DNA Results, COPD, RA, and Other Things, Oh My

Well, one of Ms Ché's cousins and her husband are coming to visit from Nevada tomorrow, and we're preparing to show them the sights. Some of them, anyway. They've been all around the world, but have never been to New Mexico, and they want a fix of "vibrant art." This is the place, right?

It's gonna be a whirlwind, as it's only two-three days, and we're planning adventures to Taos to see the Mabel Dodge Luhan house and take in the exhibit on her at the Harwood, then to the Fechin house where the Taos Art Museum is located, then out to the Pueblo. Next day, Santa Fe. The Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, several galleries (we couldn't possibly do more than a few of them) and then out to eat at Harry's Roadhouse (a must-stop-in for all out of town visitors though if it is as crowded as it can get, we'll happily go out to La Plancha in El Dorado.)

Then finally the next day, if we can swing it, out to our place, and the Route 66 tour into Albuquerque and possibly beyond. We live near what I believe is the longest stretch of the Old Route 66 still in use -- at least it's the longest stretch of it in New Mexico -- and while it isn't particularly touristy, it's actually a nice drive, and  when the weather is good, the Mother Road is always a treat.

I'm wondering how much of this I can actually do, however. One of the problems associated with RA -- rheumatoid arthritis -- is fatigue. Fatigue is also a factor in recovery from pneumonia. I've tried to do some work outdoors, catching up a little bit on spring-time chores I wasn't able to do before, and I've found I become fatigued in only a few minutes. Twenty minutes is about the longest I can go at a stretch. Each of these days of adventure next week are going to be long... We'll see how much of it I can do...

Ms. Ché and I did the Ancestry.com DNA test. Until fairly recently, it was considered a borderline fraud, in part because DNA tests are not yet able to state with certainty the specific ancestry of testees. The results obtained give general possibilities at best. Because Ancestry really didn't clarify how non-specific the results were, they got a lot of complaints from people who did the test and got results that appeared to have nothing at all to do with their actual (documented) ancestry.

I got my results back. We're still waiting for Ms Ché's.

Mine were interesting, and I think they are fairly accurate, though they require interpretation to understand.

The surprise was that I show no German ancestry, nor do my cousins who have also taken the test.

It's taken me a while to fathom that because my paternal (their maternal) grandmother's parents emigrated from (what would become) Germany in the 1850s. There's no doubt about it. We know where they came from, we have documentary evidence, yadda yadda, but there is no German ancestry identifiable in our DNA. How can that be?

Well. Could be they weren't ethnic Germans. That's the easiest explanation. It's one that fits some of the stories I've heard that suggest they were descendants of Jewish conversos. Of course, wouldn't you know, my DNA shows no "European Jewish" ancestry, either.

It does show what I take to be an overabundance of British ancestry (67%). That's much higher than I figure it should be because I only inherited British ancestry from my mother (who was essentially of British ancestry all the way down, though her people had come to America starting soon after the Mayflower -- and there are hints that she had at least one ancestor on the Mayflower itself.)

My father, on the other hand, was half Irish and half German. Well, that's what he thought. So I should be a quarter Irish, a quarter German, and half British.

The test showed my DNA was 25% Irish, no German, 67% British, 7% Eastern European, and less than one percent each Scandinavian and Iberian.

Oh. What happened to the German?

It turns out Ancestry DNA doesn't even have a German category. The closest thing it has is "Central European," and if you dig around enough in their articles about the test, they state that the test cannot distinguish between British, German, and Scandinavian ancestry with any certainty. A test report may come back, as mine did, with an overabundance of British DNA, but no Central European ancestry. The "missing German" ancestry may well be folded in with the extra-British DNA. In fact, that's probably where it is.

My cousins, on the other hand, show an excess of Scandinavian ancestry in their DNA, and once again, that may be where the "missing German" is.

The 7% Eastern European ancestry indicated in my DNA is likely from my German great grandparents, and it may be a hint of their Jewish ancestry, but I don't know. As there are no specifically Jewish markers, I'll have to let that rumor rest for a while. There are records in Germany, so maybe one day I'll probe them more deeply and find out, but for now I'll let that ride.

