If a curious man is diligent, he can actually find something on TV worth watching. It is not easy. The program “How It’s Made” has interesting stories, provided the man watching has an I.Q. that can be registered in positive numbers.

Among other things the long-running series details the intricacies of factories that make everything, everything from Twinkies to light bulbs to airplane engines. Western civilization has provided us with astounding capabilities based on higher math and an understanding of the laws of physics.

Watching a robot build a machine that builds robots is nothing short of fascinating, if, that is, a person has an attention span. Whereas nails were once made by hand, one at a time, machines spit out nails and screws by the thousands, every minute. Machine tools guided by computers drill inch-wide holes in solid steel blocks, then thread the holes to receive bolts, all in seconds. Assembly lines move products up and down and sideways on their way to packaging. Machines sort millions of letters every minute. Generators at the bottom of the Hoover Dam churn out billions of volts of electricity that is sent to homes and businesses hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Somebody built all those high-voltage lines, the windmills, the solar panels, and the nuclear power plants that electrify the world. And somebody figured out how to manage it all. I’m telling you, Western Civilization is really quite the accomplishment.

So it is our moral obligation to try and find some way to thank the many Somali engineers and technicians who built all this stuff. Who knew?

Do you like my birthday shirt? My wife understands me. She doesn’t always like me, but she understands me.

Perhaps Notes readers have noticed that I sometimes lose my mind and go screaming through the woods when I come upon the works of a person who does not know how to use the English language, or who does know and just wants to be “an individual” and Do. Things. Like. This., which is just the cutest, don’t you think?

I encourage more semi-literates to adopt their own special style, like the Substack guy whose computer can’t make capital letters or punctuation marks. It does wonders for my feelings of superiority.

Here’s an example: i like to write this way because making paragraphs is too much trouble besides what’s with all the commas and stuff all i’m trying to do is convey my infinite wisdom to the lesser folk who can’t appreciate my genius

I think most people on Notes are not much interested in reading, much less writing. They prefer to look at cartoons.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning out the attic in the house where my family used to live, where my kids spent their childhoods and half their adolescence. It was the first house I ever built, a log house, high in the Smoky mountains; and the four of us, along with an assortment of little dogs, lived there for about 15 years. Along the way the attic became filled with former treasures: a doll house and its furniture; a tent, some life jackets, some third-hand skis; rejected tableware and mismatched glasses; sentimental clothing, plenty of old shoes, and papers, boxes of papers.

I had committed myself to taking on the task of clearing the attic without succumbing to the temptation to sift through every dusty item; that I would with impunity toss them out the opening where I had removed the gable end vent, and below which a hired dumpster sat ready to receive them. On that commitment I stumbled a little. To touch and feel the things you have not touched or felt in a decade or more is to suddenly have in your hands the magical keys to the past. What has happened in those years, but that to return to a memory beguiles the time?

In my zeal I tossed out a handmade dress my daughter had worn to a friend’s wedding when she was ten years old. That night my wife convinced me that I had been advised to save the dress, and that I had just forgotten my instructions. So the next morning I was back up in Black Camp Gap, in the Balsam mountains, rummaging through the dumpster. I found the dress, and I am certain that it was better for me that I did than it was for my daughter.

Aside from the pink gown, I remember bringing home only one other item from the old homestead. It is a cancelled check, one of many that fell out of the boxes of papers, the disposal of which was my solemn charge. The check I rescued from the ignominy of eternal death in the county dump just happened to have landed face up, and catch my attention. It was filled out as payment to the Allstate insurance company, in the amount of $112.88. Written in blue ink in my wife’s neat, exquisitely readable long hand, the check is dated April 12, 1989.

We had been living in N. Carolina for three-and-a-half years, by which time I might have been earning eight or nine dollars an hour, working in the trades and trying to learn. Shelda was tending our babies and selling Avon, but not for extra money. There was never extra money.

Did you think I might never come to the point? Well, here it is: When I picked up that check from the dusty attic floor, I was awestruck by what it represented, which was not the mere payment of an ancient bill, but a reminder, visceral and powerful, of the discipline and faithfulness with which my wife had always overseen our meager household finances. Like the old people before me, I had never been much aware of how dire things were. It was a time of beans and cornbread, and they tasted mighty fine; but if anything had gone awry; if I had been injured and unable to work, or if either Shelda or I had become ill I, I don’t know, I don’t know what would have become of us and our children.

But nothing tragic did happen, and we worked and we worked and we worked, until things did get better; and through it all, Shelda continued to dutifully write the checks and check the spending, and to make the ends meet when at times it seemed impossible. Those things she did, and in a faith so great, that, 30 years later, it causes me to weep. Such is the value of an old, cancelled check.

On the Main Line

I won’t be passing by this way again.

My ticket validation soon expires.

The engineer will have me leave the train,

But civilly, I hope, and without ire.

