Bad Knees And A Nomadic Spirit

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It started snowing around midnight and I woke up to 4-5" of soft, fluffy snow this morning. This is unusual for this area to get two big snowfalls in the same month. We usually go two or three years without anything more than a dusting. The temps are in the high 30's (+/- 2.75 C) so it's starting to melt already. It never got cold enough for the snow to stick on the asphalt roads.

I got this odd feeling that the world is in the beginning of a huge change socially. Maybe the change will be physical. The earthquakes and tsunamis may be coming more frequently, but that may be the result of how fast and how thoroughly the news travels these days. It seems odd that recently I've written about the desirability of immigrating to Chile. I could be wrong.

The news and video arriving from the results of the earthquakes in Chile reveals that Chile is used to having a lotta earthquakes. It seems as though the frequency of earthquakes there had not registered with me. Maybe there's been a regular stream of information about the frequency of earthquakes in that region, and I ignored it. We don't get earthquakes here much at all. We get wind related events like hurricanes and the occasional tornado.

My life is segmented by houses or ships in which I've lived or places I've slept. It's clear that I could write about my life house by house. The places I've slept out in the open might be a little more tedious to locate. It is a little surprising to realize I haven't done much traveling in the last decade. The last of it was when I drove that semi around the country. I slept in the truck. I didn't like it much.

I do remember one particular Interstate rest stop in Texas I came to one day that totally surprised me because I'd never noticed it previously in all the dozens of times I've been through Texas. There were huge boulders poking up out of the ground right there is the rest stop. It had a name that had something to do with Hell.

I just stopped and attempted to locate that specific InterState Rest Stop that has those huge rocks right there in the middle of the InterState four-lane highway. Apparently, I am is not the only One who is fascinated by huge boulders laying in a careless pile as if pebbles. I got diverted by shifting my search to Google Maps. I was flabbergasted at the number of places that feature these huge boulders.

Many of them have been turned into tourist sites with motels, hotels, restaurants and all the appurtenances that cater to the traveling public. The first rocks like this that caught my attention happened when I was in the Navy in San Diego, California. To return home to North Carolina the east-west highway I took in the late Fifties was Highway 80. It ran parallel to the more famous Route 66 all the way across the country.

Both roads are about gone now. They were replaced by the InterState System. Especially west of the Mississippi River. You gotta go to some trouble to find the original Route 66 remains. Highway 80 is still signed in parts of the Deep South. It's Main Street in the South. Many of the larger cities including 3-4 State Capitols were built along that east-west route. Starting in Savannah, Georgia and ending in San Diego, California.

Those first pile of huge rocks and boulders I saw are due east of San Diego on the left hand side of the road as you cross the remnants of the Sierra Nevada mountains and drive down their eastern slope into the Mojave Desert. Since I was raised on the coastal plains of the Carolinas three thousand miles away where a rock the size of a man's fist is found as a rare treasure, those huge boulders really impressed me.

If I'd been raised in the mountains or even the foothills (piedmont) of North Carolina I might not have been so impressed.

Two other places that feature huge monolithic rock formations are carved by the same river/stream. In the west it's a river. In the east its a small stream. Its in Utah and runs through Zion National Park and from there to the border of Arizona and Nevada from Saint Gearge, Utah. InterState 15 follows it.

Zion National Park was an extremely interesting place for me to visit. The geological layout of the place seems to require grandiose terms even to describe it. The park and the river and the entire shebang covers hundreds of thousands of acres, but the most spectacular part of it for me was how it reminded me of how the plowed fields around here erode when there's a big rainstorm. The erosion literally looks the same in both places. Except there, in Zion National Park human being are dwarfed by the huge solid rock cliffs that are carved by the runoff of the river.

InterState 15 cuts through the northwest corner of Arizona. Like a lot of roads it follows this river that literally forms in and flows out of Zion National Park. The InterState highway goes through St. George, Utah (where I visited for a couple of weeks impulsively) cuts across the corner of Arizona, and right on the border of Nevada is the little town of Mesquite.

Like all the towns on all the highways and byways that enter the State of Nevada, Mesquite has a fair number of gambling casinos. Many frequently by long-haul truckers for whom convenient parking lots are furnished by the town of Mesquite to encourage them to stop and gamble a while. I made the trip from St. George, Utah to Mesquite, Nevada a goodly number of times during my nomadic visit to that part of the country.

When InterState 15 goes to cross that river that flows out of Zion National Park to get to Mesquite, Nevada it follows that river through the canyon the river cut through a basin and range ridge of solid rock. The four lanes of the InterState separate in order to find their way through the canyon. Practically the entire highway going through that ancient canyon is built on a continuing series of bridges.

