I figure most of you readers really wish you could be me, and I regret you can’t. The Universe only allows one at a time. But I’m obliged to all of you for not saying so. I’d be forever having to work my mind around in ways so’s I don’t feel sorry for you because I recognize you don’t visit here looking for sympathy and pity.
Part of the reason you probably wish you were me is that the Universe is always dumping surprise blessings on me just for the hell of it. Same as It does you, the difference being I tag and number them so’s they don’t go unnoticed.
It’s a low-overcast day out there and on the cold, wet side. I just went out to make sure Tabby and Shiva the Cow Cat were staying warm and dry, took them out some old clothing and wadded it into the cat houses just to provide an edge.
But while I was folding a Mexican rug into Tabby’s hideyhole I glanced across the meadow at the garden, which fared poorly past summer because I was hauling water and it was a drought. ” Something green over there,” thinks I, and proceeded to soak my footwear mucking over for a looksee.
The moisture’s brought back the garlic I put out year-before-last! Just look at that stuff enjoying life it thought had spang passed it by.
Law law law! I don’t blame you for wishing you were me. If I weren’t so would I.
I wrote this several years ago in a previous lifetime before Social Security kicked in when I was trying to make a living playing blackjack.
Casino’s Shut Down for Christmas!
Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.
Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.
Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway. Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.
So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia. Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernalillo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.
Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road. Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road. I rolled down my window, “Accident?”
“No. Most of the roads are shut down. People in groups in the middle of the roads singing carols. You’ll have to take this road. Be careful.”
Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.
I don’t so much mind people singing carols. I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.
On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.
I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die. I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.
Anyway readers, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.
But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice. Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.
If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck. As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,
In a previous post, I described what it is like as an Alberta Métis to come to Quebec and realise that ‘Métis’ does not mean the same thing here. I’m not a shut-in…I realised that there were different definitions out there, I simply hadn’t lived where I was defined by them before.
In another post, I talked about Pan-Indianism, and also Pan-Métisism. What this post and those previous two have in common, is that they are about identity.
The topic of Status was a much easier discussion, because I avoided delving into identity issues in order to give you the bare bones legislative context. Trust me, there are much larger identity discussions yet to be had on ‘who is an Indian’. More important, I’d argue, than just knowing the state of the categories right now…but you have to start from somewhere!
During the early 1990s the Coincidence Coordinators conspired to make Zuni Pueblo and the geography surrounding it a major focus in my life. I mentioned a bit about Zuni here: This is Zuni Salt Lake, but over the next couple of whiles I’d like to tell you a bit more about them.
At the time the overwhelming part of my salary was paid by FEMA and a part of my job involved mitigation of recurring natural disaster damage behind federal disaster expenditures. In New Mexico a huge percentage of the recurring expense was located on Navajo lands, but flooding on the Zuni River reared its head as a concern during the same time period.
Meanwhile, the Coincidence Coordinators got into the act. The search for the lost gold mine was being driven by documents from the US Archives, New Mexico State Archives, fragments of mention from 19th Century newspapers, later-in-life memories of men connected to the events and documented in books, topo maps and other researched sources.
Keith and I, examining and submerging ourselves together during that phase of my search, concluded the areas to the east of Zuni, and to the south were prime candidates for the location. Candidates based on what we knew at the time. Wilderness Threats.
By my own recollection that phase of the search lasted only three, maybe four years, maybe less. But it led by numerous routes, into more than a decade of closer association with Zuni, both as a tribe, and as a geography. I’ll be posting more about that, about Keith’s and my explorations, about the Zuni pueblo and the people living there, and about some aspects of the history and culture.
But I’ll begin by posting this piece of doggerel I wrote a long time ago about my first visit to the Zuni Rez and my first encounter with the Zuni and Ramah Navajo. That meeting with the Zuni Tribal Council burned itself into my memory as few things I’ve experienced this lifetime have.
Flooding on the Zuni land
Tribal chairman calls
Upstream Ramah Din’e band
Over grazing galls.
Ancient ruins I travel past
Forgotten tribes of old
And finally arrive at last
On Zuni land as told:
Tribal council meets, he chants
A time warp history.
I Listen long the raves and rants
And river mystery:
Navajo must have his sheep
To have his wealth, it’s plain.
Too many kids, too many sheep
Too little grass and rain.
Forgotten white man wrongs and deeds
The raids of Navajo
Corn that didn’t sprout the seeds
And stumbled Shalako
More sheep grazed than in the past
Arroyos grew wide and deep
Siltation settled hard and fast
In riverbed to sleep.
Navajo siltation choked
An ancient channel bed
Water rose above the banks
200 cattle dead
Houses flooded, ruined cars
Fields of grain were lost
A playground field a channel mars
And who should bear the cost?
The tribal chairman Ramah band
Listened to my tale
Stony silence, steady hand
Informed me I would fail.
“If those Zunis don’t like floods
Tell them to reduce the chances;
We’ll hold back our streams of muds
If they’ll call off their damned rain
dances.”
Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina. We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen. The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.
The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here? How did it come to this?”
The answer always came back the same. “We followed the yellow brick road.” We did it. He did it. I did it. We all did it. We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel. We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.
We abdicated. When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were. We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it. When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs. We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level. We watched them militarize the police throughout the country. We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.
We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.
We’re there now. There’s no going back. There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it. It’s time to salute the future. Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.
Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make. You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention. You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not. But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.
So long as it’s someone else.
We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves. Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.
This video is called Shopping at the Third Hand Store, aka Dumpster Diving. I love these guys. Shopping carts, cell phones, watermelons. Too cute for words.
We have been eating out of dumpsters for a little more than a year now. We have never gone hungry and we have never been sick. In fact, we now eat way better than we ever did when we had money, and our immunity to illness seems to have been bolstered from dumpstering for food.
A while back I received the following comment from Poland on one of my YouTube dumpster videos:
That’s possible only in America!
In Polish dumpsters we have only stinky dump, and i mean it, just dump.
What you have here it’s not dumpster as i know it, just place when people leave useful stuff. I think i’ll just move to America and live from Dumpster diving, it would higher…
In case you hadn’t noticed it, WordPress has evidently installed a planetarium software over-ride here with the stars speeded up and going across the blog north-to-south instead of horizontally. I’ve no idea why.
After they filmed the scene from the movie 21 grams at the motel next door to where I lived in Grants, New Mexico, I got the job of helping to clean up the site afterward. While I watched them finish things up I saw wossname, Sean Penn smoking the cigar above and leave it in this ashtray.
Those folks left a hell of a mess.
But being the sort of guy I am, I emptied those butts into a baggie and stored them away for whatever future use I could put them to. That’s bound to be an expensive cigar and I always figured on smoking it on down, but I could never build up the certainty I’d advanced to that level of risk level yet. Whatever’s on that cigar always seemed to me potentially more lethal than whatever I’ve already got and don’t know about.
But I’ve digressed. What I wanted to say is, “DAMN those movie people are a messy bunch.”
That, and, “Why don’t WordPress stars move horizontally across the screen like normal stars?”
Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
“So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command. “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”
“Who?” Hydrox explains.
“Us. You. Me. Niaid, Shiva, Tabby. The Great Speckled Bird and the hens. It’s coming on Christmas. Why aren’t we gearing up? Going on buying sprees? Getting into the spirit of things?”
Christmas where the desert went and why
“Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear. “You’re thinking of what? Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up? Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”
I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time. “Well, yeah. Everyone else does it. Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing? Don’t you miss that?”
“I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters. “So did the other cats. Christmas. Halloween. Easter. But especially Christmas. Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over. Garbage piled up around the pickup containers. You humans are a mystery to me. Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away.
“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are. Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive. You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”
This raised my hackles a bit. “We’re smart. We’re on top of things. Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence. Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground. Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.
“You eat better than the people who did all that work. You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”
Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place. “Yeah. And who’s responsible for all that?”
“Human progress,” I replied proudly. “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”
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 