Oak Creek Canyon

Spent some time at Oak Creek Canyon this weekend. It was beautiful, as always. I couldn't find any trout, however, and after I got back to my hotel I read in the guide that the ranger station puts out, that it is stocked with fish in the summer months.

I don't know the life cycles of trout and such, but it seems to me there were none to be had.

Modern Medicine

Another trip to a doctor's office today. While I'm hoping this one will bear some fruit, or help me improve my quality of life, I couldn't help but feel frustrated once again. I get the impression that doctors these days are another part of the machinery.

The mass-production, distribution machinery to get us well enough to go back to work and that's it. I know I shouldn't saddle individual doctors with the burden of healing the world, but I don't get the feeling that they have much curiosity anymore.

With all of our technological advances and the increased communication made possible by the internet, I would expect an increase in revolutionary drugs, cures for diseases, and every other sort of miracle. I don't see it happening, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

It's scary to think that what drives innovation is simply profit, that companies decide what gets studied and what sits on the shelf.

With the Social Security and Medicare programs set to be bleeding our government dry, I'm worried about the prospects for even maintaining our current levels of health care.

Maybe we go back to leaving the sick and old out on the hillsides to perish.

Wouldn't it be nice if we spent all the time, money, lives, and energy that we spend on war on curing all the diseases and ills that plague us?

Forgive my ramblings.

Big Sur - Hurricane Point

"In grappling with the mystery of 'chance' we may be unable to render suitable explanation but we cannot deny that we are made aware of laws beyond the reach of human understanding. The more aware we become the more we perceive that there is a relation between right living and good fortune. If we probe deep enough we come to realize that fortune is neither good nor bad, that what matters is the way we take our (good or bad) fortune. The common saying runs: 'To make the most of one's lot.' Implicit in this adage is the idea that we are not equally favored or disfavored by the gods.

The point I wish to stress is that in accepting our fate we are not to think that things were destined thus or that we were singled out for special attention, but that by responding to the best in ourselves we may put ourselves in rythm with higher laws, the inscrutable laws of the universe, which have nothing to do with good or bad, you and me.

This was the test which the great Jehova put to Job." (Miller 226-227).

Miller, Henry. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957.

Big Sur

I just finished reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which I enjoyed even though I was a bit surprised at its lack of polishing.

Now I've started a book by Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. So far it looks promising, more so than Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare, which was pretty much just blah for me. But having visited Big Sur myself recently, and having read Air Conditioned Nightmare which precedes this book, I think I might enjoy this one. Here is an excerpt I just read:

"Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away. As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to heighten and enhance the reality of everyday."

From reading the first 28 pages, I think that Miller makes very accurate observations of Big Sur. I was surprised, when, coming back from my trip there, I read Kerouac's book by the same title and realized that it was apparently not just me who saw the overpowering and in a way frightening force of Big Sur. I think Big Sur, by Miller, will be an enjoyable read.