The view is just spectacular. I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and say that anybody that grew up east of the Mississippi River might find themselves astonished by what they'll see just by driving from St. George to Mesquite. Frankly, for a flatlander like me, the drive from Mesquite to Las Vegas, in a different way, is just as powerful.

There ain't many land areas in the continental United States that I haven't at least drove or hitch-hiked through. I love traveling in this country any way I can. When I win the lottery, it's quite possible that I would never leave the United States to travel. There are too many places I still get surprised by.

I could spend months just traveling around the state of Nevada to visit all the little border towns. Many of those towns, as I understand it, are located where they are for more reasons than to lure local gamblers from the surrounding states. Up in the north of Nevada many of the border towns are also gold-mining centers.

My experience with those little towns out in the middle of nowhere is that they contain some really interesting friendly people. The location out in the boondocks seems to make them real easy to talk to. It's the way Texas used to be. I used to stop in some places in southwest Texas to eat, and feel compelled to stay much longer than I intended. Sometime the locals would buy me food and drink just to get a different point of view from a stranger. No mas. Not much anymore. Texas got moved in on by city slickers and the small towns only have franchise places like everywhere else.

I really believe I could spend the rest of my sorry life with a nice heavy touring car, with my lottery winnings in a bank account with a couple of credit cards, a list of greasy-spoon diners and cafes owned by the cook, and sleep nearly every night in a ritzy resort motel.
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Medicine: Your Money Or Your Life

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The pharmacist had volunteered comments about the dry mouth problems I've had complained about, and he told me they showed up visually in the appearance of my dry cracked lips. He asked me what drugs my rheumatologist had prescribed, and I told him I was taking methotrexate.

He knew what my problem was immediately. He brightened up and told me the problems I am having, as far as the sore spots in my mouth is concerned, occurs as the result of the side-effects of the prescription drug methotrexate. He said it's not contagious or caused by diet. When I stop taking methotrexate it'll go away by it's own accord.

He was friendly. He wanted to help me, but without a prescription he couldn't make the medicine (something called Duke's Miracle Mouthwash that he would make up locally) deal with the symptoms. He told me to go get a prescription and he could really make the symptoms easier to live with. 

I took that all in and started walking around the store for a while. Then, I realized this same guy might tell me about the possible side effects of Humira and if they were responsible for some of the current problems I'm having.

It turned out Humira and it's side-effects are altogether different. More lethal, because it lowers the immune system to the point that an common infection could literally kill me if I didn't get help with it fast enough. It's a proven fact to me that the VA Hospital in Durham wouldn't listen to me if I asked for that help. I'm pretty much "on my own" with the drugs they give me. I have to look out for my own ass as much as I can. No blame.

My siblings must have decided I'm dying. I'm having long conversations with them about just about anything as long as we talk. Other people too. Maybe it's my imagination. The ones with iPhones are the mouthiest. I've never witnessed such an obsession. I'd probably be obsessed to if I could afford an iPhone. The Google phone is pushing Apple with a smartphone of it's own, the Android.

I'm in a holding stage with new technology. Perhaps I have always been that way. I might give the appearance of being an impulse buyer because I am an impulse buyer, but it only appears that way to witnesses who might see me make the actual purchase. I might have a year or two worth of research and reading the reviews before I make a commitment. Nobody sees that. To make myself seem impulsive is one of my favorite things to do. I like appearing to be something I'm not just for my own amusement. There's no harm. No foul. I just like it.

I bought the computer I use now to tide me over until the new technology gets legs. Gets it's feet on the ground. It's gonna be the StarTrek dealio with a lapel button that's always on and will project a video of the caller who will talk to a video of you.

"Realization is always one step beyond knowing the unknown."
~ fmp '70

The possibility of space flight was known by the time the comic books on Flash Gordon arrived on the market. That comic strip and others and science fiction novels made actual space flight realizable, and in my opinion, wouldn't have been possible at all without the preamble.

The wind is really blowing outside and the rain is pouring down. Maybe the same type weather system that caught France off-guard is fixing to occur here too. Acts of nature seem to be stepping up the pace of natural disasters. It may be the beginning of the end for life as we know it. Death might not seem as lonesome if it's accompanied by billions of others simultaneously.
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Wine-istas

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I had a little mental relief from thinking about a friend of mine talking his wealthy girlfriend into buying a house in Costa Rica where he could live and do his art, and she could visit occasionally with his permission. I actually suggested this in an e-mail to him, and I know he has to be thinking about it, even though as a Capricorn he probably couldn't/wouldn't because he's afraid she might accept the offer as an excuse to send him outta town while she worked at attracting a new, less gold-digging boyfriend.

