Tag Archives: lifestyle

Do We Have a Plethora Yet?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 7 comments

A plethora, say, of pinatas?

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.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Government, Police, Surveillance, Survival, War on Drugs

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First Observations – Brush Berms and Rock and Brush Dam

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 comment

One of you expressed an interest when I was describing the project, so I’ll add a bit of detail on initial observations.

The effort appears to be doing exactly what it’s intended to do, the floating cedar leaves doing a better job than the Pinon I used in New Mexico.  The fresh cuts on the berms don’t appear to be doing much, but those where the leaves have dropped are blocking with dead leaves, slowing the water enough to cause it to release the silt.  And the dead leaves are sealing the parts of the berms where that’s far enough advanced to allow it.

Meanwhile, a rock and brush dam I constructed last week in the arroyo to the east is performing well, also.

The steel grille used to lie on the scoured bottom so’s to allow a truck to cross without blowing a tire on the rough bottom.  I stood it up and included it in the dam because earlier efforts have filled the bottom voids with silt enough to provide a comparatively smoother ride across, making the grille redundant as a bottom surface.

The brush and leaves on the right were what was left of the earlier effort, prior to the most recent rainfall.

Depending on the intensity of the coming runoff events, the grille might actually be knocked down and require some remedies if the water level goes high enough to put leverage on the top, but if it doesn’t I believe the bottom will catch enough to provide stability.  Those rocks are heavy enough to withstand water to a level of a couple of feet, catching more brush and dropping more silt.  Higher than that, they’ll probably wash downstream.

My thought is that the bottom might fill with enough siltation ahead of the dam to need that grille, again, to keep truck tires from going up to the hubs in mud, anyway.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Science

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Erosion by Time

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  It’s raining again this morning and all that erosion mitigation I’ve been doing is in the slow process of sealing itself with floating cedar leaves, beginning to back up water and drop the silt burden.

There’s a timely, subtle irony in this.  While that miniscule effort directed at reversing erosion by time begins doing its job, my old friend Gale, [who owns this place] pictured above climbing a mountain in 1998 is in the intensive care unit of the Kerrville hospital.  He’s been there almost a week now, them searching for a different sort of erosion.

He was carrying a high temperature for an old man when he finally went to a medico, who sent him to Emergency.  In ICU they found he had pneumonia, a blood infection, and didn’t know what-all else.  Yesterday they finally discovered a massive kidney stone.  Today they’ll be doing surgery to remove it and hopefully he’ll begin the long climb to recovery.

I’ve been spoiled by good health and mostly robust physical condition.  I suppose, even though I’ve known he had a lot of aches, pains and vehicular problems, I still think of him as that young man of almost 60, climbing that mountain, or maybe younger.  I’ve probably been harder on him, less understanding of his limitations than I should have been as I watched him not doing a lot of things he knew he should, or I thought he should.

But it’s time I recognized he’s not as young as me anymore, that he’s grown to be an old man while I watched, not noticing.  Happened too slowly, I suppose, maybe like watching a kid grow up.

I’ve got to learn to show more respect and patience for old people.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2012, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Survival

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Blackjack – Another Bug on the Windshield of Life

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 6 comments

During the late-1990s, prior to awakening to Y2K I was absorbed in a search for a lost gold mine.  I had zero interest in casino gambling and card games of chance.  But I had three close associates who believed themselves to be experts at the game of blackjack, two of whom made frequent trips into the canyons with me and had the grace to listen when I talked about it.

Because of this, I occasionally accompanied one or another of them to casinos near Albuquerque, just hanging around while they played, originally.  But I suppose this wasn’t enough.  Deano, then Mel wanted me sitting at a blackjack table enough to plunk down chips and insist I play, despite the fact I knew nothing about the game.  I found the whole thing stupid and boring.

But I saw Mel win a lot of money on those tables and Deano claimed he did, as well, though I didn’t witness it.

