My old friend Keith stopped into the blog a few days ago and commented on one of the posts. By doing so he reminded me I haven’t said much about a subject dear to my heart: Outrageous adventure.
When Keith and I were searching together we were both in our early 50s, both involved in careers, both plenty old enough to know we weren’t going to find that lost gold mine, though I, particularly figured we would. [I still held by the statement from my neophyte search early in the 1980s, “If I can’t find that mine I’m not half the man I think I am.”]
Keith and I plotted, planned and trekked into more canyons than either of us can remember and, while we didn’t find that lost gold mine we saw places not many human beings have ever seen, certainly not many in a longish time. We systematically explored promising locations from the Zuni Mountains, to Santa Rita Mesa, to Pelona on the south side of the Plains of San Augustin, to the Gallinas.
I don’t know how Keith thinks about all this these days, but I know how I think about it. I wouldn’t subtract one mile, one minute, one canyon of it from my life, though we never found what we were looking for.
Not from that, not from Y2K, not from flying a Cessna 140 all over the sky for a number of years, and not from this current adventure of survival that’s my life today, for that matter.
It seems to me people have become too ‘smart’ and ‘wise’ with the debunking culture to allow themselves a piece of outrageous risk with minimal prospects for any returns. It’s been that way for a considerable while. I believe it’s robbed a lot of people of experiencing a side of life that once a particular sort of individual demanded of himself.
An old man who wasn't afraid of adventure
When I say it’s been going on a long while I mean it. During the early 1950s my granddad and step-dad became the laughingstocks of Portales, Dora, Garrison and Causey, New Mexico, by injecting a piece of it into their lives. They bought a WWII jeep, equipment, and joined thousands of other similar men searching for uranium. Probably the last ‘rush’ in US history.
They were gone several months, didn’t find a thing, and when they returned they endured the jeers and snide laughs of everyone around them. But both men cherished the memories of that time as long as they lived. They had something the stay-at-home sneerers would never have because they were too smart, too dedicated to the other side of human existence to allow it into their lives.
And the venom they expressed for anyone else doing it provides a hint they probably wished they had.
Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
“So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command. “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”
“Who?” Hydrox explains.
“Us. You. Me. Niaid, Shiva, Tabby. The Great Speckled Bird and the hens. It’s coming on Christmas. Why aren’t we gearing up? Going on buying sprees? Getting into the spirit of things?”
Christmas where the desert went and why
“Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear. “You’re thinking of what? Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up? Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”
I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time. “Well, yeah. Everyone else does it. Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing? Don’t you miss that?”
“I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters. “So did the other cats. Christmas. Halloween. Easter. But especially Christmas. Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over. Garbage piled up around the pickup containers. You humans are a mystery to me. Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away.
“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are. Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive. You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”
This raised my hackles a bit. “We’re smart. We’re on top of things. Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence. Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground. Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.
“You eat better than the people who did all that work. You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”
Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place. “Yeah. And who’s responsible for all that?”
“Human progress,” I replied proudly. “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”
It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.
There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds. Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.
Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez. Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.
Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it. The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.
Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother. If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.
Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history. A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.
It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine. The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’. They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland. Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.
The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated. Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.
Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.
They might be right.
The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area. The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico. The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.
Heck, it’s been a few years now. Maybe they’re already mining it. Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.
From 1970 until he died a few years ago I had a friend named Bill who required some getting used to in the visual encounter department. Bill, Gale and I were part of a coffee-klatch at the University of Texas Chuckwagon. They’d both been recently released from the military, both were Russian majors, so I suppose Bill was the instrument for my becoming acquainted with Gale, who owns this place and lives through the woods half-mile from me.
Bill wasn’t an easy man to look at. He weighed around 250 pounds, had a huge head, eyes that didn’t look in precisely the same directions, kinky hair and teeth with a lot of distance between them. But he was a fine, intelligent person. Unfortunately for him, Bill also spoke with a stutter. He was acutely, uncomfortably aware of his appearance.
