Tag Archives: personal

Erosion by Time

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  It’s raining again this morning and all that erosion mitigation I’ve been doing is in the slow process of sealing itself with floating cedar leaves, beginning to back up water and drop the silt burden.

There’s a timely, subtle irony in this.  While that miniscule effort directed at reversing erosion by time begins doing its job, my old friend Gale, [who owns this place] pictured above climbing a mountain in 1998 is in the intensive care unit of the Kerrville hospital.  He’s been there almost a week now, them searching for a different sort of erosion.

He was carrying a high temperature for an old man when he finally went to a medico, who sent him to Emergency.  In ICU they found he had pneumonia, a blood infection, and didn’t know what-all else.  Yesterday they finally discovered a massive kidney stone.  Today they’ll be doing surgery to remove it and hopefully he’ll begin the long climb to recovery.

I’ve been spoiled by good health and mostly robust physical condition.  I suppose, even though I’ve known he had a lot of aches, pains and vehicular problems, I still think of him as that young man of almost 60, climbing that mountain, or maybe younger.  I’ve probably been harder on him, less understanding of his limitations than I should have been as I watched him not doing a lot of things he knew he should, or I thought he should.

But it’s time I recognized he’s not as young as me anymore, that he’s grown to be an old man while I watched, not noticing.  Happened too slowly, I suppose, maybe like watching a kid grow up.

I’ve got to learn to show more respect and patience for old people.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, 2012, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Survival

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Blackjack – Another Bug on the Windshield of Life

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 6 comments

During the late-1990s, prior to awakening to Y2K I was absorbed in a search for a lost gold mine.  I had zero interest in casino gambling and card games of chance.  But I had three close associates who believed themselves to be experts at the game of blackjack, two of whom made frequent trips into the canyons with me and had the grace to listen when I talked about it.

Because of this, I occasionally accompanied one or another of them to casinos near Albuquerque, just hanging around while they played, originally.  But I suppose this wasn’t enough.  Deano, then Mel wanted me sitting at a blackjack table enough to plunk down chips and insist I play, despite the fact I knew nothing about the game.  I found the whole thing stupid and boring.

But I saw Mel win a lot of money on those tables and Deano claimed he did, as well, though I didn’t witness it.

A Strange Way of Thinking, More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past, Mel King

Post-Y2K turned into a somewhat different matter.  Mel had always said he could make a living playing blackjack, and from what I’d witnessed I though it might be true.  But he also emphasized it wasn’t something a person could depend on, which I believed.  Deano also claimed he could make a living at it, which I believed less.  And a couple of others I became acquainted with post-Y2K, also threw their hats in the ring of pronounced ability to make a living at blackjack, whom I believed not at all.

I was running through a series of realizations of my own concerning making a living doing almost anything, squeezing by working graveyard shift as a motel clerk, substitute teaching, polishing the wheels, bumpers, grilles and gas tanks on long-haul trucks.  Squeezing by is an over statement of my success.

So eventually, when Deano proposed sponsoring me with chips, loaning me a book on blackjack, accompanying him to the local casinos, I eventually succumbed.  I learned the basics, witnessed his successes and failures, and observed carefully while I lost his money.  I wasn’t long noticing the tables are chock-full of people who believe they can make a living playing blackjack.

I also noted that they showed no signs of demonstrating that ability at the tables.  They’d mostly all read the same books, or books that said the same things about winning at blackjack.  Books, I noticed, that repeated dozens of conventional wisdoms, reiterated identical strategies to those pit bosses hand out to fledgling players sitting down at the felt for the first time.

So, every player at every table, along with the casino bosses, dealers, kibitzers, gambling addicts and losers were all singing from the same songbook.  Everyone knew exactly what a person ought to do to lose at blackjack by following the yellow brick road.

I wasn’t long concluding that if a person could win money on the tables the answer to doing it wouldn’t be found on the strategy card the pit bosses pass out to new players.  Bowing to the goddess of ritual.

