Still standing after all these years

June 25, 2025

I think I can republish this without scaring folks now. In fact, a few of you already read it because I spaced out and left it published by mistake for a few minutes. Fortunately one of my guardians was an early reader and expressed some concerns and tipped me off. I have no idea who all may have also seen it in those few minutes.

I'm relocating rhe page to Cortisone Dreams though because friendliest scrolls like this were definitely. Part of my life for several days, starting with this one. As context, I started composing it right after I got over my remorse at not being able to build an actual Tree of Life Blog. I came indoors, put my Big Boy pants on, and got to work - and didn't stop until late in the night,

As additional context, this occurred right after I broke my iPad and threw the tram into the Apple Wars for a few days, driving both halves of the team mad until it's finally, finally been put behind us.

And two more bits of background. First, the title. I opened up this post intending to describe the episode out on Marine Drive where I didn't get flattened by that sixteen-wheeler and am still standing to tell about it. As you can see though, I had some issues with holding a train of thought for longer than a few seconds at a time. Actually, I'm impressed at what a coherent narrative underlies this, and that it's essentially all true - that really is how it was. At some point I'll come back, strip this out for usable parts, and chunk it up into posts in the appendix.

And, I understand now what was going on with two other similar people like-sized four hour long walls of text that drove me further over the edge when they just disappeared completely. I even engaged the webmaster at one point, beseeching him to look under the covers and find my latest contribution to great literature of the XXI century, convinced it was out there. I see now that the site must have some sort of capacity limit it will upload at one time, and apparently wasn't designed anticipating a 10,000 word essay imported in one swell foop. I believe I just never saved my work anywhere along the way until I was prompted to by my iPad alerted me that another four hours had lapsed in a flash and the battery was about to die again. The words just never made it off my iPad. So it goes.

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The ipad is still broken, and has more issues than just a cracked screen. Something inside must have cracked or broken, so it really is a goner, among its other eccentricities it apparently wont let you save an unpublished page and then get back to it in the normal way. It just doesn't appear to even exist, even in the edit mode, More than once I gaffed at having screwed up the first cup of coffee's worth of work and failed to save it and thought I had to start over, but then I found my way back to it - back in the same place where you go to create an entirely new journal. It was still there, compete as it was when I last saw It. I gave a loud cheer in my inside voice because I'm in a coffee shop, published it, and prayed. It worked!

Brains are so complex, full I'm sure of countless genes, latent or overt, trivial or vital, congenital or acquired.. Any brain, flesh, or foul, warm or cold. My iPad's got a few overt ones overt ones that I've discovered so far: this bug, the cracked screen, a screen whose touch pad is losing sensitivity, and it won't connect to a public internet eve though I've given the right password, but will let me access through my phone's hot spot, maybe because the password has already been internalized? Who knows, but at this point they're all just annoyances so there's no urgency to get to the Apple Store and replace it.

I've got my own set, with most of the ones I've thought about or become aware of enough to form an opinion feel vital, for better or worse. In order of the age of discovery:

I can't smell, and though it took another ten years because I thought I was like everyone else and just didn't actually know what the sm selling sensation was, but I suspect I was an anosmiac at birth. Sad, because I get nothing from so many things - I can't really taste anything but what my toungue picks up either, but it wasn't until I was maybe forty years old and took a blindfolded test of chocolate and vanilla ice cream and couldn't tell the difference that I realized that was part of my package too. Thanks, unknown source whoever you were or whatever mom or I was exposed to!

I won't let I already posted the team's activities for the day, my trip to Kaiser, my birding ride out to the slough, and Rachael's latest walk out Leif Erickson Drive. I omitted them yesterdays post partly because it was full enough already and I was eager to get on with the morning, but also because I forgot some of it or didn't even think about a consequential non-event, the infamous dog that didn't bark that features in an occasional police procedural as the key to it all.
In spite of my skin and eye coloration, I very seldom burn and acquire a tan quickly, easily and deeply. We have photos of me looking almost black from playing on the sand down in Cherry Grove Beach for the one week summer vacation we took in West Virginia when I was eight or nine years around. Everyone else looks pale by comparison because they're lathered up, hiding in the shade, or red and blistered. I very seldom use sunscreen even now and didn't then, I'm still waiting for my first indication of any form of skin cancer, and I can almost count on one hand the number of severe sunburns I've had in my entire life. I put this in the bucket of all the other life-affecting features or outright horrors that so far attract a least don't seem to be in my inherited mix: MS, CF, prostate cancer, Down's syndrome, native intelligence (a nature/nurture mix, obviously), and on and on and on. I've been blessed by so many things in life, much of it attributable to white privilege of course, no wonder what 45% of the country thinks about that; but obviously Ive been way luckier with the built in package than maybe anyone I remember being close to, and most of those are very close - mom lived until 98 and was very sharp, vital, bright, introspective, and engaged in life until the last day two years when it all shut down pretty abruptly. A sad passage for all of the family at the time of course, and I didn't even see her at the end or go back from our first nine month tour of Europe at the end because she hardly knew who I was at the end and that's the ideal, really. It's what I hope for myself, it's what I hope for averyone I care for at all - which to one degree or another is most