The ride has been so quick I hardly took

My seat before the old conductor said,

“You there, come here and take one final look,”

And through the merry club car he then led

To the caboose where now I stand forthright

And gaze upon the sights, fleet and fading

From my view, darkness mingling with the light.

“That mountain range,” he said, hesitating,

“Is one you never braved; and over there

The churning surface of the sea reveals

The hopes you tossed away, abandoned where

You wrongly thought your failures were concealed.”

“But will we reach Elysian fields before

I’m told to leave this train, before I see

In solitary way a golden shore

Where Love’s pure radiance might then shine on me?”

“I know not of such things,” he told me then,

“I merely send you where you’ve never been.”

Jan. 2011

Traveling north this week toward the nation’s capital I was accosted by a Tesla fella who evidently felt it his mission in life to get in front of my Sprinter van. (Missionaries can be obnoxious.) The speed limit was 70 and I was in the hammer lane doing 75. He was behind me, upping his blood pressure and insisting to himself that he was important. Meanwhile I was passing one car after another, but Tesla fella was not satisfied. He was dissatisfied to the point of placing his hundred-thousand dollar battery car in a position more precarious than ever he could have imagined. He must have thought a five-thousand pound car could intimidate someone (like me) driving a ten-foot tall, ten-thousand pound truck.

I could have given him the hammer lane by barging my way into the chain of cars in the slow lane, but that would have been rude; besides, doing so would have been proactive in another person’s favor, and the very concept of such a thing disturbs me, especially as pertains to tailgaters in Teslas.

Although I was steadily passing cars in the slow lane, Tesla fella would not back off. I eventually tired of the sight of his white car five feet behind me, and thought yeah, that’s just about the right distance for a brake check. So, courteous driver that I am, I flipped on my turn signal to notify Tesla fella that I would be moving into the slow lane. I did that about a millisecond before standing up on the brake pedal. The five feet of clearance subsequently evaporated like a whim, and the inch or two that remained proved beyond all doubt that Teslas have good brakes. As Tesla fella was sopping up the five-dollar latte he’d just splattered all over his dashboard, I eased into the slow lane.

“Don’t be messin’ with that guy,” she warned. “He’s got road rage. He might have a gun.” I just turned and said, “Yeah? I’ve got one for each hand.”

After taking control of the hammer lane my adversary came alongside my van. I couldn’t see him through his dark-tinted windows, but I’m pretty sure he could see me laughing at him. He moved on and I moved back into the hammer lane. He slowed down, of course. The slow lane was open, so I went that direction. He moved over to block me. I moved again, he blocked again. Satisfied that he had taught me a lesson, he stomped down on his electricity pedal and sent millions of little electrons scurrying every which direction inside the big battery/bomb he was sitting on top of. Whoosh! He was gone.

I followed along amused, and as is my nature, hoping for the best. I’m particular about what I consider to be the best, and a suitable incarnation at once appeared in the distance, manifesting itself in the form of a Virginia state trooper. After I had been dismissed from class and Tesla fella had zoomed away into the distance, he had unwittingly done so at the exact instant that a dutiful trooper was staring right at him down the barrel of a radar gun.

Suddenly an awesome panorama of big blue beautiful beacons flashed across the heavens, and as Tesla fella pulled onto the roadside to await his conference with law enforcement, I knowingly smiled and waved as I went on my way.

The dumbass Beatle who sang that song should be dug up and tarred and feathered.

The above photo is of a 69-year old man who was beaten by a 32-year old tough guy who did not like the man’s Trump signs in his yard. After he pummeled the old man, the tough guy ran away.

I suspect that the macho man ran back home to his mommie’s house. Wherever he ran he was captured and is now in jail. The misunderstanding between the two men is understandable if you happen to be a deranged and violent activist, i.e., a Democrat.

Please be generous enough to donate to your local TV network affiliate. It would be a nice gesture, just to let them know how much you admire their hard work in inciting violence and hatred.

Look no further than the mainstream media for what you see in the photo. Those intrepid seekers of truth are, if nothing else, which is a lot, ever vigilant in their efforts to achieve a byline or a 20-second interview with a fat undergraduate with metal things stuck in her bulbous cheeks. Those vain men and those cosmetic-covered women are justice warriors who are fearless in their search for truth and light, and the light from all the buildings that are on fire downtown really help.

While you’re at it, sing a dirge for the now unemployed Steve Coalbert. Steve had a good job, but he was too dumb to know what to do with it, so after costing his boss hundreds of millions of dollars, the boss finally told Steve to run along. How unfair is that? The man was a beacon of hope for all the disgruntled who blame others for hurting their feelings.

Not to worry, chums. Little Jimmy Kimmel is now the standard bearer for skinny-armed males with hair-buns on their heads; for the dumpy old Baby Boomers who have no reason to live; and for all the rest who understand neither human nature nor basic math. Most of those people think the government creates wealth, and in a way, it does. Just a few short years ago, billions were made by Big Drug. That happened right after the government did its best to frighten people so badly that they took a phony drug.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat and kill a civilization.

https://gellerreport.com/2026/05/beaten-to-an-inch-of-his-life-for-trump-signs.html/?lctg=104736697

We wrote back and forth for a week or so, and at first he expressed his delight in talking to someone with a different perspective than his own. His delight soon faded.

