Category Archives: Adventure

Evening blogsters:

Someone gave me a bag of these.  Finest peppers in all Christandom.  They are, to the pepper world what Powerball and Megamillions are to the lottery world.

Habenero.

The name sort of rings musical, as does the pod.  High grade Acapulco Gold of fire and brimstone cuisine.

Fact is, they’re great for other things, as well.  You can grind them up, boil them, and spray the soup onto areas you don’t want the neighbor dogs to pee on.  You can take that soup and melt cold cream around it to rub on aching muscles and joints.

Or you can forget you have the pot boiling with them, let all the water boil off and you can fumigate your house impromptu.  You and the cats will go heaving and upchucking into the front yard first, followed by every spider, centipede and unborn generations of rodents who anticipated visiting the adobe one of these days ten years from now.

All lined up outside coughing and trying to breath, wiping the eyes, and generally having a big old time.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Hope all of you are getting the cobwebs out of your punkin heads sufficiently to maximize whatever joy a person gets out of sitting around a Christmas tree unwrapping packages.

I overslept here, didn’t wake until dawn.  Maybe some of this Christmas spirit thing rubbed off on me and disrupted my routines.  Nice morning.  Quiet outside, cool, but not a shock to hit you when you climb out from under the covers or hit you in the face when you venture outside.

A red dawn.  Sailorman would be concerned about that, I expect.

Last night the cats refused to keep me entertained, so I began reading H. D. F. Kitto’s, The Greeks.  It’s a book I’ve read before, but I occasionally read it again as a refresher course.  Kitto’s work is a fairly expansive treatise on life in Greece during the Classical Period, but he constantly jumps backward so’s to demonstrate how they got where they were and why.

Those Classical Greeks are worth the effort of remembering about.  They’re as much how we got where we are as Homer, the Dorians, the Minoans are how they came to be what they were.  We owe our ability to think in particularly organized ways to them, mathematics, philosophy, their practical use of democracy, even our concept of drama to some extent.

But we in the West also owe the curse of the Utopian Ideal to their pointy little heads.

That Utopian Ideal has haunted us every since, even though the Greeks, themselves never actually believed in it.  They knew perfectly well that human beings are fundamentally flawed in ways that assure they’ll poison their own watering holes, then run them dry.  They knew that wherever human weakness fails to do the trick, fate, or the Gods will step in to lend a hand.

Those Greeks studied Homer much the way really devout Christians study the Old Testament.  And Homer, whatever else it might be, is a refined catalog of human strengths and weaknesses.  Of the drumbeat repetition of human experience.

In their own way, the Greeks were experts on a few thousand years of history in ways we aren’t.  They learned from it, not as we believe we’ve learned from it, but haven’t, but rather as an assurance that human beings make the same mistakes over and over.  That they’ll go on making them as long as there’s a human being left to do the job.

The Greeks derived a wisdom from their knowledge of history, but the wisdom was an oblique one that provided a separate wisdom….. one that included the certainty there’ll never be any Utopia.  Never be any meek inheriting much of anything and holding onto it.

But that’s my premise, not Kitto’s.

I’ve had a couple of days break from the numbers, which I badly needed.  I’m thinkng today I’ll get back into the harness.

Best to all of you.

I hope you’ll spend a bit of time remembering what Christmas was supposed to be the anniversary of the beginning of.  Not baby-Jesuses or Santa Clauses, blogsters, but a beginning of a spiritual commitment to peace, love, understanding.

An ideal for breaking the endless cycle of power struggles, killing, worship of gluttony and greed.  A beginning for human beings to take responsibility for their own behavior, attitudes and lives.

Christmas.  Jesus.  A beginning of not being so frightened of everything.  So angry.  So aggressive and downright rattlesnake ugly mean you want to kill strangers a long way from here who are no threat to you if you’ll leave them alone, and take joy from doing it.

A beginning of having the faith that death is part of human experience, and that isn’t something you have to be so damned cowardly scared of it keeps you furious and wanting to look away at anything at all to take your thoughts away from having to do it.

I hope you’ll remember that for a few moments, blogsters, but I know you won’t.

I ain’t a Utopian.

Jack

Mainly longjohns and sweatsuits.

I did my usual bathtub washing routine on my buildup of clothes that got to clogging my sinuses and causing the cats to turn up their noses at me when I put them on.  I’d been outdoors several times and it honestly didn’t feel all that cold.

So I hung everything out on the lines and figured all’s gonna be well with the sniffers in a few hours.

A while later I went out to check them and they’d all turned to cardboard on the line.

A couple of hours later I made the uplifting discovery that the cold wind was drying them a bit despite the fact they were frozen stiff as boards.

But now it appears the weather’s going sour, so I figured I’d best bring them in and let them dry the rest of the way indoors.

You haven’t lived until you pull a pair of longjohns off the clothesline and have them break in half in your hand, except a line of threads holding them together.

Jack

Good morning blogsters:

I had lunch yesterday with a guy who was on his way down to the mountains to fly a helicopter around.

He’s looking for two prize cannons Texans either abandoned, or were killed by Apaches and just left up there somewhere during the Sibley retreat I’ve referred to in earlier entries.

The pieces have been seen over the centuries since occasionally by hunters and cowboys, but the location’s so vague and difficult nobody’s been able to relocate them.

A couple of cowboys found a civil war rifle with a bayonet stuck into a tree diagonally somewhere in the same general vicinity during the 1950s, but they never saw the cannon.

My bud’s been looking for those cannon on and off for 20 years as part of a larger search for some other things that have led him into countless tales and adventures.

He can afford to do these things because he’s a self-made multi-millionaire. 

