I love past-time. Smooth rocks. Soft landings. Encouragements and tears. I am fundamentally lost. My hull collides with waves too high to climb. My rather becomes a strange elopement. Past familiar moorings. I was sent past dogma and I reveled in constellations. I am looking for that land. Beachheads to share. A hand fit to mine. Comfort in an Ivy Wall. Long steps rejoined in a temporal faith.
This a follow-up. Of lives gone. Relevancy, crushed ice in tepid waters..
I remember riding back on a bus from a wrestling tournament in which I did fairly well beating the number one seed and then getting pinned. lol. Charlie Brown couldn’t catch a break either, I guess. On the bus with the snow heavily falling I remember Don McLean wistfully popping off esoteric lyrics; many of which had resonated with me. I remember dancing in the gym and being born in February and making me shiver and the thought of my crush possibly seeing someone else.
It was a day when Rock and Roll and God were permitted to be sung or said. Idealistic maybe, but at the end of the day, that will be what matters most. And as we wax poetically in a cape of invincibility, the pieces all fit together. “And the jester on the sidelines in a cast.” And my main blog being, ‘The Times Are Changin’. A reverent nod to Bob Dylan and the perspicacity of the young McClean. Who like in Vincent painted an indelible statue on the pantheon of auto racing history. Likewise with the brand of our cars and stock cars they seemed almost perfect in form and in function.
The eclectic poets put down their pens. The past which was ours is stilled remembered, like a Polaroid snapshot we sung with our whiskey and rye much like our school’s fight song, “you bring the scotch and I’ll bring the rye”.
Good times, a bit of self-delusion, we built a city within arenas playing the National Anthem and the song ‘Proud Mary’ which blared from cracked intercom speakers during breaks in racing activity and the intermission. A time of Drive-in theatres and Woodstock. We encapsulated in a bubble, a kind of time capsule in an era of war and rebirth.
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I do not know of a time in racing in which racing that had so much mystique as the day of Chevy and in particular but not restricted to, the 55 Chevy. In fact, the popularity today is continuing with restorations of privately owned personal automobiles as the stock car that once was such a fixture in short track racing.
Like the Pinto and Gremlins and J-2000s which dominated modifieds, the 55 is a marvel in itself. Our own dad helped Dick Casterline with his #577 which was not a Chevy but of that era. Ike Edmister’s old race car hauler which we used to slide through our yard with. The old truck with a Late Model engine and besides Ike was pretty cool.
I remember my dad and Dick partying, coming into my room and lifting weights with one hand (120 lbs) and me kind of shocked there. Anyhow, it is awesome how an era can say so much and the music reflecting the mood of those turbulent times. We had this and this was enough.
To all my old and new friends, this song is dedicated to you. To the drivers, our parents and our children. These were the days!!!!
Back in 1974, I was a kid, only 18 years and probably was witness in some way to a date rape. It sure felt like it because as I was leaving out the dorm that night, guys were pulling a train on a teen girl and some guy asked me if I wanted to have ‘some.’ I said, “no.” And besides, the choice of words haunts me too as well as the whimpering that went along with her disorientation.
I was so naive but a part of my soul has been tortured to this very day. If I knew then what I know now, I might have gone postal because I cannot imagine a crime worse than that. You see, she was drunk and whimpering. Damnit. That really pisses me off. No girl asks for ‘it.’ Not for that.
But date rape characterizations are nothing new and for the longest time just generally accepted. In the movie ‘Animal House’ the guy was contemplating having sex with a passed out underage girl. Did she ask for it? NO! Does it happen? Hell ya! Is it any wonder so many women want to spread the pain around.
Going a few years into my adult life, I had a girl friend and she was given a roofie. The net effect according to her, was she never felt the same about anything! Date-raped by her boss at the mall. She and I went through hell afterwards and my anger @ jerkoffs intensifies. My girlfriend was only pieces of ceramic, like Humpty-Dumpty, those pieces can’t always be fixed.
I suffer too, knowing that seedy men with seditious desires lay in wait, like Jack The Ripper or the Boston Strangler. In these instances the pain is far worse than death. It is a slow blood-letting of one’s spirit and sense of control. We had great times and every once in awhile we would talk.
