Category Archives: Adventure

Smile when you say I love you – uncomplicated sex

 

The following is a transcript of a recorded conversation I had with a woman several years ago.  I don’t know whether I still agree with myself about what I said here, but I suppose I must have at the time. 

She:  You were talking about these dependency relationships, where the man, if he wants certain things from a woman, is willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit to get it, and the woman usually ends up with more bullshit to tolerate. And you made a point of saying that, whether or not he says “I love you,” makes a big difference in how she’s handling it.  What does that mean, does he feel like he has to say it, even if he doesn’t really love her? Why is it so important for women to hear that, but it doesn’t seem to be important for men to say it? Or is that just some circumstances, and some relationships?

He:  It’s just some circumstances and some relationships, but it’s pretty pervasive. Fact is, it doesn’t matter what the guy feels. He can truly love her.  He can sort of love her.  He can not know whether he loves her.  Or he can not love her.  But he knows the rules say that he’s got to say that he loves her.

From the perspective of the woman, she can’t know which one of those situations he’s in.  She doesn’t acknowledge that such things exist. But the female sex has forced the issue.  Thanks to 10,000 years of females demanding that men say they love them whether they do or not, you have all the men saying I love you, easily.

Now some don’t, I don’t, some other old guy friends of mine don’t, but it’s a subject of some discussion between us, it pisses us off.  Fact is, that’s what women try hard to make a guy do, they are willing to go through all kinds of games and machinations to try to force a man to say it, no matter what the man feels.

My friends encounter it all the time with women.  I’ve encountered it with most of the women I’ve ever gotten involved with. It’s pretty much a hundred percent. It’s as though they don’t give a rat what you’re really feeling.

What women are saying is, “Okay, what I want you to do is say I love you, whether you feel it or not, and I’m gonna behave as though I believe it’s true, for whatever reasons.  Then I can use it as a bludgeon against you.”

(“Ooh, you said you loved me, and now you’ve done this or that, or haven’t done this or that, to prove you were lying.  What you’ve done or haven’t done is prima facie evidence of your liarhood!  And down underneath that is proof that you are lowlife scum because you said it to get something out of me.  And besides that, the fact you actually don’t love me is proof you are cold and unfeeling, because I love you sooooo much.”).

So,” the female sex is saying, “First and foremost I want to hear you say it.  I want you to hear yourself say it.  And I’m going to take all kinds of coercive and manipulative steps to make you do that.”

Well, the fact is, most of the male population out there says, (“Screw it.” *sigh* ) “Okay, I love you.”

She:  You don’t think most women really want to know?

He:  Well, they want to know if the answer is Yes. None of them want to know if the answer is No. “I want you to tell me you love me, and I want it to be true.”  But if it isn’t true, say it anyway.  The object isn’t getting a better hold on reality, or a better understanding about how he actually feels.  The object is to hear him say those words, and to make him hear himself saying them.

She:  So it doesn’t really matter whether he loves her or not, if he’s going to play that game and say it?

He:  Well, he’s going to play it. But fact is, men know this about women. And for the most part, men have a really cynical view of it. It’s something that gets talked about.  She’s on the warpath?   “ Oh, send her some  roses. Tell her you love her, man. Snuggle up a little bit.  She’ll get over it.”

Guys will, for the most part, go ahead and do it. They’ll do whatever they have to  do to make their lives easier.   And so the upshot is that women have created a situation where a guy out there who won’t lie is all of a sudden called cold and unfeeling, when in fact all he is, might be just honest.
 
One of the problems is in the difference in the way men and women view sex. Men, as a rule, have no problem with the concept of uncomplicated sex. Even if they don’t happen to indulge in it.  Women, on the other hand, have 10,000 generations of training to use it as a weapon or an instrument of coercion and extortion. The monopoly women have is one they’ve guarded so consistently, so long that for most women the concepts of sex and power are inseparable.

Selling sex for any commodity is prostitution.  Trading sex for power instead of money isn’t exempt.  But those who do it are ‘unadmitted whores’, as opposed to straight, upfront whores.

Many years ago a whore named Frenchie in a bar on the waterfront in Texas was bantering with me. I was trying to seduce her in the non-commercial sense. “Sex is no fun if there’s no money involved!” was her final answer.

Frenchie just about said it all, one way or another, and if you think of money as a synonym for power.

