An annual tradition is reborn!

Each year before I worked for the company In San Diego, where it was impossible to sBrisbane.jpgchedule a day off… I’d go Christmas shopping with two of my oldest and dearest friends. (Yes, I know we’re supposed to call it holiday shopping now… It’s my Blog get over it!)

Some years it was just impossible to go with both of them, other years I was able to have time to relax and enjoy a couple guys day shopping events.

I’ll be honest, there were gifts purchased for others… BUT often we purchased gifts for ourselves. So what? One sure way to avoid the returns line is to buy what you want as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. It’s not selfish…

It’s maximizing time and efficiency!

Okay, maybe that’s just a little sophistry. Moving on!

This year, I’m excited to be going shopping with both of my friends, on two consecutive days to two different locations. Neat! Lunch, Drinks, shopping, laughs, and good company. 

Although come to think of it, the last time I went shopping with one of these individuals I ended up with an iPhone X. That was a fun albeit expensive shopping expedition. But it was after Christmas and Santa hadn’t gotten me a new phone so, “Oh Well”.  I will have to make sure that I have some kind of amulet to ward off the Apple Store Spell this time. (Perhaps an old Android Phone?)

To that individual… I know you’re a traditionalist and you like classic and beautiful watches. However, the Apple watch series 5 is pretty sweet! Need I point out that we’re getting older and that fall detection and the ability of the watch to call for help is something your classic watch cannot do?  

Come on man, we’re the last of the boomers! It is our solemn duty to inflict ourselves on the young for as long as possible. A watch that summoned help in a world where most people would just instagram your fall might make sense. 

I’m gonna get a punch over that one, It’ll be worth it!

Come to think of it, both of you could use a watch! Come on guys, anytime now we’re going to be comparing medications, worried about breaking our hips, and lamenting our mis-spent youth. 

On the positive side we might live long enough to be able to take a Christmas Trip to China or Singapore where we can purchase brand new cloned bodies then we can really enjoy retirement! Suck on that millennials! 

Going shopping with these guys essentially kicks off my Christmas season and I’ve missed being able to do things like this over the past few years.

This year we’re avoiding the Black Friday insanity. There will still be insanity for sure, that’s just typical Southern California on any day. 

Obviously, I’m excited about it. 

I feel like a kid again. Of course, the day after back to back shopping I’m probably going to be tired and I don’t know if I’ll be saying “Bah Humbug” or not.

Then on to Thanksgiving I think I’m cooking here this year. NICE!

I’ll take a breather after Thanksgiving for a day or two, then it’s about locating the Christmas decorations and prepping to set up a tree. 

Maybe sometime in the midst of all this, I’ll get an early Christmas present consisting of a Job. 

Dear Santa, all I want this year is a decent job. Thank you!!!

I hope that all of you are looking forward to having time with people that you love and who love you.

Ya Know…

Ok so there’s been all this hubbub about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that Brett Kavanaugh did something sexual to her 30 years ago.

If the woman was raped I’m sorry about that, rape is always inexcusable.

That being said, the fact that she’s so fuzzy about the event gives me pause.

Before you get your undergarments in a twist because after all “HOW COULD A MAN know anything about abuse or harassment?”

I can tell you I do.

I clearly remember being 18 years old. I was working my second job at a typesetting house.

The bosses wife was one of the head honchos. Her name was Carolyn. She smoked like a house on fire and always had the stench of bad booze about her. She was thin, almost skeletal. I remember her hair was never attractively styled and she called me “Dumbshit” from day one until day 58 when I walked out of that office never to return.

I learned some interesting things while working at that company, so it wasn’t a total loss. Some of those skills have served me well throughout my career.

But I have a very clear memory of her walking up to me about an hour before quitting time. She said, “Dumbshit, we’re behind so I need you to work overtime tonight.”

I said, “Sure thing,” and asked if I could use the office phone to call my mom to let her know I wouldn’t be at dinner.

The call made, I went about my work, I said goodnight to the other workers, and Carolyn’s husband, as they left.

I kept the machines I was responsible for churning out their galleys. Each galley I took over to the light table and cut into the appropriate lengths so that they could be mounted to photo boards.

I was also cutting and pasting edited lines into the completed galleys while keeping an eye on my machines.

Yes, we were busy and behind and I was happily using new skills and doing the best job I knew  how to do.

Carolyn called me into her blacked out office. I knocked on her closed door and waited for her to tell me to come in. She often was doing titles on a small film system.

In those days we didn’t have scalable fonts or the ability to print a PDF and send it directly to a typesetting machine. You had to create a title, character by character by exposing a film strip. Then you used black & white photo development to create the title line.  After that, you measured and manually pasted the title line into the galley.

So, if her door was closed, you knocked and waited for her to secure whatever title she might have been working on, otherwise you would incur her wrath because opening the door would destroy whatever she’d been working on.

