Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Monday, May 25, 2020

Driftin’…a New Way of Life


The Corona Cruise Liner is docking. Wild shouts of pandemonium erupt. The in-place sheltering voyage is ending. Masks like black academic mortarboards sail skyward. But now what?

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We’ve been drifting around for almost three months, squeezed in stifling confinements that have shrunk smaller than closets, sick of masks, hand washing and agoraphobic hand wringing. The landscape’s unfamiliar. Normal ain’t normal anymore. Where do we go from here?

I come in from wandering aimlessly around the yard. I roll around on the floor with the dog to gain a ground-level perspective of life, swapping my share of licks. He isn’t concerned with things. He’s used to drifting through life. There’s a lesson here. What is it?

Let’s watch a movie on Netflix,” I say.

Ok. Any suggestions?” she asks.

How ‘bout The Big Lebowski? It’ll provide some prophetic ideas for reentry into a dystopian universe.”

It was a 1998 cult favorite starring two LA slackers, Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, before Goodman reached sumo wrestling status and couldn’t fit into a scene. The box-office take was meager, primarily because it failed to include Murray, Murphy, Ackroyd and the cameo ghosts of Dangerfield, Dean and Belushi, iconic paragons that gave definition to drifting in the alternative universe.

The movie begins with a tumbleweed blowing across the beaches of Malibu, the utopian venue of fruits and nuts. I hear the tune now, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” a classic written by Bob Nolan in 1930 while himself drifting through life as a caddy in LA. Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers made it famous. What better image can be found than a tumbleweed to define the essence of the drifting life?

So relax, slide into the driftin’ mood, sing along with me:

“Cares of the past are behind
Nowhere to go, but I’ll find
Just where the trail will wind,
Drifting along with the tumblin’ tumbleweeds.”


Maybe you remember the movie. It was a comedic caper bouncing between bowling alleys, bathtubs, psychedelic escapades and loosely modeled on an improbable Raymond Chandler crime plot. If there was a theme, it was weird like life itself.

But then life has always been weird. Now I’m not suggesting anyone change their lifestyle. No, go for what you know. But come tomorrow when the dust settles, it won’t be business as usual. All bets will be off, boundaries will be removed and for the fearless, ‘beginning again’ will be inspiring.

Stretch your mind, imagine the idea of drifting through life, of testing the order of chaos, of reaping the rewards of randomness as though they were common miracles. And what is a common miracle anyway but some serendipitous invasion of life? It’s what happens when something happens that shouldn’t happen. Go figure.

There’s a mystique to a ‘one-word’ life, the ‘adventitious’ life, the life of ‘improv,’ the life of just showing up…no watch, no wallet and no wireless. It’s standing beside life’s highway, thumb in the air, waiting on Providence for a ride, somewhere, anywhere, just somewhere else.

Once a friend and I were backpacking. Bad weather set in. We found ourselves standing on the edge of a frozen, sleet-covered highway at the Appalachian trailhead at Unicoi Gap. Hungry, wet, freezing, praying for a ride. Minutes passed like hours.

A pickup truck creeps cautiously over the hill, passes us by, then stops. It backs up, a door opens, we squeeze into the heated cab for a ten-mile ride to our car. This is what driftin’ through life is about. Exciting.

Flannery O’Conner wrote: “ Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there; and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

Drifting through life requires no agenda, it’s easy to comprehend. And, good jokes help. You just show up, prepared for nothing, but ready for anything. Disappointment cannot exist in this frame of mind.

Think about that. When’s the last time you didn’t have some notes shoved in your shirt pocket, or tasks tacked to the refrigerator door, or a calendar cluttered with appointments? Probably never. If you prefer this regime, drifting might not be your thing.

Dr. Leary’s manifesto of drifting through life was simple: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Maybe COVID will empower us to explore, ‘turn off, tune in and let go.’

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Driftin’…whether an LA slacker or a Georgia cracker, it’ll separate us from the herd. Do you get my drift? Report back.


