Martinsville, October, 2013

We got going yesterday about 7:15, and made it to Martinsville about 9, finding our pals just where they'd said they were on the cell coming in, slightly east of the row of portolets which were lining the main road through the hilly grounds that are the parking area for the track itself. We found a place nearby in short order, then wandered the banks of merch semis and watched Danica give a sweet interview, after that part of an interview with Junior, where we joined the mugger audience.

I got myself, at last, one of the difficult to find Kyle Busch Interstate Battery hats. Libby shopped for tiny model race cars, some of which she'll present to our nephew Wyatt down the road.

It was altogether a perfect day. The sky was blue, the temp in the '60s. While there was plenty of banging and bumping in the race, the last section of 50 or so laps was caution free, and there was not a tiresome green/while/checker finale. Jeff Gordon overtook Matt Kenseth with a few laps remaining and won the race. Bren, the Early Blurs website designer/manager and our seat mate at the race pulls for Jeff, and it's the first race he's won at Martinsville since we've been going--usually the place is owned either by Jimmie Johnson or Denny Hamlin. My man Kyle has never won there. Bren's hubby pulls for Tony Stewart, who won last year, and the dune buggy in the pic at the top is his ride, but with Mark Martin at the wheel because Stewart has been recovering from a bad wreck in the summer.

After the race we all met at the portolets and our vehicles, and watched the big semis roll out. There's no point in trying to leave Martinsville in a hurry. It was dark before we got on the road, at the very tail end of the long parade down 220 to Greensboro and points south. I did get to use a portolet before we left. Someone had stuck a little placard into the urinal. It read "Vote NRA." What's a guy to do. I sure didn't try to rescue it. I should have taken a picture.

_________________

Addendum (from our conversation on the ride home). If you look closely at the dune buggy chasing Jeff photo at the top you'll note that they painted the concrete guttering that lines the inside of the turns at Martinsville a vivid pink for the race--part of the on-going initiative in sports to remind people that breast cancer exists and needs research. Of all the risable Limbovian memes (and he's not the only one--there are actual alleged women running this garbage too), this surely tops the very long list: somehow sport is being "feminized." We then imagined a race on Limbovian terms: the cars would all be black and silver, and the sponsors would be Jack Daniels, Trojans, and Ruger Arms. What a grim dance it would be. No more Tide cars, no Clorox, no Sugar Smacks, and certainly not Gordon's Destroy World Hunger. They'd have to bring back all the cigarette advertising, the Skol Bandit car, the Winston Cup. The only current member of the field who might fit in without editing would be Kurt Busch, who runs the black 78 Denver Mattress car. Mr. Busch was unable to pass Danica's pink and green Go Daddy 10 for 16th place this past Sunday. Yee Haw.

While we didn't go up for the truck race, the hilarious doings of Harvick and his employer deserve some mention. Harvick called Childress' grandkids, the Dillon boys, sniveling rich kids who've gotten it all for free. Gramps was pissed off and snarled back "is not, are not, were not." Next day Harvick, who bites nails for snacks, apologized and blamed it on the heat of the race. Where's my youtube of Kyle pushing Harvick's car out of the way when Harvick tried to trap him at the end of Darlington, last year. It's never too genius to get into a fight with a guy behind the wheel of a 900 HP race car, when you're standing outside the window.

An Old Kerouac Memoir

JACK KEROUAC--A MEMOIR


In the spring of 1965 I was starting my senior year at UNC, having
missed a semester with mono in l963 (a topic worth lengthy discussion
elsewhere). It was final exam time, which meant then, as I recall, late
May: warm early summer nights, with twilight lasting till 9:30, and a
general tendency towards drink as the end of the school term approached.

In Chapel Hill at that time was a fine cellar bar called "The Tempo
Room," which has had various incarnations since as a variety of botiques
and mid-range Italian restaurants, none of which have even tempted me
down those dark, narrow stairs. But the Tempo, as I say, was a fine place,
both in the afternoon and the evening, and I spent many an hour there in
my undergraduate days in the mid-sixties.

In those days I was part of a fairly small society of students and
ex-students who shared a group of necessary and sufficient conditions,
including a rather high consumption of alcohol (and may I say, "the
smoke,") and an affinity for poetry, painting, and the short story, with
a bit of the politics of the civil rights movement thrown in, and the
gathering cloud of Vietnam just over the horizon. We were
all listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. We had all, certainly, read
On The Road and much of Jack Kerouac's other opus. Most of us were editors
and writers for local literary magazines, including the Carolina Quarterly,
Reflections, and Lilibolero. Our number included Russell Banks and Lucius
Shepard, as well as Robert V.N. Brown and Norwood Pratt. (Brown and Banks
were friendly rivals, the former editing Reflections, the latter
Lilibolero. As I dimly recall, Banks rented a room in Brown's '30s era
duplex on West Franklin for a while.)

One of these loosely connected people was a guy named Marshall Hay. He was a
couple of years younger than me, and wrote poetry I think. Whatever, he had been
indulging in that most studently activity of hitchhiking back from his home
town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina this fine morning in late May, l965,
when an old black Chevy stopped to pick him up. Climbing into the front,
he was poked and passed a large bottle of cheap red wine from the occupant
of the rear seat: Jack Kerouac!

This was a remarkable thing, and surely one of the great rides of all
time, any place, any where. Kerouac himself, and not only that, but
seemingly the very same Kerouac who peopled the books Marshall and all of
us had read in high school, still amazingly on the road, boozing, digging
the road whizzing by, still possessed of "white line fever" as Merle
Haggard called it later. When asked his destination, Marshall said "Chapel
Hill", and offered the great one an invitation to visit a town second only
(so we all felt then) to San Francisco in hipness. Kerouac had never been
to the southern part of heaven--though he had spent some fine time in
Rocky Mount, N.C. according to his novel Dharma Bums. He took Marshall up
on the invite.

It is at this point, late afternoon, an exam in Religion 52 to study
for later, that I walked down those dark stairs and into the Tempo and
found the place a hubbub, the back tables crowded with a throng of people.
I soon learned what the commotion was about: Jack Kerouac was holding
forth. I rushed over to listen.

If only I had had a tape recorder. Kerouac talked just like his books,
an endless, intense stream of words, enthusiastic, exuberant. He was
talking about his recent trip to Brittany, in search of his ancestors. He
was talking about many, many things. But all I remember now is the moment,
the sense of connection with someone known before only in books, and the
sense, too, of recognition, of that voice that had spoken so many evenings
in Raleigh, N.C. in my ear, spoken of the real wide open possibility of
the life which stood before me. At Chapel Hill, of course, we students
were privileged to see and hear many famous writers over the years. Such
is the life of the academe. I remember well nights in vast Memorial Hall
with Norman Thomas, or William Buckley. John F. Kennedy spoke at UNC while
I attended. Kerouac was quite different. He was here, in the Tempo Room,
sitting and drinking and talking just like we all did, a guy at a back
table under the dart board, talking, talking, talking.

After a few hours of this, Russ Banks (now an acknowledged American
Author in his own right, with several novels that I see with some pride
displayed in the Intimate Bookshop) invited the whole gathering over to
his house on (I think) Purefoy Rd. Adjourn we did, and the word continued
to spread, and more and more arrived. I arrived too, and found Kerouac
on the couch in the living room circled by people, who occasionally got in
a question as he continued his marathon declamation. At eleven or twelve,
Russ finally closed shop, and the diehards went on to still another house,
Tom Banks' (no relation) on Justice St., where the talk* still continued.
Sometime in the early morning I began to remember the Religion exam. I
at least had to attend, and to do that I had to be awake. So off I trudged,
back to the dorm.

The exam was at some hour like 10 AM, and I took it, and probably
reduced my grade by a letter. Afterwards I went back over to Tom's, and
incredibly Kerouac and his youthful Neal Cassidy look-alike driver were
still there, stirring. Kerouac started the day with a large pull of
wine, then doubled over with stomach pains. Then they straggled out to the
old black chevy, something like a '53 I think, and we all said goodbye,
come back again, good luck, and such, and they were off: on the road again.

At the time, and in a way still, I was very impressed. Kerouac was
famous. He could have been teaching somewhere, like many authors his age
and younger, safe in the bosom of the English Department after a blazing
youth. But he wasn't. He was still out there, still living his books.
Remarkable. Brave even. It is the choice all rebels want to make, intend
to make, when they are 20. It is why everyone in the older generation
seems like a "sell out," and why, at the time, there was a ring of truth
to the firebrand "never trust anyone over 30."

