Footnote - will be updated as I add footnotes

#1:

The original quote is from Plato's Apology "an unexamined life is not worth living" - I never thought much beyond the expression so I just accepted it as a negative comment on my how I lived my life. Deeper research lead me to find this

However, there would be no need to exhort us to examine our lives if we did not think that there were human beings who do not, and so have valueless, bestial lives. The noble ideal has a harsh implication: some in the herd of humankind may as well be animals, or dead.

 We should also keep in mind that Plato says this is a quote from Socrates but all we know of Socrates is what Plato says of him so, in truth, it is a Platonic quote.

#2:

Dear Anonymous (warning TMI) -

These paragraphs first appeared in DA; some are my posts and some are my response to posts; feelings and emotions expressed are subject to change, the facts are not.

response:
For the longest time, my motto was 'an examined life is not worth living' see #1. I believed this until I was in my 60s - why? Because there was this big emptiness inside of me - there was no me inside of me, just a vast wasteland. I read books - hell, I read one entire encyclopedia from cover to cover for each of 3 years (worked out perfectly, the library ran out of them just as I graduated - I graduated 52nd in my class.

beat

beat

Number 53 did not graduate, there were only 53 in my class.) I read philosophy books, I read science books, I read books about parapsychology, meditation, to no great affect. I did read about some interesting concepts in meditation ("first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain") that even went on about facing the emptiness within. I went to counselors and bullshitted them; they would test me and i would use my mental Tai chi to turn it around on them but never, ever let them see the emptiness inside (oh, crap - did I just quote the Moody Blues?
"If only you knew what's inside of me now You wouldn't want to know me, somehow But you will love me tonight We alone will be all right In the end"
that is not the quote I was looking for but it fit me to a tee from age 22 to 38 - they did love me for the night but they all went away)
Things actually started to get better for me when I started to actually talked with someone who listened and did not judge.

post:

I can not watch an embarrassing situation developing on an effing sit-com! I am bingeing on Unbreakable Kimmy and every time the setup heads for embarrassment, I get freaked out. This behavior is really beginning to grate on my nerves. When my ex and I would sit down to watch a show, I would have to get up and leave the room - I just fast-forwarded part of Kimmy. My stomach is all tensed up. Crap! I forget about it until it sneaks up and kicks me in the gut.

This is incredibly Pavlovian. I wonder how deep I am going to need to dig to find what buried humiliation lead me to this impasse. I have the ability to hide things from myself for later - in times of stress, I can actually observe myself going through certain actions and commenting on my behavior; other times, I completely block out what happened until later. The implication of this is (in a certain way) frightening but mostly confusing since I don't know that I blocked something until I determine it is 'safe' to remember. I neither believe nor disbelieve in recovered memories and am not sure this is the proper direction to look.

I am already seeing a therapist but this is a short-term thing, his job is to find a direction to look and, maybe, a long-term therapist. Adding this to a list issues just leaves me motionless. Cascading possibilities branching through multiple paths leaving me feeling like an experimental rat that is shocked randomly so it/I can't figure out the direction of least pain.
sigh, I think I need to melt some glass and make more puddles.

I know the stories I tell myself are the stories I have to change; I started my 'Random Acts of Art' project to change the 'I am not a nice person' story - I catch myself at that story fewer times now but i still tell it, sigh. Baby steps.

Yes! I, also, get really upset over scenes of helplessness - I am so glad that "Kimmy" glossed over the pre-rescue with "yes there was weird sex stuff" and just did not go there. I don't worry about what I am hiding from myself; I expect it will come up when it is necessary.

Today, i was making glass puddles of one of my monsters (the kind I call crackheads) and the glass stuck to the top of the kiln. I just have to either remember the restraints within which I work in this particular kiln or increase the working dimensions - working within constraints is good for learning control but glass needs at least +10% volume over filling the mold (even more boring details glossed over) so if I want to cast glass in a 2 inch deep most, I have to stack glass half an inch over the top of the mold which then touches the top of the kiln. Usually, it works out because the glass subsides into the mold but today, the piece did not subside, it adhered to the top of the kiln.

but I digress. I will be spending the week of my birthday in in the mountains of Montana with my sis and bil. Then we will go to their home in Wyoming to watch the eclipse.

I consider meditation to be the elephant in the room; I talk to people who hear me describe what I do and they say your elephant is not like my elephant therefore what you are doing is not the elephant.
I learned to meditate while at a monastery school when I was 15; we prayed on our knees for hours; I learned to watch the second hand of the clock. I eventually was able to be 'gone' within 5 seconds; now I can lie down and let my thoughts wander - I do not hold on to them nor do I let them go, they just are. I love this state but too much. I can spend a day just wandering.
Since my elephant is not their elephant i still do not know if I am meditating and they say what I am doing is not meditation!?

*response
I am schizoid (at least that is the diagnosis in 1969) so I understand you - I do not understand your friends (but I have never understood my friends either). There are feelings that other people talk about that I am unable to understand; there are feelings that I have that other people do not (or at least appear not to have). There is nothing wrong with you.

The struggle is the be-all and end-all of it - find your joy.
*Post titled "I know I am but what are you?"

(did you catch the play on words?)
I am not a nice person.
I know this because it is what I have been told all my life
I see it in how people react to me; I see it in how I perceive others; and it is what I tell myself all the time. (every once in a while, I catch myself saying "I am not a good person" phrased in different ways).

Please do not reply to say "You are a good person":
1) you don't know me
b) if telling me that helped, it would not be an issue.

I am here shouting into the universe (sounds remarkably like shouting into a large/huge metal pipe - the echoes reverberate off into the distance and return, amplified).
I started a project which, for lack of a better name, I call "Random acts of art". I give away objects I make. It is actually pseudo-random since I have to have some sort of connection. Example, I was going to pick up my contacts at the eye-glass place and I was going to say "I have a project I call random acts of art" and leave a random collection of glass objects (a skull, a star, a t-rex, and a couple other items - I forget what all) but the person who I normally talk to was not there and I had no connection to the person who I dealt with so I left w/o doing or saying anything. Also, it has to be some place I do not go very often because I do not want a big deal made of it.

I have given a lot of items away at work - that is comfortable because my job is so intense that I barely get to speak with my team (who are as busy as I am) so I seldom get a chance to interact with any one else (I am a seasonal worker so I have a new team every year; with 12 people to a team and I have been here 7 years - #s).

Sometimes, when I interact with someone like a person at an airline desk at the airport (and who helps me) I ask them "skull or heart"? It is so out of the blue and so not a normal customer interaction that I have to ask a couple times while they stop, see me as an individual, and pay attention - oddly, most ask for the skull, though the woman in Montana asked for the heart (I told her, next time she has to take the skull). I had to give this method up b/c there were not enough of these interactions to help me get rid of all the crap I have made.

