Category Archives: Human Behavior

Tilting Windmills Out The Window of an RV

Ira Ann Windmills2

Hi readers.

Once these damned cats croak I have one project left to complete before I fall into a burning ring of fire Johnny Cashwise.  I want to find a hubcap to use for a helmet, a garbage can lid for a shield, and a long piece of 2 inch cast iron pipe and open a can of whupass on one of those windmills they’re foresting the plains of West Texas with.

Not to suggest I have anything against them.  In fact, I respect them and whatever engineer with an Asian surname designed them.

No, I want to prove to myself and to future generations of mankind that whatever else Cervantes might have thought, he was wrong about windmills and their place in the overall scheme of things as it applies to the human condition when it’s challenged by a man of vision.

And I’m just the man to do it.

The New Old Jules

La Cantina

Hi readers.

La Cantina Entry

A man who reads this blog sent me an email a while back offering to allow me to hook up and park mi casa where he lives in far-west Texas a night, or more if we found ourselves simpatico.  So after the WalMart parking lot in Midland, we trucked up there and said hello.

La Cantina bar

Eddie and Val, their names are.  Fine, fine, fine people.  The Coincidence Coordinators blessed me once again with an unexpected shot of reminder I’m the luckiest man alive.

I’ll digress a moment and suggest you notice the birdnests on the vigas and the droppings on the orno below.  This is the entryway into the section of their home Eddie built where they evidently spend most of their time and entertain guests.

La Cantina Fireplace

I spent a few days parked in their yard, hours of every day submerged in conversation with Eddie, Val, various relatives and neighbors, digesting my life, the flood of new learning I was doing, and a lot else, thanks mainly to Val, who was forever worrying whether I could drink some more coffee, eat some more of the fare she constantly provided, putting more wood on the fire.

La Cantina deer head

Val’s an ex-school teacher, biologist, and interesting lady.  Eddie’s an electrical engineer who spent much of his lifetime travelling all over the planet, first as a private contractor, then in a corporate capacity, then decided screw-it.  I ain’t doing this no more.

La Cantina hatrack

I met a lot of interesting people, heard a lot of intriguing world-views in that cantina while the wind howled outdoors.  I’ll be telling you more of that later.

But one question I was asked over and over during my stay.  “What the hell are you doing here?”

Soaking it up,” is the only answer comes immediately to mind.

Maybe I’m working up to continuing wossname, John Ernesto Hemingway Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie – The Brave New World For Whom The Bell Tolls.

The New Old Jules

Old Dogs, New Tricks and Kick Starting Pesky Realities

Mechanized Morton Salt

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

My friend, Rich, is going down to the jailhouse in Gastonia, NC, today with Lisa.  That’s where they do weddings in Gastonia, which I think is fairly cool in its own way.  I might be tempted to marry again my ownself if I could do it in a jailhouse.  But the places I’m likely to be they probably do it someplace else.

At least I hope so.

But I’m tickled pea green for old Rich, and Lisa too.  Good people kicking holes in the future, driving new tunnels into places neither of them could have gone by themselves.

When I first became acquainted with Rich I’d have never dreamed something of this sort would emerge among his lifetime pathways.  He was an angry, bitter man carrying around all manner of rages left over from the Vietnam War jungles, losing a son in an accident a decade-or-so earlier, a wife working up to dying as a result of environmental issues.

As nearly as I could tell, Rich was a cauldron seething with more things to be angry about than a person would be likely to turn loose of during whatever he could squeeze in as a rest-of-his-life.  Rich and I would talk on the phone for hours at a time and during those first years after he became a widower the experience was dizzying for me.  At times he teetered on the edge of a depression I was concerned he mightn’t climb back out of.

After I’d hang up I’d have to run through more-than-usual gratitude affirmations, forgiveness affirmations, grab a cat to scratch behind the ears, and in a pinch, do an EFT-like tapping ritual to get my feet back on the ground where I wanted them.