But on the other hand, most of us, though not all, did pass 30 (how
long ago, how young!) And 40, and 50. Kerouac didn't. He died at 47,
only a few years after that meeting. And it's easier to see, now, all
the torments and tangles in his life, the losses and failures as well as
the bravery.

It's coming on to 30 years since that Kerouacian visit to Chapel Hill,
though, and it's still one of my vivid memories of the decade, along with
the assassinations, and Vietnam, sit-ins and smoke-outs. He had a lot of
power, that wildeyed canuck. Rest in peace, Jack.

________________________
Update

*"the talk" of what you might well ask. I recall much about Kerouac's recent
trip to Normandy, France, home of his ancestors. At some point at Russell's
place he launched into a feux about South Carolina's "blue gummed niggers,"
a phrase which was probably something said here and there in the South, and given
Kerouac's overall affinity with black culture, was probably a phrase he found
interesting as a poet finds interest in phrases, and also delimited his concern
in any sort of political correctness. Some in the party were offended and retired.
He was Jack Kerouac and could have cared less. It was a moment when the demarcation
between the '50s bohemian culture and the civil rights struggles of the '60s
was evident. In a year, some of the people there were enlisting rather than
waiting to be drafted, while others were on the road to Canada. I re-upped into
graduate school and got a very high draft number.

I wrote this back around 1995 I think. There was an event called the
"Harry's Reunion" happening in Chapel Hill, a kind of reassembling of this
group of folks I refer to in the piece. Russell Banks was in fact there. The
most remarkable thing about the event was to see Franklin Street, in downtown
Chapel Hill, suddenly full of the same folks as one would have seen on a typical
day in the mid-'60s. Harry's was a deli down the street from the Tempo Room.
By '95 the Tempo Room space had turned into a shoppe of some sort. Russell, who
was at least as old as Kerouac was when we met him, and who had published well
by then, was ensconced at Princeton. I'm now 70, and see more clearly than
I did eighteen years ago (sheesh!!!) that time does fly far far too fast, and that
we learn too much in the rear view mirror, when it's much too late to help. I dug
this piece up at the nudge of a great Sheila O'Malley piece:

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=65010

about Russell Banks' essay on depression. Kerouac was of course surely depressed,
as well as frequently manic and self-medicating himself literally to death. He
nonetheless did live a fine few years, and experience quite a lot of joy, from
the sound of it, and wrote some possibly timeless prose, even if it all rests
firmly on the foundation of "... so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Yet More Prison Adventures

"This is sorta like living with flying squirrels," Libby said sometime last week. The boom truck's cleat marks were rebounding at the glacial pace of Robert Frost's "dent in dough." I was getting ready to go to work. Usually I drink coffee and look at the computer in the morning, but just before Libby had made that remark I'd been skil-sawing a board out in the pre-dawn murk.

I think of morning awakening as roll-call. So do the Boys. First one or other of them walks on me, or jumps on the bed from the window sill. When I get up they rush ahead of me to the kitchen, and take turns jumping up on things to see if I'm putting food on their saucers. Usually Momma is also there, peering in from the stoop through the French doors. I've learned to go ahead and fix her food too. Then I can usually get the door open and feed her while the Boys are focused on their plates on the other side of the room. After all that's done I can start water for coffee, get the beans ground, etc.

Which ever morning it was, maybe Wednesday, Mokey (formerly Bruiser) didn't show for roll call. I left his plate on the counter and called him. Still no Mokey. We have this little place over in an obscure corner where the water supply pipe from the well comes into the house to the hot water heater. It's actually where two adjacent walls connect, and there's a little gap at one place on the floor where the mason didn't lay the blocks quite correctly. (Enough said about that!) The pipe comes in--handy!--and I'd stuffed insulation in the gap and put a piece of plywood over that. This is all behind a cabinet and under the loft stairs. Sometime last year the plywood got moved. Well before the arrival of the Houdahenians. So eventually I looked into that little corner and found a pile of insulation and a hole you could climb down to the ground from. If you were a Mokey I mean. Absence explained here at Stalag 109. I looked over at the slider and there was Mokey looking in. He'd no doubt heard the rattle of the kitty plates. Meanwhile, the Boys were done with eating and were crowding around the hole. Probably they found it from the cold air flowing in, or maybe they'd put Mokes up to checking it out first to see if it was safe out there.

I got Mokey in, got the Boys in the next room with the door shut. Sawed a new covering board in the morning murk. Found a very big rock to put on the board. Ha, let them move that. By then it was time for work. I took a thermos of coffee with me. The day stoked with coffee like that reminded me a bit of the story of the Lenny Bruce movie. You can look it up.

As you can see, if anyone is ok up in a tree, it's Mokey. That's the top of the refrigerator he's perched on. He can jump 6 feet vertically, and aim himself like a basketball going in a hoop. And yesterday Libby and I sawed up the sassafras tree and the maple that had scared Wuzzy up, and I started a new burn pile of branches that were too small to stack, and we worked some on Tyndall Drive, which is a great new feature of the Ranch. I might order me a street sign. The man deserves some credit.

Charlie Company Settles In

This past week the boys have been given full range in the house, with only a few small exceptions, which they can probably overrule as their athleticism increases with further leaps and bounds. That ain't no pun intended, it's just the deal. Cats are leapers and bounders. As well as being driven by an immense curiosity. They're damn near as curious as people, and probably more ruthless, truth be known. They just made a deal with us long ago. Feed us and we won't conspire to kill you.

These guys may not kill us outright, but they might eat us out of house and home and any chance to get a better vehicle or a tooth repaired. Next on the agenda is to get all three of them "neutered." The nads are showing. It's getting to be time. We don't want to rush it because we think their personalities need to develop, something that's already one of the human pleasures of being around them, in their home. The three are all quite different. Bruiser, now called Grey Bear by me (Libby has different names but I can't remember them, although they're very nifty and I need for her to write them down for me--put em on the fridge or something--Grey Bear is much less the pushy one now. He's the most "self-contained," happy to be by himself some of the time, while the two black ones, Fuzzy and Wuzzy, wrassle and tussle. He has a tendency, slowing waning, to want to "nurse" one of the others when he's wanting to go to sleep. In that regard, one of his favorite toys is a little rubble nipple that came with a pet-feeding bottle. Toss him that and he plays and plays with it, ignoring what the others are up to. Meanwhile, Wuzzy has become more and more vocal and more and more engaged with us. He will often meow loudly and then climb onto one of our chests, purring loudly, then going right off to sleep. This morning Wuzzy climbed the barrier into our sleeping loft and was exploring all over the bed. He has the kitty-alarm gene apparently, and also the sleek look of a siamese, which goes with his vocality. Fuzzy still has bigger feet, and the softest, sweetest temperament. He's a panther, but reasonably friendly. He doesn't mind being the nursee to Grey Bear. He'll tussle with either or both endlessly, but there's a kind of get-along way about him. If this was the Dirty Dozen, he'd be Clint Walker. I'm hoping Wuzzy isn't Telly Savalas. I'd like to give Grey Bear the honor of Lee Marvin's character, but I'm not sure he's quite that much of a leader. Maybe he's Bronson. Maybe Wuzzy is Jim Brown. Yea, that's the ticket. Nope, the wrong ticket--it's obvious really; Wuzzy is Cassavetes. He's the one who complains.

Right now they're all standing at the French doors watching Momma eat breakfast. Libby spend much of yesterday looking for that trap. They're all out at Lowes. Not a good sign, but a sign of the fact that spring is here, and summer close at hand. The livin' is easy for felines on the wild right now. There's plenty of water and the grass is high. Probably mice and voles and moles all abound. I know there's a bunch of squirrels. Rabbits too. The light comes early and stays late. The moon casts shadows in the woods.

Charlie Company doesn't realize how good they've fallen into. They look out the door and see nothing but fun, stretching forever. When they go to sleep they go upstairs, which was once our bedroom but at the moment has turned into an attic full of whatnot. I think it reminds them of the shed, where they first saw light. We go to sleep hearing them running around up there, then they quiet down, finding little secret sleeping places. Yesterday they sat on their "kitty condos" (made of particle board, cardboard, and felt, held together by staples, crafted by the crafty Chinese) and watched the Indianapolis 500. I shoulda made a movie of that.