The tiny bit of Scandinavian ancestry indicated in my DNA is probably from my Irish-German father. His Irish ancestors claimed to be "Irish" -- ie: Celts -- but that's likely a crock, as practically everyone in Ireland has some Scandinavian ancestry from the Viking and Norman invasions. Particularly so for red-heads like me whose red-head is a variation on blond, as opposed to the red-heads who may be Celt whose red-headedness is a variation on black hair.

The tiny bit of "Iberian" -- which could be Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian -- ancestry I attribute to my mother's father. His last name (Olive) is possibly French, possibly Scottish. Could be both given the way the French and the Scots were intertwined at one time (ie: during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots and before).

My mother's father's mother was from Colonial New England stock -- going back as far as I could trace in America and then in England as far back as I wanted to go. My mother's father's father's line stubbed out in Virginia with my mother's father's grandfather who was born c. 1798. That's all I could find out. There was no record before that.

My suspicion is that the original Olive immigrants came from Scotland or Northern Ireland at about that time, settled in Western Virginia, then moved to Kentucky, then, finally to Indiana as the Indians were expelled and the West opened to settlement.

My mother's mother's people were British from the dawn of time.

I had thought my mother was at least partially Irish -- she seemed to think so herself, but she didn't really know, because she didn't know much of anything about her biological father. Then years ago, I saw a film version of D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers," and I was stunned that one of the very British characters was the spitting image of my mother, both visually and more importantly behaviorally. Wait I thought, was my mother actually British?

Indeed, that's what I found -- at least on her mother's side as well as on her father's mother's side, and probably significantly on her father's father's side too.

Huh. Who'd a thunk? What still intrigues me is that I recognized my mother's character in a movie of a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, based in part on his own experience and family. Well, how about that?

Oh yes, COPD. Part of the treatment I'm undergoing is for COPD, which I never really thought I had, but apparently I do, thanks to repeated bouts of pneumonia and scarring from emphysema which is a result of smoking. I stopped smoking twenty years ago, and I thought I was doing pretty good at healing my lungs from the Devil Tobacco, but apparently several things have conspired to set me back. One of them is rheumatoid arthritis. Turns out that lung inflammation (like joint inflammation) is a consequence of RA, and lung inflammation can and does make RA patients susceptible to pneumonia.

Ay!

My doctor told me that the prednisone I take for RA symptoms is an immunosuppressant which may be exacerbating my tendency to get pneumonia, but others say that prednisone actually suppresses the inflammation which makes it less likely that I will get pneumonia. So. Who knows?

We'll see what the rheumatologist has to say about that...

----------------------------------
UPDATE: Ms Ché just got her DNA results back, and it is astonishing, practically a book in the making. No time to go into details, but the upshot is that her DNA spans the globe. Literally,

OT: Carboy

When I was very little, I was obsessed with cars and I became notorious for being able to identify the makes and models of practically every car on the road on sight -- and letting everybody know, too. It was considered something of a trick. Much later on, I wondered if my parents were worried about my youthful talent since my older brother had the ability to remember and recall baseball statistics in detail for decades in the past but could learn practically nothing else; his condition is called autism now, but in those days he was described as an "idiot savant". Perhaps I would turn out the same way? Hard to say...

We've been looking for an old car to supplement The Red Van to cruise Old Route 66  -- which we live quite near. There are plenty of geezers in this area who get themselves an old car to go cruising in on balmy weekends or to show off at the plaza in town. As I pore through the listings online, a whole lot of vehicles catch my eye and many are cars I remember intimately from when I was a child.

Perhaps my mother's closest friend when I was little was the widow of the local Buick dealer, and her car was one of my favorites. Of course it was a Buick, a 1941 black Roadmaster, quite an impressive automobile, and surprisingly not showing any age to speak of by the early 1950's when I was driven around in it from time to time.

