A block or so away from the Huron Cemetery sits the best bookstore in Kansas City Metro area. Prosperos. If you click the link below you can access a lot of photos to explain why it’s the best bookstore hereabouts.
Run by nice folks…. the sort of place that helps local artists and writers, has local musicians and even the occasional poetry reading.
But guess what! They published a sticker that proclaimed the store to be the Kansas City Indigenous Bookstore. And it stirred up a storm of outrage even among the writers and artists who’ve benefited from the store’s support.
The word, ‘indigenous’, which is one anyone can claim if they’re natural, if they’re born here, if they can’t be accused of being from somewhere else they could be sent back to, the word, ‘indigenous’ I was going to say, is now the personal property of a group of people who had ancestors somewhere on the continent before my own ancestors got here a couple of hundred years ago.
And if a bookstore has the brass to call itself ‘natural’, a ‘native bookstore’ of KC, it’s surprising how many people who had ancestors out, say, in Arizona or New Mexico feel themselves being robbed of the meaning of the word. And are supported by various frizzly headed folks with ancestors more recently arrived [though many probably have no idea when, nor from where ] ….
So, if you dislike seeing this sort of bullying by grabsters of the English language, if you preferred it back when people couldn’t snag a word to hold to their chests and warn off all competition for its use, next time you are in KC, visit Prosperos Book Store.
Go there and buy a book to show how damned independent and ambivalent you are about the building of barbed wire fences around words and a willingness to forsake friends, to fail to remember favors, to go into righteous battle should anyone trespass on the use of someone else s word.
A couple of weeks ago at the Gold River Auction in Olathe Jeanne found this thing for free because nobody bid on it. She gave me a call and asked if I’d like to have it. Seemed a strange concept to me, but I told her to snag it for me.
Believe it or not this thing is not electric, doesn’t require any software, and you can just type words into it to get them printed right away. No hassle with a printer, no hookups, no dried out printer-ink.
Jeeze! You just type into this thing and if there’s a sheet of paper in it, you end up with a page with what you typed right there already.
At 6 am the thermometer on my porch declared it was almost 20 degrees F. And an hour later it dropped to around 10 degrees F. So there you are.
I hope you are all having a merry little MLK day. If you didn’t get all the presents you were wanting old MLK to bring, maybe the Valentine will give them to you, or the Easter Bunny. Don’t give up hope.
So, it being a clear day full of sunshine I figured I’d go down to the laundromat to celebrate MLK. Discovered sun or no sun, those sidewalks and parking lots are SLICK. No, not slicker than greased owl droppings, but still slick enough to throw a man who was not sufficiently careful, or one who felt the need for a broken arm or hip.
But it was worth it. I’m blessed with a load of clean laundry, all folded nicely, ready to go into the various hidey holes and drawer-like places here. And while I was waiting for my dryer I stopped by Wendy’s for a Caesar salad. Which I didn’t get one of because all their damned Romaine lettuce was recalled.
So I had to settle for some other lousy salad that wasn’t worth the chewing it required.
But it was worth it anyway. Because at the booth across from me I heard the most INTERESTING conversation! It all began with a few remarks about MLK and the issue of whether racism in this country has improved since his time. Mostly these folks figured it hasn’t.
But of course, they weren’t alive or adults to experience how it was when MLK was doing his work. Everything seems to me to boil down to conjecture and personal experience. Along with the manifestations of racism a person chooses to call by that title.
But I’ve digressed. What struck me as most interesting was that the conversation drifted to something they were calling, ‘restitution’. Evidently there’s either a plan in place, a program somewhere, or just a fond hope among a lot of people that we who are alive today are going to be compensated by someone sometime for bad things our ancestors experienced.
To me this sounds peachy, but somehow unlikely. My personal ancestors, I know, experienced great hardships, deprivations, injustices and sometimes even rudeness. I’ve always resented the fact nobody ever offered to pay me for all that stuff that happened to them.
But my impression listening to these people at Wendy’s was that they thought ‘restitution’ for things our ancestors suffered but we didn’t have to not only made sense, but was somewhere on an agenda and might happen.
Where do these ideas come from? Is it because we’ve endured a system of inherited wealth and power all these generations after we ceased being aboriginals? So if we can inherit wealth, we should also be compensated for the suffering dead people endured?
