At The Wall (Again)

I’m a writer. I've always been a writer. When I was seven my best friend, Ricky Bradshaw, showed me how to fold blank paper in half, and then staple the fold to make a book. If my grandmother wasn't so cheap about her typing paper I would have written 300 books while in the second grade. These books were usually 12 pages long, and the stories were about Tyrannosaurus kicking ass. It was all there: a strong character, a plot, and a resolution. By third grade I’d branched out to the USS Constitution sinking pirate ships. In junior high school I retreated into my head as my world went sideways, but I still managed to write a story here and there.

In high school I wrote a lot. My freshman English teacher, Mr. Scheckler, encouraged me to write him stories. It was his way of keeping me interested in class, and to his credit it worked. I wrote 12 stories for him. After high school I still wrote once in a while. There was always a college rule notebook in my desk which I would write in when the urge hit me. I find these stories when I clean out my closet, or my truck. Most I don’t remember writing. They’re like gold to me now. I think about the other stories I've written which have been lost, and it boggles my mind.

The problem was before I realized I was a writer I thought being a writer meant you had to be published. This is my mistake. There are people who earn their living as writers who are not writers. Writing is a means to an end. They have no passion for their work beyond its dollar value. I have spent a great deal of time lamenting becoming a guitarist because of the years I felt I wasted becoming good at playing. Now I’m glad I did it. The very things I did to become a quality guitarist are the same thing pushing me along to becoming a good writer. Silly drills, writing prompts, description exercises, and throw-away stories are sharpening my skills. The next barrier is the one in my head.

The key to becoming a good guitarist was practice. Education, reading books, magazines, and studying the work of other players was important. Without practice it was all wasted. I practiced guitar an average of four hours a day, seven days a week. On some days I played as much as ten hours. My fingers are deformed from holding a pick for thousands of hours, or as Larry Carlton pointed out I “have the hands of a guitar player” as witness to my dedication. My skills as a writer grow with each story I finish, but the real action starts when I sit my ass down to write at a dedicated time every day. As I said, this is the wall in my head I need to get over, around, under, or destroy.

Let me clue you in on the monster in my head. I had terrible things done to me as a child. I was lucky to get help from gifted people along the way who guided me away from many dark paths. However the damage is there, and on some days it seems as fresh as ever. I call it the monster because giving it a shape and a face helps me fight it. Playing guitar helped me connect to the larger IT of the universe allowing me to create free of ego. The monster fed and justified my addiction to booze. He gave me an excuse to quit. The irony is through writing I have been able to unearth damage to my psyche I wouldn't have found any other way. With each story I write it has become harder for the monster to hide.

So now I’m at that wall. On this side is everything I know, my life from birth to now, some success within reason, and a lot of self-doubt. On the other side? Success, maybe, a life without the monster in my head is certain. So at this moment I think about women we studied in Citizen’s Police Academy. They chose to stay with an abusive husband because it’s safer than the unknown. At this point in life I can’t see how the unknown can be any worse than my life up to now. So here I am one more time. All I have to do is grab the brass ring.

Stay tuned.

On Ronnie Montrose

I haven’t written much about guitar though my screen-name is Axxman. I should fix this.

I began playing guitar in September 1978. To be honest my brother loved rock music more than I did at the time, and the evidence for this was his massive 1200 album collection. I benefitted from this by having access to just about every cool rock album there was. My own collection would grow to 500 before CDs took over. The other benefit was my brother’s to the point critiques of my playing progress, and this mostly consisted of “you suck”, “do better”, or he’d just shake his head as he walked out of the room. On the bright side he was always bringing home albums of guys he thought I should know about.

Ronnie Montrose was one of those guys.

The album was Gamma. The song which had the biggest impact was “Thunder and Lightning”. It was just a rocking song where Montrose was spotlighted. Unlike Van Halen, who is probably from another planet, Montrose’s playing was accessible -NOT EASY – but a style I could wrap my young guitarist brain around. I never fell in love with Ronnie Montrose, mostly because of his choice of questionable singers, but I always liked him.

I saw Ronnie Montrose three different times by accident. By accident means he wasn’t on the original bill when I bought the tickets. Bill Graham (his manager, and Bay Area concert promoter) would add him to the ticket later. So I saw him with Humble Pie and Ted Nugent. He opened for Blue Oyster Cult. The last time I saw him was at Oakland for a Day on the Green with Santana, Toto, and Journey.

Montrose was liked by most people he knew which speaks to his character. I just thought he’d always be around, or at least be around longer. I hope he’s happy wherever he’s gone to, I sincerely wish this for him.

Falling for Me Instead of Instead of Falling for Anything

Fear has fascinated me since I was a child. Not just the thrills of a good scare, but the way people allow themselves to become prisoners of their fear. I’ve learned that fear isn’t always obvious, isn’t always easy to address, and even once you flush your fear out into the open it is still difficult to get by. Fear creeps into the hard-to-reach places of your psyche and holds on as it spits irrationalities in your face.

My greatest fear is success. It took me 47 years to figure out why. In the beginning, way back when I had therapy in high school, I thought I had figured it out, and that I could hang my low-self esteem on my grandmother who was always happy to tell me how worthless I was. It was easy because she was a visible target. Not until I read "Falling for Me"- by Anna David

http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Me-Curtains-Learned-Traveled/dp/0061996041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305184996&sr=8-1


where she discussed her childhood bouts with anger, and how her family (her father in particular) dismissed her anger by making fun of her. As an adult she became a cocaine addict, and has sabotaged most of her relationships. She beat her addictions and struggled from one relationship to the next. Her engaging book details the journey she took to learn to allow her to love herself. It is a good book and well worth your time to read.

In my case I heard my experience echoed by Anna David. Growing up I was never allowed to have all my emotions. It was okay to be happy, but I was never allowed to be angry, and being sad was out of the question. Like Ms. David this is the root of my low self-esteem. Without access to all of my emotions from an early age I never learned to control them, so I ignored them, or I medicated them away. When I get mad I overreact, or I suck all of that anger in and hold it. I’m convinced my weight problem is a physical manifestation of this, and coupled with low self-esteem it is the perfect downward spiral. Anna David talks about how her temper kept men at a distance, and how cocaine allowed her to numb the negative feelings. Being drunk was my escape from myself too.

In Falling for Me Anna talks about not being able to blame her ex-boyfriends for the failures of their relationships, and instead beating herself up for the loss. I spent a lot of time letting people blame me for things that were not my fault. By the time I’d been laid off in 2001 I was used to being the company fuck-up, and in being the company fuck-up I was underpaid without question. So imagine my surprise when my first job as a temp was wiring control panels for Systems Integrated out at the Cal-Am water filtration plant in Carmel Valley. That job was the first time someone told me I could do an important job, and it was the first time I was complemented on my work. My self-esteem had made me a prisoner for so long that I’d just accepted when things went wrong it was my fault. Suddenly I began to look back and question this.

I went back to school in 2007 around the time I stopped drinking. At school I found I could do things, and I discovered that I’m smart. This was a new experience for me. I still don’t know how to cope with it, and every fiber of my id wants to curl up in a ball. In my writing class we had an exercise where I had to write about myself. I started out writing about why I write about monsters, and horror because of the things that had happened to me as a kid. I told my professor that I’d held back because it was kinda painful. He told me never hold back. Later I wrote a poem that was a ballad, and it bothered me. The poem was about a guy who’d been a hero but was condemned for crossing a line. The hero is called upon to save the day one more time, and just as he’s about to catch the bad guy he turns to walk away. The bad guy sets off a nuke, and the hero could care less.

This was the darkest thing I’d ever written. The poem was coming from some hard-to-reach place deep inside of me. In time I realized that I was angry for being used by so many people in my life, and I was angry at myself because my low self-esteem had made it possible. I’d always known there was a problem. I called it Knight in Shining Armor Syndrome were I was always fixing someone’s problems to boost my ego, and I the process keeping from fixing my own problems. This had spread into my love-life as I shied away from normal women to seek out damaged ones. I developed a pattern where I’d put some woman back together emotionally, and then she’d walk out of my life leaving me devastated. Looking back now I realize that I knew they’d all leave and that was fine because I didn’t deserve to be happy anyway. The new wrinkle was that I now realize that most of those women took advantage of me, and that while it was my fault in one way in another way I was victimized just a bit.

Now that I had that revelation in my writing class, and then the enlightenment from Falling for Me I have been able to flush my fear out into the open where I can begin to kill it. I intend to kill it with style too. The first thing I will do is submit a bunch of short stories to publishers. I am a writer now, and I will allow myself to accept this with pride. The other thing I plan to do is follow Anna David’s example and follow guidance from a classic book to improve my life.

In my case this book will be the U.S. Army Ranger Handbook. God help us all.

