¿Que esta chingadera?

 I managed the stairs the other day, stiff-legged with my bum knee in a brace, and walked outside for a while to enjoy some fresh air.  It was sunny in only the way sparkling winter sunshine can be.  There was a brisk, cold wind blowing steadily from the north, but out of the wind and in the sun it felt toasty warm.  I carefully sat down on some brick steps to enjoy being outside for the first time in so long.  They were warm from the sunshine and felt delightful.  I could hear the wind soughing through the trees and watched them swaying.  A flock of small birds, too far away for me to make out what they were, flew low across the ground. 

I was wearing a thick terrycloth robe, navy blue, that absorbed the heat of the sun and kept me toasty warm.  I decided to take off my knee brace and get some sun on my leg.  It was the second one I've had to wear. The first was a plaster half-cast put on in the hospital, wrapped tightly in bandages.  This one was removable.  Held on by Velcro stays it had metal braces on each side and was made of some thick heavy black material.  It was more comfortable than the plaster cast, but not by much.  So anyway, with my leg stretched out straight I undid the Velcro straps and gently slid it off.  Ahh!  My leg felt cold for a second as the light sweat under the brace evaporated, but then the sun warmed the skin.  When the first cast had been taken off and replaced by the brace, my leg above and below the knee was covered by a black bruise, purple around the edges.  But now it was a fading yellow and I could see no swelling.  I took a chance and tried flexing the knee.  No pain.  So I did it again and again.  My leg actually felt better.  In a week, maybe two, I should be walking normally, my ribs and collar bone knitted, my bruised and battered lung recovered, and all that has passed merely another fading memory that, by and by, I will forget all about.

 I was browsing a well-known rightish blog when I came across this exchange in the comments to a post:

"Given everything we know about women, it’s amazing to me that male homosexuality is still so stigmatized.

Given everything I know about women, it’s amazing to me that femicide is still so stigmatized."

And those rightie-tighties wonder why women would rather run screaming into freeway traffic than have anything to do with the alt-right or dissident right or whatever they call themselves.  You have to wonder how many bodies some of these commenters have on them.  If they had wives -- like that would ever happen --  they are the type who would destroy them with verbal and physical abuse.

These righties very especially hate white women and blame them for everything they don't like about the world today and say the most scurrilous things about them.  It seems that if they could push a button and all the white women in the world would vanish, they would mash that button flat. 

Being a mating pair (to use an ethological term) is good in so many ways.  Of course, there are bad matches and all sorts of potential troubles, but if the two of you are compatible, like each other -- or dare I say love each other -- life is so much better.   Caring about one another, having a deep, abiding affection, a pleasure in each other's company...and so much more in this emotion, this feeling, we call love is, it seems to me, very much what life is about; at least a very significant part of it, a part without which this weary life can seem unbearable.
 

Funny, nobody talks about love any more. It used to be the most important thing between a man and woman.  Now it's supposed to be sex.  I wonder why that changed.  Or if it really did.  Looking at ads and articles in magazines from the 1930s, there was a lot of female nudity. And before the Hays code the movies were getting pretty raunchy. In one of them you can even -- gasp! -- see Claudette Colbert's nipples. 
I've written about all the blatant sex going on in the 1930s.  And the birthrate was low.  But by the 1940s there was much more of an emphasis on courtship and love, and a lot more public prudery -- and when the boys came home after the war there was a baby boom.  Correlation?

Speaking of sex...well, kinda...one time I was chatting with some friends and someone asked what was the award or contest or game they were most proud of winning.  People mentioned scholarships and sports triumphs and culinary feats and so forth. When it came to me I blurted out, "A wet tee shirt contest!" It was true, too.  I've gotten scholarships but I never felt proud that I did so, only relieved and thankful. I'm not a sports person so my happiest sports memory is being kicked off the high school softball team for hitting a home run and then running around the bases the wrong way.  I thought everybody was cheering me not yelling at me.  (Why was that a happy memory?  Because I didn't want to play on the stupid team but I had to for character development or something.  I sure didn't see that happening.) I've never entered any kind of cooking contest although I like to cook but I have entered wet tee shirt contests, not as my own idea but at the urging of boy friends or el jefe.  And I win!  So, frivolous as it is, I get a rocking (jiggling?) vanity high -- and a proud male squire. Men are so easily pleased.  Fortunately.  Well, at least men who actually like women.  It seems there are fewer and fewer of those every day.  Whose fault is that?  Hmm.... Opinions differ.

I don't really understand the complaints about places and things named for American Indians demeaning them.  They were named after Indians out of admiration and respect and an acknowledgement that Indians were an integral and important part of the American story.  One of my relatives was Billy Two Moons Aenoheso, descendant of some very tough hombres who fought Crook and Custer, Terry and Gibbon, back in the old days.  But he never thought much about that, as far as I ever knew.  When it was his time to serve his country -- yes, his country -- he joined up and fought in Viet Nam, being pretty badly wounded there.

