A Green World, For Nana

 

A gentle confluence of earth and sky. Even tigers like it.

One of the greatest gifts of GOD himself to man. 

Genesis 1:11-31 ERV

Then God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants that make grain, and fruit trees. The fruit trees will make fruit with seeds in it. And each plant will make its own kind of seed. Let these plants grow on the earth.” And it happened. The earth grew grass and plants that made grain. And it grew trees that made fruit with seeds in it. Every plant made its own kind of seeds. And God saw that this was good.

It is good. We literally could not exist here on this planet without the skin of soil and its plants.  

There is even evidence that looking at green things is good for you. 

Green is good for you

In life, first there was our mother's arms. Then, father and the home environment. Then we stepped out of doors and saw the world.  It was green, if we are fortunate enough to have a lawn or garden. Some of the first things we saw were trees.

Some green things.  Avocados!  Lettuces! All the lovely green foods!  

Beautiful green stones.  Paints, fabrics. 

Reptiles! Butterflies! 

And if we are so inclined, green velvet!

...and not least!............
William Bronk

“A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen /
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene /
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.”

A Funny Thing

 

A funny thing happened on the way to today.

I began this weblog in a spirit of fun and adventure.  I had no idea what would happen if anything at all.  Very early posts amaze me with their brevity, mostly.  A picture.  A sentence.  The things I didn’t know about how to make a post!

As the months went by, I kept trying to write a little bit about a variety of things.  I didn’t have any experience writing prose.  I have always written rather terse poetry.  It was a new experience trying to seize upon my thoughts and nail them down in some sort of orderly way.  This was not natural.  Even in school they didn’t make us learn to write well at all.  They should have stressed it hard.  But they didn’t.

Having also not made my home-schooled kids write as much as I should have, I feel that I also dropped the ball.  This is probably one of the worst things to do when educating a child.  They must write, I now believe. 

I now believe that you must write, to learn how to think.  How about that? Anyone agree or disagree?  Thinking, on its own, is too amorphous.  When a kid must struggle through writing down their thoughts, it has a good effect on their thinking.  IMO, they become more logical.  Or else they write total nonsense, and the teacher must try to help.

So.  Though I have not written anything wonderful.  I have learned about the process some.  I figure maybe as well as a rather smart high school kid!

I guess I’ll just keep going.  I’ll try not to get too crazy, or too far out there in my experimental ozone zone!

I thank you for your patience and amiability! 

I do want to finish the two novels I am fiddling with!

Lol, naturally. How many songs are there about writing?

Now Do Red Mama

 Now do red, you dominator.  You who lorded over the younger siblings. You who knew must very well indeed, for red must be yours. Richtig!

Dawning. You saw the light through the red cellophane Christmas tree rope in 1953.  This red light bit deeply into your seeing soul.  It has always been there.

You saw red petals on the grass.  Of course, you had torn them there.  Just looking inside.

Frances Rosen’s deep red lipstick.  Nearly a form of black. Envy. You waited, but you never became a brunette.

The crayons.  The pencils and paints. Red always kept apart. 

Red yarn.  Imagine finding out about the scapegoat for the first time.

Always blood.  Wounds.  Births. All of it.

Red is its own category. 

(A sad fact.  If you wear your red lenses long the eyes and brain will adjust until the scene is no longer red, just dullish.)

The name Adam translates to red.  Does that tell us anything?

You're Gonna Need Your Bongos For This One

 

It’s Blue out there.

Let me tell you a tale of blue.  It will sound like everything is blue. But not me.  I am less blue all the time.

“My momma done told me…about the blues in the night…”

“I’m blue..daba dee, etc…”

At some point long ago, I reasoned out that the background color of existence was a nice sky blue.  Some see the black of space, but I figured that it was blue out there.

Every gift I can think of from my momma in the last few years of her life was blue. Predictable as sunrise. She had a real thing about it.  The dishes I inherited from her have a navy-blue stripe around the edge. Blue towels, blue blanket.

