Recurring dreams of life
Disturbed his slumber
Nightmares they often were
But they were dreams
Had to wait in line
Almost forever
To even get a nightmare
Ticket out
For just that tiny while
From all that somnolent
Incessant
Endless nothing
Broken now and then
By welcome
Welcome dreams;
Nightmare punctuation
In a twenty-chapter sentence
Was a blessing;
Wished he could kill himself
When he killed himself
In dreams
But never quite learned
To love the nightmares
While he dreamed them
The human mind is a strange place to find ourselves living if we ever get enough distance from the background noise to notice. I tend to notice it a lot.
This morning seemed destined to be just another day. Gale and Kay were doing the Austin Gem and Mineral Show, so I’d figured to walk up to his house to get the truck mid-day so’s to take care of putting their chickens to bed tonight. Startled me a bit when I looked up and there he sat in Little Red a few feet away, having brought it down to me. My hearing must be further gone than I’d realized.
Seemed they’d no sooner gone than I got an email from Jeanne saying my old friend from childhood and later lost-gold-mine chasing days was in Fredericksburg trying to get hold of me hoping I could get over there for lunch. Heck, it must be 15 years or more since I’ve seen Keith, though recently he’s been reading this blog. Naturally him being 40 miles away and me with a truck sitting there available, I headed over there.
Really nice visit, but in the course of bringing one another up-to-date he asked me a number of questions about my situation here that forced me to take a hard look and organize my thoughts about it all. That kicked off a series of trails of thinking to organize clearer, more concrete priorities for myself within a realistic examination of my options.
There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re all stacked atop a single one: having the means of leaving this place in a relatively short time if the need arises. It’s time I decided on a single course of action and begin leading events in a direction that allows it to congeal in a way that accomodates the needs of the cats.
But the process of thinking about it in an organized way had a parallel thinking-path over whispering somewhere else in my brain wiggling out a sort of excitement, anticipation about it. Here’s something that will be pure trauma and agony for the cats I do everything possible to spare such things, and my ticker’s beating a little faster in a pleasurable way just considering it.
That, combined with the certainty the process of getting things together to execute the plan I come with is going to involve some unpleasantness, excruciating work and fingernail chewing as it goes along.
Seems I’ve somehow contrived to be two different places at the same time inside my mind. One being pushed by probabilities to do what makes sense rather than what I’d prefer, the cats would prefer. And one reaching somewhere into fond memories of pinon trees, high mountains and an entirely different sort of solitude than I have here.
Keith confided to me today, “Everyone thinks you’re crazy.” I can’t find any good argument that everyone’s wrong. It’s nice being crazy and still being as happy as I manage to be all the time, though.
Anyway, to satisfy that fiddle-footed nagging, here are some songs of the highway and the road.
For a number of years I’ve watched people wearing ball caps turned backward and sideways, nobody raising an eyebrow. I’m not sure why they do it because the purpose of the visor on a ball cap is to protect the nose from Old Sol’s battering. But I gradually began to wonder if people just didn’t know which piece of a hat is the front, which is the side, and which is the back.
Eventually I decided to perform an experiment. I carefully selected a hat for my next trip to town, determined to wear it backward all day, seemingly oblivious to that. I wanted particularly to corner-of-my-eye observe the reactions of people wearing their ball caps backward and sideways.
My findings weren’t ambiguous. From my first stops of the day I saw that people of every age and gender did double-takes, then attempted to surreptitiously call the attention of someone else to the fact I was wearing my hat backward. If they had no companion they’d nudge a stranger to share it. Not once did anyone sidle up to me and whisper, “You’ve got your hat on backward,” as they’d have done if my fly was unzipped.
If I’m wearing a hat when I eat in town I usually take it off a moment while I briefly acknowledge gratitude. On this occasion the hat was on backward when I entered and took my seat, ordered my food and waited to be served. The café was well populated and though I pretended to be reading I observed the hat was a subject of notice and concealed, smiling discussion at almost every table.
When the food arrived, after the waitress left, I removed the hat and bowed my head a moment, then replaced it, facing forward. But, pretending to notice I’d put it on forward, I took it off, looked at it, then turned it backward again on my head, and began eating while still occupied with my book, watching the other patrons.
