Tag Archives: Events

SWAT teams and militarized police forces – An outlet for frustrating human needs

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

I’ve noticed a few scattered concerns on the WEB by people who think the 21st Century militarization of civilian police forces is a bad thing.  Seems to me those complainers aren’t looking at the bigger picture.

Time was when a person with a mean streak, or just a desire  to kill someone didn’t have many options.  He could sneak around and do it and maybe get by with it a while, or he could get drunk and do it, and go to the slammer.  Or he could unhealthily suppress it and go around frustrated and unhappy.

But nowadays there are plenty of outlets for a person with those needs.  Sure, he might spend years becoming a SEAL, a Marine Sniper, or a Green Beret.  But those are really too large and too institutionalized for the local badass who just wants to blow the face off someone without being criticized for doing it.   Municipal, County, or State Police SWAT teams offer a lot easier outlet.  Plus, they’re clubs where all the members have the same goals and can be depended upon to protect one another by keeping their mouths shut if it’s needed. 

For instance, there used to be a cop in Socorro, New Mexico, who was involved in a couple of extremely questionable shootings.  Residents and city officials had all witnessed, or heard about his blusterings, his posturings, his suspected desire to use that firearm as frequently as possible.  After the second shooting incident he was quietly encouraged to find greener pastures elsewhere.

So he applied for, and was accepted to the Albuquerque Police.  Trained for the SWAT team.  Wasn’t long before he got to put a bullet into a suspect and got a lot of praise for doing it.  Short while later they were raiding a drug house and an 80 year old neighbor saw what was going on, thought it was a gang.  Ran out of his house with a flashlight, yelling, and the Ex-Socorro cop stopped him in his tracks.  Turned out the raid was conducted at the wrong address, but the 80 year old was found ex post facto to should have minded his own business.

A year or two later someone was holding a baby over a freeway overpass threatening to drop it into the traffic below.  Ex-Socorro cop plugged him so’s the baby only dropped on the overpass.  Hero again.

I heard over the years he got to kill a number of other people who got downrange of the Albuquerque SWAT team, as well.  Managed to make what would otherwise probably just been a lifetime spent in prison, or sneaking around murdering people, into a healthy, productive life.

People who criticize militarized police forces aren’t considering the needs of the SWAT teamers and the healthy way they’ve dovetailed themselves into the greater good of society.

Old Jules

Old Sol’s gender change

The sun’s magnetic field is about to flip

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/05aug_fieldflip/

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Praying up Old Sol this morning He brought up a sensitive issue we’re all going to have to try to work with. Hurting the feelings of Old Sol might not be wise at this stage of the game.

Old Sol:  Now that you’re finally recognizing that the United States is My Chosen People instead of that bunch of imposters over in the Middle East there are a couple of things we ought to get straight.

Me:  I’m pretty much up for anything.  Is this a good time for you?

Old Sol:  It’s okay.  I’ve got a little time right now.  Later on I’ll have My people call your people to hammer out the details.

Me:  So what’s on your mind?

Old Sol:  Well, it’s about this Old Sol thing, and about He.  That’s been okay for the past eleven years, but it’s about to change.  It won’t be long before I’m a She instead of a He.

Me:  Hmmmm.  It’s going to take some getting used to.  I suppose we can work it in somehow.  We’ve changed all kinds of other things during the past generation.

Old Sol:  Actually it’s not just the He and She thing.  There’s more to it.  A male doesn’t mind being called old.  But I’m about to be female gender, and having My Chosen People throwing around the word ‘Old’ probably won’t be the best way of keeping things straight and level.

Me:  Wow.  I hadn’t thought about that.

Old Sol:  That’s the reason I’m bringing it up.  Old Lady Sun, Mama Sun, Mama Sol, none of those would be prudent under the circumstances.  Allowances can be made for slips using He because human habits are just not easy to change.  But flippancy could cause some anger.

Me:  Sheeze.  Okay.  I’ll have my people call your people.

Old Jules

Running from the law: The Great Cockfight Bust, or The Great C*ckfight Bust

El Palenque2

Hi readers.   Thanks for coming by for a read.  Those of you who have any morals and are offended by the alternative name for the male chicken will be soothed to see I’ve name this twice to avoid criticism.