Blue jeans.  An absolute.  

Blue berries.  The best.

That blue Mustang I got to drive around back east.  A little boy’s dream blue. Bluer than a robin’s egg. Yes. “As I remember, your eyes were bluer than robin's eggs." Joan B.

Blue can be a downer.  I have noticed that I am not inclined to visit stores that have blue lettered neon signs. Sears.

The blue hour.  Just before dark. Into the blue.  One of those bottomless blue holes.

A nice blue pickup.

A blue planet.

Blue pigment.  Precious and rare, when made of stones.

A blue sky.

Now, I'm searching for the blue of ambient sounds. It's out there.

Counting These Modern Blessings

 Having taken a good look at the ladies in full 1885 regalia that I posted yesterday, I feel like registering gratitude for the latitude of today.  Yes, things are out of whack…but in that whackdom, there is freedom for those who are in control of themselves. The fact that one could indulge in the bizarre just means that one is free also not to.

I think about getting dressed in all of that.  No wonder they often had a lady’s maid.  You would need help, I think, to get it all together.

Under the dress are several garments, including the corset for the well snugged in upholstered looking waist.  In fact, in those days a natural looking waist was considered at the very least sloppy and probably loose!  She has stockings, held up by some awkward contrivance.  Tight little shoes, a fussy hairdo and to cap it off, literally haha, a terror of a hat.

Long ago, about 1965, I remember writing a little thing for school about how our shoes shape us to their shape, in the same way that law and consensus shape our minds.  Well, I wasn’t very old then.

But I do think that clothing shows where we are, more or less, depending. Those ladies were bound up in all that fabric and fuss.  Now, maybe not as much as I think, because to them it was just clothing. But still, try to imagine climbing over a fence in that get up.  Try to imagine knowing that you can’t climb over a fence, because it’s not ladylike or polite behavior? Which came first?  The dress or the stricture? 

Three working class seamstresses.

Now, it is also true that working class girls and their moms didn’t look quite that slicked back.  Not in 1885 anyhow.  That was barely the old days really.  We have all seen photos of western women who had to be practical in dress for every day.  I bet they still got into the corset for Sunday.

Now, and for quite some years, we can wear a corset if we want to.  We can wear all the fuss our hearts could actually desire.  But we don’t have to.  Blessed freedom.  Thank God for the relief of plain old jeans, not to mention modern foundations!  You can also dress the jeans look up or down if you want to.

The language of fashion, and it is a language, has become so much more adaptable and pragmatic.  We can have glamour or grit, whatever we need.

I haven’t even touched on the subject of fashion.  This is just a note of gratitude.

Some real working class women in garb.

Maeve Considers Currency

 

{Maeve, Herself}

Gnockgnockgnock!  Gnurrrr!

Listen up, you Otters, Bunnies, Deer, and Snakes and all.  I exclude fish. Fish do not come into the picture.

I want to clue you in about Mankind and Currency, which is different from Money.  Money is intangible, a number in the cloud somewhere.  Ah, but Currency!  This we may deal with. (PS Mankind comes in two sexes. Do I have to say this?)

Both Money and Currency are neutral tools, like this rock here that I may drop on a clam…   Oh, ok, if clams thought at all, which they do not, it might not agree about the neutrality of this rock!  But we have greater matters in mind!

From his birth Man wants.  He wants the breast.  When he can control his hands, he reaches.  He reaches and never stops reaching.  About the time he starts to go to school he discovers Currency.  Bits of paper and metal that he can exchange for various desirables, both food and toys. These are known as Mediums of Exchange.  Naturally.

Perhaps you yourselves have exchanged a bit of something for something else.  We Black Birds do this.  Say a child has done us a favor and we really liked that favor because it was so tasty, why we will find a pretty thing, just anything nice, and bring it to this child!  It often works.  Though they can be slow about figuring out the exchange desired.  The bit of shiny stuff I bring to the child is Currency.  Its value is Money.  Of course, it’s not very valuable, but the concept is there.

