Nothing much

 

The more I read various posts and comments on Substack and elsewhere, the more I realize how little in common I have with these writers and maybe most of the rest of society.  This is not a new conclusion so much as it is a reinforced one.  As an armed services brat (born, raised and transferred), I grew up mostly overseas and so lived a life far from that of a normal American.  

US military bases in Japan.

I was left out of most of the cultural references and key social highlights of a typical person of my generation. I didn't see the TV shows -- never saw an episode of Friends or South Park or Sex in the City -- only heard a selection of the popular songs of the day, certainly didn't hear anything out of the Top 40, especially not anything niche, localized or otherwise appealing to a limited audience, never saw the the TV commercials that everybody liked or hated -- the Geico caveman, Donald Trump and Pizza Hut -- wasn't aware of the political squabbles or the politicians and political commenters involved, didn't participate in the fads and fashions of people my age in the States -- I never planked or wore jeans under my dress or sported a whale tail, never wore fake nerd glasses and posted selfies of myself, hands raised, fingers curled like claws, with the caption "Rawr!" I never used L33T speak, never even heard of it. I did used to tYpE lIkE *t*H*i*S oN y*A*h*O*o W*i*T*h mY ¡hOmE! ¡cReW! And I used Yahoo audibles with enthusiasm and frequency -- this one below left was my favorite. But that's about it.

I wasn't really from anywhere and had no hometown. But I had lived in lots of places -- Misawa, Yokosuka, Atsugi, Sasebo in Japan, Sigonella, Gaeta and Naples in Italy, Souda Bay, Crete, Rota, Spain, Guam, plus Whidbey Island and North Island.... One year, I went to 11 different schools.  "Class, this is our newest member. Go ahead, introduce yourself."  "Thank you, Miss Gump. My name is Wanda and...." -- out comes the Shepherd's crook and I'm jerked away to another school maybe in another country, maybe on the other side of the world.

I learned to shut up about all that when I settled stateside to finish high school, the same as I learned not to mention I was fluent in Japanese. The other kids thought I was lying or just weird. "Wait, what? You've climbed Mt. Etna and Mt Fuji? And skied both the Italian and Japanese alps? Oh, sure you have!" (belly punch)

Then in the service myself it was more time overseas, often in the same places I grew up in and in some cases where my parents and grandparents on both sides, they having been in the service, too, also lived. My grandfather was stationed at Atsugi, as was my father, and as was I, and now my little girl has, not been stationed (yet), but lived there, too. At one point, I served aboard the same aircraft carrier as my father had.

Another grandfather, in the Air Force in the 1950s, lived with his family in Washington Heights, the American housing complex in Tokyo located where the 1964 Olympic Stadium and Yoyogi Park are today. Before we Americans took it over, it was a Japanese Army Air Force facility; in fact, it was where the first airplane ever flew in Japan.

 I once saw an old Mainichi Graphic, a sort of clone of the picture magazine Life, that they had saved that had published a picture of them barbecuing in their back yard. The photo was taken through a chain link fence with a telephoto lens.  The caption read that American military in Japan were so poor that their houses didn't even have kitchens so they were forced to cook outside.  

That photo was a lesson to me in how people willfully misunderstand each other and willfully spread those misunderstandings to denigrate others and assert their own superiority.  In this particular case, the Japanese author of the story could simply have asked American military public relations to explain what was happening in the photograph and written about American customs and pastimes unfamiliar to Japanese.  But he didn't do that.  He wrote negatively about Americans to assure his Japanese readers that they were superior to these foreigners polluting their homeland.

I've walked around that area of Harajuku and Yoyogi and probably have been in the same spot or near it where the house my grandfather lived in back in the early 1950s once stood. 

I come from a long
line of service members
and their brats.

Anyway, growing up I was familiar with all the cool places to hang out in Catania in Sicily or where not to venture in Naples, or where that crashed F4U from World War Two is on Big Navy, Guam, or which trains to take from Sagami-otsuka to get to Nikko, bicycled downhill from the base gate to Rota town, gobbled up trabancos in Jerez de la Frontera, saw the monkeys on the Rock at Gibraltar, wandered around the palace at Knossos, hiked  down to the Grotta del Turco at Montagna Spaccata and so on and on.  But I had never been to New York City or New Orleans or Chicago or the Grand Canyon or....  The only America I knew was some dumb ranch and environs in Montana that I flew to, seeing only the airports in EWR, LAX or SFO.

Phi Gamma Delta. Stupid wars.

"So," you might say, "you were a citizen of the world, at home wherever you found yourself."  Uh.... No.  What I was was a citizen of nowhere, an alien outsider wherever I went.  The perpetual one who did not belong. Ask any brat.

He had baby brats.

You might think that I am bragging to mention all these foreign places, but I'm not.  Transferring from one duty station to another was just ordinary life, and while outside the gate the world was different, inside it one Navy base was pretty much like any other, with an MWR, NEX, fast-food franchise, commissary, movie theater, base housing, office buildings, hangers or port facilities looking the same, painted the same, in Guam as Japan as Spain as Italy as Greece.  But once in a stateside civilian high school, I learned that what was normal to me was seen merely as boasting so I kept quiet.

For a while, I suffered pangs of homesickness and wished I was back aboard a Navy base in a foreign land.  Homesick for a stupid Navy base? Are you brain damaged? Get out of here! No, really, I was.  Brats will understand, not you slacker landlubbers.

So what's all this blabbering leading up to?  Not that much, just the realization that still, and I guess always, I will be alienated from the American mainstream, not quite a foreigner, maybe more like an out-of-phase American.  

There are lots of stories of the dumb things I did when I first settled in as a civilian.  At the time, they weren't dumb to me.  It was just that I didn't know the correct protocol, didn't understand what things to do and not do, how the ... well, it doesn't matter.  I almost lost my life twice because I didn't understand there were no-go zones in American cities, or that a female should not be out alone too early in the morning or too late at night even in supposedly safe areas. 

