Tempest Penumbra

My cats have this game they play where they set in the road and wait to see how close they can let a car get before they move. I’m not sure if winning the game means that you make it or that you don’t but, the code phrase for when I have to go retrieve their bodies from the road is “such and such named cat won the game.” This morning, however, we had an unexpected winner. A skunk. This skunk (I assume it’s the same one), has been terrorizing my house for years. There was a certain rule that had to be followed. Never put food out for the cats late at night. This rule was often broken by many but never me directly and when this rule was broken,  the stench was unbearable for a couple of days. When I got up this morning my daughter told me that after I make tea I needed to go see what they was laying dead on the road. I said that maybe it was a cat, she never replied but, I could tell looking at it from a distance that it wasn’t a cat. So I covered my mouth and nose to get a better lo...

I think the difference in journaling and blogging is the truth in personal reflection. Some things are harder to share from a journal to a blog whether it’s just because it’s seemingly scattered thoughts or, just to personal. I look back on journal entries sometimes and think, “man, what was I thinking.” The truth is, that truth exists between the lines. It’s in the expression of what is written or said and lack of truth is not deception in this case it’s just a matter of personal perception in what is read or written,  spoken or heard. The key to understanding and finding that truth in those things is simply the elimination of introspective variables. When you eliminate what you want to believe from what you know to be true you leave behind self deception and let the personal truth come shining through. Salutation Pending  Johnny R Draper

I wonder if the life expectancy of a species depends on how good it tastes. Perhaps the Dodo bird just lacked flavor or was to stringy. I ate goat meat once and it was stringy. I found ostrich to be particularly greasy tasting like eating the meat of a extra fat pig. I made scrambled eggs once from one of their eggs. It filled up the pan. Turkey’s, well, we never seem to run out of them in America. Just eating them on Thanksgiving isn’t enough. We can hunt wild ones too and eat those. I like Turkey but I’ve never ate one that came from the wild. I’ll have to try it sometime.  Happy Thanksgiving  Johnny R Draper

A house is in itself a structure within a structure. Hidden places are the structure within. Inside the walls, the attic, or underneath. This is the place where the soul of the house lives. A skeleton housing wires and pipes, plumbing and insulation.  When I was a child my parents and I lived in a house with a hidden crawl space between the living room and the master bedroom. I barely remember the house except for it was considered cool that a person could go inside of the wall. For me I think it was an unconscious imprint of the concept of a secret house within the house where you have to go through the walls to get to it and, I don’t think I’m alone in this concept given such movies and stories as Coraline and the Spider Wick Chronicles. Even the Chronicles of Narnia involved some sort of passage to this fantasy land and I’m sure that there are a whole lot of others. I often have dreams of being inside of such houses where there are rooms hidden from the rest of the house and ent...

For the most part, anywhere in Kentucky or, any where you would find fans of the Kentucky Wildcats, you can walk into a vehicle registration office and ask for a Kentucky Wildcats tag to put on your car signifying that you are a Kentucky Wildcats fan. So, it could be said that you have a wildcat tag.  In the lower more poverty stricken or just blatant outlaw circles of society this term “wildcat Tag” has a different meaning. In this disambiguation a wildcat tag is a tag that is registered to one vehicle but has been placed on a different one. The purpose of this is to have a tag that is showing in date on the off chance that a police officer won’t call it in or, the car that you are in might be under pursuit so, stealing a tag plate from a car that looks the same might help keep you from being caught. As the story goes, I was hanging around with a couple of my cousin’s way back in the day whose names I will change here to protect the guilty. I will call them, Rob and Bob, because i...

Pretty song bird where did you go I can hear you on the wind but I can’t see you, I am led adrift, astray, bound to wayward,  By your song, and phantom scales abounding To where stray brown leaves go, to Give body and color to the wind, Over and over again in the,  Sun bleached shadows and flowers frowning. I am lost in the memory of that strain Vexed in silence just beneath the rain but,  Gone when fixed upon, muted, omitted, And though I can’t here it any more I am still hypnotized by its repetition I am complete in its climax and grasping, At resolution in its conclusion, collapsing, And then, it begins, all over again.

