SNOW FORECAST

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The forecast is calling for it and everybody is talking about it. Snow. A good day to go to the grocery store if you want to see a lot of people. The parking lot was full to where the only places left to park were down at the end by the Chinese take-out place. That's where I wanted a place. Needed to get some catfood at Food Lion and some other necessities. Then to the Chinese place for something to take home. I believe it does a body good to eat something that tastes so good it feels good going down and continues to feel good after it's been down awhile.



The fun thing about our Chinese restaurant is it could be in any Chinatown anywhere in the world, and anywhere in China. They talk in Chinese behind the counter. The sound system, a small stereo, very small, Asian small, plays a Chinese chanteuse who is probably a pop sensation in the Chinese language part of the world, which is substantial. 2 white middle class women were having a meal in there. One of them asked them to turn it down. I've seen so many Chinese films their language is familiar, though I can't make anything out. I know one word. Ha means Yes. Though if I were to say it, it would mean something else. Has to be said just right. Like you don't say yees for yes.



I imagine they like to watch Jackie Chan and Jet Li and a long list of Chinese movies. It's a big industry in Hong Kong, Beijing and Taiwan. Some beautiful films are coming out of those places. Some extraordinarily awful ones are too. They seem to never get enough martial arts mayhem. There is also Zhang Zimou, director of fine works of contemporary art. There are several others making high quality film, which is possible because boxoffice is not the bottom line. Sometimes, in mainland China, a director will be banned from making a film for a couple of years, because he made China look bad or something that challenged the party line. They walk a thin line. We have our military censors who have to approve anything in a film with military in it, as well as party line. Hollywood self-censors. It's like they're the inmates and the guards. Good behavior.



Food Lion was bustling. It wasn't as bad at the registers as usual. So many people were in there, they had all the registers going. The only problem when it's busy is all these displays in the aisles that block the flow of traffic, make people stop and negotiate who's going to do what. They're a nuisance, but it's marketing strategy. When it gets in your way, you notice it. A grocery store is a marketing wonderland. A lot of people study marketing in depth. They write books and make computer programs. People are hired out of universities in the field of marketing to work a computer and fine tune down to pennies. I'm actually fascinated by the frequent changes of stock arrangements. Obvious marketing strategy when it's getting so frequent now that the people working there have a hard time keeping up with it as much as the customers. But I don't want to know about all those subtleties. I know enough as it is. Live in our American culture all your life and you become versed in advertising.



I'm one of the shoppers they understand. I go after what I go in there for, sometimes a basket full, sometimes just catfood. I don't even look at displays. Why would I want 10 of something I don't want when I can save a dollar getting 10? Instead of 8 or 3 or 1, or none. If I don't buy any, I save at least $15. I never understood how spending is saving. As many people as were in there today, I don't remember seeing anyone I knew.



The snow appears to be a certainty. Strangely, I bought 2 half gallons of buttermilk today. I never do that. It just came to me looking at the milk section I almost never go to, that I like buttermilk and haven't had any in many a year. I guess you could say that was an impulse purchase. It had a card on it that said 2 for whatever the amount was. I thought, yeah, I'll give that a go. I've forgotten what it tasted like. Pet. When I was a kid, Pet advertised a kid's show called the Big Top or something like that. I have a psychological affection for Pet dairy products. I didn't know that until today when I saw myself pick up 2 Pet half gallons. I remembered the Big Top and the kid ringmaster who dressed as a clown and had a red pingpong ball nose. They had things like Chinese circuses that were unforgettable, somebody bends over backwards and sticks their head up between their legs, or spins pie tins on a stick, does tricks with multiple rings.



It looks like the snow really is coming. Looks like it will start around noon tomorrow, Friday, and snow all night. A foot or so forecast. I don't doubt it. We'll soon see. It will be wonderful. I've noticed hearing tv weather every once in awhile and radio weather reports, they seem to be making the weather as sensational as possible now. I've got to where I tell my friends in Atlanta who want to come up here to their place and see a weather forecast on tv that sounds like it will be the snow of the century, to check with me. They make 2 inches of snow sound like the big blizzard we'll never forget. I don't like to hear that dramatic weather reporting. Maybe it makes better ratings and gets broadcast awards, but I'm glad I don't get pumped full of that.



