Mischief and a good story (or two)…
first published by Jean on Aug 12, 2025
[ Jean: Is this a self-portrait? ]
The New American Digest
For Followers of Gerard Van der Leun's Fine Work
first published by Jean on Aug 12, 2025
[ Jean: Is this a self-portrait? ]
heh…I wish I looked that good.
Do what you like and live your own life, but when some of us do that, it turns out that they’re just nuts.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1B4kNBaV9v/
The more I experience society the more I want to stay away from it.
The more I stay away from society the worse society gets.
So then I ponder, is society becoming worse, or, am I becoming more intolerant of it? Maybe a little of both?
As I told DiveMedic the other day, these people seem to be detached from reality by way of extreme excess of an easy lifestyle and simultaneously absent any sense of responsibility. That 30+ year old woman in that video talked and behaved like she was 11 years old.
I told DM what she desperately needs is to be force fed that which which was never afforded her in her growing up years.
After all the foreign criminals are removed from this country that woman and thousands like her need to be dispatched to the fields to “do the work that americans refuse to do and the foreign criminals have done”. Pick them goddam peppers. And tomatoes, potatoes, and all the other agricultural products this country produces. IOW, a structured lifestyle for a specific amount of time that will give her the opportunity to grow the fuk up.
But, this discussion, just like the hundreds of other discussions I’ve had with people over the past 20 years or more always end the same way. I don’t remember the name of it right now but it’s the picture of a snake eating it’s own tail. There is no entity in this country with a sense of responsibility capable of instilling responsibility in people like that woman.
It’s a closed loop, a tightening gyre, that will one day crash into itself.
So we live as we can while we can … and at our ages? Maybe the blue pill is the answer – cause we can’t do much of anything even with our eyes open to the red one. Age, time, and memories work against us. Now if we were 40 or 50 years younger? But that was our world and it’s long gone. And if we were 40 or 50 years younger in these times, who’s to say we wouldn’t be just another of the crowd of today?
Does give one a sense of how those oldsters in the 60s felt about “them damn hippies” though, doesn’t it?
I was probably about 15 and Dad was stationed at Loring AFB in Aroostook County, Northeastern Maine. The high school began it’s calendar early in August and we’d be in school about a month before school would be let out for another month, to resume late September, early October.
The reason, you ask? The potato harvest. There wasn’t enough labor to harvest the potatoes and the high school kids was the answer to that problem.
There were 2 types of harvesting jobs you could get. The higher paying was the automated harvester. This digger kinda-a-thing would dig the potatoes out of the dirt with this belt made of linked metal rods. The belt would lift up past maybe 3 or 4 “pickers” riding along the machine whose job it was to pick the rocks out before the belt dumped the potatoes into a truck driving alongside.
This was the higher paying potato picking job because it was dangerous. The belt was unforgiving. If your finger got caught between the links of that moving belt, it would take your finger right off. It was very common in Aroostook County to see men (and some women) of all ages with a missing digit.
The other potato picking job–the one that I was employed at–was the manual version. The simpler <a href=”
“>digger</a> would dig up the potatoes and drop them right back on top of the ground. This meant that someone would come behind and pick up all the potatoes. You’d use a woven basket about 22″ in diameter and 8″ deep. Fill that basket up and dump it into “your” barrel which would contain about 80 pounds of potatoes.
That barrel would pay you 45 cents. It was back-breaking, miserable work, even for a 15 year old.
A year plus later, I was 16 and in California. My brother and I got temporary jobs driving tractors in the peach harvest. Still ag work, but it was hot and dirty.