See, I make glass puddles and my joy is looking into the kiln to see the world at 1,750 degs F but I end up with glass objects. I have this crap all over my apt - on the window sills, hanging on the windows, hanging on my door, little dioramas at work.
Sigh.

So, I think that if I give away some pieces of myself in my art/craft (if it is perfect, it is craft - if not, it is art - heh,heh), maybe, just maybe I might become a nice person.
Or at least be perceived as one - time for bed

*this is a response to a response to this post:

I work on the 17th floor of my building and I have about 300 co-workers who I can recognize as having seen around; in that short ride to my floor, I can find one thing to comment on to make a connection and get a smile. I have honed this skill to the point that I can turn a 'cash register moment' into a human interaction - where that person has to stop seeing me as a customer and see me as a person. This is something I delight in but it is a card trick all surface with no depth.
I know so much crap, that I can find a connection and talk with anyone about anything - for 5 minutes, then I start to get uncomfortable and move away. In high school I read one complete encyclopedia set a year for 3 years, I know a little bit about everything and not much about anything. I am schizoid so even when I panic, I am observing myself panicking, sigh. Like I said, I am shouting at the universe and your response is one of the echoes I get back. Otherwise, I would be completely trapped in my own head. I am here today to hear the echoes.
Thank you.

*this is a response to another response to this post:

The way I learned the trick was during high school I had insomnia so I would be up until 3 in the morning trying to sleep; the radio station out of Canada (CKCK/CK62) had a '5th wheel' program for truckers that was 3 hours of comedy albums (Shelly Berman, and many others whose names have been lost in the 50 years since) - this went on for 2 or 3 years before they switched to country music. My last 3 years of high school study hall were spent reading 3 complete sets of encyclopedias from cover to cover. Then in the 1970s, I started doing acid; I did so much acid that I actually started to talk with people about my experiences (one woman said "I waited for 3 months for you to start talking to me"). I lost weight (down to about 154 pounds from over 200), worked as a bartender, became a clothes-horse and got seduced a lot because I became a pretty-boy.

finally, I learned the trick because those 30 seconds on the elevator are the only human interaction I have. I was married to someone who had worse human skills than I for 25 years with the last 6 years of her trying to destroy my mind. My current list of human contacts is a coffee shop on Sundays, a friend's 4th of July party, a friend's birthday party in August and the same friends' Thanksgiving.

I am schizoid - my entire life is lived inside my head, my early family life consisted of me being completely isolated from a mother who competed with me against anything I tried to do. I learned to become just good enough at any one thing that I was better than 90% of humanity but not good enough for my mother to notice. My dad came home, said nothing at dinner, and retired to his bed, right after dinner. I can juggle, I know 3 types of martial arts, can do performance tumbling/gymnastics, I can throw darts and hit the bulls-eye while so drunk I can barely stand up (to me darts are hunting weapon, not barroom entertainment), but I can not talk to anyone for more than 5 minutes because I get really uncomfortable and expect them to turn on me with insults. I can only think of 4 compliments that I got during my first 21 years of life and none of the compliments came from family. I was a passout drunk from age 14 to 19; the number of times I got home from drunk from dances with no memory of how I got home is not countable (sometimes I had to drive 30 or 40 miles to some podunk town nearby where there was a dance). I was not an alcoholic, i just did not know any other way to behave.

In the 80s I was sent to see a counselor who asked me if I was an alcoholic - I answered "no". She said "you know I am a counselor who specializes in working with addicts", I shrugged. Many sessions later I was describing my behavior at parties - I drink until my nose gets numb and I start drinking non-alcoholic beverages and i am sober by the time I head home . She looked at me stunned and said "you aren't an alcoholic!" - I shrugged, DUH! that is what I said.
I earned the tricks I use.

My username in the past was GrimJack

  - I have lightened up a lot.Lately, I have been considering microdosing acid (I think the last time i did acid was 1986) as I have heard some good things about how it helps but, since i am a federal employee, all the things I used to do are now held against me at a higher standard, I can't even smoke pot though it is legal in my state. Hell, I used to smuggle Cuban cigars and 222s down from Canada, crap no longer an option.
Apologies for the rant.

**digression**

 This is my 'Grumpy' avatar:

*this is response to another response to this post:

Ooh - I like that! It is an act of selfishness; I do feel it is sort of conniving to try to convince people that what I have to give is of some value. When I talk of 'puddles' of glass, I do not necessarily mean that the puddles have no form - my heart series includes ones that are transparent but have a dark center; for the twins downstairs, I did a 'shared heart' design that actually was kind of sweet (but then the twins aren't even one yet so I certainly didn't want to show them my true heart). It turns out that if I 'polish' the glass with a brass brush - it gives the glass an interesting metallic patina, to be honest though the patina disguises the nature of the object; rather than looking like glass, it looks like metal and you have to touch it to know its true nature.

Glass is the most amazing substance in the world but that is a digression I do not want to get into. I am still trying to determine my true nature.

 *
So I get to the stochastic man in this scenario - I can handle it. But, still, sometimes I have to shout at the universe with rage and frustration (other times I shout love at the heart of the world).

*

When I was in college in Billings MT, we would go up to the rimrocks that surround some of the city. We had wrist-rockets and cherry bombs - they would make it out over the city and explode in the air. Since it was 1967, it was not considered terrorism (besides, we never stood around waiting for the police). Also, I still had some blasting powder and blasting caps left from when I was working on a seismograph crew (part of my job was to screw together 2 units of BP, insert the cap and lower it into the hole we just drilled); I would scoop about 2 fingers from each 5-pound unit - 2 units per blast and about 3 or 4 holes drilled per day. I was finally fired when I drove over a couple tubes of BP on the way to get more water. The crew boss jumped onto the side of the truck screaming at me, sigh.

How I got so sleep deprived to make such a mistake is a digression for another day. The BP was interesting stuff; if you lit it, it would burn so hot it would melt through asphalt but even shooting it with a .22 would not set it off. The blasting cap is necessary to produce enough compression energy to set it off - driving over the BP was not really dangerous but pretty stupid. When the ground was too wet to drill, the crew would lay out some organic material around a cap and wait for a gopher to investigate (this was not particularly entertaining for me but I was not a Texas oil-field worker).

I have only become 'enlightened' in the last decade or so -  before that, I am not sure I knew right from wrong - I did know what would get me in trouble with the law and/or other people.

*
I am so concerned because I am so concerned. I give a shit so I do what i do and I ask questions about what I do. I get something out of making - though, to be honest, the joy is in opening the kiln and seeing the world at 1700 F (and it is so brief and transitory - if I stare too long, my gloves burn, then my fingers.

when I was growing up I used to stare into flames in the fireplace; I used to take gasoline from the tool shed and light fires in the sand but there is nothing like the inside of a kiln glowing so hot that it is almost transparent with the glass puddle almost cool in comparison). The glass puddles are just a reason to heat up the world. The drudgery of making a mold, tempering the mold, coating the mold, determining what colors of glass to use or not use so that I have a reason to lift the lid off the kiln and stare for a moment at molten glass.

You are right - I really don't care if they like it or not (well, some minor part of me wants them to like it and to think I am a nice guy - but mostly, they should just say thank you and move on). If the object I make is perfect, I call it craft; if it isn't perfect, I call it art. I seldom make craft - I mostly make art.

*

Do I know you? How do you know about my T-day meals? Have I been babbling away on Ambien again? I loved those days! I remember one year there were so many people in my apt that people could barely move - one of my neighbors pounded on my door shouting "I am going to call the police" - my detective friend answered the door with his badge out saying "we are already on it", slam.
But the year between Thanksgivings is a long lonely time.

*

When I was very young we played with stones, tossing them high into the air over a lake, hoping it would would make a 'gloop' and sink without making a splash or causing ripples; we called this 'cutting the devil's throat'. I have a vague memory of standing near the pool at the bottom of a water-fall (I must have been 7 or 8) trying to get this effect. I bring it up because that is how I expect to go: quietly, with no splash and no ripples. When someone recognizes me, I see a ripple.

An odd sort of metaphor, but it might also explain why I give away my glass castings - small ripples that might reverberate beyond my passing. I am unable to find the source for this name or game - just something kids pass down through the years to other kids. I am not sure most adults even know about the game (er, does that mean I am not an adult?).

*
You have no idea. To be honest, I have no idea - I have to make the assumption you and the rest of the people who occupy the world around me have their own thoughts and motivations - that maybe you are all more than distractions. I do not know because I am unable to make connections with people that have more depth than a 3 minute conversation in an elevator.

Sorry if what I am saying makes no sense but I am responding to each comment as it comes up and so to me this conversation is part of thread that may make sense in the context of what I have said to the previous person or persons. And I will add this to the thread as I respond to the next comment. So, yes I walk to the beat of a different drummer, but it is not a dependable beat (I can't keep time and can barely dance but damned if I don't keep moving, keep trying). I am here to be serious, though I often digress.

*

Agreed. That is why I do 'drive-by' arting; I don't want anything in return - I live every day in my head, alone. I get thanked all day at my job - sometimes, the caller wants to talk to my boss to tell him how wonderful I am (twice so far* in the last 4 weeks) - it embarrasses me and i don't to want get my boss on the phone but I am required to. As soon as the caller hangs up - I hate my job, then the next caller and I am totally focused on helping and I love my job. Then the caller hangs up and I hate my job. People tell me "I did not know that the IRS could be so nice". One caller said "damn you, I am angry as hell and you made me laugh"
shrug
I hate my job. But I do a damned good job and I actually love my job when I am talking with a caller but I hate my job, otherwise.

 That was a pretty long thread and it went a lot of unexpected directions

There is a deadline on this site - all topics are closed after

4 weeks but the MOD reopened it for whatever reason

so it went on far longer than it should have.

*This is the first of a few posts talking about work:

I got a good government job about 7 years ago but things got very strange right from the beginning.
The first 6 weeks was training - in class, 2 classmates stood and yelled at me in anger that I was lying.
The next week one of the instructors was still talking when it was 2 minutes to the end of the day so I politely said "excuse me but people have to catch the ferry". The next day I was called into the supervisor's office and given a 'Letter of Reprimand' for disrespect towards a teacher. Since I was on probation as a new hire, this was pretty serious and the letter would actually go into my permanent record. I finally went to my union rep and grieved the letter so it was removed and classes were scheduled so that they ended 10 minutes before time so we had a chance to clean up before leaving.

Once I was trained and on my first team, I had a team mate stand and shout at me in anger that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. (all teams meet for an hour each week to go over 'stuff'). There was dead silence, then other team members said "'er, I think Grumpy was right that was the way to handle it"

Later (I am compressing time here as these things happened over the 7 years I was there), I came to work to find a note (written in Sharpie) that said, roughly "your feet stink, if you don't do something about it, I will report to your manager". I was stunned but just dropped note into the shredder box. The next day, I noticed my manager walking around going 'sniff' 'sniff' - so I went to her office and told her about the note; it seems she got a similar note with a similar threat about me.

One year a team member barged into my cube shouting that I can't say that (while I was on the phone) and that I was wrong (keep in mind, I am on a new team every year so the similarities are not because of the team or team member). I ended up with my finger over my head-set mic shouting over and over "get out of my cube, get out of my cube". Then that person got angry at me for 'ratting her out' - da fuck?! She was in my cube shouting at me and I was shouting at her, there was no ratting needed - the whole fucking floor had to have heard us.

In a skill up class (I am a seasonal so I work half a year and am off half a year) the person sitting next to me decided to quit and in her exit interview blamed me and said that I burped too much. I was called in for meeting (with the same person who first issued the letter of reprimand) and told me to stop burping, that I was annoying people. I said "isn't this like that stupid 'stinky feet' note?" She said nope that person was no longer with the company (this is the only reference to the incident that anyone ever made - but at least I learned that something was done about it).

I had a team mate tell me he was going to rip my face off. There is more but I just get angry when I dwell. Physical threats pretty much make me chuckle (internally) but I am really, really not very well socialized so I just put my head down and keep doing my job.
So this is the source of my 'random acts of art' project - I seem to inspire very odd behavior in other people (one of the 2 people who shouted me in the first event is still with the company - we are cordial. Someone tried to explain it to me that strong people evoke strong emotions. I seem to gather enemies and I have to assume that I have allies also because, well, I have to believe that. But I do not trust my co-workers - and does not inspire me to reach out.

Situational code-switching

When I was about 24, I started using my middle name (the first name of my father who actually preferred to be called Rod) Rodger. The reason is immaterial for this conversation. What it allowed me to do w/o a struggle was to keep my lives separate to a far deeper extent than I or anyone else noticed. It went so deep that when I played with my friends' kids I would say "come to uncle Greg" (I really wish I had been able to be an uncle for Ky and Chantal, I will try with great nieces and nephews - that was one of my jokes when Ky and Chantal had kids - I am not just an uncle, I am a great uncle). I was a wonderful uncle to the local kids; we would roughhouse, I would use them like nun-chuks, fly them in circles, tumble down hills with them. So the original code-switch was - if I am uncle Greg, we have a different conversation than if I am Rodger. It was a way to allow them (and me) to know what language we would be speaking.

In the following vignettes you will see me as Rodger - Rodger and Uncle Greg are the same person and both will show up but Rodger is also not uncle Greg. Uncle Greg would not have survived a night of drinking and doing acid at a biker gang's prospect party - but to be honest, Uncle Greg did have a run-in with a biker gang over an ex-girlfriend (a story for another time) - my very first girlfriend with whom I had sex, sicced a biker gang on me. Her biker boyfriend was pissed because she was pregnant with my kid but he had to face her parents.

