BABIES ARE THE NEATEST CREATURES

Blog number sixty-six                                    31 Dec. 2006

So this morning Teresa needs to refill a prescription so we hie ourselves down to Safeway.  Standing in line at the prescription counter, I hear a boy of about four years of age, sitting in a "car-cart," saying to his dad, "I don't like..."  I couldn't hear the last of it so I went to the father and asked him what the boy didn't like.  He said, "the sour ones."

I say, "ah," and go back to where Teresa waits.

Teresa drops off her prescriptions and we pass by the little boy.  I say, "You don't like the sour ones, eh?"

"No, I like those," as he points to a candy rack.  I point to the ones I like and tell him so.  He points to another and says, "I like those."

I point to licorice and say, "I like those."

We talk about the candy rack for a while longer, then I go to rejoin Teresa who is down the aisle, shopping.  We wander awhile and wind up near the little boy who calls me and motions me to come over, so I do.

"Are you a trainter?"  I hear him say.  I ask him, "what?"  He repeats what he said.  I still don't understand, so I ask him, "What's a trainter?" and as soon as I say it, I ask him, "You mean a 'stranger?' " He nods yes.

I tell him, "yes, I'm a stranger."   He averts his eyes and from then on he will not talk to me.

I am sitting at a table drinking coffee when his family and he walk by on their way out.  I say, "bye!"  He waves, but he still will not talk.
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We were at the mall last week and we saw the cutest girl sitting on her daddy's shoulders.  Teresa said, "oh, can we have her?"  As they walked off, we heard the little girl say, "Daddy, why do they want me?"
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WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, HUH?

Blog number sixty-six                                                 24 Dec. 2006

I was watching a nature show where this group of lions had made a kill close to a Watusi village late at night. Two men came out of the village, attracted by the noise, to see if the lions had killed any of their cattle. While the men were still quite a ways off, the lions slunk away from their feast.

I was struck by the fact that a pride of lions surrendered their kill like that. Usually, they will fight until it seemed to be too dangerous, and never, against any other animal, will they give it up without at least a show of bravado. But here, "humans coming, let's beat feet."

I got, from another nature program, that the Watusi used to, maybe still do, would prove their manhood by hunting out a lion with only shields and spears. When they came upon one, they would surround it and one guy would take his spear and shield and approach the lion until it charged him and he would fall on his back with the shield over him, stabbing the lion as it came upon him. At this point, all would attack, killing the lion.

It seems really strange to me that of all the dangerous animals in Africa, lions are more afraid of humans that anything else.

House cats love to watch people. I have seen them take what they see and repeat it to their advantage, like standing on top of each other three deep in order to hit a door latch to open it and come in where it's warm.

I once watched my cat watching me reading and it came to me that the cat could not, even in it's wildest imagination, guess what I was doing. It had no frame of reference. None.

No other animal but man has hair or fur situated as do we. All animals except humans have other animals that look and behave somewhat like them. Foxes have dogs, lions have house cats, seals have walruses. And even with these animals, there are different species of foxes, dogs, tigers, whales, different varieties. But humans are unique. There is no other animal that approaches what we are. No other animal comes close do being able to do what we have done.

Dogs, wolves, cats, bury their scat. Dogs, wolves, cats, kill and eat uncooked meat. No animal except man reads or writes. No animal except man creates civilizations and histories. No animal except man has consciously flung themselves into space or built a vehicle out of dirt that carries him at speeds exceeding traveling sound.

In a very real way, humans are alone here. There is nothing with which we can compare ourselves.

We are unique.

No one on earth knows how to make a chain saw from dirt. Yet they exist.

What's that all about?

DO TEETH KNOW WHY THEY EXIST?

Blog number sixty-four                                    12 Dec. 2006

I like to eat...

Milk toast.

Fried corn meal mush with butter and syrup.

Bullheads fried in lard.

Sour cream pie made with cream soured on a window sill.

Cinnamon crisps.

Scalloped potatoes like my mother made.

Toffee candy sold at traveling thespian shows.

I don't like to eat...

Squid in any form.

Tacos.

Burritos.

Herbs of any kind in my bread.

Vanilla ice cream bores me.
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I read a book many, many years ago called, "Man's Presumptuous Brain."  One of the things it told was that the sphincter muscle called the "duodenum," which connects the small intestine to the stomach, would not open unless it was told to by a small amount of acid.  Not opening, this caused any food eaten to back up into the esophagus.  I had this "disease," but I thought it was acid reflux.  My cure was suggested to me by my daughter-in-law.  It consisted of a tablespoon of unpasteurized vinegar taken before eating.  Worked like a dream.  The only bad thing was that you had to make sure to drink water before you swallowed the vinegar, otherwise you would probably choke on it.  The fumes, I think.

I have since discovered, maybe - I haven't done a full scale experiment, that buttermilk will have the same effect except it is easier to swallow.

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I used to make the most delicious bread using honey, buttermilk and several different flours made from different grains.  Now, you can make delicious bread using only water, flour, yeast and sugar.  Delicious bread.  Now tell me -- why is commercial white bread so tasteless?  I mean, flour, water, yeast, sugar -- you need these and only these to make bread.  What is missing or added that makes Wonderbread so yukky?  Like they do it on purpose -- making an effort to make bread tasteless.

THE PEN IS NO MATCH FOR A SWORD

Blog number sixty-four                                          10 Dec 2006

I haven't been writing in my blog.

 

Back when I was painting, I used to have five or six paintings in various stages of completion at any one time.  I used to spend all my spare time, weekends, late into the night, painting.  I spent all my spare energy on painting, totally engrossed in it.

 

One day I found some photos of some beautiful murals this guy was doing and he said that he made clay statues, shone a light on them from one side and used this as models for his paintings, creating beautiful patterns of shadows.  I decided to try that.  I got some clay, made my models, but instead of painting, I got so interested in the making of clay figures that I turned my energy into that. From there I went into wood and stone carving, leaving painting in the past.

 

One day Derek, my youngest son, asked me to paint him a painting for his new house.  When I tried to do it, I found I couldn't.  It was like losing a talent, but as I looked at it, what had happened was that I lost my passion for painting.

 

In the same manner, I have lost my passion for writing at the moment, but I am sure it will return, 'cause I like to talk about things.

 

This entry originally began as an e-mail to my nephew Mark as a response to his comment about my not writing in my blog.  Two birds with one stone, like.

READ 'EM AND WEEP

Blog number sixty-three                                    23 Nov 2006


In this book I am currently reading - Blue Blood, the cops are scoping out buyers and sellers.  The guy with the binocs tells the street guys what to look for, "It's in his sock," "it's in the cast on his right hand."

"It's in his cheek -- sorry guy, the other cheek, check between 'em.  I mean it's in his ass, copy?"

The author then notes that, "There was nothing quite like watching someone sniff a bag of dope that was fresh from a dealer's ass."

He's telling of a cop friend of his dad's -- Davey, who has been investigated for stealing guns, is used as a finder for money in DOA houses, a generally funny guy, but a bit larcenous.

Davey tells the story, "A lot of times in a car wreck, people get knocked right out of their shoes.  Now there was one wreck where a priest was killed, thrown clean from his car, and he's lying dead in his socks.  You know how well priests dress, and I found the shoes, they were better than anything I had ever seen and they were brand-new.  And wouldn't you know, they were my size, exactly!  I thought, is this a sign from God or is this a sign from God?"
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When we lived in Sacramento I was friends with a little neighbor girl -- about three years old.  She had just gotten a goldfish and often talked about it. One morning I chanced upon her when out for a walk and I asked her how her fish was.  She said, "Oh, he's in fish heaven."  I asked her where fish heaven was and she said, "Down the toilet."

I THINK IT'S KINDA FUNNY, I THINK IT'S KINDA SAD. THE DREAMS I DREAM OF DYING ARE THE BEST I

Blog number sixty-three                                    21 Nov 2006

First off, I'm reading a good book -- an autobiography about a New York cop whose beat was the projects.  I'm going to tell you a few things from there, do a little quoting.  OK?

He's telling about the sass the cops get from the tenants. 

