Tag Archives: Life

Reflections of a Y2K Survivor

Posted on July 24, 2011 by | 4 comments

I was one of those weirdos who believed so thoroughly in Y2K that I quit the last years of a career, cashed in my retirement, walked away from the IRS, all the bills, a house mortgage,  totally believing it was all moot because in just a few months it would all collapse.  I figured there was  a chance high enough to bet on that everyone left after the chaos would be wandering around hungry, diseased, and dying, if the computer gurus were telling the truth.  January 1, 1999, I performed the irreversible deed.  The retirement money made a down payment on 140 acres of land in remote high desert, I drilled a well, built a cabin, stocked up on countless items the throngs of hopeless survivors would need to survive a bit longer.

I knew there was a medium possibility the IRS, the land payments, all the rest would eventually come due if Y2K didn’t happen, but I thought the consequences of it happening and me not doing it were worse than the alternative of taking the plunge and it not happening. Once a person considers seriously  the possibility that society might collapse, it’s surprising how reasonable it seems to think so.

Did my best to be a refugee camp waiting to happen. I bought a lot of chicks to be eggs and food for the future hungry.  I knew I couldn’t survive long because of the shelf-life of a medication I require to stay alive, but I had hopes a few folks could survive thanks to a lot of training and experience I’d had in woods lore, emergency management, and survival. I moved in to a tent on the 140 acres in mid-1999, until the cabin was built and the well drilled.

I spent the next 16-18 months pretty much alone, sometimes going weeks without seeing another person. It was the best time of my entire life. I loved it.  I wouldn’t change a minute of 1999 until now, but they were the hardest years I’ve ever lived.  I’m a risk taker, more than most, but I’m also a damned fool.  Fool enough to believe Y2K not happening January 1, 2000, doesn’t mean Y2K won’t ever happen.  But also fool enough to know I’m not wise enough to know when it will, nor whether it will.

This blog will include some of the material written during that time. The rest is a compilation of reflections, before and since, of my varied runs at the brick wall of something rhyming with wisdom.

Old Jules
Steve Goodman–The 20th Century is Almost Over
http://tiny.cc/trxiy

4 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Country Life, Emergency Preparedness, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Poultry, Y2K

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Learning to Live with Being Stupid

Posted on July 23, 2011 by | 3 comments

The discovery, beginning about 15 years ago, that I’m not anywhere near as smart as I think I am, and that I’m a world away from knowing as much as I think I know, has been unsettling and somewhat disruptive.  That realization, along with the concurrent observation that an overwhelming piece of what I do know is wrong, hasn’t been as easy to incorporate into something useful in my life as you might think.

Before my smarts and knowings all started to unravel I was a fairly impressive person.  I could explain, without you even asking me to do it, just about anything you might be wondering about.  I knew what you ought to do with your life, how your life became the lousy, empty mess it appears to me to be, and what the government ought to do about anything it had the power to do.  I knew what men ought to do about women and other men, and I knew what women ought to do about men and other women.

I began to get screwed out of that when  out of the corner of my eye I noticed some aspects of my own life that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.  It crept into my consciousness that I’d made a lot of choices and given a plethora of advice to others that simply didn’t have a lot of merit.

This didn’t come all at once.  It started as a trickle with a lot of seemingly small matters I couldn’t help noticing, which I tried to compartmentalize and ignore, same as everyone else does.  But eventually I couldn’t keep them inside the fences I’d built for them.  They were forever sneaking over mingling with others I’d locked up in file drawers I’d clearly marked, “TOP SECRET – DO NOT OPEN”.

This forced me to try to herd them back where they belonged, but in doing so the others tagged along, dancing and clowning and shamelessly demanding I recognize they existed, wanting me to scratch them behind the ears and pay some attention to them.

I figured the easiest approach would be to have a look at their blood lines and shoot the mongrels and mutts, but keep the purebreds.  This required an examination of how I came by all that knowing of every description.

It rocked me to my boot heels to find almost every one of those certainties  came from something someone else said, and I believed it, hugged it tight, and called it my own.  That wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t then asked myself where the people I’d heard it from came to own it.   Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me they’d also heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else.

Gradually, I realized I hadn’t done much thinking for myself.  In fact, I hadn’t based much of anything on the evidence of my own eyes and observations.  Strangers with the voice of authority told me many things other strangers had told them and I frequently accepted it as gospel.  I often abdicated my intelligence in favor of those strangers many times removed.   Without consciously deciding to do so, I treated truth as though it relied on a vote-count of humans to decide its own nature.

