Tag Archives: miscellaneous

Erosion of Human Values

Posted on October 5, 2011 by | 18 comments

If you’re in the Northern hemisphere and you look to the south to the constellation Centaurus tonight you might view Alpha Centauri.  4.5 light years away.  The nearest star to this one claiming ownership of us and our planet.

That’s right.  About the time the light from Alpha Centauri was leaving home on the journey to your eye, all that clothing you see in the photo was sparkling new sitting on shelves in stores, racking up cash register numbers and causing people to have to frown at the bills at the end of the month.  Now every item hanging there is worth less than a US dollar.  Nobody likes products produced when the light from Alpha Centauri was just cranking up the engine, gunning the motor and heading here.

Weirdly, the value of everything around you reflects what I’m describing.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s a toaster, a washing machine, an automobile, frequently even a marriage.

Face it.  That stuff you’re buying won’t be worth squat when the light starting from Alpha Centauri today reaches here.

Maybe you’re humanocentric and think that’s lousy behavior on the part of a star, or maybe you’re one of those apologists who blame it on humanity, or Old Sol.  But either way, you’re not looking at the worst case.

Consider Vega.

Northwest sky, bright, 25 light years.  “Nothing wrong with Vega,” a person might think.  But you’d be wrong.  Almost everything people yearned and bankrupted themselves buying in 1986, when Vega was sending out the light you’ll see tonight, is in landfills and junkyards.  Owning something manufactured when that light was leaving Vega’s worse than owning something manufactured in the USSR on Monday or Friday.

But there’s a lot more.  When Vega was shooting that dot of light at your rods and cones writers were pounding away on typewriters and computers months at a time cranking out manuscripts, publishers running them up to the tops of the lists, creating tomes of gigantic lasting importance.  But Vega took care of that, too:

New York Times Best Seller Number Ones Listing
Not one stayed around until that light from Vega reached here.

Lie Down with Lions by Ken Follett (Morrow) – February 16, 1986

The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum (Random House) – March 9, 1986

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré (Knopf) – May 4, 1986

I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz (Crown) – June 8, 1986

Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour (Bantam) – June 22, 1986

Wanderlust by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) – July 20, 1986

Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy (Putnam) – August 17, 1986

It by Stephen King (Viking) – September 14, 1986

Whirlwind by James Clavell (Morrow) – November 23, 1986

You can buy any one of them for a quarter, sometimes a dime at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

————————————

Computers?  When Vega was spitting out that dot of light you see here’s what was happening:

Microsoft releases MS-DOS3.2. It adds support for 3.5-inch 720 kB floppy disk drives. [130] (December 1995 [146]) (March [346.254])

Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh Plus. It features a 8 MHz 68000 processor, 1 MB RAM, SCSI connector for hard drive support, a new keyboard with cursor keys and numeric keypad, and an 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. Price is US$2600. It is the first personal computer to provide embedded SCSI support. [46] [75] [120] [140] [180.222] [203.68] [346.167] [346.268] [593.350] [597.94] [611.41] [750.49]

Lotus Development announces it would support Microsoft Windowswith future product releases. [1133.22]

Microsoft releases MS-DOS3.25. [346.268]

Two months after releasing Microsoft Windows, Microsoft has shipped 35,000 copies. [1133.22]

The first virus program for the IBM PC appears, called the Brain. It infects the boot sector of 360 kB floppy disks. [1230.56] [1805.23] (1987 [1260.193])

IBM announces the IBM RT Personal Computer, using RISC-based technology from IBM’s “801” project of the mid-70s. It is one of the first commercially-available 32-bit RISC-based computers. The base configuration has 1 MB RAM, a 1.2 MB floppy, and 40 MB hard drive, for US$11,700. (With performance of only 2 MIPS, it is doomed from the beginning.) [31] [116] [205.114] [329.129] [1311] [1391.D1]

Compaq Computer introduces the Compaq Portable II. [108]

Tandy debuts the Tandy Color Computer, with 64 kB RAM. It is the successor to the Color Computer 2. [1133.21]

AT&T creates the first silicon fabrication of its CRISP architecture CPU, incorporating 172,163 transistors, and operating at 16 MHz. [660.6]

Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh 512K Enhanced, for US$2000. It features an 8 MHz 68000 processor, 512 kB RAM, and 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. [46] [75] [597.94]

http://pctimeline.info/comp1986.htm

Seen any of that stuff lately?  No.  It’s all deep in attics, closets, garages, or in the city dumps.

