So Far From Heaven

Old Jules, what’s your definition of kitsch?

Kitsch is the bumper-sticker rendition of all thought-forms, art-forms, music-forms and media.

Old Jules, what were you like at 18, how are you different now, and what have you learned?

I was a soldier in the pre-Vietnam War army. Not an enthusiastic one. I was confident, considered myself mature, and had made my own way for a considerable while. By hindsight, I was a babe in the woods.

Old Jules, how did you celebrate your Christmas day?

I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I’ll spend the day with my cats and chickens. As I spend most other days. I’m spared the need to indulge in holier-than-thou rhetorical manipulations concerning how others should spend their days by virtue of not being a Christian. For which I’m eternally grateful. Edit: I’m awfully fond of Robert Earl Keene’s Christmas humor, however. https://youtu.be/oqN483jm6JE

Old Jules, who sets the moral standards, and gauges them?

You’re the only one who can for your own life. The intruders and busybodies tend to try doing it for others while conveniently overlooking their own, but the straight fact is that every human being in the planet can attempt to establish your moral values for you and short of armed intervention can’t cause you to adopt what they among themselves believe you should agree to. Which is why there’s so much armed intervention. Treating your moral choices as your own affair and not behaving conspicuously out of step will keep you off the radar.

Old Jules, how can one maintain motivation in their accomplishments?

How does an undisciplined individual acquire the discipline to acquire discipline? It isn’t a philosophical question. It’s called bootstrapping. Pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. There are plenty of methods of acquiring discipline. Martial arts. Zen. Silva Mind Control. But they all require discipline to follow through once the new wears off. A person who has no discipline hits and bounces off them just as you’ve bounced off everything else you’ve attempted. Bootstrapping is the answer. But that has to come from within you.

Jack wrote this in June, 2006:

Morning blogsters:

It’s been a while.  I’ve done a lot of reflecting over the past month, or so, listening to the ground, the wind, the dry.

I generally thought nothing much could surprise me anymore, but I was wrong.  Even knowing we’re in what will someday be known as the Post-Constitutional Era, I’m still surprised.

If there’s any truth to the various blog-feeds, the western governments are tuning up for a war with Iran.  Evidently it’s an open secret involving firm plans to re-institute the draft in the US, round up those who protest, and creating all manner of tomfoolery a person ought to be able to confidently not expect from his government.

According to infowarnews (Yahoo) groups, the plan’s to generate a lot of phony terrorist scares this summer to get the juices flowing in the cattle before they begin drafting their sons.

Crazy times we live in, a sleeping, complacent public, a news media cheer-leading for the party in power and the flag-wavers doing their job.

But, I don’t think it will fly:

• If infowarnews knows what’s happening, so does Iran.
• The public might well sit by watching an all-volunteer military get itself shot up, but they’ll take a different view when it’s their own sons and daughters coming home in bags.
• We’ve come about as far with this Presidential War thing as we dare, it seems to me.  When we began those after WWII, they had a sort of logic, though it didn’t hold water for protracted wars… immediate response capability appeared to be needed when the Russkies and ourselves were aiming ICBMs at one another.  But that’s all over.  When the 900th son or daughter spills blood on Persian soil for reasons no one understands, someone’s probably going to remember the US Constitutional requirement that wars are supposed to be declared by the US Congress.

Jack

Hi everyone,

I head back to my job as library clerk in an elementary school this week. Kids arrive back Sept. 8th… around 500 coming to library class every week. Our district is putting lots of safeguards in place, but there is no doubt that distancing will be problematic at best, and the numbers of Covid cases in our county are not great…we’re in the “yellow zone.”

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has read Jack’s writing recently and thanks to the few new subscribers. Obviously, this is more of a memorial to Jack on my part than an effort to gain readers, but I do appreciate the hits and the comments. It’s a weird situation blogging for someone who has passed on, but the grief process takes a lot of forms and apparently this is how I go through this. We had lots of projects we worked on together over the years and I miss that.

The blog posts are pre-scheduled through December of 2022. They are random for the most part.  I have far more Q/A posts in the latter months of the time period. (There are far more of those in my files than I can use). I have just transcribed some letters he wrote to me and my family that I thought were entertaining.  Sometimes I find something really witty and want to publish it sooner but the rearranging of pre-scheduled posts is a pain, so I just add them in as a see a space even if it’s 2 years out.  I’m also trying to track down appropriate photos for some posts that would be improved with them. (If you have a lot of photos, take the time to label them… we did not… it’s now a nuisance that we did not!)

