GUN CONTROL & VELVET

One night at about 2 am a bunch of us were partying, just like usual. Suddenly the front door bursts open, and its some wild eyed dude, and in one hand he’s got a handful of some slutty looking chicks hair, and in the other hand he’s got a pistol. Big silver revolver with ivory handles. He's waving it around while he's swinging this chick around by the hair.

“Where the fuck is JoJo!” he hollers out.

JoJo was one of the people that lived there, but  he was was not present at the moment. Jojo’s roommate steps forward, her name is Velvet.
“What are doing bursting into my house?’ she demands
“JoJo  has been fucking my wife here!” and he jostles the slut around by the hair a little, and waves the gun some more.

Man, I’m sitting on the couch, and I just want out of there, ya know?

Well, Velvet, all this does is piss her off.
She stomps right up to him, grabs him by the arm, says “I told you JOJO aint here, now get the fuck out of my house” and tosses the guy out by his ear and closes the door behind her.

Man, we all just looked at her like she was some kind of badass, ya know?
And someone asks her ‘Velvet, weren’t you afraid of his gun?”
Velvet gets this funny look on her face and says:
“GUN? WHAT GUN?”

She never saw it. I think about that every time I have occasion (which has been a lot lately) to say “I’ve never been in a situation that would not have been made worse with the introduction of a gun.”

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He’s nineteen years old — it’s too much for him — so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it’s so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen to Rat: “Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin’ letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back.” 
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

THIS IS HOW DAVE MOWS GRASS FIGHTS THE CANCER

"I want to take a minute to thank my cells.

I began treatment for metastatic papillary renal cell carcinoma in September of last year using a targeted therapy drug called Pazopanib. I take three pills a day, and without them I would be dead. Since then, I've had new scans about every two months. My scan in November showed that my healthy cells had recaptured a huge amount of territory, with all of my tumors shrinking by 40 to 50 percent. Since then, the story has been different.

If you've never seen a CT scan, the liver is the easiest organ to spot. It's huge, and it's a dead-even shade of gray from one side to the other. And if you happen to have cancer that has metastacized to the liver, the tumors are easy to spot, too. They are a darker gray with a well-defined border. I have at least six spots between the two sides of my liver, but there's one in particular which has been my benchmark because it is the largest and easiest to spot as my doctor scrolls through the cross-sections of my body. I'd like to talk about that spot.

Since that second scan in November, I've grown very accustomed to the phrase, "It could just be slice variation." Every time Cristina Renfro and I go to Highlands to learn the results of my latest scan, we hear that I had some slight shrinkage in a few places and the rest stayed the same, and that we should be very glad for that. We have been!

As it turn out, though, all those instances of, "It may have shrunk a millimeter or two but it could just be slice variation," have added up to real millimeters. When I was at M.D. Anderson, my doctor pulled up my original scan from September, my June scan, and the scan they took in July, and put them side-by-side on one huge computer monitor, all showing that one big spot. The difference between my original scan and the recent scans was very obvious, but then my doctor dragged measurement lines in an X across the spot on my June and July scans. The long dimension was 48mm on my June scan and 46.5mm on my July scan. I beat my doctor to the punch by stating that it could just be slice variation, and she agreed, but then I told her I very specifically remembered that spot being 51mm on my November scan. We didn't have that scan to look at, but I am positive that was the number. Going from 51mm to about 47mm is not slice variation; it is shrinkage. That spot has been shrinking half a millimeter per month for eight months. Take a second to let that sink in.

That number, half a millimeter per month, got me thinking about what is happening inside my body at the cellular level. I'm seeing the most horrific trench warfare imaginable, where both sides are being bombarded with a powerful chemical compound that strangles the life from the sickest cells but torches the healthy cells at the same time. It is a bloodbath happening on a hundred fronts, day after day, month after month, with years to go before it will be over. It is a terrible fight.

I'm doing what I can do here on the outside. I make a conscious decision to keep living every day, no matter what I feel like. I exercise. I eat. I'm kind to every person I meet, or at least I try to be. I love my wife and my son with all of my heart. I surround myself with people who give me energy and try my best to give the same energy back. These are the things I can do on the outside. The real heroes, though, are on the inside. The real heroes are my cells. They are soldiers on the Ostfront, dying by the billions but slowly beating back a strong and determined enemy inch by muddy inch. I want to thank those cells. I want them to know that I understand the horror they are facing. I want them to know how huge half a millimeter is to me and how much I appreciate every day of life they give me. I don't know what else to say to my cells before sending them into the meat grinder. I can't give them any more courage than they already have. I can't make their fight any easier. All I can do is honor them by living every single day as well as I can. It's not much, but I will definitely do that!"

BLANK MAPS

"I think that one of these days you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there."