But when you look up there at Vega, that’s what you’re seeing.  All that stuff shiny and new gleaming in the eyes of you back then, packaged up for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas.  Happy faces. 

The erosion of human values following a straight line between Vega and your optic nerve.  All that stuff listed above, the cars, the computers, the books, people worked their asses off to manufacture it and others worked their asses off to buy it all. 

But that time lag between Vega and here screwed it all.  Rendered it worthless.

I’m not partisan on this, not pointing fingers of blame at Vega.  I don’t know whether it’s the fault of Vega, or whether it’s a conspiracy concocted by the same people who assassinated President Kennedy back when the light you see when you look at 19 Draconis or Alpha Cephei was leaving home.

Sirius, Procyon and Altair stuff

Old Jules

Simon & Garfunkel – Leaves That Are Green

 

18 Comments

Posted in 1980's, 2011, Astronomy, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Uncategorized, Writing

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This Anonymous Manifesto

Posted on October 4, 2011 by | 21 comments

I’d wondered when something of this sort would happen without actually believing it ever would.

Someone keeping better track of current events than I do will probably see this as a yawn. . old news.  But when someone sent me an email after talking to me on the phone about it yesterday you could have knocked me over with a feather.  After pondering it a while this entire grassroots Occupy [fill in the blank] thing strikes me as rhyming a lot with what happened during the early 1990s when the Eastern Block, the USSR, and Iran all fell to pieces in less time than it takes to tell it.

Rich, a close friend, sent me a link to a site, We Are the 99 Percent, which if there’s any substance to it, might be the beginnings of something unpredictable enough to keep it interesting for a while.  I suppose I didn’t think there was enough of that left in the world to even consider.  My initial reaction was a bit of a ho-hum.  These seem to be peaceful folk demonstrating peacefully, which, while gratifying to see going on isn’t likely to undo anything. 

But then, in walks someone, or some group called ‘Anonymous’ and joins hands with the Occupy folk. 

PC Magazine Article

Here’s the transcript of the latest Occupy Wall Street video from Anonymous:

Greetings, institutions of the media.

We are Anonymous.

The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.

It seems that the government and federal agencies enjoy enforcing the law a little bit too much. They instate unjust laws as mindless automatons, blindly following orders with soulless precision.

We witness the government enforcing the laws that punish the 99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people.

We have observed this same government failing to enforce even the minimal legal restraints of Wall Street’s abuses. This government who has willingly ignored the greed at Wall Street has even bailed out the perpetrators that have caused our crisis.

We will not stand by and watch the system take over our way of life.

We the people shall stand against the government’s inaction.

We the people will not be witnesses to your corruption and ill-gotten profits.

We will not labor for your leisure.

We will not assist you in any way.

This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.

We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.

Vox Populi, Vox Anon.

The Voice of The People is The Voice of Anonymous.

We are Legion. We are the 99 percent.

We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Wall Street: Expect us.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394071,00.asp#fbid=_qbOvyUs5hm

That seems to shine an entirely different light on things.  I don’t know whether anyone’s actually able to jiggle remote computers in a way that allows them to shut down something like Wall Street Stock Exchange, especially after giving warning ahead of time they plan to do it.  But I think making the threat is bound to have every capability in the kingdom concentrated on keeping them from doing it, first, and hauling their butts off to the slammer as soon as they can slap a pair of handcuffs on them.

Gutsy stuff, or a level of confidence surprising from the perspective of a person who figures the powers-that-be can do anything they want to do with impunity.  If they manage to do it the resulting power-shift leverage would inevitably seem to make a sharp turn in favor of the people calling themselves the 99 percent.  But do or don’t, it pulls things out of the realm of peaceful demonstration and gives the powers the excuse they might have been wishing for to drag out the machine guns against the 99 percenters.

The people posting on the 99 percent site appear to be just regular people with a lot of justified bitterness about how things are going and a determination for legitimate change.  But thinking back on the history of revolutions, the signs and banners walking out in front of the parade have always been followed back in the baggage train with enough guillotines to separate a lot of fact from fiction after the dark underbelly of human nature is exposed.

