Tag Archives: Human Behavior

Israeli wedding of Jew, Muslim of different sexes draws protesters amid war tensions

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-wedding-jew-muslim-draws-protesters-amid-war-000304290.html

Hi readers.  People in the Middle East do not like it when people of opposite sexes marry.  Currently in Tel Aviv there’s a huge hoopla going on where a man of Arabic descent and a woman of similar, though Jewish religious persuasion wish to marry.  Protesters of both sexes gathered to shout slogans pointing to the fact they were genetically identical, not far removed from being cousins.

There’s considerable fear in Israel and Palestine that intermarrying of opposite sexes will lead to deformed offspring and genetic drift.  It’s feared the children will be violent, greedy, unreasonable and probably profoundly dishonest.

This simply will not do,” one protestor shouted, “Find someone of your own sex to marry!  Death to opposite sexes!”

I don’t know much about Israeli and Palestinians overall, but I do hate to think of genetic drift confusing things over there.  And opposite sex marriages seem to be a bad idea in a place where any offspring are likely to carry similar traits to their parents.

Old Jules

Blacks in Ferguson, MO, emulate Israel rampage of destruction

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

We human beings would be a lot more believable if we weren’t such lying, greedy, opportunistic sneaky creatures.  Some cop in Ferguson, MO, shot himself a young black man the other day, as cops have a way of doing when the wife has a headache or the dog bites them, or the car needs new tires.  And when they do it tends to piss off the black Native Americans who live in the communities where it happens.

Black Native Americans aren’t that different from White Native Americans or Hispanic Native Americans in that regard.  They don’t like people killing their kids just for the amusement it gives them.  If it were the kids of middle-to-upper-middle to upper-class White Native Americans the cop-bosses would be on the shooters like stink on crap if they couldn’t arrange for a throw-down weapon or construe some other excuse for the officer having a bad day.

But Hispanic Native Americans and Black Native Americans only enjoy the privilege of having cops beating their kids to death on pain of having the copshops shaking his hand and congratulating him, mostly.  The copshop attitude toward those matters is generally that if the kid wasn’t doing something at that moment they probably owed him one from sometime they didn’t know about.

Which tends to raise the ire down in the hoods among the family and potential targets for police officer tension management moments.  Down in the hood it’s not difficult to understand some mild frustrations exist as a result of the fact the problem’s lingered so badly, overall.  They’d like to see something done about it.  This time, every time.  They’d legitimately like to see the officer beaten to death, or otherwise treated with reciprocal formality.  Legitimate grievance.

So what the hell do they do?  They smash and loot candy bars and free potatio chips out of the local convenience store.  Owned by people who didn’t have a damned thing to do with killing the kid.  Stand off in the distance and yell, throw rocks.  Stupid.

It’s as though they’re taking lessons from Israel, going on a binge of killing and property theft and destruction directed at people who had nothing to do with firing rockets or kidnapping Israeli kids.  Smash and grab for the property in Palestine they haven’t settled yet with good Israelis.  Stealing candy and potato chips in the form of minerals in the Med off the coast of Gaza.

We human beings are surely sneaky.  But we still have a lot to learn from Israel, and Israel doesn’t learn from anyone, even their own history and the long history of Jews worldwide.  Same as the rest of us they’ve never been guiltless.  But it would be a shame to see Israel screw things up for honest, only  ordinary-level dishonest and greedy Jews elsewhere in the world.  Jews who are behaving the way the rest of us barely believable and secretly greedy non-Jews behave.  Which is about the best anyone could ask for from humans.  But Israel going over the top with it makes everyone look bad in the eyes of people prone to hate Jews anyway.

We’d be a lot more believable, we humans if we weren’t so dishonest.  And greedy.  And mean as snakes.

You’ve got to admit, Israelis and the Black Native Americans down in the worst neighborhoods stealing anything they can get their hands on and mugging anyone weak enough to be mugged, are surprisingly similar.  Both begging for handouts from the US Government, and Israel actually receiving a cumulative $130 billion or so for their efforts, though mostly in weaponry.  Nobody buys guns for anyone in the hood, which is unfair any way you cut it.

Old Jules

Flea circus, Portales, New Mexico circa 1955

Flea Circus. Torps Flea Circus Tivoli Copenhagen 1956

Hi readers.  I’d just about decided my memory played tricks.  Two years in a row I remember  the carnival at the Roosevelt County Fair having a flea circus a kid could see for a dime.  Vivid memory because I somehow accidently went into the tent next door where a woman in a bathing suit who had no arms was typing on a typewriter with her toes.

But I’ve told a lot of people who grew up in Portales at that time about the flea circus and none remember it.  Most think I just dreamed it up, or remembered wrongly, which can happen.

Only the reason they thought so, and the reason I’d begun to thnk so, was that I came to believe no such thing as a flea circus ever existed outside imaginations.

The magic of YouTube doesn’t prove a flea market came to town with the carnival in Portales, New Mexico circa 1956, but it proves beyond doubt it might have.

Secrets of the Flea Circus

Secrets of the Real Flea Circus Revealed! National Geographic (Professor Oddnaught)

Genuine Flea Circus

No shortage of flea circuses were making the rounds those days.

