The Adventures of Bloggard

More Megatars than Ever!

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Secret Megatar Laboratory, Mount Shasta, 2/18/2007: For Immediate Release.

Six months and one day ago (8/15/06) Mayor Smokey Barnable of Edgewood cut the ribbon on the new Mobius Factory, declaring August 15th to be ‘Megatar Day.’

Today — six months and one day later — was a banner day in the annals of Megataria, as the first production batch of TrueTapper instruments emerged from the newly-completed Mobius manufacturing facility. Although we’re running warp drives at a mere fraction of the speed of light, precision and alignment are holding well, according to Engineering.

Megatar-starved earthlings rejoice. Additional music generators on the way!

Arrivederci, Abe’s. Adios to the Voicemail business.

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Mount Shasta, February 1, 2007: As of noon today, my voicemail business is adios, muchachos.

I’ve sold my interest in that company, and will no longer be running it. No longer to be answering that phone, saying those words, operating those particular computers, no longer doing that billing. And to those thousands of clients whom I served for the last twenty years, I am deeply grateful to have been a part of your lives.

I’m grateful to Abe’s SuperBudget Voicemail, the entity created, which took on a life of its own, relaying the messages that lie at the center of hopes and dreams, good times, and in the center of the comings and goings of so many lives. I’m glad to have been able to create this service, and I’m grateful that so many found it useful.

And I’m grateful to Abe’s for providing food and shelter for my family and myself, all these years. Thank you for the whole-wheat bread, thank you for the vegetables, thank you for the coffee and tea, cookies and cakes, yoghurt, honey, and rich creamery butter. Thank you for everything!

It will go on, Abe’s will, providing those useful services, keeping folks in touch with the worlds in which they live, they strive, they seek their fortunes, they find their loves. Let it serve you well. The company is in good hands. Only, it has passed from mine.

For my hands have found other occupation … creating music, fun, and happiness to stream out into the universe, for other lives, for other loves, for other travelers in this world.

So on behalf of myself and my family, in the words of Dorothy Collins, Giselle McKenzie, and Snookie Lansen, singing so long ago …

“So long, for a while. That’s all the songs for a while. So long to your Hit Parade, and the tunes that you wished to be played … so long.”

Charlie Bullard from Snyder, Texas

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Summer 1959, Rome: When I was growing up in Henrietta, Texas, John Bragg was the pharmacist at Henrietta Drugstore, and he was a running-buddy of my stepfather, Dr. Strickland. (For those unfamiliar with this term, it means a friend with whom you frequently hang out.) My mother was married to Dr. Strickland, and her brother was our town’s other doctor, Dr. Hurn. And before she’d married Dr. Strickland, she’d been a nurse, working in the office of her brother, Dr. Hurn.

Got all that?

OK, good, because it has very little to do with this story, which is about Charlie Bullard, who was from Snyder, Texas.

Here’s how it happened …

Because of all those doctors and my mother the nurse, for some reason I was in the habit as a child to walk down the alley behind the stores, and to go into the drugstore from the back door, where I would say hello to John Bragg the pharmacist. Moving toward the front of the store, sometimes I’d sometimes have a cherry coke at the soda counter. And at the very front of the store, each month I would read their copy of Mad magazine.

Occasionally the owner, a Mr. Harrell, would run me off, but generally I was let be, and I liked being there, for some reason. Perhaps it was the comfortable smell of rubbing alcohol, medicines, ice cream, and magazines.

So one summer when I was a teenager, I was going off to a drumming camp in Arlington, Texas, and I mentioned this to John Bragg. As it turned out, he volunteered himself to help my stepfather (Dr. Strickland) to drive me down to Arlington. At that time I had a girlfriend, a plump cousin of a girl in my school, whom I’d met and with whom I’d conducted a torrid love affair through letters, which netted me some exciting times out behind the cousin’s house some nights when she was in town visiting. But that’s a different story.

This girlfriend lived in Arlington, where I was going to the camp for snare drummers, and so all the way down there, John Bragg and my stepfather kept up a running commentary about how they might as well show up for lunch at the girlfriend’s house. How they would introduce themselves to the girlfriend’s family, and this would be good, because they were really hungry. I didn’t believe them, but it kept me on the edge of the back seat there in the car.

We didn’t visit the girlfriend, and I went to the camp and then came home a week later, but the point is this: On the drive, John Bragg told us about his uncle Sid who lived in Snyder, Texas, and about this fellow Charlie Bullard.

It seems that at a weekly card game in Snyder, Charlie Bullard was carrying on about how much he’d traveled around and how he knew just about everybody worth knowing. “Yep,” he said, puffing on a cigar stub, “I know pretty near everybody.”

Uncle Sid was dubious. Sure, Charlie was widely known all around Snyder, Texas, but that’s a pretty small place. Uncle Sid asked him if he knew the Texas State governor, who was Price Daniel at the time. Charlie nodded.

“Sure, I know him!” Charlie said, “I knew him when he was at Baylor University!” Uncle Sid thought about it, and that seemed reasonable.

“I bet you don’t know Lynden B. Johnson,” said Uncle Sid. Johnson was then Speaker of the House, and was being bruited about as a presidential hopeful in the next election, which nomination he lost to Kennedy, but was afterward chosen to run as Kennedy’s Vice President.

“Of course, I know him!” roared Charlie. “Met him in General McArthur’s tent in Australia, back in the war.” Uncle Sid was getting annoyed.

“Bet you don’t know the Pope!” said Uncle Sid.

“How much you want to bet?” said Charlie.

To make a long story shorter, the next week found the two of them climbing aboard an airplane, and two days later they were in Rome, where they found the Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano, where it seemed the Pope was to address the crowd around two o’clock that afternoon. Charlie Bullard turned to Uncle Sid.

“Now I can’t take you in there with me,” he said, “They’ve got a lot of guards and they might shoot you. I can get in, of course.” Uncle Sid grimaced.

“Of course you can,” said Uncle Sid, “And of course we can’t have the guards shooting me. So what do you propose?” Charlie pondered that for a while. Finally he pointed to a little balcony on the side of the grand building.

“That’s where the Pope comes out to talk to everybody,” he said. “How would it be if I just come out on that balcony with him and wave? Would that convince you I know the Pope?”

Uncle Sid reckoned that this would suffice. And without further ado, Charlie Bullard went walking off, and went up to a little door at the corner of the building where a guard stood. After speaking with the guard with a fair amount of gestures back and forth, Charlie was admitted through the little door.

And Uncle Sid waited in the square. And waited, and waited, and waited. As the noon hour came and went, he grew hungry but he waited. The square slowly filled with people until it was completely crowded by two o’clock. There was a bell from somewhere, and the crowd grew silent.

Out onto the little balcony came several priests in very fancy robes, and one guy in a white robe, and by golly there was Charlie Bullard, who came out, waved in Uncle Sid’s general direction, and then stood quietly near the fellow in the white robe.

And Uncle Sid had a problem.

Because Uncle Sid didn’t know what the Pope looked like.

Was that the Pope up there in the white robe? Or was this some terrific scam put on by Charlie Bullard? Uncle Sid was determined not to be tricked, and so he began asking everyone around him if that was the Pope up there. But nobody spoke English. Uncle Sid began asking, “Anybody speak English? Anybody speak English?” One Italian fellow raised his hand.

“I spikka little English,” he said. Uncle Sid grabbed the man’s sleeve, and pointed up at the balcony.

“Who is that up there?” he demanded. The Italian fellow looked up at the balcony and back at Uncle Sid.

“I’m not sure about da short guy in da white robe,” he said. “But that other fellow is Charlie Bullard, from Snyder, Texas.”

Uncle Esty

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Hurnville, Texas, Autumn 1955: Born Pfeiffer I. Estlach he was, of German family, but when emigrating to the United States, they’d made the name more ‘American’ by translating it. East Lake it meant, and so Eastlake their name became. Pfeiffer I. Eastlake married my mother’s sister, the beauty, Rosemary, and so became my Uncle Esty.

World War II fell upon them all, and like his peers, Pfeiffer had joined the army. I don’t know where he served, nor how it went for him, save that he came back. He was a small, compact man, slight but durable, with bright blue eyes and blonde hair. If he fought the Germans in the war, I’m sure he gave it his best, for in the photographs he looked very dashing in the uniform. However, I’d guess they would have sent him to the South Pacific, so that he wouldn’t have to shoot some cousin.

