The Desert Peach BONUS – Tattoo.  This is an ink painting I did years ago, but it’s still pretty (yes, scan everything and keep files!).

See the little spider on the right?  I was nearly done and my pen threw up, dropping a nice round drop of ink on the edge of the drawing.  After a momentary brain-freeze (slightly suicidal), I used the emptied point of the pen to draw out the legs.  After it dried, I gave it a shadow.

The story goes, an artist at the Smithsonian was doing a very careful display and publications painting of a wasp, using low-tolerance pigments, including blown graphite dust.  She was almost finished, almost at the fixing stage, when the pen she was using for delicate highlighting threw up a big blob of white ink.

I hear the other artists in the studio had to grab her before she went screaming out a second-story window.  I believe it.

Now we all know the Peach would never let anything happen to Udo.  That he could help  Or knew about.

But that’s the problem with life; we don’t know, we think we know, we don’t find out until too late. 

As a jake-leg historian (I would never claim to be a trained historian), I understand, if only foggily, historical and scientific rigor.  One thing I’ve discovered is that the historian can know more than the people who Were There.  Not because an historian is trained or smarter, but because s/he’s studied the subject and put the pieces together.

How many times have you watched something happen, and not known until later what it was that was actually happening?  One private in a battle can tell you what he saw and felt.  But the corporal standing next to him saw a completely different battle.  The guys in the helicopters were in a whole ‘nother world.

An old Australian Desert Rat — a member of the 8th army that fought Rommel — once said, “We used to buy this strong liqour from the Arabs.  We didn’t know what it was.”  He was told it was Arack, made from the sap of palm trees.  He was happy to know.

An old German paratrooper spoke of seeing Rommel taken from his home by a special escort, and assuming he was going back to the hospital.  Only because he and his audience had been drinking did the connection get made between the World War Two incident and the fact that Rommel was being taken away to be murdered.   The situation was ameliorated when the old man was told that if his unit had known and intervened, they would have messed up the family’s plans to survive the regime; Rommel was dying, and he traded a worthless, short-lived body for the Nazis’ respect for and care of his family.  The thought that the old Fox had pulled a last Rommel made the old paratrooper pretty happy.  Or maybe that was all the beer.

One story is never the whole story.  If two different people tell you a completely different story and hotly stick to it, they’re probably both right, and nobody’s lying. They just differered in their camera angles.

It’s mutual respect.  Yes, that’s what it is.

This is why Proposition 8 will simply not hold out in the long run. The people who would deny the rights of gays are siding with those who supported slavery, denied women the right to vote, allowed rape within marriage, backed Jim Crow, organized lynchings, and still go onto reservations to rape native women.

Sooner or later, our side wins. We’re the Good People. We don’t mistake animals in the woods for the people we want to kill. We don’t invade. We don’t sneer at the sick and crazed on the streets, as though we’re better than them.

We have Mirrors we look in every day, to ask if what we’re doing is the right thing. We give up possibilities of wealth because we know where it comes from, and there would be enough for all if we could all be as decent as my cat, Hector. We gnaw ourselves over the compromises we have to make to try to make the planet a better place for all of us, including our animal relatives — and everything alive on the planet IS our relative. The DNA shows it.

But the only reason Nearest and I clean up the garbage on the beach is because we don’t want to look at it. The guy who invented the six-pack plastic holder is going to hell.

Actually, all humans are going to hell. This planet was a test, and we blew it. If you believe in an afterlife, WE’re not getting in. How anybody can clearcut a forest and dump poison on the remains — and they still do, I’ve got the photos — and then think they’re getting into the Garden by just going to church is beyond me. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then we’re making hell right here.

We’re not going to get the little angel wings for what we did to the BUFFALO, let alone the great sea mammals and the sharks. If there is a heaven, maybe hell will be us hanging around in a burning desert outside the golden fences watching all the animals we killed enjoy themselves in paradise, while none of them can pick up a cup to hand us a drop of water.

Well, maybe a monkey. But not a lab monkey, that’s for sure. I used to say no humans would get in unless an animal would vouch for us, but why would any of them BOTHER with us?

If all this world is based on numbers and chemicals and accidents and time, then is is a wondrous, marvelous, miraculous place. If a god consciously created it — and then added humans — all I can say is, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING??”

Awwwww.  I guess this is what they call “meet-cute.”

Well, they’ve got ‘em in the truck.  They might as well lock ‘em up and see what sorts out in the morning.

You can learn so many bad — or good — tricks  in the military.  I got stuck guarding a trouble-maker on a Saturday night. When I snarled at her for it, she asked me if the Lieutenant had stipulated where I was to guard her.  She said she knew a really good party.

Yes, we got home in time; I just had to make sure she didn’t crawl out the bathroom window at the party.

