Line 'O the day - August 5

Dawn breaks, as it must.  And all that is left of the night is to cherish the memory.

Line 'O the day - July 30

Recently my worst fear COULD have been realized.  But now the unknown is known, and I walk not in fear.

Line 'O the day - July 27

I wrote pages today.  God, it felt good to feel something good.  I needed it.

Line 'O the day - July 22

A moment of clarity finds me.  And the path forward is both awesome and a bit sad, but I want to walk it.

Line 'O the day - July 19

I found myself feeling as if I were ten years old again today.  It was awesome.

Line 'O the day - July 13

‘Post-coital’ is stellar.  I was reading, and that is all the author used to set up a scene, and it worked like gang busters.

Line 'O the day - July 6

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett

Line 'O the day - July 3

I’m a cold calculating machine.  I realize it’s a bad thing, but as Popeye would say it...

Line 'O the day - June 28

I’m weary of common sense.  Perhaps cause I think I’m better than common folk.

And to the wind it blows

Our dream from yesterday of our life tomorrow, for today the breeze, no matter how gentle, sets our sail and the dream is lost. Not lost to us completely, as the dream fades it lingers long enough for comparison. The reality and the wispy image never match, but despite our sadness we are glad the dawning day veers from the vividly fragile dream. Tomorrow will assault us, as it should, with the world. If my dream beckoned to me as I step out my door in the morning the fear would grip me like nothing before. To be enveloped by your own creation, to be whisked to a life you’ve already ordered would be a box of haunting delight. It would be a fate worse than Buddha’s Wheel, for you would know what comes after before. The dream delights us, but the world surprises, and as God will tell you the unknown is far more worthy of devotion than the predetermined. So dream your dream and I will dream mine, but when I wake I’ll leave it on the pillow and live tomorrow with all the wonder and reverence due.

Author's Note:

I don't know where the fuck this came from, but there it was a couple nights ago. Over the years I've written a few... whatever this is above. It started with the title line and ran from there for about five minutes. It's like a thought is all I can call it.

Anyways nothing has been going up on here recently save for the Line O' the Day, so I figured why the hell not. Trying to work on a farm story or two for the next couple weeks, we'll see.

Line 'O the day - June 17

I attempt what I assume others do.  But then I’m a monster and that assumption could be way the fuck off base.

Present Day Note:

Pro-fucking-phetic 

Line 'O the day - May 13

Have you ever considered getting drunk?  Of course you have.  For me that is a rare occasion, which happened recently.

Present Day Note:

I have no clue what this refers to, but it must have been something terrible for me to consider drinking. Even for a moment.

Line 'O the day - May 2

I feel like I’m leaving my baby on the street and moving on.  Hopefully it fights its way to the top of the food chain while I work on a little brother for it.

Line 'O the day - April 24

I have taken too much time off here, but we’ll not call it time wasted.  Regardless it’s done; moving on.

Line 'O the day - April 1

I was defeated today by a less than worthy opponent.  When next we meet, I aim to get the better of my laziness.

Line 'O the day - March 28

Reflection has been the day’s task.  Tomorrow is my salvation, and so I look forward to the dawn.

Line 'O the day - March 4 II

Sometime in the last month I think I made the choice I’ve been contemplating for years.  The deed done, my mind is still restless.

Line 'O the day - March 4

There are two ways this plays out, success or not success.  The former would be nice, but then the latter isn’t exactly failure.

Line 'O the day - February 23, 2010

I will be me when I draw my last breath, succeeding on that level I’m fairly certain of.  Hopefully that goal leaves room for minor triumphs along the way.

Line 'O the day - February 7, 2010

Things come to a head, and in turbulent waters I can manage a breath.  For how long is the question. (Wholly spontaneous and unrelated to December 6^th line)

Line 'O the day - January 12, 2010

I feel like Sisyphus near the peak, and am momentarily afraid.  Then I realize I’m not in hell and I’m gonna reach the fucking top.

Line 'O the day - January 3, 2010

Corb Lund is awesome.  You won’t like him, but he speaks my fucking language.