There was a muffled “Come in”

I opened the door, walked in and asked her how I could help.

She said, “You’ve been catching on quickly Dumbshit. But not quite as quickly as I’d like. To make it up to me I want you to fuck me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, FUCK ME or your FIRED.”

I very clearly recall my brain rebooting.

I also recall feeling humiliated, and embarrassed, I was deeply hurt because I had been doing everything she asked and was keeping up with her output.

We were behind due to several machine malfunctions on the other side of the house where the typists were doing the input. The IBM technician had ordered parts but they’d been slow to get to the West Coast.

Granted I’d made some mistakes but I’d always stayed late to rectify them so that we’d start fresh in the morning.

I was completely unprepared for this ultimatum.

And I was conflicted. Conflicted because I was an 18 year old male. A stiff breeze could make me hard.

I looked forward to getting home each and every night to stroke my dick. This condition of terminal horniness wasn’t helped at all by the fact that the company had taken on a big contract from a publisher called Penguin Press.

Penguin Press at the time published a lot of pornographic stories. Imagine an 18 year old male scanning the pages of graphic porn while at work and that was his job.

Needless to say I’d taken to wearing looser pants, not because I was ashamed of being hard (I was) but because tight pants were just plain uncomfortable.

So here I was, hornier than hell all the time and there’s this woman telling me she wants me to fuck her. That was the first time in my life a woman had ever said she wanted my dick. It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s that I heard a woman I was dating tell me she wanted to get naked and have me inside her.

But looking at Carolyn, her cigarette ash hanging from the latest in the chain of cigarettes in her mouth, I thought, “I’d really like to fuck. I’d really like to get off, but with the bosses wife? Is that a good idea? What happens if he finds out about it?”

Then I looked at her again. She’d been pretty once, but that ship had sailed years ago. Now Carolyn looked haggard and her personality was throughly unpleasant.

The part of my brain that so wanted to fuck, whispered, “Do it, close your eyes and pound her, it’s a free pass, no dinner, no begging, no promises to respect her or love her. It’s just a pussy that wants to be plowed.”

The rational part of my brain said, “Whoa there cowboy. Down this path is slavery. If you do this once she’ll use the threat again. She’ll add the threat that she’ll tell her husband you fucked her and she’ll probably suggest that you were the one that initiated it. All in all, a bad outcome for you.  Besides you can’t lie worth a shit. What are you going to say to your mom  when she asks you how work was. What are you going to say? It was great mom, I fucked the bosses wife.”

The fuckhead part of my brain suggested, “Fuck her then quit, you don’t want to jerk off again tonight. you want to blow thrusting and hot and wet.”

The rational part of me asked, “What about pregnancy?”

That was the question that made my decision easier.

In my heart of hearts, I absolutely knew that I didn’t want to even risk having a baby with the nasty piece of work that Carolyn was.

I knew that I wasn’t paying rent, I knew that while I was living at home I had the ability to quit this job, I knew that I didn’t want to risk having a baby with this woman.

So I said, “OK then, Goodbye.”

I grabbed my backpack and walked out the door. I never looked back but was frustrated and angry. Too angry to wait on the fucking bus. So I started walking. a couple of hours later when I got home my mom said, “I thought you were going to call me when you were done.”

“Um yeah mom, I just felt like walking.”

My Mom is a wise woman who knows her children well.

“Okay, honey what happened?”

I related the story and at the end, my Mother was shaking with anger.

“Honey, you did the right thing. I put up with that shit while you were growing up. Here we are in 1979 and people still think they can get away with it. It was wrong when I was a single mom and executives thought they could bully their way into my panties, it’s just as wrong now that some woman thinks they can take advantage of you.”

My mom put a big pile of spaghetti on a plate for me, then handed me a beer. “Here sweetie eat something but don’t drink all the beer in the fridge.”

She left the room and I remember hearing the tires of her car chirp as she hit the pavement leaving the driveway.

I wondered at the time if she’d even catch Carolyn at the office.

I ate, drank my beer, rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher.

I went to my room, took off my clothes and jerked off a couple of times then fell asleep.

The next morning, I heard the normal morning sounds of my younger siblings being rushed to school.

After the house quieted, I got up. I was hungry, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and wandered to the kitchen.

There on the table was a cereal bowl, my favorite cereal, the newspaper and a check from the company for the week I’d worked and an additional 2 months pay.

I still recall the details vividly. Time has not diminished the memory of that humiliation and I doubt it ever will.

I was fortunate, I had someone who was in my corner. I had my Mom, she’d been through it. She knew what I was feeling and also knew there was very little she could do to make it better. But she got me my paycheck and bought me some time to get another job.

While my story is not nearly as sever or traumatic as rape. It is illustrative of the clarity that comes with some situations.

