“People’s lives today are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don’t survive. We don’t see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it—everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.” – Bob Dylan (interviewed by Robert Love in “Bob Dylan His Way,” 2015)
Category: Verandah
“Talent is one thing, but getting up in the morning and putting on your boots and doing something about it is another.” – Daniel Lanois (interviewed by Rick Beato on The Beato Club, published May 17, 2023)
“Don’t we just love the unusual when it’s good?” – Daniel Lanois (interviewed by Rick Beato on The Beato Club, published May 17, 2023)
“Somebody might study debate for five years in the university. That’s fine, but I’ve studied how to get along with people and how to get things done, in those five years. What would you call that? Is there a department that teaches cooperation, productivity, agreement, working together in such a way that you get to a better place collectively? These are the big lessons for me.” – Daniel Lanois (interviewed by Rick Beato on The Beato Club, published May 17, 2023)
“Imagine life without the ‘Undo’ button.” – Daniel Lanois (interviewed by Rick Beato on The Beato Club, published May 17, 2023)
Subsets and VariablesSubsets and Variables
Some wives get up in the morning and say,
“Good morning.”
Some wives get up in the morning and say,
“This place stinks.
We need to open some windows.”
Some objects are massive,
Too heavy to be easily moved.
Some objects are dense but small,
Wieldable,
And will sail across rooms.
(Published in Weekly Alibi, Vol. 5, No. 5, Feb. 7-13, 1996. Copyright 1996, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
christmas party with paralegalchristmas party with paralegal
hi how nice to meet you the weather’s been awful late-
ly would you like to hear about an interesting
gangland murder how about the counselor up on
assault charges with his car let me tell you who has
a messy history of assaulting lovers and
wives how about child molesters there’s much of inter-
est one could learn with regard to those odd fellows or
if this were halloween and not the birthday party
of a swaddled infant there’s the dark tale of the qui-
et guy who drugged his trusting roommate then video-
taped what they did together a genuinely night-
mare-
inducing story sure to keep the children up for
days oh then there’s the matter of conditions in the
jail that’s a perennial favorite plus ça change
this is wonderful cake by the way the icing is
so creamy and smooth i think i’ll have another drink
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
not too far from herenot too far from here
it happened not too far from here, last night,
just a few blocks up that way. there was this
guy beating his wife. she ran outside
and down the street, screaming for help. he ran
after her. a neighbor stepped in, told
the husband, hey, stop beating your wife.
the husband said, she is my wife and i
will beat her. the wife screamed. the neighbor said,
no, really, stop beating your wife or i
will shoot you. he had a gun. the husband
said, she is my wife and i will beat her.
you won’t shoot me. the neighbor said, yes, i
will, so stop. the wife screamed, but the husband
didn’t stop, so the neighbor shot him, twice.
once to stop him, and once to make sure.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Space of itself, and time of itself will sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between them shall survive.” – Hermann Minkowski (quoted by Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I)
lost causeslost causes
i’m reading about kosovo
its unmiks and kayfors
its pee-ohs and various constitutions
and i truly want to care about all this
—i am an educated, liberal man—
but i dreamed last night of a girl i had sex with
twenty-five years ago
(i will spare you the details i will not spare myself
or maybe i’m just being selfish)
then there was the girl i saw yesterday walking slowly away from me
she had a tattooed hip showing above the low waistband
of her pull-me-down pants
sex fractures my fragile concentration
leaving me just another of the world’s lost causes
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn
If a child lives with hostility, he learns to fight
If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be shy
If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty
If a child lives with tolerance, he learns to be patient
If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence
If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate
If a child lives with fairness, he learns justice
If a child lives with security, he learns to have faith
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, he learns to find love in the world.”
– Dorothy Law Nolte, “Children Learn What They Live”
“The whole idea of a teacher is to be able to teach the student how to learn on their own so the teacher’s not needed.” – Rick Beato, “Did Dire Straits Create the Coolest Riff Ever? Yep”
“You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” – Raymond Chandler, “I’ll Be Waiting”
Memorial DayMemorial Day
The final letter
July 23, 1950
Dear Folks
I have a little more time to write now than I did the other day. In case you didn’t get the other letter there was $80 in Travelers checks in it.
We are aboard a Japanese Ship (I can’t pronounce the name of it) We will get to Korea in the morning or at least we are supposed to. We have to sleep on the floor, eat “C” rations, wash in helmets all the comforts of home.
Tell Bob that I am in a 57 M.M. Recoiless Rifle Section, which we do not have yet and I
haven’t ever seen either but we will get them in Korea. I am an ammunition bearer and carry a carbine. There is five men in our squad.
The coast of Japan is in sight now, it is only about a mile (1) away. The name of it is pronounced Sasabu (I don’t know how it is spelled)
We pick up a convoy of ships and escorts here I hope.
We drew 40 rounds of ammo this afternoon and will get some more tomorrow.
Tell Toby and the rest of the kids to be good and to behave themselves.
Okinawa (or what I saw of it) was dirty, filthy and almost primitive beyond your imagination.
I got seasick on the first day out of Frisco and again on the 11th, 12th + 13th days as we ran into a typhoon. Don’t ever believe that it isn’t a miserable feeling. I wanted to vomit till my boots came out my mouth. One of few times and I hope for the last I missed three complete meals so you know I must’ve been sick.
I did not have time to get my baggage and equipment that was stored in the Walker, so they just gave me new stuff in place of it.
Please keep these pictures for me.
Well I can think of anything else so I’ll close. Write soon
Love
Henry
PERSONAL
Mother or Daddy
Tell Lib to send Ann what money that she (Lib) thinks neccessary. I have made out an allotment to Lib.
In case I don’t get back, and I certainly do intende to, make the kids go to school, they will need all they can get.
The Ascension of Henry Callis
Corporal Henry Callis, younger brother to my father, was on a troopship steaming to Japan in the summer of 1950 when the Korean War broke out. He was on his way with several hundred other troops to join the 29th Regimental Combat Team on Okinawa and be part of the post-World-War-Two American Army of Occupation there. The regiment was understrength and had only two battalions, instead of the three called for by its full complement. Nobody had expected war in Korea. If war came, everybody expected it to be nuclear and against the Soviet Union.
Henry and the others on the troopship arrived at Okinawa one morning and learned their mission had changed. They were issued combat gear and company assignments. By sundown they were aboard another troopship along with the rest of the 29th and were on their way to the port of Pusan on the bottom-right corner of the Korean peninsula. A day later they arrived. They disembarked and headed up to the front line, the location of which no one was certain. The North Koreans had launched a devastating surprise attack to start the war against South Korea a few weeks earlier, and were still on the march. What few American troops were available in Japan had been rushed to South Korea to help the shattered South Korean army. They were being overwhelmed. The North Korean army was large and well-equipped, well-trained and possessed of many veterans of the Chinese Civil War, which had ended the previous autumn. The situation was fluid and becoming desperate.
The soldiers of the 29th Regimental Combat Team were told they were going to fight a couple hundred communist guerrillas near a town called Hadong-ri. They headed that way by train and then by truck, and then by foot. Their rifles and machine guns were all new. The machine guns were still packed away in their protective shipping grease when the regiment got to Pusan. They hadn’t been test-fired and their sights hadn’t been aligned. And not all the equipment had been distributed. Not all the regiment’s doctors had medical tools and supplies.
The men — boys almost, like Henry, who had himself just turned twenty that spring — were very confident and very green. Very few of them, maybe about one out of every one hundred, were Second World War combat veterans. These were generally the sergeants and not the commissioned officers.
The regiment drew near to Hadong-ri and deployed along a ridge with one battalion on one side of the road and the other on the other. They saw a few soldiers moving around in the valley in front of them. They weren’t sure if these were stray South Korean soldiers, but they thought it likely that’s what they were. They had been told they would be mopping up guerrillas and they didn’t expect to see uniformed soldiers in front of them. The regiment’s commander and his staff got out of their jeeps and stood in the road at the top of the ridge and tried to figure out what was going on. They stood in a clump. Binoculars hung from straps around their necks and they held maps in their hands. Mortar and recoilless rifle fire slammed into the ridge. The first shots killed the regimental commander and his staff. The regiment was not facing a group of ragged irregulars they outnumbered five to one. They were up against a crack North Korean division that outnumbered them ten to one.
It was not long before the 29th Regimental Combat Team was shattered and routed. Its fragments were driven back down off the ridge and through the rice paddies behind it. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed or went missing. Henry was one of the missing. The soldiers were so new to their companies that many of them didn’t know each others’ names. There was no one who knew Henry Callis who survived the battle and could say what had happened to him. He was as gone as though he had vanished from the face of the earth, lifted up bodily in the rapture of war.
anythinganything
i turn on the television while i roll my first joint.
markets are rising and falling.
the japanese are calling for calm.
the spa i summered in seasons ago has been destroyed by intelligent bombs.
the chinese are demanding revenge.
the vengeful are demanding chinese.
there’s cold carry-out in the refrigerator, on the bottom shelf.
i roll my second joint.
it’s another working day. anything could happen.
