One year ago today: April 5, 2015, “Tote The Weary Load”.
Five years ago today: April 5, 2011, private penthouse in Caracas.
Nine years ago today: April 5, 2007, 144-1/2 extra beers.
Random years ago today: April 5, 2014, the evil sidewalk.
So, we now know why one of the huge uninhabited areas of central Florida exists. The Babcock nature area. Something is happening out there, but what? There is a price drop but this has happened before without much consequence. It will still require a miracle to get something decent in my range. I spot the price drops are dated around March 1 and are just appearing now. Most of the time wasted is still bozos who list trailers as real estate. Everything non-obvious has to be checked with Realtor.com (who do not list mobile homes without the land, good boys) and all this takes time.
I’ll tell you a little bit about the farm if you’ll keep it in mind that only my very early life was really farm. We moved to the house on the edge of town before I was school age. The problem was, the old man tried to move back to a farm ten years later when there was no farm. Just raw land.
That came up because I wanted to tell you how few wild animals were ever seen out on the prairies. Very rare. You’d see the odd coyote in the distance, but never a fox or wolf. Why? Because every farmer had a gun rack in his pickup truck and everybody took pot shots at anything that resembled wildlife, including by best friend’s German shepherd. There was nothing left that dared show itself, so any idyllic scenes of farm life with rabbits and deer scampering about are pure bunk.
Falkirk boat lift.
(Yes, it is a canal lock that lifts boats.)
As for the remainder of today, you get different fare. Nothing is going to happen since I cannot get my sidecar in for the starter repair until Saturday morning. This brings everything to a standstill, including a surprise trip to Naples I had tentative for tomorrow. How about I tell you some tales from the trailer court that might just contribute something to an understanding of my character and actions. I’ll type instead of taking real breaks. I don’t know if I’ll ever adopt another pet, but if I do, it will be something that takes three naps per day.
The first thing that would strike you if you had visited our farm would be the lack of tools. Other than a hammer and a saw, and a pair of those useless “fencing” pliers, there was nothing. That’s nothing to work or learn with, nothing to make repairs. When it broke on our farm, it stayed broke, often for lack of a cheap fix that nobody could accomplish. There were some mismatched pieces in the old man’s tool box, but nothing useful because he made certain of that.
This dismayed me because I knew I was no farmer, I realized I needed a backup trade for anything I went into. This made sense to me from an early age and I honestly believe I would have made a dandy tradesman of some sort. I’ve already explained why I was not permitted to take any shop courses, but besides, I had my parent’s sworn word they would put me through university. Not college, university. And parents would not lie to their own children, would they? Not bible-thumpers like mine.
I had also seen a diagram of a pipe-welding machine. For the first time today, I think I finally saw the actual device. They are laying new pipe over near Ives Diary when I passed this wagon on the roadside. It has a series of electrical control panels which lead me to conclude this is an automated welding apparatus. Not exactly a robot, but enough to put the crew out of work.
As soon as the weather turned hot, my tires began to leak [air] again. Up they go on the hoist and into a tray of water. This was two wasted hours. The leaks are too slow. Even with the best procedures available, not a trace of a leak on either, even when tactfully overinflated to betray any pinholes. A gallon of peach tea later, we decided to lay on a double dose of bicycle green slime, which has disappointed us so many times. Other than that, it’s a special order 3.50x19 [tire] from Taiwan or pay the rip-off Harley joint in St. Pete’s.
So, you want to hear more about farm life. There isn’t much more, it is boring as fuck. The same people every day, telling the same old joke each, so bored they pick petty fights, and year-in-year-out of nothingness. Any attempt at bettering yourself is punished back into line, Of course, somebody will ask what about the big outdoors. There’s a person who’s been watching too much Disney, for sure.
Like Texas, most of the prairie has ten months of too hot or too cold, and one good month in the spring, the other in the fall. The problem is, nobody can tell you when that stretch is going to occur. You can’t plan around it because it moves every year. Winter is the dead season and summer is perpetual heat and choking dust. There are no fishing holes, all the places lucky enough to have a creek have been private property long before the Civil War. And yes, the farmers will shoot at you, always aiming high but why risk your neck?
As for the outdoors, there really isn’t any. Most farming districts of today once had free-range cattle which totally wrecks the natural flora. And all the native trees have long since been cut down. Those tourist photos of aspen, a birch tree, are all replants on government land. All that’s left natural is imported trees and plants like cheatgrass that cows won’t eat. All the pine and buttonwood is long gone, I’ve never seen a native example of either, I just remember that’s what they taught us.
