So Swami starts psychoanalyzing me. I hear him say something like, it appears to me you frequently employ derision as a defense mechanism.
That’s just before I drift off into a daydream. I imagine Swami’s life before he arrived in the USA. I imagine he was born in a poor farming village in India co-joined at the ass with a twin. I imagine Swami’s mother doing everything she can to bring attention to her sons’ plight, finally connecting with a doctor in the USA who agrees to perform ass surgery to separate the boys. I imagine Swami’s mother left with the task of picking which son will have a rectum and which will go without. I imagine a coin flip takes place to settle the matter, with Swami being selected as the asshole getter. I imagine Swami always getting hit up by his twin---that his twin is never shy to put the guilt on him for taking possession of their sphincter. I imagine Swami allowing his twin to pose as him at the Powelton Club time and time again to the point that Swami can hardly ever get his golfing in anymore. . .that is until the colostomy bag accident at tea time causes the ruse to become revealed. . . .
For some reason I find Swami glaring at me, asking me angrily, have you been listening to anything I’ve said?
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
02/06/01
I suppose I could have brought up the obsession I had about the secret room in Porch Rot’s house with Swami Hard Salami when I went to see him today, but I kept it to myself. I can accept needing to be on medication to fight my depression--- especially given that my probation officer has ordered me to comply with depression treatment under penalty of jail--- but there’s just no way in hell I’ll ever accept that I’m delusional. What I have, I joke to myself, is embellishment disorder. They’re just stories that crop up in my mind. Sometimes they turn out like shows you’d see on TV or at the movies. I know they’re not real, but they just play on, and they’re actually pretty entertaining most of the time.
I guess Swami will eventually put out the verdict on me, but I’ll be damned if I do anything to make it easy for him to get to that point. He just seems to be fucking around half the time anyway. I just keep thinking why be straight up with this fucked up fucker?
Delusions don’t seem to really exist as they’re defined except in the mind of an outside observer. Seems to me that truly delusional people never seem to really know to use that word to apply to themselves. That’s not to say you still can’t develop an anxiety disorder worrying your life has been one big delusion. That’s probably more where I’m at.
Speaking of anxiety creation, Swami tells me, living out in that trailer in the wilderness, it may only be a matter of time before you turn into the Unabomber.
Unabomber? Are you kidding me? Fucked up fucker!
You know I hate when people do that Unabomber shit to me---one of Percy’s geek friends at the Super Bowl party all but said the same thing to me.
Do you know what Ted Kaczynski’s IQ is? Swami asks me.
167, I reply. Entered Harvard at age 16. Subjected to cruel, CIA-sponsored psychological experiments. Became a mathematics professor at Berkeley while still in his 20‘s. Quit. Moved into a shack in Montana. Started setting off bombs everywhere. Wrote a manifesto critical of industrial society. . .
Swami just sat there quietly looking at me like I was nuts.
Shit, why did I just do that?
Good fucking gracious.
I guess Swami will eventually put out the verdict on me, but I’ll be damned if I do anything to make it easy for him to get to that point. He just seems to be fucking around half the time anyway. I just keep thinking why be straight up with this fucked up fucker?
Delusions don’t seem to really exist as they’re defined except in the mind of an outside observer. Seems to me that truly delusional people never seem to really know to use that word to apply to themselves. That’s not to say you still can’t develop an anxiety disorder worrying your life has been one big delusion. That’s probably more where I’m at.
Speaking of anxiety creation, Swami tells me, living out in that trailer in the wilderness, it may only be a matter of time before you turn into the Unabomber.
Unabomber? Are you kidding me? Fucked up fucker!
You know I hate when people do that Unabomber shit to me---one of Percy’s geek friends at the Super Bowl party all but said the same thing to me.
Do you know what Ted Kaczynski’s IQ is? Swami asks me.
167, I reply. Entered Harvard at age 16. Subjected to cruel, CIA-sponsored psychological experiments. Became a mathematics professor at Berkeley while still in his 20‘s. Quit. Moved into a shack in Montana. Started setting off bombs everywhere. Wrote a manifesto critical of industrial society. . .
Swami just sat there quietly looking at me like I was nuts.
Shit, why did I just do that?
Good fucking gracious.
Monday, December 6, 2010
02/05/01
I was going back trying to figure out how the crazy idea came into my mind that Phil Palfrey might still be alive and caged like an animal in Porch Rot’s house. I realize now it was probably from the story Tommy New Yawka told me last month about the feral man the fire department found locked inside a burning apartment in the city. I guess Tommy’s rescue company had all they could do to bust through all the locks and reinforcements to get to the man, only to have him start attacking the firemen from that point out of fear and insanity. Meanwhile the fire continued to rage. Tommy said he decided at some point to grab the rabid little guy and put him on his back, with the guy sinking his teeth in him and growling the whole way down.
Usually Tommy is away for days at a time at the firehouse. His shift always begins and ends off-hours so he never has to contend with rush hour traffic really. He came home from work late one night and found a pack of coyotes crossing through the yard. He came to my trailer the next morning and asked to borrow a gun. He seemed unaware I was a convicted felon. Not surprised, just sort of unaware, blasé about it even, and that was surprising to me. I assumed everyone in town knew. I said my guns belong to Phebe now, you’ll have to go to the house and ask her. Tell her you need her 30-30 and her green and yellow box of ammo. Not the red box, the green and yellow one.
I can understand Tommy’s worry about coyotes with a house full of little kids like that but I almost got the sense that he was afraid he himself might get attacked by them. I couldn’t help but say oh, you city slicker, those coyotes won’t leave teeth marks on you any bigger than the ones the feral man left on you when you carried him out of the fire.
In any case, I’m glad Tommy’s opinion of convicted felons seems better than his opinion of coyotes.
Usually Tommy is away for days at a time at the firehouse. His shift always begins and ends off-hours so he never has to contend with rush hour traffic really. He came home from work late one night and found a pack of coyotes crossing through the yard. He came to my trailer the next morning and asked to borrow a gun. He seemed unaware I was a convicted felon. Not surprised, just sort of unaware, blasé about it even, and that was surprising to me. I assumed everyone in town knew. I said my guns belong to Phebe now, you’ll have to go to the house and ask her. Tell her you need her 30-30 and her green and yellow box of ammo. Not the red box, the green and yellow one.
I can understand Tommy’s worry about coyotes with a house full of little kids like that but I almost got the sense that he was afraid he himself might get attacked by them. I couldn’t help but say oh, you city slicker, those coyotes won’t leave teeth marks on you any bigger than the ones the feral man left on you when you carried him out of the fire.
In any case, I’m glad Tommy’s opinion of convicted felons seems better than his opinion of coyotes.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
@GLHancock takes on @Scatoma 12/5/10 ouch!
She said: @Scatoma Spam much? #writechat
He said: @GLHancock Define spam. . . #writechat I've been doing this for 8 months. I get 1000 reads per week and growing. I am making nothing.
She said: @Scatoma One version of spamming on Twitter is to cram as many hashtags into a tweet as you can. What do you call it? #writechat
He said: @GLHancock The reason you don't like me is not because I'm cramming too many hashtags into my tweets. If Twitter tells me to stop I will.
She said: @Scatoma The other kind of spamming is to send the same message to many individual @s, making them look like personal messages. #writechat
He said: @GLHancock I don't use deceptive tweets. What are you referring to?
She said: RT@Scatoma: The reason you don't like me is not because I'm cramming too many hashtags into my tweets. || Huh? I don't even know you!
She said: @Scatoma If you have a beef, please respond here, where you sent the first message (along with a lot of other hashtags). #writechat
He said: @GLHancock You're a industry insider unhappy with an independent author using technology in a legitimate way to promote his work #writechat
She said: @Scatoma As I wrote, I didn't even know you. Now I see you're one of THOSE. And a spambot. Why RT me if you think I'm wrong? #writechat
She said: @Scatoma: Youre a industry insider unhappy with an independent author... | Tell it to @Amazon where I SP Kindle material #writechat
He said: @GLHancock You wanna stage a Donald Trump v. Rosie O'Donnell fight here I'm all for it. I'm already seeing my numbers tick upward #writechat
She said: @Scatoma No one cares about an anonymous free blog poseurs' "numbers." Spam us and slam us, I have paid editing work to do. 'bye #writechat
He said: @GLHancock Define spam. . . #writechat I've been doing this for 8 months. I get 1000 reads per week and growing. I am making nothing.
She said: @Scatoma One version of spamming on Twitter is to cram as many hashtags into a tweet as you can. What do you call it? #writechat
He said: @GLHancock The reason you don't like me is not because I'm cramming too many hashtags into my tweets. If Twitter tells me to stop I will.
She said: @Scatoma The other kind of spamming is to send the same message to many individual @s, making them look like personal messages. #writechat
He said: @GLHancock I don't use deceptive tweets. What are you referring to?
She said: RT@Scatoma: The reason you don't like me is not because I'm cramming too many hashtags into my tweets. || Huh? I don't even know you!
She said: @Scatoma If you have a beef, please respond here, where you sent the first message (along with a lot of other hashtags). #writechat
He said: @GLHancock You're a industry insider unhappy with an independent author using technology in a legitimate way to promote his work #writechat
She said: @Scatoma As I wrote, I didn't even know you. Now I see you're one of THOSE. And a spambot. Why RT me if you think I'm wrong? #writechat
She said: @Scatoma: Youre a industry insider unhappy with an independent author... | Tell it to @Amazon where I SP Kindle material #writechat
He said: @GLHancock You wanna stage a Donald Trump v. Rosie O'Donnell fight here I'm all for it. I'm already seeing my numbers tick upward #writechat
She said: @Scatoma No one cares about an anonymous free blog poseurs' "numbers." Spam us and slam us, I have paid editing work to do. 'bye #writechat
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
02/04/01
After our interlude the other day I asked Phebe about the missing Cumberland spearhead my father gave me. She brought it down to me this morning, she said she got it out of the safe deposit box at the bank first thing in the morning. My gosh, what a wonderful piece of work it is! Probably worth as much as a tractor!
Exactly where you told me to put it, she says to me, what are your getting senile?
So I say to Phebe You didn’t go tell anyone about this?
She just looks at me like I’m an asshole. If I tell you I’ll keep something secret, you better damn believe that’s what I’m going to do!
Back when I first started getting sick, before we had Cornelius and Maddy move in and take over the operation for me, Phebe was working day and night, milking the cows some days twice a day and then putting in a full shift at the hospital too. One day she went in to work exhausted and injected an old man accidentally with something that ended up killing him. There had been some rumors going around that Phebe was running the farm for me and reporting to work exhausted, so the hospital was nervous about indemnifying her. At some point later Phebe was put under oath in a deposition and she went through a couple hours of questions and denied up and down she had ever worked on the farm before any shift, or that she ever reported to work too tired. With this placed on the record, the hospital continued to stand behind her and moved to settle the matter without much further ado. Everything could have fallen squarely on her shoulders. She pretty much saved the farm. I guess sometimes you have to decide which virtue you’re going to give top billing in life: honesty or loyalty. Don’t know which one a marriage requires most, but I now think I know which one keeping a farm requires most.
I think moral choices must have been easier for people when this Cumberland spearhead was made. All you had to do was keep from starving to death and everything was good---you were a fucking hero!
Where to put this god damn computer disk though where I won’t forget it or where it won’t get stolen? I guess I’ll keep it hidden out in the tool shed behind the trailer here. I ought to keep this spearhead together with it too. Now there’s a pair of mismatched items!
Exactly where you told me to put it, she says to me, what are your getting senile?
So I say to Phebe You didn’t go tell anyone about this?
She just looks at me like I’m an asshole. If I tell you I’ll keep something secret, you better damn believe that’s what I’m going to do!
Back when I first started getting sick, before we had Cornelius and Maddy move in and take over the operation for me, Phebe was working day and night, milking the cows some days twice a day and then putting in a full shift at the hospital too. One day she went in to work exhausted and injected an old man accidentally with something that ended up killing him. There had been some rumors going around that Phebe was running the farm for me and reporting to work exhausted, so the hospital was nervous about indemnifying her. At some point later Phebe was put under oath in a deposition and she went through a couple hours of questions and denied up and down she had ever worked on the farm before any shift, or that she ever reported to work too tired. With this placed on the record, the hospital continued to stand behind her and moved to settle the matter without much further ado. Everything could have fallen squarely on her shoulders. She pretty much saved the farm. I guess sometimes you have to decide which virtue you’re going to give top billing in life: honesty or loyalty. Don’t know which one a marriage requires most, but I now think I know which one keeping a farm requires most.
I think moral choices must have been easier for people when this Cumberland spearhead was made. All you had to do was keep from starving to death and everything was good---you were a fucking hero!
Where to put this god damn computer disk though where I won’t forget it or where it won’t get stolen? I guess I’ll keep it hidden out in the tool shed behind the trailer here. I ought to keep this spearhead together with it too. Now there’s a pair of mismatched items!
Monday, November 22, 2010
02/03/01
Had this dream the other night about Porch Rot’s house. Well, it was more than that really. It was a dream about a secret room. I know it probably sounds crazy, but I started obsessing on the thought that Hiram had lied to me and that Clean Phil wasn’t dead at all. I started imagining that Phil had gone crazy and was being kept locked up in a room in that house like a caged animal. Craziest thought, I know. I have no good evidence that the dream could ever be true. It sure got me in the most fucked up, unexpected situation though. I guess my wacky thoughts got the better of me.
My memory just kept going back to the time that I asked to go through Phil’s stuff. I realize now that the inside of the house didn’t match up with the outside of the house, that a secret room really could have existed there. What I mean to say is there should have been another room or two on the ground floor of the house than what I saw that day to account for the square footage you can figure from the outside. So as I’m recalling going through that house, in my memory I realize a big armoire was placed up against the wall where a door should have been. I suddenly recall years later a piece of door trim partly visible behind the piece. I remember thinking to myself at the time, Porch Rot has that room closed off, but I never thought at the time why that was so.
The beagle went missing again, so I took upon myself yesterday morning to go looking for him on Hiram’s farm. Got close to the house. Got near to the window where I thought the secret room might be, put my face close to the glass to look in, and what do I see inside but little Milady naked in a bathtub, her little brown jugs bobbing so sweetly on top of the water and suds. She didn’t scream or anything, but I sure did feel like a fool. I can tell I embarrassed the hell out of her. She just kind of sunk her body beneath the water so that only her head was sticking out of the soap.
I’m looking for my dog, I say all red-faced, desperate to explain myself, Perro. Mi Perro esta losto againo.
And then I left and came back to the trailer to hide under a blanket on my couch. Thought the police would show up any moment and arrest me for being a peeping Tom or a stalker or user of really bad, made-up Spanish or something. Just had these visions of being sent back before the judge on a probation violation. Had these visions of awful headlines in the newspapers. Had these awful visions of being sent to prison for twenty years or something, being boned up the ass by some burly woodchuck more foul than even myself.
What the fuck are you doing, Thoreau? I just kept thinking, buried beneath that blanket, What the fuck are you doing?
What happens next? A knock at the trailer door. Who is it but Milady bundled against the cold in a ski jacket smiling happily at me, the fucking beagle squirming in her arms desperate to get away again.
I fine your dog, she says happily.
Great, I say dishonestly, bring him in.
I was thinking I didn’t want to run the risk of trying to take the dog out of her arms and dropping him and have him run off again. I didn’t want to run the risk of brushing her titties either trying to get the dog out of her arms. Better to let her bring the dog right in so he could‘t get away again.
But just as soon as I say that, I think: why the hell are you bringing this girl into your trailer? She could accuse you of abusing her or something.
Can I get you a warm drink? Coffee? I say, slipping deeper into the abyss.
I’m thinking to myself, Why the fuck did you do that? She’ll be here for an hour now.
She just shakes her head yes, seems reluctant to say anything in English. She’s wearing these super tight jeans. Never noticed her in them before, I’m thinking what’s that about? Sits down without hesitation on the edge of the sofa I had obviously been using as my bed, had her hand crammed nervously between her thighs by her crotch. She still has her jacket on.
