Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Season’s Greetings



In Lieu of a Greetings Card*


Often the truth we sadly miss
As we see only what we know.
Nor each occasion could reveal
The gravity of what we feel,
On things we dare and dare not do.
Yet, though in vain, let me express
One simple thought, one sincere wish:
That may with love and peaceful bliss
Replete you find the Holidays!

And may the seasons thereafter
Be seasoned with mirth and laughter.
The rare occasioned somber sky
May not but serve to amplify
The happiness of days gone by,
And glories of unyielding prime,
And promises of days that lie
Uncharted in the blue abyss
And daunting vagaries of Time!

May each grief find sweet redress;
Alien to fears, much less to tears,
May triumphs and exploits increase
All through the fast succeeding years!

H A P P Y   H O L I D A Y S !!!
Merry Christmas & A Most Prosperous New Year to All
=<+>=
*I have circulated this piece every year from way back when I first wrote it in 1980.  This year, though I’m slowing down in the uptick, I don’t find sufficient reason to forbear.  So wherever you are and whatever you are into, may all your endeavors be rewarded with the bounty you so richly deserve, both materially and spiritually.

Considering that my days seem to be loaded with unpredicted (mostly close to emergency) frustrating doctors’ appointments, I deem it prudent to post it earlier than I did in previous years.  These days I never can tell where I might be during the week of Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve.

Incidentally, this piece is also on page 170 of my book released by FriesenPress, Sep-2011.  {Cf. also, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/flirting-with-misadventures-constancio-sulapas-asumen/1105736537}

Friday, November 22, 2013

JFK Legacy Redux~~It’s Rommel’s Birthday

JFK Legacy Redux~~It’s Rommel’s Birthday

Could not find much else to do, that would not exhaust my reserved energy.   I therefore stayed with TCM (Turner Classic Movies) which, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, showed the below selections all of which I saw for the first time.  Ergo it afforded me some entertainment value.  I therefore almost enjoyed the series.  In fact I’d recommend to it to everybody so inclined to watch commercial-free TV.  So check them out when you can.

I threw in the “almost” qualifier because all the while I was thinking it was Rommel’s birthday.  He happens to be my oldest nephew.  He was most instrumental in getting me reconnected to the clan when I needed it most, i.e., in a timely fashion; and at a time when I did not know how.

The information in and of itself is nothing remarkable.  All of us happen to have been born not of our choosing where or when.  We are all historical incidentals unless of course we’re lucky enough to leverage the unfolding and recording of history.

I found it ironical that when your birthday, which by all reckoning has to be one of the most significant events in your life, happens to be coeval with a world historical event, e.g., the assassination of a U.S. President (only twice last century),  it becomes rather difficult to hide your true age.

You might say, whatever for?  Believe me, if you are resourceful and live long enough you’d find instances when the leverage of falsifying your age, in numerical terms, has some advantages.  At least one of my younger brothers can attest to it ~~ good, bad, indifferent or otherwise.


So to Rommel let me say: Happy Half A Century.  May you enjoy as much the second and third halves of a century that’s yet to come.

JFK Legacy Redux~~It’s Rommel’s Birthday

JFK Legacy Redux~~It’s Rommel’s Birthday

Could not find much else to do, that would not exhaust my reserved energy.   I therefore stayed with TCM (Turner Classic Movies) which, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, showed the below selections all of which I saw for the first time.  Ergo it afforded me some entertainment value.  I therefore almost enjoyed the series.  In fact I’d recommend to it to everybody so inclined to watch commercial-free TV.  So check them out when you can.

I threw in the “almost” qualifier because all the while I was thinking it was Rommel’s birthday.  He happens to be my oldest nephew.  He was most instrumental in getting me reconnected to the clan when I needed it most, i.e., in a timely fashion; and at a time when I did not know how.

The information in and of itself is nothing remarkable.  All of us happen to have been born not of our choosing where or when.  We are all historical incidentals unless of course we’re lucky enough to leverage the unfolding and recording of history.

