Korean War vintage – The From Here to Eternity Version’s missing the first and last stanza, but worth the watch:
The complete version
Around 1956-’57 when Elvis was drafted
Sailor around 1957
A million men or more left their hearts in San Francisco to be reminded by this song. When we returned and the troop ships passed under the Golden Gate a million uniform hats went into the air:
The Berlin Crisis of 1961 brought this one to the top. I listened to it in basic training along with everyone else they could drag out of the sticks to wear a uniform:
The constant ‘brink of war’ cold war military also serving as armies of occupation:
Then along came Vietnam
And those who decided Canada made more sense
than the Okie from Muskogie
and politicians singing For God Country and My Baby to the tune of 1000 bottles of beer on the wall in 10 part harmony for another half-century.
One of the better songwriters of the 20th Century is turning 70 today. I’d wondered for a number of years whether I’m older than him because of the song, Texas 1947. I figured he must be slightly older, but not by much. When Jeanne sent me an email telling me it’s his birthday the question was answered. A year and a few days. He’s another young guy.
This next one appears to be one of the performances when he was on the road with Townes Van Zandt. I’m just guessing about that.
I can’t even recall how many performances by Guy Clark, and Guy touring with Townes I’ve seen in my life, but every one was worth the price of admission. Even when Townes was so far down the downhill slide watching him brought some pain. Those years they could bring in a house of 150 or so when they came to Austin. Just about enough to fill up the Cactus Cafe at UT Union building.
LA Freeway’s one of those songs I used to have as the single song on a 90 minute tape played on long road trips. I never tired of it.
Guy’s evidently a fine craftsman, makes all his own guitars. I gather he’s also built a boat, or two, but I’ve always preferred to think he was talking about more than boats in this song.
I’ve always thought if circumstances had been different and I’d managed to come across Guy Clark somewhere when we were both young we might have been friends. As it is, I suppose I think of him as a friend anyway because of all the joy his songs have given me over the decades.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that Gale recently acquired some material of a sort I’d never seen previously. One he was working on when I went up there was opalized petrified wood.
He’d never seen any before, either, so he polished up this piece just to get an idea what he was working with.
He’d just finished cutting this piece and it was a bit oily from the saw. It’s going to be a beautiful chunk of rock when it’s polished. Beneath it’s another recent acquisition, zebra agate, formed from river delta bottom mud. The paisley’s caused by the shells of marine life. He hasn’t slabbed and polished any of it yet.
This gives you an idea of the size of the chunk he got. He doesn’t expect to ever see any again, so he’s trying to plan ahead carefully insofar as what he’ll make from it.
Meanwhile he’s keeping three saws working up there slabbing the jewelry quality stone he picked up at the San Antonio Rock and Mineral Show, hmm or maybe it was Austin, a few days back.
I’ve been friends with Gale since 1970. At the time our circle of friends used to joke Gale was the busiest person any of us had ever met. Most of them are dead, or faded into history, so I’m the only one left to testify. He’s still the busiest man I’ve ever known.
Here’s one of the last several remaining of those Siberian Wolf Fang pendants he was working on a while back.
Here’s another of those recent acquisitions just off the saw.
Watching Gale work used to be a hair-raising experience back 30-35 years ago before he lost that finger. He became a legend for a while by making a fairly detailed chess set out of exotic woods using a radial arm saw, holding each piece between two fingers while he made his cuts with the saw.
I occasionally remind him of this piece of history and he always replies, “That wasn’t what I cut the finger off doing.”
Sometimes a song just happens to twang the heartstrings and worm its way into a lifetime, I suppose. Navajo Rug’s been such a song for me.
I first heard the song in Austin, Texas, performed by Bill and Bonnie Hearne in some tiny, packed appearance of theirs in the mid-1980s. I liked it so well I bought a tape. Then, later I discovered the Tom Russell version and made a 90 minute tape with just that song on it, listening to it on road trips sometimes for several hours at a time until the tape wore out.
Almost a decade later I was headed through the Four Corners area toward Hovenweep and various ancient sites in southwestern Utah, but still in Colorado when a road-sign announced I was entering Canyon, Colorado. I craned my neck watching for evidence of a burned down cafe in the weeds as I passed through.
But all the time I was in Utah over the next several days the Navajo Rug song and Canyon, Colorado were nagging at the back of my mind. I didn’t even have the tape with me, so I sang it to myself and the truck. Then, on the trip back I resolved to try to find out if the cafe ever existed, where it was, maybe even pick up some piece of broken melted glass or a spoon from the ruin.
