Updated 2024. Below are 80 different non fiction pieces I have written over the last few years. There is a bunch more material that is in various stages of completion, fiction and non. Sorting out my work and editing it are not my strong suits. This is honestly because I don't read any of my stuff after a quick once over for spelling and grammar errors. I will be winning no awards in this category either again this year. However, there is much to finish up and be done with. I will be switching over to non fiction here for a while as there are a couple stories already going that are several chapters each in the making and need some attention. No, I am not on social media. I left it years ago and recommend you do the same. I do try and get back to the readers and followers questions and comments and definitely appreciate the feedback. Thanks for stopping by......
Enjoy,
Jasa
1. Bought a House in WDM!
2. 30 Days on Land
3. Return to Sea
4. The Food Bomb
5. Hawaiian EOD Team Training 1991
6. Flying with a Crash Test Dummy
7. Rock and Roll Wanna Be
8. Learning About Ideals
9. Jacques Pepin: Simply the Best
10. Minimalism: Flying Solo
11. The End of a Generation
12. Football of Floyd?
13. Sex, Terror and Allah
14. Afghanistan: Vietnam 2020
15. Who is Your Daddy?
16. Thoughts on Religion
17. Madness in Mazatlan 1988
18. Welcome to The Jungle
19. Leadership By Example
20. Sanchez and Flounder
21. Memory Lane
22. Leaving Afghanistan
23. Three Strikes and You’re Out
24. The Forgotten Beatdown
25. The Hotel Johnson County
26. Almost Dying In Lake Tahoe
27. Hawaiian Humiliation
28. Bar Girls in College Classroom
29. Junior High Legend
30. Diver Down
31. Working at the VA
32. Cops and Robbers
33. Korean Airbase
34. The 373 Yard Drive
35. Math Genius
36. UFO's, Life and Time
37. Frat House Underwear in Iowa City
38. Two Dirty Jokes
39. The Rancher
40. Hawkeye Legacy
41. Sweden 1992
42. Homeless
43. St. Louis No Filter
44. $1,000 Blackjack Bet
45. MBA (Master Bullshit Artist)
46. Killing Them Softly
47. The Cornfed Giants
48. Wisdom for Tbag
49. The Mustache
50. Chef Lives Matter
51. Wog Day
52. Failed Agent
53. Dominican Dirtbox
54. Drug Smuggler
55. Hitting the Iceberg
56. Ashton Danbury Management Tips
57. Philosophy
58. Viking Line
59. Europe 2022
60. Forgiveness
61. Obituary of Paul Mee-Chee
62. Vet Suicides
63. Ikigai
64. Stolen ID
65. Smokey and The Bandito
66. Shipwreck's Eyeball
67. Back to San Francisco
68. Mare Island Contamination
69. Letting Go
70. Cancer, Dementia and Alone
71. Field of Dildos
72. Pissing Contest
73. SRV and The Tri-Dong Dancers
74. Jesus or Julius Caesar
75. Designated Driver
76. Warped Cancer Psychology
77. Purpose and Legacy
78. Jomar Daze
79. Dad's Top 15
80. Calling Dr. Love
Ahoy! One year ago things looked very different than they do today. There I was living with Kristin in her home on the south east side of Cedar Rapids, Iowa trying to get our Iowa Microgreens business off the ground. I worked a part time job at Hy Vee grocery store. The job sucked and the pay was terrible. I got nowhere trying to talk to management about purchasing our greens. I quit after a couple months after just too many idiot Indian computer geeks wanting me to cut up their chicken. Funny story if it were not so pathetic. Kristin and I broke up in April. It was fun while it lasted. We learned a lot about each other and I wish her the best.
But Cedar Rapids is a turd in my book. I was born there, lived there and my kids went to school there. It was pretty good for the sole purpose of a good place to raise kids and cheap. But that is about it. I lived there since 1993 and witnessed 2 floods, a derecho, increasing black gun crime, increase in white trash meth heads, failure of good restaurants, failure to attract quality entertainers, failure to create a theme for the city, the geeks in pick ups, Harleys and guys into deer hunting sums it up. Sure, they make good union wages but money can’t by culture. Cedar Rapids culture is a 2 for 1 coupon at Olive Garden and 24 pack of Busch light.
One year later? Coralville and Iowa City were eliminated from the running for a new hometown. The liberal bullshit of Iowa City over 2020 was a deal breaker. Iowa City is a nice town on the exterior but a look behind the curtain and it is a herd of sheeple students staring at their phones and a bloated faculty in love with itself. I am alumni of the University of Iowa but that is about all I have in common with the university anymore. They don’t bother calling or sending the donation requests either. As I stated to the last caller years ago, “ The pandering to every single liberal and minority cause with this bullshit diversity theme is pathetic. Plus, the fiscal responsibility of the University of Iowa has been appalling for a long, long time. Just take me off the list.” Sorry, guys the ripped jeans on women and skinny jeans on guys looks lame after completing high school regardless of what social media says. Time to Go.
However, as luck would have it, no sooner than Kristin was out of the picture, suddenly things started turning positive for me; VA settlement was in place, nice new apartment, Pandemic money for Iowa Microgreens, a new job, great pay. It was a huge positive upswing. After returning from Alaska in December with a few nice paychecks it was time to throw down on a new house and find a new woman who would be interested in spending some time with this sailor.
Cindy, my new girlfriend, is a 50 year old nurse from West Des Moines. I tend to move twice as fast on land as most people as I am only here half the year now. I found her on a dating site and she responded to the same spam I have been using for years, “Hey, cute pics and nice profile. Tell me more about you.” She agreed to go on a date and the rest was history.She used to live across the street from me in 4th grade as history would prove. She showed me a new development being built on a real estate website off Grand Ave.....a couple miles from where I grew up. We drove by, called a realtor and; voila. House should be built by the time I get back in the end of July. I will be a home owner again! The last couple days have been spent moving stuff from Coralville to West Des Moines for temporary storage. Big thanks to Summy, Cindy and the kids for moving me while I am going to be out to sea. Trey is getting discharged from the navy and will be living in the Coralville apartment until the end of May.
I will be getting on the Tote Arc Integrity ship here in a few hours. My second Chief Cook position. It is a car carrier that moves around 5,000- 6,000 cars at a time. I will be sailing over the Atlantic this time; East coast USA, Europe and Africa. Should be back the last week of July or first week of August. Not sure what the WiFi signal will be like but I will take some more videos and post them to YouTube when I can.
Going to Sweden after I get back on vacation this year if the pandemic dies off. It has been 15 years since I have been back in Sweden. Good to see the Swedes again. A couple weeks of Swedish playtime and then it will be back to West Des Moines and working on the new house. I am not sure how this 120 day tour will go but I suspect I might head back out around November or December 2021.
That time has come where the sea is calling once again. I stepped off the Matson Anchorage on the 23 rd of December in Tacoma, Washington and happy to do so. It was definitely a life changing experience as it was my first return to sea in decades. I can’t say I made any friends but did find a few of the guys friendly and enjoyable to work with. The work was easy and the pay was great. The beauty of Alaska, even if only observed from the ship, was amazing. The heavy seas brought a smile to my face but deep down there was always that thought if anything goes wrong with the ship there would be no surviving in those icy cold waters.
Hard not to comment on the COVID 19 pandemic. What is the truth? Sure, the virus is real and deadly. But deadly to whom? I know several people who have been infected and none of them went to the hospital. The average age of the deceased in Italy is 80 years of age I read. I don’t want anyone to suffer struggling of their last breaths of life but we all die. I do not feel sad when I read the obituaries and see an 80 year old has passed. Does it matter how they died when they are 80? How about 70? 60? What about the people who are in poor health? Sick people die too. How can you have a pandemic that locks down our entire society without actually changing the mortality rate of our country? In my opinion, this was not created by someone eating an infected bat in a Wuhan wet market. The virus seems very well designed indeed. What immunity does a two month old baby have compared to an 80 year old? I don’t want to speak out of my comfort zone but there seems to be almost no babies, children, athletes, entertainers dying from this. People are exhausted with the masks and social distancing laws that are arbitrarily enforced based on the political disposition of where you live. I guess I ask myself, “Where is all this urgency to get obesity under control?” Nope, it is OK to allow fast food establishments to continue to poison Americans with junk food. It is OK to allow people on food stamps to purchase crap that leads directly to great patients for America’s health care system. In a for profit health care system the one thing that is need is a steady flow of customers. Who better to make living off of then people who are in poor health and have Uncle Sam paying the tab for their care? Is the big concern about COVID 19 the simple fact that the best customers are dying in masses? No one wants to have this conversation and it is much easier to put your mask on, social distance and hope for the best. It surely is a perfect storm that has changed America forever. The financial fallout will be terrible.
But, for me, life is good. Being back on land there are the timeless needs a man has; to reunite with loved ones and friends, to enjoy the affection of a woman and to spend some money. Being a sailor, everything moves at twice the speed when back on land. It is interesting that it is no different than when I was in the navy decades ago; some things were almost as if I never left, others changed forever. I have seen the look in my friends and family members’ eyes when I tell my sailor stories. There is a feeling of happiness for me that I have found something in life that has changed me for the better. There is natural desire in all of us just to get away from the daily grind of life and just be free to do as you please. I am not sailing on cruise ships and am working every day, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I require a very long leash in life and, indeed, I have found one that fits.
I was disappointed to find my old girlfriend suffering from alcoholism and cigarette addiction. Indeed, there has been someone there to fill my roll that she was less than honest about but confirmed. Her life has changed but, unfortunately, not for the better. Left on her own it has become a path of self destruction only propped up by a healthy bank account and lack of anyone to hold her accountable. A wonderful lover is not enough to make for a healthy and productive relationship. Friends with benefits is also not my style as I don’t want any other friends to have those same benefits. Mutual masturbation is not love. Love indeed in the greatest feeling in the world and if it is watered down into a few physical moments without any attachment beyond that it is a relationship that already has an expired shelf life. It is only a matter of time before it doesn’t end well. I will always have a special place in my heart for her but am old enough now that I know addictions manifest themselves in self destructive behavior, dishonesty, denial and seeking out those who enable it to continue. I wish her the best and hope somewhere down the line she finds the strength to love herself as much I did.
So, as I have done in the past, I signed up for a few internet dating sites. This is comedy. I spam every girl on the site that I think is attractive and simply wait to see who bites back. Wow, eastern Iowa has few single women in my age bracket that are not overweight, covered in ink, don’t smoke, went to college and have a passport. My requirements are she has to be attractive, intelligent and honest. It doesn’t seem like asking for a lot but if she is not attractive there is little chance for a spark. If she is not intelligent I will become bored. If she is not honest the relationship is doomed from the start. After a couple brief dates that went nowhere fast I found a woman who was from my home town, West Des Moines. We lived on the same street as kids and went to the same high school. We never knew each other but indeed there are some common denominators there that are worth exploring. Not sure where it is headed but she indeed has made the last 30 days more enjoyable.
My son informed me while I was out to sea that he and his step father got into an argument where he felt it was necessary to point a gun at him. My son called the police, he was arrested and charged with domestic abuse and displaying a weapon. The judge threw him in jail for a few days. There will be no calling the ex wife to find out what happened as she has burned that bridge just too many times. She should have no misconceptions, she married a man with little man’s disease who gets drunk and lets the true colors show; a mental midget. I will always have a place in my heart for her too as she gave me two wonderful children and I wish her the best now that it is just her and him. The kids could care less about him and that is a shame as my step father has been the most influential person in my life. However, bad choices have consequences. My son is fine and
is joining the navy. I am proud of him. He has spoken with some of my old navy friends who offered words of encouragement. He will leave in a few weeks to start his life as young man with the help of Uncle Sam. My daughter is doing well in school but has had a few issues she is trying to overcome. I had a very good conversation with her and offered my love and support. Dad is not always there now but she is a young adult and needs to make some adult decisions about the direction of her life. She is a very intelligent young woman and I have confidence she will find her way.
The headlines have been fascinating. Trump’s loyalists stormed the state house in Washington DC in one of the most shameful political stunts in American history. Many of my friends are republicans and almost all of them thought it was humiliating to see. For me, it was a larger and more concentrated version of the antics pulled off in Portland and Seattle by the left wing crowd. In the big picture, I think what is unfolding is the separation of intelligence and wealth. Millions of Americans have seem to have lost their way and are willing to cling to ideals that are misguided at best. Who do you blame when you are broke, unemployed, in debt and see no way out of the trap of poverty? This is where intelligence comes into play. A person has to detach from the ideal and look at self improvement beyond the company of others in misery. Not everyone is going to be a STEM student in college or work at high paying corporate job. These people far out number the lifestyles of the rich and famous crowd. America better find a way of sharing its wealth or these divisions will only become more pronounced with even more violent uprisings.
Hard to say that social media has not played a major part in this division by distracting people from the simple things in life. People celebrate in public and suffer in private. Social media tends to make people feel insecure when they don’t have the things that are mostly being posted; vacations, nice homes, cars, sexy selfies and other material bullshit. The message is simple; “Look at me. My life is wonderful.” We all know this is rarely true but collectively say nothing. However, misery loves company and these folks gravitate to online groups that are simply like minded people who are angry and exhausted with the life that has been dealt to them. They poured out into the streets in 2020 and have continued to do so this year too. It is a very clear sign that not all is well in America. I got off social media early last year and am glad I did. I advise you to do the same. It is waste of time and a surrogate for real human connection. Thank me later.
I was around long enough for someone to steal the catalytic converter off my car. I guess it is the latest fashion in crime. A battery powered saws all totaled out my car in two minutes. It is happening everywhere as the thieves are interested in the platinum, palladium and rhodium contained within. A guy has to be pretty down on his luck to want to crawl underneath cars to steal a dirty piece of metal for a few bucks. However, good triumphs over evil and lemonade can be made out of lemons. My buddy is an ace mechanic and after being given the vehicle from the insurance company it is being put back together for half the cost of what I owed on it. That was my last actual debt. Now all I pay for in life is my rent, mobile phone and insurance. I enjoy being a minimalist and advise you too to look at streamlining your life and letting go of the whole idea that the purchase of something is going to make you happier, healthier, better looking, etc…The law of depreciation quickly takes over and the item that was purchased soon loses its appeal and the need to have something else to prop up the happiness has landed millions of Americans in debt. Not this sailor.
It is time to see some folks for the last time for a few months in the next couple days. Then it is pack the seabag, shipwreck, the sea is calling your name, again.
I left the navy in March of 1992 and will return for the first time in a few days, 28 years later. Why? An opportunity presented itself to me that I found almost too good to pass up. The events in life that have lined up in the last few years will probably be the best way of explaining the decision. Life has changed for me so much in the last few years it is hard to keep tabs on exactly what has transpired but I will give it a shot.
In 2014 I elected to end the Navy Diver Challenge. The only reason I shut it down was because we were not making any money. Sure, it was great to hang out with my buddies and get a bunch of free gear given to us from sponsors but you can’t pay your bills with watches, knives, clothes, kayaks, fire extinguishers, etc… It was fun while it lasted but in the end it just wasn’t a viable business model. This left me in the position once again of finding a new career.
I like sales and marketing and decided to build a ratings and reviews website for the insurance and financial industry with the help of an old friend. I did the manual labor of copying and pasting thousands of agents and brokers information into a website that he was building. This went on for a couple years and took most of my time and money. He was going through a disastrous financial meltdown of his own and took another job leaving me nowhere to turn. I moved into an apartment in Cedar Rapids and decided to throw the resume up on the internet again. Until I got a good paying job I decided to work part time in restaurant cooking. I have always been pretty solid in the kitchen and it is a good place to hide. To be honest, when you are 47 years of age working for $10 an hour with a college degree the ego can limbo under a welcome mat. As luck would have it, I got a job as a marketing director for a local residential construction company. The pay was $50,000 and that offer made me leave skid marks in the parking lot of the restaurant.
To be honest, I didn’t like the marketing job too much other than the pay. I sat in an office calling people who responded to internet advertisements about home remodeling. I worked alone in an office and honestly left every day early because it was so boring. Our sales reports showed I brought in almost a million dollars in business. It didn’t matter I was fired. It wasn’t because I was doing a bad job it was because the owners did not do what I told them to do. A few months later I ran into a guy I used to work with there and he told me the company folded a couple months after I was let go. I would be lying if there was not a part of me that felt they deserved it. However, this again left me unemployed and looking for another career. I had just met a new girlfriend and things were progressing nicely. The unemployment meant the cash flow would take another beating.
Right at this exact time I received a letter from the VA Vocational Rehab and Employment. Basically, I had to use my benefit or it would expire. I could return to college and trigger a $750 a month stipend. But what to study? I am honestly just to goddamn dumb to study any STEM subjects and I already had one worthless bachelors degree in political science. The only thing that interested me was the culinary program.I have always been a fan of Jacques Pepin and Anthony Bourdain. I was under no illusion that in the end the kitchen jobs would pay nothing as they always do. However, I was angling more to parlay my sales and marketing background in with a new found culinary wisdom and get into food sales possibly. I enjoyed culinary school at Kirkwood Community College. I was the oldest guy in the class, and older than the instructors, but I learned some stuff I didn’t know. I also went to Florence, Italy last summer to take a culinary class in a study abroad arrangement. During this time I also picked up a job at Popoli Ristorante in Cedar Rapids. It is a great restaurant. The pay was shit but the crew was good and I got the idea for Iowa Microgreens there. The good news was right around this time I won a long standing claim with the government over an old diving accident and received an award of $3,100 a month tax free and all health benefits for the rest of my life! This was a game changer.
In a matter of months I converted my girlfriend’s basement into our own organic garden. We were growing a variety of microgreens and had three customers. Unfortunately, Cedar Rapids is an Olive Garden type of town and the only places that are going to use Microgreens are high end restaurants like Popoli, the Cedar Rapids Country Club and Cottage Grove Retirement Home. No one else was willing to pay for them. I took a job working at Hy Vee grocery store in Cedar Rapids hoping possibly to be able to get an opportunity to get our product on the shelves in the produce department. Wrong. The job sucked. I was the gimp in the meat department. Sure, I got a lot of free meat but the final straw was chopping roaster chickens for the Indian guys who were typing out computer code across the street at Rockwell Collins. These idiots, all here on HB-1 visas, thought they were still in Bombay operating under the caste system. Apparently only the lowest geeks on the totem pole in India cook the food. Let’s be clear, this was not fabrication either. This was simply beating the damn chicken up with a meat cleaver, repackaging it and giving it back to them for no additional charge. Why not just buy the wings, breasts, thighs or drumsticks already cut up? Because they were too goddamn cheap. It was insulting. I walked out on Hy Vee. I told the night manager Hop Singh can beat up his own goddamn chicken. However, I was now unemployed again and the restaurants were closed. Unfortunately, the tension also rose with my girlfriend and our relationship was a casualty of the lockdown shortly after.
After scanning the internet for cooking jobs I came across an advertisement for a chief cook for the Seafarers Union for $8,000-$10,000 a month. This is ridiculous pay for anyone who has spent twenty minutes in a kitchen on the payroll. I spoke to my children who are now young adults. It will be the first time I am away for a significant time but it is that time in life. As luck would have it, a week before I left to Maryland for training I qualified for the government stimulus package for COVID-19 through Iowa Microgreens. This meant almost $14,000 between unemployment, a small cheap loan and grants because Iowa Microgreens was a legitimate business I paid taxes on the previous year. This was a welcome relief and almost triple the amount of the previous year's entire revenue.