Don’t ask her to take off her jacket, I think. Don’t ask her to take off her jacket.
Wouldn’t you like to take off your jacket? I ask.
She doesn’t say anything. She just shyly takes off the jacket. The beagle doesn’t like the whistling sound the jacket makes and starts yapping. Milady hushes the dog. Dog fucking obeys for once. Dog is transfixed by her, and that saying nothing of the beagle. She got a low riding blouse on and has cleavage showing to match the Rift Valley of Tanzania.
My fucking goodness, I’m such an idiot. Such a fucking idiot. I’m doing math in my head. If this girl is 19 years-old and it 2001 now, then she was born around 1982, the year John Cougar Mellencamp, who was only John Cougar then, came out with Jack and Diane. I’m remembering back singing the line life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone and I envision this girl at the time still at her mother’s breast. So then I’m thinking about her mother and what her breast must have been like in 1982 when John Cougar Mellencamp, who was just John Cougar then, was just out with Jack and Diane, and I start wondering how old she, the mother, might be. I realize I’m probably older than her mother by 10 years. Then I start thinking maybe her mother had her when she was 16 and her grandmother had her mother at 16, making the girl’s grandmother the same fucking age as me!
Now that kind of thought sure would put a damper on the old physiology. . . if it weren’t for the wonders of Viagra, I mean. Ever since the male chest cancer I’ve had to be on the shit. In reality there was no chance anything would have ever happened between me and Milady that day. I was being closely monitored the whole time. You see, Milady went to the house first with the dog and Phebe sent her down the lane to the trailer. When Phebe didn’t see Milady return from my trailer right away, she concocted an excuse to come visit me to make sure nothing untoward was taking place. Upon sight of Phebe nearing the trailer Milady got up off the sofa and put her jacket back on to leave.
I was cleaning up the house and came across your old 8 track player Phebe says and she hands over a box to me. I know in an instant from the musical selection--- Neil Young‘s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere---that she was there for a specific purpose---to partake in the Cinnamon Girl deed. I suppose she was curious to see if I had expended myself. Surely she learned that was not the case.
I remember hearing tales about World War I, how the two sides put down their arms on Christmas, climbed out of their trenches and had a good old time with each other while that particular day lasted. But then when it was over, they were back in their trenches again, back to trying to kill one another. That’s kind of the same thing Phebe and I went through on Christmas Day and now Ground Hog’s Day: Five and a half minutes of Woodchuck Love, and than back immediately to trench warfare.
Like George Carlin says: fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
He also said the shortest sentence in the English language is I am---the longest sentence is I do.
I guess you could say I saw my shadow. Somehow I’m guessing we’ll have six more weeks of Winter.
My memory just kept going back to the time that I asked to go through Phil’s stuff. I realize now that the inside of the house didn’t match up with the outside of the house, that a secret room really could have existed there. What I mean to say is there should have been another room or two on the ground floor of the house than what I saw that day to account for the square footage you can figure from the outside. So as I’m recalling going through that house, in my memory I realize a big armoire was placed up against the wall where a door should have been. I suddenly recall years later a piece of door trim partly visible behind the piece. I remember thinking to myself at the time, Porch Rot has that room closed off, but I never thought at the time why that was so.
The beagle went missing again, so I took upon myself yesterday morning to go looking for him on Hiram’s farm. Got close to the house. Got near to the window where I thought the secret room might be, put my face close to the glass to look in, and what do I see inside but little Milady naked in a bathtub, her little brown jugs bobbing so sweetly on top of the water and suds. She didn’t scream or anything, but I sure did feel like a fool. I can tell I embarrassed the hell out of her. She just kind of sunk her body beneath the water so that only her head was sticking out of the soap.
I’m looking for my dog, I say all red-faced, desperate to explain myself, Perro. Mi Perro esta losto againo.
And then I left and came back to the trailer to hide under a blanket on my couch. Thought the police would show up any moment and arrest me for being a peeping Tom or a stalker or user of really bad, made-up Spanish or something. Just had these visions of being sent back before the judge on a probation violation. Had these visions of awful headlines in the newspapers. Had these awful visions of being sent to prison for twenty years or something, being boned up the ass by some burly woodchuck more foul than even myself.
What the fuck are you doing, Thoreau? I just kept thinking, buried beneath that blanket, What the fuck are you doing?
What happens next? A knock at the trailer door. Who is it but Milady bundled against the cold in a ski jacket smiling happily at me, the fucking beagle squirming in her arms desperate to get away again.
I fine your dog, she says happily.
Great, I say dishonestly, bring him in.
I was thinking I didn’t want to run the risk of trying to take the dog out of her arms and dropping him and have him run off again. I didn’t want to run the risk of brushing her titties either trying to get the dog out of her arms. Better to let her bring the dog right in so he could‘t get away again.
But just as soon as I say that, I think: why the hell are you bringing this girl into your trailer? She could accuse you of abusing her or something.
Can I get you a warm drink? Coffee? I say, slipping deeper into the abyss.
I’m thinking to myself, Why the fuck did you do that? She’ll be here for an hour now.
She just shakes her head yes, seems reluctant to say anything in English. She’s wearing these super tight jeans. Never noticed her in them before, I’m thinking what’s that about? Sits down without hesitation on the edge of the sofa I had obviously been using as my bed, had her hand crammed nervously between her thighs by her crotch. She still has her jacket on.
Don’t ask her to take off her jacket, I think. Don’t ask her to take off her jacket.
Wouldn’t you like to take off your jacket? I ask.
She doesn’t say anything. She just shyly takes off the jacket. The beagle doesn’t like the whistling sound the jacket makes and starts yapping. Milady hushes the dog. Dog fucking obeys for once. Dog is transfixed by her, and that saying nothing of the beagle. She got a low riding blouse on and has cleavage showing to match the Rift Valley of Tanzania.
My fucking goodness, I’m such an idiot. Such a fucking idiot. I’m doing math in my head. If this girl is 19 years-old and it 2001 now, then she was born around 1982, the year John Cougar Mellencamp, who was only John Cougar then, came out with Jack and Diane. I’m remembering back singing the line life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone and I envision this girl at the time still at her mother’s breast. So then I’m thinking about her mother and what her breast must have been like in 1982 when John Cougar Mellencamp, who was just John Cougar then, was just out with Jack and Diane, and I start wondering how old she, the mother, might be. I realize I’m probably older than her mother by 10 years. Then I start thinking maybe her mother had her when she was 16 and her grandmother had her mother at 16, making the girl’s grandmother the same fucking age as me!
Now that kind of thought sure would put a damper on the old physiology. . . if it weren’t for the wonders of Viagra, I mean. Ever since the male chest cancer I’ve had to be on the shit. In reality there was no chance anything would have ever happened between me and Milady that day. I was being closely monitored the whole time. You see, Milady went to the house first with the dog and Phebe sent her down the lane to the trailer. When Phebe didn’t see Milady return from my trailer right away, she concocted an excuse to come visit me to make sure nothing untoward was taking place. Upon sight of Phebe nearing the trailer Milady got up off the sofa and put her jacket back on to leave.
I was cleaning up the house and came across your old 8 track player Phebe says and she hands over a box to me. I know in an instant from the musical selection--- Neil Young‘s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere---that she was there for a specific purpose---to partake in the Cinnamon Girl deed. I suppose she was curious to see if I had expended myself. Surely she learned that was not the case.
I remember hearing tales about World War I, how the two sides put down their arms on Christmas, climbed out of their trenches and had a good old time with each other while that particular day lasted. But then when it was over, they were back in their trenches again, back to trying to kill one another. That’s kind of the same thing Phebe and I went through on Christmas Day and now Ground Hog’s Day: Five and a half minutes of Woodchuck Love, and than back immediately to trench warfare.
Like George Carlin says: fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
He also said the shortest sentence in the English language is I am---the longest sentence is I do.
I guess you could say I saw my shadow. Somehow I’m guessing we’ll have six more weeks of Winter.
Monday, November 15, 2010
2/01/01
I was getting by financially for a while sneaking into the house while Phebe was at work scrounging for stray coins and refundable bottles and the like, but then she saw fit to have all the locks changed and a security system installed. Probably cost a fortune. Never could find where she hid the check book. Couldn’t find any credit cards either. She uses that ATM card to get money out of the machine most of the time. Never did take the time to teach me how to use it, so that ATM card wouldn’t be of any use to me even if I found it. Now I gotta go to Middletown on the tractor every so often as the weather allows with a load of scrap metal to get cash money. I load up as much scrap as I can in the manure spreader, which is my most road-worthy wagon at this point. I used to synchronize the scrap runs when I could to swing by the government center in Goshen on reporting day to save on gas, but I was told by a sheriff‘s deputy that my “mode of transport poses a health and safety hazard. . . and takes up too many parking spaces to boot.” I told him “the supermarket doesn’t seem to have any problem with me parking there--I can’t see why here should be any different.” He wasn’t too pleased with that comment, said, “you report here for probation, right?
I’ve been heating the trailer with a wood stove. Lately I’ve been cooking on it too since the electric stove in the kitchen stopped working. I had no idea last summer I would be in this predicament living in the trailer in Winter. I would have a good supply of seasoned wood stacked up otherwise. It’s been tough going out in the woods with tractor every day, dragging home whatever severed limb I can find in the snow. Right now as I sit and write this I have wet clothing hanging from clotheslines strung all throughout the trailer. Just had my second meal of oatmeal for the day. The dog hates the shit. No wonder it keeps running off. At least we’re in February now. Not that it’s any less fucking cold.
I’ve been heating the trailer with a wood stove. Lately I’ve been cooking on it too since the electric stove in the kitchen stopped working. I had no idea last summer I would be in this predicament living in the trailer in Winter. I would have a good supply of seasoned wood stacked up otherwise. It’s been tough going out in the woods with tractor every day, dragging home whatever severed limb I can find in the snow. Right now as I sit and write this I have wet clothing hanging from clotheslines strung all throughout the trailer. Just had my second meal of oatmeal for the day. The dog hates the shit. No wonder it keeps running off. At least we’re in February now. Not that it’s any less fucking cold.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
01/31/01
Poor Maddy--- 6 feet tall, 250lbs of solid muscle---couldn’t find a boy in high school with the bravery to date her, decided to go to college at Oklahoma State on a shot put scholarship to “find a real cowboy”.
Maddy used to use her shot put prowess in high school to put any boy who might cause her trouble in his place: You think I can throw these heavy balls far, she’d say, wait until I get a hold of your little scrawny ones.
She also used to joke at the time, since she was so determined to travel at a distance to find a man, that maybe she would be the first person in the family in 100 years to marry a non-relative. Who does she meet at school, fall in love with and marry but a 6th cousin, Cornelius Kuykendall, Texas cowboy, and, according to Percy‘s research, descendant of Jacob Luursen (1616-1655) immigrant to New Amsterdam same as we are.
I guess Cornelius’ parents had him when they were teenagers. He was named for Cornelius on the Planet of the Apes. He was raised by his grandmother in some trailer in the Hill Country of Texas until it was tossed during a tornado. I wonder if the head injury he got then has had anything to do with his wanting to turn into a woman. Sure makes you wonder though how that happens, especially to a hulking Texan with the testosterone level of a rodeo bull.
If you think of yourself as a woman, Maddy made the mistake of asking him, what are you thinking I am? A man?
Phebe and I let Cornelius stay on the place and farm long after Maddy moved off. Swami Hard Salami didn’t think this was good at all, and thought Cornelius needed to make a break from us and give his final answer, as Regis Philbin would say, to the surgeon before he permanently ditched his male genitalia. He was such a damn good farmer though, and Phebe liked all the handiwork he did on the house. I guess we kept him on too long. He took his truck down to the green market to sell his organic produce and hand-crafted cheese and got wasted at some gender bender bar, crashed the box truck on the GWB trying to make his way home. After that Swami lures Cornelius off to do building maintenance on all Swami’s apartment buildings in Newburgh. Said Cornelius needed to live around people as a woman, see if that’s what he really wanted before he passed the point of no return. So Cornelius is living as a woman now---Cornelia---but still is every bit still intact for now. Roll down Montgomery Street, or Grand Street, or BayView Terrace and see him up there on the ladder cleaning the gutters wearing a blonde wig. And God forbid you fail to pay your rent, Swami Hard Salami---psychiatrist slumlord---will have Hill Country Cornelia come after you and kick your ass till you pay up.
Well, it‘s not exactly like that, but still.
Did I tell you it’s the middle of Winter and I live in desolation in a trailer?
Maybe I ought to find a wig and move on out there to Newburgh too. . .
Maddy was always the better farmer of my two children. You’d never know it now but Rocky was a fragile child, born almost 6 weeks prematurely. From almost the first day he came into this world he’s been wheezing and coughing, having allergy attacks of one kind or another. Hell, he was lactose intolerant as a baby. . .to fucking breast milk! Now that’s an auspicious start for a dairy farmer! When it came to being around hay, or animal dander, or poison ivy, or bees---forget about it. He’d either be swollen up like a balloon, struggling to breathe, or oozing some kind of fluid out of one body part or another. Yeah, like he was any better suited to work drywall than farm. All that dust from sanded spackle should have killed him. I should have known it was all a crock. He got in with one of the Umbria’s crew. The drywall shit was all window dressing I think now.
My father’s family got sucked in with Dutch Schultz during prohibition, my son, with the Umbrias. I’m the fucking boy scout of the lineage, I guess. Then again I’m a convicted felon, aren’t I? Well, scratch that then. Well, of course, Maddy made it into the State Police academy. I guess she’s the boy scout of the family. They were going to throw her out when they learned her father had become a felon too in addition to her brother, but she vowed she was permanently estranged from us, and they let her stay on only because of that claim. I sure do miss seeing her.
Maddy used to use her shot put prowess in high school to put any boy who might cause her trouble in his place: You think I can throw these heavy balls far, she’d say, wait until I get a hold of your little scrawny ones.
She also used to joke at the time, since she was so determined to travel at a distance to find a man, that maybe she would be the first person in the family in 100 years to marry a non-relative. Who does she meet at school, fall in love with and marry but a 6th cousin, Cornelius Kuykendall, Texas cowboy, and, according to Percy‘s research, descendant of Jacob Luursen (1616-1655) immigrant to New Amsterdam same as we are.
I guess Cornelius’ parents had him when they were teenagers. He was named for Cornelius on the Planet of the Apes. He was raised by his grandmother in some trailer in the Hill Country of Texas until it was tossed during a tornado. I wonder if the head injury he got then has had anything to do with his wanting to turn into a woman. Sure makes you wonder though how that happens, especially to a hulking Texan with the testosterone level of a rodeo bull.
If you think of yourself as a woman, Maddy made the mistake of asking him, what are you thinking I am? A man?
Phebe and I let Cornelius stay on the place and farm long after Maddy moved off. Swami Hard Salami didn’t think this was good at all, and thought Cornelius needed to make a break from us and give his final answer, as Regis Philbin would say, to the surgeon before he permanently ditched his male genitalia. He was such a damn good farmer though, and Phebe liked all the handiwork he did on the house. I guess we kept him on too long. He took his truck down to the green market to sell his organic produce and hand-crafted cheese and got wasted at some gender bender bar, crashed the box truck on the GWB trying to make his way home. After that Swami lures Cornelius off to do building maintenance on all Swami’s apartment buildings in Newburgh. Said Cornelius needed to live around people as a woman, see if that’s what he really wanted before he passed the point of no return. So Cornelius is living as a woman now---Cornelia---but still is every bit still intact for now. Roll down Montgomery Street, or Grand Street, or BayView Terrace and see him up there on the ladder cleaning the gutters wearing a blonde wig. And God forbid you fail to pay your rent, Swami Hard Salami---psychiatrist slumlord---will have Hill Country Cornelia come after you and kick your ass till you pay up.
Well, it‘s not exactly like that, but still.
Did I tell you it’s the middle of Winter and I live in desolation in a trailer?
Maybe I ought to find a wig and move on out there to Newburgh too. . .