There is a website for people who want to reach out; they are often in pain, have no idea of where to turn or how to make a change. The conversations are limited; they are locked closed to further comment after 6 weeks. The following is a compilation of my confessions and my responses to the confessions of others - the first attempt at this was TL:DR so I am breaking it into more manageable bits.

Some backstory: in 1967 I was the first student at Eastern Montana College to have their dorm room raided for pot; I was just leaving my dorm room (with a lid in my pocket) when the police knocked on the door. "We have reports of you possessing marijuana" I stepped out of the room and said "there is no pot in my room". They sat me in a chair and proceeded to take my room apart looking for pot - they found a bottle of Everclear. I was sweating big-time since the pot was in my pocket but they never searched me (pot was still 5-10 year hard-time state felony.). I joined the Marine Corps the summer of '68 for reasons that are still not clear to me. Long story short, I was honorably discharged for medical reasons in December '69 but not before I had my first taste of acid.

The first 3 years after I got out of the USMC, are very confusing to me. I have a lot of difficulty getting the events organized in a time sequence. These were some of the most important years of my life and how I would develop - I may spend some time trying to put those years in perspective. But it is late and time for bed.

I keep wanting to go back and add more detail like taking karate classes from a Korean instructor from 1966 to 68 (though I was never really any good, it gave me a lot of confidence and a certain grace when I walked). At the time it was OkinawaTe but it is called Taekwondo now.

 I suppose I could go on and on and on as I keep triggering new, random memories.

Dynamic tension

I am not that small slice of time you think I am.

When I was a boy, my brother and I were tossing rocks into a small lake in the woods (Echo Lake??) - we skipped some rocks. Every once and a while one of the rocks hit on edge and sink with a gloop - Gerry called it 'cutting the devil's throat' (no idea??); the rock would not make a ripple. That is how I imagine my passing, slipping below the surface leaving no ripples.

I have always thought of myself as a zero, someone of no import with nothing to say of myself except that I lived this long - just a schlub. I talk with my friends, people who do good things who are in all aspects more than I - why don't they have better stories to tell? I spend 95% of my life alone in my room but I have better stories - what is wrong with them?

So, back in my youth I used to burp a lot; I mean Olympic quality burps - 3rd graders would be stunned with awe at my burps. Turns out I had an hiatal hernia (the sphincter muscle that closes off the esophagus passes through the diaphragm and the 2 muscles work together - my esophagus is displaced and does not have enough strength to close off from the stomach so the stomach acids can enter the esophagus) plus an esophageal ulcer; this created some problems that lead to the burps. I did not know all this and did not find out until about 20 years later. I thought that I was somehow swallowing air as I ate. I went to a clinic at Harborview Hospital  to get a painful warp removed from my hand and happened to mention that I swallowed a lot of air when I ate. The clinician told me that they had an expert on hand who could take care of the wart and he asked me to wait for a bit until the expert was free. After 45 minutes the guy stopped by to say the expert would be by at any moment. Finally, after another half hour wait the expert stopped in with the clinician and said "What's this about chewing on your hair and beard?"

I was confused "hunh? what are you talking about?" - the doctor asked "do you swallow a lot of hair when you eat?" "No, I swallow a lot of AIR when I eat" - the doctor gave the clinician a nasty look and started to leave so I asked "what about the wart?" - the doctor told the clinician to get me a bottle of compound W and pay attention to what people said. They were going to lock me up in the crazy ward because the stupid clinician misheard what I said.

I stopped by my favorite coffee shop (now a pizza place and coffee shop) like I usually do on Sundays to read and have my favorite sandwich an English muffin & sausage with cheddar cheese, tomato and basted egg - I have to teach the chefs what basted means!?!?!? served open-faced with no damned fork. Yes, I have to be that specific because I want to be the one who breaks the yoke so open-faced, no fork because it is a sandwich - and if the chef does not know what basted means, I will explain or do not make the sandwich. They once served me an over-hard egg - I told the server I would eat it this time but never again. So now I ask who the chef is before I order (I got the idea from the Japanese movie "Tampopo" - the scene with the gangster and his moll kissing and passing a raw egg back and forth from mouth to mouth - you had to be there).  Anyway, I was looking at their new beer menu and noticed that they included the IBUs for the ales; the owner asked what I wanted to drink but I said I was just admiring all the listed IBUs and she said "you should, it was mostly you that we were thinking of when we did it" - I would always ask what the International Bitterness Unit was for the beer I was drinking and no one knew, heh! She said they had a new IPA on tap but since I was not interested in a beer then I told her I would check it next time so she poured me a small shot to taste and it was marvelous; it had that sharp tang of hops bitterness but a real nice fruity mouth - I was going on, then stopped myself and said "but I should'nt sound all 'wine-talky' - it was good beer"
.
On the way home from work, I stopped in to a game store that is on my route (I am trying to 10k steps every day, but damn my knees hurt). I looked around for an old game I used to love called Cosmic Encounters - it was an exciting game requiring a lot of thought and deviousness. I began to talk with the owners about gaming: table-top, D&D, card based games, that sort of stuff - they tried to convince me to go to a gamer-con the next day, my immediate response was "I am not agoraphobic but I do not go far from home". That is not anything I thought about but once it was out of my mouth, it sounded right.

Random act of art

This is a reply to someone on a website called "Dear Anonymous' for people to vent on - the posts are closed and deleted after 3 weeks.

Thanks!

I have already let it go (since i got to vent here).

I do not like being yelled at but I can't carry a grudge

The picture you see is probably my best casting ever. No one will ever get to see it since I do not dare take it anywhere (if someone were to ask for it, I am not sure I could say 'no'). I am a solitary man - I 'beta-tested' my apartment 3 or 4 years ago by inviting some friends over for dinner - no one else has been up here. I do not expect anyone else. Some ask 'why don't you ever call anyone?'; I ask 'why hasn't anyone ever called me?'

I started to assemble all the casting I have made (that I have not given away - I try to keep at least one example of everything) - there are things I forgot I did, things that I did not realize I could do. Every time I clean some part of my apt., I find more crap/castings. They were on the window-sills, on the bookshelves, under stuff on the table, behind stuff in the work room - shit, I even stepped on one piece when I went into the back bedroom to answer the phone (er, I keep my phone in an unused bedroom).

My random acts of art is going well - the other day, I was admiring an old, restored Harley out front of a rehab center; I asked who the owner was, they said he was inside and pointed to an unmarked door (next to the coffee shop/center) - it was pretty dingy and there was only one guy in there all tattooed and leathered up staring at me sullenly. I asked if he owned the bike out front, he nodded, then I said I really liked it and started my spiel "I have a project I call 'random acts of art' and you can choose one of these objects". I don't think he quite knew what to make of me! Worse, the only pieces I had left were a heart, a Hello Kitty, and a black 'ninja turtle' - he chose the turtle sort of reluctantly. I said "I really do like your bike" and walked out. This worked out just as I like - I walk in, blind-side a stranger, and walk out never to see them again. One day, I will list some of my 'art hits' somewhere.

