Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
I’m a bit out of sorts this morning. That pic above was taken for the post about hats worn backward, but if I paused and had a look in the mirror it think it would be me again, minus the backward High Roller. Hats You Can’t Wear Sideways or Backwards
The protracted computer fiasco put me fairly far behind on one of my projects, which I went a hundred miles an hour for a lot of hours yesterday playing catchup without getting there. But I think doing it must have worn my mind down along the edges and frayed my thinking processes enough to have me wondering if I’m not getting old.
If I had a vehicle and enough slack in the budget I think I’d probably forget everything for a day and just go for a road trip for a day. Try out my Texas Thumb and Finger Signsand let the projects, the chickens, and the cats fend for themselves long enough to get a recharge on my batteries.
But that’s not going to happen, and the project’s going fairly well once I reconstructed where my head was when I got distracted by computers. The roosters are singing up Old Sol and I hear cats hissing at one another on the front porch, so all I have to do is wait until my head clears, kick start myself into motion.
I’ve been fighting off urges to write long written works lately, which I’m not going to do, and one of the ways I avoid doing it and push the urges back involves typing words on this blog. Pressure release valve, more or less.
I appreciate the role you readers play in the process. If you weren’t here I think I mightn’t write the blog, and find me sneaking up on myself writing a book instead. A pure disaster.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties. Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid. Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.
One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet. The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.
The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them. Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.
A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time. I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.
But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own. One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico. The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal. Back during the Y2K time.
Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico. The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.
I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.
Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening. It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.
I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round. It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.
I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.
The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.
Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.
There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.
As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.
Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t. Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.
Got an email I haven’t opened, presumably from Norton Symantic noting I haven’t plugged the modem into the E Dell Machine to test the 79 mb downloaded driver.
At least I assume it’s from Norton Symantic, though the whatchallit ‘from’ says it’s from Best-Penis and the subject line says, Max-Gentleman Enlargement Pills. But I’m not fooled. Norton Symantic was popping screens up on me all manner of ways yesterday creeping in with things intended to interrupt my focus and goals for eventually getting this E Dell Machine online.
Norton most likely suspects a degree of trepidation on my part and is poking sharp sticks in my eye suggesting I need to grow a set of whatchallits and go ahead and test it. After which they’ll sell me some penis enlargement software to make it work, which they figure at the moment it ain’t going to do.
But you have to admit, even the Chinese can’t do fireworks to compete. Some things just can’t be pulled off with the combination of cheap labor and US politicians dancing for multi-national corporations and banks.
Old Sol’s got his own cheap labor, I’m guessing.
And if he does they’re not forever counting themselves up to calculate whether they could march four abreast into the sea without wearing thin on the patience of everyone else.
I’m in the doghouse with all the cats this morning, but especially with Hydrox. The invadercat came in just at dark last night while I was feeding the can of cat food to the four belongers. Sat there 20-30 feet off the porch just watching.
Irked the bejesus out of Hydrox, especially, because I was taking its picture and talking to it instead of running it the hell off. This morning Hydrox is being standoffish and treating me with a disdain I rarely see in him.
But you’ve got to admit that looks like a pretty good cat, though I’m not going to let it stay around here. I don’t need any more cats and it’s well enough groomed to argue it has a home somewhere, anyway.
Hydrox and the other can relax, once they’ve punished me a while for causing them a momentary doubt about feline population projections for 2012.
I’ve mentioned guineas a number of times here, but I suspect some of you folks might never have seen one. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re constantly moving faster than you can realize until you try snapping a pic of them.
They look a bit like a cross between a turkey vulture and a pheasant. Most biologists believe the species leaked over here from a parallel universe and they’ve never quite managed to get a grip on this reality.
The biologists might be correct, but my personal theory is that they escaped from a Larry Niven novel, one of the Tales of Known Space from the 1970s and 1980s. Likely as not they were developed by the race that created the Bandersnatchi.
I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.
“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”
Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions. Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick. I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.
“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here? You and me? You and all the cats?” He glared at me. “You, the cats and the chickens?”
I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this. I felt a tirade in the making. “Just you cats and me. The chickens can’t be part of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.” He gestured with his nose toward the porch. “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense. It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”
His frustration was obvious. “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are. For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me. And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”
This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything. “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’. When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’. But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving? Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”
He waited while I considered it. “I suppose I don’t.”
“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”
The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking. Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life.
When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined. The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy.
“Do you have proof of residence?”
“There’s my driver’s license.”
“That’s not enough. I need a utility bill or tax return.”
“I didn’t bring that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy. And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.
Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure. In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries. When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with. In Washington, D.C. In Austin, Texas.
And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.
“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.
Old Jules
“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while. But the skunk-instincts and chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in. The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.” Josephus Minimus
I must have been four, or maybe five When grandfather said, with a snicker, “Where a man wouldn’t go with a Colt .45 That boy will follow his pecker.”
Half a century now mocks: I’d surely be elated If Papa’s eye had turned to stocks Or land speculated.
I’ve frequently suspected my granddad was speaking from his own experience.
One of the rewards the Universe gave me for getting to be this old was the raging hormones fading into oblivion. There’s still plenty of passion in my life, but it’s of a different nature, and it listens to the voice of reason.
I’d never have believed back when passion was a misery to be endured that the Universe had other passions in mind if a person could just make room for them between the preoccupations.