Maddy was always the better farmer of my two children. You’d never know it now but Rocky was a fragile child, born almost 6 weeks prematurely. From almost the first day he came into this world he’s been wheezing and coughing, having allergy attacks of one kind or another. Hell, he was lactose intolerant as a baby. . .to fucking breast milk! Now that’s an auspicious start for a dairy farmer! When it came to being around hay, or animal dander, or poison ivy, or bees---forget about it. He’d either be swollen up like a balloon, struggling to breathe, or oozing some kind of fluid out of one body part or another. Yeah, like he was any better suited to work drywall than farm. All that dust from sanded spackle should have killed him. I should have known it was all a crock. He got in with one of the Umbria’s crew. The drywall shit was all window dressing I think now.
My father’s family got sucked in with Dutch Schultz during prohibition, my son, with the Umbrias. I’m the fucking boy scout of the lineage, I guess. Then again I’m a convicted felon, aren’t I? Well, scratch that then. Well, of course, Maddy made it into the State Police academy. I guess she’s the boy scout of the family. They were going to throw her out when they learned her father had become a felon too in addition to her brother, but she vowed she was permanently estranged from us, and they let her stay on only because of that claim. I sure do miss seeing her.
Friday, October 29, 2010
01/30/01
It was said that just before Claudius Smith was hung on the gallows in Goshen in 1779 he kicked off his boots, said his mother had predicted he would die like a trooper’s horse---with shoes on. Now with this final act of defiance, so goes the tale, he would prove his mother was a liar.
In school years ago they taught us Claudius Smith was an outlaw, a cold-blooded killer--- a 7-foot tall monster. Now some people are saying there’s no evidence found that he himself killed anyone. As far as the legend that he was 7-feet tall--- they say now the only document found listing his height has him only at 5’-9”. He was a little fucker!
Percy said if the British had won the war old Claudius would probably be celebrated as a great hero. He said they certainly wouldn’t be calling Claudius a notorious thief or Cowboy of the Ramapos. Instead they’d might say in the history books: “Smith’s daring confiscation of cattle and booty from the rebels of the Hudson Valley to supply the King’s army in New York City proved to be a major contributing factor in the crown’s quelling of the 1776 Rebellion.”
Percy said the Revolutionary War was really our first civil war. He said in Orange County during those times brother was pitted against brother and neighbor against neighbor much like folks would later see in the border states during the Civil War. It was time of high anxiety and paranoia. How could you really be certain your closest friends and family members weren’t conspiring against you as spies for the other side?
As we know, even the commander at West Point--- the hero of Fort Ticonderoga---couldn’t be trusted. Had Benedict Arnold succeeded in turning over West Point to the enemy, the British could have easily gone on to seize the full length of the Hudson to succeed in the goal of dividing and conquering the colonial territory.
Pretty wild shit really that the great struggle that resulted in the foundation of the nation played out upon the very soil beneath my feet here.
In school years ago they taught us Claudius Smith was an outlaw, a cold-blooded killer--- a 7-foot tall monster. Now some people are saying there’s no evidence found that he himself killed anyone. As far as the legend that he was 7-feet tall--- they say now the only document found listing his height has him only at 5’-9”. He was a little fucker!
Percy said if the British had won the war old Claudius would probably be celebrated as a great hero. He said they certainly wouldn’t be calling Claudius a notorious thief or Cowboy of the Ramapos. Instead they’d might say in the history books: “Smith’s daring confiscation of cattle and booty from the rebels of the Hudson Valley to supply the King’s army in New York City proved to be a major contributing factor in the crown’s quelling of the 1776 Rebellion.”
Percy said the Revolutionary War was really our first civil war. He said in Orange County during those times brother was pitted against brother and neighbor against neighbor much like folks would later see in the border states during the Civil War. It was time of high anxiety and paranoia. How could you really be certain your closest friends and family members weren’t conspiring against you as spies for the other side?
As we know, even the commander at West Point--- the hero of Fort Ticonderoga---couldn’t be trusted. Had Benedict Arnold succeeded in turning over West Point to the enemy, the British could have easily gone on to seize the full length of the Hudson to succeed in the goal of dividing and conquering the colonial territory.
Pretty wild shit really that the great struggle that resulted in the foundation of the nation played out upon the very soil beneath my feet here.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
01/29/01
I never knew what people meant by “six degrees of separation” until one of Percy's geek friends explained it to me at Percy's Super Bowl Party last night. The idea goes that--- pick out any one person in the world---doesn’t matter where--- and chances are someone you know knows someone they know.
Well. . . give or take a few people more knowing people who know people in between.
I wondered later if 6 degrees of separation held true with dead people from a long time ago. . .
I’ve always let Percy on the place any time he cares to visit but I've always told him not to dig. The fucker is always sticking his head down woodchuck holes to do anything he can to get around my rule. Don’t ask me why I put up with the fucking nut. I guess I feel like I have to take care of him because that’s what Clara would want me to do. I never had much chance to do much for her in her short life. Seems she pretty much got the shitty end of the stick from the family. She was cut out completely from Dad’s will. I got everything she should have gotten. I suppose Percy knows this, but he’s never held this against me. He sure does love visiting the farm, does censuses of plants and wildlife on the place. Tells me he’s trying to be just like my cousin, Henry David Thoreau.
I said, as far as I’m aware, I’m not related to the dude---I do believe I descend from a different French asshole than him.
Percy’s not at all happy about my plans to sell. He keeps harping on the lore about Old Claudius Smith— the famous Tory cattle thief during the Revolutionary War— that Claudius had once used the old house on the farm as a hiding spot, that there’s a chest of stolen silver buried on the farm. Turns out my father--- Dowser Boy they called him for a time---proved that lore to be true, but I was never allowed to speak of it.
Dad’s family concealed the treasure find from Phebe’s family. The Noonan’s owned the place then, the Thoreaus only rented. Because the Thoreaus supposedly used assets that belonged to the Noonans to buy the farm from them, Phebe has this idea that the farm is more rightfully hers than mine. She thinks I should accede to her idea of preserving the place in the land trust for all time because it should be her say now.
Yeah.
My worry has always been if I let Percy start digging on the place he’ll dig up a fluted spearhead from the Paleo-Indian period and have the place designated as a damn National Historical Landmark or something. Lord knows I won’t see my pay day then. Dad gave me a beautiful Cumberland spearhead just like the one they pulled out of Mt. Lookout cave on the other side of Goshen. He told me to keep it hid and never tell anyone it came off the farm. Could be up to fucking 12,000 years old.
He said, you’ll have trouble selling the fucking place some day if anyone finds what I did here.
After my arrest from the plane incident, when Percy came to the Goshen mental hospital to sign me out, an investigator pulled him aside to ask him about his visits to the farm, and whether he was ever suspicious of anything going on there. Apparently Percy told them he always felt it was suspicious that I never wanted him to dig on the place, that I didn't even like it when people stuck their heads down woodchuck holes. I imagine they had the last bit they needed to make the application for the search warrant. Wouldn’t you know the fucker drove me all the way home and never once mentioned anything about being interviewed about me by the police. For once in his fucking life he finally manages to keep a secret, and it’s against me?
Peckerhead.
Dad never told me where on the farm he found the spearhead, but he said it was found together with some large bones that looked like that of a mastodon, which he covered back up in fear. He said he thought what he saw looked like a kill site. Archeologists would kill for a kill site. I know I put that point somewhere safe, but damn if I can remember where! I hope it doesn’t take 12,000 years to find again.
I was thinking 12,000 years ago is like the time of Jesus ago times 6 ---6 degrees of separation. So if Jesus had his own ancient Jesus as a savior, and that Jesus also had an ancient Jesus as his savior, he would still be about three ancient Jesus saviors away from hunting mastodon with a Cumberland spearhead.
That's some old shit we're talking.
Well. . . give or take a few people more knowing people who know people in between.
I wondered later if 6 degrees of separation held true with dead people from a long time ago. . .
I’ve always let Percy on the place any time he cares to visit but I've always told him not to dig. The fucker is always sticking his head down woodchuck holes to do anything he can to get around my rule. Don’t ask me why I put up with the fucking nut. I guess I feel like I have to take care of him because that’s what Clara would want me to do. I never had much chance to do much for her in her short life. Seems she pretty much got the shitty end of the stick from the family. She was cut out completely from Dad’s will. I got everything she should have gotten. I suppose Percy knows this, but he’s never held this against me. He sure does love visiting the farm, does censuses of plants and wildlife on the place. Tells me he’s trying to be just like my cousin, Henry David Thoreau.
I said, as far as I’m aware, I’m not related to the dude---I do believe I descend from a different French asshole than him.
Percy’s not at all happy about my plans to sell. He keeps harping on the lore about Old Claudius Smith— the famous Tory cattle thief during the Revolutionary War— that Claudius had once used the old house on the farm as a hiding spot, that there’s a chest of stolen silver buried on the farm. Turns out my father--- Dowser Boy they called him for a time---proved that lore to be true, but I was never allowed to speak of it.
Dad’s family concealed the treasure find from Phebe’s family. The Noonan’s owned the place then, the Thoreaus only rented. Because the Thoreaus supposedly used assets that belonged to the Noonans to buy the farm from them, Phebe has this idea that the farm is more rightfully hers than mine. She thinks I should accede to her idea of preserving the place in the land trust for all time because it should be her say now.
Yeah.
My worry has always been if I let Percy start digging on the place he’ll dig up a fluted spearhead from the Paleo-Indian period and have the place designated as a damn National Historical Landmark or something. Lord knows I won’t see my pay day then. Dad gave me a beautiful Cumberland spearhead just like the one they pulled out of Mt. Lookout cave on the other side of Goshen. He told me to keep it hid and never tell anyone it came off the farm. Could be up to fucking 12,000 years old.
He said, you’ll have trouble selling the fucking place some day if anyone finds what I did here.
After my arrest from the plane incident, when Percy came to the Goshen mental hospital to sign me out, an investigator pulled him aside to ask him about his visits to the farm, and whether he was ever suspicious of anything going on there. Apparently Percy told them he always felt it was suspicious that I never wanted him to dig on the place, that I didn't even like it when people stuck their heads down woodchuck holes. I imagine they had the last bit they needed to make the application for the search warrant. Wouldn’t you know the fucker drove me all the way home and never once mentioned anything about being interviewed about me by the police. For once in his fucking life he finally manages to keep a secret, and it’s against me?
Peckerhead.
Dad never told me where on the farm he found the spearhead, but he said it was found together with some large bones that looked like that of a mastodon, which he covered back up in fear. He said he thought what he saw looked like a kill site. Archeologists would kill for a kill site. I know I put that point somewhere safe, but damn if I can remember where! I hope it doesn’t take 12,000 years to find again.
I was thinking 12,000 years ago is like the time of Jesus ago times 6 ---6 degrees of separation. So if Jesus had his own ancient Jesus as a savior, and that Jesus also had an ancient Jesus as his savior, he would still be about three ancient Jesus saviors away from hunting mastodon with a Cumberland spearhead.
That's some old shit we're talking.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
01/28/01
I'm heading over to Percy's to watch the game soon. The fucker is rooting for the Ravens. He said he had to go with the team with the literary name. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. He said Baltimore named their team the Ravens because Edgar Allan Poe was from there and he had that Raven poem and all that. Percy said Poe also has some local significance to us because Poe was kicked out of West Point in disgrace and is probably the most important derelict soldiers we ever had. Percy forwarded this email from one of his Mensa buddies, Balthazar Rust, regarding all that Crypto-Judaic genealogy shit he likes to harp on:
----Original Message----
From: Balthazar Rust
To: Percy Tobiassen
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2000 6:15PM
Subject: RE: Celtic genes among Jews
Hello Percy,
I’ve researched this subject extensively. R1B, the classic “Celtic” haplotype, is one of the most common haplotypes among European Jews of Sephardic ancestry. Here is an overview:
Long before Christianity ever existed, Jews were settled in Europe and conversions of European pagans to Judaism were occurring all the time. This was like foreshadowing of things to come when the Christians converted the rest of the European pagans to their way of thinking. A lot of these pagan folks in the early game were impressed with the Jewish academies of learning that were being established around Europe at the time and they were eager to adopt the Jews monotheistic beliefs in order to take part in these education centers. These early converts apparently lost track of the fact that they weren’t really Jewish by blood and eventually the convert’s descendants were thinking they were truly sons of Abraham from a biological standpoint when they really weren’t. This accounts for the majority of Jewish people from Europe today carrying European genetic markers, known as haplotypes, rather than Middle Eastern ones. In fairness though, Middle Eastern genes have always been present in Jewish groups in Europe, and these are part of the genealogies of European Jews at large, but strictly from a haplotype standpoint you cannot tell the majority of European Jews from a person of Celtic or Aryan background because their maternal and/or paternal lines are standard European. European Jews were not so easily persuaded to convert to Christianity when Christians arrived as they were already settled on monotheistic beliefs and of course that created conflict since that time, but from a genetic standpoint the groups are not that significantly different.
Best Regards,
Balthazar Rust
----Original Message----
From: Balthazar Rust
To: Percy Tobiassen
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2000 6:15PM
Subject: RE: Celtic genes among Jews
Hello Percy,
I’ve researched this subject extensively. R1B, the classic “Celtic” haplotype, is one of the most common haplotypes among European Jews of Sephardic ancestry. Here is an overview:
Long before Christianity ever existed, Jews were settled in Europe and conversions of European pagans to Judaism were occurring all the time. This was like foreshadowing of things to come when the Christians converted the rest of the European pagans to their way of thinking. A lot of these pagan folks in the early game were impressed with the Jewish academies of learning that were being established around Europe at the time and they were eager to adopt the Jews monotheistic beliefs in order to take part in these education centers. These early converts apparently lost track of the fact that they weren’t really Jewish by blood and eventually the convert’s descendants were thinking they were truly sons of Abraham from a biological standpoint when they really weren’t. This accounts for the majority of Jewish people from Europe today carrying European genetic markers, known as haplotypes, rather than Middle Eastern ones. In fairness though, Middle Eastern genes have always been present in Jewish groups in Europe, and these are part of the genealogies of European Jews at large, but strictly from a haplotype standpoint you cannot tell the majority of European Jews from a person of Celtic or Aryan background because their maternal and/or paternal lines are standard European. European Jews were not so easily persuaded to convert to Christianity when Christians arrived as they were already settled on monotheistic beliefs and of course that created conflict since that time, but from a genetic standpoint the groups are not that significantly different.
Best Regards,
Balthazar Rust
Friday, October 8, 2010
01/27/01
Percy said the paternity tests they do today are scientifically sound and there was no reason for me to doubt the one done through the court that established Rocky as Moo-Shoo's father, but I still wasn’t so convinced by it all. Percy suggested if I wanted to put all doubts to rest I should get a DNA kit and take a swab from Mooky’s mouth and send it out to get a second result. Percy said that the Y chromosome that makes a male a male comes only from the male line, and the gene sequence is usually identical between father and son or even grandfather and grandson. So I gathered a sample when I took Mooky to the jail to visit Rocky at Christmas. I sent the sample off to a genealogy testing labs along with my own sample to see if Mooky has the same gene sequence as me. Well, I got the results from the test today and it says me and Mooky have the exact same 32 marker sequence. But I’m awfully perplexed by what I’m reading about our sequence being an E3B haplotype. This must be some kind of mistake because from what I’m reading about the E3B haplotype, it originates from Africa. I think what happened was they accidentally put my sample aside and analyzed Mooky’s sample twice or something. . .
On the web just now it says that E3b is observed in moderate amounts in all Jewish groups worldwide. This includes the Askenazi, Sephardic, Kurdish, Yemeni, Samaritan and Dierba groups. They say this pretty much proves E3b was part of the genetic makeup of some of the earliest Jews, that’s why E3b spread out in all the places Jews ended up spreading out into in time. . .
On the phone with Percy just now the lousy Peckerhead says he doesn’t think E3B is a mistake at all. He said he always suspected I was from a Sephardic family driven into France after the Spanish Inquisition and forced to convert to Christianity at some point.
