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.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming for a read.
Sometimes I surprise myself with how stupid I am. Every time I get thinking I’ve plumbed the depths of human folly something comes along to prove there’s another layer down there for me to probe. One of the ways it all manifests itself in my life has to do with sorting out priorities and shifting things around to accommodate critical paths. When enough pressure builds behind a particular critical path stricture my focus is drawn there and I begin some new stupidity energy release intended to allow the dammed up whateverness to pass through.
At the moment the focus is computers. The one I’m typing on is an old XP machine I bought at a garage sale a year-or-so ago for a strictly online machine for browsing and downloading data. But gradually for the sake of speed and convenience I sneaked around and allowed myself to do other things with it project-wise. Stupid stupid stupid stupid.
Now this machine is trying to take a hike into oblivion. It wants to join the other two computer carcasses stacked over on the futon that once did what it does. I bought an old XP in a thrift store for $50 to replace this one when I knew this one was going to retire, but a lot of files and settings in the one in front of me now need to be transferred to the next one. One of those is the modem driver that allows that machine to use the external modem this one uses to go online. It won’t recognize the modem, absolutely refuses to acknowledge there’s a modem connected to it.
Everyone tells me there’s nothing to transferring this stuff. I’ve got a cable especially made with a CD to allow this comp to talk to that one and transfer what’s needed. Both machines are reluctantly willing to admit they’re capable of doing it, each proclaims it’s ready and more than willing to do it. But then, each points the finger of blame at the other, claiming the other one has something faulty causing it to drag its heels. Neither will acknowledge a connection is live between them, thought the light on the cable says there is.
So I have a dying machine here I can’t get any of the downloaded or installed programs off of into the other machine, which is bad enough, but worse is the fact the replacement machine doesn’t even have the brainpower to recognize the phoneline modem. So it’s not figuring on having to go online.
Meanwhile, the offline machine I use for actual heavy-lifting is off the table and residing over with the two carcasses because the power cord, the keyboard, the mouse and screen it uses are being used by the XP intended for the next online one.
A lot of the day yesterday was spent trying to get these two XPs to shake hands and talk to one another. But today, I think this ‘new’ XP is going into the pile of carcasses where the heavy lifter is now, and the heavy lifter’s going back to work doing what it needs to be doing.
Wasted a lot of time getting there, and more time telling about it.
Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
This drawing of Jeanne’s was on an otherwise blank draft post page in the whatchallit, dashboard, with the title Order Out of Chaos. It’s evidently a Photoshop manipulation of another work and until I messed up re-sizing it and lost her explanation it also said (sold). Hopefully if she wants to she’ll add an addendum saying whatever else she wants to say about it.
But I was mulling over things that aren’t mainly on my mind deciding which of them to write about this morning, carefully avoiding the one thing that mainly is, when I saw the title in the drafts. It brought to focus what actually is swirling around in my brain. I suppose I might as well write a bit about that.
A project I’ve been working on almost a decade appears to be coming to a climax. Surprising progress began falling into place during the past few days, and preliminary results provide a reason to hope I’m finally examining datasets that will allow testing and formulating a theory. If the tests indicate it’s worth it, there’ll be revisions, more testing, more revisions, until something cohesive emerges, or doesn’t emerge.
I don’t dare speculate on where it will head because expectations have a way of working themselves into outcomes, and I’m doing my best to avoid that.
But the fact is, it’s taken a decade almost, and countless hours and days of research, calculations, accumulation of data, wrong directions untaken, other wrong directions taken and backed out of in getting here.
One way or another I think this simultaneity and time thing is finally going to be allowed to absent my life over the next few months. Order out of chaos finally, either by discovering my fundamental premises were wrong and I don’t have to do this anymore, or they were correct and sense can be made of this.
Either way, it’s a strange place to find myself, a hollow looming up in my life I wonder how I’m going to fill with what must inevitably be another pesky reincarnation.
I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s strange about it. Cob-webs around here are the norm. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear waste part of things. Old Jules
Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured. I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.
That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky. Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.
I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits. If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.
Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch. A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.
I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top. I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb. Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.
Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section. Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.
Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina. We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen. The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.
The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here? How did it come to this?”
The answer always came back the same. “We followed the yellow brick road.” We did it. He did it. I did it. We all did it. We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel. We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.
We abdicated. When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were. We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it. When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs. We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level. We watched them militarize the police throughout the country. We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.
We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.
We’re there now. There’s no going back. There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it. It’s time to salute the future. Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.
Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make. You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention. You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not. But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.
So long as it’s someone else.
We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves. Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.
The Cohoe women raised and sheared the sheep, made the dye, hand-wove this rug.
As the post-non-Y2K hard times hardened, I did a lot of scrambling trying to make ends meet. One by-product of that squeeze was that I began doing some trading with the tribes for pottery, rock art, rugs, and other products to resell.
This got me acquainted with a Navajo man who became a running buddy for a while. Curtis Cohoe. [Not to be mistaken for his namesake, the Mescalero referred to on several posts.] A man about 50 years old. Pine Hill (Self-determination) Rez. Good family, a generation earlier. His mom and aunt still raise sheep, shear, dye the wool with dye they make from crushed rock and plants, and weave good rugs the old way.
Early in his life, Curtis started out pretty well. He was intelligent, talented, and I’ve always assumed he must have attended a university. When he was being an artist everything he did was in demand. He was an excellent shade-tree baling-wire and chewing-gum vehicle mechanic, and he could chop a cord of wood with an axe almost as fast as I could cut one with a chainsaw.
Worked for the US Forestry Service as a fire fighter, then as a Ranger in California until things went haywire. Back in New Mexico, a cop raped his younger sister and got by with it. Curtis came back and beat the cop to death with his fists, which got him 10 years in prison.
Once that decade of bars was over, Curtis never really got back onto the right track. He had a lot of anger in him, and he had some brothers who were in and out of prison a lot, who kept the pressure on from the law. (Curtis was fairly frightened of one of the brothers, whom he described as a bad-ass. The other was an evangelical preacher who sold some drugs and stole in between times).
Curtis was much of a man in a lot of ways when he was sober, or mostly sober. I’d known him a considerable while before I ever saw him drunk, never realized he was sometimes a drinker. He shifted his residence frequently between the family place on the Rez and Grants, New Mexico. Maybe that’s how it escaped my notice.
But early in our friendship one day I drove up to a place he was doing some artwork painting on a table top in an alleyway next to the railroad track in Grants. I was just in time to see three semi-drunk Din’e toughs in their mid-20s approach him, exchange a few words, and start swinging.
By the time I got out of the truck to help him he didn’t need any help. The two fully conscious ones got to their feet and left at a stumbling run. The less-conscious one stuck around long enough for me to try to stop the bleeding by tying a bandana around his head while Curtis intermittently kicked in his ribcage. I’m glad I never met the brother Curtis was scared of and considered a badass.
I don’t know whether I knew Curtis didn’t have a license to drive an automobile. He frequently drove my truck running errands and chores. I had no qualms about loaning the Ford pickup to him when he needed to go out to the Rez for one reason or another provided my old Isuzu was running okay.
One day we were preparing for a trading trip to Shiprock and Curtis left in the Ford to get it gassed up for the trip. When he didn’t come back for a couple of hours and I saw a wrecker go past towing my truck I immediately went over to the wrecker to find out what was going on.
“Is this yours?” He grinned because he knew damned well it was mine. My apartment was no more than 150 yards from his yard and we both occasionally had coffee a few feet apart in the Chinese restaurant between his place and mine. “Your damned Indian’s in jail. Towing fee on the truck’s $50.”
“What did he do?”
“They stopped him for a routine traffic check. He didn’t have a license and when they called it in they found out he’d had a lot of DWIs. He’s going to be in there a while.”
I paid out the $50 to get the truck out of hock and seethed about it considerably. It would have been too easy for it all not to happen and I found myself thinking Curtis had about outlived his usefulness in my affairs.
But mutual acquaintances brought me a message from Curtis asking me to bail him out of jail, telling me how sorry he was about it all. He was going to be stuck in there for at least six weeks if he couldn’t raise bail. Swore he’d pay me back everything he’d cost me.
I wasn’t Mister Moneybags, but I could squeeze $500 if I had to, and I did over a few days, selling things cheaper than I’d intended. Once he was released he brought a friend from the Rez over and told me he was going back to Pine Hill for a while. Asked if he could borrow my pickup for his friend to drive him back out there. His friend had a license, and I loaned it to him, figuring it would be gone for a day, maximum.
The truck never came back. Curtis and his friend evidently got drunk on the way to Ramah and got chased by a Navajo-hired cop on the State Highway until they ran the truck into a tree, Curtis driving. I wasn’t long finding out he was being held in the private penal facility outside Grants, and that he was looking at two years in prison, and I was looking at losing the bail money.
A week or two later I heard a guard had grabbed him and Curtis knocked him down. He was now looking at no-less-than five years hard time.
Everything else being equal I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still there.
Sometime afterward I had a buyer for one of the rugs his mother and aunt made, so I stopped in on her for a visit at Pine Hill. Naturally the subject of Curtis came up.
“He needed to stay out of town,” was all she said.
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance. Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon.
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control. There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen. Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled. They couldn’t stay in step.
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
There might be a lot to that. I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)] and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers. But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens. See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
Every year I wonder about these pictures of Scrooge and others wearing pointee nightcaps. It’s a subject dear to my heart because I became an aficionado of sleeping hats when I used to do my slumbering outdoors a lot.
The function of a nightcap is to keep a person from losing his body heat through his exposed scalp and hair. Besides doing that it needs to stay on the head while you toss and turn. Those pointed hats do none of that.
I’ve tried a lot of different types of sleeping caps through the years and found it’s not easy to find one that satisfies all the minimum criteria:
This one’s sheepskin and I’ve used it for 30 years when the weather’s cold enough. But it’s stiff and doesn’t stay on all that well because one of the straps for tying under the chin broke off sometime way back there and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. The temperature has to be not-too-warm or it becomes a cranial sweat lodge and not-too-cold because it doesn’t provide any protection to the exposed part of the neck.
A balaclava solves some of that, but it’s only one layer thick, somewhat expensive, and tends to wear out at the chin. When the ambient temperature gets down around freezing it needs some help.
They make those fleece caps for women and I find them in thrift stores for a buck frequently. When I find them, I buy them and wear them a lot, outdoors, indoors and as sleeping caps when the weather’s cold, but not cold enough for something more extreme.
During this last cold snap when the water froze inside the house I came up with this, and I like it a lot. It’s a fleece blanket folded four times lengthwise, wrapped around the head and tucked into/zipped in to the fleece vest. It stays in place and is warmer than anything I’ve ever found. It’s tempting to drag out the scissors, needle and thread and cut it down to a four-layer balaclava, but I hate to mess up that fleece blanket. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” school of winter headgear might apply here.
When the weather’s cool but not cold, the stocking cap is a seductive option, even though they don’t ride out the night well. I keep a stack of a dozen of them on the bookshelf above the bed so I can reach up and find one for a quick reload without turning on the light. Same concept as a fresh clip of ammo for a rifle near at hand.
Pointee hats are talk. As Tuco observed in The Good, Bad and Ugly, “When you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
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Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
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 
