If you went outdoors with a clear sky last night early evening and craned your neck to look directly overhead you might have seen Altair. Around the time the light that met your eye was leaving Altair I was a young man approaching the age of 50.
I was beginning a new career, male hormones raging, severely involved in a tempestuous relationship with the lady described if you clicked the ROMANCE [https://sofarfromheaven.com/romance/ ] tab above. [When the light reaching your eye from Cassiopia is as old as the light last night from Altair]
When that last night Altair light was leaving home on the way to a rendezvous with your eye my old friend Keith and I were doing a different kind of time travel. We were stomping up and down mountains exploring the country around Santa Fe, discovering the ruins of numerous hippie communes begun and abandoned around the time the Altair-light was leaving on the journey to meet our then-eyes.
We were also searching the Zuni Mountains for a lost gold mine from a time when the orange giant in Scorpio was headed on its voyage to our eyes as we sat around our night camps gazing at the sky.
I was going to do a lot longer post about this, but I’m having a connection problem slowing things down. Probably moisture getting into the repaired phone line:
The light leaving Old Sol at the time I hit SAVE DRAFT will reach the earth about the time this furshlugginer computer finishes doing it. Roughly 8.5 minutes. I’m going to have to do more on this sometime when the connection’s not taking much longer than the light from moon-to-earth, start to finish.
Those of us spoiled to a particular concept of freedom and the fear it’s coming unravelled might be well served to read Papillon once in a while. I didn’t mention it in my review of it here, but I should have: Papillon.
From one perspective the entire book is about freedom of a sort we, confined to our mental boxes containing what freedom is, refuse to acknowledge exists, can exist, for ourselves and those around us. It’s the story by Henri Charriere of his own life, searching and occasionally finding that kind of freedom while trapped in an environment few slaves in history could match for savagery endured. A deliberate, carefully devised savagery imposed by a modern, civilized nation.
A nation, I’ll add, not too unlike our own.
But what I intended to say about Papillon this post is one of the corner-of-the-eye aspects of freedom and Charriere’s finding of it during the most trying of times. Once when he was in solitary confinement so severe as to be intended to drive him insane, to break him, destroy him. Another when he was confined to a boat with other escapees mid-ocean.
These shreds of rhetorical freedom we savor can be unravelled like a wool sweater with a touch of pen to paper. The freedom Charriere describes are immune to confiscation. But they’re the responsibility of each of us to find within ourselves. Nobody’s capable of giving them to us by signing a paper. We can’t win them by force of arms by storming a Bastille, or Winter Palace.
The winds of history are eroding away those easy freedoms written on parchment and signed into some illusion of reality for most of the citizenry. That’s happening and there aren’t any heroes likely to ride in on white horses, nor White Houses to save them.
But we don’t have to allow ourselves the anguish of loss. A piece of each of us lives outside the rules and the rule-makers, the savages, the rapacious Viking kings of government and finance.
Maybe the starting place for finding real freedom requires losing the illusion that Viking kings can give it to us and take it away.
O Star (the fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud – It will not do to say of night, Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says “I burn.” But say with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend. Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid, But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite, Not even stooping from its sphere, It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.
It isn’t as though you have a more favorable alternative.
One of my personal goals during the past several decades has been to live through an entire presidential term without knowing which politician occupies the White House. A second goal is to not know which segment the single party occupying the Congressional seats disguised as two parties pretends to be the one in power.
I almost made it through a presidential term without knowing who was up there once, but I fell off the wagon inadvertently because of 9/11. I don’t recall who the guy was who was president then, but I do remember having to know who he was then for a while.
This time around I hornswoggled myself into knowing. Him being a black guy, I was curious to see whether he’d be any different than the string of white ones preceding him. But now I’ve satisfied myself he isn’t and my curiosity’s receded sufficiently to allow me to pound it down into the seldom-referred-to compartment of my brain where I try to keep things that are none of my affair.
