To my children,

"your parents experienced the fear of possible world war with nuclear warheads during the Cuban missile crisis, their favorite president was assassinated, then his brother too, as well as Martin Luther King. They saw their friends and their brothers killed in Vietnam daily on the nightly news. They saw college students killed by their own National Guard, and civil rights protesters attacked with fire hoses and worse. The 60's, art and music were people's way of lifting their spirits in those types of times. "

We hid under school desks
slept to burning visions
Watched as dogs attacked
and hoses washed away the denied
But for every bad there was a good
a song, a film, a painted picture
For every bad man there was a good
a speech, a quote, an epitaph
Old men were called the greatest generation
We lived helpless through their rule
They called us Boomers
We wrote hopeful songs
and made the realistic movies
They call us Boomers,
Now, although old, is our time.

D.S.S.

I have blogged about the Kansas wind on a few occasions and I think yesterday warrants another plug from this windy godforsaken place. A picture will help spare me the words.

I was cleaning my eave troughs yesterday. As I also have said before, my front yard globe willow tree necessitates this very often. The tree sheds everything, leaves, buds, live twigs and dead branches. They all eventually end up in my eave troughs it seems. This is a constant that I have grown to become accustomed to due to the constant winds we have here.

The natives honestly don't notice it. They've lived with it all their lives and they think it's normal, the constant, unrelenting blow. I know better, I've lived elsewhere. Places where you can have a conversation while outdoors without speaking directly into another's ear. Places where you can go outdoors on the patio and actually read a newspaper without folding it into a small multilayered square. Where you can play frisbee with the kids. There are places in the world where the wind is calm, at least a few hours each day. Calm is the exception here, not the rule.

Now back to the picture. That black dot on the roof is my Budweiser cap. I have had it for years. I don't drink Budweiser and normally I don't keep my hat on the roof. I wear it on my head at least part of the time when I work in the yard. Here you really need a hat. Otherwise your hair hurts at the end of the days you must work outdoors. Yes, your roots hurt after your hair has been blown constantly in the wind all day. A hat is a necessity here if you work outdoors. I hate hats as much as I hate the wind. But I have to wear one. I'm growing older, my hair is thinning and I can't afford to senselessly lose it to the sun and wind.

Because I don't wear a hat always, I don't have hat finesse. The natives wear them always, outdoors, indoors, at the dinner table, they may even sleep in them. I have known men for many years here in Kansas and I've never seen them with their hat off. They may screw the damn things on, I don't know. I think maybe that they have worn their hat so much, ever since childhood, that they have a permanent groove around their head that the cap or hat sits comfortably into, secured, unmoveable. This is possible, there are native tribes in Africa that form their heads into all sorts of shapes. I think Kansans unknowingly have done this too. Their hats don't blow off their heads. I've never seen it!  

Being a native Iowan for my formative years, I didn't have this advantage of head shape forming. I was cursed to simply grow my skull sort of rounded like, with no grooves. Not conducive to cap or hat wearing. My hat blows off regardless of how I screw it on. The only hat I can wear without it blowing off is a stocking cap, and then only if I pull the attached ski mask over my face. They are very uncomfortable for me to wear.

Well to finish my point here, my hat blew off yesterday and ended up on my roof. It evidently landed on the roof in the only place in Kansas where the wind doesn't blow. It has been up there for almost 24 hours now. I could get out my longer ladder and retrieve it but now I'm curious. How long can it possibly stay up there? The wind is blowing 29 mph already this morning. Surely it will blow down soon. 

Such is the life of John.

E.

Looking down into our depths
where sadness overcomes us.
looking deeply into what we hope is our soul,
the helplessness we feel reigns.
and we cry not for ourselves
but for the one that is hurting,
the one who knows what is so very soon in store for her.

We cry because she knows that the time has come
her struggle is over, and life will end.
we now cry not for our eventual loss
not for her coming end
but for her knowing that death is so near.
her knowing that whatever is her end, it is better than the pain she now feels.
we cry because we have learned this too.

