Image by Frank Miller for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
I scanned nine more images today from the 3 old National Geographics from 1932 and 1933. They are all in the album, 75 years ago, and here are a few samples:
From an article on a flood in Manchuria, I got the image below, and one other that isn't as blatantly chilling, but has it's own subtly sadistic twist.
Today and tomorrow, Sun, Saturn and Pluto form a Grand Trine in the early degrees of Earth signs, on the cusps between Fire and Earth. A few days ago, it was Mercury that transited through that Grand Trine with Saturn and Pluto, with a Full Moon throwing a couple of sextiles into the mix.
I was telling Greyfox about this wonderful time of opportunity and expansion, and I could tell by his voice that he'd gone into fear mode. I asked him "WTF," not in so many words, and he admitted that the "Greater Malefic", Saturn, scared him, and, as he said, "Welll...PLUTO!"
I don't know where the guy has been learning his astrology. He says he learned all he knows from me, but that can't be true. "Malefic" is such an old-school concept. Saturn represents maturity, stability, structure, boundaries, responsibilities and commitments. That's only negative if you want to be irresponsible. I say the planet could use a heavy dose of responsibility right about now.
According to astrology.com:
A grand trine occurs when you have three celestial bodies that are all
separated by a span of 120-degrees. Trines favor focus on high ideals, insight,
vision, creative expression and well-being. Grand trines specifically promote
self-confidence, self-assurance, optimism, expectation, a sense of pleasure, an
easy flow of energy, inspiration, expansion of creativity and a sense of inner
hope and faith.
Because this trine is happening in earth signs, expect people with valuable
advice and experience to come out of the woodwork. These people will help you
accomplish your aims -- whether you want to pitch your latest creative project,
start a business or set up a savings plan for retirement. You can do more now to
make your life secure and stable than you have for a long time.
Proximity to the Fire cusps adds power, energy, spirit and confidence. Grab onto the Cosmic energy and flow with it.
It is also
An Open Letter to the President, Congress, Governors, and State Legislatures
We, the undersigned, call your attention to the attached report by Professor Jeffrey A. Miron, The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition.
The report shows that marijuana legalization -- replacing prohibition
with a system of taxation and regulation -- would save $7.7 billion per
year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and
produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana
were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed
similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2
billion annually.
The fact that marijuana
prohibition has these budgetary impacts does not by itself mean
prohibition is bad policy. Existing evidence, however, suggests
prohibition has minimal benefits and may itself cause substantial harm.
We therefore urge the country to commence an open and honest debate
about marijuana prohibition. We believe such a debate will favor a
regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other
goods. At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy
to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to
taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences
that result from marijuana prohibition.
--Gallagher
Just in case you missed all of the instances in the past five years or so when I've said this, I no longer use dope, 'cause I'm already high.
The "best" thing to happen to me lately, and perhaps in my whole life so far, is the realization that "good" and "bad", and other such absolute dualistic judgments, are unnecessary and generally counterproductive. They're too simplistic and subjective.
Things happen. Whether they are "good" things or "bad" things depends on one's perspective. Perspective changes all by itself, given time. I can also change my own perspective at will. Looked at from one point of view an event may seem good, but from a different person's perspective, or from my perspective at a later time, it will look very different.
From the highest possible perspective, it's all good, or it's all the same... it just IS. It was always a struggle to decide what was right and what was wrong. Since I gave up that struggle, I'm having fun viewing situations from all angles, observing their many facets, and finding appropriately descriptive words for them. Now, about the only times I use the dualistic terms are when I'm discussing dualism.
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
[Updated, with images from 4 years ago, when breakup came earlier. This year, it is still winter out there, snow everywhere.]
This is what "spring" means to me:
It is where we get our water. But I know that is not what the subject for the second featured_grownups challenge in April is supposed to be. It is supposed to be about the season, the one that comes between winter and summer. I am not going to be shut out of this challenge just because we don't have a season called "spring" here, leaving me unable to, as the boss-lady so eloquently put it, "Tell us what SPRING means to you... what is it you are waiting for, longing for, looking forward to?"
I am waiting for breakup, the season that keeps the glorious Alaskan summer from slamming into the stark Alaskan winter. Just because I'm waiting for it, that does not mean I am longing for it or looking forward to it. I know it has to happen before summer can begin, but I am longing for it to just get here and get itself over with.