From her bosses abuse of her, of us really, she went on a self-destructive binge with an older guy who was a criminal. Arrested for a crack ball and spending time in prison, he seemed to like finding young victims. Her sister said he liked to read magazines like ‘Barely Legal’ and ’18’. Yeah one of those! One day her sister gave me a journal she had written and she had talked to her sister about the parasite she was with and how she missed me and my steady decisions and what would I do in a particular situation. She said I am the guy that returns the shopping cart. For awhile I was miffed by that but then got the gist of what she was trying to express. She also got a disease from this miscreant, Herpes!
(She fell in love in the first place)))
For some reason these words tick me off. An otherwise innocent girl and not perfect by any means, paid the price for both of you and you both should be ashamed. And I harbor guilt for not being able to protect her from the smarmy underbelly of the beast that lurks with a touch of wind and a wiff of illicit drugs.
If her mom had not been a prostitute and subjected her to so much, she might have been able to cry on her shoulders. She could have told her Mom what he said and did and your Mom would turn away. Flushed with anger and disappointment, words she heard once upon a time. Now reverberating like a song that plays over and over on a music box. The ballerina fell suddenly and her porcelain dreams laid like a million shards of what ifs.
So let’s examine some of the dubious comments made by men and boys and mostly they are one and the same. Your high school heroes and high society icons flickered as capriciously as the stories of high school football players and date rapes. The bottom-line being the reputation of the boys and a girl who was allegedly asking for it. She was collateral damage in the game of cat and mouse.
He gave you wine or drugs and told you it was okay. He promised you everything to dance in the sheets and tomorrow he denies that he even knew you or the things you said, you couldn’t have meant, if you did say them….
Their friends and influences probably had mixed emotions about the destruction, from the boss to the drug abusing narcissist whose real romance is a synthetic cesspool of misery. Both now share in a common malady with excuses and no care for the damage they were doing.
What once was a fairy tale happiness transmogrified into a hellish world of missed chances. Where lightning does strike over and over again(in the same place) and the pain still flows, if even now to more or less a trickle. In the video above Boy Meets Girl they dance and sing with a love that we all want and yet finally, even they play a requiem to a love gone strange. To me, as I worked in the media in Tampa, the song was a fresh time. A promise. Together with Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight up’, it seemed life had spectacular promise, even after a lost preemie and the mother who ran off for a decade and a half with our daughter.
But life has second chances even if those chances require some modifications to retrofit them to make them work. I do remember what my daughter said about her 16th birthday and how much she loved me. That that was her best birthday ever. This after being lost to me from her early post natal days to about fifteen years later. Still, I would NOT change things too much because what if we never rediscovered that and that is why the blog about ‘Ten Years a Single Mother’ and her kids love for her touches my heart. Kids get the connections and their love is pure if they are loved.
The theme of this entire post is what are we going to do. Rather than just complain about the pain, how can we fix a thing? You, I and many others have lived on both sides of the track and nothing…… nothing gets fixed by complaining. We need to put people first because a warm place and a hot dinner matters.
To the abuse of women, children and the vulnerable, you and I can change the world. I have a few things going now. One is to get Emotional Support Animals and Service Pets for people who need them. Let’s teach men and society in general how to treat a lady and your kids. We need to focus on identifying potential abuse and treat the family not a case number but take care of it as a village. With compassion. No tolerance policies does not heal a family. Making rules is what politicians do. Why do we punish people like Aileen Wuornos the way we do? Why not find out where at-risk people are and help? That gives us all a better chance of surviving the obstacles in life.
From murderers to offenders of all kinds, punishment is the easy part, preventing tragedies can happen and should happen. That takes more than a Breathalyzer and seeing if you can walk a straight line. How much better will this world be with solutions and not grandstanding politicians and other nabobs using the moment for personal gain.
Education is the key to everything. Not just laws but helping people be better people. Not projecting how good we are, but how good we can all be, if we just try. Ghettos are going nowhere and neither are the homeless, the drug users and other kinds of abusers. Let’s get this done and stop maligning others. The old speck and the log thing.
