I don’t think this applies to caged chickens, but my experience with caged birds is limited. All I can actually tell you is that free ranging chickens are some of the most cunning, cagy, calculating, communist creatures on the planet.
A free ranging hen can calculate to the second how long it takes my eyes to narrow, my jaw to clamp, pause listening, and spring out of my chair when I’m trying to do something on the comp and I hear a chicken on the porch.
A free ranging hen can judge almost to the inch how far and hard a person can throw a rock with any accuracy. A free ranging hen can predict almost exactly how far and how fast a 70 year old man can run swinging a stick before he gives out.
A free ranging hen is able to predict within a few seconds how long and how loud it can cackle and raise hell just outside the window before it needs to start dodging rocks or running into the bushes.
A free ranging chicken recognizes a slingshot and knows the difference between a slingshot stretched as an empty threat, and a slingshot with just about a bellyfull of chicken games.
A free ranging chicken usually won’t eat ants unless it thinks a person would rather it didn’t, in which case it will. The whole flock will stand on a red ant bed pecking, so long as the ants aren’t carrying off their feed to the ant bed.
A free ranging chicken will ignore hard cat food scattered around on the ground away from the porch, but it will sneak around trying to find some on the porch everytime it thinks a person’s in the middle of something needs concentration.
I subscribe to the philosophy the reason the chicken crossed the road was for practice. Training dodging cars. And motivated by some human being not wanting it to cross the road. Try to get a chicken to cross the road and it’s going to stay home cackling under the window or crapping on the porch.
In town the other day I stopped into the Autozone store for a roll of electrical tape, nosed around a bit and found some titanium drill bits I think might be an improvement over the simulated drill bits I have around here.
Paid my money and went out the front door into the heat. Sitting beside Little Red was a shiny 20 year old sedan with tinted windows rolled up, engine running, making the damnedest racket I’ve ever heard an automobile make. The noise could have been heard across the street and the car almost seemed to be shaking with each new sound. I stared at it a moment trying to figure out what could be wrong with it, what was happening to it.
“That car’s got a MAJOR problem,” thinks I. “I’ll bet the owner’s going to love coming back out here and finding a pile of auto parts instead of what he rode in on.”
I perused the distance between it and Little Red to consider whether I dared go back inside to warn someone, or needed to get further from it. Decided to take the chance and stepped back inside.
A line of people were at the cash register waiting to pay and the clerk was ringing someone up. I interrupted him and he looked up.“That car out there sounds like it’s about to explode!” I gestured behind me, still looking at him.
Three people backward in line a guy who looked as though he just got out of prison, muscle shirt with a lot of muscles to go with it scowled at me and took half-a-step out of line. “No. That’s my music.” Questioning, tentative look, brink-of-threatening, deciding, considering.
“Oh. Okay.”
I did an about face and moved outside sharply. Stared and listened to the car again, trying to squeeze the concept of music into the equation. I couldn’t pull it off. Shook my head and got in Little Red feeling slightly foolish.
It’s what I get for poking my nose into someone else’s business, I reckons.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I’m really glad I don’t have free will. If I’d had free will I’d almost certainly have screwed things up something awful. I can’t see any way a person making a lifetime of deliberate, conscious choices could have made the necessary ones to allow me to eventually become me. If I’d had to find my way through that maze all by myself there’s no guessing what I’d have become, what would have become of me.
I’m a firm believer the Universe gave us scorpions, black widow spiders, brown recluse spiders and similar poisonous orthropods to train a man to shake out his trousers and boots before he puts them on. But he no sooner learns it than he begins to forget slowly, and eventually he’s pulling on his britches or boots same as if the Universe hadn’t blessed us with Brother Scorpion.
But if the timing is good, if the Universe is feeling generous, and if the asteroid Pallas is 85 days since a conjunction with Old Sol and 293 days since an opposition, sometimes the Universe will cut us a break. A man can slip on his britches, pull up his galluses, feel something crawling up his leg under the cloth, dance around slapping his pants, and shake out a regular big bug carcass instead of the various alternatives.
But I’ve digressed.
Yesterday I borrowed Little Red and headed to town feeling good, but worn down to a small frazzle from cutting big cedars with my expensively repaired chainsaw, dragging them over piece-by-piece to construct a tasteful aspiring beaver dam. Made all the feedstore, thrift store, grocery store and dollar store stops grinning like a possum, joking with the store clerks. Bought a can of Chinese boot wax and asked the clerk whether he could tell it from Shinola, which brought a blank look.
