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Living The Mongrel Life


I am in the process of writing my families history in the form of a story, that may turn into a Hemingway or Steinbeck inspired novel. I must be careful not to plagiarize either of my literary icons, but since they wrote much of what my family endured in the early part of the century and the 1930s, it may be impossible to slip here and there. Then, I remind myself that they have passed on, so if I do slip up a bit, I doubt they will be knocking at my door.

“Family Search” which is operated by the Mormon Church seems to be the most accurate for genealogy research. I tried “Ancestry,” the site that is considered the go-to library for family history, but the site gave me a headache.

My sister gave me a membership to the 22 something DNA site for my birthday. I had a few drinks of Irish Whiskey, spat into a vile and mailed it. It came back European, mostly Scottish and English with a trace of Asian Hun and a bit of Viking. The Irish Whiskey may have altered the DNA evidence.

I checked my lineage on “Ancestry” and it came back European, mostly England and Scotland. I know this is false because my grandmother was a Cherokee and was born and grew up on the Indian Nation in Oklahoma. How she met and married my blue eyed Irish grandfather is a mystery. A horse trade, or a debt may figure in there somewhere. My Granny knew and spent time with the famous Cherokee Chief, Quanah Parker, and from what I heard from my mother, she may have known him a bit too well; holding hands on the banks of lake under the moonlight and all that lore.

My mother looked like “Sacagawea” the famous Shoshone Indian girl that aided Lewis and Clark in their 1804 exploration of the America’s west of the Mississippi; all she needed was a buckskin dress and moccasins. She figured herself to be a little less than half Cherokee, which would make me chock-full of Indian DNA. My sister swears that DNA doesn’t lie. But doe’s it? Look at OJ, his DNA lied like the floor mats in his Ford Bronco.

Around the third week of research, I found in Family Search that the Cherokee Indian Nation does not release information to the “white eye,” meaning the white folks; Custer and all his hooligans. Who could blame them, distrust last a lifetime. So, I am convinced that I am Cherokee. My hair is almost long enough for a pony tail, I like sharp knives and if I drink too much “fire water” I am apt to do strange things. I also can ride bareback on a horse and shoot a bow and arrow, as long as my wife keeps adding the quarters to the slot attached to the child sized mechanized pony ride in front of the grocery store.

I contacted Ancestry via email and the nice lady replied with one; “I could go on acting like an Indian if it made me feel good about myself.” Well, bless her little wokie heart, it does make me feel better. Now Family Search says I am related to President George Washington and Elvis Presley. I am officially living the life of a mongrel humanoid.

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The Day After Easter


And Nothing Has Changed?

I don’t expect much these days. My childlike visions have long since faded into the past. Reality is a daily awakening that greats you with your morning cup of coffee and the news. I didn’t expect the world to be a better place this morning, but I held hope that it would be. My coffee tasted the same, the birds ate their seeds, and I was once again disappointed in the failures of humanity. There should be a religious name for the day after Easter Sunday. Any ideas?

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A Few Final Thoughts Of Easter Weekend


Another Easter weekend is fading into the last hours, as I am.

I remember, as a small child going to the Poly Baptist Church and being told I was a sinner and going to hell for two hours. I was six, so sin wasn’t on my radar, and the preacher told us hell was right below our seats, so I kept my legs up most of the time. I was an easy target to be pulled through the wooden floor.

After Easter service, it was home or to relatives for food, easter egg hunts, and enough sugar to keep me humming for days. I didn’t quite connect between what Easter Sunday was and what it had to do with a rabbit delivering eggs hidden in odd places for us to find and put in a basket. Christianity and Paganism clashed at that point. I know in church, I was miserable in my white shirt and clip-on tie but was happy as a town dog hunting for candy eggs in a backyard. I never saw the rabbit, and after a few years, believed it to be BS. I caught my father hiding the darned eggs so that “jig” was up ( oops..a bad word, I’m canceled, I guess). For the love of Davy Crockett, it was the 1950s, so get over it.