His wife, Arvelos Whitewolf Crazymule, was a direct descendant of Hump Back Woman, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre.  If anyone had a right to hold a grudge against white America, it would have been her, but, as far as I ever knew, she did not.  The past is the past, and it is this present we live in that we have to get through as best we can.  Both passed away a few years ago, however, and I wonder whether, if they were resurrected into today's woke world, they might feel the need to harbor resentment.  And, after all, it is a hard thing to be on the losing side of history, to be defeated and your culture, your way of life, your worldview, your personal and ethnic self-esteem be erased, leaving you no choice but to adapt to the conqueror's culture or die.  But at least American Indians were defeated by a foe that did not belittle and denigrate them but honored them in defeat, putting their visage on the two most commonly circulated coins in the years after the Indian Wars were finally over -- the Indian head penny and Indian head or buffalo nickel.  Not much, you may say, but still.... 

Among my ancestors was one William Hebb.  Born in England in 1755, he came to America in 1776 as a soldier in the British Army to fight the revolutionary colonists.  But he had no love for the King and felt sympathy for the Americans' cause and deserted.  He then joined  the Third Continental Light Dragoons, aka Lady Washington's Dragoons, which formed the life guard of George Washington, serving under Lt. Col. George Baylor.  He fought at Germantown,  Brandywine, and survived the so-called Baylor Massacre at Tappan, New Jersey in 1778.  This latter was a night ambush in which 67 of the regiment's 116 men were killed or wounded and Baylor was captured. Hebb was seriously wounded in this action and he was discharged and returned to Virginia to recuperate.  While there, he married a cousin of George Washington, the widow Jemima Washington Jenkins.   The regiment was reformed under Lt. Col. William Washington and sent to the Carolinas where, after recovering from his wounds, Hebb rejoined his regiment, which had amalgamated with the First Continental Light Dragoons due to the heavy casualties it had sustained, and fought at Cowpens, Santee River and Eutaw Springs.  Hebb was wounded at Gilford Court House and returned to Virginia, but recovered in time to participate in the siege of Yorktown.  After the Revolutionary War, he became an active abolitionist and was forced to leave Virginia and settle along a tributary of the  Ohio River.  For his service during the war, he received a pension of $8 a month.  He died in 1833 at the age of 78.  His son, Thomas Hebb, fought in the war of 1812, serving in the Virginia militia. Five of William's grandsons fought for the Union in the Civil War.  

I never knew about this ancestral line until just recently when one of my aunts sent me a a family genealogical monograph.  Reading through it, it seems that I also have French Huguenot and Welsh ancestry.  I had known about my German Anabaptist (Pennsylvania Dutch) and English Quaker ancestors and was aware I had a Knickerbocker Dutch ancestor.  I had thought that the Knickerbocker was the first of my European ancestors to arrive in America, sometime in the 1630s, but it seems my Huguenot ancestor, Abraham Vautrin, arrived some years before then, in 1624.  And, of course, my northern Cheyenne ancestors arrived a few years before that!  So I'm pretty anchored in the good old US of A.  So I guess, whatever happens to our beloved country, I'll ride out the typhoon or go down with the ship.  And since I'm descended from multiple lines of the persecuted -- Anabaptists burned alive by Catholics and drowned by Lutherans, Quakers jailed and exiled by the Church of England, Huguenots massacred by Catholics, American revolutionaries warred against by the brutal British Empire and, of course, the Indians...-- I and mine will manage to endure, survive and eventually prosper again despite what suffering we may be forced to endure as hated white devils.  At least I hope so.

I mentioned this conclusion to a friend and he pointed out that almost all these ancestors of mine fled their persecutors and emigrated to a more congenial land, so why shouldn't American whites do the same, ditch the USA and go where they're wanted. I asked where is that? He did not know. Do you?

Interesting research paper:

Identity Development and Its Relationship to Family History Knowledge Among Late Adolescents

 

The black dog

 

"People can die before their deaths and go to hell."

    I am here, I am frightened and I am alone. And I don't know what to do.

 "Help, Somebody," first broadcast over  CBS Radio Mystery Theater on August 18, 1975.

Musical paradise

 I post so many pop ditties that you may think that is the only type of tune I like.  Not so.  

Here is one of my favorites that I listen to often:  Korngold's Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra.