In 1998, Mel had given me a CD with an animated blackjack game on it, hoping I’d practice.  It allowed a person to set up a group of players, each following particular strategies for betting, playing against them, seeing how various strategies fared, one-against-the-others.  I’d never loaded it on my comp.

But now, in the post-Y2K era, I dug out that CD.  At first I just practiced using the conventional wisdoms and Deano’s book of blackjack religion. 

But that didn’t float, and it didn’t fly, though my learning of it was cheaper than sitting in a casino, at least for Deano.

Eventually I noticed the settings allowed me to let the machine play itself.

I could set all six players using different strategies, different nuances, allow them to play 24/7, against the imaginary casino.  Thousands of times, hundreds of thousands, probably millions, eventually.  I could test strategies, tweak them for each player in each position, cull strategies least successful, try anything.  Anything.  Discard it and try something else until I found every microscopic edge a player might use.  And measure it against every other.

Just leave the machine running, check every few days, test, tweak, think, and launch it again.

What I learned from that computer and that software is that it’s possible to ‘almost never’ lose at blackjack, possible to win middling large amounts occasionally, possible to pick up at least a few bucks almost always with concentration, hard work and patience.  And a willingness to throw out the book.

But the baggage of carrying it into a casino is contained in the scorn and hatred of everyone else at the table. 

You see, blackjack players believe universally it’s possible for a player to cause them to lose by violating the ‘rules’ of strategy handed out by the pit bosses.  Split a pair of tens, hit a pair of aces instead of splitting them, and everyone at the table, they believe, loses.  ‘Playing for the table’, they call it.  Though the table doesn’t pay anyone who plays for it, should the person lose.  And the table doesn’t share any wins. 

I can’t count the times some well-meaning player sidled up and whispered, “Get security to walk you to your car.  The guy over there says he’s going to catch you in the parking lot.”

As with other religions, as with patriotism, getting crosswise with doctrine can be dangerous.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Human Behavior, Survival

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Surveillance Weirdness

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 8 comments

Saturday October 28, 2006  

 

This brave new century offers a lot of interesting twists and turns for the observant.  I was reading a blog this morning, someone ruminating over a friend request he’d gotten from someone, maybe in India.

I’d gotten a similar request yesterday, so it caused me to consider whether blogs aren’t being used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, both here and abroad, to find folks with particular sets of viewpoints.

For instance, I came across a blog the other day posted by a person who called himself something like ‘dope-smuggler’.  Hmmm, thinks I, is this for real?  The blog entries and photos all involved various aspects of the use of controlled substances.

Suppose I worked for DEA, I went on thinking.  Would I throw out a trot-line or two searching for folks who’d like to admit on blogs that they were felons?  I think I might.

Or suppose I worked for Mossad  (I think that’s the right spelling), the Israeli intelligence agency.  Would I like to know as many names and locations of people who held Nazi-like viewpoints?  Would I be equally interested in folks who rabidly approve of anything Israel might do?  Probably.

And so on.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about what’s happened with surveillance technology and general nosiness, both of government and individuals.

The technology and availability of spying equipment with amazing capabilities and invisibility at a shockingly low price is out there for anyone.

At least it was shocking and amazing to me when I found myself moved to investigate the matter.

One day I’d been sitting at a blackjack table for about twelve hours, and when I got to my car in the parking lot my cell-phone rang.  I answered and was treated to hearing a long playback of my conversations at the game-table several hours earlier.  I thought back and recalled a guy who sat next to me for a while wearing an unusual fanny-pack he kept messing with, so I figured it was him.

But his motive for doing such a thing was a mystery, and how he happened to know my cell-phone number was one, as well.

That happened several times, the casino playback thing, but I only saw that particular person once, and when he took the chair next to me I asked him if he had his equipment with him.  “Oh yeah,” he answered with a laugh.  “I always carry everything with me.”  And left the table.

During the same time-period Jeanne was in New Mexico.  We were in the living room, me standing, her sitting across the room, having a conversation.  The land-line phone rang and I answered.  Similarly to the casino experience, I had a conversation played back to me, but this time it was the conversation Jeanne and I’d just had within the past five minutes.

