Random Thought Theatre

The Boxer

2012-09-11T19:43:00.000-07:00

    Well it's been a while folks. Sorry about that. The heat leaves me very uninspired but I heard an old song this morning and one of the lyrics reminded me of a story you might like. The lyric is "when I left my home and family I was no more than a boy, in the company of strangers in the quiet of the railway station, running scared". I of course had heard the song a thousand but it wasn't till this morning that I realized that I had lived that lyric.

    The day or days actually that came to mind started on a wonderful morning in Canterbury U.K. where I had spent the last two days sight-seeing and wondering about. It had been a nice time. I stayed in a great B&B, got to see really old churches and got creeped out by a boys choir. It was time to be heading home however so I made my way to the train station and bought my ticket to London. I had just enough for the trip, then once in London I was going to catch a cab to my bank, get money, pay the cab and then catch my train home. Easy right?

    The train ride to London went fine and I was in line for a cab and just as I was getting into one when a horrible thought came over me. "Oh my God! It Sunday." my brain screamed. I slid out of the cab and let the next person in line have the cab. I quickly rifled through my pockets looking for money. I had 35p or about 50 cents American. It was Sunday and my bank was closed. This was in the days (in England at least) before ATMs and there was no way for me to get any money until the next morning when my bank opened. The bank was way across town and London is a very big town. I started walking.

    At fist I got lost so I wondered around until I found myself again. I found myself close to Trafalgar Square and all of a sudden there were all these cops on motorcycles racing up to where I was with lights flashing. There was a lot of them and the first thing that goes through my mind is, "Oh perfect. I have walked into a standoff or a IRA bombing and I have no idea which way to run. Then I saw people with numbers on their chests running towards me. I had walked right into the middle of the London Marathon. I was relived and managed not trip some Kenyan guy or anything. It might have been fun to watch for a while but the city wasn't getting any smaller. I continued walking.

    Like an idiot I hadn't taken advantage of my free breakfast at the B&B earlier and now it was the middle of the day and I was starving. I found a place that bought gold and I had a gold chain that I wore back them so I went in to sell it. It would only take me five pounds to get home and I felt relief that the nightmare might soon be over. To my dismay and mind numbing disappointment the guy wouldn't buy the chain. He calmly told me that anything he could pay wouldn't be worth my time and that life tests you sometimes and you have to step up. I thought this was pretty fucking philosophical for a pawnbroker but there was nothing I could do about it. I wandered out of the shop and back to the bustling streets. My stomach was now screaming with hunger. As I wondered down the street I came upon a fruit cart. I spent all of my net worth, that whopping 35 pence, on an apple.. To this day I can still taste that apple. It was a green Granny Smith, tart and juicy. I devoured it, the juice flowing down m,y cheeks. I ate it until I was picking around the seeds in the core. It was and still is the best apple I have ever had. There was nothing but two seeds and a stem left by the time I was done with it and it actually gave my a rush. I could feel the fructose flowing through my veins and I used my extra energy to finish my walk to Paddington Station.

Paddington back then was very different from the Paddington that stands now. It's all clean today with nice shops and a pretty nice hotel next door. There is a Yo Sushi for Christ sake! Today it holds no resemblance to my one time home away from home. Back then the walls were black with coal soot and the exhaust from the cabs that drove into the station and cued up with engines running waiting for passengers to exit trains. The place that now has a sushi restaurant was a terrible little hotel that cost something like 18 pounds a night for a room that you could barley turn around in and a bed that folded out of the wall. It folded out like a cot not like a Murphy bed and was rocked not so gently all night from the trains coming into the station and the trains beneath you in the tube. The only advantage the rooms had to the benches in the station was the closet like rooms were warm. As I would find out the benches were not.

So I finally made it to Paddington having used up all the energy my apple had given me and I realized that I had reached my destination and had no plan. I couldn't sneak onto the train. It didn't look like it would be easy and I had no idea what they did to you if you got caught. I wasn't that disparate yet. I was an American and there were a lot of other Americans moving through this train station. I had some very nice camera equipment in my camera case on my shoulder so I thought I'd find an American and offer them a great deal on a camera lens.One of the most important lessons I learned this particular night is that American tourist have a bad reputation because American tourist are assholes.Serious pricks, even to their own kind. The few that let me get through telling them my predicament and offering a 100 dollar lens to them for five bucks to get home would usually just turn around and act like I wasn't there.After a few hours I just gave up.

I was hungry, really pissed off at my countrymen and getting cold. I got off my bench and walked across the station to go to the bathroom and on my way back saw a Bobbie carrying my bag away."Fuck! What now?" I thought and started walking towards the Bobbie. I had spent most of the last few hours cursing ugly Americans and without knowing it I had become the worst kind of ugly American you can be. When I got up to go to the bathroom I left my bag by the bench I had been sitting on. This was an England that every night on the news somebody had been killed by the I.R.A. The very train station I was in had signs at every entrance warning people to be aware of bombs. As I described what was in the bag to the Bobbie and got dressed down for my behavior I realized what had just put this poor guy through. He was young for a cop. He looked like he was just out of school and I had just made him open up a bag that very well could have contained a bomb that would have blown him apart. He was cross with me but if the rolls were reversed I think I would have beaten the shit out of me.

I slinked back to my bench feeling even worse than I did before and it was getting colder. The wind was blowing right through the open end of the station and right through the jacket I was wearing. As I was trying to find a position on my bench that was comfortable and finding things to help block the wind I noticed a guy that was yelling at a nearby payphone. It seemed he was trying to make a collect call but whoever he was calling was not accepting the charges and he was pissed. He left the booth and came and sat down at my bench. "Family" he said to me in a thick accent, "you know". "Yeah." I said not really want to talk to anybody but he kept going. He told me about his family in South Africa which I thought was strange because he was obviously Arab but I didn't care he seemed like a good guy. I told him about my day and he offered to buy me a burger across the street. That was about the best thing I could have heard and we went to the Wimpy burger that was close.

I tried not to inhale my hamburger but I think I did a pretty poor job. For those of you that think the Wimpy burgers were just from Popeye cartoons or have never heard of them they were the English answer to MacDonald's. I don't think they exist anymore and that isn't a bad thing. They were horrible. I think they were at least forty percent sawdust and some kind of meat that had been steamed. Right then however it was like steak and lobster. After we finished our food I was ready to head back to my bench when this guy offers me a place to crash. "It's small" he said "but it's right around the corner and its warm." Well I wasn't going to turn that down so we walked about a block to his building. It had one of those elevators that you have to close the metal grate close before it went up. I had never seen one of those before. His place was really small, one room and that was it. The bathroom was down the hall. I had never seen anything that small that somebody lived in and payed money for.The bed took up most of the apartment. I started looking around at where I was going to sleep. There wasn't much room on the floor.

We sat down and he poured us two large glasses of red wine. At this point I started getting a little nervous but this guy seemed normal and he had really helped me out so I drank my wine and continued making small talk. I remember putting my wine glass down and starting to sit back up when he grabbed me, hard, and kissed me on the mouth. Now before I go on I want to make a few things clear. I am not homophobic. I lived in the Castro district in S.F. for goodness sake and I know that it is a very rare thing that a gay man mistakes somebody that's straight for someone that's gay. However, keep in mind I was fifteen years old, that's not O.K. right there, I didn't really know where I was and I was in a very small space with a full grown man making a very aggressive move on me. That said, I was scared. Really scared and that worked in my favor in a big way. All I remember is that I hit him hard, as hard as I could in the face. I hit him right in the nose and it must have stunned him a bit because I had enough time to grab my bag and get out the door. I ran down the hall like I was being chased but at that point I didn't know if I was being chased or not. Just like a scene from a cheap horror movie, except I was playing the chick, there I was punching the down button on the elevator looking up the hall just waiting for a bleeding maniac to round the corner with a butcher knife or something. The car finally got there and then I was fumbling with that fucking metal grate thing. I'm from California we don't have old shit like that. Well at least I had never seen old shit like that. I made down to the street and before I knew it I was back at the station. I didn't even know how I knew the way but there I was again and even though I was right where he had found me, I felt safe for some strange reason. There were not many people but there were some and that made me feel better.

I was back on by bench and it was really cold now and I was still shaky from the adrenalin but that faded quickly and the later it got the less people were in the station. It got to a point that I had gathered some newspapers that were on the ground and had made myself a half windbreak, half pillow out of them. I was still cold to the point of shivering uncontrollably but with my newspaper contraption but I was so exhausted I felt like I could almost fall asleep.Then suddenly the night got even stranger.

It started with an older man with maybe three teeth in his head, who reeked of cheap alcohol, sat down on my bench. Now I say "my bench" and I mean it. It is amazing how quickly and one could argue instinctively. human beings can grow possessive and protective of otherwise arbitrary objects or pieces of geography. Something like a table in a cafe, a parking place or in my place a bench in a train station. This was my bench now and this smelly drunk was invading it. Then his friends showed up and also invaded my bench to a point that I had to sit up. They were an invading force and I was outnumbered. There were other benches not but three meters away that I could have moved to or far across the station it was empty. But this was my bench and I wasn't going to give it up.

Just as I started to open my mouth to tell the drunk men to find another bench the first toothless man started speaking to me in a loud voice. Now this guy was drunk but what came out of his mouth made no sense. The speech pattern that most Americans recognize as an "English Accent", the one that is depicted on American T.V. and movies is just one of many different dialects spoken in England (not to mention Scotland and Wales). Some of these are very hard for Americans to understand. Now I was living in a house with a woman from northern England that had such a thick accent that even after living with her for months I still couldn't understand her on the phone but I had become very good at understanding even heavy accents. At first I thought what the man was saying was just being said with an accent I hadn't encountered. When he repeated himself however I realized that he wasn't speaking English at all. It was clear he was asking me a question but he wasn't speaking English and for that matter any language I had ever heard. I didn't really know how to react, I told him that I was sorry, that I didn't understand him but like many people do when confronted with somebody who speaks a different language, he simply repeated the question slower. Like that would help but of course it didn't and he started to get a little frustrated with me.

His two friends were arguing between themselves during all this and were of no help. The man threw up him hands and pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his coat. He took a large drag off of it and handed it to me. Even at fifteen I knew whatever disease you could get be damned if your in that position you take a drink off the man's bottle. This pleased him a lot and he started shouting to one of his arguing friends. This gentleman spoke English, with a very heavy accent but English that I could understand."He wants to know what the hell you are doing here." the man said to me. "I'm stuck. I don't have any money and I can't get home until tomorrow so I'm staying here" I replied. "You're American!" the man said obviously surprised that an American would have no money sleeping in a train station. "I'm Californian!" I corrected the man. He laughed and translated all this to his toothless friend who was speaking Gaelic I realized later. The toothless man laughed hard, grabbed me by the shoulder and thrust the bottle of what tasted like kerosene back at me. It tasted horrible but it was warming and I was thankful for it.

The toothless man started showing me the things that he had. I don't know why he did this, they were all simple little ordinary things; a box of matches, a small sketchbook with some poorly drawn pictures in it, he had a watch that didn't seem to work and a watch chain and he had a small pair of scissors that were curved at the point. He took those scissors off the chain and showed me a trick that he was obviously proud of. I still don't know quite how he did it but he was able to hide them inside a closed fist and in a split second he could have the point of those scissors on the outside of his fist looking like a real weapon. At the end of this show and tell like exercise I realized that these were all the things that this man owned. These simple objects represented the totality of his worldly possessions. I felt a little stupid feeling so bad for myself for having to sleep in a train station, especially when I found out that the three of them normally slept in a graveyard.

After a few more pulls off the bottle we had worked out a system of communication that functioned pretty well. The one guy that spoke in a language that I understood filled the large gaps between myself and the other two, especially the toothless man who seemed to had taking a liking to me. For some unknown reason we all knew the words to,"If I knew you were coming I'd baked a cake." Come to think of it that pretty much all the lyrics to the song but anyway when we got to a place where language broke down. When I couldn't even understand the guy that spoke English we would all start singing, "If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake. Baked a cake. Baked a cake!" It's a good thing that it was about three in the morning and there was nobody around because with being as drunk as we were getting and singing the same song over and over again we surly would have been locked up. Especially if there were any of my fellow countrymen on holiday around (can you tell I'm still a bit bitter?)

It was late and the temperature had continue to drop and even with the whiskey I was starting to get really cold. Then something happened that amazes me to this day. My new toothless friend disappeared for a few moments and came back with an extra large really hot cup of tea. There was this tiny shop that actually stayed open all night or opened really, really early but he had gone and got me this tea. This man, who slept in graveyards, who carried all he owned on his back and who I know only had about a pound to his name. This man who I just met and who I didn't even share a language with had taken a good third of his net worth and bought me a big cup of tea because he could see that I was cold. I tried to refuse it or to share but he would have none of it. I took a big sip, which burnt by tongue but warmed my like an electric blanket. I could feel the warmth flowing from my inside to my frozen fingers. After a few sips I stopped shivering and he just watched me nodding and smiling with his few teeth. It was a beautiful smile that came from a place that I don't know if I fully understand to this day but I want to. I want to be the type of person that takes joy from easing someones suffering even when I am suffering myself. We sang the song a few more times.

The toothless man's generosity didn't end with the tea however. He reached back into his filthy jacket (I think he was actually wearing three jackets) and pulled his pair of scissors back out. The ones that he could do the really neat trick with and he put them in my hand and closed my hand around them. Then amazingly, in the only English I heard him speak, he looked hard into my eyes and in an accent so thick I barely understood him said "Never know when you might need them". He winked at me and smiled, took them out of my hands and slipped them into the inside pocket of my jacket. He zipped my jacket up further and patted me where he placed the scissors and repeated "Never know".

We all drank a little longer until their bottle was gone. They all gave me a big hug and I tried my best not to recoil at the smell and they went off to sleep in the graveyard. The one who spoke English told me that it was safer (gangs of kids sometimes sometimes beat them up for fun) and they didn't get kicked out when the morning commute started. Then they were gone and I was again all but alone in the large station on my bench. I laid back down, arranged my discarded newspaper into another wind break and put what was left of my still warm tea inside my jacket for some extra warmth and for the first time that night fell asleep. Fell asleep soundly and slept so hard that when I did wake up the station was already half full of train travelers.

I walked back to my bank, which this time did not seem so very long. I withdrew my train fare home and took a cab back to the station. I bought a turkey sandwich while I was waiting for my train and wolfed it down so aggressively the people around me probably thought I was a bit sick in the head. Then, just like that, I was in my comfortable seat int he train watching the English country side rush by in between the stops in small towns on the way. Watching the world fly by in a blur of green fields and patches of red brick I kept thinking about the four men I had met the night before. The pedophile would be rapist. I hoped that I had broke his nose and he was having to explain why he was so busted up to a boss or a classmate. I thought about how I didn't call the cops and I wondered if there would be another kid that wouldn't be as lucky as I was. I mostly thought about my three new friends. The guys that saved me when I was as low as I have ever been and the fact that I didn't even know their names. I hoped that they hadn't gotten beaten up by some teenage fucks with nothing else to do. The next few times I was in London I went to a few cemeteries in the area at night and hung out much longer than I needed in Paddington and other stations hoping to run into them again. So I could at least thank them right, give them some money, put them up in a hotel for a couple of days. I didn't have much money but I was Bill Gates compared to these guys and I wanted to show them how much what they did for me (especially the toothless man) meant to me. I never saw any of them ever again.

I kept those scissors in that same jacket for many years and was more upset about the scissors when I lost that jacket (it was stolen) than the jacket. They were a reminder of how people should be to one another regardless of difference or situation. I try to live that way, I fail most of the time but I try. When Europeans first came to the new world they named most of the tribes. They never translated what their name meant into English or French because most of their names just meant human beings.Who would have thought that half a world away in a cold train station I would meet three human beings and who would have thought that living like one could be so hard. Well if all else fails we can always sing.

Why I have not been posting

2012-05-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

Well hi everybody. I have been gone a while but it's not you, its me. These people at adsense are fuckers and disabled my account for no appearent reason and of course it being an online thing the possibility of speaking to a human being are slim to nill. There has been plenty of jokes about this but I don't think it is that funny anymore. Being an anthropologist I am interrested in humans and human contact. I think we are slowly being weened off of humanity. Some would say that this blog and others like it makes a perfect example and maybe they are right but there is no way that I could have written or hope to know the better than 2,000 of you that have read this blog and this one is really small as far as readership. I mean we can't explain problems to computers, nobody is yelling back at the angry and disturbed in the blogespere, nobody has beat up Rush or Beck. Not that they aren't entitled to their opion but lets be honest here, half the shit they spew isn't really their opinon it's what the web hits tell their producers people are responding to so if they turn up the heat, more hits, more ads, more money.I think that too many of us fall into the trap of saying "hell yeah" or "I want to kill that guy" not realizing that is exactly what they want and don't care which side your on because either way your helping them become richer.
When my wife moved to the town I'm from she was tripped out by the culture and I have written about that before. Violence, in a way, breeds manners and I really do belive that. You can't beat up a computer's voice and even if you could it wouldn't know or care why you were doing it. As recent events has shown we are becoming dividedd to the point of civil war in this country and which ever side you are on I'm sure you are firmly set that you and yours are right (I know I am) and the other side is crazy.

2012-05-15T19:32:00.001-07:00

Well some bad things have been learned this school year. Case in point, if you are a Hispanic student who parents speak Spanish at home but you are fluent in English and enter the school system as fluent one would think you would stay that way right? No. If you start to screw up, lets say in middle school as many of us do, you don't get held back or flunk, you get re designated as a English learner. Everybody is happy. You don't have to do any work and the District gets money and excuses as to why their test scores suck. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't read the files myself. Also there is a large trend to not suspend or expel students for bad behavior because it makes the District look bad. A kid in one of my classes this year pulled a knife on another kid during a fight and all he got was suspended for three days. Outside of school walls that would have been assault with a deadly weapon but why teach kids real world lessons.

There will be more on this but I swear I am not turning into a whining yuppie who sceams "What about the children!" at the drop of a hat. I was born before 1993 when children were invented. Before that people didn't give that much of a fuck about us. You had no children housing, clubs, pools, pretty much everything. Everybody was too busy swapping wives and doing coke to be concerned with small humans. I think even as a kid I liked it better that way. Kids don't like adults messing with their fun as much as adults don't like kids getting in the way of their fun.

To be fair however we didn't have video games at home (at least not good ones) and we only had three or four channels of T.V. so we were probably in need of more attention than kids today. But you didn't need kids seats, you could just throw us in the back of a pickup, close the little sliding window and drive as far as you wanted without having to listen to Shrek or anybody talking at all for that matter. Also, lets face it and be honest, our parents drove drunk. Now if you had a fucked up childhood and booze was a real problem I'm sorry and I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying that compared to today the average parent drove a little fucked up with kids in the car on a pretty regular basis. It's just how it was. Nobody cared if we cracked our skulls open riding our skateboards or for heavens sake our bikes. We didn't get helmets (thank God) and if your eggs got scrambled well that was sad but shit like that happens to kids.

I'm not saying that kids today have it easy, quite the opposite. I wouldn't want to be a kid now (except for the extension of life and seventeen year old girls, especially the girls) for anything. Their schools suck, they have to have car seats, they have to leave the house in essentially a bubble, with pads and helmets and sunscreen and GPS brackets.They can't drive until their my age and then they need an adult in the car with them. I'd go fucking nuts I was on my second car and had an apartment when I was 16.

So they can't read or do math but they are safe, will never see or hear anything that somebody else finds offensive, that is of course before they go to WAR.

Random Mass Extinctions

2011-06-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

    Well another school year is over and I have learned a few things. I started the year by hitting the ground running. On the first day I was told I would be teaching a class on Environmental Science for the whole year. I had no lesson plans, little support and the only other person that was teaching the same subject was doing so for the first time. This is a situation that no credentialed teacher would ever put up with, but us certified scum? Who cares. I was instantly thrown into a department that I think is pretty typical. Which is to say that it was totally FUBAR (fucked up beyond any recognition).

    It seems that every school department has a similar makeup and similar petty, petty feuds. Science departments are not quite as special as most, they tend to be a little more intelligent that most teachers. That is by no means a compliment, most teachers these days are not that bright and I'm not saying that out of arrogance or jealousy or anything. It is just a fact and a fact that really surprised and disturbed me at first. There are smart teachers, very smart ones but they are the minority. I have described it like two white people walking down a crowded sidewalk in Nairobi. Even if they don't say anything to each other they notice and acknowledge each other. Same thing with smart people in a department at a public school. If you are one (and yes I do consider myself a little smart) you look for your kind in a fevered manner just to make sure there is not some thing wrong with you.

    I found a few smart people in the science department and they recognized that I was one of them and they did try to shield or warn me about the really stupid or mentally unbalanced individuals that I may encounter. Unfortunately for me the teacher teaching the same class was one of those. Every week in our department meeting the two of us would sit together and talk about lesson plans and labs to make sure the classes were on the same level. You don't want one super easy and the other really hard. Every week we would sit together with our note pads. Mine was usually filled with idea about curriculum, labs and activities to help engage and challenge the kids. Her's was usually empty, waiting to be filled by my ideas which she heavily relied upon.When I had questions she would normally refer me to another teacher (one of the smart ones) because she "wasn't quite clear on an answer."

    Now many teachers will complain about the students. That the kids are different today. Well here's a news flash, kids are different today just like we were different than our parent's generation. If they weren't there would be something very strange going on in the world. Sure the electronic devices that were a constant fight, got on my nerves -- and yes, I now truly hate Hip-Hop -- but that is normal. In some ways these kids have it so much better than we did and in some ways they are fucked. I think it is beyond wonderful that I have to explain what it was like to live in a world that was a button push away from not existing anymore. That I have PSD from the emergency broadcasting tests. That I would almost shit my pants every time I heard that sound because that meant the world had about thirteen more minutes left and that was a real possibility (to most of us a likely end of the world).. However, that horrible reality did give some of us (myself for sure) an excuse to party like it was 1999 with no regrets. "Fuck it, world's going to end anyway."