Must have been 1996, 1997, I was living in Socorro, NM, and I got wind there was a major cock [c*ck] fight going to happen Saturday night.  They happened a few times a month in that area, and though official NM law allowed it as a local option at the time, murmurings in the State House rumored it was going to be prohibited soon.  They’d raided a couple of them in counties where the local option had people thinking it was legal.

Anyway, Saturday night I was at loose ends so I headed out to put hero roosters into my body of life experience.  The place was a mile beyond a gate and down a dirt road into the Rio Grande bosque.  The salt cedars opened up to a large cleared area of several acres with a large metal building toward the back.  Room to park 200 vehicles or more.

I got there early to look things over, still some daylight.  Maybe 20-30 cars and pickups in the lot, guys hanging around talking and smoking outside.  Moseyed into the barn, looked over the seating arrangements, looked a lot like an auction barn for livestock.  But with a cage blocked off in the center for the fighters and their handlers.

Nobody was in a hurry to go inside because it was hot in that barn.  I decided it would be hotter when the place filled up, so I staked a standing-up claim against the support for a tall sliding metal door at the back. 

When the place filled it was noisy, it was hot, and things were happening fast.  Bets, chickens, arms waving and yelling, every reason to be enamored of my place at the door.

But toward the shank of the evening a horn honked out in the parking lot and someone yelled, “Raid!  Cops!”  Sirens blaring, suddenly everyone inside stampeding for the doors.  I ran to the corner of the building and saw the parking lot was filled with flashing lightbars, half-dozen, maybe a dozen police cars.  Sheeze.  This is bullshit!  Guys running out toward their cars getting snagged by the cops.

So I ran like hell out into the bosque dodging salt cedars, rattlers, just put as much distance between myself and that barn as I could manage.  When I went knee deep in mud I knew I wasn’t going any further.  The Rio Grande was right in here somewhere close.

I tucked myself in next to a dead tree in a thicket of salt cedar and watched the lights through the trees, listened to the angry yells of men being arrested, watched the lights threading through the cedars chasing people trying to get away too late.  Waited, waited, felt ticks crawling all over me, found myself wondering about the rattlers, waited, more ticks, waited.

Gradually things calmed down, engines started, gradually the sirens stopped.  Things got really quiet.  But no way I was about to be fooled by that crap.  Full dark, I waited, listened.  Ticks by the hundreds crawling around on me.  Waited, caught myself dozing, jerked myself awake and waited some more.

Finally Old Sol began crawling in, me praying him up.  Still quiet except for the sounds of the morning birds and water rustling down the channel.  I carefully, carefully began working my way through the salt cedars toward the parking area.

I squatted and watched peeking out there as light filled the parking area.  There it was.  My old Mitzubishi Montero and a scattering of other vehicles.  Sitting there trying to lure me to jail.  I scratched and watched.

Finally a guy came creeping out of the bosque maybe 50 yards away, creeping toward a pickup the other side of the Montero.   Heeheehee.  Bait.  Now we’ll see where the law’s hiding.  Glad it ain’t me!

He seemed surprised.  Got into his truck, started it, no sign of the fuzz.  Spun around and vanished in a trail of dust back toward the pavement.

Hmmmm.  Hokay.  I stood up straight, Tried to act like I was just a normal guy coming out of those salt cedars.  Wandered over to the Montero and watched a dozen other guys coming out of the trees.  Cranked up the Mitzubishi and tooled home free as a bird.

The paper was full of it, the Socorro Chieftain, the Albuquerque Journal.  Printed the names of all those guys who got busted.

Served them right, too, going out there watching c*ckfights.

If people don’t have ethics and morals enough to stay away from places like that they need to be in jail.

Old Jules

Outlawry and the metaphysics of Quality – Zen, Persig et al

tabby thinking it over 2

Tabby:  So what does all this airplane talk have to do with the metaphysics of  quality?

Me:  Giving ourselves quality in life comes in a lot of forms, but each trail we take leading there relies on our personal determination to define what we believe is quality.  Although it’s remotely possible some larger social or governmental entity will offer the opportunities, it’s no priority with them.  They’re concerned with something they define as ‘the greater good’.  Keeping people on the sidewalks, off the grass.  If a person sees the need to walk on the grass, to lie on it, to find the quality in it, he’s going to have to find a way to get there without going to jail.  You have to find awareness of the grass, and you can’t be aware of it until you’ve experienced it.