So all you people who went to school beside me and don’t remember attending the flea circus I, think there wasn’t one, I say, “Horsefeathers!”  If you hadn’t been spending all your money on the steam shovels and cotton candy you’d have seen it too.  Playing bingo with pieces of corn on a checkerboard never got anyone into a tent where a woman with no arms in a bathing suit typed with her toes.

Old Jules

 

The Last Summer of La Boyita – gender ambiguities

THE LAST SUMMER OF LA BOYITA – Trailer – Peccadillo streaming on Netflix

The Last Summer of La Boyita 2009NR 88 minutes On her summer vacation, young Jorgelina travels to the countryside, where she befriends a local ranch hand with an unusual secret. More Info Starring: Guadalupe Alonso, Nicolás Treise Director: Julia Solomonoff

The lush countryside of Argentina sets the tone for this tender tale of the summer when childhood is left behind. As school uniforms are sloughed off in favor of bathing suits, much more is revealed. Argentina , 2009 , 86 min. Screening Monday, June 21, 7:00 PM during the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.

A promising lad on a ranch in Argentina begins to experience monthly bleeding and growing boobs.  Mom takes him to the nearest physician, who examines, looks strangely at her, hands her a sheaf of typed reports of findings and recommendations to go to Buenos Aires for extensive testing by a specialist.

Mama goes home and the bleeding stops, so she puts the papers in a safe place and forgets it all.  Meanwhile the absentee doctor from somewhere else who owns the ranch comes back for the summer with his daughter.  The boygirl friendish ranch hand starts bleeding again and confides to the doctor’s daughter, who confides the secret to doctor/owner.

He examines the youngster and discovers he was misdiagnosed at birth as being a boy.  That he’s actually a budding female.

Naturally his father, the ranch manager, beats the holy hell out of him as soon as he learns of it because of the deception.

And so on.

An amusing and unusual movie.

Old Jules

 

Sylvia Plath and so many other suicides

Hi readers.  Someone female sitting in the lobby late one night tossed The Bell Jar aside and groaned a curse.  Headed for the wagon yard, I reckons.  So I picked up Plath’s tome and read enough to remember everything else I ever knew, ever wanted to know about Sylvia Plath.  Most vividly I remembered a poem, Daddy, by Ms Plath.  Some University of Texas poetry course caused me to write a ten page paper about it once.

I learned to hate the thought Sylvia Plath and her lot shared this planet with regular human beings.  And after reading a while on Bell Jar, chunking it, I wrote this:

Virus of the mind

The drumbeat litany of hatred
And blame;
Of smug mindless naiveté
Numbs the mind.
Alienation is a welcome gift
From the universe
When it involves the inability
To identify with THAT.

The preoccupation with death
As though death is an unnatural state,
Created by a dark maker for the shallow purpose
Of providing a source of terror and sadness
For tiny humans;
Leaves me with a yearning:

Just once I’d like to see a poem
Just once.
A poem full of truths:

“I gave you permission
to hurt me and make me angry;
because of my illusions and expectations
you never agreed to satisfy
and didn’t
now I’m angry.

“I wanted you to behave a certain way.
Because I wanted it, I demanded it
In my expectations of you
without saying so.

“I wanted you to give up your choices.
I didn’t want it
because giving them up would make you
happier
Or more fulfilled.
I just wanted it because I wanted it.

“I’m used to getting my way.
I’ll hate you if I don’t get it.

“I’ll hate you fiercely
and if that doesn’t work
I’ll threaten to kill myself
Just to get you back.”

Or,

“I’m angry.  I’ve always been angry.
Life isn’t fair and it pisses me off.
I haven’t gotten everything I want.
Sometimes my parents weren’t kind to me;
Didn’t give me what I wanted.

“I talk to my friends and they’re angry, too.
The more we talk the more we realize life isn’t fair
And it pisses us off.

“We talk among ourselves
About how cool it would be
To kill some of those flawed bastards
We don’t like.

“We savor our anger; our hatred
We wallow in it
And think of different ways we’d like to kill
The bastards we don’t like;
How much we’d enjoy killing.
We all know
Because took a voice vote.

“Some nerd who wears his glasses crooked
And isn’t cool;
Some football jock who gets all the girls
We’d like to get;
We hate the girls and the jocks.

“Some sarcastic adult who isn’t cool
And doesn’t respect our views
About how the world is.

“We’d like to kill them all.
We took a voice vote
And we all agree.”

“We haven’t studied much
Nor read much
Nor lived much
Nor listened much
But that doesn’t keep us
From knowing how life is;
How life should be.”

“We’re angry and we’d like to kill them all!
We took a voice vote.

“And by God you’ll see
You’ll be sorry
When I kill myself!”

And the Ted Hugheses of the world , the Daddys

Sort through selective memories to avoid the truth

About this creature they loved.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003 Jack Purcell

Suicide: Make it count, son. There’s money to be made.