Bud Hearn
May 25, 2020

Friday, May 15, 2020

The Odd Couple…Hunting with Hawks and Dogs


Red meat and a hungry hawk…nature, wild, bloody tooth and nail.

The red-tailed hawk’s black talons gripped the thick leather glove on the falconer’s forearm. Its luminous eyes blazed with intensity on the slab of red meat in his handler’s hand. The hawk’s hunger transcended its natural fear of humans, and in these brief moments the man and bird bonded.

Ah, yes, love. We love what we love. Who can figure it out? We can’t even explain it to ourselves. Our natures are hot-wired with primal impulses, proclivities and inbred intuitions. Weird wiring indeed.

A vagrant spirit blows through us, ‘calling’ us for this or for that. There are calls of the sea, the mountains, the forests, deserts, the frontiers. We feel it, but living it explains it. And along Georgia’s coastal plain are diversities of lands to love.

It’s hard to separate the land from its people, the people who occupy it, who love its diversity, who understand its rhythms, who can discern its mysteries and unlock its unseen secrets.

There is the magical leisure of the sea, the mystical tranquility of the marshes, the solitude of fishing, the teeming estuaries and the historical sites of ages past. Many love these lands.

But there are other lands, wild lands, lands of palmetto hammocks, black-water rivers, green-water cypress swamps, thickets of vines and briars and forests canopied with ancient live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Fewer yet love these lands.

It’s a crisp Spring morning. I stand gazing into a tableau of ancient oaks. The dappled sunlight dances on the forest floor making it appear alive. Nothing else moves. It is from this milieu that Wes Schlosser emerges, his red-tailed hawk riding majestically on his gloved forearm and Rambo, his Patterdale terrier at his heels.

I’ve come at his invitation, to fuel my curiosity about hunting with dogs and hawks in Georgia’s back woods. Wes is an apprentice falconer but a master trainer of hunting dogs and other breeds. He has the ‘whisperer’ mystique, the talent to bond with both dogs and hawks. He trains them to hunt together. A delicate balance.

“How are the woods today, Wes?”


Alive like always. Nature is heavy-breathing today.” He is referring to humidity.

“The hawk seems calm.”

Yeah, sleepy, like we get when we’re over-served. Want to hold him?”

I cautiously slip on the glove. The hawk’s talons tighten on my forearm. It glares through me with ominous eyes that suggest I’m its next meal. Interlopers are tasty.

“What encouraged you to train hawks to hunt?”

It’s a calling, I guess. I like challenges. I’ve trained dogs since I was a teenager. I wondered if I could bond with a hawk. Somehow it works. It’s patience and food. Food builds the bond. Patience calms the fear. They see me as something benevolent, not a threat.”

“How do you get them to hunt with dogs?”

Hawks are natural born hunters. It’s inbred. It’s all about survival. Hawks prey on small critters, mostly squirrels, rabbits and mice. I let the squirrel dogs loose; they tree squirrels and then I set the hawk free. Hawks can detect the slightest movement at great distances. They have telescopic eyesight. The rest is up to the hawk. It gets excited. It soon learns the process.”

“Can hawks distinguish human voices?”

“Yes. Interestingly, their eyes control their thoughts. If they get stressed, I put the hood on. They calm down, go to sleep.”

“You spend a lot of time in the woods, right? What are its secrets?”

He laughs. “Plenty, but you have to experience the woods to figure them out. Listen, when you set foot into the ocean or the woods, you don’t necessarily enter at the top of the food chain. Walking in the woods your senses become alert, alive, and you begin to relate to life differently. Like the Indians say, you have to look at things twice to see them.”

“What are the joys of training hawks and dogs?”

“Teamwork. Like any sport, teamwork. Plus, trained hawks can survive better when released back into the wild. They’re trained killers. It’s all about survival.”

Wes puts the hawk back in its cote and we lean against the pickup and talk more about dogs, hawks and life.

He checks his watch. “Gotta get going.”

