In one image

 

 

 Why is Western civilization and the people who created it so bitterly hated, cursed and damned?

This is why.

Envy. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's happened to me

 
Dislocation

by Marge Piercy

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It's that moment when your life
is suddenly as strange to you
as someone else's coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don't belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

has lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long time passing

 

The Viet Nam War still looms large in my family’s history, as I’m sure it does in very many others.
It’s coming up on the 58th anniversary of my mother’s older brother’s death in that war. He would have been 77 this year. The other day, she was looking at some old photographs of him with his high school sweetheart and realized that she couldn’t remember what her name was. That really bothered her. She spent some time digging through old letters and papers trying to find it or jog her memory. It was important to her to remember it, but…nothing. One more link to him and his life gone.
I don’t think she’s ever gotten over his loss. She joined the Army herself as a nurse and served at Cu Chi because…she had to do something. She just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let him go.
Sometimes casualties didn’t reach the hospital till days after they were hit, and when she removed the bandages the wounds were seething with maggots. I know that because I have read letters she wrote home. She’s never spoken of her experiences beyond saying that she thought she would never be able to get the blood out from under her fingernails.
Another of her brothers served much later in the war as an Army helo pilot, and was involved in Lam Son 719, where he was shot down while trying to take off from a hot LZ. He only spoke about his experiences to me once when I was a kid, after an off-roading accident that totaled his old IH Scout and left us upside down with the engine roaring and gasoline pouring on us. He got us out of that with cool efficiency and on the long walk back instructed me on how to manage your emotions and do what you have to do to survive when you find yourself in hell.
My dad flew F4Js with TF77 in the early 1970s, a genuine Yankee Sky Pirate. Hundreds of missions over the North, and into the South during the Easter Offensive. He flew missions during Linebacker II, attacking targets in and around Haiphong.
MiGs and SAMs and AAA, friends being lost over and over again, sortie after sortie until they mounted into the hundreds. And what did he ever say about any of it? Nothing.
Well, once he said it was the most useless war in history. Otherwise, if you asked him, he would tell about this time on liberty…, or some funny stories, or maybe he would discuss some technical aspects of flying the old bird. But that’s it, and don’t push him for more. You wouldn’t get it.
Well, here’s to you, my very dear male parental unit, my wonderful mother, my uncle and all the other Viet Nam vets; that war is a very long time passing.

 

Crash!

 Hey, you guys, remember when I wrote about Dolton, Illinois, in the good old days and my relative the news man who reported on crazy police car chases after bad guys that wrecked lots of police cars and ended up in spectacular crashes? And you all said, oh, will you just get out of here with that, cops don't do stuff like that!

Well, they sure used to, and here's a news story from 1973 to prove it.  I was nosing around in a storage shed and this time didn't disturb a shoe effer but did find some old news clippings, one of which was -- ta da! -- this one:

 Popeye Doyle and Bullitt didn't have nothin' on these suburban cops back in the day. I can imagine that they were all Viet Nam vets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freejacks and snobs

I uploaded my image and asked Grok to render it in the style
of Edward Hopper. I don't think Hopper need worry about AI.

 “I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind  

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

“Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every
person has a ring of stories around it, a halo almost.
People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl
squatting in the front dooryard in mud-caked overalls,
digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and
talked to me. Some I've forgotten, but most I remember.
And so my memory goes back before my birth.”
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “I remember how warm bourbon tasted in a paper cup with water dipped out of the spring at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that I wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder."
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “At first glance you would not have thought he had any Negro blood. But if you looked sharper—and if you were used to looking—you could see the signs. It was the planes of the face mostly, the way the skin sloped from cheekbone to jaw. It was also the way the eyelids fell. You had to look close, yes. But southern women do. It was a thing they prided themselves on, this ability to tell Negro blood. And to detect pregnancies before a formal announcement, and to guess the exact length of gestation. Blood and birth—these were their two concerns.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

“The army went home heroes, and even the slaves felt pretty good. There were quite a few of them—Andrew Jackson had taken them along when he marched south, nervous and worried, not knowing the kind of British army he’d be facing. Those slaves went down with the army, served with it, and came back with it. As each man left, he got a bit of paper signed by Andrew Jackson giving him his freedom. Now, the General had a poor hand and he signed carelessly, with only the first four letters of his name showing clearly. On those pieces of paper there was just the word “Free” and a scrawl that looked like “Jack.” So these new freemen and their children for all the years after were called Freejacks.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

 

Shirley Ann Grau, terror of the KKK.

