Tag Archives: misc

Spark and Tinder for the Next Country Music Wave

Posted on January 9, 2012 by | 24 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read this morning.

A while back while I was in Kerrville I was in one of the huge office supply stores that have driven all the locally owned ones out of business.  I was nosing around looking at things when I glanced at a guy, a woman and a clerk studying copiers or fax machines. 

“Small world!”  I mutters to myself.  The male customer part of the trio was a face a decade older than one I’d known too well almost a decade ago.  A guy named Tony Wossname.  Once a motel manager in Grants, New Mexico.  A man I’d been blessed to observe through the lens of the darkest side of his character. 

I changed positions in the store, moving place to place studying this later model of a man who could spot desperate need for a job when he saw it and derived a lot of pleasure out of making it as painful and difficult for the desparee as his power allowed.

After I discovered I couldn’t get any other job in Grants, New Mexico following Y2K I went to work in a motel off the Interstate, graveyard shift, as a night clerk for a while.  Besides giving me almost enough money to pay rent, utilities, and buy a little carefully selected grub, the job showed me a side of humanity I wasn’t familiar with.  And it gave me a lot of time to think about what I observed.

One of the things Tony liked about being a motel manager was his radio in the locked office the 11-7 shift clerk couldn’t access.  The radio had no speakers in the office, nor in his apartment beside it, but it did have speakers in the lobby where he couldn’t hear it.

“What kind of music do you like?” Tony’d asked me conversationally during the job interview.

“I like any good music.”  I shrugged, recognizing a management school tactic for getting the applicant to relax.

“So do I.  But there’s some on the air these days I can’t stand.”  He scowled and shook his head.  “I hate that RAP stuff.”

“I just don’t listen to the radio much.  I like older music, mostly.  The modern CW swill could probably drive me nuts.”

He had what he wanted and changed the subject, now that I was all relaxed.

I got the job, which included two lobby speakers tuned to a modern CW station, 11 pm to 7 am with the volume control and station selector behind a locked door.

I did a lot of writing on those shifts while trying to stay sane.  Here’s one night of inspiration about modern country music:

3:30 AM

Hearing this country music station wailing all night so many nights has caused me to realize what’s changed in country music. It used to encompass a fairly wide range of fairly lowbrow experiences and sentiments. Love, cheating, drinking, bull riding, hound dogs, mama, trains, trucks, car wrecks, dead friends, being broke, dreams of something or another, hopes, losses, resentment, pride of accomplishment, prison, cows, land, and clothing. Now it’s nothing but drooling whining love songs. Wonder what the hell that means?

Probably  means females are picking all the hits, buying all the records, and the men who dance lockstep with them are also females.   Something’s definitely changed, in any case.  There are still Guy Clarks out there, still Prines, still Tom Russells, still Willies and Merles. That just ain’t getting hit records.

Maybe the baby boomers lost something after their quadruple bypasses. Ever heard of a woman getting bypass surgery? I haven’t.

Maybe ten years from now we’ll be hearing country songs about bypasses and prostate cancer- about Winnebagos, casinos, golf, medicare—about grandkids wanting to  put him/her in a nursing home- about hearing aids and false teeth, thick toenails and sagging skin.

If so, it will be an improvement, and I, for one, look forward to it.   Maybe tonight I’ll write the off-the-charts hit CW song for 2012. 

Cheatin’ a Broken Heart

Westbound on the Interstate
Out on the Great Divide
Our Winnie overheated
So we pulled off on the side

The sagebrush and the red rock buttes
Invoked our reverie
While the engine cooled I thought about
My bypass surgery.

