HATFIELD and MCCOYS in ARKANSAS

It was bound to happen.  It’s not surprising that it happened in Arkansas. It is surprising WHERE it happened in Arkansas.

I was invited over to a neighbor’s for some moonshine a few nights ago. (Actually, it was wine). It was pretty coincidental because I was also invited over to another neighbor’s for desert the same night but a few hours later. Both neighbors are great folks. The neighbors around here were all quite successful during their careers. They are quite easy to get along with.

About the time I was leaving the wine visit, I commented to that neighbor that I had really hit the jackpot because now I got to go visit the next neighbor for desert. My wine drinking friend informed me that I must really rate because he had lived here for over 15 years and he’d never been invited for any desert. I left not giving this comment any real thought, just seeing it as an observation.

While having desert at the second neighbor’s house, I made the comment that I couldn't stay too long because I had really tanked up on a good volume of wine at the first neighbors and wasn't used to doing so. That’s when the second neighbor pulled me aside and said that I may as well know a bit about the neighborhood history.

Down the road a few addresses is a large rambling lake home. It was built by the developer of the town and as the developer of a town of 25,000 people, he did quite well. When the home was built, a tennis court was built in the back of the house, overlooking the dock and the lake. This is very nice property.

A number of years later the home was sold. The new owners of the big house were collectors of exotic birds. As birds tend to do, they roamed everywhere. This wasn't a huge problem with smaller birds like Guinea Hens and of the like, but these folks had a large collection of various birds, including Peacocks.

Because the Peacocks were large and in numbers, the new owners who were not tennis players, decided to convert the tennis court overlooking the lake into a large bird sanctuary for the Peacocks. There was already a reasonably tall chain-link fence around the tennis court to stop the tennis balls from flying into the lake, so logic told the new owners it would also work for the Peacocks. I do not know if they ever did anything about the top of the tennis court or if they did and it just deteriorated over time.

Something apparently happened to the new owners after some passage of time. They either moved away or passed away. The birds didn't go with them. The smaller birds continued to mill around the area until the wild game here in the woods ate them. The same fate was not met by the Peacocks.

Somehow, the Peacocks managed to get out of the tennis court sanctuary and being large birds that can fly a bit, wound up all over the neighborhood. For some reason, they decided that a great place to congregate would be beneath the front deck of the house I bought and now live in. This was before my time.

The late husband of the lady from whom I bought the house became disgusted with the Peacocks which tended to frighten him when he went out in the morning dark to get the newspaper. The big birds would hear the clomping on the wooden deck and create havoc by squawking and pooping all over the place.

So, this fellow, being an avid golfer, decided the best way to rid himself of the big birds was to take his nine iron, or whatever the appropriate number of club would be probably based upon the size of said bird, and clobber them upside the head when they emerged from beneath the deck.

It turns out that my wine drinking friend had been feeding the peacocks for quite some time because he and his wife loved the exotic birds. He lives just next door. At some point he noted fewer and fewer birds were showing up to be fed and made some comment to another neighbor that the Peacocks seemed to be disappearing. At that point he was informed that old so-and-so had been nailing them with golf clubs. My wine drinking neighbor was outraged.

There was a confrontation. Words were exchanged and tempers flared. Sides were drawn up between varying neighboring factions. At that point, no more words were exchanged. Ever!

Being new to the neighborhood, I had been able to walk a fine line between these factions, being invited to this home and that home and that party. As far as this neighborhood goes, I feel very welcome here and like it a lot. But, I shall challenge myself to remain very ignorant when it comes to inquiring about any history here. In the future, when I am invited to one neighbor’s house, no other neighbor will ever know about it. In the meantime, I’m keeping a closer eye on my cat. 

TO BE OR NOT TO BE...THAT IS THE QUESTION

The older I get, the more problematic life becomes. I've been spending a lot of my time reading. I’m reading more than I ever have in my life and always felt this was a good thing. But, after today I’m beginning to wonder.

I have come to subscribe to my own theory that the more one reads, the more one reads. There are two prongs to this theory of mine. The first is explained partially above in that as one learns more, one is introduced to more and more information which stimulates ones curiosity to find out even more about what is out there. I would refer to this as “macro curiosity”.

Within “macro curiosity”, there is another element I would refer to as “micro curiosity”.   With this element, one does not seek to expand knowledge by looking beyond the parameters of what one has been reading, but looks within the confines of the item which is currently being read. So, if I’m reading about a certain type of Dinosaur, I may be stimulated to read more and more about paleontology  in general to learn about the environment in which that one Dinosaur lived and how it related to other Dinosaurs. But, if I am mostly bewildered about that one specific Dinosaur, I may recognize that my reading and/or cognizant abilities are limited and read the same material over and over again to better understand it, thus “micro curiosity”.