His final email began, “Please stop.” He wanted no more from me. He told me to stop complaining. He said I was depressing him. Yes, I suppose facts can be depressing.

He’d sung high praises to Planned Parenthood for all the benevolent nurturing they do. I said they were just a bunch of abortionists. No, he said, they primarily counsel women and give them information about how to become good mothers. I checked. Apparently that cornucopia of helpful doctors and nurses do abortions on more than 90-percent of the [pregnant] women who come through the front doorway. Planned Parenthood claims that abortion accounts for only three to four-percent of the services they provide. Their reporting is as deviously misleading as any reporting can be. (See the linked articles.)

My former correspondent was further displeased to hear me describe too many Americans as fat and lazy. They are not, he asserted. I’ve never met the man, but I presume he must be blind.

He suffers from a malignant case of self-inflicted Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). His first letter to me made that abundantly clear, as did his second. So I replied to his second affirmation of Trump’s evil self by saying, “Just as a thought experiment, try not to think about Trump.”

He didn’t mention the president again, but before our little tete-a-tete ended,he had concluded that I was an “extremist.”

My extremist views held that: children should learn in school how to read and write and do arithmetic, and learn Civics; that white liberal females, especially of the school and college teacher persuasion, are tearing society apart with their hatred of motherhood; that the political left salivates over the prospect of abortion on demand; and that there is no greater evil than using abortion as birth control.

On that I’d said something about “young women who couldn’t keep their panties on.” He didn’t much appreciate the language. But if staunchly opposing late-term-abortion-on-demand-as-birth-control makes me an extremist, so be it. I’m happy to be there.

Oop! I just heard someone scream, “Yeah well what about rape you don’t think a woman should get an abortion if she gets raped?” I don’t know what the woman might do; but if my daughter were raped, I would ignore speed limit signs as I rushed her to the hospital for an abortion. I oppose it as birth control, but I also oppose the fanatics who say that there can never be a reason to abort a pregnancy. In fact there are several.

Fun fact: Planned Parenthood is one of the most profitable non-profit outfits on the planet. Huh? That’ll make taxpayers happy.

https://factually.co/fact-checks/health/percentage-of-planned-parenthood-services-that-are-abortions-886969

https://nrlc.org/communications/planned-parenthoods-latest-annual-report-the-abortion-giant-has-been-a-force-for-hopelessness-and-fear/

I draw your attention to the new TV series entitled “Amadeus”. It’s about a person who wrote “some things.” They were musical things, unlike what insults ears today.

Amadeus was Mozart’s middle name. And I know the name doesn’t sound Chinese, like, say, Kung Pao Flied Lice, but that’s just because a lot of years have passed, and it’s okay now to reveal that Mozart actually came to western Europe from the province of Yu Go Naow, a desolate region inhabited mostly by cats running for their lives. When he arrived in Salzburg on Thursday, Amadeus immediately sat down outside the emperor’s house and wrote fifteen symphonies, using only a stick and some mud, because crayons had not been invented yet. In his spare time Mozart crafted tiny music boxes, using only recycled chopsticks.

If you haven’t seen the first installment of the revised history of the world’s foremost musical genius, do so now, right now. You will be amazed to learn that Mozart wasn’t a white guy at all. I feel so betrayed. I’ve been listening to his music for decades, and now I learn he was an illegal immigrant with a face made of stone. Sometimes education is depressing.

Next up: George Armstrong Custer shows his soldiers how to make dreadlocks and steal cars. The Academy Awards will be really something next year, something that I won’t watch for the 25th-year in a row.

Aside from the blue-jeans scandal, wherein Sydney Sweeney was accused of being a white woman and did not deny it, I’d not heard of her. Since the advertisement that sold millions of pairs of jeans, she now has more of a presence in society.

Last night my wife and I watched the movie – I hate it when people say film – “Housemaid”, starring the big breasted beauty herself. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that she is a pretty good actress. (If she were a man, I’d say actor.)

Then my wife said: “See? Wasn’t it nice to watch a movie without all the killing and car crashes and F-words in every sentence?”

I said: “What?”

She: “There were no F-words in that movie. So nice.”

I: “I don’t know what you were watching, but the movie I saw had plenty of F-words.”

She: “It did not.”

I: “Listen, watch it again and see. I guarantee you’ll hear all kinds of F-words.”

She: “No I won’t.”

By now she was on the move into a different room, while steadily punching the glass on her iPhone. I was right behind her.

I: “I bet you’ll hear it . . .” and I was about to say 24-times, at least, but decided to hedge the bet and say, “at least a doz . . .”

And before I could say dozen she put her phone down and exclaimed, “Sixty-two.”

I: “What? Sixty-two . . . what?”

She: “Sixty-two times.”