Hi readers.  Shortly after I came back to town after The End of Life As We Know It and the Y2K I gave myself [you can probably find the stories of that by searching the blog for Y2K] I went to work graveyard shift.  Travel Lodge, maybe, or Motor Inn, night clerk.  11pm-7am.  That story’s here somewhere, too.

Those nights in that motel were always long, sometimes interesting, never boring.  At least not to me, but I don’t recall ever having been bored this lifetime.

One night a guy came down from his room and sat in the lobby, just wanted to talk.  He was in town as part of a team cleaning up a particularly messy suicide.  That’s what he did for a living.  Travelled all over the place where suicides happened and left a terrible mess, maybe a hazardous one.

Interesting guy, with a perspective about suicide and life that I mightn’t agree with, but am glad I encountered anyway.  So sometime one of those long nights later I wrote this thing I might have once called a poem:

Industry

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Is tasteless and inconsiderate.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.

Lawsuits, insurance forms
Police reports
Accident reports
For a non accident.

Clerks, cops, lawyers
Funeral directors
Morticians
And the little guy.

Someone has to clean up
Those brain and bloodstains
On the walls and carpets;
Pick the bone fragments
Out of the doorframe
With a pair of needle nosed pliers;
Plug the holes
Re paint. 
Mop up those
Sidewalk body fluids
Untangle the lariat
Or phone cord
From the light fixture
Scrub bathtub
crimson rings.

Someone has to manufacture
Sleeping pills
Bullets
Razorblades
Ropes.

And hospital beds
For the faint of heart.

Some of that’s still
Made in America
(Good quality, too
And I’m damned proud
To say it.)

It’s hard times.
A man has to go where the work is.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.
It’s commerce.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003, NineLives Press, Jack Purcell

Old Jules

Depression

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

I noticed on the television down at the Olathe Community Center to be stared at by people on treadmills and other torture machines that some big name celebrity killed himself.  Guy who was in an amusing movie once about a house that an airplane crashed into and he bought it because it had been pre-disastered.

I don’t know.  Maybe the guy was terminally ill, or maybe just depressed.  That crap can surely happen.  Back in my younger days I used to go into a black pit of depression there seemed no way out of.  Where it seemed the Universe was trying to drag me into the hole a person doesn’t come back out of, the way this Williams guy exited.

I was lucky in a lot of ways, though I’m not sure what all of them were.  I had a name for the ‘entity’ that seemed to take possession of my mind and spirit during those times.  I called it the blue demon.  Because it seemed to be a real being.

And the way I eventually got it into my past so’s I have to work to remember about it, was by treating it as a living, thinking creature with a will I could do battle with, wrestle it to the ground.  Banish it from my psyche.

And once I discovered I could do that and did it successfully and thoroughly one time, afterward it was a lot easier.  For decades afterward anytime I sensed that blue demon out of the corner of my perceptions I’d immediately jump in and do battle with it again, drive it out before it got a foothold.

It worked so well for me that I’ve sometimes gone years, maybe decades without ever sensing it, doing battle with it.  But it’s still there, lurking, waiting for things to happen in its favor.  When my health began the slide down the slippery slope the old blue demon tried whispering to me out of the wings a few times.

Interestingly, I think I have a lot of the symptoms of clinical depression right now, today, minus the blue demon black pit and the anguish that goes with it.  I’m a happy, lucky man, grateful and congratulating myself for it a thousand times per day.

But I can’t force myself to open my mail.  I don’t answer the telephone unless I’m confident who is calling. Have to force myself to do anything that falls into the  arena of acknowledging one hell of a lot of life that would love to come in and say hello.

I’m probably going to have to do something about that.  Maybe give it a name, shake hands with it, and do battle.  I’m just not there yet.

Old Jules

 

Israel Calls For Increase In U.S. Taxes To Fund Attacks On Gaza

The Onion, News in PhotosNewsISSUE 48•46Nov 16, 2012  

  Israel Calls For Increase In U.S. Taxes To Fund Attacks On Gaza

http://www.theonion.com/articles/israel-calls-for-increase-in-us-taxes-to-fund-atta,30423/

 

Image

Nation Horrified By Carolina Panthers’ Disturbingly Graphic Logo Redesign

Sports icons are evolving to better accommodate 21st Century residents
The Onion: Photo FinishSportsfootballUnsponsoredFeb 5, 2012
When the Confederate battle flags became unacceptable as a source of self-identity for Carolinians something was bound to replace them.

Deaf school begins fall term

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Across the road I’m looking at a playing field filled with banners celebrating the return of the deaf athletes who’ll be attending the Kansas School for the Deaf.  The buildings sit beyond the playing fields and cover roughly a city block.

Interestingly the players get their plays called by drumbeat codes.  Reason, of course, being that shouted calls won’t be heard.  However, one game they always win, Olathans assure one another, is the big one of the season against the Kansas School for the Blind.  That one’s always a sellout, standing-room-only game.  A heartening event to watch.

I’m not a big lover of football but I’ll be watching the practice occasionally from the front porch.  If I knew a bookie I think I’d place a bet on that big game with the School for the Blind.  I’m always on the side of the underdog.  And I’m a firm believer in the old saying about finding acorns.  This might be the Year of the Acorn for blind football players.

Old Jules