tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66864550950686312422024-03-05T00:10:57.089-07:00Rum and Donuts"Nobody knew his name, but his T-shirt read 'Readin' Rots the Mind.'"Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-23992010245266651192018-12-06T12:37:00.000-07:002018-12-06T12:37:57.758-07:00Scrap-Wood FeastThe orchard lay east and south of the house. Winnowed by years, hot summers and bitter winters, when I was young all that remained were two apricots, two peaches, and the singletons: a single apple, gnarled with age but far from infirm, and a barren cherry, infertile and alone. Those few steps from the back walk to lush flavor, juices running from mouths edge and lip, were a delight still unmatched by anything less carnal among adulthood's discoveries. A delight now gone, as first apple, then a peach, then cherry, then the last peach succumbed to age, and finally the two apricots failed after a twenty-eight below winter.<br />Bones of limb and trunk stood, the untended dead, until they fell and were left there still. The world spun and the lives of those who should have, who once, cared tumulted and failed too in the heats and colds of life, illness, and poverty.<br />Eventually, some of these bones were dragged away and piled with others, mill worked lengths of oak so old and left exposed so long that they had regained the twists and arthritic bends of their rooted life. This oak, saved from boxcars by my great-grandfather and by his son for projects unknown, and the fruit woods lay together, bleaching and cracking in the sun and storms, more kin to Temujin's distant cairns than to sweet ripe fruit or warm hand worked carpentry. And so... and so... the years passed.<br />My life here is a complex one, as maybe anyone's is raised on land, in a place that is of such strong character and all at once fire, hammer, anvil for, and fiber soft, strong, and raw woven into, the character of those generations lived, worked, fought, nourished, fucked, slept and died there. I've run from this place, run to it, fought and feared it, and at last undertaken to live with it. To make peace, if not friends, with the ghosts and make for myself, my family, a home. Bones into meal, my days are ones of working the remains of one-hundred years of life here into the next years, the next generations. Building from what they left things my ancestors would recognize and be proud of, but that also serve me and will serve my son and daughter in their lives beyond my ken. It is nourishing work, the soul well fed with calloused hands, and the place looking and feeling alive once more. To nourish soul, place, mind, and life, you must also nourish the body.<br />The landscape is littered with small arroyos, washouts between the hard unnourishing knots of bunch grass, from the sides of which spill rusting cans and shattered jars. Long ago sheepherders, homesteaders, and cowboys lived here, much on what came out of cans. Venison and beef may hang but a few months out of the year here, and jerk dries the already dust parched mouth. The harvest of even small gardens goes further if put up in mason jars, and what a revelation a can of corned beef to go with it instead of hard salt-beef as dry as the stones. The ones who came before fed this way, leaving their trash piles rusty evidence of their passing, staying, eating, living.<br />
We eat our share of canned goods. Much of it is even not real bad, and nothing keeps here like canned food, safe from spoilage and depredations of the larders enemies, mice and bugs. There is no substitute for fresh meat, though, and every trip to town brings excitement for whatever large cut we'll be bringing home. A smoke-house will be built, but until that day the town run brings omnivorous joy at the first meat not out of a can in two or more weeks.<br />
Meat and bones, this is a natural pairing. The long dry, long removed from nourishment or use, bones of the orchard, the bones of the carpenter, can now be put to rest in use The small kitchen in the old adobe has only a cast-iron wood burning stove. Almost three square feet of smooth black iron cooktop, above an oven big enough for any Yuletide goose. Put to heat, entirely, by a firebox for only wood. Outside, in the long established New Mexico fashion, is a summertime kitchen, centered around a large wood brazier over which can be placed a grill or sheet-iron cooktop. If we eat it, it was likely made over a wood fire.<br />Nearly eighty years ago my great-grandmother planted an elm tree beside the overflow pond from the well. Still alive today, this elm has become gargantuan, though no official recorder has ever measured it the tree stands unique by size. On water nearly constantly every day of its life, the old elm reaches ten feet above the thirty-five foot windmill tower and stretches branches thirty-feet in every direction from its sixteen foot diameter trunk. The old elm has given rise to, and outlived, many children, sprouting all over the yard as elms do. Also as elms do, the old tree sheds branches from time to time, dropping whole limbs to become bones alongside its outlived children. These bones make a hot fire with a mild smoke, and though poor fair for heat compared to native cedar or piñon, elm makes a fine cookfire.<br />Today these bones are cut into short lengths and put into a kiln to turn into charcoal. The charcoal, cherry, elm and a bit of apricot, goes into my smoker below pounds of pork belly brought from town. The pork belly has been bathed in a sauce of honey, balsamic vinegar, coconut aminos, and spices and herbs including safe, garlic, pepper, and clove. As the sauce reduced, a few shattered black walnuts were added, over the brazier fire.<br />Brazier smoke mingles with the rising smoke from the smoker as the sauce bathed meat is placed onto the rack and closed in for the next six hours, to slowly cook swirled in the smoke of history, of life. When it emerges, tender and falling apart beneath the fork, it will nourish the body and soul of my hard working, fully living, family. The bones of trees that were, will have turned to powdered ash, and others will wait for the next days cook fires, and the nourishment it will provide.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-29733178728447570792017-06-29T15:11:00.000-06:002017-06-29T15:39:27.100-06:00Provisions for Winter, The Red Queen, and Rifle-Plates: A Report from The WestFrom my journal, in process of developing a magazine piece, dated 2012:<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's not a twenty-five pound weight
vest, but at eight pounds each both plates add to the workout. The
sixteen pound vest of armor plates doesn't breath well, and the extra
weight of a medical kit and a radio don't help. The plates under the
rough Cordura fabric will stop a steel-core 30.06 round, however. It's
a hot, heavy, sweaty comfort. After the climb, sitting on the rocky
hillside, watching the road below, I wonder how it got to this.<br />
<br />
Last
summer, we had a guest we never met. For months my dogs would bark,
and be answered by a single dog far out in the pasture. On various
nights, we saw a flashlight moving through the uninhabited range, or
a campfire. Both would be extinguished as soon as headlights or
another light aimed their direction. This gave no comfort. There have
always been walkers who came through the country afoot. Some going
north for work, or south to take their money home. Others just on the
bum, or just unable to handle the urban world, but they all passed on
through, and often introduced themselves on the way. They rarely meant
harm, they were just going someplace. To take up residence uninvited
on someones place, with never a word of contact and an effort to
hide, speaks to some illness of intention or nature. The last time
that had happened, the man tried to kill my father with a stolen
rifle when dad rode up on his camp. <br />
That had been in the days
before cartels, and back-country meth cooks. In the days when a man
on the run could still disappear in a different city, before
surveillance cameras and facial recognition in every airport. So I
spent some days searching, with a rifle over my shoulder and a pistol
on my hip, for this person or persons. I laid up on the hills and
glassed the country with binoculars, and I scouted waters. My intent
was not to solve any question of why they were here, but simply to
send them on their way to somewhere else. If that meant gunfire, then
it meant what it meant. Who knows what would drive someone to the
backside of a place only reachable by thirty-five miles of dirt road,
and really, who wants to find out? <br />
I never did find whoever it
was. They moved on rocks, and away from places easy to track, and
they laid up hard in the day where they couldn't be seen. Eventually,
the far-away dog stopped barking and the light stopped burning in the
night. Part of me is glad, and part of me isn't. Both parts of me
would have been very happy, then, to have these chunks of bulletproof
ceramic I have now. <br />
<br />
A man I've known all my life, one by
whose measure I judge others, has begun to travel this country with a
gun again. After his war in Vietnam, he parted with the routine
carrying or use of firearms, for the over-familiarity. Taking a
pistol for companion again was not a decision he made lightly, or one
he's not regretted to some extent. But, after finding one too many
trespasser on his family's ranch, one too many shake-and-bake meth
cook and one too many mobile lab, he couldn't not take responsibility
for his own welfare.<br />
On the border, they have cartels but
further norte we have wannabes, with dreams of glory and money. They
are less organized, and less trained, than their heroes of Sinaloa,
Juarez and others, but no less dangerous to the land-owners,
travelers and workers of the backcountry. Anyone who's seen an
episode of Breaking Bad is probably familiar with mobile meth labs,
vehicles from cars to RV's purposed to contain the workings of a
methamphetamine cook. Shake-and-bake cooks, on the other hand, have
been far less presented in the media. Combining gourmet ingredients
that include camp fuel, lithium from batteries, and crushed allergy
pills in a container and shaking it up, aspiring narcos create a
one-pot meth cook. If the container doesn't explode, that is. The
risk of explosion leads some of them to drive out into the country to
run their cook. Sometimes they just leave the cooking mixture on the
side of the road and watch from afar. Both mobile and shake-and-bake
cooks are perpetrated by the kind of people who will kill you for
interfering. Local elements of larger groups, and the desperate,
desirous up-and-comers who have dreams of easy highs, quick money,
and perhaps greater things akin to the hermanos down south. <br />
So
maybe that's how it got to this. <br />
<br />
<br />
Then, there is another
way to look at it. It has perhaps always been this way, and there was
no “getting” involved. My grandfather carried a pistol in the
backcountry, because there is often work to be done with one. Injured
animals to put down, predators to stop in their depredations of
livestock, more often than anything dramatic. But in carrying that
pistol, he wasn't unknowing of the tools violent use. Born in 1906,
leaving home in 1920 for a job behind a rifle in Arizona, he had
killed men in self defense and maybe otherwise. Though his
experiences elsewhere never followed him here, that's not to say it
couldn't have happened. Not so long after my grandfather passed, my
father had to shoot a man out here, in absolute self defense against
an aimed thirty-thirty. My body-armor may tell a different story to
the observer, but when the schizophrenic man with the stolen rifle
raised it at my father, I wonder if dad wouldn't have been glad for
some of his own?<br />
When I am out, either on the ranch or enjoying
the wilderness in other places, I always carry a medical kit, and
survival kit. Tourniquet, bandages, superglue, moleskin, oral
rehydration salts, signaling tools, emergency shelter, parachute
cord, a knife, and so on. I've rarely ever had to use any of it, but
I still carry it because, as every philosopher worth his robes has
said, shit happens. The gun is no different, nor the protection
against it. <br />
As humanity moves forward, so do our technologies,
and common tools. I've been told that I have no need for a
semi-automatic rifle on the ranch, the erroneously called “assault
rifle” being a military tool. My grandfather favored a Colt
revolver and Winchester carbine for his ranch guns, just like popular
images of the “classic” cowboy. Those tools were once at the
cutting edge of military small arms, with extended capacity and much
increased rate of fire. The difference? Time. My grandfather
eventually switched from his Colt revolver to a war-bring-back German
Luger in 9mm, that shot faster from a larger reserve of cartridges.
