Category Archives: Senior Citizens

Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits

Posted on September 5, 2011 by | 99 comments

A couple of years ago I came across a profoundly orange jumpsuit in a thrift-store clearance sale, which I picked off at a righteous price.  It’s the sort worn by students of jailhouse academies in a lot of places, so the potential was great, both as work clothing and other possibilities that came to mind and brought a smile to my face as I paid for it.

Some times of the year I get considerable low-flying air traffic over the cabin, frequently helicopters.  Scares the chickens and often has me out there craning my neck wondering what they’re up to.  Sometimes they zigzag over the area, circle, generally just burn up fuel without it being obvious whether they’re taking pictures of my workings, satisfying curiosity, or something more sinister.

But that orange jump suit’s added a whole new side to things.  Nowadays when the helicopters start flying over I stay inside until they go out of sight, slipping on the jump suit.  Then, when I hear them coming back in this direction I head over to the other side of the meadow, staying just out of the trees until they’ve had a glimpse of me.

I fake panic, run into the trees and hide, peeking out at them, pretending to try to conceal myself better while they waste more fuel trying to see what I’m doing.

It’s quite a hoot, all in all, but I count myself lucky they don’t fly around doing that much mid-summer.  I appreciate the exercise it gives me, 68 year old guy running around hiding from a helicopter, but I’m not sure my ticker would stand up to the wear and tear when it’s 100 degrees F outside.

I’ve always wondered whether the local law enforcement have gotten any calls asking whether there’s an escaped convict running around loose in the area.

Anyway, I figure it gives them a thrill, puts some adventure in their otherwise uneventful lives.  Something to talk about over the radio besides all that ‘Roger that!’ stuff.

An elderly man without a lot of means has to do whatever he can to try to help other people along this lifetime, or he’s likely to be thought a waste and freeloader if he’s drawing a SS retirement pension.

Old Jules

The Kingston Trio – Everglades
http://youtu.be/w0TtIRpG-jE

——————————–

Tuesday, September 6 edit:

If you need a few more laughs I suggest the enlightened, well-thought-out viewpoint from the helicopter:

It’s All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Shot

Ah, the fun to be had with an orange jumpsuit.
 Evidently they aren’t telling pilots nowadays they’re required to maintain an altitude of 500 feet above ground level, that they’re not allowed to shoot anything on private land out of an aircraft on a whim,  suspicion, or gut feel, and that killing people because they’re wearing  a particular color jump suit is homicide even if it’s done from an aircraft.
They used to tell us that kind of stuff.  Must be the education system’s slipped another notch into the shallow end of the gene pool.  Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, Adventure, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Texas, Thrift Stores

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The Sawmill: Joys and Frustrations

Posted on September 4, 2011 by | 8 comments

One of the ways Gale makes money for himself is saw-milling mesquite.  There’s a guy with heavy equipment bulldozes cedar and mesquite off ranch land, and he pushes big mesquite off to the side instead of burning it.  We go pick it up in a trailer, haul it back here and stockpile it for cleaning up to be saw-milled.

These are mesquite boles waiting to be sold to a woodworker or for Gale to work them down into something tasteful and useful:

Here are a few larger ones stockpiled by the sawmill waiting for sawmilling.

But when Gale bought the sawmill he din’t actually have an enviable shelter to put it in.

We plotted, planned, watched and horse-traded when they were putting in new power poles to acquire enough for a new sawmill barn:

Even laid out the footprint for the new pole barn and got the holes drilled:

We’ve got the design put together by us two geniuses.  Those poles need to be measured and cut to length, then dragged over to be slid into the holes, set vertical, tamped into place, first off.  Then everything that doesn’t look like a pole barn needs to be removed from that airspace sitting there empty.

But the fact is, Gale’s an old guy.  Claims to be older than me even, by an imaginary year.  He’s got a bad hip and too many other things troubling him to have any business out there trying to do work ought to be reserved for a younger guy, namely me.  I can’t afford to be losing an old friend and the man who owns this place because of some silly notion he might have about getting out there doing any heavy lifting and sweating.

So that barn of the future’s been sitting there waiting to happen for a year now.

