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“You wouldn’t happen to know if anybody around here raises peacocks, would you?†I asked the property caretaker when he was here this morning.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/autumn_zpsxwbnba8s.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/autumn_zpsxwbnba8s.jpg.html)
“I don’t think they grow in the wild,†I added; “I could be wrong, but I think they need the care and attention of human beings, to survive.
“There were lots and lots of them running around in a park in North Platte when I was a kid,†I went on, “roaming around freely, but I was told they couldn’t survive without the hand of man.
“So somebody around here must raise peacocks, and I wish he’d corral them in better.
“Yesterday, there were eleven of them, nine adults and two young ones, wandering around this property, and now, just before you showed up, there were nineteen of them, fifteen adults and four young ones.
“Originally, I was concerned the cats would want fresh poultry.
“But as it turned out, the cats are scared of these big birds; they run away from them.â€
“There’s no peacocks around here,†the property caretaker assured me. “You’re just bored, and imagining things.â€
Yeah, right, I snorted. “These are big birds, bigger even than the bald eagles that come and annoy me in the summer, some of them maybe about four feet tall, from the ground to the top of their heads. I’m not good at guessing weights, but I’m guessing maybe about forty or fifty pounds.
“They make a big Thanksgiving turkey look puny.
“And they make me nervous, because when I go outside, they come running up to me as if they want to get friendly. I wouldn’t know how to react if one bit me, and they’re big enough to do that.â€
“Oh, there’s no peacocks around here,†the property caretaker again insisted. “I don’t know what you’re seeing, but they’re not peacocks. The closest peacocks around here are way over in North Platte, which is clear on the other side of the state.â€
The property caretaker was born and raised over in Iowa, meaning he’s woefully ignorant of what’s in Nebraska.
“Just like the closest llamas are clear down in Peru,†I countered, “when in stark fact there’s plenty of them near Cozad, herds of them. They used to slobber and spit at me, and chase me, when I was a kid, and so I didn’t care for them; I wished they’d go back to South America, where they belonged.â€
He believed me, as he’s seen photographs of hordes of llamas annoying the long-ago lilliputian franksolich.
“Well, nobody but you seems to have seen peacocks around here,†he finally said; “nobody else has seen even a feather. If you had a picture or two, we’d believe you.â€
Okay, that’s it, I said; “when I go to town, I’ll stop at the convenience store and pick up one of those $5 disposable cameras, and take some pictures.â€
to be continued
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:popcorn:
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:lmao: After the last couple of days I've had I could use a good story so keep it up coach.
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Are you sure they aren't just hippies, frank?
I mean, hippies dress garishly, are loud and obnoxious, and trespass on other people's property without a second thought.
Have you noticed anything smelling like it's burning?
I seem to recall you posting a few years ago about some of them camping in a microbus not far from your place. Maybe they're back!
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Are you sure they aren't just hippies, frank?
I mean, hippies dress garishly, are loud and obnoxious, and trespass on other people's property without a second thought.
Have you noticed anything smelling like it's burning?
I seem to recall you posting a few years ago about some of them camping in a microbus not far from your place. Maybe they're back!
Hoary old hippies camp here all the time, as it's one of the few places where they can suck down booze legally, as such is prohibited on governmentally-owned property (such as public parks and campgrounds) in Nebraska. This is private property, and myself being a nice guy, and that surprisingly they clean up after themselves, I put up with it.
I've never been sure why they're so well-mannered--they aren't otherwise--but I suspect it's because the property manager (who lives in town, but one has to go through him to make arrangements for camping out here, as he's better able than I am, to discern if they're harmless or dangerous) tells them franksolich is an axe-murderer out on parole.
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Joe Gomez and Jose O’Brien, the two Texans who took over many of the chores of the property manager here (he’s doing more, and bigger, things in other parts of the county, but still thinks of this place as his “headquartersâ€), came early in the morning, to see if they like me could see any flocks of peacocks bustling around.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/04-003_zpszbjc2eqd.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/04-003_zpszbjc2eqd.jpg.html)
Alas, no peacocks came around, so now Joe and Jose think franksolich is hallucinating.
Both Joe and Jose are short little brown guys—hard workers, though—and only Joe knows English. I once asked Jose about his last name, and he carefully explained that it’s an old and distinguished name south of the Rio Grande.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I was still wiped out, from spending five hours the preceding evening sitting dead still in front of the computer, not moving a muscle lest I miss something, transfixed by what has to be the greatest movie ever, La Revolution francaise made in 1989.
I used to claim that Lawrence of Arabia, filmed in 1962, was the greatest movie ever made…..until a few weeks ago when I saw Waterloo, filmed in 1970, in which Art clearly outshone Larry. I was content to leave that be, Waterloo having no superior, but then by random chance and accident, yesterday I encountered La Revolution francaise, which is in French with a few English captions.
https://youtu.be/-SP4iii_THQ
I swear, this has to be the greatest movie ever made. I can’t say enough about it.
It’s awesome.
I know it sounds silly, until one realizes that having been born deaf, until the heart attack eighteen months ago, I’d seen maybe six or half a dozen movies in my entire life, including Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, yeah, I know there’s close-captioning and all that, but really, such distracts when watching something, rather than helps. And so I’ve essentially ignored television and movies.
But then after the heart attack, friends wishing to relieve my boredom discovered some sort of nuclear-powered amplifier that makes sound emanating from the internet—when matched with heavy-duty industrial-strength headsets—audible to me, although much of its sounds I’ve never heard in my life and hence are alien to me.
I don’t want to give a wrong impression; while I’m “hearing†with more clarity than I’ve ever heard in my life, a hearing person wouldn’t find it so great. But one takes what one can get.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The first full-length thing I ventured to “hear†on youtube was the entire broadcast of NBC News election night 1980, which was about five hours long, and glorious to watch. It was quite illuminating for me, learning what words actually sound like, rather than the way I’ve had to imagine they sound.
Of course, I can’t merely sit and “listen†as hearing people do; I have to concentrate, and not be doing anything else. It demands a narrow, intense focus, and one suffers bad headaches if one does too much of it.
So basically, “listening†isn’t really recreation for me; it’s work, toil and sweat, near-back-breaking labor.
I woke up all stiff and sore this morning, because the human body’s not made to stand (or sit) “at attention†without moving for five straight hours. I went to a closet and pulled out a cervical collar, or brace, that I used for a neck injury a while back, deciding I’ll wear that the next time I sit down for some heavy-duty viewing. But the pain’s been worth it, to see the greatest movie ever made.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Despite that the boob-tube appears to be the main source of illumination for the primitives, I hesitate to recommend this movie to them. It’s one of those movies where one has to be pretty well acquainted with the “background†before one can enjoy it, and primitives don’t know shit about history.
We all know cousin nadin’s “take†on the French Revolution. One has to recall that nadin is smarter than all the other primitives all put together, and if she doesn’t understand the French Revolution, it’s even less likely any other primitive would. So for any of them to watch this movie would be pointless; it’s way over their heads.
The guillotine scenes are somewhat more, uh, graphic than one prefers, but maybe the primitives would get some jollies out of those.
And I must point out there appears a parallel in the movie, and in real life here, with Big Mo’s pal Skippy, the long-ago banned NYC_SKP primitive. Louis de Saint-Just was a lesser-known among the French revolutionaries, but he was the bloodiest one, who got his own just desserts at the head-chopper, although it’s a pity it didn’t happen much sooner.
The guy was a homicidal maniac, descending destruction and death upon just about everybody, serving as a reminder that it’s very important that primitives always be kept impotent, out of power, because the havoc they could wreak is beyond terror.
to be continued
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“Yeah, sure, there’s the wild turkeys around here,†I told the neighbor’s wife at noon today, “which are a dime a dozen, but I’m talking peacocks, and I know the difference between a turkey and a peacock.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/04-012_zpshlzru4ix.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/04-012_zpshlzru4ix.jpg.html)
“There were nine of them out in the front yard this morning, six adults and three young ones, and I hadn’t gone into town to get a disposable camera yet, so I can take pictures and show the disbelieving world that this place is infested with peacocks.â€
“But didn’t you say somebody was coming over here this morning, and wouldn’t he have seen them?†she asked.
“That was [the village idiot],†I said, “and yes, he came by to borrow ten bucks, and yes, he saw them too.
“But it was [the village idiot], so who’s going to believe him?â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I told her I needed a ride into town to pick up something—the disposable camera can wait—and my own vehicle was at the garage where Dane, the mechanic of Norwegian derivation, is servicing it for the cold and winds of incoming winter.
“Sure,†she said; “where can I take you?â€
To the local telephone company, I told her, so I could pick up some more batteries for the computer apparatus that makes sound on the internet “hearable†for me. “I’m down to my last two again.â€
The batteries are AAAA, not readily available in most places, and around here, one has to order them through the telephone company at a cost, plus shipping, of $9.51 for a package of fourteen; I have no idea why they come in that number, fourteen.
I go through one package a week.
“Why don’t you just order a gross [i.e., 144] of them at a time, so you don’t have to go to get a new package every week?†she asked.
“They’re batteries,†I reminded her, “and they go bad if they sit around too long. So it’s just best to get them as fresh as possible.â€
“That’s almost forty dollars a month,†she said; “I never thought of that.â€
“Yeah,†I said, somewhat resentful. “And here we had that bitch Sandra Fluke whining that she had to pay for her own birth control pills for recreational sex, with no consideration that I have to pay forty bucks a month to get something that hearing people get for free, the ability to listen to things.â€
to be continued
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“I can’t believe my bad luck,†I complained to the neighbor this morning. He was here working on a tractor, and I’d just gotten up.
“So…..yesterday about suppertime, Mrs. Petersen came over, as she was passing through to take her daughter to the dentist in the big city. She had her son with her too, and asked if I’d watch him while they were gone.
“Yeah, sure, I said, as I wasn’t doing anything else in particular.
“So…..anyway, the three hours the boy was here, we got invaded by peacocks, more peacocks than I’d ever seen here before. By the time I was done counting, there’d been twenty-two fully-grown ones, and nine young ones.
“But…..as you know, the Petersen boy’s blind, and so can’t back me up, confirming he saw them too.â€
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“I can’t believe you did that,†the neighbor said; “you’re nuts.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/04-015_zpsw5ebkmrz.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/04-015_zpsw5ebkmrz.jpg.html)
He was referring to that I’d gotten up during the middle of the night to watch the greatest movie ever made, the 1989 La Revolution francaise, for the second night in a row.
As the movie’s five hours long, that took quite a chunk out of the night.
“I couldn’t help it,†I said; “I couldn’t sleep at all, the movie’s so good I needed to see it again.
"It's an awesome movie, the best movie ever made.
“And besides, as you know, because I can’t hear, it takes repeated times before I finally grasp the totality, the whole, of something, because I’m always missing things. I’ve admitted I watched Lawrence of Arabia—it was a videotape in somebody’s collection—about twenty times before I was satisfied I’d finally gotten it, finally grasped every word of it.
“There’s no need for hearing people to be self-righteously smug about getting something right the first time around; if one can hear, life’s as easy as strawberries-and-cream, as smooth as a pig sliding on ice.
"For some of the rest of us, no."
to be continued
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“Well, I almost had proof,†I told the neighbor’s older brother who was here at noon, bringing in some stuff he’s storing here for the winter. His place is over on the other side of the county, but he also has property around here, near his younger brother, and it’s just common sense that equipment is stored nearest to where it’s most likely to be used.
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“About the peacocks you mean, right?†he asked.
Yeah. It’s been very frustrating, trying to convince other people that this place is being overrun by peacocks of an unknown origin; they tend not to believe me because peacocks aren’t native to this area, and besides, I’m the only one who seems to have ever seen them.
“There were fourteen of them, ten adults and four small ones, about mid-morning, the same time a carload of Jehovah’s Witnesses were visiting.
“I’d invited them inside the house, as I’m always curious what makes people different from me, tick.
“That was about the same time the peacocks showed up.
“But, as always happens though I wish it wouldn’t, the minute they saw the Roman crucifix hanging above the thermostat in the living room, and that classic antiquity, a framed portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that was a long time ago a standard fixture in Catholic homes, hanging on a wall in the dining room, they looked at me as if I were a madman, and high-tailed out of here.â€
“Well, despite that they can be a nuisance, most people find it no problem trusting the word of a Jehovah’s Witness,†the neighbor’s older brother said; “just get them to vouch for you, that there’s peacocks around here.â€
‘I can’t,†I said; “their car had an Ohio license-plate, and from the look they gave me, I suspect they’d like to get as far away from this diabolical Papist as they can, and as quickly.
“They’re gone.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I mentioned I’d gone into town earlier, to get the annual influenza shot. With only the exceptions of a few years here-and-there, I’ve been getting one since they were first introduced in 1975, when I was much younger than I am now.
Those years—about six or seven—I didn’t get a shot, I got influenza, and sometimes even pneumonia—although it needs pointed out that I had been a heavy smoker (1978-2015) back then.
I fully understand that there’s many who’ve had problems with them, but I never have.
I suspect it’s because people “allergic†to the shots are people who take a lot of pharmaceuticals, and as a general rule drugs don’t mix well, especially the mood-altering ones.
This used to be a constant debate, a constant argument, a constant bone of contention, between the older siblings and myself. Each of them endured lots and lots of allergies of varying types, while I proved allergic to…..nothing. I said it was because things like allergies happen when one’s taking fistfuls of pharmaceuticals as if popcorn.
They insisted I was young and stupid, and didn’t know what I was talking about.
Well, I guess when it comes to living into old age, young and stupid trumps mature and wise.
Anyway, that wasn’t the big news. The big news was that the weight, blood pressure, and heart-beat rate had been measured. The weight’s getting a bit too lean, the blood pressure’s that of a fit-and-trim high school athlete…..but—and I came close to weeping—the heart-beat rate’s 64 bpm; it hasn’t been more than 68 for two months now.
Anybody who’s ever had a heart attack where the heart-beat rate is way up into the three digits would understand this joy and gratitude.
to be continued
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This story reminded me of the 20+ years we lived in the NC mountains we had deer and turkey everywhere. You couldn't drive from the house down to the main road without seeing one or the other at all hours of the day, and often both.
But there were several times when peacocks would somehow end up in the neighborhood, and they'd hang out with the turkeys. I don't know if they thought THEY were a turkey or what it was, but it always struck me as funny. Sometimes you'd be out walking the mountain roads or driving and you'd come up on the turkeys/peacocks and the peacock would spread its feathers out. Man, those things can put out a spine chilling scream, too. Loud; man, what you talking about.
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Several of us were sitting on the back porch last night, eating supper. It’s autumn, it’s starting to get dark sooner, it’s starting to get colder, and one never knows how much more time’s left that one can do this, before winter descends.
My guess is maybe a few more times yet, but the cold drives people indoors earlier and earlier.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/birds_zpsq8kvym8d.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/birds_zpsq8kvym8d.jpg.html)
“I wonder where they’re coming from, these peacocks,†one guest said.
I have no idea, I admitted; “they just abruptly seem to be there, before one’s noticed where they came from. But I think they come from the Italianate property just south of this place.â€
I suddenly stopped in my tracks.
“You know, I just remembered—I vaguely recall reading one time, a very long time ago, that there’s some sort of connection between the Italianate and peacocks, but I don’t recall exactly what it was; I’ll have to look it up when I have time.
“Perhaps it’s an omen, a portent, of something, but alas there’s no one of Italianate derivation around here who can illuminate us.â€
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The Italianate property, adjacent to this one, is 320 acres, more or less, of prime farmland that’s been left fallow since it was first purchased by its current owners back in 1948. It just sits there; I’m reasonably sure it’s a tax write-off of some sort, or a means of laundering money.
It was in the summer of 1948 that a big black Buick pulled up in front of the bank in town, out from which emerged an attorney from the big city, a short little Hebraic-looking guy called “Meyer,†and a tall dark sinister Italianate-looking guy with a five-o’clock shadow on his chin called “Alberto.â€
The land had been for sale, and they paid the banker cash for it. Meyer and Alberto came out here to inspect the property after buying it, and as the old woman who’d been born and raised here was still living in this house, they went in and had tea with her. She never revealed what they chatted about, other than that she found Alberto more charming than he looked.
After which neither Meyer or Alberto, or any representative of theirs, came to the property. Meyer died of old age about thirty years ago; Alberto died even sooner than that, probably the early 1960s, in a barber-shop accident in New York City.
Two times a year, every single year, without delay there arrives into the office of the county attorney a check from a legal firm in New Jersey, paying the property taxes. So it’s all quite aboveboard, all legal and financial niceties properly observed.
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Because I have no connection to it, despite that it’s right at my elbow, I leave it alone.
When the overflow of campers for the riverside on this property get too much—usually because there’s been a mix-up in communication between the property manager, myself, and the county sheriff, all three of us saying “yes†when two of us should’ve said “noâ€â€”I park the surplus along the river on that property.
The bank over in New Jersey’s never complained.
Most just camp, have a mellow time, and then leave. But a few summers ago, Brother Lamond from Detroit was here, along with his followers, for an old-time religion camp-meeting. Brother Lamond came all the way here from Detroit in a great big long black chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental with a bevy of blonde white women occupying the empty seats, and his followers arrived some hours later, jammed in an old 1957 yellow school bus that had broken down several times.
