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.