I found it ironical that when your birthday, which by all reckoning has to be one of the most significant events in your life, happens to be coeval with a world historical event, e.g., the assassination of a U.S. President (only twice last century),  it becomes rather difficult to hide your true age.

You might say, whatever for?  Believe me, if you are resourceful and live long enough you’d find instances when the leverage of falsifying your age, in numerical terms, has some advantages.  At least one of my younger brothers can attest to it ~~ good, bad, indifferent or otherwise.


So to Rommel let me say: Happy Half A Century.  May you enjoy as much the second and third halves of a century that’s yet to come.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Decoding the Rollout Debacle

Decoding the Rollout Debacle
XXI
When countless colleagues have besieged your doors
And left wild traces of some User's rage,
Take heed to not translate them to remorse
Nor head off to some sorry escapades.
The force with which most often users plead
Or emphasize the justice of their cause,
Its source, most oft', of good intentions made,
Undoing which cause justice to your use.
Most chances as begot of discontent
Of others, prove best opportunities
To probe the limits of your worth; else, vent
Your umbrage at some worthless legacies:
Such are the monuments of gross incompetence,
Much shame well-hid in codes for else ill-hidden sins!
-- In Search for Reason” {Cf. p. 140 at Flirting with Misadventures}

The histrionics ubiquitous throughout the national landscape over the so-called ObamaCare rollout debacle has been, more than anything else, clinically symptomatic of a national polity who has lost its bearings.  With the notable exception of Pat Buchanan who exhibited an exceptional semblance of equanimity amidst frenzied hysterical call for Secretary Sebelius’ head to roll as just wages for the ObamaCare logistical fiasco, Pat counseled to let her be.  I whole-heartedly concur.

Getting rid of Sec. Sebelius would only allow the administration to replace her with somebody equally as incompetent if not more so.  It would be a worse exercise in futility than re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic as a countermeasure to the impending plunge into the depths.  It would not cut our (the taxpayers’) loses to a minimum because we the taxpayers still have to pay her for a pension of sorts and pay somebody else to do the job as incompetently.

As it turned out, the main contractor for the ObamaCare rollout had a long-documented history of budget overruns on under-delivered systems, as most recently documented by Mark Styne:

Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

It takes unmitigated temerity, if not utter stupidity, deemed normal for any regime of bureaucrats and government functionaries to entrust the implementation of its signature Legislative policy achievement to a company of kindred sterling reputation.  Huckleberry Finn would not entrust the repairs of his slingshot to an outfit with such a track record.  But then again, Huck Finn was not an Obama Regime apparatchik.  Rather, he was the epitome of American pragmatism. 

He was the prototypical American with skills, who “You send them into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and they build you a shopping mall.”  Obamism has no room for the Americanism which has served as the foundation of global American hegemony, which candidate Obama vowed to cut down to size, and Pres. Obama profusely apologized for in public, every time he found a convenient platform.

Lest we get sidetracked, it behooves to emphasize that in the canonical annals of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the product owner is always the stake holder who oversees and underwrites the development.  Who ultimately ends up doing the dirty deed is a personnel decision, a matter of resource deployment and allocation.  The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) was the system owner of record at every stage of SDLC.  The choice of personnel to delegate mission critical projects to is reflective of executive managerial acumen which the Obama Regime time and again had proved to be in woeful deficit.

The fact that all levels of testing including unit, integration, regression, performance and UAT (user acceptance testing) have been established gospel in SDLC seemed to have been swept under the rugs, in an attempt to provide excuses for the rollout fiasco.  Of the above testing modalities, UAT is the most crucial.  Without it, there is no justification for any systems rollout.  Conversely, if you attempt a systems rollout, it is prima facie evidence that adequate UAT was passed with flying colors.