Guess What? We Were Warned

I thought a lot about what I’d right for the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/2001. I started a number of pieces that soon turned into rambling. As the day approached the Department of Homeland Security issued warnings of potential attacks in the form a truck-bombs, and the targets could be New York or Washington D.C. Yet due to the vagueness of the warnings the response has been mostly cynicism from most Americans. This finally gave my thoughts focus. Ten years ago in the Spring of 2001 there are warnings that Al Qaeda was planning to strike the U.S. somewhere in the world, and that it was possible that their attack would take place inside of the United States. It was no secret. The warnings were there for those who read the middle and back pages of the newspapers. Few people read the warnings, and fewer took them seriously.

On June 9, 2001, the Associated Press’s Pauline Jelinek wrote an article about how Army bases across the country would tighten security and restrict access. The story cited a “system-wide review of security…started after October’s bombing (2000) in Yemen of the USS Cole…” as a reason for the directive. Then on June 22, 2001 the State Department issued a “World-Wide Caution” alert:
http://www.familymanagement.com/reports/travel/Worldwide-090701.html
This warning is quoted in its entirety:

Public Announcement
Over the last several months, the U.S.
Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at
increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have
received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against
U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military
personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we
received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist
threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida
organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between
official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously.
U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert. U.S.
citizens are urged to maintain a high level of vigilance and to take appropriate
steps to increase their security awareness to reduce their vulnerability.
Americans should maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required
travel, and treat mail and packages from unfamiliar sources with suspicion. In
addition, American citizens are also urged to avoid contact with any suspicious,
unfamiliar objects, and to report the presence of the objects to local
authorities. Vehicles should not be left unattended, if at all possible, and
should be kept locked at all times. U.S. Government personnel overseas have been
advised to take the same precautions. In addition, U.S. Government facilities
have and will continue to temporarily close or suspend public services as
necessary to review their security posture and ensure its adequacy. U.S.
citizens planning to travel abroad should consult the Department of State's
Public Announcements, Travel Warnings, Consular Information Sheets, and regional
travel brochures, all of which are available at the Consular Affairs Internet
web site at http://travel.state.gov. We will continue to provide updated
information should it become available. American citizens overseas may contact
the American Citizens Services unit of the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate by
telephone or fax for up-to-date information on security conditions. In addition,
American citizens in need of emergency assistance should telephone the nearest
U.S. Embassy or Consulate before visiting the Embassy or Consulate. Department
of State travel information and publications are available at Internet address:
http://travel.state.gov. U.S. travelers may hear recorded information by calling
the Department of State in Washington, D.C. at 202-647-5225 from their
touch-tone telephone, or receive information by automated telefax by dialing
202-647-3000 from their fax machine. This Public Announcement supersedes the
Public Announcement - Worldwide Caution of June 22, 2001 to inform U.S. citizens
of unconfirmed threats against U.S. military facilities, personnel and
establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel. This Public Announcement
expires on December 22, 2001.

Yes, there’s nothing in there about hijacking passenger jets then flying them into buildings, but it is clear that the US Government was expecting an attack – somewhere – between June 22, 2001 and December 22, 2001. The holes in the national security machine (re: the CIA & FBI) have been painfully documented elsewhere, and will continue to be exposed as time goes onward. What has been lost in the cloud of dust of the collapse and two reflexive wars is another story from June 23, 2001. The Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC) had a reporter in Kandahar:

“"I met with bin Laden near Kandahar (Afghanistan) over the last few days and his main supporters said in front of him that there will be a big surprise over the next two weeks," the MBC correspondent said.Among the bin Laden supporters quoted were Abu Hafs, considered as bin Laden's right-hand man, and Ayman al-Zawahirit, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.”

While the two week mark came and went it was common knowledge the US was in Al Qaeda’s crosshairs. At least it was common knowledge to the Arab press, and to people who tracked terror warning. For some reason the threats didn’t resonate with the American public, even though the World Trade Center had already been bombed in 1993, and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City had been destroyed by a truck-bomb in April, 1995.

The talking heads on the national news desks and those on the cable news ghetto all begin their yearly 9/11 sermons with how naïve and innocent Americans were on the morning of 9/11/2001. This is bullshit. Americans weren’t naïve nor innocent, they were simply ill-informed. The national news media had collectively fallen asleep at the wheel. In the summer before the attacks the news universe was dominated by Congressman Gary Condit and his missing intern, Chandra Levy. There is also the Enron scandal that the media had also failed to detect in advance in spite of their multiple financial experts on staff. Just as they failed to look deeply into the Enron and the “Tech-Bubble” there was little interest in looking into threats from Al Qaeda. ABC’s John Miller seemed to be one of the few to understand Osama bin Laden to be a larger threat. His interviews with bin Laden can be found on ABC’s website, and are worth reviewing even now.

The point is that after the attacks fingers were pointed at the Bush Administration, and the bulk of responsibility rests with their disinterest in the subject of terror threats before 9/11/2001. Fingers need also to be pointed at the news media as well. The Time Magazine that hit the stands after the attacks contained amazingly detailed accounts of Al Qaeda’s movements inside the US, and their planning overseas. The only way this level of detail was possible was because reporters had already been following Al Qaeda independently, and after the attacks they quickly connected their dots. The question needs to be asked: Why was the news media so uninterested in Al Qaeda prior to 9/11/2001? The network and cable news pimps have no problem generating their own stories, and framing them in a way that they can be milked for weeks on end. Why was national security a back-burner issue?

The sad thing is that these questions will never be answered. I read the June 22nd warning in my local news paper, and on that morning when the towers came down I remembered that Al Qaeda had planned a strike on US interests. While I was shocked and horrified I was not surprised. There is much complaint about what has happened to America since the attacks, but the fact is that Americans have surrendered their responsibilities for their own security to the Federal Government. Nothing has been taken away by force. We haven’t lost anything, we handed it over. When the government asks Americans to be vigilant the response is to compare the US to Soviet Russia. If more Americans had been vigilant before 9/11 the attacks could have been headed off, and there would be no need for a Homeland Security. Yet in 2011 the average American can’t be bothered with security matters. For all of the histrionics the fact is that we are just as pathetic as we were on September 10, 2001.

In the Wake of a Beautiful Woman

Beauty is its own reward or something along those lines. Today I went to my favorite Mexican restaurant, and as fate would have it I followed just behind a stunningly beautiful young woman. Instead of watching her I watched everyone else as she entered. There was a buzz as every male head turned to stare at her; say what you want about the speed of the internet, this young lady had it beat. The Latino men working behind the counter all smiled and blushed. The man at the counter was as professional as he could be with a big goofy grin on his face.

Magically the dishwashers appeared from the back to check her out as she stood carefree at the counter. She had the kind of beauty that gave the appearance of weightlessness. Her hair seemed to float, her blouse was fit to her upper body yet not tight, and her pants seemed as if they were painted on. Nothing she wore grabbed at her. The men around her seemed to float as well, as if they’d suddenly lost thirty pounds. I suspect this was the loss of mental weight as whatever thoughts had been running through their heads drifted away like Dandelions on a Spring breeze.

She sat down at a table near the counter as her order was to go. I smiled as many of the men suddenly needed to get up and refill at the salad bar which was nowhere near her. While there may have been vulgar talk about her at one of the tables I certainly didn’t hear it. Yes every guy in the place was lusting after her, but not in an aggressive way. It’s the kind of lust saved for that woman you hope to be stranded with on a Tropical island. The kind of lust where you know you would be the happiest man on earth being the one who woke next to her each morning. This kind of beauty has gravity, the kind of gravity that pulls from the inside out. As she sat there unaware of the stir she had caused the restaurant fell quiet as the men just watched as she scrolled through the messages on her phone.

Her order was ready (in record time) as was mine. We both stood and I paused to allow her distance before I followed her out. I was enjoying the view to be sure. The magic continued outside too. She got into her modest sports sedan and backed out. Usually the traffic here is impossible at lunch. It seemed as if a gap in time-space itself accompanied her as she drove away. Once her car was out of sight the spell was broken, cars lined up making my crossing of the street a chore, and the restaurant became noisy again to the point where I could hear it from the parking lot.

I won’t waste time trying to unravel this mystery. Partly because there are things that can never be known, but mostly because I don’t wish to take the fun out of it all. I’ve seen this happen before over the years with many other women, and it always fascinates me as men change gears to adjust to this angelic presence. It is the involuntary nature of this response is intriguing because it is counter-intuitive. For some types of beauty men become clowns, or jackasses. This kind of beauty causes them to become their better selves. That is the mystery, why can’t we men become our better selves on our own, and wouldn’t this attract this kind of beauty? Is there a fear that we can never measure up? Is being that better man a frightening concept?

Like I said, I’m not going to try to figure this one out, but you never know. If I do I’ll pass the secret along.

Midnight Ride of Paul Freakin’ Revere

There were these guys called The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety who hired this guy named Paul Revere as an express rider to carry important shit to New York and Philly. On the night of April 18, 1775, this Dr. Joseph Warren guy calls Revere and tells him to haul ass to Lexington, MA, to tell Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British were on their way to bust them. Revere asks how the fuck Warren knows, and Warren tells him that the Red Coats had launched a bunch of small boats as they took the infantry and grenadiers off duty. Then Dr. Warren tells Revere to shut the fuck up and get moving.

