Salvaged wheelbarrow, salvaged nightstand and salvaged material stapled over door opening
Salvaged microwave stripped of components with the back cut off makes a great means of keeping the cat food dry
Heavy rain and the cool snap last got me scrambling to give the cats a way to get out of the weather and keep the food dry. Looks as though it will serve, but I’ve got to work on several more shelters. They’re there, but need upgrading a bit.
I’ll confess I’m behind the curve on a lot of things. I should have re-wrapped that electrical tape around the busted phone line before the rain hit. Internet’s back in tin-can telephone speeds this morning.
Gale and Kay were working the Mesquite Show in Fredericksburg this weekend, so I borrowed Little Red today and went into town for necessaries. But when I’m on the road I always shop the grader ditches and investigate any potentially useful items thrown or blown out of vehicles. Today was great insofar as upgrading cathouses:
The top was missing on this, but otherwise it's in good shape
The cats will be fighting over which gets to sleep inside this
I find a lot of these lids in the ditches and this one almost fits.
Also found these rubber bungie cords near another bunch of trash in the ditch
This is a confusing situation. First I consulted my feline advisers about it, which didn’t help much.
Mr. Hydrox did, however, point out that the chickens, coons, possums and deer want to be like cats, coming onto the porch eating cat food, which gave me pause. But then I discussed it with the Great Speckled Bird, who pointed his spurs of blame in the direction of the deer and the coons, mainly.
“You’re constantly having to run them out of the chicken feed you put out for us. Those deer aren’t even scared of you, but it’s fun watching you trying to chase them off throwing rocks, cussing and waving your arms around. Damned deer want to be like us chickens.”
The deer were next in line for consultation. That’s more difficult because they don’t speak proper English. But a young buck assured me it was the feral swine causing the problem. “Squeeee deer are just hungry. Squeee don’t meannnnn no harm ner try busting things up. Most of ussss. It’s them damned wild hawggggs doing that. They want to beeeeee like us deer. Copycat bastards.”
What I was trying to figure out was why ‘we’ US citizens want the rest of the world to be like us.
At least, we want them to want to be like us
Time was not so long ago when the US cared so little about whether the rest of the world wanted to be like us, or not, the thought would have never entered their heads yea or nay. Prior to WWII most US citizens wanted nothing more than to go about their own affairs and be left strictly out of the troubles spilling blood all over the planet. What the rest of the world did was the business of the rest of the world.
Earlier, during the Civil War, when the UK was trying to decide whether to join the French in the invasion of Mexico, the Prime Minister was saying a lot of things to Queen Victoria about the leadership of the country (Abraham Lincoln), the reasons for the war, the conduct of the war, that Americans would have found painful to hear if they hadn’t been too busy killing one another to pay attention.
But they’d have found those remarks between the PM and the Queen painful because they contained so much truth. Not because they cared a damn what the leaders of the UK thought about the US.
We’ve spent the last half-century trying to make the rest of the world want to emulate us, politically. Most of the world wasn’t interested. But we did succeed in a lot of ways nobody anticipated. We shipped all our industry off to the countries we’d spent a lot of lives and treasure whupping the socks off of, trying to help them be like us just a few years earlier.
By ‘we’, I’m not talking about ‘me’, nor am I talking about ‘you’ if you happen to just be a regular person who wasn’t involved in making decisions to ship all our production, manufacturing and skilled labor jobs off to third world countries because of the cheap labor and ostensibly trying to help them to be like us.
The ‘we’ I’m talking about is some nebulous consortium of folks who had enough money to own companies, factories, mines, lumber mills, steel mills and all the other components involved in a healthy economy with a population of employed citizens.
And by ‘we’ I’m also talking about several generations of bought and paid for politicians of both parties who found themselves more attracted to serving the interests of those described immediately above than protecting the interests of the citizens who elected them to public office.
When the parts of ‘we’ described above were minding ‘our’ own business the part of ‘we’ not included had thriving industry, plenty of jobs, affluence. Anyone who wanted a job could find one.
But gradually, as ‘we #1’ and ‘we #2’ succeeded in making the rest of the world in our own image in some unanticipated ways, all three of ‘our’ industry and production infrastructures became a dead shell. All ‘our #3’ jobs became government related, or pure government, or ‘service’, such as selling insurance, flipping hamburgers, running the sewer plant, advertising, cashiers, sales, lawyering, medical, and cops. The kinds of jobs producing nothing of lasting value, nothing for export.
