come spring, come the primitives

[franksolich]

The two guys of Texan derivation, short little guys with skin a certain tertiary color, were here this morning, once again putting in a new frame for the front door.

I’ve known of them for a while, as they’re locally famous for the quality of their craftsmanship; Joe Gomez and Jose Lopez, who go about their business as if a couple of animated Mexican jumping-beans.

If something’s going to take an hour for them to do, that’s all they charge for; not being primitive craftsmen, they don’t stretch it to, and charge for, two hours.  Or smoke dope on the job.

The last time they installed a new door-frame, it was cold, dark, and after supper, and they were in a hurry.  And so other than brief “hello”s and “goodbye”s, we hadn’t said much to each other.

This time around, while it’s still bitterly cold and the wind blowing, at least the sun was out.

I was asked if I’d mind if they played their mariachi music while they worked; “musica, you know, makes for fast and merry work, bueno work.”

Apparently most of their customers don’t care for it.

Even though I was sitting at the computer only a few feet away, being deaf, I said yeah, sure, no problem, whatever.

So they set one of those gigantic “ghetto blasters” on the edge of the dining room table, and went to work.

It didn’t bother me, but it must’ve been loud, as all the cats hightailed outdoors, into the cold, to get away from it.

- - - - - - - - - -

When taking a short break to smoke cigarettes, Joe, the taller of the two, informed me that he and his partner Jose had been hired by the property caretaker, when the weather gets better and the ground more malleable, to install the posts, motion sensors, and wiring around the house, so as to alert me that there’s somebody out there.

Apparently the wiring from post to post, and then to the house, is supposed to be all underground, which means the caretaker doesn’t have time himself to do it.

The caretaker’d probably already told me this, but I wasn’t paying attention.

“This place needs to be safe for you,” Joe said.

I inquired as to how he’d possibly know it “needs” to be safe, and much to my astonishment, learned that franksolich is a “celebrity” of sorts in the Texas-derived community in the big city.

I used to do income taxes for many who lived there, but had no idea, and that was a long time ago.

I was advised that I’m usually known as el jefe sordo, “the deaf chief,“ but among many of the women, el senor bonito y virilo.

Nothing’s to be misconstrued about that second appellation, especially by lurking and stalking primitives with their minds in the gutter.

Unlike in blue states and blue cities, those of Texan derivation around here tend to be modest, unassuming, law-abiding, religiously observant, gainfully employed, whose children are prominent on the honor rolls of schools.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Once the motion sensors are set up and operating, you’ll be safe,” Joe assured me again.

“I’m keeping an open mind,” I said, “but we’ll see.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“You have a whole chapter on door-knobs and door-latches in the socialist paradises,” the neighbor’s wife said, when she was here late this afternoon.

“And another whole chapter on how the peasants butchered hogs.

“And this, on the shapes and sizes of canes and crutches over there; a whole chapter.

“You didn’t miss anything.”

Thank you, I smiled.  “I tried to keep good notes.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It seems, though, you’re not writing this in any systematic way.”

I’m not, I said; “I just take what’s on top of a pile, and write.

“When it’s going to come to arranging it all in chronological order, I’ll just arrange the notes and letters in numerical order, and go from there.

“As you can see, I numbered every slip of paper I mailed back here--this letter to your husband--this was before you met--for example has numbers 4078, 4079, 4080, and 4081.

“I numbered everything I mailed, beginning with ‘1,’ so when I got back, I’d be able to determine if everything was there, or if something was missing.

“Mirabile dictu, after waiting a year after I’d gotten back to get all of them, I had in fact gotten all of them, every single one of them, although not in the order they’d been mailed, and of course some took its time getting here.

“I mailed the last package of notes and letters two weeks before I left, after which I just kept the people and events in my head, for writing down after I got back.”

“What was the final ’serial number’?” she asked.

I looked; “6178; that was it, and they’re all here.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I don’t suppose you’ve settled on a title yet, given that Cowboy Among the Reds is out,” she commented.

“Yeah, that, and Lamb Among Wolves is out too,” I said.

“Earlier today, I thought about The Socialist Paradises on Less Than a Dollar a Day, because it’s evolving sort of guidebook-ish, but that’s rather frivolous, and this is going to be no frivolous literary work; it‘ll outsell Bill‘s and nadin‘s books by a bunch.”

“I keep thinking about what you said earlier,” the neighbor’s wife said; “that quote from that old radio speech.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about taking a part of that too, from George VI’s message to the people of the British Empire on Christmas Day 1939, the first year of the second world war.

“It’s seared in my memory--I asked the man at the gate for a lamp, so that I may see my way through the darkness that lies ahead.

“And then God said, ‘Take My Hand, and I will guide you through the darkness better than any seen way.’

“There’s a lot class and style in that, but it’s way too long for a title, and I can’t think of any way to shorten it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So now I’m thinking of what I said to the man behind the desk at the American embassy the morning I was found, my sixth day there.

“’Well, better a bad start and a good finish, than a good start but a bad finish,’ I said, which seemed to cause him some Vesuvian tremors, but then he just told me there was a driver, waiting to take me to where I was supposed to have been six days earlier.

“If that wasn’t prophetic, I don’t know what it was.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“What made you change your mind about the book?” the business partner asked me.  “I agree with it, I wholeheartedly agree with it, but usually it takes a force majeure to get you to change your mind.

“And also, besides getting an agent to sell it to some reputable publisher, I think some of your ‘profiles,’ or ‘character sketches,’ as you call them, are by themselves worthy of individual magazine articles.”

Brushing his second comment aside, I said, “What made me change my mind was that it slowly dawned upon me that the vanity-book publishers were trying to sell me more than what I wanted to buy.

“I stated exactly what I wanted, no more, no less, and that was it.

“I’ve always been distrustful of people trying to sell me something I’m not looking around to buy, or trying to sell me something that’s more than I want to buy.

“You know, I have this reputation of being an Innocent, naïve and not especially bright and too trusting and gullible.

“But if so, how come I’ve never been ’taken’?  How come I’ve never been bilked out of a cent--and as you know, I’ve never in my life accepted a bum check.

“Or ended up with less than what I’d paid for it.”

The business partner agreed I had a point.

- - - - - - - - - -

“I suspect that because being deaf, I’ve always been insulated from the constant yimmer-yammer about ‘buy this’ or ‘buy that,’ about getting things just because ‘everybody else’ has them, about having this thing or that thing would make me ‘the coolest kid on the block,’ incessant chatter telling me what I ‘need.’

“I’m really surprised how much hearing people are bombarded with this shit.

“And I suppose having grown up without television, while that kept me out of the cultural mainstream of society, it also saved me from other people making up my mind for me.

“If I were a hearing person, I’d really resent it; after all, I don’t need anybody to tell me what I ‘need’ or ‘want.’  I already know myself, what I need or want.

“And once I decide what I need or want, I go out looking for someone who has it for sale, at a price I’m able or willing to pay.”

“A hard sell,” the business partner said.

“No, not a ‘hard sell’ at all,” I replied; “if someone tries to sell me something I’m not looking for, I’m a ‘no sell.’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It’s pathetic, watching primitives such as Atman or Skippy, succumbing to bandishments to buy this or buy that because it’s ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ or ‘trendy’ or ‘with it’ or ‘the latest thing’ or ‘everybody else has it, and so you need it too.’

“It’s as if they have no minds of their own.

“And at their advanced ages, it’s especially contemptuous; they’re old enough to make up their own minds, but n-o-o-o-o-o-o, it’s just easier for someone else to make up their minds for them.

“Bah, humbug.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Dude,” the property caretaker said this morning, “you wrote a whole another chapter last night, on…..ice.

“Is there anything you didn’t see over there, and note down?”

Probably lots, I said; “after all, I’m only human with finite resources to see and understand, but as you’ve commented before, I’m uneasy about ice.

“I’ll go a far distance out of my way, to avoid walking on it.

“It’s either the biggest, or the only, phobia I have, a sheer fright and terror of ice.

“Ice almost prevented my going over to the socialist paradises, to see what it was really like.

“And one of the ways it was really like was that, because of a lack of evil capitalist drainage, there was ice all over the place during the winter.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I’d been making plans, and just starting to save money, for a trip there when, on the morning of January 20, 1993--an unhappy date in more than one way--while coming out of a coin-and-stamp store in Lincoln, I slipped on ice.

“Utterly destroying my right elbow.

“I can’t really describe it, the damage, but I can draw a picture of it for you,” after which I did.

“The physicians and surgeons called it ‘a very peculiar break’--and of course the lower arm was completely snapped off the upper arm.

“For whatever reasons, the big strong bones were busted clean off, while the small weak ones held.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“As I worked for an insurance company, and as this was before Hillary and Barry messed with medical insurance, I had state-of-the-art, top-notch, first-rate insurance; it covered everything, 100% of everything.