[Libby took the pic, a few weeks back now. They're much bigger now. I think I'm wearing my Kyle Busch shirt, so it must be race day.]

Houdahenianland, Chapter 2: They Sign the Lease

A few days back, Libby decided it was too frustrating to keep watch on the three critters while they searched for kitty-crevices in our cardboard box living room boundary fence. The living room is a log-walled room, which means no convenient flat edges for a panel of cardboard to line up with at more or less 90 degrees. There will always be a serrated line made up of the logs and the intervening chinking area--which is recessed. The logs themselves, being hand-hewn oak logs, are by no means plumb. The hewing happened back in 1867, and originally the interior was paneled with some kind of beaded board. How many cats have lived in this house since it enclosed thin air? A question for Saint Anselm perhaps. As I moved it piece by piece in 1979, shall we count only the kitties who've been in my care?

Anyways, Libby kitty-proofed the kitchen during one late night this past week, and now they have a room which we can safely leave them in, for a good while, when we have something else to do (such as write, watch tv, do the books, etc. Cooking we might need to move 'em to still another room--Libby's putting up card board panels even as we speak. Then we'll have two rooms out of five for the critters to simply live in. As thought they were, um... cats.

They're all eating, drinking, pooping, sleeping, playing. It worries us how fiercely they play, but so far we've seen no actual blood drawn. You could put out an eye with those whip-fast claws, I tell the gray one (he's now Gracie, and might be a she). Stop biting your sister I tell Fuzzy. Stop biting your brother I tell Wuzzy. Here's a ball to play with, stop trying to find out how to get behind the stove, I tell Wuzzy and Gracie. They go back to attacking each other's tails and ears, like I just warned them about. When Fuzzy climbs atop the kitty condo to just sit back from the action and observe, it annoys both Wuzzy and Gracie greatly--and they both attack him from opposite sides. Eventually, they all go to sleep for a while, the two black ones wrapped around each other, Gracie adjacent, on three straight-backed chairs with cushions sporting wonderfully dangling ties which have previously been of great interest to all.

It's Saturday. Laundry day. Some gardening perhaps. A summer meal, as it's 90 already. This morning Libby set up their first vet appointment for Monday morning. They'll get checked out, blood-tested, etc. Gracie had a bit of a cough last night--but we think it was some lint rather than something terrible--judging by her/his spirit and appetite today. Gawd knows we have some lint here and there for them to find. Like children, everything is interesting to taste.

Libby took the pictures. You'll of course note that as I'm wearing a Kyle Busch tee, we are using Lowes Building Supplies boxes to barricade the portions of the room(s) we'd rather our charges remain innocent of. We figure such product placement will succor JJ and might even produce a victory tomorrow at "Dega" for the big Four-Eight. We'll all be watching--all 5 of us! Gracie auditions for the role of the Chessie Cat, certainly the best American Railroad logo there ever was. Gracie is even the right color as the original model, although I have seen the logo with a black cat. Might be the moment for a name change.

The Houdahenians

Been searching for the camera to take a new set of pics of the kittens. It's probably under some stuff that got piled up as we tried to make space for the kittens. It'll turn up. They have not eaten it. I'm sure of it. Right now, Saturday mid-morning, they're asleep. Their momma woke up Libby about 7 asking for breakfast from outside the window. Of course they heard momma, and were quite ready for breakfast too. I slept in, till about 8. Libby was sitting guard in the middle of the living room--the kittens' play area. We have gotten them several things to play with and on. A tubular padded thing with two soft, possibly inviting holes where a kitten might want to hide and peek out, called I think a "kitty condo." Also a more pyramid shaped climbing and scratching thing with a wide base and a small flat top, which all the kittens prize as a mount of advantage, and enjoying fighting each other for. There's also a collapsible horizontal tube that rolls around on the floor, crackles, and although at first it frightened them with its noise, this morning they were all charging through it and rolling it around. They also managed to carry a plastic wand with a pendent of some kind on one end into the tube--missed seeing that action, just noticed it was there, with one of 'em wacking the pendent back and forth. Of course the kittens are themselves kitten toys, each finding the other two of endless interest what with all that quick movement and a tail no less. We wait for them to tire. The waits are longer and longer. It was nice of momma to start them off in a dark shed--when we finally tire ourselves and put them back in the wire kennel for some sleep time, they settle down willingly and quickly snuggle together in a ball in their new soft kitten bed. We got a second kennel and are trying at the moment to figure out how to connect it to the first in a better way--so's the doors are at the ends and not in the middle. You'd think the geniuses in China would have thought of this already. I believe cats are quite popular in China. Possibly they don't pass out their cat secrets to the pale ghost devils who still imagine they rule the world.

Among still pressing needs. A better waterer--one that they don't jump in and kick over when they're not thinking about needing a drink. We want them to have constant ready access to water when they're in the kennel, or out. But this at present requires a cooperation which they do not possess. Kittens are quite shortsighted, in every sense. One reason we don't just forgo the kennel thing and just let them have a bed in the middle of the living room is that they want to check behind the book case, and under the furniture, and behind the records and CDs, and up the walls and stairs, and behind the claw-footed tub which leads to a seldom used storage area under the stairs, and up the other stairs to the loft where we sleep, which has entirely open access to the stone floor below, where a kitten could confidently stride into space while possibly attacking a bug it spots through the fixed-pane window set just past said opening. Or whatever. The general concern is to find neither a whimpering kitten with a bad fall injury, nor to hear muffled and mysterious cries from...somewhere... It's tiring, without late night high-anxiety searches. There's only so much coffee can accomplish, even high-test from Sumatra.

I'm going to try to tack cardboard temporary walls to some of the book and CD storage cases this weekend. The perfect situation for the next month or two will be the kennel with the door ajar, in the middle of a truly kitten-proof living room. It might be possible, without calling in experts from some cable teevee show. Libby and I both have degrees from the University of North Carolina after all. They must mean something? Only last year, at the age of 68, I figured out how to install a new alternator onto my truck. How hard can it be.

Meanwhile, we find distinct personalities in the three. The grey one, which seemed back in the shed days to be merely curious, has become "Bruiser," a possible lad who has the fierce eyes of his warrior pops and with his weight can win any battle with the other two. He likes to drink water, eats well, is still curious, is almost too big to fit on the little top of the pyramid thingy, which is pretty funny after he wins the battle to climb up there. At first no one liked the kitty condo caves, but I put him into the top one last night, with a play-ball, and he stayed in there, peering out with a lordly visage at the other silly kittens scampering around below, having no sense of decorum. All this suggest he's a male, and possibly even a Republican. But drop him back down in the melee and he returns to reality, just another kitten and actually a little on the chubby side, truth be known.

The short-haired black one--who used to be the runt--is now the most curious, and most person oriented. He/she purred first, meows at the sight of either of us, likes to be held but also squirms to see and do the next thing. Wuzzy eats well, poops well, seems still to be bamboozled a bit by a simple water dish, leaning down to drink and invariably getting her nose wet and sneezing. We make sure she has some milk in her food. (Bruiser, on the other hand, does not like milk with food and definitely likes to drink from the dish, when he's not tripping over it or flipping it over during a jump.)

Fuzzy, the other black one, is in a way the most reticent, although when we met in the shed she was the biggest. She eats, poops, plays, but also tires of playing and retires to a quiet corner if she can find one. (Or he.) If held, Fuzzy will usually go to sleep quickly. We have some hope that Fuzzy might be closer to house safe than the other two, but her curiosity is still powerful, and we've caught her just short of disappearing into the CD collection. They all have a skill of simply pushing their heads forward into a small space and seeing what develops. Now and then Libby takes Fuzzy away from the madding crowd into the next room and holds her. I think Libby may see a little of herself in Fuzzy's situation, as she grew up in a big crowd of other siblings. I was a member of the Fuzzy Mountain String Band too. The stars align.

There is a yen/yang to all situations. The easiest way to get from the kitchen to the back room where we sleep and watch TV is to go outside and walk around to the slider. In the middle are the kittens. Houdahenianland.

From last week: Bruiser. Thomas Nickles took the photo.

Update Saturday PM: found the cam, though not the moment for fresh new photos of the kittens in their current environment. I might need to get a head-cam anyways, for that project, and see if the google will let me post a "film," as the old folks used to call 'em. Otherwise I guess it's a youtube post and a link. Anyways, here's a rather comical shot from a couple of days ago. It's titled "The Author" and was taken by Libby.

