franksolich gets infested with primitives

[franksolich]

“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.

“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.”

“There’s no peacocks around here,” the property caretaker assured me.  “You’re just bored, and imagining things.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

to be continued

[Carl]

 

[ChuckJ]

  After the last couple of days I've had I could use a good story so keep it up coach.

[VelvetElvis]

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!

[franksolich]

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.

[franksolich]

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 “headquarters”), came early in the morning, to see if they like me could see any flocks of peacocks bustling around.

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

[franksolich]

“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.

“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.”

“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?”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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?”

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.”

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.”

“That’s almost forty dollars a month,” she said; “I never thought of that.”

“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.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“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.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“I can’t believe you did that,” the neighbor said; “you’re nuts.”

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

[franksolich]

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

‘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.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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

[USA4ME]

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.

.

[franksolich]

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.

“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.”

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.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.”

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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 “no”—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.”

It was obvious it pained him to admit that.

Anyway, so Brother Lamond doused me with water, and that was that.

to be continued

[franksolich]

“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.

“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.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.’”

to be continued

[franksolich]

“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.”

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…..”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

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.”

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

[franksolich]

“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.

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.”

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.”

to be continued

[franksolich]

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.

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?”

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.”

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.”

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.’”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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

[franksolich]

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.”

“Well,” he asked, “aren’t you going to get dressed?”

“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?”

“A guy,” he said, “but—“

Oh, okay, I interrupted, and went back to shaving.  “No need to bother.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.’”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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?”

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

[Carl]

[franksolich]

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. 

[Carl]

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. 

[franksolich]

If he had the go ahead he would have done something he felt needed to be done. 

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.

[franksolich]

“We saw some peacocks today,” my nephew’s friend announced when I arrived home. 

“And they were white.

“Seven adults, five young ones.”

“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.”

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…..”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.”

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…..”

The she-woman indignantly announced she was going to sleep in the car overnight, which I guessed was okay with me.

to be continued

[franksolich]

"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

[franksolich]

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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

[franksolich]

“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.”

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.”

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.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“You have a really unusual place,” she said; “all these portraits, all these pictures of people, hanging on the walls, even in the bathroom.”

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.”

to be continued