All that’s over there until the first post tomorrow is the single-post archive migrated from Facebook. But if you’d care to go for a look at the archive it might give you an insight into the general drift.
I’m posting this today in hopes of discovering whether anything needs changing, whether the navigation works, and to just give anyone interested a gander at it. If you click it and find there’s a problem of any sort I’d be obliged if you’d send her an email, post it here, or let us know by mental telepathy.
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.
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.
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 mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol. I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.
“CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:
“Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”
Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.
Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.
I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?
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.
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.
In a previous post, I described what it is like as an Alberta Métis to come to Quebec and realise that ‘Métis’ does not mean the same thing here. I’m not a shut-in…I realised that there were different definitions out there, I simply hadn’t lived where I was defined by them before.
In another post, I talked about Pan-Indianism, and also Pan-Métisism. What this post and those previous two have in common, is that they are about identity.
The topic of Status was a much easier discussion, because I avoided delving into identity issues in order to give you the bare bones legislative context. Trust me, there are much larger identity discussions yet to be had on ‘who is an Indian’. More important, I’d argue, than just knowing the state of the categories right now…but you have to start from somewhere!
Send her roses now and then
A box of chocolates might help
She loves to hear, “I love you.”
Even if you don’t
Candy lies with chocolates and roses
When things get bad
And the secretary winks
Keep in mind
This won’t make it any better
Keep your valentines at home
Secretaries don’t come easy
And two women in your life
Ain’t a big improvement
Over one
When the embers cease to glow
Don’t forget or you’ll regret
You forgot the anniversary
There’s nothing out there better
Give her candlelight and roses
Candy lies with candlelight and roses
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 