I hate it, discovering something like that.  The last 15 years of dismantling a system of giving strangers default authority to control my mind and my life hasn’t even been entirely successful.  I still constantly find the opinions of strangers creeping in, waving their arms around, trying to grab control so I won’t be stupid anymore.

But I’m determined to keep at it.  All those strangers saying things back and forth to one another and believing it over time hasn’t done much good for the people who believe it now.

And it never did me a damned bit of good, even though I was smarter when I believed it, too.
Old Jules

Glen Campbell – Gentle on My Mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFIRTtn_ZSE

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Posted in Education, Human Behavior

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Off the Shelf: What I’ve Been Reading

Posted on July 22, 2011 by | 12 comments


The nearest town, 15 miles away, has started a library, so I paused in my various re-readings off my own bookshelves to check out library books.   I was familiar with some of the authors I began with, but it had been a long time since reading them.

Elmore Leonard–  I ran through a plethora of his books in a short time.. everything the library had.  I’ve never read a book by the man I didn’t like, whether it’s the westerns he began with, or the detective stories that later became his tour de force.  I recommend him to anyone in danger of doing some light reading.  However, I came across one that’s unlike any Elmore Leonard I’ve ever read.  The Touch.  Those of you into metaphysics and healing would probably find it of interest.  It’s the best handling of the stigmata phenomenon, guru-ism, and commercial evangelism that I’ve ever read.

Rudolpho Anaya– This guy came highly recommended by the librarian.  Sorry, folks.  I came away thinking some editor somewhere dropped the ball on the three books I checked out.  Loose sloppy writing, wordy, rambling.  I suspect editors are a lot more forgiving of ethnic writers  and mooshy metaphysical gawdawful rambling flashbacks these days than when I dealt with them as a writer.  150 pages of Rudolpho Anaya would have benefited by a lot of cutting and brutal rewriting, and still ended up with maybe 75 pages worth the time.  Maybe.

Nevada Barr– Never heard of her, but I thought I’d give it a try.  Checked out three books, made it twenty-five pages into one and declared, “No more!”

Elizabeth M. Cosin– I check a couple of these out because the first one was named Zen and the City of Angels.  I’m willing to try what I don’t know, and the name of the yarn brought back pleasant memories of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Checked out two.  Score, zero-two.  They’ll go back in hopes someone else can struggle through them.

Poul Anderson– checked out The Stars are Also Fire because I recall liking Anderson’s work several decades ago.  The Boat of a Million Years comes to mind.  It was a fine work.  However, this Stars are Fire piece seems to me to be the work of a person who needed to smoke some weed to get his mind back, or a manuscript written early in his career, a dead turkey no publisher would touch by an unknown writer, dragged up out of the files and published as a pot-boiler hack to raise grocery and whiskey money, riding the name of the later, more competent Poul Anderson.  I’m 67 pages into it, debating with myself whether to drop the effort and read some William Soroyan off my own shelf until I get back to the library tomorrow.

I’d like to point out to you that the sentence-before-the-last in the previous paragraph is five lines long.  Count’em.  Five.

No good writer would put a sentence that long on a page where some poor human might read it.

Old Jules
Reading Increases the Imagination:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeUid2rv848

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Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Libraries

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The Liar: The Great Speckled Bird, Part 2

Posted on July 19, 2011 by | 4 comments

I’ve described a few of the attributes of the GSB on another entry, http://tinyurl.com/4yxat2b,  but I didn’t get around to mentioning another  facet of his complex character traits.  He’s a liar.

When he finds food he’ll burble in a special way for the hens, he won’t eat, but pecks it, lifts it with his beak and drops it, bringing the hens running from all directions to fight over whatever it is.

But sometimes GSB gets lonely when he hasn’t found any food.  He’s crippled up and has to move about with a crow-hop, so chasing hens down when he’s lonely doesn’t come easy the way it does for other roosters.

GSB’s developed a practical solution to the problem.  He lies.

When things get slow and GSB wants companionship he’ll pick a spot where he might have found food if there’d been some there, and he’ll burble, scratch and peck, picking up imaginary food and dropping it.  The hens are wise to this tactic.  Somehow they’re able to sense he’s faking it, so they keep on with whatever they’re doing.

