Savor sugar words
Pulse rushing to a touch
Hold tight the triggered yearning
From a voice on the phone
While it lasts
Swim in honey
And be glad
Let it hold you
Over breakfast dirty dishes
Stale cold coffee
Of the years
Sustain you through emergence
Of a human side of humans
Viewed by humans
Toenail clippings
Bad-breath mornings
PMS
And milk gone sour
In the fridge
Sit back remember
Savor sugar words
And be glad
I’ve been mildly curious watching myself for a considerable while. Weight was peeling off me and I was forgetting to eat. My body would notify me I hadn’t eaten anything in a day or two by a dose of the blind staggers, or just a dizzy spell to get me thinking back on when I last ate something.
Most of what I cook around here’s cheap and simple because of the fact I ran out of propane early last year and haven’t refilled the bottle, and because hauling water makes washing cookware an expense measured in hauling trips. So I was living mostly on potato combinations, yogurt combinations, fruit combinations and various bean concoctions. I was at the point of hating to look any one of them in the eye.
Then one day in the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrvillle I saw that rice and veggie steamer still in the box for sale for a dollar. It didn’t appear to ever have been used. So, I bought it, thinking rice and steamed veggies would at least be different.
Sheeze, the best purchase since my High Roller back in 1972. The tow bar I bought the other day might turn out to be a better deal, but I haven’t figured out anyway to cook with it. But I’ve digressed.
What I’ve re-discovered is the absolute, euphoria-laden joy of food. I’m making better meals on that thing than I could even find in a restaurant in town, but if I could, couldn’t afford them. I’ll make up a batch of one or another Asian-like mix thinking it will last two days, then find I have to fight a war with myself to keep from eating it at a single sitting.
It does require loads of fresh onion, garlic, jalapeno, cayenne, curry and ginger. I buy bags of trail mix of various sorts, dried mango, papaya, raisins and cranberrys at the Dollar Tree and pour on top, a little of each. The food bills went up something awful last month. But I don’t forget to eat.
And the simple truth is, some of these meals turn out to be classed among the best I’m able to recall having anytime in my life.
Anyone says an old dog can’t learn new tricks is kidding himself.
I don’t get many phone calls here, so a few days ago when the phone rang and a male voice with an accent said something I didn’t understand about ‘technical support’ and ‘your computer’ I kept listening a moment. But other than those two phrases I couldn’t cypher out a word he was saying.
“Excuse me. I can’t understand what you’re saying. What do you want?”
Another long string of words including the two phrases, unintelligible. My hearing isn’t all that it might be. I can’t understand what store clerks or waiters are saying half the time when I’m in town, so I nod yes, or no, as the mood strikes me and take my chances.
But this guy had something to say that might be important, and he called to say it. Seemed prudent to me to focus my iron will and patience on the job of knowing what it was. I tried several possibilities.
After I’d interrupted him three or four times asking him to speak more clearly, more slowly, though, he said, “Never mind.” Spang broke the connection.
I’m reasonably certain the man was in India. I shot a couple of phrase of Gujarati at him I remembered from Peace Corps training and he shot some back at me I couldn’t understand any better than I understood his English.
Remembering it, I recalled a story I read a while back online:
A PACKED commuter train sped hundreds of kilometres across India in the wrong direction before passengers finally realised it was pulling into an unfamiliar station.
The train left the southern town of Tirupati on Wednesday for the eastern city of Bhubaneswar, where it was due to swing north to its eventual destination of Varanasi, a city in northeastern India, The Times of India reported today.
But bewildered passengers noticed something was amiss yesterday when it chugged into Warangal – a central Indian city on an entirely different route some 980km west of its intended stop at Bhubaneswar.
The express train had managed to cross three of India’s railway divisions and travel hundreds of miles without anyone noticing it had lost its way, The Times reported.
The mistake was believed to have arisen because it was given an incorrect destination code, compounded by the fact it was a special service and many of the staff were unfamiliar with the route.
