When I finally grew up and became self-aware (mid to late 20s), one of the scariest aphorisms I read was "an unexamined life is not worth living". There was an emptiness just barely coated by a thin film of learned social responses. I have no idea how I was perceived by others but apparently mom and dad were worried enough about me that they sent me to a monastery in North Dakota (Assumption Abbey) for my freshman year of high school. I learned some interesting things there. Every day from 6:00pm to 7:00pm, we got on our knees and prayed at our desks; at the front of the room was a clock - by the end of the school year, watching the second hand, I could 'go away' within 5 seconds and not come back until prayers were over. Some people think I was just sleeping but the monks would have beaten me silly if they caught me sleeping - I was never caned like some of the wilder boys (all boys Catholic school) but I did get bent over a desk a couple times and whacked with a yardstick. Anyway, I do not know where I went; was it meditation? Why did/do I feel so good when I am back in my body? I was repeating the prayers with everyone else so could mean that it was a form of the chanting meditations (nom miyoho rengee kio or om mani padme hum) rather than the current 'mindful' meditation being practiced where you just breath. The next thing I learned was to not be in my body when something bad was happening like being beat with coat-hangers by upperclassmen - I could watch what was happening but not be in it. Another thing I learned is that even if someone beat the crap out of me then asked me if I learned anything, just say "I learned pain hurts" not give them any satisfaction. Then I took karate as soon as there was a class available which was when I went off to college - I did not care much for hitting people but I learned quite enough that no one ever hit me again - er, more than once my defense was almost impenetrable which did not win me any tournaments (though I did get 3rd place in board-breaking.
My place in the family was always the basement. my sister Jacquie always got the 2nd bedroom upstairs while Gerry and I lived in the basement. I was talking with Jacquie the other day and brought up the basement dwelling and she said "Oh, that is why I have no memories of us being together growing up". Dad was always in his bedroom reading or just laying there. I asked Jacquie about it and she says that she and dad used to play games until she got to a certain age and that stopped - this is similar to mom's stories about how dad used to play with Gerry and I while they were courting and for a while after they were married then it stopped. Dad was so extremely shy/introverted that he never talked to anyone (I guess over a certain age) - pretty odd for a bank loan officer (I later learned that the locals called him Mr. Giggles behind his back, for his nervous laugh, I suppose). Only at the cabin did he ever really talk to us and that was usually over drinks.
Living in the basement was interesting, it started when dad bought a house on the hill in Livingston; there were 2 bedrooms upstairs and an unfinished basement. I think that building a bedroom for us down there was about the only real 'handy' thing dad did. But that house is the house at the edge of civilization mentioned in other posts about Livingston. The first 2 houses we lived in in P'wood (many sticks, murmurtonia and other odd kid names for the town) were on the crick. The first house did not have enough bedrooms so Gerry and I slept on the porch until dad found a house with enough room (ie a basement for us boys) but we did not stay there long; don't know if it was because the previous owner died in the basement when the crick flooded and the basement wall collapsed on him but that kind of creeped us boys out. Then we moved into the Boundary house with another basement but this one had a mother-in-law basement apt with sink and 2 rooms with a bathroom.
I knew how to play chess and so did my brother and he would come home and make me play him but I beat him almost every time and he would so damned angry. Sometimes I would pretend to be asleep when he got home but he would wake me up to play and I still beat him. I pretended to be asleep because I never got to sleep before 3 or 4 in the morning; I would just lie there in the dark thinking my thoughts; eventually, I started making up stories in my head where I was not quite so alone. Then I got a radio and listened to CKCK (CK62) out of Regina I think - at about one in the morning they had a 5th wheel program for long haul truckers that was 2 hours of comedy albums. Can you imagine listening to 2 hours of full comedy albums every night! Shelly Berman, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge many,.many others I can't remember right now. I suppose that contributed to what some see as my sense of humor. It was always cold in the basement in the winter; it got so that I needed the cold sometimes - like I would sleep with the window over the bed open (so this was after Gerry got married so I was promoted to his bed). I remember sometimes waking up to shake the snow off my blanket and closing the window. Other times I remember being so cold my feet never warmed up.
more later, maybe
Friday, July 3, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
Thursday, June 25, 2015
I am of the world just not in it.
I just spoke with my sister a couple days ago and brought up a subject that I don't think any of my family knows: I probably have 2 children out there (since this was in the early 70s, there are probably grandchildren). I am not much on self-examination; in fact, I used to reverse the quote to "an examined life is not worth living". This will be brought up later as an explanation so keep it in mind while I appear to digress.
I got out of the Marine Corps in December 1969 (I will leave that story for another time). I moved to Seattle in 1972. Somehow, between 69 and 72, I managed to cram about 8 years worth of living. I have very strong, very definite memories of what I did during those years but I cannot order them. I went back to college for a year buy getting a $100 loan from my dad on my Winchester Centennial model .30-30 (worked an entire summer putting money down $20 at a time until I owned - it is a beauty! I got the carbine model because the octagonal barrel made the rifle too 'barrel-heavy'; the carbine is perfectly balanced and a joy to hold and to shoot. There are tricks I can do with the lever-action like balance it parallel to the ground and lever in a round without upsetting the balance or holding the lever-action level and rocking the rifle forward and back (these are tricks I learned from the t.v. show "Rifleman")) So, anyway, that must have been winter and spring quarter at EMC I can't for the life of me remember where I lived for those 6 months. Damn, too much detail - try again.
I went to college, I worked at a glass factory assembling windows (damn, another good story there for later), I went to business school, I shared an apartment with Wendell 'Wendy' Powell (my first black friend) and another guy whose name is gone forever, was a bartender at a place called Jekyll & Hyde's (because it was a steakhouse during the day and a rock club at night), I worked as an artist's model at the college, became a clothes-horse with hundreds of dollars worth of clothing (I lost weight - I think I weighed about 150 pounds at 5'8"), started doing acid (well, actually I did my first acid in the USMC) smoking pot (in 1967, I was the first person on campus to have their dorm room raided for pot - they didn't find any because they did not check my pockets, pot was a hard-time felony at the time - I think 10 to 20 years in the State Pen. this could be another good story for later), did some speed, lived in a shooting-gallery (a place where junkies went to inject drugs)with about 9 other people, got an entire wedding party high on acid and we ended up on my water-bed playing a game we invented called 'submarine' where everyone jumped up and down on the bed until only one person was left standing (the groom was someone from Plentywood who graduated about a year or 2 after I did the bride was a mutual friend who I met while at the business school - he died a short time later when a truck he was working on fell of the jack and crushed him), I went to Kalispell where I learned to be a lumberjack training on a chainsaw with a 36 inch bar (most people put the chainsaw on the ground and pull-start it - I would hold on to the starter rope at chest level and drop the saw so it would start itself -- keep in mind that chain revved up as it started so part of trick was to turn as the saw dropped so that it would not cut my legs off (this may not have been one of my smarter tricks)).
Okay, before I went to Kalispell, I met a woman, we hit it off, and we lost our virginity together. We screwed a lot, danced a lot - I worked graveyard shift so we had 'interesting' time together but I think we both started to bored with the way things were so this is when I took off for Kalispell; I told her I was leaving the night before I left. We went up (long story, a guy I knew from college and guy I knew from business school went up there together) got into this training program for loggers - gawd, just imagine testosterone-fuled 21 year olds turned lose in the woods with these huge chain saws - I was all grace and style I danced through the trees and once they were down, trimming them was poetry (we were pretty damned cocky, eh?). I first learned the undercut then back-cut method but that wasted wood; my instructor taught me to know the tree. All trees want to fall south (the most sunshine produces the most branches hence it was heaviest on the south side - once you know that then you look at the tree for things that work against the tree falling south (is south uphill? is it tangled with other trees,etc,etc). Once you determined where it wants to fall, you decide where you want it to fall so you start back cutting it until you hear the tree beginning to creep,snap and tremble - now that the tree is leaning where it wants to you start cutting on the opposite side of where you want it to land. As this huge tree is beginning to fall, you watch the top of the tree start to describe a circle. Once you get tree aimed in the direction you want. So winter weather moved in so we headed back into the south, back to Billings; it was a long snow
drive pulling a trailer but we got back. We'd drive up to Rimrocks with wrist-rockets and cherry bombs; The surgical tubing slings could fire bomb out over the heart of the city.
So I called the woman and chatted with her some (you know - thinking of hooking up again) She got enough information out of me for her an her 'friend' Rocky tracked me down to where I worked. They said a bunch of stuff about I had better meet them after work or the whole mc gang would hunt me down. Long story short, I fought them to a standstill - they could not touch me (karate and USMC training) and I beat the crap out of one of them. The point of this story is that part of Rocky's complaint with me was that her parents gave him the stink-eye for knocking up their daughter but the kid was mine not his. So, as you can imagine, I do not know much about this child other than she was pregnant and it would be doubtful that this child or this child's child would look me up.
maybe more later
I got out of the Marine Corps in December 1969 (I will leave that story for another time). I moved to Seattle in 1972. Somehow, between 69 and 72, I managed to cram about 8 years worth of living. I have very strong, very definite memories of what I did during those years but I cannot order them. I went back to college for a year buy getting a $100 loan from my dad on my Winchester Centennial model .30-30 (worked an entire summer putting money down $20 at a time until I owned - it is a beauty! I got the carbine model because the octagonal barrel made the rifle too 'barrel-heavy'; the carbine is perfectly balanced and a joy to hold and to shoot. There are tricks I can do with the lever-action like balance it parallel to the ground and lever in a round without upsetting the balance or holding the lever-action level and rocking the rifle forward and back (these are tricks I learned from the t.v. show "Rifleman")) So, anyway, that must have been winter and spring quarter at EMC I can't for the life of me remember where I lived for those 6 months. Damn, too much detail - try again.
I went to college, I worked at a glass factory assembling windows (damn, another good story there for later), I went to business school, I shared an apartment with Wendell 'Wendy' Powell (my first black friend) and another guy whose name is gone forever, was a bartender at a place called Jekyll & Hyde's (because it was a steakhouse during the day and a rock club at night), I worked as an artist's model at the college, became a clothes-horse with hundreds of dollars worth of clothing (I lost weight - I think I weighed about 150 pounds at 5'8"), started doing acid (well, actually I did my first acid in the USMC) smoking pot (in 1967, I was the first person on campus to have their dorm room raided for pot - they didn't find any because they did not check my pockets, pot was a hard-time felony at the time - I think 10 to 20 years in the State Pen. this could be another good story for later), did some speed, lived in a shooting-gallery (a place where junkies went to inject drugs)with about 9 other people, got an entire wedding party high on acid and we ended up on my water-bed playing a game we invented called 'submarine' where everyone jumped up and down on the bed until only one person was left standing (the groom was someone from Plentywood who graduated about a year or 2 after I did the bride was a mutual friend who I met while at the business school - he died a short time later when a truck he was working on fell of the jack and crushed him), I went to Kalispell where I learned to be a lumberjack training on a chainsaw with a 36 inch bar (most people put the chainsaw on the ground and pull-start it - I would hold on to the starter rope at chest level and drop the saw so it would start itself -- keep in mind that chain revved up as it started so part of trick was to turn as the saw dropped so that it would not cut my legs off (this may not have been one of my smarter tricks)).
Okay, before I went to Kalispell, I met a woman, we hit it off, and we lost our virginity together. We screwed a lot, danced a lot - I worked graveyard shift so we had 'interesting' time together but I think we both started to bored with the way things were so this is when I took off for Kalispell; I told her I was leaving the night before I left. We went up (long story, a guy I knew from college and guy I knew from business school went up there together) got into this training program for loggers - gawd, just imagine testosterone-fuled 21 year olds turned lose in the woods with these huge chain saws - I was all grace and style I danced through the trees and once they were down, trimming them was poetry (we were pretty damned cocky, eh?). I first learned the undercut then back-cut method but that wasted wood; my instructor taught me to know the tree. All trees want to fall south (the most sunshine produces the most branches hence it was heaviest on the south side - once you know that then you look at the tree for things that work against the tree falling south (is south uphill? is it tangled with other trees,etc,etc). Once you determined where it wants to fall, you decide where you want it to fall so you start back cutting it until you hear the tree beginning to creep,snap and tremble - now that the tree is leaning where it wants to you start cutting on the opposite side of where you want it to land. As this huge tree is beginning to fall, you watch the top of the tree start to describe a circle. Once you get tree aimed in the direction you want. So winter weather moved in so we headed back into the south, back to Billings; it was a long snow
drive pulling a trailer but we got back. We'd drive up to Rimrocks with wrist-rockets and cherry bombs; The surgical tubing slings could fire bomb out over the heart of the city.
So I called the woman and chatted with her some (you know - thinking of hooking up again) She got enough information out of me for her an her 'friend' Rocky tracked me down to where I worked. They said a bunch of stuff about I had better meet them after work or the whole mc gang would hunt me down. Long story short, I fought them to a standstill - they could not touch me (karate and USMC training) and I beat the crap out of one of them. The point of this story is that part of Rocky's complaint with me was that her parents gave him the stink-eye for knocking up their daughter but the kid was mine not his. So, as you can imagine, I do not know much about this child other than she was pregnant and it would be doubtful that this child or this child's child would look me up.
maybe more later
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