I will keep watching for comments and so forth, but this project is shifting to the back burner now as my schedule changes.

I have another blog for my own art work, if you want to take a look. There is not a lot of writing, but when I finish a painting or some other creative effort, that’s where I post it. Some of the links in the headers aren’t accurate any more, but blog maintenance issues will have to come later! Maybe if they cancel school!
https://jeannekasten.com/

Thanks again for reading,
Jeanne

Jack wrote this in March, 2006:

Morning blogsters:

This morning there was a newspaper in my yard.  I don’t subscribe to newspapers, but I figured since it was there, and since I haven’t seen or heard any news for a while, maybe it was the coincidence coordinators had something I was supposed to see, or maybe it was Dancing Lessons From God, which I try to keep alert for.

Front page was full of some cop in Tijeras got himself dead by some parolee.  Cops doing a major man-hunt, roughed up some kid who looked like the suspect and drove a similar car…. warned him he’d be well advised not to drive the car until the guy is caught, hinting dark possibilities resulting from mistaken identity.

Hokay.  Every day there’s a homicide or three in Albuquerque… several more in the rest of New Mexico.  A little over a year ago a good friend of mine was murdered, and when it wasn’t obvious who did it they said, ho-hum.  Forgot about it.

So, where’s the difference here?  People getting killed all over the place and nobody gets more than a sigh from the police.  But a man who happened to volunteer to be a soldier for the bureaucracy knowing his life might occasionally be risked and we get a Chinese Firedrill.

Every time.

Why is the life of a police officer worth more than the life of an 80 year old man they accidently shot when they were kicking down the door to the house next door and he came out with a flashlight to see what was happening?  Ho hum.  Mistaken identity.

Why is it worth more than a kid, a mother, anybody?

We all know why.

When you own the system some people are just more equal than others.  Orwell said it first.

Anyway, the big news of the day in New Mexico is some cop got killed in Tijeras.  Ho hum.

You newswatchers and readers hereabouts brace yourselves for a couple of weeks hearing about how frequently he brushed his teeth and what color the brush was.

Jack

Jack was on a Yahoo group for chicken lovers and posted these entries for that group:

Something got one of the guineas out of the treetops last night, nothing left but a pile of feathers. At twilight [dawn] I went out to the chicken house and smelled a skunk, came in and got a shotgun and the spotlight, found it out under where the guineas sleep in the trees, shot it but the guinea feathers were off west of there some distance. I don’t think it was a skunk got him. I was walking around when it got light enough to see and about 12-15 grown big hawgs crossed west to east in the clearing between here and the Honig fence line. I’d been hearing them but rejecting what my ears were telling me.

For some reason the skunk had dug a lot in the garden area but didn’t dig under the chicken house wall.

I gotta get music going. No ifs buts nor maybes.
Jack

March 15

My old amplifier went out for a couple of weeks and it was silent around here for the first time in 18 months or so, though for the first year it was only Gregorian chants and Carlos Nakai flute, which didn’t seem to have a universal repellent side for predators.

But within a few days after the amp died nature descended like locusts around here. The deer started to think the nighttime chicken pen was a good source of grain, an owl or something else picked off a guinea out of the trees and a skunk arrived to try out the surroundings for regular visits. Coyotes were all directions and close enough so’s we’d consult in pre-dawn howls and yips about whether I was going to put up with them.

Even though the neighboring ranch has hired professional animal killers to come out by helicopter a couple of times and shoot up the hogs and other predators they could see, the injured ones making their way to die in the grader-ditches, a good many of them, yesterday or day before I saw the biggest herd of wild hawgs I’ve ever seen, a dozen or 15, all full grown, crossing the clearing 100 yards to the north. I prioritized getting the music rolling again. Come dawn I’ll see if it made a difference.

Yesterday night or the night before when I killed that skunk, even though I asked myself three distinct times and looked more closely before I fired, whether that could be my old cat Hydrox and clearly saw it wasn’t, once I’d fired I immediately convinced myself it was him I’d shot and didn’t have whatever it takes to go look until I saw him sometime after daybreak.

