Makouli's

Post-Thanksgiving-Stuffed-Disorder…

makouli — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 13:14:47 +0000

The “echo” after turkey day. Sitting around waiting for the coffee to brew and trying to digest too much food. Lazy, bored, but well-rested.

Shep

makouli — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:32:53 +0000

When I was a kid, we had this neighbor (I’ll call him Bob) who lived up the road and raised hogs. Bob had a big ol’ sheep dog named Shep. Shep was a friendly old mutt, big and fluffy, whose mission in life was to patrol the farmyard. Now as it happens, pigs will, on occasion, just up and die. Most of the time, they’ll do it out in the middle of the hog lot or in the back of the barn somewhere. Sometimes, when the fences aren’t so good and folks (like Bob) don’t really care where the hogs are at any given moment, they’ll go out in the grove and do their dyin’ there. So it was that one day ol’ Shep finds a dead pig out in the grove and happily takes a shine to it. This pig wasn’t really that big but wasn’t too small either –just the right size for totin’ around. So bounding out of the grove and up to the back step comes Shep with his new friend.

So the next morning, Bob gets up and steps out to relieve himself only to find his way impeded by a stinking corpse. Well, this simply can’t stand so Bob grabs a shovel and flings the deceased into the manure spreader (conveniently parked nearby). Later that day, the pig, along with a thousand pounds of manure, lands out in the middle of the north forty. Shep, who is nothing if not concerned, rushes to the rescue of his new-found friend. By nightfall, Shep and his new pal are back on the step. The next morning, Bob gets up, pours a cup of coffee and steps out to do his deed.

On the way to the manure spreader, Bob tries to explain to Shep about the need for new friends. So out to the field goes Bob, the manure spreader, Shep, and the one whose friendship Bob is trying to discourage. Sure as taxes, the next morning sees the same developments. By this time, it’s beginning to dawn on Bob that while Shep is a good dog and all, he doesn’t have a primates’ brain and thus cannot be reasoned with. Shep is firmly wedded to the reward/punishment cycle and thus no amount of wishing otherwise is gonna make a bit of difference. Bob can’t bring himself to indulge in violence so he must now confront the fact that ol’ Shep and himself have come to a crossroad. Bob has to come up with some kind of solution –or face the prospect of moving out to the machine shed for the rest of the summer.

This time, Bob takes his pitchfork and hoists the earthly remains high up into the fork of a tree as far away from the back step as he’s prepared to walk. Since Shep lacks both the brains ~and the opposable thumbs~ of the primate order, Bob is now content in the knowledge that morning rituals will, henceforth, be free from any unpleasant surprises. Shep, though briefly stunned by such callous disregard for friendship, resigns himself to searching out new playmates. Soon enough both Bob and Shep were back to their usual routine.

Like most folks, I’ve got a damaged heart. There was a time in my life when things just didn’t come to pass. My little piggy never made it to market. If I were to tell my story, I could get the toughest brute out there to cry like a baby –guaranteed. But nobody is really interested in another tale of woe when there are so many tales of woe floating around –especially their own. So I’m left sitting alone in a room with something which will ~never go away~. Now, I could be like Shep and continually drag that bugger out into the light of day, or I could be like Bob and get ahead of that vicious cycle by inventing *some method* by which my private hell doesn’t intrude on morning rituals. So I have. With as much focus as I could muster, I’ve trained myself not to think about it. I just refuse to parade those thoughts and images through my head. I leave that chore to my subconscience and hope (fervently) it doesn’t come roaring out one day in the middle of the afternoon. So far, lucky me, I’ve been successful. Like Bob, I’ve managed to hoist that horrid sight into the branches of a tree –where I aim to keep it ’til Shep forgets.

Work returns…

makouli — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:54:30 +0000

So I’ve been back at it now for a couple of weeks and the sciatica looks to be on the mend. Relief, finally, from all those sleepless nights when I lay wondering if I’d ever be able to hobble around again. So it looks like I’ve made it through another winter. Mega work looms on the horizon which should route this nagging bottom line as well. So spring is just around the corner and that makes sailing front and center. I stopped down to the fairgrounds in Windom and checked on the boat –which pulled through storage just fine. I also picked up my hatch cover to do a little carving while we wait for the snow to disappear. The Sons of Norway meeting is coming up sometime in late April so I have to be ready for that. I’m building a construction time line and historical narrative via Powerpoint and have it near completion. My plan is to haul the boat as a backdrop into the Historical Society, rent a projector for the Powerpoint, and do a question and answer thingy. When this whole thing started out, my intent was merely to build a boat so that I could go sailing. I never thought that building a quintessential Norwegian boat would produce such an interested crowd. I guess you can’t blame them. Norwegians, like any people far from home, have a real longing for the sights and smells of that place in their imaginations where they think they’re from. Of course, it helps that the object of their curiousity is, in fact, a thing of natural beauty and timeless utility.