We have the German immigrants that arrived in the late 1700s to thank for the pagan rabbit-egg dealing thing. Those hearty saurkraut-cooking farmers brought it to us. Makes you wonder if little Adolf liked to hunt eggs too? I can’t imagine a tradition and stories of a German Hare making a deal with a German hen to purchase eggs so he can deliver them to children; that’s about as senseless as banning “Matilda” and “To Kill A Mockingbird” from public school libraries. Fortunately, our small town bookstore in Granbury carries those books on the banned list, and our local H-E-B had an abundance of plastic eggs, marshmallow, and chocolate Bunnies this year. MoMo’s grandchildren are likely still awake from all the candy they ate.

I listened to Glenn Beck’s interview with Pastor Gregg Laurie this morning on YouTube. Greg, now an older man, is the young man portrayed in the movie “The Jesus Revolution” that came to Jesus as a seventeen-year-old and became the senior pastor of the Calvary Church along with the help of Lonnie Frisbee, a hippie Jesus freak turned into a powerful preacher, and Pastor Chuck Smith of the Calvery Church in Southern California. It was an hour of enlightenment and awe. Pastor Laurie truly believes that as it happened in the late sixties and early seventies, another Jesus Revolution is taking place among our young and old if we live long enough. This started in Asbury, Kentucky, a few months back and has grown into a nationwide movement, just as it did in 1969 through 1972.

All the same, signs are there; the disillusionment with our government, the decadent lifestyles being pushed on our young via Hollywood and special interest groups, the drug culture that is killing our teens, the threat of a World War, the works of their parents and their schools. It’s the same formula that birthed it in the late sixties, only now the world is a more vile place than it was then. The Hippie movement was never the answer to anything. It was a pipe dream, an experiment, a cop-out. Nothing good could have come from it, except some very good music, but the rest of it was bullshit, and I know I was one of those long-haired freaks that smoked dope and played rock music. Lived it and done it, and so was my wife. We both knew Jesus then but were floundering in our faith. She rediscovered hers before I did. It took me a while longer, but it happened, and now it’s happening again, and it may again before I depart this earth.

Have a blessed Easter weekend, and remember that nothing has changed when you awaken tomorrow morning. God still loves you and to be the person he expects you to be.

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Back When Beer Was For Real Men And Real Women


“I may not always drink beer, but when I do, it won’t be an Annhiser Busch product.” You can bet your sweet Bippy on that one. The country musician boys are banning Busch products from their shows, and Kid Rock will be touring the country, shooting up 12 packs of Busch beer to cheering crowds of rednecks all through the southland. Let’s hear old Neal sing about this one. This shit is about to get serious, stat, and pronto.

Bring back the bull terrier dog with the spot on his eye, the dude with the beard and the European accent, and the happy young folks on the beach around a roaring campfire. Hell, even Hank Hill and his buddies standing in their alley sipping on a cold Alamo can of beer, anything but this transgendered mutt, Dylan Mulvaney, or whatever its name is. If you have a pecker, you ain’t a girl because you don’t have a babushka and never will. Beer is not a social statement vehicle; it’s a brew to be enjoyed with Mexican food, hamburgers, and hotdogs at the ballpark, not at a drag queen children’s indoctrination show. It’s a sacred piece of Americana, Texana, and Rosanna-Rosanna-Dana; she was a beer drinker too, as is my wife MoMo.

If he were still with us, my grandfather would be having a conniption fit over this latest bow to wokeness. He drank his beer with a few shakes of salt to give it effervescence and increase the foamy head. He drank his brew like a real man, the one that killed German soldiers with his bare hands in the muddy battlefields of France in 1917. There was no room for pansy-assed young folks printed on his beer bottle or in his life. The Busch family might want to reconsider their blunder before their American beer drinkers switch to Irish Whiskey like this old guy has done.

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An Odd Duck In A Crowded Pond


Don’t Believe What You Hear…It’s All Bull, And Then Some…

From the time I was a child, I was a bit skeptical of life in general. Blissfully ignorant with a tendency to play with the dust particles in the light of the window. My mother, bless her soul, thought me to be a bit touched, maybe from the Scarlet Fever I contracted at six years old to the concussion I suffered from falling on an iced sidewalk that same year. No matter the affliction, I was a feral child; the neighborhood was my jungle.