The world is a crazy place, and to me that definitely sounds like an idea not likely to come to pass, but stranger things have happened and still do. After all, we do allow people to inherit power and wealth generation after generation. Which probably would have sounded fairly crazy to aboriginals.
Hi readers. Thanks for hanging in there. I’d have written this sooner but I was waiting for a flash of profound understanding about whether ‘epiphany’ is singular, or plural.
Turns out it’s singular, but so vast it can buy beer and cigarettes without having to show its phony ID. So here’s the thing about epiphany for those of you who haven’t yet experienced the ‘big one’. Epiphany is what you experience when you know all the other epiphanies [singular] you’ve had during your lifetime were BS and the one you’ve just had is REAL.
You probably can avoid this by listening to talk radio.
Anyway, I’m logging on here because you readers are among the things I appreciate about being alive this long so I figured I might as well drop in and say hello. I’ve been silent a goodly while because I didn’t figure I was going to live this long and there didn’t seem to be much to say that wouldn’t go just as well unsaid. But there comes one of those moments when a person has to admit, “Screw it! Ain’t any damned telling how long I’m going to hang around doing thees stupid life I’ve gotten myself into. The sooner I get back to doing stuff the sooner I’ll get it over with, I reckons.”
So here I am, indefinitely, doing pretty well all things considered. Pretty damned well. All things considered.
So hello.
I’ve got some heartening news for those of you who get esophageal reflux, and some interesting things you can do with Masa Harina, but I’m going to keep you on the edge of your chairs and just announce they’ll be along. Stay tuned.
I’m not a person who toadies to celebrities. I couldn’t care less what they say or think about anything, what they do with their genitalia, what they eat, drink, or snort. If I like something they do on stage, on audio, on screen, that’s what gets my attention. I mostly don’t read biographies, autobiographies, mostly don’t watch interviews.
With rare exceptions. Leonard Cohen interests me. Louden Wainwright III interests me, Guy Clark interests me, and Tom Russell interests me. But Guy Clark and Leonard Cohen are the only ones I’d ever seen interviewed until now.
But I got to wondering whether Bob Dylan is still alive. I first was introduced to his music at a place on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village during the summer of 1964. McDougal’s might have been the name of the place. And same as everyone else at that time and place, I was blown away.
So I went to the miracle of YouTube and started searching, thinking at least to hear some good music. And there they were, interviews with Bob Dylan, interviews with other people talking about Bob Dylan. Dozens of them scattered over half-century. So I picked a few, beginning with back when he was my age, 70 times around the sun.
Bob Dylan Interview and a very revealing one at that
For Bob Dylan it is Always the Same Interview 42 Years in 24 Minutes
Bob Dylan.Funny Interview.
I don’t care what the Beetles think, or thought about Bob Dylan, nor about anything else for that matter. But they did have a few good songs, and maybe what they say about Dylan will interest someone.
The Beatles talk about Bob Dylan
John Lennon and Bob Dylan Conversation
Bob Dylan and John Lennon on God and Religion
Bob Dylan: San Francisco Press Conference (Dec. 1965) 1/6
Bob Dylan – After The Crash – 1966-1978 (Part 1 of 12).mp4
I never knew Dylan got religion, or whatever it was he got, but I’m glad for him, though I don’t care whether he did or not from the perspective of knowing about it.
Bob Dylan – The Gospel Interview
Bob Dylan 1966 Interview, WBAI
Bob Dylan – Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award – 1991 Grammy Awards
Dylan and I didn’t know it because we never got around to discussing the matter, but we shared a lot of respect for Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, I suppose, might qualify as another person I’d have possibly cared what he thought about some things. If I’d ever met Dylan we could have regaled one another with Johnny Cash respect, I suppose.
Bob Dylan on Johnny Cash. NDH outtake
I’ve mentioned Loudon Wainwright III is one of the people I’m mildly interested in what they might say about something outside the context of a song. Well, in this instance I didn’t have to look outside Loudon Wainwright’s music. He wrote this song to Dylan on Dylan’s 50th birthday.
Loudon Wainwright III – Talking New Bob Dylan.wmv
The Simon and Garfunkel thing about Dylan has always seemed to me to be a cheap shot. Dylan wrote the song that launched Simon and Garfunkel into fame. Sound of Silence. But when Dylan left ‘folk’ behind to invent ‘folk rock’ Simon and Garfunkel got offended enough to personally attack him in song: Bastards, both of them. Screw them, though they did one-hell-of-a-lot of great songs. If they’d kept their nasty little comments off their albums I’d never have known. Pricks.
Simon & Garfunkel – A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)
The Sound of Silence (Original Version from 1964)
Peter, Paul and Mary got pretty pissed when Dylan drifted to folk rock, too. I saw an interview with one of the guys several years later in which he said it was the only really nasty attack song they ever recorded, and that they all regretted it. Something about what he said made me thing it was directed at Dylan. Listen to the words carefully to hear the sarcasm “between the lines”. But at least they did it with some class. They made a lot of money and miles off Bob Dylan creations.
I dig rock n roll music
So I think I’ll just toadie to Loudon Wainwright’s birthday tribute to Bobby Dylan and make a wish when I think he’s blowing out the candles in the wind: “Here’s hoping you outlive me Bobby Dylan. I’d like an excuse to begin my next lifetime in time to hear what you do after I exit the vehicle.”
Heck readers. They’re calling the India foreign film industry Bollywood. At least the part happens down Bombay-way. And they’re calling the Nigerian foreign film industry Nollywood.
But Korea, yeah, Frozen Chosun, has as good, possibly better foreign film industry than those. And nobody’s assigning it any names with wood on the end. So I’m nominating Yong Dong Po llywood as my favorite, because Yong Dong Po was OFF LIMITS when I was in Korea. I enjoyed some great, but risky times in Yong Dong Po. But failing that, Sollywood [Seoul] or Pusiwood [Pusan] works fine. Further north foreign filmeywood might house Pyongyaniwood.
Welcome to Dongmakgol, 2005 NR 132 minutes , In a village in war-ravaged Korea, fate brings together a crash-landed U.S. fighter pilot, three North Korean soldiers and two South Korean soldiers. Starring:Jae-yeong Jeong, Hye-jeong Kang, Director:Kwang-Hyun Park, would make a nice debut for Pyongyangiwood, for instance.
The Warrior , 2001 R 158 minutes, Korean envoys on a diplomatic mission to China refuse to accept their fate when they’re accused of espionage and sent to a remote desert to die. Starring:Woo-sung Jung, Sung-kee Ahn
Director:Sung-su Kim, I’d hand over to YongDongPollywood.
And so on.
Just a suggestion, though. What the hell do I know.
My life’s blessed at the moment having my bud, Eddie, available to kick around finding fixes for the unfixable. In this instance, all that broken plumbing and wastewater damage blowing the tires did on the RV. That stuff’s made of a material monikered, ABS, which was never intended to be repaired. Plastics, nylon, nothing much easily available attaches to it and the hardware stores don’t carry anything much in the plumbing department made of ABS.
But ABS does attach nicely to other ABS if a person can find some.
Eddie did some web searches to find out what products might be made of ABS to be ravaged for the purposes of converting them to RV wastewater heaven. One turned out to be old computer monitors. So he dug around until he found one.
Yesterday we examined the old monitor to make certain the flat area on the side would be large enough to make a patch to cover the hole broken in the greywater tank on the RV. Then we took a waste piece of RV broken plumbing pipe, scarified it, scarified the potential monitor, and doctored both with purple ABS goo cement.
Voila! Yes. You heard me right. Voila.
That flat surface on the side of that monitor’s going to RV wastewater heaven, holding back the forces of darkness, undergoing reincarnation, likely providing a whole new US cottage industry in the future.
Damned monitors all over the US now have something to aspire to.
When our sainted once-king Ronald Reagan wasn’t parking small Volkswagens under his hair next to his scalp he was fond of saying the Soviet Union was an evil empire. But Reagan meant this in a good way. What Reagan intended to communicate was, compared to not being an empire, the Soviet Union was evil.
As the somewhat temporary monarch of his own empire extending from Guam to Hawaii to Alaska to the contiguous states of the continent to Puerto Rico, Reagan had noticed the condition of being part of an empire wasn’t an unmitigated blessing for all the non-aristocrats living inside it.
Reagan was wise enough to know that he couldn’t do much about the ills of being non-aristocrats in an empire, but he wanted to do something good anyway, or something someone might call good in the history books. And since he couldn’t do it for the non-aristocrats, hell, at least he could be a popular cult-figure doer-of-good-deeds for the aristocrats.