 One of the reasons women who don’t admit they are whores dislike women who do admit it so much involves the concept of inflation. From the perspective of a non-admitted whore, the whore is selling a commodity for mere money that’s worth so much more than money. In doing so, she (the admitted whore) is making that commodity available for a price that’s easily met, thereby robbing all non-admitted whores of some measure of power.  Several generations of Texas men had their first encounters with uncomplicated sex at a cathouse in LaGrange called the Chicken Ranch (now famous). For most of those men visits to the Chicken Ranch ended up as the ONLY encounters with uncomplicated sex in their entire lives.

The only commodity rarer and more precious than uncomplicated sex is honesty.

Old Jules a long time ago

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods


I’d planned for some while to write up the early-post-Y2K incident with the helicopters described below.  But Jeanne looked it up in her Y2K journal, read it to me over the phone, and convinced me in the interest of accuracy her version was the most appropriate.  The human mind twists and turns events and mine had worked on those helicopters enough to make the story I’d have written somewhat different from the one she recorded that day.

I’d have sworn I’d been teaching her sons how to use a survival mirror as described in the Survival Book https://sofarfromheaven.com/survival-book-2/, and that the instruction was the reason I had the mirror readily at hand to do what I did. 

I do recall vividly my increased heartbeat when they turned to fly 150 above the cabin.  I’ll defer to her record as to whether I then slunk into the trees.

From Jeanne’s y2k journal:
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2000


A nice day all around. Jules came over fairly early, seemed at loose ends, and stayed til nearly 4 PM.  While the kids were finishing homework, he started messing around with some tools we had lying around and found a rock that reminded him of a dream sheep mother like the ones he’d bought before from the Zunis.

He spent all morning carving a dream sheep out of that rock and then decided we needed a cairn to put it on.  He and Michael and Andrew worked on that most of the day, adding flagstones for a bench to go all the way around it. The dream sheep sits on top like a shrine- I love it.  It took all day, he must have moved a ton of rock. Then he build me another bench to sit on for a view of the sunset. Glad he didn’t ask me to help. Michael helped willingly, Andrew less willingly,  but he still helped.

 After he declared it finished, Michael took off for a hike up the hill and Andrew and Julia were playing around behind the cabin.

We heard some helicopters before we saw them, it turned out to be two black military copters that were slowly flying right along the road that goes by our property.  Jules didn’t say anything but he got out his pocket mirror from his survival kit and started sort of surreptitiously flashing it at the helicopters.  I got real nervous and decided I should  probably walk off in the other direction, so I headed towards the cabin.

I wasn’t sure if they could see who was doing it since he was by some trees, but I wanted to be sure it was obviously NOT me.  Damned if those helicopters didn’t turn a 90 degree angle and fly straight over the cabin to get a closer look at us! But nothing happened, thank goodness. By then Jules had faded into the trees. A few minutes Michael came down the hill and said “Did you see THAT?”

After that Jules and the boys had a long conversation about building a catapult using a sucker rod from a windmill and some other stuff. Said they ought to be able to build one big enough to lob rocks the size of cantaloupes across the road.  They all seemed pretty excited about it.

Anyhow, the cairn is a great place to sit and drink hot chocolate and watch the sunrise. I think it’ll last forever, it’s really solid.

Picked up 25 eggs later when we went down to help him collect them.


Saturday, Feb. 13, 2000

This morning we were eating a late breakfast inside the cabin and talking about going  to gather eggs and suddenly there was this horrifying roar over the cabin which scared us all half to death- we rushed to the door and saw a pair of fighter jets that had just buzzed our cabin! I think  they were getting back at us for the mirror stuff a few days ago…too bad Jules wasn’t around to have heart failure with the rest of us, seeing that it was all because of him.  Of course we had to drive down to his cabin right away to tell him all about it.
Picked up 30 eggs while we were there.

Jeanne K.




Sunday Morning Flies

I don’t recall ever seeing such an abundance of flies in Texas.  I first noticed it a week-or-so in Kerrville in a restaurant.  Flies were buzzing around the place in such profusion the customers were waving forks and dinner rolls in the air trying to drive them off.

Then I began seeing them here, hanging around the windows and door, waiting for things to happen in their favor.  I usually think of fly problems in a context of fly-breeding sources, so I checked the chicken roosts, figuring I’d allowed the droppings to build up enough to allow fly eggs to hatch and go through their development cycle.  Not so.

But up at Gale and Kay’s house a few days ago I saw they were similarly blessed.  Plenty of flies to go around.  Enough for most usual purposes.

Yesterday, or the day before they began finding their way into the cabin.  They weren’t docile enough to allow chasing and swatting as an option, and I’m not all that big about having flies walking over my face while I try to sleep, type, or meditate.  The military surplus mosquito net head-cover I’ve had for thirty years or more works as well as anything I know of to keep that from happening.

