DID I RUN and AM I TIRED

DID I RUN AND AM I TIRES?

“One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.” 

From the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn

In a recent post Yellowdog Granny commented that a friend of hers was leaving her town of West, Texas; and that she hated change.

Her post got me thinking about all the changes I have lived through in my seventy-plus years and the different people I have been. 

I won’t bore you with my life story, but I have been at least five distinctly different people during the course of my life: different beliefs, different values, different lifestyles, different friends, different families and different abilities. 

I am retired and now live, with my much younger wife, in a small post-and-beam cabin in a rural area of north-western Maine.   The cabin is small: a living room, dining room/kitchen and mudroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs in the eaves.  One of the bedrooms we sleep in and in the other I store my memories – and I write.   Over the door of my den (for want of a better word to call it) is posted a one hundred year old piece of birch bark with the hand written inscription: 

DID I RUN and AM I TIRED?

Over the door

There is a story about this piece of birch bark, but in order to tell it I have to backtrack to a different time and different life.  

I was born of a single mother and raised by a grandmother and aunts.   There was no man in my life for a role model and so I struggled to find my male identity.   At nineteen I graduated from high school and joined the Navy.  I did a tour in Newfoundland and in 1962 ended up in stationed in Brunswick, Maine.   That is where I met Doval.

As a teenager, Doval had been a Navy Gunners Mate station aboard a merchant ship during the Second World War.  He left the Navy, worked as a journeyman carpenter for a number of years, married, had kids and then came back into the Navy as an Aviation Metalsmith.    

Doval was twelve years older, but when I met him, as a fellow flight crew member in a Patrol Squadron, we hit it off right away.   He was the most unique, unmilitary, free soul I have ever known.   To him the Navy was just a job.   He played the fiddle and we spent hours drinking whiskey, picking and singing, and hunting and fishing together.  He was like an older brother that I had never had.   His wife and kids were dear to me and the closest thing I had had to a family.  We later served together in the Navy SERE School in northern Maine. 

Now to the cabin and the birch bark.

While hunting in a remote section of Maine, Doval had discovered a dilapidated log cabin.   He had already made some repairs to it before we decided it would make a good hunting camp.  The cabin was log construction, about sixteen feet long and twelve feet wide.   The roof had already collapsed, the door was off the leather hinges and there were remnants of a window in the front wall.  The rain and snow over the years had taken a toll and it was only a matter of a few years before it would be completely gone.   We took leave from the Navy and backpacked tools, nails, roofing and window glass into the camp and spent a few summer week-ends sheering up and repairing.

Now I am speculating.   At the turn of the century lumber companies hired ‘lumber cruisers.’  These men would move into remote sections of the woods and map out trees to be cut near streams that could be used for log drives.  I believe the man who built the camp possibly worked for a lumber company. 

The cabin was furnished with a full size iron bed (that was unusual) and a wood cook stove.  There was a homemade pair of snowshoes on the wall and an old metal alarm clock on a shelf by the bed.   In one corner was a pile of rotted magazines.  In the area of the cook stove there were the rusted remnants of some cookware and cans for storage.    Outside in a wood storage lean-too we found a child’s size hand built sled.

I believe the man lived in the cabin for a few years with his wife and a kid.   I have always tried to picture him.   The door to the cabin was only five feet tall so I think he was a short man.   The rotted magazines tell that he could read.  But there was more to him than that.  

Being over six feet I had to duck down to enter the cabin, and when I would straighten back up the first thing that came into my vision, tacked on the back wall, was the piece of bitch bark with the hand written statement ‘DID I RUN and AM I TIRED?'

Years later Doval and I would hunt out of that cabin.   I would end up running up and down the ridge tracking some deer that was smarter the me, and when I returned to the cabin at dark I would duck down to get through the door and then be greeted by ‘DID I RUN and AM I TIRED.'  

I date the cabin because I was able to retrieve one cover from a 1903 Field & Stream magazine from the pile of rotted paper.   I have that cover framed and hanging on my wall.  

