Tag Archives: thoughts

Papillon

Posted on August 19, 2011 by | 4 comments


Hi blogsters:

A couple of days ago I came across a tattered copy of Henri Charrierè’s, Papillon on the bookshelf.   I’d read it many times over the decades, but there’s always one more read left in it, it seems.  This might be the last.

Charrierè’s autobiography always has something new to tell me, depending on where my life is when I re-read it.

Papillon (Charrierè) was transported to the French prison islands of Guinea in the Caribbean in 1931, where thousands of prisoners were kept out of sight and mind of the French citizenry.  Devil’s Island was the most well known, but it was only one of the camps where 80 percent of the prisoners died before serving out their sentences.

The book is a story of courage, determination, brutality, as Papillon goes through a series of escape attempts, dungeons, unthinkable tortures, solitary confinements at a time in history when the ‘civilized world’ was no more civilized than it was before, or since.  Eventually, he escaped and became a worthy citizen of Venezuela from 1945 until he wrote the book in 1967.

In some ways the writing and the stories both remind me of the fiction works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Strange how some nationalities get all the credit, while others manage to escape notice.  The Spaniards and Portuguese take their battering from the waning memories of the Inquisition.  The Russians from the Gulag camps.  The Chinese from the Great Cultural Revolution.  The Belgians from the terrors they poured onto the Congo.  The Cambodians, the Ethiopians and the Germans have all been held up to the light and examined with appropriate repudiation.

Somehow the Brits and the French just managed to escape notice when the recognition for some of the vilest institutionally sanctioned acts of human brutality in modern human history.

Papillon.  A book worth reading and thinking about by all you ‘jail’em-til-they-rot’ enthusiasts.

We haven’t caught up to the French, Brits, Spaniards, Cambodians, Chinese, Russians, Belgians, Germans, and other civilized nations yet.  But we have the ingredients.

Plenty of prisoners and prisons.  A freedom-loving population of the same kind of jurors, courts, prosecutors who sent Papillon and thousands of others off to a life and deaths they’d never tolerate for any cute animal that appeared in a Walt Disney film named Bambi.

Old Jules

Papillon Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARD1l-tr6g

Papillon（1973） – Theme from Papillon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNp_3dpiTno&feature=related


4 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Human Behavior, Reading

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Lying Consistently or Telling the Truth

Posted on August 18, 2011 by | 14 comments

When I got out of the US Army in 1964 I was a confused young man.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but initially I felt some urgency to get started doing it.  My first thought was to buy a farm in the vicinity of Portales, New Mexico, where I’d spent most of my youth and done a lot of farm labor.  That area was in the process of the subtle change from hardscrabble family farms to agribusiness farms, though I didn’t recognize it.

Although my granddad had a small farm a few miles from town, and although the main revenue for the population was farm-related, most non-farmers didn’t hold  farmers in high regard.  Including my granddad, with reasons he considered adequate.

The result was that my granddad, my mom and my step-dad took active measures, once I found a 160 acre irrigated farm I could swing for, to make certain with the local bank that I didn’t get financing to buy it.  They each pronounced separately to me that I was destined for ‘better things’ than farming, which I bitterly resented.

Someone mentioned to me the Peace Corps was a place where young people at loose ends were volunteering to go off and set the world right.  Relatively new at the time, I’d never heard of it, but I applied.

Then, as I’d done numerous times before, I hitch-hiked out of that town.  The World Fair was going on in New York, and I headed that direction, and spent the summer in Greenwich Village simulating being a beatnik.

I might talk more about all this in future posts, but I’ve digressed from my original intentions for this one.

I began my Peace Corps training in Hilo, Hawaii.  India X Peace Corps Project, intended to send bright young Americans off to Gujarat, India, to teach the locals how to raise chickens.  Sometime I’ll probably wax poetic about all that, but I’m trying to limit my digressions.

Training was intended to be a time of intense learning, but it was also clear, we were cautioned from the beginning, it also served as a filter to remove the great percentage of the trainees  through observation, psychological testing, peer ratings, and voluntary withdrawals.  A sort of basic training with the emphasis on washing out all trainees with potential shortcomings.  About 2/3 of India X washed out of training before the end, including me.