I mentioned that I dropped some off at work 'anonymously' well, someone I like a lot received a heart (I think - this was a random art hit, I did not know she got one) - figured out it was me because of the art show I did a few months ago. She thanked me and I nodded and said "shhhhh" - she smiled and I walked away. Sigh! This is the part where i worry about doing this at work - having to deal with people after the art hit. I would rather just do 'hit and run' type things.

The reason the octopus will probably remain unique - I had to destroy the mold to get it out and it was pretty complex to create the mold, color it and so on. Most of the things I make are pretty quick one-offs and the molds are reusable - hell, I even keep using the molds after they break to create what i call monsters. I have block-heads (the bottom falls out of the mold) and crack-heads (the mold splits into parts) making interesting 'adjustments' to the basic images. A skull mold split into 3 pieces so, depending on how I arrange the mold, I get skulls that look perfect but you can see faint lines or they look like they were broken and reassembled by a 3 year old.

Crap - sorry for talking your ear off

Onion Boy

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

Tears

What a stunning eulogy! What a great man! What a wonderful President of these UNITED States!

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

The Giant Rat of Sumatra Coffee Co-op

I know I was going to stop naming my posts but this one just had to start somewhere. In the late 1970s I was convinced to start a coffee co-op for Starbucks coffee. It ran from 1978 to 1983. I bring this up because I am just a little nostalgic for the time when I was still an air-headed himbo; since the ex-Mrs.Grumpy left, the house was kind of stark - then she took V.I. (our kitty) and now the house is empty and kind of echo-y. No one stayed in my life longer than a year or two and when they left, I forgot them - adult attention deficit disorder can wreak havoc with friendships. When I ran the co-op people called me, wanted to get together, invited me to visit - all those social things. When people don't touch me, I forget them; you would not believe the number of partners who went away because I forgot them. I would take off to Montana for a couple weeks and when I came back, I would have forgotten them or I could not think of a reason to call, or it had been so long that I was too embarrassed to call.

Letting(?) her take the kitty without a fight seemed best for Kitty; cats are very conservative and do not like to do things for the first time. Once they have done something, then it is probably okay and they will do it again; so I did not want to let the ex take the cat until I could find a place to live that accepted cats then try and get Kitty to adjust to another new situation (I drove the ex to her home the other night and Kitty already forgot who I am and ran and hid in a box). VeeVee was a rescue kitty that we found in a PAWS cat outlet; she was almost completely shutdown, she did not even respond when we picked her up; she had been un-adopted for about 6 months from what they told us. Then things got weird for her when the ex told me she was leaving; got worse when she was gone. I just found where she was pooping; I was suspicious that in cleaning the litter box, it was all urine and only a little poop. I guess I should have looked more, she found a nice spot on a rug in a nice deep hidey-hole. It is petrified so god know how long it was there (Kitty has been gone for a week or 2 now so there may be more surprises in store for me). Kitty seemed to pee and poop in odd places at odd times. Sometimes she even peed behind the TV while we were watching. I think the ex had been building up to leaving and the cat picked up on the bad vibes - I didn't pick up on it, or actually I think I just glossed over all the signs that the ex was ready to leave.

I am listening to some Pink Floyd right now and that takes me back to my blissful himbo-hood. I saw my first concert in 1969 in San Diego CA; I was in the Marine Corps. Well, actually I was on my way out of the Corps. A Corps buddy and I rented a Carmen Ghia and drove route 66 from CA to Chicago in 1969 (I will tell that story sometime later). While we were on the way back, we were pulled over by the IHP - one thing lead to another and we were arrested escorted to the Great Lakes Brig then flown back to MCRD San Diego. We got separated, Mike (my buddy) was taken back to his/our company and he continued his career in the MC while I got side-tracked to Casual Company (yes, there is/was an Headquarters company named Casual Company where people whose MC career was on hold or ending) and eventually I was mustered out with an Honorable Discharge for medical reasons (another story for another day). While I was in C.C., I started doing acid and smoking pot; CC was for people getting in-service and pre-service use of drug discharges; at the time, you could almost get a discharge just by asking for one but it would have been either a General or an 'Other than hororable'(aka Undesirable). My first concert was Janis Joplin; I think I also saw Frank Zappa, and others that I no longer remember.

Well, more later

October 29, 2012

My ex has closed on her condo; she was able to cut $2k off the price because the water heater was 17 years old - kool, she just had a guy in to replace it for a cost of $1,000. It is a super efficient and earthquake proofed and it has already paid for itself!! She called to let me know she had to wait for the installation and might not make it 'home' - I said I would come by to get her if she wanted; on the way home, we were chatting and I missed a hitch in the road and hit a curb at about 30 and blew a tire. Heh,heh - what a bummer but I made sure to let her know there was 'no blame' it was just something that happened and not to worry or let it bother her, it did not bother me.

I have finished most of my ballot - I think I just have a couple odd technical votes to work out. So I guess I have almost done my duty, just need to get it into the mail. We here in Washington almost completely vote my mail. I miss the community of going to my polling place and chatting with neighbors but we don't have to deal with east coast anti-voter hysteria (okay, okay, Ohio is not east coast but all those states over there sort of blur together).

October 27,2012

Well, Mrs. Grumpy closed yesterday on her condo. We had breakfast this morning at the 4 Spoons, picked up some kitty litter, and went by the condo today. It is pretty nice - I am kind of jealous; it has 2 bedroom + a bonus room, a narrow deck that faces south so it will be pretty warm in the summer, has a fire-place yadda,yadda,yadda. The lease on our current apartment does not expire until February so she has plenty of time to get the place ready for her to move in. So, enough about that for now.

This is V.I. - she is our rescue kitty from PAWS KittyCity; we have had her for a couple of years now (yes, she does not look too happy in this picture - she is normally in a better mood but - who wants a vet poking and prodding them?). Since Mrs. Grumpy owns her place, I think it is best for VeeVee to go with her - probably permanently since just getting kitty healthy has been a work in progress and I don't want to upset her too much by moving her from here to there to another place - or, worse yet, try to share her back and forth. Kitty is kind of bi-polar in that sometimes she is very quiet and hides and at other times she is active and runs around. At her low times she will not come into the bedroom at night; on high times she sleeps on us - spends sometime purring on Mrs.'s hips and moves onto my chest to purr and get some petting. She loves her Greenies so were have (mostly) trained her to use the litter box - whenever we see her using it, we put some greenies down for her. Sometimes, she only goes into the box to move some litter around like she is doing something then hops out for her treat - that's okay with us as long as she does not pee or poo on the carpet.

