Friday Donuts

Friends, I love road trips. New sights, fun discoveries, eclectic experiences and a futile attempt to reach the horizon all play a part in the thrill. While anticipation builds, I find a competing distaste for leaving people and places behind counter-balances my thought process (hate would be too strong a word). As I prepare to hit the road for a few days, I’ve been trying to name this feeling. “Call of the wild” or “call of the open road” miss the conflicting desire to stay. “Resistance to change”, on the other hand, overstates the internal conflict. My search for an appropriate moniker has left me with a short list of candidates. I could call this feeling “the clash” —you know, after the British band that sang “should I stay or should I go?”. Then again that reference might be too obscure (and it certainly shows my age). I was also thinking of calling it the “Sarah impulse”, after Lot’s wife who turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the home she was leaving behind.

Friends, There’s a sort of a Mars Rush underway. Missions from China, the UAE and the U.S. are all reaching the fourth planet from the sun this month. The U.S. just landed a new SUV-sized rover on Mars. Perseverance survived the seven minutes of terror (about the duration of the song “ working man ” by Rush), made it safely onto the surface of the red planet and is now traversing an alien shore . Speaking of which, why does my Rush station play Pink Floyd, but my Pink Floyd station never plays Rush? I understand why Pandora would choose Alan Parsons Project as complementary to Pink Floyd (but not Rush) or Yes as having an affinity with Rush (and not Pink Floyd). But, if one plays another’s songs, shouldn’t it be mutual? It’s like Rush is the geek that bends over backwards for the popular Pink, who doesn’t even notice, let alone reciprocate. I know what you’re probably thinking: who still listens to Pandora when Spotify is so much better? Call me old fashioned. That said, before I begin

  Friends, The end of the universe will be homogeneous. After all the stars burn out, in the dark of the “big freeze”, entropy will evenly distribute everything into a uniform blah —I believe ”blah” is the correct technical term. Fortunately, that’s well over a trillion years away. In the meantime, I think we should celebrate visible differences. The way I see it, the contrast of opposites helps us appreciate the qualities of both. Hot and cold. Work and play. Temperance and indulgence. As we enter this lunar New Year, saint Valentine’s Day, Carnival weekend —amidst the unending lockdown— think of it as the universe’s not-so-subtle reminder to enjoy! Safely, of course. Even though New Orleans and Río’s parades are cancelled, the spirit of Fat Tuesday can’t be scrapped (a last minute indulgence before Ash Wednesday rings-in Lent). Beijing may have banned New Years’ gatherings, but no one can cancel an attitude of renewal (that would be a lot of bull —get it? It's funny because it’

Friends, The book  Ready Player One  sent me down memory lane this week. The journey was not triggered by the author’s excessive references to the 1980s, which border on obsessive. Rather, it was the name of the massive virtual reality simulation used by characters in this dystopian future to escape their grim surroundings: The OASIS. You see, that was also the name of my grandfather’s country estate, the setting where a disproportionate share of my treasured childhood memories were created.  La Quinta Oasis was a bucolic old whitewashed house with a massive stone staircase, three foot thick adobe walls and wooden window shutters that, when closed at night, would submerge the residence in pitch darkness. With no running water, electricity, phone or indoor plumbing, the only modern convenience was the battery transistor radio on which my uncles would listen to “Chucho el Roto”, a radio soap opera. The Spanish fighting roosters crowed long before sunrise, making it difficult to fall back