A quarter-century ago he lost his job up north because of down-sizing and moved to New Mexico, where he took a grunt-job at minimum wage just to keep alive.  The place he was working was a fabrication plant, and he studied what was going on around him.  He saw a lot of industry standard things going on that looked stupid to him.

So, Marsh got to thinking how it could be done better.  He went to the bosses and told them about it, hoping for a raise, but they laughed at him.  So he started making the changes in his garage and trying them out.  Sold one tool and the people wanted more, so that was the beginning.

Now he owns several large ranches and a company that makes more money than he can reasonably spend, so he set his son up in a smaller business doing other things, and his son’s company’s making a lot more than Marsh’s… a million dollars a month.

But the reason I’m telling you this involves a side conversation we had.

“You’ve got to do it in the dark.  That’s where things happen.” He observed, concerning any dream, idea, project.

“Anything that’s different or innovative, you have do do in the darkness of negativity from others.  You have to keep the faith in yourself and your ability to do it, and keep on despite the multitudes around you who’ll tell you at every turn that you can’t do it.”

Seems to me that’s worthy of mention to you younger blogsters.

Marsh was talking about looking for those cannon.  He was talking about setting up a company and making millions of bucks.  He was talking about anything worth doing in life.

His son was lucky enough to have a father who knew, who taught the same thing to him.  Taught him that he could do anything if he believed in himself.

Marsh credits his grandfather for drumming the mindset into his head that he could do anything.  He gave me a quote I can’t recall, because it rhymed so well with something my own granddad drummed into mine.

“You can’t stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps coming.”

There’s an addendum to the anecdote of the last entry that ought to be added here.

Marsh is awfully proud of that son of his. Not because he’s bringing in a million bucks a month, but because of the way he’s using it.

“He’s not loading himself down with more houses, boats, big cars, like some rock star,” he glowed. “He sponsored a church group. They’re in Afghanistan building thousands of cheap houses for those people over there! Just trying to get them into some shelter to keep the weather off them.”

Jack

Morning blogsters:

The other day the neighbor guy asked me what I’m yelling about over here early mornings.  Something with the cats, or just letting off steam.

I had to think about it before I realized I was singing too loud these predawn mornings.

Reminded me of another Jerry Sires song:

I’m an old hand at singing inside

Held back by a mixture of comfort and pride

Nobody knows, when it comes right down to it

I’m an old hand at singing inside.

Like all of the children who grew up on Hank Williams

I’m richer by measures untold.

But people might think it was downright unnatural

How Otis (Redding) took root in my soul.

But I’m an old hand at singing inside, etc.

Just take my old daddy now

Spent most of his life raising cotton and cows

But if you heard him sing the songs of his youth

You’d just wish that he’d take a bow.

Cause he’s an old hand at singing inside.

Held back by a mixture of comfort and pride

Nobody knows when it comes right down to it

He’s an old hand at singing inside.

Anyway, in my particular case it can be mistaken for yelling at the cats.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Watched a VCR of the old Mel Brooks movie, Young Frankenstein yesterday.  Hadn’t seen that one in a generation or more, but was delighted to see it still moves to the music.  Hilarious.

Marty Feldman probably had his best role ever in this one, as Igor.  But he had strong competition.  None of the leading roles came up short of the mark.  Cloris Leachman was Cloris Leachman at her best.  Madelein Kahn had her best role outside Blazing Saddles.  Gene Wilder never did a bad job on a movie and this is no exception.

If you haven’t watched this classic in a while I’d recommend it.  If you have, watch it anyway in deference to, to, to the season, to humankind, to all that’s lovely and admirable in this best of all possible worlds.

Jack

I haven’t given up, but I can’t grasp what’s written.

I’ve read all the threads, read Tenaj’s blog backward and forward.

I can quote the Lottery Bible chapter and verse, except that one part in Proverbs that escapes me at the moment.

I can thump that Lottery Bible and let my zealotry sweep over the computer screen until my face turns purple and the veins on my forehead pop out and the sweat’s soaked the armpits of my white starched shirt if I had one and my neck bulges out of my collar, my tie hanging there like dead weight lying across that Lottery Bible.

But I don’t understand what it’s all about.

Lots of people understand it, it’s clear.  Lots of people say they’re making money on it.

I go down the threads, the blog entries step by step, and I still don’t have a clue where the pointer numbers come from, the lead numbers.  I see people ask the questions that are bouncing around inside my skull, and I wait patiently to see what answer will come.

Go read (my) (tenaj’s) blog, the answer will say.

So I frown, read the blog again, and say to myself, “I like to think I am a gullible person.  For that reason, I hate it when I begin to suspect someone’s gulling me.”  When I begin to suspect someone’s gulling me it means my gullibility is eroding, coming apart.  Disintegrating.  I hate that.

In this instance, I don’t think Tenaj is really gulling me, nor anyone else.  Too many posters on LP understand what she’s talking about.

I think I’m just too damned stupid to understand.  Some ways I’m a fairly smart feller.  Other ways I’m marbled with stupidity.  I think Tenaj is looking at something, understanding it perfectly, trying to explain it, trying to do LP posters the favor of sharing valuable info, and that the piece of my brain that information has to be processed in got tarred and feathered by a rock someone threw in a crowd in the ’70s, or a whack-upside it by my mom with a mop on one particular occasion, or the ground, or maybe it just spang never was there.

Maybe that piece of grey matter that I’d need to understand the Lottery Bible stuff just took one look at the reality it was about to spend a few decades processing, that fetus piece of brain just pulled in and said, “To hell with it!  I ain’t going there!”.

I don’t know.

Anyway, I’m confused enough to make me question democracy.

Jack