A Strange Way of Thinking, More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past, Mel King

Post-Y2K turned into a somewhat different matter.  Mel had always said he could make a living playing blackjack, and from what I’d witnessed I though it might be true.  But he also emphasized it wasn’t something a person could depend on, which I believed.  Deano also claimed he could make a living at it, which I believed less.  And a couple of others I became acquainted with post-Y2K, also threw their hats in the ring of pronounced ability to make a living at blackjack, whom I believed not at all.

I was running through a series of realizations of my own concerning making a living doing almost anything, squeezing by working graveyard shift as a motel clerk, substitute teaching, polishing the wheels, bumpers, grilles and gas tanks on long-haul trucks.  Squeezing by is an over statement of my success.

So eventually, when Deano proposed sponsoring me with chips, loaning me a book on blackjack, accompanying him to the local casinos, I eventually succumbed.  I learned the basics, witnessed his successes and failures, and observed carefully while I lost his money.  I wasn’t long noticing the tables are chock-full of people who believe they can make a living playing blackjack.

I also noted that they showed no signs of demonstrating that ability at the tables.  They’d mostly all read the same books, or books that said the same things about winning at blackjack.  Books, I noticed, that repeated dozens of conventional wisdoms, reiterated identical strategies to those pit bosses hand out to fledgling players sitting down at the felt for the first time.

So, every player at every table, along with the casino bosses, dealers, kibitzers, gambling addicts and losers were all singing from the same songbook.  Everyone knew exactly what a person ought to do to lose at blackjack by following the yellow brick road.

I wasn’t long concluding that if a person could win money on the tables the answer to doing it wouldn’t be found on the strategy card the pit bosses pass out to new players.  Bowing to the goddess of ritual.

In 1998, Mel had given me a CD with an animated blackjack game on it, hoping I’d practice.  It allowed a person to set up a group of players, each following particular strategies for betting, playing against them, seeing how various strategies fared, one-against-the-others.  I’d never loaded it on my comp.

But now, in the post-Y2K era, I dug out that CD.  At first I just practiced using the conventional wisdoms and Deano’s book of blackjack religion. 

But that didn’t float, and it didn’t fly, though my learning of it was cheaper than sitting in a casino, at least for Deano.

Eventually I noticed the settings allowed me to let the machine play itself.

I could set all six players using different strategies, different nuances, allow them to play 24/7, against the imaginary casino.  Thousands of times, hundreds of thousands, probably millions, eventually.  I could test strategies, tweak them for each player in each position, cull strategies least successful, try anything.  Anything.  Discard it and try something else until I found every microscopic edge a player might use.  And measure it against every other.

Just leave the machine running, check every few days, test, tweak, think, and launch it again.

What I learned from that computer and that software is that it’s possible to ‘almost never’ lose at blackjack, possible to win middling large amounts occasionally, possible to pick up at least a few bucks almost always with concentration, hard work and patience.  And a willingness to throw out the book.

But the baggage of carrying it into a casino is contained in the scorn and hatred of everyone else at the table. 

You see, blackjack players believe universally it’s possible for a player to cause them to lose by violating the ‘rules’ of strategy handed out by the pit bosses.  Split a pair of tens, hit a pair of aces instead of splitting them, and everyone at the table, they believe, loses.  ‘Playing for the table’, they call it.  Though the table doesn’t pay anyone who plays for it, should the person lose.  And the table doesn’t share any wins. 

I can’t count the times some well-meaning player sidled up and whispered, “Get security to walk you to your car.  The guy over there says he’s going to catch you in the parking lot.”

As with other religions, as with patriotism, getting crosswise with doctrine can be dangerous.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Human Behavior, Survival

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Surveillance Weirdness

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 8 comments

Saturday October 28, 2006  

 

This brave new century offers a lot of interesting twists and turns for the observant.  I was reading a blog this morning, someone ruminating over a friend request he’d gotten from someone, maybe in India.

I’d gotten a similar request yesterday, so it caused me to consider whether blogs aren’t being used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, both here and abroad, to find folks with particular sets of viewpoints.

For instance, I came across a blog the other day posted by a person who called himself something like ‘dope-smuggler’.  Hmmm, thinks I, is this for real?  The blog entries and photos all involved various aspects of the use of controlled substances.

