Just a little over ten years left?
Fine with me.
Just hope we get the whole show: Anti-Christ, Avenging angels, Whore of Babylon, and, of course , my favorite apocalypso band: Four Horsemen, and the Beast.
And Jesus returning for the closing act. Can’t top that!
Well, if I make it to the end of the world then that would mean I made it into my eighties. And if I make it into my eighties I’d have lived longer than any of the direct descendant males on either side of the family. Cool!
It’s as I’ve always suspected, when I die; the world ends.
Kevin in PAMay 28, 2020, 6:38 PM
Ghost,
Don’t forget the hash browns.
and JWM,
We can hope.
AnonymousMay 29, 2020, 12:41 AM
Those birds look ominous. Beady eyes. Nasty little beaks. Skinny legs. With scales on them, for G-d’s sake. Flying around just to taunt us. They are up to no good. NO good, I tell you. They LOOK like AOC. Ever see HER legs? No, you haven’t. Scaly.
HMay 29, 2020, 4:23 AM
So, January 21, 2031, give or take a day? Bummer.
I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?
HMay 29, 2020, 4:26 AM
Gerard’s, dammit. It’s early and I haven’t had my coffee.
John VenletMay 29, 2020, 5:58 AM
While stationed on the USS Los Angeles (SSN688), guys who were getting close to getting out of the service would start a short timer’s card, and mark off the days until they separated. I guess it’s too early to make one of those if there’s still 3,890 days to go.
I’m up for the meet up at Gerard’s. Especially since I have plenty of time to get there according to AOC.
JackMay 29, 2020, 9:07 AM
John Venlet….when I was in the Nav guys who were within a year of discharge would trace the outline of a Playmate or Penthouse Pet on a sheet of legal sized paper. Then the artist would crisscross the drawing with squares, each representing one day and each square would be numbered from the number of days remaining until discharge all the way down to the “wakeup”.
Some guys would just use any color and shade in the day that had passed, headed toward discharge but a thoughtful artist would use colored pencils to fill in each day as it passed, and replicate, as close possible, the coloring in her skin and her outstanding virtues.
In those days of course there were no women aboard ship and we could usually get away with whatever our lustful hearts could imagine but the contemporary sailor, especially aboard ship, lives in a PC gender bent world that would have to be seen to be appreciated and a “short timer’s calendar”, as we knew them back then would most certainly gin up charges of sexism and lewdness, being put on report and very like Captain’s Mast with a reduction in rank and restriction to the base for 6 months.
But the strange thing, at least for me is, that I knew a bunch of WAVES or whatever the heck they’re called now and I didn’t meet a single one amongst ’em that could not out lewd any Salt I ever met. Those babes loved serving their country and their fighting men.
VanderleunMay 29, 2020, 9:11 AM
“I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?”
I’m going to need a bigger boat.
John VenletMay 29, 2020, 10:40 AM
Jack, the short timer calendars you describe are much more interesting than the ones used on my boat, back in the early 80s. I like your style much more. Maybe because they sound so interactive.
When I first heard about women serving on subs, I couldn’t believe it. There went the neighborhood.
The WAVES I knew during my Navy days were rather entertaining, not a Karen among them. Thanks for your reminisces.
art lindsayMay 29, 2020, 11:36 AM
I’d love to meet at Gerards, just to shake the hand of the fellow who has been entertaining me for twenty-some years. I’ll bring whiskey, a case. Be patient, gonna take me a day of hard driving to get there.
jackMay 29, 2020, 12:23 PM
John Venlet, I understand. I was in from 70-74 and really, even were they allowed, no self respecting woman would have wanted to serve on the rust bucket USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42). You could get boils and abscesses from merely drinking the water which usually contained enough JP5 to set you on fire if you smoked too soon after eating.
We did have a couple of instances when some kind of female civilian engineer came aboard and spent a couple of weeks and the old salts were visibly bothered by her existence on the ship. There was/is some kind of a warning about women being aboard a man-o-war and after 15-30 years in the service, most of the time at sea, those cats were true believers. She was pretty fetching so after a few of them had a chance to see her they settled back into their old and usual routines of simply stating that they’d like to….. her.
Several years ago when I was on FB I looked into the FB page of my old squadron and the offices and line shops were filled with women who were ordnance handlers and who worked in jet engine repair and in the paint shops. Back when I was in those were absolutely the nastiest jobs, perhaps other than being an E-3 bosun mate that one could be assigned to and I made an off handed comment that “back in the day……that stick wouldn’t have floated….or something equally leading and some CPO jumped on me and told me that I wasn’t fit to serve in “his” Navy.
