THINK OF A MOTH AND THE UNIVERSE COLLAPSES

Blog number forty-eight                                                Oct. 13, 2006

Today, on the wall of my house I saw what looked like painted stucco had peeled off a tiny part.  On closer inspection, it turned out to be a tiny gray moth that was so tight against the wall that I could not see any depth to it.  It looked like it was painted on.  I realized that this most probably was the type of moth -- likely the same species, that used to be given as an example in our science text books of how Darwin's theory of evolution works.

Supposedly, in London, there used to be thousands of these tiny gray moths and they hid from their enemy on the trunks of trees, etc., but as London got darker from the smoke coming from its many industrial smokestacks, the moths became black.  The gray moths stood out, you see, while the black ones didn't, birds ate the visible ones, the gene for black was passed on to the offspring, and viola'.  Of course this doesn't explain my moth because my house is painted tan.  Oh well.

I got to thinking.  How the hell does anyone know that that is what happened?  I mean really.  Think about it.  Maybe the moths did turn black.  I don't even know that.  I have to take my science book's word for it.  I used to trust my text books -- as we all did, I'm sure.  But Gosh darn, don't you think that they could have insisted that it was just a theory -- just what somebody thought might have happened?  It DOES sound logical, but I can think of a much better theory for how it happened, if it did, but I don't want to go into that right now.

I have heard many people say that Darwin's theory is fact.  And argue it!  Like anyone knows why anything does anything.  Pshaw.

And did you know that I was also taught that there were forty-eight chromosomes in human cells because some scientist counted them?  And did you also know that in my later years we found out that there is really forty-six because the first guy counted wrong and nobody thought to check the count?  Maybe somebody should count them again.

I was also told that neither matter nor energy  can be changed.  Along comes an atomic bomb.  Blew that theory all to hell.  And what frosts me about that was that I read later that scientists knew that matter could become energy -- theoretically at least, via Einstein et al. at the exact same time they were telling us poor children that it couldn't.

And we are still buying, aren't we, that crude oil comes from dead dinosaurs?  Ever see a dead animal turn into oil?  Huh?

I think they got that idea because of the fossil prints of leaves in coal.  So plants turn into coal, animals into oil.  Peat comes from non-decaying plants, peat turns into coal.  Coal turns into oil?  Seems like that was also in my science education, but I'm not sure.

Lotta iffy things about what happened eons ago.

I don't know why coal and oil can't just be hydrocarbon rocks.  Can anybody enlighten me a little more on that whole thing?  There IS a place for comments on this blog you know.  Or should.

I read in some book years ago that in the bottom of a running  stream in Texas they found human and dinosaur fossil footprints placed so that it seemed like the dinosaur was chasing the human.  They showed photographs of the fossil foot prints.  The story against such a thing was that they were fakes, made by people in the area to sell to gullible tourists.  But one of the locals was quoted and what she said convinced me that they were real fossil foot prints.

She said that the locals were selling fossils that they made, but you could tell the real ones from the fakes because the fakes were perfectly flat, carved from the same stone, while the real ones had ridges like if you stepped in mud, the mud would ridge around your feet.  The ridges were not all the same depth.  The fake ones were carved from the same stone.  It would take a skilled stone carver to carve prints that had realistic ridges.  And if they were that skilled, I'm sure they would have been carving other things as well.

The real ones were also much larger than the fakes because you had to be careful not to break the footprint when you took it from the rock.  With fakes, you start with the rock.  It could be any size you wanted.

Also, who would think to fake such a thing if there were not real ones to give them the idea?  Like theSufis say, there is such a thing as fake gold because real gold exists.

One of the photographs showed where the human had made a sharp turn and the dinosaur print made the same sharp turn as if it were following the human, and you could clearly see the ridges pushed out on the part of the print away from the turn.  Like would happen if you were running in mud and turned quickly. 

I told this to a friend of mine once and he asked if I was saying that humans were around when dinosaurs were and I said, no, what I was saying was that there were dinosaurs still around when humans existed.

And do you notice how those photos are totally ignored by the scientific community?  We already know that dinosaurs and humans didn't exist at the same time, so any evidence to the contrary must not exist.  Yes?  If it doesn't fit what we believe, ignore it.