My little sister, five years younger, was spared the affliction, leading to a childhood of normalcy. I suspected I was the doomed child, the voodoo Chile, way before Jimi Hendrix wrote the tune. Not quite the walking brain-feasting zombie, but somewhere in between, I lived an existence in the Twilight Zone, not knowing what the next day would bring. Rod Serling could have been my Godfather. Captain Kangaroo scared me shitless, as well as his pal Mister Greenjeans. I thought Howdy Doody was a real kid with strings attached to his limp limbs. Icky Twerp was my hero. I was a good kid with streaks of inconsolable incorrigible rebellion that possessed me like a demon from hell. My paternal grandmother refused to be in the same room with me for many years, and then it was only to prepare me Campbell’s Bean Soup, which she was convinced was the favorite of young demonic possessed children. I was baptized so many times my skin was permanently shriveled. I had no idea of my afflictions. Having spent every Sunday in the hard wooden pews of the Poly Baptist Church, I was guaranteed a seat in Heaven, or so I believed.

Age and height rectified most of the imagined curse, but still, I suffered from a contrived family affliction. My Aunt Norma, a kindly bookish woman who loved Wejie Boards, Tarot Cards, and howling at the full moon at two in the morning, thought that she gave me a kindred spirit, of which I was not. I was a kid that liked to write stupid stories in a Big Chief Tablet and mail them to the Fort Worth Press Newspaper. Years went by with no response. It was as if I never existed as a writer, but then, those were the years that I believed myself to be the next Mark Twain, and that belief was unshakeable. If I couldn’t become Mark Twain, at least I was destined to be the next John Steinbeck, even though he was still alive and kicking and was working on his Homeric tribute to his dog and America, “Travels With Charley.” I could have written that book; it was there in my oatmeal mush brain, but the puzzle pieces were missing.

To most of us, childhood was a mystery that disappoints us, then we grow up and realize it was the best time of our lives.

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Remembering Late Night Television of the 1960s


Mark Twain’s Visits With Johnny Carson On The Tonight Show

Of Course it didn’t happen, but let’s assume it did.

Johnny Carson was as big as entertainers get in the 1960s and 1970s. I watched his show with my father many times a week, staying up past my bedtime, but hey, I was in high school, so it was allowed. He picked the best comedians as a guest and gave many their boot to fame by allowing them a few minutes on his revered stage. Just for fun, let’s assume he invited Mark Twain back from the dead as a guest. No, I haven’t been smoking hand-rolled ciggies, but wouldn’t it have been eye-opening.

Carson; “Please welcome to the show, Mr. Mark Twain.” Twain, wearing his trademark white Panama suit, enters from behind the multi-colored curtain with a lit cigar in his mouth, makes his way to the stage, shakes hands with Johnny and Ed, and then sits his lanky frame on the holy sofa.

Carson; ” So Mark, just how hard was it to get a pass to visit the earth and be a guest on my show? I assume you came from above and not from that other place?

Twian; ” Not hard at all Mr. Carson; Father God enjoys your humor and likes Doc and his band. I never watched your program until Clarence the Angel told me I was coming down for a night to guest on your stage. Is this in color or black and white? We don’t have many of these new televisions in Heaven, and I refuse to own one because they are too much of a distraction from my work. Did I mention I am writing another fifty novels, all in longhand, can’t stand those new-fangled typewriters. Huck and Tom are all grown up now and doing quite well in the riverboat business, so I am continuing their life’s story. We have rivers up there too, so pilots are in short demand. We don’t have many comedians. There’s this Lenny Bruce feller, he’s a hoot but a bit blue with his language, and he’s always in trouble with the council.”

Carson; ” So back when you were on earth, all those years ago, you were quite dour when it came to politics and outspoken about the men that ran the country, do you still hold those views?”

Twain; ” Hell, yes, I do. You show me a politician, and I’ll show you a scoundrel, a thief, and a liar. So, who is this Lyndon Johnson moron? Why are we over in Viet Nam helping folks who don’t like us? I see a lot of our young soldier boys in Heaven. They’re as confused as I am, and not happy to be dead. We got no dog in that hunt, and you all are pissing away good money and destroying our countries morals with all these Hippie people running around smoking plants and marching around carrying signs. I can’t pretend to understand you folks down here on earth.”

