Roll, roll me away
Won’t you roll me away tonight?
I too am lost, I feel double-crossed
And I’m sick of what’s wrong and what’s right

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” — Sal, On the Road

[continue reading…]

I really can’t take much more of the “news of the day” this week so I’ll just take the rest of the week off with “How to Build a 3.8L Porsche Track Monster.” You can too if you choose to….

First time for my girlfriend in my E36 M3 Ringtool and also her first time on a track — especially on Nürburgring Nordschleife.***

JERRY:  You know there are two types of female orgasm: the real and the fake. And I’ll tell you right now, as a man, we don’t know. We do not know, because to a man sex is like a car accident and determining the female orgasm is like being asked ‘What did you see after the car went out of control?’. ‘I heard a lot of screeching sounds. I remember I was facing the wrong way at one point. And in the end my body was thrown clear.

*** The Nürburgring is a 150,000 person capacity motorsports complex located in the town of Nürburg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It features a Grand Prix race track built in 1984, and a much longer Nordschleife “North loop” track which was built in the 1920s around the village and medieval castle of Nürburg in the Eifel mountains. The north loop is 20.8 km (12.9 mi) long and has more than 300 metres (1,000 feet) of elevation change from its lowest to highest points. Jackie Stewart nicknamed the old track “The Green Hell”

He slapped his wallet on the table,
But Joe the Joker called his bluff.
Jack built his house with three old queens,
But was busted by a royal flush.

Jack’s boots were worn and dusty,
And he’d sometimes get the shakes,
But he’d always raise the ante,
And play for bigger stakes.

You could see him sipping Turkey
And playing dollar Keno
In the first joint over Stateline.
They called him old Jack Reno. [continue reading…]

“Would you like to live in a home or do you want to live in a yurt?” — Nate Wadsworth

Faithful readers of American Digest are acquaninted with The Essential Craftsman, a YouTube channel featuring Scott Wadsworth of Oregon. It is one of the most interesting and decent channels you can follow.

But there is also the podcast channel Essential Craftsman 2 which is anchored by Wadsworth son and partner Nate Wadsworth. This is a long-format discussion channel featuring experts in various fields of construction and any other subject that engages Nate’s interest.

Today’s enlightening and information episode is  Lumber, Logs, and Timber on Fire with John Blodgett about all things wood, including the management of our forests and the fires that ravaged the west coast of the United States in 2020.

I’ve trimmed this hour-long discussion to the section that takes a hard and uncompromising look at the causes and effects of the advent of “Forest Fire Season” in the US and how it came to be and why it isn’t going away anytime soon. And, no, it has nothing to do with global climate warming change and a lot to do with the current crazed goverment and the drooling morons that support current forest policy.

The whole podcast is valuable but this section cuts to the quick.

Recommendo.

As they did last year, they’ve come twice in the last two days. They’re kids out running “a raise money for NARAL” scam. They get a cut of anything they pull in, and they sell any info they get to Planned Parenthood or other death mills.

They’re pleasant and they are enthusiastic (I love the painting! I really admire the tree!) and they hand you the clipboard expecting you to sign in your enthusiasm to support their “work.”

I listen and then I tell them, “No, I don’t support what you’re doing or the people and causes that you represent. I think it’s evil for you to do this, and worse still to do it for money.”

Here in Seattle’s Queen Anne, where smiles, nods, and signups for their scam are their usual rewards, they seem genuinely surprised and taken aback.

“You mean you’re not pro-choice?”

I assure them that I am not pro-choice even though, long ago, I was.

Yesterday evening, at night on the darkened porch, it was a young woman. She just shook her head and walked away to get on with her “mission” of going door to door bilking pro-choicers out of money. I guess she forgot to leave the chalk mark on my door that indicates “Satan!” because just now a boy old enough to be a man but forever avoiding it knocked with the same knock and announced himself as, “Hello, I’m your friendly neighborhood feminist.” He pointed towards the pink watch cap he wore.

He ran through the same spiel and handed me what could have been the same clipboard. I listened and handed it back to it saying, “I don’t support this.”

“You mean, you’re not pro-choice?”

“Do you have any children?”

“Ah… no.”

“Son, have you ever been through an abortion with, say, a woman you love in support of her right to choose?”

“Well, no.”

“I’ve been through two. The first was one that I supported. The second was one that I had deep misgivings about but failed to oppose.  Those two abortions were all long ago, but now I know that those were two children I didn’t have and will never know, and not a month goes by I don’t think about that and regret it.

“If it ever happens to you, you’ll agree to the abortion, to the killing of your child, at the time and then, years later, it will come back to you. It will come back to you that you are missing children in your life and it is partially your doing. And it will haunt you, the thought of the people they could have been.

“You’re young and deluded. You’re going to walk away and make this a story you’ll tell to the other kids out running your NARAL scam. Then you’ll forget all about what I am saying to you now for years, maybe decades, and you’ll go off and have some abortions of your own.

“And then one day, years after that, you’ll come to know what I know now. That’s when you’ll remember me; a man who through his own selfish vanity and foolishness, kept two children out of his life.

“That’s when you’ll remember this moment; the two of us here on this porch this evening. But like me, it will be too late for you. And you will know it and it will shatter your heart as it shatters mine even to this day late in my life.”

He walked away shaking his head, already moving into the long forgetting. Some day, it will come back to him. I’ll be remembered as a stranger, but suddenly not all that strange.