I was also taught, as you were, that we see when light reflects off an object, hits the rods and cones in the back of the retina setting off a chain of electrochemical reactions from nerve cell to nerve cell up the optic nerve and into the brain and we "see." 

We see with our brains then, not with our eyes.  Right?  And doesn't touch work the same way -- we feel with our brain, not with our fingers?  We hear with our brain?  Smell with our brain?  Yes?  So the whole physical universe that we know is contained completely within our bony skulls.  Right?

Not only that, but all the evidence seems to suggest that there IS no "out there" out there.  It seems that we do not sense things -- our senses create and then shoves it "out there" so that we are able to differentiate between the perceiver and the perceived.

And what about the proof that the whole physical universe that each of us knows is contained totally within our heads?  Ever taught anything like that in elementary, high or college schools?  Ever see it discussed in "Psychology Ptoday" magazine?  Or in any other "scientific" magazine or book?  Or anywhere?  Why is that?  I'll tell you why.  Because it is not logical, that's why!  We KNOW out there is out there, so any evidence to the contrary must be in error. 

What evidence do we have that we really ARE looking at something that is really out there?  None.  Itseems to us that we are seeing, feeling, hearing things out there, so it must really be out there. Is that scientific or what?

Very strange.

The eye detects light frequencies.  The brain detects form and color.  We see a yellow pencil.

The ear detects air pressure variances.  The brain detects sound.  We hear music.

The fingers detect pressure and frequencies.  The brain detects texture and warmth.  We feel the touch of a loved one.

But don't worry.  Nothing is different.

I may seem a little harsh on scientists, but it's only because they are more visible than the guy that lives under the bridge or hiding out in a safe-house.  Scientists are people too, so what they do, everybody does. I know that.  You know that.  The only difference is that they have a credibility in their field that the ordinary man on the street doesn't have.  So they should be more careful with what they proclaim, don't you think?

It would be a good start if they would, instead of saying "The cavemen drew pictures on the walls of their caves in order to have power over their prey," they could say, "I don't know -- I wasn't there."

Or, if they say, "After careful experimentation, I think that such and such is the reason for the results," if someone says, "but what about this" they can say, "Well, I don't know.  Let me get back to you on that."  More honest. 

If the guy that counted wrong on the chromosomes had simply said, "I counted them and I came up with forty-eight of them," instead of saying, "there are forty-eight chromosomes in a human cell," he wouldn't have been wrong.  And isn't that what life is all about?  Not being wrong?

Nobody knows anything.  Take guesses, but admit they are only guesses.  That way science can be a little more open to other possibilities.  Kids won't be so likely to grow up with insane ideas.

PROSECUTORS WILL BE VIOLATED!

Blog number forty and seven                                                        Oct. 06, 2006

A dream: I'm walking with Teresa at the downtown mall in Sacramento when I suddenly realize I am naked.  I get very uncomfortable and tell Teresa that I don't have any clothes on.  She asks why I didn't put on clothes.  I tell her I just suddenly realized that I was naked.  I tell her that it is just like I sometimes dream that all of a sudden I am naked.  It does not occur to me that being naked is one of my signals that I am dreaming so that I can wake up in the dream -- have a lucid dream.

She asks me what bothers me about it -- are people looking at me?  I look around, and nobody seems to notice, but I still feel very revealed.

It seems very strange to me that THAT really was me, but THAT me had no knowledge whatsoever about ME that was sleeping in a bed.  THAT me never knows about me, but I know about "him."  Why is that?  Is there right now a "Me" that knows about me, but I don't know anything about "him?"
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When I was nineteen years old and married, I worked for a family wholesale fruit and vegetable business.  We would sometimes go to Texas to pick up watermelon, sometimes to Joplin Missouri to get cantaloupes and radishes at a farmer's market -- a real one, not these "Buy a few crates of peaches and sell them to the locals" type of farmer's market.  This stuff came direct from the farmers who grew them.

One day my boss -- a guy of about forty who I liked a lot, asked me if I would like to take the pickup to Marshalltown Iowa to pick up a load of bananas.  He said to look the bananas over really carefully because the lady who ran the warehouse was a slick character and for me not to let her give me crap.  I jumped at the responsibility.