    Of course we didn't have to live with the constant bombardment of messages telling us that if we even took a drag off a joint we were permanent losers. We had terrorism but the country wasn't obsessed with it. We had scandal but we didn't have whole T.V. networks based on them. We had political party differences but not the whack polarization that exists today. The biggest thing possibly and certainly when it comes to education, we didn't have 'no child left behind' or as teachers openly call it 'no child included in the first place'. It is by far the most damaging thing done to this generation and I am including the wars. It has removed the passion from teaching and learning. It is all about the test and nothing else can matter to the teachers or the students that want to archive. Never mind that the test is on more than a few occasions flat wrong and more often far too vague. It is just another way for people to make money and that's it.

    Let me give you an example. One of the questions I had to teach to the biology class was about the impact of human migration into the New World. The right answer on the test is that the first people to the New World (and this isn't the stupidity that they still teach that Columbus was the first person to get here from the Old World in a ship) the first people in the New World were responsible for the Late Pleistocene extinctions. That is wrong or at the very least still not proven. Now I am an archaeologist, and a New World one at that. I have had a beer with one of the globally excepted experts on this topic but if I would have taught by students the right answer or shared any of my knowledge on the topic I would be doing them a disservice and risking my job. My answer is not what the test says and therefore is incorrect. All my passion about the subject tends to dwindle when I am forced to lie to my students and I'm sure they can notice that so any potential intellectual spark that could have been ignited is smothered before it can give off any light. Both parties are left in darkness.

    In addition to the test there are the supposed standards. Towards the end of the first quarter this year I asked a couple of fellow teachers about grades because I was concerned. I was concerned because many of them were failing. I take no pride in this like some teachers do but the main reason for the students failing was that they would do no work. Not below average work or just flunking tests, they were doing no work at all so they were failing. When I inquired about it I was met with a universal "Yeah..." indicating that they all had the same problems but it was always followed by "be careful though, the district doesn't like F's". Sure social promotion is a thing of the past but it has just been replaced with teachers who can't risk flunking kids that do nothing. Let the local J.C. sort that out.

    Of course these teachers, smart or stupid, are dealing with horribly overcrowded classrooms, a problem that is leaking into the primary grades at an alarming rate, and smaller and smaller budgets. All of this means nothing to you if you're rich because then you just send your kid to private school (what they wanted all along) and your kid will have smaller classes with teachers that are better equipped and better compensated so happier in general. Unfortunately, the rich make up a very small portion of our society and don't represent a population that can have an impact on our standing in the world in regards to math and science. Thank goodness were hybrids and the genetic variation has probably given us a bit of an advantage at least for a while.

    Today I watched a class of sixth graders graduate the sixth grade. They were surrounded by happy teachers and some proud parents. One student asked me if I remembered my graduation from elementary school. He was amazed when I told him we didn't have one. We got to eat our lunches on the grass the last day. That was our big graduation. The kid was confused when I told him that kids had not been invented until 1981. Watching the ceremony made me happy but also a little sad for a few reasons. First I knew some of these kids and they shouldn't have passed. They were moving into middle school where even less attention will be paid to them and the ramifications of their actions will be more severe. Middle school is a great place to fall through the cracks. They would be returning to a system that has even less resources for them but will expect much more. That on top of all the other great shit that happens to everybody during middle school. It's a fucked up part of life.

    So another year is over and I'm going back to school so I can be more of a player (and get paid like a grown up) in this system that is so fucked up but everywhere I look I see something that I could help figure out. I'm going to do my best to publish anthropological papers on school institutions, the cultures inside them and the maladaptive practices that happen in them everyday. I want to study the power dynamic between student and teacher and find out why so many teachers have such an adversarial relationship with their students and also how the discipline of teaching was started and perpetuated as a "gift" or a "calling" instead of an important job. Until them I will play the game, watch, learn and hopefully help a few students believe that knowledge is a good thing. That is of course if the state can afford schools next year. Happy summer.

Random Passings

2011-06-04T14:15:00.000-07:00

    Not much has been said about my Grandfather in this blog and I don't know why. He was the man that raised me even though he was in his seventies when I moved in. He was my male role model and as such a very important person in my life. He was a union head in the south valley, way before Cesar, in the forties when such things were frowned on to say the least. I'll put it this way, the man carried an axe handle with him and often also a .38 special. He had fists like mallets and even well into his seventies, when I had the idea that I was a man now, he convinced me that even in his advanced age he would have used those mallets to beat the living shit out of me. There was no fear in that man's eyes and there is nothing as scary and defeating when squaring off with somebody as that. It tells you, "I have done this a million times and I am not looking forward to cleaning you up after I kick your ass". All it took was those mallets coming up and that look for me to decide that I would become a man another day.

    I bring him up now because I think he might have reincarnated as our cat Gulliver. Gulliver passed away yesterday after nineteen years (almost twenty) with us and both Val and myself are, as is normal, a little fucked up today about it. However, not as bad as we have been when we have lost other animals and here is why. About two weeks ago Gulliver had a stroke and lost the use of one of his back legs. We figured it was finally time to put him down. We are not selfish people that will keep an animal that is in pain or uncomfortable alive just for our emotional needs. However, if the animal is not in pain, has the same personality we are of the philosophy that we should let nature take it's course, even if it is a little more work for us.

    We had the appointment to put Gulliver down and a half hour before we were going to leave we asked him to give us a sign. "Have something to eat and drink," Val told him "Convince us that your still in there." We started to get ready to take him and when we came to take him to his death we found him sitting up and eating. He popped his head out of his food bowl, gave us a grumpy MEOW and had some water. "Well fuck!" we thought to ourselves,"we told him what to do and he did it so we can't put him down now" we thought. It should be noted that he was in no pain at all from his stroke so besides the leg he was himself and comfortable. I called the vet and canceled.

    Over the next two weeks Gulliver was very happy and seemed to be getting better. He ate and drank more than he had in months and got lots of attention (grooming every day, lots of pets and wet food). He was living the high life but as expected it didn't last. After about seventeen days he had another stroke and this one was much worse than the first. He seemed spaced out and not himself. He wouldn't eat and for the first time he was in pain so we got the quickest appointment that we could (just after both of us got off work) to put him down. Val held him in a large towel as I drove and we were telling him all the people that had loved him over the years, how many people would miss him and how much we loved him. It was at this point that he passed away. He hated vets and was not going to go back again. He decided when he was going to check out and it wasn't going to be at the vets.

    I bring up my Grandfather because his death was strangely similar. He had a massive stroke during breakfast with his wife in his home and at first he wasn't going to make through the night. That turned into the next day and the whole time I was alone on the Central Coast and for reasons that I won't go into now I wasn't allowed to go say goodbye (that had nothing to do with my Grandfather and was fucked up). I kept getting phone calls with the update always being the same,"He is going to be gone any second." They had put him on life support and after three days I got the phone call that they were unplugging him at two and to keep a good thought (seeing as I don't pray or anything). Well, two came and went and I waited by the phone waiting to hear that my Grandfather was gone. When the phone rang it was my mom, "Well they unplugged ramp at Two and the doctors can't explain it but he didn't.......... well... pass" she told me "They don't know what's going on.

   I put the phone down and just started yelling "Fuck yeah Gramp! Fuck them! Yeah!". I knew he was going to die soon but he was NOT going to be told when he was supposed ti die. He would die when he was good and ready. He lived for two more days and passed in his sleep. Well I have to say that Gulliver did the same thing. "Fuck vets. I hate those fuckers (he had only been once in his life). I'll die when I want to and he did. So did my Grandfather (who would have no problem being compared to a cat by the way, he loved animals, not many people but loved animals) the doctors did their best at passive euthanasia but he wouldn't have it. It was his life and he was in charge.

    So today do your best to live life deliberately and have a drink for missing friends. Also enjoy the rain!

Random Writters Block/ Randoms Ships

2011-05-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

O,K, guys. I have not abandoned Random Thoughts. I have just been a little stressed out as of late and had a bit of writers block. There has been so many things happening in the world lately it has been hard to comment on just one and there are so many suggestions from the past that I got a little overwhelmed with ideas that I never got to any of them. I'm getting my brain back however and there will be new and hopefully entertaining RTTs soon.

    I do owe everybody the end of a story I already started however so back to the bar.
When we left I was in a dimly lit bar mostly empty except for a few businessmen and one attractive young lady that had just started talking to me and I had just bought a drink. I have to be honest, it was a good thing she showed up when she did, when I was already half in the bag, because I would have blown it somehow if I was sober. She was pretty, talkative and forward and I would have been too nervous for her if I had been straight. I was a bit young after all.

   Over the next hour or two she told be all about herself. How her parents were English ex-pats living in Paris now (that explained the strange accent she had) and even though she had spent a lot of her life in France she didn't think too much of "the fucking frogs". The girls were stuck up and even though she spoke fluent French (something that she liked to occasionally show off in mid sentence) she wasn't a native speaker and there were always going to be some things she didn't quite get so she felt that she was insulted some times when she didn't realize it at the time. She felt more at home in England and so did her parents, who fought about it often, but her father had a good job in Paris and he couldn't find one as good in England. I think he was an architect but don't hold me to that. She was very impressed to hear that I was from California and by the time we were done talking about it I had become every Californian stereotype you could think of. Of course I surfed and hung out at the beach all the time, blah, blah. I lied, so kill me, she was cute.

   After a while I realized I was out of money and if I didn't have any more money I couldn't buy her any more drinks and then the party would be over. So without realizing how forward and really obnoxious this was I just asked her if she wanted to go up to my room because I had a mini-bar and we could have some more drinks. I wasn't thinking about sex (well that's not true but that wasn't why I was asking her up to my room) I just wanted to keep the conversation going and maybe get a kiss or two. O.K. three but really not throwing the line, hey baby lets go up to my room I've got a view. That is still not my style.

   She agreed to the idea with some enthusiasm and off we went. We kept talking and laughing all the way to my room and the mini bar. I opened it up and asked her what we should drink and she went right for the Champagne (the single most expensive thing in the mini bar and candy bars are 12 bucks in a mini bar). Being a gentleman all I will say about the rest of that night is I got the bottle opened and she jumped on me and I was happy.

   Now as I wrote in the first part I was the classic romantic sick teenager and when I woke up the next morning (I didn't even have a hangover) my first thoughts were of the girl still sleeping next to me. How we would go out and do London and we would do a lot more of what we did the night before and all would be grand and she would fall madly in love with me and so on. When I came all the way to however I noticed that she was not sleeping beside me she was putting on her clothes. I could give the blow by blow but I had been a young victim of casual sex, something I didn't really know existed unless it was paid for. She was going to be out of there if I hadn't woke up. I was confused and a little panicked and told her we had to get breakfast, she wasn't hungry, and that I was going to the Tower today and it would be cool if she went with. She agreed but in a kind of inconvenienced way. We didn't talk much in the cab (well she didn't) and she acted quite bored at the Tower (she hated tourist shit and didn't know why I would think it was cool).

   After an uncomfortable walk around the Tower we ended up outside and she got a cab. She kissed me and that was that. I was crushed and pissed off and disappointed and all manner of things but mostly depressed again. I had lost my virginity, what was supposed to be this big moment in life, and I had nobody to share it with and no way of contacting the girl I lost it with. Then I got the bill for the mini bar just to rub salt in the wound. I made my way back to Paddington and was ready to go back home when I realized what had just happened. It wasn't that bad. I had just had sex for the first time with a pretty girl in a nice hotel in London. Life could be worse. I bought a ticket to Windsor instead. I liked Windsor and I knew where there was a cheap B&B. I spent the next two days walking around in the drizzling rain and taking photos. I found a great little tea shop and actually ate a crumpet. I was still sad and lonely but for some reason the sadness was comforting now. I actually had something to me sad about now.

I warned you it wasn't a sexy story.

Random Prostitutes

2011-04-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

    Quick story that came to me today while driving by the place that it happened. When I was young there was lots of names for the act of getting somebody to buy you beer or whatever when you were under age, the one that we used )for some reason) was pimping. You would go and pimp some beer. "Dude we just pimped a case of Bud lets get partying" It was just the term of the time.

    So one night Mojo, Bob, Ray and Mary were doing what we did most nights, we were pimping some booze. You always send the girl. Always. Guys will buy cute girls beer, vodka whatever but if it's another dude the odds drop dramatically. So Mary was standing outside this particularly seedy liquor store by an ice machine, trying to look inconspicuous, pimping all of us something to drink. All of a sudden a Trailways bus pulls up to the liquor store. I mean a full fledged bus full of people pulls up to this little store.

    Several men stumble off the bus and go into the store but one goes towards the other door on the side where Mary was standing. Now I forgot to mention that there is a big spotlight over this door and ice machine. So this guy walks up to within about five feet of Mary and starts peeing on the ice machine. She is looking back at us watching her from the car and all of us kinda shrug our shoulders at this guys behavior. As if on cue the guy suddenly realizes that he is peeing 5 feet from a young girl. He quickly tries to zip himself back into his trousers, pees a little on himself in the process, and said he's sorry to Mary.

    Now none of us in the car could hear their conversation but according to Mary it went something like this. " Sorry about that. I didn't see you there" drunk guy said "what are you doing out here?" "Pimping" Mary replied knowing that drunk people are the best marks. "Pimping? drunk guy replied with a bit of surprise to his voice" really?" "Really" Mary said "think you could maybe help me out?" " Well" drunk guy said mulling it over "how does this work?" "Well..."Mary said "I give you some money and you get me a bottle of Vodka" She started to think this guy was drunk and a little retarded. "That's it" drunk guy replied "Hell ya, what do you want" Mary told him and he went inside and got us a couple of bottles. By the time he got out she was standing next to the car with all of us. Drunk guy saw this and looked a little intimidated. He staggered slowly over to us.

    "So what now, do I like pay one of these guys? drunk guy asked. We all looked at each other confused until Mary put two and two together. "What the fuck do you think that pimping means, man" Mary said in a loud voice. "Well I don't know. See all my buddies rented this bus for a bachelor party and you said you were pimping and...." "You thought I was a fucking whore!"Mary yelled at him. "I thought you were kinda young. I wouldn't have gone through with it. I already decided in the store." drunk guy stammered looking at the three guys she was with who were not pleased with him.

    Then just when Mary was going to chew him out he yells "The bus! Holly shit, the bus." We all look over at the front of the store and all of drunk guys friends have taken off in the bus without him. So in an instant what could have at most been a tongue lashing by Mary ends up with all five of us squeezed into Bob's car racing down this main drag trying to catch this guy's mobile bachelor party. The whole time Drunk guy was apologizing and testing the water if it was possible to work something out in between apologizing. He still had pee on his pants. It was an unpleasant situation.

    We finally caught up with drunk guys very loyal friends on the bus that had gone at least six miles and had still not noticed that he was missing. We dropped him off, rolled down all the windows in Bob's car to try to get the smell out and headed back to my place with our bottles of Vodka. Sometimes not being 21 was more fun.

Random Ships. Part One

2011-04-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

    So I have already made fun of and described in great detail the stories of some of my best friends losing their virginity. So I suppose it's probably a good time for me to get my 'come uppance' and to tell the story of how I lost mine. It's a good story and one I have told proudly for years. It has it all, foreign places, dark bars and exotic women. However, there was always a part of the story that I left out. That is until now.

    Recently I have been teaching Romeo and Juliet to a bunch of ninth graders, which by the way, is one of the stupidest curriculum choices any school district or state has ever made. First, lets fall in love and kill ourselves. Then we can be together forever. Why not just do a unit on BOC's "Don't Fear The Reaper" and get on with it. Second, most of the kids I deal with can hardly read modern English on a sixth grade level (I'm being generous with the level) more or less Shakespeare.However, this is not about the failings of our modern schools. I mention Romeo and Juliet not because of the "star crossed lovers" bit but more because I was much like Romeo before he met Juliet. I was a hormone filled depressive that felt that life was worthless without love and I'm not talking about sex, love.

    Of course sex would be very nice -- and to my friends, the only thing of interest. But in all honesty it was the whole love thing that had me. Like all adolescents I had a huge amount of emotion and I just wanted something to throw it at.

    At the time I was living in England and had a mad crush on a woman that was twenty years my senior and while we did have a strange relationship (I had managed to move to another country for her and she did like to serve me Brandy in the bath) I had realized that anything with her was hopeless. That realization and a good dose of home-sickness, made my feelings of utter emptiness all the more magnified. To give you an idea of the level of depression, I became addicted to watching the snooker championships on BBC 2.

    I finally got off my ass and decided to spend a few days in London. I love London. It is hands down my favorite city in the world. I just feel different when I'm there, more alive. Even the last time I was there the same feeling came rushing back to me. I felt lighter. I don't know why, it's overpriced, overcrowded and it used to be covered in coal soot but it's my town. I thought a couple of days there in my favorite hotel would get me out of my funk.

    London of the early eighties wasn't like the London of today, all shiny with everybody driving new cars. It was pretty fucked up. The IRA was still very active and somebody got killed somewhere in the U.K everyday from some asshole bomber or sniper attack. Fuck all Americans that gave them money. Regardless of politics terrorists are terrorists and the I.R.A. were fucking terrorists.

    The country was broke and finally realizing that the empire was not coming back. Where I lived in Berkshire it was still the England of old in a way. A hard days work and a night at the pub with fam and friends and not much fucking else to do. Every once and a while you would see an encircled a graffitied on a wall but mostly tame.

    London was not. Punk was drawing its last painful breaths and heroin was a huge problem. It would take you ten minutes, even in the middle of Piccadilly, to score if you wanted to and the last few punks roamed the tube stations late at night, like vampires. All wanting to be like Sid or Johnny and just fuck something up. If you had your head about you they were generally good blokes but if you didn't you would be in fucking pieces. But like I said I loved it. Loved the soot, loved the possibility of looking at a slammed out of his skin punk the wrong way, loved the excitement that the bar you were drinking in could be blown into a million little pieces in between sips.It was my town and I was going to let that soot baptise me back to life.

I took the forty minute train ride and rolled into Paddington Station. My home away from home. I would sleep here, hang out with homeless men who slept in cemeteries here, nearly get raped here or it started here, get mistaken for a bomber here and be reduced to panhandling here. Back then the cabs drove into the station so you would step off of a train and after a very short walk, were in the back of a cab. "The McDonald's at Marble Arch please" I told the cab driver and we were off.

    I always went to that McDonald's because it was right across the street from my favorite hotel and it just had good food. I got a hamburger and some fries and crossed the street into the lobby. The Cumberland Hotel. Way too expensive for me but the check in girls knew me I was there so much. I think I probably stood out a bit there too. I was young, maybe Canadian, obviously a bit well off and always had a MacDonald's bag in hand when I checked in. The truth was is that McDonald's would be all I would eat for a day and a half to have the money to stay there (not including drinking money) and I liked the place. There was a bar and a tobacco shop on the first floor where I could buy my Silk Cut cigarettes and a fancy restaurant on I think the fifth floor. It was right across the street from Hyde Park and Marble Arch and a stone's throw from Oxford Circus. My favorite Circus, including Ringling Brothers.

    I got my key, found my room and flopped out on the bed and devoured my hamburger and fries. I opened the windows that faced the park. I was on the third floor, the floor at the level where they flew all the flags outside the hotel. It was a nice day so I climbed out on to the window sill and let my feet dangle down towards the street. The British don't look up for some reason so I could do this mostly unnoticed. I sat there, breathed the diesel fumes in deeply, looked out at the park that seemed to go on forever and watched the flags dance with the breeze. Watched the tops of people's heads as they passed below. I don't know how long I was there but it is a fond memory. I know I felt like a large weight had been lifted from me. Like a three hundred pound man had just gotten off my chest and I could breath again. I was also hungry for some mischief but maybe just some warm up trouble at first, after all I was just back on my feet. The bar on the first floor would be a good place to start.

    Now this was not a pub. Pubs have different hours, have food and are in general happy places to be. It's pretty rare to see people drunk out of their minds at your average pub. This was a bar. Dark, no food and lots of hard alcohol. Bars in London are not places to make friends for the most part. They are there for you to have the privacy to get fucked up without shit like light, music and happy people to get in your way. You have one purpose and you want to attain that purpose as quickly as possible and fuck all else. That sounded like a plan. Go down, get fucked up, reduce life to its lowest terms, drive it into a corner and if it proved to be mean..you know the rest. So down to the bar I went.

    Now as sacrilegious as it sounds I really didn't drink much beer while I lived in England. I really didn't like beer that much. I was only sixteen and I had not yet really acquired the taste for it yet. I did however know that I liked English beer much more than I did the American beer that I had had up until that time.In all fairness to American brewers much of what I had drank in the states was like Coors and Schlitz Malt Liquor and all at barley below room temperature so it was no wonder I didn't really care for beer too much. I loved the holy trinity; Scotch, Brandy and Bourbon. Every once and a while I would drink Gin but the old saying is true, Gin makes a man mean so I didn't go there often.

    By this time I was well over the amazement that I could go into a bar, pub, or whatever and order a drink and they would give it to me. I was sixteen years old. At first it was too much for me, I couldn't believe it and every time I ordered something I was sure that this time was going to be the time they busted me. Then I found out that, at the time, English driving licenses didn't even have pictures on them so "carding" somebody was pretty dumb. If you looked and carried yourself like you were eighteen then you got served. I had to start shaving in the seventh grade so I had no problems.

    I walked into the cave/bar which looked like a triage unit for jet lagged businessmen. There were little orange lamps on the tables with 25 watt bulbs in them that provided the only real source of light in the place and most of the little tables didn't have them. Through the strange sepia tone light you could see the clientele, who seemed to be all American businessmen or burned out tourist that had left the wife and kids in the room or back at the British Museum after feigning a headache.