“The surgeon suggested I have an artificial elbow installed--the cost then being circa $70,000, not including physical therapy.

“At the lower end, he’d offered, but not advised it, simply bolting everything back together, the cost then being circa $6,000, not including physical therapy.

“The problem with that, I’d end up with the right arm permanently bent at a 90-degree angle, and pretty much useless.

“I didn’t like the idea of some fake body part being inside of me--after all, it could go bad and have to be replaced; when the time comes, if possible I’d just as soon go to God with what God gave me.

“Being made fully aware of the consequences, and possessing a clear and competent head, I opted for that, simply bolting it all back together again.

“’Whatever happens, you know I’ll gracefully accept, adapt, and move on,’ I assured the physician and the surgeon.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Naturally, back then as now, others thought I was being incredibly stupid.

“However, they were glad that it put a kabosh on my plans to go over to the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, an enterprise they thought beyond my capabilities to carry off.

“After all, the cripplement was so serious I couldn’t possibly go over there.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Okay, so everything was bolted back together, and, as predicted, the right arm was rigidly, and ostensibly permanently, bent at a right angle.

“However, I was given ‘physical therapy,’ so as to alleviate the pain and to, one hoped, give me at least a little bit of flexibility in the arm.

“’Physical therapy’ was a pain; the place was way over on the other side of Lincoln, cutting out a big chunk of my day, when I’d rather be working.

“And all it was, was keeping the elbow in warm water and massaging it.

“It felt ‘good,’ but it wasn’t curing the problem.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Getting irritated--I wanted to hurry up and get over to the socialist paradises, to see what was going on--I finally went to my physician with an idea.

“’You know, of course, I walk a lot.

“’How about if I started carrying a small empty briefcase in my right hand, and as the flexibility increases, adding weight inside the briefcase, so as to make the arm bendable?’

“Much to my surprise, he instantly agreed.  He admitted that’s usually the best solution anyway, but it’s not generally suggested because most people would rather sit on their asses having the joint gently massaged; after all, it ‘feels good.’

“And so using pain as my guide, I began doing that.

“At first, I carried the empty briefcase, and as that pain lessened, I added half of one of those reddish-brown bricks inside it, and then a full brick, and then a brick and a half, and then two bricks, three bricks, four bricks, five bricks.

“Eight months after all’d been bolted together, I’d regained total 100% complete flexibility in the joint, and unhindered by any cripplement, I was free to take off.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

The property caretaker had Joe and Jose over here in mid-morning, to show them the lay of the land, and what they’re to do about installing the motion-sensors around the house.

Once that’s all set up, apparently this place is to be as secure as Fort Knox, for deaf people, and I can tear down the sheets covering the windows and throw away the door-keys, as I’ll ostensibly always know when someone’s around.

Despite that it’s bitterly cold outside, spring is coming, which inevitably blossoms forth primitives stalking franksolich, and this year, it’s likely to be tons of them.

Admittedly, at times I get weary of it and wish it wasn’t going on, but it’s a job that needs done, exposing the primitives as a public service, for the Good of Humanity.

And as someone has to do it, it might as well be franksolich.

- - - - - - - - - -

The three of them got all done walking around outdoors, and then decided to come inside to warm up.

I’d already anticipated this, and even though I knew they were out there and would want to come in eventually, I kept both the front door and the back door locked, so that the caretaker, who used to have free run of this place, able to come and go at will, would have to ring the door-bell for entry.

This was all his idea anyway, so best he bear the consequences.

The door-bell was “rung,” impatiently so, causing all the ceiling lights in all the rooms inside to flicker on.

I took my time answering it, so the caretaker’d freeze up a little bit more.

- - - - - - - - - -

While the four of us sat around the dining room table, drinking coffee, I mentioned there was a problem.

“I have that one dude, that black guy, in town come out here to mow the grass.

“The posts holding the sensors are going to be an obstruction.”

No they won’t, the caretaker replied; “the posts are to be buried, sticking up out of the ground lower than his blade-level.

“Nothing to mow around at all; he can do as he’s always done.”

Oh.

Then I thought of something else.

“In case you’ve forgotten,” I said, “some people, especially in summer, run around here bare-footed.

“What if someone steps on one, puncturing their foot?”

“You haven’t seen the sensors yet,” he replied; “it’d be no more injurious than stepping on a 1” x 1” sponge.”

Well, damn.

to be continued

[franksolich]

“So…..tell me,” I asked the insurance man, “why is it when one makes a place or a person more safe, more secure, against loss or injury, as recommended by insurance companies…..the claims go up, instead of down?”

He and I were at the bar in town, along with the femme, who’d dropped down from South Dakota for the day, having lunch.

Swede, the cook of Norwegian derivation whose specialty is Italianate cuisine, wasn’t there.  He’d had an argument with his wife, who actually owns the bar, and had taken on a couple of long-haul truck-driving jobs, so as to be away for a few days.

So in his place, Giselde, the cook of Polish derivation whose specialty is Chinese chow, was the head chef.

She’s an older heavy-set woman, built like a refrigerator, and unlike Swede, doesn’t throw a tantrum because I order “only” a hamburger, well done, pressed down hard on the grill so as to squeeze out every drop of grease.

It’s a lot easier for her to make, than what she usually has to make for other people.

Something Swede’s never seemed to understand.

- - - - - - - - - -

“I’ve lived there since the autumn of 2005,” I continued, “about the same time the scam that rocked the internet finally wound down.

“Up until winter of this year, despite that I kept the place wide open, unlocked, unprotected, unmonitored, there was never any damage to property or to my person…..and hence no insurance claims.”

The owners of the property carry insurance on the property, and it’s a solid policy, covering everything but Acts of God.  Renter’s insurance is available to me, but I don’t have it, as there’s nothing out here to fret about, if it’s damaged or stolen.

All things valuable to me, sentimentally or in the pecuniary sense, are kept elsewhere.  What’s kept in my place wouldn’t bring two hundred bucks in a garage sale.

- - - - - - - - - -

“And then suddenly [the property caretaker], the owners, and you decided that since I’m deaf, I’m defenseless against malicious intruders, unaware that they’re around unless they’re right in front of my face, the property and I need ‘protected.’

“And so all this security stuff, none of cheap, has been, or is being, put in.

“In two weeks, because the front door was locked, two times the door and the door-frame were substantially damaged, necessitating total replacement.

“The front door had never suffered even a scratch, when I’d left it unlocked…..all those years.

“If someone came in, while I was sleeping or my back turned at the front door or away, they’d look around, and seeing there was nothing worth stealing, they’d then just leave, doing no damage at all.

“Well, now there’s two claims for your company to pay, so far four thousand bucks and rising.

“And there could’ve been a third claim, involving the back door, but something, whatever it was, scared that malicious intruder away, and the only way we knew he’d been there was because he’d dropped his axe in the snow.”

The insurance man and the femme looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space, so I gave it up.

It’s not only primitives who don’t understand common sense.

- - - - - - - - - -

Changing the subject, the insurance man said he was reading the series of chapters on conditions in the armies of the socialist paradises, as I observed them twenty years ago.

“Maybe it’s different now--Oh God, I hope it’s different--but it was a crime against humanity back then,” I said.

“One time, I was discussing a letter that had appeared in a newspaper--Ukraine, unlike Russia, had a free and untrammeled and anarchistic press--from a young woman whose two brothers, close in age, had died during ‘basic training.’

“One of them from pneumonia that wasn’t treated, and the second one from a beating by fellow conscripts.

“I was told it happened ‘all the time,’ conscripts dying during basic training.

“I was also told that 10% fatalities during basic training was customary and tolerable, although the officer admitted it’d get rather dicey if it were higher than that, becoming a public-relations problem.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Okay, having been a professional civilian all my life, that was just a number that didn’t mean anything in particular to me.

“I just made a note of it, and forgot all about it, until I came back home.

“One time, when talking with a nephew who’d been in the National Guard, I mentioned that statistic.

“He was stunned, reminding me that nothing more than zero percent fatalities during basic training is ‘tolerated’ in the American army, and probably the same for all western armies.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Borscht?” the neighbor exclaimed.

“You managed to write a whole chapter about borscht, something that people around here might have heard of, but’ve never seen?”

I know, I know, I said.  “I never in my life saw real live borscht until my first day in the socialist paradises; it was in fact the first thing I had to eat there.

“When I was left at that woman’s place--the woman at the other end of the transposed telephone number--she pulled me into the kitchen, set me down, and presented me with a bowl of borscht.

“She didn’t know English, but indicated I was to ‘eat.’

“So to be polite, I ate, while she started crying, and cried all during the time I ate.