And did Terry Gross ever get had by a coached marine the other day!  You never heard anything so touchy-feely in your life.  It was an outsider’s view of how us nice lib’ral folks think.  Right down to the whispery, emotional voice.  Like none of us ever see the YouTube films the boots are taking.  What makes the Them Folks keep thinking they can try to get away with anything in the news when all anybody has to do is Google?  Or email a resident of an occupied country?  With their home movies?

Best coverage I got on the Mumbai hostage incident was in constant tweets from practically across the street.  He DID say, “These people have Blackberries!”  Well, of course they have Blackberries.  Everybody gets to buy them.  It’s always weird how Our side always thinks the Other side is somehow different.

Good news on the home front: Price the cat’s face tumor is all cleared out, but it took most of his cheek.  He’s fine — “Feed me!” — but when I went to get him, the receptionist called into the back office:  “Is Price ready?”

Back came, “You mean FrankenCat?”

They were embarrassed until I pointed out he wasn’t a show cat, and as long as he was well, I didn’t care what he looked like.  He’s got THIS many stitches, so the name fits.

That’s right, argue with the MP’s.  We used to call ‘em the White Hats.  The WAC unit at Fort Lewis got into a fracas with them at Fort Lewis and got thrown out on the street for it.  Girl can’t even get a drink when she needs one.

This is the first time we meet Jeff Holz, the 469th’s American prisoner.  I think the back-story with him was he was flying reconnaissance, got lost and ran out of gas near the Peach’s unit.

If you want to get an idea about the Peach’s unit — the 469th Halftrack, Support and Gravedigging Battalion — watch South Pacific.  Them Sea-Bee guys.

Rommel didn’t much care what his guys wore, so long as they shaved, because “Shaving makes us look young!”

Looks like the Peach wasn’t the only one knew about looking good.

Lately I’ve heard military people on the radio, and they are cooing with gentleness and concern.  I’m sure they’ve been coached to speak in such a way that they don’t blow the cover of war, but they sure didn’t speak like that when I was in. They spoke more like THIS.

Come to think of it, when they’re on YouTube, the pigeon accents are gone.  They’re whooping about burning villages like it’s the latest video game.  I wish they’d just be themselves in the interviews and not try to pretend they give a damn about anybody in-country except their own platoon members, which is their job anyway.  What the hell are soldiers doing trying to build schools?  Soldiers are about grabbing territory; it’s up to the civilians to do the actual work, for good or ill.  Listening to soldiers try to be nice is just weird.

Ya gotta give it to Cheney — he’s totally unreconstructed.

unreconstructed.

A German teacher said “Kettenhunden” only meant any old dog on a chain.

Another German teacher said that a horse couldn’t be “fromm” because it meant “pious.”  It’s the term for “kind” or “honest” when used about a horse.

The trouble with language is none of us knows ours outside our own dialect, idiom, jargon and slang — and all them things bounce around like fleas on a hot-plate.  Germans seem to really love playing with their own language, so you never know if you’ve run head-on into a pun that only 15 people in the entire language understand.

As a side-note, I’m living in an area where you still get those people who talk about Spanish coming in and taking over their language.  These are the people who came in and made a conscious attempt to wipe out everybody else’s languages, after failing to completely wipe out the peoples themsevles.  One can only say, “Oh, well.  When people or languages are on the move, there’s not much anyone has ever been able to do about it.”  I only go into possible attempted historical solutions (and we all know what those are) if they keep pushing.

This guys should just realize the Peach is a very nice, concerned person. He can’t help it if some Cossacks are cute.

This reminds me of the way straights — especially men — are intimidated or even enraged when a gay person hits on them.  Can you imagine what would happen if women reacted to straight men the same way?  A co-worker of Nearest’s, at an after-work dinner, was simply outraged that a gay man had asked him out to coffee. Which set off the women into laughing accounts of the horrible ways we’ve all been approached.  Is there any woman who, sitting on a crowded bus, hasn’t found some standing guy — often a respectable- looking man in a suit — grinding his crotch against some part of her?  And who hasn’t been called a bitch for refusing the advance?

If you’re a guy who doesn’t act like that, good for you!  You join the Peach, who would never make such approaches.  His lover, Rosen, on the other hand, is the other guy. He’s got it, he knows it, and he can’t really see how anybody could turn him down.  Sadly enough, he’s one of those impossible people who seem to have it all and never suffer for what they do, no matter what — and everybody still loves them.  It’s GOTTA be the pheromones.

That, or those hips….

Every new commander has problems with his unit.

After Poland, the German army took all the units that were low on man-power and put them together to form new ones.  Some of the assignments were very boots-on-the-ground.

Commanders weren’t supposed to have a say about who they got stuck with, but the Peach IS the brother of Germany’s Rock-Star, Erwin Rommel.  There were more loopholes he could duck through and hope they wouldn’t immediately close around his neck.

(A bit late Pinging this.  I had to head over to the Sekiu Fly-In and get shots of the best turn-out in four years of small planes coming in from as far as Seattle for the tasty breakfast.)