Mile Marker Zion

[sooZen]

oh man, I have lost it a few times myself.

Hope that finger is better. Glad you have some remains. Of the finger that is.

I don't like cinnamon much and it is supposed to be good for me and my blood sugar so I take it in pill form but sometimes I belch cinnamon and I hate that. I would rather eat a pickle.


Yeah, you are right. Autumn is popping. So are the pomegranates which accommodates the birds. Had a grosbeak in the yard this morning, down from the Sacramentos and heading for Mexico. The hummingbirds have all left. Well, all but one and I left the feeder out for her. She seems reluctant to leave but a cool front is blowing in right now and may blow her away.

I am leaving this weekend. Adios my mingo friend. Popping off to the Land of Enchantment and to a show and our Far Outhouse. A little home in the woods, no running water only electricity. Small, cozy and perfect. A ring of pines (nine) circle my deck there. I like that. I am looking forward...hard to stay in the NOW.

[stilltrucking]

I been working all day
sorting out a bunch of stuff I got from the bear's aunt
she had to go into assisted living
she must be in her nineties now.
worked for ATT for like fifty years.
one of things I got is her award for Eurudition
I wonder if it is silver. weighs a ton.
Have you ever held a gold bar in your hand
about the size of a paperback book
it weighs a ton.

I been thinking about needle nosed Peterbilts today
I used to love those trucks
Loved to drive them.
Huge truck but the cab no bigger than a volks wagon bug(i like those mini busses too.)
you can reach out your arms and touch both doors.

I been organizing my work space here by the computer
I got it laid out like the cockpit of a peterbilt

That picture is a doozy
my eyes drawn to that patch of blue off to the write
right
I do than a lot
ya no
know
sonic errors

don't know why
I guess because when I write I am taking dictation, I hear the words not see them until they appear on this screen
and I am too lazy to go back and edit maybe
or maybe I suffer from attention defecation disorder

[the mingo]

sooZ - ain't seen any hummingbirds round here for a couple of weeks. I think they have booked for Central & South America. Gone to hob & nob with the Mayan & Incan ghosts. How do you say "ghost" in Spanish? In Mayan?

Started to get. Story of my life. Started to get.

My toes been itching for a week now. Either it's a fungus or I'm getting wanderbus. Shit! Wanderlust. Maybe Jack's right, just leave the typo's in.

Ok, sooZ, hope ya got a good time coming this weekend. May enchantment be the thing in your wings. Ya'll have fun. And come back.

[the mingo]

Thanx on the pic Jack. Glad ya liked it. Never held a gold bar in my hand. I went off the gold standard sometime in the thirties. Hard to remember when anymore. I liked that what you you said 'bout "attention defecation disorder". I get a touch of that from time to time myself.

Who needs to think anyways? People tell me all the time, "You don't know what you're talking about." Started about the time I turned nine or so. All hail Attention Defecation Disorder!

When Cain laid his brother out he opened the door for the kid killers.
That's as far as I'm going to get into that tonight.

Anyways...

[stilltrucking]

I worked for a guy who extracted the gold dust from the sweepings from the floors of wholesale jewelers. He would send me up to New Jersey about once a month to take the gold a place that was the most secure location i have ever seen. Double fences with dobermans running between them and god knows what other defences.

It was one of my more interesting jobs.

I was working the grave yard shit in a chemical plant (Eastern Rare Metals) in Baltimore. The owner bought the floor sweepings from wholesale jewelery companies and extracted the precious dust from the sweepings. Amazing how heavy a bar of gold
(the size of a paperback novel like Vonnegut's Mother Night ) is
He also started into another venture of making copper sulfate. Real easy money. All you need is a vat of boiling sulfuric acid the size of a back yard pool, maybe ten feet deep and about fifteen feet diameter and then some scrap copper wire. It was my job to monitor the process through the night and occasionally add some more scrap copper wire to the brew.
This was accomplished by placing a 55 gallon drum full of copper wire onto a pallet and then taking the old forklift and raising the the pallet to the rim of the vat of boiling sulfuric acid and then climb up onto the pallet and tip the drum over into the boiling acid. It was a very old fork lift and the hydraulics leaked so that the forks slowly went down if I took too long the pallet would catch on the lip of the vat of acid tip over iand tip me in.

James I never want to get into Cain and Able, day or night. Which makes me wonder about something
wondering why every one calls you steve.

[the mingo]

That one's easy, Jack. When I came along my folks differed on my name. My father wanted to call me James. It was his first name. My mother said there were too many Jim's already in the family, on both sides. She favored Stephen. My father said no, my name was to be James. My mother, knowing the score and a bit about human nature said OK, but his middle name will be Stephen. Hence she always called me Steve and every one else, knowing the score and a bit about human nature, followed her lead. My father, God bless him, won the battle but lost the war. I learned much from them both. From my father I learned what it was to be a man in this world. From my mother I learned the difference between getting your way & making your way.

[stilltrucking]

Thanks for the info
I think jimboloco is James the IV

I learned a lot from my dad too.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
But then the bible says much knowledge increases sorrow.
Took me years to mourn properly for my dad.
Jimboloco never knew his dad, a bomber pilot killed before he was born. I used to envy Jimbo that.

[the mingo]

Jack, I had troubles with my Dad too. Or maybe the trouble was me. I ain't never been able to sort it all out. I was in the west when the news found me that he had died. I was ok for a couple of hours. Then I was on the floor curled up like a baby wracked by spasms that kept coming from somewhere unholy deep that went on for hours.

