The Incredible Side of George

[embed]https://youtu.be/0LBJoj4Vyb0?t=2s[/embed]

I wasn't jumping, for me it was a fall

[embed]https://vimeo.com/17176433[/embed]

Full lyrics HERE.

A Lesson in Genetics

In this excerpt from Blue Highways © 1982, author William Least Heat Moon recalls a conversation in the Desert Den Bar in Hachita, New Mexico:

(Bartender) Mrs. (Virginia) Been turned to me. "He's a real cowboy. Horse, lasso, branding iron."

"Not many of us left except you count the ones that tells you they's cowboys. A lot them ones now. I been ridin' since the war."

"Weren't you up around Alamogordo when they tested the bomb?" the high-mileage man said. "Think I heard you were."

"Over west to Elephant Butte, up off the Rio Grande. Just a greenhorn, sleepin' out where we was movin' cattle. July of 'forty-five. They was a high wind that night and rain, and I didn't get much sleep. Curled up against a big rock out of the wind. I was still in my bedroll at daybreak when come a god-terrible flash. I jumped up figurin' one of the boys took a flashbulb picture of me sleepin' on the job. Course nobody had a Kodak. Couple minutes later the ground started rumblin'. We heard plenty of TNT goin' off to Almagordy before, but we never heard nothin' like that noise. Sound just kept roarin'. 'Oh, Jesus,' I says, 'what'd they go and do now?' Next month we saw wheres they bombed Heerosaykee, Japan. We never knowed what an A-tomic bomb was, but we knowed that one flash wasn't no TNT blockbuster."

"The next day the sun rose in the wrong direction," the other man said. "They've been testing soldiers stationed at Alamogordo in 'forty-five for radiation poisoning. You know, Herefords up there turned white."

"Feelin' fine. Doctor told me once it was a good thing I was behind that rock. He says the wind saved me, but the wife says the bomb musta been why we never had no kids. Says it burned out my genetics."

"You never know."

"Truth is, bad genetics runs in my family. Dad never had no kids."

"Your Dad didn't have children?" I said.

"Not a one. That's why he adopted me." He drained his beer. "You know what Spaniards called the valley where the bomb got blowed off?"

High mileage looked up. "Don't think I ever heard."

"Journey of Death," the little cowboy said. "That's the English for it."

I've Experienced That.

Poorly Drawn Lines by Reza Farazmand is on the web HERE.

"Language dreams in metaphors." ~William Matthews

The Man or the Myth

John McCain liked to tell that story that his North Vietnamese captors offered to release him early, but he heroically replied, "Not without my brothers!"

Consider that scenario:  "John, we're thinking about making a move, but first we wanted to get your input. Is this okay with you?" I have a hard time picturing that, myself. It seems unlikely.

He was a "maverick" who voted the party line in the upper ninetieth percentile, a "hero" who knowingly bombed civilian targets.

It made a nice story, I guess, if you're in to that sort of thing.

One

Today at the used book store I bought a brittle, yellowed, paperback copy of Poems From the Sanskrit , translated by John Brough, ©1977.  It's a collection of secular poems from India, all written between the fourth and tenth century A.D.

The one below is, unfortunately, anonymous, but it's the one that caught my eye and was the deciding factor in buying the book:

Although I conquer all the earth,
Yet for me there is only one city.
In that city there is for me only one house;
And in that house, one room only;
And in that room, a bed.
And one woman sleeps there,
The shining joy and jewel of all my kingdom.

 

Me

"The person I fear most in the last two rounds is me."  ~Tom Watson, leader after the first two rounds of the 1977 Masters Tournament.

And Then I'd

“Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky-- up-- up-- up-- into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.”  ~Lucy Maud Montgomery, in Anne of Green Gables ©1908

Anne of Green Gables is in the public domain and may be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, HERE.

That Unending Back-And-Forth

"That's one of the good things about the path. You're never committing yourself to suffering forever. You can always say, 'I'm out of here.' This is not a question of irresponsibility. You're taking your contribution to the troubles of the world and you're removing it. That's a choice that each person has to make for him or herself alone. We're the ones who choose to get involved, so we're the ones who have to choose to say, 'I'm out of contributing to that particular problem. I'm out of that unending back-and-forth. I want to focus on the real problems, the real causes of stress and suffering in life.'" ~Thanissaro Bhikkhu

At first I thought the translator may have taken a few liberties, but it turns out Thanissaro Bhikkhu is an American baby-boomer.  :D

The Push of Karma

The best definition I've heard of karma has two parts:  "The present is the result of decisions made in the past; the future will be the result of decisions made in the present."