You say that doesn't matter? Of course, it did then.  I was shocked and terribly frightened. But it's in the past and I learned that in some ways and in some places, America is  no country at all. It's a land before civilization. I didn't .... It got too much for me.  It really did. So as soon as I could, although I never thought I would, and when fate stepped in, I put on a uniform and escaped. And when fate stepped in again, I took it off.

Am I complaining about my childhood and I should just put a sock in it?  Well, the latter is always good advice in any circumstance, but I'm not really complaining so much as noting and evaluating how growing up as I did has influenced who I am as an adult.  I'm not a nowhere (wo)man sitting in my nowhere land, as the song has it, but I'm familiar with the feeling.

Bottom line, when I read others' personal accounts of life in these United States I feel like a stranger in a, not strange, but unfamiliar land that I thought was my own, my native land.  It is, but the people in it are not quite mine. Or I am not quite theirs.

Santa Ana lover

When I was in southern California, I liked the nights when the Santa Ana winds blew.  The breeze was like black velvet sliding across my skin. The air was so warm and dry it felt like, walking outside, that you didn't need to wear any clothes at all.  But in the clothes you did wear, you didn't sweat, even if the temperature in that deep dark was 90 degrees.  Oh, your body would perspire but the moisture would evaporate as soon as it left your pores so it was as if you didn't.

I remember skateboarding fast down 28th Street in San Pedro one night during a late September Santa Ana with views of the harbor, all the lights of the cranes loading and unloading container ships, wearing nothing but cut-offs, a tee shirt scissored off at the midriff and chucks, the wind bouncing off the hill and houses, my hair flying behind me, my arms stretched out at my sides like wings, screeching a right turn at Pacific and coasting with the wind pushing me a dozen blocks to road's end, land's end, at the parking lot where my lime green Mustang GT convertible was, stepping off the board and flipping it up, walking to the edge of the cliff and gazing out across the sea at the lights of Avalon and Two Harbors on Catalina, the wind rushing past me. I felt if I jumped the wind would lift me up and I would soar like a kite.

But I didn't jump.  Instead, I hopped in my car, put the top down and sped north in the fast lane on the Harbor freeway, then the Glendale, towards the mountains where the gale was born, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Dick Dale, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys...musty, moldy, golden oldies from the groove yard of the past, the devil wind curling into the passenger seat beside me and caressing my cheek, kissing my ear, whispering secrets.

 

In Chandler Country

California night. The Devil's wind,
the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,
raging through the canyons like a drunk
screaming in a bar.
                              The air tastes like
a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?
The weather's fine as long as you don't breathe.
Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,
lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,
and count your blessings.
                                          Another sleepless night,
when every wrinkle in the bed sheet scratches
like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,
when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,
and quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers on the edges of a knife
and eye their husbands' necks. I wish them luck.

Tonight it seems that if I took the coins
out of my pocket and tossed them in the air
they'd stay a moment glistening like a net
slowly falling through dark water.
                                                        I remember
the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,
the narrow beams dissolving on the dark
surface of the lake, voices arguing
about the forms, the crackling radio,
the sheeted body lying on the sand,
the trawling net still damp beside it. No,
she wasn't beautiful - but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty --
"Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?"

Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door
catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.
Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,
packs of coyotes come down from the hills
where there is nothing left to hunt.

"In Chandler Country" by Dana Gioia

 The Santa Ana air does not taste like a stubbed out cigarette.  It tastes like chaparral, chamise and California lilac, and I loved breathing it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolton, Illinois

 Considering that the new pope hails from Dolton, Ill., I thought I'd repost my blog entry from May 12, 2023.  I'd thought about reposting it before when the mayor of Dolton was in the news for what I read somewhere is called being mayor while black.

Re-reading this piece and trying to imagine what it was like for the upright citizens of the suburb, I thought of a civilized people being attacked by encroaching barbarians.  Their own brave warriors were able to fend off the initial, probing attacks for a while, but eventually they were overwhelmed  and forced to flee, leaving all behind, all which the barbarians, being barbarians, could not maintain and ruined.

Anyway, here it is:

 **************************************************************************************************************************************

Happy days in Dolton

Digging through a bunch of old papers and other junk in a store room, I came across a cache of photos from my relative the news man's early days as a police beat reporter.  I've written about him before, how he never intended to get into the news business but planned to be a journeyman printer with his own shop, but because he knew how to touch type, when he was drafted, the army put him to work on a division newspaper and that, ultimately, led to a 40-year career in the news biz, mostly newspapers, but also radio and television. He got to hang out with people like Len O'Connor and Mike Royko.

Anyway, one of the stories he told me about his early days working the cop news on the south side of Chicago and the suburbs in that area was how blacks would prey on the businesses and homes of such bedroom towns as Riverdale, Dolton, South Holland, Harvey and others in that area.  These towns when he reported on them in the early 1970s were pleasant white communities enjoying a solid middle-class life thanks to all the nearby factories and steel mills that provided  employment at good wages.

Each town had its own police force, which diligently kept the peace and enforced the law.  Of course, the homeowners were peaceable and law-abiding.  It was the outsiders who raided to loot and rob who had to be guarded against.  My relative told me of how when you called the cops they responded immediately to a break-in, burglary, armed robbery, whatever it was, and they would pursue the felon no matter what until they got him. Since each town's cops only had jurisdiction in their community, they would hand off a hot pursuit of a perp to the next town's cops as the bad guy fled through them.  The Cook County Sheriff's Dept. would also join in the pursuit, as would the Illinois State Police.  He told me of several such chases in which multiple police cars were wrecked, one, in which, if memory serves, 14 police cars crashed chasing a bad guy, and another where the bad guy crashed into a gas station fuel pump, which exploded in a huge fireball.  But they did get the bad guy.  And usually alive, without gunplay.  And, he said, regarding fleeing felons, never mind what the judge would hand them, the cops would tune them up on the spot.  Only then would they face a judge.

