NCOs dressing down fresh arrivals who didn’t clean their rifles or had Frito Lay in their gas-mask bags always began, “When Joe Chink comes across that line [fill in the blank]. Joe Chink. The imaginary Chinamen poised across the DMZ sharpening their bayonets. We were there to scare them into not coming South, and whup if they did. 50,000 of us.
They’re still over there waiting, those GIs, 25,000 of them, but nowadays I doubt they’re being threatened with Joe Chink. Joe Chink makes the parts for all their weapons, ammunition, their boots, every item of their equipment. Joe Chink loans money to their overlords to pay for it and pay their salaries.
And back in the God, Country and My Baby heaven Joe Chink’s athletic shoes carry America’s finest boys and jerseys up and down pastures carrying Joe Chink’s footballs for the edification of cheering spectators wearing Joe Chink’s clothing, head-t0-foot.
Back then most of us who had any knowledge of the Republic of Korea military didn’t have much doubt the ROK Army [South Korean] could whip the pants off the US Army if they wanted to, and have plenty left over to take care of Joe Chink if he came across the DMZ.
But nowadays it’s probably North Koreans the US Army’s scaring into not doing anything ugly to all those factories in South Korea making the rest of what US consumers need but can’t get from Joe Chink. Factories, and the ROK Army which could almost certainly still whip the pants off those 25,000 GIs still over there.
“Thank you for your service,” romantic patriots are fond of saying.
Morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
If I’m going to get anywhere in this life I think I’m going to have to learn how to not be so stupid.
Yesterday I made that post about the F350 wiring, which I’d been fretting and gnashing my teeth about for months. Ben offered to try to find me a wiring diagram, and tffnguy recommended a Ford Truck Enthusiasts Forum. I felt fairly uppidy and hopeful, but not sky-high enthusiastic because I’ve learned the hard way to suppress my melodrama.
But I went to the Forum site and immediately remembered I’d been there before, several months ago. The reason I remembered was the popup advertisement for Phoenix University that blocked the entire screen and came back as soon as I clicked the X, every time. The site took forever to load on a dialup, too. So I blew it off and spent the next few months twiddling my thumbs trying to find ways to fix the immediate problem.
But yesterday, because of tffnguy’s recommendation I fought my way through the esoterica, waited while things loaded, killed popups as though I could dress them out and have them for supper. Registered, posted a question about the wiring, along with pics, and asked for any help anyone could offer.
In a matter of hours I had a reply and a wiring diagram. Now I’m back where I could have been several months ago if I’d had the patience and determination to wait for that site to load and posted an identical request back then.
Gale’s fond of saying that during the 40-odd years we’ve been friends every mutual acquaintance, if asked to list my traits would have had, “If there’s an easy way and a hard way, he’ll pick the hard way and stay to the end.”
Maybe I’m beginning to understand what they were talking about. If I can get that grapefruit out of my mouth I might try to sort it out and change it.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Maybe I was too much like the guy in the picture above trying to find a vet to work on his dog. I borrowed Little Red yesterday and drove into Harper to talk to the Real Mechanic I had in mind to work on the New Truck.
He seemed a nice enough guy, but when I explained what I had in mind, described the truck and the problem, he explained he didn’t care to have anything to do with it.
There’s another Real Mechanic in town, but I decided to back off and think about how to approach this a bit more rather than ask and have him say, ‘no’, too.
The frustrating thing about it all is the fact I could get that truck running well enough to drive it into town myself if I could find photographs of the wiring on a running 1983 F350 with a similar engine. I’d replace the wiring myself, then just take it in to get whatever else needs doing for an inspection sticker.
Today I’m posting a plea on Kerrville and Fredericksburg Freecycle groups for under-the-hood photos with the air cleaner removed from anyone owning a running truck of that vintage. If that doesn’t turn up anything I’ll post on Kerrville Marketplace group offering whatever price it takes to get photos, I reckons.