And in the process, the world we made in our own image wanted to be like us. They wanted cars, television sets, air conditioners, microwave ovens. They became super-consumers. They began needing petroleum products for energy, for plastic rubber monster toys for the kids. Petroleum to run their power plants to refrigerate. Petroleum to run their hair dryers. Petroleum to run their industries.
They became like us.
Meanwhile, the dead hull of US industry didn’t demand so much energy, but our automobiles, air conditioners and plastics requirements continued to do so.
But the rest of the world wanted it, too. They became like us. Prices skyrocketed.
So, now we don’t have any industry, don’t produce anything, but still need the energy to run. And so, also, does the rest of the world because they’ve done as we hoped. They became like us. Now maybe we need to find some other ways to make them want to be like us, before they decide to be like us in some other unanticipated ways we’ll like a lot less.
But a couple of decades ago the entire Eastern Block of Nations, along with Iran, did something we might be well served to emulate. They kicked out all the politico factions who’d been selling out the interests of the citizenries, tried a lot of them for treason and other serious crimes, and tried to start anew.
Now that they’ve managed to become like us it’s time we tried to be like them.
Finally, Tabby pointed out what’s probably both true and obvious.
“You run those chickens off the porch when they try to steal our food. You do whatever you have to do to keep the coons and possums from killing the chickens. You drive the deer away from the chicken feed. And you kill the swine because they’re dangerous to all of us and destroy everything that stands in their way of taking everything from all of us.
I should have known this was coming yesterday when I took a nap and kept noticing a few things crawling on me occasionally. But I was preoccupied with musing about other goings on.
Then last night I went in there to rest a few minutes and conked out, only to be awakened around midnight-thirty with a lot of things crawling on me. Pretty much all at once, doing a little stinging here and there.
That half of the bed is taken up by upwards of a hundred books, some read already, some partway through the experience of being read, some waiting to be read, some held for re-reading. They’re usually not enough of a problem to outweigh the advantage of having a book near at hand when I need something to read. But when I turned the light on, here’s what I saw last night:
It’s not the first time that’s happened and I could have prevented further invasion if I’d been paying closer attention. I keep a container of boric acid powder nearby and usually try to do a pre-emptive strike on them on a fairly regular basis. But it requires taking the layers upon layers of books off and squirting the boric acid powder all over the underlying bed surface.
This, I’m reluctant to do, because everything gets disorganized and I lose track of which things have already been read, which are waiting to be read, which are occupied holding something else up, and generally where things are.
So they sneaked up on me. I had to do it in the middle of the night with no pre-planning, no organization at all.
Sheeze. Now it’s chaos in there.
————————————–
9:30 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add this since I’ve got them there together now. Here are a couple of authors I’ve come across lately I’ve enjoyed a lot.
They’re thrift store books, so I’m not certain you could find them easily, but both authors have an interesting approach, plotting is tight, characterization’s good, and they hold the attention well.
Upfield writes about an aboriginal who’s an Australian police homicide detective and his mystery solvings, along with his ethnic difficulties trying to do his job in that setting, along with his internal struggles demanding he go back to being a bushman. Good reads.
Alexander’s a completely different bag of tricks. He’s created a blind brother to Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, who’s a magistrate-cum-detective in London. His characters include Dr. Johnson, whores, a pirate, poets, actors, and all manner of peasantry. The narrator is actually a ‘Boswell’ sort relating the activities and events, a young teenager taken off the streets.
I don’t have enough distance from the Alexander books yet to decide whether it’s his unique and innovative setting, plotting and characterization intrigues me so much about him, or whether he’s also a damned good author.
Old Jules
11:20 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add these since everything’s screwed up in there anyway:
Mari Sandoz – Crazy Horse, and Old Jules. Mari’s my daughter in a previous lifetime. Her biography of Crazy Horse is better than a lot of others about him. Her biography of me during that lifetime is as good as you’d expect from a daughter.
Doug Stanton, In Harm’s Way is the hair-raising account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during the last days of WWII, and the ordeals of the survivors in shark infested waters off the coast of Japan.
Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign is nothing to write home about. Of the thousand-or-so books following the steps, events, tactics and strategies of the Pacific War this one ranks in the bottom third,in my estimation.