I once took a science test in high school with the multiple-choice answers written on the pencil I was using. While standing in a circle in the smoking area right before my last class, which was science, I made the comment that I wasn’t ready for the test I was about to take. So, a kid in the circle handed me the pencil and said, “there’s the answers.” I don’t know how he got the pencil. I never asked. He was a freshman and it was a sophomore class but, I made a hundred on that test. Usually I came out with a passing grade. A low C or a high D. reading the chapter was the most effort that I put into that class. Science really wasn’t my thing. In my freshman year a guy once paid me one dollar per assignment to do his homework for him. Of course, it was in my handwriting, which he wouldn’t recopy and, he acted like I was over charging him, but that was English class and he had hit me up later in the week for some Science and Math. I guess if I had been more proficient in my life of crime...

the inclination to collect stuff is steepened by the monetary value of that being collected, as well as  the rite of showing off that which is collected. Then there is the personal satisfaction of just having cool toys to look at. People collect all kinds of things: antiques, old cars, stamps. My brother collects antiques. I have an uncle that collects old coffee pots, my dad collected Chevettes for a while. When I was a small child I collected trading cards for no reason at all that I can think of. Anyone that remembers Mork and Mindy, I had a whole set of those trading cards. In my teenage years I had a bullet collection. I really loved that collection too. These days I mostly collect Magic the Gathering cards but, there was a time that I had a peculiar collection of things that I found on the side of the road. I had a bucket that I put all these things into. Of course, some things you can’t exactly bring home but, I will give you a list below of some of the things that I found, ...

There was brightness,  then it was gone.  steaming in the horizon,  cannot hear the song.  Dark lines in the distance of What may be wayward birds,  on an endless journey to the sun.  run with the angels,  onward, and low  fall with the demons,  everlasting and slow.  Scattered, shattered, lightless,  maybe cities, maybe ruin.  Somewhere, a plane of continence,  a way of ritual,  honed and true.  Dark nights form a resistance  in memories skewed,  sweat of the hour’s grace,  the dew falls.   Trial by angels singing,  sharpened and low,  judgement of demons  hearkened slaves, to stains  of ruin and  woe.

A voice like tears stressed and strained Seen through but not broken by The invisible storm, pressed and rigid creak of panes, shrilling but unbroken.  It is the wind in passant, crowded, lulling, and, never truly gone, hissing. Wave after benign wave making the world Collapsed, louder, closer. Sorrows from its deep howls and moans Rise from its empty gullet like ribbon wrapped and rolling Fingers bent, bones showing, under leaves, Crumpled brown and plucked away to become Wraiths in the night.  It is not wicked but, empowers the complacent, Stirring invocation to change at its very roots and, Hidden places where shadows deepen to linger, Long and sullen. It is the wind and it has spoken in, Its tongued aspiration, perpetual, in motion 

The last in line is a actually the name of a Dio song about some wayward bunch of eccentric…somebodies seeking some truth of esoteric things to find out if their end result is that of evil or holy.  They are the last in line. My favorite line in the song is “we are the hand that writes and quickly moves away.” This is to suggest that they exist in the shadows somehow affecting change through some passive will.  On a side note, as I wrote this post I’m not really sure which of the two blogs I will put it in. My own experience with the last in line has been that of my childhood and teenage years that the last in line was arranged by pecking order. The cool kids, the popular ones, they were first in line. Everyone in the back of the line were the outcasts,  nerds, geeks, or anyone else that just didn’t fit in with anyone else or each other like the goths, freaks, metal heads, etc. In school the last in line was a safe place.  Going to the back was a good way not to draw...

Anyone that has known me for a long time knows that I had really long hair at one time. Several years back I cut it short for employment opportunities. Sometimes I miss having it, other times I just enjoy having it like it is and knowing that I don’t have to worry about the upkeep it required but, I don’t have anything against it or anyone that does have their hair long. These days it’s gotten kind of common and accepted but, there was a time when it was not. There are several songs throughout the rock movement that touch on the prejudices toward men with long hair: Signs by Electric Light Orchestra, Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie,  Turn the Page By Bob Segar, and many others. It was common among redneck America that through their teachings in church and Sunday school that it was a sin for men to have long hair, and the peace movement of the Veit Nam War generation went a long way to add to that. It would seem that if you challenge the conformed religious beliefs of a country y...

When entering the house: check for spiders on the stairs, kill any spiders. The carpet on the stairs is actually a light brown so they sometimes blend in. you just have to look for a spot that wasn’t there before. Before taking a shower: check behind anything that can be moved for spiders. They are clever, they know how to hide. And if there’s a wet wash rag hanging in the shower, you can just about guess that you can find one hiding behind it.  I know these big brown spiders commonly called house spiders are essentially harmless but, they are just absolutely creepy looking and, they need to understand that the name house spider is figurative. They should just stay out of the house. Once while laying on my couch napping(snoring) with my mouth gaping open one of these spiders crawled inside my mouth. I jumped up and spit it onto the floor, after which, I proceeded to stomp it into oblivion. Statistics show that the average human swallows one hundred spiders in a year while they slee...

    It was a dark night and the cast of  moonlight was obscured by trees that towered on the opposite side of the road up a high bank into the mountains. On the other side were railroad tracks, a river and, an open field.       It was the darkest stretch of the highway from one town to the next that I had ever walked and I had walked it many times. It was long, and dipped only once before it came around a curve into a small community that slept restless.     However, I was welcome there and could be seen passing through on any given night. It was known by all who would peek through a window shade that I would pass through and cause no ill will toward anyone, but before I did so, I would have to complete that long stretch through the darkness known as Hogs Jaw.     On this night that I remember I walked with a friend. Sweat dampened our brows and the skin underneath our cloths. The fall of our boots echoed into the emptiness. The int...

