The Good Stuff, Waiting to be Lost
I was trying to read an article about why a guy named Lebron James won't save U.S. soccer, only to find that I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort by going straight to one of its very last sentences and then looking for something else to read. I was able to pick up the gist of that answer by reading the article, but that had been arduous and much like crossing a beach covered with huge, slippery rocks must be. The author was someone who obviously had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the sports popular in the U.S, and that enabled him to be especially adept at dropping all the big names -- names that meant nothing to me, excepting only that of the said Lebron James.
This difficulty wasn't the author's fault, or even mine. Instead it was what comes of getting away from things.
If such an article had appeared 20 or 30 years ago, I might've been able to stumble through it more easily, but now I just have to depend on what I think is the safe assumption, for example and for starters, that Lebron James is, renown-wise, the modern day equivalent in pro basketball of Michael Jordan (provided you've heard of him) and let it go at that.
I found out early that you lose stuff almost as soon as you start getting away from it, and that's a natural process that can't be helped. I've lost a little library of things that way. Bible knowledge, algebra, German, chess openings (and middle games and endgames for that matter), electronic circuitry, car mechanics, technical editing -- the list goes on and on, so that right now a good-sized intellectual desert is spreading out ever wider and deeper behind my head, and at an increasing speed.
This must be a good thing, at least for the brain, and I have to say that I can't recall one time in the last 60 years when knowing what to do with a binomial would've saved my hide.
And anyway I'm glad that there is so much still standing ahead, waiting to be lost.
This is why it's good to plant many more cantaloupes and watermelons in your garden than are really needed, as I did in the communal garden this year, despite some heavy criticism from one individual who should've known better. Now that that terrible drought has pretty much ended, a rogue raccoon whose movements can't be controlled raids my two melon patches, one fenced and one open, every night. He punches big, jagged holes in two or three of usually the biggest melons and mainly the striped watermelons, and eats out as much of the insides as he wants. But there are still so many that he can't get them all.
Nevertheless, it's making going to the garden more of a chore than it was during the worst days of the drought. To lose anything at any time is a little on the irksome side, and I did not plant and baby along those goodies just for the benefit of the wild animals, though I am told that I have a close-by neighbor who's been stringing cookies over his car and in other places, to attract bears.
This difficulty wasn't the author's fault, or even mine. Instead it was what comes of getting away from things.
If such an article had appeared 20 or 30 years ago, I might've been able to stumble through it more easily, but now I just have to depend on what I think is the safe assumption, for example and for starters, that Lebron James is, renown-wise, the modern day equivalent in pro basketball of Michael Jordan (provided you've heard of him) and let it go at that.
I found out early that you lose stuff almost as soon as you start getting away from it, and that's a natural process that can't be helped. I've lost a little library of things that way. Bible knowledge, algebra, German, chess openings (and middle games and endgames for that matter), electronic circuitry, car mechanics, technical editing -- the list goes on and on, so that right now a good-sized intellectual desert is spreading out ever wider and deeper behind my head, and at an increasing speed.
This must be a good thing, at least for the brain, and I have to say that I can't recall one time in the last 60 years when knowing what to do with a binomial would've saved my hide.
And anyway I'm glad that there is so much still standing ahead, waiting to be lost.
This is why it's good to plant many more cantaloupes and watermelons in your garden than are really needed, as I did in the communal garden this year, despite some heavy criticism from one individual who should've known better. Now that that terrible drought has pretty much ended, a rogue raccoon whose movements can't be controlled raids my two melon patches, one fenced and one open, every night. He punches big, jagged holes in two or three of usually the biggest melons and mainly the striped watermelons, and eats out as much of the insides as he wants. But there are still so many that he can't get them all.
Nevertheless, it's making going to the garden more of a chore than it was during the worst days of the drought. To lose anything at any time is a little on the irksome side, and I did not plant and baby along those goodies just for the benefit of the wild animals, though I am told that I have a close-by neighbor who's been stringing cookies over his car and in other places, to attract bears.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 9:34 AM
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