But GSB knows hens.  Keeps right on, insisting he’s actually got something they’d like.  Gets excited, urgent in his pronouncements about what he’s offering.  Eventually, one or another of the hens will begin to meander toward him, curiosity overcoming the weight of her experience and common sense.  Usually when one hen heads toward him the others can’t stand the thought she might get something they’ll miss, so the momentum increases and becomes a race to see who’ll get to him first.

When a hen reaches him GSB lifts the imaginary morsel one more time, burbles, and mounts her for a quickie.  The other hens lose interest, GSB dismounts and wanders away, and the hen stays squatted on the spot a couple of minutes on the chance he’ll come back for more.

But if it’s to be done, best it were done quickly.

Old Jules

The Taker – Kris Kristofferson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkN2i-yS04
He’s a giver, he’ll give her
The kind of attention that she’s never known
He’s a helper, he’ll help her
To open the doors that she can’t on her own
He’s a lover, he’ll love her
In ways that she never has been loved before
And he’s a getter, he’ll get her
By gettin her into the world she’s been hungerin’ for

’cause he’s a taker, he’ll take her
To places and make her fly higher than she’s ever dared to
He’ll take his time before takin’ advantage
Takin’ her easy and slow
And after he’s taken the body and soul
That she gives him, he’ll take her for granted
Then he’ll take off and leave her
Takin’ all of her pride as he goes

He’s a charmer, and he’ll charm her
With money and manners that I never learned
He’s a leader, and he’ll lead her
Across pretty bridges he’s planning to burn
He’s a talker, he’ll talk her
Right off of her feet, but he won’t talk for long
Cause he’s a doer, and he’ll do her
The way that I never
And damned if he won’t do her wrong
’cause he’s a taker, he’ll take her
To places and make her fly higher than she’s ever dared to
He’ll take his time before takin’ advantage
Takin’ her easy and slow
And after he’s taken the body and soul
That she gives him, he’ll take her for granted
Then he’ll take off and leave her
Takin’ all of her pride as he goes

4 Comments

Posted in 2011, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Human Behavior, Liars, Outdoors, Poultry, Relationships

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Brother Coyote

Posted on July 15, 2011 by | 5 comments

If it weren’t for the big cats, the spiders, the rattlers, the various predatory… and when I think about it, regular non-predatory birds… I’d be tempted to say the wild critter I love most is Brother Coyote.

But that’s when I don’t pause to think of those others individually.  Old Cuervo (Brother Raven)  is hard to beat if you let your mind wander to him.

Frustrating.  I began this blog post to talk about Brother Coyote and why I love him and somehow find myself having to tip my hat to ravens and rattlers and bob-cats and owls and blue birds and spiders.

How’s a man supposed to get anything said about one thing when his mind gets all clogged up with all those others dancing out of the wings wearing clown suits, somersaulting and tooting horns trying for some attention?

Dragging myself back to the issue at hand.  Brother Coyote’s maybe the critter out there that’s most like man.  Intelligent enough to have you shaking your head out of respect.  Loves himself, loves being a coyote.  Never wants to be something else, knows everything else was put here for his amusement, and frequently, for his destruction.

I suppose that’s the long and short of it.  Why,  I’ve studied Brother Coyote and often seen him studying me, seen his sign and his track behind a bush where he was sitting, tongue lolling, laughing as I stumbled noise-making through life.

But if I try to say more this will get too long for the attention spans of you readers.  I’ll save the stuff I planned to tell you about Brother Coyote for another entry or three sometime later.

Meanwhile, the moon’s full this pre-dawn.  Pause and have a look-see for a moment.  When you do, know it’s another thing you share with Brother Coyote.  He loves that moon same as you do.

And if he could get to it to destroy it, he’d do that, also.  Same as you.