Pregnancies are rife on ships with females aboard and I laughed and thought how charmed he must feel himself to speak against generations of war time Navy vets, either on or off the line, who simply don’t believe that a couple of dozen women should be assigned to a Navy ship filled with horny fleet sailors.
I hope he catches the clap.
ghostsniperMay 29, 2020, 12:39 PM
When I was in, 74-78, everybody made a short timer calendar as soon as they got to permanent party. Mine required 2 sheets of paper. It was the happiest day in a soldiers life when he could say, “One day and a wake up!”
John VenletMay 29, 2020, 12:52 PM
Jack, the only time we had a woman/women on the LA was for a dependents cruise. One of them was my Mum, now 88 years old, and she still likes to talk about doing angles and dangles and being invited up to the bridge by the Captain as we pulled into Pearl.
Ghostsniper, I didn’t start my short timer calendar until I had 100 days to go, and it was on the backside of one of my hardcover, government issued green log books. I filled up six of them during my time on the LA (80 – 84) because I used them as personal journals. There’s some real bitching in those journals, but also some real interesting at sea stories, not to mention adventures while on liberty in foreign ports, and running around the islands, as I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.
Roughly ten Years? Count me in, I’ll only be 91 then.
Bigger boat Vanderleun? I’ll sail my Balboa 26 down, t’ain’t that big but if we raft up, adds a lot of space. I’ll brew and stow a few kegs of my White Night’s Stout, the extra ballast will be handy running from Prince William Sound to the Inside Passage, that run can be a wee bit dicey. After the Inside Passage, a run out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, hang a left & I’m just about in hollering distance.
Shouldn’t be too hard a run, way back in the day my Tlingit and Haida neighbors used to do it all the time, in open canoes to rape and pillage down in your neighborhood.
ghostsniperMay 31, 2020, 9:41 AM
John V sed: “I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.”
=====
I remember we talked about that over at Improved Clinch way back when. You lucky dawg.
You should get those log books out and collate them into one big digital journal, all edited and supported with pix then get an online company to create a hardback version for sitting right in the middle of your coffee table.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
![Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ginsbergnirvana-150x150.jpg "Allen Ginsberg: The Interview, <strong> ➡ 1972 ⬅ </strong> [Republished by unpopular demand]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
Well… look to the bright side. If the earth is doomed that means no more AOC, too. Nice.
Good. I have time for a big ol plate of bacon and eggs.
Cortez is a ticking blivit.
Move over Greta… TIME has named Karen the Person of the Year. So many annoying people, but alas, so little time left. https://babylonbee.com/news/time-names-karen-person-of-the-year
I have marked my calendar.
Just a little over ten years left?
Fine with me.
Just hope we get the whole show: Anti-Christ, Avenging angels, Whore of Babylon, and, of course , my favorite apocalypso band: Four Horsemen, and the Beast.
And Jesus returning for the closing act. Can’t top that!
JWM
Well, if I make it to the end of the world then that would mean I made it into my eighties. And if I make it into my eighties I’d have lived longer than any of the direct descendant males on either side of the family. Cool!
It’s as I’ve always suspected, when I die; the world ends.
Ghost,
Don’t forget the hash browns.
and JWM,
We can hope.
Those birds look ominous. Beady eyes. Nasty little beaks. Skinny legs. With scales on them, for G-d’s sake. Flying around just to taunt us. They are up to no good. NO good, I tell you. They LOOK like AOC. Ever see HER legs? No, you haven’t. Scaly.
So, January 21, 2031, give or take a day? Bummer.
I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?
Gerard’s, dammit. It’s early and I haven’t had my coffee.
While stationed on the USS Los Angeles (SSN688), guys who were getting close to getting out of the service would start a short timer’s card, and mark off the days until they separated. I guess it’s too early to make one of those if there’s still 3,890 days to go.
I’m up for the meet up at Gerard’s. Especially since I have plenty of time to get there according to AOC.
John Venlet….when I was in the Nav guys who were within a year of discharge would trace the outline of a Playmate or Penthouse Pet on a sheet of legal sized paper. Then the artist would crisscross the drawing with squares, each representing one day and each square would be numbered from the number of days remaining until discharge all the way down to the “wakeup”.
Some guys would just use any color and shade in the day that had passed, headed toward discharge but a thoughtful artist would use colored pencils to fill in each day as it passed, and replicate, as close possible, the coloring in her skin and her outstanding virtues.
