Monthly Archives: December 2020

Jack wrote this in June, 2005:

Splosh splosh.

I wash my clothes in the bathtub here.  Got a pretty fair system worked out that I’ve been using since the cabin days and Y2K.  I run water into the tub, soap, and use a commode plunger dedicated exclusively for the washing of clothes to agitate them until I’m tired of doing it.  Then I put them into a couple of five gallon buckets with holes in them and let them drain off most of their water while I haul buckets of soapy water out to the front flower bed so the water isn’t completely wasted.

Then I pour them back into the tub and run a rinse, repeating the process.

Worked pretty well, until tonight.

I first sensed there was a problem when a cat came from the the back taking a step, shaking a paw, taking another step, shaking another paw, licking the tops of feet, making faces, shaking the paws some more.

Then I remembered I’d started running rinse water into the tub of clothes an hour or so ago….. jumped into the kitchen and fell spang on my arse as I tried to mount the two steps leading to the back of the house….kersplash my trousers hit half an inch of water and I skid feet-first up against the steps.

Hmmmm.

I ease back there barefoot, wincing as I splash through the water submerging the makeshift electrical cord I run into the bathroom to get lights there because the 75 year old wiring inside the adobe walls shorts out on the ceiling wires…..  but I don’t get the satisfaction of electrocuting my carcass and having the neighbors discover my body when the water gets out to the street along about July 20.

Yep.  Those clothes are good and rinsed.

Water running under all the bookcases, melting the adobe interior walls that were already crumbling.

I’m wondering do I need to give all those trowsers, shirts, shorts and socks another rinse.

Meanwhile, got Mexican rugs, saddle blankets, old torn but still good enough to wear to work outdoors shirts soaking the water off the concrete floor, but I’m thinking most will soak through the cracks if I give it a while.

Come morning I’ll hang out all those rugs and saddle blankets and give it another shot at a rinse.

Jack

The Great Escape

Call yourself a cop

I’ll call myself a robber

Corner me in an outhouse

Call in your backups

Talk to me through bullhorns

“Come out with your hands up

We know you’re in there

Watching flies strafe dust particles

In sunlight shafts

Savoring the odor and the old news

“Come out or we’ll come in after you!”

Tension builds.  No answer.

Anti-climax hero cop makes a perfect photograph

Eyeball peeking through a knot hole

Too late.

I’ve escaped

Down the hole

Into the real world.

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002 Jack Purcell

I have a couple of boxes of Jack’s papers (some going back to high school days) and I’ve been going through them as time permits. I do NOT know when this was written or who the person was that caused him to write it, but my gut feeling is that it was about a certain manager at a Dollar General in Grants, NM. I could be wrong– there’s no date on it. He certainly never meant to share it with anyone. I think he was simply reminding himself that he knew how to deal with a difficult person. But his turn of phrase really amuses me and I thought you might enjoy it, too. —Jeanne

1. Don’t allow yourself to be provoked or lured into any involvement strong enough to be called a confrontation. Ignore.
   
   2. Keep in mind that her potential as a human being has probably already been achieved, except in the still-developing malignancy of her personality. Being her is not something you’d care to experience. Remember that her decision to be pond slime is her own and has nothing to do with you. Her leprosy surrounds her like a cheap perfume. Don’t inhale.
   
   3. Her bread-crumb evil is indiscriminate and contagious. Steer clear of her physical proximity, her written words, and the venom that trails in the wake of her passage, manifested in subtleties smouldering in her tracks. Ignore, and beware. There’s nothing about her that’s worth one increased pulse beat per hour.
   
   4. Don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s nothing new or different. She came off the same assembly line as scores of others you’ve known one way or another. She’s just the economy model–not as smart, not as cunning, not as pretty, and not as dangerous.
   
   5. Remember that all she has to look forward to is getting older, fatter, uglier, and emptier. She’s never been anything more than she is now, never been anywhere, never had the imagination, most likely, to visualize herself and anything more than a pacing, ass-biting animal. She’s only beginning to grow her wolf-teeth. Just be glad she’s nobody you have to care about or are forced by circumstance to be around much.
   
   6. Remember she has no power to drag you into her witless snares unless you give it to her.

Old Jules, how did those who opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam challenge or undermine the premises of Cold War thinking?

