Category: Orphans

Coming home from work just now I thought of a line from a Warren Zevon song that was first released in 1976 — although I first heard it in 1978 — called “Mohammed’s Radio.” Even to this day I am not sure of the song’s meaning. I suppose if you believe our president was born in Kenya as a keystone to some complicated plot for the Muslims to overtake our country, then perhaps you might figure the song has something to do with Islam. The closest to the religion of Islam that I can find in the song, though is the name Mohammed, who happens to be running a pirate (unlicensed, not Arrrrrrh matey!) radio station.

I feel I had to get that out of the way before I can make my point, which is about a line in the song. There happens to be some magnificent lyrical lines in the song, which Zevon performs while touring with Jackson Browne in 1976 in the above You Tube clip. One of my favorite ever is in the song where Zevon sings: “You know the sheriff’s got his problems too. And he will surely take them out on you … “

And here we are at paragraph three. As I was driving home after a hard day of looking at how much things cost I reflected upon all the gasoline signs showing prices edging to the side of $4 a gallon. Some grades of gasoline are already there, here in Beaumont, Texas, — ironically where the modern oil business began with the Spindletop boom in 1901 and is in an area that is home to some of the nation’s largest refineries –and elsewhere in the U.S. An Orlando, Fla., gas station is charging $5.69 per gallon.

So the late Warren Zevon sings: “Everyone is desperate, trying to make ends meet. Work all day, still can’t pay the price of gasoline and meat.” Yes, this was 1976 when the song was released on the self-titled “Warren Zevon” album. Meat prices aren’t all that expensive yet but they slowly climb along with everything else when gas prices go skyward as a result of exorbitant oil prices spurred this week perhaps by the Middle East perhaps getting a case of “Independence Fever.” Who knows what will be the raison d’etre next week?

History just keeps repeating itself, at least when it comes to gasoline prices. The minister for oil barrels of Uzbekistan gets a cold and watch out! There goes gas prices flying sky high and then you have to take out a second mortgage to buy a porterhouse. If you have experienced a gas crisis, be it from World War II, to the rationing and “outrageous” jumps in price with the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, then you might just remember what else inflated in cost. It seems like every time a tropical storm blows toward our nearby Gulf of Mexico, up goes the gas prices and practically all other items for sale.

I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. History can be good to find where one goes forward. But it also can be pretty damned depressing.

Perhaps that’s why rocking all night long with Mohammed on the radio was some comfort food for the soul in Zevon’s mind. Maybe something similar will provide you some solace, although that may not be the case if you are a confirmed “Birther.”

Sorry for burying the lede. Some day it will work for me. Happy Easter Egg.

 

Pardon me, boy, is this the Chattanooga choo-choo?

Don’t be calling me boy, you cracker-faced …

Excuse the little bit of racially-tinged humor that just kind of goes splat in the solitary world of written words. But then, what do I have to apologize for, anyhow?

I’ve recently been working on an essay about trains. I don’t know why. Apparently I was taken with the trains I have written and others I have known, not in the Biblical sense, of course. When I finish the piece and publish it here, if I publish it here, then perhaps you will know what I mean. If not, do like a chicken and cluck it.

Trains were once the stuff of romance and lore and fiery, often-steam encased, crushing death. I woke up in the middle of night humming “Wreck of the Old 97,” how Woody Guthrie or Jimmie Rogers is that?

Maybe in the days before planes, took off, so to speak, perhaps trains seemed something finite. One must remember that in the days before and during the Great Depression, especially those early American years before, life itself was much more finite than today. That isn’t to say life is finite, perhaps I should qualify that with living in the sense of breathing and possessing a heart beat. Someone out there knows what I mean, I’m sure.

But trains in their heyday were something personal and having a quality of something one, in a sense, owned. The “Old 97,” the “Wabash Cannonball,” “Hell Either Way You Take It,” or squatting around with hobos squatting around a dusty box cars tossing those bones and singing “Timpson, Teneha, Bobo and Blair … ”

Airliners, unless they meet some kind of unfortunate end, are mostly a model. “Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?” Better yet, have you ever seen a DC-9? Stevie “Guitar” Miller’s heart keeps calling him backwards as he gets “on that 707.” The late John Denver liked being way up there too, “Rocky Mountain High,” but he he got no more specific than a “jet plane” on which he was leaving. Yes, John Denver wrote “Leaving on a Jet Plane” although Peter, Paul and Mary made the famous before Denver himself saw popularity. Ultimately it was a so-called “experimental” plane in which Denver met his demise. I don’t know that I would want to fly in something experimental.

