Friction and Harmony

Road Trip!  It was such a beautiful weekend – I missed riding on Saturday, but managed to hop on the bike Sunday for some wind-in-my-face therapy.  I found myself on Bourbon Street, some 200 miles away from home.  The people there are very friendly and outgoing – several folks in the hour or so I spent wandering around the Quarter said the same thing to me…  “Nice chaps.” 

"Tank" on Bourbon St.

It was a tough ride – at least the ride home.  Somewhere in the ‘just over 400 miles’ in a day is about my limit – especially when I haven’t ridden in a while.  The last 70 or so miles were brutal – the temperature dropped about 15-18 degrees.  A hot shower and a warm bed did little to cure my aching bones…  But I definitely have to do it again when I can stay the night so I can drink!

On June 6, 1999, I knelt in the surf of the Gulf of Mexico and promised her “Adventure.”  She bought it.  I guess she must have thought it sounded like fun.  On March 11, 2000, she became my wife, and it’s been nothing but “adventure” ever since.  At least I held up my end of the bargain!

Ten whole years… Wow!  Sweetheart, I can’t imagine my world without you…

I love the feel of you.

I love to touch you – to hold you and to be held by you.

I love your wit and intelligence – to talk with you, to listen and be inspired and amused, and to understand and be understood by you.

I love to laugh and play with you – to chase you through the house and tussle the sheets with you.

I love your fire and enthusiasm for the causes that move you, and your faith.

I love your practicality and logic, your love for science fiction and your voracious appetite for real books.

I love your devotion to children and the way you flirt with babies to make them smile in line at the supermarket.

I love to hear you sing when you think I’m not listening.

I love that even after 10 years, we still know and enjoy some modesty.

I love to watch you dress in the mornings, almost as much as I like to watch you undress - the vision of you still excites me.

I love to open doors for you, to guide you through a door or into a room by the small of your back.

I love to cuddle with you, to hold your hand, to brush your cheek and play with your ear.

I love your beautiful green eyes and they way they light up when you laugh.

I love having you as my wife, my partner, my lover, my best friend.

I love you.

And of course, I’m ever thankful that you even put up with me!

Happy Anniversary, Kitten!

UPDATE: As I suspected, a near immediate response hit the inbox shortly after 0900 CST.  It seems they are at least partially deserving of a break, since the dealership was purchased a couple years ago by Megalith Automotive.  As to the whether the sales staff is “now held to a higher standard”…  I’ll still opt to let someone else explore that reality.  I still don’t trust ‘em near half as far as I can spit.  

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While browsing Facebook, I just noticed this on Sarah Palin’s page.  There – do you see it?  Go ahead, click for a better view:

OMG – REALLY??  Can I?  And can I do that without having Todd show up on my doorstep to kick my ass?  And how do I explain my “gift” to Mrs. Who?

Is it hot in here?  

Getting there.

I talked with PVT Goob this weekend.  Things are going well.  He’s enjoying the letters he’s gotten from friends, family and even our blogger friends.   He’s trying to write back to everyone.  I told him that it’s damn near impossible to pick him out of his unit website pictures, ’cause everyone is in full battle gear – they all look alike – so he sent me this.  Looks like Private Goob has squared up a little!  He’s lost that scared, “what the HELL did I DO??” look.   Nowhere near perfect yet, but definitely getting there.

Lucky Goob – his 19th b-day is next week, which he gets to spend in Army BCT.  Why lucky, you ask?  Three words:  belt-fed weaponry!

I’m so jealous. 

Holy shit! When even Saint Jude appears concerned about swine flu, you gotta know…

We. Are. All. SCREWED!

UPDATE!: Now Jesus appears amid the growing chaos…

We heard from Private Goob today!

I barely recognized him by his voice – he was severely hoarse.  I immediately thought that it might have been from all the yelling they do, but no…  He’s sick.  Very sick.  He’s been congested, and he’s been throwing up, but evidently enjoying the training enough that he doesn’t want to miss any time with his platoon.

“Yesterday,” he told me, “we had tear gas training.”

“Wow, that must have wreaked havoc with your sinuses!  Did you do okay?”