Old Sol and I have that in common, not wanting to know who is president of the US. He doesn’t want to know, either. Notice how he’s got his face squinched up in preparation for what he knows is coming.
But the challenge doesn’t begin with a new president. It begins early during each election year as a Chinese fire drill of power-hungry liars telling the truth about one-another, but lies about themselves. Along with the attitudinal lackeys of each among the citizenry saying things back and forth, repeating the lies in favor of their own preference and in opposition to those they vilify for one reason or another.
I’m going to be modifying the reading material online and offline I expose myself to so’s to help me in my goal of not knowing the names of all those lowlifes and read whatever lies they’re telling about others, and what truths are being told about them by their enemies.
From my point of view the greatest presidents of the US are those nobody ever heard of. They did their jobs so well they barely get honorable mention in history because nothing noteworthy happened while they were president. Which ought to be the goal of every president.
Here are some presidents I consider the great ones:
Martin Van Buren
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
Rutherford B Hayes
James Garfield
Chester A Arthur
Warren G. Harding
I’m including Jefferson Davis because nobody even acknowledges he was once president of half the country:
Here are two candidates for future greatness:
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
Once the willow switch and razor strop went out of style as a method for dealing with loud, greedy, demanding children, the only methods left were ‘reasoning’ with them, which didn’t work, then ignoring them.
I’m going to skip the reasoning and just ignore them.
Even though Gale’s change in plans for last week postponed the schedule for The New Truck Resurrection the new year seemed a good place to start examining the next steps for exploiting the possible. I didn’t have a clear enough idea about the options and my thinking was bouncing around inside a range from becoming Joe Palooka’s pal, Humphrey Pennyworth:
to building a house on a trailer http://tinyurl.com/7a95xyo, to finding some trashed bumper-pull trailer and fixing it to live in RAZ Auction and an Aborted Escape Route. I needed to narrow things down. So I finally did the obvious and visited Craigslist to see what’s out there within the price-range of what I might be able to manage. The results were surprising, welcome and uplifting.
I received this travel trailer in a trade. It has been sitting for a while. We are in the process of cleaning it. {lots of dust} The trailer is in overall good condition. Would make a great hunting trailer. The outside looks dirty because it has been sitting onder a oak tree. I tried the A/C and it will have to have the dirt dauber nests removed, the fan makes noise. The water pump runs but I am not going to put water in the tank until the weather warms up. Not sure about the ref. but one the same size at Home Depot or Sams are about $100.00. I am selling the trailer as is where is for $1500.00. It has the propane tank with the small fitting. New tanks are about $20.00 each. The trailer looks great inside, it has not been abused.
And inside:
Or if the New Truck doesn’t turn out to be dependable after a Real Mechanic gets it going:
1983 Toyota RV – $1500
One Owner
Runs and Drives Good
53k on 4 cylinder
5 speed manual trans.
Missing door on camper…
Needs TLC..$1500 obo..
Inside:
What I found is that within a 200 mile radius of here there are a number of already livable dwellings on wheels available for $1000 to $1500. Livable, or capable of beng made so without a lot of expense or labor.
It took me a year to set aside a thousand bucks to be sure I could pay a mechanic to get the New Truck licensed, mechanic-worked, and inspection-stickered, or the Toyota fixed. But the work mightn’t require all of it. In any case, putting together whatever remains between what’s left and buying something will require some squeezing of turnip-blood.
But I need something I can pull out here and move the cats and me into so I can begin putting the cabin into the shape it was in when I moved here. And start pulling down the chicken house and pens, garden fence, and the upside-down hot tub project so’s nobody’s left with a mess I made of the place.
I think I managed, at least, to define the critical paths and some potential realities as a means of finding my way out of a situation I’d come to think of as too nigh-onto-hopeless to contemplate in any meaningful way.
All in one day, January 1, 2012.
I feel 30 years younger than I was December 31, 2011.
Good morning readers. Here’s wishing each of you whatever you consider best for yourself in 2012.