Suppose I worked for DEA, I went on thinking.  Would I throw out a trot-line or two searching for folks who’d like to admit on blogs that they were felons?  I think I might.

Or suppose I worked for Mossad  (I think that’s the right spelling), the Israeli intelligence agency.  Would I like to know as many names and locations of people who held Nazi-like viewpoints?  Would I be equally interested in folks who rabidly approve of anything Israel might do?  Probably.

And so on.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about what’s happened with surveillance technology and general nosiness, both of government and individuals.

The technology and availability of spying equipment with amazing capabilities and invisibility at a shockingly low price is out there for anyone.

At least it was shocking and amazing to me when I found myself moved to investigate the matter.

One day I’d been sitting at a blackjack table for about twelve hours, and when I got to my car in the parking lot my cell-phone rang.  I answered and was treated to hearing a long playback of my conversations at the game-table several hours earlier.  I thought back and recalled a guy who sat next to me for a while wearing an unusual fanny-pack he kept messing with, so I figured it was him.

But his motive for doing such a thing was a mystery, and how he happened to know my cell-phone number was one, as well.

That happened several times, the casino playback thing, but I only saw that particular person once, and when he took the chair next to me I asked him if he had his equipment with him.  “Oh yeah,” he answered with a laugh.  “I always carry everything with me.”  And left the table.

During the same time-period Jeanne was in New Mexico.  We were in the living room, me standing, her sitting across the room, having a conversation.  The land-line phone rang and I answered.  Similarly to the casino experience, I had a conversation played back to me, but this time it was the conversation Jeanne and I’d just had within the past five minutes.

Someone obviously had the capability to listen to what was said in my home.  But what’s intriguing to me is that they wanted me to KNOW they had that capability.

That happened a couple more times and I could never see any signs around the house of any microphone/camera, but it was obviously here.  From then until now I’ve gotten spam emails I don’t open, but with subject lines referring to something or other that’s happened in my life, said or done, recently.

Which confirms for me that I am one helluva interesting guy.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would put that kind of effort, energy and expense into my life, but I do try to provide with them with some amusement in various ways.

Sometimes I figure it’s the rich neighbor kid, sometimes I think it’s the neighbor across the street next-door to my buddy, Wes, who’s generally known to be a negative busybody.  But that doesn’t quite fit the casino incidents.

I haven’t a clue. 

But after the first phone-at-home incident Jeanne and I went to a surveillance store and looked over what was out there on the open market.  After seeing it, I decided we live in a time when it’s useless to think there are any secrets, any privacy, if anyone’s determined enough to want to know, sick enough to be willing to put out a few bucks and plant a device.

Flattering, though, knowing that despite the fact I don’t talk to anyone but the cats these days unless I’m on the phone, I’m still one hell of an interesting feller.

Golly.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Gambling, Human Behavior, Internet, New Mexico, NM, Surveillance, Uncategorized

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The Poor and Under-educated

Posted on May 5, 2012 by | 6 comments

Previously posted June 9, 2005

There’s been a lot of discussion on various threads about the statements people who think they know, (politicians, academians, religious zealots, know-it-alls, do-gooders and others with the wisdom to know what’s best for people who aren’t fortunate enough to be them) that most of the people who play the lotteries are poor and under educated.

The Poor:
I’d be the first to agree that people who are one or another level of ‘poor’ play the lotteries.  Most of us are poorer than we’d like to be…. that’s why folks such as Hollywood Henderson and Jack Whittaker bought tickets.

But how poor can a person be and still buy lottery tickets?

The poorest people I know are living on the streets panhandling.  They have their values straight, as a rule.  Priority one, when some money falls into their lives:  A bottle of something, a fix of something.

Priority number sixteen, or thereabouts:  Something to eat.

Priority number twenty-seven:  A lottery ticket.

Those folks aren’t buying a lot of tickets.