    They all seemed like people who wanted to be left alone at all cost. Nobody was sitting at the bar itself so I pulled up a stool and ordered a scotch. The first one didn't live long and alas the second drink had its life cut brutally short. By the time the third one came I suddenly came to the realization that the bar was really overpriced so the next couple had longer life spans. I had intended to leave because of the prices but just as I was getting ready to pack up and go down to Oxford Circus somebody sat down with me at the bar about three stools down and the somebody was a she so I decided to stay a bit longer. A choice that, not long from that moment, would have a big impact on my personal history.

The girl was cute with brown hair in a kind of 'bob' cut and dark eyes with that pale skin that I am so nuts for I remember she had a lot of thin silver bracelets on her right wrist and she was small. Not a midget or anorexic or anything just gracile, small boned. She looked to be a few years older than I was but within my range. She was very confident while ordering her drink even though it was a 'girly' drink like a rum and coke or something. She was dressed in a white, frilly blouse and a black skirt which looked nice but she wasn't wearing nylons and had what looked like men's loafers on.that were all scuffed up. She looked as out of place as I did with my leather jacket, jeans and 'Beatle Boots'.

    We sat there for a few moments drinking our drinks and being silent like everybody else. Then she got up, moved to the stool next to me and said "Hi, I'm Monique" and extended her hand to shake mine. I had been going through a thousand different ways to start a conversation with her that I was amazed at how simple she made it look and infinitely relived that she had been the one to start it. I shook her hand, smiled, lowered my head just slightly to imply a small bow and said to her, in a voice that amazingly did not crack, "I'm Kelly. Pleased to meet you".

    Please join us for part two because, like the movie Titanic, you will know certain aspects of the story already and there will be nudity but unlike Titanic, there will be twists and turns that don't involve large jewels and surprises that don't involve the senseless drowning of poor people. Oh and no shipwrecks, that's an important one, see ya then.

Random Mountain Methamphetamine Jamboree

2011-04-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

We are blessed today at RTT with another post from Victoria. Everybody say yeay!

I grew up in an upper middle class enclave in the San Francisco Bay Area. It doesn’t really matter which one really, they’re all pretty much the same. They all feature the same sprawling ranch-style homes and hillsides dotted with oaks and pines. The downtowns all have the same red brick sidewalks, coffee roasting companies and trendy restaurants. Everyone’s mother works in the public sector and everyone’s father is an engineer, attorney or a physician. Every 20 years or so, the whole place nearly burns to the ground.

There aren’t too many downsides to growing up in places like this – but a big one is that later in life you will probably never make enough money to go back and live in your hometown.

By my late-20s I was living in a city of about 500,000 people and I missed a lot of things about my childhood home. I missed the seasonal creek that ran behind my house. I missed listening to the frogs when they started to sing every March. I missed hiking around on trails through the pines in the summer and the way the mist clung to the hillside on winter mornings. I especially missed living somewhere where the buildings that weren’t covered with graffiti and where every major street wasn’t simply a bleak, endless expanse of billboards, concrete and congestion.

So when Kelly was accepted to a graduate program in a rural area 300 miles away, I was thrilled. While the university town was in a valley, there were pine forests in the mountains surrounding it. I could live in a house in the hills again. I could leave my windows open. I could have quiet. I could see stars at night.

There was a bonus: the houses in the mountains were cheap – dirt cheap by our standards – and the 3,000 ft. altitude meant that we would be spared the broiling triple- digit summer temperatures in the Valley. So when we started looking for a house about a month before Kelly was scheduled to start school, we skipped the university area and headed straight up the hill, my father-in-law and his wife in tow.

The town in the mountains, which I will refer to from now on as Mountain Town , had about 20,000 people spread out over a 30-mile stretch of highway that ended in a dirt road at the top of a mountain ridge. Most of the population, living in the most expensive homes, lived at the bottom of the hill. The further up the highway, the more Toyota RAV-4s would get replaced by Chevy trucks, the lots would get larger and the number of structures that appeared to blatantly break building code seemed to multiply.

Our real estate agent immediately tried to dissuade us from looking for homes near the top of the hill.

“If I had any children I wouldn’t want them living up there,” she told our father-in-law as we sat in her office. “There’s too many drugs up there, I just wouldn’t feel safe.”

Kelly and I couldn’t help but smile. At the time we were living in one the cities that had one of the highest murder rates per capita in the country.

“Why don’t you give us some listings up there, anyway,” Kelly asked gently.

The first house on the list was the furthest up the hill – and the cheapest – priced for less than $100,000. The listing told of great things: 2,200 sq feet, two stories, 3 bedrooms, fenced in acre lot, custom windows, a loft, skylights..it even had RV parking. It was only a few hundred feet off of the highway, too. Just make the first left past the reservoir and Ed’s Chainsaw Repair.

Even though we could hear the TV blaring inside, it took the tenants nearly five minutes to come to the door. The haggard middle aged man who answered didn’t even greet us, he just left the door open and walked away. The house had been on the market for years and they were clearly used to the drill.

Inside it looked like a garbage can had exploded all over a garage sale. The entire house smelled like rotten food, mold and pee. And, although it was 2 p.m., there was a teenage girl on the couch was still wearing a full length nightgown. She turned toward us with hollowed out dark eyes and a blank expression.

“Dale? Why don’t you introduce me to your little friends?” she asked the middle aged man. Dale continued up the stairs to the master bedroom without saying a word.

We ventured to the back of the house, past the teenage boy sleeping in his underwear on a bare mattress and piles of clothes in the downstairs bedroom, past the two refrigerators and a counter full of dirty dishes in the kitchen, and past the laundry room where four large Rottweiler mixes barked and clawed at a nearly destroyed dutch door. As we ventured up the stairs and marveled at the 25-foot pine, open beamed ceilings, Kelly nudged me excitedly.

“I can clean this,” he whispered.

I know I must have stared back at him with an expression of shock mixed with utter horror. A home where people sleep amongst piles of their own garbage for ten years does not get cleaned. A home where four dogs are locked in a 8x10’ room for days at a time does not get cleaned. A home where methamphetamine is clearly considered to be a food group does not get cleaned.

But Kelly bought it anyway – and, true to his word, he could clean it. He started with the downstairs bedroom, one of the hardest hit -- and about three hours into his first day of housing rehab I got a phone call.

“There are hundreds of these little sticky things on the wall,” he said. “And every time I scrape one of them off I smell grape.”

I thought for a minute – and then the answer occurred to me.

“That’s a skittle.”

“A what?” and then muffled sounds of scraping. “Oh my god…oh my god these are skittles.”

More scraping sounds. I waited for the rest of this to hit home on the other end.

“There are hundreds of them…she covered her entire room with skittles…oh my fucking god…”

And then his voice trailed off.

“Well honey, I’ll help you out when I get home, okay?” I said.

“Yeah..okay…bye bye…”

A week later, when we couldn’t get the phone jack to work, we called in a repair guy who spent a half hour tearing apart the connection only to find a gummy substance wedged deep inside.

He held it up for Kelly to give him an explanation.

“Yeah,” Kelly told him. “That would be a skittle.”

The rest of the house wasn’t much better. But a full size dumpster, 5 gallons of bleach , a steam cleaner, a shop vac that lasted for about five minutes, an economy-sized bottle of simple green, 20 gallons of paint, a visit from the exterminator and a lung infection later, we had a pretty nice home on our hands.

It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the mountains. Every Friday afternoon that fall I would stop and buy a 12-pack of Henry Weinhardts on my way home from my job on the sweltering Valley floor. As I drove up the hill the traffic would thin. By the time I reached the last country mini-mart along highway I was usually one of the only cars on the road. I would turn off the air conditioner, take off my work blazer, let down my hair and roll down all of the windows, letting the mountain air spill in. In front of me a ribbon of empty highway guarded on either side by 80-foot high stands of douglas fir and ponderosa pine. Awesome.

But we didn’t fit in. If I saw one of our neighbors at our bank of mailboxes out at the highway, they would ignore me if I said hi to them. The cashier at the store we saw at the mini-mart we went to every day wouldn’t make small talk. One of our neighbors and I worked the same schedule and he would make a point of tailgating me in his worktruck along the highway and then staring at me when he got the chance to pass. We began to wonder if we had moved out everyone’s favorite cousin, or speed connection, or both.

It didn’t help that Kelly had lined up all three of the WWII rifles he had collected over the years in the front window or that I had a license plate holder on my Toyota Corrolla identifying me as an alumni of a university 300 miles away. And when the drunken neighbor to our west parked his motorhome on our property, Kelly went to his front door and informed him that he five minutes to move it or “I’m burning the fucking thing to the ground.”

Kelly had spent a good deal of his childhood in logging towns. He insisted this was the only way to get anything done.

“There’s a reason many of them are up here,” he said. “They don’t do well around people.”

There were other clues, too. There was the Saturday night I went to the mini-mart and found myself in line behind a guy with no shirt on, sporting a giant swastika tattoo that took up most of his back. Or the mother of two small children who chastised a gas station clerk late one night for having moldy burritos in the store refrigerator. “What am I supposed to feed my children, then?” Or the ostrich standing in the middle of the highway that Kelly almost hit as he came around a corner at 60 mph. Paul, the grizzled clerk at the mini-mart, didn’t even bat an eye when he was told the story.

“Those are George’s,” he said. “Good eating – taste just like steak.”

Paul rang up Kelly’s cigarettes, gave him his change and then added,

“Hard to kill, though. I had to shoot one five times with a .22 in the head before it would die – bullets kept on bouncing off of its skull.”

Eventually we decided that making friends with the neighbors was overrated. We switched instead to badgering our friends from the city to come visit us. The last batch of friends, a couple we had lived next door to for nine years, was scheduled to make the trek up around early November that year. By then the overnight lows began dipping into the 30s and the storms had started move into our part of the state.

The Friday afternoon they were scheduled to arrive I barely noticed the weather as I left my job on the Valley floor at dusk. But as I made my up the hill, the fog started to get thicker and thicker.

I am no stranger to thick fog. I’ve spent many years living in places that are famous for it. But, with every mile I climbed up the ridge, the conditions deteriorated. I happily followed the tail lights in front of me, until the last car turned off the highway about two miles from the house. By then, the visibility was down to about 25 feet.

By the time I got to the last mini-mart along the highway, there would be no taking off of the blazer, no loosening of the hair, and the windows were already rolled down so I could make sure I was still on the right side of the double yellow line.

I pulled into the mini-mart to give myself a quick break. Paul was behind the counter, as usual, doing whatever it is grizzled mini-mart clerks do.

“Wow, I can’t believe the fog out there,” I said as I gathered the beer and snacks we would need for our friends’ arrival.

Silence.

“I didn’t know you could get fog like this up in the mountains ,” I continued as I set the beer, chips and dip down on the counter and rifled through my purse. “It’s really something.”

Another awkward pause. Paul turned toward his attention to the register.

“It’s a cloud,” he said under his breath.

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t get fog here,” he said obviously irritated. He then closed the register, looked up and leaned towards me, making eye contact for the first time in the four months I’d lived there.

“This is a cloud. You don’t get fog here. It’s a cloud.”

I kept eye contact with him as I reached for my bags, nodding slightly . I finally managed a weak smile.

“I see.”

It was only another mile to the house but it took another ten minutes to make it into the driveway. Kelly had just arrived home as well.

We unpacked the beer, straightened up the house and prepared the appetizers. We were late and our friends were expected any minute. I was in the living room dusting the coffee table when I heard what sounded like an angry baboon screaming a few houses down.

“OooooAAAAAHHHH……OoooooAAAAHHHHHH.”

I froze. And a few seconds later the sound returned again.

“OoooAAAAHHHH…..OoooooAAAAHHHHHH.”

I turned just in time to see Kelly emerge from the kitchen.

“What the fuck is that sound?” he asked.

“I…don’t…know……”

We peered out the windows and saw a curtain of grey and the outline of trees.

“OoooooAAAAHHHHHH…..OooooAAAAHHHHHH”

Kelly turned on the porch light the view turned into a curtain of white and the outline of trees.

And then a different voice, the sound of a man screaming.

“OOOOOWWWWWWWWWW! Fuck!”

Kelly went to the hall closet, pulled out the 12 gauge shotgun, and headed for the porch, now lit up by our twin 500-watt prison- yard-style exterior lights. He didn’t even take the cigarette out of his mouth as he scanned the street and cocked the shotgun. We couldn’t see them in the darkness but it would be hard to miss us.

“You bit my thumb asshole!” the voice down the street said.

And then,

“See? You pissed off the neighbor now…..get the fuck out of here! Go on!”

“OoooooAAAHHHHHHH….”

And then the sound of footsteps running by on gravel.

We got back inside just as the phone started ringing. It was our friends. They had made it to the bottom of the hill and pulled over at a gas station when the visibility had dropped to near zero.

“I think we’re at a Chevron station,” our friend Bob told us. “Well, the sign is blue, anyway. Just come and get us. We’re under the big blue sign.”

We put the gun away and got into Kelly’s Ford pickup. When driving through…a… cloud…the larger the vehicle the better. And in the half hour since we had arrived home, things had only managed to get worse.

We picked our way down the hill, Kelly watching the yellow line, with me watching 2-foot deep ditch that served as the right shoulder to the road. Suddenly we turned a corner and our headlights lit up a lone figure dressed in leather jacket standing in the middle of the road, screaming like he had been electrocuted. As we slowed down, the man lept toward the hood of the truck, pounded on it with his fists, flipped Kelly off in the driver’s side window and then jumped back into the fog laughing hysterically.

We continued driving for another minute before either of us said anything.

“What….the…fuck…….”

“I know….Jesus!”

Repeat.

A half hour later we found our friends at the bottom of the hill. We exchanged hugs and questions about their drive. Before we got back into the truck I felt the need to give them a bit of a warning.

“Umm, when we get up to the top of the road, uh, there might….and I’m not saying this will happen but it might happen….there might, uh, be a drunk guy up there who jumps out of the fog and bangs on the hood of your car, flips you off and then runs away.”

They stared back at me.

“If someone jumps out in front my car, I’m fucking hitting him,” Bob said flatly.

I managed another smile. “Probably won’t happen,” I answered.

We started to get into our vehicles.

“Where the hell did you guys move to, man?”

I shook my head – at a loss for words.

“I have no idea…..”

***********

Random Last Straws

2011-04-05T21:33:00.000-07:00

    Well I haven't had a good topical rant for a while (but we will have another drug laden story, very soon, very soon friends) so I just had to have one tonight.

If you haven't noticed the world is coming apart quicker that a Southwest flight stress fracture. Japan, fucked. Human tragedy with the added excitement of pumping water with 5 million times, a five and 6 0s, the safe limit of radiation into the ocean. If 50s sci fi has taught us anything we are about to have one hell a thousand foot tall pissed off crab. Either way it's no good.

So we got that going on. Also we have the Ivory Coast going berserk, I mean the name should tip you off that its not a nice place but bat shit crazy. Long and short of it is maybe democracy just won't work in Africa. It seems, with the exception of South Africa (and they have alot to make up for so they don't count anyway) democracy just fails when it is tried in some countries on the African continent. The guy in the Ivory Coast lost an election and thought "No. I'm not going anywhere. Make me" The conflict there is people trying to make him. I can see the logic. You rule a country, you're rich and are probably stealing huge amounts of money from your people, you're in charge of the army, so, fuck the people. I want to keep things like they are and doing anything else would be detrimental to me and that is against all my natural instincts, so I stay. Maybe we're the stupid ones. I am not being racist just pointing out real historical trends. Just like the odds of us intervening into any countries problems go up exponentially if that country has oil. Just historical facts and trends.

    Speaking of oil, we have Libya going on. A conflict that we should be involved in but already shot our wad in Iraq so too bad so sad for all those guys looking for help from the sky. Dude is going to kill all of them and that's just the way it's going to go. Maybe his son will take over but he may be the Anti-Christ so that's not good either. However, I have already gone off about this, so I will stop.

    However, the last straw for me came to fruition this week. Some hate mongering asshole passing himself off as a man of God took it upon himself to burn a Quaran. A book as holy to Muslims as the Bible to Christians. This dickhead burns it after being warned that other hate mongering dicks would take it as an excuse to kill Americans. So far (as far as I know) no Americans have died yet but many people have lost their lives in riots over dickhead in Florida. I was just telling Victoria that the Hague should bring him up on some crime against humanity but she reminded me that we don't belong to the world court. We sure like it and act like we are a part of it when it punishes people we don't like but we don't really belong to it.

    So because of a Christian radical, Islamic radicals are killing people and it's only a matter of time before that list includes Americans and there is nothing that anybody can do to him. That's it. That was the last straw. There was a time during the Reagan years when everybody in his cabinet was being indicted (who would have thought I would love to have Reagan back,WTF) and it seemed that the world was going crazy. Popular culture on T.V. seemed so stupid (Laverne and Shirley?) and we only had the networks back then so no choice. So I hit a point that I decided that the human race was hell bent on killing itself, while lying to itself to get rich on the backs of the poor, people in between were lowering their I.Q.s and didn't care because it made network T.V. entertaining.

    So I shut myself out of the world the best I could. I stopped watching T.V. and reading the news. I completely stopped caring. Humans, with the only exception being my close friends, could get bent and the quicker they blew up civilization the better. I went from somebody who cared and thought maybe I could be a part of changing the world for the good to somebody who really didn't care if they pushed the button the next day or minute. It might be good fireworks. All caring about my fellow man was gone. I might as well have been on a desert island. I went about to the important task of taking every drug I could and having sex. That was good for me for many years and I don't remember what brought me back but I started caring about what was happening to my fellow humans again.

    Dickhead in Florida was the last straw. I need some suggestions on why I should continue to care about humans and the world or I'm turning off, this time for good. Leave me some comments if you have any ideas why I should care (and puppys are cute won't cut it) about what happens to the human race when people like Dickhead in Florida and the Dicks in Afghanistan are running the world. Give me your best shots or tell me to go for it, either is cool.

Random Disabilities

2011-04-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

First things fist I want to give a big shout out to my fans of the Theatre in Denmark. Please stay with us and tell your friends. O.K. now for the random thought. When I was an undergrad I had a professor that was a wonderful person that I am still friends with. This professor had been slightly crippled most of his life due to a childhood injury, so he walked with a profound limp and walking long distances was always quite painful. Going anywhere, if you have never been, on the campus of CSU Fresno is a long distance. One day he got a phone call in his office.

   "This is Mary for disabled student services," said the voice on the other side of the phone "I have a student with a particular disability that is interested in taking one of your classes and I was hoping to talk to you in person about it. Is there any way that you could come down to my office?" "Well," the professor said "it would be better for me if you could possibly come up to mine. You see I have a bad hip and it is a bit painful for me to walk all the way across campus" The answer, from the head of disabled student services was, no." You see I'm running really late and it would just be better if you came to me" she said with all the compassion that somebody that works with people with disabilities should have, I guess.

   "I guess I could come down" said the professor still reeling from the woman's insensitivity,"It will take me a few minuets." So my old professor limped the approximately half mile to disables student services and found his way to Mary's office. " I have a student that wants to take one of your classes but I wanted to inform you of her particular disability before I gave the O.K." Mary said. "Alright" said my professor, "what it it?" I'm sure he was dying of curiosity. "She has multiple personality disorder" Mary said without batting an eye. Now my old professor is one of the smartest and funniest people I have ever met and always needs to be the smartest person in the room or at least, when presented with a situation like this, have a very witty come back. "So how many of them want to take my class." he said as deadpan as it gets, thinking this was a good damn line and a good point.

    Again without batting an eye Mary replied, "3." For the first time, probably in his life, my professor was dumbfounded. He had been outdone and that was bad enough but he had been outdone by a well known twit. Luckily the student never showed up for class so he never got to see what would happen if in the middle of class one of the personalities that didn't want to take the class took over.

Random Wormholes at Circle K

2011-03-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

I have no direct proof, but I am pretty sure there is a wormhole in the Circle K near my house.

I will lay out my evidence in a short and concise way. First, the air hose. I have a tire that has a slow leak that could be fixed by a five minute, $10 fix at a local tire shop. Worst case scenario I need a new stem. But do I do any of these things, do I fix the easily fixable? Ha! No. Now if it needed a new head gasket or some bearings repacked or anything really outside my skill set I would be all over it but simple? Never.

   I will let it annoy me a little bit from time to time just to make my life a little harder. The little 'speedbump' in my day that this slow leak usually supplies is driving an almost flat tire the five blocks to the Circle K where there is an air pump. I will use it without incident one day and then, always when I'm running a little late to work, I will go to use it again. This is when the clerk will tell me "Can't dude. They stole another one from me" "But I just saw it yesterday, I used it the day before that. It's just gone?" I reply confused. "Yep" the clerk says confidently "Tweekers."

   Now I can see a crackhead looking at a thing like this and thinking"Hey, that's copper. Copper's worth money" and getting out his pocketknife and sawing away but once said crackhead cashed the minuscule amount of metal in (we won't even get into the ethics of the assholes that would cash in an obviously stolen item) and found out it could buy him about 1/18 of a nickle rock this behavior would cure itself. However it keeps going and going.

According to the good people at Circle K there has been at least fifty of these things stolen and I simply find this a mathematical impossibility I could explain the math but trust me unless they are busing unusually mentally challenged crackheads (you get to how jacked up somebody has to be to be qualified as a mentally challenged crackhead with a whole different equation) into the parking lot of that particular Circle K just before dawn and have them all bussed out by 7:30, in great numbers, unnoticed, it is in fact impossible. Wormhole.

   Number two, my wedding ring. Now this is a plain gold ring but it was given to me by my wife on the happiest day of my life -- and I'm not just saying that because my wife sometimes reads this. I didn't think I would like wearing a ring but after a while I found it a necessary part of my persona.

