Tag Archives: musings

Too Much Blame or Praise

Posted on July 26, 2011 by | 5 comments

Visiting blogs since starting this one has been an unexpected learning experience. The general impression that almost everyone is concerned about the state of the world and the nation wasn’t a surprise.

But the fortified positions, the polarization, the nagging thought that a lot of people would gladly enforce their viewpoints on others at gunpoint if they had the option, is troubling if accurate. The middle ground, the concept of a loyal opposition, even the concept of people still potentially being okay if they have different political, religious, differing gender viewpoints just isn’t out there anymore. No live-and-let-live in the mix.

The level of rancor between opposing opinions approaches a level where it wouldn’t be too shocking if, say, a 9/11 happened in an environment limiting US victims to a particular political or religious bias, and sets of blog dialogues appearing to express:

“What the hell! They were all Tea-Baggers!”

Or,

“What the hell! They were all pinko liberals!”

Or Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists.

There are already posts on blogs I visit saying, “Let God sort them out.”

I can’t help wondering whether I’m the only one troubled by this.

I used to know a guy, a good man, who was also an alcoholic of the sort you’d rather not be too close to. Jay was his name, an ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Air Corps, B24 pilot of um-de-umph hundred bombing missions over Germany during WWII. War hero.

By the mid-1960s Jay had a drinking problem bad enough to be placed repeatedly into the hands of the Texas Alcoholic Rehabilitation Commission to dry out. Finally, in those days a bright new shining light among the mental health medicos was the pre-frontal lobotomy, was chosen as the tool of choice for curing what ailed old Jay….. But the unfortunate side effects were that a lot of him ceased to be Jay.

But those wise medicos knew what was best for him, they’d read all the recent advances and articles, so they strapped him down to a gurney and inserted electrodes on his temples and shot the juice to him. Several times.

I’d heard about all this, thought it was fairly awful, but what the hell. A few months later I was among a group of young folks friends of his who got invited to spend a day on Galveston Bay cruising around in Jay’s cabin cruiser down there.

Jay was wearing a tee-shirt that proclaimed, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy”. And he did.

It finally killed him, alcohol, the lobotomy didn’t change that…. but he always believed, afterward, that it was a fairly shabby thing for society to have done to him, that lobotomy. Deprived him of his right to make his own mistakes. At least, it attempted to.

If you boil all that down and scrape the leavings off the bottom of the pot, that’s about the way I feel about the likely outcome of the undercurrents at work in this country.

Someone’s going to get the upper hand, one side or the other.

The ones left holding smaller bag might need a bottle to soften up the resulting enforced prefrontal lobotomies and attitude adjustments.

A Great Cultural Revolution

If old Jay were alive he’d probably buy a tee-shirt.

Old Jules

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Posted in Adventure, Human Behavior

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Give a Person a Fish

Posted on July 26, 2011 by | 2 comments

Hi blogsters:

I never see that phrase about fish without a flash of memory.

During the 1950s drought stock ponds were drying up all over the southwest.  There came a day a lot like this one, though it was probably warmer, when a kid named David Cagle and I were wandering around the ruins of cow country and came across a pond that was maybe five acres of surface and about three inches deep in water.  Every square foot of water had a fish flopping in it.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

A few hundred yards from the pond was an abandoned barn where we’d noticed an old galvanized washtub someone had probably used to water calves when there was still water, or feed them when there was still food.  We hoofed over to that barn and snagged the tub, waded into that fish and cow-mud calf deep throwing fish into the tub.

We glowed over that tub full of fish all the way home, him on one handle, me on the other, thinking how deeeeeelighted our folks would be with the treasure we were bringing them.

Both of us smelled a joyous combination of cow-mud and fish when we got to David’s house, went in through the kitchen door and watched his mama shriek even before she turned around and saw the fish.

“Get those fish out of this house!”

We got them out and she followed us into the yard to hose him down before she’d allow him inside.  Me, she ordered to take those fish with me and head down the road.

