Red Grain Truck Blues – Jerry Sires circa 1975-1980
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
It’s piled high to testify
that some farmer had a little luck.
I sure like to drive these country roads
even though they’re changing every day
but I always was kind of slow
and sometimes I just feel in the way.
In the city there’s people getting by
taking in each other’s dirty clothes.
Where the big cars and fine homes all come from
I guess nobody knows.
I wonder how long it can last
When the teeming billions watch and want theirs too.
it all has to come from the earth
and she’s about done all she can do.
You can almost hear her cry
You can almost hear her moan
as another garage door opener
is carved right from her bones,
but daddy needs a new golf cart
and mama needs a new suntan machine.
Oh Bobby wants a race car
and Sally wants a full sized movie screen.
You can almost hear her cry
You can almost hear her moan
when Singapore and Shanghai
want to refrigerate their homes.
Still, daddy needs a new golf cart
and mama needs a new suntan machine
Oh Bobby wants a race car
and Sally wants a full sized movie screen.
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I trekked up to Gale’s yesterday for a while to talk wind and see whether his face had gotten over the baboon butt similarity it had the previous week. He had a good photo of it during the worst stage I begged him to allow me to post for you, but his refusal didn’t appear to leave it open for discussion.
But he told me about a project I’m feeling uppidy about working on during the year. This place has been overgrazed, probably since the invention of barbed wire, and it shows. I’ve thought from the time I arrived here I’d like to do some cheap but time consuming erosion control, but it never had a priority.
Seems to keep his agricultural tax exemption on the land, though, Gale could go back to having three cows fighting over every blade of grass in the traditional Texas fashion, or he could switch to wildlife management. He had a lady from Texas Parks and Wildlife out here going over the place with him the other day helping devise a plan to submit to the County.
Assuming it gets accepted, I’m figuring something I learned in one of my professions, at least, will finally get put to some worthy use. Between now and my departure from here I’ll have rock and brush dams collecting water and soil into every channel on the place.
I truly love erosion control, but it had slipped my mind how much. I hate to admit the urge to dance naked in the meadow celebrating.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
A nice little coronal mass ejection hit the earth magnetic field last night. I might have heard it hit the roof, but it was probably just a big tree limb, or one of the sheet-metal roof panels blowing off. The high wind during the night had more going on around here than I could keep track of and I decided to wait for daybreak to go out and make sense of it.
CME IMPACT: A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field on March 7th at approximately 0400 UT. The impact was not a strong one, but it could stir up polar geomagnetic storms anyway
I let my curiosity carry away my good sense just now and went out there with a flashlight. Turns out it was nothing amiss. Just a big tree limb. No big chunks of shattered magnetism lying around messing up my waning-anyway-and-somewhat-neglected magnetic field experiments. Most of that’s located out east of the cabin where there are no trees to fall on it, but one piece of it’s strung out across the meadow. I was needing to guy up the post over there and hadn’t. That might be on the ground.
But it’s time I was winding down on all that anyway because I’m figuring it’s part of what I won’t be following through.
Lots of noise from the Rooster Containment Center, though, when I went out. They’re probably remembering and regretting what a nuisance they made of themselves last night when I was trying to get them and the Commie Americauna penned up before dark.
I’m thinking today might be a busy one. That wind was doing a lot of bragging in the dark. But you can’t tell about winds, that way. They’ll stomp around, boast, make little things sound big and big things sound bigger, then you find it was all just a lot of bluster.
Maybe more later if there’s anything worth mentioning.
The bottom oven-mitten is your brain if you’re not on drugs. The top oven mitten is your brain if you are on drugs.
A cheap antibiotic normally prescribed to teenagers for acne is to be tested as a treatment to alleviate the symptoms of psychosis in patients with schizophrenia, in a trial that could advance scientific understanding of the causes of mental illness.
Scientists believe that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses including depression and Alzheimer’s disease may result from inflammatory processes in the brain. Minocycline has anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects which they believe could account for the positive findings.
The first account of minocycline’s effects appeared in 2007 when a 23-year-old Japanese man was admitted to hospital suffering from persecutory delusions and paranoid ideas. He had no previous psychiatric history but became agitated and suffered auditory hallucinations, anxiety and insomnia.
Blood tests and brain scans showed no abnormality and he was started on the powerful anti-psychotic drug halperidol. The treatment had no effect and he was still suffering from psychotic symptoms a week later when he developed severe pneumonia.
He was prescribed minocycline to treat the pneumonia and within two weeks the infection was cleared and the psychosis resolved. Minocycline was stopped and his psychiatric symptoms worsened. Treatment with the drug was resumed and within three days he was better again. Halperidol was reduced but he remained on minocycline. Two years after his psychotic episode, he was still well.
The article describes at length how and where the tests on patients are going on all over the world.