I look out at the snow now, still deep in the yard and the forest, and all over the muskeg, and in big, dirty piles and berms all along the roadsides, and I must admit I am tired of snow. I'm ready for winter to end. But, no... NO, I am not looking forward to breakup.
The only flowers that emerge in "spring" here are the ones on the trees, the pussywillows, and catkins on the birches, aspens, alders and poplars, that release pollen into the air but do nothing to improve the ambient fragrance of defrosting dog droppings.
There also will be pollen from the conifers: spruce and hemlock, mostly. It comes all at once, as if from a forest-wide conspiracy, and you can see clouds of it when a gust of wind wafts it off the branches. It settles and floats in an orange scum on any bit of open water -- where mosquitoes also breed.
There is no pleasant anticipation in the thought of all the
winter-killed dead things still frozen out there, and the animal
droppings deposited throughout the winter, that will soon begin to
thaw, rot, and stink. But if I want summer, I have to live through
breakup first.
I'm longing for summer, looking forward to the midnight sun, and green
things coming up out of the ground. I don't look forward to slogging
through slush as the snow melts away, and I don't eagerly anticipate
what comes after the slush is melted.
I am not longing to have my feet
sink up to the ankles in muck that wants to suck my boots off, but the
only way I'll avoid that is to stay in the house until the mud dries
up, and I'm tired of being housebound.
Breakup is the peak season for cabin fever. Do you think of "cabin fever" as a sense of restlessness, an urge to get out and about? That's the mildest form of cabin fever, the kind people get in places where winter is less than eight months long. We get that around here, too, but for some of us this season brings something more desperate.
Cabin fever can be a true derangement. It sometimes expresses itself in violence amongst those who have been cooped up together since the snow came down in October. We endure the cold and snow stoically, but when the world turns to muck around us after half a year of cold and dark, and summer is nothing more than a dim memory and a tantalizing hope, some of us snap.
Any way you look at it, breakup isn't pretty. The only things that get me through it are the hopeful signs it brings that summer is on the way. Days are longer. It gets light around 5:30 now, and doesn't get dark until about 10:30 at night. I heard a crane a day or two ago. It's a little early for the big waterfowl, not enough open water yet for their feeding and breeding, but the vanguard is here and the rest will soon follow.
The begonia hanging in my east window has its first flower of the year. I think I can make it 'til summer, but no, I am not looking forward to breakup.
He found the cacophony distracting as he walked in the room, so he turned on his heel and walked right out again. Through the house, out the door, down the steps, and off across the rolling lawn, toward the pond he went, not hurrying, but with apparent purpose. He needed some time and solitude to think about what he would do next.
He could fly to Brazil or take a train to San Francisco and get on a boat there. It would be the long way around, through the Panama Canal, but he'd never been to Panama, and there really was no hurry. He knew where he had to go. He knew that he really had to go there. But nobody said he had to be there tomorrow, nor even the next day. There was time... time to kill.
I'm a slow typist, and not exactly a quick thinker when I'm making stuff up. Five minutes gets me the beginning of a story, that's all.
Wanna play?
Here are the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the 5th sentence.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people. -- Since Pen_of_Mjoollnir, who tagged me, tagged all his friends and subscribers, I'm tagging only those of my readers who want to play.
This week's subject is suggested by Furtherthoughts
UPDATED BELOW WITH MORE PIE
Y'know what's cooking around here now? Nothing. Know who's been cooking around here lately, since I've been sick? Not me, and the kid doesn't cook, so much as he nukes, if you know what I mean. So I don't have any fresh entries for this week's challenge, but I did want to enter, and I had something in the archives. It even more or less goes with the "fall colors" theme we had a couple of weeks ago.
A few Halloweens ago, I posted the recipe for this
Late breaking food news: I found another pie in the archives. It's not a pretty pie, but it is yummy and good for you, as pies go.
...quick and easy, too, since I
quit going for the flaky butter crust and switched to more healthful
and easier to make crust with vegetable oil. The essential fatty
acids in the olive oil catalyze with the cholesterol in the eggs to
produce better nervous system function instead of arterial plaque.
This episode follows this one.
My boss at the Owl Drive-In Restaurant was also the cook on the night shift, the shift I worked. There was a big dining room inside, where they did most of their business. The curb service lot would hold only about seven cars, and I was the only carhop on duty on my shift. The only time I was ever there in the daytime was the afternoon that I was hired, so I don't know what went on there during the day.
