We listen to a lot of talking heads but this guy actually makes sense.
As an employer, you don’t have to pay his wages, retirement, medical benefits or deal with his personal issues that cost you money. Fred stays where you put him and does as he is programmed. He won’t steal from you, misrepresent what your business does, and always dresses appropriately.
As a traveler, Fred gives me information I can use, and, he is easy to walk away from.
As a watcher of trends, Fred seems, to me, to be a harbinger of our coming dystopian future.
When we listen to ” fake people ” we have already been positioned where someone else wants us.
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Teaching and playing are different disciplines.
Some musicians play. Some musicians teach. Some musicians both play and teach.
There are lots of filters that can keep a teacher’s message from reaching his students gas tank. If Chadd could just run a USB from his brain to my brain, he could download his considerable music knowledge and we wouldn’t have to wait for me to go through hours and hours of practice.
At the heart of every jazz solo is technique, clarity of thought, pureness of emotion, and an intent to swing.
There is, unfortunately, no USB connection that can bypass practice.
My attempts to master flute playing have been unsuccessful.
Chadd tells me the oboe is the hardest instrument to play he has ever tried.
I’m stuck with alto sax and clarinet, my original horn.
Right now, playing one horn well is about all the gas I have left in my tank.
Right now, listening to Chadd play a flute solo, is as close to the flute as i want to be.
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Eric, a retired Army Ranger, who patrolled streets of Iraq in full battle gear, has told me violence is a way of life and controlling or neutralizing it was once his mission as well as his livelihood.
When I talk with a man who has had to take another human life, regardless of reason, it makes me listen closer.
At Dion’s Pizza for lunch, the inscription on the man’s T shirt ,ahead of me in the order line, reads, simply, “ Deliverance of Controlled Violence. ”
I am at a loss to fully understand what this means? Is violence bad, or does it depend on what force is used to accomplish? If you use violence to subdue a violent person are you breaking the same law they are? Does this guy’s uniform legitimize his kind of violence? State violence- acceptable? Individual violence not acceptable?
I don’t know violence like Eric ,or this SWAT warrior, but I know about words.
You only need to get a few cattle to head for the barn to get the whole herd moving in the same direction.
Sweet talk and glorious words beat violence any day when you want to control, suppress, or channel human behavior.
The war for our minds is always being waged.
The New Mexico Rail Runner is New Mexico’s foray into mass transit in a state that is rural except for four larger cities along the Rio Grande north to south. In 2018, our entire population was just over two million. The impetus was to spend federal money on a project that was doomed to failure from the start but gave governor Bill Richardson something to crow about besides knowing the leaders of North Korea. The project started in December 2006 and has proved critics to be astute.
” Ridership on New Mexico’s commuter rail system has tumbled so far during the past decade that legislative analysts now recommend closing or limiting service at one location -in downtown Bernalillo….. the state should not open new stations and focus on making the Rail Runner Express more competitive with those commuting by car…. ” (from Train ridership continues to fall in New Mexico, Albuquerque Journal, 2019)
” Last year, the train made 2.8 million on fares, while the cost to operate the Rail Runner was $28.4 million. Plus, the department estimates the total debt repayment over 20 years amounts to $784 million….. “(KRKE News-May7,2015)
This train, Scotttreks suspects, will be here long after Scott is gone.
Closing the Rail Runner and putting the savings into free health clinics would have been a better return on taxpayer money than subsidizing government workers who lived in Albuquerque but commuted daily to Santa Fe.
It’s hard for all of us to find a Doctor in New Mexico, especially when we need one.
Knowing this state like we do, residents don’t understand,or like, the waste and abuse of power by their elected officials, but they keep voting them back into office, decade after decade.
It takes a lot of hard and dedicated work to stay one of the poorest states in the Union.
This group belongs in cabarets in Berlin, London, Paris, after World War 2, without the smoke, SS Officers and floozies.
A first response to new music is often to discount or find faults with it because it is new. Another response is to recognize new music as new, overpraise it, and find no faults at all.
I leave criticism in my back pocket. If all music were the same, or all posts, or all websites, or all opinions, or all people, it would be a sadder world.
During one of the songs, vocalist Tina Panera, holds a hat up and sings a sad song about ” this old hat..”
I am enchanted.and drop a crisp bill into Tina’s old hat so she can buy herself a less comfortable new one.
Musicians know lots about tip jars, old hats, sad songs, war and peace, love, injustice.
You hear some great music in airports when you least expect it.
I’m getting whisked back on a time trip in the Albuquerque Sunport International Airport and I don’t even have to go through security or board a plane.
Wars experienced vicariously are much better than those you have to fight in.
Growing up in the 1950’s, there were only three channels on our new black and white TV. The programming was sports, talent shows, westerns, game shows and nightly news.The broadcast day ended at midnight. In the 1960’s,Johnny Carson got people to stay up later and tucked his audiences into bed.