The Fork

[Momma]

Came home from work, Thursday it was, and checked on the kittens. Momma was out. Kittens were stashed again, amongst the debris of the shed where just about anything might fall on them. At first I couldn't find them at all, but I'd learned where to look, and sure enough, eventually one popped up. The last one I had to poke into reaching room from behind, gently using an available crowbar to nudge his/her backside so she/he would walk into the light. I got them inside, into the kennel, along with their little cardboard box bed we'd made for them out in the shed. Put a small litter box in with them, and some food. Some ate a bit after a while, one didn't. When Libby got home she discovered that they loved beef baby food, of which for some reason we had a jar (actually I think it was a treat for our dear departed Yoey during her last days, when she wouldn't eat at all).

We talked a lot about the dangers to them outside. We live in a good sized oak and hickory forest, in one of the most rural places left in central North Carolina. There are two small streams which meet on our place and then head off to the northeast, to meet the Mighty Haw river flowing northwest/southeast and dividing the county diagonally, the Haw eventually creating Jordan Lake impound, and below the dam joining the Deep and becoming after that a part of the Cape Fear River, which flows to Wilmington and the Atlantic Ocean. Some of these waters were John Lawson's "roads" during his long trek around the country, although he favored the Neuse and Tar watersheds to the northeast of the Cape Fear, which led him eventually to the place that became Bath, NC, the Tar eventually becoming the Pamlico River at what NC oldtimers call "little" Washington. The point being that all these rivers bring sustenance to many wild creatures--deer, beaver, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, possum, red and gray fox, all manner of snakes including copperheads, water moccasins, and the eastern diamondback, and the black and king snakes, the bobcat (heard 'em now and then), the coyote (sightings near our place), now and then a black bear will walk up from the vast lowland swamps of the NC coastal plain, which we find out about by some absurdity of a suburban or mall sighting, when the rivers run into our cities. And of course we have owls, red-tail hawks, and even some eagles (many nesting pairs are observed around Lake Jordan, a happy side-effect of the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers). And if you think about it, quite a good percentage of these creatures would find a kitten a tasty breakfast snack.

[Kittens in their box]

Friday went well. The kittens ate and, just as important, pooped. They seem healthy and are due to go to the vet for their first checkup next week. Momma is still around and calls to them from under the house. We're feeding her, talking to her, and hope to eventually get her neutered if we can catch her in a have-a-heart, since she doesn't need to become a kitten making machine, the cat world being much more organized like a very hard-core fundamentalist church than a paradise of freedom and liberty, unless you're in the moment of being top Tom, which is probably pretty fun if short-lived. This is perhaps why many folks think that when they drop off the extra puppy or cat or annoying dog, they're really just letting them "be themselves," free in the wild woods, free to run and whoop and play like people would too, if they didn't have jobs or were looking for jobs. Same for those people who don't "believe" in neutering a pet, or in fencing them in. Dogs, they think, need to run. Or maybe it's just that the struggle to teach a dog that he has a master has been won by the dog. There's a whole TV show about that, by the way.

Saturday morning I was up making coffee and four full grown dogs loped through the yard and just past the kitten shed. None had collars. Our decision was in my mind confirmed. We've barricaded a good sized portion of the living room around the kennel location, where the kits can amble and play, without letting them escape entirely into the whole house, with it's many places where a kitten can get in but perhaps not out, entailing hours of furniture moving on our parts. We do have other things to do. Really we do.

One of these days I'll tell you the story Maggie Hammons told me, long ago, about the man who decided to raise up a "panther" from a cub.

Update: I meant to note yesterday that Libby took both of the photos. Re the comment about porch supervised visiting, that idea has been raised in other quarters as well, and is a good one. We have already had the kennel outside (Friday, before the rains came this weekend) so that perhaps momma can visit them, or at least see they're ok. We're a bit concerned that she might herd them away if "unsupervised." She is extremely skittish of people, and will not get close even with the temptation of a full food bowl, if she sees a person--making "supervision" somewhat of a problem. Perhaps we could dress up like big kittens, as per the birding show I saw over the weekend, where a birder was dressed as a tumbleweed so as to view Harris Hawks in the Arizona desert. At least Momma would get a laugh.

Up the Pecos Trail

The Momma is now interacting with us, in a certain fashion. She walks up the path and stares at the kitchen door--at me--then walks back to the shed. If I follow, with a bowl of food, she runs a bit away from the shed and peeks out at me from behind a tree. I leave the food on the step and talk to her as a cowboy talks to his dogies. You know that Wyoming will be your new home. What do they hear? She's up on the step and eating before I get back to the kitchen. Her black fur is a wonderful camouflage and sometimes I am not sure I'm seeing her at all, just the shadow between the steps. When she looks back at me, even when she's standing in the cracked doorway with only her head in view, I can see the gold circles of her eyes, as close to the cheshire eyes are I've ever seen in real life. Last night Libby went into her lair after dark to check on the kittens. Momma hid behind a table and put forth her growl. Libby poured some "kitty milk" into two little saucers at the edge of the kittens' area--the table leans up against a wall beyond that, and that's where the Momma growled. Backing away, Libby could hear Momma lapping the milk. Progress.

Meanwhile, there's a big yellow tom still lurking around. I looked into his face this morning at close range. He happened to walk past and heard a sound from me. He doesn't look in the least friendly, but fearsome. The worry that he might kill the kittens continues to be an active one.

Yippie ti yi yo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjL-Xqb68Gc

The Adventure Continues, Part 2

Sheesh, interfacing with wild things. Who was it thought up the phrase, "herding cats." Something to that. Got home from work Monday and peeked in the shed. Momma was not there. Neither were kittens. All silence. On the way back to the house I saw the big wild tom, who comes around now and then, trotting up the driveway away from the house. After a bit I went back and searched around the shed and more generally. No kittens. At some point in the second search I saw Momma trotting up the driveway in the same direction the yellow tom had been heading.

Libby got home, went out to the shed, stood inside very quiet. Heard kittens. (You need to understand that this shed is a storage building, filled with a jumble of stuff we don't want to throw away for some reason. It is not set up to be a birthing parlor, or a nursery. Momma viewed it as a safe place. That's her perspective.) Searching around, Libby found all three at the far corner from where they'd been. No nice rugs to snuggle on (as we'd put down for them). They were huddled together. Libby could just reach them, handed them up to me, we brought them in, tried to feed them some (pretty mixed results there). Then we put them back in the soft, prepared corner where they had been. By then we could see Momma watching us from a distance. It was dark and her eyes glowed gold. She went back in for the night.

Tuesday it was pretty much a repeat, perhaps in a different key. Kittens had been moved. Momma was absent. But no, she wasn't, after all. Heard growling (she's got one very serious growl that neither Libby nor I want to find out more about). At one AM this morning I was trying to feed one with a little bottle of warm formula, Libby was reconstructing the good shed spot yet again. We found the for a while missing kitten, who'd been deposited in a different spot from the other two when Momma decided to move them. We put all the kittens back in the warm, soft area. By then Momma was again watching from the edge of the light. She went inside. We went to bed.

This morning when I got up she was on the shed steps, possibly looking for the food I'd been putting there when I get up. I went out with a bowl of food. She growled from inside the shed. Left the food. She came out, ate, then walked up the path towards the kitchen door where I was standing, got about half way, looked straight at me through the glass, walked back to the shed and went inside. After a while I took her a bowl of water. Very quietly left it on the step. The food bowl was empty.

There are other things to do, for Libby and I. I have to deal with a car inspection, then go to work. Libby has to go to work too. These adventures in the night are tiring. Communicating with Momma is difficult. Possibly this is rather as it was for those pitiful English settlers who camped on Roanoke Island, NC, back in 1583 or so. The ones now known as the "Lost Colony."

[Illustration "Death of John Lawson" from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/6060 John Lawson was an early settler in North Carolina, made a wonderful walking tour of much of the state which he wrote about in a book still in print, later founded Bath, NC, and was killed by Indians during the Tuscarora War.]

Sorry Mr. Chairman

Bolton, Watt, Murdoch statue--not the same guys you think

I'll just pass along this fine grab from Fox News, hard hitting journalism division, courtesy of Ataturk:


http://rising-hegemon.blogspot.com/2011/07/hard-hitting-journalism-foxnews-style.html

The other pretty hilarious quote I happened to catch on the coverage of Fox News's hall of mirrors was that highly intellectual discussion of how "we" have a hacking problem generally, that it's not particularly important whether we're talking about Fox or Murdoch's various other facets of empire, or your friendly corner bank, or that nice nuclear plant down the road.  Except, strangely (not), no mention in this sweeping upwards arc into the metasphere of the fact that in the Murdoch empire case, it was the empire that was DOING the hacking.