Everything rolls on, and people adapt. <br />
It's possible to create
many questions about these things, questions of need, odds, and so
on, but what do they achieve? There is a wisdom in this country, that
what is, is. Questions become acts of denial, things that feel like
action but are actually nothing close. Anyone who has lived out here
very long, particularly anyone of second or third or more generation
rural living, learns that you can talk yourself out of almost
anything. Extra well-pipe costs money, so do spare leathers for the
check valve, and do you really need them? Laying in extra tools,
parts and supplies for a hard winter might be wasted if the snows
never come and the roads never close. You might not need them, it is
true, but no one knows what they really need until they need it. Out
here, we try to keep as much of everything big and small on hand.
More beans in the pantry, coffee can after coffee can of nails, bolts
and screws, parts for trucks, and veterinary medicines most of us
know how to dose for people too. Because we all know, it's harder out
here than forty miles away in the land of paved roads and plenty.
When the snows blow in deep, or the clay turns to bog in the
monsoons, animals die for want of that extra feed or medication, and
so do people. The only preventative? Have what you might need, and
have it in spades.<br />
What is, is, and there's only to do about it
what needs done. And that gets done with what is available. Fences
get mended, cattle get moved, and we deal with drought, fire, and
predation on whatever number of legs it comes on. Once there were no
fences in this country, and the only thing that separated one man's
stock from another was a brand, and a particular way of whittling an
ear. Then barbed-wire got strung taught across miles of cedar fence
posts, defining the edges of each man's range. Aermotor windmills
started giving way to submersible pumps, and while that generator was
running we strung up some electric lights too. Then those who could
afford it started flying over their lands and herds in ultralights
and helicopters, counting head and killing coyotes and wolves from
the air. Numbered ear tags replaced ear marks, and then fencing got
done with steel posts. The generators got replaced with power-line
drops, or solar panels, and the kerosene lamps put away for
emergencies. Now you can run your ranges with drones, and tag your
stock with RFID tags that can be scanned on the go. Ranches across
the west have motion activated yard lights and security cameras.
Trail-cameras are placed as much to watch for people as to track
stock and predators. And the bandits that gave rise to the brands
and the fences in the first place? They care less about cattle now.
Their interests are in the remote places, far from governing eyes,
for cooking, weighing, cutting, counting money or butchering their
enemies. And those who already live there? We're just in the way. So
if we add body armor and AR-15's or AK-47's to the tools of our
trade, we're just keeping up. Doing what needs done, with what is
available. Like our fathers and grandfathers, laying in what might be
needed for a winter that no one could say was going to be easy or
hard. </div>
Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-76120233695575782642015-07-01T13:39:00.000-06:002015-07-01T13:39:02.930-06:00The Man Comes Around<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /> It rained that
Tuesday. The gutters overloaded and filthy water washed up over the
curbs. The club hadn't opened yet, and the few within were still,
watching the rain. It streaked the one-way reflective front windows.
A woman beneath a large black umbrella stopped and checked her hair
in those windows. Once sure the rain hadn't mussed her hair too
greatly, she hurried on. <br /> The piano player was oiling the
dark wood of his instrument. Most of the lamps were off and the empty
barroom was hung with grays and cool blues of wet light. From where
Lou watched, the piano player, sleeve of his white shirt billowing at
the garter, was almost silhouetted against the front windows. Lou
liked the man, and his quiet dedication to his work. <br /> The
piano player stood straight, cloth in his hand, and looked out the
windows. “It's going to be strange” he said without turning.<br /> Lou wasn't sure what the man meant, “Strange?”<br /> “Without you running the place.” <br /> “Oh. Yeah, well.
Who's surprised, eh?”<br /> “Oh, no one”, the piano players
tone was coolly even, “but it will still be strange.” <br /> Silence hung in the room, and the rain rose then to fill the
emptiness with its battering. Large drops shook the windows, maybe
the whole building, with their force. The piano player gathered his
materials and went into the back room.<br /> Lou started to make
himself an old-fashioned. He called to the piano player, “You wan'a
drink?”<br /> “I'm alright, Lou” the other man said from just
behind him. Startled, Lou slopped the bourbon a little. The man moved
so quietly. <br /> “What are your plans?”<br /> Lou sipped
the drink, “I'm going down to the coast. My sister left me a place
down there, and I've never really used it. Be good to now.”<br /> “They'll send the man around.”<br /> “They don't know about
the place” he sipped more, and stood silent, rinsing the liquor
across his tongue, for a long time, “but yeah. They'll send the man
around.”<br /> The piano player nodded, “Ya know, Lou, while
you've got the stuff out, I think I'll have that drink.” <br /> <br /> The dock was cold. To the south the water was tossed gray, capped
with dingy white. The sky another layer of the same, muted gray
across the expanse of ocean, below closer pale gray clouds. The piano
player flexed his hands, enjoying the leather of his gloves on his
knuckles. He felt good. The salt in the air teased his taste buds.
The cool temperature was refreshing, and he enjoyed wearing the wool
coat.<br /> “Do you travel much” the woman asked.<br /> “No.
But I always enjoy it when I do” and he kissed her. She giggled and
did feminine things with her eyelashes at him. <br /><br /> Lou
opened the door, and started to smile at the familiar face. The piano
player waited until Lou's face had fallen before smiling back. <br /> “So, it's you.”<br /> The piano player stepped into the
cottage, brushing past Lou, observing the emptiness. <br /> “It
was always you?”<br /> “Yes. Always me, Lou. <br /> “You've
known me a long time.”<br /> “I have. You were a good man, for
a long time.”<br /> “Now I ain't?”<br /> “Now you're
not.”<br /> Lou looked fat, and sullen, and old. He felt it too.
The piano player killed him, quietly, and left. The breeze was still
blowing in off the water, cold and salty. <br />
</div>
Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-59225987365296646782013-04-16T14:05:00.002-06:002013-04-16T14:05:27.937-06:00In April
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
10-April-2013<br />Gavin, Raylan, Cole,
Aiden, Connor. These are the names we've talked about. I've been
taking turns calling the son in her belly by each, and she laughs at
me each time. She laughs, but we ruled out a few that way in less
than six hours. She is beautiful when she laughs, and shakes her
head, ducking eyes and chin in denial of being called beautiful.
Bulbous she says. Beautiful, I say, only more so with the son of many
names in her belly.<br />Last night on the phone she told me she loves
me. We'd hung up, and I'd whispered in the darkness and continued to
drive. Then she called me back, her voice rich with confession and
fear. The same voice I'd heard just a few mornings before with news
that could take the shine off any new penny. I tensed, and I waited,
while the darkness raced away above and ahead of me for eons, and she
said “I love you”.<br />These are not the same woman. Both have a
baby in their belly, one might be mine, the other definitely not. To
say that I am lost would be a lie, I know exactly where I am. Sitting
in a room, in a falling down house, drinking beer and smoking. Miles
from a woman I loved, full up with a son that is either mine, or not.
More miles from a woman I love increasingly, her body more stranger
than friend to mine, also pregnant. I am also terrified. <br />I could
raise a son, a half of divided parents who still like one another but
who burned love down and pissed in it's ashes. I could love a woman
having a child not my own, her child a part of her I could love as
well. I do not know if I can do both of these things at once. <br />The
past year has plumbed the depths of my strength, and found the places
where I fail. Where I draw into myself, and cannot get the work done.
Where I slob for a time, or drink, or simply sit and think too much.
I found those places on my own, fighting to keep a relationship that
had turned to poison, and sacrificing a business, and anyone who
wasn't her. I found the place where I scream insults, and the
terrifying moment where she puts her arms over her head and cries
“Don't hit me!” when that was the last thing on my mind but only
I knew that. I built a library of things to play over in my head, and
wish and hate and fear about and at. All that, I found under the
weight of just me, just fading love, just a terminally ill family
member, just a business, just two-thousand acres of ruin. And now,
here I stand, about to have a son. In love with a woman who is
growing full and luminous with child of her own. Every waking breath
is full of fear, and every sleeping dream full of twisted apparitions
that bring waking.<br />We'll find out the paternity in three days, or
five. Friday, or Monday, when the results come in the mail. When I'll
know if the son in her belly is mine as well. For months now, all
five months, I've prayed in that hobbled way atheists do, that it was
mine. For reasons of faith, in myself above all others, and reasons
of deep primal urges. The same urges that sang high when I emptied
myself deep within her, shriek and wave in monkey-like demand of
satisfaction. Because I have never let go of anything, without
leaving deep claw marks in it. And now, for all that, I am desperate
in my hope that it is his instead. My best friend, her man now. I
want the names she and I discussed to be not my decision now, but
his. I am ripped down the middle by fear, and love, and desire. I am
the anti-Buddhist in this, moved by all the desire of the kingdoms of
men, and all the fear it breeds. And I am not lost, I am right here.