We capture the sadness and try to dry the warm tears
that flow over us and it calms our anger.
Anger that the one we love will be leaving
and she will finally know what all of our fates will eventually be.
We capture the sadness, embrace the thought
that we cry not for the ignorance of the mystery of life
but for both her and our frightening knowledge that a life we love will soon end.

DSS

My friend @Bricker59 has an expression I like, "older than dirt", well I am a few years older than Thom so I guess I may be called "older than the primordial slime and lava that the dirt is made from". I mention this because, in my circle of family and friends I am known as the "sixty's music fan".  Since the 80's when they started calling my 60's music Oldies, I haven't listened to much else. I have listened to 60's music performers that have had new hits though. Van Morrison, Cher, Paul McCartney, John Fogerty and strayed to the 70's / 80's to Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Mellencamp and Springstein, but hardly any 90's or current bands. Got to admit I love Smashmouth, Greenday and Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders.

My daughter gifts me "Rolling Stone" magazine each year for Christmas and I really do watch the Top 40 each week. So I'm not totally oblivious. But I'm known as the 60's guy and this Christmas, my music in passing, was called old fogey's music by my grandkids although they all can recognize the Beatles, Stones and CCR when they hear it. I have seen to that.

So here's the deal. I do love lots of music, rock music, pop music, classical, jazz, blues and the big bands. I decided it was time to get with it and come to appreciate "current music", music my younger family loves. I figure if I ever wanted to have a conversation with them again that they felt important enough to pull the ears plugs from their ears attached to what ever MP3 player, IPhone, ITune device they are currently plugged into, I better get hip to their music.

So this year I am going to try to get acquainted with at least one current popular tune and band/artist each month. I really think the kids will respect me for it. i need to show the interest. I must break out of the shell from turning into my parents or worse yet my grandparents. So I'm looking for new musical talent. Last month, January, I discovered L.P.'s "Into The Wild", I've included it below. You will recognize it as the music for the Citi Bank Utah rock climbing commercial.  
That song was an earworm for me through January and much of February.

For February's new talent, to me, maybe not you, is the Band "Fun" and their single "We Are Young". This also I first heard from a commercial that was shown during the superbowl this year which I include. The studio version shows their talent. They also performed on the Letterman Show recently.        

Here's the complete performance.

Next month for March, I'm leaning toward some very good tunes from  Florence and the Machine. There may really be life after the 60's, there really may be.

E.

As the street lights hum to life
roads reflect with orange flavored sheen
car lights bright of red and white
leave trails behind the wiper blades
Mercury vapor parking lots,
piled high with snows remains,
white hot stains of rocker salt
are washed away by the winter rain  

many nights of snow and skidding ice
with no hope of warmer days
we bundled up in down feather coats 
and followed the orange plowers sand and blade.
we slowly walked in our winter boots
our minds wandered to nicer days
when winds would change from north to south
and blow in the warm winter rain. 

E.

I can tell Bull Shit from a mile away. Not because I spent my first few years on a farm around livestock which included bulls. Frankly shit smells the same no matter what specie of animal it is deposited from, even from man. The difference is from man it is squirted from the mouth or the pen or the computer. We read it here on Xanga all the time.

I was taught that when I bragged about myself,  I was spewing B.S. My parents despised braggarts.