I: “What?”

She, unable to restrain herself: “FUCK WAS SAID SIXTY-TWO TIMES IN THE MOVIE! OKAY?”

I love the smell of victory, no matter what time of day it is.

As for the movie, at least there were no car crashes.

Miami International, 1:15 p.m.

This airport is as close to Hell as I ever want to come. The buildings are very nice, the air-conditioning superb, and the food choices are enough to make a gourmand blush. The drawback is the people, thousands of them. O how I long for the serenity of my home.

As I mentioned earlier, my departure gate has historically been at the opposite end of whatever building I happen to be in. It is one of few consistencies in my life, and Miami International is no exception. I’ve walked more today than I’ve done in years.

Remember the fat lady in San Jose, the lard tub with the cheap tattoo? She ain’t got nuttin’ on the thing I just watched waddle by. Not only was she larger than life, but her bleached white skin was plastered with colorful ink pictures. I’d be amused to see her in a few years, before the diabetes gets her. The sags will be monumental. Make Shame Great Again!

Upon landing in Miami I saw the Trump-mobile, aka Air Force One, glistening in the Florida sunshine. It was parked on the tarmac a hundred yards away. I wonder how close a person could get to that thing before being shot dead. I decided not to find out.

Speaking of well fed females, there was one behind me on the way from San Jose. I won’t say anything mean about her, and will only record that by all outward appearances it looked as though, when the Ozempic train roared around a bend, she fell off. And just so you’ll know, I have never in my life taken a seat on a plane or in a theater that there was not a mentally unconscious lug behind me who was hell bent on kicking my chair to tatters. Mustering every available ounce of self-control -- there are not very many -- I persevered. But upon landing in Miami I stood up, turned to the woman, looked her in her close-set eyes, and in a voice, the decibel level of which revealed that it was more than a whisper, declared, “I couldn’t help noticing that you have some BIG FEET.”

The plane has begun its descent into the purple-hair realm of Asheville, NC. So the flight attendant jumped on the PA system to speak a string of words so fast that no human could understand them. Nobody was listening, anyway. My wife said flight attendants talk like that to prove they are professionals.

The vacation is over.

And as the obesity epidemic in Mexico runs wild, the citizens there seem disinclined to staunch the southward progression of the disease. Costa Ricans are ballooning at a quicker pace than the arrival of lies coming from the U.S. Congress.

Unlike so many Americans, Costa Ricans are not averse to work, as evidenced by roadside fruit stands, one after another. Operating a fruit stand in the tropics or anywhere else for that matter, is a tough way to make a living. This explains the shortage of such commercial enterprises in the U.S., where sluggards stoop to EBT cards and welfare checks, rather than building a little self-respect by working for a living.

Costa Ricans are way ahead of Americans in building durable houses. They understand and appreciate the value of bricks, mortar, and concrete. No doubt this is the logical result of a lack of softwood forests; but their concrete houses will be standing long after termites, tornados and hurricanes have turned wood-framed houses into splinters and dust, if fire does not do them in first. Go to any seaside coast in N. America, and see for yourself. Perhaps one house in a thousand is built to withstand the torments of Nature. As regards home-building, can you think of anything more stupid than nailing wood siding to the walls of a beach house, where the sun and salt eagerly turn it into landfill fodder? I can’t. But don’t look for that bad habit to be overcome, not until the last spruce tree has been chopped down and sawn into 2x4’s.

Observing the heavy traffic in the towns and on the road to San Jose tells me that here there is no shortage of gasoline or diesel fuel. At this writing I ride shotgun in Leo’s mini-bus. He is a longtime acquaintance of my intrepid daughter, who lived in this country “back in the day.”

Leo, as obviously is true of every driver in this green-clad country, “ain’t scared.” He can cross the double yellow and pass a caravan of slower cars as expertly as I can hold my breath and close my eyes. In fact I am little concerned by the perils. Lately I’ve spent some hours studying Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”. Marcus was of a mindset steeped in acceptance of the inevitable, presaging by two-thousand years Alfred E. Newman’s rhetorical question: “What, me worry?” I can’t know what Marcus’ thoughts were as he lay dying, but I’ll wager they did not include an iota of fear of the unknown.

***

Motorcycles here are abundant, mostly single-cylinder, 150-cc, dirt bike types. A big Harley would just be stupid, as even the best rider could not avoid dumping the cumbersome thing on the winding, narrow, over-crowded roads. There may be some Harley’s in the big city of San Jose, but if there are, they get stolen every night. The motorcyclists, cautious though they might be, are not invulnerable to being flattened by a mini-bus, and the poor kid I saw prostrate and bleeding in the middle of a street, his bike crumpled like a Big Mac wrapper, bore witness to that fact. It’s a wonder I did not see many more such misfortunes. The guys cutting in and out of the perpetual lines of racing vehicles are actually not very cautious.