I followed up with the chief cook lead and, sure enough, they were indeed needing chief cooks. My college degree, DD214 showing my sea time and my new culinary certificate qualified me. The COVID-19 virus meant sailors were not being able to disembark the ship and the Seafarers Union school itself closed down for a few months. When it fired back up there were still several guys out at sea who were needing relieved. I spent one month at the school and was given the thumbs up to sail. I will be leaving next week to sail on the Matson Anchorage home ported in Tacoma, Washington. This is not cruise boat sailing or navy sailing. This is more like bus route sailing. The ships are in port less than 24 hours at a time currently. This does not offer sailors hardly any time at all on land. In most foreign ports guys are not even being allowed off the ships. This is why the pay is huge; no wine, no women, no weed and no wi-fi for the most part. The days are 12 hours a day, from 6am to 6pm, and 7 days a week. I do get my own stateroom and bathroom though. I will take the guitar and laptop to keep myself occupied on my down time. I do have a few story ideas and will keep a journal of my time at sea. However, this is how a guy goes from $11 an hour to around $10,000 a month. Funny how life works. If you are interested you can always follow the ship on MarineTraffic.com but I will be going back and forth between Tacoma, Washington and the Aleutian island chain in Alaska for the next 60 days. Next year I will have to find me a new girlfriend and one that can tolerate me being gone to sea for a few months at a time. Should be interesting. Bon Voyage!
I was born in 1968. It has been an explosive time to come into the world. In my five decades here the world has forever changed at a pace never seen before in human history. In my life time man has explored space for the first time, computers evolved, the mobile phone and the internet were created, tens of millions of women began taking birth control pills, DNA was discovered and electric cars hit the road. The Berlin Wall fell, China emerged from almost third world status to the world’s largest manufacturer and the Soviet Union collapsed. The Vietnam war ended when I was a child but I also found myself in the navy in 1991 during Desert Storm. My children have grown up post 9/11 and throughout their entire lives America has been involved in the war on terror. All of this has occurred in my lifetime alone, and my parents are still alive. It is not just referencing historical milestones that is amazing. We Americans have also changed as people.
The year after I was born the Woodstock music fest happened in August of 1969. If you look at photos of the event there clearly are some observations the average mind notices. Other than thousands of hippies needing baths and haircuts, the pictures offer proof there were very few fat young Americans in the hundreds of thousands in attendance and even fewer name brands on almost any clothing article. No one is walking around with a bottle of Coke or water water bottle in their hands either. None of the women had fake breasts and few of the men looked like they had ever lifted weights. It was hard to spot anyone sporting tattoos or wearing shorts in August and no one shaved their pubic hair. My, how things have changed.
I have been in the food industry a couple years now. I took every cooking module at Kirkwood Culinary Arts program in Cedar Rapids and also went to Florence, Italy for three weeks last summer to cook. Kirkwood has a great program and I definitely learned a lot more about food and the kitchen than I knew before. But at 49 years of age there was no way I was sitting in a classroom again with most kids not old enough to order a legal beer in a bar. I already have one worthless bachelors degree, another year in the classroom leading to an associates degree was not needed. The program director cut me a deal and gave me a food service assistant diploma which I am proud of. I can hold my own in the kitchen these days, but I have been writing most of my life.
I have always wanted to write about some of the concerns I see that everyone in the industry knows about but no one seems to want to say. Right now, I see a food industry that is now on its knees from the COVID 19 virus pandemic. Not only were many of the restaurants and bars required to close in the name of public safety, thousands will never reopen. On top of this, the additional $600 a week authorized by the Trump administration, above and beyond the approximately $400 a week in regular unemployment benefits, meant hardly anyone would give up their substantial pay raise compared to their usual kitchen hourly wage. This left the kitchens empty as literally no one is going to give up the best raise they have ever gotten in a kitchen to come back and work for $12 an hour. The only ones who did were the people who didn’t qualify for unemployment. The shitty pay and lack of benefits in restaurants are only part of a larger problem in the industry but significant ones.
The restaurants that do offer salaries and benefits are few and far between and usually national chain restaurants serving fast food or short order cooking. No one can live off these survival wages and those that do are teens, immigrants or burnouts living the apartment life with a roommate. In short, to attract and keep talented employees in the kitchen the money needs to be shared. How do you do this? Simple, create a food service workers union or require mandatory $15-$20 an hour wages with medicare benefits for all. Who is paying for this? Also simple, double the price of the meals. These concepts are never covered in culinary schools in America. Nor is there a peep about the Latino workers in kitchens across the country who never go to culinary school but are fantastic employees for the most part. Another let down from a culinary education is the reality that just because you graduate from culinary school doesn’t make you a chef. Yet, your neighbor at the backyard barbecue who believes by wearing an apron that says “chef” on it is he is entitled to the distinction. It is bullshit. Thus, 90% of the kids finishing culinary school today will not be in the industry 10 years from now because of one dirty little secret; they can’t afford to. The Latinos will work 12 hour days for close to minimum wage. This means usually only ex cons, teens and dead beats can afford to compete for those jobs starting at the bottom. The culinary graduate almost never starts out as an executive chef or sous chef. If you are just manning the grill, fryer or appetizers what is the point of culinary school anyways? However, with a union comes training and accreditation. The pay goes up, the skills improve, the culinary schools are jammed and the guy at barbecue with chef apron can be called out as a wanna be.
Almost every restaurant owner believes unions or higher minimum wages and benefits would be catastrophic and they would never be able to even open their doors. Good! Close the damn doors already or embrace change. There are far too many shitty restaurants available to American consumers and at least half of them aren’t worth visiting twice. The American corporate chain restaurants are garbage. I long for the days that the Red Lobsters, Olive Gardens, Dennys, Chilis and Cracker Barrels of America disappear. If you are eating at these places I suspect your are culinary and culturally handicapped. The owners attend the company meeting where the board members promote these cheesy airport bookstore ideas. The owners come back and talk to their managers about the team environment, better food and service. The employees could care less. They want to hear about pay raises, tuition reimbursements and benefits not the new employee quality scoring evaluations. This materializes at the table with my waiter trying to start a short term relationship with me or avoiding me altogether. The managers are more focused on their social media following than getting to know the actual customers. Nope, a fortune is pissed away on marketing and advertising and little in the way of quality food or good pay for employees. The profit sharing usually goes to the owners of the franchises and maybe a few upper level managers. The waitress or fry cook see zero of this windfall. Most franchises also have average food, service and ambiance at best. The popular sports bars surrounded with TV’s and multiple beers on tap have a corporate feel that neither delivers great food nor a memorable dining experience. The only reason these places are even popular is because the NFL has gouged the fans so bad for so many years most can’t, or won’t , pay the annual subscription fees or purchase game tickets to watch games. I prefer to keep my football and dining experiences separate but have often been sucked into this trade off to watch the Minnesota Vikings get their asses kicked on a Sunday too.
Almost all the fast food places should be banned and condemned because they’re destructive to our society as a whole. In three weeks in Florence, Italy last year I saw one McDonalds but tons of small restaurants with both talented employees and high quality food. You know what I didn’t see? A bunch of fat dumb asses in football jerseys and baseball hats with guts hanging over their belts walking around with some ding bat checking her social media 40 times an hour to see if anyone is paying attention to her. No one walks around with a can of Coke or Gatorade either. In fact, the only fat people in the country are American tourists. They stick out like strobe lights at midnight too. The Italians protect their food industry through strict quality regulation and preserve their culture by banning or limiting most outside influences. The chefs, cooks and waiters are vital members of their communities and not looked down upon as someone too dumb to get a real job as Americans tend to believe about our restaurant workers. The truth is if you could make $30,000 to $40,000 a year with health insurance and a retirement plan working 8 hours a day in a restaurant in America there would be far more people who would choose this line of work as a career. Corporate America wants zero to do with this model and strongly prefer the vast majority of the money going to a handful at the top.
In America If we put chemical markers in the foods from fast food restaurants the vast majority of people showing up to the hospital with diabetes, heart disease and obesity related health issues would pop positive for these exact indicators. Yup, McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Arby’s, Wendys, Papa Johns, the crap in the food courts of malls and almost anything with a drive thru. These companies are largely responsible of putting profits over customer health and proper stewardship of our agriculture. They have delivered high fat, high salt, high calorie, low quality junk food for decades. These fast food meals are usually served with a sugary drink as well. On the US Department of Health and Human services website it shows in 1970 there were zero states in America with an obesity rate higher than 25%. Today there are 32 states that hit this indicator. Odd, we can force the tobacco companies of America into a class action lawsuit over the health risks posed by smoking, and have made a substantial dent in the number of smokers, but we can’t seem to clean up the fast food industry who is an equally destructive participant in creating unhealthy Americans by the tens of millions. The dirty secret in American health care is the obese people make great patients/customers for doctors. The guy that owns the big and tall mens’ store has no problem admitting this but not a peep from the American Medical Association about their customers. In short, fewer restaurants with better quality food, higher paid employees and higher prices for restaurant meals is what is needed. Going out for a meal should be special. Higher prices will keep most people at home and thus learning to cook.
Next up would be the grocery stores. The very first thing that needs to be done is for the state and the federal government to make some very serious changes to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps. Feel free to look in the shopping carts in the check out aisle and what people that are using SNAP benefits are purchasing in their carts. You will more often than not see chips, soda, boxed food and very little in the way of fresh vegetables, fruits, or ingredients from scratch. This should be stopped immediately. The junk food lobbyists would go crazy screaming, “This is America. We don’t need the government telling us what we can and can’t eat. Freedom, communism, etc…” However, the change would not be telling Americans in need of food assistance what they can and can’t eat. It would simply be the government not subsidizing food that does not meet healthy nutritional standards. Adam Smith’s invisible hand would come into play and soon you would see far more healthier options start filling the shelves. Another dirty secret about grocery stores is the amount of food that goes in the trash every night. The shelf life expires and the food can’t be sold. It goes straight to the trash bin. I worked at the meat counter of a grocery store briefly earlier this year. 20% of all the meat on the meat counter ended up in the trash. Instead of selling all at a lower cost they get the maximum price they can and subsequently ended up wasting a large amount of fresh beef, chicken, pork and fish.
For those that say there are food deserts I agree.I would say most of these are also in the ghettos of America. To these people I would say look up Gregory Bratton’s work in South Chicago. The 69 year old manages 86 gardens in the Chicago area and most of them in impoverished neighborhoods turning vacant lots into gardens. Much of America’s inner cities can host gardens in rundown properties and vacant lots. This can be parlayed into farmers markets and job training from the ground up. Indoor farming is the wave of the future and these properties are cheap to convert or demolish. One week of a heavy equipment demolition crew operating can create enough green space for public gardens for entire communities in most circumstances. This concept sounds like one hell of a good public works project or worthy cause for non profits looking to make an impact where it is needed most.
Now back to your own kitchen. On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate your own talent in the kitchen? Granted, not everyone is going to be a legitimate chef but are you culinary challenged? This usually amounts to simply being lazy. There are many helpful and instructional videos online if you sort out the seeds and stems. This leads me to the explosion in food oriented television programs. The vast majority of the shows are worthless entertainment leaving you hungry and with little residual culinary wisdom from the time spent watching. I do like watching Jacques Pepin’ reruns on the internet I must admit. I like the guy so much I wrote a piece about him awhile back. I also still like to watch videos of the late Anthony Bourdain describing the food and the lives of the people in various countries around the world. However, I think the whole idea of these subsequent rock star chefs and cult foodie followers is misguided at best. It is entertainment not education. The food tasting contests? Some of these are beyond stupid. Celebrities that have next to zero serious time in a kitchen rating and grading meals that you will never see on a menu? Dumb. I would rather see culinary arts and physical education required in all high school curriculums in the USA. Unfortunately, the food served in public schools across America is often far from fresh or made from scratch. The obesity problems start at a young age. The public schools are the perfect place for young people to learn the basics of how to feed yourself quality meals. In reality, many communities are run on tight budgets and the kitchen staff are not culinary students by and large.
How can I write a piece about food without starting at the beginning of the food cycle? The farms and the sea also should be addressed in this piece. Most people know that we are killing animals by the billions to feed ourselves. Our farmlands are drenched in chemicals to produce the corn and beans that go into countless products we consume including the animals themselves. The streams, rivers and lakes in Iowa are polluted with nitrates and phosphates that are directly caused by herbicides, insecticides, anhydrous ammonia and fertilizers. The yields are at lifetime highs but that is only because of the desire to sell crops overseas. Now that our trade war with China has started corn and bean prices have retreated to historic averages. However, the storage bins are full as farmers hold on hoping prices go back up before they have to sell. Good luck.
Spraying anhydrous ammonia onto fields started in the 1940’s and has accelerated rapidly ever since. Prior to the anhydrous ammonia invention and being injected or sprayed on fields they would lie fallow for a year to allow the nitrogen from the previous stalks and plants to break down and be absorbed in the dirt. Anhydrous ammonia injected into the soil turns into nitrogen when it rains making the fields suitable for planting year after year. The problem now is all the fields have corrugated plastic tubing called tiling buried throughout. This moves the rain water through chemically saturated fields to the pipelines, to the ditches, then streams, lakes and rivers. This creates algae blooms in the lakes that take up all the oxygen and kill off the fish. Half of Iowa’s state park lakes have had to be drained, dredged, refilled and restocked because of this. The other half are on the docket to be next in line. The dead zone in the gulf spreading out from New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi River is the now the size of Connecticut damaging the US domestic seafood and fishing tourism industries.
America easily has enough farms and ranches to feed ourselves. I am not opposed to selling our crops over seas just not at the expense of our environment. China and India can be taught how to make their own agriculture adjustments and advancements to feed their own people. These massive American poultry, hog and cattle operations, also guilty of over supply and environmental degradation, should be banned. The process imposes pretty cruel lives for the animals themselves and the slaughter houses are kept out of public view for a reason. The grip the major protein producers like Tyson, JBS, Cargill, Sysco and Smithfield have is a stranglehold on farmers. The same can be said for Pioneer/Dupont, Novartis/Sygenta, Monsanto and Advanta who control the vast majority of hybrid corn and bean seeds and all are genetically modified these days. The organic farmer can’t compete against these multi billion dollar operations and only the Americans with deep enough pockets and more than a passing interest in healthy eating are religious organic food eaters.
Our seas have become overfished and the last stop for much of our plastics. Primarily Chinese fishing vessels are to blame on the high seas. Thousands upon thousands of these vessels roam the seas with their transponders shut off to accurately measure the scope of their undertaking. The Chinese steal fish from waters that can be properly defended or patrolled. Most countries do not have the financial resources to have a significant coast guard that can protect their waters from massive fishing vessels using drag nets that catch, kill, freeze or can the fish before they even get back to port. I would like to see the US Navy operating in conjunction with the UN and start seizing these ships and crews. China has a lot of people that need fed but this robbery of our oceans’ bounty is unacceptable. The first thing people want in emerging markets as their economic livelihood improves is better food and this means protein. Instead of snakes, monkeys, bats and pangolins they opt for pork, chicken, beef and fish. The world’s oceans simply are not stocked with enough fish to feed the world on our current population growth trajectory.
The plastics in our oceans is now finally getting the press coverage it deserves. The damage to fish stocks and the environment is difficult to calculate but by all scientific studies being released today it is staggering. Plastic is estimated to take a couple hundred years to disintegrate in sea water. The explosion in the use of plastic across the planet failed to take into consideration the disposal. Most plastic is buried in landfills as it is deemed one time use and not profitable to recycle. Other plastics were often sent off in shipping containers to China and Asia to deal with, out of sight and out of mind. In 2018, however, China stopped accepting garbage from foreign countries and now nations accustomed to exporting garbage and plastics to China have been forced to rethink their recycling policies from root to branch. This is good news as investment in this recycling infrastructure is long overdue. The recent research and advancements in plastic eating enzymes also seems encouraging.
Next up needs to be addressing India. India has roughly 1.3 billion people compared to America’s 330 million. India, however, is a filthy and disgusting country. Sorry, I call it as I see it. Youtube is full of videos documenting the filth in India. It boggles my mind they can create a nuclear weapon, are fantastic with math and computer science but still shit in the woods, on beaches, in squat toilets or in the streets and piss on the sidewalks. There are roughly 200 million Indians that still do not have electricity? This is 2/3 of the population of America without electricity. India too will have a surge in protein demand. The Hindus don’t eat beef and the Muslims don’t eat pork. But goats, fish and sheep production will skyrocket in the future to feed their people. India will require massive and unprecedented changes in its culture, infrastructure and regulation to temper its impact on global food resources and the environment. India and China’s gigantic demand for food resources can’t be emphasized enough. There are modern day aqua farms around the world and I foresee these only expanding along the coasts of these countries.
The best food news I have heard this year, however, is the rapid rise of plant based proteins in the form of burgers and sausages. This is just the genesis stages of this transformation too. I have tried this myself and have to admit an Impossible Burger from Beyond Meat was better than I thought. It is juicy and has the same taste and texture as a hamburger. I watched an interview with the CEO and he explained they can do this with almost any animal that is harvested for protein. If Asian people are really fond of the taste of wild animals they will be able to buy bat burgers and snake sausages in the future. Imagine in the lifetime of a single generation the slaughtering of animals for human consumption becomes as unbelievable to our next generation as people commuting by horse back was to ours. Crazy to think that way but I say, “Bring it on!”
In 1991 I was 23 years old and in Hawaii for EOD team training. I was a US Navy EOD diver and we were preparing for Desert Storm. I was the E-4 and lowest ranking guy on our team of four. I had actually made E-5 on the advancement test but my Lieutenant said he would frock me when he felt I had earned it. I hated the dick from the word go. We were to be trained at EOD Training Unit One in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. There were several four man EOD detachment groups going through the training at the time as America was about to start bombing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Kuwait in a few months.
Our group had to wait a week or two for our training to begin. Our team was EODMU9 Detachment 23. We were to be assigned to the USS Mt. Hood (AE-29). Our officer in charge was EOD Lt. Andy Jones (Asshole), GM1 Dennis Artman (Lumpy), EN1 Rob Powers and me, BM2 Kurt Jasa. None of us really got along but Rob and I could tolerate each other. Lt. Jones was a Virginia Military Institute graduate and subsequent flight school dropout. He was an ass kisser and self absorbed dick from Maryland. Artman was the biggest geek to ever make it as a US Navy EOD technician. He had the personality of a fire hydrant, was way overweight and had not an original thought in his head. I tagged him as Lumpy. That name stuck like glue and spread throughout our mobile unit like wildfire. Even Lt. Jones from time to time called him Lumpy. Anytime someone would say it he would look at me with absolute hate in his eyes and then kind of smirk to whoever said it.
Later on I had a buddy who worked in admin on the USS Mt. Hood. When we eventually got underway he allowed me to look through my team mates’ service records and got the scoop. Lumpy was such a piece of shit his last command had him working in the ships’ store selling candy? They gave him terrible reviews and rightfully so. He was a socially awkward guy that was not in good shape. How he ever made it in EOD was a mystery to everyone in the community. I also found out Lumpy lied about being a Shellback. It was nowhere in his service record. He had never crossed the equator before and was a Wog. Only a shitbag would lie about this. Lumpy knew he was going to take a huge beatdown from me, our team’s only Shellback, and elected not to go through the ceremony. Powers and Lt. Jones had no idea about the wrath of Jasa to unfold on them later down the line. More on that later. Powers and Lumpy also were both first class petty officers but since Lumpy had a few months more seniority he got to be the leading petty officer and Powers despised him for it. Powers was the only guy on our four man team who really knew the craft of explosive ordnance disposal.
Me? I was just a wild guy who cared more about my guitar, my distant Swedish girlfriend and dropping acid in Golden Gate Park than anything in the navy. I just tried out for EOD because it was a cool job and I was a good athlete. If anything happened during the war I knew it would be Powers who would save us. It didn’t bother me. I trusted him and he trusted me to do what he told me to do. We were given temporary orders to go out to Kahoolawe Island for a demolition operation until our training started.
Kahoolawe is an empty and unpopulated island that had neither electricity nor running water. There were four quonset huts set up near a beach and the fresh water was brought in by a small amphibious boat once a week. In the mornings we would bathe in the sea when the dolphins would come in to feed. It was cool in that I was scrubbing off the dust with a bar of soap and maybe 50-100 dolphins would swim around me. They would come in close but never close enough to touch one. The island had been a bombing range for decades. There were a few remnants of trees but the red volcanic dust on the island was littered with every type of ordnance fragmentation you could imagine. Everywhere you looked there were various pieces of metal from a bomb, missile or projectile that had landed on the island from a plane or ship years ago. Once a month the navy would offer Pearl Harbor sailors Temporary Assignment Duty to have sailors go out to the island and pick up fragmentation in 10-20 person line sweeps. All day the sailors would walk in a line arms length apart and pick up everything the size of a finger or larger. The fragmentation would be put in bags and thrown in a pile at the end of the day. The EOD guys that were a part of the sweep would place some plastic explosives on the pile at the end of the day and turn the small fragmentation into even smaller pieces. This was our job for the week.