Tabby:  But at least they’re keeping the dogs from crapping on the grass..

Me:  That’s right.  And if you’re planning to crap on it you’d destroy the quality you hoped to find there.  But if you allow the fact someone in control is afraid you’ll crap on the grass to keep you off it so’s to make sure you don’t you’ve lost a chunk of life you’ll never recover.  A piece of the quality of living gone because someone else might have violated it if they’d gone there.

Tabby:  People can’t see the damned grass anyway, right?  They walk right past it without seeing anything.

Me:  Mostly they don’t see it because they‘re somewhere else.  They‘re thinking about something they think is in the future, where they‘re having lunch, or something someone said an hour ago.  They’re walking past that grass and have a vague intellectual awareness the grass is there, but that’s only half of where quality lives.  The flash of instant ‘seeing’ it before the mind has time to intellectually define what it’s seeing is where quality hides.  And because they don’t experience the quality of the grass they have no respect for it.  They’re minds assign it no value.  They take a rhetorical crap on the grass without ever knowing they’ve done it.

Tabby:  So that’s why the people posting the signs want to keep them off the grass?  So they won’t take a rhetorical crap on it as they go by?

Me:  No.  The people posting the signs think they’re doing it to protect the grass for the ‘greater good’ of all those people and dogs going by who won’t see it.  Sign posters couldn’t care less about what people experience as they go by.  They think it’s the separation between the people and dogs, and the grass that’s important.

Tabby:  I’m glad they do it, anyway.  I hate eating grass after a dog’s peed or crapped on it. 

Me:  But you can’t taste it until you get past the signs.

Old Jules

The importance of being insignificant

N90172a

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

President Jimmy Carter was scheduled to visit Fort Hood.  The First Cavalry Division [my old unit in Korea] was to stage massive war games and tank maneuvers and culminate the affair with a chemical substitute for a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon.  Because the President was going to be there, FAA closed down the airspace over Fort Hood for civilian air traffic.

Pissed my old buddy Phil Washburn  

Afterlife of One Hero – Sex, Violence and Crazy Love

  and me off something awful.  We were taxpaying citizens.  Who the hell did they think they were telling people they couldn’t fly around not bothering anyone watching how our tax dollars were being spent?

So when the day arrived we gassed up the old Cessna …. 100+ F on the runway, and began the long climb outside the forbidden airspace.  Burned up a lot of avgas and an hour getting up to 8000-9000 MSL.  Clear day though, and the temperature became comfortable somewhere above 5000′.

We circled at the edge of the airspace boundary watching the specks of gathered tanks and massed troops a few miles to the north waiting for the show to start.  Suddenly, hundreds of roostertails of dust obscured miles of landscape as the tanks charged forward.  Then the sky below us filled with helicopters.  Wow!  Wowowowowow!

I gradually eased us north until we were almost over the action, but still far enough south so’s we weren’t trying to see straight down, kept circling.  Powered back enough to hold the altitude, savor the cool, and watch what a major wartime battle must be like viewed from the air.

Finally, toward the north beyond all the tanks the substitute battlefield nuke sent up a heluva pile of smoke and fire into the sky, rising rising rising until we were looking up at the top.  It kept rising.

Turn off the lights.  The party’s over.  The roostertails behind the tanks had all faded, everyone down there was taking a break, having a drink of orange KoolAid or something, we reckoned.  The helicopters were headed away where ever helicopters go when the shooting stops.

Time for us to get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge before the high sheriff and POLice come gunning for us.

I pointed us back toward the Killeen airport and as we neared the edge of forbidden territory I shut down the engine, pulled up the nose to stop the propeller windmilling.  The old Cessna had a 20:1 glide ratio, so we were a long while circling over the airport just listing to the whisper of the wind over the surfaces of the plane.

I’d intended to push the nose down to re-start the engine when I got on final approach, but I’d never landed dead-stick and figured this was as good a time as any to do it.  Got the numbers and came to a dead stop 50 feet beyond them, restarted the engine and taxied over to the FBO under the admiring stares of everyone who never landed an airplane dead stick on a public air strip. 

Naturally we did a lot of bragging at the FBO, and a lot of people were shaking their heads in various attitudes of disapproval, horror, and awe.