"I did take some pleasure on one downward trip, with a DOA.  The gurney was too long for the elevator, and it was stood up: the bagged body was on its feet, just out of sight of the doors.  When we stopped on a floor, midway, a man stepped toward us and I said, "Sorry, you'll have to get the next one."  He made the spit-face and the spit-sound,--ptuh!-- because nobody was going to tell him what to do, and he strode inside.  He met the corpse, face to face, and fell silent.  His deliberately reversed footsteps had the quality of mime: Here I am, leaving.  "Thanks for your cooperation and have a nice day."

A complainant called because her cat had turned vicious.   "...it's a mystical cat you know, a Jewish cat. I tried everything, petting it, feeding it, throwing boiling water at it -- nothing works, nothing."

And my favorite so far, a lady called because "Three white men in white suits locked me in the bathroom and stole my cigarettes."  Not wanting to put out an APB for the Bee Gees, he began asking her questions.  "Want an ambulance?"

"No."

"Sometimes you don't know you're hurt right away, the shock and all.  Are you under treatment, take any medicines?

She nodded, "Yes.  For the voices."

I once read in the Elk Grove Citizen, the local paper, the full blurb, that Mrs. so and so was recovering nicely after the Post Office door fell on her. 

And this next one is kinda eerie.  Might not let the kids see it.

I was talking to one of my sergeants one day, just shooting the bull, and he told me about being on C. Q.  (Charge of Quarters) one night and he was to wake this one guy and when he did, the guy slugged him and went kind of crazy.  After the guy calmed down he explained that he was once stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he woke one morning to find that the man on either side of him had his throat cut during the night, along with every other sleeping man in the barracks.  One alive, one dead, one alive, one dead -- all through the barracks.

I worked with this one Staff Sergeant at Mather A.F.B.  Good worker, good Sergeant.  One night he and some other guys went to Reno, gambling. He won big on Keno - I think ten thousand or so of 1956 money.  One day I'm working on an aircraft and he came out asking if I could loan him some money -- that he was asking everybody, and those that lent first would be the first paid back.  He had written some bad checks up in Reno and was being pressured big time.  I turned him down.  He seemed to expect it because he just said "OK," turned around and left.

One night I'm watching TV and there's a breaking story about an Air force Sergeant wanted for robbery that had dived into the Sacramento River and was swimming across at that very moment, trying to escape from the police.

It was him.

Gambling is a drug to some.   Best thing when you gamble is to loose big time the first time out.  If you win big, seems like you might get the idea that you can do it again.

And you can't.

WRITE ME A POEM, BABY

Blog number sixty-two                                      21 Nov 2006
I got this e-mail from my nephew after he read my blog entry about almost drowning.

"I almost drowned (maybe in the same pit – north of Graettinger).  A friend of my brother pulled me out.  I was not scared and didn’t get short of air and swear that I was close to being able to absorb oxygen from the water through my skin.  I remember being a little pissed in later years that he pulled me out.  I could never duplicate the circumstances or the sensation.  I was very young at the time.  As I got older it still stuck with me that maybe just maybe I was on the edge of a great discovery.  The older I got the more I dismissed it as foolishness.  Humans can’t take air through the skin or get nourishment through breathing food cooking. (another idea I swear would work)"

A number of years ago my diving buddy told me that he once ran out of air underwater and had to take a breath of water.  He asked me how this could be and I had to tell him I didn't know.  I don't really think he expected me to have an answer, but the event puzzled him so much that he felt he had to at least try to find out how such a thing could be.

After reading the same entry where I mentioned not being afraid until after I had time to think about almost drowning, my nephew wrote the following,

"I do know fear of stuff is learned.  I learned it from my Mom.  One time I got hit in the head by an ink bottle my cousin and I were throwing into the tree to make the helicopters come down.  It gashed my head pretty good.  We thought it was kind of cool with the blood running down my head.  As with all cool things I wanted to show dad.  He was in the house so I went in and AHHHHHHHHH!!!  MOM FREAKED OUT AND STARTED AHHHHHHHHH!!!  YA KNOW . 

Now I was real confused and didn’t know if I was going to get an ass whippin’ or what so I just started tocry.  My cousin got chewed out (he was older and I found out he should have know better) and I was pampered.  Very, very confusing but I remembered that.  Mom scared the shit out of me that day and I learned to be afraid when blood appeared. 

I used to be afraid to fight.  I was a maniac if I got in one.  I thought it was because I didn’t want to get hurt.  I later found out the embarrassment of losing was what I feared.  I just quit getting into fights.  If I did get into a fight, and it was only maybe two fights after that, it was to protect myself from someone who wouldn’t leave me alone.

GET THEE BEHIND ME. OR AT LEAST TO WHERE I CAN SEE YOU.

Blog number six-tee one                                      17 Nov 2006

'Ja ever have one of those times when "funny" things happen?  Funny things that are as personal as dreams which no one else can fully comprehend since they weren't there so that if you tell them about these strange things, you will set them to wondering why an extremely intelligent man such as yourself is wasting valuable time and vocalization techniques, or in this case, writing techniques, that could better be used for something interesting or important?

The story that follows is one of those.

Get rrready.

A few days ago I'm walking to the post office - about a mile away.  In front of me is an old man walking in the same direction.  I follow him a little ways when he suddenly makes a right turn and walks across the street towards a six foot high wall fronted by those bushy cacti that if you look at them cross-eyed they will attach themselves to your skin and you have a new appendage that hurts you very much. 

Now most people, walking along a roadway, if they want to go to the other side, will make a forty-five degree turn, not a ninety degree one.  So he made an unusual move toward  a harmful milieu.  An unusual goal.

I figured that maybe he was nervous having a stranger walking behind him.  No big deal.  But where he was going and the turn he made engendered a curiosity in me.  So I turned around to see where he went.  He was gone.  Disappeared. Huh.  That's odd.

On the way back I carefully observe the wall that surrounds a trailer park to see if there is maybe an opening that he could have went through.  There is not.

Today I'm walking back from the post office and at about the place where the man made his move, I see a pair of shoes neatly set by the side of the sidewalk, the soles on the ground, the heels touching the sidewalk.  Who's walking around in the desert in their stocking feet? Why lose the shoes?  They were of soft leather - a lot like a moccasin.  I don't imagine they were hurting his feet.  Never in my seventy five years of traveling the streets have I ever seen a pair of shoes lying in the street.  But here...

I'm thinking maybe the rapture has started in this area and this guy was one of the first to go.

As I'm thinking this about the rapture, I hear, on my earphone radio, that the upcoming song is "(something) capture" 

"Rapture capture," I think.

See?  You think that an entirely uninteresting and not unusual event to be writing about.  I told you you would, but you wouldn't listen.  Oh, no.  You know better.  Next time pay attention to what I'm telling you.
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We used to live out in the country near Sacramento.  The land was divided into two acre lots, so the neighbors we had didn't live that close together.

One night my wife and I were out walking and I noticed her looking in an un-shaded window.  I said to her, "Teresa!  Don't look in people's windows."

She said, "If they don't want people to look into their windows, they should draw their blinds.

Fast forward to five or six years later and Teresa and I were again walking the neighborhood street, only this time downtown.  I looked into an un-shaded window and Teresa exclaimed, "Don!  Don't look into people's windows.

I replied, "If they didn't want people looking in their windows, they should pull the shades."

We switched ethics, you see.  I learned from her, her ethics, she learned from me, my ethics.  I think that this is a common way that ethics and ideas is transmitted.  I don't think we two were all that unusual.  One other thing -- neither of us realized at the time that we had learned from the other.  To both of us, it seemed like our own ideas.

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In 1941, during the "Great Patriotic War" between Germany and Russia, The Germans captured many Russian weapons that were superior to the Wehrmacht's weapons.  They took them back to Germany and copied many of them, including the vastly superior tank, the Russian T-34.

The Allies knew in 1939 that the Germans had a superior antiaircraft gun that was also the ultimate tank destroyer as well as an artillery piece in support of the infantry.  A devestating weapon for infantry.

We called it "the 88 mm,"  or more properly, simply "The 88."

Mobile and easily deployed, it was far superior to anything the allies had all through the war, yet never was any attempt made to duplicate this deadly weapon by either Briton or America.  Why was that?  I have never seen this explained.

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In my search for God, I visited many churches as well as cults.  I once attended a service at a Four Square Church -- founded by one Amie McPherson in 1917.  Right in the middle of the services, the small congregation stopped in order to pay homage to the minister and his wife, giving them an award.  

For excellence in preaching.