But I’m having a lot of trouble getting to the point of this post because of all the background material.  Enough!

One of the methods of screening trainees was the Minnesota Multi-Phase Personality Test.  Most of the trainees were well-enough educated to be familiar with it.  The MMPP was reputed to be ‘unbeatable’, and we were each acutely aware of our personal shortcomings.  Most of us agreed if the Peace Corps had any idea what was going on in our heads they’d faint, revive themselves, and deselect us without further ado.

During the week prior to the test we’d gather at night to discuss the best strategy for foiling the Peace Corps cadre and the MMPP.  The two obvious approaches were, a] Tell the truth and suffer the consequences, and hope to be forgiven, or, b] Lie consistently.

By reputation, the MMPP wasn’t capable of being lied to consistently without catching you out.

Most of us viewed ourselves as the cream of US youth.  The Peace Corps told us that’s what we were from the first day of acceptance for training.  We’d been picked from hundreds, maybe thousands of applicants.

So we’d already fooled them that much.

Our consensus as a group was to lie consistently.  Some of us succeeded.

This is getting lengthy, so I’ll use it as a launchpad, most likely, for some future posts.

John Prine– Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian
http://youtu.be/r_vTY67Wd9I

14 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, America, Free-ranging-chickens, Human Behavior, Liars, NM, Peace Corps, Poultry

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So Long, and Thanks for all the Valentines

Posted on August 16, 2011 by | 19 comments


During the early 1990s I had a lady friend with whom I was close enough to
exclusively share a few years of my life.  Interior decorator lady who grew up in the same town and entirely different social strata than I did.

I first remember noticing her in the fifth grade, and from then until the time I left that burg as a high-schooler, I don’t believe she ever spoke to me.  She was upper crust and I was somewhere down there below the lower crust.

Anyway, 30-35 years later we spent a few years together seeing one another every day and night.  She had a lot of strong points, beautiful woman, smart, and well-intentioned.  I’d mentioned to her once that it used to really hurt my feelings in school on Valentine’s Day.  I hated it, all those kids getting valentines from one another and I didn’t get any.

Valentine’s Day, maybe 1993, ’94, I headed down to her house after work.  Came in the door and fell over.   She’d decorated the house with valentines, fed me a piece of cake shaped like a valentine, and handed me a box shaped like a valentine wrapped. Made me open it.

Crazy woman had filled that box with old-timey valentines like were around when we were kids…… full, chock full, that box was, with valentines claiming to be from kids we went to school with, all addressed to the kid I used to be …… the lower-class scum of yesteryear. Crazy stuff.

I’ve cried maybe twice during my adulthood, but for some reason I was having to hold back tears on that one. But that isn’t why I’m writing this blog entry.  I just wanted to preface the next thing with that one, so you’d understand she wasn’t a bad person underneath everything.

Anyway, she had two habits I found particularly irritating, aside from being miserable and liking to spread it around, toward the end of our relationship. She pronounced the “G” in guacamole. “Gwakamohlee.”  Drove me nuts.  Knew better, but maybe couldn’t remember, maybe didn’t care.

Secondly, she had this thing I figure came from being upper- crust as a kid.

“You find someone to work on the roof?” I might ask.

“Oh yes,” she might warble. ” Hired this little Mexican man.”

When I see the guy, he ain’t little.  He’s 240 pounds.  But he is Hispanic.

“Oh!” she might say.  “I hired this little Indian woman to do some bead work for me.”  Turned out the little Indian woman was taller than she was and weighed in heavier than the roof repair man.

You get the picture. Non-Anglo-Saxons were little, particularly if they were hired to do something.

No, the lady wasn’t a bigot, precisely.  She wouldn’t sit still for racial slurs unless they were subtle, oblique, or less so, but about Navajo folks, whom she generally disliked.  She conveyed the impression instead, that she found little men who did repairs to the plumbing so cute, so lovable, so adorable and quaint.  Something akin to looking through the big end of a telescope at them standing there so tiny doing their assigned jobs.

When we parted company after a few years it wasn’t pleasant, but I learned a lot about myself from her, once she began explaining what all was wrong with me.  It was worth a lengthy listen because she probably knew me as well as anyone ever has.