This brought giggles and laughter, even among those wearing ball caps turned backward and sideways.
My conclusion from this study is that people don’t know what is the front and what is the back of a ball cap, but they do know the front from the back of western-style headgear. I believe the findings are important enough to justify more in-depth study by PHD candidates in anthropology, sociology and fashion.
This is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona, who died in prison awaiting trial for homicide. He was posthumously acquitted. However, Swilling’s hat is the issue here. There’s a bullet hole in it, and it’s been ripped almost in half and sewn back together. Swilling’s hat could be worn backward, forward or sideways and nobody at all would allow himself to notice.
Here are some other examples of non-ball caps that might be worn backward without concern:
Manny Gammage of Texas Hatters made this hat for me in 1971, or 1972. The style was dubbed The High-Roller.
Here it is today with the original Mystic Weave band Manny put on it when he made it. I’ll leave it to your judgement and the judgement of the PHD candidates whether it ‘works’ backward.
Other possible backward hats:
This pic was taken around 1976 worn conventionally.
Here’s the same hat today, backward. Your call.
Straw John B. Stetson backward.
Felt John B. Stetson backward. These last two and the next one are hats I inherited from dead men sent me through thrift stores and flea markets and arranged by the Coincidence Coordinators.
This one is Guatamala palm leaf bought for a dollar in a thrift store. Maybe the best straw hat ever made.
Backward’s not much different.
This is a Tilley, the best canvas hat made anywhere. It can be worn backward or forward without fear.
This is a Tilley knockoff. Can’t be worn backward or forward with pride.
Gale gave me this dead man hat he picked up somewhere. Here it’s worn backward. You can just never tell.
Old Jules
Carl Sandburg, Hats:
HATS, where do you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
Hats: tell me your high hopes.
Carl Sandburg, Hats are Sky Pieces:
Proudly the fedoras march on the heads of the some-
what careless men.
Proudly the slouches march on the heads of the still
more careless men.
Proudly the panamas perch on the noggins of dapper
debonair men.
Comically somber the derbies gloom on the earnest solemn noodles.
And the sombrero, most proud, most careless, most dapper and debonair of all, somberly the sombrero marches on the heads of important men who know
what they want.
Hats are sky-pieces; hats have a destiny; wish your hat
slowly; your hat is you.
I watched it sit in a vacant lot I frequently drove past in Kerrville for several years. Occasionally I’d trip up the hill to it, walk around it, kick the amazingly good tires.
After I began scouting for a new, moveable dwelling I began going snake eyes when I got near it to keep my intentions from drawing the attention of the Coincidence Coordinators. Sydney Baker is at the other end of town from the lot it was sitting in, so I assumed the Wing King was long defunct and this jewel was waiting for me to chase down the owner, make an offer, and take it away.
But today when I drove to that lot to get the license tag number so’s to try to contact the owner the bus was gone. I figured someone had called a wrecker to haul it away because they were going to use the lot for something. I puzzled over my next step toward finding it as I drove to Sydney Baker to see who occupied the address of the Wing King on the side of the bus.
Sheeze! The Wing King was right there, still in business. Okaaaay. Got to prepare myself mentally for this. I kept driving, furious thinking. But a few blocks ahead in the parking lot of the strip center in front of Dollar Tree, there it was, parked parallel to the curb.
I walked around it, squatted down to see if it was dripping oil or coolant. Nothing. I pulled off my vest and slid under the engine. Everything was pristine. No grease, barely any dirt.
What the hell’s it doing sitting here? Why did they move it?
Nothing for it but to drive back to the Wing King and talk to the owner. Now.
I sat in the truck going snake eyes a couple of minutes to prepare, then went inside looking for someone who looked ownerish. Two kids.
“Is the owner around?”
“No, he doesn’t work days.”
“I want to talk to someone about that bus down there parked by the curb across from the high school.”
“The water pump went out on it. He’s waiting for the part.” The kid thinks I’m someone in authority about to make trouble. How the hell could he think that, looking at me?
“I want to talk to him about buying it.”
“He won’t sell it. He got it for almost nothing, $1500, and it’s only got 10,000 miles on the engine.” Thanks a lot kid. I needed to hear that last part.