I liked everything about it. I liked playing with it with my thumb and did so almost constantly. I loved banging it on things. It could mean so many different things, "I am really getting pissed off waiting in this line", "I like this song more than you do and have quite good rhythm" or "I am making up a song tapping my ring, I am making up a song tapping my ring" and so on. Finally, men you will back me up on this, I had heard of it before, never took advantage of it, but wedding rings turn chicks on. I'm sorry, they just do. It had become a part of me and wore it proudly for several years. The ring was not a loose fit, in fact I was  thinking that I was going to have to have it re-sized because I had gained weight and could barely get it off. The only way that the ring was going to come off my hand was if some mother-fucker with a gun wanted it off my hand and even then it was a big 'if'.

    Then I went to get coffee at Circle K. I shouldn't call it coffee, its only part coffee, the rest is this french vanilla brewed thing that is way too sweet but I like it so, what the hey. I make it home and am talking to my wife and this rush of unbelievable panic that only guys in my position have ever felt. It's like being put in front of a firing squad with no blindfold and instead of the laser sights dancing their little bright red dance around your heart area they are all trained right at your balls. I was so panicked that my brain bypassed any kind of internal dialog and I suddenly blurted out without thinking about it "My fucking wedding ring!", "Where is my wedding ring?" I rubbed and rubbed at the place on my finger that it normally was like it would suddenly re-appear but of course it didn't. My wife at fist calmly said "where's your wedding ring, Kelly?" and I explained to her that all I did was go and get a cup of coffee and I just had realized that it was gone.

    "O.K." she said, still way too calm for my liking "you might have taken it off in your sleep, you have done that before. Let's just go take the bedding apart and I'm sure it's in there. So we calmly made our way to the bedroom and carefully took apart and searched each piece of bedding that was on the bed and looked around and under it. The panic really started to rise. "It's not fucking here Kelly, Oh my God! It's gone, it's gone" my wife cried moving quickly from calm to defcon four.

"It has to be somewhere" I said now I'm reassuring her, there is no worse feeling that a real man can have then to have his wife or girlfriend sobbing uncontrollably and having no way to make it all better. Give me somebody to beat up, to kill, I'll kill myself just feel better and stop crying. "I had it this morning and I just went to the store. It has to be somewhere, Circle K!" I shouted like I had solved the problem and the ring was now in my hand. "It has to be at the store." So I went off to Circle K while my wife Victoria continued to look around the house.

    It was only a few blocks to the Circle K but I bet I broke at least twenty traffic laws getting there. I squealed to a stop across three parking places and burst through the front door. I walked right in front of this huge guy in line that looked like "Oh no you did fucking not" but once my story was out of my mouth he wanted to help. "I was in here just a few minuets ago" I stammered " and my wedding ring is gone. Did anybody turn in a ring?

The Mexican girl behind the counter who knows me shook her head sadly "No honey" was all she said. "Fuck! Oh sorry." I said. "where were you?" the huge guy I had crowed in front of asked. " I just got some coffee and some creamer.." I said trailing off in thought. " Well maybe it came off when you were throwing the creamers away" the big guy said ""You take that trash can and I'll look in this one" Soon I had the whole population of Circle K looking for my ring "I could play the security tapes for when you were in here" the Mexican girl said," maybe we could see something?" After a few minuets I let everybody off the hook. "It's not here" i said moving slowly into acceptance" thanks everybody." I got in the car hoping beyond hope that I would arrive home with Victoria with that' you need to be more careful, you really scared me' look in her face but when I came through the front door.Let's just say that an F4 tornado probably would have made less of a mess. The whole house was in a different place but just one foot over and upside down. She was still crying, "It's gone" she said crestfallen herself moving slowly into acceptance. "You must have somehow lost it at the Circle K" she said.

    Had the people of my home town become so crooked, so jaded that they would pocketed what was obviously a man's wedding ring? Had these people become so selfish that they would ruin another man's day and special memories for something that they might get twenty bucks for at a pawn shop? I say no. Wormhole. (I got off pretty easy because Victoria had lost hers when she jumped off of a boat in Shaver Lake eight months after our wedding, so at least I had that going for me) Again Wormhole.

    Finally, I was doing the same thing, going up to Circle K to get some coffee. I don't know if I was wearing them when I drove to the market but it unlikely I was not because without my glasses I am as blind as a bat. However what was certain was that by the time I home I did not have them. This was a big deal for a few reasons; I need them for work, we were broke as hell so replacing them would be costly and oh yeah I can't see without them. We did what had now become routine. We destroyed the house (and confused the dogs) looking for them. We freaked out and yelled. Then got into the acceptance space and finally got me a new pair. Did they suddenly reappear? Did we find them in the couch? No. Wormhole.

    The only problem with my idea is wormholes are only theoretical and if they exist they are super, super small. So there would have to be some huge power source to hold them open and widen them enough to fit my wedding ring through. Like a power source as big as the sun, so either the people at Circle K are holding out on everybody and just selling gas till it runs out and then will unveil their cheap, clean, limitless power supply that they posses, all the while selling as many Slim Jim's as possible. Another possibility is that the theorists are way off the mark and that has never happened before and the last possibility is that I have taken way too much acid leaving me absent minded and prone to losing things and imagining wormholes. Whatever the reason I think the good people at CERN should look in to this.

Random Moo

2011-03-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

So my friend Annie way living in a small one room apartment in Venice, California where we would hang out at every time I was down. She had this large (it took up a full wall) tapestry that looked middle-ageish and strange. Don't take me wrong, it was nice and made the room, but it was different. In the middle of it, almost blending into the background, was this Puckish, monkey-like thing standing on a tree branch. It was the center of the piece it was just there. One rainy day we had eaten some acid and were entertaining ourselves and somehow the conversation turned to this little monkey like thing.We decided to call him Moo. The following is my attempt at an adult children's story. A few authors have done it but I think it's a type of writing that is way over due. Check it out and let me know what you think. Best wishes and happy reading.

A Day with Moo

Once there was a boy and girl living in the country of Blue,

Where the grass was always green and covered with dew.

But the boy and girl had nothing, nothing to do,

Nothing, nothing to do in the land of blue.

They had been wrongly imprisoned by their ugly uncle Hugh

Imprisoned by the unfair King Hugh in the Royal Dungeon in tower two.

And there they sat, imprisoned and bored with nothing to do.

"We could play pirates again" said the boy.

"Oh those games are no fun and we have no toys" said the girl "Not even a pinwheel to whirl.

And we can’t make a sound, not even a peep,

Or I fear Uncle Hugo might do away with us in our sleep."

"But the guard did give us something he said was fun" said the girl

"Is it a pirate game do we get guns?" said the boy wanting to run

"We can’t make a sound, how could we have guns?" said the girl

No its just little squares of paper that we put on our tongues

That’s how it’s played, that’s how the game is won."

"That’s no kind of game! Paper on our tongues, why not put curtains on our heads or coasters on our bums?"

"The guards say it takes you somewhere else, somewhere not blue. After all we have nothing better to do."

"I say we eat it," said the girl, "right here on the spot."

That’s when the boy told the girl the guard had also given him something called purple microdot.

The girl said, "well lets have to it, anything beats just sitting in this dim tower."

After they gobbled down their squares and purple dots they waited for the game to begin for almost an hour.

"The guards led us on", the boy said, "there no game here"

"I'm still in the Tower but now my stomach has butterflies and by skin feels queer."

The girl agreed, there was no more fun than before, no fun in here.

Then it looked like, out of the corner of the girl’s eye that something scampered across the floor.

Just then the boy stood up," I don’t know about a game but those dots seem to have made me taller

than before."

"Did you see that?", asked the girl, "That thing that ran across the room?

"You must mean me!", said a disembodied voice, "my name is moo, moo to you and moo to you too."

The two looked around, did the voice come from the fireplace, the window the wall.

Maybe the guards were playing a prank down the hall.

The voice did not come from up or down or near or far

Moo seemed to be nowhere at all.

Then moo said “now, now there’s nothing to fear.

After all the whole time I’ve been right here."

Then they finally saw moo, jumping about in the tapestry that had always hung so near.

Now Moo wasn’t a dwarf, a fairy or wood shrew.

In an odd way he looked a little like me but a lot like you

His skin kept changing color and his eyes were large and bright blue.

He had a pot belly, a small head with purple hair

He had spots up here and some down there

He was one of the oddest looking things you ever could see

All of this and only three foot three

"I have been screaming and smorting "said moo

"Florting splimmin and flamammin

But you two acted like I was being as quiet as moss.

While the whole time I was trapped in this old piece of cloth"

"I wanted to play but you two just stared at the walls" he said

"Now we can play, now that you can see me and all."

They went to the Mooseum, where there was wonderful works of art

From the finest Picasso to Henry Dinkel’s doodles that he did in the dark.

They went to the Moosment Park with rides like you have never seen

Some of them made you turn blue, and some of them made you turn green.

They went to the MooZoo which had Moopopolis and Moophalant

Who was a little cross and through his eighteen foot trunk whispered “get bent”

They then went to the Mooquarium and met a Dolphin named Bart

Who was good enough to do all of their taxes and paint them some great art.

But then the day was over, it was getting dark.

“The land of Moo is so big” said the boy “and we didn’t get an early start.”

“We better get a good rest we have a lot tomorrow to do,

We will have breakfast with my five dimensional friends Hugh” said Moo

So it was back to their room , back to tower two, having gone so far,even though they hadn’t moved an inch.

Moo tucked them both in and back into his tapestry he went.

“Good night Moo. I hope we can do more tomorrow, us and you” said the girl.

Of course we will, every day, now that you believe in Moo and Moo believes in you too.

Random Kings

2011-03-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

    I got into Anthropology for many reasons. First of all I seemed to have an affinity for it, I got A's in the classes I took when I first started taking classes in the subject. Second, what could be cooler that studying humans. I mean we are interesting creatures that have had a bit of an impact on the planet and finally let's face it, it's sexy. While most anthropologists themselves are not real lookers there is a mystique about it a real sense of adventure. In reality it can be a very frustrating discipline because to be in because nobody ever listens to us. Ever. Well once at the end of WWII an anthropologist's work probably kept us out of a horrible house to house invasion of Japan that would have cost thousands of lives but since then zip.

    We are a big part of the problem. Anthro's tend not to answer their phones and they like to use words that they made up and sometimes they write in dead languages but that doesn't mean we don't have things of importance to say. Unfortunately most of it is bad news. What is happening in Libya and the surrounding region is a great example and if anybody has any solutions please pipe in.

    Now if there are any anthropologists reading this don't get snippy and write me that I oversimplified theory or don't know what I'm talking about. Everybody hasn't read Clifford or Marcus and have no reason to so I'm going to keep it simple. There is a theoretical paradigm in anthropology called Post-Colonialism that has in the past mostly been focused around the effects of shrinking Western empires. If you are born in a small country in Africa and for several generations your country has been under British rule it has a huge impact on your identity. You have English schools and you grow up playing English sports. It effects every part of your life and your world view all the way down to your God and your food. You are not English but to an outsider you would seem damn close.

    Now imagine that the English pull up stakes and give you your country back. No war or bloody coup they just don't have the money anymore to keep you so they give you back to you. It's a strange concept but this practice of moving people and cultural identities around was all the rage of the last century and it cost millions of lives and destroyed countless cultures. It's easy to be on the side of the people, the indigenous freedom fighters who want their culture and their land back from foreign rule and it is the right side to be on but it is much more complicated than "you're free!"

    What generally happens when people get their countries back is not what one would expect. Sure there are celebrations in the streets and feelings of hope and solidarity. Unfortunately this is generally short lived and horrible things usually follow. To put it as simply as possible the colonial power that had been ruling the country is like the sadistic step father or big brother that beats the shit out of you if you do anything even slightly wrong. It's a fucked up life but things get done and they get done correctly. When the sadistic step father goes away things tend to fall to shit.

    A colonial power, however fucked up that they may be, and there were big differences in styles, kept the rule of law. Long standing blood feuds between different ethnic groups went out the window under colonial rule. Everybody had a common hatred or in some cases love for the colonials and old fights had to be put on hold. As we have found out that is exactly what happened to these long conflicts, they were put on hold -- not gone -- just frozen because of colonial rule. When big brother leaves they are waiting, just below the surface of everyday life, to erupt again with renewed vigor. Even stranger things happen like groups that the colonial power created (what are you, yeah O.K. I can't pronounce that so now all of you are the wig-wigs and that bunch are the Bobs, right?) suddenly are at each others throats and ready to kill those God damned Wig-Wigs once and for all.

    Many of the western powers that had empires got wise to this trend and some tried to mitigate the inevitable conflicts that would arise once they left a region. The results of these cultural experiments were as varied as the cultures that were involved. Czechoslovakia went pretty good, Angola and Bosnia not so much. Today however most of the grand empires of old are all gone. We live in a world with one real superpower (that is in rapid decline) and many lesser powers catching up quickly. Sadly this does not mean that Post-Colonial theory is useless now. As most of the anthro's predicted and George Bush was nice enough to prove, we have a different way to apply the theory today.

    Lets take Saddam Hussein. He was a real bastard, just a piece of shit that treated many of his people like they were sub-human. He bombed his own people he tortured and he murdered but unfortunately not the worst guy ruling a country at the time of his defeat. Not by a long shot but that is a whole other argument. The point is that he was by way of his iron fisted rule the defacto colonial power in Iraq. He made the trains run on time, he kept terrorist from blowing up shit in Iraq and he kept sectarian violence down to the point of non-existence.Say what you will about the man but there was not going to be any "holy wars" fought on his watch. He would just kill all the mother-fuckers making the noise and that would be that. Cruel and quick but effective and what was the first thing that started happening once he was dead and gone? Sectarian violence. They didn't miss a beat it was almost like they had read all the theory books and were just following instructions. The timing was that perfect.

    Now we have Gaddafi. His resume reads something like this;supporting terrorism both with money, training and weapons, tortures and imprisons his own people, protected the bastards that did Locherby and the German disco bombing for a long time and by all accounts is fucking crazy or a great actor. The only thing that Reagan did and I know that many people see him as some kind of cultural hero, I thought he was a bastard but the one thing that I would have high fived him for was bombing Gaddafi's house. A Democrat wouldn't have done that or at least admitted to doing it but Ronnie, he knew exactly how this fucker thought and how he lived. He bombed his house and killed one of his kids and didn't apologize and I will always respect him for that. Gaddafi sure did because he shut the fuck up. He recoiled from the world stage and concentrated on screwing his own people and just his people for a while.

    So now his people that he has fucked for so long have been moved by the inertia of movement all around the Arab world. Suddenly, seemingly for no particular reason the whole region has come alive with cries of freedom and self rule. I think it must be similar to the L.A. riots of 94. If you were from anywhere else it just seemed that 'all the colored people had gone plumb crazy' over one guy getting the shit beat out of him but if you spent any time in L.A. during the previous years you know that it wasn't one guy that got beat up. It was a whole generation that was being abused by a corrupt police force that was sick with power and more than a little sadistic. No matter how many times history teachers try to cram it down your throat you have to know that it is never "one guy".

    So for the people of Libya enough one guys had gone by and it was now time for action. In my opinion our President and the British Prime Minister sat on their hands for too long while this was going on. The last thing that either of our countries need is another war and I'm not for that, but arms and air power and money is a different deal. If nothing else a clear message to the rebels that "we support you" would have been nice. I was especially disappointed in the English.

The day before I boarded a plane to move to the U.K. the Libyan embassy had been the scene of a gun battle between Libyan "diplomats" with sub machine guns and a few unarmed Brit cops. One of the cops was a young beautiful girl who had recently started her career as a cop in London. She was shot in the back and after they roped off the whole square where the embassy was, with the Libyans still inside, the only thing left in the square was her blood and her P.C.'s hat. It sat there as a constant reminder as the days went on and they encircled the square with huge blue tarps so no other clear shots could be taken by the diplomats inside the embassy. It just sat there every day until one man had enough.

    The cops tried to raid the embassy but there was a problem with the men that were repelling down from the top of the building (they should have sent the SAS).. One officer had just thrown a concussion grenade through a window and had his rope stuck so he couldn't move away from the force of the blast. The other cops instantly knew the mission was blown and went back up their ropes, the cop that was stuck took the full force of the blast which dislodged him from his harness and he fell three stories onto the cobblestone below, severely breaking his leg. Somehow, this man pulled himself up, went to the front door of the embassy, using his rifle as a cane, opened the front door and sprayed the lobby of the embassy with automatic gunfire, killing three diplomats. He then slowly limped over and retrieved his fellow fallen P.C's hat from the middle of the square. He continued on.

He later said he was just waiting for the sniper's bullet that would surely be tearing through him at any second, he limped the hundred or so meters until he reached the safety of the great blue tarp, bloody hat still in hand. It was one of the most heroic things I had ever seen in my life and continues as such to this day. It also was a good lesson in what it was to be English. I never thought I would see a day that the U.K. had any dealings with Gaddafi but that is the power of oil. Oil is now the western world's heroin and we will suck whoever dick we can to have a steady supply.

    Now however, the western world is finally acting, imposing a "no fly" zone so Gaddafi will stop bombing his own people and maybe not make good on his promise of turning the streets red with the blood of the drugged, brainwashed (by either Al-Queada or the U.S.) rebels. Even in this time of hope we are faced with the damned problem that the people fighting Gaddafi now come from different tribal affiliations and different sects of Islam all with different agendas. Even if this evil man gets what he deserves how long will we have to wait to see woman and children being killed in the port cities where the oil flows freely even now. How long after the iron fist of post colonial power is removed before old grudges and feuds come to the surface again and the very people being threatened with bloodshed bring it upon themselves?

    Is there an answer? We surly can't keep people like Gaddafi in power just because his cruelty keep these other conflicts on the back burner. Yet can we sit and watch again as the inevitable happens again and people throw themselves into civil war over God, tribe and money? We don't have the power to police the whole world and I'm sorry but the lives of our young brave sons and daughters are not worth somebody else's medieval feud.

Anthropologists should know, we should have some plan of action and who knows there may be an expert in the region that has a plan but nobody will listen to him or her. Their press skills will not be polished enough to get any airtime on CNN or the BBC. So we cheer on the underdog knowing full well that in the unlikely event that they actually win they will more than likely tear themselves apart not long after their historic victory. What is to be done? I'm not telling, I'm asking. If you have an idea leave a comment, if you don't sit back and watch the horror movie with the rest of us.

Random naked people on the Golden Gate Bridge

2011-03-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

We have a special treat today at the theatre, my wife Victoria. For a day my spelling and grammar check, the latter I obviously never pay attention to, will get a break. So with no further ado, Victoria.

Okay Random Thought Theatre Fans. If you've got beer in the fridge, go get one and settle in. Auntie Victoria's got a story to tell.

Before the conferences and managers' meetings, before the eat-chicken-and-clap-on-cue Rotary Breakfasts and graduate school, before slogging through my entry level work and college, there was theater school in San Francisco.

You're probably familiar with the scene: too many people in an apartment, lots of Top Ramen, diet coke and cigarettes, a mound of dirty dishes in the sink, tin foil sculptures of various body parts lining the hallway on the way in. The floor is littered with body paint, lots of badly cropped black and white photos and the remains of late night strangeness. It was the summer of 1989 and I was 18.

I lived with two friends from the Central Coast and their boyfriends -- and, although Jubilani had an apartment of his own overlooking a housing project in the Western Addition, I claimed him as a roommate because he always seemed to be in my apartment. After all of the assorted people had left for the day...to do the types of things responsible people do....Jubilani and I would always be left, watching cop shows together or venturing into the city on a quest to find some random mundane item, like a combination lock or fresh ground peanut butter.

I had, shall we say, a serious problem showing up to places at the time (work, school, etc.) It had already cost me a few temp jobs -- and Jubilani didn't help. If there was an excuse to slack, the two of us would find it. And while we reveled in our ability to completely waste a day, our skill was a constant source of irritation with his girlfriend, and my roommate, Trina.

So it was no surprise when I found him waiting in his Suzuki Samurai just outside the door of my school on an oddly warm July day. I was on my away across the street to the Geary Theater for a stage combat class and I was in a foul mood.

"You wanna go with me to check out this beach I just heard about?"

I looked around at my classmates who were making their way across Geary Boulevard. The next two hours promised a hot day in a 100-year-old theater wrestling with sweaty people on a raked stage.

"Yeah, fuck it, I'm having a bad day, let's go."

To this day I have no idea what constituted a "bad day" at theater school. Maybe someone had been bitchy to me during a scene study, maybe I had blown a cue in an improv exercise, maybe I wasn't off book for an upcoming audition. Whatever it was, I was already pissed. And so was Jubilani.

We stopped at the store and bought a gallon of vodka and a gallon of orange juice. (As Jubilani was just a few months shy of his 23rd birthday, buying alcohol wasn't a problem.) Then we headed west toward the Pacific Ocean and the Legion of Honor.

If you haven't been to the Legion of Honor, it's worth a trip. Perched on a bluff with a sweeping view of the Golden Gate bridge and the Marin Headlands, it has a Greek-style colonnaded courtyard with a large statue of The Thinker in the center, a stone edifice of a man hunched over, elbow resting on one knee.

We parked in the front parking lot, grabbed the vodka, orange juice and cups and headed through the trees to a trail that led 1/2 mile down to the beach. There, amongst the rocks and weeds, we found a log that gave us an unobstructed view of the west side of the Golden Gate bridge.

I always need to stop the story here to make one thing clear: I didn't really drink during this period. I had been drunk on several occasions by the time I turned 18, but, for the most part, I was pretty straight-laced. And I certainly had no idea that vodka makes me certifiably insane. I was also about 115 lbs at the time, and, despite the fact that I come from a long line of drinkers, I was a very cheap date.

We sat down on the log and started drinking. We each had our issues. Jubilani's job as a dispatcher for a bike messenger company wasn't going well and the city's theater world hadn't exactly been overwhelmed by my presence. We admired the bridge and talked about our love lives. We gave each other stupid drunken advice. Hours went by, the marine layer started to blow in, and somewhere beyond it, the sun began to sink into the Pacific. The gallon of vodka had been seriously dented. It was time to go.