What comes out the other end tends to look a lot different than anyone thought it would going in.  If this isn’t just a flash in the pan it sounds as though the people in the collateral damages zones might be in for some interesting times.  But, hell.  I guess we’re all in the collateral damages zones.

Revolution – The Beatles

 http://youtu.be/KrkwgTBrW78

21 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2011, Adventure, America, Communication, Education, Emergency Preparedness, History, Music, Politics, Survival, Uncategorized

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It’s No Wonder He’s So Temperamental

Posted on October 4, 2011 by | 6 comments

He thinks he’s big, but he’s got no substance.  Old Sol’s nothing but a lot of helium and hydrogen.  Sure, okay.  A couple of percentage points of other elements thrown in to give the illusion of diversity.   Big freaking deal.

Sheeze, look at him all held together by belts of interlocking magnetic fields without even  suspenders to hold them up.  Can’t even maintain magnetic polarity more than ten years or so.   Long-term goals?  Forget it.

Old Sol’s all bluster and hot air.  Got everyone convinced he’s a big deal, but he ain’t, as such things go.  Almost any self-respecting planet has more substance in its little finger than Old Sol has on his best day, which only happens when something big hits him.

Oh yeah.  He talks the talk all right.  But can he walk the walk on average, day-to-day stuff like maintaining his magnetic polarity?  Sure, he’s got plenty of education but does he have any common sense?

He’s got a lot of people fooled, but not me.

Old Jules

http://youtu.be/aB_TM5AvJP0

Carly Simon – You’re So Vain (with lyrics)

http://youtu.be/b6UAYGxiRwU

6 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy, Current Issues, Education, Uncategorized

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You made it.

Posted on October 3, 2011 by | 11 comments

You made it.

No monsters, no drug-crazed uglies, no cancer from second-hand smoke, no cops kicking down the door with guns drawn interrupted your sleep-path to set you loose from this reality.

It’s another day, and all those things you feared haven’t robbed you of getting to plod through it as best you can.

There’s something to be learned from that.

All that worrying and fretting you were doing yesterday, being scared of germs, or bosses, or cars running over you, or terrorists from somewhere else in this madhouse crawling up on the beaches of America with butcher-knives clenched in their teeth didn’t come in and set off a bomb to destroy you, didn’t poison your water because they’re jealous of the perfect existence you have.

The economy didn’t collapse during the night, dissolving the value of that plastic card with the strip on back telling whether you like cream in your coffee and other essentials about you.

Chinamen didn’t quit working three shifts manufacturing toasters for your breakfast, hair-dryers so’s you don’t have to use a towel instead of wasting a megawatt, sneakers to keep your foots off the carpet, rubber monster toys to give the kids something to do while they eat their burgers.  Their factories are still cranking out US flags for you to wave, and rubber SUPPORT OUR TROOPS magnets you can put on your Japanese car.

They’re still believing the imagination of your plastic card means they’ll get something back for their labors eventually, so civilization’s still alive.

All’s well with the world. The things you worried over yesterday didn’t happen.

_________________________________________

Ho hum.

_________________________________________

You might conclude all that worry and fear you allowed to sneak into your life yesterday to influence your thoughts and choices was wasted.

No. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

All that fear caused you to project negative energy and anger all around you.

It helped you make lousy choices to give you more challenges for this life and gave you a leg-up to just keep on doing exactly what you’ve been doing so’s you can keep on doing it while the back of your mind keeps whispering something’s going to go kerplunk.  It kept your antennae waving around listening to the airwaves for which monkey wrench is going to stop the flow of rubber monster toys, keep the commode from flushing, or raise the cost of whatever you’re putting up your nose.

But the sun’s up for a new day. Time to decide whether to repeat yesterday, or leave some of that fear behind and try something else.  Worrying about getting an ulcer over worrying about getting an ulcer’s not the answer.

Old Jules

Jesse Winchester– Defying Gravity

11 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Music, Survival

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October Quietude, Dead Bugs and Old Roosters

Posted on October 2, 2011 by | 4 comments

The rains during the past couple of weeks combined with the break in the heat wave hasn’t bumped the Great Speckled Bird back into what must have been a spry, active youth as I’d hoped it might.  [The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters] [The Liar: The Great Speckled Bird, Part 2] 

From the inside of Night Fortress 2 there’s a step up through the exit hole and he’s having a lot of difficulty with it because of his crippled leg and wing.