I spent half a day in that village slowly driving back and forth along the grader ditch, getting out and trekking around possibilities, asking around among any residents I could approach without interrupting what they were doing.
I didn’t find it, didn’t find anyone in town who’d ever even heard the song.
But I did sit down in the only eating establishment open and order two eggs up on whiskey toast, home-fries on the side.
Sometimes that’s about the best a person can do.
But it wasn’t the only time I’d found myself pursuing musical/lyrical craziness when location comspired with a song I remembered to distract me from a destination. On more than one trip through Morenci and Clifton, AZ, I did a lot of asking trying to find someone who remembered who sang Open Pit Mine.
I’m not just any old dumb-ass. I’m a dumb-ass with a lot of hats, cats and a few chickens. But I’m also a dumb-ass who’s lived long enough to recognize tripwires and the sound of impending silence tromping around in the nether regions.
I’m a dumb-ass with a pair of ears I can hear with and eyes I can see with.
What I see and hear are the forces of ‘the other side’ are dragging out the heavy artillery and the Magnificent Seven. The propagandist litany of dirty sexual organs, dirty clothes, dirty underwear and dirty Communism is already coming through the loudspeakers of surround-sound.
You’re being demonized, but they’re also planting pamphlets they claim are circulating among you about what circumstances it’s okay to kill cops. Claiming your promiscuity’s worse than that of a politician or vice cop. Claiming you’re getting your funding from any organization they think anyone hates.
These tactics have always worked for them in the past. They’re not too different from those used by the USSR against Polish Solidarity to keep it down almost a decade. They’re not, for that matter, too different from those used once in Germany to acclimatize the population to some reason behind a segment of the population vanishing.
Meanwhile it’s going to get cold nights and those who have somewhere warm to go are going to find all manner of important reasons to go there.
Generally it makes better PR to go voluntarily than to be driven out by having been discredited so badly as to seem a justifiable target for physical abuse. And it’s better to go voluntarily than just to fade from something that can be labelled ‘lack of support’, or ‘lack of interest’.
I’ve never quite been dumb-ass enough to think this OWS business is likely to bring about any positive change, but I have been dumb-ass enough to hope it doesn’t get steamrollered. Enough to allow a microscopic hope that what’s being done could get the attention of some piece of the power structure enough to get them thinking.
But now the clock is running. There’s more than a hint that both political parties have realized allowing all these folks to quietly sink back into the population when a national election’s looming on the horizon might be worse then having them out where they can be discredited and infiltrated by provocateurs, inflamed and accused.
I’m a dumb-ass who thinks the smart ones are filling up the address books with email addresses and phone numbers, packing their dirty sex, dirty underwear, and dirty Communism as carry-on luggage for a trip below the horizon, off the radar.
But I’m not dumb-ass enough to think anyone’s going to do it.
I heard a helicopter out there somewhere and was slipping into my orange jump suit while I headed out the door. The helicopter faded, but I encountered a gathering of cats and chickens as I hopped off the porch.
Hydrox: “Is that how you’re going to dress for Halloween?”
Me: “I haven’t given any thought to Halloween. What are you guys going to do? Is Halloween something you’re thinking about? You used to hate it when we were in Placitas.”
Hydrox: “I don’t know. Coons driving us off the porch every night, you shooting them through the window screen. Hauling their carcasses out to the meadow on a grain-shovel. Something BIG carrying them off. Life’s sort of scary around here.”
Great Speckled Bird: “That ain’t the half of it. Coons and skunks trying to dig into the chicken-house every night gives me and the hens a case of the willies.”
Guinea #1: “You think that’s bad? What about the possums climbing around up in the trees looking for US? It’s gotten so we’re flying around blind all night long finding branches in other trees.”
Shiva: “It’s whatever it is carrying those coon carcasses off that worries me. If we run out of coons it’s liable to come up here looking for the only thing outside worth eating. Cats.”
Guinea #2: “I resent that.”
Me: “Whoooooah! What is it you guys want? I’m doing everything I can think of to keep you safe.”
Long pause.
The Great Speckled Bird: “How about we have a celebration of Life? Of surviving this long? That might be fun.”
Niaid: “Yeahhh. That sounds good. We could pretend we’re coyotes and you could open some of those special treats for us.”
Guinea #1: “No need for anything special. You could just open a can of what you give THEM,” gesturing with her beak toward the cats, “We’d love to get some of that.”
Tabby, muttering: “You guys STEAL enough of that already. Running us cats off it when he’s not looking!”
Great Speckled Bird: “Nevermind! Nevermind. No point fighting among ourselves. Let’s keep on track here. How about you give the cats the special treats, and open some canned cat food for the rest of us?”