Some parts of this piece are so beautiful they overwhelm me emotionally and tears fill my eyes.  I often wonder what heights of human achievement European civilization could have attained if it had not destroyed itself in incomprehensibly horrific wars.  Maybe some of the anguish of the European soul slaying itself is expressed in the best of its music, like no other in the world, superior to anything any other civilization has ever produced or probably ever will.  And, of course, Korngold is a minor composer in the vast pantheon of European and European-diaspora genius.  Minor?  One could only dream of being so minor. 

Much of the concerto is derived from Korngold's compositions for movies, the then-new venue for orchestral music.  So audiences in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, enjoyed and were moved by the melodies from Korngold's mind.

From a contemporary time, another one of my favorite musical pieces from a somewhat similar popular venue -- Broadway musicals -- that I do very much like is the original version of "All the Things You Are" from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's  musical Very Warm for May. 

What a civilization we once had!  What a culture!  I can only appreciate the trailing stardust as it vanishes into the ever-receding past.  Will there ever be such as we had ever again?  Why did we let it go?

And these two pieces are bagatelles when compared to the towering geniuses of musical composition Western civilization produced.  But what bagatelles!

War lovers of 1945

 Look at the date on this major story (it took up about 15 percent of the whole magazine) in Life magazine:  November 18, 1945.  World War II had ended on September 2, 1945, just about two-and-a-half months before.  And already-- already! -- the smart boys were looking forward to World War III.  And already they knew it would be a nuclear war with ICBMs annihilating cities. 

To me, this is unbelievable.  How could they anticipate the world that came into being about 15 years later and in which we still live?  Why would they want to imagine it and depict it in such detail so soon after the greatest conflict in history had ended with tens of millions dead, empires wrecked, great, historic cities looking from the air like hell with the roof torn off?  I suppose that they published this as a warning in the hope that the prediction, detailed in a speech by Air Force Gen. Hap Arnold, could be prevented.The completeness of the story, focusing on the technology, the weapons, tactics, until the last page, when civilian casualties are mentioned: 40 million dead (out of a then US population of 140 million), every city larger than 50,000 population destroyed, is compelling.

I'm still digesting this story, wondering why it was published so soon after the end of World War II, why it was so accurate a prediction of future global warfare, and what was the intent of publishing it.  But I do find it very disturbing, and dismaying, especially in these times when it seems like the powers that be are intent on making this prediction from the first half of the last century come true. 

 

 

 

 

All things that have breath

I was talking with my mother about the fate of the women I helped train when I was in Afghanistan, one of whom I have heard has been hanged by the Taliban, I suppose for the crime of being educated and participating in society.  A lot of the commenters on rightish blogs and columns would like to do the same to American women, judging from their misogynistic blabberings.  They don't even want us to vote.

I digress.  

Anyway, my mother mentioned that while she was a volunteer with Children's Medical Relief International in Saigon in the early 1970s, she had gone up to the Central Highlands  to a Montagnard village to help inoculate the children against various diseases and to treat the injuries and illnesses of the inhabitants. After she and her team left, the communists attacked the village and exterminated every living soul, including babies. 

The photo of the girl above was one of the patients at CMRI's burn unit that my mother helped treat. How she was burned so badly my mother doesn't remember now; there were so many child casualties of the war, injured and killed in so many casually horrific ways that they all jumble together, and some the mind simply refuses to acknowledge. 

 I  understand that. In Afghanistan, I saw a bus that had struck an IED placed by...somebody...maybe the Taliban, maybe some tribal group feuding with another tribal group.  It was burning furiously when I arrived, all the passengers already dead.  As the fire consumed their bodies the heat turned the fluid in their brains to steam and their skulls burst open with loud pops and cracks.  Gratuitous nightmare-creating horror committed for no reason other than the wickedness of the human soul.  There is no evil, no cruelty man is not capable of; not only capable of, but relishes, commits with enthusiasm and pleasure.

American Indians say the reason man is so evil is because he feeds on souls, the souls of his fellow creatures that he kills and consumes.  The only way this necessary crime against life may be ameliorated is by proper respect for the creature slain, apologizing to it and asking for forgiveness for taking its life.  No one does this anymore, so the wickedness of the world increases and accumulates.  A silly superstition?  Maybe.

“O heavenly Father,
protect and bless all things
that have breath: guard them
from all evil and let them sleep in peace.”
― Albert Schweitzer

 

Me...a genius?

 I took the Raven Matrices IQ test on line and this is my result.  

*Blows on nails, buffs on sleeve.*

Actually, I'm skeptical of that figure, having been told many times in various ways that if someone looks deeply into my eyes the only thing they will see is the inside of the back of my head, and that the only way to get my eyes to light up is to shine a flashlight in my ear.

Why don't you take the same test and see how you do?  I'm sure you're a genius, too.