At the warehouse, watching the crates of bananas come by me for loading into my pickup, I realized I couldn't tell a good cratefrom a bad one.  What does a nineteen year old look for in a crate of banana's?  I suspicioned that I saw several crates come at me again that I originally rejected, but this time around, accepted.  Anyway, I got loaded and I no longer felt content with what I was doing.

I was to go to stores on our route on the way back to see if I could sell any crates.  So I'm tooling along and it starts to rain so I stop and cover the bananas with a tarp.  Why I thought rain would hurt them, I cannot now imagine.

I get back in the truck and I'm cruising along and I hear this "flap flap flap" sound.  It keeps going and I cannot imagine what it must be.  I look around and I happened to glance in the rear view mirror and here's the tarp, wrapped up like a towel being used to slap someone's ass in the shower, whapping at the top layer of bananas.  I quickly stop, get out, take a look, and every crate is banana soup.  Shit!

Not only that, but in order to hide some of my error, I dropped off a crate of the worst looking bananas I could find at one of our most valued customers.  The lady that owned the store trusted us so much that she never even looked at what I gave her.

I never heard anything from my boss about the whole thing, but I never delivered anything to that store again.  My boss always went.

Another day, the top of my truck tears out a metal awning over the front of a grocery store.  I go to the restaurant where I'm supposed to meet my boss.  I sit next to him and the first thing I say is, "Do you have insurance?"  He looks straight ahead, and replies, "No, why?"
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I worked in a fancy Des Moines cafeteria as a bus boy once.  One Sunday they served prime rib and as the customers came down the line, some would ask the prime rib guy to cut them a slice of the rib.  One lady asked if she could have a slice that was a little more done.  The guy flipped the rib over in the au jus it was sitting in, and sliced her off the top of that.  A few minutes late I hear, "Could I have a slice a little more well done?"  "Sure, lady," and he flips the rib again so the rare part winds up in the brown juice while the rare part that had been standing in the brown juice was now on top, looking like it was well done.
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One Sunday in Denver I was to pick up a friend of Teresa's and bring her to our home.  I was a little early so I stopped at a bar to have a beer.  (Taverns open on Sunday in Denver?  That's the way I remember it.)  I'm sitting at the bar and I overhear two men and a woman talking about the previous night in the same bar.  They talk about a man rolling around on the floor, screaming and carrying on something fierce and then one of the men says, "He held out his arm and said that he bet I couldn't straighten out his arm."  A few beats, then "Hell, I didn't know he was crippled."

BLOG VIGNETTES

Blog number forty and six                                                        Oct. 04, 2006

Late at night at Mather AFB, I'm walking to my car which I park outside the gate because I don't have insurance.  No insurance, no driving on base.  I see a big burning ball moving horizontally over my head, then it explodes and disappears.  I think it was a big meteor.

Bye the bye, the Air Force got to be real big on their personnel being lean and mean.  I always thought they should have built a big parking lot outside the gate and the only on-base motor traffic would be military vehicles.  If I had been General of the base, that's what I would have enforced.

Everybody walking everywhere, good exercise, and lots less traffic on base, making everyone more peaceful.  "Good idea," I thought and still do think.

Also late at night, same base, and this is a true tale although it might sound like a racist joke, but I was coming out of the mess hall late at night after eating midnight chow and I hear this female voice ask me something.  I peer around, trying to see where she's at.  Then she smiles and I see her standing about ten feet in front of me -- a Black girl in dark blue uniform.  I honestly couldn't see any part of her until she smiled and I saw her teeth.
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I caught a very small catfish one summer and inadvertently left it in the trunk of our car overnight and most of the next day.  When I finally found it, it was covered in coal dust and still alive.  No water for about sixteen hours.  Is that a survivor or what?  I put it in our water tank.