His followers, poor people of Detroit, were nice people.
But it was kind of sad to see how they were being taken for a ride—and not in a late-model Lincoln Continental—by Brother Lamond, who in public appearances wore only a tattered loincloth and carried a shepherd’s crook, making a big show of crying in the wilderness.
The first night they were here, being their host and concerned for their ease and comfort, I went down over there to check things out. Brother Lamond was standing knee-deep in the waters, baptizing his followers.
But upon seeing me, franksolich, standing on the river-bank, he suddenly stopped, his eyes as big as saucers and his mouth agape.
“Behold, now cometh He of far greater worth than I, He whose shoes I’m not worthy to tie.â€
It was obvious it pained him to admit that.
Anyway, so Brother Lamond doused me with water, and that was that.
to be continued
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“I looked it up last night,†I told my guests this afternoon while we were sitting out on the back porch, savoring what’s likely to be one of the last nice autumn days until Indian summer a few weeks hence.
“I wondered if there’d been some connection between the Italianate and peacocks, as the peacocks seem to come from the property to the south, and perhaps it’s an omen, a portent.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/early_zpseji1hdpr.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/early_zpseji1hdpr.jpg.html)
“But the only thing I could find is that the Italianate consider a pattern in the feather of a peacock to be an ‘evil eye,’ and the silly Italianate are superstitious about such things.
“That’s it; there was nothing else on the whole internet that gave any other clues.
“So the fact that the peacocks emanate from the property owned by Italianate interests in New Jersey probably doesn’t mean a thing.â€
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The guests commented upon an old rusty silver Airstream trailer parked down on the riverside, which was put there last night by some old hippies who plan to camp over there for a few days.
They, the guests, aren’t familiar with this place, so I explained about the camping; the sorts of people who camp here, the rules, and my observations and experiences.
“The most amusing time was on Labor Day about eight years ago, when the hippywife primitive Mrs. Alfred Packer, her hippyhubby Wild Bill, and the rest of the Packer clan came up here from Oklahoma. At the time, they were driving around an old Snap-On van converted into a funeral hearse, WILD BILL & BROS., WHOLESALE UNDERTAKERS painted on the sides in a half-circle, and then below that on a straight line, DISCOUNT FOR QUANTITY.
“Now, Mrs. Alfred Packer and Wild Bill were old hippies, in their late fifties, long ago gone to seed, he with a pot-belly and balding, and she very stout with grey hair. But Wild Bill’s younger brothers didn’t look any better; the boss of them, who drove the van, was born with both eyes on the same side of his nose, and the others had some similarly, uh, interesting features too.
“There were also a few stray women primitives, old she-hippies like Mrs. Alfred Packer bare-footed and wearing muu-muus, they were probably to keep company for the brothers.
“So they set up camp right there on the side of the river, where that Airstream trailer’s at now.
“While the women were bustling around, washing dishes, cooking lunch, hanging wet laundry, and the menfolk sat around being intellectual, three boys, about ten years old, came floating down the river on a home-made raft. Upon seeing the camp, they slowed down the raft and poled over closer to the shore.
“One of them asked Wild Bill if they were real hippies.
“Wild Bill was proud of his hippiedom, and admitted yes, they were the real thing, real hippies.
“’Ew,’ the boys said, and quickly poled away, headed north.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“About an hour later, a pick-up truck successfully maneuvered the rutted dirt road from the highway two miles north of here, and upon reaching the camp, circled and circled, yippying and yaying until they got bored, after which they went away.
“But no sooner were they gone than another pick-up truck appeared, a farmer and his wife who drove by, looking things over, and then drove away.
“Then there was a station wagon, two parents and four or five kids. It circled the camp while one of the kids leaned out of a back window, snapping photographs of the spectacle.
“And so on it went, all these vehicles full of people driving by to look at the phenomenon.
“At one point, a pick-up truck with the logo of the television station in Sioux City, Iowa painted on its side, and a legged camera bolted to the bed in the back went round and round and round, Will Bill angrily chasing it, as the guy standing behind the camera looking into the viewer, scanned the spectacle.
“More cars, more trucks, and more people gaping and eyeballing and photographing.
“Finally, the county sheriff drove up, asking Wild Bill if anybody was giving him any problems.
“Not really, hippyhubby Wild Bill said, people were just driving past and looking—but what the Hell was going on?
“As the sheriff explained, when the three boys on the raft reached the highway, they set up a booth with a big sign advertising HIPPYS-REAL HIPPYS-SEE THE HIPPYS-$1 A PERSON, and were raking in the bucks.
“Wild Bill protested against being used as a freak show.
“’But as long as nobody’s bothering you, disturbing you, threatening you, or harassing you,’ the sheriff said, ‘there’s no law against charging admission to see a freak show.
“’However,†he added, looking over the stout grey morose hippiewomen standing behind Wild Bill, ‘don’t let them take off their clothes and run around naked, like you all used to do during the ‘60s; we do have laws against things like that.’â€
to be continued
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“So, I had the disposable camera, and I thought in the nick of time, as there were nine peacocks—seven adults, two young ones—this afternoon.
“Peacocks, not wild turkeys or cranes of one nature or another.
“There wasn’t anybody else around, but that was okay, as I had the camera; I was so nervous, so excited, I was afraid I might scare them off, but I worried about the wrong thing, damn it.â€
I was talking to the neighbor’s wife, who’d dropped in with my mail from the post office in town.
“I punched the button, but it wouldn’t punch.
“As it turns out, the camera’s defective. Damn damn damn…..â€
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She insisted I looked tired, bleary-eyed; I admitted I was wiped out.
“Yesterday, by sheer random chance and accident, before the guests got here, I discovered the most wonderful piece of music ever composed, and the people who performed it the best; there can’t possibly be any music as good as this in the world.
https://youtu.be/98UjjwzJBFE
“It’s in two parts, for a total of two and a half hours, and since finding it, I’ve listened to it from start to finish four times. I’m drained, but really I wish I had the energy to listen to it again two or three more times before going to bed, it’s so good, it’s so wonderful, it’s so awesome.
"it's pretty complicated, so I'm probably going to have to 'listen' to it a dozen or twenty times, before I 'get' it.
“I looked it up. This very same performance, done in 1981, is available in DVD for about twenty-five bucks, and I ordered it right away. I needed to have this group, this performance, because I can’t imagine anybody else could possibly do it nearly as well, it’s so good.
"On youtube, the visuals are really blurry, but the music's crystal clear; it's very peace-giving for a troubled soul dismayed by all the evil in the world.
“According to amazon.com, there’s only one new unused one in stock…..and I’ve now been assured it’s coming my way.
“That might just be a marketing trick, though, amazon claiming there was just one in stock. But I didn’t want to take any chances.â€
to be continued
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I was up early in the morning—actually, it was 6:00 a.m., but up here in the far northern latitudes, where as winter nears it gets dark earlier and stays dark longer, it might as well have been 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.—and was sitting in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to get done when one of the guests came in, commenting it didn’t seem I’d had a peaceful night.
It’s just that I’m a restless sleeper, nothing more.
I reminded that I’d be getting up similarly “early†tomorrow, Monday, morning, as I have to go down to Lincoln, for a couple of medical examinations. I really dread going to Lincoln; I despise the city and all in it.
I lived in Lincoln for a couple of decades while in, and immediately after, college, and it was a reasonably nice city, its only significant flaw being a minor touch of academic pretensions. But as the years went on and state government in Nebraska ballooned, it evolved into something grey and dreary and utterly mediocre.
Omaha has always been the number one city in Nebraska, and with good reason, due to its population, more than two times that of the state capital, and its economic clout, based upon private enterprise and not governmental spending, surely at least five times greater than that of the second city.
The journalist John Gunther in his 1946 book Inside U.S.A. called Omaha “the most masculine city in America;†he didn’t mean “masculine†in the sense the men-hating women’s libbers think of the word, but rather, brimming with vigor, vitality, virility.
Lincoln, because of the overwhelming preponderance of state governmental employees, is more like a quarter of a million WillyT primitives, unambitious unmotivated overpaid underworked file clerks who think people should give them things simply because they’re them.
I think Lincoln sucks.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“You know, this is the last time I’m going to mess with this,†I told the guest.
“My heart’s been looked at so many times it might as well be on television.â€
After the heart attack in May 2015, while I’ve allowed cardiologists and other medical professionals to go inside there and look around as they please, I’ve forbidden them to change anything in there. They can look, but they can’t meddle.
I’d decided that based upon my lifetime of observing what happened to the parents and the older siblings after their various cardiac surgeries. It’s not always a good idea; sometimes the best solution is simply to do nothing, which has been done in my case.
However, simply looking around and doing nothing is not valueless; since everything’s been looked over so thoroughly, if something goes wrong, any medical professional would recognize immediately what went wrong, and what to do about it.
It saves time and trouble, knowing beforehand the source and scope of a problem.
Thus far, medical opinion seems to be that while the damage was substantial—after all, it was thirty-seven years of smoking 2-3 packages of cigarettes a day so as to ameliorate stress—after all this time, it appears under control, and unless I do something really stupid, I’m not likely to drop dead any time soon.
So after this trip tomorrow, I think I’ll quit letting people look at the heart, unless and until there’s some sort of change.
to be continued
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“Why these?†the nephew asked, when seeing a box full of old headsets on the dining room table.
This nephew, from Denver, had been visiting friends in Omaha, and making sort of an “arc†on the map, on his way back home stopped here to see me.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/long-necked_birds_zpsddg4zgei.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/long-necked_birds_zpsddg4zgei.jpg.html)
Oh, those, I said. “I picked them up over the past couple of weeks, at garage sales and thrift stores, usually for ninety-nine cents, or a dollar-ninety-nine apiece, so I’ll have enough to last me all winter.â€
He looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space.
“You forget,†I reminded him; “any sort of audio equipment burns out on me rather quickly, because in order to hear things, I have to crank them way up past maximum power. You weren’t around when I was younger and always blowing out speakers in automobiles, in a desperate attempt to catch what was on the radio.
“This is the amplifier,†I pointed out, showing him something attached to the “tower†of the computer; “it magnifies sound up to twenty times the decibalege, making it possible for me to ‘hear;’ not perfectly, but something.
“Well, the amplifier was built for that volume, but not standard headsets.
“There’s headsets one can buy that are built to handle that volume, but they cost a mint.
“So it’s just cheaper and easier to buy old used headphones and use them until they burn out.
Some last only a couple of days or so, but I’ve had a couple that lasted nearly a month each.
“The ‘trick’ is, the older and heavier the headsets, the longer they last. The lightweight plastic sets with foam for ear-pieces are junk, and I don’t even bother with those.
“And I’m not a perfectionist, like the tiresome tedious David Dvorkin primitive on Skins’s island, who once had perfect hearing but lost most of it, and was always whining that he could never find any hearing instruments that replicated sound as it really is.
“I think the primitive ought to be slobberingly thankful he can at least hear something.
“In my case, with these old headsets, sometimes one side’ll burn out while the other side’s still okay. Because I’m happy to take sound any way I can get it, I just keep using it until the other side burns out, too.
“When one’s deaf, it’s not as if it makes a whole lot of difference.â€
to be continued
-
I took the nephew out for lunch at the bar in town, as I was in a hurry to get him going on his way. One should never visit the sins of the parents upon the child, but for me, his parents had been the worst of the older siblings; bitchy, crabby, negative hippies.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/some_more_birds_zpsk51qwqoe.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/some_more_birds_zpsk51qwqoe.jpg.html)
And he’s just like they were; his mother considered him a sensitive, an aesthete too good for an ordinary fate, and so he ended up majoring in “art history†in college. And here we are, almost twenty years later, and he works for near-minimum wage at a hippie food cooperative.
But he lives well; he lives off a primitive registered nurse who’s a few years older than him. She’s madly in love with him, but he’s been tired of her for some years now. But he can’t let go because of all the things she gives him.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation whose specialty is Italianate cuisine, was working, and since I was paying, the nephew ordered bruschetta, minestra di pasta con pesce, garganelli, cotoletta alla milanese, asparigi bianchi e verdi, and caciocavallo. And for dessert, crocetta di caltanesseta.
I ordered my usual, a hamburger very well done, pressed down hard on the grill so as squeeze out every drop of grease, french fries cooked on the grill rather than in the fryer, and a side dish of sour cream.
Because he likes to torment me, Swede personally took our order and personally served the dishes, brushing the waitress aside. “I’m thinking,†he commented to me, “I’d like to add a new item to the menu here, pavone il immaginario; know where I can get any peacocks?â€
Ignoring him, I asked the nephew if he was going to vote next month; I knew it’d been an issue because his candidate for the presidency had lost in the primaries, just as mine had. However, mine having lost, I was still with the team, and there’d never been any question of my voting.
He said “probably not,†but he’s never been as politically dedicated as I am.
I reminded him that one doesn’t always get what one wants in life, and so it’s best to settle for what one can get. It of course made no impact, because he’s part of the gimme crowd; if he can’t have the whole loaf, he doesn’t even want the three-quarters or seven-eighths of it that he can have.
I could never understand people who are “all or nothing;†it seems to me that usually such people then end up with…..nothing.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“We need some drastic changes in society,†he said, “but nobody’s willing; everybody’s afraid of changes.â€
I looked at him as if he were Bozo from Outer Space.
“Who’s this ‘everybody’ who’s afraid of change?
“I for one would welcome with open arms, joyously and happily, sudden radical change from the way things currently are. I think it’s time to toss out the old order, and bring in the new.â€
He looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space.
“You and the gimme crowd have your asses stuck in the 1960s, thinking the Establishment, the “Man,†is still old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males.
“The ‘Man’’s been dead for quite a while now; probably since the mid-term congressional elections of 1974, after the Watergate scandal demolished the old order.
“The hippies have been in charge since then; everything on the hippie agenda of the 1960s was either legal or socially acceptable by 1980—abortion, women’s lib, cohabitation without marriage, children without marriage, disrespect for religion and the military, tons and tons of social programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
“You got control of academia, the news media, Hollywood, governmental bureaucracy, the popular culture, social values.
“Geezuz, everything the hippies wanted, they got.
“We’ve been in the Age of Aquarius, the hippies, Democrats, liberals, and primitives being the Establishment for more than forty years now. You guys have been in, but because you don’t have it all—although I wonder what else there could possibly be—you think you’re still the outsiders.
“You guys aren’t the rebels; you’re the ****ing Man, the established order, the dominant order, and it’s long past time you’re tossed out on your asses.
“Me, my kind, we’re the rebels, the revolutionaries, the radicals, the anti-establishmentarians, the iconoclasts, the ‘seditious’ and the ‘treasonous.’â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When we were getting ready to leave, he dumped something new onto my lap; he was spending the night with me, waiting for two friends to show up from Minneapolis. One would arrive this night, the second one Monday night, and then on Tuesday morning they’d all take off for Denver.
He reminded me he’d asked me, and I’d okayed it.
I alas can’t doubt it; he probably did in fact ask me, and I vaguely recall saying something to the effect of “yeah, sure, fine, no problem,†to something. I usually “yeah, sure, fine, no problem†just to get people off my back. Probably I need to pay better attention, but I’m only human.
to be continued
-
In the morning, while getting ready to go to Lincoln, I was standing in front of the sink of the kitchen shaving, when the nephew walked in.
“Use whatever you need to use, to feed and entertain yourselves today,†I told him. One of his two friends had arrived during the middle of the night after I’d gone to sleep, and they were staying here all day until the second friend arrived, after which the three of them would head to Denver Tuesday morning.
He stood there, and so I pointed to the coffee-maker. “Coffee’s ready.â€
“Well,†he asked, “aren’t you going to get dressed?â€
“I will when I get done,†I replied. “I’m running a little late, and somebody’s in there,†I added, pointing with the razor to the closed bathroom door. “Male or female?â€
“A guy,†he said, “but—“
Oh, okay, I interrupted, and went back to shaving. “No need to bother.â€
Just then, the door to the bathroom opened, and the individual walked out. Pointing to the coffee-maker, I told him, “Coffee’s ready, cups are in the cupboard immediately above.â€
“Good morning,†he said, not missing a beat. Like the nephew, he was in his thirties, and obviously a member of the gimme crowd, so I scarcely felt awkward being bare-assed naked in front of him; such people deserve to be discombobulated, either rudely surprised or indignantly offended.
I was secretly disappointed though; he was the third category, the “it’s cool†sort.
“My uncle,†the nephew said, introducing us. “Excuse him, but he likes to show off.â€
“Yeah, sure,†I said, coldly maintaining my dignity; “just like when I was a kid, and your parents reminded their friends when I was caught picking my nose or having put my shoes on the wrong feet, ’don’t mind him; he’s just simple.’â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
So…..I drove down to Lincoln, and was examined by a well-known cardiologist.
The deal is, when I had the heart attack nearly eighteen months ago, while the cardiologist in the emergency room was suggesting that this thing or that thing be done, I brought him up short, telling him he was more than welcome to go in, to poke around, to look and see what he could find, but he wasn’t to change anything.