As a child I must have first met him at my grandparents farm, for there I most remember him. On this particular Autumn morning we had to find some water, out in a field. Why? I don’t know. He cut a thin green branch from a young tree, and made a Y-shaped wooden device, and on the long arm, he mounted the cap from a fountain pen. Then, holding the two arms inside his hands he paced across the field, watching for the long arm to turn down.

Turn down it did. Dig there we did. Water we found.

Rosemary had given birth to the two boys, Bobby and Danny, and with them I ran through the woods, explored the barns and granaries, trudged the fields. We learned to hunt rabbits, and how to handle rifles. Uncle Esty showed us.

They moved from their Denton home to Wichita Falls, a larger town just up the road from Henrietta where I lived with my mother. Uncle Esty was, at that time, an insurance Agent, and drove a white Studebaker with a red-and-white sign painted on the doors, saying ‘State Farm.’ I asked him why he had a sign on his car.

“That makes it deductible,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant. Now I do, and I know he probably could have just deducted it without the sign, but scrupulous and exact he was. I suppose he adored Rosemary once upon a time, but she seemed hard on him, hard on the boys, to me. Perhaps it was that my mother was more lax.

Visiting them in Wichita Falls, I learned about chili dogs. I bought a book and hypnotized my cousin Bobby. It seemed amazing, forbidden, dark and mysterious. There were games and tents and ropes and a huge and ugly bulldog named Kip.

Rosemary was the secretary to Dr. Hoggard, the pastor of a big Methodist church, so we were very Christian, oh yes we were. And it was great to spend a weekend there, not because of the church which was huge, cavernous, impressive, and boring, but because afterward, every week, we had lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria!

One Sunday, back at their home after Luby’s, we were changing from our church clothes, and an animated discussion broke out about something. My cousin Dan was imploring Uncle Esty in earnest tones and the two boys and I followed Uncle Esty out the kitchen door and up past the flower gardens to the front of the house, while on the nearby larger street a parade of cars whispered past.

My Uncle Esty unlooped the garden hose and prepared to water the roses. He stopped. Looked down at young Danny.

“Say!” Uncle Esty said, “You don’t have any pants on.”

Danny stopped in mid-sentence, looking down to discover he was wearing only his underwear. He shot a nervous look at all the cars driving past and ran pell-mell back into the house. Uncle Esty turned on the water and began to sprinkle the rosebed.

“Hmm!” he said.

Uncle Esty seemed forever patient to me. He was smart, efficient, worldly. He belonged to the Masonic Lodge and wore the ring. He smoked a pipe.

Of course the boys grew up. They joined DeMolays which is some Masonic thing, and went to high school. I’d graduated and gone off to college, and traveled to other states far away. I read books about esoteric practices like meditation and stress, and drove cars for long distances, and Rosemary died.

Esty was alone for a time, and seemed to shrink. Their house was haunted by Rosemary, who wasn’t there. Esty remained.

Returning for a visit, I stopped to see him. His health had declined, his heart was in trouble. He was the same precise man, but slower and sad, even when he told me that he’d met a dear woman he liked a lot. It had been a close call with his heart. He was trying to move forward. I tried to tell him what I’d read about meditation, and how it might help, and …

“I just do what the doctor tells me,” he said.

Soon after, I heard that he had married the dear woman. And then before long he died.

Bobby and Danny, young men now, were forbidden the house. His Masonic Ring, personal effects, photographs, mementos — all appropriated. The dear woman had it all. Perhaps it was a business with her; I don’t know.

A lifetime of doing what was right, as best he could. Of course he would just do what the doctor told him.

A good man. My Uncle Esty.

Glynda and Pat

03.13.2011 by bloggard // 4 Comments

Denton, Texas, Summer 1963: Glynda G. was a happy-go-lucky, merry girl who’d appeared in our High School my Junior year. She was friends with Carolyn, my then-girlfriend, and the two girls had come to the same college a year after me. Pat M. was one of the four of us guys who had lived in the house in the Shady Shores community on Lake Dallas, a few miles out of town.

The Viet Nam war hovered over us all. We were being called for the draft left and right. They gave a 100-question multiple-choice test with four choices for each answer. If you scored 25 — which would be the average score if you just threw darts at the test — you passed. You qualified to be a soldier.

To escape, you had to be enrolled in school, be married, or run away to Canada.

Then, the draft board decided it didn’t matter if you were enrolled in school.

I didn’t know anybody in Canada, so I got a psychiatrist to tell them, truthfully, “You don’t want this boy.” They believed him, and I didn’t go. I’m glad, for I know I’d never have come back.

Pat said he was going to get married.

Since he didn’t have a girlfriend, I thought this idea sounded peculiar. But he had a plan.

“I’m going to marry Glynda,” he said.

And, by golly, he did.

I can’t imagine why she married him. They’d not been going together. I guess the excitement of being asked was just too much. She said yes.

I didn’t seem him much for a while, but he reported that married life agreed with him. And that summer I worked as a prison guard, in the records department of Huntsville Prison. Was it an interesting job? Yes it was. But that’s another story.

One weekend that summer, I took off and I drove back to Denton, where Pat and Glynda were living in a small apartment. They weren’t expecting me and I arrived very late on Friday evening. The lights in their apartment were off. I crept silently around to the rear, where I guessed the bedroom would be, and I crawled to a spot beneath their window. The window was open just a bit that summer night, as I’d known it would be.

There I let loose my panther scream.

Now if you haven’t heard this, it’s done like growling, but during a forceful indrawing of the breath. It makes a truly blood-curdling sound, and if you open and close your mouth while doing it, it sounds like a panther. Exactly like a panther. Like a horrible panther.

There beneath the window of your bedroom.

I heard shocked whispers through the window. “What was that?!!” she hissed.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I waited for a long, long moment, then gave another panther scream, louder!

Glynda screamed right along with me. “What the hell?!!” yelled Pat.

“Oh good,” I said, “It’s Pat and Glynda. This is your apartment.”

They actually let me in after that, which goes to show they were good friends, or maybe not very smart. We sat up talking for a while, drinking coffee and listening to a new Ramsey Lewis album about being “in with the in-crowd.” Then they made me a bed on the sofa and we all retired for the night.

The next day, Glynda told me how someone stole their blankets and towels from the laundromat, and then she asked my opinion about how to decorate a space over the sofa. They had several pictures but all were too small. I suggested they make an arrangement of all the pictures, and then held the different pictures up so that, all together, they made a large rectangle on the wall. That is, it was a large rectangle except it needed something about three feet wide and a foot tall in the lower corner.

“Let’s go look outside,” I said, and we stumbled out into the scorching heat of the vacant lot next door, where we poked through the weeds. There I found a crankshaft. I do not know why an automobile crankshaft was lying in the vacant lot, but it was the right size. So I went to the hardware store and bought a board and some trim, a piece of tan cardboard, a spool of wire, and some black paint.

Back at the apartment we cut the cardboard to cover the front face of the board, and drilled holes through the cardboard and the board. We wired the crankshaft onto the board, and then cut the trim and nailed it around the edges, to serve as a picture frame. I painted the trim black. Now we had a deep frame (black), a tan cardboard background, and the three-dimensional crankshaft in the middle. The crankshaft was rusted and had mystery speckles of white and red along one end.

We hung the framed crankshaft among the pictures on the wall.

Perfect. A wall-collage.

That was my wedding gift to Glynda and Pat. A panther, and a crankshaft.

I think they liked it.

So Long — to the Ramen King

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Osaka, Japan, January 6, 2007: Today at age 96, Ando Momofuku, the inventor of Instant Ramen, passed away. While a student at Ritsumeikan University he learned to operate a clothing business, but on a cold night shortly after World War II, he came upon a long line of people who were waiting to buy fresh ramen (noodles) at a black market food stall. In an epiphany, he came to believe that the world would have peace when people had enough to eat.

