Tag Archives: economy

The Undone, the Undead and the Unexpected

Posted on June 3, 2012 by | 2 comments

I should have named those claims the Onyx.  Everything about them, start-to-finish was Onyxpected.

Keep in mind, I was looking for evidence of a fairly specific group of legendary dead men who met their demise in the early 1860s.  Not just any old group of dead guys.  Special dead guys, though mostly nameless.

I’d been compiling, studying the versions of the legend, of accounts handed down by searchers, survivors and a lot of lies I couldn’t afford to judge without checking them out.  The evidence I was looking for was a burned out cabin ruin, maybe a sluicebox, something akin to a waterfall.  A pair of bare peaks roughly 20 miles to the north the legend called, ‘Piloncillos’.  Baldies.  Possibly a formation resembling the head of a bear.

Keith and I had been bouncing around that country for a couple of years, chasing dead men.  The Zuni Mountains, Santa Rita Mesa, Largo Canyon, Red Hill caldera, Pelona Mesa, the Sawtooths.  We saw a lot of fine real estate,  had plenty of adventure, but we hadn’t found anything to nail theory to anything on the ground.

Eventually I began assembling fragments of various versions of the legend, each at least mildly supported by some other version.  Began drawing circles at ten mile intervals outward from somewhat verifiable points, overlapping circles.  I ended up with a slice of orange peel on a map where the circles converged.   On a 7.5 minute USGS topo I counted 32 canyons within the orange peel that seemed to have possibilities.  Numbered them 1-32 with little stickers on the face of the map.

Keith was tied up in Santa Fe a day-or-so longer than I was, so I headed out, intending to cross some canyons off the map before he arrived, meet him at a camp on Elk Plateau when he got there. 

But canyon #3, I learned from a Hispanic rancher I met when I went to cross off Cabin Springs [canyon #2], had a burned out cabin ruin and something he described as a water-trough cut with an axe out of a 3′ diameter tree.  Late evening I arrived and set up camp on Elk Plateau to wait for Keith, me in a state of high anxiety.

But I’ve digressed. 

I was going to tell this story in full, but leading into the subject of platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and osmium.  How, in those days a person would have a hell of a time even assaying for them, how if located, they had to be sold through the Platinum Consortium, which wasn’t interested in buying.  How the melting temperature of the stuff makes a serious challenge of smelting it, in any case.  How it takes a special kiln, a special crucible to do anything at all with platinum.

How the New Mexico Bureau of Mines assured me our expensive spectroscopic assay was meaningless, a scam.  “There’s no platinum in New Mexico,” they assured me.  How at the precise time they told me that piece of fiction, the Platinum Consortium was mining the tailings of 19th Century gold mines near White City, New Mexico, for platinum they didn’t want when those mines were active, maybe didn’t even recognize.

How Sunburst Mining Company opened an operation mining platinum, gold and silver in microscopic quantities on the edge of a caldera within view of the peak above my claims a couple of years later.

I’d figured on telling you how they employed over a hundred people over there for a few years, got crosswise with New Mexico Department of Environment, ran into financial problems in other mining locations, went kaput.

And I was going to tell you how Keith and I found a canyon of maybe the weirdest geology I’ve ever come across.  Named it No Name Canyon.

But hells bells, I reckons I’m going to have to save that for another day.

Meanwhile, if you’ve missed the other background on all this you can find it by exploring the tags and whatnot or searching the site for ‘lost gold mine’.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Outdoors, Prospecting, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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1977 C60 School Bus – Idle Musings

Posted on June 3, 2012 by | 3 comments

Morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Some of you made some good, helpful comments about the last post, and although that bus might never come into my life, my mind’s insisting on playing with the associated problems.

Insofar as the matter of cooling for summer driving, I’m thinking ram-air venturi.  A hole cut at the question-mark, flange installed with a megaphone-like air-catcher-compressor expanding inside the bus.  Water misted from a pressurized pump-up insecticide sprayer as the air expands as it’s released inside the bus.  Rear windows open to pull the cooler air backward through the length of the bus.