Anyway the second, here are some photos of his that I thought were interesting illustrations of those days.  Most of the photos in his archive, if I may call it that, are just negatives, only a few prints.  So I only had a handful to select from.

This one on the left looks like a press conference with cops...I don't know.  But what interests me is the uniforms and the hair styles, and that guy in the background who looks like a Weegee-type news photog. He's even wearing a trench coat!  Note the photo of President Nixon, which fixes it in time.

The photo on the right is of a cop dusting for fingerprints after a burglary.  Thieves climbed up on the roof of the building and cut a hole in it and climbed down into the business to rob it but the alarms went off and the cops were on the bad guys like that.  Note the policeman is armed with a revolver.  Probably an old reliable Smith & Wesson .38.  And I bet should he have ever had to use it, he would have administered a pistol whipping, not emptied the cylinder.  Those times were far less shooty than today. Maybe that's because the police were more respected in those days, even by criminals, and cops had the authority and backing for what they needed to do on the spot, and were certain that any bad guys they nabbed would do hard time.

This photo on the left shows the end of one of those epic car chases, ending as they usually did with the perp crashing his stolen car, and the cops swarming him and hauling his sorry ass off to the calaboose.  It looks like a Cook County Sheriff's Department deputy and an Illinois state trooper were in on this bust.  I think the car is a Lincoln, but I'm not sure.  Usually the bad guys stole Cadillacs or Lincolns.

To the right is a photo of the Cook County Sheriff Department deputy pictured above left counting the recovered loot the robber got.  It would be cataloged and then returned to the store keeper, sometimes the very same day.  They didn't dawdle back then and the red tape was minimal.  Crook robs, cops catch, your money returned, crook goes to the slammer.  

Now this photo below is different.  It shows a neighborhood get-together in suburban Dolton in 1973.  The back of the photo says "pet parade."  I suppose it was a kind of street party where neighbors would gather with their pets and enjoy a nice time together.  I've colorized it to bring out just how pleasant and enjoyable it must have been, with lots of families, lots of children, lots of dogs -- and, you will notice, everybody is white.  It was Leave It to Beaver land for real, prosperous, safe, peaceful and pleasant.

Today, the factories and steel mills have long since closed and Dolton is more than 92 percent black and just barely 5 percent white, mostly elderly who can't afford to move. It's plagued by crime, drugs, gangs and street violence.  Here's a photo I found from a Sun-Times article about Dolton in 2022:

The photo, taken by Anthony Vazquez, shows Martin Luther King Blvd in Dolton.  The story says the suburb is like a ghost town with abandoned stores and buildings infested with druggies and the homeless.  A crime stats website describes Dolton today thusly:

"Dolton has an overall crime rate of 7,484 per 100,000 residents. This is one of the most dangerous regions in the United States. This means that your chances of becoming a victim of any type of crime in Dolton is 1 in 13 if you reside there for a year."

Dolton, Ill. Crime Rates

A couple of more end of police chase photos.  The bad guys never got away and never got far.  Too bad about those stolen Cadillacs:

 

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen

 

I flew up to Alaska to celebrate my brother's birthday with him. Considering the bad feelings Canadians have towards us Americans these days, if adverse conditions caused excessive fuel consumption, I didn't want to risk having to make a fuel stop there and deal with whatever hassle the Canuks might feel like subjecting a Yankee imperialist sky pirate to. So I flew to Seattle and gassed up there, then flew on to Juneau, cutting almost 200 miles off the over-Canada distance.  I refueled and had lunch at Juneau, then continued on to Anchorage, making it a pretty long day, almost 10 hours in the air and 480 gallons of fuel burned. 

The next morning, I flew on to Fairbanks where I landed to top off my fuel and have breakfast, then flew on to Bettles, some ways north of the Arctic Circle, and landed on the 5,200-foot gravel runway there, about three hours in the air total time. I was tireder the second day than the first. It does catch up with you.  The temperature was not a lot different from what it was in Montana, low 20s at night, mid 40s during the day, but the air smelled different, fresher somehow. Maybe it was the breeze blowing off the river.

When I was gassing up -- not that I really needed to, but I go by the old adage that the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire, plus full tanks preclude condensation --  a couple of guys came by to look over my plane and remarked how well I had managed to put it down on a gravel runway.  I didn't bother to tell them that our ranch runway was nowhere near as nice as this one, certainly not as wide, and also gravel.

Bettles was founded during the boom years of the North Slope oil bonanza and has been in decline ever since, the only thing going is tourism, such as it is. The place has only a few dozen permanent residents now. The airfield is bigger than the town.  I kid you not.

My brother met me, coming in from his place in a Cessna T206H float plane and off we went, flying through some spectacular scenery. The land was still just as God made it. It was easy to imagine that this was the world before Adam, and that there were no people anywhere. Gates of the Arctic was definitely a good name for the region.

For his present, I gave my brother a Ruger Hawkeye Alaskan .375 and a stack of ammunition.  Since he's had some brown bear trouble I thought it might prove useful. Carrying the rifle on my plane was another reason for not wanting to have to land in Canada. I did not want to hear that dreaded phrase, "Do you have any firearms on board?" At least not since that one time I replied, "Well, what do you need?"  Definitely the wrong answer. Those Canadians just can't take a joke.

We had a pleasant little party and spent the long evening discussing many things. It had been a long time since we had been able to just talk and talk like this.  He has always been my favorite brother, very much like me in thinking in many ways.  We both have an almost mystical, panentheistic view of life and nature and God in a way I'm not about to try to explain.  I've always envied and admired his choice of professions that has allowed him to be where he wants to be and do what he wants to do.  

His wife was five months into her pregnancy and was definitely glowing. I brought her some comfy slides with arch support.  Those slippers helped me with my last pregnancy and I knew she would get good use out of them. I wanted her to rest while I fixed supper but she insisted I sit down while she whipped up the grub, and mighty good vittles they were, too.  I asked how she was doing, being out here so far from any other people, and she said she managed. Her husband was all the company she needed. My brother said that soon he would move her down to Fairbanks for the birth where relatives would stay with her, but he had to remain in the north for his work. She said she would be just fine staying with him.  He smiled but shook his head.  He'd take her south.