He was a nice guy, and patient; he explained to me what would happen if he didn’t fix something that needed fixed. And then he patiently stood by and listened as I explained what would happen if he did fix something. Obviously, I convinced him that while I was no physician, I was of competent judgement, and so while he went in and searched thoroughly to see all that was there and what it was like, he didn’t change anything.
In the meantime, I’d quit the thirty-seven year habit of smoking 2-3 packages of cigarettes a day; so many cigarettes because I smoked to ameliorate stress and tension, of which there’s plenty for a deaf person in a hearing world.
As each month followed after the other, the numbers got better and better.
But…..but…..but…..nothing in life is certain, and thus my question. “Had it been a mistake, or had it not been a mistake, to not have anything done? Would I be in better condition, if something had been done, than I am now?â€
It’s a very simple, straightforward question. I dunno why any physician I’ve ever asked, has dodged it.
It’s like they’re afraid they’ll get into trouble if they guess, and they guess wrong.
<<<has always seen medical professionals, just as has always seen people in general, as fallible, people who sometimes guess wrong……and has never held it against them.
The best I could get from a 220-mile round-trip—and even then he acted as if he were going out on a limb—was that unless I do something really stupid, I’m not about to spring loose of this mortal coil any time soon.
Bah humbug.
to be continued
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:clap: :clap: :clap:
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:clap: :clap: :clap:
That drives me nuts, though; I think it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
And I'm fully aware one can only guess at the answer; guess whether it was a mistake or not a mistake, and the question'll never be resolved, really, until the last chapter of this life.
But medical professionals have insight I don't have, and I think that if requested, they should share their best professional speculation with me, the patient.
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That drives me nuts, though; I think it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
And I'm fully aware one can only guess at the answer; guess whether it was a mistake or not a mistake, and the question'll never be resolved, really, until the last chapter of this life.
But medical professionals have insight I don't have, and I think that if requested, they should share their best professional speculation with me, the patient.
If he had the go ahead he would have done something he felt needed to be done. :cheersmate:
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If he had the go ahead he would have done something he felt needed to be done. :cheersmate:
That's true, and I was counting on that; if something needed done to save my life that night, he would've done it, regardless of my instructions.
But since then, it's been pretty apparent that he gave it all a closer look, and decided no, it wasn't necessary.....
If one has the wits and the time, one should always apply brakes to a too-eager physician. And yes, physicians through the years have affirmed to me that I'm absolutely correct in slowing them down, and fortunately I'm diplomatic enough to not cause offense, as if I'm questioning their judgement.
<<<suspects the primitives could learn a lot how to handle things in life from franksolich. But of course they don't want to; they want to keep on being victims, losers.
-
“We saw some peacocks today,†my nephew’s friend announced when I arrived home.
“And they were white.
“Seven adults, five young ones.â€
“Did you get any photographs?†I asked, hopefully.
No, they hadn’t thought to; they’d just stood there like idiots, staring.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I was reminded that the second of the two friends of the nephew was expected shortly, probably in time for a late supper.
This was the femme, the one I’d been advised was a strident women’s-libber.
“Don’t do anything to embarrass me. Please,†the nephew pleaded.
Are you kidding? I asked him; “I’ve tangled with far too many women’s -libbers, and as I can’t win no matter what, there’s no point in engaging them. Jugs on Skins’s island a few years ago had mauled me nearly as badly as she had our good friend Laelth, who had to sign away his balls to get free of her.
“No way; I don’t mess with women’s-libbers any more.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/birds_at_dusk_zpsxl0rekue.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/birds_at_dusk_zpsxl0rekue.jpg.html)
When the libber-chick showed up, she confirmed my speculative stereotype of what she’d look like; the wire-rims-eyeglasses–angry-petulant-face, the huffy body-language.
But as I’d promised to be nice to her, I was.
Since it was rather cool outside, I suggested we dine inside, at the dining room table.
The dining room table, which seats eighteen (when all the leaves are installed, which in this instance they were), is, like, about twenty feet long. This is a big old house; there’s plenty of room for things like this in it. The center was covered by stacks of cleaned-and-folded laundry.
“I’m sorry,†I said; “I just don’t have time to put everything away. But we can manage—I’ll take the west end, by the door to the kitchen, in case anyone needs something, and the three of you can take the east end, w-a-a-a-a-a-y down there…..â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
They were so far away they might as well have been in another room, but as their faces were still visible over the heaps of clothes, communication was no problem, as I could simply read their lips.
She was bitching about how men refuse to give credit to women when they accomplish something.
I bit my tongue, but it didn’t help.
“Uh no,†I interrupted; “many times, it’s the man who does something, but as he’s scared shitless of the woman, he lets her take the credit.â€
The three faces at the other end of the table froze.
I’d done it now, but so as to salvage the situation, I pointed out the example given by Manny’s jackass message-board.
“The place was started by two women’s-libbers, and was mired down, going nowhere.
“That is, until they invited Manny aboard, after which membership and traffic soared; Manny had single-handedly made it the place for primitives to be, the place where primitives wanted to be.
“Besides that, he took care of all the mechanical problems of the web-site too, making it run as smoothly as a pig sliding on ice.
“It’s obvious Manny’s both the brains and the brawn of the message board, but oh God, he dare not point that out. Oh God no.
“He’s always walking on egg-shells, being careful to give the two chicks equal credit for something impressive he’s done…..all by himself. He doesn’t want them to get mad at him, and there’s few things in this world worse than a couple of she-women being mad at a guy…..â€
The she-woman indignantly announced she was going to sleep in the car overnight, which I guessed was okay with me.
to be continued
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"Well, I just got word from amazon.com that the DVD I ordered is on its way, and should be here on Friday. This being only the second time in my entire life ordering something on the internet, I had no idea it worked this way.
"Of course, it worked this way the first time, but I wasn't paying attention, and so didn't notice.
"That was all of those compact discs of the choir at King's College, Cambridge, that I'd ordered. Since I specified standard shipping, I assumed it'd take a long time, but that was okay; good things are worth waiting for.
"Much to my surprise, they unexpectedly showed up in my post office box in eight days.
"All the way from England. I'm old enough to remember when non-air-mail from Europe took, like, six weeks."
I was talking with the neighbor's wife, who'd dropped in on her way back from the big city.
"Once this, the most glorious piece of music ever composed, arrives, I'll get around to ordering DVDs of the three greatest movies ever made, 1962's Lawrence of Arabia, 1970's Waterloo, and 1989's La Revolution francaise.
"After that, I can't think of anything else I'll ever need the rest of my life, to be happy."
to be continued
-
“So…..what’s up? Seen any peacocks lately?†the property caretaker asked when he was here to pick up some tools.
I snorted.
Looking at the dining room table, and then glancing over to the west wall of the living room, he let out a long low whistle. “You’re doing some major major remodeling here, some major changes.â€
Uh huh I said.
“I always thought that would have to be taken down off the wall and carried out with your corpse,†he said, referring to a mounted-and-framed autographed photograph of George and Barbara Bush that I’d gotten for Christmas 1992, after the Democrat machine stole his re-election. "You always made it pretty clear you were proud of that picture."
“Yeah,†I said, “it’s too bad, but he’s obviously senile, getting all silly about Messalina Agrippina, and has to go. It’s sad when people don’t spring loose of this mortal coil when their mental faculties and sense of judgement are still sharp. It’s pathetic, watching in dismay as great men decline into imbeciles.â€
“What are you putting up to replace it?†he asked; “the wall looks kind of awkward, with that empty space between the mounted-and-framed photograph of Lord Mountbatten and the mounted-and-framed copy of the portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam.â€
“Well, I’m able to use the same frame,†I pointed out, showing him the official 1968 photograph of Charles de Gaulle in the attire of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur, a copy of the picture that was usually hung in post offices and governmental buildings when he was president of France.
"I picked him because at least he didn’t have feet of clay."
to be continued
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“Why is that really big picture of that one guy hanging on the wall of your bedroom?†she asked.
“She†being a friend of a friend; both had spent the night here on their way down to Kansas City.
“It’s a nice picture and all that, but really, it’s so big it needs its own room all to itself.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/atmansbrainondrugs/hudson_zpsaqqnxui5.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/atmansbrainondrugs/hudson_zpsaqqnxui5.jpg.html)
Oh, that, I said, absent-mindedly. “George II, the grandfather of the more-famous George III.
“It’d hung in another bedroom in a part of this house that’s since been torn down. But as I think it’s pretty impressive, I wanted to save it. As you can see, it’s nearly life-sized, and with the frame weighs what seems half a ton (although not really).
“The bedroom was the only room it could be hung, without dominating the room.â€
Anticipating her next question before she could ask it, I replied, “No, I have no idea why a farmhouse in the Sandhills of Nebraska would have a high-quality and expensively-framed reproduction of a portrait of a long-ago Hanoverian king of England, but it’s from about the 1880s, and apparently’s been in this house since then.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“You have a really unusual place,†she said; “all these portraits, all these pictures of people, hanging on the walls, even in the bathroom.â€
In reference to the last, she was referring to a framed photograph of the hate-filled old cow Senator Barbara Mikulski hanging above the tank of the commode, a place of honor that up until a couple of years ago, had been filled by a framed photograph of former vice-president and failed presidential candidate Alphonse Capote Gore, made when he’d been a mere senator.
“Thank you,†I said; “as you can see, it’s been quite an investment—over the years and decades, of course—in having most of them professionally mounted and custom-framed.
“The large one of Richard III, for example, I wasn’t paying attention when I found the ideal sort of frame for it, and when it was all done, I was sorely shocked to find the bill being $225—this was thirty years ago, when that was more money than it is now—because the frame has real gold leaf.
“And the print itself, from the National Portrait Gallery in London, had cost me……sixty cents.
“But as you can see, the frame is totally compatible with the portrait; there couldn’t have possibly been any better sort of frame for it.
“However, fortunately I usually paid closer attention; none of these were cheap jobs, but they didn’t bankrupt me either.
“I’m particularly proud of all the Holbeins—sixty-three of them—the very first ones I started acquiring when I was much younger than I am now. As you know, Hans Holbein the Younger was the greatest artist since the creation of the world, no other painter coming even close.â€
to be continued
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“I always wondered where you got the pictures,†the neighbor’s wife said when she was here this morning, making a shopping list. I despise, really loathe, shopping, while she rather enjoys it, and so she shops for me too. She has fun and I pay the bill, so it works out.
“But I never thought they’d be so cheap.â€
“Remember,†I said, “a lot of them, I got when I was in my late teens, early twenties, mostly from the National Portrait Gallery in London, either in person or via mail. They were posters that were sold. I got them, and someone mounted them on Styrofoam sheets, and then they were custom-framed as I could afford it.
“In those days, museums considered such posters as ‘educational materials,’ and priced them accordingly, dirt cheap, a few cents. If I ordered by mail, the postage was usually more than the poster.
“Nowadays, due to the Clinton-era greed of the 1990s, they’re considered ‘profit centers.’ It blows my mind, posters exactly the same as what I used to pay thirty, forty, cents for, are now ten, fifteen, bucks.
“But anyway, fortunately I was in early enough—the late 1970s, the early 1980s—that I managed to amass quite a collection of Holbeins and kings and queens and other personages, before the museums forgot their functions as educational institutions, and became profit-centers instead.â€
“But you didn’t get all of those from museums,†she said.
“No, of course not. The photographs, most of them, I got from the individuals. Or in the case of de Gaulle over there, from the French embassy, or that particularly pleasing one of H.M. the Queen at fifty years old, before she got grey hair, from the Canadian embassy.
“The Holbein portrait of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, its source was a surprise. I was struck by the aestheticity of it, and as it was an illustration on a pamphlet by the Catholic Truth Society in London, I wrote them asking if it’d be possible for me to purchase a copy.
“A long time passed, nothing happened, and so I thought no more of the matter.
“Then one day I came home—I was a senior in college—and there was this large package in front of the door, left by the mailman. The return-address was the Catholic Truth Society in London, but inside was this picture with a business-card from Windsor Castle, ‘courtesy H.M. the Queen.’
“It was as you see it, mounted, glass-fronted, and framed. And that’s no cheap frame job.
“Now, for a lot of the photographs, there’s always been the Associated Press, such as the photograph of the she-cow in the bathroom. I probably could’ve written Senator Barbara Mikulski and gotten one for free, but as I intended to put it to ignoble means, that wouldn’t be decent of me. So I instead paid the Associated Press eleven bucks for it, leaving me with a clean conscience to do with it what I wished.
“And there’s all sorts of organizations that own old photographs, and are willing to sell copies of them.â€
She’s always seen them, but never paid much attention to them until now, a whole series of old black-and-white photographs in free-standing frames sitting on the table surrounding this computer.
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“A lot of people think it’s really odd,†I said, “covering just about every usable surface of this place with pictures of people; they ask how come no landscapes, still lives, inanimate objects, somesuch, as if having pictures of people is, well, strange.
“It’s a matter of taste; to me at least, people are much more fascinating than things, so screw still lives and landscapes and rocks and flowers and stuff.â€
to be continued
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“’Taste’ is like ‘class,’†I said to my visitor.
“If one thinks one has it, one doesn’t.
“And if one deliberately tries to ‘get it,’ one won’t.
“It has to be natural, one has to be born with it, to have it.
“I’ve always been really tired of pretentious people who insist Norman Rockwell isn’t ‘art’ or Eddie Guest isn’t ‘poetry’ or a Hollywood epic isn’t ‘cinema.’
“Who the Hell made these pretentious assholes judge and jury of ‘taste’?â€
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“My criteria about whether or not a person has ‘taste,’†I went on, “is by asking myself, on which basis is that person deciding that?
“If it’s an opinion wholly arrived at by one’s own self, then the person’s probably a qualified judge of ‘taste.’
“But then there’s the other, more common type, best exemplified by a couple of primitives on Skins’s island, the husband-hating—even though he’s been dead a long time now—‘elleng’ primitive and the Hetty Green of DUmmieland, the ‘CTyankee’ primitive.
“In case you don’t know, Hetty Green was a 19th-century millionairess who thought, and lived as if, she was a penniless, landless Hindu peasant, just as the trust-funded CTyankee primitive always claims stark poverty.
“They both allege themselves to be of refined tastes, aesthetes.
“On what are they basing their high-falutin’ sense of ‘taste’?
“It’s easy to figure out, reading what they write. They think something’s good taste because someone trained them to be that way. Neither of them made up her own mind about ‘taste;’ she let someone else tell her what ‘taste’ is.â€
to be continued
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"You know," I remembered later, "there's one primitive in particular that I sort of admire, due to his lack of pretension when it comes to having 'class' and 'taste'--and this despite that he can be pretty tiresome in his name-dropping, that he lives right in the heart of kultur.
"Marc, the DFW primitive; he's never made any pretensions about being interested in the finer things of life, the uplifting spiritual things. He's a philistine through-and-through, and makes even Attila the Hun look like an aesthete.
"He wouldn't recognize any of the fine arts if one of them got right in his face.
"And it's cool that he doesn't care; doesn't care that he's only a money-grubbing barbarian.
"It's quite refreshing--and encouraging, in a way--seeing a primitive who looks at himself for what he really is."
to be continued
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"Well, that book I picked up in Lincoln on Monday might as well have been a Sears, Roebuck catalogue for ordering photographs," I said to a guest, a relative of the neighbor, this morning.
"There's only like about sixty illustrations in all its 552 pages, but I'm finding about twelve, or a dozen, photographs of what I'd like to get copies and then frame them; they're really evocative, that stirs up something within me."
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"So as soon as I get done reading the book, because of the probable expense, I'll narrow it down to about three or four of the photographs, and contact the owners of them."
"Wouldn't it be cheaper and quicker if you just scanned them?" he asked.
"Yeah, but that'd serve no purpose," I replied. "These have to be 8x10 glossies, or whatever size they are. One can't show off one's good taste, one's aestheticism, with cheap shoddy things.
"Kitsch is what Attila Marc the Hun, the DFW primitive on Skins's island, has decorating his house; there's no place for kitsch in this one."
to be continued
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“Okay,†I loudly announced to the company gathered here, in the manner of the late Clare Boothe Luce, getting their attention by banging on the side of a glass with a spoon, “as promised, it arrived at the post office in town this morning, and I need everybody to disappear for, according to the slipcase, 153 minutes’ playing time."
There’s visitors here, relatives of the neighbor, from Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“The best piece of music ever recorded in the history of mankind, and performed by the best possible vocal and instrumental groups; recorded in 1981, it’s an exact match of what I’d been watching on youtube.â€
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“I need everybody to go away and do something else, because as you’ve already been aware for a very long time, ‘hearing’ or ‘listening’ for me demands total 100% comprehension; I can’t ‘get it’ if I’m distracted.
“And that’s not only people; to me, color, light, and movement are ‘noise’ too, and interfere.
“So best to sit in the dark corner unaware of anything excepting the sound. Don’t disturb unless something’s bothering one of the cats, or the house is on fire.â€
They all knew this stuff, and had prepared for it, planning to be out of my hair, away for about three hours. I sounded short and pre-emptory not out of rudeness, but only because I was in a hurry to put the DVD into the computer and get busy ‘hearing’ it, to see how it compared with the qualities found on youtube.