I won't be a bit surprised to hear the various radio stooges repeating this blatant distraction posing as argument either.  If I'm stupid enough to turn them on I mean.  I'm trying to resist that stupidity, since the entire point of doing that (turning them on) is just to find out what new lie is coming round the bend.  Mr. Edroso and Mr. Riley actually do a good job of sending out the alerts, not to mention Driftglass.

In that regard--the alerts I mean--check out alicublog's piece on the sludge of racist comment which swamped the Village Voice comments section devoted to Edroso's column last week:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html#6543097610104557780

I guess it's been decided that it's time to amp all that stuff up again--what Edroso calls the "ooga-booga".  Maybe they're hoping that'll distract from the erosion of Murdoch's pedestal, or possibly even the debt ceiling thing, which ought by now to be a ten ton anchor around the GOP's leg.

Update for Tuesday morning.  I did listen a bit to Hannity yesterday on the drive home.  He was "conversing" with Sen. McCain.  McCain, who keeps one foot attached to reality (probably due to his war experiences), kept saying the GOP had to find a way out of the debt ceiling issue.  Hannity, talking as though he had any responsibility at all (which he doesn't), said he was against any compromise not tied to a balanced budget amendment.  McCain, proving once again why he should never have been elected to anything much, didn't walk of the show in disgust.  Later on, after I got home, I watched Matthews "converse" with Norquist, who evaded all responsibility for the debt ceiling crisis even though he's cooked up this "pledge" which apparently serves to shackle the few Republicans who have any common sense into the same corner.

In spite of much optimism on the left that the debt ceiling will be raised, I personally think it's not that likely.  Too many Republicans have lost their minds.   If it all plays out in this negative and foolish way, one would hope that the paymasters who bought this band of authoritarian fantasists will themselves find some unhappiness.  It's probably more likely that they're all simply selling short, and see more tidy profits from the various worldwide miseries that will ensue should we suffer a national bankruptcy.  That's what "too big to fail" really means. 

The Risible Mr. Hannity

I enjoyed a laugh yesterday when Hannity opined as how he was fine with the First Amendment ("I practice it everyday here on the show," he said), but not with Common's statements.  Poor fellow.  The contradictions must twist his lower intestines to such a degree that getting normal "regularity" must be a chore.  It's now only one tiny step to "I'm fine with the First Amendment, as long as you say what I approve of."  Some fellow traveler on the show chimed in to entirely change the subject to how rappers generally talk about women, assuming there is such a generalization out there in reality.  Who knows.  For a PhD in brow-beating, you can't beat Hannity.  My guess is, he learned the trade from newspaper home delivery sales drives.  Either that, or from making money in the summers selling bibles to the unwary.  Meanwhile, Osama remains deceased, and the rhetorical war on "rinos" continues apace on the rightwing blogs, according to reliable sources. 

If You Haven't Seen This...

the heroic pose

http://firedoglake.com/2011/04/01/your-republican-front-runner-mike-pol-pot-huckabee/

Huckabee is the current "front runner" in the 2012 Republican presidential field.

We're going to Martinsville for the zip around the clip.  I'll try to take a picture worth posting here, along with some droll, mildly ironic commentary.  I also plan to purchase a Jennifer Jo Cobb ball cap. 

Principles? We Don't Need No Stinking Principles

Colonial Unions Stage Work-Stoppage

Forget the reasons for the Right's manipulation of various groups of people into a "Tea Party" for a moment.  Forget the political game, in other words--the fact that the Right (read Insurance Companies, corporate power generally, and Republicans generally) needed a method for countering a much needed and much desired reform of the United States medical delivery system which was going to get enacted by a Democratically controlled Congress.  Instead, ask yourself just how the Tea Party got generated.  That is, what was it, in the received feelings and beliefs of those folks who really did turn out, that was appealed to.  Of course one important part of the answer was and is, surely, the disconcerting fact to millions of folks that there is a black person in the U.S. Presidency.  This is the submerged appeal to racism.  There is no doubt at all that it exists and existed when the Tea Party came to exist.  It's visible in the signage, for one thing, and in the birther arguments, the "he's a muslim" arguments, etc.  Racism was and is there--and we know that just because anyone who cares to pay attention to normal, everyday life will easily discern racism almost at every turn.  Just ask any black person.  And the Right knows it's there, and there to be gamed as needed.  It's just more gaming to deny it with a straight face, as the various vocalizers of Right-Wing mythology do with sickening frequency.

But let's leave the racism vein alone for the moment.  As well as that, the Tea Party also expresses a fundamental distrust of power--particularly and perhaps over-exclusively government power.  This is where it gets its name, what "Tea Party" appeals to, on the surface.  The original Tea Party was a colonial resistance to the British Government's imposition of tea taxes.  It's an objection to government power.  And how did the original Boston Tea Party happen?  Why obviously, because a group of Bostonians got together and organized a demonstration, a political theatre if you like--namely, they tossed the tea into the harbor.  And while I'm not going to bother to do the historical research right now, I think it's fair to say that the British Government's reaction to the Tea Party was supression, or at least an attempt at supression.

So then.  How is it that today Tea Party groups are actually standing with the Wisconsin government when it attempts to supress a fundamental right--the right to collective bargaining.  And how is it they're also defending a bill which, among other important details, give the Governor the power to sell by fiat State-owned and operated public utilities, without even a bid process?  What is the matter with these Tea Party folks, anyways?  They're on entirely the wrong side, according to their own fundamental principles.  Indeed, the Wisconsin Democratic State Senators who have taken the irregular tack of actually leaving the state to deny a quorum are doing a very "Tea Party" thing.  These Senators ought to get medals, and maybe they will some day.  They are doing their best to save their state from a disastrous piece of legislation--legislation of no benefit to anyone but large corporate employers--people mostly from out of state.  Outlawing collective bargaining is the opposite of populism--which is what the Tea Party is an example of.

Check out Paul Krugman's analysis of the Walker Bill.  That's pretty much all the facts you need to know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opinion/25krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
King George III would have been delighted with this bill.  

Obviously Wisconsin (as most other states) faces budget issues right now.  Outlawing unions, however, is hardly a solution to a budget problem.  Nor is transforming teaching--a very hard job--into a very badly paying job an answer to the budget problem which doesn't bring with it worse problems.  As a commenter at Driftglass remarked (I paraphrase): if you make teaching a job not worth doing, we're qualified for other work: your jobs!  It's a true point even if it ultimately plays into the hands of the employers.  There's nothing employers want more than a dog-eat-dog mentality amongst the folks who need jobs.  And that gets us right back to the fundamental principles of the Tea Party.   Get together in a group and you can get stuff done.

The Kenyan Imposter hasn't banned the Tea Party, now has he?

Update: I note with pleasure that the Daily Howler takes note of the same Krugman column I linked to above.  Howler is exactly right on his larger point--that this long-game strategy to destroy the only financial counterweight to corporate power is at the moment in full hideous bloom, with coordinated attacks on unions qua unions erupting in any number of state legislatures controlled by Republicans.  With the Citizens United ruling already the order of the day, the force of money in political discourse, and in elections themselves, is already trending towards so-called "conservative" ends which will result in less and less voice for ordinary Americans--particularly when ordinary Americans begin to discover in their own lives the destruction which "conservative" policies such as Governor Walker's will entail over time.  It would indeed be nice if the  relatively tiny liberal voices on the teevee wasted less time on the ephemeral if disgusting pundits, and worked harder to actually report (as Krugman does in his column) what is going on. 
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh022511.shtml

The Next Iran

the assassination of Anwar Sadat

http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/28/freedom-now-smells-like-tear-gas-feels-like-rubber-bullets/

Hey look, I'm no foreign policy expert, and although I do have a cousin who had a State Department career, I only hear from him now and then at Christmas, and we haven't talked about anything political since the time he mentioned, off hand, that in the halls of the Department, everyone said Bush was going into Iraq precisely because "he tried to shoot my dad," which was what Bush actually said in an off hand moment.  So, I certainly don't know anything much about Egypt.  I do know that bin Laden's "right hand man" is Egyptian, and was radicalized by Mubarek's brutal treatment of him and his family.  I read that in the New Yorker way back when.  So I expect it's probably more or less a factual thing.