Those chains, incidently, are part of an ongoing war with generations of Brother Coon trying to dig into the fortress at night.  The links where they meet the ground have treble-hooks wired to them to discourage digging there, but it’s a labor intensive game.  They’re the first line of defense.  Under the wood chips they’re on the holes are stuffed with prickly pear cactus, then covered with wood chips.  Brother Coon eventually gets past them all and insists on my going to the next level of debate:  The Lost Coon Diggings

Even the largest hen doesn’t have a problem with it.  But after the hens are all out harvesting the night carcasses under the bug-light he’ll still be in there crowing, evidently dreading the prospect of fighting his way through that opening.

I load the chicken drinking water up with home-made colloidal silver, catch him and soak his legs in orange-peel tincture, and it all seems to help, but gradually GSB’s hard living before I got him’s coming home to roost.

Usually GSB doesn’t indulge in cliche, but maybe his mind’s going, too.  Lately I’ve heard him say more than once, “If I’d known I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself.”

If he keeps doing that I might be tempted to chop off his head.

C. W. McCall “Wolf Creek Pass”

http://youtu.be/xC_onLPc-0E

4 Comments

Posted in 2011, Chickens, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Poultry, Wildlife

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Wilderness Threats

Posted on October 1, 2011 by | 10 comments


A man I went to grammar school, junior high and some high school with, then several decades later became reacquainted and huff-puffed a lot of up and down mountain canyons recently began visiting this blog.  If no other reader enjoys the tale, at least he will, because he was there:

The following is copyrighted material from a book I wrote once.  I give myself permission to use it here. [ Crazy Lost Gold Mine-ism]

I’ve never concerned myself much with the dangers of wild animals during my extensive time in the woods.  Mostly they’ll mind their own business if a person takes reasonable precautions and doesn’t go out of his way to provoke them.  In New Mexico backlands of the late 20th century the real threats usually come in the form of humans.  When those happen they usually come as suddenly and unexpectedly as finding one’s self in the middle of a herd of elk.

Grasshopper Canyon and Stinking Springs are on the northern end of the Zunis below Oso Ridge on the west face of the mesa.  Two canyons run north and south, parallel to the face, half a mile apart, separated from one another by steep, narrow walls several hundred feet high.  These two walls consist of coral reef from some ancient time when Oso Ridge was an island.  The canyons aren’t easily accessible, so I prospected there a while.

The land below Oso Ridge around Grasshopper Canyon is checker-boarded in ownership.  Grasshopper is all National Forest, but immediately south is a section of Navajo tribal land.  Adjacent to the Navajo section is a section belonging to the Zuni tribe.  Fences between these sections allow a person to always know whether he’s on public land or tribal land.

I was working Grasshopper Canyon with my friend Keith, a stockbroker from Santa Fe. We separated and worked the arroyos southward parallel to one another, gradually moving toward the fence delineating the Navajo section.  Occasionally we’d call out through the woods to make certain we weren’t out-distancing one another.  The last thing either of us expected was an encounter with another human in those woods.

I was bent over taking samples from the bed of a shallow arroyo, just deep enough so when I straightened I could view the small meadow around me.  I stood getting my breath and stretching the kinks out of my back when I saw a man dressed in cammies backing out of the woods at the edge of the meadow.  He was being stealthy, carrying a .22 rifle in a ready position.  He had twenty to thirty colorful birds hanging on a string around his neck the way a fisherman carries a stringer of fish.  As I watched, almost invisible to him with only the top of my head showing above the arroyo, his eyes searched the woods to his right where Keith was working.  Keith had called out from there a few moments previously.

Still watching Keith’s direction the man backed toward me until he was only a few feet away from me.  “Nice string of birds.”  I scrambled up the bank while he spun and pointed the .22 in my general direction.

“My partner’s in the woods back behind you.  You don’t want to be firing in that direction.”  We studied one another.  He eyed the shoulder rig I was wearing and the butt of the 9 mm automatic showing from the bottom.  “’You out here killing songbirds?”

Mister Songbird was a young man and from appearances, a Zuni.  He stared a moment longer before answering.  My impression was that he was considering whether I was a game warden or other law enforcement official.  “I’m getting them for Zuni New Year.  They let us do that.”