Vodka stalks you like a predator. It waits. It hides like a whisper in the back of your consciousness while you're drinking, and then, without warning, it slams you from behind and takes half of your brain cells with it.

It hit me just as a I stood up to leave. One minute I was calmly telling Jubilani in exquisite detail exactly how a woman's mind works and then next I'm stumbling over my own feet in the waning light and unable to speak without laughing hysterically. I was hammered.

Somehow we made it back to the parking lot -- and a scary realization. We were both supposed to be somewhere else that afternoon. And Trina was now home from work across the city and waiting for Jubilani. They had plans that night -- plans that most likely didn't include him coming back from drinking half a gallon of vodka with her roommate and showing up four hours late. I couldn't go home and I sure as hell couldn't go to his house. It it all looked very bad and we were both definitely already in trouble.

So we made the only natural decision we could make -- we wouldn't go home until we were sober. That meant finding a way to pass the time at the Legion as well-heeled couples started to arrive for a fundraiser.

The "we're so fucked" conversation then turned into the "we should" conversation which then turned into the "I dare you" conversation, which inevitably turned into the "I'll do it if you'll do it" conversation.

"Get naked."

"If you will."

"No problem buuuuuuuuuttt....you also have to run through that courtyard."

"If you will"

"Pluuuuuuus, you have to buttfuck that statue of the thinker."

And then Jubilani was gone.

I chased him through the courtyard as he tore off his clothes. He climbed to the top of the statue's base, grabbed on to the statue's shoulders and started humping away, moaning loudly.

More than 15 years later -- the night before performing my marriage ceremony, in fact -- Jubilani would recount this moment to me.

"I remember being up there going at it and slowly realizing that I ...was... being... watched. I looked to my left and there was a very well-coiffed, middle aged woman in a tea dress and pearls, wine glass in hand, staring at me it utter horror. That was when I discovered she wasn't alone. In fact, the courtyard was full of people."

But back to my version of the story:

Jubilani carefully extricated himself from The Thinker's ass, jumped off the statue and took off at a full run toward the car. Still laughing and stumbling in the courtyard, I collected his clothes and ran after him.

We jumped into the car. "We should probably leave.Um, now..." Jubilani said. And we sped out of the parking lot and down the hill toward the city.

The fear wore off quickly but the dares continued. We we drove past a lawn with the sprinklers blasting along a major boulevard. I was still dressed.

"I dare you to dance through those sprinklers naked," he said,

I did, singing David Lee Roth's "Just a Giggilo" as traffic and buses sped by on Lincoln Avenue. "I aaaaaaiiiinnn'tt got no boooooddddyyyy..." Jubilani joined me, still naked. No one blinked an eye. Just another day in the Inner Sunset district.

Back in the car.

"I dare you to run around that tree three times."

He did.

Back in the car.

"We should drive across the Golden Gate bridge!"

"Totally."

"I can't wait until the toll taker sees two naked people! We should put the convertible top down!"

(Thinking. Nodding.) "We HAVE to do that."

"And then we can go up to the top of Mount Tam and look at the lights!"

Jubilani made a left and pointed the Suzuki toward the bridge.

"That'd be great!"

Now I'm going to stop the story here to point out a few things. 1) There are no toll takers when you head north on the Golden Gate, if there had we most assuredly would have been arrested. 2) It was already foggy and there were no lights to be found, and 3) We never got around to putting the convertible top down but we also never got around to putting our clothes on, either.

We drove over the bridge. I screamed out the window at random walkers and cyclists, waving my arms over my head -- all the while letting out the official Spring Break Mating Call: "WhooHOO! Oh my god, I'm sooooo drunk!" (warning.) Jubilani drove over a set of divider cones to see if they were "metal or if they were made of plastic" (warning.) and by the time we pulled off of Highway 101 into Mill Valley we were immersed in a conversation about how cool we were. (Flashing red siren. Stop here.)

But we didn't stop. Instead we wound around Highway 1, with Jubilani turned toward me making eye contact, talking to me the entire way.

I looked up and saw a warning sign for a 15 mph turn. I glanced at the speedometer. We were doing 50.

"Jubilani. 15!"

"--It's all a matter of philosophy -- truth, you see, it's all about truth..."

"Dude 15. Dude!"

"There are different ways to look at truth"

"Dude! 15!!!"

By then it was too late. We sped off the road, over a 6 foot drainpipe and into a creek -- or to put it from my perspective squeals, bushes, windshield.

Then silence.

I put my hand up to my face. It was covered in blood. I looked at Jubilani, whose face was also covered in blood. Two circles of exploded glass at our respective heights on the windshield now told the tale of the last 30 seconds. Neither of us had been wearing seat belts. We'd never rolled the car.God protects drunks and children. We were both.

If I'd thought Trina was going to be pissed at me before, I had definitely knocked it out of the park now. How does one begin to explain how I was found, naked, wet and drunk sitting in the middle of a ravine in a wrecked Suzuki Samurai in another county with her boyfriend -- who was also naked, wet and drunk.Just how does the beginning of that conversation go?

We stared at each other in shock.

The silence was broken by a woman's voice screaming "I called 911! I called 911!" and then the inside of the car was bathed in red flashing lights. Somehow Jubilani put on his jeans and I managed to find my pants and and a sweatshirt. I then took the bag of vodka out of the back of the car and threw it about a foot away from the car. ("They'll never it find it there.") I made my way through the bushes up to the top of the ravine walking right past the firefighters who were on their way down the hill toward the car.

"I'm over here," I called after them. "We're fine."

I was walked over to the cop car and ambulance where people were peppering me with questions. I remember looking over to see Jubilani talking on a neighbor's cordless phone telling someone "We drove off the Golden Gate Bridge. But no worries, though. No worries..." Someone asked my phone number. I shook my head, mind suddenly completely blank.

And then I passed out on the hood of a Highway Patrol car.

Memories of the next few hours come in fits and starts. The paramedic picking glass out of my head and as I informed him "I'm going to be an actress you know!" Babbling nonstop all the way to San Rafeal and into the emergency room. Waking up on a gurney and signing release papers. Looking for a cigarette during the awkward silence on the trip back to San Francisco in the back of Anna, my other roommate's car. Hearing the front door open and close again once I was home and knowing that Trina had arrived, with Jubilani in tow.

We just stared at each other as he reached the foot of the stairs. Trina wouldn't make eye contact. Our friendship would never be the same again.

Eventually life returned to normal. I went back to theater school. He went back to the dispatch center. Soon the medical bills, repair bills and the questions started rolling in. Along with them, letters from the District Attorney. I wrote letters explaining how I wasn't hurt (I had broken a pinkie finger) and many months and many thousands of dollars later, a court date was set.

Kelly and I -- a couple by this point -- accompanied Jubilani to his court date at Marin's futuristic city hall. He changed into his suit in the parking lot and I checked his hair. Aside from the matching scars we now had on our foreheads from the windshield we both looked pretty presentable.

He paused. "Thank you for going through all of this with me Victoria," he said. "And thank you, so much, for taking your clothes off when I asked you to."

Random Humans

2011-03-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

It is really strange, as we make our way through life, all the people that we have contact with and then just disappear. I recently was thinking about a pair of these random humans, Black and Blaine. They were not normal people and it is quite possible that they are no longer with us yet just as possible that they are both married with three children. One never knows but anyway I owe my life to one of them and they were both a source of great entertainment.

    It was the mid 80s and I was living in a blender. Well not a real blender but a one bedroom apartment that had about five people living in it. You will be reading many stories from this little place that could because strange things just happened there. I was dealing drugs (just selling things so I could have free drugs really) at the time and the place had a constant stream of people coming and going. All of my friends were still in High School and the school was just a few blocks away so I almost worked in shifts.

    There were the people that ditched first period and came over to get stoned so the rest of the day would be bearable at the school/jailhouse they had to spend their days in. There was the lunch crowd that would come by to have a quick " in and out" with their girlfriends (mojo left at least twenty used condoms tacked to the ceiling of my closet before I noticed and thew up) and then you had the after lunch crowd that were just going to blow off their last few classes. Mind you, this is just the traffic I had during business hours. I should have gotten a time card machine and had people pay me by the hour. I would have been rich but it would have spoiled the mood of the place. I will explain more about this place and the goings on but this is about two of the many people that came and went.

    Blake and Blaine were inseparable, they were joined at the waist. You never saw one without the other except for the time Blake saved my life. These two were of the punker ilk with strange hair and torn clothes but most of us were back then. They had been brought into the fold by my friend Rockey who at the time was living in my closet with his girlfriend. They had gone to school together and had dropped out together at about the same time.

    One of the first times they ever came over to my place without Rockey being there was after a Black Flag show. It was around three in the morning and I was shaken from sound sleep by the two of them pounding on my front door. I somehow got myself out of the bed that it seemed I had just laid down in an hour earlier and answered the door to a panicked Blake and Blaine bleeding quite profusely from a head wound caused by a flying bottle. They were way too high on acid, especially for the amount of blood present and making too much noise. My neighbor was a nice Mexican woman that I had tried to make friends with right off the bat. I told her that on occasion it might get loud but all she had to do was let me know (not call the cops) and I would make sure that the noise would stop. She was older and lived alone and I also pointed out the fact that all the young men next door would look out for her and if she ever needed anything moved or fixed that I would always be at her beck and call. She liked that and was in fact a saint for what she put up with but this would be much even for her.

    Until this point the only experience I had with Blake and Blaine and L.S.D. was a wonderful night when Blake had made this poor Denny's waiter's life a living hell. Blake called the poor guy, who is already pulling a graveyard shift, to our table to complain. Now this waiter was already well aware that we were high. I don't know if they send Denny's waiters to some kind of school or institute to deal with people as high and drunk as you find in Denny's at three in the morning but I hope they get a merit badge or something.

    Whatever the case may be this young man was using all of his skills in dealing with the impaired sorting us out. We had taken too much acid, were seeing things that weren't there (and complaining about them) and Blaine had a running obsession he wouldn't let go. he would call the waiter over and calmly ask him, "I would like some blue..... syrup please" The waiter would stare at him for a second and them inform him that they were out of blueberry syrup and that he was sorry. About ten minuets would go by and Blaine would motion to our waiter again, "I require some blue........ syrup please". Just about the time the guy was going to 86 us from the restaurant somebody started shooting a gun in the parking lot. I don't know if they were shooting at somebody or were just really pleased to have finally made it to Denny's but for whatever reason it was sufficient to distract our waiter enough for us not to get thrown out. It did put the three of us in quite a bind. How long is long enough to go to your car when your on acid and somebody has been shooting up the parking lot? You sure as fuck don't want to talk to the cops but then again getting shot on acid can't be fun either so we were in a pickle. We decided not to wait for the cops (or the check for that matter) and got the hell out. This was a normal night out with these two.

    Back to the Black Flag night. I got the two of them inside before the cops were called and turned out the porch light so as not to call attention to the insane amount of blood on my porch. Once inside I did my best to calm everybody down and do a little first aid. Lacking a first aid kit (something that would prove a constant problem) or paper products of any kind except one roll of 99 cent toilet tissue, finding something to stop Blaine's bleeding was a challenge. I found a red and white checkered tablecloth in the linen closet and wrapped it around his head after I had made sure there was no glass left in his head. There was probably plenty of glass left in his hair but not in the wound itself. I found a joint in the ashtray and some Vodka, there was always Vodka at this place, and sat the boys down in a attempt to ease pain and reduce freaking out.

    So there I am, now it is about four in the morning, I'm sitting half naked with a purple haired, no pupil having acid fiend and his twin who now looks like a fucked up failed suicide bomber who's explosive belt only half worked. Blaine's blood is slowly leaking out of his tablecloth turban (he really needed stitches), Blake is Bogarting the joint like it is keeping him alive and I am nodding in and out of consciousness in between drags off the Vodka. Just your ordinary day at the McLain Hotle. Yes I wrote Hotle. Rockey and I attempted to make a sign for the place one night after a bit of drinking. Rockey had horrible dyslexia and I had no excuse but when we were done painting, wrapping in Christmas lights and hanging the sign instead of McLain Hotel, which had become the nickname of the apartment, we had hung a sign that, in flashing lights, McLain Hotle. The sign hung above my bed until I got kicked out of the place.

    A few months later (Blaine survived by the way) several friends were over as they always were and we had been drinking as we always were. To be honest everybody had been drinking but I had started off on a different vein which I called human beaker nights. In short a human beaker night was when you got as many different types of drugs as you could, took them and then drank on top of it and saw if you lived or not. This night in particular I think it was L.S.D., cocaine, Quaaludes and a few pills my grandfather took to sleep. All of that and the better part of a fifth of Vodka and you had yourself a proper human beaker night. IT was Friday I remember because Ray worked at a grocery store and every Friday as he took out the trash he would take a few bottles of Vodka out with him. He always made Fridays easy that way, no need to waste the time and energy to find somebody to buy you booze.

    Alright now this is how Blake saved my life. I'm in the living room riding the coke/lude roller coaster with about seven other drunk friends and Rockey is really drunk in the bathtub with his girlfriend Julie. Rockey had pounded a bottle of Rum to his head and was trying to sober up in the bathtub. The trouble was, as Julie was luckily around to find out, was that he was so fucked up that he kept passing out and sliding beneath the water. If Julie had not been in there with him he would have surely drown. While that is going on we are all having fun in the living room. Ray without meaning to, I think we were both talking to different people or looking at different things but for whatever reason he bumped into me pretty hard. Being in the middle of a human beaker night my balance was not that great and I fell forward, putting both my hands out to break my fall. Unfortunately for me my hands went to either side of the four foot high stereo that I was falling towards.

    My hands moved silently by each side of the stack of sound equipment leaving my head completely exposed and unprotected. My head struck the very corner of the stereo hard, really, really hard. It is one of the only times in my life that I have been hit hard enough to knock me out. I was only out for a second but when I came to I was surrounded by very concerned drunk people. I knew I was hurt pretty bad and I have the scar from the impact to this day. I am pretty sure I fractured my skull. All of my friends were freaking out and I was ripped from the daze I was in by a searing pain in my right eye. It turned out just to be the huge amount of blood that was flowing into my eye.

    So I'm half with it, everybody is freaking and Ray is trying to talk everybody into the idea that he should take me to the hospital on my motorcycle. Of course he was stumbling drunk, had a car and I had never seen him ride a bike before but this was his idea. Thank God I didn't have a phone so nobody called an ambulance. Everybody is arguing, I'm bleeding badly and just at the moment of total chaos the only sober person in the house, Julie, came into the room to see what was going on. She was great. She shut everybody up, got some cotton balls (the best she could do for paper products) to try to stop the bleeding and just when I was starting to think I might be in competent hands at last, she passed out right on top of me.

    I don't know if even Julie knew that the sight of blood made her faint but apparently it did because she fell out cold for about three seconds. I shook her back to life to get her off of me, having no idea why she had passed out. When she came to she got a completely panicked look on her face, looked me right in the eyes and screamed,"Rockey!" and ran back to the bathroom. Apparently when she got back into the bathroom her panic was well placed because Rockey had slid beneath the water again. So began Julie's strange dance of going into the living room, attempting to keep me from bleeding out, passing out on top of me, coming to and then running to the bathroom and pulling her boyfriend up out of the bathwater. She really did this at least twice before she pulled the plug on the tub so she didn't have to worry as much about Rockey.

    At some point as my friends are arguing and this girl keeps passing out on me I realize that I really want a cigarette. I asked people for one but everybody was too busy arguing so eventually I gathered the strength to crawl to the couch and sit up. When Julie came back in for her next round in the living room she was surprised to see me sitting up and was even good enough to find me a light.

    Once I was sitting up it was like I was instantly cured of any problems I may have had to my drunk friends. Now I have always been told that after a bad blow to the head the worse thing you can do is fall asleep. As soon as I was apparently cured all the adrenaline wore off for everybody. Julie had managed to get Rockey into my bed and had laid down with him and everybody else felt like the party was over and left. Suddenly I was by myself with a gaping head wound and the coke was wearing off. I started to do the one thing you are not suppose to do in this situation, I started to nod off. I was really scared and had pictures of Julie finding me the next morning, blue and dead right where I was sitting. All the fear was of no use however I felt myself slipping, just like when you have been driving for way to long, having my eyes closed just felt too good. I wasn't going to win, at least not on my own.

    Just when I had made my peace with being found dead or worse horribly brain damaged, in the morning there was a knock at the door. I never locked my door. I'm not even sure if I had a key to it. There was just too many people coming and going to worry about locks. I actually on several occasions had come home from out of town to a full blown party going on in my house. Having the door unlocked came in really handy this time because I couldn't get up if I wanted to.

   "Come in" I moaned. Through the door came Blake's head. He was a little confused by how dark it was and the fact that there weren't a bunch of people there. Then he saw my head"Holly fuck dude" he half screamed, "What the fuck happened?" I gave him the short version of the story so I could get to the important part. "Dude, could you please stick around for awhile and make sure I don't fall asleep" I pleaded with him, "I'm really scared I'm going to pass out and wake up dead." "Can I smoke some hash while I keep you awake?" he asked. "Of course" I said because, well, what the hell. "Cool" he replied and sat down on the floor "sure you don't want to go to the hospital? That looks pretty bad" "No" I said "Just talk to me". He pulled out his hash (nice black sparkling hash) and a pipe and started smoking and talking about whatever.

    He just sat there and got funnier and funnier the more stoned he got and made sure I didn't fall asleep. Sometime around dawn, well past the safe amount of time to stay awake for me, he fell asleep and I did too. When I woke up I had an awful headache and Blake was gone. I saw him several times after that night but somehow he and Blaine just drifted away like so many people do in our lives. I was probably being over dramatic about dying but Blake took me seriously and sat with me all night. I don't know but he could have saved my life or at least my ability to do higher math but the point is that after giving me such a wonderful gift I still let him drift away without even any effort to keep him around. I have done that too much in my life, behaved like I was "friend rich" like people come and go but there are always people.Well there may always be people but not many of them will stay up with you all night because of your exaggerated fears. So my advise for you and myself is to fight for those random humans that drift into your life, take care of them, stay involved and who knows they may save your life some day.

Random Thanks and Moose

2011-03-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

I want to thank everybody for all the great ideas for Random Thoughts. I am a little behind but I will get to all the suggestions and keep them coming.I will just have a short one today but it is one of the strangest, long term, coincidences I have ever known.

    It was a Halloween nights in the late eighties and I was visiting home from San Francisco. Halloween is my favorite holiday for many reasons. It pisses off fundamental Christians who think it is "the Devil's night". I actually had a couple of those freaks show up at my Grandmother's house on Halloween (she was getting older but still wanted to hand out candy so that was my job) and give me a long speech about how witches were real and everybody was in danger of them on Halloween. I didn't hit it off with them, don't know why? Oh but there is plenty of time for my disdain of fundamentalist Christians later.

    Besides scarring fundamentalists, Halloween is the best holiday of the year in Fresno because it is the real end of the ungodly summers that we have here. 110, 103, 101, Halloween, 67. The fall colors come out, the temperature becomes bearable, people decorate their houses, kids dress up, it's just cool and it is one of the only parts of the year in Fresno that you really don't have anything to bitch about. So I always try to be home for Halloween and this year had been no exception. Nobody knew that I was going to be in town so I had no plans, no parties to go to, I just wanted to be home. So I called up John and another friend named Eddie and we were going to go out and find some trouble.

    I honestly have no idea why we ended up where we did. Now let me be clear about something and this is important, our idea of getting into trouble never involved stealing anything from anyone or vandalizing anything or property damage of any kind. Shit like that wasn't cool even when we were young (when we were really young we egged a few houses and stuff like that but even that was a very short phase) so I can tell you that our intention would never be to break into somebodies house but on this night technically I guess that is what we did.

    For some reason we had ended up in an older, upscale part of town. It is one of the only parts of Fresno where an older neighborhood actually kept it's former beauty and value. We were wandering around there for some reason and found a street that none of us had ever noticed, which was quite unusual because all of us had been down this street a thousand times. The street looked more like somebodies driveway and we walked down it out of curiosity. It was a short dead end street and at the end of it we came upon a house that seemed very out of place. In a neighborhood full of tall pines and oak trees here was a house completely surrounded with cactus. There seemed to be thousands of them and in the moonlight and on Halloween, it looked a little spooky. There didn't seem to be anyone home so we decided to inspect it a little further.

    We walked through the cactus to a potting shed of sorts. I don't know exactly what it was used for because there was everything from axes to kerosene lanterns, all left out to the element. There was something creepy about it. It was almost like somebody had been working fifty years previously and just walked away and left everything. It was unsettling so we walked back into the huge maze of catus, until we saw a set of cellar doors. These were the cool type that you see in the Midwest where people go to hide from tornadoes. At least that's where I think you would see them because I've never been to the Midwest, mainly because you have to hide from tornadoes there. There is just something about that "hand of God" thing coming down and sucking you off the planet, I'm just not cool with that. They think we're crazy to live here because of earthquakes (and after recent events I don't blame them) but earthquakes don't kill people or ruin whole towns every year so I'll take the quakes. Anyway, these doors were unique and we were all drawn to them.

    I think because we had been in the potting shed like thing and because the doors were so different, we didn't really think about what we were doing. We just wanted to see what was behind those doors but we ended up breaking into somebodies basement. I shouldn't say 'break' because the doors weren't locked but if the cops had shown up that's what they would have considered it being. We went through the doors and down a few steps. All of are hearts were beating pretty fast until Eddie found a light switch and then boom, we were in somebodies house.

