My buddy Ricky stopped by today, he's the co-boss of Crockett Shoals Tubing Company. He said business is down and most of the folks are from out of the area. I told him I've been keeping tabs on the tube counts, as they roll by.

It's a great thing to do on a hot Summer day if you're in our neck of the woods! An old bus takes you and family and friends to a launching spot along Shoal Creek.

You walk around to the trailer, grab your chosen tube and start a two plus hour adventure down a beautiful creek. We pick you up just past the little bridge behind our business.

Yea, I said "We". looks like I've got my first run of the year next Friday at 1415. A private group, drop with a pickup two plus hours later. Man if I can't handle that, I need to hang it up!

But back to the main point of this post.

Ricky was saying that most folks are from out of town, it's not a locally sustainable business.

He needs a great Facebook promotion! and I have no ability to help him with that. If anyone has any ideas, my gmail = tetonpost, or if your on my list, text me.

Share a way if you have it, I'll try to implement it the best I can.

... it's a non-profit adventure, for a great local crew.

I'm thinking of a video based travel service app. Kinda like a cross between TikTok and Facebook. People from all over the world will send video snippets of their daily travels through life, along with coordinates.

Then if I, the user, want's to know what the drive up a certain back road to Nashville looks like, at 0900. I send my start and end places up to the service, and AI running on a supercomputer picks out the best snippets, stitches them together, and sends back a visual journey, using other peoples video.

Landscape mode, no shorter than one minute, no longer than five. The ultimate goal is to run it just like YouTube. Say you want to walk around downtown Paris in the evening. AI computes, and presents the best walks to you. Shot by multiple people by walk.

Then you just sit back and enjoy it on your giant TV!

In addition,

How about if everyone wore wireless ear buds with a covert video camera that records every second of our lives and streams it to the cloud.

You could walk around as someone else! I imagine millions of Swifties frozen to their phone seeing life from Taylors ear. Pathetic!

Enough, I have to get back to her new Karma video, and damn have you seen that Ice Spice?

It's been four days since the Feds swooped into David Crockett State Park and assaulted my geese buddies against their will. Putting bands on their legs, to track their every movement, while totally traumatizing them to humans from now until they die.

That would be like a bunch of parents swooping in on their teenagers heading off for a party, and installing a life-long tracker on their ankles. Totally traumatizing them to parents.

The geese flock of around 80 and I were bonding daily. I knew where they would be as I came around the corner of the Cabins, hunkered down with the ducks in the grass, waiting for me!

As I parked they all rose together, like a slow motion movie, and soon I'm surrounded. The act of a wild creature eating from my hand with no fear, is special, and now I've lost a bunch of friends, who will probably never eat from a human hand again!

The wild geese that settle into the lake dock for the Summer, are amazing birds. They fight among themselves, they mate, they are a family. They are surrounded by humans, some love them, some chase them, and some feed them bread...

I was feeding the ducks and geese last week, and a couple of young kids (boy 7, girl 9), under parental supervision, were chasing them around. I intervened with my bag of quack and showed them how much better it was to let them eat from your hand! They got it, the birds loved it, and memories were formed in these kids heads, forever

Update: I need to issue a retraction. I thought about taking this post down when I saw the geese up there this morning, but I unjustly dissed the banding program, I'm sorry.

I get my interactions with women in micro-doses, in a variety of ways, and levels. Occasionally one will happen, like that road trip, that turned moments into a dish, at a large family Thanksgiving meal.

I had forgotten how good that feels. I've been solo rolling for so many years now, I fucking forgot.

Driving, talking, learning and laughing, with an occasional downpour on the highway. For hours...

It set the standard for any future road trip.

I need to plan the next roadtrip, to Asheville, NC, with lunch or dinner at Chai Pani. I'm going to be putting this On the options table when the kids and Shelby come to town in August, and I need to review it first.

The mystery woman I just road tripped with, is on my mind! She's busy, and can't commit to a multi-day roadtrip. I get it completely!

Next up would be that lady I hooked up with through Craigslist, when she gets back from that mystery job in North Dakota.