But Mad Scientists, meanwhile, have another alternative. If you’ve been noticing you are crazy, you can order some of the stuff online from India. A lot cheaper than if a Medico wrote it down on a slip and you trucked to a drugstore for a bottle. And do your own scientific testing.
Or you could just make up some colloidal silver and take an eyedropper-full of it every day. Which is how I keep me and the cats and chickens free of insanity.
Japanese scientists with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology claimed this week that they have developed a novel new weapon by combining two specialized technologies in such a way that they are now capable of rendering someone unable to speak.
While it’s not technically a weapon, their “portable speech-jamming gun” could certainly be used as one, especially against political leaders or others who speak to large audiences for a living.
Combining a directional microphone and a directional speaker, the “Speechjammer” records and quickly plays back whatever words someone is uttering, making it very difficult for the speaker to focus on what words come next. The effect is called “artificial stuttering.”
I never knew the lady well, but I was briefly acquainted with her when I was writing the piece for Men In Adventure Magazine, Vietcong Seductress, et al. She was a lot more understanding about the slant the editors put on the piece than Sheriff Jim Flournoy. But that was before the Texas news jumped onto the bandwagon.
Edna Milton Chadwell, Last Madam of ‘Chicken Ranch’ Bordello, Dies at 84
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Edna Milton Chadwell, the last madam of the infamous Chicken Ranch brothel, died last week at the age of 84. The Chicken Ranch of La Grange, Texas, was the house of ill repute that inspired the Broadway musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” It later became a hit movie.
After the Chicken Ranch’s demise, Chadwell moved to Arizona where she met her husband and remained for the rest of her life. Her obituary from the Associated Pressquotes her nephew, Robert Kleffman.
“She was a hard-nosed lady. She was very straightforward, didn’t put up with no monkey business, no nonsense,” he said. “Hard-nosed. But with a spine of steel and a heart of gold.” Kleffman added that his aunt didn’t like to talk about her time in La Grange, but she also wasn’t ashamed of it.
Joe Stalin he might be
Fingers drumming green felt
Calculating his next purge
Fill an other gulag
With Ukrainians
Finger tapping
Focus on the down cards
Other players
Cardboard faces
Pasteboard numbers
Shouts past me
“Double down! Double down!”
Tired first base trucker
Parlaying his bets
To survive another hand or two
In this hell-camp.
Stalin tosses three greens
Past me to the trucker
From his four inch high
Stack of blacks and greens
“Double down! Double down!”
Astonished trucker pushes back
A weathered straw hat
Gazes at the green chips
The dealer upturned six
And his own sixteen
And doubles down.
On and on
Same vein
Stalin winks at me
At second base
Throwing chips past me
The driver promptly loses
But always looks now
To see what Stalin
Thinks is best
While downstream
In third base Stalin
Plays three hands all at once
Table max 200 on each place
And wins wins wins
Speznatz tattoos
On chubby knucklebacks
Stalin and I exchange small talk
And knowing smiles
Once advised
The other side of a line
I was on this side of
Did his final tour in Afghan
Got out first chance he could
When things got shaky
And the walls went down
Now he hauls produce
From east to west coast
Always stops here in-between
Shouting orders
“Double down! Double down!”
To the bloated capitalist pigs
Grumbles price of fuel
Trainloads of Chinese goods
And tyrant highway cops.
First off, The Invader Cat’s not becoming a fixture around here. It’s just hanging around getting meals and paying the fare by being bullied by chickens and the other cats. It has a home somewhere. I’m certain of it because sometimes it vanishes for a couple of days.
But it’s not a fixture and it’s not becoming a fixture. Even though when I was putting the piece of the can of feed I’d saved for it down last night, it came within a couple of feet of me scratching it behind the ears.
Secondly, if you’re among those trying to figure out what’s not happening by tracking Ganymede, you’re a day late and a dollar short. Ganymede looks great at first, but the further you hone things down the more you’ll conclude something’s missing. I’d suggest doing some dizzying calculations correlating Ganymede positions with with the position of Mercury. Which, if you run through enough ways of measuring where they are, will give you a lot clearer view of what’s not happening.
Thirdly, I worked a lot on the brush dams in the ruts on the road coming down here yesterday in hopes of further rainfall runoff forcing the hill to give up more of the dirt it’s been bringing down from above. Over the years it’s gradually been filling the worst blow-out-a-tire, high-centering ruts. Now if we can keep getting a few of these male rains I think this will finish it off.
Which is to say, spectacular erosion won’t be happening and past erosion will have reversed itself somewhat.
Lastly, despite your hardheadedness on the issue if you’ve got any, cold weather isn’t happening.
If you’re going to be a part of what’s happening you’re going to have to switch from felt to straw. If you try to hang on to your outdated good-times idea about felt you’re going to have sweat running down around your eyelids and getting into your ears next time you go to town. And you won’t be happening.
Just saying.
