NAILED IT

Maggie – I think El Coyote would approve of your Marty Robbins tune, even though we are not allowed to say Mexican girl anymore. It brought back good memories for me.

You did great, Ghost.

Lived in EP for a bit, when I was very young.

(Seems like memory says another distinctive voice, Sam Elliott, hailed from around those parts. SE stakes out & owns a place in ones ears, & EC did the same in that blend of eyes & inner ears that can be experienced in print.)

And years later, that Robbins tune was assigned to me & brother, to play on our guitars.

“Micely men” ~ nicely done.

Like you, I raised meat rodents.

(Which bunnies apparently are no longer considered to be.)

For the snakes.

(Thought I might grow up, & out, to be a herpetologist, maybe underwritten in reptilian adventures by Mutual of Omaha. But just like everything else those old crazy dreams just kinda came & went ♪♫♪ ~ Little Pink Houses).

The practicalities ~~~ behind, & beneath, & especially in front of, the dreams-sssss ~~~ of catching & keeping snakes & running a breeding operation to feed them was not as continuously pregnant with lessons in metaphor forms as all those 100’s of mice were constantly falling backconceiving & offspringing forward 24/7/365, clocks on the wall be damned – but I got a plenty big family out of it, a constellation of connections, without even trying, too.

It’s true. Hugely true. Man-eating has been woven into the environment to such an extent that it now even 3D prints micelyness. The al/chemical soup nazi serves the soup that takes away the soup.

Serves? Inundates.

The test tube nerds cash paychecks from destestible self-loathing deathwish-projectors.

But…back when men were men & the sheep weren’t, seemingly, as plentiful or as afraid as now, what did those stalwarts of 4-digit testosterone do? How did they behave? Were they not also conforming & ostensibly controlled & directed by & to the purposes of self-loathing deathwish-projectors? Those *other* self-loathing deathwish-projectors?

As I watched In Dubious Battle, ostensibly a tale of two sides (lets call them the powerside & the power/less•powerside), I heard the “song” ~ more of a guttural chant, really ~ that’s backgrounded this elevator ride my whole life.

First note/grunt is that the “two sides” have far more in common than not.

Second Clonk Clonk (a Golding story, in his Scorpion God collection – Big G was in WW2 too) is that the lesser lessees always face off with the levees & dykes & dams that the less lesser lessors lease them to waste themselves, each other, upon.

I long ago lost the youthful pretzel-pride I took in killing vipers when I was a boy. But that doesn’t mean I lost the information. When it’s necessary to kill a poisonous snake, you aim for the head, not the tail…

…or Thoreau’s root, not leafy each others.

But the boys are always “sent by the head” to do dubious battle with other boys all of whom are in the tail. Could there ever be a sadder, more suicidally pernicious, tale?

Incorrect self-correction…automatically autopiloted. Who wrote this damn story? Whoever, or whatever, wrote it is insane. Likes to pull the wings off flies, whilst thinking itself Lord, sadist-insane.

Vidal writes about his fascination with twins, other (complementary/completing) halves, doubleness, mirrors. And he recounts the written words of his complement, friend, lover in youth, Jimmie Trimble, who died ~ was killed ~ along with most of the other Marine scout platoon he was with, on Iwo Jima…

“From October to February he seems to have had a quiet time on guam. For one month he was again a baseball player, helping the division team win the local championship. On February 4 he played his last game for the division. He reports to his mother that he has sprained his ankle; meanwhile, “everything is once again wonderful with Christine & me.” He remarks that his mother is a “worse procrastinator than I ever was” – she has not sent him a long-promised picture of herself, so “how about sending one while there is still a tomorrow?” He recalls the Sunday picnics that they used to have in the Virginia mountains. “I’ll never forgive myself for refusing to follow your advice to stay in college. After the war we won’t receive any credit for having been out here…Mom, please don’t get the blues over what I am going to say, but some insurance should be taken out just in case. Mom, you know if anything happens to me you are to have all I possess but I would like to ask one favor: You know the gold ring with the diamonds sey halfway around? Well, Mom, if (it won’t) anything does happen, would you give it to Chris for me? Kind of a memorial the other way around.” Finally, “Well, Mom, I’ll write again in a couple of days…All my love to the swellest Mom in all the world. Your devoted son, Jimmie.”

This letter could have been written in the Civil War. The tone is also that of Andy Hardy in a n MGM movie, but there were once real boys like that, before the great sulleness spread over the land.