I’m a person who tends to believe most things are indicators of other things, but I haven’t a clue what this is an indicator of.  Probably someone somewhere would say it means we’re going to have a hard winter, or some other unusual kind of winter.  Usually Texas has a few flies and they’re worse in the fall season, but on its worst day this part of Texas usually can’t compare to a normal fly-day in the high desert country.  Desert flies converge on perspiration and any other water from miles around.

Swatting Flies in the Last Century

But this year Texas can brag it has something to compete with New Mexico.  Rich folks from Houston and Dallas won’t need to go to Ruidoso, Eagle Nest and Taos to have as many flies as they hanker to have crawling around on them.

Old Jules

A Sobering View of Y2K

That tribal talk a week or so ago got me thinking about an old Mescalero bud I’ve known on and off through the parts of this lifetime that matter. We go long times without seeing one another, but we top off the long spells by bumping into one another in unlikely places.

Kurtiss and I first met working on Skeeter Jenkins’ ranch near Kenna, New Mexico. Must have been 1958, ’59. Skeeter wasn’t a joyful man on his ranch-hands. He’d berate Kurtiss by comparing him to us white lads, then he’d turn around five minutes later and tell us we weren’t half as good cowboying as that damned Apache over there.

I guess the only good that came out of that job was the bond that formed between Kurtiss and me, and the lifelong lesson I learned about not trusting ranchers. Old Skeeter cheated all of us spang out of a hard week pay and spread around the word none of us were worth the board he’d furnished working for him.  Fortunately, he’d done that sort of thing before, so nobody paid him any mind when it came to hiring us for other jobs, which we frequently got screwed out of our pay on, same as with Skeeter.

The last time I ran into Kurtiss must have been 1998, ’99. He and a couple of Arizona broncos were sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked for a powwow in Albuquerque when I came across them and a case of beer that was too close to gone to be any good.  When we’d killed what was left of that case we kicked out of there and spent the night singing ’50s rock and roll songs, getting roaring drunk and filling in on the minutia of our lives since we’d last met.

Spent a good bit of time talking about Y2K also, which was much on my mind at the time, and they’d never heard of it.   I expected that and explained to them. Those Apaches thought that just might be something really fine.

Kurtiss immediately thought of a state cop over toward Ruidoso who’s bad about kicking around folks who’ve had a bit much to drink, “I hope nobody gets to that prick before I do.”

Those Apaches demonstrated some rich imagination concerning the nuances of Y2K aftermath.  “We’ll be able to run raids on the Rio Grande tribes like the old days!”   This didn’t interest the Arizonians.  They were fairly sure Mexico would be open for a bit of raiding, though, and better pickings.

Then Kurtiss went thoughtful.  “I’d sure as hell like to kill me some Navajo.”  He told the old story of Bosque Redondo and all the slaughter the Din’e did to the less numerous Mescalero during the decade years they shared the reservation.   Apache numbers there were decimated until only 1800 were left alive when they escaped the rez and went back to Mescalero.

Bosque Redondo was fresh on his mind because of Navajo whines he heard at the Gathering of the Tribes Powwow. “Mescalero’s too large for such few people.” (The enormous Din’e Rez is getting jam-packed these days, by comparison.) “They ought to take some of that land away and give it to us,” was the general theme.

We fought our way down,” Kurtiss quoted himself. “And you guys multiply like rabbits.”

This led to some laughs and sneers about the theme of the Gathering of Nations Powwow, “Celebrating 400 years of unity (among the tribes)“.

I wonder where that was,” one of the Coyoteros grunted. “The Apache never saw it and neither did our enemies. Those Mexicans and Pima and all those town Indians were lucky the whites came along to save them.”

Mostly those guys were in agreement in their scorn for other southwestern tribes. “They don’t know how to use the land,” gesturing with a nod and a slight pucker of the lips.

A whole different view of the end of life as we know it.

Old Jules

 

Opalized Petrified Wood

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Gale recently acquired some material of a sort I’d never seen previously.  One he was working on when I went up there was opalized petrified wood.

He’d never seen any before, either, so he polished up this piece just to get an idea what he was working with.

He’d just finished cutting this piece and it was a bit oily from the saw.  It’s going to be a beautiful chunk of rock when it’s polished.  Beneath it’s another recent acquisition, zebra agate, formed from river delta bottom mud.  The paisley’s caused by the shells of marine life.  He hasn’t slabbed and polished any of it yet.