I don't exactly use Julius Caesar as my model Capricorn in order to contemplate the possibilities of that sign in regard to the other. I'm more likely to envision Howard Hughes or more recently, Richard Milhouse Nixon. They're all the "little engine that could". My friend never seems to get over the hump, but he keeps trying. It's almost... hmm... cute.

I especially enjoy teasing him these days because he has evolved into a master painter, and financial success as an artist is right around the corner, but he's a double Capricorn with Cancer rising, so he doesn't trust the Gods to come through for him. On the other hand, I've had a chat, and it's a done deal. He's generous with his friends, so anything to allow him to afford better wines has got to be a good thing... right?

Another cheap friend came by yesterday afternoon with a bottle of $4 champagne. I added some of it to a glass of the $10 a gallon burgundy I dredge the SuperStore for, and it actually tasted a little bettah. He's gonna become a celebrated musician before Christmas, so that oughta help us with the cheap wine thing. He's learning to make himself invaluable to people who need him to bring their own genius to the fore. Since there are not many like that around the problem becomes sharing, but not alike.

In the past, when I used the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle daily, I seemed to learn statecraft by osmosis. In consideration of the problems I've encountered with authority figures, in the past, indirect learning such as that like osmosis might be the only way to fly.

God and the world knows I will buck up. I will get sullied up on ya' as a bid for time. I will shuck and jive. I learned from the best, like everybody else. Except that the best won't good enow. They based their enough on ancient truth that died with the dead past. I tried to find those non-physical teachers who worked it in the present on me so I couldn't not get it or use the avoidance of pain like an artful dodger.

My so-called teachers never felt my pain or acknowledged any persona I ever cooked up to impress them. Take Mescalito, for example, it just is, but you gotta take steps or wot it is don't become apparent, and even then, not to yo' mother's precious man-to-be. Something more elemental has to rise from the dead to cope with Mescalito's independence of your acknowledgement or self-interested praise.
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I've Got A Few

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For so-me it's the only way to fly. I nearly died of shame in Reno, Nevada once, among other places I also went to die of something, about nothing at all. God knows what. What died there in Reno was my first marriage. 

I was sad to death during that ti-me. The weird thing was what made my me sad. It wasn't about the woman or child nor what I'd dreamed sadness was about or for. Especially the for word. As in Being-for-myself vs Being-for-the-other. What is life for?

Who am I doing physical life again for? I wuz tricked. I could have sworn I'd figured it out and matriculated on to other dimensions or planes of ex-is-tense, but ti-me and again I wake up here with a familiar yearning for nicotine, caffeine, and an overwhelming curiosity about and need for something warm and moist. Moist? Moist? Spirits gnow nothing of elements like water. Moist almost always means I've co-me-d again with the senses. What a drag, man. 

In Reno I wept for the person my parents and caretakers attempted to make me into for their sake. It was the self-same person my first wife married too. I am had good reason for experiencing sadness. A significant other in these people's lives died because of them, for them, and it won't no pretty picture.

They all felt cheated. Why would they not? It took a long time for them to get around to saying so. They had only been able to say it to who they'd wanted me to be. He died. That boy. He won't there for them no more. It's a cold day in hell. Talk to the hand. 

I came here to die from the second wife. I knew the score even though I pretended to hide it from myself. Gnowing that I already know is the bane of my existence. I am is so hard to lie to. It jumps through all kinds of hoops to indicate otherwise. Finally, however, every day, the chickens co-me ho-me to roost.
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Wasted Days

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I guess I spent quality time with my youngest brother and his twin grandsons. They up for the weekend to give their parents a break, and then my brother brought them over here to give his wife a break. She's had problems with high blood pressure since they got back from India. Stress, I reckon, jet lag and all that jazz. I guess they figure because I'm family I oughta be ecstatic to see their wunderkin, but I had to put my writing off for four or five hours and everything else I had planned for the afternoon, so not really. What they consider a waste of time is life-giving to me.

I've been having to take several naps a day because of the self-injected prescription drugs I'm putting into my body. That's a big change from my earlier life when it was difficult for me to nap at all during the day time. I have another appointment on March 8th, and I'm preying for something less fatiguing.
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Oh, The Joy!

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It's feeling like I'm doing something for myself that matters about this crazy vegetarian diet I've followed since the first of December last year. My only verboten is eating meat. Anything else goes. That's a lotta wiggle room.

I just fixed lunch by going over to my brother's greenhouse and harvesting some wheatgrass, and kale and cabbage leafs. I brought them back to my masticating juicer and rinsed them pretty good in my new favorite stainless steel bowl. I love stainless steel. I used to love welding stainless steel pipes. They melt like butter. Lovely TIG welding.