He said, that’s why you look so much like Ted Koppel.
Ted Koppel! Where the fuck did he ever get that idea? The Peckerhead!
He said if it makes you feel any better, I have Sephardic origin too. Where do you think the name Tobiassen comes from? It’s not Dutch, it’s Spanish. It Sephardic. The Tobiases took refuge in Holland from the Iberian Peninsula, just like to Roosa and probably the Roosevelts too.
I ask, You E3b too?
He says, well no, I’m not, but I’m from a Sephardic family that went Christian at some point just like you.
I say, So what the hell Haplotype are you?
He says, R1B
I say, That Middle Eastern or something?
He says, Well, no. . .it’s kind of Celtic actually. It’s what most Irish people are, but it’s Sephardic too. It’s one of the bloodline of early Europeans who converted to Judaism--- or who raped Jewish women--- one or the other. You have the real deal Jewish genes, though, son of Abraham and all that.
So I’m the son of Abraham and Percy’s the Irishman? Boy oh boy, I don’t think I could be walloped harder over the head.
Good fucking gracious.
I have to find some fucking alcohol.
On the web just now it says that E3b is observed in moderate amounts in all Jewish groups worldwide. This includes the Askenazi, Sephardic, Kurdish, Yemeni, Samaritan and Dierba groups. They say this pretty much proves E3b was part of the genetic makeup of some of the earliest Jews, that’s why E3b spread out in all the places Jews ended up spreading out into in time. . .
On the phone with Percy just now the lousy Peckerhead says he doesn’t think E3B is a mistake at all. He said he always suspected I was from a Sephardic family driven into France after the Spanish Inquisition and forced to convert to Christianity at some point.
He said, that’s why you look so much like Ted Koppel.
Ted Koppel! Where the fuck did he ever get that idea? The Peckerhead!
He said if it makes you feel any better, I have Sephardic origin too. Where do you think the name Tobiassen comes from? It’s not Dutch, it’s Spanish. It Sephardic. The Tobiases took refuge in Holland from the Iberian Peninsula, just like to Roosa and probably the Roosevelts too.
I ask, You E3b too?
He says, well no, I’m not, but I’m from a Sephardic family that went Christian at some point just like you.
I say, So what the hell Haplotype are you?
He says, R1B
I say, That Middle Eastern or something?
He says, Well, no. . .it’s kind of Celtic actually. It’s what most Irish people are, but it’s Sephardic too. It’s one of the bloodline of early Europeans who converted to Judaism--- or who raped Jewish women--- one or the other. You have the real deal Jewish genes, though, son of Abraham and all that.
So I’m the son of Abraham and Percy’s the Irishman? Boy oh boy, I don’t think I could be walloped harder over the head.
Good fucking gracious.
I have to find some fucking alcohol.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
01/26/01
Despite all my links to the early Huguenot families of the New Paltz patent, I was brought up solidly in the religious traditions of my Noonan ancestors as an Irish-Catholic. This was the same with my half-Huguenot father before me. It does seem kind of funny that we went Pope like that after so many generations resisting. Maybe it’s all a wash anyway. I figure the same atrocities that were committed against my Catholic ancestors by Protestants, were committed against my Protestant ancestors by Catholics. . .
Even before all that Father Pipala mess broke, I was having issues with church. On the anniversary of Dad’s death-- Sunday after Ascension Thursday-- I decided to go to 9 O’clock Mass alone. I think Phebe was working that morning. ‘Course I showered and shaved and gussied up as I usually do. Well, maybe I hurried too much through, I don’t know now. Turns out, as the church filled up, this snooty little boy and his snooty mother sat down in the same pew next to me. A minute didn’t go by before the little boy pinched off his nose and said loud enough for most of the church to hear, Someone smells like poop!
Wouldn’t you know that mother stood up, and marched away to a different pew with the boy without as much as a word to her son or a word spoken to me.
Sometimes the smell of manure is like the sin of humanity, I said to her as she left, you can scrub as hard as you like, it’s still there no matter what.
Years ago you were strange if you didn’t smell a little like cow shit in church. It was one of those things taken as a given and no one noticed it. Only the priests were able to discern the true reality because of course most of them wouldn't do a day of manual labor on a farm if their life depended on it. That’s why priests got so much into using incense. That’s why they learned to walk down the aisle with that shit and hit everyone with it. No wonder I got male chest cancer breathing in all that shit when I was younger. It was actually an early measure to mask the foulness of the peasantry. . .
Phebe’s more Irish than me, yet she’s had less resistance to walking away from Catholicism than I’ve had. She’s been going to a Presbyterian church with a lady pastor lately. She started out going as a guest to some coworker of hers, the same lady that's trying to get her to run for the school board. . .using her maiden name! Phebe's even been singing with the choir, got all these old Protestant hymns down pat. One time I told her if I heard There Is a Green Hill Far Away one more time I was gonna run out into traffic on the Quickway. Funny it used to be the Catholic churches that had all the Democrats and the Presbyterian churches that had all the Republicans, but now it almost seems it's been turned all the way around the other way.
Just remember to vote for Phebe Noonan this Spring for the school board. Her husband and son may be felons, but she is not.
Good fucking gracious
Even before all that Father Pipala mess broke, I was having issues with church. On the anniversary of Dad’s death-- Sunday after Ascension Thursday-- I decided to go to 9 O’clock Mass alone. I think Phebe was working that morning. ‘Course I showered and shaved and gussied up as I usually do. Well, maybe I hurried too much through, I don’t know now. Turns out, as the church filled up, this snooty little boy and his snooty mother sat down in the same pew next to me. A minute didn’t go by before the little boy pinched off his nose and said loud enough for most of the church to hear, Someone smells like poop!
Wouldn’t you know that mother stood up, and marched away to a different pew with the boy without as much as a word to her son or a word spoken to me.
Sometimes the smell of manure is like the sin of humanity, I said to her as she left, you can scrub as hard as you like, it’s still there no matter what.
Years ago you were strange if you didn’t smell a little like cow shit in church. It was one of those things taken as a given and no one noticed it. Only the priests were able to discern the true reality because of course most of them wouldn't do a day of manual labor on a farm if their life depended on it. That’s why priests got so much into using incense. That’s why they learned to walk down the aisle with that shit and hit everyone with it. No wonder I got male chest cancer breathing in all that shit when I was younger. It was actually an early measure to mask the foulness of the peasantry. . .
Phebe’s more Irish than me, yet she’s had less resistance to walking away from Catholicism than I’ve had. She’s been going to a Presbyterian church with a lady pastor lately. She started out going as a guest to some coworker of hers, the same lady that's trying to get her to run for the school board. . .using her maiden name! Phebe's even been singing with the choir, got all these old Protestant hymns down pat. One time I told her if I heard There Is a Green Hill Far Away one more time I was gonna run out into traffic on the Quickway. Funny it used to be the Catholic churches that had all the Democrats and the Presbyterian churches that had all the Republicans, but now it almost seems it's been turned all the way around the other way.
Just remember to vote for Phebe Noonan this Spring for the school board. Her husband and son may be felons, but she is not.
Good fucking gracious
Thursday, September 23, 2010
01/25/01
Phebe said to cover the spools of copper back up and worry about it later after we return from Hawaii. So I covered the shit back up with the mulch hay and then went out in the field with a shovel and worked until the wee hours of the morning heaping dirt on old Yin-Yang. Then it was time to drive to the airport. I was frazzled. Sitting there in the plane on the tarmac I guess the whole thing hit me all at once. And that was before my fear of flying kicked in. Phebe kept shushing me. I guess I mentioned stolen copper a few more times than I should have.
That cop Funked is going to be back on the place today, I say all worried to Phebe, He said he was going to check to see that the bull got disposed of properly. What if he finds the stolen copper?
I made a call, Phebe says on the down low, don’t worry. Everything’s being taken care of. You don’t need to know the details.
Great, I say angrily, so now someone else knows about the stolen copper too? Let me guess, you got Stash Skim in on the secret? What are you guys having an affair or something? Reliving old fucking times are you?
That’s just over the top, Joseph. I wish you knew how ridiculous you’re acting right now. How dare you suggest I’m having an affair! You’re the one whose filming naked teenagers on the place.
Stolen copper, naked teenager being filmed, carcass being buried, cockpits being stormed in a fit of panic---no, no, there’s no reason to investigate me. I’m no criminal really. It can all be explained. Really, it can.
That cop Funked is going to be back on the place today, I say all worried to Phebe, He said he was going to check to see that the bull got disposed of properly. What if he finds the stolen copper?
I made a call, Phebe says on the down low, don’t worry. Everything’s being taken care of. You don’t need to know the details.
Great, I say angrily, so now someone else knows about the stolen copper too? Let me guess, you got Stash Skim in on the secret? What are you guys having an affair or something? Reliving old fucking times are you?
That’s just over the top, Joseph. I wish you knew how ridiculous you’re acting right now. How dare you suggest I’m having an affair! You’re the one whose filming naked teenagers on the place.
Stolen copper, naked teenager being filmed, carcass being buried, cockpits being stormed in a fit of panic---no, no, there’s no reason to investigate me. I’m no criminal really. It can all be explained. Really, it can.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
01/24/01
Yeah, I’d say the best dog I ever had was my Holstein bull Yin-Yang. He was about 15 years-old in September when he was shot dead. It was the day of Francois’ film shoot and Taciturn Vern’s heart attack.
Kills me to recount this one. . .
Francois paid me, Taciturn Vern, Stash Skim, Porch Rot and Starvin‘ Marvin--- foul, simple-minded woodchucks all--- a hundred dollars each to stand along a split rail fence out in my pasture and bullshit away as farmers do while he filmed us.
He kept yelling that he needed our best Delbert Ward. He keeps yelling, Just give me Delbert Ward, God damn it, that’s all I’m asking for people!
I knew from the start that some deception was involved. I’m ashamed I ever agreed to play along. If there was a crime in anything that I did it was that--- going along with that shitty stunt. I knew that Francois’ whole point was to catch a genuine look of astonishment on our faces as gawkers. But I didn’t know Francois would take it as far as he did. He told me beforehand he planned to have pretty girl gallop by us on a white horse, but he didn’t say she would be that supermodel from Kazakhstan they want beheaded for immodesty. Francois certainly didn’t say she would be completely naked.
The site of that girl's bouncing breasts, her flowing hair, her taunt limbs---her luscious, Allah-insulting forbiddance----my fucking goodness--- that sublime vision which has replayed innumerable times in my head since that blessed moment--- proved too much for Vern, who crumpled up on the ground as if struck by a bolt. Francois got exactly what he wanted, I guess. Of course I felt terrible for what I helped do to poor Vern. Thank God he survived.
911 was called. Chaos continued. Never did see the girl leave. It was like she existed for a glorious instant, and then she was gone. Call her naked singularity. To this day I’m still left wondering whether she was real.
Yin-Yang was only approaching the crowd because he was curious about what was happening on the place, with all the sirens sounding and the lights flashing-- not because he had any intent to attack anyone. On first glance you might take him as a menace, but in reality he was so arthritic he couldn’t even mount cows anymore. Well, in actuality he was the last bovine the farm has seen. I couldn’t bring myself to put him on the truck after Cornelius’ attempt at farming crashed and burned in ‘99. Centuries of continuous cattle keeping on the farm ended in that blaze of gunfire from Officer Funk. As the joke goes with him, he Funked up again with that one.
Yin Yang was something else, I tell yah . When it came time to bring the herd in from the pasture, no dog could have done a better job of rousing the cows from their slumber to drive them in towards home. He seemed to know what the deal was on the place and was willing to do his part, just like any farm dog. When he was born I had no intention of keeping him, thought I’d put him on the next truck to market, like all the other bull calves I didn’t need, but then I noticed that he had the perfect black and white markings of a yin-yang symbol on his scrotum, and I thought maybe I could get a few extra bucks for him from a novelty hunter some day. Well, a year came and went. And then another year came and went. And by then I thought for sure he’d turn ugly on me. But he settled all the cows, and even threw nice small calves with the heifers, and I thought, hell, let me see if I can get another year out of him. Wouldn’t you know the damn thing stayed docile. And then another year passed and then another year passed, and still he stayed as quiet and calm as could be.
The cops were annoyed with me for a lot of reasons that day. They weren’t showing much sympathy for the situation I was in, mourning a geriatric pet bull minutes after setting up my old friend for a heart attack. I was sternly told by Funk Face to make sure the carcass was properly disposed of or else I could expect a summons. Meanwhile I had the flight out of Newark the next day to contend with. Couldn’t get Cadaver Dog to come out on short notice. You tell me all that money from his windfall didn’t go to his fucking head! Couldn’t get Smokey the backhoe running. I had used him earlier in the summer on a hot day and got him vapor locked. Tried blowing through the fuel line to prime the carburetor with gas but I couldn’t muster the PSI. Phebe doesn’t believe me, but I think my lung capacity was diminished from all the chemo I got in ‘98 to fight the male chest cancer.
My daughter has always had the best luck with that chore blowing the fuel line. I always say to her for some reason, I don’t even want to know where you developed that skill.
‘Course that would be right about the time she would tell me to go fuck myself.
Somehow we missed out on all that good Puritan ancestry from New England.
So anyway, I just started heaping up brush and debris on Yin-Yang’s carcass as best as I could. Then I thought to haul out some years old mulch hay bales from the chicken house and heap that on the carcass too, and lo and behold what do I find hidden beneath the bales but a whole shit load of stolen copper--- spool after spool of copper cable. Probably $20,000 worth. I don’t know why Rocky never mentioned it to us after his arrest for all the other stuff. Maybe like Claudius Smith’s gang of Tory bandits and the cache of silver they planted on the farm during the Revolution, Rocky had plans of coming back and retrieving that portion of copper---secreted so considerately on my side of the property line--- after he got out of the pokey.
Not the most considerate offspring that Rocky. The fuck.
Kills me to recount this one. . .
Francois paid me, Taciturn Vern, Stash Skim, Porch Rot and Starvin‘ Marvin--- foul, simple-minded woodchucks all--- a hundred dollars each to stand along a split rail fence out in my pasture and bullshit away as farmers do while he filmed us.
He kept yelling that he needed our best Delbert Ward. He keeps yelling, Just give me Delbert Ward, God damn it, that’s all I’m asking for people!
I knew from the start that some deception was involved. I’m ashamed I ever agreed to play along. If there was a crime in anything that I did it was that--- going along with that shitty stunt. I knew that Francois’ whole point was to catch a genuine look of astonishment on our faces as gawkers. But I didn’t know Francois would take it as far as he did. He told me beforehand he planned to have pretty girl gallop by us on a white horse, but he didn’t say she would be that supermodel from Kazakhstan they want beheaded for immodesty. Francois certainly didn’t say she would be completely naked.
The site of that girl's bouncing breasts, her flowing hair, her taunt limbs---her luscious, Allah-insulting forbiddance----my fucking goodness--- that sublime vision which has replayed innumerable times in my head since that blessed moment--- proved too much for Vern, who crumpled up on the ground as if struck by a bolt. Francois got exactly what he wanted, I guess. Of course I felt terrible for what I helped do to poor Vern. Thank God he survived.
911 was called. Chaos continued. Never did see the girl leave. It was like she existed for a glorious instant, and then she was gone. Call her naked singularity. To this day I’m still left wondering whether she was real.
Yin-Yang was only approaching the crowd because he was curious about what was happening on the place, with all the sirens sounding and the lights flashing-- not because he had any intent to attack anyone. On first glance you might take him as a menace, but in reality he was so arthritic he couldn’t even mount cows anymore. Well, in actuality he was the last bovine the farm has seen. I couldn’t bring myself to put him on the truck after Cornelius’ attempt at farming crashed and burned in ‘99. Centuries of continuous cattle keeping on the farm ended in that blaze of gunfire from Officer Funk. As the joke goes with him, he Funked up again with that one.