The above quotes are from Grau's novel The Keepers of the House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.  I first heard of it when reading a blog post by Ted Gioia, the jazz historian, who so loathed it that he refused to name it, merely implying that it didn't deserve the '65 Pulitzer.  Curious, I looked it up, read it and was captivated by it.  Grau is a wonderful writer and she wrote with sincerity and intensity about her world, the rural South in the middle decades of the 20th century and its centuries of memory, but her themes are transcendent and echo down the decades.  Grau's brilliance as a writer was recognized in her day, her first story collection, The Black Prince and Other Stories,  published in 1955, was a finalist for a National Book Award. Time magazine called it “the most impressive U.S. short story debut between hard covers since J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.”

About The Keepers of the House, Orville Prescott wrote in a review in The New York Times, “The sounds and smells and folkways of the Deep South are conjured up and the onerous burden of the South’s heritage of violence and of racial neurosis is dramatized in the lives of a few unhappy people. It is all an old and familiar story, but seldom has it been told so well.” Well, yeah, but it's a lot more than that.  Grau immerses you in that world and in that time in a way that only the best writers can do.  When you are reading it you exist in that world.  It's your world, too.  The quotes from it I posted above may give you a sense of it. Katherine Seelye called all of Grau's writing "deeply atmospheric, lyrical" and that it is. It's also so emotionally entangling that you feel as if you are actually living the lives she creates. “Shirley Ann Grau writes of our most sublimated and shameful prejudices, about how miscegenation infiltrates every level of southern society, and about how racial harmony is a pretense that integration alone is unable to address,” Alison Bertolini wrote in Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction. Grau wrote of her own writing, "I try to say that no person in the rural South is really an individual. He is a composite of himself and his past. The Southerner has been bred with so many memories that it’s almost as if memory outreaches life.”

Incidentally, the Ku Klux Klan so hated Keepers that they burned a cross on Grau's front lawn.  Was she intimidated? Nah.  She told the Klan leader in her town that she was a better shot than he or any of his boys were so they better leave her the hell alone if they didn't want to get their britches filled with buckshot. 

Why does Ted Gioia despise Grau so profoundly he can't bear to mention her name?  I don't know.  I don't think he's a klansman, being of Mexican and Italian descent.  Could be the Catholic hostility to Protestants. Then there is her double first name: Shirley Ann, which you can bet she was always called, not Shirley. Double first names -- Barbara Jean, Daisy May, Wanda June -- clearly identify a person as not one of the self-proclaimed elite who lord it over us peons. I have an aunt name Shirley Ann, proof positive that I am white trash, fer shure, just like Grau.  The late-comer-to-America liberal's view of American history as irredeemably wicked and foundational Americans like Grau as evil colonist settler slavers and genocidal killers of innocent natives probably also plays a part.  I know Gioia is a liberal because he boasted that anti-Viet Nam war activists such as he ended the Viet Nam war, which is such an egregiously self-congratulatory load that I can't even.  I just can't even.  Can you? Ask a Vietnamese about that. But be prepared to have your butt kicked from here to Ho Chi Minh City.

Hmm.  What was I talking about? I forget. Oh, well, it don't matter.  Nothing does, does it?

 

 

 

 

Portrait of a Memory

"This portrait is a great work. Did you paint it from life?"
"It is all from memory; it is all from hate."

 Here is a riveting play showcasing the best of what radio once was and very much worth your time to listen to.

"Portrait of a Memory," first broadcast on April 28, 1980, on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The play is an adaptation of the Henry James story, "The Tone of Time," originally published in the November, 1900, issue of Scribner's.  You can read the story in that issue of the magazine here.

All the actors in this play were once regulars on the Broadway stage, then went into teaching, acting in television, in soap operas or became voice actors and appeared in commercials.

Marian Seldes

Marian Seldes studied under Martha Graham and Sanford Meisner, among other greats.  She first appeared on the Broadway stage in the 1948 production of Medea and went on to win five Tony awards. She was a regular guest star on television's golden age series, The Hallmark Hall of Fame. She became a member of the faculty of the Juilliard School. She is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most durable actress," having appeared in all 1,809 performances of Deathtrap.