My own mom took a more circumspect view of things, mainly because she wasn’t home when I got there.  I cleaned myself up and filled the kitchen sink with all the fish it would hold and started killing and gutting them.  The job was far enough along to make quitting a moot point when she got home.

I gutted a lot of fish over the next couple of days, though I did move the operation out into the back yard.

My mom’s one of those kind of people who remember such things after she can’t remember her own name.  I’m not sure I’ve ever returned to her company during the past 50 years without being reminded of it.

Give a person a fish and he might not appreciate it, but he won’t starve until the fish is digested.

But give a person a fishing pole and he’ll almost surely hook an ear or nostril before it’s over.

Old Jules

Sons of the Pioneers–  Cool Clear Water

Woody Guthrie–Dust Bowl Blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYKJaWuj0Y

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Posted in 1950's, Country Life, Human Behavior

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Clean Underwear and Hard Times

Posted on July 25, 2011 by | 12 comments

I think my mom would have made a deal with the devil for one of these in 1947.  She didn’t get one, nor anything else of the sort until around 1957, but I don’t recall her washing clothes in a washtub after the early 1950s.  From around 1954 until she got a home washing machine she went to the Laundromats with most of the other ladies.  I’m guessing this one was probably manufactured in the late 1940s.

I’d watched in one of the thrift stores in town for some while, them asking $55, then marking it down to $35, nobody interested enough to plug it in and find out if it worked.  But after it had been there long enough to cause me to figure they were getting tired of seeing it I plugged it in.

“HUMMMMMM!”

No vibration, nothing moving, just a clicking of the spring loaded timer and the sound of an electric motor trying to push the immoveable object.  I unplugged it more quickly than I plugged it in, carried it up to the cashier and told him it didn’t work, told him what it was doing and what was going to happen if someone plugged it in and left it trying to run.

“We can’t fix it.  We don’t have a repair department.”

“Yeah, maybe nobody can.  They haven’t manufactured parts for it in 50 years.  But maybe someone can.”

“Do you want to try?”

“Maybe.  How much do I have to risk betting I can?”

He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

The only tool required to get it running was my foldup Leatherman, oil, and a rag. It’s out there washing seven pairs of my jockey shorts at the moment.  I don’t envy it.

Been a long while since I’ve been so blessed.

12 Comments

Posted in 1940's, Country Life, Thrift Stores

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Learning to Live with Being Stupid

Posted on July 23, 2011 by | 3 comments

The discovery, beginning about 15 years ago, that I’m not anywhere near as smart as I think I am, and that I’m a world away from knowing as much as I think I know, has been unsettling and somewhat disruptive.  That realization, along with the concurrent observation that an overwhelming piece of what I do know is wrong, hasn’t been as easy to incorporate into something useful in my life as you might think.

Before my smarts and knowings all started to unravel I was a fairly impressive person.  I could explain, without you even asking me to do it, just about anything you might be wondering about.  I knew what you ought to do with your life, how your life became the lousy, empty mess it appears to me to be, and what the government ought to do about anything it had the power to do.  I knew what men ought to do about women and other men, and I knew what women ought to do about men and other women.

I began to get screwed out of that when  out of the corner of my eye I noticed some aspects of my own life that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.  It crept into my consciousness that I’d made a lot of choices and given a plethora of advice to others that simply didn’t have a lot of merit.

This didn’t come all at once.  It started as a trickle with a lot of seemingly small matters I couldn’t help noticing, which I tried to compartmentalize and ignore, same as everyone else does.  But eventually I couldn’t keep them inside the fences I’d built for them.  They were forever sneaking over mingling with others I’d locked up in file drawers I’d clearly marked, “TOP SECRET – DO NOT OPEN”.

This forced me to try to herd them back where they belonged, but in doing so the others tagged along, dancing and clowning and shamelessly demanding I recognize they existed, wanting me to scratch them behind the ears and pay some attention to them.

I figured the easiest approach would be to have a look at their blood lines and shoot the mongrels and mutts, but keep the purebreds.  This required an examination of how I came by all that knowing of every description.