Doval and I eventually shared the location of the cabin with some people we knew.   Sometime in the mid-seventies the cabin was vandalized and much of the supplies we had stored there were taken.   We knew the cabin was no longer ‘ours’ so Doval took the snowshoes and I took the birch bark and we never returned.   Doval retired and went west and I was transferred to Florida.  

In the late seventies, in a bizarre twist of faith, Doval returned to Maine and died in a head-on car crash with members of the Navy SERE School returning from a class.    I miss the old man, and think of him often.   

 I am a different person now; but still, every time I walk out of my den  I look at the piece of birch bark and I think about the person I was and the things I did and have done since – and I know the true meaning of: 

DID I RUN and AM I TIRED

the Ol’Buzzard

MY GOD IS THE GOD OF TITS AND WINE.

The lord of light wants his enemies burned.
The drowned god wants them drowned.
Why are all the gods such vicious cunts?
Where is the god of tits and wine?

  

After an afternoon of love making with my beautiful wife

We lay naked in bed together cooled by a breeze from the ceiling fan.

She is snuggled up to me and her breathing is shallow and relaxed

But I lie awake – I can’t sleep – my mind moves from pointless image to pointless image.

Though age does not necessarily make me wiser it has sharpened my focus.

I no longer plan for some distant future; I no longer trouble myself by things I can’t effect.

I have distilled my life to the basics with a goal to enjoy what I can.

Does that sound egocentric?  We are born alone and we die alone – what happens in between is tainted by want, lust and striving for achievement.  Petty goals and acquired possessions drive us – work and obligations to others fill our days.  Our ideas of pleasure are hurried, hollow and contrived, and ego drives our waking moments. 

Our time here on earth is short, and mine is drastically shorter. 

Careers, adventures and love affairs – politics, wars and social issues now all take a backward step in urgency.

Here on earth – the now is what I have; and before the sickness, the aches and pains and rot that will take me away I owe it to myself to enjoy this and every day.   Our lives can still have meaning in the things that bring us pleasure. 

We can make the departing more acceptable by the things we do each day.

See friends when they are companionable and family when they are loving, but avoid outrageous fate.  

There is no heaven or hell – there is no sky fairy to influence the outcome of the football game.  

  

At some point as you age you need to reset priorities and find a new god.

MY GOD IS DEFINITELY THE GOD OF TITS AND WINE.

the Ol’Buzzard

THE ELECTRIC MIND

I lay awake this morning thinking of the past – at this point I have far more past the future.    I thought of all the crossroads I have transited in my life and the path I took at each juncture.   The thousands of decisions I have made that presented alternate outcomes and would have resulted in entirely different futures.  

This isn’t sour grapes – I am content with who I am; but the man I am is the result of a chain of decisions that led to other decisions that led to other decisions – now here I am.   

We are not who we are by design, but who we are by chance.  The world we exist in is the product of Chaos: A butterfly in Brazil flapping its wings results in a storm in the Atlantic.  

CHAOS IN A DARWINIAN COSMOSE

RANDOMNESS

A thousand choices I have made

Each a bifurcation to diverse outcomes

Each leading to entirely different futures

A chain of events that’s totally random

ACCIDENTAL

The man I am - accident of birth

A product of a random sexual selection

One of a million sperms that penetrated

A particular egg at place and time

HAPPENSTANCE

Our entire world has resulted from happenstance

Once Mars was very much like Earth

Then something happened and its future changed

As Mars is so Earth could be

CHAOS

There is no reason we should believe

If Earth would began the process again

That the evolutionary path would somehow repeat

And resulting life turn out the same

MANKIND

There is no God no guiding hand

No past no future from divine design

We are just bits of cosmic debris

Brief random life with electric thought process  

Have a happy day

the Ol'Buzzard

AXE GRINDING

I am sick and tired of the demeaning commercials that run constantly on TV displaying older people as stupid, demented cripples with false teeth, pissing their pants, needing catheters, unable to comprehend technology, riding in motorized chairs, needing Viagra and ready to buy into schemes like reverse mortgages. 

 I have no problem with advertising the prows and cons of a product for people with specific needs; but the present selection of actors and the way these ads are presented to the general public I find objectionable.   

I feel that these ad agencies are probably staffed by thirty-something young people that actually view older people as pabulum eating, incompetent, regressing relics sliding into dementia – and that’s the way they present them on TV. 

