Journal

God, how I feel this title, and understand the movie by this name.. a Coen Brothers very bizarre, frightening, and all too true scenario of the times. The setting,,pretty much the whole south Texas region, but filmed around Alpine in far west Texas, near Big Bend. I've never been there, but this story is a tragic very real truth about the world that is now developing in my back yard.  As Tommy Lee Jones stated as an aging sheriff in Terrell County, while trying to understand and track a seriously demented serial killer, the story goes on, and I found it again a very intriguing, yet seriously disturbing sign of MY times. I don't belong to this current generation, and old timers soon find they are considered expendable, if they are considered anymore at all. The sheriff worked the case one step constantly behind the work of a serial type killer who tracked down a hapless country cowboy, while using brutal, and horrid ways of dispatching anybody when it suited his fancy to do so. The morality or code of this man was one that matches any terrorist form of so-called human being that is beyond comprehension.

     My two girls wanted to see this horrid movie, and the hardness of these days in a desert of unforgiving land, heat, and drug lord crime like we've never seen in my generation before.  Some of you may not have seen this movie, and I rented it for my girls, now aged 31 and 27 to hopefully in some ways understand how their old father today understands less and less of what's going on.  I totally understood this time the frustration of Jones' character, the aging sheriff, who followed these unrelenting crimes, in an area already full of emptiness, and killers, that depict very truly the drug scene and new Columbian cartel type of horrid misfits who make a fortune on the misery of the poor, the lonely, and the hopeless who are caught up in the middle of a country gone astray.

    "No Country for Old Men" had a line, amongest many true, and noted by the sheriff who had many years under his belt, never having seen so much carnage,,," I don't understand it", and "I'm outmatched".  What a horrible feeling it is to know I'm always repeating myself, and the embarassment I feel in a computer age that I simply "don't understand".  Frankly, it all intimidates me, and I'm glad to be hopefully leaving this world where I suppose I'll be soon forgotten. Oh, the sheriff retired, with a sense of loss in a world he once knew that seems to be a barren new planet now.  In some very different ways, I have faced life and death a few times too many, but watched my few friends go down one by one, until it seems all I know anymore are the dark horsemen who sooner or later smite down my aging friends, and too many youths in a world full of controversy that has gained speed with the advent of the computer age. And the bottom line all around the strange changes i've seen can only be described by me in that sentence,,"I don't understand it". And truly, " I'm outmatched".

     It is a very somber, sad day when I feel such a horrible way. I wish I didn't feel so down, and will just say nothing more at this point. My wife just got up,,it's around noon.  Things are barren, and I feel more ignorant every day as my mind keeps making me repeat things.

     I'm sorry, and I hope my "girls" and maybe some who care here, can understand the repeated laments of a world I don't understand.  That feeling of inadequacy has never been so intimidating as now.  Truly, in time, it becomes no country for old men indeed. May you who read this be blessed, and escape such harrowing thoughts, and suffering over the years. Sincerely, Goliad