1. Thou shalt not brag. If thou brags, thou art spewing Bull Shit.

You see their logic was if I did things well, then it would diminish my accomplishment by allowing others to know about it. They might think I was good at something. And we can have none of that. Some logic huh? That was Commandment #1. To this day I have trouble putting together my accomplishments that I have had through the year for my performance review at work. I guess I'm just not Texan or Canadian enough to brag about myself easily. I work for both. 
Never did figure out how many Commandments our family had because as I grew and acquired more knowledge, new Commandments were written to cover any deficiencies. They were living documents you might say. An other was :

 2. Thou shall not mention sex in any form, if thou speaks of sex, thou art spewing Bull.Shit.

If asked about your sex life, your answer should be "I was taught as a gentlemen to never speak publicly concerning matters of the heart." Of course at my young age, my matters of the heart consisted of only a few private moments alone in the bathroom, which had to be fast. I had three older sisters and my bathroom time was usually at the bottom of the occupancy schedule. And  I was never going to speak publicly about what I was doing in there, I really didn't need to be reminded of that. I thought I was the only one that had discovered it and I wasn't going to ruin the fun by telling anyone. Even if I did, I probably would be breaking Commandment #1 also because I certainly would have been bragging. And probably really couldn't handle the additional guilt.

3. Thou shalt not spend time in the pool hall, if you play pool thou art spending time doing Bull.Shit.

The pool hall was a terrible place for me to go. When I went it was always clandestinely. I was never good at pool for two reasons. One, I didn't get to go to the pool hall that often, it was just too hard sneaking around so no one would see me go in the joint and two, I had to learn to play while keeping my eyes trained to the door, in case my Dad or one of his good friends came in. You can not learn "english" while looking over your shoulder at the front door. That really was B.S. because I really loved playing pool. It wasn't until my junior year in high school that I learned from one of my dad's oldest friends that my father was the local pool shark in town when he was in high school. I would have loved to play pool with my dad when I was a kid but we never did. You see, he never bragged about it. It was B.S. you see. I never did understand that Commandment.

4. Thou shalt not drive a Ford, Chevy or Chrysler product, they are all Bull Shit. Thou shall drive a Studebaker.

I can remember only one Chevy and one Ford in our family while I was growing up. And they were before I learned to drive. It was all Studebakers through High School. "Hey, lets go to the Prom, the ol'man will let me use the '58  President this time, I promise, I won't be picking you up in the pink Lark". Now that is Bull Shit in anyone's book. We can have airplanes, speed boats, hunting dogs, fishing boats and shotguns but no Ford, Chevys or Chryslers. Jeez!

Well, I could go on for a long time telling of my family Commandments but frankly I have forgotten most of them. I, like Moses, broke the tablets as soon as I left my father's house and tried to wash them from my mind. Only for them to emerge after I had my own children. Having learned B.S. so well as a child, I really had no trouble spewing it at my children. And like me, they also learned to recognize Bull Shit when they saw it as well.

What B.S. Commandments did you have growing up? How well do you recognize B.S. ?

E.

As we gaze out into the morning's early start, it is predawn twilight. The Sun will surface very soon, but for now its only evidence is a lighter sky and crimson horizon. The Orange Orb will peek above the earth's rim, through the lightly layered clouds, at first slowly. But with a squint and blink of the eye, it will appear to pop to the surface as an air filled buoy rising from the Atlantic's depths. It will be a perfect Orange Circle with sharp defined edges. For just a moment, we get a glimpse of the Sun with the naked eye. For just a moment, as it rests in the distance, we can see its round completeness. We are allowed only that brief moment before it turns into a bright burning point of light that for the rest of the day we are forbidden to stare at for risk of blindness. This is how our days begin. 

E.

"I have read that when the page is blank and you are at a loss, you should write about what you know. I wonder this and think , what do I know? Or rather what do I know that I care to write about or share.

One thing that I'm not sure that I know but I believe I am more aware of than most is, as we work, wander and play around here on the Internet, am I the only one that wonders about all of the information about ourselves that we are putting out there on Google's and other's servers?

You know when I got my first (landline) telephone number and started using it, I was very confident that what information I was putting out on the telephone network was private. Unless someone tapped my lines illegally or law enforcement obtained a warrant to tap or collect my phone records, my business was safe from prying ears. It was my legal right guaranteed in our Constitution, one of the amendments about government and privacy intrusion, search and seizure. When and where did that right go away on the Internet, the Internet that we the citizens built with our tax dollars?