After the snow plows do their thing, the Catfish will be behind a wall of snow waist high and I'll have to go at it with the snow shovel. I'm ready to hunker down for several days. As long as we have electricity, I'll be fine. Without electricity, it's panic time. I like getting snowed in. Like it a lot. I may go out from time to time and shovel my walkway to the road so it won't get so deep I have to punch through the snow every step. Snowed in, unfortunately, I'll have to miss the radio show. I don't even know if there will be radio Saturday morning after an all day and all night snow. Might be a wet snow too, as the day's high will be 32 for a few minutes in mid afternoon. It does look like a certainty there will be snow.

THE LATE ROBB BURRIS

robb burris 2004

This morning an email from my friend Lynn Worth to say our friend Robb Burris died Saturday and his funeral was today. In a way I feel sorrow and in another way I feel joy. Sorrow perhaps for the slap-downs in Robb's life, his never ending despair in the later years, a pit he could not dig his way out of. Brings to mind the central image in the Japanese film Woman In the Dunes. A man goes into a pit in the sand with a house down in the pit and a woman living there to see what it was about. He couldn't climb out of the pit because the walls were sand. He did the best he could, but the sand had him. Eventually, he fell into comfortable there and chose to stay when rescue came.

When I first knew Robb, he was doing well as director at Sunbridge nursing home in Sparta. Loved the work, got on good with the staff, felt like he was doing important work. I was at the store, Backwoods Beat Music in Sparta, in the first months, when Robb dropped by from time to time. He seemed in a good mood most of the time, went to a church in Baywood that embraced him and he in turn embraced them. It was his spiritual home. In his life before, he could say, he'd been down so long it looks like up to him. He played rhythm guitar in a band of his cousins, nephews of Galax fiddler Otis Burris, Southern Pride. It's a hard-driving old-time band with James Burris playing the fiddle.

Drinking goes hand in hand with mountain music. When a musician surrenders to the Lord and gives up drinking, he usually leaves the band he's playing in and joins a gospel band. Robb had alcohol issues that he had no control over. When he was with the band, they were drinking. He was somebody liquor took ahold of and wouldn't let go. It almost killed him. He ended up in the hospital, almost dead from liquor poisoning, and had to cut it out all together. He left the band, not because he wasn't comfortable with them drinking, but they were uncomfortable with him not drinking. Robb's life rose and fell, rose and fell.

Robb had to do AA to get off the liquor and stay off it. He'd done well and his life was mended. He played guitar at his church and sang. Had a good wife. One day he told me temptation talked into his ear, the Independence nursing home wanting to hire him for director. He was happy where he was. The stakes went higher and kept on going higher as he declined until he couldn't decline any more. That was the end of Robb's well being. He was strapped down every minute at work, worked all the time and the good mood went out of him. There came a time his doctor, a new doctor, doubled his dosage of pain medication, apparently unaware of Robb's addiction problem.

According to Robb, that extra medication kicked in his addiction issue and he became irresponsible. He was caught filching pills. Charged. Fired. Made the front page of the Galax Gazette accused of stealing pain medication from helpless old people. His home paper. Grayson County. Everybody he knew and had ever known. Humiliation to the Nth degree. He fell to the bottom of his pit. Got 6 months. He told me later that prison is worse than you can imagine. What he had to go through behind bars, in addition to the valley of humility he crawled through on his belly from the day of the charges, took him down like a shipwreck.

I'm with the late attorney Lorne R. Campbell of Independence, who believed our American penal system cruel and unusual punishment; therefore, unconstitutional. He couldn't change the enormity of the system, but he could keep people out of prison. It was his belief that mountain boys don't belong in prison. I brought that up to Donna Shumate one day, about the penal system as cruel and unusual punishment. She said, the catch is, it's cruel, but it's not unusual. The experience of humiliation all the way to the bottom broke Robb's spirit. Robb was never the same after the prison time. He avoided people he knew. Shame. He'd try to rise up out of it, and it never worked.