    Not really their house but their basement and there was a ton of stuff down there. I was drawn to a huge pile of books and I have to admit I nicked one of them. It is a book of classic poetry and I have it to this day, it is still one of my favorite books and is in my "high use" book case. While I was thumbing through books and old photos of Egypt, John had hit the jackpot. He had been instantly drawn to some hunting trophies that at one time had been mounted on somebodies wall. Somebody was an avid and talented hunter because these were no average trophies. There was two fourteen point bucks that were just huge for deer. I'm not a hunter but I grew up in the mountains and have been around hunters from a young age (and deer for that matter) so I know a nice buck when a see one but there was something there that I had never seen close up before.

    To say that the Moose was big would be like saying Jim Morrison liked to have a drink now and again. It was mammoth. The rack was at least two meters across and on the ground the head came almost to my shoulders. In it's time this thing had been a real force of nature that would have killed you, if it wanted to, in about a second. John was amazed and a little in love (I kid) but really he was transfixed by this thing. "It's a fucking Moose!" he said bewildered. "That's a fucking Moose!." I could already see his mind working, looking at dimensions, thinking about weight, he wanted this Moose. "We have got to take the Moose" he said with his mind still working on the how.

    We stood and debated it for a while, I thought it was crazy. Like nobody is going to notice three guys running down the street with a massive Moose head and on Halloween no less. We couldn't even really figure out how anybody had gotten the massive thing down there in the first place. It was like they built the house around the Moose. There was no way it would fit through the doors we came through and the only other way out of the basement was up a narrow flight of stairs into the main house. As our eyes were scanning up those stairs that's when we saw the telltale blinking light of an alarm system. "Oh shit" Eddie said out loud "there's an alarm."

    For a few moments even John's attention was off of the Moose and trying to figure out if we should be running our asses off at that moment because the cops were on their way. As it turned out the Watergate morons were better buglers than we were."O.K." I said "We're getting the hell out of here." "There would have been a siren or a bell going off if we tripped it" Eddie said confidently. "Some of them are fucking silent" I replied "the cops could be coming up the driveway right now and we wouldn't know it. We would be fucked. We have to get out" I was being a bit of a drama queen but I really didn't want to end up in jail on Halloween night. At that time I was the only one of us that had ever been to jail and it sucked and I didn't want to go back for this. After arguing for some time about what would be going on if we had already tripped the alarm for a while one of us made the great point that it was pretty stupid to be arguing about if we were pinched or not when we still stood a chance of just walking out now. Even though John really wanted to try to take that Moose up those stairs, even he decided that we should get out of there. So we crept out the storm doors and made our way through the catus back to the road.

    There was no cops waiting for us and we drove away but for the next few days, before I had to go back to San Fransisco, John was bugging me about the Moose. "We have got to go back and get that Moose." "No." "But we didn't trip the alarm and we know that now." "No." "We could come prepared and bring a hand truck or something so it would be easy to move." "No." "It would be so cool, we could hang it and we would have a great story for years." "No,"

    Eventually I was back in San Francisco, John had finally forgot about the Moose and we got on with our lives with the Moose left just to be a mildly funny story to tell every ten years or so, or so I thought.

    Twenty years later I got a job teaching science to kids at a children's science museum. We had schools come to us and we went out to local classrooms and did cool things to get kids interested in science. I thought this was great fun. I got to do all the things in science class that I couldn't when I was in science class as a kid. Thing like blow stuff up and make peoples hair stand on end with electricity and handle exotic animals and fossils. It was cool stuff and the place itself was pretty cool as well.

    While the original museum, that I went to as a kid, had been burned down by an angry rose boa constrictor that was disgruntled about his housing arrangement (he got out of his cage and in the process knocked over the heating element and fire), the park still had some cool exhibits. Most of our equipment however was housed in a large barn. When I started they were still recovering from the fire so there were things coming and going all the time.

    One day I was on my way to teach a class in Paleontology at a local school and went into the barn to gather the fossil collections and everything I needed for the lesson. As I came around a corner with a dolly for my stuff in tow, I was stopped dead in my tracks. The metal handle of the dolly fell from by hand and hit the floor with an echoing pang. "Could it be" I thought to myself. "There is no way". However, as insane as it seemed I knew what I was looking at, it was THE fucking Moose. Not a Moose nut the Moose from the house all those years ago (I never forget a face).

    I quickly found my boss and trying to hide my excitement and confusion asked her about the giant Moose that was in the barn (I hadn't been working there long and didn't want to go into the whole B&E thing with my boss). "You know. I think that came with the (we will call it) the Smith collection." she replied, "Why?" "Oh it just gave me a start and it is such a great specimen I was curious." I said starting to doubt my first impressions. I mean the odds of that would be just unbelievable. How could a Moose we were going to steal during a Halloween prank twenty years ago have made it to the same place at the same time after all this time? "We haven't taken the whole tour of the grounds yet have you? my boss asked. Oh, you have a minuet before your class we should do it now.

    We saw the mock Native American camp site and the working gardens and the maze but then we came to something I was amazed that I hadn't noticed before. There it was, the last thing you would want at a camp for kids, a giant catus garden."Mr. Smith donated his whole collection of cacti to us when he passed away. There are catus in here that are worth a whole bunch of money" she said in a tour guides voice, "He was very generous with us." "Where did he live, was he from Fresno? I asked probing for more info. Yeah he lived on (the old street I was writing about) on a dead end road. His house looked like something out of Santa Fe."

    There was no getting around it, however impossible it was, it was the same Moose. I went back into the privacy of the barn and stared into his eyes. "We meet again" I said to the long stuffed animal, "Does this mean that you want me to steal you or is this just a way of telling me the in spite of our attempt to remove you and probably after a few years neglect you, you were fine. The Moose had done well for itself. I had a few moments of weighing how easy or difficult it would be to nick him from there but I decided it was wrong then and it would be wrong at the time. For the rest of the time I worked there, every time I was in the barn I said hello and asked my old friend how he was doing. I never stole him but I did wait five more years and after I was no longer working there to tell John.

Random Stupid Facts

2011-03-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

On this day in 1910 slavery was abolished in China. I bet I could find a few Chinese people that would disagree with that fact but that's what is on the books. It's nice to know that we weren't the last country that thought of people as property (and yes I know it still goes on in parts of Africa). Also for your amusement Queen Victoria's doctors prescribed marijuana for menstrual cramps. Can you picture, her in all the regalia, blowing a fattie. At that time the sun never set on the English empire so I bet that was insane ganja.
That is all.

Random Job Openings

2011-03-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

O.K. so we have all been amused as of late with Charlie Sheen taking the express train to whack-nutville. However, his is not a special trip. Sure there are millions of dollars involved and I guess there are people that watch his show that, from what I can tell, is all about a guy contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Something I have been accused of and have probably been guilty of in the past. But if you take away the fortune and fame this is just a guy having a meltdown, that would come up to me in a bar. I am a magnet for the metally instable. It's either a gift or a curse but it is real. If there is a room of one thousand people, with one guy totally off his bean, he will, without fail, come up and start talking to me. Let me provide a couple of examples.

    A really easy one was a guy that was friends with my brother. My brother the biker not the brother that was a bank robber (my family's great) but explanations for that will come later. Biker brother shows up at the ranch I was living at in Cambria. 2400 acres of sheer paradise that would take a poet to really do it justice in describing it. Anyway into this tranquil environment comes my brother and this guy Steve who also had his girlfriend with him. She was stunningly beautiful and about twenty years younger than Steve. They were all traveling in this moter home that looked like the one in Christmas vacation.

    My brother rushes in the house and informs me that we have to get out of there, notice the we part, because we were going to take a drive and have a bit of a party. So me being the idiot that I am, was out the door and in the mobile home in a matter of seconds. Our big road trip consisted of driving about ten miles down Hwy 1and parking in a turnout. Keep in mind that this is at about one in the afternoon. A turnout, yeah, party! Wow. Oh course we were in the turnout because it is really hard, even in a mobile home, to chop up lines of meth without it getting spilled everywhere. So out came the fold out table and the mirror.

    For those of you that have never really done stimulants of any kind and no drinking seven Rock Stars does not count, if your doing speed be careful who you are doing it with. Not just because you want to be careful anytime you engage in illegal activity with people you just met but when it comes to speed the quality of the drugs really are different with who you are doing them with. Average Mexican guy, the shit has been stepped on at least three times so no real jet fuel. Average black guy maybe a little better quality but in my experience most black guys don't really do a lot of speed. Coke yes but not too much meth it is a pretty white drug and I have no clue why that is. However, if your doing it with a white guy and that guy is a biker, look out. Those boys really like their speed and the shit they get is usually pure jet A quality. One decent line and your house will be cleaner than it has ever been and if you don't have somebody to screw your in real trouble and will probably end up dry humping the couch before you come down, which won't be for several days.

    Well Steve was a biker and true to form he lined up a couple of dog-killers that felt like you had just had a railroad spike pounded into your nasal cavity when you snorted one. He also was one of these guys that did not know the meaning of "Thanks but I'm cool. I don't need another one". That statement might as well have been in Latin for Steve. You always needed another one and it always needed to be huge. So while I was trying to regain my sight after snorting one of his bad boys, Steve and his girlfriend went into the "bedroom" of the R.V. for a few minuets.

    Now I will tolerate about anything drug related you can throw at me. Generally I have either done it or, well there is no or I have usually done it but I don't do needles. I lost a brother to a heroin overdose and if you pull out a rig in front of me either I'm leaving or your getting thrown out. No ifs ands or buts about it. It is one of my only firm rules.Well I didn't know it or notice at the time but that was exactly what Steve and his girlfriend were doing in the bedroom, they were mainlining this rocket fuel. Actually they were doing speedballs (heroin and speed or coke together) which is probably the best way to kill yourself without using a gun. You may get away with doing them for a while but one day the H will be a little stronger or the speed will be too cut and it's lights out. In hindsight it explained why Steve, who was a balding troll, had a hot young lady friend.

    After we all had done to many drugs in the turnout the paranoia set in almost instantly. "That same car went by five minuets ago" Steve would say about every third car, "Cops are watching us, we got to get out of here". So we would drive a few more miles to the next turnout, do some more drugs, Steve would start seeing black helicopters and we would be down the road again. This went on for quite some time until Steve hear a disturbing noise, a noise that nobody else heard but a troubling noise all the same. So in the next turnout Steve decided to disassemble the engine of the RV with nothing but a couple of wrenches, a screwdriver and a pair of needle nose pliers. This of course would draw no attention to us at all but Steve was determined. After a while he decided that the sound was coming from the water pump, even though the RV wasn't overheating, and it had to be rebuilt right then.

    We drove back to the ranch and Steve managed to get the water pump out. He sat across from me at the little pull out table and started taking apart the water pump apart with his pathetic assortment of tools.While he did this he talked non-stop about every nut job conspiracy theory you have every heard about. Apparently the U.S. government had spent millions of dollars on surveillance and brain washing attempts on him. They did this because of what he knew. He knew too much, he never said what he knew too much of but he knew too much.

Just by being in his presence I apparently was putting my life in danger because there were always Secret Service snipers with him in the cross hairs just waiting for the word, on their dedicated line, from the President to take him out. This went on for three hours, with no hope of escape, until he decided that the water pump that he never had managed to even get apart, was fixed. He put in back in the RV and he and his hot girlfriend were on there way because they had stayed in one place for way too long and the choppers were going to land at any second if they didn't get moving. Did I mention that he was wearing a shoulder holster complete with a huge hand cannon the entire time? Last I heard the Secret Service never got Steve but his pretty young girlfriend got a hot shot and O.D.ed three months later. I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

    I was on a Greyhound bus from Hollywood to Fresno in the mid eighties after a great two weeks of R.R. doing brain damage with Anne. When I boarded the bus I was surprise at how crowded it was and in fact there was only one seat empty. It was next to this hippie looking young guy that looked like he was no stranger to traveling on Greyhound, which as we all know is the highest class mode of transportation known to Western Civilization. I sat down and noticed that some of the other passengers were giving me strange looks, strange even for a Greyhound bus. Now I had never had good or normal experiences riding Greyhound but nothing could have prepared me for the trip I was about to take.

    The hippie kid and I started making some small talk after we were on the freeway.I didn't get his name and I just can't keep referring to him as 'the hippie kid' so lets call him Bob. Bob seemed normal, well as normal as you get on a bus from Hollywood. We talked about the weather and how crowded the bus was and then he started telling me about his dogs.

    It turned out that Bob had two Rottweilers that he was very proud of, "They are trained to sniff out government agents. They can nail F.B.I, A.T.F, C.I.A. but they have a hard time with Secret Service. We are still working on that." he told me as normally as if he had said "My pants are blue'. "Really?" I said "That must come in handy." "Oh yeah. They are life savers" he continued "a few weeks ago I didn't have them with me because my mom had them and I was walking down the street and the C.I.A. just came out of nowhere. Came at me from two different directions, tazed me and had me cuffed and in their car before anybody could even notice." "Really? I replied, my voice getting a little higher.

    "Yeah, it was a bad scene. They locked me up in this bunker that from the front looked like a normal house but you had to get a retina scan before the door would unlock. Then once you got in there was nothing in the house except this guy in uniform behind a desk with a M-16" he said describing every detail of the soldier's uniform, right down to the individual metals and what each one was for. "They locked me in this pure white room with a two way mirror and shot me up with a bunch of truth serum, but I'm immune to that shit because give myself a little bit of it everyday, just like those guys that can get bit by cobras, so when I didn't have a reaction they got really pissed off. They beat the shit out of me, hit me with night sticks. They even hit me up with a cattle prod but I didn't crack man. After three days they put me in this van with all the windows blacked out and then just threw me out of the thing while it was still doing like thirty and just drove away. It took me like forever to even figure out where they had dumped me." "Well you had been through a lot" I said having no idea what else to say. "Yeah" he continued, "now I don't walk anywhere without my dogs. I would have them with me now but I called and you can't bring dogs on the bus unless your blind or something." "Well, that's a drag" I said still at a loss for words.

    I have no explanation for what I did next. Instead of just staying quiet, for some reason out of my mouth comes "If you don't mind me asking, why were they after you. I mean what do you know that they want so bad". The second I said it I literally called myself a stupid fucking idiot in my head. Now Bob was going to think that I was interested in his crazy ass story or worse, think I was one of them probing for information and he would probably stab me to death right there on the bus. At the time I don't think I was sure which would be worse. After the words left my mouth he turned and gave me a really hard stare."Here comes the stabbing part of my trip" I thought to myself. He looked around a bit, looked hard at the people sitting behind us, who were obviously staring at the ceiling or the floor just so they didn't look at him because they had overheard our conversation. After checking under his seat he leaned in closer to me.

    "Because I'm the only one man" he said. "The only one that?" I replied continuing to be stupid. "I'm the only one that is keeping the world from being destroyed." he answered. He leaned in close to me,"You see God and the Devil can't talk to each other, its like against the rules or something, but they talk to me and I'm the go between. I tell God what the Devil wants him to know and God tells me what he needs to say to the Devil. Without me it would be total chaos man." "Wow", I said, "that's alot of responsibility." "That's not the most important part" he continued, "you see I do the same thing between Reagan and Gorbachev. I can come to them when their sleeping and tell each one of them what the other wants to say. Without me, nuclear war man, boom, everything gone. I mean do you really think they wouldn't launch those fuckers off if it wasn't for me. I mean it could be a flock of birds but on their radar it looks like missiles without me telling both of them what the other is thinking, I mean it gives them a little confidence that those birds aren't missiles when I tell them in their dreams what the other guy is up to. It's fucking intense."

    So needless to say I'm at a complete loss but I feel like I have to keep talking to him so I said " It seems strange that the Secret Service would be after you if, you know, your keeping the world going." "You would think", he replied "but there are a bunch of twisted fuckers that are just dying to launch those birds. They like jack off thinking about it. I met a guy that was in one of those silos." "Really" I said hoping to get away from the talking to God and the Devil conversation path we had gotten on, "I bet he had some crazy stories." "Yeah", he said his eyes getting even wider" They make those guys do a bunch of this blue cocaine and then chain them by the leg to the bottom of a big tube of water, naked, with their finger on the button." "Wouldn't they drown if they did that for any length of time?" I asked. " Oh no. They have o2 tanks and they make them stay in those tubes, high on blue cocaine so they don't sleep, for a week at a time. If a light goes on in their tube, because their in complete darkness, they push that button and it's on. I think the water is supposed to protect them from the shock waves.."

    "Makes sense" I said, a little amazed that he had some reasoning behind the whole tube thing. "Yeah this guy had just come off his week of duty and he was slamming a bottle of Jack, right there on the bus, and it didn't effect him at all because of the drugs. He was still trying to come down." "You met this guy on a bus? I asked. "Yeah" he replied "same bus we're on now." "Yeah you meet interesting people on buses" I said trying desperately not to laugh. "Well we wouldn't have met each other" he said "but I think I might have met you anyway." "Yeah" I said "I kinda get the same thing"

    Then there was a moment of wonderful silence. He was just sitting there looking out the window and I thought for a moment that the worst of the crazy was over, but no. Suddenly he reached into his bag and pulled out a big package of magic markers, that he put in his lap like a little table, and a small gray cloth bag. "Where should we have the riot be? he asked me with excitement in his voice. "The ah riot? There's going to be a riot somewhere?" I said with my hopes of an end of the crazy dashed. "We are going to cast a spell" he said "we just need to decide where we want it to happen." "Oooookkkkkk" I said channeling Homer Simpson from the future "I have no idea." "What about L.A. we could have a big riot in L.A. but they were pretty good to me down there so maybe that wouldn't be right" he said showing mercy for the city of angels. "Sacramento!" he said confidently "that's where we are going to have the riot."

    He emptied out the little gray cloth bag on the package of markers. What came out was a little plastic sword and some change. "O.K., he said "The pen is mightier than the sword" holding up one of the markers and the little plastic sword, "money is evil nut we need it" he said picking up a few pennies. He closed his eyes holding all three items tightly in his hands and seemed to be concentrating hard. "It is done!" he said loudly and proudly "The riot will be today in Sacramento. It is done!" "Yeah, fuck Sacramento" I said. I hate Sacramento anyway so acting like I was happy was easy. He put his head back and closed his eyes with a bit of a smirk of his face, obviously proud of himself and then there was more of that wonderful silence I wanted so much.

After a few minuets he shot straight up in his seat, looked over at me intensely and grabbed my arm, hard. "If you ever see a biker" he said staring almost panicked into my eyes "if you ever see a biker with a staff that has three kitty heads and a sacrificial dish on it" (I swear I'm not making this up). "Get it for me! I need that staff." "Staff, kitty heads and sacrificial dish." I replied like I was reading bad a shopping list. He nodded."OK. You got it man" I said reassuringly. "Good, good" he said as he leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes again.

    The bus pulled into Oxnard and with not so much as a "See ya later" he stood up, grabbed his bag and walked off the bus. I watched him standing outside the bus, looking around and not moving in any particular direction. He was still standing there when the bus pulled away. Then my part of the bus erupted in cries of "Thank God" and "Oh Jesus I thought we were going to die". Suddenly people I don't know are shaking my hand and even hugging me, thanking me over and over again. Apparently before I got on the bus he had been ranting like a maniac to himself and everybody was waiting for him to pull out a gun or something. The most sane he had been on the bus was while he was talking to me and now the other passengers were treating me like a hero. One woman even propositioned me to get off the bus with her in Santa Barbara and go back to her place. Of course I didn't, this was a Greyhound bus after all. I must admit however that it felt pretty cool to be the guy that handled the crazy guy on the bus.

    So you can understand the jealousy and distain I feel for the people that are currently around Mr. Sheen and are getting paid good money to ride that bus to crazyville with him. The people around him that are trying to gently steer him towards the less crazy side or just agreeing with him when he is ranting about "all phones being made by trolls" and his "magic brain". I could do that job, hell I would excel at it. I just don't know how to word the resume. Any suggestions?

Random Poo

2011-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

    When we were all growing up it was John that got the first real steady girlfriend. I mean the type of girlfriend that you start to make long-term plans with and sneak out at night to see. Her name was Sophia and I don't really remember how he hooked up with her but it was in the ninth grade. Now I'm not saying he was the first of us to have a girlfriend of any kind but I think he was the first to have what one would consider a serious relationship.

    Now Sophia had red hair and I think hazel eyes and freckles. She was not a beauty queen but for her age she had a nice body and a pretty face. All and all not a bad looking girl. She had a nice personality as well but if I had put that first all of you would have assumed that she was ugly. You know you would have.

    Anyway, Sophia lived about seven blocks from the school that we went to and was unfortunately being raised by a single mother. Now I'm not putting down single mom's. Most women stuck in that situation (and the numbers are sickening) do a very good job of raising their kids. They seem to do a much better job raising girls. As a teacher I can pretty much talk to a boy for about five minuets before I can tell if they are being raised by a single mom. While it has been proven time and again by numerous studies that cross gender relationships are very important in the formation of stable heterosexual relationships later in life, boys and young men need father figures. I think it is tied into a natural fear of death.

    Let me put it this way, even though my father was absent during my childhood I was raised by my grandfather and if I were to tell a teacher to go fuck themselves when I was a boy I would not have been surprised in the least if when I got home my grandfather told me to go in the back yard and stand by the large hole he had been digging all day in the back yard. What would have made him the most angry would have been the fact that he would have had to fill in the hole after he had blown my head off. You see I wouldn't have told a teacher to fuck off because I knew I would be killed. My grandfather loved me and would have missed me but there was obviously something seriously wrong with me and I would have had to go. Lots of single moms try to put that same fear into their sons but most of the time they don't buy it and I get told to fuck myself by some 5th grader. Sophia's mom however created wasn't raising a boy but still managed to create enough fear for several male children.

    Sophia's mom had her very young. I never did the math but I'm pretty sure that she has Sophia around the age of 16 and she was going to be damned sure that her daughter did not make the same mistake. Now I'm not talking about setting curfews and having frank discussions about pregnancy prevention and sexuality. Oh no, quite the opposite. Mentioning sex counted for at least thirteen four letter words and was not tolerated. She did not allow boys, for any reason, to step foot in her house. If you were a little boy who was being molested, had been held captive for years by some pervert, was currently on fire and shot and were unlucky enough to end up at Sophia's doorstep asking for help her mother would yell at you and send your burning ass on your way. She overcompensated a bit.