At the time I met him Bill had never had sex with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and he confided once he never expected to. A profoundly unhappy man whom I spent countless hours with trying to help persuade him away from suicide. Every month or two I’d ride with him to the Chicken Ranch, the famous Texas whorehouse, and wait, chatting with the girls while he took care of his needs. For me, one of the outcomes of those visits was the magazine article shown here: Vietcong Seductress, et al. For Bill the visits only provided temporary, but necessary relief.
Around the time he got his bachelors degree Bill found a woman who had a few problems of her own, and who was evidently able to see beneath his exterior into the fine human being he was. They were eventually married and seemingly enjoyed a happy enough life. Still, Bill and I remained close friends, talking on the phone several times a week.
One day Bill came to see me sometime in the mid-1980s with something weighing him down. We talked a while before he confided to me that he was a ‘sex addict’.
“What the hell is a sex addict, Bill?”
He explained the concept to me, as it had been explained to him by his wife, along with various pamphlets of the feminist genre describing it in loving detail. “I never knew this about myself,” he explained, carrying more guilt and self-remorse than I’d seen since he became a married man.
“Have you talked to a doctor about it?”
“I talked to [a mutual friend who was a psychologist]. He just laughed me off and said there’s no such thing as a sex addict.”
This brought a frown from me. Our bud the psychologist was a pro. If sex addiction existed, he’d know about it, and if Bill had a problem he wanted to talk about he wouldn’t brush him off. “Did you talk to him in any detail about what makes you think you’re a sex addict?”
Bill just shrugged and stared at the floor. “Yeah. He said it’s just normal. He said I’m the same as almost every other man.”
Not too long afterward Bill adopted the religious preference of his wife, Anglican. He became a deacon, and something of a zealot. But he carried his guilt and his conviction he was a sex addict with him, probably to the grave. And frankly, I never believed a word of it.
Bill had described enough of his sexual needs and practices to me over the years to convince me if he was a sex addict, so was I. I tended to agree with our psychologist friend more than I agreed with Bill, his wife, or the feminist pamphlets where the concept was invented.
Recently The Honest Courtesan, a retired prostitute has had a couple of articles and discussions about the subject in her blog. Not An Addiction, and Neither Addiction nor Epidemic examine the subject of the concept of sex addiction and what’s behind it in loving detail.
My general thought is that this wouldn’t work on most men. It would require one such as Bill, a man already inclined to guilt and one already decided to let others define right and wrong for him. Most men, I believe, would simply get a mistress or pick up a lady in a bar somewhere. A lady who measured the sexual desires and needs of the normal man as normal.
He’ll be something else then, a ‘cheater’, and she’ll be the ‘other woman’.
And that’s normal too when terms such as ‘sex addict’ become a replacement part for ‘too tired’, or ‘I’ve got a headache’.
[With the exception of Brighton Rock] I’ve never read a book by Graham Greene I didn’t consider worth tucking away for at least one future reading. I encountered The Heart of the Matter too late in life to feel any confidence I’ll live long enough to enjoy this one again, but that’s the result of the aging process, not the book. It will be there with the others still waiting if I kick before I get around to it again.
Set in an imaginary West African British colony early during WWII, The Heart of the Matter is vaguely reminiscent of Maugham’s Ashenden series in some ways, Of Human Bondage, in others, with a touch of Heart of Darkness thrown in for seasoning. Scobie, the aging, passed-over-for-promotion Deputy Commissioner of Police, is the primary character and the only European character in the book who loves Africa and wants nothing more than to remain there his entire life.
However, his wife, Louise, hates it, bludgeons him with his lack of upward mobility, harnesses his kindness and determination to avoid causing her pain even though there’s no love left between them, and tortures him with guilt. She frequently declares tearfully he doesn’t love her and draws his assurances, “Of course I love you.”
The native population loves his unique respect and fairness in the execution of his duties whenever the individuals are not involved in crime. When they are involved they despise him for identical reasons. The Indian and Syrian merchants and Neutral Nation Shipping and Smuggling concerns mostly just would rather he could be bribed or tricked into seeming to be vulnerable to bribes.