Some time back, I developed “micro curiosity” about a front page article I had seen in the newspaper:

http://z10.invisionfree.com/usedtobedoe/index.php?showtopic=70891

I had just returned from the Ozarks and if I read this news article correctly one man named Albert was lamenting the alleged murder and disappearance of his brother Gary, who was alleged to have been shot and fed to the pigs by his ex-wife Sandra, who was also the ex-wife of that complaining brother Albert, who was originally married to Sandra and warned the now missing Gary that she was bad news and not to marry her. In other words, both brothers married the same woman albeit at different times, and both marriages ended in a rocky manner with Gary’s being the rockiest as he appears missing and/or dead, or both, not to mention the possibility of  having become pig food which I have already mentioned. 

In wandering from my main point here I would assume that the second wedding, Gary’s, would have been a major Jerry Springer event, assuming that the first husband and brother Albert was in attendance. It would seem weirder yet if Albert had been the best man or a groomsman in the wedding of his ex-wife to his now missing brother. I’ve never experienced anything this weird in my own family or the families of anyone I know but I’m not dead yet and I guess there was still time. As fate would have it, I have received an e-mail from a relative with whom I am not particularly close in that I’ve barely heard from him in the past forty years or so. I won’t go into the details of his e-mail but will only say that had he lived near Shell Knob, Missouri where this event occurred there are good odds he too would have wound up married to this woman.

This is the article I've become micro curious about.  I’m trying to apply my own life experiences here to understand why I've escaped such incidents.

I've been to the doctor a lot lately and every time I go, I have to fill out a questionnaire about my lifestyle practices ie: do I drink often, do I smoke, and how often do I exercise?

One of the questions asks if I practice unsafe sex. I always answer “no”. In the back of my mind I feel most patients answer the same whether it’s true or not. I’d bet Bill Clinton answers “no” and we all know the truth there.  I honestly feel the question is answered for me each morning when I wake up and look into the mirror and briefly ask myself how the loser looking back at me ever got into my house. I’m no Bill Clinton and I’m never going to be president.  

Back to my point. It seems to me that a deep, deep reading this article indicates that some people in the Missouri Ozarks such as the family mentioned have determined one method of practicing safe sex.  With the advent of AIDS and various troubling forms of STDs, Ebola, etc., there has developed an adage that when one has sex with someone they've also have sex with everyone else that the partner has had sex with too. Thus, this family had determined that if they keep marrying the same woman over and over again, at least they know who she’s been with as does she for that matter.  This is the only logical reason for why I can imagine the second brother would marry the bad news ex-wife of the fist brother.

Finally, the micro curiosity element leads me to my final and most personal application of this theory. When I was very young, and going through puberty, I had an incredible crush on Marilyn Monroe. Even as a child, I was a realist. I would never come to know Marilyn Monroe and would not even come to meet her, regardless of her untimely death. In adopting the practical theory of the Ozark family above which suggests in a round about way that if you have sex with someone, you have had sex with everyone they have had sex with too, then I ponder, if I had had sex with JFK then would I also have had sex with Marilyn Monroe, and would it really be the same? In my own mind, the answer to this question would always be an emphatic “NO”! Undoubtedly, there are others out there who would answer the same but in reality I’m sure that some of them would really mean “yes”.

So, in my mind some of life’s choices simply cut a couple of ways. You may be able to spare yourself the prospect of catching some hideous disease if you can wrap your brain around the though of getting hitched to one of your former in-laws. But, in doing so you may be setting yourself up for becoming a big ol’ dose of pig food.

That’s something to think about, right there!

CULTURAL STEW

 It took a slow burn to finally push me over the edge in regards to the declining state of American culture. The tipping point was a trip to the local Wal-Mart to buy some much needed groceries. I was making my final turn in the procurement of my weekly grocery supply when I wheeled my basket into the cereal isle and then it happened. Two escapees from local competing trailer courts went into a head-butting catfight right there in front of the Post Toasties!      

Upon arriving home with two paper bags full of food, I deplore plastic, and a very worn brazier which I was able to garner as a souvenir from the cat-fight battle of the century, I was greeted with an alert that I had a pending e-mail from my attorney, Douglas.

