Author Archives: mandala56

Out in the currently vacant chicken house I found a rattlesnake skin the other day.  It was in one of the layer boxes, so I don’t know how long it was there before I noticed it.  But it caused me to do some thinking about old brother rattler and what manner of nuisance he’s likely to make of himself if he’s still around.

I’m a man who holds rattlers in fairly high regard, but with a lot of respect for their clumsy bad manners when it comes to getting underfoot.  I usually try to keep enough of an eye on the places they like to show up unexpectedly to avoid offending them, and when I can corner them I’ll carry them off into some likely spot well away from humans.  Mostly they’re just minding their own business, trying to make a living the same as everyone else and don’t have the good sense to keep themselves out of harm’s way when humans are around.

This one looked a lot bigger last year (I’m assuming it’s the same one) when I lifted up a piece of plywood in a pile of debris in the corner of the lot and let out an involuntary yelp as I jumped backward in time to avoid his strike.  That skin shows him to be about two feet long, but I’d have called him an easy four from my brief look at him.

Rattlers are few at this altitude, and the one who slithered off into the cane leaving me to to decide whether to just breathe a while and let my pulse slow down, or take another tug at that plywood is almost certainly the previous owner of that skin in the chicken house.

Rattlers are lucky where it comes to changing their skins.  Happens year after year, but generally they don’t change much.  People aren’t so lucky in that regard.  We change our skins a lot of times in this life, and in a sense we leave the old ones lying around to be examined by everyone with an interest in who we are, making assumptions based on the old skin.

The other night I was down at the Range Cafe in Bernallilo …. met a bunch of old guys my age down there… retirees from the Los Alamos labs…. nuclear physicists who’ve shed their old skins and discovered they’ve let their lives slither off into the bush without doing a lot of things they wish they’d done.  Now they’re all off living other places, but decided to rendezvous down here for a hurrah into the mountains, looking for a lost gold mine.

I have a notion I’d have barely been able to tolerate those men in their younger days.  There’s a nuance about value judgements involving working on nuclear weapon development that would have influenced my thinking about them.

But these guys had left all that behind, shed that skin and now just wanting to slither off into the canyons, spend some time chewing the fat over a fire and stomp around looking for a lost mine and taking joy in being around one another again.

Strange place we’ve chosen to spend a reality, thinks I.

Jack

This was the most recent of a long line of exchanges with an online friend, a man who’s had some success skrying numbers on pick 3/4s…..  This is the guy I sent 12 numbers to that were all the right ones for that night’s MM draw…. he bought one ticket…. been kicking himself every since.  Mostly he believes his life is a living hell out of habit, except when he reminds himself he’s blessed, which is only when I remind him to remind himself, thinks I.

Thought I’d share it with you blog readers.  I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my brief life as a hermit on this blog.

Morning Pal:

I suppose you’re right.  You live a complicated life.  It would be complicated, just with your interpersonal relationships, even if you didn’t have a job that would be enough to satisfy most needs for complication.  Even if you didn’t have a piece of real estate that’s located in and part of a subtle war zone.  It’s relatively easy to imagine how you’d have some difficulties focusing, doing the necessary relaxing and tuning out that’s required for skrying numbers, or anything else.

A long time ago, when I had a complicated life, I used to wonder whether a stay in the sort of place where you work, an asylum, would do the trick as a means of getting me removed from the system of complications I’d built around myself to help make myself unhappy.  I concluded that it wouldn’t.

 I also gave some thought to whether prison life would do it, but unless it was one of those kinds of Federal prisons all the Watergate folks went to, I don’t think it could.

Thought about a Trappist monastary a bit, even.  That might do it.  I don’t know, but it seemed so otherwise out of sinc with my nature that I never tried it.

But I had the advantage over most people, because I knew what I was missing.  When I got booted out of the Peace Corps in 1964, after a bit of time trying to complicate my life in Honolulu the way a person will, I was contacted by the US Army Reserve telling me they wanted to know where I was in case they wanted to reactivate me for Vietnam if they needed people with my particular MOS.  In those early days of 1965 nobody knew where all that was going and reactivating the reserves was considered a real possibility.

My support for US military adventures overseas went away entirely during my tour in the Far East.  I was gonna have nothing to do with Vietnam.  I decided I was going to spend the remainder of my life as a hermit living in the jungle on the big island….. a place called Wiamono Valley on the drainage of the Kohala range…. used to be a village in there but it was wiped out by the tidal wave in 1947 and nobody laid claim on it since.  Nobody in there but a blind mule and me…. for six weeks that mule had company.

That six weeks with nobody to talk to but a blind mule changed my whole life.  It was a pivotal moment for me, one of the greatest blessings of my stay in this reality this time around.  In addition to a book full of other benefits, it gave me a realization of what’s possible for a human being, mind-wise, if he can succeed in either simplifying his life, or in (I didn’t know then) distancing himself from the web of values, properties, interpersonal relationships and other tangle we do our best to mire ourselves in so we can’t see or hear what we’re trying to keep from seeing and hearing…… the voice of what’s beneath.

I definitely understand what you’re saying, my friend.  Hang in there.

Jack

Hi blogsters.

Been a fun day of not much going on.  Couldn’t bring myself to look another batch of numbers seriously in the eye so I just did a minimal workup and did the usual handstand, look-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye while juggling and saying mantras backward routine.  Never fails in a pinch.

All the cats have been tricked or cajoled inside out of harms way.  Naiad, the long-haired black Reiki Master puss cat was the one had to be both, cajoled and tricked, indoors.  Hydrox came in easy and somewhat serene as should a cat who’s been attuned, both as a Reiki Master, and in a lot of other things cats most generally don’t get attuned for.

Tabby, second-level Reiki, nearly as I can figure, old Tabby really never spent much time outdoors today, so she wasn’t a problem in that regard.  Had to figure out other methodology problem wise.

Shiva, not really attuned to anything, but a cagey survivor, stayed in back closeted for the day.

I have before me my numbers, but I’m thinking I won’t even look until tomorrow morning, the New Year shining bright.  Or maybe pre-dawn.  But definitely not until double ought six come blaring down the pike horns fiery slobber slinging from its noostrils and mouth looking for a likely suspect to do a bit of spitting at noostril/mouthwise and hornwise both.

I’m not a drinking man, but did some serious contemplating earlier that I just might put together a Margarita and get a little buzz on, but I decided against it.  Decided is probably the wrong word.  Making it would have required me to make it, which I didn’t.  Default.  Ergo, no Margarita for the dying breath of 2005.

I suppose if I had something else I could snort it, or smoke it, or inject it, or shove it up suppository style, but I don’t do that, either, so I didn’t.

But weirdly enough, I feel somewhat as though I did.  Feeling pretty nigh on happy here…. downright ecstatic.  Not the spiritual state of grace ecstatic …. can’t do that one on demand….. but pretty damned fine.

Nice way to finish out a year.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Some of you are too young to remember why microwave ovens and electricity were invented.  It’s a fact worth knowing.

The pioneers, when they invented this country, lived mostly in dugouts.  Dugout canoes in the summer, dugout houses in the winter.  Those winters tended to get them cold on their backsides and necks.  So they started growing wheat, milo maize, rice, to try heating up and putting in some warm container to throw around their necks to try to keep warm.

They tried all manner of containers, those cold-natured ancestors of ours.  Tried skinning rabbits and sewing up grain inside the hides, but it didn’t take any time at all before the only benefit they were getting from it was the smell of burning hair.  So they invented sweat socks to put it in.

But they needed a way to heat it up without burning it, so they invented microwave ovens.  Trouble was, the microwaves sat there for generations full of sweatsox waiting for electricity to be invented.

Then along came Nicoli Tesla Edison with the solution.

So nowadays all you have to do is plug that mama in, that microwave, shove in a sweat sock full of grain, run it about five minutes, and you have a thingamabob you can drape around your neck when it’s cold, or stiff, or for when the old shoulder’s reminding you of a motorcycle that wrapped itself around a tree 40 years ago, and you can toss in another one for putting at the foot of your blankets to give the cats a place to get hacked off when you throw them off it and go to bed.

Got two of them in that microwave right this very moment.

Thankee universe for nicola tesla edison and joseph h. microwave and their yankee ingenuity inventions.  And thankee universe for joseph cotton’s development of sweatsocks.  Also Horatio Milo, the developer of Milo Maize.

We lucky to have this universe to provide such blessings.

Jack

Hi again blogsters:

Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.

Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.

Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway.  Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.

So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia.  Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernallilo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.

Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road.  Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road.  I rolled down my window, “Accident?”

“No.  Most of the roads are shut down.  People in groups in the middle of the roads singing Carols.  You’ll have to take this road.  Be careful.”

Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.

I don’t so much mind people singing carols.  I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.

On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.

I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die.  I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.

Anyway blogsters, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.

But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice.  Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.

If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck.  As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,

You got me, babe.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

Over the T-day feasting someone was telling me about a movie they said I’d enjoy.  The name almost turned me aside, being “A Christmas Story”, which sounded a lot like a class of movie a lady-friend of the past used to insist I endure with her every Xmas season.

But this one, I’m told, is about a boy with a BB gun.

Brought to mind my first BB gun.

I was living on that small farm in the picture above….must have been 5-6 years old.  I was fairly sure I should get, and that they owed it to themselves to get me a .22 calibre rifle for Christmas.

Turned out it was a Daisy Pump BB gun, instead.  A PUMP!  Now anyone with any savvy knows the only BB gun an in-the-know kid would own is a Daisy Red Ryder lever-action.  Kids our size could take that Red Ryder and lock the butt behind their knee strain upward stopping short of a hernia, and get that thing ready for action in a New York minute.

But a pump was a different matter.  You had to put the butt on the ground, grab the pump with both hands tight, lift your feet off the ground and it would slide down far enough to pinch a blood blister on each of your little fingers, but it would be ready to go.

But it beat not having one.  Wasn’t any time after that Christmas we were all over creation having BB gun fights.  They’d usually last until someone chipped off a piece of tooth or went home crying.

My mama went through a ritual with that Daisy pump taking it away from me and giving it back after a while, always with the admonishment:

“You aren’t really going to be happy until you put someone’s eye out with that BB gun.”

I never put anyone’s eye out with it, but I never was really happy, either.

Jack