My other brother is very much like my father in many ways, and followed him into a career in naval aviation. He's of a more practical, down-to-earth mindset.  I guess I am kind of in between the two of them.  I am a romantic in the Wordsworthian sense, but also have the commonsense viewpoint of the female who has to change diapers and treat boo-boos.

Picking up some ice.

They asked how my flight from Juneau to Anchorage had been and I said, aside from some turbulence, it was uneventful. That was kind of an understatement, but I mentioned Portage Pass and the weather over Prince William Sound so I needed to say no more. The NWS forecast for the Cook inlet area when I traversed it was for “moderate to locally severe turbulence with strong winds, showers and strong updrafts and downdrafts.” The winds aloft from 3,000 feet to 12,000 feet were forecast to be southeasterly to southerly (an onshore flow of moist air) at 26 knots increasing to 52 knots with altitude. Surface winds locally through passes and canyons were forecast at 45 to 60 knots. Moderate rime icing was predicted from 3,000 feet to the cloud tops at 15,000 feet. Weather observations along my route were marginal VFR (with a VNR) to IFR, except for Anchorage airport itself, which was VFR with a light northwest surface wind and a three-degree spread between the 40 degree Fahrenheit temperature and the dew point. So...you know....  My brother knew. 

Windshield icing up.

I remarked that according to all the on-line sages women are congenitally incapable of flying airplanes and if you let a woman try to fly one she'll crash it so I guessed it was just sheer luck that I made it up here.  He asked me why I read that swill or paid attention to those arrogant morons. All they want to do is stir up trouble. I shrugged and said that I was dropping out of anything to do with politics.  Best not to even know what those characters are yapping about.  He said it was about time I stopped wasting my time that way.  Then we talked about real things, things that matter.

Back at Bettles, as I was preparing to leave a couple of men approached me and asked where I was flying to.  When I said Fairbanks and points south, they asked if they could hitch a ride with me.  I hesitated -- they could hijack me easily -- and they could read my thoughts or at least sense my uneasiness so they suggested I check them out at the ranger station, which we all went to together.  At the station, a woman asked if I had room for one more and when I said I did word got out and I ended up with seven passengers,four men, a woman and her child and another woman, all of whom traveled for free.  That was the first time I ever picked up hitch-hikers in an airplane.  I wonder how often that happens in remote, lightly populated places accessible only by plane.  I dropped off the four men at Fairbanks and the two women and the child flew with me to Anchorage where I dropped off the woman and child and the other woman continued on with me to Juneau. 

She rode with me in the cockpit and I was pleased for the company.  The weather was a little better over the central coast this time, so I could relax a bit and enjoy her conversation.  

She said she had come to Alaska to work as a stripper, which paid very well in the woman-starved north, and had also gotten into prostitution, which paid even better, but quit that as it was too dangerous, many of the men in the state being very violent, even murderous.  I was only mildly surprised to learn that she had been married and her husband was her pimp.  But I was shocked when she said that one time a john began beating her up and her husband had burst into the room to stop him and they had gotten into a fight and her husband was killed.  She ran from the room and the john chased her, but she got away.  She called the police.  They booked her for prostitution but didn't bother to hunt down the john.  He was just some guy.  They noted down his description and put the word out, but that's about all they could do. 

She was going down to Juneau to work the tourist trade, she said.  That didn't sound like she had given up prostitution, but I didn't pursue it.  I also wondered what she was doing in Bettles but I didn't ask.

We did discuss male sexual proclivities, of which she was a storehouse of information, some of it hilarious, a lot more alarming.  She warned me never to get involved with an Alaska native man.  They raped their own daughters routinely, beat their wives and often killed them.  They treated their dogs better than any woman.  I said that reminded me of the men in Afghanistan, except the hajis preferred boys to girls and treated their goats better than their women. Had sex more often with them, too.  She asked if that was really true and I assured it was indeed very true. 

When we hit turbulence, she was blasé about it and continued talking, clearly an experienced bush plane passenger. Looking me over appraisingly, she said if I ever wanted a job stripping I could make bank, especially as a blonde with milk monsters. I could have said something about that.

She said when she first got to Alaska she was dead broke.  She had hitch-hiked up the Alcan, riding mostly with truckers, paying them with blowjobs.  She was stranded in Tok for a week before she got a ride, this time with a family in their RV.  When they camped for the night, while the wife was preparing dinner she sucked off the husband. 

They dropped her off in Fairbanks. She had not even enough money to buy a meal, but she found a strip joint, got hired right away and made enough money that night to get a motel room, buy dinner and breakfast the next morning and go shopping for some clothes.  By the end of the week she had enough money to buy a second hand car and the week after rent an apartment.  I gathered she lived in Anchorage now, where she owned a house and had a boyfriend who worked construction and on fishing boats. I asked if she still stripped and she said yes.  I asked if she provided any special services to her customers and she said now mostly hand jobs and dry humps. 

When we got to Juneau, she invited me to spend the evening hanging out with her. She knew some guys who liked my type and I was a little tempted.  It would be interesting to see what her world was like.  But I decided that would not be wise.  I explained to her that I needed to get home to my kids and my husband and she said that sounded boring so why not have a girls' weekend with her before going back to the dull routine? She could introduce me to a lot of fun guys who were free with their money. She was pretty insistent about it, so I finally said I was on a schedule and I had to stick to it or I would get in trouble. I needed to get going.

I had actually planned to stay over in Juneau, but I didn't want to chance running into her or her pals if I went out to look over the town and have dinner. As I thought about it, it seemed curious that after telling me how dangerous Alaskan men could be she wanted me to come with her to meet several.  What was up with that? It also struck me as odd that she never once showed any interest in what I was doing in Alaska, why I had come to Bettles, how I came to be piloting a fairly large airplane. Her whole conversation was about herself and the money to be made off men, almost as if she were trying to sell me. 