“I never knew what was up with that.  As you know, a couple of years after I came back here, I managed to track her down, and wrote her.  She wrote me back, explaining things about that first day I didn’t know.

“But she never told me why she was crying like that.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“Anyway, yeah, borscht.

“To me, it’d always just been a word, and I assumed, some sort of soup.  I had no idea what it really was, although one of those very few times I’ve assumed right, this was one of them.

“When I was w-a-a-a-a-y little, growing up alongside the verdant Platte River of Nebraska, years before we finally moved to God’s country, the Sandhills, for whatever reasons, I developed a liking for eastern European Yiddish folklore--children’s versions of the stories, at first, and then the full adult versions.

“Now, there were no Hebraic or Yiddish or eastern European influences anywhere within 300 miles of us--it was wholly Danish--no one, least of all myself, ever knew how I’d gotten interested in such an alien subject.

“But happily, my parents catered to this taste anyway, always supplying me with books of Yiddish folklore they’d gotten during trips to Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago, and Denver.

“Since I was born deaf, they had no idea how I’d turn out, and were greatly heartened that I’d shown an interest in something literary.  It didn’t matter to them what it was, just so it betrayed some intellectual animation in me.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I was familiar with the word ‘borscht’ while my peers were still struggling through the first Dick and Jane books.

“Ultimately, I associated it with Grossinger’s in the Catskills of New York, and I aspired to have my first bowl of borscht there.

“It wasn’t an impossible dream, as my mother’s family was from near that area, although on the Pennsylvania side, and during vacations, we may’ve even driven past it, but I didn’t know it.

“For me, Grossinger’s was the ne plus ultra, the sans peer, of the ideal place to be.  Other kids could have Disneyland or Coney Island, but I wanted to be at Grossinger’s.

“To me, Grossinger’s seemed to be where it was at; all the right people, all the best people, all the stylish people, all the well-bred people, all the people one needed to know.

“I never did get there, but I still hope some day to sit down and have a bowl of borscht at Grossinger’s.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“In the socialist paradises, I learned that borscht was pretty much whatever one wished to call borscht.

“But generally, usually, most of the time, it was a soup based upon beets, cabbage, and bits of carrots.  And the cook’s own spices and seasonings.

“That was fine with me, and as long as I got to see it being prepared, so no suspicious ingredients would be put into it, I dined on it with gusto.

“But some perversely added potatoes.  I got nothing against potatoes, but to me, it seemed to change borscht from ’good’ to ’merely palatable.’

“If meat was in it, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot primitive.

“The meat usually had fat on it, so no way.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well, it was difficult to get ’basic’ borscht, as the workers and peasants thought their guest needed something fancier.

“Which always made me uncomfortable; while I could choke down borscht with potatoes, borscht with meat--meat with fat on it--was absolutely out of the question.

“But my hosts would feel insulted if I didn’t accept their hospitality, and so I was always between a rock and a hard place.

“Ultimately, I learned that I could get away with simply dipping pieces of brown bread into the liquid of the soup, dining on that, and as everybody else was getting drunker and drunker, they usually didn’t notice.”

to be continued

[Chris_]

But generally, usually, most of the time, it was a soup based upon beets, cabbage, and bits of carrots.

The purple/red color always gave it away.  I've never had it, but assumed it was some sort of beet soup.

[franksolich]

“That was one really screwed-up country,” the neighbor’s older brother said, as we drove over the cold dark Sandhills, going out to tend to some cattle.

“It sure beat anything I saw in Asia, Africa, and South America.

“Unlike those places I‘ve been, they’d had easy access, at least geographically, to western evolution and development, for more than a hundred years before you went there--”

“Yeah,” I interrupted; “before I went over there, I read an article in Time magazine or something, that said Ukraine, for example, had the ’capability’ to be the fifth-richest country in the world, but it was mired near the bottom, according to something else I’d read, at the time being 182nd out of 185 nations.

“Of course, Time, or whatever magazine it was, being left-slanted, didn’t state the obvious conclusion; that this is what happens when socialists try to invent an ‘ideal society,’ rather than letting it naturally evolve on its own.

“Kind of the same thing as Bill’s Mama Raven trying to re-mold him into her idea of the ‘perfect she-man,’ suppressing his normal and inevitable instincts as a boy, rather than just letting him evolve and develop naturally as his male genetics inclined him.

“And we all know how that turned out.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Their national anthem’s weird,” the neighbor’s older brother said.

“Ukraine is not dead yet--now, that’s real inspiring.”

“Don’t forget,” I added, “that their national hero was actually a Pole--and that historically, Poland and Ukraine had always been hostile to each other.

“It was weird,” I said; “the Russians, especially after the socialists took over, used to call Ukrainians their ‘little brothers.’

“Actually, Ukraine was the mother of Russia, from whom Russia and Russians derived, and everybody knew this, but to say so, well, one instantly went from being a Ukrainian to being a Siberian.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“When I was over there, there was some controversy about the new leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox church. 

“After the collapse of the socialists, the church, having before been simply the Russian Orthodox church, split up into various national groups.

“The eastern Orthodox churches are all one and the same--the same beliefs, the same practices--but for about a thousand years, they’d tended to self-identify with a certain country, or area.

“So…..there was now the Ukrainian Orthodox church, and they needed a leader.

“They couldn’t find anybody native to run their church, so they looked outside to find one, which they did.

“He’d been born a Latvian, baptized a Lutheran, consecrated a Russian Orthodox priest, spent most of his professional life exiled in faraway Islamic Kazakhstan, was rumored to be a secret Roman Catholic--and now he was head of the Ukrainian Orthodox church.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“God and religion were big deals over there, and unhappily for the Godless socialists, inextirpable. 

“Which is why I’ve written drafts for four chapters alone, about the subject.

“When the Gallup pollsters went over there in 1992, they found out that after seventy-five years--three whole generations of socialist indoctrination and ‘realism’--a larger percentage of the workers and peasants were ‘believers,’ than had been before 1917, when ‘membership’ had been pretty much compulsory.

“Too bad for the socialists; God always wins out, in the end.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I’d be as paranoid as Hell,” the business partner said, “if I wasn’t aware of things happening behind my back, or on both sides.

“I’d be so paranoid they’d have to put me away.

“But you run around without seeming to care; how do deaf people do that, so indifferent about dangers and perils that might be out there, that they‘re not aware of?”

“Might be out there,” I answered.

“And besides, deaf people are paranoid as Hell.

“They hide behind locked doors and closed curtains, they rarely venture out unless with somebody else, they’re afraid of strangers, they have lousy eye-contact, and they look down and mumble.

“Oops, I guess I just described the primitives on Skins’s island too.

“And besides,” I told him, “remember, franksolich is no ordinary deaf person.  I can‘t hear a damned thing just like the rest of them, but, well, I manage.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Like last June,” the business partner said, “when you were caught right in between two tornadoes.

“I could almost hear you say, ‘oh whoop-whoop-whoop-de-do.’ right as they passed you by, so close you could almost spread your arms and touch both of them.”

“That’s not exactly the way it happened,” I reminded him.

[Exactly what happened was told in the Sandhills forum, to keep it away from giving too much information to primitives stalking franksolich; there’s a nice photograph of the tandem tornadoes there too, but not taken by me, who was right exactly in between the two funnels.  Too bad for the primitives stalking franksolich.]

“I didn’t see them because it was as dark as midnight at mid-day and the rain was pouring down too hard.  One couldn’t see a thing.

“Well, storms of this intensity are, uh, commonplace around here, a dime a dozen.  Whoop-whoop-whoop-de-do; no big deal.

“I guess tornadoes make a lot of noise.

“But how would I know that?

“Now, maybe if I’d heard them, I might’ve gotten scared.

“But as far as I could see, it was just another storm, no big deal, nothing to get all agog and excited about.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Sometimes I think you tempt fate too much,” the business partner said.

“Well now,” I replied; “I’ve always been the first one to admit my life’s been ruled by God, and by random chance.

“I’m not sure, but I suspect God keeps me around for entertainment.

“And oh, to torment the primitives, as a public service for the Good of Humanity.

“If God had the least bit of ill-will towards franksolich, I’d be zapped faster than Skippy on Skins’s island could say, ‘But there is no G--oops.’”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“You know,” the neighbor’s older brother said early this morning, while we were driving back from having dealt with some cattle, “I’m starting to think that you’d trust Meyer and Alberto without hesitation…..even after you’d double-crossed them.”

We were driving over the property next to this one, a vast expanse owned by certain interests in New Jersey.

When this area was first settled in 1875, it was owned by a man who’d gambled it away.  The second owner drank it away.  The third owner went mad, and had to be put away.  The fourth owner shot someone, and was sent to prison.  The fifth owner committed suicide.

