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Stumpage Reports
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 :::
A Psychopathic Little Shit (Briefly):
Ann's recent post got me to thinking about shoplifting. I did a lot of crappy things as a kid, but I was never into shoplifting. I think I was too scared. The only thing I can recall stealing was from the grocery store. It was the July 1976 issue of Playboy magazine . (I remember the patriotic cover.) I would have been thirteen which would have been just about right.
Did we all have one friend we did the really shitty things with? There was one guy named Mark I hung out with for about a year around this time. He was probably the person I was up to the least good with, until I became a drug fiend about three years later. In addition to hocking the above magazine, we also stole a fire extinguisher from an apartment building one time. We ran around in the night and sprayed it. Just one little squeeze of a lever and a huge cloud of yellow powder came out, we almost wet ourselves. He wanted to find a cat to spray it on. We didn't and I was secretly happy, even when being a little shit I didn't want to hurt any animals. One time we also hid in some trees and sniped at kids with a BB gun. I'm glad I didn't hang out with him much longer after that. Its probably best for the world I discovered illegal drugs a couple years later, that calmed me down a lot and worked for years.
Blog Stuff:
The Suzanne Malveaux hits seem to be piling up again on this blog. Background on it is here. My original mention of her was here. That little news vixen has been a real cash cow for hits for me.
Quote of the Day:
The bayou curved like a crescent around the point of land on which La Folle's cabin stood. Between the stream and the hut lay a big abandoned field, where cattle were pastured when the bayou supplied them with water enough. Through the woods that spread back into unknown regions the woman had drawn an imaginary line, and past this circle she never stepped. This was the form of her only mania.
--- Kate Chopin, "Beyond the Bayou," 1894.
::: posted by tom at 10:43 AM
Monday, March 29, 2004 :::
Again, the Garage Sale Vikings
I went garage saleing again last Saturday. We hit twenty sales in about two and a half hours. One guys wife was with us, so I guess that meant we had a Garage Sale Valkyrie with us too. They bought a bunch of junk. Although the Budman beer stein one guy got was kinda tacky, and apparently a bargain at $3.00. I did get a big-ass Luray Pastel plate for only $1.00. My friend Eighteenth Century Lady collects these and usually pays $10 to $12 for 12-inch dinner plates, this one is at least 16 inches so I think I got a good deal.
More UDC Crap . . .
Friday at work I pulled a whole cart full of UDC stuff from the storage center next door. I went in on Saturday afternoon (my day off!) to go through it looking for Confederate Monument stuff. I found a few good things. I also found a narrative about a slave that had been supposedly kidnapped by the Yankees to dig trenches for them. According to this, the slave escape back to his master. It was full of totally sickening dialogue on the part of the slave character: "Sho' 'nuff, massa' good to me." It wasn't even that good. I thought about reproducing some of it here, but it would probably lead to even more white supremacist ads at the top of my blog. I was just so goddamn happy sitting there digging through boxes of old paper and scrapbooks.
Quote of the Day:
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garrett window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess; though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfullness or death.
--- H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon, 1917.
Oh, what the hell, there can never be too much Lovecraft, here's one of my favorites . . .
If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life - a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of egress - streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death.
--- H.P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear, 1923.
::: posted by tom at 8:58 AM
Friday, March 26, 2004 :::
For lack of anything in my own life to blog about, here's a true story a friend told the other night. The two other people with us and the Waffle House waitress were spellbound . . .
The Dead Baby
Didn't you guys know I used to dig graves? One time we had to dig up a baby. It had been buried in one part of the cemetery with the other babies, but the mother had bought a plot so we had to move it. We dug it up and the coffin looked like a styrofoam beer cooler.
The guy I was with said, "Do you wanna look?"
I said, "Whaa . . . "
He said, "Do you want look at the dead baby? I know a guy that did once. He never forgot it. He said it looked like one of those dried apple faces."
I thought about it. I kinda wanted to look. I'd probably never had another chance to see something like that. I thought: would I rather be sorry I looked or sorry I didn't look? I decided I'd rather be sorry I didn't look, so I didn't. It ended up we reburied the baby in the wrong place. So we went back the next day and I had to go through the whole thing again.
You know, that was a really good job.
Epilogue:
Tamisha (the waitress): Man, I woulda looked.