While walking one day and talking with a couple of the sailors I met a girl named Christine who very cute. She flirted with me a little and indeed we snuck out of our quonset huts and met down on the beach in the night. I had sex with her on the beach on Kahoolawe. We agreed we would hook up together when we got back to the Oahu. We were staying on Barbers Point in the barracks and she lived with her parents when not on the ship as she was from Hawaii. Another guy I met from the fleet that was out there picking up pieces was a guy named Charlie from New Jersey I think. He was a rock and roll kid like myself and I enjoyed talking to him as we walked along day after day. He was stationed on a ship on Ford Island and said he could show us around Oahu when we got back. We had a rental car the government had paid for and could do the driving. Kahoolawe was amazing and beautiful but desolate. To clean it up will take decades of line sweeps as every square inch of that island has been bombed several times over throughout the decades.
When we got back to Oahu I indeed hooked up with Christine. She was attracted to me and wanted to have sex in the barracks when she came to pick me up at Barber’s Point. I was game. I remembered watching a porn video out at sea a couple years before where the idiot guy in the video was talking to some girl on the phone while another girl was giving him a blow job while he shaved her pussy. It was hilarious because it was the time our ship’s female chaplain came into the berthing to make a round and say hello to the guys. Unfortunately, for her, she walked in to see twenty guys with erections staring at a television with the aforementioned video playing. She was embarrassed and did an abrupt about face and exited. The entire berthing burst out laughing. Anyways, I was replaying this scene with Christine when Powers walked into the room we were sharing after his shower. Of course, he was entitled to his half the room and immediately dropped his towel and asked Christine if she would like an additional Scoobie snack. I told him to fuck off and get out of the room. We waited until Powers got dressed and exited, then got back to our business. Christine was fun in bed and would do anything. We went over to her empty parents house and had sex again. She later drove me back to the barracks on Barbers Point.
During our training it became obvious that Powers and I were going to be the workhorses of our team. This was fine with me as Powers was the smartest EOD guy on the team and I was his assistant. Lumpy was worthless and Lt. Jones was more of a manager than a leader. One project we did was trying to render safe a chemical mine the instructors had driven a jeep on top of. After 20 minutes in the impregnable rubber suits we were exhausted and soaking wet from sweat. The instructors told us no one had solved the problem before and the only solution was to blow it in place. The next day we dove in Pearl Harbor on a destroyer. The instructors had put a fake limpet mine on the propeller shaft and a magnetic one on the hull. We found both. The next day we were taken into a secure area in the West Loch area of Pearl Harbor and shown some nuclear weapons. The bombs were inert but in one of the training rooms one had been cut in half to show us how it actually functioned. It was way too complicated for me to understand but the render safe procedure was as simple as turning off a light switch. No one knew what we were going to see in the upcoming battle so our six week class was accelerated to six days. It was fun actually getting to do our job.
One of those afternoons after class I called Charlie from a phone number he had given me. Powers and myself got permission from Lt. Jones to take the car down to Waikiki and hangout for the afternoon and evening. We picked up Charlie and headed towards Hanauma Bay to check out the beach. We bought some beers and ended up meeting some girls. We were definitely interested in pursuing them further. We followed the girls to a shopping mall and let Charlie out of the car to stay with them. Powers and I told Charlie to find a bar somewhere in the mall and we would park the car and track them down. Unfortunately, we kept driving around and could not find a place to park. Out of nowhere we drive up on a place called US Army Fort DeRussy parking lot. I drove up to the gate and Powers handed me his ID card from the back seat to show the gate guard. This was a common practice if two sailors were going on to a base so the driver didn’t have to put the car in park, undo his seat belt and reach for his wallet to show the gate guard a valid military ID. You would just flash the gate guard the passengers ID and get waved through. As I pulled up to the gate the guard took Powers ID from me and then asked, “ What is that between your legs?” I looked down and it was a Heineken. I was fucked. I could tell by his voice that the next step was to get out of the car and get arrested. I had to think quick.
Without looking in the rearview mirror first I grabbed Powers identification out of the guard’s hand, threw the car in reverse and slammed into a car behind me that was pulling up to enter the base. I pulled forward, then reversed the car again. I could see the gate guard drew his weapon but I turned the car and sped off. I threw Powers his ID card and we were freaking out. Powers wanted me to let him out of the car. He said he would never say a word about this and I agreed if I did get caught he was never in the car. I let Powers out of the car and continued down the road. I had to ditch the car and quickly. The sun was setting and it was getting dark. My plan was to leave the car somewhere obvious to find. I was going to say it was stolen and deny the entire event. I parked the car along Likelike Highway. I pulled off on the side of the road wiped down the steering wheel for fingerprints. I climbed up the hill beside the road. To make it look like a joyride I found a large rock and threw it at the car to give it the appearance vandalism. The huge rock bounced off the hood and on to the highway. I walked up the hill, on to the sidewalk and called a cab from a payphone. I thought about my entire story all the way back to the baracks at Barbers Point. I told Powers in the room what happened and he told me he had not seen Lumpy or Lt. Jones so there was a good chance they knew nothing yet. He reminded me we left Charlie at the mall. I called Lt. Jones’ room and he was pissed. He told me to meet him at the the police department on Barber’s Point. He made it very clear it was my fault and all our dive gear was in the trunk. If the gear was missing he said he would be sending me to captain’s mast. We truly despised one another but he was the officer and I was not. The report was filed and we returned to our quarters.
The following day the Honolulu police had called and said the vehicle had been found along the highway where I left it with the keys still in it. They tracked the rental car from the license plates to the rental car lot where it was rented. The rental lot had Lt. Jones credit card. He had written EOD Training Unit One’s address and phone on the rental agreement so they found us rather easily. We could come get the car. Insurance would pay for the damage. I hoped that was going to be the end of it but I was wrong. The cops reported the find to the Army command at Fort Derussy parking lot. They were pissed and wanted the driver of the vehicle identified and were going to bring charges because they knew it was a military guy involved in a hit and run. They clearly had gotten the license plate number and reported the incident to the Honolulu police to be on the lookout for the car. Lt. Jones was livid because it made our team, the one he was in charge of, look incompetent that a guy left the keys in the car and it got stolen. The Army investigators wanted us down to Fort Derussy ASAP for identification of the driver, me. Lt. Jones told me to wait at the EOD unit while he got changed out into civilian clothes back at the barracks. Powers said he had nothing to do with it and didn’t want to go and Lt. Jones let him off. He and Lumpy would get to the bottom of it.
I needed to get a hold of Charlie as my alibi. I lost the number he gave me but I remembered the ship he was on. I called the base directory from the bunk room attached to the quarterdeck and closed the door behind me. The operator connected me to his ship which was in dry dock. All the crew was staying in open bay barracks on Pearl Harbor. My heart sank. There could be a couple hundred guys in open bay barracks and as such most guys having to sleep there would spend most of their time away from the barracks until they were tired enough to fall asleep. The quarterdeck watch answered the phone and I told the guy I was Charlie’s father and there had been a death in the family and I needed my son on the phone immediately. After a couple nervous minutes, sure enough, Charlie answered the phone. I quickly apologized for not coming to get him the other night and briefly explained what happened. I told him I was in hot water and needed an alibi. I told him the military police were probably going to pick him up and get a statement from him. I told him our story was just he and I and not Powers. We met the chicks and parked the car near the mall, not on Fort DeRussy. One girl was a blonde named Jane and the other was a brunette named Cindy. They were civilian local girls. We drank some beer and played pool for a couple hours at the bar he was waiting at. We paid cash for the drinks and the girls left without giving us their phone numbers. We split up and took separate cabs back to our respective barracks. We recited it again to make sure the story was solid. I told him I definitely appreciated it and would take him out for dinner and drinks if we cleared the investigation.
Lt. Jones and Lumpy returned with duty driver to get me from the quarterdeck. We drove straight to the Fort DeRussy parking lot. As we walked into their small headquarters an army sergeant sees us and makes the first mistake. He looks right at Lt. Jones and says, “You are the navy boys, right? You look exactly like the guy we are looking for.” I pounced on it.
“Excuse me, soldier. In the navy we address our officers with the courtesy of, sir. He wasn’t the driver of the vehicle. I was the one who had the vehicle before it was stolen.” The machismo fell from his face.
“Sorry about that, sir.” He turned his attention to me. “We need you to fill out a sworn statement as to what transpired last night, sailor.” the guy said as he looked angrily at at me for pulling his pants down in front of Lt. Jones..
“No problem.” I replied and wrote down the story I had covered with Charlie less than an hour before. When I finished the sergeant
informed us, “We have the gate guard who was on watch yesterday who was involved in the incident. We would like for him to get a chance to look at you guys.” He stated confidently. We then followed the sergeant across the parking lot until we got to the gate guard on post at the check point. He looked right at me and said, “That is him. He was the driver of the car.” Without missing a beat I asked, “Really? Did you get a good look at my identification card if you believe it was me?”
“I did. It was an E-6.” He said as he stared right at me.
“Really, champ?” I said as I pulled out my ID. Lt. Jones and Lumpy already knew the guy was wrong. “Is this the ID you saw?” I asked. Mine was an E-4 at the time.
He grabbed the card and looked at it. “No, this is not the ID you handed me yesterday.”
“Are you saying I have an ID that says I am an E-6? I would like to have that actually.” I was being cocky.
“Jasa, knock it off.” Lt. Jones knew what I was doing.
“This is bullshit, sir.” I continued letting the gate guard also know he was on record in front of an officer. I look right at the gate guard and said, “It wasn’t me. First, your sergeant here insults my officer saying he looks exactly like the driver of the vehicle and now you say I look like the driver of the vehicle but my ID is not the one I supposedly handed you? This is a joke.”
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence and then the sergeant spoke up, “We have the military police already headed to pick up the other sailor who you said you were with yesterday. He is being brought here to make a sworn statement. We will see how well your stories match up.” The sergeant said as he was clearly agitated by not only his fumbled but now the fuck up at the check point with his gate guard. He knew it would be easy for Lt. Jones to file a complaint with their command for wasting our time. He probably would have had it been anyone other than me who they were trying to burn.
We walked back across the long parking lot in silence. We sat in the lobby saying nothing to one another and after several minutes Charlie entered escorted by the MPs in to the headquarters and taken behind a glass partition. He looked at me. I winked and nodded and he nodded back. He sat down and filled out a form for about five minutes. The sergeant picked up the paper when Charlie laid his pen down. The guy just shook his head. He came out from behind the glass while Charlie remained seated. “His story is the same as yours. We must have the wrong guy. You are free to go.” He said with a disappointed look on his face. My heart soared. I smiled and winked at Charlie through the glass. As soon as we got out of the building I shouted, “Yes, vindication!”
Lt. Jones was furious, “Jasa, shut the fuck up. I have no idea how you just got out of that. But I am telling you now. If you even think of pulling another goddamn stunt on this deployment I will have you in front of the captain and kicked out of the navy faster than anyone else in the history of of the fucking navy. You got that?
“Sir, clearly, I didn’t do it.” I smiled and replied.
“Shut up and get in the fucking van, Jasa.”
When we got back to Barbers Point I told Powers how it all went down. He was relieved. The dive gear was still in the trunk and the only damages were the dent from the rock on the hood and Lt. Jones’ ego. I didn’t give a shit. Lt. Jones was an asshole and Lumpy was a loser who was more than happy to see me get burned by the man. Desert Storm itself saw our team get almost zero action. Lt. Jones and Powers went through Wog Day ceremony out at sea and Lumpy hid out of sight. Powers and Lt. Jones knew there was no way around it and that would go directly through yours truly. I caught them trying to hide amongst a herd of Wogs crawling on their hands and knees and called them out. I abused them. I had them sucking wet garbage out of a pad eye with straws and spitting it into a cup. Then the other one would suck it out of the cup and spit it back into the pad eye. They kept doing it until Powers puked. Then I took Lt. Jones and Powers over to a puddle on the deck to practice his swim strokes with their masks and snorkels on in front of the captain. “Step right up you shitbag, Wogs. Today only, you too can be a Wog Navy Diver. Lt. Wog Ass Jones and his boyfriend, pud pounding Powers, will show you all the proper strokes. Right, shitbags?” I yelled at Lt. Jones and Powers who were also laughing. Everyone was laughing. No one said anything because I was only taking it out on Powers and Lt. Jones. After that wore off I began the calisthenics. I made Lt. Jones lie on his back with his feet spread in the air and Powers mount him in the push up position. “Now, you slimy Wog shitbags are going to workout together as a team. Powers when you are in the down position I need you to hold it there long enough for both of you to yell out as loud as you can, “Hit her in the shitter and you never forget her.” Got it? Great. Begin.” They did it in front of a bunch of guys and a few women that were on the ship. I know the captain could hear it because a friend of mine who was a navy pilot on the ship, Lt. Joy Smith, told me the captain was about to step in say something but he let it go since I was only going after Powers and Lt. Jones. They figured the EOD guys were crazy already and kept top themselves. Plus, it was fucking hilarious to watch these guys get beat down by the lowest ranking guy on their team. In the end, they both took it. Whenever the thought of Wog Day crosses my mind I think of this. In no port of call did any of us four ever hang out with anyone else on the team. When we got back to EOD Mobile Unit 9 in Mare Island California the Captain of the USS Mt. Hood gave us a Letter of Appreciation for cleaning the library. The other detachments in our unit got ribbons and awards for a variety of cool operations they were on. EOD Detachment 23 assigned to the USS Mt. Hood AE-29 looked like buffoons in front of the entire command. I didn’t give a shit. I was getting it out of the navy.
I got out of the navy a few months after Desert Storm ended. The others stayed in and I have never heard from them again. I dont care. They made my life miserable for those few months. Unfortunately, Rob Powers I found out drowned in a swimming pool a few laters. By the time I found out he had been buried for many years. He took our secret with him to his grave. I never could remember what Charlie’s last name was or what ship he was on. He was from the east coast and had an accent. If this story ever comes across his screen I owe him a huge thank you and some dinner and drinks. Had it not been for him those Army shitbags would have thrown the book at me and sent me to the brig and I would have been kicked out of the navy. RIP Powers.
Another plane crash marks the time. These folks getting smoked in Karachi on an Airbus 320 yesterday always gets my juices going. Like Pavlov’s dog I start sniffing around for information leading to some life long belief I too am going to die in a plane crash. Even if I only believe this for a few minutes it is every time I am on a plane; just as we take off and just before we land. Like a morbid reminder that I am wrong about religion and divine intervention has deemed I will be utilized as a spectacle for all to see being sucked out the hole of my window seat at 500mph. Through my mind races 1,000 reasons why this act would be dignified. In fact, I tried to warn him too, but no. Sorry, Full Monte for this joker. I look confidently at the faces around me….quick checklist, no terrorists. All good. The one dude on the other side of the isle is a huge damn guy though. He gets out of hand and I am going to have to kick him in the balls and bite anything I can until someone other dudes jump in hopefully. Wow, the stewardess is smokin’. Where in the hell do they find these ladies? Is this just me or is it every time I get on a goddamn plane there is a hottie? Note to self; I need to get a job interviewing these ladies some how. I know what good service is. Fuck man, I am sitting in the goddamn cheap seats, again. She knows I am a broke gimp...and yep, there she goes up to business class and first class. Oh, close the curtain? What, you only serve them? Hey, big surprise there, shipwreck. Oh look, here comes my guy. Name tag says, Steve. WTF? Gin and Tonic, bro.
No fooling me, 9/11 was a set up. I don’t know exactly what went down but it sure in the hell did not go down like Uncle Sam said. Did every single person that got on those planes in 9/11 have the same feeling I have right now? Nope. Next time you fly try this for yourself. Check the phone signal. Keep an eye on that baby and the Suunto altimeter on the watch. Mark time you lose reception. I have Verizon. 2,000 feet and there is zero signal at this speed? How did the government record such high quality last passenger calls before the crash with phones using 2001 technology? Jet fuel doesn’t burn steel either, fact. Most of the fuel went up in flames in the initial explosion as we all know, hot air rises. Another fact, I saw a cigarette extinguished in a bucket JP 5 jet fuel once in the navy. Think about that video of the guy on youtube with the different fuels in the jars? Jet fuel surely did not melt any steel. 9/11 had to be a set up. It had to be the use of shape charges. You can literally see the squibs going off under several floors as the buildings collapse. To pull off a stunt like that would be insane. The Man could do it though. “Ah yes, Steve. Gin and tonic with a little lime. Please and thank you. Can you give me two because I will be done with the first one before you get to the end of the row? Thanks, bro.” Super Don up there in first class is probably drinking out of a Riedel tumbler and the hot stewardess is pouring out of the bottle. I am drinking shooters out of a plastic cup served by, Steve? Story of my life.
I could have snuck something past the TSA. Security is better than it used to be but there are cracks still. Could someone sneak a TPAP bomb on here? Would the screen even pick it up since it is made of peroxide instead of nitrogen based? It would have to be someone working on the inside who could get a piece of luggage off a private plane and insert into the baggage of another flight. I remember working security at Arlanda in Stockholm in 1992. Man, that job sucked ass but my work buddies were cool. I never did get a free goddamn ticket from Delta. They can suck my ass. I am never flying those bastards again. Oh wait, shit. This is a goddamn Delta flight, genius. Impressive. I remember that one curly headed blonde Swedish kid who had the Mesa Boogie amp, Magnus. He was hilarious. He could open up any passenger bag in the damn baggage handling area. I don’t how the hell he did it but that shit was cool. He rode around in the bag delivery/conveyor tractor with the baggage carts in tow out on the tarmac and under the planes. In Swedish the word for fag is Bog. Except, put two dots above the O. An extra vowel they have and English does not. He used some tape and a marker and changed the vowel on the front of the baggage tractor to translate it literally to “Fag Driver” when he was driving the tractor. Anyone seeing him rolling around with that on the tractor would burst out laughing. Nothing they could do. He was a member of Luftfartsverket union. No firing him. He would just laugh and go about his day. Kris, Johan, Darren, Marku, Agnetta, Kerstin, Relko, Sigrid, Schumel, Agnetta, Gitte and all the other faces. I remember them. Giving up the Springsteen tickets in Stockholm to Gitte on my way back home in 1993 sucked. I always thought she was hot. I told her so in the airport as I was about to leave. She told me I probably should have asked her out. I just shook my head and stepped on the final flight out to Amsterdam. I wonder what all those people are doing now? Seems like a long time ago.
Jetway is pulling back and no one is taking the seat beside me? Huge score! I like looking out the window but I am too tall for the window seats. We are pushing back. It is going to happen. Oh wait, a freakin’ traffic jam on the tarmac just before we are to take off? Wow, I am a long way from Iowa, again. What is taking so freakin’ long? These guys better not be delaying this flight. I have seen this play before. I could use the free flight voucher though…. hmmmm. I can’t stand watching Steve up front now showing me how to put on an oxygen mask and point to the damn exits. Dude, If this baby hits the water or the pavement we are done. How about getting me another beverage? No? Nice. I am not turning off my damn airplane mode on my phone then. Make me. I want the investigators combing through the charred burned remains of my corpse to find a miracle; my OtterBox saved my iPhone in a plane crash. I would be famous if only as a charred heap on the fantail of a salvage boat with a surviving smartphone. Come to think of it…. I never did get a good look at the pilot. Think about that crazy son of a bitch on Lufthansa a few years back who locked the other pilot out of the damn cockpit and drove that baby right into the mountainside with everyone screaming for their lives all the way down. Pretty simple, pal. I told you this day was coming. Reciprocity? Revenge? Whatever, the guy driving this son of a bitch is probably crazier than you are. Life imitating art; yes? Comedy. Life insurance is paid. Kids will be alright. This won’t hurt. It will be a nano second and lights out. These people are going to freak the fuck out all the way down the drain though. Big price to pay for taking innocent victims with you. You need to get off the goddamn plane, pal. Roller coaster starts moving slowly up the massive first peak. I can feel it in my chest. Too late. Do these other people feel that shit? Sit back, idiot, and keep your seat belt fastened. As the engines roar I love that feeling. It gives me an erection. Our secret. Full throttle, brother. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah….Fuck yeah, that shit is cool. I should have been a pilot. Nice try, bozo. There is more math required than your tiny Happy Meal calculator mind can understand. Just sit back in your goddamn seat and see what they have for movie selections. Where in the hell is Steve?