It wasn’t gaining any reputation as any lucky piece of land when, in the summer of 1948, a big fancy car stopped in front of the bank in town, out from which emerged a prominent lawyer from the big city, a short little guy with Hebraic features, and a tall dark sinister-looking guy obviously of Italianate derivation.

The heirs of the fifth owner were happy to sell it, and it was paid for, in cash.

Meyer and Alberto came out to look at it, and visited the old woman who lived in this place at the time, everyone getting along grandly.

After which the new owners were seen no more.  Alberto died in a barbershop accident in New York City about 1960, and Meyer died about twenty years later.

Two times every year, exactly on time, payment for property taxes arrives at the county courthouse, from a legal firm in New Jersey.

No one knows anything about the current owners, but it’s obviously a good investment for them, as they hang on to it, refusing to sell, per that legal firm back east.

Nothing’s been done with it; it’s just sat idly there since 1948, when Meyer and Alberto gazed upon it.

- - - - - - - - - -

“To anyone reading your upcoming book who doesn’t know you,” the neighbor’s older brother said, “it’s simply not believable that a reasonable person would so blindly trust all these rascals, rogues, and ruffians--and nothing bad happened.

“Those of us who do know you, well, we’ve seen, up close, people you trust, and so know it’s all true.  You trust everybody.”

“Uh, no,“ I corrected him; “I wouldn’t trust the primitives on Skins’s island, not even with an empty and torn paper grocery sack,” I reminded him, “that sordid, sleazy pack of liars, crybabies, snobs, and misfits.

“I wouldn’t trust a primitive, no way.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“And besides,” I pointed out, “I learned early on that I could trust, with utmost confidence, all these strangers who took me to their grandmothers’ villages in the distant isolated areas of the socialist paradises, even if I didn’t know a damned thing about them at first.

“You haven’t read the draft yet, but there’ll be a chapter about that first foray outside of Kiev, to a remote village in northern Ukraine, near the end of my first month there.

“I went there with a 16-year-old kid who wasn’t doing anything else at the time; given the chaos and disorder and lawlessness that then existed, and that he wanted to visit his babushka in the village, it was ideal for a first expedition.

“Especially since he knew how one could ride trains without tickets.

“His English however wasn’t nearly what he’d alleged it to be.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So we rode the trains, fare-free, until about halfway to his village, when lo and behold, one of those one-in-a-thousand things happened.

“There was an inspector on board, and he wanted to see tickets.

“For the kid, the ‘fine’ was about four cents, American, but the inspector, upon looking at me, demanded one hundred dollars.

“Well, he might as well’ve demanded a million bucks, because I had no such money, or prospects of getting it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“At the next stop, we were escorted off the train, and taken to an office in the station, where sat a secret policeman behind a desk.

“Uh oh.

“While I sat there, the policeman, the inspector, and the kid discussed things; about what, I had no idea, other than that it was a pretty animated three-way chitchat, the policeman and the inspector frequently casting dark glances at me.

“All I could do was just sit there twiddling my thumbs and staring up to the ceiling.

“Now, the kid could’ve just abandoned me, a stranger, and gone away, leaving me helpless to my own fate.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“But that didn’t happen; I have no idea what happened.

“The incessant chitter-chatter between the three of them went on for the longest time, but then as the sun went down and it got dark, the policeman inexplicably smiled at me, and pulled a bottle of summhon, homemade vodka, out of a drawer in his desk.

“The kid never explained to me exactly what he’d said--his poor-to-non-existent knowledge of English barred that--but I got the impression he’d made promises that I was later expected to fulfill.

“The four of us had glasses of that god-awful liquid--my first drink of alcohol since March 1987--and we parted ways with much joviality, back-slapping, and goodwill.

“After which we stole rides on the next train, to get to his grandmother’s village.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I never knew what excuses, or explanations were given whenever two of us were in some sort of trouble,” I said.

“They couldn’t have been alleging I was somebody important, because that’d ‘prove’ I had lots and lots of American dollars.

“Somewhere along the line, I got a vague impression they were simply persuasive in describing me as a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one could ever hope to meet.

“And apparently there was something about my appearance, my manner, my body-language, that convinced whatever authority it was, who’d gotten all upset and bent out of shape over me.”

I was having supper at the bar in town, along with the property caretaker and his wife.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Even on my own, I found it very easy to get the workers and peasants to like me.

“I’m not sure what I ever did, but one doesn’t try to ‘figure out’ a gift; one just uses it.

“One time, when I was with someone who knew English competently, I asked, ‘Okay, so you told all these people I was coming to your village--what did they expect to see?’

“’And when I got there, what was their impression of me?’

“I was the first real-life American all of these people had ever seen, as during the socialist era, the peasants had internal passports that forbade them from traveling to big cities, and sharply limited where they could go elsewhere.  For their whole lives.

“So it’s not as if they intercoursed with outsiders that often.

“I was told that while the peasants had television--more televisions than healthy personal waste-elimination facilities--which portrayed Americans in, uh, certain ways, these rustic peasants, unlike Atman and most of his fellow primitives, knew that what was on the screen were all fantasies, nothing real about them.

“And so they had no pre-conceived notions; they’d just wait and see.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Okay, then, what about their impressions after meeting me?

“It seemed to me ‘acceptance’ was immediate; I had no trouble at all immediately being invited into the most intimate aspects of life in the socialist paradises.

“Of course, it helped that I had no camera, and the notes I wrote, I always wrote down later, usually when out of sight.

“There was that irksome ‘initiation’ to prove my American manhood in drinking bouts.

“As I’ve said before, less than half the time, but more than a third of the time, say about 40% of the time, I did end up being the last man standing--and without cheating, as I did when pretending to eat the food--so I represented America well in that department.

“That of course was because I’d enjoyed better medical care all my life, and had grown up healthier than they had, and so could withstand more of this sort of abuse.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“But that surely wasn’t all the reason.

“Because even though those competent at English were still, uh, not that good, I never did receive a decipherable reason why I was so quickly and easily accepted, so heartily liked.

“And so I got to just accepting it without questioning the ‘why’ of it.

“This is what confused me when, years later, I met the primitives on Skins’s island; even though I’m a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet, their dislike of me was obvious, and immediate.

“That really threw me for a loop; such a thing had never happened to me before.

“I guess it goes back to what my father said to me when I was a teenager; that secure, confident, positive people would always be comfortable with me, despite that I’m, uh, ‘different,’ and that only insecure, paranoid, negative, lesser people would find it impossible to like franksolich.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Whoa, a whole chapter on quality control,” the property caretaker said this morning.

“And what’s more, you made it interesting.”

The caretaker was here this morning, fussing and fuming that Joe and Jose couldn’t get started yet on installing the outdoor motion sensors because of the weather.

It’d been bitterly cold the past several days, while today’s forecast to be mellow…..but then snow and bitterly cold weather forecast to come again tomorrow.

And I was fussing and fuming because I’m tired of living as if pent up in a dungeon, what with keeping the doors locked and the windows covered up.   â€œIt’s like living in a dark cave here.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Yeah, I said; “I should’ve noticed it long before, but I wasn’t paying attention, until one day I spied a row of bottles of Stolichnaya vodka lining the barred windows of a kiosk.

“The bottles were all the same size, but whoever filled them did a lousy job.  Some were filled only two-thirds of the way up, others clear up to the brim, and most in between that; irregular quantities.

“I didn’t see any that were filled only half full, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were.

“And the customer, who had to pay the same price no matter how much was in a bottle, had no choice in selecting which one; he had to simply take the bottle the grouchy old babushka deigned to hand him, and that was that.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“And then later I was illuminated that most name-branded vodka wasn’t in fact made by that manufacturer; that it was an inferior, pirated concoction made in some other fraternal socialist paradise.

“The same with cigarettes; I’d smoked cigarettes for more than fifteen years by the time I went to the socialist paradises, but never Marlboros; some other brand.

“I distrusted Marlboros because it’d been so heavily advertised when I was a kid, and thereafter, and so maybe they were popular only because they were advertised, not because they were any good.

“Remember, I’ve never been an Atman or a Skippy, judging a product by what the boob-tube tells them.

“But at the start, I had to buy and smoke Marlboros, because it was the only brand I understood.

“All cigarettes were cheap over there, cheap as dirt.

“But soon thereafter, I learned that the ’Marlboro’ cigarettes were actually inferior, pirated versions of the real thing, made in Poland and Turkey.

“I wasn’t too fond of other countries taking advantage of, and bilking, the workers and peasants, who had so little as it was, and so I switched Belomar Kanals with their unusual cardboard filter-tips.

“Belomar Kanals were made in Russia, not Ukraine, but that was close enough, as Ukraine had no domestic tobacco producer.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The country did however grow a particularly vile sort of tobacco, called mahorka, which was sold only as tobacco, never in cigarettes.