I’ve never been weak on the insanity ration, but I think it might be getting worse.

Jack

Jack wrote this in June, 2006:

I don’t usually open spam emails, but something about that subject line’s a winner.

All over America, I imagine, men glanced at that heading, did a double take, just as I did, and clicked it open.

Reached for their cell-phones.

Squinted.

Jack

I found this poem in Jack’s papers. It was typed, so probably a final draft, but wasn’t included in Poems of the New Old West. –Jeanne

In chilling heat of steel-gray afternoons
I footprint mud beside metallic waters;
Thoughtless prayers of gratitude
For primrose blemishes
That pock the face of dying winter.

Gunmetal night explodes
In chalkboard hieroglyphs
Of ballistic trajectories.
Drowning cold kaleidoscope;
My shield…defend!  Repel
Just once again
This splinter of
Eternal chaos.

Jack wrote this in July, 2006, in New Mexico:

Whew.

There are signs, and there are signs.

Neighbor Wes tells me those rains brought us up to our yearly average (5 inches) moisture in three nights.  Looks as though more’s on the way.

I spent a lot of yesterday out digging silt out around the house, ditching, berming, putting up obstructions to help keep the water on the property and allow it to soak in.  Trying to keep it from widening and deepening the arroyos it cut in the driveway and through the carport.

Trying to slow it down, get it to drop some of that silt-loading here, instead of carrying it off onto Wes, down into the Rio Grande, over to Texas where they don’t need it.

Meanwhile, while I was working, a bald eagle landed in the tree behind Wes’s house.

Yeah, a sure enough bald eagle, right there in the treetop, me with four cats running around the yard.

I gave it a word of metaphysical advice:

“You,” says I, “There ain’t no America no more.  To me you’re no better than a buzzard.  You dip down here trying to snag one of these felines, I’m going to whack you with this shovel.”

Jack

Old Jules, what’s something unique and strange that makes you, you?

I’m a hermit getting along towards 70 years old living in the middle of nowhere in Texas. I talk to my large flock of free ranging chickens and my four cats. I don’t listen to the radio, don’t have a television, and I once almost went an entire presidential term without knowing who was prez. I became a private pilot by buying an airplane, hiring an instructor, firing him when I got sick of his antics and soloing myself. I had more than 500 hours logged before I ever applied to take an FAA test ride and get a license.

Old Jules are you a loner? If so, why did you decide to live this way? Are you ever mistreated and/or rejected by your family and neighbors who think loners are odd people?

I’m a hermit. I might be considered by others to be a loner, though I’m not. I’m a sociable person when I’m around sufficiently few people.

I’ve been out of touch with my family, some members for a decade, others for several decades. I heard recently my 90 year old mother died, but felt nothing when I heard it. I don’t know whether my dad’s alive or not. I called him up on the phone 15 years ago [first contact in 20 years] to wish him a happy Father’s Day and he hung up on me, which was okay by me.

I doubt people think I’m odd, though I do think they are. I need to go at least several days, sometimes a month, between seeing other people just to keep my head on straight.

Old Jules do you believe in animal rights?

I think I might believe in animal rights, but I’m not familiar enough with what’s going on in the world to know.

I’ve never bothered to think it through, but as a practical matter, I kill anything of any species that threatens my cats and my chickens, including the occasional feral domestic cat, and pretty much leave everything else alone. When I have to kill a coyote, coon, or something else I always chop it up and feed it to the chickens. I’ve never yet had occasion to put a human being into the mix to test my resolve.

I do occasionally eat meat when I can afford to buy it, and if I went a longish while not being able to afford it I’d probably kill one of these deer I’m forever running off with a slingshot to keep them out of my chicken feed.

Without trying to nail all this down into a philosophy it seems to me it represents a behavioral code.  I’m not sure if it’s accurate to call myself a supporter of the current animal rights philosophy.

Old Jules, has your life been what you expected? If not, in the end does it really matter?

I don’t believe I could have ever imagined much of it ahead of time, but it’s a smile and it’s been a constant adventure. When people talk about being bored I file it away as something to look into next lifetime to see if it’s as interesting as not being bored.

I don’t believe anything about this lifetime is going to end unless I manage to figure out how to do it right so’s I don’t get into the same set of challenges next time around. The prospect gives me a strong motive.

continued from yesterday’s post:

Part 2:  To Protect and Defend – “Freeze scumball!”

