Say What?

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.    --George Orwell

Arrogant?


"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."


This, of course, is as true as true can be. And nothing is ever "his" fault, so that not only can he fail and give to drink, he can be driven to drink by the outrageous behaviour of others...like when we say, "You're fired, Rummy."


"It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."


Now wait a minute.


The English language is as fluid as blood coursing through our veins given to pick up the detritus of cellular life and cart it away, and to deposit fresh oxygen to replenish the same cells as it passes by. The blood is a language, an exchanger of "information,"  that while doing so, doesn't degrade the system it services, but enhances it. The surrounding cells change as needed, and therefore, too, does the language, the blood.


So English, as a language, that is, a handy way to exchange ideas, arguments, assertions, or even memes (*gag), stays surrounded by, well, us, a society that quickly changes and evolves (and devolves) very quickly these days. So it becomes necessary for language to change right along with us, society.


It doesn't mean we're foolish when we "weed eat" the mailbox post, it means we have over come a handful of words that would mean the same thing. It isn't ugly, it is inevitable, and in some respects, even accurate. 


"Oh, honey, I'm all sweaty because I just trimmed the grass around the mailbox post with a two-cycle-engined, rotary-headed, string-bladed trimmer that resembles the type patented by the WeedEater Corporation."


Adapting language to fit extant needs is, of course, nothing new, but decrying the act of doing so as slovenly smacks of arrogance. I'm all for adapting language into more manageable forms.


Reminds me of my first and last Latin professor who responded to my question, "Why doesn't anyone speak Latin anymore?" with a wry smile and raised eyebrow and the swift reply, "Who says we aren't?" Well, indeed, I reckon we are!


So letting a language follow its course, to oxbow slowly, or run roughshod through a tight valley is only natural and only crabbed about when it suits pontificating authors...perhaps anyway.


"The point is that the process is reversible."


Which is true, of course, but how many people know that aqua bonum est?  Where would G. Orwell have our foolish society stop the cleansing backtrack towards enlightenment? Until we're conjugating Latin verbs and forgetting everything we know about syntax? No, of course not, but he should have remembered that language is a dynamic system given to change, has to change, to keep pace with a people that are no more foolish (though maybe not much smarter) than those before us.


After all, his masterwork, 1984, has given us many shortcuts in language that are as mainstream as my pet project word "alot" will be, some day, when the grammar nazis lower their standards!
(That's a pun, by the way.)

Another ten minutes.

• Algae isn't diesel fuel, and neither is old french fry grease.
• Vegan isn't green.
• Just because the food you eat didn't have a soul doesn't mean the planet didn't suffer for it.
• Vegetarians eat their prey alive a lot of the time, when they're not skinning it, dismembering it, or boiling it...alive.
• Deer ain't always as good as Walt Disney says they are...he thought Hitler had it going on too.
• Happiness isn't something we're entitled to, just like wages, or a job. It's a goal, to be sure, but for me, it's more like a drug or a bottle of really sweet wine, that when I do get a taste of it, I take the time to savour it, share it, and sometimes photograph it!
• Some days we just are.
• Cheese really is just sour milk.
• Rifles, especially old rifles, really are artifacts of engineering and time tested technology that have to be held, and fired, to appreciate the elegance and ergonomics. They aren't always ugly killing machines.

 

Time to Kill

      I don't mind hunting and not killing anything. I mean, if I wanted to just kill things I could shoot, stab or stick anything that crawls, flies, or hops--well, rabbits, I must say, if in season, probably won't get a pass this year as I discovered last year that (A) my wife can and will cook them, and (B) they're delicious.

     No, what I do mind is not seeing a living thing all morning, afternoon, or whenever I've taken the notion to take a gun for a walk...or lengthy sit down. Is there anything as pointless as getting out of a warm bed, gulping coffee in the truck while you drive with gusto to get to your spot before the sun peaks up, only to sit and see....nothing.

     The disappointment will chap your ass as sure as the wooden plank, wet leaves, or crusty, tiny folding chair you're perched upon. Rarely do I settle in and not see a little something that catches my eyes through binoculars, and when that does happen, it sorta makes the whole experience a bust.

     Sure, I see a sunrise, but I see those all the time at work, when we have work. Watching the world get warmer and warmer is part of my daily life so, I can't really sit back and find solace in the miracle of astronomy--call me jaded.

     But if there's nothing flying, or feeding in front of me, then the haunting feeling that I have just wasted four or so hours of my life creeps into my mind. The feeling's worse when I hunt alone because of the lack of available suckers with which to commiserate after the long, boring pause, but hunt with someone and hear them shoot off in the distance after you've stared at a grey, barren landscape all morning, and you fill with a new kind of easy, good-natured hatred.

     Waiting around in the woods when utterly alone will make you question your sanity a little. And it only gets worse the colder it gets as the season gets further towards the shortest day of the year. So that not only may you not see another living creature, but you might also have a 50 mile an hour wind in your face, blowing up your pants, or a nice driving sleet, or worst of all, a hearty soaking rain.

     Couple the indignity of wiping your nose with your rough-as-a-cob mittens, or worse, on your eighty dollar coat sleeve with the fact that you haven't seen so much as a blue jay all day and you begin to feel pretty small in the face of Mother's grand plan. Maybe game animals know better than to step out and get shot on a shiny, Saturday morning.