But it does kinda look like Egypt might be the next Iran, doesn't it?  Precisely because we have not been looking critically at Egypt since Nassar was dismissed.  This was kinda the deal with Iran.  The Shah was a friendly, western-talking man who was happy to work with the United States in different ways, particularly with regard to his location on the Soviet Union's southern flank, and with regard to his location viz other regional powers, and with regard to his stash of oil.  We didn't really think much at State about the internal situation in Iran.  At least I don't think we did.  And so one day we were utterly shocked when the place blew up and took our Embassy hostage and tossed out the Shah, and we ended up with what we have now, namely a black box where we don't really know what Iran is up to, but we're pretty darn afraid it ain't good. 

Egypt right now feels pretty much like five minutes before the Embassy was captured.  At least from this old nail keg I like to rest my butt on, down at the Texaco.  Just sayin'. 

Keef O

Jack Paar

 It feels pretty strange to have made that offhand comment at the end of my last entry, and then to see it come to pass last night.  I was actually watching "The Woman in the Window," Fritz Lang's noir femme fatale opus with Edward G. Robinson.  Libby came in and said Keith Olbermann just signed off his show.  We were both pretty stunned for the rest of the evening, and I never saw the end of "Window."  My first thought was that it didn't take even a week.  But it may be that Comcast is too early to be a factor at all.  Certainly there have been other similar moments where effective, engaging television personalities have abruptly left the stage.  Dave Chappelle, for example, shocked his audience by basically disappearing.  Back in the day, Jack Paar shocked his devoted viewers at least twice with resignations.  (He was the guy who did the Tonight Show before Johnny, kids.)  Paar was a lot like Olbermann, come to think of it.  Politics was just as brutal then, but Paar was willing to talk politics, and more than that, willing to be open-minded and run his show at a level that would be interesting to people able to read good novels.  His guests included a reformed heroin addict/comedian who had written a book called "May This House Be Safe from Tigers," and who argued on the air that the problem with heroin wasn't the addictive nature of the drug, but the fact that it was, in it's illegality, a source of much crime and destruction.  There was jazz.  There was (I'm guessing, but I'll bet I'm right) Norman Mailer.  And this was back when the politics was submerged--Eisenhower was President when he started, and JFK when he left--'57 to '62.  Hedy times.  

The first thing I did when Libby told me Olbermann was dark was to click over to Fox.  Sure enough, Hannity was still there.  It wasn't some kinder gentler space beam focused on the industrial/media complex by our Martian overlords.  Olbermann's departure will sorely damage the pundit lineup of shows at MSNBC.  While Maddow has many nights done wonderful work, her interviews with Pelosi and Steele have been little different from interviews Brian Williams or even Chris Wallace might have accomplished.  (Wallace would of course have been more grating.)  Pushing Ed Schultz to 10 pm is unfortunate, and he made reference last night to being unwilling to change his tone, which might be a hint of things to come.  Cenk, who now appears in Ed's former slot, I personally find boring.  O'Donnell is sometimes excellent--his argument with the gun fetishist this past week was worthwhile if little more than a shouting match--but he's what is called a "Villager."  Same with Matthews--it depends on the segment.  Olbermann was dependable: and one of the most important things he did was to offer resistance to the constant pressure applied by the right wing pundits towards the end of the Big Lie--a pressure which is effective as we can see, and which is so powerful that it's gotten to the point that a Democratic Tennessee congressman can't even point out that Goebbels perfected the science of it without being called down and forced to apologize for bringing the Nazis into the conversation.

Once when I had a tooth pulled the anesthetic seemed to have a depressive effect on me for a few days.  Suddenly my whole life seemed dark, a series of failures and pointless efforts towards nothing.  I constantly felt like weeping.  And, after about 48 hours, this emotional cloud simply lifted and vanished, and things looked pretty much as the do, day in day out.  Which was how I determined that perhaps it was the effects of the anesthetic, added to the small fact that losing a tooth is in some ways a sad moment, because after all, we are familiar in the most intimate way with our teeth, and do not really think of them as having shorter life-spans than, well, "us."  Anyways--my immediate sense after the Olbermann departure what that this is the tip of the iceburg of corporate dominance of our political life here in America.  Certainly it is in a large if vague sense corporate power that funds the Big Lie of Right Wing punditry.  Certainly the FCC in this merger has ruled on the side of contentless "business," versus considering that the Right Wing "noise machine" might need to be countered by a voice like Olbermann's.  As far as the teevee business goes, probably a large majority of viewers would be delighted with sports, "womens shows," late night soft porn, and a weather forecast now and then.  Break in for the thrice a year serious disaster coverage--the tsunami, the hurricane, the outrageous rather than commonplace multiple murder--that's all most viewers really want, and what most viewers will accept.  I have relatives who keep the telly on during all waking hours, tuned to Fox, sound off, the constant scroll of horrors at the bottom of the screen a backdrop to whatever conversation or task is occurring in the somewhat overheated kitchen-living room smelling faintly of cabbage where they live their lives of quiet desperation.  I presume these nice folks to be pretty typical Americans. The Supreme Court has already ruled that corporations are citizens, and can give unlimited funds to political campaigns.  The idea that money is power is possibly a tautological truth.  Already many interesting ideas are utterly marginalized politically, no matter that they may now and then be considered in the museum of the college graduate seminar.  James Galbraith's notion that we should lower the age of social security eligibility so that older workers can retire and open jobs for younger folks is so intelligent it is never even seriously mentioned by politicians--and certainly not by Republicans.  Not to mention that over the Reagan decades, social security has been made so pitiful that actually living on it in retirement is now pretty much impossible.  We can, however, afford two wars and plans for more wars, and a tax cut for the richest amongst us.

It should be understood, at least, that there really are two worlds in the US of 2011.  In the world of those top two percent, everything which in an ordinary person's is a subject of budgeting planning, of endless payments on time, of choosing this essential or that, all of this stuff is, practically speaking, FREE.  Oh, it's possible for a millionaire to actually blow it.  Now and then it happens.  Mike Tyson pretty much blew his fortune through endless stupid decisions.  So did Joe Lewis.  One can always put the whole kielbasa on red 23.  But the fact remains.  Life at the top, given some common sense, is life free of financial worry.  Need a car?  Get one.  Need a place at the beach?  Ditto.  Health care?  The worry is that some sort of governmental "interference" might somehow rock your boat, that including the entire population in some kind of health care insurance plan simply because they are citizens will cause some kind of inconvenience which at present isn't on the radar.

Money is power.  Mr. Olbermann is, quite suddenly, silent.  It's hard not to draw conclusions.  It's the same kind of conclusion drawn with regard to the general over-heated gun-rhetoric and the happenstance of a Tucson Massacre.  It's in the water.  Yet it's also true that on a chilly day in January, two days after I turned 68 and celebrated with a big bowl of fat shrimp and a cold beer and my arm around a wonderful wife of 27 years who loves me, plays music with me, and generally makes my world full of light and happiness--I have to say that we just don't yet know what the year will bring.  I lived through the most interesting '60s, and the most interesting '70s as well.  The one thing we all should keep in mind, as a constant, is that whatever progress gets made, there are now vast numbers of people who will be of a mind to turn the clock back.  It is no longer a viable option to just come out and vote in one big election and then go back to sleep.  We have the choices we have: Democrats and Republicans.  Same as it ever was.  One major underlying emotional factor in the political emergence of the Tea Party is the fact that there's a black man in the White House--same as it ever was.  It may be that corporate power is simply not going to brook any real change in the American status quo, and that in the lame duck tax compromise which Mr. Obama accepted with reference to "hostages," he was referring to himself as much as anyone else.  The year, nonetheless, remains young.  Winter has its beauty.  There are no ticks.

Update.  A commenter asks me to pick the most "interesting" event of the '60s-'70s era, as though eras were lists of events.  He omits the two, let's call them "thangs", I'd pick--Watergate, and the Warren Commission's in plain sight coverup of the JFK assassination.  I have no books listed in my profile, but I'd recommend Peter Dale Scott's "Deep Politics," Seymour Hersh's "Dark Side of Camelot," the magnificent work on Vietnam "A Bright and Shining Lie," and anything by Noam Chomsky, including his work on the deep structure of language. 

