Bullying’s getting all out of hand here since the weather’s cooled. I’ve written about this hen before, probably under the heading, News From the Middle of Nowhere. She’s always been a Communist from earliest chickhood. But most recently she’s begun spending her nights locked up with the two younger roosters, one a Black Silky, the other a Silky/Australorp cross. Then, after everyone’s out ranging, I let her out of the young rooster pen to range with the rest of the flock and do her laying in the same nests as the other hens.
The chickens are allowed to bully the cats here because it’s the lesser of two evils – the cats all know and respect the fact chickens aren’t to be bullied, whatever their feline instincts argue otherwise. So naturally, the chickens are well aware of this and bully the hell out of every cat that gets in the way of whatever catches their eye.
Sooooo. I re-established the cat houses for the cold weather and the felines explored and tested each for personal priorities and preferences, not taking into account the Commie hen. The cats know those are THEIR shelters. The one this Communist is sitting in is the preferred sleeping place of Shiva the Cow Cat. Not a nesting box for Communist Party meetings between chicken and egg.
Unfortunately, Shiva also knows she’s not allowed to swat the bejesus out of the hen when it becomes a contest over who gets to take over the Shiva-house. So Shiva snoozes until the Commie arrives, then the chicken comes in and gives her a couple of pecks, Shiva exits out the other side, and Ms. Commie settles down to drop a bluegreen egg.
But that’s only a piece of the bullying going on here. I was going to tell a bit about an 8-9 year old kittenish cat named Tabby who’s begun testing my patience by bullying the hell out of the older felines.
But I’ll save that so’s I won’t be tempted to use language strong enough to cause the lady-readers to blush.
This place is looking every day more like a bunch of human beings trying to get along.
I'd guess Phil probably resembled this young marine when he arrived
I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while. That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him. I’ll tell you a bit more about him.
Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car. A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer. Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.
The deputy wasn’t fooled. He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins. He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.
In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink. He became Marine Recon and a sniper. Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB. The squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.
They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer. Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.
Phil did two tours over there. When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard. Which Phil believed would be easy duty.
Instead, it was riot control. Wherever Nixon went there were anti-war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.
Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.
But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.
When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles. The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.
Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID. Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.
I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet. Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.
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.
Old Sol’s still muttering and grumbling. The earlier theory entertained by astrophysicists that the widespread sunspot activity was being caused by the Occupy Wall Street movement’s lost a lot of following. The cold weather has evidently caused the movement to adopt a wait-and-see posture, while the solar activity continues despite the inclement weather.
But you might notice there’s growing activity south of the equator.
Meanwhile, the moon was playing footsey with Jupiter last night.
“BRIGHT CONJUNCTION: Last night, sky watchers around the world witnessed a conjunction between Jupiter and the Moon. “It was very nice sight seeing the two bright heavenly bodies so close together,” says P-M Hedén of Vallentuna, Sweden, who photographed his daughter and a friend admiring the view. The show’s not over. The Moon and Jupiter are drifting apart but still less than 10o apart tonight. Look east after sunset for a conjunction so bright it shines through thin clouds and city lights.”
Astrophysicists continue to believe this affair between the moon and Jupiter is a product positions of the two within the orbits of the two celestial bodies as they relate to the position observers on the earth surface, which might be true. Certain Mayan scientists and Renaissance theologians believe otherwise.
The affair is evidently being conducted outside the sanctity of marriage, which brought shouts of indignation from certain quarters in Washington, DC. White House spokesmen have asserted they have no interest in what the moon and Jupiter choose to do with their genitals so long as both consent.
Not much else going on here, though the cats all occupied cat houses last night and the sounds coming from the chicken fortresses lead me to believe they all survived the night.
He called it honesty;
Was sincerely fond
In spite of all she wasn’t
And so many things she was
He found repelling.
She called it cruelty;
He wasn’t fond enough
To call it love
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.
That tribal talk a week or so ago got me thinking about an old Mescalero bud I’ve known on and off through the parts of this lifetime that matter. We go long times without seeing one another, but we top off the long spells by bumping into one another in unlikely places.
Kurtiss and I first met working on Skeeter Jenkins’ ranch near Kenna, New Mexico. Must have been 1958, ’59. Skeeter wasn’t a joyful man on his ranch-hands. He’d berate Kurtiss by comparing him to us white lads, then he’d turn around five minutes later and tell us we weren’t half as good cowboying as that damned Apache over there.
I guess the only good that came out of that job was the bond that formed between Kurtiss and me, and the lifelong lesson I learned about not trusting ranchers. Old Skeeter cheated all of us spang out of a hard week pay and spread around the word none of us were worth the board he’d furnished working for him. Fortunately, he’d done that sort of thing before, so nobody paid him any mind when it came to hiring us for other jobs, which we frequently got screwed out of our pay on, same as with Skeeter.
