Savor sugar words
Pulse rushing to a touch
Hold tight the triggered yearning
From a voice on the phone
While it lasts
Swim in honey
And be glad
Let it hold you
Over breakfast dirty dishes
Stale cold coffee
Of the years
Sustain you through emergence
Of a human side of humans
Viewed by humans
Toenail clippings
Bad-breath mornings
PMS
And milk gone sour
In the fridge
Sit back remember
Savor sugar words
And be glad
I’ve been mildly curious watching myself for a considerable while. Weight was peeling off me and I was forgetting to eat. My body would notify me I hadn’t eaten anything in a day or two by a dose of the blind staggers, or just a dizzy spell to get me thinking back on when I last ate something.
Most of what I cook around here’s cheap and simple because of the fact I ran out of propane early last year and haven’t refilled the bottle, and because hauling water makes washing cookware an expense measured in hauling trips. So I was living mostly on potato combinations, yogurt combinations, fruit combinations and various bean concoctions. I was at the point of hating to look any one of them in the eye.
Then one day in the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrvillle I saw that rice and veggie steamer still in the box for sale for a dollar. It didn’t appear to ever have been used. So, I bought it, thinking rice and steamed veggies would at least be different.
Sheeze, the best purchase since my High Roller back in 1972. The tow bar I bought the other day might turn out to be a better deal, but I haven’t figured out anyway to cook with it. But I’ve digressed.
What I’ve re-discovered is the absolute, euphoria-laden joy of food. I’m making better meals on that thing than I could even find in a restaurant in town, but if I could, couldn’t afford them. I’ll make up a batch of one or another Asian-like mix thinking it will last two days, then find I have to fight a war with myself to keep from eating it at a single sitting.
It does require loads of fresh onion, garlic, jalapeno, cayenne, curry and ginger. I buy bags of trail mix of various sorts, dried mango, papaya, raisins and cranberrys at the Dollar Tree and pour on top, a little of each. The food bills went up something awful last month. But I don’t forget to eat.
And the simple truth is, some of these meals turn out to be classed among the best I’m able to recall having anytime in my life.
Anyone says an old dog can’t learn new tricks is kidding himself.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this cold morning.
The adventurers are getting old and long in the tooth. I’ve written about this in the past a number of times, but a few days ago I got an email that got me thinking about it again:
Hi J, I hope this finds you well….cats too.
Age 72. Raised in northern Wyoming. Made my living mostly in electronics and related technology. Army vet.
I have been obsessed with that lost gold mine since 1974 and many years ago received a copy of your CD via a guy I think you know….If you had ever watched him shovel.
Bought your book several years ago. Lots of good stuff but editing sucked on the CD.. Also, someone you might know, Bob Gordon of Dallas went on a trip with us once to the Mangus Mt. area (probably in the early ’80’s) and I think I gave him his first copy of Allens and Byerts. Excuse me, but I am currently too many margaritas along right now and need to cut this short. I am convinced I have a lot of the story figured out….Yeah, like I’m alone. But seriously.
I would like to chat with you if only email, Fergy
I replied to his email saying I’d be willing to discuss it by email. Back during the day I spent enough hours on the telephone hearing where it was to break me of any desire to ever do that again. But there’s always a chance someone will come along and add the piece to finish out the puzzle.
When his reply elaborating on his ponderings arrived, he didn’t clear anything up, but it did get me thinking about some things.
Over the years those phone calls and emails have gradually squeezed down to men of advancing age. Most of us are getting so old we’re not likely to tromp up high mountains anymore. And we’re dying off. Of the hundreds of letters and phone calls I got over the years, every one of the originators had solved the mystery, or was near unto solving it. As I always was. Heck, as I still am, though I don’t think about it much anymore.
During the 20th Century thousands of men tried to find that lost mine, as did a similar number during the 19th Century. There was even a movie made about it in the late 1960s.