If I had my new truck running I’d be up there now, while they’re gone and can’t do anything about it, measuring and cutting those poles, dragging them somewhere they can become something better than what they are now.  I’d be getting those poles up pointing at the sky the way the Coincidence Coordinators intended when they delivered them.

All while they’re off in New Mexico at the Hatch Chili Festival doing what’s best they do and they do best.

It ain’t going to happen this time, because I don’t have anything to pull them with.  But that new truck’s going to be running next time they leave.

On the other hand, I think he might be edgy about me doing it.  They’ve both seen the things I’ve built, or am building down here:

White Trash Repairs: Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Thumbing Rides on Throwaways

News from the Middle of Nowhere

Disclaimer and apologies – I posted this accidentally when I went to save the draft.    But there’s been too much deleting of accidental posts here lately, so I’m leaving it up.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, Adventure, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Texas, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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Déjà Vu All Over Again – Ways to Be a Good American Without Waving a Chinese-made Flag

Posted on August 29, 2011 by | 18 comments

Lose the God-Damned Bigotry or Quit Calling Yourself an American -You’re Walkin’ on the Fightin’ Side of Me

on

Paid for by Americans to Restore Freedom, Austin, TX 1970

A word in advance:  About the time Merle Haggard was reaching the top of the charts with “The Fighting Side of Me”, and “Okie From Muskogee” a war over forced busing was being fought in cities all across the country by good Americans.  The poster you see appeared on telephone posts, taped to the outside of doors, windows of public places, scattered on the streets. 

In 1970 a friend and I came across a guy taping one of these up near the University of Texas.  He had a ream of them beside him on the concrete.  We discussed it with him and his noggin required surprisingly little thumping to persuade him to give us all the posters and swear he would not do it anymore.   He didn’t have the strength of his convictions.

I suppose I kept a few of them  boxed up with other curiosities from  over the decades.

The administrator for this blog found a few of them among some boxes of scribblings and asked what it was all about.

Merle’s had a change of heart, repudiated a lot of what he said and did during those times, says we all make mistakes and we all eventually grow from having made them.  But interestingly, instead of vanishing from arena of public bias, the past two years has seen a re-emergence of surprisingly similar material intended to assist in denouncing the US president.

Being a good American and a good human being isn’t about waving a flag, hating Democrats or Republicans, Muslims, or people who say ugly words about political leaders.  It isn’t about fear, hysterical dialect, consumerism and waste.

Being a good American and a good human being is about personal responsibility.  About having enough confidence and courage not to feel threatened by every little thing.  About assuming the responsibility of not being part of the problem any more than is absolutely necessary.  About self-reliance.

Sometimes it’s not obvious how a person might accomplish those things.

  • On a personal level your life will find itself a lot better place if you can recognize the fact you are going to die as a means of exiting it.  Maybe disease, a car wreck, any of a thousand common ways that don’t have a damned thing to do with any foreign country, foreign leader, foreign war.  You are going to die.  No point in going into frenzies of terror and hate because the death you get stands a billion-to-one shot at being the act of a terrorist.  Trust me on that.  You are going to die, and I’ll only be the tiniest, most microscopic bit of a liar when I tell you it won’t be from anything any foreigner does  to cause it.
  • On a personal level you’ll find it’s a hell of a lot better place if you can learn what is your own business, and what isn’t.  If you can change it, it’s your business.  If you can’t, it ain’t worth concerning yourself with, getting all worked up about.
  • On a personal level you’ll find your life’s a lot better place if you spend considerable energies looking at it, instead of other places, looking at what you like about it, and what you don’t like about it, and changing what you can.  Looking in a metaphorical mirror at the sort of person you are and asking yourself if that is the sort of person you want to be.  You can’t change the kind of person the prez of bongobongoland is, but you can change the kind of person you are into someone you have more respect for.  No one respects a dishonest, hysterical coward, including you, when you see it in others.

If all of us could pull that off our own lives would be a lot better, and America would be a better place for it.  But insofar as personal responsibility and being a good American, we can expand on that a bit.  Here are a few things a good American might do without having to shout from the rooftops about what an admirable person he/she is:

Dependence on hydrocarbons is the ultimate problem of this nation you say you love.