Old Jules
Edit 8:37 am: I neglected to mention earlier while talking about Mercury and Ganymede that Saturn seems to be happening a little bit. Even though it’s way to hell and gone off the other side of things where you’d expect it to have to be.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
That adobe was built sometime in the 1930s as a turkey barn, then later converted to a dairy barn until the 1950s. The walls were 18 inches thick, the floor a couple of inches of poured concrete, flat roof that held several thousand gallons of water when snow accumulated on the roof and the canales intended to drain the melt became solid ice.
No heat, rotten iron pipes for plumbing, and a back wall ready to collapse next snowfall. The vigas holding up the roof, cracked timbers sagging with the weight of 75 winters. Roof leaking into the adobe walls, eroding them beneath the vigas enough to cause me to arrange the couch I slept on in such a way there’d be something between me and it if the whole thing collapsed.
The rent was so high I couldn’t afford to pay it, eat, feed the cats and pay the utilities, even with the intermittent jobs I could pick up. So they’d cut off the utilities every few months until I could raise the money to have them turned back on.
Maybe the best place I’ve ever lived. Certainly the hardest.
That last winter living there I was shovelling snow off the roof, slipped and fell into the snow on the ground below and lay there unconscious some undetermined time before I awakened and struggled indoors. Stove up something awful the rest of the winter.
But the cats loved the place and so did I, even as I watched the walls dissolve and the crack between the back room wall and ceiling widen. The near-certainty the house wouldn’t last another winter gradually had me wondering whether I could find a bridge to live under without giving up the felines.
Gale had been suggesting for several years that I move here and live in this cabin on his place. Another winter in Placitas, the cat necessities, and the vice grips of no-obvious-alternatives gradually persuaded me.
Gale and his brother drove up from Texas with a trailer, packed me up and hauled me, the cats, and all my worldly goods down here in one fell swoop. A person can count himself lucky if he can have one friend in a lifetime like Gale’s been to me.
For several years here it’s been easy to not think about what comes next, to just savor being here and the absolute luxury of not being in the joy of Placitas, the adobe, the proximity of some bridge to live underneath. We seemed a lot younger, that short time ago, Gale and me. The cats, too, for that matter.
But aging comes more quickly these days and it’s creeped into the picture until it fills it. The Coincidence Coordinators are nagging at me with increasing urgency and insistence to look for the next bridge not to live under.
So far I believe I’ve been the luckiest man ever to walk the face of this planet, possibly among the happiest. I’ve discovered I’m nowhere near as tough as I once thought myself to be and Placitas taught me I’m also not the pioneer my ancestors were. I wouldn’t change a minute of those years after I gave myself a Y2K, but I sincerely won’t regret not doing it again if I don’t have to.
But maybe now I’ve toughened up enough to make the next step as much a blessing as this one’s been.
I probably should post this on Ask Old Jules, but nobody much reads that blog. Not that it matters whether anyone reads it, I suppose. But if I’m going to compose words something in me likes it better thinking it will be read by someone else, than to just fade into oblivion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this solitude addiction of mine lately, attempting to be candid with myself about it and what it means. The tripwire involved several emails I’ve received asking what makes me do it, want it, whatever. It’s plain enough the emails were sincere and genuinely interested, at least on some level. But it’s also patently obvious the concept is foreign enough to those asking to leave them without a foundation for thinking about it.
One of the emailers was a cautious man carefully lo0king for someone to keep an eye on a property he owns in a remote area. He’s somewhat caught between conflicting realities, I suppose. There’s a need for someone ‘responsible, someone he can trust. But anyone who’d stay there and do what needs doing is going to be a person he can’t understand, can’t identify with.
His concern’s legitimate. If he allows someone to occupy the place and they happen to be the sort to cook meth on the side, or grow illegal herb, he’s in danger of having the property confiscated. But he also runs that risk even if the grower or cook enter the unattended property without his knowing it. Absentee ownership isn’t as seductive a proposition as it once was.
But the email exchange did get me asking myself to form some candid understanding of exactly what motivates me and why I’m a lot happier not being around people much. And the eventual answer startled me a bit, seemed internally inconsistent.
I generally like people okay as individuals, I concluded, but dislike them in the composite. I don’t have much in common with groups, but I can almost always find something in common with individuals. So when I meet strangers in town I find I’m able to have friendly, enjoyable exchanges, though brief.
But I’m always acutely aware that each of those strangers is a part of some larger we, identifying with it, considering himself and it inseparable at some fundamental level. And almost every ‘we’ I’ve ever examined closely has led me to want nothing to do with it.
However, another piece of being around ‘we’ identifications scattered around all over urban landscapes is the forced realization of isolation and exclusion of a different sort than that of a hermit, deliberately self-imposing solitude.
The simple fact is, I get lonely and hell when I’m around people. And I’m not lonely at all when I’m not.
At least I think I might if I tried it. I actually don’t recall ever feeling lonely under those circumstances, though I do recall not caring for it.
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.
So Far From Heaven 