So in 1948 he began learning the food business, and ten years later developed instant Chicken Ramen, which he thought would provide better nutrition for soldiers in the field. His company grew and grew and grew. Two years ago, his company developed vacuum-packed noodles for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat on the U. S. space shuttle Discovery. When interviewed, Ando said, “I’m happy I’ve realized my dream that noodles can go into space.”

One small step for man, one giant leap for noodles. But perhaps more important is this: We don’t know who invented beans and rice, and we don’t know who invented spaghetti, but we do know who invented Instant Ramen. So for all the students of the world, and for those of us who once needed very affordable food for a simple meal, we thank you, Ando Momofuku.

In this simple way, you’ve changed the world.

Law 23 regarding Being, Doing, and Having

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Doingness Goals can produce more Happiness than Beingness or Havingness Goals.

That’s it. In the physical universe, one must Be something, in order to Do something, with the result that one will Have something.

For example:

One chooses to be a surgeon, so one can do surgery, and then one will have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon.

One chooses to be a ditch-digger, so one can do the labor of digging ditches, and then one will have the muscles, money, and workday of a ditch-digger.

One chooses to be a car salesman, so one can do the selling of cars, and then one will have the wardrobe, commissions, and lifestyle of a car salesman.

Can you imagine somebody being a ditch-digger, so that he can do the selling of cars, so that he will then have the respect, money, and lifestyle of a surgeon?

Nope. Because it just doesn’t work that way.

And this knowledge leads us to something very, very useful …

In these examples, it’s clear that one could set a goal of any one of these things. For example, one could choose the goal of being a ditch-digger, or one could choose the goal of doing the digging of ditches. They’re not the same goal. In the first one you’re choosing who you are; in the second, you’re choosing something to do.

If you had a house and you wanted to dig some ditches around it, you could set the digging of some ditches as a doingness goal without your having to permanently become a ditch-digger. Or … you could choose the beingness goal of being a ditch-digger, and go through your whole life that way. It might be a little limiting, unless you really, really love the life of being a ditch-digger.

Similarly, you might choose the havingness goal of having a doctor’s office. Now you might be the surgeon, or you might be the landlord. Either way you could have a doctor’s office.

So you as a human get to choose your goals in life. And the goals you choose may be Beingness goals, or Doingness goals, or Havingness goals. But these three types of goals are not equal when it comes to providing you with a happy life.

When I went off to college, I first decided that I wanted to be an engineer. However, I’d not thought much ahead to what an engineer would do. And when I found myself studying engineering, I discovered at that moment that I didn’t enjoy doing what an engineer would do. The prospect of a lifetime doing those things was pretty boring to the wild guy I wanted to be at that time.

So the first thing we can do is to look past the Beingness goal to what we will be Doing, because that’s what’s going to fill up your life. Therefore, choosing Doingness goals may be generally wiser and more productive than choosing Beingness goals. Although Beingness is senior and probably more important than Doingness, the Doingness part determines whether you perform surgery or dig ditches or sell cars.

Now, if you listen to the television or if you read the advertisements online, you’ll notice that our world has the intent to ensnare you with Havingness goals. If you are to believe them, they claim you will be happy if you have this car to drive at illegal speeds down deserted roads, or you will be happy if you have that razor to make you handsome like the guy on television, or you will be happy if you have this bank to guard your financial affairs and make you wealthy when you are old and fat with white hair.

And you know that most of that is all baloney. This is our first clue about Havingness goals.

For you notice that they’re all Havingness goals. Are there any advertisements urging you to adopt a Doingness goal such as to save up $10,000, or to repair the storm drains of your house, or to practice dancing the tango? Not really. The closest they will come is to urge you to have a savings account at the bank, to have a power tool for the storm drain work, or to have lessons at Durango’s Dance Studio.

Always Havingness goals.

And let us ask the question: Do Havingness goals make you happy?

The answer is: Yes, they do, for about three minutes.

You may enjoy your new toaster for months, or even for years if you engage in the wise practice of gratitude. However, the flush of pleasure that comes when you first open the box and plug the toaster into the wall, and the flush of pleasure that comes with your first slice of toast will diminish rapidly. After a while, it’s just another slice of toast. A big ‘So What?’

But compare that to a Doingness goal.

