I watched this movie repeatedly in theaters when it came out in 1970, always remembered it, but never came across it again. Four decades later I still have vivid recollections of certain scenes and a general impression it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
I’ve no idea whether I’d still like it today, no idea whether seeing it again would inspire me to think of all of it as still as somehow haunting and valid to the human experience as I once did.
Watching the trailer brought back some reminders of scenes, but it somehow failed to capture whatever it was that captured me.
In some subtle ways my mind connects Brewster McCloud with Balzac’s Droll Stories. A multi-layered plotting capable of being enjoyed for the surface stream hilarity, but containing something fundamental, profound and pervasive about the human condition.
If you’ve watched this movie recently enough to recall it better than I do, or if you should see it after reading this, I’d be interested in learning how it sits with you.
Please help me control the egos of the hats, cats, chickens, deer, wild hogs, dead trees and the Communist Toyota 4-Runner.
I appreciate all you visitors who come here and the kind words many of you say about So Far From Heaven. But I’m asking a favor of all of you. Accept our gratitude, but don’t offer awards.
There are thousands of fantastic blogs on the web. Many of those great blogs are getting blog awards. I believe all of those receiving those awards deserve them, aside from the awards offered to this blog. This blog is not yet worthy of any blog award.
Jeanne and I work hard on So Far From Heaven and we’re both determined to make it better, possibly good enough to receive an award someday. But we both know we aren’t there yet. So Far From Heaven has a long way to go..
Giving blog awards to So Far From Heaven detracts from the value of the awards.
But the blog awards offered to this blog have also bloated the community ego. The cats, chickens, deer, dead trees and even the Communist Toyota have all become insufferable.
So until some time in the future when we consider the blog to have reached a better standard, please accept our thanks for the thought, but don’t nominate So Far From Heaven for blog awards.
I know some of you readers are out of work and having difficulties finding jobs. With this post I’d like to twist your mind around in a way that might give you a different way of approaching the affair of starting to make money to live on.
I don’t know whether there’s any hope or not, but I can tell you it ain’t easy. From the time I gave myself a Y2K until I moved back to Texas I tried a number of desperate ideas that might have worked if I’d been smarter.
But I think there still might be something here in the way of thinking about it to give you a fresh perspective. Trying to find jobs flipping hamburgers at minimum wage or clerking in a motel graveyard shift, or stocking shelves and unloading trucks for a Dollar General didn’t prove out for me. I suspect it won’t for you. A lot of the reason is that young people don’t like working around older people. At least, they din’t in my case.
But the world’s still got niches a person might fill, things that people need doing and might pay to get done that the Chinese can’t get over here to do yet.
Polishing long-haul truck rims, bumpers, gas tanks:
I don’t know whether they’re still doing it, but truckers within the past few years [some of them] had an overweening pride in their wheels, bumpers and grilles.
Frequently they’ll pay up to $100 for the tractor wheels, gas tank, bumper and grille while they catch a snooze at a roadside park or overnight truck stop. An angle grinder/polisher, portable generator and a CB radio are the main costs of going into business.
Didn’t work out for me because my angle polishing head flew off, the knurled stem that held the head walked across the gas tank, cut through a fuel line [the truck was idling] and started squirting diesel all over the place before it caught fire [after he’d shut the rig down].
Might work out better for you. A person could make $500 – $1000 per day if he was fast and good.
Bodyguard:
Bodyguard didn’t work out well for me, either, though it paid well. Anyone who needs a bodyguard usually has a reason for needing one.
Respectable people doing legal things hire bodyguards from companies who do that for a living. But there’s a type of activity going on out there in the world that needs a different kind of bodyguard. If you’re a person who’s generally law-abiding, but desperate or open-minded enough to look into it, you might find a place there.
You’ve got to be a non-drug user, absolutely and unwaveringly, uncompromisingly honest, and you’ve got to be willing to be around some of the sleaziest human beings on the face of the earth all your waking hours. And you’ve got to be convincing that you’re uglier, colder and crazier than all those lowlifes around you.