Yin Yang was something else, I tell yah . When it came time to bring the herd in from the pasture, no dog could have done a better job of rousing the cows from their slumber to drive them in towards home. He seemed to know what the deal was on the place and was willing to do his part, just like any farm dog. When he was born I had no intention of keeping him, thought I’d put him on the next truck to market, like all the other bull calves I didn’t need, but then I noticed that he had the perfect black and white markings of a yin-yang symbol on his scrotum, and I thought maybe I could get a few extra bucks for him from a novelty hunter some day. Well, a year came and went. And then another year came and went. And by then I thought for sure he’d turn ugly on me. But he settled all the cows, and even threw nice small calves with the heifers, and I thought, hell, let me see if I can get another year out of him. Wouldn’t you know the damn thing stayed docile. And then another year passed and then another year passed, and still he stayed as quiet and calm as could be.
The cops were annoyed with me for a lot of reasons that day. They weren’t showing much sympathy for the situation I was in, mourning a geriatric pet bull minutes after setting up my old friend for a heart attack. I was sternly told by Funk Face to make sure the carcass was properly disposed of or else I could expect a summons. Meanwhile I had the flight out of Newark the next day to contend with. Couldn’t get Cadaver Dog to come out on short notice. You tell me all that money from his windfall didn’t go to his fucking head! Couldn’t get Smokey the backhoe running. I had used him earlier in the summer on a hot day and got him vapor locked. Tried blowing through the fuel line to prime the carburetor with gas but I couldn’t muster the PSI. Phebe doesn’t believe me, but I think my lung capacity was diminished from all the chemo I got in ‘98 to fight the male chest cancer.
My daughter has always had the best luck with that chore blowing the fuel line. I always say to her for some reason, I don’t even want to know where you developed that skill.
‘Course that would be right about the time she would tell me to go fuck myself.
Somehow we missed out on all that good Puritan ancestry from New England.
So anyway, I just started heaping up brush and debris on Yin-Yang’s carcass as best as I could. Then I thought to haul out some years old mulch hay bales from the chicken house and heap that on the carcass too, and lo and behold what do I find hidden beneath the bales but a whole shit load of stolen copper--- spool after spool of copper cable. Probably $20,000 worth. I don’t know why Rocky never mentioned it to us after his arrest for all the other stuff. Maybe like Claudius Smith’s gang of Tory bandits and the cache of silver they planted on the farm during the Revolution, Rocky had plans of coming back and retrieving that portion of copper---secreted so considerately on my side of the property line--- after he got out of the pokey.
Not the most considerate offspring that Rocky. The fuck.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
01/23/01
I just don’t know what to say when it comes to Percy’s artistic career. I know he's got a lot of artist friends, but it's not like that stuff just rubs off on you from other people. He’s a fine writer when it comes to history and what-have you, but just as soon as it comes to creative writing, it’s just not there for him despite all his ambition. It was Percy himself who explained that creative writing comes from the right side of your brain and all the other stuff comes from your left brain. That’s why novelists can’t always do journalism so well, and why journalist don’t necessarily make good novelists. He did a fine job too laying that all out for me, ‘course what he was describing was factual material, and the factual stuff is a breeze for him. You see someone work for years on something that monstrously huge, you just can’t go and say, your novel sucks Percy. You shouldn’t have bothered. When Percy asks me what I think of the manuscript, I just say, what bit I’ve read so far seems just like James Joyce. Of course I haven’t read more than 15 pages of James Joyce in my entire life. But then I’ll add: You do know, Percy, that Nicholas Sparks sells a lot more books than James Joyce these days. Maybe you could work on a more slender follow up.
Sparks? Percy responds, all mortified and indignant and stuff, like Squidward, Are you kidding me?
My wife drags me out to every one of those sappy movies based on sappy novels. The worst part of all is that they always turn out to be written by fucking men! I mean, you’re telling me a person with testicles wrote Steel Magnolias?
Then there was that Bridges of Madison County ordeal. That was some sick dude’s handiwork. Clint Eastwood: what body-snatching Thetan did you succumb to? Then Nicholas Sparks came along. Sometimes I feel like slitting my wrists in the theater and letting them bleed dry into my mega-sized bucket of popcorn. Of course Phebe can never get enough of that horse shit.
I told Percy about this idea I had for a movie called, The Dutch Barns of the Hudson Valley. I told him it’s about this photographer for National Gigolographic Magazine who travels around upstate New York photographing Dutch barns and porking lonely inhabitants of the rural landscape. Percy ran off and told his freaky filmmaker pal--- Francois ---about the spoof, and then Francois is at my door with Percy soon afterward looking to buy the fucking idea from me for a short film.
I tell him, you can have the idea. I don’t want a dime of money from anyone who’d pay to see anything like that anyway. Francois had me sign a waiver so he could use the idea---and by damn if he didn’t!
The best time I ever had at the movies with Phebe was when we went to see American Beauty when it was first out, must have been about a year or two ago. She thought from the title it was going to be some kind of romance, so she was pretty disappointed with what she found. I’m ashamed to admit I emulated Kevin Spacey’s dinner plate thrown into the wall scene with the turkey platter this past Thanksgiving dinner. I think the lath had to have cracked from the blow. Needless to say, I began living here in this cold fucking trailer shortly thereafter.
Like I joke with Swami Hard Salami: At least I never got the Oedipus complex screwed up by killing my mother and having sex with my father.
Sparks? Percy responds, all mortified and indignant and stuff, like Squidward, Are you kidding me?
My wife drags me out to every one of those sappy movies based on sappy novels. The worst part of all is that they always turn out to be written by fucking men! I mean, you’re telling me a person with testicles wrote Steel Magnolias?
Then there was that Bridges of Madison County ordeal. That was some sick dude’s handiwork. Clint Eastwood: what body-snatching Thetan did you succumb to? Then Nicholas Sparks came along. Sometimes I feel like slitting my wrists in the theater and letting them bleed dry into my mega-sized bucket of popcorn. Of course Phebe can never get enough of that horse shit.
I told Percy about this idea I had for a movie called, The Dutch Barns of the Hudson Valley. I told him it’s about this photographer for National Gigolographic Magazine who travels around upstate New York photographing Dutch barns and porking lonely inhabitants of the rural landscape. Percy ran off and told his freaky filmmaker pal--- Francois ---about the spoof, and then Francois is at my door with Percy soon afterward looking to buy the fucking idea from me for a short film.
I tell him, you can have the idea. I don’t want a dime of money from anyone who’d pay to see anything like that anyway. Francois had me sign a waiver so he could use the idea---and by damn if he didn’t!
The best time I ever had at the movies with Phebe was when we went to see American Beauty when it was first out, must have been about a year or two ago. She thought from the title it was going to be some kind of romance, so she was pretty disappointed with what she found. I’m ashamed to admit I emulated Kevin Spacey’s dinner plate thrown into the wall scene with the turkey platter this past Thanksgiving dinner. I think the lath had to have cracked from the blow. Needless to say, I began living here in this cold fucking trailer shortly thereafter.
Like I joke with Swami Hard Salami: At least I never got the Oedipus complex screwed up by killing my mother and having sex with my father.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
01/22/01
There was a time when I called Percy the Attractive Nuissance. I have to say the first part of that bill doesn’t really fit anymore, but the second part is as apt as ever. When Percy was young, he looked a bit like Jim Morrison. Nowadays he looks more like Meatloaf after a full frontal lobotomy. Clara ran away with Percy when she was 16. Mom and Dad were pretty much done with her. She was always a wild child bent on getting her way at all cost. Fiery as all hell. She could drink most men under the table. . .when she was like 15! She started spouting off that Dad had--- well, done something, shall we say --- next thing she knew she found all her stuff piled out in the front yard. Percy was a couple of years older than her. They both fell in with the Hippie crowd and had all kinds of stories to tell about using hallucinogens, going to Woodstock, traveling back and forth across the country in an old bus, and whatever the hell else. Both ended up in California for some time. After they got some college credits they made their way back to New York, where they both found high-powered careers in marketing, whatever the fuck that is. They were also big into the art scene. Never had any children. Clara died in ‘87 of ass cancer. Now I have to have that camera shoved up there every year or two to make sure I don’t get it there either. Percy started having panic attacks in ‘93 after the attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. He was working in the building at the time and got a hell of a scare. He became a neurotic mess. Said he felt like New York City had become just one big terrorist target that was due to be hit again at any moment. He couldn’t get that thought of danger out of his mind. He couldn’t cope much with urban life anymore and had a couple of visits to Bellevue and Dr. Swami Hard Salami up here.
Back in ‘94, I let Percy put the trailer on the place for a weekend retreat. Town made a big stink about the trailer, of course. I made Percy a farm employee and invoked the Ag and Markets law, hauled the trailer out of view to the back end of the farm at the edge of Purgatory Swamp. Town was thrilled to get the thing out of view from the road and they eventually left me alone. Spent a fortune stringing phone and electric lines out here for him though. I’m grateful now to have the trailer or else I’d have no where else to go. It’s hard to keep warm lately though and I’ve had the pipes freeze on me a couple of times since Thanksgiving night. Anyway, it always seemed to do Percy some good to get out of the city for a while to calm his nerves. Eventually it became too hard for him to keep a job and he came back to Orange County to live full-time. At some point Swami Hard Salami told him the trailer was no good for him because it was too socially isolating. Percy got qualified for some kind of housing program for the mentally ill and ended up in the duplex in Maybrook where he’s been working on a novel for years. It’s about as thick as a phone book these days. He lent me a copy to proof read for him last year. I don’t think I’ve gotten past the 4th page yet. From what I understand of it it’s Percy’s idea of a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s all the same characters and setting in Dublin only it’s no longer June 16, 1904, rather June 17, 1904. Because like people really need to know what happened to that Bloom guy the next day too.
Back in ‘94, I let Percy put the trailer on the place for a weekend retreat. Town made a big stink about the trailer, of course. I made Percy a farm employee and invoked the Ag and Markets law, hauled the trailer out of view to the back end of the farm at the edge of Purgatory Swamp. Town was thrilled to get the thing out of view from the road and they eventually left me alone. Spent a fortune stringing phone and electric lines out here for him though. I’m grateful now to have the trailer or else I’d have no where else to go. It’s hard to keep warm lately though and I’ve had the pipes freeze on me a couple of times since Thanksgiving night. Anyway, it always seemed to do Percy some good to get out of the city for a while to calm his nerves. Eventually it became too hard for him to keep a job and he came back to Orange County to live full-time. At some point Swami Hard Salami told him the trailer was no good for him because it was too socially isolating. Percy got qualified for some kind of housing program for the mentally ill and ended up in the duplex in Maybrook where he’s been working on a novel for years. It’s about as thick as a phone book these days. He lent me a copy to proof read for him last year. I don’t think I’ve gotten past the 4th page yet. From what I understand of it it’s Percy’s idea of a sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s all the same characters and setting in Dublin only it’s no longer June 16, 1904, rather June 17, 1904. Because like people really need to know what happened to that Bloom guy the next day too.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
01/21/01
Yeah, the free trip to paradise, that never happened. The plane started moving down the runway, I just panicked. Got the hell out of my seat and climbed up the aisle toward the cockpit hollerin’ like a little girl for the captain to stop the damn plane and let me the fucking hell off. September 11, 2000— that’s a date I’ll not soon forget. Took off from Newark, so by the time they got me subdued, and that Sumo wrestler guy got my face---and what seemed like the whole rest of my body too---smushed up against the window, the plane was making a descent toward Stewart Airport for emergency landing. And wouldn’t you know we ended up flying right over the damn farm! I could see the old backhoe working away in the corner of the oak tree lot, a plume of dark smoke rising up out of its engine.
That was the first of the three arrests.
Here the wife had in mind she was going to be finally visiting Hawaii like she always dreamed and I fucked the whole thing up for her. I don’t fly, what else can I say. Every time I had to go to my daughter’s college in Oklahoma I drove the hell there, even fell asleep behind the wheel once. But even after that I still wouldn‘t fly. I’m telling yah, they don’t call me Old Moa for nothin'.
Damn I wish I never won that fucking prize.
I wish I never let Percy bring that damn filmmaker on the place either. Both those fuckers are jinxes, I’m telling yah!
That was the first of the three arrests.
Here the wife had in mind she was going to be finally visiting Hawaii like she always dreamed and I fucked the whole thing up for her. I don’t fly, what else can I say. Every time I had to go to my daughter’s college in Oklahoma I drove the hell there, even fell asleep behind the wheel once. But even after that I still wouldn‘t fly. I’m telling yah, they don’t call me Old Moa for nothin'.
Damn I wish I never won that fucking prize.
I wish I never let Percy bring that damn filmmaker on the place either. Both those fuckers are jinxes, I’m telling yah!
Friday, August 20, 2010
01/20/01
So what other deep, dark secrets do you need to know about me?
I suppose you also want to know how I ended up on probation---the three arrests last Fall. My tragic decent into criminality? Yeah, where to begin on that?
Well, for one thing, I wish I never entered that riddle contest last January. Everything in my life seemed to go farther downhill from that point. What does a man who's afraid to fly need with a fucking free trip to Hawaii anyway?
I guess that could be a pretty good riddle right there.
I should have insisted on a trip by boat. The riddle was: “opposite a traffic light, when is green a signal to delay and red to proceed?” The answer came to me in my sleep a few hours after I heard it. My brother-in-law, Percy Tobiassen— the obsessive compulsive Mensa member— couldn’t believe an idiot farmer like me could ever figure that one out. He was the one I heard about the damn contest from too. He obsessed for 6 weeks trying to crack it. He came to me last Spring, after it was announced I had won, and asked me what my IQ was.
I said, how the fuck do I know! When the fuck did I ever take an IQ test? What the fuck difference does it make what the fuck my IQ is?
He said if you can crack the top 2% of intelligence, you could join Mensa.
And I said, and why the fuck would I want to do that?
He said well. . . to be around like-minded individuals.
And I said Oh, really. . .they got some fucking people like me over there in Mensa, do they?
That was when Percy brought over this old Gateway computer and set it up for me with the World Wide Web and all. My own fucking computer, imagine that. Percy hasn’t had a real job since 1993. He’s living in a little duplex in Country Club Heights in Maybrook with hardly a pot to piss in— but he’s got money somehow or another to upgrade to a Mac so he can be on par with all his geek friends. One of the first things he did after he got me set up was make me take an online IQ test. Seems like the fucker just couldn’t sleep at night dwelling on the thought that I might actually be smarter than him. I came away on one test at 146 and another one at 144. Percy looked all pale and downtrodden.
I say, those good?
He says, well. . . yeah. . .
I say, would it get me in Mensa?
He says, well. . .yeah. . .
I say, My score’s better than yours, isn’t it?
He says, well. . .yeah. . .
All these fucking years— all those snooty assholes looking down on me like I’m shit. How the fuck was I suppose to know I’m in the top one percent for intelligence?
I suppose you also want to know how I ended up on probation---the three arrests last Fall. My tragic decent into criminality? Yeah, where to begin on that?
Well, for one thing, I wish I never entered that riddle contest last January. Everything in my life seemed to go farther downhill from that point. What does a man who's afraid to fly need with a fucking free trip to Hawaii anyway?
I guess that could be a pretty good riddle right there.
I should have insisted on a trip by boat. The riddle was: “opposite a traffic light, when is green a signal to delay and red to proceed?” The answer came to me in my sleep a few hours after I heard it. My brother-in-law, Percy Tobiassen— the obsessive compulsive Mensa member— couldn’t believe an idiot farmer like me could ever figure that one out. He was the one I heard about the damn contest from too. He obsessed for 6 weeks trying to crack it. He came to me last Spring, after it was announced I had won, and asked me what my IQ was.
I said, how the fuck do I know! When the fuck did I ever take an IQ test? What the fuck difference does it make what the fuck my IQ is?
He said if you can crack the top 2% of intelligence, you could join Mensa.
And I said, and why the fuck would I want to do that?
He said well. . . to be around like-minded individuals.
And I said Oh, really. . .they got some fucking people like me over there in Mensa, do they?
