Category: Notes From The Cactus Patch

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Mountain Air Will Set You Free


Picture, courtesy of Fred Flintstone

After a week in the mountains of New Mexico, it’s good to be back home, I guess, but I would rather be back in Ruidoso’s cool, thin mountain air.

Mrs. MoMo and I have been, for years, regular visitors to the village of Ruidoso, New Mexico. If not for Texans, we believe the town would be a service station, a post office with one red light, and a herd of wild horses if Texans stopped coming. I’ve yet to meet a local that wasn’t a former resident of Texas.

We are used to seeing and swerving our car to avoid hitting, feeding, and gawking at the Deer, the ornery Elk, and the pesky herds of Wild Horses, and now we have seen the handy work of the local dumpster-diving Black Bears. These aren’t your usual Bears; they are “smarter than the average Bear.” The dumpsters have a bolted stop-gap, and the Einstien Bears have figured out how to open the lids. The big one wore a pork pie hat and a necktie; the little sidekick sported a bowtie and whined a lot. The lady next door captured them with her iPhone camera.

We awoke, carried our coffee mugs onto the front deck, and were greeted with a trail of white plastic trash bags torn and strewn half a block down the street. A kind lady in the house across the street helped us clean it up. I had thrown away an empty bottle of Irish Whiskey and found the top cork pulled out and slobbery evidence that a Bear had stuck his tongue in the bottle, trying to get the last drop of hooch. They also enjoyed the last bite of the Frito Bean Dip we tossed and some stale corn chips and chicken scraps. If I had known the critters were that hungry, I would have sat out a “Pic-a-Nic Basket” for them.

The big draw for Ruidoso is the quarter horse races at the Downs. I don’t bet anymore (I’m a cheap ass), but MoMo has it down to a science, and she wins money. If the horse is cute and frisky, and she likes his racing colors and the color of the jockey’s silks, and the horse takes a big poop while parading before the race, she slaps some cash down. She also considers the name of the pony, like; Blue Byou, Lewie Lewie We Gotta Go, Take The Money And Run, Trailer Park Queen, Beach Blanket Bingo, Mama’s Money Bag, and so on. Do the owners ask the horse if they like their name? Probably not. Imagine a stately racehorse with a ridiculous name.

Since the pot is now legal in New Mexico, we saw small groups of aged Hippies wandering the sidewalk in the Mid-Town shopping district. It seems the Woodstock generation has moved to New Mexico for the fresh mountain air breathed through a bong.

Velvetine and Woodstock. Photo by Timothy Leary
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World Breaking News From The Cactus Patch..No kidding.


Breaking News from The Dead South News Service

Mrs. Mister, 1958. Photo by Mr. Mister

Flash – London, England. A genomic study out of Britain found that natural Blonde women will be extinct by 2223. The last natural blonde woman will be born in Finland in 2220. Genome scientists are working frantically to find a new genetic cure. It’s believed that the overabundance of “bottle blondes” in our society has mysteriously affected the natural gene in the world’s women, causing it to rebel and destroy itself. The Geno team also said that Fox News and CNN will be SOL in finding a news host if they are still around.

Get off my grass, or I’ll sick my T-Rex on you!

The same Geno team has recently discovered from a sample taken from a Neanderthal skull found in a downtown park in France that the Neanderthal’s died off because they carried a gene that caused them to resist change, wanting to keep things like they were “in the good old days.” It’s said that around 70 percent of modern men and women carry the gene, and it becomes awake and active around the age of seventy. That explains everything.

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A Visit To The Old Jacksboro Highway


A surprise from old buddy Mooch…

A Typical Beer Joint on Jacksboro Highway, photo by a local Wino

I’ve known old buddy Mooch for around fifty years and thought I knew everything about the man, but now I know I don’t

I rode with Mooch to Fort Worth to pick up a load of mulch. It’s one of those places where a tractor drops a bucket full in the bed of your pickup truck. Cheap and efficient. When Mooch picked me up, I assumed his Chihuahua, Giblet, would be in the front seat next to Mooch. Giblet was in the back seat strapped into a child carrier wearing Apple Air Pods, held in place with scotch tape. I didn’t want to appear stupid, so I said nothing about a dog using Air Pods. I did ask what Giblet was listening to. Mooch said, “He likes those Tibetian Dog Chants; it keeps him soothed, and he doesn’t break out in hives or crap in the seat. Chihuahuas are a nervous type, you know.” He’s right; the little shit has bitten me numerous times; once, while trying to steal my Whataburger, he bit my bottom lip, and I needed stitches. The dog is so damn old; he’s probably broken some kind of Chihuahua life record.

Since we were near Jacksboro Highway, Mooch asked me how about dropping by his favorite bar for a beer. Sounded good to me, it was over a hundred degrees, and there’s nothing like a dark, cold bar in the summer.