  • Be conscious of your own energy use.
  • Every plastic grocery or garbage bag, every foam-plastic hamburger box, no matter where it was produced, drives up the price of oil.
  • Every time you fire up that hair-dryer you drive up the world-wide price of hydrocarbons.
  • Every made-in-China yellow ribbon ‘SUPPORT OUR TROOPS’ you buy to stick on your car drives up the price of hydrocarbons world-wide, increases the demand.
  • Every made-in-China flag made of nylon you wave drives up the price of oil and increases worldwide demand.
  • Every new plastic radio, CD player, computer monitor.  Every plastic wrapper from that frozen pizza pie.  Every cellophane cover and foam plastic bottom covering the piece of animal you’re having for supper and sending to the landfill afterward is driving up the world-wide competition for oil.
  • Sure, there are the other obvious things.  The things Jimmy Carter used to beg you to do when he was prez, to help you quit relying on foreign petroleum products.  Turn down the heater.  Turn up the thermostat on the AC.  Don’t drive anymore than you have to.  Which, of course, you didn’t care for then and immediately forgot when he left office (which is part of the reason you’re in the fix you are in now.)

But there’s a lot more to being a good American, as opposed to a good human being.  Here are a few more ways you could try to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem:

Quit buying ANY foreign product if you can avoid it.  Even if it saves you a few cents.  Just say no.  Refuse and make it clear why you’re refusing.  If US workers didn’t manufacture it and you can live without it, don’t buy it.  If your old one’s broken buy a replacement used in a thrift store, garage sale or flea market.  If it can be repaired take it to a local appliance repair shop and let a US worker repair it.  Every dollar you spend on a new foreign-manufactured product reduces the value of the dollar you’ll get next paycheck because of the overwhelming trade deficit.

If this country is going to survive another century the population is going to have to begin manufacturing what it consumes, energy-wise and every other wise.  Building hamburgers to sell back and forth to one another isn’t enough to keep a country sound.

Americans are going to have to produce products, and the other Americans are going to have to buy them.  We can’t continue indefinitely sending our chunks of our trade deficit off to bongo-bongo land for petroleum, to China for plastic bags, television sets, seat covers and rubber monster toys.  We can’t starve out our farmers by buying agricultural products from Mexico and Argentina.

Being a good American involves a hell of a lot more than getting angry when some foreigner says something ugly about it.  Loyalty to America and Americans is about keeping America alive, productive, self-reliant, healthy economically.

If we can do those things we’ll find we’re spending a lot less time hurling empty rhetoric back and forth, hating the owners of bongo-bongo land oil, a lot less time bombing the hell out of foreign lands, a lot less angry and full of fear and hatred.

And we wouldn’t need to wave flags to prove we were good Americans.

Old Jules

http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/187535.html

MERLE HAGGARD – Fightin’ Side Of Me
http://http://youtu.be/QX9X5zJ91Ac

Afterthought:  Tffnguy’s got a rant on similar but not identical subjects you might find worth a read, along with comments by a number of oldsters on my blogroll.  http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/2011/08/divide-and-conquer.html

18 Comments

Posted in 1970's, 2011, America, Current Issues, Ethnic Supremacy, History, Human Behavior, Politics, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Survival, Thrift Stores

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Who Has Been an Inspiration in Your Life, and Why?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by | 13 comments



I’m not an admirer of human beings as being particularly inspirational, on the whole.  Yeah, a lot of human sentences find themselves trapped between quotation marks in fragments people find supportive of viewpoints that won’t stand on their own hind legs.  Pithy wisdomoids giving authority to vapid premises.  Often this does happen in a synthetically inspirational context.  But the sources of those quotes usually don’t appear so wise or unblemished under careful scrutiny.

Maybe ‘inspirational’ isn’t the appropriate word to capture the concept I’m hoping to convey.

Maybe ‘has had an influence on your life you believe helped you to be a person you came nearer admiring than the one you were previously’ would more accurately describe it while filling the need for cumbersome rhetoric.  The inspiration derived from firing wisdomoids back and forth at one another isn’t made of the strong stuff I’m trying to communicate.

