About the Ranch

 

 

 

 

I never had a computer before November of 1998. I had always been a bit intimidated by them. A childhood friend of mine had encouraged me for years to bite the bullet and get online. For whatever reason, I finally became willing, and Phillip put together a computer in my apartment out of scrap parts he had gathered together. It was an old CD-ROM server that had been put out to pasture, and it looked monstrous compared to the little box on my desk today.

I was a true neophyte. I barely had the basic point and click skills garnered from years of using proprietary software at various jobs I'd had. Still, I'm a fairly quick study. I discovered that I could get a domain name of my own for relatively little money and decided it would be a good learning tool and a way to keep me off the streets as well. I already knew what I would call it before I even knew I could get one.

The Spread Eagle Ranch has existed for ages before it ever became the electronic vanity license plate that it is today. Years ago in Irving, Texas there was a group of guys about a dozen years or so older than me who had a plot of land on the outskirts of town. This was the original Spread Eagle Ranch, and the parties they hosted out there are something of a local legend to those who are still alive and retain enough synaptic function to tell the tale; there may be a half-dozen such people. I never actually visited the Ranch, although I know roughly where it was located. I first heard about it from one of the original crew, who happened to be my partner in a two-bit gamecock operation and my weed connect to boot. Albert was a huge man with a head like a buffalo and a wooden leg he wore as a result of a family squabble involving LSD and a shotgun. He was very representative of the kind of folks who frequented the original Ranch. He was also stereotypical of the kind of people I grew up with in Irving. I miss that environment...

The Ranch has a different meaning for me. It does not exist in the physical sense, although wherever I live is the Ranch by default. It is very much a state of mind. It is my sanctuary. It is my sandbox and my Promised Land. Putting the Ranch on the web means allowing anybody and everybody to see what catches my attention for what that's worth. It is truly narcissistic, but I pay the rent. So fuck em and feed em fish if they don't like it.

None of the links and pics on the Ranch are necessarily indicative of my beliefs. I am not an anarchist, though the idea appeals to me. I am not a communist, though I am intrigued by the hold that particular ideology has on so many people. I am queer, but it is not the central fact of my personality. I am not religious, yet I spent a long time and suffered a great deal at my own hands trying to get a pat on the head from God. I am not necessarily enamored of any of the famous/infamous people whose pics can be found throughout the site, however I am fascinated by the fact that so many people are so willing to blindly follow those who possess no greater talent than simple charisma or the ability to use language effectively. What makes some of us sheep and some of us masters? Why do people so desperately desire someone to follow? Why such an intense need for a magic formula to fix the fluid world of circumstance into a comfortable pattern?

We are really little more than so many sacks of fluid and electromagnetic energy endlessly consuming and seeking anaesthetic from our terrors. I am not so much misanthropic as I am a little ashamed of my own attempts to find solace in the pathetic narcosis of a rut.

What does this all have to do with the Ranch? Who cares? Perhaps I just wanted to pull the curtain and show a little bit of my face. I don't really know if this site is really about me or just a reflection of what I see. There is very little order to my life. It is finally simpler to find comfort in the chaos than to attempt to arrange the images I see in neat compartments. I just wanna play a little. I'd like to know a little about the people who take the time to read this drivel. If you've got the time, click on the Email link and tell me about yourself. I'm always curious. I also encourage you to click on the little bony guy icon below and go post something on the bulletin board.

30 June 1999

 

 

 

Addendum:

If the navigation of this little wide spot in the cyber road gets a little confusing to you, let me clear it up a bit. On that shared left border I've stuck links to just about everything that I care for people to see here. Starting at the top are links to poems, vignettes, haiku, tanka, sonnets, weird tales and whatever else I've written so far that I think is fit to publish in a public forum that my parents frequent. Below that are links to other pages on the site that contain the writings of others. Principally among those figure my father and mother, who are both much better writers than I am, and better than they think they are as well. I've collected all of what I think Dad has posted on the message boards and included that stuff with his pages of writings. That corpus of work will continue to grow almost daily. Mom's contribution has remained more static, but only because she is more actively in the market to be published, and I don't want to put any obstacles in her path. Her writing is truly amazing to me at times.

