Dirt World View.... re: Being a Jackass

Yesterday, when I was watching the evening news about the outrageous activities of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-California), I told my husband there should be a new charge called: Being a Jackass.

My thought being, that if you could catch them young enough, they would have a chance to turn their lives around.
Those that didn't stop being Jackasses might get rap sheets and they would be known as Habitual or Serial Jackasses.

I haven't, and won't, work out the fine print of this misdemeanor, and I'm usually in favor of fewer laws, not more, but, having this violation on your record, if the offense was committed after a "youthfull indiscretions" grace period, would prevent you from holding a public office or being in any branch of law enforcement, ...

Unattended Children.....

It Ain't Me Babe

As I was listening to this Bob Dylan song a few minutes ago, I found that I was changing the words as I sang along. "Someone to open each and every door", was coming out: "Someone to mop each and every floor...It ain't me babe, no no no it ain't me babe. It ain't me you're looking for, babe."

My childhood vision of myself as a grown-up never included being a "house wife". I'd be too busy riding my horse. Later it became a dream of being an Architect. I even went to the trouble of getting a degree in it in college. I have spent lots of time trying to understand why I was always letting life's circumstances grind my dreams into the dirt, some of which I could have grabbed hold of and changed, but didn't.

I have a bitter little place in my heart, that I hate. Some say learn forgiveness, including forgiving myself. I fear, often, that that dark little cancer will kill me again, as it does, over and over. I become too weak to stop the tears and anger. That sweet girl who's fondest dream was to be on a horse, running free...I miss her.
I don't know who I am any more, but I know it ain't me, babe.

My Kid's Fridge Pictures Are Different Than Yours #2

More Art done by Savant when he was between about 15 and 17 years old, before the schizophrenia hit at age 18. Despite his struggle with this tragic illness, he is still prolific and his style continues to evolve, is more abstract and amazingly beautiful.

Channel 1:



Construct:



Boxes:



Tribal:

My Kid's Fridge Pictures Are Different Than Yours

Some art done years ago by Savant. I know the images are much darker on my screen than they are on Savant's. My apologies to the artist. After his illness struck when he turned 18, we sold posters of his work on eBay for a while, then I got tired of running the auctions, but we can still make them if we need to. He is a prolific artist and his style changes as time passes. This is just a taste.

This abstract reminds me of Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase no.2", but Savant says it is a visual of the sound a guitar string makes.



Chomsky:

[PS: (Feb. 2007) Noam Chomsky has this print now! I emailed Mr. Chomsky to get permission to use his quote, featured here, in a small edition of signed and numbered, 18" X 24" prints for sale. His representative gave permission and asked for one for Mr. Chomsky's own archives. Contact me or check eBay if you want one. Beautiful Mind Fine Art.]

A tribute to Noam Chomsky. It is a shame the text is unreadable at this size, because it goes so well with the art and is still politically relevant. He calls the character "Picasso's Bull". This one sold more posters than any other.
Chomsky text:
Top left frame:
They were called "scientific methods of strike breaking," and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian Gulf War, "Support our troops." Who can be against that? ....Anything that's totally vacuous.

Top Right Frame:
In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything.


Bottom Left Frame:
The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people of Iowa. Of course there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy?
But you don't want people to think about that issue.
That's the whole point of good propaganda.

Bottom Right Frame:
Its critical value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? "Of course we don't not support them." Then you've won. That's like Americanism and harmony. We're all together, empty slogans, let's join in, let's make sure we don't have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about class struggle, rights,...& that sort.

Nostalgia:



Not All Punk Gods:

Please Pass the Guilt, I Mean Gravy

Disclaimer:
I usually prepare a store-bought turkey breast for this puzzling holiday. Giving thanks for the bullets dodged, happy memories of the year, and a chance to spend a day with relatives or friends, is usually how I see the celebration. But, as an Anglo* who is a Native-American Sympathizer, I don't like what happened to the indigenous peoples after that meal they kindly provided for the strange interlopers on their shores. Even though none of us existed during the extermination of the "Indians", or when people owned African slaves, many of us carry around a kernel of "White Guilt". Lots of us are really sorry about it, even though we had nothing to do with it. *(Several years after I wrote this, my father had his DNA tested before he died. His Mitochondrial (mother's line) DNA is Native American (first wave). Blew our minds!)
Disclaimer Over.

