Tag: photography

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Dispatches From The Cactus Patch Feb. 28th, 2024


One of the by-products of becoming a senior citizen is the onset of boredom. I can only watch so much Wheel of Fortune, although Momo would sit for days watching a pre-recorded loop of the same episodes and keep guessing all the puzzles, waiting for old Pat to send her a check or a vacation voucher to Ukraine. I want to slit a vein.

The Beatnik thing didn’t work out; I was too old, forgot all the best verbiage, and couldn’t stand to wear turtleneck sweaters anymore. Revisiting “On The Road” stirred an interest, but then I took a nap and forgot about it. When I have a good idea, it’s best to avoid daytime naps; they tend to act as a mental reset button for us folks.

Momo suggests I try my hand as a social influencer on TikTok or YouTube. She might be onto something. I have an abundance of white hair, much like those TV preachers from the 1980s when a person could lay their hands on top of their Motorola console color unit and be healed, but only after you gave the call-in number person your credit card number: no donation, no cure. I have the schtick and the suaveness to pull it off. I imagine it would be more like a Brother Dave Gardner comedy album. Speaking of, Brother Dave was my idol back in the late 50s and early 60s. But then, the portable record player broke. My comedy stint was over before it started. But I have the hair: you be the judge and let me know; my phone number is BR-549. A coinsedense how much I resemble Brother Dave.

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In Remembrance: Mrs. Mister Makes A Killing


A Tall Texas Tale For Those With Wrinkles…

Pictured above is none other than my childhood neighbor, Mrs. Mister, pouring her revolutionary beauty concoction, “Mrs. Mister’s Transforming Beauty Soak And Wrinkle Eradicator,” into the swimming pool at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, circa 1956. After emptying the last magnum of this magical elixir into the pool, every female club member over the age of fifty plunged into the water and adamantly refused to emerge until they attained Mrs. Mister’s enviable wrinkle-free appearance. Admittedly, a few of them came close to the mark, but, alas, the majority remained, shall we say, in dire need of further miraculous intervention.

Being the shrewd entrepreneur she was, Mrs. Mister struck a deal with Avon and pocketed a tidy sum for her creation. The miracle potion was rebranded as “Avon Skin So Soft,” renowned not only for its beautifying properties but also for its ability to repel those pesky “no-see-um” gnats. After all, why not fend off insects and look fabulous while doing so?

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Observations From The Cactus Patch On A Sunny Afternoon


Is That A Pruner In Your Pocket, Or Are You Happy To See Me?

The winter cutback in the Cactus Patch has begun. I sharpened my loppers, oiled my pruners, drank some prune juice, purchased a pair of garden gloves that have built-in copper magnets to relieve arthritis pains, found my knee pads, washed my garden apron, found my straw hat, which had small bites around the brim: likely hungry mice in my shed/art studio, which explains the holes in my tubes of paint, dusted off my old pair of Sketchers from the rack on the patio and discovered that during the winter that a cat peed in them, went to Walmart to buy a wheelbarrow I saw on Sunday for $53.99 to discover the price had jumped to $59.99: the sales associate said the increase was due to trucking cost even though the wheelbarrows didn’t move, so I am now forced to ferret out the best price from Home Depot, Lowes or Tractor Supply, need more Sunflower seed and Peanuts for my Avian friends because the Crows have figured a way to get three nuts in their beak instead of the usual one, and the Bluejays have joined forces with them to clean out the feeder in thirty seconds, saw a snake, was almost stung by a Wasp, fought off a Wasp that disguises itself as a Honey Bee, ate some Honey Graham Crackers and Peanut Butter, cracked my shin bone on a large rock, listened to some rock music on my Bluetooth speaker, spoke to my neighbor next door, oiled the hinges on my back door, bumped my head on my pickup truck door, put gas in my pickup which cost $2.89 per gallon: and no kiss before pumping, filled my pump sprayer with weed destroyer from Walmart then the pump thing froze up and the sprayer wand malfunctioned blowing hazardous weed killer on my clothes and skin, found my safety glasses and both screws fell out, got screwed at Walmart the third time this week, felt weak and sat down for a while which sedgwayed into a two hour nap in which I dreamed I had passed away without turning the hose bib off, sprayed some OFF bugjuice on my arms resulting in a nasty rash with large fluid filled pimples, watched a video on my phone of Dr. Pimple Popper removing a humongous cyst from the back of Quasi-Moto looking man, drank some Power Aid, powered off my iPhone because the telemarketers from India are burning up my battery telling me I am in pain and they can help me, no one can help me, finally the day ended and Ima worn out. Tomorrow will be a better day.