February 25, 1945, Jimmie arrived at Iwo Jima in what turned out to be one of the bloodiest engagements of the war. Twenty thousand Japanese were killed, 6,821 American troops were killed, mostly teenage Marines. Jimmie was in the 4th Platoon. A member of what was called the Reconnaissance Company. A survivor of the platoon recalls, “I was with the first observation team that went up there; we stayed three days, then they relieved us; I saw him [Jimmie] when they relieved us, & that was the last time. They relocated their position forward; lost contact with them. In the early morning hours.”

There were eight men in Jimmie’s squadron as of the night of February 28. Thet were arranged, as far as I can tell from a news story, two to a foxhole “on a slope overlooking our infantry front line & the enemy’s concrete placements beyond. As dawn broke at 4:45, March 1, 1945, all hell broke loose upon them. A Jap raiding party had infiltrated the front lines & attacked their post.” Six of the eight were killed” “one…was dead in his foxhole. He had been bayaoneted in his sleep. Another had been killed by a grenade, & a third by rifle fire. One burned poncho was found in the foxhole shared by the two missing men….Sixty-three Jap bodies sprawled in the observation post’s little battleground.”

Jimmie was the scout who was killed by a grenade. Another Marine who was there bears witness: “We were all real proud of Jim Trimble, & everybody else was. He was a joy to be around. He had a good personality. He was always joking. I know he wanted to go back & go to school & play professional baseball. He was just a joy to be around. I remember that he went to the ship’s store – because it was cold up in Iwo. Everybody thinks of it as the Pacific, but it was their winter up there, & it was only 700 miles from Tokyo. Jim went in & bought a black Navy watch sweater. He was theonly guy that kept warm, before this happened. But then, you know, I’ll never forget the way that grenade hit him in the back, & that sweater was just all wrapped up inside of him.

“You know, in circumstances like that, you’re probably closer to those guys than you are to your own brothers. Of course, for me now, we’re talking about 50 years. You kind of forget. Like I said, the wars all kind of blend into each other.

He was tall, blond, curly hair. But I’ll tell you, he was heavy, carrying back. I thought I’d die. At that age, you know, I was 18, & I weighed about 145. He had to weigh 160. He felt like 2,000 pounds by the time I got back to the foxhole.”

When the commanding general heard of Jimmie’s death, he was, according to a witness, “moist-eyed” for one boy lost in all that carnage. The Third Division named its baseball field on Guam Trimble Field. That was that. Since then, “the wars all kind of blend into each other.” …

“[TP] Gore explains his “resolution [that] warned American citizens not to exercise the right to travel on the armed ships of a nelligerent….I introduced that resolution two or three days after the celebrated Sunrise Conference which is now ‘historic’…I thought then that we were speeding headlong into war – as we were.” For someone brought up in the wreckage of the Civil War, any *foreign* war seemed like perfect folly. For someone who detested the country’s ruling class, the idea of a war that would be profitable only to the Rockefellers & to the Morgans was insupportable. Certainly, those who actually fought the war would not do well out of it. But then they never do. From one of Jimmie Trimble’s last letters to his mother from Iwo Jima: “After the war, we won’t receive any credit for having been out here. It’s the smart guy who stays in the States earning money. I’m not even getting much self-satisfaction by telling myself that I’m at least doing my part, for peace of mind does no good if anything happens.” Three weeks later something happened. When I wrote in a memorial issue of Newsweek about the war & Jimmie’s death, letters from ex-marines began to arrive. They are still in a rage at what was done to them, not to mention all the dead.”

Infiltrating Japs killed Jimmie Trimble and the others. Just at the end, there. But the real infiltrating killers that suffused the preceding span of time, from conception all the way to that last bit of time on Iwo Jima, that OS & ouroboros snake, twisted on itself ∞, are the real killers.

I always look up and say “That mother fuckers made out of cheese

It’s an alien space station of course. where have you been?

The Bible says it’s a female and self luminescent; the lesser light to rule the night. A celestial body. It is a part of the most magnificent timepiece ever conceived.

You’re confusing refinements with originality. The word progress has been so bastardized it no longer resembles the founding premise. There hasn’t been a significant invention in the last half century. The Age of Enlightenment is over, we are now moving into the consolidation of Technics, as Francis Parker Yockey prophesied in Imperium, where all science is focused not on discovery and invention, but harnessed by bureaucrats into a force of surveillance and domination.

Inventions elevate mankind, Technics oppress them.