I know a sort of Hen of Mankind, who wanted to read and record some very serious pages about the spirituality of how Money is used, but I managed to distract this Hen with the attraction of Story.  Story is deadly attractive to her.  Lucky for you all!

The great trial and lesson that Mankind must learn is to use his tools, but not to love them.  Love goes to the Creator Spirit and other dwellers on the earth, not this tool.  This is such a good tool.  It can fulfill spiritual functions of Mercy and Care.  It can facilitate great building and much usefulness.

But, I hazard, and I believe I am correct, that when Money is the love of life, that incorrect affection devours all other Loves, eventually.  The eagerness to achieve and earn is not what I am on about.  That is neutral and can be very useful.  As always, the Heart is the Heart of the Matter.

The reason for this little meeting?  We Beasts deal only with the Heart, and we would understand our Betters, if we can.  We do not have the temptation to amass Value.  That is their Bane.

 

You may be excused now!

IMNSHO

 

I decided to pick on agriculture tonight.

I will posit that grain farming is the great reset of the deep past and is the revolution that enabled so much misery on the earth.

What in the world makes me say that you may ask.  From grain in abundance, we get jolly bread and beer and cookies and cake! Surely no one could object.

It’s well known that the skeletons of nomadic ancients were taller and more robust and had better teeth.  These people lived on meat and whatever edible plants they could gather. After about ten thousand years ago, after the agricultural reset, the skeletons are shorter and have bad teeth.

(Remember how in the Garden, the Lord accepted Abel’s sacrifice of the best of his flocks, but not Cain’s plant offering?  I think there is a ghost of something historical in that. Cain ended up condemned to a life of farming, didn’t he? Or maybe it was just wandering, away from his farm!)

Grain farming both allowed and required organization and even government because it required many hands to successfully grow and then care for the crops.  The life of a shepherd or a hunter was solitary and to succeed did not require the organization of a bunch of people.

From this reset we get psychotic thugs and war lords and big boss men.  It all follows from there.  Tribes, villages, towns, kingdoms, and nations.  Wars and deviltry of all kinds.

Why did farming catch on like it did?  Well, wheat or barley or corn or whatever are easier to catch, and infinitely easier to store. (This is where our relationship with cats comes in!)  In addition to that, kind of like the old concept of original sin, mankind loooooooooves starches, beer and sweets.  This stuff was like crack to historical flesh eaters, who didn’t get much in the way of carbohydrates normally.

We love carbs so much that we have just about built our whole world around them.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine a modern world built on flocks or herds instead.  For one thing there would not be the numbers of people we have now.  One of the results of the reset was a greater number of births.  The women were chubbier and more fertile. It’s true!

That’s it in a nutshell.  I know, I know.  I am descended from farmers too.  We love farmers and we are not going to change all that now.  But we could eat more like shepherds or hunters and gatherers and be healthier and stronger for it. 

Our Lord referred to himself as a Shepherd, not a farmer!

 

lol!!

Why The Ambient Noise?

 

I thought maybe if I sat very still

And I listened very carefully

that I could hear the rumble of the universe, 

or maybe time rolling.

Maybe I could catch infinity

stretching its limbs.

Even down here on ground level,

I listened for traces,

echoes.

In Which We Meet Roops D. Jones

 

well, it was just a day!

It was totally different now to walk down those sidewalks over the little words printed in white paint. Follow Me.  Maybe that’s what we were doing.  I could feel something new rising.  A sense of resistance. NO is right. None of this is right.  People couldn’t live like pet rats with unknown fates and nothing to look forward to.

The local alternative radio station was one of those things that had faded away.  No people.  No market. No money anyhow.

***

The windows were well covered with cardboard.  There was no way to just see if he was home so Doug pounded on the door good and loud.  We waited.  It was a cheap little wooden door painted green.  After about three minutes it was flung open by a huge man dressed all in black.  Black knee length shorts, a black sweatshirt and he had a black beanie on and big black boots.  However, he looked friendly behind his grey and black beard and moustaches. He looked us all over and spoke to Bubby. 