Refrain:
You can have your diabetes
Talk about your brand of “C”
But when heat waves blur the red rock
I’ll take bypass surgery

We’ll be turning south at Flagstaff
For the fairways to the south
Where my third ex-wife will meet us
With the grandkids and her mouth

Those two eggs up on whiskey toast
Home fries on the side
She always made for breakfast
Were my downfall and her pride

We’ll take the brats along with us
And camp somewhere below
The international boundary
Buying meds in Mexico

‘Cause it’s not the margaritas
Nor the senoritas sweet
It’s the discount pharmaceuticals
That tug these flattened feet

Now the engine’s finished cooling
And the wheels begin to roll
And there ain’t no bloody stool
In the RV commode bowl

Refrain:
You can have your diabetes
Talk about your brand of “C”
But when heat waves blur the red rock
I’ll take bypass surgery

So here I am, 2012 coming on strong and fast.  The lyrics for the big hit for the year already written, the New CW Wave craze all mapped and ready to take off.

Gotta find a musician.

Remember where you heard it first.

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Grants, Human Behavior, Music, New Mexico, NM, Senior Citizens, Survival

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The Price of Not Expecting the Unexpected

Posted on January 8, 2012 by | 15 comments

If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.

I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up.  I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.  

Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ‘way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].

If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting.  Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home.  Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it.  Years of hindsight would have been helpful.  Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years.  But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.

After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro.  Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned.  But I was on autopilot.

The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit.  There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.

I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself.  A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling.  When I finished I went to his window. 

 
“Anything I can do to help you?”

The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local.  “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”

“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour?   The speed limit’s 55.  If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”

“What gumment agency you working for going that fast?  I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”

I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning. 

I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna.  The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.

I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck.  I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again.  A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.

Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call. 

I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me.  I don’t recall why I did this precisely.  I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point.  Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago.  Even the old outhouse was still standing.
 
I drove on, taking my time now.  But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting.  He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him.  So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
 

But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again.  He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar.  He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again.  But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again. 

I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso.  I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t.  So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running.  I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.

I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway.   By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed.  I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this. 

I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight. 

“Why are you following me?”

“Ahhhm not following yew.  I just stopped here to take me a rest.”

“You waited back there at the intersection.  You waited again in Lincoln.  Why are you following me?”

“I’m not follering yew.  But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”  And so on.

“I’m warning you.  Don’t follow me anymore.”  I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.


 
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso.  He wanted me to know he had a fix on me. 


 I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing. 

It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour.  As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for  something. 

I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there.  There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.

A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe.  When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know?  Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”

He thought about it frowning.  “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that.  I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you.  They’d have asked me.”  Then he looked me in the eye.  “You need to be careful about that speeding, though.  If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked.  They’ll fire you.”

What began that day lasted almost a decade.  Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years. 

But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me.  I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.

Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.

Old Jules

 

15 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Music, New Mexico, NM, Portales, Relationships, Solitude, Survival, Y2K

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The Strangeness – Background Context of Unsolved Homicides

Posted on January 7, 2012 by | 12 comments

By the time this was published in 1999, I was no longer going up that particular mountain.  I was busy on my Y2K land and dwelling preparations about 50 miles northeast of Quemado.

But this will give you an idea of the general local psychological environment in the area, both while I was working the mountain and [it turned out] later, while I was doing Y2K.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/20/news/mn-36275

Unsolved Slayings Have Small N.M. Town Living in Fear

Crime: With seven people killed since 1996, residents are openly packing heat. Authorities see no connections among the deaths.

November 20, 1999|PAUL DUGGAN | THE WASHINGTON POST QUEMADO, N.M.

— There’s not much to the town. You come upon it in the vast, yellow-brown emptiness of southern New Mexico’s high desert grassland. It’s mainly just a strip of old storefronts on Highway 60, with some dusty side streets.

In a 40-mile radius of Quemado you might find 500 people, about half of them ranchers living like pioneers on the plains and in the foothills, miles from any neighbor. The rest live in town, in trailer homes and faded stucco bungalows amid the tumbleweeds and pinon trees.

The sheriff, Cliff Snyder, said it used to be a peaceful place in its lonesome way, before all the killings. Now there’s fear in the air, like a foul wind.