His reply cracked me up…

“It was hell on earth!  But actually, it cleared me up enough to breathe for the first time in a couple of days!”

Then he detailed what had happened.  They were supposed to enter the bunker, remove their gas masks, state their name, hometown and social security number, then exit after 30 seconds to clean and reseal their masks.  He said he choked on the first syllable, dropped to his knees, then ended up projectile vomiting.  As he exited the bunker, there was a female soldier taking their pictures.  He thinks he may have thrown up on her boots, too.  As he was trying to recover, he felt a hand on his shoulder, turning him around.  He realized it was a Drill Sergeant, and thought to himself, “uh-oh, this isn’t going to be good.”

He had a streamer of snot that was wrapping half his head, from his chin to his eyebrow – and no doubt some revisited breakfast on his face, too – and his eyes were bloodshot and streaming.  But instead of getting yelled at, his Drill Sergeant was laughing hysterically and trying to take his picture with a cellphone camera!  No doubt that picture made the rounds at the end of the day!

He said he’s really down with being sick, but he’s not going to let it wash him back OR make him miss anything…  He’s looking forward to learning to shoot the M16-A2 rifle this week, so he really doesn’t want to have to spend any time in medical.

I am so proud of him for toughing it out.  I asked him if he’s still happy with his decision…  “Definitely,” he replied, “but there have been a few times when I’ve really wondered what the heck I got myself into!” But he affirmed that he is enjoying the camaraderie and the challenges, and he’s looking forward to where this experience will take him.

Unfortunately, just as he was telling me about his graduation and ‘Family Day,’ his cell phone battery died.   I’m on my way down to the T-Mobile store as soon as I finish this post to buy a new phone charger for him.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words.  I printed them out and am sending them along with my next letter.  In the meantime, here are some pictures snagged from his unit website:

This is my favorite picture so far…  He looks so different.  The transformation to man and  soldier has begun!

Son, you have no idea how proud I am of you!  I love you, kiddo.  (Guess I won’t be able to call you that much longer…)

-Dad

I finally got around to watching a movie that has been on my “to-see” list for quite some time.  It’s called SLC Punk!, and tells the story of “the only two real punks in Salt Lake City,” circa 1985:

“Cool,” I thought, “I wonder if I’ll recognize anybody.”

You see, I was on the punk scene in the eightes – as early as 1981.  Loved the music.  “Slammed” at the Indian Center and the Fairgrounds arena and Horticulture Building.  Fronted the attitude – Anarchy was more than a political (mis)direction, it was an expression of gritty teen angst and wanton aimlessness.  We didn’t care that it was irrational or stupid.  We were teenagers…  WE were irrational and stupid – though at the time we were certain that it was THEM, not us.  Had the colored hair.  In fact, my hair was up to three different un-natural colors at one time: blue, green and purple.  Had a blue and sliver mohawk for a brief time – they’re pretty hard to maintain, and “fashion punk” wasn’t my gig, either.

Was I “hardcore?”  Hell no.  But I was defiant.  I attended the only parochial Catholic high school in the Salt Lake valley at the time.  I introduced punk to that institutionalized populace.  I was the first to have the guts to walk through the doors with more than a fucking notebook with an Anarchy symbol on it­.  But I didn’t do it to be “cool.”  I wasn’t punk to attract anybody.  I was punk to keep everyone else the fuck away.  Punk for me was an escape, a barrier to everything I hated and feared most.  It was soul-ripping, hard driving music that told the world to fuck off and die.  I loved it with every fiber of my teen-angst ridden being.

The upperclassmen certainly didn’t understand my visage.  They called me “Devo” in the hallways, since that was the closest thing in their experience they could label me with.  Ozzy, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, Scorpion, Poison and the emerging 80′s hair bands…  Those where where the general populace identified.  They didn’t understand that Devo wasn’t even in the same music galaxy as CRASS, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L., Rudimentary Peni and the Crucifucks.  “New Wave” alternative rock was just gaining popularity, and a shocking, colored hairstyle must mean I’m one of those.