He decided if those aristocrats could be turned absolutely loose to acquire wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams they might be satisfied and allow some of the good to trickle down into the pockets and households of the peasantry who were mowing their lawns, flipping their hamburgers and doing tune-ups on their Rolls Royces.
The result was profound. The nature of his empire went through a lot of subtle changes and the texture of the evil was distilled in some unexpected subtle directions. In no time at all US jobs, businesses and small industry were swirling down the toilet headed for China and other countries where the labor was less expensive. His aristocrats discovered the multi-national grass was a heluva lot greener than the stuff under the purple mountains majesties on the fruited plains.
So in a sense it can be said Reagan destroyed his own evil empire in favor of a much larger one owned by banks and multi-national corporations. And somehow in the process he managed to make the rednecks and semi-literates lower their voices in reverence when they spoke his name.
Today he’s still remembered that way, but more within the legions of Oliver North clones serving his multi-national aristocrats.
Finding something that rhymes with empire that isn’t evil is a tough gig.
Hi readers. I probably should have warned you about this sooner. Hopefully I’m not too late.
I write this blog because I enjoy doing it. I write it because to me writing it reduces the pressures of having to exist in a world where swarm behaviors dominate my species. This blog is my teflon coating to help me partially escape participation in the swarm. I write this blog to help me unravel the world around me as I observe it and attempt to draw meaningful conclusions.
For me it’s a piece of my own determination to be a better human being tomorrow than I am today. It’s a part of an ongoing program to continuously persuade myself such a thing is possible.
Sometimes I write what I believe are facts. Sometimes analogies. Sometimes absurdities that only contain what I believe bear similarities to facts without actually attempting to capture them.
Swarm behavior can’t be examined, analysed, understood from inside the swarm. Sometimes my thinking is trapped inside the swarm and I attempt to examine it, but frequently I’m able to achieve escape velocity and observe from some distance away. Even I usually don’t know which is which, whether I’m making valid observations from outside, or flawed ones from inside.
In any case, I suggest nobody take this blog seriously. If you see words, phrases, paragraphs here you find disagreeable, there’s no call to be offended. I can’t threaten your swarm, and if you’re outside your swarm you probably can’t beckon me to the position you are viewing it from.
But the main thing is, enjoy the blog if you can, because there’s nothing I might say of enough importance to justify a moment of displeasure. It’s an easy blog not to read.
Protect whatever mental health you believe you are carrying around with you, either by smiling when you read here, or by going somewhere else to read something more smileable. This blog is not an important issue.
As far as I’m aware the blog does not cause cancer, does not carry any communicable disease in its words. I don’t believe there are any environment consequences, no threats caused by second-hand blog when it’s shared. I’ve tried to be responsible and avoid that
Reference the preceding post: I was probably negligent by not pointing out part of the reason for sustained peace in Ireland is the respect for established borders. Borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland haven’t changed significantly since they were agreed to by both sides. No understanding would be gained by posting a map of Ireland.
Israel is a comparatively young, new nation. Zionists evidently tend to harken back to Biblical times when they consider boundaries. They probably don’t understand that the older, more mature nations take borders seriously.
And the borders of Israel haven’t changed since 1966. The Palestinians own East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Syria owns the Golan Heights. However, 300,000 Israeli settlers occupy the West Bank. 200,000 Israeli setters live in East jerusalem.
On the other hand, here’s a map of Israel when it was established by the UN in 1947, and recognized by the US in 1948.
Here’s a more detailed map of the pre-1967 borders of Israel with later claims by Israel shown in red.
Here’s Israel and the occupied areas today.
In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza. But it maintains a strong security force in both places.
Every country probably wishes more land was contained within its borders. However, most modern countries recognize if they attempt to occupy territories belonging to other countries they’ll draw criticism from some quarters. Often the people living in the areas being occupied.
Israel could make a far stronger case for being a peace-loving country, a more believable case in the eyes on non-Zionists, by withdrawing to areas the world recognizes are contained within its established borders.
Otherwise it will forever having to fall back on the argument that everyone just hates Jews is the only reason for all the problems with neighbors. An outward sign of a desire for peace sometime during the past 50 years might have gone a long way toward achieving it.
Some strategy along the lines Ireland’s used, maybe.
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 