Which is the tl;dr of the poem below:

Whiplash
by William Matthews
from A Happy Childhood, © 1984

That month he was broke,
so when the brakes to his car
went sloshy, he let them go.
Next month his mother came
to visit, and out they went
to gawk, to shop, to have something
to do while they talked besides
sitting down like a seminar
to talk. One day soon he'd fix
the brakes, or-- as he joked
after nearly bashing a cab
and skidding widdershins
through the intersection
of Viewcrest and Edgecliff--
they'd fix him, one of these
oncoming days. We like
to explain our lives to ourselves,
so many of our fictions
are about causality–chess
problems (where the ?! after
White's 16th move marks
the beginning of disaster),
insurance policies, box scores,
psychotherapy ("Were your
needs being met in this
relationship?"), readers' guides
to pity and terror--, and about
the possibility that because
aging is relentless, logic too
runs straight and one way only.

By this hope to know how
our disasters almost shatter us,
it would make sense to say
the accident he drove into
the day after his mother left
began the month he was broke.
Though why was he broke?
Because of decisions he'd made
the month before to balance
decisions the month before that,
and so on all the way back
to birth and beyond, for his
mother and father brought
to his life the luck of theirs.

And so when his car one slick day
oversped its dwindling ability
to stop itself and smacked two
parked cars and lightly kissed
another, like a satisfying
billiards shot, and all this action
(so slow in compression and
preparation) exploded so quickly,
it seemed not that his whole life
swam or skidded before him,
but that his whole life was behind
him, like a physical force,
the way a dinosaur's body
was behind its brain and the news
surged up and down its vast
and clumsy spine like an early
version of the blues; indeed,
indeed, what might he do
but sing, as if to remind himself
by the power of anthem that the body's
disparate and selfish provinces
are connected. And that's how
the police found him, full-throated,
dried blood on his white suit
as if he'd been caught in a rust-
storm, song running back and forth
along his hurt body like the action
of a wave, which is not water,
strictly speaking, but a force
that water welcomes and displays.

Pip

[embed]https://youtu.be/v78-ftcqpNw[/embed]

When I was a boy, I wanted to be a Pip when I grew up.  The suits, the style, the moves, the silky-smooth vocals; they enchanted me.

"There's no hope, but I may be wrong."  Pete Seeger (source)

Where have all the flowers gone?

We tried to go to a Bellamy Brothers concert last night.

The evening began with a rousing tribute to our brave and glorious troops, after which the crowd burst into spontaneous applause because they, too, love our brave and glorious troops.

Then we were compelled to rise and recite the pledge of allegiance (I declined), after which the woman next to us, grinning from ear to ear, shouted "AMEN!" Several men, overcome with emotion, pumped their fists in the air.

Nobody but me seemed to notice that there wasn't actually a flag present.

Over an hour later the band still had not taken the stage. We looked around at the stone-faced polyester stretch pants and western shirts mindlessly contemplating their cell phones, and decided to call it a night.

We're giving up.

In the future, we'll drive a little farther to attend concerts that are more focused on music than some weird political/religious litmus test.  East Texas is not for us.

---

Pete Seeger used to host a famous Strawberry Shortcake Festival in New England. It was purposely, decidedly non-political. He just wanted everyone to come, have some strawberry shortcake, and enjoy singing songs and each other's company.

I miss Pete.

Happenstance

“Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.” ~Anna Quindlen (via)

Paisley

[embed]https://youtu.be/JHcoftcX6ZM[/embed]

Grief is a weird thing. It can hit you out of nowhere.

I was in Stein Mart last week and found a wonderful paisley shirt, and as I was heading towards the checkout it suddenly hit me that the only other person who would be as excited about this shirt as I was would have been my mother, but she's gone.

So I didn't get the shirt, and it knocked me down for a long, long time.  It's strange to consider that something as simple as a pretty shirt can light the tinder.

Anyway.