For instance, I used to be acquainted with a Vietnam vet, who lived in an Econoline van in Albuquerque.  He had a route of parking spots and a time schedule he’d follow to hang around each place for a while.  The street guys who were dumpster-diving knew his schedule.  They also knew  he’d pay a fair price for  anything he could get his money back on that they’d salvaged out of the trash.  After making his rounds, the Econoline would head to the flea market and he’d sell first to the crowd, then whatever was left to the flea market merchants.

By reselling it from homeless guys dumpster-diving, he provided them a means of getting some cash for a lot of things they’d have no way to sell  for themselves, or would have had a lot of difficulty getting more than a few cents for.  His route superimposed an economic network devised to offer those submerged in hardship a trickle of income, a safety net.  He provided a valuable service.

But what I particularly admired was that, when he came across someone he believed was ready to try drug or alcohol withdrawal he’d pack them up in the van and head off somewhere to the middle of nowhere, usually a small town with a restaurant or grocery store where he could pick up food and supplies. Once out of the city environment, he’d keep the addict in the van a week, two weeks, a month, drying them out, getting them clean, being there for them.

I came across him once parked at Vietnam Memorial Wall park in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  I didn’t realize at first what I was seeing.  I just saw his van with the white Ministry sign roughly painted on the side and recognized it and him outside it.  I stopped to chew the fat with him, then heard the moaning in the Econoline.  He caught my eye and shrugged.

“Trying to kick smack.  He’s on his second week.  It ought to start getting better in a few days.”  The odor of vomit, urine and human excretions was strong near the truck, so we drifted further afield as we talked.  Probably he was used to it, but I wasn’t.

Christian guy.  One of the Christians I’ve known that kept me believing there are honest-to-goodness bona fide Christians in the world.

I surely admired his guts, his determination and compassion.  There’s a lot about him I’d admire in myself if I looked inside me and surprised myself finding it there.

Nice to come across a Christian occasionally who isn’t all hat and no cattle.

“I wonder what Jesus thought about sin.  Jesus did his talking about loving neighbors, compassion, peace-making, mercy, that sort of thing.  Hardly said anything about sin.  If he could speak his mind today I wonder if he’d forgive Saul of Tarsus the way he did Judas.”  Josephus Minimus

Here are a couple of blogs you might find of interest:

Urbandumpsterdiver’s Blog

Doing It Homeless

Old Jules

Kingston Trio-Reverend Mr. Black
http://youtu.be/sKJiDbvKbZs

John Lennon– Cold Turkey
http://youtu.be/n6wxTkkfLqM

13 Comments

Posted in America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Thrift Stores, Welfare, YouTube

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Learn a New Language with YouTube

Posted on August 22, 2011 by | 14 comments


Hi blogsters:

I rarely talk to young people, though I’ll confess to craftily observing them when I can, watching their interactions reflected in a plate-glass window, sneakily watching them at another table in a restaurant, trying to hear and understand what they’re saying.

The problem is, mostly I can’t understand what they’re saying.  As the years have progressed I’ve noticed that, even in convenience stores and fast-food joints I often can’t understand the simplest thing that’s being spoken.  I tilt my head, ask them to repeat, explain I’m a bit hard of hearing and ask them to repeat again, and finally usually give up and just smile and nod ‘yes’ if that seems it might be appropriate.

I don’t believe it’s entirely my hearing doing this.  I think there’s something new and different going on with language, but more importantly, inside the heads of people who sound as though words should be spoken through a mouth full of something, and really fast.

Mostly I don’t have a clue.  Frequently my curiosity taunts me.  I don’t know who these people are.  I don’t know what, nor how, they think.  To me it would be easy to merely mutter to myself, these kids are incredibly stupid, illiterate, and so whacked-out on television and public school brainwashing it’s a wonder they can function at all.

But I’m trying to insist to myself that the human race hasn’t truly devolved all that much in only a couple of generations.  These aren’t subhumans, though it would be easy to conclude they are, based on a lot of their mannerisms and behaviors in public.  I think these creatures probably think and feel, but that they don’t express those thoughts and feelings in ways that allow me to fathom them.

