Category Archives: Personal posts

Yesterday while I was at work, and for reasons that I can’t remember, I ended up talking to the cashier about a portion of my childhood. It started with the story about how I stole a bag of chips from the local IGA store, then went a bit deeper into why I did it. If you have actually read through the archives on the left side of the screen you have probably seen the story already, if not, in a nutshell, I was really hungry, and hungry for tortilla chips in particular. For unknown reasons I went further into my childhood than I have ever spoken of to anyone other than my mother, yet I found that it made for an almost unbelievable story so I will type it here.

Before I get into it, however, I must mention that my Mother actually reads this page, while my Father is dead and can not defend himself. I remember things the way I remember them and if my memory is horribly flawed I am pretty sure that Mom will let me know. Of course Mom might not be the most objective person, since she is one of the two factions at war, but I will do my best to tell it like I remember it. While the mind does seem to dull with age, it is amazing how vivid these memories from 20+ years ago really are.

First up will be a couple of fractional, at best, memories that I have of the impending divorce. I have a scar on my right wrist that is slightly over an inch long, I got that while in Arizona visiting an uncle. I don’t really know why we were in Arizona, but I do know that Dad was not there with us (I have not actually tried to fact check this one with Mom, but that was at a point when Dad was pretty drunk and abusive nearly every day). My wrist got cut when I was trying to fuck with a cat on my uncle’s couch. Unfortunately, the uncle had a solid mirror coffee table that had jagged edges on the side nearest the couch. When the cat finally swiped at me, and I jerked my arm away, I hit the coffee table and split my wrist wide open. It was really bad. While I don’t remember the verbatim dialogue that followed, I do remember exactly what I said to my mother the instant after it happened, “Mom, I need to go to the Hospital.”. In the fuzzy part of the memory, I think she may have actually scolded me for interrupting while the grown ups were talking. I know for sure that she really thought that I needed to get to the hospital immediately once I shoved the wound in front of her face.

Funny thing about scar tissue is that it stays the same forever, while the normal skin continues to grow. As I look at that scar right now I can still see the 8 suture marks around the scar, yet they are now a good quarter of an inch from it and spaced apart even further. Now it looks like it was a nick, when it happened it pretty much looked like my wrist wrist may fall off, or I would lose the use of my thumb. It all worked out for the best though, I still have full use of all of my digits, not to mention a story to tell (and that one went over HUGE at show and tell back in the day. Yet, as I have found over the years, chicks don’t really dig scars.).

The car ride to the hospital was a bit unnerving. I didn’t know how this would be taken care of. I posited my theory that they had bodies laying around that they could take spare parts out of to fix the patients. Mom told me that this was not the case and that I would have to be sewed back together with a needle, at that point I am pretty sure that I told her that I was fine, didn’t need to go to the hospital or anything, but we ended up there anyway. The funniest part of the car ride, as I look back on it, is that my uncle stopped to ask a cop for directions to the nearest hospital, his exact quote to the cop was, “My partner hurt his arm, we need to get him to a hospital! (that sticks out in my mind only because he called me partner, not nephew, not sister’s child, not bastard son of 100 men, no, he chose partner)” That doesn’t seem funny, but as I look back on it with adult eyes that is probably the first time in his life that he had spoken to a cop without being in handcuffs, possibly the last as well.

I got stitched right up once we got to the hospital, it didn’t hurt at all. There was a small tinge of pain when the doctor shot the (insert name here)cane into the wound to numb it, but after that it was smooth sailing. When the stitches came out, however, wow, boy howdy, that shit hurt. The suture removal was performed by the same uncle that took me to the hospital, but with no pain killer, and it really hurt. Or at least I thought it did, but what was I six? Plus they gave me a candy for every one that they pulled out, I bet I was amped that night.

The next fuzzy memory I can’t really date, I remember the events but I can’t possibly place the time. It was at my uncle Steve’s house, Steve moved so frequently that I also can’t remember exactly which house it was in. Dad was horribly drunk, yet wanted to drive home. He asked the three of us kids “Who wants to go home with Dad?” He was horribly wasted at the time, and Highway 42 in Oregon has claimed more lifes than air travel, but we all wanted to go home with him, thankfully, Mom nixed that idea and we had to stay in that old, stinky house. Again, with adult eyes I am able to look at that experience and realize that Mom really did have our best interests at heart. Not to mention a broken finger, since dad had thrown her down the stairs outside the house. One of the images that is so burnt into my memory that I am sure I will never forget it is the image of Dad squatted next to the wood stove when we all got home the next day. I don’t think he ever actually knew what happened that night.