Robb was defeated. I remember Jim Senter was defeated by prison. Another who need not have gone there in a realistic legal system. These are gentle natured people who are no threat to society in any way. Robb is someone who's crime did not deserve to be paid for with his life. It was a minor crime. I don't care what you say about drugs and all that crap. I'm looking at living in a civilized society that has a perspective that's more or less realistic as the ideal, not as the reality. It is not the reality. And I don't want to hear, they deserve it. They do not deserve it in at least 3/4 of the cases. The sister of a friend of mine worked as a psycho-therapist in a prison in Atlanta. From the inside she said our penal system is so horrible, she attempts to ease it somewhat for a few of them. She said the system cannot change until the American people change. If our penal system is a reflection of us, all I have to say is, Yikes.

DUNNO

woody woodpecker was here

Don't quite know. Those words came to the front of my mind when I came onto this space to start writing. Don't quite know. Don't quite know what? That's easy. Everything. But that's all the time. Why this moment in time and not another moment in time? And I wasn't thinking that r&b song, don't know much about algebra, don't know much about the French I took. Not that. However, it applies. But I do know that I love you. That was back in the time of underground music (classic rock) they didn't play on the radio. On the radio they played Motown and other r&b. Commercial radio was freaked out by what was happening with the San Francisco sound and then from England. It was too wild and free. Too experimental. Had too small a percentage of listeners. The real deal was the advertisers. The people that listened to it didn't have any money. They were the bottom of the list of consumers. College students. Before the credit card banks discovered them as a source for billions of dollars in fees and interest.

What a crazy old world we live in. That's getting closer to don't-quite-know. At 5 I let the radio be, didn't turn on the news. Didn't want to hear about the problem of Arabs, and the problem of government, the problem of bombs. Once a week or less is about enough. I'm glad to say it's mostly less. Usually I hear the NPR news when I'm driving, but more and more turn it off. I'd rather listen to the Catfish's quiet motor. Yesterday in town when I was driving Billings's loaner, I saw in Sparta the exact likeness of the Catfish. I noticed the grille coming my way, then saw the taillight in the side mirror. The same. Except the paint looks better. Must have been kept in a garage. It looked good.

Don't quite know about anything any more. I find momentary conversations with older people, like at the grocery store where two people who don't know each other speak a few sentences and go on, are repeatedly about how bewildering things are any more. It's not because I direct the other person's thought. I am wondering if there comes a time in one's life, living in a culture of ongoing change, that a certain time comes when the older people cannot understand kids any more. Generation gaps in multiples. There comes a time, when I have cds and a cd player, I'm not converting to the next new thing. I've got enough music and movies to entertain myself mightily. What's happening now in pop music is of marginal interest. That somebody can yell louder than another interrupting Town Hall Meetings only tells me they hate democracy. It's nothing to talk about. Or think about.

Obnoxious people make headlines. Like the parents who made up the scheme of the kid in the attic and the silver balloon. To get on television. Now they can say they've been on national tv. Many years ago I saw a tag on the front of a white Cadillac convertible that said, "I've had national attention." It could only be network tv. I didn't want to know. An awful lot of our events on the news were created for the news. The news, thus, created them. National news is a web you never want to fly into. What Tiger Woods needs to do is divorce his Nordic blond, and marry Oprah. A marriage like Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. A corporate merger.

I heard one guy saying on radio, and I couldn't tell if it was irony or he was for real, but remembered Americans don't do irony, it's too complex a perception for tv, "I don't care what he does in his own driveway, but when he enters the public road is where I'm concerned." There is something to that, but his vehemence struck me a little too In Charge. The judge with the hawk's eye. Tiger, our first athlete billionaire. It's looking like the press is gearing up to dethrone him for being so aloof to them over the years. It's totally his problem. Not mine. Sorry Tyg.

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This is what Tiger already knows---

Television made you.

Television can destroy you.

Without the media

You have no value.

What a thing to have in my mind. A news fantasy. The fantasy that we believe we know something about Tiger Woods' private life, and what it says is he's (duh) just like us. Only being found out that he's just like us can be fatal to his career as a celebrity. If he's just like us---in the first place, he's not white so his starting place is all the way at the back of the line of just like us. The place they can get him is in the sponsorships. Do we really want this boy in the tabloids representing our product? Don't quite know. The stardom game always has new ones waiting and conspiring in line for one of the old ones to fall. Are you gonna miss me when I'm gone. Don't quite know.