Of course, I could be just letting my imagination run away with me.  She might have even been intimidated, if that's the right word, by me, someone with a professional-grade skill and occupation, as she may have assumed, while she was...well, what she was and she wanted to show to me that she had a good job, too, one that made her a lot of money.  I don't know. Maybe she just wanted a friend. Maybe I missed a fun evening.  And maybe I avoided being sex trafficked.  Who knows?

Anyway, so, tired as I was after busting through the leg from ANC to JNU, I refueled and took off for Seattle.  I put on my oxygen mask and snorted the pure stuff whenever I felt my eyes grow heavy. I put the plane on autopilot as I usually did not do, as I've mentioned before, in case I dozed off --which I didn't do.  With night, there was nothing but the glow of the instruments, the drone of the engines, some radio chatter, and the stars racing between clouds. I kept my scan going and kept up my dead reckoning plot to match with my GPS track. My mind drifted free, the time passed.

When I finally chirped the tires at BFI, I had been in the air for some 14 hours total that day.  I felt like I had gone from God's own heimat to an encounter with one of the denizens  of a Henry Miller novel to normal earth.  I thought about gassing up and getting on home but I knew I was just too tired to even try. It completely exhausted me just to handle the details of getting my plane serviced and find accommodations. 

When  I got to the hotel, I was so tired that I fell asleep flopped across the bed fully clothed and slept until dawn, got up, took a shower and went back to bed. I woke up a couple of hours later and went out to the airport.  I hadn't eaten dinner so I was ready for breakfast but I couldn't find anything open. At my plane, I got out my stash of emergency MREs, selected cheese tortellini with assorted crap, wolfed it down and was good to go. I leaped into the sky and pointed old Betsy's nose into the eastern sun. About two and a half hours later I touched down on home ground.  As I sat in the cockpit after pulling the throttles to idle cut-off I nodded off and didn't wake up until Jeff, a concerned look on his face, touched my shoulder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fore!

 I blundered across an essay, Golf is Sublimated Sex, that at first I thought was a parody but soon realized was completely in earnest.  I didn't really know what to make of it.  It seemed so...how can I put this?  Well, I can't.  According to the author, playing a round of golf is the same thing for a man as going to a brothel. 

Okay...(clears throat). Sure.

All I know is that if some guys said to my husband, "Hey, let's all go to a brothel," and he said, "Nah, I'd rather play golf," I wouldn't shrug and say, same diff, so boy is he gonna get it when he gets home. Not even. If I heard about it, I'd give the big galoot a hug and tell him I'd do anything he wanted me to, which would probably be to make him a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon and jalapeños on thick-sliced Italian bread with a side of french fries and a beer.

Well, I did learn from the essay that golf courses are sex objects and that playing 18 holes of golf is, for a man, the same as fcuking 18 nubile lasses. 

Uh huh.

Seriously, I did note how for radical lefties words have magical powers.  So if you describe something in a sexual metaphor, it actually is that sexual thing. Cue Twilight Zone theme.

I know when to admit I'm wrong, but I don't want to.

"Sexual language abounds. The balls, struck with clubs on long shafts are said to penetrate the air. Hills represent hips, mounds look like breasts, smooth gentle contours delineate the maiden (the fairway) from the untamed older woman (the long thick grass of the rough, which can trap a man’s ball, impeding its progress towards the hole). The long thick grass of the “rough” is like hairy legs of women who are not depilating themselves for men’s pleasure, or the wrinkled skin of older women.  Having hit his ball along the fairway, avoiding, if possible, traps such as lakes, bunkers of sand and the rough, the golfer reaches the very short grass of the “green” where the aim is to get the ball in the hole. The number of strokes he takes is recorded and the man who gets his ball into the holes with the fewest strokes is the winner."

I hate to break it to the author, but when it comes to real sex, the man who does it with the fewest strokes is definitely not the winner.  Trust me on that.

The author writes, "Challenging a man’s access to sex, actual or sublimated, is in many cases threatening the thing most precious to him in the world." Um, sure getting laid is right up there on a man's to-do list, but is it really the most precious thing in the world to him?  I don't think so. Men aren't just big hairy fcuking machines.  They are human beings, unique souls in the universe. They have other interests, other desires, other priorities. Not that there's anything wrong with big hairy fcuking machines. I kinda like them, actually.  Not on a golf course, of course. Well...(clears throat again).

You know what?  When it comes to men, golf and sexual fantasies, I bet you a dollar that right now that there is some guy obsessed with Greta Garbo's big toe comparing the 4th hole of Gotham City Municipal Golf Course to it and getting a chubby thinking about it.  Okay, I wouldn't actually bet on that but I wouldn't be surprised if it were so.  Okay, okay, I would be surprised.  And I'd laugh like a loon.  You guys....

The author attacks golf courses for being environmentally destructive. I dunno.  When golf courses are gotten rid of they are invariably replaced by housing developments.  Which is more environmentally destructive?  

Found this quote on Golf Course Atlas. OK, so I'm wrong. Golf is sex for men.

The major theme of the essay seems to be golf as a symbol of the patriarchy, which is, it need not be said, evil beyond the comprehension of man...er, womyn. And golf represents both the male's sexual lust and his sublimation of sexual lust.  Now I always thought that sublimating desires was a good thing.  And not just regarding sex.  You want to pig out on a whole quart of Haagen-Dazs but you sublimate that urge into writing a play called "Desire Under a No Exit Sign."  A guy wants to lay pipe with a girl who gives him the air so he sublimates his desire for her into inventing the steam locomotive. Why would anyone have a problem with that?

I'll contend that the entire creation of civilization was sublimated male sexual desire. Why do I contend that? I don't know.  Why not? Hey, if academics can contend utter crap, why can't I? But, then again, maybe it's not utter crap.  Maybe it's truth from a different point of view? What do I know? Seriously. I have no clue about this world.  I've been meaning to stop by the clue factory outlet store and buy one but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Well, I do have one clue.  It's that nobody else has a clue about what's going on, either. This world completely baffles me. And it baffles you, too, doesn't it? Come on, admit it! All you know is that you get horny when you think about your favorite golf course.  Huh? Huh?