The other one, a girl chimes in. “Yeah, and parked there with that sign on it reminds the high school kids we’re here!”
Ahhhh. And Kerrville has a sign ordinance. That bus parked there doesn’t violate it.
That’s a bus the cats and I will never live in. But at least I found out about a place sells chicken wings. Wonder if they’re any good.
Old Jules
C.W. McCall – Wolf Creek Pass – a song about a truckload of chickens.
The politico dependent portion of the US population has gone to enormous effort to keep the boundaries of dialogue within a poured concrete septic tank for an awfully long time. Those boundaries have confined what can be expressed by the totally disfranchised, the largely disfranchised, the mildly disfranchised and the slightly disfranchised safely outside platforms for discussion.
Two dominant political parties, lobbyists, government contractors, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies and the health industry, multi-national corporations and defense industry entitlement organizations have all found comfortable niches to work within that structure and prosper. The symbiosis benefits the yin of government officials, both elected and hired-hands, and furthers the interests of the yang of anyone with the financial backing to feed the gargantuan resulting from it all.
Technology and communications at a grassroots level have conspired to abruptly allow voices outside that structure to be heard in the context of peaceful assembly by citizens with little in common besides their frustration with being locked outside the box. Evidently enough of that dissatisfaction exists to spread their numbers over a surprisingly wide area.
Enough to set off the burglar alarms across the spectrum of the comfort zones of those accustomed to doing precisely as they wish quietly in warm and friendly waters. Probably their best strategy would have been to ignore it all and almost certainly it would have gone away. It would have faded without the tsunami of indignation the bought and paid for elements of mass communication rattling denouncement through every channel, calling out the cavalry, piling insult and venom on those peacefully expressing themselves in harmless ways.
This ‘movement’ wasn’t created by the seedlings who began it. The Occupy Wall Street movement would have died on the vine if it hadn’t been nurtured and fertilized by the shrill cries of the safe and comfortable denouncing it. And by continuing to do so they provide the life blood for future expansion.
The protests on wall street are those coming from inside the buildings. Someone’s opening a door they believed they had locked.
Me thinks the lady [inside the buildings] protests too much.
Brother Coon and I couldn’t come to an agreement about the availability of indoors as acceptable behavior for a coon with a long life expectancy. Whatever I did to keep him out, half an hour later he’d be poking around trying to find a way in, eventually leading to success.
Last night I’d had a bellyfull of it. I brought the live trap in and put it down next to the sack of cat food, then went to bed. Around 3:00 am I heard the trap slam shut and a lot of ruckus. Transported trap, coon and angry all outdoors to await arraignment, trial, conviction and final disposition.
For once I predicted something and it came to pass. That ice chest I salvaged out of the grader ditch actually has proved itself the popular cat-hotel I hoped it would.
She loved bridge
He loved mostly poker;
Never understood
How his sevens-high full house
Betted to the limit
Looking at her pair
Of Aces
Turned out to be
Disaster
Crushed beneath
An Ace high full
Every time he let her
Cut the deck
Around 1969, I was in a freshman Geology course at the University of Texas, first week of classes. The instructor was a grad student teaching assistant who began the course with an overlay of how geologists determine the age of a particular layer of deposition.
Along about the third day a kid who’d been sitting next to me raised his hand. I’d noticed him squirming from the first day, and now he just had to get whatever was bothering him off his chest.
“I’ve been trying to understand what you’re saying, but it’s confusing. How can all this be true, all those depositions being so old when the world’s only (some specified low-range number of thousands) years old. It’s all been calculated when God created the earth.”
After the chaotic eruption of laughter from forty sophisticated freshmen who knew better subsided the instructor directed his response to the now-cringing questioner.
“You can’t have it both ways. This is a Geology course. Everything you hear in this room is based on the premise that the earth is ancient beyond imagination. That the world we see around us is the product of eons of tectonic activity. Of faulting, lifting, erosion, weathering followed by more of the same.
“I’m not going to try to convince you that what you’ve said is wrong. But I’ll tell you that if you can’t accept, for the sake of discussion, the possibility that the book in front of you describes reality, you’ll never get through this course.”