That was when Percy brought over this old Gateway computer and set it up for me with the World Wide Web and all. My own fucking computer, imagine that. Percy hasn’t had a real job since 1993. He’s living in a little duplex in Country Club Heights in Maybrook with hardly a pot to piss in— but he’s got money somehow or another to upgrade to a Mac so he can be on par with all his geek friends. One of the first things he did after he got me set up was make me take an online IQ test. Seems like the fucker just couldn’t sleep at night dwelling on the thought that I might actually be smarter than him. I came away on one test at 146 and another one at 144. Percy looked all pale and downtrodden.
I say, those good?
He says, well. . . yeah. . .
I say, would it get me in Mensa?
He says, well. . .yeah. . .
I say, My score’s better than yours, isn’t it?
He says, well. . .yeah. . .
All these fucking years— all those snooty assholes looking down on me like I’m shit. How the fuck was I suppose to know I’m in the top one percent for intelligence?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
01/19/01
Well, George W. Bush will be sworn in as our 43rd president tomorrow. That’ll sure put a knot in Phebe’s panties. She’s been in support of all this recount nonsense. She’s been for Al Gore all the way. She changed her voter affiliation to Democrat last year.
Hillary Mania has sure done a number on her. Anything Hillary stands for, Phebe’s now right there with her, spouting off the same talking points. Liberal Ditto-head, that's what you'd call it.
Good fucking gracious.
I was sad the day Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the race against Hillary. I thought with Giuliani, for once people foolish enough to marry their cousins would have an advocate in Washington.
Her Yankees beat my Mets, and her Hillary beat my whatever the fuck his name was now, but at least my King Boy George beat out the other uninspiring scion of wealth and privilege, Gore the Bore.
Fucking Tennessee liberal for gun control, like that makes any sense.
Phebe's actually has been suggesting that Gore should have continued to contest the presidency despite the Supreme Court ruling because the Florida vote, she says, was really in Gore’s favor and was rightfully his to claim under the constitution.
My view on that is, yeah, seems it was pretty tight there in Florida, but Gore got thumped in his home state! What the fuck does that say about you when they hate you at home?
Well. . . maybe I’m not so much the one to ask that question. . .
In reality, Gore would have had a cakewalk to the presidency if it wasn’t for Ralph Nader being in the race. Percy said he voted for Nader, the fucker.
Talk about choices between rats and snakes. I guess I have to be careful not to fault Percy too much. In some ways I kinda agree with him that we don't need a third party-- we need a 10th one. If you got a lot of money and there’s only two teams, how much more would it take to buy off the other guys too? The more political parties we can get, the better off for our democracy, the idea goes, because buying influence would finally become onerous to wealthy special interest.
Look at this shit with Bill Clinton pardoning that fugitive financier. That doesn’t tell you something about where he‘s at?
In reality, Gore would have had a cakewalk to the presidency if only Bubba had been able to keep his Johnson in his pants---or shall I say his Dick Nixon?
Mr. Clinton, there’s a canker on the presidency.
Hillary Mania has sure done a number on her. Anything Hillary stands for, Phebe’s now right there with her, spouting off the same talking points. Liberal Ditto-head, that's what you'd call it.
Good fucking gracious.
I was sad the day Rudy Giuliani dropped out of the race against Hillary. I thought with Giuliani, for once people foolish enough to marry their cousins would have an advocate in Washington.
Her Yankees beat my Mets, and her Hillary beat my whatever the fuck his name was now, but at least my King Boy George beat out the other uninspiring scion of wealth and privilege, Gore the Bore.
Fucking Tennessee liberal for gun control, like that makes any sense.
Phebe's actually has been suggesting that Gore should have continued to contest the presidency despite the Supreme Court ruling because the Florida vote, she says, was really in Gore’s favor and was rightfully his to claim under the constitution.
My view on that is, yeah, seems it was pretty tight there in Florida, but Gore got thumped in his home state! What the fuck does that say about you when they hate you at home?
Well. . . maybe I’m not so much the one to ask that question. . .
In reality, Gore would have had a cakewalk to the presidency if it wasn’t for Ralph Nader being in the race. Percy said he voted for Nader, the fucker.
Talk about choices between rats and snakes. I guess I have to be careful not to fault Percy too much. In some ways I kinda agree with him that we don't need a third party-- we need a 10th one. If you got a lot of money and there’s only two teams, how much more would it take to buy off the other guys too? The more political parties we can get, the better off for our democracy, the idea goes, because buying influence would finally become onerous to wealthy special interest.
Look at this shit with Bill Clinton pardoning that fugitive financier. That doesn’t tell you something about where he‘s at?
In reality, Gore would have had a cakewalk to the presidency if only Bubba had been able to keep his Johnson in his pants---or shall I say his Dick Nixon?
Mr. Clinton, there’s a canker on the presidency.
01/18/01
I know what you’re thinking: It’s been well over two weeks and how many pages already and the dumpy Redneck Asshole still hasn’t told me how the fuck a meteorite landing on Porch Rot’s farm led to solving Phil Palfrey’s disappearance.
Well, it was easy enough to see that Porch Rot was having none of it in terms of allowing meteorite hunters to search his farm for other fragments that may have fallen nearby --- apart from the fragment that killed his Holstein--- any one of which could be sold for a small fortune. There were plenty of people, myself included, who showed up at Hiram’s door willing to pay a tidy sum just to look around for the day whether successful or not in finding anything. He was turning away a lot of desperately needed money, and it just didn’t make sense. And the other thing to it was the media coverage: Surely if Phil was still out there at liberty to hear all the stories about what was happening back home he would have shown up to see things for himself and be part of it. Ultimately Hiram brought attention to a spot of ground between his old barn and his house that put the matter in clearer focus for me. He towed out his old El Camino that had been kept under cover in his garage for decades and left it outside in the elements, said he needed to make room in the garage for a tractor instead. Like that made any fucking sense. Then it occurred to me that I had visited that spot where the old car now rested with my father when I was a child. As I recalled, we were helping the Palfreys to put in hay at some point in the late 50’s and we tried to pump up a drink from the old hand dug well that was there. Dad blamed our difficulty on the leathers being dried out. Dad told me he had dowsed the place for the well to be dug when he was a mere boy, when he became renowned for his water divining talents in newsreels as Dowser Boy. I had not realized the well had been filled in and obliterated at some point since then. It seemed funny to me that here at a time when folks from the outside world were stopping by seeking to search over the ground as a possible strewnfield, that Hiram would seek to cover over a particular spot like that. He was betraying something with his actions, and I was the only person with the background knowledge needed to pick up on it.
I say: Hiram, don’t shit me. I know something funny is going on. What the hell you got buried in this well?
And all of sudden it’s like the water works are turned on, and he starts sniffling and snorting.
Joe, he cries out, don’t you go telling’ nobody. I found Phil hanging by a rope in the barn. I know it wudn’t right, but I didn’t want people to know that’s what he done to himself. I didn’t know what to do, Joe. Believe me, I just didn’t know what to do. I put him down in the well. He’s down there at rest. That’s where I think we should leave him. What good would it do anyone to bring him out of there, Joe? What good would it do? He’s at rest, Joe. He’s at home.
It still amazes me that I would enter into a conspiracy of silence with Porch Rot Palfrey regarding a dead body in his old well, but that’s just what I did. I just asked myself, if that was you instead Joe, what the fuck would you do? Really, how do I know I wouldn’t do the same fucking thing?
Of course I’ve had my own trouble with stuff buried on my place. I had to plead guilty on that, there was no other way. That’s how I got into this whole convicted felon probation fix in the first place. No guns anymore, but at least I’m not being sodomized right now.
I really have to be careful now to keep this on disk and keep it hidden somewhere. They could stop by at any moment to check in on me and take a hard look at all this. I don’t live in the same world as the rest at this point. My ass is owned. Seems anything I think or do is subject to examination at any moment.
Not to say my PO ain't a sweet gal or nothin.
Well, it was easy enough to see that Porch Rot was having none of it in terms of allowing meteorite hunters to search his farm for other fragments that may have fallen nearby --- apart from the fragment that killed his Holstein--- any one of which could be sold for a small fortune. There were plenty of people, myself included, who showed up at Hiram’s door willing to pay a tidy sum just to look around for the day whether successful or not in finding anything. He was turning away a lot of desperately needed money, and it just didn’t make sense. And the other thing to it was the media coverage: Surely if Phil was still out there at liberty to hear all the stories about what was happening back home he would have shown up to see things for himself and be part of it. Ultimately Hiram brought attention to a spot of ground between his old barn and his house that put the matter in clearer focus for me. He towed out his old El Camino that had been kept under cover in his garage for decades and left it outside in the elements, said he needed to make room in the garage for a tractor instead. Like that made any fucking sense. Then it occurred to me that I had visited that spot where the old car now rested with my father when I was a child. As I recalled, we were helping the Palfreys to put in hay at some point in the late 50’s and we tried to pump up a drink from the old hand dug well that was there. Dad blamed our difficulty on the leathers being dried out. Dad told me he had dowsed the place for the well to be dug when he was a mere boy, when he became renowned for his water divining talents in newsreels as Dowser Boy. I had not realized the well had been filled in and obliterated at some point since then. It seemed funny to me that here at a time when folks from the outside world were stopping by seeking to search over the ground as a possible strewnfield, that Hiram would seek to cover over a particular spot like that. He was betraying something with his actions, and I was the only person with the background knowledge needed to pick up on it.
I say: Hiram, don’t shit me. I know something funny is going on. What the hell you got buried in this well?
And all of sudden it’s like the water works are turned on, and he starts sniffling and snorting.
Joe, he cries out, don’t you go telling’ nobody. I found Phil hanging by a rope in the barn. I know it wudn’t right, but I didn’t want people to know that’s what he done to himself. I didn’t know what to do, Joe. Believe me, I just didn’t know what to do. I put him down in the well. He’s down there at rest. That’s where I think we should leave him. What good would it do anyone to bring him out of there, Joe? What good would it do? He’s at rest, Joe. He’s at home.
It still amazes me that I would enter into a conspiracy of silence with Porch Rot Palfrey regarding a dead body in his old well, but that’s just what I did. I just asked myself, if that was you instead Joe, what the fuck would you do? Really, how do I know I wouldn’t do the same fucking thing?
Of course I’ve had my own trouble with stuff buried on my place. I had to plead guilty on that, there was no other way. That’s how I got into this whole convicted felon probation fix in the first place. No guns anymore, but at least I’m not being sodomized right now.
I really have to be careful now to keep this on disk and keep it hidden somewhere. They could stop by at any moment to check in on me and take a hard look at all this. I don’t live in the same world as the rest at this point. My ass is owned. Seems anything I think or do is subject to examination at any moment.
Not to say my PO ain't a sweet gal or nothin.
01/17/01
Ziggy Moskowitz got close to breeding out all the off-colors in his herd and claimed to have produced several perfect red heifers befitting the standard of Numbers 19. But Ziggy was apparently of failing sight and had trouble discerning charcoal in the cows’ lashes. And so he was turned away by his religious advisers. Somehow Phil Palfrey caught wind of Ziggy’s enterprise in the mid 90's, while he headed up Route 17 on his way to visit a Joseph Smith site upstate along the Susquehanna (religious nut jobs really do have a special way of finding one another, don’t they) and the two discussed contingencies for the cows to go to Phil on the Palfrey farm in the event that Ziggy— by then an old man— became too ill to keep them any longer. The goal I guess was to keep trying to produce a perfect red heifer which could then be secretly cloned and birthed in Israel, or some shit like that.
Porch Rot had that big ol’ pole barn still standing at the time with all its automated gates and its fancy milking parlor. Those poor little red cows had all they could do to survive on the place until they became acclimated. Sticking pet cows in a place like that is almost like signing their death warrant, really. The stress is often too much on them. They’re out of their element. It’s like the same effect this old, stinky farmer experiences when I go to mass every decade or so. . .
One day in ‘97, Ziggy’s sons arrived at the Palfrey farm with legal paperwork and a cattle truck to haul the Sullivan Reds away. Ownership was never formally transferred to Phil before that time, but a large stack of cash was involved to soothe any hard feelings that may have been felt by the Palfreys with the sudden reduction of the farm’s milk output, such as it was. Porch Rot was OK with it all but Clean Phil threw a fit and called the State Police seeking to stop the transfer, arguing that ownership of the cattle had been placed with him by old man Moskowitz. The police took a look at the Moskowitz brothers’ documents and ordered that Phil stand down. Seems the sons were rather secular in their outlook and were quite appalled by their father’s intentions to use cows to touch off Armageddon. They were determined to do anything they could to stop their father’s madness and preserve whatever comedic legacy he had left.
And so it was that the last know herd of Sullivan County Reds were hauled off from the Palfrey Farm to oblivion. But better a small herd of sub-standard cattle go that route, I say, than all of fucking humanity.
Porch Rot had that big ol’ pole barn still standing at the time with all its automated gates and its fancy milking parlor. Those poor little red cows had all they could do to survive on the place until they became acclimated. Sticking pet cows in a place like that is almost like signing their death warrant, really. The stress is often too much on them. They’re out of their element. It’s like the same effect this old, stinky farmer experiences when I go to mass every decade or so. . .
One day in ‘97, Ziggy’s sons arrived at the Palfrey farm with legal paperwork and a cattle truck to haul the Sullivan Reds away. Ownership was never formally transferred to Phil before that time, but a large stack of cash was involved to soothe any hard feelings that may have been felt by the Palfreys with the sudden reduction of the farm’s milk output, such as it was. Porch Rot was OK with it all but Clean Phil threw a fit and called the State Police seeking to stop the transfer, arguing that ownership of the cattle had been placed with him by old man Moskowitz. The police took a look at the Moskowitz brothers’ documents and ordered that Phil stand down. Seems the sons were rather secular in their outlook and were quite appalled by their father’s intentions to use cows to touch off Armageddon. They were determined to do anything they could to stop their father’s madness and preserve whatever comedic legacy he had left.
And so it was that the last know herd of Sullivan County Reds were hauled off from the Palfrey Farm to oblivion. But better a small herd of sub-standard cattle go that route, I say, than all of fucking humanity.
01/16/01
One mystery uncovered in Clean Phil’s writings was his motive in acquiring the last known herd of Sullivan County Reds. Turns out his interest had nothing to do with farming really, or preserving rural heritage for that matter. Instead it appears to have had more to do with feeding his religious delusions that his actions were somehow crucial to the fate of the world.
Sullivan County Reds were a hardy, old-time cattle breed that were once common throughout the Catskills. It’s thought they derive from the Devon breed. They had long ago fallen out of favor commercially (like just about every other breed of cattle) to Holsteins, and were discarded wholesale in the 1950's. Seems Ziggy Moskowitz, the former Borsch belt comedian turned militant Zionist, held onto a small herd of them on a farm outside Liberty for the purpose of producing a perfect red heifer as mentioned in Numbers 19. And so the breed was saved by Moskowitz at least for a time from extinction.
According to what I learned on the World Wide Web, ashes from a perfect red heifer are required for purification in Jewish law. It is believed by many Zionist militants that without such purification, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is off limits to them because it has been defiled by Muslims when the Temple there was destroyed 1,300 years ago, giving way to the Dome of the Rock. It is therefore believed that the Temple Mount cannot be reclaimed without the ashes of a perfect red heifer being produced. To the thinking of many, this will fulfill the final step to usher in the Messiah and the End of Days. Yeah, who fucking knew? The fate of the world will one day hinge on the birth of a damn red cow! Maybe a damn Sullivan County Red! And you know once that Dome of the Rock (the oldest structure in Islam, by the way) is blown up, it’ll all be mushroom clouds from here to fucking kingdom come!
Sullivan County Reds were a hardy, old-time cattle breed that were once common throughout the Catskills. It’s thought they derive from the Devon breed. They had long ago fallen out of favor commercially (like just about every other breed of cattle) to Holsteins, and were discarded wholesale in the 1950's. Seems Ziggy Moskowitz, the former Borsch belt comedian turned militant Zionist, held onto a small herd of them on a farm outside Liberty for the purpose of producing a perfect red heifer as mentioned in Numbers 19. And so the breed was saved by Moskowitz at least for a time from extinction.