“Hey Bubs, how’s it going?”

“OK” said Bubby, “do you know this bunch?”

“I know the guys from school, not the girls.  What gives?”

“I found the girls wandering around in front of your mom’s place yesterday…”

I’d swear that dog was laughing.  We weren’t.  Our mouths were hanging open.  The last two days had been a bit much, but this… I felt like I was on the wrong planet, or in some strange waking dream.

“Don’t just stand there!  Come in!” said Roops. 

With that we entered another world.

Hidden from prying eyes in here was more electronic equipment than anyone of us had ever seen.  There were five large screens.  There were some highly arcane looking keyboards with too many keys, etc. Most of it I could not identify.  I thought that some looked like very complicated antennas.

 

“Dogs don’t talk,” said Doug. 

Lou was standing there giving Bubby some very odd looks.  Perhaps she felt betrayed.

“This one has been to space with the brothers, I got him a ride!” crowed Roops.  “But hey, who are the young ladies, Doug?”

“Jen and Lou, sisters.  We were down at the Wharf last night when the P-Sec, I guess, blew it up.  We met them at the store. They came with us to attend a meeting of the NO.  What do you mean you got him a ride?” said Doug.

Roops settled into a big old wooden office chair and indicated some ratty armchairs and stuff with a wave of his big hand.  We sat, still stunned.

Bubby settled down on the floor beside Lou’s chair.  He looked very normal there.

“See the deal is, dogs can talk, with some minor adjustments.  I found this out yakking with some ETs once. I thought it would be fun if Mom’s dog could talk and it has been fun.  He likes to spring it on people.  He has a pretty frosty sense of humor, doncha Bubs?” Bubby yawned.

“One night I asked them if they could fix him up that way and they said sure, and I went over to Mom’s and met them outside the house, and they took him for a ride overnight and did a little minor surgery on him. You should have seen the hospital ship!  It looks like a big egg! I told him not to talk to my mom.  I think that might finish her off.”

 

“I’m hungry,” said Bubby.  I put my pack on the floor between my feet and fished around in there and got him some nice big pieces of Bambi to chew on. “Thanks Jen,” he said.  It was really hard to get used to.

 

Roops shifted back in his chair and began again, “I heard about the café. I am pretty sure who did it.  They have been reverse engineering stuff for decades, out in New Mexico.  This has been going on since the 40s.  Hard to believe it’s closing in on a hundred years! The real question is, how did they know where to demonstrate their power that way? Was it a normal leak, or do they have some new way of locating trouble?  Or were they mainly just showing off their nice new triangle ships?”

“I’ve been listening to the planet jibber jabber, as you know, Doug” he said. “Since about the last ten years there has been a sort of central global power forming in the Middle East.  I think it’s based in Israel at the Dome of the Rock! Believe that or not!

Hey, Elf, why don’t you go out to the backroom and get ol’ Bubs here a bowl of water?  Jerky is dry work!” Roops grinned at Elvin who took off for the water.

“Now, I don’t know who actually, physically built the triangles, but you can bet they are in cahoots with that gathering power structure. I get a lot of gossip from those space bros too.  I sure hope the truth is in them.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell, when you’re yakking with ETs, who are the good guys and who just ain’t!”

“Oh, they don’t have any trouble with English.”  He sat forward, elbows on his knees.

“Here’s what we need to do guys!  We need to plant a seed.  We need to make a kernel. Power starts small.  If it’s healthy it will grow!”

In the tenth year of the pandemonium.docx

Rupert Dillinger Jones

 

Roop

“Well, Elf doesn’t talk a lot, but when he does it’s usually something he has been thinking about.  Maybe it is time to bring the Roop into the scene,” said Doug sitting in the dim light with his hands behind his head.

