Tag Archives: Education

December 1, 2011 – The Best Laid Plans

Posted on December 1, 2011 by | 7 comments

Good morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit and read. I went to sleep last night with the thought on my mind to try a run into Kerrville today.  I figured I’d wander around in the AutoZone store for a while to see if I could locate some Chinese engineered tool designed to outsmart Japanese mechanical engineers.

But it turned out to be one of those nights when a lot goes on.  A high wind rose for a while and started dropping dead tree branches, I assume it was, with a lot of fanfare and drama, on things probably didn’t need any trees falling on them.  I recently got that fuel-line bulb replacement for the chainsaw For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise and at that point my middle of the night thinking changed my plans for the day. 

Seemed everything was stacking up for me to spend the day bringing down dead oaks and cutting firewood.   I settled back to sleep peacefully dreaming of a fire in the woodstove and a few layers less clothing on my agingly fragile bod.

Daylight was still a long way off when I was awakened by a ruckus on the front porch I interpreted as the cats telegraphing me there was a coon out there bothering them, so I got the .22 and the spotlight and went out to unravel whatever was happening.  Turned out it was the invader-cat crosswise with Hydrox, second-in-command around here.

I adopted my mean-evil-ugly persona, put down the .22 and started yelling and waving my arms around to break up the spitting growling party, then chased the invader-cat off the porch and across the meadow keeping it lit up in the spotlight.  Hydrox was playing point-man, but chasing with no intention of catching.  The invader-cat has me figured out, I reckons, and kept turning around hoping I’d say something friendly and we could come to an agreement, adding a cat to the local population.

But that ain’t going to happen.  You can’t stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps coming.  Hydrox and I chased that cat clean into the woods to the east, me breathing steam and gutsy language.

When I got back to the porch with Hydrox the other three were waiting and demanded a prayer-meeting.  They all saw me put down that .22 and interpreted it as an ominous sign I might be sneaking around wondering if we couldn’t fit another cat into the equation.  The consensus was that we can’t.

So one of the jobs today is puzzling out how to get the invader-cat into the live-trap and deliver it to one of the herd of wildlife-rescue women springing up like weeds all over the Texas Hill Country.

It looks like a pretty good cat and I’ve got to tip my hat to the fact it’s awfully well groomed for a stray.  But it’s a long way from anyone likely to be grooming it.  Just the fact it’s survived out in the woods a while, though, has me thinking it mightn’t be easy to lure into the live trap.

Anyway, after daybreak I went out for a perusal of whatever damage the trees might have accomplished and found things are normal, though one’s a lot nearer the ground than it was yesterday.  It’s foggy, cold and feels like rain.  Maybe I’ll cut wood, and maybe I won’t.

But what I originally intended to tell you this morning was that last night I came across a blog where someone’s discovered an identical replication in nature between a beetle and a parasite duplicating the relationship between government and high-finance interests, multi-national corporations, almost every facet of human organizational structure.  I think it might be where we learned how to do all the stuff we do.

Mind-controlling beetle parasite.

Instead of studying cats, chickens, deer and other critters to puzzle out what’s going on with us humans I think I need me one-each of those beetles and parasites.  I’ll keep you updated on whether I find one.

Maybe old Franz Kafka wasn’t too far wrong.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Current Issues, Homesteading, Politics, Senior Citizens, Texas

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Confession Time

Posted on November 30, 2011 by | 11 comments

Confession #1: I’m in almost daily communication with the team of Toyota mechanical engineers who designed the 1991 Toyota 4-Runner and the Japanese Toyota assembly plant worker who tightened the starter-bolts on the one parked across the meadow jacked up and partly dissassembled.

Those men don’t need to have a command of the English language to be laughing and giving one another the high-five while saying:  “Hahaha you Yankee pig!  You’ll never get that starter off!   Hahahaha!  We nailed your young ass good!”

Although that bolt head is the ‘easy’ one, this American can’t get to it with any wrench yet invented for a straight-on shot.  The mechanical engineers made sure of that.  But the guy working in the assembly plant lacked sufficient confidence some can-do American wouldn’t come up with a way to put a wrench on it, so he torqued it down with a cheater-bar, thinks I. 

Trying to get it loose repeatedly already has the grim prospect looming that I’m going to round off that head.  If that happens I might as well take a cutting torch to the whole shebang and use it for a new chicken house.