The cow hooves also punctured the soil for thousands of acres and you can still see wide swaths in the shaded areas where trees take root, but never seem to grow more than ten or so feet. More like large bushes, useless for firewood. And any plant spread by cow droppings is now weeds that croweded out almost all the natural prairie grass. Most of the surviving plants came from Europe and smell a little off.
I’ll tell you a little Texas lore. Not many people know that many of the oldest Mennonite families came to Texas (it was actually Oklahoma back then but nobody knew that) by way of the Ukraine, not direct from Germany. Fleeing Catholic Europe was a major source of immigration and many went to the Ukraine, which is where they learned how to plant winter wheat. They were semi-invited to the USA in the early 1850s for a simple reason. The American farmers planted spring wheat and nearly starved.
Spring wheat ripens in fall, just in time for the locust plagues, drought, and killing frosts every third year. Just ask the Mormons. But winter wheat was harvested even before the birds could eat it. All the rest is legend.
Except the legacy of the time in the Ukraine. It meant the elders, who insisted on nothing but proper German, could all converse in Ukrainian. And they often reverted to Ukrainian when not wanting us kids to know what was up. As for German, we were not allowed to speak it ever, not even counting. It worked. By age ten, none of us could speak German. Most parent could speak three languages, including Ukrainian but could not read or write it. To this day, I know swear words in Uke when I hear them, although I don’t know any meanings.
True, I missed this deal, but my hesitation was largely because I did not know enough about repairs to be sure it was fixable. The sharp dude who got it lived in the first unit for years, but I imagine he’s got himself set up in much fancier digs now. I believe after the fire, the place sold for $40,000. Now it must pull in around $100,000 a year. And I’m still looking for a place that might never happen unless there is another bust.
I checked the listings and went back to read that last statement again. We’ve always known something funny was going on in the Tampa-Orlando corridor and this afternoon it looks like entire subdivisions of mobile homes just went up for sale. I call these a “bloom” and here is what looks like just north of Plant City. I’ve never checked these out because I won’t buy again unless I get the land, but I’ll hazard a guess: The trailer park has just announced a huge rent increase. This is why I want to own my own land.
Another book, this time about Ghana, the African other African country with gold and oil besides Nigeria. I’ll get you the report, but for now, I’ll say the book, published this year, is exceedingly well-written. The author is either part genius, or top of the class journalist. And accurate, because he describes the illegal Chinese miners in the countryside with an accuracy that cannot be imagined, he has seen it. Right down to the inflections of the Cantonese words and habits of the mining provinces.
Now Ghana, corrupt as it is, beats Nigeria any day. They at least have an infrastructure that works, albeit at a glacial pace. A police detective gets transferred to a northern town and is assigned first day to a murder case. Someone killed one of the Chinaman operators and put him in a pit where the diggers would find him. The author also knows police procedure down to a T. It’s no different than here, the idea is to trick you into a confession by bluff, bluster, and threat before you realize you have rights.
ADDENDUM
The Internet is such a hodgepodge that I still buy books when I need specific information at hand. I regularly comb lists of top music because there is so much of it I have not heard. That’s correct, as a musician I have a preference for individual tunes, not artists. I often could care less who recorded a song so it often surprises me to learn many of my favorites never had a hit on the Billboard Top 40. Yet people I’ve never heard of got as many as fifteen.
Why a book? Try to imagine the task of finding out, say, the birthdates of all the hundreds of recording artists who had a hit. Unless you got lucky, you could still be searching weeks from now. Get the book, which is how I flipped to the pages of birthdates. Scanning down the lists, I was amazed to see how many of the top names were born in the 40s. Hasn’t anybody really famous been born since then? Plus, the majority of recording artists that endured got their first hit in their twenties. Those any younger didn’t seem to last.
This was only my first glance, I may just read this book over a period of days to gain some perspective on who’s where on that age scale. I mean, Ronstadt turns 70 this month and I haven’t released my first hit single yet. My excuse is that I was a bass player or something like that. Hey, it took me decades to get over the notion that bass players can’t front the show. Which reminds me, shouldn’t I give Cowboy Mike a callback? Who knows, this time he might see the light.
That is wishful thinking. I still have never met a Florida guitar player who could learn new music. They play what they play, same as me. Of the 61 tunes I learned note-for-note with the five piece band, not one remains because it was the “wrong” kind of music. I would have to relearn the music to play it again. You’d think we (Cowbody Mike and I) could just pool our tunes and go play, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead, I wind up learning all their tunes and they learn none of mine. When I point this out, they say idiotic things like “bass is easy”.
You got it. In the songs I play, the guitar is easy. So easy, they don’t want to play it. And round and round she goes. I’d say the biggest difference in attitudes between guitarists and bassists is that a guitar player will refuse to learn any song he does not personally like. That also accounts for the rotten boring three songs they play for every good one.
Last Laugh
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