If that don't happen, go it alone!

btw: I took my Craigslist post looking for a lady roadtrip partner down the next day.

My head is reeling from yesterdays road trip. My body is dealing with everything else.

What day is it? Do I have anything on my schedule? Do I even have a schedule, and if I do, where the fuck is it?

Ate breakfast at the Square, fed a hungry fuel tank with Kroger gas, and drove to the park. When I got to the lake, a dozen or more wildlife trucks were there. I'm not sure if they were State or Federal.

All the geese had been rounded up into a big black oval pen, and about twenty or more people were around and in the pen, doing something.

I approached the area and a cute Park Ranger approached me. She told me they're tagging them to track migration habits.

I told her I've been feeding them for a while, and she said "I know, I see you here all the time!" I wonder if they have a nickname for me back at the Ranger Station? The Bird Feeder? The Old Quacker? The Bag Man?

I went back at noon and they were far away, hanging out by the dam. They all have new leg bands on that gives them a unique ID, their sex, tracks them, and god knows what else.

What if a male goose identifies as a female goose? Where's the LGBT whatever communities uproar over this!

The human to goose progress I had made with that group, having them eat from my hand, and thump my leg when I missed their turn, is in question.

They certainly didn't want to be back at the dock, where the humans earlier trapped them, grabbed them up and pulled their feathers down around their genitals. Then get handed off to other humans, that I assume put the band on.

They're traumatized at the moment, and I hope one of my squawkers bit a nose! I'll check on them tomorrow.

I just had the most amazing road trip, up thru Nashville and into Illinois, with a lovely, hot, smart and cool woman. She used to be a teacher, and she rides a Harley!

We talked about everything on the way up, stopped at the store, ate great barbecue, then laughed all the way back.

Stupid shit started coming out of my mouth. She closed her eyes for a minute, and when she opened them, I told her that I had been staring at her tits. She looked straight into my eyes, a smirk formed on her mouth, and then she laughed.

We had a great time. It's so nice to roadtrip with a lady like this, I think I'm smitten.

She showed me her place, I made my first drink of the day at 1530 in her kitchen, and we kept open the possibity of another roadtrip in the future.

Sometimes life can be better than sex. Especially when you're in your seventies, and she's in her thirties.

Life is really funny, and can take so many different directions from every single decision you make. You need to focus on an outcome early in life, so you make the decisions that get you to where you want to end up.

I never had that focus growing up. I actually didn't think I would make it past thirty, so all of my decisions were random unfocused bullshit.

Then I didn't think I would make it to fifty, and a lot of my decisions were random unfocused bullshit. On the day I turned fifty I shook my young son Riley's hand and told him I would quit smoking if he agreed to never start. Finally, a good decision!

I didn't envision myself landing as a sad lonely old man on a dead end street in the deep South, but I have obviously made the decisions that got me here.

We only get one shot at life, and I wish someone had told me this, as a kid...

Some folks say I don't have a life. That's just not true! It's a beautiful day here in the South, and I do stuff.

The hundred or more geese now recognize my truck, along with both groups of ducks, and they all come running when I pull up to the dock. I get there around 0830 and I swear they are waiting for me. It's a wild scene!

I scatter quack cocaine everywhere and a bunch of the geese gather at my feet and demand that I hand feed them, bumping their beaks against my leg. The ducks stand off by the side and wait for me to emerge from the geese crowd to give them attention.

Then I take care of any errands, like filling up my gas tank so I can drive to the Park. I try not to drink before 1100, so this helps.

Then the busses start rolling down my street, full of floaters and tubes. The driver that I trained named Chris, throws open his door as he comes by, and we shout greetings to each other.

I put on my Crockett Shoals Tubing Company staff tee shirt, and walk down to watch everyone float by. I've taken to wearing the shirt because I don't want anyone to think I'm just checking out the women in bathing suits.

So I just watched a group of women float by, we chatted from the bank, and they probably thought I was the owner. Sorry Ricky :-)

And it was a hopping day at CSTC, the busiest tourist attraction in town!

So there you go, I have a life!