Carol Teitel

Carol Teitel studied under Lee Strasberg and made her Broadway debut in 1941's Stage Door.  Over the years she acted in numerous Broadway shows, including appearing next to Richard Burton in Hamlet, and winning two Obies, In television, she acted in the soap operas The Guiding Light, The Edge of Night and Lamp Unto My Feet. She was killed in an automobile accident a few years after acting in this CBS radio play. Her papers are archived at the New York Public Library in the Billy Rose Theater Division.

Norman Rose as Juan Valdez

Norman Rose  studied at the Actors' Studio before being drafted in World War II, where he was a news announcer for Armed Forces Radio. After the war, he began his Broadway career acting in such plays as The Respectful Prostitute, Richard III and St. Joan. He was described as having "the voice of God" during his acting career.  He became the spokesman in television commercials for Colombian coffee, portraying the coffee grower Juan Valdez. He also acted in the soap operas One Life to Live, Search for Tomorrow, The Edge of Night and All My Children. His voice was heard in the movies Love and Death, Radio Days, The Nutcracker, Biloxi Blues, Message from Space and Destroy All Monsters. He was the promotional announcer for both NBC and ABC television.

 

 

 

 

Helter Skelter

Still here, just been busy, running around helter-skelter.

More soon! 

Friends or enemies?

When we returned Iwo Jima to Japan, they mocked our Marines'
legendary flag raising by conducting their own flag raising
right next to the memorial marking our flag-raising.

 I was talking with my mother's longtime Japanese immigrant friend the other day.  I've written about her before, as well as her mother.  She's always expressed her gratitude to and admiration for America, although, despite having lived here for almost half a century, she's never become a naturalized citizen.  But in this conversation she was talking about some Japanese politician who, apparently, has become quite popular recently.  His main appeal is his attacks on the "Anpo," the Japanese-American security treaty.  He claims that all other such treaties the U.S. has with other countries requires the U.S. to obtain permission from those countries before it deploys its forces from them, such as, say, dispatching air tankers based in Dubai to refuel bombers sortied from mainland USA.  But only Japan has no such agreement and the U.S. can do whatever it wants without consulting with the Japanese government. This politician says this is arrogance on the part of America and a danger to Japan.

I don't know if this is true or not. I could look it up, but I don't care.  What I do care about is that this woman, who owes -- and has admitted she owes -- all she has ever become, all her success, to the life America not only allowed, but encouraged and helped her to achieve, does not think first what is true about America, and what is best for America, but only about what is claimed about America by Japanese to be harmful to Japan, and only what is best for Japan, even if it is detrimental to America. She, despite having lived a life she never could have in Japan -- and she knows it, and has often said so -- now thinks first and only about Japan and what is good for it, and expresses hostility to America.

Not only that, she asserts such things as that white people have small heads compared to Japanese and are not as smart; in fact are stupid compared to Japanese, and that they are all racists, while Japanese are not racist at all...excuse me while I guffaw till I collapse on the floor...and on and on.

I asked my mother what was going on with this woman, and she said that as people get into old age, the mask slips and their true self and true thoughts are revealed.  Not all people wear masks, of course, so as they become elderly they remain the same as they always have been.  But many people conceal who they fundamentally are, either on purpose, or, often, unknowingly even to themselves.  Then, as they age and mental constraints erode, they say what they really think, express who they really are.  All the resentments, all the slights and insults, real and imagined, that they've received, all the failures they've endured...everything, bursts out of them.  Maybe, she said, it's a last gasp of their life, railing at the unfairness of it all.

I said, okay, but what's all this got to do with this woman's sudden hostility to America and Americans when before she was so positive and admiring?  My mother said that she, of course, couldn't know, but maybe this woman had always resented America for being so much better for her than her own country, her native land, her race and culture.  That a person could hate that which enables their success is not unusual.  People often resent the helping hand even as they grasp it.

We should never have given Iwo Jima back. From Time, March 5, 1945.

I came away from the conversations with both my  mother and her friend with a bitter taste in my mouth.  But I did understand why the Japanese in the United States were interned after Japan attacked us in World War II.  

Later, thinking about everything, I concluded that love of one's native land never dies.  It's a fundamental loyalty to home, to your own people.  You might suppress it for all your life if you need to, but as your end draws near, your soul searches back to its beginnings and there is where your heart is, where it always was, and so you embrace it as the light fades.

That's how I would like to think about it, anyway, how I would like to think about this Japanese woman's ... regression.  I don't know. 

Dying Marine aboard ship at Iwo. Photo by D. Chapelle.

As I've written before, my grandmother was a navy nurse serving aboard a hospital ship at Iwo Jima. The ship took aboard four times the number of  casualties it was equipped to handle. Wounded were placed on the deck because there was no place for them below.  She was tasked with going ashore during the fighting to carry out triage, selecting who was wounded but could wait for evacuation, who would survive if they were evacuated immediately, and who was too badly wounded to save and so were injected with lots of morphine and left to die in as little pain as possible. What terrible decisions for a young

Wounded on deck of hospital ship. Photo by D. Chapelle.

woman to have to make. Again and again, and in haste as life depended on speed.  And as snipers fired at anything that moved and shellfire screamed overhead and mortar shells crashed down.  What lasting horror and remorse and second-guessing that remained fresh and alive in her mind all the rest of her life.

And what was it all for?  We just gave the damned island back to the Japs. Geopolitics?  Geopolitics be God damned. 

 

 

 

The USS Ronald Reagan idles off Iwo Jima, over which a Japanese flag flies, just as if the battle had never been. All for nothing.

 

 

 

 

The eternal Trump

 

 

What was the point?

Two women sit on a park bench amid the ruins of Cologne, 1945.  

 Some 117,000 Americans died in Europe during World War I serving in our armed forces.  Another 250,000 died serving in Europe during World War II.  Plus hundreds of thousands more wounded, very many quite severely.  And what did we ordinary Americans benefit from all those deaths?  Had we stayed out of those wars, remained strictly neutral, not gone abroad seeking monsters to slay, as John Quincy Adams said on July 4, 1821, how would we have been worse off?  Wouldn't having  all those hundreds of thousands of our men alive, living full lives, being productive and inventive, having children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren (essentially all of them white, by the way) been better for us?

German immigrants being expelled during WWI for being Germans.

 
Adams, in his speech, termed Europe "Aceldama." Aceldama is the field Judas bought with the money, his 30 pieces of silver, he was paid for betraying Christ. It literally means "the field of blood"; that is, a field bought with blood money. See Acts 1:19. That's a helluva way to describe Europe, ain't it? It's right up there with dismissing Europeans as "the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells," as Adams also does. Two centuries ago, our noble statesmen saw Europe for what it was and called it out, urging we Americans to keep clear of it. Why has that changed?  Who was to blame?

 Here is Robinson Jeffers' poem "[President] Wilson in Hell."  Written in 1942, it was excised from The Double Axe by Random House's Bennett Cerf.

Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said “I
         blundered into it
Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that
           I died
In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you
Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately
Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied
My hope had built. You have too much murder on your
      hands. I will not
Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the
         Mercy
That permits us to meet in the same heaven.—Or is this
my hell?”

Another suppressed Jeffers poem is “So Many Blood-Lakes” written a few days after Germany surrendered in 1945: 

We have now won two world-wars, neither of
            which concerned us, we were slipped in.
            We have leveled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble
            and dependence. We have won two wars and a
            third is coming…

—As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. it is a foolish
         business to see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run
         the world through so many blood-lakes: and we
         always fall in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

The top photo shows an episode in 1945 during World War Two in Stendal, in northern Saxony-Anhal, Germany, at the corner of Sperlingsberg Street. The bottom photo is of the same intersection, taken last year.  Why did an American have to die fighting for this inconsequential intersection thousands of miles away from his home? Why were Americans dying fighting in another stupid European war? Europeans are fighting each other today, killing each other at a clip of a thousand a week, despite the fact they are facing demographic collapse.  Europeans have always fought each other and they will never stop fighting each other. They're crazy. What profit it us to jump in and die with them?

 

Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on Foreign Policy, July 4, 1821.
John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State

"AND NOW, FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation [wobbling] and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....America's glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice."

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Perfect Season

 The Last Perfect Season

by Joyce Sutphen

No one knew it then, but that was the last
perfect season, the last time sky and earth

were so balanced that when we walked,
we flew, the last time we could pick a crate

of strawberries every morning in June,
the last time the mystical threshing

machine appeared at the edge of the field,
dividing the oats from the chaff, time of

hollyhocks and sprinklers, white clouds over
a tin roof. Everyone we knew was young then.

