This thing’s going to need some repairs before anyone can use it again. Trying to get it airtight enough to do any good in outer space ought to be a full time job for someone.
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This area abounds with covered wagons, plows, cultivators, the occasional intercontinental missiles and a few of the people who used them, coveted them, wore them down to a small frazzle, or just sneaked around admiring them when they were shiny and new. The automobiles get pretty fair physical therapy, but a lot of it just sits rusting in decorative positions in parks, front yards and displayed in unlikely places.
VA Medical Center surprised me by deciding I ought to get some physical therapy they’re too far away to provide. They’re paying for a few weeks of me going to the Olathe Medical Center for it. Had my first run at it last week on the day I wasn’t having something done to my goozle. It was a surprising display of a lot of really old bastards walking around panting and generally being a lot more friendly to one another than they’d probably spent their lives being to other people.
Most appeared to be the sort I smile and speak to when I meet their eyes in a grocery store or on the street, and they turn their heads away as an alternative to acknowledging I exist. I sometimes carry the conversation further with, “Don’t you dare say hi to me! No telling what I’d do back.”
But down there at physical therapy you’re more likely to meet again soon, him on the electric walking machine next to my stationary bicycle. Snobbing a person off who’s there for a stay in close proximity could lead to all manner of long time discomfort.
So I smiles perlightly and says hi, [first to do it mostly] and while we each try to make something inside us perform better, we discuss weighty matters involving. That’s right. Involving.
Involving things our opinions don’t have anymore influence on than they ever did on anything else. Mostly the weather.
All but two of these guys were 2 year draftees or single enlistment 3 year recruits. Those would have all come home before the end of 1964, ETS [expiration term of service]. Just in time to miss the Vietnam debacle. Those returning to the US for reassignment went to 11th Air Assault Group, Fort Gordon, GA, training to jump out of helicopters. Then the Army moved the 1st Cavalry Division to Vietnam, dissolved the 11th Air Assault Group, and sent everyone in it to Vietnam. I’m betting these guys had better sense than to reenlist.
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Camp Howze, Korea, 1963, 1964. I was standing in a chow line almost certainly with one of the guys in this picture waiting for breakfast. A twelve-year-old Korean lad came down the line selling Stars and Stripesnewspapers, yelling, “Lots of Japs killed! Hurrah! Lots of Japs killed!”
Koreans still savored a deep hatred for Japanese in those days. Having your mamas and grandmamas raped more-or-less whenever the mood hit for a few decades probably does that. At least when the rapers are of a particular nationality. [I’ve wondered whether East Germans don’t feel some of that toward the Rooskies because of their grannies during the retreat from the Eastern Front].
Anyway, it was a ferry disaster of some sort carrying Japanese passengers. The first time I recall ever paying any mind to ferries and the associated dangers.
But over the decades I’ve certainly heard about a lot of them. I suspect a risk assessment involving frequent use of ferries would reveal it to be more dangerous than airliners, trains or busses. Not to say I haven’t ridden on a lot of them.
But on a ferry going between [I think] Newport News, RI, and Long Island, a nuclear attack submarine surfaced next to our ferry almost close enough to touch. We assumed at the time the submarine commander was perfectly aware of the ferry. By hindsight, though, I’m brought to wonder whether he had to go change his shorts when our presence and proximity came to his attention.
A person used to be able to pay once to get on the Statin Island Ferry and ride it back and forth all night, which I did a good many times. Near misses with smaller craft were relatively common and a source of amusement for the ferry passengers.
I was on a ferry to one of the outer banks islands of Georgia, or North Carolina once when it hit something hard enough to jangle the eye-teeth of everyone aboard. Never heard what it was, but none of the passengers were laughing.
Which is to say, life’s full of surprises and ferries have the potential for providing new ones.
I don’t recall when I began carrying a couple of hundred feet of small diameter 200 pound test rope with me in my luggage when I travelled. But I do recall it was a decision I made watching people diving out of the windows of burning multi-story buildings on the news. A bit of rope, I observed, would have saved a lot of them by allowing them to get off the upper floors and beneath the fires.
If I had to ride a ferry every day I’d probably decide an inflatable camp pillow would provide a nice place to sit on those hard ferry benches. One person aboard protected by one inflatable pillow would remove the temptation those vessels wave around in front of the Coincidence Coordinators inviting disaster.
Hell they just want to be like us. You can’t blame them. Who in the world doesn’t want a piece of the best sociology, culture, society, music, attitude, behavior, the US has to offer. The centerpiece for the cultural best has to be exported for the advancement of humanity.