The engineers did their job and the assembly-line worker did his.  Now where did I leave that right-angle cutter and 300 foot extension cord?

But they had a backup plan.  I’ve been talking about the easy one.  This one I can’t even get into a position to see, but I think that might be it, back where I have to stick the camera in to try to get a view of it.  I can’t think of a single way I’ll ever get a wrench anywhere near it.

Confession #2:  I am the stupidest person you’ll ever encounter writing a blog on the Internet.  The proof is enshrined here:  The Communist Toyota 4-Runner.  “But there it is.  Hot diggedy damn!”  “Easy!  Easy money!”  “Man, people pay good money to get to do a job as easy as this one’s going to be.”

*Old Jules

*Old enough to know better.

11 Comments

Posted in 2011, Trucks

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Old Sol’s Moodiness and Being a Character In a Book

Posted on November 29, 2011 by | 24 comments

In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life:  Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction.  But important things first:

From http://spaceweather.com/

Here he is November 28:

As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.

Here’s today.

Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.

Strangeness

SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:

“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.

The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.

I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.

Okay.  Now for the main thrust of this post.  Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3

A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson.  She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him. 

But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies.  She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.

 To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living.  Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico.  I considered him a friend.

 But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob.  He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.

I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me.  Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.

 Naturally, I bought and read a copy.  Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder.  My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.

I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction.  But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.

Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.

We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery.  But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar.  And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.

 Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself.  Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying.  Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.

But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me.  That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.

Live and learn.

Old Jules

 

24 Comments

Posted in 1980's, 1990's, 2011, Books, Creative Writing, Hack Writing, Human Behavior, Liars, NM, Portales

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Songs of 20th Century Wars on Victimless Crimes

Posted on November 28, 2011 by | 11 comments

In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn.  In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled.  Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.

 

The song was ended but the melody lingered on.

Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song.  I’d be remiss leaving it out.

 

The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to:  Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops.  Sound familiar?

Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’.  Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker.  Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.

 

Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.

 

The US Government isn’t a fast learner.  They were already controlling and taxing whiskey.  They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine.  The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets.  Nor even out of the prisons.

Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.

 

But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough.  The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.

 

But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers.  Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.

 

I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.

I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.

 

 

 

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2011, Liars, Music, YouTube

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Bullying – Bringing it all Back Home

Posted on November 28, 2011 by | 17 comments

If the power to intimidate is derived from a 'legitimate' source the term 'bully' is not applicable.

When I promised a summation of conclusions about bullying behavior based on ponderings and experiences described in those recent other posts, I didn’t grasp what I was setting myself up for.  Every direction I took in my thinking led to unsettling places I couldn’t trust without backing up and thinking it through from other directions.

If you’re new to this blog and haven’t read the earlier posts it’s possible you’ll find it easier to follow if you read them first.

More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past
A Bullying Commie Americauna
The Bullying Homestead Part 2
Half-Century of Male Evolution – Bullying Part 3
Stolen Horses and Baby Rattlers – The Anatomy of a Bully – Part 4

Okay, all that prefacing and cowardly side-step-waffling out-of-the-way, here’s what eventually I found myself inescapably glued to as a conclusion:

Bullying is so much a part of life on this planet we don’t even notice it.  It’s the glue holding every community together, every species, cross-species, inter-species.  It’s the determinant governing community behavior of every description.  We just don’t recognize it as bullying unless it falls into a class of activities we happen to disapprove in our matrix of human-cum-societal judgements.

That’s if ‘bullying’ is defined as a behavior, as opposed to being anchored to a larger concept:  the source from which the power being exerted is derived.  Building a concept bounded by ‘legitimacy’ and protocols does allow what we usually label bullying to be cut out of the herd and isolated in a pen of repudiation.  But by doing so we’d be forced to accept an equally unpalatable conclusion:

If the ‘bullying’ behavior subtracted from the bullying definition is legitimate because it derives power from approved sources of authority is an important piece of what holds things together, we’re stuck with it.  Lock, stock and banana-peel.  As an example, that 5th grade teacher of mine who liked to beat-hell out of me and other kids who weren’t in a ‘protected’ mode, wasn’t bullying us at all.  Reason being that his power derived from his position as a designated tool of the power of legitimate authority.