Then there’s the danger of going to prison, which isn’t likely, but could happen. The things that go sour in that line of work tend to be of a different variety.
Tool handles:
It used to be a person could do well trading with the tribes if he was willing to go deep into the rez. Might still be so. They always have tools with broken handles, so buying a load of handles somewhere for all manner of tools, replacing the handles on the broken tools you’ve bought, then taking them by the truckload onto the rez, buying their heads with broken handles and selling them a used one you’ve repaired can be middling lucrative. But you’ve got to be relatively near a big rez or a lot of small ones.
Those mightn’t fit you and probably don’t, but they might give you an idea or two about some crack you can shine a flashlight into and find a way to make a living. Even in this brave new 21st Century.
Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
“So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command. “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”
“Who?” Hydrox explains.
“Us. You. Me. Niaid, Shiva, Tabby. The Great Speckled Bird and the hens. It’s coming on Christmas. Why aren’t we gearing up? Going on buying sprees? Getting into the spirit of things?”
Christmas where the desert went and why
“Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear. “You’re thinking of what? Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up? Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”
I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time. “Well, yeah. Everyone else does it. Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing? Don’t you miss that?”
“I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters. “So did the other cats. Christmas. Halloween. Easter. But especially Christmas. Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over. Garbage piled up around the pickup containers. You humans are a mystery to me. Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away.
“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are. Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive. You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”
This raised my hackles a bit. “We’re smart. We’re on top of things. Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence. Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground. Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.
“You eat better than the people who did all that work. You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”
Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place. “Yeah. And who’s responsible for all that?”
“Human progress,” I replied proudly. “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”
Send her roses now and then
A box of chocolates might help
She loves to hear, “I love you.”
Even if you don’t
Candy lies with chocolates and roses
When things get bad
And the secretary winks
Keep in mind
This won’t make it any better
Keep your valentines at home
Secretaries don’t come easy
And two women in your life
Ain’t a big improvement
Over one
When the embers cease to glow
Don’t forget or you’ll regret
You forgot the anniversary
There’s nothing out there better
Give her candlelight and roses
Candy lies with candlelight and roses
From 1970 until he died a few years ago I had a friend named Bill who required some getting used to in the visual encounter department. Bill, Gale and I were part of a coffee-klatch at the University of Texas Chuckwagon. They’d both been recently released from the military, both were Russian majors, so I suppose Bill was the instrument for my becoming acquainted with Gale, who owns this place and lives through the woods half-mile from me.
Bill wasn’t an easy man to look at. He weighed around 250 pounds, had a huge head, eyes that didn’t look in precisely the same directions, kinky hair and teeth with a lot of distance between them. But he was a fine, intelligent person. Unfortunately for him, Bill also spoke with a stutter. He was acutely, uncomfortably aware of his appearance.
At the time I met him Bill had never had sex with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and he confided once he never expected to. A profoundly unhappy man whom I spent countless hours with trying to help persuade him away from suicide. Every month or two I’d ride with him to the Chicken Ranch, the famous Texas whorehouse, and wait, chatting with the girls while he took care of his needs. For me, one of the outcomes of those visits was the magazine article shown here: Vietcong Seductress, et al. For Bill the visits only provided temporary, but necessary relief.
Around the time he got his bachelors degree Bill found a woman who had a few problems of her own, and who was evidently able to see beneath his exterior into the fine human being he was. They were eventually married and seemingly enjoyed a happy enough life. Still, Bill and I remained close friends, talking on the phone several times a week.
One day Bill came to see me sometime in the mid-1980s with something weighing him down. We talked a while before he confided to me that he was a ‘sex addict’.
“What the hell is a sex addict, Bill?”
He explained the concept to me, as it had been explained to him by his wife, along with various pamphlets of the feminist genre describing it in loving detail. “I never knew this about myself,” he explained, carrying more guilt and self-remorse than I’d seen since he became a married man.
“Have you talked to a doctor about it?”