Old Jules

You’ll enjoy this short video of a rising moon with a running coyote:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddsimages/5371270617/?reg=1&src=comment

Coyotes
by Bob McDill, sung by Don Edwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kVdOxXB8fg

Cunning vs Habit

Coyotes soon learn
Becoming trap-wise in time
Never snare-wise
In time.

from Poems of the New Old West,  NineLives Press, copyright 2004

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Posted in Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Photo of the Day, Poetry, Wildlife, Writing

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Vietcong Seductress, et al

Posted on July 15, 2011 by | 2 comments



Hi blogsters:
Sometimes trying to piece together our lives can be quite a chore.  Peaceful Warrior posted something on one of the groups about the way his name has been a problem to him, and it got me thinking about it.
I was given a name at birth that nobody since has been able to pronounce.  They followed that with another one nobody’d ever heard of.  So when I exited that burg at the age of 15 or so, I left those two names behind and became Jack for most purposes.
But as a struggling young writer in the late ’60s I found myself needing yet another handle…. I was writing for the hairy-chested men magazines… Men, For Men Only, a genre of magazines that vanished by the mid-1970s.
They usually had a picture on the cover of a Marine with a machete struggling with python wrapped around a half-naked woman in some jungle.  That sort of thing.
Well, fact was, in those days I thought there was half-a-chance I’d want to be president, or try to get a decent job sometime.  Didn’t want stories like, Viet-Cong Seductress, or The Half-Million Dollar Sex Salon The Texas Rangers Can’t Find following old Jack around the remainder of his life.
Adopted the pseudonym, Frank C. Riley, which worked well enough.
Then the market collapsed for hairy-chested men stories.  Best paying hack-writer market left was something called ‘Confession‘ mags, which must have been read by the mothers of Romance Novel readers of today.  I figured, what the hell.
Popped out  I Was An Outlaw Motorcycle Mama, sent it off, got a nice letter back telling me there was a middling amount of what they read they liked, but that I needed to work on my female perspective a bit.  Eventually they published it, but they never bought another, though I tried.  But unless I’m mistaken, Motorcycle Mama was the only time I ever succeeded in passing myself off as a woman.  Only time I really ever tried, during that confessions market thing.
Amazing the things a man will do for money.

Old Jules

Hack Writing

Editor:
“Give me a 750 word
Masterpiece
Describing
How crushed ice
Machines
Can be used
On construction sites
To slow the cooling

And surface cracking
Of freshly poured
Cement.
Make it lively
Make it dance

I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

“Give me 2000 words
To titillate
Give me that whorehouse
That famous Chicken Ranch
In La Grange, Texas.
I want pockets picked
I want gonorrhea
I want luscious hookers
And hints of corruption
Deep in Texas
Law enforcement

I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

“I want 2000 words
Fiction
Something about
Beautiful Vietcong seductresses
Luring innocent GIs
To bed and death
In some stinking thatched hut
With pigs squealing outside
I want to see her despair
Her soul searching
As she discovers she loves him

I want a hint of non-fiction.

We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

Workshop:
“I want a poem
About how you feel
When your lover
Jilts you
In favor of someone
Of his own sex
And begins
Taking hormones.

I want the word
Encyclopedia
Used in every
Third line.

No pay
You just have
The pleasure
And satisfaction
Of doing what I
Told you to.
To help you
Get used to the feel
Of being a writer”

From “Poems of the New Old West”, NineLives Press, Copyright 2003

The Beatles– Paperback Writer



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Posted in 1970's, Adventure, America, Books, Communication, Creative Writing, Hack Writing, History, Human Behavior, Photo of the Day, Poetry, Texas, Writing

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A Question for the Brave New World

Posted on July 13, 2011 by | Leave a comment



When I went back to my hometown as a young soldier on leave, Christmas, 1961, it was enough of an event to bring my granddad in from his hardscrabble farm.

We sat around the living room, my mom and step-dad, sisters, and granddad, mulling over the war we were certain to have with the Soviet Union soon.

At that point I was as well-educated (by usual standards) as any of the people in the room and all our ancestors by virtue of having completed high school prior to entering the Army.

In talking about the (then current) brink-of-war crisis my granddad muttered something in Latin.  My mother and step-dad cocked an ear.

“Cicero’s probably not the best place to gain any wisdom about America today,”  My step-dad frowned and adjusted his dentures, followed by another Latin quote.

“Neither is Pliny.”  My mom shook her head at both of them.

Young man who knew everything worth knowing, I was.

I didn’t know any Latin, didn’t know who Pliny was, nor Cicero.  I was as ‘well educated’ as anyone in the room and considered my knowledge sufficient to have a wealth of valuable opinion on the issues of the day.  I felt a vague discomfort with them spouting Latin back and forth at one another and naming people I knew nothing about.

I had reason to recall that conversation in 1976, the US Bicentennial year, when the state of America and the state of education was being examined and bandied about.  Thoughtful minds were concerning themselves that Americans were becoming illiterate and ill-educated.