But there’s not room for two.
People in conquered lands always want to imitate the conquerers. That’s why British all try so hard to behave as though they’re Normans. And [East] Indians try so hard to be good Christians.
Same as the whatchallem, Native Americans who aren’t whites, Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, and such. Aboriginals, they’ll likely want to be called sometime. Tribal Americans, some other time.
The Rooskies have always been good at gangsta, but they always felt something was missing over there in the KGB, GRU, and up in the Gulag.
We haven’t gotten around to conquering Pakistan yet, but maybe dropping a few cruise missiles and drones down their smokestacks was enough. Bound to be an explanation and drones might be it.
Africans adapt surprisingly well to modern US culture.
New York Jewish gangsta rap would be difficult to top by Israeli gangsta rap I’m betting.
Australian aboriginals get into the swing about as well as a person can wish. Hard to find fault with that.
All in all I’d say this fits the 21st Century better than Christianity fit the earlier ones.
Jeanne’s uncle Dr. Philip Carlson patented this thing back in the 1960s. Got himself and it all written up in Popular Mechanics. So you’d figure when they put it together to serve a need of civilization, quid pro quo, wouldn’t you?
Well, there ain’t. They’re building it though, and someone’s going to get rich off it in a timely manner.
Brings to mind the story of my ex-wife, Carolyn’s uncle Arthur, who invented the forklift while serving in the Army during WWII. General Eisenhower visited his mom and dad in Comfort, Texas when he died, but they never saw a penny for the forklift.
This week, a small town near the U.S.-Mexico border gave an unusual company the right to build a 2,250-foot-tower, destined to become the tallest structure in the U.S. The company, Solar Wind Energy Tower Inc, is only three years old. But the idea it’s hocking dates all the way back to the 1960s.
It’s called an “energy tower,” or in the words of Forbes, an “energy skyscraper:” A massively tall hollow concrete structure situated in a warm, arid climate. The sun’s rays super-heat the top of the tower, and a cool mist gets sprayed across. The water evaporates and the cool, heavy air is then sucked down into the base at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. At the bottom, the whooshing gusts of air push through a circle of wind turbines—producing energy.
Solar Wind, which is based in Maryland, wants to start construction on the first major energy tower in the country, in San Luis, Arizona, by 2018. The town of 26,000 has also agreed to sell the company the water it needs to continually spray a fine mist over the 1,200-foot wide top of the tower. This mega-structure will sit on a 600-acre piece of desert near the Mexican border where the temperatures regularly reach 106 degrees—perfect for the technology, which relies on hot, dry climates.
So, where does this fairly incredible-sounding idea come from? It turns out that the energy tower dates back to the 1960s, when an engineer names Dr. Philip Carlson floated the idea. In a December 1981 issue of Popular Mechanics, Carlson, then an engineer at Lockheed, describes how the idea came to him while working on a desalinization plant in the 1960s:
We ran some calculations and found that, theoretically, we’d get out eight times the energy we put in to pump the water to the top of the chimney. But, in 1965, there didn’t seem to be any need for new energy sources.
Carlson did patent the concept in 1975, but it seems the idea was tabled. Since then, two engineers named Professor Dan Zaslavsky and Dr. Rami Guetta from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have resurrected the idea, studying it extensively and publishing a number of papers on the topic.
So, why isn’t the American Southwest dotted with 2,000-foot-high energy towers? First of all, there are considerable challenges involved in actually building them—including not only funding the construction of such a huge tower, but also the cost of pumping water up to the top at a constant rate. Building Solar Wind’s tower, in Arizona, will require $1.5 billion in capital, according to Businessweek.
It’s also easy to imagine that communities aren’t excited to welcome huge, industrial-looking towers that would loom over their homes. But as a San Luis city official told Forbes, it’s also an economic driver and an opportunity for smaller, struggling cities:
In Arizona you do get a lot of dreamers who say, ‘You could really do something with this.’ With (Solar Wind Energy), they have already gotten permission and concurrence from federal agencies in Washington. They weren’t starting with the Air Force, they weren’t starting with BLM. They were starting at the top. It isn’t a guarantee of success, but it is a lot more feasible than a lot of the other things I’ve seen.
The deal with San Luis no doubt hinges on the fact that the construction and upkeep of the tower would bring thousands of jobs to the area—not to mention producing 1,200 megawatt-hours of power in the hotted, driest months.