Good Country Folks

Gloucester, NC, Mardi Gras, 2010

I went out yesterday, about 7:30 or so, intending to drive the eight miles in to work.  About two-thirds of the way there I encountered a road entirely glazed with ice, and noticed a number of folks slipping and sliding, and then parking their vehicles in fields and on shoulders as quickly as they could.  Out here where I live it had not been this way, and I was driving South--which of course was in the direction in which the weather was coming.  My little 2Xdrive, light truck started sliding around at about the moment I noticed the parkers.  Several times I nearly went into the ditch, but fortunately I avoided that and maintained a bit of progress towards town.  There was no on-coming traffic.  After a few hundred yards I came to a driveway with some decent parking places and got myself into one of them.  Almost instantly the owner of the place drove up, on the way to town, and said it was fine for me to leave the truck there.  I called Libby, told her what was happening, called work, embarked on the walk home.  I was decently dressed for the weather, although my very comfortable standing on concrete shoes are not nice and warm like the work boots I wear to cut wood and generally be outside in.  My great Kyle Busch toboggan which was a Christmas present was sitting at home in the kitchen, but I did have a hat.

It wasn't long till I got offered a ride, by a woman in a big blue 4X Dodge truck.  The road was so slick that I was unable to walk across it to the truck, so I told her thanks, but just worry about your own situation.  She drove down the road apiece, parked in a church parking lot that was kinda flat, and I eventually reached her, where I got in.  She was going precisely my direction, and getting to miss a 6 mile walk was pretty nice in my book.  As we rode along she told me she was going to see her parents in Burlington (about 20 miles or so to the north at that point), and had taken this particular road because it was scenic, not realizing it was iced.  Her parents, she said, were both stroke victims and needed assistance in the on-coming winter storm, which had already dropped some 5 inches of snow and ice on Georgia.  We chatted about parent care and such, and it turned out that her parents were both a good bit younger than me.

I don't usually pick up people she told me, but in this weather....  Anyways, she said, I have a gun.  I smiled and told her my name, and how Libby and I had been stuck in a snow-induced traffic jam just south of Roanoke on US 220, a few years back.  Ever been on 220 I asked her.  Nope.  She went around a stationwagon that was totally stalled on an uphill.  That situation had caused the big jam we had been stuck in.  My rescue-er said both her parents smoked.  I asked if she did and she said yes.  You ought to quit I said.  I know she said.  Maybe when the stress of dealing with my parents is less.  Yeah I said, I know.  (I quit back in '84; it was not easy.)  We got to where my road T's into the road we were on.  I said let me out here, I can walk the rest--you don't need to go out of your way.  I told her my name and shook her hand.  Then I got out and started walking.  Another person came along and gave me a ride the rest of the two remaining miles.  Good country folks, every one.  I didn't even have my fiddle in hand, as a credential. 

Later, in the evening, we watched Ed Schultz interview a young guy who'd been one of the people to tackle the shooter in Tucson.  He revealed to Ed that he'd been armed.  I always carry a gun he said.  I saw what was going on, had the safety off.  I would have killed the guy if I'd of needed to.  What had happened was, he saw a man with a gun, ran and grabbed him.  Then someone said, no, not that guy, this one.  So he went and grabbed the real shooter and helped hold him down.  He said there was blood everywhere, screaming, crying.  The worst thing I ever saw he said.  He was glad he carried a gun.  I thought that it was also good he hadn't shot the wrong person--that first guy he saw, with a gun.  Still, the guy did good, no doubt about it.

I was also glad my rescue-er had been armed.  Otherwise, she would not have rescued me.  And I was glad she wasn't crazy, and glad she didn't shoot me.  Glad that things had pretty much been for me what I'd expected, aside from that moment when my truck went sideways and it turned out there was ice on the road.  And I was glad I didn't wreck the truck, for that matter.  And that nobody stole the wheels till I could go get it later, when the ice had melted.

It was over all a pretty good day yesterday, for me.  Made me think of the Robert Hunter lyrics:

"See here how everything, lead us to this day
And it's the same as it ever was:
Sun comin' up and then, the sun it goin' down
Shine through my window, and my friends they come around...."

This year's Gloucester Mardi Gras is February 19.

Mid-First-Week

I-540, Raleigh, NC, one day in 2010

It's been a relief to write "2011", and I have a feeling that my metaphorical ears have popped just a bit (although like Mr. Edroso we're struggling under a nasty sinus and lung gunk attack that makes me actually wonder if the thousands of dead blackbirds out in the midwest isn't some as yet unrecognized symptom of a Change).  What I noticed yesterday, at any rate, was that the morning NPR "analysis" of the new lay-o-the-land politically speaking is just the same old "balanced" meme, so neutral that you'd imagine a memo had gone out to "keep yr heads down fer gawds sake, Issa's on the prowl."  Could be.  Even the dead birds story they covered without real curiosity.  An "expert" just said, "yeah, it happens some times; may they got skeered by a noise."  The Inquiring Mind said "uh-huh."  Next, in Katmandu, ...

I'm not trying to start a rumor about the birds (or the big fish kill either).  Who knows.  It does happen.  We'll possibly find out, if there's any funding left in the till for a bit of scientific investigation.  I'm just saying that the incredible short-memory problem that the main stream media has developed has become so obvious, at least to me, that I just can't take anything these media analysts say any more seriously.  And that includes the so-called "liberal" Chris Matthews.  Maddow and Olbermann I'll still give an ear too, but I won't say "uncritically" there either.  Today the new Congress starts up.  We'll see if the "Revolutionaries" really have something beyond more of the same in a flat key.  I'm curious as to whether the Democrats will actually try to kill the filibuster as we know it.  The Republican threat that "if you do that, the Tea Party might pass some weird stuff," is pretty amazing in its utter insanity, yet another example of the Clevon Little Hostage Situation in action.  Perhaps that one image from Mel Brooks is symptomatic of the whole scam that's been successfully run on America by one of our Great Parties since 1980, one acid drip at a time.  And this just isn't news, dear friends.  Ten years back we all saw the picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.  That picture was worth a million unspoken words, and still is. 

So Happy New Year.  At least it's not 2010.  Get over the flu.  The nice thing about winter down here is, there ain't no ticks.  And already the days are getting longer.  Also, copper, the metal that runs the modern world, is at its highest value ever.

A Link:  If the Rummy-Saddam hugfest photo didn't shine a light, there was this, way back in March, '10:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/a/m/americandad/2010/03/an-open-letter-to-conservative.php?ref=recdc/Superb

Ignorance Isn't Bliss

Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools

1.  I feel like following up on the last assertion I made in my previous post--namely, that keeping the public in the dark is a mistaken strategy for the Democrats, because such an unenlightened public is part of the fundamental character of the Republican base--the Tea Partiers as it were.  The unenlightened public is prey to fear.  Fearful people are drawn to fearful analyses--the sine qua non of the Glenn Beck cult, which takes up four hours of air time each and every day. (With the Beck cult I also suspect a perverse pleasure may be at work--people can certainly learn to love the feeling you get when you lean over the abyss, and Beck in that aspect becomes a mental roller coaster ride for the enraptured attendees of his daily seminars in paranoia.)  Toss in Limbaugh and the loathsome Hannity, who plays the jerk down at the end of the sticky-floored neighborhood bar every afternoon, and a Tea Party is born.  When the Obama Administration colludes in the situation by continuing to feed the forces of suppression and fear, the Obama Administration is just building up the Tea Party that much more. 

2.  I happened to watch C-Span's coverage of the Senate doings yesterday morning, for a while.  I was shocked at the disconnect between real life America and these people who are supposed to be "deliberating" on what to do next.  Some one, or more than one, has noted that one of the problems with our elected government is, these people imagine that they are the middle class.  I think so, yes.  But George Voinavitch doesn't have a clue.  Tom Coburn doesn't have a clue.  Mitch McConnell doesn't have a clue.  And the same is true for many of the Democrats.  What can they be thinking?   And how stupid do they think we are, to assert that since there is a deficit problem, the thing to do is to keep taxes low on people making millions and billions of dollars.