The somewhat higher level of poor people do buy some tickets, I’ve observed standing in line behind them at the convenience store.  They drive up in automobiles, buy a case of beer for the evening, some chips, and probably go home to watch the results on television.  They mightn’t have a nice home…. maybe a trashed out mobile home in some park full of human lessons to be learned, anger and loud music, but they aren’t actually poor.

In fact, by any standard besides the one we judge such things by today for social reasons, these ‘poor’ people are generally enjoying a level of wealth seldom experienced in human history.  There’s food available to them through food banks all over this nation to keep them from starving.  They have shelter from the weather and warmth in the winter.  They can purchase clothing at any garage sale for a quarter.  They drive automobiles or use public transportation unless they choose to walk.

In a world where the history of human living conditions have predominantly involved worrying about where the next meal is (or isn’t) coming from, where death by exposure to the elements has almost always been a reality, the US doesn’t have more than a smattering of poor people by standard that existed a century ago. 

Those poor people referred to by the politicians and statisticians are adults, making choices about what risks they wish to indulge with the money they have in hopes of improving their lot.  They’re submerged in wealth.  If you don’t believe it, imagine those pictures you probably see on television of villages somewhere with kids lying around with pot-bellies, flies walking all over their faces, them without the energy to lift a hand to brush them off, one step away from exiting the vehicle because there’s nothing to eat and there’s not going to be.  That’s poor.

The Under-Educated:

I happen to have a pretty fair formal education, though I’m ‘under-educated’, as is everyone I’ve ever met.  Which boils down to all lottery players being under-educated, and that being a shared trait with all those who don’t play.  Until someone invents an educational level that includes being ‘over-educated’, and ‘just-the-right-educated’, none of the above tells us much about who plays the lottery.

But it does tell us a lot about manipulative rhetoric, politics by guilt, religious posturing, hypocracy, and a willingness (or unwillingness) to allow adults who might be just as smart and savvy as we are to make their own choices about how they want to spend their money.  About what risks they’re willing to take in life.  That comes under the heading of something called, “freedom”.  Not a lot of it floating around these days.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Education, Gambling, Human Behavior, Lottery, Politics

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Mechanical Disadvantage – Fulcrums, Chinese Steel and Gorilla Glue

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | 15 comments

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

The project outdoors seems simple enough.  Clearing the intrusive cedars from under the oaks. 

Establishing a gentle downhill grade across slopes.

Creating a series of rock and brush berms to intercept the runoff and direct it across the slope to slow the concentration times during heavy rainfall runoff.

I followed the grades with a carpenter-level and board, mainly, keeping it to about a quarter-bubble.

Filling the deep ruts in the road with brush to rob the water of the siltation load.

Even the tools are uncomplicated.  But of course, a person has to find a wheel barrow tire that isn’t flat.

I eventually found this solid rubber one – bought the wheel barrow from a garage sale for the solid rubber tire.

I was a long while getting to it.

But a solid rubber wheel barrow tire beats a dozen Chinese flat ones.

The arms on the loppers you see in the green wheel barrow don’t provide a lot of mechanical advantage and require a lot of stoop labor.  Naturally, I was elated when I found this one in a thrift store with telescoping arms.  $8 US bucks.  Cheap at twice the price.

When I got home I broke the first arm off in about 20 minutes.  After I cut off the break and put it back together I broke the other one off 20 minutes later.

Chinese steel rears its ugly head.

This was obviously going to require some modifications.  A sleeve to go over that weak point, something to fill in the space between the sleeve and the joint/handle.  Nothing to it.

I was going to melt down some old shower shoes to pour into the space, but Gale suggested silicone caulk. 

But my tube of caulk was dried out, so I decided on Gorilla Glue instead.

Here’s how long it took to discover the next weak point in the design.

The culprit.

Who but the Chinese could produce a bolt a man could spang break in half?

Well, Mister Commie, you might think this is over, but it ain’t.  I’ve got another dance or two left in me.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Texas, White Trash Repairs

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Naming Your Own Poison: Dependency Relationships

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 4 comments

This is taken from a letter written in the year 2000:

Seems the modern world’s addicted to more afflictions than drugs.  Maybe it’s tied up in the unprecedented social experiment of the 20th Century attempting to yank the values and roles of 10,000 years of human history up, shake the dirt off, and clone them into something never before tried.  But without entirely losing what went before.