Other contributors are Tasso and Kevin DeBroux, neither of which I have ever met face to face, but both of whom I think are writers of some substance or potential. There is also a page of writings from other folks, including my sister, Pam. There's not as much on that page as there used to be, but only because it used to have Tasso's and Kevin's stuff on it as well as a couple of others who haven't remained a constant fixture here. I encourage anybody who is interested to submit to me their work, and I will gladly post it regardless of aesthetic. I truly adhere to the adage: "de gustibus non disputandem est".

There are also several pages of pics for public display for no other reason than I'm narcissistic as fuck and a little weird in that regard. My grandmother, Munner, used to say, "He's cute. Just ask him". There's also pics of friends, family, pets, and lovers - current and former.

There is a plurality of message boards here as well that come and go according to my fickle tastes. Feel free to set up shop anywhere here and make yerself at home. If I don't like it, you'll find out soon enough. But I'm hard to offend (that should be obvious), so don't sweat the small shit.

7 November 2001 (has this place been around that long?)

 

 

 

The Ranch in its particulars

I like having a lot of nooks and crannies around that people can just find themselves in by mistake. But I also like having some coherence to the site as well. However, it also don't mean a much either way for that matter. I like the Ranch to be like that crazy guy's house at the end of the street I grew up on back when we still had drainage ditches instead of curbs. He had like a mobile home that he built onto with various outlandish accretions, a reef of assorted salvage materials that gave the whole pile a sense of organic permanence our bricks lacked. To us it looked like the ultimate fort and hideout, and that's what I always wanted to live in. That's what the Ranch is like to me. That's why I like flea markets like the old Pirates Den on the north side of Austin when I was a kid. There was junk everywhere and tons of paperbacks and old horror comics and dust. And everything was worn out and reused until it had taken on a little bit of everything that ever touched it. Just like every person I ever knew who took on a little bit of everybody that ever touched them.

It's my sandbox here, and my hideout. And you thumb through it like the bins of dust-covered paperbacks and comics, only there's old letters and scraps of conversation mixed in, and people you forgot or never knew who stopped in and left a mark on the place somewhere, some tag or bit of graffiti or well thought out prose on a scrap of paper left lying out where others stopping by will also add to it and leave another layer of accretion on the walls of the fort. There is a tree-house of immense proportions and a spacious cellar that affords ample space for piles of junk and notes and old letters to people I don't even remember in some instances. There's also a huge dirt-pile out back by the grill that you can dig around in for kicks, unless you just want to sit out at the picnic table under the tree and drink beer and have a cookout and play cards all night. There?s acreage here and a mythical river, and we can all climb into my pickup and ride slowly down to the edge of the water. There?s plenty of wildlife out here at dusk, though oddly, the mosquitoes are never a problem. We see snakes, but nobody ever gets bit. There?s a covered landing out over the water where we can drop crappie lights and fish all night in any weather for just as long as the bait and the ice chest last and the fish keep biting. But the fish are always biting.

There's always plenty of food; I love an abundance of food, just look at me. And there's plenty of room for people to crash out or watch TV or play pool or pinball - it's the kind of hideout I always wanted in that regard. There are tons of places to go and wander around in and almost get lost in yourself, or in me for that matter. In any case, it's not the kind of place where you particularly want to spend the entire day perhaps, but there's always something else you could wander around in whenever you stop by.

It?s not always a hangout and crash pad over here, however. Sometimes it is a retreat. I can crawl back into the inner sanctum and ignore all the surface froth outside my private chambers deep in the bowels of the network of corridors and dead ends of the Ranch. From this Center I can rant and hold forth and enter into the crucible of my past to bring some new wonder out of my base metal.

Well, it's a wonder to me, if nobody else, anyway.

15 December 2002