It was much like this one:

1941 Buick Roadmaster (via Wikimedia Commons)

Our own car at the time was a 1942 Packard Clipper that had seen better days. It was green... well, it had been at one time, but the paint had faded to a wretched gray with greenish highlights. There was a significant dent in the right rear fender -- whether someone ran into the car or something else happened, I don't remember. The stuffing was coming out  of the driver's side armrest and the upholstery was torn in places. I don't think the radio worked. The manual transmission was balky -- it sometimes wouldn't go in reverse, and going forward it would often get stuck in low. My mother hated to drive it.

This was the model, however:

1942 Packard Clipper

 And here's a picture of Little Me standing in the yard with the Packard in the background.



Finally, in 1951, we got a new car, actually a slightly used one, a 1950 Plymouth De Luxe like this one:

1950 Plymouth

I was very fond of that car and to this day every time I see one, I get a little thrill. There is one available fairly nearby, and the price is decent, so it's on my list of potentials...

Next, we got a 1957 Ford Fairlane, purchased new in Los Angeles (the name of the dealer escapes me now, but I recalled it not so very long ago, could even visualize the salesman...)  It was something like this (it was tan, but it was a fordor):

1957 Ford Fairlane models from brochure

 It was followed by a 1959 Hillman Minx, very much like this:



It was the first car I actually drove myself, not very well to be sure. It was foreign and small, and difficult to service, so we got rid of it pretty quickly.

The Hillman was followed by a 1961 Ford Galaxie. It was huge. Domestic. Black with a red interior. And it was considered very sharp in those days:

1961 Ford Galaxie from brochure

Next, can you guess? A Mustang. Yes, it was a 1965, green, and extraordinarily fun for me to drive. By then I had a driver's license. And I could drive the Mustang quite well, thank you very much. Of course, it was smaller than the Hillman, but who cared!

1965 Green Mustang

After that, I got my own car, a 1950 Packard Victoria Convertible... A very rare model, and today worth a good deal of money. I think I paid $250 for it -- I had only $100 and borrowed the rest from my mother or sister. This car was on its last legs when I got it, barely running at the time. I did some minor repairs and started replacing the top, but I don't think I drove it for more than a few months before it died the death -- and I couldn't afford to put more money into it. So it sat in the garage for a couple of years, and then I gave it to a friend who said he wanted to restore it and thought he could do so for a decent price. I don't know what he paid for the restoration, but this is pretty much what the car looked like when it was done:



Except he painted it gold, which I never liked. The car was a really nice turquoise with a red leather interior when I bought it. The top was cream color. As I recall, the power equipment (seat, top, windows, windshield wipers) was all pretty wheezy, but the radio worked!

Though I didn't approve of the color he had it painted, he loved the car and eventually sold it for a pretty penny.

The next car I bought was a 1951 Buick Roadmaster, a car I enjoyed enormously, drove everywhere, and I would love to find another one like it. I think I paid $150 for it and I sold it for the same price several years later.

1951 Buick Roadmaster

I followed that with a 1958 Cadillac, which I didn't like quite as much as the Buick, but was happy enough with. Again, I bought it for very little and sold it several years later for about what I paid for it.

1958 Cadillac 60 Special

After that one, there seemed to be a swirl of new and used cars, mostly Chevrolets and Fords, but then after the Escort lost a wheel on the freeway (it just snapped right off), the switch was on to Toyota and then to Subaru.

The last car we had (donated it to charity before The Big Move) was a Pontiac; we brought The Red Van out to New Mexico where it has been many times before, and it has been reliable transportation through the fall and winter, but now that spring is coming on, the hunt for a cruising car is underway.

Frivolous, I know!

More Than Half Way There

Dateline: Early Morning, Kingman AZ

Wiping the crusts from my eyes, I'm stumbling around a motel room looking for bits and pieces of my wardrobe and grooming accessories to get ready to go down to breakfast before heading out on the second leg of my journey back to New Mexico, the journey that was postponed due to... coughing up blood and various annoyances associated with pneumonia and suspected other diseases. Well, I have officially been declared TB Negative, and I have the paperwork that proves it with me, so that part at least is done.

