Got an email I haven’t opened, presumably from Norton Symantic noting I haven’t plugged the modem into the E Dell Machine to test the 79 mb downloaded driver.
At least I assume it’s from Norton Symantic, though the whatchallit ‘from’ says it’s from Best-Penis and the subject line says, Max-Gentleman Enlargement Pills. But I’m not fooled. Norton Symantic was popping screens up on me all manner of ways yesterday creeping in with things intended to interrupt my focus and goals for eventually getting this E Dell Machine online.
Norton most likely suspects a degree of trepidation on my part and is poking sharp sticks in my eye suggesting I need to grow a set of whatchallits and go ahead and test it. After which they’ll sell me some penis enlargement software to make it work, which they figure at the moment it ain’t going to do.
Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.
Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire. At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.
But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver. Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work. Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.
But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far.
Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.
So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo! The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts. I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.
She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died. But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized. I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.
Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.
Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole.
So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter. Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller. A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration. A man you want to be like. Same as before all this crap happened.
That’s the proposal for the chapter. Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.
I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am. Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.
Old Jules
6:46 am edit: Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver. The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring. It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future. It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with. Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.
I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.
“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”
Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions. Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick. I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.
“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here? You and me? You and all the cats?” He glared at me. “You, the cats and the chickens?”
I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this. I felt a tirade in the making. “Just you cats and me. The chickens can’t be part of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.” He gestured with his nose toward the porch. “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense. It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”
His frustration was obvious. “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are. For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me. And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”
This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything. “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’. When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’. But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving? Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”
He waited while I considered it. “I suppose I don’t.”
“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”
The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking. Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life.
When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined. The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy.
“Do you have proof of residence?”
“There’s my driver’s license.”
“That’s not enough. I need a utility bill or tax return.”
“I didn’t bring that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy. And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.
Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure. In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries. When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with. In Washington, D.C. In Austin, Texas.
And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.
“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.
Old Jules
“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while. But the skunk-instincts and chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in. The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.” Josephus Minimus
I must have been four, or maybe five When grandfather said, with a snicker, “Where a man wouldn’t go with a Colt .45 That boy will follow his pecker.”
Half a century now mocks: I’d surely be elated If Papa’s eye had turned to stocks Or land speculated.
I’ve frequently suspected my granddad was speaking from his own experience.
One of the rewards the Universe gave me for getting to be this old was the raging hormones fading into oblivion. There’s still plenty of passion in my life, but it’s of a different nature, and it listens to the voice of reason.
I’d never have believed back when passion was a misery to be endured that the Universe had other passions in mind if a person could just make room for them between the preoccupations.
And yet, today I listen to any one of the songs below and it brings back vivid, pleasant memories of [usually] one woman. The shadow of the past agonies is still there if I choose to examine it, but if I don’t the songs and the passage of time allows it all to be a bit nostalgic. And the songs don’t last long enough to insist on thorough remembering.
Old Jules
(Arirang) Korean Folk Song [She never had an orchestra background that I recall]
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes said things too well. It was one of several I put as a single song on a 90 minute tape and wore out. Live version, no embed: http://youtu.be/GQJAsEZ-S3I
Hank Snow 90 Miles an Hours Down a Deadend Street was another ‘said things too well’.
Morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
There was a long email in inbox this morning wanting me to join some protest by ‘blacking out’ this blog. The idea is for me to go to the settings and do something or other to cause the blog to look different, which will result in my having somehow sent as message to someone in the US government that I’m opposed to them doing something or other. In this case, passing something or other limiting ‘freedom’ on the web.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much a proponent of empty meaningless gestures as the next person. But I don’t want to go to a lot of trouble changing settings and possibly not being able to get them back the way they were before.
So, I’m going to take a more direct approach:
TO ALL YOU SENATORS, CONGRESSMEN AND PRESIDENTS OF THE US WHO READ THIS BLOG:
I’M OPPOSED TO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU’RE DOING.
There. If that doesn’t set them straight, nothing will.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.
I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t. The whole thing might be a moot issue. Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air
I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either. I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.
A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.
I’d never seen a white dove before. It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store. So I didn’t figure it was a pet.
But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly. At first I thought it was injured or sick.
It had no fear at all. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground. Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.
A free spirit. Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers. Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages. Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it. But not living in fear.
Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.
I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s. I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.
What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.
On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times. ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.
And to complicate matters further, a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.
I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation. When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents. My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.
I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.
Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must. Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.
So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by this morning.
I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning. Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life. The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream. But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff. I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.
The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.
Busybusybusy. It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was. From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them. I thought they’d passed out of my life.
I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up. Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.
Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back. Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description. It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.
Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again. But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream. I never cared much for him anyway.
When my mom left her second husband near Apache Junction, Arizona to move near my granddad’s place at Causey, New Mexico, I was considerable upset about it all. I’d become overfond of the Arizona guy, liked him a lot despite his human flaws that bothered my mom.
Time proved my level of upset couldn’t be handled by beating it out of me, nor by any of the other usual ways people tried back then to nudge a kid back into being seen and not heard. The Runaways, 1947
My first step-dad [Arizona] was fond of reading the Alley Oop comic strip to me and I was a huge fan. Alley was a cave man skipping forward and backward in time thanks to a 20th Century scientist. Alley even had a 20th Century lady friend named Oola.
About the only thing I’d brought with me from Arizona was my stack of Alley Oop comic strips. We’d travelled light across the desert. And when we arrived in Causey one of the jobs my sisters had was reading those Alley Oops to me, trying to bring up my spirits. Which I suppose it did until they’d finished reading them to me.
Something more permanent had to be done, and my granddad decided to have a shot at it. He promised to take me to visit Alley’s home. Mesa Verde, Colorado.
What a trip that must have been, me pestering him whether we were there yet, how much further before we’d see Alley’s home. I don’t know how long we stayed, but I never forgot old Alley and his home. I still had one picture of the cave dwelling he took back then until Y2K.
And of the hundreds of ancient ruins, documented and undocumented, I’ve poked around in during my life, I’ve never visited one, found one, without thinking to myself with a smile that Alley Oop might have lived there, visited there ahead of me.
When Mel King and I were exploring the ruin on Gobbler’s Knob and were driving back to Socorro when he reached into his daypack for something, came out with a human skull it was the first thing I said to him. “What the hell is that? You packed off Oola’s skull. Get it the hell out of this truck!”
I screeched onto the shoulder and he hid it behind a cedar until we’d be headed back to Gobber’s Knob so he could put it back where it belongs.
Nowadays I think I have more in common with Alley Oop than with any modern human being. If there was ever a right time for me to pop out of the gene pool it would probably have been more appropriate temporally in some other Universe where Alley Oop lived and breathed. It made more sense than this one.
That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect. While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky. She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.
Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet. You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything. A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.
Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.
A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right. Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday? He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him. He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.
The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks. But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.
For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s. Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?
That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act. It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.
On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide. You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for. And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.
I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 