We used to put live fish in the water tank and sometimes I would go there and fish, catching them again.  I have caught catfish that were on a string that had gotten loose from its mooring.  Trout won't do that. You catch one, the rest of the school are done for the day.  Catfish are like pigs.  They'll eat all day long.
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I lived in a housing development with my wife and kids for a few months one year, got to know the neighbors pretty well.  One afternoon one of the neighbors came over and asked me to look at his mother because he thought she might be dead.  When I got there, her eyes were open, but there was no sign of life, and since the son was convinced she was dead, that was good enough for me.  This was when I was afraid of dead people and I just wanted to get out of there.  I closed her eyes and said, "Yeah, she's dead."  The next time I looked, her eyes were open.  I never said anything.
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Was watching "Weeds" on the telly the other night, one of the guys was being bitten by a pit bull and one of the other guys said for someone to stick a finger up the dog's rectum.  I got to thinking, "I'll bet that would work."
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Used to do twenty-five pushups if I couldn't sleep, then I'd crawl into bed and drop right off.  After my bypass, even after a year's workout three times a week at the gym, couldn't get more than two pushups. It was not like I was straining, either.  It was more like trying to fly or something like that.  I think some nerves or muscles were cut that prevents me form exercising the right muscles.  They just won't move.
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I repeated an est training.  Cost me ten dollars for a repeat instead of three hundred for the first.  Girl asked me what I wanted to get out of est and I told her I just wanted to have the experience again.  She said I couldn't do that.  I asked, "Why not? -- that's what I wanted to get out of it."

We argued a bit and I finally asked if she wanted me to lie and she said yes, so I did.  Now you have to realize that est was a very, very ethically oriented training, and magic also, because what you went for was what you were going to get, so I was kinda curious as to how this new factor was going to play out.

So the third day we were supposed to choose between an imaginary chocolate ice cream cone and a vanilla one.  Then the trainer (a different one than I had the first time through) would ask why we chose that particular one and the answer was supposed to be, "Because I chose it." 

This one lady, I don't know what her problem was, but she absolutely refused to go along with it.  The trainer finally said she would have to leave, so she turned in her name tag and left, whereupon the trainer went out after her.  They came back and he asked her again which cone she would choose and she, very upset, said, "But you told me I wouldn't have to do that if I came back."  He kept insisting.  She was finally cajoled and threatened into it.  The TRAINER lied to her!

I realized I had seen the first result of the girl insisting I had to lie in order to get to go through est again.  This was going to be a "lying est."

I began to get bored toward the end of the third day, so at the break I told the assistant trainer that I was going to leave.  She said to wait until after the break and we would talk about it.  I said, "OK."

The break ended and she never approached me, (she lied) so I went to where she was behind the table and told her I was leaving.  She asked me if I had made an agreement to stay and I said yes, AND I was leaving.  Est taught us that too. It is not, "Yes, but..." It is "Yes, AND..."  One circumstance does not determine another circumstance.  I put my name tag on the table and walked out.  A young girl followed me and we started talking about my leaving.  I explained to her that I had had a "cosmic experience" that told me If I did what I wanted, everything would be all right and what I wanted right then was to leave. 

We were enjoying each other's company, it seemed, just chatting, and then the trainer's assistant came out.  She started in on me again about didn't I agree to stay and why was I not keeping my agreements and I told her about the cosmic experiences and she got this very, very angry look on her face as she said, "Don, you're crazy."

I figured this was going nowhere, so I said, "Well, at least we can still be friends."  She responded with, "This isn't about friendship." Hearing that, I turned to the pleasant girl to say good-bye to her, and lo and behold she had the same angry look as did the trainer's assistant.  From friendly to hateful without me saying a word to her, nor any insulting thing to anyone.  I left.

As I was walking away, playing the whole scenario in my mind, I realized that just before the break, the trainer had told everyone -- these two women heard it too, he said that if you tell someone that you are going to do what you want, people will tell you that you are crazy.
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Remember what I told you about people having watches on their person after being repeatedly told not to have them?  Well, when you repeat an est training, you are not allowed to share (est is where that term came from that is now part of the American lexicon) or to ask questions.  You have a different colored name tag.

This one guy is asking the Trainer about something and the trainer is answering him and then the trainer stops and says, "Wait a minute."  Aren't you a repeater?"  The guy says, "Yes."

The trainer says, "You're not supposed to be talking."  The guy resounds with, "Yeah, but I wanted to know what you meant by what you said."