Raven Matrices Test

 But there is more to a person than his or her IQ.  Ambition, agreeableness, shyness, what one desires in life...all sorts of things -- including the so-called "D factor,"  D standing for "dark." This is defined as, "The general tendency to maximize one's individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others — accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications"; in other words, traits which are generally considered to be ethically, morally, and socially questionable. 

 The characteristics of the "dark" personality:

• Self-Centeredness (correlates egoism on the Self-Centeredness Scale)

• Lack of Nurturance (correlates Machiavellianism and psychopathy on the International Personality Item Pool—Interpersonal Circumplex: Nurtance Scale)

• Lack of Internalized Moral Identity (correlates: moral disengagement on the Moral Identity: Internalization Scale)

• Dominance (correlates narcissism on the International Personality Item Pool—Interpersonal Circumplex: Dominance Scale)

• Lack of Perspective-Taking (correlates psychological entitlement on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index: Perspective Taking Scale)

• Impulsivity (correlates psychopathy on the Dysfunctional Impulsivity Scale)

• Insensitivity (correlates sadism on the Empathy Quotient: Insensitivity measure)

• Power (correlates Self-Interest on the Schwartz Value Survey: Power measure)

• Aggression (correlates spitefulness on the Forms and Functions of Aggression Scale)

Source for this information:   Morten Moshagen, Benjamin E. Hilbig, and Ingo Zettler. "The Dark Core of Personality," Psychological Review, Vol. 125 Iss. 5, (October) 2018. 656-688.

So how do I score on dark personality traits?  I took a test to find out and my results are: 

 

 So whatever my IQ may be, despite the conclusion offered in the Raven test that I could be another Bill Gates or similar type, that is very unlikely.  I just don't have the personality to be a top dog, king of the hill, master of the universe.  Thank God.

 

Why don't you take the same test I did to determine your D-Factor:

D-Factor Test

USA! USA!

When I was staying at the line shack I found, as I mentioned, some tools that I had no idea what were.  I took photos of them to ask about when I got home.  Most turned out to be for shoe-making or repair, which made sense because a cowpoke who damaged his boots, probably not a rare occurrence, way out in God's country would be in serious trouble if he had no way to repair them or even make new ones. But this one in the photo to the left nobody I asked had any idea what it could be used for until I showed the photo to an old fence rider and he recognized it immediately as fencing pliers, a tool used to make and repair fences, an essential tool for a cowboy mending four-wire cattle fences, such as ours are.  The hammer head is used for pounding in staples (not the office kind but those double-bent nail type things). The hole at the top of the pliers is actually a pincer and is used to grab a staple and pull it out of the fence post. It's also sharp and is used as a wire cutter. The spike is for prying staples out.  It can also be used as a marlin spike to loosen rope knots or untwist wire. The bigger hole below the pincers is for grabbing fence wire and twisting and stretching it so you can tie lengths of wire together and pull them tight.  The series of holes below the pliers' jaw are for wire stripping or twisting small gauge wires.  The two holes, one on each side are also for something, but I forget what. In any case, each part of the tool has a purpose.  And it still functions just as well as when it was new.

I've encountered a lot of them in my life, and know some quite well and I can say that, in my experience, ex-patriots all seem to have the same characteristics whatever their nationality.  Despite their claims that it is the politics or culture or history of their home country that they are rejecting, it's always something personal that prompted them to leave it.  
One Japanese woman, whom I've written about previously, who came to the United States more than 40 years ago to get away from her life in Japan, still hates that country with an undiminished bitterness.  I was talking with her about all the terrible mass murders recently in the news and she dismissed them saying that Japan was even worse and reeled off several knife and bludgeoning murders that have taken place in Japan recently, as well as robberies, home invasions, extortions, child rapes and on and on.  For her, those crimes in Japan loom far larger than anything that happens in America, however much the crimes in America dwarf in enormity those in Japan.  They validate her decision to get out of Japan.  Anything that might suggest she was wrong to do so she refuses to acknowledge.  
She has a "Chinese" friend living in Monterey Park who also hates Japan -- and China -- although she, my Japanese friend, despises Chinese, considering them loud, selfish, crude money-graspers with foul personal habits, etc.  I put Chinese in quotation marks because this so-called Chinese woman was actually born and raised in Tokyo, as were her parents.  But to the Japanese she is and will always be Chinese, an alien outsider.  She owns a Chinese restaurant in Ginza yon-chome (a pretty ritzy part of town) as well as a Lion Beer Hall, I forget where in Tokyo.  She also owns property in Harajuku, a very expensive neighborhood, worth well over $10 million.  She could live a life of luxury in Japan, but she chooses to live in a modest apartment in LA.  She cannot stand the Japanese and doesn't think much of the Chinese, although she lives among them in an upscale overseas Chinese community.  She lives about five minutes away from where the recent dance club mass shooting occurred, but, unlike we Americans and our mass media, doesn't think of it as an American crime