Even bought two packages of this for a buck each at Dollar Tree. I’ve never seen the stuff before, but my thigh was itching something fierce from that non-black widow earlier. I was feeling a strong urge to find a restroom and drop my pants for a looksee.
As a backup, in case whatever was going on down there was as full of drama as it felt, I picked up a tube of this, too, at a buck.
But I’ve digressed again.
On the way out of Dodge I swung by the Boys Ranch Thrift Store, second to the last stop. Not much of interest there except a shopping cart full of hardback books with a sign, “Free Books”. I nosed around, popped open an anthology, A Treasure of the Familiar. It opened to “Barbara Allen“, which I haven’t thought of in half-a-century. Walked out singing to myself, trying to remember the words to “Barbara Allen“, putting the first few stanza together. Sang it a mile down the road to the dog-catcher thrift store, debating with myself whether to go inside, or just head home.
In the parking lot a joyful sight grabbed me.
The finest off-road vehicle I’ve ever owned was a 1986 Montero. Thousands of giddy miles up and down mountains, desert and canyons in my old Montero. That truck would squeeze between any two trees the Universe could invent, climb anything, go through hip-deep water. But when you got it stuck, it was for-sure, lead-pipe cinch, STUCK.
So I left that place singing “Barbara Allen” at the top of my lungs, pretending Little Red was my old Montero, remembering and flying low to the ground.
Stopped in to drop off a few bags of feed at Gale’s, needing to lift something to bring myself down, but even after unloading a few hundred pounds of sacks, still singing, still flying.
I’d just settled in for my afternoon nap when the phone rang. Sheeze!
Radio announcer voice explained he was Dan Somebody-or-Other with the Police Benevolent Association fund raising.
“This number’s on the no-call list. It’s illegal for you to call here. Same as if you’re giving me a ticket for five miles over the speed limit.”
“Uh…”
“I paid a $35 fine for a burned-out license-tag bulb last time I had any dealings with your kind. Think of that as my contribution.”
Spang hung up on me just when I was getting warmed up to ask to see his license and proof of insurance.
Meanwhile, went up atop the hill with my spyglass. Counted 14 buzzards circling around the ranch house for the 4000-plus acre ranch half-a-mile to the north. Widow lives there alone, but maybe she had grandkids visiting killed something last night. The buzzards are swooping but not landing, maybe skittish because it’s so close to the house and barn.
No buzzards circling over toward Gale’s, the new neighbor’s place, or the CopShop Party Hunting Cabin. Only other buzzards swooping are probably checking out a coon that was on the front porch a couple of nights ago, tore half-an-ear off the invader cat. I shot it through the window screen during a pause in the action and it flopped some, dropped a lot of blood on the porch.
But by the time I got my shoes on and went outdoors it was gone. Looked around all over from hell-to-breakfast for it next day, but couldn’t locate it.
Buzzards think it’s under a clump of dead cedar 100 yards from the cabin. Glad it didn’t die on the porch and dump all those fleas for the cats.
Built a humongous rock and brush dam I’m hoping will prove to function as though a beaver built it. I’m a firm believer the only reason a beaver dam holds water is because nobody ever told it science don’t allow beaver dams to hold water.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
1:55 am I must have been on the verge of awakening anyway. Someone fired off six rounds from what might have been a .22 magnum rimfire pistol, rapid, but somewhat spaced. Then a pause, maybe to reload, then a single shot. Close enough and loud enough to get one of the roosters crowing and me considering the matter.
Then, 2:15 am, ten, maybe 13 rapid fire shots from a large-bore autoloading pistol. Afterward, silence.
It’s none of my affair, but I’ll confess to lying there awake pondering it all. Doesn’t make any sense at all. That first six shots sounded aimed, maybe someone shooting a coon, hitting, but not getting a killing shot. Reloading, issuing a coup d’grace.
Okay. But what about the second set of shots, thinks I. Something didn’t die, or run away? Someone crawling around amongst the ticks and rattlers looking for a target to shoot back at?
What the hell?
I don’t mean to be nit-picky and overly critical, but I’m thinking it might have been poachers who didn’t have a clue.
Dammit, that isn’t the way you road-hunt deer. You use a .22, spot it between the fences, drop it with one shot, get it into the trunk or back of the truck and get out of Dodge. And you don’t road-hunt on a road where there’s only one way out [back the way you came], such as this one.
That’s all assuming it’s outsiders. Anyone living around here hungry for deer meat would just knock one on the head with a hammer daytimes when they’re trying to run them out of the front yard.