“I talked to [a mutual friend who was a psychologist]. He just laughed me off and said there’s no such thing as a sex addict.”
This brought a frown from me. Our bud the psychologist was a pro. If sex addiction existed, he’d know about it, and if Bill had a problem he wanted to talk about he wouldn’t brush him off. “Did you talk to him in any detail about what makes you think you’re a sex addict?”
Bill just shrugged and stared at the floor. “Yeah. He said it’s just normal. He said I’m the same as almost every other man.”
Not too long afterward Bill adopted the religious preference of his wife, Anglican. He became a deacon, and something of a zealot. But he carried his guilt and his conviction he was a sex addict with him, probably to the grave. And frankly, I never believed a word of it.
Bill had described enough of his sexual needs and practices to me over the years to convince me if he was a sex addict, so was I. I tended to agree with our psychologist friend more than I agreed with Bill, his wife, or the feminist pamphlets where the concept was invented.
Recently The Honest Courtesan, a retired prostitute has had a couple of articles and discussions about the subject in her blog. Not An Addiction, and Neither Addiction nor Epidemic examine the subject of the concept of sex addiction and what’s behind it in loving detail.
My general thought is that this wouldn’t work on most men. It would require one such as Bill, a man already inclined to guilt and one already decided to let others define right and wrong for him. Most men, I believe, would simply get a mistress or pick up a lady in a bar somewhere. A lady who measured the sexual desires and needs of the normal man as normal.
He’ll be something else then, a ‘cheater’, and she’ll be the ‘other woman’.
And that’s normal too when terms such as ‘sex addict’ become a replacement part for ‘too tired’, or ‘I’ve got a headache’.
I’m aware some of you readers keep chickens. If you’re having problems with blindness among them you might be interested in joining http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_Ranging_Chickens/ where there’s an interesting discussion going on about the problem. This was the beginning post for the thread:
Blind Rooster Posted: Sat Dec 3, 2011 5:47 am (PST) Just wondering if anyone has had any experience with this. Monday afternoon, I noticed two hens on the wrong side of the fence, so went to retrieve them, and find the rest of their little band. Found all but one rooster. Couldn’t find him in any of the “regular” places, but they do have lots of room to roam. Figured I’d check again before bedtime, as he’s usually the first one in. Didn’t show up. Put everyone else in, and went hunting, for feathers if nothing else:(. Well, I found him by the fence, but inside. Just sitting there. He let me pick him up without protest, but he’s always been laid-back. Still, I knew something was wrong. Put him in a different coop, with shelves instead of bar roosts. The next day he was down on the floor, walking around, but bumping into the screening for the duck section, and sitting in corners/nests. Realized his vision was at least partially gone. Blocked him in, and started antibiotics, since I had no idea what else to do. That night he was back up on the shelf, so he must have some vision, I guess. Wasn’t eating or drinking that I could see, just walked over everything. Brought him into the Hospital Unit (a carrier in my bathrooom :). He began to drink, and finally eat. He crows (oh, swell) but his cue seems to be noise rather than light. Put him outside yesterday (in a big crate) afternoon for some sun, but he just sat there. Some of the other chickens did come scratch around him, but he seemed oblivious. His eyes look odd, not whiteish, but the center (behind the cornea and inside the iris, where it should be black) looks “solid”, if that makes any sense.
Meanwhile, you readers involved in clandestine, extra-marital relationships might be well-advised to remove your diamond jewelry before checking into some seedy motel.
In the quantum world, diamonds can communicate with each other
The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by scattering a pair of strong pump pulses (green). The generated motional entanglement is verified by observing nonclassical correlations in the inelastically scattered light. Credit: Dr. Lee and colleagues, Image Copyright Science|AAAS http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-quantum-world-diamonds.html
Barred Spiral Milky Way. Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA
The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.
Government and Wall Street Cray computers working on the problem tentatively estimate the 99 percenters are actually 0.000000000000001 percenters galaxy-wide. Political and financial-industry hired-guns are working three shifts to prepare television documentaries and PR campaigns to assist in correcting the error.