 When did corporations like Google, Microsoft and our own government agencies like the NSA get the idea our business on the internet was free information for them to garner, distribute, and correlate. Just because it is there doesn't mean everyone has a right to it. HTTPS has lost its security if information gathered while on a secure server is distributed among many companies, I'm talking credit card numbers, addresses, phone numbers, financial records, the most private details that you must share with companies in order to do business over the web.

 Consequently information we give companies non internet related, like paying bills personally and other records are placed on those same internet servers. These records are shared also. Read the new Google privacy policy, the information you give any of their companies, which are many and enormous, is shared across their entire corporation. They own hundreds of companies that we are unaware of or companies we choose not to deal with perhaps. I wouldn't be surprised if this may be challenged in the Supreme Court as early as this year.  I could go on for pages about this but I think we need to know about this. Large private Corporations, like my own, are spending billions of dollars to protect themselves against these intrusions, private citizens should too. There will soon be a worldwide breach in the private information companies like Google are telling us they are securing, which will change the way business will be done for decades to come. Just beware the Android.

It seems the definition of privacy has been changed to "why are you worried, what do you have to hide". Well, there is a big difference between the words "hiding" and "privacy". We should wake up."

What you just read, I wrote on a Sunday, 29 January 2012. Today, July 1, 2013, we continue to read, hear and wonder about what the outcome of the Edward Snowdon security breach will amount to. Is there really anyone out there that is truly surprised that the NSA is collecting all of our telephone records. The Patriot Act has been enacted and extended at least three times since 9/11/2001. You would have to be stationed at the North Pole for the last 12 years with no access to any communications if you didn't know that the Patriot Act allows exactly what the NSA is doing. Basically spying on American citizens in the name of terrorism. And as we learn more, European, British, Canadian, Japanese and China's citizens. Pretty much everyone on the Earth. The internet and telephone landline and wireless network has very thin borders. 

Corporations are in on this also. Google, Verizon, ATT, you name them and they are spewing private information about their customers like teenage drinkers with the dry heaves. When we say the government's agency, the NSA, we must include the private corporations that the NSA has subcontracted to do their dirty work.  Booz Allen Hamilton being the most notable as the employer of whistleblower Snowdon. We now must decide whether he is whistleblower, spy, traitor, hero or patriot.

I find it hard to call him a whistleblow when as I said, anyone with a brain has heard of the Patriot Act and the debates that have gone on mostly unnoticed. How can you whistleblow when so many in this country have already stood by silently as this ridiculous act was passed and extended so many times. No one, no one in this country should be surprised that the NSA has overstepped into the intrusion of our personal lives in the name of terrorism. Perhaps we have met the enemy and found that he is us.

I agree whole hearted with my friend Steve Wozniac and what he said last week about this Edward Snowdon affair. You may want to read The Woz's statement here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/steve-wozniak-edward-snowden_n_3505727.html

I would have to go a long way to call Snowdon a Hero, but I would call him an expeditor, he has delivered a cold slap in the face to America, waking us up and someone must say "thanks we needed that!".

Seizing phone records and other information of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American and should be stopped immediately.

E.

 I have felt the ache of hard work
the dull bore of endless rows
I can erase the remaining harvest from my thoughts

I feel the dirt

Only on bent knees and back and cramped neck
Can I peek up to see the horizon
The sun tells me the time
the cool breeze my rest
Warm water from my belt quenches my thirst
but stirs my empty stomach
Silently I work only for Saturday's pay
and Sunday's short afternoon. 

I plan the long walk

There will be no kindness of strangers
And only uncertain rides
I will go home and hope it will be there.

 

Now it snows.
The winds have blown,
the cool north weather shifts
Light snow fog breezy and mist
34
branches shine mercury wet
flakes rest melted on grass 
roads splash and hiss
into night.