Okay, here’s a similar case, only backward:

A man living in the woods.  Might have poached a deer, or a bobcat. 

Two protectors and defenders with time on their hands visit him and one makes a fatal mistake.  Officer pulls a gun on a man who’s not in the mood for it:

When the dust settled the man without a badge served 22 years in the slammer.  No talk of reducing this one.

Claude Dallas

(Ian Tyson, Tom Russell, 1986.)

In a land the Spanish once had
Called the Northern Mystery,
Where rivers run and disappear
And the Mustang still lives free,
By the Devil’s wash and the coyote hole
In the wild Owyee Range,
Somewhere in the sage tonight
The wind calls out his name.
Aye, aye, aye.

Come gather round me, buckaroos,
And the story I will tell:
The fugitive Claude Dallas
Who just broke out jail.
You might think this tale is history
From before the West was won,
But the events that I’ll describe took place
In nineteen-eighty-one.

He was born out in Virginia,
Left home when school was through.
In the deserts of Nevada,
He became a buckaroo.
He learned the ways of cattle.
He learned to sit a horse.
He always packed a pistol
And he practiced deadly force.

Then Claude he became a trapper.
He dreamed of the bygone days.
He studied bobcat logic
In the wild and silent ways,
In the bloody runs near paradise,
In the monitors down south,
Trapping cats and coyotes,
Living hand and mouth.
Aye, aye, aye.

Then Claude took to living all alone
Out many miles from town.
A friend, Jim Stevens, brought supplies
And he stayed to hang around.
That day two wardens, Pogue and Elms,
Drove in to check Claude out.
They were seeking violations
And to see what Claude’s about.

Now Claude had hung some venison,
Had a bobcat pelt or two.
Pogue claimed they were out of season.
He says, “Dallas, you’re all through.”
But Dallas would not leave his camp.
He refused to go to town.
As the wind howled through the bull camp,
They stared each other down.

It’s hard to say what happened next.
Perhaps we’ll never know.
They were going to take Claude in to jail,
And he’d vowed he’d never go.
Jim Stevens heard the gunfire,
And when he turned around,
Bill Pogue was fallin’ backwards.
Conley Elms, he fell face-down.
Aye, aye, aye.

Jim Stevens walked on over.
There was a gun near Bill Pogue’s hand.
It’s hard to say who’d drawn his first,
But Claude had made his stand.
Claude said, “I’m justified, Jim.
They were going to cut me down.
A man’s got a right to hang some meat
When he’s livin’ this far from town.”

It took eighteen men and fifteen months
To finally run Claude down.
In the sage outside of paradise,
They drove him to the ground.
Convicted up in Idaho,
Manslaughter by decree,
Thirty years at maximum,
But soon Claude would break free.

There’s two sides to this story.
There may be no right or wrong.
The lawman and the renegade
Have graced a thousand songs.
So the story is an old one.
Conclusion’s hard to draw.
But Claude’s out in the sage tonight.
He may be the last outlaw.
Aye, aye, aye.

Idaho outlaw Claude Dallas freed from jail

BOISE (AP) — Idaho’s most infamous outlaw, Claude Dallas, was released from prison Sunday morning after serving 22 years for the slayings of two state officers in 1981.

Dallas, 54, gained notoriety as both a callous criminal and a modern-day mountain man at odds with the government. He was released Sunday after his 30-year term was cut by eight years for good behavior.

Dallas wore a light blue shirt, prison-issue jeans and a denim jacket as he walked out of the Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino at 4:55 a.m., said Teresa Jones, an Idaho Department of Correction spokeswoman.

“He doesn’t want to talk to the media or make a big deal out of his release,” said Kevin Kempf, the prison warden. “He just wants to go live his life.”

Dallas was picked up by a family member. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1982 for the shooting deaths of Conley Elms and Bill Pogue, officers for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game who were investigating reports of bobcat poaching by Dallas in remote southeast Idaho.

Pogue, who had drawn his own weapon, was hit first with a shot from Dallas’ handgun. Dallas then shot Elms two times in the chest before using a rifle to fire one round into each man’s head.

The case made national headlines and turned Dallas into an anti-government folk hero for some — a reputation only heightened by a 1986 jailbreak. Dallas hid for nearly a year before he was caught and sent back to prison. He was charged in the escape, but acquitted by a jury after he testified he had to break out because prison guards threatened his life.