It rocked me to my boot heels to find almost every one of those certainties  came from something someone else said, and I believed it, hugged it tight, and called it my own.  That wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t then asked myself where the people I’d heard it from came to own it.   Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me they’d also heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else.

Gradually, I realized I hadn’t done much thinking for myself.  In fact, I hadn’t based much of anything on the evidence of my own eyes and observations.  Strangers with the voice of authority told me many things other strangers had told them and I frequently accepted it as gospel.  I often abdicated my intelligence in favor of those strangers many times removed.   Without consciously deciding to do so, I treated truth as though it relied on a vote-count of humans to decide its own nature.

I hate it, discovering something like that.  The last 15 years of dismantling a system of giving strangers default authority to control my mind and my life hasn’t even been entirely successful.  I still constantly find the opinions of strangers creeping in, waving their arms around, trying to grab control so I won’t be stupid anymore.

But I’m determined to keep at it.  All those strangers saying things back and forth to one another and believing it over time hasn’t done much good for the people who believe it now.

And it never did me a damned bit of good, even though I was smarter when I believed it, too.
Old Jules

Glen Campbell – Gentle on My Mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFIRTtn_ZSE

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Posted in Education, Human Behavior

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Off the Shelf: What I’ve Been Reading

Posted on July 22, 2011 by | 12 comments


The nearest town, 15 miles away, has started a library, so I paused in my various re-readings off my own bookshelves to check out library books.   I was familiar with some of the authors I began with, but it had been a long time since reading them.

Elmore Leonard–  I ran through a plethora of his books in a short time.. everything the library had.  I’ve never read a book by the man I didn’t like, whether it’s the westerns he began with, or the detective stories that later became his tour de force.  I recommend him to anyone in danger of doing some light reading.  However, I came across one that’s unlike any Elmore Leonard I’ve ever read.  The Touch.  Those of you into metaphysics and healing would probably find it of interest.  It’s the best handling of the stigmata phenomenon, guru-ism, and commercial evangelism that I’ve ever read.

Rudolpho Anaya– This guy came highly recommended by the librarian.  Sorry, folks.  I came away thinking some editor somewhere dropped the ball on the three books I checked out.  Loose sloppy writing, wordy, rambling.  I suspect editors are a lot more forgiving of ethnic writers  and mooshy metaphysical gawdawful rambling flashbacks these days than when I dealt with them as a writer.  150 pages of Rudolpho Anaya would have benefited by a lot of cutting and brutal rewriting, and still ended up with maybe 75 pages worth the time.  Maybe.

Nevada Barr– Never heard of her, but I thought I’d give it a try.  Checked out three books, made it twenty-five pages into one and declared, “No more!”

Elizabeth M. Cosin– I check a couple of these out because the first one was named Zen and the City of Angels.  I’m willing to try what I don’t know, and the name of the yarn brought back pleasant memories of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Checked out two.  Score, zero-two.  They’ll go back in hopes someone else can struggle through them.

Poul Anderson– checked out The Stars are Also Fire because I recall liking Anderson’s work several decades ago.  The Boat of a Million Years comes to mind.  It was a fine work.  However, this Stars are Fire piece seems to me to be the work of a person who needed to smoke some weed to get his mind back, or a manuscript written early in his career, a dead turkey no publisher would touch by an unknown writer, dragged up out of the files and published as a pot-boiler hack to raise grocery and whiskey money, riding the name of the later, more competent Poul Anderson.  I’m 67 pages into it, debating with myself whether to drop the effort and read some William Soroyan off my own shelf until I get back to the library tomorrow.

I’d like to point out to you that the sentence-before-the-last in the previous paragraph is five lines long.  Count’em.  Five.

No good writer would put a sentence that long on a page where some poor human might read it.