I’m thinking for cooling the bus as a dwelling, a thermal syphon arrangement pulling air from the shaded area under the bus, releasing it along the floor, the hole for the venturi open and the windows cracked at the top to pull the cooler air upward from the floor. 

Maybe some sort of misting device inside the bus, also.

I use those pump-up insecticide sprayers anyway for showering now, today, and that one would serve that use when the bus is parked as living quarters.  I’d cap the hole with a PVC cap when the venturi wasn’t in use, weather was cold, or it was raining.

As for heating it winters, I’ve got a number of ideas, some as strange and unlikely as these.  But the cats and I are used to living cold and hard.  What’s bare minimum for us isn’t likely to be much warmer than our ancestors spent their lives living with, uncomplaining.

For cooking meals while driving down the highway I’ll install one of those enclosed propane grilles to sit atop the engine, use waste-heat from the engine to do the cooking, pull it out when I’m ready, slow-cooker-like.  There’s plenty of room under the hood for a cooker capable of handling a banquet.

There’s an old propane refrigerator from a camper I gave Gale 30-40 years ago stored up there I posted a picture of here on an earlier entry, which I’d install.  Those AC shelves will work well, I thinks, as a means of running water lines, gas lines, and electrical wiring.  Out of sight, out of the way, but accessible.

A couple of propane burners on a platform and a Coleman stove oven might be the solution for somewhere to prepare food while camped if I don’t cook outdoors.

I’m thinking LED lighting, assuming I can find it at the right price.

Those pump-up insecticide sprayers are surprisingly useful for all manner of unlikely purposes.  Good for washing dishes, rinsing dishes, showering, all in a severely water-saving mode.  Heat the water, fill one with soapy water, another with clear water, you’re in business.

Thanks for your interest and comments.

Gracias, Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Homesteading, Survival, Transportation

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Jeanne’s Bumper-Sticker Dearth/Plethora After-Action Report

Posted on June 2, 2012 by | 4 comments

This email was waiting for me when I logged on this morning, in part:

“The total bumper stickers on a 2000 mile trip was one Semper Fi, two Obama/Biden, one home made one that said Troginator or something, and one that said “ If religious groups want to get into politics they should pay taxes” which I’ll send to you re-sized sooner than the others if you want to use it. If there are certain subjects I might have taken that you’d like me to email the pic of, let me know and I’ll resize those first just to send along quickly.
 “Saw something in a comment that the new bumpers don’t do well with bumper stickers, and since almost all the cars I saw were new, I suspect people don’t want to mess their bumpers up with something that won’t come off. Just guessing.”

Jeanne might be right, of course, same as any of us might as easily be as being wrong at any given time, on any given issue we enjoy strong opinions about. 

I hate to think US drivers have become so sissy they’d quit spewing their certainties, hatreds, biases and half-baked simple solutions to complex phenomena just because of their paint-jobs.  I’d prefer to think they’ve become uneasy about what’s going on around them, sensed it enough to cause the hair on their necks bristle a bit.

The deliberate polarization of strong feelings in this country regarding politics, religion, environmentalism, ethnics, abortion, sexual preference and patriotism seem to me to have introduced the potential for having tires slit in the parking lot as a means of counter-expression.

The guy in the picture at the top today is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona.  His hat was his bumper-sticker.  Someone shot a hole in it, ripped it in half so’s he had to sew it back together.

But in another sense, a person might figure, “Hell, if I’m going to be in Swilling’s neighborhood, I ain’t putting no bumper-sticker on my horse.”

The country’s jam-packed with people today who might be sneakier and more cunning than Jack Swilling, but have the same eyes developed listening to talk radio too much.  Or spending too much time in the slammer to love their fellow Americans.  Or snorting too much of this or that recreational drug. 