I have two other fuzzy memories on this subject that seem to blur together. One involves a horrible pounding against the house as Dad tried, while horribly drunk, to back his truck out of the driveway (which was steeply sloped towards the house). It happened over and over again for a long time. The other was a pounding sound that was (as my Mom later described) Dad beating her head against the floor (interesting aside on that one is that I thought she was lying, while I was six, there is no way to beat someone’s head against the floor while they are standing up. It took a bit of living to realize that he had her pinned to the floor to make that possible). After at least one of the said fuzzy memories, Dad was passed out in the yard. Mom told me that he tried to do a Hand-Spring but forgot to put his hands down, I dunno, that seems like a pretty flimsy alibi.

All of my fuzzy memories aside, that was the situation that my Mother was in, and it certainly was far worse than my memory. The divorce was a good thing for all parties involved. Well, all parties except for Mom and the kids.

When the divorce finally went down, Mom just sort of gave up all material possessions for the custody of the children. Unfortunately the child support laws back then were not quite what they are today. She was getting about 100 bucks a month to support three children. That doesn’t even cover the cost of food, but we got food stamps, so that helped. She was dirt poor… She was dirt poor, but she did her best and I think that we all (her children) turned out pretty good.

Living accommodations along the way could have been better…

The first house that I lived in with my mother, post divorce, was on Curry road. It was not so much a house, more like enough plywood leaned together to make what passes for shelter. There was no indoor plumbing, well, there was a sink, there was a shower, but I am pretty sure that the water from those just drained directly onto the ground below. The toilet, I will never forget the toilet, was on the outside of the house, and some twenty yards away. Some may call that an outhouse, I called it my salvation. When you really have to shit, right now, snow be damned, you are gonna foot your way out to the little box in the pasture to make it happen. How many people who are alive today can remember taking a dump in an outhouse?

Over the next several years, it seemed that we were trying to keep one step ahead of the building inspector. We moved into Hartz Cabins, a facility that was condemned only a few months after we moved in. A few misfires later, we ended up in a house on Shoestring road, Just outside of Riddle, Oregon. We were there for some time, a few years I think. (there may have been a couple of houses in Arizona between the latest listed points, I dunno, the mind seems to alter the facts after all these years).

We never had much, and what we did have we were thankful for. Mom did her best with what she had, which was very little. Dad could have stepped in to offer some compensation, maybe even did (I dunno), but Mom went it alone and raised us alone. That must take a great deal of resolve to accomplish. Three children raised with no help from the father (virtually). Kudos to mom.

I have been less than honest with my Mother for all of the years since. While I loved her “indian bread” (deep-fried flat bread), I was not so keen on her actual bread. The bread tasted kind of doughy, with the additional taste of yeast…Not all that tasty, yet, when soaked in butter, that was good stuff. I did my best to keep up the charade, but, as she told me recently, I lost a lot of credibility.

When we all lived in that tiny little dive (the one without indoor plumbing), we each had a birthday. The gift to each of us was a really itchy green blanket (donated by the local military reserve) and ten dollars in food stamps to spend however we wanted. I don’t remember exactly what I spent mine on, but I would guess it was probably on sugared cereal.

Fast forward a couple of years, perhaps rewind. In my memory this event was long after the military blanket, yet before I moved back to live with dad. There was a Christmas that happened. We lived in a slightly better dive than the last one (this one had an eagle claw bathtub), and we each got cards from Dad. Each card contained a ten dollar bill. While I don’t remember what the rest of the money was spent on, I do remember that I spent a couple of bucks on Christmas wrapping paper. Gods be damned! There might not be a gift under the tree (which is not entirely true, we did get gifts just not many of the flashy, store bought ones that we so craved), but what little we had to exchange was going to have the “have yourself a merry little Christmas” logo on it.

I don’t remember all these experiences as being bad per se, I don’t have another childhood to compare them to. Each one of these experiences helped to make me who I am today. If it weren’t for having to camp out by Cow Creek eating nothing but barley soup for a few days I might not appreciate everything that I have now as much as I do. If I hadn’t seen how badly it hurt my Mother when Dad beat her (and I don’t mean physically, I mean the transformation from the vibrant, beautiful woman she was in her senior photo to the shell of the woman she had become when she finally had the resolve to walk out on him), I might not have such tremendous respect for women, I might even be abusive to them myself, who knows?

Your childhood is something that you really had no control over, as such there can’t be any regret. Just as every scar on my body reminds me of a particular place or event, every memory that I have of my youth reminds me of conscious decisions that I made. While it may seem hard to believe that I made a vow, at the ripe old age of six, to never hit a woman, I did. That is a vow that I am quite happy to say I have never broken (well, once in the fourth grade, but that bitch was holding me on the ground and literally pulling my hair out. And once in my junior year of High School, but again I was provoked; I called a certain girl a slut, based only on the fact that she had had sex with at least three guys at a party the night before, her younger sister took offense to me calling her sister a slut, walked up and kicked me square in the nuts. I fell to the ground immediately. When I got back up I saw her laughing with her friends, I walked up to her and gave her a right that bloodied her nose and put her to the ground, she had it coming.), although I did accidentally break Angie Dixon’s leg in the fifth grade while playing soccer, sorry Angie.

But this post is all about the bread so I guess I better get to the point. Mom told me recently that she knew that I didn’t like her homemade bread as much as I let on. The way that she knew was that on one occasion where I was able to spend food stamps however I chose, I bought a loaf of bread. She never told me that she knew that I didn’t like it all that well until very recently, I think that she was just glad that I was making my brothers look like a couple of little whiners. Older brothers don’t like to be made to look like babies you see.

The truth is that I could probably list a couple dozen things that I really didn’t like to eat but ate and pretended that I liked. That was all we had and with my brothers bitching about it already what good would it have done? I will list just a couple though, for sentimental value. Barley, while when combined with hops, fermented and aged, is certainly my favorite drink, yet Barley soup is just plain disgusting (I don’t even know if I was able to disguise my disgust at this soup when I was young). Potato pancakes weren’t all that bad, but they weren’t all that good either. I didn’t have to pretend much with those though, since my brothers both seemed to like them. Corned Beef Hash, now this one is complex as I actually do like it sort of. This was a dish that we often had pre-divorce, but even at the time I didn’t really like all of it. I loved the taste that the potatoes had after cooking with the corned beef for so long, but the meat itself was so salty that I had to pick it out and give it to one of my brothers. Chicken is quite similar, I don’t mind the taste of chicken but I hate the skin, simply won’t eat it, of course since my brothers would fight for the skin I didn’t want it was all good.

On the up side, there were a lot of dishes that our finances forced on us that I really liked. Ramen noodles for instance. Those things were damn tasty, a child can make them (though why mom let me do that, considering the horrible burn scars on my chest and neck is beyond me), and after you eat the noodles you have a cup of warm broth to drink. An entire meal for a child for, well you can get them 10 for a buck now (on sale) so probably 15 or 20 for a buck then, so like 5 to 7 cents. Then there were the potatoes. Those things were practically free back then so we had a lot of them. I love mashed potatoes, not so much the pancakes they turn into the next day, but mashed potatoes is one of the things that is on my plate at every buffet. There is a certain way to make them though. The ones that are made out of dehydrated flakes simply aren’t edible. Even if you use real potatoes, if you mix them with a power mixer they have the consistency of an orange Julius, also not edible. They must be mashed with an old fashioned masher, they must have only pepper as seasoning no salt! Salt can be added by the consumer but not taken away. Finally they really should be made with real butter. I have had to use margarine to make them for Thanksgiving the last few years and they still taste pretty good, but butter is certainly the best way to go.

To finish this off with the thought that started it, the real reason that I wanted the store bought bread had nothing to do with the taste of the home made bread. The thing about the home made bread is that you have to slice it yourself and that makes for some pretty awkward looking sandwiches. Sometimes, no matter how down to earth you try to be (for a small child) you just want to have a sandwich that looks the same as the ones that all the other kids are eating. Is that so wrong?

Over the last week or so I have been performing a different duty than normal while at work. Mostly involving standing around a lot while tending to the cash register. What I don’t understand is why this makes my legs and lower back hurt so bad. And hurt it does.

Why is it that I can stand on my feet for six, eight, or even ten hours at a time, while throwing heavy boxes (60-80lbs.) around with no ill effects, yet when I am forced to stand and work in a smaller area it just kills me? I know that I usually walk at least a couple of miles per day, under normal circumstances, and I do throw a lot of heavy shit around. So do my back and legs ache from lack of stress/impact? That seems completely opposite to the way it should happen.

Seriously, is it the lack of motion that makes my joints hurt or what? Is it kind of like starting your car on a cold morning; no lubrication of moving parts for a few minutes? All the stop and go moving adds up? I simply don’t understand why I can carry heavy stuff around for eight hours or longer, yet, when I have to stand still for minutes at a time, over the same length of time, it hurts my back.

I need to dispose of this body and try to develop an exoskeleton. I will probably keep this body until I have the exoskeleton working though…

In a previous entry I mentioned that the diamond on my wife’s wedding (engagement really) ring was lost. The loss has turned out to be a good thing though.

Now for a bit of the back-story about the ring in question.

I am a cheap bastard through and through. I get annoyed when there are lights left on in rooms that aren’t occupied, even knowing that it only costs a couple of cents a day to power a light bulb. I wear a pair of shoes long after my feet begin to stick out the torn seams since they still protect the bottoms of my feet, that is the point of shoes, right? As long as my underwear have a waistband they are still in the rotation, regardless of the number of holes in them. My wife has been trying to help me to change some of the cheap bastard in me, as far as clothes are concerned, and I suppose I do look more presentable when not one (visible) article of clothing has a hole in it. I am still a cheap bastard though.

When I went to find an engagement ring the first thing I did was to throw the two months salary rhetoric right out the window. Not that I don’t love my wife, more that I don’t see how having a huge rock means that you somehow love her more, in fact it seems to work inversely; the women with the huge diamonds generally have the most adulterous husbands. I was looking for ring set (you know, the engagement ring and wedding band fit together) that was simply very pretty. When I found the one that I bought for her I paid far less than I had expected, but the center stone was quite small, I only found out how small after she lost it when my Mother-in-law said that it was only 1/10th of a karat (which was not what it was advertised as, but judging by the price I paid, and the fact that the Mother-in-law has been in the jewelry business, I must assume that to be true).

When I initially bought the ring I wanted to be able to pay cash for it, my intention was to upgrade the diamond somewhere around our 5th anniversary. I wasn’t sure how big of a diamond I would be looking for at that point, but definitely bigger and more sparkly, as the little sliver on what I bought her could barely catch enough light to reflect anything. I have heard people argue that the meaning is lost once you alter the ring, but I simply have to think back to an axe (of all things) that my dad had to disprove that notion.

An axe is a very simple tool, well it used to be. A wooden handle with a metal blade. Yet men take their tools seriously, well they used to, some still do. Tools would pass from generation to generation of men much the way that precious china does among women. I guess all men are cheap bastards at heart though, as the tool never moves to the next generation the same as it was in the last. Take the axe in question for instance. It was allegedly my Great Grandfather’s axe. The one he used every day to chop firewood. Through even twenty years of use the axe must have had the handle broken and replaced several times. The blade must have been dulled and re-sharpened to the point that it had to be replaced at least once, yet the tool, which likely had no part of the original was still considered the same tool. Considered so some sixty years later! I suppose that it is possible that my Grandfather touched the same handle as my Great Grandfather, possibly even used the same blade, but at some point Great Grandpa died and Grandpa had to repair the axe himself, slowly making a newer axe that had never been touched by his father, but it was still his father’s. Sentiment is a powerful thing.

But back to the ring. The loss of the stone prompted my wife to try to find some replacement estimates, which seem astronomical since some were damn near half of what I paid for the whole thing in the first place. Thankfully, my Mother-in-law stepped in to say that she still had the ring from her broken marriage with my wife’s father, and that she could have it for free (which translates to owing a lot of favors but no cash). The diamond on this ring was 1/4th of a karat and a different cut, but it was still far less expensive, while much larger, than the original stone. That stone was added to my wife’s ring. The ring looks absolutely gorgeous with the new stone. Many kudos to the Mother-in-law.

My plans to enhance the ring are still not gone though. I may put it off for additional years now that it looks so perfect, but I do have a goal. Among the rhetoric in the diamond commercials it sometimes mentions that less than 10% of women will ever own a diamond of 1 karat or larger size. My wife deserves to be in that less than 10% bracket since she has been 100% perfect to me since the day we met.

At the risk of sounding campy, if love could pay for the diamond, my wife’s would be this one. If love is never recognized as currency, however, I may have to set my sights a bit lower.

No, not like that you sick freak. I just had one leg suspended by a ceiling fan while the other was attached to the far leg of the bed. It was all going well until someone turned on the damn ceiling fan. Ouchers… I only wish I was so flexible.

The action in question is much more mundane; I was trimming the limbs from a tree. That doesn’t sound like something that would lead to discomfort, but it sure did. The tree is pretty tall, probably about 18 feet at its highest point, but I was trying to trim away the smaller branches that were growing down instead of up. Since the tree had portions of nearly every limb touching the ground this took quite some time. About thirty minutes into it I had all of the small, off-shoot limbs taken care of, which simply left a huge tree with large branches still touching the ground. Bring on the pain.

I was equipped with both a hand saw and a pair of lopping shears. While the saw was easier, the lopping shears were faster by far. Of course they aren’t really designed to be lopping dozens upon dozens of 1.5″-2.5″ thick limbs that happen to be above your head, did I let that stop me? Hell no!

Imagine, if you will, trying to do a standard Butterfly press (I apologize for the lack of linkage, thing is I was not able to find an example of someone actually doing the press ((in image form anyway)), all that I was able to find were images of the butterfly stroke ((in swimming)) and pressed butterflies ((in some pseudo art type thing)), I was able to find a machine that allowed you to do the butterfly press for weight training purposes but that would hardly help to illustrate my point), you know, with your arms out to your sides and bent to square at the elbow, the weights are set up so that they are moved by the pads on your forearms. When you bring your arms together (looking like you are praying basically) it burns in your Pectoral muscles. Now imagine a similar action, but above your head. Arms outstretched moving towards the center, but above your head. The Pectoral’s sure aren’t helping there.

I would like to get into a long-winded rave about how this exercise has helped me in some way, but the fact is that all it has done has made it so that my shoulder hurts so bad that I can hardly move it. If you want to hold a sword above your head and scream “I have the power” then, by all means, do it. Don’t try to actually chop shit up while you are doing it though, it will hurt the next day…Mostly in the shoulders.

So do you remember all of those commercials from the 1990’s that said, “A diamond is forever.”? They lied.

It turns out that the actual lifespan of said diamond is about four years, seven months and three days. That all being based on the date that I gave my wife her engagement ring (Xmas Eve of 2000) to the day that the diamond was noticed to be missing, which was yesterday.

Do you have any idea how bad a diamond ring looks without the diamond? It is not pretty.

I thought the diamond was supposed to last forever. Why is it that the ring is still in decent shape (with the possible exception of missing one of the mounts that held the diamond) while the diamond has vanished completely? Is this some strange conspiracy cooked up by the diamond sellers? Diamonds don’t usually just disappear you know.

I know the missing mount might be part of the reason that the diamond has gone missing, probably the main reason really, but it still just doesn’t seem right to have my wife, in all her beauty, walking around with a tan line around where her wedding band should be. She is my wife dammit! Hands off! And while I am on that subject, neither her or myself appreciate you gawking at her breasts. Hands off!

Anyway. If a diamond really is forever, shouldn’t they come up with a mount that is at least a decade? Failing that, they could at least mention that since the diamond is going to outlast the ring you might want to have it checked on occasion. No one ever told me that when I bought the damn ring. Now I have a wife walking around with a black heart on her left hand where her wedding band should be (of course the black heart was the ring that she wore for years before I actually decided to propose so it’s not so bad). Still, the diamond may be forever (wherever you lost it, forever) but the ring is still on the finger. While the diamond is gone…Work on that all you jewelers, we need to make the rings last as long as the diamonds.

Archaeologists have unearthed jewelry that is over 2,000 years old, many of those pieces still have the precious gems intact. Are you telling me that two millennia of technology has worsened the process? Damn lazy jewelers with their damn profit margins.

It comes along one day every year, without fail, seemingly oblivious to how it will affect me. The recurrence of my genital warts Today is my birthday, well technically speaking this date thirty-one years ago was my birthday, so it is the anniversary of my birthday. The 31st one of them (in case you are really slow).

Lots of people seem to enjoy much fanfare on the anniversary of their birth, I am not one of them. My idea of the perfect birthday is basically acknowledgement of it by those close to me and possibly a gift from the wife, though the gift from the wife is generally something useful (shoes this year, as my old ones leave a toe or two hanging out currently). Perhaps if I had a very wealthy family that was prone to giving extravagant gifts I would feel differently? I somehow doubt it, though if someone were to gift me a vacation home in France I certainly wouldn’t turn it down (I would likely never see it due to the fear of flying and all, still it would be a nice gesture).

The real thing that I am reflecting on is why people celebrate birthdays at all. When you think about it logically it is basically just a countdown to your death. Woo-hoo! Only x more years to go! Isn’t that sort of like celebrating the anniversary of the day that the doctor told you that you only had three more years to live? Good times.

Maybe I am looking at it from the wrong perspective. I guess this means that now I only have to work for 34 more years until I can retire! Of course in the coming 34 years the retirement age will get bumped up a couple of times making it so that you have to be 70 or so before you can get Social Security benefits, so I am not even really into celebrating that. Not to mention that I smoke way too much to envision being alive in 34 years, let alone 39+.

The person who really should be celebrating the day is my mom, who was in labor for 23 hours, while walking to and from school in snow three feet deep, uphill both ways. Not only that but her youngest son has made it 31 full years without ever once wearing pantyhose over his head (in this context), standing at the top of a clock tower, with an assault rifle, and shooting innocent people. A claim she might not be able to make at this time next year. Congratulations Mom! Here’s to hoping they finally let me buy an assault rifle before my next birthday!