Tag Archives: culture

Computer Saga Proposed Denouement

Posted on January 24, 2012 by | 14 comments

Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.

Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire.  At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.

But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver.  Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work.  Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.

But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far. 

Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.

So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo!  The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts.  I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.

She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died.  But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized.  I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.

Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.

Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole. 

So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter.  Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller.  A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration.  A man you want to be like.  Same as before all this crap happened.

That’s the proposal for the chapter.  Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.

I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am.   Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.

Old Jules

6:46 am edit:  Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver.  The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring.  It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future.  It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with.  Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.

12:23 pm edit:

Done Deal

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Posted in Adventure, Communication, Country Life, Current Issues, Education, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Thrift Stores, White Trash Repairs

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Priorities Floating in a Syrup of Reality

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming for a read.

Sometimes I surprise myself with how stupid I am.  Every time I get thinking I’ve plumbed the depths of human folly something comes along to prove there’s another layer down there for me to probe.  One of the ways it all manifests itself in my life has to do with sorting out priorities and shifting things around to accommodate critical paths.  When enough pressure builds behind a particular critical path stricture my focus is drawn there and I begin some new stupidity energy release intended to allow the dammed up whateverness to pass through.

At the moment the focus is computers.  The one I’m typing on is an old XP machine I bought at a garage sale a year-or-so ago for a strictly online machine for browsing and downloading data.  But gradually for the sake of speed and convenience I sneaked around and allowed myself to do other things with it project-wise.  Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Now this machine is trying to take a hike into oblivion.  It wants to join the other two computer carcasses stacked over on the futon that once did what it does.  I bought an old XP in a thrift store for $50 to replace this one when I knew this one was going to retire, but a lot of files and settings in the one in front of me now need to be transferred to the next one.  One of those is the modem driver that allows that machine to use the external modem this one uses to go online.  It won’t recognize the modem, absolutely refuses to acknowledge there’s a modem connected to it.

Everyone tells me there’s nothing to transferring this stuff.  I’ve got a cable especially made with a CD to allow this comp to talk to that one and transfer what’s needed.  Both machines are reluctantly willing to admit they’re capable of doing it, each proclaims it’s ready and more than willing to do it.  But then, each points the finger of blame at the other, claiming the other one has something faulty causing it to drag its heels.  Neither will acknowledge a connection is live between them, thought the light on the cable says there is.

So I have a dying machine here I can’t get any of the downloaded or installed programs off of into the other machine, which is bad enough, but worse is the fact the replacement machine doesn’t even have the brainpower to recognize the phoneline modem.  So it’s not figuring on having to go online.

Meanwhile, the offline machine I use for actual heavy-lifting is off the table and residing over with the two carcasses because the power cord, the keyboard, the mouse and screen it uses are being used by the XP intended for the next online one.

A lot of the day yesterday was spent trying to get these two XPs to shake hands and talk to one another.  But today, I think this ‘new’ XP is going into the pile of carcasses where the heavy lifter is now, and the heavy lifter’s going back to work doing what it needs to be doing.

Wasted a lot of time getting there, and more time telling about it.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Communication, Human Behavior, Internet

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Finding Non-Virtuous Pursuits: The Challenge

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | 13 comments

I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it.  But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.

For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice.  If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs.  Sounds harmless enough.  I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it.  I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water.  I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.

But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion.  Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place.  I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.

I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust.   It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.

So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels.   I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.

Lessee. 

pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride.  Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.

covetousness  Maybe that’s a possibility.  Maybe I can think of something to want really badly.  Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.

envy  … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy.  But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.

lust … Nope.  Donealready beentheredonethat with lust.  I ain’t going there again.

anger  …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was.  Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was.  Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks.  I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.

gluttony . . .   Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there.  Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions.  Curry.  But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous.  Something to think about, anyway.

sloth …  Sheeze!  Sloth is absurd.  It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way.  But hells bells!  When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day?  Sloth is BS.  Forget it.

That milo’s looking better and better.  At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2012, Human Behavior, Music, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival

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Sculpting Realistic ‘We’ From the Ideal Universe

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | 16 comments

Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.

“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”

Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions.  Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick.  I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.

“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here?  You and me?  You and all the cats?”  He glared at me.  “You, the cats and the chickens?”