Carson: “Well, Mark, you certainly don’t hold back; why don’t you tell us how you really feel. (audience laughs), Ed looks uncomfortable, and Carson plays with his pencil.

Twain; ” I gotta go now, but let me give you some parting advice, in 2022, which is a good bit away, you idiots down here are going to be right back in a Viet Nam situation, but it’s going to be in a country called Ukraine, and you will be fighting Russia and the Chinese, it it ain’t going to be a pretty show. How do I know this? Well, fellas, God tells me everything when we play our chess game every Thursday over cigars and brandy. Oh yeah, Johnny, you’re going to get divorced real soon, and that gal is going to pick your bones clean as a whistle.” Twain blows a smoke ring with his Havana cigar and exits the stage. Doc and the band play “Dixie.”

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Palm Sunday Service In The Cactus Patch


Reverend “Chicken Little” conducted a rousing Palm Sunday service in our backyard this past Sunday. His Peeps, though fewer in attendance from last year, were attentive and behaved themselves, even though a Blue Jay carried a few of them away to an unknown fate. Also, a severe attack of fire ants cut the sermon short before Sister Bunny and her choir could provide the hymns.

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“The Show Must Go On” In The Cactus Patch


Things are a bit shaky in the Cactus Patch this week. Spring is here, but holding off a bit, giving us cool and cruel weather. I have a worrisome cough. I am never ill, except for the Cancer that I beat off with a stick a few years back. I should be a petri dish of diseases at my age, but my bride, an RN, keeps me going. I keep checking my arm for a bar code and an expiration date. My iPhone is able to read codes, so when one does appear, I will scan myself.

Mrs. MoMo and I are going to the legendary and beautiful Granbury Opera House on Friday evening to see “The Liverpool Legends,” a group of hand-picked ( by George Harrison’s sister) musicians that believe themselves to be The Beatles. They put on a great show, so I am stoked and a bit jiggy about the evening. We are meeting two more couples of our old friends for supper, adult beverages, and sharing the event. Danny, Jordan, and I played in a rock band for 19 years, The American Classics, to be exact. We played many Beatles tunes, so revisiting live music should give us a proper fix for a while. It would be the perfect event if our lead guitar player, John, was still with us, but he is playing with better musicians in Heaven and can’t make it. We can reform the band at a later date.

My wife, MoMo, has gone full Hippie Chic on me. She turned a pair of jeans into bell bottoms by adding a 60s-style fabric to create the bell effect. She didn’t stop there. Next, she made a genuine cow leather vest complete with fringe and other adornments dangling. The gal was a bit of a hippie wild-ass back in the day, so she knows that clothing makes the person and produces the proper vibe. She is so excited the concert has taken a back seat to the wardrobe. I look for her to grind her own wheat for homemade bread and stop shaving her legs and armpits; she may change her name to Sunshine or Saffron before Friday. I will remain the same grumpy codger but will sport my leather jacket with cow-fur trimmings and Larry Mahan Ostrich boots. My hair is not long enough for a pony-tail, but if I drink enough Chi-Tea, it may grow enough by then.

Our bird feeders have turned into a Shakespearean performance stage. It seems the small Avians have formed their own theater company and take great pleasure in giving us a good show every morning. Two Crows have joined the cast, and a pesky Squirrel hogs the Sunflower seed but does a formidable tap dance, so he is welcome. The Doves have joined forces and now number in the dozens, making a solid ensemble. They tend to deplete the seed in a manner of minutes, but we are well-trained and keep the critters well-fed. We have a wild Turkey that walks with a nice strut and an educated Road Runner that visits, but so far, no Coyote.

God Bless Davy Crockett, and remember the Alamo. Adios for now.

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The Truth won’t Set You Free, But It Will Offend Almost Everyone And Send Your Friends And Family Running For Your Door


I made a pledge to myself a while back that I would step away from expressing my political and religious beliefs, and for the most part, I have upheld my own self-imposed exile. However, the last two days have blown that apart, and I have to speak my mind; as juvenile and impetuous as it may seem, it is full of unpleasant truths that will likely offend many. I don’t apologize for the facts as I read or see them.

If the shooting at the Nashville church school isn’t horrific enough, our president, in a news conference to speak of this tragedy, tells jokes about chocolate ice cream and calls out the cute little girls in the back of the room, chuckling and yukking it up, then says a few mumbling words about the shooting; ban guns, ban Christians, put everyone in prison that isn’t a liberal Democrat, you know, the usual vomitous. Where is the national outrage over this behavior? There will be none…nada…zip. One of the clear signs of advanced dementia is the use of unpleasant, inappropriate speech. Notice anything inappropriate about that speech, “Dear Hearts?”

This weekend, one of the days will be declared a “National Day of Transgender Violence, or Vengence” it could change to something else by then. A group of sick individuals pushing this agenda have created another movement to captivate the masses. Just when the nation was getting over BLM, Antifa, and Hollywood. How will this be handled by the FBI and the DOJ without hurting their delicate feelings? Will they turn to the Kardashian women or The Oprah to soften the blow? How about us folks answering with a national day of American Christians against transgendered violence. I know…..I know, we are supposed to “turn the other cheek,” would that be the face one or the ass-one? I will turn neither and will give no quarter to these fanatical, confused, and now dangerous humans. The Ulvade police should watch the video of the Nashville policemen who ran to the shooter and took her, yes, a real woman, down within minutes of arriving on the scene. I once thought Texas had the best cops and Rangers in the country, but now I’m sure we don’t, just a bunch of wokie, pansy-assed-gun-toting-donut-eating good ole boys. I know a few cops who aren’t that, but I can’t vouch for the boys in Ulvade.

Where are the conservative voices in Washington? You know, the ones that were supposed to right all the wrongs in record time? Spiky Haired McCarthy, Turtle McConnel, WWF Jordan, and the others. The absence of Christian leaders speaking out? Franklin Graham, where in the world are you? Where is the swamp? Pelosi? AOC? all the other rats living in the tidal basin? They do not wish to offend the small percentage of freaks in the sideshow that might, through social media, influence their demise at the polls; that’s why no one is speaking out. We are in bondage to the gods of social media; Facebook, Instagram, Chinese Tik Tok, Rat Bastard platforms on iPhones, Google Chrome Notebooks, and every device that we carry.

In the words of the lunatic newsman from the classic movie Network, ” I’m mad as hell and am not going to take it anymore.” Did I say too much? Probably.

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When Evil Grabs A Gun


Another act of evil upon our young. Guns kill things, animals, humans, and everything in between; it matters not but the person who chooses to use them for evil. Children are lost to the devil that possesses humans. Now we learn the shooter is a woman but identifies as a man; could this be a factor? Confused identity or mental illness, is it one and the same? I’m a big boy and old, so come at me as you will. Words will not harm me; I am beyond that weakness.

This is a question we must ask ourselves, our loved ones, or the politicians that supposedly represent us. ” Is there a war on Christianity? I don’t wish to believe there is, but the attacks on churches and schools, and now on innocent young children attending a church school. There is a disconnect in our society. Every malcontent and sociopath has a movement against our nation’s treasured values that I remember well from the 1950s. Those years were not perfect, but they were Homeric compared to our now weekend society.

Our news media will not speak the truth on this act, any more than they do of anything of importance. In his expensive suits, Old NBC Lester Holt spits out the bullshit he is told; he has no balls or guts to speak the words the country begs to hear; he is a puppet, as our president is. If one is bullied, pushed, slighted, or looked upon hard, that is the reason to kill everyone that you feel has done you wrong. It is the new American way of repentance and evening the playing field. The perpetrators must pay with their lives. It’s fairness from the middle ages. An eye for a word.

In my youth, a lifetime ago, we threw a few punches, a wrestle or two in the dirt of the playground, shook hands, still remained friends, and moved on with our childhood and our lives. What changed, and when did it? I’m old, and now more confused than I was as a child.