And yet, today I listen to any one of the songs below and it brings back vivid, pleasant memories of [usually] one woman. The shadow of the past agonies is still there if I choose to examine it, but if I don’t the songs and the passage of time allows it all to be a bit nostalgic. And the songs don’t last long enough to insist on thorough remembering.
Old Jules
(Arirang) Korean Folk Song [She never had an orchestra background that I recall]
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes said things too well. It was one of several I put as a single song on a 90 minute tape and wore out. Live version, no embed: http://youtu.be/GQJAsEZ-S3I
Hank Snow 90 Miles an Hours Down a Deadend Street was another ‘said things too well’.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by this morning.
I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning. Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life. The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream. But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff. I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.
The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.
Busybusybusy. It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was. From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them. I thought they’d passed out of my life.
I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up. Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.
Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back. Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description. It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.
Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again. But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream. I never cared much for him anyway.
When my mom left her second husband near Apache Junction, Arizona to move near my granddad’s place at Causey, New Mexico, I was considerable upset about it all. I’d become overfond of the Arizona guy, liked him a lot despite his human flaws that bothered my mom.
Time proved my level of upset couldn’t be handled by beating it out of me, nor by any of the other usual ways people tried back then to nudge a kid back into being seen and not heard. The Runaways, 1947
My first step-dad [Arizona] was fond of reading the Alley Oop comic strip to me and I was a huge fan. Alley was a cave man skipping forward and backward in time thanks to a 20th Century scientist. Alley even had a 20th Century lady friend named Oola.
About the only thing I’d brought with me from Arizona was my stack of Alley Oop comic strips. We’d travelled light across the desert. And when we arrived in Causey one of the jobs my sisters had was reading those Alley Oops to me, trying to bring up my spirits. Which I suppose it did until they’d finished reading them to me.
Something more permanent had to be done, and my granddad decided to have a shot at it. He promised to take me to visit Alley’s home. Mesa Verde, Colorado.
What a trip that must have been, me pestering him whether we were there yet, how much further before we’d see Alley’s home. I don’t know how long we stayed, but I never forgot old Alley and his home. I still had one picture of the cave dwelling he took back then until Y2K.
And of the hundreds of ancient ruins, documented and undocumented, I’ve poked around in during my life, I’ve never visited one, found one, without thinking to myself with a smile that Alley Oop might have lived there, visited there ahead of me.
When Mel King and I were exploring the ruin on Gobbler’s Knob and were driving back to Socorro when he reached into his daypack for something, came out with a human skull it was the first thing I said to him. “What the hell is that? You packed off Oola’s skull. Get it the hell out of this truck!”
I screeched onto the shoulder and he hid it behind a cedar until we’d be headed back to Gobber’s Knob so he could put it back where it belongs.
Nowadays I think I have more in common with Alley Oop than with any modern human being. If there was ever a right time for me to pop out of the gene pool it would probably have been more appropriate temporally in some other Universe where Alley Oop lived and breathed. It made more sense than this one.
1964 was a big year in my life. I rode the USNS Breckinridge troop ship back from Korea with 2000 other GIs coming home, separated from the army late in June. Hung around Portales, New Mexico for a while, applied to join the Peace Corps, then hitch-hiked to New York to pass the time until I heard from the Peace Corps.
Beatniks hadn’t yet been displaced by hippies and Greenwich Village was jam-packed with thousands of us implying we were beatniks but carefully not saying so. Hanging around coffee shops writing poetry, playing chess, saying momentous deep-thinking things back and forth to one another. Listening to folk singers.
Being rocked back on our heels in mock, simulated shock and disgust when wheat-straw blondes from Westchester down for the weekend to be beatniks, too, refused our advances. “WHAT? You don’t believe in FREE LOVE?”
Which, surprisingly, almost always worked. Provided you’d done a convincing enough job trickling out the bona fides of being a REAL beatnik. And wouldn’t even think of hopping in the sack with someone so uncool she didn’t even believe in free love. Even if she did iron her long hair out straight.
So after I hopped the freight to go back to New Mexico, got thrown in jail in Rochester for taking the wrong train, The Hitch-Hiking Hoodoos, got released to hitch home, things stayed eventful for a while.
A guy from Buffalo picked me up on the Interstate, older guy in his 30s. When I got in I threw the pillow-case with my belongings into the back seat. “I don’t know why I picked you up,” he glanced at me with disgust.“I never pick up hitch hikers.”
Over the next few miles he questioned me about who I was, where I was from, what I was doing hitching, what I’d do when I arrived, and I explained it all in loving detail.
“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with a hitch hiker the few times I’ve picked them up. But if I do ever get killed by a hitcher it will probably be some half-baked kid who doesn’t know what he wants in life.” He thought about it a minute. “But I don’t have to worry about you. You threw your gun into the back seat in that pillow case when you got in.”
We talked a lot over the highway between Rochester and Buffalo. Enough so he didn’t take the Buffalo exit and carried me down to where a tollway squeezed the traffic going south to Cincinnati, Ohio. He pulled up beside a car with a family in it, man, woman and a couple of kids. Motioned for them to roll down the passenger-side window.
“Are you going on through Cincinnati? I’ve carried this guy all the way from Rochester and he’s okay. He’s going to New Mexico. But I’d like to get him a ride past Cincinnati. He’ll never get through that town walking.”
The couple said they were just going to Cincinnati, but we were all watching the traffic edge forward to the toll gates. “We’d better take him anyway. He might not get another ride.”
The Buffalo guy was right, but it began the next phase of a long story. Guess I’d best hold it for another day.
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 