Old Jules
Reading Increases the Imagination:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeUid2rv848

12 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Libraries

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Brother Coyote

Posted on July 15, 2011 by | 5 comments

If it weren’t for the big cats, the spiders, the rattlers, the various predatory… and when I think about it, regular non-predatory birds… I’d be tempted to say the wild critter I love most is Brother Coyote.

But that’s when I don’t pause to think of those others individually.  Old Cuervo (Brother Raven)  is hard to beat if you let your mind wander to him.

Frustrating.  I began this blog post to talk about Brother Coyote and why I love him and somehow find myself having to tip my hat to ravens and rattlers and bob-cats and owls and blue birds and spiders.

How’s a man supposed to get anything said about one thing when his mind gets all clogged up with all those others dancing out of the wings wearing clown suits, somersaulting and tooting horns trying for some attention?

Dragging myself back to the issue at hand.  Brother Coyote’s maybe the critter out there that’s most like man.  Intelligent enough to have you shaking your head out of respect.  Loves himself, loves being a coyote.  Never wants to be something else, knows everything else was put here for his amusement, and frequently, for his destruction.

I suppose that’s the long and short of it.  Why,  I’ve studied Brother Coyote and often seen him studying me, seen his sign and his track behind a bush where he was sitting, tongue lolling, laughing as I stumbled noise-making through life.

But if I try to say more this will get too long for the attention spans of you readers.  I’ll save the stuff I planned to tell you about Brother Coyote for another entry or three sometime later.

Meanwhile, the moon’s full this pre-dawn.  Pause and have a look-see for a moment.  When you do, know it’s another thing you share with Brother Coyote.  He loves that moon same as you do.

And if he could get to it to destroy it, he’d do that, also.  Same as you.

Old Jules

You’ll enjoy this short video of a rising moon with a running coyote:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddsimages/5371270617/?reg=1&src=comment

Coyotes
by Bob McDill, sung by Don Edwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kVdOxXB8fg

Cunning vs Habit

Coyotes soon learn
Becoming trap-wise in time
Never snare-wise
In time.

from Poems of the New Old West,  NineLives Press, copyright 2004

5 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Photo of the Day, Poetry, Wildlife, Writing

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Vietcong Seductress, et al

Posted on July 15, 2011 by | 2 comments



Hi blogsters:
Sometimes trying to piece together our lives can be quite a chore.  Peaceful Warrior posted something on one of the groups about the way his name has been a problem to him, and it got me thinking about it.
I was given a name at birth that nobody since has been able to pronounce.  They followed that with another one nobody’d ever heard of.  So when I exited that burg at the age of 15 or so, I left those two names behind and became Jack for most purposes.
But as a struggling young writer in the late ’60s I found myself needing yet another handle…. I was writing for the hairy-chested men magazines… Men, For Men Only, a genre of magazines that vanished by the mid-1970s.
They usually had a picture on the cover of a Marine with a machete struggling with python wrapped around a half-naked woman in some jungle.  That sort of thing.
Well, fact was, in those days I thought there was half-a-chance I’d want to be president, or try to get a decent job sometime.  Didn’t want stories like, Viet-Cong Seductress, or The Half-Million Dollar Sex Salon The Texas Rangers Can’t Find following old Jack around the remainder of his life.
Adopted the pseudonym, Frank C. Riley, which worked well enough.
Then the market collapsed for hairy-chested men stories.  Best paying hack-writer market left was something called ‘Confession‘ mags, which must have been read by the mothers of Romance Novel readers of today.  I figured, what the hell.
Popped out  I Was An Outlaw Motorcycle Mama, sent it off, got a nice letter back telling me there was a middling amount of what they read they liked, but that I needed to work on my female perspective a bit.  Eventually they published it, but they never bought another, though I tried.  But unless I’m mistaken, Motorcycle Mama was the only time I ever succeeded in passing myself off as a woman.  Only time I really ever tried, during that confessions market thing.
Amazing the things a man will do for money.

