One year ago today: March 19, 2022, land use issues.
Five years ago today: March 19, 2018, remember Bushnell adultery radio.
Nine years ago today: March 19, 2014, all musicians are progressive . . .
Random years ago today: March 19, 2012, fasting, Cowboy Mike.
Bryne e-mailed from Texas saying get out the winter parka. Sure enough, overnight it dropped into the 40s. Don’t hand me any guff about that not being cold. People retire and move south, not north. That does it, if I’m going to freeze, I’ll do it in Tennessee. I dragged the cables under the cabin, noticing there is already a length I left there, I remember it was not quite long enough or something. Good, it will be there when I get back. I’m out of here as soon as I load up the van. Call the Reb and tell her I’m on the way. Here’s that idiotic millennial GPS displaying the nearest Dunkin Donuts is 53 miles behind me. Where do they even?
Test driving the van last evening for twenty minutes, all is ready. I stopped at the old club but did not sing. Too many millennials in the place into that contemporary disco-rap-like chanting music. I can play all that music, you know. Both notes. I’ve got a pre-flight checklist I’m going over right now and I expect to be out of town some point after noon. I’m planning to re-read my old book “Burma Road” by Nicol Smith. There are six audio books (on CD) in the van and twice as many blankets as needed for sub-arctic weather. I’m loading the bass and amp as we speak.
Off to a great start until we hit the freeway near Ocala. You’d think on Sunday the roads would be empty since the traffic jams in Florida are generally due to people using the Interstates to commute. Nearly 3 hours to go 60 miles, I still maintain the first person who stops on a freeway with a clear road ahead of them should be arrested, not excuses allowed unless they can prove they had absolutely no choice. The sign says minimum 40 mph and move accident vehicles off travel lanes. Yet the traffic came to a complete stop on all six lanes around six times.
As I got further north, the sky cleared and it became a beauty of a travel day. The sky cleared enough that I drove an hour after dark. Thanks to Ocala, however, that found me just in Macon. That’s one weird town but it shows the outcome of demographic transition. Statistically, it is 55% non-white. Yet after maybe 6:00PM, you never even see any white people. Every street, store, car, club, café, mall, parking lot, or sidewalk it is 100% blacks. Similar to Florida, the area has few direct roads between districts. I was 1-1/4 miles from Wal*Mart and I needed batteries. It took me almost 5 miles to get there. And 8 miles to get back because I took the freeway rather than drive through them neighborhoods again.
Remember, GPS has no “low crime” filter.
Copper blouse.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I’ve begun reading “Burma Road” in more detail. It’s another of the trend-setting 1930s efforts that avoid telling you what things cost or where they got the money for such adventures, a disgusting format that describes almost every travel account since. My trip here cost $139 in gasoline and $11 in food, but remember the last $50 is the tank up that inevitably seems needed just outside of town. So you arrive here with a full tank. I got the money from my pensions, which I paid into and deserve every penny of. Now, in the book, a film maker from San Francisco takes a dozen crates of food, film, and cameras in a late-model Ford car on a two-way trip down the then just completed Burma Road.
The book is not recommended, partially because not being a good photographer, he’s a so-so story-teller as well. This blog on a boring trip easily outclasses his best chapters, although he does at times have some decent paragraphs. He is also hesitant to say anything negative in a direct manner. He does express the odd bit of pity for the situation in China. Here’s an example. He mentions a school for blind girls, and how he paid one the princely sum of $5 American dollars for one to make him a pair of socks.
Here, in my opinion, is what he should have written. In China, there are ten times as many blind girls as boys. Female children are often not considered worth raising, and are sold into virtual slavery. The boys are sold to tin mines for a year at a time, where their skin turns green from arsenic poisoning and 30% of them die annually. The girls become sex slaves and are often hated by the wife of the purchaser. The girls become liability when they reach puberty, but it is unwise to just abandon them, as they can identify their tormentors.
However, under Chinese custom, blind people are not allowed to identify anyone, so the girls are blinded and thrown in the ditch. I remind all people who say that humans are all one race to get off their high horses and think these things through. It is not good enough to say that White Europeans also committed such sins—for two strong reasons. One is they grew out it, and two, their media influence (unlike China for example) was world-wide, so there is no pretending those still involved in such practices could claim not to know better.