But gradually Rich pulled himself into a different place and the rage slowly dissipated, peeled away in layers, seemed to me.  I suspect gratitude affirmations might have been part of how he did it, but taken in time-lapse head photographs within my mind it seems both unlikely and profound.

Then he met Lisa and bubbled up into being an old codger so happy with himself and his life maybe he belonged in the jailhouse.  Anything makes a man that happy is almost certainly illegal in the US these days.

So here’s me, shooting some gratitude affirmations to the Universe for Rich and Lisa.  And hoping they don’t keep them inside too long.

Old Jules

The Burden of Guilt – “When It Rains It Pours”

when it rains

Hi again readers.

One of the things I like least about Christmas is the fact it brings out so much dialogue about how we ought to devote ourselves to making it better for those less fortunate than ourselves.  Got an email just a minute ago someone posted somewhere talking about it again.

I agree entirely with the sentiment, but it’s a killer for a man [the only one] such as myself.  I’m the most fortunate man on the planet.

So how the hell am I supposed to go about doing it? 

Everyone on the planet is less fortunate than me.  Should I start by figuring out a way to make life better for wossname, Donald Trump?  The Dallas Cowboys and those who watch them?  The American Association of Non-RV Owners?  The Federation of Human Beings Alienated From Cats?

I ain’t giving what few cats I have left to someone, no matter how unfortunate they might be.  Okay, I’m a stingyguts, but there you are.

I’m at a complete loss here, and the guilt is overwhelming.

Old Jules – Headed for the finish line

The Brother of Invention

Humane gunfighters

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Life’s so full of happy surprises here it took me a while to remember to be surprised when I awakened warm, still parked where once chickens scratched and pecked on mornings such as this.  Then I remembered what it was I ought to be surprised about – that I’d expected this post to be made on a fast WIFI connection somewhere out where it’s probably colder than it is here.  Which is plenty cold enough to satisfy the needs of the feline population, I’m informed.

I thought it was the money situation keeping the delays coming hot and heavy, but when I managed yesterday after the temperature dropped to 20 degrees F, to get the propane heater working in the RV, I knew a new reality had dropped in to flex its muscles.  That heater had to be why the Universe kicked in to impose good sense into my activities.

I don’t know how I fixed it.  Maybe just pulling things apart and putting them back together, tapping on things, testing, and taking them apart again was what did it.  Or maybe it was my genius brother, Invention.

So this morning I woke someplace warm for the first cold morning in at least a couple of years.  I hope today I’ll be changing the oil on the RV, wrapping up a couple of other details, and try to round up the cats to hit the road before the end of the week.

But it’s not easy to feel much dissatisfaction with life when there’s warm out there to be had.  I’m going to have to kick myself with some determination to impose a sense of urgency into my intentions.

But I’ve digressed.  I’d planned to tell you about that truck I saw parked in front of the Humane Society Thrift Shop new construction area.

Can’t recall now what I was going to say about it.

Instead, here’s wishing all of you plenty of warm.

Old Jules

Searching for The Lost Granfalloons* – Mine

FAST-GROWING SUNSPOT: Barely visible when the weekend began, sunspot AR1619 has blossomed into a large active region more than three times as wide as Earth.  So far the growing sunspot has not produced any significant flares, but the quiet is unlikely to continue if its expansion continues apace. Fast-changing magnetic fields on the sun have a tendency to reconnect and erupt. NOAA forecasters estimate a 20% chance of M-class solar flares during the next 24 hours.  http://spaceweather.com/

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been watching SS 1619 and wondering what the hell is going on with Old Sol. Likely you’re wondering, as I am, why he persists in blessing us with all those weird smiley faces with Errol Flynn mustaches.  Wondering what he’s got up his sleeve.

I have the advantage on most of you because I’ve been messing around with rare earth magnets, glueing them behind cabinet doors in the RV to keep them closed.  So rapidly changing magnetic fields are fresh on my mind, along with the wrinkled, crispy fingertips acquired by fastening them in place with super glue.