I recognize that women are far more likely to be abused than men, when they are abused, they rarely have a support system to fall back on. But the women I’ve known who have been raped, and  or abused are never fuzzy about the details.

They’re very clear and they can tell you grizzly details of their assault 40 or 50 years on.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m somewhat skeptical of Dr. Ford’s allegations thus far. We’ll have to wait and see what her testimony reveals.

And just because Kavanaugh might have been at the same party, doesn’t automatically mean he sexually assaulted her.

Hell if being at a party where an assault happened is the only test, then I might also be guilty using the same broad brush strokes.

Shit happens, it’s bad, of that there is no doubt. But bringing up something that happened 30 years ago just because someone is famous seems a bit contrived doesn’t it?

After the bad shit happens, the best you can do is deal with it and move on. That’s what I’ve learned from rape and harassment victims that I’ve known in my life.

That’s what I’ve done.

And from the “OH For FUCKS Sake Column”

HenryCavillOk I’m catching up on news and noticed that Henry Cavill… You know Superman?

Apparently he caught a bunch of crap for expressing his personal opinion and observation that dating SUCKS!

I get what he’s saying, maybe it’s because I’m a white male. 

This guy’s comments resonated with me because I censor myself all the time. There is not a moment in a workplace or public place where I’m not wondering if anything I say is going to be taken out of context and used to suggest that I’m some kind of racist, rapey person.

For him it’s more of an issue because he’s a public figure.

There are a lot of people looking to be offended by almost anything, all the damn time. The response that his comments drew is actually a prime example of exactly what he was talking about.

There are self absorbed little special snowflakes the world over who seem to be spending their entire days looking for the slightest thing to be offended about. In the case of far too many women, (NOT ALL) everything they encounter in their world is about causing them offense.

Guess what princess, the world don’t give a shit. Get over yourselves. Ain’t nobody got the time to tailor a series of affronts to you. Increasingly, fewer and fewer people have any time to worry about whatever the fuck you’re bitching and whining about this week.

If a dude expresses an interest in you it does not automatically mean he’s going all rapist. It means that he finds you visually, personality-wise, or intellectually appealing. Take it as a complement and even if there’s no way in hell you’d like to date him, you can at least be nice about it.

Now, if that dude doesn’t take “no” for an answer then you’ve got something to complain about and ample recourse either with the law, or with some big strapping decent man who’d be pleased to make sure you have a nice time by putting a dirt bag out of whatever establishment you’ve found yourself in.

I’m not denying that there are dirtbag men out there who have no clue about proper behavior. But ladies… stop making every man you encounter fear any interaction with you.

Who knows? You might find a prince charming if you’d drop your defenses for just a moment and let a guy buy you a drink and spend two minutes talking with him.

Just Sayin…

Doc says I’ll live a while longer…

Doctor cigarette header3459162096

Results of my annual physical are in.

By all the usual standards, I’m alive!

Nice to know that.

I like my doctor, I hate going to the doctor. I dread the day he comes back with the result of some test or other and tells me really bad news. I have no ideal how I’ll respond to it.

Oh sure… the 7 stages and all that; but what does it really mean to me as a person? Will I embrace the reality and fight? Or will I choose to live in blissful ignorance and simply forget to wake up one day?

Burning man.jpeg

There are pluses and minuses to each course of action.

If it’s serious and you fight, you could easily find yourself living in a tight little circle running from appointment to appointment at medical facilities for the rest of your days. I hate the smell of antiseptic in the morning!

On the other hand, if you choose to live in ignorant bliss you could simply live a happy if short span. If you go that route, you have to opportunity to do all the things you might have been afraid to do. Imagine the freedom of being able to do any drugs, have any kind of crazy ass sexual escapades, jump out of planes, climb mountains, live life homeless wandering the world. 

173669 peyote8

Suddenly, albeit perhaps briefly the world really is your oyster. What penalty could conventional law place on you? Arrest? If you’re imprisoned, they provide you free health care. If the law allows you to go you simply go back to doing what you want.

When I’m confronted with my mortality I find myself thinking like this. The concept of no boundaries appeals to me in a very fundamental way.

The idea that nothing, no matter how dangerous really matters is alluring. I suspect the very first thing I’d try is something like peyote or the drug from that tribe in South America that’s been called the “god” drug. Supposedly, this stuff allows you to take a journey to the center of your being and commune with the universe. 

Why haven’t I done these things? Laws, Conventions, Rules, Expectations.  

In other words… FEAR.

Fear of consequences, punishment, loss of freedom, or simply people not liking me.

Consumer Society

It’s ironic because in a very real way I gave up absolute freedom to live in and be a part of a society that I no longer recognize. I guess I’m at that age now where I wonder; What If?

Down that road lies the potential for despair. Not bad to occasionally think about it… Very bad to dwell there.

So what’s the alternative?

