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Showing posts with the label pandemics

What is Time?

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Cliff Pueblo 26 x 14 Mixed Media on Artists Canvas $820 Growing up surrounded by ancient history I have often scoffed at time. I have seen it as an artificial construct. Or as my father put it, "a gentleman's agreement." And to that end I was raised to always be punctual to whatever time was agreed upon. To do less would be disrespectful.  To be late is to say your time is more valuable than the others'. But time on that daily level is so short. What about time on the cosmic scale? Or all times at once as Einstein theorized. In the midst of this pandemic and self-isolation I am beginning to totally get what Einstein meant. Certainly the hours, maybe even the days do not matter. There are no appointments, gentlemen's agreements, to which I must be held. I have self-isolated before it was the thing to do. As a resident of a tourist area I always, like the Cheshire Cat, hide myself away during spring break. Now all of us should be doing the same. Forty-thr...

Living in the Time of Corona Virus

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Where were you when you realized this was serious? I was having a 1942 Case Tractor delivered to my house as a lawn ornament/landmark. Through my life there have been a series of questions which are landmarks or turning points. Questions that still pop up in conversations with people who have lived through the same times. Where were you when President Kennedy was shot. At the student union building at University of New Mexico having lunch with friends from high school. One had brought a bag of Frito's. I have not eaten them since. There are a who bunch of when you heard someone was assassinated in the following years, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Stand out. Then there was Kent State. I was in Senator Charles Goodall's offices when the news broke with fellow staffers all stunned as we watched the news. The same staffers I worked with during Watergate. I was back in New Mexico when Nixon resigned. I was skiing in Red River when we attacked Iraq the first...

Memories of 1968

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I was reading up on the growing threat of Swine Flu this morning. I do not live in a major city and with my lifestyle (artist in own studio) I can avoid a lot of the risk centers. But I do live in a border state with Mexico and between the drug traffic and illegals crossing (not to mention tourist traffic) I cannot be totally sure of safety from the feared pandemic. This morning's news was, however, particularly interesting in that I evidently survived a previous pandemic in 1968. From Yahoo News : While all the deaths so far have been in Mexico, the flu is spreading in the United States. Eleven cases were confirmed in California, Kansas and Texas, and eight schoolchildren in New York City caught a type A influenza virus that health officials say is likely to be the swine flu. The new flu strain, a mixture of various swine, bird and human viruses, poses the biggest risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu surfaced in 1997, killing several hundred people. A...