Lauro Martines, Fire in the City, is a narrative of the strange and
surprising emergence of Friar Girolamo Savonarola in Rennaisance Florence. So little attention has been paid this fascinating man and time it’s worth the read even if you aren’t crazy about Martines’s particular style of writing and his method of organizing his material.
If you’re in the Northern hemisphere and you look to the south to the constellation Centaurus tonight you might view Alpha Centauri. 4.5 light years away. The nearest star to this one claiming ownership of us and our planet.
That’s right. About the time the light from Alpha Centauri was leaving home on the journey to your eye, all that clothing you see in the photo was sparkling new sitting on shelves in stores, racking up cash register numbers and causing people to have to frown at the bills at the end of the month. Now every item hanging there is worth less than a US dollar. Nobody likes products produced when the light from Alpha Centauri was just cranking up the engine, gunning the motor and heading here.
Weirdly, the value of everything around you reflects what I’m describing. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a toaster, a washing machine, an automobile, frequently even a marriage.
Face it. That stuff you’re buying won’t be worth squat when the light starting from Alpha Centauri today reaches here.
Maybe you’re humanocentric and think that’s lousy behavior on the part of a star, or maybe you’re one of those apologists who blame it on humanity, or Old Sol. But either way, you’re not looking at the worst case.
Consider Vega.
Northwest sky, bright, 25 light years. “Nothing wrong with Vega,” a person might think. But you’d be wrong. Almost everything people yearned and bankrupted themselves buying in 1986, when Vega was sending out the light you’ll see tonight, is in landfills and junkyards. Owning something manufactured when that light was leaving Vega’s worse than owning something manufactured in the USSR on Monday or Friday.
But there’s a lot more. When Vega was shooting that dot of light at your rods and cones writers were pounding away on typewriters and computers months at a time cranking out manuscripts, publishers running them up to the tops of the lists, creating tomes of gigantic lasting importance. But Vega took care of that, too:
New York Times Best Seller Number Ones Listing
Not one stayed around until that light from Vega reached here.
You can buy any one of them for a quarter, sometimes a dime at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
————————————
Computers? When Vega was spitting out that dot of light you see here’s what was happening:
Microsoft releases MS-DOS3.2. It adds support for 3.5-inch 720 kB floppy disk drives. [130] (December 1995 [146]) (March [346.254])
Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh Plus. It features a 8 MHz 68000 processor, 1 MB RAM, SCSI connector for hard drive support, a new keyboard with cursor keys and numeric keypad, and an 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. Price is US$2600. It is the first personal computer to provide embedded SCSI support. [46] [75] [120] [140] [180.222] [203.68] [346.167] [346.268] [593.350] [597.94] [611.41] [750.49]
Lotus Development announces it would support Microsoft Windowswith future product releases. [1133.22]
Microsoft releases MS-DOS3.25. [346.268]
Two months after releasing Microsoft Windows, Microsoft has shipped 35,000 copies. [1133.22]
The first virus program for the IBM PC appears, called the Brain. It infects the boot sector of 360 kB floppy disks. [1230.56] [1805.23] (1987 [1260.193])
IBM announces the IBM RT Personal Computer, using RISC-based technology from IBM’s “801” project of the mid-70s. It is one of the first commercially-available 32-bit RISC-based computers. The base configuration has 1 MB RAM, a 1.2 MB floppy, and 40 MB hard drive, for US$11,700. (With performance of only 2 MIPS, it is doomed from the beginning.) [31] [116] [205.114] [329.129] [1311] [1391.D1]
Compaq Computer introduces the Compaq Portable II. [108]
Tandy debuts the Tandy Color Computer, with 64 kB RAM. It is the successor to the Color Computer 2. [1133.21]
AT&T creates the first silicon fabrication of its CRISP architecture CPU, incorporating 172,163 transistors, and operating at 16 MHz. [660.6]
Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh 512K Enhanced, for US$2000. It features an 8 MHz 68000 processor, 512 kB RAM, and 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. [46] [75] [597.94]
Seen any of that stuff lately? No. It’s all deep in attics, closets, garages, or in the city dumps.
But when you look up there at Vega, that’s what you’re seeing. All that stuff shiny and new gleaming in the eyes of you back then, packaged up for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas. Happy faces.
The erosion of human values following a straight line between Vega and your optic nerve. All that stuff listed above, the cars, the computers, the books, people worked their asses off to manufacture it and others worked their asses off to buy it all.
