This one’s still in the US doing duty for a fried chicken joint in Kerrville, TX. But the next lifetime for it might well be Guatemala.
La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
(La Camioneta) 2012NR1hr 11m You rated this movie: 5 stars – Average of 25,249 ratings: 3.5 stars Follow the journey of a school bus from the United States to Guatemala, where it’s resurrected as a vehicle that transports Guatemalans to work.
The murderers are killing the bus drivers and anyone else who strikes their fancy. Thousands of orphans from homicided parents. And trekking to the US with all the risks is their best chance, even with legions of pedophiles waiting every step along the way. And a welcome from the Statutes of Liberty and a citizenry with a motto, “I got mine!”
I love old school busses. Maybe I’ll get to be born in Guatemala next lifetime. Or better yet, maybe you will, my fellow Americans.
I was watching a movie on Netflix last night about Puerto Ricans living in Chicago, a considerable enclave of them. At one point a 15 year old girl was asking her sister how old she’d been when she first had sex with a man.
“Ohhh. Mom hasn’t talked to you yet? We’ve got to get you a dildo!”
“I don’t want a dildo.”
“No, what you don’t want is a kid before you finish school. A dildo is what you want.”
Earthy, practical. Unexpected.
Streaming on Netflix. Generally a fairly lame movie, other than the thing about the dildo.
Chicago Boricua
(Boricua) 2004R1hr 47m In this edgy character study set in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, a group of young Puerto Ricans grapple with issues of identity.
On the other hand, All Night Bodega 2002R90 minutes was okay as such things go:
Seeking a better life for herself, 15-year-old Venus breaks away from her rough neighborhood and gets caught up in a world of violence and crime. More Info
I was going to tell you and forgot. Graduation day at the cardiac physical therapy facility a little fat guy about my age who’s always pretended I don’t exist was standing nearby as I chugged water. He asked one of the other guys who the graduation banner was up for.
“It’s for Jack. He’s graduating today.”
“I wonder if he’ll celebrate by getting a shave and haircut.”
To which I couldn’t resist, “No, but I might try to gain 40 pounds, get six inches shorter and start picking my nose a lot.”
I’m thinking I might have run into the guy in an all-night truck stop when I was hitching through in 1965. 2 am drunken local good old boys noticed me in a back booth swilling coffee waiting for daybreak.
“Hey, what have we got here? Are you one of the Beetles?”
Hi readers. Monday after Physical Therapy they stood me in front of a Happy Graduation banner, gave me a diploma and card signed by all the nurse-ladies, put a mortarboard hat on me and took a picure. Then they played Graduation March and I went around the room shaking hands while all the old codgers on machines cheered and waved on their various machines.
So the VA paid-for session of my return to physical perfection is done.
I’ve paid for another month use of the Olathe Community Center machines because I’m not 17 years old again yet.
Some of the guys who’ve been using the medical center facility a long time who’d been through similar cardiac situations to mine said they kept improving a while after the first physical therapy, is the reason I’m still hopeful it’s going to improve more despite congestive heart failure. But they also said, every one I discussed it with, that there’s a plateau that comes somewhere afterward, and things don’t get better from then on. It becomes a matter of maintaining, holding what you’ve got.
So I’m hoping the plateau for me will involve an ejection factor a bit higher than the 10-15% the VA and private cardiologists measured before therapy. I need to be able to go out in the world and climb over fences, trespass onto forbidden places. I need to be able to walk down to the grocery store somewhere and back with a bag of groceries inside each arm.
Or at least I need to be able to walk around the streets somewhere pusing a shopping cart with my belongings in it without tiring myself out too terribly. Some things in life a person just hates to give up the prospects for.
But phase one is done. Sorry if you didn’t get your invitation but graduation was never a sure thing. Even during the final weeks, even the next-to-the-last session the fast six minute measured distance walk took the wind out of my sails.
I’m going to miss all those old guys. Especially the ones doing post-graduate work hanging around because they didn’t have a courthouse square to hang around in playing dominoes and spitting tobacco. They’re paying a dear price to go there and can’t even spit.
Most of you will have already seen the news that the VA Medical Centers have been given complete responsibility for preventing spread of the Ebola pandemic to the US. The White House issued the statement Tuesday that, “the facilities are in place all over the nation and are under utilized. Recent new attention to possibly funding the VA Medical Centers and providing physicians who have not had their licenses to practice medicine suspended yet provides a solution to two problems. And a possible solution to a lot of others.”
Workers in VA Medical Centers are numerous and if Ebola or some other contagion doesn’t prevent it, many will enjoy Federal retirement benefits within twenty years. Potential fiscal saving spinoffs for giving Ebola to the VA are enormous.
We humans, we Americans are chock-full of opinions. Most we’ve had for ages, decades, and we can’t actually identify when we came to adopt them, can’t support them with anything deeper than gut feel. Mostly it doesn’t matter because nobody cares anyway.
But the opinions we choose reflect the health of our souls. In a real sense our opinions are who we are. Occasionally it’s worth distancing ourselves from them and the ego attachments we form to them. Just to find out whether our opinions have any connection to anything inside the real world.
Old Jules
Why Can’t Americans See the Obvious Truth?
Jimmy Carter unveils truth about Israel
An honest Israeli Jew tells the Real Truth about Israel
Back when she was still Princess Elizabeth the US magazines had a love affair with her. We kids in Portales, NM, saw pictures of her looking her best and didn’t think she looked all that great, for a princess. A bit horse-faced, we thought. And the kid, prince Charles with his snooty little spoiled brat look. We hated his guts.
