I was out studying this problem again yesterday and this morning.
I’ve got a starter, but I hadn’t dared start the job because of a Catch 22. At the time the 4Runner was my only transportation and even starting it by rolling it downhill was better than no transportation. But once I got it blocked and it rolled forward a bit the blocks would be wedged in front of the wheels and I’d have no way to get them out. My mind locked into this problem, so when the battery went dead and it rolled to the other side of the meadow without starting I didn’t back up in my thinking and realize it didn’t apply anymore. I already didn’t have any transportation.
Believe it or not, that took me several months to figure out. But I finally did, and studying the situation I decided if the new starter doesn’t repair the problem I can hook a cable to the back bumper and that telephone pole behind and use the 2-ton come-along to pull it back up with the battery fully charged. The downhill roll from the telephone pole should turn it over enough to get it started. Afterward I can try Plan B to decide what to do next, but with a truck that will work if I park it on a downhill grade.
As nearly as I could figure that wheel well is the only access to the starter.
I stuck the camera in there for a better look at how much of a Commie it planned to be.
Bigger than Dallas, a man can get to the heads of both bolts holding it on. The Universe is kind to a man like me.
But first I needed to jack it up from a bumper so’s the brake disc wouldn’t be pushed up squeezing what little room I’d have to work.
And I had to get that wheel off. I’d forgotten why I always carry that wheel-puller in the truck. The hubs are from an old Isuzu Trooper I used to own and they don’t make an exact fit. When I torque down the lug nuts the wheel jams against the threads and it won’t come off without a lot of persuasion.
But there it is. Hot diggedy damn!
Easy! Easy money!
Man, people pay good money to get to do a job as easy as this one’s going to be.
And there it sits after I ran spang out of altitude, airspeed and fancy ideas. My tools are up at Gale’s under the hood of my New Truck.
Sheeze. I’ll have to bring them down next time I borrow Little Red.
“If somebody says, I love you, to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? I love you, too.”
–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922), U.S. novelist. Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, Address at Dedication of Wheaton College Library, 1973 (1974).
She: I still have lots of trouble accepting that it’s normal and even considerate for men to NOT say I love you. I wasn’t raised that way, and I always thought if the man wouldn’t say it, it simply meant he wasn’t thinking it either. The first guy I ever fell in love with wouldn’t say it, and it was years before I realized he had good reasons not to. Saying he loved me would have made me draw all kinds of inappropriate conclusions.
He: I think there are lots of reasons for not saying I love you besides not loving you. The trouble is, the word’s got hooks in it. You can lie, and say “I love you,” when you don’t. But when you do, and go around admitting it a lot, that’s really screwed up. I kind of put that in this category of you and me. I try my best not to say that. I feel like it puts a burden on you to try and read into that what the hell I’m meaning, and it puts an equal burden on me to somehow assume you’re understanding, “Okay, this means this, this, this, and this, but it doesn’t mean this, this, this, and this.” (Laughter) So I generally work at not saying it.
She: From my end, I work at not saying it because I know it bugs you to hear me say it. If you’re not going to say it, I don’t want to say it. It makes me feel silly, even if I really think it and feel like saying it, when you don’t need to hear it.
He: If we had a strictly platonic relationship, we could say that, and no danger. If we were just friends, no problem, say it all you want to. Until that’s the case, you got to be damn careful with it.
On the other hand, see, the moral equivalent of your ex-husband not saying it in so many ways has brought you to where you are right now. It didn’t have to happen. I may be wrong, but I think I know women. I think I know you pretty well. If your ex-husband had done anything right, you wouldn’t be where you are right now. The guy blew it. He either didn’t know anything about women, or just didn’t give a shit.
If you have something like what you and he had, and you wanted to save it, you’d have to at least do this, to keep it going. For you and most women, “this” doesn’t happen to be much. It just takes a little bit of tenderness, a lot of respect, and the pretense, if not the reality, of a willingness to listen to what you’re saying, what you’re feeling, and what you’re needing and wanting.