(Published in High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19); copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Thought is the enemy of flow.” – Vinnie Colaiuta (quoted by Rick Beato in “Why Jeff Beck is Uncopyable”)
“I’m not the kind of guy who believes in hell, or in a god who imagines a lake of fire. I just can’t see it—you have a mind that’s wider than the sky and that is what you use it to picture? To me, that sounds too petty, too human, too undivine to be real. People sell all kinds of gods all the time. I know the One that moves me and it’s not the one I was raised on. To me, you can’t say you’re love, choose to roast people for eternity, and then pretend it breaks your heart. Pick a side.” – Eloghosa Osunde, “Good Boy”
“The most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a compass.” – Justin King, “Let’s talk about a BBC analysis of Russian personnel”
“Is it forever that the sword must devour? Do you not know that it will be bitter afterward? Until when will you not bid the fighting-people to turn back from going after their brothers?” – II Samuel 2:26 (trans. Everett Fox)
“There are old pilots and bold pilots but no old bold pilots.” – Peter Johnson, Retired Airline Pilot, Quora
“You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.” – Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor
“It’s OK to be wrong; it’s unforgivable to stay wrong.” – Marty Zweig
“The Negro as beast: it is always convenient and comfortable to believe that those who are about to be either killed or exploited mercilessly are something less than human, and hence available to be used for the benefit of humans. The dehumanization of the object is an important psychological precondition of destruction, and it is convenient to make the victim the embodiment of evil, indeed to project upon him one’s own worst and most feared impulses, to make him an externalization of one’s own beast.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“Before the arrival of Europeans the peoples of West Africa had lived under a number of remarkable empires of considerable diversity. Many of these peoples were pastoral, some were agricultural; they fished, they traded extensively, they developed skilled craftsmen, well-articulated codes of law, and highly sophisticated sculpture and music. Some African cities, such as Benin, Djenné, and Timbuktu, were complex societies, particularly Timbuktu, which was a notable center of Muslim learning. But the Africans had not developed their own written languages, and their isolation from Europe, protective though it was, shut them off from the scientific thought and mechanical invention of the early modern world. Their great cities were built of clay and wood, and in time they crumbled; a considerable portion of their history and institutional lore was lost for lack of records; their artifacts were carried off to museums.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“For many thousands of servants their term of indentured servitude was a period of enforced celibacy. Marriage without the consent of the master was illegal, and the crimes of fornication and bastardy figure importantly in the records of bound servitude—not surprisingly, when we realize how many of the servant population were between the ages of eighteen and thirty.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“Among the by-products of English Social change of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a very substantial pool of criminal talents. The laws devised to suppress the criminal population were so harsh—scores of crimes were defined as felonies and hanging was a standard punishment for many trivial offenses—that England would have been launched upon mass hangings far beyond the point of acceptability had it not been for two devices that let many accused off the penalties prescribed for felons. One was the benefit of clergy—a practice inherited from the Middle Ages and continued until the early nineteenth century—which permitted a convicted felon to ‘call for the book’ and prove his literacy. On the ancient assumption that those who could read were clerics and thus exempt from severe punishments by the secular state, the relatively privileged class of literate felons could be permitted to escape with the conventional branding on the thumb. A second practice, the predecessor of convict transportation, was to secure royal pardons for ordinary offenders deemed by the judges to be worthy of some indulgence. Until the end of the French wars in 1713 it was customary to send them into the army, but in peacetime England did not know what to do with felons and drifters. In 1717 Parliament passed an act which in effect made royal clemency contingent upon transportation to the colonies for a term of labor; in consequence the large-scale shipping of convicts began which continued to the time of the American Revolution. To America at large, including the island colonies, around thirty thousand felons were transported in the eighteenth century, of whom probably more than two-thirds reached Virginia and Maryland.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
“Led by a young lawyer, Francis Daniel Pastorius, who was charmed at the prospect of taking a community to lead ‘a quiet, godly, and honest life in a howling wilderness,’ in 1683 a pioneer group settled in what was to be called Germantown, not far from Philadelphia, which became a center where German immigrants collected before moving out into the neighboring counties of Pennsylvania. Pastorius’s pioneers were followed by a smaller group led by Johann Kelpius, a hymnographer and mystic of ingratiating saintliness and eccentricity, one of the first of a long line of visionaries to be drawn to America, One of Kelpius’s associates, a distinguished astronomer who died en route, had projected that the millennium would come in 1694, and hoped to greet the end of the world in America. Kelpius himself, who was given to withdrawing to a cave for prayer and contemplation, hoped to achieve a kind of immortality, but confessed himself mistaken on the eve of his death in 1708. For some, America has always been a land of disappointment.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“It is hard now to imagine, but it is a matter of record that the mid-eighteenth-century mariner approaching the American strand could detect the fragrance of the pine trees about 60 leagues, or 180 nautical miles, from land.” – Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait
“What you can laugh at, you cannot be afraid of.” – Mikhail Iossel, Notes from Cyberground