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A conspiracy and a confession
A sunny day greets me as I rise a little late this morning. Ran out of the normal allergy meds and had to use Benadryl before bedtime. It works well, but the side effects are a deep but not so restful sleep, late awakening and drowsiness for the first couple of hours.
I am just finishing my first cup at a quarter past nine. 9:15 for you who are post digital, and filled it for the completion of this little morning missive. So with a fresh cup where do we go?
The news? A local 26 year old man is charged with rape of a consenting 13 year old. My thoughts are all over the place on this one. No he shouldn’t have. But a rape charge? Don’t they have a sex with a minor child law here? I dunno …
More rockets in Israel. More targets in Gaza. HAMAS is acting badly, and my hope is that the Palestinian people will weary of these jihadist and toss them out. Yeah. False hope.
Obama can’t catch a break. I don’t think he deserves a lot of the abuse he gets, and perhaps I gloat a bit too much when he does get caught out. I do think he expanded the executive way beyond what he should have, no matter how noble it seems to him and others.
Yeeps. I am beginning to see what happens when I don’t write. The quality of my words and sentences goes down dramatically.
If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.
~ Jascha Heifetz
Lois Learner. I think that there is so much pressure on the IRS upper echelon that some bureaucrat is going to crack. And an old saw goes:
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack
And with that, time goes by … the smell of ersatz sausage wafts by the studio, and soon Snookums will signal breakfast is ready. Today is preparation day. A day to get ready for a day of rest. All the food is cooked today. The Shabbat table is laid, awaiting candle lighting. In my not so orthodox home, Shabbat always arrives at 6 PM instead of sundown. I guess that makes me a heretic of some sort, but *shrug* ….
Good morning!
~r
Grainnuel
This was originally posted on multiply.com, but I wanted to save it on this blogsite. My apologies to most of you who have already read and commented on it.
Granuaile woke on the featureless plain this morning. She knew that it was that time before she went to sleep in the rude bed she shared with her husband, and had prepared for this day by setting her crude dulcimer on the rocking chair on the porch. The words spread through the community like fire when they espied that omen. It meant change for good or for evil, was nigh.
They natives of that old Arkansas community were afraid of Granuaile, severe in her plain dress and fiery red hair, and frail to near emaciation. But her looks were deceptive. She was not frail at all, and her eye saw clearly that which the people feared. Calvinism ruled the valley, and many believed that Granuaile was a witch. But Granuaile was not a witch. Granuaile saw things with a different eye. Her vision was as sharp as an owl at night, and she could see the spirits that worked order in the universe.
She was not aware of the cabin, nor was she aware of crowd that had gathered out her door as she arose that morning. Donning her simple dress, she padded barefoot to the porch, picked up the dulcimer, and placed it across her knees as she sat down in the rocker. All she could see was a featureless plain, filled with shadowy, almost human wisps going about their obscure tasks in studied disarray when she struck the first discord on the dulcimer. That chord rippled across the plan in concentric ripples, the spirits stopped their relentless walking.
All the rural community could see was her grim visage; jaw clenched in determination as she strummed the dulcimer with strong, unadorned chords and rigid rhythm. Then she began to sing, not with beauty and grace, but with a flat intonation devoid of modulation and accent. She sang old dirges for long gone relatives. Songs of unrequited love. Songs of young men gone to war who never returned. Songs of women dying in childbirth. Songs of droughts, and withering suns, and of locusts and pests. The people of the village heard her words as if they were a judge’s verdict. The spirits in the plain reordered their paths. The slate sky rippled with the strong cords and piercing voice, each ripple magnifying and nullifying interfering ripples in a chaotic, yet paradoxical predictable pattern.
Time stood still on that hot Arkansas day, the village people perspired in the blistering sun, but did not move. They heard the words, but could not cipher the meanings. Granuaile played and sang with determination. She had songs that needed singing, and she was determined to sing them all.
In time, the singing and strumming stopped. The people looked around sheepishly. Granuaile returned to her cabin to rest, dulcimer in hand. The slate skies were again calm and the spirits resumed their resolute walking.
One of the villagers remarked to another as they arose one by one to return home: “That woman is crazy!”
The spirits pondered to themselves. “Who is this being to order us around as if she were God?”
Her secret love ached in the loneliness of silence that followed her departure. Could no one hear?
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Smarter’n smart ….
I was making the rounds between some WordPress and Blogster pages today. There is really quite a war going on between the various factions. Conservatives call Liberals stupid. Atheists call Believers stupid. Peaceniks call warmonger stupid. Everybody is stupid but them.
“Ahm smarter’n you. You stoooopid. If’n you don’t think like me, youse gots to be stoooopid.”
~To the tune of I’ve been workin’ on the Railroad
Oh, I’m more smarter than you, babe
I’m more smarter than youuuuuu!
I’m more smarter than you babe!
I’m more smarter than youuuuuu!
(repeat once)
Now that I’ve given you all this little earworm, maybe I can read a well thought out piece that doesn’t exalt the writers self-sense of intelligence at the expense of others.