It was here that I realized that in Christian churches, except for hymns and prayers, God is never mentioned.  Just Jesus.

Well, maybe not never, but rarely anyhow.

It was also at this same church -- could have been the same service, I don't remember, a woman took her fourteen year old son to three of the church elders for a laying on of hands in order to chase the devil out of him.  I thought the whole thing a bit like a secret boy's club ritual.  It looked very amateurish -- as if each of the layer-on-of-handers were looking to each other for guidance on the proper method of driving out devils.  I don't think there are text books on the practice.

I thought it strange that a boy so young would want to be a party to such a farce, but as the ritual finished and the mother and boy turned around to walk back up the aisle, the boy looked at me and rolled his eyes.  I immediately understood that none of it was his idea -- it was his crazy mother's idea. 

"Don't blame me," he seemed to be saying.

BOTTOMS UP!

Blog number six-tee                                       17 Nov 2006

I did some volunteer work at a detox center.  Just talked to the guys.  One guy was telling me about being in bars and pulling out large wads of cash when he happened to get lucky at the tables or got paid a large lump sum for some work he did.  A little later he was telling me about getting robbed.  One guy followed him into the bathroom at a bar and took all his money from him.  He said he only got robbed when he happened to have a large sum of money with him.  After he told me this, he looked off into space and kinda mused out loud, "I wonder how they knew I was loaded?" 

I told him that he showed them he had money when he showed them the wad of cash.  He looked surprised and said, "I did!  THAT's how they knew!  I told them!  Well I'll be damned."

One morning an old guy was being told by one of the ladies that he couldn't come in.  The old guy was nearly in tears.  I felt so sorry for him.  I asked what he had done to be barred and the lady said, "He knows what he has done."

I said, "Maybe not."  Sometimes people just don't realize they have done something wrong."

She said, "He tried to smuggle in some whisky through a window."

I said, "Oh."
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I found a book store close by the detox center that sold "Alcohol Anonymous" books at a very low price.  I don't think the author gets any royalties for them and they are probably printed cheaply because of the solidarity of recovered alcoholics.   I bought a case.  I don't remember the price, but I think I got a box of a dozen for ten or fifteen dollars.

I took them to the detox center and laid them on the floor by a post and left for lunch.  When I came back, the box was gone.  I asked at the desk if they knew what happened to the books.
The lady told me that someone left a case of the books and she had to take them into the office because they would get stolen if left out there.

When I left the books where I did, I had already reasoned that if any get stolen, at least they would be in the hands of somebody that wanted them, for whatever reason.  If they could sell them, then the person buying them would want them for whatever reason and they still could be in the hands of someone who wanted them.  Seemed like a win-win situation to me.

I told the lady that I had left them there and I didn't care if they got stolen that I would replace them as needed but she would not be swayed.  So I didn't buy any more.  I guess maybe I could have kept buying them until the office was packed to the ceiling with them, but I didn't think of that.

The irony is that the lady, in trying to save the books, lost all of them except for that one case.  I stopped going there after that.  I hate stupidity.

HEADS UP!

Blog number fifty-nine ******** 15 Nov 2006

All the evidence points to the fact that there probably isn't anything out there at all.

I'm sure I'm missing something here. Did you give the evidence or is that something we need to get later;

Naw. I didn't give the evidence. But here it is.

The only thing we have in order to "perceive" what is "out there" is our senses. But we do not see with our eyes, we do not feel with our fingers, nor do we hear with our ears. We do all those things with our brain. The whole physical world is "perceived" inside of our heads.

Since everything "out there" is actually and really, "in here," we don't have anything that can give us any indication whether or not there is really anything out there at all.

Basically, there are absolutely no facts supporting the idea that something is "out there." None at all. Nada.

There exist, however, some facts that indicate that there is probably nothing at all out here, that it is all an illusion. One of these facts is the fact that when we dream at night, we create rivers to swim in, people to talk to, dogs to bark at us.

Our minds can create worlds, time, space, people, reality. It does it every night when we dream. No problem at all. And if you ever wake up in a dream, have a lucid dream, everything looks, feels, and IS "real."

If Mind can create reality -- which we have seen it does easily, then why would nature need anything else in order to create reality? Why not let tried and true Mind do it?

Besides, anyone who watches their thoughts notices very quickly that the reality we are talking about is seen to be created by what we believe. That's how we create strangers, enemies, wives, countries. By thinking these things exist and then believing what we are thinking.

GIVE ME BACK MY MEDICINE

Blog number fifty-seven                                      02 Nov 2006

In Midtown Sacramento we had this street person that used to attend church services in a church run mostly by and for young people.  One time I heard one of the girls tell this person, "Ray, I told you.  Don't hug me when you've been dumpster diving.  You smell."
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We lived in a housing development in Sacramento and I used to walk to my favorite coffee house wearing my bib overalls.  One day, coming back, three houses from my house, a little girl about seven years old stopped me to talk.

"Do you have a horse?"

"No."

Pause.

"Do you have a cow?"

"No."

Pause,

"Do you have a barn?" 

"No."

"You don't have a cow or a horse or a barn?"

"No."

"Well, what kind of a farmer are you then?"          

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I just found out today that in Bolivia they write the date, using numerals in the order of: day, month, year, while in the US it's month, day, year.  That's bad enough, but with me, I always have to ask my wife the proper sequence while bemoaning the fact that there would never be any confusion if everyone would just use day, month, year like they do in the military.  14 Apr 31.  Seems obvious to me that that is the way to go, but then, that's just me.  I have no power at all.  If ever people stop blocking my ambition and let me become my life's dream of being a benevolent dictator, the first thing I would change would be that.

Next I would get rid of  daylight savings time and AM and PM nomenclatures and just have military time.  0100, 0200, 1600, instead of 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 4:00 PM.  Then I'd rewrite and eliminate laws and have lawyers leave that profession and retrain into professions that benefited other humans.  Like grocery clerk.  Or garbageman. Or acting.

And the only permissionable election ads will be in the newspapers or magazines.

Bolivia is still mad at Chili for taking it's coastline in a war.  Bolivia is now a landlocked country, but it still has a navy that is stationed in a lake, awaiting the return to the ocean.

I was stationed with a guy that was from Chili.  He had green eyes and his surname was, "Thackery."  He said they had real war heroes over there.  He said during the war with Bolivia, one of Chilean cooks on a ship jumped onto a Bolivian warship and stabbed their captain to death. 
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I was at Barnes and Nobles Bookstore and Coffee Shop this morning and saw a book entitled, "Science Explores the Afterlife."  I thought, "Whaaaaaat!"

Ever notice that you can tell your fingers to type out the word, "type," but you have absolutely no idea how you tell your fingers to do that?  Maybe science should explore THAT phenomena. At least they could get photographs, unlike with the afterlife.
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Did I ever write in this blog about the time I stepped on a nail that ran through my foot and it got infected and the doctor shot Novocain in it and started to clean it out and the big toe got large beads of sweat standing on it like it could feel the pain but I couldn't?  Huh?  Did I?
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I did write about somebody in the emergency room stealing my morphine though. I remember writing that.

DIE, YOU DIRTY DOG! DIE!

Blog number fifty-six                                                                      Oct 31 2006

If you find this entry morose, I'm sorry.  It is not meant to be.  It is meant to be an assurance that existence is a serene sacred blessing.  It is meant to be an assurance that there are benevolences cleverly disguised as cruelty.

When I was seven years old I stepped off into a deep hole in a water-filled gravel pit and I didn't know how to swim.  The best I could do was to continually push my hands upwards and bring them down to my sides -- over and over.  My head never broke the surface but evidently my struggles brought the attention of a young girl who grabbed me by the hair and pulled me out.

I did not thank her.  I never spoke to her.  I didn't even look at her.  I was embarrassed.  I simply walked to the car where my mother and Aunt Aunie were waiting for me, climbed into back seat and off we went.

While I was underwater I kept trying to wake up.  I thought I was having a nightmare.  At some point I realized I wasn't drowning right because no bubbles were coming from my mouth like I had seen in the movies.  So in order to do it right, I opened my mouth, tilted my face up towards the surface, relaxed with my arms hanging backwards behind me and sank, letting water run down my throat like chugging beer, creating the desired bubbles.  After doing that for a while, I resumed by fruitless churning of the water above me until the girl grabbed my hair.