Some years are better viewed by hindsight than during the actual living of them. 1954 was such a year, and I have an idea 2012 might be another. Long hindsight smooths down the rough spots and helps remove a lot of the detritus keeping us from viewing it in ways we can appreciate the strong points.
Almost everyone in that picture is dead, with the possible exceptions of the blonde kid next to me, cousin wossname, the girl behind me without glasses, and my ownself. The blonde kid might be dead, or he mightn’t.
He and I never had much truck after the time that picture was taken. He lived in Pennsylvania was part of the reason, but the other part was in the fact I accidentally shot him in the lower leg with an arrow and his mom didn’t care to bring him down our way anymore. Next time I might have improved my marksmanship, she alleged.
Fact was the kid and I were shooting at a target, taking turns. He was down close to the target waiting for me to shoot so’s to retrieve the arrows and take his turn. But just as I released, he ran in front of the target and ruined my shot, sank that arrow spang into his calf a goodly distance.
On the ground bleeding and squalling to high heaven, he denied that’s how it happened, and there was an element of belief among the adults present. Them knowing how much I despised that spoiled little prick.
Anyway, with the softening provided by the passage of all those decades and all the protagonists either dead, or might as well be, 1954 shines out as a middling good year.
Similar to how I think there’s a good chance most people who are online January 1, 2013, will have fonder recollections of 2012 around January 1 2050, than they do recapping it 2013.
Which isn’t to suggest 2012 won’t be a great year. I fully expect it will. I won’t be the least surprised if 2012 has more surprises in store than almost any year in living memory. Tremendous opportunities for growth experiences. But growth experiences do have a way of needing more hindsight to be appreciated than those years when all we do is sit around watching television.
So, here’s wishing all of you as much potential for personal growth during 2012 as you consider yourself qualified to appreciate as soon afterward as possible.
A few years ago my friend Rich asked me if I’d be interested in talking with an older guy in his late 70s who was experimenting with hydrogen generators for retrofitting onto his vehicle. I wasn’t looking into hydrogen generating, but I’m a curious sort of fellow. I didn’t require any persuading. I just told Rich to give Bryce my phone number. About a week later he called me.
Turned out Bryce had spent his career as chief mechanic for the Ford and General Motors Speed Teams, or Racing Teams, some such thing. He was part of the group that put together the hydrogen powered vehicle that established a record for the highest speed ever recorded for an internal combustion engine driven automobile.
Using what he learned from all that, Bryce had created a series of hydrogen generators for his own vehicle, trying to maximize efficiency and deal with other shortcomings with the system. He did it all from salvaged materials. Heck of an interesting guy the first few times we talked. I wish I’d taken notes and drawn sketches of what he told me.
At first during our acquaintance Bryce and I had conversations. Two people brainstorming things he was doing, and I was doing. But gradually the hydrogen generating conversational possibilities ran down. Bryce was calling me every day or so, telling me all manner of things I didn’t want to hear, such as what the waitress in the cafe where he took coffee and meals said to him, what he said back, what she said back. Or what other customers said to him and what he said back. Or his brother.
Bryce would call, ask how I was, not wait for an answer, and talk non-stop for an hour, two hours. I could put the phone down, go feed the chickens or make a cup of coffee and come back to the phone without him noticing. Sometimes I’d tie a bandanna around my head attaching the phone to my ear and read a book waiting for him to wind down.
This went on for months. I didn’t know what to do about it, except straight-on explaining to him that this wasn’t conversation and wasn’t a source of joy to me. I mentioned it to Rich, and it turned out Bryce was doing the same thing to him.
Finally, as gently as I could manage, I interrupted one of his monologues and explained the problem, as I viewed it. I told him I liked him, that I’d enjoy conversations with him, but that I didn’t want to hear the same stories over and over about people at the restaurant, his brother, etc. That if we were going to continue having communications there’d need to be exchanges and some level of concern as to the amount of interest the other person had in hearing it.