The thinkers of 1976, asked Americans to ask themselves whether they were better educated than their parents and grandparents, despite many more years spent in formal educational institutions.

The general answer in polls was that Americans considered themselves more canny, better informed than their parents, though weaker in most areas of knowledge once considered essential for a person to be ‘educated’.

The moving finger writes and then moves on.

Are you better educated than your parents and grandparents?

Better educated?
Less well-educated?
Know more about everything but less well-educated?
Less well-educated, less well-informed than parents?
Smarter and with more common-sense without Latin, history, philosophy, and other useless studies?

Sam Cooke- Wonderful World


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Posted in 1960's, America, Books, Country Life, Current Issues, Education, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Reading

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The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters

Posted on June 29, 2011 by | 5 comments

We humans cross paths with nobility so rarely, the surprise is in the fact we recognize there’s something akin to reality behind the concept.  Instead of looking for it we make heroes of celebrities, preachers, soldiers, cops, politicians, popular science personalities and any gender capable of making our genitals tingle.

We need heroes too badly to hold out for anything worthy of admiration in our fellow humans.  Far better to have a fat, power-drunken political radio rhetorician, an angry, strutting songster shouting a drumbeat of communal self-pity,  a tribe of pierced, tattoo–branded cattle, anyone who can catch a football  to represent the best we can find as objects of our veneration,  than to have nothing at all.

But I’ve digressed.

Probably Christendom runs amok with people who share their lives with creatures they believe are noble, worthy of a higher level of respect than the fantasy masturbation indulged in when they consider their favorite preacher, guru, rock star, or pleasing features.  A cat, a horse, a dog– anything capable of out-doing a human being when it comes to loyalty and the ability to do well what nature gave it the means of doing.  Most settle for less, knowing it doesn’t require perfection to trump any competition the human species is likely to put forward.

I’ve known a good many cats, and share my life with some now I’d stack up against the great majority of humans I’ve met in 6.8 decades of life.  They were good, each in ways we measure felines.

But the Great Speckled Bird is in a class all his own.

He was given to me as a discard, a crippled leg, a wing that hung low from some past injury.  I took him, but I wasn’t glad.  Not until a few days later when I saw him trying to convince a hen that a particular spot was okay for laying eggs.  Not until he snuggled himself into the spot while she looked on, hen-like.  Not until he stood guard at the entry while she did her business.

That was my first hint there was something special going on here.  I’ve admired roosters for conspicuous courage, smiled at their pride and posturing, cursed their wrong-headedness, acknowledged over time that traits of average roosters bear a lot of similarity to those of human heroes, celebrities, and the common run of mankind, only the roosters are more consistent, better at  it.

Learning to respect the Great Speckled Bird required me to suspend disbelief.  I had to learn to believe my eyes and forget the expectations acquired by long acquaintance with roosters.

Over time I watched him deprive himself as a matter of ritual, calling the hens to any food he found, picking it up showing it to them, dropping the morsel for them to fight over.  Refusing to go into the chicken-house at night until all the hens were safely inside.  A few months after his arrival I’d lost seven hens to some predator within a couple of days.  I was indoors when I heard the cacophony of flock alarm somewhere out back, took up a long gun and hurried to see what was wrong.  The Great Speckled Bird took flank position and we trekked in the direction of loose feathers up the hill.  I knew I’d lost another chicken, but I saw no sign of what got her.

Suddenly TGSB spread his wings and made a run for a cedar about 40 yards away.  When he was a few yards away a fox darted from beneath, crosswise to both our paths.  I fired and the fox chose to visit the place where chickens don’t have roosters and men with guns to guard them, or whatever place fox-folk think they go when they die.

Last winter was a tough one for the Great Speckled Bird.  Younger roosters were maturing and a long cold spell weakened him enough so the beta birds discovered they could beat him out in a fight.  I caged them so they couldn’t follow through, and he recovered.

But I’ve just pulled a brooding hen off nine eggs she sat for 25 days, none of them fertile.  The winter must have done more damage than his frost-bitten comb and the beatings from the other roosters.  No more chicks around here until he’s gone, but I doubt he’ll make it through another winter.

One morning I’ll go out there, see him lying beneath the roosting hens and whisper, the king is dead.  Long live the king.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, Adventure, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Homesteading, Poultry, Senior Citizens, Texas

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