    Did all of this keep Sophia from having boys in her house? Of course not but it did put the fear of God into any of the boys that may have had the balls to step foot into said house. Now John and I at this point in our lives were virtually inseparable but I never understood why he wanted me to tag along with him to his girlfriend's house. We would go over while her mom was at work. After some polite small talk, they would go off to Sophia's room to make out and I would sit bored out of my mind and read magazines in the living room.

    Now there were two kinds of excitement in doing this. First, I might leave a magazine out of place or something tipping off Sophia's mom that there had been people in the house which would have resulted in Sophia's untimely demise. The second point of excitement was that Fresno had a curfew back then. If it was dark and you were under 18 years old you would get taken downtown in cuffs and wait for your parents to pick you up. I had a friend that was out walking his dog around the block, literally around his block, and was picked up by the cops. He begged the cops to just go down three houses and knock on the door so he could prove he was telling the truth. That was apparently too much trouble so he was taken downtown and the dog was taken to the pound. What about this was fun for us? Running from the cops of course while we walked back from Sophia's house. That was cool, except the time I rolled under a car to hide from a cops spotlight and hit a hot muffler. Anyway, the point is most nights John got to make out and I got to read Cosmo.

    Well one night, while reading fourteen ways to please your man, the impossible happened. Suddenly headlights pulled up into the driveway. I didn't have time to drop the Cosmo before a ghost white John, wearing nothing but his underwear, came running into the living room. "Oh no, oh no, it's Sophia's mom, oh fuck" he said running around in a circle panicking. Sophia ran out just as panicked, he eyes as big as saucers, "eh, eh, oh no, oh no" she stammered and started to go in circles like John. It was beginning to look like a really bad Cirque De Sollie bit. All it needed was some barely clothed chic to come down a rope from the ceiling and we would have had a show. Realising that she had just seconds Sophia got it together and grabbed John who was still jogging around in a circle.

    "Come on!" she yelled/whispered while grabbing John. She motioned for me to follow and she led us to her little sister's room. Her sister was about nine at the time and was spending the week with her father. We made our way through the maze of toys that were lying all over the floor (room looked like somebody nuked a Toys R Us) and Sophia shoved both of us into a tiny closet. A second later she returned and thew John's clothes in the closet, pressed her finger up to her lips hard letting us know we had to be silent and then closed the closet door.

    Now Sophia's sister had way too many things and by the feel of it she cleaned her room by shoving everything that may have been laying about into her closet. There was not enough room for me to put both feet on the floor in was so crowded. So now I'm in a dark closet standing on one foot like a flamingo with another guy dressed only in white briefs with his arm around me to keep his balance. Then we herd the front door opening.

    It can be strange and eye opening when you get a glimpse of how other families work when nobody else is around. I always knew that Sophia's mom was a dragon lady but God damn. We herd her come through the door and the first thing out of her mouth, which was a scream by the way, was "What the fuck is that smell!" First thing. Not "Hi darling. How was your day" no "What the fuck is that smell. Has somebody been in here!" Sophia was pretty cool," What are you talking about mom. Nobody has been in here. I have just been doing my homework." "No" Sophia's mom replied "there is somebody in here. It smells like a boy". I'm stuck in a closet thinking, "Who the fuck is this lady, the giant from Jack and the bean stalk. What the fuck!"

    Then bad went right into worse. John in his panic to grab his clothes and get slammed into a closet had forgotten his jacket in the living room. "What the fuck is this? Sophia's mom screamed. John and I are in the dark she could have been holding up a used condom or a horses head for all we knew but we knew it was bad. "Well!" screamed Sophia's mom. Sophia at this point still has ice water in her veins. Without missing a beat she says, "It was cold and John loaned me his jacket when he walked me home. I just forgot I was wearing it. I'm going to give it back to him tomorrow." Super cool but no dice. " He was in this house wasn't he. Wasn't he?" Sophia's mom started to yell louder. Now I don't know what Sophia's face looked like at this point but whatever passed over her face made her mother go from maybe there was a boy in the house, past tense, to there is a boy in the house now. "He's still here isn't he?" she wailed. John and I clung to each other in the darkness now in complete terror. "Where is he. Where is that son of a bitch?" she yelled as we listened to her begin stomping through the house.

    Sophia was obviously cracking a little at this point. She continued to deny everything but her voice was starting to crack and it sounded like she was about to cry. If she broke we were fucked and we knew it. Her mother was so unbelievably pissed at the concept that a boy had been in the house the idea of finding one in his underwear hiding in a closet, what she would do, we could literally not imagine the horror that was waiting for us. Sophia's mom was still screaming and stomping through the really small house and her voice was getting closer.

    Suddenly the lights in the bedroom we were hiding went on. The closet door was cracked just one quarter inch but the light was hitting me right in the eye. I saw Sophia's mom stomp into the room. I think my asshole turned inside out. Suddenly the closet door flew open. I can't imagine what Sophia must have seen but she for some reason felt it was necessary to remind John and I to be quiet. Like we fucking needed that. Like we were going to start a God damned sing a long or something. Anyway, the door flew open and John and I were both sure it must have been Sophia's mom. Under any other circumstances what Sophia must have seen would have made most people laugh hysterically. Here were two young men, one fully clothed in a dress jacket and standing on one foot and another young man clinging to the first wearing nothing but a pair of tighty whities, both pale as ghosts with looks of utter terror on their faces. From our point of view we were done but it was Sophia who just made a shhhhhh motion by putting her finger up to her lips and then she closed the door again as far as it would close.

    My heart was in my throat and beating about a thousand times a minuet. I was shaking and truly scared yet through all the adrenaline and fear something was making its way through. Something was powerful enough to override all my terror. It was of all the strange things a smell. My racing mind was trying desperately to slow down enough to figure out what it was when John spoke, now remember we are clinging to each other in a dark three by three closet, not able to make a sound above a whisper, with no where to go and John says, "Dude, I'm sorry but I think I shit my pants." He wasn't even wearing pants! When the door flew open he had literally dropped a load in his briefs.

    I always thought "I shit my pants" was a figure of speech. I didn't think that anybody but very old people actually did it but there I was in this closet being overcome by the sheer stink of the McNuggets making my friends briefs droop. I couldn't run, move or even really react to the incredible stink building up in the closet but that was far from the worst of it. The worst part was that we had to wait until Sophia's mom went to bed before we even tried to make our escape. For the record it was FOUR HOURS before we could risk leaving the closet.

    Now the bedroom we were in was right down a short wood floor hall and Sophia's mom slept with her door open. Sometime around three in the morning we slowly started to crawl down the creaking hallway pausing every time the old floor made a sound. This meant that it took us an incredibly long time to cover any distance. After crawling down the hall for what seemed to be hours all of a sudden lights come on. I don't know if John shit himself again but I almost did. We did the fast backwards crawl all the way back to the closet and I was back on one foot in pooville.

    Luckily it was Sophia being quite smart and pretending that she was letting the family cat out. She came to the closet, motioned us to follow her and acted like she was talking to the cat. If Sophia's mom would have gotten up we all would have been toast but amazingly she stayed in bed and all three of us headed into the front room. Now unknown to Sophia and I, John had spent all the time with that turd in his drawers coming up with a great escape plan. Unfortunately he had not shared this plan with anyone else. So when Sophia and I had made it to the near freedom of the front door, when we turned around John was heading into the kitchen. We both did our best whisper scream until we got his attention and he looked at the two of us like we were fucking up.

    Apparently John's plan was to sneak out of the closet, crawl down the hall and instead of going out the front door he planned to go out the back through the kitchen. There was one problem with John's plan (well more than one but one main one) and that problem was named Rex. Rex was Sophia's Golden Lab that hated John and barked at him every time he saw him. At night Rex was kept in the laundry room, right by the back door, behind one of those kid barriers that fold up. Rex would have lost his mind and woke up the whole house if he had saw John at three in the morning. Oh did I mention that Sophia's mom had a gun and was very proud of the fact that she would blow away anybody that ever tried to break into her house? That was just more motivation, back to John's plan. So John in his turd induced haze had decided that the only way to escape without getting caught or shot was to sneak into the kitchen, grab a big iron pan that was there and hit Rex as hard as he could with it, hopefully knocking Rex out but if he killed it well too bad. Then for some reason to hide his crime he had planned to stuff Rex's unconscious or dead body in the washer and run out the back door. Even though Sophia had safely gotten us to the front door without waking anybody up, John was still heading to his date with Rex and destiny

    We finally got John's attention and we both amazingly, after six hours of horror, wqalked out the front door. John was half running, half hopping down the street, trying to put his clothes back on. We successfully navigated our way back to my house without getting busted by any cops and managed to sneak into my house without waking anybody. To this day I can't tell you what happened to those shorts or that turd. I know it never made it to my house and my best guess is that Sophia's little sister had some questions when she put her toys back into her closet or her mom found it, thought it was some kind of weird behavior and she ended up in therapy that she didn't need for many years. If only every turd had such an exciting life.

Random Whimps

2011-03-03T19:29:00.000-08:00

First of all I (not being a very tall guy myself) have always been amused when people meet their favorite movie star hunks in person. Now there are exceptions to this rule like (I will spell his name wrong) Liam Neilson, Conan O'Brien, Sean Connery to name a few but most screen leading men are under six foot. Mel Gibson, Tom Cruse, Robert Downy Jr. all about 5'8 or so. This does not make them bad actors or not tough guys. Jackie Chan is shorter than I am and could kick five 6'6 guy asses. However the opposite can also be true. Being an action hero does not make you a tough guy.

    I almost killed Don Johnson a few years ago and we share the same birthday (it had been a crappy previous 10 hours before I almost killed the guy). Freddie Mercury, not a film star but famous and tall but not the most manly guy in the world while he was still living. What really drives the point home is a guy that has made several movies using my last name. That's right John McLain, A.K.A. Bruce Willis. Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, Tears of the Sun he is a tough guy extraordinary. However, not only is he not the tallest guy in the world he is a crybaby to boot.

    It turns out that during filming Tears of the Sun (if you haven't seen it you didn't miss much. It's a warmed over bad Chuck Norris movie. Double secret agent Army guy holding a gun that should be mounted in the real world, frees a bunch of people, with many exploding things in Vietnam or some place that looks like it proving once and for all that we DID NOT lose that war. Lots of explosions and a little sex, all American) while filming Bruce got hit by a piece of fake shrapnel in the forehead from one of the many, many explosions.

    Now "shrapnel" is far too strong of a word, it was much more like a slow flying piece of plastic that wasn't hot enough to leave a red spot. It struck him in the forehead (My face, my beautiful face!) and witnesses say that he bled a "little bit", above nicking yourself while shaving, below anything that might need direct pressure. So Bruce did what all tough action guys do. He sued.

    He is attempting to sue the movie's producers and the studio as well as the director, the company hired to do the special effects, right on down to the union guy that pushed the 'on' button. Now you might be thinking, "Hey some of those effects look really fucking dangerous and I agree. If you were standing in front of a claymore, even a Hollywood one, it could blow your ass up. Hell Vic Morrow got his (and two child extras) head chopped off by a helicopter blade that was not suppose to be where it was, more or less at full speed, when the heads rolled. At least that was for a decent B-Movie but this was not the case for Bruce's injury.

    No, no huge explosion. No getting shot at close range with a blank or my favorite, getting shot with a real bullet the later killed Bruce Lee's son. No this monster, crowd wowing effect was the little puffs of air that come up to look like bullets striking the ground. This effect had all the massive power to make dust move. It probably had the blasting power of as ladyfinger firecracker. If you are a guy you know these very well and you probably let one go off in your hand because a friend dared you to do it. If you weren't that smart you probably closed your hand around it and felt a little numbing sting when it went off. After it went off, you shook you hand for a minuet, made sure you still had all your fingers and started out lighting a new one.

    Bruce on the other hand, according to what he filed in court, was physically and mentally scarred by the incident. He got a boo-boo and him was a scared. So scarred that he had to go to a shrink to deal with it before he could make another shitty movie. I can only imagine, reoccurring dreams of bad reviews and horrible box office numbers. Days and days of lying to talk show hosts about the quality of the movie. Oh yeah, and getting hit in the head with a slightly warm small piece of plastic. Oh the humanity!

    No word as to any agreements that might have been made or any number amount on what Willis is actually suing each party for. Regardless, this case should serve as a testament to all directors and special effects people, that all Hollywood tough guys are in fact made of porcelain filled with strawberry jam and should be treated as such or just make all of your movies abroad.

    So ladies remember if you are looking for a real man try to stay away from men that don't wear makeup when they go to work and don't need others to dress them for work. They are pretty to look at but hell, I could look like Brad Pitt with enough makeup spakeled on my face and I do all my own stunts (and have the real scars to prove it). Also, and this is a big one, small pieces of plastic don't send me screaming in horror. Then again, I'm taken and maybe by fearless approach to plastic is part of why.

Random Bad Planning

2011-03-01T20:48:00.000-08:00

I don't like the title of this one but it seems only fitting considering the Random Perfection post earlier. You see after having such a wonderful experience the first time Mary, Anne and myself had on acid on a particular beach up the coast from L.A., we decided that we should do it again. This is that story and I will stress again that all of this did happen.

    This time I brought a friend from Fresno. A mistake I would make a few times without learning the inevitable outcome. It isn't that people from Fresno are all like Jay and have a hard time out of their comfort area, it's just things in my life had become very different (as far as what I considered O.K.) when compared to many of my old friends that I grew up with. I was madly in love, not with either of the girls at the time, although it didn't hurt that they were both beautiful, it was really this whole life view. It was day to day. You didn't know where you were going to sleep and often it ended up being on the beach or a car. You never knew where the money for the drugs or for that matter food or gas would come from but somehow it always appeared. I loved the abandonment and the refusal to let little things like beds, meals and gas back home stand in our way of having a great time.

This time I took my friend Mojo with me. He was an attractive and very intelligent young man who had actually lived outside of the greater Fresno area (I think we were the only people out of our friends that had at this time. Mojo had grown up in Hawaii, had been exposed to my flying circus back in Fresno and always emerged undamaged and still looking good. This was a man that I respected then and still love and respect today.

    So when he showed up for our road trip I should have noticed the small hard-sided brown leather suitcase he was bringing along. This was obviously a gift from Grandma and it looked more like a briefcase than a bag. Just not the kinda thing you bring on a trip 'Gareeteed to blow your mind'. But I though, hey practical and all my stuff was stuffed in a garbage bag in the back seat so I was going to be bumming things off him before the trip was over.

    We had an relatively usual trip down to L.A. Now at this time I should point out what uneventful trip meant back then. You see I was driving was a silver Mazda station wagon, with silver primer and a piece of rusting barbed wire for a radio attenae. It was amazingly fast thanks to the rebuild engine but it did have one large problem. It had no brakes.

    Now when most people say they had a car that had no brakes they mean that the car doesn't stop as quickly as if should or there is a grinding sound when the brakes are applied. This car, I swear, when I say it had no brakes it had no brakes that you could call, let say a safety feature. That really wasn't the big drag. That was that the emergency brake was disconnected. We slowed this car down by down shifting so hard that many times I thought the engine would seize, until we got down to about five miles an hour. At that point it was (again not joking) feet out the door and yelling at other cars to get out of the way.

    This system worked as long as there were no surprises. If there was a surprise that you couldn't avoid you could shut off the engine in gear and hope the steering wouldn't lock or rev the engine really hard and attempt to slam the 5 speed into reverse. You can't do this anymore but in a pinch it could work. I once was not paying attention and came over a blind rise to find a red light and an old pickup in my lane. I swerved to miss the pickup, reved the engine and with an unholy sound slammed the car into reverse, popped the clutch and started burning rubber backwards while I was slowly still moving forward. The back of the car, billowing black smoke from the tires burning off started to fishtail and I'm still slowly moving into a major intersection.The only good thing about the whole situation was the seventy something year old farmed observing all of this next to me. He watched curiously while I burned off the rest of my forward progress into a large plumb of noxious gas and came to a halt. The second I wasn't moving forward I turned the ignition off. I tried to give farmer John a smile after the smoke stopped but he was clearly unimpressed by my incredible driving proves.

    This was the car we were taking to L.A. and Mojo being my bro trusted me to get us there.But this time would be different. We scored acid but it was already dark by the time we scored. We ended up in an alley in Culver City (a very unfriendly place for people such as us) splitting up the hits. It was going to be Mojo's first time and unknown to us, even this stuff had the same name, it was about three times as strong. We split up the acid (two for me and Annie and one each for Mojo and Mary) and were on our way up the coast.

    This time we already for the trip. We had fire wood and lighter fluid, for the huge bond fire we were going to build, some food and some alcohol. We were ready for the cave with Morrison still bouncing off the walls and the anticipation was high. This time when we arrived it was well after the beach closed so we had to pack all our gear all the way down to the beach. Already I could tell that this blotter acid was a lot stronger than the mind blowing stuff we had last time. As usual there was Annie popping one and a half more hits in my mouth even though I new I was already very high.

    Once we had climbed the thousand or so stairs down to the beach we found a fire ring and started creating our huge fire. Having brought no flashlights finding firewood was a challenge in courage. Was that a piece of wood or a huge snake that had gotten out of somebodies fish tank and is now here starving just waiting for us.We managed to get a few logs and before we know it we had a large bond fire.

    Now there comes a point when you have done a little too much acid when your in a group that are all in the same boat. There are large periods of silence brought on by people having something to say, answering and analysing the statement and then finding some flaw in the comment or question all before you had a chance to open you mouth and then your not quite sure if you said it out load or not but if you did nobody commented so it must of been dumb so you better shut up before you say something else stupid.

    Out of the semi-silence Annie who was sitting next to me pointed out an ant crawling on the sand. "Hey look Kell, a little ant fighting against the sand". "What a trip" i said being relieved that somebody was talking. "wonder what he's doing all the way out here." Mojo this whole fire has been poring lighter fluid on the bond fire. "Yeah....." Annie said with a bit of apprehension. There sure is a lot of them and then BAM the whole beach was ants. Every grain of sand was now magically a crawling ant. The weird thing that was a reoccurring theme for the night is that I had the same hallucination at the exact same time.

    We both lept to our feet and Annie was already taking off her shirt and heading to the dark, black sea and I was only a step behind. Mary at that point saved us from surely drowning. "It's not ants. Think! why would there be so many ants, ants don't like beaches, we have no food. You're tripping, calm down. Just like that the ants were gone and we sat back down, still wiping our arms and legs off. Things calmed down. After a few moments of silence I was looking up at Mojo and his huge fire that he had going which he was still dousing with lighter fluid. I don't remember which one of us noticed it but the onset of panic could have been a disaster. We noticed that the plastic bottle of lighted fluid that Mojo was squirting this huge fire with had a large leak in it and he had lighter fluid pouring down his arm and onto his shoes. He was covered in flammable liquid less that a foot from the fire. We all screamed a him which just made him freeze in fear.

    Much like the ant thing we slowly got him to back away from the fire and while he was not on fire he was now completely freaked out. I calmed him down and we sat by the fire for what seemed like just a few minuets but easily could have been an hour.When we looked up the girls were gone. We called for them but got no response. They had gone to climb on top of a rock to get a good view (and probably needed a break from us) but to me they were gone. At this point I was too stoned and needed to get home. I wasn't in my right mind and started to do something I never would have. I was hiking out and going home.

    To give you an idea of how high too high was everything I looked at was made of human eyes. Everything! I came up to the top of a rise that had a great view of Santa Monica in the distance. For some reason the words "I am part of God, I am God" went through my mind and at the moment what I saw of Santa Monica burst into fire. That was it home. "What about the girls" Mojo pleaded. "They will be fine, we have to go." I sternly replied. Now leaving women on a deserted beach is as about as far away from my style but at the moment it was the only thing that could help my head not to explode. So up the hill we went.

    Now in my mind I was going to drive all the way back to Fresno but after the fife minuets it took me to figure out how to start my own car, I think Mojo had his doubts. Those doubts turned into action when I got distracted for a second and ended up driving the wrong way up P.C.H. Thank God it was in the middle of the night. Mojo made me let him take over. Now Mojo had never driven my car and I spent a long time telling him about the fact that the car had no brakes. Which he mostly dismissed and started to drive fast because I think he was more than a little pissed at me for getting into this. Remember, first time.

    There was nobody on the road and the trip back to Santa Monica went pretty smoothly. Mojo drove while I had decided that money was the root of what was wrong with the world and commenced throwing my rent money out the window, one hundred dollar bill at a time (some road crew was stocked) and cleaning my fingernails with a small knife. Everything was going smooth until Mojo saw a sign for Santa Monica which turns off to what is probably the steepest, shortest street in the city that just goes under Santa Monica pier.

    We hadn't seen another car for miles, yet there was one at the end of this steep off ramp stopped at a stop sign (stopped cold with no other cars in sight). Mojo slammed on the brakes and realized that I meant no brakes just as I had said. With much skill he swerved around the still stopped woman and sideswiped the boardwalk shattering the window next to me and the one behind me, which looked amazing at the time. Mojo was then so freaked he couldn't get the car started. I convinced him to let me try and I got it started and promptly turned down the second steepest hill in Santa Monica which dead-ended into the beach walk. With a small crash we landed safely at the end of the dead end road.

    We didn't know and were in no shape to tell, if the car was still road worthy so we decided to call my roommate. Now I was totally out of my mind and got him on the phone and begged to find a way to get us home and I was too high blah blah. Unknown to us he had tried speed for the first time in his life on the same night and was spun out of his brain. Unknown to us he got off the phone and quickly called the Highway Patrol on us complete with a description of us and the car (which stood out).