Jack Swilling’s still out there, but he’s wearing his hat backward most likely.  Instead of saying, “What the hell are YOU looking at?” most likely he’ll just drag his keys the length of your paintjob or slit your tires.  Unless he can catch you alone broken down on the highway.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Communication, Education, New Mexico, Politics, Survival, Texas

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Escape Routes and Hideyholes

Posted on May 31, 2012 by | 10 comments

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

Gale had himself an appointment with the kidney-marble specialist yesterday to find out what they might do about getting it out of there.  Haven’t heard the outcome yet.  But what I’ve seen of him from the time they turned him out of the hospital until now leads me to think he’s going to be slow getting back into peak performance any way a person might view it.

This entire health event episode has hardened the realization for me that if things had played out differently I might have had to jump ship from this place with whatever cats I could take along, almost no lag-time.  Got to devote some attention to pounding a hole in the wall of the Universe that includes something besides hitching out and finding a bridge to live under, minus felines.

If the Coincidence Coordinators allow it, that 1977 Bluebird school bus might provide the answer.  I figure it’s going to take a month of stopping by there when I’m in town and nobody else buying it during the interim, but I might be able to beat him down enough eventually to be able to swing it.  But if it works the price will have allow me to fit in buying tags and liability insurance coverage.  Plus a tank of gas, cat food and a little for me to last the rest of the month from when it happens.

Once it’s out here I can work on it to make it capable of the cats and me living in it, while still working on the various things need doing on Gale’s place that he’s not going to be able to do for a while.  The wildlife management plan he promised the county he’d do includes thinning the cedar, erosion control mitigation, etc., and there’s heavy lifting with me being the only one here able to do it.

I’m fairly determined to get his first year promises done before I leave here, provided he’s alive to need them done.  If the bus works out, once I sense something complete in it, I’ll feel free to box up me and the cats and head for the sunset.

I’ve got a lot of stirrings in me churning around, telling me I need to be somewhere with more interesting rocks than a person can dig up here, the trees aren’t dying like flies, and the rivers empty into the Pacific Ocean..

The guy from up the hill told me when he was here that they’re crying for backhoe operators in the country between Uvalde and the Mexico border.  Oil field work.  So a stop out there a while to garner my resources on the way west might fit into the plan if the Coincidence Coordinators think it’s a good idea and the cats will agree to it.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Current Issues, New Mexico, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas

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The Legal Money Raffle Consortia

Posted on May 24, 2012 by | 4 comments

Previously posted in 2005:

I used to know a guy named Mike, down in Socorro.  A man with a lot of ideas.

During the mid-‘90s, about the time the Internet was cranking up big-time, Mike had the idea it would be cool to start an online raffle.

Mike had some money lying around.  Just about enough to buy a full-sized Harley, and a large RV.  But he thought he could increase the amount of money he had by taking a risk.  He’d sell raffle tickets online for a Harley and a large RV without buying them until someone won the raffle.  If he didn’t sell enough tickets, he’d make up the difference with his savings.  But if he did sell enough tickets, he’d give away the Harley and RV, and pocket whatever extra came in.

It turns out raffles are illegal at almost any level, though the cops and prosecutors look the other way if they feel the cause is a good one, or if it’s just small potatoes.  But item one for Mike turned out to be that if he went online he’d be almost certain to be prosecuted.

Item 2, was the fact he was, in effect, proposing to raffle a motorcycle and an RV that didn’t exist.  The fact he didn’t own them yet compounded the felony he would be committing.

Now what Mike was proposing to do was precisely what lotteries do.  Raffling off something that doesn’t exist…. Money that they plan on earning as interest.

But, of course, when a government-sanctioned, or government-owned administrative entity commits an act that rhymes with something that would be a felony if an individual behaved identically, all’s well with the world.

Unless they happen to have a lot of attention focused on their behavior, which sometimes happens.

Similarly, I used to know a guy named Dan, who had a lot of cash lying around doing nothing.  He dreamed up an online something he called a ‘money club’, or ‘money pool’.  Members, Dan dreamed, would pay $5 per month into the pool.  Every month the total proceeds, minus 10 percent (to Dan as operational and administrative fees) would be handed out to some lucky member by a process known as Random Number Generator…. Something nearly identical to what’s being done by lotteries.  Except it would be private enterprise….. private sector.