I moved to Kent, WA in the early nineties to be with Riley. I wrote code for the airlines Black Box, and then made $5K for each printer driver I wrote for Mark Zackman's PC Paintbrush, out of Atlanta.

Then things fell apart and I went homeless. These days, being homeless means free phones, food and clothes. The only help I ever got was my black buddy Roger getting me stoned every morning in the tent my buddy Dave loaned me, in a field that later became a Target, and the $200 my sister sent me from California.

I jumped off a carport roof after rescuing some kids toys up there, and crushed my left ankle. I ended up on welfare while I healed, finally landing a job at a local hotel, washing dishes and busing tables, at $4.50 an hour.

I did that for years as I crawled back on my feet. Got a place, raised Riley, and thought about my $65 an hour position I left in the Bay Area, and the companies I formed down there, every day.

I eventually left Kent, WA with my head held high, as a ParaTransit supervisor, with Steph by my side, and moved to Idaho.

I put my RouteQue app out to the MapBox community yesterday! This statement probably doesn't mean shit to you, so let me explain.

I wrote a web app a couple of years ago, that I'm really proud of. It's a mapping program where you specify a starting and ending point here in the U.S. and the program plot's your route for you.

Yea, Google does the same thing, sort of, but I do it better. I have used this app many times to plan my trips lately, and I really love it. I can switch map modes on the fly, zoom down to locations, and shift into Streetview to see the place.

And the fact that I created it, makes it even better! I honestly don't know how I do this stuff.

Since the early seventies I have been a computer genius. I create code from a part of my brain, that simply ends up working great. I developed two software systems over five years that turned Interocean Steamship Corp into the most prominent shipping company on the West Coast. And I now have no idea now how I did that!

That's the place I'm at with RouteQue now. My programming brain is toast, if I had to go back into that thing and fix something, I'd be fucked.

So it is what it is, a great tool for planing a road trip. I will keep paying my web host the money to keep it going, like my blog, until I die.

Here it is: RouteQue. To get started, just click the map and select point A, then click again for point B. Or you can specify places down to an address...

Enjoy my baby...

I got my first car when I was in High School at Paradise, CA. It was a 1941 Chrysler, I stripped the back seat out and put a bed in there. I took one great road trip in her down to San Francisco.

It became a party car, my few friends and I would drive down to Chico and drink, then crash in the back.

One night we were all passed out, and one girl decided she needed to get home, so she drove the car back to Paradise. Unfortunately she left the emergency brake on as she drove back up the hill to Paradise, and blew the engine.

I woke up the next morning, everyone was gone, and I had a dead 1941 Chrysler...

I'm all ready for a road trip, I just put a few thou on my debit card, and stuffed a bunch of cash into my wallet. My bills are paid, my trucks in good shape and I have enough clean clothes to last awhile.

I even have a plan. Drive the six hour run to Asheville, NC and have lunch at Chai Pani, an Indian place voted the best restaurant in America a while ago.

Then continue over to Myrtle Beach, SC on the Atlantic ocean, and then head South and follow the coast through Georgia, and all along the Atlantic, and Gulf Of Mexicao Florida coastlines. Then head North to home at Pensacola.

It's a very ambitious road trip, one I've been thinking about for a long time.

But I have a problem. I've been solo tripping for decades now, always wanted to address the adventures and challenges alone. I left Steph behind, on a couple I could have included her on, and I've felt bad about that.

I'm really at the point where I don't want to travel alone anymore. So I asked her yesterday if she wanted to go on this one, and she turned me down. How ironic! Hey, she has a lot of stuff going on with her family back in Washington, so any time off would be dedicated to that. I get it.

So what to do? I haven't figured it out yet...

Back in the days when I attended Merritt College in Oakland,CA I was the computer and audio visual guy there.

It was a beautiful new campus up in the Oakland hills and I ran both departments as a student, on the side.

We installed a brand new IBM System 3 Model 10 computer that controlled the entire school system, and I ran the place. That's where I learned the skills that launched more then a decade of consulting projects across the Bay Area.

I was also responsible for making audio recordings of famous people that came our way. I recorded Muhammad Ali as he made his speech about one of his few losses.