“One had to sprinkle some on a piece of paper, and then roll up the paper.

“Even the peasants loathed it, but during times of financial stress, I had no trouble smoking it.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“It might be different in real life over there now, but sometimes I wonder if boob-tubers realize, when seeing pictures of the riots and war over there now--or in any third- or fourth-world country--that while the clothing might seem similar to what we wear, it’s not.

“It looks nice and new and sleek and durable and all that, but they’re just inferior imitations, made in rogue other-world countries, so flimsy they fade and fall apart after only a couple of washings.

“When I was over there, the big deal was fake ‘Chicago Bulls’ jackets, which to the workers and peasants--and their kids--looked hip, cool, trendy, with it, and ‘American,’ but upon close inspection by someone who’d seen authentic ‘Chicago Bulls’ jackets, these were junk, not destined to last long.

“And as expensive as Hell.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Much to my surprise, apparently the workers and peasants produced some of the best-quality, durable, corduroy in the world--it was a little different from the way we’re used to it, with more space between the ridges in the fabric.

“Clothing made of this rough-and-tough fabric however was usually spurned by the workers and peasants because it was, well, so ’peasant-y’ so backward, so out-of-date.

“They’d wear it only with the utmost reluctance, almost under duress, but conditions at the time were such that nearly everyone was under duress.

“Whenever given the chance, I always traded my American-made, American-quality, pants for this native corduroy, and thought I got the better of the deal; this stuff was good.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Hey, we’ve recovered that package that was taken from your place the other week,” the county sheriff told me when I dropped in for a casual visit.

“It was found in an abandoned car; the plates and the VIN number had been taken off, so nobody has any idea.

“But at least your package, whatever it is, looks unharmed.”

I looked; it was all there, and unopened, with Skippy’s handwritten labels still intact.

I heaved a sigh of relief that nobody had touched it.

- - - - - - - - - -

Leaving it with the sheriff would’ve been a possible solution, but I didn’t want to allege there was a nuclear bomb in it, sent by Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive on Skins’s island, because the package might turn out harmless.

In which case franksolich’d turn out looking like an idiot, and besmirched Skippy’s name, having accused him of attempting harm when he hadn’t.

For all I knew, it might contain a “peace offering,” Skippy apologizing for having denigrated my accuracy in compiling and itemizing information about the primitives, which had first drawn my attention to his existence.

<<<doesn’t jump to conclusions about things.

Although it might be a nuclear device, best it be kept in my hands until it was determined it was.

- - - - - - - - - -

When I brought the package back here and set it in the middle of the dining room table, the property caretaker, followed by Joe and Jose, came inside from the garage.

They were cold, despite it being a reasonable day, and they could’ve been doing what they were doing out in the garage, inside the warm house, but as I’d been told to keep the doors locked when I’m not around, well…..

“Oh no, not that again,” the caretaker said, upon seeing the package.

Yeah, I said; “But it’s safer with me than with anybody else, because at least we know where it’s at.

“They could’ve been clear over to Wyoming, or down in Kansas, opened it, vaporizing everybody and everything for 200 miles around, and nobody’d ever know why.

“Best it stay here until we know what’s in it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“What is ‘Skippy’ and who is the package?” Joe asked.

“Skippy’s a primitive on Skins’s island,” I replied, “who’s paranoid, demented, muy loco, burning with rage and hate against all that’s good and decent.

“He’s a good actor, too, posing as a mild-mannered older middle-age guy in polyester and too-tanned skin.

“He’s actually best pals with those black-robed, hooded-faced, guys waving scimitars and severed heads, that you see on television.

“He wants us liquidated, and he wants most of all franksolich liquidated.  He’s just really paranoid, and doesn’t care if, in taking out franksolich, thousands of innocent people are taken out too.”

“The package is an atomic bomb,” the caretaker added.

Joe’s hair rose.

Jose’s, who doesn’t know English, didn’t.

“It might be,” I interrupted; “it might be.

“After all, Skippy’s the only primitive capable of making a nuclear device all by himself.

“And his principal foe is this beacon of illumination, franksolich.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I showed some of the drafts of your book to one agent so far,” the business partner told me.

“There’s still six or seven other prospects I’ll have to talk with, but it’s a start.

“The biggest problem seems to be that the material’s not au courant, it’s dated, it’s from twenty years ago, and it’s not about anything that interests a whole lot of people.

“On the other hand, it might have the potential to become the next Annals of Imperial Rome or the Travels of Marco Polo, and he thinks you should keep on writing, until you’re all written out.

“After all, it could be cut, if something needs cut.  But lay it all out, the whole thing, first, after which the cherry-picking can be done.

“He thinks you did an excellent job in capturing the fear, the paranoia, the silent panic, the dread, the gloom-and-doom, that overhung that unhappy place like a poisonous cloud, in that draft where you described your afternoon with a madman.

“But he thinks that’s too far along in the book; you need to describe the rampant Skins’s island-like paranoia much earlier, maybe those observations--which you haven’t written yet--about your first six days there, when you were lost.

“Also, he thinks there’s not enough of ‘you’ in what you’ve written; that you’re writing about a guy who’s watching television, and describing what he’s seeing on television.

“And there’s that irksome problem--and I know it’s a problem here, too--of articulating, describing, exactly how it is, that a deaf person ‘hears’ what’s being said, what’s going on.

“He got the impression you were pulling the readers’ leg, but I reminded him I’ve seen charts of your ‘hearing,’ which remind one of an EKG of someone who’s already been dead ten minutes.

“I know it’s hard, and you haven’t succeeded yet, but you’ve got to explain that in the book, so as to maintain credibility.

“Also, your description of the ‘why’ of it needs more detail; why a deaf person would undertake, and succeed at, something that would be too formidable for even a hearing person.”

Okay, I said; “I’ll keep trying.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, I already explained that part,” I said to the neighbor’s wife when we had breakfast alone together this morning, she having dropped the children off at school and come over here for some casual chit-chattery.

Despite that I hardly lack for female friends, she’s the best one.

“I was tired of living the dull, mundane, barren life, and wanted to do something different.  By then it was obvious I wasn’t ever going to get rich, or even mildly affluent, nothing near the scale of Skippy on Skins‘s island--but that didn’t mean I couldn’t at least have an exciting life.

“And I was perfectly situated to just go off and do it, not having any wife or kids or aged parents or mortgage or car payments or other bills to worry about; I was as free and light as a bird.

“I was asked the same question by that pit-bull of an investigator two years later, when being looked into for a higher-than-usual level of national security clearance, for my then-job.

“He was a ferocious one; he kept going back to the subject, ’why, why, why, why?’ 

“Such personal interviews for other employees of Immigration & Naturalization, at the time, usually lasted forty-five minutes or so.

“I was under the hot lamp from about 4:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m.--I worked second shift there, remember--with only breaks for cigarettes and supper.  This guy was tenacious.

“I guess I finally convinced him I was honest about it, as I got the clearance.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“And then there was that other question, asked so many times not only by him, but by friends and relatives.

“Why, given that all had started out so badly, after which a rational person would simply give up and go home, did I mule-headedly insist on staying there the entire time I’d planned, despite an, uh, abysmal lack of resources?

“Well, it was a simple matter of pride.

“I hadn’t compiled any impressive list of successes in life, and many thought this enterprise far beyond anything else I’d ever tried.

“I left on a Thursday.

“The general speculation was that I’d be back in Nebraska the following Thursday.

“It was pride; I wasn’t going to go home with my tail between my legs.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I hope you’re not quoting entire parts on that one message-board,” the insurance man said to me this evening; “best to not do that sort of thing until it’s copyrighted.

“Given that there’s primitives who’d like to swipe your literary efforts and claim them for their own—after all, it’s been done before—you need to protect yourself.”

Yeah, I said; “I’m aware of it, and that the primitives tend to be the thieving kind.

“But I’ve only ever described bits-and-pieces of chapters, not quoting anything from them directly…..and I haven’t even said anything about my ‘character sketches’ of individual workers and peasants.

“I think those are the best parts of what I’ve been writing, and if I describe everything that’s in the book, then nobody’ll want to read the book, already knowing what’s in it.”

“Good; one can’t be too careful,” the insurance man said.

“And those profiles, or as you call them, ‘character sketches,’ are some of the finest writing of yours I’ve ever read.

“The one that stands out is your description of that abbess or prioress, or whatever she was, at the ‘hospice’ of the damned.

“That is awesome, how you ‘captured’ her.

“But I disagree with your other critics on something; I think you need to drop the euphemisms when describing her doomed charges, and instead describe, bluntly, just straight out, what you saw.

“And of course what you were seeing was the future of medical care in America.”