After I decided it was over I continued talking to her every night on the telephone for about a month, an hour-or-so per night, determined to listen carefully and consider everything ugly she could think of to say about me without any argument.  She mightn’t be right, or she might be right but about something I didn’t want to change, or she might be right and I might want to change it.

But we don’t get many opportunities in this life to have someone who knows us well go into loving detail explaining every flaw and wart, everything we haven’t noticed  about ourselves.  There aren’t any little people a person could hire to do that.

Eventually I came to realize she was enjoying those protracted nightly diatribes more than was possibly good for her.  She’d begun repeating herself, also.  So I told her it was over.

I mostly remember her for the valentine side.  The going up big was worth the coming down little.

Old Jules

P.S.  For you bloggers, a note from Jeanne (Admin):

Click here for a chance to win a slot in The Bloggess sidebar for a month sponsored by freefringes.com
http://freefringes.com/2011/09/20/lovelinks-24-open/

P.P.S. Another note from Jeanne (Admin):
We’re getting a few new readers from the contest site who are probably confused about my linking  to some old guy’s blog… so I wanted to mention that I’m a background partner on this blog and no, I didn’t write most of these posts!  I didn’t really understand the submission forms, so the blog is listed under “Jeanne Kasten”. I don’t know why. Sorry for any confusion!

Paul Simon– Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

19 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Communication, Ethnic Supremacy, Human Behavior, Native Americans, NM, Portales, Relationships, Youth

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The Challenge of Quietude

Posted on August 15, 2011 by | 16 comments


Things could seem fairly grim to almost anyone trying to stumble through this new century.  Somebody always walking into a schoolhouse with a gun, someone always bombing someone else, shooting someone else.

  • A cop probably feels things are middling dangerous for cops, feels things have gotten out of hand, feels threatened.
  • Store employees fearing their bosses, merchants fearing their employees, all of them fearing the dangerous potential of every customer.
  • Politicians fearing the opposing party, fearing the voters, fearing the prez.
  • Gang bangers fearing opposing gang bangers, fearing the cops, fearing their brother gang members knowing they’ll sell them out for a plea-bargain in a minute if faced with a long-term sentence.
  • Druggies fearing the dealers, fearing the cops, fearing the high cost of a habit, fearing other druggies, fearing their families, fearing do-gooder mammas and sisters and angry wives who might give them to the cops ‘for their own good’ after a long series of attempts to kick that didn’t work.
  • Christians fearing Muslims, Muslims fearing Christians, everyone fearing what the price sign above the gas pump’s going to show the day after the November election.
  • Single women fearing they’ll grow old without a man, married people fearing they’ll lose their partners to disease, to war, to accidents, to infidelity, to abuse.
  • Everyone fearing for the kids, for their safety, their increasingly brainless approaches to reality, for their futures.
  • Everyone watching the television screen, everyone shaking his head with the latest thing happened somewhere.

We’re in one of those niches in human history during which mass hysteria prevails.  An erosion of faith, a lapse of memory as a result of the bombardment of news submerging the mass-consciousness into the goldfish bowl of NOW.

The reality is that things aren’t worse now than they’ve ever been. 

Death still comes one-to-the-customer.

Kids, cops, gang bangers, birds, whales, baby seals, druggies, Christians, Muslims, every living creature is going to cross the finish line, same as they always have.

People aren’t killing one another more frequently than they’ve ever done.  They’re doing it about the same amount as they always have.  Killing and stomping one another, enslaving one another, robbing one another, invading one another.

Life’s a tough gig if we forget we’re going to die.  It always has been.

The challenge to man has always been putting himself above all that.  The courage to accept he/she will die, the kids will die, their kids will die.

The challenge is in the courage of acceptance, of distancing the self from the daily events creating the illusion death is somehow foreign, unnatural.  Tragic.

The challenge lies in living in the knowledge we’re going to die while behaving as though we aren’t.  In the courage to transcend the inevitability and allow ourselves to understand those other folks, the kid-killers, the gang bangers, the druggies, the cops, the government goons, the Christians and Muslims, the sheeple, all of them are just the same as us.  All stumbling around trying to get through this life.

