Year of the Ox 4707
27 June 2009 AD
0732 hrs CDT
Stormcrow Ranch
Boone, IA
USA
"Squirrel Corn Capital Of The World."
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
--Mark Twain, "Old Times on the Mississippi" Atlantic Monthly, 1874.
I was checking my stocks yesterday—you know—the same ones we all have: GM, Citicorp, et al. (The ones we bailed out), and wasn’t too encouraged by the returns on my/our investments. It looks like we are still dumping cash down so many rat holes, I think the world might tip over due to the sheer weight of worthless paper alone.
Now, I don’t know about any of you, but as a shareholder in these corporations, I should be getting at the very least some kind of quarterly report, as well as returns when the value of my stock goes up (Citicorp was down to $0.40 a share at one point, it’s sextupled since then, so my roughly three thousand shares should be garnering a dividend about now.
Did I miss something in my mailbox? “Buehler? Buehler?”
But I noticed something as I tried to read the tiny font used in the newspaper; it’s getting pretty bad when I have to use my reading glasses to locate my bifocals.
Now, when I was a kid, only masturbation caused blindness, or so my grandmother told me. However, Chef heard that the latest Surgeon General's report states that macular degeneration is the leading cause of loss of sight in individuals of our near-advanced age group. He reasoned, and rightly so, apparently that either we are spending far too much time alone in bathroom with magazines, or we are getting old.
And, I suppose this is very telling of where we are as my generation ages.
I was born, (for no good reason at all apparently, if my blog is any indication), at about the very end of the Baby Boomer generation, those heady and halcyon years from 1945 to 1963, after the Greatest Generation, but before Baby Bloomers, Generation X, and Dot Com Kids. And mine is the last group that will not ever make more money than their parents.
Think about it: from the very first expatriates on these shores, it just seemed to get better and better--money flowed like water through a sieve and everyone ate butter, bacon, and lard every day— Life was good and bright, the very soul of The American Dream--until about the mid-1980s. Right about here weasels got in the hen-house and rats got in the corn (actually, historically it really started about the time of Adams/Jefferson, but that was before the days of streaming, biased, and sin-money-bought media, when there used to be things like objectivity and honesty and integrity
Stephen King once said growing old is like a bad dessert after a great dinner. I have to agree with him, here now in the second third of my life. And though we are down to 1,270 days on the Mayan Long Count Calendar, I still think we have a chance to be The Greatest Generation…Ever, no offense to Tom Brokaw’s outstanding book.
My readings this week: The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry, Culloden (a history of a Scottish battle)... Some Twain, and a bit of Will Rodgers. My admittedly monstrous intellect demands a constant feeding, so I usually have about four books going at any given time.
And my snail-mail box is often crammed with all-manner of things—the bills, o' course, and the usual magazines: Fine Wood-working, American Journal of Medicine, Saveuer, Oriental Vixens in 3-D, US News & World Reports, Leather Cat-Women Nuns of The Moon—the stuff that everyone reads.
But within these stacks of screed, are also bits of intelligence-- Smithsonian, Scientific American, Invention & Technology, and The Writer.
There are more I’d like to get, but the seed catalogs, and gizmo stuff (J. Peterman, Hammler-Schlemmer, etc.) take up the rest of my quiet evenings by the fire (always a fire going, which plays hob with my air conditioning in the summer months, but those unpaid bills burn with a bright and cheery flame).
It comes to this: this is my world, and I want to learn everything about it, before the rest of you are swept away. But that does not mean you don’t have a chance. Make a choice.
“Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”
--The Shawshank Redemption
I may be the last of the baby-boomers but I do not want to be akin to The Last of The Mohicans.
This is why, I always,
Rage, rage,…
~~Hob
Post Script:
I was astounded the other day, when I heard my words quoted.
Chef and I were working the pit—BBQ—not a bar (Sheesh, how little you think of me) and Side Dish showed up, and said these startling words. “Yep. ‘The land of cow and corn.’”
No one I know can turn a fragment like that into an all-encompassing description of where I live, save one. Let alone six simple words, which describe a history and generations of one lone state, and one of its native born, far-less-than-famous sons.
“Hey! Those are my words!”
“Yeah, I read your blog this morning. Chef told me I might want to check it out. I liked it. Though I’m still not sure about you.”
“Well, there is that.”
~~H.