I grabbed his massive forearm as he left the stage, and had him sign the tape for the school. I met and spoke with the Man!

It's been an interesting Friday morning. I turned my phone off as usual last night and was sleeping really soundly when my watch started beeping around 0500. I answered it from my wrist and it was Daniel saying we should take a walk down by the creek.

I hung my watch up on him. A couple hours later he's at it again and I ignored him. Then he's knocking on my door. He's working four tens this Summer and I guess my Fridays are shot.

We ended up taking the pile of cash that's been collecting on my table from bet's over the last couple of months, and went in my truck to the Square for breakfast.

Daniel, born and raised here, knew both of our waitresses and got hugs. After we ate I just gave them the pile of cash and told them to settle the bill and split the change as a tip. You gotta love life in a small town in the South.

He's got a bunch of shit to do around the county today and invited me along. I told him I have to watch tubers float down the creek today. He gave me that look, and I guess I'm going with him.

But first, I dropped him off at his house and went to the park. All of my ducks were there, thankfuly, and I actually had a couple of wild geese eat from my hand! They've been watching the ducks, and figured out I was cool.

I'd like to become a rancher, buy a big old barn, put a couple hundred fat cows in there, and call it a Bingo Parlor.

Al Pachino, 83, and his 29 year old girlfriend, are having a baby together. Just sayin...

The main group of ducks, including Whitey, are missing at the Park. I haven't seen them for two days now.

I installed Zoom on my laptop for a face to face this morning with my behavioral therapist. Got up to speed with it pretty quickly, even did a test meeting at the Zoom website.

The therapist was cool, a guy around fifty. The zoom connection was high quality, like sitting across his desk from him. He had a wall full of books behind him.

I told him I had never been in therapy before, but I was wrong. I remember the time Marci and I went to a marriage counselor in Berkeley, CA. We divorced shortly after and she landed in his hot tub up in the hills.

I unloaded on him, and he was asking me questions that made me realize I'm not as bad off and crazy as I could be. The albino squirrel showed up on the porch and I swung the laptop around to show him.

We talked about goals and I told him I would love to be the non-drinking in shape man I've been before, but that's hard to do when your legs are giving out from under you.

We decided the best direction to take was moderating the drinking, and he's sending me resources in the mail. This could be a one time visit, but the guy is available via zoom anytime.

I flagged the new guy down after he dropped off a load of tubers at the end of the street. He seems to be enjoying the job and I told him to keep an eye out for the albino squirrel. Even point him out to his customers if he's in my yard as they go by.

I'm sitting here on a quiet afternoon, no TV, no traffic, watching this beautiful rare squirrel I've named Albi, eat peacefully off my porch. I guess life is ok, and maybe God is saying hello!

I may be a fucked up old man, but I have a good heart. I never have any intention to hurt anybody, and I help folks out every opportunity that I get, without expecting anything in return.

I listen and understand well, without needing it back. I don't lie or try to manipulate anyone. I'm as real as I can be.

I do my best to be a law abiding citizen of this great country. I respect the police, and understand they are not perfect.

These are values that unfortunately were not taught to me as a young man, I had to learn them through hard knocks.

But now I sit here in my chair, on a dead end street in the south, and I know that I have integrity!

The squirrels were totally entertaining tonight from my open front door. I'd spread a bunch of the wild bird seed out on the feeding board, in the yard, and up on the bird feeder.

The parents were out there with their kids having dinner while the kids, including the albino, were eating, playing, and chasing each other around.

Daniel and I have been trying to figure out how they're beating our bird feeder cone defense system, and tonight I saw it happen!

A squirrel was sitting on the wire where it's attached to the tree. Suddenly it jumped out to the top of the cone, used it as a launching pad, and landed on the roof of the bird feeder.

Then he sat inside and wiped the seed out, as I sat in the comfort of my chair, and took this shot.

Daniel was here, couldn't see it happen from his chair, but he heard it. Then he peeked around the TV and confirmed what I've been telling him, they're reaching the feeder!

