Happy Holidays!
I started 2012 in Waimate, New Zealand and quickly left for Coromandel, a pleasant little town on the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula of the North Island of New Zealand, due east of Auckland. I had a very pleasant month there staying in a retirement village and getting in what sight seeing I could, include a great hike along the stunning Coastal Walkway. I left Coromandel by ferry near the end of January and met Greg Wright in Auckland. From there we departed for Australia, landing in Sydney the next day. After a few days there (a great city), we headed north into the tropics and Cairns. It was a muggy change from NZ, but they at least had AC. We snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef (a 5-6 foot black-tipped reef shark swam near me), toured the rain forest (“No worries, too easy…”), but didn’t swim at most beaches: box jellyfish (everything can kill you in Australia). From there we did a great whip through the south island of NZ, hitting all my favorite spots for another week and then headed home.
I started a job in Rocky Mount, NC a week later, effectively avoiding winter. There are worse places than Rocky Mount. I had a quick trip to Atlanta for a small-scale USAF reunion in April, a great week in California (first time ever there) in June with the Smiths (Charles, Kerry and Parker), with a few days in Yosemite and a few in Sequoia National Park They are both truly awesome places, and the weather was the same: not a single cloud in the sky for 6 days. In July I spent a week at our summer cottage with the family, and then on Aug. 24th I was released from Rocky Mount.
My first major action was to buy a new car. I wanted a clean diesel Jetta or Golf, and used are hard to find, so I had to pay just a bit less than I spent on the scholarship last year for a Jetta TDI (white) with 6 speed manual. It is a great car and the fuel economy is amazing. I started an easy job on the west shore of the Harrisburg area in late September, working as the employee physician for Highmark Insurance. I will be there through the end of the year, so I will be able to spend some time in Danville, visit my local friends, and be around for the holidays without much travel.
This year’s preoccupation, if there was one, was writing letters speaking truth to power (however limited). It started as 2011 drew to a close and I wrote the District Health Board in Timaru, New Zealand about their system, its problems, and their treatment of general practitioners. Along with my yearly donations to the Catholic Church in Danville, I took the opportunity to voice my displeasure with many ongoing problems in Catholicism to my parish priest. Once I got to North Carolina, I was bombarded with demagoguery from the pulpit about the impending referendum on same-sex marriage, which prompted a 6 page letter to the Bishop of Raleigh. I followed that with a letter to the local priest about his continued distortions as he relentlessly preached about religious freedom, specifically his freedom to impose his religion on everyone else. I closed the protest letter year with one to the Composite Medical Board of Georgia demanding they inactivate my medical license there in protest of their new anti-immigration laws. Of note, only one of these missives drew a response: the letter to the District Health Board in New Zealand. I did recently receive a generic letter about renewing my license from GA, and they want to charge me $200 to inactivate my license – guess I will drop them completely. I was not always complaining: I wrote a nice letter to Coach Bill O’Brien at Penn State this week.
Music Update: I bought several worthy albums, my three favorites being the delightfully melodic The Avett Brothers “The Carpenter”; The hook-laden rock of The Gaslight Anthem “Handwritten”; and, from New Zealand, the anthemic rock of Midnight Youth “World Comes Calling”. Just below those are Bob Mould “The Silver Age”; Grouplove “Never Trust a Happy Song”; The Joy Formidable “The Big Roar”; Our Lady Peace “Curve”; Soul Asylum “Delayed Reaction”. Two huge favorites who had substandard but still very worthy albums were Fiona Apple “The Idler Wheel…..” and Todd Snider “Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables”; Quirky but nice music from Esperanza Spalding “Radio Music Society”; Of Monsters and Men “My Head Is an Animal”; Van Wagner “The Flood Sessions” and Jack White “Blunderbuss”.
Travel: After Greg Wright and I got back in New Zealand, we did the following in 7 days: All day walk of the Fox Glacier; Canyoning in Wanaka; kayaking in Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound (I performed a unique double, swimming briefly in both – quite cold despite it being summer); Bungy Jumping, Sky Swinging, and Street luging in Queenstown; hiking and running near Mt. Cook, and an aerial tour of the southeast coast of the island courtesy of Crispin Langston (our two bodies served as his extra weight flight training). Greg did a serviceable job accompanying me as I gave him a good taste of traveling “Terry Style”: up early to run, all day adventure, drive to next town/city, dinner, bed, repeat. Our time in Australia was more relaxed than that (and included prettier women).