Think of all the plane wrecks you know of though, bro. The crash in the Potomac when you were a kid and the people in the frozen water. That one dude who gave his life to save that lady. How about the space shuttle blowing up when you were a kid. Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash,. Buddy Holly plane crash. Roberto Clemente plane crash. Jim Croce plane crash. Your great uncle plane crash. Patsy Cline plane crash. Bill Graham helicopter crash. SRV helicopter crash. All those guys on ST6 that went down in Afghhan helicopter crash. Those guys that went down in the drink on your tiger cruise on the Ch-46. Seems to me like you have been flying on borrowed time, pal. How many times have you been over the Atlantic? You don’t even have a single damn frequent flier mile? Why does this not surprise me? Not sure. Doesn’t matter. You won’t be needing them. You bought a round trip but this one will be a one way.
Not sure where these other folks are from or going but if this is Retribution Day their families and friends will never see them again either. I guess today is as good a day as any. You know bad news always comes unexpected and today’s ride will be no different. Any last prayers, comments or thoughts before we hit the pavement or the sea at the speed of sound? No? Imagine that. This will be noted. Already descending….? The wing flaps down like that changes the air flow over the wing? Whoa, the roar of that is so cool sounding. It is subtle at first and the crescendo will bring us to a stop on the runway. That was some smart shit figuring that out. I need to come up with something like that. All the fuel is in the wings though. Is that a goddamn flock of seagulls? Jesus, man, they are flying right us. I fucking knew it. Taken out by a goddamn bird dumber than I am. Wait a minute….. That is not a flock of seagulls you dumbass. Try wiping the goddamn window off. Have you been staring at a freakin’ booger and the remnants of a sneeze this whole time? Jesus. Try taking the sunglasses off, Elvis. How do you even manage to dress your goddamn self in the morning? However, if the wings tear off the fuselage when we land these are some terrible seats, Homeboy. You are fuckin’ doomed. You are literally going to be turned into a flaming shitbag in the sky before being extinguished in the harbor when this baby comes up short of the runway. Life by the drop, bro. Comedy. 3…2…1….Then the bump, the skid mark and the freakin’ noise of the wings catching all the air is just fantastic. Sounds like a Mesa just grinding it down my ear hole straight into the helmet. Then it slows down and we are just taxiing. Wow, that shit was great. I love flying. Sorry, spirit world, maybe next time. Time for another adventure. I see my buddy near the baggage claim. “Hey, how have you been, man? Wow, you look great. How was the flight?”
“All good. Same as usual. “ :)
In the process of sorting through my goods I stumbled across the tickets again. I have always kept the tickets to music concerts I have been to. These tickets do not encompass all of the shows I have seen and certainly there are a few that I never did get to see. Seeing some of the dates on the tickets I can say I am getting on in rock and roll years. In kindergarten I already knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, Elvis. Simple, he was the coolest guy in America. Well, him and Evil Knievel. I was too young for a motorcycle but I knew the words to Elvis songs. In my mind, all I needed was to learn to play the guitar and the rest would all fall in to place eventually. Little Michael Jackson and his brothers were already on the radio since I could remember. One of Elvis Presley’s last shows was in Veterans Auditorium in 1977 in Des Moines, Iowa. I saved up my allowance because I wanted to see him in concert. My mom said no and a couple weeks later he was dead. I was heartbroken
.
This childish dream was supplanted by the first time I heard Kiss “Dr. Love” and the first time I remember smelling marijuana. My brother Bill told me Elvis was dead and I needed to get over it. This memory was also on S. 19th in West Des Moines at Terry and Mike Smith’s house. Terry was a Valley High drop out with long hair. Mike was my brother’s age and a grade ahead of me. Terry was the Fonz in my book. He could ride a wheelie on his bicycle all the way down S. 19th on a shit bike with a cig in his mouth. My mom hated him and we were forbidden to go over to their house. Too bad. We did anyways when she went to work. Soon I was in the Kiss Army and even more positive this was my destiny. The 3rd grade talent show I remember a couple buddies and I dressed up like Kiss for our in-class talent show. The teacher played a Kiss song on the record player with the lights off and we lip synced it. But, like all Kiss fans know, Gene Simmons spits up the blood. Back in the 70’s the dentists used to have these little red dye pills you would chew up that would stain your teeth a reddish color. This was supposed to show you the plaque on your teeth. I kept a bunch of these extras and used them for the show. So, during our act I spit the red crap in my mouth on some girl’s desk on cue. End of the show. The music was turned off and I was transformed back into a 4th grade kid in my aluminum foil costume. Clean it up, Kurt. Comedy.
My third rock and roll memory was also on 19th St. in WDM. It was a couple years later and my mom had a new boyfriend who lived with us, Mat Smith. We lived across the street from the old duplex and the Smith’s house in the Briarwood Apartments. The guy’s name was Lane Wolfe. He had a foosball game in his apartment living room. It was the first time I heard “Never Been Any Reason” by Head East. It was great. He was a stoner too, like Terry. He was probably 18-19 and was fooling around with Dee Dee Smith, Mike and Terry’s sister. She was in high school. Anyways, one day Mike and my brother Bill knew Lane and Terry were up in her room fooling around. They got a ladder out of the garage and climbed up on the roof to peek in the window. Right as I was about to climb the ladder they came running back down the ladder saying he’s coming and to take off running. Didn’t need to tell me twice. Lane chased Mike down and I saw he smacked him hard for as young as we were. We called the cops and I am not sure what happened. It didn’t matter a couple weeks later he was arrested for murder. He stabbed his mother’s boyfriend down the street, wrapped him up in a blanket and tried to sink him in Moffit Lake Reservoir. The body floated up and Lane was arrested. It was in the newspaper. You can look it up. He died a couple years ago. I always think of this when I hear that song.
The fourth rock and roll memory was another talent show slap down. My new buddies and I were going to do another lip sync act for the entire 7th and 8th grade class at Indian Hills Junior High. This time the song was “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. The crescendo was me tearing my shirt off in front of a couple hundred kids. This was one of the most forgotten performances in musical history as my lifetime friend, Craig Kleffman, and Rod Leverington pushed a trap set, amp and guitar into the gym. They were really playing and were fantastic. Our act was forgotten faster than last year’s locker combination and those two guys used my ego to mop the gym floor.
I was given a guitar when I was 14. It was a nylon string Conn guitar. Junk. Didn’t matter. It was my destiny. It was hard to learn to play. I was already behind. I took a couple lessons and talked my step dad into getting me an electric. I am not even sure what it was but I had a little peavy amp with distortion. Slowly but surely I was getting better. Some of my buddies played too. Some were better than me and some not. The Hype was formed in high school in the Pace brothers’ basement in our freshman year of high school . Proud to say Kleffman and Tom Pace are still friends to this day and probably reading this. Like all garage bands, this one broke up because there were too many guys and not enough talent. Specifically, mine. I couldn’t sing or solo on the guitar. I was 15.
It didn’t matter. Myself and the best looking guy in the band, Alec Johnson, set off on our own. We formed a band with a tall skinny drummer named Mike Smith and I can’t remember the the other kid who was a freshman at Iowa State that played bass. We had one gig, his frat house in Ames. We sucked so much ass people refused to listen to us and instead stood outside the frat house calling us names and telling us to stop through the windows. We did. Some frat kid had a bunch of mushrooms I remember eating but the message was clear. I just wasn’t good enough, yet.
As life went on I held on to that dream. I joined the navy and kept practicing, I saw many, many shows and slowly, but surely, cracks began forming under my ego. The pros talent level was undeniable. It was live. I could not on demand play a good song all the way through including the bridge and solo. Not a shit song, a good one. I was writing one shit song after the next and bouncing them off anyone on the ship who would endure them for feedback. I could tell I was improving and this kept me going. It was a learning curve and I was learning, a little late to the game at 19 but I could practice for hours and days on end in the navy and did. I met a couple stunner guitar players in the navy. I also heard my first Mesa Boogie amplifier in Ron Molway’s living room and was stunned. He was a very talented player but that damn thing made my Fender Super 60 sound like a transistor radio. I had to get one of those some day in the future.
Ah yes, how could I forget the way too drunk on stage performance in Penang, Malaysia. This was our first port of call after 60 days at sea in Desert Storm. Some other drunken shipwrecks coaxed me up on stage because the local Malaysian guy had a Fender strat and amp. He sucked worse than I did. Doesn’t matter, do not play drunk in public was the lesson to be learned this time around. As I fumbled around I looked up and saw our ship’s captain drawing the throat slash about 3 tables away from the stage. He was sitting with a friend of mine who was a hot navy pilot, Joy Smith. She looked worried. I basically made the Americans look obnoxious, drunk, loud and with not much talent. I shut it down and went to my room in the hotel. My ego crashed and burned again and this time it was life support. I was very depressed over this stunt as it could have been a great opportunity for me to showcase some talent and do a solid. Instead I looked like a drunk asshole in front of the captain in a foreign country.
I ended up chasing my first love to Sweden in 1992 after the navy and met my Swedish buddy Kris Lind. We worked this shitty security job together at Arlanda airport outside of Stockholm. He introduced himself as a professional guitar player who just came back from America. I thought he was a bullshitter. I went over to his apartment and he played a little bit. He may as well have jammed his guitar in my ear. He is probably the best guitarist I personally know. He was in a band called Easy Action in Stockholm in the 80’s. They cut an album and had a hit on the Swedish charts back in the day. He showed me a stack of magazines they were in. Kee Marcello left Easy Action to for Europe and that stupid 80’s anthem “The Final Countdown” was a hit in America. Kris inspired me to be better. He seemed just like me, another guy. Wrong.
After I came back to the US I bought a Les Paul and 4track and doubled down. I even got a Mesa Boogie. It was now or never. I couldn’t have my own buddy, who wasn’t even a damn American, be a stunner and me the guy who has followed his whole life suck ass. In short, I met some other local guys and we did our best. Fail, fail, fail and of course.....fail gain. Done. For me, these were though times. Not just the guitar player persona failure but I just couldn’t get away from the fact I just wasn’t good enough. I can’t translate melody into physical notes in my head if that makes sense. I am tone deaf and even though I constantly have different melodies in my head it is impossible for me to manifest these into physical transcription let alone performance. In short, I don’t have what it takes. At best, my ideal was misguided. It really was fortune, fame, attention and everything else that does not have a goddamn thing to do with expressing a natural musical talent that I really wanted.
It didn’t matter that no one else cared. It bothered me. It kind of still does. The one guy that saved me from just walking away altogether was a music teacher at the university of Iowa. I interrupted a classical vocal audition one time in 1994 playing the lost dumbass wandering the halls trying find out where my audition was. I didn’t have one. This was uncomfortable but I didn’t care I just stood there. Most really good musicians are weird and have odd personalities so the teacher gave me the benefit of the doubt and simply wanted me to sing do, re, fa, so, la, ti, do while he played it on the piano. Once through and he shook his head. “Can’t help ya. Half is natural and and half is effort. You don’t have the natural part.” I understood and walked out. I was fucking doomed. That music professor hit me where it hurt the most. I not only didn’t have natural vocal talent I didn’t have the guitar talent either? This is why it was
not working out? I am not talented enough. Fuck, last stop the lead tambourine player in the puppet show? Wrong, Bozo, you are done. That was probably 20 years ago.
Big picture? Rock and roll itself is on life support and a ventilator. None of the kids today even play guitar anymore except a very few. I don’t listen to much rock and roll anymore either. I have heard all of it so many times. I mostly listen to classical or flamenco. However, I have probably played more in the last month than the last 5 years. It is like a bicycle in that once you learn it is a lifetime skill. Most of us can still make it down the street on the bike, but few guys roll down the street on one wheel with a cig like Terry Smith could.
Several years ago I was given an audio recording of a motivational speaker by a mentor. My mentor, Loren, was a very successful insurance agent in Iowa that was my parents age. He hired me out of college. I worked for him for a couple years selling insurance and financial services to clients of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa agency. We parted ways as the company went through some changes in the 1990’s but remained in touch via a business lunch once or twice a year for a few years. He was very intelligent and could offer me advice on business that few else could. I respected him for his wisdom and the success he had garnered from manifesting his knowledge and reputation into financial success. It was what I wanted to do. I saw myself as a young version of him at the time. All I needed to do was emulate what he had done and take his advice on what he would do if he were me and it would happen for me as well.
A few years had passed and I met Loren for a lunch one day to catch up on life. He had merged his business with another and was a millionaire several times over. My failed solo insurance and financial career was a flop. I ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt and was forced to file bankruptcy with a young, and very pregnant wife. I literally took the same job I had in college, telemarketing for MCI/Worldcom, for $8 an hour and commission. I was actually one of the best callers in the company and was quickly promoted to a supervisor within six months. The wife and I had another child and purchased a new home. I felt comfortable with a good salary and proud of my accomplishments. Soon I felt I would be a manager, then senior manager, etc…this vision was squashed in 2004 when MCI/Worldcom crashed and burned in a massive fraud. The company ended up in bankruptcy, the CEO went to prison and 40,000 employees lost their jobs. I had to start over again. However, this time I had a wife, two young kids and a mortgage. The job market looked flat to me and I found corporate America too restrictive. I am not an ass kissing kind of guy. I swear like a sailor and am a wanna be rock roll guitar god at heart. Van Halen never called and I was forced with dilemma of paying the bills and holding up my end of the family bargain. I needed a good paying job where I got to carry the ball, call the shots and create huge stacks of chips that would feed my ego and get me the respect I felt I was due.
My idea was spawned by rewinding how I ended up in the position I was currently in. The future went from bright to bleak in less than 10 years out of college. I realized the reason I failed in the insurance and financial industry was not because I wasn’t smart or didn’t try hard enough. I failed because I ran out of people to talk to about my services. In reality, no one wants to talk to an insurance or financial professional unless they have to. The rejection is high and the attrition rate in the industry is on par with the fast food industry. Don’t be fooled by the nice cars, suits and watches. The industry knows that people want to do business with people that are successful, or at least appear to be successful. For every Loren in the industry there were a thousands folks who failed. Most didn’t fail because they made too much money either. It was the opposite. They failed financially, like me, not because they could not pass a test or didn’t try hard but because they ran out of people to talk to and the price of marketing yourself was too expensive. In a 100% commission environment you can’t go too many months without a paycheck before you hit the wall. Of course, you never hear this at the career fair on campus when companies are trying to recruit the next gimp who bought the line, “ Would like to be your own boss? You want to have an office, choose your clients, make a great income and be respected in the community?” It is much easier to recruit using these one liners than speaking the truth, “Step right up, son. You look like the exact kind of geek we are looking for. Let me guess, you are too dumb to do math and science so you opted for the bullshit liberal arts degree that no one here at the job fair is looking for, right? If you come work for us there is a 50/50 chance you will be broke and out of this industry within two years and an 80% chance you won’t make it five years. In fact, anyone you do sell, long after you are gone if they continue to pay premiums the home office gets that money and you get zero.” I bit on the former job description and the latter I learned, like most, the hard way.
My idea was a boiler room. I would combined the telemarketing skills with the knowledge I had of the insurance and financial industry. In short, I was going to cash in the 401k and start calling other insurance and financial professionals and see if they needed some more appointments throughout the week. We would call their clients or find some prospects in their area that would be interested in talking with them. The wife thought it was a terrible idea and the friction became unbearable. She had zero faith in me or my plan. The idea of setting up some telephones in the basement and have guys calling out of the house was a terrible idea. I didn’t care. I felt if I made it work and made a bunch of money she would have to admit I was right all along. Wrong, she filed for divorce, started sleeping with a guy at work and took half the 401k in a very messy divorce. It didn’t matter, my back was against the wall and it was now or never. The gloves were coming off. I recruited some former MCI/Worldcom guys in their early 20’s with telemarketing experience and started calling from the basement. Bing, bang, boom….It took off by us emailing and calling agents. I figured the guys in Iowa didn’t have enough money to afford the service, however, the guys in the big cities surely did. I was correct. A few hundred a week became a few thousand. There was beer drinking, pot smoking, shirts off and sunglasses on in my operation. I leased a few offices in Guaranty Bank in downtown Cedar Rapids and we started humming. I was up to five or six good reps on the phones making 50 calls a day each.
I didn’t give a shit what guys said on the phone. This business was going to be checks only and only from agents and planners that lived outside the state of Iowa. I could easily impersonate Loren on the telephone enough to let the hungry agents on the other end of the phone know I knew what I was talking about. The half a dozen reps I had simply copied me without out ever knowing anything about the insurance and financial industry or a semester of college. If they had a hot call it got passed to me to close them. For me, I knew most of these geeks on the phone were chest beating idiots much like myself back in the day who were too lazy to do the prospecting themselves or thought they were smarter because we were doing the heavy lifting for an affordable price. “Those dumb Iowans have no idea how valuable their service is to agents.” Wrong, Bozo. After a couple weeks of them getting zero appointments they would get pissed, call in and complain or request a refund. “Nope, sorry, pal. No refunds. We can have a conference call with your team though to go over best practices, a script and maybe explain some of your niche market a little better.” To listen to these idiots one by one talk about themselves was comedy. They hated to admit their own ego was used against them and they got played. Eventually, they would bitch and moan all the way down the toilet. We were bringing in a minimum of $20,000 a month the summer of 2006 and ended up making almost $400,000 that year.
The problem was I was miserable. It was a hustle. I wasn’t Loren. Shit, we couldn’t even tell the clients the truth or they would never buy the service in the first place. In the beginning we actually called a bunch of people to try and get these guys appointments but no one wanted to talk to any of our clients. It was easier just to not call and tell them they got a zero and no one was interested. It was much more profitable to spend our time going after new money. I was conflicted because I knew I was not going to be out hustled on the phone but the business model itself was doomed because we could never get repeat business. They all got ripped off. They couldn’t get their money back and if they wanted to take us to court they would have to come to Iowa which was out of the question. I called Loren and we had a lunch and I explained my dilemma to him. He did not have an answer for me but he sensed the problem was with me and not the business. The business was just a function of my input. A day or two later he sent me an audio recording of a motivational speaker that he recommended. I can’t remember the guy’s name but he worked with high end athletes, entertainers and rich folks about their maximum performance for about $10,000 a weekend in varying fancy hotel conference rooms across America.
I listened to the recording and the guy made a lot of sense. He said there were basically two types of successful people; Group A and Group B. Both have natural talent. Both usually have a high level of net worth. Both have success that is easily observed by others via material possessions. The difference was the Group A people were very happy, active in their community, close with their family and friends, philanthropic and spiritually growing. The Group B people were unhappy, selfish, constantly worried about their money, untrusting, jealous, had troubled relationships and feared failure as a core motivation. I was stunned. As much as I wanted to see myself as an A Group guy I fell into the latter group. The analogy the guy used was genius. He said the two groups of people view the exact same sunset on any given night. The Group A people see it as a beautiful and romantic moment to be enjoyed. When it sets they go home and think fondly of the episode. If so inclined they can watch again the very next evening. The people in Group B see the same beautiful and romantic sunset, however, instead of going home they go down to the dock, fill the boat up with gas and chase the sunset at full speed not wanting to lose the feeling of being in the moment. In reality, they pursue the moment at all cost because they believe it likely will never come again. They do not have an accurate perception about themselves and thus impossible to find continuity with others. In the process of trying to maintain an inaccurate ideal of ones self relationships are damaged, money is blown, time is wasted, mistakes are made and failure is inevitable. I knew I was doomed before the recording even stopped but I continued to listen.