I have worked the entire year so far - no furlough this year due to all the ID theft/fraudulent returns filed; Seattle was one of 2 sites in the US and we handled 80% of the nation's IDTheft calls. It has been pretty tough spending 8 hours a day trying to help people who have had a fraudulent return filed - way too many people depend on getting their tax refund to cover expenses and it takes about 204 days just for a caseworker to get assigned. And the people who perpetuate the fraud - it is a federal crime worth up to 5 years + up to $250,000 per incident and some of these people filed hundreds of returns. Plea deals can get the sentences reduced to 10 years or so. Penalties for purposeful tax fraud can be up to 75% of the amount received. And it goes on and on - there is a law moving through congress to add tax fraud to the list of offenses as a predicate for aggravated id theft that requires a minimum of 2-5 years mandatory sentencing guidelines. Since I am not legally trained do not hold me to any of the details since each case would be prosecuted on its own merits and plea deals save everyone time and money.

September 21, 2012

"It is better to go to the hospital to find out it is nothing than to stay home and die of diphtheria."

Advice to a friend last week while we were in Argentina - he had been suffering for 5 days and it was getting worse rather than better. We were in Argentina for 2 weeks of major beef fest! That is pretty much what tied us together as a group, we were the major partners in buying a cow each fall and parting it out. Mrs. Grumpy worked with the sick dude, the older couple were his girlfriend's parents. It was a really fun time but like all such vacations they end on an airplane which can only really, really suck - though on good days it just sucks.

Two days before we left for AR. Mrs. Grumpy declared that she was 50 (I knew that) and that she did not want to be 51 and still living with me (I should have known that but kept talking myself out of believing it). Kind of sucks too since we have been together for about 23 years. We both cried a bunch, promised we would stay friends, and she really did want me to go on this vacation (though I am not sure if it was my company or my share of the expenses that she wanted). Of course, the awkward part is we have a lease that does not run out until February but she is looking to buy a condo. Who knows how this will end. I am not really good at seeing how events will unfold until it actually happens but this does not really bode well. Since she she is the one who is breaking up and moving out, she says that she will continue to pay her share of the expenses until such time as....

For some reason, in the back of my mind I assumed that all the gay people knew all about each other and talked freely amongst themselves but 'Big Guy' asked us "what is with 'The Cop'? Is she/he in the process of changing genders?" she is just herself, I have no idea and would not ask her even if I was interested in the answer. Big Guy is in a 10 relationship and his partner is transitioning to womanhood - Big Guy is gay and proud and it sort of bothers him that when he is walking with his partner, he is considered straight; so I told him about Other Big Guy who has been married for 20 years and his wife is transitioning to man. Other Big Guy is absolutely straight but when he and his wife walk down the street everyone thinks he is gay. What do I know?? b-t-b I use 'Big Guy' for both because both are over 6'4", over 300 pounds and each can bench 400 pounds. Big Guy is able to use a concrete cutter on a wall - think about that for a minute, he can lift that big fucking gas-driven hunk of metal and cut a door-frame out of a concrete wall. Other Big Guy plays with boomerangs.

So there is a couple thousand dollars of electronics in the room - the only sound is of clicking keyboards and/or tippy-taps of smart phones as everyone but me is blogging about Argentina as it happens. Anyway, we came back the beginning of the week (yeah I am blogging about it but after not during).

The trip back was hell for me; I ran out of Vicodin a couple days before the trip home and it was really difficult to get NSAIDs out of the AR pharmacies so I ended up spending 24 hours with no pain-relievers. Now you have to realize that I have a problem with pain - I have peripheral neuropathy (translates as unexplained pain in my hands and feet - they kind of burn all the time), rheumatoid arthritis, and carpal tunnel - and, temporarily, tennis elbow) and so I was in pain for the entire trip and only fell asleep a couple times for about 2 or 3 hours. There was no distraction which is my usual way to combat the peripheral neuropathy. My doctor laughs and says that I have a prescription to play first person shooters for pain as needed.

June 12,2012

We have learned that a furlough is coming soon - at first, I thought it was this week but they have to give us at least 5 days notice. I was talking on the elevator with a couple of the managers and they said that the temp. seasonals (they are so temp that they do not get benefits) were kept on past their 'due date' and now get benefits; this is hint that there might not be much of a furlough. The rule for seasonals is that they have to be furloughed for at least one pay period each year or they become permanent (or some other harsh punishment). Yesterday, I had my 2 vacation requests okay-ed; 2 weeks in September so I can go to Argentina with beef crowd (we buy a cow every year and split the meat after it is butchered. Our farmer is a Mennonite from across the mountains gets them at 6 months and finishes them on grass. Anyway, we are 6 couples who are renting a 6 bedroom house for 2 weeks in Buenos Aires - should be fun. I am taking my birthday off + the rest of the week. They denied my request for the week of the 4th of July.

The issue with the furlough this year is that there has been so much ID theft (you know, where people buy ss#s and names so they can file a couple hundred return hoping that a couple get past the internal testing. Most of the returns are stopped from refunding out but it causes an immense burden on the real people who have to go through the process. It generally takes 120 days for the ID theft unit to send a letter of confirmation that they are indeed victims of ID theft and that we will watch their account for the next 3 years. We have no time frame for when the refund will come out - it could be 6-8 weeks, it could before Christmas, or you might get next years refund before this years. Some estimates are that there are of a million victims of ID theft this year. We are swamped; we log on in the morning and do support all da

June 2, 2012

Gender perceptions and sexual preferences have been on my mind lately. A friend of mine was griping the other day that people see him as a straight man because the love of his life has changed her gender. She was a guy when they fell in love and in the intervening years she decided to transgender (can that be used as a verb that way? Nope, I just found this blog/post). My friend still loves her but is a loud and proud gay so it kind of bothers him (on an intellectual level at least) that when people see them together, they see a heterosexual couple. A different friend had been married to his wife for 15 years when she decided that she was a man and started hormone therapy. They are still together; they both have beards and now when people see them walking down the street they think they are a gay couple. Oddly enough both of the 'husbands' are over 6 ft 6 in tall and weigh over 300 pounds, one can use a concrete cutter overhead and the other slams 350 pounds in the squat machine; one of the partners is trainer in a gym and the other is a network geek. The couples do not know each other - they are from different decades.

My first experience with a transsexual man was back in the 1970s. I played D&D with a pretty diverse crowd; we smoked a lot of dope, did some acid, and played D&D 2 times a week for hours on end. One of players was a woman who was a stripper down on First Avenue (across the street from the Pike Place Market). She called herself The Grey Mouser (we just called her Mouser). We assumed that she was a lesbian but when she and her partner came back from a cross-country trip in an huge old van they named Leviathan she started on her hormones and then he grew a beard. It took me a while to get the pronouns right. One friend kept kicking me under the table; I got fed up and yelled "Mouser has been a friend for 8 years, he understands that mistakes will be made". Pissed me off a bit - but I did eventually stop using feminine pronouns. He went in to get his driver's license renewed and the clerk looked at him and said "looks like someone made a mistake and checked female on your license; let me fix that for you" and he got his gender changed. Later he got married and move off into the country way south of town. When Mrs. Grumpy and I went off on her post-doc hot-time tour, spending about 7 years split between Tuscon and Raleigh (in a car with no a/c!). By the time we got back the 'tribe' had pretty much gone their separate ways. I did run into Mouser's ex-wife who complained about community property and how Mouser got half of everything without yadda, yadda, yadda.