Still, there are plenty of questions about how their plan would work—starting with who’s going to put up the $1.5 billion to build it. But Solar Wind doesn’t seem to be letting that slow it down: Beyond putting up a tower in San Luis, the company reportedly wants to license its technology to developers all over the world. For now, winning approval from the small town is a huge step forward. [SMH; Businessweek; Forbes; Solar Wind Energy Tower]
The arrow indicates the crowd pleaser point of interest. “I can’t believe it ain’t cancer!’ Chorus of GI specialists declares. “Go back in and biopsy that SOB again!”. It ain’t all because I’m a white guy. White guys, it turns out, are one hell of a lot more prone to cancer of the goozle than non-white guys. And nobody likes to see anyone win in lotteries of this nature. It makes everyone look bad.
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I just this morning had my third endoscopy in two months. Not to mention various CAT Scans, etc, and one of those big things involving a donut and a magnet on a rolling human-scale tray. Jeanne tells me it’s the MRI, which I can’t have anymore because of my electric cow-prod defibrillator.
This week I had a manometry, gastric emptying tests, and fights with the VA hospital concerning whether I ought to be letting them do nothing instead of going to the private physicians and them doing stuff.
In fact I’m bankrupting Medicare with my heartfelt cardiac flaws and my Disneyland esophagus darling of gastroenterologists and Asian male physicians. They do the snake swallowing a camera routine, take pics and biopsy it. Look at the pics and say, “Ohshitohdear!”
“It MIGHTN’T be malignant,” they cautiously confide. “We won’t know for certain until the biopsy results come back.”
Well, the nice Asian GI specialist today came after I regained my cogitude to give me a puzzled frown and tell me it ain’t cancer again this time. But it’s inflamed as hell, got a grotesque growth about it, and has every right to rear up on its hind legs and be what it damned well wants to be. Thinks they’d better have another look at it as soon as they can forget it ain’t.
What I haven’t confided to them is the part about Caisse’s herbal tea. Black burdock, turkey rhubarb, sheep sorrel and slippery elm all boiled together half an hour in stainless steel, left 12 hours, boiled again, strained, and taken in increments of an ounce morning, another nights.
I call it making my own luck. I’m not evangelical about it, but if anyone ever tells you you’ve got terminal cancer and you might as well go home and tell the heirs who’s getting what, consider remembering it. Black burdock, turkey rhubarb, sheep sorrel and slippery elm.
My lungs and goozle think it’s death to oncologists.
As you see in the photo the nearby dumpster provides easy diving as well as convenient disposal of garbage accumulations for community volunteers policing the area. Note also the ‘donation’ bin located middle right. Nearby residents are thereby able to voluntarily dispose of items of their own choosing rather than having things stolen willy-nilly from their vehicles and homes. A pad located at the donation bin informs residents of the high-rise of who is contributing, and who is not carrying part of the load voluntarily.
Opaque windows on all four sides at all levels to allow both privacy and lights are only one of the imaginary, unique, compassionate features.
Riding by one of these the other evening with Jeanne the inside was actually lit. Couldn’t tell whether there were any homeless in there, but it was clear I’m correct about what these things are all about. Despite the skepticism communicated in secret smiles every time I tell someone what they are.
Good they’ve got those opaque windows so those hobos can have some privacy doing whatever it is they’re doing in there all lit up at night. Comforting to know. I’d love to see the inside of one, find out which floor the bathroom’s on, whether they’ve got a basement in case of tornado threats.
Nice little parking area there for shopping carts, but it’s vacant in this pic.
Okay, then there’s the other thing.
Had to take Mr. Hydrox to the vet last week. First time he’s visited a physician this century. Because of the fact he couldn’t pee. Cost ‘way up there pushing the borderline of $100, but I got him pissing again, got some green pills to give him in hopes they’ll kill whatever germs were corrupting his urinary tract making little grains of sandlike abrasive to foul his works.
For a while there I thought I was going to outlive the last damned feline I have a contract with. That would feel truly weird. Free at last, Great God Almighty Free at Last sort of thing.
It’s parents do this sort of thing. Trying to twist the minds of their offspring into something that makes them feel better about themselves. The selves of the parents, not the damned selves of the trees. Someone a couple of blocks away must have known that fact back when parents were parents and offspring were glad of it. The offspring who did the tree are mostly dead by now, but they’re twisted inside their damned coffins. Had a hell of a time getting them nailed down inside something 3 feet wide and six feet long.
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People my age have already worked most of a century trying to untwist themselves from the twisting their parents did to them. Meanwhile, they’ve occupied their own idle hours twisting a few more generations beginning with their own children and grandchildren, so’s to give them something to do with themselves.