I was scared of my boss at first, not for any good reason, just because he was the boss, the man with the power, and he was a little abrupt in his manner and sharp in his speech. The day he hired me, he told me what he expected: speed, efficiency, accuracy and courtesy. Orders had to be written in his code, no exceptions. The abbreviations were simple, and mostly obvious, but there were a lot of them to learn.
My first night there, I learned some of the more obscure points of the code by getting it wrong and being called back to the service window to make it right. I guess my fear and embarrassment showed. One of the waitresses caught me in a quiet moment and told me not to let the boss scare me, he was really a nice guy. He was a retired sergeant, not long out of the U.S. Marine Corps, and that accounted for his roughshod approach. When I got to know him, I really did like him. I wish I could recall his name.
I had a few slow weeknights to get used to the job before my first busy weekend. Most of my customers were airmen from Warren Air Force Base. The boss referred to them as flyboys, even to their faces. They called him, "the jarhead," but never to his face. The guys flirted with me, and I wasn't comfortable with it. My instinctive response would have been to joke around with them, play the game, but I was married and thought that made a difference. I guess my confusion and discomfort made me seem sorta stiff. Some of them tried extra hard to get me to loosen up.
That first Saturday night, right in the middle of the dinner rush when every table inside was occupied and every space at the curb was filled, I served an order to a flyboy, alone in his car, parked right outside the door. He asked me, "Is that a wedding ring on your finger?" I said yes and he said, "Let me see." I held my hand up, he grabbed it, put a handcuff around my wrist and snapped the other cuff around his own wrist, with the chain going through his car window, which was surrounded by a solid steel frame.
I jumped back as soon as I saw what he was doing, and started yelling at him to let me go as I pulled on the cuffs. He had opened his car door and was hanging on it, about halfway through the window, when my boss came storming down the steps waving a nightstick and screaming at the guy to unlock those cuffs. The kid said he didn't have a key. My boss ordered him to climb the rest of the way through the car window, and he did. We were headed into the building for my boss to call the cops, when another airman came up with a handcuff key and liberated me.
I had orders waiting to be served, so I just went back to work. The boss told the kid he was permanently eighty-sixed. He jumped in his car and laid down rubber as he left. I was flustered, and there was some kidding for a while, from customers and waitresses. The boss went back to cooking, and said no more about it until closing time, when he handed me the $20 tip he had extorted from my captor for me. He said he'd demanded $50, but the kid didn't have that much. After that, I wasn't afraid of him any more.
I loosened up and started joking with the guys who flirted with me. Several of them asked me out and I turned them all down. My tips improved as customers got to know me. Some of the guys didn't exactly flirt, but they showed what appeared to be real friendly interest in me. As much as was feasible in the moments while I took orders, served food, and picked up trays afterward, we got acquainted. I found out where they came from and gave them the parts of my history they asked about.
Every night just before closing there was a mini-rush of guys who had just gotten off the swing shift at the base. One night one of the friendly ones offered me a ride home. I flashed the ring at him and said I was married. He said he was, too. His smile was sincere and his eyes were nice, and a cab would have cost me most of the tips I'd earned that night, so I said okay.
We talked all the way to the Kinmans' house that night, and he showed up again the next night to take me home. Within a week or so we had kissed and soon after that we started going out to a remote part of the base and steaming up his car windows until dawn. I was seriously smitten with the man, and to all appearances the feeling was mutual. We talked a lot, about all sorts of things, each time our breathing would return to normal. He knew all about my abusive marriage and I knew about his shotgun bride who chose to live with her parents and raise their baby on the Air Force allotment.
I don't recall his name, either, and it doesn't matter. We'd been hot and heavy lovers for only about a week or so when Mrs. Kinman woke me early one morning and told me that Marie had woken crying in the night and kept her up until almost dawn and she couldn't condone such immoral behavior as my staying out 'til dawn. We had to get out. She gave me 48 hours, "for the baby's sake."
That night at work, I told my boss I had to quit. He seemed sincerely sorry to see me go, and he was more than willing to pay me what I'd earned without waiting until the end of the regular pay period. ...period... oh, yeah! I had been a little worried about pregnancy, but on the morning I put all my stuff in a cab and took it to the bus depot, my period started. I went to a nearby drugstore for pads, then, for economy and convenience decided to try something my mother had always frowned upon: tampons. Never wore pads again, except for minis for a little extra protection.