In the days after that I thought about that experience constantly and this was when I began to experience intense fear.  Not during the ordeal, but afterwards.  A creation of Mind, you see. 

It was at about this time that I had to get to bed before my siblings so that I could go to sleep with the light on.  I slept with my hand over my heart so I could be assured my heart didn't stop beating without my knowledge.  I saw ghosts behind every door at night, especially in the closet next to our bedroom.  My father once took me in there with a flashlight and said, "See?  There's nothing in here."

"Yeah, NOW there isn't," I thought, "big deal.  But just wait 'til you leave."

My fear led me to read all I could on the topic of death or dying and I used to ask new acquaintances if they had ever almost died and if they said yes, I would ask them what it was like.  None of them nor I, had ever felt any fear or pain.  The fear sat in later when we had time to think about it.

I think that maybe while you are dying, there's too much else going on to be thinking about abstractions such as fear or pain.  These things come if you don't die.

I talked to one guy who had got caught in an undertow, and seemingly, from outside his body, a little above and behind, he knew his body was going to take a breath and he would die.  His head broke the surface just as his body took a breath.

I asked him if anything was beautiful, this being reported by all the near victims in the books I had read.

He said, "There wasn't anything to see.  Everything was black. All I could see was black."

I asked him again if anything was beautiful, thinking of the occasional report of beautiful music or peacefulness.  He started to shake his head, "No," again, but then he stopped and got a thoughtful look on his face -- as if he were remembering the incident, and then a look of wonderment as he announced, "Yeah! There WAS something beautiful.  The black!  It was beautiful!"

A man being mauled by a lion, a man falling from rock to rock down a mountain, a man flying through the air after being tossed from his smashed automobile -- each viewing the incident dispassionately amidst vividly beautiful lights and colors in a peaceful silence, as if time had stopped.  Beauty, peace, entertainment.  Dying sounds like it might be more enjoyable than we've been led to believe.

Death is hated and feared not because of what it is -- a natural and necessary blessing, but because of what it takes from us -- our loved ones.  And what it gives us -- sorrow.  Selfishness then.  Other people's deaths affects us personally and negatively.

Every one of us is going to die.  What does it matter to the one who dies, when that happens?  What do the dead care about time spent living?   

Life insists upon suffering being a part of it. Life and suffering, the only wedded couple that will never divorce.  Buy one, get the other free.

I don't understand people who accept the miraculousness of being born a human once, but firmly believe it cannot happen twice.  And if you do believe you will be born, die, born, die, forever, what's the problem with one death?

Or if you are only born once and die once, you go to heaven and live forever there.  Or to hell, and shame on you for that.  It's what you deserve.  What's the problem?

Or you are your body (despite all the evidence against that nonsense) and you die once and the worms eat you and that's it.  What's the problem there?  You become an inert stone.  Does a stone regret death?

No matter how you look at it, death is a certainty that cannot be avoided.  If it's horrible, it'll happen.  If it's a blessing, it'll happen.  Lighten up.

It is a common dictum of Eastern Philosophers that one should ponder on one's own death daily.  That way one doesn't get so torn up when one sees one's life beginning to come to an end.

I once read that if a person fears death, they should look at it and see if it is death they fear, or dying. 

I looked and found that I feared dying.  I looked to see why I feared dying and found out that I was afraid I was going to be afraid when I was dying.  I feared fear. 

Thank God we'll all know the truth about death in just a few years. 

Until then, lighten up.

BE GRATEFUL TO THE TWENTY PERCENT

Blog number fifty-five                                                                      Oct 30 2006

I just finished reading an essay in the New Yorker by Robert Stone under the subsection, "Life During Wartime," entitled, "Antarctica, 1958."

Okay.  What war are we talking about in 1958?  The Korean War is over by five years, The Vietnam War did not officially begun until 1962 - give or take four or five years.  So if this happened during wartime, it happened right after the French left Vietnam.  And the essay takes place in Antarctica.  Seems to me to be a stretch to make this vignette into a wartime story, but let's give them that.  It's not that important.  Poetic license, one might say.  But what IS important, at least to me, is that it is a story about nothing.  They see a flock of penguins off in the distance, think it a ship, realize it isn't, beginning and end of story. 

But the story uses excellent writing skills, you see. 

The only essay I have ever read in the New Yorker that I liked was one by David Sadaris and that was because it was humorous.  It had a theme, you see.  A purpose.  Most stories in the New Yorker do not have the function of purpose outside the words themselves.  These essays are like abstract paintings -- pretty, but meaningless.

The essay started me to pondering the idea that the New Yorker magazine has a reputation with people who are supposedly people of discernment and influence in the world of writing. 

The literati. 

The written word experts. 

The written word authority. 

From pondering this,  I beganpondering the field of experts and authorities in general that I have run across in my life's experiences.

I like to ponder.

Beats working.

I took a fiction writing class once and the Prof - the expert, the authority, used to rave about this one student's writing.  The guy used flowery words in artistic ways, but he never said anything.  Evidently Teach couldn't see that, being mesmerized by the writing --like New Yorker editors seem to be.

Come a time when we were to try our hand at writing a fiction story and this guy came up with an obvious knockoff of The Wizard of Oz.  I mean, obvious.  I KNEW he couldn't write a story, just from listening to him read what he did write.  Teach didn't know he couldn't write.  Teach praised everything the guy wrote.  The student had the explanation that he "just couldn't think of anything."  Well, duh!  Writing a story is more than just alliterations.

I used to listen to two funny radio personalities in Sacramento.  One day they were talking about a list of the hundred funniest movies and in the course of this they both agreed that "Singing In The Rain" was the funniest movie ever. 

I took these two guys to be experts -- to be authorities on humor until I heard them say that.  "Singing In The Rain" was a musical -- not a comedy.  There was a little sophomoric humor in it, but I wouldn't call it a funny movie.  And most certainly not the funniest movie ever.

And the TV series, "Sex In The City."  That series got awards for being the best comedy on television.  I watched that series for a year and not once did I ever even giggle.  The show is nothing more than an exercise to see how many different kinds of sexual activity could be portrayed.  It definitely is not a comedy.  It's simulated soft porn at best.  It's not even as funny as "Singing In The Rain."

One of the best examples of the power of authority I ever heard came from a radio call-in talk show host.  A caller would say, "well, St. Aquinas said..."  And the host would come back with what some other authority had said, and it went on like that for a while until one caller said, "Before there were religions, there was God."

The host immediately wanted to know who said that.

The caller, "uh ah, well... I did."

The host, you could tell was at a loss for a while and then said hesitantly, "well.... I guess you could say that."  Giving him permission.

You see, the host was looking for an authority.  He couldn't see for himself whether the statement was true or not.  He needed an authority to tell him.  Where he thought an authority would find the idea, I don't know.  In some text book I guess.

There is a story about a man in the desert dying of thirst that refuses a cup of water offered him because "the cup is rusty."

The water stands for truth and the rusty cup symbolizes one who is not an accepted authority.

Now this authority-expert thing is not all cut and dried.  There are thousands of people who see Frank Sinatra as one of the world's greatest singers and I think except for one song, he is horrible.  I can't believe that all those thousands could be mistaken.  There must be something in his singing that I miss.

At one time, until I was in my late twenties, I couldn't stand oysters or asparagus or avocado.  Now I love all three and I realize that the very same taste and texture that used to disgust me I now find delicious.  The very same flavor and texture.  So Sinatra has something that tastes good to many but not to me.  Those two radio hosts that thought "Singing In the Rain" to be the funniest ever.  Are they wrong?  Who's to say?

Are those stories in the New Yorker really as I see them or is there something I am missing -- that a story isn't at all necessary when telling a story?  This is true of music.  The story isn't all that necessary in a song, even though it is telling a story.

When I was doing graduate work in Experimental Psychology we were to write up our finished experiments with ten references for each of our papers.  We would get these references from something called the Psych Abstracts - a set of books of all the published work in psychology -- experiments, studies and the like.

If I was trying to find out how chickens picked food from pebbles so quickly, I would just find a mention of a study involving chickens as, "In the 1935 study by Wilkenson and Brady, it was found that chickens favored corn over oat grain."

What that had to do with my study wasn't important evidently.  We were learning to write up experiments.

One study that I found in the Psych Abstracts showed that in over thirty percent of all psychology experiments, the statistics shown were in error by a large degree.  Something like ten percent of them actually showed a result different from the one declared.