According to what I learned on the World Wide Web, ashes from a perfect red heifer are required for purification in Jewish law. It is believed by many Zionist militants that without such purification, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is off limits to them because it has been defiled by Muslims when the Temple there was destroyed 1,300 years ago, giving way to the Dome of the Rock. It is therefore believed that the Temple Mount cannot be reclaimed without the ashes of a perfect red heifer being produced. To the thinking of many, this will fulfill the final step to usher in the Messiah and the End of Days. Yeah, who fucking knew? The fate of the world will one day hinge on the birth of a damn red cow! Maybe a damn Sullivan County Red! And you know once that Dome of the Rock (the oldest structure in Islam, by the way) is blown up, it’ll all be mushroom clouds from here to fucking kingdom come!
01/15/01
The Palfreys claim to be direct descendants of William Palfrey, a patriot of the American Revolution, born in Boston in the 1740's. I guess old Billy Blueblood was an aide to General Washington and Paymaster General of the Continental Army as well. A real big shot. (Just goes to show you, I guess, how past success from a genealogical standpoint is no guarantee of future performance.) Hiram said in 1780 his esteemed progenitor was appointed Ambassador to France by a unanimous vote of Congress, boarded a ship, headed to sea, and was never heard from again.
When you consider what happened to Filthy Rich and Clean Phil, you have to wonder if the Palfrey name carries some kind of disappearance curse. Not that you could say Phil was truly a Palfrey by blood, but he was a Palfrey by name at least.
When Phil was about 10 years-old, his mother and twin brother were brutally killed in front of him by a loose bull. Phil would never really get over that tragic event. The boys had been playing on the side lawn with their mother when the agitated bull suddenly happened upon them. Vera did her best to get the boys situated on a tree limb before the bull trampled her down. Phil's twin jumped down from the tree in a vain attempt to save his mother. Phil did the smart thing and remained safely in the tree. He was eventually rescued there without a scratch but he was forever changed from that point forward, destined to forever carry guilt with him that he did not act to save his mother and brother. Porch Rot, of course, was pretty much clueless with regard to attending to Phil’s mental health. Phil remained in a mental hospital for months after the tragedy when it was found that he had stepped out of himself and had begun assuming his deceased brother’s identity. The poor kid was pretty much screwed up in the head from that point on. They used to find him all the time up a tree overlooking his mother’s grave in the graveyard, lost. Bright as all can be, but he just seemed to move from one fixation to the next. Phil was always good around the farm though, no matter what obsession he was caught up in, and with the work around the place getting done, Old Porch Rot was never willing to really acknowledge there was ever anything seriously wrong with the kid.
Don’t give ‘em any ideas he’s crazy! Hiram would say. Of course a kid’ll act nuts if he thinks it will get him attention. Don’t bring attention to that stuff. I never do.
At one point CPS even tried to take custody of Phil. This was after he was hospitalized a series of times in his early teen years, but Phil was sent home from foster care soon afterward after Porch Rot agreed to maintain mental health services for him. In the end, though, Phil made his way to manhood as crazy as a shit house rat.
When you consider what happened to Filthy Rich and Clean Phil, you have to wonder if the Palfrey name carries some kind of disappearance curse. Not that you could say Phil was truly a Palfrey by blood, but he was a Palfrey by name at least.
When Phil was about 10 years-old, his mother and twin brother were brutally killed in front of him by a loose bull. Phil would never really get over that tragic event. The boys had been playing on the side lawn with their mother when the agitated bull suddenly happened upon them. Vera did her best to get the boys situated on a tree limb before the bull trampled her down. Phil's twin jumped down from the tree in a vain attempt to save his mother. Phil did the smart thing and remained safely in the tree. He was eventually rescued there without a scratch but he was forever changed from that point forward, destined to forever carry guilt with him that he did not act to save his mother and brother. Porch Rot, of course, was pretty much clueless with regard to attending to Phil’s mental health. Phil remained in a mental hospital for months after the tragedy when it was found that he had stepped out of himself and had begun assuming his deceased brother’s identity. The poor kid was pretty much screwed up in the head from that point on. They used to find him all the time up a tree overlooking his mother’s grave in the graveyard, lost. Bright as all can be, but he just seemed to move from one fixation to the next. Phil was always good around the farm though, no matter what obsession he was caught up in, and with the work around the place getting done, Old Porch Rot was never willing to really acknowledge there was ever anything seriously wrong with the kid.
Don’t give ‘em any ideas he’s crazy! Hiram would say. Of course a kid’ll act nuts if he thinks it will get him attention. Don’t bring attention to that stuff. I never do.
At one point CPS even tried to take custody of Phil. This was after he was hospitalized a series of times in his early teen years, but Phil was sent home from foster care soon afterward after Porch Rot agreed to maintain mental health services for him. In the end, though, Phil made his way to manhood as crazy as a shit house rat.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
01/13/01
I wasn’t open about my courtship with Phebe --- Phebe Reynolds Noonan— named in honor of the local Revolutionary War heroine--- my second cousin through the Noonan Family—--until after Dad was in the ground. He most certainly would have objected in some murderous manner or another.
The Noonans were supposed to be the influx of outside blood that our old-time Huguenot and Dutch asses needed, and here I ended up dipping twice in it.
Dad read a story in a supermarket tabloid once about a family who been fucking around with cousins so often that all their children were being born with monkey tails due to all the messed up genes from the in-breeding (or, if you wanted to be polite, the endogamy). He’d always warn me to find a woman who wasn’t related to avoid having monkey children, as he apparently believed our luck had been pushed as far as it could go genetically within our tribe. I’m quite certain he believed we were on the verge of slipping backward to the point that we would again wear fur and hang by our asses in the forests. . .
When I was about 16, Dad caught me with Phebe’s sister Vera in the hay mow and he beat the living shit out of me with a rake handle. Phebe was just over the next stack of hay at the time messing around with Stash Skimington. We were all pretty drunk at the time, but that wasn’t so much Dad‘s concern.
We have the automobile now! I remember Dad yelling, drive down the road for a few more fucking miles, will ya! There’s no need for anyone in this age of locomotion to be fucking around with kinfolk!
Dad made his point and I gave up on Vera. Well in reality I was just one of several guys, er, men, I should say, she was running wild with. Both Phebe and I found ourselves jilted in common by our respective de-blossomers, as Stash Skim was no more serious about Phebe at the time than Vera was in me.
Like Swami Hard Salami says in his delightful Indian accent, proximity is the biggest force to be contemplated when it comes to settling on a partner for fornication. He said you either have to gain proximity with a compatible person to gain sex or avoid proximity to avoid sex--- say with a second cousin who grew up next door--- but you have to deal with the proximity issue either way. He said people are like bodies in space at risk of falling into the gravitational pull of others that may near. I don’t know if those girls ever realized they needed to close their curtains at night to keep from going on display in the pasture out back. I certainly wasn’t prepared to say anything, and I don’t think my father was either.
Vera ended up marrying Richard Palfrey, younger brother to Porch Rot. They married in ‘68 after we graduated high school. Vera was already knocked up by then, but then she lost that baby. Filthy Rich---so named jokingly because he was a farm kid who didn’t like to get dirty--- was on his way to the skies over Vietnam. Was shot down somewhere in the jungles. His body was never recovered. Vera was devastated. She never seemed the same again. One day it became apparent Vera had taken it up with Hiram. I don’t think she ever married him though because she could never bring herself to have a judge declare his brother dead. I think she was always holding out hope Richard was a prisoner of war somewhere and that he would be freed and one day would be returned home. More likely his body rotted away somewhere in the jungle. Vera went on to have twin boys with Hiram. Actually their provenance was a rich source of local gossip. Of course I refused to be a part of that shit. I’m always quick to say I wasn’t released from the Army until she was halfway along. Stash Skim has always been incredulous and is fond of saying that a turkey baster had to have been involved if the boys were truly Porch Rot’s. A blow to the groin by a vicious heifer had Hiram in the hospital years earlier in the summer of ‘69. Word has been that he suffered some permanent damage that prevents him from fully launching his Apollo 11, if you know what I‘m saying. I’m not sure if Viagra can be of any help to him these years later. Summer of love it was not though. Hemingway could have made a classic out of it. There’s been a lot of horrible things said as to why that heifer got so angry. Porch Rot always accepted the boys as his own though. I understand he was listed as the father on their birth certificates. He had a couple of boys to help run the places when he got older, what could be better? Dumb fuck. Yeah, it was hard for some to see how Vera and Hiram were compatible. Maybe Porch Rot looked a bit like his brother, but there the similarities between them ended. Porch Rot has always been a dumb fuck and Filthy Rich was always like, well, a bright star. As I’m fond of saying for some reason: Porch Rot is surely no Filthy Rich, never was, never will be.
I guess grief can make you make some strange decisions. . .not unlike love, I guess.
The Noonans were supposed to be the influx of outside blood that our old-time Huguenot and Dutch asses needed, and here I ended up dipping twice in it.
Dad read a story in a supermarket tabloid once about a family who been fucking around with cousins so often that all their children were being born with monkey tails due to all the messed up genes from the in-breeding (or, if you wanted to be polite, the endogamy). He’d always warn me to find a woman who wasn’t related to avoid having monkey children, as he apparently believed our luck had been pushed as far as it could go genetically within our tribe. I’m quite certain he believed we were on the verge of slipping backward to the point that we would again wear fur and hang by our asses in the forests. . .
When I was about 16, Dad caught me with Phebe’s sister Vera in the hay mow and he beat the living shit out of me with a rake handle. Phebe was just over the next stack of hay at the time messing around with Stash Skimington. We were all pretty drunk at the time, but that wasn’t so much Dad‘s concern.
We have the automobile now! I remember Dad yelling, drive down the road for a few more fucking miles, will ya! There’s no need for anyone in this age of locomotion to be fucking around with kinfolk!
Dad made his point and I gave up on Vera. Well in reality I was just one of several guys, er, men, I should say, she was running wild with. Both Phebe and I found ourselves jilted in common by our respective de-blossomers, as Stash Skim was no more serious about Phebe at the time than Vera was in me.
Like Swami Hard Salami says in his delightful Indian accent, proximity is the biggest force to be contemplated when it comes to settling on a partner for fornication. He said you either have to gain proximity with a compatible person to gain sex or avoid proximity to avoid sex--- say with a second cousin who grew up next door--- but you have to deal with the proximity issue either way. He said people are like bodies in space at risk of falling into the gravitational pull of others that may near. I don’t know if those girls ever realized they needed to close their curtains at night to keep from going on display in the pasture out back. I certainly wasn’t prepared to say anything, and I don’t think my father was either.
Vera ended up marrying Richard Palfrey, younger brother to Porch Rot. They married in ‘68 after we graduated high school. Vera was already knocked up by then, but then she lost that baby. Filthy Rich---so named jokingly because he was a farm kid who didn’t like to get dirty--- was on his way to the skies over Vietnam. Was shot down somewhere in the jungles. His body was never recovered. Vera was devastated. She never seemed the same again. One day it became apparent Vera had taken it up with Hiram. I don’t think she ever married him though because she could never bring herself to have a judge declare his brother dead. I think she was always holding out hope Richard was a prisoner of war somewhere and that he would be freed and one day would be returned home. More likely his body rotted away somewhere in the jungle. Vera went on to have twin boys with Hiram. Actually their provenance was a rich source of local gossip. Of course I refused to be a part of that shit. I’m always quick to say I wasn’t released from the Army until she was halfway along. Stash Skim has always been incredulous and is fond of saying that a turkey baster had to have been involved if the boys were truly Porch Rot’s. A blow to the groin by a vicious heifer had Hiram in the hospital years earlier in the summer of ‘69. Word has been that he suffered some permanent damage that prevents him from fully launching his Apollo 11, if you know what I‘m saying. I’m not sure if Viagra can be of any help to him these years later. Summer of love it was not though. Hemingway could have made a classic out of it. There’s been a lot of horrible things said as to why that heifer got so angry. Porch Rot always accepted the boys as his own though. I understand he was listed as the father on their birth certificates. He had a couple of boys to help run the places when he got older, what could be better? Dumb fuck. Yeah, it was hard for some to see how Vera and Hiram were compatible. Maybe Porch Rot looked a bit like his brother, but there the similarities between them ended. Porch Rot has always been a dumb fuck and Filthy Rich was always like, well, a bright star. As I’m fond of saying for some reason: Porch Rot is surely no Filthy Rich, never was, never will be.
I guess grief can make you make some strange decisions. . .not unlike love, I guess.
Friday, June 25, 2010
01/12/01
Percy researched my family’s genealogy pretty thoroughly and put it all on a computer disk. I’m pretty sure he would have made a big fuss if he found we were descendants of someone like Joseph Smith.
Genealogy for me is hard to take, so I haven’t studied Percy’s work but lightly.
Mom and Dad were second cousins to one another through the Roosa family and more distant cousins through more than a dozen other local Dutch and Huguenot families tracing back to the days of New Amsterdam and the early days of the New Paltz patent. If you ever brought that shit out in conversation with Dad he’d all but take a stick to you to get you to shut up about it. It was the truth. There was no way around it really, but he didn’t want that kind of stink getting out in the world. I guess if you’re not prepared to abide by a taboo, you better be prepared to stay forever quiet about it’s violation.
I remember Mom saying once: Franklin and Eleanor were cousins to one another. They even grew up with the same last name. No one seemed to fuss much. That kind of thing happens all the time in high society and Royalty doesn’t it?
I remember Dad grumbling in response: We’re not Roosevelts. . . and I don’t want to utter that filthy name again in my house.
In fact, according to Percy’s research, both Mom and Dad’s Roosa ancestors descend from the children of Heyman Aldertse Roosa (1643-1708) and Anna Margariet Roosevelt (1654-1706). We are indeed Roosevelts as true as they come. . . with Roosevelt lineages to spare it seems. . .
If the hay baler hadn’t thrashed Dad to a bloody pulp I’m quite sure internet genealogy would have eventually gone on to do the same had he been able to hang around that long.
Genealogy for me is hard to take, so I haven’t studied Percy’s work but lightly.
Mom and Dad were second cousins to one another through the Roosa family and more distant cousins through more than a dozen other local Dutch and Huguenot families tracing back to the days of New Amsterdam and the early days of the New Paltz patent. If you ever brought that shit out in conversation with Dad he’d all but take a stick to you to get you to shut up about it. It was the truth. There was no way around it really, but he didn’t want that kind of stink getting out in the world. I guess if you’re not prepared to abide by a taboo, you better be prepared to stay forever quiet about it’s violation.
I remember Mom saying once: Franklin and Eleanor were cousins to one another. They even grew up with the same last name. No one seemed to fuss much. That kind of thing happens all the time in high society and Royalty doesn’t it?
I remember Dad grumbling in response: We’re not Roosevelts. . . and I don’t want to utter that filthy name again in my house.
In fact, according to Percy’s research, both Mom and Dad’s Roosa ancestors descend from the children of Heyman Aldertse Roosa (1643-1708) and Anna Margariet Roosevelt (1654-1706). We are indeed Roosevelts as true as they come. . . with Roosevelt lineages to spare it seems. . .
If the hay baler hadn’t thrashed Dad to a bloody pulp I’m quite sure internet genealogy would have eventually gone on to do the same had he been able to hang around that long.
Friday, June 18, 2010
01/11/01
I should explain that late in ‘98 I asked Porch Rot if I could help track down Phil when he went missing again, but he at first declined. He said he was certain Phil would find his way home again in time once his adventure played itself out, just like all the times before. Months went by, though, and Winter set in, and Phil remained at large. By that point, I was a lot more insistent, and asked Hiram if I could take a look in Phil’s room and poke around in his shit to see if there were any clues to be found regarding where he may have wandered off to.
