When All Else Fails...

 

So I'm sitting at home watching murder shows on Hulu, when my phone rings. It is my youngest son asking me if I can try to find his work keys. Folks I turned the house upside down and no luck. I started to drive to where my oldest son works to see if they had been left in his car but my wife called and stopped me. She was on her way home to look for the keys. OK...Good luck. I turned around and headed home. When my wife arrived she walked into my youngest boy's room (where I had looked in earnest TWICE.) She walked out with the keys in hand within 30 seconds! 

What's wrong with that picture? I guess I am just getting older and can't see for squat!

The moral of the story is: When all else fails, call in the expert!

Take The Deal Dude

 

So Zelensky doesn't want the deal as offered? Then change it and give him less! Let's dispense with the formalities right off the jump, shall we. Russia was the aggressor. OK fine. Zelensky had the support of most of the world and with good reason. Putin was invading Ukraine and that was an act of war. I get it. But make no mistake about it, as time passed Mr. Z was getting exactly what he wanted, too. MONEY! If someone gave you 360 BILLION dollars and tons of top flight weaponry you should be able to hold off a nutjob who was using weapons from 60 years ago!Unless... unless that money (or a huge chunk of it) was going somewhere besides the war effort! That is exactly what I am convinced has happened in Ukraine! Zelensky is up to his hip pockets in graft and corruption! He and a few others in the Ukrainian government are siphoning off the top, bottom, and middle of the stack. Change my mind if you can. 

Putin is not my favorite dictator. Neither is Zelensky. But make no mistake, both ARE dictators. Dictators have one goal in mind no matter what country they are in charge of...putting money in their own pockets at any cost. These two are no different. 

The problem, as I see it, is that Putin has no intention of giving back the land he has taken so far in this war and Z has no chance whatsoever of forcing him to. There will be NO WINNER in this war. Millions of men, young and old alike, have died. For what? So Putin can look like the big shot leader to the people in what is left of Russia? So Z can look like a patriot to the people of Ukraine all the while lining his pockets with American taxpayer money as their sons and fathers die in vain? Spare me your sanctimonious, self-righteous posting of the yellow and blue flags on your FB pages. Keep your virtue signaling to yourselves. I do not stand with Ukraine or Russia. I stand with Trump and Vance as they keep that idiot dictator in check!

Zelensky better wake up and smell the bodies piling up across his country. He had the opportunity to make a great deal that would have kept Russia at bay for a long, long time but he got greedy. Now it is off the table. No more deal. UNLESS... unless he comes back to Trump, hat in hand and not his hand stuck out for more money, ready to apologize for being an idiot. Then MAYBE he has a chance to bring this senseless war to an end and stop the killing. Otherwise he cane take a hike and take his chances. By the way...Ukraine will never get into NATO. It has no business there. To allow them in would be to invite WWIII. 

I Love The Good Stuff

 

I love singing. I'm no longer able to carry a tune, (too much working around heavy machinery without ear protection), but I love listening. Especially to gosple or that type of song. I could sit and listen to the Gaithers and their Vocal Band for hours. Some of the best singing ever has been from gosple quartets. The Gaithers, The Blackwood Brothers, The Oak Ridge Boys (Yes, they started out as a gosple quartet and continued to incorperate it into their legacy throughout the years.). The list of great quartets is endless. 

I have decided that quartets are not the only ones who can craft a song or sound that holds my interest. Last night I stumbled across a few country songs and was captivated by the sound AND the words. Country singers have long gotten their start in gosple.One of the songs I listened to last night was one called "I Believe" by Brooks and Dunn with an assist from Jelly Roll. I listened to that song three times through. Wow. Just...wow. Alan Jackson is another of my favorites. He put out an album of just gosple songs for his mama. Incredible. On that album was an old favorite of mine. It was my mama's favorite hymn. I'll Fly Away. What a great song sung by such a great voice! You just can't beat a gosple song sung by a country artist. If you listen closely you will be effected by the words. I am. Take a minute or two and go on over to YouTube and search for gosple songs in the box. How I do love that old sound. The words just come alive! 

If you will excuse me, I need a "gosple fix"! Let's go to YouTube!

The Sound Of Music...

 

Man we had some good music back in our day!

I was born in 1960 and spent my formative years in some tumultuous times. Viet Nam raged in the jungles of South East Asia. Drugs and Hippies were everywhere. And Love was free. We had hot rods. We had the best looking girls. We had the world by the tail and didn't even know it. Yes sir...We had it all!

Most of all we had the music that defined a generation better than any before or since. Rock and Roll was everywhere and the bands of our day were undeniably the best to grace the stage in history! We sang a variety of songs that spanned the spectrum. Elvis made his comeback in '68 and Three Dog Night played on my record player at home. (Some of you may be scratching your head wondering what the heck a record player was. LOL) Wolfman Jack hosted a late evening program on TV that was just awesome! The Midnight Special shined it's light on all of us! The sound track to American Grafitti was a top seller. Zeplin was a household word and nothing to do with balloons. A Brittish fella named Elton John was taking the music world by storm like the Beatles had just a few years prior. He was Crocodile Rockin' and singing about Benny And The Jets and a Rocket Man somewhere in outter space. The Bee Gees were up and coming.

