Category Archives: Communication

Old Sol – Fondling Mother Earth With Magnetic Fingers

Posted on July 1, 2012 by | 5 comments

spaceweather.com

Me:  How’s the hammer hanging this morning, big guy?  You ready to rock and roll?  Ready to kick some serious ass of darkness?

Old Sol:  Depends on the part of the spectrum you’re referring to.  I imagine where you’re standing it’s the impression you’ll be left with.

Me:  Cool.  Hey, while I’m thinking about it, been intending to ask you about this a couple of days.  About all this sneaky pinching and feeling around on Mama Earth’s magnetic field every eight minutes . . .[Flux Transfer Event Topology]

Old Sol:  Hold on just a minute there, Bubba.  Just because you took so long noticing doesn’t mean I’ve been hiding anything.  Nothing illicit, surreptitious going on at all.

Me:  Okay.  Forget I said that part.  But We, and I think I speak for everyone on the planet in asking this.  We, I was going to say, are curious about a couple of things.  First, what are you getting back out of it?  Some sort of erotic feedback? 

Old Sol:  You need to get your mind out of the gutter.  First off, my relationship with your planet is strictly platonic.  Free exchange of hmmm, not ideas, exactly, but something that rhymes with ideas on a somewhat larger scale.

Me:  Yeah.  So you say.  But those little throbs every eight minutes don’t seem all that platonic to the disinterested observer.  Is this connection, this rubbing around against one another something you just do with Earth?  Or are you doing with the other objects you can reach, too? 

Old Sol:  Think about it before you start your holier than thou moralizing.  Do you think I can resist a magnetic field anywhere close enough for me to feel it?  I’ve been watching you long enough to know, when it comes to issues of resisting, you’ve got no more going for you than I have.

Me:  We’re not talking about me here.  Quit trying to dodge the issue.  You got your pulsing little fingers out there on Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus all the time, too?  And what’s with the eight-minute thing?

Old Sol:  Some are more satisfying than others, I’ll admit.  Those crustal magnetic fields don’t give me much of a lift, but they can be a nice quickie.  But there’s nothing like a good core magnetic field to wake up against on a cold morning.  I’m an old renaissance star in a lot of ways.  I can go either way, crustal, or core.   Either way’s fairly celestial on my end of things.  And nobody out there’s complaining, that I’ve heard.

Me:  Mama Earth know about all this?

Old Sol:  No.  And don’t you go telling her about it, either.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Communication, Relationships, Science

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Giving God More Marching Orders

Posted on June 15, 2012 by | 8 comments

It was flags and God Bless America signs I noticed mostly in Kerrville last trip in.  Had me wondering whether something was going on I’d missed. 

Here’s a country where they’re still planting grass in the suburban yards so they can mow it at $3.50+ per gallon for the mowers, giant television sets, shiny new doolies, SUVs, RVs and golf courses demanding more blessings because the ones already provided don’t fill the cup.

But maybe I’m reading it wrong.  Maybe God Bless America’s a parenthetical statement:

(Help me God, because the onliest people I’ve got to choose from are all going to provide me with more undeclared wars, ship more jobs overseas, bail out more banks, automobile companies, allow my savings to be ravaged, and treat my Social Security as though it were welfare beggings.)

I dunno.  Seems to me this nation’s enjoyed considerable blessings for the duration of the lives of everyone living in it.  Even those living on the streets, on the Reservations, just about everywhere, compared to a great majority of the less-deserving who didn’t manage to get born here.

If there’s a diety out there looking for advice maybe a “Thankee!” would get a better hearing than, “Gimme more!”

Maybe it’s time to belly up to the bar and recognize that life’s a tough place to live and sometimes people have to live it without giant television sets and new SUVs.  Judging by the people the US public have selected to look out for their interests it would take a diety a lot more forgiving than the one a majority of believers believe in to heap more blessings on those demanding them.

Thowing good money after bad isn’t one of the traits attributed to the usual diety.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Communication, Government, Human Behavior, Politics, Senior Citizens, Social Security, Texas

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The Illusion of Survival

Posted on June 14, 2012 by | 4 comments

Several years ago during that pesky time when the publishing house had accepted Desert Emergency Survival Basics for publication, but I hadn’t yet seen the contract they were proposing, the editor was asking for re-writes and a number of changes in the final draft. We discussed it on the phone a number of times and I was pecking away at it, but holding back until I’d seen what they were bringing to the table. 