The challenge lies in forgiving them for forgetting, forgiving ourselves for forgetting, we’re going to die and submerging ourselves in fear and brother hate.

The challenge lies in transcending the forgiveness enough to be grateful for the moments, every one of them, between the crying and the dying.  Grateful for the pain, the hardship, the loss, and the spiritual growth potential.

The challenge of acceptance that it ain’t all flowers and honey, never  has been, never was supposed to be.  That this life isn’t about what happens across the ocean, in Washington, in the crack-house down the block, or in the next bedroom where the kids are sleeping.

This life is about this side of the ocean, this city, this block, this house, this bedroom, right there where you are sleeping.

The impression you are making in that mattress, that pillow is where the minutes are ticking away, that’s where opportunities to become something better are located somewhere in a flash of life and time that’s ticking, ticking, ticking, trickling sand into the bottom of the glass.

The courage to repudiate the mind-games of others.

Others shouting to you that where someone else dies matters.  Others demanding you pretend you won’t have to die, if you hire more cops, hand more of your personal decision-making over to the government, watch more television, put more people in prison, send the army off to stomp bad guys somewhere.

Ignoring the cowards whispering if you avoid different ingredients in your food, buy the latest health miracle and don’t breathe second-hand smoke you won’t have to die.

That’s the challenge.  Same as it’s always been.

Old Jules


 

Four Sacred Mountains- R. Carlos Nakai (Song for the Morning Star)

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Posted in Communication, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Solitude

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Amazing Synopsis

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 4 comments

Have you ever considered how much time, energy, money and lousy grades could be avoided if world history could be summarized for the kiddos into videos lasting a few minutes?  For instance, consider the European conquests of Africa, the American continents, and India.  The chillerns spend all kinds of time having to memorize the nigglingest details and names the teachers can’t even pronounce.  Pizzzzarrro.  Montezooooma.  Courtessss.   Geroneeemo.  Krazyhorse.  Not to mention the even worse ones in Africa and India.

But the hilarious fact is that all that isn’t needed.  All those books didn’t need to be printed.  All those names and dates didn’t need to be memorized to understand the basics of the European conquests of more-primitive geography.

Here it is.  The incredible 4 minute 56 second summary of the European conquest of Africa, the Americas and India:

http://youtu.be/1csr0dxalpI

If the video doesn’t play the link below should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csr0dxalpI

Those kids can now go back to playing on the computers with a total understanding of the history of their ancestors.

I’m going to search around to try finding some more good summaries of other hard-to-remember history.

Old Jules


4 Comments

Posted in Education, History, Human Behavior, Movies

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Could you choose to live on the street?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 19 comments

That little farm you see down there is the place where I spent a good many of my formative years after my mother remarried and we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As you can see, we’d had a pretty good year for hay, which dates the picture to 1949, or 1950, before the big drought hit.

When we sat outdoors in the evening the red neon lights blinked “Schumpert Farm Supply” across the top of the long building running diagonally to the railroad tracks until I went to bed. From my limited perspective the Schumperts were ‘rich’. In that small town that railroad running through didn’t identify who was rich but it did identify who wasn’t. That little farm I lived on and no other property that side of the tracks had any rich people.

In the rigidly established social structure in Portales business men generally came down on the side of being ‘rich’, along with professors at Eastern New Mexico University, bankers, physicians, preachers, school teachers and a few elderly ladies who lived in houses big enough to be thought of as mansions. Farmers, ranchers, Mexicans and people who worked in the businesses weren’t ‘rich’.

I doubt the adults paid a lot of attention to the social strata, but school teachers did, and the kids adopted it more firmly than a religion. Rich kids were easy to recognize because they made good grades, weren’t hassled by teachers, got elected to everything, brought cookies to school Christmas, Easter and Halloween, and had the best bicycles early, cars later. For the most part they were insufferable snobs.

But not the Schumpert boys. I was in school with Stephen and Billy, and there was a precocious younger one I don’t recall the name of. Stephen was a year older than me, Billy a year younger, and there wasn’t a breath of snobbery in the entire family. Stephen, particularly, had a knack for getting in just the right amount of just the right kinds of trouble to keep from qualifying as a goody-goody. Good solid boys from a good solid family. I had a lot of respect for all of them.