“Another training?”

“Yes, another challenge. A Great Dane that’s deaf.”

Every day is worth living when it’s spent among the people who live in the land that we love.


Bud Hearn
May 15, 2020

Monday, May 4, 2020

The FICO Score Fiasco


“Sometimes it hard to know what to do.
” Bukowski

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With COVID putting the pinch on us, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of insufferable solitude. The pent-up energy is volcanic. It’s fish or cut bait time. Open up, let us out, or else. Something’s gotta give.

The day began being mildly ticked off. Not about big things, things that numb the senses. Just the little irritants, things like an embedded sand spur in your toe. Or, today, news that my FICO score has been violated.

The FICO-score news arrived in yesterday’s mail along with the usual refuse, some not much different than the fertilizer my neighbor’s dog sometimes dumps on the flowers.

I flip through it, and there, in bold letters is my FICO score. It has been dinged by 80 points by the credit bureau. I feel myself about to go haywire, the Fates deciding to air out some of the complex mental junk I’d been carrying around and unleash it on the world.

Before going totally ballistic over the disparaging FICO score, I resort to advice from the Good Book, the one with red-letter writing.

I close my eyes, flip to a page and blindly put a finger on a random line. There, for better or worse, is today’s advice. It reads, “Forgive, if you have anything against anyone.”

I wish my finger had found the part that reads, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Inheriting is a blessed thing, easier than working for it. But it comes with the caveat of ‘meek.’ Being meek is hard.

Now that’s easier to read than to achieve, especially when I think of my neighbor’s dog. Not that I hold anything against his dog doing daily duties, but in the flowers? I shout across the lawn, “Hey, put it in your pocket.” He hollers back, “It’s compost.” Did I just read about ‘Forgiveness?’ I meekly regret the finger I gave him.

Back to FICO. Without pristine credit a stigma follows you for a lifetime. It’s the equivalent of having 666 stenciled to your forehead. Without it you can’t buy, borrow or barter.

I vent frustrations to my wife. “Can you believe this? FICO dinged me 80 points, and for no justifiable reason.”

Computers make no mistakes. What did you do?”

“Says I missed a $60 payment to Comcast 5 years and 1 month ago. Their error. Comcast actually owed me a $32 credit.”

So, take it up with Comcast.”

Have you ever tried to negotiate anything with this den of thieves?

Keep calling. Besides, what do you care? You were born in 1942, who’s going to extend credit to you anyway?”

Look, says here my oldest account was opened 45 years and 5 months ago. That’s before computers and cell phones. The average age of my accounts is 31 years and 11 months. Proof of pristine credit.” She reads the notice.

“Says here your score was affected by the ‘derogatory indicator.’ Your past finally caught up with you.” She laughs.

This is no laughing matter. I have a derogatory indicator rap sheet now. I’m ruined. Forgiveness is out of the question.”

Pretend you’re a politician. They’re used to the DI. Just change your name and reapply. This is America, people are born again all the time.”

I call the banker, maybe I can slip by. “Hi, say, wonder if I can get a loan to tide me over?

“How much do you need?”

“About $5 thousand should do it, enough to buy a freezer. I’m stocking up for round two of the apocalypse.”

I’ll run a quick FICO score on you, hold on.”

Silence for about a minute, and she comes back. “Well, seems you have a problem. The FICO score derogatory indicator disqualifies you. It indicates you’re a bad risk now, ineligible for a loan.”

“How can I shake this FICO curse?”

Dying is one way, or you can take it up with Comcast. Take your pick. Besides, there’s been a run on freezers. None available, a five-year back-order. Buy rice and beans instead. Cheaper, and they don’t ask for your FICO score.”

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Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Really? Maybe next time my finger will find, “Wine makes merry, but money answers all things.” And it says nothing about being meek.

So to hell with FICO scores. I’ll just wait meekly for my stimulating check. Good luck with your PPP application.



Bud Hearn
May 4, 2020