but rather a Chinese crime, committed by a Chinese against other Chinese, and having nothing to do with the type of people she considers Americans -- whites, probably white Christians, as she and her Japanese friend have had business dealings with Jews and consider them a separate variety of human from "Americans."   Both say that Jews are very aggressive and  tenacious and always work out a way to win.  I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an insult or compliment.  She also doesn't consider crimes committed by blacks to be "American" crimes.  Blacks are blacks, dangerous "others" who need to be avoided.  They have no impact on her preference for life in America over that she lived in Japan or could live in China. 
I know a German man who loathes Germany and Germans.  He's lived in America for about 15 or 20 years but really doesn't know much about it.  The other day when he had ordered something and it got delayed and he contacted the shipper to find out where it was and was told it was in Jamaica he was baffled and outraged -- how could those morons have sent it to the island of Jamaica?  What idiots!  When I told him Jamaica is also a neighborhood in Queens, New York, where JFK airport is, he paused in his rant and said, "Oh."  Had I a sign handy, I would have handed it to him.  Anyway, from what he has told me, his life in Germany was miserable.  His father was an alcoholic who died at home and he discovered his body in the bathroom.  His mother was a shrill scold who beat him as a child and slapped and punched him as an adult.  He didn't do well in school, being unable to study at home and his teachers were, he says, incompetent, indifferent and cruel.  He liked a girl and tried to be her boyfriend but she scorned him.  German life in general was conformist and confining.  He noticed that Germans were always looking down on Americans and criticizing them, rather the way they criticized him, so he thought maybe at heart he was one of those Americans.  So he came to the USA on a student visa, earned a BS.Min.E. from West Virginia University, got a good job, a jolly country girlfriend who became his wife, a passel of rambunctious kids and friends who like to go hunting and snowmobiling and water-skiing and call him Dutch.  He's a happy guy now and can laugh at his life in Germany, but still thinks that country sucks big hairy donkey balls, as he says, glorying in the colloquial bawdiness of American expressions.

I was reading a blog about some Seventies rock group, the lead singer or whatever he was, of which had just died, and the comments where readers yammered on about all these bands from that era, almost none of which I had ever heard of, quarreling with and insulting each other over which ones were the best...the usual comment fare on any subject.  I listened to a a few of the music videos posted.  Definitely not my thing.  I hate whiny, self-indulgent, pretentious pop ditties.  Give me a break.  It's all just ear candy. And none of it has any significance other than to provide a few minutes of pleasure and enjoyment. It should, anyway. If it's got a good beat and you can dance to it, and the lyrics are sugary sweet, I like it.  Otherwise, I'll grab a line from The Dad's Handbook of Common Phrases, and yell, "Turn that damned noise off!"  Heh.   So I prefer stuff like this.  Yes, yes, it's all the bad things you want to say about it.  I don't care.  I like it.  

 

Be happy

It's a pretty grim world out there. Each day brings some new incomprehensible horror.  Has the world gone mad?  I don't understand what's going on.  The world wasn't always like this...was it?
Well, there's nothing I can do about it, so I'm adopting my father's viewpoint about all that happens in the outside world:  it's just a dull background roar.  Tune it out. Ignore it.  I'll just stay on the family freehold, and feed and banter with the hands, cheer them up and try to make their days have at least a few pleasant moments, play with my mini me and house apes, train and educate them as best I can, try to be a good friend and companion, a worthwhile helpmeet, lend a helping hand to those who need it whenever and however I can.  That's all I can do.

 My theme song these days --

 

If the story of your life had a first line, what would it be?

These days, sitting in my straight-backed chair waiting for my bones to knit, often just staring at the floor when I get tired of looking out the window watching the shadows rotate slowly, shortening as the morning climbs up to noon, then lengthening as the afternoon slides toward evening, I feel like Christopher Walken in this video.  In my mind, I, too, stand uncertainly, then begin to dance without restraint. (I know this is not the original version of the video but I can't stand the original's music -- so sue me! I prefer this tune.) Plus Christopher Walken is just too cool for school.

 

We've had a break in the storms. Finally.  It seems odd to see the sky instead of a gray ceiling of soggy stratus.  The sunny days make me restless and eager to get back in shape and start doing things.  At least when the weather was miserable I could console myself with the fact that even if I were well I would still be stuck indoors.  But now....  And while I sit, careful not to make any sudden moves, my mind riots and thinks about all sorts of things, dipping into daydreams and fantasy.