I left that town early and stayed mostly away for several decades. I lost track of almost everyone I ever knew there.

But after Y2K when I moved into town to Grants, New Mexico, I came across Billy Schumpert being president of a bank there. Naturally we got together and talked about whatever we each knew that might interest the other. Billy’s the one told me what happened to Stephen.

Stephen worked as a bank examiner several years, then became president of a bank in Colorado, maybe Denver. Had a regular family, seemed to be destined to follow a career path and eventually retire. But one morning he didn’t show for work late in the 1980s. Nobody had any idea what became of him. He wasn’t a drinker, didn’t use drugs, didn’t have a ‘secret life’. He just vanished for no apparent reason.

Over time the police and other agencies gave up, assumed he was the victim of some crime, dead. But the family put up a reward for information about Stephen, sent private investigators and others searching for him. Eventually, six, seven years later they located him living under a bridge in Seattle.

Over time everyone who loved Stephen went up there trying to talk him into returning to real life, return home.

“No! I had enough!” That’s all he’d say and he never came back.

I’ve pondered Stephen a lot during the years since I learned what he’d done with his life. In some ways I think I understand, though I’m not sure. My own life has been a long series of reversals in direction. It’s meandered, cutting as wide a swath of human experience as I was able to pack into it. So, from that perspective, I can gnaw at the edges of understanding Stephen’s behavior. But I was a wild kid and I’ve always pushed the envelope, all my life.

Stephen was ‘tame’.

I’d like to see old Stephen again if he’s alive. He’d be 70, 71 years old now and maybe wiser than he was in the 1980s when something told him he’d had enough. I’d like to sit on the porch and talk with him a long time to come to know how he came to make his choice to isolate himself, to impoverish himself.

Simon & Garfunkel – Richard Cory 1966 live
http://youtu.be/euuCiSY0qYs

19 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Senior Citizens, Welfare, Youth, YouTube

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How Do You Say the Pledge Nowadays?

Posted on August 12, 2011 by | 14 comments

It’s come to my attention that school is starting already. I recall being in a school auditorium as a youngster when they added the words,
‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Doak and Mr. Burke, Civics and
History teachers, were up there trying to get it right while teaching it to a couple of hundred kids.  Kids who were still on shaky ground from learning it the first time. That would have been in the mid-1950s:

Mr. Doak:  “Okay.  This isn’t complicated and shouldn’t take long.  Just say it like you always said it, but after, ‘one nation’, pause, then say, ‘under God’, then pause again before going on.

“Try it.  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation,

under God,

with liberty and justice for all.”

Cacophony of 300 kids lost mid-way through.  Mr. Doak pauses with a frown waiting for the noise to die down. Mr. Burke’s frowning too.  He nudges Mr. Doak.

Mr. Burke:  “Eh, John, hold on a minute.  I think it’s supposed to be ‘one
nation under God’, not ‘one nation with a pause, under God with a pause.”

Mr.Doak:  “Ralph, look at it.  The comma’s in front of and after ‘under God.'”

Mr.  Burke: “John, that doesn’t mean it’s supposed to sound like some run-on sentence.  This is the Pledge of allegiance!”

Mr. Doak:  “Ralph, I know what it is.”  Doak scowls and turns back to the 300 lost faces.  “Let’s try it again now.”

Burke:  “No, no, no, John.  Let’s try it one time my way.”

Doak grinding his teeth:  “Ralph, we have to get this over with.”

Burke:  “I’m not the one holding it up John.  We’ve got to get this right.  What you’re telling them is wrong.”

Doak:  “Who’s in charge of this, Ralph?  When Livingston said one of us has to do it you didn’t volunteer to get up here and explain it.”

Burke:  “Neither did you.”

Doak:  “No, but I eventually agreed to.  You just agreed to come up and help.”

Burke:  “Never mind.  Tell them to do it any way you want to.  The Pledge is yours!  I have nothing more to say.”

Doak:  “Good.”  Turns back to the 300.  “Okay, let’s try it again.”