We threw rocks at cops, smoked a lot of jade and loved promiscuous sex and rock and roll. When we weren’t doing those things we wrote for underground newspapers, marched, rioted, occupied public buildings, talked a lot, and wondered why that damned war wouldn’t end.

Old Jules, what is the healthiest philosophical perspective on our own individual importance in this world?

The healthiest perspective would probably be that we aren’t at all important in this world except to the people who know us personally and care about what happens to us, and to ourselves. We’ve got to earn our self-respect and if we don’t nobody else is going to respect us (which is unimportant except by implication).

Old Jules, what decade is the most important in a man’s life?
The decade that will determine whether he looks backs on his life and he is a success. The decade that determines not only his career but the happiness of his personal life. Or do you think that all is lost by the end of the teenage years?

Whichever decade he learns to question all his own certainties might well be most important in a lot of ways. Or the one during which he comes face to face with his own mortality, provided it motivates him to carefully examine his own life.
The teenage years don’t have much to do with anything.

Old Jules, what do you think are the responsibilities of the U.S. when faced with strong evidence of genocide?
Despite a lot of hand wringing and rhetoric to the contrary, the US traditionally doesn’t interest itself in genocides and does nothing to prevent them unless they happen to already be at war with the perpetrator. Tradition is the determinant since there’s no cause to believe otherwise.

As a practical matter it’s demonstrated with the Armenians, the Ukrainians, the Kurds, the Biafrans, the Cambodians, the French death camps in the Caribbean prior to WWII, anywhere besides Germany. The relatively recent Israeli participation in a mass killing in Lebanon is no exception.

If you can find an exception to this you’ll have yourself a unique piece of detective work.

Old Jules, would you care whether or not humanity survives beyond your own lifetime?

Not in the least. For that matter I don’t care if we all die together before my lifetime ends.
Humans die. I don’t see an advantage to all those alive today dying over 100 years as opposed to all dying in a single day. They’ll have all lived and all died, same as every human before them. They all had their individual shots at living their lives.
Whether any human being walks the face of the planet at any given time being something of value seems to me to be a humanocentric concern, which I don’t share.

Jack wrote this in June, 2005:

There’s been a lot of discussion on the lottery threads about the statements people who think they know, (politicians, academians, religious zealots, know-it-alls, doogooders and others with the wisdom to know what’s best for people who aren’t fortunate enough to be them) that most of the people who play the lotteries are poor and under educated.

The Poor:

I’d be the first to agree that people who are one or another level of ‘poor’ play the lotteries.  Most of us are poorer than we’d like to be…. that’s why folks such as Hollywood Henderson and Jack Whittaker bought tickets.

But how poor can a person be and still buy lottery tickets?

The poorest people I know are living on the streets panhandling.  They have their values straight, as a rule.  Priority one, when some money falls into their lives:  A bottle of something, a fix of something.

Priority number sixteen, or thereabouts:  Something to eat.

Priority number twenty-seven:  A lottery ticket.

Those folks aren’t buying a lot of tickets.

The somewhat higher level of poor people do buy some tickets, I’ve observed standing in line behind them at the convenience store.  They drive up in automobiles, buy a case of beer for the evening, some chips, and probably go home to watch the results on television.  They mightn’t have a nice home…. maybe a trashed out mobile home in some park full of human lessons to be learned, anger and loud music, but they aren’t actually poor.

In fact, by any standard besides the one we judge such things by today for social reasons, these ‘poor’ people are generally enjoying a level of wealth seldom experienced in human history.  There’s food available to them through food banks all over this nation to keep them from starving.  They have shelter from the weather and warmth in the winter.  They can purchase clothing at any garage sale for a quarter.  They drive automobiles or use public transportation unless they choose to walk.

In a world where the history of human living conditions have predominantly involved worrying about where the next meal is (or isn’t) coming from, where death by exposure to the elements has almost always been a reality, the US doesn’t have more than a smattering of poor people by standard that existed a century ago.

Those poor people referred to by the politicians and statisticians are adults, making choices about what risks they wish to indulge with the money they have in hopes of improving their lot.  They’re submerged in wealth.  If you don’t believe it, imagine those pictures you probably see on television of villages somewhere with kids lying around with pot-bellies, flies walking all over their faces, them without the energy to lift a hand to brush them off, one step away from exiting the vehicle because there’s nothing to eat and there’s not going to be.  That’s poor.