In our ideals we see our selves at our peak performance with all the attention, respect, wealth and health that can be imagined. We physically look fantastic, sound intelligent when we speak, are the life of the party, the source of vast wisdom and the envy of all. The Group A people understand these ideals are simply positive self images and intellectual motivational tools to strive for and set goals around. There is conscious proactive work that goes into improving. Although the goal may never be reached the pursuit and effort applied to accurate ideals leads to outcomes that benefit not only the individual but those around them. The Group B people see themselves as failures in their ideal. They will never look or sound as good as needed to really be successful. They are always way behind and desperately running out of time. Their mistakes are insurmountable and compounded with each subsequent failure. If people really knew the person under the flesh they would not only not be impressed they would run. Thus the approach becomes to emulate someone else who is successful instead of understanding there is a formula for your own happiness and success. The Group A people know that failure is a learning opportunity and a chance to improve. The Group B people look at failure as humiliation and an assault on their ego. They were cheated somehow from what should have been a victory for them. The Group A people know that their friends and family are also not perfect but have faith in them and give them the benefit of the doubt as they know their hearts snd minds are in the right place. The Group B people have no genuine confidence in their skills. It is just a matter of time before they are figured out and the sun will set on their goals and dreams. Many friends and family members suffer from the Group B behaviors on display exhibiting a poorly calibrated ideal.
At the end of the recording I realized why Loren gave it to me. He could see the talent in me that I too saw in myself. What he knew that I didn’t is that I based all of my ideals on financial success. If I had a lot of money I would become the person I always knew I could be. In reality, the money is just one byproduct of an accurately calibrated ideal. My ideal was not that I wanted to take the introspective steps Loren had undergone to understand more about himself. I wanted to look at it in reverse. I wanted to be the center of attention and have the crowd ooh and ahh at my performance and material possessions. I was convinced this would lead me to happiness and freedom from the guy in my head who was brutally skeptical and cynical. Sure enough, the boiler room crashed and burned like MCI/Worldcom did. My failures continued and I often turned on myself. Unfortunately, for me, it was impossible to not like myself and expect to make others happy and productive. I had to find a way to like the person inside instead of comparing myself to an ideal I was never meant to, or going to be able to, achieve. Plus, if I could not achieve this ideal then it makes it very easy to be critical of others who are also not going to achieve the ideal either. Around this exact same time a guy said to me, “Jasa, if you have a conflict with everyone how do you win?” It just floored me. Most talented people have pretty big egos. Not all, but most. If you are not happy or in a cycle of failures and looking for wisdom to possibly change your trajectory I would save the $10,000 and recommend evaluating your ideals. What is your ideal? What do you look like? What is the tone of the conversation? We all want attention but how are you going about getting yours? Is it realistic? Are you setting goals and tracking them closely? How much attention do you pay to others goals and ambitions? If you don’t like you why should anyone else? Did you compliment or encourage someone else today? Do you owe someone an apology? Can you forgive someone for making a mistake? Are you a good loser? Do you share your struggles with people? How can you help? What are you doing to positively impact others?
This was years ago and I can say the motivational speaker’s message is something I need to remember in life. Sure, I still fumble and fail all the time. I am still not 100% sure what I want to be when I grow up either. However, I do know that I take myself with me wherever I go. If that guy is squared away and has a realistic ideal of himself and a properly calibrated moral compass the chance for happiness and success go up exponentially. When the ego gets in the way of the ideal the failures usually come quickly thereafter. Sorry, I can’t remember the name of the motivational speaker.
Jacques Pépin: Chef, Author, Educator, TV Pioneer
To speak to most millennials today about working in a kitchen is often confusing. For me, it seems as if most imagine my education in culinary arts will lead eventually to only two outcomes; one, my own restaurant or, two, an aging line cook working a part time job for a couple years. Sure, there is repetition, low pay, long hours, no fame and constant cuts, burns and kitchen arguments. This goes against the grain of the immediate satisfaction and get rich quick mentality that is constantly bombarding us. For me, this process and sacrifice is the price one pays for learning. Of course, this falls on deaf ears to the living room couch crowd. The real kitchen life has been edited, amplified and marketed by contemporary television chefs and producers to a crescendo that more often than not leaves me looking for the remote to change the channel than engaging me. None can tell a story like Anthony Bourdain and none have the personality of Jacques Pepin. I am opposed to the rigged cooking shows, bloated kitchen personalities and the constant product promotions that feel synthetic. What do I say to a person who believes that a modern chef is a guy with an accent yelling at aspiring yet nameless subordinate kitchen nomads in a choreography that amounts to gastronomic perfection? I simply tell them to watch reruns of Jacques. I guess that is is why I like Jacques; he is himself.
There is a good argument to be made that, after the passing of Julia Child in 2004, Charlie Trotter in 2013 and famous French chef Paul Bocuse in 2018, Jacques now sits at the top of the lifetime culinary accomplishments hierarchy. Sure, Anthony Bourdain was a great chef and storyteller but he is gone now too. Gordon Ramsey indeed is talented, wealthy and successful but is also an annoying constant self promoter. Mario Batali? He too was talented but his legacy now resembles Harvey Weinstein’s more than a great chef. Emeril Lagasse? Bam, he retired and stepped away after making a fortune hawking eponymous cooking ware. Paula Deen? Was she even a chef? She is still apologizing somewhere for actually speaking like a real chef on camera. Wolfgang Puck? He is a very talented and successful chef indeed. He also seems like an Austrian version of Gordon Ramsey in that right under the surface is something designed to make him wealthier and more famous.
I personally can think of no chef who has been around longer at the top echelon of the culinary world than Jacques. Born in Bourg-en-Bresse, France December 18th, 1935 Jacques is now 83 years old. Unfortunately, for me, writing about Jacques Pépin cannot be compressed into a two page paper that even remotely comes to close to defining the man, his life’s work and accomplishments. His simple, friendly and methodical demeanor in his multitude of books, videos, television appearances and live performances are authentic to say the least. His sincerity in teaching what he has learned in the culinary industry over the decades always anchors his every appearance or publication.
What I see in Jacques is a confident statesman of the craft. For many years I have watched him on public television cooking delicious dishes and all seems to be broken down into the most basic steps the average viewer can follow. In fact, Jacques goes out of his way not to advertise products, or himself, in his shows or appearances. The selflessness itself is rare in today’s celebrity chefs considering that modern mass media wants everything loud, flashy, exciting, competitive and sexy. Of course, the commercials and product placements are always trying to sell me something. If you watch Jacques on public television or on the internet you will never see him pitching a new line of cookware or restaurants. It is quite the opposite. He rarely names brands and it is up to the viewer to see what knives and utensils he uses. It is impossible to say his lack of commercialism is not a function of his design. One of my favorite videos is this old one https://youtu.be/nfY0lrdXar8 where Jacques debones a whole chicken like a surgeon.
I have only seen a sliver of the thousands of shows, appearances and performances Jacques has done in front of audiences but the continuity is obvious. His audiences and guests for decades range from amateurs, to other famous chefs to world leaders. Although he is late in his years now he still contributes to an online college course on French cuisine and culture through Boston University. His programs on public television over the years; Jacques Pépin Heart & Soul, Essential Pépin, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, Julia & Jacques: More Cooking in Concert and Jacques Pépin Heart & Soul are must see television for any food enthusiast.
However, another of my personal favorites is his one on one interview in front of a live audience with the late Anthony Bourdain. At the time of the interview Bourdain was probably the most recognized culinary face on television but Anthony makes no bones about it....he was not in Jacques’ league. Here is a link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3QYai6bv5M&feature=share but when Bourdain asks Jacques “What makes a good chef?” Jacques replies, “A hard worker, consistency, on time, etc...with these you have the potential for someone’s with talent to really excel.” Jacques also speaks in the interview of the fact the cook was very low on the social totem pole decades ago, even while cooking for presidents and dignitaries they were not allowed to eat in the dining room of the very people they were cooking for. There was also the anonymity; the chef was literally unknown until the 1960s. The expansion of air travel on planes allowed Americans to explore Euro cooking and return with ethnic traditions and tastes while talented European chefs saw America as opportunity.
Jacque is also a substantial proponent of education and his has been life long. After WW2 he began working in his family’s kitchen in his home town of Bourg-en-Bresse named Le Pelican. At age thirteen, he began his formal apprenticeship at the distinguished Grand Hotel de L’Europe. During his two years of required military service in the 50’s Jacques was also a chef. He was the personal chef to three French heads of state, including French president Charles de Gaulle. Subsequently, he came to America in 1959 and worked in New York at the famous La Pavilion French restaurant. It is here he was introduced to long time friend and famous American chef Julia Child. Together Jacques and Julia would film a multitude of television episodes over the years on public television. It was also at La Pavilion he met a famous guest; Howard Johnson, the owner of the eponymous hotel chain. Johnson hired Jacques to be the director of research and development of meals for his chain of hotels for a decade. Jacques is also no stranger to the college campus. He has a BA in general studies and a Masters degree in French literature from Columbia. He serves as the dean of special programs at New York’s International Culinary Center and still writes a quarterly column for Food and Wine magazine. If that were not enough, he is also the executive director for Oceania Cruise Lines restaurants featuring the eponymous Jacque’s Bistro. I am not certain but I suspect this was done for a substantial donation his foundation as I have never heard him even reference it. He is 83 after all.
Jacques fondness of literature is also on display in his multitude of culinary publishings. His first book in 1975 was A French Chef Cooks at Home. However, La Technique published in 1976 and La Methode in 1979 have been inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. He has published over twenty books with his latest book published in 2015; Heart and Soul in the Kitchen. Most of the books, with the exception of his memoirThe Apprentice: My life in the Kitchen, are recipes he has prepared for for his readers. Many of the books have received critical acclaim as well as appeared on various best seller lists.
Jacques is now an American citizen and resides in the state of Connecticut with his wife of many decades, Gloria. He has one adult daughter, Claudine, who often appears alongside him in various videos and live filmed presentations available on the internet for viewing. Claudine is also the co founder of the Jacques Pepin Foundation. Jacques’ estate is estimated at $20,000,000.00. Not too bad for a poor French kid who began cooking with his parents. The accolades and honors Jacques has won are numerous. The most significant occurred in 2004 when he received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest order of merit. One day Jacques won’t be with us and he will pass on like many other great chefs of varying fame and fortune. I chose to write this paper about Jacques simple because his style resonates with me. I am not alone in this as I see Jacques has about 250,000 Face Book likes. Jacques started a lot younger than I did but I still find the man the most inspiring personality in the kitchen.
It is official I am an empty nest. It is one thing for mom and dad to shed a tear as they drop off junior at college or the recruiter’s office. I have already caught a little blow back from the 18 and 19 year old attitudes and perspectives of adulthood. Junior was reminded in front of his crew that helped move me into the new place that when we speak forget the “He be like” bullshit. You went to a good school and even though the lights went out on your senior year no need to talk like a derelict at the bus station.
“Yo, I can talk how I want, Dad. Your day is done, Old Man. Dad there is a white guy rapper, Ima Shitbag, he makes sick money and he says it that way. You? You are moving into a one bedroom apartment.” He retorts and smiles to his friends acting cool. My son. I shake my head.
“Son, I don’t give a shit how many billons of views Shitbag has on Youtube, his bitchez, his bling, his guns, his jewels…Yawn. Unfortunately, the crippling part is from time to time he sits around the table with the attorneys, accountants and financial guys and he learns the hard way he has the linguistic talent of a 14 year old. Ever wonder why most rap songs have only one or two syllables? As far as the cash? Always nice to have more than less. Let’s hope Shitbag saves some of his because times do change and there is a real strong chance he is not intellectual thunder. Hopefully, he just sounds like a dumbass as part of his act to suck geeks like you guys in and really is a tremendous orator in private with his friends and family.” They just started laughing. Truth is in Cedar Rapids there have been 5 kids in the class of 2020 throughout the city of 125,000 who have either been shot, committed suicide or overdosed. Fortunately, not my kids.
I bought some pizza and beer. They did not drink a single beer. Instead, they preferred a Texas Tea? An Arnold Palmer idea with about 5% alcohol. One can each. Didn’t even finish it. These guys are surely high school kids. The baptism of beers, babes and bong hits with Blutarski awaits them. I can see myself in them, but not really. These kids have been pampered their entire lives as far as I am concerned. There were a couple colorful moments but absolutely nothing like the way my brother and I grew up and this I am quite proud of. My son, in fact, is about as tough as his mom. Don’t tell him that. This is good. Hanging out at the University of Iowa Recreation Center is truly the absolute best optics in the state of Iowa. Soon he will be staring in the mirror in the weight room, getting beat down in pick up games, talking about last night and all that goes with campus life. My daughter is still chugging along with a nursing degree. Grades are good. Works at the hospital humping patients around too. She too has it all figured out and when we disagree she simply blocks me on her phone and disappears. The idea of sacrifice is part of the equation she finds most uncomfortable. These are short conversations. The old boyfriend is gone and new one is on the scene. Guess I will be meeting him soon, or not. I kind of liked the last one.
Storage shed is almost completely empty. The apartment is packed with my most important, useful and sentimental possessions. The rest is sold off. It is just me now. Everything in a one bedroom apartment. Nice place; all vinyl flooring, new appliances, free water, cable and internet. Electric is $50 a month. Underground parking. Security door and right on the bike path in a great location. $1,000 a month. Tough to beat. I will pick up a part time job until I head out to sea for some extra cash. Tons of ladies down here too. I do have a weakness for beautiful and intelligent women. I should write about some of my internet dating experiences. You guys would be in tears laughing. Maybe I will in the future. No ladies right now but when I do slip back into the water this is primo hunting grounds. I have literally used the same one liner for 15 years with fantastic results. I join match.com and simply spam every hot woman the same thing, “Hey, great looking pics and interesting profile. Tell me more about you.” The only ones who will bite back are the ones that like my mug and crazy profile. Then you start sorting. Tell them a couple jokes, agree with them on whatever is important to them and move to a beverage somewhere. Trust me, it works like a charm.
“Ah yes, Dr. Melphie, Wow you are even better looking in person. Whoa, your ex husband was truly a shitbag for losing you. Anyone can clearly see you, princess, deserve better. Communication broke down? Damn. You did everything while he just sat there? I can’t believe it. Wow, I am getting hungry. I forgot about the chicken in the fridge. I will be cooking chicken Parmesan with a pairing of Tuscan red wine tonight. You like Italian? You do? Amazing, I just went to culinary school in Florence last year.” Rinse and repeat. The trick is to appeal to their lowest instincts. Every other idiot out there is talking about their motorcycle, car, boat, lake house, cash, etc... The women I like have very good taste and have enjoyed most of these things already as I have, less the motorcycles. Most women are looking for something much more simple in internet dating and not just the next chest beater with a viagra prescription and some selfies. I will get settled in and get back out there, have no fear. Different story.
But we are traveling light from here forward. I have little debt, good credit score and a few bucks in the bank. Should become a little more productive with the pencil now too.
I never did like Trump. I watched his TV show for about 10 seconds once years ago. My IQ dropped 3 points in that short interval and I turned the channel. It was kind of fun to watch him beat up the other republicans in the 2016 primaries I will admit though. The stiff white guys talking off well scripted and vetted public statements was always a yawn. I also am a huge fan of killing off the political correct shit. It is a false narrative simply designed to control the discussion. Just like the geeks in HR at your job. Yawn. Life is not a G rated movie. Bill Maher, a big wheel on the left, has repeatedly said the political correct shit is like a cancer on the Democratic Party. Does he get shit on now too? Seeing the events unfold in the streets it appears many of the left leaning folks just want to pounce on anyone who doesn’t carry their flag and agree with them. This is not very politically correct and neither is the violence, looting, etc...
What I do not hear is an actual strategy to make things change. I also don’t want things to go back to the way they were either. That really only worked out for the folks in the top tax brackets. Oddly enough, the guys in the NFL are in the top tax brackets. Same with NBA. These are the big money winners in sports in America. The athletes are mostly black but the crowd is mostly white. Why? Well, when we actually let the black guys play a few decades back many of them were just simply better and many of the all time best are black. That is an undisputed truth. Watch an old NBA game from the 50’s sometime. It is terrible and boring basketball. Today’s game? If the only name of the game is to win the best guys are the only ones on the court or the field. The entertainment level went up and so did the television coverage. Collective bargaining from the athletes meant profit sharing and that was warranted. Unfortunately, by paying the athletes huge salaries the subsequent effect was ticket prices went through the retractable roof. The concession stands are robbery. The jerseys are grossly over priced and those watching on television are bombarded with junk food advertisements, stupid insurance mascots and commercials for smart phones that all do the same thing. Most poor folks just don’t have the cash to warrant spending it on a three hour ball game played by adult men. The court and field is dominated by black men but the crowd in the stadium is predominantly white.
Odd, a couple years back CTE was the rage in the sports headlines. Is football any safer today? Nope. It is a brutal damn sport. Aaron Hernandez of the Patriots was only 26 years old and a millionaire Super Bowl champ. Didn’t matter he had late stage CTE the autopsy showed. Was he really just acting out the disease and this is how it personifies itself? I think this is true. But instead of demanding an end to the game that causes well documented long term injuries the players association accepted a cash pay out? Where exactly does CTE begin? NFL? College? High School? Kind of like looking at a dead smoker’s lungs; when and where did this start? This is the tip of the spear of liability. Yes, this here folks is the beginning of the unraveling of the truth.
I was there as a kid when ESPN and Nike actually were spawned. The shoes were cool and so were the reruns and highlights of games. What has transpired over the last few decades is a shame and very hypocritical. I will not own anything Nike anymore. It is not a goddamn lifestyle. They make shoes, clothes and sporting goods. Period. Full stop. Any legit athlete knows your shoes and clothes are about the last damn thing that matter in your performance. I clearly remember getting schooled back in my playing days by a drunk black guy wearing pants half way down his ass and playing in Timberland boots.
As far, as the manufacturing of Nike products? I think it is a legitimate argument that the people making the shoes in Asian sweat shops lead some pretty shitty lives. Their pay is next to nothing and the shoes are then jacked way up in cost and marketed directly at the people here who can least afford them; kids and minorities. How many 50 year old college graduates do you see wearing Nike sneakers outside the gym? I would honestly like to see BLM also include those people of color on the other side of the planet who are, and have been for many years, being abused just to make the sweat suits and shoes. Where is Nike to say, “We are so concerned about our black Americans we are bringing all our factories back to America and in black communities.” Nope, not a peep. Not by the NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB and not by any of the players wearing the shoes and using the toys. This is bullshit and should be addressed.
Reparations for slaves? OK. Sounds good to me. I want that settlement to come from all of these professional sports franchise owners, Nike, Reebok, Adidas, etc. Also, if you are going to advertise during a game you need to contribute to the settlement fund. Same goes for those broadcasting the games...NBC, Fox, CBS, Direct TV, etc....they can kick in too. Casinos placing bets on the games? Yup, every single bet placed on these games also has a portion go into the fund. It will kind of be like the Bernie Madoff settlement we simply claw the money back for the victims. I say half the value of the leagues, companies and casinos and we will call it a deal. Divide that number by 13% of the black population and start sending out the checks just like the stimulus checks....All these franchise owners are billionaires and the companies have even more. Even if you only had $1 billion it still leaves you with $500 million. Not too bad. Nope, not a freakin’ whisper of this. However, ol’ MJ will be giving $100 million to black communities over a decade? Mike, pleeze. You have a microphone few have and do you say anything about the terrible conditions the other people of color making your shoes live in? Nope. The $100 million is also a tax write off. Let’s keep that real too, MJ.