~r
Living free
“Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”
When I focus on the nation and the world about me, I grow very discouraged. There is a relentless march to trade risk for tyranny. The cowards lead, demanding a king to set all things right for them, and call it seeking freedom. Gun control is only a very small part of this exorable march to live under a beneficent régime where all is set right by a simple fiat from the king.
The other day we were discussing the issue of gun bans. It is a charged issue, but most people do not see it as an issue of living free and being responsible for your own welfare. One moron even tried to make the case that since she has the ability to get pregnant, I should succumb to her womb. “It’s all about mah babieeeees” she wails. Then she had the chutzpah to get offended because I don’t give a rip about her babies, her womb, nor her safety. I didn’t hire on as her champion. Then she huffs “I am done talking about it!”
OK … tell me the conversation is over, and it is over. But this ignorant ass continued on with her bleating in other threads to other people, so this in a way is my rebut. I do not want to live in her ignorant, weak Utopia, where her safety is entirely dependent on a wise king and loyal law abiding citizens. I’ll take my chances at defending my own family. I don’t give a rip about her babies. Really.
But she is just a mere microcosm of a great evil that has befallen us. I don’t blame Obama for the morass, and Bush didn’t do it either. Weaklings did it. Weaklings who cannot exist without entrapping others into their cocoon of perceived safety and correct speech. All goodness come from government seems to be their creedo, yet when you look at the government, especially in the macro, you find that it does nothing well.
I find myself wishing I could sit out on the front porch after I heard her screaming for help, and calling 911 as any citizen is obligated to do. But damned if I would run over there with one of my {{{ shudder }}} guns to help her. We got a king for that, don’t you know.
So, now that I got this weak sister off my chest …
Bleedin’ diabetes is gaining on me again. Just put a call into the doc about the high readings for the last few days. I had to forgo one of the more useful drugs because of arteriosclerosis, but hopefully I can still medicate it down rather than going to insulin.
Not much else happening on the homestead. The grass grows, we take care of each other and try to stay out of sight of the kings revenooers. Snookums prepares for her day at the food bank. And I sigh because slaves cannot learn to live free …
~r
A study in simplicity … or … p’shat
I love the idea of p’shat, or reading holy books looking for the simple, plain meaning and seeking no other. Not that there aren’t deeper levels to plumb, they indeed are. Some are so sublime that almost everyone misses them.
One if the earliest experiences I had when I began this walk with religion was meeting a young man who was retarded, as we said back in that era before the euphemismists renamed it ID, or intellectual disability.
Jim was his name. He wandered the streets around a city section we called Capitol Hill, an area that had sunk into urban decay. Slums they were called then. Hippies, drunks and sex addicts all filled the streets almost every hour of the day, along with a smattering of Jesusfreak storefronts that you could amble into for a cup of coffee, a doughnut and an ear beating. Some famous Christian evangelists started out there as street people.
Jim had fallen in with a group of hippies who thought it rather cool to load him up with weed, hash oil, LSD or whatever else was around at the time, and watch him amble off into what must have been a hell on earth experience. But they continued to feed and housed him, so I guess they should get some misguided brownie points.
Then one day Jim wandered into one of the Christian storefronts, and found Jesus. His life changed, and he disappeared off the street. I hardly noticed his absence. People came, people went, people died, people went to prison. Jim was simple another lost soul out of the hundreds around me then.
A couple of years later, I ran into Jim again. Life had changed greatly for me, and apparently, it had for Jim as well. Neither of us were on the streets, but rather steadily employed. When I talked to him, he was rational, but there was not one ounce of sophistry about him. I asked him what happened, and he began his tale.
He talked in mysterious vignettes, snatches of disjointed images of sleeping in doorways and being gang raped in a homosexual nightclub/bathhouse. He talked of drugs with an insanity that only another drug user would understand. The confusion coming from his mouth caused confusion and suffering in me.
Then Jim met Jesus. No, not some preacher. Not some sandal clad street evangelist. But Jesus.
Those of you who know me know how uncomfortable I am with that word, Jesus. It means something far different to me than it probably does you, and most of it isn’t good. But Jim’s Jesus was a different sort of Jesus. Jim was healed instantly. His voice became even, calm, and ordered. He spoke of how he dared not even move unless Jesus told him to.
Jim went to work as a custodian, and was paid rather well for it. He began visiting Bible studies and home groups. He was always a study in humility, never offensive, never in ones face. But so many time he would level the sophistry of the study group with two or three sentences of such a divine and irrefutable sureness that it left us gasping in amazement.
Over the years, I have learned that much of what I learned was not what I was supposed to learn. Much of what I read is contradicted by some sage telling me that what I just read isn’t what was really meant, that I would have to read another passage in a different book to get a handle on why the writer really didn’t say what he said. I am getting much too sophisticated, and long for a Jim to come back into my life.
Bulldozing old haunts
It is cool this morning at 66°, light breezes gently sway through the tree, and the humidity is moderately high. Today is rehab day, and the departure time looms ominously as I sit down to compose a morning missive.