I hung around the Cosmic Aeroplane book store and head shop.  CD’s hadn’t yet surfaced, and surfing the bins of imported vinyl for something new to listen to was as necessary as foraging for food – and I was hungry enough to circle the sleaziest music shops in some pretty unsavory areas of town.  Raunch Records was located under the 4th South viaduct, where the homeless often congregated around burning barrels in the winter time and slept on old shipping palettes when it was warmer.  The best music, however, came on bootlegged cassette tapes.

Drugs weren’t my thing, and though I was straight and clean, some of the people I hung out with weren’t.  I was so hardcore and daring, I got my ear pierced.  But I knew a guy who wore a diaper pin in his cheek and a rounded over, rusted nail in his ear.  I saw plenty of LSD and pot, “crosstops” and other shit.  Cocaine didn’t enter my world until I got chased by a drug dealer in a Corvette in a case of mistaken identity (he thought I looked like the guy who stole $30k in cash and stash from him.)  I even carried a gun illegally – for good reasons, though this isn’t the post for that story.

But back to the movie…  SLC Punk was actually a pretty accurate depiction of one important facet of social atmosphere in one of the most socially repressive cities on this continent in the 1980′s.  The Mormon-influenced socio-political scene was a pressure-cooker that brewed some pretty crazy shit at that time.  While I recognized a good bit of embellishment and artistic license with respect to the details, the bizarreness of it all – the people, “tribes,” the attitudes, the social atmosphere – was more or less spot-on.  Of course location names did not reflect reality, but seeing many of my old haunts on screen was just creepy.

While the characters were colorfully fictional, I could spot elements and parallels of people and lives that I had witnessed more than twenty-five years ago.  Of course the seeming fictionally-absurd but God-as-my-witness concrete elements of the story had me laughing out loud.  The beer run segment and “Stevo’s” explanation of why a trip to Evanston, Wyoming for some Mickey’s Big Mouth was so necessary had me in hysterics.  I had to wonder if I had ever crossed paths with the writer of SLC Punk.  He had obviously been there, drifting the same landscapes of my past…

As I watched the credits, my jaw dropped.  James Merendino.  Ha!  I quick ran to IMDB and found his page.  When I saw his picture, I was certain…

No shit.  So here’s what James looked like in my Senior year (1984) yearbook:

He was a year behind me in high school, and I remember him hanging on the fringe of our little group.  I remember him as a pretty cool kid – quiet and a little quirky (i.e., just like the rest of us) – he didn’t draw too much attention.  He hung out with, among others, an underclassman named Paul who lived in my best friend’s neighborhood, and who frequently hitched a ride.  (How’s that for a peripheral association?)  I can clearly picture James with braces and a porkpie hat with buttons on it, hanging out with us at some music venue – probably a school “stomp” or a minors club we frequented, but which name I can’t recall.  I want to say he was also in one of the school music groups (Jazz Ensemble?), but despite my greatest efforts, I discovered that I was dismally retarded when it came to musical talent, so I didn’t spend too much time with the people who could.

All in all, SLC Punk was a good indy film that brought back a LOT of memories, and some uniquely in the know laughs.  I can see why the movie has a cult following.

James, if you should ever wander by and see this – I’m sorry for the yearbook picture.  Though I barely knew you, the movie is definitely a keeper.  I ordered my DVD copy from Amazon today.  Congratulations on your success.

Hey, at least one of us made it out of that asylum with a future!

I ran across this while excavating some memories (more on that later – perhaps).  This irreverent magazine illustration (Playboy, as I recall) was stuck inside my Senior year high school yearbook.  It was one of the many bizarre decorations adorning my adolescent “personal space” – my locker door at the Catholic high school that I attended in the early 1980′s.  I still think it rocks:

Ah, 1984.  Miss it, but you couldn’t PAY me to go back and do it again.  Well, maybe if I could go back knowing what I know now… but even then.

We heard from Recruit Goob last night.  He’s in “Reception” still – where he’ll be waiting until his platoon actually moves “across the railroad tracks” into the barracks for Basic Training.  He’s been issued his uniform and had his head shaved, but they’re “just chillin’ for now.”  And then he sent me his picture as proof he’s made it this far: More »