Who murdered Gary and Judy Wilson? It’s a mystery. They disappeared in November 1995 and turned up eight months later, so many bones in the woods. Who shoved Gilbert Stark into a 20-foot well and closed the cover in ’96? Who shot the elderly Clark couple and their daughter in ’97? Who put a bullet in the heart of James Carroll, 59, as he stood in his corral just north of town one autumn day last year? The sheriff doesn’t know.

He and the state police said they are convinced the cases aren’t related. They were random eruptions of murder where murder used to be rare, Snyder said. He has no clear explanation for it. All of the victims lived in the countryside around Quemado, about 125 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Before the Wilsons were slain, no one had died by another’s hand in this part of sprawling Catron County in nearly a decade.

And no one wants to be next. In a swath of America where gun control means hitting what you’re aiming at, a lot of folks are packing iron. They’re propping shotguns and rifles beside their beds; they’re driving with pistols on the front seats of their pickups. The sheriff said he doesn’t mind. This is the rural West, he pointed out, and guns are a heritage.

“We’re raised with them,” said Snyder, 42. He shrugged. “If I pull over a vehicle, I figure they’re armed, if they live in this county.”

At El Sarape Cafe on Quemado’s main street, Irene Jaramillo, 43, keeps a .22-caliber semiautomatic on a shelf near the griddle. One morning last week, Paul Strand, 67, who owns a horse ranch south of town, was sipping coffee in the cafe with his wife and holding forth on the subject of their firearms.

“I sleep with a Colt .45 under my pillow,” he said. “I have a loaded assault rifle beside the bed, a Russian-type, ready to roll. And a sawed-off shotgun next to that, loaded, legal, but just barely, in terms of the barrel length.”

Across the street, Carl Geng, who is in his 60s, runs the Allison Motel with his wife. They also own a ranch outside of town. Geng said he thinks he knows the culprit in one of the homicide cases. “I’ve got a .38,” he said, gesturing to his truck in the parking lot. “He sets one foot on my ranch, I’ll blow his head off.”

The sheriff said he and the state police think most or all of the victims were murdered by acquaintances with whom they had personal disputes. As for suspects, investigators have only “theories,” he said.

It’s a crime in New Mexico to carry a concealed loaded weapon in a public place but legal for anyone 21 or older to carry one openly, no permit necessary. James Clark, a Vietnam veteran, started packing two handguns after his parents, William Clark, 84, and Pearl Clark, 74, were slain in 1997 along with his sister, Sharron Hutson, 44. Folks in Quemado are used to seeing him in town with a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker on his right hip and a .40-caliber semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.

“Which is fine,” said Irene Jaramillo’s husband, Jimmy, who is one of Snyder’s deputies. “I told him, ‘As long as I can see them.’ “

James Clark and his wife, Elaine, 42, now live in the remote trailer home where the elderly couple was murdered. Elaine Clark, who prefers a lighter-weight .35-caliber, sat in the kitchen one day last week with her husband’s heavy semiautomatic on the table in front of her. There was a loaded hunting rifle propped against the freezer by her left hand.

“We always used to brag that it was like the Old West, in the way that your house was never locked,” she said. “Someone passing by, if you were gone, they could come in and get something to eat. But now it’s more like the Old West the way you’re always on guard. You don’t walk up to my house unless I know you’re coming . . . or you could darn well get shot.”

Catron County, with just 3,000 residents, covers almost 7,000 square miles. It’s bigger than Connecticut. Snyder, who was a deputy when the seven homicides occurred, was elected sheriff last year. He has an undersheriff and four deputies, including Jaramillo, who patrols the northern half of the county around Quemado. Half a dozen state troopers also work in the county. But with such a vast area to cover, it sometimes takes an hour or more to reach the scene of an emergency.

12 Comments

Posted in 1990's, New Mexico, NM, Survival

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Cold Mystery, Fevered Romance and Lost Gold

Posted on January 7, 2012 by | 33 comments

A burned out cabin ruin with an aspen tree growing out of the inside, bear claw marks 12 feet up, 3 hand forged nails, a longtom sluicebox axed out of a 3 foot diameter log, a spring 75 feet above the sluice, an arrastra below. 

