Notes: Arrowhead (Sagittaria Latifolia) and the wild orchid known as green adder's mouth(Malaxis unifolia) are common North American wildflowers. Pardon the mixed metaphors of stag and bull which in time-honored fashion I ascribe to poetic license.You can read a quick synopsis of the myth of King Minos, his wife, the white bull sent him by Poseidon, its pursuit by Heracles and its eventual sacrifice by Theseus here.
Process Notes: Kerouac's great novel On The Road was written in one continuous burst. "Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paperinto long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together
into a 120-foot-long roll which he then fed into the machine.
This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of
reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or
paragraph breaks...
..On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida,
Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He
suddenly felt nauseated and ..began to
vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital,
suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage...He..died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47.
His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage..caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse." ~ wikipedia
Notes:You may wonder how this is related to climate change, but almost everything impacting animals negatively today is so related in one way or another. In this case, the climate of the West and Southwest plains has been growing rapidly more arid for several decades, increasing the stress put on the land to sustain the wild horse herds, native species like elk and deer, and cattle and sheep ranching populations. The public land areas are also feeling the push for oil and gas development, as well as unregulated trophy hunting. The ones to lose in this scenario are the wild horses.
More info: The American Mustang is a feral horse that is descended from domesticated horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish in the 15th century, and is protected under the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Populations are "managed" by the Bureau of Land Management who use a series of yearly round-ups and contraceptive measures plus an adoption program to keep mustang numbers down. While control of these populations is necessary to prevent over-grazing and over-population, the BLM's practices have been criticized time and again for cruelty, corruption and incompetence, while civilian animal welfare groups have relentlessly pushed to reform and control them, with mixed success. The BLM has been accused of turning a blind eye to mass "adoptions" where the horses are slaughtered for dog food, as well as for keeping large herds of animals penned up indefinitely without any plan for their fate other than eventual slaughter.
Most recently under the Trump administration, things have swung round to the worse scenario level, as might be expected in a 'pay to play' government:
from 2018: "The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) winter roundup season is
upon us. The traumatic helicopter roundups that will be conducted this
season are even more concerning than usual, since every single wild
horse captured is in danger of being killed or sold for slaughter.
Signaling its intent for America's wild herds, the BLM is
planning to conduct numerous roundups simultaneously. The agency's
increased capacity for rounding up horses endangers more lives and
proves problematic for advocacy organizations that intend to document
the mass capture of mustangs from their homes on our public lands." ~American Wild Horse Campaign
from 2020:
"The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is putting together the fiscal
year 2020 roundup schedule. Once funding is approved by Congress in the
fiscal 2020 debate...we may see the schedule explode to
include up to 20K wild horses removed each year for the next 3-4 years.
These will be the largest roundup schedules in history.
This will decimate existing populations. It is based on the severely
flawed parameters of politics in the 1970’s and perpetuated through a
program based on excuses and chaos ever since." ~Wild Horse Education
55 sharply falling degrees, once for the g-man, and once more for earthweal Open Link
Process
notes: BLUE NORTHER: Refers to a swift-moving cold frontal passage
in the southern Great Plains, marked by a dark, blue-black sky with
strong wintery winds from the northwest or north and temperatures that
may drop 20°F to 30°F in a few minutes. ~weather.com
Image:Storm Front by Vicious Kitten on the now obsolete flick'r Fair Use
Fire showed him young there are some servants
you can't trust, like the machine
of mind, a servant wanting only
to be master, to take more
than it could ever give; even giving life
each day, and all the things of life,
its dear ambitions always yearn
towards your disaster.
It took his home and sister
as a child, when mother's hands
left off tucking in and washing clothes
and turned to burning rafters
when mother's mind
turned to burning coal
in fire her father
drowned but
couldn't quench.
Later he ruled the road
by having nothing, sleeping cold
on the floor, no trust for the soft
trap of a stranger's bed.
He came to live on Mermaid Avenue,
played, wrote, sang, laughed; he held his children.
But fire and madness chased him
just the same, from town to town,
woman to woman, bed to bed, and found him
and found him.
At last they took his daughter, his songs, his arm,
burned to bare bone at the drunken campfire.
He never played guitar again, the machine
would never kill another fascist, though
behind him he dropped
a thousand flowering bombs;
still, in the end
stiff and locked in his head
in the hard white hospital bed,
I wonder what else he could have done
but sing and run.
~July 2015
"Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen...'
Process notes: Woke up thinking about Woody Guthrie today. He was a hero of mine, the original Dust Bowl refugee and troubadour, and the reason I came to Oklahoma. He was born in Okemah July 14th, 1912, named for Woodrow Wilson, who at the time was a candidate for president. His father was a small-time business man and would-be politician, a possible member of the KKK. His mother, who bequeathed him Huntington's disease, was confined in an insane asylum when he was 14, after burning down their homes repeatedly; in one such fire, his sister died. His grandfather died in a drowning incident also a result of the pattern of the disease. Woody dropped out of high school and took to traveling and playing the guitar, learning every Scotch and Irish and traditional folk ballad extant at the time, and writing many of his own.
He was a lefty to the bone, and worked tirelessly and with great humor and grace in the cause of justice and fairness for all. He wrote hundreds of songs which have become part of our common sense of who we are as a people, (most famously This Land is Your Land) and which influenced a generation or two of musicians. He married three times, loved children and had 8, including Arlo Guthrie and his siblings, who escaped the disease (children from his second marriage to Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dance instructor at the Martha Graham School in New York.) There also were several from his first and last marriage who died in various accidents at a relatively early age, possibly due to the effects of of Huntington's, and one, a young daughter with Marjorie, who died at 4, also in a fire.
His best and most productive years were spent on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, with Marjorie (who, though divorced,later came back when his third wife left him, and tended him till he died) and their four surviving children. In the early fifties, the disease was eating him up, and his arm was burned so severely by gasoline used to start a campfire that he never played the guitar again. He was hospitalized in 1956 and spent the remainder of his life institutionalized, until he died in 1967.
Woody's autobiography, published in 1943, was titled Bound For Glory. The legend that he never slept in a bed while bumming around as it would 'make him soft' is verbal and may be apocryphal.
via google image search
Images: The Guthrie house in Okemah, Oklahoma, where Woody was born
Public domain via wikimedia commons
Corey Rowley (Mexican Radio) asks us to travel back in time to our first ride.
Process Notes: 'Eddie Sneath" was an alias and alter ego of a friend. The car was a '64 VW microbus named Ruby, purchased by my first husband. (She had the white and turquoise paint job pictured above, so Ruby described her personality, not her color.)When I was put behind the wheel one foggy morning on Van Ness, I had never driven a car in my life, but I learned. The flying, that was harder.
Optional Pop-Psychedelic Musical Accompaniment
Images: Authors unknown. I have slightly manipulated both.