I’m talking about married women who have a couple of kids and are domestic. It really doesn’t take very much to keep them happy. All you have to do is be attentive, and respectful and loving, and they’ll roll over and shake your hand, or play dead, or do any damn thing you want them to. (Laughter)
She: I feel very frustrated by what you are saying, because I feel like I’m being described as a less complex person than I am, but I can’t find anything untrue about it. I guess it works pretty well with me. When I met you I was impressed by your doing those exact things. But maybe all you’re describing is a normal healthy relationship where two people care enough to be considerate and attentive, where they don’t automatically assume they know what’s happening in the other person’s life.
A lot of sudden wear and tear showing up on my clothing. I attribute a lot of it to this:
I picked it up at the tail-end of a garage sale in Kerrville, still in the box, evidently never used, for $7.00 US. I thought it would make a great addition to the old Kenmore by offering a means of rinsing one load while another was being washed. Neither of the two uses a lot of water, but this one uses a bit less than the Kenmore. I was hugging myself with joy.
But I believe this thing wears out clothes instead of washing them. At this rate I’ll be running around naked under my outer clothing before another change of underwear’s required.
My current thinking is I’m going to have to figure out something to do with this thing that doesn’t involve washing clothes.
Meanwhile maybe it’s time to test a theory I’ve been chewing on for some while that nobody would notice or care if they saw a 68 year old man in town doing business, buying groceries and chicken feed, bare-assed naked.
Maybe they’d like it better than one who has plenty of cotton and chinese poly-whatchallit covering his privates, but stinks to high heaven.
I’m going to get away from the brave new world of the 21st Century and the animal kingdom for this segment and go back a few million years to my childhood. I explained a little about that farm on the other side of the railroad tracks here: Could you choose to live on the street?, but to pursue the bullying issue I’ll elaborate a bit.
The kids who lived on the other side of those tracks were overwhelmingly tough, poor, and ‘bad’. The families were farm laborers or otherwise unskilled, lots of kids, and Hispanic or considered ‘white trash’. The kids living there went to Lindsey Grammar School, and the RR tracks defined the boundary between Lindsey and the other two grammar schools.
In 1949, when I was starting school my mother went to war with the superintendent of schools and the school board to make certain I went to East Ward, not Lindsey. She succeeded.
Meanwhile, on this side of the tracks and the highway there were a few neighborhoods of kids who belonged in Lindsey, but were doomed by geography to go to school with the regular population at East Ward. One of those was a boy named Floren Villianueva and his siblings. A tough, bad, mean as hell youngster with older brothers meaner than him. He and I entered the first grade in the same class.
Floren and I somehow got crosswise with one another almost the first day of classes during recess. He gave me a blow to the stomach that knocked the wind out of me, doubled me over and might well have been responsible for the hernia of the goozle that’s caused me trouble to this day.
After school each afternoon Floren and his brothers walked home the same route I did, and for a few days they went the extra distance to chase me home, throwing rocks at me when they couldn’t catch me, beating hell out of me when they could. Me finding safety only when I went through the door to the house.
That naturally came to the attention of my mom after a few days. One afternoon she was standing on the porch shaking a rug and saw me running across the tracks chased by Floren and his brothers. They came right into the yard, and she grabbed a broom and chased them off, yelling insults.
When they were gone she turned on me in a fit of rage, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me into the house where she kept her switch. While she was beating hell out of me she was yelling, “If I ever see or hear of you running from a fight again this is nothing compared to what you’ll get.”
When my step-dad got home she told him about it and he just shook his head. “Running from a bunch of God-damned Mexicans!”
I went about in disgrace a few days, the story circulating among the adults with me in hearing distance, all of them dumbfounded by my cowardice.
But I never ran from a fight again. I started carrying a heavy stick with me walking home and only had to whack one of those other kids upside the head with it one time. Afterward Floren and I fought a lot of times during recess and I never whipped him, but I took the beatings rather than the alternatives.