Reflections In A Cold Margarita…

Sitting on my patio as the afternoon turns to dusk, sipping my Metamucil Margarita with a prune on the glass rim, a thought finds its way into my jumbled head, ” I am in the twilight of my life,” and that might explain why I keep humming Simon and Garfunkle songs all the time. Sounds of silence, bridges over troubled waters, look around leaves are brown, there’s a patch of snow on the ground, and all that. Did Paul Simon know that 60 years later, his tunes would be embraced by old folks? Songs that were socially hip and loved by youngsters in the sixties are now the soundtrack for old folks. I’m bummed.

My Close-Knit Family

Writing the family history and have been for a while now. I use Family Search, a Morman outfit, and Ancestry, as well as some tidbits from my cousin, Sissy, and my sister because the rest of the family is kaput, checked out. I discovered that I am related to George Washington; isn’t everyone? Also to Bob Dylan, Joan Beaz, Donovan, The Kingston Trio, Sponge Bob, Scooby Do, Scooby Don’t, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchet, Bob Barker, Vanna White, Pat Sejack, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, Buckwheat, Spanky, Alfalfa and Darla, Commanche Chief Quanah Parker and the outlaw Belle Star, as well as Bass Reeves, Steve Reeves, and Brother Dave Gardner, which I am excited about because I dug his comedy back when we listened to him on Vinyle records.

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In Remembrance: Fort Worth Days


Captain Salt and the Lonely Beatnik Band

Pictured above is my late cousin’s band, Captain Salt And The Lonely Beatnik Band. They had a steady gig as the house band for the Hip Herford Coffee House in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1957. Junior Parker, my cousin, is the hip dude in the striped shirt. No one could play a stringed instrument, so everyone had a set of bongos. When a guest, such as Brother Dave Gardner, was on stage, the boys would provide a soft, cool beat, adding an aura of hipness to the poet’s reading. The band released a greatest hits album in 1958 that was a local hit within a four-block area. A young visitor from England, on vacation with his aunt, visited the coffee house, heard the band, and dug their stuff. It’s rumored he went back to England and formed his own band called the “Quarrymen,” and years later paid homage to the boys with a groundbreaking album, Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. I guess you can say my cousin had “X-Ray Eyes and knew his groceries. ” Hit me, man, I’m ice cold.

born to be wild

I wasn’t satisfied with my ordinary peddle car; I craved excitement and wind in my flat-top haircut: Speed was my need. My neighbor, Mr. Mister, our local mentor, and mad scientist, helped me install a Briggs & Stratton 5 HP lawn mower motor in my Western Auto peddle car. We tested my machine on the runway at Carswell Air Force Base, and it reached a speed of 70 MPH. I was a speed demon… ready for Thunder Road, figure 8 stock car races, quarter-mile drags, cruising Berry Street, racing teenagers between traffic lights, which is what I did one Saturday night when my parents thought I was asleep and wound up in a jail cell after the fuzz arrested me and confiscated my hot rod.

Delinquent women on motorcycles

“The Shangri-La’s” motorcycle gang, Fort Worth, Texas, 1957. My late cousin, Marlene Brando, right front, on the bad-ass Harley, was the Leader Of The Pack.