Only a few bars are left on the old Hell’s Highway; they’ve all been dozed, and shopping centers and fast food joints have taken their place. We drove until we were in the country, then pulled into a gravel parking lot in front of Big Mamu’s Bar And Grill.

” This is my favorite bar in my whole life,” says Mooch. ” I’ve been coming here since I was of legal age to drink beer. This is where I got my first taste of the nightlife and other things I can’t discuss.” We ambled in, sat at the bar, and a female bartender brought us two ice-cold Lone Star longnecks. Mooch introduced her as Little Mamu. Her mama, Big Mamu, sold the place to her some years ago and retired back to Chigger Bayou, Louisiana, her hometown. Little Mamu and her husband, Budraux, run the business. Little Mamu, after a closer look, was darn rough. She’s seen some action in her bar years, probably shot or cut a few folks and busted some heads. Bottle blond hair and a hefty figure with arms like Popeye, I wouldn’t want to mess with her. The songs say the gals look better at closing time, but I doubt Mamu would improve by 2 am.

This bar was right out of the 1950s. Red naugahyde booths with little jukeboxes at each table. The rest of the furnishings looked to be original as well. The old Wurlitzer JukeBox in the corner was an antique but was pumping out Merel Haggard like a champ. The neon and backlit beer signs were old and likely worth a fortune. The Ham’s Beer bear was there, the Miller High Life man fishing for trout, and a revolving Jax Beer sign. This was a man’s bar. It dripped dive and beer joint like a dimestore Siv.

Mooch pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and sat on the bar. ” You about ready, Little Mamu?” he says. Mamu grabbed a step stool, climbed onto the bar, and walked over to where Mooch and I sat. I didn’t know if she would do a Hoochi Coochi dance or drop-kick one of us in the face. Mooch turned on the flashlight; Little Mamu raised her skirt a bit, and Mooch shined the light up her dress, bent over, and took a peek upward. ” Yep, everything looks just fine, gal,” he says, handing her a twenty-dollar bill. ” When did you start wearing those Fruit of The Loom underwear? ” Little Mamu didn’t miss a beat, ” I would have worn my Fourth of July ones if I had known you were coming; you haven’t been here in months,” she says. I’m not sure what I just saw; Mooch looking up a woman’s dress with a flashlight? I’ve seen some things, but this is the best one yet. We finished our beer and left.

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The Cactus Patch Has Had Enough Of Texas…For A While


Hitch up the wagons, load the party bus, and roll em out…

I’m kidding of sorts, we don’t own a wagon or a bus anymore, but the Honda CRV is a good substitute, and it has air conditioning and practically drives itself. It’s been over a hundred degrees here for a month. I’m not talking about a mere pansy-assed 100 degrees; we’re talking real temperatures, like, 105-110, and that’s without a heat index thrown in that makes it feel like a visit to Hell On Wheels Texas in Satan’s un-airconditioned tour bus. MoMo and I are escaping and going to Ruidoso, New Mexico, this week. The land of enchantment, cool air, majestic mountains, and high rental rates. Hoping to see Deer, Elk, Bear, and Aliens if we stop in Roswell. Since the pot is legal in New Mexico, and Ruidoso has a large collection of cute little shops selling the evil weed, we will likely see many old hippie-type folks stumbling around town or cleaning out the Hostess cupcake aisle at “The Walmart.” The last time we were there, MoMo purchased some gummies made in the shape of Willi Nelson’s head, and they messed up my head badly. They were supposed to relax you and let you sleep like a baby.. naturally. At least that’s what the cute little Pot-a-rista told us. All I heard for two days was ” On The Road Again” and “Red-Headed Stranger,” and that was in my head, no music playing. I’m taking ample Irish Whiskey this time. At least if I stumble and fall from the whiskey, I won’t think it’s a revelation or a sign from above and say, “Wow, that was far-out; let’s do it again.”

Aliens eating Egg-A-Muffins and happy meals…

On the last trip to Ruidoso, we stopped in Roswell, New Mexico, UFO, and Alien Central. Having breakfast in the local Mcdonald’s downtown, a short walk to the Alien Museum, was a treat. The place’s interior is all UFO design with a play area shaped like a saucer. There was no shortage of strange people in the place. One homeless alien was taking a sink bath in the men’s restroom, and another ratty alien was begging for money in the parking lot. As we left, MoMo got excited because she spotted a little alien walking with some Earth Pod People. We stopped to gawk and realized It was a five-year-old big-headed kid in spider man pajamas walking with his parental units. She was bummed out. I told her not to worry keep believing because they will be here soon. Turns out, they are here and have been for quite a while now. She’s scared.