His buddies had arranged a signal in the Old North Church where they’d hang one lantern if the Brits came by land and two lanterns if they came by sea. Well the Redcoats were coming both ways but they didn’t have a signal for that. Way to go, assholes. So Revere gets some guys to row him across the Charles River and goes to the home of his buddy, Deacon John Larkin. Most historians will tell you that Revere borrowed Larkin’s horse, but the truth is that Deacon Larkin kept the Batmobile in his stable. I don’t know, somehow it traveled time or whatever, but Larkin found it. Then Larkin briefs Revere on where the British check points are, but Revere tells him that he doesn’t care because he’s driving the fucking Batmobile. So Larkin says “Cool” and Revere does a wicked-hot peel out.

So Revere is doing like 125 down the road, and he’s yelling over the loud speaker “The British are coming, and not in the fun way!” Houses light up as he blows past them. He pulls up in front of the house where Adams and Hancock are staying. They come out and can’t believe what they see.

“Yo Revere! What the fuck is that thing?” Hancock says.

“What the fuck does it look like? It’s the mother fuckin’ Batmobile” Revere says. Then an argument breaks out over who should get the Batmobile from here on out. Revere thinks he should keep it because he needs to haul ass to Concord to warn the militia, but Hancock and Adams insist that they should drive it because they’re more important. Finally Revere agrees to give them the Batmobile for a keg a week of Adam’s wicked beer for the rest of his life. A fair trade? I think so. As this is goin’ on a second rider, William Dawes shows up. Revere gets a horse and rides off with Dawes towards Concord. As they ride down the road they’re joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. However they don’t get too far before they run into a British patrol and get arrested. That’s what happens when you blow off a mission briefing, but I digress.

Dr. Prescott escapes right off the bat by using the old “Your shoe lace is untied” trick, and rides off to Concord. In the confusion Dawes escapes too, but Revere stands there like a fucking dumbass. So the British start questioning him, and Revere tells them everything like a big pussy. The British officer wasn’t buying it so he pulls out his pistol, and puts the muzzle to Revere’s skull. Then for some reason he asks if Revere is the same dude who does the quality metal work and Revere says he is.

“Well Christ, Revere, my wife has all of your stuff. She fucking loves the silver tea set your people made. Look, get back on that horse and go home, I’d hate to have to shoot you.” So Revere gets escorted a few miles back towards Lexington before the Brits screw him by taking his horse. So Revere walks back to Lexington were he finds Adams and Hancock about a mile from where they’d started.

“What the fuck? You two gonads should be in Philly by now” Revere said. He was pissed.

“Hey, give us a break, ass-clown, it’s 1775 so we don’t know how to fucking drive yet” Hancock said.

“Okay, fuck it, I’ll drive. Move over.” Revere said. He got behind the wheel. About four minutes later they were at a house in Woburn four miles away. Now that they were safe, Revere hauled ass back to the Clark house to find out what the fuck was going on. When he gets there two riders show up and tell him that British soldiers are almost there. So Revere runs inside and grabs a trunk full of Hancock’s papers, drags it outside, and puts it into the trunk of the Batmobile. Just as he closes the trunk the British show up. Revere gets into the Batmobile and locks the door. The British soldiers form a skirmish line in front of the car, and the officer orders Revere to surrender. Revere flips them the bird. The troops open fire but the musket balls bounce off the car’s armor plating. Revere gets on the loud speaker and tells the Brits that they can lick his hairy ball sack. The Soldiers fire another volley, and Revere just laughs. Suddenly the car roars to life as Revere floors it in reverse, then he hangs a perfect bootleg turn, and he’s fuckin’ outa there.

I don’t know what happened to the Batmobile after that. One rumor says that the British captured it, and took it back to the Tower of London where it was kept up until 1870 when Queen Victoria crashed it into the palace wall while testing the air bag system. The other says that it was given to George Washington after the war, and on his death he willed it to be kept in the basement of the White House. Supposedly every President has driven the Batmobile at least once. That makes more sense, with great power comes an awesome car.

Ben Franklin said that.

The Follow-On Tragedy of the Arizona Shootings

Now that the smoke has cleared from the shootings that occurred a week ago today it is clear that the shooter, Jared Loughner, is saner than the news media, and the many political talking heads of our country. In less than two hours the political voices in the country raced to plant their spin-flags among the corpses. Because the shootings happened in Arizona, and because the primary target was a Democrat the assumption was automatic: The shooter was a Tea Party activist and Sarah Palin was to blame. Almost as soon the right-wing marshaled their forces to defend themselves and point fingers at the left. This all happened before we knew anything about the shooter including his name. Even worse we witnessed respected media personalities fall victim to their own prejudices. Maybe it was fitting that the shootings happened in Arizona because of it is synonymous with the old west, and the media’s reaction was exactly that of an old-west lynch mob. Just like the aftermath of those old-western lynching’s the true culprit went unpunished.

The culprit at the root of this shooting is mental illness. That is what we need to be talking about. Our prisons are full of the mentally ill because we are failing to address this problem. I work in a job where I come into frightening contact with homeless people who are clearly mentally ill, and quite often my life is in danger. I am not trained to deal with the mentally ill, my police department has limited options about what they can do with the mentally ill, and more and more the mentally ill are either being shot by police or killing someone themselves. I don’t pretend to have any answers here, and my frustration is that because the political whores have prostituted this incident away from the actual cause, and instead they have decided to dress it up as their various boogey men.

Shame on them.

Americans hate to talk about mental illness because it is a complex issue that ultimately comes down to how the illness affects each individual. Americans like simple answers and cookie-cutter solutions. Mental Health is the opposite of both those and it … well it drives us crazy. Mental Health is also expensive on almost every level which automatically complicates the subject as the political-media industrial complex knee-jerks into action. Exotic medications, MRIs, CAT Scans, psychiatrists, and psychiatric councilors are all expensive prospects. Then you have mental health advocates who are well meaning, but in the end limiting the help that the mentally ill can receive. Their motivations stem from the 19th and 20th Century abuses of the mentally ill in asylums around the world. These abuses were such that as they came to light Americans demanded change, and most mental institutions were eventually closed down. What happened to their former patients? All dumped onto the streets.

All of this could be the center of discussion in the media today yet it is not. Although by Sunday of last week we knew that Loughner was mentally ill the news media had decided to continue with the angle that “vitriolic political language” was the cause of the shooting. The very people who are tasked with reporting facts (NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN) had instead stooped to innuendo. The idea that political activism had more appeal then having to discuss yet another troubled person with blood on his hands, and one has to question not only the judgment of those news editors they also must question their sanity as well. How is a discussion of gun-sites on Sarah Palin’s campaign website or Rush Limbaugh considered rational in conjunction with what we know about Loughner? It is clear that Loughner had stalked/targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords but it is not clear he did so because she was a Democrat. As of now it is just as likely that she was targeted because she was accessible, and because she just happened to be the Congress person within range.

Jared Loughner is the first encounter with what will be a big problem in the 21st century. Loughner may have an under –lying mental illness but it has been compounded by Digital Retardation. Loughner didn’t watch TV, nor did he listen to the radio. Instead he was a creature of the internet. In my spare time I moderate a message board that is geared to video gaming and high-tech gadgets and issues. The posters on this board range from 13 years old to 75 years old with the bulk of them being college age. They do not read books on the level that their predecessors twenty years ago did, and this handicap is evident as even the brightest young people lack the ability to grasp complex issues on an adult level. The internet afford young people the ability to never come into contact with adults, and the result is that they either mature more slowly , or never mature beyond a 15 year-old’s mind set. The internet’s anonymity also allows antisocial behavior to go unchecked, so Loughner couldn’t understand why behavior that was acceptable on the internet was not acceptable in a college classroom. His handicap was compounded by the lack of intellectual maturity because he was able to feed his world view easily by frequenting websites where his delusions would be considered normal. The absence of rational adult input can only be guessed at for now but it is likely that is sped Loughner’s downward spiral.

As you can see Loughner represents a convergence of complex issues that require serious discussion. Once again Americans, when confronted with the uncomfortable problem of the mentally ill, have decided to change the subject. I can’t speculate as to why the news media went the way that it did. Unlike the responsible news agencies I can only address the facts as I know them now. When more facts come along I will adjust fire accordingly. Why can’t the news media do this? What I saw on Saturday and Sunday of last week was right out of the Salem Witch Trials. How did paranoia (and that is the only explanation) engulf so many educated and otherwise rational people? It was like watching Medgar Evers putting in a KKK robe. Why was it more important to hang their personal political agenda on Loughner’s act than simply deal with the facts? How did this help anyone? Don’t they realize that they undermine their credibility when they do stuff like that? To underscore the failure of the big media was the fact that a handful of bloggers were ahead of them in obtaining and reporting the facts.

So at the end of the day not only were six people dead but the credibility of the news media died off just a little more too. Yet those who work in the media fail to understand or admit their failures on every level. So instead of making this about the victims they turned it into political circus, and then condemned others in the media for turning this event into a political circus (complete with t-shirts at the memorial – that is another rant for another time). In doing this the nation lost valuable time on a serious discussion that affects our society on multiple levels. Like I said earlier, the real tragedy is that Loughner’s actions and the media response were equally insane.