We talked for a few minutes, me accepting what he said at face value, and the tension gradually dissolved.  He agreed to get the hell out of the canyon because we were working there and wouldn’t want any shooting.  Besides, we’d probably messed up his hunt with our yelling and bustling around the woods.  I watched him back into the meadow to the south and allowed myself to sigh with relief.

Back in Santa Fe I called the US Fish and Game Department.  I thought there was a remote chance the feds were really allowing Zunis to kill protected species birds on National Forest land.  If so, I was prepared to be indignant.

When I told my story the fed was silent a moment.  “You are a lucky man,” he observed.  “You confronted an armed man committing multiple Federal felonies and he didn’t shoot you.”

*     The following didn’t make it into the final draft of the manuscript: The fed also observed the Zuni lad would have spent a lot more years in prison for killing those songbirds than he would have for killing me.  I drew a good bit of comfort from knowing that.

Eventually logic won out over the other appeals of the Zuni Mountains as a location for the lost gold mine I was searching for.  Although the Zunis were handy for me, being only a few hours drive from Santa Fe, they were too far from Tucson.

Also, too many prominent landmarks in the area would have immediately brought the original survivors back.  The route I imagined them following would have taken them within sight of Los Gigantes and enough other one-of-a-kind eccentricities to make the location unmistakable.

Even the Big Notch and Little Notch in the Continental Divide can be seen from miles to the west.  There’s nothing else similar to it in North America.

Marty Robbins – Little Green Valley

http://youtu.be/WT5qegD28Wo

10 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Liars, Native Americans, NM, Prospecting, Uncategorized, Wildlife

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More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past

Posted on September 30, 2011 by | 9 comments

I was discussing  the Future Me post with Hydrox and his littermate, Naiad, a few days ago and they suggested some other letters to the guy I was would probably be in order.  Those two were there through those years wondering with me where the next bag of Purina cat food would be coming from after I gave us a Y2K [ https://sofarfromheaven.com/category/y2k/].

To be delivered January 1, 2002.

“Hi Guy,

“This is me, Hydrox and Niaid, talking to you from 2011.
You are in for a lot of strange experiences over the next few years, and some profoundly difficult times.  You’re going to do a lot of things you’ve never dreamed of doing, just to get by month-to-month.  You deliberately chose to give yourself a Y2K, whether anyone else had one or not.  Trust me, it’s the best decision you ever made.
 I can tell you now:
“Don’t waste your time trying to get teaching jobs, any job where you can take advantage of your education and job history.  Save yourself a lot of energy and discouragement.  [Hydrox suggests I mention it also won’t buy any cat food.]
“That part of you is gone.  They don’t want any white male in his late 50s, no matter what he might have done in the past.  You are going to have to become really good at some unconventional approaches to survival to just squeeze by without going to live under a bridge somewhere. [Naiad says to tell Niaid to stay the hell away from that pool of water running out of the pipe behind the motel next door and quit worrying about Mehitabel bullying.  She’s about to get hers.]

“All that Y2K credit history and the mistooken belief the IRS would collapse is catching up with you.

“You’ve always succeeded in everything you did.  Now you’re basing your decisions on that history, but you’re failing to comprehend that everything’s changed.  Don’t waste your life in all those months of self-doubt and guilt, judging yourself against a set of standards and assumptions you learned from Grand-dad and you’ve always tried to live by.   Those are dead.

“You are still you.  You’re still strong, and you still have a million things to be grateful for.  What those human resources departments believe is meaningless, doesn’t say a thing about whom and what you are because they reject you.

[Hydrox says to tell Hydrox he can save himself a lot of grief by staying out of that bucket of waste grease behind the Chinese restaurant in front of the apartment.  And if he gets it on him, tell him to just belly up to the bar and get it shampooed off in the bathtub.  Licking it will provide a lingering case of the Egyptian Ducksquirts.]

“You’ve always relied on yourself and you now have to start doing it again in ways you never thought possible.  You are about to have to become a person living in the shadows, off the government paperwork, inside the underground economy.  The sooner you understand there’s no place for you in the ordinary job market the better off you’ll be.

“Old Deano,  [A Strange Way of Thinking] over in Belen’s going to try to talk you into learning blackjack.  You’ll want to shrug and resist.  My advice to you, is ponder it.  Don’t resist so hard, but don’t believe anything he, nor anyone else tells you about the nuts and bolts of playing it until you study it all and think it through.  What’s said by the experts is largely BS.