People!
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I was watching "Cops" and this young girl was talking to the cops that came as a result of a domestic disturbance call.  She hadbeen beating on her much smaller husband, She kept telling the cops, over and over, "When you get married you're supposed to be happy.  I'm married.  I'm not happy."

IT'S JUST A DREAM. GO BACK TO SLEEP

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Blog number forty and five                                                        Sep. 30, 2006

After my bypass operation, the first thing I remember is a nurse asking me how I'm feeling.  I try to tell her I feel all right, but I can't speak because of the breathing tube stuck down my windpipe.  I shook my head as a response.  I remembered at the time that someone had told me I wouldn't be able to speak with that tube down my esophagus, so I wondered why she asked me a question.  My son Daryl tells me later that he didn't think I was alive, so the nurse did that in order to show him that the doc hadn't killed me.

The next thing I remember is that I was nauseous, so I rang for the nurse and told her my problem.  She said she would give me a shot that would take care of that.  A few minutes later I rang her again and asked for some crackers. She said, "I thought you were nauseous." 

I replied, "I am.  I wanted the crackers to see if that would make me feel better." 

She said, "I haven't given you your shot yet."

Now here's a strange thing, and remember, I was still in ICU, going in and out of consciousness.  Every time I thought of that incident, I remembered the nurse bending down by the foot of my bed and injecting the drug to make my nausea go away, but as I remember it, my head was down there, lower than my feet.  Why that is so, I don't know. I think I subconsciously put my head where my consciousness was.  It was only after I went home, and several weeks after that, that I focused on that experience and realized what I had imagined.  It seemed so real until I really looked into it.  It also seems strange to me that I didn't think anything odd, my head being down there.  Seems odd now, so I guess my mind is catching up with the real reality.  Either that or I'm crazy like my wife says I am.

A very kind nurse pulls the tubes out that were stuck in my chest by telling me beforehand what she was going to do each time, then slapping near the tube while at the same time jerking the tube out.  She also bathed me, which was very welcome.  I sensed a sadness about her -- some tragedy happening or recently happened.  I wish now I had had the where-with-all to tell her how much I appreciated her efforts in my behalf.  Of all the nurses I have ever had, she stands out as the most caring.  I really felt that she was focused totally upon my comfort.

I had another nurse that told me to make sure my private parts didn't show when had to get in and out of the bed.  I told her that I was too sick to worry about my modesty and she said, "I'm not concerned about your modesty.  I'm concerned about mine." 

I thought, "Well, fuck you, lady.  Don't look." 

The last thing done to me was when the doctor came and pulled out the wires that were placed in my body in case I needed a pacer. He didn't do like the nurse did.  He just jerked one out, then the other.  It was the strangest feeling, like a chill inside my chest.  Very weird, very uncomfortable, but not painful.

There is a lot more I could tell, but it ain't all that important.  If I was writing a novel; I could use it to flesh out the story, but I ain't, so I won't.
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I was watching a reality program last night called, "The Blue Tide" about drug use in Los Angeles.  They were talking to this druggie woman whose boyfriend had just shot himself and she was bandaging her arm, all the while explaining that she shot up there, then would see bugs under the skin and would start picking at it until it was a pretty bad wound.

She then talks about the same kind of wounds she has on her upper arms and pulls her shirt aside to show them, but we can't see them because they are blurred in order to save our sensibilities in some way.  So I'm wondering, why are they showing this while at the same time blurring it so we can't see it?  What's up with that?

I was sitting at Java City on 18th and Capital in Sacramento and I overhear four young men at another table talking about the methadone treatments they have.  I learn that at least one guy is daily - I think, maybe weekly, selling his blood serum to pay for his methadone treatments.  Backing away from the situation, I realize that our society seems to be vampiristic, (don't look for this word in the dictionary. It's my own coinage.) taking blood in exchange for treatment for a condition brought on by the very same society.  Something seems very wrong there.

"THIS WOULD BE FUN IF IT DIDN'T HURT SO BAD"

Blog number forty the four                                                        Sep. 28, 2006

So I'm walking down an alley and I feel a dull ache running down my left arm.  I get so pissed!  I raise my right fist to the sky and shout, "Kill me, you bastard!"  I am furious.