Now let’s move down a wrung on the ladder over here to the NCAA. Absolutely corrupt and should be disbanded. The highest paid guy on the state of Iowa payroll is the goddamn football coach? This clearly exemplifies where the state’s priorities are. University of Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz is a nice guy. I have met him. But he is an average coach for an average team. He is nowhere near being worth that kind of money and it would be much better spent going to the students. This happens in almost every single state in the USA. Where is BLM to ask for this?
The athletic scholarship process? The pursuit of winning at all costs and getting the best talent on the field is a straight up scam. Only 1% of our top Division 1 athletes will ever make a dime from their sport. 99% will make nothing and half the scholarship athletes don’t even finish college because, slowly but surely, they realize they are not going to the NFL or NBA and no one is hiring for the African American studies degree. In fact, anyone still playing college basketball after 4 years today wasn’t good enough to get in the NBA earlier. A system that is designed to offer a great life opportunity to talented youngsters is pissed down the leg and they are used like tools to fill the stands and make huge amounts of money off their performance. This policy is designed to keep not so smart athletes academically eligible so they can keep playing. I know this because I was in the statistics in society 101, college math for athletes, class at the U of Iowa. I was going to walk on to the team as a wide receiver. I enrolled in the simplest college level math class to satisfy the one requirement for math/science just like the rest of the team. None of the athletes came to class or discussions unless it was a quiz or a test and all of them had their female tutor with them. I didn’t have that. Plus, you can’t make any money as a scholarship athlete? What a sad joke played on the athletes. I said no way. I did pass the class though. The answer here is very clear; get rid of the NCAA and make the athletes employees of the university with all the benefits the other employees have including short and long term disability. When their time of playing is completed they will then be honored the scholarship so they don’t have to be distracted by sports practice and games. Where is BLM to demand this? Not a peep.
One wrung further down the ladder, high schools. Time to get the sports out of schools. Ours have been infected with a crippling disease. School spirit has been exploited to the point that getting a kid in sports is now a part time job for the parents. Now I am to feel shame for saying, “ Yo, Johnny, you are not getting the $200 shoes and no you are not going to freakin’ football summer camp on the other side of the state. The grades are limp and, honestly, you aren’t big enough, fast enough and tough enough to be a pro. Try getting a job.” The model is Europe, the sports are after school subjects handled through their clubs and YMCA type organizations. In short, if you wanna play everyone in the city can try out for the team. We still play the kids in the next city over, same fields, playoffs, etc...The kids also have to be academically eligible. Because their education is far more important than what they are going to learn playing with a ball in 99.99% of these cases. School is for education and we are falling behind.
In Sweden, high school stops at 10th grade. Then it is two years of your choice of one of three different lines; liberal arts, math/science or industrial technology. After that you can go to a 4 year school which is free and you actually get an allowance to go. Nope. Not here. My kids didn’t even get letter grades in high school. It was exceeding expectations, meeting them or needs improvement. No actual letter grade? What a shit show. Sure, it was only $100 a year to register my kids and it was a good school. Unfortunately, this idea protects the stupid kids from being stigmatized and penalizes the very brightest kids. The vast majority of kids are not going to be STEM students. Just like the vast majority will not be starting in the game on Friday nights. Public education needs to be K-16. If Jethro, jr. knows at 16 he wants to be a diesel mechanic than enough of the history, art and math classes. If Jethro changes his mind later he can return to college to learn a new skill. Make sense?
The BLM is suffering right now from lack of a clear message, a concise strategy and talented leadership. Where are LeBron, Kanye and Jordan to ask everyone to sign the online pledge to stop using the word nigger in rap, in movies and in conversation? Until we can get past that nothing will change as it is beyond hypocritical and poison for their community. Where are the fathers to instill a good moral compass and family values in their children? 75% of black families are headed by a single female in America. One would think these women would insist on the misogynistic laced profanity would never be tolerated. Nope. I think we do need to help black Americans out but we also need to stop the bullshit with the sports and entertainment. I love sports but like my dad said, “It doesn’t take a smart guy to see something is wrong. It takes a smart guy to fix the problem. Focus on the
The passing of my 93 year old grandmother and her brother in the last couple days completes the end of a generation of our family. There is now no one left alive to tell the story in the first hand. All of my grandmother and grandfather’s children are still alive. However, now we all assume the next role in the life cycle; I assume my father’s previous role as he now assumes the oldest branch in the family tree. My kids are just now young adults and no longer kids.
My children have no idea what life was like back in 1926 when grandma was born in rural Delaware, Iowa. Growing up during the Great Depression was one of the last conversations I had with her. Grandma said it was rough but most of the farmers could feed themselves from their own land and animals. These were the days when the woman of the house could kill a chicken, clean it and serve it with pride for dinner. Everyone was broke, however. These were the days of radio and reading. No one had a television set as they were not invented yet. This was rural Iowa and not the bustling roaring 20’s that seem to dominate our history’s recollection of itself. This went on for years until the war came.
My kids also have no idea what it means for your entire class of 17 and 18 year old young men to sign up for the draft and most of them get deployed with tens of thousands never to return. When the newspaper hit grandma’s porch in 1941 with word of the bombing of Pearl Harbor it landed with a thud, her brother David was stationed there. He lived. Her future husband, my grandpa and the gentlemen in the photo, was stationed with the 39th Army engineering corps. He earned 5 bronze stars in Italy it says in the few remains of his service records. Unlike myself, he was the silent type. He made it a point to say almost nothing about his service to anyone. Unfortunately, most of his records too were consumed in the famous VA fire in the 70’s that destroyed much of our veterans’ history from WW1 to Vietnam.
Grandma was also the last living person who could connect all the military dots in our family. It started with her father, Jesse, being a radioman in the navy in WW1. Her brother David was in the navy on Pearl Harbor in WW2. Her husband, Bill, my grandfather, fought in Italy in WW2. Her brother Bob was a medic in the Korean War. Her son, John, was in the Army and her daughter, Christine, in the navy during Vietnam era. Her grandson, me, was in the navy and my brother, Bill, also had a brief career in the Army during Desert Storm era. Her great grandson, my nephew, Nick, was in the navy post 9/11. Her great grand daughter, my daughter, Lauren, and another great grandson, another nephew, Matthew, has short stints in the Iowa National Guard. If that was not enough testimonial to her connection in our family’s dedication to service of this country she was also there in 1953 when news of her brother in law, Ed Meader, my grandpa’s brother, went down in the B-36 crash in Newfoundland with General Ellsworth killing everyone onboard. The base in South Dakota was posthumously named Ellsworth AFB after the accident. Ed was the 1st. Lt. That literally is over 100 consecutive years in this country’s history when we find ourselves in conflict our branch of the family tree seems to rise up out of the corn fields.
An odd piece in all of this is in the 50’s a young grandma and grandpa took a couple little ones and headed out west to California. Where did they end up? Vallejo, California. This is the exact place of my last duty station in the navy, EODMU9 on Mare Island. Grandpa was a construction vet after the war and if you were swinging a hammer in Vallejo back in the 50’s it was probably on Mare Island. My dad was a little kid and has few memories of that time but it is true. They were only out there a little while but came back to small town Iowa. Unfortunately, I never met my grandfather as he passed way too young at 43 years of age in 1966. My brother was named after him the following year.
Grandma was a very religious woman and lived her life as she believed. I can say I never heard her say a single curse word, drink alcohol, smoke a cigarette, cut her hair, wear a pair of slacks or own a television. Her family and her church were very important to her. In fact, her brother, Bob, died a couple days later literally across the hall in the same nursing home. Unfortunately, under the current circumstances with the COVID 19 pandemic the funeral is going to just be a burial next to grandpa in the same tiny cemetery in the cornfield in Delaware, Iowa where many of this branch of the family tree are buried. I am not even sure if any words will be said with social distancing but I have said mine. Rest in Peace. Grandma.
Yup, I want to take credit for calling this one out years ago. Of the group of Saudis military officers in flight training in Pensacola, with their now dead classmate who turned assassin on the base, 15 of 20 are looking at child porn? All are being rejected and sent home. Any chance the other roughly 850 Saudi military students in US military schools today are watching child porn? Sure, you can say pedophilia is in every culture, race, pay grade and job title. But to deny these Arabs are sexually immature and relationship ignorant is being far too polite. Look at almost any rally in the streets in the Mid East. Where are the women? Where are the women when it shows the worship in the sacred mosque? No where to be seen.
Why? Well, some are wearing the black dress and full niqab; the walking coffin look. Oh, don’t say you missed her walking into the train station. This also seems to be the chosen outfit of the female suicide bomber by the way. Hard not to stare at her in public, specially if the purpose was to create anonymity for the woman. To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable standing in a crowd at the subway or bus station and the coffin walks up. These are uncomfortable truths many won’t speak about in public. Fact is, team Allah has been pumping out every bit as many sex freaks as the Catholic Church ever did or more.
So why do these guys flip from being just another mid eastern guy in the math class playing soccer to a Muslim freedom fighter when they are in the west? The fact is their knowledge about American women usually comes from television, movies and porn. Reality is it is hard to break the ice with the American, Latino and Euro ladies if you don’t drink, don’t eat meat, pray 5 times a day and have a physique that looks like my mom could kick your ass. Hey, the huge wallet is nice but the Muslim guys should start a therapy group with the Asian guys rolling around campus in Porsches and wearing the Canada Goose jackets without an American girl in the passenger seat. You have a lot in common. The money and grades are not going to help you here. Grab a beer, eat some wings and head down to the tailgate at the stadium and you just might get lucky. Learning how to be cool would be a great place to start. In short, the vast majority of western women find the idea of Mrs. walking Coffin repulsive wether they admit it in public or not.
So what really happens? The Muslims come over here and think they are in Disneyland at first. America is intoxicating to first time visitors. But the integration is minimal and the Muslim communities become diasporas right here in America.
The cultures are quite different also. That is fine, I have been to Chinatown too. But the Chinese are not behind the suicide and car bombers. They might be trying to steal all our intellectual property but It is the Muslim zombies that think they are going to meet 12 virgins as a martyr. Not my words, theirs. Hard to say how many of these martyrs had ever seen a real life naked woman, had sex or ever been in love. But it is impossible to deny a connection to their religious belief about virgins in the after life and their misguided pursuit of them in real life. Many Muslims have several wives, marriages of convenience and engage in pedophilia. You can easily find the documentary of an imbedded Afghan reporter who reported a few years back on the Bacha Bazi. These are the young boys sex trafficking rings the US troops discovered in Afghanistan. They reported the practice was wide spread by tribal leaders and government officials alike. The documentary proves it.
Today America is supposed to be stunned by the fact 15 of these trainees were watching child porn? Didn’t 19 saudis hijack the planes that ran into the World Trade Center? Come to find out they spent their time hanging out in strip bars before their mission. Boston marathon bombing? We missed those guys too? Coincidence none of these guys came over and found an American girl and lived happily ever after here in America? Terrorism is the blow back. How many of these guys were radicalized in mosques and over the internet? Guess what, no women there either. Your women, Hadji, must be in the afterlife if only you can become a martyr? This has to be the weakest line of bullshit told to man. But there are no shortage of young Muslim men being radicalized.
This behavior will not change as long as the oil rich OPEC nations are allowed to continue as theocracies. This recent stunt was just the latest in a cycle of green on blue attacks on US troops. Let’s be real about the effectiveness of our training these guys too. Iraq? These guys literally laid down their weapons and ran from ISIS. To this day they can’t defend themselves. Saudis? After decades of training and trillions of dollars the Saudi’s can’t beat the freakin’ Houthis down in one of the poorest countries in the world, Yemen. It is literally on their own peninsula? Syria? Somalia? Lebanon? Palestine? All shithole countries.
Only when the Muslim theocracies crash and are supplanted with legitimate democracies will they ever have a chance of assimilating with the west. Only when women are treated as equals and the goofy costumes are thrown on the campfire will the rest of the world honestly take them serious. Only the oil of OPEC has allowed a failed religion to flourish and suppress millions. As the world turns away from oil to renewables the Muslims will be forced to adapt to a new reality or watch their countries and economies become irrelevant sooner than later.
I remember my dad telling me at the very beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan that it smells like another Vietnam. “It’s too far away, we have nothing in common with those people and nothing is going to change. Should have learned that from Vietnam.” Dad seems almost prophetic now as this article alludes to. Another thing I remember him telling me was how Vietnam changed America. “When I was a kid you believed your parents, your principal and the president. After Vietnam and Watergate that was destroyed and never came back.” This wisdom needs an exclamation mark.
Today? I guess my first question is do I feel safer here at home post 9/11? Not really. The TSA and the department of homeland security were needed, however. People often forget the caliber of employee at the airports prior to 9/11. This was one step below Starbucks and one step above McDonald’s. Had the airlines and airports offered their ground employees the same nice perks the pilots and stewardesses get there is a good chance a higher caliber employee would have been able to draw suspicion to at least one of the 19 Saudi terrorists who all had red flags in the check in process.
Unfortunately, the Patriot Act was passed and The Man snuck into every crack in our private lives it could find entry. As Andrew Snowden’s Prism leak showed the world, this was done exclusively with the biggest internet and phone companies in America. This agreement allows backside access to Uncle Sam in real time. Sure, the NSA targets, collects and stores information on bad guys. But no one signed up to have all their communications recorded, stored and accessible by the government without their knowledge, period. Plus, there will be more leaks in the future. Recently leaked was the CIA’s catalogue of hacking tools and that were then subsequently released for sale on the dark web for untraceable crypto currency. Do I feel safer? Not really.
One of the biggest failures of our military and defense institutions is the requirement to always trumpet good news and suppress bad news at the lowest levels. Advancing in rank means more money and more prestige. In Vietnam the only thing that mattered was a body count. This number was easily digested by the American audience. Unfortunately, that number swelled to 57,000 dead Americans and many more wounded. The truth came out, protests erupted in the US and Saigon fell.
In Afghanistan, and Iraq, the troops on the ground, and the vets who came back, were all silenced by the Bush and Obama administrations unless that message was freedom, honor and sacrifice. Predictably, another leak changed that narrative. Bradley Manning’s leak posted also on Wikileaks showed an American helicopter firing on and killing civilians and a reporter in a van. How did this happen? Just like Vietnam; the enemy is hard to identify among locals, we don’t speak the language and a feeling of impunity felt by the troops. Never was there any serious debate in public about, “Why not cut our losses and get the hell out of there?” Nope, the only message coming out of the Mideast is more freedom and democracy and winning the war on terror. Everywhere in the Mid East a Muslim terrorists mastermind is lurking around the corner we are led to believe. Whatever....just don’t say oil.
I have said all along the reason the results in the war on terror are terrible is this is an ideological war with no mission objective. Desert Storm of 1990-91 which I participated in had a solid war time playbook. There a clearly defined mission and overwhelming force. Kuwait was liberated, Saddam took a huge beat down and we left. In place was a no fly zone that kept tabs on Saddam’s decimated military. There was no shortage of history or intel on what lied in wait for us in Afghanistan prior to entering; legions of Muslim zombies, 3rd world poverty, largest poppy fields on the planet and a shit ton of guns and ammo in the hands of the bad guys. However, there wasn’t much in the way of prime targets for air strikes after a few days. Soon the the mission became a trillion dollar military machine targeting illiterate teenagers hiding in caves and valleys. One would think with such overwhelming force the results would have been different.
Osama bin Laden and his henchmen had left Afghanistan long before any building was left standing that cost less than the bomb to blow it up. He supposedly ended up killed in a US Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan. The most highly sought after terrorist in the world was simply shot and killed in a botched raid and thrown over the side of aircraft carrier within 24 hours? After a years long international manhunt, torturing of detainees and paid informants when we finally get to the guy we shoot him in the head and dump him over the side without a single picture or video of proof of this for the American public? Odd, the Internet still has pictures of Saddam Hussein being hung and Libya’s ousted Ghadaffy being beaten to death but zero visual proof on Bin Laden’s demise. Odd, to say the least.
The only way Afghanistan possibly might have worked was if the intention was making it, Ameristan. Colonize it and take over the entire country and establish martial law. America didn’t have the stomach for this. There were campaigns to win hearts and minds, payments for alternate crops, infrastructure projects and billions in cash poured into Afghanistan. However, it has been one of the most corrupt places on the planet for decades. The intelligence told us Bin Laden had left long ago. It we stayed. In fact, he’s been dead for a few years now and we are still there. What is also still there is $1 trillion dollars of rare earth and other minerals found by American geologists. Who did our Afghan puppet government give the mining rights to? China and India.
No, the Taliban will not adhere to this new agreement either. No, they will not support the puppet government, women’s rights, human rights, opium trafficking or any of their other previous agreements. Yes, Afghan is led by an American puppet government and the Taliban obviously know this too. They can wait, we can’t. Yes, Trump is right about departure. It doesn’t matter, it is not worth it and it is time to come home. Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia should also be a part of these negotiations. There is little to be gained in any of these places for America. There is untold opportunity right here on our side of the planet and plenty of bad guys just south of the border if our military wants to flex its muscles or do good deeds.
To the troops and buddies of mine who served over there I wanted to thank you. There are many scars from this war as there have been throughout our country’s short history. The troops are youngsters just doing their jobs. America, like a young adult, will make mistakes. What is important is that we learn from them and avoid them in the future. This was not the case in Afghanistan. Good deal, bad deal or no deal....Bring the troops home.
How would you feel if you found out one day the person whom you thought was your father was not. This, in fact, happened to my mother, Liz Patterson, in 1974 shortly after the death of the man she presumed was her father, Floyd Patterson of Marion, Iowa. Floyd, the husband of Violet Williams-Patterson, was a welder for Iowa Manufacturing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the 1960’s and and 1970’s. There were four daughters and a son between Floyd and Violet. Floyd was a little guy about 5’7” and 140lbs. soaking wet. From my father and step father’s testimony back in the day Floyd was not a real smart guy and had a temper. Violet can best be described retrospectively as a wild, red headed, unfaithful liar. I know this because I also made it a point to get her side of the story prior to her death on Christmas Day in 2002 too. What a crazy story it is.
Floyd was a simple guy who enjoyed fishing in the river, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. My dad said he was also a good roller skater too. He fished with Floyd from time to time prior to his divorce from my mother around 1970-71 when I was approximately two years old. I have a few vague memories of him. The pictures I recovered from my mother’s photo album later in life jogged memories that were long buried in my mind. I was five years old when he died of lung cancer in 1974. Shortly after his death my mother’s aunt Kathryn, Floyd’s sister, told my mom that Floyd was not her father. Her father was a guy named Earl “Bud” Coghlan of Manchester Iowa. Bud was a teenage local guy who had sex with a teenage Violet before Floyd. Violet got pregnant and prior to my mother’s birth in June of 1949 Floyd and Violet got married. I never heard the name Bud Coghlan until this year, 2020, as my father finally told me the guy’s name. He also said my mom did not have a good up bringing. My dad was a small town guy himself from Alburnett, Iowa. My mom was the flirtatious girl from Marion. One thing led to another and my brother Bill was born in 1967 and I was born in 1968. The short and tumultuous marriage between my biological father and my mother collapsed after a couple years and my step dad entered the picture. It should be noted that I trust both my father and step fathers’ stories 100%. My mom? Not so much. She has always had a problem with honesty and as my step mother told me years ago, “I just don’t think she can help it.” Years later, I think that was a pretty accurate call. But that is another story.
None the less, my father and mother agreed that my step father could adopt my brother and I and in turn he agreed to pay off the debts my mother had run up in her departure. Not the kind of agreement I would have ever agreed to but they were in their early twenties, it was 1970-71 and I was two or three years of age and eighteen months younger than my brother. My step dad took a job as the manager of the restaurant Country Kitchen in West Des Moines, Iowa. My brother and I grew up in West Des Moines. Unfortunately, the marriage with my step father was not successful either. The death of Floyd and subsequent confession by aunt Kathryn was the final straw. My mom went nuts and divorced my step father within a couple years. Since he had adopted Bill and I my mother soaked him for child support which he paid until I was 18 years of age. By the time I entered kindergarten my mother had divorced twice and was living with another guy, Bob Reynolds. He was a loser from Waukee, Iowa with with a loser 13 year old son named Randy that were in the picture for a few years in the disco days. My mom had no formal education and bounced around from job to job over the years. My brother and I would see both our biological father and step father from time to time as we grew up. Our biological father we saw maybe a few times a year but our step father was there every other weekend until I was maybe eight or nine years of age. One weekend he didn’t come to pick us up and stopped answering the phone. I was heart broken as I truly loved him and knew my mother was not telling me the truth about what happened. This was the beginning of a very difficult upbringing for both my brother and I. Dick would reappear a few years later and explained he felt he was in the way since my mother had already moved on with another guy but he still paid child support the whole time. We were also forbidden growing up to to see my grandmother in Marion as she was deemed a liar and had zero visitation rights. My mother clearly wanted to control the narrative without much detail.