Hell of a fine day to be an outlaw.   I recommend it.

Old Jules

Being doomed ain’t all that bad

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

A guy I usually stop and have a cup of coffee with when I’m in Kerrville was exchanging pontifications with me lately.  Seemed everything we could think of to talk about led to a similar ‘where’, and that where didn’t invite any street dances.  At least unless a person could rotate it on the axis enough to recognize all the ‘wheres’ are the same place as they always were.

Problem was we kept switching around looking at things too collectively.  Individually he and the other old codgers who hang around there talking with him, including me, aren’t doing too badly.  Some of us have health issues, and all of us are a lot nearer death [by appearances] than we were ten years, or ten minutes ago.  Same as everyone else, though an argument might be made we’re nearer than them.

Nearer, by appearances, only.  Those people driving by out there on the pavement all are operating under the illusion they’re going to live as long as us, which one-hell-of-a-lot of them won’t.  They’ll get terminal illness, car smashups, all manner of unexpected ways to exit the vehicle while some of us old guys are still stopping by visiting one another.

And by far the greatest likelihood is that we ain’t all, including the ones driving by, ain’t going to all die the same week, the same day, even the same decade.  Which is the difference between individual, and collective doomsday.

But when you come right down to it, what-the-hell is the difference?  If we all pick the same day to die we’ll each still have had our day in the sun.  Same as we would have otherwise. 

Thinking about this during the times I’m not in the company of other people it seems to me there’s a lot more emphasis put on the collective side of things than contributes to uppidyness at an individual level.  If I happened to care a lot whether and when I die, I can see how the prospect of all sorts of risk-taking might seem something to be avoided.  Might be able to influence one-way-or-another [though not nearly as much as I might imagine] whether I kicked sooner, or later.

But looking around me and seeing all manner of cumulonimbus signs of doom coming up on the horizon and concluding it’s worse than just my own personal demise, that it’s something humanity ought to avoid, just doesn’t make any sense at all.  It requires the assumption that there’s something better after I’m dead, about lots of human beings running around watching television, driving to the grocery store, playing games on the computer, and having romances.

Fact is if they all die the same week as I do the great bulk of them will have been spared a lot of pain and worry, and looking around me I’m not certain the happiness and satisfaction they might have experienced is enough to offset it for most of them.  At least not enough to be worth interrupting the happiness and satisfaction of now on an individual level to devote thought to it.

One of the things comes up in those conversations is what a shame it was we waited so long to figure out we could have been living right back then, instead of waiting around to do it.  We’d have gotten a lot more living done, on the one hand.  And on the other, if doomsday had come along and interfered, we’d have still gotten something for our money.

Old Jules

Hitch-hiking from Beatnik to Hippiedom

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

When I got out of the Army, summer 1964, I had a lot of ideas about my bright future.  Shopped around the Portales area for a while and found a quarter-section cotton farm I thought briefly I’d buy and become a starving-to-death farmer, which fell through.  Worked meanwhile, for Abe Ribble at his cement operation, and applied for the Peace Corps, knowing I wouldn’t hear from them for several months.

I was hanging out with a number of other young guys who were at loose ends, drinking coffee and walking around town, sitting on benches around the courthouse trying to figure out the meaning of life.  Going out with a waitress out at the truckstop when she got off work at midnight.  A young woman with goals, and confidence that no matter what a man might want for himself, she could mold him into something more to her liking.  Once she got him nailed down on all the corners.

The World Fair was going on in New York that year.  I could feel the walls of Portales trying to close in on me, and the guys I’d been spending spare time with were mostly thinking of themselves as beatniks, to the extend a person could be a beatnik in Portales.  A slight beard and a beret went a long way in that direction.  Sketchpad and a piece of charcoal, or a lot of free-verse poems jotted on cafe napkins were the tools.

So another aspiring beatnik, Stan Sexton, and I, decided to hitch to beatnik heaven.  Check out the World Fair.  Visit a couple of New Yorker weekend beatniks who went to Eastern New Mexico University, but were home in Westchester that summer.

I’ve told elsewhere on this blog about that summer, about sleeping on the Brooklyn Bridge, about catching the freight-train out late-August, jail in Rochester, and eventually hitching, driving the school bus to California, etc.  About all those would-be beatnik women and the “Eh?  YOU don’t believe in free love?” pickup line that always worked.

