf battles, who's in control, yaddity, yaddity, yaddity.

        Once some of us were called "angry young men or women." Now we are angry again. As the saying goes, we know where the bodies are buried and we have secrets we will take with us. We've seen how we've missed getting it right, over and over.

       General's also talk about fog. They call it the fog of war, a confusion and lack of judgement caused by war. We are a people at war with our values, with each other, living on a planet that we are at war with.

        The great American writer Ben Hecht offers us wisdom; I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life's hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are."

            See you down the trail.

Harmony Discovered

 

        15 years ago Harmony was a darling little snooze. Folks visited the post office for the Harmony California post mark on Christmas cards.

        Then an inspired Italian chef turned a long abandoned kitchen into a little cafe that could have been on the Amalfi coast, or in Provence. We leisured away delightful hours and in near privacy.

        

        The famed Painted Sky recording studio took a small corner of the Historic Creamery building. That led to magical evenings of live music and tucked away dining for locals and friends.

    

        Then a new owner bought the town. Changes; some refurbishing, some new directions, and then came magazines, newspapers, travel sites, network stars and now Harmony has been discovered!"

        The Creamery is one of the tourist stops in this new tourist destination.

        

        It's good for the potter and the glass blower and the new Harmony Ice Cream vendor and Harmony Cheese food truck.

It's good for tourists too, a place to stimulate the economy.

        Where we once sat in dappled sun beneath spreading trees, sipping wine, enjoying a world class tiramisu, hearing distant cattle lowing has now been turned into a thriving wedding chapel business, complete with full service bridal beauty parlor.

        

        20 years ago when we told our California friend Jim we were moving to the central coast, he called it the "undiscovered California."

        All the glowing words and gorgeous photos, especially in the last 5 years, has changed that. 

        Harmony in Harmony means something different than it once did.

        Paraphrasing a quote from my late buddy Phil Allen,

    "I like the lights of Paris,

    I like the lights of Rome,

    but the lights I like the most

    are the tail lights of tourists heading home!"

    See you down the trail.

 

This option is joy...

In the season of life there is a lot on all of our minds.

Today, we give it a rest. Instead we celebrate.

Here's the latest report from Lana's back hill garden.

     Color and vibrance of another sort as we visit the garden patios of Casa Munch, the home built by Paso Robles wine legend John Munch of Le Cuvier.

    John is a creative giant, he writes as magically as he makes wine and builds houses. 

    He's a great force in a writers group as well.    

One of his mentees, Clay Selkirk, is a budding legend of a winemaker as well.

Cheers!

See you down the trail. 

Is Winter Weather a Grind?

 A Winter Diversion

        After a while snow, ice, gray skies, freezing temperatures and being confined inside is a drag. I know. 

        So, what if your job is a beach?

        And what if waring 5000 pound elephant seals were a job hazard?

    

        That's the deal for a couple of Cal Poly researchers recording behavior and communication sounds of elephant seals at our local rookery. The battling brutes kept wrestling closer to equipment.

        Try being nonchalant as the bull edges ever closer while your colleague is trying to extract a sound boom that another beach resident has rolled on down at the ocean.

        It's not always picnic at the Pacific shore. Researching the colony also includes counting the pups that don't survive.

       Still, the beach beats any office I've known.

        And who's going to complain about you catching a nap?

        When compared to those winter's past, it's hard to think of even a foggy and cool day as being a bad day at the beach. That idea is shared out here.

 

         February can be brutal out there. On the central cost, it brings green and the hint of the spring's renewal that comes to all. 

    

        Back when my patience with winter chill and hazard was at its end, I'd start playing Paul Simon's April Come She Will.

     It will and for those of you in freezing temperatures, rain and snow, hope the adage "life's a beach!" warms you a bit. 

    See you down the trail.