Hoo boy…

makouli — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:58:22 +0000

Yea, emotion is such wonderful stuff, eh? Haiti tuggs at your heartstrings, that’s for sure. It makes you say things that, in retrospect, read a ~little~ smarmy. Here’s what I know after the smoke clears. The sun is not altered in its course when a million baby seals are bludgeoned to death on the ice. The sun couldn’t care less. The geological processes which daily shape this Earth aren’t even aware that certain primates have descended from the trees and learned to make tools. The only entity that feels the death of children are their parental units. Oh sure, stuffed suits on CNN recite the statistics but then go on (in the next minute) to relay the latest dog-bites-man story.

I’m a pretty blistered cynic today as I’m nose to nose with my dwindling bank account –a blasted wasteland beneath the cold, grey skies made so by the fact that I haven’t worked since the first week of December. Worse, I dropped 700 bucks on Jeep repairs yesterday which has to come from ~somewhere~. Hey, I’ll just crank up the old CREDIT CARD and hope there are sunnier days ahead. Perhaps if I were to bite the head off some small mammal…

Yea, the country is riddled with sad stories and mine pales in comparison to others –I shouldn’t complain, I suppose. Even those close to me have sacrificed heavily (the Paulsons). My heart goes out to them in one minute and the next I go back to my measly bottom line. There is a way out of this, naturally. I can put my last $40 in the gas tank, drive back out into the cornfields and drag my sciatica across the jobsite and in ten days, I’ll get a paycheck. I wanna scream!

Haiti

makouli — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:42:17 +0000

I ran across this story in the NYTimes just now while reading up on those among us who are no longer. This is one of those tales that deserves to be enshrined somewhere deep in memory, where there’s no other traffic to obscure or trivialize the message –somewhere, like a favorite spot in the woods, where it will always be just you and your thoughts. It doesn’t seem so long ago that Bomb and I were sitting around the supper table watching with mouths open as the devastation of the city of Port au’ Prince unfurled across the TV screen. Squeaky clean anchor people sitting in climate-controlled newsrooms managed to get us to scribble a check for $50.00 (where normally we don’t even buy girl scout cookies) but the real feel of this story, for me at least, has waited until this eulogy. Read The City of Dust, by Michael Paterniti and then lean back in your chair and look at the people around you. And then consider that life has always been like this. We, as insulated, wealthy, well-born consumers are immune from the more jagged edges of existence as outlined here but are in the soup up to our necks just the same. Think about the histories of your families, the little victories, the slamming defeats, the irrevocable loss, the sorrows, the joys, the hopes, the dreams. Now crush it all beneath your merciless heel and multiply it by 300,000. What the sunrise must have looked like to the Termilus’ that next day. You can almost feel the weight of the world from Paterniti’s prose –but not quite. It must have seemed like the sky opened up and let every vile and savage demon imaginable crawl down the throats of every living thing in sight. Imagine looking at that pile of rubble knowing your life was underneath it. Mark Twain’s ruminations about the untimely death of his daughter comes to mind: “It is one of the mysteries of our nature,” he notes, “that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live.”

Where does the will to live come from? How is it that a man can wake from a dream, roll over to see the legs of dogs and chickens sticking out from the ground and convince himself to rise again? Where is that wellspring? How did Mark Twain, [does] Frantz Termilus, or any one of us stare into the maw of that screaming abyss and not give up? It has to be something more than food, greater than hope, bigger than sunshine. I’m thinking that it must be love. I have to believe that at the end of even the blackest day, there will always be ~something~ left. A dedraggled cornstalk, a three-legged kitten, a shattered wife or a dazed young boy. Something then becomes your focus –there is a vessel for your care. So it must be love, man. The same force that shaped the world is now called upon to remake it. That’s all there ever was. That’s all there will ever be. Let us feed it and nurture it, keep it sheltered from that which would snuff it out. Let us give it freely to others and by doing so grow it in ourselves. We must for we are its source.