By hindsight, I don’t know whether the guy thought he was talking to someone in the US, Australia, or the UK. I can’t for the life of me form an opinion about whether he knew something about my computer it was important I know, or wanted to tell some train pilot in New Zealand he was going backwards and another one was coming at him 90 miles an hour the other way.
This brave new world’s getting a bit complex for a 20th Century man.
No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.
Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.
She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.
The mountain I used to prospect for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water. Big ruins. I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.
One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset. In the basin below there’s a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains. I’d discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely. What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses?
But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob! Yon damned Mogollons used it to mark summer solstice!
A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of those people who lived in that ruin. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave. Politicians, or priests, or both, deciding what was best for them.
One day they just left. I’ve always thought it was because of that grim civil war nobody knows anything about that happened among them around the time these ruins were abandoned. Bashing in the heads of anyone who didn’t agree to migrating.
They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.
What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.
Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind. Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things they couldn’t carry.
Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, the pain and sorrow in those villagers. Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn. A few weeks of planning. What to take? What to leave behind.
Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before. At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad. Knowing they’d never go home again, wondering about the place they were going.
Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have. Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancestors had roamed for 2000 years.
They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths. But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside. The kids probably screeching enough to cover everyone elses grief.
As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages. The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them. They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.
Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village. They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they’d ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.
Today, it’s just piles of rock, potsherds, holes left by scholars and other diggers for spoils. The land still falls off across Johnson Basin, sun going down over that volcanic nub that once measured the time to plant. Cow men ride their motorized hosses across the old trails, cows stomp around looking for grass, making the pottery fragments even smaller.
But sometimes late at night when the wind howls down the mountain a man might hear, or think he hears an echo of the chants, the drums, the night mumbles and whispers of lovers, the ghosts of lovers. Pulls the bag tighter around his ears and wonders.
Good morning, readers. I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time. Never quite got around to it.
I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.
Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.
Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less. They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.
Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.
Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.
One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.
Amazing footage.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.
The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief. But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.
But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.
Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.
At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
When I began posting this blog just before the end of June last year,
The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters, my life was a somewhat different place, though it hasn’t changed much by outward appearance. Mainly what’s changed is priorities. Time has speeded up for me in a sense. Things I’ve needed to be doing all along, but were on the back burner indefinitely have fought their way to the front burner and now are holding the high ground.
The season that’s been attempting to pass itself off as a winter here seems every day to be assuming the attire of early spring. Which is to say, I need to be doing spring-like things inside the priority mix, instead of winter things, and the spring activity demands this year will be somewhat different from last year.
One of the ways that will manifest itself is that I’ll be posting less regularly on this blog, trying to spend more time doing higher priority activities. A lot of the projects I had planned, or was working on during the blog months are going to be abandoned or allowed to be pushed into abstractions for some future time, except one.
So the frequent and somewhat regular posting here will change to a target-of-opportunity mode.
Jeanne will continue posting the Ask Old Jules entries, and I’ll probably occasionally post something there also, as time allows.
I’m no good predicting the future, but my intention, within the context of what the Coincidence Coordinators will allow, is to have this shelter and the area immediately around it back mostly as it was when I arrived several years ago. Including me being somewhere else. Most of my priority juggling is going to try to fit itself into that as best it can.
Hopefully the ancient Mayans had all that figured out and that’s what all the hoopla about the Mayan calendar’s really about. The cats and me experiencing another pesky reincarnation without the Universe raising any eyebrows.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
The Universe is off attending a manditory Universe Sensitivity Training Conference today. It worked a little overtime so things wouldn’t stack up while it was busy getting sensitized.
So everything that was scheduled to happen in the Universe today has already happened. No point in anyone all worked up worrying about anything they thought might occur. If it hasn’t happened yet it’s been re-scheduled for Wednesday.
“Hey! Congratulations man! You picked a hill worth dying for and just got your leg shot off instead of dying. Cool!”