Got a call last week from our public works dept in New Mexico. They'd turned off our water. Good thing. Of course it had been running for who knows how long, the bill is something like $94 so it could be days, it could be weeks, but it had been running, due no doubt to busted pipes thanks to the freeze. Naturally, because the house was unoccupied when this happened, any damages are not covered by insurance. So my task is to assess the damage and get repairs under way if I can. It being New Mexico and all, you never know! This is not a slam, by the way. It is just the way things are in NM. It may take a while.

I worried that the pipes would break, of course, but the plastic plumbing that was used when the whole thing was replaced was supposed to be immune to freeze bursts. So I'm a bit puzzled. On the other hand, temperatures were so very low, double-digits below freezing on several occasions, it's not all that much of a surprise that they couldn't handle it. I keep thinking that if I had been able to go back in January when I intended to -- before the Big Freeze -- this might have been avoided, but the fact is I was too sick, and that's just the way it is.

Kingman is a little more than half-way there. It's a beautiful day as is so often the case, and though I dread what I may find, I'm very much looking forward to arriving. It's... hard to explain. But then, my heart soars whenever I pass over the line from Arizona into New Mexico. And once at our place in the East Mountains (ie: east of Albuquerque, south of Santa Fe) there is such a sense of... relief and release? Well, borderline joy will do! ETA sometime this afternoon.

Till then.

Travel Notes

It's a long haul between Northern/Central California and Central New Mexico, as I'm sure everyone who's driven it knows, and those few who might stumble on this little corner of CyberSpace have seen me write about a few times.

It's about 1100 miles each way, two days driving, one overnight stop (usually in Kingman, AZ), about 10 hours on the road in one segment, 11 hours in the other. The route I take is very historical for a lot of American migrants: down California's Central Valley on US Hwy 99 to Bakersfield, across the Tehachapis on California State Route 58 to Barstow, then on to NM on I-40 -- which parallels the old Route 66, the Mother Road, America's Main Street, and from which many segments of Route 66 are still easily accessible.

The longest stretch of the actual Route 66 I'm aware of that's still in use is now SR333 in New Mexico, also called Central Avenue (or just "Central") in some places. Although officially it only runs from Tijeras to Moriarty, about 27 miles or so, it actually runs all the way through Albuquerque, along Central to where it hooks up with I-40 at Paseo del Volcan, which is easily another 25 miles or so. And then I-40 is either on or directly parallel to the remainders of Route 66 most of the rest of the way west.

[As a personal side note, this trip was something of a struggle for me, much more so than any previous trip, and while in NM I had quite a scare as I was putting up Christmas lights. The episode passed, but it was a not-so-gentle reminder of, shall we say, mortality, my own in this case. What -- if anything -- to do about it is still being worked out.]

While driving, I thought a good deal about what sort of connections I've had to this road since I was an infant. In an earlier post I wrote that when I left Iowa where I was born, it was in the backseat of a 1942 Packard driven hellbent for leather westward, much of the trip -- at least from St. Louis on -- was on Route 66. As far as I know -- and I can't be absolutely certain at this point, it was many years ago after all, and I wasn't taking notes at the time (heh) -- it was pretty much the route from St. Louis, through Missouri, Oklahoma, across the top of Texas, through New Mexico, Arizona and the Mojave Desert in California, to Barstow, then up to Bakersfield, and finally over to the Coast on what is now the 46, taking the 101 south to Santa Maria. But the route could have almost as easily followed Route 66 through Los Angeles and picked up the 101 from Pasadena or wherever. In fact, given some of the household moves when I was a child, from Santa Maria to various places in the Los Angeles Basin along what was still the Route 66 route, I highly suspect that it was that route that got us to the Central Coast, not the upper one through Bakersfield.

A note on Highway names: In Southern California it is the custom to refer to all freeways and numbered highways as "The" -- whatever. For example, Interstate 40 is called "The 40," and Highway 101 up the coast is called "The 101." In Northern California, highways are called by their number or other designation without "The", so for example, one travels on "99" up and down the Valley, or on "I-5" on the West Side. Cross over into Arizona, and you call the northern Interstate "I-40", without "The", much the way Northern Californians refer to their highways, but when you get to New Mexico, things get a little hinky. You may refer to the Interstates as "I-40" or "I-25" or just "40" and "25." Or you may say the cardinal directions, "north and south," "east and west" "on the Interstate", and that's sufficient to know which one is being referred to, unless you're in Las Cruses, and I'm not sure what they say there, since I-10 picks up in Las Cruses for the southern route west.