3.  After a dose of this, I went to work.  At work, a young man came in who wanted to buy a scrapped wood stove, which had been sitting out near the fence for several weeks in the hope that someone might want to buy it (rather than simply smashing it flat and sending it on to the shredder).  The young feller is a regular customer of ours.  He scrounges up scrap metal and brings us a pick-up load probably at least once a week--been coming for at least two years.  The boss said to him, "we're just going to give you that stove."  I think the boss's thought was, he was a good customer, it was near Christmas, he deserved a little reward.  The boss is a good guy.  So the kid says, "Thanks very very much.  My mom just left my dad, dad's out of work, I'm out of work except for scrounging, my wife's the only person in our family working right now, and our stove broke."  This wasn't a sob story.  He already had the stove.  This was just real life.  He's a young man, probably between 20 and 25, probably graduated from high school, probably knows car engines and how to cut a straight line on a board.  He's obviously a hard worker--scrappin' is hard work.

4.  I'm hoping he doesn't find the Beck/Limbaugh line of hate and blame attractive, as he rides around looking for some rusting metal or discarded aluminum cans in this early pre-winter winter we're experiencing here in central NC.  This morning there's snow on the ground and freezing drizzle in the air--probably I won't get to work today because of the roads.  But I do have a job anyways.  Obama's argument for passing the Obama/McConnell "compromise" tax bill is that a rise in taxes would hurt the middle class; McConnell asserts with a straight face that millionaires need to keep making every dollar they're making right now because that way they'll create jobs--the ones they're not creating right now.

5.  The kid with the stove most likely has no Federal Income Tax to pay.  He pays the regressive sales tax, of course, like the rest of us.  He pays his county tax on his 1985 Ford Pickup with the primer gray coat and the bad muffler.  That would be probably about $3.27.  (I have a truck pretty much like that, featured in my song "SOB in the Carvel Truck" at an earlier stage in its career, so I know about the county taxes.)  As Tom Coburn expresses for the umteenth time his great concern about the deficit, which according to Senator Doctor Tom requires the Federal Government to cut back on social expenditures before China causes our dollar to be worth less (or even worthless), the wood stove in question is being fixed up a bit (broken door), and installed.  Maybe while the kid's beating on that stove door he's listening to Hannity, who's telling him that there's a Kenyan Marxist in the Presidency. And yes, his wife might have to pay a little bit more in Federal Income Tax when she files in 2012, assuming things go along as they are now. 

6.  Down at the Texaco, the faux conservative intellectual with the DeKalb hat, the one I used to argue with before I gave it up as a waste of breath, has decided that empathy itself is a phony liberal construct aimed at fooling the American people into outright Marxism.  This was one of the reasons I gave up on him.  Mr. Gingrich argues in his many guest appearances on the various right-wing pundit shows, that the Democratic Party is the "party of losers."  It's a perfect circle.  You can probably find it in Dante, actually.   I think Bosch was an avid Dante reader.  Waited with baited breath for each new installment to come out in the Dutch translation, or possibly even read the Italian.

For further reading: 
http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2010/12/theres-always-tomorrow-for-dreams-to-come-trueunless-youre-a-conservative-then-all-dreams-will-come-true-yesterday.html

Seems like Mr. Mannion was thinking somewhat along the same lines this morning.  A tip of the Hatlo Hat to ya sir.

Balance

The number of times "moderate" or "reasonable" pundits and editorial writers have used the concept of "balance," as in locutions such as "well the left and the right in this country both need to ..." etc. etc. has surely now reached numerical realms beyond ordinary comprehension.  I wonder when this fact will itself begin to ground some inchoate judgment, even later coalescing into an actual editorial marker in the blue-pencil list of places not to go, at which moment we will begin to be spared, at least at the places which still have some concern for editing and writing in and of itself, further lectures on "balance."  If this tipping point does in fact develop, at that moment we can use appeals to "balance" as indicators that we are reading not simple opinions, but propaganda.  At this moment, the propagandists hide in amongst the banal, making judgment more difficult.  For myself, I'm now suspicious of any appeal to "balance." 

It used to be a sensible thought.  In ordinary life, all of us have our point of view, and we all would do well to respect this fact, and give a listen to what each person has to offer.  No one, after all, can see the future, or understand everything about a situation.  Buy?  Sell?  And that's a metaphor of course.  But in our political life, it seems to me that "balance" has come to allow an ever shifting center point, as the Right pushes harder and harder to the right.  We are close to a moment, for example, when people who are basically just maintaining a perspective of common sense--such as Keith Olbermann--are being marginalized out of existence in the way that genuine Marxists already have been marginalized out of existence--at least in the discourse of political life at the "mainstream" level.  According to some congressmen, NPR is now "Marxist."  Oh really?  The Car Guys?  Garrison Keillor?  Saturday NPR's Morning Edition featured a segment on bird watching so "in depth" as to eventually cause me to simply turn off the radio entirely.  Leftist?  No, it was just too much detail, too rich a portrait of what bird watchers actually do of a morning.  Yet possibly some right wing climate denier somewhere was fulminating on the "touchy-feeliness" of the segment, and checking even this bland portrait of people who obsess about birds as yet another example of how the Left is influencing our energy policy with emotional appeals. 

Yes, there once was a Weather Underground.  But these days the balancing of Right Wing appeals to "Second Amendment Solutions" occurs when large numbers of somewhat formerly engaged young people turn back to their more interesting social lives and don't bother to vote at all in an election which returns the Foxes to the Henhouse.  That is, "balance" these days is a ploy, and aims, with significant success, to effect a soporific fugue-state.  The "system" will and must always be flawed, because money is power, and the powerful always have a louder voice.  This is the context within which all of our feeble efforts at effecting progress and democratic change must of necessity occur. 

The Passing of the Caboose

It struck me the other day that our great national slide into insanity and depression started a ways back, with the decision to drop the caboose from railroad trains.  You wouldn't think everything would hinge on such a decision.  But we know from countless examples how one small thing can lead to incredible consequences.  We can see this fact of existence illustrated on the billiard table, and on the chess board as well.  For some reason the science oriented cable channels are stressing the fact that, even as we speak, some small whack given to an asteroid of relatively modest proportions can lead, in a relatively modest amount of time (when speaking of the universe, if not the human life span), to the end of human life on our planet.  And of course as well as bulls-eyes, we can equally contemplate the near misses which sprinkle through our lives, and through history.  Alice Munro writes a remarkable story in her collection "The Moons of Jupiter" which ends with a bickering couple driving home from a party down a road passing through tall corn fields.  Just as they approach an intersection, a speeding car with no lights passes through the intersection.  The couple finish the ride home in a different frame of mind.  Once Libby and I were driving out of West Virginia and observed, some distance in front of us, a Blazer heading in the opposition direction slide around a curve and off the road, into the guard rail which stopped it's progress from continuing in an arcing descent of probably hundreds of feet into the valley.  Had we been thirty seconds sooner that vehicle would have knocked us over that rail.  As it was, we drove past the Blazer to the sight of several youngish lads sitting stock still and looking straight head out the front windshield in rapt contemplation. 

I think that the vanishing of the caboose may be the harbinger of our current times, unnoticed, unremarked.  Here and there you can find a person who loves the caboose.  Some have been adopted as ready made cabins or storage buildings.  A few can be found in museums.  A great lot of these charming break rooms on the roll have no doubt been scrapped for their metal.  You could be riding in a former caboose, or part of one, just as your wedding ring could possibly be composed of Cleopatra's fillings.  Mostly, the caboose has just vanished.  I watched a coal train pass by a few days ago, some eighty cars, all rolling down to a coal-fired electric generating plant which serves our needs here in Chatham County.  It ended simply with the last of the coal cars.  No jolly red punctuation mark, smoke coming out of its little chimney, or the brief glimpse through a greasy window of overalled men standing around a potbelly with cups of coffee in their gloved hands.  Though I will say that the coal, itself, was on the verge of nostalgia, and probably could I have clambered atop a car and stomped around on top of the coal, the old smell from my days of shovelling coal into the hopper in our basement furnace would have brought back many memories, since even remembering the smell as I write evokes immediately that basement and furnace--the pipes and dials, the red clinkers in the belly of the firebox, the wonderful metal tongs I would use to clean said clinkers away, the big coal shovel, hanging at the ready on the wall, and perhaps best of all, the pictures of dinosaurs which my father had painted onto the coal bin door, without comment.  (And my dad was born on a farm in 1901!)

Sometime in the past, between that coal bin door and this moment writing in the kitchen amidst the peak moment of fall foliage in my woods, some men in suits decided that the caboose was unnecessary.  Little did they know the implications of their seemingly unremarkable decision.  The precipice continues to crumble beneath our feet.

Update.  On the other hand, William Rivers Pitts does have a point:  
http://www.truth-out.org/a-small-fraction-a-man65077