Another thing commonly done here by shopkeepers, one that Americans deign not to do, is protect their stuff. Fifteen years ago in San Jose I walked past a jewelry store where a man stood outside. Across his chest were full bandoliers, and in his arms was a sawed off, 12-gauge, pump action shotgun. I saw no hopeful robbers. His was an effective way of warding off any such persons inclined to snatch and grab. It is a style of living that should be emulated in America.

While rampaging through the American south in the last months of the Civil War, Gen. Tecumseh Sherman met a man in Jackson, MS. He was the owner of a downtown hotel, and he was begging the implacable warrior to spare his establishment the flames that were at that moment consuming everything in sight. Sherman did not say so, but he may have been amenable to the hotelier’s request had the man gotten on his knees and groveled. This, however, would have proved an impossibility, owing to a physique that prohibited it. He was, in the general’s estimation, “a very fat man.” The Yankees burned down his hotel.

In the airport a few minutes ago I encountered just such a person, but of the female gender. I doubt the victim of Sherman’s torch had any ugly tattoos, but the woman I just saw had one, a drab and unimpressive gray outline of a butterfly, just above her left hoof. It was permanently embedded in the expansive stretches of what would have been her calf, except that it was a full-grown steer. There were probably others, but she had graciously kept them from sight with copious amounts of polyester-blend cloth that hung loosely on her, if you can believe it. Yes, brothers and sisters, I’m on my way back to N. America, land of the fat, home of the fatter!

***

I’ve never sat down and eaten a bucketful of broken glass, but such a task could not be any less terrible than traveling by airplane. Being crammed into a seat in which the circulation of my blood is greatly constrained is merely the coup d’grace to first getting inside the plane. Nothing says “people are sheep” like airport livestock pens, in which impatient, self-absorbed travelers move and moan and hate the people in front of them.

(O man, my long-suffering wife just uttered words more beautiful than any I’ve ever heard. As we were being herded toward Gate 19 — Why is my gate always the one with the highest numerical designation, and located at the far end of the runway?

— she turned to me, groaned and said, “We ain’t doin’ this again.” Ah, music, darling, music to my steadily failing eardrums. Yeah, we’ve had enough pleasure to last us 17-lifetimes, God please forbid.)

Our plane, best described by the philosopher/poet, Rene Saunts, as being “a winged aluminum tube, not unlike a tin of rancid tuna” is loaded, and I hope locked.

Herewith an example of something else they can’t do, which is create a decent insult. Here on Substack’s “Notes” section, their complete lack of imagination is daily on display.

Believe or not, I have been known to insult people on “Notes”, which is a chatroom, of sorts. My invective takes aim at the purple-hairs, exclusively. I shouldn’t do it. It’s like shooting sitting ducks.

A few days ago one of them blundered into my comments, with a typical, rehearsed attempt at insulting me. I’ve been called a misogynist, racist, homophobe, islamophobe, Nazi, etc. etc. Ooo . . . like I care. Do they come up with those vapid sobriquets on their own, or do they learn them at George Soros rallies?

Anyway, this white, uptight, liberal, honky female laid into me with some of her troop’s oft repeated and extremely lame attempts at insult. I don’t recall her words exactly, but they included the time-worn favorites of the intellectually challenged, something like “fuck you” or “eat a bag of dicks” or some other lackadaisical irreverence that impressed me not at all.

What is interesting is the purple-hair and bun-head fascination with human genitals. It’s very strange. Recently a photo of President Trump showed the folds of skin in his neck. Jimmy Crybaby Kimmel then repeated what his wife (who writes all his material) told him to say during his monologue. It was something to the effect that those folds of loose skin resembled a woman’s vagina. What sort of sick mind conceives stuff like that? Yes, if humans had no sex organs, the purple-hairs would be at a complete loss.

There is a photo of me in my Substack, and it shows similar folds of skin in my 74-year old neck. Oh man! This broad jumped all over that, and after a few “fuck you’s” she finally, in desperation, took another poorly aimed shot at me, and said something about my neck. What she must have thought to be a caustic insult was boring, nothing more than an unoriginal, knee-jerk recitation of a term she learned from her ugly, tattooed friends.

At the conclusion of our little chat, she signed off with another swipe at what her demented mind conjured up: my “vagina neck”. Unable to control myself, my immediate, gleeful retort was as follows: “I bet my vagina neck smells better than the one between your fat legs.”

And “just like that” she disappeared into the ether.

They can’t meme. They can’t insult, and they can’t even spell the word wit.

Here we see Grandson No. 2 breaking the rules by feeding his cousins. The white face, or capuchin monkeys are voracious, beggarly, and ubiquitous.

Throughout the Quepos area, ropes can be seen stretched across streets that are busy with motor traffic, and our cousins use them to cross over safely. Last year I battled squirrels that were robbing my bird feeders. When I realized that the cable stretching from house to deck post was just an invitation, I gave up the fight. Well, the squirrels have got nothing on monkeys that can scurry, wide open, across the streets on ropes, while their babies hold on tight.