Dan figured the payout percentages would be so much better, the odds so much better than any lottery that it would cause players to flock to him.  He might have been right.

But there was naturally a catch.  What he was proposing was and is a herd of felonies at almost every level of jurisdiction.  Even though what he proposed was a lot better for the players involved, than the competition (the government and the various legally recognized mob) could (read ‘would’) offer.

So neither of these ideas ever came to fruition, though each represented the cleaned up versions of corrupted first-cousins we all accept as normal in the lottery systems.

It’s surprising sometimes to see people who claim to believe in free enterprise so blindly support any government monopoly.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Gambling, Government, Human Behavior, Internet, Lottery, New Mexico

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Quid Pro Quo Chainsaw-wise

Posted on May 21, 2012 by | 8 comments

The old Poulan chainsaw’s always done me a good job of work until the priming bubble burst:  For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise.  I eventually found a replacement at a place a few miles out Highway 27, midway to Center Point.  Double M Equipment Service.

I installed the primer bulb, but no joy.  It wasn’t sucking gas.  I pulled things apart enough to see the fuel line had become brittle and a piece of it was broken off inside the gas tank.   The whole thing appeared to be iffy, and I honestly didn’t want to spend any of my frustrations messing with it.  I need those frustrations for other things.

So I decided to put that saw into a place where they did that sort of thing, let them do it.  Never put a chainsaw in a shop before, but it’s the experience I’m after this lifetime.  I ain’t in this for the money.

So I went back to Double M Equipment Service, midway to Center Point on Highway 27, spang walked in and whistled to myself until the lady looked up from something important she was doing.  [Fans, Compromises and Drowning in Over-My-Head Math].

I could tell right away I was imposing on her, but I explained about my saw and she handed me a piece of paper for me to write it down, which I considered prudent.  She handed me a tag with a number on it.  “Be sure you put your phone number on there.  I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

I couldn’t remember my phone number, so I wrote down what might, but probably wasn’t Gale’s number.

“How long you reckon it’s going to be?  I only get into town every couple of weeks.  I’ll just swing by and check.”

“No.  It’s running two-and-a-half weeks, average.  I’ll call you as soon as it’s ready.”

“I’m a hard man to get on the phone.  I’ll just call or stop by next time I’m in town.”

“No.  I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

This friendly lady was Lisa, according to the business card.  Mark and Lisa, it said.  Double M Equipment Service.  Lisa.

Three weeks later I stopped in, asked about it and Lisa advised me it wasn’t ready yet, but she’d call when it was.  “Eh?”  My hand behind my ear.  “I’m sort of hard of hearing.  Can’t hear the phone ring.”

Two weeks later I stopped by again.  This time it wasn’t ready, but it was next on the list, friendly Lisa explained.  Next week it wasn’t ready again, she didn’t know why. 

Heck, maybe I’m getting the time passage mixed up.  It went in around April 17.  At least that’s when I mentioned it on the blog post.

Anyway, after X number of trips by there and X number of weeks without a chainsaw, I stopped in and friendly Lisa said it was ready.  $65 US.  Called Mark from the back and he brought it up.  “I replaced that gas cap for you so you don’t have to take it off with a wrench anymore.”

The cap’s slotted so’s a screwdriver can be fitted in perpendicular for taking it off.  Never had a problem with it.  Guess Mark never noticed that feature.

Anyway, I got the saw home, found it still doesn’t prime, but if a person pulls the recoil starter long enough mostly it will eventually start.  Runs a few minutes, long enough to cut down a cedar as thick as your bicep before it runs dry of gas.  At which time a person does the whole process again.

$65 US.  Double M Equipment Service, Highway 27 E & Laurel Way, Kerrville, Texas.  Mark and Lisa.

Tell ’em I said hello.

But I’ve digressed.

What I wanted to tell you about in this post is that when I was picking up that chainsaw I asked Lisa whether there was a good cafe anywhere nearby.  She told me about a good hamburger joint just beyond the crossroads in Center Point.

Good place, decent price.  Middling better than average hamburger.

