I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s strange about it. Cob-webs around here are the norm. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear waste part of things. Old Jules
I watched this movie repeatedly in theaters when it came out in 1970, always remembered it, but never came across it again. Four decades later I still have vivid recollections of certain scenes and a general impression it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
I’ve no idea whether I’d still like it today, no idea whether seeing it again would inspire me to think of all of it as still as somehow haunting and valid to the human experience as I once did.
Watching the trailer brought back some reminders of scenes, but it somehow failed to capture whatever it was that captured me.
In some subtle ways my mind connects Brewster McCloud with Balzac’s Droll Stories. A multi-layered plotting capable of being enjoyed for the surface stream hilarity, but containing something fundamental, profound and pervasive about the human condition.
If you’ve watched this movie recently enough to recall it better than I do, or if you should see it after reading this, I’d be interested in learning how it sits with you.
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
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Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
My old friend Keith stopped into the blog a few days ago and commented on one of the posts. By doing so he reminded me I haven’t said much about a subject dear to my heart: Outrageous adventure.
When Keith and I were searching together we were both in our early 50s, both involved in careers, both plenty old enough to know we weren’t going to find that lost gold mine, though I, particularly figured we would. [I still held by the statement from my neophyte search early in the 1980s, “If I can’t find that mine I’m not half the man I think I am.”]
Keith and I plotted, planned and trekked into more canyons than either of us can remember and, while we didn’t find that lost gold mine we saw places not many human beings have ever seen, certainly not many in a longish time. We systematically explored promising locations from the Zuni Mountains, to Santa Rita Mesa, to Pelona on the south side of the Plains of San Augustin, to the Gallinas.
I don’t know how Keith thinks about all this these days, but I know how I think about it. I wouldn’t subtract one mile, one minute, one canyon of it from my life, though we never found what we were looking for.
Not from that, not from Y2K, not from flying a Cessna 140 all over the sky for a number of years, and not from this current adventure of survival that’s my life today, for that matter.
It seems to me people have become too ‘smart’ and ‘wise’ with the debunking culture to allow themselves a piece of outrageous risk with minimal prospects for any returns. It’s been that way for a considerable while. I believe it’s robbed a lot of people of experiencing a side of life that once a particular sort of individual demanded of himself.
An old man who wasn't afraid of adventure
When I say it’s been going on a long while I mean it. During the early 1950s my granddad and step-dad became the laughingstocks of Portales, Dora, Garrison and Causey, New Mexico, by injecting a piece of it into their lives. They bought a WWII jeep, equipment, and joined thousands of other similar men searching for uranium. Probably the last ‘rush’ in US history.
They were gone several months, didn’t find a thing, and when they returned they endured the jeers and snide laughs of everyone around them. But both men cherished the memories of that time as long as they lived. They had something the stay-at-home sneerers would never have because they were too smart, too dedicated to the other side of human existence to allow it into their lives.
And the venom they expressed for anyone else doing it provides a hint they probably wished they had.
Tree Numero Uno didn’t agree to my offer to let it go down without a fight. The trunk broke but the uppidy part refused to answer the demands of modern physics.
I’m not the sort of man to sit still for anything defying science and gravity.
I got my digging bar and proceeded to put forward reasoned arguments as to why that tree needed to obey the law.
The top part of the trunk moved over on the stump every time I applied pressure to the bar.
I cut the trunk at an angle so the trunk couldn’t slip back this way when it fell and get in the way of the path I was leaving to get the cut wood out. But now, by cunning Communist refusal to do what’s right there are several tons of potential energy trapped in the upper trunk. If I use the bar to pry it further this way that upper trunk’s going to snap out of there like a catapult and knock the bejesus out of everything downrange.
But if I leave it standing it’s going to pick its own time to come down. And it’s already demonstrated a lousy set of values and ideals enough create a suspicion I’ll be under it when it does.
Maybe I was actually supposed to go to Kerrville today.
Old Jules
4:04 PM edit: I got it down, but with more style and panache than I consider tasteful under the circumstances. No broken bones, no serious injuries, nothing destroyed I can’t live without. On the other hand, there’s still a lot more tree left propped up on dead branches 10-15 feet in the air, so there might be another dance left in the old dame yet. Jules
Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.
I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor: Shaving with sheep shears.
Well, heck! I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for. I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare. So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth. Riding the Bread Line
Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard. Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts. Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.
The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.
Yesterday Gale and Kay were away on another craft fair and I had access to Little Red, so I decided to trip into Harper for the farm/livestock auction.
The pickings were fairly slim because fewer people showed for it than I’ve ever seen at that auction. But things were going dirt cheap as a result.
Cheap, I should have said, by comparison with the usual fare. On a normal third Saturday someone falls in love with this sort of thing and is willing to hock the family jewels to carry it home.
But yesterday even jewels of this sort were going for a couple of bucks:
You’d think the seat and steering wheel on this would be worth someone hauling home at those prices.
A few items did draw bids a bit higher.