Enter, the blessing of YouTube.  When they aren’t too long, it rarely takes more than half-hour download on my dial-up.  But it’s a chance to actually decipher something one of those people thinks, feels and expresses, in a way that bypasses the mouth full of marbles and the speed with which the words come to the fore.  Once it’s downloaded it can be repeated until near-understanding arrives.

Old Jules

Steve Goodman– Talk Backwards [Edit: hope one of these links will work better]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMSMAjg2zCU

http://youtu.be/AMSMAjg2zCU

(Cee Lo Green) “Fuck You” sign language performance
http://youtu.be/sv3tadz5Q3o

Note: Thanks to Monique Maes for her photo.
http://moniquemaes.tumblr.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/teapartyseance

14 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Education, Human Behavior, Internet, Senior Citizens, Youth, YouTube

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Could you choose to live on the street?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 19 comments

That little farm you see down there is the place where I spent a good many of my formative years after my mother remarried and we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As you can see, we’d had a pretty good year for hay, which dates the picture to 1949, or 1950, before the big drought hit.

When we sat outdoors in the evening the red neon lights blinked “Schumpert Farm Supply” across the top of the long building running diagonally to the railroad tracks until I went to bed. From my limited perspective the Schumperts were ‘rich’. In that small town that railroad running through didn’t identify who was rich but it did identify who wasn’t. That little farm I lived on and no other property that side of the tracks had any rich people.

In the rigidly established social structure in Portales business men generally came down on the side of being ‘rich’, along with professors at Eastern New Mexico University, bankers, physicians, preachers, school teachers and a few elderly ladies who lived in houses big enough to be thought of as mansions. Farmers, ranchers, Mexicans and people who worked in the businesses weren’t ‘rich’.

I doubt the adults paid a lot of attention to the social strata, but school teachers did, and the kids adopted it more firmly than a religion. Rich kids were easy to recognize because they made good grades, weren’t hassled by teachers, got elected to everything, brought cookies to school Christmas, Easter and Halloween, and had the best bicycles early, cars later. For the most part they were insufferable snobs.

But not the Schumpert boys. I was in school with Stephen and Billy, and there was a precocious younger one I don’t recall the name of. Stephen was a year older than me, Billy a year younger, and there wasn’t a breath of snobbery in the entire family. Stephen, particularly, had a knack for getting in just the right amount of just the right kinds of trouble to keep from qualifying as a goody-goody. Good solid boys from a good solid family. I had a lot of respect for all of them.

I left that town early and stayed mostly away for several decades. I lost track of almost everyone I ever knew there.

But after Y2K when I moved into town to Grants, New Mexico, I came across Billy Schumpert being president of a bank there. Naturally we got together and talked about whatever we each knew that might interest the other. Billy’s the one told me what happened to Stephen.

Stephen worked as a bank examiner several years, then became president of a bank in Colorado, maybe Denver. Had a regular family, seemed to be destined to follow a career path and eventually retire. But one morning he didn’t show for work late in the 1980s. Nobody had any idea what became of him. He wasn’t a drinker, didn’t use drugs, didn’t have a ‘secret life’. He just vanished for no apparent reason.

Over time the police and other agencies gave up, assumed he was the victim of some crime, dead. But the family put up a reward for information about Stephen, sent private investigators and others searching for him. Eventually, six, seven years later they located him living under a bridge in Seattle.

Over time everyone who loved Stephen went up there trying to talk him into returning to real life, return home.

“No! I had enough!” That’s all he’d say and he never came back.

I’ve pondered Stephen a lot during the years since I learned what he’d done with his life. In some ways I think I understand, though I’m not sure. My own life has been a long series of reversals in direction. It’s meandered, cutting as wide a swath of human experience as I was able to pack into it. So, from that perspective, I can gnaw at the edges of understanding Stephen’s behavior. But I was a wild kid and I’ve always pushed the envelope, all my life.

Stephen was ‘tame’.

I’d like to see old Stephen again if he’s alive. He’d be 70, 71 years old now and maybe wiser than he was in the 1980s when something told him he’d had enough. I’d like to sit on the porch and talk with him a long time to come to know how he came to make his choice to isolate himself, to impoverish himself.