I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this.  I felt a tirade in the making.  “Just you cats and me.  The chickens can’t be part of it.”

“Well, that’s a relief, anyway.  But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.”  He gestured with his nose toward the porch.  “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

I thought about it a moment.  “That makes sense.  It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”

  His frustration was obvious.  “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are.  For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me.  And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”

This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything.  “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’.  When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’.  But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving?  Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”

He waited while I considered it.   “I suppose I don’t.”

“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”

The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking.  Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life. 

When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined.  The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy. 

“Do you have proof of residence?”

“There’s my driver’s license.”

“That’s not enough.  I need a utility bill or tax return.”

“I didn’t bring that.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy.  And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.

Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure.  In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries.  When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with.  In Washington, D.C.  In Austin, Texas. 

And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.

“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.

Old Jules

“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while.  But the skunk-instincts and  chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in.  The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.”  Josephus Minimus

 

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Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Communication, Current Issues, Liars, Politics, Poultry, Relationships, Survival

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The Toothless Soothsayer

Posted on January 18, 2012 by | 17 comments

The Toothless Soothsayer

I must have been four, or maybe five
When grandfather said, with a snicker,
“Where a man wouldn’t go with a Colt .45
That boy will follow his pecker.”

Half a century now mocks:
I’d surely be elated
If Papa’s eye had turned to stocks
Or land speculated.

I’ve frequently suspected my granddad was speaking from his own experience.

One of the rewards the Universe gave me for getting to be this old was the raging hormones fading into oblivion.   There’s still plenty of passion in my life, but it’s of a different nature, and it listens to the voice of reason. 

I’d never have believed back when passion was a misery to be endured that the Universe had other passions in mind if a person could just make room for them between the preoccupations.

And yet, today I listen to any one of the songs below and it brings back vivid, pleasant memories of [usually] one woman.  The shadow of the past agonies is still there if I choose to examine it, but if I don’t the songs and the passage of time allows it all to be a bit nostalgic.  And the songs don’t last long enough to insist on thorough remembering.

Old Jules

(Arirang) Korean Folk Song [She never had an orchestra background that I recall]

;

Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes said things too well.  It was one of several I put as a single song on a 90 minute tape and wore out.  Live version, no embed: http://youtu.be/GQJAsEZ-S3I

 Hank Snow
90 Miles an Hours Down a Deadend Street  was another ‘said things too well’.

Terry Stafford – “Suspicion” (1964)

 

Leroy Van Dyke Just Walk on By

DALE & GRACE – I’M LEAVING IT UP TO YOU.wmv

 

Johnny Duncan and Janie Fricke Thinking of a Rendezvous

Eartha Kitt – C’est Si Bon (Live Kaskad 1962)

 Leonard Cohen – Take This Waltz

 

Cohen’s tribute to Lorca

Merrilee Rush & the Turnabouts – Angel of the Morning

 

 We’ll Sing In The Sunshine– Gale Garnett- 1964

 

Third Rate Romance Low Rent Renzezvous – Amazing Rhythm Aces

Leonard Cohen – Closing Time

 

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Posted in Adventure, Music, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas, YouTube

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White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2000's, 2011, Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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Shiva’s Headband – Old Sol’s Magnificent Coronal Hole

Posted on January 14, 2012 by | 14 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol.  I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.

“CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:

“Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”

Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks  as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.

I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

  

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Posted in 2000's, Astronomy, Science

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Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

When my mom left her second husband near Apache Junction, Arizona  to move near my granddad’s place at Causey, New Mexico, I was considerable upset about it all.  I’d become overfond of the Arizona guy, liked him a lot despite his human flaws that bothered my mom.

Time proved my level of upset couldn’t be handled by beating it out of me, nor by any of the other usual ways people tried back then to nudge a kid back into being seen and not heard.  The Runaways, 1947

My first step-dad [Arizona] was fond of reading the Alley Oop comic strip to me and I was a huge fan.  Alley was a cave man skipping forward and backward in time thanks to a 20th Century scientist.  Alley even had a 20th Century lady friend named Oola. 

About the only thing I’d brought with me from Arizona was my stack of Alley Oop comic strips.  We’d travelled light across the desert.  And when we arrived in Causey one of the jobs my sisters had was reading those Alley Oops to me, trying to bring up my spirits.  Which I suppose it did until they’d finished reading them to me.