“The only thing that bothers me,†I said as they all got ready to leave, “is that when I ordered this, amazon.com said there was ‘just one copy left for sale,’ and I got all worried, wondering if I was going to order it in time.
“And then a day after they told me it was on its way, I saw it now says ‘just two copies left for sale.’
“Yeah, right. That’s the last time I’m going to let a seller tell me, the buyer, when to buy
something, rather than buying it in my own time at my own convenience.â€
to be continued
-
Well, the DVD was as I’d hoped; an exact duplicate of what’s already on youtube. The pictures on the DVD are sharper than they are on the internet. As for sound quality, I assume there’s a difference, but of course I have no way of knowing how.
And as was demonstrated this afternoon, when one’s listening (“listeningâ€) on one’s own computer than on the internet, one’s own computer isn’t subject to internet interruptions and outages.
The DVD is about two hours and a half long, and I “listened†to it two times.
Leaving the body a wretched mess. I neglected to think about wearing the cervical collar (something left over from a neck injury some time ago), but during the course of “listening,†I didn’t bother getting up and getting it…..and so am now paying the penalty.
And as mentioned other times, other places, the human body is not made to remain at rigid, unmoving, attention for several hours, but alas for franksolich, that’s part of the “cost†of being able to “hear†something. Even the hands get “frozen†stiff into near claw-like positions.
There’s no help for it. If one wishes to “listen,†that’s what one has to do.
So I’m pretty stiff and sore now.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The guests came back; they’d spent the afternoon over at the neighbor’s place. They’re his relatives, but they’re staying here because he’s already got a full house.
One of them inquired how it’s possible for a person with no ears to hear. Or rather, to “hear.â€
I’ve had to explain this before, no big deal. There’s four levels of hearing absence—mild hearing loss, moderate hearing loss, severe hearing loss, and profound deafness. There’s really no thing such as “totally†(or 100%) deaf, though.
There’s something called “residual hearing,†which I think is a silly term. “Residual†suggests it’s left over from something that was once there…..but in some cases (such as this one), there was never anything there.
Science and medicine’s pretty sloppy in applying words to things; another good example is “Buerger’s disease,†which is not a disease at all but rather, a condition. These people are supposed to be smart; I dunno why they mislabel things.
Residual hearing is actually traces of hearing; faint, weak, indistinct, inchoate means of sensing sounds.
The way nearly all of the civilized world hears is via the travel of sounds through the air, but that’s not the only way one can pick up sounds. It’s also known that one can sense sounds through vibrations of the skeletal structure, “bone conduction,†although that has nowhere the efficiency of hearing through the air. I dunno; maybe 1% or 2% as good, some but not much.
That is probably the way franksolich “hears,†but it’s not known for sure.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Much as people seem to be eyewitness to “baby’s first word,†there was a substantial audience the very first time I “heard†sound, sometime in infancy, when I grabbed a crumhorn that was being played (I was on the person’s lap).
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It was memorable for everybody (excepting myself) because the instant I grasped the sound, I let loose with a number one or a number two (depending upon who was telling the story). Until that time, I’d never given the slightest indication I was “hearing†a thing.
The older brothers and sisters teased me unmercifully about it to the end of their days, but the ridicule never bothered me because an infant just discovering the world is not responsible for his reactions to it; whoop-de-doo.
That was the first sound I ever “heard†in my life, some notes on a medieval flute-like instrument.
But as already described, “hearing†via conduction of sounds through the bones is woefully inefficient, and…..weak.
An instance where this would be easy and effective is that method as used by Helen Keller, putting the finger-tips on the throat of the person speaking, picking up vibrations of sound that way. But Helen Keller was an old woman obviously incapable of doing any harm to anyone, while franksolich is a fully-grown adult male who looks strong enough to do some damage if I went around putting my hand on other people’s throats.
The closest I ever came to “hearing†that way was when I was still a small child, say less than six years old, and sometimes my father used to hold me as he either practiced, or actually sang on stage, various solo arias from Handel’s Messiah, and I pressed the top of my head against the bottom of his chin.
But usually one just lip-reads, while desperately seeking any other clues in body language that might give one an idea of what somebody’s talking about.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
After I had a heart-attack in May 2015, some friends in the band and music business, wishing to cheer me up, tried various devices that could, or couldn’t, help me “hear†music. They’d been trying such things for years, but the heart-attack motivated them to redouble their efforts.
For about a year, I’ve been “hearing†music from youtube via a super-duper amplifier attached to the tower of the computer, along with hardcare heavy-duty headsets that would blast holes through hearing people’s heads, but have the effect of cotton-balls falling on this skull.
How well I “hear†depends upon the music; if it’s simply instrumental music, things seem to work pretty well, and easily. If it’s instrumental and vocal combined, the former comes through pretty much okay, but the latter makes things rather muddy. If it’s only vocal, I need a script to follow along; otherwise it makes no sense to me.
DVDs are better than mere CDs, because one can get a better “grasp†on the music by following the body-language of the conductor. I probably watch the conductor more than I try to “hear†something. That’s why I’d wanted a copy of this latest DVD so badly; the conductor’s so expressive that the sound doesn’t matter that much.
to be continued
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I was flipping through some already-mounted but not-yet-framed portraits when the three guests came back; we all had been invited over to the neighbor’s for supper, but suffering a vicious headache, I had passed with thanks; the other three decided they’d go and dine at the bar in town, to spare the neighbor’s wife the trouble, as she was already fixing supper for sixteen as it was.
One of them inquired where I was going to find any more room for more pictures; I said I was reasonably confident I could make room if there wasn’t enough.
My mentor in interior decorating had been the late Eva Bowring, a rancher’s widow whom I knew and revered when I was a little lad. She’d once been a United States Senator from Nebraska, during the early 1950s, at the same time another woman had been the other senator.
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I believe “backward†“reactionary†red-state Nebraska had been the first state ever to have women as both U.S. Senators…..and they were both evil Repugs. So much for the “progressive†women’s “liberating†Democrats, liberals, and primitives…..
She was dutch508’s next-door neighbor over on the other side of the Sandhills from here, but while I’m sure dutch508’s heard of her, I dunno if he ever knew her.
Fascinating woman, Eva Bowring. She was ancient when I knew her, decades past when she’d been in Washington, D.C. She and dutch508 lived on the western slope of the Sandhills; I was growing up in the heart of the Sandhills, but spent three summers near where dutch508 lived, but he was a puny little ‘un back then.
She had a big house; on the inside, the wall in every single room was nothing but framed photographs.
Nearly all of them were framed in what were then 79-cent 8x10 metal-and-glass frames one got at the local drugstore, but the people whose pictures those cheap frames framed were pretty exceptional, presidents and prime ministers and military leaders and senators and congressmen and governors and members of presidential cabinets and Hollywood celebrities and famous writers, all but the royal ones signed to her (royalty doesn’t do autographs).
“There’ll always be room for more,†I assured my guest.
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“But nice frames, no discount metal-and-glass ones,†I said.
“I have no intention of being like my good friend Atman over there in eastern Connecticut; not only does he try to skip out on paying highway tolls, but he’s an Ebenezer Scrooge, a grasping tightwad, an irascible miser, with his son.
“You see, Atman’s a professional artist.
“I myself happen to think he’s a very good one, a caricaturist. If I had any need for his artwork, I’d buy it.
“However, it needs pointed out mine’s a minority-of-one opinion.
“But anyway, when Atman’s daughter-in-law had an infant, of course people took lots and lots of pictures.
“When it came time to display the pictures, the son and daughter-in-law had to go out and buy those Dollar General frames—you know the type, where there’s a bunch of cut-out squares and rectangles and circles inside of which one puts in little pictures, six or eight or ten of them to a frame.
“Chintzy. Kitschy. Trailer court. Vomitous.
“Atman’s a professional artist, remember. He knows ‘good presentation’ when he sees it, and he usually does it with his own artwork, really nice sharp-looking professional custom frames. And unlike many decent and civilized people who really can’t afford better, he’s got dough.
“But he’s too tight to give his son money to buy other than Dollar General junk.â€
to be continued
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“You know, I can be just as adolescently juvenile as the next guy,†I told the neighbor’s wife when she was here this morning. “But at least I don’t spend any money on it.â€
The relatives of the neighbor had all left earlier, going back to Minnesota and Wisconsin, having been here a few days for a funeral. There’d been lots and lots of them, and three of them had stayed here. The neighbor’s wife had usually fed all of them, and was tired.
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I was referring to a recent revelation by the big guy in Bellevue, “Omaha Steve†on Skins’s island and on Manny’s jackass message board, that he owns, or owned, some sort of computer toy that probably isn’t cheap, given that he’s getting a $9.00 “bonus†for having it.
“What in the world is a nearly-60-years-old grossly obese guy doing, playing with something that most dump when they’re about 14 years old, and first starting to date?
“And given its name—I have no idea what it is, as obviously I haven’t been into toys for the last, oh, about forty years—apparently it’s specially-made for fat people to play.
“Geezuz gawd. And to think he almost got elected city councilman in Bellevue.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“You know,†I said, as I brought our cold lunches to the dining room table, “I can understand the fascination with computer games, but I’ve never any obsession for them…..nor the need to spend money on any of them.
“It’s something one usually outgrows, and obviously I—like the big guy in Bellevue—am old enough to have outgrown them before computers became ubiquitous, all over the place in everyday use.
“But as nobody’s perfect, I came perilously close to becoming an Omaha Steve.
“During most of the 1980s, when I was just out of college and not doing anything in particular, for extra money I used to ‘housesit’ for affluent people in Lincoln. If one had pets, having me live in their home while they were away for a long time, was cheaper than boarding the pets, not to mention it discombobulated the pets less.
“There was one place where I practically lived for about three months a year—an ancient dog and an ancient cat were the reason—which was my favorite place, despite that it was one of those “modern†avant-garde arte-nouveau Frank-Lloyd-Wrightesque houses in a traditional country club neighborhood.
“I had some great parties out there—which the owners’ rules allowed me the freedom to do—but one time when I was looking for something in the basement and came across a videocassette recording of the full-length 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, I entertained less and less.
“Instead, I sat on the floor in front of the large television in the basement, watching that over and over and over again. The television had no accompanying headsets, and even though I sat only inches away from the screen and speakers, I had to crank the volume up as high as it’d go, one time burning out one of the two speakers.
“God, I loved that movie.
“That was bad enough, my becoming almost a recluse while there, neglecting to invite friends over, but it became even worse after I discovered a 3.5†computer disc with the game ‘Strategic Conquest’ on it.
“This was a late 1980s version of it, in black-and-white, and it could be played only on a Macintosh.
“God, I loved that game.
“Upon going there to housesit, I stocked up on packages of cigarettes and empty ashtrays, because once I got started, I wouldn’t stop. The only thing allowed to interrupt me was if the dog or the cat needed something. I played that game many times through the night into the following day; I played it sometimes going two or three days without eating; of course it was easier to go a whole entire week playing it without shaving.
“I was hooked, obsessed.
“However,†I said, wrapping it up, “number one, I was much younger than Omaha Steve, number two, I really had nothing else—such a wife or trash that needed taken out or dishes that needed washed—demanding my attention, number three, I never spent a dime on the past-time, and number four, once the house-sitting stint was over, I found it easy to slip back into regular life, not missing the game at all.â€
to be continued
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“Well, do you suppose there’s any primitives with, what you might call, class, culture, or taste?
“I think most of them have too much hate inside of them to have any refined taste in anything,†she added. (“She†is someone who dropped in to leave a package.)
Yeah, I said; “probably nearly all of them don’t.
“There was one, a long time ago, one of the ‘Nikki’ primitives, ‘NikkiStone’ or something like that, from California, who probably had class, but she was tossed off Skins’s island—and then later off Old Elm Tree—a long time ago.
“I can’t pass judgement on three primitives—my fellow alum Skins, the buzzy one, and the brooklynite primitive—because I’m biased towards them, but I suspect I’m reasonable in assuming that yeah, they have class.
“For Skins and the buzzy one, I’m not sure in what directions. The brooklynite primitive is a wizened little scrawny guy, but looks like the sort of aesthete who’s into arte nouveau avant-garde cutting-edge ‘modern’ stuff.
“But outside of those three, and the long-ago Nikki primitive—not the same ‘Nikki’ who loves abortion more than she loves her own mother—I can’t think of another primitive who might have class.
“There’s one primitive with no class for whom I feel sorry, though; he’s on the verge of departing Skins’s island.
“Attila Marc the Hun, the ‘DFW’ primitive, the American expatriate living among the Teutons.
“He’s boring, he’s tedious, he’s tiresome, in his relentless name-dropping and long-standing idolatry of some now-dead woman reporter, Molly Ivins…..or something.
“And he’s got a wee touch of snobbery about him.
“But I feel sorry for him. Because he has money and a few times generously shared with it with some primitives, every 'needy' primitive—which is to say damned near every one of them—has hit him up.
“It’s a real nuisance, and so he doesn’t hang around like he used to.
“The second of two reasons I feel sorry for him is that there he is, right in the middle of, the heart of, the center of, kultur, and he can’t appreciate it because he was born only with the coarse unrefined senses of a philistine capable only of thinking about money-grubbing, an uncouth barbarian with no intellectual or emotional ability to understand the finer and higher things in life.
“It’s kind of the same situation as a blind man living amidst the scenic beauty of the Sandhills of Nebraska, or a deaf person living in a symphony concert hall.â€
to be continued
-
:cheersmate:
-
One of the music “experts†(quotation marks his, not mine) was here this evening, from that big city over in Iowa. He plays in a band, works in a music store, and knows audiological equipment. He was one of those who, about a year ago, set up this thing here for me.
It was merely a social call, but he did bring along five ancient headsets he’d found. Headsets I use have to be old and heavy, so as to better thrust sound into my head. Also because I use them at a volume that ultimately causes them to “burn out,†they need to be something cheap. No point in buying more-expensive brand-new ones that last only as long, if that long at all.
There’s a cold, sweaty fear in me that someday this winter, when it’s -40 outside, with 40 mph winds and 40 inches of snow on the ground, the last headset will burn out (I have the same fear about bags of dry cat food, and used to have it about packages of cigarettes, being isolated here without).
As it's been a while, he asked me if I’d learned anything new.
“Yes,†I said; “there’s no point in me merely trying to hear sound; I have to see it too.
“Compact discs that are music only are really difficult for me to grasp, if I grasp them at all, while compact discs with visuals make sounds more ‘hearable.’
“It’s kind of like art imitating life. In real life, radio and telephone and other ways in which I don’t ‘see’ sounds being made, remain ‘unheard’ by me. It’s the same difference between someone saying something behind my back, and in front of my face.
“I find that when looking over selections on youtube, I’m looking for the conductor.
“If there’s enough camera shots of the conductor directing an orchestra and singer, it’s almost—almost, not quite—as easy as strawberries-and-cream to grasp the flow of the music without seeing or ‘hearing’ the instruments and voices.
“And then after ExGeeEye on conservativecave described the physical outlay of bands and singers, once I get the angle from which a camera’s coming, and since a camera inevitably gravitates towards the source of a sound, it gives me an even better idea what’s going on with the music.
“But without catching at least an occasional glimpse of the conductor, I’m at sea.â€
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^^^the very best, the most “readable,†one
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(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/oldguy_zpsre6xwk4m.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/oldguy_zpsre6xwk4m.jpg.html)
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/somebody_zpsvwvryg49.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/somebody_zpsvwvryg49.jpg.html)
Of course, realistically, I’m not hearing shit, as confirmed by professional audiologists.
I’m picking up enough feeble signals to extrapolate, and because of my age and exposure and knowledge [sic] of music, I extrapolate much further beyond those extrapolations.
Just as with social conversations, it’s all in my head, in my imagination. So I’m really only guessing.
The last professional audiological examination using this particular amplifier and one of my (now burnt-out) pair of headsets, showed that physically, realistically, I’m actually hearing (in the same sense hearing people hear) only about 5-7% of the sound sent my way.
All the rest is from inside my head, my imagination, my memory, and guesses.
(Of course, those who know me best in real life know this is exactly the case; I'm only imagining, not actually hearing. But, as nothing can be done about it.....)
However, it’s all mountains better than it used to be, and so I’m eminently content.
to be continued
-
“You look like you feel a hundred years old, man†Joe said this morning when he and his partner Jose came over to pick up a vehicle before driving their families to church in the big city.
Joe Gomez and Jose O’Brien, both of Texan derivation and reasonably brown and short, do some of the maintenance work around here so that the property caretaker has more time to take care of other properties.
Joe knows English; Jose doesn’t, although he’s the more inquisitive one.
“Oh, I probably do, because that’s exactly what I feel like, all sore and stiff as if I’m a hundred years old,†I replied.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/52_zpsy4kdkilo.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/52_zpsy4kdkilo.jpg.html)
“You got to quit doing that,†Joe said, “sitting there like that all day long and into half the night, not moving.
“Someone could come in and chop off your arm while you’re ‘listening’ on the computer, and you wouldn’t even know it.
“It’s scary, the way you’re here, but you’re not here.â€
Yeah, yeah, I came back; “as soon as I get tired of this, I’ll probably stop doing it.