GIGO, an axiomatic acronym in the province of systems development, was always taken to mean, “garbage in, garbage out,” or “gospel in, gospel out,” but never “garbage in, gospel out.”  An algorithm that would effectively cleanse or purify the content from whatever inherent conceptual sins is yet to be invented.  This was largely the reason that the acolytes of Global Warming miserably failed in their attempt to fudge the data to prove that the paradigm of anthropogenic global warming was an accepted settled science. {Cf. e.g., “Consensus Does Not a Science Make,” Ch 20 pp. 263ff at Flirting with Misadventures also see, http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2009/11272009.htm }.

The redistributionist mechanism that is embedded in ObamaCare is precisely the kind of content garbage, the “ill-hidden sins,” that the system attempts to bury so that it is implemented unbeknownst to the user, i.e. the insurance consumers or policy holders.  In the succinct formulation of Charles Krauthammer, “. . . [The] three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge” were the sins that the insurance policy cancellations laid bare.  And, as I emphasized earlier elsewhere {Cf. p. 211 at Flirting with Misadventures}, ‘. . . President Obama is the Zen Master of “the nexus of political subterfuge so effectively employed by both Lenin and Stalin against their rivals to pull off the Bolshevik revolution.”’

In order to fix the logistics woes of the ObamaCare rollout, this nation has to fix the ideological underpinnings of the Statist Regime which mandate that the health of the citizenry should be managed by the government.  This requires cleansing the national psyche of the culture of dependency and parasitic opportunism that Obamism has perpetrated on the national polity.

This should start with garnering a veto-proof majority in the House and getting a GOP majority in the Senate.  Otherwise, it might be far easier or more politically convenient to succumb to the fatalistic resignation and comfort of surrender:
One might argue: Why get so annoyed?
Tough work to pursue, tougher still unemployed
What with inflation going up by the hour
'Tis no simple mission to get worth for your dollar.

Well, then, it is obvious, there isn't any choice;
Methinks it takes genius, takes cunning otherwise;
Some take the drudgery, all day, nine to five,
Mischief and trickery, nay, sin to survive!

-- “Worker’s Lament” {Cf. p. 171 at Flirting with Misadventures}

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Bluff & Bluster over the Broken Pottery Rule

Bluff & Bluster over the Broken Pottery Rule
Beyond reform is your predicament,
It's time you venture forth a better way!
Nor tears of bitterness, nor mute lament
Can free you from your own captivity!
That captors are your very native sons
Is but insult added to injury
And no excuse for patient tolerance
Nor cause to languish in your misery.
With debtors' need false leaders agonize,
For credits, they may make your people bleed;
Bleeding, you may yet seek to galvanize
To life true leaders of a bolder breed:
By visionary men are nations built
Thy lack of vision is this nation's guilt!!

When the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Tuscany, properly constituted authorities sought to indict neither the navigator nor the purser for the tragedy.  Nor was the incident explained away by any distractive activities on board the vessel or the nefarious alignment of the stars that imposed the Friday-the-13th date and all the evil influences attributed thereto from superstitious antiquity.

Despite well documented attempts to pass the blame to the helmsman, Capt. Francesco Schettino, was held accountable both by the state authorities and the established media, traditionally the advocate for and custodian of the truth in chronicling momentous events, especially ones with tragic consequences.
The Pottery Barn Rule is as old, if not older, an Americanism as the Declaration of Independence itself.  It was most recently notably popularized by then State Secretary Colin Powell in the run up to the Iraqi War.  But if Juan Williams and his usual-suspects cohorts of self-anointed Obama Acolyte Apologists have their way, that Americanism too soon shall be vanished from the National Lexicon, along with any notion of accountability.

Short of appointing a Scapegoat-in-chief as a cabinet post, the Obama Regime has done every conceivable thing in the sun to buttress the firewall insulating his Regime from any and all untoward unintended consequences that could possibly tarnish his Regime’s legacy.   A prominent aspect of that legacy is the successful damning down and draining out of traditional sensibilities from the long-chronically dyslexic American soul.