Update: That's a custom bird feeder btw. I bought the base feeder from Greens Hardware, then asked the local lumber boys how much a foot square piece of plywood would cost, and they just gave me one. The wood was then super glued to the bottom, and it gives everyone a place to hang out :-)

It was a pretty day at the park, the birds were hungry, and only one fight. The larger group of ducks were missing, so it was Cotton Top, his two buddies, and a bunch of geese.

I forgot to convert the video down to 1920x1080, so it's sitting up on YouTube as 4k. OMG, I was wondering why it took so long to upload and process.

I'll be talking with a behavioral therapist next Thursday morning via Zoom. I presume we'll have the opportunity to discuss my issues, and options.

I think I've figured the issues out to a certain extent, and it would be helpful to summarize them here for reference.

I have Essential Tremor, which means that my body vibrates strongly from the inside every second of my life. It's evolving into full blown Parkinsons, which is in the family on my dad's side, big time. I'm a walking, talking vibrator. Too bad there's nowhere to stick me into!

I'm taking two prescriptions recommended for these issues, but they become less effective every day. My hands are shaking, my walk is declining, and the ability to do simple things, is fading.

In the mornings I stay busy and just deal with it, but by 1100 I've had enough, depression about this and life in general slides in, and I start to drink. By 2000 I'm able to hit the bed, pass out, and have a decent sleep.

When I don't drink, or drink lightly, I lay there feeling the vibrations course through my body all night.

I'm an alcoholic, and I've gotten sober many times in my life. The problem now is, I'm running out of reasons to quit, and I have nobody by my side to help. The last great effort was when I turned seventy back in Idaho! I lasted a year, got in great shape and dropped down to an amazing 150lbs. Steph was my supportive partner.

I'm now just an old man living alone in an old house, drinking myself to sleep at night! What a hell of a way to land...

So, that's it. Maybe I'll just email the therapist this post before the Zoom meeting, so we can cut to the chase!

New post notifications here have ended, finally for good. If anybody is interested in what I have to say, they can drop on by and see what's new. If they're not, pushing a notification out to them, is an assault on their space.

Writing is my self-therapy, it allows me to formulate my thoughts and helps me understand them. I could just write a journal and keep it on my hard drive, that nobody would ever see. But fuck that, this is the Internet baby, and I have created a great blog.

I very often write a post that embarrasses me to the point that I have to take it down, but that's called life online! When I see internet content that makes me go WTF, I just move on. But pushing notifications to someone's private phone as a text message, is shoving your stuff into their face.

That is now over at OldManJim.com. Boom!

Update: Grand-daughter Shelby just told me she want's to be notified of new posts. Ok, if anyone reaches out like that, they're back on the list. Otherwise, I'm not bothering anybody, anymore...

It was a really wild scene at the dock parking lot this morning. There was a large flock of geese there, maybe a hundred, with the two factions of ducks on both sides. Everyone converged on me as I pulled in and parked, honking and quacking loudly.

One guy watching the quiet lake from his cabin deck had to come out and see what was happening. They were all squabbling for the quack cocaine. One duck from the rival group put his head down and bum-rushed Cotton Top in the middle of the parking lot, and CT's three buddies rushed to his defense. It was crazy!

There was nobody else there so we weren't disrupting any family outings, but I think it may be getting out of control. On the other hand, it's quite entertaining, kids would love it, and the quack is good for the birds.

Just because you're a broken man, doesn't mean you can't take care of business. The flock of geese that is hanging with the ducks in the Park came running to me this morning, right along with my buddies. It was quite the sight!

Even though I have trouble making my bed and feeding myself, doesn't mean I can't get things done. I paid my license tabs at the County Clerk, renewed my Farmers insurance, reminding Chad that I have been a Farmer's customer for more than thirty years, and never filed a claim. I then filled up my gas tank, bought groceries, picked up ice and a Walgreen script. All before 1000.

I was going to leave the laptop on the shelf, but grand-daughter Shelby needed some advice on web-hosting, so I put it back on the table. I also got a call from the Behavioral Health clinic, and I have a Zoom meeting scheduled next Thursday with somebody to talk about my options.

Then I cleaned my blog up from the stupid shit I've written lately, and wrote this. My bills are paid and my truck is ready to roll, if I choose to...