“It’s all strange to you because people like me usually don’t spend so much time and trouble, if any at all, to hear.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“And there’s some concern,†I admitted, “it’s affecting my posture, and one of the side-effects of my kind of deafness is that if one lives long enough, he declines into hunchbackery. Scientists and medical professionals know why, but I don’t know myself, only that it happens.
“But really, I don’t need criticized for risking my health to get something everybody else gets doing no damage to themselves at all; it’s a very human thing to want to hear.â€
“But there’s other people like you, and they don’t want to hear,†Joe insisted.
Yes, yes, I said, “people who are afraid of the world and all in it; people who live their lives wrapped up in a cocoon, people stunting their intellectual and emotional growth by avoiding new people and experiences, people degenerating themselves into lesser beings by refusing to do things for themselves, people who lose the contents of their bowels when seeing a shadow, people who lock their doors and pull shut their curtains so as to keep out the sunlight and fresh air.
“Surely the deaf are among the most wretched people in the world, and it’s their own fault—they don’t need to be primitives.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/267_zpscvtjcaae.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/267_zpscvtjcaae.jpg.html)
“But you’re the same way, man,†Joe persisted. “You live way out here all alone, but that’s not enough; even out here, you want to be alone more than you are.â€
“Oh now, it’s not that big of a problem,†I replied; “name me one time where I’ve ever not welcomed someone coming here, with enthusiasm. Anyone who comes by, feels wanted.â€
“It’s all an act, though,†Joe argued. “You really want to be left alone.â€
“Okay, but that’s not due to the deafness,†I said, as if it made some sort of difference. “That’s due to something else.
“Sometimes I like to fool myself, claiming I long ago outgrew those same things that still afflict the lazy fat slob the Odin2005 primitive on Skins’s island, who thinks he’s smart enough to run the world, but at the same time he’s ‘too handicapped’ to work.
“I probably did in fact outgrow most of it, but there’s lingering traces, including a near-obsessive mania to be left alone.
“However, at the same time, I’m no threat to others or to myself—geezuz gawd, I’m the most mellow, laid back, relaxed person I know—and unlike the squalid lazy fat terrorist-loving Odin2005 primitive, I’ve always worked so as to pay my own way through life.â€
to be continued
-
“Well, I saw four peacocks here this afternoon,†I announced. “It surprised me, because I supposed—without knowing anything about it—that they’d go away after the first couple nights of frost.â€
“Did you get any pictures?â€
“No,†I replied, “because I’ve adopted everybody else’s attitude about it; that they’re just a figment of my imagination, that they don’t really exist.â€
The neighbor’s wife was here, along with the two youngest of their five children, a 6-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl. The latter two were outside, where I’d sent them to look for peacocks, or at least their eggs.
She was rubbing arthritis ointment on my shoulders and back.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“You know,†I told her, “shopping on the internet’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
“Of course, I don’t like to shop anyway. I just decide what I need to get, go get it, and that’s that.â€
She’s used to it; for years, she’s put up with my “fast in, fast out†technique.
“Since I now have a DVD of the best piece of music ever recorded, I decided I’d order a DVD of the greatest movie ever made, La Revolution francaise, from 1989. The place on youtube where I’d watched it said there’s one, and linked to it.
“So I go there, but before ordering a copy, I checked the specifications.
“And immediately hit a speed-bump.
“It advised the DVD wouldn’t work on an American computer.
“And explained why—which went over my head—and so I looked around for one that would.
“Believe it or not, unless I missed it, there doesn’t appear to be a DVD of that movie made to work on American computers.
“Surely there has to be, and I’ll look around later.
“As long as I’m waiting to figure that out—I’m not in any big hurry, after all—I decided then that I’d order a DVD of the second-greatest movie ever made, Waterloo, from 1970.
“So I looked around, and ooops, too many choices.
“I’m not in the mood to make choices at the moment, so I put it all aside for later, and went looking for a DVD of the third-greatest movie ever made, Lawrence of Arabia, from 1962.
“Ooops, same problem, and there seems some variations in the versions offered.
“You know, maybe the old sourassed sourpuss running for the Democrat nomination for president was right, that we have too many choices, when we really need only one or two or three.
“I wasn’t in any mood to decide, so I decided I’d decide later.
“That’s why I have so many CDs and DVDs of the choir at King’s College, Cambridge. On nearly all their youtube offerings, there’s a link to where one can go and buy a CD or DVD of that particular performance.
“No hunting around, no choices to make.
“I’m hoping to eventually acquire a complete collection of every single CD and DVD they’ve ever made, as it is after all the greatest choir that ever existed; the sans peer, the ne plus ultra, the primus inter pares of all organized choral groups.
“They seem to understand one of the principal rules of successful marketing; if you want people to buy something, make it as easy as possible to find and purchase.
“Well, I wanted to order something, while waiting to find out about the French movie (whether or not there’s one that works on American computers), or to decide upon the appropriate Waterloo or Lawrence movie.
“This morning, I was watching and “listening†to
https://youtu.be/T83W3rgQuXQ?list=PLiM7aCrI8qsEnId8aNaWkUzSy0vz_NLVD
“Now, the Mikado as it was presented on television back in 1960 is one of my favorite things; of course I never saw it on television, but I became acquainted with it about fifteen years later, when a record of it was used in my speech therapy.
“I couldn’t get enough of it; I had to imitate speaking the lyrics, my favorite part being ‘I’ve Got A Little List,’ which I think of every time I’m reading the primitives.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/record_cover_zps3bhgze3g.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/record_cover_zps3bhgze3g.jpg.html)
“Well, here was a selection of it…..and because these people understand the tricks of successful marketing, there was the link right there, where one could go and buy it.â€
to be continued
-
“What’s all in this state?†he asked me; “none of us had ever been here before, and we didn’t look anything up before coming.â€
He was part of a party of five that was camping down on the river for a couple of days; a party from Ohio that was headed up to Alaska. I’m not sure, but I suspected they’re part of an academic group.
Actually, I was probably told exactly who they are, but not paying attention, I neglected to remember the details.
“Well, there’s lots here, but we prefer to keep it a secret, because the past few years our reputation as a nice place to live has gotten us that bluedog primitive from Florida, and that stuck-up bitch primitive who’s a nurse from southwestern Pennsylvania, and we’d rather not have those sorts of people here.
“But anyway, generally, you want to avoid the state capital, Lincoln, which is nothing, really, other than a quarter of million WillyT primitives, sinecured governmental employees, mediocre low-performance people who think they’re entitled to be treated as if they’re exceptional, and paid as if they do a lot of work.
“Omaha’s good, though, if you like the hustle-bustle, the noise and tumult, the vibrant activity, the gregarious friendliness, the hail-fellow-well-met, of urbanity—“
“But what about your part?†he asked; “like, what’s here?â€
I already knew their travel plans, and that they’d already seen this part, the northeastern corner, popularly called “Lewis & Clark Country,†but on their way out west, they were planning on hitting some other parts too.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/007_zpsqbopxxjb.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/007_zpsqbopxxjb.jpg.html)
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“Okay, well, you’ve already seen this part,†I said. “And now you're going south to pick up that one person, so the next place you’ll be is where I spent my childhood, along the black-dirt farmland of the Platte River.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/0003_zpslxactran.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/0003_zpslxactran.jpg.html)
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“And then you’ll be going north, through the Sandhills of Nebraska, where I spent my adolescence.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/0005_zpsqkgjoe1p.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/0005_zpsqkgjoe1p.jpg.html)
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/0006_zpsln641v6n.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/0006_zpsln641v6n.jpg.html)
“And finally, before leaving the state towards the end of the week, you’ll be around near where I was born and spent my infancy.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/0001_zps0rcl6mwx.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/0001_zps0rcl6mwx.jpg.html)
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/0002_zpstzfxgck5.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/0002_zpstzfxgck5.jpg.html)
“What’s your favorite part?†he asked, pouring himself another cup of coffee.
“The Sandhills,†I said; “God’s country, the most wonderful place in the whole world.â€
to be continued
-
an open letter to elleng
Greetings, madam.
It hasn’t been without interest that I’ve been watching your attempts to teach taste and class to the primitives on Skins’s island, and while your goal is noble and spirited, surely you must realize what a futile hope it is.
You’d probably have better luck trying to teach manners and grace to a pig, madam.
It was from observing your endeavors that I began seriously thinking about taste and class some weeks ago. franksolich comes from a good background and all that, blah, blah, blah, and even as a child I was reading Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post, but I just never thought about it until recently.
After all, it’s usually people who aren’t aware they have taste and class, who do.
And if they think they do, it's a sure thing they don't.
I give you, madam, the example of your colleague Ms. Vanderbilt-Astor, the NJCher primitive. By oddest of coincidences, she actually originated in this area of Nebraska, and there’s some around who remember her from when she was young.
What they remember most about her is what a snob she was. And from watching her appearances on Skins’s island, apparently she hasn’t changed.
And, as you know as well as I do, madam, being a snob disqualifies one from having taste and class.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
comment 2623:
http://conservativecave.com/index.php?topic=81827.2600
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I must confess, madam, I used to think of you as a wannabe when it comes to taste and class, but upon much reflection, God compelled me to change my mind. I used to consider you in the same category as the sparkling old dude’s trophy wife, which should give you an idea of how meanly I’d supposed you to be.
It finally occurred to me—long after it should have—that you’re much older than franksolich, had a husband, and bore infants. You’ve wrestled with problems and worries in life that have thus far not afflicted me. Compared with you, I’ve enjoyed nothing but the merry carefreest of lives.
Seriously, madam.
So now I put you in the same category as the wives of alumni of Brandeis University—wives of physicians and surgeons, dentists, attorneys, professional investors, &c., &c., &c.—as I fondly remember these women from their annual book sale in Evanston, Illinois, every May.
They tended to be older middle-aged women who took care of themselves, slim and elegant; well-dressed, with jewelry dripping from their wrists and necks—real jewelry, not fake stuff—oozing grace and class from every pore. And very nice and gracious even to those of us unlike them.
Definitely not snobs.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
But I dunno what to suggest about your brave attempts to teach taste and class to the primitives; there’s three of them who have it—my fellow alum Skins, the buzzy one, and the brooklynite primitive--and so don’t need taught—but all the rest are hopeless; all they’re interested in is greasily and noisily copulating with as many of each other as possible.
With my affectionate good wishes, madam, I remain
franksolich.
-
Oh my.
I wonder how she knew I was "listening" to Mozart most of the day, while resting an injured foot.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018901055
elleng (71,370 posts) Mon Oct 24, 2016, 06:57 PM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Rondo alla Turca
https://youtu.be/geER3iQDO5k
(Posting my favorites today, as they appear on my radio station. [after which the "waving at franksolich" smiley, as used in the cooking & baking forum])
-
“How did you possibly do that? With a sledge hammer?†the property caretaker asked, incredulous.
He was standing in the dining room along with Joe Gomez and Jose O’Brien, inspecting a hole in the wall.
No, I said; “out of frustration, I kicked it.â€
“You had to have been wearing steel-toed boots then,†he replied, "because this is a pretty solid wall.â€
Nope, I said, “I kicked it barefooted, I was so vexed.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Well, at least it couldn’t be any big deal, I pointed out. “After all, this house is doomed to leveling anyway, so it’s not like repairing the wall demands a professional-looking job. Just covering it up should do.â€
“What got you pissed off enough to do that?†asked Joe Gomez.
Jose O’Brien, who doesn’t know English, indicated it must’ve been something muy grande.
“Well, yeah, I can’t imagine you getting that upset,†the property caretaker said; “you’re so relaxed, laid back, and mellow, sometimes it scares people. I can’t imagine anything possible, anything so terrible, anything so bad, it’d provoke a violent reaction out of you.â€
I explained.
“Some days ago, I began having problems on the computer, with copying-and-pasting primitive threads; it was taking almost forever for the mouse and the screen to respond after I ‘right-clicked’ anything.
“Only when I was trying to bring comedy material from Skins’s island; copying-and-pasting from other message boards, including Manny’s jackass site, presented no problems, caused no delays.
“Just from Skins’s island. I’d shade and ‘right-click’ a certain primitive comment, and then it’d take anywhere from thirty seconds to a whole ****ing two minutes before the little box popped up, asking me what I wanted to do.
“In this case, I wanted to ‘copy,’ and indicated thusly. After which I’d go to where I wanted to ‘paste’ it. I’d ‘right-click’ a certain area there, after which it’d take anywhere from thirty seconds to a whole ****ing two minutes for the little box to pop up, asking me what I wanted to do.
“In this case, I wanted to ‘paste,’ and indicated thusly. And then it would take anywhere between thirty seconds and a whole ****ing two minutes before it’d ‘paste.’
“What had been a two-minute copying-and-pasting job was now taking damned near half an hour.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Obviously, it was a problem with Skins’s island, I said, as it occurred with no other site, friendly or hostile.
“Nobody else in the whole world was having this same problem,†I said; “just me and my computer.
“I figured maybe the elusive enigmatic Elad, who knows my internet provider number, my ISP, had programmed things so I’d be obstructed in using primitive material; that once my ISP showed up over there, a monkey-wrench was thrown in.
“But as far as I know, Elad doesn’t have anything against franksolich.
“So then I speculated, and quite reasonably so, that the problem was that Skins’s island was hostile to my browser, Internet Explorer 11.
“I didn’t like the idea of having to download a second browser, because it’d inevitably mean I’d have to download a third one, and then a fourth one, and so on, as I’d need a different browser for each web-site I visited. That’s not supposed to happen, but it does.
“One used to be able to go all over the internet using just a single browser.
“So I regretfully resigned myself to that I’d have to download another browser, one that hopefully was compatible with Skins’s island.
“I chose Chrome, and started downloading it, when Chrome asked me if I wanted Firefox instead.
“I’ve had Firefox before, two computers ago, and didn’t have any particular reason to dislike it, so I said ‘yeah, sure, I’ll take Firefox instead,' and hoped it’s compatible with Skins’s island.
“So I downloaded Firefox, not knowing for sure what happened to the half of Chrome I’d already downloaded.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Okay, so Firefox set itself up, and it worked as I remember it used to work.
And most happily of it all, Firefox appeared compatible with Skins’s island; I was able to copy-and-paste threads from there again.
“Being a moderator, it’s part of my job to bring over material from Skins’s island; conservativecave believes in working moderators, not moderators who just indolently sit around.
“However, I noticed that every time I shut down the computer to go to town or to go out to eat or to go to bed, when I returned and turned it on again, when I opened Firefox, it always asked me if I wanted to make Firefox my default browser.
“As Firefox worked for Skins’s island, I said ‘yes,’ thinking that settled the matter. I even checked off ‘don’t ask me this again.’
“But no, every time I opened Firefox, I got that box—‘Firefox is not your default browser; do you want to make it your default browser?’
“Like Hell it wasn’t my default browser; I’d said ‘yes, make it my default browser’ repeatedly.
“To add insult to injury, after I’d answered the question each time I opened Firefox, I got a second box, telling me to set my default programs for, I dunno, half a hundred or fifty different programs.
Since I don’t know computers and generally trust people who do, I said ‘you pick the ones you think best,’ and checked off ‘okay, finish.’
“None of this shit ever took. I had to reanswer the questions every ****ing single time I opened up Firefox.
“I got so frustrated I kicked the wall, not realizing I’d kicked it that hard.
“And then I went to CCleaner and had it ‘uninstall’ everything and anything having to do with Firefox, and what I’d put in of Chrome.
“I’m now right back to where I started, which means I can’t copy-and-paste from Skins’s island—I can’t do my job.â€
to be continued
-
“Oh my, didn’t that hurt?†the neighbor’s wife asked, when she saw me walking around wearing one of those “boots†one usually wears after some sort of podiatric surgery.
There’d been no surgery in my case; this was just something to protect the foot and toes until they got over the pain of colliding with a wall.
“it does at times,†I admitted, “but when it does, I immediately think of a decadent primitive—Attila Marc the Hun, the offshore primitive, the defrocked warped primitive, &c., &c., &c.—who’s alleged to suffer from gout, and imagine how much it’d hurt one of them, after which I start laughing.â€
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“Everybody seems worried about the election,†she said.
“I know, I know,†I replied. “Decent and civilized people are starting to despair, and the primitives are all agog and excited.
“It’s what happens when one allows the news media to dictate what one thinks, how one feels.
“That of course is an advantage of being deaf; since I don’t hear what the media and pundidiots say, I have to arrive at how I think or feel on my own, my thoughts and feelings being my own. I guess I’m a free thinker, an original thinker, of some sort.
“I’m not going to bother anybody, keeping my own counsel, but two things need pointed out—the news media’s misled, lied, before, encouraging the public to think some certain thing’s going to
happen that ends up not happening.
“And second, given the Rube Goldberg jerry-built nature of the current economy, things can’t hold forever; they’re going to fall apart, and probably soon, unless there’s a war before.
“Given that, it’d be a blessing a Republican isn’t in the White House to take the blame for Obozo’s ****ups, but on the other hand, it’d be a curse with a Democrat in the White House, given that Democrats, liberals, and primitives don’t know shit about economics, and it’d be worse than it’d have to be.
“I’m not going to say what I think is going to happen, but those are two things both the primitives on Skins’s island and decent and civilized people need to pause, and think about.