This is too lengthy for me to continue where I’m going with it, but it’s necessary background to get in place before going forward in this segment.
Someone found this blog by search engine yesterday with the question, “What kind of words does a man want to hear during sex?”
I don’t believe I’ve elaborated on the issue on the blog because I don’t have a lot of sex going on around here. The cats are all neutered, the Great Speckled Bird is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth with the crippled up wing and leg causing the hens to threaten break-ins to the pen where the younger roosters abide.
So all I can figure is the person wasn’t thinking in terms of me, or the chickens or cats. The person had to be thinking more along the lines of a generic man. A brave new world post-Y2K feller.
I don’t want anyone going away from this blog with questions unanswered and 21st Century puzzlement inhabiting his/her mind, so I’m going to answer on behalf of the generic man, the 21st Century man:
The sounds a 21st Century man wants to hear during sex are: “I saw the prettiest dress at WalMart today, honey! Are you nearly finished? Is it okay if I eat that apple if you’re going to be at this a while?” and the sound of an apple being eaten.
Korean War vintage – The From Here to Eternity Version’s missing the first and last stanza, but worth the watch:
The complete version
Around 1956-’57 when Elvis was drafted
Sailor around 1957
A million men or more left their hearts in San Francisco to be reminded by this song. When we returned and the troop ships passed under the Golden Gate a million uniform hats went into the air:
The Berlin Crisis of 1961 brought this one to the top. I listened to it in basic training along with everyone else they could drag out of the sticks to wear a uniform:
The constant ‘brink of war’ cold war military also serving as armies of occupation:
Then along came Vietnam
And those who decided Canada made more sense
than the Okie from Muskogie
and politicians singing For God Country and My Baby to the tune of 1000 bottles of beer on the wall in 10 part harmony for another half-century.
The following is a transcript of a recorded conversation I had with a woman several years ago. I don’t know whether I still agree with myself about what I said here, but I suppose I must have at the time.
She: You were talking about these dependency relationships, where the man, if he wants certain things from a woman, is willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit to get it, and the woman usually ends up with more bullshit to tolerate. And you made a point of saying that, whether or not he says “I love you,” makes a big difference in how she’s handling it. What does that mean, does he feel like he has to say it, even if he doesn’t really love her? Why is it so important for women to hear that, but it doesn’t seem to be important for men to say it? Or is that just some circumstances, and some relationships?
He: It’s just some circumstances and some relationships, but it’s pretty pervasive. Fact is, it doesn’t matter what the guy feels. He can truly love her. He can sort of love her. He can not know whether he loves her. Or he can not love her. But he knows the rules say that he’s got to say that he loves her.
From the perspective of the woman, she can’t know which one of those situations he’s in. She doesn’t acknowledge that such things exist. But the female sex has forced the issue. Thanks to 10,000 years of females demanding that men say they love them whether they do or not, you have all the men saying I love you, easily.
Now some don’t, I don’t, some other old guy friends of mine don’t, but it’s a subject of some discussion between us, it pisses us off. Fact is, that’s what women try hard to make a guy do, they are willing to go through all kinds of games and machinations to try to force a man to say it, no matter what the man feels.
My friends encounter it all the time with women. I’ve encountered it with most of the women I’ve ever gotten involved with. It’s pretty much a hundred percent. It’s as though they don’t give a rat what you’re really feeling.
What women are saying is, “Okay, what I want you to do is say I love you, whether you feel it or not, and I’m gonna behave as though I believe it’s true, for whatever reasons. Then I can use it as a bludgeon against you.”
(“Ooh, you said you loved me, and now you’ve done this or that, or haven’t done this or that, to prove you were lying. What you’ve done or haven’t done is prima facie evidence of your liarhood! And down underneath that is proof that you are lowlife scum because you said it to get something out of me. And besides that, the fact you actually don’t love me is proof you are cold and unfeeling, because I love you sooooo much.”).