- - - - - - - - - -

The insurance man noticed the package from Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive on Skins’s island, was no longer on the dining room table.

“What’d you do with it?” he asked.  “You need to have it where everybody knows it’s at, in case it goes off.”

Oh, that, I said; “Sometimes I’m a little slow in thinking of resolutions to problems, and so it’s something I should’ve done when I first received it, but I didn’t think of it until this morning.

“I just put a ‘return to sender’ label on it, and sent it back to Skippy.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I’d always heard that stuff was poison, what they drink over there,” the neighbor’s older brother said to me, as we finally got done doing whatever it is one does with cattle in the middle of the night, and were driving back here.

It’s a bitterly cold night, and so the job took longer than usual.

“Yeah,” I said; “I not lying when I say they could make summahon, homemade vodka, out of anything.

“Old shoe leather, old shoe soles, old shoe-laces.  I saw it all.

“Because getting to some village usually entailed some, uh, dodging or running away before someone in a uniform could ask to see our tickets, one had to travel light, with as little as possible.

“But no matter how little I took, there was always something fermentable in it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The old grandmothers, the babushkas, didn’t much care for all the drinking their younger menfolk did—I always got looks of approval from them for insisting we do it in ‘moderation’ or preferably not at all—were oddly always most cooperative in the making of it, though.

“They had various means of instant fermentation, and the babushkas did it fastest of all, on the stove-top.

“It was amazing, how quickly they could turn out something, the bent-backed grandmothers.  One would come in from the backyard with a bucket of fresh goat’s milk, and in like ten minutes—maybe a little bit longer, but not much longer—they’d have milk, sour cream, butter, and cottage cheese.

“Like—snap!—that. 

“The same thing with fermentation to make this horrid concoction; I suggest western brewers and distillers discard their fancy, expensive, slow drawn-out, laboratory experiments on such things, and go watch how these rustic workers and peasants do it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I just didn’t care for it, but to get along, I had to go along.

“The temperance movement never got hold in the socialist paradises, but there were two groups of workers and peasants renown for not imbibing, and I always hoped to connect up with a few of them, so as to get a respite from this constant drinking.

“But I never did, as they tended to be shy, reticent, withdrawn people not likely to have much to do with outsiders…..or anybody else but their own kind.

“The Baptists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The Reformation of the 1500s, the advent of Protestantism, never made it into the socialist paradises—other than very minor incursions—the impenetrable wall of Roman Catholic Poland blocking that.

“The Baptists in the pre-socialist paradises evolved independently, and from some other source, than did western Baptists.

“However, their beliefs and their practices were, or are, remarkably similar with those of western Baptists; almost the same thing.

“If one wants to call them ‘Protestants,’ which isn’t strictly correct, well, the Baptists there were the largest Protestant group in the socialist paradises, its adherents a little more than 1% of the population; about half a million.

“Always being rather modest people, they suffered greatly under the God-hating socialists.  They were murdered in droves, but still lived, and increased.

“I wouldn’t call them a defiant people; I’d more call them an unconquerable people.”

“The peace-loving socialists ultimately gave up trying to kill them, and instead relegated them to the lowest, the most menial, roles in both the gulag and in society.

“Their situation had improved somewhat by the time I was there, but they were so used to the treatment they’d gotten, they were still pretty much, and voluntarily so, the wallflowers of society.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’d describe a bit differently; they’d been around only since the dawn of the 20th century, and there were only a few tens of thousands of them.

“They weren’t only unconquerable, but also defiant.

“The more the fraternal fatherly socialists tried to wipe them out, the more tenacious they seemed to get.

“Unlike the Baptists, with whom even a Roman Catholic could find common ground and common values, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were, and are, a totally different breed, far unlike the rest of us.

“But one’s still obligated to admire them, for their sheer tenacity in surviving some of the most violent, most brutal, bloodiest repressions in all the history of mankind.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Now, I didn’t see everything while over there—there were observant Jews and Moslems too, but I never ‘connected’ with any of them.

“I’m not a pushy, assertive, person; I just took whatever hand was extended to me, and if one wasn’t, I didn’t go grabbing for it.

“But I badly wanted to meet some Baptists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, at least once in a while, simply because they didn’t drink.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

The business partner was here this afternoon—man, it’s bitterly cold out there, such a cutting wind—and was curious how things were going, with my setting up the new computer.

I’d purchased it last November, but was waiting for the old one to give out, before I started using this one.  The old one finally quit earlier this week, when only one out of four “ports” remained operable, and one can’t do a whole lot with a computer with just one port.

Others had offered to set up the new one for me, but I’d insisted no, I wanted to do it myself.  All my life, others have done things for me (because it’s easier for them to just do it, than take the considerable time and trouble showing a deaf person how to do something), and I was curious as to how, exactly, it’s done.

A decision I’ve since regretted, but as I’d committed myself, I’ll see it through to the bitter end.

- - - - - - - - - -

Life was much more simpler, when buying a used computer; one carried it home, plugged it in, and voila!—it was all there, ready to go.

The disadvantage to a used computer, though, is that like buying a used car, not all parts are in good working order, or in fact are missing. 

The former computer, for example, had only two of four ports that worked, meaning I couldn’t hook up the printer-copier-scanner to it.  And for whatever reasons, nothing would ever “take” on the compact-disc drive.

(However, other than that, it was a great computer, and lasted far beyond its expected life-span.)

But if I buy a new computer again, I’ll take it in secret to some expert of whose existence none of my friends are aware, and pay him to set it all up for me.

- - - - - - - - - -

I reminded the business partner it’s probably time we looked around for a “fact-checker,” for the book.  It’s about one-eighth of the way done, and it’s enough material to keep a fact-checker busy.

franksolich means to put out no book with misinformation and falsehoods, such as that vanity-published by drunken Bill on Skins’s island some years ago.

My memories of course are mine, and can’t be fact-checked, but there’s plenty of wordage there where I describe the “why” and “what” of things as if they’re fact, but they might not be.

“Such a fact-checker should be, ideally, someone born and raised in the lower classes—the bottom classes, the other half, the 99%--in the socialist paradises, intimately acquainted with life there, but now living in this country, preferably around here.

“To show me where I’ve misinterpreted the ‘why’ or ‘what’ of something, and then alleged it to be factual when it’s not.

“As you know,” I reminded the business partner, “it doesn’t bruise my ego being corrected.  God demands only that one be reasonably ‘good,’ not perfect.”

- - - - - - - - - -

The business partner inquired about another matter, and I assured him it’s apparently being treated as something rather serious; more serious than I’d thought it’d be taken.

In fact, I’d been willing to brush it off, forget all about it.

“When writing my version of what happened, I had to be very careful so as to avoid saying ‘he said’ or ‘I heard.’

“I learned a very long time ago, that I can’t do that.  Any defense could easily show my charts of hearing, proving that I heard nothing at all.

“Someone could violently threaten me right in my face, but I can’t allege that, because I didn’t really hear it.

“And interpreting body language, gestures, facial expressions, movement of limbs, intuition and instinct, doesn’t have the same credibility as hearing something.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Why are you looking for a fact-checker?” the neighbor asked me at lunch today; “of all that I’ve read, you’re coming across as eminently credible.”

“But I may be mistaken on some things that I cite as if they were facts,” I told him, “and I want this to be an indisputable book, unlike drunken Bill’s hurry-up vanity-published job twelve years ago.”

“Well, like what sorts of facts?” the neighbor then asked.

- - - - - - - - - -

Okay, I said; “take the draft of the chapter about water in the socialist paradises.

“I describe how, when in the villages, the old babushkas used to look at me in dread fear, and even crossed themselves, when I drank a tumbler of plain ordinary water.

“It was poison, they insisted.”

The water in most parts of the socialist paradises was surfeited with sulphur, both in odor and taste.

To eliminate the stench and taste of sulphur, the workers and peasants boiled the water.  And it was something that worked; after boiling, the water was…..just plain ordinary water.

- - - - - - - - - -

“In that chapter,” I said, “I commented that the workers and peasants weren’t aware that by boiling the water to get rid of that, they were also sterilizing it, so it was pure; no contaminants or germs in it at all. 

“One wasn’t going to get typhoid or malaria from boiled water.

“However.

“However.

“However.

“Maybe I mis-stated things, by saying the workers and peasants didn’t understand that; maybe they understood it very well, and there was a different reason they considered boiled water ‘poison.’”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The workers and peasants weren’t primitives, and were generally educated above their assigned stations in life.  Even the simplest peasant could read and write, and did it often.

“Despite their socialist ‘education,’ the workers and peasants were more knowledgeable than the average primitive on Skins’s island, and definitely more knowledgeable than people from schools in blue states and blue cities.