This compressor that might work went for around $15.
Plenty of antlers of all description but I wasn’t sure what Gale could use or I’d have stayed around to bid on some of the lots.
The poultry barn only had a few dozen birds, none I found a compelling need for. The livestock weren’t out in force. A few bighorn sheep, four starving longhorns, a few ibex, maybe a wildebeest I didn’t get a look at, and a horse headed for the dogfood factory.
I could have left after one quick swing around except for this:
It was set up for propane and water at some time, but mostly everything except the wiring and hoses were removed. That bottom-middle vent, when opened, looks directly inside through a stripped cabinet that evidently once held a sink.
This rear window would have to be removed to get anything wider than the door inside. It doesn’t open. And I couldn’t help wondering why there had been a deliberate removal of the tail lights. No evidence of a license tag ever having been on it.
Those two vents open directly into the trailer underneath the two seats at the front, which would be a problem on the road in inclement weather.
But even knowing it was going to require a lot of work, beginning with protecting that particle board, it was a possible. This winter would be a lot warmer living in there, and that’s a factor to warp judgement to a degree. And having something that would provide a mobile escape route if I need one, a lot easier than anything I’d come across thus far lent itself to a decision to bid if the competition wasn’t strong.
I figured it might go for $300, which I could cover. I decided I couldn’t go more than $500, and even that would squeeze things a bit uncomfortably. When the bidding came it went to my $475, long pause and someone bid $500. I turned to walk away, then spur of the moment raised my arm for $525. And the bidding stopped.
I’d just bought the damned thing.
I went to the office to pay for it, forked over the money and the young lady was filling out the paperwork when the older lady behind her chimed in. “He told you about not being able to get a trailer title for it didn’t he?”
“Hmmm. No.”
Her face curled into a snarl. “That SOB! He was supposed to announce that before he auctioned it. You can’t take it onto the road. You can’t get a title for the highway.”
This caused me to have to back up and try my hand at rapid thinking. Not my long suite.
After a pause, both of them staring at me, “Do you still want it?”
“Um. I guess not.”
She counted my money back to me, I handed them the keys and went back outdoors to re-organize my life.
Nothing much had changed while I went from one package of my immediate future back to the one I began the day with. The world was still waiting for Godot.
But while I went about the task of getting my mind back unshuffled I watched this dog make a statement about the whole event, laying a line of cable between me and all that potential future I’d just stuck my toe into, then pulled it back out.
Morning, readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit.
Today marks an event I never expected to see. Old Sol’s about to light things up, shake his head and shrug when he looks down and sees I am here again, come spang around him one more time. Sixty-nine times I’ve gone around him and come to this same spot, tipped my hat and said hi.
Here’s the reason neither Old Sol, nor I, had any reason to expect this:
Back in the late 1970s I had occasion to spend some time looking around nursing homes. I managed to do it enough times and look them over closely enough to convince myself that we Americans haven’t kept our eye on the ball when it comes to living and being alive.
The people in those nursing homes are alive, but they aren’t overjoyed about it, and the life they’re living only has in common with actual life that the bodies and food are warm. The caretakers roll them back and forth or they hobble between television sets, meals, games, then through the long hallways filled with the forever odor of urine, back to their rooms.
I did a lot of thinking about why that happens, those mass coffins for the living. Of one thing I was certain. I didn’t want it to happen to me.
The reason, I decided, people end up in those places is because they live longer than they’d have expected to, wanted to. The reason they lived so long was that they took all kinds of measures to make certain they did, increasing the intensity and focus as the years built up on them.
Every year those elderly reduced the numbers and kinds of risks they took. They watched their diets, quit doing things they enjoyed when they were younger, many barely did anything at all as they reached into the advanced years of retirement besides a golf game or sea cruise.
And they got what they paid for. Lives that endured long past anything a person would call living. They sidestepped and hid and and ran from Death, and he didn’t find them when he was supposed to. So now they sit around strapped into wheel chairs watching rolling television screens paying the price for being too worried about dying when they were still alive.
That’s when I came to an important conclusion about how I wanted to live my own life.
From that time until now one of the rituals I’ve tried to perform around birthday time and New Years Day involves examination of the physical risks I’m taking now, and how I’m going to increase them during the coming year. And how I’m going to stay as far as possible away from do-gooder, busybody medicos and CPR-knowers sticking their noses in my living experience getting me cross-wise with Death.
How I’m going to be out there when Death comes looking for me, in a place where he can find me, doing something I love to do.
I'd guess Phil probably resembled this young marine when he arrived
I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while. That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him. I’ll tell you a bit more about him.
Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car. A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer. Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.
The deputy wasn’t fooled. He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins. He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.
In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink. He became Marine Recon and a sniper. Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB. The squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.
They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer. Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.
Phil did two tours over there. When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard. Which Phil believed would be easy duty.
Instead, it was riot control. Wherever Nixon went there were anti-war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.
Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.
But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.
When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles. The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.
Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID. Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.
I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet. Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.
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 