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Intriguing News From The Cactus Patch


Some Of My Favorite Things…sort of like Julie Andrews sang about in that movie with all the singing kids

One of the better albums from 1960s Japan. Godzilla does a jam-up job on his Yokohamafuchi electric guitar, although when he attempted to sing ” It’s Hard To Say I Love You When I’m Breathing Fire,” with his backup singers “The Hiroshima Sisters,” he hiccuped and accidentally incinerated the girls, along with most of the studio musicians.

Kids with a few dollars in change will buy anything. I was one of the little suckers for these ads in the back of comic books. Charles Atlas training manuals, tea-cup monkeys, live sea horses, tiny submarines that ran on baking soda, and the above X-Ray Specs. I sent my five quarters in an envelope and a month later received my prize. They were more like those cheesy 3-D glasses than real glasses. Georgie, my buddy, was my test specimen. Nope, nothing there, still Georgie in his baseball cap, no bones, innards, or X-Ray vision. I should have ordered the genuine Super Man glasses. I tried them on a few of the tom-boy girls in the neighborhood. After I told them I could see their bones and guts, they beat me with a hula-hoop; although I tried to tell them I was kidding, the beating continued; I barely got away. I handed them to my mother; she put them on, looked at me, and said, ” I see you’re still wearing yesterday’s underwear.”

Back before we had NPR and educational television, we kids had Shari Lewis and Lambchop, Howdy Doodie ( who was a real kid with strings tied to his body), Mickey and Amanda, the mud turtle and Opossum, Soupy Sales, and White Fang and a dozen more. This album was somewhat educational, in a Dave Gardner, Rusty Warren adult party sort of way. The gal that sings songs about puppets is Shari Lewis’s half-sister, which tried to horn in on Shari’s gig by coming up with two repulsive puppets calling them “Clam Chop” and “Devil Baby.” My cousin Jok loaned me the album. He’s the one that blew up everything with cherry bombs and shot my other cousin, Ginger, in her butt with an arrow. He was not the best influence.

A picture of my Christmas display in my front yard from six years ago. I saw nothing wrong with having a rubber T-Rex and a few Raptors eating Santa and Barbie for Christmas dinner. I had colored solar lights at night, which looked like a professional display. I was feeling pretty darn good about it until a few old ladies in my neighborhood, the ones that drove Cadillacs, sported blue hair, and wore prune faces, complained to the association office, and under threat of arrest and seizure of my home, I removed the display.

Yep…I had one of those too. Imagine giving a kid a toy gun that shoots hard plastic bullets, and they hurt at close range. In the 1950s, folks didn’t see the harm in giving us kiddos potential leather weapons. Everything was good until my cousin, a little cherry bomb kid, forced a 22-caliber bullet into my rifle and blew the thing to pieces. I also possessed a real sharp full-size Jim Bowie knife and a WW2 Army Surplus hand grenade.

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It’s 2009, And We Are In The Studio, Again!


The American Classics Band, 2009

Left to Right; Danny Goode-lead vocals and bass; John Payne-vocals, lead guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and keyboards; and probably some more instruments I’m leaving out. Phil Strawn-vocals and rhythm guitar, banjo- Jordan Welch- drums and bongos, cowbell, and sings like Roger Miller.

The American Classics Band
https://on.soundcloud.com/i9ryA

Track 4 covers Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Navajo Rug.” I’m new to SoundCloud, so I cut off our heads in the pictures. Why do these apps make it so darn hard to move anything over? WordPress won’t allow WMV files, so I had to upload the tunes to SoundCloud, which converted it to an MP3.

Track 1, “For What It’s Worth,” is our cover of Buffalo Springfield’s song about the riots on the Sunset Strip in 1967. The CD was cut at Wavelight Studios in Haltom City, north of Fort Worth. Larry Dylan was the sound engineer and owner of the studio.

Danny and I, back in 67-69, played together in “The Orphans” and “The A.T.N.T.,” which I posted our record a few weeks ago. John Payne played with the “Fabulous Sensations” out of Lubbock, Texas. He also got to sit down and visit with Buddy Holley’s parents in Buddy’s childhood home, so he has been close to musical royalty. Jordan Welch played with The Coachmen, another great popular band in the DFW area, back in the 1960s.

If you haven’t noticed, I discovered background colors today, so bear with the experimentation. It doesn’t take much to entertain me these days.

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Erratic, But Informative Ramblings From The Cactus Patch 7/28/23


Pictured above is my first realistic gun, The Fanner 50. It had authentic steel bullets that took green stickum caps, the cylinder turned as you fired it, and cap smoke belched from the realistic barrel. All my buddies in the neighborhood had them, and we thought we were bad assed cowboys. Billy Roy, one of our buddies who turned into a hoodlum child after hanging out with the “hard guys” across the tracks, attempted to rob our neighborhood grocery store with his Fanner 50. He was arrested and sent to the Dope Farm for a few months. After that, he went on to a stellar life in crime, all because of a cap gun.