<br /><br /><br />16-April-2013<br />On the train headed home now. Watching
the city I love roll away, and knowing I'll never be here for any of
the same reasons again. Two years ago she moved up here, rich with
the beginnings of a car full of belongings and sunshine on new walls.
Two years now, and I'm moving on. I was never here, in the ways I
should have been, and never there like I needed to be. Two years torn
between living. Riding this train back and forth, and now riding it
away. It's not that last time I'll ride, and not the last time I'll
be here, but the last time for any of the old reasons. The sun is
high and bright, the air clearer than yesterday, and I am clean as
I've ever been. <br />The baby in her belly is not mine. We got word
late in the day, yesterday, and I felt the line go taught and then
rip away. The last hold between the great love of my middle twenties
and wherever it is I'm going now. I cried, and left four knuckle made
cracks in the doorframe, and then I joyed and shook loose and clean.
I bought whiskey, and smoked cigars, and spoke into the darkness and
light of miles of copper and fiber. I told the far away woman, also
growing and beautiful, that I was loose upon the stones, and headed
her way.<br />Going through old writing, I found a poem I'd forgotten
from years ago. And I'd written there about the pack I've worn on my
back, the last seven years now. It was newer then, less taken to the
ends and depths of everything, and at the time so very empty. It's
been filled, and emptied, and torn and sewn again and again since
then, and now it has been replaced. Two days ago I bought another,
newer and better. The old pack, I bought to go to Georgia, and the
new one I bought to go there once again. In that old poem, I wrote
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“If I had something to pack</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and somewhere to ride</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and a pair of arms waiting for me at
the end</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
I’d be rich”</blockquote>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and now I see that
I am. Whatever comes. <br /><br />I am here in April, a spring month, returning to
center, stripped away and moving forward. I'll never be a man who
practices clean living, but I am cleaner now and it's beginning to
feel very good.
</div>
Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-80841208248155393142012-09-28T14:14:00.000-06:002019-07-25T19:39:31.875-06:00The Weight of Her That Would be Familiar in my Hands<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My friend Amanda walked into my hotel
room the other night. Through the door and past the foot of the other
bed, never waking the other friend sleeping there. She sat on the
foot of my bed, the weight of her that would be familiar in my hands,
pressing down the soft mattress. Dressed in white, she smiled and
spoke. Not hearing her, I raised up, turning my ear to the fullness
of her lips. Still not hearing her, I looked and of course, she
wasn't there.<br />
She was seventeen or just barely eighteen when we
met. She worked at the coffee bar on campus, and was beautiful in
ways that made me afraid. I bought coffee, kept my eyes down, and
only looked up again to watch her from far away. Friends sat at the
bar, I sat with them, and I made friends with the girl on the other
side. We walked, sat together and bellowed “Damnit, Janet!” and
“Slut!” during Rocky Horror, played naked in the Rio Grande. She
called me Cowboy. She was my roommate for awhile, and there were
nights we drank in the kitchen, laughing and dancing, and nights she
sat on my bed, half naked in my arms, weeping. Some nights, the same
nights. She taught herself Latin, because she wanted to, and worked
leather in her spare time. I've missed, for years and all the worse
now, a leather armband she made me and I lost somewhere. Often I
watched her start dancing alone, in dark and in the light, and bring
the whole room around, everyone moving and laughing.<br />
I have so
many memories, they outnumber the glitters of fast clear waters. Of
her laughter, of her small hands improperly but enthusiastically
wrapping my .45 the day I taught her to shoot, of her body,
her mind and the whispers from her lips. I remember her so many ways,
and among them, under dark clouds. When you're nineteen, there are
days that are so fucking hard it hurts just to be alive. They are,
until you're actually an adult leading a grown-up life and find out
different, the worst. I was there to see Amanda have some of those
days, and I remember times when, in the face of all else, she could
cheer herself up by getting dolled up. She'd come into the house
trailing dark fumes, only to go into the bathroom and start putting
on makeup, and come out smiles. <br />
One night this past July, in the
little travel trailer she'd gypsied across more than a few states in,
Amanda cleaned herself up, stripped to her most beautiful state, put
on her makeup, lay down naked, and shot herself in the head. She
was happy, as far as anyone knew, and had plans with friends for the
days that followed. Long ago I came to love the questions in life,
and since I've been glad of that, because there are damn few answers.
<br />
I had grown a bit distant from her by the end, but had often had
the thought that, as interesting as she was now, not even
twenty-five, she would be fascinating in her thirties and beyond. If
you keep a list of things you'll never see, it will always run ahead
and outstrip the list of what you have. It is best to not take an
account, but the hand is forced at times. Having been distanced from
her, by other loves and an impatience with certain immaturities,
there are parts of her living that were unknown as well, but that is
so different. With the living you can, at the least, always turn and
find that they are somewhere, familiar and breathing. The dead are
the emptiness in our panning of the crowd. You can't roll back the
days and go to her, tell her you love her or ask her why. This is
universal, an unwritten law of physics: The mechanics of dealing with
it. <br />
<br />
As we get older, we suffer less for childish pettiness
and the immature anguishes of our late teens and early twenties. Not
that we suffer less, but we suffer less for the cheap and bullshit
things that once seemed so important. In this still young awareness,
of our selves, of the important, we see those who've been there with
us for so long. Some people and ideas never last, they fall aside as
we move forward, while others stay. The lessons we learn from those
people are what has carried us, and if we are lucky, there are a few
people who are still there when we get here. <br />
Amanda was the
second of my friends to die, in as many months. Paul Gomez, a friend and
mentor, passed away unexpectedly the month before. And just a couple
weeks before that, two of my dogs were poisoned. This summer has been
a wave of absence, days on end of looking expectantly and adjusting
to the emptiness in rooms, corners and telephone lines. Empty hands
wrapping around formless air, in hope of the shapes and weight of the
familiar.<br />
I keep finding out that it is in the autumn when the
lessons of the past year begin to sink in. This is when I grow,
realign, and drive anew from experience. This is when everything
comes, on turning leaves and cool eddies of air, from event into
learning.<br />
What I've learned now is something I'd long parroted in
my own head, but which now is mine. I own this knowledge, as we all
must. This is all very fleeting. The beautiful and the ugly, the
naked, the clothed, the loved, the hated. You aren't here for long,
and they are here for less. Tear off big pieces, splash in the
waters, and drink mouthfuls of whatever tastes good. You cannot
structure, moderate, or responsible death into abatement. You cannot
abstain enough to not die. Abstinence and structure are the nature of
death, as it is the only promise, the only fixed thing. We live
within it's confines, and that is structure enough. All you can do is
live.</div>
Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-87670291127628985222012-03-31T18:10:00.001-06:002012-04-08T23:02:18.982-06:00Train<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I'm falling in love. Sometimes I fall
fast. Sometimes I fall slow. Most times, I can't tell. This is one of
those times. I've fallen in love with the train. Its stinking,
roaring, mass hurtling along has charmed me, taken from me, opened my
eyes and given to me. The train is filled with humanity, all its
trash, stories, tears, smells, hopes and inescapable realities. When
we ride, we go with people we might otherwise never meet, companions
we would never choose on the road. The train does not follow the
roads though, it is the disruption and ruin of roads, and travels its
own line. A line fixed in place, spiked to the earth in case it might
otherwise try to move, because the places it runs are not necessarily
kind or wholesome. The rail is fixed to places of waste, degradation
and abandonment, thus passing tie by tie across truth and among
beauty. Things otherwise unseen. <br />
<br />
When I get on, I see the old
man sitting by the window across the aisle from where I like to sit.
I say old, but he is anywhere from forty to eighty. His skin is pale,
a melanin rich hide disused to the sun. His clothes, a white wife
beater and blue shorts lay over him with a looseness of hand-me
downs, or lean times. We talk, eventually, and he tells me today is
his first day on the outside in nine years. He doesn't say what he
was down for, but he shows me drawings he did while he was inside.
They are all for his daughter, made in the half-light glow of the
block after lights out, with the stubs of golf pencils hidden by day.
Pencils were contraband he tells me, and it was hard drawing with
only the last inch or so. The sketches are masterful, of beautiful
Hispanic women, their long flowing hair drawn across the entire
pages. There the graphite is laid on in fine long strokes until it
shines and has the texture of hair. Across cheeks, it is carefully
smudged and erased, to give blush and dimple to the faces. Each
sketch is a different size, on torn pieces of copy paper and blue
lined notepaper. He speaks with pride, and confidence, of the making
of the sketches, the stealing of paper and pencils. When he says he's
going to give them all to his daughter tonight, his voice shakes and
his eyes wet, though only the smallest amount. <br />
While we're
talking, I take off my glasses to wipe away some dust, and he see's
the birthmark, a single dark freckle really, below my left eye. He
touches his teardrop tattoo, and with a smile tells me I have the
killers eye. I have no hope, I gave it up, so I just nod and say
maybe.<br />
<br />
The pale gray concrete ties, in multitude beneath the rail, are as bones
of some ancient colossus windswept from dark volcanic sands. This is
a desert carved out of another, the railroad right of way barren and
scattered with the loose debris of industrial function. Between the
rails like ribs, and the cottonwoods, this journey is a skeletal one.