Us: Really?!?
Tamisha: Yeah, I like disgusting stuff.
Storyteller: You should see him naked. (Points to one of us)
::: posted by tom at 8:06 AM
Wednesday, March 24, 2004 :::
Climbing Their Family Trees
Monday evening my workplace dispatched me to Albemarle, North Carolina to give a talk to the local genealogy society. It went well, the audience was composed of the type of folks you would expect at such a gathering. No refreshments. My job was to overwhelm them with information in preparation for when they get overwhelmed when they visit the archives. It was kind of fun watching the little old ladies discuss whether or not to purchase a GPS thing for use when they are mapping old cemeteries. "The fire department had one they said we could use, but it got ran over by a fire truck."
The event was in the public library, and I got there a little early to do some research on their Confederate monument. One source I have said it was dedicated on September 25, 1925. I had no luck looking at the newspaper for that date, so of course I went to May 10 of that same year and did find something about the contract being awarded for the construction of the monument. I was referred to the head of the local UDC who was going to be at the meeting. I told her I was researching the monument and she said "What do you need?" and I said "What do you have?". She said "Everything, would you like me to make copies for you?". So hopefully that will come through.
I got to spend the night in Charlotte and see some folks, it was a nice day.
::: posted by tom at 10:32 AM
Monday, March 22, 2004 :::
Smut
The other day I had to look up a whole bunch of wills and estate papers from Guilford County. The surname the customer was searching for was "Dick." There were a ton of Dicks. I had more Dicks than I could handle that morning. My hands were full of all different Dicks that day. Big Dicks, little Dicks, old Dicks, male Dicks, even female Dicks.
A co-worker just walked up and informed me there are a bunch of people in Cabarrus County with the last name "Pussy."
::: posted by tom at 1:53 PM
Friday, March 19, 2004 :::
Interview with an Editor
The job I interviewed for involves working on some Civil War books. I thought I did pretty good right out of the gate. The first exchange:
Interviewer: Suppose you were assigned to prepare a unit history of the 88th North Carolina Regiment. What sources would you look in first?
Me: North Carolina only raised sixty-eight regiments during the war.
At another point they gave me a paragraph from one of their books that had been all screwed up on purpose, filled with typos and misspellings. My job was to correct it in 15 minutes. One thing I noticed was they mentioned General Burnside and the Army of Ohio. Any dolt knows the Yankees named their armies after rivers, so that would be Army of the Ohio. It sure was nice to be in a position where that little bit of knowledge came in useful.
Speaking of the Civil War . . .
Quote of the Day:
Cam laid him gently behind a tree, whipped tears off his own cheeks, then walked back into the killing.
--- Sherman: Fighting Prophet, by Lloyd Lewis, 1932.
::: posted by tom at 9:39 AM
Thursday, March 18, 2004 :::
Not a Whole Lot . . .
. . . of stuff to blog about. I've had a couple phone calls from the Real, Live, Actual Girl. I have a CD of hers (doesn't that always happen when you break up with someone?) She wants to get together so I can give it back to her . . . I'm putting space between the periods in my elipses because I have an interview for an editing job today and that kind of thing is very important to those people . . . still reading Lincoln's Last Months, I can't recommend it enough . . . taking a break from that to read "USCT Veterans in Post--Civil War North Carolina" by Richard Reid. It can be found in Black Soldiers in Blue . . . USCT stands for United States Colored Troops for you yokels out there . . . lately I've been listening to The Ramones' compilation disc All the Stuff and More, vol. 1 . . . I'm hoping for another expedition this Saturday with The Garage Sale Vikings . . . History nerds on the road: my boss and I are hoping to take a road trip soon to go to an Abraham Lincoln Symposium at the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. Now, if we can just figure out a way to have it count towards work and get paid for it . . .
Quote of the Day:
At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it. People had been coming in all day from the country, but they were assimilated in the town and you did not notice them. The square was as quiet in the hot sun as on any other day. The peasants were in the outlying wine-shops. There they were drinking, getting ready for the fiesta. They had come in so recently from the plains and the hills that it was necessary that they make their shifting in values gradually. They could not start in paying cafe prices. They got their money's worth in the wine-shops. Money still had a definite value in hours worked and bushels of grain sold. Late in the fiesta it would not matter what they paid, nor where they bought.
--- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926
::: posted by tom at 9:24 AM
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 :::
Funny...
Here is a line from a column in the Charlotte Observer that made me laugh today. The editorial talked about the fact more people die everyday in car accidents than in terrorist attacks:
"Granted, it seems less presidential to call for more guardrails than to invade Middle Eastern countries."
::: posted by tom at 2:26 PM
Saturday, March 13, 2004 :::
Goodbye Girl
Well, the Real, Live, Actual Girl is still a real, live, actual girl, she's just not going out with me anymore. I had seen which way the wind was blowing and was not real surprised. The "no-spark" feeling was actually kind of mutual, but I was willing to try and keep the short-lived corpse of our relationship on life-support, hoping to get some more of that lemon meringue pie.
After I got off the phone with her Thursday night I was hardly upset, we both were real adult about it. I paid a couple bills, read Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and went to bed.
Reading:
Lincoln's Last Months, by William C. Harris, 2003.
Last Listened To:
Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, 1965.
::: posted by tom at 7:54 AM
Thursday, March 11, 2004 :::
Abraham Lincoln was the wisest President this country has ever had.
"It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies."
--- Abraham Lincoln, response to a serenade, Washington D.C., November 10, 1864.
::: posted by tom at 11:41 PM
Tuesday, March 09, 2004 :::
Fun At Work
I can't even begin to explain this. One thing I know for sure is I hate doing genealogy. We got a question from a researcher in the U.S. Congress doing research on a congressman from North Carolina from the 1790's. They sent an entry from their biographical dictionary and said they thought it might be talking about two different people. Their entry said guy was NC Senator, US Congressman, and Mississippi Territorial Governor. His name was Robert, cousin of Marmaduke and brother of Louis. The entry in the North Carolina Dictionary of Biography said essentially the same thing, except that he was brother of Marmaduke and cousin of Louis. Oh, the North Carolina book also cited the Congressional Dictionary as a source.
I dug around, found their old man's will and bunch of deed books with the guy signing them when he should have been in Mississippi. (He was one slave-selling motherf*cker.) I also checked a county history book, but it had been written by the same person who did the erroroneus NC Biography Dictionary entry. Then my boss's boss and I went to the genealogy library on another floor and looked at all these creepy family histories with this guy's surname. (Did you know all family histories start out with "Three brothers came to America ... " and everybody can trace their lineage back to Robert the Bruce?).
We found a family history book with these guys in it that looked pretty good. The best we could figure out, these two dodos were cousins and had the same first name. One of them was the senator guy, and the other was the Mississippi governor. If you're having trouble following this, think how I felt. I had to draw pictures. I wanted to get some of those Fisher-Price little people, put name tags on them, and arrange them in family groups.
So we think we figured this out, these two guys had been combined into one when the US Congress people did their dictionary, and that error has been perpetuated. So the moral is .... don't believe everything you read, no matter how good the source looks. Go to the archives and find the real documents. Of course, those can lie too ...
Quotes of the Day:
How can you not love this guy? I few snippets from Jonathan Edwards:
"Children's coming into the world naked and filthy and in their blood, and crying and impotent, is to signify the spiritual nakedness and pollution of nature and wretchedness of condition with which they are born."
"The extreme fierceness and extraordinary power of the heat of lightning is an intimation of the exceeding power and terribleness of the wrath of God."
Those two little pick-me-ups are from Images or Shadows of Divine Things. Edwards also gets the award for the best New England Puritan sermon title: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
I don't know where all that weirdness came from. I was looking through an anthology of early American lit for quotes and thats what I came up with.