Through this tightening stricture of War, Colonial idiosyncracies, needy personal relationships, and intrigue Greene threads Scobie’s strait-jacketed life along a complex and interesting plot worthy of far more well-known and durable writers.
I’d suggest readers who’ve only been exposed to Brighton Rock might find themselves surprised to discover in The Heart of the Matter that Greene is a writer they want more of. Same as so many other of Greene’s works.
I’m aware some of you readers keep chickens. If you’re having problems with blindness among them you might be interested in joining http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_Ranging_Chickens/ where there’s an interesting discussion going on about the problem. This was the beginning post for the thread:
Blind Rooster Posted: Sat Dec 3, 2011 5:47 am (PST) Just wondering if anyone has had any experience with this. Monday afternoon, I noticed two hens on the wrong side of the fence, so went to retrieve them, and find the rest of their little band. Found all but one rooster. Couldn’t find him in any of the “regular” places, but they do have lots of room to roam. Figured I’d check again before bedtime, as he’s usually the first one in. Didn’t show up. Put everyone else in, and went hunting, for feathers if nothing else:(. Well, I found him by the fence, but inside. Just sitting there. He let me pick him up without protest, but he’s always been laid-back. Still, I knew something was wrong. Put him in a different coop, with shelves instead of bar roosts. The next day he was down on the floor, walking around, but bumping into the screening for the duck section, and sitting in corners/nests. Realized his vision was at least partially gone. Blocked him in, and started antibiotics, since I had no idea what else to do. That night he was back up on the shelf, so he must have some vision, I guess. Wasn’t eating or drinking that I could see, just walked over everything. Brought him into the Hospital Unit (a carrier in my bathrooom :). He began to drink, and finally eat. He crows (oh, swell) but his cue seems to be noise rather than light. Put him outside yesterday (in a big crate) afternoon for some sun, but he just sat there. Some of the other chickens did come scratch around him, but he seemed oblivious. His eyes look odd, not whiteish, but the center (behind the cornea and inside the iris, where it should be black) looks “solid”, if that makes any sense.
Meanwhile, you readers involved in clandestine, extra-marital relationships might be well-advised to remove your diamond jewelry before checking into some seedy motel.
In the quantum world, diamonds can communicate with each other
The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by scattering a pair of strong pump pulses (green). The generated motional entanglement is verified by observing nonclassical correlations in the inelastically scattered light. Credit: Dr. Lee and colleagues, Image Copyright Science|AAAS http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-quantum-world-diamonds.html
Barred Spiral Milky Way. Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA
The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.
Government and Wall Street Cray computers working on the problem tentatively estimate the 99 percenters are actually 0.000000000000001 percenters galaxy-wide. Political and financial-industry hired-guns are working three shifts to prepare television documentaries and PR campaigns to assist in correcting the error.
In a related story, multi-national corporations and Wall Street banks have hired a team of astrophysicists and astronomers to study black holes in an effort to develop more thorough strategies and techniques to solidify and expand their holdings. Additionally, the illustration on the right suggests black holes might also provide improved methods in the use of pepper-spray.
“An optical image of the sky showing the location of the black hole, Cygnus X-1. (Right) An artist’s conception of the black hole system, showing the black hole drawing material towards it from a massive, blue companion star. This material forms a disk and jets that emit radiation. Credit: Optical: DSS; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
“Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginary surface, or “edge,” of finite size (its “event horizon”) within which anything that ventures becomes lost forever to the rest of the universe.” http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-black-hole-unmasked.html
The overall optimism derived from these stories was something I wanted to share with you readers to lift whatever waning spirits you might experiencing his crisp, rainy morning.
Good morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit and read. I went to sleep last night with the thought on my mind to try a run into Kerrville today. I figured I’d wander around in the AutoZone store for a while to see if I could locate some Chinese engineered tool designed to outsmart Japanese mechanical engineers.