“I’m relaxed, mellow, laid back. It’s God’s problem; God’ll take care of it without any help from franksolich.â€
to be continued
-
“I just can’t believe it,†the neighbor said, “that you’d lose it badly enough to do that damage.
“I mean, you’re about the last person known to get upset over anything.â€
There you have it, folks, verification that franksolich is one of the most calm, mellow, laid-back, people around, even when in the face of dire catastrophe—and this, from the person around here who’s known me the longest (not the person who’s known franksolich the longest, but the person from around here who has).
The neighbor and I first met each other in Lincoln circa 1990, when he was a freshman in college and I was managing a privately-owned student union on campus. There’s gaps (none of them of a negative nature, though) in all the years that followed, but obviously not important ones.
Well, it was pretty frustrating, I said; “in fact, I’ve rarely been so frustrated in my life.
“I’m supposed to bring over material from the primitives on Skins’s island, for the illumination and amusement of decent and civilized people, and if I can’t copy-and-paste anything from there, well, I can’t do my job.
“I can do other things, such as bringing material from other primitive places, and writing my own stuff, but it’s never as good as the stuff the primitives on Skins’s island write for us.
“It’s a bitch, man.â€
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(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/fleeingBelgium1940_zps0ba1b1d2.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/fleeingBelgium1940_zps0ba1b1d2.jpg.html)
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/fleeingbelgium1940-a_zps924b4242.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/fleeingbelgium1940-a_zps924b4242.jpg.html)
The thing about it, I said, “is that I get a kick out of imagining the primitives losing it---I’m sure they do, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to conjure it—and never thought I’d react like one of those idiots.
“I mean, it’s easy—and heart-warmingly funny--to see hypertensive Bob or the late bird-smacking stoned red-faced primitive Redstone or my good friend Atman or the Bostonian Drunkard in an alcoholic rage or the sparkling old dude, kick a hole into the wall.â€
Right, agreed the neighbor; “you’re the type who gets a great deal of innocent merriment out of upsetting other people, not getting upset yourself.
“And you’re so slick, so cool, doing it.
“Just like when you lived in Lincoln, and someone you didn’t like came to your place too early in the morning, and you’d never get dressed—“
“But that was like tickling the tail of a dragon,†I said, “because I was never sure exactly what sort of reaction I’d get. The intention was to shock, to offend, to drive away, a nuisance, but that was never guaranteed to be the reaction, so it was always kind of dicey. Generally I got the reaction I wanted, but not always.
“When I want to get a Democrat, liberal, or primitive all angry, upset and bent out of shape, I use the ‘deaf idiot’ act, taking advantage of their vomitous pity for, and condescension to, we ‘handicapped.’
“No matter how much they want to, they don’t dare say anything to offend, such as ‘oh, you stupid dummy,’ even if one deserves it. I can be as aggravating as I wish to be, pushing their buttons, stretching their patience, eroding their goodwill, but because I’m ‘handicapped,’ they put up with it, on the inside jumping up-and-down, getting red-white-and-blue in the face.
“It’s a great deal of fun, doing this ‘deaf idiot’ act with Democrats, liberals, and primitives, and they’ve got only themselves to blame for the frustration and anger it causes them.â€
to be continued
-
“Okay, that’s it,†I announced this evening. “I’ve either got to do something, or resign as moderator of the DUmpster, one or the other. I can’t do my job any more.â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/The_Empire_Needs_Men_WWI_zpsq5upk5ji.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/The_Empire_Needs_Men_WWI_zpsq5upk5ji.jpg.html)
I showed what happens with Skins’s island now when accessed via Explorer 11, opening up the front page.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/1st_zpsbxs06rhv.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/1st_zpsbxs06rhv.jpg.html)
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/2nd_zpszkwuinm2.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/2nd_zpszkwuinm2.jpg.html)
“See?†I asked. “See how one tries to scroll down.
“It goes down a quarter of inch, stops, and then after thirty seconds, goes down another quarter of an inch, stops, and then after thirty seconds goes down another quarter of an inch, stops, and then after thirty seconds, goes down another quarter of an inch, stops…..
“It not only takes nearly forever to copy-and-paste from Skins’s island—and from no other place on the internet—it can take a whole afternoon to get from the top to the bottom of a single thread.
“I can’t say how tired I am, of this stupid game Elad appears to be playing, making it so my computer can't handle Skins's island.â€
to be continued
-
“Well, thanks to Duke Nukum on conservativecave, I finally got inspired enough to check user comments and complaints on various things I use,†I said this morning.
“He was looking into my problem with Firefox—which is no longer a problem, because I’ve since pitched Firefox—and conveyed to me what he’d found out. My problem of having to run an obstacle course every time I opened Firefox was apparently a common one.
“And Firefox doesn’t seem to care about resolving it.â€
Jose O’Brien, half the property maintenance team along with Joe Gomez, had come out here early, and was eating breakfast. Both are short brown little Texans, but Jose doesn’t know English.
However, he acted as if he was taking it all in, competently absorbing all that I was saying. He would’ve fooled a primitive or other sort of unobservant person, but I’ve done that myself, and so he wasn’t fooling me.
“This isn’t the same Firefox I knew and used a few years ago. But if Firefox doesn’t care, well then, I don’t care either.
“It’s all too bad, because the one day I had it, it worked on Skins’s island, allowing me to copy-and-paste.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I’d never before bothered checking user comments and complaints about products and services because there’d never been a need to. Whatever I had or used, worked okay for me.
Until now, when the Internet Explorer 11 browser appears unable to interact with Skins’s island, making it glacially slow to open—and that merely to read it—and damned near impossible to copy-and-paste for the amusement and illumination of decent and civilized people reading the DUmpster.
Internet Explorer 11 works fine on everywhere else on the internet, no matter where one goes with it; Skins’s island is the only web-site where it doesn’t.
So I checked out user comments and complaints regarding Internet Explorer 11…..only to find nothing but the glowingest of praises for it. Some users were so rapturous in its virtues they sounded as if teenaged boys describing a model in a girlie magazine (“sexy,†“sleek,†&c., &c., &c.).
There might have been some criticism of it, but I didn’t run into any, even after reading five different sites concerning it.
The problem’s obviously not (a) my computer or (b) Internet Explorer 11; there seems to be some dark sinister malicious force on Skins’s island that blocks franksolich specifically.
Some might insist, “oh, that’s nonsense; Elad’s smart, but he’s not that smart.â€
With which I disagree; he’s not as smart as Skins, but he’s pretty smart.
And smart enough to wire my ISP number, which he knows, so that whenever it shows up on Skins’s island, it triggers all sorts of monkey wrenches to interfere.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“While I was at it,†I explained to Jose, “I decided to check user comments and complaints about a couple of other things.
“I’d recently—and regretfully—dumped juno.com, which I’d used for twenty-one years, because the last few years, it’s gotten clunkier and clunkier, much more cumbersome and slower as one waits to have it load.
“And juno.com doesn’t seem to care.
“And then I checked out photobucket.com, which I’d been using ever since it started more than ten years ago. Like juno.com, they’ve gotten clumsier and slower, and more of a nuisance to use, than a utility. It’s a real bitch, sharing images from there any more.
“Obviously thousands of photobucket users have noticed, and complained, about the same thing.
“And photobucket.com doesn’t seem to care.
“Well, if they don’t care, I’ll be damned if I care.
“Now, of course both juno and photobucket are free services, and one gets what one pays for; I’d always accepted that one has to put up with some inconvenience and advertisements that must load on a page, but that didn’t used to be a problem. A trifling bother, but nothing more.
“Beginning about a year ago, I wondered if by offering to pay for either service, I’d get better service.
“It’s a good thing I took so long wondering, because user comments and complaints allege that the ‘premium’ services are no better than the free ones.â€
to be continued
-
“You know, I’m really tired of this,†I said. “There’s no point in wasting any more time and hopes on photobucket. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I’ll think of something…..sooner or later.
“Remember, that’s one of those where user comments and complaints have pointed out that, like juno, their ‘premium’ paid-for services are no better than the free services. One pays, but all one gets is exactly the same slow clunky sort of page that needs ‘refreshed’ several times before it works.....when it works.â€
It's a fine Indian Summer day out here in the Sandhills of Nebraska, but obviously I can't show it off because photobucket doesn't deliver.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"You're the most relaxed person I've seen about the election," I was told.
Yeah, I admitted; "I'm gravely concerned, but I just don't see any point in getting all worked up over it. I don't even see any point in wondering who's going to win.
"I have my own ideas about it, but I'm not going to waste my time expressing it, because nobody pays attention to franksolich anyway.
"Somebody's going to win, and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
"I can fully understand why others are so concerned about it--decent and civilized people because they're concerned for the future of their children, and Democrats, liberals, and primitives because they're concerned for their cushy governmental jobs or social services freebies.
"Remember that which separates me from most other people.
"I have no dependents, no financial responsibilities of any import, no great job, not a whole lot of personal possessions to fret over and worry about.
"No matter what happens, I have more freedom of action than most people do; I can take hair-raising risks few other people can. I've got little, if anything at all, to lose.
"So there's that; living the spartan austere ascetic life has its gifts.
"But really, while I doubt I have any significant talents to offer any cause, anyone a friend of God and religion, a friend of freedom, a friend of the Constitution, a friend of the Republic, a friend of America, an enemy of the primitives, who needs whatever I can give after the elections, it's his, all of it."
to be continued
-
“Remind me,†I told the property caretaker this morning, “that when I move to a different place, while it may have just one bedroom, to be sure it has two, preferably, three bathrooms.â€
I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, shaving. The door to the bathroom was shut, an overnight visitor, someone I didn’t know but was a friend of a friend, and reputably the fussy demanding sort, using the room.
“I live here alone in this one-bedroom one-bathroom place, and I can’t ever seem to get to use the bathroom.â€
Because there’s still lots and lots of construction, and improvements that need made, on this property, any move is still in the moderately-distant future, but it’s always good to think ahead.
“I wish I could remember how it went,†I said, rinsing off the razor, “growing up in a big family, in two different houses that each had two-and-a-half bathrooms. Despite three sisters, there never seemed to be a line, or any waiting.
“And the socialists had one thing right, a bathroom actually being two different rooms side-by-side, one room with a bathtub and lilliputian sink, and the other with the commode, so that two people could use the facilities at the same time.
“A great idea, but it appears that out in the civilized world, only upper-class French ever adopted it.â€
The guest came out of the bathroom, and ignoring his startled stare, having shown who is boss around here, I reminded him the coffee was ready, if he wanted any.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The property caretaker, who's had to deal with the consequences of something, repairing a hole in the wall of the dining room, inquired if everything was okay yet, between my browser and Skins's island.
No, I told him, although I'm hoping it might be resolved Monday evening, when an expert and franksolich are both on conservativecave at the same time, and I get done installing a new browser that we both hope will work.
"But in the meantime, I check a couple of times a day, going over to Skins's island using Internet Explorer 11, hoping to see the problem worked itself out by itself, as problems on computers sometimes do.
"Nope. When scrolling down on a page, it still goes a quarter of inch, stops for thirty seconds, then descends another quarter of an inch, stops for thirty seconds, slides down another quarter of an inch, stops for thirty seconds, and so on.
"And forget about copying-and-pasting from there, but I've already bored overlong with that particular problem, so won't bother describing it yet another time. It's the same problem.
"These are problems I have with no other site on the internet, just with Skins's island.
"So.....I'm still resorting to swiping material from Manny's jackass primitives, and writing my own stuff.
"But the audience of the DUmpster prefers material from Skins's island--especially since right now, the primitives there are going through some rather comedic convulsions--because Manny's jackass primitives aren't nearly as amusing, as neither are the everyday happenings in the daily life of franksolich.
"I hope to God this problem gets resolved; I dunno how much longer I can bear it."
to be continued
-
“That’s a really nice picture of de Gaulle you have there, “ I was told.
“Thank you,†I replied; “I think it shows him off as his best."
"You know," she said, "I never paid much attention, but I have seen photographs of de Gaulle in old history books and a few television documentaries, but as far as I remember, this picture shows him in a different light than those other ones."
"A man who'd suffered much, but who bore it stoically," I replied.
“I know he has a popular reputation as being some sort of old curmudgeon, acerbic and anti-American and all that, but the truth was something else. He, along with Golda Meir and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, was one of the three most remarkable people of the entire twentieth century.
"He was great because he did so much with so few resources.
"If one were Franklin Roosevelt, it was easy to be great, because one had the vast resources of America to back one up. It's somewhat more difficult accomplishing great things when one doesn't have a whole lot to work with, which had been his case, especially in June 1940 and during the 1960s when the gloire d'francais was fast eroding.
"There's the usual nonsense that he was anti-American because he disagreed with some of the most arrogant presidents we've ever had, Kennedy and Johnson, but that was nonsense. When the chips were down, he was always on our side.
"He's a good example of what Tanker on conservativecave is always trying to remind readers; nations don't have friends. They have interests and allies, but not friends.
"And there was the personal, private part of him.
"How one acts when one doesn't think other people are watching says a great deal about character--a lesson the primitives are most certainly learning right this minute. In the case of de Gaulle, he was more honorable and principled in private, than in public.
"A deeply religious man, he had an exceptional sense of family values, devoted to his wife and three children. His son became a military authority and one of his two daughters married well, flourishing and prospering.
"The second daughter, born in 1929 when Mme. de Gaulle was up there in years, was a mongoloid, at whose peak she attained the knowledge and skills of a two-year-old.
"She was the most precious thing in his life. When, in June 1940 and the Germans and primitive Frenchmen had put a price on his head, while of course he was concerned about all of his family, he was most concerned about this handicapped daughter, and very happy when learning the retreating British had picked up all of them, and were bringing them along.
"They were inseparable, father and daughter; those who were fortunate enough to catch glimpses of the two of them together said it was awesome, to see the love and concern that passed between them.
"She died or pneumonia or something like that in 1949, when about twenty years old, and it devastated him enormously; it was the worst tragedy of his life.
"He was grievously bothered that she'd been denied the life of an ordinary child, but in the end finally decided God had set matters right; she was now 'just like all the others.'
"It's a great story, rarely told. I always wondered why people concerned about the right to life never throw it into the face of the haters and the killers."
to be continued
-
Well, now that I can hang around on Skins’s island with no problems, life has returned to normal here.
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The guest noticed a DVD and asked about its contents.
“The greatest symphony conductor ever,†I said, “Nicholas Harnoncourt, who unfortunately died earlier this year. The greatest ever; no one else came even close.â€
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Oh, he said.
I was disappointed, but then remembered that if the philistine Attila Marc the Hun, the "DFW" primitive on Skins's island, given his ethnic, cultural, and academic background, his affluence, and his smarts, doesn’t have class and taste, it’s too much to expect of someone for whom life hasn’t been so easy.
The guest is the brother of a woman in town; even though a legal adult, he’s “restricted†in his activities for reasons one might, or might not, guess. She can’t stand him, and he needed a place to be for a couple of weeks, and myself being a nice guy…..
to be continued
-
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“Who’s this?†the guest asked when I returned back inside the house, having installed another winter window on the north side of the house. Because of my cardiac condition, I put them up only one at a time, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon.
It’s got to be done, but there’s no hurry.
And being a nice guy, I’m loathe to bother the property caretaker, Joe Gomez, Jose O’Brien, or the guest about it. If I can handle something, I handle it.
Oh, I said; “Ludmilla Matsyura, the greatest organist ever. She’s of eastern European derivation, quite possibly like myself distantly related to the cousin nadin out in San Diego, but last I knew, she’s head organist of a famous medieval cathedral in Spain; this was only a performance of hers, at Notre Dame d’Paris.
“The greatest organist since the Creation of the World; nobody’s ever come close. A sheer joy and delight and ecstasy to hear. Even God sits down to listen when she plays.â€
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“But everybody’s ‘the greatest’ to you,†the guest pointed out. “You’re deaf, and while I can understand you manage to ‘hear’ some things, I wonder if you’ve heard enough of things to make any judgement about them.â€
Well, I admitted, “I’ve probably heard about one-one-hundredth of one percent—really, no kidding—of all that hearing people my own age have heard in their lives, but there’s a difference.
“I heard all that I’ve heard, whereas they ignored most of what they’ve heard.
“When listening to music, instrumental or vocal or both, with twenty pounds of weight on my head, I’m concentrating on the music, and nothing else. I’m a dedicated listener, who when ‘listening’ isn’t doing anything but sitting there absorbing sounds.
“As you know, it inevitably gives me eye-crossing throbbing headaches, but it’s worth it.
“Hearing people, when playing music, are usually at the same time yakking on their cellular telephones, conversing with other people in a room, watching television, cooking supper, dining, dancing, vacuuming the floor, driving the car, hopping around in the sack, fighting with the wife or girlfriend, scolding the children or pets, chopping firewood, whatnot.
“The music’s only a faraway background to them, and they don’t really hear most of it.
“Me, I don’t miss a damned thing.
“That, despite my deafness, makes me a superior judge and critic; don’t forget that since I’m taking everything in, I’m probably ‘hearing’ things in it that get by hearing people unheard.