I saw a sloth crossing on a rope, moving much, much more slowly than the monkeys, naturally. The one I saw was moving head first, and I learned that it was a three-toed sloth. Two-toed sloths, on the other paw, move across butt first. I probably have that backwards, since I learned about it yesterday, where I left my memory. Meh.

Also yesterday my crew and I toured national park Manuel Antonio, where, thanks to our guide, we saw all sorts of creatures that otherwise would have been invisible: fabulously colored birds, tiny spiders, iguanas, lizards and a partridge in a palm tree . .

It’s one of those places of hedonistic grandeur. My and my wife’s suite comes with a shower room -- yes, I did not call it a stall -- that is spacious enough for several recliners and a few end tables. I think there are at least four more bathrooms and three half-baths; and there are three different kitchens. But this region is nothing if not steep, so home builders practice the art of vertical construction, meaning stairs, many stairs. How else to get to all four levels?

Yesterday my daughter and I climbed a few mountains to the nearest store, about a third of a mile from the house,

and when we returned I collapsed in exhaustion. I exaggerate but slightly.

***

My six companions and I have boarded our private, tiny bus, and are now enroute to Quepos, on the coast. The temperature change from the Villa Cala down to San Jose was stark. I went from needing a hoodie, to needing a tub of ice water. The sun is bright, the blue sky mostly clear, and it is not raining, yet.

Prospective travelers to Spanish speaking countries are advised (by me) to go in the care of an interpreter. I highly recommend my daughter. She is fluent in the language and well-traveled, and she is also fearless. The kid was riding a rope swing at five-years old, that grown men declined to ride. She is also determined and tough, as well as being quite lovely. And she is well schooled in the dubious art of forging ahead through traffic at breakneck speeds. Speed limits are posted in kilometers per hour, but are cavalierly ignored by everyone. And if hiking to the Boto lagoon took strength and endurance, driving a car in this country takes courage and an iron-willed determination.

Highway #27, speed limit 70-kph, sometimes 80, is a toll road, which requires our driver to pause and flash a credit card at a robot that will lift the barrier and allow him to proceed. Yes, between robot toll takers and billboards depicting a grinning man obviously thrilled to now have 5G phone service, it is safe to say that progress will eventually ruin this country.

My gang and I are hopeful that traffic will be light enough to allow us to stop along the way, on a particular bridge. In the water below and along the shorelines of a muddy river, crocodiles sun themselves and hope that a small child will fall off the bridge, just to provide them with a little snack. Whether, as on bridges in the American west, there are suicide hotline numbers posted on the crocodile bridge is not known. Should there be? A few miles back we passed high over the Rio Grande, and, no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of.

On down the road we are again on the bank of the Rio Grande -- it evidently has curves -- at the crocodile bridge. Our intrepid driver has successfully navigated the toll booths and crowds of passive-aggressive drivers, each of them bent on beating us to nowhere. How does one identify a passive-aggressive driver? He’s driving.

What a disappointment! Fifteen years ago there was a bridge across the river, and nothing else. There was nothing. Cars would be parked on either end, and people would walk onto the bridge to view the crocodiles. It’s still possible to stroll either of the pedestrian lanes on the bridge, but at the east end today, there stands the CrocWalk, a cable and welded steel abomination, anchored by huge concrete footings. From the cantilevered end, accessed by passing through a palm-reading turnstile, tourists can gawk at the reptiles below, although the croc’s numbers today are scant. To get onto the walkway one must first pass through a Costa Rican version of a Bucky’s gas station, those obscene, gastronomical nightmares of candy and assorted other forms of sugar and indigestible grease. This place is like a vulgar, grandiose amusement park, crowded with gawkers and festooned with banners and flags and stocked with every sort of gee-dunk garbage that is so readily prevalent in my home country. It’s so bad now that the crocodiles have said adios, and fled to parts unknown.

Today from the CrocWalk I saw two crocodiles and one very bored iguana. Fifteen years ago, and before the onslaught of commercialism, I saw dozens in the mud, 50-feet below. Ugh. Didn’t I just tell you that progress would ruin this country? Yes, I did.

We will be in this area for another night, before moving on to our villa on the Pacific coast.

Above the city of San Jose are the ancient forests, so green as to make the “green”, purple hair activists even more green with envy. And it does not take a genius to realize that no human will ever stroll through these forests. It’s not possible. Instead he will hop, stumble and crawl. The vegetation is that dense.

But the trails in the volcano park are wide and paved, if not a little steep. At the summit overlooking the lowlands, a curious tourist can look down upon the crater of volcano Poas, which was built by nature a few million years ago. It’s still smoking, and the last eruption was in 2017. That explains the various warnings. “You are entering this protected wilderness area at your own risk.” There, should he be so lucky as to witness a fiery eruption, the desperate, terrified one can attempt to dash inside one of the three or four concrete shelters. In 2017 bowling ball sized rocks were spit out of the mountain, to rain down upon the earth. and potholes in the concrete sidewalks bear witness to that exciting day.