Simon & Garfunkel – Richard Cory 1966 live
http://youtu.be/euuCiSY0qYs

19 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Senior Citizens, Welfare, Youth, YouTube

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Old Man, Young Man, on a Mountain Top

Posted on August 11, 2011 by | 5 comments

I got an email from a young man who’d been reading my blog and was astute enough to notice I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and didn’t appear to have a corresponding level of grief and regret. He asked me a number of personal questions regarding all that. I answered most of his questions, but the email reminded me of the following, which I wrote a few years ago.
Old Man and Young Man
On a Mountain-top

Old man and young man
Sit, gaze at far reaches
Of valley and desert
Spanning to horizon

“How’d I get to be this old?”
Old man smiles, serene
“I wonder sometimes myself”

Young man: “I’m serious”
Old man sighs and leans
Against a rock.

“You’ve already
Heard the parts about
Cheating, lying, and
Stealing all your life.
Those can shorten things
Considerable.
Could have mine.

Those are things you need to
Keep in moderation.”

Young man frowns.
“You’re joking.”

“No. Just being
Completely honest
For once.
But those are more
Likely just to ruin
Your life than
To end it.”

Tosses a flat rock
Into the void
Eyes follow
The long descent
“I never killed myself
When I wanted to.
Never threw myself
On my sword over
Defeats I can’t recall now.
Never flang myself
Off a cliff over scores of women
I no longer remember.”

Old man digs his pocket
Pats his other pockets
Looking for his pipe.
“I never gloated sufficiently
On my amazing successes
Over the efforts of others
(Those escape my mind
These days)
To make anyone want
To kill me enough to
Actually do it.”

Tamps the pipe
Frets with a match

“I was astute enough
To recognize early
When you bed
Another man’s woman
She’ll eventually tell him.
She mightn’t say who,
But she’ll always say what
And if he’s smart
He’ll puzzle out who.
That’s a worthy thing
To keep in mind.”

Pipe bowl sparked
Glowed, smoke
Curled around him

“I’ve always lived hard
Pushed the envelope
Hung it out over the edge.
I’d rather have died early
Than not done that

“But I always kept good tires
On whatever mechanical
Critter I was depending on
To get me back
Always kept the brakes
In good shape.  And
I was damned lucky.”

They sit silent
Watch the shadows
Crawl into arroyos
Far below.

Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence 1966 live
http://youtu.be/FaSFzp6IDgw

5 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Poetry, Senior Citizens, Youth

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I Can’t Stop Illegal Aliens, But I Can Slow You Down, Old Timer

Posted on August 10, 2011 by | 14 comments

In 1961, I joined the US Army for three years with the intention of killing young Russian men to keep this from happening in the US:

On a regular basis,  I join the throngs of US senior citizens crossing the International Boundary to trek a couple of blocks into Mexico to buy prescription medications.  The reason we  all brave the hot, the skyrocketing gas prices, the long drive and the short walk?

A block south of the border prescription meds cost a tiny fraction of their cost a block north of the International Boundary. Plus, you don’t need a prescription.

But that’s another issue for another time.

Coming back waiting on the US side behind a line of oldsters in the US Border patrol station the fun begins.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “Do you have anything to declare?”

Elderly lady pushes through the turnstile to stand in front of his table.  “I have this.”  She holds up a bulging plastic bag.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “I didn’t tell you you could come through the turnstile.  Go back to the other side.”

She goes back to wherever a person is when on the other side of the turnstile.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “OK.  Now you can come through.”

She goes back through the turnstile, stands in front of him.  “Do you have anything to declare?  Medications, anything?”

She holds up the bag again, but before she can speak, elderly hubby, the other side of the turnstile, holds up a bag.  “I’ve got the medications here.”  Pushes part way through the turnstile holding up the bag.

“DO NOT COME THROUGH THAT TURNSTILE UNTIL I SAY YOU CAN!”

Old man, startled, backs into never-never-land, turnstile clicking.

Hitler mustache to woman:  “Do you have anything to declare?  Medications?  Anything?”

