Fire works for Mike H

Mike, I saw your dispolay and thought you might like this one. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/embed/_LpMB1OZ53g?feature=player_detailpage%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20allowfullscreen%3e%3c/iframe%3e&autoplay=1

You keep bringing up subjects lately that force me to respond. We could start with Lefty I guess, but some other things come into play at the same time. I don't usually do this, but there's an oratorical framework that comes to mind. It's kind of like the famous structure that almost always works to get people's attention: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." and a little like the traditional joke lead-in that goes "A guy walks into a bar and..." So if I were to think about the bigger issues silently I would be musing to myself about illusion and reality and such heavy duty stuff such as 'at, but this is the oratorical framework that springs to mind: "There are three kinds of people in the world...." Some are afraid of being humble and working hard and getting dirty because if people look down on them they are ashamed. Some are afraid of being well-off because if people look up at them they are ashamed. And then there are people who pitch in and do as much as they can wherever they are, however they are, and whoever they are because what other people think of them is just not very important.

I think you are blessed to have one set of genes in each world. Nothing beats that in my opinion. Agree with everything you put out there really. I think you and Lefty and I would all agree that what's likely to beat Ideas + Action is Ideas + Action + Knowledge. In my opinion, the only thing that makes life worth living is Ideas + Action + Knowledge + Spiritual Honesty. For me personally, Action has to include work and preferably physical work at least part of the time (if not more) and I really dislike the idea of robots taking away the salvation of hard work. We can all work on Sudoku and Mensa puzzles in our spare time. Nothing gets me more fired up than thinking, "Let's Do this!" That kind of thinking has already converted itself to action. It's hard to turn back by that point. And if I like doing it once, I usually like doing it again and again. Roofing is made to order for me. Truly. And I don't care what anybody thinks of me for doing it, for wearing tools, for getting broken nails, worn out shoes, wrinkles, you name it.

If you're not doing what you love, you're wasting your life. As the longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, "Making a million dollars is as good a way of wasting a life as any." I think what I'd like to do right now is keep on trucking, keep on roofing, visit Alaska, visit Scotland, and finish Dante's Divine Comedy which is an absolute bear of a book to read. No pain, no gain.

I would never discount the value of education, but nor would I ever encourage anyone to rely on it, and I think we have too much of that happening in our world today. The value of work has been diminished, to the decline of a nation that was built by it.

Despite grandpa Hicks' humble beginnings, he was a genius, and always learning..... and on my other side of genetic tree, my other grandpa was an attorney, past president of the Ohio BAR Assoc., and was asked to be a federal appeals court justice, but he turned down the appointment because he didn't want to move his family from our wonderful little town.

One granpa oversaw the building of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy dams during the depression, while the other grandpa unloaded rail cars of concrete bags for $1 per car, and felt fortunate to have the work... can you imagine? They paid 3 men, $4/rail car. The man with a car got an extra dollar for providing the transportation to the sites.

But while one man was highly educated, and I had great love and respect for them both, it was the the dropout that taught me the things of greatest value.

He and my dad used to say, "From the neck down, a man is only worth so much, but from the neck up, there's no limit. Ideas+Action will take you farther than all the knowledge of the world left unapplied.".... I can think of no greater example than Lefty Holencik.

I have to comment on the subject of edumacation, now that Mike brought that up. Neither one of my grandfathers made it through high school. One was itching to have his own farm and the other was mechanically inclined and a man of few words and no bookish interests. One grandmother was a high-school graduate and well-spoken but not well-read or well-educated. The other, the farmer's wife, was taken out of school with rheumatic fever and longed to go to college for the rest of her life. She made sure her children all went. My father was the first in his family to graduate and loved every minute of it. "The best time of my life" he called it. I can't say that, but he did. My mother was an artist, they met in college, and she got a teaching credential and lived and died for helping children with difficulties learn to read and do math.

It took me awhile, but there was no way I was not going to get my degree. I roofed my way through and I'm glad I did but I can certainly understand how intelligent people, like my son for example, might not. I have had drop-outs work for me and I have had graduates work for me.

People talk about thinking outside the box. It makes all the difference in the world, but I believe the main point has nothing to do with boxes. My favorite go-to question is, "What was I thinking??" not what did they tell me or what was i supposed to have memorized. Somebody has to be thinking.

A quality education pushes you out of your comfort zone. What's viable survives and most everything else gets pushed aside. Given enough time that happens anyway, but education accelerates the whole process. Just another kind of wheelbarrow. That's my two cents and I like to rub them together as often as I get the chance.