The trees in summer have burned, and not regrown. In the coming
winter, they will be barren and stark white. In ancient graves are
the altered forms of children, held from birth to be sacred
offerings, their bones twisted and misshapen by bindings. These trees
are like those bones, nothing that can be known beforehand, all
angles different, unexpected and sinister. The rail is ordered, a
mechanistic cruelty. The trees are laughter, along the river, their
ghastly twists natural and always returning to leafy greenness. There
are bones, and then there are bones.<br />
There is a lie beyond these
windows, that we free of the signs of human presence. Yet it is that
very thing we ride in and atop. The train does not move through empty
wastes, but rather is and is surrounded by the debris of people.
Broken and thrust from the sand, like more old bones, gas station
drink cups, broken electronics and indistinguishable refuse. These
things scatter the holy lands, beside sheep carcasses and car bodies
burnt and rusting. Are these things bereft of meaning, apostasies in
the sacred dirt for not being killed pots or real bones? Or are they
the only objects which carry the human truth?<br />
No land is a waste,
until someone sets foot on it and declares it so.<br />
<br />
Along the
train tracks there is much truth in the land, that protected yet
rarely inviolate right-of-way. Down against the bricks and among the
weeds are beds of rotten cloth, soiled sleeping bags and scavenged
foam. The very same materials as beds of plenty, but stripped apart
and ruined, brought down to fluid stained fundament. In some of the
beds are actual bones, decorated with jerked strips of failed flesh.
The winds will open these bundles, and play the weightless,
waterless, lifeless tatters. Prayer flags for still living losers,
asleep in stolen beds, the spirit of the dead ground into the
remnants beneath them. <br />
These things are beautiful, and I am glad
to see them, these gifts of loss and misery. I would not be able to,
if not for riding the train. This great machine, this diesel devil,
iron horse, this beast of will and smoke. I am in love with this
thing, in its beauty and filth, for all it passes through, and all it
carries.
</div>Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-74633739817064935972011-10-30T16:56:00.000-06:002011-10-30T16:56:50.704-06:00Meaning in AccidentThere is a piece of clay in my house. About the size of a Kiwi fruit, and shaped vaguely like one that's been a bit squashed. It is dingy-white and red, a natural clay found not far from here, and harder than stone. Never having seen a fire, it was age that hardened it. Being worked, at a nearby clay works, it was one day dropped and never again picked up.
<br />In its surface, indented a small depth, is a perfect human thumbprint, its whorls and ridges as hard as the hubs of hell. A thousand years and change, and the thumbprint is perfect to the touch, not mating with my own but rough against it. A human presence, physical, warm if left in the sun, cold if left in the shade. To touch the dead, all I have to do is turn to the cabinets and take down this artifact. To touch the living, all the dead have to do is wait.
What meaning exists, must exist in accident. Nothing with purpose could carry so much weight.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-46550744883690053852011-08-01T12:35:00.000-06:002011-08-01T12:35:48.438-06:00Language - Stephen Fry, with Kinetic TypographyI rarely post others content here these days, trying to avoid lazy posting (lazy posting, or no posting, quite the dilemma), but this is delightful and I anticipate the small audience I have here will appreciate it. <br />
Do take the time for it, please. I took the time to let it load on a 36Kbps dial-up connection, with less stability than Libya, and it was worth it. I'll have to download the whole original audio at some point as well. <br />
<br />
<iframe width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/J7E-aoXLZGY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-14749909373428397412011-05-26T14:16:00.000-06:002011-05-26T14:16:51.363-06:00InchoateThe first tool we want from our fathers toolboxes is the hammer<br />
It is a tool of youth, young men bashing the world to shape<br />
We learn first to strike and smash, and then to drive nails<br />
Leaving dents and spikes in everything, and then more occasionally building<br />
Rambling leaning furniture, haphazard sculptures of adolescence<br />
our work shows perhaps talent, but always enthusiasm<br />
blemished with the touch of too much, too fast<br />
Ragged cuts and the clinched nails of inexperience, poorly placed <br />
and at the last turned back and driven over, where some hold fast forever<br />
because boundless energy and small pay can earn anything, but enough time <br />
<br />
Some of us never survive their days as inchoate men<br />
and those who do, coming to a quieter place of ourselves<br />
with fuller choice of tools, are held fascinated in sudden moments<br />
by a hammer, and memory of singular approaches to the world<br />
In those moments the wind, even in still rooms, dances our hair<br />
and whispers the names of those we've known who will always be youngNagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-20114084998109038932011-04-22T16:59:00.000-06:002011-04-22T16:59:26.682-06:00The Marks Left on ToolsMy girlfriend recently gave me a very nice handmade knife from the 1970's. Made by a small shop in Whitefish Montana, long out of business, the knife is in excellent condition. The near mirror polish on the blade hardly marred by scratches, and the edge was untouched by a stone or use since its final rouged-buffing at the makers bench. For something approaching forty years old, the knife remained essentially new. The design of the knife is simple, a modified drop-point hunting knife, with pinned wood-laminate handle scales. It carries in a hand-stitched leather sheath, of a quality of workmanship not always common to even custom knives. Well made through and through, it is a tool; An object of combined elements of purpose. And yet, it has gone the decades since its making unused. <br />
I am bothered by this newness of things meant to be used. There is no poetry in disuse of fine tools. It is the death of intent and meaning, an act against life to always rest a thing meant to be worked with.<br />
<br />
On my workbench there live a few tools of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers, from the L.S. Starrett company. They are not new, in any sense. Most have passed a century. All have been used in the numerous tasks of a machinist, for lifetimes now. As machinists tools, they are exceedingly precise, and still have sharp edges, fine points and little slop or wiggle in their moving parts. These tools were made in a time before computers, when math was done by hand and mind, and the most precise work was that of men who manipulated machines themselves. The precision of these tools was artistry of purpose. Tools finely made, so they might be used in making other things that would be used. They have lasted not because they were put away and never taken down, but rather because they were acted upon and with as intended. A tool used is, of necessity and responsibility, a tool cared for. <br />
The use of tools imbues them with an even greater richness, from the users knowing of them, the oils of his work and himself in their fine knurling, the experience of what he can do with them. The care of tools is a natural result of this. We care more deeply for that which we know, and value through experience, because we wish to preserve that which preserves us. Good tools, like good lovers, make our desires possible, our wills able to be wrought, their touch fuels our engines, and we care for them, or we die alone and empty. It is a lesson we learn, those of us who know it, just in time.<br />
<br />
I sharpened the knife she gave me. The buffed factory edge, though shiny and new and perfect to see, was not keen when I took it up to use. Stoning the edge to a shaving sharpness left it uniformly and finely scratched where it had been as mirrored as the blade, and to a collector (those ill preservers) less valuable. Sharpening and using the knife is an act of being alive. Touch and pressure and wear are real and whole, and nothing good exists absent of them. Nothing good is unmarked by the passing of time.<br />
Our tools, the objects in our lives we call valuable and their condition through time, are markers of ourselves in the world. If our tools are given over to rust and devastation, all we leave for the world is brokenness and useless oxidization. Ruined tools are things that perhaps should never have been. Tools that are unmarked, boxed, shelved and protected in perfect newness, never truly were. Only things used, worn, marked by process and care carry any valuable weight. The marks we leave on tools, are the marks we leave on the world.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-61822928904801192052011-03-22T22:35:00.002-06:002011-03-22T23:23:43.233-06:00KineticsThis family pulled away from my father, as water from shores before the wave. It was the small things, that went mostly unnoticed. My files gone from his office computer, the lack of words from my mother over dinner. We felt the drawing up, our selves pulling back to a disrupted center, and the waiting tension to return. To return in full, washing over the shores where he had been, and further, to wash away the structures there.<br />
Like many acts of natural fury, this too began slow. The start was rumblings of dysfunction rising to a final draw, when my mother asked him to leave. Things come apart. Either slowly, or quickly. The part of the family that was my father was being unmade slowly at that point. My own feelings were mixed. Even knowing where I stood, there was an awfulness in what I then still believed was the lifetime of a man coming to failure. Amid this, it was curiosity that led to cataclysm. In drawing back, in the steady rumbling of process, I stumbled upon something that did not fit. It felt, beneath the touch of my concern for his devastation, somehow wrong. You look closer at things rough to the touch, and the truth is what you find, not what you are told. <br />
He had built islands of artifice. Shores with the names of all things goodly familial; Love; Compassion; Hope. He poured the sands of his lies on them, and trusted that we would come no further than these inviting beaches. It was all there, in his own words to this other woman. Full accountings of the things had had built, and the lies with which he had built them. The give and take of lapping waves finally ceased, the drawing away completed in a moment. Everything compressed upon its center, and rushed outward again. For every action, a reaction. Such acts are kinetic, moving with fury, unwilling and unable to do anything but take ground. Everything before you is overrun, swept under and you drive on.<br />
<br />