But before I got too far along I got a call from him because of a news event.  A family in Oregon, or Washington had taken a back road in the National Forest, gotten snowed in, and died because they didn’t apply some of the basics suggested in the Survival Book.

Him:  The scope of the book is broader than the name suggests.  It shouldn’t require a lot of work to make it a general survival manual.

Me: A lot of work’s already gone into it.  And I’ve already re-written it the way you suggest earlier.  You’ve got it in front of you.  Before I do any more work on it you and I need to talk about money.  Every time I’ve asked about what you’re offering as an advance you’ve hedged.  Said you needed to discuss it with the boss.

Him:  We don’t usually offer much in the way of advances.  We’re not that big, even though we offer a lot of titles.

Me:  Then you and I probably don’t have much to talk about.  You know and I know I’m never going to see a penny beyond the advance.  I have a fair idea what’s contained in your standard contract.  I’m not going to lift another finger on this book until I see an advance, and if it’s not enough to pay for my time already, hearing you’re going to be flexible about changing the contract details.

Him:  I’ll talk to the boss.  But that book needs to be published.  That family might have survived if they’d read it.

Me:  I’ve got some survival issues of my own here.  Hypothetical people who might die won’t pay my rent.  I’ve already done the work.  But if you’re proposing to print that book and give it away so neither of us makes anything on it what you’re saying might make sense.  Appeal to my better nature.

Him:  I can’t do that.  We’re in business.

Ultimately they sent me the standard contract and offered a token advance.  The willingness to alter the details of the contract didn’t include changes that would have allowed me to eventually get paid for my labor by eliminating provisions for them to squirm out of paying.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years and eventually concluded the entire concept of survival and survival books qualifies as a cruel hoax.  An ironic illusion.  Because human beings are going to experience death inevitably as a means of exiting the vehicle.  Some are going to die getting lost in the woods.  If they survive getting lost it’s almost certainly going to be luck, instinct, or common sense.

As an example, somewhere earlier on this blog I described a snowstorm Keith and I got caught in on Santa Rita mesa, and how the GPS seemed to be lying about where the truck was.  How we believed the GPS instead of what we knew to be true, and more-or-less quickly found the truck.

That same snowstorm, not too far away, a kid was lost.  The news was full of it, Search and Rescue eventually was ready to give him up for dead.  But the kid, clothed in a light jacket, used his brain, sheltered under a rock ledge, and made it out after five unlikely days.

Which isn’t at all the same as saying the kid survived.  He won’t.  Neither will anyone else.

Old Jules

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Posted in Adventure, America, Books, Communication, Creative Writing, Emergency Preparedness, Hack Writing, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Survival, Writing

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The Smoke We Called Living

Posted on June 10, 2012 by | 12 comments

A few days ago Wayne, the guy everyone’s looking at in this pic sent it to me.  Brought back memories of a time when I had a dozen suits in the closet and more ties than would fit on a rack across the closet door.  That photo must be from 1975, 1976.  Leading edge watch I was wearing must have cost a bundle.

I’m the one with the chin.  The meataxe is the one without one.  Ken was his name.  If my memory serves me rightly he died sometime in the late 1980s, early ’90s and left a lot more people glad he did than wished he didn’t.  By that time he’d been far enough out of my life long enough so’s I didn’t give much of a damn one way or another.  Ken never amounted to much this lifetime, but he narrowly missed a few good bets, geography and time being a key factor.  He’d have fit right in a number of places when goose-stepping was more popular as a pastime.

Old Wayne’s stuck with that career all these decades, fought his way up the ladder to success, winding down now.  When we re-established contact a few months ago I’d thought for a long time he was probably dead, too.  But he’s a couple of months away from hanging up his gun, instead.  Retiring.  Cleaning out his desk, I reckons.

I’m hoping before I head off into the sunset, but after he finishes getting all that behind him, we’ll get out on a river bank somewhere and watch the bobbers on a trotline, scramble up some catfish and eggs for breakfast.   Him winding down, me just listening and watching.

For a human being, getting success behind ain’t always easy.  Tough drug  to kick most times, but a man has to do it.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Communication, Country Life, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens

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Honoring the Oceans in the Hen House

Posted on June 9, 2012 by | 2 comments

Me:  Why so quiet there Ms. Australorp?  Thinking of giving up on those chalk eggs?

Her:  No.  I’m just feeling a little reflective and sad.  I spent yesterday honoring the oceans.

Me:  You WHAT?  You spent yesterday wearing down those chalk eggs, same as every other day for the past couple of weeks. Honoring the oceans?  I need to pull those eggs out from under you.  A few days out chasing grasshoppers will help you regain perspective.

Her:  No.  Really.  I was thinking about all that radioactivity in the North Pacific.  Thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  All those poor turtles and plankton.

Me:  Thinking of signing some petitions?  Thinking of voting for someone who knows what to do about that garbage in the ocean vortices?  Those two roosters caged over there know as much about what to do about it all as any human being.

Her:  I know.  Still, I feel sad about it.  I think an empty, meaningless gesture or two might help me feel better.  Maybe a rally and a few petitions after these eggs hatch.

Me:  Rest your mind on that one, babe.  I’m pulling those eggs.  The golf ball, too.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Communication, Country Life, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Nature, Solitude, Survival

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Jeanne’s Bumper-Sticker Dearth/Plethora After-Action Report

Posted on June 2, 2012 by | 4 comments

This email was waiting for me when I logged on this morning, in part:

“The total bumper stickers on a 2000 mile trip was one Semper Fi, two Obama/Biden, one home made one that said Troginator or something, and one that said “ If religious groups want to get into politics they should pay taxes” which I’ll send to you re-sized sooner than the others if you want to use it. If there are certain subjects I might have taken that you’d like me to email the pic of, let me know and I’ll resize those first just to send along quickly.
 “Saw something in a comment that the new bumpers don’t do well with bumper stickers, and since almost all the cars I saw were new, I suspect people don’t want to mess their bumpers up with something that won’t come off. Just guessing.”

Jeanne might be right, of course, same as any of us might as easily be as being wrong at any given time, on any given issue we enjoy strong opinions about. 

I hate to think US drivers have become so sissy they’d quit spewing their certainties, hatreds, biases and half-baked simple solutions to complex phenomena just because of their paint-jobs.  I’d prefer to think they’ve become uneasy about what’s going on around them, sensed it enough to cause the hair on their necks bristle a bit.

The deliberate polarization of strong feelings in this country regarding politics, religion, environmentalism, ethnics, abortion, sexual preference and patriotism seem to me to have introduced the potential for having tires slit in the parking lot as a means of counter-expression.

The guy in the picture at the top today is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona.  His hat was his bumper-sticker.  Someone shot a hole in it, ripped it in half so’s he had to sew it back together.

But in another sense, a person might figure, “Hell, if I’m going to be in Swilling’s neighborhood, I ain’t putting no bumper-sticker on my horse.”

The country’s jam-packed with people today who might be sneakier and more cunning than Jack Swilling, but have the same eyes developed listening to talk radio too much.  Or spending too much time in the slammer to love their fellow Americans.  Or snorting too much of this or that recreational drug. 

Jack Swilling’s still out there, but he’s wearing his hat backward most likely.  Instead of saying, “What the hell are YOU looking at?” most likely he’ll just drag his keys the length of your paintjob or slit your tires.  Unless he can catch you alone broken down on the highway.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Communication, Education, New Mexico, Politics, Survival, Texas

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The Great Divide Separating the Two Political Parties

Posted on May 30, 2012 by | 7 comments

Party #1

Party #2

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  Some of you might have noticed the lady who administers this blog hasn’t been around for several days.  Fact is, she’s taken off from her two jobs in Olathe, KS, gone on a road trip. 

I asked her on the phone before she left to watch for bumper stickers during her travels.  This dearth of bumper stickers in Texas during a major election year has me puzzled and I’m wondering if it’s happening everywhere.

Last I heard from her about it, she’d gone from Olathe, KS, to Tucumcari, New Mexico without seeing a single bumper sticker.  Something unprecedented in my experience and observation.

Maybe people have just lost track of the abyss separating the two major parties in the US.  Maybe they’ve noticed, no matter which party they vote for, it always turns out the same no matter which one’s elected.

This has to be a big blow to the bumper sticker industry, which might be the only industry left on US soil.  Something needs to be done quickly to save the situation, and I’m going to do my patriotic duty to try to help.

Since there’s not a nickle’s worth of spit other than rhetoric separating the two parties, it’s time to get what difference there is out where people can see and understand it.

So here I am, doing my tiny part to help it along.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Communication, Current Issues, Ethnic Supremacy, Government, Human Behavior, Texas

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About Trust and Knowing Other Humans

Posted on May 15, 2012 by | 5 comments

Originally posted on another blog Tuesday, October 24, 2006 

Maybe this is all bull, but it’s the most painless way I’ve ever found to view reality and my human co-conspirators here in this lifetime.  Riding the mudball around the star and watching the two-legged critters wade around the muck beside me hasn’t caused me to admire us as a species.

As for knowing other humans, we mostly don’t allow ourselves to ‘know’ anyone. Instead, we construct them as we wish them to be, assign a set of behaviors required of them.  Often the people we’re trying to hammer into our mold haven’t  agreed to try to satisfy these requirements.  Still, we count it a violation of ‘trust’ if they don’t perform according to the rules we created.

But, even if they told us they agreed to be what we wished them to be, (and they might have meant it when they did it) obeying contracts of that sort just aren’t part of the usual human machinery. The flesh is weak and time and circumstance erode the best of intentions.

Trusting human beings based on unrealistic contracts probably leads to more heartache than simply abandoning the concept of ‘trust’ and the demands that go with it, and adopting a consistent readiness to forgive and continue loving them. (With no joint checking accounts or shared credit cards).

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior

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Surveillance Weirdness

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 8 comments

Saturday October 28, 2006  

 

This brave new century offers a lot of interesting twists and turns for the observant.  I was reading a blog this morning, someone ruminating over a friend request he’d gotten from someone, maybe in India.

I’d gotten a similar request yesterday, so it caused me to consider whether blogs aren’t being used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, both here and abroad, to find folks with particular sets of viewpoints.

For instance, I came across a blog the other day posted by a person who called himself something like ‘dope-smuggler’.  Hmmm, thinks I, is this for real?  The blog entries and photos all involved various aspects of the use of controlled substances.

Suppose I worked for DEA, I went on thinking.  Would I throw out a trot-line or two searching for folks who’d like to admit on blogs that they were felons?  I think I might.

Or suppose I worked for Mossad  (I think that’s the right spelling), the Israeli intelligence agency.  Would I like to know as many names and locations of people who held Nazi-like viewpoints?  Would I be equally interested in folks who rabidly approve of anything Israel might do?  Probably.

And so on.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about what’s happened with surveillance technology and general nosiness, both of government and individuals.

The technology and availability of spying equipment with amazing capabilities and invisibility at a shockingly low price is out there for anyone.

At least it was shocking and amazing to me when I found myself moved to investigate the matter.

One day I’d been sitting at a blackjack table for about twelve hours, and when I got to my car in the parking lot my cell-phone rang.  I answered and was treated to hearing a long playback of my conversations at the game-table several hours earlier.  I thought back and recalled a guy who sat next to me for a while wearing an unusual fanny-pack he kept messing with, so I figured it was him.

But his motive for doing such a thing was a mystery, and how he happened to know my cell-phone number was one, as well.

That happened several times, the casino playback thing, but I only saw that particular person once, and when he took the chair next to me I asked him if he had his equipment with him.  “Oh yeah,” he answered with a laugh.  “I always carry everything with me.”  And left the table.

During the same time-period Jeanne was in New Mexico.  We were in the living room, me standing, her sitting across the room, having a conversation.  The land-line phone rang and I answered.  Similarly to the casino experience, I had a conversation played back to me, but this time it was the conversation Jeanne and I’d just had within the past five minutes.

Someone obviously had the capability to listen to what was said in my home.  But what’s intriguing to me is that they wanted me to KNOW they had that capability.

That happened a couple more times and I could never see any signs around the house of any microphone/camera, but it was obviously here.  From then until now I’ve gotten spam emails I don’t open, but with subject lines referring to something or other that’s happened in my life, said or done, recently.

