Read & Rant

It’s three till noon, a late start on column day.

Please excuse me. Other priorities. So now, here I sit, once again trying to come up with something, potentially dangerous, even though I do have some benign topics in the hopper.

My first priority this morning was to finish William McKeen’s recent Hunter S. Thompson biography, which took hold of me like a lusty snort of Ecstacy in the mosh pit. Yes, that exhilarating. Coming on the heels of the book I read over the weekend on baseball pitching legend Satchel Paige, I’ve been quite busy out back, soaking in the hot sun at a quiet, comfortable, canopied metal table hidden in the alcove between barn and woodshed; just me and pup Chub-Chub, him keeping me company, me teaching manners. Maybe if someone tried to teach me right and wrong in such a peaceful, non-threatening environment, I would have listened. No, probably not. I always leaned toward incorrigibility, especially with adolescent hormones flittering like that green hummingbird that approached my seat a few times the past two days. But let’s not go there. I don’t want to get distracted, flash back to the wayward youth I enjoy revisiting. Dr. Gonzo and Satchel took me there, stirred indelible memories.

When I read about Satchel barnstorming the nation, pitching three games in a day, winning that fabled, 1-0, 13-inning marathon over World Series hero Dizzy Dean in 1934, I thought, gee, the game was better then, less money, more pure. In those days, the tail end of which I fondly recall, every town had a team and from them came the semi-pro sandlot clubs that took on all comers and played with a weekend passion unknown in the game today. It wasn’t about money then. It was about winning, executing, matching your best against theirs, playing for keeps. And when the game was over, the boys sat down for a cold beer and some lively banter, maybe even a frisky little scrap here and there once the booze got flowing. In those days it was a game, not a corporation for cookie-cutter, sour-pussed behemoths turned pampered prima donnas raking in more money than even, heaven forbid, crack-head grandchildren could ever blow.

Maybe I shouldn’t get rolling down that path, though. It’s dangerous. Who among mainstream readers wants to be bored by another of my radical rants. Folks borne of Ronald Reagan’s redneck, consumerist America have no patience for men who think like me? Face it, Dude, that’s the audience nowadays, people who cut their teeth and earned their degrees in the boredom of Republican rule and police gone wild, not the days of Hunter S. and ole Satch. When Slick Willie came along, miraculously won two elections and even had the audacity to show people how to have a good time along the way, he promptly awoke the fundamentalist attack dogs still guarding the gate. No wonder Hunter Thompson blew his brains out at the kitchen table. He couldn’t stomach what Bush-Cheney was cooking, and neither could a lot of other folks who lived the idealism of the Sixties, when someone — far be it from me to venture a guess who — assassinated our charismatic agents of change and brought out the Third Reich in their jackboot splendor. The result? Open your eyes. You can’t miss it. With only a five-percent share of world’s population, we claim a whopping 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated. That’s right. Here in the land of the free. See what riches get you? How can anyone add it up and make sense of it? Oh yeah, I forgot, that’s easy. Just employ one of those advertising agencies, masters of deceit and deception that sell us our TVs, dishwashers, hunting boots, fishing rods, senators and presidents. They can figure out the perfect message and keywords to sell you anything, even Richard Freakin Nixon and Ronnie Ray Gun, the counterculture nickname he earned as a right-wing nut job in the Sixties, when both future presidents appeared politically dead and buried. Boy, were they resurrected. In a big way. The rest of the world is still paying.

But enough of that! Let’s move to beechnuts. Is that innocuous enough? Maybe the transition will keep the fellas in the white suits away from my door. You see, I recently learned something about beech trees and the nuts they produce; this after decades of observing beeches, actually seeking out beech groves for their smooth, peaceful, gray beauty, yet remaining clueless. In traveling through these quiet wilderness pockets, usually hunting or scouting, I’d marvel at the largest trees and often scratch up the fallen leaves at their base to retrieve the tiny, brown, three-sided nuts lying next to their open, brittle, brown spiky cases. I’d bite into the nuts and rarely find any meat, almost always hollow. Well, about three weeks ago on one of my daily treks with the dogs through Sunken Meadow, that changed. I noticed low clusters of these large, green, spiky husks on a long muscular limb drooping to eye level. They looked more like chestnuts than beechnuts, much larger than what you find on the ground in the fall. I pried several husks open and found two large, green, three-sided nuts in each, all of them full of dense, immature, greenish-colored meat. Hmmmm? Interesting. I was so intrigued that I retrieved a hunting buddy to show him my discovery. We had bitten into many a hollow nut in our days together.