Oh, by the way, girls play golf, too. Millions of them. I do.  And when I play I don't think I'm doing the equivalent of visiting a brothel.  Nor belting on a strap-on and nailing 18 women. As if, I'm sure.  But what about if the brothel was filled with gigolos?  And couldn't the pin or flag stick represent a...you know...? Eighteen of them all standing firmly erect. (Clears throat again, looks around, looks up at the sky, whistles tunelessly...).  Um, honestly, under no circumstances would I consort with a gigolo.  Not happening.  A gigolo, heh, give me a break. You have to be an industrial strength weenie to be a gigolo. Get out of here.

If some golf course replaced their pins with giant dildos I probably would never play that course. But then again, if it was a nice day and I really wanted to play that course...eh.  I might even have my picture taken posing next to one, maybe even hugging it.  You can't take the frivolous seriously.

What a completely nutty time we live in. The West is melting into an ooze of gibberish.

Same time, same station

 

In by-gone days, the old, weird America produced a variety of radio plays featuring protagonists with out-of-the mainstream professions.  In this play, the narrator is a free-lance insurance investigator, the story told through entries in his expense account.  He is hired to locate the beneficiary of a $1,500 life insurance policy (about $18,000 in 2025). Not much to make a story out of? You might believe so.  But you would be wrong.  This is well worth your time to listen to, as you live life in these United States as it was 70 years gone by.

The writer and novelist Colin Fleming has written about this play, "At one point, Dollar is so ground down emotionally by what he's learning about this person--and, via her, what he's learning about humanity, that he begs off the case." Don't you.

 "The Broderick Matter," a Johnny Dollar radio play first broadcast over CBS radio the week of November 14~18, 1955. All five 15-minute episodes:

Bob Bailey, the actor who portrays Johnny Dollar, was very much a part of the old, weird America.  His Midwestern parents owned a stock company and he first appeared on stage when he was 10 days old.  He began regular acting at the age of four. He never attended school, picking up what education he needed along the way. He ran away with a carnival when he was 15, working as a barker --"Step right this way to see the tattooed lady! (she'd be out of work today)."  "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one thin dime will reveal to you the secret arts of seduction of the fabled Orient!"  

From there he got into radio with his mother's help; she had switched from stock company acting to the new medium almost as soon as broadcasting became a thing (as we say today).  Bailey became a regular on The Chicago Theater of the Air, first broadcast by WGN and later carried nationally over the Mutual Broadcasting System. It was hosted by "Colonel" Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, staunch America Firster, and foe of Franklin Roosevelt. The Theater produced operettas and serious dramas, airing from the Medinah Temple at 600 N. Wabash Ave., performed in front of packed crowds, its 5,000 seats sold out every week for 14 years, 1940 to 1954.

 It may seem odd that an unschooled Ohio kid could have a successful career starring in operettas and that operettas were wildly popular among the national radio listening audience.  But such he had and such they were. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's really important to me

 "Whether I was sewing, working in the garden, cooking, milking, tending my chickens, or helping the children hoe, my mind was always with them. And watching them at times like that gave me a thrill. They were my flower garden in my hard years of toil and loneliness. As each child was born it was a flower added to my garden, each a new kind, each needing different care."
~ Mary Mann Hamilton, Trials of the Earth

 In raising my children, I think back -- or try to -- to when I was a child and how I was every day, what I liked, didn't like, how I felt, what I wanted to do, what I didn't, what I liked to eat and didn't like, what were the frightening and unpleasant things for me, the happy and enjoyable, and then try to think how my parents fit into all that, my mother, my father, then see how I can use those memories in helping my children.

My parents roles and influence were very different, my dad being away a lot at sea or off on some TAD.  During the Gulf War he was gone for 11 months, so my mom was in charge of the household and had to handle everything, including us kids, by herself.

Almost every summer I got bundled off to my grandparents at the ranch starting when I was eight.  My brothers also came, sometimes, but being older usually had something else to do, go to Boy Scout camp at some exciting place -- to me it seemed exciting anyway -- like Emerald Bay on Catalina Island, where they learned to sail and snorkel, get lifeguard certified and all kinds of cool things.  But at the ranch I had my own horse and learned how to take care of her and other animals. 

My grandfather and his friend, a retired search and rescue expert, taught me how to track, which I found fascinating. What I remember most about that is that I had to go barefoot while tracking.  That made me watch carefully where I stepped, looking down at where I placed my feet.  Doing that, I noticed what I otherwise would not have -- all the little details, insects, scat, disturbed pebbles and twigs, a grass blade pressed into the earth....  I also learned to look behind me frequently, not only to remember the way back, but also because an animal that realizes it is being tracked will circle around behind the tracker and keep an eye on him (or her). 

My grandfather would step on a blade of grass or a dandelion and have me not merely look at it but study it so I could remember how it looked freshly stepped on.  Then an hour later he would have me do the same thing, then two hours later...then the next day, the day after...the next week.  When I could tell him with certainty how many hours or days had passed since the blade of grass, plant leaf or flower had been stepped on, he had me do it in increments of minutes.  You think that can't be done? It can.  He taught me to do the same thing with scratches on tree bark, broken twigs, disturbed pebbles, footprints in soil and mud, with scat (animal feces).

I learned that if you are looking for deer, don't look for the body, which may blend in to the surroundings, but look for the ears.  Not only do they stand out but they move.  Sooner or later they move and then you will spot them. 

I learned that any animal, human included, on a still day has a scent hemisphere about 30 feet in radius.  Any animal that comes within 30 feet of you will become aware of you.  But it will ignore you if you don't behave in an aggressive manner -- that includes looking directly at it: only predators stare at other animals. There are things you can do to conceal your scent, the most effective being to smear yourself with the feces of another animal. Coating yourself with mud also works, though not as well. My grandmother put her foot down on me doing that.  Thanks, grandma!