The Under-Educated:

I happen to have a pretty fair formal education, though I’m ‘under-educated’, as is everyone I’ve ever met.  Which boils down to all lottery players being under-educated, and that being a shared trait with all those who don’t play.  Until someone invents an educational level that includes being ‘over-educated’, and ‘just-the-right-educated’, none of the above tells us much about who plays the lottery.

But it does tell us a lot about manipulative rhetoric, politics by guilt, religious posturing, hypocrisy, and a willingness (or unwillingness) to allow adults who might be just as smart and savvy as we are to make their own choices about how they want to spend their money.  About what risks they’re willing to take in life.  That comes under the heading of something called, “freedom”.  Not a lot of it floating around these days.

Jack

Jack wrote this in May, 2005:

Jack wrote this in May, 2005:

There’s an ongoing thread on the lottery discussion site, though maybeso it ends and begins again the way the head of a snake on a Hopi tablet pursues the tail, or poor old YinYang has to always go back to the place it began.

The thread is a carnival, a celebration of what the posters would do if they won the lottery.  I’ve been thinking about that a bit, wondering what I might be wise enough to do or not do.  Wondering what some of my best friends, as well as what some fascinating strangers I’ve never met might do.

Anyway, I think I know what I’d do.  Naturally what I’d do would be jammed to the gullet with wisdom, good tastes, subdued good manners, though probably lacking in ostentation.  Therefore, unworthy of sharing here on the blog, where I feel the responsibility to entertain and edify in equal parts.

So, let me discuss discerning tastes a bit.  How good tastes have been demonstrated by close friends and associates.

When I was in the cabin waiting for the catastrophe of Y2k a jellicle cat of a certain size wandered in and hung around making a nuisance of himself to the other cats, but yearning for fulfillment as a barn cat.  I always welcome cats if there’s room for them in my organizational chart.  Particularly jellicle cats.

This one came to be known as Xerox.  (Most of my adult life there’s been a place for a Mehitabel, a Hydrox, a Xerox, and a few other names.  When there’s an opening in one of the names and a new animal arrives, it gets the empty name.  When this one came there was an opening for a Xerox.  Simple enough.)

Anyway, Xerox was a good cat.  He caught a lot of mice, never succeeded in becoming an indoor cat, and dodged coyotes, owls and hawks for the duration of his tenure.  He was holding himself back for better things.

After Y2k didn’t happen for most people, after it became obvious that I’d made an error in judgement that would require me to move back to town, Xerox naturally came with me.  It was there in Grants, NM, while he stalked vermin along a ditch bank that Xerox had his moment of glory.  A pair of bald eagles flew along that ditch a couple of times a day doing roughly the same thing Xerox was doing.  Not many days passed before the male made a dive from a hundred feet and ended Xerox’s hunting days until the next life.

That, my friends, is discerning tastes.  That is going out in high style for any cat, being killed by a great bald eagle.

On the other hand:
Naiad.  Littermate to the current Hydrox, never cared much for Xerox, never paused to indulge in a moment of awe, respect for the discerning tastes of Xerox.  She has her own methods of discernment, of demonstrating her breeding:

A couple of days ago she brought this to the front porch, placed it at my feet for my examination.  It’s a rare bird in the US, particularly this far north.  It’s a Streak-backed Oriole, usually found in Mexico, but sometimes in Arizona.  This one can be found lying on a box in the carport in northern New Mexico.  Haven’t arrived at a proper disposal approach.  Anything I that comes to mind seems inadequate or inappropriate.

Anyway, I’m reasonably certain if Naiad won the jackpot her main ambition would be to kill an American Bald Eagle, preferably a male, and drop it at my feet on the porch.

There’s a man in Mullinville, Kansas, I’m betting has the most votes in all Christendom in favor of him not winning any lottery.  His place borders the highway.  Here’s an example of the kinds of things he’d most likely do a LOT more of if he won the jackpot:

It goes on for most of a mile, cartoon characters of plate steel.  Everyone would probably as soon he sticks with the resources available to him now, as opposed to a sudden and unexpected means of acquiring a forest of shiny metal.

I have exquisite tastes, myself, and I can’t tell you how glad it makes me to see along any fence line, the least display of good tastes.

Jack