Yet nobody is calling them on it.

Citizens of a Forgotten Planet

Fort Ord was nick-named “Planet Ord” or just “The Planet” sometime in the 1950s. It has its own geomagnetic field, its own weather patterns, and because the fog line can move unevenly across the base a long road march would often seem to start in a different country. The Army opened Fort Ord proper in 1941; its roads and ranges were laid out under the supervision of General Joseph Stillwell. If understand Stillwell then you understand that Fort Ord was designed for foot travel. Used for basic training for part of WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam as well as being home to a variety of units lead to ten million men and women passing through this base by the time it was shuttered in 1993. The last group is what interests me, the 7th Infantry Division’s “Lightfighters.” They were my generation born from 1963 onward (known as the “Baby Busters”), and they represent a brief moment in US Army history when the Army seemed to get it right.

The 7th ID Lightfighter stood out for two reasons; the first being their distinctive rag-top helmet covers that lead to their various nick-names: Cabbage Patch Kids, Swamp Things, and Bob Marlies, and they stood out because of their above average soldiering skills. The 7th ID was the first unit to be built upon the lessons of the Vietnam War, and its many officers and NCOs were veterans of that war. The Army raised its standards for fitness and performance in 1984, and the new Lightfighters responded to the challenges and then raised the standards to a new level. At the same time the Army instituted the COHORT (Cohesion Operational Readiness and Training) system wherein entire platoons would serve their entire four year enlistment together from Basic Training onward. These platoons were usually the various weapons platoons such as the mortar crews, anti-tank, anti-aircraft, engineers, and artillery. These platoons received an extra three weeks of training on their weapons before moving to Fort Ord. Upon arrival those Vietnam era NCOs could take the freshly minted GIs and mold them into soldiers in their own image.

Hiking the maneuver ranges of Fort Ord (known as the “Back Yard”) can be a lesson in infantry archeology. Fighting positions (Fox Holes) can be found in the textbook locations at trail intersections all over. Where the Lightfighters made their mark is where they put their positions. Well camouflaged holes can still be found almost intact throughout the entire base. These are invisible until one walks right up on them. The mark of the Lightfighter seems to be the impossible fighting position that can be found on the steep canyon sides. Even more impressive is that after the position was occupied another team of Lightfighters attacked this impossible position; the spent shells of .556 and .762 rounds complete with the rusting detached belt links from the assaulting SAW (a light machine gun) along with four or five pulled hand grenade rings still lay where they fell.

Over the next ridge from this forgotten skirmish site is Fort Ord’s MOUT-Site. MOUT stands for Military Operations in Urban Terrain; Fort Ord’s MOUT-Site is named “Impossible City” because its design made successful assault on any building impossible without massive casualties. Unlike MOUT-Sites at other Army or Marine bases Impossible City is one square mile of densely packed buildings with many tight allies and only one road. Here the Lightfighters trained for potential battles in Korea, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, and Peru. Impossible City is today owned by Monterey Peninsula College for its police academy, and it is routinely used by various military special operations forces and SWAT teams from all over California. It is here where the Lightfighters excelled in gleeful ruthlessness as the attacking forces would encounter booby-trapped staircases, hallways, and alley ways. Blackhawk Helicopters would swoop in and the men would “Fast Rope” sixty feet down onto the rooftops. The mock battles sometimes ended up in actual fist-fights as the OpFor (Opposing Force) laid waste to the attackers. The MOUT-Site was where the majority of Fort Ord’s serious injuries occurred as soldiers went flying out of third-story windows, or dove down flights of stairs avoiding improvised explosive devices made from the plastic MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) packs that were armed with the charge from a practice grenade and stuffed full of unpleasant bodily excretions.

Booby-traps were the 7th ID Lightfighter’s signature. Lightfighters booby-trapped their booby-traps, and it is unwise to pick up anything one might find walking through the back country. A few years back I was hiking with a friend who had been stationed at Fort Ord from ’89 to ’93. As we cut through an off-limits swath of land he suddenly stopped and told me in a hushed voice to slow down, and to walk directly behind him. He had walked me into a kill-zone where his unit had once operated in a defensive action. They had strung the trees with practice Claymore mines and when I suggested that they must have been cleared by that time he pointed to a trip-flare still attached to the nearest tree. Then he pointed to the second wire that leads away to where a Claymore had once been placed. Over time even the aging charges inside practice munitions can ruin your day.

It is eight miles from the brigade area to the rear gate of Fort Ord. Round trip is sixteen, and with creative trail use this can be stretched to twenty miles. Lightfighters could cover that distance in four and a half hours. Not as fast as the Ranger Battalion’s mandatory four hours but still respectable. The twenty-mile ruckmarch was performed once a month, but because the 7thID had few trucks their Lightfighters often logged ten or miles each day under full 70+ pound packs. They bitched about it too. Once a year some brigades would land the men on the Big Sur coast, walk into Fort Hunter Liggett, and then once the exercise was over they would then ruckmarch the eighty-five miles back to Fort Ord. Lightfighters were in great shape, and when they weren’t training they could play just as hard.

Basketball and football could better be titled murder-ball and the death-bowl as rivalries between the companies were fierce. It was so bad that the different regiments rarely played each other out of concerns by command of crippling injuries. The Enlisted Man’s club today is CSUMB’s student center and store. The Army named it “The Rallying Point”, and up until 1984 it was also a topless club. The Lightfighters nicknamed it “The Punch & Jab” because fights broke out early and often and only the base stockade can boast more murders, but not by much. The classic fight at the Rallying Point came in 1987. The 2-9 Manchus were celebrating the regiment’s birthday, and some guys from 3-17 decided to crash the party. What ensued was out of a John Wayne western as tables were overturned, chairs crashed into heads, bodies flew through the air, glass broke, and a blizzard of fists filled the place. A call went out to every police agency, and soon sixty police officers descended along with fifty MPs to shut the festivities down. However the Lightfighter is always in combat mode; as soon as the first cops were sighted the men exited the building and into the Oak forest behind the club. Lightfighters were masters of night warfare, and even though there were estimated to be three hundred men involved in the fight only nine were arrested. The rest simply used the darkness and their comfort with walking long distances to evade capture by walking the longest way possible back to their barracks.

Today I wonder about the kids who attend CSUMB. Do they understand that there is a level of excellence that was established by the men and women who had once called this place home? Do they know what is possible if they push themselves? Do they know that the only limits they face are the limits that they impose upon themselves? For ten years the Army challenged the 7thID’s Lightfighters and the Lightfighters took it all in stride. The Army quit on the 7thID, not the other way around. Although the transformation from military to university is complete this is still a place of transformation. The lesson to be learned from the 7thID Lightfighters is to face the challenge, stick out your chest, and ask “is that best you got?”