Port Aransas, Texas, 1967, My Chevy Impala with a mighty V8, 283 engine, and no air conditioning, loaded with my longboards, ready for the waves. Note all the smashed bugs on the grill and front of the hood. Texas, in the summer, is a buggy place. The board over the driver’s side is my 9 ft 6-inch “Surfboard Hawaii,” and the other is a 9ft. “Hansen”; is perfect for the surf in Texas. Leashes weren’t around yet, so if you lost your board, it was a long swim.

My first rock band, 1965 “The Dolphins.” I can’t remember who came up with that name, but I wanted to use ” Don’t Hit Your Sister,” but it was vetoed by the other members. Jarry and I stayed with the band, but had different members the following year and a new name, “The Orphans.” We were playing a gig at the Harrington Park Swimming Pool in Plano, Texas. Left to right; Jarry Boy Davis, Warren Whitworth, Ron Miller on drums, Jerry Nelson and me with my cheap Japanese electric guitar.

One of my favorite books in grade school. Most of the kids were into “Fun With Dick and Jane” and that dog of theirs, the one that bit everyone in the neighborhood. I liked a more realistic read, like Mickey Spillane’s crime novels and The Grapes of Wrath. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Badger, confiscated this book and escorted me to the principal’s office, which resulted in me getting a butt-whooping when I got home.

1968, my late cousin, Wandering Star. Pictured here with his wife, Saphron, and their nice little hippie family. They lived in a tepe in a commune in the Colorado Rockies. True to the Indian traditions required in the commune, they named their children after the first thing Wandering Star saw when he stuck his head out of the tent after the children’s natural holistic birth. Left to right are; Morning Rain, Chattering Squirrel, Sunny Morning, and Two Dogs Screwing. I heard that later in life, the kids renamed themselves.

Texas International Pop Festival, August 1969, in Lewisville, Texas. Me and my pal, Jarry Boy Davis, are in there somewhere, as well as my wife, MoMo. A crowd of around 200 thousand kids and some adults attended. It was three days of great music, fatal sunburns, LSD freakouts, giant joints passing through the crowd, no food, no water, no sleep, 100-degree temperatures, and no shade. It was worth it; I met Janis Joplin while standing in line to buy a hot dog. This was at night, and this gal asked to cut in line, so being the gentleman that I was, I let her cut in. She turned, introduced herself as Janis with a hearty handshake, and it was then that I knew who she was. She was a fellow Texan, so we briefly talked about the heat. It was the 60s, so you had to be cool and act like it was no big deal, but I about pissed myself. She was a nice gal who had good music later that night and died too soon. This was also the night that Led Zepplin got on stage, and Jimmy Paige declared they would never return to this Hell Hole of a state because of the heat. A few months later, they played a concert in Dallas and had to eat some humble pie. It wasn’t Woodstock, but damn close.

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“The Truth Is Out There; We Are Not Alone. See… I Told You So!”


Bugs and Marvin The Martian, courtesy of Mel Blanc

Since childhood, I knew we were not alone in this universe. A steady diet of space movies on channel 11 made a believer out of me. “The Forbidden Planet” with the robot and that hubba-hubba Ann Francis chick, and “Invaders From Mars,” where kidnapped folks had a red glowing jewel drilled into their neck, became zombies, and were sucked into the Martian cave via sand dunes. Those are the two that gave me screaming assed nightmares but piqued my still-forming juvenile imagination into what it is today. Certain that I saw a UFO over the Gulf of Mexico when I was eight years old, a run-in with small grey alien beings when I was abducted from my warm bed, taken aboard a mother ship, and implanted with a device that tracked my life and gave me superior mental powers over my childhood friends. I was hooked like a crappie on a purple people eater jigamajig spinner.

Now, all of these decades later, our slippery when-wet government confirms that the spaceships and little green men are real, and we have many of these crafts in our possession. I am relieved to know my beliefs were correct. The next time I drive through Roswell, New Mexico, which will be next month on our way to Ruidoso for some mountain air and horse racing, I will feel relieved that I was right all along. May the force be with you, and all that goes with it.

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Breaking News From The Cactus Patch


White House First Dog Bites 6 Secret Service Agents

” It’s Cocaine Dog”

The Secret Service, after being bitten six times by the new First Dog, confirms the dog found another baggie of the white powder on the front lawn. It appears the First Dog ingested a large quantity of the drugs before going on a biting spree through the president’s private residence. Agent 86 confirms the dog has been spending a lot of his off time with first son, Hunter.

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Beach Time In Texas


The Original Beach Bunny. Note the soft natural fur instead of the bleached blonde hair, the Coppertone tan, and the too-small bikini.