I told that to a friend of mine and he said that is probably true in the soft sciences, but not in the hard sciences such as physics and biology. 

I sure hope so.

Our first homework in this experimental psychology class was to go to the zoo, pick out an animal and write down exactly what the animal did, and make sure not to assign any human behavior onto the animal.  Anthropomorphism.  No-no.

So I did that.  "The bear sat down.  The bear looked to the left.  The bear put his right paw on his head" and so forth.  Never anything like, "The bear looked sad."

A day or two after we turned in our papers, I was in the room and the Prof began going over my paper with me and the Teaching Assistant wanted to know how I knew to write like I did. Did I get it out of a book? 

I got the idea that he had to learn not to anthropomorphize.  And found it very difficult.  For a first timer to get it immediately seemed to be beyond his ability to comprehend.  This student, going for his MA in Psychology, would supposedly someday be one of our respected Experimental Psychology authorities.

Behavioral Modification is a psychological method developed by B.F. Skinner that enables a change to take place in a person's behavior by giving negative or positive reinforcement for an action.  Put simply, if a person does an action you want to put a stop to, you punish him in some way every time he does it.  Or, you can reward him every time he does something else instead.

Now, Skinner vehemently declared that negative reinforcement is not permanent.  He gives the example of sheep held in a field by an electric fence.  If the fence ever becomes not electrified, as soon as the sheep find this out, they will escape.

So. Many people have paid big bucks and no doubt are still paying big bucks to quit smoking or drinking by having a small electric shock administered every time they smoke, or every time they take a drink.  Negative reinforcement.  What the creator of the discipline specifically declared to be a temporary fix at best.

The problem is that once the subject leaves the room in where they are being shocked, they can buy a pack of cigs and hit the bars.

And it is the graduates of Behavior Modification schools -- the Phd's and the M.A.s and even the B.A.s that are doing what the guru of Behavior Modification -- B.F. Skinner, explicitly told them wouldn't work.

And as we saw, even a little bit of reasoning will tell the discerning scientist that it won't work.

I was taking a class on dreams in a Clinical Psychology class and one day we got into a discussion about experiments to prove astral projection.  The instructor suggested that one experiment might be to hide something written up in the rafters of a building and if someone could tell what was on the paper without going up there, that would prove that he must have astrally projected. 

Now this guy had a doctorate in clinical psychology -- a scientist, you see.  I pointed out some fallacies with such an idea, but no one else in the class of six psych graduate students along with this Professor with a Ph.D. in Psychology saw anything wrong with a proof like that. 

I didn't push it very much, as I felt very embarrassed for them.  I liked them.  They were kinda like friends and I didn't want them to see that I thought they were kinda naive and dense.  But Damn!  What kind of therapists were they going to be with such sloppy reasoning?

We must never forget, when we have a tendency to believe what an authority in some field tries to tell us some "fact," that eighty percent of the people in any profession are incompetent in that profession.

I finally lost all interest in Experimental Psychology when I ran across a study done on whether first born and only children are more apt to become beauty parlor operators. Sheesh!

                            

A MISTAKE WAS MADE BECAUSE HE HAD A MISCONCEPTION ABOUT THE NATURE OF MISCONCEPTIONS.

Blog number fifty-four                                  Oct 27, 2006

Whenever I saw workmen using a jackhammer, I always thought that the one using the jackhammer was the supervisor and the ones standing around watching were the workmen.  I thought that because it looked like fun, using a jackhammer, and I noticed that all the fun jobs - driving the tractor or the truck, were always done by my father or my grandfather. It was only when I rented a jackhammer to break up some cement borders that I understood things are not always as they seem.

I picked out a sixty pounder, thinking it an odd description of a tool.  I thought it might have to do with force or energy or something  horsepower-like.  It doesn't.  It is how much the damn thing weighs, and why it is classed by weight became understandable after a few minutes of usage.

Another thing I thought about jack hammers was that the hard work came with the hammering of it - trying to hold it steady.  That's not true.  That'‘s the easy part.  You just hold it upright - probably do that with one finger.  The tool does all the work.  No, the hard part comes when you move it a few inches to another spot.  You have to lift it up, you see.  And when you lift sixty pounds every few minutes for hours at a time, it's like lifting free weights for hours at time. Makes your arms melt.

Those were supervisors and replacements standing around watching that man working a jackhammer.  Obviously.
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My wife and I were discussing things and at one point she said, "The Pope was a hotsy totsy Nazi.  Say that out loud for the full poetic effect.
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I was just daydreaming about when I was stationed at Mather and I got to thinking about the six B-25's that were stationed there when I first arrived in 1955. They are a beautiful bomber.  Twin vertical stabilizers on the tail, a small bomber.  Anyhow, they used to take off in the morning for practice bombing runs.  I saw one take off at night once and blue flames shot out the exhaust.  Very impressive.

One morning a couple of us saw them loading up practice bombs for their morning bombing runs and we volunteered to help them load up.  Well, I was sitting here daydreaming about that and it suddenly struck me.  Why were they practicing bombing runs with obsolete B-25s in 1955-56?  Who were they going to bomb for real?  Were they to train some South American pilots for their South American purposes?

I wish I had thought of it back then and asked why were they doing what they were doing and what it was that they were doing and if they had any spare change.                                              

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One morning a crowd was gather around a t-29.  There was a swarm of bees on the tip of the right wing.  Discussions were going on about how they could be dispersed so the aircraft could take off.  Finally, above the chatter could be heard the voice of reason, "Leave them alone.  When the aircraft takes off, they'll be blown away."

Duh.

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Underneath our fatigues we all wore tee shirts.  Mandatory.  Come time to get flu shots and a handwritten sign in the clinic said, "Please do not remove fatigue shirts.  We do not want airmen standing around with tee shirts visible to female dependents."  Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?

That was the first and only year that sign went up.

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When you go to any management training anywhere, one of the main things you are always told is that when you take over as a new manager, make sure you wait long enough to find out what is going on and to get a feel for the place before you start making changes that might upset and/or infuriate the employees.  Sound advice, no?

Every couple of years we would get a new Chief of Maintenance and ALWAYS, within days, changes would be made that would make certain parts of our jobs impossible to accomplish.

One year we got orders via a new Chief of Maintenance that the only persons to call in work orders were the crew chiefs.  Now, a crew chief's main job was to take out the trash and call for fuel and towing and to run up the engines, checking them out, taxiing the aircraft if need be.  They had no training whatsoever in electronics or structure repair.  How could they know what needed repairing from reading the writeups?  They couldn't. 

So that morning we all sat around waiting for the light to dawn in the Chief's head so that he would make everything go back to the way it was always done.  That happened about time for lunch - 1100.

Where were his advisors in all this?  Were they new too?  Or never did  understand the operations the working men did?  Probably that.

I think I told you this next story once, but I'll tell it again just in case, because it points up my theory that they never understood what we did.

We used to have to come in on the weekends whenever the C model T-29's were flying, in case they had Bomb/Nav problems.  The fact that they were not Bomb/Nav flights meant that they never had Bomb/Nav writeups and they never would and therefore our weekends were often messed up for no reason at all.

We complained to our supervisors, who knew the problem, but they said they couldn't do anything, it was the Chief'scall and if he wanted us there , we would be there.

One Saturday I  met a Lieutenant in the hall and I told him of the idiocy of our working on week ends when none of our equipment was being used.  He said, "Well, I'm sure the General (Of the base) knows what is going on."  I told the Lieutenant, "How would he know?  Nobody has told him.  You didn't know until I told you."  That was the last time we had to work week ends.

Fact-finders always go to the supervisors to find out what is going on instead of to where the answers really lie - with the peons doing the actual work. I have seen that happen time and again
You wanna find out if there is mud in the bottom of the ditch?  Ask the guy doing the digging, not the supervisor sitting in his office.

I think we win our wars because of a very few men that know what they are doing, and not because everyone knows what they are doing.  I love humanity, but does it have to be composed of so many idiots?

IMAGES. ARE THEY MERELY THIRD EYE INHABITANTS?

Blog number fifty-three                                        Oct 26, 2006

A few years back, when I was walking the streets of Sacramento in my bib overalls, black hat and barefoot, there existed a local newspaper called, "The Suttertown News." The owner/publisher/reporter was a local Midtown guy, often seen on his daily newspaper duty rounds. We would sometimes wind up at the same coffee houses.