I hope the big flock of wild turkeys who spent Spring and Summer on our land survived. They disappeared near the end of the summer and I've had a bad feeling about it, there are just so many hunters around here. I will be happy if all of them show up next year and have hundreds of chicks.

I called my first son (AP)Chimera to invite him and his wife over for the day. After many unanswered calls, Chimera's wife called to say they had other plans. I'm starting to doubt I'll ever meet his wife. I asked if Chimera was there and she said he was, but he was afraid to talk to me or his step-father. I said, that's silly, he's such a scared [(scarred)] little boy, put him on the phone, if he'll talk to me.
His paranoia is a long term thing, but his excuse for it this time was the "smash & grab" visit he paid me a week before. He thought his step-dad would be pissed off that he had hit me up for money. Chimera, we already know your ways and just say, "That's just who he is now". I still don't understand him though.

My husband has helped him so many times. He got him a construction job on a big project he had going in Kentucky one year when Chimera was off heroin. He even drove all night to get to Kentucky when Chimera called in the middle of the night to say that the drunk guys he had been hanging out with were going to beat the crap out of him because they had sent him out to get some marijuana, and he had failed to find any. He was hiding and need protection.
So seeing my husband as "the bad guy" is ridiculous. He won't hesitate to tell you when you have been behaving like a Jackass, but sometimes you need to hear the truth.

I am a cynical, "well" of second chances to get it right, please, no next time, please get it right. That is tricky when you also don't want to be an addict's enabler. An addict can smile and lie into your loving eyes to get what he wants.

He says they are planning to move to Denver because they have a really good Methadone clinic there. HUH!? I thought the idea was to get off drugs, not travel around, and get hooked up with another clinic. (He's been in de-tox, before, in Denver. That is another long story. He had just gotten out of the Air Force...)

So when he came over a week ago, I emptied some people food and cat food, toilet paper, etc., out of our pantry for him to take home. I met him at the gas station, put gas in his "newer-than-anything-we-own" SUV, bought 2 cartons of cigarettes, and gave him $40.00 cash. I know he wanted more money, but sorry, we'd hit my limit of generosity (being a fool for anyone who says they need food). The fact that he was dressed impeccably like a Wall Street executive, sporting a diamond ear ring that was at least 1 CT, made the "I'm unemployed and really need some money" story seem absurd. Knowing him, he wouldn't be caught dead with a CZ in his ear. (His father's sister charged a Rolex watch to her mother's charge card... all the kids used her charge cards, but JP and I certainly didn't have one when we were married.)

I hope their financial situation improves. They have both been through too many rough times.

Number One Son

As I said, before, I took my son, AP, to live in Austin, TX after the divorce. He was a very easy-going kid; the love of my life and reason to make a good life for the two of us. After a while my present husband joined us as a live-in boyfriend and about four years later we got married. I think AP is about eight years older than his half sister, A. Beauty, and ten or eleven years older than his half brother, Savant.
When AP was about thirteen, my husband's business went belly-up, along with the rest of the economy in Texas in 1986. Our marriage was going through a stressful time too. We decided to head back to his home state in the North-East, stay with his parents while he looked for a job, and make a fresh start.

AP had always been a good, normal kid. Our move prompted AP's Tennessee family to propose that he come to live there for a while, until we got settled. They, his Grandparents, said they would send him to a good private school (he had been a bright student), only the best for their only Grandson. I haven't sent anyone to a private school and didn't really care, but, I think they were trying hard to persuade me that he would be fine with them. I refused the offer based on what a frightening life I had experienced with the creepy control-freak his father is; that and he had no idea how to be a parent. He dropped acid the day AP was born and said he wanted to be the first one to turn our child on (give him hallucinogens).

Are you getting why I wanted to keep him away from them? No one else knew what a freak-show the kid would have to deal with every day with his dad and girlfriend. My mother and his other Grandparents were all lobbying to let the Tennessee side of his family have a turn to enjoy having him with them. I finally caved in, only because I truly believed that it was going to be only for a few months until we got settled up-North and he would then rejoin us. I also thought that JP's girlfriend couldn't be as wierd as he was. I thought she probably just got involved with him due to youthful stupidity, the way I had.

AP (Chimera evolving) soon figured out that he could do as he pleased, and that kind of power can go to a thirteen year olds' head. Things then got turned upside down. He knew that we had normal expectations for good behavior, rules, curfew, sobriety, doing your school work,... the basic parent-child stuff. According to Chimera, at his Dad's, he could sell marijuana for daddy dear or stay away for days without checking in with anyone... He began changing quickly and not in a good way. Did his father ever give him any of the "magic medicine" he took so frequently, himself?