“I didn’t pick it man. I don’t know who picked it. Maybe the General. Maybe the Colonel. Maybe the other side. I din’t do any picking. Nobody asked me anything.”
“Wow. You got your leg shot off and didn’t even make your own choice about whether it was worth the effort?”
“Higher than my paygrade. Not my job to figure out whether hopping around on a stump of a leg the rest of my life or spilling my guts across the landscape is worth why they think I should do it. It’s up to the big brains to decide that. The Generals, and Colonels and Lieutenants. The people who see the bigger picture. I’m not into long-term thinking.”
“Sheeze man. Tough gig.”
Bloody Valverde. Measured in percentage of casualties among those participating, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War.
Texas Mounted Volunteers were on that mesa, coming down to cross the Rio Grande just below the left end.
Federals and New Mexico Volunteers were below and across the river trying to keep them from doing it.
You can’t get over there anymore without breaking some laws. The railroad police will arrest you for trespass if they catch you trying to cross the RR bridge. Last I heard, Ted Turner owns the ranch the mesa is on. He has riders out there who’ll haul you off for trespass if the RR police don’t get you.
A few cows graze up there and Ted Turner can’t have people up there bothering them by poking around among the pockmarked hideyholes and artillery placements. A lot of men on both sides died so Ted Turner could keep the right to keep you off his holdings and bothering his cows.
If you sighted across the top of that monument across the end of the mesa and drew a tight bead you’d be looking at a mushroom cloud about 50 miles away when they fired off the first atomic bomb in 1945.
But by 1945 the government and scientists all finally realized the place wasn’t worth anyone getting excited about, getting legs shot off or dying for. By that time they knew it wasn’t worth anything except for blowing up with an atomic bomb. You can’t go over there, either, for what that’s worth.
Pretty big hunk of granite for such a little event. But nobody much winds around those desert roads to look at it.
I used to have a pretty nice cannon ball that came off that battlefield. Wonder what ever became of it. Hope I didn’t scare any of Ted’s cows or stir up any future atomic bomb attacks on the place by the US Government.
If I believed in representative democracy I think I might be tempted by this, even though I don’t smoke dope.
There’s something refreshing about seeing someone injecting some humor into all the scowling. This modern religion of self-important in-your-face sneering between opposing political illusions and conflicting certainties about ‘What this country needs‘ and who’s most worthy of hatred and purple scorn ought to get boring for those doing it. For the good of their souls, maybe. Or, failing that, just as a means of demonstrating a human brain resides inside the human skull.
ABOUT WILLIE NELSON’S TEAPOT PARTY
Willie Nelson was busted in Texas for possessing marijuana on Nov. 26, 2010. Following the arrest, Willie founded the Teapot Party, declaring: “Tax it, regulate it and legalize it! Stop the border wars over drugs. Why should the drug lords make all the money? Thousands of lives will be saved.” Since then, Willie clarified the focus of the party. “The purpose of the Teapot Party is to vote in people who believe the way we do,” he stated, “and vote out the ones who don’t.” With that in mind, we’ve embarked on a campaign to find candidates to support in upcoming elections. So far we’ve made four endorsement and there will be many more to come. We encourage Teapot Party supporters to use this site to their advantage. Learn who we’re supporting, read the latest blogs, find out what’s happening in the marijuana-reform community, order free stickers, buy Teapot Party merchandise, keep up with our Facebook and Twitter feeds and upcoming events, such as rallies and meetups. With your support, we can make a difference by ending cannabis prohibition in our lifetimes. Please send donations to the candidates of your choice. Then go out and “vote in people who believe the way we do and vote out the ones who don’t,” just like Willie says.
I suppose old Willie still believes in representative democracy. I’ll try to forgive him being stupid by believing something I don’t. I’ll reciprocate by being stupid enough not to start smoking dope again. Too damned much trouble.
I’m trying to remember when it was I figured that out. Sometime a long time ago, but before too much later, I think it was. I had the High Roller already, but I don’t think I had the gray John B. Stetson yet.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 