One morning, reading his paper, I see a news article about a guy wearing bib overalls, barefoot, who came into the Suttertown Newspaper office ranting something about the "king of Jupiter’s imminent arrival and to beware.

Now, I knew right away that that wasn’t me that did that. And who else in Midtown dressed in bib overalls? No one that I knew. What adult - or child above the age of ten for that matter, went barefoot in the city? None that I knew. So what the hell was the owner/publisher/reporter doing putting something like that in his paper? What gripe did he have against me? I never talked to the guy. Said , "Hi" once in awhile, but why would that upset him? And why such a strange response to anything I might have done to upset him?

I had no solution to offer for that mystery until one day a young neighbor girl - Erinn, the daughter of Maryanne of an earlier blog entry, told me that she had seen a guy that looked just like me - clothes and everything - that she really thought it was me until a closer inspection convinced her it was not I. Ain’t that weird?

Was he the guy that stormed into the newspaper office? Probably.

Did I ever encounter him? No.

Was he a doppleganger? Possible.

An alternate self? God, I hope not.

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One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandmother’s knee with my older by two years brother Bill while she read the funnies to us. Pointing to a panel, she read it and went to the next. Passing a panel without reading it, reaching the end of the panels and stopping, I point to the panel she had not read and tell her, "read that one." She tells me that she can’t – that there were no words there to read.

Now, I don’t know if that was the beginning of my life-long love affair (what a trite saying) with the written word, but I remember it made an impact with me that there was a depth to the funnies that had escaped my consciousness, and I do still vividly remember that scene.

I read a lot.

A lot.

My favorite books are well-written biographies. I like Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle for that reason - he writes about what he sees and what people say to him and what he thinks about these things. But there is one group of people who write autobiographies that I have sworn never again to open one of their efforts, but time and again I forget and get fooled. These autobiographies are those written by politicians.

They will not reveal themselves in their autobiographies as do actors, for instance. They hide the goodies. I think that might come from always presenting an image of themselves to the public instead of presenting their real selves. They just can’t get out of the habit. Or maybe more to the point, they don’t want to risk losing out on another run for office by saying something their opponents can use against them.

I never listen to speeches by politicians either. For the same reason. They never say anything that isn’t coded in some manner so they can backtrack if they have to. "No, I didn’t say that. You misunderstood me."

Have you noticed that after a speech by a politician we need pundits to tell us what the guy said?

I suppose you have already noticed that most of our lawmakers are lawyers? Coincidence? Could there be any special benefit for a lawyer to write the laws that he will be interpreting for his paying-big-bucks clients?

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I did some volunteer work at a hospital once and I found myself in the hallway that runs between floors talking to three nurses. We were laughing,joking around, and I was about to leave and I did a little dance which I used to do occasionallybecause it usually got a laugh - a takeoff on Jackie Gleason’s "And away we go..." Sure enough, the three nurses started laughing, but because a lot of my joking is of the schizophrenic type where you pretend it is serious, I did not laugh or smile with them. I kept talking as if nothing untoward had happened. They continued laughing until all at once, all three of them stopped laughing and began to look very uncomfortable. I realized I had gone too far, but I couldn’t think of a way to get back on track, so we four left each other at that.

About a year goes by and walking out of a restaurant in Midtown, I see one of those nurses. She acts like she doesn’t know me. I walk up to her and say, "HI. Remember me?" She says, "Yeah, I remember you," flat-like. As in, "go away, Creep" I realize then that they thought there was something wrong with me when I did that little dance and then acted as if I did no such thing. Oh well. Their loss, right?

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Hitchhiking from Iowa to California in 1955, on the western side of salt Lake City Utah, I see, from my seat on the passenger side of my ride, hitchhikers lining the highway going towards Los Angels. Hundreds of them! One guy was five mile outside of Salt Lake, on crutches. Did he walk that far on crutches or did he carry them in order to elicit pity and thus a ride? I was ever so grateful to have already gotten a ride and didn’t have to buck that competition. It was a sight I had seen no where else in all my years hitchhiking. I wonder if some of them are still there.

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When I was stationed in Perrin AFB, Dennison, Texas, we had to, each morning, polish our shoes because during the night cockroaches would eat the polish off and at night, walking downtown, the critters were constantly being crushed underfoot. Funny thing was, you got used to them and never paid them any mind.

Coming back from Oklahoma early in the morning, I pick up a guy who was also stationed at Perrin. I get too sleepy to drive any more, so I told the guy that and asked if he could drive. He agreed and I went into the back seat and fell asleep whereupon I was awakened by a loud crash and being thrown around. The guy had fallen asleep and ran into an oncoming Greyhound bus. Fortunately, not directly head on.

I get on the bus after some confusion due to the circumstances and the late hour, but also because I found out that we had passed Perrin. I asked my wayward driver where he had been headed and he told me he was going to Dallas. The creep done stole my car after I gave him a ride. I don’t know what happened to him after that. Probably started hitchhiking towards Dallas.

I had fifty dollar deductible and I hounded the guy until he at least paid me that. Strange thing was that an insurance guy came to my work and told me that due to the accident and the payoff by the insurance company, I still owed some insurance payments. He asked me if I was willing to pay them up and I told him I would, but I never did.

Two things. How did it come to pass that an insurance company allowed me to owe them money? And what made them think I would give them money for something I didn’t need or want? Crazy people.

 

 

THE SAINT THAT IS MY WIFE

Blog number fifty-two                                  25  Oct 2006

My wife is a wonderful, darling girl, takes care of me, feeds me, gives me an adequate allowance.  All in all, a pretty great person.

She puts up with a lot of crap from me - I dirty the sink, forget to set the alarm and lock the doors at bedtime, leave dishes in the wrong place, am always in the kitchen when she wants to be there.  I should be ashamed of myself, but being the type of person I am, I ain't.  I never dwell on what a dork I am and how much that affects the beautiful woman that is my great wife. 

She even has to put up with women falling at my feet, begging me for a little lovin'. 

She is a great cook -- tamale pie, chicken soup, tamales, stew, bean soup, good stuff.  She takes all my stress which allows me to skip through life with a silly smile on my face, grabbing at women and small dogs.

My cup runneth way, way, over.

STAR STATUS GONE AWRY

Blog number fifty-one                                       Oct. 24, 2006

In 1954 I saw a great movie called, "Sundowners," starring Robert Preston - a vastly underrated actor.  Ever since, I see "The Sundowners" coming up on the telly and I think, "Oh, boy.  Maybe this time."  But nope, it's always that horrible flick starring Deborah Kerr about sheep ranching in Australia.

The one with Robert Preston is a rancher having trouble with rustlers and he hires his brother to help him out, which he does, by rustling the rustler's cattle. 

Preston's character had this neat "shtick" of saying, "Why shure" real quick, with a wry smile which my younger brother picked up and used a lot.

In the same vein, I was cross country one time and a buddy lent me a paperback book called, "Anatomy of a Murder."  I flew home and forgot the damn thing and I was only half way through and I really wanted to find out how it ended, but once again, just like with the movies, we have two books with the same title and the one that always comes up when I search for it is the one of which they made a movie starring Jimmy Stewart.  A movie which I think should never have been made, by the way. 

WRM (which reminds me), somewhere around Healdsburg* Calif. - in the redwoods, is a farm, ranch, home, whatever, with a wooden sign on the road leading to the house reading, "The Fred MacMurrarys."  From "My Three Sons"?  The television program?

I just put that down because it strikes me as a bit odd.  I mean, Fred has no fear of Paparazzi?  Is he looking for fan visits?  Why not just a mailbox? Seems like misplaced hubris to me.  Would Cher's house have a ""The Chers" sign in front of her house?  I don't think so.

I was in a movie once.  "Leave Yesterday Behind." It was a made-for-TV-movie, so don't ever look for it at your local theater.  It was me, Carrie Fisher, John Ritter, Buddy Epson and a lot of other people. 