He came up to see us in the summers now. He was a seriously conflicted kid now and I couldn't get him back. We made plans for him to start school and move back with us, but when he found out that he would get his driver's license a year earlier in Tennessee, the plan was off. One year he showed up with a Mohawk and an offensive fashion look that was sort of neo-Nazi. My husband and I are open to free self expression, but there are limits. He looked like one of those frightened young men who dresses up in "fuck you" fashions to cover up his insecurities.

To be continued....

Three Year Anniversary Apology

Dear Savant,
Has it really been three whole years sense you lost your sanity? I want to apologize for the shitty genes your father and I gave you; it was a total accident. I'm so glad you have been taking your medication lately. Have you noticed how it makes things go so much smoother? Your Dad and I sure have, and we know how difficult it is for you to remember to take them on schedule.

When you came home today and told me you were going to interview for a part time holiday job selling knives door to door, I hope you will forgive my negative take on that particular job being anything but a scam. You know that I called them and posed as a potential knife sales person to see if I could squeeze any specific information about the job out of them. When I asked if it mattered if I had a criminal history or suffered from insanity, they said,"No problem! Just come on in for an interview."
Well it's nice to know that at least one company that does "in home demonstrations of deadly weapons" (cutlery) does not discriminate in their hiring policies.

Two young men who were selling knives, came to my door before you were born. I wouldn't open the door and told them there was no way I was letting any strangers with knives come inside. But, hay, you know how I can always see potential problems where they probably don't exist. Maybe they don't sell knife sets at all. Maybe they just need mules to deliver drugs or plutonium in boxes that have pictures of knives on them.
I still think it's not the right job for you, but don't take it personally. I don't think it is a good job for anybody.
Love, Mom

There's a Light On in the Fridge, But Only The Vegetables Are Home

The "Beard" post dredged up so many bad memories, I've been having trouble making myself continue with the story. I want the things that happen in this life to make sense to me, but lots of them just don't.

That child, my first son, AP, is in his early 30's now, and has just gotten married. It was a secret wedding.
Immature charming narcissist funny X-junkie. I love the little boy he was; and the shitty parents he was dealt, his shrew of a step-mother included, can't explain all the choices he has made for himself, but it's still significant. I got custody of him when I divorced his father, JP. I also got: $20.00 a week child support, a mattress set, a rocking chair, a little cash and my freedom. JP got to hit-up his parents for $20.00 a week and take AP to Tennessee for the summers. Actually JP"s father gave him a mimimum wage "job" at the oil company. The elder JAP (junior) had inherited several lucrative companies from his father, JAP the First. The job required some real work from time-to-time, but JAP III usually spent the day playing guitar.

After years of moving around the country on a less than shoestring budget (money begged from his parents) and my frequent escape attempts, JP, our son AP, and I were back in Tennessee, living in a little, old, country house that his parents owned. (If you put your ear to an outside wall, you could hear bees buzzing. I like to imagine that this house is insulated with one huge honeycomb. I'd like to be there, to see, if they ever knock it down.) It was at the end of a lane and backed up to a river. They had usually used it when his father wanted to go hunting. One of his employees lived in a house on the lane that the P. family owned and across the road from them was a small building that housed his collection of beautiful German Shorthair Pointer hunting dogs (the brown speckely kind). I think the employee was supposed to feed and water the dogs, but JP's father made sure they were under-fed, because he said that made them hunt better. I didn't know how bad the situation was. I didn't visit the kennel, because they kept it locked, and I assumed that the man across the street and JP's father took care of them.
I called the ASPCA after the winter most of them froze to death, but no one ever did anything to stop his mistreatment of the dogs. I walked down to their kennel, in the snow, to see them because they were transporting the survivors to the vet's to try to save them. I was shocked and furious at what I saw. Each of these beautiful dogs was in a separate pen divided by chain link fencing, so there was no way they could have huddled together for warmth. They were on a cold concrete floor and they had no bedding to keep them warm. They were skin and bones. I was told that this was not the first winter that this had happened. He would just replace the dead dogs. I had never liked the elder JAP, but now I hated him. To me those dogs symbolized the mind set of that family. I feared for any slaves their forefathers might have owned.

We took in an old friend of JP's (that I had never met). We were giving him temporary lodging, because the house had four bedrooms and he, A.T., would soon be renting a house of his own. JP's Grandmother owned a few old houses on the lane to the house we were in, and she knew A.T.'s family, so she agreed to rent one of her houses to him.
A.T.'s father had been the Mayor at one time, but they had moved to Montana before I moved to town. A.T.'s Grandmother still lived there, though, so he had been staying with her until he reconnected with my husband and his old friends. Sorry, Grand Ma, old friends are just more fun for long term hanging out.

For years, I had tried to figure out a way to finally leave JP, and live on my own with my son and make my own money to live on. One morning, just as I woke up, the solution hit me! I would divorce him, go back to school and get a job to support my son and me. I would be able to get loans and grants for school, because of my below-poverty-level income for the past years, which would help enormously. I was thrilled by the plan. I sat up in bed, ecstatic, and said, "I finally figured out how to leave you!" He looked shocked, probably more by my happiness than the news that I wanted a divorce. He already knew I wanted out, but I was usually stranded and had no way to get away. I had pretended to be happy so many times, just to survive and end the private hostage situations he put me in; but I had promised myself that the first chance I saw a way to leave and be able to take care of my son, I was out of there. When the baby was little, and we were in Eugene, Oregon, he would grab him and run out the door saying I would never see either of them again. They would live off of berries in the woods. I'd be running down the street after them, screaming and begging him to give me the baby (he was still nursing). JP was high on peyote buttons most of the time we were in Oregon. He made sure not to waste any of his peyote money on food. Why would anyone want out of that marriage?

Back to Tennessee: I was so naive that I drove to JP's parents' house and told them my plan and asked if they would help me financially to go back to school, etc.. The answer was, of course, no. JP then inflamed his relatives against me by telling them that the reason I wanted a divorce was that I was having an affair with A.T.. It was a lie of course, but they loved the story and came at me with the hate a cheating slut would deserve. I moved into a house in town that was occupied by people from "The Farm". We had become friends. They were pre-med and nursing students, and they had a spare room that my son and I could rent until the divorce was over. My parents helped me with the rent. I was going to move to Austin, Texas afterward to be near my family. They were no longer in Indiana and no longer married.
I didn't even know JP had told people the lie that I was screwing A.T., until JP's grandmother came over to the Farm People's house and stood out on the front lawn yelling at me to tell A.T. that she wouldn't rent her house to him now. I told her he wasn't there, and maybe he was living with his grandmother, but I didn't really know where she could find him. I thought it was really weird that she had come there looking for him. She was gone by the time I figured it out.

Yes, A.T. and JP, were both handsome, but I have never fooled around on either of my husbands. And, A.T. and I were just friends. JP used to try to get me to seduce a male friend of ours, so we could all have sex together. I told him he was out of his mind and it was out of the question, but every time JN would come over my husband would urge me to do it when he was out of JN's earshot or he would do those little eyebrow-jerking nods behind his back. I would just glare. The three of us were very good friends and that was how I wanted it to stay.
(My father was a cheatin' pole cat and I grew up with a very dim view of liars. If you want to fuck around, get divorced first, shithead. Unless you have a mutually agreed upon gay-dike set-up like the one described in the comment on the previous entry.)
A light bulb did go off for me when A.T. moved in, but it wasn't the one between my legs. He could reason like a normal person, he didn't make up an alternate reality with bizarre rules that he lived in. I had lived in Idiotland so long that every time I managed to get away from JP for any length of time, I felt like I was coming out of a very foreign land, back to the land and language of my birth. One where no one gave a shit what I ate, etc..
JP was, and has been supported by his parents' money his whole life. After we were divorced, he made pocket change with occasional part time jobs, most of which involved playing guitar at restaurants. He is a gifted musician, I'll give him that. It is his life's main obsession, and he has many; that and food phobias. He wanted me to be his anorexia buddy from the start; boy was I skinny back then, and hungry and did I say HUNGRY?! He never seemed hungry; I think it's the real deal when starving yourself is fun.

JP's parents had given me a brand new car for Christmas, but it wasn't until the divorce that I was let in on a little game the men in the family play. They all have the same name: JAP, JAP Jr., JAP III...., so if the suffix is absent on a document, JAP is whomever they want it to be. They always paid cash for everything, no loans like almost everyone else. So my lavish Christmas present was not legally registered in my name, but to JAP.
I have to confess to being infuriatingly fair minded. My attorney was an old friend from high school; he is now a member of the United States Congress, The House of Representatives in Washington D.C., Bart Gordon (D-TN). I thought that I should only ask for half of the value of the car, because JP's parent's were denying they gave me the car! What was all that fuss on Christmas morning then?
No one from JP"s family was present at the court for the divorce, not even JP, just their attorney. Back then they didn't have No Fault divorces in Tennessee. I plead mental cruelty. After the Judge listened to me on the witness stand, I could tell he was shocked at the life I had been subjected to by a member of one of their town's "fine families". He told me he would give me the car if my attorney had asked for it. I waited for Bart to speak up and ask him to let me keep my car, I really needed it, but he didn't say a word. I was too shy to speak up, and too fucking modest to say "I want it, and enough alimony and child support to live on." I think the Judge would have helped me if I had spoken up, but I was such a kicked puppy by then, that I couldn't stand up for myself. So I ended up with a couple of thousand dollars for letting them take the car away from me, and no alimony, because JP was a broke moocher. The fact that he had no living expenses, other than guitar strings and health food, was not brought to the judge's attention. JP's parents paid for all utilities, free car, free gas, free house, free clothes, free insurance...

I'm no where near finished with this story, but I'll work on this later.

I Did Not Understand That He Was Being True To Who He Is

My first husband told me, before bed on our wedding night, that we would be having a sexless marriage. It was fine with me, if two people of the same sex loved each other. I knew from a very early age that the opposite sex attracted me. Husband #1: JP and I had sex before we were married. I did get the feeling that it meant more to me than it did to him; but this post-wedding decree was a total shock to me. There was a cold finality to it. My first thought was, "He can't be serious!... Can he?" My second thought was that he would change his mind. I mean, he can't be gay, he just married me! Right?

I was on my own with this secret. I was too stupid to get an immediate annulment, and I had convinced myself that I could not live without him. When we began as travel buddies, my severe depression lifted, and I thought he was the drug that kept the hellish depression away. I had no one to explain to me, how I was supposed to live like this. I went from feeling beautiful and desirable, to feeling like I was truly sexually unattractive. I would beg, and cry for an explanation, or a kind touch, only to be ignored or chastised. Nothing about it made any sense to me.

I kept up a pretty good front, but I was miserable, and I kept thinking, if I just waited for a while, he would start to be more like he was before we married. Surely he couldn't resist my charms for long. Wrong. I did wrangle him into the act a few times, but he would get very angry with me after. Even an innocent touch of his hair was met with a cold stare. I tried to do things the way he wanted them: I ate what he ate, strict vegetarian; I did yoga, because he did yoga; I gave away all of my clothes and possessions except for a bare minimum because he didn't want excess possessions and what we didn't give away he sold. We were a cult of two, and I was the one who was brain-washed, willingly. Sure, there were happy times and times I thought I couldn't live like this for another day.

How did this stretch into a six year relationship? There were so many layers to those six years that I can only focus on one at a time, so it will take me a long time to uncover those years. I tried to leave him many times, but we were so poor, that many times, I literally did not have a dime for a phone call or any way to get to a phone to make a call. I'll cover the starvation, homelessness, his voracious appetite for peyote, mushrooms, LSD, Marijuana,....etc., in other essays.

I've told you that we eventually had a son. The way that happened is that we went to a yoga retreat, and I asked the yogi in front of a group, that included JP, "How often should married people have sex?" I had nothing to lose, and I was pretty sure the answer would not be: never. The Yogi said:four times a month. So after that I was allowed 4 times a month, and JP made sure I knew that it was not something he looked forward to. He hated the chemicals from my birth control foam, poisoning his purified body, and he refuse to get rubbers. Possibly he thought he had found a loop hole that would make it impossible for us to continue with sex. Then, in the health food store book rack, there was a book called "Astrological Birth Control". Don't look for it, it doesn't work. I wrote the authors to tell them that I was pregnant. Hmmmm... You're the only one it hasn't worked for, you must have done it wrong.

And so we have a precious son.

29 Aug 2019, Post Script: I did not finish this because bringing up the pain from the past felt so wrong. Why willingly dive into it again. Fourteen years later, I have come a long way in sorting it out. My first husband took a massive amount of LSD at Woodstock, before we were together as a couple. He was different after that. What he became focused on after that was purifying himself in every way. He warned me that he did not want anyone or anything in his life that interfered with that. But, I didn't understand clearly what he was about. I reacted to everything as though he was trying to hurt me. And I was very hurt. Only as an older, wiser person do I understand that if I had the courage, I would have known that I should not try to make a life with someone on a journey like his. He was being true to himself and I was not being true to myself, that is not his fault.

