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Goldfield Lays Town Father Bryan Smalley to Rest

August 31, 2022 UPDATE

A ten minute video about Bryan can be viewed here. It’s a short film the family asked me to do.

https://vimeo.com/thewritingrockhound/videoforbryan

Original Article Follows:

Bryan Smalley died in Goldfield on October 30, 2021. He was 61 years old. The family does not wish to disclose the cause of death. His Pahrump Valley Times written obituary is here: –> Obituary of Bryan Smalley (external link)

Goldfield Lays a Town Father to Rest

By: Thomas Farley / thomasfarley@fastmail.com

More than a hundred people attended Bryan Smalley’s funeral on Saturday (11/06/2021) in Goldfield’s historic cemetery. Those included town folk, family, close friends, and members of Bryan’s church.

Notable was law enforcement from Esmeralda and Nye County as well as fire and ambulance services. They all remembered and honored Bryan’s twenty years as a deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County. Deputies helped lower the casket into his grave while a strong wind whipped the cemetery and the sage covered hills. An officer designated as an honor guard made sure a carefully folded United States flag was placed on Bryan’s coffin with quiet ceremony and solemnity.

Family friend Randy Wilson conducted the service, observing that Bryan had carved many of the cemeteries’ crosses and headstones surrounding the mourners. A close friend of Bryan’s, Sharon Artlip, later said that he never charged for that work and that, “Bryan would have preferred to build his own coffin and to carve his own headstone.”

Folding the flag before presenting. / Click image to enlarge

Artlip owns Goldfield Art and Business in Goldfield at the center of town and collaborated with Bryan on many projects. She said, “Bryan was my friend. He owned Hidden Treasure in town which is a rock shop. He was a partner with my sister Nadia and I with the Gemfield Gem claims that we own outside of town. He helped me do my porch on my building. He helped people with their businesses. And he always promoted Goldfield and had the best in mind for everybody in Goldfield. But most importantly, he was my friend.”

Lowering Bryan’s coffin into the grave. / Click image to enlarge.

Stacey Smalley is a younger brother. He talked about how Bryan got Hidden Treasure going even before he retired from the sheriff’s department. It was a love of rocks and the land. “He was always, always into rocks and minerals. And he just loved this area. He loved Nevada and he loved Goldfield.”

Some of the mourners. / Click image to enlarge.

After the funeral, the day’s event moved to the high school auditorium in downtown Goldfield for a community get-together and a pot-luck lunch. An appropriate venue since Bryan did a great deal for the local school district. Stores were shuttered throughout town with perhaps half of Goldfield’s residents in attendance. Everyone was exchanging their favorite stories about Bryan. Erma Greegh said she met Bryan in 1993 and that he didn’t like wearing shoes in restaurants. “Always had to kick them off.” And if you needed a sign made for any cause, Bryan would carve or paint one for you.

The grave awaiting a headstone. / Click image to enlarge.

Some people traveled hours to get to the funeral since Bryan’s help extended far beyond Goldfield. Many rocks in the Mineral County Museum, for example, were donated by Bryan years ago. Further north of Hawthorne by Walker lake is Schruz, Nevada, home to the RockChuck Gem and Mineral Gallery, owned by Chelsea and John Keady. Bryan affectionately referred to the couple as the “kids.” I talked to John Keady who was there with his wife and young son after a two and a half hour trip.

Overall picture of the Goldfield Cemetery. / Click image to enlarge.

”Bryan was really helpful to Chelsea and I. When I was learning to flint knap, Bryan would stop in every time he passed by to show me a few new tricks. He taught me how to complete the edge of my knives so that the blade would be centered. He would just grab the obsidian from me that I was working on and start chipping. And pretty soon his hand would be bleeding all over the place, and he would just keep on going, never skipping a beat. He told his customers to check out our store on their way to Reno. Just a great guy. When my wife was pregnant, he brought us a dozen donuts on every visit. When he heard I needed help with my saw blade, he gave me new blades. We’ll never forget him.”

Bryan in 2019 at the counter of one of three shop buildings he built himself.. These formed the  best rock shop in Nevada. / Click on image to enlarge.

Bryan’s love of people, place, and helping shone through most vividly with what twenty-three year Esmeralda County Sheriff Kenneth Elgan told me at the cemetery. He said, “To be successful you have to have good people behind you. Bryan would do anything at any time to help. He was with every search and rescue operation we conducted and he knew every road in the county. With the large area that we serve, everyone in my department especially relies on each other. Bryan typified that. Bryan was also a pillar of the community and he will be missed.”

While Goldfield may now be missing some gold in human form, Bryan Smalley certainly left golden memories for friends, family, law enforcement, and town folk to cherish forever.

–end of article–

Bryan shown here in June, 2020 cutting some of this writer’s copper in quartzite from the Striped Hills of Nye County near Lathrop Wells, Nevada.

The jewelry room with Bryan at the end of the video along with a guest appearance by Fred the Dog.  Bryan told me that  a few customers once saw Fred on my Instagram post and knew him by name when they visited.

 

More Bryan Smalley links here

Extra 1 (internal link)

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Extra 5 (internal link)

–30–

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NightWare Review: My First Ten Days with NightWare

November 4, 2021

A NightWare™ review. I will try to produce a rough transcript of this video tonight.

My nightmares started with a traumatic incident that happened in 1988. I did not see the event in person.