Similarly, all that Jew-baiting that went on in the 3rd Reich and elsewhere in the world.  The pervasive use of police forces to beat hell out of union strikers in the late 1800s and early 20th Century.  The iron fist used constantly after the Indian wars in the western US to keep tribal members on the REZ and out of the hair of the ‘legitimate’ citizenry far into the 20th Century.  The removal of the tribes east of the Mississippi, to designated places west of the Mississippi, even though doing so was a clear violation of previous treaties and agreements.  National Guardsmen shooting students at Kent State.  Policemen spraying little old ladies with mace.

Almost overnight, previously accepted non-bullying behavior/attitudes can become disgusting examples of bullying.

 

Sometimes focusing precisely on where the power resides becomes ambiguous.

 

 

Other times it’s not ambiguous in fact, but owns the tacit approval of de facto power.

 

Sometimes it’s bullying when it happens to the the group in question, but non-bullying when they’re doing it.

 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of being the wrong place at the right time.

 

And when the ‘legitimate’ source of power tacitly approves it, it’s not bullying.

 

So when a cop tasers a ten-year-old kid it’s actually business as usual.   It might eventually become ‘brutality’ or might be deemed excessive force, but it will never become ‘bullying’.

But it gets more complicated than that.  There’s a more subtle side of non-bullying we all see so frequently we take it for granted.   For instance, the entire pantheon of political rhetoric today is choreographed to  promote an atmosphere of something akin to bullying, character assassination, and denigration of the opposition.  But because it’s satisfying to the targeted body of listener/participants, it’s ‘legitimate’.

 

Bullies constantly strive to give the moral high ground to their attitudes and behavior.  Frequently, they succeed, and when they do those attitudes and behaviors cease to be bullying.  Probably the best example can be found in the most non-bullied segment of society filling the jails and prisons in the U.S.  Prostitutes.

They do openly and honestly what millions of women do every night with less honesty, more covertly, in singles bars and honkytonks.  They do it on streets surrounded by ‘legal’, ‘legitimate’ porn houses run by ‘legitimate’ businessmen and patronized by ‘legitimate’ consumers paying to observe the act of fornication.

But prostitutes enjoy the unique, traditional status of being bullied by pimps and johns, brutalized and extorted for sex by cops, exploited by lawyers, and of being the ‘product’ passing through the criminal justice system into the prisons-for-women industry.

They’ve never achieved the sanctity of the moral high-ground to get wives, girl-friends, and ‘respectable’ women objects of scorn and outlawed.  They’ve never found a reservoir of support to allow them to see those other classes of women outlawed and thrown into jails.

But they probably would if they could.

Inside they’re almost certainly bullies, too, like cops and schoolteachers, and like you and me.

Old Jules


 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?

17 Comments

Posted in Human Behavior, Relationships

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November 22, 1963

Posted on November 22, 2011 by | 24 comments

C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series of kid books and the Screwtape Letters died.  He was also a middling good science fiction writer.  I always enjoyed his work and consider him an important writer within his area of interest. 

At the time of his death I didn’t hear about it because Aldous Huxley died the same day and got most of the fanfare.

Huxley’s Brave New World was all the rage at the time, one of those books young intellectuals all asked one another whether they’d read, and of course they all answered, “Yeah, wasn’t it great?” whether they’d read it or not.

Overall I believe Lewis has stood the test of time better than Huxley, but we can’t go back and give Lewis a better funereal showing at this late date, so I just figured I’d mention it here.

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Books, Writing

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Feral Hog Plague

Posted on November 21, 2011 by | 19 comments

One thing that happens when you get a group of country people hanging around without a lot going on involves a mysterious sorting and filtering process.  Small groups of strangers with similar interests are drawn into intense exchanges of arcane esoterica.

Saturday a few old guys including me got talking about chickens, coons, skunks and feral hogs none of us would have ever learned if we hadn’t been to the auction.

The wild hogs seem to be concentrated, we found, in some locations and absent in others.  A guy from a few miles east of town seems to have the worst problem of any in the group, and despite the fact he’s killed a hundred hogs this year he says it hasn’t made a dent in the population. 

He’s devised an ingenious trap with several interior rooms the hogs can get into but can’t get out, allowing him to capture a dozen at a time.  He kills them in the traps and drags them down to a remote corner of the property with the previous hauls.