Look forward. Remember that all it takes to change the future is to choose the future you want. 

That’s where I’m at. Yep I’ll live another few days, months, years, decades, whatever, but the future is as yet unwritten. Since I’m the one doing the writing I have to remember not to let the past have too much control over what I write next.

I think I’m at a place where I want to experience some of the things I’ve denied myself for no other reason than I wanted to fit in, to be accepted, liked, and thought of as doing what was expected.

I supposed I should say, “Thanks Doc, see ya next year.” maybe I will the next time I talk to him.

Until then… I’m setting a blank piece of paper and a fresh new pen on that desk in my head. I’ll start writing something new.

OK So yesterday wasn’t so Quiet…

Doctor

Got done at the Doc’s.

(No Happy Ending!)

Apparently I was alive enough for the Doc to be confident that I wasn’t going to drop dead in his office.

Yesterday was the first time that my Doc mentioned anything about politics. Apparently, he’s still hopping mad about Trump. I told him I don’t watch the News anymore, and joked, that it’s obviously helped my blood pressure.

He asked how I stayed informed. I told him I read the news because it’s a lot easier to limit my exposure to shit that pissed me off. He said what about Trump? I told him I thought Trump was simply the latest in a long line of politicians who as my grandfather used to say, “are all crooks and liars.” 

My Doc said he loved Obama… 

I said I didn’t love any of our politicians, because they all too easily forgot their job was to be in service to all the people. I’d be happier if they said what they mean, did what they said, and always put the needs of all the people who elected them, first.

There was an uncomfortable silence and we moved back into the professional comfort of the Doctor, Patient relationship.

Traffic

I was glad, because on Obama and the Democratic party, my Doctor and I are poles apart. That doesn’t mean I think my Doctor is a bad guy, or necessarily completely wrong.  I was however, suddenly concerned that he might just be so angry about the current state of our political system, that he might lose sight of the fact that I’m not a bad guy either.

In all honesty, we’re both probably operating from misinformation and the truth is somewhere between our two points of view. More importantly, he’s a good doctor and someone that I value having in my life.

I guess I valued the relationship we’ve built over the years more than the desire to swing him over to my opinion. I suspect that he may have reached the same conclusion.

FLU SHOT

All I can say is that I’m really glad that my hunger hadn’t reached the point that I wasn’t thinking. Otherwise the situation could have gone badly.

I’m really sad that the political polarization in our country is permeating into every aspect of daily life. Politics used to be something you bitched about in a bar with your friends, half drunk. Now it’s almost everywhere and 24/7. I mean who gives a fuck? Those assholes in Washington and the Statehouses across the nation are more than likely in someone’s pocket. The only voice we have is voting and that voice is growing weaker each election cycle. It’s been demonstrated that elections can be affected, not only by foreign governments, but also by a media who is not adhering to good journalistic practices. Thank goodness I thought this instead of speaking it.

Flu

By the time I was done, I was starving. So I thought I’d head out to get something to eat immediately. Traffic was a nightmare!  After sitting on the freeway, (Thats a mis-named thing if ever there was one) for about 45 minutes I noticed I was close to a place I used to have my hair cut. I figured, “What the hell,” and pulled in. They had an opening and soon I was in the chair having my mop cropped. Still very, very, hungry.  

WOW! The prices had gone up… Should’ve checked that before I sat in the chair. A couple of years ago the prices were obscene, NOW, the prices are astronomical! Grrr!

Why is it that you can’t get a decent haircut at a reasonable price anymore? I don’t want anything fancy, I just want consistent.  I’ve tried many places in Escondido & San Diego and you’re lucky if the same person is working at the place from month to month. The phenomena isn’t limited to San Diego, it’s everywhere. I was noticing it long before I moved out of the OC / Riverside area. I don’t like clipper cuts, I like scissor cuts. Clipper cuts accentuate the cowlicks I have and frankly, I could probably give myself a clipper cut. 

Iu

Anyhow, the stylist did a pretty good job, at least it’s workable. Maybe I can find a hairburner in San Diego that can maintain the cut. If that fails, I’m going to be heading to a stylist in Beverly Hills that comes highly recommended by several friends.  Who, believe it or not… is cheaper than the place I was at yesterday.

Still hungry, I get back on the misnamed road called a freeway. Traffic was better and the further I got out of southern OC the better it got. Pretty soon, I could see the mountains I call home. 

Got in the door, started wolfing down junk food, then started laundry.

Shutting down the irrigation system had to wait until today. 

However, I’m moving very slow today. Maybe the flushot I got yesterday. Not that I feel sick, but I do feel super tired. That’s probably the immune response kicking in, creating antibodies to fight off the faux infection. It’ll pass in the next day or two.

Gotta get a move on, the day is passing and I’m done with the weeks laundry.

Have a great weekend.