But it turned out to be one of those nights when a lot goes on. A high wind rose for a while and started dropping dead tree branches, I assume it was, with a lot of fanfare and drama, on things probably didn’t need any trees falling on them. I recently got that fuel-line bulb replacement for the chainsaw For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise and at that point my middle of the night thinking changed my plans for the day.
Seemed everything was stacking up for me to spend the day bringing down dead oaks and cutting firewood. I settled back to sleep peacefully dreaming of a fire in the woodstove and a few layers less clothing on my agingly fragile bod.
Daylight was still a long way off when I was awakened by a ruckus on the front porch I interpreted as the cats telegraphing me there was a coon out there bothering them, so I got the .22 and the spotlight and went out to unravel whatever was happening. Turned out it was the invader-cat crosswise with Hydrox, second-in-command around here.
I adopted my mean-evil-ugly persona, put down the .22 and started yelling and waving my arms around to break up the spitting growling party, then chased the invader-cat off the porch and across the meadow keeping it lit up in the spotlight. Hydrox was playing point-man, but chasing with no intention of catching. The invader-cat has me figured out, I reckons, and kept turning around hoping I’d say something friendly and we could come to an agreement, adding a cat to the local population.
But that ain’t going to happen. You can’t stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps coming. Hydrox and I chased that cat clean into the woods to the east, me breathing steam and gutsy language.
When I got back to the porch with Hydrox the other three were waiting and demanded a prayer-meeting. They all saw me put down that .22 and interpreted it as an ominous sign I might be sneaking around wondering if we couldn’t fit another cat into the equation. The consensus was that we can’t.
So one of the jobs today is puzzling out how to get the invader-cat into the live-trap and deliver it to one of the herd of wildlife-rescue women springing up like weeds all over the Texas Hill Country.
It looks like a pretty good cat and I’ve got to tip my hat to the fact it’s awfully well groomed for a stray. But it’s a long way from anyone likely to be grooming it. Just the fact it’s survived out in the woods a while, though, has me thinking it mightn’t be easy to lure into the live trap.
Anyway, after daybreak I went out for a perusal of whatever damage the trees might have accomplished and found things are normal, though one’s a lot nearer the ground than it was yesterday. It’s foggy, cold and feels like rain. Maybe I’ll cut wood, and maybe I won’t.
But what I originally intended to tell you this morning was that last night I came across a blog where someone’s discovered an identical replication in nature between a beetle and a parasite duplicating the relationship between government and high-finance interests, multi-national corporations, almost every facet of human organizational structure. I think it might be where we learned how to do all the stuff we do.
Instead of studying cats, chickens, deer and other critters to puzzle out what’s going on with us humans I think I need me one-each of those beetles and parasites. I’ll keep you updated on whether I find one.
This was written before I realized the rats are just a diversion and Chinese containerized cargo-boxes are the real invaders.
“Trouble!” says you. “What trouble?”
“The Ruskies went home a decade ago,” You say. “Berlin wall came down and no one even remembers it. The Germans are all running around hugging one another worrying about mad cows and leaving everyone else alone.
“We kicked the holy bejesus out of Samdam Hoooosane and his royal guards,” you say, “And might do it again if he doesn’t behave,” you say, “And we’re all safe and sound here in the land of milk and honey…..Ain’t gonna war no more,” you say, “Except the occasional invasion of a minor third rate Middle Eastern or Balkan country,” you say…..”All safe and sound, swords into plowshares, all that.”
And you really believe that, do you?
Well, if you believe that, you’d better prepare yourself for a shock down to your carefully manicured and polished toenails……’cause the real challenge is still out there, the real challenge is happening right there in your back yard even as we speak, in your attic, in the sewer under your squeaky clean porcelain commode; in the trees behind your quiet complacent little hidey hole you’ve made for yourself to stick your soft American head into.
You kept your guard up all those years because one of the Marx brothers talked about lulling the West into a false sense of security, and of course he was right. Of course he was.