But that time lag between Vega and here screwed it all. Rendered it worthless.
I’m not partisan on this, not pointing fingers of blame at Vega. I don’t know whether it’s the fault of Vega, or whether it’s a conspiracy concocted by the same people who assassinated President Kennedy back when the light you see when you look at 19 Draconis or Alpha Cephei was leaving home.
I’d wondered when something of this sort would happen without actually believing it ever would.
Someone keeping better track of current events than I do will probably see this as a yawn. . old news. But when someone sent me an email after talking to me on the phone about it yesterday you could have knocked me over with a feather. After pondering it a while this entire grassroots Occupy [fill in the blank] thing strikes me as rhyming a lot with what happened during the early 1990s when the Eastern Block, the USSR, and Iran all fell to pieces in less time than it takes to tell it.
Rich, a close friend, sent me a link to a site, We Are the 99 Percent, which if there’s any substance to it, might be the beginnings of something unpredictable enough to keep it interesting for a while. I suppose I didn’t think there was enough of that left in the world to even consider. My initial reaction was a bit of a ho-hum. These seem to be peaceful folk demonstrating peacefully, which, while gratifying to see going on isn’t likely to undo anything.
But then, in walks someone, or some group called ‘Anonymous’ and joins hands with the Occupy folk.
PC Magazine Article
Here’s the transcript of the latest Occupy Wall Street video from Anonymous:
Greetings, institutions of the media.
We are Anonymous.
The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.
It seems that the government and federal agencies enjoy enforcing the law a little bit too much. They instate unjust laws as mindless automatons, blindly following orders with soulless precision.
We witness the government enforcing the laws that punish the 99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people.
We have observed this same government failing to enforce even the minimal legal restraints of Wall Street’s abuses. This government who has willingly ignored the greed at Wall Street has even bailed out the perpetrators that have caused our crisis.
We will not stand by and watch the system take over our way of life.
We the people shall stand against the government’s inaction.
We the people will not be witnesses to your corruption and ill-gotten profits.
We will not labor for your leisure.
We will not assist you in any way.
This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.
We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.
Vox Populi, Vox Anon.
The Voice of The People is The Voice of Anonymous.
That seems to shine an entirely different light on things. I don’t know whether anyone’s actually able to jiggle remote computers in a way that allows them to shut down something like Wall Street Stock Exchange, especially after giving warning ahead of time they plan to do it. But I think making the threat is bound to have every capability in the kingdom concentrated on keeping them from doing it, first, and hauling their butts off to the slammer as soon as they can slap a pair of handcuffs on them.
Gutsy stuff, or a level of confidence surprising from the perspective of a person who figures the powers-that-be can do anything they want to do with impunity. If they manage to do it the resulting power-shift leverage would inevitably seem to make a sharp turn in favor of the people calling themselves the 99 percent. But do or don’t, it pulls things out of the realm of peaceful demonstration and gives the powers the excuse they might have been wishing for to drag out the machine guns against the 99 percenters.
The people posting on the 99 percent site appear to be just regular people with a lot of justified bitterness about how things are going and a determination for legitimate change. But thinking back on the history of revolutions, the signs and banners walking out in front of the parade have always been followed back in the baggage train with enough guillotines to separate a lot of fact from fiction after the dark underbelly of human nature is exposed.
What comes out the other end tends to look a lot different than anyone thought it would going in. If this isn’t just a flash in the pan it sounds as though the people in the collateral damages zones might be in for some interesting times. But, hell. I guess we’re all in the collateral damages zones.
He thinks he’s big, but he’s got no substance. Old Sol’s nothing but a lot of helium and hydrogen. Sure, okay. A couple of percentage points of other elements thrown in to give the illusion of diversity. Big freaking deal.
Sheeze, look at him all held together by belts of interlocking magnetic fields without even suspenders to hold them up. Can’t even maintain magnetic polarity more than ten years or so. Long-term goals? Forget it.
Old Sol’s all bluster and hot air. Got everyone convinced he’s a big deal, but he ain’t, as such things go. Almost any self-respecting planet has more substance in its little finger than Old Sol has on his best day, which only happens when something big hits him.
Oh yeah. He talks the talk all right. But can he walk the walk on average, day-to-day stuff like maintaining his magnetic polarity? Sure, he’s got plenty of education but does he have any common sense?