That didn't happen when my mother passed.

Some connections are so solid that the life we live denying them is a fake thinking better that than the truth and we are so wrong.

[stilltrucking]

I know my dad loved me steve.
I have come to have compassion on him for his mental anguish.
I cried when JFK was murdered, but I was really crying for my dad. I did not realize it at the time. Something called abreaction I think.

He was a brilliant man, a chess player, he played Boby Fischer to a drawl. Which was quite an accomplishment. he took me with him to the Pentagon after world war two before the iron curtain came down. They had a short wave link hooked up to Moscow and americans were playing the russians in a match. I got sleepy so he laid me down on some mail bags stacked in a corner and told me to try not to piss on them. I was a bed wetter.

None of us have middle names, when people ask me for my middle name I tell them my parents were poor and could not afford them. My real name is Jackie, but no one calls me that anymore.

[SadLuckDame]

I know my Dad loved me too.
My therapist wanted to put all the blame on him,
she didn't understand all the blame he carried around
all on his own already.

It's nothing to me to carry some of the blame as my own, I sleep at night now.

The therapist just wants to screw people up by letting them separate
from their earnings, panes, by putting it on someone else. I love my Dad, and when he says he loves me with tears in his eyes, I believe him completely, effortlessly.

If he wasn't pissed, he took me bike riding or fishing or riding the motorcycle. My Mom may have never been pissed, but she never took me motorcycling, bike riding or fishing either. I don't blame her or if I do, I'm figuring it out on my own raising a daughter.

[the mingo]

The mind is a library. A city. A crossroads even. You can get there by helicopter camel.

Martin Poloroid was the greatest helicopter camel pilot that ever lived. He was Billy the Fuckin' Kid with rocket launchers mounted in his nose & 48 ft. laminated blades fixed to the top of his skull. That guy flew in there and saved me from Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Bob Dylan, the Buddha & Elmer Fudd not once but three times. He wore a small cross on a chain around his neck. Last time he came for me the whole world was under fire when I heard over it all the whop whop whop of those big blades sticking out of Martin's head. He was laughing & the lead was meaning business as he sat that flying camel down and looked at me with a grin. "NEED A LIFT?" he shouted. "GET IN." Once back in the sky he looked over his shoulder at me crouched on the bay floor. He shouted over the roar of the turbine "NEXT TIME MING THAT YOU FEEL YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN TO FUCK WITH THESE GUYS REMEMBER JESUS IS THE WAY THE TRUTH & THE LIFE" as he pointed to the cross dangling from the chain around his neck. "TO HELL WITH THAT GUY & SCREW THE FLAG TOO I JUST WANNA GET HOME IN ONE PIECE" I shouted back. Martin looked out through the cockpit glass and said "I AM HOME, MING. HELL, I WAS BORN FOR THIS!"

At the beginning of winter in the year '88 I learned that former Warrant Officer Martin Poloroid, who had found a job flying helicopter camels for a hospital rescue squad, died on his way home in a car accident east of Rapid City in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It seems he came around a curve & there was a jackknifed semi blocking the road. He swerved to miss the truckdriver who had heard the car coming and was running up the road to warn him. There was ice on the road. The car went into a skid and through the guardrail and plummeted down the mountainside. Martin was alive when the truckdriver got down to him. There was a snowstorm on the wind. Martin died there in the cold because the helicopter camel from Rapid couldn't get to him in the storm. The truckdriver said Martin's final words on learning the camel couldn't make it were "Fuckin kids, they don't know shit. But that's not their fault, I guess. Not their fault." On the seat next to him was a copy of Bukowski's War All the Time. There was a bookmark placed in it just shy of the halfway point.

The news broke my heart.

The teamster retired soon after and moved to mother-bum-fuck Alaska where he opened a fishing guide service. I kept in touch with him over the years after the accident. He died in 2002 from hypothermia & exposure after jumping into the sea to save one of his clients who had fallen overboard into the frigid water. He had saved that client's life.

It was that teamster who gave me Martin's copy of War All The Time by Charles Bukowski. Not for sentimental reasons does it sit on my shelf here at the lodge. Right next to my Bible.

[stilltrucking]

I sometimes think
Yes but what has Jesus done for me lately.
(I would delete that because I am not sure how I meant it.)
I suppose I don't pray to Jesus any more. As if He already knows what I need. But a couple of months ago I was in such pain that I called out His name. Not so much as a prayer but more as a complaint.



The last couple days I been thinking about the huge statue of Jesus Christ in the main lobby of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. My mother used to take me there every week to the eye clinic after I got bit in the eye by a stray dog.

Just mundane stuff, nothing to compare with your powerful Christian testimony. But I remember my mother never wanted to use the main door. We always went in by a side entrance. I don't think she liked to look at that statue. She was spooked by it. She would hold my hand tightly as we walked by it and look away.

I don't know why I been thinking of that statue the last couple days. So much good work done in the name of Jesus. And so much bad work. I suppose it all balances out in the end.

Jesus told me or I heard a thought when I was down on my knees with bloody underwear praying to him for a nights sleep. "Ok now go and walk like a man" And I slept very well that night. He has so many people to take care of I try to stay out of His face.

I was born for this mingo.

thank you

[the mingo]

Everybody's in a jam, Jack. I say that in all humility.

[the mingo]

Sunset @ Nine Mile Point

[SadLuckDame]

Mingo, this is a beauty.