Which has created a loose granfalloon Old Sol and I both belong to.

But I’m what most people would call a real cool guy, full of compassion and sensitivity for all you who aren’t in a granfalloon with Old Sol right now.  So I’m not going to arouse your fears and spoil your Thanksgiving holidays by telling you what he might have up his sleeve.

One of the shortcomings, in fact, with granfalloons is that it might be anything, anyway.  Your guess is as good as mine.

But I’ve digressed.  My main purpose in posting today is to tell you about some other granfalloons of my past are cropping up hither thither and yon in my sinookas**.  For reasons I dassn’t speculate about, a good many of them involve a search I used to do for a lost gold mine.  Strangers from hell to breakfast are sending me emails wanting to talk to me about it, hinting around that, though they haven’t been within a thousand miles of that country, they know where it is.  Or might be.

Some granfalloons just don’t let go once they get their teeth locked into your leg.

So maybe  all this busy, busy, busy*** going on around here right now is about me going out and searching for the Lost Granfalloons – Mine.

Not that I plan to bank any money on it.  I’m spang out of money until my SS pension check arrives.

Old Jules

* granfalloon – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is “Hoosiers“; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so they really share little more than a name. Another example is a Cornellian, a student or graduate of Cornell University.

**sinookas – the tendrils of one’s life.

***Busy, busy, busy” – what a Bokononist whispers whenever he thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Cats Cradles, Communities, Hungers and Bokononism

Good morning readers.  Thanks for the visit.

Cats Cradle

I’m rapidly developing an overweening pride in this.  15-18 pounds of cat slept on it last night, and it’s no worse for the wear.

But, I’ve digressed.

Maybe it was inevitable.  While I was doing other things over the past weeks my mind began toying around with abstractions involving communities and the attraction human beings have for them.  I’d been reading some Jack London and found myself sticking pieces of his thinkings off in the side of my mind, observations about the packages of community he experienced and wrote about.

But on the side Slab City sneaked into my mind occasionally, and the attraction I’ve no intention to indulge, that remains despite my intentions. 

Or the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous RV and van dwellers are going to stage in Quartzite, Arizona in January.  http://cheapgreenrvliving.com/Rendezvous.html 

Evidently thousands of RVs and van dwellers converge on the spot every January for a big RV show, and the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous takes place concurrently.    50-100 people who live in RVs or vans or wish to live in them, and feel the need to be part of a community of a sort they didn’t find surrounded by RVs, campers and vans in RV parks, State Parks, or in National Forests.

Are the people occupying those dots down there different than the ones you’d meet if you went knocking on doors at the Take It Easy Trailer Court in Kerrville, Texas?  I dunno.

But something in my mind connected the concept of community and the human need for it with Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Bokononism:

Bokononism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bokononism is a fictional religion invented by Kurt Vonnegut and practiced by many of the characters in his novel Cat’s Cradle. Many of the sacred texts of Bokononism were written in the form of calypsos.

Bokononism is based on the concept of foma, which are defined as harmless untruths. A foundation of Bokononism is that the religion, including its texts, is formed entirely of lies; however, one who believes and adheres to these lies will have peace of mind, and perhaps live a good life. The primary tenet of Bokononism is to “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

Bokononism encompasses a number of unique concepts expressed in the San Lorenzan dialect:[1]