I suppose for romance of objects to work that a little anthropomorphism must be applied, and no that is nothing like Cruex. And so it is that I find myself using romance and Cruex in the same sentence, I think it is time for a wrap. For as Isaac Newton and countless others discovered, there is nowhere to go but down.

 

It ends up that I spent the past hour or more working on my book.

Yeah, I’ve told people on and off over the past five years that I have been working on a book. Even though much has not come forth. That is due to a lack of direction.

But I have decided my direction has to come from somewhere, and why should it not come from here? I mean, why shouldn’t at least part of my book come from the time I have spent over the past half-decade? These have been some of the most tumultuous, yet some of the most interesting of my life. These five years have marked a time of facing aging and pain head-on. It is a look at “middle age plus then some.” It isn’t always a happy time.

Many folks want happy stories. Many want uplifting tales. Mine aren’t all that way. Yet, all of my stories aren’t all depressing. I have written on this blog on all sorts of topics regarding my life — past and present –society, politics, yadda, yadda and yadda. So why shouldn’t from these Web pages come a book of sorts?

You want to know why? Well do you?

I can’t think of any reason why such a book shouldn’t be.

My mind is beginning to focus on turning, at least, parts of EFD into a book or a CD or both.

Obviously, all of this blog doesn’t belong in a book. And so it will be that this “book” or whatever publication coming forth will contain excerpts from the past five years of EFD as well as fresh pieces of life from Eight Feet Deep.

What happens, we shall see what we shall see.

So let’s see if we can make a book out of this, what do you think? Or don’t you?

This has become the “Spring of Fire” in Texas. One may only hope that it doesn’t become the “Summer of Fire” too.

I heard on the TV news this morning that all but two Texas counties were touched by wildfires. I don’t know which were the lucky two of 254 counties, but it would seem the chances were good for all 254 to end up in blazes.

Firefighters have been battling a blaze of more than 7,000 acres about 30 miles north of where I live. This fire or fires in Hardin and Tyler counties have threatened more than a couple of dozen homes, according to local media reports. It is hard to say, but luck, skill of those fighting the fires and perhaps a combo of the two have kept homes from also going up in flames in that local fire.

The fires have threatened at one time or another a part of the Big Thicket National Preserve where I have gone for winter hikes on several occasions. I mention “winter” because most people with any sense wouldn’t hike in that tangle of flora and creek bottoms during Summer. Sure, it would be a shame if fires ran through the Turkey Creek Trail in the Thicket, just as it was a shame some of my other favorite hiking areas were shut down after Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

Nature has been taking care of things there in the Thicket and in other East Texas woods for many, many years, though. So far the forests have managed to come back as good as ever. One might note, the natural areas of the Sabine-Neches watershed fared much better over the years in its bouts with nature than it has  in tussles with man.

Mostly urbanized and suburbanized American folks have to be reminded at times that nature was the woods and prairies and plains own personal gardener before man moved in started messing with the natural order of things. Progress? I guess.

My worst allergy is from the tree, or shrub, named Ashe juniper but is better known by its nickname, mountain cedar.  Thankfully, those irritating abominations aren’t found here in deepest eastern and Southeast Texas. It is found in abundance in Central Texas where I once lived. One time when I worked out there a fellow told me that this scourge of mountain cedar has grown to such excess because people farmed those lands and, as they do today, did all that was possible to extinguish those fires and save the homesteads. As a result the Ashe juniper flourished there while the natural wild native grasses went unseen for years.

My guide told me that the lightning-induced fires that burned the lands before man came along to put out the fires created a natural cleansing for native plant life. How much all of that is true, I don’t know, nor care for that matter. For that type of life cycle plays out worldwide.

It is great my neighbors to the north have not been burned out of their homes. Perhaps it also is a tad unnatural, which is probably a bit blasphemous for me to say so, coming from one who once worked risking his life to save the property of others from fire. But that’s the way it is and the way it will always be until it isn’t the way anymore.

As this Friday comes to a close I say: “Good riddance.”

Yesterday I apparently pulled a muscle while using my mobile computer at work. It’s been difficult dealing with all the other crap with the doctors, pharmacy, the bureaucracy at work and all the rest.

The Flexiril I was prescribed is making me drowsy. Like the old hypnotists in movies and TV would say: “You are now getting drowsy.” So before I lay me down to sleep, I say see you next week, sucka. Or maybe before. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz