Well, gas is cheap right now and the roads are empty…
Attended a function down at a Rod & Gun Club outside of Harrisburg, PA @ 2010 where Uncle Ted gave a political speech for about an hour, gave a bow hunting demo and then gave all 200 of us a meet and greet with a handshake and autograph pic. Great dude.
Got tickets for a Black Crowes concert at the end July in Western NY, hopefully it’ll happen but the bastards are cancelling everything. Got us in a goddamn stranglehold.
Uncle Ted’s doing pretty well for 70+ though, wot?
I used to know a gal who worked for Fred Bear back-in-the-day. She said he was the best boss she’d ever had and she was stupid to have quit.
AnneApril 28, 2020, 2:53 PM
Just a thought to add to this day. It is the anniversary of Harper Lee’s birth and I thought it would be good to post this from her . . .
“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.” Thank you GV for helping to keep it alive in my life every day.
Iowa SquireApril 28, 2020, 3:54 PM
At a time when the walls feel like they are closing in, there’s no denying the palliative efffects of a dose of Uncle Ted. Thanks!
Snakepit KansasApril 28, 2020, 6:35 PM
Sweaty Teddy is good live. Although sometimes the melodic original lead cannot be much improved upon.
David SmithApril 29, 2020, 3:21 AM
Great Bob Seger! Wonderful keyboard. Harkens back to bicycle rides in Michigan’s Upper, across Big Mac from Mackinaw City. Rode in yesterday’s sunshine, spring a long time coming after snow in April 14.
Teri PittmanApril 29, 2020, 9:48 AM
I take the dogs out for a truck ride every Sunday. What I’ve been doing is using the Map app on my phone to go to a town nearby and having the app chart the way without using freeways. It’s been interesting. I know how to get to these places on the freeways, but haven’t driven the back roads. We all really enjoy it (although I learned one dog gets carsick on windy roads.)
Ghostsniper’s Fred Bear link; Guess when one has a certain number of years behind them good words/music resonates bringing back grand memories.
Listening I thought of Henry Baley, an Eskimo from Noatak I used to hunt with.
Riding behind him on a Polaris snowmachine getting my feet knocked off the running boards by foot tall hundred year old spruce trees on a high plateau right at the edge of the tree line (Most Eskimos, back in the day, figured snowmachine’s had two speeds, off and full throttle) and him stopping occasionally, walking a circle around, checking the tracks of the caribou we were following. Fifteen, twenty miles later, five caribou, seventy five or so yards off. My .308 FN, his .30-06 Springfield. dropped all five in their tracks. Him, field dressing them in far less time than it would take to tell (I learned his technique but never approached his speed.), two trips sledding them back to the pickup truck and a great addition to the winter’s supply of meat for both our families.
& that brought back memories of one time when Henry, his wife, Edna, me and my wife were down at Chitna dipnetting salmon. Climb down a two story cliff, brace you net in a back eddy, haul it out when a salmon bumps it. When day’s done, haul them up the cliff (20 or so salmon per person limit back then.) etc.
So! As we were spending a long day at the bottom of the cliff I collected some nice dry driftwood making a fire so we could have some tea and coffee. Remembering well the woodcraft I’d learned as a Boy Scout, I proceeded to slowly and carefully make a fuzz stick shaving a twig with my knife, leaving the curls of shavings attached to it all around. Edina asked me; “Whatschudoin’ ?”. I explained I was making a fuzz stick to get the fire started. She told me, “No, that ain’t the way to do it.”, taking a kleenex or a paper towel out of her pocket, putting it under the kindling & igniting it with her lighter, -with the dry kindling and the river wind, a roaring little fire in seconds, yep, everyone, including me, had a great laugh at my expense!
Thanks Ghost, thanks Ted!
ghostsniperApril 29, 2020, 1:28 PM
The first time I saw Ted do Fred, heh, it was the electrified version and worth it’s weight but the one I posted here is far better. Just Ted. With a box guitar. Sitting at a camp fire. Doesn’t get more basic than that. When you strip away all the showbiz he is still a good guitar player and song writer. Personally though I don’t think I’d get along with him very well. He’d get on my nerve pretty quick.
Fluella De VilApril 30, 2020, 7:50 AM
The essential American soul is soft, ovine, libertine, and a suicide. It has melted in a puddle on the floor. Bummer.
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
ARTIST: CASEY KLAHN
Song of Myself
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
“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’.”
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
![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]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
Well, gas is cheap right now and the roads are empty…
Attended a function down at a Rod & Gun Club outside of Harrisburg, PA @ 2010 where Uncle Ted gave a political speech for about an hour, gave a bow hunting demo and then gave all 200 of us a meet and greet with a handshake and autograph pic. Great dude.
Got tickets for a Black Crowes concert at the end July in Western NY, hopefully it’ll happen but the bastards are cancelling everything. Got us in a goddamn stranglehold.
Equally atrocious on an acoustic, see here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyNYzcXAPf4
Uncle Ted’s doing pretty well for 70+ though, wot?
I used to know a gal who worked for Fred Bear back-in-the-day. She said he was the best boss she’d ever had and she was stupid to have quit.
Just a thought to add to this day. It is the anniversary of Harper Lee’s birth and I thought it would be good to post this from her . . .
“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.” Thank you GV for helping to keep it alive in my life every day.
At a time when the walls feel like they are closing in, there’s no denying the palliative efffects of a dose of Uncle Ted. Thanks!
Sweaty Teddy is good live. Although sometimes the melodic original lead cannot be much improved upon.
Great Bob Seger! Wonderful keyboard. Harkens back to bicycle rides in Michigan’s Upper, across Big Mac from Mackinaw City. Rode in yesterday’s sunshine, spring a long time coming after snow in April 14.
I take the dogs out for a truck ride every Sunday. What I’ve been doing is using the Map app on my phone to go to a town nearby and having the app chart the way without using freeways. It’s been interesting. I know how to get to these places on the freeways, but haven’t driven the back roads. We all really enjoy it (although I learned one dog gets carsick on windy roads.)
Ghostsniper’s Fred Bear link; Guess when one has a certain number of years behind them good words/music resonates bringing back grand memories.
Listening I thought of Henry Baley, an Eskimo from Noatak I used to hunt with.
Riding behind him on a Polaris snowmachine getting my feet knocked off the running boards by foot tall hundred year old spruce trees on a high plateau right at the edge of the tree line (Most Eskimos, back in the day, figured snowmachine’s had two speeds, off and full throttle) and him stopping occasionally, walking a circle around, checking the tracks of the caribou we were following. Fifteen, twenty miles later, five caribou, seventy five or so yards off. My .308 FN, his .30-06 Springfield. dropped all five in their tracks. Him, field dressing them in far less time than it would take to tell (I learned his technique but never approached his speed.), two trips sledding them back to the pickup truck and a great addition to the winter’s supply of meat for both our families.
& that brought back memories of one time when Henry, his wife, Edna, me and my wife were down at Chitna dipnetting salmon. Climb down a two story cliff, brace you net in a back eddy, haul it out when a salmon bumps it. When day’s done, haul them up the cliff (20 or so salmon per person limit back then.) etc.
So! As we were spending a long day at the bottom of the cliff I collected some nice dry driftwood making a fire so we could have some tea and coffee. Remembering well the woodcraft I’d learned as a Boy Scout, I proceeded to slowly and carefully make a fuzz stick shaving a twig with my knife, leaving the curls of shavings attached to it all around. Edina asked me; “Whatschudoin’ ?”. I explained I was making a fuzz stick to get the fire started. She told me, “No, that ain’t the way to do it.”, taking a kleenex or a paper towel out of her pocket, putting it under the kindling & igniting it with her lighter, -with the dry kindling and the river wind, a roaring little fire in seconds, yep, everyone, including me, had a great laugh at my expense!
Thanks Ghost, thanks Ted!
The first time I saw Ted do Fred, heh, it was the electrified version and worth it’s weight but the one I posted here is far better. Just Ted. With a box guitar. Sitting at a camp fire. Doesn’t get more basic than that. When you strip away all the showbiz he is still a good guitar player and song writer. Personally though I don’t think I’d get along with him very well. He’d get on my nerve pretty quick.
The essential American soul is soft, ovine, libertine, and a suicide. It has melted in a puddle on the floor. Bummer.