Truth is I guess I’ve never been around beech trees in midsummer, so I was experiencing a revelation. Perhaps, I thought, beech trees, like white oaks, produce a nut that germinates and disappears quickly in the fall, leaving only barren, hollow nuts behind. But I couldn’t be sure, and with vacation looming, I put the puzzle on the backburner till this week, when I queried forester Bill Lattrell, a longtime e-mail correspondent I respect but have not met. I was happy to see his response when I finally got to my desk to write this. He offered a detailed explanation, prefaced by the warning that the answer to my question was a little complicated. He said beech trees flower in May, when the nuts start forming. When mature in September, the nuts fall to the ground and are quickly devoured by deer, bears, turkeys, squirrels and other critters. “As you can imagine, most of the good nuts are immediately consumed,” he wrote, “leaving behind the hollow ones typically found during hunting season.” But there’s more to it than that. The massive, productive beech I pass on my daily travels rises out of wet, bottomland soil not far from the Green River, perfect habitat for beeches, which require lots of water to produce a bountiful nut crop, according to Lattrell.

Fascinating stuff. What took me so long to figure it out?

But that’s enough on beechnuts. Something else I want to mention is a CD neighbor Tom Echeverria dropped in my mailbox before I rose from bed in the morning. Surgeons awake early. Seems he’s having fun these days with a video trail camera that has thus far captured a bear, a bobcat, a doe and fawn, and a flock of turkeys for his viewing pleasure. All the animals were making their rounds within earshot of my home. No cougars, though. At least not the four-legged variety. Who knows about that new two-legged breed of cat? They seem to be everywhere. Not that I harbor even a passing fancy. What would we be talking about for a 58-year-old man like me? Seventy? Eighty? Ninety? I guess I missed the boat.

But, really, I’m trying not to digress. When Doc Echeverria told me on the phone that he’d leave that CD in my mailbox, how did I forget to mention my expired knee-brace prescription he signed during a May 2009 appointment? The slip’s been held by a magnet to my refrigerator ever since, me protesting the mandatory $350 co-payment. Never did I pay a penny for two previous braces? Why now? I spent so much time arguing on the phone with greedy insurance maggots that the six-month scrip expired before I finally got around to calling the orthotics lab for an appointment. By then, I needed a new prescription, which irritated me even more. How embarrassing.

Of course, my Republican friends (yeah, I do have a few) would be quick to blame my misfortune on Obamacare. I know better. I took college rhetoric classes before they were removed from liberal arts curriculums. Why teach people to be skeptics and cynics? I guess that’s the rationale. Anyway, Obama wanted single-payer medical care, not the late-term abortion the other side forced upon him by “compromise,” totally weighted in favor of the scummy insurance industry that greases their palms. And then, to make matters worse, after creating the dysfunctional mess, they attach Obama’s name to it. These spinmeisters and wordsmiths can sell you anything, even poisonous nuclear power plants looming large in our backyards. It’s crazy-making. Insane. Where will it stop? When?

Appropriate questions. For me, sitting here today, it’s going to stop right now. I’m done. Finito! The rant is over. Time to feed the dogs, run them, fix supper, and wind down before heading to work. Tomorrow’s a new day. In fact, I think I’ll whittle away another surplus vacation day to create a long weekend. There’s another title from my Deadelus’ salebooks.com stack that I’ve been itching to read. It’s Bertrand M. Patenaude’s hardcover biography of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who eventually fled Stalin and was murdered in Mexico by his secret police.

So, be forewarned. I have no idea where my next little reading project will lead me. Why worry? It’ll be just me and little Chub-Chub sitting in the backyard, thinking, trying to behave, isolated from the maddening world, tiny green hummingbird occasionally buzzing through to break the hot summer silence.

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