“Rupert Dillinger Jones is a maniac.  He is an old hacker from before.  He believes in the Wild Men of the Woods, and some say he is part wild man himself.  He is sixty something now and grey bearded. He is bald on top, but his back hair goes down to his butt. He is about six five and weighs like three fifty, but he doesn’t look fat.  He just looks big like a buffalo.

He has access to world news, as bad as it is, because he still has internet, but I don’t know how.  If you go to his place and sit around, he will tell you what the world is doing any particular day.  I don’t know if it’s good or bad to know some of that stuff.

He lives in an old radio station building by himself.  I don’t ask why. I guess none of us ask those questions now days.”

I was so sleepy.  But it occurred to me to ask, “so what’s the connection between you guys and this Roop dude?”

Says Doug “Roop is the grand wazoo.  He tells us what’s up and the NO party was his idea, but he says he is too old to run it and besides he likes hiding out and supplying information better than being out in the open where he is noticed. Also he likes dreaming up the more colorful stuff like the stencils and the posters.  He is a bit of a latter-day hippy too, I guess.

Roop says we need a central figure like a king or something.  He says there aren’t enough people for a representation gov. He thinks like until the population gets back up, we need a guy who can make decisions from the seat of his pants and maybe on the run!

The weird thing, and the scary thing is, he thinks I am probably that guy and the even weirder thing is I think he might be right.”  Doug sighed. “I suppose we better go see him and make introductions all around in the morning.”

“Well, Y.M., I think I will run upstairs and hit the sack.  We can figure it all out tomorrow. Um, good night I guess.” I said.

 

On the way up the stairs I wondered if ol Rupert had any news on the triangle things that blew up the Wharf Café.  I had noticed that the two boys didn’t seem all that surprised to see them.

The last thing I thought about before sleep was those things flying over so silently and low, doing their business and then silently going away over the water.  That silence was so creepy.

 

First light.  Very dim.  I was awake, but still horizontal.  I realized now that I had a larger “family” to feed breakfast to.  Oatmeal.  Yup.  Everything I heard last night and the memory of the meeting and all that came back to me suddenly. I got that crazy feeling again like everything was changing.

I was thinking about an old Cat Stevens song.  I told you that the only music we hear is old stuff our parents have on CD’s.  Morning had broken alright, good and hard.

Lou hadn’t moved since she hit the pillows last night.  I was sitting on the side of my bed trying to wake up.  I decided to take a quick shower and then go downstairs and see what we had down there.  I bet they were asleep.

By the time I went down there Doug was awake.  He was drinking plain boiled hot water and standing looking out of the kitchen window. I noticed how thin he was.  I also noticed that in just his t-shirt and jeans he wasn’t hard to look at.  But never mind that!  He had washed last night’s few dishes. Well!

“Can you stand oatmeal?”  He nodded and sat down at the table while I cooked oatmeal.  It would have been very nice to have some cream or butter or sugar, but we didn’t.  We had some raisins though, so in they went.

I noticed a funny noise at the front door.  It sounded like scratching.  What?  So of course, I had to take a look and opened the door.  There stood Buddy.  I could say that he was smiling.  He walked in like he did it every day and headed in to the sofa and woofled around Elvin until he woke him up! He sat up and grinned at the dog and now all we had to do was get Lou to get up and get ready to roll.   So, I yelled up the staircase and she told me to shut up and it was a real morning for sure!  I could hear her slamming drawers and doors and so I knew she was up.

 

We sat again at the kitchen table, ate oatmeal darn near plain and talked about going to see the Roop. Buddy lay under the table with his big head on my foot.  I was utterly charmed. I was beginning to feel like we were enacting some kind of epic journey story.  Maybe we were. It sure wasn’t normal life.  I guessed I remembered normal life from my early childhood. It was seeming very far away and long ago about then.

Just like all heroes of epic journey stories we prepared for a walk back to town and the next step, if we could figure out what it was. Doug said that Roop lived on Willow Street in the old KSMR station building.  There was no way of letting him know we were coming, so we had to just chance that he would be there.