Hubby across the turnstile to wife:  “God damn it!  I told him I have the medications over here.”

And so, ad infinitum.

Mr. Uniformed Mustache with a gun never came out and said,

“I am one stupid son of a bitch here to give elderly US citizens a hard time after they have to walk into another country to get their medications at a reasonable price.”

He didn’t need to.

Old Jules

Tom Russell– Who’s Going to Build Your Wall?
http://youtu.be/LZkAoosVLkA

Note:  I wrote this after my last trip to Mexico.  Afterward I curtailed my trips and started buying my blood pressure and other med off the Internet from Canada and India.  But I decided to post it after reading this yesterday:

Border Patrol Antics or (I got searched), Tire
http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/2011/08/border-patrol-antics-or-i-got-searched.html

7:30 AM musings over coffee:

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s a piece of a paradigm shift [whatever the hell that is] but one of the corner-of-the-eye changes I believe has happened in my lifetime within the US is a morbid fascination and indulgence in, patience with and capitulation to fears.  Maybe it’s a replacement for anger, maybe just boredom needing to speed up the heartbeat.

Back when every day was a brink-of-war crisis with the USSR the attitude was duck and cover, build a bomb shelter and bomb the bejesus out of them.  A conspicuous absence of fear.    Contrasted half-century later with a citizenry frightened so badly by a microscopic possibility a terrorist will harm them, they hire a few new layers of police, agree to be searched, and humiliated for their own protection, and indulge in a series of self-bankrupting foreign adventures with the stated intention of finding an outlaw gang hidden in fantasyville, Asia.

Hiring thugs to protect us from other thugs has probably been around for a longish while.  But never worked all that well.


14 Comments

Posted in 2011, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Mexico, Senior Citizens

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Internet Wisdom

Posted on August 3, 2011 by | 8 comments

I spent a while this morning visiting various blogs, groups and reading blasts.  Stayed mostly away from the news feeds, however.

But I came away renewed, refreshed and relaxed from all the exercise dodging ricochets of wisdom, originality and profundity.

  • Found out Love’s a big deal however it happens to be packaged, especially if it’s universal and unconditional (not making any demands), and I was appropriately edified with the knowing of it.
  • Found out pets are cute and smart, which I hadn’t noticed before,
  • Found out wild animals wouldn’t hurt a flea, mostly, unless it’s the fault of some human,
  • Found out humans mostly wouldn’t hurt a flea if they’re properly loved,
  • Found out millions of chickens spending their lives in lines of 3′ wire cubes a mile long and three deep from egg to hatchet were capable of being subjected to some irony  called legal cruelty if they died prematurely by some other than the normal method,
  • Discovered there’s an amazing breadth of conflicting, mutually exclusive truths floating around,
  • Discovered the wisest folk on the planet and those most prone to pass one-sentence fragments of that wisdom along to others are those who wish they’d been born with a Tribal Census Number of one sort or another, but who almost certainly weren’t (though they, followed by I, would be the last to say so).  The good news is there are plenty more of the same tribe willing to shoot it back at them.

I suppose I’ve almost exhausted that source of wisdom for the moment.  Thinking next I’m going to study the labels on food cans.

Old Jules

http://www.pcworld.com/article/137100/the_10_funniest_sites_on_the_internet.html

8:00 AM afterthought

I probably should have mentioned something else I’m noticing and find a lot more humorous than any of the above:

The emergence of the “I fought in [name a war the US indulged in during the past half century] syndrome.  Most don’t come right out and say so, but the great majority attempt to convey a distinct impression they were infantry point men, or at least out where the bullets were flying.  And it was tough.   The PX, pizzas and whores were all off somewhere different than where they were.  Tough and scary with all those meanies trying to get through the wire every night and them laying ambushes on the jungle trails, crawling in tunnels full of snakes and little brown brothers with hand grenades.  Unspoken implications they weren’t among the 150/1 REMF [rear-echelon MFs] in Vietnam, not among the 500/1 in everything since.

Naturally all this gets followed by a lot of fawning modern day patriots thanking them for protecting all this freedom we now enjoy, frowning about how little thanks and respect vets get for being vets.