Okay, poachers road-hunting seem unlikely.
On the other hand, those cops from Beaumont who rent the lease half-mile southeast of here were up there a few days ago. Maybe they just got noisy-drunk again and had a firefight over one of their lady friends who sometimes squeal and go shrill after midnight. That might make sense.
Or maybe the new neighbor was just trying out his night-vision on something moved in the bushes and the dog barked.
Hell, I don’t know. Ain’t my affair. I’ll keep an eye open for the vultures circling, anyway.
During the toughest times of the post-Y2K years the blessing I appreciated most, but enjoyed least was cutting salt cedar in the bosques, trimming it,and selling it as latillas off some busy intersection in Albuquerque. The best bosques weren’t accessible by vehicle, were loaded with ticks, and all the bosques on the Rio Grande are home to more rattlesnakes than live in the rest of New Mexico combined.
But when nothing else was working, when they’d cut off the utilities because I couldn’t pay the bills, I’d hitch up Old Faithful, the pickup bed trailer, load the chainsaw and loppers, and head for the bottomlands for a couple of days.
The work was grueling. Bundling them and pissanting them back to the trailer took forever and assured a person would have a dozen ticks fighting over every inch of skin, and avoiding Brother Rattler required lightning reflexes along with a wary eye.
Once I had a full trailer-load I’d bundle them, pack them down and find a busy street corner where I’d sell them for $10 per bundle. Usually took all day, but I’d try to get back to Grants in time to reach the city offices, pay the utilities and have the power turned back on first thing the next day.
It’s a lot easier in Texas, though I doubt there’s any market for them. Never heard of anyone in Texas using latillas. But salt cedar’s as water-hogging, damaging, invasive and pervasive here as in New Mexico. Grows in the grader ditch between here and the State Ranch Road 385.
I can get a truckload of it in half-hour or so, and in a lot of ways I think it might be better than juniper for erosion control. In that particular length of driveway between Gale’s front gate and his house the last runoff bypassed some of the earlier work and cut some new channels. The salt cedar’s easier to obtain in this instance than juniper, so I’m shoring it up with salt cedar.
I’ve built four more rock and brush dams downstream from the first one in the creek to the east, hopefully to catch whatever washes out of the main one, come next runoff event.
Hmmm an aside. A digression. A parenthetical remark:
The new neighbor up the hill’s got him a spanking new machine to back up his track loader dozer and his rubber-tired backhoe/frontend loader.
It’s a lopper of the magnum variety mounted on a Bobcat with tracks over the tires. Air conditioned, everything computerized, even got a rock rake with it. Only $57K.
I reckons I’ll just stick with my $8 thrift store Chinese repair job loppers.
Meanwhile, on a more exciting note.
I was telling my friend Rich on the phone about weirdness and anomalies I was getting on barycentric calculations for Old Sol positions. While we were talking he went to the US Naval Observatory site and pulled up the ‘Read Me’ file for the MICA software.
Rich, generous, amazing friend that he is, spang right-then-and-there ordered a copy for me.
Turns out they discovered an error for multiple calculations that didn’t exist for single calculations. They’ve released a new version, 2.2.2, with the errors corrected, along with some other improvements I’d grumbled to myself it needed but suffered silently.
Only trouble I’ve found with it is that it won’t allow me to import my hundred-or-so custom locations. I’m having to feed them in individually, longitude, latitude, elevations, each freaking one! The Location Manager’s designed so I can’t even copy and paste them.
And when I luckily installed it on the old machine first, just in case, it over-wrote my old location manager. Freaking erased it spang off the damned computer.
Damned pointee-headed astronomer bastards. Rot in hell.
The cascading failure of representative democracy in the US has a lot of causes. Those involve all manner of shell games played by professional politicians, political parties, incumbents, payoffs, power blocks, extortions, bribes, and bird-nests on the ground. Doesn’t matter whether it’s local, state government, national government or some district or other. It’s always the same names, the same non-working solutions, the same broken promises, the same background names everyone recognizes buying them off.
So how’s a country going to break itself free of all the ne’er-do-wells hanging around over Power Lunches, back rooms, limousines, and board rooms thinking up new ways to get rich?
The answer is actually fairly obvious and simple. Opening the system up, letting it air out. Castrating the tradition of pork barrelling over the falls of disaster by a transfusion of new, uncorrupted [yet] blood and single-term tenure in office.