J.D. Salinger

THE FRANZ KAFKA INSURANCE COMPANY

I sold one of my cars. Called the insurance company to remove that car from my policy. “You have to come down here to the office to do that” the lady said.
“Where is your office?” I asked.
“Irving”
“Oh my”

Now Irving may only be 10 miles away, but for me that’s like light years. Plus, I would have to cross over into Dallas County, something I avoid at all costs. After sleeping on it for a night, I decide to call back. When I added that car to my policy I didnt have to go to Irving. We did it over the phone just fine.

So I called, and when the lady said “You have to come down here to the office to do that” I was ready.
I asked her “Why? Why to I have to come down there?”
“Because you have to sign the paper” she says.
“Well, I had to sign to add the car on. They faxed the paper to me. Can you fax it to me, and I’ll send it back?”
“Yes, that will work “ she says.

This makes me happy. I won't have to go to Irving. She puts me on hold, and when she comes back she says there is a problem with their fax machine. Can I call back tomorrow?


So I call back the next morning. The phone ring and rings, no answer. I call again and again. Finally, an answer. They transfer me, but they transfer me to a phone that keeps ringing. Finally a computer answers, and I end up in a recorded voice computer loop. Its as endless as a Mobius strip.
I hang up and call back. No answer.

So at lunch I drive to Irving. I surrender. The bastards won.
I walk in the door to the office. Behind the desk is a  giant cockroach, who looks up and says "Can I help you?"
For some reason it doesn't surprise me at all to see a giant cockroach sitting there. The whole thing is pure Kafka.
I tell the cockroach I need to remove a vehicle from a policy. I’m seated in front of his desk. As he pulls up my info on the computer I tell him: “It’s a shame I have to come down here to do this. That I can’t get it done over the phone.”
“Well sir, you have to sign a paper, that’s why” he says.
“No, you can fax the papers to me, and I fax them back, that’s what the lady that doesn’t ever answer her phone said”
He nods, prints off one sheet of paper and hands it to me, using his little cockroach hands, for me to sign. We talk about the weather a moment while I check the details, and the cockroach takes a sip of his coffee.
I sign it, and as I’m handing it back to him I say “It really is a shame I had to come down here”.
“Mr. Renfro, you didn’t HAVE to come down here. We could have done this over the phone.”

Just.Kill. Me. Now.

OUR POLICY

After a few weeks of contemplation we have finally established our official position on the Confederate Flag:
“I fully support the flag known as “The Confederate Battle Flag” to be flown at automotive junkyards, displayed on bottles of whiskey, at Charlie Daniels Band concerts, and all KKK rally’s, as long as it is displayed properly”.

FAST EDDIE

When I was working at Fort Worth Hyatt, there was a pastry chef that came over to help us on a big party. I got to talking to her, and she's  telling me about this crazy cook they have in Dallas. 

"Fast Eddie we call him" she said.
"Fast Eddie ?" I asked. "This guy doesn't happen to look like a Mexican Kamikaze fighter pilot on a bad batch of crank, does he?"
"Why yes, he DOES!" she says.
"And he's faster than any human could ever possibly be?"
"YES!"
"Is his last name *****?" I say.
"YES!" she says. "How do you know Fast Eddie?"

Man, Eddie and I worked together at Luminarias in 1975 for about 2 years. Sweating our ass during the Friday and Saturday rush, whistling the "Bridge Over The River Kwai" theme to try to take a little pressure off.
 So I found Eddie in 1988 working at the Dallas Hyatt.
Fast Eddie. That guy was fast, and crazy weird.
And in 1988 he was just as fast, and crazy weirder than ever.
Is that hilarious or what?

BACK TO PRACTICE

I was standing around with some of my musician friends. They were having a little jam practice session at Gilly’s house. Buddy wasn’t there, but Buddy knows all these guys.
Anyway, we’re standing there during a break, and I’m not a musician, so I started asking about all the equipment they had. They all had all sorts of gear. 15 guitars, 10 amps, cables and pedals everywhere. One guy had a whole box full of pedals.
“This one does this” he tells me “And that one does that, and the Bad Monkey gives you this, and the Cry Baby gives you that”.
I was pretty impressed, but I had to ask:
“So why doesn’t Buddy have any of this stuff?”
Man, all five guys with guitars kinda look at me, and then they look down at the floor, and the boxes full of pedals and there is a long silence…finally one of them says, almost as if he is confessing a great sin:
“Well, Buddy doesn’t need all this stuff”
They all nodded their head.
Break was over.
Back to practice.

NICE PANTS

Here’s a picture of Hillary Clinton with a confederate flag in the background. But its not political.

Its been posted by Dinesh D’Sousa, the guy that gave us the “Obama 2012” movie, and another one “What Would The world Be Like Without America” or something like that.

