Guesstures is one of the board games that can bring out the competition, foster claim to bragging rights, and leave everyone in a better mood, without having to reach for the medicinal-use only bourbon, Ibuprofin, or a band-aid. 

After a long day at work, seven of us gathered in a friend’s living room tonight to continue building friendships on the foundation of our common spiritual beliefs.   

So there we were – teachers, an administrator, a construction foreman, semi-retired, metro transit supervisor, and an engineer – who have no reservations about playing this game, or Apple-to-Apples, Balderdash or whatnot.
It certainly allowed all of us to melt away the cares of the day.  Oh, yeah – our team lost by a few points — Next time buddy!

Never in my wildest imaginings did I think I would become so enamored with civil disobedience!  Henry David Thoreau refused to support the war effort of his day, the Mexican War. At the time I first read about him in high school, I had little experience to appreciate Thoreau.  But  Thoreau’s treatise is after the life experience of fifty years, very appropriate today.  He noted, “The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”  

I’m not a young man anymore.  

Not that I am ready to roll over and die just yet, though.   I have made an effort to go to the gym every weekday, to keep the gray at bay.  I try to be engaged with the social media, though it seems there is one school of thought that finds it quiaint or even mildly annoying that ‘old people’ use it for anything other than report comings and goings to restaurants and starbucks coffee.   And at an age now, very comfortable with married life,  I have joined the ranks of the over-forty somethings, who sport graying beards and staccato hair, Costco -fashion shorts and company polo shirts.  Fashion -sense is for the young, unmarried folks.  But then in my workplace, the ones who write all the code or hunch over benches testing devices shuffle about in flip-flops – while the managers who are attired in the unusual button down shirt and slacks, must have customers onsite that day.  

As for conversations, my peers discuss aches, colds, college-bound kids, and who will bring the bagels on Friday.   In contrast, younger men and women are planning a weekly competitive match-up, a vacation destination, or some activity, and the young marrieds have to hustle home for either toddler duty, a parent-teacher meeting, or a  youth sporting event. 

When my colleagues stop by my office or we have a chat in the hallway to and from the break room,  I can find myself in a conversation with another former navy Chief, one of the facilities workers, a former manager, or my co-worker D_ with whom we’ve been label the twin sons of different mothers for our penchant to be loud, amusing, and equally diligent on our search for the left-over snacks or catered lunch remains in the lunch-room.

Today one of the female engineers on my former project stopped by to see how my kids and spouse were doing – she commented before on the yellow sticky note that still covers a picture of my son- and his now-ex fiancee.  How the fund-raising was going for the walkathon Sheri was participating in.  And to chat about clutter in our respective offices.  

I can chatter about anything technical, social, or political.  Conversation is an art of listening to others though.    So glad I didn’t go off on one of my routine political rants that my generation is so fond of doing.  The 70s altered the consciousness of the country, the 80s  was all about money and success, the 90s for social mores, and since 2000, the loss of national identity. 

But one thing that 50 years provides, is some measure of perspective.   It really is going to be chaotic for the next several decades, but then every generation has faced a paradigm shift in what is important.   I know that in another fifty years,  the over-forty crowd will still be talking about kids, colds, and finances, the youth will still be planning whats in and whats out, and the politicians will still be singing the same tunes …. perhaps though from life-size holographic, personalized projections.

Ha!

Oh wow, it’s my birthday today and I forgot – as I really don’t care to remember anymore.  It’s on one hand, now I feel better and I’m getting in better shape, and on the other hand a race with Father Time – with increasing aches and pains.  So in this clip,   Monty Python’s   Not quite dead yet!  51? I feel 40.   I’m feeling better!”

When I decided to quit trudging through life in a perpetual work -commute-weekend chores-church-work cycle, it became something of a mission to find a hobby, activity, or project, that a fifty-one year old man could enjoy.  It’s even more of a challenge with a perpetual dearth of money. 
Exercise costs very little so it is a favorite.  Or more recently, hiking. Now I am in decent shape, as I go to the gym. sometimes less frequently that I should, but in the last two years I routinely have been to the gym for an hour or so three times a week.   But there is something about being outdoors and away.