Old Jules

Hack Writing

Editor:
“Give me a 750 word
Masterpiece
Describing
How crushed ice
Machines
Can be used
On construction sites
To slow the cooling

And surface cracking
Of freshly poured
Cement.
Make it lively
Make it dance

I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

“Give me 2000 words
To titillate
Give me that whorehouse
That famous Chicken Ranch
In La Grange, Texas.
I want pockets picked
I want gonorrhea
I want luscious hookers
And hints of corruption
Deep in Texas
Law enforcement

I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

“I want 2000 words
Fiction
Something about
Beautiful Vietcong seductresses
Luring innocent GIs
To bed and death
In some stinking thatched hut
With pigs squealing outside
I want to see her despair
Her soul searching
As she discovers she loves him

I want a hint of non-fiction.

We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”

Workshop:
“I want a poem
About how you feel
When your lover
Jilts you
In favor of someone
Of his own sex
And begins
Taking hormones.

I want the word
Encyclopedia
Used in every
Third line.

No pay
You just have
The pleasure
And satisfaction
Of doing what I
Told you to.
To help you
Get used to the feel
Of being a writer”

From “Poems of the New Old West”, NineLives Press, Copyright 2003

The Beatles– Paperback Writer



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Posted in 1970's, Adventure, America, Books, Communication, Creative Writing, Hack Writing, History, Human Behavior, Photo of the Day, Poetry, Texas, Writing

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Riding the Bread Line

Posted on July 13, 2011 by | 3 comments


Someone sent me an email forward the other day explaining to me how illegal aliens, welfare recipients, other low-lifes and me, retired and living off Social Security,  is what’s causing this great country to go down the tube.  I swan.

I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to radio, don’t read newspapers or magazines, but I do get email forwards and see sidebar news flashes at Internet sites.  So knowing the country is down the tube didn’t come as a complete shock to me.  Every couple of weeks I go to town for groceries, chicken feed and other necessaries, and the fact gasoline prices are a mite high, bread, milk and produce are worth more than they used to be, and people are older, all had me wondering if things hadn’t slipped downhill.

But knowing all those old people in the grocery lines and I are causing it surely gave me pause.

Made me realize life is harder for people with ball-caps turned sideways, studs in their nostrils, belly buttons and lips, tattoo-tears running down off their faces, and attitude have it tougher than I did all those years I was younger than I am now, because I wasn’t up here then.

I mostly try to mind my own business and tend my own affairs.  I don’t want to be a part of a problem someone else has.  If people living down in the trailer parks sitting in the backs of their pickups drinking beer Saturday afternoons are suffering harder than they would if I was out living under a bridge somewhere dumpster-diving for a living I wouldn’t be half the man I think I am if I didn’t consider it a viable alternative.

I paid money every paycheck for about 50 years into Social Security, but I never figured I’d come to depend on it for a living.  When it happened I never stopped to consider that expecting some of it back was different from people living off their military retirement, Federal Employment Retirement, or Congressional Retirement systems.

If I need to go dumpster-diving and live under a bridge to clear my conscience I figure I can do it.  Lots of people are already doing it.  Just looking at them I hadn’t thought about the moral high ground they’re holding.

Old Jules

King of the Road- Roger Miller


3 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Current Issues, Free, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Internet, Politics, Senior Citizens, Social Security, Solitude, Survival, Welfare

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A Question for the Brave New World

Posted on July 13, 2011 by | Leave a comment



When I went back to my hometown as a young soldier on leave, Christmas, 1961, it was enough of an event to bring my granddad in from his hardscrabble farm.

We sat around the living room, my mom and step-dad, sisters, and granddad, mulling over the war we were certain to have with the Soviet Union soon.

At that point I was as well-educated (by usual standards) as any of the people in the room and all our ancestors by virtue of having completed high school prior to entering the Army.

In talking about the (then current) brink-of-war crisis my granddad muttered something in Latin.  My mother and step-dad cocked an ear.

“Cicero’s probably not the best place to gain any wisdom about America today,”  My step-dad frowned and adjusted his dentures, followed by another Latin quote.

“Neither is Pliny.”  My mom shook her head at both of them.