Suppose that you really, really love dancing the tango, and you really, really enjoy teaching the tango to other people. You love the Doingness of dancing and teaching the Tango more than anything else in the world.

Now suppose you adopt the doingness goal of dancing and teaching the tango. And you start doing that.

How long will the pleasure last?

For the rest of your life.

You see, what happens in our world is that spirit or life (beingness) appears in the physical universe and does this and does that (doingness), thus bringing about the natural consequences or the inevitable effects (havingness) of such action.

Spirit –> Action –> Effect
Be –> Do –> Have

Life doesn’t really have to ponder much what it is being, just as you don’t have to ponder much what you are being when you focus on how you just love to dance and teach the tango. And you will have the natural consequences of the actions of a person dancing and teaching the tango.

The before and the after parts (being and having) are the premise and the natural consequence of the part in the middle (doing). The part in the middle is the part you most get to choose, and if you choose doing something that makes you happy, you can be happy your whole life long.

Now, within that, you can also make choices of whether you just get by, or whether you have riches untold while doing the thing you love. For example, you could squander your tango salary on red wine and drift from tango job to tango job, or you could own a national chain of Tango Studios and bring the joys of tango to the masses, or you could write startling and popular books on Tangercise and sell millions on television. So the havingness could vary tremendously. But in any of these cases, whether its the giddiness of red wine or the fame of Tangercise, you’d spend your life dancing and teaching the tango, and your entire life can be happy.

And the reason you can be happy for your entire life is that, when you choose Doingness goals, you are expressing what a spirit is designed to do in this physical universe.

You are fulfilling your destiny.

On This Day: Joe Bob Briggs Explains ‘Yee-HAW!’

03.13.2011 by bloggard // Leave a Comment

Mount Shasta, CA, December 31, 2006: Recently, when Adrienne was writing our Christmas cards, she asked me how to spell ‘Yee-HAW’. If you live in a foreign country and do not know, this is something that Texas people like to yell out; it connotes extreme enthusiasm. For example, in the movie Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides the H-Bomb, he yells, “Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW! Yee-HAW!” This signifies his happiness in the moment.

Since Adrienne is from the East Coast, she didn’t know how to spell it, and so I told her. But that got me to thinking …

Where did Yee-HAW come from?

Where did ‘Yee-HAW’ come from? What is its origin? Did it come down to us through the ages, or was it just something that some cowboy yelled out one day while riding a wild horse, and somehow it caught on?

Naturally, these questions made me think of Joe Bob Briggs — the best drive-in movie reviewer in the greater Grapevine, Texas area — who is a veritable font of crucial information that we sorely need in these troubled times. If anybody would know, I reasoned, it would be Joe Bob Briggs, who is a close personal friend of mine. So I asked him.

Here is his answer …

“Yee-Haw derives from the Middle English “yee,” which became “ye” by the time of the King James Bible, a formal second-person pronoun normally used only in the singular but occasionally, when conjoined with qualifiers (“ye ungodly swine”), acceptable as an adjectival plural as part of an interjection.

“The word “Haw” was a borrowing from late 10th century Hungarian, a crude epithet used by soldiers to describe a rural imbecile (possibly a distant cousin of “harrow” or “harrower,” applied to those who till the soil, who were overwhelmingly illiterate in the Middle Ages).

“The words “yee” and “haw” were never used together until 1478, when a farrier in Long Sutton, among the eastern fens of Lincolnshire, was accosted by angry sugarbeet farmers whose draft animals had been quarantined by the Duke of Rutland upon pain of taxation necessary for the upkeep of Belvoir Castle. To defend himself from the angry mob, he quickly extracted iron bits from his furnace with a blacksmithing tong and hurled the fiery missiles at the luckless yeomen.

“When they began to scatter, the farrier execrated them with curses, including, at the point of his maximum excitement, “Yeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaawwww!” — the strict meaning of which would be something on the order of “you worthless lice-infested buffoons,” but of course given a sanguine connotation by the fact that the farrier was exultant and triumphant.”

“I thought everyone knew that.” — Joe Bob Briggs, www.joebobbriggs.com

Thank you, Joe Bob. As this year winds down, as a prediction for the new year coming in, I would add only this —

Yee-HAW!

reviews