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Tall Tales And Ripping Yarns From The Great State of Texas


In the past few weeks, I have received comments from folks who are not frequent followers of my blog. I enjoy hearing from new bloggers, no matter the platform they find me on. It’s good to know how the pulse of the country beats. I welcome all comments and have only trashed a few inappropriate ones over the last fourteen years. Lately, some folks write, “That can’t be true; you made this up.” Well, yes, I did make it up, but there might be a smidgen of truth that sparked the fire. Mark Twain wrote many fictitious tales based on real folks he knew. A kid’s dream found me wanting to be the next Mark Twain, but then, he had already claimed the prize and the glory, and I had to settle for John Steinbeck as my hero and mentor. A good choice.

The heading for my blog clearly, in bold letters, states that it’s ” Tall Tales and Ripping Yarns From The Great State of Texas.” Most of my stories, and some rants, are true and are real recounts from my childhood into adulthood. I trust my longtime readers can tell the difference. My wife, Momo, my perfect muse, to this day, will still ask me if this is a true story or one of my weird ones.

In Texas, we are called Storytellers, Dichos, and raconteurs. My grandfather was a raconteur of the whittle and campfire variety, often playing salty licks on his fiddle while he entertained the family with his yarns. Two uncles on my mother’s side were world-class storytellers and the best liars I have known. They missed their calling by not becoming writers or folklorists like our American legends, Will Rogers and J. Frank Dobie. Genetic tagging from my mouthy relatives to me may have something to do with this malady that keeps me awake with a burning brain. Momo says I am touched in the head; she may be right. I do remember a fall from my mother’s arms to a kitchen floor when I was a wee-one. The result is quite clear.

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In Remembrance : Better Health Through PEZ


Warning to readers! This is a Tall Texas tale. Some of the folks are real, but most are not. Fort Worth, Texas, Pez Candy, and the polio epidemic of the 1950s are. i was there.

Pictured above is my late cousin, Beverly Hills, of Fort Worth, Texas. Let me tell you a legendary tall tale about her father, a renowned infectious disease doctor at JPS Hospital. He came up with a rather unconventional idea for administering the new Polio Vaccine. Instead of using a giant needle, he thought, “Why not load up a Pez pellet with the vaccine and shoot it into the kid’s mouth? No needle, no trauma, no chasing down running kids, just a minty Pez Candy shot down the throat with a cute little Flash Gordon Ray-Gun dispenser.” What could possibly go wrong?

The hospital installed a fancy display at Leonard Brothers Department Store, and Beverly, with no license to administer anything stronger than her cats kibbles, was designated to give the trusting kiddos their Polio Vaccine with the Ray-Gun Pez Gun. The word spread like wildfire, and soon, the line snaked around the block as moms and kids showed up to beat the dreaded Iron Lung by ingesting a tiny mint. Things got a little wild – police had to step in to control the crowd, and they even started serving hot dogs and cokes to calm down the hungry mob. It was quite the scene – July heat, a frenzied crowd, and the perfect conditions for the spread of Polio. The things people will do for a medical minty treat!

Beverly was overwhelmed, having shot Polio Pez mints down the throats of a thousand or more kids by noon, and supplies were exhausted. Her father’s duffus assistant, overwhelmed by the mob scene, retrieved what he thought were more vaccine pellets from a store room but instead picked refills of “Mother Little Helper Hormone and Hot Flash Lozenges.” They were packed in a similar non-descript box as the Pez Pellets and exactly the same size, a simple mistake made in the heat of battle. Beverly and a nurse vaccinated another thousand kids by afternoon and were done. When loading the car to head home, her father, Doctor Hill, discovered the real Pez vaccine in the trunk of his car. An inspection revealed the terrible mistake, but it was too late, and he had no way to contact the families of the children who had received the hormone therapy lozenges. Fearing fatal retribution, he decided to keep mum and let nature take its course. Better living through pharma did just that.