Months later I'm talking to a friend that I hadn't seen in a few weeks and he tells me he had a bypass and when he got the pains, he knew right away what it was and he told me he got very angry.  Now I'm wondering if that isn't a normal reaction, to get angry at a serious defect in the operation of the organs of the only body we can use at the moment.

I tell the Doc and he gives me an electrocardiogram and a prescription for nitro pills.  He tells me to sit down and rest if I ever get another chest pain and if that doesn't work after a few minutes, to take one of the nitro pills, If that doesn't work, take another one and if that doesn't work, call 911.

I have a few more pains over the next few days, and, still angry about it, instead of resting, I do pushups.  Surprisingly, this seems to help.  I tell the doctor this and he says not to do that.  Now I'm torn.  Obey the doctor or go with what seems right.  I go with the doctor.  Mistake?  I dunno. I might have been on the verge of a major medical discovery, engendering me fame, fortune, and a spot on Oprah.  Oh well...

One night, lying in bed, I have a chest pain.  I take a pill, since I am already resting.  That doesn't work, so I take another.  That doesn't work either.  Next day I go to the doctor. (calling 911 seems silly).  He has me take some tests, tells me he is going to do an angioplasty.  He tells me he is going to give me a drug that will enable me to obey instructions and that he will tell me when he is about to inject the dye and that I will feel it as a warmth running throughout my body. 

Starting the angioplasty, I am lying on a bed.  The doctor and his aide are fiddling with the machine.  I lift my head to see what they are doing.  This is all new to me and I am curious. He brusquely tells me to keep my head down.  This surprises me, because what harm is there in my watching their preparations?  He is an India Indian, so I think maybe it is a culture thing.  He has always been kind and understanding before.  Maybe he thinks I will be upset by what I see.  Maybe something else.  I don't ask.  I don't want to be yelled at again.

So the thing starts and he tells me to roll over.  I have been in a deep sleep up to this time, but I am immediately conscious when he tells me to roll over and immediately unconscious.  The next thing I am conscious of is that he tells me he is going to inject the dye and I will feel the warmth he talked about.  And I do.

This is a strange experience and I wonder if the drug given me was sodium phenothol, the so-called "truth drug."  If I had been asked any question I would have answered honestly with the thought of, "Why not?"

The test convinces the doctor that I will have to have a bypass.  I say, "Damn!" because I had kind of thought I could have just had the balloon spread the clogged arteries and I wouldn't have to have the surgery.  When I said, "Damn," he kind of looked at me intently and asked if I didn't want the surgery.  I said, "No, no.  I want the surgery."  I don't know how he read that I was refusing the surgery from my single, "Damn."

I wake up lying in a bed in a room with several other patients who must have also had the same procedure.  We all have a clamp holding down our opened femoral artery until the blood coagulated enough to release it.  I was in very much torment.  I felt very much that I would like to run up and down stairs with forty pounds of weights on each leg.  But I wasn't allowed to move.  They didn't want the clamped artery to start spewing my life's juice, you see.  One guy had to be carted out for repair because he couldn't hold his blood in.

A nurse finally talked to me and told me I could bend the other leg and this helped, but not much.

If I have to have that procedure done again, I'm going to tell the doctor how much I suffered and ask if maybe I could be kept under until I got my clamp off.  Probably not, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

I raised my head to look around once and my doctor yelled at me to keep my head down.  What IS it with this guy anyhow?

The night before the surgery, I am lying in bed after eating a supper. (eating supper before morning surgery?)  A guy comes in and starts shaving my chest and one of my legs.  We chat while he does this and then I start getting severe razor burns with every stroke of the razor.  The chatting stops.  I never complain, but he must have seen spots of blood appearing wherever he shaved.  It was like he was using a very dull razor.  I told my son about this later and he, having worked in hospitals, said that he never heard of them using an old fashioned razor. They always use an electric razor. 

Kinda reminds me of when I went to the emergency room for a cracked rib.  I was in severe pain and I don't know if it was a doctor or a nurse, butt he said he was giving me a shot of morphine. I went to x-ray under excruciating pain, almost passing out from it and when I got back to my bed, I asked the same guy if I could have more morphine because the first one wasn't enough.  So he gave me another shot and that did nothing either.

I told my hospital-experienced son about this experience and he said that the first shot should have put me in a very nice place.  We both decided I had not been given morphine, and he said if they tell you they are giving you something, they have to give you that -- no placebos.  I reported the incident to Patients Assistance and a doctor (at least he said he was a doctor) called me and told me they were looking into it, and I never heard anything after that.  I think somebody was stealing my morphine.

So the next morning, after my shave, I'm being wheeled down to the operating room.  Nobody except for the shaving guy ever talked to me about anything.  I would have liked to have talked to somebody 'cause I felt pretty much alone and helpless.

Next Blog, I'll talk about my stay in the hospital.  I promise.

LIVE A LITTLE. EAT A PRUNE, TAKE A BATH, READ A BOOK

Blog number forty the two                                                         Sep. 24, 2006

I once had an epiphany that fear could not harm me and that there was a "rush" associated with it -- like in a roller coaster ride.  Know what I mean? 

I went on a lecture tour for a while concerning abused children because of a fear of a talking in front of people but that got boring after a while.  Then I noticed an ad in a local "Learning Exchange," offering a class in standup comedy.  Ah!

I wrote what I thought was a good bit for my "final," which was to do an actual standup at a local bar.  I practiced it, memorized it, and was ready to go.  Come time for rehearsal and besides what I had written and practiced, I thought I would do this real easy bit that I had just thought of as I walked up to get ready for my main bit.  I didn't need to memorize it because I was just going to tell what I was doing, like the announcer does at the Olympics? 

"He's walking to the microphone, ladies and gentlemen.  Now he's talking the microphone off the stand, holding it in his hand, bringing it to his mouth..." and so forth.  Easy, right?  Ah, no.  I completely flubbed it -- scared into petrification.  I was physically incapable of doing it. 

I told the instructor I couldn't and wouldn't go on.  He took me outside where I told him what was wrong.  I kept saying I couldn't do it.  I was too scared and couldn't remember anything.  He suggested I write down my bit and keep it in my pocket and if I needed it, I could just take it out and refresh my memory.  That sounded good.  It would relieve the pressure.

Come time when my name was announced and I went to the mike, I threw away the "Olympics" bit and went straight to my set.  First thing out of my mouth, I get a heckler, Fortunately what the heckler said fitted right in with what I was doing, so I skated over that. Getting into my act, still not at my expected first laugh, I got a big one.  "I thought. If they laughed a that, wait 'til I get to my goodies."

Later, when the nervousness came on I took my cheat sheet out of my pocket and started trying to find my place.  Took me some time and I began to notice giggles coming from the audience. "What's this?" I thought.  Never expected that.

My last part of my set wasn't as strong, but I could see where being a standup wasn't all that hard, providing one wasn't petrified with fear.  I was glad I had done it -- like diving from a cliff in Acapulco, but I firmly promised myself that I would never do that again.

That night I woke up in the middle of the night and vomited.
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MY wife and I are planning to surprise my youngest son (Derek) and his wife (Kiki), so I told Teresa not to say anything about it to them.

I get a call from a guy and my son happened to be over and he asked me what that was all about.  I told him it had to do with a guy that was going to do something for us and my wife started going on about "I thought we weren't going to say anything.  It was your idea, why did you tell him" -- like that.

I finally told her that she should stop talking about it because SHE was the one blowing it.  You can see that, right?

One day a friend of ours (let's call her "Mary Ann") told us that her boyfriend (Let's call him, "Ed,") had the hots for Aunt Bea of "The Andy Griffith Show."  She told us not to tell anybody because Ed would be embarrassed about it and Teresa and I both promised that we wouldn't.

So few days later a friend (let's call him, "Carl,") was over visiting.  Carl, Mary Ann, Teresa and I were all sitting on the front porch talking and I don't remember what topic had come up, but I said, "We know a guy that has the hots for Aunt Bea."

Immediately Teresa and Mary Ann jumped all over me, "Dammit Don!  You promised not to tell. What's the matter with you?" etc.  This went on and on from both Mary Ann and Teresa and Carl isn't dumb.  I'm pretty sure he figured out who the guy was from the way the girls were carrying on, while if it had just dropped with what I said, he would never have known who I was talking about.  I wasn't about to tell him.  I didn't even defend myself with the two because I knew that might just add to the evidence.
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This idiot (Let's call him "Larry,") who felt himself to be a scientific genius hung out at Weatherstone's.  One day I heard him saying, "Darling, darling, seemingly directed towards a girl sitting nearby.  Came to find out later that he had named his dog, "Einstein Darling."  Is the guy an idiot or not?  You tell me.
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My daughter (let's call her "Trinja") used to watch soap operas and seemed to enjoy them, so I started watching to see what the attraction was.  The first thing I discovered was that all the people in the soap -- the guy in jail; the cheating wife, the thief, the runaway, they were all related or tied together in some way.  One big happy soap family.

The funniest thing I ran across was on "All MY Children" when a guy told a woman that another character was pregnant and I realized that everyone in town knew she was pregnant except for one person -- the pregnant woman herself.

ONLY EMO PHILLIPS IS FUNNIER

Blog number forty the one Sep. 21, 2006

So Teresa (my wife) is waiting in line at the Bel Aire (A fancy grocery store) and I'm kinda standing back watching people. I notice two boys about eleven years of age looking over the DVD's in the children's section. One of them picks up a Disney DVD and excitably exclaims to the other while pointing to a cartoon picture on the front, "She's good! I saw her in "Beauty and the Beast."

In an "all you can eat" place - Hometown Buffet, I was standing behind an eight year old boy who was staring at the cinnamon rolls in front of him, plate in hand, and I heard his mother say, "No, those aren't vegetables."

I got a call from Italy one day -- a wrong number. Apparently the Italian lady's son was supposed to be a student exchange and was to live in the person's house that she was trying to call when she got me. She hadn't heard from anyone when she was supposed to, so she was trying to find out what was going on. She gave me the family's address, so I went over there to see if I could find out what was happening. I couldn't find the address because some of the streets were forbidden to me because they were in gated communities. I talked to a lady behind a fence and told her the story and she said she would go get a map, and for me to stay right there and she would be back shortly. I thanked her and she left, leaving a little girl on a bike.

I said to the little girl, "Lemme ride your bike." She said, "No." I said, "Aw, come on. You been riding it all morning." She stared at me for a moment and then she blurted out, wide eyed, expectant, "Are you Santa Clause?"
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Used to be that if you were going to make a turn in your car, you stuck your arm out the window and signal. When I was fourteen, they came out with turn signals. For the life of me I couldn't understand how the car would know when it was going to turn. Fourteen years old, man!

Took me and another guy a lot of moments trying to figure out how a circular lawn mower cut all the grass.

I was confused about the world I lived in for most of my life.

I had a girl in town and I lived about four miles out of that same town - Graettinger. I used to stay with her until about four in the morning when I had to walk the four miles home -- past a graveyard. I was deathly afraid of ghosts. Every time, without fail, I used to mentally kick myself for staying with my girlfriend, making me walk past that graveyard when there were absolutely no cars on the road. "Never again!" I would tell myself.

If I had left at a reasonable hour, say ten o'clock, I could have probably gotten a ride from one of the farmers coming home from the beer hall. But nooooo. My lust took over my brain and good common sense.

I was absolutely sure each time, that THIS time a ghost was going to get me. Dr. Burke once asked me what I thought the ghosts were going to do to me and I was stumped. I didn't know.

After I went through the terror of actually walking right past the ghosts' stamping ground, I would feel a slight sense of relief at once again foiling the bastards, but every few seconds I would get a creepy feeling in the nape of my neck and quickly look back. I never really relaxed until I reached the first farmhouse. From then on it was a walk in the park. I was usually so sleepy that I would close my eyes and try to catnap while walking, but I always felt I was walking right into the ditch, so I didn't get much sleep.
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I used to trap and I caught a civet cat one morning, so I smelled like a skunk. When I went to school I told the principle what happened and he had the janitor spray me with formaldehyde. Now that stuff stunk MUCH worse than the outdoorsy smell of skunk. "'sides, we know now that formaldehyde is poison.