Line 'O the day - January 1, 2010

Woody’s advice from a couple weeks ago (see previous line) may be stellar for a 70 year old, but I’d say many a temporary measure may come with strings attached.

The Old Saw Mill

So I've slipped again on my silly ass country musings. But a thing I saw the other day has prompted me to relay another little portion of my upbringing.  A notice about child labor laws made me laugh, as a number of things it stated weren't proper conditions for folks under the age of 15 aren't exactly adhered to on most farms and ranches.  Further if such guidelines were followed, young would be farmers would never learn a goddamned thing.

That brings me to the specifics of this post, the old saw mill. Working around a saw mill is a massive no no for kids, as far as labor laws are concerned.

Witness the hipster farm boy. I was rocking the hipster sunglasses way back in the early 90s.  Oh yea and notice the huge dangerous apparatus behind the old man and me.

So when I was a real little kid there was this old saw mill, from like the 1930s, tucked back up in the timber that was once used by dad and grandpa when they wanted lumber to build a barn or what have you.  It was just this old rusted bunch of iron to me at the time.  About the time I was 14 the old man wanted to resurrect the derelict contraption.  And so we did.  Dad hauled it out of its hole and parked it out behind our house and set about putting it all into working order.

I'll try to explain how this death trap worked.  Its rather simple, not exactly easy mind you, but simple. Once you have your log you had to wrestle it up onto a sort of trolly (you get a good idea of that in the photo above). So the first danger is getting crushed by the log before you have it secured on the carriage, or just smashing a finger or 5 while hoisting it into place.  Once secured to the trolly you're ready to start cutting.  Now you need a tractor to run the mill, both turning the blade and trucking the trolly back and forth along its 40 foot long track.  There are a myriad of little levers and pulleys and gears, all of which are just open to everything.  Like I said the thing was built in the 30s or 40s and there wasn't much thought back then to protective guards to save fingers and such.
(Back then they required you to respect your equipment, now we just try to make everything idiot proof. An idiot probably couldn't run that old saw mill.)
Where was I, oh yea onto the blade. This thing is similar to like what you'd see on a circular saw or a table saw, but its like 4 feet tall. No guard on it either, its instant maiming or death if you slip up around it.  And you're gonna be inches away from it while you're cutting, that's just the way you've got to do it.  Now then there's one big lever that controls this whole mess. Push it forward and the trolly moves forward passed the blade, pull it back and the trolly returns to the starting position.

There's other stuff like constantly turning the log on the trolly to get your boards like you want them and getting the speed of the trolly right depending on how hard the wood is, but the basic operation is running the log back and forth along the stationary blade.

Based on dad's face in this picture I reckon I made a suggestion he thought was fucking stupid and he's telling me why it was so.

The saw worked, but it had its drawbacks too.  We cut a fair amount of lumber with it to build all sorts of things, but you couldn't really aim for perfection with the machine.  You might be wanting to cut some good 10 ft long 2x4s, but we'd just take into account that one end might be an inch and half wide while the other was a good bit over two inches.  The blade never ran true as it were, but it still cut and as the old man would say, it was good enough for government work.

The old saw mill has since been retired permanently, and dad's got a newer homemade saw mill that is just as ridiculous for it's own reasons.

Next time I might talk a bit about something we built with the old mill's product.

Line 'O the day - December 20, 2009

… whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. --- Boris Yellnikoff

Line 'O the day - December 11, 2009

A list came out today. It would be sweet to be on it next year. Sweeter though would be not being on it cause the damn thing was in the can by next December.

     Note: That’s vague for the fun of it and I’m fucking tired.

Line 'O the day - December 6, 2009

I could tread water in the shallows all day long, but that will not suffice since I consider myself a strong swimmer. So headlong into the current I must go, no matter how daunting.

Present day note:

There's a tinge of sadness for this one.  That's all I'll say.

Line 'O the day - November 22, 2009

Success in this venture could come in varied forms. Let us hope the experience is not the only reward.

Line 'O the day - November 19, 2009

Anticipation for a great many things is upon me today. One is a certainty; the rest must be sought out in the ether.

Line 'O the day - November 12, 2009

I live in squalor, though none of it causes a risk to my health. So it is of little fucking consequence.

Line 'O the day - November 7, 2009

Procrastination or skill building; we’ll say both have guided me to my current coordinates.

Line 'O the day - August 20, 2009

Had a girl lay her hands on me today; it didn’t cost anything and neither of us really enjoyed it.

      Note: the hope is I forget the facts of this statement in time.

Present day note:

Sadly I have not forgotten the facts.  It wasn't a salacious moment at all.

Line 'O the day - July 24, 2009

We have adventures and misadventures, and they can only be categorized after the fact.

Line 'O the day - July 12, 2009

Question: What is your ambition in life?

My Answer: Simple, to be myself for at least a small portion of everyday.

Present day note:

At times in the past this has been a tough ambition to follow.  Not so much recently, for better or worse.

Line 'O the day - July 9, 2009

An ancient endeavor long dead and buried is born anew; not a miracle, but pleasant all the same.

What do you have to say?

If you don’t have anything to say you’re writing will suffer.  Let me rephrase; if you’re just writing to expel some sequence of events you’ve constructed for your characters it’s gonna be SHIT.  It is. There’s no way around it. No matter what you’re writing. I’ve got a couple things I’m working on and while I’ve got the string of events ready to roll I’m still fine tuning what exactly it is I want to say, using the aforementioned events.

I’ve been watching a lot of stand up recently and I’m of a mind that the best comics shine when they’re trying to say something. For stand-up it’s usually about themselves, but can reach universal themes on occasion. Even on that small personal level it makes everything you say connect with your audience. A funny premise and pay off that comes and goes in thirty seconds inside a ten minute set carries everyone in the room further if you give it an underlying meaning (it doesn’t have to be some great meaning, just something other than surface).  That funny story about you on your couch at four in the morning with a tub of Bull Bell watching NCIS on Hulu might be funny if you make it sound pathetic enough. Dig in though, why is it pathetic? What does the fact that it is pathetic say about you or about society?  Is it pathetic because NCIS is a drab, cookie cutter, mind numbing, barely excusable example of entertainment which the masses, for some reason, devour like slop in a pig trough? Oh, so that is what you want to say? Great, now just make sure it is both hilarious and snappy because that’s your job, you do stand-up remember.

I do not do stand-up, I can drag my shit out if it’s good enough (this ain’t so I need to start wrapping it up). But dragging shit out makes it worse if you’re not saying anything. If you’re not proving a point or constantly reminding your audience what it is you want to get across to them what you’re doing is a futile fucking effort.  Oh, but your prose is lyrical and your characters are well defined.  Well done, but that’s all window dressing. Say Something.

Line 'O the day - June 24, 2009

I’m a liar and a thief, neither a challenge for most folk. Talent, though, is required to steal other peoples’ lies and pass them off as your own.

Line 'O the day - June 6, 2009

I am uncertain about the future on occasion, but then I remember I tend to come through in the end.

Or

Procrastination is the light at the end of my tunnel.

Line 'O the day - May 3, 2009

Change and balls are two things I’ve lacked in recent times. Absence of the former begat the withering of the latter, and I shall endeavor to reverse course in both regards.

Line 'O the day - April 19, 2009

One need not hit the road to be part of a menagerie. Seek and ye may find copious diversity in your own backyard.

Line 'O the day - April 9, 2009

A valuable thought occurs to me. I will aim not to forget it come the end of the week nor the instance which brought it forth.

Present day note:

I've forgotten whatever the hell this was.

Line 'O the day - April 5, 2009

That’s four day old fish, and I ain’t buying it! --- Steve Dallas

Jake Up a Tree

It's been a little over a year since I wrote the first of these farm stories, and about six months since I posted the last one.  Hopefully I can get back on track here.

I’ve yet to mention the sale barn, which is odd as it served as a major focus of my life from the time I can remember up until I got out of high school.  Now when I say ‘Sale Barn’ I mean a livestock auction.  You’ve seen it in a movie or somewhere, hell you might have even been in one.  There’s a ring and auctioneer, stadium seating for buyers, sellers and other rural folk just there to pass the time.  On sale day, which is Monday by the way, Grandpa would usually make his way to the sale barn at some point and when I was little I would obviously be right at his heel.  When I was real little like that my favorite thing about the sale barn was the bubble gum man.  Now he was an older dude who hauled cattle to and from the sale barn for other folks, but he always kept a variety big bucket of Double Bubble in his truck and a bunch in his pocket, and was always just the bubble gum man to any of the younger set who happened to show up around the auction.  But moving along…

My story for today stems from my many years working at the sale barn (I’ll probably have a few more stories to remember from the place).  Our old man worked at the auction as well as both my brothers and this particular event has me and Jake, my older brother, trying to entreat a cow to return to her assigned corral.  I started working at the sale barn during the summer I turned 14, but this event I reckon was a few years after that and I figure Jake was around 20 at the time so I was 16 or so.

Cows can be crazy, if you didn’t know, and they’re really dumb to start with so a crazy cow is a mess to handle.  They’re unpredictable cause of the natural stupidity and they don’t even know what they want to do.  Well there are dozens of pens and stalls that the livestock can go in and then two large pastures at the far back of the sale barns property.  What transpired that allowed this particular crazy cow to find her way into the back pasture I’m uncertain of. Figure she broke through a gate or something.  Regardless Jake and I were tasked with getting her out of the pasture and back into one of the smaller pens near the front, an easy enough task on the surface.  But remember now she’s batshit insane.

A little more on the setting, along the fence of this pasture there’s a stand of trees that hang out from the fence about forty feet or more.  And the cow, showing a semblance of intelligence is hiding back in the trees.  As we're stomping across the pasture she comes to the edge of the clearing and gives us a glance.  We had been warned she was a handful, but in that little instant we saw that, yep she was crazy.  Before we even got to her she rushed out and headed up toward the open gate to the proper pens, and for a second we’re happy cause she’s gonna remedy this problem all on her own. Wrong!

She gets almost out of the pasture and wheels around and runs full steam back to the trees as far from the gate as she can.  This is when we formulate a plan.  Jake will go into the trees, get behind her and flush her out, and I’ll flank her guarding against her angling back away from the gate.  Now there are only two of us and we have to wrangle her through an area the size of a few football fields, but cows are stupid and usually are very obvious in their intentions so you can stay a step ahead.

As Jake gets into the tree line I set up out in the middle of the field as a deterrent from her looping back once he gets her moving.  I’m waiting for her to come busting out into the clearing, and waiting and waiting, and just as I’m about to start yelling after Jake to see what the holdup is, I see the top of a tree start to shake.  When it dawns on me that she must have chased Jake up a tree, he starts to yell out to me, confirming my thought.  Obviously I start to laugh at the notion of a crazy cow running my brother up a tree, but that humorous thought lasts all of about two seconds as she steps out from the trees.

There’s a good fifty yards between us, but as she stops and stares at me, with dumb cow malice in her dull eyes, I start to realize I’m pretty vulnerable out in the middle of the field.  And then she just starts to barrel right at me.  I’ve got that fifty yards between us, but I’ve got double that to the nearest batch of trees or the closest fence, reckon she would have got me if I tried for either of those.  And getting waylaid by a thousand pound cow isn’t exactly like a shiatsu.  My best bet was a small brush pile out in the middle of the field maybe fifteen or twenty yards from me, so I turned and bolted.  I could hear her coming up behind me, gaining ground, but I was pumping my legs and not risking losing a step looking back to check my odds of survival.  I reached the little island of branches and thorns and dove head first to safety, with maybe a couple yards to spare.  She didn’t follow and veered off swinging back towards the trees and away from the gate.

Jake stepped out of the tree line just as I was untangling myself from the brush pile.  We tried twice more to flush her out of the trees toward the far off gate, but to no avail, mainly because we ourselves wouldn’t stray too far from the protective trees or brush pile thus giving her ample room to get between us or around us.  We gave up and opted to let her ‘calm down’ some before trying again.

There’s no real moral to this story, except maybe to say that no matter what you’ve heard know that cows are incredibly dumb creatures.  That doesn’t mean I don’t respect that I tip the scales at a buck seventy-five and most cows got ten times that on me.  I’m not dumb, well at least not as dumb as cattle.