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"
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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