Cardiac Rehab

It's a long "gym" with machines lining the promenade. At the back are some diagnostic tools, a rowing machine, a treadmill and a friggin' tv. There're two Adams; Adam 1, the supervisor, and Adam 2, a physical therapist; Yvonne & Javier assist. I had an appointment in February but The Deadly Virus forced a reschedule.

The "scene" was raucous when Michelle and I arrived but when I told Adam about the PTSD he quickly took us to a private room. After the history-taking I clambered aboard the treadmill and did a few wind-sprints at 2 mph (3.2km/hr) for about a minute or so. Then it was on to the recumbent bicycle where I lasted 8 minutes at a sedate amble. We wrapped it up with an ergomometer.

We were there almost two hours. Most folks are expected to come in three times a week, but the community center gym is quiet and we frequently have it to ourselves, so I declined. But we got a baseline and some good advice on how to guage the severity of the angina. Further!

Leisure

I started school, University, at age 33. I didn't have anything in particular in mind; I'd grown bored with my thoughts and was curious. The U seemed a good place to go find out.

When I asked the philosophy professor the meaning of life he replied, "Free time."

Herewith is an excerpt from page nine of Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime.

This is how it's done...

Illustration by Marc Marc Simont

from Ten Copycats In A Boat

(Harper & Row, 1980)

American Democracy: thirtieth on the Economist's List

Economist’s Democracy Index labeled Taiwan a “full democracy” for the first time. In 2022, the index named Taiwan [PDF] the world’s tenth-most-democratic country, ranking it higher than its Asian neighbors (Japan ranked sixteenth and South Korea ranked twenty-fourth) and the United States, which was thirtieth. Recent elections have seen high voter turnout.

See the last paragraph in the section headed:

Has Beijing undermined Taiwan’s democracy?

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-relations-tension-us-policy-biden

Clam Chowder Performance

On page 4 in Cosmic Apprentice by Dorian Sagan (Univ of MN Press, 2013), he recounts being delayed by a TSA official when a can of Trader Joe’s condensed clam chowder was discovered in his luggage. After checking around, the official gave Dorian the go-ahead. See below.

 

 

Doesn’t this seem like an opportunity? What if every frequent flier carried a can of condensed clam chowder with them? It’d be a performance piece!  

Roast

I'm enjoying having an oven. I never succeeded in making eye-of-round roast in a frying pan when I lived in Phoebe. 

Phoebe

A dutch-oven might've worked but I chose the accordion instead.

The Yard

Decades ago there was a maple tree and a line of small basalt boulders separating the upper half from the lower. The front half was grass; a couple of yuccas perched on the leading edge of the upper level while a huge cholla presided over the rest. 

One weekend late in the aughts, I rented a bobcat and with Vince's help we dug out the grass, loaded it into a rented pickup & took it to the dump. It was three weeks before I could walk again. Somewhere along the way the maple died and an elm grew in the center of the cholla.

After I left in 2010, Michelle cut the cholla back, removed the elm, planted some apache plume and had some brickwork put in.

The cholla, now half the size it once was, still attracts thrashers, distant cousins of the nightingale, and roadrunners.

Streetwalker

Meat Loaf

online, renewing a library book, I stumbled upon teen-author Sarah Van Name's bio in which she mentions The Toast. I went to see and this came up. Though, I got no further, I thought you might find it entertaining. It stopped in 2016. (Meat Loaf is the professional name of Michael Lee Aday)

Let’s Make Meat Loaf A Lesbian Icon

For the record: Later, I checked out The Toast and decided it must be a lesbian thing; I wasn't impressed. Oh, well.

Update: a friend emailed to let me know that a meatloaf is a guy who's attracted to a woman who's lesbian; googling gives a variety of other definitions.

Michael Adalay (aka Meat Loaf) - I'd Do Anything For Love

Process...NOT Goal

This post, the one you're now looking at, was the first on Wahnfried Der Nomad. In October of 2023, after retiring from the road, I changed the blog's title to Wahnfried Der Feststehend, which translates to "settled." Though much iis different, as its said in Waiting For Godot: The essential doesn't change. Thus, I decided to reuse that first post on this one. 

That said, if you read the last post on Wahnfried Der Feststehend, you might've expected me, as did I, to be dead. It's a puzzle, but I'm doing what I can to keep my "‘satiable curtiosities" (ala Kipling's The Elephant's Child) going.

Below is the post as it appears on Wahnfried Der Festehend....

...once we recognize the process nature of human experience and the infinite potentialities of human thinking and discovery, we give up hope of an orderly and completed system of thinking.

But having given that up, we are begun upon an intellectual adventure which has within it high excitement and genuine creative potential. Many of us will find the ambiguity and inexorable incompleteness of this approach to be threatening. Certainly I experience these feelings myself.

But I know too that once we change the conception of the enterprise in which we are engaged to that of exploration in an infinite system, once we give up the hope of making the ultimate and definitive discovery and recognize that our transaction with our experience of the out-there is a creative, artistic one, there is more to be gained than lost.

(From: The Search For Authenticity by J.F.T. Bugental 1965)

And if Manny (with cigar) sez it's so, it's so!