"So when franksolich says something's good, one should believe it."
to be continued
-
“Well, he’s kind of like the retrowire primive on Skins’s island,†I said; “from a dirt-poor family, reminiscent of ‘white trash,’ but unexpectedly bright and with potential to acquire class and taste, although it’d be a really big job.
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“In case you didn’t know, the retrowire primitive comes from real poverty, bona fide poverty, authentic poverty…..out of the 1930s Dust Bowl although out of North Carolina, not Oklahoma. It’s a shocking, haunting, daunting sort of poverty no other primitive’s ever lived.
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“The lyrical primitive’s got nothing on him, when it comes to stark poverty.
“So he’s here for a couple more weeks, until there’s room for him with a member of the family up in South Dakota.â€
“Well, be sure he doesn’t get to hang around longer than that,†she said.
“Oh, absolutely not,†I said, “because I’ve got a busy Christmas coming up, and won’t have any time to improve anybody, it takes time being Henry Higgins to somebody.
“But it is a pity, because he does have the potential, more potential than the philistines Attila Marc the Hun or Big Mo even during their salad days when they could’ve been influenced to improve themselves, to acquire some class and taste and manners.
“They’re way too far gone now.â€
to be continued
-
She and I went out to dine tonight at the bar in town. Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation whose speciality is Italianate cuisine, is off for the week, his place being taken by Cao Chu-tsu, whose speciality is Finnish cuisine.
She had his famous kaalikääryleet, along with perunamuusi and lihapullat and for dessert, vispipuuro. I had my usual, a hamburger very well done, pressed down hard on the grill so as to squeeze out every drop of grease, french fries cooked on the grill rather than in the fryer, and a side dish of sour cream.
“How’d your day go? How’s your guest?†she asked.
Well, the guest spends most of the day in town at his sister’s, even though she loathes him, and as it’s slow with work for me, I’ve been spending much of my time devising a brand-new categorization of primitives.
“You already know about the PoP and PonP, ‘primitives of prominence’ and ‘primitives of no prominence’ and the five tiers of primitivity—non-primitives, first-tier primitives, second-tier primitives, third-tier primitives, les risibles primitives, and drek primitives.†I reminded her.
“Now I’m categorizing them as PwC, PpwC, and PwnC, ‘primitives with class,’ ‘primitives potentially with class,’ and ‘primitives with no class.’
“And there’s sub-groups in the last category, such as ‘primitives with no class but who think they have class’ and ‘primitives with no class who don’t care.’â€
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/card1_zpsooholuks.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/card1_zpsooholuks.jpg.html)
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“Could you give some examples?†she asked. She’s not as much into the primitives as franksolich is, but she has a good working knowledge of them.
“Well, there’s two that I haven’t yet categorized, because while I’m sure they have class and manners and style and grace, but I'm not sure where to put them—Skins and the buzzy one.
“There’s two I know for sure have class, the brooklynite primitive and the husband-hating elleng primitive, although the brooklynite primitive’s somewhat too cutting-edge, avant-garde, arte nouveau for my personal tastes.
“Also, the long-gone NikkiStone primitive, and the long-ago AllentownJake; they had class.
“I’m pretty sure retrowire has the potential to have class, but it’d be a lot of work.
“And so far there’s three primitives who don’t have class and who don’t give a damn—Big Mo, my good friend Atman, and cousin nadin.
“There’s mountains of primitives who don’t have class but think they do; primitives who wouldn’t know good taste and good manners if slammed into their faces. Bores, boars, and boors who suppose themselves God’s gift to humanity; the Bostonian Drunkard, the Bostonian Drunkard’s maternal ancestress the Raven primitive, the aristus primitive, Ms. Vanderbilt-Astor the NJCher primitive, the sparkling old dude’s much-younger trophy wife, and Attila Marc the Hun, are good examples.
“I just started working on the list today, so I’m far from done compiling and categorizing them.â€
to be continued
-
“Why the fascination with Lyndon Johnson?†the guest asked me while we were having a late night snack.
I noticed that lately when talking with me, he’s been writing notes in a small spiral notebook; I dunno what he’s writing, but I hope I’m not flattering myself too much when I suspect perhaps franksolich has acquired a Boswell.
“He was a liberal Democrat, but you seem to admire him.â€
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“Of course I admired him,†I replied, “but not for reasons of politics, in which he was lousy, bad for America. He was a great influence upon me though, during my childhood.
“He taught me one of the greatest lessons in life; that no good deed goes unpunished.
“As a Republican enfant, I wasn’t too pleased to see how he dispensed so many freebies to special interest groups, the young, the aged, women, minorities, the poor, the hippies.
“For example, he was already paying slavery reparations to Lamond’s older brothers decades before Jesse Jackson ever thought of it, with all of these lavish dependency-creating social programs.
“Everything and anything they wanted, the special interest groups got it.
“Even when young, I never considered Lyndon Johnson personally generous, being aware that he was simply being generous with other people’s money, just as Vast Teddy soon thereafter learned to do. He got all the credit for being such a nice guy, while the people actually doing the giving got yelled at for being selfish, for not giving enough……again, just as Vast Teddy did later.
"It's easy to be generous with other people's money. With one's own, no, as Vast Teddy knew.
“But regardless, he gave the young, the aged, women, minorities, the poor, the hippies, more than anybody else had ever given them before. And so they should’ve been grateful, but they weren’t. The more he gave them, the more they hated him.
“I suspect they resented that they were getting such largesse from this guy, rather than from their dead idol John Kennedy, who never gave any of them a damned thing, but whom they admired anyway, as if he’d given them lots and lots.
“They hated Lyndon Johnson’s guts and drove him from office, a tired old man worn out from giving them things.
“It wasn’t America’s finest hour, the way his beneficiaries treated Lyndon Johnson.â€
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As I got up to clear the dishes from the table, I continued.
“You know, I think he’s owed something, by those to whom he gave so much, at least by those still alive today, such as the sparkling old dude or Minnesota Moses or any other ancient primitive.
“I think they need to build a pagoda-like temple in San Francisco dedicated to him, inside which there’s a large golden seated Guatama, a seated Buddha with the head and face of Lyndon Johnson, and with his pot-belly exposed, showing off the scar from gall bladder surgery.
“And then every year on his birthday, whenever it is, the surviving beneficiaries of Buddha Lyndon’s generosity, should gather in San Francisco near the temple, shave their heads, don those yellow robes, and carrying the huge seated Guatama Johnson on an open-air sedan-chair, march around the temple eight hundred times, chanting ‘oh Ram, oh Ram, oh Ram,’ and tossing lotus-flower petals in front of the procession.
“And every so often, those carrying the sedan-chair should pause, one of them gently shoving the back of the seated Lyndon’s head so as to tip him a little bit, making it possible for the primitives walking by to pause and kiss his golden ass, in gratitude for all that he gave them.â€
to be continued
-
"It looks as if professional music critics disagree with you," the guest said while we were sitting at the table in the dining room, he jotting down notes in his little spiral notebook and myself trying to repair a broken shoe-lace.
"How so?" I inquired.
"They don't think that Phillip Smith of the New York Philharmonic is the greatest trumpet player in the history of the world, like you do," he said.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/phillipsmith_zpslrwfu7uk.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/phillipsmith_zpslrwfu7uk.jpg.html)
"Well, that's too bad," I dryly commented; "if they don't think he is, they don't know shit about who's good with a trumpet, and who's not.
"Anyway, I really don't want to argue. I'm all burned out watching the primitives watching the elections, and if I could, I'd pay attention to them only on Tuesday, not before.
"It's very discouraging--and troubling--that criminality seems 'okay' with so many people in this country today. I wish they could have the government they deserve--the problem being, decent and civilized people would have the same government, with the same primitive disregard for the rule of law, for equal justice under the law.
"We have to live under theirs, or they'll have to live under ours.
"I'm tired of living under theirs."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"But I'd like to know," the guest persisted, "why you think so lowly of the conductor James Levine of the New York Philharmonic while professional music critics think rather highly of him."
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Hold on, hold on, I interrupted. "I don't think lowly of James Levine; in fact, I think rather highly of him. He's a stellar conductor, and any symphony that can get his services is a very lucky symphony indeed."
"But you think the late Nicolas Harnoncourt was better," the guess argued; "you said he was the greatest conductor in the history of the world."
Yes, I said that, I agreed, "but that's hardly any detriment to James Levine. Harnoncourt was so good, so excellent, that to be a mere third as good as he was, still puts one in select company, in the top five or ten in the world."
"But why do you think Harnoncourt was better than Levine is?"
"Levine lacks the gravitas of Harnoncourt," I replied. "Levine is a bubbly, effervescent, animated, sprightly, buoyant, vivacious conductor who hops around like a Mexican jumping-bean, and whose facial expressions are easily deciphered; a great conductor for someone who's deaf, and follows the music simply by watching his body language.
"Levine's a joy to watch. I could watch him for hours without getting tired.
"But he needs to put a little solemnity into his conducting; Harnoncourt is better than him because although expressive Harnoncourt is as serious as God."
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"Why do you call Samuel Ramey, who you describe as the greatest male singer ever, in the history of all mankind, simply a 'male singer,' and not what he is, a baritone?
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"You have 'greatest male singer,' 'greatest female singer,' and so on; wouldn't it be better to consider them by their voices, the greatest bass, the greatest alto, and so on?"
"Because I'm not sure if Ramey's a baritone or not, and so it's just safer to insist he's a 'male singer.'
"I don't hear well enough to differentiate voices; I can barely discern the difference between a soprano and a bass.
"And.....and.....and....." I pushed a certain point, "even hearing people can't seem to differentiate. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it, where a guy's sometimes described as a bass, and then as a tenor, and then as a baritone, and finally as a counter-tenor. The same guy, but whose voice is identified four different ways by four different music experts.
"You describe Ramey as a 'baritone;' if I searched youtube, I could probably find some examples where he's described as a tenor, or at least singing parts designed for a tenor.
"I suspect--without having any way of knowing, though--that what a voice is, is a matter of individual subjective opinion; it doesn't seem possible to scientifically measure it.
"You got these teachers having their students yodel in front of a tuning-fork, which ostensibly tells them something--I have no idea what or how, though--after which they declare her to be a soprano.
"But a second music teacher, watching the tuning-fork vibrate, might deem her an alto.
"I think the tuning-fork's a device simply meant to make it look as if the test is 'scientific;' after all, to be 'scientific,' some sort of 'tool' must be used, to 'measure.' It looks 'scientific,' but it's just a distraction.
"Really--although again, I have no way of knowing anything about it--it seems to me hearing is individual, and highly subjective, and so people's voices are whatever a particular listener calls them.
"Anyway, so I'm really dragged out and tired, so good night."
to be continued
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“You look like Hell,†she said, when we met at the bar in town for lunch today.
“I know,†I said; “when I feel like this, shaving’s the first thing to go, and then the gauntness kicks in.
“I’m just really tired of watching the primitives watching the elections, and thank God they’ll be over Tuesday evening. The primitives nauseate me, the way they’re such greedy, self-centered, arrogant, two-faced, pusillanimous, retarded, depraved people.â€
“But you don’t have to watch them,†she said.
Uh no, I disagreed. “It’s a civic duty, a public service for the good of humanity, to keep one’s eyes on them, given that while most of them are weak harmless impotent entities, there’s a few who present a real and present danger to our liberties and freedoms, to the Constitution, to the Republic, people who’d sell us out if they could find a buyer convinced they had the goods to sell.
“As it’s engraved on the walls of the Nebraska State Capitol, ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’ and then somewhere else there, ‘the salvation of the state [i.e., the rule of law] is the watchfulness of the citizen.’
“I wish they’d all die so we wouldn’t have to pay attention to them.â€
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Olga, the cook of Hindu derivation whose specialty is Argentinian cuisine, was working, but as it was only lunch, no big deal. She had a large salad with blue cheese dressing; as I wasn’t especially hungry, I had a dish of sour cream, which I dined upon as if it were ice cream.
“How’s the house guest?†she asked.
“Well, right now he’s with his sister, and they’re up in South Dakota until this evening, where he’s going to be moving in a couple of weeks.
“I’m sure they’re having a great time cooped up together in a car, as she loathes and detests him…..which of course is why he’s staying out at my place, instead of with her.
“Her husband begged me to take him in so as to keep his wife pacified, which was silly; he knew that franksolich is one of the most willing, one of the most hospitable, people one can ever hope to meet.â€
“Well, I’d be nervous,†she said, “given his violent criminal past.â€
Yeah, right, I sneered; “that’s the first objection everybody brings up. True, he has a past that isn’t exactly commendable, but think of something.
“Think of the hundreds of people I’ve had as guests out there the past eleven years, most of them camping down on the river, but some of them inside the house, all of them utter strangers to me, many of them far from aesthetic or otherwise not respectable-looking.
“I’m sure there’s been many with a ‘past,’ even a violent criminal past, but here I remain, whole and intact. I’ve never been touched—although the hippywife primitive Mrs. Alfred Packer’s hippyhubby Wild Bill one time tried to garrote me when my back was turned and I didn’t know he was there--and the only thing that’s ever been stolen was an unopened package of three pairs of white briefs.â€
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“Well, still, be careful,†she nagged. “You look as if you can handle things, take care of yourself, but that’s only an impression, not reality. Because of your fragile infrastructure underneath the strong-looking surface, just about anybody could beat you up, beat you into a pulp.
“In fact, this worried me a lot at first,†she said, “when I was concerned you’d do something to purposely offend him, after you’d been told he was the prissy, fussy, finicky sort of person—“
‘You forget,†I said; “that’s my job, my purpose in life, the reason God made franksolich—to considerably discombobulate prissy, fussy, finicky people, to get them all upset and bent out of shape until they come to understand how silly they are.
“And you have to admit I do it very well, but I don’t seem to have offended him thus far.
“I tried, but he took it with aplomb. And then after I found out he’s queer, I was very happy he took it so casually, not getting any ideas about me.
“But at any rate, as things have evolved, I’ve been more and more impressed. Despite his white-trash trailer-court background, that he never graduated from high school, and his criminal past, his spelling and grammar are impeccable, his vocabulary vast. His handwriting eminently legible.
“It’s a joy and delight to see a note from him, laying on the table when one returns home.
“Atman on Skins's island, despite his good breeding and affluent background, can’t spell worth a damn.
“I dunno how that happened, but as you know, such things happen, certain characteristics and skills in people one least expects to find them; the peasant well-mannered enough to dine with a prince, the prince [another one] not fit to sit down with pigs.â€
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The guest keeps notes on what I tell him, I proudly pointed out to her.
“it’s very rare I encounter anyone who thinks I know something about anything.
“Last night, however, he dared argue with me.
“He insisted there can be exact, scientific measurements of the human voice, as most hearing people insist, whereas I insisted that ‘hearing’ is such an individual, personalized, custom-made thing, that no two people hear the same voice the exact same way.
“Of course, being deaf, I’m the last person who knows what I’m talking about here, but still, that seems a damned solid theory to me.
“He wanted to argue it further, but as I had a headache, I had to go to bed.â€
to be continued
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note: photobucket appears to be down, so no photographs at this time, alas
https://youtu.be/D1NdcAjBKb4
“So…..who do you think was the greatest woman writer, ever?†the guest asked me, sitting down at the dining room table, plopping open his spiral notebook so as to take notes.
The question startled me; usually I’m not asked my opinion on anything, and if I try to offer it, I get commented back, “Oh, what do you know?â€
Such is the fate, even when adults and even outside of one’s own family, when one was born at the tail-end of a large family; I got used to it a very long time ago.
“Actually, there’s been three of them,†I answered; “women writers sans peer, ne plus ultra, primus inter pares. No other women writers have come even close to these three.
“That of course,†I cautioned, “is by putting Mari Sandoz on the shelf, her own distinct place.â€
I’ve done this before, because there are certain “greatest this†or “greatest that†which deserve their own individual place, too good to be in competition with anybody or anything.
In music, for example, with all of its own “greatest this†or “greatest that,†one is compelled to put the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, on the shelf, out of contention, because there’s nothing in the world impressive enough with which it may be compared.
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“The first was Rebecca West, whose writing and whose wit dripped with cerebrality.
“The second was Barbara Tuchman, surely one of the most thorough writers ever.
“And the third is Doris Kearns Goodwin, the only writer of a biography of Lyndon Johnson that treated him fairly and compassionately; also Wait Till Next Summer, about her girlhood being a New York baseball fan.
“Now, if Ruth Bader Ginsberg had kept up her writing about growing up Jewish in New York City, instead of throwing away her talents in law school, and gone on to become the Head Patroness of abortion on the Supreme Court, she’d be on the list too.
“I dunno why people with a remarkable talent in something chose to not use it, and go on into something for which they’re considerably less gifted.â€
to be continued
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After watching a campaign speech by a certain candidate broadcast live on youtube, I went to the bar in town, to see if anything was going on, as there was nothing going on here. The guest is still up in South Dakota.
The property caretaker was there, with a couple of his friends, and so I joined them, even though I don’t drink, and they do. Lots.
Some time during the course of the conversation, the property caretaker mentioned I was engaged in improving the mental, intellectual, and spiritual state of a guest out here, much in the manner of Henry Higgins remodeling Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
He commented the guest keeps a notebook, in which he enters lists of things I assure him it’s important to know, if he wishes to attain class and taste.