On a springlike evening just as the sun was beginning to fall, I was on what seemed to be an old base, replete with World War II barracks that were both offices and dorm rooms for the college students. In the military you were privacy to some antiquated housing and furnishings but comparatively, the Air Force was light years ahead of other branches.
In any regard this is a reasonable facsimile of dorm life back in the 60s and 70s and some back as far as the 1950s. It is hard to imagine that our new dorms in Basic Training were the new dorms then (1974) and are the old dorms of yesteryear. Confused? Me too!
The Dorms above were those new-old dorms and the new ones today are very nice. Almost too nice. The second floor overhang is where we did PE and was also close to the Chow Hall (We called it the dining halls because we were more sophicated, lol). Anyhow, our first day was about 11PM and like in the movie ‘Stripes’ the old stodgy Sergeants had the most pleasant things to say.
While we were waiting to go into the chow hall the TIs went in for awhile, ostensibly to find good things to say to us when they got back. But all of a sudden we had two black guys in line who were dancing and clapping and changing rows. I snickered and marveled at their nerve or stupidity. I can’t believe they didn’t get caught! It was kind of like ‘Soul Train’.
And like in ‘Full Metal Jacket’, we had such great give and take with the Drill Instructors, or we called them TIs or Training Instructors in the Chair Force. The banter was light and convivial as we drank tea and did bird-watching. It was almost like we were bestest friends and most TIs wanted to adopt us because we were the finest bunch of recruits they ever saw.
Then I woke-up, and yes they (The TIs) took out their wrath on the aluminum trash cans and told us how much we stunk. I even had the pleasure of discussing facial hair and the need to shave. I had a face like a baby’s behind. I looked like the smaller end of the height scale amongst 7th or 8th graders than a new recruit. Even the foot lockers stood taller and menacing.
There were no private Jokers in our flight, instead we were all Private Pyle. With our shorn and shaved domes, we looked like Vin Diesel without the muscles. And while they were strongly encouraged not to kill us, they found other ways of making us feel like spineless-soft-bodied flesh-eating larvae in the noon day sun (maggots). I think they took a class on how to jam their cute little TI hats into our face. I still have entrance and exit wounds from those hats and dreams of reveille or the girl I used to have in upstate NY.
I never knew I had biological family and friends in basic because our Instructor told us he was family! Literally! He was our parents, our friends, family and girl friends. No wonder they were cranky at 4A.M.! After breakfast we swam along the Euphrates with 300 lbs of gear, against the flow! Okay, that might be a little stretch or maybe a war story. The war in Vietnam was coming to a conclusion and not ending well for people in the south part of that country.
As Adrian Cronauer said, “It was hot, damn hot”. With our canteens full of Perrier Water and Fig Newtons hidden in our lids (hats) even SEALS didn’t mess with us. I had a lot of freckles then and was what you youngins refer to as Gingers. So basically we were hardcore, like a bunch of newborn fetuses dressed in green, we marched or tried to, to the strains of Mozart and Tiny Tim.
One of the more fun ventures were the shots (vaccinations) that were delivered by a kind of air gun loaded with testosterone and Viagra. No wonder that trees were not safe and off-limits to us. Now I know why we had to stay off the grass.
And at night we had girls and partied late into the night. Okay, more accurately we had letters from our hot chicks (if you were lucky) and got to shine our shoes and the GI Parties were not co-ed! We learned how to wax floors and fold our underwear. Those beds were made with hospital corners and if they were not done right, the hospital was a very real possibility.
When we started molting and changing from maggots to gadflys, we were getting salty and irascible. To give us a pass meant to go watch a movie on base or go and frolick with the natives in San Antonio and watch a movie.. We took pictures and discovered four-lettered words but couldn’t use them on base or against our family (The TIs).
But all good things must end and just when we were having fun. Remember back then too many civilians hated our troops so while our facilities are better now, so is the frame of mind and the acceptance of our communities.