In a related story, multi-national corporations and Wall Street banks have hired a team of astrophysicists and astronomers to study black holes in an effort to develop more thorough strategies and techniques to solidify and expand their holdings. Additionally, the illustration on the right suggests black holes might also provide improved methods in the use of pepper-spray.
“An optical image of the sky showing the location of the black hole, Cygnus X-1. (Right) An artist’s conception of the black hole system, showing the black hole drawing material towards it from a massive, blue companion star. This material forms a disk and jets that emit radiation. Credit: Optical: DSS; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
“Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginary surface, or “edge,” of finite size (its “event horizon”) within which anything that ventures becomes lost forever to the rest of the universe.” http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-black-hole-unmasked.html
The overall optimism derived from these stories was something I wanted to share with you readers to lift whatever waning spirits you might experiencing his crisp, rainy morning.
ERUPTING FILAMENT: Today, with little warning, a magnetic filament rapidly erupted on the sun. Between 10:30 and 11:30 UT, observers in Europe watched tendrils of hot plasma rocket away from the sun’s NW limb. Debris from the explosion is not expected to hit Earth. Images: #1, #2, #3.
Astrophysicists aren’t certain what he was shooting at, but several noted deer season recently opened. Others speculate Alpha Centauri was throwing bottles or tin-cans in the air for him.
With no flares of significance in days, the sun is strangely quiet. Nevertheless, the view remains dynamic. Rogerio Marcon of Campinas, Brasil, took this picture of the local starscape on Dec. 2nd. Using a telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, Marco captured 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments; also included in the field is the dark core of sunspot 1364 (lower right). It doesn’t look very quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-class solar flares in the next 24 hours. http://spaceweather.com/
Some astrophysicists noted 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments could be considered a middling lot, everything else being equal.
PHD candidates from UC Berkeley and MIT have gone on record with a theory there’s some kind of celebration going on up there. NASA space cadets believe otherwise, but refuse to elaborate except to darkly hint Old Sol’s expressing his displeasure about agency budget cuts.
Israel and the CIA aren’t saying what’s causing it, but are planning airstrikes on unnamed Central Asian targets in retaliation.
Possibly this one would choose something by Arthur Rimbaud,
“True, the new era is nothing if not harsh.
“For I can say that I have gained a victory; the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of hellfire, the stinking sighs subside. All my monstrous memories are fading. My last longings depart, – jealousy of beggars, bandits, friends of death, all those that the world passed by. – Damned souls, if I were to take vengance!
“One must be absolutely modern.
“Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!… The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men; but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God alone.
“Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.” From ‘Farewell’ by Arthur Rimbaud
Or Baudelaire:
“— Enjoyment fortifies desire. Desire, old tree fertilized by pleasure, While your bark grows thick and hardens, Your branches strive to get closer to the sun!
“Will you always grow, tall tree more hardy Than the cypress? — However, we have carefully Gathered a few sketches for your greedy album, Brothers who think lovely all that comes from afar!”
From ‘Flowers of Evil’, ‘The Voyage’, by Charles Baudelaire
Or Edgar Allen Poe:
The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token—
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
From ‘Spirits of the Dead’, by Edgar Allen Poe
My own saga with Oak Wilt and this particular tree is sung in these past posts:
I’d written about possibly trying to salvage some of it for sawmilling, but that’s not in the cards:
The interior of the trunk is riddled by cracks caused by the rapid shrinkage.
Oak Wilt came on it fast from the roots. By the time anything showed topside the tree was evidently already dead.
Arthur Rimbaud, Charlie Baudelaire and E.A. Poe should have put their heads together and written something immortal about how to get the rest of it down. The job has the potential for being right there in the target zone for their kind of writing. It’s going to be a booger-bear any way I cut it.
Old Jules
Everything else being equal I think I favor pines:
All that tree-stuff hanging up there leads me to think our songsters are too humanocentric about hanging trees.
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 