He would like you to believe this is in her dorm room or something. Apparently, he is reduced to photo-shopping old Life Magazine pics from June 1969, the one with Joe Namath on the cover, and the interview with Hillary inside.

Here is one from that issue, hands up, with no confederate flag. When you do a Tin-Eye Reverse Image search you get 182 returns without the confederate flag, but only one with.  For a smart guy like Dinesh, you’d think he would be smarter.

Oh, here's one, hands down. Nice pants.

THE ROAD

I cant recall the last time I read a new book all the way through. I'm about halfway through Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". Tight terse style with short sentences, incomplete even, very spare. Very sparse.

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”


“He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.”

THE AFTERMATH

From PBS Newhour Friday, July 2nd, regarding the Supreme Court ruling lifting state bans on Same Sex marriage. (click here)

This Bakery had an employee quit when she found out the shop would make cakes for LGBT Weddings.

JAN KISH, OWNER: Right. Because we support the gay community, she feels that she doesn’t want to be part of that because of her religious background. And that’s fine. You know, that’s her moral stance, and she has a right to that.
PAUL SOLMAN: You didn’t try to talk her out of it?
JAN KISH: (smiling) I asked her for two weeks’ notice.
BOTH: (laughing)

God, I love this country.

PRAYER REQUEST

Asking for prayers and good thoughts for my nephew Dave @ Dave Mows Grass.
After being diagnosed with cancer last year he has managed to keep an incredibly positive attitude, run a couple 25 K Marathons, joke about breaking his record slowest times, ride bikes with his son every day the last 4 months (even the days the chemo was kicking his ass) , build a bike, take up bowling using the most unorthodox style imaginable with great success, complain not at all about the side effects of chemo (even though it has turned his red hair to an albino silver), and from what I can tell be a really super husband for his wife Cristina.
Please pray for him, and all the other Cancer Survivors, and give thanks for such an outstanding facility as MD Anderson, and the doctors and nurses and caregivers and the good work that they do.
Dave is the most courageous and resourceful guy I know, and God is good.
Thank you.

SOME GIRLS

I knew one that liked to go to tanning salons. She had a beautiful tan, and she told me that she didn’t have any tan lines, because that’s the way she tanned, presumably naked. I knew her for years, and she rebuffed all my advances. In fact, I never knew her to have a boyfriend or to go on a date.
But she had a beautiful tan, and one day when she mentioned she had been ‘tanning” I just had to ask:
“What good is a tan if you aren’t going to let anyone fuck you?”

I was at a friend’s house last week, and met their cousin. 
She wears a big diamond engagement ring on her finger to "keep horny men away", she proudly says.
I told her I hadn't even noticed, I was too busy looking at her ass.

"TRADITION!"

"Pledge? They made each other a pledge?"

Tevye’s daughter marries outside the faith in spite of tradition.

And in keeping with tradition, Tevye rends his garment and refuses to speak to Chava for years.

The Russians come, and evict Tevye and his entire town.  They are displaced, to be refugees. They begin packing their wagons for the exodus.

Chava and her husband, already packed, pass by Tevye’s house.

Chava tries to call to her father: “Goodbye Papa!”

He doesn’t look up, keeping Tradition by ignoring his daughter, keeps packing the wagon.

Chava calls to her sister Hodel, “Goodbye Hodel”

Hodel, who has been helping her father Tevye to pack the wagon, looks up and waves “Goodbye, Chava”.

She looks down, sadly,  to her father, still packing the wagon.

Her father mutters under his breath “Go with God”.

Hodel smiles and looks up to Chava and delivers the message:

“Go with God, Chava!”


From the Supreme Court ruling, lifting the ban on Same Sex Marriage in the United States:
 "The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations" 

"LOOK AWAY, DIXIELAND"

Sometimes, this is what you have to try to do:
To focus more on understanding, and less on being understood.

Its easy for me to try to understand why people would want a Confederate Battle Flag flown at a State Capitol. The unity experienced by the South, and the pride it inspires is immeasurable. Damn, it’s a good looking Flag too, Ol’ Dixie, and I can remember the swelling in the chest I would get when I saw one. I remember as a boy in Detroit we would sing "Dixie" in Music class, and I would almost tear up as we sang it. I was the only person in my grammar school class from the south, and my buddies would all look at me and smile as we sang it. I read a lot of history books way back then, and could tell you all about Fredericksburg and Stonewall Jackson by the time I was in the Fourth Grade. On vacation trips back to Texas and going to Six Flags, I was always delighted watching the Confederate Army march past, with the black drummer boy bringing up the rear.
It filled me with an enormous sense of southern pride, and when I got back to Detroit and would try to tell my friends how wonderful it was, the story always fell a little flat.
There is no way you can explain that feeling to a Yankee. There is no way they can feel it themselves. I should not expect a Chinaman, or an Israelite, or a Negro to feel that way about Dixie.