[Hydrox and Naiad both want you to urgently inform their counterparts NOT to stay indoors when you go off working 11pm to 7am at that damned motel every night and to keep a sharp eye out for those damned cat-killing dogs.]

“Don’t let anything surprise you except by hindsight, as it surprises me, all these years later in 2011.

“These are just short-term morsels.  Deano’s been dead so long I barely remember him.

“You, my friend, are entering a brave new world.  Savor every minute of it.  Maybe I’ll send you an email occasionally to hint you along.

“Hang in there amigo.  You can do it.”

[Hydrox and Niaid in two-part harmony to Mehitabel:  “YOU ain’t here, BITCH!]

Yourself, 10,000 blackjack hands in the future, and after it’s a dim memory.

9 Comments

Posted in Communication, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Internet, Y2K

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Helpful Advice

Posted on September 29, 2011 by | 9 comments

I don’t give advice, but I’m frequently interested in the viewpoints of people who do consider themselves wise enough to give it.

Well, I say I don’t give advice and I sincerely try not to, try to catch myself at it and chide myself when I discover I’ve backslid in a way I can’t squirm out of.  Well, most of the time.  If you’ve read the Survival Book  [  https://sofarfromheaven.com/survival-book-2/ ]  you know I’m lying to myself and to you when I say it.

Some of you nitpickier readers might assert the ‘Ask Old Jules’  blurbs Jeanne posts on the Facebook page amounts to advice, but I can’t agree.  That’s just answers to questions with no attempt to be helpful, no wish to influence the choices other people make.

But I’ve digressed.

I read Ed Hurst’s blog, ‘The Oracles of Marriage’ http://my.opera.com/soulkiln/blog/, and while I find myself not in total agreement with him in a lot of ways, I suspect people involved in relationships with other people might profit from reading and carefully considering what he says.

There’s also the Dear Coke Talk http://www.dearcoketalk.com/ blog ruminating and giving advice I find amusing and might have found helpful when I indulged in relationships.

We’re living in a time of possibly the most profound social experiment in the history of mankind.  During the past century 10,000?  50,000? years of accumulated human wisdom and tradition has been discarded worldwide in favor of various packages groups believe they’ll like better.  I’m not, personally, certain anyone on the planet is qualified to give advice in times such as these.  The body of experience just isn’t sufficient to pull solutions out of a catch-as-catch-can gut feel cauldron of individual preferences and biases, and deliver them any meaningful where.

Seems to me it would be a good time for people involved in relationships to do a lot of pondering, reading, discussing with the party of the second part about boundaries, about ownership, about mutual dependencies, about verbalizing expectations, and about self-reliance.

But what the hell do I know?  I can show you how to start a fire with flint and steel.  I can elaborate at length on how you can make the best of almost any bad situation and come away from it a lot more confident and probably happier than you went into it.  But when things go into the arena of two people clinging to one another in a complex web of expectations neither has clearly defined, neither has ever agreed to, the only reasonable approach seems to me to be honest communications.

I was married 25 years and one of the conversational mantras during that time was, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, something’s the matter.  What is it?”

“Nothing.  No, really.  Nothing.”

That interchange sums up what I’m talking about.  It’s a statement communicated by non-verbal methods that the party of the second part hasn’t satisfied the expectations of the party of the first part.

Why isn’t the answer a forthright statement?  Because the unsatisfied expectation isn’t one that has been brought out into the open, discussed, and agreed to.

“I’m angry and I want you to know I’m angry, but you’ll have to guess why, want me to not be angry.  I’ve chosen this method in hopes of getting you to modify your behavior to something more in tune with what I want from you, knowing you probably won’t agree to it unless I sulk it out of you.”

How the hell can anyone presume to give advice about how to do that better?  When the goal is ownership and control who’s better qualified than the party of the first part, whichever the gender?

Old Jules

Kenny Rogers & The 1st Edition – Something’s Burning

9 Comments

Posted in 2011, Human Behavior, Liars, Relationships

Tagged , , , , , ,

Cat houses and such

Posted on September 27, 2011 by | 10 comments

Three of these four worthless felines are getting a bit long in the tooth, two longer than the next in line.  It’s been a tough summer with the drought and heat wave, so I’ve had to take some measures to give them some relief I couldn’t provide for myself.