That guy knew some hog catching tricks I’ll probably use here next time they come in here or up and Gale’s tearing things up.  He uses boxes of Jello as bait.  Says they can’t resist it and they’ll choose going into a trap after Jello over breaking into a feed bin or tearing the walls off a storage shed for chicken feed.

But everyone agreed the hog population in Central Texas is out of control something awful.

Then, this morning, my old bud Rich sent me a link to this Yahoo News story:

Mexico to cull 50,000 wild boars from US invasion

http://tinyurl.com/7qrtwng

Mexican officials have unveiled plans to slaughter some 50,000 wild boars that have crossed the border from the United States and now threaten agriculture in Mexico.

The Ministry of Environment in Chihauha state said some 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of farmland in the border town of Ojinaga have been affected by the large number of feral pigs that have come from Presidio County, Texas.

“We must get rid of these European wild boars because they sleep overnight on US soil during the day and cross over to the Mexican side to feed,” Ignacio Legarreta, a state official, told local media.

The boars of European origin, which were imported to Texas as pets and then replicated in the wild, have caused serious damage to the flora and fauna of the area, officials said.

“They have reproduced to reach more than 50,000 animals that threaten the area,” said Legarreta.

The authorities intend to use cages with food inside to trap the animals.

But back at the auction.  I asked whether any of them had ever tried bringing the hogs in and selling them at auction.  None had, and at first everyone’s reaction was a guffaw.  Nobody likes getting close to a critter capable of ripping you in two and eating you.  Probably the auction folks wouldn’t take them despite the fact they handle a lot of dangerous animals.

But then someone mentioned there’s a place in Ingram always advertising they want to buy swine on the hoof.  Sausage place, one thought.  Which got us thinking how a person might build a trap on a trailer so’s to not have to deal with them more than dragging the trailer to Ingram, letting them inspect them and kill them in the trap, drag them out, weigh them, and pay up.

I allowed if I’d considered that and thought of it earlier this year I’d be a lot better off financially today than I am.  There was a lot of muttering and thinking going on among all of us before the conversation changed to coons.

Old Jules

19 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Country Life, Mexico, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival

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A Ritual of Resolutions and Risk-taking

Posted on November 19, 2011 by | 98 comments


Morning, readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a visit.

Today marks an event I never expected to see.  Old Sol’s about to light things up, shake his head and shrug when he looks down and sees I am here again, come spang around him one more time.  Sixty-nine times I’ve gone around him and come to this same spot, tipped my hat and said hi.

Here’s the reason neither Old Sol, nor I, had any reason to expect this:

Back in the late 1970s I had occasion to spend some time looking around nursing homes.  I managed to do it enough times and look them over closely enough to convince myself that we Americans haven’t kept our eye on the ball when it comes to living and being alive.

The people in those nursing homes are alive, but they aren’t overjoyed about it, and the life they’re living only has in common with actual life that the bodies and food are warm.  The caretakers roll them back and forth or they hobble between television sets, meals, games, then through the long hallways filled with the forever odor of urine, back to their rooms.

I did a lot of thinking about why that happens, those mass coffins for the living.  Of one thing I was certain.  I didn’t want it to happen to me.

The reason, I decided, people end up in those places is because they live longer than they’d have expected to, wanted to.  The reason they lived so long was that they took all kinds of measures to make certain they did, increasing the intensity and focus as the years built up on them.

Every year those elderly reduced the numbers and kinds of risks they took.  They watched their diets, quit doing things they enjoyed when they were younger, many barely did anything at all as they reached into the advanced years of retirement besides a golf game or sea cruise.

And they got what they paid for.  Lives that endured long past anything a person would call living.  They sidestepped and hid and and ran from Death, and he didn’t find them when he was supposed to.  So now they sit around strapped into wheel chairs watching rolling television screens paying the price for being too worried about dying when they were still alive.

That’s when I came to an important conclusion about how I wanted to live my own life.

From that time until now one of the rituals I’ve tried to perform around birthday time and New Years Day involves examination of the physical risks I’m taking now, and how I’m going to increase them during the coming year.  And how I’m going to stay as far as possible away from do-gooder, busybody medicos and CPR-knowers sticking their noses in my living experience getting me cross-wise with Death.

How I’m going to be out there when Death comes looking for me, in a place where he can find me, doing something I love to do.

Old Jules

Loudon Wainwright– High Wide and Handsome

98 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Human Behavior

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So what happens when you lose light speed? Occupy CERN!