Two weeks went by, and freaked-out mothers were bringing their kids to hospitals all over town. Eight-year-old girls were growing boobies, wearing makeup, smoking cigarettes, and asking for a martini in the afternoon. Young boys were reading Hollywood Movie Star Magazines, dressing their dogs in doll clothing, painting their fingernails, shaving their still hairless legs, and began wearing their mother’s peddle pusher pants and mid-drift blouses. The town had gone street-rat crazy-town. Dr. Hill fessed up, suffered the consequences, and treated the affected kids with the appropriate drugs to reverse the changes. It seems that 1957 Fort Worth, Texas, was the forerunner for what is going on now. Who would have thought it was all because of a Pez Candy.

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Warnings From The Cactus Patch


Don’t Do It..Don’t Press That Cute Little Button With Your Mouse!”

Who wouldn’t want to see what an AI generated Barbie Doll for each state would look like..right? Well, I was on MSN, the evil 1984 computer software owned by “Steve Jobs rip-off-boy and Mail Order Doctor, Bill Gates, and the article was there with a cute picture of a Barbie doll. She was wearing a woodchopper shirt, staring all dead-eyed with that perky little nose and luxurious plastic hair, so I clicked the read. First Barbie for the state of Alabama popped up, a chirpy little southern belle, very racist in her frilly debutant outfit, holding a mint julep; I kept looking for “the help” doll that came with her. Cute, I wouldn’t buy it for my granddaughter, who never liked Barbie anyway; she was into the American Girl high-dollar dolls. Then I hit the continue button, “Bammo…. call 800 Microsoft, and all these scanning windows come up on my screen, ” your PC is infected with a Virus of lethal origin, your information will be lost in space and your laptop will melt into a puddle of plastic unless you call this number.” Lucky for me, I have a great anti-virus called Webroot, and that caught the little basement-dwelling culprits, likely some Chinese dudes living in Shang-Hi or Bali Hi, with their mothers serving them Fung Chow tea and eating fried bats with Raman noodles all day. This is the tech-savvy security checks that MSN gives its users. I’d be safer using Alta-Vista on a dial-up modem.

Her New Album Is Coming…

The Swift One, The Anoited Ambushiness Blond, The Long-Legged Succubus, so many names, so many men to write songs about. Now, poor Neanderthal raw meat-eating Kelce is her focus. His attack on his coach told Tay-Tay that she probably shouldn’t marry this Transformer, who has no control over his testosterone-fueled madness. So, in a secret recording studio, somewhere in deep Europe, the album has begun in secret. This signals the end of her partnership with the NFL unless she can steal Patrick Mahomes from Elle May. I know my post a few days ago said no more Taylor stuff, but this is just too good to pass up. Gimme a hall pass on this one.

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New York Gives All The Key’s To The City To Thankful Zombies


Jaques Coustou holds Mayor Adams’s Voodoo Doll

Not that Momo and I plan to visit New York in our lifetime, which has shortened considerably in the last three years due to calculated circumstances. Today, I read in the New York Press that Mayor Adams is begging fellow New Yorkers to house migrants/invaders in their private residences. What..are all the four and five-star hotels full? It’s reported by untrusted and misinformed sources that the hordes of illegal river rafters have trashed most of the hotels in New York to the point that they will need total reconstruction if the verminatosious are ever evicted.

One well-meaning moronic family in Long Island, feeling all warm and fuzzy after a Saturday morning trip to Starbucks and Barnes and Noble Bookstore, offered two rooms of their luxurious home as a safe haven for a poor migrant family. They called the appropriate agency, and within an hour, a family of four from Haiti was knocking at their door, ready to move into their new “forever home.” The Haitian family needed a few extra rooms for their goats and chickens, which would be used in voodoo ceremonies, and one of their children, a certified living dead Zombie, ate the family’s pet cat, Doonsbury Jr. After a week of torment, finding voodoo dolls in their likeness all over the house, and fearing for their lives, B.D. and Joanie Caucus and their two children, Zonker and Lacy fled in the dead of night from their 2.5 Million Dollar abode and are now staying at the Fredrick Mercury homeless shelter in Queens. The Haitian family has had the locks and the alarm code changed and has run up a $2,000.00 DoorDash bill using Mrs. Caucus’s credit cards found in a desk drawer. Bet they’re feeling all warm and fuzzy about now.