Sprawling frontier adventure with Gregory Peck as a sheriff who is given a map, said to show the location of a large cache of gold hidden in a valley, and soon finds he’s the target of every fortune hunter in the West. The star-laden cast also includes Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Julie Newmar, Lee J. Cobb, Edward G. Robinson. 123 min. Standard; Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital stereo; Subtitles: English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai; biographies; theatrical trailers.
But as the 20th Century wound down something interesting happened. There were no new legions of youngsters replacing the old ones, researching, reading, poring over maps and trekking into remote canyons. Something was gone, and it’s over.
Old Fergy, Keith and I, a few others are still out there thinking about it, but what we are and what we were is something modern humanity has left behind without noticing it’s done so. I don’t know what that means, but I’m not overjoyed about it. My preferred view of humanity and youth is going to require some adjustment.
Old Jules
Previous posts referring to the lost gold mine search:
I don’t get many phone calls here, so a few days ago when the phone rang and a male voice with an accent said something I didn’t understand about ‘technical support’ and ‘your computer’ I kept listening a moment. But other than those two phrases I couldn’t cypher out a word he was saying.
“Excuse me. I can’t understand what you’re saying. What do you want?”
Another long string of words including the two phrases, unintelligible. My hearing isn’t all that it might be. I can’t understand what store clerks or waiters are saying half the time when I’m in town, so I nod yes, or no, as the mood strikes me and take my chances.
But this guy had something to say that might be important, and he called to say it. Seemed prudent to me to focus my iron will and patience on the job of knowing what it was. I tried several possibilities.
After I’d interrupted him three or four times asking him to speak more clearly, more slowly, though, he said, “Never mind.” Spang broke the connection.
I’m reasonably certain the man was in India. I shot a couple of phrase of Gujarati at him I remembered from Peace Corps training and he shot some back at me I couldn’t understand any better than I understood his English.
Remembering it, I recalled a story I read a while back online:
A PACKED commuter train sped hundreds of kilometres across India in the wrong direction before passengers finally realised it was pulling into an unfamiliar station.
The train left the southern town of Tirupati on Wednesday for the eastern city of Bhubaneswar, where it was due to swing north to its eventual destination of Varanasi, a city in northeastern India, The Times of India reported today.
But bewildered passengers noticed something was amiss yesterday when it chugged into Warangal – a central Indian city on an entirely different route some 980km west of its intended stop at Bhubaneswar.
The express train had managed to cross three of India’s railway divisions and travel hundreds of miles without anyone noticing it had lost its way, The Times reported.
The mistake was believed to have arisen because it was given an incorrect destination code, compounded by the fact it was a special service and many of the staff were unfamiliar with the route.
By hindsight, I don’t know whether the guy thought he was talking to someone in the US, Australia, or the UK. I can’t for the life of me form an opinion about whether he knew something about my computer it was important I know, or wanted to tell some train pilot in New Zealand he was going backwards and another one was coming at him 90 miles an hour the other way.
This brave new world’s getting a bit complex for a 20th Century man.
No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.
Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.
She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.
The mountain I used to prospect for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water. Big ruins. I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.
One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset. In the basin below there’s a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains. I’d discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely. What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses?
But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob! Yon damned Mogollons used it to mark summer solstice!
A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of those people who lived in that ruin. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave. Politicians, or priests, or both, deciding what was best for them.
One day they just left. I’ve always thought it was because of that grim civil war nobody knows anything about that happened among them around the time these ruins were abandoned. Bashing in the heads of anyone who didn’t agree to migrating.
They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.
What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.
Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind. Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things they couldn’t carry.
Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, the pain and sorrow in those villagers. Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn. A few weeks of planning. What to take? What to leave behind.
Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before. At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad. Knowing they’d never go home again, wondering about the place they were going.
Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have. Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancestors had roamed for 2000 years.
They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths. But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside. The kids probably screeching enough to cover everyone elses grief.
