People that inhabit a property that they have no legal claim to do so.
Big news when we hear of squatters and the legal frustrations involved trying to extricate them.
Aren’t we all just another form of squatter?
We are here, free to live and do whatever we want until another more powerful entity decides otherwise.
It certainly has happened before.
Just not here.
Yet.
As I approach my seventieth birthday tomorrow, I reflect on the past and think of when I was a squatter in the early 70’s.
No, not one of those losers who inhabit someone else’s dwelling. I had moved to Flagstaff and was playing in a rock and roll band at a college bar in town, and every night, after closing time, we would drive our drunk asses down 89A and make a camp in a cave overlooking Oak Creek at Grasshopper Point.
So we could drink some more.
We were careful not to build too big of a fire so as not to attract a nearby Forest Ranger and we did this for three months until summer ended.
We were finally caught one sunny Sunday afternoon when a Ranger came upon us and told us our uninvited stays were now truncated.
He was very cool about it saying that if he weren’t told to break up the party, he would never have done so on his own. He said we always kept a clean site and never spoiled the natural beauty of Oak Creek Canyon.
We had just got a gig in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so it ended up being perfect timing.
So that old buzzard JoJo is raising tariffs on Chinese products.
This action serves to toughen his image with his Chinese dealings, but who really pays the freight?
The tariffs to be imposed (up to 100%) include pollution-reducing electric cars, so guess what?
Now, (darn it), politicians can now reaffirm their allegiance (and their campaign funds) by backing the oil industry under the thin veil of patriotism, no less.
Surprise.
As long as there is money to be made…
I am very familiar with the good old American dollar.
Beginning from my early attempt to make my mark selling the great inventory provided by my mother’s china and silver cabinets.
Zero overhead.
100% profit.
100 yen was big money in 1959 rural Japan.
For a five-year older.
Check out this fond remembrance from my youth included in the preface for the letter “Q” in my book EMOTIONS: Not your Mama’s ABC’s!:
Q
Querulous implies complaining, something I do, but mostly in private. My problem is that I’ve never given a shit about anything, so if I don’t care, I don’t really have the right to complain, right? The first story has plenty of it.
A quandary by definition, is an uncertain state where your mind cannot or will not, make a clear-cut decision, perhaps because nothing is clear-cut anymore.
In a perfect world, everyone questions everything.
In reality, very few question anything. As long as people are people, you (we) need to continue to ask until we are satisfied with the answer proffered. Never having to ask and never suffering injury is truly Pollyannaspeak.
Reminds me of the very first job I ever had. I was five years old when I befriended Johnny. We became best friends as we were the only American children living in the tiny Japanese village of Nakagami-Akashima. Our “compound” held four American families and Johnny was my next-door neighbor. We both held down the same “job.” We were hired by a local papa-san (anyone older than my brother was a papa-san to me) as his, for lack of a better word, slaves.
Actually, we were subcontractors, performing services for compensation. On Saturday, we would go early in the morning on his dusty wooden cart pulled by two small, but old, brown donkeys. There was a small patch of woods and Johnny and I would fill the entire cart with wood, some pieces even too big for our little spaghetti-arms to hoist. Papa-san would sit in the cart barking orders and drinking whiskey. After what seemed like days, the cart was loaded and back we went to the village. Invariably, papa-san would have to wake us up from our exhausted sleep.
Turns out the wood was for firing the furnace for the community bathhouse, as there was no internal plumbing (outside of our compound) in the entire village. Everyone in town would eventually make their way to the bathhouse.
Papa-san asked Johnny if we wanted ten-yen (about two cents) or something else. Now ten-yen might not sound like much, but it might as well have been ten million dollars to us. We could literally live for weeks off that kind of cash. Sno-cones, candies. We could get a hundred pieces of candy!
Here is where the quandary part comes in.
The “something else” papa-san offered was the opportunity to go up on the narrow, rickety bamboo walkway he had constructed his drunk-ass self. From up there you could look down on the entire bathhouse and all the naked girls, or so he claimed.
Johnny and I had a decision to make, one that could possibly be life-defining. After the torture of loading wood all day, this was really a no-brainer.
Johnny smiled at me as he flipped his ten-yen piece, dreaming of the sweet treasures to come.
He looked really small down there from the walkway.
***
Stay well.