Tay-Tay Kicks Kanye’s Ta-Ta…Elly Mae Jets In From Beverley Hills

This will be my last paragraph about Tay-Tay Swifter. The Super Bowl did me in. Momo and I went down in flames. Eleven times, the cameras cut to the “anoited one” and her entourage of hangers-on instead of showing the game. Now, I learn that she had poor, old, downtrodden Kanye West barred from attending the event after he had purchased seats in front of her private suite. “Like…you know….like…ain’t nobody gonna…like…. steal my camera time,” she was overheard saying to her new bestie, Elly Mae Mahomes. Poor old Travis, her knuckle-dragging fiance, has been forced to move out of his home because manic packs of young “Swifties” invaded his residence and are refusing to leave until Tay-Tay comes to the house and gives them a blessed Swiftie communion. There’s a song in there somewhere.

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In Remembrance: The Day I Was Hypnotized


In Remembrance is not about a last tribute to a dead guy; for me, it’s about remembering, while I can, bits and pieces of my colorful childhood.

I was nine years old and thought of nothing but baseball, cartoons, and fireworks. I won’t say my childhood was purified and biblically cleansed; my neighborhood pals and I did get into our share of trouble, resulting in no less than three or four butt-busting per day: my poor mother’s spanking arm was toast by noon. We did nothing bad, just the usual little kid stuff: blowing up mailboxes with Cherry Bombs, setting garages on fire, and fighting the “hard guys” across the tracks. It was the 1950s, and we were the first generation of baby boomers unleashed on our suburban-dwelling families.

Our hijinx had reached a crescendo, and the mothers in the neighborhood were plumb worn down from our growing delinquency. Threats of being sent for a stint at The Dope Farm, a boy’s ranch for unruly boys, had lost their punch: we needed an intervention, and fast.

My neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Mister, retired Air Force officers and native Californians, were consulted over cocktails and cigarettes in their luscious backyard one summer evening. A few of the mothers and fathers had one too many Hollywood Dirty Martinis and made an early exit from the pow-wow, leaving my folks, a few buzzed moms, and Skippers’ parents to ask for help. The Misters were our heroes, mentors, and dream parents. We would have gladly traded ours for their parental guidance. Mrs. Mister was the neighborhood “it girl,” and all the fathers had the “Hubba Hubba’s” for her: she was an exact pod person for Jayne Mansfield.

Mrs. Mister, after a few double Martini’s, said she knew a doctor who worked miracles with hypnosis. He had convinced Mr. Mister to quit smoking and hypnotized her Poodles, Fred, and Ginger when Mr. Mister had made them street rat crazy after sending them into the stratosphere on his homemade rocket and Doganaut capsule. The dogs were a wreck until Doctor VanDyke got hold of them. She felt the doctor could take some of the piss and vinegar out of us boys and a few of the poor girls that had joined our coterie of mayhem. The plan was hatched.

The Misters gave a backyard cookout, which was the cover for the intervention. Doctor VanDyke set up his office in the Mister’s TV room, and each of us kids was escorted to the Doctor by a parent. Skipper was first to go down, then Georgie, Cheryl, Rhonda, Bean, Frankie, Billy Roy, Stewart, Stevie, and I batted clean-up.