Despite my attempt to soften the words, Bryce got his feelers hurt badly by this. He never called again, which I preferred to the alternative of things continuing as they were.
Sometime a few months later Rich finally got his fill of it and tried the same tactic on Bryce, with the same result. He was more reluctant to do it than I’d been, because he felt sorrier for Bryce than I was willing to allow myself to indulge.
Bryce came up in conversation between us a couple of days ago. Turns out it’s been almost exactly a year since Rich has heard from him, and a few months more than that for me. We wondered aloud how he was doing.
But neither of us is willing to bite the bullet and call him to find out, on pain of maybe starting the whole mess again.
I began this post figuring on saying some things about hydrogen generators but drifted off into Bryce and his problems. Maybe some other time, the hydrogen generators.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came for a visit this morning. In case you’re experiencing post-Christmas letdown this morning I’m going to indulge in a couple of guilt-ridden confessions to provide you a measuring stick so’s you’ll realize whatever troubles you have aren’t all that bad.
First I’m going to tell you something dawned on me about the Communist Americauna hen. All my life I’ve known about clucks. Everyone who’s ever been around chickens knows about them. Every flock of any size has a cluck.
Farmers and town folks who’d lived on farms when I grew up had an expression, “Dumber than clucksh*t” as a means of describing me, frequently, and others of my ilk, and everyone knew the exact reference in the comparison. A cluck is a chicken that’s crosswise with the world, with humanity, out-of-step with the flock.
I raised these chickens around here except for the Great Speckled Bird, either from hatchery chicks, or from eggs hatched by brooding hens. I’ve always taken a great deal of pride in the fact I don’t have any clucks. My flock is comprised of all good chickens.
But over the past few weeks something sinister’s been creeping into my mind. I’m being forced to acknowledge the Communist Americauna’s a cluck, right here in MY flock. Always has been.
So if you think you have troubles, if you had a war with your relatives over Christmas, if you bankrupted yourself buying doodads, if your dad didn’t like the gloves or socks you gave him, forget it. Forgive yourself. At least you probably haven’t raised up a cluck and had it right there in your life all this time without knowing it.
But as if that weren’t bad enough:
Now the inter-species sex confession. That silky rooster’s always been a source of amusement to me. Back when I had silky hens he fathered the other bachelor rooster here and was always good to the hens when he could catch them.
But now the Communist Americauna’s moved in nights with the two bachelor roosters this one’s become odd-man-out. His filial son got the Commie. When I turn them out he’s spending his time lying constantly claiming he found something good but the Commie and other hens aren’t paying him any mind.
The same people who used the word ‘cluck’ to describe me had another in their arsenal they used on me a little later, and it applies to this poor old rooster, too, same as it once did to me. “Hornier than a three-peckered billy goat” crept into the language as I reached young-adulthood, and here it is again referring to this silky rooster. I, at least, stuck to my own species and the opposite gender.
The guineas here came from the hatchery with a rooster chick for every four keets, the reason being guineas are braindead stupid and the only way they can learn to survive until they have a chance is having roosters to teach them the basic tricks like breathing, drinking water and eating. All but two of those guineas got picked off by predators over time, but the two remaining still venerate the Great Speckled Bird and these two bachelors. They listen to the rooster lies about what they’ve found and come running. And when the roosters fight the guineas try to be peacemakers, interfering any way they can.
The other day I was outdoors and noticed the silky lying to the two guineas, which he’ll do, but then he started doing his rooster-dance and quicker than I can tell it spang mounted one of them. And she cooperated. An unsettling sight.
But then, somewhat later, Shiva the Cow Cat was down in the meadow digging one of her holes to relieve herself in when I saw the silky approach her, dance a couple of steps and he was on her so fast it took her a second to react. She couldn’t believe what had happened, and neither could I.
Next thing I know he’ll be trying to mount my leg like some poodle dog.
So whatever problems you think you’ve got in your life this morning, console yourself. It ain’t that bad, most likely.