Someone obviously had the capability to listen to what was said in my home.  But what’s intriguing to me is that they wanted me to KNOW they had that capability.

That happened a couple more times and I could never see any signs around the house of any microphone/camera, but it was obviously here.  From then until now I’ve gotten spam emails I don’t open, but with subject lines referring to something or other that’s happened in my life, said or done, recently.

Which confirms for me that I am one helluva interesting guy.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would put that kind of effort, energy and expense into my life, but I do try to provide with them with some amusement in various ways.

Sometimes I figure it’s the rich neighbor kid, sometimes I think it’s the neighbor across the street next-door to my buddy, Wes, who’s generally known to be a negative busybody.  But that doesn’t quite fit the casino incidents.

I haven’t a clue. 

But after the first phone-at-home incident Jeanne and I went to a surveillance store and looked over what was out there on the open market.  After seeing it, I decided we live in a time when it’s useless to think there are any secrets, any privacy, if anyone’s determined enough to want to know, sick enough to be willing to put out a few bucks and plant a device.

Flattering, though, knowing that despite the fact I don’t talk to anyone but the cats these days unless I’m on the phone, I’m still one hell of an interesting feller.

Golly.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Gambling, Human Behavior, Internet, New Mexico, NM, Surveillance, Uncategorized

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Mechanical Disadvantage – Fulcrums, Chinese Steel and Gorilla Glue

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | 15 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The project outdoors seems simple enough.  Clearing the intrusive cedars from under the oaks. 

Establishing a gentle downhill grade across slopes.

Creating a series of rock and brush berms to intercept the runoff and direct it across the slope to slow the concentration times during heavy rainfall runoff.

I followed the grades with a carpenter-level and board, mainly, keeping it to about a quarter-bubble.

Filling the deep ruts in the road with brush to rob the water of the siltation load.

Even the tools are uncomplicated.  But of course, a person has to find a wheel barrow tire that isn’t flat.

I eventually found this solid rubber one – bought the wheel barrow from a garage sale for the solid rubber tire.

I was a long while getting to it.

But a solid rubber wheel barrow tire beats a dozen Chinese flat ones.

The arms on the loppers you see in the green wheel barrow don’t provide a lot of mechanical advantage and require a lot of stoop labor.  Naturally, I was elated when I found this one in a thrift store with telescoping arms.  $8 US bucks.  Cheap at twice the price.

When I got home I broke the first arm off in about 20 minutes.  After I cut off the break and put it back together I broke the other one off 20 minutes later.

Chinese steel rears its ugly head.

This was obviously going to require some modifications.  A sleeve to go over that weak point, something to fill in the space between the sleeve and the joint/handle.  Nothing to it.

I was going to melt down some old shower shoes to pour into the space, but Gale suggested silicone caulk. 

But my tube of caulk was dried out, so I decided on Gorilla Glue instead.

Here’s how long it took to discover the next weak point in the design.

The culprit.

Who but the Chinese could produce a bolt a man could spang break in half?

Well, Mister Commie, you might think this is over, but it ain’t.  I’ve got another dance or two left in me.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Texas, White Trash Repairs

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Naming Your Own Poison: Dependency Relationships

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | 4 comments

This is taken from a letter written in the year 2000:

Seems the modern world’s addicted to more afflictions than drugs.  Maybe it’s tied up in the unprecedented social experiment of the 20th Century attempting to yank the values and roles of 10,000 years of human history up, shake the dirt off, and clone them into something never before tried.  But without entirely losing what went before.

Personal boundaries became ambiguous, and while there was always the dependency inherent in shared family and social role assignments, removing it without replacement parts might have set things adrift further than anyone anticipated.

For instance, in my personal life with my ex-wife, there was a dependency thing, but it was a fairly mature relationship except in certain aspects of the dependencies.  Those grew and gradually became boa constrictors over the decades, became such a part of the rock and roll of marriage, I found I couldn’t breathe.  And I suspect the same almost had to be true for her, as well.