Personal boundaries became ambiguous, and while there was always the dependency inherent in shared family and social role assignments, removing it without replacement parts might have set things adrift further than anyone anticipated.

For instance, in my personal life with my ex-wife, there was a dependency thing, but it was a fairly mature relationship except in certain aspects of the dependencies.  Those grew and gradually became boa constrictors over the decades, became such a part of the rock and roll of marriage, I found I couldn’t breathe.  And I suspect the same almost had to be true for her, as well.

But after that marriage broke up, it really used to trouble me that my relationship with the next woman couldn’t have been an adult, happy, non-dependency, shared-joy kind of relationship. We were both people who had been through long marriages and half a century of life. It only missed it in enough crucial places to kill it.   In fact, there were places where it was there.  But it was woven into a fabric of unstated, unagreed-to expectations, manipulations and untuned boundaries directly tied to ownership.  Or a hunger for ownership and the powers and controls inherent with it.

It’s not easy to imagine how younger people find their way around inside that matrix of nebulous expectations.

You’ve got to learn from your mistakes, . . . I’m not saying that I’ve got the way, the truth, and the light here, but I will say, subtract raging hormones from your system. Raging hormones screw everything up. And if what you want is self-respect and growth, dependency relationships are the antithesis of it. I mean, there is a stage of your development where you can grow from that, but if you need that, it’s a statement of your level of growth. And once you get past that, the whole concept is repugnant.

And if you have learned everything you’re supposed to learn, you’re probably not going to have another relationship.  I’ve told you that after I knew I was breaking up with her I spent six weeks or so just listening and considering her catalog of complaints about me. Some were valid, some weren’t. But I listened and considered them all because that kind of input from someone who knows you well doesn’t come often and in a context where the ego allows you to distance yourself from it in a way where you might be able to actually learn something about yourself. Once I knew I was going to break with her, I no longer had any investment in defending my behavior. I learned a lot.

During the same time frame, and during all the preceding months she never listened to a damn thing–never learned anything about herself–remained stolid in her absolute innocence, victimization, purity of thought, and responsibility for any aspect of the failure of our relationship, which she desperately didn’t want to fail.

The part of this that’s most difficult to grasp is that she wanted and needed sex as much as I did. We were a matched set in that way, a couple of really uninhibited, highly-sexed people. But there was an assumption of quid pro quo in her whole approach to the problems–all her life men had been lusting after her because of her physical beauty.

She never came to the realization that all she had to do was relax a little in her “rightness”, compromise, understand, give a little, take a little, and she could save the relationship and grow some at the same time. Growth wasn’t her strong suit. She hadn’t changed much since we were kids.

Truthfully, in hindsight, I’m grateful for my own sake that she couldn’t bend,  couldn’t hear the things I’d said, and responded with shocking venom to every attempt I made for honest dialogue about our mutual problems. If she had, I’d have had to remain with her–it wouldn’t have taken much–I’d have been owned by her, and at her insistance, owned her.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior, New Mexico, Relationships, Spirituality

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Mel King

Posted on April 30, 2012 by | 7 comments

The hoopla about the dead cop in Tijeras got me thinking about my old friend, Mel King, and another dead cop just down the road from this one in Mountainair, New Mexico, in 1987. 

That one changed Mel’s life in a multitude of ways, for all the remainder of it.  I posted this on another blog December 21, 2005, the anniversary of his death:

If I ever write another book, Mel King will have to occupy a few chapters of it.  I’ve mentioned him a few times on this blog, but mostly, I’ve not been able to write much about him at all.  I’m still digesting what happened to him.

On one of the threads recently the discussion drifted to the War on Drugs.  I suppose if I’d never met Mel I probably wouldn’t have thought much about that issue, would never have bothered to form an opinion about it.