Rock Guitarists Connections

I have played the guitar since the third Monday of September, 1978. I bought my first electric guitar, and Ibanez Iceman, in 1979 and in doing so I joined a fringe element of mankind. Rock guitarists, I would discover, share knowledge of a handful of truths about the word, and about us that outsiders can never know. A rock guitarist is a creature that could only exist in the late twentieth century. We played a new kind of instrument and a new kind of music in a new kind of world. From the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s as the modern world moved away from serious spirituality towards religious materialism the rock guitarist would become an anathema. Classic rock music lovers today loudly ask where are today’s guitar heroes? The current batches of demigods are in their twentieth year of their career on average with not a lot of young guys coming up the pipeline. The reasons for this are subtle.
When Les Paul invented the solid-body electric guitar in 1940 it is doubtful that he fully understood what his creation would eventually unleash. As the solid-body guitar became mated with the powerful amplifiers of Hiwatt, Vox, and the sublime creation of Jim Marshall it evolved from a musical instrument into a portal that removed the barrier between the conscious, subconscious, and the divine. Most rock guitarists recognized this on some level, and even a few are fully aware of the secret. The act of playing the guitar at high volume creates a closed-loop vortex wherein the music flows from the player’s mind out through his fingers, and then is zapped back into his head. Plato talked of divine enlightenment, and the act of the creation of music is divine, and this is the secret element of this closed loop. To put it another way the guitarist is in direct communion with his creator via his guitar and amp.
How the electric guitar works is that electrical current is fed through magnetic coils called “Pickups”, and the pickups transmit the vibrations of the guitar strings out to an amplifier. The amp takes that signal and makes it louder by pumping the vibrations of the strings through (usually) 12-inch speakers. Once the amp is set to a certain volume a good guitar player can manipulate the exchange between the string vibrations, the magnetic pickups, and the magnets in the amp to cause sustain or feedback. Feedback is where the sound from the amp is cycled back through the guitar. If fire sang it would sound like a guitar feeding back. There is a second kind of feedback that occurs within the player’s head as the gifts of skill and knowledge flow out from deep within the brain, and then return through the ear seeming to inspire more creation. It is a form of fusion; which is what powers the sun, but instead complex heavy gasses being compressed it is ideas and inspiration.
I used the word demigod because that is what it feels like when standing in front of your fully cranked amp blasting cords, and unleashing screaming scales. There is a transmutation that takes place as the guitar is played, and the player temporarily becomes something more than mortal. Between the player and his audience there is transubstantiation as the listener becomes part of that divine closed-loop vortex which in turn unlocks parts of their mind. This process can actually have a negative effect on some guitarists as they try to reconcile the difference between the guy they are while they are playing and the guy that they revert to the rest of the time. Unaware of their inadvertent divine interface, many guitarists seek to recreate that high through the ingestion of artificial substances. This is what happened to Hendrix; almost lead Clapton to kill himself with heroin, made Page, and Van Halen drink like fish. The tragedy is that these substances become a barrier between the player and the divine, and the players that don’t end up prematurely dead face a harsher fate of becoming only a shadow of their former selves.
For the guitarist who has self control or has discovered the truth life takes and interesting turn. That connection to the creator provides a cushion between the hard realities of life, and the possibilities that exist here and beyond simultaneously. We can make people dance, smile, and even cry with our instrument. The rock guitarist intuitively understands that good music connects us to the larger universe and our deepest selves. Now rock guitarist may move on with their lives and put the guitar away, but their intuitive knowledge of deeper truths of man and the universe remain. We know that people are not bad but simply lost; lost from that connection with the divine. The rock guitarist may no longer play regularly yet when that guitar is picked up and plugged in it becomes a time machine as well. The feel of steel under the fingers transports the player back to the very first day they picked up the guitar. The connection is quickly reestablished and the act is much like drinking from a mountain spring.
Guitarists can also pick out other guitarists in a crowd, but they couldn’t tell you how. When this happens total strangers speak as brothers or sisters. They will discuss their guitars, crazy gigs, and other guitarists. I have never met a fellow rock guitarist who felt like a stranger. The reason behind this is simple in that the same divine thing that inspired me also inspired them, and because I was part of that divine loop I was connected at some level with every other rock guitar player who had ever played and will ever play in the future. It isn’t something that I can quantify; it is only something that I know it true.
I described the rock guitarists as an anathema because we are a threat to the current establishment of social cool. Today it is considered foolish to feel connected to the divine; it is popular belief that to do so is primitive, and backwards. The rock guitarist embodied a truth that people could connect to something pure through music, and this is a threat to the materialistic 21st centurions. So we wait and we teach the young. The revolution will continue one day when the time is right.

Fixing Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour, Because Why The Hell Not?

A few weeks ago my Creative Writing class was assigned to read three short stories. One of the stories was The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin which was written in 1894. The story covers about a page and a half. We meet Louise Mallard, a housewife who has just received news that her husband has been killed in an accident. After her initial shock she begins to contemplate her new life without her husband. She becomes excited at the prospect “[F]ree! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Louise is suddenly very happy at the news that she is a widow, and as she sits in her room “ drinking in the very elixir of life” her sister, Josephine, is on the other side of the door flipping out because she’s worried about Louise’s faint heart. Finally Louise opens the door and the story ends like this:

There was a feverish fire in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly
like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they
Descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard
Who entered, a little travel stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.
He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know
There had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry;

at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

But it was too late.

When the doctors came they said that she had died from heart disease –
Of a joy that kills.

Half the class didn’t like the ending. They didn’t like that Louise had her new freedom taken away from her along with her life. The people who didn’t like the ending were actually pissed off about it all. I liked it. It is good writing, and it is a good exercise in time-frame writing (like “24” takes place in 24 hours). It was fun to listen to the class exchange opinions about the story and how upsetting the ending was to them. That got me thinking; why not just fix the ending?

So for you, my loyal readers, I give you alternative endings in the styles of my favorite writers. The story will pick up where Mr. Mallard comes through the door and Josephine screams…


The Edgar Allen Poe ending:

…Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But it was too late. Aghast, Brently shouted at Josephine “ run and bring Doctor Howard, and be quick about it woman!” As Josephine’s sobs and footfalls faded in the distance Richards looked at Brently and said “She’s gone. My condolences.” Then Richards and Brently shared a smile as Richards dropped Louise’s lifeless hand to the floor and stood. “Will Dr. Howard be paying you directly for his fresh cadaver?” Richards asked. “Yes, $1500, and your cut will be $300 as agreed” said Brently. Richards thought to himself for a moment and then offered “Do you think that Dr. Howard would pay the full $1500 for a second body?” Brently was no in front of the Brandy reaching for two glasses, “Are you thinking of Josephine?” “Why not? I wouldn’t need the $300 share.” Brently nodded at Richards and handed him a glass. “You are a crafty one, good Sir” he said as he handed Richards the glass. “Cheers” said Richards as he gulped back his Brandy. Brently knew that Josephine would not be returning from Dr. Howard’s, and then he wondered how long the poison in Richards’ drink would take.

Jacqueline Susann ending:

Josephine screamed but Louise was strangely still. Brently stood at the bottom of the stairs with quizzically looking at Richards, then Josephine, and then his wife. Louise looked at Brently like he was a slice of bologna. Then she turned to Josephine and said in a calm voice “Fuck it, Jo, I’m going to go to bed” Then she turned and retreated into her room locking the door behind her. After she’d put on her night gown she sat at the vanity looking at her reflection. Then she reached for a medicine bottle and poor a single Quaalude into the palm of her hand. For a brief second she considered taking the entire bottle and ending it all, but as Scarlett O’Hara said “tomorrow is another day.” She stood up and turned towards her bed, but then turned and for the bottom right drawer of her vanity. Her hand found the vibrator and pulled it out. Louise clicked it on to check the batteries, and then climbed into bed and turned out the light.

Quentin Tarantino ending:

Louise looked at her husband and then at Richards. “What the fuck? When I pay for a dead husband I fucking expect a dead husband!” “Jesus Christ, Louise” Richards said “He was supposed to be on the goddamned train. I’m not a fucking psychic.” “Yeah, if you were a fucking psychic you’d see this coming” she said as she pulled the nickel-plated .357 from her thigh holster. BAM! Brently’s face was instantly covered with Richards’ brain matter as his body dropped to the floor like a sack of shit. “If you want something done right…” Bam! Brently took a shot to the balls, and then Louise walks down the stairs to place the muzzle in the base of his skull. Bam! “Whoa! That’s some serious fucking shit, Lou.” Josephine said from behind her. Louise turned to Josephine and hissed “What the fuck are you doing standing there like a fucking statue? Get your ass back upstairs and grab our bags. We’re switching to plan B.” Josephine paused for a second; her face looked like a goldfish, and then she spun and ran back to the bedroom. Louise looked out the front window to see if the gunshots had attracted attention, but everything was normal, and that was good because they would need to put thirty miles between here and the next town where the train still ran. Louise then went into the parlor and poured kerosene from one lamp onto the floor. She then grabbed the second oil lamp and emptied the contents over the two bodies. Just then Josephine came running down the stairs. She made her way around the bodies and went outside and tossed the bags into the back of Richards’ carriage. Louise stepped outside the front door, struck a match, and tossed it on her husband’s back. Flames erupted across the floor as she closed and locked the door. Louise climbed into the driver’s side of the carriage and whipped the horses into motion. “Why can’t I get a fucking break?” Louise asked to no one.

The Stephen King ending:

Louise put her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. Whatever was standing at the bottom of the stairs may have looked like Brently, but she knew that it wasn’t the same man who’d walked out of the house. In fact she knew that it wasn’t even human. A dim scent of sulphur entered her nostrils. When Louise Mallard had promised to sell her soul to take away her husband the last thing that she’d thought was that the devil would come to collect in person. The thing that was now Brently locked eyes with her and grinned.

The Frank Miller ending:

Richards looked at Louise, then frantically at Josephine, and then back at Brently. Louise looked at her healthy, living husband and let out a sigh. She turned around and walked back to her room. She walked to her vanity and pulled the .38 from the top-left drawer, and then stuck it in her mouth. “I’m fwee” she said as she pulled the trigger, showering the duvet with blood, brain, and skull fragments.


So there you go. I’ve fixed it. There should be an ending here that will make one feel better about Ms. Chopin’s little story.

