December 21, 2005
Winter Solstice. Warm early, cloudy afternoon. Looks like a good chance of showers tonight.
Spread our replacement heifers and bulls into two fields today, hoping that the grass will carry them now without hay. Trying to get all the loose ends of our cattle work done so that we might get to thinking about Christmas, families, etc.
A part of what makes this site exciting and risky is posting fresh poems that I intend to edit or delete completely as we go forward. Some may make the sort to Chapbook In-Progress, an onsite shuffle that may or may not ever be conclusive. But all this is incidental to what I perceive [at the moment] as the purpose of our participation here.
Just now, one local weatherman is relieved that a high-pressure ridge is diverting the “nasty” weather to the north “where it should be,” apparently unaware that current water resources cannot sustain current population growth in the Central Valley. Bill O’Reilly has continually discounted the value of rural culture in his “No Spin Zone” and quite recently queried why anyone would want to know “how a cowboy thinks” in passing reference to the new movie, “Brokeback Mountain.”
The disconnect in the established media selling ad-space plays to the majority, of course. However, even the eldest of C.J. Hadley’s “Red Meat Survivors” are accustomed to being a minority, and those of us younger have become muscled-up swimming against the main stream current. Filling that chasm is tough, perhaps hopeless in the end – but what the hell, we’re still here!