Americauna Hen: “Yeah! Cool. And we’ll have a big celebration of LIFE before you lock us into the fortress tonight! Then if a coon or skunk gets in we’ll die happy.”
Guinea #2: “Or if a possum grabs one of us before we know it’s up there.”
Hydrox: “Or if whatever-the-hell’s carrying off those coon carcasses comes up here and catches one of us cats.”
The Great Speckled Bird: “We’ll come knocking before sunset.”
I started pulling off the orange jump suit and opened the door to go inside. Behind me I heard Niaid, “If he doesn’t do it we’ll dress up as a SWAT team and go after him.”
The human mind is a strange place to find ourselves living if we ever get enough distance from the background noise to notice. I tend to notice it a lot.
This morning seemed destined to be just another day. Gale and Kay were doing the Austin Gem and Mineral Show, so I’d figured to walk up to his house to get the truck mid-day so’s to take care of putting their chickens to bed tonight. Startled me a bit when I looked up and there he sat in Little Red a few feet away, having brought it down to me. My hearing must be further gone than I’d realized.
Seemed they’d no sooner gone than I got an email from Jeanne saying my old friend from childhood and later lost-gold-mine chasing days was in Fredericksburg trying to get hold of me hoping I could get over there for lunch. Heck, it must be 15 years or more since I’ve seen Keith, though recently he’s been reading this blog. Naturally him being 40 miles away and me with a truck sitting there available, I headed over there.
Really nice visit, but in the course of bringing one another up-to-date he asked me a number of questions about my situation here that forced me to take a hard look and organize my thoughts about it all. That kicked off a series of trails of thinking to organize clearer, more concrete priorities for myself within a realistic examination of my options.
There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re all stacked atop a single one: having the means of leaving this place in a relatively short time if the need arises. It’s time I decided on a single course of action and begin leading events in a direction that allows it to congeal in a way that accomodates the needs of the cats.
But the process of thinking about it in an organized way had a parallel thinking-path over whispering somewhere else in my brain wiggling out a sort of excitement, anticipation about it. Here’s something that will be pure trauma and agony for the cats I do everything possible to spare such things, and my ticker’s beating a little faster in a pleasurable way just considering it.
That, combined with the certainty the process of getting things together to execute the plan I come with is going to involve some unpleasantness, excruciating work and fingernail chewing as it goes along.
Seems I’ve somehow contrived to be two different places at the same time inside my mind. One being pushed by probabilities to do what makes sense rather than what I’d prefer, the cats would prefer. And one reaching somewhere into fond memories of pinon trees, high mountains and an entirely different sort of solitude than I have here.
Keith confided to me today, “Everyone thinks you’re crazy.” I can’t find any good argument that everyone’s wrong. It’s nice being crazy and still being as happy as I manage to be all the time, though.
Anyway, to satisfy that fiddle-footed nagging, here are some songs of the highway and the road.
Evidently a bat got confused and got snagged in the buglight instead of coming into the cabin to fly around as they usually do.
Every m0rning the chickens feast under that light as soon as I turn them loose. But I think I’d best unplug it before I poke around with a stick trying to get that bat out of there.
Ah well. Maybe the chickens will eat it.
This cool morning had me putting on clothing instead of running around with nothing but shoes on to turn out the chickens and feed the cats. But it reminded me I’ve been almost a year without any gas for the cookstove and no way except the woodstove to knock the morning chill out of the cabin. I’m going to have to do something about that.
Then there’s this:
It’s coming nigh onto time to haul water again. Probably also ought to try to figure out what’s wrong with that well pump. It’s been since last December it quit, but I didn’t want to rush anything. If I need to pull that pump I didn’t want to do it in cold weather when it happened, but didn’t want to do it in hot weather the rest of the time.
Saw this in the parking lot of the Humane Society Thrift Store the other dayInside the guy was easy to identify, looked about like you'd figure
He was poking around in a box of old LP records. I tried to start a conversation with him about old music but he wasn’t having any of it.
This old XP’s going kerplunk. I picked up a replacement at the Thrift Store and if I can figure out where all these wires go I’ll have it in here in a jiffy as soon as I get around to it.
North by Northwest – Climbing the American ladder of success
The Alamo – “When I was a boy any girl would turn up a bunch of trees like that, cut a bunch down and one for a ridge pole and build herself a cabin alongside the other. Seems like all anyone would ever need.”
The Outlaw Josie Wales parleys with 10 Bears – “Dying ain’t so hard for people like you and me. It’s living that’s hard. Governments don’t live here. It’s people who live here. I’m saying people can live here together without butchering one another.”
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 