If you hold your mouth right you can get a smile out of this phenomenon.  Twist it around a little further and you can even squeeze out a laugh.

REMFs circa 1963

[Edit:  Sheeze.  Just got an email from someone thought I was saying I was a Vietnam Vet.  I’m not.  This pic is Korea, 1963.  Nobody ever heard of Vietnam yet.  That 1st Cav patch – in those days was “The horse we never rode, the line we never crossed and the yellow is the reason why”]

I took the picture but I’ve since then metamorphosed into a point-man with a nasty scowl figuring on getting a Veteran bumper sticker and some thanks for all I must have sacrificed so you modern patriots could stay free, etc etc etc etc etc.

Sometimes I think we old people really are as pathetic as young people believe we are.

10:00 AM afterthought

If lip-service croc-tears patriots actually wanted to say thanks to someone who made a sacrifice they’d pay a visit now and then to a long-term care VA hospital instead of displaying “Support Our Troops” stickers and sloganizing a lot of easy, empty rhetorical cliché.  The wheel chair population wasting away forgotten in those hospitals sacrificed something they wanted to keep, even though they probably never believed they did it to protect the freedom of anyone else.

Likely it gets lonesome in there being a has-been swept off into a corner so’s they don’t distract from the enthusiasm for the ones haven’t done their unintentional sacrificing yet.  Paying them an occasional visit, taking them a pecan pie, sitting around exchanging lies about wars we fought would get a lot nearer to sincerity than a thousand flags and bumper stickers.

And those guys would welcome it, though they’d have every right to be suspicious and wonder whether the world’s coming to an end.

8 Comments

Posted in 1960's, America, Human Behavior, Internet, Liars, Reading, Senior Citizens

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Civility and Civilization

Posted on August 2, 2011 by | 12 comments

Hi blogsters:

Taking a breather here and got to thinking about something that happened a few years ago that might be worth relating.

During the post-Y2K financial challenges I substitute taught in the public schools for a while.

Those situations often leave the sub in front of a bunch of kids without any obvious means of spending the time. The regular teach, say, didn’t know he was going to get into a car wreck or have a terrible hangover, so there was sometimes no agenda.

One week I found myself in front of several days of classes of high school seniors. Rather than let them use it for a study hall, I decided to get them talking about what they believe in. Try to get them into a mode of defining it and possibly thinking in ways they hadn’t done so before.

One of the days was spent talking about civilization. What it is. What are the characteristics of a civilization, as opposed to merely a complex society or culture with traditional, defined behavioral norms?

From the beginning, every classroom full of kids believed a society couldn’t call itself a civilization if it condoned slavery within it. They continued believing that (after some discussion) even after I pointed out the fact the US allowed slavery until a century and a half ago. Almost every group of humans we dub ‘civilized’ in history had slaves.

Watching those kids absorb, then adopt the realization that by their own definitions the US couldn’t possibly have been a civilization until the end of the Civil War was fascinating. But they were universally adamant about it, even after thinking about it. When I pointed out further that slavery existed almost all over the world in one form or another until fairly recently in history….REALLY recently they gradually decided most of their recent ancestors weren’t civilized..

Once they’d decided there couldn’t be civilization without civility defined as a respect for some degree of freedom of the individual, they hung tight on it. Those kids decided human beings weren’t civilized anywhere until ‘way after a lot of civilizations (by other definitions) had risen and fallen.

Those were smarter kids than I figured on them being. And perfectly willing to stick by their guns on something they believed in.

Over the course of a few days these kids decided they absolutely believed, following a lot of debate, that due process is the foundation of civilization. They believed wars without due process were criminal, that they were the antithesis of civilization because they failed to respect human life enough to follow their own prescriptions and procedures. They believed killing, mayhem are serious matters worthy of reflection, debate, and a profound respect for doing things thoughtfully and exactly according to law. They believed failure to do so is a symptom of a society withdrawing from the condition we call ‘civilization’.

Toward the end some of them must have ratted me out to their parents. I didn’t get many sub-teaching jobs after that.

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in Current Issues, Education, History, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens

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