My 12th Step: G.I.Joe

I was never a raging alcoholic. In fact I would go weeks without a drink at times. I usually drank on my days off and the problem was that when I drank I drank too much. When I was younger this was all in good fun but as I reached my mid-thirties it was just kind of sad. This was in the late 1990s and there was resurgence if the 12 inch military action figures along the lines of the original GI Joes made by Hasbro in the 1960s and 70s. The company that spearheaded the revival was 21st Century Toy’s Ultimate Soldier line that featured modern uniforms from today’s military. They were a huge success which spurred Hasbro to reissue GI Joes in the 12 inch original size. This was great because Hasbro’s GI Joe is a top-quality body made to be played with. Ultimate Soldier featured cheaply made figures in first rate uniforms.
The figures ran around $20 each and I decided that if I spent money on action figures I wouldn’t have any left to waste on beer or wine. This seemed to work as my intake of alcohol dropped off to an occasional bottle here or there. The funny thing is that it wasn’t the money it was because GI Joe was filling a void in my life which made me feel better about myself.
You see, I could never win as a child. I could never get a break. This was painfully true on my birthdays when I would get some of the things that I had asked for or hinted at, but then I would be presented with an expensive game or toy that I didn’t want. I know this sounds selfish but I knew that my mother didn’t have a lot of money and it always burned me up that she would waste it on a toy or game that I would never play with. Worse still was when the new SEARS catalog came out and I would find out that for the price of that toy I could have gotten some kick-ass GI Joe command center or vehicle. I think the most GI Joes I had at one time was three, and one didn’t count because it was a talking GI Joe (“I have a tough assignment for you!”).
I had a few friends as I was growing up; it wasn’t like I lived in a cave. The problem was that most of the kids my age moved away around 1971 and the rest of my friends lived too far away to play with on a regular basis. Since I couldn’t always get permission to go down and play at the Carmel River I’d make do with our backyard which featured many locations that were GI Joe-friendly. I also suffered from asthma which often kept me at home as well and GI Joe was there to keep watch as I fought for air. I did have other toys and I loved to build plastic models but GI Joe was my go-to toy most of the time.
So when they reissued the 12 Joes I snapped them up. I didn’t save the boxes; the Joes were placed on display in my room. They made me happy and after a while I understood why this was. I was finally in control of my life; I could buy a GI Joe at will, and in the morning when I woke to see a growing army of little dudes on the top of my dresser it made me happy. I didn’t have to ask permission from anyone and I realized that now that I had control over the GI Joe thing I could also gain control over other aspects of my life. That’s when the drinking stopped.
Then one day I looked at all of the GI Joes that now dominated every flat surface in my room I realized that I had more than I would ever need. Technically I had too many. So I bought a couple of plastic storage bins and I put all but a dozen away into the closet. A few smaller Superman and Batman action figures have popped up to take their place but for the most part I have somehow moved into a happier life. It is funny how something stupid like a bunch of GI Joes can patch a hole in your life. I allowed myself to do something that made me feel good. Something that didn’t involve chemical alteration and something that was not destructive. By indulging in a childhood dream I ever so slightly righted my ship and put myself back on course.
The Joes are still packed away in my closet. Down the road I will give them away to some kids who need a friend too. Today I don’t drink and I haven’t bought a 12-inch action figure in over two years. I’m back in college working towards a degree. My life is far from perfect but it is far away from the person al disaster it could have been. Today my challenge is my weight and my crippling fear of success but now that I cannot hide behind a bottle success seems to be heading my way regardless of what I feel. I have reconnected with old friends and I am making a few news ones along the way.
I guess what I want you, dear reader; to come away with is that you don’t need to buy a ton of toys to make you feel good. However there are times when that kid deep inside of you screams out to be pleased. Maybe it means that you buy that stupid HALO action figure and put him on your desk at work. Perhaps it means just letting yourself have a banana split before you get home so you don’t have to share it. Or finally it might be as simple as jumping into a mud puddle on a rainy day or rolling on the lawn. If you can in some way undo that bad day you had as a child it could either break a chain that holds you down, or it can launch you to the next level.

Thanks for being there, G.I. Joe.

Do You Expect Me To Believe?

As a reformed conspiracy nut, the 911 Truth movement (such as it is) has been an amusing side-show. Like a former alcoholic who walks past a bar on a Friday night and watches the drunks stumble out; thinking to himself how lucky he is to no longer imbibe, and how sad the drunks are, I view the 9/11 troofers with both disdain and pity. Pity because I was once a fool who would have bought into the bullshit that they pedal, and disdain because of the emotional pain that they cause the survivors and families of the victims of 9/11. They are not in the least bit interested in the truth, only their version of it, the one that advances their fucked up world view. As the ninth anniversary is upon us, I have a few questions for them:

1. Do you expect me to believe that the U.S. Government – under the leadership of George W.Bush – was able to pull off the greatest act of mass murder on U.S. soil and keep it secret for nine years? The same administration that couldn’t keep illegal wire-taps secret, couldn’t keep torture secret even though it was performed at secret foreign prisons (which they also couldn’t keep secret)?
2. Do you expect me to believe that operatives placed over 5000 pounds of explosives inside of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7, but nobody who worked there saw these people nor the explosive charges?
3. Do you expect me to believe that they put explosive charges in only three WTC buildings, but not the others?
4. Do you expect me to believe that the 123 witnesses you list as hearing explosions are right, but the 170+ witnesses who saw American Airlines 77 fly into the Pentagon are wrong?
5. Do you really expect me to believe that some secret government cabal staged to hijackings as a pretext for going to war in Iraq, but they couldn't frame one Iraqi national as a terrorist?
6. Do you really expect me to believe that the Thai intelligence service has never uncovered any proof that 9/11 didn’t happen the way we accept that it did?
7. Do you really expect me to believe that Dick Cheney would allow a plane to fly into the largest bond trading firm in North America that trades billions of dollars each day?
8. Do you really expect me to believe that the billionaire clients of that bond trading firm would not rest until no stone was left unturned in the search for the truth?
9. Do you really expect me to believe that if these billionaire clients once they had proof of government involvement in the attacks would not hesitate to burn the Bush Administration?
10. Do you really expect me to believe that the thousands of NYPD, NYFD, NY State investigators, FBI, BATF,NTSB, and other investigators at the Ground Zero and Fresh Kills sites either never saw anything incriminating in the tons of wreckage, or decided to keep silent instead of reporting directly or leaking information to the news media? This in spite of the fact that many of them had lost personal friends in the attack?
11. Do you really think that if Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA that we wouldn’t have faked his death by now in a very public way thus allowing the CIA operative to shave his beard and move to Aruba?
12. Do you really think that Dick Cheney would invade Iraq on the pretext of WMDs, and then forget to plant WMDs using our special operations forces (or just Halliburton aircraft)?

I could go on, but these are the biggest questions that I have for them. Belief in fairy tales take a lot of work to avoid reality. They have to be on constant guard to replace the insulation between their fantasy world and the real world. Not me. It feels good not to be a nut-job any more.

As a reformed conspiracy loon I do feel sorry for the Troofers. So wrapped up in their sad, sorry egos that they have lost all self awareness. In many way they are worse off than that homless guy with the hand-made sign that reads "The End is Near" because deep down that guy knows he's a freak. Troofers do not.

Creative Writing Class (I be in one)

The few of you who read my stuff regularly have noticed that my posts have been few and far between. There are two reasons for this; I am back in college working towards a degree in Marine Geology so I am taking my general-ed courses so that I may transfer to CSUMB, and the other excuse is that I have been amusing my friends on Facebook with tales from my youth. Some of those stories may migrate over here in the future if I feel like polishing them up a bit.

The great news is that now I have a creative writing class, so much of what I write there will end up here after I get a grade for them. Three years ago I had been submitting writing for my book to various agents and publishers, and I never heard anything back from them. Then I got a short e-mail from one that said “you need to take some English and writing classes.” Ouch. Okay, so I signed up at Monterey Peninsula College (MPC, also known as “Elestero Tech” or “DMSU” [Dennis the Menace State University]) and went through the English 1A, 1B, and English2 classes. I lucked out and got a tough-grading professor who pushed my skills until I could integrate a quote with the best of them. I was also exposed to classic literature like Sophocles and Hemingway which gave me more options as a writer for tackling my 7th Infantry book.

The reason for taking the creative writing class is that I need to be pushed outside my comfort zone, and I need to bounce my work off the brains of people who don’t know me (friends are great, I love you guys, but I need to hear feedback from neutral or even hostile sources too). I already have a list of poets and poems to check out from our second day of class. Right out of the gate we have to write poems in the form of Haiku and Cinquain. I had never heard of a Cinquain before last Thursday. The Cinquain for is as follows:

Two syllables
Four syllables
Six syllables
Eight syllables
Two syllables
So you get something like this:

Boogers
Where to hide them?
Flick them out the window?
Stick them under the table-top?
Eat mine.

I am sure this is exactly what the guy was thinking when he invented this framework. This is the kinda stuff you guys will have to endure from me through December.

I am pretty stoked as my professor, Henry Marchand, actually knows who Ambrose Bierce is which qualifies him to teach writing in my book. Plus he went to Penn State as did my high school English teacher, Mr. Scheckler, who was the first important person ever to believe in my writing. There must be something in the water at Penn State. Mr. Scheckler pulled me aside one day after class and told me to write him stories. He said that they would be extra credit, and that I would still have to do the regular assignments too. He said that the stories would not be graded for grammar; instead he said “just write, tell me a story!” So I did just that. My spare time was spent writing “Twilight Zone” type stories about parallel dimensions, time travel, and a double-crossing drug smuggler who gets his in the end.

Henry Marchand seems to be in the same vein of teacher. He knows that there is some great stuff stuck in everyone’s brain and he wants to get it out onto paper. He says that we will end up looking deep inside ourselves as we explore the writing process. You guys know that I have already done this, and that work is archived here. The class is orderly yet comfortable so I can’t wait to see what comes out of my brain.