A man I went to grammar school, junior high and some high school with, then several decades later became reacquainted and huff-puffed a lot of up and down mountain canyons recently began visiting this blog. If no other reader enjoys the tale, at least he will, because he was there:
The following is copyrighted material from a book I wrote once. I give myself permission to use it here. [ Crazy Lost Gold Mine-ism]
I’ve never concerned myself much with the dangers of wild animals during my extensive time in the woods. Mostly they’ll mind their own business if a person takes reasonable precautions and doesn’t go out of his way to provoke them. In New Mexico backlands of the late 20th century the real threats usually come in the form of humans. When those happen they usually come as suddenly and unexpectedly as finding one’s self in the middle of a herd of elk.
Grasshopper Canyon and Stinking Springs are on the northern end of the Zunis below Oso Ridge on the west face of the mesa. Two canyons run north and south, parallel to the face, half a mile apart, separated from one another by steep, narrow walls several hundred feet high. These two walls consist of coral reef from some ancient time when Oso Ridge was an island. The canyons aren’t easily accessible, so I prospected there a while.
The land below Oso Ridge around Grasshopper Canyon is checker-boarded in ownership. Grasshopper is all National Forest, but immediately south is a section of Navajo tribal land. Adjacent to the Navajo section is a section belonging to the Zuni tribe. Fences between these sections allow a person to always know whether he’s on public land or tribal land.
I was working Grasshopper Canyon with my friend Keith, a stockbroker from Santa Fe. We separated and worked the arroyos southward parallel to one another, gradually moving toward the fence delineating the Navajo section. Occasionally we’d call out through the woods to make certain we weren’t out-distancing one another. The last thing either of us expected was an encounter with another human in those woods.
I was bent over taking samples from the bed of a shallow arroyo, just deep enough so when I straightened I could view the small meadow around me. I stood getting my breath and stretching the kinks out of my back when I saw a man dressed in cammies backing out of the woods at the edge of the meadow. He was being stealthy, carrying a .22 rifle in a ready position. He had twenty to thirty colorful birds hanging on a string around his neck the way a fisherman carries a stringer of fish. As I watched, almost invisible to him with only the top of my head showing above the arroyo, his eyes searched the woods to his right where Keith was working. Keith had called out from there a few moments previously.
Still watching Keith’s direction the man backed toward me until he was only a few feet away from me. “Nice string of birds.” I scrambled up the bank while he spun and pointed the .22 in my general direction.
“My partner’s in the woods back behind you. You don’t want to be firing in that direction.” We studied one another. He eyed the shoulder rig I was wearing and the butt of the 9 mm automatic showing from the bottom. “’You out here killing songbirds?”
Mister Songbird was a young man and from appearances, a Zuni. He stared a moment longer before answering. My impression was that he was considering whether I was a game warden or other law enforcement official. “I’m getting them for Zuni New Year. They let us do that.”
We talked for a few minutes, me accepting what he said at face value, and the tension gradually dissolved. He agreed to get the hell out of the canyon because we were working there and wouldn’t want any shooting. Besides, we’d probably messed up his hunt with our yelling and bustling around the woods. I watched him back into the meadow to the south and allowed myself to sigh with relief.
Back in Santa Fe I called the US Fish and Game Department. I thought there was a remote chance the feds were really allowing Zunis to kill protected species birds on National Forest land. If so, I was prepared to be indignant.
When I told my story the fed was silent a moment. “You are a lucky man,” he observed. “You confronted an armed man committing multiple Federal felonies and he didn’t shoot you.”
* The following didn’t make it into the final draft of the manuscript: The fed also observed the Zuni lad would have spent a lot more years in prison for killing those songbirds than he would have for killing me. I drew a good bit of comfort from knowing that.
Eventually logic won out over the other appeals of the Zuni Mountains as a location for the lost gold mine I was searching for. Although the Zunis were handy for me, being only a few hours drive from Santa Fe, they were too far from Tucson.
Also, too many prominent landmarks in the area would have immediately brought the original survivors back. The route I imagined them following would have taken them within sight of Los Gigantes and enough other one-of-a-kind eccentricities to make the location unmistakable.
Even the Big Notch and Little Notch in the Continental Divide can be seen from miles to the west. There’s nothing else similar to it in North America.
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 