You haven't played Dungeons And Dragons until you've played it high on acid.

April 27, 2012

I have given up on the 'cute' titles for my post - they make sense when I start but.... Oddly enough, the whole reason I started my blog never actually happened; as far as I can tell, no kidney stone (yay!). Work is a bitch - I have been on ID theft since the second week in January. The plan during the first week of Jan was that ID theft was such a 'harsh' duty, they would spread it out - instead of having a week of id theft each month, more people would be put on call and each person would only have id theft 1 day a week. That changed real fast; it is believed that there have been more than a half a million cases of ID theft this year alone. Compare that to approximately 400,000 cases from 2009 to 2011.

It is pretty intense having to help people through a pretty harrowing experience while keeping an eye on the clock - the tax payers tell me they waited almost an hour to get through; many hang up out of frustration. Worse yet, they put the phone down for a moment and I take the call and I have to disconnect if no one answers within a certain time frame. Once I walk them through getting their return filed and telling who else to contact to protect themselves, then I have to tell them it will be 90-120 days before the ID theft team contacts them - even worse, that is only informing the taxpayer that we have verified their identity - there is no time frame for the actual processing of the return which does not start until we verify the TP's id. There are people right now who are just getting their 2010 tax refunds.

Today, Friday my manager came by at 4:00 to tell us we can get off the id theft line for the rest of the day - I turn off my phone at 4:20 so "yippee!" I got 20 minutes of helping people pay their past due tax bill. I do what I can to help; I try to keep up-beat. I think that being a seasonal worker will keep me sane; my tour of duty ends June 15 - they can extend it but they have to furlough me for at least 14 day by the end of June to keep me in seasonal. They can call me back after that. Last year, I was called back for 6 weeks early September, then again at the beginning of December. Boom, it was January and my ToD began; they up-skilled me to ID theft during the first week and suddenly, here I am.

Thanks for letting me rant.

More distractions

I have not written much lately; mostly, because Deus Ex: Human Evolution is so much fun. I am working - I finally got my dream hours (8:00am to 4:30 pm) - I work out after work; I play a PBeM game (Olympia), try and keep up with the Liberal blogosphere, and play Deus Ex - I played the first 2 and loved them - it keeps me from many other things I could/should be doing.

Have you been paying attention to politics lately? What do you think of the Republican presidential candidates?
Boring! Not even worth laughing about right now. I wonder if the Republicans will end up actually having their convention and choosing someone who might actually have a chance to beat Obama - I don't think the conventions have actually had an impact on who the candidate is since the 1960s. This one could prove interesting. The other possibility is that one of the non-winners (normally, I would say 'losers' but....) will run as a 3rd party candidate who might peal away some independents from either side.

The Oscars are on and it is boring me; I sent off my turn to Olympia and can't make any more changes until some of my allies get back to me; I am at a Boss fight in DE:HE and the Boss is kicking my butt - he has this really bad-assed gun that I can barely avoid plus he is tossing gas grenades at me and he disappears and jumps over walls while I have had my 'upgrades' disabled, sigh!

BRB (I think I will read a couple more blogs /BRB

Well, I made it through all the blogs I wanted to read, the Oscars are over, I have been killed 4 or 5 times now and it is time for me to do my drugs for bed (the actual med.s I take aren't many - the most important is the Ambien generic)

Just died a couple more times and I am pretty adrenalled up so I had better sit here and calm down or i will never get to sleep. Next major purchase will be my passport - it is now about $150 to renew one.

Ah, well - time for bed and then another week of work.

The lost years

I think I know where it started; it was a comment made on the spur of the moment, trying to look cool. I have never been part of a group; I have ADD, sleep apnea, and insomnia - these have been with me for as long as I can remember. Heck, even in high school I played football for 4 years (lettered 3 of them) but I was not a jock - a buddy and I stole a box of Mars Bars (specifically because of their soft interior), a bunch of chocolate flavored x-lax, some Chicklets and some Chicklet-like laxatives; we carefully opened the Mars Bars on one end and pushed 4 squares of x-lax into each, swapped out the chicklets for the gum laxatives and gave them to the rest of the football team. I swear the sewage system overloaded; with the entire football team sitting on the toilet all night. We only wished we could have seen it. Of course, the payback was painful - in practice, the team tackled us constantly (and I was the center, heh - Jim Strickerts my friend, was a halfback).

Anyway, by the time I got to college I was lost; ADD does odd things, like if someone is not in my face I forget about them (really, I lost some friends both male and female because if I did not see them or they did not call me, I would forget about them), I slept all the time and just sort of wandered around campus in a daze. My final GPA was .69 and it was that high because I got "A"s sports classes like karate, and stuff. Anyway, I was in the locker room when I hear someone around the corner say that he had some pot for sale. To sound cool, I said "hey, if you have any extra, let me know". Next thing you know, I got a call from the guy, saying he had a bag of pot for me. He sold me a lid for $10.00 (this is back in the old days - 1967 - when pot was cheap and sold by the lid, the match-box, or the joint. So I started smoking pot. Then I joined the Marine Corps, think about that for a moment - ADD, insomnia, sleep apnea and weapons, lots and lots of weapons. I got to shoot M79 grenade launchers, toss grenades, shoot m60 machine guns, shoot marksman+ at the firing range but I could fall asleep with a DI's hand on my throat screaming at me to wake up. A buddy and I rented a car and took a trip to Chicago on Route 66 - the car was a Carmen Ghia.



We got caught, put in the Great Lakes brig and flown back to San Diego, my buddy went back to our company,but since we were separated and I was put into Headquarters Battalion and Casual company made up of Marines who were their way out for in-service/pre-service use of drugs. The corporal sold me my first LSD, the gunny sold me some pot, and a couple jar-heads kept saying "it smells like pot", "who's smoking pot" as a joke because they were sure no one would be dumb enough to smoke pot in the common room. I had to go up to the guys and offer them a toke if they would shut up - they were stunned and apologized for being stupid. Later that night while I was like really, really stoned on acid, the MPs came crashing into the barracks; after a bunch of shouting and hollering, the Sargent said "Look if you are going to smoke pot in here, please warn the firewatch so they don't keep making fire reports! Can I get a toke?"

Some things still puzzle me.

