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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Friday, July 9, 2010

01/14/01

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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.