My uncle and my cousin came to visit me and after chatting about this and that for a few minutes, I guess to cheer me up or take my mind off my present condition, my uncle suggested that once I was all healed up we could all go dancing in the big city, and I said great, we could stay at that same hotel and have a threesome!  I don't know why I said what I meant that way.  I meant...well, I don't know exactly what I meant, I was just uttering verbal Styrofoam.  But the look on their faces -- astonishment, concupiscence, uncertainty...I actually laughed at their reactions. I thought about saying I was only kidding, but it was so funny to see them wondering if I was serious that I didn't.  I think my uncle pretty quickly realized I was, because he shook his head and smiled wryly at me, but my cousin really seemed to think I might mean it.  As if.  After they took their leave, my cousin quite reluctantly, giving me a last lingering look -- I must have seemed so sexy in my old sweat pants and zip-up sweat shirt -- my mother, who had been in the next room and obviously heard what I said, came in and gave me a look that clearly said that she couldn't believe that she had given birth to a complete moron.  I shrugged, then winced with pain.  Damn.  Anyway, it was just a lame joke.  But as she has told me over and over again, and as I very well know, you absolutely cannot joke with men about sex.  But it's fun to do so.  Most guys know it's just banter.  But occasionally there's a weirdo or creep who doesn't get it.  So the wise thing to do is keep your sense of humor knees jammed together.

That evening I voice-messaged with el jefe -- I've been telling him Skype is not working for some reason, as I don't want him to see me until I'm all better -- and mentioned the incident.  He thought it was hilarious and said if I actually did it to be sure to make a video and send him a copy, it would be like a Three Stooges sex tape.  I knew he would say something like that.  He always does.  He gets a kick out of knowing men...well, you know.  I guess for him it's like guys envying the car he has or whatever.  Anyway, he's not the jealous type -- not that he need be; I'm too much of a germophobe to do anything like that.  I talk the talk but don't walk the walk.  What would I gain from doing something like that anyway?  I already have what I really want.

But I am thinking do I really want to live on the ranch.  Maybe just part time.  In this winter weather my condo in the south seas does beckon to me most seductively.  But I have too many obligations, too many people depending on me, to pack my seabag and hitchhike off into the sunset.  Maybe in 15 years or so.  Maybe.

Relaxing in the Guam condo pool admiring Two Lover's Point in the distance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, what would the first line of the story of my life be?  I don't know.  Hmm.  How about, "Here's your sign"?  But I suppose that would be the last line.

Or --

"Call me Wanda."  “As Wanda awoke one morning from uneasy dreams she found herself transformed into a monstrous vermin.” "In a hole in the ground there lived Wanda." "All this happened, more or less."  "Wanda, light of my life, fire of my loins."  "All children except one grow up." "She was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."  "Last night I dreamed I went to Afghanistan again."  "They shoot the white girl first."  "When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold." "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." "In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street." "Wanda can see the color of time: it's blue."

All those are first lines from actual novels (some slightly modified. Duh.)  Do you recognize any of them?

Do you know what the first line of the story of your life would be?

 "There is no big picture. There is only this particular moment in this particular life."
~ Amy Bloom

 

 

Happy days...

 ... ?

Oh, my Lord!  I'm beginning to miss the Navy!

The fun part

You can always dance, wherever you are, whatever you have to do.  
It makes life more enjoyable. So bust a move!

The hard part

Don't give up on yourself.  If the other guy or gal can do it, so can you.

 

The serious part 

Jesus Christ!

 

 

The bad part

Um... I forget....

The Question

 

"It is not only what we have inherited that exists again in us but all sorts of dead old ideas and beliefs.  They are not actually alive in us but they are dormant and we can never be rid of them.  There must be ghosts all over the world."
~ from the play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

 We are all haunted by the past and the people who lived in it; all the things we never said, all the questions we never asked, all the answers we never gave; the things we did and the things we didn't do, the love we gave and the love we withheld, the feelings we expressed and the ones we didn't even know we had.  
We thought there would always be time for all that, we thought we would live forever and there would always be time because we would never die.

"The Question," first broadcast by CBS Radio Mystery Theater on November 5, 1980.

 

A Good life

 Still limited in my ability to get around and mostly stuck sitting bolt upright, trying not to move my upper body too much, I've been thinking a lot about my time in Guam and my life in the Navy.  I suppose recalling those tropical days in Guam is at least partially an escape from the terrible winter weather we have been having.  Blizzard after blizzard.  Our stocks of hay to feed the cattle -- they need to eat a lot more in weather like this to keep warm -- are running low and there's very little to be had for sale: everybody needs it, and the prices are rising with demand: in some cases, there are bidding wars for it.  So if the price of your T-bone goes up this summer, don't be surprised.  