I’m obliged knowing about it.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Relationships, Texas, White Trash Repairs

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Dumping Representative Democracy

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 7 comments

The cascading failure of representative democracy in the US has a lot of causes.  Those involve all manner of shell games played by professional politicians, political parties, incumbents, payoffs, power blocks, extortions, bribes, and bird-nests on the ground.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s local, state government, national government or some district or other.  It’s always the same names, the same non-working solutions, the same broken promises, the same background names everyone recognizes buying them off.

So how’s a country going to break itself free of all the ne’er-do-wells hanging around over Power Lunches, back rooms, limousines, and board rooms thinking up new ways to get rich?

The answer is actually fairly obvious and simple.  Opening the system up, letting it air out.  Castrating the tradition of pork barrelling over the falls of disaster by a transfusion of new, uncorrupted [yet] blood and single-term tenure in office.

You want to be king?  Buy a ticket and take your chances.  Want to be a senator or congressman and get rich fast?  Buy as many tickets as you want.  Sheriff?  Mayor?  State Governor?  Same deal.

Think how refreshing it would be to have some waitress with things sticking out of her lips, nostrils, belly button for your president instead of some sleezeball never did anything in his life except improve his lying skills.  A US Senator who only last week lived down in a trailer park trying to figure out how to keep his truck from being repossessed.  A governor who just last week was a librarian, clerk in a toy store, selling lawn mowers, renting out excavating equipment, building houses, working some-way-or-other.  Scrambling, trying to get by.

There’s a long tradition of picking juries by lottery.  And jury-duty’s one hell of a lot more important than hanging around Washington D.C. lying, stealing, and thinking up new strait-jackets for the citizenry to wear.

It ain’t going to happen, of course.  If it did I’d personally be careful not to buy a ticket.  But I’d be tickled pea-green to see the snake shed its skin and grow a new one.  Might actually buy a ticket and give it to some guy hanging out in the parking lot down at the convenience store.

The office holders mightn’t be better than the ones up there now, but they’d be fresh and it would spread the wealth around.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Government, Politics

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A Plethora of Pinatas

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 7 comments

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

Mostly it’s just a hodge-podge here at the moment.  Got a call from Gale and Kay before sunset, they were on the way home, he’d been released from the hospital.  So things are good on that front.

The rainfall event following the most recent post was about three inches according to the new neighbor.  Below’s a pic of Ranch Road 385 crossing the Little Devil Creek [locals are adamant it’s a ‘river’, not a creek].  Provides some perspective about how frequent three-inch rain storms are in this vicinity, and how much more maudlin and sentimental another inch would have been.

The rock and brush dam survived.

There’s a goodly bit of silt  dropped ahead of it, the parts that washed out weren’t maudlin and sentimental enough to kill the deal.

Speaking of which.  Although there’s a surprising dearth of bumper-stickers for an election year, this [I conjecture] non-political one is still at the top of the charts on Texas bumpers and back windows.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what drivers who choose this in one form or another are attempting to convey about themselves to other drivers, but thus far it escapes me.  No parking lot in Texas is complete without a few vehicles decorated with some variety of the plethora that must be available from the bumper sticker/decal magnates of imagination.

A roll of toilet paper on the ground there under the hat would go a long way to clear things up, if that’s the intended message.  But most likely it ain’t.

The demand by Texas drivers that other drivers support undeclared Presidential Military Adventures might be becoming stealthier, though it was fairly stealthy from the start.  Replacing the red-white and blue with cammie at least, is an uncharacteristic approach to honesty in motivation.

But as for explicit political bumper stickers, I only saw three.  One for some wannabe king who isn’t, the other demanding the current king be dumped without confessing a preference for an alternative.

The other political bumper sticker:  SHAFFER FOR SHERIFF – The Next Generation In Law Enforcement, struck me as a bit ominous.  Evidently the candidate wants voters to know he intends to incorporate more sophisticated surveillance, cameras, cow prods, computerized profiling of drivers at traffic stops, weaponry with more fire power, and newer vehicles for deputies to ride around in.