Young man who knew everything worth knowing, I was.

I didn’t know any Latin, didn’t know who Pliny was, nor Cicero.  I was as ‘well educated’ as anyone in the room and considered my knowledge sufficient to have a wealth of valuable opinion on the issues of the day.  I felt a vague discomfort with them spouting Latin back and forth at one another and naming people I knew nothing about.

I had reason to recall that conversation in 1976, the US Bicentennial year, when the state of America and the state of education was being examined and bandied about.  Thoughtful minds were concerning themselves that Americans were becoming illiterate and ill-educated.

The thinkers of 1976, asked Americans to ask themselves whether they were better educated than their parents and grandparents, despite many more years spent in formal educational institutions.

The general answer in polls was that Americans considered themselves more canny, better informed than their parents, though weaker in most areas of knowledge once considered essential for a person to be ‘educated’.

The moving finger writes and then moves on.

Are you better educated than your parents and grandparents?

Better educated?
Less well-educated?
Know more about everything but less well-educated?
Less well-educated, less well-informed than parents?
Smarter and with more common-sense without Latin, history, philosophy, and other useless studies?

Sam Cooke- Wonderful World


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Posted in 1960's, America, Books, Country Life, Current Issues, Education, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Reading

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A Strange Way of Thinking

Posted on July 10, 2011 by | 12 comments

I’ve encountered this other places, but the first time was several years ago from the man in the picture.

Dean Kindsvater.  Deano.  A man who never saw $50,000 free and clear in his sixty-four years of life.  He played the lottery, but he’d scoff when the prizes weren’t in the high millions.  He’d buy tickets for the big jackpots and wouldn’t even check them if nobody won.  “Hell,” he’d say, “those small prizes aren’t even worth the trouble!”

Here’s a guy, never finished high school, left home in his low-teen years, bounced around as a dish washer and short-order cook for years.  Finally got into the HeeChee jewelry manufacturing business in the early `70s.  Bought an old railroad hotel in Belen, NM, ran a team of illegal aliens out of the top floor until someone discovered Heechee  could be made cheaper in Southeast Asia.

Deano rode through, living in one room of the bottom floor of that hotel the remainder of his life.  Windows all boarded up, top floor a vacant ruin of pigeon droppings and the debris of the life of the man.  He opened a junk shop and sold odds and ends and made up the difference moving a little jade on the side.  Lived downstairs with a propane bottle for heat, extension cords running all over the place from the one outlet, keeping the TV going, the microwave oven for coffee, refrigerator for TV dinners. Cold water sink to wash his utensils.

Three mongrel dogs living there with him.

The only book Dean ever read in his entire life convinced him he could make a living playing Blackjack, which he couldn’t.  Visiting him in that hotel the first time, knocking on that door, hearing him coming from the interior coughing, reminded me of a Frankenstein movie, him as Igor.

I was with him once when someone asked him what religion he was.  “Christian.”…. “No… I mean what denomination?  Catholic?  Baptist?”

Deano thought about it before he answered.  “Catholic.”  But the conversation afterward suggested Deano didn’t know the difference between a Catholic and a Baptist.  He’d never stopped to think about it.  To him those churches he never went into were all alike, all the same bunch of folks.  Never entered his mind that it might be something worth thinking about.  Never been in a church in 64 years of life, never paused to wonder anything at all about anything at all, so far as I could tell.  A unique man.

But Deano thought the prizes too small to bother with if the jackpot was just $10 million.  Never even bothered to check if he’d won  the $100K someone had a ticket for in NM, but had never claimed.  He had, in common with a lot of other people, that scorn for the smaller prizes that could have changed his life.  He’d probably be shyly flattered, knowing his picture was up here for strangers to see.  Flattered and a little suspicious.  “How’s this going to make anyone any money?” he’d ask the universe.

RIP Deano.

Hope the prizes are bigger wherever the heck you are these days.

Old Jules

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Posted in Human Behavior, Lottery, Senior Citizens

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