What followed was time, probably days but immeasurable in the cloud. For that time, we allowed it that things were neither good or bad, but rather the efficient neutrality necessary to do as needed. The worst of processes are sometimes the easiest. You pragmatize for calm, and focus on physical labors. There is a logic and order to packing, even large amounts and big items. Like high ground, he clambered atop these acts, keeping above the water and moving. A life, even one deceitful, can be stripped down into so many orderly boxes, taped and marked. Old furniture can be pulled apart, this top piece separating from that piece, the contents rifled for a sense of belonging with whats to be left set haphazard to available horizontals. Into the removed drawers can be packed things to be taken. In such a taking apart, many voids will be found, and this is how all empty spaces are filled, with things from elsewhere. Strangers and aliens in spaces of former comfort, teaspoons in sock drawers and socks in pants pockets and pants shoved into garbage bags. The garbage, and dust, of thirty-six years all left on the floors. Strewn behind him, the waste and old receipts of the thing now undone. Or was it the thing long undone? Like days, some knowing was clouded. <br />
And some knowing will never be. Amidst it all there was always a clarity. Some things are known to the point of gravity, a fact beyond all concept of denial. The knowledge, there in every discovered word of my fathers, was inescapable as the risen sea. That too made it easier. If in war it is easier to do the work when you hate your enemy, so too is it easier to do anything at odds with another. Who-gets-what arguments are are easier for the absolute wrongdoing of a single party, for there is always that card to play. The sins are real, untruths and infidelities whole, and they put end to the forever circular arguments. I wonder how families do this when there is less clear-cut reason; How mine would have done it if reasons of amorphous dysfunction had remained the paramount. <br />
<br />
And then, after the mad rush of it all, calm. Water and wind, and a great and wholly natural silence follow disaster and action of all sorts. Not for long, there is always the cleaning up, the putting to rights, the changing of lightbulbs and calendars to turn. Some of this work will be difficult, and some is already proving to be, but everything has indeed been washed clean. The rot that escaped the wave, that lingered on or was accelerated is being found, mostly by smell, and cut away. Birds twitter, and other creatures great and small circle and joy in the coming spring. All acts are for now in accordance to plan and planting cycles, a pace lacking any greater kinetic push than life itself.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-22746685337875040692010-12-24T00:46:00.001-07:002010-12-30T11:22:01.971-07:00Poem Published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)I'm very pleased to note that one of my poems has now been published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k):<a href="http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Poetry+518+bi"> "Holiday Poem"</a><br />
<br />
I've been reading Poor Mojo's for a few years now, and am delighted to now be a small part of that wonderful publication. I'm also quite pleased by the timing of this publication, being just prior to Christmas. The poem is drawn from an experience on Christmas thirteen years ago, was written around Christmas last year, and now has been published just prior to Christmas. Great, great, timing all around. <br />
<br />
Merry Christmas, everybody!Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-7903625450342162452010-12-15T00:02:00.003-07:002010-12-15T18:59:29.774-07:00Faceless Consumption (Being a Tale of Idiots, and Meat)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXxSbkWasjUYqE-ogdfGoSQXYjkfSbrc_9zApbIn_sYGJbcNAAlLLu25XRTUp2ItyAbfPbNbtQejjPS9JBYxs8UadVS5HL9LA88_kvviPMN24-8r7yVqtvL-QeyK3XOmkAnHfSUcQCrnP2/s1600/3432071719_a2290ebed7_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXxSbkWasjUYqE-ogdfGoSQXYjkfSbrc_9zApbIn_sYGJbcNAAlLLu25XRTUp2ItyAbfPbNbtQejjPS9JBYxs8UadVS5HL9LA88_kvviPMN24-8r7yVqtvL-QeyK3XOmkAnHfSUcQCrnP2/s320/3432071719_a2290ebed7_z.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The other day I tripped over a piece of foolishness online, and haven't been able to shake it. This being the internet, finding foolishness shouldn't come as any surprise, but it did. I was reading in one of the few low-idiocy havens I've found online; A forum which the core membership of is primary military, law enforcement and emergency rescue personnel. So I was relaxed and receptive when I stumbled into the following gem of subintelligent thought, sort of like wandering into a trap. It was not meant for me, like all truly devastating traps it was entirely impersonal and aimed at whomever chanced upon it. A Bouncing Betty of stupidity.<br />
The discussion at hand was on the film “The Cove”, which depicts in horrifying detail the mass slaughter of Dolphins in a particular cove in Japan. The general consensus was that killing something smarter than many people (or any politician) was “not cool”, and killing much of anything in that fashion was equally unacceptable. All of this brought on a small discussion of hunting, and that is where the idiot struck. He said, <i>“The day I have to kill for food is the day i[sic] eat fucking nuts and berries. With all the meat in someones local food superstore, why kill any animals? I am in no way putting anyone down for hunting,it just isn't for me or something I want to do. Terrorists,yep. Animals,No[sic]."</i><br />
<br />
I was flabbergasted by this idiots perspective, quite honestly. Not that I don't believe people think this way. I know that such twits exist, but I remain amazed and disgusted by it. In this case the source also probably has a lot to do with why it continues to bother me. Such a statement coming from someone with a military background, a group of people who commonly refer to themselves as “meat eaters” and take a great pride in the hunting of many things, is particularly surprising. More than that, I find this perspective fairly insulting in a broader fashion. No matter your background, or your particular thoughts on hunting, divorcing yourself so thoroughly from the origins of your food is beyond dishonest. <br />
It is an incredibly spoiled and elitist position; One made possible only by a certain class of living, allowing such a luxury as routine access to a supermarket and little or no exposure to agriculture. Only from there is it possible to have no involvement with the animal, except to get hunks of its meat from the store, all while expecting others to do the killing (and even the thinking about the killing). This total removal of the self from the process of killing what is eaten is to deny that what we eat was ever alive. As an act it reduces life, a heartbeat and a spirit, to nothing more than a commodity. Whole beings become nothing more than their inanimate pieces. People who act this way say the animals death bothers them, as their reason for this denial of it's life, but there is no honor or respect in their actions, no respect for life. <br />
This act also reduces the actor to something less as well; Something which is also denied heartbeat and spirit by the very spirit possessing it. If none of our food has a face, we ourselves become faceless. Such denial of the life of food is, in essence, making a choice to be sub-human. To make that choice, to seek that ignorance, is to say <i>"I am not a human being. I am not a predator. I am some creature that eats the hard work of others, consumes the lives of other animals, without doing any of the mental or physical work or giving recognition to the costs necessary for me to survive."</i> That's akin to being some sort of vaguely sentient mushroom or something, that just soaks in nutrients without awareness of where they come from. <br />
It is incredibly disrespectful to divorce yourself from the process of killing and still want to consume its results. It is disrespectful to those who do that work, and it's disrespectful to the life you're now treating as merely commodified pieces. Such disrespect is also disrespect of the self, and remains so even if the divorce from food carries over to only eating non-animal foods. It is disrespectful to the self, as a human being, a predator; A creature of strong legs, and cunning mind, evolved to hunt and kill. <br />
Some might say they wish to overcome being a predator, but do they have any idea what we would be if were were not predators? Our hunting and meat eating habits are at the root of many of the fundamental attributes of human beings; <a href="http://jn.nutrition.org/content/133/11/3886S.long">We are what we are because of eating animals</a>. Theory suggests that the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128849908">impact of meat consumption on brain development</a> was fundamental to achieving the brains we have today. Who you think you are (to jump from brain to mind for a moment) owes to the mental gymnastics you are capable of thanks to descending from predators. And that's not to say anything about what being predators has done for the body. <br />
Jackson Landers, “<a href="http://rule-303.blogspot.com/">The Locavore Hunter</a>”, provides us with this:<br />
<blockquote>“As Christopher McDougall points out in his book, ‘Born to Run,’ we became modern humans in large part because we became predators. We have a lot of anatomical features that don’t make sense any other way. We are unique among living primates in that we have an Achilles tendon. An Achilles tendon is only really good for long-distance running. You don’t need one to walk or to sprint (as other apes demonstrate). Ditto our unusually large gluteus maximus muscles. We are finely tuned to be long-distance runners. And what good is running long distances? We can’t sprint fast enough to escape predators. But over marathon distances we can outrun even a racehorse. As a few indigenous tribes are still demonstrating, our bodies are very good at running down four legged prey until it collapses from exhaustion.<br />
The physiological adaptations that allow us to do this are profoundly complex. Our tendons are especially springy compared to other primates. Our hearts and lungs are capable of amazing efficiency. We can sweat and regulate our bodies temperatures to avoid overheating. That kind of evolution doesn’t happen for nothing.<br />
The title of McDougall’s book, ‘Born to Run,’ tells half of the story. The other half is that we were born to kill.”<i> </i><a href="http://rule-303.blogspot.com/2010/11/in-defense-of-predation.html%20"><i>In Defense of Predation,</i> The Locavore Hunter </a></blockquote><br />
These mushroom-people who want to divorce themselves from being predators are not just rejecting meat, they are rejecting essential humanity as well. Refusing to be a predator is a decision to step outside of humanity and be something else. Adherents of such a lifestyle seem to think they have risen above by doing so. They often act as if they've gained some pious state from which to condemn and dictate to others. Such people are so convinced of their superiority as to verge on suggesting tyrannies against real human beings acting in tune with nature (likening meat eaters to pedophiles and cannibals, as people who need to be "corrected"):<br />
<blockquote>“The line of thinking goes like this: Evolution is natural, and what is natural is good; and because humans evolved the capacity to eat and digest meat, the practice of eating meat must also be natural and subsequently good. This is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy">naturalistic fallacy</a> and it leads to all sorts of problems. Given this line of thinking we should also condone other human traits that came about through evolution, namely rape, murder, pedophilia and cannibalism. Obviously we’re not about to do this any time soon. We know very well that many people cannot be left to their own hard-wired devices; this is why we have self-corrective memes (i.e. ethics, laws, etc.) and why we need to have police and penal systems.<br />