A mysterious map chiseled on the face of a 300 pound rock surface depicting the exact layout of the canyon, the cabin, the waterfall, all so accurately depicted the person had to have scrutinized the layout from the mountaintop, then scratched it on this stone 600 vertical feet below and half a mile away.  The rock was carefully placed on the canyon wall above eye-level so it was easily seen, but only by someone looking up.

I’m guessing the date must have been spring, 1995.  I’d moved my search to the mountain I described above and was performing a systematic search of  the canyon from the discharge to the mountain crest.  I’d filed two mining claims at the location of the cabin and sluicebox pictured in the earlier post, and downstream.  I hadn’t yet found the map rock, and I was spending every moment I could squeeze between job duties, romantic obligations and financial constraints camped on that mountain.

I headed down there planning on spending a week, but on the road the Mitzubishi Montero sprung a water hose a few miles outside of Grants.  It was raining while I mucked under the hood, taping the hose and getting enough coolant in it to drive it to a parts house in Grants, where I installed it in the rain.  I was chilled and soaked as I drove south from Grants, but in too much of a hurry now to change clothes.

By the time I arrived at my usual camp site I was running a high fever and feeling my breathing becoming hard labor.  I hastily dragged a tarp out of the truck,  put my sleeping bag under it and got inside, hoping I’d shake off what I was afraid was coming.  I’d had pneumonia enough times this lifetime to recognize the onset.

The next morning found me weak, fever skylining, knowing I’d better try to get out of there while I still could.  I threw some brush over my gear because I was too weak to reload it onto the truck, and started down the mountain.  My vision was blurred and I was hallucinating, barely able to stay on the two-track.  When I reached the US Forest Service road a line of fenceposts ahead briefly became a line of riflemen aiming at me.

I remember nothing of the trip after that until I found myself at the home of my lady friend in Albuquerque, wrapped in a blanket on the floor of her downstairs because I wasn’t strong enough to climb them, burning with fever, shaking with chills.  She, nursing me with herbs and leftover antibiotics from her medicine cabinet.

“There are some people missing out there where your claims are.”  She was sipping coffee at the table, looking over the paper at me.  “A man and his wife.  The State has people out searching for them.”  She shook her head.  “They must have been right near where you were.”

The couple lived across a basin at the base of the mountain.  I could probably see their dwelling through binoculars from the mountaintop.  They were woodcutters, but I’d never encountered them, to my knowledge. 

As I recovered in Albuquerque the search died away.  The local sheriff announced the couple had probably just abandoned their house and gone somewhere else.  They were nobody, outsiders.  He refused to treat their vanishing act as a possible crime, didn’t allow the State Police to investigate their home.  But the time on the floor in Albuquerque weak as a kitten, tended hand and foot is one of those tender, grateful memories of my years with the lady.

Over the next several months I continued, sometimes in company with Keith, sometimes with other friends, sometimes alone, exploring, sampling, puzzling over what I was finding there.  Then, the first day of elk season that fall I encountered two elk hunters with their truck stuck in a stream bed.  When I finished towing them out, we introduced ourselves.

“Did you hear about those bodies they found in the canyon over there?”  He gestured to the mountain indicating a canyone one over from mine, plus one.   Renfro Canyon on the rock map sketch.  Less than a mile from my claims.  “A bear dug them up.  They were buried in an Indian ruin and a hunter found them this morning.”

The bodies turned out to be the people who’d turned up missing while I was giving myself pneumonia.  I felt reasonably confident the police would be contacting me with questions about whether I’d seen anything, because I was probably the only person on the mountain besides the victims and the murderers at the time it happened.

The Bureau I worked for, Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] was part of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, though a step-child and somewhat separate.  I went to my Bureau Chief and explained what had happened, asked whether he thought I should go over to the State copshop and volunteer to talk to them about it.

“Man, I wouldn’t touch that.  Let them come to you.  You might be the best suspect they’ve got.”  A lawyer friend gave me the same advice, informally.

