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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