I don't think I even seriously considered trying to find a place to live and staying in Cheyenne. Nor do I recall the conversation with my husband, or how I explained to Al that I was coming to Washington. I'd be willing to bet anything, I didn't tell the truth. Knowing the person I was at the time, I probably told him I missed him too much to wait. Anyway, that's the first plausible lie that comes to mind now.
By the time Marie and I got to Tacoma, Al had rented us a house.
The episode that comes before this one can be found HERE.
It is difficult for me to remember much detail about this time of my life. I don't mean that remembering is painful. I mean that I don't remember much. I can remember the little house we lived in. I have a mental snapshot of it, as I approached off the street, walking on a gravel driveway. It was a small, square, Ozarks vernacular stone building set among several others just like it, in a cottage court about half a block south of Main Street, near the east end of the town's business district.
I don't recall the inside of that little house, or anything I did there. It's a safe bet that one of the things I did to pass my time was reading, but I don't remember a library in that town, and don't recall any books I might have read at that time. I must have cooked, but I don't recall what the kitchen there was like. My dishes and household goods had been left in the shed behind Uncle Frank's and Aunt Katherine's house in Sacramento, so we must have bought some cheap replacements. Blanks.
I also don't recall eating in any cafes or restaurants in the town, but I probably did, at least a few times. I remember that there were lots of bars and tattoo parlors in Waynesville, but I don't think I ever went into any of them. I never saw Fort Leonard Wood because it was out the opposite side of
town from the way I arrived and left. We didn't have a car. Al rode
on an army bus from the post to town and back.
Obviously, Al had been in at least one of the tattoo parlors in Waynesville, or closer to the gate of Fort Leonard Wood, several miles east of town. One vivid memory I have is of his tattoos. He had "Lynn" tattooed on one of his arms, but I think he might have gotten that done when he was stationed at Fort Ord. Still fresh and swollen and backed with inflammation on his chest, over his right nipple he had "sweet," and over his left nipple, he had, "sour." He unveiled them proudly the first night I was there.
I was not impressed. If he'd had a big multi-colored dragon or something, I might have been impressed, but he had these small one color things, and my name was in a misshapen heart, both a cliché and poorly executed. By that time, I knew better than to criticize, but I couldn't generate enough enthusiasm to praise them, so he got pissed off at me anyway. He was sober, so I didn't get beaten up. He sulked.
At some later date, he had my other name done on his other arm, that time with a rose, all in black again. The last time I saw him, about '68, his pecs weren't visible, so I don't know if he'd done anything with the sweet and sour tats. He still had the rose and the heart, but where my names had been there was just solid black ink.
There was a little dress shop on the corner not far from where we lived, just across from the courthouse square. That was where I bought the green satin dress I'm wearing in this picture. I needed a new dress because Al's best buddy was getting married and we were in the wedding party. We were the wedding party.
The selection I had to choose from in that shop was small. The dress fit, but might have been more appropriate for cocktails than for a wedding. I don't recall wearing it again after that... not many cocktail parties in my life... not even one as far as I recall.
Bob and his girlfriend Montie were from Cheyenne, Wyoming. The guys were finishing up their combat engineer training at Fort Leonard Wood. Al was to be transferred to Fort Lewis, Washington, for floating bridges training, and Bob was going someplace else. I had been in Waynesville a while, maybe a month or more. Bob and Montie had been engaged since high school, and decided to get married then even though she wouldn't be able to accompany him to his next post.
Within a few days of the wedding, the guys were to ship out for their new posts. Montie was headed back to Cheyenne. She consulted her parents, then invited Marie and me to go with her and stay at her parents' house until Al settled into his new assignment and found us a place to live in Tacoma.
Cheyenne in the summer was scorching hot days and cool nights under an immense open sky. The Kinmans let Marie and me have their family rumpus room in the basement, where none of the day's heat ever intruded. Montie had a car, and she spent a day showing us the local sights. Montie's mother was nuts about my daughter and volunteered to babysit if I found a job there.
I think of the job I found in Cheyenne as my first real job, because the live-in housekeeping job in Sacramento was that: housekeeping, living in. I read the classified ads, and Montie and her mom advised me about the various employers in the ads, and told me where things were. Of the available jobs at the time, the one that looked best was a carhop position at The Owl Drive-in. At least, I think that's what it was called.
I phoned, arranged for an interview, went out there, and got hired on the spot, to start that very night, working from 5 PM to 1 AM.
to be continued in Cheyenne....
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