Frantz Termilus in Port-Au-Prince.

Merry Christmas

makouli — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 02:34:28 +0000

So it’s been awhile since I’ve been here. No excuses, I guess. I have had my face pressed up against facebook. So there are distractions. Today is Christmas and as Christmas’ go, it was probably one of them that will remain scorched in the memory. I’ve been laying around trying not to spend any money as I have been waylayed by a nasty case of sciatica. That stuff is Painful! Nikoula made a lovely glazed ham with all the fixins and we were sittin’ around pickin’ our teeth when the phone rang. “Oh Hi, mom, hows the day goin’?” “Good, how’s your day? Didja get my email” Email? Well, I hadn’t looked in the last several hours so I was caught wondering. “Vonnie passed away.” “What!?!?!” And on Christmas day, too. Her family will never live through another Christmas without feeling punched in the belly. Vonnie was more than ready to go. She was first diagnosed with Alzheimers some weeks before Dad died in 2004. She was at the funeral but stayed close to Carol, her sister. It was a steady loss of altitude since. Some time ago, Mom went to see her at the nursing home and she was quite alert and comfortable. She didn’t say anything but smiled and laughed when Mom spoke to her. Some weeks ago, when she stopped again, she was completely withdrawn –no sign of any interaction with the world at all. Just lately, she was having difficulty keeping food down and breathing. These are pretty basic things naturally, so when you lose ‘em, death starts to look like a friend. Imagine that –longing for the peace that expiration brings. I didn’t witness any of the corkscrew into the ground so my memories of Vonnie will always be of a fresh, beautiful young woman. So in some ways, my loss of my cousin is more poignant. Her family, I’m sure, are relieved and grateful that her suffering is over. It must have been like watching a barn burn or a great ship sink at sea.

Vonnie and Carol --2000

CO2

makouli — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:38:58 +0000

Laid in a pool of CO2 today. Had no idea what was going on. Seems the fan that was “ventilating” the tank that I was in was sucking CO2 from the floor above me (they were flooding some lines for some reason) and funneling it directly into the tank. I was laying on the floor, repairing the welds on some plates, and never knew what was going on. The safety nazi wandered by, stuck her sniffer in the manway and freaked out. Readings were well into the 30′s and then couldn’t be repeated. I vacated none-the-less. They went to the top of the tank and pointed the fan in the other direction. More welding tomorrow.

More or less….

makouli — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:41:09 +0000

So today, I’m recovering from a marathon work session at Winnebago. The day of August 4, 2010 turned into 23 hours of mind-numbing labor. Naturally, the morning of the 5th was focused on sleep. I had no water at home so I had to stop on the way and load up. Then I had to boil some of it, put it in a basin and bathe with a washcloth –all while so tired I could barely walk. This is worth it, they say.

Recent bus pic…

makouli — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:36:25 +0000

At the kitchen table

And on and on….

makouli — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:23:31 +0000

So today, I get up, look out the window, scratch my head, blink a few times and wander toward the computer. The mrs is still in the hay, laid out like a fallen branch, and oblivious to the world. I open up the email and see that my Aunt Aggie is no longer with us.

I really meant to work this thing more than I have. Perhaps something will come up which forces me to. But so far, nothing. Then I think about my cousins and the grip they’re in at the moment and other things don’t seem worth worrying about.

Since we last spoke, I’ve been through minor surgery, we’ve engaged in drive-by real estate hunting in Mankato, and I remain at M&G Services –much to everyone’s consternation as work (and thus money) has been sporadic. So sporadic, in fact, that as we speak, I’m drawing unemployment.

So then, as if the craziness isn’t already downright palpable, another one of the pillars of the family is no more. Aggie, I remember, was one of the strong, silent types. Ray and Aggie had 10 kids so strength and fortitude were essential commodities in the Paulson household. Raymond was the penultimate father type. He didn’t say much but when he did, he was always respectful, honest and interested. And there was Aggie –right there by his side with a kid in her arm and three more clustered around her ankles. I should have known them better but the geography wasn’t right. By all estimations, they came out just fine.

The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Madison Lake...