My part was the father of a college kid going to Columbia University who sat in the bleachers watching an indoor polo game with a hundred other drama students.  I got to sitnext to the actors playing John's father and mother.  I got to sit right next to both because they had me move once.  The mother's face was very familiar to me, but I don't know her name

Before the polo shooting, the director told us that John Ritter was afraid of horses and for us not to make any signs of laughing at John's horsemanship.  We did good.  You could tell John was scared to death.  I would have been too.  To be a new rider riding with a dozen other horses at a full gallop, wheeling and turning in the arena. If it had been me, I think I would have taken some riding lessons and did a lot of riding first.  But that's just me.  He had a lot of guts, doing that.

My daughter wanted me to get John's autograph so I went to his trailer and there were about twenty girls all gaggling around him.  He saw me coming a a big smile broke out on his face.  I asked him for his autograph and he smilingly took my paper and I told him to make it out to "Trinja" and his smile dropped, he signed, handed it to me and turned away to talk to the girls.

I have always felt from his reaction, that I did a faux pas.  I think maybe he thought I was a real fan, unlike silly girls and then he found out I was just a stand-in for a "silly girl."  I dunno.  He might have been gay.

The movie was a tear jerking sop.  Horrible thing.  Ruined my acting career.  Couldn't show my face in Malibu after that.  Fan mail stopped.  No hate mail, thank God.
                                     
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When I was stationed in Northern Texas, my immediate supervisor was Sgt. Cox.  One day four of us were sitting around and he told us that his landlady had once introduced him as, "Mr. Dicks."

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My younger brother once got into a full box of ex-lax, ate the whole box and when my mother found out, she gave him an enema.  I was four years old and even at that young age I knew that was like pushing a river downstream.

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It was in Britt Iowa that I worked for that guy buying produce from farmers and selling to stores that I told you about earlier.  Every year Britt held a "Hobo Day."  A king and queen hobo was picked, a carnival with rides and games were allowed to set up.  A fun day for the hicks.

One of the shows was an all-Black dancing, ribald comedy show.  The performers gave a bit of a show on the stage before the curtain and before the show -- kind of a teaser.  The costumes looked dirty to me, the comedy not funny, the dancers lackadaisical.  Besides, these were Blacks in Northern Iowa in 1950.  All in all, they should have picked up with another show.

When they finished their spiel, everybody turned away to look at other things except this one white guy who ran up the steps, looked around at all the leaving potential clients, and waved his hand, beckoning to them, saying, "Come on."  A shill, you see.  Bad show, bad performers, bad shill. 

I really felt very sorry for them.  Where were they going to get money for food, costume repair, costume cleaning?  How did they ever get started in this business?  What were they going to do if all of them went flat broke?

One of the things I most enjoyed on the farm with my grandparents were the magazines she had.  One of my favorites was "The Saturday Evening Post."  I read in there about a cheating carnival.  It explained lead bottoms in the bottles in a "knock them over, win a prize," game, a game where plastic or wooden -- probably wooden, ducks would swim in this trough, go behind a partition and come out again.  They had numbers on them and you would bet on a numbered duck -- each betthat you lost, if you added a little more money, your chances would improve greatly and there would come a time when, if you had kept paying more and more money, you would be almost certain to win.  Unknown to the sucker, the ducks had magnets on them, the con man would flip a switch and viola!  You lose.

Another one was a basketball-type thing.  He would give you three free-throws and you would easily sink the baskets and would have won if you had paid your money.  When you saw how easy it was, it was a sure thing to bet and sink.  Unfortunately there was a lever that would place a board against the backboard which made the ball rebound way back over the basket.  And you had to hit the backboard for some reason I now forget.

So I'm at this carnival maybe thirteen years later and the guy calls me over and gives me a free free-throw.  I sink it easily.  I pay my money and the first throw hits the board, bounces way out of range.  It suddenly strikes me that I am at that carnival I read about in The Post.  I walk away without trying any of my other throws because I know there is no way I am going to sink anything.  The proprietor calls after me, but I ignore him.  I don't remember from the magazine, but I am pretty sure it was a "pay more money, chances get better" type of thing.  The whole carnival was set up to cheat.  That's all it did, except for the rides.  I watched a couple lose twenty dollars of 1950s money on the duck game. I watched the whole thing from beginning to end, and it was just like in the article.

I figured there must have been complaints.  Were the town fathers getting a cut or were they just ignorant?  I dunno.  I did nothing, told nobody.

* My darling wife just informed me that Fred's house wasn't in Healdsburg, it was in Cazadera.  She also said I was stupid.

 

SURE IT'S PRACTICING MEDICINE WITHOUT A LICENSE BUT I AM JUST PRACTICING.

Blog number fifty!                                                                Oct. 17, 2006

When I was a youngun' spending my summer days walking around Des Moines with my friends, one of our favorite past-times was to go down to the capitol and swim in the water surrounding two of the bronze statues placed in the capital garden.

We would stay there until hunger drove us home.  Walking in the alleys we would often come across green apples.  I don't know how this came about, and I think it is commonly known, but if you take a sour green apple and bang it on a rock or a log, the resulting bruise will taste sweet.  Ain't that odd?  We always used to bang sour green apples against an object and thought naught of it.

I once read that if you have cucumbers that are bitter, what you do is to cut it in two - I used to cut near the end, and rub the two cut pieces together, resulting in a sort of foam forming.  This would make the bitterness disappear and the cuke would be sweet.  Sounds impossible?  I thought so to when I first read it.  But I tried it and it works.  here's an even more impossible thing:

A carpenter was working on our house and got something in his eye -- probably wood dust, and we couldn't get it out.  I tried pulling out on his upper lid, pulling the lid down over the bottom lid, I tried rolling up his upper lid with a wooden match stick, I tried everything.  Nothing worked.  I then asked him if he wanted to try something that my grandmother had taught me and it always worked, but it was going to sound pretty crazy.  He said, "OK."

I told him to close the eye that had the particle in it and blow his nose from the nostril opposite the side the eye was on.  He did and it worked, like it always does and it makes you wonder, "What the hell?!"

MY grandmother also taught me to drink a cup of ginger dissolved in hot water with a little bit of honey for taste for upset stomach.  I remember I would drink as much as I could, tell her I couldn't drinkany more and she would always say, "Just one more sip."

I have recently found just by experimenting that Desenex athlete's foot cream placed on a cold sore will not only cure the cold sore, but if you get it early enough, the cold sore will not even develop.

For many years I have found that pouring plain old rubbing alcohol into the ear will cure most ear aches.  Scuba divers use it when they get done diving for the day in order to prevent an ear infection caused from water being in the ear.

Stationed in Texas, I would occasionally have to go on sick call for jock itch, a horrible painful rash.  The salt from sweat will increase the pain exponentially.  Jock itch is located in the inner thighs near the groin and has nothing whatsoever to do with the sensation of itching.

The nurse there -- a young male corporal would give me a tiny bottle of a clear liquid and tell me to rub this over the jock itch area.  I go to my barracks, take down my pants and shorts and pour some of the liquid into my hand and proceed to rub the painful sensitive raw area WITH RUBBING ALCOHOL!  Yeow!

I went through this scenario three separate times.  The alcohol would fix it right away.  But what gripes me is that the guy at the desk that gave me the alcohol never told me what it was.  I figured out from the smell of it and the looks of it and the result of putting it on a raw sore place, that it must be rubbing alcohol.  The next time I got the itch, I bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol and cured myself.  Now, why didn't that guy tell me what was in the bottle so I didn't have to go on sick call every time I got jock itch, and I didn't have to suffer more than a few minutes?  Huh?

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I'm having dinner in the mess hall. One section is closed, but I see three or four tables over there with a bunch of guys eating steaks while I'm eating hamburgers or stew or something like that.  I don't remember exactly, but I DO remember that I wasn't eating steak.

I asked the cook what was going on and he said that was the Air Force wrestling team.  When I got back towork, I calledthe mess hall and asked to speak to the man in charge.  I asked him why it was that people in the same military, eating in the same mess hall, were eating entirely different meals.  He said that was the wrestling team and they brought in their own steaks and the mess hall just cooked them.  I asked him if I brought in my own steaks if the mess hall would cook them.  He said, "No."

I said something to the effect that I thought the Air Force's primary raison valable was to fight off our enemies and since I was more in a position to do that with my job than a wrestler was with his, why do they receive star treatment and the rest of us who are protecting our way of life, don't.  He asked, "Don't you want our team to win?" 

I replied, "No, not especially.  I don't care whether a bunch of athletes win or not.  Do they care whether I do my job better than anyone else?"