Posted on November 18, 2011 by | 16 comments

“A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.”   “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.

A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’.   Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed.  60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.

The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors.  Now those results are out.  Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed.  But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go.  The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.

But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust?  What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?

The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way.  Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties.  Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back.  Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.

All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.

Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway?  It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.

Everyone hates cops and snitches.

Occupy CERN.

Old Jules

 

 

16 Comments

Posted in 2011, Human Behavior

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Stolen Horses and Baby Rattlers – The Anatomy of a Bully – Part 4

Posted on November 16, 2011 by | 15 comments

This is all leading up to the summation of Old Jules’ Unified Bullying Theory. 

Hopefully this will be my last buildup segment before trying to summarize something I’d call a theory about bullying, supported by the interactions of animals here and childhood memories that included plenty on the subject.

My childhood friend, Keith, was reflecting on how he remembered the two of us as kids recently when we met in Fredericksburg.  Fiddle-Footed Naggings and Songs of the Highway.  This pretty well dated Keith’s first clear recollections of me to the sophomore year of high-school, though we’d actually been in classes together since the 4th grade.  He remembered the two of us as being a couple of nerds, getting pushed around a lot. 

 

What I’m riding there just about says anything needs saying.  That kid I was at that stage of my life was no bully in the making.

The picture with my two sisters might be about the time I was getting chased home by Floren and his brothers.  At that point there was nobody I was likely to bully.  Anyone can see the kid needs chasing home and a few beatings on the way can’t do anything but help. 

But by the time this picture was taken I was hanging out at the school cafe with the Lindsey kids, smoking, and everyone knowing who was tougher than whom else.  In those days any kid who could ride bareback was probably in danger of doing some bullying, too.  I’m guessing all those kids from Lindsey Grade School could ride bareback.  

I was bareback because the horse was stolen, though the person taking the picture almost certainly didn’t know it.

I was keeping three hogs for an FFA project in one of the buildings in the background, though the place was otherwise abandoned.  I kept the horse there a couple of weeks before things got too hot, then took it out to the dirt road between this place and the neighborhood I was living in and slapped it on the rump to run it off.  But the owner and authorities had already decided it hadn’t just strayed.   A while later that picture glued me to the missing horse.

Sometimes I still wonder how the family adults could have been so damned stupid in those days.  Where the hell did they THINK I got that horse?  On the other hand, a copy of the picture became a small piece of a lot more damning evidence of how I’d been spending my adolescent years.  By the time I was caught it filled up a corner of the Roosevelt County Sheriff’s Office. 

Somewhere between this picture and the one above it things went south.  Coincidentally, I was attending Central Grade School when the picture was taken, where I considered everyone rich kids, which they weren’t.  But two years in a row I had teachers famous for their bullying. 

One, the fifth grade teacher, gave me a spanking in front of the class at least once every day that year.  Me, and any other kids who admitted when they were asked the first day of classes whether their parents would give them a whipping at home if they were told they got one in school.   I didn’t realize until a couple of decades later it was a ruse to find out which kids wouldn’t tell their parents what was happening.

I used  to want to go back to the graveyard in that town and spit and puke on his grave until a lot later in life than you might guess.

That’s me on the right at the pinnacle of my hellion/bullying times.  Even that snake and the baby rattlers we found got me into a peck of trouble.  Within a couple of months of the time this picture was taken I was being held in the Roosevelt County Jail for a couple of weeks waiting for them to decide whether I needed to get the rest of my education at the State Boys Reformatory at Springer, New Mexico.

They decided to keep me around on juvenile probation instead.   That ended the bullying completely.  If I’d looked sideways at anyone, or let myself get provoked into a fight I’d have been in Springer in a heartbeat.  It was open season on me for anyone who felt the urge to kick someone around, and there was no shortage of those who did. 

Here’s a year later while I was working with Kurtiss and some other youngsters for Skeeter Jenkens.    A Sobering View of Y2K

That fall would be the school year Keith almost certainly remembers.  Just another nerd.  A peaceful, inconspicuous nerd doing his best to stay out of reform school.  Midway through the Junior year it was clear I had to get out of that town, and I did.  Nobody at all was sorry to see me gone.

The next bullying post is going to pull all this together with the animal bullying into Old Jules Unified Bullying Theory.

Old Jules

 

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