When I was accepted for Peace Corps Training and headed out of New York I had no idea I was seeing the dying gasp of the Beatnik phase everywhere.  That a year later everyone who was anyone would be Hippy.  That Greenwich Village would be replaced by San Francisco as the center of ‘what’s happening in America’.  Kids would be burning their draft-cards and taking acid trips.  Doing ‘Love-ins’ in the park.

By the time I got back to Portales to spend my time waiting for the Peace Corps India X training to begin in Hawaii the world had begun a sea-change, though it didn’t know it. 

But at least some of the pressure was off in Portales.  The waitress had found someone else with better prospects for a bright future.  Cotton farmer, he turned out to be, if I remember correctly.

Old Jules

Bigotry, counter-bigotry, and civility

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

I stirred up a nest of hornets with the last two posts, the first being an attempt at unbiased observations concerning everything I’ve understood through observation during my lifetime, as well as extensive reading on Jewish, Christian, western civilization, Moslem, and ancient history.  The post wasn’t intended as an attack against the state of Israel, an indictment of Jews, anything of the sort.  Even in the re-reading of it I can find nothing to support such a claim.

Nevertheless, wossname, leanpower,  a man with strong Israeli ties who, himself, is in the business of designing, manufacturing and selling war weaponry, accused me of something considerably stronger than simple anti-Semitism.  I responded in anger, and for that I apologize.   That second post.

The issue of whether or not I’m an anti-Semite is of no importance.  The larger question of whether the viewpoints I expressed in the first post are an indictment of anti-Semitism against the holder of those views, however, is indeed an important question in the modern world.  Though not to me, personally.  I have no investment in modern Israel and my views are of zero importance to anyone.

But I’d offer the suggestion that the responses to what was said in the first post contained evidence that, if I don’t fully understand the issues [and provided my views are the result of a lack of information, as opposed to being a result of a bias against Jews in general] I’m in good company among a lot of other people within the US and elsewhere.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that only a tiny piece of the western world has ever read Biblical texts, know nothing of the times surrounding the Jewish Revolt, know nothing of the times preceding WWII when the discussions began concerning a Jewish state in the Middle East.  Know nothing about the floods of Jews fleeing Germany and its neighbors during the 1930s into Spain, Portugal, the Middle East, anywhere willing to accept them.  Know nothing of the starving hoards of Jews begging all the great powers to give them refuge, and the trickle of acceptance.

The miniscule dribble of acceptance by the powers for thousands of Jews without homes, many without money, food and clothing, asking for help.  And a response amounting to refusal by default.

Seems to me the post-war context for the formation of the Israeli state is trapped within that pre-war reality, and the post-war general recognition of what had come to pass in Germany, Poland and other Axis-occupied areas  for those who didn’t flee.

Given the ignorance and horror of all that within the general non-Jewish population, the acute awareness, on-the-other-hand, by Jews, it’s not difficult to understand why discussion of the issues become heated.  If modern Israel and its behavior as a nation weren’t so crucially involved in US foreign policy, the entire matter would be better left alone.  Better left to be settled by Israel and the surrounding countries.

From my perspective, that is not the case today.  Even with the care I take to isolate myself from world news I frequently see Israel threatening to bomb, say, Iran.  Bomb it whether the US approves, or disapproves.  Which would almost certainly expand to US involvement, and quite possibly a lot of other countries.

Which is to say, evidently modern Israel is willing without the consent of the US to lead the US by the nose into conflicts the US mightn’t find to be within its own best interests.  Or to allow Israel to be destroyed without the support of the US, which Israel is acutely aware won’t happen.

In that context is it acceptable for a US citizen to have viewpoints differing from those manifested in the behavior of the modern Israeli state?  Is it possible to examine and criticize, even wrongly, the policies of Israel if that examination leads to a conclusion that Israel has other alternatives than constant war?

Is it possible to examine and express these views, even if the views are developed partly out of ignorance, without being a Jew hater?  An anti-Semite?  A follower of the beliefs of the ELDERS OF ZION lunatics?

What I believe is of no consequence to anyone.  Israel and Washington DC don’t call me for advice on these matters.  So the post, whatever I might have said in it, was of zero value except to arouse an Israeli militarist to play the race card to stifle any expression of perspectives other than the Israeli one.