Likewise, it’s a little harder for me to completely understand the other side. But I can try to put myself in the shoes of a black parent, with their four year old child, walking up the steps of a courthouse to register my car and seeing that flag. It just might give me a chill. It just might remind me of my Great-grandfather, who died in bondage. It might remind me of my grandfather, who was lynched. It might remind me of my father, who experienced the harshest effects of Jim Crow south. It might remind me of the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle form of systemic discrimination and racism I had experienced in my life time.

And I think how I might feel, standing there with my four year old daughter, and watching the flag be lowered from the State Capital for the last time and forever. Its difficult for me to imagine all this.

Its even more difficult to imagine what that four year old might think, presently and some twenty years into the future, as America plays out this long history of dysfunctional race relations that began as our country was born.

I also remember that at Six Flags I was afraid to ask mom and dad could i have a Dixie Flag, because I thought they would say no. I thought they would say no, because I always sensed deep inside that there was something a little wrong about wanting that flag.
But damn, its a handsome flag!

BOSTON MARATHON BOMBER

I watched  Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center and former deputy director of the FBI National Security Branch on Charlie Rose two years ago.

He is an interesting fellow, who gives a hell of an interview.

He outlined the differences between the terrorists of 9/11 and the two kids who were responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing.

He said those responsible for 9/11 were ideologically committed to a cause,  a Jihad, while the Tsarnaev brothers were just a couple dissatisfied kids, with more in common with Columbine than 9/11. That the 9/11 guys would never apologize for what they had done, but the surviving Boston bomber, 21 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would eventually apologize and show remorse.

And today, after being tried and convicted and sentenced to death, he did just that.

Follow the first link for a great Charlie Rose interview with Phillip Mudd.

AS BAD A PLACE AS ANY (REDUX)

Dad had this swim trunk outfit he wore.
It was red, with Tongatoan writing and Easter Island statues printed on the fabric.
There were the trunks, and then a matching top, which amounted to a loose fitting shirt with no buttons. Dad was an apple, and his big belly stuck out, but the whole outfit looked right on him.
Of course he always had that cigar.

He wears that when I see him on the shoreline of Grapevine Lake, launching the boat, and we are about to go fishing.

“Do you think I can drive the boat today dad?” I always ask.
“Umm-hmm” will come his absent minded reply. But I know that I will not drive the boat today. I never did. Instead, we will cruise across the lake, and he will pull up to a spot, and say “Do you want to try it here?” and I will grin, and grab my pole.
As we lower our lines into the water, dad will look at me, and with the cigar still chomped between his teeth he will say:
“This looks like as bad a place as any”

Sometimes we caught fish, and sometimes we didn’t, and I never did get to drive the boat.

If I count the years back, I haven’t seen dad for 28 years now. I count all the years that he had Alzheimers, and couldn’t do all the things I remember him doing, locked away in that VA hospital. That would make more than 40 years without dad.

But I imagine heaven, and seeing him in that funny red outfit, and we are fishing again.
In heaven you get to do stuff over you know, and I’d like a do-over on our fishing trip.
You might think my do-over would be where I finally get to drive the boat.
But that’s not it.

In my do-over, when we stop to fish and dad says “Do you want to try it here?”, I beat dad to the punch, and it is me who says:
“Looks like as bad a place as any, Pop!”

I have to remember to do that when I get to heaven.
I think he will like that a lot.

Originally posted 3 years ago, but I found pics of dad, and the outfit I described to add to the post!

MAKE A WISH

I wish the AARP would not send my sister any more mail. I wish they wouldnt send her any more invitations to join, with a 3X5  sized "Temporary Membership Card" made out of Credit Card stock, with a big picture of a "Day Bag" on it which can be "YOURS, ABSOLUTELY FREE" just for joining AARP today by sending in $16.
It says the Day Bag will hold your electronic tablet, your copy of AARP magazine, and a six pack of Ensure. Its "great for day trips, or any time you are on the go".

The thing is, I'm older than my sister. Why are they not sending ME offers for free stuff? Do they know that because of bad financial planning I will never be able to retire? They seem to know that in order to get my sister to join all they needed was to offer her a free Day Bag.
If they know all that, why do they not know my sister is dead? That she will never need another day bag, not even for a minute?
I wish the AARP would stop sending my sister offers for free stuff.

ON RAND PAUL

Has rolled out his Flat Tax Plan.
Among Republicans, having the lowest Flat Tax Rate is like having the biggest dick in the locker room.
Paul strikes me as a needle-dicked little mother fucker.

NOT WANTING TO BE SAVED

“You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.”

–Dorianne Laux