After seeing the inside of Porch Rot’s house, I can understand why he didn’t want my half Irish and half Huguenot ass poking around in there. The place is a fucking pig sty--- clutter the whole fucking house through! Phil’s room hasn’t seen the hand of a woman, I suppose, since ‘82, when his mother was killed. It was a damn scene to behold, I tell you— strewn with books of every kind imaginable befitting a paranoid, addled mind. The walls of the room were covered in strange obsessive writing and riddled with bullet holes. Porch Rot explained that Phil had little tolerance for rats in the walls and would often shoot wherever the slightest scurrying sound could be heard within them. It’s called D-Con people! I asked Porch Rot if he was ever worried Phil might shoot him accidentally this way, but he said Phil used 22 shorts for the purpose and by the time the bullets passed through the two sides of lath and plaster in the old walls, the bullets barely packed a sting.
I took inventory of all the books, journals and reading materials I found laying around in Phil’s bedroom, thinking they might provide some clue to his most recent obsessions, and therefore provide clues regarding this latest disappearance. From what I could gather from his shit, it appeared his latest interests were all somehow connected to the new millennium, space aliens, religion, and the end of the world. It was apparent he was obsessed with anything to do with guns, Joseph Smith— whom he claimed direct ancestry somehow— and anything to do with UFO visitations, which he wrote explained the Angel Moroni’s appearance to the Mormon prophet as well as a host of other biblical shit, including the burning bush, the immaculate conception of Mary—A.I. by aliens wouldn’t you know— and the star of Bethlehem, a hovering mother ship.
Heaven’s Gate cult eat your heart out.
Good fucking gracious.
After seeing the inside of Porch Rot’s house, I can understand why he didn’t want my half Irish and half Huguenot ass poking around in there. The place is a fucking pig sty--- clutter the whole fucking house through! Phil’s room hasn’t seen the hand of a woman, I suppose, since ‘82, when his mother was killed. It was a damn scene to behold, I tell you— strewn with books of every kind imaginable befitting a paranoid, addled mind. The walls of the room were covered in strange obsessive writing and riddled with bullet holes. Porch Rot explained that Phil had little tolerance for rats in the walls and would often shoot wherever the slightest scurrying sound could be heard within them. It’s called D-Con people! I asked Porch Rot if he was ever worried Phil might shoot him accidentally this way, but he said Phil used 22 shorts for the purpose and by the time the bullets passed through the two sides of lath and plaster in the old walls, the bullets barely packed a sting.
I took inventory of all the books, journals and reading materials I found laying around in Phil’s bedroom, thinking they might provide some clue to his most recent obsessions, and therefore provide clues regarding this latest disappearance. From what I could gather from his shit, it appeared his latest interests were all somehow connected to the new millennium, space aliens, religion, and the end of the world. It was apparent he was obsessed with anything to do with guns, Joseph Smith— whom he claimed direct ancestry somehow— and anything to do with UFO visitations, which he wrote explained the Angel Moroni’s appearance to the Mormon prophet as well as a host of other biblical shit, including the burning bush, the immaculate conception of Mary—A.I. by aliens wouldn’t you know— and the star of Bethlehem, a hovering mother ship.
Heaven’s Gate cult eat your heart out.
Good fucking gracious.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
01/10/01
At that point in time around the Manfred and Gladiola episode, Clean Phil appeared to be pretty well through with his Michael Stipe days and his Joseph Smith days (or so one would think) and appeared outwardly like any other woodchuck left around here— content to remain covered in cow shit most of the time, living in squalor, shunned by the neighborhood, hardly venturing beyond the confines of Porch Rot’s acreage. Just a few years earlier Phil had been bedecked like a girl in makeup and traveling all over the freaking country with a REM cover band he named Spanking Time For Frankenstein. He even had a girlfriend back in those years, some crazy anorexic chick from Long Island who dropped out of Vassar to travel around with him, leading to her being disowned by her parents. Nowadays she’s a published poet, for whatever that’s worth. Plumped up pretty nicely though. Still a little Goth though. She came around looking for Phil a couple of times now since ‘98. Last time she stopped by she told me she had managed to get published a collection of things Phil had written. From what I understand she went missing too. Maybe the same mothership that snatched up Clean Phil snatched her up too. I guess Phil met her--- Delia was her name --- at a Karaoke bar outside the campus of New Paltz College back around ‘91. Phil showed up there one night out of nowhere, began blowing people away with his renditions of It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Losing My Religion. He had no social skills, of course. He was never a college guy--- had no connections with the college lifestyle--- but somehow music and his clever, obsessive mind bridged some gaps for him. His perfect mimicry of Stipe's voice and mannerisms caught the attention of a group of student musicians, who were willing to overlook his other-worldly freakishness and barn odor to form a band around his talent. And so it was that he got swept away from the farm for awhile into a new reality of artistic expression and notoriety. What a fucking trip.
Phil’s Stipe obsession gave way suddenly to religious fanaticism, from what I understand, one day in early ‘93. The band was traveling from a show at Oswego College to another one at Buffalo and some time was taken to smoke pot and visit the Joseph Smith museum at Palmyra. Where the other band members ridiculed the museum displays, Phil was completely transfixed by the story of the Mormon prophet and his early travails in Upstate New York. Phil’s brain suddenly reprogrammed, I guess you could say, and suddenly he couldn’t be bothered with imitating Michael Stipe, covering REM, or singing in a traveling band from that point. Porch Rot said when Phil came home after that tour he took all his band stuff out back and started a bonfire. The only evidence I found in his room of his earlier REM obsession was a CD of the album Document which had slipped down the wall behind a dresser into a gap between the wall and the baseboard.
I’m rather fond of The Finest Work Song, the first track of that album. I’d still like to know what this line might entail for me though:
The time has been engaged
To Throw Thoreau and rearrange
By March of that year, Phil was camped outside the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas holding a protest vigil during the government siege there. Whether he bought a tee-shirt there from Timothy McVeigh, another upstate New York boy drawn obsessively to the tragic site, is anybody’s guess.
I have my worries though.
Phil’s Stipe obsession gave way suddenly to religious fanaticism, from what I understand, one day in early ‘93. The band was traveling from a show at Oswego College to another one at Buffalo and some time was taken to smoke pot and visit the Joseph Smith museum at Palmyra. Where the other band members ridiculed the museum displays, Phil was completely transfixed by the story of the Mormon prophet and his early travails in Upstate New York. Phil’s brain suddenly reprogrammed, I guess you could say, and suddenly he couldn’t be bothered with imitating Michael Stipe, covering REM, or singing in a traveling band from that point. Porch Rot said when Phil came home after that tour he took all his band stuff out back and started a bonfire. The only evidence I found in his room of his earlier REM obsession was a CD of the album Document which had slipped down the wall behind a dresser into a gap between the wall and the baseboard.
I’m rather fond of The Finest Work Song, the first track of that album. I’d still like to know what this line might entail for me though:
The time has been engaged
To Throw Thoreau and rearrange
By March of that year, Phil was camped outside the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas holding a protest vigil during the government siege there. Whether he bought a tee-shirt there from Timothy McVeigh, another upstate New York boy drawn obsessively to the tragic site, is anybody’s guess.
I have my worries though.
Friday, June 4, 2010
01/09/01
My first case, if you want to call it that, actually involved the mystery of another dead Holstein belonging to ol’ Porch Rot---it was a two year old heifer found sprawled out and bloated in the pasture. That was in ‘98, not long after I sold my milking herd to Cornelius Kuykendall (my gender-confused, likely soon to be ex-son-in-law from Texas) and found myself in need of something to do with myself. Well, it was more than that really---I needed something to keep myself occupied as I underwent chemotherapy and a chestectomy to stave off the hand of death from male chest cancer. (I‘m fine now. Had my chests fixed up and have been given a clean bill of health, so you‘d never know I was ever sick, thank fucking goodness.) It was also just before Clean Phil went missing this latest time. Seems a wedding balloon had landed on the Palfrey place from afar which soon suffocated the animal when the snack became lodged in its airway. After the balloon was recovered from the carcass by Cadaver Dog, it was found that it— the bovine death agent— had been custom printed for the nuptials of two apparent freaks named Manfred and Gladiola, who were quickly identified in an internet search at the Goshen library — due in no small part to the uniqueness of their fucked up names— as residents of Reistertown, Maryland. After they received a picture of Porch Rot’s poor pathetic heifer, sprawled and bloated in the field with an explanation that their wedding balloon had wrought the calamity, Manfred and Gladiola--- flush with wedding cash--- were quick to send out a check for $1,500 to Porch Rot for restitution. Here it is the 21st century and I’m not sure the bastard has any comprehension, even now, of the power of the World Wide Web. If only he had shown the same kind of awe for a Mars rock landing at his feet as he did for that little shitty bit of information the library’s computer cranked out for me just by typing in the names Manfred and Gladiola into a search engine.
Good fucking gracious.
Good fucking gracious.
Friday, May 28, 2010
01/08/01
Orange County is certainly not East Coast Wisconsin anymore. There’s not much of a farm community left to dick around in anymore outside onion country in the Black Dirt. In the hills east of Goshen there’s nothing but a handful of dairy farmers left on the land, and they seem just as bankrupt and as desperate as the next one. You’re certainly not getting paid any better for your milk than you did a generation ago, and of course your taxes and expenses are probably three times what they were. Your best effort nowadays might result in you breaking even or being able to pay half your bills. You better have a wife who can work as a nurse or a school teacher or something. Otherwise you have to resort to some form of hustling just to keep going.
Much as I hate to admit it, if Phebe didn’t have her career at the Newburgh Hospital, we would have probably folded long ago. She calls herself my patron and chronic enabler. That’s surely what she was to Rocky. Me? I don’t know. For a time Starvin Marvin resorted to growing Marijuana between his corn, or so says Stash Skim. Honest man has to know dairying now is like a cruel vice, unhealthy, hardly wholesome to the soul. Shit, I see more farm folk now at the probation office on reporting day than I do at Agway (well, just about all the Agway stores around here went out of business last year).You couldn’t really say they’re family farms that are left unless you counted the dogs and cats on the places. A lot of these guys left prefer to be loners, or women won’t have them. Call it husbandry without actual husbands. If you found more than a handful of farms in the area still in the business of actually producing milk you’d be lucky. That’s all they ever did in these parts years ago. Our milk products were once the gold standard for the country at large. Goshen butter was famous. But you wouldn’t know it today from the look of the place with all these fucking McMansions going up on every knoll and hillside. The milk industry has been abandoned, just like the iron industry, railroad industry, trotter horse industry, knife industry and any other good thing we once had. You know what we have now? Fucking warehouses. We got fucking large square buildings the size of farms plopped down anywhere they can put ‘em. They can park all those Chinese widgets and doo-dads there for a spell before they get sent out to all the retail stores--- which we also have in abundance.
What kills me are these guys like Taciturn Vern or even Stash Skimington who have no equity left to fall back on. Both have little more left on the deed than a rundown farmhouse and an old barn or two. In reality they’re working their asses off for mere beans. Meanwhile these faceless real estate holding companies they’re in partnership with, they’re just waiting for the right day to cash in, and are using the farmers rental of their land to save a fortune in taxes every year. If you could find a more feudalistic arrangement, I’ve never heard it. . .
All those years getting to this point though of retiring. . . boy, I guess you could say it was like being enslaved or something. I can’t get over now how much wondrous shit there is in the world to wrap your mind around when you don’t have to spend your every waking hour concerned about the many and varied needs of 3 dozen lactating bovines. Maybe that’s why people are so quick to judge farmers as an ignorant lot---because smart or not, it’s so damn apparent they can’t afford to put their minds to fucking anything beyond the rigorous demands of their business. Farming’s got to be one of the loneliest, most isolating occupations there is, and I’d say it’s the same here in the shadow of New York City as on the plains of Nebraska. If anything it’s worse in the suburban areas like this one if you go on the idea that the farmer becomes more and more at odds with the neighbors as the farm culture dwindles from existence.
Much as I hate to admit it, if Phebe didn’t have her career at the Newburgh Hospital, we would have probably folded long ago. She calls herself my patron and chronic enabler. That’s surely what she was to Rocky. Me? I don’t know. For a time Starvin Marvin resorted to growing Marijuana between his corn, or so says Stash Skim. Honest man has to know dairying now is like a cruel vice, unhealthy, hardly wholesome to the soul. Shit, I see more farm folk now at the probation office on reporting day than I do at Agway (well, just about all the Agway stores around here went out of business last year).You couldn’t really say they’re family farms that are left unless you counted the dogs and cats on the places. A lot of these guys left prefer to be loners, or women won’t have them. Call it husbandry without actual husbands. If you found more than a handful of farms in the area still in the business of actually producing milk you’d be lucky. That’s all they ever did in these parts years ago. Our milk products were once the gold standard for the country at large. Goshen butter was famous. But you wouldn’t know it today from the look of the place with all these fucking McMansions going up on every knoll and hillside. The milk industry has been abandoned, just like the iron industry, railroad industry, trotter horse industry, knife industry and any other good thing we once had. You know what we have now? Fucking warehouses. We got fucking large square buildings the size of farms plopped down anywhere they can put ‘em. They can park all those Chinese widgets and doo-dads there for a spell before they get sent out to all the retail stores--- which we also have in abundance.
What kills me are these guys like Taciturn Vern or even Stash Skimington who have no equity left to fall back on. Both have little more left on the deed than a rundown farmhouse and an old barn or two. In reality they’re working their asses off for mere beans. Meanwhile these faceless real estate holding companies they’re in partnership with, they’re just waiting for the right day to cash in, and are using the farmers rental of their land to save a fortune in taxes every year. If you could find a more feudalistic arrangement, I’ve never heard it. . .
All those years getting to this point though of retiring. . . boy, I guess you could say it was like being enslaved or something. I can’t get over now how much wondrous shit there is in the world to wrap your mind around when you don’t have to spend your every waking hour concerned about the many and varied needs of 3 dozen lactating bovines. Maybe that’s why people are so quick to judge farmers as an ignorant lot---because smart or not, it’s so damn apparent they can’t afford to put their minds to fucking anything beyond the rigorous demands of their business. Farming’s got to be one of the loneliest, most isolating occupations there is, and I’d say it’s the same here in the shadow of New York City as on the plains of Nebraska. If anything it’s worse in the suburban areas like this one if you go on the idea that the farmer becomes more and more at odds with the neighbors as the farm culture dwindles from existence.
Friday, May 21, 2010
01/07/01
Phebe and I made the mistake of signing over the Colonial to our son Rocky back in ‘98. He had pestered us like hell to sign it over to him with 5 acres of ground and then he turned around and sold the fucking place to cover a huge drug and gambling debt he racked up. Should have known he was up to something. I guess you could say we were conned. What the hell did we know? He had a dry wall business back then and it looked like he was doing pretty well for himself. Some Mafia guys in Newburgh were looking to crush his balls. Rocky said he tried to do what he could to settle his debt without selling the place, but unfortunately this involved a lot of burglary on his part and a lot of stolen copper. Rocky got the shortest sentence of the crew. He testified against the others and helped bring down a mob boss. They’ll probably kill him when he gets out. One of the things he testified about was going around with a couple of buddies offering home repairs to old people who live alone. One of the guys would get the homeowner to follow them outside and the other would sneak inside and grab whatever cash and jewelry they could. Some fucking model citizen I raised. We all got screwed pretty good. Now we got a family of New Yawkas living 100 feet away, their damn Shetland Pony got out last October about a week after they moved in and barely survived a fall through our rusted septic tank. I guess you could say the pony almost did a Mexican Mike. Someday when I have the courage, I’ll have to recount that one with a little more gusto. Let’s just say I earned my Eagle Scout badge that day wading in the remnants of the last 25 Christmas dinners putting a strap underneath it to hoist it out and save the damn runt thing. What else could I do? Those little kids of Tommy’s were hysterical crying.
Devil got his due, I guess.
Yeah, I’ll get my price one day, and then I’ll be on to my next adventure, you can be sure of it!
Maybe the Old Moa will make his escape to New Zealand after all! In grand style!
Devil got his due, I guess.
Yeah, I’ll get my price one day, and then I’ll be on to my next adventure, you can be sure of it!
Maybe the Old Moa will make his escape to New Zealand after all! In grand style!
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