In walked the dog-headed baboon, carrying a notebook

from The Nuremberg Chronicles. Note: how I feel most days.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Saint Christopher (the patron saint of travelers) is sometimes portrayed as a dog-headed man. Having done a fair amount of traveling myself, I can testify to the once being mistaken for a Mexican in the Dallas Greyhound station, and in grad school I was famous for (among other things) expounding in great detail, while I was drunk, about how men are dogs -- which means, among other things, that I owe the whole canine species a deep and heart felt apology.

I pair those two instances together only to point out two things. First, living on the road it challenging to bathe frequently enough for so-called "civilized" people.   I did note that as soon as I identified as a plain old dirty white boy, the older white man who approached me in the bus station to inquire about my racial and ethnic background quickly darted off in search of others who might look vaguely not Anglo on whatever quest he was on. The tone of his voice when he asked wasn't exactly aggressive, but it wasn't friendly or concerned, either. I didn't think he was packing, but to be honest I wasn't paying attention, either. And, having been approached over the years by all kinds of people, from panhandlers to Mormon missionaries, I feel like I have a pretty idea when someone talks to me out of concern for my welfare.

The second thing I'd like to point out is that only an idiot would confuse a pasty, German Irish mutt like me for a Mexican. 

I woke up this morning thinking of  Mr. Ibis from Neil Gaiman's masterpiece, American Gods. Mr. Ibis was, in fact, Thoth, the Egyptian god of the moon and writing. In addition to running the best funeral home in the country -- though no one but him and his partner Jackal -- Ibis also wrote stories. Not stories anyone ever read, of course. Just stories for himself.

In other incarnations and traditions, Thoth is also depicted as a dog-headed baboon, because not only were they nocturnal, but they were considered very intelligent.

I bring all of this up because, well... regardless of whatever incarnation I happen to be in at any given moment ... teacher, journalist, podcaster, activist/agitator, dishwasher, bum... I always end up writing stuff down. I either scribble it down in my field notebook* or I make a mental note and write it down later.  Two ex-wives and multiple ex-girlfriends have told me over the years that my "fiction" is thinly veiled auto-biography. I neither confirm nor deny this because fiction is just a filter that reality pours through. In this sense, it's perfectly reasonable for there to be dog-headed men, or baboons taking notes. Shakespeare could still be a room full of monkeys who also wrote under the pseudonym Christopher Marlowe.  What is real is sometimes less important than how it's described, remembered, or written down. Truth, I maintain, is in the way a story is told, not in the details.

from WDRB. Note: not a smart baboon

I recently sat in a room with a bunch of people who are hoping to be able to create a coalition of labor and community organizations to mount a defense against Kentucky's little fascista, Matt Bevin,  and his full frontal attack on working people. I remember trying to go to the Central Labor Council right after the election, hoping to convince them that we all need to get together to mount an organized defense/offense against what Bevin said he would do. I went to artists who were worried about Bevin gutting the Kentucky Arts Council. I spoke with adjunct instructors about the need to organize when he started going after university budgets. Each group pretty much told me the same thing:

"We need to be reasonable. There's no way the GOP will take control of the Kentucky Legislature. We need to vote, not organize."

Well, these very same people have spent the last few months since the election mourning. Liberals act like they're shell-shocked. The Democratic Party is trying to figure out how to grow a spine. Hard core unionists and those who generally ignored me when the Democratic Party hoisted a piece of cardboard to be governor and lost are NOW calling for unity. NOW they call for a coalition.   I find myself going to a lot of meetings. I will go to more. I'm going to listen, and I am listening for a very specific set of words.  I have high hopes.

For those of you inclined to prayer, I offer this image of Saint Christopher, the dog-headed saint. Pin ye, therefore, your hopes upon the love of travelers and dogs. Because we don't have time to wait for the sweet by and by.

_________________________________________________________________________________
*Writers are all anthropologists at heart.

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

Eastward-ish - Up on Cripple Creek (Colorado)

Up on Cripple Creek she sends me
If I spring a leak she mends me
I don't have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard's dream if I ever did see one - The Band (1970)


...these adventurous characters, going out into a new country...where it would seem that at last all men would stand on equal footing, have suddenly discovered that amid these primitive surroundings the modern industrial system is... found at its worst. -William Hard, writing about 19th Century Colorado miners.

When I met my 95 year old  Uncle Dan  for the first time a few days ago and gave him the short and sweet version of what I've been doing -- pointing out, as I do whenever possible, that I am continually struck by the beauty I find as I travel -- he remarked "There's a lot of beauty to see. A lot that's ugly, too."

Leave it to a Parsons to say so much in so few words. 

Those of you who understand the irony of this statement, now is the time to guffaw. That's right. Guffaw.

This cell was used to house up to 6 men, sleeping on hammocks.

And Colorado is, like a lot of this part of the country, is simply stunning to see. Mary, my first cousin, drove me up into the mountains, up through the City of Woodland Park, towards Cripple Creek -- which has been wrested from decay by the legalization of casinos and the subsequent tourism which has swelled as a result. You lose  (or win) at a casino, you can look for free range donkeys, you can walk up and down the main drag, look at the plaques on the buildings, buy ice cream, trinkets, toys, take a tour of the old jail... which really isn't that old, since it was last used in 1994. That's the year my daughter was born. She is 17 years old. I suppose it could be argued that metal boxes never go out of style and that prisoners should'n't be spoiled too much. I mean, after all, it's guilty until proven innocent, right? Make the bastards suffer. And the bitches, too, for that matter. The women's cells were upstairs... only two of them, along with a room for the Matron and a separate cell for children who were arrested. The women prisoners -- who, as far as I could tell, were mostly arrested for prostitution or other unladylike behavior -- did get a window view of the street, as well as a private  toilet and access to a bath tub. Still a metal box, though. with no heat in the winter, no respite from the heat in the summer.

The other thing that stuck out to me -- probably because the plaques describing them were included in the jail tour, is the labor history in Cripple Creek: like the 1894 Miner's Strike and the subsequent Colorado Labor Wars.  The 1894 Strike started because miners were fighting an enforced 10 hour work day. It was a violent strike, and it cemented the reputation of the Western Federation of Miners as a violent group. During the Labor Wars, which ran from 1901 to around 1904, were also violent, and included both the use of state militia, the National Guard under the command of Adjunct General Sherman Bell (who has a building with his name on it) and mercenaries like the Pinkertons, and the Baldwin-Felts. 


If you're a student of history, you might notice that the Haymarket Square Bombing -- for which four men, including Albert R. Parsons, were unjustly hanged -- occurred a few years prior the Cripple Creek Strike. (The Pinkertons were there, too. Notorious fuckers, the lot of them.)


I tend to get stuck on stories like this. Stories like that tend to be glossed over for the sake of tourism, and for the sake of revising some corporate entity's sense of guilt. And by corporate, I mean the government, I mean any governing body empowered by The State,  I mean the mining company that put profit above the safety of workers, and I mean anyone -- including the WFM, long defunct -- who resorts to violence. But mostly I mean the government, governing bodies, and mining companies.

I tend to get stuck on stories like this because there are always stories that aren't being told, that aren't being exploited for tourist dollars, that aren't left to history books that no one except historians read.

I actually had a nice time wandering around the town, because 1) I'm a history junkie and 2) I love small towns with a sense of character, some sense of self. And, as my cousin Mary pointed out, there's more history there than can be learned in one visit. I'm finding that for the most part, that's true of every place I've been since January. There is never enough time, and always more stories to hear.

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