More to the point, however, is the acknowledgment that overriding our evolutionary baggage is part of the human mission. Having Darwinian processes guide our moral compass is sheer lunacy. Where is the morality in ‘survival of the fittest?’ Evolution may have helped us describe how we got here, but it most certainly won’t help us move forward as a compassionate species.” <a href="http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2007/08/meat-eaters-are-bad-people.html"><i>Meat Eaters are Bad People</i>, Sentient Development</a> </blockquote>The cost of moving forward as a “compassionate species”, to those standards at least, will be not moving forward as a species at all. The nature these types claim to love and want to protect from “bad people”, is actually the very thing they are denying when they go on like this. They seem to see themselves to as smarter than, superior to, the way of the world for millions of years, and in their arrogance think they can override it. In reality, these petty would-be-god's have simply decided to be something less capable and interesting than a human being. Something needs to come along and eat them, if it can palate the taste.<br />
<br />
In a certain way, these (anti-)people who either divorce themselves from their food, or refuse to be predators, should make me happy; If a cataclysm were to seriously challenge the survival of the human species, even if these mushrooms survived the initial event, they would be among the first to die or be eaten in the aftermath. That thought might bring a smile to my face, but for the fact that such cataclysm isn't around the corner. Even as things continue on the path they are on, true cataclysm is unlikely. So, we're forced to harbor these mental defectives; Those of us who participate in agriculture are forced to feed them, and the rest are forced to share with them. <br />
<br />
(Photo: Original from <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkadog/">Beverly & Pack</a>'s Flickr stream)Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-13906622757301348562010-12-04T23:49:00.000-07:002010-12-04T23:49:28.825-07:00Penitent DistanceShe wasn't able to find the last shell casing, lying silent and glimmerless in the shadows of the tall grass. A panic set in that they would catch her now. She swallowed it, with the bile and let joy rise in its place. In this joy she ran. <br />
<br />
The motel smelled of cigarettes and water leaks. Thin curtains barely hid her from the light, and she slept restlessly beside the pistol. Her joy came and went, another part of ragged dreams making for fitful sleep. In the moments she slept her long fingers arose, with wills of their own, and caressed the pistol. In waking, she held it close and smelled the steel and gunoil. As the night wore on to day, she knew what had to be done. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fought for hope of another option, but with the dawn breaking came certainty.<br />
<br />
It was worse than the killing. The pieces of her friend, stripped to bare components in a bread sack, turned her stomach. She felt an awful emptiness as its familiar weight was reduced to parts jostling and dangling in the cheap plastic. The riverbank stretched before her, and through her grief she saw that the water flowed. Bird songs fought against her, but their joy was winning out. <br />
She dropped pieces of him as she went. Small ones first, into the mud and flowing brown water. She took her time, and felt like she walked some great penitent distance between each lonely, and hopeful, splash and plop. As the sun drew low in the sky, setting the river ablaze in reflection, she emptied the bag and dropped it. This was the last of him, the barrel. Her fingers ached from the loneliness of each piece she'd dropped before, and ached more to feel his cold metal so long a friend. She kissed this last of him, and found it cold and rank with oil against her lips. With a cry she flung his finality into the deep water, and stood watching the ripples become overwhelmed in the flow.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-88852898400423136062010-11-12T00:19:00.000-07:002010-11-12T00:19:46.824-07:00Link MusingsI've been debating starting to do regular link posts... I might. If I do, they may be in the form of thought-streams from my day, or a few days (if some sort of topical, or at least related, lumpet emerges from my reading/thinking/writing for more than a day). This may also be another random post, never to be repeated, in a blog full of them.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=from-nature-to-networks-2010-11-08">Digital Ecology?</a> - This musing from <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/guiltyplanet/">Jacquet</a> is pretty interesting, and reaches beyond the immediate field in which her musings occur. I keep returning to “This is a different type of ecology, one facilitated by the digital universe”, and wondering if there isn't more there. The idea that the digital universe has its own ecology whispers beneath the surface. Not that that is a new idea...just a compelling one.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://50cyborgs.tumblr.com/">50 Posts About Cyborgs</a> - This is interesting for the topic/material, but also for the format. I'm increasingly interested in the variety allowed by “blog form” publishing. I like the idea that a stand-alone, non-continuous, digital object can be created as a blog – Particularly in the simple interface delivered by Tumblr. Although I'm not sure I need more inspiration to start new blog projects, as I'm sitting at... half a dozen blogs now, including this one. Most of them I have no idea what to do with... other than I wanted to write about, or create something about, a topic that didn't fit in well on a blog I'd already established. That said, I have some writing/thought projects that would make interesting non-updating blog-form works. <br />
On the Cyborg topic: <br />
<blockquote><i>Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented. We have used our minds to manufacture our selves and thus we humans today are the first cyborgs. We have invented ourselves. And we are not done yet. </i><a href="http://quietbabylon.com/2010/domesticated-cyborgs-kevin-kelly/">Kevin Kelly</a></blockquote>I like a lot of this (the whole piece), although some of it is just distressing. Distressing in that it gives me visions of fat, iDevicePadObject plugged in, and tuned out, humans; Evolved with our technology, gone slow, dumpy and soft. Slow, soft, dumpy things are food to my mind. Obligate button pushers are a terrifying concept. They are not spear throwers, or rifle shooters; Those dangerous creatures of beautiful and lethal form. I refuse to be a button pusher. I'll go wild, and raise other wild things, if I must.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/10/launch_of_newsp.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TrendsInTheLivingNetworks+%28Trends+in+the+Living+Networks%29">Newspaper Extinction Timeline</a>- Interesting in the whole new publishing vs. old publishing way. I wonder how true this is for local papers in more remote places? The nearest towns to me are small, and isolated by miles and miles without urban sprawl; They are also not technologically contemporary communities, nor (most importantly) are there electronic media sources to supply them. What of the small town local paper in the Western US, and similar areas of geographic isolation, low population and low support from electronic media? Local media is different when you're in San Francisco, Ca. and San Francisco, NM. <br />
<br />
I got notification of an acceptance the other day (on my birthday actually), and it should be getting published soon... If so, you'll get more soon. If not, perhaps more weeks of silence. This is my blogination-machine, and I'll use it as I see fit, after all.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-2157870119285702602010-11-11T15:14:00.000-07:002010-11-11T15:14:25.989-07:00Scorched BastardsA nut hit the dirt ahead of my boot, its fleshy paleness rivulet with blood and blue veins. Stepping through the dust, I felt it slide and rupture under my heel accidentally. The injection gun in my hand creaked as, bending to the heaving flank, I stuck the needle in and squeezed. I stepped away again quick, as I felt the heat of the iron pass beside me. The denutted bull-calf bawled in pain as the hot iron struck his hip. He strained and twitched. The kid on the calf's neck twisted the foreleg higher, screwing himself down harder to the animal and the earth. Hot iron struck flesh once more, and then everyone pulled back. The calf jumped up, all snot, flying hair and dirt, kicked free of the rope and bolted to the corner of the corral. There, shoulders bumping against the others, the fright passed from his eyes. I spit, flicked a droplet of antibiotic from the needle tip and slid into observation.<br />
<br />
The work was more than just putting the old two iron brand to flesh. The calves were roped out, and dragged nearer the cedar fire where the irons rested. Swift in movement, I stepped, gave the shot and withdrew. An ear got notched, and nuts got cut. Then the fiery-irons and scorching. All together the work became a flow. The dust, bawling and smoky smell of blood thickened in the senses, and the rhythm carried us. An easy joking rose among us in moments of panic, and fell to silence in the fluid moments of steady work. We darted with function and purpose, and laughed in disregard to the tastes in the air. We were all scorched bastards there, burnt in the sun and by the irons, but some laughed.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-17893829299995638472010-10-26T01:18:00.001-06:002010-10-26T01:22:36.830-06:00CurrentlyI've been writing a great deal lately, but Rum & Donuts has still suffered greatly over the past few months. My writing has been going to other projects, including some not yet made public. I've written so little here that Amazon canceled my Kindle publishing (not that it was exactly successful anyway, save for seeing that tool in action). Hopefully there are still enough readers following to take note of a new post.<br />
<br />
I'll be Twenty-Five in a couple of days. I'm remarkably unimpressed by birthdays for maybe the first time. That might have something to do with seeing that maybe I do have time to do the things I want to do. The maddening rush of my early twenties, driven primarily by college, seems to've slowed to something more realistic. I'm not interested in “settling” by any means (not in, not down, and certainly not for), but I am interested by far in more permanence. If there is any maddening pressure it is now to be doing things which contribute significantly, tangibly, not just to my immediate but to my long-term. My casual interests in sustainability, self-sufficiency and all manner of other skills for a life well earned in any circumstances, are becoming less casual.<br />
