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Copyright 2024 James LaFond

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

Bob Johnson has worked a wide variety of jobs in the American West, in livestock, agriculture, construction, infrastructure, resource extraction and as a hunting guide. These are the stories of a working life that has left Bob something of a cyborg, with more steel parts than most American automobiles.

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Dedication

For Deb Johnson, who still puts up with this guy!

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“I was about thirty, when I was working with an older man, an old hand that was somewhat like me. He observed, ‘You push back, you don’t put up with much.’

“I responded, ‘I can’t kiss ass, wasn’t weened to be a suck up.’

“He stood there pointing his finger and said, ‘That will get you in trouble. It will be your downfall and you will get thrown under the bus.’

“I’m sorry, James, I just could not kiss ass!”

-After coffee, 10:21 A.M., Oakley, Utah, October 18, 2023, three years after the world took the Z-pill.

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To the Reader

And a book was born a few hours after its subject, a big, wide man of muscle and objective scorn for the world, confided that he had not lived an interesting life, merely a toilsome one, and that he did not imagine such a book would be of interest to many. Well, such books, of interest to the few rather than the many, to the thinking unheard rather than the mewing herd, are this broken worker’s remaining stock-in-trade. As I assemble histories from our mostly forgotten or misrepresented past, it dawns that such journals of working humans under this great and evil system that hates its very apish engines, might be of use to an honest historian of our future.

Bob Johnson is literally the best man I have known of many: hard, uncompromising, loyal and compassionate, unable to bend the knee, lick the boot, or kiss the corporate asses of the subhuman ciphers who have been elevated above the mob to rob first and foremost, from those decent men who hold a job.

I hope to visit Bob over the winter for a week or two and complete the rough of this draft. Uncle Sham willing, we will type by light of night and lie of day to shine some light on what America was like before Everything Got Gay.

-James, a gimp of a wan ghost on the economic wind

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Scheme

-1. Childhood Chores

-2. Youth Jobs

-3. Hunting, Fishing & Poaching as a Youth

-4. Jobs as a Single Man

-5. Jobs as a Married Man

-6. Jobs as a Grandparent

-7. Work as Serenity in Retirement