In those days of course there were no women aboard ship and we could usually get away with whatever our lustful hearts could imagine but the contemporary sailor, especially aboard ship, lives in a PC gender bent world that would have to be seen to be appreciated and a “short timer’s calendar”, as we knew them back then would most certainly gin up charges of sexism and lewdness, being put on report and very like Captain’s Mast with a reduction in rank and restriction to the base for 6 months.
But the strange thing, at least for me is, that I knew a bunch of WAVES or whatever the heck they’re called now and I didn’t meet a single one amongst ’em that could not out lewd any Salt I ever met. Those babes loved serving their country and their fighting men.
“I propose we all gather up at Gerald’s that day and have ourselves a time. I’ll bring the Shiner Bock, who else is in?”
I’m going to need a bigger boat.
Jack, the short timer calendars you describe are much more interesting than the ones used on my boat, back in the early 80s. I like your style much more. Maybe because they sound so interactive.
When I first heard about women serving on subs, I couldn’t believe it. There went the neighborhood.
The WAVES I knew during my Navy days were rather entertaining, not a Karen among them. Thanks for your reminisces.
I’d love to meet at Gerards, just to shake the hand of the fellow who has been entertaining me for twenty-some years. I’ll bring whiskey, a case. Be patient, gonna take me a day of hard driving to get there.
John Venlet, I understand. I was in from 70-74 and really, even were they allowed, no self respecting woman would have wanted to serve on the rust bucket USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42). You could get boils and abscesses from merely drinking the water which usually contained enough JP5 to set you on fire if you smoked too soon after eating.
We did have a couple of instances when some kind of female civilian engineer came aboard and spent a couple of weeks and the old salts were visibly bothered by her existence on the ship. There was/is some kind of a warning about women being aboard a man-o-war and after 15-30 years in the service, most of the time at sea, those cats were true believers. She was pretty fetching so after a few of them had a chance to see her they settled back into their old and usual routines of simply stating that they’d like to….. her.
Several years ago when I was on FB I looked into the FB page of my old squadron and the offices and line shops were filled with women who were ordnance handlers and who worked in jet engine repair and in the paint shops. Back when I was in those were absolutely the nastiest jobs, perhaps other than being an E-3 bosun mate that one could be assigned to and I made an off handed comment that “back in the day……that stick wouldn’t have floated….or something equally leading and some CPO jumped on me and told me that I wasn’t fit to serve in “his” Navy.
Pregnancies are rife on ships with females aboard and I laughed and thought how charmed he must feel himself to speak against generations of war time Navy vets, either on or off the line, who simply don’t believe that a couple of dozen women should be assigned to a Navy ship filled with horny fleet sailors.
I hope he catches the clap.
When I was in, 74-78, everybody made a short timer calendar as soon as they got to permanent party. Mine required 2 sheets of paper. It was the happiest day in a soldiers life when he could say, “One day and a wake up!”
Jack, the only time we had a woman/women on the LA was for a dependents cruise. One of them was my Mum, now 88 years old, and she still likes to talk about doing angles and dangles and being invited up to the bridge by the Captain as we pulled into Pearl.
Ghostsniper, I didn’t start my short timer calendar until I had 100 days to go, and it was on the backside of one of my hardcover, government issued green log books. I filled up six of them during my time on the LA (80 – 84) because I used them as personal journals. There’s some real bitching in those journals, but also some real interesting at sea stories, not to mention adventures while on liberty in foreign ports, and running around the islands, as I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.
Roughly ten Years? Count me in, I’ll only be 91 then.
Bigger boat Vanderleun? I’ll sail my Balboa 26 down, t’ain’t that big but if we raft up, adds a lot of space. I’ll brew and stow a few kegs of my White Night’s Stout, the extra ballast will be handy running from Prince William Sound to the Inside Passage, that run can be a wee bit dicey. After the Inside Passage, a run out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, hang a left & I’m just about in hollering distance.
Shouldn’t be too hard a run, way back in the day my Tlingit and Haida neighbors used to do it all the time, in open canoes to rape and pillage down in your neighborhood.
John V sed: “I was fortunate enough to stationed at Pearl for my entire active duty stint.”
=====
I remember we talked about that over at Improved Clinch way back when. You lucky dawg.
You should get those log books out and collate them into one big digital journal, all edited and supported with pix then get an online company to create a hardback version for sitting right in the middle of your coffee table.