By the time I was sixteen years of age my brother was living in a boys home in Johnston, Iowa and I had run away from home several times. Both of us were involved with drinking, drugs and petty crime. One time I ran away for about 6 months and lived on my aunt Sharon and uncle Gary’s couch in Clive, Iowa, another Des Moines suburb adjacent to West Des Moines. During this time I got to see my grandmother for the first time in years. She seemed like any ordinary grandma. I was in a tough spot but I clearly remember seeing her at my aunt’s house around 1984-85. As time went on I joined the navy at seventeen years of age. While I was on a ship I sprained an ankle and had an X-ray taken on my ankle which revealed a shadow on my tibia. I was referred to Oakland Naval Station in 1988 to have the X-ray reviewed by a naval orthopedic surgeon. The surgeon told me it was benign and had been there since I was born more than likely or since childhood. It never bothered me and had it not appeared on the X ray I would have never known about it. That episode seemed insignificant until years later when my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
I had graduated college, married and began a family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was an adult and had visited my grandmother a few times living in Cedar Rapids. I asked her one time about the story that Floyd was not my father. She adamantly denied any other story other than Floyd was my grandfather. She said in fact that the proof was within me. She pointed at my knees and said that not only did Floyd have bone spurs removed at the University of Iowa decades ago that I also had them too. She said it was called osteochondroma. There is no way Violet would have known this word had she not heard it before. Simply, she wasn’t the kind of gal orthopedic surgeons would be hanging around discussing patients with. She clearly remembered it from Floyd’s diagnosis. I remembered the X ray from the navy and immediately requested my records. My feeling was my mother may have called out her own mother in error after her aunt Kathryn’s confession. I did a little research on osteochondroma and discovered that the incidence of hereditary osteochondroma was approximately 1 in 50,000. The population of Cedar Rapids in 1949 when my mother was born was around 50,000. It would be fantastic and very compelling proof because if I did have osteochondroma it would prove the link to Floyd being my grandfather as statistically he was probably the only guy in the city who had the marker. The records came back and, sure enough, I had osteochrdroma stated in the records of the Xray taken at Oakland Naval Station. I called my mother and informed her of what had transpired and offered her the evidence to review.
My mom was in a tough spot because, in fact, if the records were accurate it would be hard to deny that Floyd was her father. My mom in the interim reached out to her aunt Kathryn who was still alive and had her come over to my house with her. Both of them sat at the kitchen table and were shown the evidence. They did not know what to say. The evidence seemed very compelling. My mother’s aunt was confused by the documentation and insisted it didn’t matter that she knew her teen brother’s wife was impregnated by someone else other than Floyd in 1948 prior to their marriage in April 1949. My mother was born in June of 1949. I told Kathryn she had created enough problems in my family and was completely unaware of the subsequent disaster that unfolded in my mother’s life and both my brother and I caught the majority of that fragmentation. I asked her to leave my house and she did.
My grandmother was dying and I spent some time with her towards the end. I showed her the documentation from the navy and she seemed confident that it was correct. Grandma, however, also had a lifetime lover named Karl Sibert. He was Floyd’s supervisor at Iowa Manufacturing in Cedar Rapids. I was informed it was well known that Karl was not only married he was having an affair with Violet for years. My step mother told me that it was terrible and that his wife would call over to Floyd and Violet’s looking for Karl. My dad told me there was no way Floyd didn’t know that Karl was fucking his wife. He also told me Karl was a dumbass and a shitbag. He was the kind of guy who would run his mouth about banging black pussy as he called it. Karl stayed around for decades and indeed I met him towards the very end when I was over at my grandma’s house painting the interior for her little house. It was an ugly mint green color I will never forget. She let me rummage through all her photos and I took several that have been scanned into the cloud. However, in the conversation with grandma and Karl I explained what had transpired with the navy medical records and Kathryn. Karl looked right at me and said, “Bone spurs? I have those too.” I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing and changed the subject.
I went home and looked up osteochidroma further on the internet. There are a variety of different types of this bone disorder and because I have a benign one on my tibia and Floyd had some removed is not conclusive proof of genetic lineage. They are all dead now and the only way to prove that now would be to find the dependents of Earl L. “Bud” Coghlan and have them take a DNA test. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a dependent of Karl Sibert tested to eliminate him from the picture. Karl’s obituary mentions nothing of my grandmother Violet and neither does Earl “Bud” Coghlan’s. But, my grandmother’s obituary does mention Karl as her long time companion. Floyd, Violet and Karl are buried in Cedar Memorial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Earl “Bud” Coghlan is buried in Thorpe Cemetery in Manchester, Iowa. If any of the defendants of these families would like to take a DNA test to get to bottom of this once and for all I am game. But the larger lesson in life is that dishonesty, poorly calibrated moral compasses and failure to come clean created tremendous damage in my mothers life and both my brother and I’s lives. People tend to inherit more than just hair color and eye color from their parents. All of Floyd’s other children were small in stature like him with dark eyes. My mother clearly was taller than all of her siblings and had light colored eyes. My brother and I are both over 6 feet tall. Bud was a guitar player and so am I. Floyd was a good roller skater and I am as well. I have blue eyes and my brother brown. Karl was taller than either Floyd or Bud and cleary was with Violet for many years. But when did that begin? Who really is my grandfather?
"There are no atheist in foxholes.” A wiseman once said. I have to agree with this. I am not really sure what is out there to be honest. It would be foolish to say there is nothing beyond what the human mind can perceive at this point in time. However, I am almost positive it is not what the vast majority of religious people on the planet believe today. I do not believe in Allah, Buddha,Jesus or their supporting evidence. I am positive these religions will eventually fail as philosophies in general and take their place on history’s trash heap of once popular but abandoned ideas of the meaning and purpose of life itself.
Honestly, there is not much proof beyond the ancient texts or scribblings either. Let’s be honest, this type of evidence today wouldn’t stand up in small claims court let alone explain life. I find it strange that just because something was written down a couple thousand years ago that it is automatically accepted as fact. There were no bullshitters or people with an agenda? On the contrary. When you add in the fact that the majority of people on the planet were illiterate well into the 15th century, at a minimum, much of this religious “science” and “history” can be categorized as folklore. Ever wonder why religious books are not stored in the non fiction section of the library?
A good universal test that can easily disprove most ancient religious tales is simply demonstrating the unreliability of human story telling in general. In a classroom, church, auditorium or gathering of 50-100 people who are unsuspecting of the test one simply needs to begin a short story. For example, “ A lady walks down 4th St. to the library on 3rd Ave. She picks out a book, The Life of Bud of Jones. It was a classic fictional story written by His granddaughter, Helen Jones, in 1934.” This can be any short 3-4 sentence story in this example. The person giving the test then whispers, or shows the sentences written on a piece of paper to the first person. That person then tells the next person verbatim what was told to them in a voice quiet enough no one else can hear it. Person number two then repeats the story quietly to person number three. The process repeats until the last person in the room gets the story. What you will find is that by the time the story gets to the last person in the room it is nowhere near the original story. So why do people believe stories written down a couple thousand years ago, translated many, many times over and created by illiterate people are true?
A good example for Christians would be comparing and contrasting some common American fables to stories in the Bible. No, the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota were not created by Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox roaming around the woods swinging an axe and creating gigantic depressions with their foot prints that later filled up with water. There is no one that believes this to be true. However, the idea of Adam and Eve creating all of mankind from one another is also not true. Obviously, this requires incest. As man has known for many, many centuries that incest leads to mental and physical abnormalities and deformities thus making it impossible to create a diverse world of humans from a single set of parents. The Bible is full of these falsehoods; walking on water, feeding the masses with a few fish and few loaves of bread, splitting the Red Sea, an arc carrying two of every animal, etc…To deny these are mere folklore is simply choosing to be ignorant. The same can be said for the 12 virgins in heaven awaiting muslim martyrs. Are all of these virgins females? Does this apply to women muslim suicide bombing martyrs too? Do they get 12 virgin females or is there a caveat so they get 12 virgin males? In fact, where are the damn Muslim women in religion? Same with Buddha. You can sit around and meditate all you want but in my life I have found the harder I work the luckier I get. There is nothing wrong with meditation but you also need to get off your ass and start hustling in the world if you want to accomplish anything meaningful during your time on the planet.
Nope, religious people move along in life clinging to their scriptures and belief systems cherry picking the parts they like and ignoring the more controversial parts like yesterday’s potato salad. They wear goofy costumes and hold strange ceremonies worshipping a deity they have never met and only exists in their head. Their faith or personal relationship with their high power is simply gullible and misguided in my book. If they want to believe if in this stuff that is fine with me but never try the holier than thou stuff with me. I have done my own homework and I am not buying. Keep in mind there had to be the last person to believe in each of the pervious belief structures in history too. Eventually that person died off or was presented with a more sensical belief about life itself.
When I look out at the stars I often feel like some of the people that were roaming around the pubs and inns of Spain and Portugal around 1490. The Catholic Church’s doctrine was that earth was the center of the universe and all the other heavens rotated around this center. If one continued to keep sailing west there would be the edge of the earth and sea serpents devouring ships and their crew before they fell off the edge. Surely, there were citizens in these coastal towns and cities that told Columbus, his crew they were crazy. Indeed, Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were not the first ones propositioned to fund the journey to the new world, they were the last. Who are the most forgotten people in history? Indeed, the people in these same towns and cities across Europe that said Columbus and his crew crazy. In very short-order the discovery of the new world turned religion on its head. Soon came Copernicus and Gallileo to spawn the beginning of modern astronomy, physics and engineering. Eventually, the old ideas and philosophies about how the world worked died with its believers.
This brings me to another aspect of religion that has always seemed obvious. Why is it that man actually believed in the Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods in the first place? Almost all of these beliefs were tethered to astrology and seasonal changes that dictated the growing and harvesting of crops. No Horus of Egyptian mythology was not born from the bones of his father after his mother put his dismembered body back together, minus the penis that was thrown into the river and eaten by a catfish. No, Apollo did not pull the sun behind his chariot across the sky. No, Aphrodite, the Goddess of love and beauty, was not born from sea foam and the severed penis of Uranus.
Long before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic these once popular belief systems had been laid to rest as folklore. Odd, the religious people of the world today seem to dismiss these once popular religions as ridiculous and yet cling to theirs as if their faith in their religion has somehow transcended the ignorance of our ancestors. Really? Actually what I notice with most religious people I have met is they are not very open minded at all. Although they may tolerate another’s different religious belief, deep down they believe the different religion to be inaccurate or misguided. “If only they knew the true power of the true gospel. “ This is mutual exclusivity is universal in the religious folks.
In my opinion, a relationship requires two way communication. No, you do not have a special relationship with your higher power, God or whatever you want to call it. If you hear a higher power talking to you I would seek medical attention or suspect someone dropped some acid in your kool aid. No, the man or woman calling themselves a prophet, priest or spiritual translator is no more accurate their flock of sheeple in these failed belief structures. Anyone can can turn the television to the cable TV channels and watch the stupidest exercises in human reasoning 24 hours a day in America. One bullshit idiot after the next claiming to be the translator of the lord with more emotion than reason and then subsequently asking for donations. It is literally everything from talking in tongues, snake handling, faith healing or simple motivational speaker jargon disguised as Christianity. This garbage is so bad other Christians don’t even want to acknowledge their existence. Why? Of course, they have a more fundamental belief or more lucid translation of the scripture….Yawn
“So, what is that I do believe in? Nothing?” I have been asked. Well, I guess I would have to put myself in the modern day crew of Columbus. I do believe there is something out there. There are just far too many observations in science and life itself for there not to be a larger force in play. When I look out at the stars, much like our ancestors once did, I can’t see the other side. However, when I look at the periodic table I see a bunch of microscopic spheres with other spheres clinging to them that identify them as individual elements. For me it is the same thing I see when I look to the stars; a bunch of spheres with other spheres that identify individual locations. The exploration of the planets that are around us have proven they have the same microscopic elements we have here on earth in different amounts, density and temperatures. Life, as we know it now, can’t survive on these other planets because of these fluctuations. However, in our own Petri dish, earth, the environment does exist.
A Petri dish is also a good analogy to start. If one looks through a microscope into a sample grown in a Petri dish life is there. One can usually see a specimen of something using the available resources within the environment to grow by killing off and eating the other specimens in the Petri dish until all the resources are gone or they are moved to a bigger environment where they can continue to grow and flourish. Do the living organisms in the Petri dish have any idea they are part of an experiment? Nope. What about the blood cells in your body? Viruses? Bacteria? It is quite easy to see the biblical claims in Genesis that man has dominion over all the animals is ignorant. In fact, it is this microscopic world who has dominion over us and always has. It is only in the last couple centuries have humans really began to understand this world unseen to the naked eye.
This illustration also alludes to a hierarchy of intelligence. When I look into a fish tank I can clearly see life forms swimming around. They are born, mature, reproduce and die just like me. They know who their friends and foes are in the tank. They can even acknowledge me tapping on the glass. They know when I sprinkle food on the top of the water that it is nutrition for them. They can learn. Not much more than this but they don’t need to for their species to have evolved and lived for millions of years. This goes up and down the animal kingdom.
The smarter and more complex animals sit at the top of the food chain. In the ocean this is the dolphin that is trained by man to do a variety of tasks. On land this is the chimpanzee who can be trained to communicate and use tools on a rudimentary level. But neither the dolphin nor the chimp have any idea about the bigger picture in life as they are just not smart enough. It is quite convenient for man to believe we are at the top of the food chain in our galaxy and there is no scientific experiment being undertaken on us without our knowledge. Do I believe in extra terrestrial life or UFO’s? I have never seen or experienced anything like this but many people have. It would make a lot of sense if it were true.
I also believe the single most important thing to life is not elements that are building blocks but intelligence. Without the ability to even perceive the surroundings? Nothing even exists. I believe that intelligence, like eye color, hair color and height definitely has a genetic component to it. We are just now on the very edge of this science but I do believe it will lead to the manipulation, incubation and gestation of life in a prescribed format. Why would you not want some better looking, more intelligent and healthier human life forms? We do this with almost every single living plant and animal incapable of stopping us already. All the crops in the fields, the animals on the farms and the organisms in the Petri dish go through this exact methodical process to get the desired species or outcomes that we humans want. None of these life forms have any idea that their entire life cycle is being manipulated either. Is it possible this pertains to life forms beyond humans too? If I am accurate and intelligence is something that can become a commodity it too would need a Petri dish to manifest itself or it would simply be a lifeless equation. If we are certain that man evolved from the apes and the apes evolved from another species and that species from another, etc...It would be ignorant to believe we humans are not in evolution. Even though we came from monkeys the monkeys are still here too. Do they know we came from them? Nope.
I don’t have all the answers either but this what I think about the subject of religion.
I was just telling a buddy this old sea story the other day. Although it is a little naughty it is a true and crazy story. This story unfolded while I was living onboard the USS New Orleans (LPH-11) in 1988. It was tough living having to work as a freakin’ mess cook about 12 hours a day and share a berthing with about 100 other guys. There were no women on our ship except a couple pilots and they were off limits. As time would have we found ourselves anchored off Mazatlan, Mexico. I was 20 years old. My long distance Swedish girlfriend and I were on again and off again. These few days transpired while we were on the outs. My shipmates and partners in this adventure were; Dan “Deke” Rundberg, Mike Patrick and Tim King. We were on a quest to party. All of us in our group were guys training to go to SEAL training or navy diving training. In short, we were young guys in great shape between the ages of 20-24. In fact, we swam in the open sea to Isla de Parajos, an island about half a mile off the beach, for some training. To our surprise, however, we discovered there were some Canadian sorority girls on vacation also on the beach. This was a young sailors dream come true.
My trusty shipwrecks and I abandoned the ship for our 3-4 days in port and decided we would get a hotel room on the beach in Mazatlan. Sure enough, we found a location close to the action in a hotel that looked almost identical to all the other cheap hotels. This was a simple two story motel with one and two bed rooms for dirt cheap. Being the broke sailors that we were we opted to get a single room for four guys. The chances were pretty good that at least half of the foursome would do nothing more than shit, shower and shave in the place and use it as a storage for our sea bags. However, we did commit to the shipwreck rule that if one of us got a girl back to the room the others would have to forfeit the other bed and head for the beach to sleep on the sand. Sex with a woman in the room would trump almost any other cause a sailor in port could imagine and specially a simple good night’s sleep off the ship. On our way to the room with seabags in hand Deke noticed an open window on the room next to ours. He crawled inside and opened up the front door. Voila, we now had two rooms if no one rented the adjacent room.
As luck would have it, my stars aligned these few days. Our first night out we got verification the Canadian sorority girls indeed were in town and there were a bunch of them. We went to one of the random bars stretched out across the lengthy beach and began to drink beers. As the sun set all of us went our separate way in search of the Canadian girls. I found them myself standing in a long line outside a bar. Unfortunately, they all were wearing a glow in the dark bracelet that signaled they had prepaid for the experience so free food and beverages would be included upon entrance. I asked the door man but there was no buying a bracelet. I had to find a way into the bar so I decided to go around back towards the beach. There was a high surrounding wall that contained an outdoor dance party inside. Obviously this was invite only and the only way in would be to scale the wall. I jumped up and looked over the wall and the place was packed. There were some young white guys in the mix too but they were clearly outnumbered by the girls. I had to risk it. I scaled the wall and began dancing with all the others like I had been there all along. There were a couple shipwrecks in the crowd but not my peeps. I had to let the fellas know I? Had penetrated the fortress containing the beauties. A wink and a nod to the other guys who I noticed were not wearing bracelets either but the focus was soon directed to the young lady in front of me. She was attractive and that is all I remember now so many years later. To a shipwreck, an attractive girl giving you the signal? This was a slap upside the helmet telling me to immediately get her away from everyone else and make my move. No telling me twice. We exited the bar and headed down to the beach. A few minutes later and the clothes came off and we were packing sand in every crack that would fit a grain. Whatever, the deed was consummated and I felt like I was rounding third base to the roar of the home team fans in my head after I smoked a rocket over the centerfield fence. Great to tell my shipwreck buddies of my conquest. Unfortunately, we walked a bit up from the surf where we disrobed one another and she discovered a Mexican gypsy had stole her purse. She was pissed and vanished in a matter of minutes to retreat to her friends back at her hotel room. This was unfortunate, but I felt proud as a shipwreck. The victories were few and far between for a mess cook living in a berthing in the bottom of the USS New Orleans with a 100+ other shitbags. I took this initial victory as a conquest like young men do. It surprised me that there were young women who were equally as sexually charged as I was. Maybe not equally, but close enough.
The next day our crew regrouped. I am not sure what the other guys’ stories were after all these years. I do remember a Mexican guy, however, who walked up and down the beach letting people throw three steel tipped darts at him for $5. I have never thought of myself as sadistic, but a guy letting you throw three darts at him from about 20 feet away for$5? It was genius on his part. Chances were good most people couldn’t even hit him, specially after drinking. I saw him take a couple shots to the chest after telling the tourists, “No shots to the face.” He simply covered his eyes while the dart was thrown and then pulled the steel tipped darts out of his chest, wiped away a little bit of blood from the puncture wound and then moved down the beach looking for the next tourist with $5 who was willing to throw at him. This was impossible to forego. I signaled the man, took my darts in hand and threw them more like a baseball than a dart. The first shot rocked the guy. He winced in genuine pain. It stuck maybe quarter of an inch into his chest. I laughed hysterically. It didn’t matter, that wasn’t his first fast ball to the chest, nor the last. The second shot was a miss and the third was a ricochet off his thigh. It was still worth $5.
The news of the Canadian girls spread like a wildfire amongst the USS New Orleans shipwrecks on the beach. The rumor, and immediately verified truth, was the Canadian sorority girls had rented out the entire bar with the surrounding 8-10’ foot walls on the beach. They would be there every night we were in port. This undoubtedly was divine internvetion. The sexual desire of a crew of shipwrecks and shitbags who had been at sea for weeks was about to be released upon the Canadians. The second night there were even more ladies standing in line for entrance than the night before. I made my around the wall and noticed several guys were peering over the wall and then ducking back down. Again, I was now listening to the music, hearing the girls’ laughter and the smell of their perfume commingled with the smell of fresh meat on the grill. It was too much. There must have been 20 guys out by the wall plotting their next move. No hesitation on my part. I jumped up for a quick look and then quickly over the wall. It was heaven. The young Canadian women again were everywhere. Drinking, laughing and dancing to latin music. As luck would have it, I hooked up with an attractive brunette after a few songs. We danced for a couple numbers and tried to talk over the loud music. It was almost impossible. Soon we were kissing on the dance floor. I was stunned there were so many good looking girls in varying degrees of intoxication. I gave her the eyebrows up and looked at the front door. I wasted no time exiting the bar with my new girlfriend of the evening. I decided not to go down to the water after the previous night’s experience. I walked around to the other side of the bar. That place had to be the spot guys ducked into and took a piss after night fall when no one was looking. There were some beach chairs stored alongside the large wall and the spot was secluded enough for our intentions. The clothes came off and we had sex right there on one of the chairs. It was a quick act and she said she wanted to go back into the bar to check on her friends. I didn’t have a bracelet so I said I would scale the wall and rejoin her inside. I never made it back into the bar and instead opted for one of the beds in one of the motel rooms.
No one rented the room beside us again and thus the maid didn’t go into the room in the morning to clean it. It was a fantastic bonus. The two free beds meant no one would have to sleep on the floor. I am not sure how King and Patrick ended up but I do remember sitting in a bar with Deke the following day and he was 0 for 2 in our two days in port. I testified to the breaching of the wall stunt and surely by then every sailor on the USS New Orleans knew the drill. We listened to U2’s Joshua Tree album over the bar’s speakers and looked out over the sea. We were a long way from home but it was good to be alive. We got drunk looking at the waves wondering where King and Patrick were. I told Deke not to be bummed out about not scoring with the ladies. Part of being a USS New Orleans shipwreck is get flamed out by the women in San Diego bars. They knew we were in the navy and thus broke idiots with hard ons. I encouraged him to have no fear and we would simply scale the wall again after dark and just keep talking to the Canadian girls. Eventually, sunset fell upon us and without a second thought we went immediately back to the wall. Sure enough, a crew of various shipwrecks from our boat had mustered by the wall. I paid them no mind as they were the competition. I successfully scaled the wall a third and final time that night. I was met again by another large mix of college girls and various guys. I noticed a few guys from the ship had already made it over and were not wearing bracelets so the owners must not having been checking very thoroughly.
The fourth night was our final night in port. I was proud of myself. I had never had sex with two different women in two days. I was looking for either of the girls from the previous encounters but did not see them. Fortunately, I soon found myself dancing with a very attractive blonde girl. It was almost too loud to even talk so I asked her if she wanted to go outside where it was quieter. She agreed and we left the bar holding hands. As we were walking out I saw the girl with light brown hair from the previous night. I know she saw us but pretended not to notice. I said nothing. We got down to the beach and I kissed the blonde girl. She was very receptive. Could it be a triple play? Three different girls in three consecutive days without paying for it had to be a ship’s record. We walked down the beach a bit too far talking and the plan was made to return to our motel room. However, all of the bars, restaurants and homes along the beach had closed their beach access gates. There was no way to get off the beach without walking all the way back to the original bar with high walls. I also didn’t want to risk a chance of running into the brown haired girl who potentially could ruin the opportunity with the sexy blonde girl by making a scene. We cut in between two properties and decided to just climb their gate. Unfortunately, for me, the top of the gate had tines on it. The blonde successfully made it over to the other side but when I went to swing my leg over I pierced my right calf on one of the tines. I began bleeding heavily and it was obvious as I was wearing shorts. Luckily, we were close to the motel. I hobbled over to the motel room and knew that I needed to get the bleeding to stop and see the puncture in a little better light. I made it up the stairs and went to the rented room only to find Deke and King already in bed. Instead of wasting time trying to enforce the sailor with a lady prividlege we had agreed upon earlier I went over to the next room still unrented and climbed through the window and let her in. I got a towel out of the bathroom and turned on the lights. It was worse than I thought it was and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. She was even more beautiful in the dim light of the hotel room. I remember I told her I was a mess cook on the ship and living in a berthing with 100 other guys. She wanted to take me to a hospital but I talked her out of it saying there was one on the ship and it was only a couple stitches. We talked for a bit longer then I turned off the lights and we began kissing. The clothes came off and we had great sex on the bed. We agreed after the act that I needed to return to the ship on the first boat back. It was early in the morning and probably around 4am. Right as we exited the room Patrick was walking up the stairs and was shit faced. He made a comment about the sexy blonde and without a second thought went into the room we just exited. I hobbled back to the beach and we parted. She gave me her phone number and address. I told her I would call her when we got back to San Diego. It was the last I ever saw of her. The ship’s doctor sewed up my leg with a couple stitches and I went to my rack in the berthing and crashed into a deep sleep.
The next day I was limping around the hangar bay and was approached by Patrick. I began beating my chest over my triple play conquest but he was pissed. I asked what his problem was and he asked me in return, “What in the fuck happened in that room?” I told my story and he just shook his head. “Fuck, man. I got woken up by a maid and a Mexican cop. They thought someone was killed or stabbed in there. We didn’t pay for the goddamn room so I had to pay for that and all new towels and sheets. They were pissed. I thought I was going to get arrested.” I laughed my ass off. I offered to pay for half the room. The ship pulled up anchor and we headed back to San Diego. Not too long after that I went to dive school in Florida, King and Patrick went to SEAL training and Rundberg got out of the navy. If I ever see Mike Patrick again I am sure this story will come up. I honestly don’t remember any of the girls’ names and have no pictures as I was not taking my camera out at night. Too bad. I called and wrote the hot blonde girl a letter but she never answered. Funny to think she surely has to be reminded of this night whenever she thinks about the college trip to Mazatlan in 1989.
It would be hard not to write something about the Philippines. Although it has been many years since I have been back I can say there is no place I felt further away from home than the Philippines. The volcanic mountains tower over the island jungles and low lying towns. There are several stories I could tell of getting drunk on .25 cent Red Horse and San Miguel beer on Magsaysay Drive in Subic Bay. There are also the stories of great bands, idiot stunt pulled by drunk sailors and marines and the multitude of bar girls that were about $15 each. However, every US military guy that has been to the Philippines since WW2 has these stories and I can only say most of what you have heard regarding these subject matters is probably true.
The base is closed now. The US pulled after the Mount Pinatubo volcano in 1991 leaving behind a long legacy of US servicemen’s sins. Back in the day, when leaving the former US Naval Station Subic Bay sailors and marines crossed a bridge over the famous Shit River. It was a large filthy drainage basin that filled with varying amounts of seawater, rain water, raw sewage, bikes, beer bottles, household appliances, garbage and genuine filth. Kids could be seen playing in the water from time to time but never a US service member. It was a disgusting introduction to Olongapo; the town on the other side of the bridge. From first glance Olongapo looked like a filthy strip of Tijuana, Mexico. The smell of Shit River was supplanted by the smell of diesel pouring out of the exhausts of the jeepneys. These were converted old US military personnel carriers that had been left behind and now decades later were the Filipinos version of public transportation. Most were decorated like Asian Christmas trees blasting rock music at all hours of the day and night. If Shit River didn’t make you gag as you walked down Magsaysay Dr. there was the distinct hint of vomit, beer and piss in the air that was undeniable. All of these scents were jammed in your nose by the oppressing humidity that kept the stink low to the ground and pulled the sweat out of you simply by walking around at 8am. Walking down Magsaysay Dr. At night the streets were jammed with servicemen being constantly solicited to buy something from the tiny bodegas and bars. All of it was cheap both in price and quality. All the bars had American names and most of the girls did too.
I can say the most memorable events transpired in the fall of 1990. As America was ramping up Desert Shield to eventually become the invasion and subsequent war, Desert Storm, I found myself as a member of a four man Explosive Ordnance Disposal team onboard the ammunition carrier USS Mt. Hood (AE-29). The four of us did not get along well and spent no time with one of the others from our team while we were in any port and the Philippines was no exception. However, when we pulled in to Subic Bay EODMU5 took over the duties and responsibilities of the ordnance on the ship and pier. We were temporarily assigned to Mobile Unit 5 for a few days while the ship was loaded with a massive amount of ammunition on the pier. I knew one guy already at EODMU5, Perry Sassnet. He was a guy I had partied with a little bit in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida around the time I was in EOD school. He was a cool guy and he and some other EOD guys had rented a huge house right on Subic Bay. The rock music was blasting from some Bose 901 speakers and the beer was drank by the case. After my $15 bar girl let me throw it in her butt for an extra $5 in one of the rooms in the house her and another girl were sent off to get some fish for the evening’s entertainment. A 22 year old sailor 10,000 miles from home coming off a few weeks at sea and arriving in the Philippines? It was impossible to deny the comfort of sex with a woman. There were literally hundreds of girls to choose from dancing on the bars in bikinis with a number pinned to their bathing suit. It was as simple as speaking to the mama san and paying the $15-$20 fee. You actually got a receipt that was good for 24 hours. It was crazy but true.
The hours passed and Perry and I drank beers and told sea stories. It was good to be back on land after crossing the Pacific. Some other EOD guys showed up and a few of them had brought their wives from the states over with them. I am not sure if they were visiting, lived on base with them or out in town. It was smart of those guys to bring the wives over. A marriage would never make it if the guy was sent to the Philippines by himself. The temptations are just too strong and easily financed. What the women actually would do for jobs would obviously be restricted to the base as they would be paid almost nothing like everyone else in the Philippines outside the base. As the afternoon progressed into the evening the girls returned with a fish almost the length of my arm. I am not sure what kind of fish it was but it had already been gutted. They started a fire in a pit, threw a grate over it then threw the fish on top. It was primitive but highly effective. Not too long after that we were eating fish right off the carcass. It was probably best to end the evening there as I was already very drunk and should have headed back inside the house to crash but people began sitting around a picnic table. The next thing I knew a Filipina girl came out and stood on the table. She placed a soda bottle on the table and then stacked some coins on top of the bottle. This was the Peso Show I had often heard about but never witnessed. Without missing a beat the girl squirted some baby oil on the stack of coins balanced on the bottle. She dropped her bikini bottoms off and squated on the stack of coins taking each and everyone inside her vagina. She then jumped up and down and the coins came bouncing down on the table. I was laughing but the white wives were just stunned by the performance and offered a large tip. It brought the women up to speed in real short order about the difference between sexuality and love I suspect.
The following day we were back at Mobile Unit 5 and were assigned to a few guys who were going to blow up some retrograde ammunition out on their demolition range. We took about a fifteen minute pick up ride through the jungle to their range. The jungle was so dense you could not see but a couple feet into it. All I could think about was what it would be like to be my age back in Vietnam fighting in there knowing there were a bunch of other guys in there locked and loaded with booby traps everywhere. When we stopped the truck and got out it was a symphony of screeching birds and monkeys. There were a bunch of monkeys close to us and I had never seen them in the wild before. “Roll the window up, bro.” One of the MU5 guys told me.
“Why? It is about 80 degrees already.” I replied.
“Yo, genius. The monkeys will get in the car and steal our lunch if you don’t.” He replied sternly.
“Are you serious?” I was stunned as I looked up at the monkeys staring at me.
“Dead serious.” He said as he waited for me to obey the command. “You see that monkey right there?” He asked as he pointed his finger at one that apparently had one arm but was sitting close by in a tree.
“The one with one arm?” I asked.
“Yeah, that is Lefty. He is an asshole. He constantly stole our lunch and would shit in the truck. We rigged a blasting cap inside an apple and blew his goddamn arm off. He is still fucking there, man. Get our tools out of the truck we need to head down range.” He said as he walked off. I stared at Lefty and laughed. There were few rules in the Philippines. I liked that.
When we got out to the range before we set up the charges the MU5 guy was looking in the jungle with his binoculars. “What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Negritos” he replied without taking the binoculars off his eyes.
“What are negritos?” I asked
“They are bush people for the most part. They live in the jungle. They are darker in color than most of the Filipinos in town. They know what we are doing. They sit around and watch us from the bush. If they see us setting up a charge and walking back out of the fragmentation radius too slow they will run out there and cut the time fuse and steal the detonation cord, blasting cap and the whole damn charge. We can’t shoot them and they know it. So they hear us driving up and will look for a chance to steal our shit.” He confessed.
“Un-fucking real.” I was stunned
“Oh, it is real alright. Our captain is in the hospital right now because of these bastards. They use it for fishing. They throw the dynamite or C4 in the water and after it blows up the dead fish float to the surface. They collect the fish and sell them in town. We had some guys out on a dive op and these fuckers come floating up on a bonka boat and did exactly that. Our captain was one of the guys on the op and could have been killed. He got fucked up pretty good from the blast though.” The guy said as he let the binoculars fall from his face and walked out on the ammo that was being stacked up by the other guys. I was stunned by the balls these negritos had to have to run out on a burning piece of time fuse and cut the damn thing before it went off.
The next day we were diving on a WW2 navy ship that had been scuttled in Subic Bay during WW2. The ship was very cool but I had a problem with my regulator and had to abort the dive about five minutes into it. It was unfortunate because it was an amazing shipwreck in excellent condition. The following day I was in the hospital on base trying to get a new pair of glasses when I noticed a bunch of guys standing around a television. It was president George Bush saying we had begun bombing Iraqi targets. I went back to the ship and we left the next day for 60 straight days at sea without pulling in to a port. We never pulled back in to Subic Bay on our return home but I definitely want to go back one day.
The importance of a mentor can not be underestimated in life. Every person in their 20’s and 30’s knows what it means to be a teenager and going through the motions of maturing in life. For me, I can mention several individuals who have graced my life and made a change in me. Many of them are worthy stories of their own but this one is about a time in my life when I was on the fence between being a negative and heavily depressed young sailor in the navy or challenge myself to make the best of the situation starting with my attitude.
In 1988 I was 18 years old. I had been kicked out of US Navy Dive School in Coronado, California. I was assigned to the USS New Orleans (LPH-11). My job was a blue shirt, a flight deck ape. The ship was an amphibious helicopter carrier with about 600 crew members and an accompaniment of 1500 marines when on deployment. One day while I was moping around the flight deck in the rain I retreated to the super structure of the ship to find our space with the other apes full with no where to sit while waiting for the next helicopter to land. I was exhausted and retreated to the gear locker a few feet away inside the super structure. I laid down on a pile of air hoses and drifted off. My life sucked. My friends were off to college partying with college girls and I was a dive school drop out floating around the pacific on the ship of fools doing a job an ape could do. I closed my eyes and drifted off knowing I would be awaken by another blue shirted ape telling me it was my turn to go back out on the deck and chain the incoming helicopter down when it lands.
Fortunately, for me, I was indeed awaken, but not by another blue shirted ape. It was Lt. Bruce Anderson, a navy helicopter pilot and my division officer. “Jasa, what in the hell are you doing? Are you sleeping? We got birds coming inbound. Get your ass out on deck and see me in the air department office when you get off spot.” He yelled as I scrambled to my feet and made my way out the door as he just shook his head. The helicopter filled up with gas, took off to fly off and do laps around the ship until it ran out of gas again and I retreated below decks to the air office to find Lt. Anderson sitting at his desk with my service record in front of him. “Jasa, what are you trying to accomplish in the navy?” He asked.
“I want to be a navy diver.” I replied honestly.
“You are not good enough. Says here in your record you failed. A few months later you are working for me and I find you sleeping on a pile of hoses in the gear locker during flight operations. Imagine that.” He stared right at me.
“Sorry about that. Wont happen again, sir.”
“I should hope not, Jasa. I am looking at your ASVAB scores right here in front of me. You are probably one of the smartest guys on the flight deck. You are also probably one of the best athletes on the ship too. Your attitude? Probably the worst. The navy can change your life. Sure, your job is not the most difficult or challenging but it is important none the less. You need to be professional about your job if you want to advance to other opportunities. Trust me, the navy needs good sailors.” He said as he looked up from my service record.
“Yes, sir.”
“Jasa, what do you want to do with your life?” He simply asked.
“I want to go back to dive school, sir.” I again relied honestly. It was a huge failure on many fronts. My ego was was on life support and instead of doing a cool job in the navy I was stuck with a bunch of geeks in the middle of the ocean chaining down helicopters.
“You are not good enough. For shit sake, I just caught you sleeping in the gear locker. Those guys are very legit navy sailors.”
“I would like to try again, sir.”
“I’ll make a deal with you. You clean up the attitude and show me you are serious about the navy and I will consider it. You are going to be on this ship for quite awhile before you are even eligible to try again so I will have plenty of time to evaluate your performance.” He replied and smiled. He was the one signing off on my evaluations. What he said is all the government cared about regarding my career.
“You got a deal. Thank you, sir.” I was elated I was not being punished.
It was not too long after that one night we were doing flight operations when another ship in the area had a helicopter go down in the ocean. Our helicopters were deployed to go look for survivors. The word came across the deck that a pilot had been rescued from the sea and was headed inbound. It was a cool feeling. We had actually saved a guy and he was being flown back to the ship for medical evaluation. I was called out on spot with another individual to chain the helicopter down when it landed. When the bird touched the deck and was chained down I saw the door on the fuselage slide open and a soaking wet guy in a flight suit with an inflatable life preserver on emerge from the helicopter. The look on his face when he stepped on to the deck was unforgettable. He was alive. He had been saved. I looked into the helicopter and there sitting in the pilot’s seat was Lt. Anderson. He saw me looking in and gave me a thumb’s up. I nodded my head and then fell into a rapid and deep depression.
“There you go. Proof positive. The man is a hero. He just literally plucked this guy from the ocean in the middle of the night and saved his life. You? Sound asleep in the gear locker during flight ops? What would have happened had your number been called?” I thought to myself. I couldn’t escape it. This was exactly why Lt. Anderson’s number got called and not mine, I wasn’t good enough to even do one of the easiest jobs on the boat for one reason, my attitude. I had failed and been humiliated. My ego took a fatal blow. However, instead of learning from the experience and improving I blamed the navy and fell into a negative spiral that encompassed my entire being. Something had to give. Lt. Anderson challenged me and I accepted.
Over the course of the next few months I improved my attitude, advanced in rank twice and was given good evaluations. Lt. Anderson followed through and signed off on my request to return to dive school. I had to extend my enlistment an additional 15 months to get the orders. It was difficult but I made it the second time around. I only stayed in the navy a couple more years but that lesson was never forgotten. You can’t control much of life but you can control your attitude. A positive attitude, some discipline and hustle and the world opens up. A negative attitude, laziness and complacency is a prescription for disaster. But like most things in life we learn from failure. It is what you do with that failure that matters. It gets down to attitude pretty quick. Having someone more mature, more experienced and genuinely interested in your outcome is priceless. I was fortunate to have someone interject in my life and challenge me to improve. I have never won any awards for a positive attitude but when I do become deflated, bored or lonely I think about Lt. Anderson from time to time and our encounter. I think of the many youngsters I have been fortunate to mentor over the years. I am but a cheap facsimile of many great people who have graced my life. However, if some characteristics in my demeanor have improved the life of another I did something correct.
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