::: posted by tom at 9:19 AM
Monday, March 08, 2004 :::
The Garage Sale Vikings
I had been wanting to go on a Saturday morning garage sale jaunt with my friends Jack and Peter for several months now. I used to work every Saturday, and the last several Saturdays I'd been busy with the Real, Live, Actual Girl. But she was working last Saturday and I gleefully told Jack I could accompany them. In his clipped, midwestern with a touch of New Joisey accent, Jack read off the rules:
1. Since our trucks only seat two, we'll have to take your car. (Okay)
2. Unless you want us shrieking at you "No! No! Turn there! No, don't park there!! We'll never get out! Faster! Faster! You fool! You fool!" you'll have to let Peter Andretti drive your car. (Okay)
3. We're meeting at my place at 5:30 AM. (What the fuck?!? ... okay).
These guys had done their planning. First sale was at 6 AM and we hit that about 5:50 and it was total shit. Although there was a pretty tacky picture of MLK Jr. on the back wall of the garage, not for sale. We spent the next 45 minutes scoping out the locations of the 7 AM sales and figuring out the best routes. (I quickly realized red lights don't matter in Raleigh at 6:30 AM on a Saturday). As we whizzed about in the pre-dawn darkness we saw other people doing the same thing, and Jack and Peter said things like "There's that fuck in the red Nissan we saw last weekend." We would pull up to curb, often leave the car running, and ascend on the sale like a horde of Vikings, minus the raping and pillaging. We hit about 6 or 8 sales between 6 AM and 8:30 AM. It was shit as far shopping goes. Both my companions announced it was the worst garage sale day this year. But we had fun and a good breakfast afterwards. The bounds of decency prevent me from revealing topics of conversation.
Quote of the Day:
But the freight had to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect, and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The old long sickness, which had been purely and intellectual sickness, recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again. But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts, intellectual in their inception, had been laid by sane and normal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of John Barleycornm and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, one must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn promises but never delivers.
--- Jack London, John Barleycorn, 1913.
::: posted by tom at 10:05 AM
Friday, March 05, 2004 :::
I Love My Job, But ....
... some things are a pain in the ass. We got an email from the folks working on the George Washington Papers books, which is pretty cool. However, the email was one of the most unorganized and unproffesional things I have seen. No problem reading the 18th century handwriting in the Governor's letter book for the stuff we think they wanted, but it took four of us to try and decipher the email and find out what they wanted. Even then, we still haven't reached a consensus on what they really want.
Someone requested information on Wills, Estates, Marriages, and War of 1812 Service for four people in two possible counties all on one sheet of paper. There are so many things about that that are wrong I can't begin to explain. I did all the wills and estates searches for her and found nothing. I advised her she'd have to resubmit other request on seperate sheets of paper. I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed so much telling a customer "No, we don't have that."
::: posted by tom at 9:58 AM
Thursday, March 04, 2004 :::
Last night I met a lady from Australia. As she was leaving, she stuck out her hand and said, "Nice to meet you, mate."
::: posted by tom at 6:01 PM
A GHASTLY FIND -- The Wilmington Seacoast Railroad, a few days ago, bought a lot of coal from the Cummock Coal Mines, Chatham County, in this State, where the terrible fire-damp explosion occurred a few days before last Christmas, causing such a frightful loss of life. Capt. R.O. Grant, Superintendent of the Seacoast Railroad, tells us that yesterday, while handling the coal, the part of a skull, with the brains clinging to it, and other bones of a human body, were found in the coal. It will be remembered that 1 of the miners was never accounted for, and it is supposed that the pieces and portions are of the unfortunate man's body.
--- Sanford Express, Sanford, NC. March 6, 1896. Reprinted from the Wilmington Messenger.
Quote of the Day:
Velasquez believed in painting in costume, in dogs, in dwarfs, and in painting again. Goya did not believe in costume but he did believe in blacks and grays, in dust and light, in high places rising from the plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all the but he tried.
--- Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932.
::: posted by tom at 9:39 AM
Tuesday, March 02, 2004 :::
Waiting For the Swans
I always forget how unpopulated parts of eastern North Carolina are. Last Saturday we drove out to the Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge in Hyde County. We drove through miles of scrubby pine trees and dormant cotton fields. The main object of the trip was to view some 30,000 Tundra Swans. Supposedly these swans spend the day in fields around the lake, then at sunset all come flying into the lake. After driving around the lake for awhile, we found a field with acres and acres of the white swans sitting on it. We hustled over to the closest place we could get to the lake just as the sun began to set. (Sure babe, come out here in the dark with me, I promise we'll see the swans). Said swans never made the flyover, but we were treated to a cacophony of bird sounds and a beautiful sunset. It was cold, but not miserably so. I would like to go back when it is a little warmer, but not too warm. I could have sat in that place for hours.
::: posted by tom at 10:18 AM
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