  • boko-maru – the supreme act of worship of the Bokononists, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
  • “Busy, busy, busy” – what a Bokononist whispers whenever he thinks about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
  • “Calypso” – song from The Books of Bokonon. Eight such songs are cited in Cat’s Cradle, some of them are presented with a title (i.e. On Dynamic Tension or The Boko-maru Calypso) and others are presented with a number (i.e. The Hundred-and-nineteenth Calypso). The Calypsos illustrate various aspects of the teachings of Bokonon.
  • duffle – the destiny of thousands of people placed on one stuppa
  • duprass – a karass that consists of only two people. This is one of the few kinds of karass about which one can have any reliable knowledge. The two members of a duprass live lives that revolve around each other, and are therefore often married. “A true duprass can’t be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.” The novel cites the example of “Horlick Minton, the New American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire.” The two members of a duprass always die within a week of each other.
  • foma – harmless untruths; lies that, if used correctly, can be useful.
  • granfalloon – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is “Hoosiers“; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so they really share little more than a name. Another example is a Cornellian, a student or graduate of Cornell University.
  • kan-kan – the instrument which brings a person into his or her karass
  • karass – group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God’s will. The group can be thought of as the fingers that support a cat’s cradle.
  • “Now I will destroy the whole world” – What a Bokononist says before committing suicide.
  • pool-pah – wrath of God or “shit storm”
  • saroon – to acquiesce to a vin-dit
  • sin-wat – a person who wants all of somebody’s love for him/herself
  • sinookas – the tendrils of one’s life
  • stuppa – a fogbound child (i.e. an idiot)
  • vin-dit – a sudden shove in the direction of Bokononism
  • wampeter – the central theme or purpose of a karass. Each karass has two wampeters, one waxing and one waning.
  • wrang-wrang – someone who steers a Bokononist away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang’s own life, to an absurdity.
  • Zah-mah-ki-bo – fate, inevitable destiny

Brought me to realize these cats around here are all Bokononists.  They’ve been sneaking around here converting me to their religion all these years without me knowing it, superimposing their viewpoints over my natural ones.

Forcing me to have a community with them.

But at least I don’t have to go to Quartzite, Arizona to have a community.  Bokononism is a big step up in life if I can look around inside the RV and find a community without having to go all the way to Quartzite, or Slab City, AZ.

Old Jules

Brief Out-of-Sequence Flashes of Yesterday

Scene:  Highway 479 midway back from Kerrville.

Boom!  Riiiipppp-like drumbeat roar from somewhere in the back of the truck.  I pulls over first opportunity, no sign of anything wrong.  Squat down peek under boxing the compass.  Nuthun.

I re-mount, pull back onto the pavement, nothing seems wrong for a few miles, then the unmistakeable sound of a tire flopping.  Pull over again.  Yep, inside rear dually tire’s blown.  What the hell.

Tire’s destroyed, but it’s a blessing.  I’ll just have to sort out how sometime later.

Scene in town, me and a guy I stop in to see when I’m there and have time, sitting on the porch telling one another how glad we were for the rain

“By the way, I’ve decided to swap you that trailer if you still want it.  Let me know and I’ll take the stuff off it and we’re in business.”

“Yessir.  Thankeevurymuchsir.  I wants it.”

Behind the scenes – RV air conditioner listing San Antonio Craigslist potential potentate:  

“I won’t give you more than $150.”

I ponders.  Seems to me a new tire’s likely to cost $200. 

“I ain’t taking less than $200.

The RV Air Conditioner Universe takes a powder, hopefully considering.

Scene – Elsewhere, Out-of-Nowhere Political Remark:

“We’re in deep doodoo if this guy gets re-elected!”

“We’re in deep doodoo no matter who gets elected.”

“Yeah, but more so if this one does.”

“We’ve been in deep doodoo from the time we first started letting kings make the deep doodooism decisions.  If one man’s capable of getting us up to our necks in doodoo he’s going to do it.  Ain’t nobody to stop him, so he has a moral obligation to the doodoo delivery dingus. 

“Simple as that.  If you don’t like it, don’t elect anyone.”

Old Jules

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Magnetar – The Mechanism

“This image shows a ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the corpse of a massive star. The collapsed star, called a magnetar, is located at the exact center of this image. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope imaged the mysterious ring around magnetar SGR 1900+14 in infrared light. The magnetar itself is not visible in this image, as it has not been detected at infrared wavelengths (it has been seen in X-ray light).”