Many of these interests are very much at home on the ranch, and I am beginning to really get into them. Next years garden, for which I am already preparing, is going to be significant. My goal is to grant my folks a greater degree of self sufficiency, and thus freedom with their income, via a serious garden. To me, this is an investment in my future; Securing my family and beginning hands on learning that will be foundational for practices I desire to make a larger part of my life away from here. Though when I return, soon, to more urban settings I'll not have the same amount of room for raising food, I will still be able to use lessons learned from what I'll have created here.<br />
<br />
Taking my gardening with me to the urban space is not all I have desire for, in moving back to the city. A more urban setting is more truly vital for other things I desire to foster. I really wish I had a space in which to create something different. A collaborative space for people who strike marks in the world with acts of iron and flesh; Who find themselves full in those hard actions between civilization and destruction. I envision a space where things come together. A space full of iron and knives, sinew, nylon, and will. That smells of gun-oil, metal being milled, wood being worked, and flesh sweating. A place of performance and evolution: Of pitiless evaluation, and uncompromised growth. The forge running in the yard, iron being lifted and flesh formed inside, heavy bags and mock-opponents being dealt repeated learning blows, fires being started from raw sticks and sheer will. I have friends interested in my pursuits, in the wilds, with tools and weapons and with shaping the flesh, the corporeal self; I desire to create a space for those things to be shared and explored more fully. <br />
I also desire a space which I can fill with books and interesting things of that nature; Records, a turntable, maps and photographs, comfortable arrangements and good lighting for coffee and reading. A pile of books to be lent out by the door, and music always filling the space. I am much more of a social animal than I ever thought I would be, and my socialization is working and thinking, and joying in such things with fellows. Of all the things I miss from the city, that is what I miss the most. <br />
<br />
All this takes its rightful place though, as all things must. Captivating, compelling, even driving, these interests and pursuits must still be put aside for more important things. I tell her all the many things I am thinking about, and she scoffs, “You should free up your mind. So, forget the plants, forget tomorrow. Now sushi, sex, and me should be left. What sense do you make of it?”<br />
And I say that it occurs to me “that if the world were a right and just place, I'd be eating sushi off your naked body. Not sure if that is a form of 'sense' or not... but I like the idea”.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-75040667369862337662010-07-13T14:50:00.000-06:002010-07-13T14:50:32.300-06:00Two Fingers “Bourbon.” <br />
She always ordered two fingers. Held up, slightly apart, although never a sign of peace or victory. The first times, I'd reached for the well and she'd shaken her head. Slowly, as if moving faster might be damaging to her fine, articulate, neck. Her long neck which pulsed as she swallowed her bourbon. Sometimes I saw her stroking it, her long fingers tightening around its ivory shaft. Her eyes would meet mine, turn hard and then look to her cigarette in the other hand. Those nights she came in, that is how it was. I poured her good bourbon, she smoked her expensive cigarettes and my stomach rumbled. Hungry on low pay, and an emptiness other than food.<br />
<br />
In later years, with a fuller stomach, it was her neck by which I judged all others. Measuring them as they drank beer, and Jack Daniels by the gallon, smoking Camels. Their hands limp and numb, moving roughly. Thick fingers strangling the joy from anything they touched. Their eyes all too soft and wanton.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-21281930492891282252010-06-15T23:35:00.004-06:002010-07-13T12:19:54.172-06:00No More Old MenIn darkness and pain he trembled. Unable to walk, to do more than stumble, his right foreleg hung useless and unbearing. In the headlight beams there was little to tell of his injuries, lost to shadow and his own darkness. The pain, still, was obvious. Horses get drawn with pain, an expressive clinging of skin to muscle and muscle to the bone. Nothing is lost in their large eyes, unless they want it to be. Approaching him, slowly, hand out, his eyes told stories I did not want to hear. He reached out with his head, and his lips nibbled at my fingers. He was soft, and sweet. And I had no help, no real comfort for him. It was late, and I was on the road. <br />
That was then. Now in the cool morning, the extent of the shattered shoulder is obvious. The flies have begun to torment him, as he stands too weak to flick his tail. Too drawn and pained to twitch his skin. I approach again with my hand out, and he moves only a little. Brushing his face and neck I talk to him softly, and below his vision I pass the gun from my left hand to my right. I hold it against the back of my thigh, and pull the hammer to the rear where it clicks. He moves away from the metallic, mechanical, noise and I move with him. Stilling him, I touch and stroke with my left hand, as I whisper. The words are for me, their softness for him. I brush the hair of his mane from the top of his head, scratching softly at the fly bites. I can see the white blaze of his forehead clearly now and my fingers linger on it for a moment. He breathes steadily and lowers his head just slightly. There is no time but now, and any greater amount of now will only draw out his agony. <br />
There is a stillness after gunfire as the world comes to life again. The moment after the shot nothing has moved save the hand in recoil. It too is frozen, for an instant in waiting, before sound and motion, like water drawn away from a shore, come rushing back. In that rush of birds cries and fluttering wings, he falls. He goes down straight, legs buckling to lay him into his own dragging tracks, a great weight upon the earth. The body, so many long milliseconds dead, tenses and convulses briefly and stops, then with the stillness comes blood. Everything relaxes and pours out, upon the dust etched with agony.<br />
<br />
The strict facts are simple enough, but their meaning depends on things impossible to relate. Experience is the ancient flood, tearing new canyons and river bottoms, and like younger waters we are destined to run the course it shapes. This is no different. This story, as all killing stories do, runs deeper than the killing.<br />
The horse had been ridden at a gallop through a rat den, his leg dropping into the pit, loading his shoulder until it came apart. His rider, a weekender in the backcountry, had left him near the water and gone back to town too much a coward to make it right. Three days the horse had stood, alone and without food, before I drove past and saw him. <br />
The rider is the next generation of a family I've known all my life. The old men of the family, those who were old when I was born, helped raise me. In the silent teaching of action they gave me the gift of an older way. I came up among them tougher and better honed than their own sons and actual grandsons. Those younger man all products of towns and rejection of the old ways. <br />
It is far too late for old men. The world moves on, and they begin to fail. There are only a few left, of all the good ones I've known. Those who are still alive so rarely come to the ranch country, leaving it for their descendants, who take it only for a playground. Those descendants who don't have what it takes. Whose macho falls away to cowardice when it really matters. Who commit evils and sins that their fathers would have found unthinkable. Their fathers who fought and killed, drank and whored, but never once shied away from a thing for the hardness of it. <br />
If there is ever a final judgment, I'll stand with the old men I've known. We'll pass a bottle, and watch as it all goes down.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-28002133372403482482010-06-14T00:08:00.001-06:002010-06-14T00:13:02.362-06:00Sleeping, Snorting, Fucking.This is a bit delayed, as I was waiting for the last of them to run, but I've recently had three pieces published in the lovely journal <a href="http://sleepsnortfuck.blogspot.com/">Sleep.Snort.Fuck.</a><br />
You may find all three of them here: <a href="http://sleepsnortfuck.blogspot.com/search/label/Morgan%20Atwood">Morgan Atwood, at Sleep, Snort, Fuck</a><br />
<br />
Or, in order of publication:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://sleepsnortfuck.blogspot.com/2010/05/magnum.html">Magnum</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://sleepsnortfuck.blogspot.com/2010/06/measure-of-ecstasy.html">Measure of Ecstasy</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://sleepsnortfuck.blogspot.com/2010/06/taste.html">Taste</a><br />
<br />
Hopefully needless to say, given the name of the journal, some content may be considered Not Safe For Work (/Wife/Children).<br />
<br />
I feel spoiled to, yet again, have somewhere I really like publish my work.<br />
<br />
(These publications also mark an interesting point for me as a poet. I once said all my poetry was non-fiction and this is no longer true. These mark the first success I've had, both in personal feelings about them and publication, with fictional poetry. I say that not to disown the themes or any unpleasantness, but more because I find the revelation of my own process a wonderful ongoing mystery.)Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-22370229031512206922010-06-07T00:34:00.000-06:002010-06-07T00:34:12.040-06:00Solutions for Austerity and HostilityI've been far too busy with other things recently, and have been neglecting my blog here. For those friends and readers who are interested in issues of and skills for wilderness survival, abandoned mine exploration, armed citizen/concealed carry, armed professions, individual medical skills and tactical medicine, and a related mish-mash there of, I'll invite you to where I have been busy:<a href="http://draft.blogger.com/%20http://BFELabs.com"> http://BFELabs.com</a> is my “professional” home as something other than a writer/artist. Some of you may find it interesting. Some of you may find it appalling.<br />
I'll admit some trepidation at linking these two halves of my life. While the one is rather accepting of the other, it doesn't always go both ways. The artsy, literary, side of the house is often not at all accepting of the gun carrying, wilderness capable, military/police friendly, war-on-terror supporting, knife fighting, mine exploring, MMA-training, type. Whereas the long fangs are often as artsy and literary as anyone else. This is a constant source of disappointment in my life, as folks from the supposedly kinder/gentler art and writing world are often so put-off by the other as to make friendship difficult. The professional costs may be as high as well. That is, however, just the way it is. I am who and what I am, and I'll never compromise that because I offend the delicate political sensibilities of my fellow artists and writers. It's not that I am politically incorrect – You are just ideologically sheltered.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-15366156850061698762010-05-31T19:14:00.000-06:002010-05-31T19:14:15.783-06:00Man in the MirrorI am soaked. I feel the hot sweat dripping down, its sting in my eyes. Something inside wants to give way, to void my stomach of its burdens. My mind shuts it down. Everything unessential is suppressed, so that everything unwanted may be carved away.<br />