Stranger Than Fiction

My husband (#2) and I moved to Newton, MA, from Austin, TX in mid 1986. His family is from MA and the Texas economy was crumbling. My husband had a concrete company and contractors stopped paying for the slabs he had poured. Warning to some people in one ritzy section of North West Austin: We own the slabs your houses are sitting on! We filed liens, but found out that people could still buy the houses without clearing the liens if they "bonded around the lien". This is not the strange part.

Story #1:
In the middle of the night in Massachusetts, (insomnia) I was flipping channels on the TV. When I got to the PBS station, there on the screen, smiling out to all the world, is my mother and her husband! I freaked!
It was an episode of "Austin City Limits". The explanation for their close up is that one of my younger sisters, M., was working as an intern on the show for her degree in RTF: Radio, Television and Film. Later, M. got parts for various family members, who lived in Austin, as extras in the films she worked on. When she decided to become a single Mom, she got calls from a film crew, wanting to know when her baby was due. They needed a newborn for a TV mini-series. So they slathered her new daughter in the secret recipe for birth goo, most of it is fruit jelly, and a star was born. The actress that played her mother, Angelina something, became really famous a few years later. My sister got a job with a computer giant after that, so she would have the steady income a parent needs.

Next Story:
After my divorce from husband #1, I was in Austin waiting tables and taking classes at the community college; waiting for a year to pass, so that I could go to U.T. as an in-state student. My son stayed at a daycare that was near my apartment. I was parking my dad's car at the daycare to pick up my son, and looked over at the car parked next to me. It belonged to a girl who had a son in the same group my son was in. Her kid bit my kid a lot. Sitting in her passenger seat was a guy that hit all my desire buttons. I remember thinking, "where did she find a guy like that?", I wanted one. I couldn't picture them as a couple, because she was a very: the shoes match the bag, perfect makeup, jewelry, hair type; and he looked like a hot lumberjack's dream with a beard and ponytail. (late 1970's)

Skip forward a year or so. I begin waiting tables at a different restaurant, one that is very near my apartment. She was a regular customer, mostly in the bar part of the restaurant. Waiters and Bartenders come and go all the time. A guy who worked there and quit, before I began working there, got rehired. He became a full time bartender. I found out that he had been a teacher in Mass. and was divorced with no kids. We eventually became romantic. I was living in U.T. Family Housing with my son. It was a great, affordable little 2 bedroom apartment that backed up to the Colorado River. My boyfriend began telling me that his former girlfriend had lived across the street in the older group of Married Student Apartments even though she was not a student. Her, then, X-husband was the student, but she and her son continued to live there after the split. When he told me her son's name, the light bulb went on! He was the kid who used to bite my son. That day in the parking lot flashed back into my memory. He was the guy I had lusted after!

I've joked over the years that it was really my Dad's cars that caught his attention. My Dad and Mom were divorced and I rented an apartment in the same complex where my Dad lived so I could borrow one of his cars until I could buy my own. He had a purple Jaguar XKE and at least one Triumph, maybe 2, so I think they attracted attention first, and then you would notice the slim, buxom girl with the blue eyes and the long blond hair. (My present description would be a bit more bulky than the one from back then. Picture Benjamin Franklin in drag.)

Story 3:
After husband #2 and I were married and had a kid or two. He bought an older Jaguar and worked on the engine in his spare time. One day on the highway, I put the petal to the metal to pass someone, and the gas pedal became locked in the "down to the floor " position. I tried shoving my foot under it and pulling up, but it wouldn't budge! The car is flying and I'm panicked! I was standing on the break to no avail. I down shifted my way to neutral and turned off the key and pulled up on the emergency break. When I finally got it to stop, I was off the road in a parking lot of some sort, freaked out but unhurt.
I found a phone and called my husband. He drove out to investigate. It turns out that there is a thingy, that has to do with the accelerator linkage, that if it goes beyond a certain angle, picture 12:00 on a clock, if it goes past that even a little bit, the angle is too wide for it to return in the direction it came from and it gets STUCK in rocket mode! When my husband turned the key, the engine began to roar at full tilt again. He fixed it, but I was still afraid of that car.
When I see people on TV, trying to tell an investigative reporter that this has happened to them, sometimes with horrific results, I BELIEVE! The automobile companies always say it is impossible, and that the people were mistakenly flooring the gas pedal when they thought they had their foot on the break. BULL!