I withdraw from the whole affair.

Old Jules

The Bible and modern Israel – A study in human reality

Hi readers. 

Although I’m not of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tribe [and sub-tribes] I do love studying the Bible.  There’s a lot of wisdom to be found there, a lot of history, and it’s jam-packed with all sorts of things we humans and products of western civilization probably ought to recognize about ourselves.  At least if we ever aspire to cease being smart two-legged omnivores and become human beings.

There mightn’t be any better case study past/present of humanity than modern secular Israel and the gene-pool of those folks as they behaved in ancient times.  Fact is, OT Hebrews struggled along as bronze-age barbarians killing, robbing, enslaving and generally hating their neighbors for a debatably long time.  Never got along with anyone who wasn’t among their tribes.  And eventually paid the price by revolting against the Romans once too often.

Those miles of crosses along the Appian way outside Rome that Christians are fond of taking ownership of were actually predominantly Jews the Romans managed to catch.  And those they couldn’t catch were scattered from hell-to-breakfast across Europe and the Middle East for the next 2000 years.  The ‘diaspora’.

You’d think a self-defined tribe would learn something from all that.  But those ancient Hebrews weren’t all that different from the rest of us.  So, when the major European powers and the US developed a sentimental kinship for the descendants of the ancient Hebrews and decided to let them return to the Middle East to a formal Israeli nation, the tribe had to fight their genetic cousins of different religious persuasions to take it away from them.

It all might have worked.  accommodations and compromises could almost certainly have been made.  The Muslims had a long history of toleration for their Jewish cousins.  Far more tolerant than Europeans.  As far as I’ve ever been able to discover there was never a single Muslim pogrom, attempt to exterminate Jews on any scale comparable to what always existed in Europe.

Fighting at the beginning was inevitable, but once it was all established a person would assume the modern secular state of Israel would begin battening down the hatches, finding any way it could to keep the neighbors happy, make them happy to have those Jews back in the neighborhood.

But Jews being human beings and a lot of them with a long European cultural history as baggage, spent the next 65 years doing exactly what their ancestors in ancient times had done.  Even though they were badly outnumbered.  They knew they had the upper hand, knew they had friends of super-power status to fend off any new diaspora.

So they flew the ‘Don’t Give An Inch’ flag and went through a series of wars wars wars, same as the rest of us of European stock.  Which we might well have partly learned by venerating their holy book.

The Bible’s been well-studied for 2000 years now, both by Christians and by Jews.  But there’s every reason to believe we haven’t learned a damned thing from it.

Old Jules

From bronze-age barbarian to nuclear warhead rocket-rattler.  Same as the rest of us.

Getting nasty old Brother Coon safely into the past

tabby asleep outdoors3

Although I don’t believe I’ve come right out and said so, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the felines since June 9th when old Brother Coon made his debut.  Even though I’m not inclined to think he was sick, it’s not easy to reconcile with my past experience with wild animals.  If it weren’t for the single episode a year or two ago when Hydrox and I stood off a somewhat aggressive coon [described somewhere on this blog] I’d be more concerned.

But even so, I don’t trust this last one.  In 70 years of being around wild critters this qualifies as the first time I’ve ever been attacked by one, even though I’ve been in close woods-proximity to a lot of them including bears and cougars.  Always was able to stand off the bears without any increase in heartbeat rates and the cougars never had much interest in me.

But when I consider how big I must have looked to old Brother Coon I can’t help thinking this incident might involve something wrong with his thinker.

And as I’ve describe on some other recent posts, Tabby’s been acting uncharacteristally stand-offish, paranoid, etc.  Usually I wouldn’t be much bothered by that, because Tabby’s a cat with a long history of behavioral changes, more-or-less when the wind changes.

She seems healthy enough even though she barely comes to the porch for food and definitely doesn’t want any attention, affection, etc.  This morning she only spent a few minutes up here eating dry cat food then headed off across the meadow to sit staring back.  I took some canned food out there and she devoured it, but didn’t encourage me to scratch her behind the ears or stroke her.

I gave her what she wanted without any arguments.

Today’s June 21 and the Great Coon Incident happened June 9.  I’ll return to being insistent with Tabby when two weeks have passed, assuming she’s not foaming at the mouth or wobbling on her hind legs.

Old Jules