| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
|---|
having said that: i went down to austin for my mother's 66th birthday. it was a 4-day weekend. i saw my sister and neice. i saw some cousins. stayed at the farmhouse. had a close encounter with some coyotes. went over to driftwood for birthday barbeque at the salt lick and then paid a visit to the bharsana dham hindu temple. had a cool poster i recently got framed. drank a lot - one night my mom and i killed two bottles of wine by ourselves. i rode back to fort worth with my mom. when i was transferring into the passenger seat of my mom's car, she gave me a shove on my butt as way of helping me over to the seat. i banged my head on the outside of the door and then landed on my hand crushing my finger a bit. no big damage, but it hurt. my mother took apart my chair (removed the wheels and folded down the backrest) and put it in the trunk. the caliche road on our property is in such bad shape that my mother has to drive her honda no faster than 10 miles an hour to keep all the rubble on the road from damaging the undercarriage of the car. i call this trip "the crawl". finally we hit paved road and start heading home. about fifteen minutes into the trip she looks over at me and says: "did i put your wheels in the trunk?" "the wheels to my wheelchair? you better have." "well, i probably did." "whoa, whoa...no. there's no 'probably' in a situation like this: you're either absolutely sure they're in there or you're not." "think i should check?" "please." she pulls over to the side of the road and goes to the back of the car. i hear her open the trunk and close it again after a few seconds. then she gets back into the car. she smiles at me. "there not there." she turns the car around and heads back to the farm. about halfway back she pulls over again and says, "maybe there under the bag of garbage." the gets out again and quickly looks in the trunk. there still not there. we go all the way back to the farm, including "the crawl." when we get back to the farm house, my wheels are lying on the dusty ground, glistening in the sun. she puts them in the trunk. i told my mom i was going to tell this story to everyone. to be honest, i'm kind of disappointed that we didn't make it all 175 miles back to fort worth before we found out. it would've made a much better story. |
|
|
|
have you ever been to maui? |
it'd been a much funnier story, dan, if i'd made it to fort worth only to open the trunk and find my wheelchair was little more than a serviceable deck chair. and perhaps about the same time one of my cousins would happen by the farmhouse, look down at the ground and say, "are those wheelchair wheels." |
I also very much like the idea of the quonset hut and turkey buzzards out under the stars, but I think they are not nocturnal. Well the b uzzards, the stars are questionably nocturnal, as they are present during dayliht but, oh hell... But am not sure of the drinking self to death either, though I tried that for some twenty years. it never did work. I couldn't even get a good dwi or a bad liver out of it. Must have been the vitamins I was on. I am, as they say, and as those dead drunks before me have proven without a doubt, I am paying for it now, but nonetheless still very much breathing and taking up space. when I went to retreive the rabbit ears for your cat, they were unresurrect-able into any toy shape or drunken visage of one. So I did not send along to Sarah. However, if you still want me to get some, I think we've got some at the office unused and untangled and perhaps useable as cat toys. I was west of OKC yesterday morning, just after sunup, further west into the scrub than I had ever been, out in Chickasaw land.. I don't care for that part of OK. I guess the far western region is more to my liking, and certainly the eastern mountains around the joseph river. I taught in OKC with a friend of mine from Dallas. |
about as reasonable as a connection between detroit and madagascar. i don't get it. i don't get much these days, so no big surprise there. although i have met a bunch of people in portland that seem to have connections to both austin and hawaii-- so maybe there's something to it after all. "i will drink every night out in the stars until i finally keel over and my body is body is devoured by coyotes and picked clean by turkey buzzards." that's pretty much my plan. give me a call if you're ever in the mood for bad company. |
|
swine. |
|
|
|
I recall growing up in a house that rarely saw a canned item that was not in a reuseable glass container. When can, tin or steel, began showing up, they were washed, cleaned, flattened. the round ends were used to plug holes in wooden walls in the grainery, or in the cellars. the flattened part became a patch or metal component of a wagon or other farm implement. Everything was used, but I do recall a large amount of burning of refuse, paper in particular, which somehow escaped being burned in fireplaces or stoves. As I grew up, consumerism hit the place and things changed, and then there was garbage pickup...except out in the rural parts where we farmed. There was the family dump, two of them that I know of, for non useable items from bent pipes (which usually went into any concrete in place of rebar) and rotting wood (which usually was cleaned of any nails and then composted), on an originally large section of land (1000's of acres) which got divided into brothers and sisters plots and farms. I recall only a scant knowledge of metal and other stuff in the dumps, glass ware for instance, and the later generations of the family would scavenge these for folksy items..I grew up on a farm that comprised 242 acres, but adjacent my uncles 300 and other relatives' plots ... so it seems much bigger than it was...this for upstate New York. Miniscule size farms compared to the midwest and further west certainly. |
|
|