When the national landscape is finally drained off of the quagmire that is the Obama Legacy, only the fatalism of Omar Khayyam would be appropriate to pay tribute to the national folly of installing twice, by Affirmative Action, a blatant incompetent as President:

LXVIII 
We are no other than a moving row 
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go 
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held 
In Midnight by the
Master of the Show.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Calibrating Entitlement Expectations

I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.
--Namit Arora, What Do We Deserve?

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
We are the ones we have been waiting for

Growing up in a farming/fishing village, where the nearest neighbor was three bends of the meandering creek away, or three hilltops on the mountain path away, or a decent downwind blow of the conch horn on a fair and sunny day, your first lessons on the wherefores of it all inevitably came from your parents.  By “all” I mean the incessant beginning and ending of life all around you, if you happen to be in a flourishing farm environment.
This would put you at a distinct disadvantage.  As a sentient and observant being, you knew that you as a child had been under the protective custody of your parents.  Your needs were being provided for by them.  You were sheltered from potential harm and the pain it usually entailed.  You were being taken care of by them.  Providing for your well-being was, prima facie, their utmost concern in life.
It however, begs one important question: what if you were not particularly thrilled at being alive?  What if you don’t particularly enjoy your lot in life?
I assert, contend and maintain that every person in this God’s Great Creation is legitimately entitled to only one thing, namely, why without being first consulted, you were brought into being?  Every parent owes it to his/her child at least an attempt at a coherent explanation.  Or, in the more esoteric formulation of Omar Khayyam,
XXIX 
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing 
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 


XXX 
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence? 
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence! 
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine 
Must drown the memory of that insolence! 

Above and beyond that one question, everything else is governed by societal mores, more subject to generational nuance than being cast in marble.  Admittedly, if we as a generation had created entitlement expectations much more than what we can reasonably deliver upon, then we as a generation had failed in our duty to hand down a world much better than we found and inherited from our parents.

Monday, September 23, 2013

A Light at the End of the Tunnel



It was such a relief to confirm that the proverbial Light at the End of the Tunnel” was not an oncoming train.  It simply is the difference between what the letters “R” and “S” signify in the acronyms MRSA and MSSA.  The former stands for “Resistant.”  The latter stands for “Susceptible.”  They are in fact exact opposites as far as bacterial behavioral patterns go.

The error was not borne of panic at what I earlier characterized to be a near-doomsday scenario.   Rather, it was simply forgetting to apply the most popular of Reaganisms in Foreign Policy, namely, “Trust but Verify.”  It all started with the tiny print in the thirteen-page “Clinical Report” from the hospital.  When the home health care nurse read the diagnosis allowed as “high grade MRSA,” it sounded very similar to what I heard discussed about when I was in the Critical Care Unit ward at Stony Brook University Hospital.

Thanks to the feisty reaction by my wife, Krystyna, at the full implications of having to live with somebody infected with MRSA in the same household.  It meant she had to maintain two sets of dishes and utensils, two sets of laundry, and to disinfect my footsteps with Clorox or Lysol anywhere I’d venture within the house.  She adamantly felt that the health care system had no business sending me home if I had MRSA.  I should have been institutionalized so that I did not become a threat to family and friends and the community-at-large.

She was prepared to do battle with anyone who disagreed with her when she telephoned my Infectious Diseases physician.  The good doctor promptly assured her that somebody made a mistake somewhere because he was the one who wrote the “Clinical Report” and there was no mention of MRSA in it.

Independently, I started examining the fine print that I heretofore entrusted to the nurse.  I was relieved to find no mention of MRSA therein but only MSSA.  While this allows me to approach my 69th year in the sun on somewhat a different light, I’m getting more curious to hear from Rommel about his conversation with the attending physician at Stony Brook.

Someone somewhere in this entire episode failed to communicate accurately.  No wonder my daughter, Renata, is sporting for a fight and busily looking for a medical malpractice lawyer she could rely on.  Volunteers, or referrals anyone?

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Afloat in the Vortex of Uncertainty



On 29-Jul-13 my wife Krystyna discovered before she went off to work that I was running a temperature of 99.5F.  By the time the Catholic Home Health Care nurse found me home, circa 11:30am, it had gone up to 102.0F which prompted her to call an ambulance to take me to Stony Brook University Hospital emergency room.  By 20:00 hours that night, the fever was at 105.7F.  I was refrigerated in one of the rooms at the Critical Care Unit.

It was certainly a far cry from Mr. Roberts’ boredom on sailing “. . . from Tedium to Apathy and back again, with an occasional side trip to Monotony.”  The closest comparison I could come up with from my memory banks was my protracted bouts with Malaria as a high school teenager.  I assure you both episodes were anything but monotonous.  They were more akin to indulging in blindfolded hopscotch along the vortex-envelopes of delirium ever uncertain whether to hold on and stay afloat or just give in to the delicious seduction of complete surrender.

On hindsight, it was a blessing that I had gone through the delirious experience with Malaria and without the benefit of any medical assistance at that.  Then, I just toughed it out and weathered the storm.  I dared say I came out ahead at the end else I would not have been here to tell the story.  The point was, surrender never even factored into the equation.  The sense of déjà vu had sufficiently blunted off the bite and implications of what could otherwise have been construed as a desperate situation, this time around.

Just to stay on the record, here’s how:

·       Diagnosis: High grade MRSA (an acronym for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, a bacterium that is resistant to many antibiotics);
·       Treatment Protocol: Think A Hail Mary Pass in American football—i.e., give it all you got and hope for the best;
·       Prognosis: Heaven knows, Mr. Allison, the WWII movie—i.e., your guess is as good as mine or anybody else’s for that matter.  You can never tell for sure until what you were afraid of may happen had happened and there was nothing left but to react to the new events.

When I regained access to cyberspace after a fifty-day hiatus attendant to my serial stints at the hospital and the rehab center, I scoured the web for every bit of literature on MRSA.  There is a relative preponderance of case histories in the extant literature.  However, the most remarkable aspect of my findings had been the absence of any case history where the patient was completely cured from or rid of the infection even for a moderate duration.  If it sounds like a death sentence for me, to be nonchalant about, the other side of the coin would be that if there is nothing I can do about it, I might as well live with it the best way I can.

There is something in this near-doomsday scenario that I find sort of perversely fascinating.  Firstly, it explains a lot of the otherwise enigmatic behavior, bordering on the evasive, by the medical care providers at the hospital.  For instance, every day during the first week to ten days of my hospitalization, blood was harvested from my veins presumably for bacterial culture and routine laboratory analysis.  I was periodically informed that all tests and cultures came back negative for whatever they were trying to detect.  At the same time, I was told that the I.V.-administered antibiotics should continue around the clock, just to leave no stones unturned.

At some point, I found the attending physicians’ explanation of my condition to be so unintelligible to my medically uninitiated mind, I requested her to brief my nephew Rommel who holds a doctor’s degree in medicine that I might be able to glean from him and more satisfactorily learn about what was going on with me.  The net effect was to put closure to the question.  I have not spoken to Rommel about it since then but I’m content that should something “unexpected” happen to me he should be able to brief the rest of the clan on his conversation with the physician.

Secondly, it puts into proper perspective the series of non-diagnostic results obtained from the various attempts to isolate and identify the source of the infection.   There was an initial hypothesis that the source of the infection was most likely wherever the stents were anchored to my blood vessel attendant to the endovascular repair of the aneurysm.  There were even suspicions that some of these anchor sites could be leaking.  None of these was ever confirmed nor completely ruled out.  It did add two questions I need to ask the vascular surgeon when I see him on Tuesday, 24-Sept-13, viz, if a leak did exist between the stent and the blood vessel,

a)   How does he propose to fix the leak; and
b)  Would not the leaked blood accumulate between the stent and the walls of the vessel constitute “dead blood,” and potential source of lethal blood poisoning?

Finally, there was an attempt at radioactive isotope tagging of the infected blood platelets so that they could be easily located should they congregate with some “usual suspects” site localization such as my artificial cardiac aortic valve, the stents of my four cardiac bypasses, or the most recently installed stents for the abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair.  As luck would have it, no such localization was detected: non-diagnostic result—i.e., the infection is throughout my blood stream.

I managed to transform myself from the walking biological time bomb before the AAA repair to a walking biological disaster after the blood infection.  In the unsolicited view of the Catholic Home Health Care nurse who conducted the initial  evaluation last Tuesday, 17-Sep-13,

After the post-hospitalization six-week regimen of I.V.-fed antibiotics followed by a four-week regimen of oral antibiotics (Cephalexin 500 mg and Rifampin 300 mg—both stink like swam sewers), if I’m not done with the infection, I’m practically as good a being done for.

If this is a binding verdict, I don’t know whether to mourn or celebrate.  But having known myself for a good part of sixty-nine years, I probably just take it in stride.  Life is too precious to waste worrying about circumstances over which I don’t have any leverage.

Incidentally, and for the record, having experienced the malarial chills I earlier reported, on the day after the AAA endovascular repair in a hospital room at The Good Samaritan Hospital, I definitely classify my present malady as an HA-MRSA, i.e., a healthcare-acquired MRSA in contra-distinction to what is designated as CA-MRSA or Community-acquired MRSA.

Friday, July 26, 2013

The Other Side of Midnight


The Other Side of Midnight


Despite having been identified by a member of the Asumen Clan as harboring a PAGOD syndrome, I’m eager, willing and happy to report that the promise of a blossoming dawn proved to be what awaited me on the other side of midnight.  It seemed most appropriate that midnight has come to be a perfect metaphor for the temporary sojourn into the realm of the unconscious, as obtains under general anesthesia.

I was out for a total of eight hours.  The first thing I saw on waking up was the surgeon giving me a thumbs-up and informing me that I did an excellent job.  This worried me some because I did not do anything as far as I could remember.  Besides, I had developed the trick of humming a tune before going under and I used to find myself humming the same tune on waking up.  This time around I was a complete blank.  Ergo I was gone for longer than I usually did during my other several trips into midnight.

Three operations were completed in the eight hours that I was out.  They kept me in Good Samaritan Hospital to recover some and was discharged the evening of Wed, 10-Jul-13.

One scary episode brought me face to face with my mortality and jolted my faith on the value of a hospital stay.  At 4:30pm on Tue, 9-Jul-13 I had an attack of chills reminiscent of my bouts with malaria when I was in high school, circa 1960-’61.  I could not feel anything south of the incisions on my groins. 
I reported it to the nurse and she drew a blank on me.  Quoted she: “I heard of malaria but I really don’t have any idea what it is all about.  I left a message for the Dr. I cannot do anything else until he gets back to me.”  She covered me with two more blanket and I just shivered it out for some four hours.  This was when I realized that one can actually die in a hospital room.  Some report will be written up as footnotes to the statistical item that used to be you.

It’s such a delight to have a surgeon with a sense of humor.  I went for my first follow-up appointment on Tue, 23-Jul-13 and to have the staples taken off the incisions, which per discharge instructions was somewhat overdue because both the surgeon and his secretary were out of town on business.

After waiting five minutes on his examination table, the surgeon greeted me with:

Dr.: “Mr. Asumen, how are you doing”?
Me: “Well, I have not been doing much of anything.  It appears I’m still in one piece but I have been living off Percocet and I have taken the second to the last one when I left home this afternoon.”
Dr.: “If I remember correctly, you did have a not-so-trivial surgery.  I know because I was there.”

He gave me another 30-tablet prescription for Percocet and an appointment for a follow-up visit on 13-Aug-13 to assess the overall medical/physical disposition of the stents. 

