Observations and Musings While on the Road

While my senses are focused on the road, my vehicle, and those around me from all directions, my mind tends to muse: recording observations, forming opinions, composing the next episode of one of my unfinished novels, that kind of stuff.  When you have driven as many miles in as many different machines as I have, your conscious mind can be elsewhere while your lizard brain and senses: sight, sound, smell, and touch, handle the machine. (I didn't include taste though there are some instances where it cohabits with smell.) In emergency situations, my conscious mind comes into play only reacting to what my body has already handled.  Enough about driving.

Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts and observations that I made while on the road. Ignore the ones that trouble you and recognize that these are examples of where my mind wanders on a long drive:

•  I saw many billboards with variations of Pray for the Unborn, but not one that urged Pray for those Born Into Poverty.
• The majority population of Eugene, Oregon appears to be in great physical condition: few are overweight, there are many bicycle riders on the many bike lanes, and joggers abound.
• Eugene has a few tent cities in parks and such where folks have squatted because they: lost their homes to the wildfires, are trying to deal with PTSD from the inhuman activity of multiple combat tours, have adopted a wandering life, or some other reason.  The city provides some food and tends to their sanitary needs among other services.  It helps to care.
• Western dogs ride in the bed of pickups, not inside like eastern dogs.
• I missed a ton of photographic opportunities because I was too timid to ask permission to take the shot. Some photographer, huh?
• I am no longer able to drive the daily distances I could cover thirty years ago.  Does that surprise anyone?
• We lost our America less than a month after 9/11.  Bin Laden won.  With those planes, he introduced us to our fear, anger, and distrust to a degree we had never before experienced.  He exposed our underbelly to the world.
• It takes no courage to raise a weapon, but a great deal to face one.
• I sometimes wish I had my seventy-nine years of experience in my twenty-five year old body.  
• I am a lucky man.

Until next time,

Namaste