Let's pause to go back and remember that important part of the story. Taking my poor cracked iPad can wait another day.

Spoiler alert #2. The Guinness is an NA purchased from Safeway, but maybe by the time we get there we'll be able to celebrate with the real thing. Also, note the egret, which is obviously not our snowy egret but Europe's equivalent, the little egret.

Laminar Flow

All of you will be familiar with the concept of if not the name of laminar flow, either from your background or your lived experience. You see evidence of it everywhere in nature, from the difference between fields of wheat wafting in a light breeze and when it's whipping wildly in a gale-force blowout. The effect on the water surfaces of lakes, rivers and seas, the clouds above, bikes in a peloton, scooters in Taiwan, it's ever around you, something source aware of at some level but perhaps just subconsciously and then suddenly you realize it's everywhere and you can't stop seeing it, looking in amazement at a new manifestation of it, and then thinking: ah, there too.

From the usual source:

Laminar flow is the property of fluid particles in fluid dynamics to follow smooth paths in layers, with each layer moving smoothly past the adjacent layers with little or no mixing. At low velocities, the fluid tends to flow without lateral mixing, and adjacent layers slide past one another smoothly. There are no cross-currents perpendicular to the direction of flow, nor eddies or swirls of fluids. In laminar flow, the motion of the particles of the fluid is very orderly with particles close to a solid surface moving in straight lines parallel to that surface. Laminar flow is a flow regime characterized by high momentum diffusion and low momentum convection.

There were two Huxley Colleges

I imagine very few of you knew have heard of the first Huxley College, much less the newer one. If you have though, you're most likely to be aware of this old Marxist institution:

The first Huxley College shows up over a hundred years ago. You can still see it today if you know where to look.

Far fewer of you are likely to be aware of the other one, which came later:

Here's the other one, which came along about fifty years later. You can still see it today too.

Although you may not have been aware of either of these institutions of higher education, I can't believe any of you have heard of at least one and maybe both of their namesakes. The first was named for this old British white guy, whose ideas and writings seem especially relevant today. Very smart guy, Oxford grad, philosopher, writer of some note, but ultimately a failure: nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature nine times, but never got there. Loser.

Still, clearly a very smart guy. If a guy like this were alive today he probably wouldn't have that weed in his hand, he'd be a mega billionaire with an enormous yacht parked at the some private island off the coast of Albania or wherever. and surprisingly enough, for such a loser he seems to be an especially relevant figure today. Go figure.

The first one was named for this old guy, nine-time loser. Aldous Huxley. You might have heard of him, maybe even read an Ai summary of one of his books.

In relocating this I came across Huxley's biography on Wikipedia, and was startled to find this excerpt:

He contracted the eye disease keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years"and "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor". In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916 amidst the First World War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote:

I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province.

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The second was named for his biological brother, and thus also obviously just another old British white guy.

Aldous' brother Julius, another old loser from the past. Still, you might have heard of him too.

And finally, there's the oddity that I misnamed Julian. I'm sure it's because I had Romans on my mind - specifically Caligula and his horse, thinking ahead to where I planned to turn next.

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And then there's Aldous's other brother Darryl (hey, is that a Welsh name)? Also relevant today to Team Anderson particularly, because we've had Wales on our mind lately. Whales too, as far as that goes.

Oops. My bad. It's Karl, not Darryl. Brain fart, blame it on the prednisone. Karl doesn't look Welsh, but you never know - neither did Jones, the first time I learned better (thanks, Ms. Jones!). Also, not Aldous and Julian's brother either. Just another old white loser from the past. But whip smart too, smart enough to be a prof at Huxley college. Either of the two, really.