The men are working overtime trucking the hay out to the range lands, rescuing and tending to frozen cow brutes. We've already lost some.  It's all a lot of brutal hard work in raging wind, blowing snow piling into drifts blocking roads and gates and freezing cold.  In some places slides block the roads, so out come the front loaders, dozers, excavators, power shovels and dump trucks. Man against nature, a fight for survival.  It really is. And I can't even help warm the guys up with some good hot grub and gallons of strong coffee when they can make it back to the cookhouse.  Rats.

So here I sit dreaming of Guam and thinking what a good life I had in the Navy and how glad I was to serve.  I heard recently that one of the Afghani women I helped train in handling severe wounds, especially head wounds, has been hanged by the Taliban.  She was pregnant at the time.

Sigh.  This world....

Well, here's a little video tour of Guam and the Navy facilities.

And here is one of my favorite enlistment ads for the Navy, a part of the controversial "a force for good" campaign.  I don't know why it was controversial.  I think it's true.  I guess it wasn't blood-and-guts, we-blow-stuff-up-real-good macho enough. Phooey!

By the way, the man behind the campaign was Admiral  Huan Nguyen.  You probably have never heard of him but you almost certainly have seen a photo intimately connected with him.  It's the picture of the instant a Viet Cong is executed by pistol shot to the temple by a South Vietnamese policeman.  Yeah, that one.  Well, the man executed, Van Lem Nguyen, had just hours previously murdered the admiral's entire family.  He broke into their house with a squad of Viet Cong and tortured and murdered  then nine-year-old Huan's father, mother, his five brothers, his sister and his grandmother.  Huan himself was shot three times, including in the head and left for dead.  His mother lived for two hours after the attack and Huan stayed by her side trying to stop the bleeding from her cut throat until she died.  Why did the Viet Cong do this?  Huan's father was a ranking officer in the ARVN.  Reason enough.

When Saigon fell in 1975, Huan was evacuated to Camp Asan, Guam, now Asan Beach Park.  In an interview upon his retirement from the Navy as a flag officer last summer, Huan said, “The images that I remember vividly when I arrived at Camp Asan were of American sailors and Marines toiling in the hot sun, setting up tents and chow hall, distributing water and hot food, helping and caring for the people with dignity and respect. I thought to myself how lucky I am to be in a place like America. Those sailors inspired me to later serve in the United States Navy.”  Which he did, having a long and distinguished career.  I think this one-minute ad, if you can call it an ad; it seems so much more than that to me, expresses his feelings for "America's Navy" very well.

Dancing the blues away

 When I'm able to dance again, I am going to go down to the rec room when nobody is home and go to that big old stereo with the gigantic floor and wall-mounted speakers that produces the most beautiful, rich, full-bodied sound outside of a live orchestra, and I am going to load it up with a bunch of silly old-time love songs that you can lose yourself dancing to, turn up the volume, and I am going to dance until I can't dance anymore.  Just be a dancing fool.  I won't dress up, just wear what I usually wear around the house and the ranch, so I can just be me with no need to anticipate the expectations of others or make myself attractive to them.  Just goofy old me hopping and jumping around, swinging and swaying, rocking and rolling.  And you know what?  For as long as I am dancing, I won't be thinking.  I will just be.

I'm still a Guambat!

 I spent some of the happiest days of my life in Guam.  I do yet remember it and all the people I met there fondly.  I still own an ocean-front condo in Tamuning.  It used to be a hotel but went bust in the Asian economic crash of '97 and was converted into condominiums.  I still harbor vague plans to retire there in my old age to bask in the warm tropical sun and wade in the warm tropical waters.

The island has been dominated by the US military, especially the Navy which for decades after the Spanish-American War controlled the island.  The Navy built a reservoir so the island has a permanent fresh water supply, as well as roads, health clinics, schools, etc.  -- the Spanish never bothered.  The most notable thing the Spanish ever did was, after the native Guamanians revolted against their rule, they killed ever male, man and boy, on the island, leaving only women and girls alive to be their servants and concubines.

Liberation Day, July 21, which celebrates the American reconquest of the island from the Japanese, is Guam's biggest holiday.  The Japanese occupation, short as it was, was horrifying in its brutality and is not forgotten.  I think that on a percentage basis, more Guamanians join the armed forces than any other group except American Indians, mostly the Navy, same as the Indians. 

Despite the American armed forces presence, nowadays tourism is the most important business of the island.  Millions of Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Russians visit annually.  The Japanese and Koreans mostly consist of honeymoon couples who stay a few days.  The Chinese usually stay a couple of weeks and the Russians may stay for a month or more, avoiding the harsh Siberian winter weather.  The beaches near the big hotels and shopping areas where the tourists teem are usually all that the visitor sees, but the beaches accessible from Big Navy and Anderson AFB, as well as the off-the-beaten-track local beaches, are practically pristine and on a weekday morning or at midday are deserted.  Even on busy weekends, compared to the beach scene at the resort areas of the island, the base beaches are practically empty. 