But in many ways, Mel was a product of that war, from the time it began during the Reagan Administration, he was one of the adversaries.  It changed him from a small-time marijuana growing woods-vet to a wealthy man.  When the ‘war’ drove the price of jade sky-high he was approached by a number of ranchers in the area, asked to teach them how to grow weed in quantity.  He became their broker, as well as a grower.

The War on Drugs involved Mel in a major felony arrest, confiscation of much of his property, caused the mysterious death of a police officer, got Mel targeted repeatedly on America’s Most Wanted television series, and constant harassment by the FBI, State Police and local police for the remainder of his life.

They wanted to believe he killed a Mountainair, NM, police officer because it was the only construction of the facts that didn’t expose the rotten core of the War on Drugs.  If Mel didn’t kill that cop, another cop, or cops, almost certainly did.

Unacceptable.

Shortly before he was murdered in December, 2004, he showed me an anonymous, hand-written letter accusing him of killing the policeman and threatening to come balance it all.  The undertone and nuances of the letter suggested it was written by another member of the ‘policeman brotherhood’ who wanted to even things out, not because he knew the dead cop, but because a person doesn’t get suspected of killing a cop and get by with it.

It’s time I began writing down a few things about Mel King anyway.

Mel King was a major, financially successful marijuana grower and large-scale broker in New Mexico for many years.  During that time he was also a long-term heroin addict.  (He first became addicted to morphine while in the hospital recovering from wounds he got in the Marine Corps in Vietnam).

The only way Mel got away with what he was doing for so many years was by being considered a complete maniac, and by making certain the authorities got their fair share of the proceeds.  He drove around in a VW van with bullet-holes in the windshield from the inside.

When he got busted in 1987, with 150 pounds in his house it was because he made himself too big a nuisance to be allowed to go on.  He was attracting too much attention.

But even so, he never came to trial.  That 150 pounds of high-grade vanished from the evidence lockers.  The empty bags with his evidence numbers on them were found in the home of the policeman who made the initial stop during his arrest.  But someone murdered that policeman, probably for the marijuana, which is how they happened to find the empty evidence bags.

While he was in jail awaiting bail, Mel resolved to turn his life around.  He freed himself from heroin and when he was released he started a successful furniture business, did his best to stay clean for the remainder of his life.  Succeeded in being a trustworthy, successful man and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

During the years I knew him, Mel was a deeply spiritual man.  He was honest, guileless, hard-working, sincere, courageous, and in many ways, wise.  We prospected a lot of canyons together, talked of many things over campfires listening to the wind in the pines.  He was also my partner during Y2K.

Mel and I disagreed on many things, but he believed, as I do, that he knew what happens to a man when he dies.  He never feared death and he never believed he’d done anything in this life to give him any reason to fear it.

I believe he was right.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Liars, New Mexico, NM, Police, Politics, Uncategorized, War on Drugs

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Mexico Trip Complete

Posted on April 28, 2012 by | 4 comments

Previously written Sept. 9, 2005

Mexico trip complete.  Home to the felines, with a gift bag to myself.  Another year of life.

Another time around the sun contained in these dozen plastic bottles rattling with medications.  Normal blood pressure. Pain and internal bleeding from acid reflux avoided 12 more months at the cost a few uninsured cents on the insured pharmaceutical US dollar.

Traitorous, cowardly purchases in these times when our nation needs our blind, unquestioning support.

Border guard:  “What country were you born in?”

Old man:  “This one.”

Border guard:  “What are these?”

Old man:  “Drugs”

Border guard:  “Who are they for?”

Old Man:  “Me.”

Border guard:  “Do you have a prescription?”

Old man:  “No.”

Border guard: (Shrugs).  “Go on through.”

Turnstile clockticks planetwise around a steel post.

Foreign enemy homeland fades  (No. No. That was a different century.  They’re friends now.  If not friends, at least neutral.  They’ve mostly forgiven us for taking this spot of land from them by force of arms), pulsebeat slows.

A dozen Hail Marys and a flagwaving parade in penance, I promise.  I pop a cap and sink a Prinivil dry into mouth cavern, feel the rush of sinking blood pressure.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Mexico, New Mexico, Senior Citizens, Uncategorized

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