I first learned of the younger Huxley College back in 1970 when I was still a PFC filing clerk stationed at Fort Lewis, an office filing clerk creating shipping orders for shipping roughly a thousand trainees each month to Vietnam for their two year tour of duty in Vietnam as infantry soldiers. It was a horrible year in many ways, with me torn between feeling guilty about having this cushy indoor job while other draftees were either outside shivering in the cold and snow and rain of a PNW winter - freezing and wet,msuffering from URI's or pneumonia or worse, learning to handle weapons of war for use in a tropical jungle by shooting Ar15's and bazooks and lobbing live grenades in the snow, surrounded by folks who mostly had almost no common background or lived experience with me. Many were minorities, typically black; but the majority were white because that's how the draft worked then - everyone was subject to the draft unless they were certified conscientious objectors or had college deferrals or 'legitimate' exceptions - bone spurs in the feet is one example. I can still remember a few of those guys. One kid was only 17 I think - too young to be subject to the draft, but I think he was there as a 3 year RA, there either to improve his odds of avoiding jungle duty or because life offered no better prospects at the time. He seems like the most likely man in my platoon to still be around, I should try googling the name of ours - A-4-2 -and the year I served to see if any names or Facebook pages pop up.

Every platoon had its mascot and motto. A-4-2 guys were all tigers - "Every Man a Tiger!". I can still see the images of five small tigers painted facing away from you on a battleship grey painted in front of a row of a half dozen stalls, you and everyone else in the barracks standing in line naked except for their army issued white boxer shorts, groggy, depressed, scared, embarrassed, desperate to go to the bathroom, desperate to not be last in and last out the door for the flag raising assembly, a dishonor that will leave you shamed in front of the company doing pushups in the snow while the entire company looks on while you pump out whatever number you've been assigned, everyone looking stiffly ahead waiting for me to be done so they can get on with life but inwardly surpressing their dismissive laughter because they're all just normal Mount American guys, teenagers still for the most part, most of them with ten times the upper body strength that I've ever had or ever will at this point, none of it acquired at cushy indoor workout spaces that hadn't been invented yet. And either right before that or after everyone's passed inspection and back in line again (you can also land barehanded in the snow pumping away your number in the snow because you've got insufficiently shined army issue black leather dress shoes, polished to a hopefully perfect sheen that you've spent the evening before lights out polishing to its hopeful perfection along with the rest of your dress uniform and person before its lights out - picture a flow of two hundred multicolored teenage guys all sitting on their army issued footlockers filled with their few personal belongings and all the exact same army issued kit your neighbor has in his (it's of course all guys as far as anyone new - trans as an idea was nothing any of us could imagine half a century ago, much less express shock T or feel threatened by. I still remember the first time I even knew it was a thing when I read footlockers morning which will result and in need of that first espresso or Americano that will brighten up the day a bit. Once you're at the front of the line and you're in a stall at last, when you sat on the throne taking a dump. Gre

One was Wincraft or Winfield or something similar - I can't be sure any more -think it was, the guy who was upstairs on my bunk bed in the barracks: a black kid with a head of hair that eventually grew out into a short Afro with a black comb stuck in it when he was legal indoors as long as it was kept short enough to be hidden under your cap when you went out for reverie each morning precisely at dawn, rain, snow or sun, 365 days a year. Wincraft I was inducted just before Christmas, so I lost the lottery in more than one way that year so long ago - April or May wold have been much nicer, or September would have been perfect - two months in the beautiful early Autumn, then off to the jungle for the winter - just like going to Tucson but without the guns and a few more guns and other threats. inside the barracks ant was legal. Or Junior Binns, an 18 year old all but illiterate short white farm boy from rural Georgia, up to enjoy his winter in the snow # a year I'm sure he'll always remember in his own way, in the unlikely event that he's still upside.

And then there was our drill sergeant, SSG Crowder was black, quite different than me in so many ways, and I detested him as much as anyone I'd ever been involved with at the time for what he put me through,

A big Afro just out of Garfield High up in Seattle, a recent high school grad with a big Afro that grew out after the initial scalping everyone got at induction, standing out in the shivering, wet midwinter cold in wharprever street clothes you haspd and a completely bald head, waiting and suffering the endless emotional and physical basically an indoor College in Bellingham, where it was taught to me by my Water Pollution Engineering professor. I was a student at Huxley (not the Huxley College, for those knowledgeable film buffs out there) in 1971, the year after I got out of the army inspired to become an environmental scientist and save the world. The first Earth Day event had occurred the first spring, and I was a member of the first class when it was spun off from from as a cluster college think it's

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Karen PoretBravo, Professor Scott. You have passed your exams in long term memory.
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2 weeks ago

Scott AndersonI can't believe you made it through this, Karen, what a glutton for punishment. I was definitely on a roll though, and I'd have kept on rolling if the battery wasn't about dead. And did, actually. This is only about a half of this month's fine output.
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2 weeks ago