I despise the commercial with the older woman in her hover-chair riding around in circles in her kitchen, waving her hand in the air and appearing to holler ‘wee wee wee!’ like the pig on the GEICO commercial.

I am seventy-two.   I retired from the military at forty-two.  I received my Bachelor Degree at forty-six and my Masters at fifty.  I spent eleven years teaching in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska – retiring at sixty-seven.    I am married to a young woman and have great sex (without Viagra.)  I made my first solo parachute jump at seventy and plan to jump again this summer.  I ride a motorcycle in the summer, and in the winter I heat my house with firewood.  I work out at the gym twice a week and bowl twice a week – and, I am not unusual.

I hope that if the time comes that I require special products for age disability I can deal with a company that will approach me an intelligent adult. 

The Ol’Buzzard 

I AM NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORIST

BUT…

I am seventy-plus years old.   I have been around the block numerous times; and though I don’t think that age necessarily equates to intelligence – I can post an impressive resume.  And, the one thing I know for sure is: I don’t blindly trust our government to act in our best interest.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a loyal American (of American ideals) – and I have the scars to prove it.  But, I don’t trust our government (politicians.)    Our government has never been a government of the people, by the people… etc.   It has always been the government of special interest and “the bigger picture” gamesmanship.

Our government constantly packages swamp land as “Preferred Real Estate Property” and sells it to the citizenry.   They tell us it’s candy but in the bottom of the box there is often a scorpion.

The last thing I blindly bought into was the liberation of the South Vietnamese people in the Vietnam war; only to discover that our real reason for occupying South Vietnam was to tactically establish a permanent nuclear military presence on the southern border of China (sounds familiar in reverse: Cuban missile crisis.)    Then, of course, “Iraqi Freedom” where a White House full of oil men invade a country with the second largest oil reserve on earth. 

We have constantly been sold a bill of goods only to find that some patriotic spin name has been added to cover up the smell:  The Patriot Act – I need say no more.

We have moved from Bush’s “phone tapping of (only) foreign suspected terrorist”, to authorized surveillance of American citizens and to expanded surveillance authority for civilian police.  Now Obama has just signed an appropriations bill that allows the government to arrest and detain, without trial, any American citizen suspected of terrorist connections.   Obama says he will not use this authority, but what about a future fundamentalist, Tea Party, Republican President – what about a President Cheney clone?  

 Think about how this could fit in to George Orwell’s 1984 repackaged as 20XX.  

Now there is a new government threat covertly aimed at taking the first step to control and censor the Internet.

On October 26, 2011 the Bill HR-3261 was introduced by Lamar Smith (R-TX.)   The bill is touted to prevent the piracy of U.S. copyrighted material.  The bill is commonly known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act.)  The actual title is “To Promote Prosperity, Creativity, and Innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes."

It’s the - “and for other purposes,” - that bothers me.  At first glance the bill seems to require Internet providers to monitor customer’s traffic and block web sites suspected of copyright infringement.  

But, the bill also states that it would make unauthorized streaming of copyright material a crime with a maximum imprisonment of 5 years for ten infringements within six months.

That has me nailed; and probably everyone reading this blog who include pictures or YouTube clips on your post.  This is an open invitation to some political regime of the future to use the NSA or FBI to monitor web sites and blogs that they feel are not in the best interest of Big Brother and shut you down; or to threaten or actually imprison people that speak out.    (Does anybody still remember the First Amendment to the Constitution?)

The internet should not be the property of any government and no government should have the right to censor it “for the greater good” of its people.

the Ol’Buzzard.  

OLD MAN SHOUTS AT CLOUDS

A RESPITE FROM DEATH POST


I just read the post by MRMACRUM in the blog LOST IN THE BOZONE.   He was blogging about how things had changed in his lifetime, and not necessarily for the better. This got me thinking about all the things I have seen during my 70+ years that have gone by the wayside.   I found myself scribbling items in an old notebook – then decided to post them for what they are worth.