Good morning readers.  I’m aware most of you won’t have any interest in this and my sense is that the folks who once did read here and did have an interest no longer visit the blog.   I’m just posting it in case someone ever happens to be chasing disbelief down the same corridors I’ve been following the past several years and type the right words into a web search. 

SGR 1900+14, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. After a long period of low emissions (significant bursts only in 1979 and 1993) it became active in May–August 1998, and a burst detected on August 27, 1998 was of sufficient power to force NEAR Shoemaker to shut down to prevent damage and to saturate instruments on BeppoSAX, WIND and RXTE. On May 29, 2008, NASA’s Spitzer telescope discovered a ring of matter around this magnetar. It is thought that this ring formed in the 1998 burst.[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

SGR 1900+14’s not the magnetar I’ve been testing against.  I just used this one on the post today to illustrate it’s actually possible for something 20,000 light years away to exert a subtle influence on affairs in this solar system.  That, and the fact the image is particularly impressive as it bounces off the human mind.

The one I’ve been testing things against is

1E 1048.1−5937, located 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The original star, from which the magnetar formed, had a mass 30 to 40 times that of the Sun.

The Spin-down Rate and X-Ray Flux of 1E 1048.1-5937 http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/475/2/L127/fulltext/5676.text.html

If I live long enough to do it, I’ll be testing the other 20 magnetars to try to discern whether they’re involved in what’s going on here in the solar system.

I’d been trying almost all this year, and on-and-off for several years to isolate a source and a mechanism inside the solar system.  About a year ago I began to suspect the magnetic fields within the solar system were behaving as something akin to lenses for whatever the mechanism was, changing focal lengths in relation to earth as they followed their orbits.  Those changing focal lengths bore a direct relationship to specific, repetitive, securely recorded events on the surface of the earth. 

The most obvious source would seem to be Old Sol, but exhaustive testing never provided any indicators that was where it was originating.  But recently someone who knew I was interested in such matters sent me an email forward concerning a particular magnetar.  Before recieving it I’d never been aware they existed.

But I’d been having a rough time making myself continue chasing the solar system down every path imaginable, coming up with intriguing, argumentative, persuasive results along with the arrogant statement, “Screw you, bud!  You still ain’t looking in the right place for the source.”

So I pulled up the coordinates for the nearest magnetar and began running through the routines, testing it against the lenses of the planetary magnetic fields.

Voila, thinks I.

The problem with a project of this sort is that a person’s constantly having to discard everything he believes he already knows in favor of possibly learning something he doesn’t know yet.  As the song says, “You push the little key in and the music goes round and round and it comes out here.”

Old Jules

Rain, Feral Swine, Leaks and Yankee Soldiers

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

We were blessed with a few days of rain here, beginning with a frog strangler during the night.  Most of the cats and I were in the RV when the tree fell on the roof of the cabin, but it made enough noise to satisfy our needs to hear something.

I made a run for the cabin to see how bad things were, but it turned out nothing came through the roof this time.  Just a wake-up call, though.  Lots more dead trees around the cabin.

After the big rain came a day of light, intermittent rainfall which allowed me to chase down and caulk various roof leaks in the RV roof I’d noted and I plugged a good many of them.  Found a few more when the rain began again, but it’s coming along.

Second night after the rain the feral hogs came in, snorting and banging around between the RV and the cabin.  I just ignored them, let them do their own thing because I wasn’t needing any altercations with that sort of individuals. 

Meanwhile, the neighbor up the hill was able to burn a lot of the piles of cedar he’d been pushing up, clearing it.  Looked like a thousand campfires across there.  Beautiful sight in the dark.  Must have been the way it would have appeared for a Civil War army looking across the landscape at the enemy camps the night before a battle.

Next morning the cats and I had our muskets loaded, bayonets fixed crouched in our hidey holes, waiting for all those Yankee soldiers to swarm across the meadow, but I reckons we scared them off.

Old Jules