Something more permanent had to be done, and my granddad decided to have a shot at it.  He promised to take me to visit Alley’s home.  Mesa Verde, Colorado.

What a trip that must have been, me pestering him whether we were there yet, how much further before we’d see Alley’s home.  I don’t know how long we stayed, but I never forgot old Alley and his home.  I still had one picture of the cave dwelling he took back then until Y2K.

And of the hundreds of ancient ruins, documented and undocumented, I’ve poked around in during my life, I’ve never visited one, found one, without thinking to myself with a smile that Alley Oop might have lived there, visited there ahead of me.

When Mel King and I were exploring the ruin on Gobbler’s Knob and were driving back to Socorro when he reached into his daypack for something, came out with a human skull it was the first thing I said to him.  “What the hell is that?  You packed off Oola’s skull.  Get it the hell out of this truck!” 

I screeched onto the shoulder and he hid it behind a cedar until  we’d be headed back to Gobber’s Knob so he could put it back where it belongs.

Nowadays I think I have more in common with Alley Oop than with any modern human being.  If there was ever a right time for me to pop out of the gene pool it would probably have been more appropriate temporally in some other Universe where Alley Oop lived and breathed.  It made more sense than this one.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 1940's, 1990's, Adventure, America, History, Human Behavior, Music, Native American, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Youth, YouTube

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Unforseen Consequences

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2000's, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Science

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Back Just Before Hippies Were Invented

Posted on January 10, 2012 by | 24 comments

1964 was a big year in my life.  I rode the USNS Breckinridge troop ship back from Korea with 2000 other GIs coming home, separated from the army late in June.  Hung around Portales, New Mexico for a while, applied to join the Peace Corps, then hitch-hiked to New York to pass the time until I heard from the Peace Corps.

Beatniks hadn’t yet been displaced by hippies and Greenwich Village was jam-packed with thousands of us implying we were beatniks but carefully not saying so.  Hanging around coffee shops writing poetry, playing chess, saying momentous deep-thinking things back and forth to one another.  Listening to folk singers. 

Being rocked back on our heels in mock, simulated shock and disgust when wheat-straw blondes from Westchester down for the weekend to be beatniks, too, refused our advances.  “WHAT?  You don’t believe in FREE LOVE?”

Which, surprisingly, almost always worked.  Provided you’d done a convincing enough job trickling out the bona fides of being a REAL beatnik.  And wouldn’t even think of hopping in the sack with someone so uncool she didn’t even believe in free love.  Even if she did iron her long hair out straight.

So after I hopped the freight to go back to New Mexico, got thrown in jail in Rochester for taking the wrong train, The Hitch-Hiking Hoodoos, got released to hitch home, things stayed eventful for a while.

A guy from Buffalo picked me up on the Interstate, older guy in his 30s.  When I got in I threw the pillow-case with my belongings into the back seat.  “I don’t know why I picked you up,” he glanced at me with disgust.  “I never pick up hitch hikers.”  

Over the next few miles he questioned me about who I was, where I was from, what I was doing hitching, what I’d do when I arrived, and I explained it all in loving detail.

“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with a hitch hiker the few times I’ve picked them up.  But if I do ever get killed by a hitcher it will probably be some half-baked kid who doesn’t know what he wants in life.”  He thought about it a minute.  “But I don’t have to worry about you.  You threw your gun into the back seat in that pillow case when you got in.”

We talked a lot over the highway between Rochester and Buffalo.  Enough so he didn’t take the Buffalo exit and carried me down to where a tollway squeezed the traffic going south to Cincinnati, Ohio.  He pulled up beside a car with a family in it, man, woman and a couple of kids.  Motioned for them to roll down the passenger-side window.

“Are you going on through Cincinnati?  I’ve carried this guy all the way from Rochester and he’s okay.  He’s going to New Mexico.  But I’d like to get him a ride past Cincinnati.  He’ll never get through that town walking.”

The couple said they were just going to Cincinnati, but we were all watching the traffic edge forward to the toll gates.  “We’d better take him anyway.  He might not get another ride.”

The Buffalo guy was right, but it began the next phase of a long story.  Guess I’d best hold it for another day.

Old Jules

 

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