    Now that the cops were looking for us I realized that we had left the girls back on the beach, the single most uncool thing I had ever done, and I had to get back to them. Mojo would not give me the keys so I yelled at him that I just wanted to lit a cigarette and I needed them for that. I was in the back seat for Christ sake. What was I going to do. I got the keys, turned them enough so the lighted would work, lit my cigarette and then jumped in the drivers seat and ordered Mojo out of the car. He pleaded with me not to go (remember I don't know the cops are looking for the car) but my only stupid response was something like "Party on my grave" or something equally stupid. Now the story becomes two. Mojo's and mine.

    Mojo was left next to the deserted boardwalk with no money and no idea where he was. He wandered up and down the beach walk with the brown leather suitcase that he managed to grab out of the car before I drove away. He kinda though he would do this till light and go from there but fate would not be so kind. A distinctly orange car passed by him on the walking area and drove on. He didn't think much about it until the car returned and came up the walk a lot faster than before.

    Right after it passed him a man jumped out wearing a Mexican Wrestling mask on with a big knife in his hand and started running towards. Mojo. Now luckily Mojo is a very fast runner but he didn't know where he was. After he ran for a bit the masked man went back to his car and started after him in it. Mojo ran until he saw lights and a person. It was a dive motel that one generally rents by the hour (this area may have changed this was a while ago). There was his savior behind several inches of bullet proof glass.

    "You got to help me, He stammered, still clutching his brown suitcase, "there's a man trying to kill me". "You call ahead?" the man replied in a thick Arab accent. "No! I didn't fucking call somebody is trying to mug me, he is chasing me in this orange car and I.." "Orange car? the man behind the glass asked. "Yeah and he's wearing a mask and he has a knife..." " O.K.", the I buzz you end and call police.

     So Mojo had to spend the next hour talking to cops with his eyes still looking like two big black platters from the acid. It turns out that this guy had been mugging people right in that area and he was a little lucky because some of his victims had been beaten up pretty bad. The cops talked the Arab guy into comping him a room for the night and that is where Mojo stayed, all by himself, coming down off his first acid trip.

    I on the other hand was in almost as much danger. I was driving a car. Not any car but a car that apparently had large snakes crawling around my feet and as I passed a famous restaurant on P.C.H. which has a big neon blue sign of a crab out front, I acquired a few little blue men dancing on my windshield. When I turned on the windshield wipers the trails of them were much worse that the blue men. Somehow however I made it back to the beach and found the girls who were not nearly as pissed as I thought they would have been. I was just safe they were O.K. But now we had to get back on the Highway and somehow find Mojo.

    We made it all the way into Santa Monica when the impossible happened, we ran out of gas. It's four o'clock now and the nearest station is miles away. Mary is asleep in the back seat and Anne has no ideas but has faith that I will make something happen. I was barefoot, wearing baggy pants and a trechcoat with no pants. I walked out into the deserted but strangely well lit street. Then I had an idea.

    With the pocket knife I had I crept from yard to yard until I found a garden hose. I sawed and sawed with my dull knife under a window with the T.V. still going, until I had a piece of hose I could syphon gas with. Unfortunately the only receptacle I had was a big gulp cup. So me and my garden hose walk down the street as inconspicuously as I could. I tried a V.W. bug first. I put the hose in the tank, took a deep breath and sucked. That was the first and last time I huffed gas. The tank was low and I got a lung full of fumes to add to my not so faded acid buzz. I stumbled on until I saw somebody walking down the street.

    I tried to act as innocent as a guy at four in the morning with all the tools to syphon gas in his hands could. The man walked right up to me. "Evening" he said "What ya doing out at this hour". He talked like an O.K. guy, a little scruffy but then again so was I, so I went for it. 'Look man, I ran out of gas and I'm just trying to get home. Do you know a gas station close." "No," he said "but I can help you with some of these gas tanks. Some are easier than others." Great I thought some help. "First we have to get out of this light. There's a little parking garage area behind these houses".

    I followed him around the block to a dark parking area. Just then a car started coming down the street. "Get back here" he said grabbing my shoulder,'if that's LAPD they are going to have some questions" "Yeah" I replied nervously. There we were in this little staircase when out of his mouth comes, "So, are you married?" "oh you must be fucking kidding me" I thought to myself and with one motion he said"ever fool around?" and stuck his hand down my pants.

    That was it, I was done, done, done. I stepped back and hit this guy with the perfect (in my mind) most powerful, well placed punch I had ever thrown. I had so much confidence that this punch would instantly send him unconscious to the ground that I didn't even put a guard up or think anything about a follow through. This turned out to be a large mistake of mine driven by drugs and stupid assumptions about gay men that I had at the time. I'm sure it was a good punch but it paled compared to the haymaker he let loose on me. Not that it comes up alot but I would never advise getting cold cocked while on acid. If moving your head or arm gives you killer trails imagine the whole world moving like that. That is just what it seemed like. He was a bit surprised that I was still standing and when I started yelling at him he took off running, leaving me to go back to a car full of girls and try to explain why my lip was bleeding so bad.

    Now as homophobic it sounds I want you all to know that while I did at first try to cover it up, "What happened to your lip?,,,"(muffled) I bfag hit me"...."What"...."A pagay guy hit me"..... "Somebody hit you." I finally got fed up, "I gay guy just made a passed at me and I punched hit and he fucked me up, O,K,!"
"Oh shit, did you hear that Mary?" Anne said happily. "Want to go home now" muttered Mary who was done with the night. "I'm sorry dude" Annie said "that was just not what I expected." "Think about me" I replied.

   Well in an attempt to make an already long story a bit shorter, this is how the rest of the evening/morning went. I did siphon some gas which was easier than getting the gas from the big gulp cup into the car. We got Mary home and Anne and I had to go back to the beach to get some things we for got. We got trapped by the tide and had to hike up a hillside of ice plant between multi-million dollar homes and were caught by a woman bent on explaining tide maps to us and who was also all the way in the bag with a drink in her hand at 7am. We ended up finding Mojo but I can't for the life of me remember how. Remember this was before cell phones so no answers on how we found him but we did and besides a scary story and a mean hangover he was fine. I learned gay people can punch just as hard as straights and if your on acid and there is something on your windscreen for God's sake don't turn on the wipers.

Random Demons

2011-03-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

Robin Williams has a joke about a T.V. evangelist that my wife and I use constantly to describe all sorts of people off their bean. The quote is, "I will now compare and contrast Jesus and Spiderman" and it appears that this kind of nuts has spilled onto the world stage. We have the always amusing (unless your being tortured or killed be him ) Col. Gaffadi, who recently said that the mass rebellion in his country was just some kids that had been dosed by Bin Laden. Bin Laden, a guy known for his crazy acid and coke parties, between prayers and drone attack, where anything goes. Good old Gaddafi's, truly one of the old guard. A dying breed of colonial megalomaniacs that have been slowly replaced by people that are just as dangerous but know how to hide much better.

    Saddam was one, and they hung him. Most of the old crazies faded away on tropical islands with the millions that they stole from their people.In a way I will miss them, the Amines and Poppa Docs, because they were easy. You knew they were bad guys and they were proud of their black hats. We still have quite a few but slowly they are being replaced by multi-national corporations that you need a forensic accountant to find out what color their hat is and most of the time it's gray. They cover up their evil and feed their egos with ridiculous amount of money. They don't want to kill or torture you, they want to take any money and property you might have and then if you would be so good as to die quietly (while racking up medical bills large enough to take what little money you might still have) and have already paid for your last expenses they are cool with that.

    It never stops amazing me when I'm teaching to realize that many of these kids have no idea what an ICBM is or why it would be important to them. During the Cold War it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad, unless you had been brainwashed by either side. There was really bad men on both sides of that dance and on many occasions these guys almost cost us the world. Not money or cars, the world.

    Some people that read this blog now and in the future will be amazed or appalled by the amount drugs and debauchery that went on in my younger years but I was a true believer in the fact that the world was going to be blown to fuck and I sure didn't want to know where a bomb shelter was so I could hang out on the "new Earth". I never believed they would even give us our 13 minuets or however long it took for the missiles to get here. I always thought we would see something in the sky that looked like a jet and then bang, gone.

    If there is anything that can make a teenage young man feel mortal it's an ICBM. I mean the world almost ended (and not many people know this one) because Sweden (I think but near there) test launched a missile without telling anybody. Didn't tell anybody, during the Cold War! We thought it was a Russian first strike and they thought it was an attack by one of our subs. We had guys in silos with their hands on launch keys (please don't both sneeze at the same time) before Bjorn said "You know maybe we should call someone".

    There were lots of stories like that and I just didn't have that much faith in mankind. Humans are so known for their restraint. So I took Prince's advise and partied like it was 1999 and when 1999 rolled around for real I hardly partied at all. Luckily I was wrong and the world was still there and the threat of evaporating while bowling had almost gone away.

    Now we worry on a more personal level. Is the guy next to us on the plane a religious nut with a pack of M80s around his nuts or what's that van is doing parked out front of the building, nobodies moving. For me that is a better world because even if I get blown up the world is still here and life continues on. But do you appreciate life as much?

    I was watching this Travel channel idiot in the Amazon taking a local hallucinogenic brew and talking about how the whole night while he was tripping it was just an epic battle between himself and his ego. Well I shouldn't call him an idiot in light of his trip, it's what all people should have during such an experience.

    In an earlier blog I said that all healthy (mentally and physically) people should take acid once in their lives and the world would be a better place, I was serious. Watching Ghaddaffi melt down with his ego and all the lives it will cost, only drives the point home.More people need to stand naked in their own minds mirror, under their own microscope, and realise how fragile they are, how fragile life is and how arrogant they have become. When you take all the people in all the history books that people have decided to remember and compare that to all the people that have ever lived you can easily do the math on what your chances are of being remembered beyond a generation or two are. Wouldn't you want to be remembered for something good? Nobody is going to remember you for the car you drive or the clubs you can get into, or the clothes you wear. Maybe nobody will remember you for the good you do either but you up your chances every time you do something.

    We all have demons running around our heads. It doesn't matter if your a dictator or a country or a janitor they are always there, telling us we are better than the other guy and we deserve better not realising that right beside us there is a guy dreaming of having our lives and thinking he deserves it more than you. The fairy tales of the Cold War were an easy excuse to blow off the future and get fucked up but some of us did learn something. So remember that death is just a pathogen or a religious nut away and in the eternal words of Bugs Bunny, "Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive". Oh yeah and look up at the sky from time to time. Peace.

Random Virgins

2011-02-20T21:33:00.000-08:00

The alpha and omega from about twelve years on up is of course losing one's virginity. As a guy you don't just freak when you lose your, it is great when one of your friends loses his. This gives you details of what to expect when you lose yours, it makes the chances that you are going to lose yours in the near future go up( groups of friends tend to have most of the individuals lose their virginity around the same age), and it gives you something new for your Whank-Bank if your really hard up Now the story of how I lost my virginity could be told as a pretty cool scenario but it wasn't and is a story for another time.

    However, what was very cool (and also too long to tell the reasons why now) was that I had my own apartment when I was sixteen. I also had my first real paying job at the time. Now I did work for the National Institute for the Blind when I was in the ninth grade but it really doesn't count. All I did was go through the white pages of the phone book and look for people who were doctors or lawyers and listed themselves as such in the white pages. I would write their numbers down and then some other idiot would call them for donations. Why they thought that people that were arrogant enough to list themselves as Dr. John Doe in the white pages or better yet John Doe esquire or atty, would be the charitable type I don't know.

    The next job I had, the job I had when I had my first apartment, was far superior. It paid ten bucks an hour cash, no taxes, and all I did was get stoned, manicure weed and drive to get food. To this day it was the best job I ever had. It was flawless and I got to take home tons of free high grade weed to boot. So to recap I was sixteen with my own place and had lots of free drugs. To say that my place was a "party" house would be the understatement of the century but there will be plenty about all of that in the future, this is about losing virginity. I had to set the stage for this to make sense.

    The apartment was a small one bedroom crckerbox pad but in that small apartment three of my friends (that I know about) lost their virginity in the space of about five weeks. The first one was a friend that had a girlfriend and it was just a matter of connivance. They had been waiting for a place that would be safe and that's were I came in. The other two were a bit different and one of them was proof of the power of the male sixteen year old libido. Oh yeah and they were with the same chic.

    The first was Jay who after a night of drinking with a girl we went to middle school, we will call her Lynda, was simply drug into my walk in closet. Now this closet was in my bedroom so I wasn't really eavesdropping but lets say I knew what was going on in the closet. I was stoked for Ray and the minuet he was done he emerged from the closet with the biggest grin on his face I had ever seen. Then the son of a bitch slapped my face with his hand that had his and hers bodily fluids on it. I shouldn't say slap it was more of a rub but it was far beyond disgusting. When I realized what he had just rubbed in my face my first thought was of punching him in the face but when I looked at the face I was going to punch it was still smiling like a kid that got a new bike on Christmas day. He smiled even bigger, hugged me for some reason and went back into the closet. We were all happy for Ray and I even let him get away with the fluid exchange.

    Fast forward twenty four hours. Lynda was back at the apartment, Ray had to stay home and I was in the mood to get fucked up. We had a lot of liqueur in the house that night and Lynda had brought several bottles of champagne (Lord knows why teenage girls think it's a good idea to get crooked on champagne) and a few of us were playing a drinking game. Present that night was my friend, we'll say George, who had the all time stoner right to brag. First of all the man could take bong hits so big it would explode most humans lungs. He always looked like a fish out of water at the end of his hit, gasping for every last bit of smoke he could cram into his body. He did this so well (this is the bragging right) his mother took him to a doctor because she was concerned about his persistent cough, X-Rays, allergy test, the full nine, just because he took too many huge bong hits. He had been taking many of these this particular night and drinking heavily, something that he didn't normally do.

    After all of us were too screwed up to pay attention to the game any more Lynda started to flirt with George. At first I don't know if George was too buzzed or just a little shy but he didn't really respond to Lynda's advances at first. This made Lynda very determined and out of nowhere there was a porno movie happening in my living room. Lynda had her bare feet in George's lap while she blatantly preformed fellatio on a bottle of champagne. She was staring at George while she licked, stoked and deep throated this lucky bottle of champagne to every body's amazement. Unfortunately for George he had already consumed much too much alcohol at this point and could not look out of both eyes at the same time because of the horrible double vision he was experiencing.

    This is where the sheer power of the teenage male sex drive comes in. George was sitting there, trying to flirt back, with one eye closed. Every minuet or so he would close his eyes, or blink I guess, and we all watched him painfully as he strained with all his might to open the other eye. After the opposite eye popped open there would be a small smile of accomplishment and then a refocusing on Lynda. This dance of eye switching went on for some time until George screwed up. I can't remember if it was warm beer or warm champagne but George took a swig of it and it instantly wanted out. He dropped Lynda's feet to the floor and ran the four feet to the bathroom.

    Now it should be pointed out that for some reason there was no music or television on in the apartment that night. That was unusual because there was always music playing but not that night. So when George was hurling from his toes five feet away with nothing but a paper thin wall separating him with all of us we could hear every agonizing moment. ERRRRRRRRAAHHHHHHHH, oh, oh, God oh no, EERRRRRRAHHHHHHHHH! For some reason the sound of somebody puking is the funniest thing on the planet to me and always has been, so I was on the floor and everybody else was in hysterics as well. This went on for a brutal ten minuets so all the guys are thinking, "Oh man did George blow it". After the toilet flushed a few time and the sink ran for some time, George emerged smiling, still with only one eye open and returned to his seat and put Lynda's feet right back on his lap.

    This was a new man. Determined, single minded and strong with the exception of the ability to use both eyes at the same time. He flirted back with one eye at a time and before we knew it he was off to the walk in closet that Lynda was becoming so accustomed to. Unlike Ray, after losing his virginity he did not strike me with any bodily fluid and actually stayed the night with Lynda. At the break of dawn he was waking me up in a slight panic because he had to get home before his parents were up and I was the only one with a car. His house was not far but we were both dreadfully hung over and much of the ride was spent in silence. I think there was a "way to go man" exchanged but George was too worried about getting in the house before it was discovered that he had been out all night to really enjoy the moment. When I got back to the apartment Lynda was cleaning like she was moving in or nesting or something. That terrified me so as soon as I was actually sober enough to drive legally I took Lynda away. There are friends to this day that don't forgive me for doing that.

    The moral to the story is never underestimate the power of a teenager's sex drive. Even a guy that had been transformed into a staggering, vomiting, smoke belching, cyclops because of ingesting an obscene amount of drugs and alcohol, will not be denied. So parents, you can install motion detectors, tracking devises and everything else you can think of but when it comes down to it teaching them about safe sex is really your only option.

Random Disasters

2011-02-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

Well today I am not going back to the past for strange stories or facts. These are timely happenings that effect only me and the whole world.

So yesterday I was teaching a class of surprisingly well behaved fifth graders. Now I was surprised by their good behavior for two reasons. First, their in the fifth grade and have the brains of squid. Second there was 50 billion of them in this one class. Well honestly there was 38 but with fifth graders it might as well been several hundred. During the 'W' years he got "No Child Left Behind" passed which teachers lovingly call no child left. The program is a joke and has horribly damaged and already fucked up system. People who don't work in education don't get it generally. We all had teachers that were shit. They didn't care about the kids, they seemed mad just to be doing their job and weren't that good at their job when they were doing it. These people quit after a few years.

There is one more group of problem teacher and they are the "God has given me this gift (read burrdon) and I must share it".These teachers also has one of the largest turnover rates of any profession. People think they like kids and really just want summers off so they go into teaching. They have a horrible time, hate their students and generally don't last very long. The other type has been teaching since students took notes on stone tablets and should have retired long ago because they would much rather be at home watching their soaps (not washing, days of our lives) and couldn't figure out how to operate a DVR to save their lives. The point is the first group quits after about two years and the other group dies in about the same period of time.

The rest of them, most of the time, really try to give your children a decent education. Since no child left behind all what most teachers do and what they are required to do is to teach the test. Everywhere you go in a High School there are reminders of the test. How many days are left until the next test and how you have wasted twelve years of your life if you don't do well on it. The test is almighty. Let me give you an example.

I was recently asked to teach a crash course on the math portion of the exit exam to 10th graders who were scoring well below proficient. The district paid a boat load of money on this magical software, that in reality doesn't teach anything just has the kids take the test over and over again so they may not know what to do with the math but they know how to get the right answer, they also paid alot for training and daily overtime for me and others. At the end of every week there was a drawing for the kids that were showing up to class and they gave away, Ipods, Ipads, bikes and other things. This is every week that they are having this drawing. At the end of the nine week class everybody got to take a chartered bus to Magic Mountain.

You may ask and should ask, "What if my child had done their math when they were supposed to and did well on the test the first time (somehow 'proficent' according to no child left behind is 50%) what do they get. I will tell you. NOT A FUCKING THING! I worked hard and passed math when I had the class, it was really hard but I got tutoring and did research online and I passed it with a good grade and my reward i, nothing.. However, if I fuck up and don't care I can maybe get an Ipad and I'm going to Magic Mountain. Sure that's the right message.I would like to know where is all this money coming from and couldn't it be spent in a better way. Every teacher wortrh his or her salt you tell you the best thing to increase scores is to lower\ to teach the test will tell you that the best thing you can do to improve education is to reduce class. size.If you have seven classes with forty students each well how are you at memorizing 280 names, more or less knowing what each none needs as students and what they are struggling with. Especially in the early grades, those foundation years, this important, However, now the important thing is to teach the test. It doesn't matter that you have some real world applications for the subject, teach the test.. That means if for some reason Bill Gates wanted to teach a class on computer programing, he would have to go back to school and teach the test. Just as an example of how far up their own asses they are they never thought that the lower income kids will have no money to buy and maintain service on an Itouch.

The long and short of it is besides lowering class size, like most teachers say is the main problems, they send kids to Magic Mountain for passing with a 50% on a test they should have already. So I can't say that I was not surprised that I had close to forty fifth graders in my class. There was a law reducing class size in preliminary grades, everybody is breaking the law out of necessity. I'm all for having kids prove their proficiency in English and math by the time they graduate. However, they should let teachers teach. I could give an I.Q. test to average kids everyday for six months and by the end of the class all the kids would be testing at genius levels. Would they really be geniuses. No, they would just know what the answers the test wanted them to put down. The system as it is now helps nobody except the people who make the software. Enough if that, back to the story.

I had gotten the class quieted down and was teaching some basic geometry. I showing them what a staircase would look like if you didn't use geometer to build it. While I'm doing this my bad knee went out (all the way out) and fell hitting my head on the lectern on my way down. I'm screaming tryingg not to curse with blood spurting out of my head, kids freaking out.. Can I make an entrance or what? Lucky the kids were cool and the V.P. was only cconcerned if I was going to file a working comp claim (of course I didn't). At least those kids an application of geometry.

The other thing that could be a disaster isthat we are going to impact the largest solar storm we haven't seen for decades. Now they still don't know the polarity of the storm (they can be positive or negative and neg is much worse). In the best case scenario we might have a couple of satellites fried. In the worse case whole power grids could fail, many aircraft could lose essential systems while in the air and people could be without power for possibly months. Normal day in NYC to Mad Max just like that.

Now most of the time our magnetic field protects us from solar storms and at worst we could see the 'Northerb Lights' much further south than normal. For those of you in Seattle, hope for a clear night and you might have a nice light show. However, many people don't know that the Earth has what's called polar reversals. This is when the North Pole turns into the South Pole and vise versa. We know that this happens and I won't bore you with how we know it happens but we are way overdue for one and there are a few things we don't know. We don't know if the process is gradual, leaving us vulnerable to solar radiation during the change. Our magnetic field makes life on this planet possible so if it goes away for a period of time we could be in trouble. We also don't know if Mars is a victim of a poorly timed solar storm which hit it when it's magnetic field was in flux, blowing it's atmosphere out into space. That's a bad thing.

So we need to get rid of 'no child left behind and we need to hope that our magnetic field holds on a little longer.