To get back to Milltown and the radio station we had to go past Mrs. Steele’s house again.  I thought we should stop and say hi and see what was up with Buddy following us around like he was.  So, we all four and Buddy walked up the drive and I knocked on her side door, with all the scratches scored into the paint.  In a few minutes I could hear motion and then she opened the door.  She looked about a hundred years old.  She must have weighed all of 97 pounds, looked like a wind would blow her away, but she was smiling.  She was wearing a floral dress and house slippers and a home-made sweater in royal blue yarn.

She looked at her dog, who walked right in, and then at us and said, “why don’t you all come in?”  We did, and I asked her “I wanted to know if it was ok with you if your dog comes with us sometimes?  He followed us to Milltown yesterday and stayed with us until we walked past here again.  I started calling him Buddy, but I bet that’s not his name?”

Mrs. Steele grinned at him and said, “that’s funny because we always called him Bubby.  He must have thought you knew him!  No, it’s fine with me if he wants to go out and play with you kids.  It’s just fine.  I think he gets bored sitting around here with me.”

Thinking, she said, “you know what?  While my husband was alive, one of the last things he did was shoot a deer and I turned most of it into jerky.  I could just about fill one of those backpacks with Bambi jerky and you could feed it to him and it’s good enough for people too! How about that?”

We thought that was a very fine idea.  So, since my backpack was pretty empty, we let her put the jerky wrapped in it’s plastic bag into my pack. We thanked her very much and trooped back out the door and back onto the road to town.  Lou was walking with her hand on Bubby’s collar.  The rest of us just hiked along. We’re off to see the wizard for sure!

Link to the whole deal so far: In the tenth year of the pandemonium.docx

Maybe The Nature Of A Hometown

 When you're out rolling around

your town do you ever get the feeling

that it's all like a big living room

and you are driving a big armchair?

It's not quite this dark!

It's more sleepy than anything.

Just to liven it up a bit it's fun to drive 

unusual places.  Sometimes the city

posts these areas later.

This has happened more than once.

Just because of a bit of exploring.

I wonder if it's the same out in the country.

I wonder if your living room is just a lot bigger than mine?

The old marina store is gone now.

Something new and sleek is there.

They ripped out my whole waterfront that 

used to be and are still building new stuff down there.

Meh.

I like to drive the alleys because

you can see the bones and ghosts of the old 

city's past there.  People don't change 

the backs of things that much.

Looking kinda north.

Yeah, you can still drive down there.

Snooping has been a quiet hobby.

Usually nobody cares.

Quiet fun.

Then I go home, and the house has a sense 

of being part of a place that has a 

history etc, like that.

Brand Naming Stuff-Open Thread, But They All Are!

(a guy we knew did some arty Polaroids for me with youngest modeling. The imperfections are intentional.)

As you know, naming stuff is one of my deals. 

One of the things I used to do for fun is name imaginary companies, and make up some paper work and tease people with imaginary mailings and bills.  The first one of those was the Glydden Moon Madness Factory.  It did not purport to represent any particular product or products. Another one was Savage Chapeau. I thought that was pretty good.  My French was not so good.  

Before caller ID, I also liked to call people and tell them I represented such and such and try to engage them in conversation.  It usually did not work very well, but I never got yelled at, which is amazing.

Back on the Res. I started a little knitwear company, which did have products.  I even had a little catalog of designs that I printed and would provide to interested parties and I did do some custom knitting for actual living customers.  It was called Rainy County Knitwear.  When I named it I was thinking of the kind of almost silence you hear in a forest when it's raining just a little.

One of my sweater designs, btw.

and another one:

You get the idea.  That's why I had a thousand labels made!  So many labels.

I have cycled around a few years, but I just got an idea for a really good brand name for a knitted product.

Blue Chullo

I think I might just like to do that.  What could it hurt!?  What do you all think?