State highways in New Mexico are called whatever people want to call them, including the numbers they have now, numbers they used to have, or names that they were once called or are currently known by.

For example, SR333 used to be Route 66, and some people still call it that. It's also called "Central." SR550 used to be 44W, and some people still call it that. SR14 is also called "The Turquoise Trail," and so on, but whatever the case, one is just expected to know most or all of the variations on highway names and designations in New Mexico, and one of the surest signs you're an outlander is if you don't, or if you're confused about it. I still get confused, though I'm learning. Ha ha.

So I was thinking as I was driving along during this last trip that Route 66 was the way I got to California in the first place, and it's the way I've been trying to leave it for some years now, so far without complete success. Parts of the route still preserve some of what used to be, but much of the mythology of Route 66 makes it into much more than it ever was back in the day. It was just a road. To get from place to place. Back before there were freeways.

Of course it brought all those refugees from Oklahoma and the Dust Bowl to California when time was. And that trek was a trial, often dismal and heartbreaking, and not just because the road was a challenge. People were a challenge. Especially eager to challenge refugees.

Road travel was not easy in this country until the advent of the Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower administration, and the Interstate system was advocated at the time on the basis of Defense. They would be roads that would make it easy to transport military materiel and personnel when the dreaded Soviets invaded. Or whatever. The pre-Interstate system was a patchwork at best, and in many places, it was lousy, run down or difficult to get through without breakdown or harassment. The notion that Route 66 was somehow this grand Main Street through the country, so very pleasant and appealing every inch of the way, with happy merchants eager to serve their traveling customers is just silly. It wasn't like that. In fact, it was rough.

But then, all roads and highways in this country were essentially rough back in those days, and it really was not easy to get goods and people from place to place by road. The alternative, of course, was the train, and that was how most people and goods got from place to place, not by road.

Along the highway route today there are numerous trains, almost all freight trains, loaded down with shipping containers in an endless -- and colorful -- stream, going this way and that, taking some of the shipping burden off the Interstate, but still the Interstate highways are dominated by truckers. Before the economic crash, trucks were so pervasive on the Interstates and State Highways, it was often difficult or impossible to maneuver through or around them. There is still a predominance of truck traffic, and in many areas, especially in California, the trucks have nearly destroyed the Interstate highways and other roads. There are places in Arizona where the Interstate has been allowed to deteriorate significantly, but for the most part, it still isn't as bad there as it is nearly everywhere in California. In New Mexico, on the other hand, much of the Interstate highway system (and quite a few sections of state highway) has been rebuilt from the ground up in the past few years. It's mostly in very good shape, and the completion of reconstruction I-40 and most of I-25 in and around Albuquerque has made an astonishing improvement in road travel through there, one that is visually striking almost every mile of the way. The I-40/I-25 interchange in Albuquerque (called "The Big I") is stunning, both functionally and visually. It is one of the easiest big interchanges to navigate I've seen (well, except when parts of it are shut down for various reasons). And visually, it borders on stupendous. I won't go so far as to say it is "beautiful," but for what it is, it ain't bad.

But then, practically every overpass on the Interstates in Albuquerque is a work of art, meant to appeal to the aesthetic senses of drivers. Think about that. Here's a road that's just supposed to get you from place to place efficiently, and everywhere along the way through Albuquerque, there's Art, at least an attempt at Beauty, and some of it is really intriguing stuff. Besides which it is laid out well, the signage is good, and while some of the drivers are wild, you can generally get where you need to go without too much of a struggle.

There is no other city on the route I take that has put so much care into the appearance and the functionality of the Interstates that pass through. Albuquerque is in a class by itself.

And in Albuquerque, too, the legendary Route 66 lives on in all kinds of ways along Central Avenue. It is still the main surface street through town, and much of what once was there is still there as if little or nothing had changed. It's still very busy, littered with roadside attractions and city services (though many of the motels and restaurants that catered to tourists are gone there has been an effort to preserve some indications of them, and in some cases the actual sites and buildings as well). But Central is a vibrant commercial street; things come and go. There is little permanence, but there is a lot of history, from the Old Town Plaza (c.1706) to the University of New Mexico, and everything in between, including Downtown.

Farther out along Central/66 to the east, a lot of the stops and attractions are gone, but some of them are still there, still as vital as ever, and for the most part they don't cater to tourists at all, or only peripherally. They are local businesses, with a largely local clientele, and if by chance a Route 66 aficionado happens by, that's fine, if not, that's fine, too!

So many people, including so many people I care a lot about, have made the trek west -- or in some cases east -- along the storied Route 66 and its successors. Despite all the changes there's a strong sense of ...stability to be gained from what's been preserved along the way, and from what so many of the travelers or their descendants have become.

One day, though, I'll have to do some riffs on what it was like in the backseat of that 1942 Packard. I don't remember the trip west specifically (but I still carry some simple memories of the car and trips made in it) but I could go on at some length about that backseat. It became almost like another room in my home. But that's a whole other story for another time.

Then there are all the stories of Pismo Beach I could tell.

Heh.

Get Your Kicks

Today and tomorrow are travel days. Back to California, most of the route to Barstow paralleling, and in some cases actually on, The Mother Road - America's Main Street - Route 66.

It's quite a trip. So much history. So much present. Even some future.

On the Road Again

I'm supposed to leave today for New Mexico. I'm dawdling. Not because I don't want to go; I very much do.

But there is a kind of inner resistance to driving through Arizona again. It creeps me out. Arizona is in the process of secession, and it is ruled by freaks on the loose.

360 miles through Arizona. The alternate route, through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, is 360 miles longer. Another half-day on the road at least. And I haven't driven that route for decades.

May have to suck it up though.

What have we come to?

Thoughts before traveling

    I-40 outside of Grants, NM. Mount Taylor (Diné: Tsoodził) in the distance. March, 2008.


I'll be on the road tomorrow and Thursday, heading out to New Mexico to assess the situation. I got a call from a former neighbor a couple of weeks ago saying she hoped I be coming out to NM soon. She wouldn't say, exactly, but there might be a problem. I couldn't leave at the time because the painters were coming to paint the house in California as soon as there was any clear weather, which there was and they did. The weather turned ugly, however, and two of the three mountain ranges I have to cross were tied up in blizzards. Best to wait.

As far as I can tell, tomorrow will begin an fairly extended period of mostly clear weather from Southern California to mid New Mexico so I'll give it a try. The van is good in snow, but I'm not that fond of driving in a blizzard (which I've done a few times.) I've never been very good at driving in snow in any case, not having grown up with the White Stuff. When I was out in New Mexico in December, there was snow one morning, maybe two-three inches, hardly a blizzard, and most of it melted by noon. I went to get some supplies, and the lady at the store, perhaps after noticing my Californina license plates, went on at some length about the snowy conditions the previous week and how drivers who'd never been in anything worse than a slight dusting of snow come out there to the country and think they know how to drive. The wind up in the ditches or overturned on a patch of ice, and she thought they were just stupid. She said, "I remember when we used to get six to eight feet of snow at a time every winter. Now, we're lucky to get a whole foot of snow the whole season."

I gave her a look.

"When was the snowfall ever six or eight feet?" (That can sometimes happen in the Sierras, though rarely in one storm. It'll accumulate that much pretty quick, though.) She sort of muttered, "Oh, eight-ten years ago. Maybe 20. You know. It used to be bad. A lot worse than it is now. Where's your place?" I told her. She said, "Well, it's not so bad there, they plow and stuff, so you're probably OK. I live farther out, and they never clear the roads out there." Turns out where she lives, they're lucky to have electricity. And what they have goes out plenty often.