The question of whether the framers of the Constitution would have thought a child having to say, ‘under God’ is a fairly weird one, by hindsight.  But not because the placement of the commas is a major issue.

The reason it’s weird lies in the fact that the question of whether this nation
is indivisible was never considered by the Supreme Court, never mentioned in the US Constitution.  The founders put off any debate about the indivisibility issue because every member knew that no state would agree to become a member if the decision was irreversible, whatever the circumstances.  So, while it was discussed, it was also pointedly not discussed in loving detail.

Half century later it was discussed, however.  The discussion began at Fort
Sumter and ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. That avoidance by the founding fathers of an inevitably crucial issue was decided by force of arms, one half, (the half possessing an army) of the nation believing it was indivisible, the other half believing it was divisible. The stronger half forced the weaker half to accept indivisibility at gunpoint after a lot of bloodshed.

Thus, the Pledge of Allegiance came into existence after Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox. The winning side forced each surrendering Confederate soldier to say a pledge accepting indivisibility as one of the precepts of citizenship, followed afterward by many generations saying the pledge from early childhood since then.

But the US Supreme Court was never asked whether that Pledge acknowledging indivisibility was Constitutional, which might have saved a hundred thousand lives, legs, arms, and a whole different approach to US governance.

Instead, they’ve been asked repeatedly to decide the easier matter of whether it’s a violation of a child’s civil liberty to utter the words, “Under God”.

Old Jules

Civil War Songs – Oh I’m A Good Old Rebel
http://youtu.be/mO2cL64Fbaw

Battle Cry of Freedom — Civil War song on mountain dulcimer
http://youtu.be/K_jANE2QPFE

Fife and drum – Battle Cry of Freedom – 145th Gettysburg
http://youtu.be/eAsD4Bg0st0

Note:  The flag with a Native American waving a weapon flies summertimes near the booths along IH10 as it passes through the Laguna tribal lands.  Although the Laguna universally despise the Acoma neighbors neither tribe has engaged in warfare against anyone since 1597. 

14 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America, Current Issues, Education, History, Human Behavior, Youth

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Some blogs you might sneak a peek at

Posted on August 11, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I’m finding I like them fairly well:

the slitty eye  See the reality from my slitty eyes – Asian perspective ..

different slant on a lot of issues

http://theslittyeye.wordpress.com/

Looting Matters – Discussion of the archaeological ethics surrounding the collecting of antiquities.

http://www.lootingmatters.blogspot.com/

The Outspaceman – unusual art, music observations, woodwin instruments

http://outaspaceman.blogspot.com/

Leave a comment

Posted in Adventure, Creative Writing, Internet

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Old Man, Young Man, on a Mountain Top

Posted on August 11, 2011 by | 5 comments

I got an email from a young man who’d been reading my blog and was astute enough to notice I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and didn’t appear to have a corresponding level of grief and regret. He asked me a number of personal questions regarding all that. I answered most of his questions, but the email reminded me of the following, which I wrote a few years ago.
Old Man and Young Man
On a Mountain-top

Old man and young man
Sit, gaze at far reaches
Of valley and desert
Spanning to horizon

“How’d I get to be this old?”
Old man smiles, serene
“I wonder sometimes myself”

Young man: “I’m serious”
Old man sighs and leans
Against a rock.

“You’ve already
Heard the parts about
Cheating, lying, and
Stealing all your life.
Those can shorten things
Considerable.
Could have mine.

Those are things you need to
Keep in moderation.”

Young man frowns.
“You’re joking.”

“No. Just being
Completely honest
For once.
But those are more
Likely just to ruin
Your life than
To end it.”

Tosses a flat rock
Into the void
Eyes follow
The long descent
“I never killed myself
When I wanted to.
Never threw myself
On my sword over
Defeats I can’t recall now.
Never flang myself
Off a cliff over scores of women
I no longer remember.”

Old man digs his pocket
Pats his other pockets
Looking for his pipe.
“I never gloated sufficiently
On my amazing successes
Over the efforts of others
(Those escape my mind
These days)
To make anyone want
To kill me enough to
Actually do it.”