There were so many groups and songs that we would never be able to listen to them all...but we tried. Radio stations like the blow torch XERF AM just across the southern border from Del Rio, Texas, blasted the sweet sounds  and utilized the unmistakable raspy voice of the man we mentioned earlier, Robert Weston Smith, better known as The Wolfman. KSHE in St. Louis kept the party going.

I sometimes wish I could go back in time to my youth for many reasons, but the music of the era was no small factor!

I Was A Young Man Once

 

Ecclesiastes 9:11 states that "time and chance happens to all men." So true.

In the early hours of this morning I was lying awake listening to the storm roll through. My mind drifted and I soon found myself thinking about my youth and what might have happened to it. 

I recalled playing in the back yard with my brother, way back in the 1960's, before America lost it's way. Back when a kid could still be a kid and parents didn't have to worry about the pedo living next door. We played army. We played mumbly peg with a pocket knife given to us by our grandfather. We simply "played" without concern. We rode bicycles through mud puddles and neighbor's yards. No one complained. They actually kept an eye on us for our parents. There were other kids living around us. We made our own "motorcycle gang" complete with loud cycles created by placing a playing card in the spokes of our bicycles. We terrorized...no one. Just had fun riding from daylight until dark when it was time to go home.

A few short years and we were into cars. Hotrods. Almost every car from back then is a "classic" today and what we wouldn't give to have them back! We had a 69 Chevelle and a 71 Camaro. My brother inherited a 66 El Camino when dad passed in our early teen years. What a glorious collection we had our hands on without knowing it! 

Later came college and work and the toys went the way of the world. I still drove the Camaro but I hustled pool instead of going to class to afford gas for it. I was pretty good, too, but that's a whole other Jerry Springer. Not going to class soon caught up with me and I dropped out of the Junior College I was attending and went to work in the oil field. Unfortunately that didn't work out well since the oil field in East Texas soon dried up and work was hard to come by. So back to college I went. This time in a foreign land called "Arkansas." Just over four years later I had my degree in hand and returned home triumphant! Well...Sort of. I now had to find a job that would support me, only now I had student loans to pay. It would take me 30 years to pay them off, but I did it myself. No government assistance program to step in and pay them.

Many jobs later, now married with children, I look back on my life and wonder where my youth disappeared to. Don't get me wrong. I have a great life and a great family. I'm just no longer the young man I used to be. My body has begun to betray me on so many levels. One bout with cancer. One heart attack. Arthritis in so many joints I can't count them all on both hands and one foot! Yet I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Got to keep moving or lay down and die I suppose. I do enjoy remeniscing about those younger days. Those days when I once was a young man. Time and chance folks. Time and chance happen to all of us.  

I hope for all who read this that you have opportunity to sit quietly and remember your youth fondly. If you are still young...don't waste the time and opportunity you have. Have fun. Live like you mean it! Time and chance will come along soon enough.

Take care. And as my old friend Robert always says...let freedom ring!

 

Not A Poltergeist

 

I think my bedroom is haunted. Something sinister lurks in the shadows of the room. In the dark of the night something happens from time to time...OK it happens most nights. It usually happens between 3 and seven and it happens more than one time a night most nights. I will be sleeping peacefully, floating along in my REM bliss and BAM!! It's as if something reaches up from inside me and yanks on my bladder for all it's worth! I believe it is a Pottygeist! A mythological creature who's sense of timing is incredibly annoying and definitely mischievous. 

The Pottygeist has no sense of fairness. It attacks the young and old alike. Usually with the same possibility. A few days ago I was slumbering nicely around 5 a.m. when the Pottygeist grabbed my bladder and squeezed mercilessly! "YIKES!" I exclaimed in my head. I quickly scurried out from beneath the covers and headed for the bathroom, making it by the skin of my teeth. After what seemed like an eternity I returned to the bed. Unfortunately I managed to somehow dislodge the TV remote from the nightstand sending it crashing into a plastic bowl which contained a plastic water bottle. Those two together make a lot of noise in the tranquility of the early morning! The noise woke my wife up. Uhoh... I just simply said, "Oops!" What else could I say? 

I went back to sleep. My wife was now awake and an hour early at that! It's OK...The doghouse is well lit and modestly comfortable.  

Darned Pottygeists!

It's Good To Be The Texan!

 

I am a proud Texan by birth and the grace of God! Being a Texan means something. It means you don't have to endure long extremely cold winters. Ours are usually a month, MAYBE two, long and it begins to warm up to the 50's and 60's and all is right in the world as we know it! I, being a hater of the cold, am particularly happy with this arrangment. Some will argue that the summers in Texas are offsetting to the short, mild winter. I say NAY! I'd much rather have a hundred degree day than a 10 degree day! That is why God created air conditioning! 

Another blessing of being a Texan is the wide open spaces and beautiful country side. I grew up in East Texas where God spends His vacations. The land and people are the best ever there! Pine trees populate the roadside everywhere you look. Awesome. Just awesome. The people are friendly and will help out wherever there is a need! 

No, we don't all have oil wells in our back yards or horses in our pastures. This is just a myth, a rumor started by the uneducated Yankees. You do, however, usually find a dog or two in our yards, maybe a cat for the mice and snakes. But what you WILL find, without doubt, is a sense of neighborliness. 

I love my Texas. I wouldn't live anywhere else. God bless Texas!!