Finally, I got my chainsaw back finally from putting it in to let a real person work on it, finally.  Haven’t fired it up yet, but I know from what it cost to get it worked on and how long it took, that it’s gonna be a bull-goose chainsaw now. 

You folks looking for an entrepreneurial enterprise to occupy yourselves might be well served by considering small engine repairs.  This guy had a parking lot filled with riding lawn mowers waiting to be fixed, and if the chainsaw’s any indicator, there’s a fortune waiting to be made.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Country Life, Politics, Texas

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Do We Have a Plethora Yet?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 7 comments

A plethora, say, of pinatas?

Jefe: I have put many beautiful pinatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little suprises.
El Guapo: Many pinatas?
Jefe: Oh yes, many!
El Guapo: Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?
Jefe: A what?
El Guapo: A “plethora”.
Jefe: Oh yes, you have a plethora.
El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
Jefe: Why, El Guapo?
El Guapo: Well, you told me I have a plethora. And I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has no idea* what it means to have a plethora.
Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me? 

Three Amigos – circa 1980s

 

Mindless outdoors work gives me a lot of time for my thoughts to ramble into unexpected places.  Theyve been doing that a lot lately. 

I’ve found myself pondering how a governed population can escape resp0nsibility for the activities of the government they put up with.  No matter how oppressive that government might be, no matter how inclined the members of that government are to ignore the wishes of the governed [or responsibility for the consequences of their decisions as fragments of the governing body].

If any of us gave a damn about karma we’d probably be concerned.  Everywhere on this planet human beings are allowing themselves to be governed.  Tacitly approving and being a part of what those governments do.  The bedrock fact is there… those governments couldn’t do what they do without the consent, at one level or another, of the populations giving them support. 

Nanking, say, couldn’t have been raped by Japanese if some substantial piece of the Japanese population hadn’t actively or tacitly participated.  The gulags in the USSR, the NAZI horrors, even the killing fields in Cambodia weren’t just a government job of work.  The insane, lazy, entrepreneural capitulation of US education, industry, economic solvency, labor and energy leading to where we are now didn’t happen because of single piece of government idiocy, corporate greed,  educator incompetence, Chief Executive dynastic aspirations.

Those pinatas hanging in the pic at the top came to be there because the citizenry of the US snort coke and toke marijuana through one breath and pretend they don’t through the next.  And they’re going to remain silent and pay for more penal institutions so long as the folks filling up the prisons for doing it have enough pigment to their skins to keep them out of the equation.

The prohibition against their behavior runs the price of it high enough so’s thousands, millions of people world-wide who are blessed with fewer alternatives find themselves involved in one of the processes.  It offers a legion of lawyers a product cycling through a system of human cages to enrich themselves.  It provides a river of money to fund so many layers of copshops nobody can keep track of them. 

But the bottom line is that it ain’t the government, the copshops, the brotherhood of  judges, lawyers, jailers and private prison corporations doing it.

Fact is, it’s humble us.  The people who sit on juries. 

This entire damned selectively-enriching, otherwise-bankrupting, oligarchy-growing pretended attempt to control the behavior of adults in their private lives, crimes without victims, can’t happen without a dozen citizens on every jury agreeing to help it continue.  Those juries, soberly listening to the somber prosecutors, the judges, are pronouncing death penalties every time they sell their souls to an abstraction.

Those people hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo were convicted and sentenced by US jury members who allowed themselves to believe they were just sending some black guy off to the slammer to get himself raped by his fellow felons for possessing a controlled substance.

Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me? 

Maybe Jefe was onto something bigger than the knew.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Government, Police, Surveillance, Survival, War on Drugs

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Blackjack – Another Bug on the Windshield of Life

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 6 comments

During the late-1990s, prior to awakening to Y2K I was absorbed in a search for a lost gold mine.  I had zero interest in casino gambling and card games of chance.  But I had three close associates who believed themselves to be experts at the game of blackjack, two of whom made frequent trips into the canyons with me and had the grace to listen when I talked about it.