The joke is that should the Chinese or Russians nuke the island, they would kill more of their own countrymen than American military -- there are only about 20,000 stationed there, mostly submariners and support personnel at Big Navy.  Andersen Air Force Base hosts units that rotate in and out on a short-term basis, so the big bombers are still based in CONUS.  The Marine air comes down from Iwakuni in Japan for short stays as well and the Navy air wings are on visiting aircraft carriers.  From what I understand, the Army, in conjunction with the Navy, is building a multi-layered missile defense system.

Filipinos are a big presence on the island and seem to run most of the businesses, except the strip joints and prostitution, which are run by the Koreans.  These cater to the tourists, not the locals or military.  They bring in some "talent" from Korea, but mostly they lure naive Micronesian girls from other islands with promises of office jobs and the like, only to force them into prostitution, keeping them as virtual slaves.  The local Guam government and police don't seem to care.  Chinese are notorious for kidnapping women, drugging them and shipping them back to China to work as prostitutes.  When I was there, the Navy put out a warning memo to female personnel to always walk on the inside of sidewalks close to buildings and be alert for vans that might pull up beside you.  That was a typical kidnapping method, a van pulling up beside a woman, the door opening and men jumping out and grabbing her.  On the other islands, Chinese and Korean fishing fleets were notorious for kidnapping local girls, including children, to keep aboard ship as sex slaves.  When they were returning to their home port they would throw the women overboard so there was no evidence of any crime.

Gosh, here I've gone and talked about a lot of negative stuff about Guam, but nothing bad ever happened to me there, and every day had its moments of sheer delight.  The water inside the reef was clear, and never seemed cooler than 80 degrees and often was much warmer  It was full of colorful sea creatures, too,  and some scary ones -- sea snakes and sharks and giant manta rays, but only the rays seemed to be common. The air was usually in the eighties, too, with 80-some percent humidity.  And when the frequent showers sparkled down from the blue sky full of billowing cumulus clouds it was about 80 degrees, too.  You could go for a swim and when you entered the water it wasn't a cold shock and when you came out of the water the air did not feel chilly, nor did it feel hot, with the sand burning your feet, forcing you to skip up the beach to get under some shade.

Of course, there were some big thunderstorms in the afternoons.  The clouds would billow up into giant towers, the sky would grow dark and then the rain would come down in big warm drops.  It was actually a pleasure to stand in it; it was like taking a shower with the whole sky your shower head.  If you were outside walking in casual clothes, you were probably already soaking wet with sweat, so getting washed clean by the rain left you no wetter than you were before.

Guam does get hit by typhoons, sometimes record-breakers.  But the building codes have long taken those big winds into account and the there is never much damage beyond some downed trees and power lines, and the usual low-lying flooding.  Houses are made of cement, as are the power and telephone poles. I actually enjoyed watching the typhoons rage from my condo, high above the flying debris and with a good view out to the reef and beyond, to see the spectacular waves, the coconut trees bending almost flat in the raging wind, and always, always, somebody walking around outside simply glorying in the power of the storm.

Away from the tourists, a lot of Guam is still
undeveloped jungle and grassland, and there is plenty of hiking to be done, boonie stomping as we called it, sometimes to beautiful secret places, more often well known but hard to reach spots that take some effort to get to.  It was not hard to find relics of the fighting on the island during World War II, everything from Japanese sake bottles to crashed airplanes.  If you came across an old hand grenade or mortar shell it was best to give it a wide birth. I always enjoyed the hikes, but you were guaranteed to get muddy, hot and sweaty, so it was good to hike to a water fall and enjoy its cool mists and wade in the pools at its base.  Wouldn't you like to do that, too?

 

Tidbits through time

 Some old photos...

Just married, 1909.

Kids get a bath every Saturday whether they need it or not.  Stove is made from an old 55-gallon drum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get a horse!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can ranch, mine, enlist or work on the railroad....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Or operate heavy equipment in dangerous terrain.

You get ahead by studying and education.

Our own Carnegie library!  Thanks, Andy!

Lunch counter during the Depression.

Lady Lex sailors on liberty, Panama Canal Zone, 1939.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coffee break, Navy style.  You better like it black.

 

It's war with the dirty Japs!

 

Pilot's ready room, USS Lexington, early 1942.

Good order and discipline!

Advancing under fire, Okinawa, 1945.

 

 

 

Driving from Atsugi to Otemachi after the Japanese surrender.  The Japanese soldier facing away is a mark of respect to the conqueror.  We thought it was a snub.

Let's watch this new type of radio with pictures called television.  The future is here! 1949.