Only the time-skid was slower than anticipated and all the Marx brothers died.
Yeah, Groucho and Harpo sleep with the fishes, but it’s still going on.
The fifth column is here, now, at work near you, near your home.
“Rats.” I say.
“Rats?” You say.
Yeah. Rattus Rattus, the good American rat, the roof rat, is the only real American who knows, and he ain’t saying much.
Old Rattus Rattus suffers silently in his simple Christian American way; fighting quietly for his homeland with American know-how. Sure, it sounds silly and pointy headed, Rattus Rattus, but that’s his damned name, same as yours is Homo Sexian or some such thing.
Rattus Rattus struggles without complaint for his tiny children, while slowly, the habitat and other lousy habits, recede every year. You ought to know by the name; Rattus Norvegicus, the Norwegian rat, the dreaded wharf rat: the foreign rat the communist pinko athiest moslem heathen yellowjapaneseinvader super rat of the future is bullying him back.
While you sleep there in your complacent soft pillowland, it’s going on outside and up in your attic, in the streets, the alleys, the sewerplants, the amber grainfields, the feedlots, the silos, Rattus Rattus battles for you against the silent invaders. Rattus Rattus draws his lines in the sand, digs his little burrows, fortifies, and retreats as the highly mechanized divisions of Norwegian rats advance, house by house, burrow by burrow……Every year the Rattus Rattus line moves inward a few miles, seven miles in along the whole perimeter.
Yeah. There are bulges, enclaves of encirclement. Enclaves of resistance, but Norvegicus takes no prisoners, spares no one. And you sleep silently, peacefully while your own good American rats are diminished, you who gutsylike bomb the bejesus out of other commie pinko foreign middleastern terrorist muslim and Balkans, sleep while your own brother-rats in your own back yard die without your help.
And what do you think, you sleeping bastards, will happen when the final conquest is complete? Do you think you will be left alone, when the last fighters have all fought on your behalf, when the silent armies of Rattus Rattus are all destroyed, all the food for ravens scattered on the battlefields of America? Don’t bet on it. The sound of scratching in the ceiling, inside the walls has barely begun.
Time to join the battle, fellow Americans, time to get out the cyanide, the 1080, the pellet guns and the mousetraps, time to stock up on cheese, and warfrin, and time to prepare for the big battle for America in the American way. Time to begin the manufacture of tiny tanks, (maybe Tonka and some of those can help) and artillery pieces, and scatterguns and nervegas and miniaturized nuclear weapons…..time to join in the real battle for America here at home.
If you aren’t with us, you are against us, behind enemy lines, already under the areas controlled by the foreign devils, and you won’t be spared, unless you form an underground, a fifth column of your own…..
They’ve already got all the other countries, the other continents, and as has happened so often in history, America stands alone against them, a tiny host of good American rats, behind the scenes, fighting against all odds for you, to the end……
And that doesn’t even touch on the imported fire ants killing our domestic fireants, the imported Africanized bees killing our good American queen bees and selfishly taking over the hives, the Russian Thistles (tumbleweeds) cluttering up our prairies, the imported hares (jackrabbits), the English Sparrows (that battle’s already lost), the tamaracs (salt cedars stealing our precious water for their foreign interests), and the imported fruitflies…….it’s all there, all in black and white, been written down, so it’s true …..a multi-pronged attack against all that’s good in America…..while you sleep…….
And now the foreign weathermen, the Canadians and Mexicans, are predicting our weather, keeping the good stuff for themselves……
In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life: Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction. But important things first:
As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.
Here’s today.
Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.
Strangeness
SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:
“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.
The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.
Okay. Now for the main thrust of this post. Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3
A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson. She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him.
But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies. She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.
To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living. Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico. I considered him a friend.
But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob. He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.
I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me. Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.
Naturally, I bought and read a copy. Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder. My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.
I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction. But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.
Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.
We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery. But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar. And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.
Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself. Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying. Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.
But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me. That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.
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 