     Well, maybe the only saving grace is spending time with yourself, learning how cold your feet can get before they snap off, or how full your bladder can get as it distends and tightens your pants. Perhaps it is the hunting trips that end in sheer boredom that teach us the most about ourselves...yeah right.

     I paraphrase the late (probably by now) Haston Reynolds who, though speaking about sex, said this which can be construed to be about hunting as well: "Even the worst I ever had was better than nothing." And to that, I say, amen, Rummy.

     

Better in the Morning

I'm better in the morning
      Better still in bed.
I'm better in the morning
     Warm pillow under head
I'm better in the morning
     Still taunt, thin and flat
I'm better in the morning
     Before eating turns me fat
I'm better in the morning
     Always up, way before
I'm better in the morning
     Waiting, wanting more
I'm better in the morning
     If you'd like to try
I'm better in the morning
      I want to make you smile
I'm better in the morning
     As hand on skin implies
It's better in the morning;
     If you'd just open your eyes.

Better

I'm better in the morning,
Better out of bed--
Where we all shut down for hours,
And practice being dead.

Cadence

I'd forgotten the plop,
The control of breath,
The grip in the toes,
Like a hand on a cliff.


I'd forgotten the breeze,
The lack of sweat,
The perfect part,
Like wind-machined effects.


I'd forgotten the dark
The footfall depths,
The reckless heels,
Like crutches on steps.


But most of all,
I'd forgotten the pump,
The master muscle,
The secret center,
Like the drummer in the back,
Saying, "follow me."

Veterans' Day

Veterans' Day and the birthday of the United States Marine Corps has come and gone. On the days themselves, I was out of work so I rented the entire HBO mini-series The Pacific to kill some time and to commemorate the occasions. And while watching the movie, which is pretty good (but no Band of Brothers), I noticed the weapon the Marines were carrying....

And then I realized that I had a veteran upstairs in my safe! Upstairs, enjoying semi-retirement is my United States Rifle, Calibre .30, Model of 1903. The preeminent assault rifle adopted by our military at the turn of the century . The design was a thinly disguised rip-off of the German Mauser patents! And even the "great" president Theodore Roosevelt had a hand in designing the rifle.


The cartridge it shoots, was a total rip off of the Mauser cartridges as well, with one difference. By the time the bureaucracy got around to adopting the cartridge in 1903, it had become obsolete by the extant standards of the day. So the Government changed the Cartridge in 1906, and called it .30 Calibre, Model 1906...get it? 30-06.


Which brings me back to mine. In 2006 through the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which our gun club is affiliated with, I was able to get my own 1903 Springfield in 30-06 that December to help me celebrate the 100 years this country has fought with, hunted with, and plinked at targets with one of the most useful (albeit overpowered for most applications) cartridges ever developed.


So it came in the mail right to my door. I opened the box and saw what war and long term storage can do to a rifle. The cosmoline it was packed in hid the ugly truth. I had inherited a Marine and a Pacific veteran.

Picking up at the 3,000,000 serial number, Remington started making these rifles for a country freshly at war and in desperate need for battle rifles as the also famous M-1 Garand was in short supply. So, in 1942, my rifle was made in Ilion, NY. Almost unchanged from the very first the Springfield Armory had made to supply the troops for the FIRST World War, my 1903 must have surely gone to the Pacific Theater.


The U.S. Marines have a long tradition of getting hand me downs from the other armed services. From what I've heard, not much has changed. But to look at the furniture on my rifle, the stock it came with, is to wish that, indeed, it could talk. The toe was repaired with a piece of softwood, and the rest looked as if if someone had used it as a boat paddle and/or put a fire out with it.

I can imagine it sloughing through the mud in the jungles of the Pacific. I can imagine it being fired until it was hot enough to crack the wooden hand guards and stock. I can smell the history embedded in the wood when I press it to my cheek at the firing range. I can feel exactly how a Marine felt when he shoved a clip of rounds into the magazine, and I can feel what he must've felt when he squeezed the trigger.


I hear the same report. I feel the same recoil, and the same heft. And I smell the same burnt powder that any soldier, be him from 1917 in France or from Viet Nam in the early days of sniper work there, must have smelled. That's the allure. That's the gain you get from having a veteran in your hands and not just looking at a black and white picture in a book.


And figuring this rifle of mine has seen hell, been there and back, it seems only fitting that it should never be misused again. It should never be rained upon, or dragged through the mud, or used as a pike or a club, or used to take a human life. But any life?


It's truer purpose is to send a projectile screaming super-sonic down range towards a target intended to be killed, destroyed even. Is to not use it as such a denial of its raison d'etre? Would it be like the sixty year old retirees one sees tooling around town in their corvettes....ten miles and hour under the speed limit? Is to do so a betrayal?


I am going to carry this 1903 Springfield into the woods. I am going to throw it over my shoulder like the men who carried it before me. And though I really can't imagine what it'd be like to "draw a bead" on another man, human, I'll approach that feeling with the same awe I feel when I put the front sight over the beating heart of a deer.


Maybe, one more time, the veteran will do what it was meant to do, but in some small way make it possible for something good to come from a weapon of war and death. Another just cause for the rifle to speak for: the maintaining of a healthy population of game, where unbridled success has become a burden for them and us, though the deer cannot know this.

I hope the ghosts this rifle carries with it don't mind if it kills again. I hope when I get my cheap thrill that it doesn't sicken these ghostly Marines with the thought of something dying by the tools of their trade. And I hope I do the rifle justice and I hope it, and I, have a good veteran's day together.