Our mothers wore dresses the color of
dove wings, slim at the waist, skirts flaring

just enough to let the folds drape slightly,
like the elegant suits our fathers wore,

shirts so white they dazzled even
the grainy eye of the camera when

we looked down into the viewfinder to
press the button that would keep us there,

as if we already knew that this was
as good as it was ever going to get. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The other day, someone referred to me as a cookie-cutter blonde trophy wife. I was quite pleased and proudly informed el jefe.  He said everyone deserves a participation trophy.

Which reminds me that when I got back from Alaska I mentioned that I was worried I might have been sex-trafficked and he said I didn't need to worry about that unless the 99 Cent store got into the sex trade. I said I thought they had gone out of business and he said well I guess they should have gone into the sex trade.

 

 

  

 

******

 Vegan

by Sue Ellen Thompson

My daughter hauls her sacks of beans
and vegetables in from the car and begins to chop.
My father, who has had enough caffeine,
makes himself a Manhattan-on-the-rocks.

It's Sunday, his night for sausage and eggs,
hers for stir-fried lentils, rice, and kale.
Watching her cook eases his fatigue
and loneliness. Later, she'll trim his toenails.

He no longer has an appetite
for anything beyond this evening ritual.
But he'll fry himself an egg tonight
and eat dinner with his granddaughter. 

For a widower,
there is no greater comfort in the world
than his girls and his girls' girls. 

 ******

 "I've been a doctor for 26 years, and the quality of the people I meet in medicine is very hit-or-miss. There are good people, but it seems like I have to sift through a lot of douche bags to find them. Generally, my experience with physicians is that they tend to have more opinions than life-experience. And you know what they say about opinions....
However, when I associate with ex-military types, there are spectacular people everywhere I turn. Operationally savvy, hard working, direct, and thick-skinned. I am proud to work with nearly everyone I've met during my short time in the Navy. Great people. Driven."
~ Gary Mullen

****** 

A few days ago, I thought I'd poke around in one of our storage sheds, but when I got inside I found Keith, the assistant ranch manager, whom we've had up to the house for dinner often and I've driven around the ranch with many times and otherwise spent time with, pants around his knees, vigorously humping an old high-heel shoe -- one of my old high-heel shoes that I had tossed into the trash.
I said, "Oh, hi, Keith." 
He said, "This isn't what it looks like."

I mentioned the incident to el jefe and he said that instead of giving Keith a Christmas bonus this year maybe we could just give him a bunch of my old shoes. 

 

 

 

 ******

 Hay for the Horses

by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
— The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds —
"I'm sixty-eight," he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

******

 A guy asked me why I can push the old Twin Beech up to higher altitudes than such a plane normally flies at and I mentioned such things as ram air carburetor induction and jet stack exhausts that probably help a bit and then I remembered something my father said that Randy, our A&P guy, had done: blue-printed and ported and polished the engines so they actually did deliver 450 horsepower.  Most engines coming off the assembly line don't actually deliver the advertised horsepower and after they built up the hours, even properly maintained, produce even less.

Dad and my grandfather used to race motorcycles and they always put the engines on a dynamometer to determine what actual horsepower they were producing when they first got them, then gave them that treatment and the increase in horsepower was dramatic, even for the Harley-Davidson XR-750, which was designed to be a racing engine only, when they re-dyno'd them, even without souping them up in any other way.

Dad was friends with a number of well-know racers when he was a teen.  One I remember him mentioning was Phil Read. Another was Bud Ekins.  Through Ekins, dad met David Carradine, Steve McQueen and Carey Loftin and got to do some stunt work on Carradine's TV show Shane and with McQueen's Solar Productions outfit, where he met Robert Vaughn.

Years later, not long after dad and my mom were married, they stopped by Musso's without a reservation, hoping they could get a table. As they were waiting, a waiter came over and said a gentleman had asked them to join him. It was Telly Savallas. A few minutes later, David Carradine came over and joined them, and then Robert Vaughn stopped by. They ended up having a three-hour dinner, paid for by Savallas, who said he had invited them over because he hated to see a young couple looking as tired and forlorn as they did.

******

I'm going to go get my training in the King Air and all its fancy do-dads as soon as I can set aside the time.  Probably be a solid week. Maybe two. I'm looking forward to it and then parking the 18.

I did fly the 18 on the Fourth of July, giving everybody who wanted one a free ride.  There were lots of requests for me to buzz something but I didn't. I've read too many accident reports of somebody deciding to buzz a friend's house or workplace and crashing to even consider it.  I'll let you guys do that stuff.  I'm too chicken, especially with passengers on board who rely on me not to kill them.

