We both got it right this morning! We guessed and got lucky after the confusion of the recent Short Week caused by Labor Day in which we didn’t. Labor, that is.

This morning we are awake at the same time and relatively certain as to what day it is! That is a challenge sometimes, since retirement has liberated us from some of the stress of figuring out what day it is besides the one that ends in “y.”

We normally get that confirmation stream as the message stream kicks off at the beginning of “life in the middle” section- the one with mountainous humps. That starts across the ocean to the right, which in our experience is a little darker than the one on the left. The one in Europe (Right) starts six hours ahead of us and sweeps into dawn in Daylight Savings Country here.

We do our American Morning Patio thing- our first trip to the head and the slow shaking of our heads as we look at the time-stamp on the upper right margin of the laptop that only barely covers the “lap.” A couple months ago, we started taking the news from China again from a professional organization that tracks the problems coming at us, left to right, and numbering around a hundred messages in the queue to plow through.

The early risers on the left side of the Atlantic are moving at 0430 or so. The excitement of regaining consciousness spreads across North America’s time zones for hours- three or four of them- before the passage of the sun leaves the West Coast bright and astern.

Our shorthand for the process is “three hours to LA” and all three are filled with reports of escaped murderers, Constitutional violations, assorted criminal conduct and Politics As Usual.

Also becoming usual is the hysteria about who will be running this grand nation after the election next year. Of course, there is some question about that matter right now, and it is not limited to people who live in the nine standard time zones (STZ’s) covering The Contiguous States. Or the other three that cover the territories and other US possessions strewn haphazardly across the vast spread of oceans.

That amounts to 11 or an even dozen TZ’s. It is a lot to ask of Hawaii and Guam to pick up the slack engendered by all that Pacific Water as our planet spins to the right, not the left.

We also thankfully have active correspondents in the Antipodes, since without them we might fall off the equator, uncertain if “up” and “down” refers to north or south or left and right. Fred is down there working and we have no idea how many messages and strings clog his morning computer screen, or if he is surprised at the appearance of the ghostly constellation of the Southern Cross above.

It is the middle of the seven day weekly cycle there as well, though The Date Line (TDL) is a bit controversial in application. That has always been a little confusing if you are not actually flying over it or churning the light blue waves themselves.

We are good at that, since it is necessary to do the mid-week drill to try to capture some of the various improbable events all around the globe. The middle of the five weekdays happens around noon here, or twenty minutes away. There may be more breaking news happening now that will go down before that occurs. Mid-week is an opportune time to plot what fits in the wake behind us as it collides with the waves ahead.

We will emphatically not go into the issue of Camel physiognomy, either by nose under the tent flap or by the significant hump in the middle.

Let’s just leave it as ‘the mid-point of the working week’ and remind us all it is time to get slightly better arrayed for the future.

You can see it in the attached Weekly Weather Report. Apparently the Pennsylvania State Police nailed the young man who escaped prison two weeks ago with an amazing spider-style scaling of the prison wall. That has been a bubbling story right through the beginning of this month and had notations from last week, this one and the next. We hope he is back in a cell-block to close out this moment in his life sentence. That would be the only way to keep track of what day it might be that is better than ours. The days are not timeless, not exactly, but they are identical in description, “one after another (OAA).”

We had to talk about the loss of Jimmy and Billy- Buffett and Richardson, if you are keeping track beyond the OAA. We felt we needed to before H-Day slipped away.

Jimmy’s contribution to our natural and national need for speed goes without saying. He did so with a margarita in hand and a smile on his lips.

Bill left us a little confused, which was not an unusual circumstance. We have been tracking average ages of passing with some interest since the pandemic arrived to smite us. We had been of the opinion that “late 70’s” was about what American men could hope for, on average.With that assumption, both of these talented and energetic men left life only a whisker early.

We looked it up to compare with the obituaries. Jimmy left at 76. Bill was 75. We had assumed the average time we are allotted on the planet was in the later part of the seventh decade.’78’ was our (INCORRECT)previous estimate of “78 years for males.”

That was based on an old glance at a box chart from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We are uncertain if “Prevention” is still part of their formal name, since it might have been lopped off like the years of our lives.

CDC has redone their statistical labors and the newest issued data now includes 2021, the first year they were able to capture the impact of COVID-19.

Down in Atlanta, Doctor Geetika Gupta supervised the compilation of the report. He issued the data with what seemed to be mild surprise. You will not be surprised that the optimism last displayed about 2018 reflects some changes.

According to Dr. Gupta, from 2020 to 2021 the average life expectancy for U.S. males fell from 74 to 73 years. That was much lower than expected, or would be if you did it as a percentage headline as “US Life Expectancy Falls 5%!’ With new numbers, it actually is the lowest it has been since 1996, when things seemed to be getting longer. Mom and Dad lasted to the end of their 80s, but one single pandemic seemed to snip that trend right off.

Last August, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) stated that life expectancy data for American Women dropped 0.8 years, down from 79.9 years (2020) to 79.1 (2021). Men, as usual, were in the lead with a drop of a full year for 2021. Guys dropped from 74.2 years (2020) to 73.2 (2021). There have been the usual explanations fo that. Men drink more and conduct various higher-risk activities like getting out of bed.

It has also been suggested that women are just smarter than men. We put away some of the gas (and electric) tools out in the shed, since we are prepared to accept that.

All those bullets on the attached slide? Yep. “All this stuff is going on.” It is likely to continue to do so, since the last quote we heard from 2022 was 2023 shouting something like: “Hold our Beer!”

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com