Some young yuppie milling around behind me taking a breather from five minutes on the treadmill mutters to his friend about how much I am sweating. How I'm working out in boots and long pants. How rude it is. I breath, steady and in rhythm to my body and focus on self improvement.<br />
The tide rises, the urge to vomit argues that it would be a phenomenal act of defiance against the yuppies in the gym with me. Lean sideways and puke on their carpet. Who carpets a gym anyway? They've probably never done anything until they vomited. Not worked out, not run, cried, fucked, or lived until their body couldn't take it and started shedding everything unnecessary. These yuppies, their lives are a monument to the unnecessary – It is their idol, and identity. I breath again, and let them fade away. Vomiting is unnecessary. They are unnecessary. All that matters is self improvement – If they were improving, they'd be too busy to even notice me. Each breath in, my focus returns to me. Each breath out carries something hateful. <br />
Something screams quit. In the mirror I see myself, breathing, sweating. I am ample, and full looking. The man in the mirror snarls at himself. I snarl at him. That fullness must be reduced. I drive on, push harder, sweat more. I wish death upon the man I see: A fundamental stripping down, to sinew and bone, to sheer necessity, to existence alone. A tearing apart until he is worthy of that womans touch he's felt. Until he is worthy of his own goals. Because if I don't, if I cannot become unmade in this act of physical will, then I will succumb to pain, to fear, to neediness. I scream back at the quitting voice, tell it how much it sucks if it can't do these things. Another ten minutes of force is a small goal. Not a woman, not a mountain, not a complete act of deconstruction, much less rebuilding. It's just a few minutes. The man in the mirror can't do it, but I can. Staring him down, killing him a mile at a time, I keep going. <br />
<br />
Someday, I will do this to maintain. I will look at the man in the mirror, and I'll keep going for preservation, rather than revelation.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-39476246313367172472010-05-04T23:55:00.002-06:002010-05-05T00:02:38.772-06:00Rules for WritingThe more I write, interact with other writers, and attempt to get published, the more observations I have on my craft. I have begun keeping a running list of some of my observations that have become personal rules (albeit flippant) for my writing. At some point this will be a longer list, and worth putting out in its entirety. For now, however, my first five rules will have to suffice. Will add more over time.<br />
<br />
1. Turn token and poetry pay into beer. (Turn no pay into beer; Look in the couch cushions for money.)<br />
<br />
2. Turn every six pack into poetry, every bottle into a story.<br />
<br />
3. Earn acceptances that make all your rejections turn to regret in the pit of the rejecting editors stomach.<br />
<br />
4. Get back in the saddle. Now. <br />
<br />
5. Commit to the shape of things, and embrace the "attitude of the knife"; When editing is finalized, divorce yourself from any desire for the work, cut it off, say “now it's complete, because it's ended here", and send it in.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-31274690197416829722010-01-28T15:55:00.003-07:002011-01-28T18:04:37.031-07:00Those Who Are About to Die<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZxA0w5d8OO__Thx4zMvI8W3Z9YsCDlMy1mxuMs8INoRj_5BtO7koZpqnkTq_27YwM66xgWEu6X4iD_nkfXWpaB1nHnpFRiOJGNC3XqPlPhYKbZZQ89RzdagIy3gykdIRpGvtPBjCiD12k/s1600-h/Challenger-745970.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZxA0w5d8OO__Thx4zMvI8W3Z9YsCDlMy1mxuMs8INoRj_5BtO7koZpqnkTq_27YwM66xgWEu6X4iD_nkfXWpaB1nHnpFRiOJGNC3XqPlPhYKbZZQ89RzdagIy3gykdIRpGvtPBjCiD12k/s320/Challenger-745970.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>"Burn the Land, and Boil the Sea - You Can't Take the Sky from Me." <b>Firefly</b></i><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Fortuna Audaces Iuvat -</span> "Fortune Favors the Bold"<br />
<br />
<br />
Twenty four years ago today, in the Florida sunshine the space shuttle Challenger roared to the cold sky, its solid rocket boosters burning rapidly towards a failing joint and O-Ring seal that had cracked in the cold. Seventy-three seconds into the flight when the fire reached the joint it blew out the side, and hit the fuel tanks - A fiery blow as if from an angry and fearful god, selfish of his skies. The explosion and resultant fall to sea took the lives of the seven crewmembers, six astronauts and one civilian, who were daring to follow mankind's dream of the stars. Astronauts Ellison Onizuka, Mike Smith, Dick Scobee, Greg Jarvis, Ron McNair and Judy Resnick, and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe experienced one minute and thirteen seconds of the dream before their lives were cut short in a fireball and they took the bigger journey into the greater unknown. They were not the first to die, finger tips brushing at the black, and they would not be the last.<br />
<br />
On January 27th 1967 Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died aboard Apollo 1, still on the launch pad, when a spark ignited the pure oxygen atmosphere of the sealed capsule during pre-flight tests.<br />
On April 24th 1964 Vladimir Komarov reentered the earths atmosphere in the malfunctioning Soyuz 1 capsule and died when the parachute lines tangled plummeting Soyuz 1 into the earth at two hundred miles an hour.<br />
In May of 1967 the crew of Soyuz 11, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov, died when a malfunctioning valve caused the capsule to depressurize just prior to reentry.<br />
<br />
Between then and the morning of January 28th 1986 no astronaut or cosmonaut would die engaged in a mission. Then following that cold January, it would be fifteen years before sacrifice was once more demanded. On February 1st 2003 the crew of the space shuttle Columbia - Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark and Ilan Ramon - died when the shuttle, suffering damage to its protective tiles, blew up over the western United States during reentry. It is quite possible that these seven people knew or at least suspected they were going to die and proceeded ahead, chasing the dream to infinity.<br />
This is not taking account of, but in no way to discount, the sacrifices of test pilots, engineers and others who have died in explosions, plane crashes or as a result of other accidents associated with the various space programs. They are many, and their sacrifice is as great.<br />
<br />
We live in a world of sports heroes, movie stars and rock gods. People who, on whole, are shallow, fatuous, and often as not disgusting and disagreeable individuals, more concerned with image, money and whatever “cause of the month” will get them the most attention. Among them are rapists, thieves, murderers, and narcissists of the highest order who have no greater dream or vision. No desire to live for something greater, and certainly, perhaps most certainly of all, no strength to die for something greater.<br />
While those people are made heroes, there are quieter, smarter, stronger men and women who dare to brave the unknown, the unknowable, and the dangerous to chase down what may be the greatest dream of the human race: The secrets of the heavens - The glittering and shimmering unknowns of that great expanse of possibility and hope.<br />
In the end, it will not be the movie gods and rock stars who will carry mankind into the future, into new hope, new worlds. It will not be the sports heroes who open the doors for us all. It will be such quiet people willing to serve a dream, and if necessary, die for it.<br />
It is my prayer, whispered desperately to those heavens, that we will hold on long enough, that they may deliver that dream to us before it is lost to the murky depths of forgotten consciousness.<br />
<i>”Go! at throttle up”</i> the stars are ahead.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686455095068631242.post-18585065155727822072009-12-24T01:14:00.000-07:002009-12-24T01:14:42.213-07:00The Santa Fe Super Chief and Albuquerque Depot, Circa 1943<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjIkXbTNmsLvFMUDBDkRuJtVRQQ-oayriY4HHFOCUV9ML8Osr_m8S9JKOg-rE63Hg32-gT7QxSQGFlGBrWCx68SlX2NbZ7jJ7yZSpk0xV20HooQbIPYFMOjOj5VyhMQXwsFEhP7Vd1n3F/s1600-h/SC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLjIkXbTNmsLvFMUDBDkRuJtVRQQ-oayriY4HHFOCUV9ML8Osr_m8S9JKOg-rE63Hg32-gT7QxSQGFlGBrWCx68SlX2NbZ7jJ7yZSpk0xV20HooQbIPYFMOjOj5VyhMQXwsFEhP7Vd1n3F/s320/SC.jpg" width="315" /></a><br />
</div>This is a photo of the Santa Fe line's Super Chief, that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was taken in 1943, at the Albuquerque depot, by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Delano">Jack Delano</a>. <br />
This was posted on a military forum I hang out on earlier this evening. There are quite a few history buffs, train geeks and Americana junkies there, understandably, but I was still surprised to see something so close to home getting attention. Credit for bringing it to the forum posters attention goes to <a href="http://www.acontinuouslean.com/">A Continuous Lean</a>, where the photo is included in a neat look at the <a href="http://www.acontinuouslean.com/2009/12/22/the-santa-fe-super-chief/">Super Chief</a>.<br />
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I am kind of a geek for New Mexico rail history. My great-grandfather was the head machinist at the Belen, NM yards when the roundhouse was there. I grew up with pieces of steam locomotives in my backyard. I am not a huge train nut, but there is still something about them. Trains are cool. Trains are industrial, and mechanical and engineering-in-action and magic. The history and stories surrounding the railroad industry are equally magic. If you can't see it in this photo, you're lost and will never understand.<br />
There are so many cool things going on in this picture, I'm sort of overwhelmed by it. It is a collection of some of the most iconic American images, all together as functional elements in a piece of reality. A reality long gone, before my time. <br />
There is, of course, that fantastic engine. Its bright red and yellow preserved in perfect Kodachrome by Mr. Delano. There are men in denim work wear, carrying lunch, pumping diesel - Working and living a hard, earned, life. Men in suits, and hats (what happened to hats?). Those fantastic automobiles when cars really looked like, and were built like, something to be valued and appreciated. <br />
Behind all this, in Mission-Revival glory are the old Albuquerque depot and the <a href="http://www.wheelsmuseum.org/alvaradohotel.htm">Alvarado Hotel,</a> both gone and replaced by a tacky facsimile. Built in 1902, the Alvarado was one of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company">Harvey House hotels</a>, and among the largest and most beautiful. It was demolished in 1970 and replaced with a parking lot. The rest of the original depot burned in the late Eighties or early Nineties. The reproduction buildings were put up later, a supposed tribute to the original. <br />
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A truly great photograph. An ordinary moment, frozen on film, that has in the passage of time become an amazing moment.Nagromhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12464768190969600481noreply@blogger.com1