Stay Tuned…

More Confessions of a Former Conspiracy Theorist.

My road to conspiracy kookdom began innocently enough. My dad gave me his copy of the Warren Commission abridged report along with a book of pictures that spanned that fateful day in Dallas. He got to see Kennedy in Florida as he reviewed the troops assembled there in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dad said in passing that he never believed the Warren Report or that Oswald was the shooter. I was eight or nine years old at this time and I was way too young to understand things like the Watergate story that was dominating the news around this time. When you’re a kid you tend to believe your dad. So in a way I was already handicapped as I approached the subject of the Kennedy assassination.
The first serious exposure I got into this conspiracy world was a documentary called “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”, and it featured most of the mythology that surrounds the event. It is a good starting place if you wish to understand how conspiracy theories feed on themselves and spin into competing theories that soon do battle with each other. The movie’s theory is that Kennedy was murdered by a professional French hit man hired by powerful Americans via the CIA, who used the mafia as a proxy for hiring the hit man. Why? Vietnam, Texas Oil, Cuba, and all kinds of evil right-wing stuff.
The Men Who Killed Kennedy features all of the standard elements that you can find in just about every conspiracy theory:

1. New eye-witnesses with fantastic stories.
2. Former government/intelligence insiders who are shot in silhouette who say that the assassination looked like a professional job, but either have no direct knowledge about the events of November 22, 1963 but “know a guy who told them everything.”

3. Both the new witnesses and the government insiders “‘fear for their lives”.
4. Interviews with “Experts” who aren’t really experts in the subjects that they discuss.
5. Frame by frame analysis of film of the event but the analysis has a narrow focus.
6. Informants. In this movie’s case they are Mob guys. Bottom line on Mob Guys is this: Mob Guys don’t talk. They sure as hell don’t talk on camera. The ones who do are full of crap.

7. The Men Who Killed Kennedy also features an interview with the alleged assassin, but of course he can’t go into detail. He writes a letter that is put in the warden’s safe with instructions that if he is murdered that only then can the letter be released to the press. Oh yeah, the assassin is already in a French prison and will only speak to investigators if he is moved to the U.S..
8. Enhanced photographs showing, well, showing nothing but a mess that is open to interpretation.

These elements are usually present in conspiracy theories and should be a giant BS-flag whenever they appear.

Conspiracies are real, they do happen, but they tend to fall apart which is how we know about them. Watergate is a prime example of a conspiracy and how it unraveled. It started with a break-in at Democratic head quarters in the Watergate building in Washington D.C. There were guys arrested soon after. Then the Washington Post got a tip that someone should take a closer look at the guys who were arrested. It turned out that they had interesting pasts. Then the source, who became known as “Deep Throat”, would lead the Washington Post to more evidence that eventually lead back to the Nixon White House. From there Federal Investigators jumped in and eventually Nixon resigned and members of his staff went to prison. At every step there was evidence that lead to more evidence. This evidence was solid. While “Deep Throat” remained anonymous to the public his identity was known to the Washington Post. The Post never ran with Deep Throat’s claims, instead they double and triple-checked them before they were printed in the paper. Nothing about Watergate was open to interpretation because most of the conspirators confessed.
If the “Plumbers” had been less inept, would Nixon have gotten away with it? It is hard to say, but probably not because it had too many moving parts. Nixon had ordered the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal records. The problem is that there would have been other break-ins after Watergate and with each one the odds of being caught would grow.
Of the dozens of books that I have read about the Kennedy assassination the best one is Live by the Sword, by Gus Russo. It does two things; the first thing is that it firmly establishes Oswald as the lone shooter, and the second thing it does is outline the actual cover-up after the assassination. The cover-up was not to obscure Oswald and his possible accomplices, but to separate the President (and his brother the Attorney General) from their clandestine operations to kill Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Russo’s book isn’t perfect in that he falls into the trap of alleging that Cuba offered to allow Oswald to immigrate there as a reward for killing Kennedy. While he lays out his argument he has no actual evidence. However, the rest of the book is outstanding as it documents RFK’s suppression of evidence and shaping the investigation away from the CIA and Cuban nationals in the Gulf Coast area of the U.S.
I have written before about my conversion to reality. I had gone to Dallas to visit my brother and we went to the Dealy Plaza Six Floor Museum in the old Texas Schoolbook Depository building. Looking out onto Elm Street from the window next to the “Sniper’s Nest” one thing became immediately clear to me – it was an easy shot. Roughly 300 feet from the window to the fatal head shot, and with that rifle’s scope Kennedy’s head would have looked like a pumpkin. Then as I was checking out the famous grassy knoll the sound of a helicopter filled the plaza (they were filming the first X-Files movie a few blocks away) and I was stunned by the amount of echo the buildings cause. So those witness reports about shots coming from other locations around the plaza all made sense. In recent years recreations of the assassination have proven the devastating effect of the Mannlicher –Carcano’s round, and I have learned that the rifle was once sought after by Olympic marksmen and prized by elephant hunters because of the penetration power of the bullet. The Carcano was hardly the cheap piece of crap that conspiracy kooks had led me to believe. They also wanted me to believe that Oswald couldn’t shoot, which his Marine Corps records show otherwise.
Standing in front of the Texas Schoolbook Depository that day it became clear that I had been fooled and willingly so. This made me a giant douche-bag. Worse still was the fact that I had bought into other conspiracies too like UFOs and secret societies. After re-evaluating those I felt like a bigger chump. Why was I such a giant sucker? This was depressingly easy to answer: I like being smarter than everyone else and I like the idea that I am special. Being “In” on the biggest secret of the 20th Century made me feel special and I ate it all up. I was too clever for my own good. Today I have learned to wait until most of the facts are available before I express an opinion on an event.
By September 11th, 2001 I was immune to conspiracy-itus. I had watched the conspiracy rise up around TWA 800, and it followed the usual patterns of the government conspiracy. Mysterious naval movements, witnesses who thought that they saw a missile fired, and later Pierre Salinger would come forward with exclusive footage from a radar screen. The thing is that the FBI brought the plane’s wreckage up from the bottom of the ocean and reconstructed it in a hanger. There was no evidence of a missile strike. So as I watched the events of 9/11 unfold I wondered how long it would be until a conspiracy would be woven from that day. It literally started the next day. I stopped by my friend’s place to discuss the attacks. He told me that he had received a fax listing all kinds of anomalies and that we were being fed a lie. He told me that the footage of the Palestinians dancing in the streets in celebration of the attacks was actually four years old, even though one of the cars in the footage is clearly a 2001 model.
It wouldn’t be until after the invasion of Iraq that the “9/11 Truth” movement would pick up steam. The first book was written before the invasion by Thierry Meyssan called “The Horrifying Fraud”, and it claimed that the Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines 77 but by a missile. Meyssan also believes that the Beslan massacre was carried out by the CIA to gain control of the Caspian Sea. While he is an obvious nut-job, his book was a big hit in France (the French also think the Kennedy was killed by the CIA too) and gave rise the domestic 9/11 Truth gang. The premier zeitgeist of the “Truthers” is the film “Loose Change”. “Loose Change” was written and directed by Dylan Avery and produced with his buddies Korey Rowe, Jason Bermas, and Matthew Brown.
“Loose Change” is a piece of work, and it contains all of the red flags that I mentioned. The first version insisted that there was some kind of a pod under the wing of the plane that hit the South Tower of the WTC, and then suggested that this was proof of the plane being under remote control. Although the first version of “Loose Change” had been released in 2005; at which time the American public was well aware of the Predator drone, for some reason they felt that a pod was necessary to enable remote controllability. The movie has had to be revised three times as the claims are soundly debunked. It is nowhere near the masterpiece that The Men Who Killed Kennedy is. Avery and his pals produced their movie right after they graduated high school, and I can see myself in their rabid zeal to expose the truth. I suppose that if the internet had been around in 1982 that I would have done something similar because I had bought into the whole thing. I genuinely feel sorry for them because they seem like nice guys but they are oblivious to the pain that they are causing the survivors of those attacks and the families of those who did not come home on 9/11/2001.
There is a larger problem today as I see it. While the 9/11 Truthers are clearly nut, there is a secondary layer of kooks that operate freely within the media and politics. The myth of vaccines causing Autism is prevalent today in the US and Europe even though the original report has been redacted from the British medical journal because it was a fraud, and the doctor who wrote it has been stripped of his license to practice medicine. Yet even after all of this the subject is still treated with a serious tone by newscasters. The CIA is still given way too much credit for things it could never possible pull off.
Today I am free from conspiracy-itus. I no longer see the Illuminate behind every tree. I review the issues of the day on their own merits and the facts that surround them. It is liberating because I don’t have to find a way to make them fit into some larger, twister conspiracy framework. I am amazed at the level of stupidity I was gleefully willing to indulge in. I consider myself lucky for finally seeing the light. It is easy to get sucked into conspiracies; I need to warn you about this fact. They are presented with enough facts to make them plausible. Before you know it you have bought into some seriously crazy stuff.