So I kept quiet and waited, and they never came.  I kept working that mountain, homicides and multiple-homicides continued to happen over the next couple of years remaining unsolved and generally thought to be uninvestigated, and the entire county became a quagmire of paranoia.  Everyone carrying firearms, nobody trusting anyone.

Meanwhile, the mountain echoed the weirdness and pressure the county was experiencing.  Somewhere during that time began the strangest chain of events and experiences of my entire life.

Which I might describe in a later blog or series of blog posts.

Old Jules

33 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting, Solitude, Survival

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Scouting the Escape Route

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 13 comments

Even though Gale’s change in plans for last week postponed the schedule for The New Truck Resurrection the new year seemed a good place to start examining the next steps for exploiting the possible.  I didn’t have a clear enough idea about the options and my thinking was bouncing around inside a range from becoming Joe Palooka’s pal, Humphrey Pennyworth:

to building a house on a trailer http://tinyurl.com/7a95xyo, to finding some trashed bumper-pull trailer and fixing it to live in RAZ Auction and an Aborted Escape Route.  I needed to narrow things down.  So I finally did the obvious and visited Craigslist to see what’s out there within the price-range of what I might be able to manage.  The results were surprising, welcome and uplifting.

I received this travel trailer in a trade. It has been sitting for a while. We are in the process of cleaning it. {lots of dust} The trailer is in overall good condition. Would make a great hunting trailer. The outside looks dirty because it has been sitting onder a oak tree. I tried the A/C and it will have to have the dirt dauber nests removed, the fan makes noise. The water pump runs but I am not going to put water in the tank until the weather warms up. Not sure about the ref. but one the same size at Home Depot or Sams are about $100.00. I am selling the trailer as is where is for $1500.00. It has the propane tank with the small fitting. New tanks are about $20.00 each. The trailer looks great inside, it has not been abused.

And inside:

Or if the New Truck doesn’t turn out to be dependable after a Real Mechanic gets it going:

1983 Toyota RV – $1500

One Owner
Runs and Drives Good
53k on 4 cylinder
5 speed manual trans.
Missing door on camper…
Needs TLC..$1500 obo..

Inside:

What I found is that within a 200 mile radius of here there are a number of already livable dwellings on wheels available for $1000 to $1500.  Livable, or capable of beng made so without a lot of expense or labor.

It took me a year to set aside a thousand bucks to be sure I could pay a mechanic to get the New Truck licensed, mechanic-worked, and inspection-stickered, or the Toyota fixed.  But the work mightn’t require all of it.  In any case, putting together whatever remains between what’s left and buying something will require some squeezing of turnip-blood.

But I need something I can pull out here and move the cats and me into so I can begin putting the cabin into the shape it was in when I moved here.  And start pulling down the chicken house and pens, garden fence, and the upside-down hot tub project so’s nobody’s left with a mess I made of the place.

I think I managed, at least, to define the critical paths and some potential realities as a means of finding my way out of a situation I’d come to think of as too nigh-onto-hopeless to contemplate in any meaningful way.

All in one day, January 1, 2012.

I feel 30 years younger than I was December 31, 2011.

Old Jules

 

13 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Transportation, Trucks

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The Tanglefoot of Expecting the Unexpected

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 20 comments

You couldn’t make this up.

Yesterday several blogs I subscribed to began with identical words:

A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” prosecuted as terrorists, perhaps because nothing could more terrifying than exposing where our so-called food comes from and how it is manufactured.”

I didn’t disbelieve it initially, but it seemed a bit sloppy, though not outside the realms of the possible.  What bothered me about it was the fact nothing was mentioned about who made the FOIA request, why, and the precise wording of the contents of the FBI document. 

So I plugged the sentence, A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” into the dogpile dot com search engine.  http://tinyurl.com/7y6cokz

My thought was that it wouldn’t require much search to find an initial post with the core information.  Instead, as of early evening yesterday, there were 20 pages of posts repeating the one I’d recieved.  Earliest I found was December 23, then more a couple of days later, gradually building up to a landslide yesterday.  Blogs all over the web re-posting the same piece of writing, some with variations or addenda of their own.