“And smart, too.

“Now, Skippy on Skins’s island, while he has the appetites, ethics, and morals of a gouty pig, is perhaps the brightest primitive of them all.

“But I saw plenty of workers and peasants brighter than even Skippy, making him look about as dense as the big guy from Bellevue.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So the odds were that even the most low-born peasant was aware that boiling water removes germs and contaminants.

“So maybe there was another reason they looked in horror as I gulped down water, lots and lots of water.

“But I can’t think of what it’d be.

“A fact-checker, born and raised in the socialist paradises, but now living here, preferably in this area, would know such things.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Well, it might be a problem finding such a fact-checker around here, the neighbor said; “nobody knows anybody of eastern European derivation.  We’ve been shorted on diversity.

“Remember that Alberto, who came here with Meyer to buy that property next to where you live, was the last person of Italianate derivation ever seen in these parts…..and that was back in 1948.

“And we’ve got more people of African derivation around here, than of Judaic or Greek or Irish derivation.

“To find someone of eastern European derivation who’s been in both worlds—there and here—in this area, might be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Whoa, mama mia,” I said; “where’ve you been all my life?”

I was at a bar in another town with Romeo, who’d found us two women, the one for me being tall, angular, dark-haired, pale-skinned, and the one for him being, well, Romeo has no taste in women.

“Dobry den” she said; “my name’s Olga.”

If I’d had ears, they would’ve perked up.

She was a student at the University of South Dakota, in nearby Vermillion, majoring in biology, in preparation for veterinary medicine.

“Of eastern European derivation, I suppose?” I asked.

Yes, she said, but of third-generation, from Russia.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Ever been there?” I asked; “know the language and stuff?  Know the customs of the workers and peasants?”

No, she said, disappointing me.  “Actually, I don’t know much about my ancestors, as my parents and grandparents never talked about it much.

“My great-grandmother, who’s 93 years old and lives with my grandparents up in South Dakota, was born and raised there, but came here in 1947, via Germany.

“You’ve been there,” she said; “were those stories about cannibalizing true?”

Yeah, I said; “one of the brighter examples of socialist benevolence, during both the early 1930s and the late 1940s, socialist-created famines so as to punish the recalcitrant people.

"Skippy on Skins's island would've loved it.

“Your great-grandmother was a refugee, I assume?’

Yeah, she said.

“But she grew up with the workers and peasants, and would know a lot about them, right?”

Yeah, she said.

- - - - - - - - - -

I dismissed all other plans for the evening.

“Do you suppose I could meet her, and ask her questions?” I asked, eagerly.

Well, I don’t know, she said.  “Babushka’s pretty old, and she’s always been suspicious of people.  She lives in two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room, in the house of my grandparents, and doesn’t do much except when the weather’s good, sits outdoors and sometimes still manages to garden.

“Her rooms are something else, the walls cluttered with icons and other Russian regalia, and framed pictures of the countryside there.  The sitting room’s always dark, and there’s candles and incense burning, which makes my grandfather nervous about fires.

“She never goes out far; she still dresses the way they used to.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“I’d like to meet her,” I said, “because I need some answers to some questions.”

“But she doesn’t speak English, only Russian.”

No problem, I said.

“And she’s really grouchy and nasty towards people she doesn’t know.”

No problem, I said.

“And she’s deaf.”

No problem, I said.

“And she’s blind.”

No problem, I said.

“And she mumbles when she speaks.”

No problem, I said.

“And she’s, well, sort of senile.”

No problem, I said; “I need to meet her, because I need help, and she’s probably exactly the person who can help me.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, I don’t think you need a fact-checker for the book,” the property caretaker said this morning, when he was showing Joe and Jose what he wanted with the roof of the garage, when the weather’s better.

“Really, I’ve never been there, especially not under the conditions you were, but from all I’ve read of your drafts, if one knows how you are in real life, there’s not anything that stretches the credulity.

"You really are that careless and reckless and rash."

I know, I said; “maybe I’m being too paranoid about getting all the facts right, but I always remember the ‘blue mailbox’ phenomenon.”

This was before the caretaker was born, and when I was still a kid.

There’d been a made-for-television movie that came out in 1973, based upon the assassination of John Kennedy ten years earlier, in 1963.

I never saw the movie, and it was years later, when reading old editions of Time magazine I’d picked up at a garage sale, that I learned about it.

In one scene in the movie, there was a mail box on a street-corner; one of those big old ones not used by the public, but in which mailmen stashed mail they couldn’t deliver on their routes on that day, leaving the mail for the next day.

It was painted all blue.

The movie was depicting events of 1963.

Before 1970, such mail-boxes had always been painted red-white-and-blue; then in an economy move about the same time the post office was demoted from a cabinet position, it was decided to just paint them blue, period.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Why was that little error a big deal?” the caretaker asked.

“Well,” I said, “if one notices a mistake like that, one then starts wondering what other sorts of mistakes were in the movie, mistakes of which one’s not aware, and starts to doubt the credibility of the whole production.

“Fact-checkers are a good thing to have.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Or,” I went on, “a more-recent problem.

“There was a book, about three or four years ago, written by a reputable journalist, describing the first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

“It was a good book, a great book…..until I abruptly hit a speed-bump.

“The author had identified Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Democrat U.S. Senator from California.

“Douglas ran for the Senate, but lost, and was never a U.S. Senator; however, she’d been a U.S. Congresswoman.

“I contacted the author, who kindly responded that ooops, I was right, assuring me the mistake would be corrected for the paperback version of the book.

“I don’t know if it ever was, because I don’t read paperback books, only hard-cover books; paperbacks are for tightwads and primitives.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“So I went back to reading about the first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt, supposing that was the only error in the book.

“But after another hundred pages or so, I hit another speed-bump.

“The author had identified Bennett ‘Champ’ Clark as being a U.S. Senator from New York.

“Which was wrong, way wrong; Clark was a U.S. Senator from Missouri, not New York.

“I thought about contacting the author again, but then just quit reading the book, figuring that with two mistakes like that in it, there were probably a whole lot of other mis-statements of fact, depriving the book of any credibility at all.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The next time you’re with me when I’m looking for something in the archives stored in town, remind me to show a few letters, from 1971, when I was still a kid.

“Someone had given me a very large book, The Glorious Burden by Stefan Lorant, about the presidential campaigns up to 1964; that was about the biggest and heaviest book I’ve ever owned.

“Anyway, on the chapter dealing with the 1960 campaign, there was a photograph of John Kennedy, the Democrat candidate for president, riding in a car in between two other people, campaigning in Maine.

“I forget who the other guy was—either the then-governor of Maine or U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie, one of those two—but the woman was identified as U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith.....a Republican.

“’Whoa,’ I thought, and I immediately sent off a letter to her; in case one’s not aware, Margaret Chase Smith read all of her mail, and personally responded to all letters herself.

“Being rather unimpaired in the chutzpah department at that age, like Doc, the PCIntern primitive, probably was when he was that age, I asked, ‘Hey, what were you, a Republican, doing, campaigning with Kennedy instead of Nixon back in 1960?”

“The distinguished Senator, who was unexpectedly defeated by the powers of Mainian greed and primitivity a couple of years later after I'd written her, got a copy of The Glorious Burden from the Library of Congress, and lo and behold, I was right.

“She then contacted Random House—I think it was Random House—who’d published the book, pointing out that the woman in the photograph next to Kennedy was actually Lucia Cormier, her Democrat opponent that year, not her.

“The publisher wrote her back, apologizing for the error, and told her it’d be corrected for later editions of the book.

“She sent me copies of that correspondence, and in a personal letter to me, assured me that she’d actually campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1960, along with a photograph of the two of them, taken in 1960, in Maine somewhere.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“It’d be impossible to write a book 100% accurate in the facts, but I’d just as soon write one that’s as near to accurate as humanly possibly; no sloppy mistakes like all those.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“I got a call from a guy up in South Dakota this morning,” the business partner told me. 

“It started off kind of strange, but as it went on, I figured it out.”

Since it’s a hassle for me using a telephone—even one designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing—and because of my life-long antagonism about telephones, when someone has to leave me a message, rather than giving my own telephone number, I give the other person the name and telephone number of someone else, with whom to leave a message.

One can leave a message on the answering machine here, and it can blink that little red light all it wants, but it’s not going to be “received” until someone else is here, to listen to the message for me.

Since that’s the case, it’s just easier to give the name and telephone number of someone else, for whom using the damned thing isn’t a problem, to get the message, after which that someone else relays it to me in person.

I use only people already intimately familiar with me, and for whom it’s not a bother or a hassle.  I’ve done it for years, for decades, and no one’s ever told me it was a problem.  If it were a problem, I’d quit doing it.