Which confirms for me that I am one helluva interesting guy.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would put that kind of effort, energy and expense into my life, but I do try to provide with them with some amusement in various ways.

Sometimes I figure it’s the rich neighbor kid, sometimes I think it’s the neighbor across the street next-door to my buddy, Wes, who’s generally known to be a negative busybody.  But that doesn’t quite fit the casino incidents.

I haven’t a clue. 

But after the first phone-at-home incident Jeanne and I went to a surveillance store and looked over what was out there on the open market.  After seeing it, I decided we live in a time when it’s useless to think there are any secrets, any privacy, if anyone’s determined enough to want to know, sick enough to be willing to put out a few bucks and plant a device.

Flattering, though, knowing that despite the fact I don’t talk to anyone but the cats these days unless I’m on the phone, I’m still one hell of an interesting feller.

Golly.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Gambling, Human Behavior, Internet, New Mexico, NM, Surveillance, Uncategorized

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Naming Your Own Poison: Dependency Relationships

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 4 comments

This is taken from a letter written in the year 2000:

Seems the modern world’s addicted to more afflictions than drugs.  Maybe it’s tied up in the unprecedented social experiment of the 20th Century attempting to yank the values and roles of 10,000 years of human history up, shake the dirt off, and clone them into something never before tried.  But without entirely losing what went before.

Personal boundaries became ambiguous, and while there was always the dependency inherent in shared family and social role assignments, removing it without replacement parts might have set things adrift further than anyone anticipated.

For instance, in my personal life with my ex-wife, there was a dependency thing, but it was a fairly mature relationship except in certain aspects of the dependencies.  Those grew and gradually became boa constrictors over the decades, became such a part of the rock and roll of marriage, I found I couldn’t breathe.  And I suspect the same almost had to be true for her, as well.

But after that marriage broke up, it really used to trouble me that my relationship with the next woman couldn’t have been an adult, happy, non-dependency, shared-joy kind of relationship. We were both people who had been through long marriages and half a century of life. It only missed it in enough crucial places to kill it.   In fact, there were places where it was there.  But it was woven into a fabric of unstated, unagreed-to expectations, manipulations and untuned boundaries directly tied to ownership.  Or a hunger for ownership and the powers and controls inherent with it.

It’s not easy to imagine how younger people find their way around inside that matrix of nebulous expectations.

You’ve got to learn from your mistakes, . . . I’m not saying that I’ve got the way, the truth, and the light here, but I will say, subtract raging hormones from your system. Raging hormones screw everything up. And if what you want is self-respect and growth, dependency relationships are the antithesis of it. I mean, there is a stage of your development where you can grow from that, but if you need that, it’s a statement of your level of growth. And once you get past that, the whole concept is repugnant.

And if you have learned everything you’re supposed to learn, you’re probably not going to have another relationship.  I’ve told you that after I knew I was breaking up with her I spent six weeks or so just listening and considering her catalog of complaints about me. Some were valid, some weren’t. But I listened and considered them all because that kind of input from someone who knows you well doesn’t come often and in a context where the ego allows you to distance yourself from it in a way where you might be able to actually learn something about yourself. Once I knew I was going to break with her, I no longer had any investment in defending my behavior. I learned a lot.

During the same time frame, and during all the preceding months she never listened to a damn thing–never learned anything about herself–remained stolid in her absolute innocence, victimization, purity of thought, and responsibility for any aspect of the failure of our relationship, which she desperately didn’t want to fail.

The part of this that’s most difficult to grasp is that she wanted and needed sex as much as I did. We were a matched set in that way, a couple of really uninhibited, highly-sexed people. But there was an assumption of quid pro quo in her whole approach to the problems–all her life men had been lusting after her because of her physical beauty.

She never came to the realization that all she had to do was relax a little in her “rightness”, compromise, understand, give a little, take a little, and she could save the relationship and grow some at the same time. Growth wasn’t her strong suit. She hadn’t changed much since we were kids.

Truthfully, in hindsight, I’m grateful for my own sake that she couldn’t bend,  couldn’t hear the things I’d said, and responded with shocking venom to every attempt I made for honest dialogue about our mutual problems. If she had, I’d have had to remain with her–it wouldn’t have taken much–I’d have been owned by her, and at her insistance, owned her.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior, New Mexico, Relationships, Spirituality

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