I have (re)discovered hiking.  Day hikes such as one I spent this morning.  I decided to start by hiking the county parks in the East County.   I have been to Flynn Springs several times, and to Lindo Lake, but I let Google discover that I had never been to Louis Steltzer County Park in the East County which was closer somewhat than driving out to Ramona or to Torrey Pines State Beach  So my dog Sydney and I hiked to the Steltzer summit trail this morning.    It was a decidely modest-exercise hike – until the final third of a mile to the summit which probably was the most heart-pounding exercise I had outside of the gym elliptical machine this year.

When you misplace your reading glasses at this age, you need Grace. From your peers at work, social circle – though they too may be hunting for their own at the time, and from your children.  There’s a running joke from my peer review committee when we critique test procedures I’ve developed, that I need larger font, to read what I wrote — when it’s displayed by projector!    And when I inspect circuit cards, my co-worker and I share an “I spy” or pocket magnifying glass – when we forget our respective glasses. 

Though we all now are focusing on better health, by going to the company-sponsored gym near work, aches and pains aren’t any longer “signs of weakness leaving the body”, as the Marines are fond of saying, but decrepitude!  Rotator cuff, “tennis elbow” tendon strains, the padding around the midsection – are all reminders that I’m never seeing forty, nevermind 25 again. 

Now where was I going with this?   
And I realize I must keep putting new information in my head to keep the outflow at some sort of control.   It’s like real-life, where politicians are grateful for every new catastrophe or Lindsay Lohan debacle – I guess that is a natural catastrophe too, come to think – for the public to collectively forget the failures of the last government effort.    I am studying more and practicing new technologies, designed for keeping up with my young engineer peers at work. 
Now if I only could remember why….

 Combat veterans have another reason to be outraged by arrogant wannabees.  In an article,  New York Times, May 18th.,  that reveals the  Connecticut Attorney General has been trading on a wartime history that is indefensible.   As a veteran, if you find it irritating that a former President was a Guardsman who was guarding the rear, ticked that another silver spoon-fed politician as a vet twenty years earlier detailed conduct of combat soldiers before Congress, angered by a third who continues shabby treatment of veteran issues as a legislator when touting military service as a POW that other former POWs question.   But for this politician to arrogantly believe it is cachet today to be a combat veteran, in order to win votes and approval – incredible!   For a lawyer turned politician to continue the practice of creatively manipulating juries/voters through inferred, implied and crafted speech – has no understanding that facts are all available to be researched on the Internet.

Politics. A contest of will between “the public” and the “the public servant”.   In 2010, the public is roused out of a stupor, and demanding that our Government return control to the the governed.   In California, we have a governor’s race whose candidates are a jostling to demonstrate who has more dirt on the other, platitudes and restating the problems rather than indicating solutions.  At the national level, the Government has spent all the money that China is willing to lend us AND is giving away more Monopoly money to prop up governments which are also full of corruption and idiocy.    
The much maligned, abused and ignored public has been growing in vocal and ballot-opposition.   WE THE PEOPLE have far to go.  There is still a general contempt in the halls of power for us.  The news media is beginning to see where their bread is truly buttered;  little at a time, the tide of contempt for a politically-savvy and ground-swell body-politic is reversing.   The Arizona citizen is absolutely correct in demanding a government put some teeth in the regulations that our federal government does not have the will to enforce. In California we should demand the same commitment from our leaders – but the small lobbyist groups which in truth are the unelected government have held sway far too long.  In Washington, all the bureaucracy has destroyed our future.  The talk of improving conditions economically is refuted by reality.  Flooding the cable channels with foolsih drivel will not put food on my table or gasoline in my car.  When there is no job to make the money that the government plans to siphon from us, a government job or handout is just monopoly money.
I should advise that we all take a realistic if jaundiced eye at all the chaos of our present,  I plan to carry on outwardly as usual, but become self-reliant more and more.  I have cut the bonds of servitude and silence, and invite the reader to join the Formerly Silent Majority!