- - - - - - - - - -

“He says he’s been told all about you, and because you’re who you are, you’re welcome to visit his ancient mother, although he’s not quite sure how seeing her would help you.

“But he suggests you wait until the first few days of spring, when apparently she gets more animated, after which she goes downhill the rest of the year.

“She’s 93, her mind isn’t clear, she’s deaf and blind and mostly mute, knows only Russian, is hostile to strangers, and even though she’s his mother, she’s never in his life mentioned life in the socialist paradises to him.

“She was clear-headed and all that when she came here as a refugee from Germany in 1947, got married, had three children, raised them, husband died, after which she retreated back into a dark private world into which nobody else is allowed.

“She’s been ‘gone’ for about fifty years now.

“He suspects it has something to do with the violence and bloodshed and purges in the socialist paradises, and then her subsequent treatment as a slave-laborer in socialist Germany.

“He said her appearance is, well, something from another time and place, but you’d be familiar with it, and comfortable with it, even if others wouldn’t be.

“What’s this all about?”

- - - - - - - - - -

I reminded the business partner that I’m looking for a fact-checker for the book, to correct me on things I’m wrong about, and I hope, to give me additional information, about rural life among the workers and peasants in the socialist paradises.

“So…..” the business partner said, “how’s a senile old lady going to do that?”

I’m not sure, I said, “but surely I’ll get something useful out of it.

“You forget,” I continued, “being such a late child, my grandfathers were dead by the time I showed up, and both my grandmothers ancient and senescent.

“But both of them were important for my growth and development.

“Maybe it was because I was their only ‘handicapped’ grandchild that they took to me, and I to them.

“As a kid, up until she died when I was 20, the only television, the only baseball, I ever cared watching were the games showing the Philadelphia Phillies, seated right next to my maternal grandmother on the couch.

“At first, I thought the games were just something meant to entertain her in her senility, but as it turned out, she’d been a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies since God was a boy, really.”

- - - - - - - - -

“By the way,” I said, “there’s a lesson here for Judy grasswire on Skins’s island.

“Instead of spending all that time hanging around with the primitives, making herself look silly in public, perhaps she should be spending more time with that ‘handicapped’ descendant of hers, who lives with her.

“I don’t know the nature of his ‘handicap,’ but I assume it’s pretty severe…..and Judy grasswire’s probably the most important person in the world, to him.

“But she doesn’t pay attention to him, preferring instead to hang around with the primitives.  About all she does for him is that she desultorily slices and fries carrots on the stove-top for him in the morning, for breakfast.

“Judy grasswire’s got to get her priorities in order, because given her age, she doesn’t have much time to make an impact on anybody, to be lovingly remembered by someone when she’s sprung loose of this mortal coil.

“After all, given their short-term memories and narcissism, it’s pretty much a sure thing the other primitives, even those in the cooking and baking forum, won’t remember her.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“Well, he doesn’t think I’ll get any good out of it,” I told the neighbor, in reference to the business partner’s skepticism about my newly-found fact-checker.

“What he doesn’t understand is that I’ll get something out of it; I dunno what, but something.

“I think he’s a little grouchy because I’m expecting him to come along with me, whenever spring comes to the prairies of our northern neighbor.”

The business partner and I have something going, that provides a substantial part of my own income, but only a little to his own.  He has two other businesses much larger, and thinks that this third one could grow as large as those other two, but I’m reluctant to “expand.”

I’ve lived a very tumultuous, convulsive life, and I’d like to take it easy from here on out; with so many things happening, I’ve never had a chance—at least not since infancy--to take a breather, to relax, to slow down for a while. 

As long as franksolich can pay his own way, franksolich is content.

“But I reminded him he owes me one, so he’s agreed to go along, despite that he doesn’t see the purpose of it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well,” the neighbor admitted, “nobody’s sure what you’re going to get out of it, trying to pry information out of a deaf, mute, and blind old woman who’s mind’s been gone since Lyndon Johnson was president.”

“I myself have no idea what I’ll get out of it,” I reminded him; “but the instinct, the intuition, tells me I’ll get something out of it, so best to do it.

“This reminds me of when I was 18 years old, and spent Christmas in Canterbury, England. 

“I paid the customary visits and homages to the sites of historical interest, but I was more interested in meeting the real people there.

“Finally, I met an old man who agreed to take me to meet some of the hoi polloi, the common people, definitely not Ms. Vanderbilt-Astor’s, the NJCher primitive on Skins’s island, sort of people.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The first place he took me to was the home of an automotive mechanic; he wasn’t home, but the wife and children were.

“The wife was a grotesquely obese woman, wearing a slightly-soiled shift, and was sitting at the table in the kitchen.  The table was covered with oilcloth.

“What was singular about her was that she’d borne ten children.

“First, a single child, a girl.

“Second, twins, two boys.

“Third, triplets, three girls.

“Fourth, quadrupulets, four boys.

“But fortunately, given her condition, she wasn’t likely to ever have quintupulets.

“It was something out of Dickens; she was absolutely intriguing, especially the way she’d so casually thump one of the tow-headed imps on the head with a wooden spoon, to make him behave.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“The second was to an old man, really old, in socialized medicine’s version of a nursing home.  He was in his 90s, and out of it.

“There was a framed photograph there, an ancient one, showing him as an infant sitting on the lap of an old man, taken circa 1889 or somesuch time.

“I thought maybe the old man was his great-great-grandfather or something, but no, he was the guy for whom this old man had been named.

“He was the last still-surviving veteran of the British army…..during the Napoleonic Wars.

“The infant in the picture was staring up into the unseeing eyes of the old man.

“For some reason, I felt compelled to look into the unseeing eyes of this guy.

“I was looking into the eyes of someone who’d once looked into the eyes of someone a contemporary, or at least someone who was around, George III, the Duke of Wellington, Admiral Lord Nelson…..Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, probably even George Washington.

“It was awesome, some sort of mind-blowing spiritual experience, where I was, for a split-second, yanked back into the far distant past…..but alas pulled out of it too quickly.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

The wife of the former property caretaker was here this morning, bringing back the laundry she’d cleaned and sewed last week.

The former property caretaker is still in “rehabilitation” from injuries suffered in an automobile accident from some years ago—necessitating hiring the new one—but unhappily, given his age—he’s seventy-one—he’s probably never going to be the same again.

The last time he was here was about a month ago, to check on the “security measures” the now-property caretaker is having installed here, so as to make the place “safe” for a deaf person, and guarding against angry primitives stalking franksolich.

“I think it’s all a good idea,” his wife said; “for years, everybody’s been worried about you, living out here in the middle of nowhere, alone.

“And the most you ever let him do was put up that high-school science telescope on the railing of the back porch, so you could see what was going on down by the river.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Whatever, I said; “remember, the person who lived here before me was an old woman blind as a bat, and she got along okay, despite living all the way out here alone.”

“But she’d been born and raised here,” the former property caretaker’s wife said; “and besides, she had all those dogs.  And even though ancient and blind, she could still use a gun competently.”

The previous tenant had been born here in 1884, nine years after the place was first settled; she’d married, had and raised children, after which she’d embarked on decades of widowhood.

In 1986, even though she was getting along fine, still tending all seven gardens (flowers and vegetables) surrounding the house and further afield, her descendants decided it was time to move her to town, to a nursing home.

Where she died a few months later.

After which franksolich showed up here nineteen years later, as the scam that rocked the internet was winding down.

- - - - - - - - - -

“It’s nice to see you have the dining-room table cleared,” she said, as she sorted and stacked the clean clothes on it.  I’d carried in the baskets and boxes, but she insisted upon sorting them out.

“This way, you’ll put it away,” she said.

Probably not, I thought; when needing new clothes, it’s just easier to take something off the dining-room table, than going into the bedroom and the closets to find something.

- - - - - - - - - -

“What was in that big box?” she asked.

“It was from Skippy, the NYC_SKP primitive on Skins’s island,” I said, “but I sent it back to him.

“It might’ve been a nuclear device—Skippy’s smart enough to make such things out of old miscellaneous unmatched spare parts from things—that would’ve vaporized all of northeastern Nebraska and the eastern half of the Sandhills, if opened.”

“Now, why would he want to do that?” she asked.

“Skippy’s paranoid about franksolich,” I said; “and given his mind-set, it wouldn’t bother him at all if tens of thousands of innocent lives were lost, just so he got franksolich.

“I dunno why he’s so paranoid; it’s all very silly, and not befitting an older-middle-aged guy who’s got mountains more IQ than I do.”

“Well,” she asked, “when he gets it back, what do you suppose he’s going to do with it?”

I’m not sure, I said; “but having armed it, I’m pretty sure Skippy would know how to disarm it, before it vaporizes the entire San Francisco-Oakland metropolis.”

the end