You want to be king? Buy a ticket and take your chances. Want to be a senator or congressman and get rich fast? Buy as many tickets as you want. Sheriff? Mayor? State Governor? Same deal.
Think how refreshing it would be to have some waitress with things sticking out of her lips, nostrils, belly button for your president instead of some sleezeball never did anything in his life except improve his lying skills. A US Senator who only last week lived down in a trailer park trying to figure out how to keep his truck from being repossessed. A governor who just last week was a librarian, clerk in a toy store, selling lawn mowers, renting out excavating equipment, building houses, working some-way-or-other. Scrambling, trying to get by.
There’s a long tradition of picking juries by lottery. And jury-duty’s one hell of a lot more important than hanging around Washington D.C. lying, stealing, and thinking up new strait-jackets for the citizenry to wear.
It ain’t going to happen, of course. If it did I’d personally be careful not to buy a ticket. But I’d be tickled pea-green to see the snake shed its skin and grow a new one. Might actually buy a ticket and give it to some guy hanging out in the parking lot down at the convenience store.
The office holders mightn’t be better than the ones up there now, but they’d be fresh and it would spread the wealth around.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Mostly it’s just a hodge-podge here at the moment. Got a call from Gale and Kay before sunset, they were on the way home, he’d been released from the hospital. So things are good on that front.
The rainfall event following the most recent post was about three inches according to the new neighbor. Below’s a pic of Ranch Road 385 crossing the Little Devil Creek [locals are adamant it’s a ‘river’, not a creek]. Provides some perspective about how frequent three-inch rain storms are in this vicinity, and how much more maudlin and sentimental another inch would have been.
The rock and brush dam survived.
There’s a goodly bit of silt dropped ahead of it, the parts that washed out weren’t maudlin and sentimental enough to kill the deal.
Speaking of which. Although there’s a surprising dearth of bumper-stickers for an election year, this [I conjecture] non-political one is still at the top of the charts on Texas bumpers and back windows.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about what drivers who choose this in one form or another are attempting to convey about themselves to other drivers, but thus far it escapes me. No parking lot in Texas is complete without a few vehicles decorated with some variety of the plethora that must be available from the bumper sticker/decal magnates of imagination.
A roll of toilet paper on the ground there under the hat would go a long way to clear things up, if that’s the intended message. But most likely it ain’t.
The demand by Texas drivers that other drivers support undeclared Presidential Military Adventures might be becoming stealthier, though it was fairly stealthy from the start. Replacing the red-white and blue with cammie at least, is an uncharacteristic approach to honesty in motivation.
But as for explicit political bumper stickers, I only saw three. One for some wannabe king who isn’t, the other demanding the current king be dumped without confessing a preference for an alternative.
The other political bumper sticker: SHAFFER FOR SHERIFF – The Next Generation In Law Enforcement, struck me as a bit ominous. Evidently the candidate wants voters to know he intends to incorporate more sophisticated surveillance, cameras, cow prods, computerized profiling of drivers at traffic stops, weaponry with more fire power, and newer vehicles for deputies to ride around in.
Finally, I got my chainsaw back finally from putting it in to let a real person work on it, finally. Haven’t fired it up yet, but I know from what it cost to get it worked on and how long it took, that it’s gonna be a bull-goose chainsaw now.
You folks looking for an entrepreneurial enterprise to occupy yourselves might be well served by considering small engine repairs. This guy had a parking lot filled with riding lawn mowers waiting to be fixed, and if the chainsaw’s any indicator, there’s a fortune waiting to be made.
I talked to Kay on the phone last night. Gale’s doing a lot better. His marble-sized kidney-stone is still in there, but they installed some kind of bypass tube until they can identify what it’s made of, then break it up or do something else with it. His fever’s down and though he’s still in ICU, looks as though this won’t be his excuse for exiting the vehicle.
Marble-sized kidney stones ought to be worth something, considering the trouble a person goes to in the growing of them. The only one I ever had was only the size of a grassburr, but it was worth every cent I paid for it, plus some boot. In Peace Corps training I’d passed some blood and the medico told me it was probably a kidney stone, so I thought I knew about them, but I didn’t. If that Hawaii thing was a kidney stone I must have been living right.
This one came on suddenly, sometime in the mid-1970s, and for a few hours it got so the nearest thing to a painless position was upside down against the wall, bent at the neck, torso, feet and legs held up by the wall.
I decided I was dying fast and agreed to allow my ex-wife to haul me to Scott and White Hospital, 30 minutes away, to die there. Someone in the emergency room suggested it might be a kidney stone and I emphatically declared it wasn’t. “I’ve had a kidney stone. This isn’t a kidney stone. This is a grapefruit-sized tumor!”