 

******

The late Larry Auster wrote a number of essays about black men who had murdered or mutilated white females, whether they were their girlfriends, or drunken girls they’d crossed paths with, late at night. He wrote, “Liberalism is a factory for producing dead women.” He was asked if he hadn’t meant, “Liberalism is a factory for producing dead white women”? He responded in the affirmative, and thereafter gave the complete version. 

Colin Flaherty documented the mayhem in his book, White Girl Bleed A Lot.

******

 Shortly after a British Airways flight had reached its cruising altitude, the captain announced: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain. Welcome to Flight 293, non-stop from London Heathrow to New York. The weather ahead is good, so we should have a smooth uneventful flight. Sit back, relax, and -- Oh! My God!"
Silence followed.
Some moments later, the captain came back on the intercom.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm sorry if I scared you. While I was talking to you, a flight attendant accidentally spilled coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!"
From the back of the plane, an Irish passenger yelled, "For the luvva Jaysus you should see the back of mine!”

******

 I tried following Naomi Wolf, but a while back when there were those big fires in Canada that blew smoke over New York City she wrote about it being some kind of government conspiracy and then went on about chem trails and all that foolishness, so I couldn't take her seriously. 
Those sorts of big fires happen about every 75 years.  The last one was in the early 1950s, when London experienced a blue sun (not moon!) because of huge fires in western Canada.  It's a well understood natural phenomenon and nothing to do with sinister overlord plots.  
Then I tried reading The Beauty Myth.  I dunno.  It just seemed to me that she was projecting her own world view onto everybody.  I didn't see it applying to me.  I asked my girl friends (note the space!) about it and, although none had ever heard of her, when they read through the book they just rolled their eyes.  Maybe what she wrote was true for her generation and her social circle and ethnicity, but not for us.
I had a similar experience reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae.  When she wrote about authors I knew quite well -- the New Englanders, Emerson, Thoreau, et al, I felt she didn't understand them at all.  She was coming at them from the viewpoint of an FOB Italian Catholic and was clueless about the world of early 19th century English-descended Unitarians grappling with German romanticism, love of nature, individualism, social reform, abolitionism and all the rest of it.  If I want to read a woman about that I will read Margaret Fuller. Which I have.
I think a problem I have with a lot of women writers is that they are too "vague" for me. What do I mean by that?  I'm not really sure I can express it in concrete words, but I am practical-minded and even when I start thinking in a "touchy-feely" sort of way, soon enough my thoughts turn to direct thinking.  If I wonder about, say, PTSD, I don't think about talk therapy and hugs, but examining the brains of those who suffered from  the disorder in life, taking tissue samples of their brains to examine under the microscope and discovering if there is a real physical cause for their mental state.
News flash: I did that and there is.

****** 

 At Quarter to Five

by Angela Janda

I was feeling lonely so
I went outside to the wind-
swept yard and beyond
that to the wind-tousled outer
yard and found where last
night in the moonlight we left
two sets of boot prints when
you stopped on your way
through the darkness to bring a
lemon bar and a movie, and
beside ours the tracks of the
smallest thing with claws, which
must have followed sometime
later. And I chased its tiny prints
and our mud-wash indents to
the far back gate and through
the gate out to where the
land is still dirt and brush
and bushes and cow
pies, my hair pinned
to my head but still blowing,
blowing, and finally a hard
breath, and I could see
through lonely to the wide
open, long blue lines of sunset,
moonlit night, the airplanes
trailing one another
down to runways, all those
people landing home.

 

Worshipping goddesses

 Browsing some chat sites, I came across some men talking about their favorite female pop singers, old guys, it seemed, talking about young women, and being really into them, the songs they sang, the way they emoted lyrics, how they dressed, their "look," talking about worshiping them, referring to them as goddesses without tongue in cheek or cynicism.  They meant it.

I didn't think the discussion was creepy or weird.  I thought it was rather sweet.  It reminded me of when, before I was married, I got that attention from guys even if I wasn't a pop singer, and, believe you me, I liked it.  It was fun.  I loved the attention.  Who wouldn't?

You know, the thing is, men need women in some very deep, profound way.  Maybe it goes back to motherhood and the womb and the awareness, maybe a subconscious awareness, that they were created, owe their existence, to a woman.   Sure, sexual desire is a part of it.  But I think that is superficial.  Nobody worships a sneeze between the knees.  