While in North Carolina, in addition to the trips noted above, I hiked and ran in the Uwharrie National Forest, in Boone and Grandfather Mountain, and made three trips to Roanoke, VA (and still the Wrights wanted more). I made one solo trip to Keuka Lake to do some trail running and kayaking over Labor Day weekend, a three day weekend venture to Pittsburgh to see Andrew and Kelsey O’Rourke and run in Schenley Park, twice took Amtrak to New York City from Harrisburg for a weekend visit to Greg and Michael’s (I threw in a night as a bodyguard in Bushwick the first time), one of them in celebration of my sister Jennifer’s 50th birthday. I did a zombie run the 27th of October, which was very muddy fun.
Fitness and Health: after a miserable 2011, I turned it around in 2012. I am sure time alone helped my knee, but I left little to chance and developed, with the help of a few physiotherapists and study, a quite good, though time intensive, routine of running and leg exercises that have my knee back to essentially normal function. I do some “sprinting” 3 days a week and have done quite a few runs over 10 miles without problems. I am still careful not to overdo it, and I continue to buy and use many types of shoes (current faves Altra Zero Drops) and go to the gym otherwise on a regular basis; I am looking pretty good even though I operate on the assumption I am not vain - just making good use of my time and being healthy with the bare minimum of posing.
Books: I read a lot about Russia – it is a weird place - and lots of nonfiction. Good to great ones: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels; Travels in Siberia by the amusing and insightful Ian Frazier; The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by the fearless Masha Gessen; The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress by the incendiary Chris Hedges; reread one of my all-time faves, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (even better the second time); laughed as hard as I ever have alone while reading Stephen Colbert’s America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t (possibly the funniest book ever written); The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer (available free at his website – amusingly (yet somewhat terrifyingly) explains how the divides and conflicts in this country and elsewhere are the result of certain personal traits that can be reliably measured); and the most important book of the year and one we should be required to read: The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars by John Tirman. It is hard to imagine a better book about such a difficult subject.
Mr. Tirman’s book contained a passage that has haunted me and changed how I approach many things. It almost kept this letter to a brief few lines. He told of an interview with a soldier returned from Vietnam. This infantryman had done amazing things, seen horrible things, and he wanted to tell people about it when he got back, but he said he tried and “no one gave a damn.” It opened my eyes to how little people really cared about anything, even themselves and their own health, their families, neighbors, the needless sacrifices of soldiers, the horrible things governments do. It is particularly troubling to me, since I care a huge amount about everything that matters but meet apathy more often than I should. Why continue to bother? I can’t help myself – I am compelled. So, you get to keep reading.
Great quotes:
From Ambrose Bierce’s The Complete Devil’s Dictionary:
Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.
Edible, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
John Tirman: “That American elites and the broader public do not seem to care much about innocent bystanders in the wars we begin is not really in dispute.” “that to the extent the American public reacts at all, it sees the civilian deaths, injuries, disease, and displacement as (if not “normal” in wartime) something the war zone population has brought upon itself.”
Anyone without his or her head in the ground had to be annoyed beyond tolerance by the election. The people in office changed little (possibly for the better), so not much accomplished there, but I see an encouraging rejection of magical thinking and big money and a reach instead for reasonability, something there has been too little of for too long in this country (see Bob Altemeyer, above). There is much hype about the impending budget and tax changes, and I hope the trends noted above will continue with a practical solution.
With that, I remind you that my tlorourkejr@pol.net email address is defunct in January, so from now on you must contact me, if you give a crap, at tlojrmd@gmail.com most likely the address from which you received this and a few photos. I started a video channel of my own on YouTube, called, originally, “Terence O’Rourke.” You can check them out – generally well-edited, cleverly captioned, and mercifully short. All the best in 2013!
Terry O’Rourke
Comedy Addendum:
The boy scouts got some bad publicity this year, and that was far from humorous, but there is still a need for young men to be mentored and for role models. If I started the “Terry Scouts”, these would be a few of my Merit Badges:
1. “Critical Thinking” – find and describe three non-miraculous events in the Bible that could not possibly have taken place as written (hint: you don’t need to go too far into Genesis.).
2. “Endurance” – average 6-7 hours of activity a day for 7 consecutive days.
3. “No Pain, No Gain” – finish two of the 1000 page plus (not large print versions) novels published before 1900, even if you don’t enjoy them (but you will….)
4. “Music” – find 10 albums by groups you’ve never heard of and listen to each of them at least 5 times.
5. “Spice” – order meals made “hot” at an Indian, Thai, Wings and Korean/Vietnamese restaurant. Finish them all.
6. “Humor” – watch 4 Colbert Reports (preferably recorded) and count every time he says something funnier than you could have come up with. This will take much longer than you think.
7. “Hydrology” – drink nothing but tap water for 1 year (can be filtered and chilled).