Don't Look

Watching TV can be harmful to your sense of well being. That's not an original observation but it is a true one. Here I see this live report from Wuhan, China, the site many experts believe to be the source of the coronavirus from its wet markets.  "Wet" is a euphemism for blood and the picture I saw of a worker cutting up body parts of some animal in this massive tub of blood was enough to drive one to carrots, cabbage and kale.

And so the killer virus.  It's difficult to dismiss the suggestion that this is just evidence that nature has always sought balance for species over-populating themselves.  COVID-19 is selective in its spread to those who have serious health issue as well as those who have become old. Isn't that the logical way to thin the herd?

Too few of our leaders are blessed with the gift of critical thinking. They could learn from this pandemic that among their fellow human beings we have lost, thousands should not have been selected for disposal. There is no cure for getting old but we all accept that as a firm life rule.  But social inequities that lead to many of the health conditions that make the person vulnerable to the virus can be corrected.  How we achieve fair and equal governance should be as important as finding that serum that will foil this edition of the plague.

My reading of history is not encouraging for belief this latest viral attack will make any lasting course correction in the pursuit for a more humane society. But all we can do is try while always taking care to follow that guiding principle: Illegitimi non carborundum (Mock-Latin for:"Don't let the bastards wear you down".)

Will Rogers Tells Us

Everybody who lives in my commune would know who Will Rogers was because we are all old.  For everyone else I will tell you that in the 1920s and '30s he was a national celebrity of Oprah Winfrey magnitude.  Big, big enchilada.

Rogers was a Cherokee citizen born in 1879 in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in what is now the state of Oklahoma.  His father was a hard-working, prosperous ranch owner who had fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War and was himself an owner of slaves. Both his parents, Clem and Mary, had Cherokee blood.

Of all the Indian tribes, the Cherokees were the most successful at adapting to the White American culture.  They adopted American names.  They became farmers and ranchers.  They believed in education. In their nation they adopted American political structures and even wrote their own constitution. Rogers took great pride in his Indian heritage although he rarely referred to it in his professional life.

Will was riding horses when he was 3 and his father  hired a man to lift him on and off the saddles.  Like his father, Will did not find schools to his liking and only attended for a short time.  While his father was a gruff, humorless, but savvy business man, his mother was well educated, witty and charming.  It was from mother Mary that Will Rogers inherited his charismatic talent to become a national, iconic, celebrity.  He delivered Mark Twain-like monologues. He acted in movies (silent and talkies). He wrote newspaper columns (the editor of the New York Times instructed those working on Roger's copy to change nothing in his spelling, sentence construction, or punctuation).  He performed lariat rope routines in the Ziegfeld Follies.

In 1935 Rogers was filing copy on a ten-day flying tour of Alaska with his pilot friend, Wiley Post, when their plane went down near Point Barrow, Alaska.  Both men died in the crash.  America went into a shocked state of national mourning for the beloved cowboy humorist and schools all over America adopted his name.

Let's give the last word to Will:

             Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.

.

Hear Will Rogers

I don't belong to an
organized political 
party, I'm a democrat.

Will Rogers Says

Everybody is ignorant
only on different
subjects.

Advice From Will Rogers

An onion can make
you cry but there's
no vegetable that
can make you
laugh.

Kid Days

Lately my thoughts have drifted back to my pre-teen years on that farm seven miles west of Grants Pass where my best pals were the Wardrip brothers, Bob and Lee; Bob my age and Lee two years older. Yeah, the ones with whom I went on that spelunking fiasco.

One time we started playing with hoops, using those metal rings barrel makers used to hold the barrel's staves in place. We would cut a three foot long stick from a board and then nail a piece of lath about five inches long crosswise to the end of the stick making it a T-device for driving the hoop as we ran behind it. We drove those hoops for miles.

One day we went hooping with some beer bottles to the Applegate Tavern where each one would net us a nickel which we would immediately spend on candy bars carried by the tavern. It was necessary to cross a narrow highway bridge over the Applegate River to get to the tavern so driving the hoops over the bridge was too dangerous. There was a high bank at the entrance to the bridge and we would throw our hoops up to the top of the bank and then walk across the bridge. This time Lee and I were successful in getting our hoops to the top of the bank, but Bob didn't release his in time and it went flying back over his head right into the windshield of a farm truck approaching the bridge. Loud sound of shattering glass.

The driver couldn't stop on the bridge but he pulled off on the other end and came running back shouting as us. He was using adult language. We knew it was in our best self-interest to not discuss what happened with an angry farmer, so we scrambled up the bank and went running through the woods to escape his vengeful justice. We did feel guilty about the unfortunate accident but considered the loss of our beer bottles and the consequent loss of the Mounds chocolate bars to be payment for our sins.

The whole thing pretty well cooled our enthusiasm for hooping and we never went back to it.

Robert W. Service, Yukon Gold

I know, I know. His critics say his stuff is not poetry.  They call it doggerel and even Robert W. Service himself said he wrote verse, not poetry. So, whatever you call it, its lowbrow.  And I love it. So it rhymes.  So what?  From The Cremation of Sam McGee:  "...He turns to me and Cap, says he, I'll cash in this trip I guess and if I do, I'm asking you won't refuse my last request. Well, he seemed so low I couldn't say no, then he says with sort of  moan: yet 'taint being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains..."

That's from memory...a few words may be wrong.  Anyway, I consider Service to be someone I envy for his talent in making his own kind of music, critics be damned.  So I let RWS's spirit guide my fingers on the keys when I write lowbrow stuff.  Like this unfinished country western song (Netarts is a small community west of Tillamook, Oregon).

My sweetheart's in Netarts and I'm in the slam,

I shouldna done what I did.

With smokin' and drinkin' and now here I am

From actin' like some half-ass kid.

(to be continued)

Once I complete the libretto I will have to find somebody to compose the music or maybe find something in the public domain so no royalty issues would be involved.  I considered the Star Spangled Banner but it just didn't feel right.  So that goes into the ToDo bucket.

My Russellville home is celebrating April's poetry month and has invited contributions from the inmates. Here is my submission:

Save the Rose Garden

We've lived year by year with terrible fear

Of bombs raining down from the sky

But now the real fear, it seems to appear

Is breath from that next to us guy.

We slink to our rooms and stare at the walls

The TV feeds unending gloom

Loop after loop, walking the halls

So it seems our future is doom.

Our years we are told, suggest we are old

In truth that is hard to deny

But hear what we say before we go cold

We're still here, we're not dead, watch us fly.

Hey, some of Shakespeare's early stuff wasn't all that grand either.  Of course, he was only three.