Guy down the road a few miles in Overland Park killed some people a few days ago because he thought they were Jews. Over in Kansas City, MO, in the neighborhood around the VA Medical Center I’m assured a white person’s got a good bet for being shot for being white if he gets caught there after dark. But being black or Hispanic’s no cakewalk. It ain’t enough they’re the darlings of affirmative action. They’re odds-on favorites for going to prison or getting killed in drive-by shootings by people similarly ethnic in origin. In large part for being Hispanics and blacks.
So really, despite the fact the Overland Park guy targeted Jews because he thought that’s what they are, being a Jew is still a lot better than being a black, Mexican, or even a white under the right circumstances.
Nobody assumes Jews are trailer trash, or rednecks, or welfare cases, drug pushers, gangsters. Even though a lot of them probably are each of these stereotypes. Guy tells you he’s a Jew you’re going to assume he’s got a college degree, lives in a good neighborhood. He’s an accountant, physician, attorney, banker, politician, stock broker, CEO of something, engineer, musician, actor, photographer. Drives a BMW or Porche or Volvo. White collar criminal who’ll never spend a day in jail. Jews just don’t go to jail. Period.
Not like white people, or Mexicans or blacks. Jews don’t need shooting, nor putting into the slammer.
The good news is this tree is no worse for the wear. It wouldn’t have been a damned bit better off if it hadn’t been twisted in its formative years. All’s well that ends well. If it had been Nuns, or teachers, or science fiction test tube baby creche families twisting it the threads might have run the other direction, but twisting is twisting. Nobody gets a free ride.
Jews are as twisted as the rest of us, but saying so is a hate crime. I’m going to apply to be one next lifetime.
Tail-end Charlies. Some of these folks were costumed as tin men, lions, witches etc. These were the fun runners only in for 3 and 6 k.
Hi readers.
Hydrox bolted through the door and hid under a cabinet, should have tipped me something innocent was happening. Instead I figured the cops had me surrounded, scrambled around trying to remember where I could find a firearm, shoot it out with them. All my life I’ve wanted to yell, “Come and and get me, coppers!”and a second glance at Hydrox told me the great day had arrived.
Bastards. Turned out it was the Garmin Marathon, Half-Marathon and 6 K running events coming down Loula Street holding up traffic, upsetting dogs and terrorizing innocent cats. Garmin. The people who’ve completely screwed up the minds of 21st Century humanity by allowing the citizenry to find its way home whether they deserved to or not. Without regard for whether home wanted them back.
Young zoned-out minds trapped inside cell phones, unable to read maps and confused by the words, north, south, east and west, being led around by a sexy female voice telling them to turn right at their own driveways.
Garmin. Land of Oz Marathon. An apology to evolution.
These are the outdoor cats tended by jeanne’s family a few blocks away. Note the cat with the pliers and spray lubricant waits patiently while those lower three hang around being useless eaters. The top cat [above] knows all this but doesn’t care so long as the work gets done by the worker cat. It’s all factored in, and the lower three cats are relatives.
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Puzzling critter, the human mind. A year ago I hadn’t been examined by a physician for almost two decades and I took full responsibility for my health, was certain I would continue to do so without the involvement of physicians.
If I manage to remain alive long enough to write another long book I might begin with the premise a person just never can tell. Or something profound along the lines of ‘never say never’.
I began trylng to understand how I got from there to here last night. I’m thinking it had a lot to do with the cats. At the time I had my [what’s now by hindsight clearly a serious] heart attack November 7, 2013, I was in the middle of nowhere on Gale’s property in Texas. If I’d dived out of this lifetime and the cats were trapped inside the RV they might have joined me the hard way in a few days by dehydration.
Everything else, the week in the Kerrville Hospital, the trip to Andrews and stay with Eddie Brewer while attempting to begin VA medical care, the return to Gale’s and final dash to Kansas all followed in tiny increments of the mind. Micro-abdications made in ignorance with a growing determination to know what the hell was wrong with me.
All without ever making a clear and decisive, well-thought-out decision to abandon the conscious philosophical position I’ve held twenty years and never doubted during that time.
So here I sit with a stack of monthly co-pay payments to make out of a skinny pool of finances, taking a lot of medications, carrying a defibrillator in my shoulder, and not profoundly improved in my physical capabilities over November and December, 2013.
Please don’t willfully misunderstand me and think I’m implying my choices were ‘wrong’. I don’t know whether they were wrong, or right, or whether concepts of wrong and right even fit into the equation. What I’m saying is that my life enjoyed a major change in direction without the guy in the pilot seat ever having given the matter any thought.