The kid joined me at a table in the Union coffee shop later. He was still upset and confused by the incident, the laughter. Turned out the kid truly couldn’t wrap his mind around the concepts being discussed. He KNEW it to be otherwise at such a fundamental level that he’d have had to relax all manner of other things he KNEW and held sacred to even consider it.
So he dropped the course and never let his mind out of the cage he’d built around it.
The experience that kid had in a geology classroom isn’t too different from what all of us encounter in life. It’s all a matter of where we place the boundaries of the cage.
Within a decade of the incident the geology world was turned upside down with emergence of tectonic plate theory, and much of what he’d have learned if he’d finished the course would have been out of date.
But Tectonic Plate Theory found similar boundaries among geologists’ minds during the difficult battle for acceptance. Old department heads wrestled against it in a war as bloody as a fundamentalist preacher would have fought against the concept of an earth more than a couple of thousand years old. They’d just placed the boundaries a bit further out than the kid and whatever school teacher told him the world was young. Those old geology profs KNEW there was no such animal as continental drift. No point in discussing evidence supporting it.
It’s a juggling act. In some pursuits the only doorway involves a body
of data we like to call ‘facts’. But frequently the doorway isn’t big
enough to allow a person through with his suitcase full of all his
life-accumulated facts he treasures. He has to pare them down to fit
into a briefcase, or a fanny-pack and leave the rest behind so’s to get
through the door and understand what he sees in the room he’s trying to
get into. If he tries tricking the system and dragging all the rest of
his facts through in a cotton-sack or some such thing he’ll be forever
tripping on them and stumbling.
A man’s got to be careful what he knows in this lifetime [maybe others,
also]. Traveling light can save a lot of trouble.
Sheeze. I was lying in there meditating, preparing my spirit for the coming day when I heard a rustling in the other room. I ignored it at first, figuring it was just one of the cats took advantage of the window screen that doesn’t latch convincingly. But gradually I focused because somebody was having a party in there.
As I considered the awakening possibilities an opinion formed that it was probably Tabby as the most likely candidate, her being the youngest and most imaginative. Now, completely focused I listened for more hints until the sound of something falling nudged my curiosity enough to pull me out from under the blanket.
When I came through the door I couldn’t see any cat, but the window screen was pulled open far enough to admit a large cat. No sign of the offender still, though as I walked over for a closer look.
Then out from under the layers of books and other belongings a large coon face glared at me, hissed and threatened. I didn’t like this a bit. There was an escape route through the window, but I was near enough the way out Brother Coon mightn’t consider it the best option. I didn’t want him coming further into this maze of hiding places. This cabin isn’t big enough for me and a coon.
I stepped slightly away from the route through the window, eyes locked to his, baring my teeth, growling and snarling, him baring his, then stood stock still. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in the final scene of the Good Bad Ugly. It seemed to last forever.
But while the tension never eased, like Tuco, I saw his eyes working toward that route outdoors. My arms were spread to increase my threatening appearance and my hand was near an open bag of pinto beans. I allowed my hand to creep toward it, then drew and fired a handful of pintos at the coon.
He didn’t have the strength of his convictions. No Lee Van Cleef, old Brother Coon. He was out that window faster than I can type it. I probably should add, I’m having a bit of difficulty typing. My hands are still shaking a bit. Clint Eastwood, I ain’t.
————————————–
Ms Cholla, I feel obliged to update you, wasn’t there for headcount again last night. This time I was more canny, looked right away over at the rooster compound and there she was, searching and poking around for a way in. No problem for me. If she wants to live with the damned roosters it suits me just fine.
————————————————
Spent most of the day yesterday trying to get the Documents and Settings saved from this going-kerplunk comp into some sort of form to allow it all to be transferred to the Thrift Store comp, but no joy. Kept getting error messages after a few hours at a time of the old machine considering the matter.
Just saying.
Old Jules
5:30 am – That coon’s been back on the porch three times since the post. He’s standing on his hind legs trying to look in the window or playing with the edge of the door trying to get back in. But thus far, he’s just a smidgen too canny to give me a shot at him through the window screen.
He needs to figure out something else to do with his time if he wants to live until daybreak.
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 