This gives you an idea of the size of the chunk he got.  He doesn’t expect to ever see any again, so he’s trying to plan ahead carefully insofar as what he’ll make from it.

Meanwhile he’s keeping three saws working up there slabbing the jewelry quality stone he picked up at the San Antonio Rock and Mineral Show, hmm or maybe it was Austin, a few days back.

I’ve been friends with Gale since 1970.  At the time our circle of friends used to joke Gale was the busiest person any of us had ever met.  Most of them are dead, or faded into history, so I’m the only one left to testify.  He’s still the busiest man I’ve ever known.

Here’s one of the last several remaining of those Siberian Wolf Fang pendants he was working on a while back.

Here’s another of those recent acquisitions just off the saw.

Watching Gale work used to be a hair-raising experience back 30-35 years ago before he lost that finger.  He became a legend for a while by making a fairly detailed chess set out of exotic woods using a radial arm saw, holding each piece between two fingers while he made his cuts with the saw.

I occasionally remind him of this piece of history and he always replies, “That wasn’t what I cut the finger off doing.”

Miracles do happen.

Old Jules

 

Poking Around Canyon, Colorado for the Navajo Rug

Sometimes a song just happens to twang the heartstrings and worm its way into a lifetime, I suppose.  Navajo Rug’s been such a song for me.

I first heard the song in Austin, Texas, performed by Bill and Bonnie Hearne in some tiny, packed appearance of theirs in the mid-1980s.  I liked it so well I bought a tape.  Then, later I discovered the Tom Russell version and made a 90 minute tape with just that song on it, listening to it on road trips sometimes for several hours at a time until the tape wore out.

Almost a decade later I was headed through the Four Corners area toward Hovenweep and various ancient sites in southwestern Utah, but still in Colorado when a road-sign announced I was entering Canyon, Colorado.  I craned my neck watching for evidence of a burned down cafe in the weeds as I passed through.

But all the time I was in Utah over the next several days the Navajo Rug song and Canyon, Colorado were nagging at the back of my mind.  I didn’t even have the tape with me, so I sang it to myself and the truck.  Then, on the trip back I resolved to try to find out if the cafe ever existed, where it was, maybe even pick up some piece of broken melted glass or a spoon from the ruin.

I spent half a day in that village slowly driving back and forth along the grader ditch, getting out and trekking around possibilities, asking around among any residents I could approach without interrupting what they were doing.

I didn’t find it, didn’t find anyone in town who’d ever even heard the song.

But I did sit down in the only eating establishment open and order two eggs up on whiskey toast, home-fries on the side.

Sometimes that’s about the best a person can do. 

But it wasn’t the only time I’d found myself pursuing musical/lyrical craziness when location comspired with a song I remembered to distract me from a destination.  On more than one trip through Morenci and Clifton, AZ, I did a lot of asking trying to find someone who remembered who sang Open Pit Mine.

 

Not a soul even remembered ever hearing the song.

Old Jules

Occupy Someplace Warm and Cogitate

I’m not just any old dumb-ass.  I’m a dumb-ass with a lot of hats, cats and a few chickens.  But I’m also a dumb-ass who’s lived long enough to recognize tripwires and the sound of impending silence tromping around in the nether regions.

I’m a dumb-ass with a pair of ears I can hear with and eyes I can see with.

What I see and hear are the forces of ‘the other side’ are dragging out the heavy artillery and the Magnificent Seven.  The propagandist litany of dirty sexual organs, dirty clothes, dirty underwear and dirty Communism is already coming through the loudspeakers of surround-sound. 

You’re being demonized, but they’re also planting pamphlets they claim are circulating among you about what circumstances it’s okay to kill cops.  Claiming your promiscuity’s worse than that of a politician or vice cop.  Claiming you’re getting your funding from any organization they think anyone hates.

These tactics have always worked for them in the past.  They’re not too different from those used by the USSR against Polish Solidarity to keep it down almost a decade.  They’re not, for that matter, too different from those used once in Germany to acclimatize the population to some reason behind a segment of the population vanishing.

Meanwhile it’s going to get cold nights and those who have somewhere warm to go are going to find all manner of important reasons to go there.

Generally it makes better PR to go voluntarily than to be driven out by having been discredited so badly as to seem a justifiable target for physical abuse.  And it’s better to go voluntarily than just to fade from something that can be labelled ‘lack of support’, or ‘lack of interest’.

I’ve never quite been dumb-ass enough to think this OWS business is likely to bring about any positive change, but I have been dumb-ass enough to hope it doesn’t get steamrollered.  Enough to allow a microscopic hope that what’s being done could get the attention of some piece of the power structure enough to get them thinking.