If you are hitchhiking for the purpose of having to be somewhere at a particular time then, lets face it, you are rolling the dice of time intervals and luck, as to whether you will make it or not to said destination at the time that you needed to be there.  Many, many times have I walked to the highway and put my thumb out there signifying in that universal sign language that I, was a person walking on the road that needed a ride, and after several strange and close to traumatizing experiences I became very reluctant to put my thumb out when stepping to the road.  I don’t see a lot of hitchhikers these days. I see people walking but it’s rare that I see a thumb stuck out there. I have to wonder if anyone even knows what it means anymore or if these days anyone is even in a hurry to get there. Myself, I’m always in a hurry these days it seems like but, I did give up walking and hitchhiking. I traded in my thumb for a car, but not before I mastered the art of hitchhiking. First...

I spent a lot of time in the past on the road either walking or riding, across the country, on the main highways or just drifting in the peace and quiet of the back roads with no destination and, finding that every road has its own spirit of evolution in a flux of constant change or lack of. Paths are blazed, then worn into place by much travel or taken back by nature when not leaving their ghost behind almost unnoticed. As a child I remember back roads that were mud, that then became gravel. Later in my teenage years the county would pave them except, it didn’t take at first. The black top would crack, crumble, and break, coming up in chunks mostly where potholes already existed. I remember my cousin and I going out and tearing up the chunks that broke loose and busting them into smaller pieces.  Of course, the county would return to patch the broken pieces and fill in where the potholes had formed. Sometimes with gravel and sometimes with more asphalt. They would leave behind tar...

This is an introductory post for the commuter’s guide to my spiritual understanding, as it is, of roads. I do not have any idea how long this thread will continue, or if it will be broken by dead ends or an endless highway but, it will most likely just appear every time I take a notion to write about roads. Be that as it may, I already have three drafts ready for posts about roads. The Roman’s built roads and conquered the world. In any war the question has always been, do we keep this road for our own logistics? Or, do we destroy it to keep our enemy’s from using it. Roads are the spider web of the world where civilization has grown from infancy to adulthood. The way I see it, roads exist in two different worlds and, the differences in those worlds are in juxtaposed similarities of a special relativity, space-time kind of way. Those two worlds are called, the walking world, and the driven world.  In the walking world the horizons change slowly. Every hill is felt in the leg muscle...

When I was a teenager I played this game called Starflight on an old Commodore 64. It was state of the art at the time but like its nae sake it would soon become an endangered species. i couldn’t say whatever became of it. I’m sure all of its parts, components, and pieces have all dissipated in some way out of existence, recycled into something else to where no one would ever recognize it for what it once was. The object of the game was to fly from planet to planet collecting resources while simultaneously working out the puzzle of the back story. While on a planets surface you would utilize the terrain vehicle. I remember it making this rather annoying vibrating sound while it worked its was across the surface like it was really working for it. It also had a scan option, and when you would tell it to scan you could here the processing working its little heart out. The longer and harder it worked, the more resources it would find. I don’t remember the old commodore ever needing updates...

I’ve never really considered myself an animist, not intentionally but, then I guess that would be the whole point. Then, just mere awareness of the word and its meaning brings it into a natural light in consideration of coincidence of where the realization started and then came to fruition in that sense of awareness. The strangest thing happened today. I was standing in my yard having my morning tea and cigarette when I heard two cats fighting. Of course, I knew they were my cats. Two particular tom cats that can’t get along and, I’m the only one around here with cats. They had fought in the past but, this one sounded particularly bad and kind of final. The noises they were making gave me an eerie feeling. It didn’t last long and came to a sudden stop leaving this feeling of finality in the wake of the silence.  After a moment one of them came out of the wood line and staggered through the yard. His eyes were beat closed, and his mouth was covered with blood. He staggered through t...

I imagine that it is difficult to find comfort in a personal way during the winter months. especially during a particularly cold spell when the ice falls and the temperature falls lower, freezing up life itself and stopping all freedoms of movement. The whole season is like a temporary death while we wait to travel back closer to the sun. I don’t like the cold, but there is a simple pleasure I take in the colder parts of the winter, and that is, a warm fire. If you ever you stayed at my papa’s house on a cold miserable night you would find that there was indeed warmth to the point of discomfort,  the sun would have been envious of the amount of heat he could make with an old stove packed full of wood and coal. Those cold nights that I lay on a couch sweating I suppose were a prelude to a rite of passage. This ritual doesn’t require tea, but it is a nice touch. It doesn’t require sleep either, yet you can find some, but when the snow starts to fall, then there is no hurry to get any...