Crazycrazycrazycrazy. I honestly never anticipated a man in the bidness of fixing cars would refuse to fix one. Guess the economy isn’t as bad as I’ve been hearing it is.
Maybe I need to find a vet.
Old Jules
Today on Ask Old Jules:
Old Jules, what was the happiest time in your life?
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Nobody much uses a tow bar anymore. The only thing available to rent in town was something called a ‘car dolly’, and I didn’t like the idea of renting one, even a little bit. But Gale’s reluctance to pull the New Truck into town with a chain was expressing itself full volume without him having to say anything outright.
I’d put notices on Kerrville Freecycle, Kerrville Marketplace, done everything I could think of without success. But a week or so ago Gale mentioned he’d seen one for $100 at a thrift store in Kerrville. At least he thought it was a tow bar. He said it had been sitting there a goodly while.
Those of you who read here probably know the idea of paying price-tag prices for something isn’t in my makeup. And $i00 for a tow bar, while probably a reasonable price, just wasn’t something I was about to do. I’d rent a car dolly first.
I borrowed Little Red and made a special trip to town in the hope it was a tow bar, and in the further hope they’d be ready enough to see it gone to be willing to do some horse trading. When I arrived unsuspecting began a bargaining session lasted maybe two hours. Tough, tough, tough, those people have become.
The only time in my life I ever recall having to dicker that hard for anything was in Mexico when I was 17 years old bargaining for a pair of needle-toed, fancy-stitched turquoise-dyed-stovepipe topped boots. I’d only tried one of them on and the fit was perfect. Got that guy down to $17 for the pair. But when I got back to Portales and put them on, turned out they were two different sizes. Killed my feet, wearing them.
But I’ve digressed.
As you can see from the pic, the tow bar’s now here, same size for both feet. And now it’s only going to be a matter of prying Gale away from whatever else he thinks he ought to be doing to get the New Truck to a Real Mechanic.
Savor sugar words
Pulse rushing to a touch
Hold tight the triggered yearning
From a voice on the phone
While it lasts
Swim in honey
And be glad
Let it hold you
Over breakfast dirty dishes
Stale cold coffee
Of the years
Sustain you through emergence
Of a human side of humans
Viewed by humans
Toenail clippings
Bad-breath mornings
PMS
And milk gone sour
In the fridge
Sit back remember
Savor sugar words
And be glad
No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.
Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.
She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.
The mountain I used to prospect for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water. Big ruins. I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.
One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset. In the basin below there’s a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains. I’d discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely. What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses?
But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob! Yon damned Mogollons used it to mark summer solstice!
A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of those people who lived in that ruin. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave. Politicians, or priests, or both, deciding what was best for them.
One day they just left. I’ve always thought it was because of that grim civil war nobody knows anything about that happened among them around the time these ruins were abandoned. Bashing in the heads of anyone who didn’t agree to migrating.
They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.
What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.
Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind. Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things they couldn’t carry.
Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, the pain and sorrow in those villagers. Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn. A few weeks of planning. What to take? What to leave behind.
Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before. At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad. Knowing they’d never go home again, wondering about the place they were going.
Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have. Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancestors had roamed for 2000 years.
They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths. But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside. The kids probably screeching enough to cover everyone elses grief.
As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages. The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them. They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.
Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village. They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they’d ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.
Today, it’s just piles of rock, potsherds, holes left by scholars and other diggers for spoils. The land still falls off across Johnson Basin, sun going down over that volcanic nub that once measured the time to plant. Cow men ride their motorized hosses across the old trails, cows stomp around looking for grass, making the pottery fragments even smaller.
But sometimes late at night when the wind howls down the mountain a man might hear, or think he hears an echo of the chants, the drums, the night mumbles and whispers of lovers, the ghosts of lovers. Pulls the bag tighter around his ears and wonders.
Good morning, readers. I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time. Never quite got around to it.
I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.
Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.
Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less. They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.
Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.
Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.
One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.
Amazing footage.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.
The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief. But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.
But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.
Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.
At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.
Let no fate willfully misunderstand me and snatch me away, not to return. Robert Frost
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Evidently some readers were left with the impression yesterday post was a farewell notice. It wasn’t. I’ll be posting here, but not so often, is all, until I’m where I can’t. I just won’t be spending so much time online.
Keith: I got your email, but I can’t do Facebook because of the slow connection. Check your Yahoo mailbox, amigo. I know you have computer issues, but I think that’s the only way available from this end. J
The invader cat has raised the ante here. It’s evidently a female and in heat. Walks around mewing all the time, to the disgust of the four resident felines. But I’ve begun feeding it because I’m not going to have it starving while I figure out who it belongs to.
My friend, Rich sent me a RAM upgrade for my offline computer and it arrived yesterday. Jumped me from 4 gb of RAM to 12 gb with Readyboost, and it allowed me to follow some computations I’d never been able to do before. Uplifting, satisfying day.
Gale’s fairly under the weather, but he brought down the RAM chips and we conversed a while. Seems he might have come across a tow bar for sale without recognizing it for what it is. Got me fairly excited, because the towing issues are the reason the New Truck isn’t in town being worked on, or isn’t finished, licensed, inspection stickered, lock stock and banana peel. I’m borrowing Little Red to go into town today and try to chase it down.
Maybe I shouldn’t have made the post yesterday, though I wasn’t smart enough was the reason I did. It seemed an explanation of why I’d be making fewer posts.
For those who read it rapidly I suppose it seemed I was about to take off all my clothes and run naked into the sunset.
It’s too cold still for that.
Old Jules
Previous posts about the transportation issue saga:
“Hey! Congratulations man! You picked a hill worth dying for and just got your leg shot off instead of dying. Cool!”
“I didn’t pick it man. I don’t know who picked it. Maybe the General. Maybe the Colonel. Maybe the other side. I din’t do any picking. Nobody asked me anything.”
“Wow. You got your leg shot off and didn’t even make your own choice about whether it was worth the effort?”
“Higher than my paygrade. Not my job to figure out whether hopping around on a stump of a leg the rest of my life or spilling my guts across the landscape is worth why they think I should do it. It’s up to the big brains to decide that. The Generals, and Colonels and Lieutenants. The people who see the bigger picture. I’m not into long-term thinking.”
“Sheeze man. Tough gig.”
Bloody Valverde. Measured in percentage of casualties among those participating, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War.
Texas Mounted Volunteers were on that mesa, coming down to cross the Rio Grande just below the left end.
Federals and New Mexico Volunteers were below and across the river trying to keep them from doing it.
You can’t get over there anymore without breaking some laws. The railroad police will arrest you for trespass if they catch you trying to cross the RR bridge. Last I heard, Ted Turner owns the ranch the mesa is on. He has riders out there who’ll haul you off for trespass if the RR police don’t get you.
A few cows graze up there and Ted Turner can’t have people up there bothering them by poking around among the pockmarked hideyholes and artillery placements. A lot of men on both sides died so Ted Turner could keep the right to keep you off his holdings and bothering his cows.
If you sighted across the top of that monument across the end of the mesa and drew a tight bead you’d be looking at a mushroom cloud about 50 miles away when they fired off the first atomic bomb in 1945.
But by 1945 the government and scientists all finally realized the place wasn’t worth anyone getting excited about, getting legs shot off or dying for. By that time they knew it wasn’t worth anything except for blowing up with an atomic bomb. You can’t go over there, either, for what that’s worth.
Pretty big hunk of granite for such a little event. But nobody much winds around those desert roads to look at it.
I used to have a pretty nice cannon ball that came off that battlefield. Wonder what ever became of it. Hope I didn’t scare any of Ted’s cows or stir up any future atomic bomb attacks on the place by the US Government.
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 