CARS

cloud on bullhead 14dec09


The only thing of importance today was picking up the Catfish after Chuck did some more work on it, like a major part he could not have to put on until today. Ordered. It's the fuel pump assembly that goes down inside the gas tank. Meaning the gas tank had to be taken off, emptied first, the old fuel pump assembly taken out and the new one put in. The pipes that came out of it to run the gas forward to the engine, had corroded and were seeping gas. Plus, the reading on the dashboard from E to F changed. Before, the needle went way above the F when full. When the needle was at F it was half full. Now the needle more accurately describes what's in the tank.



I feel happy with the Catfish in near perfect running order. Chuck did a beautiful job on it. I like to ride in it now just to feel the engine run smoothly, the muffler absorbing the exhaust sound, new filters, new brakes, clean throughout the flushed cooling system and flushed fuel injection system. New tires. It's a joy to drive. Maybe I can get some car deodorant called New Car Smell. Except those things only smell like chemicals to me. I don't need chemicals to tell me the car runs fine, and I believe it will for a long time. I'm still taken by how like new the interior is after 16 years and 128k miles.



Jerry takes good care of a car. He's like my uncle Sonny in that way. Sonny bought a 1954 Chevy brand new. He kept it and drove it as his primary car for a very long time. He kept it clean and waxed all the time. Never a spot of rust. It looked brand new off the showroom floor. When he bought a new Chevy up in the 90s, he put the 54 in his dad's garage. He loved his car. I have an appreciation for cars, always have had. If I had chosen a life of luxury, I'd have the finest cars in the land. They would be my treasures. Since I can't afford to have material treasures, it's been a lifetime of getting used to it. It's like Jr's trophies he cared little about. He didn't like that they were stolen, but he didn't miss them.



Sonny came home from WW2 with stress syndrome. Stayed in his room alone all day and all night. I was told to leave him alone. He had a calendar with that picture of early Marilyn Monroe nude on the red bedsheet. Sonny was known for liking spicy calendars. How many years out of high school? 2 or 3? As Sonny started coming around he began to have girlfriends. One I remember worked at the ticket booth of a movie theater in downtown Kansas City. She had red fingernails, red lipstick and she smoked Pall Malls. Mid 1940s. The big story I remember when I was 4 she was robbed. A man pulled a gun on her and told her to hand over the money. She fainted and he left. Management was very happy with her. I missed her when she quit coming around. She paid attention to the little kid and the kid was enchanted with her. She had the classic 40s glamor girl look with the permed hair, high heels and a cigarette.



My grandmother, mother's mother, when she was here told me of the time her brother in law, her husband's older brother ("He was one of them mean Germans"), beat her up really bad when she was pregnant with Sonny. That was the day she quit loving her husband. Sonny was ok, but she couldn't help but see a connection with his mental instability as a result of the war experience, whatever it was. I was never told and never asked. Sonny found a woman when he was getting some psychiatric help who was also getting psychiatric help. They eventually married and had a girl who needed psychiatric help. I don't mean like they were people whose heads leaned over on one shoulder. He worked for Bell telephone from his first job after the Army to retirement. A lineman. Loved it. They were good people. Sonny's wife Helen called me The Reader. She liked to read too. We were the only ones. The ones that needed psychiatric help. Or rather the ones that recognized they needed it.



Sonny grew up on golf courses, his dad a greenskeeper. By the time he was out of high school, he was playing in tournaments around KC and winning. He and his dad won father-son tournaments all the time. He wanted to go the way of pro golfer, but that old mental instability killed it. Nonetheless, he won a lot of amateur tournaments, played a good game up until he couldn't play any more. Had a lot of trophies. It was like he was born with golf in his blood. Sonny was a good natured kind of uncle to have. Always good with the kid who looked up to him. All his nephews looked up to him. James Joseph Brink, Jr.



Uncle Sonny comes to mind in relation to taking care of cars. The man could take care of a car. If I wanted to live the life of having a garage, a yard, garden hose to wash the car in the yard with, I could be one to take care of a car like Sonny did, with him as my role model growing up. I thought it was really neat to wash and wax a car. In high school years I was way into custom cars. Daryl Starbird was in Wichita and brought a big custom car show to Wichita every year. In this later time of the life looking back, I tell myself if I'd followed my heart I'd have gone into auto body work with customizing as my purpose. I also don't believe that's where my heart would have led me, because it had the chance and didn't. It's a kind of work I believe I would have enjoyed a great deal more than many others. But I am now where my heart led me.