Story #4:
When Savant was in High School here in Tennessee, his best friend was a boy who had been raised in Saudi Arabia by an American father and a Syrian mother. I spent some time talking to them when I was picking my son up from their house one evening. During the course of the conversation, we realized that we had lived in Austin at the same time. We were all students at the University at the same time, and we had lived across the street from each other in the University Family Housing. We rode the same bus to and from classes. Small world, huh?

Story #5:
I was in the check out line at the grocery store near the U. of Texas Apartments, and up ahead of me, in line was a friend of mine from Tennessee! Jack, of the crackers and spam, in a previous entry. I was blown away to see him there. He visited us a few times before he moved on to parts unknown.

Story #6:
Husband #1 and I were in a park in Ashland, Oregon during a short stay there. We were talking about a yogi from India that we knew when we lived in Indiana, Yatishvarananda, and how he would always mispronounce the name of one of our friends. Less than a minute later we see this same fellow sitting on a bench in the park!

Name Dropper and Crack Whore Barbie Dolls

When I was adding the Music column to the sidebar, I had to stop, because I like some of every type of music. Though it's not my first choice, I even like the Eminem, Pink, Alicia Keys... radio station. Grunge, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day,...Radio station. National Public Radio's Classical Music and their talk features. If I feel like crying or laughing it's a Country station. Sometimes I can find music from other cultures - I like it all. A Gregorian Chant, Celtic music, Chris Isaak, Jazz, Blues, Tribal music, Chinese singing: You name it I like some of it.

I was thinking about the Pink Floyd song "Comfortably Numb" when I was doing yard work yesterday. I love that song. There is a part where they sing:

When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain you would not understand...

Did anyone else have this happen to them? It used to happen to me when I was a child and had a fever. I was surprised that someone had felt the same thing and written it into a song. And, that the guy that wrote it shares a name with me. My maiden name is Waters. Odds are we're not related, though, in my head I refer to him as cousin Roger sometimes. Pink Floyd can put on a concert! If they ever tour again, take your deaf grandmother, she'll like the light show.

Then I decided to do an entry devoted to brief brushes I've had with people who have names you might recognize. Not that I expect you to be impressed; it's just so I could tell some stories, because that's what I'm here for.

Garth Brooks' cousin (see, I told you not to be impressed): We were living in some apartments in Hermitage while we were building our first house on the land we bought in Franklin. The two kids left at home were approx. Middle School age. My daughter was pals with the young lady who wrote Faith Hill's first hit single (I think the word "Roses" was in the title), or should I say she seemed to like the company of the kids, and the other brother/sister pair (Blake and Andrea), that they spent most of their time with. She gave Blake a white dove someone had given her.

Let's get even more off topic. One day I came home and the 4 kids had transformed A. Beautie's Barbie Dolls into "Crack Whore Barbies". It was great! The dolls come with some pretty slutty outfits anyway, but they had given them the "been out trolling all night and catching a few winks under a park bench" skanky sluttyness. I laughed my ass off. God, I was proud of them! I think I have them packed away with their other toys. I think they learned about Crack Whores at school in their drug awareness class, that and how to set up a meth lab just about anywhere. (Wasn't the Scopes Trial near here?)

OK, I'm getting to the Garth Brooks' cousin part.(Idiot Like a Savant had not dubbed himself that name yet; the psychosis did not hit until he was about 18.) Anyway, he was either riding his bike or skate board on the tennis courts, and some boys who were about his age showed up with tennis rackets to play tennis. A dispute broke out and Savant came back to the apartment pissed off. He had bloody knuckles where one of the kids had hit him with the tennis racket. He said he took the racket away from the kid after that and hurled it into the woods next to the tennis court. He headed to his room to fume and calm down. Shortly after that there was a knock at the door. I opened the door and there stood what looked like a slim Garth Brooks with hair. The kids had told me Garth Brooks' cousin had moved into the apartments, but for some reason I had pictured someone in their early 20's, who might just be full of bull.
Whatta ya know, it's true. He wants his tennis racket. His kids told him my son had thrown it into the woods. He was not happy. I tell him about the bloody knuckles and get Savant to find the racket for him. He sees Savant's hand and apologizes. They go find the racket. The End

Saw Nanci Griffith at the veterinarian's office. Her dog was sick, my cat was sick. The End

Saw Donna Summer "the Queen of Disco" in the grocery store.