Didn’t much care who knew it, either.
Law law law. The British still had themselves thinking maybe it was an empire in those days. Didn’t take a lot of the reign of Liz to put that thought out of the minds of anyone with an eye to see. No Victoria, our Liz.
So here she is today, maybe still alive and in the catbird seat. Been there longer than Victoria. Hasn’t been poisoned or strangled by either of her offspring. And actually managed to win one war during her watch.
That was the Falklands War. Whupped Argentina all by themselves, those British did. Still had a whisper of a navy in those days. Lots of fireworks and generally a fairly safe war without any danger of contagion carrying it out of the ocean and onto places with Argentina firebombing London or vicee versee.
Put Britain down on record as the only civilized country in the world to win a war after 1918. A clear win, no illusions with the losers popping up as economic giants taking over the world marketplaces.
Hell, Liz was there when most of the shooting stopped in Northern Ireland. Might still be there when Mr. Scotland thumbs his nose at who? Henry was it? And tells the rest of the island to go piss up a rope. [After thinking on it while I showered I’m thinking it was Longshanks, Lackland, wossname, maybe Henry II. They all run together these days.]
Anyway, I’m just glad little Prince Charles with his snooty little short pants never got to be king. That was worth the price of admission, having to know something about what the damned British monarchy did or didn’t do anytime in my life.
Old Jules
Afterthought: I recall sometime during the 1980s the other kid, Andrew, I think, had a girlfriend who was a porn star, which I applauded. If he’d gotten to be king I mightn’t have minded knowing about it. Randy Andy they dubbed him at the time. If the bard had been reincarnated to see that he might have written a good tragedy about it.
Hi readers. She snuck out of the nursing home they put her in after they snagged her car and sold her house. When a movie begins with that there’s nothing much can be done to spoil the ending. I’d put it up beside Harry and Tonto, generally.
Redwood Highway, 2013PG-131hr 30m, You rated this movie: 5 , Itching to get out of her retirement community but estranged from her family, Marie uses her granddaughter’s wedding as an excuse to go on a walk.
Woman my age dons a backpack and hikes roughly 100 miles up the California coast dodging search and rescue, refusing rides and shooting molesters in the face with bear spray.
Seems more obvious every day that wossname, George Bush Sr. needed to stay the hell out of wars in the Middle East instead of waging them and giving himself a premature ejaculation. That Desert Storm I must have been the absolutely most senselessly waged war in US history even before he pulled out and splattered the proceeds across the belly of the whole region.
That would have been a good time to sigh and notice the cold war was over and bring the troops home from Korea, Europe, and all those pestholes across the world where they don’t speak English. George Bush was never any great shakes, but Desert Storm 1 followed by him not noticing the end of the cold war when the USSR ceased to exist defined him. He set the course as surely as it could be set to continue disastrous military spending and constant military adventures for the foreseeable future.
For this reason George Bush Senior qualifies as the worst president in US history until those who followed him.
There’s no need to go through the litany of tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees who came after GB Sr, identical to him in every respect aside from being lousier presidents. They all marched to his drum and carried the country into more endless wars and a bottomless pit of national debt directly resulting from military expenditures, wars, and foreign aid to bought-and-paid-for friends we only need for more wars and military adventures.
What else he didn’t do? He didn’t sit Israel down and insist they withdraw inside their International Boundaries as recognized by the UN and every other country in the world. On pain of losing what eventually became $130 billion in foreign aid from US taxpayers.
Because GB Sr., had he done what any responsible president should have done, could have ended the next generation of troubles we’re experiencing as a contributory factor, today.
The US, and the US Presidents are frequently accused of responsibility for not stopping what some Roosky strongman’s doing, or some Mexican from Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan does or doesn’t do. Or what some Chinaman from Japan, or Burma, or North Korea does or doesn’t do.
What a laugh! What a stupendous irony.
The only thing in the entire world a US President might control, might influence helpfully, is the slaughter between Palestinians and Israelis. The problem we helped create.
By insisting Israel return to inside its established boundaries and withdraw the settlements. Cease claiming lands assigned to others, cease claiming mineral rights offshore belonging to Palestinians.
The US Presidents love to toss around sanctions against, say, Russia, or Syria, or Iraq, anywhere. Except the one place they’d surely resolve the fundamental problem.
When people in Israel shout, “They don’t acknowledge we have the right to exist!” what they mean is, “They don’t acknowledged we have the right to take their lands designated for Palestine for our own!”
This series of duckwalking ducktalking clowns who’ve occupied the White House could probably have made two gestures to appear to be something other than the mediocre hopscotching puppets they were .
They could have brought the troops home and sliced the military budget to something approaching what other countries have.
They could have forced Israel back inside its borders and bribed Palestine to accept things as they are with foreign aid akin to what Israel receives.
But I suppose imagination is too much to hope for in a duckwalking ducktalking politician.
Old Jules
Who’s Profiting From Israel’s Offensive in Gaza
Israeli Military Torturing Palestinian Children ~viewer discretion~
How the Jews Treat Christians in Israel – It’s Serious!
Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land
THE TRUTH HURTS JEWS ADMIT THEY ARE NOT THE JEWS OF THE BIBLE
Shlomo Sand: Challenging notions of a Jewish People
Israelis: What do you think of settlers forcing Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem?
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 