Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
— Hilaire Belloc (1898)
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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
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.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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
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
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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
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
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
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.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Likey!
I’ll order 2 crates.
Watched “Red October” for the first time a few weeks ago. It’s hard for me to equate BLM/Antifa with world wide evil power governments But maybe they are. No one not in them believed in Nazi Concentration Camps. Long time lurker commenting.
I’ll chip in for another crate if I can come to KlahnFest and test them out. Love it!
Nancy, what do you mean when you say it’s hard for you to equate BLM/Antifa with world wide evil power governments who most assuredly will create and utilize concentration and death camps for
all of their opponents and for many of those who assisted them in their conquests?
Are you serious?
The 40mm is impressive but my .41 mag Desert Eagle is a bit handier.
When I bought it, the .41 was one only one the dealer had in stock. I planned to buy a .44 mag barrel for it later but as the .41 penetrated three 2X4s & over half way in to a fourth one, I decided the .41 would suit my needs just fine.
I carry the Desert Eagle as a bear gun, not necessarily the best choice for crowd control.
If I ever have need to control a crowd of bears, I think I’ll grab my Winchester Model 12 instead, still a bit handier to haul around than the 40mm 😉
James sed: “If I ever have need to control a crowd of bears, I think I’ll grab my Winchester Model 12…”
========
I used to think that way. (I have a 1917 vintage model 12, 12 ga.) When I went to Alaska to run trap lines the idea was to have my Ruger .357 on my hip and my 870 Wingmaster with slugs slung across my back. Well I seen a video the other day of a black bear running down an antelope and caught it. Saw another vid of a bear aggressively climbing a tree. Those vids changed my attitude about bears. I’m thinking a pump shotgun might not be fast enough to do what needs doing. Maybe an 1100 autoloader. In 10 gauge. Double Barreled.
I’ve fired 40mm rounds before, from an M203 but the rounds weren’t as long as in the vid. They had a horrible trajectory. You have to rainbow them onto the target, which in my case, was a tank turret.
Ghost, if you’re going to use a heavily stoked 12 gauge, and I’m speaking in terms of a tube full of 3″ magnum rounds, you might do better in terms of shock and recoil management with a .375 H&H. And, in any situation for defense shot placement is paramount.
I’ve shot a lot of stuff in my life and a 12 with 3″ loads knocks the crap out of me. I think of it as vicious. I had little time to recover and get back on target because that gauge with a 3″ slug will whack you with roughly 54 pounds of felt recoil and follow up shots, even with an auto loader are worse. I think that the felt recoil with a side-by-side might be a little less but double barreled shot guns, as opposed to double barreled rifles, aren’t notoriously accurate at distances beyond 50 yards because shotgun barrels are not regulated like those of double rifles.
The .375 on the other hand might hit you with 35+/- pounds of felt recoil with a 300 grain slug. That recoil is roughly twice that of a .30-06 with a 150 grain bullet and I think the .30-06 is very pleasing to shoot. A .375 in a double rifle is very often the chosen rifle of African PHs for rapid followup shots on dangerous game but good ones are expensive.
Kimber, makes a lovely bolt action called the Caprivi or something like that and it’s available for a little beyond a $1,000, +/-. If I had another 10-15 left in me I’d own one today. Even if I didn’t use it.
Correction….I don’t know how I missed the key stroke. The Kimber usually sells just above $3K and it’s a great deal.
Yes. I’m a dummy. Never thought it would happen in the USA. Almost as dumb as Joey Biden.
@Jack, I am older and wiser now and even if I had an unlimited budget the allure that attracted me way back then, some 40 years ago, does no more. I try not to have a quarrel with any animal especially those that can eat me.
Funny, I was thinking about bears this morning…having decided to crank out as many of the sections of the Mountains to Sea Trail situated on Game Lands as I can during the weeks left before the shooting commences in September. This morning’s foray was about 70 miles inland, and chock full of turkeys, raccoons, doves, deer, and reasonably sized black bear, if the tracks are any indication. The walks are rather pedestrian as far as trails go; generally one is on shadeless dirt roads all or most of the time, and the sun beats down mercilessly, so one is well advised to get a relatively early start, though too early can have one inadvertently face to face with critters best viewed from afar.
I’ve pretty much always got a pistol on me, but my existing daily carry may have to be supplemented with something a little more potent, rather more akin to the sort I observed my fellow tipplers at The Bird House checking as they arrived to commence the ritual downing of Redeyes. Alas, .40 cal self defense loads out of a 2.5″ barrel, while sufficient for removing the genitals of would be urban muggers, (your target wearing a heavy sweatshirt on a 95 degree day tends to make one ponder just what is below, say body armor, thus altering one’s point of aim) might only piss off a raging ursine, bouncing off its cranium or lodging harmlessly in fat. Suggestions for something concealable (in the legal, if not strictly practical sense) yet sufficient for the task would be most sincerely appreciated from those of you in climes where they grow ’em bigger and badder (bears, not ‘yoots).
As far as ammo goes, that’s some nice high tech 40mm…very trick, indeed. Even on the big, fast, haze gray boat they only gave us star shells for the M-79, to warn off folk before the M-2s did their thing. The niftiest thing I ever saw for those was also a Norskie product, from Nammo’s predecessor, Raufoss rounds. Not that I admit to having ever possessed such a thing…probably wouldn’t be sporting for use on small craft.
For an “outdoors” sidearm I’ve gone with a Ruger Redhawk filled with Buffalo Bore solids. Springfield makes their XD in 10mm and the mag capacity is 15. I would use Buffalo Bore in that too. The Alaskan fishing guide who stopped a bear with a 9mm was shooting Buffalo Bore.
The ammo for the Mk19 is a much higher-velocity round than those used in the M79 or M203 and the airburst function really enhances the effec on the target.
Sorry if I don’t believe in being “sporting” in these matters
Jack. You can’t take the money with you. Buy the gun, whether you ever use it or not.
Love to have even a smidgen of those arms, all the serious arms I had went in the Paradise fires. Hard to replace in the state of California. Lots of paperwork.
Ghost, after well over 50 years up here on top of the world, I’ve worked out my bear safety strategy pretty carefully; first and most important, pick a companion that runs slower than me, second carry a heavy gun so when I drop it I can run even faster! Alas, as I get older, it’s harder and harder to find someone slower. 😉
Seriously though I’m reasonably comfortable in bear country with my Model 12 with a pumpkin ball in the chamber & pumpkin balls and double-aught in the tube. If nothing else that little extra assurance allows one to stand quietly instead panicking, running & looking like fast food. In my few bear encounters, just standing and letting them have the right of way worked out fine.
-knowing, of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results.