The Poas crater is not small, approximately 2,500 meters wide. It is a “hot, hyper acid lake, complete with “hot springs” and “boiling mud spots”. And the shelters are for “ballistic protection” from “fumarolic activity”.

(At the site I saw an old man with no lower jaw, and his pitiful countenance prompted me to again recognize and appreciate my many blessings. Everyone is blessed, some more than others. Our blessings count, and to count them is to be humble, and wise.)

The greenery is unending. At least one shrub here is a botanical cousin to the laurels of Appalachia. The trees here have evolved to have some natural protection from the eruptions, and one in particular bears leaves that are thick, like shoe leather. Their surface is smooth, waxy, and the largest measure six inches long and four inches wide. Another prominent plant produces broad, circular leaves, three feet across, with a texture that is rougher than the south side of Chicago. It discourages all but the stoutest of plant-eating bugs, and wards off any other plant-eating creatures in the jungle.

From the crater a concrete path leads up to the Boto lagoon, named after the Indians who have since departed to various destinations and fates unknown. It is a pleasant stroll to the lagoon, provided one is in excellent physical condition, able, say, to run two marathons in a row. Otherwise, it is not for the weak hearted. The lagoon is the evidence of a failed volcano, 14-meters deep and 400-meters in diameter. It is not particularly inviting for swimmers, sporting a temperature of about 45-degrees and an eye-scalding, skin-frying pH of 4.4 to 6.5, whatever that means. The purple-hair-metal-faces will not appreciate the fact that the lagoon’s waters are constantly emitting tiny bubbles of CO2, the gas that is anathema to them. Never mind that trees in Central and S. America are gaining wood because of the abundance of that life-giving gas. The haters don’t know, and if they could, the purple-hairs would fill in the lagoon with peace signs and coexist stickers.

In Costa Rica strawberries are like pineapples in Hawaii, sweet, luscious, and plentiful.

***

To me it was a phenomenon, what I saw today. Probably because it is Good Friday, and a holiday, local people were out and about, everywhere. On the mountain roads we passed hundreds of people picnicking on the roadsides. Cars were parked, barely off the road, and on the grassy shoulders families celebrated their food, their lives, and one another. This culture is vastly different from that in America. Here there is social cohesion, familial pride, and what the French call “the joy of life.”

From the Boto lagoon my group set out on one of those “three hour tours.” Piloted by my able and intrepid daughter, our rental car took us through forests interrupted only by the narrow, winding, perilous and frightening roads. I’ve lived in the mountains of western N, Carolina for over 40-years, so the roads here caused me no great concern; but for American city folk, a trip like ours today would be daunting, at least.

The building codes are different from those in America. In fact, based on what I have seen, there is no building code at all; nor is there the concept of property setbacks. Along these roads a person is driving either on the road, or driving on someone’s front yard. I do not much exaggerate. Property lines apparently extend to the roads themselves, and the citizens use all they can. This is not a wealthy country, at least not in the American sense of wealth. But it is inhabited by a race of people who know one another, talk to one another, and understand one another. It is a way life that is barely existent anymore in America, if at all.

Roads here have an acute lack of signage, unlike in America where the highways are often hard to find amidst all the signs. So it is not difficult at all for a visitor to find herself driving through a village in the wrong direction on a one-way street; but locals are quick to point out her error with car horns and flashing headlights. From the volcanos -- there are several in this rugged land -- we drove in the direction of San Jose, the lights of which were shining far away and far, far below. Without a GPS device, navigating these roads would be not merely foolish, but futile. It seems that every foot of roadway is inhabited. Houses and stores line the roadsides, and different towns occur sporadically and magically, and are known by name only to the residents. There are no signs, unlike in my homeland, where every half-horse community has big brown aluminum signs denoting its “historic” district. Also, most roads bear two-way traffic, provided somebody coming in the opposite direction gets out of the way.

***

It’s a really good thing that temperatures never reach the unkind level of cold. Mornings in these mountains are cool, and attempting to build a fire with the local cordwood was for me a waste of time. I’ve never seen seasoned firewood that refused to burn, so this excursion has provided me that insight. The cabins at the Villa Calas have fireplaces, but mine turned out to be just a brick frustration

Look closely at the top photo. Find the sloth. The only thing that moves more slowly is the U. S. Congress.

.

Even if flight attendants earned 150-thousand dollars a year, I would still prefer a minimum wage job digging ditches.

“What did you do in the war, mommy?”

“Well, let’s see. I would begin my day squeezing into an ill-fitting and uncomfortable uniform, then I would ride a moving sidewalk for several miles before climbing into an airtight tube and locking myself inside with gangs of irritable, unpleasant passengers, each of whom believed with all their hearts that air travel was designed by God, and designated for them.

“Then the tube would roar down a runway before bringing into question the validity of the physical laws of nature, by zooming through a heavy fog and into a visually impenetrable cloud bank.