The old guy was covered in creepiness. Bald head, a sharp devil goatee, horned-rim glasses, and a bowtie. My mother sat in the corner as the doctor held a little pendent in front of me, giving instructions to watch the shiny object, and I was getting sleepy. I gave in: Doctor Creepy put me under. It was a nice nap, and I was refreshed and a bit goofy when I joined my pals in the backyard, but something was off, not just with me but with all of us.

Rhonda and Cheryl announced they were no longer friends with us and were quitting the baseball team so they could go back to playing with doll babies. Skipper wouldn’t drink his Kool-Aid; said it tasted like cat turds. Georgie was whimpering and crying like a baby and sucking his thumb, Stevie got all Romeo’d up and tried to plant a kiss on Rhonda, and she whacked him on his head with a Coke bottle, causing blood to run down his face, and I had this sudden urge to pee, which I did without embarrassment, whipping it out in front of all the guests. My poor mother was mortified. Doctor VanDyke had flicked the wrong switches in our young brains; we were now worse than before. The party abruptly ended.

After a week of house arrest, most of us were back to our normal bad behavior. Mrs. Mister learned that Doctor VanDyke was not a real doctor but had learned hypnosis from a mail-order course advertised in the back of the Farmers Almanac. He was a huckster.

The gang went back to our routine, baseball, cartoons, and fireworks. The two girls rejoined the team and threw away the doll babies and dresses. I felt pretty darn good, except I couldn’t bring myself to touch plastic Tupperware; it was like a live Rattlesnake in our kitchen. The old standby staple of every mother’s kitchen scared the liver out of me. It still does.

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Dispatches From The Cactus Patch…A Few Things You Might Not Know About


Pictured are my late father’s late cousin, Bell, and her husband, Alexander, showing off their 1952 invention, the “Head Phone,” which was the predecessor to the modern mobile cell phone. It was an awkward unit to use. The phone is attached to your head, and the braided phone line is carried in a backpack. Cell towers weren’t invented, so the unit and the lovely couple were tethered to the home plug by a five-hundred-yard cord roll. She eventually sold her phone ideas to some hot-shot princess in Monaco who came out with her own line of cute little bedside phones. ” Besides”, Bell said, “every time the damn phone rang, it gave me a massive headache.” Alexander, on the other hand, was unable to speak, smoke a ciggie, or drink his nightly cocktail, which impacted their social life.

Pictured is my first real grown-up science experiment kit, Christmas 1955. I asked our neighborhood mentor and mad scientist, Mr. Mister, to tutor me in the art of scientific experimentation. He brought home a few viles of Plutonium X3 from his job at Carswell Air Force Base, and with parts and dangerous minerals from the kit, an old Waring blender, and a Betty Crocker pressure cooker, he and I constructed and tested a small nuclear device right there in our neighborhood. Our garage was totaled, and we were all puny and hairless for a few months, but the family got over the effects of the radiation and, seeing they had a small genius in the family, awarded me a second kit the next Christmas. See Below.

Christmas 1956, I received my second kit, like the one above. I had no idea what Meth was, and the instructions were in Spanish, so frustrated with making 9 Love Potions and disappearing inks, I gave the kit to my cousin, Jock, who set up a cute little lab in his family’s camper trailer parked in their backyard. After blowing up their trailer and suffering non-life-threatening injuries, he was sent to the Juvenile Dope Farm for six months. The last I heard, he opened several pot shops in Ruidoso, New Mexico, after retiring from the Texas Senate.

Who knew that Lard was so good for you? My grandmothers would not have been able to cook a meal without a tub of Crisco, White Cloud, or Puffy Stuff lard. They also kept a soup can full of used bacon grease next to the stove, so if they were out of that soft, luscious lard, they could still fill our bloodstream with massive doses of saturated vein-clogging fat. My grannie soaked her chicken mash feed in Puffy Stuff and then fed the hens her secret mixture. She claimed it made the eggs bigger and better, and when she wrung the head off of one of the greased-up hens and cooked it for supper, the chicken was already basted and fried to a golden brown. Yummm. Gotta love that country cooking.