The last time I ran into Kurtiss must have been 1998, ’99. He and a couple of Arizona broncos were sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked for a powwow in Albuquerque when I came across them and a case of beer that was too close to gone to be any good. When we’d killed what was left of that case we kicked out of there and spent the night singing ’50s rock and roll songs, getting roaring drunk and filling in on the minutia of our lives since we’d last met.
Spent a good bit of time talking about Y2K also, which was much on my mind at the time, and they’d never heard of it. I expected that and explained to them. Those Apaches thought that just might be something really fine.
Kurtiss immediately thought of a state cop over toward Ruidoso who’s bad about kicking around folks who’ve had a bit much to drink, “I hope nobody gets to that prick before I do.”
Those Apaches demonstrated some rich imagination concerning the nuances of Y2K aftermath. “We’ll be able to run raids on the Rio Grande tribes like the old days!” This didn’t interest the Arizonians. They were fairly sure Mexico would be open for a bit of raiding, though, and better pickings.
Then Kurtiss went thoughtful. “I’d sure as hell like to kill me some Navajo.” He told the old story of Bosque Redondo and all the slaughter the Din’e did to the less numerous Mescalero during the decade years they shared the reservation. Apache numbers there were decimated until only 1800 were left alive when they escaped the rez and went back to Mescalero.
Bosque Redondo was fresh on his mind because of Navajo whines he heard at the Gathering of the Tribes Powwow. “Mescalero’s too large for such few people.” (The enormous Din’e Rez is getting jam-packed these days, by comparison.) “They ought to take some of that land away and give it to us,” was the general theme.
“We fought our way down,” Kurtiss quoted himself. “And you guys multiply like rabbits.”
This led to some laughs and sneers about the theme of the Gathering of Nations Powwow, “Celebrating 400 years of unity (among the tribes)“.
“I wonder where that was,” one of the Coyoteros grunted. “The Apache never saw it and neither did our enemies. Those Mexicans and Pima and all those town Indians were lucky the whites came along to save them.”
Mostly those guys were in agreement in their scorn for other southwestern tribes. “They don’t know how to use the land,” gesturing with a nod and a slight pucker of the lips.
A whole different view of the end of life as we know it.
Probably 1978-’79 I was going north on the Interstate somewhere between Waco and Waxahachie preparing to exit when I saw a woman past the ramp trying to thumb a ride. Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole had been at work leaving a string of female corpses up and down the Interstate at the time. When I saw her I split-second decided to take a route further north so’s to give her a ride and get her off the Interstate.
“I saw you swerve back onto the highway to pick me up.” She settled the bag with her belongings onto the floorboard. Attractive, dark skinned lady in her mid-20s with a coy smirk. “You must like my looks.”
“Hi. Where you headed? I just decided to pick you up to tell you about something you might not know. I’ll get off further north than I was going to.” I was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and she was making herself obvious staring at my lower legs.
“I’ve been on the road for a month. I usually don’t take rides from four-wheelers, but I like your looks.”
I wasn’t in the market for having my looks liked by some female who’d been on the road a month hitching rides with truckers. The whole concept gave me a shrinking sensation in my groin. I explained to her about why I’d picked her up, about how someone was killing women on the Interstate and leaving their bodies cluttering up the landscape from hell to breakfast.
“Where are you from before you started hitching? Can you go back there?”
She settled back and gave my legs a rest, frowning. “I’m from the Kickapoo Reservation.” She named a mid-western state. “My husband was drunk and mowing the grass. Slipped and cut the front half of his foot off.”
That last sentence had a lot of visual impact for me. It drew a cringe and a moment of silent recovery. But after I’d digested it the next question was obvious. “So what are you doing here, thumbing rides?”
“I left before he got out of the hospital.” Her face twisted into a mask of indignation. “I wasn’t going to hang around there carrying that SOB like a turd between two sticks for the rest of his life! I’ve been on the road ever since.”
My exit wasn’t far up the road so I just left it at that. Made a mental note to turn loose of the handle if I ever slipped and fell backward mowing the grass.
There’s a temptation to believe we moderns living within the boundaries of the US have a lot in common with one another, and in many ways we do. But what we have in common with one another isn’t necessarily what we believe we do. One of those areas of commonality probably has to do with the perception of Native Americans as a somewhat generic group of people with a lot in common with one-another and far less in common with whites and Hispanics.
This leads to a lot of packages of thinking among people not living on the Rez, whether they’re whites, second or third generation off-Rez Native Americans, Hispanics, or folks who carry a bit of tribal blood in their veins a few generations old, but never lived on the Rez.
One of the packages contains a romanticized view that the cultural heritages on the Rez still exist, still carry some similarity to those before the coming of Europeans, and are similar to one-another. The phrase, ‘the old ways’ has found its way into the language of those seduced into buying the package. The “I-know-the-old-ways-too-because-my-granddad-was-a-Cherokee [or Apache, etc]” syndrome frequently found among artists, blue-eyed-blond-haired ladies in Atlanta, and in cities across the nation among those who see something wrong with modern life and hunger for a deeper spiritual life.
The fact is, those tribes don’t have much at all in common with one another, aside from being packaged and treated as though they were similar for at least a century-and-a-half by the US Government, far longer for some in the eastern US. Bits and pieces of the original cultures have survived on some reservations, less on some, almost none on some. And those cultures remaining are as unlike one another as they are different from European.
But I’ve digressed. I began this blog entry with the intention of talking about a particular cultural phenomenon re-emerging on Navajo tribal lands, strange and not easily understood by anyone including the Din’e living there. The Skin Walker. A person who voluntarily adopts witch-like and other behaviors that violate the most fundamental religious/spiritual forbiddings of the tribe. The subject, even the name is such that even most Din’e have only a general understanding of what those practices are. But there’s no lack of agreement that Skin Walkers are a threat to everyone, a cause for revulsion, anger, fear, hatred.
On the Pine Hill Navajo (self-determination) Rez south of Ramah Chapter there’s a place that’s come to be called, “Skin-Walker Valley” by everyone who’s willing to use the word. Interestingly, the valley extends into an area checkerboarded with white-owned lands called Candy Kitchen.
What’s surprising is that, while the Skin-Walker phenomenon clearly began on Din’e land, the weirdness and negativity spills over and permeates into the white community. Although some good folks, both white and Din’e, live and make out as best they can in this remote area, it’s shockingly pervaded by all manner of crime. Speed freaks and laboratories are drawn there as by a magnet.
Violence is pandemic. As an example, a few years ago three Navajo youths tortured and killed an octogenerian white woman in her home, puncturing her skull with a screwdriver eighteen times until she died. She had nothing much worth stealing. They did it for ‘fun’. When the lads were identified they were arrested on the Rez, where tribal authorities resisted giving them up for white justice for several days.
Meanwhile, deep in the Rez to the north, near Pueblo Pintada, another valley is rapidly coming to be known as ‘Skin-Walker Valley’, and another at Alamo, far to the southeast.
This phenomenon, were it discussed openly and recognized as in need of investigation, would be far easier for tribal officials to develop strategies to deal with. Open discussion would also help nearby residents and authorities off the Rez toward a clearer perspective concerning an energy and a belief system that is oozing up through the cracks of their lives, slouching across from tribal lands.
But this is getting too long and it’s time to turn out the chickens. Maybe more later.
Edit: 7:50am
This poem was written a few years ago about an event on the minds of northwest New Mexico at the time. The fact it happened near ‘Skin-Walker Valley’ was a cause for a lot of concern and confusion.
Last Friday Night
“It’s just too deep in the Rez
For a white-man style killing,” he says:
“A bullet each to the back of the head,
At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead;
Two Navajo brothers are dead.
“It isn’t a skin-walker killing;
No feud, not a woman too willing.
A knife, a club, a thirty-ought-six
Is common enough and at least doesn’t mix
White man logic with Navajo tricks:
No bullet each to the back of the head!
But at Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!
Two Navajo brothers are dead.”
From Bread Springs to Shiprock you’ll hear people say
“No place is safe now! You can’t get away!”
Nageezi to Yah Ta Hay
You’ll hear the Din’e people say
“The killer’s from Pie Town or Santa Fe.
Some white, somehow, somewhere must pay
For a bullet each to the back of the head!
At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!
Two Navajo brothers are dead.”
There’s no danger of our remembering the past in the ways required to keep us from repeating it. However, if we could, we might be well advised to look at areas:
1. Spanish Inquisition – to keep religious zealots in their proper place,
2, The French Revolution – to remind us about the down-side of revolutionary fervor,
3. The Soviet Union – to further remind us,
4. Santa Fe Trail – The eroded, abraded gorges and arroyos along the length of it to remind us it’s worth looking at the ground we’re standing on occasionally, rather than devoting all our attention to the horizon and a future we influence, but don’t comprehend.
5. The Chacoan/Mogollon, the Inca, the Aztec, the Mayan, to get our feet back on the ground when we indulge our fantasies that someone, once, ‘had it right’.
6. Japan in the 1930s, to remind ourselves the most rabidly cruel torturers can be forgiven, rebuilt, and sell us television sets and automobiles with impunity.
7. Hiroshima, to remind us surprises can happen to the most devoted, arrogant and unwary.
8. The ruins of castles, fortifications, National Cemetaries to remind us these crises we’re submerged in this moment will pass, as well, and be forgotten.
9. The DDT consequences of the 1960s to remind us science doesn’t have all the answers, that sometimes it’s better to put up with an insect than using the most expedient means of exterminating it.
10. Any man-made catastrophe, debacle in human history to remind us of the law of unforseen consequences.
To remind us we aren’t as smart as we tend to see ourselves.
To remind us, no country ever attacked another thinking it would lose.
No religious zealot ever killed or tortured anyone of another belief system believing his behavior would eventually be pointed to as proof of the falsehood of his beliefs.
No scientist ever released an invention or development believing it might one day destroy his kids, or their kids.
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 