But after that marriage broke up, it really used to trouble me that my relationship with the next woman couldn’t have been an adult, happy, non-dependency, shared-joy kind of relationship. We were both people who had been through long marriages and half a century of life. It only missed it in enough crucial places to kill it.   In fact, there were places where it was there.  But it was woven into a fabric of unstated, unagreed-to expectations, manipulations and untuned boundaries directly tied to ownership.  Or a hunger for ownership and the powers and controls inherent with it.

It’s not easy to imagine how younger people find their way around inside that matrix of nebulous expectations.

You’ve got to learn from your mistakes, . . . I’m not saying that I’ve got the way, the truth, and the light here, but I will say, subtract raging hormones from your system. Raging hormones screw everything up. And if what you want is self-respect and growth, dependency relationships are the antithesis of it. I mean, there is a stage of your development where you can grow from that, but if you need that, it’s a statement of your level of growth. And once you get past that, the whole concept is repugnant.

And if you have learned everything you’re supposed to learn, you’re probably not going to have another relationship.  I’ve told you that after I knew I was breaking up with her I spent six weeks or so just listening and considering her catalog of complaints about me. Some were valid, some weren’t. But I listened and considered them all because that kind of input from someone who knows you well doesn’t come often and in a context where the ego allows you to distance yourself from it in a way where you might be able to actually learn something about yourself. Once I knew I was going to break with her, I no longer had any investment in defending my behavior. I learned a lot.

During the same time frame, and during all the preceding months she never listened to a damn thing–never learned anything about herself–remained stolid in her absolute innocence, victimization, purity of thought, and responsibility for any aspect of the failure of our relationship, which she desperately didn’t want to fail.

The part of this that’s most difficult to grasp is that she wanted and needed sex as much as I did. We were a matched set in that way, a couple of really uninhibited, highly-sexed people. But there was an assumption of quid pro quo in her whole approach to the problems–all her life men had been lusting after her because of her physical beauty.

She never came to the realization that all she had to do was relax a little in her “rightness”, compromise, understand, give a little, take a little, and she could save the relationship and grow some at the same time. Growth wasn’t her strong suit. She hadn’t changed much since we were kids.

Truthfully, in hindsight, I’m grateful for my own sake that she couldn’t bend,  couldn’t hear the things I’d said, and responded with shocking venom to every attempt I made for honest dialogue about our mutual problems. If she had, I’d have had to remain with her–it wouldn’t have taken much–I’d have been owned by her, and at her insistance, owned her.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior, New Mexico, Relationships, Spirituality

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Mel King

Posted on April 30, 2012 by | 7 comments

The hoopla about the dead cop in Tijeras got me thinking about my old friend, Mel King, and another dead cop just down the road from this one in Mountainair, New Mexico, in 1987. 

That one changed Mel’s life in a multitude of ways, for all the remainder of it.  I posted this on another blog December 21, 2005, the anniversary of his death:

If I ever write another book, Mel King will have to occupy a few chapters of it.  I’ve mentioned him a few times on this blog, but mostly, I’ve not been able to write much about him at all.  I’m still digesting what happened to him.

On one of the threads recently the discussion drifted to the War on Drugs.  I suppose if I’d never met Mel I probably wouldn’t have thought much about that issue, would never have bothered to form an opinion about it.

But in many ways, Mel was a product of that war, from the time it began during the Reagan Administration, he was one of the adversaries.  It changed him from a small-time marijuana growing woods-vet to a wealthy man.  When the ‘war’ drove the price of jade sky-high he was approached by a number of ranchers in the area, asked to teach them how to grow weed in quantity.  He became their broker, as well as a grower.

The War on Drugs involved Mel in a major felony arrest, confiscation of much of his property, caused the mysterious death of a police officer, got Mel targeted repeatedly on America’s Most Wanted television series, and constant harassment by the FBI, State Police and local police for the remainder of his life.

They wanted to believe he killed a Mountainair, NM, police officer because it was the only construction of the facts that didn’t expose the rotten core of the War on Drugs.  If Mel didn’t kill that cop, another cop, or cops, almost certainly did.

Unacceptable.

Shortly before he was murdered in December, 2004, he showed me an anonymous, hand-written letter accusing him of killing the policeman and threatening to come balance it all.  The undertone and nuances of the letter suggested it was written by another member of the ‘policeman brotherhood’ who wanted to even things out, not because he knew the dead cop, but because a person doesn’t get suspected of killing a cop and get by with it.

It’s time I began writing down a few things about Mel King anyway.

Mel King was a major, financially successful marijuana grower and large-scale broker in New Mexico for many years.  During that time he was also a long-term heroin addict.  (He first became addicted to morphine while in the hospital recovering from wounds he got in the Marine Corps in Vietnam).

The only way Mel got away with what he was doing for so many years was by being considered a complete maniac, and by making certain the authorities got their fair share of the proceeds.  He drove around in a VW van with bullet-holes in the windshield from the inside.

When he got busted in 1987, with 150 pounds in his house it was because he made himself too big a nuisance to be allowed to go on.  He was attracting too much attention.

But even so, he never came to trial.  That 150 pounds of high-grade vanished from the evidence lockers.  The empty bags with his evidence numbers on them were found in the home of the policeman who made the initial stop during his arrest.  But someone murdered that policeman, probably for the marijuana, which is how they happened to find the empty evidence bags.

While he was in jail awaiting bail, Mel resolved to turn his life around.  He freed himself from heroin and when he was released he started a successful furniture business, did his best to stay clean for the remainder of his life.  Succeeded in being a trustworthy, successful man and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

During the years I knew him, Mel was a deeply spiritual man.  He was honest, guileless, hard-working, sincere, courageous, and in many ways, wise.  We prospected a lot of canyons together, talked of many things over campfires listening to the wind in the pines.  He was also my partner during Y2K.

Mel and I disagreed on many things, but he believed, as I do, that he knew what happens to a man when he dies.  He never feared death and he never believed he’d done anything in this life to give him any reason to fear it.

I believe he was right.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Liars, New Mexico, NM, Police, Politics, Uncategorized, War on Drugs

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The Skins We Change

Posted on April 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Note from Jeanne:
I’d like to thank those of you who commented on yesterday’s art work. I appreciate it. It has been a while since I’ve worked on large drawings (spending more time recently on jewelry) and just getting the feedback from you has been an encouragement to follow through on some other ideas I’ve had.  I’ll post a drawing here every once in a while and I’ll try to fix the categories so you’ll be able to find them all easily.
 Old Jules has been spending a good deal of his time cutting cedar and working on a huge erosion control project for Gale and Kay and hasn’t been online much. I’m sure he’ll update you at some point, but I have some posts  scheduled ahead since I don’t know exactly when that will be.  Thanks again for visiting, reading,  and commenting here, we both appreciate it very much. ~Jeanne

Previously posted June 7, 2005  (Placitas, New Mexico)

Out in the currently vacant chicken house I found a rattlesnake skin the other day.  It was in one of the layer boxes, so I don’t know how long it was there before I noticed it.  But it caused me to do some thinking about old brother rattler and what manner of nuisance he’s likely to make of himself if he’s still around.

I’m a man who holds rattlers in fairly high regard, but with a lot of respect for their clumsy bad manners when it comes to getting underfoot.  I usually try to keep enough of an eye on the places they like to show up unexpectedly to avoid offending them, and when I can corner them I’ll carry them off into some likely spot well away from humans.  Mostly they’re just minding their own business, trying to make a living the same as everyone else and don’t have the good sense to keep themselves out of harm’s way when humans are around.

This one looked a lot bigger last year (I’m assuming it’s the same one) when I lifted up a piece of plywood in a pile of debris in the corner of the lot and let out an involuntary yelp as I jumped backward in time to avoid his strike.  That skin shows him to be about two feet long, but I’d have called him an easy four from my brief look at him.

Rattlers are few at this altitude, and the one who slithered off into the cane leaving me to to decide whether to just breathe a while and let my pulse slow down, or take another tug at that plywood is almost certainly the previous owner of that skin in the chicken house.

Rattlers are lucky where it comes to changing their skins.  Happens year after year, but generally they don’t change much.  People aren’t so lucky in that regard.  We change our skins a lot of times in this life, and in a sense we leave the old ones lying around to be examined by everyone with an interest in who we are, making assumptions based on the old skin.

The other night I was down at the Range Cafe in Bernalillo …. met a bunch of old guys my age down there… retirees from the Los Alamos labs…. nuclear physicists who’ve shed their old skins and discovered they’ve let their lives slither off into the bush without doing a lot of things they wish they’d done.  Now they’re all off living other places, but decided to rendezvous down here for a hurrah into the mountains, looking for a lost gold mine.

I have a notion I’d have barely been able to tolerate those men in their younger days.  There’s a nuance about value judgements involving working on nuclear weapon development that would have influenced my thinking about them.

But these guys had left all that behind, shed that skin and now just wanting to slither off into the canyons, spend some time chewing the fat over a fire and stomp around looking for a lost mine and taking joy in being around one another again.

Strange place we’ve chosen to spend a reality, thinks I.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, New Mexico, NM, Senior Citizens, Wildlife

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Cosmic Mandala

Posted on April 24, 2012 by | 16 comments

Here’s one of my early gel pen drawings. This one sold at the first exhibit I ever had. I hope you enjoy looking at it.
Jeanne

Today on Ask Old Jules: Complimenting  an Older Woman?

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Posted in 2000's, Admin., Adventure, Art, Mandalas

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Introduction to Being a Hermit

Posted on April 18, 2012 by | 2 comments

The following is an email that Old Jules wrote several years ago and subsequently posted on a previous blog. I’m posting it after his description of the Peace Corps experience to give continuity to that time period.  ~Jeanne

Old Jules:
This was the most recent of a long line of exchanges with an online friend, a man  who mostly he believes his life is a living hell out of habit, except when he reminds himself he’s blessed, which is only when I remind him to remind himself, thinks I.

Thought I’d share it with you blog readers.  I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my brief life as a hermit.

Morning Pal:

I suppose you’re right.  You live a complicated life.  It would be complicated, just with your interpersonal relationships, even if you didn’t have a job that would be enough to satisfy most needs for complication.  Even if you didn’t have a piece of real estate that’s located in and part of a subtle war zone.  It’s relatively easy to imagine how you’d have some difficulties focusing, relaxing, or anything else.

A long time ago, when I had a complicated life, I used to wonder whether a stay in the sort of place where you work, an asylum, would do the trick as a means of getting me removed from the system of complications I’d built around myself to help make myself unhappy.  I concluded that it wouldn’t.

 I also gave some thought to whether prison life would do it, but unless it was one of those kinds of Federal prisons all the Watergate folks went to, I don’t think it could.

Thought about a Trappist monastery a bit, even.  That might do it.  I don’t know, but it seemed so otherwise out of sync with my nature that I never tried it.

But I had the advantage over most people, because I knew what I was missing.  When I got booted out of the Peace Corps in 1964, after a bit of time trying to complicate my life in Honolulu the way a person will, I was contacted by the US Army Reserve telling me they wanted to know where I was in case they wanted to reactivate me for Vietnam if they needed people with my particular MOS.  In those early days of 1965 nobody knew where all that was going and reactivating the reserves was considered a real possibility.

My support for US military adventures overseas went away entirely during my tour in the Far East.  I was gonna have nothing to do with Vietnam.  I decided I was going to spend the remainder of my life as a hermit living in the jungle on the big island….. a place called Wiamono Valley on the drainage of the Kohala range…. used to be a village in there but it was wiped out by the tidal wave in 1947 and nobody laid claim on it since.  Nobody in there but a blind mule and me…. for six weeks that mule had company.

That six weeks with nobody to talk to but a blind mule changed my whole life.  It was a pivotal moment for me, one of the greatest blessings of my stay in this reality this time around.  In addition to a book-full of other benefits, it gave me a realization of what’s possible for a human being, mind-wise, if he can succeed in either simplifying his life, or in (I didn’t know then) distancing himself from the web of values, properties, interpersonal relationships and other tangle we do our best to mire ourselves in so we can’t see or hear what we’re trying to keep from seeing and hearing…… the voice of what’s beneath.

I definitely understand what you’re saying, my friend.  Hang in there.

(Old Jules)

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Posted in 1960's, Adventure, Hawaii, Human Behavior, Solitude, Survival, Youth

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Day of Lost Souls (Part Two)

Posted on April 16, 2012 by | 6 comments


Peer Ratings and Mid-Selection
Mid selection was coming in that beautiful land, and before it arrived, I was fairly certain I would be one of the de-selectees.  I was also fairly certain McCreary would be.  Neither of us fit in.  We weren’t much like the others I thought would be deselected, but we were different.  We’d been through the Minnesota Multi-Phased Personality Test.  The rumor was you couldn’t even lie consistently on that one, except they could sniff you out, flush you like quail in the cool dawn.  I knew I was doomed.

The morning before selection time the staff added the final horror.  Humiliation and forced betrayal.  Peer ratings.

Question:  Here is a list of your fellow trainees.  Top to bottom, list the people you consider most equipped for the task of peace corpsman, down to least favorable.  Top to bottom, who do you like the most.  Down to who you like the least.  And so on.  Sell your young souls, trainees; young Americans…..won’t accept the papers back until you’ve listed them all, every white space above a black line filled with a name of someone here around you.

I was angry, watching 80 eyes probe the room, checking names against faces.  I worked out my own strategy, locking eyes, whenever I could.  I reversed the list they wanted.  Picked the weakest and least liked for my Ajax and Penelope.  Threw the leaders to the dogs.  With my own name at the pinnacle, of course.  But I knew it was futile.

De-selection and Jumping Ship in Honolulu
Still, I was crushed when my name came out on the list of get-outs.  I didn’t notice how the others reacted, and I don’t remember much about the time between the boot and the airplane.  I do know that somewhere in there, I decided I wasn’t going back to the mainland.  Somewhere in there David also decided something similar.

The rain was falling sideways when we got off the plane in Honolulu.  Big Joe Weiss, Korean War marine was with us on the plane to Oahu.  He listened to our dreams talked quietly of staying in the islands with us.  He was as crushed as I was about being given the shove.  But in the terminal building, he couldn’t look at either of us as he told us he was going on to the mainland.  I could see that big Joe was limping inside, hurting.  Maybe worse than I was, with all my bravado.

David and I had some kind of notion about catching a sailing boat, heading for Australia or New Zealand.  We had a couple of hundred bucks each, guts, energy, and no promises to keep.  We’d signed on for a two year stint in Injia, and Injia had belched us back like a bolus flying out the mouth of someone who’s just had the Heimlich performed unexpectedly in the middle of a dying incident.

We spent a few precious bucks on a taxicab…..told the driver we wanted the cheapest hotel he knew of.  It was the Huna Hotel, he took us to.  Twelve bucks a night.  But we were young in that country.

The rain continued through the night, and we emerged from the room still full of energy and bravado….we were taking big steps, making deep tracks in our future lives…..we thought we were about to make big tracks on the land.
Picked up a newspaper looking for boarding houses……David found one belonging to a Japanese lady named Matsushige….he wrote down the address as I looked over his shoulder….wrote on the classified page of the newspaper…..2323 East Manoa Road.

We took a city bus, carrying our bags, our belongings from the dead peace corps experience, and got off at the confluence of east Manoa and Manoa.  The driver pointed a direction for us.

But at 2323, our knock was answered by a man who appeared to be dressed in a pair of WWII Japanese uniform trousers.  He explained curtly that he didn’t know what the hell we wanted, didn’t want to know.  Didn’t appreciate our disturbing his home, his morning. We walked to Manoa and looked….nothing made any sense.

So, we found a pay phone and David called the number from earlier…..wrote 2319 on the newspaper.  Hung up the phone, turned puzzled from the booth.  “Twenty twee twenty twee?”  I burst out in laughter every time I thought of that incident for more than three decades.  I can still see him turning puzzled from the booth, frowning, “Twenty twee twenty twee?”

Matsushige’s Boarding House, Finding Work and a Gypsy Good Time
We settled in at Matsushige’s that day, a second floor room with two bunks, 4 feet or so apart, parallel, a desk between the two at the head.   Shared john with some other roomers….settled in young, full of bravado, full of dreams.

Next day we went looking for work and such.  David took a paper and headed down to check out the openings on Waikiki…..I headed for the bars on hotel street, looking for a job or a hooker to fix me up for my job search.  I’d go down to Waikiki tomorrow to  find my busboy job at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.  Today, more pressing matters.

In a while, I came to a booth with a pretty gypsy lady…..started flirting a bit, talking around the issue.  Was pretty certain she was a hooker.  Finally, “You want a gypsy good-time?” she demanded.
“Yeah!  A gypsy goodtime!”
She took me into an attached room with nothing but a cot, sat me down.  “$10″….she took my money and assured she’d be back in a moment.  I sat there and knew when she brought in a snaggle toothed crone that I’d just lost a sawbuck for another of my lessons in life.

“Here it is!  A gypsy goodtime!”  She and the crone danced back and forth in front of me, all of us laughing.  My life has been rich in gypsy goodtimes, I’ve been a man wealthy in gypsy goodtimes, but that one was best in those times when the coconuts fell beside us and mangos piled high under the trees blocking the sidewalks and David and I grumbled in our cots picking off sunburned skin to throw to the giant roaches.  We were young in that country.

Final Selection – Dropouts and Volunteers – Honolulu
We stayed in touch with a few of the trainees on the big island.  Lillie and I wrote and sometimes talked by phone.  We made plans, after final selection to meet in Oahu, whether she went on to India or not.  Nancy Philson and Priscilla Thomas came through a few days ahead, voluntarily dropped from the venture.  An evening of drunken revelry on hotel street and they were off to the future.

I met Lillie at the airport with the other triumphant survivors.  Chianti, baby gouda cheese, and a rented jeep, and we made long and easy love on the beaches in sight of Chinamans Hat, Hanauma Bay, the blowhole, toward the end, pounding surf spraying the moonlight.  Her red hair tickled my face as we idled the jeep down the inland spine of Oahu, back to Honolulu.

Next night, the gin mills of Honolulu and Hotel Street.  Lillie’d never seen a stripper….I took her to a place I’d been a few nights previously with Nancy and Priscilla.  The best I’d ever seen, her veils of blue velvet, blue chiffon.

They boarded the plane, and India X was off to save the world from hunger, from savage restraints, from a historic dearth of fowl in their diets.  Off to Gujarat.

Back to the Big Island – The Jungle and Solitude
In a while, I flew back to the big island and went into the jungle off the Kohala range, thinking to become a hermit, thinking to die there.  David met a Japanese Hawaiian girl named Janice and flew back to the mainland with her.
In six weeks I came out of the jungle, in a maelstrom of roiling greyblue clouds.  I’d met myself for the first time.  I finally had seen myself, seen god in that quiet forest.  I knew I had more to do.

David’s kids, when he was in the marine corps, and after came to be among my favorite children….Janice, an object of my deep respect.

This year, she left him for a Japanese man.  David’s in Seattle, trying to find what he should do with his life, henceforth. Searching for the greatest gypsy good-time of them all.

And I await the moment I’ll go again into the woods as I did so many years ago beneath a savage sky in that country of youth and springtime.

“Life’s a strange place for a human being to have to spend a lifetime.” Josephus Minimus

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