Late one afternoon I walked near an area that was closed, bummed me out; when I turned around there were a couple black guys were standing there. One of them said "What are you doing here,N&&&r?" I looked behind me and around then looked back and said "You must be talking to someone else". They laughed, walking away saying "I didn't know white guys had a sense of humor". I never did figure out had happened.

I was sitting in the S.U.B. at Eastern Montana College (Billings, MT - now a University, used to a 'Normal' school meaning a teacher's college), when this black guy sat down with us and introduced himself. He chatted for a while; told us that he did tan by showing us the tan-line under his watch; then he went off to another table. This was the first time I had ever seen a black guy, let alone talked with one.

I was snorkeling about 200 yards off of Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef, taking pictures and generally being completely blown away by the colors, the fish, the whole 'abundance of life' thing going on. Something bothered me but I don't know what. I looked around but did not see anyone or anything around but I was really, really uncomfortable so I headed back to the beach - just in time get evacuated from the island due to Cyclone Muni. The boat-ride back to Australia was on a trimaran which made the 14 ft swells FUN! There were a bunch of us standing the front of the trimaran riding it like a roller-coaster - up to the top of a swell, then drop 14 feet to the trough; there was nothing like it (the fact that it was a trimaran kept all the motion up and down with very little side-to-side motion). Green Island was swept pretty clean by the cyclone.

I was playing with the fire in the fireplace at our cabin in the tobacco root mountains; this annoyed grandma (seems like everything annoyed her) and she told me to go outside to play. I grabbed a handful of kitchen matches and went out to play. Bored with the tiny flames from burning pine needles, I opened the valve on the 40 gallon gas tank and trickled some gas and the flames got pretty large. When the flames began to die, I opened the valve a little more so more gas would come out; hah, this produced even more flames in a wider pool. This eventually got boring so I wandered off to do something else. Nothing burned down and I did not start a fire; the only reason I can think of that I survived was the gasoline was too cold - it is the fumes that burn not the liquid.

St. Mary's cont.

Most of the people I remember from my time at St. Mary's are from after we moved from 711 W Clark st. A friend name Guy is the only person I remember who lived in that area (sorry for telling everyone that guy in the dictionary meant 'a queer looking person' - at least you had Zorro). Across the street from us were the Prims - Marcia (in my class), Mark (a year behind), Mike - well, you see the pattern developing. All the kids had the initials M. P. and there were at least 5 of them. We were a pack and played all sorts of games; we had a raft on the 'lagoon' that was near the swimming pool (if you went swimming in the lagoon, they would not let you into the pool that day). There was a small woods on the other side of the lagoon where we would drag old christmas trees into a fort. On the street that lead down to the swimming pool was a dairy where we could get really fresh ice cream.

I remember playing British and Mau Mau as a kid; my brother and his friends were the British and us little ones were the Mau mau who were always slaughtered. Think about that for a moment - 1954, Livingston, MT the MauMau rebellion was the stuff of backyard cowboys and indians, cops and robbers play - I think the machine guns were what made them so popular; the "no Annie Oakley" rule did not apply to machine guns. Oh, yeah, the drive-in theatre was pretty close - I remember that we would sneak in under the fence and go to the front row and turn on all the speakers so we could lay out watch the movies. The owner would, at some whim, chase us away sometimes and sometimes not. His son was about our age so the only thing I can think of is that he was making sure we did not see certain types of movies.

The next house we moved to was up on the hill - I think I mentioned that we lived in the second house from the edge of civilization (so to speak). The walk from school to home now included crossing the railroad tracks. Livingston was some sort of rail town, I remember that we had to cross 4 or 5 sets of tracks. In the summers, we would open the ice carts and use the huge trident-like ice pick to break junks of ice off the blocks. We would put nickels, dimes, pennies and sometimes dimes on the tracks and they would get smushed out of shape. Once we put some oil on the tracks where there was a tiny hill on the way out of town. When the engines hit that spot, the driving wheels actually created enough friction heat to partially melt the track - never did that again. The Caseys lived just across the tracks on my way home but they lived on the base of the hill - they were railroad people. I remember running into one of the Casey boys at a train depot in Miles City about 10 years later.

strange triggers

It is cold season again and I have this 'post-nasal' drip thing going so I do that disgusting half snort inhale through my nose to clear it up and -wham- I think of my brother. I don't know why (or maybe I do) he comes to mind with that simple, private act. I miss him. He died over twenty years ago and had gone missing out of my life for 20 years before that. He and his second wife with her 2 daughters moved from Montana to Denver CO and cut the family off nearly completely. Though we were part of it; he said that if he could not have his kids, they weren't his, cutting my niece and nephew out of his life. I think he was upset that we kept his ex-wife as part of family and he sort of made us choose between him and his ex and we did not want to lose contact with his kids.

I would like to think that he was trying for rapprochement; we had some longish phone calls (listening to him talk was like listening to myself - we sounded so much alike; I remember going to the movies with him and one or the other of us laughing and someone from the crowd would shout "sounds like a Coghlan is in the house"). In the mid-1980s, I took the train to see my grandfather on his 90th birthday; I just assumed it would be a big deal with lots of people but it was just me, grandpa Rusher and his new wife. I spent a couple days with them, grandpa was still pretty sharp and we had some good conversations and he gave me some pictures of family.

Grandpa was a character; he was a worker with his own tools too old to go to war (WWII) so he traveled around the country working all sorts of jobs; a person with his own tools ruled. Grandpa was a j.o.a.t.- he bought up land with money his sons sent home from the war and started a farm for them near Roundup MT. He did a pretty good job for a chicago city boy. When the boys got home from the war, they were `pretty excited about ranching; my father met my mom in Paris, married her and brought her 'home' with him; my uncle had about 8 kids. They bought a Piper Cub plane and used it to get to town and back. The trick with the Piper Cub is that it can stay in the air at 50 mph - that is damn near a hover. Since 'the boys' had families (my brother and me on the way - I was a 'diaphragm' baby, and been lucky ever since), they made a vow to never fly together.

Long story short my father and uncle had an argument/fight/loud discussion and one drove into town the other flew into town; one for supplies the other for laundry. Sometime after the plane was prepped to return to the ranch - ranchers buy their fuel in bulk and pay no (or fewer) taxes on it so in prepping the plane for the return trip, it was prepped for one person. The brothers made up in town; it was getting late so they decided to leave the car in town and fly home. The neighbor heard them prepare to land but they were in the wrong field and pulled out of the landing; the engine spluttered, the plane stalled and there was no time to pull out of the stall. The engine crushed my uncle; grandpa says that my father survived the crash but webbing holding him in his seat failed and he fell and broke his neck. The neighbors were there withing minutes but too late.

After I was born, mom lost it - 2 boys, in a strange land, with almost no English. She moved back to Chatou just outside Paris to her parents little house on Rue de Landes.

But I digress - after celebrating grandpa's b-day I took the train to Denver and saw my brother in his home. We had some good talks.