“That’s when all the rich rewards of my station in life would reveal themselves, as I delivered soft drinks and crackers to the mewling throng of malcontents sitting before me.”

“Gosh, mom, I bet that was awesome!”

Indeed. I have always contended that human beings are not supposed to climb inside machines that leave the ground unattached. It is as unnatural a thing as I can imagine. Yet here I am, along with my entire immediate family and two grandchildren, jetting our way across the blue, sometimes oily waters of the infamous Gulf of America. We are enroute to the tropical jungle paradise of Costa Rica, where we will strive to achieve adequate sunburns while dodging poison frogs. Our destination is a home near Manuel Antonio national park, where we have big plans to commune with some of our more recent ancestors, namely capuchin, howler, and squirrel monkeys.

***

American travelers are perhaps the most slovenly gang of tourists in the world. Where once men dressed in shirt and tie, and women wore dresses blessed with corsages, contemporary airline passengers show up at the gate today wearing either sweat pants or pajamas, or that most horrid of all known habiliment, tights, colloquially known to some, like me, as leotards. Flip-flops are popular, as are cutoff blue jeans, t-shirts emblazoned with tennis shoe logos, and bizarre, incongruous wardrobes that look to have been tossed out of Greg Gutfeld’s closet.

I am here compelled to offer to the women of the world a single bit of sage advice: Unless you are a teenage gymnast performing incredible feats on the parallel bars, you have little to no business wearing a leotard in public, especially in an international airport. The advice, incidentally, is for my benefit and the humane treatment of my eyeballs, and to spare your own-selves the embarrassing gawking of incredulous men like me. If when in a leotard your posterior looks like a plastic sack of golf balls, people will stare. Do the right thing.

There also seems now to be a plague of exposed, unsightly midriffs jiggling and sloshing hither and yon throughout the nation’s airports. This, too, is a sartorial abomination of the highest order. Have mercy.

***

In preparation for this expedition I spent many hours watching disaster shows on TV. One was particularly cruel, and depicted what happens to an overloaded jet when the pilot tries to get up enough speed to fly, while having forgotten to turn off the brakes. Those things are great when landing, but . . . The pilot did manage to get the hobbled plane airborne, but alas, the flight was brief, its end deadly.

I’ve never gotten inside an airplane and not expected to die in a fiery crash. It takes away the worry. Anticipate the worst, I always say, and when Fate cheats you, consider it a win.

And, probably just to spite buffoons like Al Gore, Jr., the gods of air traffic have given no indication that they will surrender to activists who neither understand science, nor seem the least bit interested in learning some. They are frustrated, and can only stand and await the end. I don’t know when the oil wells will run dry, but nobody seems too concerned about that inevitability. So the only worthy consideration when flying is not to fret over the world’s oil supply, but what is in the fuel tanks in your airplane

Traveling is such fun, provided one is a devout masochist. After four or so hours in the winged tube, my party and I disembarked and joined in the procession moving like a snail inside the San Jose airport, inching toward the customs desk. The cattle pen of nylon barriers bore the presence of 500-people, none of whom appeared to be any too happy. Gritting my teeth, snorting and scrubbing the concrete with my hooves, I joined in. It only took one hour for the procession to deliver me and mine to the official behind a glass partition, who would decide whether we would be allowed in the country. Weaving back and forth through the line had the (probably) intended purpose of having me come face to face with the same weary people, over and over. One of them, obviously an American, was dressed as I earlier described. She was fifty-ish, lean, wearing a gray t-shirt, the surface of which allowed the protrusion of her nipples to be on prominent display, not that I was at all interested. It was her hair upon which my gaze was repeatedly transfixed. Shoulder length, the strings of hair were reminiscent of oily, grayish-brown stalks of hay that had been left out in the rain. Ugh. On I trudged.

***

It is so odd that airports are equipped with public address systems, i.e., tin speakers turned up to the highest possible level. What is the purpose, aside from irritating people? The sounds are certainly audible, but are as unintelligible. What language do they use; and I mean in Charlotte, NC? Unsure, I’ve named it monogarblish.

After Life that so concerns the many,

But Death. And -- although it may seem to some

That fates worse than finite death, if any,

Might steer our souls toward a distant hope

That shimmers in the night as if t’were real,

-- We do not live beyond the finite scope

Of our mortality. Should not we feel

Then compelled to strive -- Strive! -- in earnestness

For what rewards might grace our fleeting days?

Is not Life our own sublime blessedness,

The opportunity to learn the ways

To practice well our exit, here and free,

Before the nighttime of Eternity?

Why did the D.C. crowd exclude themselves from taking the China virus vaccine?

Could it be that they wished to rear healthy children?

You do know, I presume, that our “dear leaders” excluded themselves.

It would seem, to a conscious human, that the government may not have our best interests in mind.

Will there be accountability? Are you out of your mind?

The election will be in November, and still there is no one worthy of a single vote.

No self-respecting person would run for office; and those who do are defeated.

The Republicans have the House, the Senate and the presidency, and what have they done with their power? What?