Tamps the pipe
Frets with a match

“I was astute enough
To recognize early
When you bed
Another man’s woman
She’ll eventually tell him.
She mightn’t say who,
But she’ll always say what
And if he’s smart
He’ll puzzle out who.
That’s a worthy thing
To keep in mind.”

Pipe bowl sparked
Glowed, smoke
Curled around him

“I’ve always lived hard
Pushed the envelope
Hung it out over the edge.
I’d rather have died early
Than not done that

“But I always kept good tires
On whatever mechanical
Critter I was depending on
To get me back
Always kept the brakes
In good shape.  And
I was damned lucky.”

They sit silent
Watch the shadows
Crawl into arroyos
Far below.

Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence 1966 live
http://youtu.be/FaSFzp6IDgw

5 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Poetry, Senior Citizens, Youth

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I Can’t Stop Illegal Aliens, But I Can Slow You Down, Old Timer

Posted on August 10, 2011 by | 14 comments

In 1961, I joined the US Army for three years with the intention of killing young Russian men to keep this from happening in the US:

On a regular basis,  I join the throngs of US senior citizens crossing the International Boundary to trek a couple of blocks into Mexico to buy prescription medications.  The reason we  all brave the hot, the skyrocketing gas prices, the long drive and the short walk?

A block south of the border prescription meds cost a tiny fraction of their cost a block north of the International Boundary. Plus, you don’t need a prescription.

But that’s another issue for another time.

Coming back waiting on the US side behind a line of oldsters in the US Border patrol station the fun begins.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “Do you have anything to declare?”

Elderly lady pushes through the turnstile to stand in front of his table.  “I have this.”  She holds up a bulging plastic bag.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “I didn’t tell you you could come through the turnstile.  Go back to the other side.”

She goes back to wherever a person is when on the other side of the turnstile.

Guy with a gun, a uniform and a Hitler mustache:  “OK.  Now you can come through.”

She goes back through the turnstile, stands in front of him.  “Do you have anything to declare?  Medications, anything?”

She holds up the bag again, but before she can speak, elderly hubby, the other side of the turnstile, holds up a bag.  “I’ve got the medications here.”  Pushes part way through the turnstile holding up the bag.

“DO NOT COME THROUGH THAT TURNSTILE UNTIL I SAY YOU CAN!”

Old man, startled, backs into never-never-land, turnstile clicking.

Hitler mustache to woman:  “Do you have anything to declare?  Medications?  Anything?”

Hubby across the turnstile to wife:  “God damn it!  I told him I have the medications over here.”

And so, ad infinitum.

Mr. Uniformed Mustache with a gun never came out and said,

“I am one stupid son of a bitch here to give elderly US citizens a hard time after they have to walk into another country to get their medications at a reasonable price.”

He didn’t need to.

Old Jules

Tom Russell– Who’s Going to Build Your Wall?
http://youtu.be/LZkAoosVLkA

Note:  I wrote this after my last trip to Mexico.  Afterward I curtailed my trips and started buying my blood pressure and other med off the Internet from Canada and India.  But I decided to post it after reading this yesterday:

Border Patrol Antics or (I got searched), Tire
http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/2011/08/border-patrol-antics-or-i-got-searched.html

7:30 AM musings over coffee:

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s a piece of a paradigm shift [whatever the hell that is] but one of the corner-of-the-eye changes I believe has happened in my lifetime within the US is a morbid fascination and indulgence in, patience with and capitulation to fears.  Maybe it’s a replacement for anger, maybe just boredom needing to speed up the heartbeat.

Back when every day was a brink-of-war crisis with the USSR the attitude was duck and cover, build a bomb shelter and bomb the bejesus out of them.  A conspicuous absence of fear.    Contrasted half-century later with a citizenry frightened so badly by a microscopic possibility a terrorist will harm them, they hire a few new layers of police, agree to be searched, and humiliated for their own protection, and indulge in a series of self-bankrupting foreign adventures with the stated intention of finding an outlaw gang hidden in fantasyville, Asia.

Hiring thugs to protect us from other thugs has probably been around for a longish while.  But never worked all that well.


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Posted in 2011, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Mexico, Senior Citizens

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