The main reason this post was so late in coming was because I just could not sit up long enough to be able to write up anything remotely intelligible.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Ruminations on the Question of Legacy


Arguments on a Question of Legacy

 Yet even these bones from insult to protect
 Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
 Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.


When you get to be as old as I am, as I am aware some are definitely more seasoned than I have been fortunate to consider myself one, you would notice more intangibles that you want to treasure more before you forget them.  At least in my particular case, that had appeared to be a pronounced tendency.
It is not so much because I want to catalogue them before they become totally divorced from me.  Rather because I want to assimilate the essence of their beauty into the substance of my soul.  Hopefully, by so doing, I shall have enriched, tempered, and strengthened the essence of my being to be better able to handle the realm of the unknown in the hereafter.

But if there is no hereafter, you say?  I happen to believe there is.  And should I be wrong, I shall have enjoyed the process of immersing myself in the spirit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.  If you don’t know what they are all about, there is really nothing that I can do about it now that can be of benefit to you.  You should have recognized them early on when you started to notice yourself as a sentient being and began to wonder where your sense and sensibility came from.

In this ever more frequently occurring journey to what I tagged my inner universe, I wish I would discover within me the faculty to create or compose a melody, a musical tune out of whatever it is melodies emerge from, perhaps the nothingness of being.  I know I appreciate the melody I like when I hear one.  But to create one out of nowhere and out of nothing, I cannot help but wonder what the experience is like.  And to be able to communicate it to another sentient being, must constitute the consummation of total nirvana.

It is in this vein of total unknowing and wonderment that I listen to music.  It is in this context that I acknowledge and pay homage to the inventors of YouTube.  It is a wonderful venue to give vent to my passion to listen to melodies which resonate with the most profound dreams and longings of my soul.  Beyond that, it affords me a vehicle to belt out a few tunes myself as a way of letting loose and let go some pent up emotions which cannot otherwise be verbalized.

The concept of a playlist affords me a corridor, a beach, a landscape, or a horizon in the tides of time through which I can wander and get lost in the inner chambers of my reverie, simultaneously as I interface with kindred journeys of kindred souls~ ~they who uploaded the melodies which I strung together into a playlist.  Not to mention the souls whose talents and performance are showcased in the component melodies which constitute each Playlist, I commune with them too.  They are not even aware that my soul is touching theirs in some profound way even if only with the vestige traces of their sojourn in the vast magnificence of both the here and now and the great beyond in God’s Creation and the infinitude thereafter.

The playlist gives me a venue for both prospects and retrospects.  It allows me to look back with gratitude and reverence to the souls who were here before me.  It affords me to look forward with awe and nonchalance at the judgment of posterity from the generations of souls who shall come after me.  Or in the immortal lines of Thomas Gray,
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev'n from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

It is important to me that I am aware of the various interfaces and interactions.  For as John Donne in Meditation XVII would have it,
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; . . .

It is in this spirit that I nurture my passion to create playlists and endeavor to share them with any and all, who might enjoy what they offer, however different from whatever ecstasy and entertainment I derive from them.

I have so far created twenty-five playlists, ranging in length from two to fifty component videos.  In terms of playback duration it ranges from as short as nine minutes for the two-video list to thirty-two hours for the list of fourteen complete performances of my favorite opera masterpieces.  Below is one of them which I titled “Down Nostalgia Lane.”


I don’t apologize for including number 17.  It may be crude and devoid of any instrumentation.  It however provides a graphic illustration of the emotional outlet function of YouTube that I alluded to earlier above.  Besides, it showcases the lyrics I myself wrote.  I am still hoping to find somebody with better diaphragm and vocal cords than I have at my disposal to take the composition for a much more deserving test drive than I can muster.

You may skip it at playback.  But I beseech you to not eliminate it from the list even if you know how.  That would, ipso facto, violate the intent and charitable spirit of the venue.  Otherwise, enjoy the ride.  Or in the somberly imposing verses of John Milton:
“. . . Live while ye may,
Yet happie pair; enjoy, till I return,
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed!”