Parts of rural New Mexico are still very old-fashioned. To put it mildly. Our place is on a paved road, of all things. Electricity. Natural gas. Running water. Even sewer. Telephone and cable if I want it -- I won't have cable, though, so there's no teevee. Nothing comes in over the air. We can play videos and DVDs if we want. And of course there's radio, from Albuquerque and Santa Fe and parts east and west. It's pretty good in New Mexico, unlike some other parts of the country. Variety of formats, stations, and programming, some of it in Spanish, but New Mexico Spanish, which is distinctive, and I'm still learning some of its idioms. Some of the radio broadcasts are in Native languages, primarily Diné (Navajo), but also some of the Pueblo Keresan, Tiwa and other languages as well. And one of our old radios brings in good, clear shortwave stations from all over the place, including China and Europe. Some of it is in English!

UPDATE (02/24/10)

I like the fact that it's "starting" to dawn on some of the hotter legal shots on the Intertubes that the Department of "Justice" is pretty much irredeemably corrupted and politicized. Hm. Seems to have something to do with Careerist Margolis and his history as a "fixer" to smooth over otherwise inconvenient actions -- or as the case may be, lack thereof. Bmaz over at FDL gets into some of it. The sad thing, of course, as always, is that these revelations are given with only a sigh. As if nothing can be done about it except for Documenting the Atrocities.

For History's Sake. I guess. You know. If anyone ever gets around to probing What The Fuck Happened and all. 

Meanwhile, the Pauliacs have been tramping all over the place. One of the Greater Mysteries to me has been the need so many Libertarians and their fellow travelers have to masquerade as something they're not, for example as "Liberals." Even "Hard Left Liberals" the way Markos does.

They're mostly not Liberals at all, nor are they even remotely "Hard Left," but what happens when they put on this act -- and it is an act -- is that their position gets defined as "Left" or "Liberal" in the media and in the eyes of much of the public, even though they are Libertarians (big or little "L" it doesn't matter) who essentially despise the "Left" and all it stands for. World without end, Amen.

There's nothing more despicable in politics than this habit of The Masquerade. Everybody seems to do it -- if they want to be taken "seriously." They pretend to be what they are not, to believe what they don't, to support what they despise. This is apparently how politics is supposed to be done in the Big Boy's Club, and your position in the Club is based on how many of the Rubes you can fool and keep fooled by your little act.

Obama's mask is more than a little tattered these days, but he still maintains a solid "favorable" majority. Trouble is the minority is moving in for the coup de grace, and it could well be sooner than we think.

But on the Tubes, more and more are rightly questioning the "Lefty" cred of such luminaries as Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, Markos Moulitsas, John Aravosis, Arianna and so on. As well they should. Jane has thrown her lot with the Pauliacs and Grover Norquist. Good luck with that. Glenn is becoming more and more strident and shrill in his antipathy toward anyone who doesn't share his rigidity and absolutism, which he calls "principle," no matter how wrong or dangerous it may be. Markos is just a joke. He was never a "Leftist" and his pose as Master of the Hard Left is absurd.  Aravosis has never been anything but a very staid, proper, and basically Old Line Republican who has been severely disappointed by his colleagues who don't support issues of basic fairness and civil rights on matters of Teh Ghey. And as for Arianna, ha ha ha ha.

The only really consistent Liberal/slightly Leftish predominant presence on the Intertubes has been Digby, and she has been moderating her positions for years so as not to raise the ire of the Big Libertarians whose influence on the Lefty Blogosphere is vastly disproportionate to their numbers.

The irony is that there should be no reason for Libertarians to play this little mind-fuck game, especially if they are sincere in their political ideology. Libertarianism may be puerile and impracticable, but it is an American ideology of longstanding, defensible (sort of) on its merits (such as they are), and there is no need to pretend to hold some other political position or to make believe that somehow Libertarianism and Liberal-Leftism are compatible. 

They aren't. In some respects they are mortal enemies. Just as Libertarianism is incompatible with  what is generally thought of as American Conservatism.

Where I'm headed, New Mexico, is full of Leftists -- the real kind -- Libertarians of all stripes, old line Conservatives, real honest-to-god tribes and tribalism, and plenty of pure addled nonsense from all over the political and social spectrum.