OK, it is just a list, and lists are boring – but hey I old and self-absorbed, and  it's two-o-clock in the morning – so here are a few things I can remember:

Automobiles: Plymouth Fury, DeSoto, Nash Rambler, Rambler American, Packard, Hudson Hornet, Kiser, Henry J, Studebaker and the first T-Bird. Cars had distributors and car tires had inner tubes.

Motorcycles I have known: Service Cycle, 650 Triumph Bonneville, Snort-n Norton 750, Royal Infield, BSA Lightning, BSA single cylinder 500cc, Indian Chief, Harley 45, Kawasaki three-cylinder, Suzuki water buffalo; and, You meet the nicest people on a Honda.

Telephones connection with live operators that would ask you:” number please.”   If you didn’t know the number you just asked for the person by name.

Telephones in our town in Mississippi had single, double and triple numbers – our number was 26.   There were also party lines and later dial telephones.

At one point we had a real Ice Boxes; and ice was delivered by the ice-man in 25 and 50 pound blocks.

My grandmother and I lived in a shotgun house in Mississippi that had Linoleum floor covers with floral decoration that looked like a rugs.

We had lights that hung from the ceiling and you turned them on with a pull cord; we also had push button light switches on the walls.

Before television there were console radios – every home had one.   Later there were transistor radios. The first TV I saw was black and white and had a nine inch screen.

Before calculators we used slide rules.

Kids and working men carried lunch boxes

Back in the 50’s everybody smoked.   The cigarettes available were Lucky Strike, Camels, Chesterfields, Old Gold, Philip Morris and roll your own.

There were 5cent Cokes, 10c movies, 25c sandwiches, 15c for a small loaf of Wonder Bread and 25c for a large loaf, Milk was 25c a quart, ice cream cones 5c; there was penny candy, 5c candy bars and 15c gasoline. Cokes, Pepsi, Orange Crush, Canada Dry Ginger Ale and Dr Pepper were all in 6 ounce bottles – Upper 10, RC Cola and Nehi Cream Sodas; also Nehi Orange, Grape and Strawberry came in 10 ounce bottles. The bottles were kept cool in the grocery stores in a water bath coke box.

The alternative to sodas was ice tea and Cool Aide (“Cool Aide, Cool Aide can’t wait. We want Cool Aide, taste great.”)

I had a Red Rider BB gun and a JC Higgins bicycle (I was paid $2.50 cents a week to deliver 25 papers, seven days a week.)

The barber shop was a man’s world.   There were stuffed fish and deer heads mounted on the wall, along with calendars of scantily clad women.   Old men sat and smoked and spit in the spittoons while they discussed politics, women and hunting and fishing.   Haircuts were 50c and you had your choice of Lucky Tiger, Vaseline or Wildroot Cream-oil hair tonic.

Men shaved at home with straight razors or the Schick safety razors; and they lathered from soap cups with animal hair brushes.

My grandmother kept a can of bacon grease on the back of the stove for frying and she made coffee in a percolator on top of the stove.

Women wore girdles, stockings with garters, and pill box hats.


Hell I could go on and on and on, but even I get tired of list.
the Ol'Buzzard





















http://thefilecabinet.blogspot.com/2011/11/retro-grouching.html

THE SUBJECT NO ONE WANTS TO TALKABOUT

Back to the HOKEY POKEY

I know that people don’t care to sit down and read long post.   Like everything else in this time of computers, twitter and cell phones, people want to read a few paragraph from a blog they are following, make a comment and then move on to the next post.

For this reason I have decided to breach the subject of DEATH in two or even three installments.

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far from being on a cruise ship.   Most of your time is spent lying on your back.  The brain has shut down.   The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens and nothing is esxpected of you." 

STIFF, by Mary Roach

I recently attended the funeral of my wife’s aunt.  It is not the first funeral I have attended, but the first commercial funeral I have attended in a long time.   That funeral and my approaching birthday (no. 72) have me rethinking about death; and how death is handled by different cultures and how it is perceived by different individuals.   As I have said before: Death is the final debt we owe to nature for our time alive on this earth – but that’s bull shit.   I don’t question so much why I must die; but the real question seems to be why have I lived?