But now the clock is running.  There’s more than a hint that both political parties have realized allowing all these folks to quietly sink back into the population when a national election’s looming on the horizon might be worse then having them out where they can be discredited and infiltrated by provocateurs, inflamed and accused.

I’m a dumb-ass who thinks the smart ones are filling up the address books with email addresses and phone numbers, packing their dirty sex, dirty underwear, and dirty Communism as carry-on luggage for a trip below the horizon, off the radar.

But I’m not dumb-ass enough to think anyone’s going to do it.

Old Jules

 

 

Halloween in the Middle of Nowhere

I heard a helicopter out there somewhere and was slipping into my orange jump suit while I headed out the door.  The helicopter faded, but I encountered a gathering of cats and chickens as I hopped off the porch.

Hydrox:  “Is that how you’re going to dress for Halloween?”

Me:  “I haven’t given any thought to Halloween.  What are you guys going to do?  Is Halloween something you’re thinking about?  You used to hate it when we were in Placitas.”

Hydrox:  “I don’t knowCoons driving us off the porch every night, you shooting them through the window screen.  Hauling their carcasses out to the meadow on a grain-shovel.  Something BIG carrying them off.  Life’s sort of scary around here.”

Great Speckled Bird:  “That ain’t the half of it.  Coons and skunks trying to dig into the chicken-house every night gives me and the hens a case of the willies.”

Guinea #1:  “You think that’s bad?  What about the possums climbing around up in the trees looking for US?  It’s gotten so we’re flying around blind all night long finding branches in other trees.”

Shiva:  “It’s whatever it is carrying those coon carcasses off that worries me.  If we run out of coons it’s liable to come up here looking for the only thing outside worth eating.  Cats.”

Guinea #2:  “I resent that.”

Me:  “Whoooooah!  What is it you guys want?  I’m doing everything I can think of to keep you safe.”

Long pause.

The Great Speckled Bird:  “How about we have a celebration of Life?  Of surviving this long?  That might be fun.”

Niaid:  “Yeahhh.  That sounds good.  We could pretend we’re coyotes and you could open some of those special treats for us.”

Guinea #1:  “No need for anything special.  You could just open a can of what you give THEM,” gesturing with her beak toward the cats, “We’d love to get some of that.”

Tabby, muttering:  “You guys STEAL enough of that already.  Running us cats off it when he’s not looking!”

Great Speckled Bird:  “Nevermind!  Nevermind.  No point fighting among ourselves.  Let’s keep on track here.  How about you give the cats the special treats, and open some canned cat food for the rest of us?”

Americauna Hen:  “Yeah! Cool.  And we’ll have a big celebration of LIFE before you lock us into the fortress tonight!  Then if a coon or skunk gets in we’ll die happy.”

Guinea #2:  “Or if a possum grabs one of us before we know it’s up there.”

Hydrox:  “Or if whatever-the-hell’s carrying off those coon carcasses comes up here and catches one of us cats.”

The Great Speckled Bird:  “We’ll come knocking before sunset.”

I started pulling off the orange jump suit and opened the door to go inside.  Behind me I heard Niaid, “If he doesn’t do it we’ll dress up as a SWAT team and go after him.”

Tabby:  “What would we get him for?”

Hydrox:  “For being HIM!”

Old Jules

 

 

Making Your Own Colloidal Silver – Almost Free

For those who use colloidal silver as an antibiotic for themselves or pets, but who haven’t yet discovered how to avoid bankruptcy buying it from health product stores:

This 4 fluid oz bottle was purchased in 1995 at a cost of $23.49 from a health product store.  I’d hate to even speculate what it would cost today.

By using the method illustrated in the first picture you can turn out a gallon of stronger solution for a fraction of a penny.  Just be sure you use unalloyed silver.  Not Sterling. 

Old Jules

Discarded Jewelry

Ruidoso Steak-House
Glanced at her reflection
In the plate-glass window
New squash-blossom turquoise
Sassy Stetson
Patted 50ish blonde curls
And wished
They’d eaten at the casino
Where this didn’t happen
Wrinkled pretty nose
Don’t give him anything
He’ll just get drunk!” Stage whispered
To her Houston lady friend
As though he wasn’t there
She was right of course
Except the old man Mescalero
Was already drunk
He turned away
Then turned back and mumbled
Sing the Song of Life each day
Or when the time arrives you won’t know how
To sing the Song of Death.”

Old Jules