It’s a big job, I admitted, “but the kidâ€â€”actually he’s 28 years old—“has the talent for it. If he wants taste and class and grace and manners badly enough, he’ll get them.
“Which would be remarkable considering his background, in which he makes Tobacco Road look Country Club.â€
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The property caretaker mentioned that I itemize for him lists of “great†things, but then suddenly out of the thin air changed the subject. “You know your history," he said; “what was the greatest football game, ever, that was played?â€
Oh man, that’s easier than strawberries-and-cream, I replied.
“The greatest football game, ever, was Texas at Arkansas in 1969. Texas won that game 15-14, and it was a stellar example of what happens when an irresistible force runs into an immoveable object.
“There’s never, before or after, been a game as great as that one; no other game’s even come close.â€
Well, this of course is Nebraska, and so inevitably someone pointed out the game where Nebraska played at Oklahoma in 1971, the alleged “Game of the Century.â€
“It wasn’t, though,†I said; “we were expected to beat Oklahoma, and we did, 35-31. A game with an already-expected outcome is hardly a history-making game.
“This ‘Game of the Century’ was just so much television hype and hoopla.
“In fact, I’ve always considered the Oklahoma-at-Nebraska game in 1978 as a greater game than the one seven years earlier. Oklahoma was expected to win that game, but we did, 17-14, when Oklahoma’s Billy Sims fumbled the football on the Nebraska three-yard line with just seconds to go in the game, and Nebraska recovered it.
“That was an unexpected outcome, so that was a great game, greater than the ‘Game of the Century’ in 1971.â€
to be continued
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I went to town this morning to speak with the brother-in-law of the guest, asking him to convey a message, as obviously I can’t do it myself, unable to use a telephone.
“I don’t know what’s going on, and it’s probably not any of my business anyway, but something really odd happened during the middle of the night, and I think he ought to know about it.
“I was sleeping when the cats began making a ruckus—you know of course that because I’m not a cat person, I’ve always trained the cats as if they were dogs—indicating to me there was some mischief afoot somewhere on the property.
“As I didn’t want to give any clues I was awake and alert, I got up in the darkness and found the 1-3/8†S/K adjustable wrench with the 17†handle in the drawer of the bedside table, and walked around, checking the inside of the house.
“I didn’t see anything until I was in the living room, and caught, through the picture-window, a flicker of movement on the front porch.
“So I walked over to the front door, and as I opened it, also turned on the porch light.
“There were three guys there, and I’d caught them by surprise, because they didn’t move, just standing there and staring.
“’May I help you, gentlemen?’ I asked, but then they suddenly ran off the front porch down onto the front lawn, got into a car and drove away.
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“By then, I’d turned on the yard lights, which as you know are pretty bright, and saw that the car had license plates—I wasn’t quick enough to get any number, though—from the blue state where your wife and her brother had been born and raised.
“Now, your brother-in-law told me once that there were ‘some people’ ‘after him,’ so I think he needs to know about this before returning here from South Dakota.
“I have no idea why they’d be ‘after him,’ but they didn’t strike me as especially friendly.â€
“That’s good, you scared them off,†the brother-in-law said; “they saw you, and got scared.â€
Thank you, I’m flattered, I said, “but I have no idea how I might’ve scared them. It was probably the death-wielding wrench I was carrying, although there didn’t seem to be enough time for them to absorb what it was.â€
“Good God, man, you’re the most fearless, the most confident, person around,†he replied. “You didn’t say anything about getting dressed when the cats woke you up.â€
I blushed.
“It’s your boldness, your sheer audacity, your brazen impudence, that scares them.â€
Oh, I said.
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Okay, he said, he’d pass on the message, and if given any information that would be illuminating for me, he’d pass that on to me, too.
“But really, the wife was afraid, when you agreed to have him for a couple of weeks, that you’d care too much—‘he’s a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet,’ she said, ‘a saint, a friend of the friendless and taker-in of the abandoned, franksolich can’t help himself, caring.'
"After all, he’s been a lot of trouble for people all his life, and he’s queer besides.â€
I begged to differ on the first point, although admittedly he’s been around here only about a week.
“Really,†I said, “after speaking with your wife, I’d been set for all sorts of problems—nothing which I couldn’t handle, though—but for whatever reasons, there haven’t been any problems at all.â€
to be continued
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I went to the big city to have lunch with the former business partner. I live about forty miles east of the big city, while he lives about 200 miles west of it, about halfway from here to dutch508’s vast cattle barony on the western fringe of the Sandhills of Nebraska.
I say “former†because after the heart attack a year and a half ago, I had to fold up my cards, cash in my chips, in the endeavor. I felt badly about it, because while it contributed only a minuscule portion to his own income (he does two other things, each of them larger than this ever was), it was a major part of mine.
But well, things happen. All one can do is shrug the shoulders and move on.
He brought with him a DVD of the music of Mozart, which flattered me much. He’d found it among other things at an auction, and thought it wasn’t any big deal, but I reminded him it is; “I could go bankrupt buying all the DVDs I’d like to get before I die.
“The day before yesterday, I finally got around to ordering the DVD for the 1960 NBC television production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, starring Groucho Marx and Helen Traubel—best always to wait for the income to flow in, before the money flows out again—and in theory, it’s supposed to arrive here next Wednesday, the day after the elections.â€
https://youtu.be/idyOV6XoKmY
He inquired about the primitives. Not that he cares about them, but like me wishes they’d all die.
“You know, I’ve never in my life,†I told him, “seen a group of people so persistently and muleheadly stick with ideas and notions that are decades old, long past and gone. It’s like you and I are living in the twenty-tens, and they’re still mired down in the nineteen-sixties.
“They still, for example, romanticize themselves as rebels, revolutionaries, counter-culture, anti-establishment, against ‘the Man,’ non-conformists, iconoclasts.
“Well, they once were…..a whooping fifty years ago.
“Democrats, liberals, and primitives have been the Establishment, the Man, for some decades now; my guess is since the mid-term elections of 1974, which ousted the last bastions of WASPery.
“Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew, Lyndon Johnson, Curtis LeMay, the Rockefellers, Sam Yorty, John Wayne, &c., &c., &c., have all been dead and buried a long time now.
“The national defense outlays, more than two-thirds of federal expenditures under their idol the dead Kennedy and their demon Lyndon, hardly makes up pocket-change in today’s defense outlays, but yet they persist in believing it’s the main component of governmental spending and can be cut down considerably so they can get more free things.
“I swear, their brain-cells are petrified.
“Everything on the hippie agenda of the 1960s was either legal or at least socially-respectable, by 1980.
“They’ve had their way more than the past forty years, in addition to their total takeover of the news media, academia, the bureaucrats, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and popular culture.
“They’ve been the Establishment, the Man, far too long now, and decent and civilized people the outsiders, the non-conformists, the counter-culture. My God, it’s nearly an act of sedition to have a son in the Boy Scouts or a daughter attend home economics courses in high school these days, brazen rebellion to be monogamous or to work for a living.
“As an outsider, as a rebel, as anti-establishment, I think it’s high time the Old Order, the Democrats, liberals, and primitives, got sic transit gloria mundied, consigned to the dustbin of history while a new society, a society built upon decency and civility, the rule of law, evolves.
“And we’re probably going to start seeing that on Tuesday, although there’s so much shit to get rid of, it’s surely going to take years and years; after all, it takes much longer to build, than to destroy.â€
to be continued
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Being bored out here, I went to the bar in town to see if anything interesting was happening. There was a time I went to the bar only to pick up an order of my usual to bring back here, but since the heart attack eighteen months ago, it seems as if I spend more time there than someone who actually drinks.
I suspect it’s a perhaps unreasonable—but very real—fear of being alone when the cardiac organ throws a temper tantrum and I’d have to deal with it all by myself, as I did six years ago when the esophagus exploded. I’ve always handled such personal crises when alone, but really, it’s better that if one’s going to have one of them, that someone else is around too.
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There were a lot of people there, mostly grousing about our loss to Ohio State in football, and such a lopsided loss it was, 88-3 or something like that. After it got way up to 62-3 I quit caring, and Ohio State probably scored a bunch more times.
“You know, do we have a right to feel sorry for ourselves?†I asked. “I think we brought this all upon ourselves fifteen years ago, when we let the then-athletic director fire the then-winningest coach in college football.
“We had the finest football possible, but weren’t grateful. It wasn't enough. We wanted more.
“Of course, I can exclude myself and some other Nebraskans from the blame; we weren’t the ones wanting anything to change, and we weren’t the ones all agog and excited about what all these new people were going to bring to Nebraska football.
“Keep in mind that for more than forty years Nebraska, then the smallest, tiniest, state in the union with a major college football team, was the terror of the gridiron. Big blue states such as California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, quailed in horror at any prospects of playing little itty-bitty red Nebraska.
“But then about twenty years ago, television, and Nebraskans who wanted us to be hip, trendy, cool, with it, just like everybody else, started complaining, ‘oh, it’s so old-fashioned the way Nebraska plays football; it’s boring, and we want to see something different, something new.’
“Never mind that Nebraska won tons of football games—against much larger states with many more people and vastly more resources—being old-fashioned and boring.
“Well, here we are…..â€
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The brother-in-law of the guest came in, obviously having been out looking for me. Because franksolich is unreachable by telephone, one has to go out and look for me. But it works the other way around too; when I’m looking for someone, I have to go out and physically hunt-and-search.
I figured he’d want to pull me aside and tell me what was up, but instead, in front of the large assembled crowd, he announced, “I talked with him [the guest, who’s up in South Dakota at the moment], give him your details, and then he gave me his.
“You don’t want to mess with them; they’re bad news. Since they know where you live, you can’t stay out there, you’ve got to go somewhere else. These aren’t nice guys—“
I looked at him as if he were Bozo from Outer Space.
“Now, why would they have anything against me?†I asked; “they’re trying to get [the guest], not me. As long as he’s safely up in South Dakota, they aren’t going to bother with me.â€
to be continued
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“How many guns do you have out there?†I was asked, by someone sitting across the table.
I looked at him as if he were Bozo from Outer Space; obviously he didn’t know me.
None, I replied; it’s probably the biggest square mileage of gun-free in the whole county.
However, I went on, “that’s not because I’m anti-gun; far from it. In fact, I’m more a friend of the Second Amendment than even owners of firearms. And owners of firearms are free to bring and use their own personal implements out there, no problem.
“It’s just a ‘personal preference’ thing; I don’t know a damned thing about using a gun, and I suspect that given my temperament, I’d be useless trying to use one. I don’t have the patience; when dealing with a difficult or hostile person, I’d just as soon get up close and personal as quickly as possible, and start pounding.
“I’m a close-quarters brawler, not a from-a-distance marksman.
“My weapon for self-defense is a 1-3/8†S/K adjustable wrench with a 17†handle and, as I know how to use it, am comfortable using it, I suspect I’d be far more lethal, if I had to be, with that, than someone with a gun.â€
These are my people, and I love them dearly, but some of them irritate me, when they insist a firearm’s the only effective means of self-defense. To each his own; whatever works, and whatever one’s most comfortable and competent using.
“What about him?†I was asked, the question referring to the guest.
He’s not around right now I said, “and if he were, well, just as he’s not allowed to drive a motor vehicle, under the conditions of his release back where he’s from, he’s not allowed to carry and use firearms.
“But as long as he’s far away from them, and from me, neither he nor I have anything to worry about.â€
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“Why’d you come back?†I asked the next morning, seeing him sitting in the kitchen
“I was afraid you’d be in some sort of danger, and thought I needed to be here,†he responded.
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Great, I thought; he’d jumped from the frying-pan into the fire, and at the same time shoved me off the kitchen counter onto the stove.
But what’s done can’t be undone, so one might as well accept, adapt, and move on.
As we were dining on breakfast—he made it, eggs over medium, whole wheat toast, hash browns heaped with sour cream, and strips of bacon very well done—he pulled out his little spiral notebook and turned to the page headed ‘facts a person with taste and class would know.’
“You said that St. Jerome, a guy from the fourth century anno domini, was the first person to read without moving his lips.â€
Uh huh, I replied, “he was.â€
“But how do you know that?†he asked.
“It was from a New Yorker magazine of the 1930s,†I said; “when I was a kid, I used to collect and read ancient magazines, and while Time was my favorite, the New Yorker ranked up there too. I used to buy them if I could, but most of the time, people cleaning out their basements, attics, and garages just gave them to me.
“I practically grew up on 1920s editions of the American Mercury, Liberty, and the Literary Digest; ate them up, every word of them.â€
“But how would the New Yorker know this?†he asked. “It seems questionable; why would you believe them so blindly?â€
“I believe it because if it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t have appeared in the New Yorker.
“Just as with Time magazine under Henry Luce 1923-1964, the New Yorker under Harold Ross 1925-1951 was never known to print an untruth.
“Henry Luce of course was famous for the use of denigrative adjectives, especially for people he didn’t like, but that had nothing to do with whether or not he was telling the truth. Henry Luce may have expressed opinions, but he never lied.
“The news media’s changed considerably since then.
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“Both Luce at Time and Ross at the New Yorker kept on their staffs dozens and scores of college coeds, sorority girls from the fancy eastern women’s colleges such as Radcliffe, Vassar, Briarcliff, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and somesuch. They were usually daughters of friends of theirs, and their job was to check all statements a writer made, to be sure the writer had related all the facts correctly.
“Which they’d indicate by making a circle above the appropriate word or phrase. If all the words of an article didn't have circles above them, the foreman in the printing shop couldn't put it on the presses.
“If they rejected a word or phrase as being untrue, the writer, no matter how ‘big’ and famous, had to rewrite it, to make it true.
“These fact-checkers, shy modest slim 19- and 20-year-old girls, wielded enormous power over some of the biggest names and egos in the literary and journalism worlds of the time.
“Most of the time, a writer, usually someone left-leaning, and usually one of the blowhards with too high of an opinion of himself and his talents, would rage and storm about having to re-write something to make it true, but whatever one of these young women said went, and that was that.
“Those skirt-wearing fact-checkers were good. So if it was in Time magazine or the New Yorker during the 1920s and 1930s, it was undeniably true, as true as if God had said it.
“I dunno the source of the fact that St. Jerome was the first person able to read without moving his lips, but as it'd been checked out and because it’d been allowed to appear in that magazine, it’s true, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.â€
to be continued
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“Whoa, you’re all tensed up,†the neighbor’s wife said. “I’ve never seen you this tight before.â€
I was in the kitchen of their house, where I’d gone and taken off my shirt, bending with my elbows on the table, so she could massage the stiffness out of my neck and shoulders.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/autumn2016/driveway04_zpskm0bvmsy.jpg) (http://s1100.photobucket.com/user/Eferrari/media/autumn2016/driveway04_zpskm0bvmsy.jpg.html)
“I’ll bet it’s the elections,†she added; “everybody’s all worried about them. It’s a good thing they’ll be over tomorrow, and life can get back to normal.â€
No, it’s not the elections, I told her. “I got an e-mail from amazon.com this morning telling me that the DVD of Groucho Marx and Helen Traubel starring in The Mikado—a television special from 1960—had arrived to the post office in town. This was two days earlier than they’d promised.
“The only thing of it available on youtube is a single song, and I’ve been anxious to get the whole thing, to see if I remembered the comic opera correctly.
“I did. It’s fifty-two minutes long, as the original show had been—meaning it was considerably cut down from the real two hours and some minutes it takes to perform in its entirety—and I played it four times, sitting ramrod straight in front of the computer so as to not miss a single thing because I moved around.
“So now I’m stiff and sore again.â€
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“Well, how are you feeling about the elections?†she asked, returning to that.
“As usual, while a little tiny bit concerned, for the most part laid back, relaxed, mellow.
“Whatever happens, happens, and one can’t do a damned thing about it.
“It’s far more important to be prepared to react in the best possible manner, to whatever happens, than it is to worry about what’s going to happen.
“Win or lose, I suspect franksolich is all set to react appropriately.â€
You know, I said, “I wish people—which includes my own people—would stop allowing the news media and popular sentiment dictate how they feel about things—pessimistic or optimistic, negatively or positively, melancholy or joyous.
“They need to evaluate information and speculate outcomes themselves.
“I can’t tell you how many times the past few months I’ve heard, especially from our side, ‘oh, I’m so worried’ or ‘oh, we’re going to lose’ or ‘it’s no good, there’s no hope.’ And then upon inquiring why they felt that way, it turned out they were allowing the news media and popular sentiment to dictate to them how they were supposed to feel.
“I’m the only person I know—the sole solitary person—whose feelings about the election, and speculations about its outcome were based upon my own brain, independent of pollution by pundidiots, pollsters, and prophets.
“Of course, because I don’t do television or radio, that’s easy for me to do, coming to my own conclusions without being influenced by other, most likely selfish special, interests who want me to think their way.
“There’s an advantage to living in a world where one doesn’t hear anything, and has to make judgements based only upon what one sees.
“I’m not going to tell what I’ve concluded, only to say that I’m defiantly relaxed, laid back, and mellow about the whole thing.â€
to be continued