“So,” the female sex is saying, “First and foremost I want to hear you say it. I want you to hear yourself say it. And I’m going to take all kinds of coercive and manipulative steps to make you do that.”
Well, the fact is, most of the male population out there says, (“Screw it.” *sigh* ) “Okay, I love you.”
She: You don’t think most women really want to know?
He: Well, they want to know if the answer is Yes. None of them want to know if the answer is No. “I want you to tell me you love me, and I want it to be true.” But if it isn’t true, say it anyway. The object isn’t getting a better hold on reality, or a better understanding about how he actually feels. The object is to hear him say those words, and to make him hear himself saying them.
She: So it doesn’t really matter whether he loves her or not, if he’s going to play that game and say it?
He: Well, he’s going to play it. But fact is, men know this about women. And for the most part, men have a really cynical view of it. It’s something that gets talked about. She’s on the warpath? “ Oh, send her some roses. Tell her you love her, man. Snuggle up a little bit. She’ll get over it.”
Guys will, for the most part, go ahead and do it. They’ll do whatever they have to do to make their lives easier. And so the upshot is that women have created a situation where a guy out there who won’t lie is all of a sudden called cold and unfeeling, when in fact all he is, might be just honest.
One of the problems is in the difference in the way men and women view sex. Men, as a rule, have no problem with the concept of uncomplicated sex. Even if they don’t happen to indulge in it. Women, on the other hand, have 10,000 generations of training to use it as a weapon or an instrument of coercion and extortion. The monopoly women have is one they’ve guarded so consistently, so long that for most women the concepts of sex and power are inseparable.
Selling sex for any commodity is prostitution. Trading sex for power instead of money isn’t exempt. But those who do it are ‘unadmitted whores’, as opposed to straight, upfront whores.
Many years ago a whore named Frenchie in a bar on the waterfront in Texas was bantering with me. I was trying to seduce her in the non-commercial sense. “Sex is no fun if there’s no money involved!” was her final answer.
Frenchie just about said it all, one way or another, and if you think of money as a synonym for power.
One of the reasons women who don’t admit they are whores dislike women who do admit it so much involves the concept of inflation. From the perspective of a non-admitted whore, the whore is selling a commodity for mere money that’s worth so much more than money. In doing so, she (the admitted whore) is making that commodity available for a price that’s easily met, thereby robbing all non-admitted whores of some measure of power. Several generations of Texas men had their first encounters with uncomplicated sex at a cathouse in LaGrange called the Chicken Ranch (now famous). For most of those men visits to the Chicken Ranch ended up as the ONLY encounters with uncomplicated sex in their entire lives.
The only commodity rarer and more precious than uncomplicated sex is honesty.
One of the better songwriters of the 20th Century is turning 70 today. I’d wondered for a number of years whether I’m older than him because of the song, Texas 1947. I figured he must be slightly older, but not by much. When Jeanne sent me an email telling me it’s his birthday the question was answered. A year and a few days. He’s another young guy.
This next one appears to be one of the performances when he was on the road with Townes Van Zandt. I’m just guessing about that.
I can’t even recall how many performances by Guy Clark, and Guy touring with Townes I’ve seen in my life, but every one was worth the price of admission. Even when Townes was so far down the downhill slide watching him brought some pain. Those years they could bring in a house of 150 or so when they came to Austin. Just about enough to fill up the Cactus Cafe at UT Union building.
LA Freeway’s one of those songs I used to have as the single song on a 90 minute tape played on long road trips. I never tired of it.
Guy’s evidently a fine craftsman, makes all his own guitars. I gather he’s also built a boat, or two, but I’ve always preferred to think he was talking about more than boats in this song.
I’ve always thought if circumstances had been different and I’d managed to come across Guy Clark somewhere when we were both young we might have been friends. As it is, I suppose I think of him as a friend anyway because of all the joy his songs have given me over the decades.
