I Splurged...

 I like getting magazines in the mail and while Cathy can often be seen at the box by the road in pajamas as she collects them the diligent carrier tosses my newspaper way up in the garage so the only special going to get the paper dress up required first thing in the morning for me is a cup of coffee in hand. No matter what I am wearing this is how I get the majority of my news. 

One magazine I take, Rolling Stone Magazine, once a great bastion of the counter culture which I somehow managed to acquire a lifetime subscription to pictures a world of music and culture I'm not a member of. It's changed.  The other magazine, The New Yorker has a great mix of poetry, politics, short story fiction, science, books, music,  theater, current events, food and more reported each week in it's pages. The Lufkin Daily News is a Pulitzer Prize winning paper and while at three days a week it's a shell of it's former self I think it does a good job. 

Now I know some will say, "I knew he was a commie liberal when I saw him in boxers fetching up that rag the LDN out of his garage." Because we live in historical times and I wanted the best coverage I splurged on the introductory offer made by The New York Times to deliver to my email in box the entire paper for the vast sum of $1 a month for the next 6 months. The Times has been around since 1851. They probably know what they are doing.

I guess in addition to being a commie liberal I'm now a member of the East Coast Elite because Lord, Dorothy, out here in Kansas we don't even think about New York but the thing I see all these news sources have in common is that if it walks like a duck they say so with no bias. It's left for you to decide if it is indeed a duck. 

Recently there was a story in the Times that touched my heart. A photo accompanying the story of the civilian causality toll of war in the middle east showed two wounded brothers, about the age of my grand children laying on cots. One of the kids badly wounded himself was rolled so he could keep his arm on the other in comfort. I watch my grandkids as they help each other, finding lost shoes, getting a drink of water or a snack, teaching the little ones how to climb and putting all that together with the picture of the two wounded boys I get just a glimpse into how we should treat each other in the world.

That's not how it is. It's the 21st century and in the middle east, the Ukraine, Sudan and other places human beings still bomb cities and civilians. 

To try and get a grip on thoughts about this I turned to an unlikely place. I thought of the Grateful Dead song China Cat Sunflower. It can be tricky to turn to pop personalities for wisdom because like Popes and Presidents they are flawed fallible men and women and the song certainty has it's psychedelic overtones but reportedly the authors say it's less about this than it is about the connection we have to each other and what it's like to remember being three years old. 

That's my prayer today. Let everyone splurge and remember what it's like to be three years old. We might then walk out to the mail box to some different news. 

                

  Look for a while at the china cat sunflower

Proud walking jingle in the midnight sun

Copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono

Like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind

Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandanna

Like a one-eyed cheshire, like a diamond-eye jack

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle

To a double-e waterfall over my back

China cat, china cat

China cat, china cat

China cat, china cat

China cat, china cat

Comic book colors on a violin river cryin' leonardo

Words from out a silk trombone

I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls

In the eagle-winged palace of the queen chinee