The conversation ended with my getting no satisfaction except the chance to blow off a little steam at a suspected injustice.

In a similar vein, we that were taking courses could not read our text books or do homework during downtime in the shop.  we were told to "read tech orders" if we wanted something to do.  However, come World Series time and a TV was set up in the shop, the lights were turned off, and all work stopped until the game was over.  This went on every day during the World Series.
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We guys in analysis were to come up with a plan to wash off aircraft that happened to get contaminated by radioactive dust.  Fortunately we had on board a sergeant that had been trained in procedures to follow after an atomic blast.

He told the rest of us that the best people for a job like that were the wash crew, because that's what would be done and those were the people that did it every day.  Whether it was contaminated dust or plain old dust, the washing would be accomplished the same way.  To wash is to wash.  We all agreed that that was a good plan and we signed off on it and sent it upwards to the powers that be. 

It came back that since we had a radioactive "expert" already in place, the most efficient crew tobe assigned to wash the contaminated aircraft was us.  None of us had ever washed an aircraft in our lives.

Now here's what really frosted me.  They asked the advice of an "expert" and then took the advice of someone that had absolutely no training of any kind in radiation contamination, even though it went against the advice of the only person that did have any training.
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The guy that most impressed me during my twenty-one some years in the Air Force was Senior Master Sergeant Chin.

He was of Korean extract, once told me that his father was a village chieftain until he had to leave Korea because the Communists didn't much care for "elitism."  The family now lived in Hawaii.  He said his father would mediate arguments among the people, that he wore one of those funny black hats that have a stiff brim and the crown is a cylinder about eight inches high and sits right on top of the head.  I think they wear black frock coats too.  He said that "uniform" was a sign of a village chieftain.

He told me about hunting mongoose as a child -- that they were rather stupid because they never learned.  He also said there were a lot of cardinals in Hawaii, which surprised me because I always heard that where there were mongoose, you couldn't have birds because the mongoose would eat all the eggs.  Another scientific urban myth?

He would not let anyone put their feet upon the table or a chair.  He once chewed out the captain for sitting on a table and the captain took him aside and kinda whined, "Gee, Sarge, you didn't have to chew out in front of the men," and Chin replied, "Captain, I don't let my men sit on the table.  Why should I let you?"

Sgt. Chin was stationed at the Pentagon before he came to Mather.  He was looking for a place to retire and California looked good, so he created a job for a senior master sergeant in our shop and had himself fill the new opening.

I once had a job going around with a colonel placing posters, etc., about "Zero Defects," another silly worthless piece of moral-building crap.  I didn't like it at all and one day I asked myself what would Sgt.Chin do if he had this job and I realized he wouldn't do it!  So I quit without telling anybody.  Worked fine.

They had a contest to think up a good slogan for Zero Defects and a lieutenant won with the slogan, "Hit 'em High, Hit'em Low. Zero defects, Go Go Go." 

Now this damn thing WON!  it won, I tell you!  The best damn slogan in the contest.

A friend and I were laughing about this and we came up with the slogan, "Hit 'em low, Hit 'em high.  Zero defects, my my my."

I HAVE A SUGGESTION WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH IT

Blog number forty-nine                                                                      Oct. 15, 2006

Starting in the sixties, a Suggestion Program was initiated in the Air Force, and I think in all government agencies.  Cash awards were given if a suggestion was accepted that would save money, make a process more efficient, or anything else that would benefit the Air Force and ultimately, Our Government. A few years into it, I was assigned to a task that enabled me to walk around the base talking to different people, watching what they did -- a general all around wonderful job.  I had absolutely no responsibility.  I did whatever I wanted.  Which wasn't much.

I began watching the awards given for suggestions and I noticed that while a suggestion was accepted and the suggester awarded a great deal of money -- sometimes in the thousands and not all that rarely, in the tens of thousands, the suggestions were very often never implemented.  I started checking out why, and I found that the "new" way of doing something was not worth the trouble -- it was tried and found wanting, or the "fix" fixed something that wasn't broken in the first place, or the department never got around to implementing the new suggestion because they had work to do and didn't have the time to waste on what was obviously a dumb suggestion.

It seems obvious in retrospect, that if an idea was any good, it would already have been initiated and used, anyhow.  Without any award.  I mean, I don't think the invention of the wheel or of the steam engine was accomplished because of any suggestion program.  Sheeze!

The problem basically lay with the suggestion being evaluated by the suggester and his buddies -- although of course, it was not supposed to work that way, but anyone with half a brain could see that only those people with the know-how that enabled them to evaluate a suggestion had to be employed in the department that employed suggester.  I mean, a mechanic was not going to evaluate a new form for writing up payroll.  A clerk was not going to invent a new process for checking the balance on propellers.

I remember one suggestion that came from an enlisted man that had just finished a course in colbol language for computers in college, to have the data cards changed into colbol language I asked him how this could be done and he didn't know -- "have someone else do it -- just pay me the money for suggesting it and I thank you."  Or words to that effect.  Made me want to suggest that someone invent a time machine so we could make WW2 come out even better -- maybe have a large force of aircraft carriers on the ready at pearl harbor in 1941.  I could make a lot of bucks if I got that suggestion OKed.

Another suggestion was to put trash cans in the barracks parking lot so the men would put their trash in it instead of on the ground. That one was evaluated and denied by the Bobbsy Twins that I told you about earlier with the explanation that it was against the rules to litter, so the men shouldn't be throwing trash on the ground anyhow.

All in all, a pretty sorry mess.  Cost the Air force lots of money, lots of wasted man-hours, lots of other bad things -- probably even global warming in later years, I dunno.  The suggestion program was still going on when I left in 1974 and I imagine it is still going on.

One day I decide to put in a suggestion to do away with the suggestion program, listing the different suggestions that had been approved and awarded and their total noncompliance and why they were not implemented, and the money awarded.  I heard about a week later from my Pinochle buddy who sat in on Chief of Maintenance meetings that the guy running the suggestion program had sent my suggestion to the Chief of Maintenance along with a remark that I "evidently didn't understand the suggestion program."  My friend said the Colonel said that I seemed to understand the suggestion program very well.

The guy running the suggestion program denied my suggestion and I wrote back saying that he was obviously biased since he was being paid to run the program I was suggesting be obliterated.  He responded that a new person would be on board in six months and we could have him evaluate it.  I agreed and lo and behold, when the new guy took over the suggestion program,he denied my suggestion.  Saw that one coming a mile off.
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I had a sergeant that told me that he was in an aircraft that caught on fire and the pilot told everyone to bail out but my sergeant refused.  He said the pilot kept insisting, and all the other crew members bailed out, but he said he was too scared and he would be damned if he would.  He said the pilot argued with him, but he was adamant and finally the pilot stayed with him and eventually landed the plane. 

Too bad the suggestion program wasn't in effect then.  For my sergeant's suggestion to stay with the plane, he saved the Air Force and our Government a lot of money.  I don't know how much since I didn't have the curiosity to ask the sergeant what type of plane it was, but it must have been a large one, carrying a crew.

This same guy was being hounded by the suggestion program to have his department put in more suggestions so in order to satisfy them, he started putting in silly suggestion, like keeping the base swimming pool open all winter so those who like to swim in freezing water could do so.

One of his men got injured during a basketball game and when that happens, you have to fill out a form describing how and why it happened and what is being done to prevent such injuries in the future.  He suggested that basketball players wear helmets and shoulder pads, and a face mask during games.  He said the Captain called him on the phone and asked if he were being sarcastic.  He said, "Why no.  Football players didn't wear protection at one time, but now it is thought to be a good thing."  He mollified the Captain, who probably wasn't all that convinced, but what could he do?
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I was flying with a training mission once and I heard over the intercom the navigating instructor notify the pilot that a mountain was coming up and we wereflying below its crest.  A few minutes pass and the instructor again notifies the pilot -- "Uh Pilot, there is a mountain dead ahead and we are below its crest."  "Roger, " replies the pilot.  A few minutes go by and the instructor again notifies the pilot and this time his voice sounds a little stressed.  I start to lose my confidence in the pilot's good sense.  And a few minutes later, almost sounding like a command, "Pilot!  Mountain dead head."  A pause, then, "Roger."  Another pause and the plane begins to rise.  I kinda think the pilot for some reason, was messing with the instructor's head.
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