Looking back at thirty plus years of treatment for these on and off nightmares, I’m convinced that trauma broke my brain. That break now lets in the incredible daytime anxiety I have felt since the third grade into the nighttime.

I can’t do avoidance therapy when I am asleep. My anxiety finds me defenseless against all of the mindless fears and frights that I have and turns them into attacks with these nightmares.

No, addressing my anxiety has not stopped the nightmares. Like you, I have tried everything including ECT. I am now out of options.

Until later — I sincerely wish you peace and a quiet mind.

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

ROUGH, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO

[00:00:08.750]
Hi. My name is Thomas Farley, and I have been a nightmare sufferer since October 1019 88. If you are suffering nightmares, I simply do hope for the best for you. This is a new FDA approved treatment system for reducing, possibly eliminating nightmares called Night Ware. W-A-R-E.

[00:00:46.310]
I’ve had it for about ten days, so anything I say in the next ten minutes is subject to change, but these are my first impressions. I’m really glad that there is a new treatment out there. I wish the developers well, first things first. This is about $7,000. As it sits.

[00:01:10.430]
You get my insurance won’t pay for it. The majority of insurance carriers will not and they’re working on that. But right now you’re out of pocket. I have always been out of pocket with my psychiatric care. I never can get seen often enough for it to do any good.

[00:01:31.010]
So you have just charging cables, especially provisioned dedicated iphone that works with specially provisioned Apple Watch. If you’re not familiar and what it does is it monitors your heart rate, your movement, and when it hits certain parameters within this algorithm they’ve developed, then it will tap you on the wrist to try to interrupt that violent nightmare, that event that you’re experiencing. If you’re not familiar with an Apple watch, this is my personal Apple watch, and it actually is electromechanical. These little dots here actually can tap you on the inside of the wrist when you have it on.

[00:02:34.170]
So that let’s say you’re driving and you are using Google Maps and you’re getting instructions on your iphone.

[00:02:45.870]
Your iphone will communicate to your watch. So that is a left turn is coming up. You’ll get a tapping produced by the watch on your wrist. The phone is communicating with the watch, and it’s a physical sensation. It can be significant.

[00:03:09.910]
I think the main thing is that I wasn’t really that well informed at all about the device. The major limitation for me right now, it isn’t going to be fixed until the future. And I hope around in the future is that it does not start, it will not start an intervention. It will not start this tapping to disrupt a nightmare within 30 minutes of going to sleep. And I wish I had known that I would have tried it anyway, but I can have a nightmare within well, as soon as my head hits the pillow and I’m sure there’s thousands or hundreds of thousands of other people.

[00:04:00.810]
So I never envisioned the idea that a medical device could be hooked up to you. Essentially, you could start the medical device and it wouldn’t start recording until or helping for 30 minutes, and it won’t.

[00:04:23.590]
Yeah, any reduction later on in the night. But here’s a problem with that in that if you turn off the watch, say in 2 hours, if you have a really ragged sleep cycle, you’re getting 30 minutes. Here an hour and a half here then you got to walk around for 3 hours each time you turn it off and then turn it back on. Each time you turn it on, you’re locked into this 30 minutes of no help coming whatsoever ever period. So best to keep it on.

[00:05:00.730]
I would say the entire night and then let the what they call machine learning figure it all out.

[00:05:14.150]
The literature and what I was told on the phone kind of contradict each other, and in all cases, there’s a lack of information of the gritty details you want, and my camera instruction manuals are more detailed than this. Why this is important is because I want to have the device work for me as well as it can. And to do that, I want to understand it. I know I’m going to have to be going back and forth with my psychiatrist. I was keeping a sleep log of all of these false positives that were being triggered, and apparently the sleep blog doesn’t matter at all.

[00:06:05.610]
It’s learning on its own. And maybe I can get into the details of some of the emails that he sent me, but that lack of detail is especially telling because they don’t have any customer support at night or on weekends when we’re all up having our nightmares. So more information is always better. And I don’t know why the documentation isn’t put up online, and I really hope that they do. And it would say endless emails back and forth with them as well as telephone calls trying to figure out why did this happen?

[00:06:44.910]
Why did that happen? For example, with that 30 minutes window of no interventions possible, normally, that information, the event will be recorded on their servers, but not necessarily shown in the graphs that you see or are routinely sent to the psychiatrist, they have to be apparently singled out somehow for recollection. I’m still working through this, but again, I think that’s enough for right now.

[00:07:27.610]
Okay, so $7,000 and of course, if it’s life or death for you, I don’t know what to say, and those 1st 30 minutes won’t ever get you an intervention. So with that, I will try to make some more videos as things go along as I learn more. And I really wish the developers will.

 

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Thoughts on writing Uncategorized Writing by others

Heart Of Darkness

I’ve supplied the paragraph breaks in the following, my apologies to Conrad. The online presentations of Heart of Darkness are hard to read for their dense, blocky paragraphs. Still, you should read it in its original form. Conrad came to English late; his writing shows what a non-native speaker can achieve. He was forever receiving Polish/English dictionaries as gifts and he was insulted each time he got one.

Heart of Darkness:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm

All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing.

The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’

The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career. I had full information about all these things, and, besides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory. I’ve done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilization. But then, you see, I can’t choose. He won’t be forgotten.

Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can’t forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully—I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.

https://likeawordmisplaced.wordpress.com/heart-of-darkness-part-2/