Sometimes a song just happens to twang the heartstrings and worm its way into a lifetime, I suppose. Navajo Rug’s been such a song for me.
I first heard the song in Austin, Texas, performed by Bill and Bonnie Hearne in some tiny, packed appearance of theirs in the mid-1980s. I liked it so well I bought a tape. Then, later I discovered the Tom Russell version and made a 90 minute tape with just that song on it, listening to it on road trips sometimes for several hours at a time until the tape wore out.
Almost a decade later I was headed through the Four Corners area toward Hovenweep and various ancient sites in southwestern Utah, but still in Colorado when a road-sign announced I was entering Canyon, Colorado. I craned my neck watching for evidence of a burned down cafe in the weeds as I passed through.
But all the time I was in Utah over the next several days the Navajo Rug song and Canyon, Colorado were nagging at the back of my mind. I didn’t even have the tape with me, so I sang it to myself and the truck. Then, on the trip back I resolved to try to find out if the cafe ever existed, where it was, maybe even pick up some piece of broken melted glass or a spoon from the ruin.
I spent half a day in that village slowly driving back and forth along the grader ditch, getting out and trekking around possibilities, asking around among any residents I could approach without interrupting what they were doing.
I didn’t find it, didn’t find anyone in town who’d ever even heard the song.
But I did sit down in the only eating establishment open and order two eggs up on whiskey toast, home-fries on the side.
Sometimes that’s about the best a person can do.
But it wasn’t the only time I’d found myself pursuing musical/lyrical craziness when location comspired with a song I remembered to distract me from a destination. On more than one trip through Morenci and Clifton, AZ, I did a lot of asking trying to find someone who remembered who sang Open Pit Mine.
I’m not just any old dumb-ass. I’m a dumb-ass with a lot of hats, cats and a few chickens. But I’m also a dumb-ass who’s lived long enough to recognize tripwires and the sound of impending silence tromping around in the nether regions.
I’m a dumb-ass with a pair of ears I can hear with and eyes I can see with.
What I see and hear are the forces of ‘the other side’ are dragging out the heavy artillery and the Magnificent Seven. The propagandist litany of dirty sexual organs, dirty clothes, dirty underwear and dirty Communism is already coming through the loudspeakers of surround-sound.
You’re being demonized, but they’re also planting pamphlets they claim are circulating among you about what circumstances it’s okay to kill cops. Claiming your promiscuity’s worse than that of a politician or vice cop. Claiming you’re getting your funding from any organization they think anyone hates.
These tactics have always worked for them in the past. They’re not too different from those used by the USSR against Polish Solidarity to keep it down almost a decade. They’re not, for that matter, too different from those used once in Germany to acclimatize the population to some reason behind a segment of the population vanishing.
Meanwhile it’s going to get cold nights and those who have somewhere warm to go are going to find all manner of important reasons to go there.
Generally it makes better PR to go voluntarily than to be driven out by having been discredited so badly as to seem a justifiable target for physical abuse. And it’s better to go voluntarily than just to fade from something that can be labelled ‘lack of support’, or ‘lack of interest’.
I’ve never quite been dumb-ass enough to think this OWS business is likely to bring about any positive change, but I have been dumb-ass enough to hope it doesn’t get steamrollered. Enough to allow a microscopic hope that what’s being done could get the attention of some piece of the power structure enough to get them thinking.
But now the clock is running. There’s more than a hint that both political parties have realized allowing all these folks to quietly sink back into the population when a national election’s looming on the horizon might be worse then having them out where they can be discredited and infiltrated by provocateurs, inflamed and accused.
I’m a dumb-ass who thinks the smart ones are filling up the address books with email addresses and phone numbers, packing their dirty sex, dirty underwear, and dirty Communism as carry-on luggage for a trip below the horizon, off the radar.
But I’m not dumb-ass enough to think anyone’s going to do it.
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 