It seems that another customer who contemporaneously witnessed the Wal-Mart fracas had the wherewithal to record the event on his smart-phone. The subsequent story was uploaded to the world-wide-web and soon went viral. Douglass had just sent me the link: http://wtvr.com/2015/02/11/walmart-headbutt-fight-video-la-porte/       

A lot of words were spoken about someone’s mama, bad names were exchanged, and then a much smaller woman apparently having Billy goat genes in her DNA (or perhaps DNA in her Billy goat genes as I’m not really certain how that deal works) decided it wise to head-butt a much larger woman. You’d think these fools were members of Congress.  

Unfortunately, this is the kind of behavior we’ve come to expect as we venture into society. We witness it on TV, the radio, in the Newspaper and on C-Span, etc. This behavior is emblematic of what our cultural stew has become. I for one am ready to escape it. I have finally reached the age wherein I have become aware that I am no longer relevant for a number of reasons. Take for example the following: I am initially aware that most folks no longer listen to the radio much for music as there are many and more efficient electronic methods for doing so which have the added capability of being individually personalized. One can now listen to exactly the music one wants to listen to, when they want to listen to it, and do so on the go.    

Frankly, I don’t consider much of the contemporary music to even deserve the classification of music, which is another reason I’m convinced of my irrelevancy. Passing for talent is all too often the sound of some woman screeching out some incomprehensible phrase and holding some note, which is required to be one note beyond her vocal range, for what seems like an eternity.    

Then there’s this Hip-Hop. It won’t die. There’s no music to it. Jibberish! And, Kanye West? I saw where he was described as a musical genius. Funny, but when I was growing up, geniuses were rare, very rare. Geniuses were great scientists and mathematicians. Sometimes, even artists were declared geniuses. Names like Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, or Vincent VanGoh come to mind. Kanye West? I’m convinced that when it comes to modern entertainers, anyone who can wear a tuxedo and fart at the same time is considered a genius.  

Country music deserves a spot. Modern country or “New Country” as it is sometimes seems Hip-Hop’s stupid cousin. Let’s get drunk and write a song about it. To my way of thinking, Hank Williams Jr. was the end of country music. He spent the first several years of his career singing about his drunken old man, then bellyached because everyone compared him to his father. Shoot, sing about someone else for a change and that nonsense would have stopped. Eventually he did and it did. He still stunks!    

Some folks are now famous for no other reason than being famous. Paris Hilton started that whole deal. Now along comes Kim Kardasian. Kim is pretty enough to be a genius, but she has this great big old protruding butt that looks for all the world like a rectal goiter. It turns out it’s not even real. She has had an enhancement to make it look that way. Kanye West married her I guess because he was attracted to her big ol’ butt. I guess that makes her a butt genius. There are really getting to be a lot of geniuses out there.      

Business has even become part of American culture. This has happened for several reasons. One is the Supreme Court which in the Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission determined that corporations are people. For years and years only men, white men, were people. Then, women got to be people and black people got to be people too. Workers got to be people and even children got to be people. At any given time in our history, some or all of these groups were not people and generally that was because of the corporations that misused them. Now, the corporations are people and being “people” for real people is once again not what it is cracked up to be.

The poster boy for business is Donald Trump. He’s everywhere! Because he has a lot of money, he can get on TV anytime he says anything. He has the face of a large rodent with hair that he intentionally grooms to look like tumbleweed on steroids. He has a program on TV where he relishes firing people. The show is called, “You’re Fired!” The purpose of this show is to remind the smelly TV viewing audience that even though they are technically still people, they are not as important as corporations which are people who fire regular people.

The 21st Century Pledge of Allegiance:    I pledge allegiance to the logo of the United States  America, and to the oligarchy for which it stands. One corporation, under God, with dividends and debentures for only a select 1%.....         

Donald Trump once described himself as a self- made man. He said that is why people admired him. I have never met anyone who claims to admire him. But, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps when upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League School, it has been reported that his father gave him a gift of $50 million and said you’re on your own. He received a BS degree in economics and has been a great practitioner of BS ever since. Actually, his very wealthy father gave him a job right out of school. Eventually, Donald declared bankruptcy three times but still managed to become very wealthy. He extols the virtues of the “free enterprise” system and stands against government interference, except when getting protection from the federal bankruptcy courts. That free market is really a marvelous thing.  

Trump hints at becoming President. This idea was once a farce but with the Citizen’s United ruling, there’s a good chance that the voting rights of corporations will outweigh those of real people and Trump could be elected. If so, he likely will put his name on everything imaginable, ie: Trump White House, Trump Library of Congress, Trump Yellowstone Park, etc. Regular people will no longer be able to get into such places.

I no longer relate much to our culture. I've witnessed to whole stinking deal. And, all I got out of it was a well worn bra. I will mount that over my fireplace….right next to my deer head.