Jeanne does Christmas but she has a gift worth giving. I mostly don’t do Christmas so I tips my hat in gratitude she’s here to give it.
Note from Jeanne: This is one of the largest gel pen drawings I’ve ever made. It’s 24 x 24 inches square. I did that size as an experiment for a contest entry for a casino, but when I didn’t win, I re-worked it quite a lot and decided to show it in other exhibits. I hope you enjoy looking at it!
Morning Readers,
Hope all of you are getting the cobwebs out of your punkin heads sufficiently to maximize whatever joy a person gets out of sitting around a Christmas tree unwrapping packages.
I overslept here, didn’t wake until dawn. Maybe some of this Christmas spirit thing rubbed off on me and disrupted my routines. Nice morning. Quiet outside, cool, but not a shock to hit you when you climb out from under the covers or hit you in the face when you venture outside.
A red dawn. Sailorman would be concerned about that, I expect.
Last night the cats refused to keep me entertained, so I began reading H. D. F. Kitto’s, The Greeks. It’s a book I’ve read before, but I occasionally read it again as a refresher course. Kitto’s work is a fairly expansive treatise on life in Greece during the Classical Period, but he constantly jumps backward so’s to demonstrate how they got where they were and why.
Those Classical Greeks are worth the effort of remembering about. They’re as much how we got where we are as Homer, the Dorians, the Minoans are how they came to be what they were. We owe our ability to think in particularly organized ways to them, mathmatics, philosophy, their practical use of democracy, even our concept of drama to some extent.
But we in the West also owe the curse of the Utopian Ideal to their pointy little heads.
That Utopian Ideal has haunted us every since, even though the Greeks, themselves never actually believed in it. They knew perfectly well that human beings are fundamentally flawed in ways that assure they’ll poison their own watering holes, then run them dry. They knew that wherever human weakness fails to do the trick, fate, or the gods will step in to lend a hand.
Those Greeks studied Homer much the way really devout Christians study the Old Testament. And Homer, whatever else it might be, is a refined catalog of human strengths and weaknesses. Of the drumbeat repetition of human experience.
In their own way, the Greeks were experts on a few thousand years of history in ways we aren’t. They learned from it, not as we believe we’ve learned from it, but haven’t, but rather as an assurance that human beings make the same mistakes over and over. That they’ll go on making them as long as there’s a human being left to do the job.
The Greeks derived a wisdom from their knowledge of history, but the wisdom was an oblique one that provided a separate wisdom….. one that included the certainty there’ll never be any Utopia. Never be any meek inheriting much of anything and holding onto it.
But that’s my premise, not Kitto’s.
I hope you’ll spend a bit of time remembering what Christmas was supposed to be the anniversary of the beginning of. Not baby-Jesuses or Santa Clauses, readers, but a beginning of a spiritual commitment to peace, love, understanding.
An ideal for breaking the endless cycle of power struggles, killing, worship of gluttony and greed. A beginning for human beings to take responsibility for their own behavior, attitudes and lives.
Christmas. Jesus. A beginning of not being so frightened of everything. So angry. So aggressive and downright rattlesnake ugly mean you want to kill strangers a long way from here who are no threat to you if you’ll leave them alone, and take joy from doing it.
A beginning of having the faith that death is part of human experience, and that isn’t something you have to be so damned cowardly scared of it keeps you furious and wanting to look away at anything at all to take your thoughts away from having to do it.
I hope you’ll remember that for a few moments, readers, but I know you won’t.
I wrote this several years ago in a previous lifetime before Social Security kicked in when I was trying to make a living playing blackjack.
Casino’s Shut Down for Christmas!
Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.
Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.
Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway. Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.
So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia. Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernalillo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.
Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road. Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road. I rolled down my window, “Accident?”
“No. Most of the roads are shut down. People in groups in the middle of the roads singing carols. You’ll have to take this road. Be careful.”
Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.
I don’t so much mind people singing carols. I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.
On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.
I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die. I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.
Anyway readers, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.
But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice. Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.
If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck. As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,
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
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 