Saw Naomi and Wynona Judd on the highway near the airport. They were in a vintage American convertible, with the top down. It had the license plate "Red Heads". They had on scarves and sunglasses.

During the 1960's at my elementary school, Wooldridge, located a couple of blocks from the University of Texas in Austin, there was a teacher named Miss Curie. I was not in her class and never knew her first name, but we were told that she was the daughter of Madame Curie and her mother had won the Nobel Prize. Cool!(By the way, Madame Curie's mother and father also both won the Nobel Prize, the hard way.) I've always wondered if her mother was Irène Curie? Or if my kid memory and my old lady memorie have scrambled the story.

Saw a bunch of TV and Movie actors at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, one January. My husband and kids ski; I gave up skiing because I spend more time tempting serious spinal injury than enjoying it. So this was the perfect vacation combination for all of us.

Stevie Ray Vaughn: Late 1970's or early 1980's he was a regular fixture in the Austin music scene. Though I float back to those times in Texas, when I listen to his music, I never got to see him play, because I was a dutiful single mother and student who didn't allow myself much fun. But he and a couple of his pals (Double Trouble?) came into the restaurant where I was waiting tables. The place was packed and the hostess, who didn't know who they were, seated them next to the bathroom, which was near the door to the kitchen; in other words, the crappiest table in the place. I passed that table on the way to my section which was up a few stairs and much nicer. I saw them and thought "What Idiot put them there?" I didn't have any empty tables or I'd have moved them. They didn't stay long. The End

One of the waitresses at the restaurant inherited 6 figures from her father, when the airplane he was piloting crashed. She married the drummer in the band Pretenders, but soon became an O.D. widow. The End

My husband and I went to the U.S. Open (Golf) at Pinehurst the year Payne Stewart won, about six years ago. When we were sitting in some bleachers for a while, and my husband pointed out that the man sitting in front of me was Donald Trump: creepy hair, cute date. My husband is the golfer, but I was excited to see all the Greats of Golf: Tiger Woods, Payne Stewart, Phil Mickelson, VJ Singh, etc...
The End

Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash: Johnny Cash had a T.V. show that was filmed in Nashville. My friends and I went to this taping. Everyone knew which motel the guests stayed in, so after the show, everyone but about 3 of us, drove to the motel. I decided to be in the group that trotted there behind Bob Dylan's limo. I was surprised when the limo pulled over and Bob shouted out to some guy walking up the street. They talked a bit and then the limo moved on. When we got to the motel, we, and our friends who drove, were the only kids there. Joni and Bob were being picked up by Johnny and June to go to their house. I have all four of their autographs on a scrap of paper somewhere. The End

Are you impressed yet?

I missed Woodstock! Some of my friends went, and I was stuck in Indiana looking at it on the news, saying "I should be there! Crud!" I did go to the Atlanta Pop Festival. My daughter thought it was funny that I used the word "pop", but that is what we called them back then. We called one of my friends "Kathy California" because she used to live there. She had seen the famed "Monterey Pop" festival.
Back to Atlanta, a couple of car loads of us went. But, I for one, had given no thought to bringing much money or food or anything for that matter. Only one intrepid traveler had brought crackers and spam with him. It was 103+ degrees and our only shelter was a tarp pulled between two cars in the parking lot. We didn't qualify as hippies; they had built a fantastic community of huts, tents, lean-to's... in the woods, where you could get cool beads, pipes, hippie stuff, and any kind of mind bender you were looking for. I can't remember if it was a two or three day event, but I was really excited about seeing Jimi Hendrix play. He was a headliner, which meant it would be very late at night when he took the stage.

Everyone was so hot that a fence was pulled down on some land nearby, that had a pond. Pond, beautiful pond, pond good. I think the only thing I had to eat the whole time was a tiny bit of Jack's crackers and spam. I just remember being hungry most of the time. They didn't have much in the way of food & drink vendors back then, and I probably ran out of money before the first day was over.
Anyone who suffers from migraine headaches knows that: no food, dehydration, loud music, extreme heat and cheap marijuana are a sure fire combination to trigger a really bad one. I never saw Hendrix, but I got to hear him while lying in the parking lot under the tarp between the cars, while my head exploded with pain. Aspirin, had anyone brought any, has no power to calm a migraine, and they hadn't invented Imitrex yet.
Did I ever tell you I used to be an Idiot? The End

Saw Janice Joplin once. She hated everyone in the audience and cussed us out. Good concert. The End