Because of this, I occasionally accompanied one or another of them to casinos near Albuquerque, just hanging around while they played, originally.  But I suppose this wasn’t enough.  Deano, then Mel wanted me sitting at a blackjack table enough to plunk down chips and insist I play, despite the fact I knew nothing about the game.  I found the whole thing stupid and boring.

But I saw Mel win a lot of money on those tables and Deano claimed he did, as well, though I didn’t witness it.

A Strange Way of Thinking, More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past, Mel King

Post-Y2K turned into a somewhat different matter.  Mel had always said he could make a living playing blackjack, and from what I’d witnessed I though it might be true.  But he also emphasized it wasn’t something a person could depend on, which I believed.  Deano also claimed he could make a living at it, which I believed less.  And a couple of others I became acquainted with post-Y2K, also threw their hats in the ring of pronounced ability to make a living at blackjack, whom I believed not at all.

I was running through a series of realizations of my own concerning making a living doing almost anything, squeezing by working graveyard shift as a motel clerk, substitute teaching, polishing the wheels, bumpers, grilles and gas tanks on long-haul trucks.  Squeezing by is an over statement of my success.

So eventually, when Deano proposed sponsoring me with chips, loaning me a book on blackjack, accompanying him to the local casinos, I eventually succumbed.  I learned the basics, witnessed his successes and failures, and observed carefully while I lost his money.  I wasn’t long noticing the tables are chock-full of people who believe they can make a living playing blackjack.

I also noted that they showed no signs of demonstrating that ability at the tables.  They’d mostly all read the same books, or books that said the same things about winning at blackjack.  Books, I noticed, that repeated dozens of conventional wisdoms, reiterated identical strategies to those pit bosses hand out to fledgling players sitting down at the felt for the first time.

So, every player at every table, along with the casino bosses, dealers, kibitzers, gambling addicts and losers were all singing from the same songbook.  Everyone knew exactly what a person ought to do to lose at blackjack by following the yellow brick road.

I wasn’t long concluding that if a person could win money on the tables the answer to doing it wouldn’t be found on the strategy card the pit bosses pass out to new players.  Bowing to the goddess of ritual.

In 1998, Mel had given me a CD with an animated blackjack game on it, hoping I’d practice.  It allowed a person to set up a group of players, each following particular strategies for betting, playing against them, seeing how various strategies fared, one-against-the-others.  I’d never loaded it on my comp.

But now, in the post-Y2K era, I dug out that CD.  At first I just practiced using the conventional wisdoms and Deano’s book of blackjack religion. 

But that didn’t float, and it didn’t fly, though my learning of it was cheaper than sitting in a casino, at least for Deano.

Eventually I noticed the settings allowed me to let the machine play itself.

I could set all six players using different strategies, different nuances, allow them to play 24/7, against the imaginary casino.  Thousands of times, hundreds of thousands, probably millions, eventually.  I could test strategies, tweak them for each player in each position, cull strategies least successful, try anything.  Anything.  Discard it and try something else until I found every microscopic edge a player might use.  And measure it against every other.

Just leave the machine running, check every few days, test, tweak, think, and launch it again.

What I learned from that computer and that software is that it’s possible to ‘almost never’ lose at blackjack, possible to win middling large amounts occasionally, possible to pick up at least a few bucks almost always with concentration, hard work and patience.  And a willingness to throw out the book.

But the baggage of carrying it into a casino is contained in the scorn and hatred of everyone else at the table. 

You see, blackjack players believe universally it’s possible for a player to cause them to lose by violating the ‘rules’ of strategy handed out by the pit bosses.  Split a pair of tens, hit a pair of aces instead of splitting them, and everyone at the table, they believe, loses.  ‘Playing for the table’, they call it.  Though the table doesn’t pay anyone who plays for it, should the person lose.  And the table doesn’t share any wins. 

I can’t count the times some well-meaning player sidled up and whispered, “Get security to walk you to your car.  The guy over there says he’s going to catch you in the parking lot.”

As with other religions, as with patriotism, getting crosswise with doctrine can be dangerous.

Old Jules

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