Not one expressing the slightest doubt the story was true.  Not one questioning where the original claim originated.   Today there’ll be more as the panic spreads, I’m thinking.

The problem is the powers running this country opened a door to a new avenue of the believable.  Indefinite detention Act voids US Constitution, Get a Job! Internment/Resettlement Specialist, US Army, Sunday morning thoughts December 18, 2011, and  The Long Watch referred to the activities of the US Congress a few days back, along with the way some people were responding to it. 

But once that desire to be able to lock US Citizens up without any due process based on being suspected of terrorism was enshrined in Congressional activity, all bets were off.  Suddenly it makes all kinds of sense for the folks charged with law enforcement and pesky people doing all manner of legal things they’d like to lock them up for to want to squeeze them into the meaning of the word terrorist.   They know that, and you and I know they know that.

So out of nowhere comes a claim the FBI’s already doing it.  How much disbelief does the discerning reader need to suspend to accept it as gospel without the acquired skepticism of experience with the huge mass of BS on the web?

Heck.  Maybe it’s even true.  The only evidence it isn’t true is the fact there isn’t a grain of evidence it is.

Expecting the unexpected has some inherent pitfalls.  One being that we see what we expect to see.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Liars, Politics

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2012 – A Pretty Good Year by Hindsight

Posted on January 1, 2012 by | 34 comments

Good morning readers.  Here’s wishing each of you whatever you consider best for yourself in 2012.

Some years are better viewed by hindsight than during the actual living of them.  1954 was such a year, and I have an idea 2012 might be another.  Long hindsight smooths down the rough spots and helps remove a lot of the detritus keeping us from viewing it in ways we can appreciate the strong points.

Almost everyone in that picture is dead, with the possible exceptions of the blonde kid next to me, cousin wossname, the girl behind me without glasses, and my ownself.  The blonde kid might be dead, or he mightn’t. 

He and I never had much truck after the time that picture was taken.  He lived in Pennsylvania was part of the reason, but the other part was in the fact I accidentally shot him in the lower leg with an arrow and his mom didn’t care to bring him down our way anymore.  Next time I might have improved my marksmanship, she alleged.

Fact was the kid and I were shooting at a target, taking turns.  He was down close to the target waiting for me to shoot so’s to retrieve the arrows and take his turn.  But just as I released, he ran in front of the target and ruined my shot, sank that arrow spang into his calf a goodly distance.

On the ground bleeding and squalling to high heaven, he denied that’s how it happened, and there was an element of belief among the adults present.  Them knowing how much I despised that spoiled little prick.

Anyway, with the softening provided by the passage of all those decades and all the protagonists either dead, or might as well be, 1954 shines out as a middling good year.

Similar to how I think there’s a good chance most people who are online January 1, 2013, will have fonder recollections of 2012 around January 1 2050, than they do recapping it 2013.

Which isn’t to suggest 2012 won’t be a great year.  I fully expect it will.  I won’t be the least surprised if 2012 has more surprises in store than almost any year in living memory.  Tremendous opportunities for growth experiences.  But growth experiences do have a way of needing more hindsight to be appreciated than those years when all we do is sit around watching television.

So, here’s wishing all of you as much potential for personal growth during 2012 as you consider yourself qualified to appreciate as soon afterward as possible.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2000's, 2011, America, Education, Senior Citizens, Survival

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2011 Red Oak Wilt Movement and Behavior

Posted on December 31, 2011 by | 10 comments

The disease evidently arrived when the powerline went in running north to south at the top of the ridge on the far left side of the pic.  Or possibly when that gravel pit was scooped out just to the right of the earliest attack.  Those earliest trees have been dead at least five years.

In 2010 it moved abruptly downgrade attacking the trees surrounding the cabin and in the vicinity of the chickenhouse.  But I hadn’t noticed until I viewed the sat-image that it’s also moving west beyond the ridgeline [far left].   Beyond that ridge and to the west it’s heavily treed with oaks all the way to the western property line. 