Something I've really come to appreciate in my old age as I fill in some huge gaps I didn't "think" I had time for earlier, is when you go beyond what you know in your daily life, you get to meet people who have been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years who were just as intelligent as we are and were working to understand things that we now assume are just part of common sense.

Don't get me wrong. It's not all peaches and cream. I'm obstinate too and I went from a straight-A student to a rebel at significant consequence to the almighty grade point average, but sometimes that's what it costs to be a self-styled freedom fighter and it's all worth it in the end. Education might or might not increase your wealth, but it definitely brings its own reward and has value not measurable with any simple yardstick.

Thanks for responding, Mike. Very interesting summary of your family history.

J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy also chronicled several instances of violent and gory "mountain justice" in his family history.

I actually got the book because I was called for jury duty and figured I would have lots of idle time. I didn't get picked (too obstinate, imagine that) but found the book so engrossing that I finished it in 2 days.

OS, in reality, those are way beyond impossible, though there are some rudimentary sky designs, like smiles, etc., but... they only work from one vantage point and there's no way to control the spin and direction of a shot, so in the law of averages, you only get one in 4 that gives you a hint of the intended design. Most of those are also WAY TO HUGE to be real, if you think about the scale of the shot to the sky.

wywoody. First let me say that while I've been known to use the saying "HICKS, it's a tradition, not a description", we also call ourselves the hick's from the sticks, as we are somewhat south of our primary urban market area.

I have not read the book, but I surmise there is a similarity. My paternal great grandparents met on a river boat in the Tennessee river drainage. He became a revenuer during prohibition. When a knife fight broke out during a court session in their one-room, dirt floor cabin, and the loser bled to death from the throat in front of my three year-old grandpa, GGma said "Henry, we are moving to Ohio....."

GGma had family up here. They raised 6 boys and 3 girls in a 3 bedroom log cabin, on what was once the county dump. My grandmother and dad also lived in that home for a spell when Gramps spent a year in a military hospital in Mississippi.

Gramps quit school in the 9th grade and opened a coal mine behind the house, using a wheelbarrow he built from a steel wheel, a spike for an axle and flat boards he scavenged from the dump. He dug for a year before he hit coal, and some years later, after hearing noise through the walls of the mine, he and his un-educated grandfather proved using nothing more than a carbide light and a compass, to the great humiliation of county engineers, that the county had been extracting coal from under their farm. The $1,000 settlement saved the farm.

Today, I live at the end of the valley on Hicks Avenue, and there are 6 other family members living in Hicks Holler.

So they came up here well before the war, and all 6 of the sons saw some sort of action in WWII or Korea. All 6 came home to raise families, own businesses or work good solid jobs. We are almost 100% republican, and near 100% christian.

During their service absence, to occupy her mind, my GGma crocheted some of the most intricate and beautiful items you ever did see, including a table cloth big enough to cover the family dinner table.... and it's a big table. (not sure in crochet is the right term. It's a fine thread, not yarn)

We never have been too big on edumacation. The family has very few college grads. Grandpa said many times, "D students work for C students. C students work for B students. B students work for A students, and A students work for drop-outs. It seemed to prove true with us, Mikey Dell, Willy Gates and Stevy Jobs.

We Hicks can be hicks, and certainly retained a bit of billy in our hills, but we dun did alright as a family up in these shallower valleys.

Hope that helped ;)

OS, I didn't mean to imply Mike was a hick, I recall has referred to hillbilly lineage. Hey, I have hillbilly lineage, it's Idaho hillbilly but I could relate to the (nonfiction) story in Hillbilly Elegy. One thing I thought Mike might relate to was the two men in the author's family that he considered a success were in roofing and construction.

But the author hits right on lots of other things, the bad work habits of millenials, he nails the Trump swing voter even though it was written well before the election, the deterioration pattern of post-industrial towns.

Twil, the author refers to the Hillbilly Highway and Steve Earle. I think it was hiway 23. I could never return to where my roots are, it's now though of a place for millionaires now that the billionaires have taken over Jackson Hole.

Woody, just because his name is Hicks, doesn't mean he is one!

I have a question for Mike H. Have you read the book Hillbilly Elegy? And does your family history mirror what is described in the book. I don't mean the dysfunction of the authors family, I just mean the migration of Appalachian people to the emerging industrial jobs in Ohio last century.

I had no ideas how they would do something like that, but it sure looks neat!

You know those aren't real, right?