When I the above ingredients ready to be juiced I prepared three apples by washing them and then cutting them up with my new apple corer and slicer. It has a hole for the core of the apples and five blades to segment the apple into six neat pieces that fit handily into the juicer in one fell swoop. Then, I took a vegetable brush and cleaned a nice fat carrot to top the whole thing off.

I had three kinds of apples to juice with the wheatgrass and vegetables. The Granny Smith is a great apple for juicing because it's very firm and has a lotta juice in it, but the Red Delicious apples my sister-in-law left here for me to use while they went to India has taught me a thing or two.

It's the way the juicer removes the juice from the pulp of the stuff I put in it that gave me the idea. The Red Delicious (or other soft eating apples) don't go through the juicer like the harder Granny Smith apples. They seem to crumble inside the juicer, if "crumble" evokes the image I'm attempt to draw with words.

The end result is that the softer apples make a sort of foamy juice rather than the clear, cider-like apple juice like you might find for sale on the roadside in season. Between the two types of apples and the other ingredients it looks like and has the physical consistency of a smoothie. I doubt if I've drank as many as 4-5 smoothies in my life ere now, but the concoction I put together is very good. Especially good compared to pure wheatgrass juice. I may find even tastier combinations as I go along.

Constitutionally, I'm as regular as I've been... maybe forever. That's a big deal with the methotrexate I just took an hour or so ago. The side effect is some fairly severe nausea that forces me to only eat what I can keep down. Very unpleasant experience, but I experience a lotta pain in my joints if I don't take my medicine.

I'm not so willing to face the prospect of taking some sort of powerful drugs to deal with some very specific pain for the rest of my life. I will do it. My tolerance for pain has always been high because of the way I've lived my life, but these days that same high tolerance is like the ol' grey mare. She ain't what she used to be.

Maybe this vegetarian diet will help. Maybe it won't. But, I gotta do something that suggests there is a less painful way to conduct my affairs. What if I live to be as old as my father was when he died totally free of pain? That would be eighteen more years of progressively worse pain. Oh, the joy... eh?
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Grandparents I Never Knew Well

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In a documentary I watched last night, Yo Yo Ma's father reputedly stated that it takes three generations of concerned parents in order to produce a musical genius in the family tree. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching it is written, "... three days before, three days after." How revealing could it be for some scholarly sort of person to research to find out if for three generations after the musical genius evolved, the genie upped and left that lucky family.

This causes me to think of my grandfather. My father's father. He died when I was around two years old and he was 74. My father was his youngest child by a long shot. I don't know the truth because they never talked about it around me, but my uncle, the oldest child, eighteen years older than my father, may have been more of a father figure to my father than their real father. My great-grandfather, however, was a little more known, but he died a broken man not long after he returned from the final battles at Petersburg, Virginia at the end of the Civil War.

One thing is for sure. My immediate ancestors weren't trying to produce a musical genius like with the Yo Yo Ma family. With my question being: What was their focus, if any at all? I came along at the end of an era. Everything my ancestors tried to build up got torn down by acts of nature or of God. Depending on what a person buys hope with.

My father seems to have exaggerated the importance of his forefathers. My older sister and my youngest brother, both Aquarians, dispelled by their research the grandness of the "old home place" and the general store and cotton gin my grandfather supposed operated. My sister got caught up in the genealogy bug, and my brother has a penchant for collecting family photographs. Between them, a different image than the one my father painted came to light.

My great-grandfather did serve in the Civil War, but as a private, not an officer. Not even a Sergeant. He was a magistrate and county registrar, not an Alabama Supreme Court Judge as had been whispered. He apparently did own a two-thousand acre cotton plantation and a couple of hundred slaves. I don't know what it might mean if I knew or had known the facts.

My father may not have made these claims himself as I remember, but he didn't really go to the trouble to correct our (my) impressions. Almost the entire time he stayed up here in North Carolina where he only intended to stay temporarily until the Great Depression ended. He openly meant to go back to Mississippi and take over the family farm his parents had managed to hold on to, and said so on many occasions.

It never happened. In the end it couldn't happen. His father died, and that left everything in his mother's name. She secretly instructed my father's siblings to sell the farm to anybody but my father. She didn't want him to come back to Mississippi once he ever got out of what must have been for her a living hell. He was her baby boy and she protected him even against his wishes. Too bad she died before I knew her.

I don't know the truth. I don't even remember what she looked like. I was still a baby when she died. The whole Civil War/Reconstruction/Boll weevil/ Great Depression sequence appeared to have caused her to lose faith in Mississippi ever becoming a good place to raise a family. What she did broke my father's heart, but it probably best for his family. I saw what happened. I was born there. The place is sadly jinxed and a hard row to hoe.
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