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.