There's a reason Aldous Huxley chose it as the site of the Savage Reservation in "Brave New World." Maybe it's time to review.

So... time to pack up and head out. 

OT: Off to the Hi Lo Country again

I'll be out of town for the next week, chilling as it were in the Hi Lo country of New Mexico. Oh that drive, down California's Central Valley on Hwy 99, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens country, large parts of it sucked up for suburbs during the Bubble and now forlorn and half-empty seeming and among the poorest regions in the country; then over the Tehachapis into the Mojave and through the scrub and the Joshua trees, the Panamints, and on to the Colorado River, a silver thread in the hazy distance. It's a desert, yes, but I've been chased by thunderstorms and torrential rains while driving through the Mojave. It's a trip.

It takes forever just to get out of California. It is as far from my starting point to the border with Arizona out of Needles as it is to my desitination in New Mexico from the Welcome to Arizona sign on the highway. A highway now called Interstate 40 but which parallels Route 66 most of its way, little remnants and reminders of the Mother Road all along the drive through Arizona and into New Mexico where the spirit of the Road lives as strongly now as ever.

There I'll plop myself down in our turn of the 20th century adobe, listen to the birds, do some fixing and cleaning, maybe write some things, go off to visit the ruins, maybe even go to Santa Fe -- haven't done that for a while, and every now and then venturing among the touristas to listen to their complaints about finding "nothing but art galleries" in Santa Fe can be bracing. Where else do tourists complain of too much art? I ask you.

As a friend refers to my expeditions to New Mexico, "Release and Relief."

Nothing much has changed with regard to the collapse of California's government; there is still no budget agreement; our hot-tubbin, stogie smokin gubna is still issuing his fruitless commands and demands, protestors still assemble at the Capitol -- sometimes even blockading parts of it, discommoding (at least for a little while) the routines of posturing and statement making of the higer mucky-mucks, and Dems still mewl and wring their hankies about how hard they're working to reach a compromise that Stogie-man with the Wrinkled Ass will accept.

It's nuts-making.

We're no longer doing Hospice Care at Home; glory be, the patient was discharged a couple of weeks ago, because she's made such an amazing recovery. They really didn't expect her to live more than a few weeks, and after 9 months, the hospice service said, "Well, she's not gonna die, is she? So let's put her in Home Care for a while, and take it from there."

The shift from Hospice to Home Care was smooth enough; it's basically the same, but for the fact that the visiting professionals are not on Vigil any more, and they really do have an interest now in getting her up and around, but I don't really think that's going to happen. She's still blind and very frail, becomes exhausted easily, and she continues to suffer from various ailments, some the consequences of old age, some due to her vulnerabilities from all the surgery and other procedures over the years. She's not returning to hearty hale health, but she is doing remarkably better than when she first came from the hospital last October. There are such things as miracles.

Meanwhile, since we're OT, a note about cats. Those who follow the blog know that our cat Mao died on New Year's Eve after an illness. He was deeply, profoundly missed as he still is. No other cat pal we've had over the years has formed the kind of bond we had with him.

So, a couple of months ago, we noted that a very beautiful and well-groomed tabby had seemingly moved into the garage (where we assumed she was going to have kittens, but she never did.) Then a fluffy black cat showed up. He had a red heart on his collar and after a while, I got him tame enough to pick him up and read what was on his collar; it was his name: Louie. How cute. Then a big black and white, huge, showed up. And a little black and white. The little black and white strongly resembled Mao, and she (not a he; she) marched right into the house and moved in. As if she'd always lived here and we were her guests.

And she's been here pretty much ever since. She's taken on many of Mao's characteristics, many of his places, many of his attitudes. It's quite an amazing transformation. We look on in awe.

All right, gotta finish packing, then it's back to the road. If there is an internet connection at my destination, I may be able to post about what the recession is continuing to do to that rural and thinly populated, somewhat isolated region of the old west. Last time I was there in March, it was obvious what kind of effects the economic collapse was having and it wasn't pretty.