A blistering and rare performance from Clapton’s Classic Cocaine Period that basically blows out the back walls of the concert hall (with an assist from Phil Collins on the drums–  good to the last pop.).  We advise full screen and speakers up combined with a deep rocking dance around the room. Go ahead. Nobody’s watching.

The opening five bars of Layla

Layla was inspired by a love story that originated in 7th-century Arabia and later formed the basis of The Story of Layla and Majnun by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, a copy of which Ian Dallas had given to Clapton. The book moved Clapton profoundly, because it was the tale of a young man who fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful young girl, went crazy and so could not marry her. The song was further inspired by Clapton’s then unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend and fellow musician George Harrison of the Beatles. Clapton and Boyd would eventually marry.

As Clapton commented on the song: ‘Layla’ is a difficult one, because it’s a difficult song to perform live. You have to have a good complement of musicians to get all of the ingredients going, but when you’ve got that. … It’s difficult to do as a quartet, for instance, because there are some parts you have to play and sing completely opposing lines, which is almost impossible to do. If you’ve got a big band, which I will have on the tour, then it will be easy to do something like ‘Layla’—and I’m very proud of it. I love to hear it. It’s almost like it’s not me. It’s like I’m listening to someone that I really like. Derek and The Dominos was a band I really liked—and it’s almost like I wasn’t in that band. It’s just a band that I’m a fan of. Sometimes, my own music can be like that. When it’s served its purpose to being good music, I don’t associate myself with it anymore. It’s like someone else.

Pattie Boyd wrote: “We met secretly at a flat in South Kensington. Eric Clapton had asked me to come because he wanted me to listen to a new number he had written. He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume, and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard. It was Layla, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable. He played it to me two or three times, all the while watching my face intently for my reaction. My first thought was: ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to know this is about me.’

“I wasn’t so happy when Eric wrote ‘Layla,’ while I was still married to George. I felt I was being exposed. I was amazed and thrilled at the song – it was so passionate and devastatingly dramatic – but I wanted to hang on to my marriage. Eric made this public declaration of love. I resisted his attentions for a long time – I didn’t want to leave my husband. But obviously when things got so excruciatingly bad for George and me it was the end of our relationship. We both had to move on. Layla was based on a book by a 12th-century Persian poet called Nizami about a man who is in love with an unobtainable woman. The song was fantastically painful and beautiful. After I married Eric we were invited out for an evening and he was sitting round playing his guitar while I was trying on dresses upstairs. I was taking so long and I was panicking about my hair, my clothes, everything, and I came downstairs expecting him to really berate me but he said, ‘Listen to this!’ In the time I had taken to get ready he had written “Wonderful Tonight.”

Despite the lyrics being so marked by Clapton’s personal tribulations, the composition was largely shaped by guest collaborator Duane Allman, who devised that brazenly confrontational intro riff, and who helped transform Clapton’s early, self-pitying balladic draft into a bravura rock showpiece.

Such is the impact of those opening few bars that it’s easy to forget that two-thirds of Layla consists of an extended outro, written by Dominos drummer Jim Gordon –although he lifted the tune from a song written by his ex-girlfriend Rita Coolidge, which she later released as “Time” in 1973.*** [continue reading…]

Let’s see. War, huh?

I’ve never fought one, and I’m aware that some here have. I did graduate from the top infantry school, which means I graduated from every other infantry school lading up to that, and I’ve made a life’s study of Clausewitz and his peers. Sun Tzu isn’t in that group. Put him away and read the grown-up books. So, I guess as far as preparation is concerned, I’ve done some of that.

After I retired from mountain guiding in the PNW, I took up a gentlemanly sport: hunting. Some things I learned in that endeavor were not learned in the army or in the high mountains. Adopt your sights quickly and efficiently – it must be second nature to you. Suppressive fire is all good until you meet someone or something that won’t “be suppressed”. You must hit your target, whether from the offhand or from a field-expedient support.

Bipods are heavy, but essential in certain country scenarios. Carbines are fun but they don’t match rifles. Shotguns are like gold, but train to aim them; your cheek will be black and blue but expend some money on target loads for your .12 gauge. They are available, I think.

Learn to think inductively. That’s what I said and I didn’t stutter. There is an art to war and to hunting and to any extreme endeavor outdoors.

Study up on the OODA loop and understand how to get inside your enemies’ decision arc. I found out how to get inside the coyote’s skills arc, and he’s one of the sharpest adversaries you will find; sharper than the normal human by a longways.

Killing animals is a start. I have no idea what it’s like to kill humans but when the ABC and the BLM begin in on killing, you’ll know what to do.

Does that sound harsh? I was reflecting on the woman who was murdered in cold blood inside the capitol building on Jan 6th. She was surrounded by more law enforcement, uniformed and plain-clothed, and by BLM and Antifa types, and FBI types, than by her own kind, when she presented herself in that broken window aperture. The cuck who shot her (who knows his name?) went for a head shot, at almost point-blank range, and in as ideologically comfortable a place as he could be as far as his cohort is concerned, and the muthafugga missed the head and got her neck. Probably the reason no one else needed to be shot that day was there were too many fukn govt. agents, undercovers, and Antifa APs to get any decent shots.

How’s that make you feel?

The Vietnamese high command waged an offensive defense against the USA and the West. The Italian campaign was an offensive defense. It is a strong position, my friends. Keep your arms, don’t give the Left even an inch ideologically. There ain’t a GD thing wrong with America, as founded. The races aren’t at odds, and the fukn planet is just fine. Private property is not a vice, and Marx is as wrong now as he ever was.

That’s what I’m thinking today. — Casey Klahn March 1, 2021