If a police officer stops you for a minor violation and points a gun at you, do you:

Think he’s a highly trained professional and he’s only protecting you and defending you?

0

Wonder if he’s ever killed anyone else in the line of duty and liked the feeling?

1

Think he might shoot you because you sassed him? (See Woods, above)

1

Joke and clown around to lower the tension? (Not recommended)

0

Think he might shoot you because he’s having a bad day and knows he can get by with it?

2

Think he might shoot you by accident? (Happens too frequently to make the front page)

1

Wonder whether the piece is ‘on safety’? ( It ain’t.)

0

Wonder why they don’t drug-test these guys now and then? (They don’t)

1

Wonder whether he’ll plant evidence in your vehicle? (If you sassed him and he doesn’t shoot you)

0

Breathe deeply and be grateful you live in America and you’re protected from criminals?

1

Jack

Jack wrote this in March, 2006:

Two different sides of a similar story here.

Part 1 – To Protect and Defend – “Freeze scumball!”

The first is about a Park Ranger who had an argument with a 58 year old unarmed man wearing sandals, shorts and no shirt.  The crime was an unpaid  $14 park fee.  The criminal tried to run away from him, though his vehicle remained parked right where the Ranger was standing. 

No problemo?  Put a citation on the car and go on to other things?

Nope. 

The only solution’s to shoot the running man. He’d smarted off and sassed a badge.  Plugged him twice in the back.  Kilt him spang daid with the first shot.  Second one was to make sure.

Here’s how the Criminal Justice system’s dealing with this protector and defender: 

• Begins as Second Degree Homicide. 
• Reduced to Voluntary Man-Slaughter. 
• Reduced to Involuntary Man-Slaughter.

Hang on a bit and they’ll give him a pay raise and a Police Association Man of the Year Award.

Family: Ranger shot man in the back at Elephant Butte

ELEPHANT BUTTE STATE PARK, N.M. (AP) – The family of a man who was fatally shot by a State Parks officer at Elephant Butte State Park allege the shots were fired into the man’s back.

That according to a copyright story in today’s Albuquerque Journal. (March, 2006)

Fifty-eight-year-old Bruce Teschner was killed August 23^rd during a confrontation with State Parks Officer Clyde Woods.  Authorities say Woods shot Teschner after he refused to pay a 14-dollar-a-night camping fee and refused to leave the park.  Authorities say Woods apparently was unarmed.

An affidavit says Woods told the belligerent Teschner that he would be arrested and got Teschner prone on the ground.  But Teschner did not comply, got up and moved away with his  hands apparently in his pockets.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. (AP) – A State Parks officer who fatally shot a man following a dispute over a camping fee at Elephant Butte State Park is facing a second-degree murder charge.

State police say Clyde Woods turned himself in Monday after an arrest warrant was issued. He’s being held at the Sierra County jail on a $100,000 bond.

Woods shot 58-year-old Bruce Teschner on August 23rd during a confrontation in which Teschner had refused to pay a  $14-a-night camping fee and refused to leave the park.

State Parks director Dave Simon says criminal charges constitute an extremely serious situation and the division is following the matter closely.

Simon says Woods’ law enforcement powers have been suspended and he remains on paid leave until the division can review the findings of a state police investigation and conduct its own review.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. (AP) – The case of a state parks ranger who fatally shot a man in a dispute over a camping fee at Elephant Butte State Park will be heard in state district court.

A Sierra County magistrate bound the case over to district court during a preliminary hearing Wednesday.

The judge also reduced the charge against Clyde Woods to involuntary manslaughter. Woods was initially charged with second-degree murder.

Woods shot Bruce Teschner on August 23rd during a confrontation in which Teschner refused to pay a $14-a-night camping fee and refused to leave the park.

According to an affidavit, Woods told the belligerent Teschner that he would be arrested and got Teschner prone on the ground. But the man did not comply, got up and moved away with his hands apparently in his pockets.

Woods was placed on paid leave following the shooting.

Summary: 

1. If you’re going to deliberately kill someone you need to be wearing a badge. 
2. If someone with a badge points a gun at you you’d best let him shoot you or you’ll go to jail.
3. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

(Part Two in tomorrow’s post).