If not wrong or right, probably irresponsible at the least.
A year ago the chances of my living long enough to burn through the money, minus interest, I paid into Social Security over half-century was zilch. I’ve never figured out what the interest would amount to, nor factored in the FICA paid in by employers.
But I confess in all honesty that I’m probably approaching the great divide because of Medicare paying off for my hospital bills and testing during 2014. Not to mention all the costs the VA is absorbing in other testing and examinations. This, by virtue of my being a hero and having protected the freedoms of all you vacant eyed US citizens. Back when men were men and constantly faced the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases in foreign lands.
So without ever having made a conscious choice to do so, I’ve been reduced to the status of health beggar, become the burden on society I’d have sworn I’d never be.
Precisely how such a thing could come to pass certainly ought to be the subject of a treatise.
This advertisement in the Kansas City Star isn’t sufficiently well explained to allow me to ease your thoughts by elucidating the reasons it’s included in the Johnson County Museum.
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The Kansas City area has as much history as any area of its size in the United States. Every few hundred yards there’s a sign, “California Trail crossed here“, “Santa Fe Trail crossed here“, “Oregon Trail crossed here“, and “Overland Trail crossed here“.
The Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant near De Soto was a huge operation during WWII, the Korean War and somewhat so during Vietnam. Today it’s mostly in ruins, a superfund cleanup site with no funding remaining. This sign was evidently from one of the times when they had plenty of money to throw away feeding workers.
Yet over and over again as you puruse the exhibits in the Johnson County Historical Museum you’ll find yourself muttering, “Why is this place so Goddamned lame?”
Thanks to Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant employees sweating like good Americans the Korean War didn’t last as long as it did and not as many people were killed and injured as actually were. All our boys have come home from Korea now thanks to these Americans.
Some historians possessing PHDs have believed almost all babies born to pioneers nine months after resting overnight within this geographical area were conceived here.
When you have a labor shortage you have to appeal to the baser instincts of every potential labor pool. Gypsies, tramps and thieves. Safecrackers. Negroes. Patriots. Whatever works.
There used to be cowboys and Indians, stagecoaches, battles between the north and south, raids, rapes, plunderings, blunderings, Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Jessse and Frank James, the Daltons, the Youngers.
Probably similar things are being spoken in Chinese today somewhere in Asia.
But Kansans know everyone was pretty much passing through, either time-wise, or on their way somewhere else geographically.
Harry Truman and Joe Stalin fought on the same side in WWII. But both had to readjust their thinking rapidly, think on their feet as shown here, because five years later they were on opposite sides.
Part of the problem is that even though human beings live fairly long lives, human memories are short and budgets are ‘budget-years‘. Budget decades might allow for long-term alliances and loyalty between friends measured in years or longer. But budget-years demand constant realignment to keep the funding rolling in.
To help everyone remember when there’s a war going on a lot of strategies have been tried. War Dad caps were only partially successful because older guys frequently became confused about who’s the enemy this week. Especially if they were shooting at the friends and dodging bullets they fired a short while back.
Weaponry ideology has been attempted on numerous occasions.
This was intended as a morale builder. Unfortunately it allowed friendly fire to be identified with too much certainty by those on the receiving end to become a trend.
But attempting to get Kansans out of the yellow brick road mindsets and into the Jesse James and John Dillinger approaches to history doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
If one of those guys had long hair I’d lean to believing it was Bonnie and Clyde.
Maybe there’s still something from the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant days still to be learned and useful.
The US might yet make use of an explosion proof clock. I sort of wish i had me one if I leaned to having wall clocks.
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.
![All but two of these guys were 2 year draftees or single enlistment 3 year recruits. Those would have all come home before the end of 1964, ETS [expiration term of service]. Just in time to miss the Vietnam debacle. Those returning to the US for reassignment went to 11th Air Assault Group, Fort Gordon, GA, training to jump out of helicopters. Then the Army moved the 1st Cavalry Division to Vietnam, dissolved the 11th Air Assault Group, and sent everyone in it to Vietnam. I'm betting these guys had better sense than to reinlist.](https://sofarfromheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1stcav2.jpg)
![These are the outdoor cats tended by jeanne's family a few blocks away. Note the cat with the pliers and spray lubricant waits patiently while those lower three hang around being useless eaters. The top cat [above] knows all this but doesn't care so long as the work gets done by the worker cat. It's all factored in, and the lower three cats are relatives.](https://sofarfromheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/lineup3.jpg)
So Far From Heaven 