I took an interesting bunny trail yesterday. Someone asked if my childhood home was still standing. Indeed it was. At least the home I had through high-school. It was half a block away from the roundhouse, where little steam engines that ran between Alamosa and Durango were housed, and the car shops that maintained the rolling stock.
Many was the night that I was lulled into sleep by the whine of the steam turbines of the engines, the chuffing of the air compressors, the rumble of the idling diesels awaiting the morning train to Denver.
But now, the roundhouse, car shops, coaling stations and all the trackage have been removed and graded flat. The team tracks in front of the house is now used by a local builder for storage, and my old home is 
unrecognizable after extensive remodeling.
The artesian well next door that watered a huge cottonwood and my dad’s rhubarb row has dried up, and the honeysuckle thicket in that vacant yard has been removed. We had caves and forts in that thicket, and it wasn’t a place adults could go into without difficulty.
It was a spooky thicket at night, though. Frogs ribbited, feral cats rustled, and other mysterious noises cautioned. Many was the dark evening when I would be walking home by that thicket, and a sudden noise would cause me to break out into a hard run to get by it.
The corner was lit by a single bulb streetlight that almost put out enough light to see the intersection, but didn’t spill down the street much. The lamp swayed with the breezes, casting menacing shadows across the honeysuckle. But a mad dash up the sidewalk got me home.
The front of the house had a glassed in porch that lit the yard with welcoming light, and where I set up my surplus two way radios that I used in the Civil Air Patrol. One was a low band unit that allowed me to converse with other CAP installations across Colorado, and one that I could use to communicate with local aircraft and occasionally military aircraft that needed to use our remote airfield.
But all that is gone now, along with the memories. A non-descript house with a detached garage, a plumbers workshop next door, a couple of low rent apartment houses, and a huge swath of cinders graded to a uniform flatness.
I mourn the loss. But then the early denizens probably mourned the loss of vast seas of timothy grass, the cotton woods along the Rio Grande river from which the town received its name, Alamosa.
And life goes on.
Good morning!
~r
Tuesday rains and coffee
More spring rains have arrived, which makes us drought hardened Texans cautiously hopeful that the long, long drought is broken. Most of the trees we have planted survived because I assiduously watered them with expensive water company water, even though we planted drought resistant varieties.
But with great pleasure this morning, I set here with my coffee watching the sheets of water fall past my window. It messes with my plans to do some serious pruning of the trees along the front walk, but I am certain another day will appear to do it.
I have been receiving lots of invitations and suggestions to tour Israel, both from friends here and friends there. I wouldn’t have to pay housing fees, and could be driven in comfort from place to place. But some revolting afflictions of old age beset me, and Rusty is not going anywhere. My visit to Israel will be postponed until the day of the coronation of the king occurs. Rumor has it that a new, faster and more comfortable form of transportation will be available then as well.
So I am resigned to remain here in my adopted home state, civilizing a feral plot of buffalo grass and scrub oak. But that is OK .. it is just the way I planned it. A place that snows occasionally, but no one owns a snow blower, and the county doesn’t own a salt truck. The natives have never seen such implements. If God causes it to snow here, we let God remove it. But the curse side is mowing. In spring, we mow weekly. Five hours on a riding mower each week until the hot July suns make the grass grow dormant. Then we get a break until late September.
Not much else is happening on the homestead this day. It will be a long day of whimsically musing, ubiquitous coffee cup warming my fingers, and unfocused gazing out on the rain soaked verges of retirement haven.
Good morning!
~r
Have a memorable Memorial Day!
“Happy” Memorial Day?
Better, perhaps should be “Have a memorable Memorial Day!”
So the day arrives … unfurl the flag and put it out … feel good about remembering the sacrifice others made for us.
Perhaps we should wonder if we would be as worthy if called to make that sacrifice.
There is a contingent in the US that thinks preserving their own hides is a more worthy ideal, and they continually congratulate themselves for their lack of patriotic standards.
Some have reminded me that the time used to be called visiting day, when you went to the graves of love ones and cleaned them up. I like that idea too, and some old gravesites around here do not have professional grounds keepers to maintain their cemeteries, so graves are still maintained by families.
Anyway. It is as good of a time to remember our own mortality too.
Good morning.
More low grade zen
Time is like walking through a Slinky™, with each coil a year. Along the length you find oddly colored loops that are the prophets warning. The slinky has a beginning in eternity, and an ending in eternity. It walks down the celestial staircase in measured bends.
Time begins at the top landing, and each step down the case is one iteration of time repeating itself, rectilinearly stretching and compressing like a python. But one day, the traveler comes to the end of the coil, and steps out into … what?
… I stop to remember
Fort Logan National Cemetery. My parents are interred here, as well three friends and one beloved mentor. Of memory blessed be they.
Even on Memorial Day, the place maintains a hushed spirit. Row upon row of identical white headstones stand in silent military precision as far as the eye can see. There is peace here. Even the birds softly sing their lovliest songs from the trees.
I have reconciled myself with the passing of family and friends, but the last visit, I watched three aged comrade-in-arms from the Viet Nam era go unerringly from one headstone to another to honor their dead.
I wept.
Headstones are for the living to remember. The dead care not.
Rusty's Armory 