Be careful.

Back in the Sadlle

I can’t tell you how many times I have started and stopped trying to get into a simple exercise regimen. It is very hard to go from sloth to some kind of basic activity, I remember how hard it was the second time I began getting into shape back in 1993. I was trying out for the California Highway Patrol, and those first weeks were just a huge pain. It takes six weeks before the human body fully adjusts to a new physical tempo, as my doctor explained it to me in between sets at the gym. I am entering my second week of every-other-day sessions on the stationary bike and once again my body is feeling the change.
Suddenly I am walking with a little more authority and moving faster for longer. I am less winded climbing the stairs at work. My legs want to go places. The truth be told it seemed as if they swung themselves out of the bed and just dragged me along to the bike. I like the feeling I’m getting from my body, so I hope I am on my way to a healthier me.
Here’s what has made the difference from the recent failures. My boss suggested that I just put a colored dot on the calendar for every time I worked out. So each day when I get to work I see those blue dots accumulate I feel good, and adding another dot also makes me feel good. I’m kind of an addictive type, or a binge-type and right now I’m just building upon each session. This week I’m at 30 minutes on the bike, next week it will be 45. Then I will have to find stuff to add, and that will probably be weights at the Fitness Center once a week.
That is in the future. Right now it’s just one workout session at a time. Nothing fancy.

Carmel River Days

From the age of 8 until I was 14, I spent most of my free weekend and summer days down on the Carmel River. For those of you who’ve never been there the Carmel River is a river during the winter months through about June, and then it dries out leaving a few shallow pools along the sides of the river bed. I lived about a mile from the mouth of the Carmel River where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. The river’s mouth is marked by a lagoon and marsh that are not very big. My area of adventure stretched a mile in either direction from the Highway 1 Bridge, which was one of the entrances to this other world.

I need to point out that I had been going down to the river since I was four years old, but that was always with my mother. When I was eight I was allowed to go down there by myself, something that I doubt the young kids who live in Mission Fields get to do in today’s world ruled by irrational fears. There were just as many dangerous people back then as there are today lurking near that bridge; fading drugged-out hippies were common in the hidden camp-sites that dotted the berry-bushes under the trees that lined each side of the river’s banks. I never had a problem with them, but I remember one guy who scared me pretty good. I had come down the riverbank under the bridge and had begun walking up the dry riverbed when I saw a pair of blackened feet. My eyes followed the legs up from those feet until they met the eyes of your standard burn-out hippie. He had the full Taliban beard, and was pretty sunburned. The thing that struck me was that his eyes were black, and as he stared back at me it was like looking into an empty hole in space. Today I know that his eyes were dilated from a psychedelic drug, but that day he just looked frightening. He didn’t move and he said nothing, he just looked at me. I turned and walked up the river until I knew I was out of sight, and then I ran like hell back home.

That was one of the few frightening moments I had. The river was a happy place for me. The main attraction for me was the reptiles that could be found there. The county had built up segments of the river bank with concrete brickabrack to reinforce it against flooding. They had also piled two mountains of sand in an area behind the Safeway. One pile was over thirty feet tall. I guess that the county would come along and load some of that sand onto dump trucks for use somewhere else. In the mean time between those sand piles and the concrete slabs I had plenty of hunting grounds for the Blue-Bellied Fence Lizards. I got pretty good at catching them with my bare hands, and often came home with two or three to keep in a terrarium for a while before turning them loose on our woodpile on the back yard. They kept the spider population in check.

Snakes were around too, but they were often too fast for me. Every once in a while I would get my hands on a Garter Snake, which I would soon regret because those things release a foul stink. I don’t know why they aren’t called Skunk Snakes instead. The grand prize was the Gopher Snake. Gopher Snakes look like Rattle Snakes because of their color and their size (Gopher Snakes can grow to almost four feet long). I learned early on that if you wanted to catch a Gopher Snake you had to accept that you were going to get bit. It made no difference where you grabbed them they’d whip around and take a chunk out of you. The trick was never to hold it too close to your face. I think that in my snake-catching career I caught four Gopher Snakes. I only brought one home because my grandmother had a fit when I did.

That area behind the Crossroads Center that stretched all the way to Rancho Canada had once been some kind of access road. There were three rusting hulks of 1950s Chevys hidden in the berry bushes that I and my friends would discover in our explorations. This road is still back there today but it is over grown. Back then it served as a dirt-bike track and motocross bike track. We’d ride our bikes up and down that road, and we’d build jumps so we could be Evil Knievel. The McCurdy brothers and Arlen Moore would take their dirt bikes down there too and race around. We would have to clear out when they came or they’d beat us up. Sometimes we’d hide out in the bushes and watch them ride.

The county suffered a four year long drought that ended in 1977. At one point the county dredged a mile-long section of the river bed to expose the water that ran about six feet below the sand’s surface. It was deep enough to swim in and we bought some inflatable mattresses at longs to float around on. This sudden water supply had a side effect that was awesome for a ten year old boy. Snakes converged on the water holes in the hundreds, and when you walked along the side of the pool it looked like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in the snake-filled Well of Souls. With each step dozens of Garter Snakes would slither out of the way. I remember reaching down to grab one snake only to pull up three of them. The other thing that the water brought was thousands of baby toads. About three weeks after the dredging I had come down to the river and as soon as I reached the water there was a mass rush of tiny toads. It looked like D-Day. So I returned with a coffee can and filled it with more toads than I knew what to do with, and I took them home.

As I got older, around the age of ten I extended my range a bit to include the area that cut through the golf course. This led me up to Middle School where I discovered that the toads that lived near the lower baseball field were friggin’ huge. They lived in the holes dug by ground squirrels, and would liter near the entrance. To catch them you had to approach the holes from the blind side and then jam your hand down fast. Toads will pee first thing when they are captured, and I quickly learned to hold them away from me until they were done. I think that I personally de-populated a few square miles of toads. There was nothing like catching a big toad too, for me it was like catching a tiger.

When the drought finally ended I was there to watch as the river rose to about three feet below flood stage. There is a picture of me sitting on the river bank with a few other people watching the water flow past the depth marker that was painted on the first support pillar. I remember looking at all of that water rushing past and then trying to picture the empty river bed. Needless to say the following summer the river was all new again as the flow of water had reshaped much of the landscape.

As I got older I spent less time down at the river as my interests changed to other things. When I did go I found myself down in the lagoon area, back in the tidal marshlands behind the Carmel River School and Mission Ranch. There was easy access via a through-way between the school’s fence and the last house on the 16th Avenue. Between 1977 and 1978 I often went into the lagoon dressed in my military cammo pants and jacket. My grandma had bought me a nice set of binoculars, and I used them to indulge in my new passion of bird-watching. The lagoon was (and is) home to over two hundred different bird species, and that grows during the winter and spring migrations. Walking around through the marsh I learned to accept being wet all the time, but hanging out on the reeds was the best way to get up close to the Herons, ducks and other birds that sought privacy there. I learned that the channels were not too deep and could be crossed as long as I didn’t mind getting wet up to my chest. The reeds were also where the babies were hidden, and it was always a special treat to see them paddling along behind their mother.

As I became a full-fledged teenager I stopped going down to the river all together. The last time I ventured down was when I was twenty. I was working at the Crossroads Cinemas then, and I had an hour to kill before my shift started (I think that I was working a split shift). I walked the familiar trail down to the water’s edge. The river was flowing, but it was not too deep. I became nostalgic as the river gurgled its greetings to me like a long lost friend. The wind whispered through the trees making to late evening sun sparkle on the water. I was thinking that there was still magic in the world when I saw movement on the opposite bank. A Bobcat emerged from the brush; the first one that I’d ever seen, and it casually walked along its side of the river. Time seemed to stop as I watched that beautiful cat move along the river, and for a split second I felt like I was going to live forever and all that I had to do was stand in that spot. For that moment everything was perfect, I was part of some ancient dance between man and nature with the river and the wind providing the music. The suddenly the Bobcat caught sight of me and made his exit into the bush again, vanishing like a ghost, and leaving me there alone again on the river’s edge. I looked at my watch and turned around to walk back to the theater.

Today the old Carmel River Bridge is gone, torn away during the great flood of 1996. Parts of it are still lying on the southern bank of the river but they are slowly being buried by sediment and covered by plant life. The brickabrack that I spent hours on catching lizard has been buried completely by the river. Down at the lagoon the old channels that I’d cross in search of birds have all shifted as they’ve been filled in by sediment. All of the people, I grew up with in Mission Fields can no longer afford to live there and have moved off to new homes all over the world. The river is still there. The eastern side is often hidden these days by the trees on each side of the bank. If you are driving over the new bridge you should look west to the ocean if you want to see the river below. The Carmel River was my second home, but I don’t really miss it because it still runs wild in the back of my head. There in my head I stand upon a slab of cement brickabrack that once jutted out like a bowsprit over a small patch of the river. I am still nine years old and I am scanning the northern bank for pirates, Nazis, or the McCurdy brothers. The river was a place where I could find adventure, and if I couldn’t find it, it would find me.