Back then, we went to our television sets like an older generation went to their radios before us and listened to TV anchors tell us ” how it was.” In those days, we trusted our institutions to do what they said they were doing.
At Wal-Mart this morning, Scotttreks runs into a TV crew filming a segment for the local evening news. These days, entertainment and political correctness saturate each nightly news story and finding truth comes last in third or fourth place.
ThIs news production, promoting a Wal Mart sponsored winter coat drive for kids, is only seconds long but takes a crew of five most of the morning to produce.
I don’t watch news anymore.
News people want to do all my thinking for me and make sure I don’t have trouble coming up with my own answers.
Discerning truth from fiction, I believe, is still my responsibility, as a living being.
Newsmen and used car salesmen have much more in common than we previously thought.
This might be Beth’s Bar and Grill, but it might not be Beth who serves us.
This morning our hostess, waitress is a short, stubby, older looking than she is woman who wears house slippers and a blue apron. She screws up her face funny when she writes our order into her little spiral notebook, grasping the pencil tightly.
” Is that it? ” she says, looking at us as she reaches for our four menus as if she doesn’t want them to get away.
” That’s it, ” we say.
” We should have been higher, ” Weston says, ” the seismic was no good. ”
His dad nods. Max and I check our silverware for food the ex- con dishwasher didn’t take off.
This little Bar and Grill,in Benkleman, was in its heyday in the 1950’s when oil drilling in the Continental U.S. was strong and wheat and cattle brought good prices. The wallpaper, yellowed now, was new then and conversation was heady and animated. World War 2 was over and servicemen were back home with most of their limbs and some of their mental health.
” Disappointing, ” I add, the only coffee drinker in the group.
” If the oil isn’t there, it isn’t there, ” Neal reminds us.
When the food comes it is as plain as the building. There is no salsa or sprig of parsley to give the plate a fancy look. A man sitting at the table behind us is happy Beth is open on a Sunday morning with snow on the ground at seven in the morning. He has hot tea , reads his local newspaper, checks cattle futures and has his toast with a bit of orange marmalade. He appears to be a regular who is joined by a friend halfway through my eggs over easy.
There are three pool tables in the back of the restaurant and some evenings, under dropped lights, men will be playing pool, watching football, and drinking beer, staying out of their wife’s house.
There is money in alcohol, not so much in food.
Dry holes, last time I looked, still cost me a fair bit of money.
Disappointed, but not dejected, we all leave Beth a good tip, even if we didn’t hit anything but dirt.
The Geo-Hut is adjacent to the derrick, hooked up to electric with heaters blasting 24/7 to deal with deteriorating colder and colder weather.
Snow started yesterday and has laid a six inch blanket atop the Geo-Hut roof. Inside the trailer-office-bunkhouse, one bed is covered with clothes,gear, and Max’s guitar. A sleeping bag is on the other. In a separate room is a desk, a microscope, and a place to spread geological maps. A bag of groceries is on the floor by the front door. There is no stove or frig and an orange portable toilet is at the edge of the drill site,at the field’s edge, and it, thankfully, has paper.
Max has been here several days, arriving after the well was surveyed and spudded. There are long stretches in drilling where nothing happens, then short quick stretches of anxiety or exhilaration when the drill bit enters a pay zone.
This evening, late, the creators of this business plan peer at samples, measure how the interior of the Earth is conforming to their mental picture of it, wait for more samples, decide which zones need to be tested to see if they are to be profitable. This well is the end of a long process of coming up with a prospect, leasing land, selling the deal to investors, lining up a driller, making sure your t’s are crossed and your i’s are dotted, all legal and proper.
We don’t stay all night, have an upstairs hotel room in Benkleman heated with three little electric heaters plugged into the walls. Tomorrow morning, early, we’ll be back to this well site looking for a profitable bottom line..
The oil business is predictably unpredictable, in a predictable way.
The rig moved in four days ago.
The drilling crew are cold and wet but crews run twenty four seven coming back out of the hole only to replace a broken or dull bit, or let a logger test a zone.
Despite what you read in the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the New York Times, the environmental impact of this rig is about as much as a fly on an elephant’s back.
Thom’s shop is full of heavy steel automobiles from the fifties and sixties, stripped down, in various stages of renovation.Paint and body tools are resting in the shop where they were used last,collecting dust on the hood of a Chevy Pickup or the roof of a Ford mustang.
Hanging on wire lines in the shop’s paint booth are a detached hood and car door, suspended from a cable running from one side of the room to the other. The painter can walk around the hood and car door, unobstructed, wearing his respirator , careful to keep the spray gun moving, not creating runs and catching all the nooks and crannies.
When the final coats of paint are done,my nephew Weston’s El Camino will be a beauty.
Collectors want their gems to sparkle.
When you put lots of time, thought, and energy into a project you want it to be worth doing.
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