One useful practice I gained from that training was to mark my footwear in some distinctive way, cut a notch in the soles or something, and tell others so that if I became lost and rescuers were searching for me, when they found a footprint they could immediately know whether it was mine or not.  All my family's footwear is so identified now.

My grandfather also taught me how to shoot, which I learned to do well, but which I did not like and had no interest in, but learned because I wanted not to disappoint him.  He was a stern man and I was a little afraid of him and I didn't want to make him cross with me. So when he threw an old tobacco can in the air and told me to shoot the head off Prince Albert, I raised my single-shot Ithaca .22 and knocked it out of the sky.

Relic of the old weird America. Guess what No. 10 is.

Remembering these episodes, I am happy to teach my kids things they obviously have interest in, but I am torn about teaching them things they are not.  Should, for example, I teach, or have el jefe teach, my mini-me how to shoot?  As I was, so is she: she has no interest in guns or shooting, but might she not someday need to be able to effectively handle firearms for her own protection? I remember reading about a little girl being taught to shoot at a firing range and accidentally shooting and killing her instructor.  I can imagine, although I have no idea if it's true, that an eager father pushed a reluctant child into...well, no need to speculate.  I'll let the gun thing go, for now. I do wish that we lived in a civilized society where no one ever needed to take a thought about guns.

As it is, we teach as things come up. Children are naturally curious about  pretty rocks, clouds, flowers and trees and all the wild things flying buzzing, hopping and grazing they see. So without effort they are introduced to botany, zoology and geology. These lead not only to general sciences like evolution, meteorology and climatology but more practical sciences such as pedology, animal husbandry and assorted agricultural practices. These sciences are taught naturally during the day as we carry out routine activities, take walks and horseback rides, finding interesting rocks and curious plants, hear different bird songs, see frogs and newts, fish and crawdads in streams, find intriguing animal trails and spoor. 

Children love to hear stories and have things explained to them on the spot: "Mom! Look! Look! What is this shiny red rock with these white circles in it?" "Dad, is this an arrowhead?  Can you teach me to make a bow and arrow and can I use this as the point?  What kind of wood should I use for the bow? Should I use a different wood for the arrow shaft?  How can I tell those trees apart and where should I look for them?  Why are there different trees anyway? How did the Indians make bowstrings without string? What...."

Finding a fossil leads to paleontology and the coolest thing of all for little boys -- dinosaurs!

Helping Dad build a doghouse for Fido or a playhouse for them, they not only learn carpentry and a bit about architecture, but geometry and the practical value of numbers in such things as accurate measurement, calculating area, angles and so forth.  And, of course, how to use tools safely and select the correct ones for each job.

Being around animals and observing the practices of selective breeding they learn about sex in a matter-of-fact way and what it is for -- producing the next generation. They see and we help them understand the differences in behavior between males and females. They also learn the value of creating offspring with a high genetic-value partner, and the troubles that come from bad mate selection.  We practice eugenics with our livestock, as do all stockmen; if we didn't, we'd be out of business.  We buy and sell sperm from high quality sires as a matter of course. They see the results. We point out that we breed the traits that are useful to us, not the animal; in fact some traits we breed for would result in the animal's death in the wild, and the animal has no say in how we breed it. 

When they ask about the applicability of eugenics to people, we discuss the ramifications, speculate about a world ruled by eugenics and who would determine what traits were eugenic. We speculate on breeding humans for specific uses, like insects in an ant colony, and are we not now haphazardly doing it? That leads us to both literature and history. History inevitably leads to warfare, especially warfare before what we call civilization -- societies organized around agriculture, controlled by a literate elite -- when invading tribes would exterminate all the males of the conquered, but keep the desirable, breedable females.  That leads to archaeology and anthropology....

Cuts and scrapes and more serious injuries both to themselves and their animal friends lead to not only learning first aid but about germs and infection, the immune system and other aspects of the body.

 So just by going about their day-to-day activities, our children are becoming very well educated. Of course, they have periods of formal study, the self-disciple and persistence required to master complex subjects being an important part of a person's education.  They need to learn to focus on the goal and not the boring, tiresome early stages of acquiring a skill that in future years they will find useful, remunerative or simply enjoyable.

 

 

 

 

I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'll think of something

 

Here's a story from the old, weird America that once was, where there were isolated rural enclaves where the old ways still lingered, where a 16-year-old girl was of marriageable age, where teenage girls were not bobby-soxers in pedal-pushers and saddle shoes swooning over Guy Mitchell songs but broom-wielding barefoot witches whom you had better not upset or, brother, look out! 

I've wondered why the belief that adolescent girls have mischievous powers, cause poltergeist activity and that sort of thing, has been common for such a long time.  Adolescent boys are not ascribed such powers.  Because the conviction that, as it is usually described, an angry or unhappy pubescent girl can cause havoc, make things and animals fly through the air, break crockery, even teleport herself, persists, it would seem like there must be something to it.  

I don't know.  When I was a teen, I had my share of anger and unhappiness, but I could never cause things to shatter or fly through the air.  I certainly could not teleport myself.  

Darn it.

"You with your kindness and your handsome face and your city manners," Abbie said. "How could you do it? You made me fall in love with you. It wasn't hard, was it? All you had to do was hold a little hill girl's hand in the moonlight an' kiss her once, an' she was ready to jump in bed with you. But you didn't want anything as natural as that. All the time you was laughing and scheming. Poor little hill girl!"

 Wherever You May Be, first broadcast on June 26, 1956, by NBC radio as an episode of the series X Minus One. It was based on a novella by James A. Gunn published in the May, 1953, edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.

 An episode of the 1989 Soviet science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, "Psychodynamics of Witchcraft," was based on this story.