Mona and I went to see ELO in Dallas Monday night, and I was still so depressed we almost didn't make it.  Mona was ready to punt and drive me home.  But I did rally enough to make it into the venue, and once we there we both had a great time. The crowd sang, danced, and were totally immersed in the experience.  This was Jeff Lynne's first tour in thirty years, and he hasn't lost a step.

It was healing.

Percussion

[embed]https://youtu.be/xjhQLeK02o4[/embed]

The music isn't really my thing, and it may not be yours either, but it's worth watching at least a little of the video to see the girl on the box.

Her dancing provides the percussion:  the box is the drum, her high-heels the drumsticks.

It's mesmerizing and wonderful.

Any Day Now

[embed]https://youtu.be/fFiIJ4vW2IU[/embed]

I read an article once that said Jerry Garcia should not be considered  a top-tier guitarist because he played too slow.

I disagreed with it.

Sleeping in Sunlight

Lauren Sleeping in Winter Sunlight by Kurt Solmsse, (2012), oil, 48 x 36 inches

Good to know I'm doing it right

"A zen master’s life is one continuous mistake."  ~Dogen Zenji (source)

Cargo Cult

Cat and Girl is on the web HERE.

(If you're not familiar with the term "cargo cult," Wikipedia has a nice article HERE.)

A Place That's A Little More Timeless

[embed]https://youtu.be/6ySLbSAFm4A[/embed]

At 3:59 she talks about how poetry creates a safe spot to view the world from.  I like that a lot.

Ask him to sit beside me for a minute

Here
by Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

A Silvery Sea

Young Girl in a Silvery Sea by Joaquín Sorolla, 1909

The Open Destiny of Life

Excerpted from the short story A Conversation with My Father by Grace Paley, © 1972:

"I would like you to write a simple story just once more," he says, "the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next."

I say, "Yes, why not? That's possible." I want to please him, though I don't remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: "There was a woman…" followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

Improbably Mixed

I don't like to look at old photographs.  Thinking about the past, or the future, almost always makes me melancholy.  I try not do either.

Which makes my love of this poem a little unusual:

 

Slides of Your Life
by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Different Ways to Pray ©1980

What amazes me is how easily we do this,
like thumbing through newspapers
or catalogues of holiday fruit.
Here you are, age ten, your shirt torn,
no one lets you pitch.
The slides are improbably mixed;
between graduations and new Buicks
we have a woman's breasts,
enormously white.
They are historical markers,
someone died here.
Another boy, your own,
raises his fist to the camera.
He is the wild animal dodging traps.
But then it's parties,
dark laughter,
tables spread with food.
You click as if you're still hungry.
Smiles reel and vanish, your wife,
a scarf knotted at her throat,
turns away from you in the park.
Your lives pull apart like old cloth
you mend and mend so long, then make rags.
I'd forgotten all this, you say,
unearthing birthday parties
and cherry blossoms
as if they are still happening,
tonight,
on this wall,
in another world.

Mind-Made Me

"When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head… This is the ego, a mind-made 'me.' That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces. When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking… Who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it."  ~Eckhart Tolle (source)

I'm happy not knowing

I remember reading an article one time that confidently stated, "Well, we now know who Jimmy Durante's 'Mrs. Calabash' is," and I was a little disappointed. I enjoyed the secret. But then I did a quick internet search, and found a site that named a different person, and a third that named a third person.

I suppose that's the best of all worlds: the people who need an answer think they have one, the people who enjoy the mystery know they don't.

I'm happy with a little mystery.  I don't want to know what happened to Emilia Earhart, or the true identity of D.B. Cooper, or the final disposition of Jimmy Hoffa. I want to believe that Ms. Earhart circled back and lived a long and happy life with a secret lover, that D.B. Cooper enjoys a prosperous new life somewhere in the wide open spaces, that Mr. Hoffa entered the witness protection program with one hell of a cover story.

And I'd also like to believe that Elvis is hiding in plain sight as an impersonator in a kitschy wedding chapel in Las Vegas, eating peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and laughing himself to sleep every night.

There's hope in "maybe."

So we decided

In this excerpt from Amy Tan's short story The Joy Luck Club ©1989, the narrator's mother explains why she founded a mah jong dinner club while a refugee in war-torn China:

"It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it? How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws? What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

"So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck."

Impermanence

"People say 'phase' like impermanence means insignificance. Show me a permanent state of the self."  ~Alixandra Bamford (source)

From Every Direction

"Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."  ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin