I'm way down the well of life, deep into her heart, and she's not talking to me, just an occasional laugh.
Watching the first total eclipse to hit Mazatlan, Mexico, live on Fox. I've been there twice and loved it, now I'm simply being moved.
I had to go to my YouTube channel today to watch my 2017 experience in Idaho. It was surrounded by videos that showed my life there, and it was good.
Now I sit here alone as the sky starts to darken. I'm in the path again, it's cloudy so I don't need to see it, just feel it . Not like the direct path I was under back then, but I'll take it!
People around here say I don't eat, that all I do is drink, smoke and bitch about life. Here's todays meal, and I'm proud of it. Fish sandwich, sliced tomato, coleslaw, tarter sauce and mayo. On toast!
I threw out that DoorDash Mexican crap last night, and go South Carolina!
I've discovered a serious excavation that has appeared overnight at my house. A square rock thing has been dug up, using my shovel with birdshit on it, exposing a small plastic object in the ground.
I'm suspecting it's the detonator for neighborhood destruction, overlooked since the nineties when the creek actually wiped the place out.
But who knew it was there, and who exposed it last night? Maybe I should just go push it?
I've got fourteen grandkids, and I've only known five. Shelby and her brother John I met as toddlers almost thirty years ago. Chris was the first born and I haven't seen either of the guys for decades.
I've met and gotten to know two more grand-daughters, Shannon and Taylor. I'm in close contact with only one of them, my Shelby down in Florida.
So, that leaves nine grandkids I have never met. They have my genes and my history. Washington and Lincoln were our cousins. I have great strong American blood that goes back centuries, on both sides.
Even their mothers family has strong Iowan farmer history.
I'm an ex brilliant computer scientist and a very smart guy. I have a strong propensity towards intoxicants, and I have Parkinsons.
It would seem that my grandkids would have an interest in those facts, maybe they do, but I haven't met most of them, much less sat around and talked heritage.
I wrote four Posts yesterday, and deleted them all when I stumbled from my bed this morning. Usually I would tweak out the stupid shit and keep a couple, not today.
I've been blogging here for over five years and I've trashed many a Post. The ones that dive real deep and cross the line hard, kind of Post.
I've never emptied the trash on this blog. Without checking it out, maybe my hosting platform does not have an automatic housekeep function. That means there may be two worlds here!
(1) What I present to the world as my truth and reality.
(2) What I presented for a short while, then realized it was too honest, and brought it down to trash.
Ok, I just checked and the only trashed Post's left go back to the first of this year. That means that most of the torment drained out of my old troubled mind, through my fingers and lingering online for a moment, is gone.
Hmmm, the Trashed Journal of OldManJim could have been a hit!
I don't remember last night. I know my two buddies were over at some point, that's it.
All I ate yesterday was a terrible big mac and hard fries, so I poured myself into my clothes this morning and drove to breakfast.
It's a beautiful day here in Tennessee, crisp air, blue sky, and quiet. I crossed the highway and slid into the downtown square on the backroads.
When I pulled up there were three women outside the door, and I knew them! Two were the Jehovahs Witness ladies I met a week or so ago, and the other was Gail, a cool old chick with a walker.
We chatted in the warm sunshine of a very quiet town square, and it made the fact that I don't remember last night, mute.
Then I escorted Gail in and we sat together inside a totally dead place. We both had coffee and I ate some eggs.
She talked about needing to go to Walmart but the local transit services were not currently available for some reason.
My first reaction was to throw her walker in the back of my truck and drive her there. I'm an ex paratransit guy, it's what I did for decades.
But then I thought, wait... Gail's a sweet old lady but this is just a second date. Do I really want to tie my day up driving her around town?
I chose not, maybe next time. Daniels now coming over to tell me about the crazy late night we just had.
I just really realized what I have with this blog, and I'm very proud. As I dove down into the code today to eliminate a redundant video message and adjust the spacing, I love how it appears across platforms.
It looks and works great on a phone! It spreads out nicely as the screens and machines expand.
It is totally under my control. I pay for the hosting (IONOS) and the image storage (FLICKR). I take advantage of and enjoy many platforms across the internet. I embrace and love the JOOMLA blogging platform, thanks guys for building such a great thing.
I'm not at the bidding of anyone, this is my platform! I chose almost six years ago to not allow comments, I wanted this to just be a place where I could speak my mind and present my stuff to the world, without having to defend my position.
I have succeeded and I'm happy! This is most likely my last big computer project. I've had many great computer software victories over the decades, and so proud of them all.
I was born in 1946, sixteen years later I had my first drink, a beer. A year later I smoked my first joint, a skinny thing rolled with seeded Mexican weed, under the Hollywood sign.
Now it's sixty years later, and my reality is coming out strong lately. The normal restrictions that I apply to human interactions, are fading away quickly.
And I like it a lot! Life is too short and precious to have it clogged up with bullshit, insecurity, or nonsense.
A couple of times over the last few days, I hit the trifecta. Running in zero bullshit mode, confident as hell because my give a shit is broken, and all that's coming out of my mouth is the truth.
The last total Solar Eclipse visible in the U.S. happened back in August 2017. There's a very narrow path where the moon totally blocks the sun, and where I lived, Driggs, ID, was directly underneath.
I was driving the local bus then and I watched people swarm into town from all over, to experience the event. Yea there were other places along the path, but this was at the base of the Grand Tetons at a very popular tourist destination.
This video was shot a couple hours before totality:
Here's the eclipse. You can hear voices rising up from the valley, in awe and amazement, including mine.
Now, as the next one approaches this coming Monday, I'm again under the path. Not as close, I'd have to drive a ways West of Nashville to be under it completely, and I have no intention to. I've done the eclipse!
Back in the mid-sixties I was eighteen, living in the last house off Neal Rd in Paradise, CA. Yea, the place that burned up in the huge 2018 Camp Fire.
I was breaking horses with a buddy and I had a favorite mare that I took for a long ride down into the canyon one day.
Usually I would let my dog Sandy, a smart beautiful yellow lab, tag along on rides, but this day I wasn't sure of the terrain so I had my mom keep her in the house. Which she did for an hour before Sandy drove her crazy to get outside, and she let her out.
I was a couple miles down into this virgin canyon, when guess who showed up on our tail? What a great nose she had, down in country she had never been in.
My brother ended up taking her down to the Bay Area when she got older. She ran away from there and was caught on one of the big bridges, trying to get back home to Paradise, 150 miles away. She was put down shortly after.
Sandy was a great dog!
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