The only answer I can surmise seems to be that at some random point in time, one of the millions of sperms in one of my fathers random ejaculations (who ever the hell he was) happened to connect with a random egg passing through my mothers uterus.  The whole thing seems perfectly random: I am here via the butterfly effect described in the Chaos Theory.   I am a random male, that had a random birth, that has made random choices in life, that has led me to be a random old man, expecting a random death at sometime in the random future.

Without getting any more metaphysical than that, in the following post I will write about how death is handled in our culture, and how it differs from the death rituals I experienced while living in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska.

But first a little background.

From the earliest times death has been feared and misunderstood by man.   Early humans left their dead for the animals and the environment to consume, as evident by early archeological finds.   Early man was fearful of the unknown, fearful of death and fearful of the dead; and somewhere along his cognitive development the idea of gods and ghost and an afterlife evolved.

Early Neanderthal burial vaults have been discovered that contained weapons and personal artifacts, evidence of a belief in an afterlife.   Pharoses of Egypt were entombed with riches, personal belongings and even slaves.   Michael Crichton describes a Viking funeral pyre in his book Eaters of the Dead in which all preparations were made for the Viking chief’s journey to Valhalla. (Though fiction, Crichton researched his material thoroughly.)

Now we have the advent of major religions and their drive to take control of death



Ars Moriendi (The art of dying), a Latin text dating about 1415, contains woodblock prints presenting the Christians’ dilemma at the time of death.  



The dying man is surrounded on one side by the demons of hell and on the other side by saints and angles.   A battle is in progress for the dying man’s soul.   The only chance this man has is for the last rites to be administered in order to purify his soul so that he might be received sinless by the body of angles.   Early Catholics feared the prospect of sudden death because dying unconsecrated could result in being abducted by demons into the inferno of hell.

The early Catholic Church, with its doctrine of purgatory, was able to manipulate huge financial benefit from the policy of priest receiving money to pray to the saints for the deceased’s speedy trip through purgatory.  The more someone paid the more prayers the priest would offer – thus insuring the rich man a prominent place in the heavenly realm.

(Side note: even today the Catholic Church is one of the biggest individual owners of funeral homes in the city of New York – again profiting from death.)

Notice the early church was all about men going to heaven – the Christian church has never be overly concerned about women, other then to pose them as wanton, temptresses, debasers of men and the cause of original sin.

The image of The Church as the protector from death was lain bare during the mid-14th century when the Black Death swept through Europe, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.   During that time traditional burial customs collapsed as most victims were consigned to mass graves.   It has been claimed that not only the dead, but also the dying were buried in public pits in an attempt to stem the contagion.

Today death is a big business.   Funeral homes are never short of business and they prey on the grief of surviving family members to sell the biggest and most elaborate death ritual the family can afford.   Cemetery lots increase the value of land from cost per acre to cost per square foot.   Massive cemeteries blanket our country and tie up valuable land from productive use for the many centuries to come.

The dead in our culture are feared and considered an unnatural macabre spectacle to be endured, avoided and dispensed with as fast as possible.   Death is a damn profitable business, and the major recruiting tool for religions of the world.

I know reading a post about death is a bummer - but maybe it can help you

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE



The Ol'Buzzard

I CAN'T EXPLAIN IT - SO THERE MUST BE A GOD.

I'm"Old

Oops!
I posted pictures earlier and none of them took - I ended up with big empty boxes with some kind of script at the top.   Not sure why.  Blog Fodder thanks for the heads-up - Linda thanks for the input.

But after all I'm OLD.

(excerpt from FOOL by Christopher Moore.  A parody of King Lear

as told from the point of view of his jester.

A great read.)

"Goneril went to her father and took his hand, "yes father you are old.   Very old.   Really , really, extraordinarily, mind-blogglingly -"

She turned to me for a clue, "Dog fuckingly, " I suggested.

"- dog-fuckingly old,' said the duchess.   'You are feebly, incontinently, desiccatedly, smelling-of-boiled-cabbagely old.  You are brain-rottingly, balls-draggingly  -"

'I'm fucking old!' said Lear. "We'll stipulate that."

http://www.chrismoore.com/

Now that I'm old I can use that as an excuse: I'm fucking old -

the Ol'Buzzard