Shiva’s not one of the two oldest, but she had a health event a couple of winters ago that’s taken a long time to recover from, and she has a special job here if the cows ever come back.  She’s Shiva the Cow Cat.  Loved chasing cows back when they were bothersome. [ Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3 ]

I might add some other meanderings here today as other things come to mind, but what’s on my mind this morning is I need to start working on the front porch cat houses I put together last fall to give them all places to get out of the elements.  Now that the heat’s bending in the other direction I wouldn’t be shocked to see a winter rearing it’s head before I’m ready for it.

Old Jules

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7:45 AM – Escape Route Possibilities – Fridge and trailer

Another issue that’s been on my mind a lot lately is creating myself a place to live if anything intervenes to insist I get the hell out of Dodge.  The whole thing’s complicated by the contract I have with these cats, all but one of them, to take care of them until they die off, or I die off.  I’ve talked with them about it, and they have some strong views about minimum living conditions, etc, which I’m obliged to consider.  A tent or under a bridge doesn’t meet their minimum criteria.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m looking around for an old travel trailer I can get for a price I can afford, and the new truck up there Gale’s going to help me pull to town to let an honest-to-goodness mechanic fix the wiring mess, inspect it to get it legal, and eventually pull whatever I come up with for it to pull.

While I’m scouting around looking for an old travel trailer I’ve also been looking at this, considering whether it mightn’t offer an alternative:

http://tinyhouseblog.com/

Of course, if I select this option I’ll be building it from salvaged recycled materials.

This trailer below has been sitting there with that load on it from the time Gale and Kay moved here from Pflugerville.  His shop building was full and he didn’t have anywhere to put all that stuff, so it’s stayed there, everything on it getting ruined by the weather and the tires going flat.

another view:

That lathe, left rear, is troubling to see.  But so’s a lot of the other once-useful items on there.

another view:

another view:

If I can think of somewhere to put that junk, protecting whatever’s left worth protecting, I just might be able to talk  him out of the trailer if I decide the building a house on a trailer option seems the best  after everything’s considered.

On the other hand, the fridge is now a sure thing.  I was talking with Gale while he was doing some jewelry work the other day and noticed this, down there bottom center:

Turns out it’s the gas/electric fridge out of an old travel trailer I gave him about 30 years ago.  He says it’s mine if I want it.

It’s going to be a job getting it out of there:

Behind and under a few important things

Old Jules

Jesse Winchester, Just Like New

10 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Country Life, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Solitude, Survival, White Trash Repairs

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Thinking on your Feet

Posted on September 26, 2011 by | 4 comments

A friend and I were chewing the fat outside a car wash business he owns next to a convenience store in Las Lunas, New Mexico a few years ago. A pregnant woman who worked at the convenience store came outside and plopped down out of sight of the front door, smoking a cigarette, sitting on the concrete and leaning against the building.

We’d discussed this woman before…. a nice young lady with a life a person wouldn’t wish on anyone…. last time I’d seen her she was sitting in the same spot crying, which is how I came to ask my bud about her story. Anyway, seeing her brought her into the conversation again.

Most recent weirdness in her life:

The lady was  20 years old. She’d gone into Isleta Casino a while back with a friend, began feeding her paycheck into the slot machines. Now, it was illegal for this woman and her friend to be playing the slots, minimum age being 21.

So what happens? She hits a $5000 jackpot on the machine she’s playing. It lights up like Times Square on New Years Eve, making all kinds of commotion, people coming from all directions to see. She knows she’s going to have to show an ID to get the money. So what does this poor lady do?

She and her friend beat feet out of there, leaving the jackpot.

I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is this: What the hell was she doing putting her money into a gambling machine if she couldn’t accept a payoff, supposing she hit?  Did she do some heavy thinking about this?

But, even so, she ought to have been able to get someone legal to accept the payoff and split it with her, thinks I.

But she knew she was breaking the law, and what do you do when you get caught red-handed? Why hell, you run if your knees are still good enough to allow it.

That’s what’s called thinking on your feet.  Thinking afterward what you done-already should have thought before-wards.

Old Jules

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie– Luck be a Lady

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Posted in Adventure, Human Behavior, Native American, NM, Youth

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