Saluting the...um...you know.

Well, I don't know.  I've heard that strippers are baffled by the way that if they squat in front of a patron and open their legs so he can see their pussy up close, he will gaze at it as if he were seeing God, eternity, the meaning of life.  I don't get it.  I for sure don't want to look at another woman's hoo-hah.  I don't even want to have to see mine and only do so for necessary purposes. I certainly wouldn't consider it access to the godhead.  Give me a break. And I sure don't want to see some guy's junk, let alone see it up close and personal -- get that thing out of my face!

Doesn't look much like
me but I was flattered.

I think a lot of the hostility of men toward women might actually be a resistance to this attraction.  The necessary escape of the boy from his mother's world into the world of men.  There is nothing worse than a mamma's boy and I think the fear of being one may be behind, at least in part, much of the misogyny a number of men exhibit. They feel compelled to assert their disassociation from the female.

 So are they cases of arrested development, locked in an adolescent mind set?  Could be.  Perhaps neurotic in some way.  I wouldn't be surprised.  Maybe something happened between themselves and their mothers that cut them deeply, that they can't get over.  So they project that experience on to all women.  I've read that something like that is behind the actions of serial killers of women.  

But not, it seems, the actions of incel spree killers.  Their resentment seems to be that they can't get laid. Or at least laid by the hot babes they lust after.  Especially when they see other guys, men who are nothing special as far as they can tell, getting dates with women who don't even notice their existence, or, if they do, just consider them creepers. 

Y'all wanna escape this?
If it's your mom, yeah,
you should. Otherwise...

This fear of female influence on their masculinity may also be what motivates the hostility to women "invading" what are seen to be traditional men's activities.  Again, at least in part. Not entirely. But I have had experience with that.  Ain't no goddesses in that environment, just some pushy broads, as they are perceived.

So men want to embrace women, worship them, adore them, treat them as ethereal goddesses, but at the same time, or alongside that, they want to escape the world of women, fear very much becoming feminized by the power of the female. At least, the power of the female over the male child, the little boy to whom mommy is everything. 

If the boy is to become a man, he has to break away from that. And the mother has to understand that and not only allow it but help him do it.  She only has him as her little boy until about the age of seven.After that, she has to let him slip away from her and, step-by-step, make his way into the world of men, leaving her behind.  That's very hard for both to accept, but that's the way it has to be. As a mother, you want to keep your little baby boy forever.  But you must not. And you also must accept that one day a young woman will take his love and affection, leaving you in the background of his life.

I think in accomplishing this in a natural, emotionally non-traumatic way, a good father who has a good relationship with his wife, the boy's mother, is very important.  The boy learns he can become a man, his own person, and still maintain fond relations with not only his mother but all women.  If he likes his dad and his mom and knows that his dad is considerate of his mother and also sexually attracted to her, that they enjoy having sex with each other, he can become that way, too.  Find his own woman and in turn repeat the role his parents had. 

So then, what's with the goddess worship of young women by men who should know better, especially having lived long enough in this world to know your average dame ain't no goddess?  Ya got me.  Maybe it's just something they enjoy indulging in. A happy fantasy.  Nothing wrong with that.

How about me? Do I want to be the object of male worship, a goddess?  Nah.  It was fun back in the day, but it was just some goofy frivolity, nothing important.  But being a good wife and mother, now that is important.  Really important.  And it takes all I've got to try to achieve it.  

You guys!

 

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

PS: If guys like you, gals will not.  I once overheard some women discussing me and one said that I had a "come fuck me face" and the others agreed. It was not meant as a compliment. The only thing I could think of as to why they said that is that I enjoyed bantering with guys and flirting. Shame on me. (I just asked my husband if I had a come fuck me face and he started to laugh. He's still laughing.  I take that as a no.)

I was also once sent this Sylvia Plath quote by a female classmate:

 She personifies the word cute. She's svelte and luscious. You notice her "thumpable" nose, her long lashes, her blue eyes, her long hair, her tiny waist. She is Cinderella and Wendy and Snow White. Her face is cute. She talks cute with white teeth under a bright lipsticked mouth. Her smile is cute, and she is perfectly coordinated.
You are always aware of her insolent breasts which pout at you very cutely from their position as high and close to her shoulders as possible. They are versatile breasts, always clamoring for attention. Perhaps they are angry at her face which does not notice them, but smiled lashily and innocently above them.
They are gay breasts, pushing out delightfully plump curves in her weak-willed sweaters. They are proud breasts, lifting their pointed nipples haughtily under the black, gold-buttoned taffeta or the shiny green satin. She is a breasty girl, and those two centers of emotion and nerve endings are shields, proud standards to lift to life and to the human race.