WHAT'S IN A NAME ???

Many years ago, I worked for a state social service agency determining eligibility for cash welfare and Medicaid assistance for needy families. Before I go too far here, this is not a rant at all against the general welfare population. A number of years of experience with several thousands of folks made me aware that there are a great many people who are truly desperate through no real fault of their own. Like any group in society, engineers, attorneys, ministers, exotic dancers, politicians, teachers, me, etc., there are a few nuts that really poison the pie. This report is a true experience with one such nut. Names are history. They are words and they at one time actually meant something. One can look at English names for example: Stone, Miller, Elder, etc. These were names which reflected an occupation of someone’s ancestor. Some names are Biblical in origin, ie: Mark, James, Ezekiel, etc. And, these names often have a limited universality from language to language. An example is the name James which in Greek is Actually Demetrious or Demitri in Russian. Names have come to be sorely abused in the modern era. Wealthy folks of certain influence are sometimes guilty of this by giving their children pompous first names to show a specific pedigree, an unearned position of influence. Examples may be: Bradford Johnson, Harrison Billington, or Prescott Bush. This makes the more swarthy among us aware that one rich family most likely married into another and we are to KEEP OUT of the gene pool, which is fine with me. Some folks on welfare come to this practice of abuse from a totally different angle. They make names up because to them it sounds good. Some claim to take portions of grandparents’ names and reconnect them; however, in my years of experiencing this, I never could make such a connection with any such mangled naming method. Thus, their children are condemned to a lifetime of ridicule or abuse through no fault of their own, also insuring they will not break out of their gene pool any too often. No way does Bradford Johnson Billington ever marry De’la’Shawna Re’nae’ela Jones. We, in the office, used to keep a running list of bizarre names and the list was lengthy. This is the experience I had with one such name. In the late 1980’s to early 90’s, assistance records became computerized along with the rest of the business world. These early computers were very limited in terms of space and capabilities compared to today’s computers. We didn’t have built in word processors and spreadsheets were too interactive with about the only real computing capability being that one could sum a column of numbers after manually entering data. All letters were capitals and it was even suggested that in the future, the computing world would make lower case letters obsolete. In no way could an apostrophe ever be entered into a computer field designed for a name. That field would accept no symbol, punctuation marks, numbers or even lower case letters. If one did enter a lower case letter, it would be converted to an upper case letter as the computer recognized only upper case letters in this field. One day, a woman comes barreling into the office, asking for me and is mad as a hornet. “Where does my arrogant ass get off calling her son ‘Shithead’ and putting that name on his Medicaid card?” she demanded! Well, I never called anyone “Shithead” and never put such on anyone’s Medicaid card. As it turns out, she named her child at birth, “ Shi’Thead”, pronounced Shi-thee-add. I had entered the name into the computer just as she had indicated from the child’s birth certificate. The computer, not recognizing the apostrophes, determined on its own the name “SHITHEAD”. The name on the card sure enough appeared, “SHITHEAD JONES”. I explained to the irate mother the nature of computer programming as a valid explanation for what had occurred. She would hear none of it and demanded that we have the programming changed to accept apostrophes. Given the 20,000-30,000 or so names of folks on assistance in the entire state, there was no chance the programming would be changed to accommodate one name. I suggested perhaps she reconsider the name and give her child a real one. She indicated he had a real name and it was “Shi’Thead”. So it ended and I often wondered what life was going to be like for little Shi’Thead whenever he got report cards, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, etc. As time went on computers became much more sophisticated and I quit thinking much about the story and newer better computing allowed for small case letters, numbers and even punctuation marks in any field. Finally an older and bigger Shi’Thead would have been allowed to grow beyond the name with which his dumb mother had saddled him. One day very many years later my neighbor Hank who was employed by a major delivery service, possibly FedEx, comes over to my yard while I was mowing and stopped me. He was laughing his butt off in amazement as he told me I would NEVER guess the name of a guy he had delivered a package to that day. He then said the guy’s name was “SHITHEAD”. I responded, “JONES”? His jaw stopped as he stood there completely dumbfounded. How could I possibly have known that? I said, “Really John, there could only be one.” As an aside: Hank came over to my yard some time months later while I was mowing. He told me that if I ever found his body dead in the yard to not try to take matters into my own hands. I assured him that if ever I found his body dead in his yard or mine, under no circumstance would I ever try to take matters into my own hands. It turns out he was going through a nasty divorce. I never saw him or spoke to him again, but I heard he had developed a quite active dating life via an internet dating site and was quite happy. That is an entirely different story.