As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages. The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them. They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.
Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village. They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they’d ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.
Today, it’s just piles of rock, potsherds, holes left by scholars and other diggers for spoils. The land still falls off across Johnson Basin, sun going down over that volcanic nub that once measured the time to plant. Cow men ride their motorized hosses across the old trails, cows stomp around looking for grass, making the pottery fragments even smaller.
But sometimes late at night when the wind howls down the mountain a man might hear, or think he hears an echo of the chants, the drums, the night mumbles and whispers of lovers, the ghosts of lovers. Pulls the bag tighter around his ears and wonders.
Good morning, readers. I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time. Never quite got around to it.
I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.
Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.
Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less. They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.
Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.
Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.
One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.
Amazing footage.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.
The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief. But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.
But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.
Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.
At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.
Let no fate willfully misunderstand me and snatch me away, not to return. Robert Frost
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Evidently some readers were left with the impression yesterday post was a farewell notice. It wasn’t. I’ll be posting here, but not so often, is all, until I’m where I can’t. I just won’t be spending so much time online.
Keith: I got your email, but I can’t do Facebook because of the slow connection. Check your Yahoo mailbox, amigo. I know you have computer issues, but I think that’s the only way available from this end. J
The invader cat has raised the ante here. It’s evidently a female and in heat. Walks around mewing all the time, to the disgust of the four resident felines. But I’ve begun feeding it because I’m not going to have it starving while I figure out who it belongs to.
My friend, Rich sent me a RAM upgrade for my offline computer and it arrived yesterday. Jumped me from 4 gb of RAM to 12 gb with Readyboost, and it allowed me to follow some computations I’d never been able to do before. Uplifting, satisfying day.
Gale’s fairly under the weather, but he brought down the RAM chips and we conversed a while. Seems he might have come across a tow bar for sale without recognizing it for what it is. Got me fairly excited, because the towing issues are the reason the New Truck isn’t in town being worked on, or isn’t finished, licensed, inspection stickered, lock stock and banana peel. I’m borrowing Little Red to go into town today and try to chase it down.
Maybe I shouldn’t have made the post yesterday, though I wasn’t smart enough was the reason I did. It seemed an explanation of why I’d be making fewer posts.
For those who read it rapidly I suppose it seemed I was about to take off all my clothes and run naked into the sunset.
It’s too cold still for that.
Old Jules
Previous posts about the transportation issue saga:
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
When I began posting this blog just before the end of June last year,
The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters, my life was a somewhat different place, though it hasn’t changed much by outward appearance. Mainly what’s changed is priorities. Time has speeded up for me in a sense. Things I’ve needed to be doing all along, but were on the back burner indefinitely have fought their way to the front burner and now are holding the high ground.
The season that’s been attempting to pass itself off as a winter here seems every day to be assuming the attire of early spring. Which is to say, I need to be doing spring-like things inside the priority mix, instead of winter things, and the spring activity demands this year will be somewhat different from last year.
One of the ways that will manifest itself is that I’ll be posting less regularly on this blog, trying to spend more time doing higher priority activities. A lot of the projects I had planned, or was working on during the blog months are going to be abandoned or allowed to be pushed into abstractions for some future time, except one.
So the frequent and somewhat regular posting here will change to a target-of-opportunity mode.
Jeanne will continue posting the Ask Old Jules entries, and I’ll probably occasionally post something there also, as time allows.
I’m no good predicting the future, but my intention, within the context of what the Coincidence Coordinators will allow, is to have this shelter and the area immediately around it back mostly as it was when I arrived several years ago. Including me being somewhere else. Most of my priority juggling is going to try to fit itself into that as best it can.
Hopefully the ancient Mayans had all that figured out and that’s what all the hoopla about the Mayan calendar’s really about. The cats and me experiencing another pesky reincarnation without the Universe raising any eyebrows.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
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So Far From Heaven 
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