James Gunn was also an example of the old America, his grandfather appearing in Ripley's Believe It or Not because he could name every county of every state in the union. A high-ranking mason, Gunn studied Japanese to learn the secrets of the Orient. As a result, when he was drafted in World War II he was sent to the Pacific to interrogate Japanese prisoners and learn their secrets.  After the war, he became a professor of English at the University of Kansas, teaching science fiction.  He wrote The Listeners, which Carl Sagan called, "one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written."

Gunn's novella was adopted for radio by Ernest Kinoy.  Kinoy fought in World War II with the 106th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, his regiment was surrounded by the Germans and forced to surrender. The Americans were interned at Stalag IX until they were transferred to the concentration camp at Berga, the slogan of which was Vernichtung durch Arbeit -- extermination through labor. One day the commandant of the the stalag lined all the regiment up and ordered those who were Jewish to step forward.  The senior NCO replied that they were all Jewish. So they were sent to Berga where Kinoy and his fellow soldiers dug tunnels and space for an ammunition plant 150 feet underground under conditions so harrowing that 47 men died.  When the US Army neared the camp, the prisoners were force-marched to another camp.  Thirty-six died along the way. Kinoy survived all this, graduated from Columbia University and became a script writer for NBC during the Golden Age of Television, writing for Studio One and Playhouse 90 as well as such television series as The Defenders, Dr. Kildare and Route 66, in addition to writing for radio. He, too, is an example of the America that was.

Patsy O'Shea, the actress who plays Abigail Jenkins, was also part of the America that was and lived to see what it has become. Born at the height of the Depression in 1931, she became a wildly popular child star beginning at the age of three, appearing in hundreds of radio plays. She became a regular on the soap operas Guiding Light and As the World Turns, among others. A 1942 article described her as “Orson Welles in miniature,” adding, “She is so much in demand that if you tune in on any daytime radio serial and hear a little girl’s voice the chances are that it’s Miss O’Shea.”  She switched to television when it came along, continuing her roles in the soap operas as well as appearing in such early TV series as Boston Blackie, The Line-Up and City Detective. She died alone in a nursing home in 2020 at the height of the Covid lock-down madness, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and 90-year-old husband of almost 70 years forbidden to visit her.

Ants and the Borg

See that line across the road just about in the middle of the photo to the left?  That's an ant trail.  It was there when I was a little girl visiting my grandparents.  It was there when my mother was a little girl and my grandmother told me it was there when she was a little girl and her mother told her it was there when she was a little girl.  So that ant trail has been in the same spot for more than a century and a quarter, and very probably a lot longer than that. 

 How much longer? Who can say, but probably a lot longer than that road has existed, centuries maybe, maybe thousands of years.  Maybe it was there before the Indians came.  If I learned that it had been there since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised. And if, somehow, I was to learn that that ant trail would still be there when the glaciers come grinding down from the north again, as by and by they surely will, whether that's a hundred years from now or 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised, either. What is time to an ant colony anyway? We humans are like mayflies compared to colonial creatures, whether ants and termites or coral polyps.

Then there are plants.  Some years ago I came across a study of the flora of the Mojave Desert.  It mentioned that the author had found a creosote bush that was 12,000 years old.  The plant grows by spreading out in an ever-widening circle.  Underground the roots spread from the central, original plant, the above-surface parts of which may die, but beneath the surface, it lives on, essentially indefinitely.  Even a fire, which may burn off the above-ground parts of it, won't kill it because the root structure is untouched.  It can, of course, be killed.  In this case, the bush was bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a housing development.  Alive since the beginning of the Holocene, a grassland ape destroyed it to create another one of its ever-proliferating nest heaps.

Do plants think, are they sentient?  Define sentience. Is there only one type?  Is your definition valid for any life form other than hominids? How do you know?  

How about fungi? I once listened to a very -- very --  smart guy proposing and defending convincingly the hypothesis that all fungi on the planet are really just one globe-spanning life form that has been continuously alive since the first fungi evolved.  What about the oceans separating continents, and continents moving around via plate tectonics? What about islands far out in the ocean? Wouldn't that have broken apart the Ur fungi?  He had an answer to that, but I forget what it was.  

Fungi and vascular plants interact intimately with each other.  Fungi act as a communications pathway between trees, conveying information about their health, telling a tree that it is time to die -- yes! that's true -- among many other things including, no doubt, things we, as animals, could never understand, or even be aware of.

Are fungi sentient?  How about the combined creature that is a forest/fungi symbiote?    

And what about Gaia, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' updating of Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere as the interconnected biomass of the earth through time and distance that maintains itself through feedback loops. Is it sentient?  What experiment could we devise to prove or disprove it? What if we are just a part of Gaia's "brain," rather like our brain is made up of various parts that separately are nothing but combined are us? Or maybe we are like one of the cells in our body that, alone, is nothing but combined with millions of other cells is us and we continue to be us even as the individual cells die and others replace them, rather like bees in a hive.  The hive continues on year after year though the various bee units come into being, function for a while, then perish, each bee, aware of its impending death, leaving the hive to die alone so as not to pollute the hive with its decaying corpse.  How does the bee know it's going to die?  Or does it?  Perhaps it just begins to feel tired and so, on one of its excursions, stops to rest on a flower petal and goes to sleep, forever.  Will we ever understand these things?  Or just imagine that we do?

I recall reading, maybe in The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, speculation about social insects having a group mind, rather like that of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched that with my dad when I was a kid and remember him saying, "Borg, Borg, okay Borg.  But where's Warner, that's what I want to know.  What did Borg do with Warner?"  I had no idea what he was talking about but my brothers laughed.

I digress.  Where was I?  Hmm.  I forget.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
―Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 
I would take a splendid sapling in my hands, pull it back, let it fly, as it did with a will, into position again—its uprightness. One day I stopped in the exercise, the thought striking me: This is great amusement to me; I wonder if not as great to the sapling? Maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass.  

In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.

I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as it pass’d me, murmuring out of its myriad leaves, “We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.”

I fling out my fancies toward them,
Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.

~ from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass