Category Archives: Adventure

Writing the entry about the flu stuff got me thinking how often we humans tend to worry about the wrong things.  Reminded me of a guy I used to fly with a bit during the late 1970s named John Rynertson.

John was a man who flew a blue Cessna 120.  It was a lot like the 140 Helldragger I flew.   But he was also a man prone to introduce himself to people around the Killeen, Texas airport as ‘one of the best pilots around’.

Naturally there were those who didn’t favor his self introductions involving pilot skills.  John wasn’t a man who could claim a lot of friends.  But he did have a wife almost as desirable as that 120 he flew.  So pretty, she was, that whenever he wasn’t flying, John was worrying about her.  He fretted over what she might be doing when he was off flying, or when he was almost anywhere he couldn’t keep an eye on her.  Which was a good bit of the time.

Old John just worried himself silly about that women.

Then one day he was flying with some Warrant Officer from Fort Hood and managed to get more airspeed than that old air frame was willing to put up with.  The 120 wasn’t rated for snap rolls.  But being one of the best pilots around, John just naturally figured they weren’t referring to him when they rated the airplane.

Wings came spang off that mama at about 3000 feet above the ground.

Turned out John didn’t need to be worrying about what his wife was doing.  If he was going to worry, he needed to be focusing on learning to stay alive and fly at the same time.

Whatever his wife might or mightn’t have been doing while he was alive, she certainly did after he was grease scattered over an acre of ground.

Similarly, I recall all those kids who used to spend all their time worrying about getting drafted for Vietnam, then took too much of the wrong thing and ended up corpses right here in the good old US of A with never having been fired at in anger.

A person needs to use a lot of care, consult an internal map, look at the compass and GPS, picking things to be worried about.  Otherwise he’ll spend all his time worrying about things that don’t happen while the things that do sneak up behind him and tap him above the ear with a ball-peen hammer.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Around 1969, I was in a freshman Geology course at the University of Texas, first week of classes. The instructor was a grad student teaching assistant who began the course with an overlay of how geologists determine the age of a particular layer of deposition.

Along about the third day a kid who’d been sitting next to me raised his hand. I’d noticed him squirming from the first day, and now he just had to get whatever was bothering him off his chest.

“I’ve been trying to understand what you’re saying, but it’s confusing. How can all this be true, all those depositions being so old when the world’s only (some specified low-range number of thousands) years old. It’s all been calculated when God created the earth.”

After the chaotic eruption of laughter from forty sophisticated freshmen who knew better subsided the instructor directed his response to the now-cringing questioner.

“You can’t have it both ways. This is a Geology course. Everything you hear in this room is based on the premise that the earth is ancient beyond imagination. That the world we see around us is the product of eons of tectonic activity. Of faulting, lifting, erosion, weathering followed by more of the same.

“I’m not going to try to convince you that what you’ve said is wrong. But I’ll tell you that if you can’t accept, for the sake of discussion, the possibility that the book in front of you describes reality, you’ll never get through this course.”

The kid joined me at a table in the Union coffee shop later. He was still upset and confused by the incident, the laughter. Turned out the kid truly couldn’t wrap his mind around the concepts being discussed. He KNEW it to be otherwise at such a fundamental level that he’d have had to relax all manner of other things he KNEW and held sacred to even consider it.

So he dropped the course and never let his mind out of the cage he’d built around it.

The experience that kid had in a geology classroom isn’t too different from what all of us encounter in life. It’s all a matter of where we place the boundaries of the cage.

Within a decade of the incident the geology world was turned upside down with emergence of tectonic plate theory, and much of what he’d have learned if he’d finished the course would have been out of date.

But Tectonic Plate Theory found similar boundaries among geologists’ minds during the difficult battle for acceptance. Old department heads wrestled against it in a war as bloody as a fundamentalist preacher would have fought against the concept of an earth more than a couple of thousand years old. They’d just placed the boundaries a bit further out than the kid and whatever school teacher told him the world was young. Those old geology profs KNEW there was no such animal as continental drift. No point in discussing evidence supporting it.

Similarly, we all KNOW the numbers are random.