Not meant as praise.  Women police women far harsher than any priggish man. You just better believe that.

 

 
 

 

Good morning, son
I am a bird
Wearing a brown polyester shirt
You want a Coke?
Maybe some fries?
The roast beef combo's only nine ninety five
But it's okay
You don't have to pay
I've got all the change

(Everybody knows)
It hurts to grow up
(And everybody does)
It's so weird to be back here
(Let me tell you what)
The years go on and
We're still fightin' it

Twenty years from now
Maybe we'll both sit down
And have a few beers
And I can tell
You 'bout today
And how I picked you up
And everything changed

It was pain
Sunny days and rain
I knew you'd feel the same things

You'll try and try
And one day you'll fly
Away from me

And you're so much like me
I'm sorry

 

Wishing

 

 I've been listening to a lot of old love songs recently.  They have simple sweet lyrics and simple, sweet music.  I find myself singing them when I'm washing my hair or folding clothes, or, sitting down at the piano, I play the tunes by ear and sing.  It makes me feel good, and sends me back to the times before this horrid present.  I forget the now and slip back 60...65...70 years into the past.  

I drove my grandmother's 1959 Dodge Custom Royal Lancer convertible down to the post office the other day.  It was restored a few years ago and runs just fine.  It's got an automatic transmission that you engage by pushing buttons. It has power windows, automatic dimming headlights, front bucket seats that swivel out for easy entry and and exit, and air conditioning.  Oh, and a honking big V-8 engine.  When it was restored, a modern sound system was installed, so I was able to listen to all the old songs.  Cruising down the highway, hardly ever another car on the road, it was easy to imagine that I was back in Eisenhower's America.  I felt if I wished hard enough, I would be.

  

 

After the fall.

 

 

When civilization has long collapsed, the Warring States era has come and gone leaving strontium-90 and cesium-137-salted ashes where once great cities stood and humanity is not even a memory, only this will remain as a reminder of the glory that was. 

In the days gone by

 

 

 

When houses were affordable?

 In 1937, the median American household income was $723, the average, according to the Social Security Administration, was $890. That's with, usually, only the husband working. The inflation factor to convert that to 2025 dollars is 22.28.

In the first quarter of 2025, the median household income was  $80,610, the average $82,373. That's with, almost always, both husband and wife working.

 The houses pictured here, from a 1937 issue of Life, cost between $3,000 (upper left) and $6,000 (the two next to the bottom; the bottom house is $4,000), so between $66,840 and $133,680 in inflated dollars. In the first quarter of 2025, the average house price was $503,800.

So in 1937, if we take the average house price to be around $4,500, a house cost something like five or six times a typical family's annual income. And in 2025, a house costs roughly six times a typical family's annual income.  

What kind of amenities did houses in 1937 have?  Take a look:

Of course, a lot has changed in the country since 1937, much of it, maybe most of it, not for the better. For example, in 1937, the average house price in the Richmond district of San Francisco was around $3,500.  Today it is over $1.8 million.  So back then an ordinary working stiff could buy a home in a lovely part of the country, ride a trolley bus downtown or to the wharves to a job that paid him enough to own that house and support his family. His wife could shop at the local corner store and volunteer with the PTA and the library. His kids could walk to safe, disciplined schools that actually taught math and science, history and literature. On his days off he could take his family to Golden Gate Park or other safe and enjoyable parts of the city. Without owning a car. Today?  He couldn't afford a house within two hours of San Francisco, and that would be with his wife working. The schools he can afford for his kids are pointless, violent child warehouses.  He needs a car, and so does his wife, not only to get to work, but also just to get groceries. And crime....

Now you may say that there are still plenty of affordable housing areas in the country, and no doubt there are.  But are they in delightful areas by the ocean or a lake with lovely mountain views? Are they crime free with excellent schools? Are they close to cultural amenities like world-class museums, concert halls, theaters? Are there plentiful, well-paying jobs within a short bus-ride (a safe, clean bus ride)? Are there corner stores and shops within walking distance of home the wife can visit daily for fresh foods for her family?

Are they? Are there?