I used to remember the long boring flights across the pond and across parts of the U.S. Airline periodicals (some of those do not exist – Allegheny Airlines, e.g.) were really intense. Reading copious amounts of airline propaganda and smelling the sweet ambiance of restrooms, was always a highlight.
I remember when the back two rows were not the only coach seats and where DC -9s and 727s hauled most of the freight. Still I did ride a pond jumper into Memphis, complete lightning strikes, hail and wind sheer. The best part of those flights was probably the propeller engines grinding to a stop and the jerking noise made as the wheels grazed the runway and the nose came gliding down.
Also those stewardesses (mostly at the time) won awesome little hats, serving Gingerale, stale peanuts and movie reviews on an aircraft with no headsets but plenty of antiquated gas masks. Still, it wasn’t all bad. Gone are the days when security personnel didn’t molest octogenarians and three year olds. A time in which OJs biggest hurdles were football players and suitcases.
But back to that reading fare. Back then no one was telling you that there will extra charges for additional luggage and one butt bought one seat. I keep forgetting the reading part. Anyhow, before LOL and ROFL we had old magazines that must have been out of date, even for a doctor’s office. Periodicals which FDR’s third term and how one day air travel might actually transport people across the country and even the world.
In day when a non-stop flight was done along with crop dusting and mail deliveries. Could you imagine what they must have read back then? Or the stewardess (mostly) saying, “oh crap’ had a totally different meaning. So if you see hieroglyphics and the Original 10-15 Commandments consider yourself lucky. It could have been worse, you might have had to watch ‘Annie Hall’ and her polymorphous sexual expressions. Still trying to find those. That Woody!!!!
I was so in lust that purity and licentiousness intermingled. A strange concoction of guilt and a road never traveled. All the sweat but none of the auroras that surge inside of me. Her look was electric. It pulled my willing self nearer to the spot where I belonged.
Yet innocence challenged the moment, the soft refrain echoed like a chemical chimera waiting to devour it’s young prey. As she pulled me in she got me to a new place. I was the hunted man-child, every cougar’s tender morsel. I was like veal in a cage of happenstance hurling trinkets into the abyss.
The tide was high and the rush of the wind compounded the fury of that soft parade. Pushing past the lapping waves of crescendo, I was lost. Emotions tighter than a manic harp, playing it’s own mischievous chord like the grunts of an obese oboe in a band playing it’s own tunes.
Harmony and biology and the conquest of same, a boy victim without a name. Lost near a buoy my eyes glassed over and now I searched for a ship to pull me in. Proudly vanquished, I smiled. My story would change as I increased my wile. She is a battered gown, with icing reminders of a sweetness turned sour.
No, this is not a requiem but a mooring to few or many docks. The bright young adventurer did not want a curtain call for the young man had given his all.
The prince of darkness and a highlighter pen. Marking his victims one through ten. Studying his quarry he chuckles and chortles, oh how he loves the mere mortals. The sun on hiatus in a full moon dark, which gave us our peculiar spark and gave our paths original names, in honor of men called errr. Peter and James.
His quarry are gathered, some of the best and the brightest, or so they think, he’s getting ready to show them and throw at them, even the proverbial sink. Pretty soon the ten became thousands… finally much more.
Pretty soon the gavel smashed and the room quivered in fear, why did our friend call us here? Why does this place has tall fiery gates and pictures of all their victims? Wait?
A sonorous laughter filled the great room, as the chandeliers began to shake and fill them with doom. Pretty soon it was all for themselves, as their allies wore signs and epitaphs from many wars.
The choir was assembled, not hastily though, it was time for the revenge of the primate doe. Fear coursed through body and their much troubled brains, is this what happens just before the holidays.
Now the penniless pauper with his nubile daughter look directly into the eyes of of.. new found doubt. The King’s crown looked a bit withered and dithered and the jewels now gone replaced with inscriptions. The writings now were in many languages but still just one, there was going to be no room for interpretation, no not one nor drinks of ale or the fattest of quails. This was their requiem for filling the jails.
The horny magistrate with his pointed tail, was giving them remorse with the whip of his tail. Suddenly they wanted to cry but none of that, they were going to eat envy with silent wails. All the former slaves laughed with glee and the sting of the whip could never cut so deep as the sting of a trapped conscience.
So bullies beware, an election or coop lasts for a few years only and then my fearful one, all is done and made right.
The sudden storm blew in. The tumbleweeds rushed by and the howl of the wind pushed them like unwanted stepchildren. I was one of those unfortunate souls, who prayed for darkness and heavy rain. The gloom seemed to cheer me up, the low clouds compacted the world and the heavy snows further reduced the shrapnel of ugly words and harsher correction.
Even better was the icy and snowy weather that kept the devil at bay. The whiteness like a signet made it official and angry ice cycles crashed from atop the roof of our house. At night I would sleep walk, perhaps to walk into the road or fall upon the broken glass. One night in my dream state I decided the camper window should be a punching bag. The echoes of anger that permeated my realm.
In my heart I cheered the removal of my anxiety. The sound of the engine and in it’s wake a measure of relief. On one occasion we had two cats. For some reason that one day would harbor a death penalty for one of our cats. With seventeen acres of land, my father determined that one should die.
My brother took at him and with a thud, my heart filled with pity, anger and disillusionment. Unbearable voices led me to the scene and the grave of soft ash an ethereal tomb. Suddenly the Raven appeared and that poor cat with blood on it’s side to my astonishment that poor gray cat seemed to be begging, hoping for some kind of reprieve and a tear or many fell. My brother finished the task and that thought and an attempted or threatened murder of my mom at five, congealed into an unholy miasma of doubt and uncertainty.
Like the gales of a winter, this inclement weather was a well-timed respite. Revenge against the Tsunami that always lain in wait. A patient wraith with a two-edged bite and like a small warrior I tried to turn away that wrath, especially for a mother whose esteem in our eyes was stunted.
Maybe the rain was a song of sadness reaching out for love, surely such wrath would pass but never did. As I grew up the mixed messages closed in around me. I made my peace with that person I called dad and seeing his own tragedy I gained perspective about him. Unable to justify he reached out. Forgiveness? Without a doubt and an unlocked toolshed seemed so unimportant now.
I did not glory in his sickness but I did look back and realized the good that was hidden from plain sight. No one can justify abuse but a humble heart finds a way. Gasping for breath all I could do is hold his hand. This warrior who too late for himself never really enjoyed the fruits of his ambition until the very end.
He and my sister found a common ground and her fear was not being able to be loved by him. In all that, that is my special moment with Dad. The cold aloofness and rage was dulled by the medication and softness of a pillow. As he drew his last breath, I felt release in him, the devils vanished in a bright light and the shadows cowered.
The lesson is never give up. As bad as life can be, we can survive. I survived a certain hell which has led to my OCDs and fear of random violence. I have several panic attacks every day but I am learning to get well and move on. One rung at a time.
I am building a tower and it will be built upon by the hands of time. It will be finessed and the etchings carved into marbleized histories, remnants left for consideration. A bored scholar will scribe his articulations on paper and artists upon the heart sometimes with words and other times shades of different colors.
Our passions darken as our own freedom gives us license. To establish who we are and why we should matter.
The dimming lights provide sanctuary for secrets held within, while the new trees bear the same old fruit. Replacing antiquity with green limbs envious. Accounts will be altered, values distorted like a warped window or a cracked mirror. Only tiny shards indiscernible will collect dust. The hammering thoughts of preservation are to no avail. The ebb and flow of matter reconstitutes itself. Aware of nothing but it’s new place, neither the checkered foster homes of neglected souls or the random insects in their constabularies. New kings and queens arise, like heaving opportunists secure in that moment only.
Willingness gives way to wood, brick and dust and from these new houses are made. New conflicts arise and the sentient drama of conflicting self wills lay about and scattered by Zephyrs and Foehn. Tears drip from random placements like lost toys of our youth, neither material or a ether just an unnoticed stroke of a pen and a purchase.
The final revolution spins to a stop and the cul-de-sac of expectancy gives way to a somber recollection. Momentary gratitude and an appointment looming, breaks the shadow of what once was and will never be again.
Floyd, Times Are Changin 