Jack

One of the savorable aspects of being alone is the way the mind wanders according to incidental, routine events.  I’ve noticed that when I’m cooking up a breakfast of eggs up on whiskey toast with home fries there’s only one song starts running through my head:

Navajo Rug
Tom Russell
Well it’s three eggs up on whiskey toast
Homefries on the side
Wash it down with truckstop coffee
Burns up your inside

Just a Canyon, Colorado diner
And a waitress I did love
We sat in the back ‘neath an old stuffed bear
And a worn out Navajo rug
Well old Jack the boss he’d close at six
Then it’s Katie bar the door
She’d pull down that Navajo rug
And she’d spread it ‘cross the floor
Hey I saw l ightning in the sacred mountains
Saw the dance of the turtle doves
Lyin’ next to Katie
On that old Navajo rug

Ai-yi-yi, Katie, shades of red and blue
Ai-yi- yi, Katie
Whatever became of the Navajo rug and you?
Well I saw old Jack about a year ago
He said the place burned to the ground
And all he saved was an old bear tooth
And Katie she left town
But Katie she got her a souvenir too
Jack spat out a tabacco plug
He said “You shoulda seen her runnin’ through the smoke
Draggin’ that Navajo rug.”

Ai-yi-yi, Katie, shades of red and blue
Ai-yi- yi, Katie
Whatever became of the Navajo rug and you?

Now everytime I cross the sacred mountains
And lightning breaks above
It always takes me back in time
To my long lost Katie love

Ah but everything keeps on movin’
And everyone’s on the go
They don’t make things that last anymore
Like a double-woven Navajo
Katie, shades of red and blue
Ay-yi- yi, Katie
Whatever became of the Navajo rug and you?

Tom Russell
From the album Song Of The West – The Cowboy Collection 1997

For some reason that song always gets me vaguely reliving one or another of several incidents, 1958-59, working on a ranch outside Kenna, NM, as an impressionable youth with a ’40 Model Chevi.

I think the first time I ever heard Navajo Rug must have been mid-1980s in Austin, Texas.  Bill and Bonnie Hearne were on tour performing in a small place somewhere over west of the University.  I’m not sure whether Tom Russell wrote it, or someone else.  It’s been a Jerry Jeff Walker song, Ian Tyson, in addition to Bill and Bonnie Hearne and Tom R.

I do know I once spent half a day moseying around Canyon Colorado, which is mostly empty spaces, looking around the weeds for evidence a diner was once there and burned down.

Life’s a good place to spend it, amigos.  Full belly of eggs up on whiskey toast, home fries on the side to all of you this morning.

Jack

A few days ago I was messing around out front (trimming the tree those guys said they were going to come back about, prior to the yesterday visit).

A pickup truck pulled to a stop and an elderly Hispanic lady rolled down the window on the passenger side, stared past me, squinted, pointed at something up near the house, and said something to the driver.  By now she had my full attention.

“I want to get my cat back.”  Pointing to one of the cats on my porch.

I looked over my shoulder, mistook which cat she was talking about, but she corrected me.  “No that one.”

“That’s not your cat.”

“Yes it is.  It only ran away a week ago.”

Well, I happened to know this cat has been around a long time, but what the hell.  Cats are metaphysical beings.  I moseyed up to the porch, talked to the feline in question, picked her up and cradled her upsidedownkitty style.  “That woman accuses you of having two homes.  She’s going to take you to the other one now.”

I stood on this side of the gate, she on the other, maybe three feet apart, she, eyeing the feline.  “This your cat?”

“That’s him.”

Well, I knew this particular cat is a female.  But what the hell.  Cats are metaphysical beings.

“She says you went through a sex change without telling me.”  I lift the cat, still upside down cradled above the fence and the lady reaches up to take him/her.

At the point the cat decided the gag had gone a bit far, did what cats do.  Probably an experience the lady’s still thinking on.

“Does that cat have shots?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks”

Dancing lessons from God, I calls such experiences.  A way to get acquainted with the neighbors.

Jack

On the thread about how Brits are becoming an assortment of on-line gamblers I made an observation involving the geography of the island as it pertains to nastiness of attitude and civility.  Another poster, claiming to have spent a number of years on the island hopped on like ugly on a monkey to set me straight.

I don’t have a problem with that.  Personal experiences differ, and generalities, while they tend to contain enough truth to sting, also tend to be riddled with exceptions.  If the poster had stopped there I’d have to agree with (most of) (or some of) what was posted.

Unfortunately, the poster went on to express a smugness and spillage into some matters that went beyond my, admittedly flawed, generalizations.  The poster was obviously oblivious to history, both of the US, and of Britain.  Actually included in the post the allegation that Britain’s been a consistently good and strong ally to the US.

Patently absurd.

Britain, and every other country on this planet, has sponged the blood and tax money of Americans whenever they could, so long as it furthered their own interests.  American blood spilled all over the world to protect the interests of Britain throughout the 20th Century.

True also of France, the Philippines, the USSR and China through WWII.  Post WWII, American tax dollars rebuilt Japan, Italy, the Philippines, France and West Germany, while Americans bore the burden of the cost of defense of all.  America and Britain created Israel, and provided the weaponry for it to defend itself during the early years, while American taxpayers paid the bills.

America has no allies.  There’s not a speck of gratitude in any of those countries for the Americans rotting in their graves, their lives forfeit to the best interests of Britain, France, Germany, indirectly, the USSR, Korea, Japan.  Those countries have drained us dry, bankrupted US taxpayers, and bought us with the industry we built for them.

I have to respect scam artists who know how to spot a mark and bleed him dry, toss him off when he’s no longer useful.  I have to respect those countries I’ve named.

Because, blogsters, we Americans are the folks who love being scammed.

Eventually, we’ll probably learn, but we’ll be dead broke in the learning.

The poster on that thread is a person well-scammed.  But a scammee who loves the feel of it.

Jack

He was tuned into all the possibilities.  His antennae were wiggling and waving around, discounting nothing, searching for a stroke of luck, open to the possibility, the hope that a lightning strike of fate would drop something of value out of the sky on him.

That guy wasn’t looking for the ‘big win’.  He was looking for anything.

The dumpster diver was surrounded by wise, upright citizens who weren’t dumpster diving.  Every one of those people had an equal opportunity…. they passed within feet of that million dollars.  But their consciousness wasn’t sniffing the air for possibilities.

The dumpster diver was the only human being in the place who was listening to the song of abundance the universe sometimes sings.

He heard the song and he danced.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

It’s a good morning for gratitude affirmations.  Every day’s good for that, but this one holds some particularly thorny challenges, making it a better candidate than most.

Aside from having a nest of dragons to fight, it’s a good day.  Gonna be a good day.  I’m grateful for it, grateful for those particular dragons, the particulars making up the ten, or so, things I’m going to remind myself to be grateful for, and figure out reasons why.

Additionally, this morning I’m gonna throw in some other kinds of affirmations so’s to remind myself that we’re all just a bunch of flawed humans, that I’m no exception, that we’re all just stumbling along making a lot of wrong turns and occasionally running red lights.  And that I’m no exception.  That anger is a destroyer of the soul of the host, that the damage is internal, not external.  That it’s a responsibility each of us carries to cleanse ourselves of anger, else it will damage, maybe destroy us.

Yep, I’ll have to spend some time on that one.

Other news:

Predawn cat fight between one of mine and one of someone else’s got my juices flowing…. They hadn’t finished their business, and they felt cheated, resentful having a human being interfere.

One of the cats got an unusual bird, left the wings, crop and legs/feet on the porch as a trophy.  Looks like a small hawk or owl from the wings, but no talons.  Dunno.

That’s about it here, this fine morning I’m grateful to be alive in.

Jack

A wealthy senator somewhere wins a jackpot and immediately the grumbling aphorisms of barely disguised class warfare mentality, jealousy and reinforcement of the ‘poor man’ mentality bob to the surface of threads.

“Yeah, grumblewhine, the rich get richer.” As though those words represented some wisdom, some worthy truth about life.

A truth that didn’t apply a few days earlier when a dumpster diver found a million dollar ticket.

The irony is obvious. People are playing the lottery because they hope to become wealthy. But they hear of something good happening to a wealthy person, and they hate it.

Let me say that again. Lottery players want to become wealthy. But many of the same players feel a dislike for wealthy people. They hate to see something good happening to a person who is what they wish to become.

In my unique reality the universe listens to that sort of words and the underlying feelings and motivations they portray. The underlying pride, the identification at some gut-level of being ‘poor’, which they almost certainly aren’t.

There are a lot of reasons for a human being not to embrace negativity, ill wishing, resentment for good that comes to others, but this one is particularly damaging, in my view.  Damaging to the soul, damaging to the psyche, and damaging to the kinds of positive energy we’d like to have in our own lives.

Throwing an anchor into the rocky bottom where misfortune resides and dragging the vessel toward it doesn’t stand much likelihood of bringing in wealth. Thumbing the nose at the incarnation of what one hopes to become isn’t one of the best ways to bring it into a life.

Strange, strange world we live in, master Jack.

Jack