They took me at my word and pursued other avenues for several hours while I demanded they check me in and begin cutting out that tumor. Around midnight I began telling my wife I’d be dead in just a little while, “You’ve been a blessing in my life, Babe. I’m sorry to leave you like this.”
But they finally dyed my bloodstream and proved to me it was a kidney stone. Gave me a shot of morphine and I went around the ER shaking hands, thanking everyone, congratulating them on being genius-quality practicioners of medicine. They assured me the morphine would wear off and offered the hope I’d pass the stone before it did.
But I’ve digressed. Get a person telling about a kidney stone and he’ll tell it as long as you’ll listen. Giardia and kidney stones have that in common, though giardia might be worse in the long haul. Getting the Egyptian Ducksquirts and abdominal cramping for six months is probably memorable. Then there’s shingles, which I could tell you about, but won’t. But all those qualify as 900 pound gorillas, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Mostly people survive them.
Yeah, I digressed again. I began this post to tell you about Junction, Texas. The County Seat. Gale and I went over there the day his world took the plunge into the planet-kidney-stone, so’s he could submit his application for the Agricultural Tax Whatchallit.
I was going to tell you how a mile of main street had half a dozen cars parked along it, how a few businesses are still struggling to survive. How they have a lot of thrift stores, but the prices are too high. How the town’s got a huge park on the river I’d like to fish in sometime.
But I won’t. To hell with it. I’ll tell you some other time.
Jefe:I have put many beautiful pinatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little suprises. El Guapo:Many pinatas? Jefe:Oh yes, many! El Guapo:Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas? Jefe:A what? El Guapo:A “plethora”. Jefe:Oh yes, you have a plethora. El Guapo:Jefe, what is a plethora? Jefe:Why, El Guapo? El Guapo:Well, you told me I have a plethora. And I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has no idea* what it means to have a plethora. Jefe:Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
Three Amigos – circa 1980s
Mindless outdoors work gives me a lot of time for my thoughts to ramble into unexpected places. Theyve been doing that a lot lately.
I’ve found myself pondering how a governed population can escape resp0nsibility for the activities of the government they put up with. No matter how oppressive that government might be, no matter how inclined the members of that government are to ignore the wishes of the governed [or responsibility for the consequences of their decisions as fragments of the governing body].
If any of us gave a damn about karma we’d probably be concerned. Everywhere on this planet human beings are allowing themselves to be governed. Tacitly approving and being a part of what those governments do. The bedrock fact is there… those governments couldn’t do what they do without the consent, at one level or another, of the populations giving them support.
Nanking, say, couldn’t have been raped by Japanese if some substantial piece of the Japanese population hadn’t actively or tacitly participated. The gulags in the USSR, the NAZI horrors, even the killing fields in Cambodia weren’t just a government job of work. The insane, lazy, entrepreneural capitulation of US education, industry, economic solvency, labor and energy leading to where we are now didn’t happen because of single piece of government idiocy, corporate greed, educator incompetence, Chief Executive dynastic aspirations.
Those pinatas hanging in the pic at the top came to be there because the citizenry of the US snort coke and toke marijuana through one breath and pretend they don’t through the next. And they’re going to remain silent and pay for more penal institutions so long as the folks filling up the prisons for doing it have enough pigment to their skins to keep them out of the equation.
The prohibition against their behavior runs the price of it high enough so’s thousands, millions of people world-wide who are blessed with fewer alternatives find themselves involved in one of the processes. It offers a legion of lawyers a product cycling through a system of human cages to enrich themselves. It provides a river of money to fund so many layers of copshops nobody can keep track of them.
But the bottom line is that it ain’t the government, the copshops, the brotherhood of judges, lawyers, jailers and private prison corporations doing it.
Fact is, it’s humble us. The people who sit on juries.
This entire damned selectively-enriching, otherwise-bankrupting, oligarchy-growing pretended attempt to control the behavior of adults in their private lives, crimes without victims, can’t happen without a dozen citizens on every jury agreeing to help it continue. Those juries, soberly listening to the somber prosecutors, the judges, are pronouncing death penalties every time they sell their souls to an abstraction.
Those people hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo were convicted and sentenced by US jury members who allowed themselves to believe they were just sending some black guy off to the slammer to get himself raped by his fellow felons for possessing a controlled substance.
Jefe:Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
Maybe Jefe was onto something bigger than the knew.
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 