Judging from what’s happening to the west of the ridge there mightn’t be a red oak left on that side of the property within a couple of years.

But downgrade to the east there doesn’t appear to be any infestation at all, yet.

Truly a mystery.

Old Jules

My 2011 posts about this:

Oak Wilt, Firewood and Sawmilling, For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise, A Poem as Lovely as a Tree – An Oak Ponders Oak-Wilt, Outsmarted by a Dead Tree.

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Posted in 2011, Country Life, Homesteading, Nature, Texas

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Possible Mistaken Identity

Posted on December 30, 2011 by | 10 comments

Morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a visit.

Now that my freezer compartment’s thawed out I was due to make a town run for necessaries.  Yesterday I took Little Red in and took the back road past Habitat for Humanity thinking they’d be open, but they weren’t. 

But there’s a pallet out front where they always put things that didn’t sell for anyone who wants them, free.  Whether they’re open, or closed, there’s often a lot of stuff there a person with the right turn of mind might find a use for.  Around the other side of the building there’s a similar area marked, DONATIONS, clearly separated from this one.

The ‘Free’ sign wasn’t out, but the pallet did have a lot of junk on it, so I pulled in and looked it over.  I figured the store was just closed for the day for some reason.  I picked off three ceiling fan motors and a few other possibly useful items.  I’ve got a number of other ceiling fan motors I picked off that pallet here I haven’t decided what to do with yet, but copper’s got a high pricetag on it, at the very least.

But when I got back and swung by Gale’s to brag about it he shook his head.  “Man, they’ve been closed since before Christmas.  I’m amazed someone hadn’t picked them up.”

“Closed?  Since before Christmas?”  Wrinkled brow, puzzling.  “Sheeze!  I’ll bet somebody dropped those off as donations.  Just left them in the wrong place.”

So maybe I made a haul of some discarded fan motors and maybe I temporarily stole some intended to be donations to Habitat for Humanity.  I’m going to have to contact Linda, the manager, to find out whether I need to haul them back to town.  And if they’re closed until after New Year I reckons I’ll have the use of them until the status is nailed down as to whether they’re stolen property or pre-emptively rescued from some other less deserving scavenger.

Seems life’s never simple.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, America, Thrift Stores, White Trash Repairs

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Order Out of Chaos

Posted on December 29, 2011 by | 18 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read. 

This drawing of Jeanne’s was on an otherwise blank draft post page in the whatchallit, dashboard, with the title Order Out of Chaos.  It’s evidently a Photoshop manipulation of another work and until I messed up re-sizing it and lost her explanation it also said (sold).  Hopefully if she wants to she’ll add an addendum saying whatever else she wants to say about it.

But I was mulling over things that aren’t mainly on my mind deciding which of them to write about this morning, carefully avoiding the one thing that mainly is, when I saw the title in the drafts.  It brought to focus what actually is swirling around in my brain.  I suppose I might as well write a bit about that.

A project I’ve been working on almost a decade appears to be coming to a climax.  Surprising progress began falling into place during the past few days, and preliminary results provide a reason to hope I’m finally examining datasets that will allow testing and formulating a theory.    If the tests indicate it’s worth it, there’ll be revisions, more testing, more revisions, until something cohesive emerges, or doesn’t emerge.

I don’t dare speculate on where it will head because expectations have a way of working themselves into outcomes, and I’m doing my best to avoid that. 

But the fact is, it’s taken a decade almost, and countless hours and days of research, calculations, accumulation of data, wrong directions untaken, other wrong directions taken and backed out of in getting here.

One way or another I think this simultaneity and time thing is finally going to be allowed to absent my life over the next few months.  Order out of chaos finally, either by discovering my fundamental premises were wrong and I don’t have to do this anymore, or they were correct and sense can be made of this.

Either way, it’s a strange place to find myself, a hollow looming up in my life I wonder how I’m going to fill with what must inevitably be another pesky reincarnation.

Old Jules

18 Comments

Posted in 2011, Human Behavior, Nature, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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